Anno Dracula (73 page)

When he heard of Herko’s defenestration, Warhol was almost irritated. ‘Gee,’ he sighed, ‘why didn’t he tell me he was going to do it? We could have gone down there and filmed it.’ Herko was just the first of the Warhol death cluster, his personal disaster series: Edie Sedgwick (1971), Tiger Morse (1972), Andrea Feldman (1972), Candy Darling (1974), Eric Emerson (1975), Gregory Battcock (1980), Tom Baker (1982), Jackie Curtis (1985), Valerie Solanas (1989), Ondine (1989). And Warhol himself (1968?). Only Andy made it back, of course. He had to be the vampire they all would have been, even Valerie.

In 1965, the term ‘vampire movies’ took on another layer of meaning at the Factory, with the arrivals of Ronald Tavel, a playwright hired to contribute situations (if not scripts) for the films, and Edie Sedgwick, a blueblood blonde who was, in many ways, Andy’s ultimate supervamp. Movies like
The Death of Radu the Handsome
(1965), with Ondine as Vlad the Impaler’s gay brother, and
Poor Little Dead Girl
(1965), with Edie as the vampire Claudia, run to seventy minutes (two uninterrupted thirty-five minute takes, the length of a film magazine, stuck together), have intermittently audible soundtracks and mimic Hollywood to the extent of having something approaching narrative. Were it not for the incandescent personalities of the supervamps, the beautiful and the damned, these efforts would be more like ‘zombie movies’, shambling gestures of mimesis, constantly tripping up as the immobile image (Andy had the most stoned Mole Person handle the camera) goes in and out of focus or the walk-on ‘victims’ run out of things to do and say.

Ondine, Edie and a few others understand that the films are their own shot at vampire immortality. With dime store plastic fangs and shrouds from the dress-up chest, these living beings cavort, preserved on film while their bodies are long in the grave, flickering in undeath. For Andy, the film camera, like the silkscreen or the polaroid, was a vampire machine, a process for turning life into frozen death, perfect and reproducible. Hurting people was always so interesting, and left the most fabulous Rorschach stain patterns on the sheets.

Edie cut her hair to match Andy’s wigs and took to wearing imitations of his outfits, especially for photographs and openings. They looked like asexual twins or clones, but were really trying to model themselves on that most terrifying denizen of the world of darkness, the old vampire couple. R.D. Laing’s study
Helga and Heinrich
(1970) suggests that, after centuries together, vampire couples mingle identities, sharing a consciousness between two frail-seeming bodies, finishing each other’s sentences as the mind flickers between two skulls, moving in on their victims in an instinctive pincer movement. If one partner is destroyed, the other rots in sympathy. Edie would probably have gone that far -she did eventually commit suicide - but Andy was too self-contained to commit anything or commit to anything. He saw her as the mirror he didn’t like to look in - his reflection reminded him that he was alive, after all - and would often play the mimic game, patterned after Harpo Marx, with her, triumphantly squirting milk from his mouth or producing a walnut from a fist to show he was the original and she the copy. When he said he wanted everyone to be alike, he was expressing a solipsist not an egalitarian ideal: everyone was to be like him, but he was still to be the mould.

Warhol and Ronnie Tavel made
Veneer
(1965), arguably the first film version of Bram Stoker’s
Dracula
(1897). In
Stargazer: Andy Warhol’s World and His Films
(1973), Stephen Koch reports: ‘Warhol handed Tavel a copy of the novel with the remark that it might be easier to compose a scenario based on fiction than one spun out of pure fantasy. He had acquired the rights to the Stoker book for $3,000, he said; it ought to make a good movie. And so it did. It’s not hard to guess why Warhol was impressed by
Dracula.
(I should mention in passing that, contrary to the myth he propagates, Warhol is quite widely read.) The book is filled with the sexuality of violence; it features a tough, erotic vampire dandy joyously dominating a gang of freaks; its theme is humiliation within a world that is simultaneously sordid and unreal; it is a history which at once did and did not happen, a purposeful lie. Finally, there is the question of class... I think Warhol participates very deeply in America’s best-kept secret - the painful, deeply denied intensity with which we experience our class structure. We should not forget that we are speaking of the son of semiliterate immigrants, whose father was a steelworker in Pittsburgh. Within the terms of his own intensely specialised mentality, Warhol has lived through American class humiliation and American poverty. And
Dracula,
although British, is very much about the sexuality of social class as it merges with spiritual domination.’

