POPism (32 page)

The arrangements were all last-minute, just like everything else we did. The night before we left, we took the plane tickets with us when we went to Max's as usual and handed them out there. In addition to Paul and Gerard and me—and Lester Per-sky, who we were taking along to help us publicize the movie—Rodney La Rod, David Croland and Susan Bottomly, and Eric were coming along. A few hours later, at ten in the morning, we were all together on a plane for France.

When Eric left for Cannes with us, he was leaving a top-floor apartment on Central Park West and 80th Street that he'd painted completely black except for white trim on the woodwork. I asked him who he was letting stay in it while he was gone, and he said, “I just left it.”

“But aren't you going back to it?” I asked him.

He shook his head no, vaguely.

“But didn't you leave all your stuff there?” I said.

He shrugged yes, then eventually said, “I was getting all fouled up. Too many people, and things were getting very close, wrapped up into too much drugs and stuff, and that's why I'm, like, really glad you said to come.”

Eric had just broken up with his girl friend, Heather—she'd left him and gone off to London. Technically, Eric was married, and I asked him about that.

“I met my wife, Chris, at Ben Frank's in L.A. three years ago,” he told me. “I was coming home from my girl friend's and I was tripping and I met her and she had these big turquoise eyes which later turned out to be contact lenses. We fell in love instantly and drove to Las Vegas the same day and got married. I had a daughter with her—Erica. Chris came back to New York with me; that was when I was trying to get a store together, right before I met you. I got really attached to my wife, and when she went out free-loving the way I did, I got crazy and went through a heavy gay scene for a while, and then when I was coming out of that I would do things like offer whatever woman I had with me to Jim Morrison at Ondine, so that I could imagine him having pleasure on my head and there would be this connection between us, Jim Morrison and me—just, you know, like watching people you love get together.” Eric got a strange, almost bitter look on his face, thinking about all the times he'd watched
people he loved have sex with people he loved. “It seems,” he said, “like anybody that I did love I watched ‘get together.'”

I asked him when he'd gotten married for the second time—and if he'd ever even gotten a divorce from Chris. He hadn't. “I sort of got a ‘separation' thing from the court,” he told me, “but then the people down at the court wanted me to go through this whole thing with more papers and stuff and I just got all fouled up.”

I never knew what to think of Eric: was he retarded or intelligent? He could come out with comments that were so insightful and creative, and then the next thing out of his mouth would be something
so
dumb. A lot of the kids were that way, but Eric was the most fascinating to me because he was the most extreme case—you absolutely couldn't tell if he was a genius or a retard.

The strange thing was, I'd assumed that Eric had been with us every night, and it wasn't until he described what he'd been doing for the last few months that I realized I hadn't seen him for quite a while.

When we got to Cannes, we discovered that the guy who was supposedly arranging everything hadn't set up even one showing of the movie. Even Lester, who'd come over to help us publicize it, couldn't do anything; it was too late.

We decided to hang around anyway and just have fun, which we were always good at, going to parties, water skiing, meeting the foreign movie people—we met Monica Vitti and Antonioni, who'd filmed
Blow-Up
at the same time we filmed
Chelsea Girls
. And we met Gunther Sachs, the West German ball-bearing heir who brought us home to meet his wife, Brigitte Bardot. She came downstairs and entertained us like a good European hostess, and I couldn't get over how sweet that
was—to be
Brigitte Bardot
and still bother to make your guests comfortable!

One afternoon we all drove out to a huge, beautiful château in the country. While everyone was taking a look around, the owner was busy telling Susan how beautiful she was and that if only she would stay on there for a few days with him, she could have anything she wanted in the whole house, which was full of old European artworks of every kind. Just then David came back from the house tour—all excited because he'd seen a portrait in one of the bathrooms that he said looked just like him, and everyone else agreed that it did, too.

