POPism (13 page)

Nicky had left
Vogue
to be the art director of A & P heir Huntington Hartford's short-lived magazine called
Show
. Hunt himself interviewed Nicky for the job: “First he analyzed my handwriting,” Nicky told me, “and then he asked me to kiss his wife so he could see how she reacted, and then he gave me the job.” Nicky used Jane on a
Show
cover—a David Bailey photograph of her in a yachting cap and World's Fair sunglasses, with an American flag between her teeth.

Mick was staying down at Nicky's on East 19th Street again, and so was Keith Richards, who had Ronnie the Ronette spending a lot of time there with him—the Ronettes were very big then, after “Be My Baby” and “Walking in the Rain.”

The theme of the party was going to be “Mods vs. Rockers,” so on the night of the party, to make it look authentic, Nicky went over to an S & M leather bar on 33rd Street and Third Avenue called the Copper Kettle, where he'd just taken his friend Jane Ormsby-Gore dressed as a boy (she was the daughter of the British ambassador to Washington) and invited all the leather boys to come by later on but to really bust their way in to make it look like a real confrontation between mods and rockers. The leather boys did come, but since nobody even tried to stop them, they just wandered in with no problem—and no impact.

Then for a band, Nicky had gone over to the Wagon Wheel on West 45th Street to ask the all-girl house band, Goldie and the Gingerbreads in their gold lamé outfits and stiletto heels, if they wanted to play at the party. They did, and they played until five in the morning, with the floors shaking so badly we were amazed at the bounce.

The party was a smash even though the Stones were so shy they stayed way upstairs in Jerry's apartment most of the time. It got written up in all the papers, and it did as much for Baby Jane as it did for the Stones—Tom Wolfe's “Girl of the Year” article on her, which defined her as the new type of Pop sixties girl and was eventually part of his
Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby
book, featured the party.

The Rolling Stones weren't the only ones with foreign publicity problems. I realized I had some myself when I had a major show at a gallery in Canada and I didn't sell one thing. Gerard went up with me to Toronto on the train. The day of the opening we loitered around the gallery, but nobody showed up—nobody. Gerard went out to browse around and came back with some poetry books that you could only get in Canada (there was one by a poet called Leonard Cohen who nobody in the States had heard of yet), so he was thrilled, but I was feeling like a total dud. The gallery was about to close, so you can imagine how relieved I was when a tubby, red-cheeked high school kid all out of breath came running up to me with a three-ring notebook in his hands and puff-puffed, “Oh! Thank God you're still here—I'm doing my term paper on you.” By this point I was really thrilled to see him. He said he had picked me to do his term paper on because his cousin had seen my Elvis Presley show in Los Angeles the year before but also because I hadn't done that
much yet so he wouldn't have to do too much research. All I could think of was that if I was still this big a nobody in Canada, then Picasso certainly hadn't heard of me. This was definitely a setback, because I'd sort of decided by then that he might have.

Everyone always reminds me about the way I'd go around moaning, “Oh, when will I be famous, when will it all happen?” etc., etc., so I must have done it a lot. But you know, just because you carry on about something doesn't mean you literally want what you say. I worked hard and I hustled, but my philosophy was always that if something was going to happen, it would, and if it wasn't and didn't, then something else would.

My art was still considered peculiar, and when I was first at Castelli, my work didn't sell too well. But then the Flowers show came up and a lot of those paintings got sold, though still no one seemed to want to pay a good price for the early cartoon pictures.

I was happy at Castelli, I knew they were doing everything they could for me, but Ivan sensed that I was uncomfortable when I got low prices. One day he said to me, “I know you feel you're not getting the right prices for your early work, but at this point people still feel it's too peculiar and aggressive and that the subject matter isn't appropriate—that they couldn't live with it. And now that you're using silkscreens, they don't like that either. They just don't understand what you're doing. But you're being very patient, Andy, and I think this year things will change.”

I was glad to hear it. Changing the subject, I said, “Gee, Ivan, you really should come by and visit us. You never do anymore.”

