POPism

by Andy Warhol

  “It’s very selfish of me, I know,” Larry said, “but all I can think is that there’ll never be anybody who likes my work as much as Frank did. It’s like that poem of Kenneth’s—‘He Likes My Work.’”

  It was scary to think that you could lose your life if you were taken to the wrong hospital or if you happened to get the wrong doctor at the right hospital. It sounded to me like Frank wouldn’t have died if they’d realized in time that he was bleeding.

  I’d known Frank, too. He was kind of small, and he always wore tennis shoes, and he talked a little like Truman Capote, and even though he was Irish, he had a face like a Roman senator. He’d say things like “Listen, Circe, just because you’ve turned us all into pigs, don’t think we’re going to forget you’re still our queen!”

  I started going to Max’s a lot. Mickey was an art fan, so I’d give him a painting and he’d give us credit, and everybody in our group could just sign for their dinners until the credit was used up. It was a really pleasant arrangement.

  The back room at Max’s, lit by Dan Flavin’s red light piece, was where everybody wound up every night. After all the parties were over and all the bars and all the discotheques closed up, you’d go on to Max’s and meet up with everybody—and it was like going home, only better.

  Max’s became the showcase for all the fashion changes that had been taking place at the art openings and shows: now people weren’t going to the art openings to show off their new looks—they just skipped all the preliminaries and went straight to Max’s. Fashion wasn’t what you wore someplace anymore; it was the whole reason for going. The event itself was optional—the way Max’s functioned as a fashion gallery proved that. Kids would crowd around the security mirror over the night deposit slot in the bank next door (“Last mirror before Max’s”) to check themselves out for the long walk from the front door, past the bar, past all the fringe tables in the middle, and finally into the club room in the back.

  Max’s is where I started meeting the really young kids who had dropped out of school and been running around the streets for a couple of years—hard-looking, beautiful little girls with perfect makeup and fabulous clothes, and you’d find out later they were fifteen and already had a baby. These kids really knew how to dress, they had just the right fashion instincts, somehow. They were a type of kid I hadn’t been around much before. Although they weren’t educated like the Boston crowd or the San Remo crowd, they were very sharp in a comical sort of way—I mean, they certainly knew how to put each other down, standing on chairs and screaming insults. Like, if Gerard walked in with his fashion look really together and had that very serious Roman god-like expression on his face that people get when they think they’re looking good, one of the little girls at Max’s (the Twin-Twats, they were called) would jump up on the table and swoon, “Oh my God, it’s Apollo! Oh, Apollo, will you sit with us tonight?”

  I couldn’t decide if these kids were intelligent but crazy, or just plain pea-brained with a flair for comedy and clothes. It was impossible to tell whether their problem was lack of intelligence or lack of sanity.

  Edie Sedgwick and Susan Bottomly had gotten to be good friends, although Susan was about five years younger. They’d met in New York in the late winter of ’66—two rich, beautiful girls from old New England families.

  One afternoon in October, David Croland stopped by the Factory when we were dishing and I asked him right out what he thought of Edie. He was silent for a few seconds and then started out carefully, “Well, she’s very unsure of people when she first meets them….” Then he suddenly started laughing at how phony he sounded. “What am I talking about? She’s a snob. A big snob! One of the first nights I met her, at Arthur, I flashed on her huge earrings—half-moons with stars—and I asked her would she please let Susan borrow them for a couple of hours. She pulled them right off her ears and handed them to me. She said, ‘I will give Susan these earrings. But don’t ever ask me to lend anybody anything.’” David smiled, remembering it. “She’s a kleptomaniac who gives everything away. She’ll never be at your apartment that you won’t find something missing after she’s left…”

  A few days after that conversation with David, the candles that Edie always kept burning in her apartment on East 63rd Street started a fire in the middle of the night, and she was rushed to Lenox Hill Hospital with burns on her arms and legs and back.

