POPism
Page 34
Candy suffered a big disappointment in ’69. In fact, she never got over it. As soon as the news that a movie of Myra Breckenridge was going to be made appeared in the trade papers, Candy began writing letters to the studio and the producers and whoever else she could think of, telling them that she’d lived the complete life of Myra and that she knew even more about forties movies than Gore Vidal did. It was true.
And they gave the part to Raquel Welch.
Poor Candy wrote begging them to please, please reconsider. She knew that if there was ever going to be a role in Hollywood for a drag queen, this was it. When she didn’t hear anything back, something changed with Candy—it wasn’t a change you would notice unless you knew her very well (after all, she was always giving some level of a performance). But suddenly she had to face the fact that Hollywood had slammed the door on her. All her life she’d been rejected and rejected by everybody and everything, and all through it she’d held onto the fantasy that even if no place else in the world would take her in, that Hollywood would, because Hollywood was as unreal as she was; Hollywood would surely understand—somehow. So when she didn’t get the part of Myra and she saw that Hollywood didn’t want her, either, I saw her become bitter.
The big nude theater craze hit in ’69. It was only the year before that police had stood by in San Francisco to arrest the Living Theater performers if they so much as started taking their clothes off. Then all of a sudden the new thing was for performers to take all their clothes off and dance around completely naked on stage in long-playing well-advertised shows like Oh! Calcutta! and Dionysus in ’69.
During this period I took thousands of Polaroids of genitals. Whenever somebody came up to the Factory, no matter how straight-looking he was, I’d ask him to take his pants off so I could photograph his cock and balls. It was surprising who’d let me and who wouldn’t.
Personally, I loved porno and I bought lots of it all the time—the really dirty, exciting stuff. All you had to do was figure out what turned you on, and then just buy the dirty magazines and movie prints that are right for you, the way you’d go for the right pills or the right cans of food. (I was so avid for porno that on my first time out of the house after the shooting I went straight to 42nd Street and checked out the peep shows with Vera Cruise and restocked on dirty magazines.)
I’d always wanted to do a movie that was pure fucking, nothing else, the way Eat had been just eating and Sleep had been just sleeping. So in October ’68 I shot a movie of Viva having sex with Louis Waldon. I called it just Fuck.
At first we kept it at the Factory, screening it occasionally for friends. Then, when we opened Lonesome Cowboys in May and it began to die pretty quickly, we had to think about what to replace it with, and I wondered if it should be Fuck.
I was still confused about what was legal in pornography and what wasn’t, but at the end of July, what with all sorts of dirty movies playing around town and dirty magazines like Screw on every newsstand, we thought, oh, why not, and put Fuck into the Garrick Theater after changing the title to Blue Movie. It ran a week before getting seized by the cops. They came all the way down to the Village, sat through Viva’s speeches about General MacArthur and the Vietnam war, through Louis calling her tits “dried apricots,” and through her story about the police harassing her in the Hamptons for not wearing a bra, etc., etc., etc.—and then they seized the print of our movie. Why, I wondered, hadn’t they gone over to Eighth Avenue and seized things like Inside Judy’s Box or Tina’s Tongue? Were they more “socially redeeming,” maybe? It all came down to what they wanted to seize and what they didn’t, basically. It was ridiculous.
• • •
Viva wanted to go to Paris in November ’68 so I gave her a round-trip ticket. In January I got a letter from her saying, “If you don’t send me money, I’ll work against you as well as I worked for you.” When somebody threatens me, I don’t listen to them anymore. Naturally I was disappointed, but with Viva, I was getting used to disappointment. A telegram from her came in February saying essentially the same thing and I deliberately ignored it. Then we heard she’d gone to Los Angeles to star in Agnes Varda’s movie Lions Love.
The time did seem right for Viva to make it. More and more girls were picking up on her look—the elegant velvet and satin look, the tunic-length blouses over pants, the slouch and the bored gestures, and most of all the hair—the frizzed, full-blown, out-to-there hair.
