Famous for 15 Minutes

by Ultra Violet

  She is the Superstar of the day. About to become famous, she is already infamous.

  After the press is satisfied, she is booked on charges of felonious assault and possession of a dangerous weapon with intent to kill. She is fingerprinted and locked up.

  I go home, exhausted and yet exhilarated. For all these years now, I’ve been trained to experience events of every kind in terms of headlines and photographs in the paper. Real emotions? Real feelings? They have been smothered by our obeisance to the media, warped by our need to strike a pose, smile, smile some more, whip out a witty retort.

  Of course, I don’t want Andy to die. I don’t want him to be in pain. I want desperately for him to recover. But I am not able to cry for Andy, not yet. I am not choked with grief. My heart is not breaking with sorrow or loss. Rather, I am excited, turned on, by the drama launched by that crazy woman’s bullets and now being played out in Andy’s hushed hospital room.

  Andy stays in intensive care and on the critical list for a week. He is allowed no visitors except his mother and his two brothers. Soon Jed Johnson is permitted to see him. Distraught at the time of the shooting, he is calmer now and brings us daily reports of Andy’s progress.

  Since I can’t see Andy, I decide to call on his mother. It’s the kind of civilized thing you’d normally do to comfort the mother of a friend who’s been injured. I tell myself my motives are pure, but more than anything, I want to see the inside of his house. As far as I know, he has never allowed any of us through the front door—certainly not any of the women. What is he hiding? I am dying to know.

  With a bouquet of pink roses in my hand and a bottle of champagne and dressed a la Czechoslovak, meaning in a mixture of flower prints, I ring the bell. The wrinkled woman receives me. She remembers me from the shopping excursion. I am so dazzled by what I see that I can hardly squeeze out a polite greeting. So this is why Andy never lets any of us in, I say to myself. He plays poor, but look at this treasure trove.

  My eyes can find nowhere to rest amid the carousel horses, boxes of all kinds, a giant wooden Coke bottle, a carnival punching bag machine, a John Chamberlain sculpture, Victorian furniture mixed with dozens of shopping bags, Tiffany lamps, stuffed peacocks, rugs piled as in a cluttered shop—Indian, American Indian, Oriental, rugs of all sizes—silver everywhere, china, porcelain, paneling, all of Ali Baba’s treasure. What a collectomaniac! We’ve shopped together in antique stores, but I never knew he bought everything in sight.

  Julia seems happy to see me. The poor woman hasn’t had her Andy to talk to, even though he’s never won any prizes as a conversationalist. In her thick accent, she cries, “They kill my Andy. They kill my Andy.”

  I scrutinize her face, searching for any resemblance to her son. She continues: “I love him, my Andy, the good, the bad, it’s all in my Andy, the smart, the dumb, the genius, the drugs, it’s all inside of him. The Slovak red blood, very red, inside him. He photographs everything, my Andy, does everything. He is the everything man, it’s all in him. He dies for it.”

  “No, he is not dead,” I say. “He will be fine. You’ll see.”

  She is cheered and looks at me. “Oh, you nice girl. You’re still not married.” She is staring at my left hand.

  “No.”

  “My Andy nice boy. He should marry.” I nearly choke on the piece of braided cake she has offered me. “Eat, eat, it’s houska, hoska.”

  “It’s delicious—it has nutmeg. What else?”

  “Almonds, raisin, butter, eggs, milk, sugar, flour, lemon skin. I cook for moje sladké srdce.” That’s the way it sounds to me. I write it down later, phonetically. She goes on: “My Andy wears his red cheek inside, his white cheek outside. That’s the American white cheek. Great artist, my Andy.”

  “Yes, he sure is.”

  “Would you like to marry my Andy?” I start to choke again. She taps me on the back while I cough and swallow the remaining crumbs.

  What can I say to her? I decide to speak her language. “Your baby sweet baby, but too white for marriage.”

  She looks at me, opening her eyes wide, waiting for a better explanation. “Anemic,” I say. “Red blood count low.”

  She nods.

  “Not ready for marriage yet, your baby,” I go on.

  “My baby forty years old,” and she lapses into incomprehensible syllables: “Srdce moje, môj genius, ja milujem svoje dieťa, ja nemôžen, bez neho.”

