Famous for 15 Minutes

by Ultra Violet

  Jackie does not want to be upstaged by a discussion of Holly’s gender and credits. “I’ve had six husbands,” she says.

  “Six husbands and no wives,” I tease.

  “Always husbands, whether I’m a boy or a girl,” Jackie insists. “I fell in love six times, and now I’m on my seventh.”

  I find this whole situation burlesquely bizarre, but I go along. “Hey, Ultra, would you act in my next play?” Jackie asks.

  “Sure, I’d love to.”

  Holly, Candy, and Jackie have been invited to appear in Warhol movies. Candy is exploding with excitement. “He is the biggest thing since Cecil B. DeMille,” she gushes. “My mother always knew I’d be a movie star. She dressed me as a girl, but my father always called me ‘the boy.’ Now I’m going to be photographed as the most perfect hermaphrodite.” (In 1970 Richard Bernstein photographs her naked on a bed of clouds, with long white hair flowing from her turban. Her nymphet breasts and her demierect penis leave viewers with mouths agape.)

  In 1968 Candy and Jackie both have small parts in Flesh, the first of Andy’s more professional movies. In one scene they are sitting in ladylike poses on a couch, reading old magazines out loud, while a blow job is being given to Joe Dallesandro by Geri, a topless go-go dancer.

  At the informal screening of Flesh at the Factory, Candy wears rags. I’m not sure whether they are the latest fashion or just rags. I ask her when she first met Warhol. “I’m going to meet him tonight for the first time.”

  “What do you mean? Wasn’t he there when you made the movie?”

  “No, he wasn’t. Isn’t that strange?”

  It would have been strange four or five years earlier, when Andy handled the camera himself for his simple, black-and-white home movies, but as his movies have gained in complexity they have passed from Andy’s hands to those of Paul Morrissey and others with real professional skills.

  A few days later, Candy calls me at two in the morning. She has been thrown out of her hotel room for not paying her bill. She wants to stay with me. I can’t say no, for we are part of the same band, Warhol’s band. Candy arrives, tipsy, wearing a long, black satin décolleté dress torn at the rump, long white tattered kid gloves, a white moth-eaten ermine wrap, and an almost Marilyn Monroe wig.

  I give her my guest bedroom and run a hot bath for her. “Oh, you’re so kind,” she says. Not really. I’m worried about ticks, fleas, who knows what germs she’s picked up from her partners of the night. I go to sleep. At noon she has not yet surfaced, so I quietly open her door. She is as frightening as a de Kooning woman. Her head is tilted back and sideways, her mouth a grimacing pit bordered with three menacing lower canines. Her runny mascara blackens her cheeks, her purple lipstick is smeared. She is naked, one voluptuous pink round breast exposed. Her legs are wide-spread. Her hated male organ sticks out like a water-spouting gargoyle. I don’t intend to check under it for a female orifice. Some things are best left unexplored. I look for a breathing motion. There is none. I can see the headline: HERMAPHRODITE FOUND DEAD IN UPPER EAST SIDE PENTHOUSE. Candy calms me with a random rattle. I close the door and decide she cannot stay another night.

  When she finally awakens at 4 P.M., she spends an hour putting on her glamorous face, whispers, “Thank you,” and runs out the front door for another hot night on the town.

  At the formal opening of Flesh at the Garrick Theater on Bleecker Street, where it runs for six months, October 1968 to April 1969, Candy, at twenty-five, is at the height of her glory. Her teeth have been fixed. She uses good makeup. The press goes wild over Candy. In interviews she recites a long list of films she is planning to appear in, but none of it is true. She dreams up titles as she speaks: “Beyond the Boys in the Band, The Valley of the Fags, Blonde on a Bummer, Sandwich à Trois …”

  Warhol is thrilled by the success of Flesh. He sees it as a documentary of boys who spend their lives trying to be complete girls, working double time to get rid of the stigma of male organs. Sexual ambiguity always fascinates him. He judges correctly that the public is ready to blur the lines between male and female. He is getting thousands of dollars’ worth of publicity from the film. I am as caught up in the success of it as he is. But I am not as caught up as Candy. She really believes in her momentary fame. She is convinced she is already a star.

