POPism (23 page)

“We heard you were seeing her,” I said, pointedly.

He picked up one of the silver pillows.

I was taping and held the mike over to him, “Come on, Brian. Did you fuck her?”

“I would have to say…” he began, slowly.

“You can lie,” Allen Ginsberg called over.

“Yeah, you can lie,” I said.

Brian passed up the option. “I would say twice, only. Who hasn't?” He picked up my wrist to examine the ruby studs I always kept in the pleated white shirt I wore—over my T-shirts—to paint in. “I can admit her, but there are some people I can't admit. There's always someone we can't admit we've done it with, wouldn't you say?” He faded off, looking around.

I tried to bring his attention back. “So where did you fuck her?” I asked him.

“At someone's country house—one of those English parties where every generation is invited and all the mad grandmothers who dance like chickens come on to you….” He stared blankly at the Duchess, who was jabbing a syringe into her fanny while she rode the bike. She was absolutely desperate for attention.

• • •

We did screen tests of Brian and Dylan while Gerard fought with Ingrid Superstar over whose turn it was to pay for the malteds: the poor delivery kid from Bickford's stood around, frustrated, until Huntington Hartford arrived and finally settled the tab. Ingrid hugged him and gave him a big smooch. Hunt had just invited us to use his Paradise Island in the Bahamas any time we wanted an exotic shooting location.

When the Duchess saw Hunt, she forgot about wanting attention and decided to concentrate on striking him for fifty dollars. They knew a psychiatrist who had this game going—he gave her Desoxyn prescriptions whenever she let him listen in while she talked dirty to people, and so she had a routine arranged with Hunt that when she'd call him with a cue line, he'd pretend to be a john getting excited by the dirty talk—and then she would get her prescription. Huntington Hartford was a great friend of Ingrid's, too—he had an eye for pretty girls and he liked to pop into the Factory now and then to see who happened to be around.

It was Gerard, actually, who would recruit a lot of the beautiful, photogenic girls for the Factory. He would see a girl in a magazine or at a party and really make a point of finding out who she was—he'd turn these interests of his into sort of poetic “quests.” Then he'd write poems about the girls and tell them all they'd get a screen test when they came by.

Nico sang some of the new songs for Brian and Dylan that Lou and John had just written for her—“I'll Be Your Mirror” and “All Tomorrow's Parties.”

Paul wasn't the type to primp in the mirror, but when we'd be going out with Nico, you couldn't help noticing that he'd check out how he looked a few times. But if he thought she was
the most beautiful woman in the world, a lot of people would agree. Whenever he'd find her picture in magazines for ads like London Fog raincoats that she'd done the year before, he'd tell her to never
never
smile in pictures—Paul thought beauties should never smile or look happy in photographs. But then ironically, Paul was maybe the one person in the world who could always make Nico laugh. And they'd have “arguments” all the time about drugs—like the one they were having that afternoon.

“If you keep taking the LSD, Nico,” Paul warned, “your next baby will be born all deformed. They're finding these things out now.”

“No, it's not truuuuue,” Nico said. “We'll get better and better drugs, and make
fantastic
children.”

Meanwhile, the phone at the Factory was ringing more than usual because we'd just put an ad in the
Voice
that read: “I'll endorse with my name any of the following: clothing, AC-DC, cigarettes, small tapes, sound equipment,
ROCK‘N‘ ROLL RECORDS,
anything, film, and film equipment, Food, Helium, Whips,
MONEY;
love and kisses Andy Warhol. EL 5-9941.” We had so many people hanging around all the time now that I figured in order to feed them all we'd have to get other people to support them—like find a restaurant that wanted us to hang around that would give us free meals.

There were so many of us now that we were even starting to have trouble getting into parties. People didn't mind the ten or twelve kids that I used to show up with on my arm, but when it started to be over twenty, they'd try to throw some of them out. We'd just gone over to a party given by a girl who was some relation of Winston Churchill's, and Jayne Mansfield was inside—and we'd been turned away at the door. They said
I
could
come in, but nobody else, so we all just left, which killed me because I really wanted to meet Jayne Mansfield.

