Famous for 15 Minutes

by Ultra Violet

  I realize how sharply the world has shifted when I am invited in 1977 to a private party at Studio 54 on West Fifty-fourth Street, at that moment New York’s most in sanctum. I reach into my closet for a suitable outfit and pull out a pink satin nightgown of the 1940s and its matching long jacket with exaggerated shoulders. It will do.

  The place is garish, frantic, ear-pounding, in the usual disco manner. It’s four in the morning. The game is to see who’s there. Everyone’s playing it. I spot Andy and Truman Capote standing off to one side. I’m not sure I can make myself heard over the music except through body language. I have seen little of Andy since the night he told me on the telephone about his mother’s death—that’s how far our paths have diverged.

  The two move toward me. Andy is all in black leather. He looks older, his face is leaner, his eyes deader. Truman wears a gray felt cowboy hat, a long red scarf, a black satin bow tie, a jacquard sweater, and a dark brown tuxedo jacket. His waddling body reminds me of Donald Duck.

  They greet me as if we’ve seen each other the day before. It is business as usual. I ask Truman, “Are you a fan of Walt Disney?”

  “Ooh, yees, I loove tooo haave breeeaakfaast whiile waatching hiis mooviees.” Truman’s speech is now slurred and quite indistinct.

  Now, as the photographers descend on us, Andy says, “I love openings. I’d go to the opening of a new toilet.” He must go every night—still. He adds, “When I’m out, I play hard.” He points to the tape recorder and the camera draped around his neck. He’s also carrying AA batteries, an extra black-and-white camera, and ninety-minute tapes. He goes out only with friends who supply a limousine to transport his equipment.

  Capote says, “Aandy, yoooou missed myyy best paaartyyy ever.”

  “How many celebrities were there?” Andy asks. That’s how he judges a party.

  “Hoooow suuperfiiicial caaan yooou get?” Truman demands, hypocritically.

  The crowd is packed in so tight it is almost impossible to move. A waiter, naked as far as I can see, offers champagne. Then I see he is wearing a G-string. I accidentally step on Truman’s webbed foot. He goes, “Yaacks, yaacks, yaacks.”

  Andy does business here. He promotes Interview magazine. He says, “Last week I promised the cover to Bianca Jagger, Lee Radziwill, and Margaret Trudeau.”

  “III’m duuue for your cooover,” Truman reminds him.

  “When it’s really fun here,” Andy says, “you expect someone to be murdered.” There have recently been several mob-related killings around the club.

  I stare at him and wonder how he can speak so lightly of death after the attempt on his own life, and after his mother’s passing away and Edie’s tragic ending. Has he no memory? I feel as if I’m going to scream.

  Since my breakdown I have viewed life with a survivor’s eyes. I want an end to the violence and cruelty. I look around at all the barren glitter. I wonder: Do I really have higher values now? Or have I just lost my sense of fun? Am I jealous of the eighteen-year-olds I can no longer compete with? Has my immunity to cynicism run out? Yes, I think it has. I know it has. I feel a chill under the hot lights. The writhing bodies around me conjure up images of Sodom and Gomorrah. I pull my nightgown jacket closer around me.

  Why am I squeezed into this sordid place in this drunken, drugged, uncaring crowd, in an out-of-date nightgown? It is ludicrous. I have to leave. I don’t even stop to say goodbye. I doubt that either Andy or Truman notices that I am gone.

  A few days later, I walk down a New York street with the seven-year-old daughter of a friend. We pass a newsstand. She notices a magazine cover showing a bright, bloody red crotch. The child does not quite know what to make of it. She stops and asks, “Is it dog food?”

  “No, it’s hamburger, center cut,” and I mutter to myself, “New York cunt.”

  “What’s that? Does it hurt?”

  I drag her past the lewd display, and as we walk I reflect on pornography, the scourge of the seventies. I think of Gutenberg and his invention of movable type five and a half centuries earlier. What if he’d anticipated such a newsstand display of hairy cunts, spread crotches, parted cheeks, licking tongues, darkened assholes? I begin to wonder: Did we contribute to the pornographic invasion in the heedless Warhol years?

