POPism

by Andy Warhol

  In short, I was telling him, “Hustle.”

  After a couple of days in London, where my most vivid memory is of Rodney La Rod leaping onto Paul McCartney’s lap the second he met him (that’s what I liked about Rodney—he did all those things you felt like doing but knew you shouldn’t), most of us went back to New York. David and Susan decided to go back to Paris for a while, though, and Eric stayed on in London at the house of my art dealer there, Robert Fraser, who was young, good-looking, and beautifully tailored in pinstripe suits—and he had a gallery in Mayfair.

  The Dom went through yet another management transformation in the middle of ’67. Jerry Brandt took it over, completely redid the place, and called it the Electric Circus. There was a big opening for that and we all went; we were naturally curious to see what had been done with the discotheque space we’d launched the year before.

  The difference between the Exploding Plastic Inevitable and the Electric Circus sort of summed up what had happened with Pop culture as it moved from the primitive period into Early Slick. It was like the difference between a clubhouse under the back porch steps and a country club. The year before we’d had to pioneer a media show out of whatever we could improvise from whatever we had lying around—tinfoil and movie projectors and phosphorescent tape and mirrored balls. But suddenly, during the ’66–’67 year, a whole Pop industry had started and snowballed into mass-manufacturing the light show paraphernalia and blow-your-mind stuff. And a good general example of how much things had changed in such a short time is “Eric’s Fuck Room.” With us, this was just a small alcove off the side of the dance floor where we’d thrown a couple of funky old mattresses in case people wanted to “lounge,” but it’d ended up being just a place where Eric hijacked girls to for sex during the E.P.I, shows; now, under the new Electric Circus management, it was transformed into the “Meditation Room,” with carpeted platforms and Astroturf and a health food bar.

  • • •

  In the early summer, we all went out to Philip Johnson’s Glass House in New Canaan, Connecticut, for a Merce Cunningham Dance Company benefit sponsored by the de Menil Foundation of Houston. A young kid from Texas named Fred Hughes was helping with the arrangements for the foundation and when he overheard someone wondering what rock group to get, he informed them, “There is only one rock group—the Velvet Underground.” He’d seen the Velvets at the Dom the year before when he was in town on one of his trips between Houston and Paris, where he was working at the Iolas Gallery. When he saw Nico at the Dom, he couldn’t believe it was the actual girl from La Dolce Vita who he’d fallen in love with on screen—I mean, there she was in the flesh standing right in front of him on St. Mark’s Place.

  Fred had grown up in Houston where the great art patrons John and Dominique de Menil and their five children, George, Philippa, François, Adelaide, and Christophe, lived in a great house designed by Philip Johnson. Fred was only in his early twenties then, but all through his teens he’d been working for them on their art projects and acquisitions. Even before he left Texas for France, he’d bought one of my paintings for himself, and he’d arranged for some of our movies to be screened down in Houston. Later he met Henry Geldzahler at the Venice Bien-nale, and the next time Fred was in New York, Henry brought him over to the Factory.

  In those mod, flower-power days, Fred was conspicuous—one of the only young people around who insisted on Savile Row suits. Everyone always stared at him because he was so perfectly tailored—like something out of another era. When he came by that first day, he was wearing a flared, double-vent dark blue suit, blue shirt, and light blue bow tie. He and Henry rode up in the elevator with Ondine, who Henry eloquently introduced as “the greatest actor in underground cinema today,” and Ondine smiled a very charming smile: “I’m so glad you said that, because most people confuse me with being a vulgar pig.” The three of them came in as we were screening a sequence titled “Allen Apple” from what would eventually be ****, our twenty-five-hour movie. Henry took me aside and briefed me that Fred worked for the de Menils, which of course was a magic name—they were so interested in art. But Fred, in any case, was a cute kid—young and such a dandy.

