POPism

by Andy Warhol

  “The Hotel Teresa! That’s where I had my last abortion.”

  “You went up to Harlem for an abortion?” I gasped. “Why didn’t you go back to your classy Fifth Avenue doctor where you got your first one?”

  “Because the first one was the worst pain of my whole life. He did the one where he sticks his hand all the way up me with one of those banana things. For ten minutes? It was excruciating.”

  “He didn’t give you a shot for the pain?” I said.

  “Nothing. He didn’t want me to pass out in his office and not be able to get home.”

  “But isn’t anything better than going up to Harlem for an abortion? Weren’t you scared?”

  “I couldn’t face pain again like that first time,” she said, “but after the Teresa, my dear, I wished I had. Some woman did one of those packing jobs on me. She told me to go home and exercise, to not just lie in bed, and to call her when I got labor pains in seventeen hours. The next morning—first thing—I went up and down the escalators at Bloomingdale’s about fifty times. Then I went home and I was so out of my mind with the pain that I threw a shoe through the TV. Finally it just dropped in the toilet, my dear, and I haven’t been pregnant since.”

  Just then, from the back of the Factory, we could hear Ondine’s voice, apologizing to a trick, “But look how big it is, I’m just sorry it doesn’t work on you.”

  David Whitney, a young kid who worked at the Castelli Gallery, stepped out of the elevator with two very suburban women from Connecticut who were “interested” in my art. I was standing there doing some Flowers for my Paris show coming up in May and talking to the women when Ondine came out from the back holding a huge jar of Vaseline and launched into a whole big tirade against drag queens and transvestites, maintaining that if you couldn’t do whatever you wanted to without any clothes on—least of all women’s—then you should forget about sex altogether.

  And then he looked at the women—both of them were certainly looking at him—and demanded, “And for the last time, what is a ‘gay bar’? What is it? Can you tell me?” The ladies just stared at him. One looked intrigued, and the other didn’t have any expression at all. Ondine kept it up: “As a homosexual, I will not go to one—why should I be segregated?!”

  “That’s right—” the Duchess agreed, “—you should be isolated….”

  “It was the best party of the sixties.” That’s how Lester Persky rated the party he gave at the Factory for “The Fifty Most Beautiful People” in the spring of ’65. “There was certainly no better party. It lasted until five the next afternoon. Did anyone keep a list of who was there?” Lester wanted to know. Of course not.

  Judy Garland was definitely there. I watched as five boys carried her in off the elevator on their shoulders. It was odd because that night, for some reason, nobody seemed to notice her. I noticed her, though. I always noticed Judy Garland.

  The same way rich kids fascinated me, show business kids fascinated me even more. I mean, Judy Garland grew up on the MGM lot! To meet a person like Judy whose real was so unreal was a thrilling thing. She could turn everything on and off in a second; she was the greatest actress you could imagine every minute of her life.

  Even though Lester was the host, since he’d had to go pick Judy up, he didn’t get to his own party until very late. Judy was famous for not being ready. For not even dreaming of being ready. She was late for everything. The cameras never rolled until she stepped in front of them, so naturally everything should wait for her all her life, right? She was living at 13 Sutton Place, Miriam Hopkins’s house with the red doorway, which everyone used to rent, and you’d walk in and a couple of hours later she’d be almost ready to start getting ready.

  When the boys who’d carried her in that night finally set her down on her feet, she started to wobble, so then they picked her back up and set her down on the couch. I went over to Lester and asked him where he’d been all this time. Of course, I knew exactly where he’d been—waiting for Judy—but I hoped my question would get him going, and it did:

  “I picked her up,” Lester began, holding his drink, looking around the loft, trying to see who was there. David Whitney danced by in the arms of Rudolph Nureyev. “And then after about an hour I said, ‘Judy, don’t you think we’d better be going?’ She told me no, no, there wouldn’t be anybody there yet. I said, ‘But, Judy, I’m the host. I have to be there.’ Finally, finally, we’re outside on the street and I raise my hand to hail a cab and her boyfriend very nonchalantly waves it on. So I raise my hand again, a cab pulls up, and the boyfriend waves it on again….” Tennessee Williams danced by in the arms of Marie Menken.

