Anno Dracula (71 page)

Everyone took in a breath.

Geneviève’s heart leaped. Surely, after so long, it couldn’t end like this? A lone grudge-holder with no plan, just running up to the King of the Cats with a silver sticker, bringing down the reborn empire. After the long road back from death and the rapid rise to power, would this renewed Count be cut off by a random assassin?

Simon was on the floor, yelping. The bouncers were on top of him, bearing down with all their weight. The bowie knife skittered away into Holly’s hand.

‘Plain steel,’ she reported.

Simon could have done no harm with it except to Dracula’s suit.

Kate took Geneviève’s arm.

‘Look,’ she said, ‘he’s bleeding gold.’

Dracula’s shirt parted around the cut, exposing dead white skin. Coins dripped out, pattering onto the floor, spilling around his shoes. He must be wearing a money-vest. Shining gold rolled away from him. The Count laughed, sprung finger-claws, and slashed at his sides, his hips, his loins, opening silky rents in his clothes, transforming himself from Oscar night elegant to shredded vampire punk. From every gape in his suit, gold spurted, coins in an almost liquid flow. More than ought to have been possible.

He extended his hands and stood, a fountain of money.

It took a moment. No one would know who was first but someone snatched a coin from the floor. Then someone else took a fistful. Five or six others dived and scrabbled. Even the richest of the crowd struggled through to pick up the spilled cash. Minimum wage catering staff and million-a-year execs jostled each other to get the gold.

Dracula let them claw and fight. He
was
money; he didn’t care. He loved what money made of men, just as he loved what the vampire red thirst did to them. There was blood spilled too, inevitably. This spectacle, unedifying yet elegant, was what he wanted. A beautiful woman on her knees stuffed gold into an arm-length evening glove; another, with no other receptacle handy, filled her mouth with coins; men fought seriously and in play; some snatched with humour, without shame, while others filched sneakily and hoped no one would notice.

Independent of the melée, coins rolled at their feet.

Kate picked one up and showed it to Geneviève. It was old gold but new-minted, with the profile of Dracula.

‘Don’t bite it,’ Geneviève told her friend.

Her hand, discreetly black-bandaged, throbbed. It wouldn’t be better for a long time. The poison of silver had struck her; but it was nothing to the poison of gold.

Kate flicked away the coin. Francis Coppola snatched it out of the air and sadly closed his fingers around it.

Geneviève looked at Dracula.

He stood above it all, laughing through a fanged grin, clothes in tatters, face shining red and gold, eyes midnight black. There was a terrifying joy and purity to him. She understood the fear and love he could inspire, and why people would follow him into the fire. She knew how much easier life was for those who signed up with the Order of the Dragon or Alucard Industries or whatever he was calling his invisible, world-spanning kingdom. And she knew that she could never be a part of it.

Never.

With the memory of Charles, the example of Kate, and her own burning blood, she could not become one of Dracula’s acolytes.

She shook her head. He knew.

The next time would be worse. Always, the next time.

‘Come on, Kate,’ she said. ‘This isn’t our party.’

‘Too true, Gené.’

Leaving, they passed Penny. For a moment, the three vampire women looked at each other. At this party, they’d not even talked.

For Charles’s sake, Geneviève let Penelope be. This time.

Outside the black-glass building, on Sunset, nightbirds passed by on foot and in shining automobiles. A billboard for
The Rock
dominated a dozen blocks.

‘You have to admit it’s bloody impressive,’ said Kate.

‘It won’t be there forever. This is Los Angeles. Nothing is permanent. That’ll be gone next week. It’s what he’s forgotten. Again. He wants to stand for all time, a statue of gold. He’s a man of blood and iron and gold. Centuries will wear him down, break him in the end.’

‘Us too?’

Geneviève shook her head.

‘We can change. He can’t. When I first came here, someone told me I was good and that I could do good. I needed to hear it. Just as you need to hear it now, Kate. We’re good. We are. Sometimes, it doesn’t seem that way, but it’s true. Independent witnesses verify it. There won’t be any money in it, but we’re going into business together. The world is drowning in Dracula’s gold, so we have to work on a case by case basis. We’ve done it before, remember? We have skills. We can figure things out. You can write and report. I can open doors. We can catch the killers and save the girls.’

