POPism

by Andy Warhol

  So when we’d gone to the Bizarre to see the Velvets that time, what Paul was trying to do was psyche out how they’d be in a big airplane hangar of a discotheque and how they’d go down with the kids. If any band then could fill up seventeen thousand square feet with blasting sound, it was the Velvets. We liked the idea that their drummer was a girl, that was unusual. Sterling Morrison and Lou Reed—and even Maureen Tucker—wore jeans and T-shirts, but John Cale, the Welsh electric viola player, had a more parochial look—white shirts and black pants and rhinestone jewelry (a dog collar-type necklace and bracelet) and long black spiky hair and some kind of English accent. And Lou looked good and pubescent then—Paul thought the kids out on the Island would identify with that.

  Another idea we had in mind when we went to check out the Velvets was that they might be a good band to play behind Nico, an incredible German beauty who’d just arrived in New York from London. She looked like she could have made the trip over right at the front of a Viking ship, she had that kind of face and body. Although Nico got more and more into the swirling capes and medieval monastery look as the sixties went on, when she first came on the scene she dressed very mod and spiffy in white wool pants, double-breasted blazers, beige cashmere turtlenecks, and those pilgrim-looking shoes with the big buckles on them. She had straight shoulder-length blond hair with bangs, blue eyes, full lips, wide cheekbones—the works. And she had this very strange way of speaking. People described her voice as everything from eery, to bland and smooth, to slow and hollow, to a “wind in a drainpipe,” to an “IBM computer with a Garbo accent.” She sounded the same strange way when she sang, too.

  Gerard had met her in London that spring and given her the Factory number to call if she ever came to New York. She called us from a Mexican restaurant and we went right over to meet her. She was sitting at a table with a pitcher in front of her, dipping her long beautiful fingers into the sangría, lifting out slices of wine-soaked oranges. When she saw us, she tilted her head to the side and brushed her hair back with her other hand and said very slowly, “I only like the fooood that flooooats in the wiiine.”

  During dinner, Nico told us that she’d been on TV in England in a rock show called “Ready, Steady, Go!” and right there she pulled a demo 45 rpm out of her bag of a song called “I’ll Keep It with Mine” that had been written for her, she said, by Bob Dylan, who’d been over there touring. (It was one of a few pressings that had Dylan playing the piano on it, and eventually Judy Collins recorded it.) Nico said that Al Grossman had heard it and told her that if she came to the United States, he’d manage her. When she said that, it didn’t sound too promising, because we’d heard Edie telling us so much that she was “under contract” to Grossman and nothing much seemed to be happening for her—having a well-known manager was never a guarantee that things would really happen for you. (We were still seeing Edie, but we weren’t showing her films anymore—the idea of the Edie Sedgwick Retrospective at the Cinemathèque had fizzled out, and it looked like our contribution to the Expanded Cinema series would be something with the Velvet Underground instead.)

  Nico had cut a record called “I’m Not Sayin’ ” in London (Andrew Oldham, the Stones’ producer, had produced it), and she’d also been in La Dolce Vita. She had a young son—we’d heard rumors that the father was Alain Delon and Paul asked her about that immediately because Delon was one of his favorite actors, and Nico said yes, that it was true and that the boy was in Europe with Alain’s mother. The minute we left the restaurant Paul said that we should use Nico in the movies and find a rock group to play for her. He was raving that she was “the most beautiful creature that ever lived.”

  Nico was a new type of female superstar. Baby Jane and Edie were both outgoing, American, social, bright, excited, chatty—whereas Nico was weird and untalkative. You’d ask her something and she’d maybe answer you five minutes later. When people described her, they used words like memento mori and macabre. She wasn’t the type to get up on a table and dance, the way Edie or Jane might; in fact, she’d rather hide under the table than dance on top of it. She was mysterious and European, a real moon goddess type.

  I was invited to speak at the annual banquet of the New York Society for Clinical Psychiatry by the doctor who was chairman of the event. I told him I’d be glad to “speak,” if I could do it through movies, that I’d show Harlot and Henry Geldzahler, and he said fine. Then when I met the Velvets I decided that I wanted to “speak” with them instead, and he said fine to that, too.

