POPism

by Andy Warhol

  It upset me a lot to see Viva lose control. After a scene like that, you can never trust a person in the same way again, because from that point on, you have to look at them with the idea that they might do a repeat and freak out again.

  I left Viva outside on the street and went upstairs. When I told Paul what had just happened, he said that he wasn’t at all surprised—she’d called him half an hour earlier from a pay phone, screaming, “Listen, you fag bastard! Get down here and let me in.” He’d hung up on her.

  That incident with Viva really got me wondering about whether the problems with her parents had really started with them—for the first time it was dawning on me that maybe she’d twisted all those stories about her father trying to beat her up; maybe she drove him to it, maybe he went after her only after she’d driven him absolutely crazy—and it also made me wonder about Edie’s family. I’d always just accepted Edie’s story that her whole childhood was a nightmare, but now I started thinking that you should always hear both sides.

  • • •

  Nico was staying with Fred during the spring of’68, in the apartment he’d taken on East 16th Street, just a walk across Union Square from the Factory.

  Fred doted on eccentrics, and Nico was a true specimen: among other things, she thrived only in the gloom—the gloomier she could make the atmosphere around her, the more radiant she became. And the more peculiarities Nico indulged in, the more fascinated Fred became—to find a woman that beautiful and that eccentric was a fantasy come true for him. She liked to lie in the bathtub all night with candles burning around her, composing the songs that would be on her second album, Marble Index, and when Fred came home from Max’s really late, she’d still be in the water.

  Fred was back and forth to Europe a lot. When he arrived back at the apartment one night with all his suitcases, he stumbled into the living room and found that he couldn’t switch the lights on. He saw a candle flickering in another room around a corner, and then Nico walked in holding a candelabra.

  “Oh, Nico! I’m so sorry!” he said, suddenly realizing that Con Edison must have turned off the electricity. “I just remembered I forgot to pay the light bill, and here you’ve been in the dark all this time!”

  “Nooooo, it’s fiiiiine,” she said, positively beaming with joy. She’d had the happiest time of her whole life, drifting around there in the dark for a whole month.

  In May, Paul, Viva, and I went out west together to talk at a few colleges, and once we were out there, we started filming a surfing movie in La Jolla, California.

  La Jolla was one of the most beautiful places I’d ever seen. We rented a mansion by the sea and a couple of other houses for the people who were going to be in the movie—some of them had flown out with us and the others just met us there.

  Everybody was so happy being in La Jolla that the New York problems we usually made our movies about went away—the edge came right off everybody. I mean, it wasn’t like our going out, say, to the Hamptons to film, where it was just a day-trip extension of New York City.

  We’d lounge around listening to our transistors on the beach, playing songs like “Cowboys to Cowgirls,” “A Beautiful Morning,” cuts from the Jimi Hendrix Axis album. From time to time I’d try to provoke a few fights so I could film them, but everybody was too relaxed even to fight. I guess that’s why the whole thing turned out to be more of a memento of a bunch of friends taking a vacation together than a movie. Even Viva’s complaints were more mellow than usual.

  Back in New York, on June 3, I was at home on the phone all morning, mostly to Fred, getting the gossip. Fred was still at home, too. The night before on 16th Street, coming home from Max’s, he’d gotten mugged by three little black kids with knives. Even the hippies down in the East Village had gotten really aggressive lately when they asked you for (demanded, really) “change.” Attitudes out on the street weren’t like the summer before when everybody was acting so enchanted.

  “It happened right outside your building?” I said. “Was Nico watching?”

  “No,” Fred sighed. “When I finally staggered into the apartment, she was in the bathtub as usual with all her clothes on, singing.”

  Ordinarily, Fred would get up early in the morning and zombie-zip over to the Factory. With Fred, it didn’t matter if he hadn’t gone to bed till five of nine—at nine sharp he’d be dashing across Union Square Park to work. Getting to the Factory “office” that early didn’t make much sense, since nothing much went on there until after one or two, but that didn’t matter to Fred—he wanted to set a good example for himself. He’d sit there with his black coffee, take out his fountain pen, and write elegant-looking memos to himself in those little leather-bound, gilt-edged, fine-papered European datebooks.