Kate thought about it.

‘He’d like that,’ she said. ‘Charles.’

Geneviève didn’t have to say anything.

Arm in arm, they walked along Sunset. They weren’t warm, but they were alive.

Paper delivered at ‘Warhol’s Worlds’, inaugural conference of The Andy Warhol Museum (April 21-23, 1995); revised for publication as ‘Warhola the Vampyre’ in
Who is Andy Warhol?
edited by Colin MacCabe with Mark Francis and Peter Wollen (The British Film Institute and The Andy Warhol Museum, 1997).

They were calling him a vampire long before he turned.

At the Silver Dream Factory, the Mole People, amphetamine-swift dusk-til-dawners eternally out for blood, nicknamed him ‘Drella’. The coven often talked of Andy’s ‘victims’: first, cast-offs whose lives were appropriated for Art, rarely given money to go with their limited fame (a great number of them now truly dead); later, wealthy portrait subjects or
Inter/VIEW
advertisers, courted as assiduously as any Renaissance art patron (a great number of them ought to be truly dead). Andy leeched off them all, left them drained or transformed, using them without letting them touch him, never distinguishing between the commodities he could only coax from other people: money, love, blood, inspiration, devotion, death. Those who rated him a genius and those who ranked him a fraud reached eagerly, too eagerly, for the metaphor. It was so persistent, it must eventually become truth.

In
Swimming Underground: My Years in the Warhol Factory
(1995), supervamp Mary Woronov
(Hedy/The Shoplifter,
1965;
The Chelsea Girls,
1966) writes: ‘People were calling us the undead, vampires, me and my little brothers of the night, with our lips pressed against the neck of the city, sucking the energy out of scene after scene. We left each party behind like a wasted corpse, raped and carelessly tossed aside... Andy was the worst, taking on five or six parties a night. He even looked like a vampire: white, empty, waiting to be filled, incapable of satisfaction. He was the white worm - always hungry, always cold, never still, always twisting.’ When told that the artist had turned vampire, Lou Reed arched a ragged eyebrow and quizzed, Andy was
alive?’
In the multitude of memoirs and word or song portraits that try to define Andy Warhol, there is no instance of anyone ever using the adjective ‘warm’ about him.

Valerie Solanas took superstitious care to shoot him with homemade silver bullets. She tried wrapping .32 ammunition in foil, which clogged the chambers, before resorting to spray-paint in the style of Billy Name (Linich), the silver-happy decorator of the Factory who coffined himself in a tiny back room for two years, coming out only at dead of night to forage. The names are just consonants short of anagrams: Andy Warhola, Wlad Draculya; Valerie Solanas, Van Helsing. Valerie’s statement, the slogan of a fearless vampire killer: ‘He had too much control over my life.’

On the operating table - 4.51 pm, Monday, June 3, 1968 - Andy Warhol’s heart stopped. He was declared clinically dead but came back and lived on, his vision of death and disaster fulfilled and survived. The stringmeat ghost of the latter years was sometimes a parody of his living self, a walking Diane Arbus exhibit, belly scars like zippers, Ray-Ban eyes and dead skin.

Warhola the Vampyre sloped nofratu-taloned through the seventies, a fashion-setter as always, as - after nearly a century in the open in Europe - vampirism (of a sort) at last established itself in America. He had no get, but was the fountainhead of a bloodline. You can still see them, in galleries or
People,
on the streets after dark, in the clubs and cellars. Andy’s kids: cloned creatures, like the endless replications of his silkscreen celebrity portraits, faces repeated until they become meaningless patterns of coloured dots.

When alive, Andy had said he wanted to become a machine and that everybody should be alike. How did he feel when his wishes were coming true? How did he feel about anything? Did he feel? Ever? If you spend any amount of time trying to understand the man and his work, you can’t help but worry that he’s reaching from beyond the grave and forcing you to become Valerie.

