POPism

by Andy Warhol

  Dylan played his first electronic concerts this summer. The Byrds had done their version of his “Mr. Tambourine Man,” and the Turtles had done “It Ain’t Me, Babe.” He was out of folk and into rock and he’d switched from social protest songs to personal protest songs, and the more private he got, the more popular he got, and it seemed like the more he said, “I’m only me,” the more the kids said, “We’re only you, too.” If Dylan had just been a poet with no guitar, saying those same things, it wouldn’t have worked; but you can’t ignore poetry when it shoots into the Top Ten.

  That summer, for the first time really, pot was all over the place. But acid still wasn’t, it certainly wasn’t being dropped out of helicopters yet. You still had to “know somebody.”

  Not that much dope was being handed around on the Village streets yet, although the Duchess had a friend who hung out around Washington Square with the M taken off the M & Ms and told the kids from the boroughs, “It’s dynamite dope, only don’t chew it because if you do you’ll die. See, it has to dissolve after it gets to your stomach.” He’d deal sugar to little girls from Brooklyn—he wouldn’t even bother to mash it up, he’d just take a box of granulated Domino out of his jacket and pour it into something. How did he get away with it? “I’m a spade, man,” he’d explain. “They worship me. They want to shoot up, I say, ‘You girls should sniff it, stay high longer, ask somebody.’”

  Kids were so naive about drugs in ’65. Nobody knew how to buy dope yet—but a lot of people sure knew how to sell it.

  When Vinyl was shown at the Cinemathèque down on Lafayette Street in late summer, Gerard brought a young filmmaker named Paul Morrissey by to see it. Paul had been around the underground movie scene for years. He lived downtown in an old storefront on East 4th Street and he and Donald Lyons had gone to Fordham University in the Bronx together. One day in ’60, Donald told me, when they were both seniors, “Paul got hold of an 8-mm camera and stole some priests’ vestments from behind the altar at Fordham church, and then we went over to the Botanical Gardens with another friend of ours and Paul filmed us—me as a priest celebrating a brief Mass, giving Communion to an altar boy, and then shoving him off a cliff. It was a silent short. Paul called it Dreams and Daydreams.” Donald had gone on to graduate school in classics at Harvard and Paul had stayed in New York, working first at an insurance company and then for the Department of Social Services.

  (Long after I got to know him—in ’69, right before he was going to shoot Trash—I saw a couple of his other early films when he showed them one afternoon at the Factory just for fun. One was a color film of a fifties hustler-type kid with slickedback hair and close-set eyes reading a comic book slowly, slowly, so he looked semiliterate. The other was a black and white one shot on machine gun surplus film, the kind they use when planes take movies of enemy territory. It showed a couple of his social work cases, a black boy and girl shooting heroin and getting their rushes, and with that one Paul put on a reel-to-reel tape of Dionne Warwick singing “Walk On By” and “You’ll Never Get to Heaven If You Break My Heart”—he said that was the sound he always screened it with.)

  So Gerard introduced us at the Vinyl screening in the summer of ’65. Paul was busy chatting with Ondine and I said, “How do you know Ondine?” And he said, “How could you not?”

  They’d been discussing a favorite topic, the Roman Catholic Church, and someone made a crack about “creeps like you two in the Church.” Ondine lifted up his head, got very imperious, became the Pope, and informed the “heretic” that it was “a far, far better thing to have creeps like us in the Church than on the outside working against it!” Then he turned to Paul with a raised finger and counseled, “My son, we must see a great lesson in this…”

  Paul and Ondine had one big thing in common aside from the Church—they were both nonstop talkers and everybody just shut up when they were around in order to let the show go on. But with Paul it was a much more subtle thing because he wasn’t exactly performing, he was just naturally very outspoken and witty.

  Paul didn’t take drugs—in fact, he was against every single drug, right down to aspirin. He had a unique theory that the reason kids were taking so many drugs all of a sudden was because they were bored with having good health, that since medical science by now had eradicated most childhood diseases, they wanted to compensate for having missed out on being sick. “Why do they call it experimenting with drugs?” he’d demand. “It’s just experimenting with ill health!”

