POPism

by Andy Warhol

  Mick was shuttling back and forth between the upstairs, where Jerry lived, and the downstairs, where the party was. I tried to talk to him but every time we’d go over, some girls would come along and try to rip his clothes off. Then he’d run back upstairs, turn around, and slink down again, literally throwing the girls aside as he walked.

  Susan Pile had been working for Gerard part-time for free since the fall, coming down from Barnard on the Broadway IRT every afternoon, over on the shuttle from Times Square to Grand Central, past the “Baked-on-the-Premises” doughnut stand (who would ever want a doughnut baked in the subway, I’d always wondered when I passed there—why didn’t they at least pretend they were made somewhere else? Like, “Not Baked on the Premises”), up out onto the street, through E. J. Korvettes, and into the Factory. Sometimes I’d notice her studying a little Chaucer in the Bickford’s downstairs. Gerard was in his Benedetta Barzini period, writing lots of poems about her, and Susan would type those up and work on the anthology of writings by poets and kids we knew that was published the next year, called Intransit, The Andy Warhol Gerard Malanga Monster Issue. She’d sit Japanese-style on a cushion typing at a very low sawed-off silver desk with a missing leg that had been replaced with a stack of magazines. One day as I walked by, I overheard her telling Joey that she was going to have to look for another job because she needed money. I told her that if she would stay and type things for the Factory instead of just for Gerard, we’d give her money. I asked her how much she thought she’d need, and she estimated that since she was being partly subsidized by her parents, she’d only need about ten dollars a week. (That was fifty trips on the subway then.) I immediately began giving her lots of reel-to-reel tapes, the sound tracks to Chelsea Girls, Kitchen, My Hustler, things like that, to type, and she did some Ondine tapes that would go to become part of the Grove Press novel a the next year—ones that the high school girls had never gotten to. I was especially glad to have someone typing right there at the Factory, because recently I’d discovered the hard way that you couldn’t be too careful: one of the little girl typists had taken a reel of Ondine home with her to Brooklyn to transcribe it there, and when her mother got an earful of the dialogue on the tape, she confiscated it and I never got it back.

  The Easter Sunday be-in in Central Park was incredible; thousands of kids handing you flowers, burning incense, smoking grass, taking acid, passing drugs around right out in the open, taking their clothes off and rolling around on the ground, painting their bodies and faces with Day-Glo, doing Far East–type chants, playing with their toys—balloons and pinwheels and sheriff’s badges and Frisbees. They could stand there staring at each other for hours without moving. As I said before, that had always fascinated me, the way people could sit by a window or on a porch all day and look out and never be bored, but then if they went to a movie or a play, they suddenly objected to being bored. I always felt that a very slow film could be just as interesting as a porch-sit if you thought about it the same way. And now all these kids on acid were demonstrating the exact same thing.

  Since the beginning of the year when Thomas Hoving became Parks Commissioner, the kids were using the parks a lot more—and this be-in was the ultimate use so far. In the middle of April, though, Hoving was scheduled to become director of the Metropolitan, and he seemed to be trying to temper his Pop image a little now, going around reassuring people that he wasn’t going to turn the Met into a big “happening.”

  At the end of April there was another be-in—not as big as the Easter one, but big enough so everybody was looking forward to a fantastic summer in the park.

  In the spring, Stash, the son of Stanley from the Dom, called to say that he and the Dom bartender—a good-looking Irish guy, I remember—wanted to open a discotheque in a place he’d found uptown on East 71st Street, a gymnasium, and that he wanted us to be involved—to revive the Exploding Plastic Inevitable there. All during March, Nico was still down at the Dom singing away with Tim Buckley, Jackson Browne, Tim Hardin—whatever musicians Paul could arrange for her to sing with. Leonard Cohen, the Canadian poet, was there quite a few nights in the audience down at the bar, just staring at her. Later on, when he cut a record album, I read a review that said his singing was like he was “dragging one note over the entire chromatic scale,” and I couldn’t help thinking of all those hours he’d spent listening to Nico….

