POPism (21 page)

A week or so after Philadelphia I got a real lesson in show business and Pop style. Just when you think you're getting famous, somebody comes along and makes you look like a warm-up act for amateur night. Pope Paul VI. Talk about Advance PR—I mean, for centuries!

Definitely the most Pop public appearance tour of the sixties was that visit of the Pope to New York City. He did it all in one day—October 15, 1965. It was the most well-planned,
media-covered personal appearance in religious (and probably show business) history. “Never Before in This Country! One Day Only! The Pope in New York City!”

The really funny thing for us, of course, was that Ondine was known in our crowd as “the Pope,” and one of his most famous routines was “giving the papal bull.”

The (real) Pope and his entourage of aides, press, and photographers left Rome early that morning on an Alitalia DC-8. Eight hours and twenty minutes later, they got off the plane at Kennedy with the Pope's shiny robes blowing in the wind. They drove in a motorcade through Queens—the streets were lined with people—through Harlem crowds, and then down to the jammed-for-blocks St. Patrick's Cathedral area in the Fifties where the Pope seemed to want to go out into the “audience” but you could see his aides talking him out of it. After all the stuff in the cathedral he ran down the street to the Waldorf-Astoria, where President Johnson was waiting. They exchanged gifts and talked for a little under an hour about world troubles. Then it was over to address the UN General Assembly (essentially he said, “Peace, disarmament, and no birth control”), out to Yankee Stadium to say Mass in front of ninety thousand people, over to the closing World's Fair to see Michelangelo's
Pieà
in its Pop context before it went back to the Vatican, and back out to Kennedy and onto the TWA plane, saying, when the reporters asked him what he liked best about New York,
“Tutti buoni”
(“Everything is good”) which was the Pop philosophy exactly. He was back in Rome that same night. To do that much in that short a time with that kind of style—I can't imagine anything more Pop than that.

We watched most of the Pope's tour of New York on TV at the Factory. He came right by our window on his way over to
the UN—there were Secret Service people jumping all over the roofs. Ondine was going crazy with the real Pope in town; he was running back and forth from the window in a cape. Edie was on the couch getting made up, looking into a hand mirror, flinging her earrings over her shoulder. (Her hair was really short and the earrings really did go all the way down to her shoulders so the only thing to do was treat them like long hair.) Ingrid was next to her, doing basically the same routine. Chuck Wein was there and Ivy Nicholson, a beautiful fashion model, in Courrèges boots. Naomi Levine was standing next to me in one of those moods where she wanted to argue about Pop Art and whether I was “fraudulent” or not, and finally she wandered away and I was left just standing there thinking about how Pope Paul VI himself had gone right by the Factory that afternoon—I mean, the
Pope, the
Pope!

Tennessee Williams came by later and we talked about suicide. Just that day we'd screened one of our movies called
Suicide
for someone where this kid who has nineteen scars on his wrist points to each one and gives the story of why he tried to kill himself that time. I told Tennessee about how Freddy Herko had danced out the window—Tennessee was the right one to talk to about
that
.

Paul Morrissey came over to Tennessee and told him how disappointed we were that we couldn't afford to buy the rights to any of his properties but that there was no one in the world who could think up better names, so “How much would you charge for just a few titles?” Tennessee thought that was very funny and he gave us
The
for free.

In the weeks right after the Philadelphia opening, Sam booked a lot of local screenings for our movies, and the whole time the
exhibit was on, he kept the publicity going by promising we'd be coming back soon for more personal appearances. On November 9 we got an afternoon train down to Philly.

Sam had limos waiting to take us to the Barclay Hotel in Rittenhouse Square where we'd stayed before. The last time, Edie and I had ordered up fifty breakfasts for everybody who was visiting us and charged them to the Institute of Contemporary Art, but later on the hotel had had a lot of trouble collecting from the institute, so they weren't exactly happy to see us back. We weren't even going to spend the night this time—Sam had just booked a couple of rooms for us to use to wash and change in. At first the hotel said he had to rent a separate room for each of us, but finally he got them to agree to let him rent just two rooms—but then they insisted that one room would have to be for the girls and the other for the boys and that “guests” could only visit the room that was for their own sex. It was ridiculous—just like a fifties bedroom comedy. But when we arrived, it all of a sudden got very sixties, because the hotel made a big issue out of our hair.

