POPism

by Andy Warhol

  The next day Viva arrived at the apartment where we were filming Loves of Ondine (which was originally part of**** but which we eventually released as a separate feature). The first thing she did was open her blouse and show us her breasts: over each nipple she’d pasted a round adhesive bandage, and so we filmed her telling Ondine that if he wanted to see her naked, he’d have to pay for every article of clothing she removed, including the two adhesives.

  We all loved Viva; we’d never seen anything like her, and from then on, it was just taken for granted that she’d be in whatever movie we did. She was funny, stylish, and photogenic—and she gave great interviews. She even wrote reviews of our movies for a local publication called Downtown, using the by-line of Susan Hoffmann (her real name), giving herself, naturally, total raves: “Viva! is a hilarious combo of Greta Garbo, Myrna Loy, and Carole Lombard…. she combines the elegance of the Thirties with the catty candor… of the Sixties….” We took blurbs from Viva’s rave reviews of herself and ran them in newspaper ads for our movies. Why not? Everything she said was true.

  And if a good way to get around the censors was to confuse them, then Viva was perfect for the times, because when she took her clothes off, there was always the question of whether her bony body was a turn-on or -off—the “prurience” was really in question there.

  When Chelsea Girls opened at the Presidio Theater in L.A. in late August ’67, Paul, Ultra, Ondine, Billy, and I flew to California for personal appearances. Nico was already out there; she’d been at the Castle all summer with Jim Morrison, but she’d gone off with Brian Jones to the Monterey Festival. (Edie stayed at the Castle a little while that summer, too. She had come cross-country in a Volkswagen station wagon—someone else drove— after being very out of it, taking lots of drugs those last days in New York.)

  We were sort of in two groups. Ondine, Billy, and a girl they called Orion the Witch of Bleecker Street—an A-head friend of theirs from New York who’d just moved out to San Francisco— formed one group. They went around terrorizing the flower people and saying every minute how they couldn’t stand the West Coast another second. I walked into their rooms once when they had all just taken belladonna, and I watched a friend of Ondine’s, naked except for polka-dot socks, drop a marble tabletop on his foot and not feel it. Ondine said, “There is no hallucinogen other than belladonna. It is a visual poison.” I’d heard that from a few people—that acid was nothing compared to belladonna.

  The rest of us just went wandering around the city, getting the feel of the place at the end of the big Love Summer. There were bad vibrations from the San Francisco hippies toward anything that was above a sort of psychedelic poverty level—anything that looked like it cost money was part of the Establishment— and so when we drove around town for a day or two in a Cadillac limousine that the movie theater rented for us, it was like we were waving a red flag; the flower children in the street would turn and glare at us, very contemptuous. That didn’t bother us; we thought it was funny, and Paul, of course, was having a ball—he even figured out a way to antagonize the Haight Ash-bury types a little more: he’d have our driver pull over beside groups of kids in beads and flowers, then he’d roll down the limousine window and ask them, “Say, where’s the nearest Salvation Army? We want to buy ourselves some hippie clothes.”

  As we drove through the different sections of town, we were all talking about the Black Panthers. (In between “Negro” and “black,” the term “Afro-American” had come up, but it had never caught on the way “black” had—it was like trying to make people call Sixth Avenue “Avenue of the Americas.”) The Black Panthers got a lot of attention walking around San Francisco with their guns showing, and nobody could stop them because evidently it wasn’t against the law to carry guns openly, just to conceal them. But since nobody much had ever really taken advantage of the technicality before, the sight of those guns was a shocker, especially in the flower-power make-love-not-war city.

  It had been a whole year since we were out there at the Fillmore with the Velvets. So many kids were still tripping, but the scene was clearly losing its momentum, and in another month journalists would be writing about what a complete mess Haight Ashbury had become—garbage and scummy soda stains on the sidewalks and the Day-Glo signs that had looked so great when they were new getting all horrible and dirty. October would be the month of the funeral procession through the streets for “Hippie, devoted son of Mass Media,” staged by all the original hippies who’d been really involved with organizing alternate community living and who now resented all the free-style young kids who’d come in during the summer who they called “irresponsible” hippies. There was a sense that autumn that the whole hippie thing had been ruined the summer before—made too big and commercial.