  So one evening in the middle of January everybody at the Factory went over to the Delmonico Hotel where the banquet was taking place. We got there just as it was starting. There were about three hundred psychiatrists and their mates and dates—and all they’d been told was that they were going to see movies after dinner. The second the main course was served, the Velvets started to blast and Nico started to wail. Gerard and Edie jumped up on the stage and started dancing, and the doors flew open and Jonas Mekas and Barbara Rubin with her crew of people with cameras and bright lights came storming into the room and rushing over to all the psychiatrists asking them things like:

  “What does her vagina feel like?”

  “Is his penis big enough?”

  “Do you eat her out? Why are you getting embarrassed? You’re a psychiatrist; you’re not supposed to get embarrassed!”

  Edie had come with Bobby Neuwirth. While the crews filmed and Nico sang her Dylan song, Gerard noticed (he told me this later) that Edie was trying to sing, too, but that even in the incredible din, it was obvious she didn’t have a voice. He always looked back on that night as the last time she ever went out with us in public, except for a party here and there. He thought that she’d felt upstaged that night, that she’d realized Nico was the new girl in town.

  Nico and Edie were so different, there was no good reason to compare them, really. Nico was so cool, and Edie was so bubbly. But the sad thing was, Edie was taking a lot of heavy drugs, and she was getting vaguer and vaguer. Her Society lady attitude toward pills had changed to an addict attitude. Some of her good friends tried to help her, but she wouldn’t listen to them. She said she wanted a “career” and that she’d get one since Grossman was managing her. But how can you have a career when you don’t have the discipline to work at anything?

  Gerard had noticed how lost Edie looked at that psychiatrists’ banquet, but I can’t really say that I noticed; I was too fascinated watching the psychiatrists. They really were upset, and some of them started to leave, the ladies in their long dresses and the men in their black ties. As if the music—the feedback, actually—that the Velvets were playing wasn’t enough to drive them out, the movie lights were blinding them and the questions were making them turn red and stutter because the kids wouldn’t let up, they just kept on asking more. And Gerard did his notorious Whip Dance. I loved it all.

  The next day there were long write-ups about the banquet in both the Tribune and the Times: “SHOCK TREATMENT FOR PSYCHIATRISTS” and “SYNDROMES POP AT DELMONICO’S.” It couldn’t have happened to a better group of people.

  In January, when the Cinemathèque moved to 41st Street, the Velvets and Nico played together again and we screened Vinyl and Empire and Eat in the background and Barbara Rubin and her crew ran around the audience as usual with movie cameras and bright lights. Gerard was up on the stage whipping a long strip of phosphorescent tape in the air. The whole event was called “Andy Warhol Up Tight.”

  These were still the days when you could live on practically no money, and that was about what the Velvets seemed to have. Lou told me that for weeks at a time he and John would go without eating anything but oatmeal and that for money they’d donate blood or pose for the weekly tabloids that needed photos to illustrate their shock stories. The caption to one of Lou’s pictures said he was a maniac sex killer who’d murdered fourteen children and recorded their screams so that he could jerk off to the tape every midnight in a Kansas barn; and John’s picture appeared with
the story of a man who’d killed his lover because the lover was going to marry his sister and the man didn’t want his sister to marry a fag.

  Paul asked Lou how the Velvets happened to have a girl drummer and he said, “Very simple. Sterling knew her brother, who had an amplifier, and he told us we could use it if we let his sister drum for us.” They needed more amplifiers, though, and we called up a few equipment places trying to get them free, but the best we could do was get a few dollars knocked off when we paid cash. Then the Velvets started practicing at the Factory with their drums, tambourine, harmonica, guitars, Autoharp, maracas, kazoo, car horn, and pieces of glass that they hit.

  A reporter once asked Paul if we paid the Velvets, and when Paul said no, the reporter wanted to know what they lived on. Paul had to consider that for a second, then he offered, “Well, they eat a lot at parties.”