  I’d seen Edie lighting candles once, and from the absent-minded way she went about it, it was clearly a dangerous routine. I told her she shouldn’t, but she naturally didn’t listen—she always did exactly what she wanted.

  • • •

  That fall, after working all day at the Factory, we’d usually go out to II Mio and then to Ondine and wind up at Arthur.

  A band called the Druids had been playing at Ondine for a couple of months. Jimi Hendrix—this was before he was Jimi Hendrix, he was still Jimmy James—would sit there in the audience with his guitar and ask them if he could play with them and they’d say sure. He had short hair and really beautiful clothes—black pants and white silk shirts. This was before he went to England and came back here as the Jimi Hendrix Experience, way before he played Monterey, before the bandanna and the twangy guitar and all that. But he was already playing with his feet. He was such a nice guy, so soft-spoken. One night he told me that he was from Seattle, Washington, and it seemed like he was homesick when he talked about how beautiful it was there, all the water and the way the air was. It’s funny but I remember the song that was playing at Ondine while we talked—“Wild Thing” by the Troggs—the song I’d eventually see Jimi do so fantastically himself in ’67 at the Fillmore East in his pirate prince look—a green velvet shirt and hat with a pink Musketeer plume. But the night we talked, he was just simple black and white elegant and there was a very sad look to him somehow.

  This fall was the first time I remember black people wearing Afros. Everything had changed—from white student-type kids going down south, doing SNCC things, to all-black groups and all-black meetings and all-black demonstrations. Suddenly there was no place for white people in the black problem—the blacks started telling them to just stay home in front of their checkbooks.

  • • •

  In November the Doors came to New York for the first time and they played at Ondine. When we walked in, Gerard took one look at Jim Morrison in leather pants just like his and he flipped. “He stole my look!” he screamed, outraged. It was true enough—Jim had, I guess, picked it up from seeing Gerard at the Trip.

  The girls all went crazy over Jim Morrison—the word got around fast that there was a group with this very cute, very sexy lead singer. The Doors were at Ondine because, according to Ronnie Cutrone, who should know—he hung out there enough—the girl who played the records, Billie, knew them from L.A. (She also knew the Buffalo Springfield from the Coast and she got them a gig there, too, right after the Doors. “In fact,” Ronnie told me, “the one and only time I was ever naive enough to try to ‘fix Lou [Reed] up’ with a girl was with Billie’s roommate, Dana. And not only was it a total disaster”—he laughed—“but the Buffalo Springfield happened to be over visiting them during this date, and Lou was very hostile—a lot of ‘California trash’ remarks—and they weren’t so thrilled with him, either…”)

  After the Doors and the Buffalo Springfield played Ondine, the image of the place went from chic to rocking, and groupies started hanging out there, beautiful girls like Devon and Heather and Kathy Starfucker.

  It was so obvious just from watching these kids operate that there were new sex maneuver codes. The girls were only interested in the guys that didn’t go after them. I saw a lot of girls pass on Warren Beatty, who was so good-looking, just because they knew he wanted to fuck them, and they’d go looking for somebody who looked like he didn’t want to, who had “problems.”

  • • •

  When you walked into Ondine, on the right was the coat check, on the left was a red leather couch, then there was the bar, and the
n a narrow strip with tables in it, and then the back room that was the dance floor, with the record booth at the end of it. Jim Morrison got to be a regular there, and the Doors played there again a few times the following spring. Jim would stand at the bar drinking screwdrivers all night long, taking downs with them, and he’d get really far gone—he’d be totally oblivious—and the girls would go over and jerk him off while he was standing there. One night Eric and Ronnie had to actually carry him out to a cab and take him home to where he was staying in the West Forties.

  Jim was supposed to be the star of my first “blue movie”—he’d agreed to bring a girl over and fuck her in front of the camera—but when the time came, he never showed up. He was always very sweet to me, though—in fact, I never saw him be anything but sweet to anybody.

