POPism (14 page)

De was Marguerite's date—they were good friends. He'd gotten her some writing jobs, and now she was a correspondent on the New York scene for some English newspapers. (She had a map of midtown Manhattan on her wall at home with little flags that she moved around when people would phone and tell her where they were having lunch or dinner.)

Marguerite, De, and I took the action in from a corner. We watched Bob Scull running around in some sort of checked jacket. He went over to a major young painter and shoved a fifty-dollar bill at him and said, “We're about to run out of soda water—go get some.” The young guy just stared at him like “Up yours.”

De shook his head. “That guy is impervious,” he said. It was true, no gaffe could ever affect him. De said, “In a way, he's the oddest figure out of this whole scene, because at one level he's coarse beyond description—beyond imagination! And yet at another, he really saw what was going on and put his money out.” Then De laughed and added, “Ver-ry ver-ry lit-tle of it. A teent-zy, teent-zy amount. But enough to get the best—you can't take that away from him…”

It's a strange thing to be talking about someone in a big crowd and then watch them from a distance being exactly the
way you're describing them. There was Bob Scull stomping around, giving orders. Who could ever figure out how a man who behaved like that socially could have such a keen sense for art?

The postscript to that night is that Ethel and Marguerite argued for weeks over how much each of them had spent for what—adding up hot dogs, tallying bottles, practically dragging paper cups out of the garbage to count them—and they wound up hating each other. It was a great party.

That fall, David Bourdon started writing on art for the
Village Voice
. When I'd heard they were looking for an art person, I'd introduced him to the
Voice
theater critic, Michael Smith, who I knew from the San Remo/Judson Church crowd.

Shortly after David got the job, he called me and said, “Well, now that I'm working for the
Voice
, do you think I'm chic enough for people to come all the way out to Brooklyn Heights if I give a party?”

Gerard and Billy and Ondine and I rode out to the Heights in a limo. As soon as we got there, Billy announced to David that his party was on our “circuit” for that night, and David got really offended at that, at our “lack of commitment,” he said, and then he kept asking sarcastic questions like were we sure we weren't allotting him too much of our time. But that type of hurt, paranoid attitude was part of David's sense of humor—setting himself up as an articulate underdog.

He had a big crowd—this was right after Freddy Herko died, and that was about the only Judson dancer who wasn't there. When I saw Susan Sontag, I asked David how he'd snagged her, because she was considered the dazzling intellect of the year. She'd just published her famous essay in the
Partisan Review
on the differences between high, middle, and low “camp,” and she was very
influential—she wrote about literature, pornography, films (especially Godard), art, anything. David told me that he'd heard she didn't think too much of my painting—“I hear she suspects your sincerity,” he said. Well, that was no surprise, since a lot of dazzling intellects felt that way. I didn't go over to talk to her, but I watched her from where I was sitting. She had a good look—shoulder-length straight dark hair and big dark eyes, and she wore very tailored things. She really liked to dance, too; she was jumping all around the place. Everybody then was doing the frug or the jerk-style dances, to the Beatles and the Supremes mostly. But the song that everybody wanted to hear over and over again was “I'm In with the In Crowd”—they played it every other song.

All through '64 we filmed movies without sound. Movies, movies, and more movies. We were shooting so many, we never even bothered to give titles to a lot of them. Friends would stop by and they'd wind up in front of the camera, the star of that afternoon's reel.

Once De started making movies, he never went back to the art scene. In the past year we'd only seen each other a couple of times, at parties. But then I bumped into him one afternoon on the street and we went to the Russian Tea Room for a drink. We sat there gabbing about what we'd been doing, and I offered that since we were both doing movies now, wouldn't it be great to do one together. Now, with people who know me, I'm famous for this sort of thing—proposing collaborations. (I'm also famous for not spelling out what the collaboration will consist of—who'll do what—and lots of people have told me how frustrating that can be. But the thing is, I never know exactly what I want to do, and the way I see it, why worry about things like
specifics beforehand, since nothing may ever come of the project? Do it first, then look at what you've got, and
then
worry about who did what. But most people would disagree with me, saying it's better to have an understanding at the outset.) When I suggested doing some sort of a joint production to De, I was just being impulsive. But De was always so practical, he squelched my suggestion right away, saying that our lives and styles and politics (I can't remember if he was calling himself a Marxist yet) and philosophies were just too different.

