POPism (41 page)

It was a very hot day, and as Jed, Valerie, and I waited for the elevator, I noticed that she was wearing a fleece-lined winter coat and a high turtleneck sweater, and I thought how hot she must be—although, surprisingly, she wasn't even sweating. She was wearing pants, more like trousers (I'd never seen her in a dress), and holding a paper bag and twisting it—bouncing a little on the balls of her feet. Then I saw that there was something even more odd about her that day: when you looked close, she'd put on eye makeup and lipstick.

We got off at the sixth floor and stepped right out into the middle of the studio. Mario Amaya was there, an art critic and teacher who I'd known since the fifties. He was waiting to talk to me about putting on a show somewhere.

Fred was up front at his big desk writing a letter in longhand. Paul was across from him at his matching desk, talking on the phone. Jed had gone to the back to put in the fluorescent lights. I walked over to Paul.

The windows in the front were all open—the doors to the balcony, too—but it was still so hot. They were European-style
windows—two vertical panes in wood frames that opened in and you latched them like shutters. We liked to keep them swinging free, not fastened back by anything, so if there was a breeze they'd move in and out, back and forth. But there was no breeze.

“It's Viva,” Paul said, standing up and handing me the phone. I sat down in his chair, and he walked to the back. Viva was telling me that she was uptown at Kenneth's salon where the
Midnight Cowboy
production people were trying to match her hair color to the hair of Gastone Rossilli, the boy she was doing a scene with.

Both Paul's and Fred's desks were actually low metal file cabinets with big ten-foot by five-foot boards across between them—the working surface was glass, so that when you looked down to write something, you could see yourself. I leaned over the desk to see how I looked—talking to her was making me think about my own hair. Viva kept gabbing, about the movie, about how she was going to play an underground filmmaker at a party scene where Jon Voight meets Brenda Vaccaro. I motioned for Fred to pick up and continue the conversation for me, and as I was putting the phone down, I heard a loud exploding noise and whirled around: I saw Valerie pointing a gun at me and I realized she'd just fired it.

I said, “No! No, Valerie! Don't do it!” and she shot at me again. I dropped down to the floor as if I'd been hit—I didn't know if I actually was or not. I tried to crawl under the desk. She moved in closer, fired again, and then I felt horrible, horrible pain, like a cherry bomb exploding inside me.

As I lay there, I watched the blood come through my shirt and I heard more shooting and yelling. (Later—a long time later—they told me that two bullets from a .32-caliber gun had
gone through my stomach, liver, spleen, esophagus, left lung, and right lung.) Then I saw Fred standing over me and I gasped, “I can't breathe.” He kneeled down and tried to give me artificial respiration but I told him no, no, that it hurt too much. He got up from the floor and rushed to the phone to call an ambulance and the police.

Then suddenly Billy was leaning over me. He hadn't been there during the shooting, he'd just come in. I looked up and I thought he was laughing, and that made me start to laugh, too, I can't explain why. But it hurt so much, and I told him, “Don't laugh, oh, please don't make me laugh.” But he wasn't laughing, it turned out, he was crying.

It was almost a half-hour before the ambulance got there. I just stayed still on the floor, bleeding.

Immediately after I was shot, I learned later, Valerie turned and fired at Mario Amaya, hitting him in the hip. He ran for the back room and slammed the big double doors. Paul had been in the bathroom and hadn't even heard the shots. When he came out, he saw Mario, bleeding, holding the door shut. He went to look through the projection room glass, and saw Valerie on the other side trying to force the door. When it didn't open, she walked over to my little office on the side—it was closed, so she tried turning the knob. It didn't open, either—Jed was holding it shut from the inside, watching the knob going around and around—but she didn't know that, she left it for locked. Then she went to the front again and pointed the gun at Fred, who said,
“Please! Don't
shoot me! Just
leavel”
She seemed confused—undecided whether to shoot him or not—so she went and pushed the button for the elevator. Then she walked back to where he was cornered, down on the floor, and pointed the gun
at him again. Right when it looked like she was about to pull the trigger, the elevator doors opened suddenly and Fred said, “There's the elevator! Just
take
it!”

