Famous for 15 Minutes

by Ultra Violet

  In bed, I think about our dinner. I see the huge table covered with a white cloth, elaborately embroidered with the family initials. I see the porcelain designed by my grandfather, his monogram engraved in gold and in silver on the heavy flatware. My sisters have received substantial dowries and my brother lives magnificently on my maternal grandfather’s estate. Perhaps someday some of the wealth will be mine.

  I consider the lives of my siblings—their homes, their family treasures, their gardens, their trees. Why have I torn up my roots? I think of my mother’s kiss. I left home without looking back. Now I want to tell her I’ve changed, I want to tell her how much I love her.

  My tears flow. Where are these oceans of tears coming from? Healing tears pour down my face, balm for my wounds. I look around my room, à la recherche du temps perdu. On a small Louis XVI library table I see a book, beautifully hand-bound. It is a book of records in my mother’s handwriting. I sit on the edge of my bed and turn the pages of our past. The first page records my brother Yves’s birth, the date, the hour, his weight. He was breast fed. Each precise time of feeding is noted. On the second day his weight has decreased slightly. The record continues for each day of his babyhood. His height is noted, his first words, his first cold, the day he first ate apple puree. How remarkable! How moving that this is all here in her writing, lovingly preserved.

  I turn more pages, and there is the same careful record for my sister Catherine. Her history covers ten pages. Turning more pages, I see with amazement my own name, my weight, the hour of my birth, the time of my first breast feeding. I, too, weighed a little less on the second day of my life than on the first. I, too, gained, ate apple puree, spoke my first words—papa, toutou, maman. Again it takes ten pages to tell my story. There are another ten pages for my younger sister, Edwige.

  The tears start again. I have been loved. I have been loved exactly as the others were loved. But I never knew it. I always thought I was discarded, cast out of my parents’ love. Now, after I have spent nearly forty years in the prison house of darkness, the light of truth opens my blind eyes.

  I pick up another bound volume, a record of our ancestors, the line of the Terrays. Heading the genealogy is Antoine Terray, bourgeois de Boen-en-Forez; cité en 1569. What is he, sixteen or seventeen generations my senior, alive in another time of turmoil—renaissance, reformation, endless wars of religion and territory, Medicis and short-lived monarchs? Did he know about the then new New World across the broad, restless sea, to which I have fled? That night I dream of kings in ermine and velvet, their heads lopped off by flashing golden swords.

  When I awaken the next morning, my brother and sisters and the children are at sea on a fishing boat. We meet at lunch to admire their catch, which will become a bouillabaisse for dinner. We talk about family. I ask, “What happened to Jean Duron?” He is the wild young cousin who led all our mischief in childhood.

  “After a collection of wives,” Yves says, “he voluntarily left for Africa, without a forwarding address.”

  “He is the shame of the family,” my mother says.

  My brother-in-law asks politely, “How is your life in New York?”

  “Have you heard of Andy Warhol?”

  Heads shake all around the table.

  “He is hard to explain,” I say. “He is an artist, the shyest, the simplest, the most commercial, the most conceptual artist the world has known.”

  “He is your … friend?” my mother asks tactfully.

  “He was my very good friend,” I say, knowing that she will misunderstand, for friend, in that sense, means lover in France, but there is no way to explain what Andy was, or is, to me. I go on: “Life in New York is different, not as traditional.” To stay on safe ground, I tell them about a neighbor who was threatened with eviction from his apartment because of his barking dog. To keep both apartment and dog, he had the veterinarian remove the animal’s vocal cords.

  “How perfectly awful,” my mother says.

  “Now the dog can’t speak,” a small nephew says.

  Rip, my brother’s Dalmatian, growls as if he’s been following the conversation disapprovingly. We all laugh.

  My older sister says, “We saw you on TV in Taking Off. We recognized you right away.”

  “That was one of Miloš Forman’s first movies,” I say, and to the children, “I played the parent of a runaway child.”

  “Weren’t you in Midnight Cowboy too?”

  “Wow, you’ve met Dustin Hoffman!” a nephew exclaims.

