POPism (15 page)

Danny says he'll always remember that Sunday afternoon we met, because that was when he decided he wanted to really get to know all these people better. “You were sitting there reading my paper and Gerard was talking to Denis and Arthur was kicking the beautiful French model in the face with his good leg. She got upset and ran for a window that was open from the top and climbed up onto the ledge. Nobody paid the slightest attention to her. You just glanced up from the newspaper and said so calmly, ‘Ooo. Do you think she'll really jump?' and went back to reading. Finally I couldn't stand it any longer and I ran over and opened the window from the bottom and pulled her back in, and when I turned around, everyone was still just sitting there chatting and I thought, ‘Gee, this is a very cool crowd. I think I'll pursue this….'”

“The first time I saw Edie,” Danny said, “she'd just driven down from Boston with Tommy Goodwin and they stopped by the apartment that Hal Peterson and David Newman were subletting on Riverside Drive around 78th. The World's Fair had just opened and we were all going out there the next day. The radio was going full blast; the Beach Boys were singing ‘I Get Around.'

When Edie came in and saw her girl friends, she started jumping up and down and pretty soon everyone was jumping up and down and hugging and kissing each other. They all looked so collegiate—Shetland sweaters and circle pins and little pleated skirts. And Edie was so pretty and bubbly and big-eyed. Everyone stayed up all night talking and walking along Riverside Drive.

“Tommy Goodwin was staying with me then,” Danny went on. “God, he was beautiful. At Harvard everybody was in love with him. His mother and father were both very famous doctors. He was good friends with Chuck Wein and that whole bunch and he would just sort of hang around New York and carry cameras and let everybody fall in love with him. Edie stayed at my place for about two weeks when Tommy was there—she spent most of her time sitting in the window, talking and laughing on the phone all day, smoking cigarettes. She had a little group picture of a few members of her family, taken when they were all checked into the same Society mental institution during the same period—Silver Hill, I think it was. It cost three hundred a day for each of them, she told me, so that was cozy.”

Edie used to talk about her childhood as if it were a nightmare straight out of Dickens. At first I always believed everything the kids told me about their parents, but as the years went by and I'd now and then meet one of the parents, I wasn't so sure.

“When I first met Edie, she was so fresh,” Danny continued. “She'd have a couple of drinks, but that was it.” Then he added, “I could see, though, that she
wanted
to take other things. The people coming in from Cambridge always had acid with them—it wasn't even illegal yet, that's how long ago this was. It was brown on sugar cubes, and they'd put it in my refrigerator—it looked so harmless but it was probably enough for two thousand
doses. They'd sit at my kitchen table with medicine droppers, bopping their shoulders to the Supremes, dripping the LSD onto the little cocktail sugar cubes. Edie took some acid when she was staying with me, as sort of a debutante giggle.

“Then one day they started to move her trunks in and I got a little nervous, but by September she was in her own apartment on East 63rd Street. She'd sort of decided to become a model.”

One of the people who was friends with everyone in that Cambridge crowd summed up the relationships this way: “The whole thing was the beautiful Ivy League boys, the clever faggots who loved them, and the beautiful debutante girls the beautiful Ivy League boys loved.”

Why did they all come to New York? “These kids from Cambridge in their early twenties,” Danny said, “represented inherited wealth, inherited beauty, and inherited intelligence. These were the most glamorous young people in all America. I mean, they were
so
rich and
so
beautiful and
so
so smart. And so
crazy
. But up in Cambridge, all together, all they could think was, ‘Oh, God, we're so bored, we're so tired of going to classes. We want to move out into the
real world
.' Moving out into the real world meant getting their picture in the papers and getting written up in the magazines.”

I've always been fascinated by the assumptions that rich kids make. A lot of them think it's normal, the way they live—because it's all they've ever known. I love to watch their minds operate. There are two kinds of rich kids—the ones who're always trying to act poor and prove that they're just like everybody else and who secretly worry that people only like them for their money, and the ones who just relax and have fun with it, who even play it up. The second kind are fun.

