POPism

by Andy Warhol

  So anyway, by the time Henry and I went to Truman’s ball, we’d drifted away from a close relationship. At first, it had just been a slow, steady drift, but then in June ’66, the Venice Biennale came up, and that was a big drama. At this point we were still talking on the phone a lot to each other—every other day or so. I mean, I talked to him the day before he left on a trip to Egypt and everything was very casual, blah-blah-blah-blah-have-a-nice-trip. But the next day, when I picked up The New York Times, I read that he’d been chosen the commissioner for the Venice Biennale. He hadn’t even mentioned it to me!

  At first, I was so hurt that he’d kept the news from me that when people asked if I’d heard about it from Henry, all I could say was “Henry who?” But I got over it little by little: I could forgive his not putting my work in the Biennale (he used Helen Frankenthaler, Ellsworth Kelly, Jules Olitski, and Roy Lichten-stein)—that was his business—but I couldn’t understand his not telling me. We were always more reserved with each other after that, but we stayed pretty friendly—obviously, since here we were in November going to the big Capote Masked Ball together.

  Henry came to pick me up at the Factory, and all the kids crowded around to see us off in our tuxedos—they were really proud of me, that I was invited. Henry was wearing a mask of his own face, and I had sunglasses on and a big cow’s head sitting on my shoulders. I didn’t wear the cow’s head for very long, though—it was too uncomfortable. The black and white look of the party had been planned out by Cecil Beaton, and evidently it was based on the Ascot scene in the movie My Fair Lady that Cecil had done all the sets for.

  When we got to the Plaza, I was totally intimidated, I’d never seen such a herd of celebrities before in my life. Truman had rented a dinner jacket for the doorman of his apartment building and had him there checking the glamorous names at the door when you came in. Everyone had been asked to wear either black or white, and the first black or white people we noticed were Alice Roosevelt Longworth, Katharine Graham (she was the guest of honor), Margaret Truman’s husband Clifton Daniel, John Kenneth Galbraith, Philip Roth, David Merrick, Billy Baldwin, Babe Paley, Phyllis and Bennett Cerf, Marella Agnelli, Oscar de la Renta, David O. Selznick, Norman Mailer, Marianne Moore, Henry Ford, Tallulah Bankhead, Rose Kennedy, Lee Radziwill, George Plimpton, Adele Astaire Douglass, Gloria Vanderbilt Cooper, and, as Suzy Knickerbocker would say, “like that.” Then Lynda Byrd Johnson brushed past me—she’d just gotten a job at McCall’s and the gossip columns were putting her together with George Hamilton. Out on the dance floor, Lauren Bacall was dancing with Jerome Robbins and Mia Farrow Sinatra was dancing with Roddy McDowell while her husband, Frank, talked to Pat Kennedy Lawford.

  As far as I could tell, this was the densest concentration of celebs in the history of the world. As Henry and I stood there gaping, I told him, “We’re the only nobodies here.” He agreed.

  It was so strange, I thought: you get to the point in life where you’re actually invited to the party of parties—the one people all over the world were trying desperately to get invited to—and it still didn’t guarantee that you wouldn’t feel like a complete dud! I wondered if anybody ever achieves an attitude where nothing and nobody can ever intimidate them. I thought, “Does the president of the United States ever feel out of place? Does Liz Taylor? Does Picasso? Does the queen of England? Or do they always feel equal to anyone and anything?” I tried to stick around Cecil Beaton because at least he was someone I knew well enough to say hi to.

  I decided to grow along the sidelines, like a good wallflower, and as I was standing there, I heard a Society lady remark, “He’s such a good dancer,” as she watched Ralph Ellison, the Negro author of The Invisible Man.

  That’s the extent of what I remember about Truman’s party. It was a perfect affair for Mad magazine to cartoon, because it was so surreal—I mean, you couldn’t look over your shoulder without dropping thirty names.

  As for the Biennale, Henry and I didn’t clear the air about that for a long, long time. One day years later, he gave me his side of the story.

  “When I was asked to be the commissioner, I said yes very quickly and made my choices instantly and intuitively. It wasn’t even in my head to say, ‘Look, Andy, I want to be the next curator of twentieth-century art at the Met, and I can help you much more in the next fifty years if I do that than if I blow my chances by becoming some sort of crazed super-Pop curator.’”