  In 1969 the trade papers announce that a movie is to be made of Myra Breckinridge, Gore Vidal’s best-selling novel about a star-struck transvestite. A nationwide, highly publicized search for the screen Myra continues for many months. Candy desperately wants the role. She repeatedly calls the producer and the director, bombards them with letters telling how she has lived the part of Myra and knows the 1940s movies even better than Gore Vidal. When Candy learns that the role is going to Raquel Welch, something in her is destroyed. Her dream of Hollywood dies.

  To have or not have a vagina is the main question in Trash, the 1970 film in which Holly masturbates with a beer bottle and convinces a welfare worker she is pregnant. She is obviously a boy, but just as obviously appears to be a girl. A born comic, she keeps the audience laughing nonstop.

  I ask Holly how much she was paid for Trash. “One hundred and twenty-five dollars when I signed the release,” she says.

  “How long did it take to film?”

  “Six days.” I figure that’s just over twenty dollars a day. Some salary for a Superstar!

  Jackie, Holly, and Candy all appear in Women in Revolt, made in 1972. Jackie insists that Andy be at the camera. She refuses to go on unless he is filming. Luckily Morrissey is standing by and realizes Andy is putting the film in backward. Even though everyone knows that Andy does not move the camera or operate the zoom, his presence inspires the actors. Without Andy, there is no performance, no electricity, no magic. The camera might as well be out of film.

  24 HOURS

  It’s one of many whirlwind days in mid-1968 when Andy and I stay up twenty-four hours without sleep. Andy’s uppers keep him going; all I need is my natural high. I drift into the Factory in midmorinng. We’re supposed to be shooting a movie, but nothing is happening. Gerard and a young kid hold silk screens in place; Andy works over them with rollers of cerise and persimmon paint. Rock music blares. I flip through the latest fashion magazines.

  Ingrid arrives. We thumb through the magazines together. Now Gerard strings cables across the floor. It will be hours before anything happens. I make a call at the pay phone and take a cab uptown. Dali and I have lunch at the Pavilion with Verushka, a Russian-born model who is a Vogue favorite. She is wearing a black muslin see-through dress with seams running from waist to neck that center over her breasts so they hide one fifth of each nipple. Men stare at the hidden part and women stare at men staring. I have to laugh—our downtown way of dressing has reached high fashion circles. Dali is wearing a gold lame vest and a white ruffled shirt. I am wearing what is for me a conservative outfit: a violet mini with violet shoes and violet hose, which will not be changed until tomorrow at this time.

  Dali holds forth on the rhinoceros’s horn, reputedly the world’s most powerful aphrodisiac. He says, stretching out each vowel, “There is not a day I don’t thank Sigmund Freud for his great truths. Thanks to him, in all my paintings I manage to paint a rhinoceros horn. Even in my famous Bread, there is a rhinoceros horn resting in the basket. I have to give you some powdered horn someday.”

  “Thank you, but I don’t really need an aphrodisiac,” I say.

  Dali continues. “When I was ten, I prayed on all fours in front of a table made of rhino horns.”

  Verushka does not seem to know what to make of all this.

  I take out my pad and pencil and say to Dali, “For that article I’m writing for France-Amérique, I need to know your definition of surrealism.”

  “To transcribe thoughts spontaneously without any rational aesthetic constraint, to apply a paranoia critique to liberate men from the tyranny of the rational world.”

  I tell him, “I guess I was born a surrealist but never k
new it.”

  He goes on. “Neglecting neither blood nor excrements, nor atheism nor the immaculate intuition, I add my Mediterranean hypocrisy, capable of perversity. But André Breton expels me from the group because I am too surreal. The most important thing for me is to commit the maximum number of sins.”

  “I, too—” I begin, but Dali is not stoppable.

  “Soon I knew the Nietzschean Dionysus was my guardian angel.…” I try to follow word by word his surreal monologue, but soon I let it envelop me like music. “Eventually I return to the truth of the Apostolic Roman Catholic religion, which meets my Dalinian cosmogony with its limp watches that prophesy the disintegration of matter, its hallucinating phosphenes, reminiscent of my angelic intrauterine lost paradise.”

  I contrast this flood of tangled rhetoric with Andy’s halting silences. Andy—oohhh! I look at my watch and run.

  It’s nearly three when I get back to the Factory. “Where have you been?” Andy asks. “You’re not in the picture.”