Consider the signs, the symptoms, the symbols: that pale, almost-albino face, simultaneously babyish and ancient, shrinking like a bucket of salted slugs when exposed to the sun; the sharp or battered black clothes, stiff from the grave; the goggle-like dark glasses, hypnotic black holes where eyes should be; the Slavic monotone of the whispery voice and the pared-down, kindergarten vocabulary; the covert religiosity, the prizing of sacred or silver objects; the squirrelling away of money and possessions in a centuried lair; even the artificial shocks of grey-white-silver hair. Are these not the attributes of a classical vampire, Dracula himself? Look at photographs taken before or after June 1968, and you can’t tell whether he is or isn’t. Like the murgatroyds of the 1890s, Andy was a disciple before he became a vampire. For him, turning was dropping the seventh veil, the last chitinous scrap of chrysalis, a final stage in becoming what he had always meant to be, an admittal that this was indeed what was inside him.

His whole life had revolved around the dead.

Andrew Warhola was an American - born in Pittsburgh on August 6, 1928 - but his family were not. In
The Life and Death of Andy Warhol
(1989), Victor Bockris quotes his statement ‘I am from nowhere,’ but gives it the lie: ‘The Warholas were Rusyns who had emigrated to America from the Ruthenian village of Mikova in the Carpathian Mountains near the borders of Russia and Poland in territory that was, at the turn of the century, part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.’ Introducing early the theme that comes to dominate his biography, Bockris takes care to note, ‘The Carpathian Mountains are popularly known as the home of Dracula, and the peasants in Jonathan Harker’s description kneeling before roadside shrines, crossing themselves at the mention of Dracula’s name, resemble Andy Warhol’s distant relatives.’

The third son of Ondrej and Julia Warhola grew up in Soho, an ethnic enclave that was almost a ghetto. From an early age, he seemed a changeling, paler and slighter than his family, laughably unfit for a future in the steel mills, displaying talent as soon as his hand could properly hold a pencil. Others in his situation might fantasise that they were orphaned princes, raised by peasant wood-cutters, but the Warholas had emigrated - escaped? - from the land of the vampires. Not fifty years before, Count Dracula had come out of Carpathia and established his short-lived empire in London. Dracula was still a powerful figure then, the most famous vampire in the world, and his name was spoken often in the Warhola household. Years later, in a film, Andy had an actress playing his mother claim to have been a victim, in childhood, of the Count, that Dracula’s bloodline remained in her veins, passing in the womb to her last son. Like much else in Andy’s evolving autobiography, there is no literal truth in this story but its hero spent years trying to wish it into reality and may even, at the last, have managed to pull off the trick. Before settling on ‘Andy Warhol’ as his eventual professional name, he experimented with the signature ‘Andrew Alucard’.

Julia was horrified by her little Andrew’s inclinations. For her, vampires were objects not of fascination but dread. A devout Byzantine Catholic, she would drag her children six miles to the wooden church of St John Chrystostom on Saline Street and subject them to endless rituals of purification. Yet, among Andy’s first drawings are bats and coffins.

In the 1930s, the American illustrated press were as obsessed with vampires as movie stars. There were several successful periodicals -
Weird Tales, Spicy Vampire Stories
- devoted almost entirely to their social activities. To look through these magazines, as the child Andy did, is to understand what it is to learn that a party is going on after your bedtime, to which you cannot possibly secure an invitation. Literally, you had to die to get in. In Vienna, Budapest, Constantinople, Monte Carlo and private estates and castles scattered in a crescent across Europe, vampire kings and queens held court.

Young Andrew clipped photographs and portraits from the magazines and hoarded them for the rest of his life. He preferred photographs, especially the blurred or distorted traces of those who barely registered on cameras or in mirrors. He understood at once that creatures denied the sight of their own faces must prize portrait painters. He wrote what might be called ‘fan letters’ to the leaders of vampire fashion: the Short Lion of Paris, Herbert von Krolock, the White Russian Rozokov. His especial favourites among the undead, understandably, were the child-vampires, those frozen infant immortals Noel Coward sings about in ‘Poor Little Dead Girl’. His prize possession as a boy was an autographed portrait of the martyred Claudia, ward of the stylish Short Lion, considered a paragon and an archetype among her kind. He would later use this image - a subscription gift sent out by
Night Life
- in his silkscreen,
Vampire Doll
(1963).