What Ivan said to me then made me realize for the first time that he didn't like the Factory scene. I'd always assumed he was just too busy to come all the way to midtown—after all, my studio used to be much closer to the gallery. But now I had to face
the fact that it wasn't the distance that was keeping Ivan away. I started to get the idea when he said, “Andy, I know a lot of people think it's glamorous over there at your studio, but to me it's just—gloomy. Your art is partly voyeuristic, which is completely legitimate, of course—you've always liked the bizarre and the peculiar and people at their most raw and uncovered—but it's not so much a fascination for me. I don't need to see that so much…. You have a group of people around you now that's essentially destructive. Not that they set out to be necessarily, but…” Ivan shook his head, not finishing. “I'd rather see you in a small crowd or just alone like this. I guess I'm just totally embedded in the art community—it's wholesome and I feel comfortable in it.”

We never for a second stopped being friends, but from then on we understood that it was really only art that was our common ground. And it suddenly occurred to me that Henry Geldzahler was the only friend from '60 that I was still seeing a lot of. Or at least I was talking to him a lot—three to five hours a day. He was involved in all the same things I was—the art scene and the Factory/movie scene. He was someone who was as fascinated by the bizarre as I was—we were both open to involvements with crazy people.

All during '64 Freddy Herko had been taking a lot of amphetamine. Like so many people on speed, he'd think he was doing creative things when he wasn't. He'd sit there with a compass and a Rapidograph and twenty or thirty Pentels and make intricate geometric designs on a little pad with dirty fingerprints all over it and think he was doing something beautiful and clever.

Freddy would come by the Factory a lot to see Billy. He'd left some of his clothes and costumes there in a trunk—all the
amphetamine dingle-dangles, the flowers made out of broken mirrors, and the cloaks and feathered hats and pasted-on jewels—someone had once described Freddy as “a seventeenth-century macaroni.” He had the rest of his belongings scattered around downtown in different friends' apartments. At the Factory he'd walk in, talking so fast, with his shoulder bag slung behind him, sit down, and show me his drawings, then leap up—he danced in leaps wherever he went. Amphetamine symptoms were still new to me, I didn't even recognize them, I didn't even know about the amphetamine compulsion to draw little patterns. I only thought, “Gee, this person is an incredible dancer. High-strung and neurotic maybe, but really creative.”

One of the saddest times with Freddy was when Gerard and I and a couple of other people went with him to visit his Aunt Harriet at her apartment in the Fifties—it had a lot of big mirrors in it, so Freddy was leaping around; it must have been like being in dancing class. Whenever he stayed still long enough, Aunt Harriet hugged him.

As we were leaving, she gave Freddy some money, and then this is the really sad part—she pressed a dollar bill into each of our hands because she said she wanted Freddy's friends to have a little something, too.

I filmed Freddy three times. The first time was just a short dance thing on a roof. The second was a segment for
The Thirteen Most Beautiful Boys
where Freddy sat nervously in a chair for three minutes, smoking a cigarette. And the third was called
Roller Skate
, and Freddy was the star of it. He put a skate on one foot and we filmed him rolling on it all over town and over in Brooklyn Heights, day and night, gliding in dance attitudes and looking as perfect as the ornament on the hood of a car. We filmed glide after glide of him, keeping the camera going. When
it came time to take the skate off, his foot was bleeding, but he'd been smiling the whole while and he was still smiling, wearing a WMCA Good Guys sweatshirt.

Freddy spent the months before he died with a girl dancer over in an apartment near St. Mark's Church, taking more and more amphetamine. He began staying inside, never going out. He never smiled anymore. He withdrew from the whole apartment into one single room, and then from the room to the end of the hall, and then from the end of the hall into a walk-in closet—he'd stay in there for days at a time in his mess of textiles and beads and records. Oh, he would occasionally come out to make a few ballets but then he'd go right back in. Finally the girl dancer asked him to leave, and he moved down to the lower Lower East Side.

One night he showed up at Diane di Prima's to borrow a record and invited everyone there to a performance; he said he was going to leap off the top of his building downtown.