  While Lester and I talked, some boys were attending to Judy. She spotted us and started to get up, but she sank back into the couch. Lester waved brightly, blew her a kiss, and went right on spieling. “Finally, after three or four taxis, I asked the guy, ‘Is it a Checker cab you want or something?’ and he said, ‘Oh, no, Miss Garland hasn’t been in public transportation in years.’ And I said, ‘Well, look, I’m not suggesting we take a bus—this is a taxi!’ But she wouldn’t go. There was no way she would even consider it. I was desperate. I said to her, ‘Well, can we walk, then? It’s only eight blocks.’ ‘No,’ she said….

  “The boyfriend went back inside and phoned some old beaten-up limousine service in the Bronx that used to be on call to MGM, and so we had to wait another hour for the limousine to get there…”

  Edie looked beautiful that night, laughing a lot with Brian Jones. Gerard and the Duchess were staring hard at Juliet Prowse, who’d just broken up with Frank Sinatra. She was really striking, too.

  Judy was on her way over to us and when she was a few steps away, she announced to Lester, “I will definitely star in Tennessee’s play.” Lester whispered to me that she’d been on this kick all night—she’d decided that she wanted to play Flora Goforth in The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore, which was the first movie Lester was going to produce. (The title was changed to Boom for the movie.) Then for a few minutes, she gave us all the different ways she could play Flora until Lester interrupted her and said in a joking way: “The funny thing is, Judy, that Tennessee thinks of you as a great singer rather than a great actress.” The funny thing was that that was exactly how Tennessee did feel at the time, I’d heard him say so.

  As soon as the words were out of Lester’s mouth, he knew he’d made a big mistake; Judy wouldn’t drop it. For hours it was “When did he say that? What did he mean? What was he thinking of? How dare he! Where is he?”—every variation on the theme that you can think of.

  Finally Judy walked up to where Tennessee was standing with Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs and pointed back at Lester. “He said that you said that I can’t act!”

  Lester was going crazy. “My God! She’s transmogrified one remark into a complete visitation!” He went over to where they all were and I could see the drama going on for at least another hour.

  Meanwhile, one of my favorite people, Brigid Berlin, had come over and was busily telling me a story. I didn’t realize why, though, until she was all finished, and as usual with Brigid, that took a long time.

  “Once,” she said, “I was out with some piss-elegant queen who said he’d been to one of my infamous lunches on Fire Island the summer I was spending all my money.” She was talking about the summer she married a window dresser, came into a trust fund, and spent practically all of it throwing parties in Cherry Grove, renting helicopters to fly into the city to pick up her mail. Brigid was another one of those people I loved who didn’t take money seriously, who knew how to have fun with it. Of course, she was from a rich family and she knew that even if they didn’t exactly support her, she’d still always be in close contact with money.

  Brigid’s father was Richard E. Berlin, the president of the Hearst Corporation, and she’d grown up on Fifth Avenue overhearing phone conversations between her father and U.S. presidents. She’d told me that the first time she saw Judy Garland in The Wizar
d of Oz, it was in the screening room at San Simeon and teenaged Elizabeth Taylor was sitting right next to her. But by the time I met Brigid, she was living in two-star hotels, mostly on the West Side, under the name of Brigid Polk. Her parents were totally disgusted with the way she’d gone through so much money that summer and weren’t going to pay for her anymore except for her basic hotel bill. Brigid and her younger sister, Richie, had never gotten along with their parents anyway, and by this time they’d each been told, “You live your life, your father and I will live ours.” When Brigid brought her window dresser fiancé home to meet the family, her mother told the doorman to tell him to wait on a bench across the street in Central Park. Then she handed Brigid her wedding present—a hundred-dollar bill—and told her to go to Bergdorf’s and buy herself some new underwear with it. Then she added, “Good luck with that fairy.” However, right after that an old family friend died, leaving each of the four Berlin kids a big trust fund. Brigid’s was totally gone by October. But she was so charming she could always talk anybody into cab fare.

  So I knew exactly what period of her life she was talking about, the minute I heard her say she had a limousine, because she sure didn’t have limousines anymore.

