POPism

by Andy Warhol

  This attitude was brought home to me in a very dramatic way at a party given by an Abstract Expressionist painter, Yvonne Thomas, mainly for other Abstract Expressionist painters. Marisol had been invited, and she took Bob Indiana and me with her. She was always very sweet to me—for instance, whenever we were out together, she used to insist on taking me home instead of the other way around. When we walked into that room, I looked around and saw that it was chock full of anguished, heavy intellects.

  Suddenly the noise level dropped and everyone turned to look at us. (It was like the moment when the little girl in The Exorcist walks into her mother’s party and pees on the rug.) I saw Mark Rothko take the hostess aside and I heard him accuse her of treachery: “How could you let them in?”

  She apologized. “But what can I do?” she told Rothko. “They came with Marisol.”

  For my second show at the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles—the Liz-Elvis show—I rode cross-country from New York in a station wagon with Wynn, Taylor Mead, and Gerard. It was a beautiful time to be driving across America. I think everyone thought I was afraid to fly, but I wasn’t—I’d flown around the world once in the fifties—it was just that I wanted to see the United States; I’d never been west of Pennsylvania on the ground.

  Wynn was tall and lanky, a very good Magic Realist painter who was beginning to get a little interested in Pop. Taylor I knew a little, from out at Old Lyme. He was one of the first underground film stars, starting out in North Beach in San Francisco in the fifties in Ron Rice’s The Flower Thief and Vern Zimmerman’s Lemon Hearts, which I’d seen over at the Film-Makers’ Coop. A couple of days before we were supposed to leave, Henry came by the studio with Taylor, who he’d bumped into wandering around near the Met. That’s what Taylor used to love to do all day—drift all over town in that way he had that people called pixieish or elfin or wistful. He always had a slight smile on his face and in his eyes—one of them drooped, and that was a little trademark. He looked so chronically relaxed you felt that if you lifted him up by the back of his neck, his limbs would just dangle. I mean, he looked like he didn’t have a nervous system, that was the attitude he had. He’d never seen any of my work, but he’d just read an article about my Campbell’s Soup Cans in Time, and when Henry introduced us, he said, “You are the Voltaire of America. You’re giving America just what it deserves—a can of soup on the wall!”

  Taylor agreed to split the cross-country driving with Wynn—Gerard and I didn’t know how to drive. I frankly couldn’t believe from looking at Taylor that he really knew how to drive—I’ve always been surprised at the people who can drive and the people who can’t.

  I knew the whole thing would be fun, especially since Dennis Hopper had promised us a “Movie Star Party” when we got there.

  I’d met Dennis a couple of months earlier through Henry, on the same day that I’d introduced Henry to the young English painter David Hockney. Dennis bought one of my Mona Lisa paintings on the spot and then he and Henry and David and I went up to the sound stage on West 125th Street where Dennis was doing an episode on the TV show “The Defenders.”

  Wynn and Taylor and Gerard came to pick me up. We threw a mattress into the back of the station wagon and took off.

  The radio was on the whole time—full blast. As a matter of fact, I was the one who insisted on blasting it because I get very nervous about people falling asleep at the wheel. You sure get to know the Top Forty when you make a long trip like that—over and over again, the same songs: Lesley Gore, the Ronettes, the Jaynettes, Garnet Mims and the Enchanters, the Miracles, Bobby Vinton… And there were long stretches where there was lots and lots of country and western. And everywhere we drove through was so different from New York.

  James Meredith had enrolled at Ole Miss just the year before, but New York seemed much closer to Europe than to the Deep South. Dancing clubs in Paris were just starting to be called discothéques and there were all these new looks—the Chelsea look, Edwardian, Carnaby Street mod. This was the summer when the styles and music and attitudes that would shortly be shipped over as the English Invasion were all happening in London. And with all the nonstop jet flights, people were popping over from Europe all the time, three or four times a year instead of once a year like in the old days when the trip took fourteen hours, and they started buying apartments here, too. The minute their planes touched down, they’d go straight to dancing places like L’Interdit, which had opened in ’63, or to Le Club, which was run by Olivier Coquelin for friends of his like the Duke of Bedford, Gianni Agnelli, Noël Coward, Rex Harrison, Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., Igor Cassini, Borden Stevenson—the international swingers. I sat at Le Club one night staring at Jackie Kennedy, who was there in a black chiffon dress down to the floor, with her hair done by Kenneth—thinking how great it was that hairdressers were now going to dinners at the White House.