In March while I was in the hospital for a follow-up operation, another telegram from Viva arrived at the Factory—this time from Las Vegas: it said she’d gotten married. About a week later she returned to New York, with her new husband, a French filmmaker named Michel that she’d met in Europe and taken out to Hollywood with her. I wished her luck in her marriage. As we talked, she was making little asides to the husband, asking his advice on what to do about this check or that photograph. She told me she was writing an autobiographical novel called Superstar for Putnam’s and that it would also be an exposé of the underground. She added that, as a matter of fact, she was taping this phone conversation of ours for a chapter in it.
At the end of the sixties it looked like Hollywood was finally about to acknowledge our work and give us money to make a big-budget 35-mm movie. (Flesh, meanwhile, had opened in Germany and was a huge success. When Paul and Joe went over there to publicize it, they got mobbed.) Columbia Pictures wanted to do a project with us and they told us to go ahead and put some sort of script or treatment together.
About this time we met a writer named John Hallowell who was living in L.A. doing interviews with movie stars for the Los Angeles Times. John was doing a book called The Truth Game, a bunch of chapters on different stars but written sort of like a novel with him as the boy reporter main character. He came to see us in New York because he wanted to end the book with a chapter on the Factory crowd. He and Paul hit it off immediately and started collaborating on a screen treatment for us to take out to Hollywood—showing the different areas of life in L.A. It was tailored for a mix of our superstars with some Hollywood stars John said he could line up.
John went back to Hollywood to talk the idea up with the people out there. We’d get excited calls and telegrams from him saying things like “Raquel can’t wait,” or “Natalie says wonderful,” and I’d tease him about all the name-dropping. (Once he astounded me—he actually did put Rita Hayworth on the phone. But somehow we couldn’t really talk to each other, maybe because she was shy and I was shy. We mumbled something about art—she told me she’d once done a painting of a gardenia. She was very sweet, but it was sad because she was slurring her words and sounded sort of lost. She said she just knew I’d make her “the most super star of all.”)
In May, Columbia flew us out to L.A.
The conferences with the studio seemed to be going fine until one of the executives asked whether the Great Dane in the treatment was absolutely necessary. (This was the routine way they talked budgets down in Hollywood—he was just dutifully asking questions to sound economy-minded.) When Paul told him oh, yes, the dog was essential because one of the girls was “going to have an affair with it,” he went into shock. Paul assured him that the sex with the dog would be off-camera, but we could see that the roof had fallen in.
We didn’t hear another word from the studio. When we were back in New York, John called to say they had turned the project down for “moral reasons.” “Don’t you love it?” he sneered. “For ‘moral reasons’: They’re about as moral as Attila the Hun.”
That trip to L A. wasn’t a complete waste—we’d seen a real preview of the New Hollywood. Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper had just finished making Easy Rider. We saw a rough cut of it over at Peter’s house in one of the canyons. They put the film on the projector and as it started, Peter turned on his stereo and played all the rock songs that went with it—they weren’t actually on the print yet. (Afterward Paul teased him, “What a great idea—making a movie about your record collection!”) It was exciting to see you
ng kids like Peter and Dennis putting out the new youth image on their own terms. The idea of using rock that way made you think back to certain underground movies, but what made Easy Rider so new-looking was the Hollywood style of opening it up, getting it out, and moving it on the road. (And of course, it was Jack Nicholson’s first great role.)
I have to admit, though, that at the time I wasn’t so sure Easy Rider would be a box office hit, that people would accept its loose style. Little did I know that when it opened that coming July it would be the exact image millions of kids were fantasizing—being free and on the road, dealing dope and getting persecuted.
• • •
The superstars from the old Factory days didn’t come around to the new Factory much. Some of them said they didn’t feel comfortable with the whiteness of the place. When people called up looking for them (magazines doing stories or model agencies with jobs or just old friends of theirs who’d lost touch), we’d try to find out where they were staying and we’d leave messages around town for them. But things had changed.
By the end of ’69, after the yes-no-maybes/it’s on-it’s offs from L.A. had dragged on for a whole year, we were restless to get started on another movie.
Paul was tired of drugs being glamorized, he told me—especially in the movies. He wanted to completely take the romanticism away from drug-taking—shoot a movie about a Lower East Side junkie and just call it Trash. It sounded like a good idea to me and I said sure, to go ahead.
