POPism (44 page)

The big question that everyone who came by the Factory was suddenly asking everyone else was, “Do you know anyone who'll transcribe some tapes?”

Everyone, absolutely everyone, was tape-recording everyone else. Machinery had already taken over people's sex lives—dildos and all kinds of vibrators—and now it was taking over their social lives, too, with tape recorders and Polaroids. The running joke between Brigid and me was that all our phone calls started with whoever'd been called by the other saying, “Hello, wait a minute,” and running to plug in and hook up. I'd provoke any kind of hysteria I could think of on the phone just to get myself a good tape. Since I wasn't going out much and was home a lot in the mornings and evenings, I put in a lot of time on the phone gossiping and making trouble and getting ideas from people and trying to figure out what was happening—and taping it all.

The trouble was, it took so long to get a tape transcribed, even when you had somebody working at it full-time. In those days even the typists were making their own tapes—as I said,
everybody
was into it.

It's hard to believe, but very few journalists tape-recorded interviews back then. They'd come with their pads and pencils and scribble down key words you said and then go home and do it up from memory. (Of course, when I said “everybody was taping,” I meant “everybody we knew.” Other people weren't taping at all and, as a matter of fact, when they'd see your recorder they'd get all paranoid: “What's that?… Why are you taping?… What are you going to use it for?” etc., etc.)

Tapes brought up great possibilities for interviews with all kinds of celebrities, and since we were a long time between movies lately, I began to think about starting a magazine of
nothing but taped interviews. Then John Wilcock dropped by one day and asked me if I would start a newspaper with him. I said yes. John was already publishing a magazine on newsprint called
Other Scenes
, so he had a complete typesetting and printing setup already. Together we brought out the first issue of
Interview
magazine in the fall of '69.

Newspapers and magazines kept sending reporters to do stories on us, and we made sure we always had somebody new around for them to focus on. At the end of the year it was Candy Darling—she confided to them all that she had a “multipicture deal” with us, and she'd dream up titles—
Blond on a Bummer, New Girl in the Village, Beyond the Boys in the Band
, whatever phrase occurred to her that day. (Even if our movies had gotten fewer and farther between, there was no shortage of titles.) We got thousands of dollars' worth of publicity for movies we weren't bothering to make and for superstars we never got around to using on film.

Flesh
had a smash run from October '68 through April '69 at the Garrick Theater on Bleecker. Joe Dallesandro got quite a following around town—the assistant manager at the Garrick, a young kid named George Abagnalo, told us that he noticed the same faces coming back to see the movie again and again. And Candy, too, was a big hit in her one scene where she sits, very ladylike, on a couch with Jackie and reads old movie magazines out loud while Geri the topless go-go dancer gives Joe a blow job.

Sometime during the run of
Flesh
, Jackie and Candy rented a room together at the Hotel Albert on 10th Street and University Place. By then Jackie was into total drag—complete with
bushy red hennaed hair, dark lipstick, and forties dresses fastened with big brooches, including a favorite one that spelled “Nixon” in marcasite. When people asked him why he'd “gone all the way,” Jackie would explain, “It's much easier to be a weird girl than a weird guy.”

Jackie as a full-blown woman wasn't that hard to take because he played it like a total comedy; it was his in-between stage that had been so creepy. He'd started taking female hormones sometime in '68, and by that summer, when Paul was filming him and Candy in
Flesh
, he was in that weird part man/part woman stage—but still a long, long way from both. His eyebrows were all plucked and he wore pancake makeup, but it didn't make up for much: the beard was coming through in stubble, and there were welts—tiny red bumps—where you could see he'd been getting electrolysis. (A lot of the drag queens we knew had their body and face hair removed by the students in a midtown electrolysis school—it was cheaper that way.) But the creepiest part of a sex change has nothing to do with appearance—it's
the voice
. In Jackie's case, he did what most men do when they want to sound like a woman—he dropped his voice to a whisper. However, the thing was, whispery voices never made the drag queens sound more femme—they only made them sound more desperate.