  But this morning it was eleven o’clock and he was still in bed. He sounded really blue; the muggers took a beautiful wristwatch that he said could never be replaced. He quickly changed the subject (his philosophy was always to “chin up” and forget about things) by telling me that he’d heard at Max’s that Susan Bottomly and David Croland were breaking up. Earlier in the year, we’d introduced Susan to Christian Marquand, who’d been a matinée idol in France before becoming a director, and he’d put her in Terry Southern’s Candy—a little scene where she runs down the street crying, “Candy! You forgot your shoe!” They filmed that part here, but then he flew her to Italy to do something, I forget what, with the Living Theater. She’d just come back from Rome, she’d stayed over there for months.

  Fred and I spoke some more on the phone—it was Monday, so we had the whole weekend to rehash—and by the time we were done, the early part of the day had gone by.

  I got down to 33 Union Square around four-fifteen. I’d done some errands in the East Fifties and, since I was in the neighborhood, I’d rung the bell of a costume designer friend of mine, Miles White, on East 55th Street, but he wasn’t home, so I headed down to the Factory. As I paid the cab driver, I saw Jed coming down the street with a bag of fluorescent lights from the hardware store. I stood there for a few seconds waiting for him, beside a kid who was leaning against the building, blasting “Shoo Be Do Be Doo Be Doo Da Day” on his radio. Then Valerie Solanis came along and the three of us went into the building together.

  I didn’t know Valerie very well. She was the founder of an organization she called “S.C.U.M.” (for the “Society for Cutting Up Men”). She would talk constantly about the complete elimination of the male sex, saying that the result would be an “out-of-sight, groovy, all-female world.”

  She once brought a script to the Factory and gave it to me to read—it was called Up Your Ass. I looked through it briefly and it was so dirty I suddenly thought she might be working for the police department and that this was some kind of entrapment. In fact, when we’d gone to Cannes with Chelsea Girls the year before and I’d given that interview to Cahiers du Cinéma, it was Valerie Solanis I was referring to when I said, “People try to trap us sometimes. A girl called up and offered me a film script… and I thought the title was so wonderful, and I’m generally so friendly that I invited her to come over with it, but it was so dirty I think she must have been a lady cop…”

  I had gone on to tell the interviewer that we hadn’t seen her since. But then after we got back to New York, she started calling the Factory asking for her script back. I’d left it lying around somewhere, and I couldn’t find it—somebody must have thrown it out while we were off in Cannes. When I finally admitted to her that it was lost, she started asking me for money. She was staying at the Chelsea Hotel, she said, and she needed the money to pay her rent. One afternoon in September when she called, we were in the middle of shooting a sequence for, I, a Man, so I said why didn’t she come over and be in the movie and earn twenty-five dollars instead of asking for a handout. She came right over and we filmed her in a short scene on a staircase and she was actually funny and that was that. The main thing was, she only called occasionally after that, with those same man-hating S.C.U.M. speec
hes, but she didn’t bother me so much anymore—by now I’d decided that she wasn’t a lady cop after all. I guess enough people must have told me that she’d been around for quite a while and confirmed that she was a bona fide fanatic.

  It was a very hot day, and as Jed, Valerie, and I waited for the elevator, I noticed that she was wearing a fleece-lined winter coat and a high turtleneck sweater, and I thought how hot she must be—although, surprisingly, she wasn’t even sweating. She was wearing pants, more like trousers (I’d never seen her in a dress), and holding a paper bag and twisting it—bouncing a little on the balls of her feet. Then I saw that there was something even more odd about her that day: when you looked close, she’d put on eye makeup and lipstick.

  We got off at the sixth floor and stepped right out into the middle of the studio. Mario Amaya was there, an art critic and teacher who I’d known since the fifties. He was waiting to talk to me about putting on a show somewhere.