Casting Edie as an ephebic silver-haired Dracula (Drella, indeed), Gerard Malanga as a whip-wielding but humiliated Harker and Ondine as a sly Van Helsing, Warhol populated the Factory’s Transylvania and Carfax Abbey (the same ‘set’, black sheets hung with silver cobwebs) with lost souls. Well before Francis Ford Coppola, Warhol saw that the problems in filming the novel could be sidestepped by force of will. Indeed, he approached the enterprise with a deliberate diffidence that all but ensured this would not be a ‘proper’ film. Ronnie Tavel at least read half the book before getting bored and typing out a script in his usual three days.

Since shooting consisted of a complete run-through of the script as a performance, with breaks only when the magazine ran out, Tavel considered that there ought to be actual rehearsals and that the actors should stoop to learning their lines. Too fearful of confrontation to disagree, Warhol simply sabotaged the rehearsals Tavel organised and even the shooting of the film by inviting the press and various parasites to the Factory to observe and interfere, and sending Malanga off on trivial errands or keeping him up until dawn at parties to prevent him from even reading the script (as in the book, Harker has the most to say). Koch, again: ‘The sense that making a film was work - that it should involve the concentrated attention of work - was utterly banished, and on shooting day the Factory merely played host to another “Scene”, another party.’

Stoker’s intricate plot is reduced to situations. Harker, in black leather pants and Victorian deerstalker, visits Castle Dracula carrying a cross loaned to the production by Andy’s mother, and is entertained, seduced and assaulted by the Count (Edie’s enormous fangs keep slipping out of her mouth) and his three gesticulating vampire brides (Marie Mencken, Carmillo Karnstein, International Velvet). Later, in Carfax Abbey, Harker - roped to the Factory couch - watches as Dracula fascinates and vampirises Mina (Mary Woronov) in a tango that climaxes with Mina drinking Campbell’s Tomato Soup from a can Dracula has opened. with a thumb-talon and which he declares is his vampire blood. Van Helsing appears, with his fearless vampire hunters - Lord Godalming (Chuck Wein), Quincey Morris (Joe Dallesandro), Dr Seward (Paul America) - dragged by Renfield (a young, ravaged Lou Reed), who is leashed like a bloodhound.

Crucifixes, stakes, whips and communion wafers are tossed back and forth in a bit of knockabout that makes some of the cast giggle uncontrollably and drives others - notably, the still-tethered Malanga - to furious distraction. In Tavel’s script, as in Stoker’s novel, Van Helsing’s band corner and destroy Dracula, who was to be spray-painted silver and suffocate, but Ondine is distracted when a girl who happens to be on the couch for no real reason - she seems to be a set-visitor straying into frame - calls him a ‘phony’, and Ondine ignores the King Vampire to lash out at this impertinent chit, going for her face with his false fingernails. Ondine’s methedrine rant rises in a crescendo, peaks and fades: ‘May God forgive you, you’re a phony, Little Miss Phony, you’re a disgusting phony, get off this set, you’re a disgrace to humanity, you’re a disgrace to yourself, you’re a loathsome fool, your husband’s a loathsome fool... I’m sorry, I just can’t go on, this is just too much, I don’t want to go on.’ The camera, handled this time by Bud Wirtschafter, tries to follow the unexpected action, and for a few brief frames catches the ghost-white face of Andy himself hanging shocked in the gloom; the removal of this slip is perhaps the only proper edit in any Warhol film made before the arrival of Paul Morrissey. Van Helsing, inconsolable, stands alone and the film runs on and on, as he reassembles himself.

Edie, fangs spat out but still regally and perfectly Dracula, gets Wirtschafter’s attention by tossing the soup can at him, spattering the lens, and commands the frame, hands on hips, for a few seconds before the film runs out. ‘I am Dracula,’ she insists, the only line of dialogue taken directly (if unintentionally) from the book. ‘I
am
Dracula,’ she repeats, sure of herself for the last time in her life. Stoker had intended to inflict upon Dracula the defeat he eluded in reality, but Edie has dragged Warhol’s Dracula movie back to the truth. In the Factory, Drella bests the squabbling Vampire Slayers and reigns forever.

It is easy to overstate the importance of Nico to Warhol’s late ’60s work. She was, after all, his first ‘real’ vampire. Croaking, German and blonde, she was the dead image of Edie, and thus of Andy. Nico Otzak, turned some time in the ’50s, arrived in New York in 1965, with her doll-like get Ari, and presented her card at the Factory. She trailed the very faintest of associations with Dracula himself, having been a fringe member of that last party, in Rome 1959, which climaxed in the true death of the Vampire King. ‘She was mysterious and European,’ Andy said, abstaining from any mention of the v word, ‘a real moon goddess type.’ Like Dracula, she gave the impression of having used up the Old World and moved on, searching for ‘a young country, full of blood’.

