by Andy Warhol
Viva said that when she was talking to me on the phone from Kenneth’s salon and the shot went off, she thought someone must be playing with the bullwhip left over from the Velvet Underground days, because the sound was like a cracking noise, and that when she’d heard me screaming Valerie’s name, she’d thought I was saying “Viva!” Even when Fred got on the phone and told her I’d been shot, she still didn’t believe it, she said. She had someone at Kenneth’s call back to check it, and Jed told them the same thing.
Brigid said that the next night, after watching the news at Viva’s uptown, she walked into Max’s and the people around the cigarette machine told her, “Bobby Kennedy’s been shot.” She went on toward the back room and collided with Bob Rauschenberg who was coming down from the upstairs, all sweaty from dancing. “I told him the news about Bobby Kennedy,” she said, “and he fell to the floor, sobbing, and said, ‘Is this the medium?’”
“What was that supposed to mean?” I asked her.
“First you, then Bobby Kennedy,” she said. “Guns.”
One of the letters from Viva and Brigid said that when Louis Waldon came to the hospital the night of the shooting, all the girls in the waiting room rushed over to tell him he had to go home with Ivy and stay with her because she was saying that the moment I died, she was going to kill herself. Later he told Viva and Brigid, “I spent the whole night with her and those poor children of hers and she kept calling the hospital every ten seconds wanting to know if Andy had died yet so she could jump right out the window if he had. Finally, at six in the morning, they told her they thought he was going to make it, and I collapsed into bed.”
When I was well enough to, I read all the newspaper and magazine articles on the shooting that everyone had saved for me. The papers said that Valerie had been up to the Factory earlier that afternoon and that when she was told I wasn’t there, she went outside to wait till I showed up. Around seven o’clock, three hours after she shot me, she turned herself in to a rookie policeman in Times Square. She handed him the gun, the papers said, and then told him, “I am a flower child. The police are looking for me. They want me. He had too much control over my life.” The policeman took her to the 13th Precinct house, just two blocks away from the hospital where I was still in surgery. She told the police at the precinct, “I have a lot of very involved reasons. Read my manifesto, and it will tell you what I am.” Later on in court, she told the judge, “It’s not often I shoot somebody. I didn’t do it for nothing.” The newspapers also quoted a lot from her S.C.U.M. manifesto.
As I’ve said, I was the headline of the New York Daily News—“ACTRESS SHOOTS ANDY WARHOL”—six years to the day from the June 4, 1962, “129 DIE IN JET” disaster headline that I’d silkscreened for my painting. The picture on the front page of the June 4, 1968, final was of Valerie in custody, holding a copy of the day’s early edition in her hand. The caption quoted her correcting, “I’m a writer, not an actress.”
I couldn’t figure out why, of all the people Valerie must have known, I had to be the one to get shot. I guess it was just being in the wrong place at the right time. That’s what assassination is all about. “If only Miles White had been home when I rang his doorbell,” I kept thinking, “maybe she would’ve gotten tired and left.”
Fred filled me in on what had happened with the police.
“They took Jed and me over to the 13th Precinct house,” he said. “They questioned us until about nine o’clock that night. They told us we were ‘material witnesses,’ and I was so naive I didn’t realize that that meant they were holding us as suspects!”
“Whaaaaat?” I said.
“Yes—until after they booked Valerie, I guess. They wouldn’t tell us anything. I kept demanding to know your condition, and they wouldn’t even tell me that.” He laughed in an ironic way. “They were probably hoping we’d confess.”
“They didn’t take Paul or Billy?”
“No, just Jed and me, because we were the only ones who’d actually seen the shooting. Viva came running in later, hysterical, and they questioned her for a while—she just told them what she’d heard over the phone.”
“Did the police lock up the Factory—rope it off or something?” I asked him. I had television police show “scene of the crime” images in my mind.
