POPism

by Andy Warhol

  He had a big crowd—this was right after Freddy Herko died, and that was about the only Judson dancer who wasn’t there. When I saw Susan Sontag, I asked David how he’d snagged her, because she was considered the dazzling intellect of the year. She’d just published her famous essay in the Partisan Review on the differences between high, middle, and low “camp,” and she was very influential—she wrote about literature, pornography, films (especially Godard), art, anything. David told me that he’d heard she didn’t think too much of my painting—“I hear she suspects your sincerity,” he said. Well, that was no surprise, since a lot of dazzling intellects felt that way. I didn’t go over to talk to her, but I watched her from where I was sitting. She had a good look—shoulder-length straight dark hair and big dark eyes, and she wore very tailored things. She really liked to dance, too; she was jumping all around the place. Everybody then was doing the frug or the jerk-style dances, to the Beatles and the Supremes mostly. But the song that everybody wanted to hear over and over again was “I’m In with the In Crowd”—they played it every other song.

  All through ’64 we filmed movies without sound. Movies, movies, and more movies. We were shooting so many, we never even bothered to give titles to a lot of them. Friends would stop by and they’d wind up in front of the camera, the star of that afternoon’s reel.

  Once De started making movies, he never went back to the art scene. In the past year we’d only seen each other a couple of times, at parties. But then I bumped into him one afternoon on the street and we went to the Russian Tea Room for a drink. We sat there gabbing about what we’d been doing, and I offered that since we were both doing movies now, wouldn’t it be great to do one together. Now, with people who know me, I’m famous for this sort of thing—proposing collaborations. (I’m also famous for not spelling out what the collaboration will consist of—who’ll do what—and lots of people have told me how frustrating that can be. But the thing is, I never know exactly what I want to do, and the way I see it, why worry about things like specifics beforehand, since nothing may ever come of the project? Do it first, then look at what you’ve got, and then worry about who did what. But most people would disagree with me, saying it’s better to have an understanding at the outset.) When I suggested doing some sort of a joint production to De, I was just being impulsive. But De was always so practical, he squelched my suggestion right away, saying that our lives and styles and politics (I can’t remember if he was calling himself a Marxist yet) and philosophies were just too different.

  I must have looked very disappointed, because he held up his drink and said, “Okay, Andy, I’ll do something for you that I’m sure nobody’s ever offered to do for you and you can film it: I’ll drink an entire quart of Scotch whiskey in twenty minutes.”

  We went right over to 47th Street and made a seventy-minute film. De finished the bottle before I reloaded at the halfway point, but he wasn’t showing the liquor yet. However, in just the little while it took to put more film in the camera, he was suddenly on the floor—singing and swearing and scratching at the wall, the whole time trying to pull himself up and not being able to.

  Now, the thing was, I didn’t really know what he’d meant when he told me, “I’ll risk my life for you.” Even when I saw him crawling around on all fours, I just thought of it simply as someone being really drunk. Then Rotten Rita, who was hanging around, said, “Marine Corps sergeants keel over dead from that. Your liver can’t take it.”

  But De didn’t die, and I called the movie Drink so it could be a trilogy with my Eat and Sleep. When the little old lady we used as a go-between brought it back from the lab, I called De to come over and see it. He said, “I’m bringing my woman and an English friend and I hope no one else will be there.” There was no one at the Factory right then anyway, except for Billy and Gerard and me and a couple of people who looked like they were on their way out. But as soon as I hung up, a gang of Gerard’s friends happened to walk in, and by the time De got there, there were around forty people all over the place. We ran the film and after it was over, De said to me, “I’ll probably sue you if you ever screen it publicly again.” I knew he’d never sue me, of course, but that was his way of telling me not to have a print made of it.