  • • •

  As we walked around, I realized that in San Francisco the Vietnam war seemed so much more real than it did in New York— if you stood by the bay, you could actually see ships leaving for Southeast Asia.

  The girls in California were probably prettier in a standard sense than the New York girls—blonder and in better health, I guess; but I still preferred the way the girls in New York looked—stranger and more neurotic (a girl always looked more beautiful and fragile when she was about to have a nervous breakdown).

  Most of the places around the area that had opened as “free” stores or service centers were starting to close down or go into debt. A lot of the hippies were leaving for communes all up and down the California coast and in western Colorado and New Mexico. In New York, the Diggers were only just about to open a free store (“Free Stew and Coffee”) on East 10th Street, right near where Paul lived, and Country Joe & the Fish had just played on the same street, in Tompkins Square Park, at a “smoke-in” where Frosty Meyers, the New York artist, had his laser going all around the sky.

  Everybody in San Francisco seemed upset about all the amphetamine that was around that summer—especially the love children, who were embarrassed that so many people were taking it, because speed made you aggressive, it was everything that flower power was supposed to be against. But there really was every kind of drug you could imagine floating around out there.

  We ran into a kid we knew from New York, Gary, walking along the street. He had short hair now and was wearing a sports jacket—he looked very square. But the accordion case he was carrying turned out to be full of marijuana. We ducked into one of the lesbian strip joints where girls simulated sex things with other girls and there was a dancer who took people from the audience and whipped them. Gary lifted his jacket away from his back pocket and showed us one of those intercom beepers, which he used for communication with some sort of Drug Central. He’d been totally drug-free when we knew him back in New York—he was going to the School of Visual Arts. I asked him how he got involved in the dope business, and he said that for the couple of months before he left New York he was spending most of his time at school in the bathroom smoking joints that one of his teachers was always giving him. Then he and a friend of his went out to San Francisco where the friend knew some people. They rode over the Golden Gate Bridge out to this split-level house in Marin County. There was a Ferrari parked outside, and inside there was a few rock-and-roll bands’ worth of equipment, and when you pressed a button, light shows went on all over the ceiling and beds started revolving. There were color TV’s in all the bedrooms and all the bathrooms and the kitchen, and stereo sets in every broom closet.

  “I went, ‘Gee, this is class!’” Gary said. “They told me, ‘Class? Man, we’re poor. We had a bad week, we only took in ten thousand.’ And in the morning when we went down to the kitchen, the lady of the house was looking into the refrigerator at all these grains and vitamins and fruit juices and drugs. First thing, she took out a vial of long needle crystals and said, ‘What do you want to do today?’ I said, ‘Pot would be fine.’ But she’s holding the crystals and saying, ‘I’m going to take some of this. Would you like some?’ So I took some—and I thought I’d
never be a human being again in my life…”

  The stripper was whipping somebody at the next table. I said to Gary, “We heard you were hustling out here.”

  He looked surprised and then very embarrassed. “Yeah, well…” I’d only said it to tease him, but now I could tell that I’d really hit on something.

  “Just a little bit when I first got out here,” he said defensively, “a few guys rubbing up against you, jerking themselves off, blowing you—but listen, I myself have never blown anybody.”

  We left the strip joint, said good-bye to Gary, and started walking again. Some sounds from a band rehearsing came out of a building we passed.