The management took one look at us and right there in the lobby started to determine each person's “sex” by how long their hair was. They escorted Edie, giggling, to the “boys' room” (she was wearing pants, so that'd clinched it) and they sent Gerard and Paul to the “girls' room” because they both had longish curly hair. They sent me up after Edie to the “boys' room”—we were the only two people in it, but Sam could “visit” us because he had short hair.

We were really laughing hard, and Paul and Gerard were fighting with someone out in the corridor when Edie, who had the TV on, started getting very excited, saying there was a big power blackout in the Northeast over eight states and two Canadian
provinces, and we were missing it! We all wanted to get right back up to New York, but we were scheduled to go to a screening and pose for pictures. We checked right out of the hotel, ran over to the theater, did our number there quick, and jumped into a limousine for the return trip.

All the way back to New York, we kept hoping the blackout would still be going on when we got there. We couldn't go through any tunnels—the radio was saying they couldn't ventilate them without electricity—and when we got to the bridge, we couldn't see any lights on the whole Manhattan skyline, just car headlights. The moon was full and it was all like a big party somehow—we drove through the Village and everybody was dancing around, lighting candles. Chock Full o' Nuts looked so elegant all lit by candles. There were no traffic lights on, so of course everything moved very slowly—the buses were just creeping. People in suits and briefcases were sleeping in doorways, because all the hotels were booked solid, and Governor Rockefeller had had to open the armories up.

There were cute National Guard soldiers around helping people up out of the stuck subways and I thought that down there must be the worst place to be—the only thing that could ruin a beautiful idea like this. It was the biggest, most Pop happening of the sixties, really—it involved everybody.

After driving around a little, we went over to Ondine and then on to Le Club where we stayed until the lights started going on around four. Then all around the city things started coming to life like the Sleeping Beauty castle.

The next day, the Duchess told us she'd been in her pill doctor's office on Fifth Avenue when the lights went out. A lot of people used to go to this one particular doctor—he gave them what they wanted.

“I was in Doctor Pill's office and I was thrilled. I thought, ‘This is it, the big haul.' I stuffed as much as I could get my hands on into my pocketbook while he went out to see what was happening, and I ran out of there across to the park and sat down by the Met. I couldn't wait to see what I'd gotten. It turned out to be some green iron pills, some Phisohex, and lots of that green soap doctors use. I didn't get
anything
, my dear. But oh, what a place to be in the dark…”

“Is he a
legal
doctor?” I asked, because I knew all the kids got drugs there and I'd heard that some drag queens were getting hormone shots from him—I mean, it sounded like a big social club up there.

“Well, naturally he's not legal when he does abortions, but yes, he's a legal doctor.”

“And he's never gotten in trouble with the police?”

“Oh, they
know
about him, but it'll take years to get him. They've got to have proof—they've almost got to catch him doing it…”

“But why would a real doctor take a chance like that?”

“He needs the money, he gambles. He bets on the trotters every day—that's where it all goes. So he has to do abortions and charge a fortune for pills. But if I give him, say, an old invitation to a debutante ball or something—one of those fancy engraved ones—he gives me a bottle of amphetamine for free because he wants to impress his friends.”

“Oooo,” I said, “he must be creepy. Is he?”

“No. Actually, I adore him.”

“How much did your abortion cost?” I asked her.

“A lot. Eight hundred dollars. But he followed up on me that night, and they don't usually do that, you know? They usually just dump you afterward. He brought me home and gave
me orange juice and tea, and every day for five days he came over to give me penicillin injections. Believe me, it was worth the eight hundred dollars. His office has paintings by movie stars who are too famous to mention.” She laughed, and then she mentioned them.