  At the time of the Biennale, Henry’s boss, Robert Beverly Hale, was about to retire, so Henry was having to be very careful of his image. He said that he felt Pop Art had been “heavily represented” at the previous Biennale in ’64: “Castelli staged that all very well. Being Italian, he had lots of connections with the Italian press and the judges. Let’s face it, Andy, if I’d included you in the Biennale show, you would have wanted to come over with the Velvet Underground and the movies and the strobe lights and the whole entourage and you would have totally eclipsed the other artists; it just wouldn’t have been fair to them.”

  Yes, I thought, that’s logical, but still, why couldn’t he have told me himself—why did I have to read about it in The New York Times?.

  “Yes, people are fascinated with Pop Art,” he went on, “because it’s a media event, it’s glamorous, it’s ‘what’s happening,’ but as an art historian, I felt I also had a high art tradition to protect. I was already identified with Pop Art so much—remember that full page of me in Life magazine in a swimming pool at a happening? I just couldn’t afford to be exclusively connected with it anymore…”

  Yes, I thought, all that’s true, but still, why had he let me read about it in the newspaper?

  “And even considering the show just from the standpoint of how it would look,” Henry went on and on, “Helen’s and Jules’s pictures were soft and smoky, and Ellsworth Kelly’s were hard and cool, and I realized that from the point of view of color and contour edge and mechanical surface, Lichtenstein and Kelly at either end with Frankenthaler and Olitski in the middle would make an incredible foursome. Your edges weren’t as sharp as Kelly’s so you wouldn’t’ve balanced out with him the way Roy did. So it wasn’t just that I was being a hideously ambitious careerist—the show did, after all, look good. And remember, Andy, you had actually ‘stopped painting’ by then.”

  “Yes, sure,” I finally said. “But, I mean, Henry, I understand all that. When it’s business, you can’t think about friends, and I’ve always believed in that. But you could have told me before you told The New York Times. You owe it to a friend to tell it to them face to face, that’s all…”

  “I know, I know,” he conceded. “You’re right. I should have bitten the bullet and called you. But I didn’t know what to say to you. It was just so easy not to say anything because I was leaving the country the next day.”

  Well, anyway, I thought, that was very Pop—doing the easiest thing.

  I kept up with what was happening in the art scene, even though I wasn’t going around to galleries myself as much as I used to. David Bourdon was writing on art for the Voice, and he and I would talk on the phone at least once a week and compare notes on what we’d been seeing. Sometime in ’66 David called to tell me that Life had offered him a job and he didn’t know whether or not to take it—that is, whether taking it would mean he was “selling out” and “going establishment.” While we talked, there was a limousine parked outside my house waiting to take me to an opening. I took it over to David’s place in Brooklyn Heights first.

  It was a beautiful night so we went out for a walk over toward the Brooklyn Bridge, with the limousine following us. David said right off that he felt really uncomfortable with the idea of talking art through the mass media. As we walked across the bridge to Manhattan, I told him, “Just think about all the money you’ll be making, David. I mean, it’s Life magazine. Don’t be a fool!” The lights in Manhattan looked so inviting as we continued walking toward them, but a policeman stopped us at the other end. It must have looked suspicious, l
ike a drug transfer scene or something, with the limousine lurking.

  He took the job.

  By November the Velvets had stopped practicing at the Factory and stopped living at Stanley’s. Lou was living down on East 10th Street; John Cale was living with Nico, who had just broken up with Eric; Sterling was living with his girl friend; and Maureen was living out on Long Island with her parents.

  The Velvets never really went out touring on the road. They’d played Cleveland earlier in the month, but what they would do was play a city and then come right back to New York. They still came by the Factory a lot, though, just to hang out.

  One afternoon as I was silkscreening some Jackie canvases, I watched Lou answer the phone, then hand it over to Silver George who identified himself: “Yes, this is Andy Warhol.”