  “What did you shoot?”

  “Your big scene.”

  Ingrid shakes her head. “They ran out of film. They haven’t done a thing except bitch at each other.” One of the kids comes in with film. When the camera is loaded, Paul tells us to look busy. Three pretty boys entwine themselves on the broken-down couch. We number ten now, some strangers, Ingrid, Eric, me, and the three pretty boys, who have taken off their pants and entwined themselves even more tightly.

  Andy, clicking his Polaroid, exclaims, “Fab! Great!” I go back to flipping Vogue. Maybe I’m on camera, maybe not. There’s no way to tell. His phone rings again and again. Kids doing term papers call in to speak to Andy. Whoever answers the phone pretends to be Andy.

  At four, Andy and I go uptown to meet Truman Capote for tea in the Palm Court of the Plaza Hotel. I notice Truman’s round, rolling eyes, his pinkish skin, his grown-up baby look. He has an air of false naïveté. He is wearing a pale gray Borsolino hat, traditional gray pants, a brown jacket, and a red scarf. The conversation turns to the concept of yin and yang, two forces always in opposition and yet always complementary. It is a favorite subject of mine. While Andy is reloading his Polaroid, I say, “Yang is the masculine, active principle, as in light, heat, dryness. Yin is the feminine passive principle of darkness, cold, wetness. In Cold Blood is a yin-yang title.”

  Truman’s novel based on a real-life murder in Kansas has had a long life atop the best-seller list.

  Andy remarks, “Made lots of yang money.”

  I believe deeply and passionately that every human being seeks the opposite of his or her innate essence. The act of intercourse is the ultimate and glorious union of opposites. This is why I have so much difficulty with the idea of homosexuality. The absence of opposites appears necrophilic to me. I have the eerie feeling that my two escorts will die long before I do.

  With that thought in mind, I ask Andy to stick out his tongue. From its appearance I can make a diagnosis. Andy hesitatingly displays a whitish tongue. I say, “A white tongue is an early sign of stomach trouble.”

  Andy responds with his usual “Gee.”

  I ask Truman to show me his tongue. He hesitates, then has difficulty stretching his tongue out straight. It trembles; it has a deep middle crack.

  I say, “There is trouble in your nervous system or brain. Watch your heart.”

  As I stick out my tongue, the waiter drops his tray in a shattering of broken glasses. He is horrified by all three tongues, especially mine, which is obscenely long. I can extend my tongue a full six inches. It has been photographed many times as a rare specimen. I have received fan mail from a man who claims his tongue is far longer than mine.

  We all pack in our tongues and walk out without paying the check.

  While we wait outside for a cab, we spot a strange creature standing in the circle of green facing the Plaza on the Fifth Avenue side. A tall, thin man gesticulates in slow motion, as if floating in air. A crowd is observing the expressive motion of his limbs. “It’s t’ai chi, an ancient art of self-healing,” I tell my companions. Truman waddles off in his duck walk, Andy and I go up to Seventy-eighth and Madison, where we catch three different art openings in the same building.

  The galleries are so jammed with people clutching plastic glasses of white wine and jabbering to each other and to us as we shoulder our way to the rear gallery and then back to the large front room that it’s impossible to see the paintings. Looking at the paintings is not the idea. People are here to see each other and be seen and to buttonhole an errant curator or museum official or to say at the next stop, “Oh, I just said to Joni Mitchell …” or “I just saw Andy Warhol …” People crowd around Andy. They want to be near him, to touch him. They all have something to tell him.

  Andy and I are invited to Jasper Johns’s for dinner. We taxi to Canal Street and the Bowery. Jasper lives and works in a building that used to be a bank. He is a serious painter who can take things as ordinary as flags, targets, maps, and the numbers we’ve all looked at a million times and give them beauty, depth, and aliveness. Andy is envious of Jasper and his friend Bob Rauschenberg. Bob pioneered Pop Art in 1958 when he created a kind of collage with a hole into which he inserted four Coca-Cola bottles. Bob and Jasper are already famous and making big money.

  Andy by now has had shows at the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles and the Stable Gallery in New York. He has shown at the Sonnabend in Paris and in Philadelphia has had his first museum show. His name is known, his face is always in the papers. He is a celebrity in New York. But five-figure success—$25,000 and up for a canvas—and kowtowing by major museum directors still elude him.