“About eight plainclothes detectives came up, and they were running all over the place, putting tape where the bullets were, saying things like”—Fred laughed—“ ‘Let’s take the slugs out of the wall.’ They got into everything—opened every drawer, went through, God, I don’t know, the stills of Sleep, old coffee shop receipts.… I kept telling them, ‘You know, these things you’re looking through have nothing at all to do with what happened.’ But of course they kept it up. They were going through color transparencies of the Flower paintings—anything—throwing photographs and slides around, running around bumping into each other…. It was like the Keystone Kops.”
I started to laugh, and it hurt. “Oh, please, Fred,” I had to tell him, “don’t say anything funny.” It’s strange how when you’re alone and you read something funny, you don’t laugh, but as soon as somebody else is there, you get the physical reaction.
“And after they’d been poking around for at least two hours—every drawer in every cabinet was pulled out—I saw a paper bag sitting right on top of the desk where you were shot.
“I went over to the bag, and I said to the cop—who was sitting there leafing through Paul’s photographs of Joe—‘What’s this?‘ Then I looked inside and—are you ready?—in this paper bag was another gun, Valerie’s address book, and a Kotex pad!”
“Are you serious?” I said. Then I remembered the paper bag she’d been twisting in the elevator. “And you mean it was sitting right on top of the desk all that time and the police never even looked inside it?”
“That’s right.”
Fred also mentioned that when Valerie began shooting, it was quite a few moments before he realized what was actually happening, and his first thought was “Oh, my God, they’re bombing the Communist party.” As I said, the Communists had their offices on the eighth floor.
The shooting put a whole new perspective on my memories of all the nutty people I’d spent so much time with. I thought about when the girl came up to the 47th Street Factory and shot through the Marilyn canvases, and about the guy doing Russian roulette there. I thought about all the people I’d seen with guns—even Vera used to carry one. But I’d always thought it was unreal—or else that it was just a joke. It still seemed unreal, like watching a movie. Only the pain seemed real—everything around it was still a movie.
I realized that it was just timing that nothing terrible had ever happened to any of us before now. Crazy people had always fascinated me because they were so creative—they were incapable of doing things normally. Usually they would never hurt anybody, they were just disturbed themselves; but how would I ever know again which was which?
The fear of getting shot again made me think that I’d never again enjoy talking to somebody whose eyes looked weird. But when I thought about that, I got confused, because it included almost everybody I really enjoyed! I decided that I wouldn’t try to plan anything out, that I’d just wait and see what happened when I finally did go out around people again.
While I was in the hospital, Paul gave me reports on the local filming of John Schlesinger’s Midnight Cowboy. Before I was shot, they’d asked me to play the Underground Filmmaker in the big party scene, and I’d suggested Viva for the part instead. They liked the idea of that. And then John Schlesinger had asked Paul to make an “underground movie” to be shown during the “underground party” scene, so Paul went and filmed Ultra for that. Then the casting agent had asked Paul to round up a lot of people we knew—the kids around Max’s—to be day players and extras. I felt like I was missing a big party, lying there in the hospital like that, but everybody kept me up to the minute on what was happening, they were all so excited about being in a Hollywood movie.
• • •
I had the same jealous feeling thinking about Midnight Cowboy that I had had when I saw Hair and realized that people with money were taking the subject matter of the underground, counterculture life and giving it a good, slick, commercial treatment. What we’d had to offer—originally, I mean—was a new, freer content and a look at real people, and even though our films weren’t technically polished, right up through ’67 the underground was one of the only places people could hear about forbidden subjects and see realistic scenes of modern life. But now that Hollywood—and Broadway, too—was dealing with those same subjects, things were getting a little confused: before, the choice had been like between black and white, and now it was like between black and gray. I realized that with both Hollywood and the underground making films about male hustlers—even though the two treatments couldn’t have been more different—it took away a real drawing card from the underground, because people would rather go see the treatment that looked better. It was much less threatening. (People do tend to avoid new realities; they’d rather just add details to the old ones. It’s as simple as that.) I kept feeling, “They’re moving into our territory.” It made me more than ever want to get money from Hollywood to do a beautiful-looking and sounding movie with our own attitude, so at last we could compete equally. I was so jealous: I thought, “Why didn’t they give us the money to do, say, Midnight Cowboy? We would have done it so real for them.” I didn’t understand then that when they said they wanted real life, they meant real movie life!
