POPism

by Andy Warhol

  Paul seemed to see Joe as another Brando or James Dean—a person with the kind of screen magic that’d appeal to both men and women. When I saw Paul one day looking Joe’s face over critically, holding his hair back so he could pick out his “bad side,” I could tell that Paul was really interested in making movies with him.

  Of course, Paul wasn’t doing any of the photography on our movies yet—I was still doing it all. But the next year when I was in the hospital, he made Flesh by himself, and Joe was the star. Eventually, he became Paul’s main star. (“Don’t try to act, Joe—just stand there,” I heard Paul yell at him during the shooting of Trash. “Stop the Method moping—just talk. And whatever you do, don’t smile unless you don’t mean it!”)

  So Joe was just starting to be around now, and he was in Max’s that night, across from Jim Morrison, who’d come in with a pretty new girl. At another table was Billy Sullivan and Matty—two Brooklyn kids—talking to Amy Goodman—her father owned Marvel Comics—and Matty was telling them that people shouldn’t have houses anymore, that they should just have “rest depots.” And right beyond them was Jimi Hendrix with one of those beautiful black girls—Devon or Pat Hartley or Emeretta, I can’t remember which one, they were all friends. At about three in the morning, Andrea came tearing into the back room in a velvet miniskirt up to her crotch and a big-brimmed velvet hat. She climbed up onto the big round table where we were sitting, ripped her blouse open, and screamed, “It’s Show Time! And everything’s coming up roses! Marilyn’s gone five years, so love me while you can, I’ve got a heart of gold!”

  This was her basic routine. Some nights she’d get too crazy and get into fights, and Mickey would throw her out for a few weeks. But if all she did was stand on the table, rip open her blouse, and sing a couple of numbers, that was fine. Usually, she’d also grab her tits and tell everyone, “I’m a real woman—look at these grapefruits! I’m gonna be on top tonight!” Geraldine would always egg her on, screaming, “More! Take more off! More! More!” Then Andrea would go find some guy and tease him till he got fairly interested—and then freak out if he even so much as touched her. Patti was over in the corner, and I heard her telling a boy named Robin, a “security guard” at Tiger Morse’s boutique where there’d been a lot of shoplifting (“At least half the stock leaves without saying good-bye,” Tiger once told me), “I don’t believe in wearing clothes, anyway, so why should I pay for them?”

  As I said, I tried to imagine these kids at school or work. I tried really hard, but I couldn’t—I couldn’t imagine them anywhere but right there in Max’s back room.

  When Taylor Mead left New York in ’64 to go live in Europe, he was a little disappointed in my filmmaking style; he felt I wasn’t being sensitive enough to actors’ performances. I remember how annoyed he was once when I filmed a reel of Jack Ker-ouac, Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, and him on the couch at the Factory—that I did it from the side and you couldn’t really see who was who—and then on top of that, we lost the reel. He thought that was just too irresponsible, and I heard he was calling me “incompetent.”

  Taylor had planned to stay in Europe until the Vietnam war was over, but already in’67 he was beginning to get tired of France, and when he saw Chelsea Girls screened at the Cinemathèque in Paris, he called me right up at the Factory.

  “I’ve been in La Dolce Vita land too long, Andy,” he said. “Chelsea Girls is the real thing. I’m coming home.”

  He came immediately, and the very day he got back here we filmed him with Brigid and Nico and a former child actor named Patrick Tilden Close (who’d played the boy Elliot Roosevelt in Sunrise at Campobello with Ralph Bellamy and Greer Garson) in a segment titled Imitation of Christ for the twenty-five-hour movie.

  Taylor couldn’t wait to tell me what had happened at the Paris screening of Chelsea Girls to make him come straight home.

  “Half the French audience walked out,” he said. “I was sitting next to the man who was supposed to be the most far-out person in Paris, and even he got up and left! That whole supposedly sophisticated audience was spooked. That’s when I decided that the United States has the worst and the best.”

