Famous for 15 Minutes

by Ultra Violet

  At one point he owns some twenty-five cats, and it takes the mastery of a lion tamer to be surrounded by freaks, to come out with Pop Art, to anoint himself Pope of Pop. Later, he paints portraits of lions and lionesses of industry and finance.

  “One must certainly have the lions of the moment at one’s party,” wrote Vita Sackville-West. Warhol becomes the whole party. A party without him is not a party. He seizes the lion’s share, the largest part, gets all the credit and takes all the receipts for films that are collective works. Although the sixties are a time of communal living, communal love, and sharing your bread with everyone, Andy, in the words of the writer Jean Stafford in another context, “slyly sneaked the lion’s share of buttered toast at tea.”

  That’s our Andy, all right.

  On occasion Andy comes with me to tea at Dali’s, and one day in 1965 Dali takes us upstairs to his studio in the St. Regis. The room is filled with his toys: stereopticons and boxes of cards to view in the machines, photographs of exotic places and beautiful people, including dozens and dozens of himself, stacks of back issues of Scientific American, dried flowers, a white plaster Venus de Milo, yards of red velvet, a cardboard pyramid, live leeches in an aquarium, several gold-dipped lobsters, crabs, and sea urchins. Andy stares in fascination at this accumulation of odd objects. He plays with a foot-long, helium-filled silver blimp attached to a string. “Oh, how great!” he exclaims. “Where did you get this?”

  “At Schwarz’s toy store,” Dali tells him.

  A little later, on our way to F.A.O. Schwarz, Andy says to me, “Leave Dali. He’s too old, and he’s not with it.”

  “He’s still getting plenty of press attention.”

  Andy grimaces.

  In the toy store we buy two blimps. I don’t think much about the purchase until the next year, when Andy’s show at the Castelli Gallery features his Flying Pillows. Bigger than bed pillows, the helium-filled rectangles of silver Mylar are clearly derived from the toy blimps. They have the dreamy beauty of indoor clouds. One wafts gently out the gallery window; several turn up as props the following season in one of Merce Cunningham’s ballets; but four do not bring an estimated price of $20,000 at auction at Sotheby’s in the spring of 1988.

  Leo Castelli is the best art dealer of our time. His big, wide nose is too large for his tiny face, but it carries this short man forward, sniffing art and money a mile away. Leo always speaks to me in French and hugs me warmly when he sees me. I knew him way back in his Paris days, when he was associated with the remarkable dealer René Drouin in an interior design firm. He is amused that I have become Ultra Violet. One day I ask him what he thinks of Andy as a painter. He says in a straightforward way, “It will be hard to place him in art history. It is still too early to tell. But one thing is sure: he’s a genius at publicity.”

  On April 1, 1965, Andy and I are on our way to see Si Newhouse, publisher of Vogue magazine and head of the whole Condé Nast publishing empire. I met Si through Rene Drouin when I was collecting art in 1961.

  “Introduce me to important people so they can produce a film for you to star in,” Andy has said. I organize the meeting. Si occupies a duplex penthouse on East Seventy-third Street. He is a short man with a grin. He lets us into his handsome modern living room. There are three piles of Vogue back issues. He shows us his paintings: Liberman, Olitski, Cuixart, Lichtenstein, Stella, many more.

  In front of every painting, Andy stops, exclaims, “Oh! How fantastic!” Andy always compliments everyone, anytime, about anything. Whenever I take Andy to a film premiere and introduce him to the director, he inevitably says, “Oh, it was fantastic!” Later, on the street, he tells me how bad it was.

  Si is as curious to meet Andy as Andy is eager to meet Si. “Where is art going?” he asks Andy.

  As usual, Andy does not know what to answer. Si offers us cocktails and canapés. Andy says, “No, thank you.” He prefers a pill and pops it down his throat with a sip of soda. “Soon we will all live on pills, no more food,” he explains.

  Si asks Andy what he is working on. “My next show will be of people. I will exhibit Ultra, Brigid, English Ivy, International Velvet.”

  Si does not understand. Is Andy putting him on? I hasten to explain about the names of the Superstars. Andy will pin us to the wall or rent us to collectors for the weekend. It is getting late. We must go. Si is too wise to back a Warhol film. But ever since that day, Andy is a favorite of Vogue and later of Vanity Fair. So it is a worthwhile visit for Andy.

