POPism

by Andy Warhol

  In June of ’64 the Rolling Stones had come over to play some American cities and the tour was a big disappointment to them. They’d wound it up at Carnegie Hall on a bill with Bobby Goldsboro and Jay and the Americans. They had a big hit with “Tell Me,” and they did have a following, but they were no supergroup yet in the United States—all anybody cared about over here was the Beatles. In October they came back for another try—they played the Academy of Music down on 14th Street and on the twenty-fifth they were slated for The Ed Sullivan Show for the first time. With the idea to get more publicity for them—which was what they badly needed—Nicky Haslam and some other friends of theirs planned a party at Jerry Schatzberg’s photography studio on Park Avenue South for the Friday night before the Sullivan show. (Ed Sullivan must have learned his lesson after he turned down young Elvis in the fifties when he could have had him cheap, only to pay a record price for him later on, because in the sixties Ed was the first with all the English pop groups.) That was also Baby Jane Holzer’s twenty-fourth birthday, so what it evolved into was a party for her with the Stones as the star guests. Jane had just started to appear in big Vogue fashion spreads, and Clay Felker, the editor of the New York Herald Tribune Sunday magazine supplement (he revived it as New York magazine a couple of years after the Tribune folded) had assigned Tom Wolfe to write a piece on her.

  Nicky had left Vogue to be the art director of A & P heir Huntington Hartford’s short-lived magazine called Show. Hunt himself interviewed Nicky for the job: “First he analyzed my handwriting,” Nicky told me, “and then he asked me to kiss his wife so he could see how she reacted, and then he gave me the job.” Nicky used Jane on a Show cover—a David Bailey photograph of her in a yachting cap and World’s Fair sunglasses, with an American flag between her teeth.

  Mick was staying down at Nicky’s on East 19th Street again, and so was Keith Richards, who had Ronnie the Ronette spending a lot of time there with him—the Ronettes were very big then, after “Be My Baby” and “Walking in the Rain.”

  The theme of the party was going to be “Mods vs. Rockers,” so on the night of the party, to make it look authentic, Nicky went over to an S & M leather bar on 33rd Street and Third Avenue called the Copper Kettle, where he’d just taken his friend Jane Ormsby-Gore dressed as a boy (she was the daughter of the British ambassador to Washington) and invited all the leather boys to come by later on but to really bust their way in to make it look like a real confrontation between mods and rockers. The leather boys did come, but since nobody even tried to stop them, they just wandered in with no problem—and no impact.

  Then for a band, Nicky had gone over to the Wagon Wheel on West 45th Street to ask the all-girl house band, Goldie and the Gingerbreads in their gold lamé outfits and stiletto heels, if they wanted to play at the party. They did, and they played until five in the morning, with the floors shaking so badly we were amazed at the bounce.

  The party was a smash even though the Stones were so shy they stayed way upstairs in Jerry’s apartment most of the time. It got written up in all the papers, and it did as much for Baby Jane as it did for the Stones—Tom Wolfe’s “Girl of the Year” article on her, which defined her as the new type of Pop sixties girl and was eventually part of his Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby book, featured the party.

  The Rolling Stones weren’t the only ones with foreign publicity problems. I realized I had some myself when I had a major show at a gallery in Canada and I didn’t sell one thing. Gerard went up with me to Toronto on the train. The day of the opening we loitered around the gallery, but nobody showed up—nobody. Gerard went out to browse around and came back with some poetry books that you could only get in Canada (there was one by a poet called Leonard Cohen who nobody in the States had heard of yet), so he was thrilled, but I was feeling like a total dud. The gallery was about to close, so you can imagine how relieved I was when a tubby, red-cheeked high school kid all out of breath came running up to me with a three-ring notebook in his hands and puff-puffed, “Oh! Thank God you’re still here—I’m doing my term paper on you.” By this point I was really thrilled to see him. He said he had picked me to do his term paper on because his cousin had seen my Elvis Presley show in Los Angeles the year before but also because I hadn’t done that much yet so he wouldn’t have to do too much research. All I could think of was that if I was still this big a nobody in Canada, then Picasso certainly hadn’t heard of me. This was definitely a setback, because I’d sort of decided by then that he might have.