  The first thing Fred did was tell me very earnestly that he loved my work and that my movies were beautiful, and I reacted my usual way—modest noises came out of my mouth, the sounds you make when you’re embarrassed but saying thank you. I told him we were having dinner in the Village and invited him to come along. Fred laughed and said that just coming down to the Factory on 47th Street was a big deal because it was the farthest downtown he’d ever been, so the Village struck him as really an expedition. Just then the movie reel ended and the lights went on, and as Fred turned to look around the loft, there on the big red couch was a black guy fucking a white guy. I hadn’t noticed before, so I guess they’d started during that last reel.

  Fred did come to dinner with us, and then he started coming down to the Factory almost every day. He’d spend mornings and afternoons at the de Menil Foundation, having meetings with people like Nelson Rockefeller and Alfred Barr of the Museum of Modern Art, and then straight from that he’d come down to the Factory to sweep floors. For some reason, most of the people who came to work at the Factory were drawn at first to sweeping floors—Paul had done it for months, too, before getting involved with other things. I guess it was a natural thing to do, with so much mess around and so many people there making more. Fred got more and more outrageously elegant—black jackets with braiding on them, shirts with bow ties to match. One day he arrived in a big Tom Mix hat. (He eventually gave it to me and I was photographed a lot in it on the Lonesome Cowboys set.) But the really funny thing was that a lot of days he wouldn’t want to go all the way home to change before meeting his society friends for dinner at places like “21,” so there he’d be with a broom in his hand sweeping the floors in his dinner jacket.

  When Fred came on the scene in ’67, I really wasn’t painting at all, but shortly after that I started to work on the large electric chairs for my big retrospective in Sweden the next year. Fred got involved right away with both art and moviemaking—he arranged a commission for me from the de Menils to film a sunset for something to do with a bombed church in Texas that they were restoring. I filmed so many sunsets for that project, but I never got one that satisfied me. However, it was with the leftover money from that commission that we eventually made Lonesome Cowboys at the end of the year and the beginning of ’68.

  At the time of the Merce Cunningham benefit at Philip Johnson’s, we didn’t know Fred that well yet, which I especially remember because when there wasn’t room for all of us to go in the limousines from the de Menil house on 73rd Street off Park where all the people who’d paid a thousand dollars a ticket were having drinks beforehand, Philippa de Menil and Fred were formal enough with us to insist that Paul and Gerard take their places in the cars. (They wound up taking the train out to New Canaan and hitching from the station to the Glass House.)

  • • •

  In those days the picnic lunches from the Brasserie with the red-and-white-checked napkins were the big rage. The people out at Philip’s, who’d all paid a hundred dollars a ticket, got those box lunches for their money—plus a dose of the Velvet Underground and a dance concert by the Cunningham dancers to a John Cage score for viola, gong, radio, and the door-slams, windshield-wipes, and engine-turnovers of three cars. Jasper Johns was there, and I heard him say that in the fall he was moving downtown to Houston Street into a huge building that had been a bank, and that Susan Sontag was going to take over his Riverside Drive apartment.

  I couldn’t wait to look through Philip’s underground art museum. Gerard was carrying his whip that day because he was dancing onstage with the Velvets, Paul was in an eighteenth-century jacket and a lace shirt, I was wearing blue jeans and a leather jacket, and Fred was in a collegiate outfit—a Shetland pullover sweater or something. The four of us looked like extras in different movies as we wandered through the museum
together. We were the only ones there at that point, and Paul started giving one of his oral essays on modern art which everyone at the Factory knew almost by heart—Fred was the only one who hadn’t been exposed to it yet. In any case, Paul always had a few new put-downs to throw in:

  “Modern art is nothing but atrocious graphics,” he said, stopping in front of a very good abstract painting. “The days of true art are over and I’m afraid they have been for quite some time. Now, if these atrocities were good graphics, people would recognize them as such; but they can’t, because they’re ugly and garish and banal. There is no art anymore; there’s just bad graphic design, which people are trying desperately to imbue with some meaning. I mean, if you want to see real abstract designs, you can go up to Harlem and stare at old linoleum! All modern art is, is graphics and slabs being overanalyzed by a bunch of morons.”