  One evening I am chatting at the bar of the elegant Le Pavilion restaurant with its proprietor, Henri Soulé, New York’s premier restauranteur. In walks Frank Sinatra. He stares at me. I look back at him. We exchange charged glances. The words to his song “Strangers in the Night,” pound in my head. Our glances hold. When I was sixteen I had a crush on Ava Gardner. I identified with her. I’ve been told I look like her. Is it my resemblance to Ava that magnetizes Sinatra?

  This time my courage wavers. I drop my eyes. Sinatra walks on. I often wonder: Was he really interested? What if I’d encouraged him with a coquettish invitation? Was I spared ecstasy or grief?

  I think of this near miss some time later, when Sinatra is courting Mia Farrow. She is one of the Dalinians, a member of Dali’s circle of admirers, a highbrow version of Sinatra’s rat pack. “Should I marry him?” she asks. She is not even sure that his intentions are matrimonial. “How do I get him to propose?”

  “It’s very simple,” Dali says. “Wear one green and one red sock.”

  “What will that do?”

  “It’s an eye-catcher.”

  Mia is used to Dali’s riddles. She sits there looking like a frail blossom. She has long, silky blond hair. She wears angelic white. Her skin and eyes are transparent. She follows Dali’s instructions. A few days later, she is wearing a child-size diamond bracelet around her tiny wrist. Sinatra has given it to her. We decide he must be very much in love.

  “Now,” says Dali, “to make the final catch, wear your shoes inverted.”

  We don’t understand at first, then we realize he wants her to wear her shoes on the wrong feet. “But that hurts,” she protests.

  A year after their marriage in 1966, Sinatra, Mia, Dali, his wife, Gala, myself, and Chici, Dali’s ocelot—what a collection of Italian-sounding names!—are having drinks in the King Cole Room of the St. Regis. I am wearing a violet dress, a violet smile, violet hair, and violet socks. Sinatra looks me over. “You look like a violet flag.”

  “I am.”

  “What country?”

  “Ultraland.”

  He decides not to ask me any more questions.

  In November 1967, my debut in the New York theater produces much excitement. I love the discipline of reporting every night to the Ridiculous Theater on the Bowery, where I play Natolia, a queen from Saturn who speaks Middle English, and Ondine plays Zabina, a queen from Mars, in Charles Ludlam’s play Conquest of the Universe. The curtain does not go up until Ondine, in full view of the actors, inserts a needle into his arm, pulls it out, and gives the actors’ blessing, “Break a leg.” I respond, “Break an arm.” Then we go on.

  On November 21, I invite Marcel Duchamp to watch my performance. The box office attendant runs back to tell the cast, “Duchamp is here.” Ondine screams, “Who the hell is Duchamp?” After the show, Marcel embraces me while puffing on his cigar. He says, “It’s a collage from Brecht, Shakespeare, Adolf Hitler’s writing, TV ads. I love you in it.” He had to love it, for in the Wall Street Journal, John O’Connor writes, “The colorful chaos is a direct descendant of Dada.”

  In the Village Voice on November 30, Michael Smith writes, “Conquest of the Universe is an explosion of talent that leaves the mind in tatters. Vaccaro [our director] has assembled an astonishing cast, many of them ex-inmates of Andy Warhol movies, and they produce countless flashes of brilliance.… Ultra Violet is brilliantly funny as the Italianate Natolia.”

  A year before, Andy introduces me to John Cham
berlain, maestro of the wrecked automobile. His assemblages consist of smashed car parts. He is one of those apache types who always appeal to me. In fact, he is a nearly full-blooded American Indian. I take him on, extract him from his slob clothes—dirty pants, out-of-shape sweatshirt, clodhoppers—outfit him in black patent-leather moccasins, orange corduroy pants to counterpoint my violets, and a jacket almost as long as an artist’s smock. A little later, when I introduced Chamberlain to Dali at tea, Dali says, “That one is a chimera.”

  He is absolutely wild about me. He photographs me a mile a minute. We fly to Mexico to film The Life of Hernando Cortez. Taylor Mead plays the conquistador in a gay, laid-back, gringo style. I play his spouse-mistress. The highlight of the film is John’s performance. Dressed in silver and violet lame, his face half covered with wide aviator glasses, he roars up a gigantic cedar tree to reach his love—me. The camera swirls as it films our flaming, torching, electrifying romance in the sky.

