POPism (7 page)

“Ron is such a devil.” Taylor smiled (Ron was still alive at this point; he didn't die until a year or so later). “Stealing his girl friends' support checks, running off with all the theater receipts, chasing people down the street with his camera trying to film them—and everybody loves him. He took a film course once at the Cooper Union and then he made a film of people ice skating. Then together we made
The Flower Thief
. I had to fight him
all the way to get him not to put a blue wash on it. I told him, ‘Look, Ron, in a few years that kind of thing will be
over
.'”

After San Francisco, Taylor came east and read at coffee shops like the Epitome in the Village. He'd hitched crosscountry five times by then, and that's how he knew all about the truck stops.

I told him, fine, he could pick out the next place we stopped for dinner. After directing Wynn on lefts and rights for a few miles, he steered us into a big truck stop. We sat in a booth over on the side—and were, in fact, a sideshow. I don't know what it was, exactly, about the way we looked, but the alien alert was on; people were turning to look at the “freaks.” I thought we looked normal enough—our clothes were pretty conventional—but it was obviously
something
, because
everybody
was staring. One by one they came up to us, all friendly and smiling, but studying us—beautiful blond kids, girls in ponytails and ironed blouses, boys in crew cuts or long, slicked-back farmer cuts—and they all said, “Where you from?” When we told them New York, they stared more, wanting—they said—to just “dig us.” After that experience we went back to Carte Blanching.

The farther west we drove, the more Pop everything looked on the highways. Suddenly we all felt like insiders because even though Pop was everywhere—that was the thing about it, most people still took it for granted, whereas we were dazzled by it—to us, it was the new Art. Once you “got” Pop, you could never see a sign the same way again. And once you thought Pop, you could never see America the same way again.

The moment you label something, you take a step—I mean, you can never go back again to seeing it unlabeled. We were seeing the future and we knew it for sure. We saw people
walking around in it without knowing it, because they were still thinking in the past, in the references of the past. But all you had to do was
know
you were in the future, and that's what put you there.

The mystery was gone, but the amazement was just starting.

I was lying on the mattress in the back of our station wagon looking up at the lights and wires and telephone poles zipping by, and the stars and the blue-black sky, and thinking, “How could an American debutante marry a guy and go off to live with him in Sikkim?” I'd brought about fifty magazines with me and I'd just been reading about Hope Cooke. How could she do it! America was the place where everything was happening. I never understood, even, how Grace Kelly could leave America for Monaco, which didn't seem nearly as sad as going to Sikkim. I couldn't imagine living in a tiny, nothing little place in the Himalayan Mountains. I didn't ever want to live anyplace where you couldn't drive down the road and see drive-ins and giant ice cream cones and walk-in hot dogs and motel signs flashing!

“Could you turn the radio up a little? It's my favorite song,” I yelled to the front. Actually I couldn't stand the song, but I didn't want Wynn to nod off at the wheel.

The Hollywood we were driving to that fall of '63 was in limbo. The Old Hollywood was finished and the New Hollywood hadn't started yet. It was the French girls who had the new star mystiques—Jeanne Moreau, Françoise Hardy, Sylvie Vartan, Catherine Deneuve, and her tall, beautiful sister, Françoise Dorléac (who would die horribly in a car crash in '67). But this made Hollywood
more
exciting to me, the idea that it was so vacant. Vacant, vacuous Hollywood was everything I ever wanted to
mold my life into. Plastic. White-on-white. I wanted to live my life at the level of the script of
The Carpetbaggers
—it looked like it would be so easy to just walk into a room the way those actors did and say those wonderful plastic lines. I kept raving about that movie all the time to people in Hollywood, but for some reason I was calling it
The Howard Hughes Story
so nobody knew what I was talking about.

We made it in to Los Angeles in three days. When we arrived, we discovered there was a World Series going on and all the hotels were filled. (Baseball had been big news in New York all summer, too—but only because the Mets lost over a hundred games in their second season.) We called Dennis Hopper and his wife, Brooke, right up and she called up her father, the producer Leland Hayward, in New York and got him to give us his suite at the Beverly Hills Hotel. (Her mother was the beautiful actress Margaret Sullavan, who'd killed herself the year before.)

