by Ultra Violet
“Are you sure this is the right place?” I half shout at Andy over the insistent music.
He is very sure. Nobody pays any attention to us. The kids light joints. I try to make introductions. “This is Andy Warhol,” I say, “and I am Ultra Violet.” Complete silence. “Andy is here to discuss his next movie.” More silence. “Are you the investors?” I ask the men.
“Hey, I heard of you,” one of the women squeals. “You always wear purple. Gertrude, look—this is the actress who wears purple.” Close enough. I’m wearing a lilac mini. “Gosh, imagine meeting you.” The men, wreathed in cigar smoke, go on talking about the vagaries of the financial markets.
Andy stands up. “Let’s go,” he says. We wriggle out between the jammed-together tables and chairs. My toes are tapping. I’d really like to dance to the fast-paced music. We lose the two kids.
“What about the two thousand dollars?” I ask. Someone’s made a mistake, but Andy isn’t one to admit an error. It’s time to move on anyway.
Max’s Kansas City is where the Pop scene, Pop life, and Pop Art fuse. It is a two-story restaurant and bar at Park Avenue South and Sixteenth Street, the big hangout of the sixties. Mickey Ruskin, the owner, has operated previous establishments—Deux Magots on East Seventh Street, the Paradox, the Ninth Circle, the Annex—that attracted poets, poetry readings, painters, sculptors. At Max’s, the heavyweights of the art world hang around the long bar, and in the back room, kids, groupies, dropouts, beautiful little girls of fourteen who’ve already had abortions, get noisy or stoned.
Going to Max’s is like going to a gallery opening. You dress up or down. The last time I was at Max’s I wore an old lace nightgown dyed violet. Tonight my ultra mini will stop traffic.
In the back room, lit by talented light artist Dan Flavin, red and yellow neon tubes produce an air of mystery and modernism. Taped rock music bounces off the walls. Mickey has a flair for recognizing who is somebody in art and who will be somebody. For booze and food he exchanges paintings and collages that years later will make their way into museums. The barter system keeps the place noisily animated, for even the least solvent artists can drink with abandon. We eat the biggest steaks I’ve ever seen. Andy had nothing earlier and I only had time to sample the lavish buffet at Jasper’s … when? Just a few hours ago, but it seems like days.
Andrea Wips, that sweet little Jewish lamb, so tiny she looks like a child, comes in at 2 A.M., stoned out of her tiny skull. She jumps on a table and screams, “Show time, everything’s coming up roses! Marilyn’s gone, so love me while you can, I’ve got a heart of gold.” She dances to the rock beat pouring out of the speakers. She lifts her blouse to show her beautiful, adolescent, pinkish breasts. She grabs her tits and challenges the men, then freaks out if one touches her. “Look at my melons, they’re juicy, I’m going to be on top tonight, I’m a real woman! Show time!”
She lives on Park Avenue in a rich uncle’s apartment. She is in love with Andy. She has a fantasy that they will marry and share their whole life. She makes an entry about Andy in her diary every single day. She sidles over to him. He says, “See you tomorrow.” That seems to make her happy, even though it’s Andy’s generic greeting.
A kid walks up to our table and asks Andy, “Do you have a lendable dollar?”
Andy looks him over. He’s a good-looking youngster, probably an art student. Andy says, “Come by the Factory tomorrow. We’ll put you in a movie.” The kid takes the remaining slice of rye bread out of the basket in front of me, spreads it with mustard from the jar on the table, and walks away. Andy is ready to move on. It takes us a while to hail a cab. (Damn that wild Indian giver John Chamberlain. If not for him, I’d still have my beautiful car.)
We taxi down to St. Mark’s Place and look in at the Dom. The place is packed. The Velvet Underground assaults our ears. Two films are playing through red filters. Clouds of smoke swirl in the red beams of the projectors. I expect fire engines to arrive any minute. Ondine dances over and holds a whispered conference with Andy in the corner farthest from the music. I hear a whip crack backstage. “Let’s go,” I say.
“Come by tomorrow,” Andy tells two girls in green bras and black tights. “We’re making a movie.”
Stanley Amos lives nearby. He runs an open house for artists, street people, druggies. We drop in. Half a dozen people sit around in a psychedelic room, painted in Day-Glo whirlpools of color on walls and ceiling. We hang out there for an hour. I am glad to sit quietly.