  I can visualize her back in the 1950s, much younger, perhaps thinner, bending over Andy’s commercial art assignments as she deftly adds color or extends a line and then signs his name in her pointed, wide handwriting. I visualize her as a young woman, pretty, with high color, sitting at the bedside of her little lamb. She made herself indispensable when he was a baby. He made her indispensable when his career was beginning. She loves him for it. Their knotted umbilical cord is still tied.

  As I leave, chewing on the piece of braided cake that she’s pressed on me in the doorway, I think of something that has not crossed my mind in decades: my mother’s baba au rhum, an old family tradition. It’s strange; I almost never think of my mother.

  RECOVERY

  After the shooting, Andy remains in the hospital for fifty-four days. By June 19, he is listed in satisfactory condition. The papers print his medical bulletins daily. When he is finally allowed to receive phone calls, I dial his number. The phone rings six times before it is picked up. “Hello, Andy.”

  Protracted silence, then, “Yes.”

  “This is Ultra. You must feel like the lucky sole survivor of a plane crash.”

  “Yes.”

  “Are you thinking about taking off again?”

  “Ummm.”

  “We all love you, you know. We miss you. I think you should settle down, get married.”

  “Ghr, ghr, grrhh.” It’s his turn to do a little choking.

  “I truly love you for all you’ve done.”

  “Ummm.” He does not like to get sentimental.

  I wonder if he can talk, or is he strapped to a life-support system, with tubes in his nose and mouth? I ask, “How do you explain it all?” Silence. “Why were you the one to get shot?”

  In the voice of a blanched octopus, he says, “I was in the wrong place at the right time.”

  I tell him about the reactions of various members of his entourage. I tell him that Jackie Curtis is considering tattooing his name over her heart. International Velvet and her boyfriend and Nico locked themselves in her apartment, drew the blinds, lit all the candles they could find, turned the place into a votive chapel, sat on the floor, and stared into the candles, swinging back and forth like Moslem weepers, until they heard his surgery was successful. I don’t tell him at this point that International and her boyfriend have split, and she has left for Paris.

  Another thing I don’t tell him about is the story by Peter Coutros in the Daily News the day after the shooting. It is a slashing, pitiless obituary, not just for Warhol but for his era. In the years to come, I am to read it and reread it many times. It goes, in part:

  Long before Valerie Solanas got around to pouring her venom at Andy Warhol through the muzzle of a gun, the waspish, silvery-haired Maharishi of Modness was in trouble, deep trouble. His world … suddenly stopped caring, stopped knowing, stopped even realizing that Andy Warhol was alive and reasonably well. The pop artist who had savored success out of a can of Campbell’s soup was now the pooped artist. The underground film maker who once focussed his camera for eight hours on the navel of a sleeping man had dissolved, faded out.… Andy Warhol was in trouble. The morality of the middle class bugged Warhol. He grew up in it and now he was running away from it. He was running hard but getting nowhere because he was running in the New Morality of the Four-Letter Word, and there’s no traction there.… Creativity doesn’t imply rendering classics into “The Adventures of Huckleberry Fag” or “Puke’s Bad Boy.”… It’s been said that Warhol movies and stag movies were the same. Not true. No one ever needed a score car
d to tell the players at a stag.

  As he struggles to stay alive in a world he has so little use for … Andy Warhol must smile at having reaped one large satisfaction. His “achievements” earned him space on the art and film pages of the press. His precarious condition has gotten page one headlines.

  When Andy is able to talk, he gives me the victim’s-eye view of the event. “Forget it, no chance,” are the last words he hears before losing total consciousness. Someone has pronounced him dead. He makes no claim of crossing into heaven or elsewhere, of viewing the awesome mysteries and then returning to earth. But undoubtedly there is a perilous moment when his vital organs fail and he hovers on or just over the brink of death. Heroic medical measures restore him.

  “How did it feel?” I ask.

  “For days I’m not sure if I’m back or not. I feel dead, I keep thinking I’m dead. Then I think I’m alive, but I feel I’m dead. It’s strange.” A brush with an eternity of silence has rendered Andy eloquent.

