I Used to Be Charming

by Eve Babitz

  Men should know this, but they don’t. They don’t appreciate the fact that what happens between a man and a woman on a dance floor is so romantic and pure, so steeped in tender tradition that few women can resist it. There are other wonderful things about dancing. It’s a return to a more innocent time, back to the days of courtship when young couples danced the fox-trot, the waltz, and even the tango, and then fell in love with the way they felt in each other’s arms, moving to the music. After they fell in love, they got married. And then they stayed married.

  On a dance floor, it’s OK for men to take the initiative and not worry about being viewed as Neanderthals. The man is supposed to ask the woman to dance.

  And once you begin to dance, the man leads. It doesn’t work well if you both lead, and it’s no better if you take turns. The man gets to show off his physical strength, lifting her up and twirling her around. It’s a scientific fact that once a woman feels a man’s strong arms around her, she feels a lot better about life in general and can’t complain much at all.

  Women don’t complain about the fact that most of them dance better than men. If a man can’t cut it on the floor, the next time he asks, “Do you want to dance?” he may get a reply such as, “I think you need more practice. Why don’t we meet somewhere and try?” Women are perfectly willing to help someone learn. They’ll even become the dance partner of a man they might not otherwise entertain in any way other than as a grave doubt. Any man who so much as wants to learn to dance is given much more slack by the women in ballroom dancing than the women are by the men, once the man has learned to dance and is totally impatient with the least imperfection. I know this marvelous dancer named Frank, who, the minute we start to tango (we take Tango Argentino class together, the dance of the truly driven), begins looking at me in the mirror and saying, “Can’t you do your ochos on your own balance?”

  Frank, in fact, had a perfectly gorgeous partner named Irena, with long red hair down to her waist and a back like a Victorian virgin, her profile so pale and sweet against his dark, Latin good looks. But Frank was such a barrel of critiques that finally, one day, she just upped and quit, saying, “I can’t dance with you anymore. It’s no fun.”

  As for me, one day I asked Frank, “Don’t you like dancing with me?”

  And he said, “No. Not all the time.”

  So I left him alone from then on, even in a class where people were expected to dance with anyone handy. I ignored him for a long time. Now he asks me to dance, nicely, and things are a lot better.

  Since I began doing ballroom dancing, I’ve discovered that there are two types of men to dance with. There’s the kind who, like me, learned everything they know from teachers and who wouldn’t veer off the beaten track if an earthquake struck in midstep and with whom dancing is incredibly beautiful and brings moments of such happiness that they know they’ll remember them until the day they die. And then there are the men who were born to dance, who took a few lessons when they were young and have been dancing ever since. These men regard dance as a simple way to express themselves, leading their partners into things they never dreamed of doing in a million years, and making me, at least, feel as though I’ve just been to a motel—or a small hotel in Santa Barbara—for the best weekend of my life.

  “My God,” I asked one partner, named Aldo, at the end of a slow Latin bolero. “What do you call that?”

  “That,” he said, smiling, “is dancing.”

  No wonder he has been married five times. I would have married him, if only for a few infatuated months of ballrooms, moonlight, and what he does to music. Fred Astaire was like that, I suppose. He learned a few steps in his youth and just took off when he felt like it in later life. Oh, to be in Fred Astaire’s arms. Or even Ralph’s arms.

  I had a first date with Ralph last Saturday. We were having dinner in one of those elegant old downtown L.A. hotels that have a great restaurant, and after dinner, we walked past this hotel bar, where a combo was playing “But Not for Me.”

  “Oh,” he said, “that’s a fox-trot, right?”

  “I think so,” I said, wondering how a man who was only thirty-four and had been raised in Southern California would know.

  “You want to try?” he said, smiling, and cherry bombs went off in my heart.

  “To dance?” I said. “Oh, let’s.”

  The floor was almost empty, maybe two other couples, and we stood for a moment while he listened for the slow/quick-quick beat, which is all a fox-trot is. And there we were, gliding away, my heart turning into cotton candy and my head in and out of the clouds. I stood up straight, my feet stayed on the floor and in that moment, I was prepared to forgive him for anything he would do for the next forty years.