On a Wednesday night in the middle of December, NBC aired a program called “Hollywood on the Hudson.” At the Factory only Paul was watching—the famous cinematographer James Wong Howe was being interviewed, one of his favorites. Someone was taking “We Gotta Get Out of This Place” off the record player and putting on the Beatles' new album,
Rubber Soul
. Then there were more interviews—with Darryl Zanuck, Blanche Sweet, Douglas Fairbanks, Sidney Lumet, Rock Hudson. Suddenly Paul jumped up and said that a section on
me was
just starting, and we all ran over to the set. (Later I thought that if I'd known I was going to be on and had been sitting around waiting, it wouldn't have been half as exciting—I thought, “This is what happens to famous people all the time—walking by a TV set and just happening to hear about themselves.”)

The next day as I walked along 57th Street I realized how powerful television is, because so many of the Christmas shoppers were pointing at me and saying, “It's him,” and “No, it's not, look at the hair,” and “Yes, but the sunglasses,” and “Yes… no,” etc. Up until then I'd been in
Time
and
Life
and all the newspapers a lot and nothing had ever made me be recognized this much, but now just a few minutes on TV had really done it.

One night in December the Film-Makers' Coop screened my movie of Henry Geldzahler smoking a cigar. Henry and I were still good friends; we still spent hours every day talking to each
other on the phone, but right about now, Henry met a boy named Christopher Scott and they started living together, and there's nothing more depressing than calling up somebody you've been calling up for years, any time of the day or night you felt like it, and suddenly someone else is answering the phone and saying, “Yes, just a minute.” It takes the fun out of it. So Henry and I started drifting apart gradually, cutting down on the phone time—he wasn't always “available” anymore. I could only be really good friends with unattached people, that's just the way I am—if they're married or living with somebody, I would just forget them, usually. And they'd usually forget about me, too. Henry and I stayed friends, but the immediacy of it was fading.

After the screening Jonas and I talked about what was happening in films. He'd just written in one of his
Voice
columns that he thought cinema had “come to maturity” in the years from '60 to '65. Now he was talking about filmmaking as an “art of duality,” saying that there were two kinds of movies—the abstract, visual kind and the narrative kind. What
I
think was happening at this point was that commercial moviemakers were learning and incorporating from underground movies but that underground movies weren't developing their narrative techniques as much as they might have—so commercial movies were coming out way ahead. Commercial moviemakers had always known that a movie couldn't make it big without a coherent story line, but now they were starting to do the narrative things with a freer style.

As'65 turned to '66, the big new interest at the Factory was a group of musicians that called themselves the Velvet Underground. For New Year's, the Velvets, Edie, Paul, Gerard, and I all went to the Apollo Theater up in Harlem, then raced back downtown to watch ourselves on the evening news. Eventually we passed out in front of the TV. Then later, when I went out on the street to go home, it was impossible to get a cab because the great Transit Strike had started that midnight, just as John Lindsay, the city's Hollywood-handsome, lovecomic beautiful new mayor, was stepping into office. That was another “happening,” sort of like the blackout—people walking hundreds of blocks to work or riding bikes or hitching rides.

In January, Jonas moved the Film-Makers' Cinemathèque from Lafayette to West 41st Street. He was in the middle of a series called Expanded Cinema where artists like Jack Smith and La Monte Young and Robert Whitman would combine cinema images and projectors with live action and music. I remember Oldenburg's piece where he dragged a bicycle down the aisle from the last row of the theater while a movie was being projected, and I remember Rauschenberg where he was a walking light metaphor, so beautiful to look at, electrified and standing on glass bricks holding a live wire and fluorescent tubes—the artist Arman had made glass shoes for him so that the electricity wouldn't be conducted.

We'd met the Velvets through a filmmaker friend of Jonas's named Barbara Rubin, who was one of the first people to get
multimedia interest going around New York. She knew a lot of rock and folk performers, and she'd sometimes bring people like Donovan and the Byrds by the Factory.