POPism (26 page)

“Why don't they take heroin?” Paul suggested, pointing to the group on stage. “That's what all the really
good
musicians take.” Graham didn't say anything, he just fumed. Paul knew he was driving him good and crazy so he kept it up. “You know, I think I'm really all for heroin, because if you take care of yourself, it doesn't affect you physically.” He took a tangerine out of his pocket and peeled it in one motion, letting the peels fall on the floor. “With heroin you never catch cold—it started in the United States as a cure for the common cold.”

Paul was saying everything he could think of to offend Bill Graham's San Francisco sensibility, but in the end it was dropping the tangerine peels on the Fillmore floor—which he had
done totally unconsciously—that brought on the showdown. Little things mean a lot. Graham stared down at the peels, and he got livid. I don't remember his exact words, but he started yelling—things like:

“You disgusting germs from New York! Here we are, trying to clean up everything, and you come out here with your disgusting minds and
whips
—!” Things along that line.

On the plane coming home, Paul reflected, “You know, there's a lot to be said against San Francisco and its love children. People are always so boring when they band together. You have to be
alone
to develop all the idiosyncrasies that make a person interesting. In San Francisco, instead of becoming outcasts like you're
supposed
to when you take drugs, they organize communities around it! Then they get pretentious and call it a religion—then they get hypocritical and say some drugs are good, others are bad….

“L.A. I liked,” Paul continued, “because the degenerates there all stay in their separate suburban houses, and that's wonderful because it's so much more modern—people isolated from each other…. I don't know where the hippies are getting these ideas to ‘retribalize' in the middle of the twentieth century. I mean, in New York and L.A. people take drugs purely to
feel good
and they admit it. In San Francisco they turn it into ‘causes' and it's so tedious….There's a lot to be said for the hardcore New York degenerates. After one day in San Francisco you realize how refreshing and unpretentious they are….But what I'm really praying for is a great resurgence of good old alcoholism…”

After California, the Velvets played Chicago—a club called Poor Richard's in the Old Town section. Nico was off in Ibiza and
Lou was in the hospital with hepatitis, but Ingrid Superstar was there, and Mary Might, and Angus MacLise was subbing for Lou. The club had advertised for dancers to come and “try out” for the show—which was just a good gimmick to get kids into the place and out there on the dance floor.

Poor Richard's was inside an old church—it was so hot in there—and we projected the movies and slides from the balcony. We met two kids there who lived just outside Chicago—Susan Pile and Ed Walsh—and they'd read about Edie and me in
Time
and
Newsweek
and seen a lot of photos of Baby Jane in
Vogue
and I guess it must have all seemed really glamorous to them—the Campbell's Soup Cans and the parties and the idea of instant stardom. They were trying to do everything as “New York” as possible.

Every single night the Velvets were there, Ed and Susan came by, and each night their outfits got more silver and elaborate—“whips” made out of tinfoil, aluminum outfits (Paraphernalia had opened a boutique by then in Chicago). Everyone just assumed the two of them were part of the show. “It's great,” Ed said. “We're instant stars in Chicago—which is exactly what we fantasized would happen if we met Andy Warhol.”

The experience of playing in the heat of Chicago in a club that had no air conditioning didn't go over too well with the E.P.I., and since the Dom didn't have air conditioning either, Paul told Stanley, the landlord, that we would wait and rent it again when it got cool in the fall.

The Factory felt more strange to me than ever that summer. I loved it, I thrived there, but the atmosphere was totally impenetrable—even when you were in the middle of it, you didn't know what was going on.

The air didn't really move. I would sit in a corner for hours, watching people come and go and stay, not moving myself, trying to get a complete idea, but everything stayed fragmentary; I never knew what was really happening. I'd sit there and listen to every sound: the freight elevator moving in the shaft, the sound of the grate opening and closing when people got in and went out, the steady traffic all the way downstairs on 47th Street, the projector running, a camera shutter clicking, a magazine page turning, somebody lighting a match, the colored sheets of gelatin and sheets of silver paper moving when the fan hit them, the high school typists hitting a key every couple of seconds, the scissors shearing as Paul cut out E.P.I. clippings and pasted them into scrapbooks, the water running over the prints in Billy's darkroom, the timer going off, the dryer operating, someone trying to make the toilet work, men having sex in the back room, girls closing compacts and makeup cases. The mixture of the mechanical sounds and the people sounds made everything seem unreal and if you heard a projector going while you were watching somebody, you felt that they must be a part of the movie, too.