  In November we went with the Exploding Plastic Inevitable to Detroit to play at a “mod wedding” that was being sponsored by a supermarket at the Michigan State Fairgrounds during a threeday “Carnaby Street Fun Festival” that also featured Dick Clark, Gary Lewis (right before he got drafted) and the Playboys, Bobby Hebb, the Yardbirds, Jimmy Clanton, Brian Hyland, and Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs. The couple getting married, Gary and Randy (she was “an unemployed go-go dancer” and he was “an artist”), had volunteered to be married publicly so they could get the prize of a free three-day honeymoon in New York City, which included a screen test at the Factory. The parents of the couple watched as I gave the bride away and Nico intoned “Here Comes the Bride.” A local radio deejay was the best man. The bride wore a white minidress and high white satin boots, and the groom wore a plaid Carnaby Street jacket, a cowboy belt, and a wide tie. For a wedding present we gave them an inflatable plastic Baby Ruth bar.

  During the ceremony, I painted a paper dress on a model—with ketchup. Earlier that month I had gone out to Abraham & Straus in Brooklyn with Nico and some other kids, to make a personal appearance promoting two-dollar paper dresses in “whitest white twill of Kaycel R” that came with a do-it-yourself paint set. Nico wore the dress while I painted it. I could never understand why paper dresses didn’t catch on—they were such a modern idea, so logical. Maybe they just weren’t marketed right—I mean, at A & S they were selling them in the notions department! I thought they were so great that I couldn’t help doing something with one at that wedding.

  When friends were passing through town—or even when they were planning to stay for a few months—Gerard and Paul were great at finding them places to stay. The two of them together functioned like a placement service—they’d call somebody up who had an apartment that the visiting person looked like he belonged in, ranging from Lower East Side to Sutton Place.

  As I said, Marie and Willard Maas were like Gerard’s godparents—he even kept a lot of his papers and clothes over at their house. I was going somewhere else for Thanksgiving dinner, but I met up with everybody later on at Arthur, and they’d all been out in Brooklyn at Willard and Marie’s.

  A blond kid from Yale named Jason was in town for the weekend, out on the dance floor watching Susan Bottomly and David Croland, who stood like androids, smack in the middle of all the wild to-the-side bugaloo-type dances going on around them, staring straight over each other’s shoulders with their heads tilted just a little to the side, moving their bodies in a slight roll and a slow shuffle. They were so tall and sexy it looked great. Somebody behind me said that the Dave Clark Five had just come in.

  Later that night when we were down at the Tenth of Always, Jason was still studying Susan Bottomly and David, with the same envying expression he’d had at Arthur. When he caught me catching him at it, he said, “Well, what do you expect? They’re a sharp couple.” Susan was beautiful, and she wore the short sixties clothes so perfectly, but still her body was womanly. Then when she opened her mouth, she sounded sort of dumb—which made her even more perfect. Like a lot of the girls, she carried a few changes of clothes around with her—just tucked a few dresses or skirts into her pocketbook before she went out—and Jason was peeking at a black disco dress she had in her bag, in with all the eye makeup and earrings.

  Susan Bottomly’s voice was the strangest thing to hear coming out of this girl. Everybody went around doing Susan Bottomly imitations. It was a monotone, but not at all like Nico’s: Susan’s was a low-pitched American monotone. What she was like was a very beautiful, sexy cow.

  Lou Reed and John Cale were there at the Tenth of Always, too, and later they took us to a building at 36 East 30th Street, to a place called something like One-Two-Three because there were three floors of dancing: the first floor was straight, the second floor was gay, and the third floor was lesbian. Lou disappeared into the back of the second floor, and Jason and I went on up to the third.

  “I’ve seen dykes before, but never like this,” Jason said, looking around at all the tall girls in capri pants and halter tops in very striking colors like shocking pink and turquoise. They were all dancing together—to Barbara Lewis singing “Hello Stranger”—and holding each other really tight, and they had good suntans and lots of blond hair teased in flips. “This is the good stuff, all right,” he said. “They all look like Angie Dickinson. It’s funny—the last time I was in New York, the most degenerate thing I could imagine was getting drunk on three Manhattans. It just doesn’t seem like only a year ago.”