Then we taxi uptown, to Park Avenue and Fifty-third Street, for breakfast at the Brasserie, in the Seagram Building. On the way we stop at a newsstand to pick up the morning papers and a stack of new magazines. The early morning sun is just hitting the windows on the eastern walls of Park Avenue’s towers. They glow in pale orange rectangles. We order big breakfasts—bacon, eggs, French fries. We spread out our reading material, turn to the gossip columns first. I say, “Let’s see if we’re alive today.” I flip through the pages. My name is mentioned once, Andy’s twice, but there are no pictures of us. That makes it only a fair day. A day with no mention of ourselves is a lost day.
We check the list of art and movie openings, figure out how to crash those we’re not invited to. Invitations and announcements arrive by the stackful every day. We feel we must go everywhere, do everything. If we’re not invited, we walk in anyway. The whole game is people: meeting them, getting them involved, asking them for money, pulling them into our orbit, being invited to their parties and events. Every new person is a new possibility, a link in an ever-lengthening chain, an ever-climbing ladder.
What we’re doing now is scheming the scene for the day. We do it every day, sometimes alone, sometimes together, sometimes on the telephone. Finally we go to our separate homes to shower, change, pick up our messages, scheme some more.
When I step into a taxi at the Park Avenue corner, the driver says, “Hi, Ultra.” I feel as if I own the earth. That instant of recognition makes my day. I have Andy to thank for this degree of fame, for putting me in his movies. I feel a part of American culture. Maybe I’ll be in the history books. I’m ready for the next twenty-four hours.
JULIA WARHOLA
I am dying to meet Andy’s mother. We all know she lives with him in his brownstone at Eighty-ninth Street and Lexington Avenue, but she never comes to the Factory, and we are never invited to his home. She has been instructed not to answer Andy’s phone at the house. She has her own phone, for calls to the family and local merchants. It’s clear that Andy doesn’t want to reveal his dissolute life to Mama. But that doesn’t diminish my curiosity. Finally I say, “Why are you hiding your mother? Are you ashamed of her?”
He evades answering, but when I keep at him, he says, “She doesn’t have the right clothes.”
“That’s easy—let’s buy her some.”
I definitely have the right clothes and not necessarily expensive designer outfits. I’ve learned to achieve a distinctive contemporary look by putting together tops, bottoms, shawls, scarves, surprise accessories from odd and offbeat sources. I patrol the thrift shops, uptown and down, for marvelous, outrageous, eyestopping clothes. My best recycling effort is a wraparound white skirt that once camouflaged the ugly legs of a dressing table in an old house on Staten Island. The New York Times photographed me in that skirt and Women’s Wear and various fashion magazines have frequently pictured me as a pacesetter.
“Come on, let’s buy her some nice things.”
“She never wears anything I get her.”
“Did she wear that two-dollar paper dress from Abraham and Straus?”
“No.”
“Thank God. Your mother needs some good clothes and a woman’s touch in choosing them.”
“You can’t shop with her—you wouldn’t understand each other.” He thinks that closes the discussion.
I persist. “So come along,” he says, “but don’t tell the other girls.” He grimaces, but he is trapped. We make a date for the next day at noon. On a sunny
Thursday in the fall of 1967, I take a taxi to their house, ring the doorbell, and get back into the cab to wait. I know I’m not going to be invited in, so there is no point in standing at the door and putting Andy on the spot. Andy comes out first, then a strong-looking older woman dressed in black. She has pale skin, ghostly gray hair, a large nose. She wears beige low-heeled shoes with comfortably rounded toes. She carries a shopping bag for a purse.
Andy sits in the middle and asks, “Where are we going?”
“Let’s try Macy’s,” I say. “It has the best choice.” And, I think to myself, moderate prices. I can’t imagine thrifty Andy is interested in a big-ticket wardrobe. We take off. I give Mrs. Warhola a small bottle of perfume and say, “A lady without a scent has no future.” Her smile is fresh, earthy.
“Thank you, thank you,” she says, nodding her head.
“Mom needs clothes for our next film. She’s going to star as an aging peroxide movie star with a lot of husbands.”
I hold back a laugh.