  “Anyway,” she said, “this queen I was out with invited me to stop by his townhouse. He said, ‘I live with Mahhhhn-tee,’ and when I heard that, I thought, why not? Because I hadn’t seen Monti Rock III since I made scrambled eggs for him in Cherry Grove. As soon as we got to this townhouse, he went right upstairs, leaving me all alone in the living room. It was about six o’clock in the morning and the sun was beginning to come in the windows and there I’m sitting, waiting for Monti Rock III. A guy with tousled hair and horn-rim glasses on came down in a blue terry-cloth robe and said hello to me very nicely and put on some music….” I looked over at Edie, who was mussing Brian Jones’s hair and laughing with Donald Lyons.

  “Andy, listen to this, it’s funny!” Brigid said. “The guy came over and sat down next to me on the couch, and I just sat there waiting for Monti. Meanwhile the guy who brought me came in and began fixing drinks. I admired a miniature French chair and he said, ‘That was a gift from Liz,’ and it still didn’t click until I turned to the side and realized that this guy with his arm around me was Montgomery Clift! And I was wrecked. All I could think to say was ‘You were great in Judgment at Nuremberg.’

  “There!” Brigid said, pointing across the room, and now I saw why she’d been telling me about Monty Clift—he was there at the Factory, too. I asked Brigid if she’d gone over yet to say hello, and she said, “No, he’s too out of it.”

  Suddenly I heard Judy scream, “Rudy!” and she staggered forward with her arms out toward Nureyev, who yelled back, “Judy!” and walked toward her, and it was stagger/step/Rudy!/Judy! back and forth until she fell around his neck saying, “You filthy Communist! Do you know that Tennessee Williams thinks I can’t act?” Let’s go find out if he thinks you can dance…”

  The “What does he mean I can’t act?’ chaos went on into the next day, and she made Lester give her a dinner that night so she could continue to confront Tennessee.

  Judy’s favorite meal was spaghetti, but I didn’t know it in those days—I always assumed Lester was just being cheap, having pasta all the time. But that was actually all she ever wanted. We’d go to the Café Nicholson on East 58th Street a lot and even when it was closed, Johnny Nicholson would come in especially to cook his special spaghetti for Judy. He’d even go over to Lester’s to cook it for her there—which was what happened that night. We were all sitting around the table and Judy was telling us how Mr. Mayer—she always called Louis B. Mayer “Mr. Mayer”—had her under analysis for years, and Tennessee asked her, “Well, did it help any?”

  “No, it obviously didn’t,” she said to Tennessee, “because according to you I still can’t act.” Then she turned to the rest of us and continued, “But how could it help? I would never tell him the truth.”

  And Tennessee was appalled. “You lahhhhed to yo’ analyst? Oooo, that’s a crahhhhm, that’s a see-yin!”

  Judy said she found out later that her analyst was on the MGM payroll and was being paid by Mr. Mayer to tell her, “Don’t fight with your employers—they love you.” And Lester just couldn’t get over that, he kept saying over and over, “That’s a frightening thing… really frightening…”

  Then Judy burst out laughing, opening her mouth wide, with strands of spaghetti overflowing at the corners, and started singing: “Some-where / o-ver the rain-bow”—I just couldn’t believe it. I thought, “This is outrageous. Here’s Judy Garland sitting right across from me belting ‘Somewhere Over the Rainbow’ with a mouth full of spaghetti!”

  Gerard always said that it was at “The Fifty Most Beautiful People” party that the stars went out and the superstars came in, that there were more people staring at Edie than at Judy. But to me, Edie and Judy had something in common—a way of getting everyone totally involved in their problems. When you were around them, you forgot you had problems of your own, you got so involved in theirs. They had dramas going right around the clock, and everybody loved to help them through it all. Their problems made them even more attractive.

  You never had to buy things in the sixties. You could get almost anything for free: everything was “Promotion.” Everybody was pushing something, and they’d send cars for you, feed you, entertain you, give you presents—that’s if you were invited. If you weren’t invited, things would run about the same, only they wouldn’t send the car. Money was flowing, flowing.

  A publicist once asked Danny Fields, “How can I get the Factory people to come to this opening?” Danny told him, “No problem. You don’t even have to tell them what it is. Just send a limousine, and tell them to go downstairs. I guarantee when it pulls up they’ll all file right into it.” We did.