  Andy once asked Emile De Antonio, an art champion of the fifties and sixties, “Why don’t they like me?”

  Standing nearby, I heard Emile say bluntly, “Andy, you’re too swish and you’re a commercial artist and you collect art.” At that time, about 1963, collecting was suspect in an artist—it was the province of museums and collectors. Andy’s commercial career was already well in the past, but among art snobs he remained tainted by it, although enriched with its money. And while the post—Abstract Expressionist sensibility was quite a homosexual one, Andy’s gossipy style was not taken seriously—at first.

  Food is the show tonight, not art. The buffet begins with fern buds, the tightly curled tops of wild ferns, cooked al dente with currants, pignolia nuts, and spices. I am enchanted. Dozens of other foods are set out on an improvised table under the twenty-one-foot ceiling—cold lobster terrine, a jellied consommé, a smoked salmon mousse surrounded by tiny shrimp, sauced Mexican style with a coulis of green tomatoes, many marvelous-looking breads, an Alsatian tart of apples, heavy cream, egg yolks, sugar, and cognac baked to a lush custard. The incredible spread has been prepared by Frank Lima, a poet, dancer, and chef, born in Puerto Rico.

  I am so preoccupied with the food that I barely notice the ten other guests, who are concentrating on the booze, which flows in torrents. The legend was that unless Jasper and Bob were drunk out of their skulls, they couldn’t paint a thing. They’re busy now reinforcing the legend. The food is wasted on Andy. It is too complicated for him. He is tongue-tied in front of his host. Jasper has eyes that reflect, absorb, shine, capture—in a word, they see. He has a bad complexion, an intense expression. Isn’t Jasper the name of one of the Three Kings? Isn’t it an opaque variety of quartz? This Jasper radiates warmth and power. We hang around for a while, then Andy says, “See you tomorrow,” his standard farewell, and we leave.

  We walk a few blocks up the Bowery, sidestepping the bums sleeping on the sidewalk and bypassing the panhandlers. Lights are on in the windows of the grimy lofts above us. Artists have been moving into the low-rent space. The neighborhood is on the move. Andy stops growling about his envy of Jasper and Bob and turns on his real-estate head. “We should buy here,” he says. “Look how wide the street is.” It’s true—the Bowery is probably the widest avenue in Manhattan, although at this moment the vilest, with i
ts soup kitchens, flophouses, and population of derelicts. An odoriferous drunk staggers against me.

  “Would you want to live here?” I ask.

  “It’s a good investment,” he says stubbornly.

  We pick up a cab and head north to Chelsea, where some kids are having a party on a roof. Up six flights of creaking wooden steps permanently steeped in the fragrance of boiled cabbage, we emerge into the party area, where the fumes of marijuana engulf us. The scent is so strong it must blanket the whole neighborhood. Recognizing some of the kids, Andy says, “Can we film on your roof?” The youngsters in their sandals and black turtle-necks cluster around him. Andy listens rather than talks, but he seems much happier than he was earlier.

  I inspect the buffet, set on boards mounted on wooden horses. The well worked over spread is served from original wrappings. Pretzels and potato chips nestle in torn bags that blare brand names. Heinz catsup, Gulden’s mustard, Hellman’s mayonnaise bottles huddle together. Bud and Miller cans lean against Pepsi bottles. Schrafft’s ice cream melts in pink rivulets down its cardboard carton. It is a Pop collage, a Pop landscape.

  “Andy, look.”

  “Looks great,” he says.

  Now it’s on to a quick stop at the Peppermint Lounge, on West Forty-fifth Street. A couple of kids join us, and we all squeeze into a cab headed uptown. The Peppermint Lounge, run by the genial and publicity-wise rock-and-roll singer Chubby Checker, is the birthplace of the Twist, a fast, gyrating dance that is routinely denounced from pulpits as a shortcut to hell, but everyone’s doing it. We grope through the dark to a round table where Andy is supposed to meet some people interested in investing in his next movie. He is always looking for investors. He’s been promised two thousand dollars, to be delivered tonight. At the table, two men are talking about interest rates and currency manipulations; the two women with them are flashing their diamonds and clutching their minks, although it is much too late in the season for furs. They look at us coldly but make room at the table.