“I’m trying to bring back old people,” Andy says, and to his mother, “Ma, you can put on the perfume in the movie.” She nods her head, and again her smile illuminates her face as she says, “And drink champagne.”
At Macy’s, we head for the women’s department. Julia holds tightly to the side of Andy’s black jacket, her wrinkled fingers tightly pinching the heavy leather. We browse through the dresses. Julia looks at the price tags and shakes her head. I select three dresses, one black with a pleated skirt, one with little flowery red roses on a black background, and a draped dress in pale mauve. Andy sits in an armchair and buries his head in a magazine. He flips the pages automatically.
When Julia goes into the dressing room, I stand by outside. She emerges wearing the mauve dress backward. Andy says, “Fabulous, Ma.”
She looks at the price tag and says, “Too much.”
“Don’t worry, Ma.”
She returns to the dressing room and this time invites me in. “Andy’s my baby,” she says confidingly. “My other baby, a daughter, she die when my husband left, 1912.”
I feel my heart turn over for her. I had not known that when Andy’s father departed for America he left behind a young wife grieving over the loss of her firstborn. Very tenderly I help her take off the dress. For underwear she is wearing a home-made camisole of white sateen. On the left shoulder strap, pinned over her heart, are three gold medals, two of the Virgin Mary and one of Christ.
“I marry in 1909,” she says. “Beautiful wedding, like a picture. Gone, all gone—the war, the soldiers. Ondrej run to Poland, in the night, one mile, go to America. My baby girl die, six weeks. I go crazy. Baby dead, no doctor, I scream. Andy my baby now.”
She puts on the black pleated dress and shows it to Andy. He says, “Fabulous; take it.”
Julia examines the price tag and shakes her head. “Too much.”
“Don’t worry, Ma.”
Back in the dressing room, Julia continues to unburden herself. “I live with old people. Work like horse, carry bags of potatoes on my back. Nine years I don’t see my husband.”
We show Andy the printed dress. “Fabulous.” We buy all three.
“Mom needs a fur coat, a mink,” Andy says.
I am astonished. Now that he’s in a shopping mood, there’s no stopping him. We take the escalator to the fur department. Julia holds on to the black leather sleeve of her baby. This time Andy looks at the merchandise. He quickly pushes apart the coats on their hangers. As he glances at each coat, Julia grabs the price tag and says, “No, no, no.”
Andy pulls out a pale mink and shows it to his mom. She shakes her head emphatically. “No, I like baraní-kožuch, baranica.”
“What’s that?” I ask.
“It’s a sheepskin coat they used to wear in her village.”
“Embroideries,” she adds.
Julia finds a rabbit coat. “Zajac,” she says, looking pleased. It has brown spots.
This time it’s Andy who shakes his head. “A peroxide movie star has to wear a mink coat.”
I can see we’re not going to get anywhere with the mink today. “What about a hat?” I ask.
“Šiatok,” Julia says.
Andy explains. “That’s the flowered scarf they wrap around their heads.”
Mama Warhola never plays the peroxide movie star, but she does appear in a filmed portrait, one of a series of quickie films of individuals, which represent a barely moving version of a photomatic sequence. Some time later, he gives Maminko a mink coat. By then I’ve learned that a number of canny fur dealers are swapping pelts for paintings. I’ll bet anything that Maminko’s mink cost Andy nothing but a small silk-screened flower. And I’ll also bet the furrier today is still happily licking his whiskers.
CHELSEA GIRLS
The movie Chelsea Girls, made in 1966, is the high-water mark of underground films. At a cost of less than $1,500, it grosses $500,000. Breaking away from the linear narrative that prevailed in filmmaking from the earliest days of silents, it batters the spectator’s perceptions with random continuity, split screens, disjointed drama, and spiced-up sadomasochism. The camera, nailed to a tripod, every so often unexpectedly zooms or swivels.
In a cinematic stroll from room to room in the raunchy Chelsea Hotel on West Twenty-third Street, the film, in twelve reels, visits twelve rooms, in which twelve different comedies, extravaganzas, operas, and outrages are enacted, among them: room 116, “The Trip”; room 202, “Afternoon”; room 422, “The Gerard Malanga Story”; room 516, “Hanoi Hannah”; room 632, “The John”; room 732, “The Pope Ondine Story”; room 822, “The Closet”; room 946, “George’s Room.” Precisely on target, the film captures the disarray of the unraveling sixties, when transgression became law and unorthodox routes were traveled for instant enlightenment or ever-denser confusion.