  Pop fashion really peaked about now—a glance around the Gymnasium could tell you that. It was the year of the electric dress—vinyl with a hip-belt battery pack—and there were lopsided hemlines everywhere, silver-quilted minidresses, “microminiskirts” with kneesocks, Paco Rabanne’s dresses of plastic squares linked together with little metal rings, lots and lots of Nehru collars, crocheted skirts over tights—to give just the idea of a skirt. There were big hats and high boots and short furs, psychedelic prints, 3-D appliqués, still lots of colored, textured tights and bright-colored patent leather shoes. The next big fashion influence—Nostalgia—wouldn’t come till August, when Bonnie and Clyde came out, but right now everything mod-mini-madcap that had been building up since ’64 was full-blown.

  Something extremely interesting was happening in men’s fashions, too—they were starting to compete in glamour and marketing with women’s fashions, and this signaled big social changes that went beyond fashion into the question of sex roles. Now a lot of the men with fashion awareness who’d been frustrated for the last couple of years telling their girl friends what to wear could start dressing themselves up instead. It was all so healthy, people finally doing what they really wanted, not having to fake it by having an opposite-sex person around to act out their fantasies for them—now they could get right out there and be their own fantasies.

  Skirts were getting so short and dresses so cut-out and see-through that if girls had still been the sexy Playboy or Russ Meyer types, there might have been attacks all over the streets. But instead, to counteract all these super-sexy clothes, to cool down the effect of, say, micro-minis, the kids had new take-it-or-leave-it attitudes about sex. The new-style girl in ’67 was Twiggy or Mia Farrow—boyishly feminine.

  “Tell It Like It Is” was a big song at the beginning of the year, and that was the new attitude all around. It was an exciting time for pop music. Everybody was waiting for the Beatles’ new album to come out (which would be Sgt. Pepper finally, in June) but some single cuts from it were already on the radio—“Penny Lane”/“Strawberry Fields” was out in February, and Aretha Franklin’s “I Never Loved a Man” was out, and “Mercy Mercy Mercy,” “Gimme Some Lovin’,” “Love Is Here and Now You’re Gone,” etc., etc.

  • • •

  The Gymnasium was the ultimate sixties place for me, because, as I said, we left it exactly as it was, with the mats, parallel bars, weights, straps, and barbells. You thought, “Gymnasium, right, wow, fantastic,” and when you look again like that at something you’ve always taken for granted, you see it fresh, and it’s a good Pop experience.

  Our first weekend at the Gymnasium was also the weekend of the big spring mobilization march against the Vietnam war. Martin Luther King, Jr., and Stokely Carmichael and some other people gave speeches in the Sheep Meadow and then marched down Fifth Avenue. It was a rainy day, and from the Factory window, Paul, Nico, and I watched the crowd crossing 47th Street toward the UN. A face like Nico’s looked wonderful in the natural afternoon light—it was made for looking out windows and across deserts, into horizons, etc. I remember her so well standing there in a Tuffin and Foale pants suit with “Happy Together” by the Turtles playing somewhere off in the background.

  This was the time that Stokely Carmichael did his catchy “white men having black men fight yellow men” line and he was getting so much coverage in the media then that I noticed him right away later that weekend when I saw him at the Gymnasium dancing with a tall blonde girl.

  From the Gymnasium we usually went on to a discotheque called the Rolling Stone, and then to Trude Heller’s new place on Broad
way and 49th, a few blocks down from Cheetah—“Sweet Soul Music” was the big song at all the clubs—and soon after this, Salvation opened down on Sheridan Square, so there were suddenly all these new places to go.

  • • •

  We went out to Los Angeles in April for the opening of Chelsea Girls at the Cinema Theater there. John Wilcock, who’d just started a newspaper in New York called Other Scenes, was out there covering our trip, and he published a picture of himself with Paul, Lester Persky, Ultra Violet, Susan Bottomly, me, and Rodney La Rod taken at the opening.