I was in my surfer look for the second summer in a row, blue and white T-shirts. Most people who came by to see me wouldn't even recognize me at first if I wasn't painting, because the pictures in the newspapers usually showed me wearing my leather outfits from the Leather Man down in the Village. But it was summer—the summer of the Spoonful's “Summer in the City” song, as a matter of fact—and it was just too hot for my trademark look. So because I didn't look like what they expected, people often didn't notice me.

One afternoon I watched a tall guy with dark curly hair step out of the elevator carrying a big manila envelope under his arm.
He was wearing a suit from the new Pierre Cardin men's boutique in Bonwit Teller's. The kids were lying around reading or just staring into space, and Paul was busy fussing with the projector. Nobody looked up from what they were doing—nobody ever did—so the guy didn't know who to talk to and he just started wandering around, looking at the canvases, the screens, the vinyl, the plastic, the crumbling walls. If anybody “received” people at the Factory, it was Gerard, but he'd just gone out to mail invitations to one of his poetry readings. The guy walked three-quarters of the way through the Factory till he saw me sitting in my corner and almost jumped—it was so hot I hadn't moved for an hour. He handed me the envelope.

It was from the artwork department at MGM Records.

That summer I was doing the album cover for
The Velvet Underground & Nico
, the jacket that eventually became the stick on banana that you peeled off and there was a flesh-colored banana fruit underneath. (I'd originally considered doing a plastic surgery series for the cover, and I'd sent Little Joey and a friend of his, Dennis, out to medical supply houses for photographs and illustrations of nose jobs, breast jobs, ass jobs, etc.—they brought me back hundreds! Little Joey was working full-time at the Factory this summer, picking me up at my house at eleven-thirty every morning. He'd grown a few inches and dropped about twenty pounds of baby fat since we'd met him in the fall.)

The guy who'd come in with the envelope said his name was Nelson Lyon and explained that he'd been over at MGM doing some work (he'd designed the
Doctor Zhivago
album cover for them that had just gotten a Grammy) when he heard someone call for a messenger to go to the Factory. Nelson offered to bring the package himself. “I wanted to meet you,” he told me that day.

Years later, after he got to be a good friend, he elaborated: “I'd been at the Dom when you first opened it, so when I got to the Factory building that day I recognized Gerard Malanga coming out. He told me, ‘It's five flights up,' and I looked at him in his leather outfit, and at this elevator cage and thought, ‘Holy shit, this is like the entrance to hell.' Then when I wandered into that silver place, not one person moved, everybody was so cool. For all you knew, I could've been the district attorney or a
Times
reporter, a narcotics agent, whatever—nobody cared. And then I saw
you
sitting there in your dark glasses with your silver hair and your mouth open a little, just blending into everything….I can't explain it but there was something about the Factory at that time… it was a juncture in history; you wanted to stay in that atmosphere and become part of it, and yet you didn't even know what it was. And you know, the more you involved yourself in it, the more of a mystery it was.”

One day in July, Susan Pile came to the Factory. It was her first time in New York and she'd just been uptown taking a preview look at the Barnard/Columbia campus in Morningside Heights where she'd start school that September. Next she was on her way out to the Newport Folk Festival because there was a big rumor going around that Dylan would be there again.

“You mean,” I said to her, “that you're actually going all the way from Chicago to Rhode Island just to see Bob Dylan?”

She laughed. “No. To
possibly
see him.”

Paul had come over, and when he heard that, he groaned and shook his head.

Susan told us that right after the Velvets played Chicago, the Jefferson Airplane was there on their first tour outside San Francisco,
and that a new group called Big Brother and the Holding Company had also just played on Wells Street.