  Everyone always reminds me about the way I’d go around moaning, “Oh, when will I be famous, when will it all happen?” etc., etc., so I must have done it a lot. But you know, just because you carry on about something doesn’t mean you literally want what you say. I worked hard and I hustled, but my philosophy was always that if something was going to happen, it would, and if it wasn’t and didn’t, then something else would.

  My art was still considered peculiar, and when I was first at Castelli, my work didn’t sell too well. But then the Flowers show came up and a lot of those paintings got sold, though still no one seemed to want to pay a good price for the early cartoon pictures.

  I was happy at Castelli, I knew they were doing everything they could for me, but Ivan sensed that I was uncomfortable when I got low prices. One day he said to me, “I know you feel you’re not getting the right prices for your early work, but at this point people still feel it’s too peculiar and aggressive and that the subject matter isn’t appropriate—that they couldn’t live with it. And now that you’re using silkscreens, they don’t like that either. They just don’t understand what you’re doing. But you’re being very patient, Andy, and I think this year things will change.”

  I was glad to hear it. Changing the subject, I said, “Gee, Ivan, you really should come by and visit us. You never do anymore.”

  What Ivan said to me then made me realize for the first time that he didn’t like the Factory scene. I’d always assumed he was just too busy to come all the way to midtown—after all, my studio used to be much closer to the gallery. But now I had to face the fact that it wasn’t the distance that was keeping Ivan away. I started to get the idea when he said, “Andy, I know a lot of people think it’s glamorous over there at your studio, but to me it’s just—gloomy. Your art is partly voyeuristic, which is completely legitimate, of course—you’ve always liked the bizarre and the peculiar and people at their most raw and uncovered—but it’s not so much a fascination for me. I don’t need to see that so much…. You have a group of people around you now that’s essentially destructive. Not that they set out to be necessarily, but…” Ivan shook his head, not finishing. “I’d rather see you in a small crowd or just alone like this. I guess I’m just totally embedded in the art community—it’s wholesome and I feel comfortable in it.”

  We never for a second stopped being friends, but from then on we understood that it was really only art that was our common ground. And it suddenly occurred to me that Henry Geldzahler was the only friend from ’60 that I was still seeing a lot of. Or at least I was talking to him a lot—three to five hours a day. He was involved in all the same things I was—the art scene and the Factory/movie scene. He was someone who was as fascinated by the bizarre as I was—we were both open to involvements with crazy people.

  All during ’64 Freddy Herko had been taking a lot of amphetamine. Like so many people on speed, he’d think he was doing creative things when he wasn’t. He’d sit there with a compass and a Rapidograph and twenty or thirty Pentels and make intricate geometric designs on a little pad with dirty fingerprints all over it and think he was doing something beautiful and clever.

  Freddy would come by the Factory a lot to see Billy. He’d left some of his clothes and costumes there in a trunk—all the amphetamine dingle-dangles, the flowers made out of broken mirrors, and the cloaks and feathered hats and pasted-on jewels—someone had once described Freddy as “a seventeenth-century macaroni.” He had the rest of his belongin
gs scattered around downtown in different friends’ apartments. At the Factory he’d walk in, talking so fast, with his shoulder bag slung behind him, sit down, and show me his drawings, then leap up—he danced in leaps wherever he went. Amphetamine symptoms were still new to me, I didn’t even recognize them, I didn’t even know about the amphetamine compulsion to draw little patterns. I only thought, “Gee, this person is an incredible dancer. High-strung and neurotic maybe, but really creative.”

  One of the saddest times with Freddy was when Gerard and I and a couple of other people went with him to visit his Aunt Harriet at her apartment in the Fifties—it had a lot of big mirrors in it, so Freddy was leaping around; it must have been like being in dancing class. Whenever he stayed still long enough, Aunt Harriet hugged him.

