POPism (27 page)

Tiger Morse opened her tiny new boutique called Teeny Weeny on upper Madison Avenue at the end of August. Her policy there was man-made materials only—vinyl, Mylar, sequins. There were mirror bricks all over the walls. Wherever I saw fragmented mirrors like that around a place, I'd take the hint that there was amphetamine not too far away—every A-head's apartment always had broken mirrors, smoky, chipped, fractured, whatever—just like the Factory did. And Tiger did take a lot of amphetamine. She always boasted, “I am living proof that speed does
not
kill.”

A little bit later Tiger got the backing of some big company to design a line of pajamas and nightgowns for them, and to launch that, she gave a big party at the Henry Hudson Baths on West 57th Street that was sort of a fashion show “happening” around the pool, with models walking out onto the diving board, sometimes diving in, sometimes just turning around and walking back. As I said, it was Tiger who made happenings pop, turning them from something artistic into big parties. She'd stand around in her silver jeans and huge sunglasses, having a ball herself. People got so drunk they jumped into the pool with all their clothes on and then later tried to dive to the bottom for things like wallets that had fallen out of their pockets.

I'd done a few movie sequences with Tiger at her old boutique, Kaleidoscope, on East 58th Street, above Reuben's Restaurant,
where she had about six seamstresses sewing for her and hundreds of jars of beads and sequins all around. Before that she'd sold her clothes out of a house on 63rd Street near Madison. In those days she did very expensive, chic, silk-and-satin brocade-and-lamé-type designs for women who wanted nicely made couture-type dresses—a little froufrou sometimes—the kind of outfits that would have a hand-stitched lining that was more elaborate than the dress itself. Then Tiger went off to England, and after she came back she went plastic and started to make dresses out of shower curtains. Eventually she took over the Cheetah boutique on Broadway, right outside the club—it stayed open as late as Cheetah did, and people would just pop in and buy new disco clothes on their way in to dance.

Tiger designed that famous dress that said “Love” on the front and “Hate” on the back. And she did dresses that lit up on the dance floor, only there would always be some problem with the technology—the lights wouldn't work or the batteries would be dead, etc. Women used to have old-fashioned problems like slips hanging and bra straps showing, but now there was this whole new slew of problems.

I've heard people say, “Tiger Morse was a fraud.” Well, of course she was, but she was a
real
fraud. She'd make up more stories about herself for the newspapers than I did. Nobody knew where she came from, really, but who cared? She was an original, and she showed a lot of people how to have fun.

We met David Croland at a party Paraphernalia had for those big earrings he designed. Like a lot of other jewelry and clothes designers, he had a contract with Paraphernalia, which was by now like a little department store with branches in cities and towns all over the country, from Los Angeles to Washington,
D.C. It was all great-looking stuff, and almost everything in the store would disintegrate within a couple of weeks, so that was really Pop—like, a designer we knew named Barbara Hodes crocheted her dresses by hand for Paraphernalia and they looked fantastic, but they'd completely unravel if the girls caught them on a nail or a splinter. Paraphernalia had become a really mass boutique, which was sort of a contradiction—now if you designed for them, you had to be able to make
lots
of whatever you made, enough to send out to their stores all over the country. The masses wanted to look nonconformist, so that meant the nonconformity had to be mass-manufactured.

I was standing with Susan Bottomly at the party for David. She pointed him out to her Cambridge roommate and told him to “get him.” Il Mio had low chandeliers and the first thing David did was pick two crystal drops with the chains attached and adapt them right there into beautiful earrings for Susan. (“We were all such thieves in those days,” David said to me once. “Remember all the times you walked out of Arthur with those big thick goblets?”) After Il Mio, we all walked over to a party in an apartment on Fifth Avenue, and Susan and David locked themselves into the bathroom. When they came out finally, Susan informed the people who were screaming to know what they'd been doing in there all that time, “Fucking.”

She and David wound up living together for two years. David decided that those crystal earrings looked so good that he'd include them in his line for Paraphernalia, and so after a couple of months, the chandeliers at II Mio were looking pretty bleak.