  “Oh, God, the music in this city is so incredibly bad,” Paul started up again. “Just think about it: San Francisco has not managed to produce even one individual of any musical distinction whatsoever! Not a Dylan, not a Lennon, not a Brian Wilson, not a Mick Jagger—nobody. Not even a Phil Spector! Just some nothing groups and some nothing music. They delude themselves that music is a group thing—the way they think everything is….” Just then, the band got louder. “Really, listen to that,” he said. “Nothing but tired imitations of bad imitations of white imitations of Negro blues bands. The Beach Boys were the most wonderful group in America because they accepted life in California for the mindless glory it is, without apologizing for it or being embarrassed about it—just go to the beach, get a girl friend, get a suntan, period. And that was the most sophisticated approach you could have—musical instead of message-y. Of course, their greatest song, ‘God Only Knows,’ was never the hit it should have been here in America.” He shook his head. “I just don’t know….” The music got more and more frenzied. “Oh, God! ” Paul screamed, covering his ears. “Fortunately, they’ve never come up with a melody, so none of this has to stick in your brain to torment you.”

  On that trip we did some lectures at colleges and shot some footage for Bike Boy, but we never did come off cheerful enough to satisfy the San Francisco people—if you didn’t smile a lot out there, they got hostile toward you.

  Late one afternoon in September, Paul and I went over to the Hudson Theater to check out what kind of audience, I a Man was pulling in. We’d be opening Bike Boy there in a couple of weeks, and we wanted to see if the audience was laughing or jerking off or taking notes or what, so we’d know whether it was the comedy, the sex, or the art they liked.

  We walked into the Hudson and sat down on a couple of scruffy-looking seats. There were a few college-type kids sitting together down front, and some raincoat people, alone, scattered here and there. It was the scene where Tom Baker is trying to turn on one of the girls and he says, “Why don’t you relax?” and she tells him, “I don’t know you well enough,” and then he asks her, “Does it turn you on that I’m sitting here naked?” and she tells him, “Well, if there was music I’d be turned on…”

  We didn’t stay too long—just long enough to see that the kids thought it was hilarious. On our way out, the box office guy told us that during lunch hour was when business was the best.

  The more we hung around Max’s, the more young kids we got to know. There were three tiny little girl beauties who were always there who’d been running around together for years— Geraldine Smith, Andrea Feldman, and Patti D’Arbanville. Patti had grown up in the Village. Her parents still lived across from the Café Figaro, and that’s where the girls would hang out till it closed for the night, and then go over to Patti’s house to sleep. One night that fall at Max’s, when everybody in the back room was totally silent, drawing in their trip books—with the exception of an outrageous queen who was doing a sort of interpretive dance on top of a table to the Supremes singing “Reflections”—I coaxed Geraldine to tell me about her background.

  “I went to three Catholic schools in Brooklyn, and they all threw me out; then I went to Washington Irving High,” she said, nodding her head in the direction of 16th Street and Irving Place, just a few blocks away. “And what about Andrea?” I asked her. “Andrea, she went to this progressive school for theatrical-like kids that cost a lot of money called Quintano’s—it was the kind of school you could go to just when you felt like it. It was right near [the discotheque] Ondine.”

  I couldn’t imagine any of these girls sitting in classes or working at a job. Maybe a couple of days a year, but that was all. So I didn’t understand how they always had the best clothes and went everywhere in cabs. That night I came right out and asked Geraldine where they got their money from. She pointed across the room at a girl who looked about their age. “Andrea and I live with Roberta,” she said, “on Park and 31st.”

  “And where does Roberta get her money from?” I asked her.

  “Her husband is very rich.”

  I took another look at Roberta while Geraldine went on: “She had Donyale Luna living there with her, and now she has me and Andrea, and her husband supports us all.” Donyale Luna was one of the first big high-fashion black models and she was gorgeous.

  “How old is Roberta?” I asked Geraldine.

  “Thirty-three—I swear to God! But you can’t tell because she’s so tiny.”

  Geraldine said that she thought they were all going to get kicked out soon because Donyale was making about five hundred dollars’ worth of calls to Europe every month and Roberta’s husband was getting mad about the phone bill.

  “And Donyale has this crazy boyfriend who came in last night and smashed her over the head with a beer bottle”—Geraldine laughed—“right after she was giving us this big lecture about how disgraceful it was that we were smoking pot and taking LSD.”