“Isn’t it amazing?” Paul said on the phone one night while I was still in the hospital. “Hollywood’s just gotten around to doing a movie about a 42nd Street male hustler, and we did ours in ’65. And there are all our great New York people sitting on their set all day—Geraldine, Joe, Ondine, Pat Ast, Taylor, Candy, Jackie, Geri Miller, Patti D’Arbanville—and they never even get around to using them…”
“What’s Dustin like?” I asked.
“Oh, he’s very nice.”
“And Jon Voight?”
“He’s very nice, too…. So’s Brenda Vaccaro,” he said, absently. “They’re all very nice.” Then he laughed, remembering Sylvia Miles. “And Sylvia’s absolutely indomitable. A force of nature.”
I got the feeling that making that little film of Ultra and then just hanging around a movie set watching the production had been pretty frustrating for Paul—he thought he should be out there doing a film himself. After all, he’d done his own films before he came to the Factory.
“Well, you know,” I said, “maybe we did our film too early. Maybe now is the smart time to do a film about a male hustler. Why don’t you do another one—this time it can be in color.”
“That’s what I was sort of thinking,” Paul admitted.
In July, while I was still in the hospital, Paul began filming Flesh with Jed as an assistant. They didn’t shoot too much film and most of what they shot was actually used. Paul liked long takes.
One afternoon Geraldine Smith rang up my room right after she’d finished shooting her first scene.
“You’re in Paul’s movie?” I said.
“Yeah. Paul called me up this morning and said, ‘Why don’t you meet us at Fred’s apartment; we’re going to shoot some film,’ and I thought he meant like a little home movie, and my two girl friends were warning me, ‘Don’t be in an Andy Warhol movie—there’ll be a spell on you all your life,’ but I went over to Fred’s anyway and did it—you know how I love Paul.” Geraldine had a big crush on Paul.
“What did you have to do?” I asked her.
“Paul told me Joe was my husband or something, I don’t know, and threw me in front of the camera and said to do whatever I was going to do, so I told Joe to go out and hustle so I could pay for my girl friend’s abortion.”
“Who played your girl friend?”
“Patti.”
“Patti D’Arbanville’s in the movie? How great! Then what did you do? Did you make it with Joe?”
“Are you crazy? In a movie?”
“You didn’t make it with him?”
“Although I must say, he had a hard-on.” She giggled.
“Ooo. How exciting. Was it really big and hard? What did you do?”
“I—” She started laughing. “—I tied a bow around it.”
“Reeeeally?” I said. “Around his cock? And then what did you do?”
“You know me,” she said. “I started to laugh.”
On July 28 I went home from the hospital. My whole middle was taped. I looked down at my body and I was afraid of it—I was scared to take a shower, especially, because then I would have to take away the bandages, and the scars were all so fresh; they were sort of pretty, though, purplish red and brown.
For the following week and a half I had to stay in bed, and that’s how I spent my fortieth birthday on August 6. When I called people up and they heard my voice for the first time since the shooting, sometimes they’d start to cry. I was very moved to see that people cared about me so much, but I just tried to get everything back to a light gossipy level as quick as possible.
David Croland called one morning and I asked him what had finally happened with him and Susan Bottomly, because she’d come back from Europe the day before I was shot, so I’d never gotten the full story.
