POPism (31 page)

Little Joey was with us, and that was rare—I'd always tell him he couldn't come places with us because he was under age, especially since his mother would call up occasionally from Brooklyn and say, “Where's my little Joey? Is he getting into trouble?” He said she was always asking him, “What do you want to hang around with all those queers for?”

We were sitting around in this wall-to-wall-carpeted, colorcoordinated living room—lots of mirrors and end tables and big sofas—watching the Stones do “Let's Spend the Night Together,” which Ed Sullivan had had them modify to “Let's Spend Some Time Together,” and “Ruby Tuesday”—Brian Jones was playing the sitar, I think, with a big white hat on. Joey was absolutely begging and pleading to come to the party, so finally I gave in and said okay, since not only did he worship the Stones,
he loved Jerry's photos for their albums. Joey was planning to go to Visual Arts after graduating high school, and after that he wanted to go into “rock graphics.” (Before the Beatles kids used to give up rock and roll when they got out of school, but now so many of them were charting out rock-related careers for themselves, rock was such a big industry by this time.)

There were crowds of people outside Jerry's building trying to get into the party. Inside, the first person Joey nudged me about was Zal of the Lovin' Spoonful (they were really popular now—they'd just done “Did You Ever Have to Make Up Your Mind?”) and he was in a cowboy hat, too, like Brian was. Joey went to look around for Brian, because that was his favorite Stone, and he finally found him with Keith in a corner holding a drink in both hands, standing not far from Twiggy, who was a new face in town then. Joey, who was only around five feet five inches, was surprised to see that Brian was even shorter than he was. I watched him go over and try to talk to him, and when he got absolutely no response, he sort of poked Brian a few times with his finger—and still nothing happened. So then Joey turned to Keith and said, “I'd just like to tell him how much I admire him,” and Keith looked back with the blankest stare that anybody could ever give anyone, so then Joey just gave up. The circles under Brian's eyes were dark and his skin was dead white and his strawberry blond hair looked weird in the lighting. He was wearing the same outfit as Mick that night—a T-shirt with a striped blazer and white pants and white shoes. Keith, though, was in a pin-stripe suit.

Mick was shuttling back and forth between the upstairs, where Jerry lived, and the downstairs, where the party was. I tried to talk to him but every time we'd go over, some girls would
come along and try to rip his clothes off. Then he'd run back upstairs, turn around, and slink down again, literally throwing the girls aside as he walked.

Susan Pile had been working for Gerard part-time for free since the fall, coming down from Barnard on the Broadway IRT every afternoon, over on the shuttle from Times Square to Grand Central, past the “Baked-on-the-Premises” doughnut stand (who would ever want a doughnut baked in the subway, I'd always wondered when I passed there—why didn't they at least pretend they were made somewhere else? Like,
“Not
Baked on the Premises”), up out onto the street, through E. J. Korvettes, and into the Factory. Sometimes I'd notice her studying a little Chaucer in the Bickford's downstairs. Gerard was in his Benedetta Barzini period, writing lots of poems about her, and Susan would type those up and work on the anthology of writings by poets and kids we knew that was published the next year, called
Intransit, The Andy Warhol Gerard Malanga Monster Issue
. She'd sit Japanese-style on a cushion typing at a very low sawed-off silver desk with a missing leg that had been replaced with a stack of magazines. One day as I walked by, I overheard her telling Joey that she was going to have to look for another job because she needed money. I told her that if she would stay and type things for the Factory instead of just for Gerard, we'd give her money. I asked her how much she thought she'd need, and she estimated that since she was being partly subsidized by her parents, she'd only need about ten dollars a week. (That was fifty trips on the subway then.) I immediately began giving her lots of reel-to-reel tapes, the sound tracks to
Chelsea Girls, Kitchen, My Hustler
, things like that, to type, and she did some Ondine
tapes that would go to become part of the Grove Press novel
a
the next year—ones that the high school girls had never gotten to. I was especially glad to have someone typing right there at the Factory, because recently I'd discovered the hard way that you couldn't be too careful: one of the little girl typists had taken a reel of Ondine home with her to Brooklyn to transcribe it there, and when her mother got an earful of the dialogue on the tape, she confiscated it and I never got it back.