In
Edie: An American Biography
(1982), Jean Stein definitively refutes the popular version, in which the naive, warm American is supplanted by the cold, dead European. Edie Sedgwick was on the point of turning from vampire to victim before Nico’s arrival: she had made the cardinal error of thinking herself indispensable, a real star, and Andy was silently irked by her increasing need for publicity as herself rather than as his mirror. She had already strayed from the Factory and towards Bob Dylan’s circle, tempted by more serious drug habits and heterosexuality. Edie was justifiably miffed that the limited financial success of the films benefited only Andy. His position was that she was rich anyway -‘an heiress’, one of his favourite words - and didn’t need the money, though far less well-off folk did as much or more work on the films and silkscreens for similarly derisory pay. Edie’s self-destruction cannot be laid entirely on Andy and Nico - the Dylan crowd hardly helped, moving her up from amphetamines to heroin - but it is undeniably true that without Warhol, Edie would never have become, in the British expression, ‘dead famous’.

With Nico, Andy finally had his vampire. At the back of their association must have been the possibility - the promise? - that she would turn him, but for the moment, Andy held back. To become someone’s get would have displaced him from the centre of his life, and that was insupportable. When he turned, a circumstance that remains mysterious, he would do so through anonymous blood donation, making himself - as usual - his own get, his own creature. Besides, no one could seriously want Nico for a mother-in-darkness: for the rest of her nights, she drew blood from Ari, her own get, and this vampire incest contributed to the rot that would destroy them both.

Andy was especially fascinated by Nico’s relationship with mirrors and film. She was one of those vampires who have no reflection, though he did his best to turn her into a creature who was all reflection with no self. He had her sing ‘I’ll Be Your Mirror’, for instance. ‘High Ashbury’, the oddest segment of
****/ Twenty Four Hour Movie
(1966), places Ondine and Ultra Violet either side of an absence, engaged in conversation with what seems to be a disembodied voice. There are signs of Nico’s physical presence during the shoot: the displacement of cushions, a cigarette that darts like a hovering dragonfly, a puff of smoke outlining an oesophagus. But the vampire woman just isn’t there. That may be the point. Andy took photographs of silver-foiled walls and untenanted chairs and passed them off as portraits of Nico. He even silkscreened an empty coffin for an album cover.

Having found his vampire muse, Andy had to do
something
with her, so he stuck her together with the Velvet Underground - a band who certainly weren’t that interested in having a girl singer who drank human blood - as part of the Exploding Plastic Inevitable, the club events he staged at the Dom on St Mark’s Place in 1966. Amid so much black leather, he dressed Nico in bone-white and put an angelic spotlight on her, especially when she wasn’t singing. Lou Reed bought a crucifix and started looking for a way out. The success of the EPI may well have been partially down to the wide cross-section of New Yorkers who were intrigued by Nico; most Americans in 1966 had never been in a room with a vampire, a real vampire. Andy knew that and made sure that, no matter how conveniently dark the rest of the packed club was, Nico was always visible, always the red-eyed wraith murmuring her way through ‘Femme Fatale’ without taking a breath. That song, of course, is a promise and a threat: ‘Think of her at nights, feel the way she bites...’

As the Velvets performed, Warhol hid in the rafters like the Phantom of the Opera, working the lights and the projectors, cranking up the sound. Like Ulysses, he filled his ears with wax to get through the night. Behind the band, he screened his films. Often, as his real vampire paraded herself, he would show
Veneer
, trying to project Edie onto Nico as he projected himself upon them both.

Everybody agrees: between 1966 and 1968, Andy Warhol was a monster.

Valerie Solanas was the founder and sole member of the Society for Killing All Vampires, authoress of the self-published
SKAV Manifesto.
In bite-sized quotes, the
Manifesto
is quite amusing - ‘Enlightened vampires who wish to demonstrate solidarity with the Movement may do so by killing themselves.’ - but it remains a wearisome read, not least because Solanas never quite sorted out what she meant by the term ‘vampire’. Of course, as an academic, I understand entirely the impatience she must have felt with what she considered irrelevances like agenda-setting and precise definitions of abstruse language. In the end, Solanas was a paranoid sociopath, and the vampires were her enemies, all whom were out to get her. At first, she didn’t even mean
nosferatu
when she referred to vampires, but a certain type of patriarchal oppressor. At the end, she meant everyone else in the world.