POPism

by Andy Warhol

  I was standing with Susan Bottomly at the party for David. She pointed him out to her Cambridge roommate and told him to “get him.” Il Mio had low chandeliers and the first thing David did was pick two crystal drops with the chains attached and adapt them right there into beautiful earrings for Susan. (“We were all such thieves in those days,” David said to me once. “Remember all the times you walked out of Arthur with those big thick goblets?”) After Il Mio, we all walked over to a party in an apartment on Fifth Avenue, and Susan and David locked themselves into the bathroom. When they came out finally, Susan informed the people who were screaming to know what they’d been doing in there all that time, “Fucking.”

  She and David wound up living together for two years. David decided that those crystal earrings looked so good that he’d include them in his line for Paraphernalia, and so after a couple of months, the chandeliers at II Mio were looking pretty bleak.

  A few days later we all went up to Provincetown on Cape Cod where the Velvets were going to play at the Chrysler Museum. The silver lamé leather people in our New York group looked totally alien to the tan, healthy-looking Massachusetts kids. When our people—Susan Bottomly, David, Gerard, Ronnie, Mary Might, Eric, Paul, Lou, John, Sterling, Maureen, Faison the road manager—sprawled out on the beach, they looked like a giant Clorox spot on the sand, all those pasty-white New York City bodies out there in a sea of summer tans. Gerard had on his leather bikini, and he looked confident that it would turn somebody on, but everybody up there seemed more into the Boston-Irish look.

  Naturally the A-heads were going crazy because they were almost out of amphetamine, and they’d walk around the P-town streets with their hands cupped to their ears as if they were hard of hearing, going “A? A?” trying to score. The night the Velvets played, the police raided the show—somebody had tipped them off that the Velvets had stolen most of the leather braids and whips they were using in their act from a local handicrafts store that afternoon. When the police came in, Mary had just strapped Eric to a post and was doing the S & M whipdance around him. They confiscated the whips and then undid Eric so they could confiscate the straps he was tied with.

  The houses we’d rented got really disgusting in the couple of days we were there because the toilets all stopped up—it seemed like no matter where the Velvets went, the toilets would stop up—and so they started scooping handfuls of shit from the toilets and slinging it out the windows. I’d heard references to this habit of theirs, but you don’t believe stories like that till you see people running by you with handfuls of dripping shit, laughing.

  I remember walking on a street near the beach and looking up and seeing Eric in a bathing suit and high black lace-up boots dancing pirouettes on a balcony with no railing and a twenty-foot drop. And later, in a grocery store, he talked a kid at the cash register into trading a carton of Marlboros for a Campbell’s Soup Can with my signature. I signed by the checkout counter and gave the can to the kid, who handed Eric the cigarettes.

  David and Susan got lost from us at one point and decided to move to a hotel. “Susan had the money and the checkbook,” he told me a long time later, “so we had to register as ‘Mr. and Mrs. Bottomly,’ and that,” he laughed, “is how the whole problem got started.” When I asked him what he meant, he smiled and said, “Oh, come on, you remember what a joke I was in those days, tagging along with Susan to all her modeling jobs, carrying her portfolio, hoping someone would point to me and say, ‘Oh, why don’t you get into this shot, too?’ I wanted to be a model then, but what I didn’t realize was that I was trying to be a female model!”

  There weren’t very many young, new-style male models then yet. Male modeling didn’t get really big until the next year when there were suddenly new men’s lines all over the place. But in ’66 men were used in photographs still, just to stand there and look butch, to sort of set off the girls and show that the girls were fascinating to them.

  All that summer we were shooting the short interior sequences that we later combined to make up Chelsea Girls, using all the people who were around. A lot of them were staying at the Hotel Chelsea, so we were spending a lot of time over there. Often, we’d have dinner and sangría at the El Quixote Restaurant downstairs and everybody would be coming and going back and forth from their own rooms or somebody else’s. I got the idea to unify all the pieces of these people’s lives by stringing them together as if they lived in different rooms in the same hotel. We didn’t actually film all the sequences at the Chelsea; some we shot down where the Velvets were staying on West 3rd, and some in other friends’ apartments, and some at the Factory—but the idea was they were all characters that were around and could have been staying in the same hotel.