  At the end of ’64 we made Harlot, our first sound movie with sound—Empire, the eight-hour shot of the Empire State Building, had been our first “sound” movie without sound. Now that we had the technology to have sound in our movies, I realized that we were going to be needing a lot of dialogue. It’s funny how you get the solution to things. Gerard and I were down at the Café Le Metro for one of the Wednesday night poetry readings when a writer named Ronnie Tavel was reading passages from his novel and some poems. He seemed to have reams of paper around; I was really impressed with the sheer amount of stuff he’d evidently written. While he was reading, I was thinking how wonderful it was to find someone so prolific just at the point when we were going to need “sounds” for our sound movies. Immediately after the reading I asked Ronnie if he’d come by the Factory and just sit in a lounge chair off-camera and talk while we shot Mario Montez in Harlot, and he said fine. As we left Le Metro, Gerard sneered, “Your standards are really ridiculous sometimes.” I guess he thought I was too impressed with the quantity of stuff Ronnie turned out. But the thing was, I liked the content, too, I thought he was really talented.

  • • •

  Mario Montez, the star of Harlot, was in a lot of off-off-Broadway plays and doing a lot of underground acting for Jack Smith and Ron Rice and Jose Rodriguez-Soltero and Bill Vehr. And this was all in addition, he told me, to his regular job: working for the post office. Mario was one of the best natural comedians I’d ever met; he knew instinctively how to get a laugh every time. He had a natural blend of sincerity and distraction, which has to be one of the great comedy combinations.

  A lot of Mario’s humor came from the fact that he adored dressing up like a female glamour queen, yet at the same time he was painfully embarrassed about being in drag (he got offended if you used that word—he called it “going into costume”). He used to always say that he knew it was a sin to be in drag—he was Puerto Rican and a very religious Roman Catholic. The only spiritual comfort he allowed himself was the logic that even though God surely didn’t like him for going into drag, that still, if He really hated him, He would have struck him dead.

  Mario was a very sympathetic person, very benign, although he did get furious at me once. We were watching a scene of his in a movie we called The Fourteen-Year-Old Girl, and when he saw that I’d zoomed in and gotten a close-up of his arm with all the thick, dark masculine hair and veins showing, he got very upset and hurt and accused me in a proud Latin way, “I can see you were trying to bring out the worst in me.”

  Ronnie Tavel appeared for the Harlot shooting and he and a couple of other people just talked normally off-camera. Sometimes the talk was about what we were shooting and other times it wasn’t—I loved the effect of having unrelated dialogue. After that Ronnie did quite a few scenarios for us—The Life of juanita Castro, Horse, Vinyl, The Fourteen-Year-Old Girl, Hedy (The Shoplifter), Lupe, Kitchen, and others. I enjoyed working with him because he understood instantly when I’d say things like “I want it simple and plastic and white.” Not everyone can think in an abstract way, but Ronnie could.

  1965

  In January ’65 I met Edith Minturn Sedgwick. She’d just come to New York that summer. She’d been in a car accident and her right arm was in a cast. We were introduced by Lester Persky, but we were bound to meet anyway, since I’d gotten to know quite a few people from the Cambridge/Harvard group she was part of. A lot of them hung out at the San Remo.

  Edie’s family went all the way back to the Pilgrims—she was related to Cabots, Lodges, Lowells. Her great-uncle Ellery had been the editor of the Atlantic Monthly, and her greatgrandfather was the Reverend Endicott Peabody, the founder of the Groton School. And somebody on her grandmother’s side had invented some basic industry l
ike the trolley or the elevator, so they were rich, too. Edie’s parents had moved as far away from New England as you could get—to California—but her brother was an undergraduate at Harvard and Edie was in Cambridge, too. She was studying sculpture with Lily Swann Saarinen, the ex-wife of the famous architect Eero Saarinen, and living in a small studio on Brattle Street where Longfellow and people like that had lived in all those glamorous old houses. She used to drive around town in her Mercedes to parties, lots of them given by her own brother. The two Sedgwicks were beautiful rich kids who knew how to have a good time in Cambridge.