  I was getting a reputation for taking no less than twenty people everywhere I went, including—especially—to parties. It was like one whole party walking into another one whenever we arrived. Nobody really minded, though—they knew when they invited me in the first place that I wouldn’t be coming alone.

  The Rolling Stones were around town that February. Brian Jones was a good friend of Nico’s and he and Dylan came up to the Factory together one afternoon when the Velvets were rehearsing and I was working—with David Whitney and David White, both from the gallery, beside me—on my Silver Pillows for a show at Castelli that was coming up in April. (I’d used the pillows, too, in a Merce Cunningham dance concert, and they meant something special to me: it was while I was making them that I felt my art career floating away out the window, as if the paintings were just leaving the wall and floating away.)

  There were two little high school girls over in another area transcribing down to the last stutter some reel-to-reel tapes of Ondine that I’d made in the late summer of ’65 for my taped novel. My original idea had been to hang in with him for a whole twenty-four hours—he never slept—but I didn’t quite make the complete twenty-four on the first session and had to finish up the balance on one more day.

  I’d never been around typists before so I didn’t know how fast these little girls should be going. But when I think back on it, I realize that they probably worked slow on purpose so that they could hang around the Factory more, because these girls were really slow—I mean, like a page and a half a day.

  Little Joey, the Factory go-fer, was there when Brian and Dylan walked in, and he was thrilled out of his mind. He’d just turned fifteen and these were his two idols. (The Stones around that time were doing “Get Off My Cloud” and “As Tears Go By” and “19th Nervous Breakdown.” And Dylan was between the Highway 61 album and Blonde on Blonde, which wouldn’t be released till the coming summer. He was the first rock person I can remember who got super-popular strictly on albums—he hadn’t had a big hit single except for “Like a Rolling Stone,” although around that time his “Positively 4th Street” came on the radio now and then where he runs into an old friend in the Village and puts him down, and all the kids loved that.) The little typists were going crazy, too, trying to get over for a good look at Brian. Then Allen Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky dropped by.

  The Duchess was frantic because nobody was paying attention to her, to whether she should lose a hundred pounds and put her hair in pigtails or just switch from Honey Amber to Tawny Peach Blush-on. She wasn’t impressed with Dylan or the Rolling Stones because she was over thirty and never listened to rock if she could help it. She glanced over toward tiny Dylan and even more tiny Brian with his pale, pale skin and fluffy strawberry blond hair and said as loud as she could, “Those aren’t men, my dear. I like them tall and craggy and divine like Greg Peck.” Then the Duchess got up on a bicycle that someone had propped against a wall and started pedaling around the red couch just as Jane Holzer walked in. I was asking Brian about a certain beautiful but dizzy English actress we both knew.

  “We heard you were seeing her,” I said, pointedly.

  He picked up one of the silver pillows.

  I was taping and held the mike over to him, “Come on, Brian. Did you fuck her?”

  “I would have to say…” he began, slowly.

  “You can lie,” Allen Ginsberg called over.

  “Yeah, you can lie,” I said.

  Brian passed up the option. “I would say twice, only. Who hasn’t?” He picked up my wrist to examine the ruby studs I always kept in the pleated white shirt I wore—over my T-shirts—to paint in. “I can admit her, but there are some people I can’t admit. There’s always someone we can’t admit we’ve done it with, wouldn’t you say?” He faded off, looking around.

  I tried to bring his attention back. “So where did you fuck her?” I asked him.

  “At someone’s country house—one of those English parties where every generation is invited and all the mad grandmothers who dance like chickens come on to you….” He stared blankly at the Duchess, who was jabbing a syringe into her fanny while she rode the bike. She was absolutely desperate for attention.

  • • •

  We did screen tests of Brian and Dylan while Gerard fought with Ingrid Superstar over whose turn it was to pay for the malteds: the poor delivery kid from Bickford’s stood around, frustrated, until Huntington Hartford arrived and finally settled the tab. Ingrid hugged him and gave him a big smooch. Hunt had just invited us to use his Paradise Island in the Bahamas any time we wanted an exotic shooting location.