  One night I even lend him my car, the beautiful limousine put at my disposal by Mr. XYZ.

  A few nights later, when I am at supper at Park Avenue in the Seventies, I hear a phenomenal crash from the street. Somehow I know it’s my car. In a half hour, there is a call from the nearest hospital emergency room. John and his passengers, one of them the painter Neil Williams, are cut, bruised, and bleeding. The car is a total wreck. John does not have the elegance to sign the crushed metal, which today would be worth something in the six figures.

  I flee to France to escape John’s wrecking hand. I call him from there. “John, I’m pregnant by you.”

  “That’s your problem,” he replies.

  I hang up, dazedly dwelling on the glaring contrast between aesthetics in behavior and aesthetics in art. I question my relationship with John. The meteor has burned out. I get an abortion.

  A little later, John softens, but only for the wink of an eye. He offers me a sculpture, his version of the Winged Victory of Samothrace. While he is away, I go to his loft to claim my consolation prize. It is too big to take out through the stairway or the elevator shaft.

  Andy, with his superb sense of commerce and timing, tells me, “Get it out of his place. Squash it, bend it, but get it out now.”

  I don’t have the heart to mutilate the work—I respect it too much. I wait for John’s return. Warhol is right—it is only an Indian gift. John changes his mind. I never get the sculpture, which I really would have loved. Would I have loved the child? Not really, for I would be a mother with a heartless bosom, and the child would have no father.

  I do not stop to mourn my lost baby. Almost immediately I have another loss to contend with which, at the moment, looms larger in my life. Mr. XYZ does not take kindly to the destruction of his car. He has other complaints as well. At first he is amused by my transformation into Ultra Violet. But as my clothes grow more flamboyant and my name or picture appears in the paper more often in connection with some new Pop outrage, his affection chills.

  “I think you should keep away from those Warhol people—they are a bad influence,” he says.

  That’s all I need—to be told what to do, whom to see. It’s the nuns all over again, giving me orders. I flare back at him. He walks out. A door slams. A door is closed for good.

  A few days later, I search among my papers for the deed to my apartment house, to see where I stand. I can’t find the document anywhere. I am always careful with important papers. Where can this one be? I play back in my mind that joyous moment when I signed the papers in Mr. XYZ’s office and then went to tell my friend Véronique of my good fortune. Dimly I recall that his attorney kept the papers for recording. I was to receive them later. But in my euphoria I never kept track of “later.” And now, obviously, it is too late. The bitter truth dawns. I never owned anything.

  I laugh ruefully. My shrewd lover never intended to let that paper out of his hand. After I signed it, he either locked it in his own safe-deposit box or tossed it into his wastebasket. Well, I felt rich, very rich, while it lasted. One thing I won’t do: I’ll never tell Véronique of my failure as a gold digger.

  TRANSVESTITES

  When I meet Jackie Curtis in 1967, she appears to be a girl, but she has the body odor of a man. Each time she lifts her arm, the thick male hair of her underarm exudes a male scent. Her meticulously overpainted dark red lips and heavily shoulder-padded low-cut dress recall a 1940s movie star. Her eyebrows are carefully plucked. Her beard is barely visible, bristling up through pancake makeup and pimply red skin. I learn that she is having her facial hair removed at an electrolysis school, where unskilled students practice on her.

  I ask Jackie about her childhood. She was raised by her mother and two aunts; the three sisters were completely in love with the movies. She shows me a dog-eared album filled with stills of Mae West, Joan Crawford, Garbo, and dozens of others. “This was my education,” she says. I see a photo of Mae West cut from a magazine. The head has been amputated and replaced with a cutout of Jackie’s face.

  “How strange.”

  Jackie turns the page and points to a similarly decapitated Joan Crawford with Jackie’s face. “My mother and Aunt Josie did that. We worshiped the stars. It was not a dream. We entered the silver screen.”

  Jackie was born a boy with a chunky body and a psyche that fluctuated from masculine to feminine. When she/he took diet pills to lose weight, Jackie became a svelte woman. When she/he stopped the pills—they were speed—the body became heavy and mannish again. From year to year she/he went back and forth from male to female. Now, as a performer, she plays both male and female roles, but her public prefers her as a female. That, of course, means more speed. She raises her arm to fix her thick, flowing locks. I am intoxicated by the sweaty male odor.

