Famous for 15 Minutes

by Ultra Violet

  “Your building is fabulous,” Andy says. He is referring to the celebrities. That’s what interests him.

  “Bobby Kennedy just gave me a lift,” I say. Andy has to know all about it. I tell him that I was waiting for a taxi under the canopy over the circular driveway. It’s often a long wait. Kennedy was waiting for his car. He asked, “May I drop you somewhere?”

  I noticed his wide, blue, unevenly set eyes, recessed in his overtanned face, his mechanical-looking teeth, the deep pores on his nose, very clean pores. I accepted his offer. He sat in front with his driver. I sat in back, alone. He asked, “Are you visiting?”

  “No, I live here.”

  “I haven’t seen you before.”

  “I just moved in. We’re doing a movie tonight in my apartment. Would you like to come and be in it? Anyone can be in it.” I thought how pleased Andy would be if I could round up Bobby Kennedy for the cast.

  He gave me a masculine half smile. When he dropped me at “21,” I handed him my card and said, “Remember the movie.”

  “Will he be in the movie?” Andy demands. “Gee, that would be great.”

  “Maybe, but I doubt it.”

  I go home to get ready.

  At midnight the doorman calls on the house phone.

  “There’s a group of people here. They say they know you.” I detect disdain in his voice.

  “I know them. It’s OK.”

  A few minutes later, my doorbell rings. Andrea Wips, a cute blond groupie, comes in, her Lolita breasts clearly visible through her transparent dress. Chuck Wein, an underground moviemaker, wearing a greasy black leather cap, carries bags of lighting equipment: lights, a boom, electrical cords. With his immaculate, white-cotton-gloved fingers, the elevator man picks up the tattered end of an extension cord.

  Edie, so high she floats several inches above the thick carpeting of the corridor, wafts in. Paul has on dirty sneakers. Andy, wearing his dark glasses in the middle of the night, looks more like a phantom of the movies than a real person. In fact, he startled one of the white-gloved hall attendants, who thought for a moment he was seeing a ghost.

  “Oh, this is great,” Andy croons.

  The building is so new, my walls and doors have not yet been painted. The doors are still marked in large letters, “Front door,” “Hinges on the left.” The walls have streaks of concrete sticking through the plaster. Andy mutters, “Fabulous.”

  There is no furniture except for a bed and a huge foam-rubber cutout by sculptor John Chamberlain, which can be a floating raft, a platform, a love-in, whatever you want.

  Andy turns to me and says, “Ultra, you have to get undressed.”

  I am startled. We have not discussed my wardrobe. Or lack of wardrobe. I am torn. I am supposed to be the wild, daring, uninhibited Ultra, who does anything, anything. I enjoy the tease of my see-through dresses. But I am not comfortable undressing down to the skin in front of this crowd and in front of a camera, which will show my nakedness to the whole world. Is it the way I was raised? Is it original sin? Is it the eyes of the beholders? Yes, I think, that’s it. It’s all the dirty eyes converging on my pubic hairs. If the eyes are clean, it is different. Conflicted by my bashfulness and my desire to shock the bourgeoisie, I snap at Andy, “You are using me.”

  He snaps back, “No, you’re using me.”

  There’s no point in continuing this discussion. The cinema must go on. I look in my bathroom for large Band-Aids to tape over my nipples. Of course, I don’t have any. I call down to the doorman and ask if he has any tape. He says, “Yes, but it’s locked in the office.” Tomorrow won’t do. I think of using gaffer tape, the tough silver tape the sound men use on their equipment, but I’m afraid it may pull the whole nipple off when I remove it.

  Meantime, International Velvet has arrived and is rolling around on the Chamberlain couch, getting higher and higher. The camera is rolling too. I’m glad they’ve started without me. The movie has no plot or story. It is just the present, our present, whatever we are doing. It is a slice of time, or slice of flesh. Later, this segment will be pieced with other segments to form the complete twenty-four hours.

  I must say it is not inhibiting to work with Andy in a film, for you never know if you’re on or off. You never know whether the camera is rolling or stopped. The prevailing attitude is: Come on, loosen up, don’t be chicken. I finally take off my clothes and sit on the couch, showing my back, not my front. I am angry at myself for being embarrassed, and I’m angry at Andy for putting me on the spot. The one thing it never crosses my mind to do is to show the whole scurvy crew to the door. That is unthinkable. Monstrous as they are, they are now my family, my life.