  Ole Miss seemed pretty far removed from what was going on in New York.

  When we drove cross-country that October of ’63, the girls were still wearing cashmere sweaters with little round necklines and tight, straight fifties skirts. There was a time gap in those days of up to three years between when new fashions showed up in New York City and when they filtered out to the rest of America. (By the end of the sixties, though, with media life-style pop coverage so fast and furious, this gap had almost closed.)

  The movie marquees we passed were featuring titles like Cleopatra, Dr. No, and my favorite, The Carpetbaggers, which I’d seen three times before I left New York.

  We stopped to eat at all the Carte Blanche places. That was the credit card I had, and those were the places I trusted, anyway. But Taylor got bored with that. Somewhere around Kansas he began screaming over the “honey-loves” on the radio, “I’m leaving this tour right now if we don’t eat where I want to eat for a change!” He had a big thing about truck stops and truck drivers.

  Taylor had a slow, easy, if-anyone-happens-to-care delivery. He would just very occasionally glance at Wynn or Gerard or me as he talked, and always, as he got to the endings of his little stories, he’d lift his chin up up and away and stare out the car window into the distance as he finished up. He told us about all the poetry readings he gave in ’60 down on MacDougal Street in a basement theater run by a guy who sat around during performances with a shotgun on his lap because the authorities were trying to close him down. One night, Taylor said, Leonard Lyons, the newspaper columnist, came in with Anna Magnani, Tennessee Williams, and Frankie Merlow, Tennessee’s longtime lover. Taylor stood up and read his poem “Fuck Fame,” and Lyons wrote a whole column on him. And then another time Frankie came in and handed Taylor a couple of checks for a hundred dollars each, signed by Tennessee. Taylor talked about all the poets and performers who were around in those Village places, names I had scarcely heard of then—like a guy with shoulder-length hair who played the ukulele named Tiny Tim, and a young folk singer named Bob Dylan, who had one or two albums out by this time but wasn’t a big name yet.

  “I gave Bob Dylan a book of my poems a couple of years ago,” Taylor said, “right after the first time I saw him perform. I thought he was a great poet and I told him so.” A Woody Guthrie song playing on the radio, “So Long, It’s Been Good to Know You,” had prompted Taylor’s story. “And now,” Taylor started to laugh, “now when he’s a big sensation and everything, he asked me for a free copy of my second book. I said, ‘But you’re rich now—you can afford to buy it!’ And he said, ‘But I only get paid quarterly.’”

  (Taylor confessed to me a couple of years later, “The minute I heard Bob Dylan with his guitar, I thought, ‘That’s it, that’s what’s coming in, the poets have had it.’”)

  When he was twenty-two, Taylor had quit his job as a broker at Merrill Lynch in Detroit. I wondered what Taylor had been doing at a job like that in the first place. “Well, my father, Harry Mead, was the political boss of Michigan,” he explained. “He was one of Roosevelt’s favorites, and his official title was Wayne County Democratic Chairman
, but he was also head of the Liquor Control Commission and the WPA in the Detroit area. He’d made the resident partner of Merrill Lynch in Detroit the state treasurer, and so the treasurer felt obligated to give Harry Mead’s son a job.” Taylor spent most of his time there studying graphs on how to beat the market. “I finally figured out a system,” he said, “and it really spooked the boys at Merrill Lynch.” I asked him what kind of a system. “I could have made a fortune,” he said. “I told my father about it. The only trouble was he didn’t get around to buying the stock I’d recommended until after the point when I would have already sold it! And that,” Taylor said dryly, “was the only opportunity my father ever gave me to prove myself.”

  I couldn’t imagine Taylor poring over stock market graphs and charts, but then, I couldn’t imagine him driving, either, and there he was, at the wheel.

  When Taylor left his stockbroker job in Detroit, he had just fifty dollars in his pocket. “Kerouac’s On the Road put me on the road,” he said, “and Allen’s Howl, which had just come out, had a big effect on me.”

