I'll Be Your Mirror: The Selected Andy Warhol Interviews (27 page)

O’BRIEN: Do you ever think about politics?

WARHOL: No.

O’BRIEN: Did you ever vote?

WARHOL: I went to vote once, but I got too scared. I couldn’t decide who to vote for.

O’BRIEN: Are you a Republican or a Democrat?

WARHOL: Neither.

O’BRIEN: You only do things for the Democrats. You did a Nixon print for the McGovern campaign. You did the Carter cover on the
New York Times
magazine.

WARHOL: I did Rockefeller’s portrait.

O’BRIEN: You gave prints to Bella Abzug?

WARHOL: I just do anything anybody asks me to do.

O’BRIEN: What’s your favorite painting of all your work?

WARHOL: I guess the soup can.

O’BRIEN: What’s your favorite color?

WARHOL: Black.

O’BRIEN: What do you think of danger-oriented conceptual artists like Vito Acconci and Chris Burden?

WARHOL: I think Chris Burden is terrific. I really do. I went to the gallery, and he was up in the ceiling, so I didn’t meet him, but I saw him.

O’BRIEN: Where did you get the idea of using photo silkscreens?

WARHOL: I started when I was printing money. I had to draw it, and it came out looking too much like a drawing, so I thought wouldn’t it be a great idea to have it printed. Somebody said you could just put it on silkscreens. So when I went down to the silkscreener I just found out that you could reproduce photographs. The man that made the screens was a really nice guy named Mr. Golden. I think the first photograph I did was a ballplayer. It was a way of showing action or something.

O’BRIEN: So once you found that process, where did you get your ideas for images?

WARHOL: Oh, just reading the magazines and picking up the ideas from there.

O’BRIEN: Did you really do the Campbell’s soup cans because you had it for lunch every day?

WARHOL: Oh yeah, I had Campbell’s soup every day for lunch for about 20 years. And a sandwich.

O’BRIEN: How did you get the idea to make Brillo boxes?

WARHOL: I did all the cans in a row on a canvas, and then I got a box made to do them on a box, and then it looked funny because it didn’t look real. I have one of the boxes here. I did the cans on the box, but it came out looking funny. I had the boxes already made up. They were brown and looked just like boxes, so I thought it would be so great to just do an ordinary box.

O’BRIEN: Did you ever hear from Campbell’s or Brillo or any of the manufacturers whose products you painted?

WARHOL: Brillo liked it, but Campbell’s Soup, they were really upset and they were going to do something about it, and then it went by so quickly and I guess there really wasn’t anything they could do. But actually when I lived in Pittsburgh, the Heinz factory was there, and I used to go visit the Heinz factory a lot. They used to give pickle pins. I should have done Heinz soup. I did the Heinz Ketchup box instead.

O’BRIEN: What was your first big break?

WARHOL: My first big break was when John Giorno pushed me down the stairs. No, actually my first big break was meeting Emile de Antonio who now lives across the street. He laughed a lot and that encouraged me.

O’BRIEN: In your book you say “Some people have deep-rooted and longstanding art fantasies and really stick with them.” Do you think that goes for you?

WARHOL: I really don’t have any fantasies at all. But art fantasies, that sounds really terrific. Do you spell that with a
ph
?

O’BRIEN: You used an
f
. How did the Factory get the name
Factory
?

WARHOL: Billy Name named it. It was in an office building. I guess it was really a factory. There was a lot of machinery there and a heavy floor. They must have made shoes there or something.

O’BRIEN: Who were the first people that worked for you?

WARHOL: Gerard Malanga was the first one. He was writing poetry in between helping me do things. Actually it was Billy Name that brought people to the studio. He began putting silver all over, and he needed some people to help him.

O’BRIEN: Was he working for you?

WARHOL: No, he wasn’t actually working for me. He wanted a place to stay, and he stayed there. That was the start of it.

O’BRIEN: How did you start making films?