I must have looked very disappointed, because he held up his drink and said, “Okay, Andy, I'll do something for you that I'm sure nobody's ever offered to do for you and you can film it: I'll drink an entire quart of Scotch whiskey in twenty minutes.”

We went right over to 47th Street and made a seventy-minute film. De finished the bottle before I reloaded at the halfway point, but he wasn't showing the liquor yet. However, in just the little while it took to put more film in the camera, he was suddenly on the floor—singing and swearing and scratching at the wall, the whole time trying to pull himself up and not being able to.

Now, the thing was, I didn't really know what he'd meant when he told me, “I'll risk my life for you.” Even when I saw him crawling around on all fours, I just thought of it simply as someone being really drunk. Then Rotten Rita, who was hanging around, said, “Marine Corps sergeants keel over dead from that. Your liver can't take it.”

But De didn't die, and I called the movie
Drink
so it could be a trilogy with my
Eat
and
Sleep
. When the little old lady we used as a go-between brought it back from the lab, I called De to come over and see it. He said, “I'm bringing my woman and an English friend and I hope no one else will be there.” There
was no one at the Factory right then anyway, except for Billy and Gerard and me and a couple of people who looked like they were on their way out. But as soon as I hung up, a gang of Gerard's friends happened to walk in, and by the time De got there, there were around forty people all over the place. We ran the film and after it was over, De said to me, “I'll probably sue you if you ever screen it publicly again.” I knew he'd never sue me, of course, but that was his way of telling me not to have a print made of it.

At the end of '64 we made
Harlot
, our first sound movie
with
sound—
Empire
, the eight-hour shot of the Empire State Building, had been our first “sound” movie with
out
sound. Now that we had the technology to have sound in our movies, I realized that we were going to be needing a lot of dialogue. It's funny how you get the solution to things. Gerard and I were down at the Café Le Metro for one of the Wednesday night poetry readings when a writer named Ronnie Tavel was reading passages from his novel and some poems. He seemed to have reams of paper around; I was really impressed with the sheer amount of stuff he'd evidently written. While he was reading, I was thinking how wonderful it was to find someone so prolific just at the point when we were going to need “sounds” for our sound movies. Immediately after the reading I asked Ronnie if he'd come by the Factory and just sit in a lounge chair off-camera and talk while we shot Mario Montez in
Harlot
, and he said fine. As we left Le Metro, Gerard sneered, “Your standards are really ridiculous sometimes.” I guess he thought I was too impressed with the quantity of stuff Ronnie turned out. But the thing was, I liked the content, too, I thought he was really talented.

• • •

Mario Montez, the star of
Harlot
, was in a lot of off-off-Broadway plays and doing a lot of underground acting for Jack Smith and Ron Rice and Jose Rodriguez-Soltero and Bill Vehr. And this was all in addition, he told me, to his regular job: working for the post office. Mario was one of the best natural comedians I'd ever met; he knew instinctively how to get a laugh every time. He had a natural blend of sincerity and distraction, which has to be one of the great comedy combinations.

A lot of Mario's humor came from the fact that he adored dressing up like a female glamour queen, yet at the same time he was painfully embarrassed about being in drag (he got offended if you used that word—he called it “going into costume”). He used to always say that he knew it was a sin to be in drag—he was Puerto Rican and a very religious Roman Catholic. The only spiritual comfort he allowed himself was the logic that even though God surely didn't
like
him for going into drag, that still, if He really hated him, He would have struck him dead.

Mario was a very sympathetic person, very benign, although he did get furious at me once. We were watching a scene of his in a movie we called
The Fourteen-Year-Old Girl
, and when he saw that I'd zoomed in and gotten a close-up of his arm with all the thick, dark masculine hair and veins showing, he got very upset and hurt and accused me in a proud Latin way, “I can see you were trying to bring out the worst in me.”