  “Yes.”

  “Wow, how is he?”

  “Just like you and me.”

  “You must be famous.”

  “For fifteen minutes,” I say.

  My statement is not in any context for them, but they all laugh anyway.

  We take our coffee on the veranda, in the shade of century-old parasol pines. “We go to church at eleven tomorrow,” my mother says, “… if you wish to come with us.” I note her hesitation. The last time she saw me in church, I was crying piteously at Christmas mass after I was released from reform school.

  I say quietly, “Yes, I wish to. I’ve been reading and studying the Bible lately. I find it most fascinating.”

  My mother looks up, startled. I have forgotten. French Catholics of my mother’s generation do not study the Scriptures. It’s probably no longer forbidden, as once it was, but my conservative family still follows the old ways. The word “Bible” to my mother signifies the Old Testament. She says, “You know we don’t read the Bible. We are not Jewish.”

  An old memory stirs. “You were very kind to the Jews during the war. Didn’t you hide Mademoiselle Lévy-Durass?”

  My father says, “Yes, and your aunt Françoise hid a whole family.”

  “Just like Anne Frank,” my brother says.

  I had not known about the hidden family. My father tells us that Francoise trembled each time her father, my grandfather, came for lunch, because he was the chief clerk of the court of justice. All of them could have been deported or killed if the Nazis had found out.

  After lunch we form a procession back to the portrait gallery. I have noticed how much little Lionel, Catherine’s son, looks like Aribert, one of the remote ancestors. His father holds up Lionel in front of Aribert, and the boy takes the same pose. “How amazing,” says my brother-in-law.

  “Is that me?” Lionel asks.

  On that good note we part, I for a three-hour siesta in my room to gain more strength, the others for the beach or tennis. As I lie on my bed, many thoughts and emotions crisscross within me. I do not want for myself the life of my sisters and brother, yet now I wish to be married, married for all time and eternity. I have to laugh at myself—I am so absolute. That’s my nature: black or white, violet or orange, tout ou rien. I have thrown away hundreds of proposals. I was not ready for them. Now I am ripe for marriage, but who will have me, whom would I accept? I would not want either of my sisters’ husbands. Why am I so difficult to please?

  I’m a stranger to my family. When I first came to New York, never for an instant did I feel like a stranger. But here, now, at home among my own people, I am a stranger. The same blood flows in our veins but mine pulsates to a different beat. I want the conversation to be more intimate, more about feelings, but it never is. I must accept them and admire them as they are, accept them on their terms, not mine. Is there love among us? There is politeness, sociability. Then I scold myself. How can I abandon my family in complete rebellion, then come back two decades later and expect them to believe I am overflowing with love for them? I would have to explain the purgatory I’ve gone through, the full circle of hell that has brought me back to honor my father and mother.

  When I awaken from my nap, I gaze at a wooden lion, rampant, on the mantel, a cherished heirloom from my father’s side of the family. Another Leo. I think of Andy, that pale Leo with his plastic mane. Why did I ever invite him into my life? Why did I invest so much of my life in his? It seems incomprehensible to me now. Fame? Fren
zy? To be at the most innermost in spot in the universe? But why? I will never really know.

  At dinner, I find that the excellent home cooking and my family’s good humor have restored my appetite. I eat ravenously. The conversation returns to my life in New York.

  “Are you earning a decent living with your art sales?” my father asks.

  “Just about.”

  One of my brothers-in-law talks about a Broadway show he saw on a recent trip to America. I tell the children, “Tomorrow we’ll have an English lesson before dinner.”

  “Oh, that has merit,” says my father.

  We talk at length about the next day’s menu—food is always a favorite topic. We move on to whether Edwige spends too much money on clothes. She is wearing a new suit from Chanel. I compliment her on it and tell her that I once had tea with Chanel in her salon. Everyone is enormously impressed. “Did you buy anything?” my sister asks.

  “No, I was there with Dali.” They know who Dali is, but they are not curious to hear more.

