POPism (40 page)

From the time in August '67 when we first shot Viva in
Loves of Ondine
, her hair had been getting fuller and more teased every day until eventually it was a full-blown mane. Viva would vacillate between thinking she was beautiful beyond compare and thinking that certain parts of her face and body were plain ugly. She spent three days with Paul and me in Sweden in February '68 right before the opening of the big retrospective of my work at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, and she came back desperately wanting a nose job. I thought she'd get over it—I mean, the people in Sweden were so perfect-looking that we
all
felt a little strange about ourselves by the time we left—but no, she carried on about that nose job for months, and finally she asked Billy when would be the perfect astrological time to get it done. He did up a nose job chart for her. Meanwhile we all kept on telling her how really beautiful her nose was, and in the end, she never did go through with it.

But then she started staring at her legs in the mirror and moaning that they were out of proportion to her trunk, which I must admit was true, but so what? Everybody had flaws. More than anything, though, she worried about getting old. She wasn't even thirty yet, but she would study every line that she imagined had come into her face in the last week. She was incredibly obsessed with time passing and running out on her—she said she felt she was already living on borrowed time. Most of the girls around then—except for Brigid, who was the same age as Viva, and Ultra, who was older—were in their teens, so Viva really was a different generation, but that's one of the things that made her more interesting than all those little girls screeching
around Max's. And there was absolutely no popular literature around then to persuade women that experienced and lined could be beautiful, too. They were on their own when they looked in the mirror and saw the lines coming.

Women's issues weren't even being discussed then; there was no large organized women's movement yet—I mean, right up through '69 it was almost impossible for a woman to get a legal abortion in this country. Viva was unusual for those times—a girl who'd look into a camera and complain about cramps from her period, or tell men that they were bad in bed, that maybe
they
might think they were doing great but it wasn't doing a thing for her. Viva was the first girl we'd ever heard talk that way.

I was so fond of Viva then; there was something really sweet about her in spite of all her complaints and put-downs. Just when you least expected it, she would turn very modest and get all unsure about herself—which made her an even more appealing person. She'd worry that this kid or that guy didn't like her, and I'd just tell her, “Don't even think about it—when you're famous, you'll be able to buy him,” or, “He's probably a fag, anyway.” But Viva always seemed to look to men for final approval. She would
talk
very liberated, but she seemed to expect men to do little things for her—like support her! But I was convinced that she'd work out these problems and make it big in the celebrity world. I thought she had all the qualities—plus the magic—that could make a woman into a true star. A long interview with her by Barbara Goldsmith would be coming out in
New York
magazine in April, and Diane Arbus was doing the pictures for that.

Those months between August, when she was first in our movies, and February, when we moved downtown, Viva and I
were inseparable—we made movies, gave lectures, and did interviews and photography sittings together. She seemed like the ultimate superstar, the one we'd always been hoping to find: very intelligent, but also good at saying the most outrageous things with a straight-on beautiful gaze and that weary voice of hers, the dreariest, driest voice in the world.

She talked about her family a lot—her parents and her eight brothers and sisters—and her stories all usually cast her father as a Roman Catholic fanatic and her mother as a Joseph McCarthy fanatic who made the kids watch the hearings on television in their entirety. When Viva graduated from her Catholic high school, she went on to Marymount, a Catholic college in Westchester, New York, and from there she went to Paris and lived in a convent on the Right Bank while she studied art. She would give us all long speeches about what was wrong with the Catholic Church—putting down every nun she'd ever known, every priest, every bishop, right up to the Pope—but she always claimed that there was one good thing about being brought up strict: when you finally did go out and do all the things you'd never been allowed to, they thrilled you a lot more. She'd often talk about the physical fights she had with her father, about how he'd chase her around the backyard, threatening to kill her. It never occurred to me that her life might not really have been exactly as she'd described it. But then one day, something happened out in front of 33 Union Square that made me wonder, and things were never really the same between Viva and me after that.