  Everybody went right on doing what they’d always done—being themselves (or doing one of their routines, which was usually the same thing) in front of the camera. I once heard Eric telling someone about the direction I gave him for his first scene. “Andy just told me to tell the story of my life and to somewhere along the line take off all my clothes.” After thinking for a second, he added, “And that’s what I’ve been doing ever since.” Their lives became part of my movies, and of course the movies became part of their lives; they’d get so into them that pretty soon you couldn’t really separate the two, you couldn’t tell the difference—and sometimes neither could they. During the filming of Chelsea Girls, when Ondine slapped Pepper in his sequence as the Pope, it was so for real that I got upset and had to leave the room—but I made sure I left the camera running. This was something new. Up until this, when people had gotten violent during any of the filmings, I’d always turned the camera off and told them to stop, because physical violence is something I just hate to see happen, unless, of course, both people like it that way. But now I decided to get it all down on film, even if I had to leave the room.

  Poor Mario Montez got his feelings hurt for real in his scene where he found two boys in bed together and sang “They Say That Falling in Love Is Wonderful” for them. He was supposed to stay there in the room with them for ten minutes, but the boys on the bed insulted him so badly that he ran out in six and we couldn’t persuade him to go back in to finish up. I kept directing him, “You were terrific, Mario. Get back in there—just pretend you forgot something, don’t let them steal the scene, it’s no good without you,” etc., etc. But he just wouldn’t go back in, he was too upset.

  Jack Smith always said that Mario was his favorite underground actor because he could instantly capture the sympathy of the audience. And that was certainly true. He lived in constant fear that his family or the people in the civil service job where he worked would discover that he dressed up in drag. He told me that every night he prayed in his little apartment on the Lower East Side for himself and his parents and for all the dead celebrities that he loved, like “Linda Darnell and James Dean and Eleanor Roosevelt and Dorothy Dandridge.”

  Mario had that classic comedy combination of seeming dumb but being able to say the right things with perfect timing; just when you thought you were laughing at him, he’d turn it all around. (A lot of the superstars had that special quality.)

  For her reel in Chelsea Girls, Brigid played the Duchess. She got so into the role that she started to think she really was a big dope dealer: she took a dirty hypodermic needle and jabbed Ingrid in the fanny. (The Duchess wouldn’t have done it any better herself.) Then, as we filmed, she picked up the phone and called a lot of real people up (who had no idea they were part of her movie scene) telling them about all the drugs she had for sale. She was so believable that the hotel operators, who were always listening in, called the police. They arrived at the room while we were still filming and searched everyone, but all they could come up with was two Desoxyn pills. Still, after people saw Brigid in the movie, they were as scared of her as they were of the Duchess.

  • • •

  At the end of September, just around the time the Whitney Museum was opening its new building at 75th and Madison, we all fl
ew up to Boston for the opening of a show of my work.

  In the middle of the opening David Croland suddenly pointed at a distant wall and said, “Look! Andy! There’s a painting in here that you didn’t do!” He was indignant.

  “Where?” I asked, knowing it was impossible, but very curious to see which painting he would think wasn’t mine.

  “Over there.” He pointed at a Do-It-Yourself canvas I’d done in ’62. “That really ugly paint-by-numbers thing.”

  David was so young he’d missed the first part of my career as a painter, so he had absolutely no idea he was insulting a piece of my work—he thought it was a curator’s mistake!

  All I muttered was, “Oh. How crazy. How did that get in here?” I mean, after all, occasionally you can look at something you’ve done and wonder the same thing yourself—“How did that get in here…?”

  The Velvets played like crazy at the opening, and then about twenty of us invaded a little-old-lady Boston tearoom restaurant. Everybody thought I was going there as a joke, but really, those were the restaurants I truly loved the most—ones just like Schrafft’s.

  In the fall when Paul went back to rent the Dom, Stanley told him sorry, it was already rented. Al Grossman and Charlie Rothchild opened it as the Balloon Farm and asked the Velvets to play there anyway—upstairs—and they did, since they didn’t have anything else to do. So even though it wasn’t our place anymore, most people assumed it was a continuation of our Exploding Plastic Inevitable show from the spring.