  I remember when Sam Green had to get his entire apartment furnished free in one day that spring. He’d gotten so excited about moving that he’d already invited hundreds of people to a party at his new place the next night before he realized that he didn’t have anything for them to sit on. So he was up at the Factory all day making calls. I’d hear him phoning kindergartens, saying desperate things like “But what about those mats that the kiddies take their naps on? Couldn’t I rent some of those? Because you see, I’d have them back to you the next afternoon….” He hung up the phone and moaned, “What can I dooooo? I’ve only got fifty-six dollars in my checking account!” I told him he’d think of something.

  “But listen,” he said. “I’ve called everywhere—Hertz Rent-A-Cushion. Everything’s so expensive.” I told him, “You’re being dumb, Sam. If you’re willing to pay for it, they know you’re poor: rich people don’t pay for things. Tell them you want it free. Don’t be such a loser. Think rich. Call Parke Bernet, call the Metropolitan Museum!”

  Sam thought of a better one. He dialed a famous fur designer he’d met at a party the week before, refreshed the introduction, then plunged into “I’m giving a party tomorrow night… What?… Oh, no, no, I’m not inviting you, it’s just this boring business thing I’m stuck with—for some art collectors, but Life is sending their photographer to cover it and they want some kind of a theme, a texture or something. They’ve seen Warhol’s Silver Factory and they feel they’ve got to have wall-to-wall something, so I told them I’d have my apartment done up for them in plastic or fur or whatever. ‘Photogenic,’ you know…” etc., etc.

  The next morning a truck pulled up in front of Sam’s new place on West 68th Street with forty-two thousand dollars’ worth of furs, bonded, and he signed for them. He threw them all over the place—even out on the terrace—and that night everyone was lying around on minks and lynxes and foxes and seals, with hundreds of candles and a big fire blazing—the place looked great.

  There were a few guys in the latest velvets and silk shirts, but not too many—the boys were still mostly in blue jeans and button-down shirts. Edie brought Bob Dylan to the party a
nd they huddled by themselves over in a corner. Dylan was spending a lot of time then up at his manager Al Grossman’s place near Woodstock, and Edie was somehow involved with Grossman, too—she said he was going to manage her career.

  I’d met Dylan through the MacDougal Street/Kettle of Fish/Café Rienzi/Hip Bagel/Café Figaro scene, which Danny Fields claims got started when he and Donald Lyons saw Eric Andersen, the folk singer, on MacDougal and thought he was so handsome they went up and asked if he wanted to be in an Andy Warhol movie. “How many times did we all use that one?” Danny laughed. And after that Eric got interested in Edie and suddenly we were all just around the Village together. But I think Edie actually knew Dylan because of Bobby Neuwirth. Bobby was a painter who originally started singing and guitar playing up in Cambridge just to make money to paint with, he told me once. Then he hooked up with Dylan and became part of that group—he was something like Dylan’s road manager-confidant. And Bobby was a friend of Edie’s.

  At Sam’s party Dylan was in blue jeans and high-heeled boots and a sports jacket, and his hair was sort of long. He had deep circles under his eyes, and even when he was standing he was all hunched in. He was around twenty-four then and the kids were all just starting to talk and act and dress and swagger like he did. But not many people except Dylan could ever pull that anti-act off—and if he wasn’t in the right mood, he couldn’t either. He was already slightly flashy when I met him, definitely not folksy anymore—I mean, he was wearing satin polka-dot shirts. He’d released Bringing It All Back Home, so he’d already started his rock sound at this point, but he hadn’t played the Newport Folk Festival yet, or Forest Hills, the places where the old-style folk people booed him for going electric, but where the kids started going really crazy for him. This was just before “Like a Rolling Stone” came out. I liked Dylan, the way he’d created a brilliant new style. He didn’t spend his career doing homage to the past, he had to do things his own way, and that was just what I respected. I even gave him one of my silver Elvis paintings in the days when he was first around. Later on, though, I got paranoid when I heard rumors that he had used the Elvis as a dart board up in the country. When I’d ask, “Why would he do that?” I’d invariably get hearsay answers like “I hear he feels you destroyed Edie,” or “Listen to ‘Like a Rolling Stone’—I think you’re the ‘diplomat on the chrome horse,’ man.” I didn’t know exactly what they meant by that—I never listened much to the words of songs—but I got the tenor of what people were saying—that Dylan didn’t like me, that he blamed me for Edie’s drugs.