It was the day that a big “family photograph” of the Factory crowd was being taken for
Eye
, the new pop magazine that the Hearst Corporation was launching, aimed right at the big youth
market. I went down to the Factory and when I got out of the cab on 16th Street, there was Viva in the pouring rain, pounding at the door to the building and kicking at it, jerking furiously at the handle. She looked up and saw me—her face had a crazed expression. She screamed hysterically that she demanded keys to the Factory, that only the
men
had keys: “I don't get any respect because I'm a woman and you're all a bunch of fags!” And then, before I could duck, her pocketbook knocked me in the head: she'd thrown it at me—I mean, I couldn't believe she'd actually done it. I was stunned for a second. I kicked it back at her feet, I was so mad. “You're crazy, Viva!” I screamed.

It upset me a lot to see Viva lose control. After a scene like that, you can never trust a person in the same way again, because from that point on, you have to look at them with the idea that they might do a repeat and freak out again.

I left Viva outside on the street and went upstairs. When I told Paul what had just happened, he said that he wasn't at all surprised—she'd called him half an hour earlier from a pay phone, screaming, “Listen, you fag bastard! Get down here and let me in.” He'd hung up on her.

That incident with Viva really got me wondering about whether the problems with her parents had really started with them—for the first time it was dawning on me that maybe she'd twisted all those stories about her father trying to beat her up; maybe she drove him to it, maybe he went after her only after she'd driven him absolutely crazy—and it also made me wonder about Edie's family. I'd always just accepted Edie's story that her whole childhood was a nightmare, but now I started thinking that you should always hear both sides.

• • •

Nico was staying with Fred during the spring of'68, in the apartment he'd taken on East 16th Street, just a walk across Union Square from the Factory.

Fred doted on eccentrics, and Nico was a true specimen: among other things, she thrived only in the gloom—the gloomier she could make the atmosphere around her, the more radiant she became. And the more peculiarities Nico indulged in, the more fascinated Fred became—to find a woman that beautiful
and
that eccentric was a fantasy come true for him. She liked to lie in the bathtub all night with candles burning around her, composing the songs that would be on her second album,
Marble Index
, and when Fred came home from Max's really late, she'd still be in the water.

Fred was back and forth to Europe a lot. When he arrived back at the apartment one night with all his suitcases, he stumbled into the living room and found that he couldn't switch the lights on. He saw a candle flickering in another room around a corner, and then Nico walked in holding a candelabra.

“Oh, Nico! I'm so sorry!” he said, suddenly realizing that Con Edison must have turned off the electricity. “I just remembered I forgot to pay the light bill, and here you've been in the dark all this time!”

“Nooooo, it's fiiiiine,” she said, positively beaming with joy. She'd had the happiest time of her whole life, drifting around there in the dark for a whole month.

In May, Paul, Viva, and I went out west together to talk at a few colleges, and once we were out there, we started filming a surfing movie in La Jolla, California.

La Jolla was one of the most beautiful places I'd ever seen.
We rented a mansion by the sea and a couple of other houses for the people who were going to be in the movie—some of them had flown out with us and the others just met us there.

Everybody was so happy being in La Jolla that the New York problems we usually made our movies about went away—the edge came right off everybody. I mean, it wasn't like our going out, say, to the Hamptons to film, where it was just a day-trip extension of New York City.

We'd lounge around listening to our transistors on the beach, playing songs like “Cowboys to Cowgirls,” “A Beautiful Morning,” cuts from the Jimi Hendrix
Axis
album. From time to time I'd try to provoke a few fights so I could film them, but everybody was too relaxed even to fight. I guess that's why the whole thing turned out to be more of a memento of a bunch of friends taking a vacation together than a movie. Even Viva's complaints were more mellow than usual.

Back in New York, on June 3, I was at home on the phone all morning, mostly to Fred, getting the gossip. Fred was still at home, too. The night before on 16th Street, coming home from Max's, he'd gotten mugged by three little black kids with knives. Even the hippies down in the East Village had gotten really aggressive lately when they asked you for (
demanded
, really) “change.” Attitudes out on the street weren't like the summer before when everybody was acting so enchanted.

