Famous for 15 Minutes

by Ultra Violet

  “Then the robot does it.”

  Another time I ask him to name his favorite movie. I tell him that mine is Gone With the Wind.

  “Mine’s Barbarella.”

  I remember the Roger Vadim film. Jane Fonda in leather is strapped onto a lovemaking machine, and gadgets and metal tentacles caress the erogenous zones of her body. She finally has the orgasm of her life. Yes, that’s Andy’s style: Let the machine do it.

  “A robot-computer to answer the phone,” he says. “That would be great.” He is back to his sex-phone idea, pushing it along another notch. “It would do the job without emotion.”

  There’s no point in telling him that emotions are what make people what they are.

  “The computer could be programmed with a male or female voice,” he continues.

  All right, I’ll play too. “You could use the voice of the caller. You know, record the incoming call. Then the computer imitates that voice when it answers.”

  “That’s for people who love themselves.”

  “You’ll need a toll-free number,” I say.

  “No, no, we charge fifty cents a call.”

  “Just to call in?”

  “Sure. That’s to get a recorded sex message. We change the message every fifteen minutes so perverts keep calling. When you get a talking robot on the line, that costs thirty-five dollars.”

  “How long does the call last?”

  “Gosh, however long it takes a man—two minutes, twenty minutes.”

  “What about a woman?”

  “Same price. And sixty dollars for two robots on two extensions.”

  “They’re all in bed together?”

  “Yes.”

  The phone rings. We are at the Factory. Andy walks over to the silvery phone, hung by the silvery door, on the silvery wall, near the silvery elevator. “Hello. Do you want Rotten Rod or Baby Boy or Italian Salami? Oh, all three? That’s an add-on, twenty dollars more. Tell me what you want and I’ll set it up. Yes, sir, I’ll get down and lick your boots. Come on over.” Andy hangs up. His new concept makes him eloquent.

  “Who was that?” I asked.

  “Some kid.”

  “It works; it’s all in the imagination,” I say.

  “Sex is an illusion. The most exciting thing is not making it.”

  I’ve heard Dali say the same thing. Is Warhol copying Dali? Or does Warhol think like Dali?

  “If it’s a fetish call, like incest,” he goes on, “it’s easy on the phone. In person, it gets out of hand.”

  “I like the warmth of human skin, the touch of a hand.…”

  Andy ignores me. “A mutilation call, gee, that’s easy on the phone. You can cut off anything you want.”

  All the while, Andy has his tape recorder on. That night when we drive home from the Factory, I somehow manage to slip the tape out of his bag. It is so unbelievable I want to play it for the other girls.

  One day, we’re being driven downtown to a party. “What’s the most bizarre sex you’ve ever heard of?” I ask.

  “A faggot who likes to dress up in lacy nightgowns and have smoke blowing on his face and that’s how he comes.”

  Andy starts to talk about a place called Hell Fire Club, on Fourteenth Street. It is reported to be a private club where the most unimaginable and indescribable things happen. I’ve heard that the odor of urine and feces is everywhere. Biting, hitting, slapping go on until blood spurts.

  “Have you been there?” I ask.

  “Sure, yes.”

  “Is it true they have dildos, clamps, chains, handcuffs?”

  “For starters, and golden showers.”

  “What’s that?”

  “A man drinking piss.”

  “Don’t tell me any more.”

  “And brown showers.”

  “No, don’t—”

  “A shit shower.”

  “No.”

  He won’t stop. “You know about fist fucking and head fucking?”

  “No, please.”

  He explains with an obscenely graphic gesture.

  “They must end up in the hospital.”

  Now, years later, looking back with an altogether different consciousness on the ugliness and brutality, I wonder what the satisfaction is meant to be. Everything is so destructive. I let my mind dwell on the depravity, searching for meaning, to understand how people can do such revolting things to each other. And why: Surely not for any kind of pleasure I can comprehend.

  Then gradually I begin to grasp what Andy was trying to say with all his babble about machines and sex. Where sex has turned repulsive and inhuman, machine sex beckons alluringly. Only in telephone sex, robot sex, computer sex, is there escape from ugliness and cruelty. Machine sex is the only kind left that is uncontaminated, antiseptic, clean, even a little mysterious. Let’s not think about affection and tenderness—they are entirely beyond expectation.

