POPism (16 page)

Finally Judy walked up to where Tennessee was standing with Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs and pointed back at Lester.
“He
said that
you
said that I can't
act!”

Lester was going crazy. “My God! She's transmogrified one
remark
into a complete
visitation!
” He went over to where they all were and I could see the drama going on for at least another hour.

Meanwhile, one of my favorite people, Brigid Berlin, had come over and was busily telling me a story. I didn't realize why, though, until she was all finished, and as usual with Brigid, that took a long time.

“Once,” she said, “I was out with some piss-elegant queen who said he'd been to one of my infamous lunches on Fire Island the summer I was spending all my money.” She was talking about the summer she married a window dresser, came into a trust fund, and spent practically all of it throwing parties in Cherry Grove, renting helicopters to fly into the city to pick up her mail. Brigid was another one of those people I loved who didn't take money seriously, who knew how to have fun with it. Of course, she was from a rich family and she knew that even if they didn't exactly support her, she'd still always be in close contact with money.

Brigid's father was Richard E. Berlin, the president of the Hearst Corporation, and she'd grown up on Fifth Avenue overhearing phone conversations between her father and U.S. presidents. She'd told me that the first time she saw Judy Garland
in
The Wizard of Oz
, it was in the screening room at San Simeon and teenaged Elizabeth Taylor was sitting right next to her. But by the time I met Brigid, she was living in two-star hotels, mostly on the West Side, under the name of Brigid Polk. Her parents were totally disgusted with the way she'd gone through so much money that summer and weren't going to pay for her anymore except for her basic hotel bill. Brigid and her younger sister, Richie, had never gotten along with their parents anyway, and by this time they'd each been told, “You live your life, your father and I will live ours.” When Brigid brought her window dresser fiancé home to meet the family, her mother told the doorman to tell him to wait on a bench across the street in Central Park. Then she handed Brigid her wedding present—a hundred-dollar bill—and told her to go to Bergdorf's and buy herself some new underwear with it. Then she added, “Good luck with that fairy.” However, right after that an old family friend died, leaving each of the four Berlin kids a big trust fund. Brigid's was totally gone by October. But she was so charming she could always talk anybody into cab fare.

So I knew exactly what period of her life she was talking about, the minute I heard her say she had a limousine, because she sure didn't have limousines anymore.

“Anyway,” she said, “this queen I was out with invited me to stop by his townhouse. He said, ‘I live with Mahhhhn-tee,' and when I heard that, I thought, why not? Because I hadn't seen Monti Rock III since I made scrambled eggs for him in Cherry Grove. As soon as we got to this townhouse, he went right upstairs, leaving me all alone in the living room. It was about six o'clock in the morning and the sun was beginning to come in the windows and there I'm sitting, waiting for Monti Rock III. A guy with tousled hair and horn-rim glasses on came down in
a blue terry-cloth robe and said hello to me very nicely and put on some music….” I looked over at Edie, who was mussing Brian Jones's hair and laughing with Donald Lyons.

“Andy,
listen
to this, it's funny!” Brigid said. “The guy came over and sat down next to me on the couch, and I just sat there waiting for Monti. Meanwhile the guy who brought me came in and began fixing drinks. I admired a miniature French chair and he said, ‘That was a gift from Liz,' and it still didn't click until I turned to the side and realized that this guy with his arm around me was Montgomery Clift! And I was
wrecked
. All I could think to say was ‘You were great in
Judgment at Nuremberg.'

“There!” Brigid said, pointing across the room, and now I saw why she'd been telling me about Monty Clift—he was there at the Factory, too. I asked Brigid if she'd gone over yet to say hello, and she said, “No, he's too out of it.”

Suddenly I heard Judy scream, “Rudy!” and she staggered forward with her arms out toward Nureyev, who yelled back, “Judy!” and walked toward her, and it was stagger/step/Rudy!/Judy! back and forth until she fell around his neck saying, “You filthy Communist! Do you know that Tennessee Williams thinks
I
can't act?” Let's go find out if he thinks
you
can dance…”

The “What does he
mean
I can't
act?'
chaos went on into the next day, and she made Lester give her a dinner that night so she could continue to confront Tennessee.