“It happened right outside your building?” I said. “Was Nico watching?”

“No,” Fred sighed. “When I finally staggered into the apartment, she was in the bathtub as usual with all her clothes on, singing.”

Ordinarily, Fred would get up early in the morning and
zombie-zip over to the Factory. With Fred, it didn't matter if he hadn't gone to bed till five of nine—at nine sharp he'd be dashing across Union Square Park to work. Getting to the Factory “office” that early didn't make much sense, since nothing much went on there until after one or two, but that didn't matter to Fred—he wanted to set a good example for himself. He'd sit there with his black coffee, take out his fountain pen, and write elegant-looking memos to himself in those little leather-bound, gilt-edged, fine-papered European datebooks.

But this morning it was eleven o'clock and he was still in bed. He sounded really blue; the muggers took a beautiful wristwatch that he said could never be replaced. He quickly changed the subject (his philosophy was always to “chin up” and forget about things) by telling me that he'd heard at Max's that Susan Bottomly and David Croland were breaking up. Earlier in the year, we'd introduced Susan to Christian Marquand, who'd been a matinée idol in France before becoming a director, and he'd put her in Terry Southern's
Candy
—a little scene where she runs down the street crying, “Candy! You forgot your shoe!” They filmed that part here, but then he flew her to Italy to do something, I forget what, with the Living Theater. She'd just come back from Rome, she'd stayed over there for months.

Fred and I spoke some more on the phone—it was Monday, so we had the whole weekend to rehash—and by the time we were done, the early part of the day had gone by.

I got down to 33 Union Square around four-fifteen. I'd done some errands in the East Fifties and, since I was in the neighborhood, I'd rung the bell of a costume designer friend of mine, Miles White, on East 55th Street, but he wasn't home, so I
headed down to the Factory. As I paid the cab driver, I saw Jed coming down the street with a bag of fluorescent lights from the hardware store. I stood there for a few seconds waiting for him, beside a kid who was leaning against the building, blasting “Shoo Be Do Be Doo Be Doo Da Day” on his radio. Then Valerie Solanis came along and the three of us went into the building together.

I didn't know Valerie very well. She was the founder of an organization she called “S.C.U.M.” (for the “Society for Cutting Up Men”). She would talk constantly about the complete elimination of the male sex, saying that the result would be an “out-of-sight, groovy, all-female world.”

She once brought a script to the Factory and gave it to me to read—it was called
Up Your Ass
. I looked through it briefly and it was so dirty I suddenly thought she might be working for the police department and that this was some kind of entrapment. In fact, when we'd gone to Cannes with
Chelsea Girls
the year before and I'd given that interview to
Cahiers du Cinéma
, it was Valerie Solanis I was referring to when I said, “People try to trap us sometimes. A girl called up and offered me a film script… and I thought the title was so wonderful, and I'm generally so friendly that I invited her to come over with it, but it was so dirty I think she must have been a lady cop…”

I had gone on to tell the interviewer that we hadn't seen her since. But then after we got back to New York, she started calling the Factory asking for her script back. I'd left it lying around somewhere, and I couldn't find it—somebody must have thrown it out while we were off in Cannes. When I finally admitted to her that it was lost, she started asking me for money. She was staying at the Chelsea Hotel, she said, and she needed the money
to pay her rent. One afternoon in September when she called, we were in the middle of shooting a sequence for,
I, a Man
, so I said why didn't she come over and be in the movie and
earn
twenty-five dollars instead of asking for a handout. She came right over and we filmed her in a short scene on a staircase and she was actually funny and that was that. The main thing was, she only called occasionally after that, with those same man-hating S.C.U.M. speeches, but she didn't bother me so much anymore—by now I'd decided that she wasn't a lady cop after all. I guess enough people must have told me that she'd been around for quite a while and confirmed that she was a bona fide fanatic.