  Donald Lyons, who was studying classics then at the Harvard graduate school, remembers how Edie took a bunch of friends to the Ritz-Carlton one night for dinner after a very drunken all-day lawn party and how all of a sudden she got up and started dancing on the tabletop and how the management very very politely asked them to leave. They stuffed all the silverware they could lay their hands on into their pockets, but then as they were leaving, Edie tripped at the top of the stairs and all the knives and forks and spoons spilled out of her purse and went avalanching down the stairs. Even with that the management was polite to her because they knew her father—it was just “Tsk, tsk, don’t do this again, dear.”

  For her twenty-first birthday party, Donald told me, Edie had “rented the Charles River boathouse and invited about two thousand people. ‘Edie in Cambridge’—it was right out of Gatsby.”

  Danny Fields was one of the first people in the early sixties to come down from Cambridge. He’d just quit Harvard Law School and set up a life in New York, and so he was like Information Central for the other Cambridge kids when they came to town.

  I’d met Danny at a party on 72nd Street. It was a Sunday that one of the newspaper supplements was illustrating a lead story with my Campbell’s Soup Can, and Danny happened to have the paper with him. I was sitting on a couch next to Gerard and Arthur Loeb of the Wall Street Loebs. I borrowed Danny’s paper to see how the soup can had come out. Meanwhile, a crazy, beautiful fashion model was crawling snake-style toward Arthur, groveling and telling him how much she was in love with him and begging him to please, please, marry her.

  Denis Deegan was across from us. He’d been out in California when we were there in the fall of ’63. He was tall and congenial, very Irish-looking with his red hair and blue eyes. He was staying with a friend on 19th Street near Irving Place, and when you asked him what he did, he’d smile beautifully and say, “Nothing whatsoever.” The glamorous young kids in the sixties didn’t work. You couldn’t say that they were “unemployed,” because the idea of working never even came up, yet they always had the best clothes and all the plane trips they wanted. Rich people were especially free with their money then, supporting kids that they liked having around, so these kids would just get up in the afternoon, make a few phone calls, play a few records, decide what they were going to do later on, party all night, and then start all over again the next day.

  Danny says he’ll always remember that Sunday afternoon we met, because that was when he decided he wanted to really get to know all these people better. “You were sitting there reading my paper and Gerard was talking to Denis and Arthur was kicking the beautiful French model in the face with his good leg. She got upset and ran for a window that was open from the top and climbed up onto the ledge. Nobody paid the slightest attention to her. You just glanced up from the newspaper and said so calmly, ‘Ooo. Do you think she’ll really jump?’ and went back to reading. Finally I couldn’t stand it any longer and I ran over and opened the window from the bottom and pulled her back in, and when I turned around, everyone was still just sitting there chatting and I thought, ‘Gee, this is a very cool crowd. I think I’ll pursue this….’”

  “The first time I saw Edie,” Danny said, “she’d just driven down from Boston with Tommy Goodwin and they stopped by the apartment that Hal Peterson and David Newman were subletting on Riverside Drive around 78th. The World’s Fair had just opened and we were all going out there the next day. The radio was going full blast; the Beach Boys were singing ‘I Get Around.’

  When Edie came in and saw her girl friends, she started jumping up and down and pretty soon everyone was jumping up and down and hugging and kissing each other. They all looked so collegiate—Shetland sweaters and circle pins and little pleated skirts. And Edie was so pretty and bubbly and big-eyed. Everyone stayed up all night talking and walking along Riverside Drive.

  “Tommy Goodwin was staying with me then,” Danny went on. “God, he was beautiful. At Harvard everybody was in love with him. His mother and father were both very famous doctors. He was good friends with Chuck Wein and that whole bunch and he would just sort of hang around New York and carry cameras and let everybody fall in love with him. Edie stayed at my place for about two weeks when Tommy was there—she spent most of her time sitting in the window, talking and laughing on the phone all day, smoking cigarettes. She had a little group picture of a few members of her family, taken when they were all checked into the same Society mental institution during the same period—Silver Hill, I think it was. It cost three hundred a day for each of them, she told me, so that was cozy.”