  Fred was up front at his big desk writing a letter in longhand. Paul was across from him at his matching desk, talking on the phone. Jed had gone to the back to put in the fluorescent lights. I walked over to Paul.

  The windows in the front were all open—the doors to the balcony, too—but it was still so hot. They were European-style windows—two vertical panes in wood frames that opened in and you latched them like shutters. We liked to keep them swinging free, not fastened back by anything, so if there was a breeze they’d move in and out, back and forth. But there was no breeze.

  “It’s Viva,” Paul said, standing up and handing me the phone. I sat down in his chair, and he walked to the back. Viva was telling me that she was uptown at Kenneth’s salon where the Midnight Cowboy production people were trying to match her hair color to the hair of Gastone Rossilli, the boy she was doing a scene with.

  Both Paul’s and Fred’s desks were actually low metal file cabinets with big ten-foot by five-foot boards across between them—the working surface was glass, so that when you looked down to write something, you could see yourself. I leaned over the desk to see how I looked—talking to her was making me think about my own hair. Viva kept gabbing, about the movie, about how she was going to play an underground filmmaker at a party scene where Jon Voight meets Brenda Vaccaro. I motioned for Fred to pick up and continue the conversation for me, and as I was putting the phone down, I heard a loud exploding noise and whirled around: I saw Valerie pointing a gun at me and I realized she’d just fired it.

  I said, “No! No, Valerie! Don’t do it!” and she shot at me again. I dropped down to the floor as if I’d been hit—I didn’t know if I actually was or not. I tried to crawl under the desk. She moved in closer, fired again, and then I felt horrible, horrible pain, like a cherry bomb exploding inside me.

  As I lay there, I watched the blood come through my shirt and I heard more shooting and yelling. (Later—a long time later—they told me that two bullets from a .32-caliber gun had gone through my stomach, liver, spleen, esophagus, left lung, and right lung.) Then I saw Fred standing over me and I gasped, “I can’t breathe.” He kneeled down and tried to give me artificial respiration but I told him no, no, that it hurt too much. He got up from the floor and rushed to the phone to call an ambulance and the police.

  Then suddenly Billy was leaning over me. He hadn’t been there during the shooting, he’d just come in. I looked up and I thought he was laughing, and that made me start to laugh, too, I can’t explain why. But it hurt so much, and I told him, “Don’t laugh, oh, please don’t make me laugh.” But he wasn’t laughing, it turned out, he was crying.

  It was almost a half-hour before the ambulance got there. I just stayed still on the floor, bleeding.

  Immediately after I was shot, I learned later, Valerie turned and fired at Mario Amaya, hitting him in the hip. He ran for the back room and slammed the big double doors. Paul had been in the bathroom and hadn’t even heard the shots. When he came out, he saw Mario, bleeding, holding the door shut. He went to look through the projection room glass, and saw Valerie on the other side trying to force the door. When it didn’t open, she walked over to my little office on the side—it was closed, so she tried turning the knob. It didn’t open, either—Jed was holding it shut from the inside, watching the knob going around and around—but she didn’t know that, she left it for locked. Then she went to the front again and pointed the gun at Fred, who said, “Please! Don’t shoot me! Just leavel” She seemed confused—undecided whether to shoot him or not—so she went and pushed the button for the elevator. Then she walked back to where he was cornered, down on the floor, and pointed the gun at him again. Right when it looked like she was about to pull the trigger, the elevator doors opened suddenly and Fred said, “There’s the elevator! Just take it!”

  She did.

  When Fred called the ambulance for me, they said that if he wanted them to sound the emergency siren, it would cost fifteen dollars extra. Mario wasn’t hurt badly, he was walking around. He actually called for another ambulance for himself.

  Of course, I was unaware of all this at the time. I didn’t know a thing. I was just on the floor, bleeding. When the ambulance came, they didn’t have a stretcher with them, so they put me in a wheelchair. I thought that the pain I’d felt lying on the floor was the worst you could ever feel, but now that I was in a sitting position, I knew it wasn’t.