A few days later we all went up to Provincetown on Cape Cod where the Velvets were going to play at the Chrysler Museum.
The silver lamé leather people in our New York group looked totally alien to the tan, healthy-looking Massachusetts kids. When our people—Susan Bottomly, David, Gerard, Ronnie, Mary Might, Eric, Paul, Lou, John, Sterling, Maureen, Faison the road manager—sprawled out on the beach, they looked like a giant Clorox spot on the sand, all those pasty-white New York City bodies out there in a sea of summer tans. Gerard had on his leather bikini, and he looked confident that it would turn somebody on, but everybody up there seemed more into the Boston-Irish look.

Naturally the A-heads were going crazy because they were almost out of amphetamine, and they'd walk around the P-town streets with their hands cupped to their ears as if they were hard of hearing, going “A? A?” trying to score. The night the Velvets played, the police raided the show—somebody had tipped them off that the Velvets had stolen most of the leather braids and whips they were using in their act from a local handicrafts store that afternoon. When the police came in, Mary had just strapped Eric to a post and was doing the S & M whipdance around him. They confiscated the whips and then undid Eric so they could confiscate the straps he was tied with.

The houses we'd rented got really disgusting in the couple of days we were there because the toilets all stopped up—it seemed like no matter where the Velvets went, the toilets would stop up—and so they started scooping handfuls of shit from the toilets and slinging it out the windows. I'd heard references to this habit of theirs, but you don't believe stories like that till you see people running by you with handfuls of dripping shit, laughing.

I remember walking on a street near the beach and looking up and seeing Eric in a bathing suit and high black lace-up boots
dancing pirouettes on a balcony with no railing and a twenty-foot drop. And later, in a grocery store, he talked a kid at the cash register into trading a carton of Marlboros for a Campbell's Soup Can with my signature. I signed by the checkout counter and gave the can to the kid, who handed Eric the cigarettes.

David and Susan got lost from us at one point and decided to move to a hotel. “Susan had the money and the checkbook,” he told me a long time later, “so we had to register as ‘Mr. and Mrs. Bottomly,' and that,” he laughed, “is how the whole problem got started.” When I asked him what he meant, he smiled and said, “Oh, come on, you remember what a joke I was in those days, tagging along with Susan to all her modeling jobs, carrying her portfolio, hoping someone would point to me and say, ‘Oh, why don't
you
get into this shot, too?' I wanted to be a model then, but what I didn't realize was that I was trying to be a
female
model!”

There weren't very many young, new-style male models then yet. Male modeling didn't get really big until the next year when there were suddenly new men's lines all over the place. But in '66 men were used in photographs still, just to stand there and look butch, to sort of set off the girls and show that the girls were fascinating to them.

All that summer we were shooting the short interior sequences that we later combined to make up
Chelsea Girls
, using all the people who were around. A lot of them were staying at the Hotel Chelsea, so we were spending a lot of time over there. Often, we'd have dinner and sangría at the El Quixote Restaurant downstairs and everybody would be coming and going back and forth from their own rooms or somebody else's. I got the idea to unify all the pieces of these people's lives by stringing them
together as if they lived in different rooms in the same hotel. We didn't actually film all the sequences at the Chelsea; some we shot down where the Velvets were staying on West 3rd, and some in other friends' apartments, and some at the Factory—but the idea was they were all characters that were around and
could
have been staying in the same hotel.

Everybody went right on doing what they'd always done—being themselves (or doing one of their routines, which was usually the same thing) in front of the camera. I once heard Eric telling someone about the direction I gave him for his first scene. “Andy just told me to tell the story of my life and to somewhere along the line take off all my clothes.” After thinking for a second, he added, “And that's what I've been doing ever since.” Their lives became part of my movies, and of course the movies became part of their lives; they'd get so into them that pretty soon you couldn't really separate the two, you couldn't tell the difference—and sometimes neither could they. During the filming of
Chelsea Girls
, when Ondine slapped Pepper in his sequence as the Pope, it was so for real that I got upset and had to leave the room—but I made sure I left the camera running. This was something new. Up until this, when people had gotten violent during any of the filmings, I'd always turned the camera off and told them to stop, because physical violence is something I just hate to see happen, unless, of course, both people like it that way. But now I decided to get it
all
down on film, even if I had to leave the room.

Poor Mario Montez got his feelings hurt for real in his scene where he found two boys in bed together and sang “They Say That Falling in Love Is Wonderful” for them. He was supposed to stay there in the room with them for ten minutes, but the boys on the bed insulted him so badly that he ran out in six and
we couldn't persuade him to go back in to finish up. I kept directing him, “You were terrific, Mario. Get back in there—just pretend you forgot something, don't let
them
steal the scene, it's no good without you,” etc., etc. But he just wouldn't go back in, he was too upset.