We were getting ready to leave and the man still hadn't convinced Susan to stay on, but he was a good sport and told her she could have whatever she wanted in the house anyway. David was encouraging her to take the most expensive thing, but instead she whispered to Gerard to show her where the bathroom with the portrait was, and she walked out of the house with that painting under her arm, and she presented it to David in the car riding back through the French countryside. He gave her a kiss—he was thrilled—but after a few seconds he got practical and wondered, “Maybe you should have stayed a couple of days and gotten some furniture, too…”

We found out later that it was actually a portrait of Sarah Bernhardt.

In France, Eric didn't want to come around to the parties and things with us. “I can't get into anybody right now; I'm just, like, writing a lot and keeping a journal, and just relating to myself as a companion.”

“You do so many trip books,” I said. “Whatever happens to them all? Where are they?”

“I have a lot of them that're around, being held for me, but unfortunately, through tripping, I lose a lot…”

Eric went off water skiing with Gerard and to one party with us, and then he decided to leave for London—we were going to Paris and Rome first.

In Rome our hotel was taking messages, the same frantic message essentially, every few hours from Eric in London—he'd spent all his money and couldn't pay his hotel bill.

The first thing we had to do when we got to London was go over to Kensington and settle his hotel account. Then I gave him the same basic lecture that I ultimately gave every superstar when I began to feel they were depending on me too much for money. I told him, “Look, Eric, you're young, you're good-looking, and people like to have you around. Don't you realize there are all these incredibly rich people with big beautiful empty houses who are bored? Start thinking rich. Start being grand. You shouldn't have to stay in hotels! We'll introduce you to the swells and you can live off the fat of the land. You've got to start thinking of these things for yourself, though, Eric. We won't always be around to rescue you. Just go out there and be a beautiful house guest and you'll never need a hotel again. You're Entertainment: don't give it away! People like things more when they have to
pay
for them,” etc., etc.

In short, I was telling him, “Hustle.”

After a couple of days in London, where my most vivid memory is of Rodney La Rod leaping onto Paul McCartney's lap the second he met him (that's what I liked about Rodney—he did all those things you felt like doing but knew you shouldn't), most of us went back to New York. David and Susan decided to go back to Paris for a while, though, and Eric stayed
on in London at the house of my art dealer there, Robert Fraser, who was young, good-looking, and beautifully tailored in pinstripe suits—
and
he had a gallery in Mayfair.

The Dom went through yet another management transformation in the middle of '67. Jerry Brandt took it over, completely redid the place, and called it the Electric Circus. There was a big opening for that and we all went; we were naturally curious to see what had been done with the discotheque space we'd launched the year before.

The difference between the Exploding Plastic Inevitable and the Electric Circus sort of summed up what had happened with Pop culture as it moved from the primitive period into Early Slick. It was like the difference between a clubhouse under the back porch steps and a country club. The year before we'd had to pioneer a media show out of whatever we could improvise from whatever we had lying around—tinfoil and movie projectors and phosphorescent tape and mirrored balls. But suddenly, during the
'66–'67
year, a whole Pop industry had started and snowballed into mass-manufacturing the light show paraphernalia and blow-your-mind stuff. And a good general example of how much things had changed in such a short time is “Eric's Fuck Room.” With us, this was just a small alcove off the side of the dance floor where we'd thrown a couple of funky old mattresses in case people wanted to “lounge,” but it'd ended up being just a place where Eric hijacked girls to for sex during the E.P.I, shows; now, under the new Electric Circus management, it was transformed into the “Meditation Room,” with carpeted platforms and Astroturf and a health food bar.

• • •

In the early summer, we all went out to Philip Johnson's Glass House in New Canaan, Connecticut, for a Merce Cunningham Dance Company benefit sponsored by the de Menil Foundation of Houston. A young kid from Texas named Fred Hughes was helping with the arrangements for the foundation and when he overheard someone wondering what rock group to get, he informed them, “There is only one rock group—the Velvet Underground.” He'd seen the Velvets at the Dom the year before when he was in town on one of his trips between Houston and Paris, where he was working at the Iolas Gallery. When he saw Nico at the Dom, he couldn't believe it was the actual girl from
La Dolce Vita
who he'd fallen in love with on screen—I mean, there she was in the flesh standing right in front of him on St. Mark's Place.