  That was fine with me. Everybody at the Factory did that. By late ’66 I wasn’t taking as many calls as I used to—there were just too many. (I think I’d stopped returning the calls on my answering service around the middle of ’66.) Anyway, it was more fun to let other people take the calls for me, and I’d sometimes read interviews with me (supposedly) that I’d never given at all, that had been done over the phone.

  “You want me to describe myself?” Silver George was saying. He looked at me as if to say, “You don’t care if I do this, right?” I asked who it was and when he said it was a high school paper, I motioned for him to go ahead.

  “Well, I wear what everybody else around the Factory wears,” he said, looking over at me as a reference. “A striped T-shirt—a little too short—over another T-shirt, that’s how we like them… and Levi’s… and thick belts and”—he looked down at my feet—“I finally just stopped wearing ugly black engineer boots with the strap across them—I’ve moved into more refined Beatles boots with a zipper on the side….” He listened for a few moments. “Well, I would call myself—youthful-looking. I have a slightly faggy air, and I do little artistic movements….” I looked up from painting. I’d thought all they wanted was a fashion description, but it didn’t matter, I was 99 percent passive in those days, so I just let Silver George go on describing me—whatever he said couldn’t be any worse than the way a lot of journalists described me anyway.

  “Well, I have very nice hands,” he said, “very expressive. People always say how aware they are that they’re talented hands. I keep them in repose or touching each other, or sometimes I wrap my arms around myself. I’m always very conscious of where my hands are…. But the first thing you notice about me is my skin. It’s translucent—you can really see my veins—and it’s gray, but it’s pink, too…. My build? Well, it’s very flat, and if I gain any weight, it’s usually all in my hips and stomach. And I’m small-shouldered and I’m probably the same dimension at my waist as I am at my chest….” Silver George really had momentum now. “… and my legs are very narrow and I have tiny little ankles—and I’m a little birdlike from my hips down—I sort of narrow in and taper down toward my feet…. ‘Birdlike,’ right… and I carry myself very square, like a unit. And I’m rigid—very conservative about my movements; I have a little bit of an old-lady thing there. I don’t look like I could walk very far—like maybe just from the door to the cab or something—and my new boots have sort of high heels, so I walk a little like a woman, on the balls of my feet—but actually, I’m very… hardy…. Okay?”

  It sounded like the interview was over. “No, it was no trouble,” Silver George told the high school newspaper. “Oh, well, right now we’re just working hard, doing lots of projects—have you seen Chelsea Girls yet?… Yeah, well, will you send us a few copies of the interview when it comes out?”

  When Silver George hung up, he said they were really thrilled because they’d heard I never talked and here I’d just said more to them than anybody they’d ever interviewed. They’d also said how surprised they were that I could be so objective about myself.

  1967

  In January ’67 Chelsea Girls was still playing but now it was even farther uptown at the Regency on Broadway and 68th, where it had gone the month before when it finally left the Cinema Rendezvous on West 57th. Then Roger Vadim’s movie The Game Is Over, starring Jane Fonda, which had been prebooked, moved into the Regency and so Chelsea Girls moved over to the York Cinema on the East Side. We had an arrangement with the Film-Makers’ Distribution Center (FDC), which was then headed by Jonas, Shirley Clarke, and Luis Brigante, to split the net profits fifty-fifty, wherever it played. Everyone was excited about Chelsea Girls’ being the first underground movie to play a long run in commercial theaters in midtown Manhattan. The FDC was getting calls from commercial distributors who wanted to handle it nationally, but the FDC had already made their own arrangements with the Art Theater Guild, which had art houses all across the country.

  Jonas especially was excited; he felt that the success of Chelsea Girls was an indication that ordinary people wanted to see underground movies, too. He suggested that we put our films on a bill with some other underground movies that they had down there at the FDC, but Paul really resisted that; he—we—didn’t think of our movies as underground or commercial or art or porn; they were a little of all of those, but ultimately they were just “our kind of movie.” Also, for all anyone knew yet, the people filling the theaters for Chelsea Girls might be there purely for the nudity. So the success of Chelsea Girls didn’t necessarily mean that other underground movies would make it—it didn’t even mean that our own other movies would make it.