  It was a typical scene at the Factory: Fred was over in a corner looking at some of Billy Name’s photographs that were going to go into the Swedish catalog for my art show in Stockholm the following February; Gerard was reading a letter from a friend in London about Brian Epstein’s death from an overdose; Susan Pile was sitting in front of her typewriter looking over the first issue of Cheetah magazine (the one with the nude Mama Cass centerfold on the bed of daisies); the radio was playing “Funky Broadway”; Paul was on the phone to a theater manager, telling him we’d have a new movie ready soon called Nude Restaurant, and clipping reviews of I, a Man and Bike Boy out of a stack of newspapers in front of him (Paul was obsessive about cutting articles and mentions out of the papers and pasting them into scrapbooks—his first job had been with an insurance company, cutting out clauses from one policy and pasting them into others so they could be photocopied, and he said that cutting and pasting was something he still liked to do); and I was busy signing some of the posters that I’d done that year for the Fifth New York Film Festival at Lincoln Center’s Philharmonic Hall. We were all just finishing up and getting ready to go out to a movie—Fred was reading out a list of what was playing around town: Point Blank!, Privilege, Games, To Sir with Love, A Man for All Seasons, A Man and a Woman, Bonnie and Clyde, Ulysses, In the Heat of the Night.…”

  As he got to Thoroughly Modern Millie, the grate to the elevator opened and a guy came in with a gun.

  Just like the time that woman came in and shot a hole through my Marilyns, again it just didn’t seem real to me. The guy made us all sit together on the couch: me, Taylor, Paul, Gerard, Patrick, Fred, Billy, Nico, Susan. It seemed to me like he was auditioning for one of our movies—I mean, subconsciously I thought he had to be joking. He started screaming that some guy who owed him five hundred dollars had told him to come to the Factory to collect it from us. Then he pointed the gun at Paul’s head and pulled the trigger—and nothing happened. (“See,” I thought, “he really is joking.”) Then he pointed it to the ceiling and pulled it again, and this time it went off. The shot seemed to surprise him, too—he got all confused and handed the gun to Patrick—and Patrick, like a good nonviolent flower child, said, “I don’t want it, man,” and handed it back to him. Then the guy took a woman’s plastic rain bonnet out of his pocket and put it on my head. “Expressway to Your Heart” was coming out of the radio. Everybody just sat there, too scared to say anything, except for Paul, who told the guy that the police would be coming any second now because of the shot. But the guy said he had to get his five hundred before he would leave—and now he was demanding movie equipment and a “hostage,” too.

  Suddenly Taylor jumped up onto his back. (Later Taylor said, “It felt like jumping a steel statue, he was so strong.”)

  As Taylor was hanging on his back, the guy started to open up a folding knife. Taylor slid off him, grabbed the rainhat from my head, ran to the window with it over his fist, and broke the glass, screaming to the YMCA across the way, “Help! Help! Police!”

  The guy ran down the stairs as fast as he could—he didn’t wait for the elevator. We looked out the window and saw him get into the passenger side of a big car with its trunk open, and then it drove away.

  Taylor said that he’d jumped the guy because he’d been so embarrassed for me, to see me looking so silly, sitting there in a woman’s rain bonnet.

  We went to see Jackie Curtis’s play, Glamour, Glory, and Gold, at Bastiano’s Cellar Studio on Waverly Place in the Village, and later on that night we were at Salvation on Sheridan Square when Jackie walked in with Candy Darling and two men I didn’t know. Jackie came over and sat down at the table where I was talking to three of the Stones—Brian, Keith, and Mick.

  Salvation had a sunken dance floor and colored lights, but no live band, just records (a good place for dan
cing, though—the music was incredibly loud). It had opened in the summer of ’67 where a place called the Downtown used to be. Bradley Pierce and Jerry Schatzberg and some other people were backing it, but Bradley was the one who actually ran it, deciding who to let in and who to keep out and who to throw out. He was like a father figure to the little groupies, and you could always count on seeing him over in a corner joking with them and sort of taking care of them—like a popular teacher in high school. The Salvation didn’t last that long, but it was great while it did: it gave you someplace to go right before Max’s. It was an easy money place for the owners, too—just records and drinks. Minimal—perfect for right then.

  Jackie and Candy were obviously trying to dump the two creeps they’d come in with. Candy went straight to the dance floor, and Brian looked over at her and said to me, “Who’s that guy?” Right away he knew.

  Jackie told me they’d just been at Max’s. “Tonight was only my second time there, and Candy’s first, and they put us upstairs,” he said. In the days before there was dancing there, upstairs was definitely not the place to be at Max’s—everybody was either downstairs at the bar or in the back room. No body went upstairs.