  They took me to Columbus Hospital on 19th Street between Second and Third avenues, five or six blocks away. Suddenly there were lots of doctors around me, and I heard things like “Forget it” and “… no chance…” and then I heard someone saying my name—it was Mario Amaya—telling them that I was famous and that I had money.

  I was in surgery for about five hours, with Dr. Giuseppe Rossi and four other great doctors working on me. They brought me back from the dead—literally, because I’m told that at one point I was gone. For days and days afterward, I wasn’t sure if I was back. I felt dead. I kept thinking, “I’m really dead. This is what it’s like to be dead—you think you’re alive but you’re dead. I just think I’m lying here in a hospital.”

  As I was coming down from my operation, I heard a television going somewhere and the words “Kennedy” and “assassin” and “shot” over and over again. Robert Kennedy had been shot, but what was so weird was that I had no understanding that this was a second Kennedy assassination—I just thought that maybe after you die, they rerun things for you, like President Kennedy’s assassination. Some of the nurses were crying, and after a while, I heard things like “the mourners in St. Patrick’s.” It was all so strange to me, this background of another shooting and a funeral—I couldn’t distinguish between life and death yet, anyway, and here was a person being buried on the television right in front of me.

  My first visitor was unofficial—Vera Cruise, disguised as a nurse.

  I was lying in the bed, trying not to think about the pain that racked my body. I was in intensive care, so there was someone else in the room, a young kid I recognized from around Max’s who’d overdosed on some drug, but the doctors and his parents didn’t know which one. They’d tried to find out from his wife, they told the doctor, but she was on so many drugs herself that she wouldn’t tell them. Sometimes this kid would get delirious and start screaming, and that’s when I noticed that there was another drama going on, that when nobody was looking, a certain nurse would come in and she and the boy would hug and kiss. She knew what drug he was coming down off of, and when he got too bad she’d get it out of the cupboard and give it to him. I would keep my mind off the pain by watching them.

  On one of the first days—I couldn’t tell the days from the nights, it was just cycles of pain—I looked up at the face on top of the nurse’s uniform beside my bed and there was Vera. Then I understood why they don’t let you see people when you’re in the hospital—because the slightest emotional thing makes the pain come more.

  “Oh, go away, Vera,” I moaned. All I could think was that she’d come to steal drugs out of the cabinet, and I di
dn’t want trouble.

  My mother visited me with my two brothers from Pennsylvania and my nephew Paulie, who was studying to be a priest. Paulie stayed on with my mother after the other relatives left, because she didn’t speak much English and was sort of batty by then. She couldn’t be left alone, certainly, since she had a habit of letting anybody into the house who rang the bell and said they knew me. Any reporter could have gone right up there to talk to her and, if nobody was there to stop her, she’d take them on a complete tour, play my tapes for them, arrange a marriage with me if it was a girl, or with one of my nieces if it was a man—I mean, any embarrassing thing could happen if my mother became a hostess.

  When I was shot, Gerard had gone up to my house to get her and bring her over to the hospital, and that first night he and Viva took her home. Then somewhere along the line, I heard that the Duchess had been up at the house, too, visiting my mother, so that was food for some horrible thought.

  If you value your privacy, don’t ever get shot, because your private life turns into an open house very quickly.

  Viva and Brigid were sweet and wrote me long letters together every day on yellow legal pads, telling me what was happening with everybody we knew, and eventually, when I could take phone calls, I learned more details about the shooting and the days right after it.

  Brigid said that at four o’clock on Monday when I was getting shot, she was in a cab on her way over to the Factory from Lamston’s five-and-dime store where she’d gone to buy her week’s supply of Rit and Tintex (she was still “dyeing every day”), but that then she changed her mind and told the driver to take her home to the George Washington Hotel instead—she’d had a fight with Paul the day before and didn’t want to face him—and that’s how she missed the shooting.