  As we were leaving, she gave Freddy some money, and then this is the really sad part—she pressed a dollar bill into each of our hands because she said she wanted Freddy’s friends to have a little something, too.

  I filmed Freddy three times. The first time was just a short dance thing on a roof. The second was a segment for The Thirteen Most Beautiful Boys where Freddy sat nervously in a chair for three minutes, smoking a cigarette. And the third was called Roller Skate, and Freddy was the star of it. He put a skate on one foot and we filmed him rolling on it all over town and over in Brooklyn Heights, day and night, gliding in dance attitudes and looking as perfect as the ornament on the hood of a car. We filmed glide after glide of him, keeping the camera going. When it came time to take the skate off, his foot was bleeding, but he’d been smiling the whole while and he was still smiling, wearing a WMCA Good Guys sweatshirt.

  Freddy spent the months before he died with a girl dancer over in an apartment near St. Mark’s Church, taking more and more amphetamine. He began staying inside, never going out. He never smiled anymore. He withdrew from the whole apartment into one single room, and then from the room to the end of the hall, and then from the end of the hall into a walk-in closet—he’d stay in there for days at a time in his mess of textiles and beads and records. Oh, he would occasionally come out to make a few ballets but then he’d go right back in. Finally the girl dancer asked him to leave, and he moved down to the lower Lower East Side.

  One night he showed up at Diane di Prima’s to borrow a record and invited everyone there to a performance; he said he was going to leap off the top of his building downtown.

  A few days later, on October 27, he turned up at an apartment on Cornelia Street that belonged to Johnny Dodd, who did the lighting for the Judson Church concerts. The front door to Johnny’s apartment was bolted and sealed with nails driven through the jamb, but there was a panel, maybe ten inches wide and three feet high with hinges, that by really stooping you could get through. The door had gotten this treatment because of Freddy; he’d kicked it in a few times.

  What Freddy did when he got inside was go and take a bath. The apartment was stuffed with stage props and collage things—gold fabric covering bare brick walls, a Tintoretto-like eighteenth-century baroque heaven scene on the ceiling, a picture of some ballerinas framed with a toilet seat, a photograph of Orion the Witch of Bleecker Street, a portable wall of postage stamps, and so forth. After his bath, Freddy put Mozart’s Coronation Mass on the hi-fi. He said he had a new ballet to do and he needed to be alone. He herded the people there out of the room. As the record got to the “Sanctus,” he danced out the open window with a leap so huge he was carried halfway down the block onto Cornelia Street five stories below.

  For the twenty-six nights following Freddy’s death, the group at Diane di Prima’s apartment met formally to read the Tibetan Book of the Dead. The ritual involved making sacrifices, and most people pulled out a few of their hairs and burned them.

  There was a memorial service for him at Judson Church, but so many people showed up that there was another one for him, at the Factory. We showed the three films.

  (It’s so strange to look back on that last year of Freddy’s life when he retreated into that closet, because in ’68 Billy Name did the very same thing, went into the darkroom closet and didn’t come out.)

  The Sculls, Bob and Ethel, were big—very big, the biggest—collectors of Pop Art, and of course they got to know all the Pop artists and through collecting and knowing all the artists, they made quite a place for themselves in the booming sixties art scene. To celebrate the opening of Philip Johnson’s new building for the Museum of Modern Art, the Sculls gave a party, and at that party Ethel Scull seated herself next to Mrs. Lyndon Johnson. There they were, sitting together. A few years before, no body—not even a gossip columnist—would have known who Ethel Scull was, yet in the period between ’60 and ’69, the Sculls more than anyone else came to symbolize success in the art scene at the collecting end. A lot of the swinging mod couples in the sixties started to collect art, and the Sculls were models and heroes for these people. The collection of Pop Art that Bob Scull had acquired was already legendary. He was in the taxicab business, but he’d been smarter than all those people at the museums. He’d pulled off what everyone who collects dreams of—he built the best collection by recognizing quality before anybody else was on to it, while it could still be bought cheap.