  He had a real “angry young man” look, in photographs especially—he’d always scowl and put his chin down. He dressed in army surplus–type clothes—thirteen-button sailor pants and turtlenecks—while the rest of us all wore the blue jeans—T-shirt uniform. He wasn’t into mirrors a lot. He was tall and a little birdlike, with curly hair that he was just starting to keep very full and disheveled in the Dylan style.

  Paul knew more about the critical and historical approaches to film—especially Hollywood films—than anybody who’d ever been around the Factory. He knew all the Hollywood trivia, all the character actors, all the obscure scenes in all the obscure movies that all the big stars had been in. He loved George Cukor and John Ford and John Wayne, and he knew about all the cinematographers—foreign and American. He was a very big fan.

  Paul had strong opinions about everything. He thrived on being contrary. He had a habit of starting everything off with “No, but…”—just in case somebody had said something. And he was mysterious. The running question was, did he have a sex life or not? Everyone who’d ever known him insisted that he did absolutely nothing, and all his hours seemed accounted for, but still, Paul was an attractive guy, so people constantly asked, “What does he do? He must do something…”

  When he’d introduced us, Gerard had said, “This is a friend of mine, Paul Morrissey, he’s very resourceful.” And right away Paul began coming by the Factory while we were shooting, to see how we did things and if there was any way he could get involved. At first he just swept the floor or looked through slides and photographs. He’d been wanting to start shooting sound movies himself, but he didn’t have the money to rent all the sound equipment. He was fascinated to see our setup and he asked Buddy Wirtschafter, who was then our sound man, a lot of questions. Gerard was right, Paul was very resourceful—eventually to the point where he came to seem magical to us.

  We had a videotape machine around the Factory for a few months that summer and fall. It was the first home recording equipment I’d ever seen—and I definitely haven’t seen anything like it since, either. It wasn’t portable, it just sort of sat there. It was on a long stalk and it had a head like a bug and you sat at a control panel and the camera rejointed itself like a snake and sort of angled around like a light for a drawing board. It was great-looking.

  Norelco gave me this machine to play with. Then they gave a party for it. Then they took it away. The idea was for me to show it to my “rich friends” (it sold for around five thousand dollars) and sort of get them to buy one. I showed it to Rotten and Birdie and they wanted to steal it. I remember videotaping Billy giving Edie a haircut out on the fire escape. It was the new toy for a week or so.

  The party for the machine was held underground, on the abandoned New York Central Railroad tracks on Park Avenue under the Waldorf-Astoria. You went in through a hole in the street. There was a band and Edie came in shorts, but there were people all dressed up in gowns who were screaming and dodging the rats and roaches and everything—it was the real thing, all right. Also being promoted at this party was a magazine called Tape that was just starting up—and just finishing up, too, as it turned out. It was print supplemented by cassette tapes that you were supposed to play while you read, only it never caught on.

  In August there was a big party at Steve Paul’s the Scene on West 46th Street; Steve had been the publicist for the Peppermint Lounge. Jackie Kennedy showed up at the Scene one night, and Steve blew up the newspaper articles of it and that put his place on the map.


  I didn’t even know who was giving the party or what it was for—as usual, we all just went. Somebody said it was a groupie ball—in honor of all the girl groupies who hung out there—but then I read later in some magazine that it had been given by Peter Stark, the son of Ray Stark the producer and the grandson of Fanny Brice, as a going-back-to-school party for himself. During the party, the Scene people projected some of our movies on the wall, something with Edie in her underwear.

  Liza Minnelli was there with Peter Allen—I think they were engaged then, Judy had fixed them up. (Liza was just starting out, doing Flora the Red Menace on Broadway, dancing with a cast on her leg, even. At the Scene that night I saw a couple of guys pointing out Liza’s and Edie’s legs as the best in town.) Jane Holzer was there and Marion Javits and Huntington Hartford and Wendy Vanderbilt and Christina Paolozzi, who was the first model to appear nude in Harper’s Bazaar. Joan Bennett and Walter Wanger’s beautiful daughter, Stephanie, was there—she was married to Winston Guest’s tall, handsome son, Freddy—and Gary Cooper’s daughter, Maria, and Melinda Moon and one of those tall, leggy, aristocratic Cushing girls from Newport.

  Mel Juffe, the evening reporter for the Journal American, the afternoon paper, was covering the party, and he decided to write it up as a complete mystery since nobody seemed to know who was giving the party or what it was for. And even after he covered it, it was still a mystery. When the photographs came in, he told me, all the guys in the city room at the Journal American stood around trying to guess which was “Edie” and which was “Andy.”

  By now we were getting pretty notorious around town for being at every party, and reporters loved to write us up and take our picture, but the funny thing was, they didn’t really know what to say about us—we looked like “a story,” but they didn’t really know who we were or what we were doing. And the reporters weren’t the only ones who were confused. Eric Emerson, a dancer I met in ’66, told me he’d spent that entire year following Tiger Morse around at parties because he thought she was “Andy Warhol who could get me into underground movies.” He’d asked somebody once what I looked like and the person had told him, “He’s around here someplace—silver hair and sunglasses,” and just then Eric flashed on Tiger, who fit that description, too.

  Mel met Edie for the first time at that party at the Scene and he really fell for her. When he wrote his party story up, he used the word beaming a few times to describe her. Much later he told me he felt she was very weak and very strong both—a little girl who could really take command of a situation when she wanted to. He made a date to meet us at Arthur after he put his story to bed, and he was around a lot for the next few months, fascinated, watching Edie.

  “When I was seeing you and Edie,” he reminded me, “you two were at your absolute pinnacle as a media couple. You were the sensation from about August through December of ’65. Nobody could figure you out, nobody could even tell you apart—and yet no event of any importance could go on in this town unless both of you were there. People gladly picked up your checks and sent cars for you—did anything and everything to get to entertain you. And one of your favorite jokes at the time was shoving different people forward and saying they were you…”

  I remember one afternoon a group of us, including Edie and Gerard and Mel and Ingrid Superstar, a big tall blonde from New Jersey who’d just come on the scene, all walked over to the opening of Darling at the Lincoln Art Theater on West 57th Street. As usual, the movie was over by the time we got there. Mel pointed at two bottles of champagne with six paper cups set on a table out in the lobby and laughed—“This is easily the tackiest party of the season….” And as if that weren’t bad enough, the manager was just getting up to make a speech—with a microphone yet—to a group of people who’d sort of wandered in off the street. Somebody must have told him, “Edie and Andy are here,” because he spent two minutes giving a warm welcome to “Edie and Andy,” thanking them profusely for coming, before he looked around, blank, and said, “Now, uh, will Andy and Edie please step forward?” He had absolutely no idea which ones we were. So Edie and I pushed Ingrid and Gerard toward him, and the manager thanked them some more. It was a case of “We’re thrilled to have you. Who are you?” But that was the way it was all over town—people were glad to have us at their parties, but they weren’t exactly sure why they should be glad. It was a lot of fun because it made absolutely no sense.

  After that gala opening, we went down to a place on Christopher Street called the Masque that only lasted a couple of weeks. Everybody there dressed in tinfoil and the only thing they served was Coca-Cola. The guy who ran it had asked Brigid to work as the official hostess, but she’d refused. Before the Masque closed down for good, Ingrid got to give a poetry reading there, and she was thrilled when Dylan wandered into it.

  Ingrid was just an ordinarily nice-looking girl from Jersey with big, wide bone structure posing as a glamour figure and a party girl, and what was great was that somehow it worked. She was a riot. She watched all the other girls and would sort of put on airs and try to do what they did. It was so funny to see her sitting there on the couch next to Edie or, later, Nico and International Velvet, putting on makeup or eyelashes exactly the way they did, trading earrings and things and beauty tips with them. It was like watching Judy Holliday, say, with Verushka. We would tease her endlessly, like tell her she was in the running for the next Girl of the Year.

  “Fabulous!” Ingrid said. “What do I have to do to make it?”

  “Go into seclusion,” somebody advised her.

  “I can’t go into seclusion—I’m lonely enough as it is!”

  In the middle of all her airs, she’d suddenly come from behind like that with total honesty that cut right to the point. Deep down, Ingrid was absolutely unpretentious.

  We took her everywhere with us, she was so much fun, so easygoing—the type of girl who’d jump up and do the pony no matter what year it was. And she wore go-go boots, she really did, and her poems were good, really good, half poetry and half comedy. And everywhere we went, she thought she knew somebody. You know the routine: “Is that—? That guy looks like this guy I—Is it?… Is it? No, it really looks just like him, though…”

  During the summer and fall, Edie started saying she was unhappy being in underground movies. One night she asked Mel and me to meet her at the Russian Tea Room for a “conference.” She wanted him to arbitrate while she explained to me how she felt about her career. That was one of her standard ploys—getting everyone involved in whether she should do this or that. And you really did get involved. That night she said she’d decided that she definitely was going to quit doing movies for the Factory.

  Jonas Mekas had just offered us a lot of consecutive nights’ screenings at the Cinemathèque to do whatever we wanted with, and we thought it would be fabulous to have an Edie Sedgwick Retrospective—meaning, all of her films from the last eight months. When we’d first thought of it, we all thought it was hilarious, including Edie. In fact, I think Edie was the one who thought of it. But now, this night at dinner, she was claiming that we only wanted to make a fool out of her. The waiter moved the Moscow Mules aside and put our dinners down, but Edie pushed the plate aside and lit up a cigarette.

  “Everybody in New York is laughing at me,” she said. “I’m too embarrassed to even leave my apartment. These movies are making a complete fool out of me! Everybody knows I just stand around in them doing nothing and you film it and what kind of talent is that? Try to imagine how I feel!” Mel reminded her that she was the envy of every girl in New York at that moment, which she absolutely was—I mean, everybody was copying her look and her style.

  Then she attacked the idea of the Edie Retrospective specifically, saying that it was just another way for us to make a fool out of her. By now I was getting red in the face; she was making me so upset I could hardly talk.

  I told her, “But don’t you understand? These movies are art!” (Mel told me later that he was floored when he hear
d me say that: “Because your usual position was to let other people say that your movies were works of art,” he said, “but not to say it yourself.”) I tried to make her understand that if she acted in enough of these underground movies, a Hollywood person might see her and put her in a big movie—that the important thing was just to be up there on the screen and let everybody see how good she was. But she wouldn’t accept that. She insisted we were out to make a fool of her.

  The funny thing about all this was that the whole idea behind making those movies in the first place was to be ridiculous. I mean, Edie and I both knew they were a joke—that was why we were doing them! But now she was saying that if they really were ridiculous, she didn’t want to be in them. She was driving me nuts. I kept reminding her that any publicity was good publicity. Then, around midnight, I was so crazy from all the dumb arguing that I walked out.

  Mel and Edie stayed up talking until dawn, and finally she made some sort of “decision.” “But you could never expect anything too systematic from Edie’s thinking,” Mel told me later, “because the next afternoon when I called her, everything she’d ‘decided’ was all changed around.”

  That was essentially the problem with Edie: the mood shifts and the mind changes. Of course, all the drugs she was taking by now had a lot to do with that.

  Anyway, she did make some more movies with us.

  We were showing our films like Screen Test, the Beauty series, and Vinyl all that summer at the Factory and at the Film-Makers’ Coop, which was now down on Lafayette Street. Even though we never knew ourselves till the very last minute which films we were going to screen, somehow, as if by magic, the people who were in the movie, or friends of theirs, would always know to turn up. (Screen Test was Ronnie Tavel off-camera interviewing Mario Montez in drag—and finally getting him to admit he’s a man. And Vinyl was our interpretation of A Clockwork Orange with Gerard as a juvenile delinquent in leather saying lines like “Yeah, I’m a J.D.—so what.”)