Judy's favorite meal was spaghetti, but I didn't know it in those days—I always assumed Lester was just being cheap, having pasta all the time. But that was actually all she ever wanted. We'd go to the Café Nicholson on East 58th Street a lot and even when it was closed, Johnny Nicholson would come in especially to cook his special spaghetti for Judy. He'd even go over
to Lester's to cook it for her there—which was what happened that night. We were all sitting around the table and Judy was telling us how Mr. Mayer—she always called Louis B. Mayer “Mr. Mayer”—had her under analysis for years, and Tennessee asked her, “Well, did it help any?”

“No, it obviously didn't,” she said to Tennessee, “because according to
you
I still can't
act.”
Then she turned to the rest of us and continued, “But how
could
it help? I would never tell him the truth.”

And Tennessee was appalled. “You lahhhhed to yo' analyst? Oooo, that's a crahhhhm, that's a see-yin!”

Judy said she found out later that her analyst was on the MGM payroll and was being paid by Mr. Mayer to tell her, “Don't fight with your employers—they love you.” And Lester just couldn't get over that, he kept saying over and over, “That's a frightening thing… really frightening…”

Then Judy burst out laughing, opening her mouth wide, with strands of spaghetti overflowing at the corners, and started singing:
“Some-where / o-ver the rain-bow
”—I just couldn't believe it. I thought, “This is outrageous. Here's
Judy Garland
sitting right across from me belting ‘Somewhere Over the Rainbow' with a mouth full of spaghetti!”

Gerard always said that it was at “The Fifty Most Beautiful People” party that the stars went out and the superstars came in, that there were more people staring at Edie than at Judy. But to me, Edie and Judy had something in common—a way of getting everyone totally involved in their problems. When you were around them, you forgot you had problems of your own, you got so involved in theirs. They had dramas going right around
the clock, and everybody loved to help them through it all. Their problems made them even more attractive.

You never had to buy things in the sixties. You could get almost anything for free: everything was “Promotion.” Everybody was pushing something, and they'd send cars for you, feed you, entertain you, give you presents—that's if you were invited. If you weren't invited, things would run about the same, only they wouldn't send the car. Money was flowing, flowing.

A publicist once asked Danny Fields, “How can I get the Factory people to come to this opening?” Danny told him, “No problem. You don't even have to tell them what it is. Just send a limousine, and tell them to go downstairs. I guarantee when it pulls up they'll all file right into it.” We did.

I remember when Sam Green had to get his entire apartment furnished free in one day that spring. He'd gotten so excited about moving that he'd already invited hundreds of people to a party at his new place the next night before he realized that he didn't have anything for them to sit on. So he was up at the Factory all day making calls. I'd hear him phoning kindergartens, saying desperate things like “But what about those mats that the kiddies take their naps on? Couldn't I rent some of those? Because you see, I'd have them back to you the next afternoon….” He hung up the phone and moaned, “What can I dooooo? I've only got fifty-six dollars in my checking account!” I told him he'd think of something.

“But listen,” he said. “I've called everywhere—Hertz Rent-A-Cushion. Everything's so
expensive.”
I told him, “You're being dumb, Sam. If you're willing to pay for it, they know you're
poor: rich people don't
pay
for things. Tell them you want it
free
. Don't be such a loser. Think rich. Call Parke Bernet, call the Metropolitan Museum!”

Sam thought of a better one. He dialed a famous fur designer he'd met at a party the week before, refreshed the introduction, then plunged into “I'm giving a party tomorrow night… What?… Oh, no, no, I'm not
inviting
you, it's just this boring business thing I'm stuck with—for some art collectors, but
Life
is sending their photographer to cover it and they want some kind of a theme, a texture or something. They've seen Warhol's Silver Factory and they feel they've got to have wall-to-wall something, so I told them I'd have my apartment done up for them in plastic or fur or whatever. ‘Photogenic,' you know…” etc., etc.

The next morning a truck pulled up in front of Sam's new place on West 68th Street with forty-two thousand dollars' worth of furs, bonded, and he signed for them. He threw them all over the place—even out on the terrace—and that night everyone was lying around on minks and lynxes and foxes and seals, with hundreds of candles and a big fire blazing—the place looked great.