• • •

It wasn't surprising that Edie should vaguely decide to be a model. This was the year when the idea of “modeling” held more excitement for a girl Edie's age than it ever had before. It had always been glamorous to model—but now it could be outrageous, too. Very soon, Edie would be innovating her own look that
Vogue, Life, Time
, and all the other magazines would photograph—long, long earrings with dime-store T-shirts over dancer's tights, with a white mink coat thrown over it all.

A discotheque called Ondine (just a name coincidence—no connection with our Ondine) opened on East 59th Street at the very beginning of '65, and that was where you started seeing lots of beautiful girls in mini-skirts (they weren't even called that yet, though), short and pleated and with stripes and dots and big colors and stretchy knits.

Everyone started going to Ondine right away, all the celebs in town. The girls there were beautiful—Gerard picked Marisa Berenson up there one night on her very first modeling trip to New York and brought her by the Factory for a screen test.

Edie went there all the time, throwing a lot of money around in the beginning when she still had it, picking up the check for as many as twenty people every night. She still had her arm in a cast from the car accident, and she'd be swinging it around, standing on top of the tables. She always kept both her feet solidly planted on the table or the floor or whatever—as if she was afraid she'd lose her balance and topple over if she lifted one of them, she was so stoned all the time there, just drinking, having a great time. Her dance moves were sort of Egyptian, with her head and chin tilting in just the right, beautiful way. People called it the Sedgwick, and Edie was the only one who did it—
everybody else was doing the jerk to “The Name Game,” “Come See about Me,” “All Day and All of the Night.”

We partied all night but we also prepartied all afternoon, just hanging around the Factory. The Duchess was always so high on speed that any little thing could send her into an hour-long monologue and I'd just sit there and watch the show. When the news came over the radio in February that Malcolm X was just shot up in Harlem, they were interviewing people at his Hotel Teresa headquarters and that was all the Duchess needed to hear:

“The Hotel Teresa! That's where I had my last abortion.”

“You went up to Harlem for an abortion?” I gasped. “Why didn't you go back to your classy Fifth Avenue doctor where you got your first one?”

“Because the first one was the worst pain of my whole life. He did the one where he sticks his hand all the way up me with one of those banana things.
For ten minutes?
It was excruciating.”

“He didn't give you a shot for the pain?” I said.

“
Nothing
. He didn't want me to pass out in his office and not be able to get home.”

“But isn't anything better than going up to Harlem for an abortion? Weren't you scared?”

“I couldn't face pain again like that first time,” she said, “but after the Teresa, my dear, I wished I had. Some woman did one of those packing jobs on me. She told me to go home and exercise, to not just lie in bed, and to call her when I got labor pains in seventeen hours. The next morning—first thing—I went up and down the escalators at Bloomingdale's about fifty times. Then I went home and I was so out of my mind with the
pain that I threw a shoe through the TV. Finally it just dropped in the toilet, my dear, and I haven't been pregnant since.”

Just then, from the back of the Factory, we could hear Ondine's voice, apologizing to a trick, “But look how big it is, I'm just sorry it doesn't work on you.”

David Whitney, a young kid who worked at the Castelli Gallery, stepped out of the elevator with two very suburban women from Connecticut who were “interested” in my art. I was standing there doing some Flowers for my Paris show coming up in May and talking to the women when Ondine came out from the back holding a huge jar of Vaseline and launched into a whole big tirade against drag queens and transvestites, maintaining that if you couldn't do whatever you wanted to without
any
clothes on—
least
of all women's—then you should forget about sex altogether.

And then he looked at the women—both of them were certainly looking at him—and demanded, “And for the last time, what is a ‘gay bar'? What
is
it? Can you tell me?” The ladies just stared at him. One looked intrigued, and the other didn't have any expression at all. Ondine kept it up: “As a homosexual, I will not go to one—why should I be segregated?!”

