POPism

by Andy Warhol

  The World’s Fair was out in Flushing Meadow that summer with my mural of the Ten Most Wanted Men on the outside of the building that Philip Johnson designed. Philip gave me the assignment, but because of some political thing I never understood, the officials had it whitewashed out. A bunch of us went out to Flushing Meadow to have a look at it, but by the time we got there, you could only see the images faintly coming through the paint they’d just put over them. In one way I was glad the mural was gone: now I wouldn’t have to feel responsible if one of the criminals ever got turned in to the FBI because someone had recognized him from my pictures. So then I did a picture of Robert Moses instead, who was running the fair—a few dozen four-foot squares of Masonite panels—but that got rejected, too. But since I had the Ten Most Wanted screens already made up, I decided to go ahead and do paintings of them anyway. (The ten certainly weren’t going to get caught from the kind of exposure they’d get at the Factory.)

  The thing I most of all remember about the World’s Fair was sitting in a car with the sound coming from speakers behind me. As I sat there hearing the words rush past me from behind, I got the same sensation I always got when I gave an interview—that the words weren’t coming out of me, that they were coming from someplace else, someplace behind me.

  I guess Mark met everyone in the New York art scene that summer, not necessarily at the Factory but probably because of it. “You’d stand there painting,” Mark remembers, “and you’d say, ‘Do you think Picasso’s ever heard of us?’ and then you’d send me off to see people.” I sent him to dinner at Henry Geldzahler’s, and through Henry he met Jasper Johns and Stella and Lichtenstein and Ellsworth Kelly, and then once I sent him as a get-well present to Ray Johnson who was in Bellevue Hospital with hepatitis. We went down together to that art gallery near Washington Square that Ruth Kligman, who’d been Jackson Pollock’s girl friend and was right in the car with him when he was killed, was running with her new husband, Mr. Sansegundo. They screened movies every night and Jonas would be there with underground filmmakers like Harry Smith and Gregory Markopoulos. John Chamberlain and Neil Williams were around a lot, too, looking identical—they dressed alike and they both had big butch moustaches and were always drunk.

  The really funny thing about all this was that the whole time Mark was making notes and taking photographs because when he went back to England he was planning to go around giving lectures and showing slides! He said that the people over there were just as fascinated by what they had heard was going on here as Americans were by London.

  One thing I’ve always liked to do is hear what people think of each other—you learn just as much about the person who’s talking as about the person who’s getting dished. It’s called gossip, of course, and it’s an obsession of mine. So one afternoon as we stretched Marilyns, when Mark remarked that he thought Gerard was very “complicated,” I was in like a flash and asked him just what he meant by that.

  “Well.” he said, “he doesn’t want anyone else to be as close to you as he is. He told me once, ‘When it’s one-to-one with Andy, it’s very easy, but when you’re in a group, Andy creates competition between people so he can watch problems being played out. He loves to see people fighting and getting jealous of each other, and he encourages people to gossip about each other.’”

  “What did he mean?” I asked him.

  “Well, say, like we are right now.” Mark smiled. “Here I’m gossiping about him to you, and then at some point you’ll get him to tell you exactly what he thinks of me.”

  “Oh, really?” I said.

  “Yes. And I suppose he also meant that, for example, when we leave here tonight, you’ll be going on somewhere, but you’ll never say who else is invited—you’ll just contrive in an elegant fashion to make sure the people you don’t want to be there aren’t.… And you’ll do it all without saying a word, or by saying something very oblique—some people will realize they have to fall away, and some people will just know they can come along.”

  “Oh, really?” I said, letting the subject drop—I mean, you can’t gossip about yourself.

  We usually worked till around midnight, and then we’d go down to the Village, to places like the Café Figaro, the Hip Bagel, the Kettle of Fish, the Gaslight, the Café Bizarre, or the Cino. I’d get home around four in the morning, make a few phone calls, usually talk to Henry Geldzahler for an hour or so, and then when it started to get light I’d take a Seconal, sleep for a couple of hours, and be back at the Factory by early afternoon. As I walked in, the radio and the record player would both be blasting—“Don’t Let the Sun Catch You Crying” mixed with Turandot, “Where Did Our Love Go?” with Donizetti or Bellini, or the Stones doing “Not Fade Away” while Maria Callas did Norma.