When we showcase the film on campuses, students go wild. It is manna from heaven. It is their lives, or their fantasies—or both—played back to them in garrulous, chattering, mind-boggling disorder. The first four reels are shot in color. We run out of money, so the next eight reels are black and white. When the management of the Chelsea Hotel finally throws us out, we have to finish shooting at the Factory. The change of locale causes considerable anguish, for it violates the strict rules of cinema verité, but we have no choice.
Cinerama is the rage that year. We can’t afford the technology, but we knock it off by splitting the screen. We put two screens side by side, run two projectors, and daze the viewers with two separate sets of moving images that assail their vision and force their heads to pivot, right, left, right—migraine!
Chelsea Girls opens with a blank screen on the left, and on the right pretty boy Eric Emerson is seen, first through a red filter and then through a blue, obviously tripping. Now on the left screen, Ondine, in black parody of a priest’s garments, pulls a syringe out of a greasy paper bag and in a familiar ritual, sticks himself in a vein. The microphone must be just under the bag, for the crackling sound of the paper is as nerve-racking as the rustling noises of a compulsive candy-eater in the next seat in a movie house.
With new blood in his Methedrine, or rather new Methedrine in his blood, Ondine, as the pope, serves as confessor to Ingrid Superstar, while on the right Eric starts a striptease. Ingrid calls Ondine a disgusting phony; he smacks her on the jaw. The right side of the screen goes blank as the smacking accelerates. Ondine orders Ingrid off the “set,” acknowledging that this is a film, not a glimpse into real life. Ondine strikes again. As Ingrid runs off, Ondine screams, “Who the fuck does she think she is, coming on the set and pulling such a trick …”
In one episode, Nico, the singer with the Velvet Underground, endlessly trims her bangs but never talks. Brigid, playing the Duchess, deals dope. There is toilet sitting, restless eroticism, muffled frenzy, narcissistic egoism, hustling homosexuality—something to offend everyone. Each minidrama plays until its reel ends. The viewer knows the film, all three hours and fifteen minutes
of it, is over when the houselights go on.
I am around for most of the filming, and at the first showing I position myself at the theater exit to gather comments from viewers. These run the full gamut, from “a grand epic of the underground” to “a paroxysm of disintegration,” with such in-between opinions as “fat, disgusting lesbianism,” “quel ennui,” “elegant,” “nasty mockery,” “only a fool will sit through it,” “degrading,” “very hip,” and “Warhol should be locked up.”
After he sees it with a real audience in a real movie house, I ask Andy his impression. He says, “People are so fantastic—you just can’t make a bad movie.” At the time I’m rather impressed with it. I see it as an epic of sorts, with Joycean overtones. (But when I see it years later at the Whitney Museum as part of a retrospective of all Andy’s films, I can barely sit through its deliberate meaninglessness and self-indulgence.)
The New York Times says: “Andy Warhol has produced a film that is half Bosch and half bosh … at its best a travelogue of hell, a grotesque menagerie of lost souls whimpering in a psychedelic moonscape of neon red and fluorescent blue.… If it was Mr. Warhol’s aim to show that the really appalling thing about sin is the boredom it springs from and ends in, he has succeeded all too well.”
With a send-off like that, which Andy’s fans interpret as a rave, Chelsea Girls becomes the first underground film to enjoy a long run in a commercial movie house in midtown Manhattan. We are all elated. We feel we are real moviemakers. One of these days we may even become real stars.
In the spring of 1967 I meet Andy at the Cannes Film Festival, where he has already arrived with Paul, Gerard, Lester Persky, and International Velvet, our real, real beauty. We are not part of the main festival, but our purpose is to screen Chelsea Girls in one of the smaller viewing rooms, to bring it to the attention of international film distributors. We all dress in menacing black leather, we wear sinister hip boots and dark glasses with enormous lenses. We carry whips, make scenes wherever we go, pretend to bully waiters and ushers. We do anything to get noticed by the distributors and covered by the press.