  After dinner, the women move into the card room, the men to the smoking room. My sisters speak candidly of inheritance and the eventual disposition of the family business. At first I am shocked. I have forgotten that the orderly distribution of assets across the generations is as ordinary a subject of conversation to them as casual talk of succession to the British throne is to us.

  Then it dawns on me that they are eyeing me with more than a little suspicion, thinking that I have returned home to solidify my inheritance rights. Oh, little do they know the truth. I came here really to say goodbye before I die. But now I know I am not going to die. I am going to live.

  A month of their healing, their love, even if at arm’s length, a month of their fine food, sunshine, my mother’s smile, and my father’s immutability, and I am well again. I take my leave, promising to return soon, much sooner than before.

  The first thing I do when I get back to New York is to call Andy. My first question to him is: “How is your mother?”

  “Why do you ask?”

  “I just came back from France. I am bathed in the unconditional love of my family. I am a new person. I am concerned about your mother.”

  There is silence.

  “How is she? Is she still wearing the dresses we bought?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  No answer.

  “How is she?” I insist.

  “She died.”

  “When?”

  “Several years ago.”

  I am aghast. “Several years ago, and you never told me?”

  “I never told anyone.”

  “Why?”

  More silence.

  “Where did she die?”

  “In Pittsburgh. She went there when she became ill.”

  “Did you cry at her funeral?”

  “I didn’t go.”

  “You didn’t go?”

  “No.”

  “When did she die?”

  “In 1972.”

  Now I am silent.

  He says, “I switch to another channel in my mind, like on TV. I say, ‘She’s gone to Bloomingdale’s.’”

  I have a little trouble breathing as I hang up. I can’t grasp the idea that Andy, who lived with his mother for over forty years, who was closer to her, more faithful to her, than to anyone else—friend, family, or lover—can speak of her death in such an offhand manner. And not to go to her funeral, not to accompany her on her last earthly journey. Well, at this late date I should no longer be surprised by the paradoxes Andy presents and lives.

  Maybe I should listen to him more carefully. When he says he is, or would like to be, a machine, he speaks the truth. It is not a put-on. A machine does not have to deal with grief.

  THE SOBERING SEVENTIES

  Moving into the seventies is like falling off the edge of a suddenly flattened earth—not just for me; for almost everyone in the Warhol circle. Reputations reverse, connections break off, people vanish—into death, into obscurity, into altered states.

  After the shooting in 1968, Andy gradually shuts his door on the old entourage, the bohemians, the stoned strangers who take off their clothes. Ondine, Taylor, Jackie, all feel betrayed by Andy and unwelcome in the by-appointment-only, high-tech Factory at 33 Union Square West, where doors are now locked and bolted. A receptionist keeps a security watch, and an air of efficiency replaces the kinetic freakiness. By 1973 Andy moves his operation to plush offices at 860 Broadway, exquisitely decorated by Fred Hughes with an Art Deco desk from the S.S. Normandie, a Courbet painting, and a formal, paneled dining room. Andy buys Art Deco treasures, many of them by silversmith Jean Puiforcat, for a song on one of his trips to France. Art Deco has not been revived yet, but once again Andy is ahead of the trend. His collecting mania is well under way.

  Andy’s goal from the beginning has been fame and money. He has the fame—although never enough of it. Now he is after the money. That requires a different, more serious coterie of attendants and helpers, to prepare his screens, apply his paint mops, take his Polaroids, develop his photographs, drive for him, run his enterprises, shuttle his photographs and paintings around the international gallery and museum circuit, keep his complex affairs going from day to day.

  I drop in at the new headquarters from time to time, but without the old silvered ambience and the welcoming crazies, I no longer feel part of a close family. I greet Andy at openings and social events. We talk on the phone. But it is different. The affection I once felt for him—to the extent that affection for a person so deliberately plastic, robotic, and unreachable is possible—is draining away.