  A lot of people thought that it was me everyone at the Factory was hanging around, that I was some kind of big attraction that everyone came to see, but that’s absolutely backward: it was me who was hanging around everyone else. I just paid the rent, and the crowds came simply because the door was open. People weren’t particularly interested in seeing me, they were interested in seeing each other. They came to see who came.

  I’d gotten myself a 35-mm still camera and for a few weeks there I was taking photographs, but it was too complicated for me. I got impatient with the f-stops, the shutter speeds, the light readings, so I dropped it. But Billy started using the camera and his “Factory Fotos” caught the exact mood of everything that was happening—embalmed-in-action: the smoky atmosphere, the parties, the broken bits of mirrors, the silver, the velvets, the planes of faces and bodies, the fights, the clowning, even the attitudes and the depression. Billy had the magic timing that could get it all at the right split second. We had one of those early copying machines at the Factory, a Verifax—sprayed silver, naturally—and Billy used to fool around copying photographs and negatives on that. At first he sent his pictures out to be developed, but then he got a darkroom together and he took more and more and more. Billy didn’t go out too much. If he needed some film or something, either he’d call for it or he’d ask Gerard or somebody to pick it up.

  “I adored Billy,” Mark told me years later. “He took all that speed and yet he never changed toward people. He hardly ever said a word, but they knew he was their friend. At the end of the summer, when I was leaving, he gave me a beautiful photograph of himself with a hard-on. He was so very sweet.”

  Everybody adored Billy. Henry Geldzahler told me that once when the underground star Paul America gave him (Henry) the first LSD he’d ever taken and then left him, Billy came by and found him all alone on the bathroom floor, freaking out, and he held him in his arms for hours, until the trip was over.

  Mark went up to Cape Cod a few times. Dick Smith, the English artist, was honeymooning up there, and Ivan Karp was there; and Motherwell and his wife, Helen Frankenthaler, were living in Provincetown, where Walter Chrysler had his museum in an old church; and Mailer was just down the street from the Motherwells. Mark had fallen in love with Bloomingdale’s; he bought all his clothes there, but everyone in Provincetown, as soon as they heard his accent, kept complimenting him on his “fantastic English clothes.” One Monday afternoon at the Factory, he told me that Mailer had walked over to him at a party over the weekend and punched him in the gut.

  I was impressed. “Norman Mailer actually punched you?” I said. “How great…. Why?”

  “That’s what I asked him. He said it was for wearing a pink jacket.”

  Norman Mailer was one of the few intellectuals that I really enjoyed.

  I didn’t leave the city on weekends that summer the way I had the one before. I thought, “Where could be more fun than this, with everybody you know coming by all the time, and you’re getting work done yet?” It was a constant open house, like the format of a children’s TV program—you just hung around and characters you knew dropped in.

  Of course, an “open house” has its risks:

  One day late in ’64, a woman in her thirties, who
I thought I’d maybe seen a few times before, came in, walked over to where I’d stacked four square Marilyns against a wall, took out a gun, and shot a hole right through the stack. She looked over at me, smiled, walked to the freight elevator, and left.

  I wasn’t even scared; it just seemed like I was watching a movie. I asked Billy, “Who was that?” and he told me her name. Ondine and I flipped through the stack and saw that the bullet had passed through two blue Marilyns and an orange one. I said, “But what does she do? Does she have a job?” Ondine and Billy both answered together, “Not that we know of…”

  Billy’s friends were outrageous. As much as you trusted Billy, that’s how much you’d never trust any of the people he knew. There was no problem about it, though, because they never expected anyone to trust them, they knew they were ridiculous. But there were varying degrees of untrustworthiness. Some of them would go right into your pocket and steal everything you had. Some of them would only steal half of what you had. Some of them would give you a bad check or try to sell you a bad electric typewriter (“All it needs, honestly, is the cord thing”). Some of them would only steal from big chain stores. There were lots of different codes that you could never figure out, and once in a while they’d catch you off guard and you’d think, “This time they mean it, they really will come right back with the change.”