  Rodney La Rod was a young kid who hung around the Factory a lot—he claimed he used to be a road manager for Tommy James and the Shondells. He was over six feet tall. He greased his hair and wore bell-bottoms that were too short, and he’d stomp around the Factory, grab me, and rough me up—and it was so outrageous that I loved it, I thought it was really exciting to have him around, lots of action. (When eventually we found out he was under age and I had to stop taking him around with us, everybody unanimously said, “Good,” because he drove them crazy.)

  This was the first time I had ever traveled with Ultra Violet. She was still a big mystery; nobody knew what her scene was—she kept her life very secret (as opposed to everybody else we knew who were always telling you the most intimate things about themselves). I’d met her one day in ’65 when she walked into the Factory in a pink Chanel suit and bought a big Flowers painting that was still wet for five hundred dollars. Her name was Isabelle Collin-Dufresne then and she hadn’t dyed her hair purple yet. She had expensive clothes and a penthouse on Fifth Avenue, and she drove a Lincoln that was the same as the presidential one. She was past a certain age, but she was still beautiful; she looked a lot like Vivien Leigh.

  Ultra would do almost anything for publicity. She’d go on talk shows “representing the underground,” and it was hilarious because she was as big a mystery to us as she was to everybody else.

  All the girl superstars complained that Ultra would somehow find out about every interview or photo session they had scheduled and turn up there before they did. It was uncanny the way she always managed to be right on the spot the second the flash went off. She’d tell journalists, “I collect art and love.” But what she really collected were press clippings.

  Gradually, we pieced together that she was from a rich family of glove manufacturers in Grenoble, France, that she’d come to America as a young girl to visit the painter John Graham (co-incidentally in the same building where the Castelli Gallery was), who introduced her around the New York art world, and then when he died, she met Dali, and then she met me, and then she became Ultra Violet.

  She was popular with the press because she had a freak name, purple hair, an incredibly long tongue, and a mini-rap about the intellectual meaning of underground movies.

  We took Chelsea Girls over to the Cannes Film Festival that spring of ’67—that is, we took it but we never got to show it. (The situation reminded me of when the Lincoln Center Film Festival had so graciously shown our movies—on little crank-up machines in the lobby! Only in Cannes, things didn’t even get that far.)

  The arrangements were all last-minute, just like everything else we did. The night before we left, we took the plane tickets with us when we went to Max’s as usual and handed them out there. In addition to Paul and Gerard and me—and Lester Per-sky, who we were taking along to help us publicize the movie—Rodney La Rod, David Croland and Susan Bottomly, and Eric were coming along. A few hours later, at ten in the morning, we were all together on a plane for France.

  When Eric left for Cannes with us, he was leaving a top-floor apartment on Central Park West and 80th Street that he’d painted completely black except for white trim on the woodwork. I asked him who he was letting stay in it while he was gone, and he said, “I just left it.”

  “But aren’t you going back to it?” I asked him.

  He shook his head no, vaguely.

  “But didn’t you leave all your stuff there?” I said.

  He shrugged yes, then eventually said, “I was getting all fouled up. Too many people, and things were getting very close, wrapped up into too much drugs and stuff, and that’s why I’m, like, really glad you said to come.”

  Eric had just broken up with his girl friend, Heather—she’d left him and gone off to London. Technically, Eric was married, and I asked him about that.

  “I met my wife, Chris, at Ben Frank’s in L.A. three years ago,” he told me. “I was coming home from my girl friend’s and I was tripping and I met her and she had these big turquoise eyes which later turned out to be contact lenses. We fell in love instantly and drove to Las Vegas the same day and got married. I had a daughter with her—Erica. Chris came back to New York with me; that was when I was trying to get a store together, right before I met you. I got really attached to my wife, and when she went out free-loving the way I did, I got crazy and went through a heavy gay scene for a while, and then when I was coming out of that I would do things like offer whatever woman I had with me to Jim Morrison at Ondine, so that I could imagine him having pleasure on my head and there would be this connection between us, Jim Morrison and me—just, you know, like watching people you love get together.” Eric got a strange, almost bitter look on his face, thinking about all the times he’d watched people he loved have sex with people he loved. “It seems,” he said, “like anybody that I did love I watched ‘get together.’”