WARHOL: We had gotten a video machine, and I’d gotten a sound camera, and we were just making movies through the Cinémathèque. Actually, I bought the first camera because Wynn Chamberlain was taking Taylor Mead and me to California, and since Taylor Mead was such a great screen star, we thought it would be a great idea to do Taylor going across country. So I bought this 16mm camera, and we just shot Taylor in California. That was the first movie. It was called
Tarzan and Jane Regained Sort Of
.

Then they had sort of newsreels at the Cinémathèque and every time you’d do a three-minute newsreel they’d show it at the Cinémathèque. Everybody began showing their three-minute movies. We started with the person of the week or something. Then I sort of got an idea to do John Giorno sleeping, because he could fall asleep and never know that you were around. So I just turned on the camera and photographed that, and somebody really liked it. That was
Sleep
. They showed it to Jonas Mekas, director of the Cinémathèque, and he really liked it, and from that we went into Robert Indiana eating and other things. The Empire State Building.

O’BRIEN: How did you introduce actors and plots?

WARHOL: Through Gerard we met Ronny Tavel, and he wrote scripts. They were really good scripts, but nobody would follow them. But we’d get the gist of the thing. Then we did 30-minute reels.

O’BRIEN: Did you direct them?

WARHOL: At that time anybody who turned on the camera was the director.

O’BRIEN: Who invented the word
superstar
?

WARHOL: I think it was Jack Smith.

O’BRIEN: And who were the first superstars?

WARHOL: They were all Jack Smith’s stars; every one of them was really a great person. The first ones we used were Taylor Mead, Edie Sedgwick, Brigid Berlin, Alan Midgette.

O’BRIEN: Did you meet them through Gerard?

WARHOL: No, Lester Persky, who’s the big producer now. Lester had a good eye. He was doing the eight-hour commercial. Really, he used to do these one-hour ads for Charles Antell. He did Melmac and some others. I guess that was where I got the idea for doing things long.

O’BRIEN: How did you meet Lou Reed?

WARHOL: He was playing at the Cafe Bizarre, and Barbara Rubin, a friend of Jonas Mekas, said she knew this group. Claes Oldenburg and Patti Oldenburg and Lucas Samaras and Jasper Johns and I were starting a rock and roll group with people like La Monte Young and the artist who digs holes in the desert now, Walter De Maria.

O’BRIEN: You started a rock band?

WARHOL: Oh yeah. We met ten times; and there were fights between Lucas and Patti over the music or something.

O’BRIEN: What did you do?

WARHOL: I was singing badly. Then Barbara said something about this group and mixed media was getting to be the big thing at the Cinémathèque, so we had films, and Gerard did some dancing and the Velvets played. And then Nico came around, and Paul started the Exploding Plastic Inevitable.

O’BRIEN: Was that a light show before the San Francisco light shows?

WARHOL: Yeah, it was, sort of. Actually, the Cinémathèque was really combining all the arts together. Then Olivier Cocquelin was going to start a discotheque for Edie Sedgwick and me called “Up.” And somehow he forgot about us, and Murray the K was doing something out on Long Island, and somehow they didn’t hire us. So Paul decided to open up a place a week before they opened up. We just rented the DOM and opened before the other places. We rented it by the week, and when it was doing so well, other people just took it away from us.

O’BRIEN: When did you get the idea that you might be able to make really commercial movies?

WARHOL: We never did. We were making a movie a week, and Paul found this theater in the Forties. We made a movie, and it played for three or four weeks. When they got tired of it, we just made another one. We did about six, and they did really well. They paid for themselves. Then they played outside New York in art theaters.

O’BRIEN: Did you go on college tours yourself before you sent Alan Midgette to impersonate you?

WARHOL: Oh, yeah, I went on a couple. I wasn’t getting any work done, and every time I did go, I didn’t do any of the things the kids had read I would do. So we thought we’d send somebody who was more what they really wanted. He was more entertaining and better looking and he could keep up and go to 18 different parties afterward. The people were happy with him.