  The doorbell rings. Andy comes alive. “I hope it’s Bobby Kennedy.” I hope it’s not. I put on a robe to answer the door. It’s John Chamberlain, dead, roaring drunk.

  A moment later, the doorman calls up. Andy says, “This time it’s Bobby.” The doorman is apologetic, but a tenant has complained about the noise. I turn off the blasting radio. Chamberlain passes out on his floating raft. The movie ends when the film runs out.

  When we are invited to the screening of the twenty-four-hour movie that takes twenty-four hours to view, we all go to catch up on our sleep.

  In the spring of 1968, the Factory people go wild with excitement. We learn that some of us are to appear in the film Midnight Cowboy, starring Dustin Hoffman, Jon Voight, and Brenda Vaccaro. Now at last we’re in the big time. It makes perfect sense to us that we should be cast in important roles—haven’t Rossellini and dozens of other European directors taken people from the streets, peasants, fishermen, complete unknowns, given them lead roles in major films, and catapulted them to fame? Here is the break we have all been waiting for—out from the underground into real money and real stardom.

  Our first disillusionment comes when we learn we’re not to appear in the main film with the Hollywood luminaries but in a film within the film, a black-and-white, eight-millimeter underground movie that is shown at a dissolute party scene in a downtown loft. We are bitter at first. Don’t they trust us? Don’t they think we have enough talent to appear with the Hollywood people? Eventually we calm down. We’ll be playing ourselves, and we’ll get a chance to show a very wide audience how talented, how remarkable we are.

  In Midnight Cowboy, Viva is cast as Gretel, Taylor Mead as Peter Pan, Amanda Tree and Paul Jabarra as party guests, and I am a Superstar. When we report for the first day’s shooting, on June 28, 1968, at the Filmways Studio in East Harlem in Manhattan, Andy is not with us. He is in intensive care at Columbus Hospital after the attempt on his life by the crazed Valerie Solanas. Jed Johnson, a sweet, naive boy who has recently become Andy’s roommate, brings us daily reports of Andy’s progress. Jed has curly hair, baby skin, blue eyes, an innocent look, a childlike voice. He seems pure and clean. He is devoted to Andy, and they stay together for ten years. He is the keeper of dogs and in charge of the filmmaking. Much of the joy has gone out of our Hollywood debut, but we must carry on, for ourselves and for Andy.

  Our part of the shooting lasts two weeks. Hollywood logic requires that I wear a blond wig. Things turn out a little better than we hoped, for Viva and I actually do appear in a scene with Voight and Hoffman, when the corrupted Joe Buck (Voight) takes the innocent Ratso (Hoffman) to the loft party. I contrast John Schlesinger’s firm-handed direction with the disorder of our filmmaking.

  One scene is shot in my Pop bedroom, where the bed is decorated with a giant American flag and the wall is hung with a Roy Lichtenstein felt banner depicting a huge revolver aimed point-blank at the observer. I bought the Lichtenstein for a song from John Chamberlain at a time before the Pop artists entered the museums and escalated their prices.

  At the end of the shooting we all wind up at Elaine’s on Second Avenue and Eighty-eighth Street. Elaine, all two hundred plus pounds of her, does her own x-ray search of each arriving customer, turns away the nobodies, sends the minor somebodies to the less desirable tables and th
e headliners to the privileged sections. The meals at Elaine’s are what we call “fairy portions”—small and overpriced. Nobody goes there for the food. We go to see and be seen.

  It is at Elaine’s that Andy promises me, “You’ll be the star of I a Man.”

  “Am I to play the man?”

  “No, Tom Baker plays the man.”

  The movie is to be shot in California. Nico, Paul Morrissey, Andy, and I fly to San Francisco, where Tom meets us. I am filled with excitement. Stardom at last! But my hopes are dashed when I realize I am not the lead. I am one of seven girls flirting with Tom. As usual, there is no script.

  “What do I do?” I ask Andy.

  “Nothing,” he replies. “Just blow hot air on Tom’s feet.”

  That’s my big role—as one eighth of a stinker.