  Fred was gaping; he’d obviously never heard anyone talk that way, let alone someone who worked for an artist. In front of the artist, yet. And one of my Self-Portraits was hanging nearby. Fred looked like he wanted to disagree, but he didn’t say anything—he just stared, amazed, while Paul continued:

  “Unless you paint a picture of a man, a woman, a cat, a dog, or a tree, you’re not making art,” Paul said. “You go into a gallery today and you look at some drippings and you ask one of those pretentious gallery people, ‘What is this? Is it a candle? Is it a post?’ and instead, they tell you the artist’s name. ‘It’s a Pollock.’ They tell you the artist’s name! So what! All it comes down to is people looking at price tags in galleries and buying whatever bad graphics they can afford.

  “It’s like reading architecture criticism.” Paul lowered his voice a little since, after all, we were in a famous architect’s house. “You read all those words in all those pathetic magazines—about the windowpanes and doors that’re on these modern glass slabs. The buildings are practically nothing, so they go and invent language to make them sound like something.”

  The great thing about Paul was that however ridiculous his arguments were, you couldn’t help being entertained by them. He could be telling you that you were a moron and you probably wouldn’t mind—in fact, usually you’d be laughing—because he’d find some outrageous way to make his case.

  “Let’s go find the Velvet Underwear,” Paul suggested, and we went back outside. It was dark now, but the lights from inside the Glass House were shining out on the trees and grass, and there were picnic baskets scattered all around. The Velvets were already starting to play, and Gerard rushed to join them. I was reflecting that most people thought the Factory was a place where everybody had the same attitudes about everything; the truth was, we were all odds-and-ends misfits, somehow misfitting together.

  Fred got caught up in the scene completely. He moved from the beautiful de Menil house where he’d been staying into the Henry Hudson Hotel way over on West 57th, where a lot of our people were living then. He chucked his glamorous, privileged setup for a bare-essentials West Side hotel room—he was fascinated with the kind of seedy glamour he was seeing at the Factory and wanted a heavier dose. The first night he ever went to Max’s—or, rather, tried to—he was wearing his big ten-gallon Tom Mix hat and Mickey blocked him at the door and told him, “We don’t know you.” Fred confided to me later that he was so crushed when that happened that he just said, “Oh, okay,” and left and went uptown on the rebound to exclusive El Morocco. (And nothing makes you feel dumber in an embarrassing situation than being in a funny hat.)

  People say that you always want the things you can’t have, that “the grass is greener” and all that, but in the mid-sixties I never, never, never felt that way for a single minute. I was so happy doing what I was doing, with the people I was doing it all with. Certainly, at other times in my life I’d wanted lots of things I didn’t have and been envious of other people for having them. But right then I felt like I was finally the right type in the right place at the right time. It was all luck and it was all fabulous. Whatever I didn’t have that I wanted, I felt that it was just a matter of any day now. I had no anxieties about anything—everything just seemed to be coming to us.

  The Montreal Expo had opened in May on the banks of the St. Lawrence River with six of my Self-Portraits up there at the U.S. Pavilion, and I flew up to Canada with John de Menil and Fred in Mr. de Menil’s jet to see them.

  The American pavilion was Buckminster Fuller’s big geodesic dome, with its aluminum shades catching the sun, and an Apollo space capsule and a long free-span escalator. Those were things like you’d expect to find at an international exposition. What was unusual was that the rest of the American show was almost completely Pop—it was called Creative America. I remember thinking as I looked around it that there weren’t two separate societies in the United States anymore—one official and heavy and “meaningful” and the other frivolous and Pop. People used to pretend that the millions of rock-and-roll 45’s the kids bought every year somehow didn’t count, but that what an economist at Harvard or some other place like that said, did. So this U.S. exhibit was like an official acknowledgment that people would rather see media celebrities than anything else.