“You look so fashionable,” I told her. She was wearing a little checked Betsey Johnson minidress with a scoop neck and huge sleeves. She clicked open her suitcase and flashed a little sliver of a silver dress, another Betsey Johnson number, and said that as a matter of fact, the new singer with Big Brother and the Holding Company—a girl named Janis Joplin—had absolutely no clothes and so she'd borrowed this silver dress of hers to wear onstage. She and Ed liked Big Brother a lot, Susan said, and they'd gone every night to see them, the way they'd done with the Velvets.

When people don't have regular working hours, they start finding personal problems to worry about, and if they can't find any, they make some up. And when these people are on drugs, they can have as many as twenty dramas a day going on. No matter how little the problem is, it's always a big scene—they get as upset if they think somebody stole their laundry pickup ticket as when their boyfriend doesn't come home. More, actually.

Everything just then was getting really complex, because free love and bisexuality had come in, and people weren't supposed to be getting jealous anymore, so the discussions would all start out very cool and impersonal and abstract between two people who were having sex with the same third person, but then they'd always wind up tearing the third person apart together. And that's how the mystique went out of a lot of romances and the comedy came in.

We'd sit in gardens or sidewalk cafés for hours, and I'd listen to everyone discuss abstract things like whether some new
person was “definitive” enough to become a superstar or whether someone else was too “self-absorbed” or “self-destructive.” I was fascinated by the way people could read so much into so many things, but then you never knew if you were getting to know the person or getting to know the drug they were on. It would all get so paranoid and psychological, and it would start from something as innocent as, “Did he
know
he had crabs when he borrowed the pants?”

This summer, a lot of people were living (or “staying”—it seemed like nobody actually “lived” anyplace anymore) on the Upper West Side—kids like Eric and his girl friend, Heather, and Ronnie, and Pepper, a southern girl who was in some of our movies—especially in the blocks between Broadway and Central Park West. I never knew who was staying with who, it was just sort of a circuit up there then. And there were also a lot of people staying down at the Chelsea Hotel on West 23rd Street, a whole group of our friends. Brigid swore that she never went into her own room there more than once a week—the rest was just in-house visiting, running from room to room.

Susan Bottomly (who became known as International Velvet in our movies) was the new girl in town. She was only about seventeen—a very tall brunette, very beautiful. When I think back on all the beauties we knew, I realize there was something special about the way they all held their heads and moved their arms. There were other girls who were just as beautiful as Susan Bottomly was, but her way of moving made her extra beautiful. People constantly wanted to know, “Who is she?”

Susan's father was a district attorney in Boston. Her family had money and they paid for her room at the Chelsea and sent
her an allowance. She always had the most expensive makeup and the newest clothes. She also had one of the few bodies that could really bring out the ultimate look in a dress like, say, the ones Paco Rabanne made out of plastic disks or like the short black “discotheque dress.” And with her long neck, she could wear the new big earrings the way nobody else could.

Susan would spend hours putting on the latest makeup, stroking on Fabulash over and over again, painting her eyes three different shades of brown, brushing the rouge slowly, slowly, up and out, with those big fat sable brushes from the theater makeup stores, outlining her lips, then whiting them out. Watching someone like Susan Bottomly, who had such perfect, full, fine features, doing all this on her face was like watching a beautiful statue painting itself.

Gerard stayed with Susan at the Chelsea for the first couple of months she was in town, and all that time he was writing poems to her and about her. Her parents weren't happy with her new “career”—modeling in New York—and later on, when she was the cover of
Esquire
, photographed in a garbage can (“Today's Girl, Finished at 18”), they were really upset, she said. But they went on supporting her, and she went on supporting lots of her friends. A typical scene at the Factory was Susan writing a letter to her father asking him to please send some more money, then handing it over to Gerard. Gerard would put it in this attaché case he'd just started using. Then he'd tote this letter over to the Grand Central Station Post Office—very businesslike in the briefcase—and mail it Special Delivery up to Boston. Toward the end of the summer, though, Susan took in an additional roommate—a shrill character from Cambridge who wore a button over his ass that said, “The Fleet's In.” Gerard used to complain bitterly that this “new element” was doing everything
possible to break him and Susan up. By the fall Susan was going with someone more her own age named David Croland, and Gerard after a few false starts got involved with the beautiful fashion model Benedetta Barzini, the daughter of Luigi, who wrote
The Italians
, and so then he was writing poems to and about
her
.