  One day in 1967, our visitor at the Factory—which is now located at 33 Union Square West, in a large loft with a rear screening room, a mirrored front office and a no-nonsense, high-tech atmosphere—is Mario de Vicchi, a film distributor and self-proclaimed coproducer with Fellini of La Dolce Vita. Mario tells us he and Fellini took their first acid trip together in 1961. Whenever Fellini comes to New York, good friend Mario searches frantically for Felliniesque characters for a circus-type party, pretending these monsters, whom I help him recruit, are his closest and dearest friends.

  When he calls, he says to me, “Ultra, do you know anyone so fat you can’t see his eyes? Any encephalitic dwarfs? Bald hermaphrodites? Hunchback white Negroes? Bilingual lepers?” I describe bizarre types I run across in my night travels. Mario tracks them down.

  This collector of untyped casts tells Andy how much he admires his films. “What are you doing now?” he asks.

  “Looking for money,” Andy says.

  “That’s no problem.”

  Andy’s face brightens. For our visitor, Jed Johnson screens a scene from Lonesome Cowboy. In it, Viva, half naked, is abandoned by her cowboy friends after being raped. She is on the ground, cursing, her legs spread apart, her crotch exposed.

  “Great,” says Mario. “I want exclusive rights to distribute that film.”

  A year later, Mario introduces Andy to Alberto Grimaldi, an Italian producer. Grimaldi arranges to distribute Trash and Eat in Italy and brings together Andy and Carlo Ponti, Sophia Loren’s husband. Ponti is instrumental in getting the money for Andy to make Flesh, starring Joe Dallesandro and a baby. Wouldn’t you know—the naked baby steals the show.

  HIGH LIVING

  If I left France to see the world, I am succeeding. I live my life among headliners. By 1964 I live it with elegance in my room at the St. Regis Hotel, to be closer day and night to the surreal master who is my obsession, and I have at my disposal a Lincoln Continental with a violet stripe on each side below the windows and my logo, an interlocking UV, on the doors. A small sketch of me by Dali decorates the ceiling behind the driver’s head. The car is another gift from my still adoring Mr. XYZ, the generous donor of the apartment building I own.

  I have an arrangement with an unpaid driver named Joe. He is on call when I need him, but when I am away, at home, or busy for several hours—spending the day at the Factory or going to the theater—he hires out the car and his services. At the beginning, Joe and I are both happy with this system.

  But I become more and more dependent on the car. It picks me up at five in the morning when I come out of Le Club, takes me to breakfast at the Brasserie. I leave there at six-thirty to stop by the flower market to buy fresh flowers for the day. The car takes me home and goes to pick up my laundry while I bathe and get ready for a 10 A.M. drive to the gym before going to the Factory. Later, I am driven to a rendezvous with Mr. XYZ, on to dinner with Andy, a party with someone else, back to Le Club. Chauffeuring me becomes a twenty-four-hour job for the driver, who takes catnaps between my appointments and has no time to drum up other business.

  No wonder then that one morning my car is not in front of my hotel. I phone Joe and say, “I need my car at once. I’m going to a Merce Cunningham rehearsal.”

  “OK,” he says, but no car appears. After three days of phoning and no sign of Joe, I take a taxi to Spanish Harlem to look for my car. I spot it two blocks from Joe’s door. I guess he isn’t getting enough sleep. I’m too selfish at this point to be concerned that he’s not making a living. I use my duplicate key to get into the car and drive downtown.

  I find another driver, same arrangement. The car becomes my ambulant living room. I even make love in it, despite the lack of a partition, window curtains, and tinted glass. The folklore at the time is that immediately after you make love you are resplendent, oozing eroticism from every pore. The trick is to make love on the way to a party so that the semen in you is still fresh. The logistics of the situation requires sex at great speed. One partner looks out the window, smiling beatifically at passersby as the driver zooms through amber lights to avoid at all costs a standstill of any kind. During one unavoidable stop, I find myself smiling at a well-known art dealer I have just done business with. He approaches the car to greet me. I crank down the window one inch, throw my fur coat over my partner, and yell, “Don’t come closer—you’ll catch my measles.”