The cast was a new, younger, post-Pop group of kids (like Jane Forth, a sixteen-year-old beauty with great shaved eyebrows and Wesson-oiled hair). All the morality and restrictions that the early superstars had rebelled against seemed so far away—as unreal as the Victorian era seems to everybody today. Pop wasn’t an issue or an option for this new wave: it was all they’d ever known.
POSTSCRIPT
Some of those kids who were so special to us, who made our sixties scene what it was, died young in the seventies.
Edie stayed out in California, living quietly. She even got married. But she was in and out of hospitals and in 1971 she died of “acute barbital intoxication.”
One day little Andrea Feldman left some notes in the apartment where she lived with her family at Fifth Avenue and 12th Street. She said she was “heading for the Big Time” and then jumped out the fourteenth-floor window, clutching a Bible and a crucifix.
They found Eric Emerson one early morning in the middle of Hudson Street. Officially, he was labeled a hit-and-run victim, but we heard rumors that he’d overdosed and just been dumped there—in any case, the bicycle he’d been riding was intact.
Candy Darling never made it to Hollywood. Tennes see starred her in his off-Broadway play Small Craft Warnings, and that was the closest she ever came to regular show business. In 1974 she got cancer and lay dying for weeks at Columbus Hospital, just a few blocks from the Factory. Then she had the movie star’s funeral she’d always wanted, uptown at Frank Campbell’s.
One morning when we got to the Factory, the door to the darkroom at the back where Billy had locked himself in for two years was open and he was gone. The room smelled horrible.
There were literally thousands of cigarette butts in it and astrology-type charts all over the walls. We had the mess cleared out and the black walls painted white. A few weeks later we leased a copying machine and it became the Xerox room. About a year later someone told us they’d seen him in San Francisco, but I never saw or heard from him again after the note he’d tacked to the wall when he left that night. It said:
INDEX
****, 272, 291, 317–18
a, 362, 363
Abagnalo, George, 368
Agnelli, Gianni, 46
Agnelli, Marella, 246–47
Allen, Peter, 151–52
Allen, Woody, 141
Amaya, Mario, 342, 344, 345
America, Paul, 94, 157, 158, 323
American Ballet Theater, 72
Amos, Stanley, 67–69, 74–75, 197–201, 250
Amram, David, 39
Andersen, Eric, 134–35
Andress, Ursula, 141
Animals, 88
Anthology Film Archives, 61
Antonio, Emile de (“De”), 3–7, 11–15, 26, 30–31, 37, 38–39, 60, 61, 110, 112–14
Antonioni, Michelangelo, 267
Arbus, Diane, 335
Ari (Nico’s son), 230–31
Arman, 179
Arthur (club), 144, 153, 181, 237, 238, 241, 242
Ashbery, John, 18
Ast, Pat, 354
Atlantic Monthly, The, 119
Baby Jane.See Holzer, Baby Jane
Bacall, Lauren, 247
Baez, Joan, 277
Bailey, Alice, 365
Bailey, David, 35, 75–76, 102
Baker, Tom, 287, 297, 312, 317
Balart, Waldo, 142–43, 144
Baldwin, Billy, 246
Banana, 204
Bananas, 317
Band, The, 137
Bankhead, Tallulah, 247
Bardot, Brigitte, 267–68
Barr, Alfred, 272
Barrow, Clyde, 245, 313
Barzini, Benedetta, 222, 259
Barzini, Luigi, 222
Battcock, Gregory, 41, 89
Beach Boys, 121–22, 296
Beatles, 36, 75, 76, 88–89, 101, 112, 168, 175, 258, 262, 286, 299–300