The Easter Sunday be-in in Central Park was incredible; thousands of kids handing you flowers, burning incense, smoking grass, taking acid, passing drugs around right out in the open, taking their clothes off and rolling around on the ground, painting their bodies and faces with Day-Glo, doing Far East–type chants, playing with their toys—balloons and pinwheels and sheriff's badges and Frisbees. They could stand there staring at each other for hours without moving. As I said before, that had always fascinated me, the way people could sit by a window or on a porch all day and look out and never be bored, but then if they went to a movie or a play, they suddenly objected to being bored. I always felt that a very slow film could be just as interesting as a porch-sit if you thought about it the same way. And now all these kids on acid were demonstrating the exact same thing.

Since the beginning of the year when Thomas Hoving became Parks Commissioner, the kids were using the parks a lot more—and this be-in was the ultimate use so far. In the middle of April, though, Hoving was scheduled to become director of the Metropolitan, and he seemed to be trying to temper his Pop image a little now, going around reassuring people that he wasn't going to turn the Met into a big “happening.”

At the end of April there was another be-in—not as big as the Easter one, but big enough so everybody was looking forward to a fantastic summer in the park.

In the spring, Stash, the son of Stanley from the Dom, called to say that he and the Dom bartender—a good-looking Irish guy, I remember—wanted to open a discotheque in a place he'd found uptown on East 71st Street, a gymnasium, and that he wanted us to be involved—to revive the Exploding Plastic Inevitable there. All during March, Nico was still down at the Dom singing away with Tim Buckley, Jackson Browne, Tim Hardin—whatever musicians Paul could arrange for her to sing with. Leonard Cohen, the Canadian poet, was there quite a few nights in the audience down at the bar, just staring at her. Later on, when he cut a record album, I read a review that said his singing was like he was “dragging one note over the entire chromatic scale,” and I couldn't help thinking of all those hours he'd spent listening to Nico….

Pop fashion really peaked about now—a glance around the Gymnasium could tell you that. It was the year of the electric dress—vinyl with a hip-belt battery pack—and there were lopsided hemlines everywhere, silver-quilted minidresses, “microminiskirts” with kneesocks, Paco Rabanne's dresses of plastic squares linked together with little metal rings, lots and lots of Nehru collars, crocheted skirts over tights—to give just the idea of a skirt. There were big hats and high boots and short furs, psychedelic prints, 3-D appliqués, still lots of colored, textured tights and bright-colored patent leather shoes. The next big fashion influence—Nostalgia—wouldn't come till August, when
Bonnie and Clyde
came out, but right now everything mod-mini-madcap that had been building up since '64 was full-blown.

Something extremely interesting was happening in men's fashions, too—they were starting to compete in glamour and marketing with women's fashions, and this signaled big social changes that went beyond fashion into the question of sex roles. Now a lot of the men with fashion awareness who'd been frustrated for the last couple of years telling their girl friends what to wear could start dressing themselves up instead. It was all so healthy, people finally doing what they really wanted, not having to fake it by having an opposite-sex person around to act out their fantasies for them—now they could get right out there and be their own fantasies.

Skirts were getting so short and dresses so cut-out and see-through that if girls had still been the sexy
Playboy
or Russ Meyer types, there might have been attacks all over the streets. But instead, to counteract all these super-sexy clothes, to cool down the effect of, say, micro-minis, the kids had new take-it-or-leave-it attitudes about sex. The new-style girl in '67 was Twiggy or Mia Farrow—boyishly feminine.

“Tell It Like It Is” was a big song at the beginning of the year, and that was the new attitude all around. It was an exciting time for pop music. Everybody was waiting for the Beatles' new album to come out (which would be
Sgt. Pepper
finally, in June) but some single cuts from it were already on the radio—“Penny Lane”/“Strawberry Fields” was out in February, and Aretha Franklin's “I Never Loved a Man” was out, and “Mercy Mercy Mercy,” “Gimme Some Lovin',” “Love Is Here and Now You're Gone,” etc., etc.