Ronnie Tavel appeared for the
Harlot
shooting and he and a couple of other people just talked normally off-camera. Sometimes the talk was about what we were shooting and other times it wasn't—I loved the effect of having unrelated dialogue. After that Ronnie did quite a few scenarios for us—
The Life of juanita
Castro, Horse, Vinyl, The Fourteen-Year-Old Girl, Hedy (The Shoplifter), Lupe, Kitchen
, and others. I enjoyed working with him because he understood instantly when I'd say things like “I want it simple and plastic and white.” Not everyone can think in an abstract way, but Ronnie could.

In January '65 I met Edith Minturn Sedgwick. She'd just come to New York that summer. She'd been in a car accident and her right arm was in a cast. We were introduced by Lester Persky, but we were bound to meet anyway, since I'd gotten to know quite a few people from the Cambridge/Harvard group she was part of. A lot of them hung out at the San Remo.

Edie's family went all the way back to the Pilgrims—she was related to Cabots, Lodges, Lowells. Her great-uncle Ellery had been the editor of the
Atlantic Monthly
, and her greatgrandfather was the Reverend Endicott Peabody, the founder of the Groton School. And somebody on her grandmother's side had invented some basic industry like the trolley or the elevator, so they were rich, too. Edie's parents had moved as far away from New England as you could get—to California—but her brother was an undergraduate at Harvard and Edie was in Cambridge, too. She was studying sculpture with Lily Swann Saarinen, the ex-wife of the famous architect Eero Saarinen, and living in a small studio on Brattle Street where Longfellow and people like that had lived in all those glamorous old houses. She used to drive around town in her Mercedes to parties, lots of them given by her own brother. The two Sedgwicks were beautiful rich kids who knew how to have a good time in Cambridge.

Donald Lyons, who was studying classics then at the Harvard graduate school, remembers how Edie took a bunch of friends to the Ritz-Carlton one night for dinner after a very drunken all-day lawn party and how all of a sudden she got up
and started dancing on the tabletop and how the management very very politely asked them to leave. They stuffed all the silverware they could lay their hands on into their pockets, but then as they were leaving, Edie tripped at the top of the stairs and all the knives and forks and spoons spilled out of her purse and went avalanching down the stairs. Even with that the management was polite to her because they knew her father—it was just “Tsk, tsk, don't do this again, dear.”

For her twenty-first birthday party, Donald told me, Edie had “rented the Charles River boathouse and invited about two thousand people. ‘Edie in Cambridge'—it was right out of Gatsby.”

Danny Fields was one of the first people in the early sixties to come down from Cambridge. He'd just quit Harvard Law School and set up a life in New York, and so he was like Information Central for the other Cambridge kids when they came to town.

I'd met Danny at a party on 72nd Street. It was a Sunday that one of the newspaper supplements was illustrating a lead story with my Campbell's Soup Can, and Danny happened to have the paper with him. I was sitting on a couch next to Gerard and Arthur Loeb of the Wall Street Loebs. I borrowed Danny's paper to see how the soup can had come out. Meanwhile, a crazy, beautiful fashion model was crawling snake-style toward Arthur, groveling and telling him how much she was in love with him and begging him to please, please, marry her.

Denis Deegan was across from us. He'd been out in California when we were there in the fall of '63. He was tall and congenial, very Irish-looking with his red hair and blue eyes. He was staying with a friend on 19th Street near Irving Place, and when you asked him what he did, he'd smile beautifully and say,
“Nothing whatsoever.” The glamorous young kids in the sixties didn't work. You couldn't say that they were “unemployed,” because the idea of working never even came up, yet they always had the best clothes and all the plane trips they wanted. Rich people were especially free with their money then, supporting kids that they liked having around, so these kids would just get up in the afternoon, make a few phone calls, play a few records, decide what they were going to do later on, party all night, and then start all over again the next day.