  “Our escorts,” Jackie said sarcastically, nodding toward the two guys, “thought it was just wonderful up there—they did not even suspect we were in Siberia. Candy and I were so embarrassed, we rushed to the ladies’ room and stayed there. She just kept putting more and more makeup on, and saying, ‘I’m not sitting there.’”

  “Who are they?” I asked.

  “Well, the tall one has been writing checks all week, and let’s put it this way—he’s got a lot of friends at Chase Manhattan, only none of them has ever heard of him…. Oh, well,” Jackie sighed, “it was nice while it lasted. We just found out. And the short one is a great fan of Judy Garland’s who thinks he has a lot in common with Candy, when all it really is, is their genitals, and he can’t resist informing everybody, ‘She’s a man.’”

  I noticed that Jackie was starting to do more femme things than when I’d first met him on the street that summer—he’d probably picked them up from being so close to Candy. “Why aren’t you in drag, too?” I came right out and asked him.

  “I’m too scared. My family lives around here, you know. People know me.”

  Candy came over to Jackie and whispered meaningfully, “Hope is here.”

  “Who’s Hope?” I asked Jackie after Candy had gone back to the dance floor.

  “Hope Stansbury. Over there with the long black hair and the pale, pale skin,” Jackie said, pointing to a girl in a nice-looking forties suit. “Candy moved in with her for a few months behind the Caffe Cino so she could study her, although Candy will never admit that—she gets mad when I even tell people where she got the name ‘Hope’…”

  “But she’s not using the ‘Hope’ anymore.”

  “Right.” Jackie said, handing me the cast list from the play where the billing was clearly “Candy Darling.”

  There was one very interesting thing about seeing Glamour, Glory, and Gold that night—I mean, besides Jackie having written it and Candy being in it. All ten of the male roles were played by Robert De Niro—it was his stage debut. Years later, after he got famous, Jackie explained to me how he happened to be in it.

  “He came over to the director’s apartment where Candy, Holly Woodlawn, and I were sitting around, and you would have thought he was crazy—we did. ‘I gotta be in the play! I gotta be in the play! Please! I’ll do anything!’ he kept pleading. I said to him, ‘Ten roles?’ He said, ‘Yes! And I’ll do the posters, too—my mother has a printing press.’ I said, ‘My grandmother has a bar, how do you do.’ He was fabulous in the play—the Voice gave him a rave.”

  One afternoon when we were screening Imitation of Christ, a nice-looking guy named Paul Solomon from The Merv Griffin Show came by “hunting for talent.” Brigid immediately got a crush on him and he immediately got a crush on Viva and Nico. And that’s how Merv got into his period of having quite a few “underground freaks” on his show. Ultra Violet had already been on a few times, and the people over there had liked her a lot—she was articulate, so I guess they thought that on the whole she was a pretty reasonable freak—and she paved the way for the other girls.

  Viva was also pretty good on television. But the two TV talk show disasters from our group were Brigid and Nico. When Nico was on, she played a little number on her little portable organ, which was fine, but then when Merv tried to talk to her afterward, she just sat there, saying absolutely nothing. He got so exasperated that right on the air he sent for somebody in production to come out onstage and explain to him exactly who this girl was and why she’d been booked on the show. This was after he’d crawled under his chair. That was Nico.

  And then there was Brigid. Brigid in those days was incredibly hostile. (After playing the Duchess in Chelsea Girls, she actually stayed in that character for a couple of years.) They’d asked me to go on The Merv Griffin Show, and I said no, like I always did to television. So I offered them Brigid instead, and I talked her into going on, I even promised to escort her to the studio and be right there in the audience for support.