  As he gradually regains consciousness after the operation, he hears on a distant radio the words “assassin”… “shot”… “horror” … “disaster” … “terror.”

  “I think it’s related to my death,” he recalls. “I hear nurses crying. I think: You shouldn’t cry for me. Later, I vaguely see images of a burial on the TV. Is it my burial? I figure that’s the way it is—after you die, they rerun your death and life on TV.

  “Then I hear the name Kennedy and a shot. Why are they rerunning the JFK assassination? Through a cloud, I see a picture of St. Patrick’s and I think: Why do so many people come to my funeral? It’s so strange to be dead. It’s just like watching TV.”

  Not for several days does Andy discover that two days after his own shooting, Robert Kennedy was fatally gunned down in a California hotel. It is this second Kennedy assassination and funeral that he sees through a fog of sedation on television. The nurse confirms it to him.

  Once Andy is on the mend, he enjoys talking on the phone to the Factory crowd, to celebrities, to people from the art world, to reporters and well-wishers. When he starts complaining, we know he’s recovering. “If only Kennedy were shot a different time, I would have gotten all the publicity,” he laments. “Death is just another headline.”

  He gets plenty of publicity anyway. The press covers every step of his recovery. He leaves the hospital in August. The first trip out of his house takes him down to Forty-second Street, where he sees a porno movie and buys the dirtiest magazines he can find. He loves pornography and, deprived in the hospital, is in need of a quick fix. His second trip takes him to the studio of Richard Avedon to have his lacerated torso, crisscross scars, and stapled stitches immortalized by the foremost photographer of beautiful women. The striking photo, which turns him into a St. Sebastian, except for the black leather jacket framing his shoulders, appears in hundreds of newspapers and magazines worldwide.

  In early September Andy and I attend a party to celebrate the completion of Midnight Cowboy. Our picture, taken at the party, makes the front page of the New York Post on September 6, 1968, my birthday. The caption reads: “Artist Andy Warhol, accompanied by his underground film star, Ultra Violet, made his first public appearance last night since he was shot in June by another of his stars, Valerie Solanas. Miss Solanas was sent to a mental institution.”

  I say to Andy, “You’ve had publicity, fame, headlines. Now what?”

  “More fame.”

  “Fame is a moving target.”

  In a voice that sounds like a distant echo, he taunts me: “How do you always manage to get in front of the camera?”

  Several weeks later, we are alone in the Factory. Andy turns to me and with a beyond-the-tomb look in his eyes says, “I’m afraid.”

  I am startled. This is not our Andy. He normally knows no fear. Now he says, “I wasn’t afraid before. I shouldn’t be now, since I’ve just been dead and come back. But I’m afraid.” He looks at me, almost pleadingly. “Why?”

  “It’s just that you haven’t gotten your strength back. You’ll feel differently soon,” I tell him in a gentle, soothing voice. It is painful to look at him. He is bent forward, with one hand placed protectively on his stomach. I want to reach out and stroke his arm, reassure him with the pressure of my fingers, with human contact, but I dare not.

  Then, in a flash of insight, I see that from now on Andy will always be afraid. Fear will not leave him. When the ambulance attendants pick up his still-pulsating body from the floor of the Factory, Warhol the artist remains there, sprawled forever next to a stack of his paintings. Even as the surgeons stitch together the flesh torn by Valerie’s bullet, their surgical thread cannot stem the artistic fluids that continue to ooze from every pore. Only one shot penetrates Andy’s body, but all four bullets penetrate the creative spirit inside him, killing the artist.

  That night I toss on my bed. I cannot sleep. My mind is on Andy and his bleak cry of fear and my certainty that the artist is now dead. Why should this be? I think back over all the times I’ve used death words in connection with Andy. I’ve talked about his necrophilia, his condemned-to-die face, his predilection for disasters, his paintings of a plane crash, an electric chair, a race riot, an ambulance accident, Vietnam, a suicide, a pistol. Death hovers around him. He plays footsy with death. He holds death at bay with his art.

  Yes, that’s it. In his continuing flirtation with death lies the source of his creativity. His death wish fuels a fire that blazes into paintings, films, originality, energy, art.