“Things were just too crazy between us,” he said. He still didn’t sound too happy when he talked about it; I could tell he really missed her. “The night she got back,” he said, “it was sweltering, and I just knew she was going to say she was leaving me. Then Nico came over to the house to tell us you’d been shot. We just sat there in the heat not knowing what to do—should we go to the hospital? Shouldn’t we? Finally Nico said, ‘We should siiiiit here on the flooorrrrr and waaaaiiiiit with the candles burrrrrning and praaaay.’ I was so freaked that I thought, ‘You know, she’s right.’ So we lit all the candles and Nico closed the blinds and we sat down on the floor. The place looked like a church. Nico was leaning over back and forth, Susan was completely freaked out from being on a crazy up trip in Rome and then coming back and having this thing happen with you right away, and I was going nuts because I knew Susan was going to leave me and you were in the hospital—we didn’t even know if you were going to live or not. Whenever we called the hospital, they said, ‘All the lines are jammed for him. All we can tell you is that he is in very critical condition.’ So it was goose bumps for hours and hours. The three of us sat there like that all night. Nico finally left. We called the hospital again, and they said you were better. A few hours after that, Susan split for Paris.”
Henry Geldzahler’s career at the Met had taken a big jump in the spring of ’67 when he was named curator of twentieth-century art, and now as I convalesced, we had a few long leisurely chats, almost like in the old days, and he gave me the inside scoop on some of the dramas that had been going on at the museum. There’d been a confrontation between him and Thomas Hoving, the director of the Met, over the exhibition of a huge Pop painting.
During the summer of ’67, Henry told me, he’d gone to Paris to look over a show the French government wanted to send to the Met:
“It was unbelievable what they had in that show,” he said. “The finance minister’s brother-in-law’s dentist was in it, the cousin of the fiancée of the security guard. I went back and told Hoving, ‘Under no circumstances can we take that show,’ and Hoving said, ‘You’re absolutely right.’ And then, without saying another thing to me about it, he signed the agreement to bring it right over. I gulped, but I didn’t say anything.”
Then in February of ’68 Hoving took Jim Rosenquist’s big Pop painting, F-lll, on loan from Bob Scull, and exhibited it right next to Emanuel Leutze’s Washington Crossing the Delaware. Hoving’s idea, apparently, was to contrast a historical painting from the sixties with an older one, but Henry felt that this was cutting into his own twentieth-century art territory, and he resigned.
“While I was on vacation,” he told me, “B
ob Scull and Hoving had talked at a dinner party or something and decided that the F-lll should be shown at the Met. True, it’s a fascinating picture—however, I’m the curator of twentieth-century art, not Scull and not Hoving. So I handed in my letter of resignation, and about ten days later Hoving called me up and admitted that he’d been calling all over the country to get recommendations for a replacement for me and that everyone just told him how crazy he was to be looking for one. So I agreed to go back to work, but with the understanding that I was in complete charge of all twentieth-century art.”
When I was up and padding around the house, I had all the footage from Lonesome Cowboys brought over from the Factory; hours and hours of one-of-a-kind scenes. I worked with just a projector and a splicer, chopping whole blocks of it here and there to cut it down to a standard two-hour running time.
With painting, I didn’t have the strength to work with big canvases yet, so I did lots of tiny little Happy Rockefeller paintings that were seven by six inches each while I watched TV. It was a violent summer on the news. I watched the Soviets tank into Czechoslovakia, and then came the Chicago Democratic Convention where the demonstrators and the Chicago police fought in the big park and on the streets.
By September I was back at work.
I had to wear heavy surgical corsets to support my scarred sections, but as glued-together as I felt, I was thrilled to be back at the Factory.
However, every single time I’d hear the elevator in the shaft just about to stop at our floor, I’d get jumpy. I’d wait for the doors to open so I could check who it was. We decided to have an entrance hallway built so we could screen people before we let them into the main area, and in the wall there we put a Dutch door—closed at the bottom, open on top. Of course, these security things were just symbolic—they wouldn’t stop anyone who had even a good kicking foot, never mind a gun. Still, the place at least looked like it would be much harder to crack. Anyway, the days when people could just drift in were over.