• • •

The Gymnasium was the ultimate sixties place for me, because, as I said, we left it exactly as it was, with the mats, parallel bars, weights, straps, and barbells. You thought, “Gymnasium, right, wow, fantastic,” and when you look again like that at something you've always taken for granted, you see it fresh, and it's a good Pop experience.

Our first weekend at the Gymnasium was also the weekend of the big spring mobilization march against the Vietnam war. Martin Luther King, Jr., and Stokely Carmichael and some other people gave speeches in the Sheep Meadow and then marched down Fifth Avenue. It was a rainy day, and from the Factory window, Paul, Nico, and I watched the crowd crossing 47th Street toward the UN. A face like Nico's looked wonderful in the natural afternoon light—it was made for looking out windows and across deserts, into horizons, etc. I remember her so well standing there in a Tuffin and Foale pants suit with “Happy Together” by the Turtles playing somewhere off in the background.

This was the time that Stokely Carmichael did his catchy “white men having black men fight yellow men” line and he was getting so much coverage in the media then that I noticed him right away later that weekend when I saw him at the Gymnasium dancing with a tall blonde girl.

From the Gymnasium we usually went on to a discotheque called the Rolling Stone, and then to Trude Heller's new place on Broadway and 49th, a few blocks down from Cheetah—“Sweet Soul Music” was the big song at all the clubs—and soon after this, Salvation opened down on Sheridan Square, so there were suddenly all these new places to go.

• • •

We went out to Los Angeles in April for the opening of
Chelsea Girls
at the Cinema Theater there. John Wilcock, who'd just started a newspaper in New York called
Other Scenes
, was out there covering our trip, and he published a picture of himself with Paul, Lester Persky, Ultra Violet, Susan Bottomly, me, and Rodney La Rod taken at the opening.

Rodney La Rod was a young kid who hung around the Factory a lot—he claimed he used to be a road manager for Tommy James and the Shondells. He was over six feet tall. He greased his hair and wore bell-bottoms that were too short, and he'd stomp around the Factory, grab me, and rough me up—and it was so outrageous that I loved it, I thought it was really exciting to have him around, lots of action. (When eventually we found out he was under age and I had to stop taking him around with us, everybody unanimously said, “Good,” because he drove them crazy.)

This was the first time I had ever traveled with Ultra Violet. She was still a big mystery; nobody knew what her scene was—she kept her life very secret (as opposed to everybody else we knew who were always telling you the most intimate things about themselves). I'd met her one day in '65 when she walked into the Factory in a pink Chanel suit and bought a big Flowers painting that was still wet for five hundred dollars. Her name was Isabelle Collin-Dufresne then and she hadn't dyed her hair purple yet. She had expensive clothes and a penthouse on Fifth Avenue, and she drove a Lincoln that was the same as the presidential one. She was past a certain age, but she was still beautiful; she looked a lot like Vivien Leigh.

Ultra would do almost anything for publicity. She'd go on talk shows “representing the underground,” and it was hilarious because she was as big a mystery to us as she was to everybody else.

All the girl superstars complained that Ultra would somehow find out about every interview or photo session they had scheduled and turn up there before they did. It was uncanny the way she always managed to be right on the spot the second the flash went off. She'd tell journalists, “I collect art and love.” But what she really collected were press clippings.

Gradually, we pieced together that she was from a rich family of glove manufacturers in Grenoble, France, that she'd come to America as a young girl to visit the painter John Graham (co-incidentally in the same building where the Castelli Gallery was), who introduced her around the New York art world, and then when he died, she met Dali, and then she met me, and then she became Ultra Violet.

She was popular with the press because she had a freak name, purple hair, an incredibly long tongue, and a mini-rap about the intellectual meaning of underground movies.

We took
Chelsea Girls
over to the Cannes Film Festival that spring of '
67
—that is, we took it but we never got to show it. (The situation reminded me of when the Lincoln Center Film Festival had so graciously shown our movies—on little crank-up machines in the
lobby!
Only in Cannes, things didn't even get
that
far.)