  But now that the acrid taste of death fills his own mouth, the game is up. The reality of near death kills the death wish. The life/death tug of war is played out. His body wins. But his inspiration loses.

  In this crystalline vision of Andy’s future, I see that from now on his art will be repetitive, automatic, empty, a rerun of what went before. His life will veer off in a different, safer, more conforming direction. The artist, the sorcerer, the conjuror, the diabolist of the 1960s is gone. The man—the businessman, the moneyman—will live on, accumulating more and more money and mountains of possessions to allay his terror.

  VALERIE SOLANAS

  Valerie Solanas, the failed assassin, fascinates me. I am struck by her activism in the face of Andy’s passivity. I contrast her passion for a cause, no matter how weird, to his indifferent voyeurism. Her inflamed but misguided courage astonishes me. I must find out more about her. Nearly all of us at the Factory have had our moments of anger at Andy. He’s promised us fame, money, Superstardom, and only given us walk-on parts in his home-made movies. When a film has succeeded, he’s kept the profits and seized the headlines. When we’ve protested, he’s said, “Next time, you’ll see.” We try again, and next time is exactly like last time. But we’re hooked. We’re having the time of our lives riding the Pop wave, and if we quit, what other game is there? We are all captives of Andy’s magnetism and his outlaw culture.

  And now Valerie, no more wronged than any of us, probably less so, pumps real bullets into his already frail body. Who is she, this would-be murderess, ma semblable, ma soeur?

  Her birth certificate indicates that Valerie Jean Solanas was born on April 9, 1936, in Ventnor, New Jersey, just south of Atlantic City. Her father, Louis Solanas, twenty-one, born in Canada, is a waiter in an Atlantic City hotel. Her mother, Dorothy Bondo Solanas, eighteen, was born in Philadelphia. She is a salesgirl in a five-and-dime. After Louis and Dorothy divorce, sometime in the 1940s, Valerie moves with her mother to Washington, where, in 1949, Dorothy marries Edward Frank (Red) Moran, a piano tuner. Valerie has two sisters.

  From the start, Red Moran is irked by the willful Valerie. She is disobedient, runs away from Holy Cross Academy, stages tantrums in the public school she is sent to, chops off her shoulder-length hair, then, dissatisfied with the result, ransacks her sister’s bedroom, upends the garbage pail, laughs defiantly when her maternal grandfather whips her with his belt.

  She never forgets her sense of female helplessness in the face
of overpowering male authority.

  On her own at fifteen, she goes out with a sailor. It’s not clear whether or not she gets pregnant, but ever since, she’s angry at men. She graduates from high school in 1954, in her senior year collects A’s in everything except a B in physics. She enters the University of Maryland at College Park, does well, supports herself by working in the animal laboratory of the psychology department, where she vivisects animals, and especially enjoys cutting their organs, including their sex glands, into slender slices.

  She puts in a little under a year at the Graduate School of Psychology at the University of Minnesota. After a brief time at Berkeley, she wanders the country and lands in Greenwich Village, where she writes her scalding manifesto and copyrights it in October 1967. She also writes a play, Up Your Ass, about a man-hating hustler and a panhandler. In one version, the woman kills the man. In another, a mother strangles her son.

  At the Chelsea Hotel she meets Maurice Girodias, publisher of Olympia Press, who left France after he got into trouble for violating pornography laws. He gives her a six-hundred-dollar advance on a novel she wants to write along the lines of her manifesto, but he can’t do anything with her play. Grove Press turns it down. Nobody takes her manifesto seriously.

  Her anger builds. Maybe she can use Warhol’s films to promote SCUM. Andy is intrigued by her campy, offbeat notoriety. She hardly seems any more of a Bellevue basket case than the rest of his outré sorority. In this instance, the murderee leads on the murderess. He underestimates her pathology. His confidence is not unreasonable, for he has already escaped death a few times at the Forty-seventh Street Factory.

  Some years back, a stranger wandered in about midnight, asking for money. Then, with no provocation, he fired at Paul Morrissey’s head. The gun chamber was empty. He fired a second time, into the air, and a bullet went off. The cold war was going on outside; inside, Russian roulette was just another adult game.