POPism (11 page)

In the sixties good trashing was a skill. Knowing how to use what somebody else didn't, was a knack you could really be proud of. In other decades people had sneaked into Salvation Armies and Goodwills, embarrassed that somebody might see them, but in the sixties people weren't embarrassed at all, they bragged about what they could scavenge here and there. And nobody seemed to mind when a thing was dirty—I'd see people, kids especially, drinking right out of a cup they'd just found in the trash.

One day Billy brought in a phonograph from somewhere. He had a big collection of opera records—I think it was On-dine who started him on that. They both knew every obscure opera singer—I mean, singers no one had ever heard of—and they haunted the record stores for all the out-of-prints and private recordings. They loved Maria Callas best of all, though. They always said how great they thought it was that she was killing her voice and not holding anything back, not saving anything for tomorrow. They could really identify with that. When they'd go on and on about her, I'd think of Freddy Herko, the way he would just dance and dance until he dropped. The amphetamine people believed in throwing themselves into every extreme—sing until you choke, dance until you drop, brush your hair till you sprain your arm.

The opera records at the Factory were all mixed in with the 45's I did my painting to, and most times I'd have the radio on while the opera was going, and so songs like “Sugar Shack” or
“Blue Velvet” or “Louie, Louie”—whatever was around then—were blended in with the arias.

Billy was responsible for the silver at the Factory. He covered the crumbling walls and the pipes in different grades of silver foil—regular tinfoil in some areas, and a higher grade of Mylar in others. He bought cans of silver paint and sprayed everything with it, right down to the toilet bowl.

Why he loved silver so much I don't know. It must have been an amphetamine thing—everything always went back to that. But it was great, it was the perfect time to think silver. Silver was the future, it was spacy—the astronauts wore silver suits—Shepard, Grissom, and Glenn had already been up in them, and their equipment was silver, too. And silver was also the past—the Silver Screen—Hollywood actresses photographed in silver sets.

And maybe more than anything, silver was narcissism—mirrors were backed with silver.

Billy loved reflecting surfaces—he'd prop broken bits of mirror here and there and paste little sections of them onto everything. This was all amphetamine busywork, but the interesting thing was that Billy could communicate the atmosphere to people who weren't even taking drugs: usually people on speed created things that only looked good to them. But what Billy did went past the drugs. The only things that ever came even close to conveying the look and feel of the Factory then, aside from the movies we shot there, were the still photographs Billy took.

The mirrors weren't just decoration. They got used a lot by everybody primping for parties. Billy especially spent a lot of time looking at himself. He positioned the mirrors so he could see his face and body from every angle. He had a dancer's strut that he liked to check in motion.

Everything went young in '64.

The kids were throwing out all the preppy outfits and the dress-up clothes that made them look like their mothers and fathers, and suddenly everything was reversed—the mothers and fathers were trying to look like their kids. Even at art openings, the new bright-colored short dresses were stealing the show away from the paintings hanging on the walls. To go with the new clothes, hairdressers were doing either cropped, slick little cuts or incredibly huge teased-out jobs; and as for makeup, lipstick was finished and the big thing was eye makeup—iridescent, pearlized, goldenized—stuff that gleamed at night.

Generally speaking, girls were still pretty chubby, but with the new slim clothes coming in, they all went on diets. This was the first year I can remember seeing loads of people drink low-calorie sodas. (Amazingly, lots of the people who got thinner looked better and younger ten years later at the end of the sixties than they had at the beginning. And of course, tits and muscles were on the way out along with fat, because they bulged too much in clothes, too.) Since diet pills are made out of amphetamine, that was one reason speed was as popular with Society women as it was with street people. And these Society women would pass out the pills to their whole family, too—to their sons and daughters to help them lose weight, and to their husbands to help them work harder or stay out later. There were so many people from every level on amphetamine, and although
it sounds strange, I think a lot of it was because of the new fashions—everyone wanted to stay thin and stay up late to show off their new looks at all the new clubs.