  Even when they didn’t mean to steal, you’d still be missing things because, like they’d say, “We don’t steal, we transfer.” And it was true, they’d take things from you and then in their place you would find other people’s stuff. It was as if they thought they lived in an apartment that had four hundred rooms—they didn’t distinguish all the apartments they hung around in as separate places. Even Billy was like this—they were all so spaced. They weren’t taking things to get money or anything; they would simply, say, take my jacket and leave it at someone’s house, and take his gold cigarette lighter and leave it for me on the couch at the Factory—they were just moving objects around the city.

  When I first met Rotten Rita, he was still employed, at some factory that made fabrics—velvets or something—and he’d come by with yards of this and swatches of that. This was before he started stealing cars but probably during his bad check period.

  In those days, he and Binghamton Birdie always went around together. Rotten was about six feet tall, and he had kind of a collegiate look, like a goofy computer repairman—very sharp, chiseled comic-book features. And Birdie was a good-looking type with big muscles; he looked like something out of a physique magazine.

  Billy didn’t stay at the Factory all the time; he alternated between there and Henry Geldzahler’s apartment in the West Eighties, which he used to house-sit when Henry went out of town. It was crazy that people would trust him so much, but they did—I mean, when you think of the scene he was involved in (of all the people in New York City, his best friends happened to be the ones you were having him there to protect your property against). Henry trusted Billy the way everyone did, including me; there was just something about him that made you feel he was “in charge.”

  Rotten and Birdie and Ondine would be over at Henry’s house a lot when Billy was house-sitting it. One summer Henry came back from a weekend in Provincetown and walked in and found “a big fat naked woman” lying on his gneiss marble table poking a needle into her ass. (It was summertime and the stone table was the coolest surface to lie on.) That was his introduction to the Duchess.

  “At that point,” Henry told me years later, “I thought, ‘I am out of my mind to be letting this happen.’ I thought about morality, and then I thought, ‘God. I want to go on going to work and writing articles and giving lectures so this won’t happen to me.’” (He was getting up every morning as usual and going to his job at the Metropolitan Museum, and when he’d come home in the evening, his answering service would tell him, “The Mayor called” or “The Duchess will call back”—the operators were very impressed with his social life.)

  When Billy house-sat at Henry’s, he’d glide around the parlor floor with a cigarette holder between his first and fourth fingers (he looked like he was playing a flute) checking to see that nothing was missing, especially the small Al Hansen Hershey Bar painting on the wall of the two-by-four kitchen—it was a big favorite of the A-heads. In the living room there was a big Chamberlain car crash sculpture attached to the wall, and a black easy chair where Henry would smoke his cigars. The Duchess would come by the Factory and announce things like “Debbie Drop-out’s been at Henry Geldzahler’s for a week because Spanish Eddie’s trying to kill her.” I never understood how Henry could give those characters the run of his house. I would never go that far—the Factory was a different thing from where I lived—I wouldn’t want to go home to that kind of insanity, ever.

  Henry had one of the first loft beds around, complete with its own stairs. It was halfway between the floor and the fourteen-foot ceiling. One night he came home and opened the big sliding door to his bedroom and there in his bed were Billy, Ondine, and Silver George swathed in velvet (they were all incredible velvet freaks). Tosca was playing at top volume and Ondine sang/shouted “Mar-i-o MAR-I-O!” as he dove off the loft bed onto the floor.

  If you looked at Ondine from an angle or from the back, he was very striking because he had beautiful dark Italian hair. He wore the basic jeans–T-shirt uniform that everyone wore, and he usually carried an airline flight bag. His face would have been actually handsome, but there was something too arch about it: the mouth was pure Ondine, a sort of quizzical duck’s mouth with deep smile lines around it.