A few days later, on October 27, he turned up at an apartment on Cornelia Street that belonged to Johnny Dodd, who did the lighting for the Judson Church concerts. The front door to Johnny's apartment was bolted and sealed with nails driven through the jamb, but there was a panel, maybe ten inches wide and three feet high with hinges, that by really stooping you could get through. The door had gotten this treatment because of Freddy; he'd kicked it in a few times.

What Freddy did when he got inside was go and take a bath. The apartment was stuffed with stage props and collage things—gold fabric covering bare brick walls, a Tintoretto-like eighteenth-century baroque heaven scene on the ceiling, a picture of some ballerinas framed with a toilet seat, a photograph of Orion the Witch of Bleecker Street, a portable wall of postage stamps, and
so forth. After his bath, Freddy put Mozart's
Coronation
Mass on the hi-fi. He said he had a new ballet to do and he needed to be alone. He herded the people there out of the room. As the record got to the “Sanctus,” he danced out the open window with a leap so huge he was carried halfway down the block onto Cornelia Street five stories below.

For the twenty-six nights following Freddy's death, the group at Diane di Prima's apartment met formally to read the Tibetan Book of the Dead. The ritual involved making sacrifices, and most people pulled out a few of their hairs and burned them.

There was a memorial service for him at Judson Church, but so many people showed up that there was another one for him, at the Factory. We showed the three films.

(It's so strange to look back on that last year of Freddy's life when he retreated into that closet, because in '68 Billy Name did the very same thing, went into the darkroom closet and didn't come out.)

The Sculls, Bob and Ethel, were big—very big, the biggest—collectors of Pop Art, and of course they got to know all the Pop artists and through collecting and knowing all the artists, they made quite a place for themselves in the booming sixties art scene. To celebrate the opening of Philip Johnson's new building for the Museum of Modern Art, the Sculls gave a party, and at that party Ethel Scull seated herself next to Mrs. Lyndon Johnson. There they were, sitting together. A few years before,
no
body—not even a
gossip columnist
—would have known who Ethel Scull was, yet in the period between '60 and '69, the Sculls more than anyone else came to symbolize success in the art scene at the collecting end. A lot of the swinging mod couples in the
sixties started to collect art, and the Sculls were models and heroes for these people. The collection of Pop Art that Bob Scull had acquired was already legendary. He was in the taxicab business, but he'd been smarter than all those people at the museums. He'd pulled off what everyone who collects dreams of—he built the best collection by recognizing quality before anybody else was on to it, while it could still be bought cheap.

Ethel Scull (in those days, she liked to be called “Spike”) gave a lot of big, generous parties, where she somehow always managed to instigate little intrigues and feuds that would peak in embarrassing scenes. She had the “You're-my-friend-this-week” style that made for tense dramas.

For example, I was at a party of theirs when they still lived out in Great Neck on Long Island. It was their debut party in the art world. I guess they'd finally gotten their collection to the point where they wanted to show it off. It was a great place, the art was fantastic, and there were beautiful flower arrangements all over the place. In the middle of the party, Jim Rosenquist's wife happened to pluck a carnation from one of the centerpieces. Ethel zeroed in on her and screamed, “You put that right back! Those are
my
flowers!” Ethel could sure give people something to talk about.

For my Flowers opening at Castelli, Ethel gave a party at the Factory with that southern girl-around-town Marguerite Lamkin. Up until they gave that party together, the two women were good friends. They had it catered by Nathan's Famous with hot dog carts and french fries and hamburgers—there was a real boardwalk atmosphere. Senator Javits and his exuberant wife, Marion, were there, and Allen Ginsberg in a tam-o'-shanter, and Jill Johnston, the
Voice
dance critic, was climbing up the silver
pipes. Fred McDarrah from the
Voice
was there taking a lot of pictures. Even the police stopped by.

The two ladies had hired Pinkerton detectives and stationed them downstairs, and you absolutely had to show your invitation or they wouldn't let you in. I'd told a lot of my friends to come—I mean, I didn't know there were going to be guards there—and every one of them got turned away at the door. They were all mad at me for not being right down there to get them in, but whenever a situation looked like it was going to be problematic, I usually tried to stay out of it.