  I think back to one of Andy’s earliest paintings, compelling in its simplicity—a starkly black-and-white six-foot-high Coca-Cola bottle, painted in oil on canvas in 1960. It is his first serious Pop work. I think of the paintings of clean, shiny Campbell soup cans, the young, unlined, fresh-scrubbed faces of Marilyn Monroe, Jackie Onassis, Ingrid Bergman, so many others.

  Yes, here is still another of the endless paradoxes Andy strews along our paths. In sex, as in art, tongue in cheek, thumb to nose, finger on the collective pulse, he reinvents shining, pristine, early morning purity. His kind, of course: on the surface, no deeper.

  THE SHOOTING

  On Monday, June 3, 1968, I look out the bedroom window of the seven-room duplex just off Fifth Avenue in which I have been living since 1967. The sun is so hot on my terrace that I prefer to stay indoors. I am sitting naked in the full sun on my bed—which is covered with an American flag—and I am talking to Andy on the telephone. “You know, Andy, that Valerie Solanas is a dangerous cookie. She’s a real bitch. Have you read her SCUM Manifesto?”

  SCUM, the Society for Cutting Up Men, is one of the more bizarre manifestations of the radical fringe of the feminist movement that is just coming into full flower. The excesses, of course, command the press, so almost daily there are headlines about editors and business executives besieged in their offices by throngs of enraged women, about bra burnings, and about threats of mass castrations. The SCUM Manifesto pushes the feminist rhetoric to a new fury. I read Andy some choice bits:

  “‘To be male’s to be deficient; emotionally limited; maleness is a deficiency disease and males are emotional cripples.’

  “‘The male has a negative Midas Touch—everything he touches turns to shit.’

  “Listen, this is what she says about prejudice: ‘… the various discriminations have the practical advantage of substantially increasing the pussy pool available to the men on top.’”

  “Uh-huh,” is all Andy manages to say about this.

  I go on: “And about communes [then very much in vogue]: ‘The most important activity … is gangbanging.’

  “On the hippie: ‘He’s … all the way out to the cow pasture, where he can fuck and breed undisturbed and mess around with his beads and flute.’

  “Now hear this on culture: ‘… a sop to the egos of the incompetent.’”

  Another “Uh-huh” from Andy. He must think I’m his mother, reading him the funny papers.

  “How about this on money: ‘After the elimination of money, there’ll be no further need to kill men.’”

  This time he groans.

  “Here’s something else about men: ‘The male’s by his very nature a leech, an emotional parasite, and, therefore, isn’t ethically entitled to both live and prosper.’

  “‘If SCUM ever marches,’” I go on reading, “‘it’ll be over the President’s face; if SCUM ever strikes, it’ll be in the dark with a six-inch blade.’”

  Nothing’s too outrageous for Andy. He says, “She’s a hot-water bottle with tits. You know, she’s writing a script for us. She has a lot of ideas.”


  I warn him, “But you have to know what she’s writing about. You might be a target for her.” He laughs again.

  After we hang up, I stretch out full length on my flag to sunbathe. All year round I sunbathe nude. I hate white marks on my body and I love to soak up the vitamin D. Later, I dress, lunch with a friend, check the thrift shops in my neighborhood for recent donations of violet castoffs.

  Valerie is on my mind all that day. I first met her in 1967, when we appeared together in the film I a Man. We were seven principal girls along with Tom Baker, a serious actor. I recall the way Valerie fixed her narrow, piercing brown eyes on me. She had brown hair cut in bangs, a sagging mouth. She was about twenty-eight, of average height. She wore flat shoes, khaki trousers, a sweater, and a dark blue work cap. We called her Valerie Barge Cap. In the film she was to play herself, improvising along the lines of the SCUM doctrine.

  She opened her conversation with me: “Those disgusting pigs, men! They’re all leeches.” She moved closer to me. “Love can only exist between two secure, freewheeling, groovy female females. Love is for chicks. Why do you let him exploit you? Why don’t you sink a shiv into his chest or ram an ice pick up his ass?”

  Before I could figure out an answer, Andy herded her toward the staircase outside the Factory, where her scene was to be shot. Valerie was excellent in her role. She spouted from her manifesto. Andy was moaning behind the camera, a kind of approving moan. He liked her switch-blade pronouncements.