  In the basement there was a bar with a jukebox, and Paul managed that, off and on, into the next spring and charged admission.

  Nico and Lou had a fight. (“I’ve had it with the dramatic bullshit,” he said. “Yeah, she looks great in high-contrast black and white photographs, but I’ve had it.”) He said he wouldn’t let her sing with them anymore and, moreover, that he was never going to play for her again, either. (That was actually the big problem right there—was she singing with them, or were they playing for her?) As a going-away present, Lou recorded the music she sang to on a cassette tape and handed it to her. Then she started being the chanteuse in the bar downstairs, trying to work a little cassette recorder. But it was pathetic to see this big, beautiful woman singing to music coming out of this cheap little cassette, and in between acts the tears would roll down her face because she just couldn’t remember how the buttons worked. And Paul would try to help her—he even bribed the guitar players like Tim Buckley, Jackson Browne, Steve Noonan, Jack Elliot, Tim Hardin—promising them they could do a set alone if only they’d play a little for Nico while she sang. (Jackson Browne and Tim Hardin worked out the best, and Nico eventually recorded some of their songs on her first album, Chelsea Girl, which was released in July ’67. But everybody wanted to be a star, and nobody really wanted to play backup for anybody, so Nico’s problem wasn’t solved until John Cale bought her a tiny little organ in ’68 and she learned how to play it.) We looped a little 8-mm movie of a guy parachuting and we projected it behind her while she sang, and sometimes we’d show Kiss.

  Susan Pile, who was working at the Factory now, would come over to the Dom and baby-sit for Ari, Nico’s four-year-old son, during the first set, and then take him over to Paul’s apartment a couple of blocks away on 10th Street and Second Avenue. She’d practice her French on him. He was such a beautiful little kid, and he’d say the strangest things, like “I want to throw hot snowballs.”

  Downtown at the big Village Theater, which would later become the Fillmore East, Dr. Tim Leary was doing shows that September—they were called Celebrations—for the League for Spiritual Discovery—LSD. The idea was to give people a preview, through a mixed-media show, of what an ideal LSD trip was like. Leary always had people on the bill with him like LeRoi Jones and Mark Lane and Allen Ginsberg. Everything about these shows was so sweet and naive—they told you you should plan your LSD trips as carefully as you’d plan your itinerary for an actual vacation, like have specific records to play and paintings to look at while you tripped—otherwise, Tim said, it would be like “drug abuse.” Paul was laughing through the whole show, saying, “God, Doctor Leary is wonderful! What a medicine show!”

  Tim was up there, this charming, handsome Irishman, informing his audience, “God doesn’t think in words, you see—He thinks in visual images like”—and then he would gesture behind him to where all these abstract slides were suddenly projected over the stage—“these!”

  Paul got excited. “Look!” he said. “He’s doing a complete copy of our Exploding Plastic Inevitable show! Oh, he really is wonderful. But you know, this is all for the good, because now that drugs have gotten this commercialized, they’re bound to go right out. I guarantee you that in three months drugs will be finished completely—look what a joke they are already.” (In the drugged-up years that followed, Paul would admit many times, “That prediction was my most enormous miscalculation.”)

  Listening to Tim Leary give his Celebrations that fall was like taking an Acid for Beginners course. By the time the next summer came, if you stood on the corner of 6th Street and Second Avenue, about every other kid who passed by would be tripping on LSD, and 90 percent of the rest would be high on some other kind of drug.

  Chelsea Girls was the movie that made everyone sit up and notice what we were doing in films (and a lot of times that meant sit up, stand up, and walk out). Until then the general attitude toward what we did was that it was “artistic” or “camp” or “a put-on” or just plain “boring.” But after Chelsea Girls, words like degenerate and disturbing and homosexual and druggy and nude and real started being applied to us regularly.