Studying the shortcomings of the other drag queens made you realize how special Candy was, how hard she had to work to stay so femme—and how successful she was at it.

Candy suffered a big disappointment in '69. In fact, she never got over it. As soon as the news that a movie of
Myra Breckenridge
was going to be made appeared in the trade papers, Candy began writing letters to the studio and the producers and
whoever else she could think of, telling them that she'd lived the complete life of Myra and that she knew even more about forties movies than Gore Vidal did. It was true.

And they gave the part to Raquel Welch.

Poor Candy wrote begging them to please, please reconsider. She knew that if there was ever going to be a role in Hollywood for a drag queen, this was it. When she didn't hear anything back, something changed with Candy—it wasn't a change you would notice unless you knew her very well (after all, she was always giving some level of a performance). But suddenly she had to face the fact that Hollywood had slammed the door on her. All her life she'd been rejected and rejected by everybody and everything, and all through it she'd held onto the fantasy that even if no place else in the world would take her in, that Hollywood would, because Hollywood was as unreal as she was; Hollywood would surely understand—somehow. So when she didn't get the part of Myra and she saw that Hollywood didn't want her, either, I saw her become bitter.

The big nude theater craze hit in '69. It was only the year before that police had stood by in San Francisco to arrest the Living Theater performers if they so much as
started
taking their clothes off. Then all of a sudden the new thing was for performers to take all their clothes off and dance around completely naked on stage in long-playing well-advertised shows like
Oh! Calcutta!
and
Dionysus in '69
.

During this period I took thousands of Polaroids of genitals. Whenever somebody came up to the Factory, no matter how straight-looking he was, I'd ask him to take his pants off so I could photograph his cock and balls. It was surprising who'd let me and who wouldn't.

Personally, I loved porno and I bought lots of it all the time—the really dirty, exciting stuff. All you had to do was figure out what turned you on, and then just buy the dirty magazines and movie prints that are right for you, the way you'd go for the right pills or the right cans of food. (I was so avid for porno that on my first time out of the house after the shooting I went straight to 42nd Street and checked out the peep shows with Vera Cruise and restocked on dirty magazines.)

I'd always wanted to do a movie that was pure fucking, nothing else, the way
Eat
had been just eating and
Sleep
had been just sleeping. So in October '68 I shot a movie of Viva having sex with Louis Waldon. I called it just
Fuck
.

At first we kept it at the Factory, screening it occasionally for friends. Then, when we opened
Lonesome Cowboys
in May and it began to die pretty quickly, we had to think about what to replace it with, and I wondered if it should be
Fuck
.

I was still confused about what was legal in pornography and what wasn't, but at the end of July, what with all sorts of dirty movies playing around town and dirty magazines like
Screw
on every newsstand, we thought, oh, why not, and put
Fuck
into the Garrick Theater after changing the title to
Blue Movie
. It ran a week before getting seized by the cops. They came all the way down to the Village, sat through Viva's speeches about General MacArthur and the Vietnam war, through Louis calling her tits “dried apricots,” and through her story about the police harassing her in the Hamptons for not wearing a bra, etc., etc., etc.—and
then
they seized the print of our movie. Why, I wondered, hadn't they gone over to Eighth Avenue and seized things like
Inside Judy's Box
or
Tina's Tongue?
Were they more “socially redeeming,” maybe? It all came down to what they wanted to seize and what they didn't, basically. It was ridiculous.

• • •

Viva wanted to go to Paris in November '68 so I gave her a round-trip ticket. In January I got a letter from her saying, “If you don't send me money, I'll work against you as well as I worked for you.” When somebody threatens me, I don't listen to them anymore. Naturally I was disappointed, but with Viva, I was getting used to disappointment. A telegram from her came in February saying essentially the same thing and I deliberately ignored it. Then we heard she'd gone to Los Angeles to star in Agnes Varda's movie
Lions Love
.