  Not long after, I am sitting in the back seat of a beige Mercedes, straight off the showroom floor. Ellen Harrison, widow of Wallace Harrison, the architect, is driving. Next to her is a Mercedes salesman. Kay Leperck, a motherly friend, is next to me. We are talking about Ellen’s husband. She says, “It took him only thirty-eight minutes to conceive the whole architectural ensemble of Rockefeller Center.”

  I say, “I think Lincoln Center is his greatest legacy.”

  “Hold it,” Ellen says. “Lincoln Center was his baby, but the United Nations was his masterpiece.”

  Kay cuts in: “The most kitsch was at Flushing Meadow, the Trylon and Perisphere at the 1939 World’s Fair.”

  The car makes a right turn downtown from Eighty-sixth Street. Ellen sees Andy Warhol crossing the street. “That corrupter of youth!” she yells. “Think what he did to Edie.” Her foot accidentally pushes down the accelerator. The car almost mounts the sidewalk. Andy gives a leap backward to avoid the front right wheel. His hair brushes against the building and gets trapped between two unmortared bricks. His wig remains hanging on the brick wall. The Mercedes salesman puts a hand on the wheel to help steer us safely into our lane.

  “Thank you,” Ellen says calmly, “and yes, I’ll buy this car. It has good control of the road.”

  “Who was that?” the salesman asks. Nobody bothers to tell him. I am amused that Ellen feels such anger toward Warhol. She must see a number of his most famous paintings on the wall whenever she visits her relatives. Her uncle David Milton married Abby Rockefeller, the sister of Nelson Rockefeller, who was almost as compulsive an art collector as Andy. Ellen’s mother, I’ve heard, did not want her brother to marry a Rockefeller, but in this case, true love prevailed.

  I recall that at a dinner at the vast Rockefeller estate at Pocantico Hills in Westchester, Andy once said to me, “Why don’t you have an affair with Nelson?” That’s one party I’m happy to say I sat out.

  It becomes open season on Andy.

  I hear that after Edie’s death, Bob Dylan uses one of Andy’s paintings as a target in a dart game.

  Andy’s book Popism, written and compiled by Pat Hackett, partially from tapes, comes out in 1980. He says of me in it: “All the girl Superstars complained that Ultra would somehow find out about every interview or photo session they had scheduled and turn up there before they did—it was uncanny the way she always managed to be right on the spot the second the flash went off. She was popular with the press.”

  The week after I finish reading Popism, I see Andy on a Sunday morning at the flea market at Twenty-fourth Street and Sixth Avenue. He is buying cookie jars. I tell him I’ve enjoyed reading his book but I’ve noticed many inaccuracies in it. He replies, “Not my fault. I never wrote it, never read it.”

  SURVIVORS

  As the 1960s recede into a past that seems as remote as ancient Nineveh and Tyre, I start to collect the stories of the survivors and the obituaries of the victims. It becomes an undertaking that keeps me busy until this day.

  To my amazement, Ondine, real name Bob Olivio, one of the freakiest of the drug people, turns out to be a survivor. He tells me, “If it were not for my mother’s love, I would be dead. I owe her everything. I collapsed. I OD’d. My liver went, my teeth went, my kidneys went, my mind went. My mother is a saint.”

  The roof caved in on Ondine after Andy was shot in 1968. At that point, he turned away from drugs and booze and got the support of AA. When he and Andy went together to the funeral of Judy Garland, another victim of the pharmacopoeia, Andy said of the straight, sober Ondine, “Oh, I can’t stand Ondine now. Now that he’s clean, he’s lost all his wild eloquence.”

  Ondine now lives in Queens with his mother. It’s hard
to visualize him in a humdrum, middle-class life.

  Viva is one of the few who have stayed completely in character. In an article in New York Woman in 1987, she complained that she is still penniless, still celibate, still a Communist, and still living at the Chelsea Hotel. But she is luckier than the rest of us—she has two beautiful daughters: Alexandra, fathered by her onetime husband, Michel Auder, a French filmmaker, and Gabrielle, whose father, a soap opera actor, refuses to acknowledge paternity. Gaby was baptized on the roof of the Chelsea by a feminist radical rabbi and an Episcopal priest. Alexandra and Gaby are breaking into show business. Returning to her first real interest, Viva recently had a show of her paintings in the south Bronx.

  Gorgeous Susan Bottomley, known to us as International Velvet, abandoned modeling, moved to Paris, then Wales, then Hollywood, then San Francisco. Each time she moved, she married. Her prominent lawyer father retired to Utah and died there.