The Beatles' first U.S. tour was that summer, and all of a sudden everybody was trying to be English. The British pop groups like the Beatles, the Dave Clark Five, the Rolling Stones, Herman's Hermits, Gerry and the Pacemakers, the Kinks, the Hollies, the Searchers, the Animals, the Yardbirds, and so forth, came along and changed everybody's idea of what was hip from the last vestiges of the tough, big-city teenage look into mod and Edwardian. American boys would fake cockney accents to pick up girls, and whenever they found a real person from London, they'd try to keep him talking and talking so they could get his accent down.

All that summer a young English kid named Mark Lancaster—the English Pop artist Richard Hamilton, whom we'd met at the Duchamp party in Pasadena the year before, had told him to look me up—was coming to the Factory every day, so I got to watch the Anglophilia up close. People would come over to talk to him as he helped me stretch the Flowers for my first show at Castelli coming up in the fall, and the small black and blue Jackies, the funeral image, and some big square Marilyns with different-color backgrounds, and one Jackie-Liz-Marilyn combo. Mark and I would work with Lesley Gore singing “You Don't Own Me” and Dionne Warwick doing “A House Is Not a Home” and bouncy hits by Gary Lewis and the Playboys and Bobby Vee playing.

Technically, Mark didn't have a cockney accent, or even a London one; he was from Yorkshire. Still, the first thing kids would ask him was “Do you know the Beatles?”—which surprised
him because by then the hottest ticket in England was the Rolling Stones; the Beatles had been the summer before's thing.

When Mark walked into the Factory for the first time, fresh from his student flight, he couldn't get over the fact that the “lift” was silver and self-service and that the girl who had gotten on right after him, Baby Jane, had this huge head of hair and these high little boots.

We were right in the middle of shooting another scene for
Dracula
. I was sitting on a couch with Jack Smith and Billy; and Rufus Collins, the dancer, and Ondine were around in the background, and Gerard and Jane. Jack was busy with his usual elaborate preshoot preparations, getting a set of fruits and baskets together, and Naomi Levine was darting around, looking very busy and excited.

The first thing I asked Mark was did he want to be in the movie, and he said sure, then everybody started taking off their clothes. He got out of his suit and joined the group molding silver foil jock straps around their underwear. It was so funny to watch people running off to answer the phones in their silver diapers. Gregory Battcock, the art and film critic, had come in, and Sam Wagstaff, who looked like an ageless Clark Kent, and Sam Green, who was working at the Green Gallery that summer. (He loved the way everyone assumed it was his gallery when he said he was “Sam Green from the Green Gallery.” Actually, it was run by Dick Bellamy, who was backed by Bob Scull.)

Since Jack was doing the organizing, there were at least ten people in and out of the movie that day. I ran the camera and did the zoom thing, and after we finished, everyone just sat
around in foil for a while. Then, as Mark remembers it, he thought, “Well, that was very nice,” and put his suit back on and came over to thank me for letting him come by. I just said, “See you tomorrow”—I always just said, “See you tomorrow”—so after that he kept coming back every afternoon, and since it was boring to just hang around, he began helping me stretch paintings.

We were still doing
Kiss
movies that summer and Mark did one with Gerard.

I had fun introducing Mark to people in the art world because then after he'd meet them we'd have more people to gossip about while we stretched. He'd come back from Frank Stella's studio down on Orchard Street and tell me about the big shaped metallic paintings Stella was doing, or about how Marisol sat down next to him at the Cedar bar and asked him, “Do you think I should go to Sidney Janis?” or about who was down at Bob Indiana's loft, or about Roy Lichtenstein's seascapes with clouds and horizons and his new series of landscapes.

The World's Fair was out in Flushing Meadow that summer with my mural of the Ten Most Wanted Men on the outside of the building that Philip Johnson designed. Philip gave me the assignment, but because of some political thing I never understood, the officials had it whitewashed out. A bunch of us went out to Flushing Meadow to have a look at it, but by the time we got there, you could only see the images faintly coming through the paint they'd just put over them. In one way I was glad the mural was gone: now I wouldn't have to feel responsible if one of the criminals ever got turned in to the FBI because someone had recognized him from my pictures. So then I did a picture of Robert Moses instead, who was running the fair—a
few dozen four-foot squares of Masonite panels—but that got rejected, too. But since I had the Ten Most Wanted screens already made up, I decided to go ahead and do paintings of them anyway. (The ten certainly weren't going to get caught from the kind of exposure they'd get at the Factory.)

