Edie (36 page)

JOHN CAGE
 In September, 1963, we had ten pianists to play one of Satie’s “Vexations” in relays, including me and one music critic who thought he could play the piece and wanted to get in the act. I forget his name. he was very friendly, but he made more mistakes than the others. viola farber, the dancer, played the first twenty minutes. While she played, someone on her left was sitting on the bench ready to slide over and pick up the piece so there wouldn’t be a hitch in it.

The effect of this going on and on was quite extraordinary. Ordinarily, one would assume there was no need to have such an experience, since if you hear something said ten times, why should you hear it any more? But the funny thing was that it was never the same twice. The musicians were always slightly different with their versions—their strengths fluctuated. I was surprised that something was put into motion that changed me. I wasn’t the same after that performance as I was before. The world seemed to have changed. I don’t know quite how to say it. A moment of enlightenment came for each one of us, and at different times. People would say, “Oh!” as it would suddenly dawn on them what was happening. The audience varied. It started with four or five and ended with seventy-five. I stayed there for all eighteen hours and forty minutes. I may have gone down to Chinatown to get something to eat. There was one person who stayed, the whole time except when he went to the men’s room. He had brought his food and his shaving equipment. After it was over, I drove back to the country and I slept for a long time, something like twelve hours. When I got up, the world looked new, absolutely new.

Edie, Roger Trudeau, and René Ricard in
Kitchen,
May, 1965

I hadn’t realized Andy was there. But even if he wasn’t, it doesn’t surprise me that his work followed the same lines. Of course, artists are encouraged by other things that happen, but mostly by what is either in the air or already inside them. Andy has fought by repetition to show us that mere is no repetition really, mat everything we look at is worthy of our attention. That’s been the major direction for the twentieth century, it seems to me.

RONALD TAVEL
 Warhol used to say, when he was interviewed, “We make a film a week,” but It’s not true. I kept a calendar and it shows that we made a film every
two
weeks . . . which is a big difference. Sometimes Warhol wanted me to move quickly from script to script, and I’d say, “But I have to see the film we’ve just made!” Obviously, I had to learn from what I’d just done before I could move on to the next project. So as soon as I saw the completed film, he would tell me what he wanted next, just the subject: “I want something on Juanita Castro,” “I want something happening in a kitchen,” “I want a screen test,” and so forth.

One of the things Warhol was always talking about, and I was, too, was what you can do that hasn’t been done before. Unexploited territory. Sado-masochism, transvestites—such things came in not only because they were novel but also theatrical . . . all image and display. For example, Anthony was a genuine sadist. Incredibly exotic-looking and devastatingly beautiful. Women just couldn’t control themselves. “My God, you’re good-looking.” He was into things that are hard to take seriously. Into wheelchairs. Into all this therapeutic material. . . crutches, carts . . . and he’d stand on the street and look at this stuff through the display window of the hospital-supply stores and he’d be ecstatic!

His apartment was on the Upper East Side. It was very small, two rooms, and just candle-lit. The walls were painted like a Rousseau jungle—the entire thing, ceiling, walls—so that you were in a lush Rousseau jungle right down to the little tigers staring at you. A candle swung on a chain, suspended, and as it swung, it illuminated a portrait of St. Barbara, the black saint, with her slashes. I asked, “What’s she doing there?”

He said, “Well, look at all the slashings. Read up on her.”

He had torture racks in there. A filmmaker friend and I were there one day to do research and Anthony wanted to put us on the racks. It was quite something. He talked a great deal to us. Sado-masochists are very gentle. They always want you to try things out because they
feel that most people, even if they have such inclinations, are so repressed that they can’t even experiment. After all, no one’s going to come out and say, “Here’s what I’d like to do,” if they haven’t done it before. So he had to guide us. He did things like put us on the racks, stripped, and then he’d throw wood alcohol on our genitals, which is quite something to go through. It came as a total surprise. He said, “It’s good. You’ll feel good. It’s wonderful.” And then suddenly splash. But it was not good. It was not funny. You go tearing out of the place.

Out of this research came
Horse.
The film was made around Tosh Carillo and Gregory Battcock and one or two other people. Dan Cassidy, the poet, and Larry Latreille. With Tosh Carillo I thought I had discovered a new Turhan Bey. But it turned out that the horse was probably the star of
Horse.
Andy had called some agency and asked for a pony. In came this enormous stallion, very nervous because, though they are trained, bringing a horse up to the Factory in a freight elevator and making him stand stI’ll for hours, with a camera and people milling around, can make a horse very nervous indeed. This horse was there with his trainer, who kept feeding him whatever they give them—tranquilizers, I guess. The horse stood in front of a painted Western setting that looked terribly real. That bothered Andy because he kept saying, as he looked through the camera: “I’m telling you, it looks exactly like a Hollywood Western,” and he didn’t like that. He kept telling me to lower the mike and the boom so we’d have that showing in the picture frame. The actors were under great tension because of that huge stallion. They had no idea what was happening. All they were told was to dress vaguely Western; just
suggest
being a cowboy. So they came in, of course, dressed to the hilt like cowboys, and we had to take off a lot of their paraphernalia. We wrote their lines out for them on these big idiot cards. They had wanted to see the script, but we didn’t want that. They were under great stress because they were sitting there practically
under
that horse and they had no idea what they were supposed to do or say until they saw what was written on the idiot cards.