  Besides, he no longer needs me for introductions to socialites who once left him tongue-tied. Now, on his own, he finds moneyed buyers for his paintings and, in his new, upscale social life, entertains them at formal lunches in his paneled dining room, courts them with spreads in Interview, his gossip magazine about movies, art, and life-styles. Interview had its beginnings in 1969, when I was around enough to be as annoyed as the others when we were refused free passes to a film festival. The solution was to start a publication of our own. I was there when Andy, John Wilcock, Gerard Malanga, and Paul Morrissey launched Interview on a shoestring. I peddled the magazine on the street on my way to parties. It quickly blossomed into a powerful publicity vehicle for Andy and a recruiting device for his celebrity and socialite portrait sitters.

  For anyone with $25,000 to spend, Andy happily takes a Polaroid (which he automatically snaps anyway), blows it up, has silk screens made, passes rollers over the screens. Voilà! A genuine Warhol, untouched by human hands. The whole world sits for him: Liza Minnelli, John Lennon, Muhammad Ali, Diana Ross, Ingrid Bergman, Golda Meir, Jane Fonda, Yves Saint Laurent, Eric de Rothschild, Halston, Diane von Furstenberg.

  He flirts with powerful and wealthy ladies: Lady Lambton, Diana Vreeland, Mercedes Kellogg, Lily Auchincloss. In one of his rare political statements, he does a portrait of Nixon and captions it: “Vote McGovern.” From that day on, he claims, he gets audited by the IRS.

  The prestigious museum shows that eluded him for so long now occur almost routinely—the Tate in London, the Whitney in New York, the Musée Galleria in Paris, important shows in Stuttgart, Düsseldorf, Bremen, Berlin, Munich, Vienna, Zurich. His photographs go on view in Cologne, Amsterdam, London.

  “The greatest art is making money,” he tells an interviewer.

  In New York in 1972, Andy sends Bob Colacello, a young writer for Interview, to do a two-page spread on the New Ultra. It is titled “At Home with Ultra” and includes an old photo of me as a man. Bob describes my electric-blue foyer, my American-flag curtain, the astronaut-on-the-moon pillows that cover the twin beds placed in the center of my living room. Commenting on the spectacular view of Central Park, the Hudson River, the midtown skyline, he writes, “No wonder Ultra has delusions of divinity.” I tell him that I am working on a script, “The Last Supper,” which combines spiritual drama and camp comedy. Jackie Curtis, Hol
ly Woodlawn, and Viva are to appear in it.

  Bob asks, “Why are you using girls to play the apostles?”

  I tell him, “Well, Holly is not quite a girl. Jackie, she’s not quite a girl. But I think women are finally coming out of oppression.”

  By this time I have many new friends and new interests. In New York and in Hollywood I appear in ten films. I compose popular songs and record an album for Capitol Records and write on the cover:

  in the beginning

  there was nothing

  but ROCK

  then somebody invented the wheel

  and things began

  to ROLL

  It is a rainy Sunday in 1972.

  “One, two, three, I am under,” says Jane Fonda.

  “Under where?” I am tempted to look under the table in the Russian Tea Room on Manhattan’s West Fifty-seventh Street. But there’s no need to, for Jane is sitting right in front of me, ignoring the restaurant’s fabled chicken salad. She is ignoring everything. For five long minutes she is completely silent. Then suddenly she snaps her fingers and says, “I’m out from under.”

  “Under what?”

  “Under hypnosis.”

  I’ve never had any experience with hypnosis. I’ve always thought of it as something on the circus side. But Jane seems perfectly normal. “I just think of going into myself,” she explains. “I concentrate on the tip of my cranium, and at the count of three I am under. When I am under, I program myself for whatever I want. I imagine myself thin, not smoking, memorizing a script. I only wish I could resolve the Vietnam War by hypnosis.”

  Thank God she is out from under in time to help me extinguish a cigarette butt that has kindled a fire on our table. She gives me the address of Dr. Jules Bernard, her hypnotist in Hollywood. I take his course on self-hypnosis and learn about the power I always knew I had, the power we all have. I will always be grateful to Jane for teaching me this skill. I use it to memorize scripts and songs, to calm myself when the tension builds. It gives me a sense of self-control that I never had before.