Fred had grown up in Houston where the great art patrons John and Dominique de Menil and their five children, George, Philippa, François, Adelaide, and Christophe, lived in a great house designed by Philip Johnson. Fred was only in his early twenties then, but all through his teens he'd been working for them on their art projects and acquisitions. Even before he left Texas for France, he'd bought one of my paintings for himself, and he'd arranged for some of our movies to be screened down in Houston. Later he met Henry Geldzahler at the Venice Bien-nale, and the next time Fred was in New York, Henry brought him over to the Factory.

In those mod, flower-power days, Fred was conspicuous—one of the only young people around who insisted on Savile Row suits. Everyone always stared at him because he was so perfectly tailored—like something out of another era. When he came by that first day, he was wearing a flared, double-vent dark blue suit,
blue shirt, and light blue bow tie. He and Henry rode up in the elevator with Ondine, who Henry eloquently introduced as “the greatest actor in underground cinema today,” and Ondine smiled a very charming smile: “I'm
so
glad you said that, because most people confuse me with being a vulgar pig.” The three of them came in as we were screening a sequence titled “Allen Apple” from what would eventually be ****, our twenty-five-hour movie. Henry took me aside and briefed me that Fred worked for the de Menils, which of course was a magic name—they were so interested in art. But Fred, in any case, was a cute kid—young and such a dandy.

The first thing Fred did was tell me very earnestly that he loved my work and that my movies were beautiful, and I reacted my usual way—modest noises came out of my mouth, the sounds you make when you're embarrassed but saying thank you. I told him we were having dinner in the Village and invited him to come along. Fred laughed and said that just coming down to the Factory on 47th Street was a big deal because it was the farthest downtown he'd ever been, so the Village struck him as really an expedition. Just then the movie reel ended and the lights went on, and as Fred turned to look around the loft, there on the big red couch was a black guy fucking a white guy. I hadn't noticed before, so I guess they'd started during that last reel.

Fred did come to dinner with us, and then he started coming down to the Factory almost every day. He'd spend mornings and afternoons at the de Menil Foundation, having meetings with people like Nelson Rockefeller and Alfred Barr of the Museum of Modern Art, and then straight from that he'd come down to the Factory to sweep floors. For some reason, most of the people who came to work at the Factory were drawn at first to sweeping
floors—Paul had done it for months, too, before getting involved with other things. I guess it was a natural thing to do, with so much mess around and so many people there making more. Fred got more and more outrageously elegant—black jackets with braiding on them, shirts with bow ties to match. One day he arrived in a big Tom Mix hat. (He eventually gave it to me and I was photographed a lot in it on the
Lonesome Cowboys
set.) But the really funny thing was that a lot of days he wouldn't want to go all the way home to change before meeting his society friends for dinner at places like “21,” so there he'd be with a broom in his hand sweeping the floors in his dinner jacket.

When Fred came on the scene in
'67
, I really wasn't painting at all, but shortly after that I started to work on the large electric chairs for my big retrospective in Sweden the next year. Fred got involved right away with both art and moviemaking—he arranged a commission for me from the de Menils to film a sunset for something to do with a bombed church in Texas that they were restoring. I filmed so many sunsets for that project, but I never got one that satisfied me. However, it was with the leftover money from that commission that we eventually made
Lonesome Cowboys
at the end of the year and the beginning of '68.

At the time of the Merce Cunningham benefit at Philip Johnson's, we didn't know Fred that well yet, which I especially remember because when there wasn't room for all of us to go in the limousines from the de Menil house on 73rd Street off Park where all the people who'd paid a thousand dollars a ticket were having drinks beforehand, Philippa de Menil and Fred were formal enough with us to insist that Paul and Gerard take their places in the cars. (They wound up taking the train out to New Canaan and hitching from the station to the Glass House.)