  As for Silver George, he looked like an anthropology project—big (over six feet tall), Neanderthal, hairy-chested, and with eye ridges and a Beatle haircut dyed three different shades a month.

  Silver George went home to Brooklyn on the day of his mother’s funeral that summer and he noticed that his father looked “depressed,” so when the old man went to the refrigerator for milk, George slipped some Methedrine into his Rice Krispies. His father immediately began darting around the house dusting the rooms. And when Silver George phoned Billy a little later, he reported, “The patient is responding nicely. I’m sure he’ll enjoy the funeral enormously.”

  Another time, when Henry was traveling in Europe, his secretary stopped by to check on the apartment and discovered Billy shrunken to about ninety pounds. He’d draped the loft bed in black velvet and was lying on top of it like it was a catafalque—it all looked like something out of a Spanish painting. The girl called the psychiatrist Ernie Kafka, who diagnosed a severe case of dehydration and prescribed vitamins.

  The only thing “underground” about American underground movies—I mean, in the strict political sense of having to hide from some authority—was that in the early sixties there was the big censorship problem with nudity. The fifties had been Lolita-scandal time—even as late as ’59 there was the big deal about Grove Press publishing Lady Chatterley’s Lover and later on about Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer. The censorship policies in this country have always completely baffled me because there was never a time when you couldn’t walk into any 42nd Street peep show and see all the cocks and cunts and tits and asses you wanted, then suddenly out of the blue the courts would single out one popular movie with a few racy scenes in it for “obscenity.”

  Some underground filmmakers actually kind of hoped the police would seize their movies so they’d get in all the papers for being persecuted for “freedom of expression,” and that was always considered a worthy cause. But it was pretty much a fluke who the police arrested and who they didn’t and after a certain point it all got boring for everyone.

  The first movie of mine that was seized was a two-minute-forty-five-second one-reeler that I’d shot out in Old Lyme of everybody during the filming of Jack Smith’s Normal Love—the one where the cast made a room-size cake and got on top of it. Actually, it was seized by mistake—what the police were out to get was Jack’s Flaming Creatures.

  Jonas’s Coop ha
d moved from the Gramercy Arts Theater to the building Diane di Prima and some of the other poets used on St. Mark’s Place on the southeast corner of the Bowery. After Flaming Creatures was seized, the screenings there stopped for a little while. Then Jonas rented the Writers Stage on 4th Street between Second Avenue and the Bowery and he screened Genet’s Un Chant d’amour there. “I knew that Jack’s would be a difficult case to fight,” Jonas told me, “with nobody really knowing who he was, and I felt that Genet—for the right or wrong reasons—would be a better case because he was a famous writer. And I was right—when they clubbed us that time for obscenity, we won.”

  After all the court cases Jonas realized that he needed some type of umbrella nonprofit organization, so he created the Film Culture Non-Profit Organization, which published Film Culture magazine and sponsored screenings and other things. During that period they had screenings in “respectable” places—like that Washington Square art gallery of Ruth Kligman’s—so they wouldn’t be closed down again by the police. Ruth’s was where Jonas showed a lot of Marie Menken’s films and in the fall we showed Blow Job there publicly for the first time.

  Jonas had screened his film of the Living Theater’s production of The Brig in that building on St. Mark’s and the Bowery before the police seized Flaming Creatures there. I was intrigued with the equipment he’d used—for nine hundred dollars he’d shot the whole thing in sync sound. It was eighty minutes long, and he’d done it with the Auricon camera that was used by journalists a lot to shoot live situations since it recorded sound directly on the film—all you had to do was hold the camera. The quality of the sound was primitive, of course, but still it was sync sound. Jonas showed me how to operate the Auricon and I used it right away to film, of all things, Empire, which had no dialogue. A boy named John Palmer gave me the idea: we shot the Empire State Building from an office in the Time-Life Building that belonged to a friend named Henry Romney, who around that time was trying to buy the rights to A Clockwork Orange, saying that he wanted me to film it using Nureyev, Mick Jagger, and Baby Jane Holzer as stars.