  Now it is a year later. At about a quarter to five in the afternoon, my phone rings. The voice on the other end is frantic, hysterical. I think it is Viva. Much later I find out it is not, and to this day I have no idea who made that call. The Viva-like voice is gasping, “I was just talking to Andy on the phone. Then something happened. I heard him say, ‘Oh, no!’ Then there were three revolver shots and screams. He dropped the phone. I yelled into my phone, but no reply. There’s trouble.”

  “Right, right,” I say soothingly. I think the caller is tripping. I’ve had calls of this type before.

  “You don’t understand,” she screams at me. “Andy has been shot.”

  Viva has a stormy temperament. I don’t want to antagonize her, but I want to get her hallucinations off my phone line. “OK, OK, I believe you,” I say coolly, trying to bring down her intensity.

  Her intensity stays up. “We might be next. I bet the Communists did it.” (They have their office in the same building as the Factory.)

  She hangs up. That’s a good script, I think to myself. Andy should stage it. But it would have to be real to work. No phony gun. No catsup for blood. No dummy props. We never pretend anything. It must be a real assassination.…

  Suddenly a flash goes off in my head. I have a crystal-clear vision of Valerie Solanas aiming a thirty-two-caliber gun at Andy. I dial the Factory. A voice I don’t know answers the phone and says, “There’s been a shooting here.”

  I throw on a Chanel suit and take a cab to the Factory at Union Square. There I find police cars, policemen, and crowds in the street.

  “He is dead,” someone says.

  I want to rush up to the fifth floor, but the police bar my way. I join the crowd in front of the building and spilling over into the square. I look up toward the windows of the Factory, but they tell me nothing. No one seems to know exactly what has happened, beyond the fact that there has been a shooting. Most people believe Andy is dead. I finally find out that he has been taken to Columbus Hospital on Eighteenth Street. I hurry there.

  A mob mills around the lobby—police, press, some of the Factory regulars. Out of the babble and confusion, I piece together the story.

  Valerie’s spinning mind is under the impression that Andy and Maurice Girodias, publisher of Olympia Press, have conspired against her, that they are trying to control her and have taken over the rights to her writing. She has to straighten them out. She can’t find Girodias, who is in Canada. She goes to Andy’s loft at two-thirty that afternoon and is told he is out. At four-thirty, she reappears and takes the self-service elevator upstairs. She is wearing khaki jeans, torn blue sneakers, a yellow sweatshirt, a blue turtleneck sweater, a trenchcoat, on that hot, sunny day, and, most peculiarly for someone of her ultra-feminist persuasion, she has on mascara and lipstick. In one pocket of the trenchcoat is a thirty-two-caliber automatic and in the other a twenty-two revolver.

  Andy has recently acquired a new assistant, Fred Hughes, a dark-haired, handsome man who formerly worked for the oil-rich, art-collecting de Menil family in Houston. Fred has been making sense of Andy’s chaos. He small-talks Valerie. “You still writing dirty books?”

  She steps around him, pulls out her thirty-two, targets Andy, and fires a barrage of bullets. Andy lies on the floor, bleeding real blood, not red paint. He tries to crawl under the desk. She moves in closer and fires again. He is having trouble breathing. Fred leans down over Andy and starts giving him artificial respiration.

  Valerie turns toward Mario Amaya, whose magazine has recently run an article on Andy. She fires at him. He ducks and catches the bullet in his hip, flees toward the back room, crashes through the door, slams it shut. She hurls herself against the door to push it in; Mario holds it closed from inside. Paul Morrissey, hearing the shots, watches Valerie through the projectionist’s window, helpless to stop her. She about-faces and, legs apart, parodying a gunman in a Western movie, walks toward Hughes, who begs her not to shoot.

  “I must shoot you,” she yells.

  Fred falls to his knees and cries, “You can’t. I’m innocent.”

  As she aims at Fred, the elevator doors open. She darts in and disappears. Fred calls an ambulance and the police. Billy Name, crying, leans over Andy to help him. By the time the stretcher arrives, Andy is unconscious. He is carried out, flat on his back, wearing a leather jacket, trousers, and boots, his silvery wig brushing against the cop’s holster.