There were a few guys in the latest velvets and silk shirts, but not too many—the boys were still mostly in blue jeans and button-down shirts. Edie brought Bob Dylan to the party and they huddled by themselves over in a corner. Dylan was spending a lot of time then up at his manager Al Grossman's place near Woodstock, and Edie was somehow involved with Grossman, too—she said he was going to manage her career.

I'd met Dylan through the MacDougal Street/Kettle of Fish/Café Rienzi/Hip Bagel/Café Figaro scene, which Danny Fields claims got started when he and Donald Lyons saw Eric Andersen,
the folk singer, on MacDougal and thought he was so handsome they went up and asked if he wanted to be in an Andy Warhol movie. “How many times did we all use
that
one?” Danny laughed. And after that Eric got interested in Edie and suddenly we were all just around the Village together. But I think Edie actually knew Dylan because of Bobby Neuwirth. Bobby was a painter who originally started singing and guitar playing up in Cambridge just to make money to paint with, he told me once. Then he hooked up with Dylan and became part of that group—he was something like Dylan's road manager-confidant. And Bobby was a friend of Edie's.

At Sam's party Dylan was in blue jeans and high-heeled boots and a sports jacket, and his hair was sort of long. He had deep circles under his eyes, and even when he was standing he was all hunched in. He was around twenty-four then and the kids were all just starting to talk and act and dress and swagger like he did. But not many people except Dylan could ever pull that anti-act off—and if he wasn't in the right mood, he couldn't either. He was already slightly flashy when I met him, definitely not folksy anymore—I mean, he was wearing satin polka-dot shirts. He'd released
Bringing It All Back Home
, so he'd already started his rock sound at this point, but he hadn't played the Newport Folk Festival yet, or Forest Hills, the places where the old-style folk people booed him for going electric, but where the kids started going really crazy for him. This was just before “Like a Rolling Stone” came out. I liked Dylan, the way he'd created a brilliant new style. He didn't spend his career doing homage to the past, he had to do things his own way, and that was just what I respected. I even gave him one of my silver Elvis paintings in the days when he was first around. Later on, though, I got paranoid when I heard rumors that he had used the Elvis as a dart board up in the
country. When I'd ask, “Why would he do that?” I'd invariably get hearsay answers like “I hear he feels you destroyed Edie,” or “Listen to ‘Like a Rolling Stone'—I think you're the ‘diplomat on the chrome horse,' man.” I didn't know exactly what they meant by that—I never listened much to the words of songs—but I got the tenor of what people were saying—that Dylan didn't like me, that he blamed me for Edie's drugs.

Whatever anyone may have thought, the truth is I never gave Edie a drug, ever. Not even one diet pill. Nothing. She certainly was taking a lot of amphetamine and downs, but she certainly wasn't getting any of them from me. She was getting them from that doctor who was shooting up every Society lady in town.

Now and then someone would accuse me of being evil—of letting people destroy themselves while I watched, just so I could film them and tape record them. But I don't think of myself as evil—just realistic. I learned when I was little that whenever I got aggressive and tried to tell someone what to do, nothing happened—I just couldn't carry it off. I learned that you actually have more power when you shut up, because at least that way people will start to maybe doubt themselves. When people are ready to, they change. They never do it before then, and sometimes they die before they get around to it. You can't make them change if they don't want to, just like when they do want to, you can't stop them.

(I did eventually find out what Dylan did with that silver Elvis. More than ten years later, at a time when similar paintings of mine were estimated at five or six figures, I ran into Dylan at a party in London. He was really nice to me, he was a much friendlier person all around. He admitted that he'd given the painting away to his manager, Al Grossman, and then he
shook his head regretfully and said, “But if you ever gave me another one, Andy, I wouldn't make that mistake again….” I thought the story was finished then but it wasn't. Shortly afterward I happened to be talking to Robbie Robertson, guitarist in the Band, and he started to smile when I told him what Dylan had just told me. “Yeah.” Robbie laughed. “Only he didn't exactly
give
Grossman the painting—he
traded
it. For a sofa.”)