“That's right—” the Duchess agreed, “—you should be
isolated
….”

“It was the best party of the sixties.” That's how Lester Persky rated the party he gave at the Factory for “The Fifty Most Beautiful People” in the spring of '65. “There was certainly no better party. It lasted until five the next afternoon. Did anyone keep a list of who was there?” Lester wanted to know. Of course not.

Judy Garland was definitely there. I watched as five boys carried
her in off the elevator on their shoulders. It was odd because that night, for some reason, nobody seemed to notice her. I noticed her, though. I always noticed Judy Garland.

The same way rich kids fascinated me, show business kids fascinated me even more. I mean, Judy Garland grew up on the MGM lot! To meet a person like Judy whose real was so unreal was a thrilling thing. She could turn everything on and off in a second; she was the greatest actress you could imagine every minute of her life.

Even though Lester was the host, since he'd had to go pick Judy up, he didn't get to his own party until very late. Judy was famous for not being ready. For not even dreaming of being ready. She was late for everything. The cameras never rolled until she stepped in front of them, so naturally everything should wait for her all her life, right? She was living at 13 Sutton Place, Miriam Hopkins's house with the red doorway, which everyone used to rent, and you'd walk in and a couple of hours later she'd be almost ready to start getting ready.

When the boys who'd carried her in that night finally set her down on her feet, she started to wobble, so then they picked her back up and set her down on the couch. I went over to Lester and asked him where he'd been all this time. Of course, I knew exactly where he'd been—waiting for Judy—but I hoped my question would get him going, and it did:

“I picked her up,” Lester began, holding his drink, looking around the loft, trying to see who was there. David Whitney danced by in the arms of Rudolph Nureyev. “And then after about an hour I said, ‘Judy, don't you think we'd better be going?' She told me no, no, there wouldn't be anybody there yet. I said, ‘But, Judy, I'm the
host
. I
have
to be there.' Finally,
finally
, we're outside on the street and I raise my hand to hail a cab and
her boyfriend very nonchalantly waves it on. So I raise my hand again, a cab pulls up, and the boyfriend waves it on again….” Tennessee Williams danced by in the arms of Marie Menken.

While Lester and I talked, some boys were attending to Judy. She spotted us and started to get up, but she sank back into the couch. Lester waved brightly, blew her a kiss, and went right on spieling.
“Finally
, after three or four taxis, I asked the guy, ‘Is it a
Checker
cab you want or something?' and he said, ‘Oh, no, Miss Garland hasn't been in
public
transportation in
years
.' And I said, ‘Well, look, I'm not suggesting we take a
bus
—this is a taxi!' But she wouldn't go. There was no way she would even consider it. I was desperate. I said to her, ‘Well, can we walk, then? It's only eight blocks.' ‘No,' she said….

“The boyfriend went back inside and phoned some old beaten-up limousine service in the Bronx that used to be on call to MGM, and so we had to wait another hour for the limousine to get there…”

Edie looked beautiful that night, laughing a lot with Brian Jones. Gerard and the Duchess were staring hard at Juliet Prowse, who'd just broken up with Frank Sinatra. She was really striking, too.

Judy was on her way over to us and when she was a few steps away, she announced to Lester, “I will definitely star in Tennessee's play.” Lester whispered to me that she'd been on this kick all night—she'd decided that she wanted to play Flora Goforth in
The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymore
, which was the first movie Lester was going to produce. (The title was changed to
Boom
for the movie.) Then for a few minutes, she gave us all the different ways she could play Flora until Lester interrupted her and said in a joking way: “The funny thing is, Judy, that Tennessee thinks of you as a great
singer
rather than a great
actress
.”
The funny thing was that that was exactly how Tennessee did feel at the time, I'd heard him say so.

As soon as the words were out of Lester's mouth, he knew he'd made a big mistake; Judy wouldn't drop it. For hours it was “When did he say that? What did he mean? What was he thinking of? How dare he! Where is he?”—every variation on the theme that you can think of.