  Taylor was in San Francisco in ’56 when the beat poetry scene got going. One day he stood up on a bar and over the noise all the drunks were making, started screaming some poems he’d written. Ron Rice saw that scene and began following him around, filming him with black and white war surplus film stock.

  “Ron is such a devil.” Taylor smiled (Ron was still alive at this point; he didn’t die until a year or so later). “Stealing his girl friends’ support checks, running off with all the theater receipts, chasing people down the street with his camera trying to film them—and everybody loves him. He took a film course once at the Cooper Union and then he made a film of people ice skating. Then together we made The Flower Thief. I had to fight him all the way to get him not to put a blue wash on it. I told him, ‘Look, Ron, in a few years that kind of thing will be over.’”

  After San Francisco, Taylor came east and read at coffee shops like the Epitome in the Village. He’d hitched crosscountry five times by then, and that’s how he knew all about the truck stops.

  I told him, fine, he could pick out the next place we stopped for dinner. After directing Wynn on lefts and rights for a few miles, he steered us into a big truck stop. We sat in a booth over on the side—and were, in fact, a sideshow. I don’t know what it was, exactly, about the way we looked, but the alien alert was on; people were turning to look at the “freaks.” I thought we looked normal enough—our clothes were pretty conventional—but it was obviously something, because everybody was staring. One by one they came up to us, all friendly and smiling, but studying us—beautiful blond kids, girls in ponytails and ironed blouses, boys in crew cuts or long, slicked-back farmer cuts—and they all said, “Where you from?” When we told them New York, they stared more, wanting—they said—to just “dig us.” After that experience we went back to Carte Blanching.

  The farther west we drove, the more Pop everything looked on the highways. Suddenly we all felt like insiders because even though Pop was everywhere—that was the thing about it, most people still took it for granted, whereas we were dazzled by it—to us, it was the new Art. Once you “got” Pop, you could never see a sign the same way again. And once you thought Pop, you could never see America the same way again.

  The moment you label something, you take a step—I mean, you can never go back again to seeing it unlabeled. We were seeing the future and we knew it for sure. We saw people walking around in it without knowing it, because they were still thinking in the past, in the references of the past. But all you had to do was know you were in the future, and that’s what put you there.

  The mystery was gone, but the amazement was just starting.

  I was lying on the mattress in the back of our station wagon looking up at the lights and wires and telephone poles zipping by, and the stars and the blue-black sky, and thinking, “How could an American debutante marry a guy and go off to live with him in Sikkim?” I’d brought about fifty magazines with me and I’d just been reading about Hope Cooke. How could she do it! America was the place where everything was happening. I never understood, even, how Grace Kelly could leave America for Monaco, which didn’t seem nearly as sad as going to Sikkim. I couldn’t imagine living in a tiny, nothing little place in the Himalayan Mountains. I didn’t ever want to live anyplace where you couldn’t drive down the road and see drive-ins and giant ice cream cones and walk-in hot dogs and motel signs flashing!

  “Could you turn the radio up a little? It’s my favorite song,” I yelled to the front. Actually I couldn’t stand the song, but I didn’t want Wynn to nod off at the wheel.

  The Hollywood we were driving to that fall of ’63 was in limbo. The Old Hollywood was finished and the New Hollywood hadn’t started yet. It was the French girls who had the new star mystiques—Jeanne Moreau, Françoise Hardy, Sylvie Vartan, Catherine Deneuve, and her tall, beautiful sister, Françoise Dorléac (who would die horribly in a car crash in ’67). But this made Hollywood more exciting to me, the idea that it was so vacant. Vacant, vacuous Hollywood was everything I ever wanted to mold my life into. Plastic. White-on-white. I wanted to live my life at the level of the script of The Carpetbaggers—it looked like it would be so easy to just walk into a room the way those actors did and say those wonderful plastic lines. I kept raving about that movie all the time to people in Hollywood, but for some reason I was calling it The Howard Hughes Story so nobody knew what I was talking about.