  The dance came to an end and he said, “That was fun.” I was seeing stars so badly I could hardly talk, but when he said “One more?” I managed a feeble “Oh, I’d love to.” Maybe it’s the public formality of it all that makes the whole thing so private yet so intense. It took all my wits to keep from offering to be his slave for life.

  “Ahhh,” he said, “you’re the queen of slow dances, aren’t you? You’re so easy to dance with, your body is the great escape.”

  “Now, now,” I said, blushing like a love-struck kid. But I wasn’t a teenager in love, I was something worse—I was a tango dancer in love.

  If a year ago someone had asked me to dance a dance in a place like that, he’d have been sorry. I was worse than a heavy lead, I led myself. But now my body was fully clothed while my mind, heart, and soul were quite a different story.

  “In heels,” he said, “you’re just the right size for me.”

  Was he planning our future?

  When I get infatuated this completely, I tend to think of headstones—what we’ll have written on them and if he’d like the side-by-side look or prefer nice mausoleum plaques. A year ago, I might have asked his view, but now, due to the rigorously enforced charm that I acquired in tangoland, I’m as good at keeping my mouth shut as I am at keeping my back straight for the entire dance. If Ralph wants headstones, I’m sure he’ll ask. I now leave it to the man to propose.

  Of course, it’s only a dance.

  Nothing more.

  But the great thing about ballroom dancing is where it can lead, if only a woman knows how to follow.

  Playboy

  October 1989

  THE SOUP CAN AS BIG AS THE RITZ

  IT’S ODD to think that last summer, while friends of Andy Warhol were waiting for the diaries to come out, Chuck Workman—this documentary filmmaker who is probably the only man hip enough to be a documentary filmmaker in New York who failed to meet Andy Warhol—was working on his new film, Superstar, out interviewing those same friends of Andy, friends who didn’t yet know they might not like Andy anymore once they saw that book.

  Now here I sit, interviewing Chuck Workman about interviewing Andy’s friends, thinking to myself that this whole edifice is a house of mirrors, with Andy’s image reflected on every surface. Well, that’s what Andy was, wasn’t he? A multitude of images. (Like any celebrity. Like anybody.) Only people are still trying to get to the bottom of the Mystery That Was Andy.

  •

  Andy was definitely about money, because when he died in 1987 his estate was valued at $15 million and now, two years later, I heard on the radio it’s up to $100 million.

  And he was definitely about being famous—except that since the book was published, Andy’s image has become that of a common gossip, someone who routinely stabbed his friends in the back. People were shocked.

  I wasn’t surprised. I knew about Madame Récamier. After the French Revolution, Madame Récamier was considered the height of fashion in Parisian hip society and was deemed beautiful, brilliant, and kind by all who knew her. In fact, when I was younger I wanted to grow up and become Madame Récamier, reclining on a chaise in a backless dress, and felt mad that I was stuck in L.A.

  Then I read her diaries.

  She was a hog.


  She was mean, vicious, and without mercy towards her friends.

  Her dearest companions, she slit to ribbons.

  “If that’s ‘kind,’ ” I said to myself, “I’ll take L.A”

  Of course, that’s what diaries are for—to allow you to get out your hatred of people close to you without actually laying it on their heads and thus not getting invited anywhere anymore—but really, are artists supposed to be that craven about Warren Beatty?

  Which brings us back to the first question: Was Andy an artist?

  Someone once told me that she saw Andy and another painter trading silk screens and Andy was saying, “Well, these three are worth $60,000—that’s $20,000 a piece.”

  “OK,” the other artist said, “Well, this is worth $15,000 and this is worth $45,000, so we’re equal.”

  “What I realized they were doing,” my friend said later in tones of awe, “was minting money. They were creating money where nothing but silk screens had been before.”

  Is that art?

  •

  Believe it or not, people still debate that issue—whether Andy was a great artist or a complete fraud. Chuck Workman’s documentary, for example, uses footage of an Art Students League class in which the young artists discuss Andy: some claim him as an inspiration, others insist he’s bogus.