  “But who buys your clothes?” I asked her, looking over the designer mini-dress she was wearing and the beautiful leather boots.

  “We go shopping on Andrea’s charge cards—her mother’s, I mean. And I don’t know…. I can always get people to buy me clothes…”

  One of the first times Geraldine came into Manhattan from Brooklyn, she said, was when the Beatles were in town and the whole city was going nuts, with girls yelling and screaming on the TV news and Beatles songs blaring twenty-four hours a day on the radio.

  “I was walking down Bleecker Street with a couple of my girl friends,” Geraldine told me, “and this beautiful blonde girl came running over to us and said, ‘Do you want to meet the Beatles?’ I thought she was crazy. There was a guy waiting for her in a car, and I thought they were trying to rape us away or something. But they convinced us to trust them and we rode uptown with them to the Warwick Hotel where there were hundreds of girls all lined up in front screaming, like, very insane. We waited downstairs with a man who had some kind of newspaper pass for about an hour. I kept saying, ‘This is crazy, this is a joke—my mother wants me home to Brooklyn by eleven,’ but then we got taken up in a little elevator and the door to a suite opens and there’s the Beatles having a party! Another girl who was there, I realized later, was Linda Eastman, but I didn’t know her then—I was just out of Brooklyn, all I knew was the Beatles.

  “We played spin the bottle with them and all these other games like that, and we watched TV till like five in the morning, and then we passed out. Sometime during the night somebody took a big American flag and draped it over the three of us like a blanket.”

  She trailed off as if that were the end of the story, but I wasn’t going to let her get away with that.

  “Oh, come on, Geraldine!” I insisted. “You must have made it with them. Admit it! Come on, I won’t tell.”

  “Nooooo! I swear!” She giggled. “The guy who picked us up in the car said to me, ‘Why don’t you go in with Paul?’ and I said no, because at that time I was a virgin, we were very innocent. And the guy got real mad because I guess he was supposed to pick up girls that would do something…. In the morning we got woken up by screams from outside—we went over to the window and looked down and the street was all girls having fits.

  “When I got back to Brooklyn, my mother said, ‘I thought you were dead. Where were you?’ That was
like the first time I’d ever stayed out all night, so she was real mad. She was sitting there with one of her girl friends and I told her, ‘Ma, you’re not gonna believe this, but I was with the Beatles.’ She looked at her girl friend, like, ‘She’s crazy—she thinks she was with the Beatles.’”

  “So who are you making it with now?” I asked her.

  Geraldine giggled and pointed across the room to a handsome blond guy who was new in the crowd then. “I’m having an affair with Joe Dallesandro, actually. He’s asked me to marry him.”

  I’d heard that Joe was already married, to the daughter of the woman his father was living with, or something.

  “But Joe’s already married, isn’t he?”

  “Yeah,” she said with a wave of her hand, “but you know with him, that doesn’t matter….” Then her expression turned serious. “He’s very much in love with me,” she said. Then in one split second the seriousness turned into a fit of hysterical laughing.

  We’d met Joe Dallesandro when he wandered by mistake into the apartment in the Village where we were shooting a reel for Loves of Ondine—he was on his way to visit somebody in another apartment in the building. But when we saw the reel with him in it developed, he turned out to have a screen look and a hot-cold personality that Paul got very excited about.

  Paul was always studying faces—how to light them, how to photograph them. He’d walk by with a picture of Jackie Kennedy, murmuring, “Did you ever see a photographer’s dream like this face—look how wide apart the eyes are.” He used to study Eric and tell me, “Eric has one of the few perfectly symmetrical faces I’ve ever seen.” But something he admired even more than a person with a perfect face was a person with a flaw who knew how to play it down: “Elvis,” he pointed out to me once, holding a still from Loving You, “has absolutely no chin—that’s why he’s so intelligent to wear these high collars that stand up.”