All during January and February we were meeting with the disco producer about opening the airplane hangar discotheque with the Erupting (it wasn't “Exploding” yet) Plastic Inevitable (E.P.I.) in Roosevelt Field in April. The producer had come down to the Expanded Cinema series at the Cinemathèque the night the Velvets played there. It was the first time he'd ever heard them perform, and although he'd said “great, great” when we asked him how he liked the show, looking back on it, I can see that he must have hated it but didn't want to cancel with us till he covered himself by finding something to take our place.

In March we drove down to Rutgers to play at their college film society—Paul, Gerard, Nico, Ingrid Superstar, a photographer named Nat Finklestein, a blond girl named Susanna, Barbara Rubin, a young kid named Danny Williams who was working the lights, and an Englishman named John Wilcock, who was one of the first journalists to cover the counterculture. We went into the Rutgers cafeteria to eat before the show, and the students couldn't take their eyes off Nico, she was so beautiful it was unreal, or off Susanna, who was going around picking food off their plates and dropping it grape-style into her mouth. Barbara Rubin was filming the kids, and the guards were following her telling her to stop, then somebody came over wanting to check our “cafeteria pass” and Gerard started yelling at them and there was a big commotion. We got kicked out, of course, but fortunately it all made people want to see the show, which until then hadn't been doing too well in advance sales.

We did two shows for over 650 people. We screened
Vinyl
and
Lupe
and also movies of Nico and the Velvets while they were playing. It was fantastic to see Nico singing with a big movie of her face right behind her. Gerard was dancing with two long shining flashlights, one in each hand, twirling them like batons. The audience was mesmerized—when a college kid set off the fire alarm system by holding a match near it, nobody paid any attention to it.

I was behind one of the projectors, moving the images around. The kids were having a lot of trouble dancing, because the songs sometimes started out with a beat but then the Velvets would get too frenetic and burn themselves out, losing the audience long before that. They were like audio-sadists, watching the dancers trying to cope with the music.

A few days later, we left New York for Ann Arbor in a rented van to play at the University of Michigan. Nico drove, and that was an experience. I still don't know if she had a license. She'd only been in this country a little while and she'd keep forgetting and drive on the British side of the road. And the van was a real problem—whenever it stopped, it was hard to get it started again, and not one of us knew anything about cars.

A cop stopped us at a hamburger drive-in near Toledo when a waitress got upset and complained to him because we kept changing orders, and when he asked, “Who's in charge here?” Lou shoved me forward and told him, “Of all people—Drella!” (“Drella” was a nickname somebody had given me that stuck more than I wanted it to. Ondine and a character named Dorothy Dyke used it all the time—they said it came from combining Dracula and Cinderella.) We spent the night in a motel near there, and once again it was the-boys-in-one-room-the-girls-in-the-other
scene, even though somebody kept telling the little old lady who ran the place, “But we're all queer.”

At Ann Arbor, we met up with Danny Fields, who'd just been made the editor of a teenage magazine,
Datebook
. He was out there covering the concert. I hadn't seen him in a while.

“Well,” he laughed, “I finally have an identity of my own. Up until now, I was just a groupie with no real reason to exist.”

“And to think you launched your career,” Lou reminded him, “getting out the
wrong side
of a limousine.”

Nico's driving really was insane when we hit Ann Arbor. She was shooting across sidewalks and over people's lawns. We finally pulled up in front of a nice big comfortable-looking house, and everyone started unloading the van. Danny wouldn't believe that anyone was going to let “a truckload of freaks” pull up and walk right into their house until a beautiful woman came running out to meet us. She was Ann Wehrer, whose husband, Joseph, was involved with the early “happenings” and had arranged for the E.P.I. to come out there.

Ann Arbor went crazy. At last the Velvets were a smash. I'd sit on the steps in the lobby during intermissions and people from the local papers and school papers would interview me, ask about my movies, what we were trying to do. “If they can take it for ten minutes, then we play it for fifteen,” I'd explain. “That's our policy. Always leave them wanting less.”

Danny remembers that one interviewer asked if my movies had been influenced by the thirties and forties and that I told him, “No, the tens. Thomas Edison really influenced me.” And as a matter of fact, we had a strobe light with us for the first time. The guy we rented spotlights from in New York had brought it to the Factory to show us—none of us had ever seen one before. They weren't being used yet in the clubs. The strobes were
magical, they went perfectly with the chaos music the Velvets played, and that long piece of phosphorescent green Sylvania tape that Gerard was now using for his dance numbers, whipping that around, looked terrific when the strobes flashed on it.