  Brigid Polk, born Berlin, a permanent fixture at all four Factories (the original one, on East Forty-seventh, the two later ones on Union Square, and a fourth, the headquarters of Andy Warhol Enterprises, opened in 1984 in a former power plant on East Thirty-third Street, totally restructured and decorated by Fred Hughes), endured with Andy until the end and beyond. If you call Warhol Enterprises today, she answers the phone. A loyal defender, she says, “From the beginning, I adored Andy.” She weaned herself off drugs in the early seventies and today has well-groomed hair, subdued makeup, the poise of a Park Avenue lady. “I could kill the doctor who first started me on tranquilizers,” she said recently. Helped by AA, she lives with her three “kids”—her cats Truffles, Jimmy, and Greta.

  Paul Morrissey directs one film after another. His latest are Beethoven’s Nephew and an Italian-American comedy, Spike of Bensonhurst. Early on, with impeccable taste, he began collecting Americana—mission furniture, old books with engraved illustrations, pottery, turn-of-the-century paintings. “It’s all trash,” he said of Andy’s vast hoardings of collectibles, although he admits Andy dealt with the period of the sixties more fully than anybody else.

  Billy Name, born Lenick, walked out of the black closet at the rear of the loft in 1970, leaving behind cigarette butts, astrology charts, and a note: “I’m fine, just gone.” He went to San Francisco, wasn’t heard of again, and we all assumed he was dead. Imagine the rejoicing when he turned up at the memorial service, distributing his card and telling us that he does community work in Poughkeepsie, New York.

  I ask, “Why did you leave the Factory?”

  “To go to the planet. I’m an artist.” He calls himself a concrete poet/sculptor. He says of Andy, “Naturally synthetic, a Czechoslovak wizard, a true monk. He was given a second chance to live, and so was I.”

  Baby Jane Holzer is alive and living well on East Seventy-fourth Street in New York. She had the foresight to pull out early, in October 1965, after the filming of her last movie, Camp. “The scene was too scary,” she says. “Too many drugs, too many crazies, too much laughing gas for everyone to sniff.” She is now a successful producer of plays and movies—in 1985 she was associate producer of The Kiss of the Spider Woman—and is involved in real estate. She is divorced and has a grown son.

  Gerard Malanga left Andy in 1970. In Rome, he had an encounter with the authorities for selling questionable Warhol paintings. Authentication is at best nebulous for Andy’s silk-screen works, especially since Andy’s non-touch policy sometimes disinclined him to put his signature on a canvas.

  It became normal practice for anyone who happened to be around to sign his name on “Brillo Boxes,” “Marilyns,” various versions of the soup cans. I myself took my turn at signature duty. Gerard, in charge of all the mechanics of the Pop production, ordered the silk screens, stretched the canvases, applied the screens, mopped on the paint, and, on various occasions, wrote Andy’s name.

  Question: Whose painting is it?

  When that question was raised during the flap in Rome, Andy told me, “The painting’s mine. There’s my name on it. They should send me the money.” The incident blew over, and Gerard, still a poet, a photographer, and a filmmaker, is now the curator of the photo archives at New York City’s Parks Department.

  Taylor Mead, bohemian poet of the counterculture and brilliant star of the underground theater, says, “I live on disinheritance and $350 a month.” I saw his impressive performance in Kenneth Koch’s play Red Robins at the Lower Manhattan Ocean Club; he played six roles, from Mike the Tiger, a carnivorous-vegetarian Asian mammal, to an Oriental sage with the wisdom of the ages strapped to his shoulders.

  He says, “My happiest films with Andy were Lonesome Cowboys and Nude Restaurant.”

  “Why didn’t you make more films with Andy?”

  “The more destroyed you were, the more likely he was to use you.”

  Taylor recently impersonated Bernhard Goetz in a play by Stephen Miller. Bernie used to repair my old radios. I tell Taylor that Goetz is the only person in town who knows how to fix those old boxes I collect. When he came to my house about seven years ago, we had a passionate argument about mission furniture. I told him it was great; he said it was junk. He struck me as high-strung.

  Lou Reed is living on his farm in Pennsylvania, working on a new album.