  In the way of art there were works by Rauschenberg and Stella and Poons and Zox and Motherwell and D’Arcangelo and Dine and Rosenquist and Johns and Oldenburg. But a lot of the show was pop culture itself—movies and blow-ups of stars, and props and folk art and American Indian art and Elvis Presley’s guitar and Joan Baez’s guitar. And these things weren’t just part of the exhibit; they were the exhibit—Pop America was America, completely.

  The old idea used to be that intellectuals didn’t know what was going on in the other society—popular culture. Those scenes in early rock-and-roll movies were so dated now, where the old fogies would hear rock and roll for the first time and start tapping their feet and say, “That’s catchy. What did you say you called it? ‘Rock and… roll?’ ” When Thomas Hoving, the director of the Metropolitan, talked about an exhibit there that included three busts of ancient Egyptian princesses, he referred to them offhandedly as “The Supremes.” Everybody was part of the same culture now. Pop references let people know that they were what was happening, that they didn’t have to read a book to be part of culture—all they had to do was buy it (or a record or a TV set or a movie ticket).

  Paul thought the Factory should be more under control, more like a regular office. He wanted it to become a real moviemaking-moneymaking business enterprise, and he never could see the point of having all the young kids and old kids hanging around all the time for no particular reason. He wanted to phase out the drop-in, lounging habits of the past few years. This was inevitable, really—we’d gotten to know so many people all over town that our small circle had expanded to hundreds and hundreds, and we just couldn’t have the all-day-all-night “open house” anymore, it had gotten too crazy.

  Paul turned out to be a good office manager. He was the one who’d talk to business people, read Variety, and look around for good-looking or funny (ideally, both) kids to be in our movies. He’d dream up theories to throw out to the interviewers—for instance, he had a whole presentation about how similar our organization was to the old MGM star system. “We only believe in stars, and our kids are actually very similar to the Walt Disney kids, except of course that they’re modern children, so naturally they take drugs and have sex.”

  • • •

  Most things Paul told the newspapers looked outrageous in print. At first, it was only a comment here and there, but by the end of the next year, interviews about us were full of his quotable spiels. The early Factory style had come out of Pop Art, where you didn’t talk, you just did outrageous things, and when you spoke to the press, it was with “gestures,” which was more artistic. But now that style was all played out—everyone was ready for some articulation, and Paul was nothing if not articulate.

  To make the Factory into more of the “business office” he had in mind, Paul put partitions up around one-third of the floor s
pace, dividing the loft into little cubicles. The intention was to let people know that the Factory was now a place where actual business was conducted—typewriter/paper clip/manila envelope/filing cabinet business. It didn’t exactly work out the way he’d envisioned it, though: people started using the cubicles for sex.

  Meanwhile, we were becoming the target for some very aggressive attacks on drugs and homosexuality. If the attacks were done in a clever, funny way, I enjoyed reading them as much as anybody. But if someone in the press put us down, without humor, on “moral grounds,” I would think, “Why are they attacking us? Why aren’t they out there attacking, say, Broadway musicals, where there are probably more fags in any one production than there are at the whole Factory? Why aren’t they attacking dancers and fashion designers and interior decorators? Why us? when all I have to do is turn on my TV to see hundreds of actors who are so gay you can’t believe your eyes and nobody bothers them. Why us, when you could meet your favorite matinee idols from Hollywood who gave out interviews all the time on what their dream girls were like—and they’d all have their boyfriends with them?”

  Naturally, the Factory had fags; we were in the entertainment business and—That’s Entertainment! Naturally, the Factory had more gays than, say, Congress, but it probably wasn’t even as gay as your favorite TV police show. The Factory was a place where you could let your “problems” show and nobody would hate you for it. And if you worked your problems up into entertaining routines, people would like you even more for being strong enough to say you were different and actually have fun with it. What I mean is, there was no hypocrisy at the Factory, and I think the reason we were attacked so much and so vehemently was because we refused to play along and be hypocritical and covert. That really incensed a lot of people who wanted the old stereotypes to stay around. I often wondered, “Don’t the people who play those image games care about all the miserable people in the world who just can’t fit into stock roles?”