Jack Smith always said that Mario was his favorite underground actor because he could instantly capture the sympathy of the audience. And that was certainly true. He lived in constant fear that his family or the people in the civil service job where he worked would discover that he dressed up in drag. He told me that every night he prayed in his little apartment on the Lower East Side for himself and his parents and for all the dead celebrities that he loved, like “Linda Darnell and James Dean and Eleanor Roosevelt and Dorothy Dandridge.”

Mario had that classic comedy combination of seeming dumb but being able to say the right things with perfect timing; just when you thought you were laughing at him, he'd turn it all around. (A lot of the superstars had that special quality.)

For her reel in
Chelsea Girls
, Brigid played the Duchess. She got so into the role that she started to think she really was a big dope dealer: she took a dirty hypodermic needle and jabbed Ingrid in the fanny. (The Duchess wouldn't have done it any better herself.) Then, as we filmed, she picked up the phone and called a lot of real people up (who had no idea they were part of her movie scene) telling them about all the drugs she had for sale. She was so believable that the hotel operators, who were always listening in, called the police. They arrived at the room while we were still filming and searched everyone, but all they could come up with was two Desoxyn pills. Still, after people saw Brigid in the movie, they were as scared of her as they were of the Duchess.

• • •

At the end of September, just around the time the Whitney Museum was opening its new building at 75th and Madison, we all flew up to Boston for the opening of a show of my work.

In the middle of the opening David Croland suddenly pointed at a distant wall and said, “Look! Andy! There's a painting in here that you didn't do!” He was indignant.

“Where?” I asked, knowing it was impossible, but very curious to see which painting he would think wasn't mine.

“Over there.” He pointed at a Do-It-Yourself canvas I'd done in '62. “That really ugly paint-by-numbers thing.”

David was so young he'd missed the first part of my career as a painter, so he had absolutely no idea he was insulting a piece of my work—he thought it was a curator's mistake!

All I muttered was, “Oh. How crazy. How did that get in here?” I mean, after all, occasionally you can look at something you've done and wonder the same thing yourself—“How did
that
get in here…?”

The Velvets played like crazy at the opening, and then about twenty of us invaded a little-old-lady Boston tearoom restaurant. Everybody thought I was going there as a joke, but really, those were the restaurants I truly loved the most—ones just like Schrafft's.

In the fall when Paul went back to rent the Dom, Stanley told him sorry, it was already rented. Al Grossman and Charlie Rothchild opened it as the Balloon Farm and asked the Velvets to play there anyway—upstairs—and they did, since they didn't have anything else to do. So even though it wasn't our place anymore, most people assumed it was a continuation of our Exploding Plastic Inevitable show from the spring.

In the basement there was a bar with a jukebox, and Paul
managed that, off and on, into the next spring and charged admission.

Nico and Lou had a fight. (“I've had it with the dramatic bullshit,” he said. “Yeah, she looks great in high-contrast black and white photographs, but I've
had
it.”) He said he wouldn't let her sing with them anymore and, moreover, that he was never going to play for her again, either. (That was actually the big problem right there—was she singing with them, or were they playing for her?) As a going-away present, Lou recorded the music she sang to on a cassette tape and handed it to her. Then she started being the chanteuse in the bar downstairs, trying to work a little cassette recorder. But it was pathetic to see this big, beautiful woman singing to music coming out of this cheap little cassette, and in between acts the tears would roll down her face because she just couldn't remember how the buttons worked. And Paul would try to help her—he even bribed the guitar players like Tim Buckley, Jackson Browne, Steve Noonan, Jack Elliot, Tim Hardin—promising them they could do a set alone if only they'd play a little for Nico while she sang. (Jackson Browne and Tim Hardin worked out the best, and Nico eventually recorded some of their songs on her first album,
Chelsea Girl
, which was released in July '67. But everybody wanted to be a star, and nobody really wanted to play backup for anybody, so Nico's problem wasn't solved until John Cale bought her a tiny little organ in '68 and she learned how to play it.) We looped a little 8-mm movie of a guy parachuting and we projected it behind her while she sang, and sometimes we'd show
Kiss
.