All of a sudden I put up this direction which was:
APPROACH THE HORSE SEXUALLY EVERYBODY
. So everybody stood up,
en masse,
and
assaulted
the horse . . . probably quite tentatively and gently, but not to the horse, which struck out and kicked Tosh right in the head. Under normal circumstances he probably would have fainted. But he kept right on assaulting that horse.

What I was doing with this idea was working on a whole theme about cowboy homosexuality and masturbation and asexuality implicit
in the Old West with no women about, and with their love for horses and everything. But I also wanted to make a point about racial prejudice. So the next stage direction I put up on the idiot card was you now ATTACK TOSH. He could be taken for a Mexican-American, you see, although he’s Hawaiian. When the actors saw that sign, they left the horse and they nearly killed Tosh on that concrete floor. They released all the tension and fear they’d had under the horse, and they used Tosh as an outlet for it. Oh, they just beat him up I First Gerard and I put up a sign: stop, enough, which nobody saw, of course, and then we had to run onto the set and break it up, screaming: “Stop! Break this up! What are you doing?”

EMILE DE ANTONIO
 Andy’s like the marquis de sade in the sense that his very presence was a releasing agent which released people so they could live out their fantasies and get undressed, or, in some cases, do very violent things to get Andy to watch them. in one of Andy’s films somebody was blowing a black guy and being buggered by another guy at the same time. It may be what she had always wanted to do, but I doubt she wanted to do it on the couch at Andy’s studio with a camera on hand.

He was able to bring that out in a lot of people—people doing weird things in those early films who wouldn’t have done what they were doing for money or D. W. Griffith or anybody else.

TRUMAN CAPOTE
 I’ll give you an interesting analogy here. Have you ever read Carson Mccullers”
The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter?
All right. Now, in that book you’ll remember that this deaf mute, Mr. Singer, this person who doesn’t communicate at all, is finally revealed in a subtle way to be a completely empty, heartless person. And yet because he’s a deaf mute, he symbolizes things to desperate people. They come to him and tell him all their troubles. They cling to him as a source of strength, as a kind of semi-religious figure in their lives. Andy is kind of like Mr. Singer. Desperate, lost people find their way to him, looking for some sort of salvation, and Andy sort of sits back like a deaf mute with very little to offer.

GEQRGE PLIMPTON
 I got involved—somewhat against my better judgment—in trying to put together a retrospective of Andy Warhol films. My co-producer was Peter Ardery, just out of Harvard, who was the managing editor of the
Paris Review.
He was a film buff, and
absolutely fascinated by what Warhol was doing during that period. He was certainly the instigating force of the two of us, and it was through his efforts and prodding that for five hundred dollars we purchased the rights to everything that Warhol had done in film up to that time. It was a low period in Warhol’s career. Five hundred dollars apparently meant a lot.

The films arrived at my apartment in two large cardboard cartons. Most of them were hundred-foot reels which lasted for three minutes on the sixteen-millimeter projector which we set up in the living room. The projector worked overtime. We spent hours looking at what we had. I was discouraged. I thought it was really all very bad—just what one might expect of someone, however clever, who’s picked up a movie camera for the first time and has started to learn how to use it. There were the usual standard home-movie shots of people mugging for the camera, little half-done scenes with the principals suddenly breaking down and giggling with embarrassment, and most of it out of focus, of course.

Then one day we put a film on the projector titled
Beauty Part II.
It came on one of the larger reels and lasted sixty minutes or so. It had a sound track. It was electrifyingly different . . . I suspect it was one of the first attempts in the Factory to do something more than simply point the camera and hope for the best.

In the film the camera was focused on a bed throughout. There were no cutaways or different camera angles or anything sophisticated like that: the camera was trained on the bed like an artillery piece. I seem to remember the bed as being of the hospital variety, with a white sheet on it, upon which lay Edie Sedgwick and a character from Warhol’s Factory named Gino Piserchio. He looked like the Spanish bullfighter Cordobes—a dark, small, but muscular figure wearing a pair of Jockey shorts, as I recall; Edie was almost naked as well—wearing a bra and panties, both of black lace. She looked absolutely ravishing—that pale, long-limbed girl on the bed, with her great, dark eyes, and I remember the contrast . . . almost a study of contrast . . . with the white of the bed sheets, and the girl on them—really quite an elegant, almost aloof beauty she had—contrasted with the general tawdriness of the scene and the dark goatherd-type guy next to her. I don’t recall that he ever said very much. His function in the film was to paw at her from time to time, not violently but rather sleepily, as if he had started awake from a half-dream and thought it might be nice to indulge in some leisurely lovemaking before slipping back to sleep. One had the feeling the two of them had been on the bed for a very long time.