Dennis assured us the Movie Star Party was on for that very night.

The famous Bel-Air fire in '61 had burned the Hoppers' house to the ground. Their new house out in Topanga Canyon was furnished like an amusement park—the kind of whimsical carnival place you'd expect to find bubble-gum machines in. There were circus posters and movie props and red lacquered furniture and shellacked collages. This was before things got bright and colorful everywhere, and it was the first whole house most of us had ever been to that had this kiddie-party atmosphere.

Brooke and Dennis had met in
Mandingo
, a play that closed on Broadway after just a few performances. Dennis wasn't getting much film work at this point; he was doing photography then,
and also, he was one of the few people out in California who collected Pop—he had my Mona Lisa painting up, and one of Roy's paintings, too. I'd first seen him playing Billy the Kid on one of those Warner Brothers television westerns in the fifties—“Cheyenne” or “Bronco” or “Maverick” or “Sugarfoot”—and I remember thinking how terrific he was, so crazy in the eyes. Billy the Maniac.

The Hoppers were wonderful to us. Peter Fonda was at the party that night—in those days he looked like a preppy mathematician. (He'd been on Broadway a couple of seasons earlier in a play at the same time that his sister, Jane, was doing her first Broadway run, too.) Dean Stockwell, John Saxon, Robert Walker, Jr., Russ Tamblyn, Sal Mineo, Troy Donahue, and Suzanne Pleshette—everybody in Hollywood I'd wanted to meet was there. Joints were going around and everyone was dancing to the songs we'd been hearing on the car radio all the way across the country.

This party was the most exciting thing that had ever happened to me. I only wished I'd brought my Bolex along. I'd left it back at the hotel. The party seemed the most natural thing to take pictures of—after all, I was in Hollywood, accompanied by an underground film star, Taylor. But I felt embarrassed about letting people see me with a camera. I was self-conscious shooting even people I knew—like the ones out at Wynn's country place. The only time I hadn't been shy about filming was with
Sleep
because there the star was asleep and nobody else was around.

After a dazzling party like that, my art opening was bound to seem tame, and anyway, movies were pure fun, art was work. But still, it was thrilling to see the Ferus Gallery with the Elvises in the front room and the Lizes in the back.

Very few people on the Coast knew or cared about contemporary art, and the press for my show wasn't too good. I always have to laugh, though, when I think of how Hollywood called Pop Art a put-on!
Hollywood??
I mean, when you look at the kind of movies they were making then—those were supposed to be
real
???

Marcel Duchamp was having a retrospective at the Pasadena Museum, and we were invited to that opening. When we got there, they didn't want to let Taylor in because he wasn't dressed “properly”: he was wearing a sweater that was way too long for him; it belonged to Wynn, who was so tall that the sweater hung down past Taylor's hands and knees. He had to roll the sleeves up and up till they settled somewhere around his wrists—they looked like life preservers. After a while the door people relented and let us in.

All the L.A. Society swells were there. Brooke and Dennis were the only “movie people.” A photographer from
Time
or
Life
or
Newsweek
muscled past Taylor to get a picture of Duchamp and me, and Taylor started screaming, “How dare you! How dare you!”

This was the first of the countless times during the sixties that I would hear that phrase screamed. The sixties were one confrontation after another, till eventually every social obstacle had been confronted. I'm convinced that the attitudes behind the mass confrontations in the last part of the sixties came from these minor scuffles at the doorways to parties. The idea that anybody had the right to be anywhere and do anything, no matter who they were and how they were dressed, was a big thing in the sixties. The fifties' idea of youth rebellion was motorcycles and leather jackets and gang wars—all that stuff from the movies—
but everybody in the fifties did ultimately stay in their own places—everybody stayed right where they “belonged.” I mean, down south Negroes were still riding in the backs of buses.