She did.

When Fred called the ambulance for me, they said that if he wanted them to sound the emergency siren, it would cost fifteen dollars extra. Mario wasn't hurt badly, he was walking around. He actually called for another ambulance for himself.

Of course, I was unaware of all this at the time. I didn't know a thing. I was just on the floor, bleeding. When the ambulance came, they didn't have a stretcher with them, so they put me in a wheelchair. I thought that the pain I'd felt lying on the floor was the worst you could ever feel, but now that I was in a sitting position, I knew it wasn't.

They took me to Columbus Hospital on 19th Street between Second and Third avenues, five or six blocks away. Suddenly there were lots of doctors around me, and I heard things like “Forget it” and “… no chance…” and then I heard someone saying my name—it was Mario Amaya—telling them that I was famous and that I had money.

I was in surgery for about five hours, with Dr. Giuseppe Rossi and four other great doctors working on me. They brought me back from the dead—literally, because I'm told that at one point I was gone. For days and days afterward, I wasn't sure if I
was
back. I felt dead. I kept thinking, “I'm really dead. This is what it's like to be dead—you think you're alive but you're dead. I just
think
I'm lying here in a hospital.”

As I was coming down from my operation, I heard a television going somewhere and the words “Kennedy” and “assassin” and “shot” over and over again. Robert Kennedy had been shot, but what was so weird was that I had no understanding that this
was a
second
Kennedy assassination—I just thought that maybe after you die, they rerun things for you, like President Kennedy's assassination. Some of the nurses were crying, and after a while, I heard things like “the mourners in St. Patrick's.” It was all so strange to me, this background of another shooting and a funeral—I couldn't distinguish between life and death yet, anyway, and here was a person being buried on the television right in front of me.

My first visitor was unofficial—Vera Cruise, disguised as a nurse.

I was lying in the bed, trying not to think about the pain that racked my body. I was in intensive care, so there was someone else in the room, a young kid I recognized from around Max's who'd overdosed on some drug, but the doctors and his parents didn't know which one. They'd tried to find out from his wife, they told the doctor, but she was on so many drugs herself that she wouldn't tell them. Sometimes this kid would get delirious and start screaming, and that's when I noticed that there was another drama going on, that when nobody was looking, a certain nurse would come in and she and the boy would hug and kiss.
She
knew what drug he was coming down off of, and when he got too bad she'd get it out of the cupboard and give it to him. I would keep my mind off the pain by watching them.

On one of the first days—I couldn't tell the days from the nights, it was just cycles of pain—I looked up at the face on top of the nurse's uniform beside my bed and there was Vera. Then I understood why they don't let you see people when you're in the hospital—because the slightest emotional thing makes the pain come more.

“Oh, go away, Vera,” I moaned. All I could think was that
she'd come to steal drugs out of the cabinet, and I didn't want trouble.

My mother visited me with my two brothers from Pennsylvania and my nephew Paulie, who was studying to be a priest. Paulie stayed on with my mother after the other relatives left, because she didn't speak much English and was sort of batty by then. She couldn't be left alone, certainly, since she had a habit of letting anybody into the house who rang the bell and said they knew me. Any reporter could have gone right up there to talk to her and, if nobody was there to stop her, she'd take them on a complete tour, play my tapes for them, arrange a marriage with me if it was a girl, or with one of my nieces if it was a man—I mean, any embarrassing thing could happen if my mother became a hostess.

When I was shot, Gerard had gone up to my house to get her and bring her over to the hospital, and that first night he and Viva took her home. Then somewhere along the line, I heard that the Duchess had been up at the house, too, visiting my mother, so that was food for some horrible thought.

If you value your privacy, don't ever get shot, because your private life turns into an open house very quickly.