  We made it in to Los Angeles in three days. When we arrived, we discovered there was a World Series going on and all the hotels were filled. (Baseball had been big news in New York all summer, too—but only because the Mets lost over a hundred games in their second season.) We called Dennis Hopper and his wife, Brooke, right up and she called up her father, the producer Leland Hayward, in New York and got him to give us his suite at the Beverly Hills Hotel. (Her mother was the beautiful actress Margaret Sullavan, who’d killed herself the year before.)

  Dennis assured us the Movie Star Party was on for that very night.

  The famous Bel-Air fire in ’61 had burned the Hoppers’ house to the ground. Their new house out in Topanga Canyon was furnished like an amusement park—the kind of whimsical carnival place you’d expect to find bubble-gum machines in. There were circus posters and movie props and red lacquered furniture and shellacked collages. This was before things got bright and colorful everywhere, and it was the first whole house most of us had ever been to that had this kiddie-party atmosphere.

  Brooke and Dennis had met in Mandingo, a play that closed on Broadway after just a few performances. Dennis wasn’t getting much film work at this point; he was doing photography then, and also, he was one of the few people out in California who collected Pop—he had my Mona Lisa painting up, and one of Roy’s paintings, too. I’d first seen him playing Billy the Kid on one of those Warner Brothers television westerns in the fifties—“Cheyenne” or “Bronco” or “Maverick” or “Sugarfoot”—and I remember thinking how terrific he was, so crazy in the eyes. Billy the Maniac.

  The Hoppers were wonderful to us. Peter Fonda was at the party that night—in those days he looked like a preppy mathematician. (He’d been on Broadway a couple of seasons earlier in a play at the same time that his sister, Jane, was doing her first Broadway run, too.) Dean Stockwell, John Saxon, Robert Walker, Jr., Russ Tamblyn, Sal Mineo, Troy Donahue, and Suzanne Pleshette—everybody in Hollywood I’d wanted to meet was there. Joints were going around and everyone was dancing to the songs we’d been hearing on the car radio all the way across the country.

  This party was the most exciting thing that had ever happened to me. I only wished I’d brought my Bolex along. I’d left it back at the hotel. The party seemed the most natural thing to take pictures of—after all, I was in Hollywood, accompanied by an underground film star, Taylor. But I felt embarrassed about letting people see me with a camera. I was self-conscious shooting even people I knew—like the ones out at Wynn’s country plac
e. The only time I hadn’t been shy about filming was with Sleep because there the star was asleep and nobody else was around.

  After a dazzling party like that, my art opening was bound to seem tame, and anyway, movies were pure fun, art was work. But still, it was thrilling to see the Ferus Gallery with the Elvises in the front room and the Lizes in the back.

  Very few people on the Coast knew or cared about contemporary art, and the press for my show wasn’t too good. I always have to laugh, though, when I think of how Hollywood called Pop Art a put-on! Hollywood?? I mean, when you look at the kind of movies they were making then—those were supposed to be real???

  Marcel Duchamp was having a retrospective at the Pasadena Museum, and we were invited to that opening. When we got there, they didn’t want to let Taylor in because he wasn’t dressed “properly”: he was wearing a sweater that was way too long for him; it belonged to Wynn, who was so tall that the sweater hung down past Taylor’s hands and knees. He had to roll the sleeves up and up till they settled somewhere around his wrists—they looked like life preservers. After a while the door people relented and let us in.

  All the L.A. Society swells were there. Brooke and Dennis were the only “movie people.” A photographer from Time or Life or Newsweek muscled past Taylor to get a picture of Duchamp and me, and Taylor started screaming, “How dare you! How dare you!”

  This was the first of the countless times during the sixties that I would hear that phrase screamed. The sixties were one confrontation after another, till eventually every social obstacle had been confronted. I’m convinced that the attitudes behind the mass confrontations in the last part of the sixties came from these minor scuffles at the doorways to parties. The idea that anybody had the right to be anywhere and do anything, no matter who they were and how they were dressed, was a big thing in the sixties. The fifties’ idea of youth rebellion was motorcycles and leather jackets and gang wars—all that stuff from the movies—but everybody in the fifties did ultimately stay in their own places—everybody stayed right where they “belonged.” I mean, down south Negroes were still riding in the backs of buses.