  Dead on arrival is the consensus minutes later, when he is carried into the hospital. But Andy, as usual, dissents. He is still alive enough to be rushed into emergency surgery, where a team of four doctors fights for six hours to save his life.

  While Andy hovers between life and death, the rest of us, in the tiny hospital lobby, are a living hurly-burly. Andy’s mother is there, crying, “Moje dieťa je mrtvé, zabili moje dieťa, oh my God, blázni, my baby je mrtvé,” mixing English with Slovak, I am told by someone who knows the latter. “Moja laska je mrtvá, moj milovanў syn odišiel, on bol najlepší, moj Andy, moj drahý,” or so it sounds to me. She is wearing a babushka. She seems about to fall to the ground. Gerard Malanga holds her up until an attendant brings her a wheelchair and she is sedated. I walk over to her and I take her hand in mine. I remain silent.

  I hear someone say, “How can they bring him back from the already dead?” Billy Name, a bathtub plug hanging on a metal chain from his neck, his eyes as red as a rabbit’s, is nervously pacing the corridor. The only two seemingly normal people are dealers Leo Castelli and Ivan Karp, in a corner, giving an interview. The press is voracious. Reporters crowd around us, hurling questions. “Is it drug related?” “Was she his girlfriend?”

  Photographers fight for front positions and in the process almost trample Julia’s wheelchair. She bends her head low to escape the photographers. She does not want her picture taken. For many in the entourage, this is their first view of Andy’s mother. They crane to get a look at the Old World peasant, transplanted to New York, who has been concealed inside his brownstone all these years, shielded from the unorthodox life of the Factory.

  Now Viva is comforting her. Andy’s mother is muttering to herself in English: “My boy good boy. He go one o’clock mass St. Paul every Sunday. Good religious boy. They kill him, my Andy.…”

  “Your baby will be fine,” I say, patting her hand.

  She is the only one not interested in publicity. Shamelessly, the rest of us vie for position in front of the cameras. Viva and I make the paper the next day. The caption says we are waiting anxiously durin
g Andy’s operation. I have a strange hairdo with two ringlets on each side, like a Hasidic Jew. Viva is wearing a fringed suede cowboy jacket and lots of mascara. In one article I am quoted: “A girl calling herself Ultra Violet, another Warhol film femme, said, ‘This underground movie world is a mad world with a lot of mad people in it. Maybe this girl, Valerie, was mad herself.’” I am sorry to see one of my less brilliant statements preserved in print.

  In the hospital lobby, an impatient line snakes toward the pay phones. The hospital phones ring constantly. Ivy Nicolson, a tall, beautiful model, sometime actress, and mother of four children, is threatening to kill herself if Andy dies. She is delusional and thinks Andy will marry her. She is eventually taken home by Louis Waldon, a most kindhearted underground actor, who keeps a close eye on her as she calls the hospital every ten minutes, ready to jump at the fatal word.

  Dr. Massimo Bazzani, medical director of Columbus Hospital, gives Andy a fifty-fifty chance to live. Is that good news or bad news? At least he’s alive.

  Later, the doctor reports: “The bullet that hit Warhol twisted crazily through his abdomen and chest, wreaking much damage. It entered through the left lung, his spleen, stomach, liver and esophagus before penetrating the right lung and emerging from his right side. X-rays established that only one slug had caused the damage.”

  The police put out an alarm for the attempted murderess, whose last known address is a dark single room in the back recesses of the Chelsea Hotel on West Twenty-third Street, where we filmed Chelsea Girls.

  Word arrives that Valerie has surrendered at 7:30 P.M. to a rookie patrolman on traffic duty at Seventh Avenue and Forty-seventh Street. She handed him her guns and said, “The police are looking for me.”

  The press abandons us and flies, like a flock of crows, to the Thirteenth Precinct station on East Twenty-first Street, where Valerie is to be booked. Thirty newsmen are made to wait outside for an hour while she is questioned. When she finally comes through the door, smiling triumphantly, her hands cuffed behind her, it is bedlam. She poses and smiles for the photographers. The clicking and whirring of the cameras drown out her voice. When it is quiet enough for her to speak, she says, “I’m a writer. [Smile.] Read my manifesto. [Smile.] It will tell you what I stand for. [Smile.] It’s not often I shoot somebody. Warhol’s a culture vulture. I gave him my manuscript. He claims he lost it. He’s using it.”