When we got back to New York, Paul tried to pin the disco producer down to a definite date for the opening, but he just kept assuring us, “Don't worry.” Then somehow we found out that he'd already hired the Young Rascals to open the place.

Paul and I went down to meet the Velvets at the Café Figaro—they were staying at an apartment just down the street—to tell them that the big gig had fallen through. When we walked in, they were already there, sitting around in their wraparound “girl watcher” dark glasses, all in a great mood, full of plans for the gala opening.

“We have a new number using John's thunder machine,” Lou said as we sat down; then he laughed. “For the second time this week, a cop threatened us. He came up to the apartment and told us to go out into the country someplace if we were going to play that kind of stuff. This is a week after he stopped us on our way out the door and accused us of throwing human shit out our windows…. The awful thing is that it was
just possible
.” Lou's voice was dry and flat, and he had droll timing with a little Jack Benny in it.

“We want to play all in the dark so the music will be the only thing. Tomorrow we're going to go to used car lots and buy hundreds of car horns and wire them all up so the honking will be nonstop.”

“Yes, no, that's great, but listen—” Paul started to tell them, but Lou just went on, more and more enthusiastic.

“We're going to play some of the ferocious songs that no one listens to anymore—the ones that run underneath everything we usually play—like ‘Smoke from Your Cigarette' and ‘I Need a Sunday Kind of Love' and ‘Later for You, Baby'—everybody's going crazy over all the old blues people, but let's not forget about the Spaniels and people like that. And we're working on Sterl to play trumpet again; he's been too busy looking for a psychiatrist to get him out of the army.” Sterling was right across the table, telling John about a friend of his with aquaphobia who slept on air mattresses in the Hamptons in case the sea level rose and carried rubber diver's fins in the backseat of his car in case the 59th Street Bridge should ever collapse while he was crossing it. “He feels that with the fins, he won't be screwed….” Sterling was an on-again off-again English lit student but he struck you as a preoccupied scientist type. His thought patterns seemed very methodical. It was as if he got up in the morning, got a certain thought, then spent all day developing it—he might, say, pause for an hour, but when he started talking again, it would be to make an “additional point,” or to “clarify,” no matter what everyone else had been talking about in between.

I noticed that Paul was eavesdropping on the conversation of two people at the next table. Incredibly, they were talking about a big Polish dance hall they'd just rented over on St. Mark's Place that they didn't know what to do with. Paul swiveled around and introduced himself. He told them he lived around that neighborhood and hadn't ever noticed a big dance hall. The two introduced themselves—they were Jackie Cassen and Rudy Stern. They told us they did “sculpture with light” and that they'd rented this big Polish dance hall called Stanley's the Dom (
Polsky Dom Narodny
—
Dom
is Polish for “home”) but that they
wouldn't be ready to use it till May and that they didn't know what to do with it for April. Paul asked if we could go and see it right away. We left the Velvets at the Figaro without telling them about the airplane hangar falling through—it's always better to wait with bad news till you have some good news to go with it.

The Dom was perfect, just what we wanted—it had to be the biggest discotheque dance floor in Manhattan, and there was a balcony, too. We sublet it immediately from Jackie and Rudy—I gave them the rent check, Paul had a fight with the owner over the insurance, then we signed a few papers, and the very next day we were down there painting the place white so we could project movies and slides on the walls. We started dragging proptype odds and ends over from the Factory—five movie projectors, five carousel-type projectors where the image changes every ten seconds and where, if you put two images together, they bounce. These colored things would go on top of the five movies, and sometimes we'd let the sound tracks come through. We also brought down one of those big revolving speakeasy mirrored balls—we had it lying around the Factory and we thought it would be great to bring those back. (The balls really caught on after we revived the look, and pretty soon they were standard fixtures in every discotheque you walked into.) We had a guy come down with more spotlights and strobes that we wanted to rent—we were going to shine them on the Velvets and all around the audience during the show. Of course, we had no idea if people would come all the way down to St. Mark's Place for night life. All the downtown action had always been in the West Village—the East Village was Babushkaville. But by renting the Dom ourselves, we didn't have to worry about whether “management”
liked us or not, we could just do whatever we wanted to. And the Velvets were thrilled—in the Dom, the “house band” finally found a house. They could even walk to work.