O’BRIEN: How did Paul Morrissey start directing your films?

WARHOL: Well, it was always whoever worked the camera. Then I guess I was in the hospital, and he worked the camera so–that’s how it happened.

O’BRIEN: Did you ever get any Hollywood offers before a commercial hit?

WARHOL: We went out to Hollywood a lot of times, and everything always fell through. Most of the studios took us out, and nothing ever happened. It still doesn’t happen.

O’BRIEN: Do you think Hollywood is afraid of you?

WARHOL: No, it’s just that I was too wishy-washy. If you have a project and you know exactly what you want to do you can get them to do it. It’s all learning.

O’BRIEN: Would you like to make really expensive movies or do you want to keep it simple?

WARHOL: No, I think it would be great to make a $2- or $3-million art movie where nobody would really have to go to it. I thought that would be a good project to work on . . . do something really artistic. I think video is the best market. When the cassette market comes out, if you just do movies that nobody else can do, that’ll be the new way.

O’BRIEN: Would you ever put out your old films on cassettes?

WARHOL: No. I’d rather do new stuff. The old stuff is better to talk about than to see. It always sounds better than it really is. New things are always much better than old things.

O’BRIEN: How did you get the idea to start your magazine
Interview?

WARHOL: It was just to give Gerard something to do. He was supposed to work on it. Also, Brigid Berlin’s father ran the Hearst Corporation, and we thought Brigid could really run the magazine. But she didn’t get interested in it.

O’BRIEN: Did you ever think it would be successful?

WARHOL: It still isn’t successful. It would just be great if it could pay for itself. I always thought it should be for new people, but I guess there aren’t enough new people to buy it. You go to these rock concerts, and they can fill up a place with 30,000 people. It’s funny. They aren’t the same people who look at magazines.

O’BRIEN: You’ve done art, movies, records, books, TV, a play, a magazine. Is there anything that you’d still like to do?

WARHOL: Uh, have a baby? Oh, I had my first Coke in ten years.

O’BRIEN: Really?

WARHOL: I mean Coca-Cola.

HIGH TIMES: Why did you abstain for ten years?

WARHOL: Well, it was always so sweet. But we went to this apartment, and they had every brand food there. It was just so great to try all the Twinkies. It was a junk-food party. It was so good. I used to drink Coke all the time. It was so good. It gives you a lot of energy. You drink Coke a lot?

O’BRIEN: I think I like Pepsi better now.

WARHOL: You really do? Can you really taste the difference? I’m really going to do the test now. What does Coke taste like?

O’BRIEN: It’s more carbonated and has a sharper taste. Pepsi is sweeter, easier on your stomach.

WARHOL: But if you do the test, you’ve got to take it out of bottles or cans. If you take one out of a big bottle and the other out of a can, or a big bottle and a small bottle, they taste really different. The little Coke bottle and the little Pepsi bottle, which is a bigger bottle, are still the best.

O’BRIEN: How did it happen that Valerie Solanas attacked you?

WARHOL: I had just ridden up in the elevator with her and I turned around to make a telephone call and just heard noise, that’s all.

HIGH TIMES: Did you think about dying?

WARHOL: No, my life didn’t flash in front of me or anything. It was too painful. I put it together after a couple of weeks . . . what happened. I was so drugged up. I just never think about it.

O’BRIEN: How did you start taking a tape recorder around?

WARHOL: I had a big Uher that could go on for four hours at a time, and that all started around ‘64. Then I got the idea to do Ondine talking for 24 hours. That’s why I got a tape recorder.

O’BRIEN: Was that for your novel
a
, which was Ondine talking?

WARHOL: Yeah. Ondine used to sit up 24 hours a day, and that gave me the idea to have somebody talking for 24 hours.

HIGH TIMES: How did you write
The Philosophy of Andy Warhol!

WARHOL: I taped most of it talking to my secretary, Pat Hackett. I used to call her in the morning to tell her what I did the day before.