  We are going to Slugger Ann, a bar on Second Avenue run by Jackie’s grandmother. As we cross Tenth Street, a kid yells, “Yaaah, queen in drag.”

  In a soprano male voice, Jackie shouts, “Little cocksucker!”

  “What kind of name is Slugger Ann?” I ask.

  “My grandmother was a dance hall performer. It runs in the family.”

  At the bar I meet Candy Darling, who is working as a barmaid. She is wearing a bra and shorts, and in the see-through bag she carries I spot a Tampax. Her red-lipped smile reveals many missing teeth. “Candy is my new name,” she explains in a whispery, soft voice, like a low-volume Kim Novak. “I was born Jimmy Slattery. I’m from Massapequa, Long Island. I belong on the screen. I was born to be a star. I’m in Jackie’s play Glamour, Glory and Gold. I inspired her to write it.”

  Jackie, I discover, is also a playwright. Glamour, Glory and Gold has just opened. All about glamour, glory and gold, it has become a camp treat and has launched the acting career of Robert De Niro, who plays ten roles. According to Jackie, De Niro begged on bended knee to act the ten roles. The Village Voice has given him a rave revue.

  Candy keeps talking, without any encouragement. “I’ll be anything but a man. I’ll be a lesbian. I’ll be beaten up by men for not being a whole woman. My breasts are sensational. There are none better in town.” When she raises her bra to show me, the fairies in the corner of the bar don’t bother to look up. “I go to this dating agency on Park Avenue. We all meet there for our hormone shots. I love it when my stockings run. I love all the problems women have.”

  I point to the Tampax. “Are you menstruating?”

  “No; I carry it to minimize my flaw.”

  “What flaw?”

  Jackie explains that Candy refers to her penis as “my flaw” and always carries a Tampax, letting it fall on the table so that men can be reassured of her femininity. Candy is retrieving her fake eyelash, which has dropped onto a customer’s plate. As Candy picks up her lash in front of the traumatized customer, she says, “Even Garbo had her girdle.”

  By this time we are having drinks, and Candy is munching on a Wonder Bread sandwich. I see her sandwich progressively getting redder and redder. Jackie, too, is staring.

  When Ca
ndy notices blood on her hand, she screams, “My God, another tooth. I’ll be toothless soon!”

  A little later, Holly Woodlawn joins us at Slugger Ann. Holly, no beauty, has a prominent nose, a receding chin, and a friendly, inviting way about her. The three of them form the odd trio. I ask Jackie if Holly has had breast transplants too. She laughs. “Not transplants, implants; hormone implants.” Yes, twenty-five-year-old Holly is growing breasts.

  Holly is a highly praised courtesan. She is much sought after, for there are a lot of men out there, men leading seemingly normal lives, who will part with a good deal of their money to indulge their strange whims. She is also an off-Broadway actress and has appeared in the Ridiculous Theatrical Company with Charles Ludlam and John Vaccaro. She tells me that she knew she belonged on the stage when she saw Elizabeth Taylor in Cleopatra.

  “The movie was shit, but I love Hollywood shit,” she explains.

  Coming from a European childhood, never mesmerized by the movies, and not parked for hours in front of Hollywood reruns on the TV screen, I find it hard to understand the total infatuation with the silver screen I see around me at the Factory and here with these three. Of course, I am delighted when Andy invites me to appear in a movie; but my head is not saturated with dreams of stardom, and I am not addicted to fan magazines. Jackie and Candy say in unison, as an incantation, “MGM, RKO, Paramount, and Twentieth Century—Fox will call us. We’ll be stars. We’ll be famous forever.” After a while, Candy says, “Hollywood is taking too long to get in touch with us. We’ll make films with Warhol. If you are a Warhol Superstar, you have it made.”

  Another day, over beer and potato chips at Slugger Ann, Holly says, “Andy creates his own Hollywood. I am the sultry Hedy Lamarr, Candy is Kim Novak, Jackie is the Joan Crawford type, and Joe Dallesandro is the Clark Gable. And you”—turning to me—“are Vivien Leigh.”

  Confused about who is what sex, I ask Holly, “Would you call yourself a transvestite?”

  “Honey,” she says, in her whispery, affected voice, “call me anything, but call me.”