  Shortly after we got back from that mod wedding in Detroit, Truman Capote was having his famous Masked Ball in the grand ballroom of the Plaza Hotel. All the magazines and newspapers were calling it “the party of the decade”—not only was this before the decade was over, mind you, it was before the party had even happened—and there were all these incredible dramas going on over who was invited and who wasn’t.

  I knew Truman Capote. In the fifties, in my pre-Pop days, I wanted to illustrate his short stories so badly I used to pester him with phone calls all the time till one day his mother told me to cut it out. It’s hard to say now what it was that had made me want to connect my drawings with those short stories. Of course, they were wonderful, very unusual—Truman was a pretty unusual character himself—they were all about sensitive boys and girls in the South who were a little bit outside society and made up fantasies for themselves. I could almost picture Truman tilting his head and arranging his words around the pages, making them go together in a magical way that put you in a certain mood when you read them. Truman’s book, In Cold Blood, about the murder of the Clutter family in Kansas, had come out in a big way the year before. (Nine people from that small Kansas community would be at his party, but not the two boys who did the murders—they’d been executed in the spring of ’65.)

  Henry Geldzahler had been invited to the ball, too, and we decided to go to it together, although that year our friendship had really cooled out. The main focus of Henry’s life was still art, and the main focus of mine was Pop—Pop anything. Then, as I said before, Henry’s personal life had changed and we didn’t gab on the phone as much as we once had. And I had a new crowd—I was pretty involved with the Velvet Underground, and Paul Morrissey had brought a lot of new interests to the Factory. (The one thing Paul didn’t seem to care anything at all about, though, was contemporary art. Actually, he ridiculed it. What he liked were things like nineteenth-century landscapes that he’d find in junk shops and in the garbage in his neighborhood and then a neighbor of his, an elderly Englishman, would clean and restore them. Paul liked antique things—paintings, furniture, photographs, sculpture, books, etc.—anything but what was happening at the moment.)

  By ’66 Paul was organizing as many of our excursions around the city as Gerard was. I was pretty passive in those days. I’d go anywhere that I was organized to go, since I wanted to go everywhere, anyway. And there were so many things coming up. As I’ve said, amphetamine was the big drug in New York in the sixties because there was so much to do that everybody was living double-time or they’d miss half of what was going on. There was never a minute around the clock where you couldn’t be at some kind of a party.
It’s amazing how little you want to sleep when there’s something to do. (“Remember how we never went to bed?” somebody said to me in ’69, nostalgic already for the ’65–’67 era. And it really was a whole era, those two years.)

  Everybody was feeling the acceleration. The August ’66 issue of Esquire announced it was time to call an end to the sixties—“Let the next four years be a vacation,” the text read. Then the article opened with a posed photograph of me dressed up as Batman with Nico beside me in a Robin outfit—captioned “Andy What’s-his-name”—which I loved. (The Batman image was very popular that year because the remake TV show had gone on in February, so camp was really being mass-marketed—everyone was in on the joke now.) The text of the article was by Robert Benton and David Newman, who were the screenwriters on Bonnie and Clyde that would be coming out in ’67. (Many years later I read an interview with them in Film Comment where they said that the underworld of the thirties and the underground of the sixties were “strange phenomena that the media sponge soaked up and made popular,” and they went on to say that it was finding out that the real-life Bonnie Parker had wanted to be a celebrity so badly—sending poetry in to newspapers, etc.—that had flipped them out. Newman said, “The sense of their own style was important; Bonnie and Clyde were like Edie Sedgwick and the other Andy Warhol ‘superstars.’ They were getting a lot of press, but nobody was quite sure why—just that they were outrageous; aesthetic outlaws.”)