The time did seem right for Viva to make it. More and more girls were picking up on her look—the elegant velvet and satin look, the tunic-length blouses over pants, the slouch and the bored gestures, and most of all the hair—the frizzed, full-blown, out-to-there hair.

In March while I was in the hospital for a follow-up operation, another telegram from Viva arrived at the Factory—this time from Las Vegas: it said she'd gotten married. About a week later she returned to New York, with her new husband, a French filmmaker named Michel that she'd met in Europe and taken out to Hollywood with her. I wished her luck in her marriage. As we talked, she was making little asides to the husband, asking his advice on what to do about this check or that photograph. She told me she was writing an autobiographical novel called
Superstar
for Putnam's and that it would also be an exposé of the underground. She added that, as a matter of fact, she was taping this phone conversation of ours for a chapter in it.

At the end of the sixties it looked like Hollywood was finally about to acknowledge our work and give us money to make a big-budget 35-mm movie. (
Flesh
, meanwhile, had opened in
Germany and was a huge success. When Paul and Joe went over there to publicize it, they got mobbed.) Columbia Pictures wanted to do a project with us and they told us to go ahead and put some sort of script or treatment together.

About this time we met a writer named John Hallowell who was living in L.A. doing interviews with movie stars for the
Los Angeles Times
. John was doing a book called
The Truth Game
, a bunch of chapters on different stars but written sort of like a novel with him as the boy reporter main character. He came to see us in New York because he wanted to end the book with a chapter on the Factory crowd. He and Paul hit it off immediately and started collaborating on a screen treatment for us to take out to Hollywood—showing the different areas of life in L.A. It was tailored for a mix of our superstars with some Hollywood stars John said he could line up.

John went back to Hollywood to talk the idea up with the people out there. We'd get excited calls and telegrams from him saying things like “Raquel can't wait,” or “Natalie says wonderful,” and I'd tease him about all the name-dropping. (Once he astounded me—he actually did put Rita Hayworth on the phone. But somehow we couldn't really talk to each other, maybe because she was shy and I was shy. We mumbled something about art—she told me she'd once done a painting of a gardenia. She was very sweet, but it was sad because she was slurring her words and sounded sort of lost. She said she just knew I'd make her “the most super star of all.”)

In May, Columbia flew us out to L.A.

The conferences with the studio seemed to be going fine until one of the executives asked whether the Great Dane in the treatment was absolutely necessary. (This was the routine way they talked budgets down in Hollywood—he was just dutifully
asking questions to sound economy-minded.) When Paul told him oh, yes, the dog
was
essential because one of the girls was “going to have an affair with it,” he went into shock. Paul assured him that the sex with the dog would be off-camera, but we could see that the roof had fallen in.

We didn't hear another word from the studio. When we were back in New York, John called to say they had turned the project down for “moral reasons.” “Don't you love it?” he sneered. “For ‘moral reasons': They're about as moral as Attila the Hun.”

That trip to L A. wasn't a complete waste—we'd seen a real preview of the New Hollywood. Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper had just finished making
Easy Rider
. We saw a rough cut of it over at Peter's house in one of the canyons. They put the film on the projector and as it started, Peter turned on his stereo and played all the rock songs that went with it—they weren't actually on the print yet. (Afterward Paul teased him, “What a great idea—making a movie about your record collection!”) It was exciting to see young kids like Peter and Dennis putting out the new youth image on their own terms. The idea of using rock that way made you think back to certain underground movies, but what made
Easy Rider
so new-looking was the Hollywood style of opening it up, getting it out, and moving it on the road. (And of course, it was Jack Nicholson's first great role.)

I have to admit, though, that at the time I wasn't so sure
Easy Rider
would be a box office hit, that people would accept its loose style. Little did I know that when it opened that coming July it would be the exact image millions of kids were fantasizing—being free and on the road, dealing dope and getting persecuted.