  When the Duchess saw Hunt, she forgot about wanting attention and decided to concentrate on striking him for fifty dollars. They knew a psychiatrist who had this game going—he gave her Desoxyn prescriptions whenever she let him listen in while she talked dirty to people, and so she had a routine arranged with Hunt that when she’d call him with a cue line, he’d pretend to be a john getting excited by the dirty talk—and then she would get her prescription. Huntington Hartford was a great friend of Ingrid’s, too—he had an eye for pretty girls and he liked to pop into the Factory now and then to see who happened to be around.

  It was Gerard, actually, who would recruit a lot of the beautiful, photogenic girls for the Factory. He would see a girl in a magazine or at a party and really make a point of finding out who she was—he’d turn these interests of his into sort of poetic “quests.” Then he’d write poems about the girls and tell them all they’d get a screen test when they came by.

  Nico sang some of the new songs for Brian and Dylan that Lou and John had just written for her—“I’ll Be Your Mirror” and “All Tomorrow’s Parties.”

  Paul wasn’t the type to primp in the mirror, but when we’d be going out with Nico, you couldn’t help noticing that he’d check out how he looked a few times. But if he thought she was the most beautiful woman in the world, a lot of people would agree. Whenever he’d find her picture in magazines for ads like London Fog raincoats that she’d done the year before, he’d tell her to never never smile in pictures—Paul thought beauties should never smile or look happy in photographs. But then ironically, Paul was maybe the one person in the world who could always make Nico laugh. And they’d have “arguments” all the time about drugs—like the one they were having that afternoon.

  “If you keep taking the LSD, Nico,” Paul warned, “your next baby will be born all deformed. They’re finding these things out now.”

  “No, it’s not truuuuue,” Nico said. “We’ll get better and better drugs, and make fantastic children.”

  Meanwhile, the phone at the Factory was ringing more than usual because we’d just put an ad in the Voice that read: “I’ll endorse with my name any of the following: clothing, AC-DC, cigarettes, small tapes, sound equipment, ROCK‘N‘ ROLL RECORDS, anything, film, and film equipment, Food, Helium, Whips, MONEY; love and kisses Andy Warhol. EL 5-9941.” We had so many people hanging around all the time now that I figured in order to feed them all we’d have to get other people to support them—like find a restaurant that wanted us to hang around that would give us free
meals.

  There were so many of us now that we were even starting to have trouble getting into parties. People didn’t mind the ten or twelve kids that I used to show up with on my arm, but when it started to be over twenty, they’d try to throw some of them out. We’d just gone over to a party given by a girl who was some relation of Winston Churchill’s, and Jayne Mansfield was inside—and we’d been turned away at the door. They said I could come in, but nobody else, so we all just left, which killed me because I really wanted to meet Jayne Mansfield.

  All during January and February we were meeting with the disco producer about opening the airplane hangar discotheque with the Erupting (it wasn’t “Exploding” yet) Plastic Inevitable (E.P.I.) in Roosevelt Field in April. The producer had come down to the Expanded Cinema series at the Cinemathèque the night the Velvets played there. It was the first time he’d ever heard them perform, and although he’d said “great, great” when we asked him how he liked the show, looking back on it, I can see that he must have hated it but didn’t want to cancel with us till he covered himself by finding something to take our place.

  In March we drove down to Rutgers to play at their college film society—Paul, Gerard, Nico, Ingrid Superstar, a photographer named Nat Finklestein, a blond girl named Susanna, Barbara Rubin, a young kid named Danny Williams who was working the lights, and an Englishman named John Wilcock, who was one of the first journalists to cover the counterculture. We went into the Rutgers cafeteria to eat before the show, and the students couldn’t take their eyes off Nico, she was so beautiful it was unreal, or off Susanna, who was going around picking food off their plates and dropping it grape-style into her mouth. Barbara Rubin was filming the kids, and the guards were following her telling her to stop, then somebody came over wanting to check our “cafeteria pass” and Gerard started yelling at them and there was a big commotion. We got kicked out, of course, but fortunately it all made people want to see the show, which until then hadn’t been doing too well in advance sales.