  Edie used to talk about her childhood as if it were a nightmare straight out of Dickens. At first I always believed everything the kids told me about their parents, but as the years went by and I’d now and then meet one of the parents, I wasn’t so sure.

  “When I first met Edie, she was so fresh,” Danny continued. “She’d have a couple of drinks, but that was it.” Then he added, “I could see, though, that she wanted to take other things. The people coming in from Cambridge always had acid with them—it wasn’t even illegal yet, that’s how long ago this was. It was brown on sugar cubes, and they’d put it in my refrigerator—it looked so harmless but it was probably enough for two thousand doses. They’d sit at my kitchen table with medicine droppers, bopping their shoulders to the Supremes, dripping the LSD onto the little cocktail sugar cubes. Edie took some acid when she was staying with me, as sort of a debutante giggle.

  “Then one day they started to move her trunks in and I got a little nervous, but by September she was in her own apartment on East 63rd Street. She’d sort of decided to become a model.”

  One of the people who was friends with everyone in that Cambridge crowd summed up the relationships this way: “The whole thing was the beautiful Ivy League boys, the clever faggots who loved them, and the beautiful debutante girls the beautiful Ivy League boys loved.”

  Why did they all come to New York? “These kids from Cambridge in their early twenties,” Danny said, “represented inherited wealth, inherited beauty, and inherited intelligence. These were the most glamorous young people in all America. I mean, they were so rich and so beautiful and so so smart. And so crazy. But up in Cambridge, all together, all they could think was, ‘Oh, God, we’re so bored, we’re so tired of going to classes. We want to move out into the real world.’ Moving out into the real world meant getting their picture in the papers and getting written up in the magazines.”

  I’ve always been fascinated by the assumptions that rich kids make. A lot of them think it’s normal, the way they live—because it’s all they’ve ever known. I love to watch their minds operate. There are two kinds of rich kids—the ones who’re always trying to act poor and prove that they’re just like everybody else and who secretly worry that people only like them for their money, and the ones who just relax and have fun with it, who even play it up. The second kind are fun.

  • • •

  It wasn’t surprising that Edie should vaguely decide to be a model. This was the year when the idea of “modeling” held more excitement for a girl Edie’s age than it ever had before. It had always been glamorous to model—but now it could be outrageous, too. Very soon, Edie would be innovating her own look that Vogue, Life, Time, and all the other magazines would photograph—long, long earrings with dime-store T-shirts over dancer’s tights, with a white mink coat thrown over it al
l.

  A discotheque called Ondine (just a name coincidence—no connection with our Ondine) opened on East 59th Street at the very beginning of ’65, and that was where you started seeing lots of beautiful girls in mini-skirts (they weren’t even called that yet, though), short and pleated and with stripes and dots and big colors and stretchy knits.

  Everyone started going to Ondine right away, all the celebs in town. The girls there were beautiful—Gerard picked Marisa Berenson up there one night on her very first modeling trip to New York and brought her by the Factory for a screen test.

  Edie went there all the time, throwing a lot of money around in the beginning when she still had it, picking up the check for as many as twenty people every night. She still had her arm in a cast from the car accident, and she’d be swinging it around, standing on top of the tables. She always kept both her feet solidly planted on the table or the floor or whatever—as if she was afraid she’d lose her balance and topple over if she lifted one of them, she was so stoned all the time there, just drinking, having a great time. Her dance moves were sort of Egyptian, with her head and chin tilting in just the right, beautiful way. People called it the Sedgwick, and Edie was the only one who did it—everybody else was doing the jerk to “The Name Game,” “Come See about Me,” “All Day and All of the Night.”

  We partied all night but we also prepartied all afternoon, just hanging around the Factory. The Duchess was always so high on speed that any little thing could send her into an hour-long monologue and I’d just sit there and watch the show. When the news came over the radio in February that Malcolm X was just shot up in Harlem, they were interviewing people at his Hotel Teresa headquarters and that was all the Duchess needed to hear: