POPism

by Andy Warhol

  Over the Labor Day weekend we went out to Fire Island to shoot My Hustler starring Paul America. Lester Persky had “discovered” Paul at the discotheque Ondine and brought him around to the Factory. Paul was unbelievably good-looking—like a comic-strip drawing of Mr.America, clean-cut, handsome, very symmetrical (he seemed to be exactly six feet tall and weigh some nice round number). I don’t remember how he got the name Paul America, unless it was because he was staying at the Hotel America on West 46th Street between Sixth and Seventh avenues, a super-funky midtown hotel that was the kind of place Lenny Bruce, say, stayed in.

  The minute we got off the Fire Island ferry, lugging our movie equipment in all those heavy metal suitcases, we had to rush to meet a friend of Rotten Rita’s called the Sugar Plum Fairy in a gay bar in Cherry Grove so he could show us the way to the house we were supposed to be staying at. As the two Pauls—Morrissey and America—walked through the bar holding the suitcases high over their heads and maneuvered their way through the crowd, someone yelled, “Oh, look! Honeymooners!”

  We filmed My Hustler in black and white. It was the story of an old fag who brings a butch blond hustler out to Fire Island for the weekend and his neighbors all try to lure the hustler away.

  Years later I read an interview with Paul America in The New York Times where he stated that he’d been on LSD all during the shooting. I didn’t know that, specifically, at the time, but what I did know was that there was a lot of it out there that weekend. We were with the Cambridge kids again, and they were slipping it into everything. I made sure I only drank tap water, and I only ate candy bars where I could tell if the seal had been broken. Believe me, I knew these people well enough to know that if you spent a weekend with them, you’d get a dose of acid if you weren’t careful.

  Speaking of acid, Gerard took his first trip shortly after we moved to the Factory in January of ’64. I walked in one day and there he was with a broom in his hand, crying and sweeping up the loft. Now this—the sweeping—was the kind of thing Gerard never did. He was a good worker as far as stretching and crating went, but one of his big shortcomings was that he could be very slobby (you’d open up his desk drawer and mixed in with notebooks and papers would be his dirty laundry), so when I saw him actually sweeping up, I was stunned. I said to Billy, “What’s wrong with him?” And Billy lifted his head up and turned to me slowly and said, “He’s… tripping.” Apparently Billy was, too.

  Everybody has different stories about who had acid that weekend and who didn’t. All anyone agrees on is that we had a Crystals record called “He Hit Me (and It Felt Like a Kiss)” playing over and over day and night, which everyone loved because the lyrics were so sick. Gerard said that the acid was in the eggs and that everybody ate the eggs, including him. Stephen Shore said that he saw the Sugar Plum Fairy put it in the orange juice and that everybody drank the juice, except him. For months afterward Gerard insisted that the acid was in the scrambled eggs and that I had some. We had long fights about it.

  “Everybody ate the scrambled eggs, Andy. Paul ate the eggs, I ate the eggs, you ate the eggs—we all ate the eggs! I saw you eat them. Admit it!”

  “I did not,” I’d insist. “I knew they were going to put it in the eggs, so of course I didn’t eat any. I wasn’t eating anything there anyway!”

  “Andy, I saw you eat them.”

  “You were tripping, right? So then you hallucinated it, because I didn’t have any.”

  “Why don’t you just admit it,” Gerard would keep saying. “It was beautiful, a beautiful trip. No one had a bad trip, not even Paul Morrissey! I mean, when we found him beside the boardwalk in the fetal position, he was smiling….”

  “Look, Gerard, maybe Paul ate the eggs, maybe you ate the eggs, maybe everybody in Cherry Grove ate the eggs, but I did not!”

  “Andy. We came into the kitchen and you were on the floor picking up the garbage and putting it into bags in a very childish, very peculiar way.”

  Gerard obviously thought people only cleaned when they tripped. I could never convince him that I absolutely hadn’t had anything that was going around, that I was really living off candy bars and tap water the whole weekend.

  It was funny to watch them all tripping, though. The night everyone was on acid, they marched in a pilgrimage from the house to the beach, pretending they were Columbus or Balboa or, anyway, someone out to discover the New World—and it was all very primal until somebody looked down at the Fire Island shoreline and saw a jar of Vaseline.

  This is the only time I know of that Paul Morrissey apparently got dosed with LSD and I noticed he was much more careful about what he ate at parties after that weekend. As I said, Paul was against all drugs and he definitely hadn’t wanted to take any LSD, so he was embarrassed about it to the point where he began to deny the whole thing. However, I saw him in the fetal position beside the boardwalk, and, to tell you the truth, he was smiling.

  By now we were obsessed with the mystique of Hollywood, the camp of it all. One of the last movies we made with Edie was called Lupe. We did Edie up as the title role and filmed it at Panna Grady’s apartment in the great old Dakota on Central Park West and 72nd. Panna was a hostess of the sixties who put uptown intellectuals together with Lower East Side types—she seemed to adore the drug-related writers in particular. We’d all heard the stories about Lupe Velez, the Mexican Spitfire, who lived in a Mexican-style palazzo in Hollywood and decided to commit the most beautiful Bird of Paradise suicide ever, complete with an altar and burning candles. So she set it all up and then took poison and lay down to wait for this beautiful death to overtake her, but then at the last minute she started to vomit and died with her head wrapped around the toilet bowl. We thought it was wonderful.

  Edie would still vacillate between enjoying the camp of making movies with us and worrying about her image, and by vacillate I mean she’d go back and forth from hour to hour. She could be standing, talking to a reporter, and she’d look over at us and giggle, then tell him something arch like “I don’t mind being a public fool—as long as I’m communicating myself and reaching people.” That was one side of her, putting the media on like that. But then fifteen minutes later, she’d be having a dead serious tantrum that she wasn’t being taken seriously as an actress. It was a little insane.

  Larry Rivers had a retrospective at the Jewish Museum on upper Fifth Avenue in September, and I’ll always remember the way the people there were dressed. Larry poked me excitedly and said, “Look at that girl! Girls are showing parts of their bodies in public now that they’ve never shown before! You have the desire and then you have an object that somehow catches it, and then you have this incredible bursting out!” Larry was looking around the place, as excited by the bright colors and all the styles as I was. (He was talking about the girls, because the boys weren’t that brave yet. But in a couple of more years you could look around any party and be saying the same things about the boys.) It was good that people were coming dressed like this to art openings. In another year, though, they’d be skipping the openings altogether and just going straight to Max’s, which became the gallery for that whole attitude.

  • • •

  We went to Philadelphia a few times in ’64 and ’65. Sam Green knew a lot of people there, and carloads of us would drive down. In ’65 Sam got made the director of exhibits at the Institute of Contemporary Art on the University of Pennsylvania campus. We used Philadelphia as a backdrop for a lot of the movies we shot, and we screened quite a few of our movies down there, too. Sometimes Sam’s rich distant cousin Henry McIlhenny would have dinners for us in his townhouse on Rittenhouse Square with a footman behind every chair and we’d be sitting there in Queens College sweatshirts. (Cecil Beaton was at one of those dinners and when I asked him if I could do his portrait, he said of course, so we went right upstairs and I drew his foot with a rose between his toes.)

  When Sam started at the institute, there was an advisory board and a university governing thing, and a couple of the
governors wanted to have Gauguin and Renoir retrospectives. Sam told me, “Fortunately they don’t have the budget to do anything that boring.” What he suggested instead was that they have an Andy Warhol retrospective. They were very reluctant at first, so he told them that if they agreed to this Pop thing, they could all work on an Abstract Expressionist show next and wouldn’t that be fun. Finally they decided that they couldn’t make this decision themselves, they’d have to send a delegate up to New York to make it for them.

  Sam had this good friend called Lally Lloyd—her husband was H. (for Horatio) Gates Lloyd, one of the heads of the CIA, and she herself was a Biddle from the Main Line with a big estate. Sam introduced us at a dinner that the art dealer Alexandre Iolas gave for Nicky de St. Phalle at the Café” Nicholson. (Right before the dinner he’d told me, “Now please don’t do your monosyllabic shy act and ruin everything.”) Mrs. Lloyd was telling me how flattering it was that I was considering their tiny little museum for a show (it would be my first nongallery show, actually) when out of the blue I asked her if she wanted to be in a movie.

  “She asked you what she’d have to do,” Sam reminded me, “and when you deadpanned, ‘Have sex with Sam,’ she thought you were so outrageous that from then on everything went beautifully—and the main thing was she liked your work. And she got the museum advisory board to allot four thousand dollars for the exhibition. Of course, it wound up costing a lot more, but we raised the rest ourselves by getting you to do the Green Stamps poster for the exhibition and having blouses made out of silk printed up with Green Stamps on them, and there was even enough silk left over to make a tie for me. And then, remember, I wheedled actual labels out of the Campbell’s Soup Company and printed the invitation for the October 7-November 21 exhibit on the back side of them.”

  Sam arranged about four solid months of publicity before the show. He got a few of our films screened in theaters around town and on the Penn campus, and he sent Philadelphia society reporters up to New York to interview us. “I’ve told them to make sure to get scandalous photos.”

  Sam had Society teeth and a beard and he especially liked Society ladies who were dying not to be stuffy anymore. He’d say things to them like “There’s this madman named Warhol who brings his entourage into your house and apparently makes an entire movie in an afternoon. You must meet him.” And since Sam knew about drag queens and offbeat things, the ladies thought he was fun. I met a lot of grand gals with Sam who were out looking for fun.

  • • •

  One thing, you’d never have to arrange for a photographic sitting at the Factory. It would all just happen. On almost any afternoon in ’65 you could count on having Billy there listening to Callas, Gerard writing poetry or helping me stretch, a great little high school go-fer with a Beatle haircut named Joey Freeman coming in and out with paint supplies, Ondine going back and forth from Billy to me to the phone, a few kids just hanging around dancing the afternoon away to songs like “She’s Not There” and “Tobacco Road,” and there’d be Edie maybe putting on makeup in the mirror. Baby Jane would stop by a lot, although she was never one to hang around all day. Then there’d always be some art collector types wandering around—guys in three-piece suits touring women in leopard-skin coats through, looking from side to side, “inspecting.”

  Reporters and photographers would arrive and try to figure out what was going on.

  Since I never knew what was going on myself, I loved to read the articles. It was always interesting to see which reporters concentrated on which people—if they were fascinated with the boys or the girls, and going along from there, which boys or girls. They had their pick of who to write about, so you could tell more about the reporters than the Factory from reading their stuff. The Factory brought out strange things in people. By “strange” I don’t necessarily mean “wild! uninhibited!” I mean atypical—it could even bring out, say, a puritanism that a person didn’t know he had. A reporter from the Washington Post once told me that she’d picked the Andy Warhol Factory for an assignment when she was a student at the Columbia University School of Journalism and that she’d had a nervous breakdown in the middle of it. She went to her professor and told him she didn’t think she could be a journalist after all, that she was going to drop out, that she just couldn’t handle the assignment, didn’t know what to say about the place, couldn’t be objective, etc., etc. The professor sat her down, she said, and told her, “Look. What you’ve just been through is like a freak accident—it will never happen again. You picked the Warhol Factory as your subject, and even veteran reporters who spend days there don’t know what to make of it—they come away not even knowing how they should spell Factory! Just forget about this experience. Pick another topic and things will go better, you’ll see.”

  So Sam got Philadelphia reporters to come by with their notepads to glance around. In those days practically no one tape-recorded news interviews; they took notes instead. I liked that better because when it got written up, it would always be different from what I’d actually said—and a lot more fun for me to read. Like if I’d said, “In the future everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes,” it could come out, “In fifteen minutes everybody will be famous.”

  By now Edie had been in both Time and Life, and a lot of the Philadelphia people had seen our movies of her, and all the reporters had stimulated everybody’s imagination about what really went on at the Factory. Still, we didn’t expect the mob scene that eventually happened at the opening.

  I didn’t get a student perspective on that opening until ’68 when I met a girl named Lita Eliscue who was working for the East Village Other. Back in ’65 she’d been an undergraduate at Penn (“in Candice Bergen’s class,” she volunteered) and she told me, “The people who sponsored you were the Tastemakers, the ones who were already out in the real world doing glamorous things, and of course glamour was what everyone was looking for. So when we heard that you were coming down, we all wanted to see and touch New York! Myth! Glamour!” Lita was a very little girl, under five feet. I used to introduce her as the Monet Jewelry heiress because her father owned Monet Costume Jewelry. (I asked her once why he’d named it that and she said it was because he liked French Impressionism.) In ’68, when she was telling me all this, she was in her twenties but she looked like she was still twelve—her face was absolutely preteen—but then out of her mouth would come this very modulated, officious voice that would every once in a while break into giggles. “And when people come face to face with a myth,” she continued, “they want to become part of it themselves. Some of the kids at school pretended they actually knew you, Andy. If they’d been to New York once in their lives, they were now suddenly saying they’d been to a party you were at or even worse, they’d actually describe what the Factory looked like—partly from a magazine and partly out of their imaginations.”

  When we walked into the Philadelphia opening, there were floodlights turned on us and television cameras. It was very hot and I was all in black—T-shirt, jeans, short jacket, what I always wore in those days—and the yellow-lens wraparound sun/ski glasses didn’t keep the glare out; I wasn’t ready for it.

  There were four thousand kids packed into two rooms. They’d had to take all my paintings—my “retrospective”—off the walls because they were getting crushed. It was fabulous: an art opening with no art! Sam stood there in his white jacket and Green Stamps silk tie—the members of the advisory board were running around in their Green Stamps silk blouses—and told the press that nobody came to art openings to see the art anyway. The music was going full blast and all the kids were doing the jerk to songs like “Dancin’ and Prancin’ ” and “It’s All Over Now” and “You Really Turn Me On.”

  When the kids saw me and Edie walk in, they started actually screaming. I couldn’t believe it—one day you’re in an art gallery in Toronto and not one person comes in all day to see you, and then suddenly there are people who get hysterical at the sight of you. It was so crazy. Older people in evening
gowns were next to kids in jeans. They had to lead us through the crowd—the only place we wouldn’t get mobbed was on some iron stairs that led up to a sealed-off door. They put guards at the bottom of the steps so nobody would rush us. All the people we came down from New York with were on these steps—Paul, Gerard, Chuck Wein, Donald Lyons, David Bourdon, and Sam, too. Edie was wearing a pink Rudi Gernreich floor-length T-shirt dress made out of stretchy Lurex-type material. It had elastic sleeves that were supposed to stay rolled up but she unrolled one of them about twelve feet past her arm—perfect for this setup, because she could have a drink in one hand and be draping and dipping and dangling her sleeve over the heads of the crowd below. She was putting on the performance of her life. Every guy wanted to be up there with her—she was looking around for somebody she knew who was going to school down there, calling out for him and everything, and you could tell from the faces on all the boys that they were really envious of whoever it was.

  We were on those steps for at least two whole hours. People were passing things up to be autographed—shopping bags, candy wrappers, address books, train tickets, soup cans. I signed some things but Edie was signing most of them “Andy Warhol” herself. There was no way to leave—we knew we’d be mobbed as soon as we came down. Finally the officials ordered the fire department to break through the sealed off door behind us with crowbars, and we were led out that way, through a library, onto the roof, over an adjoining building, down a fire escape, and into waiting police cars. Now things were getting really interesting.

  I wondered what it was that had made all those people scream. I’d seen kids scream over Elvis and the Beatles and the Stones—rock idols and movie stars—but it was incredible to think of it happening at an art opening. Even a Pop Art opening. But then, we weren’t just at the art exhibit—we were the art exhibit, we were the art incarnate and the sixties were really about people, not about what they did; “the singer / not the song,” etc. Nobody had even cared that the paintings were all off the walls. I was really glad I was making movies instead.