  Joe Dallesandro is busy starring in spaghetti Westerns in Italy.

  I run into Timothy Leary in October 1986. With his tanned skin and clipped white hair, the leader of the drug revolution looks like a retired West Point general. When I comment on the devastation wrought by drugs, he says cryptically, “I don’t tattoo genes.”

  Holly Woodlawn still does a terrific nightclub act. When I see her in 1978, we reminisce about the old times. She says, “I never knew Trash would gross nine million or whatever. I was paid only for my five days’ work. If I’d been smarter, I’d have asked for a percentage.”

  “None of us was smart.”

  “I’m bitter. I made all that money for him. Trash really established Warhol. Before that he was doing those out-of-sync boring movies. Who could sit through Empire State Building? Trash at least had a plot and involved welfare and drugs and made its mark on society. I hate him and adore him. He’s rich and I’m not. Overnight I was a star, but I didn’t take advantage of it. I was dumb.”

  “It’s like all the people Toulouse-Lautrec painted,” I tell her. “Their names are printed in some art books, but you know nothing about them. Only Lautrec is known—and Andy. Do you think he owes us anything?”

  “He would say no, because I got my twenty bucks for each day’s work. But maybe that’s why that girl shot him.”

  Fred Hughes, the executor of Andy’s estate, after presiding over the dispersal of his fabulous trash-to-treasure trove, is licensing Andy’s name to a wide range of products and administering megamillions to be distributed by the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, as specified in Andy’s will.

  My beloved Edward Ruscha has become the West Coast’s leading artist. He is now back with his patient, understanding ex-wife.

  Jed Johnson is a successful interior designer. He inherited Amos and Archie, Andy’s dachshunds.

  John Chamberlain enjoys show after show of his sculptures. “He is counting his millions,” says Taylor Mead. I think of him as a genuine, grand native American.

  One strange survivor of the Warhol years deserves a brief mention. Actor Allen Midgette impersonated Andy for a fee of one thousand dollars at the University of Utah in October 1967. Students demanded their money back when it was revealed that the fellow in the dark glasses who was showing them disjointed film clips was an impostor. Andy’s comment: “Maybe they’ll like him better than me.”

  Since Andy’s death, Allen, dressed in black pants, black turtleneck, white nylon wig, dark glasses, and white Kabuki makeup, shows up in SoHo streets and at club and museum openings. He just stands there. People come up to him and say, “Hi, Andy, glad you’re back.”

  The legend goes on, even if counterfeit.

&nbs
p; Now for the eulogies, for in the midst of the rollicking laughter, the sixties people were hell-bent on immolating themselves.

  There is no need to say any more about poor, doomed Edie.

  Truman Capote died of drugs, alcohol, and bodily disintegration on August 26, 1984.

  Eric Emerson, the pretty, psychedelic playboy who liked both pretty boys and pretty girls and fathered four children, was found dead near the West Side Highway early one morning in May 1975; he lay next to his bicycle, which he loved to ride while yodeling like an urban troubadour. The kinder version of what happened says he was a hit-and-run victim while cycling and yodeling; the more likely asserts that after he died in someone’s pad of an overdose of heroin, his body was disposed of outdoors, next to his bicycle, which was found unscratched. He was thirty-one.

  Jackie Curtis died of an overdose on May 15, 1985.

  Candy Darling died at twenty-five of leukemia, on May 21, 1974. Her friends recall that almost to the end she was taking hormone shots and buying additional hormones of dubious purity on the street.

  Nico, born Christa Paffgen, died Monday, July 18, 1988, in a hospital on the Spanish island of Ibiza, a few hours after falling off a bicycle. A coroner’s report said she had suffered a cerebral hemorrhage. She is survived by her son, Ari.

  Mario Amaya, the journalist and art critic who received a gunshot wound from Valerie Solanas at the time of the assassination attempt, died in London on June 29, 1986, of pneumonia brought on by complications of AIDS.

  Gregory Battcock, an actor who starred in Horse and Drunk, was mysteriously murdered on December 31, 1980.

  Jimi Hendrix blew up in smoke, and Janis Joplin died of an overdose on October 4, 1970. That day, some friends and I were to pick up Janis and continue on to a concert. Our limousine stopped in front of her building, we went to her apartment, and to our horror, we found her body on her bed. Rigor mortis had begun to set in.