By the end of the party, Duchamp had invited Taylor to his table when he realized that he was a famous underground actor/poet. I talked a lot to Duchamp and his wife, Teeny, who were great, and Taylor danced all night with Patty Oldenburg—she and Claes had been living in California for a year “to get the feel of a new environment,” she said, so they could send back a “bedroom” for a group exhibit at the Sidney Janis Gallery in early '64. (Claes had done
The Store
on the Lower East Side in '61, and in '62 he'd changed the name of the Ray Gun Manufacturing Company to the Ray Gun Theater and staged happenings like
Injun
and
World's Fair
and
Nekropolis
and
Voyages
and
Store Days
down there around all his soft sculpture.)

They served pink champagne at the party, which tasted so good that I made the mistake of drinking a lot of it, and on the way home we had to pull over to the side of the road so I could throw up on the flora and fauna. In California, in the cool night air, you even felt healthy when you puked—it was so different from New York.

Somewhere in here the girl who you could call my first female superstar arrived in Los Angeles—Naomi Levine. She was staying with the sculptor John Chamberlain and his wife, Elaine, in Santa Monica. Before we left New York, Gerard and Wynn had introduced us at a performance at the Living Theater on Sixth Avenue and 14th Street, and then we'd all gone up together to a black-tie opening at the Museum of Modern Art. Naomi was working at F. A. O. Schwarz, the Fifth Avenue toy store, but she was also making films; she was very film-studentish. Jonas Mekas
had just printed something in his “Movie Journal” column in the
Voice
about one of her movies getting confiscated (and one of Jack Smith's, too) by a New York film-processing lab for having nudity in it—and they hadn't merely confiscated it, they'd gone ahead and actually destroyed it! Naomi said she was in L.A. to raise money for the Film-Makers' Coop. But Gerard and Taylor kept claiming that she was in love with me and that that's why she'd flown out, that she was disappointed we hadn't invited her along for the ride.

Out in Hollywood, I kept thinking about the silly, unreal way the movies there treated sex. After all, the early ones used to have sex and nudity—like Hedy Lamarr in
Ecstasy
—but then they suddenly realized that they were throwing away a good tease, that they should save it for a rainy day. Like, every ten years they would show another part of the body or say another dirty word on screen, and that would stretch out the box office for years, instead of just giving it away all at once. But then when foreign films and underground films started getting big, it threw Hollywood's timetable off. They would have wanted to have everybody waiting out another twenty years to see total nudity while they milked every square inch of flesh. So Hollywood began to say that they were “protecting the public morality,” when the fact was they were just upset that they were going to be rushed into complete nudity when all along they'd been counting on lots of money from a long-drawn-out striptease.

By this time I'd confessed to having my Bolex with me, and we decided to shoot a silent Tarzan movie around the bathtub in our suite at the Beverly Hills Hotel—with Taylor as Tarzan and Naomi as Jane.

Wynn knew a tall, red-headed kid from Harvard named Denis Deegan out there who knew John Houseman, so then we did some filming at John's house, where we met Jack Larson, who'd been Jimmy Olsen on television's “Superman” and who at this point was writing operas. We all went down to the pool and Naomi took her clothes right off and jumped in the water. Taylor was supposed to climb a tree but he couldn't, so he yelled for a stunt man. Dennis appeared and climbed the tree to get a coconut for him. (When Taylor saw the rushes back in New York, he said, “You know, I've always liked Dennis's acting, but it's usually so rigid. This is the most relaxed on camera I've ever seen him.” In '69 when
Easy Rider
came out, Taylor reminded me of that day again. “I think that afternoon by the pool was a turning point for Dennis,” he said. “It opened up new possibilities for him.” Maybe so, I thought. You never know where people will pick things up and where they won't.)

We moved out of the Beverly Hills Hotel to the Venice Pier where Taylor had lived when he was going to the Pasadena Playhouse in the fifties. He still knew a lot of people there. We threw a party by the carousel that Taylor sort of planned and since he was a vegetarian, it was all cheese. But it was hot weather and the cheese was smelly and it ran all over everything, and people were hopping around picking the splinters they'd gotten from the wooden horses out of themselves and wiping the runny cheese off their hands.