  Ethel Scull (in those days, she liked to be called “Spike”) gave a lot of big, generous parties, where she somehow always managed to instigate little intrigues and feuds that would peak in embarrassing scenes. She had the “You’re-my-friend-this-week” style that made for tense dramas.

  For example, I was at a party of theirs when they still lived out in Great Neck on Long Island. It was their debut party in the art world. I guess they’d finally gotten their collection to the point where they wanted to show it off. It was a great place, the art was fantastic, and there were beautiful flower arrangements all over the place. In the middle of the party, Jim Rosenquist’s wife happened to pluck a carnation from one of the centerpieces. Ethel zeroed in on her and screamed, “You put that right back! Those are my flowers!” Ethel could sure give people something to talk about.

  For my Flowers opening at Castelli, Ethel gave a party at the Factory with that southern girl-around-town Marguerite Lamkin. Up until they gave that party together, the two women were good friends. They had it catered by Nathan’s Famous with hot dog carts and french fries and hamburgers—there was a real boardwalk atmosphere. Senator Javits and his exuberant wife, Marion, were there, and Allen Ginsberg in a tam-o’-shanter, and Jill Johnston, the Voice dance critic, was climbing up the silver pipes. Fred McDarrah from the Voice was there taking a lot of pictures. Even the police stopped by.

  The two ladies had hired Pinkerton detectives and stationed them downstairs, and you absolutely had to show your invitation or they wouldn’t let you in. I’d told a lot of my friends to come—I mean, I didn’t know there were going to be guards there—and every one of them got turned away at the door. They were all mad at me for not being right down there to get them in, but whenever a situation looked like it was going to be problematic, I usually tried to stay out of it.

  De was Marguerite’s date—they were good friends. He’d gotten her some writing jobs, and now she was a correspondent on the New York scene for some English newspapers. (She had a map of midtown Manhattan on her wall at home with little flags that she moved around when people would phone and tell her where they were having lunch or dinner.)

  Marguerite, De, and I took the action in from a corner. We watched Bob Scull running around in some sort of checked jacket. He went over to a major young painter and shoved a fifty-dollar bill at him and said, “We’re about to run out of soda water—go get some.” The young guy just stared at him like “Up yours.”

  De shook his head. “That guy is impervious,” he said. It was true, no gaffe could ever affect him. De said, “In a way, he’s the oddest figure out of this whole scene, because at one level he’s coarse beyond description—beyond imagination! And yet at another, he really saw what was going on and put his money out.” Then De laughed and added,
“Ver-ry ver-ry lit-tle of it. A teent-zy, teent-zy amount. But enough to get the best—you can’t take that away from him…”

  It’s a strange thing to be talking about someone in a big crowd and then watch them from a distance being exactly the way you’re describing them. There was Bob Scull stomping around, giving orders. Who could ever figure out how a man who behaved like that socially could have such a keen sense for art?

  The postscript to that night is that Ethel and Marguerite argued for weeks over how much each of them had spent for what—adding up hot dogs, tallying bottles, practically dragging paper cups out of the garbage to count them—and they wound up hating each other. It was a great party.

  That fall, David Bourdon started writing on art for the Village Voice. When I’d heard they were looking for an art person, I’d introduced him to the Voice theater critic, Michael Smith, who I knew from the San Remo/Judson Church crowd.

  Shortly after David got the job, he called me and said, “Well, now that I’m working for the Voice, do you think I’m chic enough for people to come all the way out to Brooklyn Heights if I give a party?”

  Gerard and Billy and Ondine and I rode out to the Heights in a limo. As soon as we got there, Billy announced to David that his party was on our “circuit” for that night, and David got really offended at that, at our “lack of commitment,” he said, and then he kept asking sarcastic questions like were we sure we weren’t allotting him too much of our time. But that type of hurt, paranoid attitude was part of David’s sense of humor—setting himself up as an articulate underdog.