  (People reacted very strongly to that movie. A very nice older woman came up to me at a party at the UN once, and after we’d small-talked a little bit, she said how much she wanted to see Chelsea Girls. I told her that it didn’t play around much anymore but that we could show her some of our newer movies that were easier to get hold of for a screening. She said no, she only wanted to see Chelsea Girls, because her daughter had jumped in front of a train right after seeing it. I didn’t know what to say to her.)

  We opened it at the Film-Makers’ Cinemathèque on 41st Street. It was eight hours of film, but since we were projecting two reels side by side on a split screen, it only took about half that time. Parts of it were in color, but it was mostly black and white.

  We got our usual sympathetic reviews from the underground writers. But then Jack Kroll wrote a long, fascinating review of it in Newsweek that made so many people want to see it that we had to move to a bigger theater, the Cinema Rendezvous on West 57th Street. Then Bosley Crowther wrote a silly review (it was a reprimand, really) of it for The New York Times: “It has come time to wag a warning finger at Andy Warhol and his underground friends and tell them, politely but firmly, that they are pushing a reckless thing too far. It was all right as long as [they] stayed in Greenwich Village or on the south side of 42nd Street…. But now that their underground has surfaced on West 57th Street and taken over a theater with carpets… it is time for permissive adults to stop winking at their too-precocious pranks…”

  If anybody wants to know what those summer days of ’66 were like in New York with us, all I can say is go see Chelsea Girls. I’ve never seen it without feeling in the pit of my stomach that I was right back there all over again. It may have looked like a horror show—“cubicles in hell”—to some outside people, but to us it was more like a comfort—after all, we were a group of people who understood each other’s problems.

  In September we started going regularly to a two-story bar/restaurant on Park Avenue South off Union Square that Mickey Ruskin had opened in late ’65. It was called Max’s Kansas City and it became the ultimate hangout. Max’s was the farthest uptown of any of the restaurants Mickey had ever operated. He’d had a place on East 7th Street called Deux Mégots that later became the Paradox, and then he’d had the Ninth Circle, a Village bar with a format similar to what Max’s would have, and then an Avenue B
bar called the Annex. Mickey had always been attracted to the downtown art atmosphere—at Deux Mégots, he’d held poetry readings—and now painters and poets were starting to drift into Max’s. The art heavies would group around the bar and the kids would be in the back room, basically.

  Max’s Kansas City was the exact place where Pop Art and pop life came together in New York in the sixties—teeny boppers and sculptors, rock stars and poets from St. Mark’s Place, Hollywood actors checking out what the underground actors were all about, boutique owners and models, modern dancers and go-go dancers—everybody went to Max’s and everything got homogenized there.

  Larry Rivers once said to me, “I’ve often asked myself, ‘What is a bar?’ It’s a space that has liquor that’s usually fairly dark, where you go for a certain kind of social interaction. It’s not a dinner party. It’s not a dance. It’s not an opening. You move in a certain way through this space, over a period of time, and you begin to recognize faces that begin to recognize you. And you may have had experiences with some of these people before which you kind of pick up on in another way in this space.”

  One night I happened to be at Max’s when Larry came in. That afternoon Frank O’Hara had been buried in Springs, Long Island, with Jackson Pollock’s grave in the distance, and half the art world had gone out there for the funeral. Larry came over to my table holding a drink and sat down. He looked terrible. He’d been really close friends with Frank. After he was hit by a car, they took him to the nearest hospital, Larry told me, where they didn’t realize he was bleeding internally until the next morning, and by then he’d been losing blood for eight hours. Frank’s best friends, Larry and Kenneth Koch and Joe LeSueur and Bill de Kooning, were all called to the hospital, and de Kooning and Larry went up to his room to see him. “He thought he was at a cocktail party,” Larry said. “It was a dream conversation. And three hours later he was dead. I made this speech at the funeral today—I was practically in tears. I just thought I’d describe what Frank looked like that afternoon, the marks on his body, the stitches, the tubes coming out of him. But I didn’t get to finish because everyone was screaming at me to shut up….” Larry shook his head. It sounded like a very Pop eulogy to me—just the surface things. It was just what I hoped people would do for me if I died. But evidently death wasn’t something the people out there in Springs that afternoon wanted to be Pop about.