  I asked him when he’d gotten married for the second time—and if he’d ever even gotten a divorce from Chris. He hadn’t. “I sort of got a ‘separation’ thing from the court,” he told me, “but then the people down at the court wanted me to go through this whole thing with more papers and stuff and I just got all fouled up.”

  I never knew what to think of Eric: was he retarded or intelligent? He could come out with comments that were so insightful and creative, and then the next thing out of his mouth would be something so dumb. A lot of the kids were that way, but Eric was the most fascinating to me because he was the most extreme case—you absolutely couldn’t tell if he was a genius or a retard.

  The strange thing was, I’d assumed that Eric had been with us every night, and it wasn’t until he described what he’d been doing for the last few months that I realized I hadn’t seen him for quite a while.

  When we got to Cannes, we discovered that the guy who was supposedly arranging everything hadn’t set up even one showing of the movie. Even Lester, who’d come over to help us publicize it, couldn’t do anything; it was too late.

  We decided to hang around anyway and just have fun, which we were always good at, going to parties, water skiing, meeting the foreign movie people—we met Monica Vitti and Antonioni, who’d filmed Blow-Up at the same time we filmed Chelsea Girls. And we met Gunther Sachs, the West German ball-bearing heir who brought us home to meet his wife, Brigitte Bardot. She came downstairs and entertained us like a good European hostess, and I couldn’t get over how sweet that was—to be Brigitte Bardot and still bother to make your guests comfortable!

  One afternoon we all drove out to a huge, beautiful château in the country. While everyone was taking a look around, the owner was busy telling Susan how beautiful she was and that if only she would stay on there for a few days with him, she could have anything she wanted in the whole house, which was full of old European artworks of every kind. Just then David came back from the house tour—all excited because he’d seen a portrait in one of the bathrooms that he said looked just like him, and everyone else agreed that it did, too.

  We were getting ready to leave and the man still hadn’t convinced Susan to stay on, but he was a good sport and told her she could have whatever she wanted in the house anyway. David was encouraging her to take the most expensive thing, but instead she whispered to Gerard to show her where the bathroom with the portrait was, and she walked out of the house with that painting under her arm, and she presented it to David in the car riding back through the French countryside. He gave her a kis
s—he was thrilled—but after a few seconds he got practical and wondered, “Maybe you should have stayed a couple of days and gotten some furniture, too…”

  We found out later that it was actually a portrait of Sarah Bernhardt.

  In France, Eric didn’t want to come around to the parties and things with us. “I can’t get into anybody right now; I’m just, like, writing a lot and keeping a journal, and just relating to myself as a companion.”

  “You do so many trip books,” I said. “Whatever happens to them all? Where are they?”

  “I have a lot of them that’re around, being held for me, but unfortunately, through tripping, I lose a lot…”

  Eric went off water skiing with Gerard and to one party with us, and then he decided to leave for London—we were going to Paris and Rome first.

  In Rome our hotel was taking messages, the same frantic message essentially, every few hours from Eric in London—he’d spent all his money and couldn’t pay his hotel bill.

  The first thing we had to do when we got to London was go over to Kensington and settle his hotel account. Then I gave him the same basic lecture that I ultimately gave every superstar when I began to feel they were depending on me too much for money. I told him, “Look, Eric, you’re young, you’re good-looking, and people like to have you around. Don’t you realize there are all these incredibly rich people with big beautiful empty houses who are bored? Start thinking rich. Start being grand. You shouldn’t have to stay in hotels! We’ll introduce you to the swells and you can live off the fat of the land. You’ve got to start thinking of these things for yourself, though, Eric. We won’t always be around to rescue you. Just go out there and be a beautiful house guest and you’ll never need a hotel again. You’re Entertainment: don’t give it away! People like things more when they have to pay for them,” etc., etc.