  But the documentary doesn’t stop at pondering Andy’s artistic credibility. Chuck Workman interviewed at least twenty-five people about Andy, so you have at least twenty-five different versions of who Andy is.

  So far he’s talked to Sally Kirkland, Shelley Winters, Dennis Hopper, Holly Woodlawn, David Hockney, Viva, Henry Geldzahler, Chris Makos, Ultra Violet, Joan Quinn, and Bob Colacello, among others. Three people died before Workman could get to them: Robert Mapplethorpe, Ondine, and Steve Rubell. Then there were the people like Lou Reed who didn’t want to be interviewed, and Paul Morrissey, who said he “didn’t want to be associated with Andy anymore” and refused to be in the documentary. For Paul not to be in a documentary about Andy Warhol just goes to show the truth about golden ages like the Age of Pericles in ancient Greece, which gets Pericles’s name on it but in reality was about Socrates, Plato, and those comic and tragic playwrights. For those of us who were there, Paul Morrissey was Glue and everything else was Falling Apart. Paul got the ideas for the “Warhol” movies, cast the movies, wrote the scripts, woke the people up who were in the movies so they’d not be nodding out during their scenes, shot the film, took the film to the developers, edited it, got the movies distributed. And Andy? Andy said, “Yes.”

  Andy said, “Great, just great.”

  Andy said, “I just don’t know, talk to Paul.”

  I suppose if you’re the designated driver in a golden age, to be interviewed for a documentary about a time when you alone were awake and everyone else lived in dreams of tinfoil and superstardom, might be more than a straight street type like Paul could abide.

  Then there are the people you’d expect to be interviewed in an Andy documentary, but aren’t, like Halston and Bianca and Liza Minnelli, who apparently felt funny about saying anything nice about Andy after reading about themselves in his diaries.

  Chuck Workman didn’t ask me, but if I were reminiscing about Andy I’d say that he was about being hip. In 1963, when Andy first came to L.A., I was a teenage groupie waiting to happen. The Beatles had yet to arrive to give my life impetus and luster, but at that time L.A. was the scene of some feverish art activity. There was this place called the Ferus Gallery which showed artists who barely seemed willing to leave the beach but who somehow managed (on overcast days) to go inside and produce actual work. “I had to make a decison,” Laddie John Dill once told me. “Art or surfing. I gave up surfing.”

  At nightfall the artists would get dressed and go off to Barney’s Beanery, a hangout in West Hollywood which had the world’s hottest chile and least cool jukebox (lots of Bing Crosby).

  •

  The Ferus Gallery was run by Walter Hopps, who never got tan and wore dark Brooks Brothers-y looking suits and ties. His straightness was a perfect cover for the anarchy going on in his gallery. If Walter Hopps decided someone was cool, the person was (in my opinion) cool for all eternity.

  So when he explained to me one night over chile at Barney’s that Andy Warhol was going to have a show at the Ferus, I said, “What? The soup can guy? You’re kidding!”

  How could that soup can guy be cool? (And his hair?)

  In fact, when I first heard the name Andy Warhol, I thought it must be a joke, there couldn’t be an artist named Andy. It sounded like a puppet on an after-school show for kids.

  “He’s seven jumps ahead of everyone else,” Walter may have said (his way of explaining that a person was so cool you were lucky to have heard of him).

  But later on, after I’d actually seen Andy, leaning against the wall at the Ferus, with his black turtleneck, his loose pants, his silver hair—looking like someone you glimpsed through blue water from a diving bell, living in another element from the rest of us, the element of fame, the mantle of self-enchantment, the wings of glamour, the aura of things to come—I changed my mind. Before the Beatles, there was Andy. No joke.

  Andy Warhol, the serious, served tomato soup to those who were first come—I mean, it was ridiculous.

  But it was true.

  The soup as big as the Ritz.

  The soup that is loaves and fishes. The soup that goes forth and multiplies. And the thing is, you can make it just as well yourself at home.

  My friend Judy Henske, the blues singer, once told me regarding jewelry, “Never buy it in a store if you can make it just as well at home.”