Beaton, Cecil, 162, 205, 246, 247
Beatty, Warren, 28, 239, 313
Beauty film series, 137, 157
Bellamy, Dick, 39, 89
Bellamy, Ralph, 304
Bennett, Joan, 152
Benton, Robert, 245
Berenson, Marisa, 124
Bergen, Candice, 165
Berlin, Brigid, 129. See also Polk, Brigid (Brigid Berlin)
Berlin, Richard E., 129–30
Berlin, Richie, 130, 200
Bernhardt, Sarah, 268
Big Brother and the Holding Company, 218–19
Bike Boy, 297, 304, 312
Billie (DJ at Ondine), 239
Billy. See Name, Billy
Binghamton Birdie, 79, 96, 97, 150–51
Black, Karen, 205
Blackburn, Paul, 65
Black Panthers, 293
Blow Job, 64–65, 100, 204
Blow-Up, 256, 267
Blue Movie, 371–72
Blum, Irving, 27–28
Bonnie and Clyde, 245, 261–62, 313
Bono, Sonny and Cher, 210
Boom, 128, 362
Bottomly, Susan. See International Velvet (Susan Bottomly)
Bourdon, David, 24–25, 28–30, 41, 66, 78, 111–12, 167, 168–69, 249–50
Brakhage, Stan, 61
Brandt, Jerry, 270
Brice, Fanny, 151
Brigante, Luis, 255
Brigid. See Polk, Brigid (Brigid Berlin)
Bringing It All Back Home, 135
Brothers, Joyce, 310
Brown, Tally, 317
Browne, Jackson, 230, 261
Bruce, Lenny, 157
Buckley, Tim, 230, 261
Buffalo Springfield, 239
Burroughs, Julian, 327
Burroughs, William, 129, 327
Byrds, 146, 180, 210
Café Bizarre, 93, 180–81
Café Figaro, 93, 134, 194, 196, 298
Café La Mama, 67
Café Le Metro, 65, 114
Café Nicholson, 131–32, 162
Café Rienzi, 134
Café Winslow, 68
Caffe Cino, 67, 93, 308
Cage, John, 4, 274
Cahiers du Cinéna, 341
Cale, John, 181, 185, 189, 194, 198, 225, 230, 242, 250, 286–87
Callas, Maria, 82, 93, 164
Camel, Donald, 141
Camp, 204
Campbell’s Soup Company, 163
Canby, Vincent, 256
Candy, 340
Cannes Film Festival, 265–67, 341
Capote, Truman, 235, 243–48
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Cappucine, 141
Cardin, Pierre, 216–17
Carey, Ted, 7–8
Carlisle, Kitty, 59
Carmichael, Stokely, 263
Carpenter, Scott, 144
Carpetbaggers, The, 47, 52
Carson, Johnny, 360
Cass, Mama, 210, 304
Cassen, Jackie, 195–96
Cassini, Igor, 46
Castelli, Leo, 9, 10, 25–27, 141, 248. See also Leo Castelli Gallery
Castel’s (club), 141, 142
Castro, Fidel, 142–43
Castro, Raul, 142–43
CBS, 38
Cedar bar, 15, 16–18, 90
Cerf, Phyllis and Bennett, 246
Chagall, Marc, 143
Chamberlain, Elaine, 55
Chamberlain, John, 55, 91, 289, 327–28
Chamberlain, Wynn, 35–36, 40, 43, 44, 45, 47, 50, 51, 54, 55
Cheetah (club), 207–8, 223, 263
Cheetah magazine, 304
Chelsea Girls, 33, 209, 226–28, 232–33, 252, 255–56, 259–60, 264–67, 291–92, 303, 304, 309, 341
Chelsea Hotel, 220–21, 226–28, 341–42
Christopher, Jordan, 181
Christopher, Sybil Burton, 144
Chrysler, Walter, 94
Church (discotheque), 30–31
Churchill, Winston, 190
Ciao Manhattan, 289
Cinemathèque, 147, 155, 179–80, 182, 185, 191, 232–33, 317–18
Cino, Joe, 67
Clanton, Jimmy, 240
Clark, Dick, 240
Clarke, Shirley, 60, 255
Clift, Montgomery, 131
Clockwork Orange, A, 101, 157
Close, Patrick Tilden, 303–4, 305, 317
Club 82, 202
Cohen, Leonard, 103, 261
Collin-Dufresne, Isabelle, 264. See also Ultra Violet (Isabelle Collin-Dufresne)
Collins, Judy, 182
Collins, Rufus, 89
Columbia Pictures, 373–74
Commentary magazine, 60
Cooke, Hope, 51
Cooper, Gary, 152
Cooper, Gloria Vanderbilt, 247
Cooper, Maria, 152
Copper Kettle, 102
Coquelin, Olivier, 46, 207–8
Corso, Gregory, 39, 303
Cosby, Bill, 310
Couch, 204
Country Joe & the Fish, 294