  I went to pick her up at the George Washington Hotel on 23rd and Lexington where she was living. She was in a pink corduroy jacket and jeans and shiny black patent leather shoes, and she had little ribbon bows in her hair. It was raining hard outside, and she was afraid she was going to get her hair all wet, and she was moaning, “Oh, why did I ever say yes….” I called a cab to take us over to the taping at the Little Theater on West 44th Street, but when we passed Howard Johnson’s on Broadway she tried to bolt, pleading, “Let’s just split and have a malted.” (Brigid wasn’t too fat then, just sort of chubby with a beautiful baby face, and she never passed up a chance to eat if she could. She used to tell me stories about when she was little and her mother would bribe her to lose weight—fifteen dollars for every pound she lost—and how she’d just stuff socks under the doctor’s scale in her bedroom to lower the reading—and how Nora the housekeeper would find oatmeal bowls under her bed—minus the oatmeal—and how later on when she was married, she’d go out to dinner with friends and then go right home and have another dinner with her husband.) I told her we could go to Howard Johnson’s after the show.

  Backstage in the makeup room at the Little Theater, Dr. Joyce Brothers, another guest on the show that day, was being made up. They told Brigid that the makeup man would do her next, but being Brigid and being hostile, she told them very haughtily, “No,” as if to say that everybody else might be so plastic as to need makeup, but that she was real and didn’t need it! (But I noticed her slip out a Blush-on compact and dust herself when she thought no one was looking.) Then Bill Cosby and Vincent Price walked by, and I left Brigid alone and went down into the audience.

  When Brigid came out onstage, Merv tried to open the conversation up with a little mention of Ultra—probably thinking that the underground was one big happy family, or else that superstars would be smart enough to at least pretend that it was when they were on television, the way Hollywood people always did (“I had a lot of fun making the picture”). Instead, Brigid put Ultra down—way down. And Merv began to get nervous that Brigid wasn’t going to be so nice. He was right. Her attitude toward him was like he was a stranger annoying her in a bus depot—she was really giving him hostile looks there, and once she even threw a pure amphetamine glare straight into the camera. Merv tried everything pleasant he could think of, but still she wouldn’t change. The only good thing that happened was when he looked over her outfit and asked, “Who’s your designer?” and Brigid stood up and announced, “You can always tell by the little gold button: Levi Strauss.” Then Merv, a little encouraged, asked her what she did all day every day since she’d said she didn’t work, and Brigid told him the truth: “I dye every day. I go from beige to another color. I take beige jeans and I dye them in my bathtub.”

  The second the show was finished, Brigid ma
rched off the stage down into the audience to get me. She asked me how she’d done, and when I told her the truth, “Horrible,” she didn’t believe me! I asked her how many pokes of amphetamine she’d had before going on and she wouldn’t answer me. We went over to the Factory and watched the show with everybody there, and even seeing it, she was still so high she didn’t realize how bad she was. (She had absolutely no regrets about it at all until years later when she got off speed and finally got embarrassed.)

  The day after the show, fifty pairs of large beige corduroy jeans arrived at the Factory addressed to her—courtesy of Levi Strauss & Co. for the plug she’d given them on the air.

  In October I got into trouble over some college lectures that the big lecture bureau I was signed up with had booked me to do out west. I always took a group of superstars with me to the colleges where I had “speaking engagements” because I was too shy and scared to talk myself—the superstars would do all the talking and answer all the questions from the audience and I would just be sitting quietly up there onstage like a good mystique. I brought along people like Viva and Paul and Brigid and Ultra and Allen Midgette, a great-looking dancer we’d used in a few movies, and the colleges always seemed to be satisfied, even though it wasn’t exactly a “lecture” we were giving—it was more like a talk show with a dummied-up host.

  One night in Max’s, I was sitting between Paul and Allen—we were all supposed to be leaving the next day to give a few lectures out west, and I suddenly just didn’t feel like going, I had a lot of work to do. After I’d been complaining about it for a while, Allen suggested, “Well, why don’t I just go as you?” The few moments after he said that were like one of those classic movie scenes where everybody hears a dumb idea that they then slowly realize maybe isn’t so dumb. We all looked at each other and thought, “Why not?” Allen was so good-looking that they might even enjoy him more. All he’d have to do was keep quiet the way I did and let Paul do all the talking. And we’d been playing switch-the-superstar at parties and openings around New York for years, telling people that Viva was Ultra and Edie was me and I was Gerard—sometimes people would get mixed up all by themselves between people like Tom Baker (I, a Man) and Joe Spencer (Bike Boy) and we just wouldn’t bother to correct them, it was too much fun to let them go on getting it all wrong—it seemed like a joke to us. So these antistar identity games were something we were doing anyway, as a matter of course.