Viva and Brigid were sweet and wrote me long letters together every day on yellow legal pads, telling me what was happening with everybody we knew, and eventually, when I could take phone calls, I learned more details about the shooting and the days right after it.

Brigid said that at four o'clock on Monday when I was getting shot, she was in a cab on her way over to the Factory from Lamston's five-and-dime store where she'd gone to buy her
week's supply of Rit and Tintex (she was still “dyeing every day”), but that then she changed her mind and told the driver to take her home to the George Washington Hotel instead—she'd had a fight with Paul the day before and didn't want to face him—and that's how she missed the shooting.

Viva said that when she was talking to me on the phone from Kenneth's salon and the shot went off, she thought someone must be playing with the bullwhip left over from the Velvet Underground days, because the sound was like a cracking noise, and that when she'd heard me screaming Valerie's name, she'd thought I was saying “Viva!” Even when Fred got on the phone and told her I'd been shot, she still didn't believe it, she said. She had someone at Kenneth's call back to check it, and Jed told them the same thing.

Brigid said that the next night, after watching the news at Viva's uptown, she walked into Max's and the people around the cigarette machine told her, “Bobby Kennedy's been shot.” She went on toward the back room and collided with Bob Rauschenberg who was coming down from the upstairs, all sweaty from dancing. “I told him the news about Bobby Kennedy,” she said, “and he fell to the floor, sobbing, and said, ‘Is
this
the medium?'”

“What was that supposed to mean?” I asked her.

“First you, then Bobby Kennedy,” she said. “Guns.”

One of the letters from Viva and Brigid said that when Louis Waldon came to the hospital the night of the shooting, all the girls in the waiting room rushed over to tell him he had to go home with Ivy and stay with her because she was saying that the moment I died, she was going to kill herself. Later he told Viva and Brigid, “I spent the whole night with her and those poor children of hers and she kept calling the hospital every ten seconds wanting to know if Andy had died yet so she could jump
right out the window if he had. Finally, at six in the morning, they told her they thought he was going to make it, and I collapsed into bed.”

When I was well enough to, I read all the newspaper and magazine articles on the shooting that everyone had saved for me. The papers said that Valerie had been up to the Factory earlier that afternoon and that when she was told I wasn't there, she went outside to wait till I showed up. Around seven o'clock, three hours after she shot me, she turned herself in to a rookie policeman in Times Square. She handed him the gun, the papers said, and then told him, “I am a flower child. The police are looking for me. They want me. He had too much control over my life.” The policeman took her to the 13th Precinct house, just two blocks away from the hospital where I was still in surgery. She told the police at the precinct, “I have a lot of very involved reasons. Read my manifesto, and it will tell you what I am.” Later on in court, she told the judge, “It's not often I shoot somebody. I didn't do it for nothing.” The newspapers also quoted a lot from her S.C.U.M. manifesto.

As I've said, I was the headline of the
New York Daily News
—
“ACTRESS SHOOTS ANDY WARHOL”
—six years to the day from the June 4, 1962, “129
DIE IN JET”
disaster headline that I'd silkscreened for my painting. The picture on the front page of the June 4, 1968, final was of Valerie in custody, holding a copy of the day's early edition in her hand. The caption quoted her correcting, “I'm a writer, not an actress.”

I couldn't figure out why, of all the people Valerie must have known, I had to be the one to get shot. I guess it was just being
in the wrong place at the right time. That's what assassination is all about. “If only Miles White had been home when I rang his doorbell,” I kept thinking, “maybe she would've gotten tired and left.”

Fred filled me in on what had happened with the police.

“They took Jed and me over to the 13th Precinct house,” he said. “They questioned us until about nine o'clock that night. They told us we were ‘material witnesses,' and I was so naive I didn't realize that that meant they were holding us as suspects!”

“Whaaaaat?” I said.

“Yes—until after they booked Valerie, I guess. They wouldn't tell us anything. I kept demanding to know your condition, and they wouldn't even tell me that.” He laughed in an ironic way. “They were probably hoping we'd confess.”