The thing I most of all remember about the World's Fair was sitting in a car with the sound coming from speakers behind me. As I sat there hearing the words rush past me from behind, I got the same sensation I always got when I gave an interview—that the words weren't coming out of me, that they were coming from someplace else, someplace behind me.

I guess Mark met everyone in the New York art scene that summer, not necessarily at the Factory but probably because of it. “You'd stand there painting,” Mark remembers, “and you'd say, ‘Do you think Picasso's ever heard of us?' and then you'd send me off to see people.” I sent him to dinner at Henry Geldzahler's, and through Henry he met Jasper Johns and Stella and Lichtenstein and Ellsworth Kelly, and then once I sent him as a get-well present to Ray Johnson who was in Bellevue Hospital with hepatitis. We went down together to that art gallery near Washington Square that Ruth Kligman, who'd been Jackson Pollock's girl friend and was right in the car with him when he was killed, was running with her new husband, Mr. Sansegundo. They screened movies every night and Jonas would be there with underground filmmakers like Harry Smith and Gregory Markopoulos. John Chamberlain and Neil Williams were around a lot, too, looking identical—they dressed alike and they both had big butch moustaches and were always drunk.

The really funny thing about all this was that the whole time Mark was making notes and taking photographs because when
he went back to England he was planning to go around giving lectures and showing slides! He said that the people over there were just as fascinated by what they had heard was going on here as Americans were by London.

One thing I've always liked to do is hear what people think of each other—you learn just as much about the person who's talking as about the person who's getting dished. It's called gossip, of course, and it's an obsession of mine. So one afternoon as we stretched Marilyns, when Mark remarked that he thought Gerard was very “complicated,” I was in like a flash and asked him just what he meant by that.

“Well.” he said, “he doesn't want anyone else to be as close to you as he is. He told me once, ‘When it's one-to-one with Andy, it's very easy, but when you're in a group, Andy creates competition between people so he can watch problems being played out. He loves to see people fighting and getting jealous of each other, and he encourages people to gossip about each other.'”

“What did he mean?” I asked him.

“Well, say, like we are right now.” Mark smiled. “Here I'm gossiping about him to you, and then at some point you'll get
him
to tell you exactly what he thinks of
me
.”

“Oh, really?” I said.

“Yes. And I suppose he also meant that, for example, when we leave here tonight, you'll be going on somewhere, but you'll never say who else is invited—you'll just contrive in an elegant fashion to make sure the people you don't want to be there aren't.… And you'll do it all without saying a word, or by saying something very oblique—some people will realize they have to fall away, and some people will just know they can come along.”

“Oh, really?” I said, letting the subject drop—I mean, you can't gossip about yourself.

We usually worked till around midnight, and then we'd go down to the Village, to places like the Café Figaro, the Hip Bagel, the Kettle of Fish, the Gaslight, the Café Bizarre, or the Cino. I'd get home around four in the morning, make a few phone calls, usually talk to Henry Geldzahler for an hour or so, and then when it started to get light I'd take a Seconal, sleep for a couple of hours, and be back at the Factory by early afternoon. As I walked in, the radio and the record player would both be blasting—“Don't Let the Sun Catch You Crying” mixed with
Turandot
, “Where Did Our Love Go?” with Donizetti or Bellini, or the Stones doing “Not Fade Away” while Maria Callas did
Norma
.

A lot of people thought that it was me everyone at the Factory was hanging around, that I was some kind of big attraction that everyone came to see, but that's absolutely backward: it was me who was hanging around everyone else. I just paid the rent, and the crowds came simply because the door was open. People weren't particularly interested in seeing me, they were interested in seeing each other. They came to see who came.