  One day in early January, in The New York Times, right next to a story about Jack Ruby dying in jail of cancer, was an article by their film critic, Vincent Canby: “Adult Themes Head for Screen; Many of Old Taboos Seen Rapidly Disappearing.” Most of the piece dealt with Chelsea Girls and Blow-Up, and it said that David Picker, who was then the number-one vice-president of United Artists, was feeling, along with other big Hollywood types, that the freedom of expression in Chelsea Girls would inevitably influence the people who made conventional films. The article went on to describe how MGM, which had financed Blow-Up, had formed a new little subsidiary company to release it, which was what most of the big film companies were doing then—forming little companies to release their dirtier movies that wouldn’t pass the Production Administration Code, which was the industry’s self-censorship body. In other words, the studios were making a big show of regulating themselves—setting up and paying for a censorship board to review their clean movies—but when they had a “dirty” one they wanted to get out, they’d just form a new company with a new name and that way they’d be able to stand very aloof from it and moralize all the way to the bank.

  We were thrilled to have the attention of Hollywood—now it was only a matter of time, we felt, before “somebody out there” would want to finance some of our breakthroughs instead of just sitting back and commenting on them. I mean, we’d done My Hustler back in ’65, and now here Hollywood was in ’67 just getting ready to shoot a movie called Midnight Cowboy about a male hustler in New York City. Paul and I read Variety all the time now, really feeling that at last we were a part of the commercial movie business.

  That January we’d go to see movies on 42nd Street like we always did, and then walk up Broadway to 68th Street to check on our own movie audience there. We loved seeing the big marquee, it meant we’d really made it with the people. I felt so good about things then, like we could do anything, everything. I wanted to have a movie playing at Radio City, a show on at the Winter Garden, the cover of Life, a book on the best-seller list, a record on the charts…. And it all seemed feasible for the first time.

  Jerry Schatzberg, who’d been doing the photos for the Stones’ record albums, was giving another party for them down at his place on Park Avenue South, on a Sunday night right after one of their appearances on The Ed Sullivan Show. We walked over to watch them on color TV at Stephen Shore’s apartment on Sutton Place where he lived with his parents.

  Little Joey was with us, and that was rare—I’d always tell him he co
uldn’t come places with us because he was under age, especially since his mother would call up occasionally from Brooklyn and say, “Where’s my little Joey? Is he getting into trouble?” He said she was always asking him, “What do you want to hang around with all those queers for?”

  We were sitting around in this wall-to-wall-carpeted, colorcoordinated living room—lots of mirrors and end tables and big sofas—watching the Stones do “Let’s Spend the Night Together,” which Ed Sullivan had had them modify to “Let’s Spend Some Time Together,” and “Ruby Tuesday”—Brian Jones was playing the sitar, I think, with a big white hat on. Joey was absolutely begging and pleading to come to the party, so finally I gave in and said okay, since not only did he worship the Stones, he loved Jerry’s photos for their albums. Joey was planning to go to Visual Arts after graduating high school, and after that he wanted to go into “rock graphics.” (Before the Beatles kids used to give up rock and roll when they got out of school, but now so many of them were charting out rock-related careers for themselves, rock was such a big industry by this time.)

  There were crowds of people outside Jerry’s building trying to get into the party. Inside, the first person Joey nudged me about was Zal of the Lovin’ Spoonful (they were really popular now—they’d just done “Did You Ever Have to Make Up Your Mind?”) and he was in a cowboy hat, too, like Brian was. Joey went to look around for Brian, because that was his favorite Stone, and he finally found him with Keith in a corner holding a drink in both hands, standing not far from Twiggy, who was a new face in town then. Joey, who was only around five feet five inches, was surprised to see that Brian was even shorter than he was. I watched him go over and try to talk to him, and when he got absolutely no response, he sort of poked Brian a few times with his finger—and still nothing happened. So then Joey turned to Keith and said, “I’d just like to tell him how much I admire him,” and Keith looked back with the blankest stare that anybody could ever give anyone, so then Joey just gave up. The circles under Brian’s eyes were dark and his skin was dead white and his strawberry blond hair looked weird in the lighting. He was wearing the same outfit as Mick that night—a T-shirt with a striped blazer and white pants and white shoes. Keith, though, was in a pin-stripe suit.