  Andy and I go to the ballet with Louis Martin, a socialite and sometime impresario, who knows many show business people. He takes us backstage to meet Rudolf Nureyev, and we all go out to supper. I am mesmerized by Nureyev, thrilled to be near him, he is so beautiful, so Russian. I run into him again a few days later at a party given by Monique Van Vooren, the actress and singer, who is in love with Nureyev. After about our fourth meeting, Nureyev dances into my orbit. He is magic, magic, anytime, anyplace. In bed he is a star. I love to touch his skin. I like to go to his dressing room and see him half naked. He is made of one piece of solid magic.

  The members of the ballet troupe live by a strict discipline. Every day they rehearse from one to four in the afternoon, rest from four to seven, then get ready for the curtain at eight. They are as ascetic as monks.

  Meanwhile, Rudy, superstar, superman, rehearses like a man, fucks like a beast, and dances like an angel. I tell him, “You Russian peasant, how can you make love before a performance? What gives you the strength? Is it the borscht? The yogurt? The vodka?”

  “No, darling—my well-shaped balls, full of sperm!”

  After a performance we go to El Morocco. Rudy asks me to dance. I adore being in his arms in a roomful of glittering people. But I am full of terror. Suppose I step on one of his multimillion-dollar toes? He is oblivious of my concern. He holds me with such power, yet such lightness, that there is no danger of mis-stepping.

  He is never in love with me; I am never in love with him. We are both in love with pleasure. We are a perfect fit. At the end of the season, when he leaves New York, it is over. Meeting again, we do the noncommittal two-cheek kiss and turn away.

  One day, Andy and I meet Yoko Ono and John Lennon at Phebe’s Place, a restaurant on the Bowery. Andy is hoping to design a cover for John’s new album. Yoko wears black pants, a black top, and a large belt of ammunition. I am shocked by the ammo belt and wonder what she can be advertising or promoting. Why else would this outspoken advocate of peace—“Make love, not war”—carry bullets around her waist? But we are in a time of such explosion and confusion that white becomes black, yes means no, and bullets speak peace. Maybe she would argue that the weapon belt is a reminder of the atrocity of war.

  Yoko is very reserved during our meeting, says only a word or two. John is much more natural and open. He wears beige army pants, a T-shirt, and Top-Siders. He carries the magic of Beatlemania on his shoulders. He has a kind of likable British arrogance. He says at one point, “You know, at the height of our acclaim, we were more popular than Jesus.”

  Andy reacts with his usual “Hmmm.” Yoko nods her head. Andrea Wips wanted to come with us. Andy did not let her. She’d get drunk and misbehave. Andrea was very upset. She said, “Everybody hates that Jap, she’s so tacky. She broke up the Beatles.
She is the black pest with her conceptual nothingness.”

  Andy just said, “What’s tacky about her?”

  “Everything.”

  “Tacky” is a word Andy uses often for people he thinks are not for real. It is ironical coming from a man who is himself “naturally synthetic.”

  At the restaurant we are photographed, Yoko, Andy, and I. She holds a catsup bottle in her hand, her conception of Pop.

  He doesn’t get to design the record album jacket.

  I meet the self-appointed American high priest of drugs, Dr. Timothy Leary, a former lecturer at Harvard University, at a plush Park Avenue apartment. He promises the assembly of socialites and intellectuals an expansion of consciousness and an ecstasy revealing itself from within through the use of drugs. He tells me, “LSD is Western yoga.”

  Handsome, slim Timothy Leary slides his words out of his smiling mouth. His credo is “Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out.” I photograph him, dressed in white, meditating next to a bumper sticker inscribed, “Have a marijuana. I’ve gone to pot.”

  Andy’s drug of choice is Obetrol, a kind of speed, which he pops into his mouth as casually and frequently as someone else sucks breath mints or cough drops. It keeps his eyes open, but otherwise has little visible effect. He stays cool, remote, observant, mechanically wielding his tape recorder or his camera, always the calm epicenter of the hurricane around him, always at ground zero.

  I try every way I know to persuade Billy Name, the resident astrologer, to let me see Andy’s horoscope. He refuses, so I work out an informal one myself. Andy was born August 6, 1928, under the sign of Leo. His leonine image is uncanny—a nocturnal mammal of the cat family with a tawny body, tufted tail, and shaggy blackish or dark brown mane in the male. That’s Andy’s whitish, yellowish, brownish, silvery wig to a T.