  When Andy came to L.A. in 1963 and had a party at the Santa Monica Pier merry-go-round, it was the only place to be in L.A. that night. If you were with Andy in the sixties, you were in the right place. And in the sixties, being in the right place was of the essence.

  Andy was usually—no, always—in a good mood. It wasn’t cool to be in a good mood in those days. In 1966, when I next knew him in New York City, just about everyone else around him was pushing Tragedy in a big way. When, for example, I met Edie Sedgwick my first week in New York, she was crying. It was at this great big party, a fund-raiser for the East Village Other which I myself had organized in one week, seven bands playing at the Village Gate, one of which was the Velvet Underground—and there, in the dressing room, in an unironed silk blouse, Edie Sedgwick was crying tears like Tiffany baubles.

  Suddenly unironed silk blouses seemed to me the perfect style. At the party that night, Yoko Ono and her first husband, Tony Cox (a conceptual artist), spent the entire evening twisting paper streamers from the rafters as part of a happening—creating more chaos than was already there, with the TV cameras and all these reporters documenting the event—well, Felliniesque is an understatement. There were dozens of reporters there, and they were more important to the audience than the audience was to them. The cameras were the news.

  It was just like Marshall McLuhan said, even if he was Canadian. (But then of course a Canadian would want to think the world was a global village since otherwise he would be left out of practically everything.)

  The next time I saw Edie she was sitting at the bar at Max’s Kansas City with Bob Neuwirth, the famous hippest coolest art type guy of his generation, and again she was crying, this time into a gin and tonic.

  Sitting there together, they were a movie—The Two Hippest People in New York City Being Unhappy Together in Public.

  Suddenly, my ambition became to look gorgeous and miserable, but I was always so thrilled to be anywhere and do anything in those days, I never cried a single tear except when I heard that the bass player of the Fugs got drafted. But in the middle of my tears, walking across Washington Square, I ran into Jim Morrison, who’d only that day arrived in New York. “Light My Fire” was a hit and I immediately forgot why I was crying. By the time Jim was close enough to talk to, I had a plan to introduce him to Andy. I mean, one look at
Jim in this black fur jacket and Andy Warhol came to mind as someone who would appreciate him. “Do you think this jacket goes with my image?” Jim asked.

  So Jim and Andy met, and Andy invited Jim to come to a party with him. People invited Andy to these parties hoping he’d come alone, or just with Edie, but he always brought his own entourage—a bunch of leather-crazed beauties with Cheekbones and speedy asides. I remember one countess who lived in the Dakota gave a party for some English novelist to which Andy invited the entire Factory. She served special smoked geese and rare roast beef with horseradish dip laid out on an oaken table, which was demolished by these crazed speed freaks, who unexpectedly discovered that speed didn’t ruin their appetites but rather made them eat faster. (If you weren’t on speed, you weren’t in New York City in the sixties. I was certainly on it. In fact, if you took speed out of New York in the sixties, it would have been Des Moines.)

  Andy, however, during this particular era, ate only lemon drops in public.

  He’d carry a wrinkled paper bag with him to those parties—even dinners given by hostesses in fancy penthouses—and only eat these little yellow candies.

  Meanwhile, before the dinners, my friend John Wilcox of the East Village Other and I would go to Chock Full o’ Nuts to meet Andy, who’d order a couple of toasted English muffins with marmalade which he ate for his actual dinner. The image of Andy, the artist who ate only lemon drops, was kept intact, while the real Andy couldn’t resist marmalade.

  That was when I discovered how much fun it was to sit beside Andy and watch people go by Chock Full o’ Nuts. Just his comments about girls in yellow boots were worth their weight in lemon drops.

  After the dinner parties we’d go to the Dom, this Polish dance hall on the Lower East Side where the Velvets played and they ran movies on the walls—like Kiss, this movie Andy (and Paul Morrissey) made of two gorgeous kids kissing and kissing and kissing. The world’s most fabulous people were dancing everywhere, and on stage was Nico, the girl lead singer of the Velvets, looking down at the audience with eyes that saw nothing but apocalyptic collapse and a voice that did nothing but emit a bagpipe-like drone.