Famous for 15 Minutes Read online

  There is no taking of Polaroids in heaven; the ineffable light precludes it. So how can Andy do a portrait? By hand drawing? Unthinkable for an artist who wanted to be so completely detached from his art that he refused to touch it.

  But wait a minute. What makes me think Andy has arrived at a place where he can have commerce with good St. Peter? Maybe he is now somewhere quite different. He sinned; he abetted sinners. He broke commandments. Did he repent? My Bible opens to Luke 13:3: “Unless you repent you all likewise perish.”

  Now, Isabelle, where is your charity? Here in this sacred place you must not withhold the hand of mercy. The Church has forgiven Andy, or we would not be here. In time and eternity, Andy will work everything out. I do not doubt it for an instant.

  Of course, Andy must be loving every minute of this ceremony. I use the present tense intentionally, for Andy is watching his own memorial on the great celestial TV and is not missing a moment.

  This is his kind of party. All the celebrities are here. The media people are out in full force. It is an all-star, superstar, megastar happening—the memorial mass for Andy Warhol.

  THE FACTORY

  In December 1963, dressed in an exquisite Chanel suit woven of gold-pink-blue thread, a black velvet bow in my hair, I step out of Salvador Dali’s limousine in front of 231 East 47th Street in Manhattan. The block is nondescript and commercial. The brick building is dilapidated, the metal fire escape on its facade rusting. I walk through a run-down entranceway. With some hesitation, for it is my first time doing this, I operate a crumbling self-service elevator that is spacious enough for a truck. The gates are painted silver. On four, I step out onto a concrete floor painted silver and into a vast silver interior.

  An impression of devastation immediately hits me. The raw barrenness—except for a collapsed couch large enough for a ménage à cinq and a broken wooden slat-back revolving armchair—makes me suspect a fire has taken place. The odor of old smoke remains. Thinking out loud, I hear myself say, “There must have been a fire here.”

  “No.”

  Against the silvery background of the wall I have not noticed my silvery host. Is it the metallic reflection of the walls or is it Andy’s birthright complexion? He appears coated with quicksilver.

  “Was there a disaster here?”

  “No.”

  “It feels like it.”

  “Uh.”

  “You work here?”

  “Gosh, yes.”

  “I thought you were a painter. In the studios I’ve seen, Dali’s, Picasso’s, you smell paint, you see canvases. Here you’ve only got empty space.” The walls are eighteen feet high, the glittering box thirty feet wide and a hundred feet long.

  “Space is where it’s at.”

  “I see now why you call your studio the Factory.”

  “Oh, tell me why. I can’t figure it out, except that it used to be a factory.”

  I think: Is he an alchemist? Or is he Ali Baba in his magic cavern?

  “Where are the jewels?” I ask.

  “They’re here somewhere.” He is referring to his paintings.

  I hear the sound of tinkling coins and realize Andy is laughing. All around me, silver disintegrating walls, pipes wrapped in aluminum foil, like giant Christmas gifts, silver-sprayed file cabinets and stereo equipment decorate the loft.

  Something stirs in my memory. Of course: I am back in the basement apartment of painter John Graham, with its mirror-covered walls that four years ago beckoned me into an artistic and erotic unknown. When I walked through those chimeric mirrors, I left behind forever my severely Catholic upbringing, my link to linear logic. Here in the Factory the mirrors have come out of their frames and merged into a total environment of silvery reflections and refractions. Once again I am in a place of magic, a wonderland where you step in and out of yourself, where memory and fantasy race into each other at full tilt. I think of Salvador Dali’s White Labyrinth in Spain, another abode of reverie and unreality, and of the silver outfit I assembled to astonish the master of Surrealism.

  The tips of my fingers tingle with excitement. I feel my heart race. But I stay very cool. I am the elegant stranger who has ventured in out of curiosity. Will I step through the looking glass into a kingdom of illusion? I don’t know yet.

  Andy picks up a can of instant silver spray and touches up an inch of space, a non-silver gap between two tinfoil seams.

  “Ouch, you just sprayed silver on my gold Chanel shoes.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry. It’s the draft.”

  “What do you do here?”

  “Gee, I don’t know.”

  “As an artist, what do you do?”

  “Look for ideas. I never find any.”

  Even the light emitted by the aluminum spotlight shines with a silvery glow. Or is it the glittering interior that reflects itself?

  “You’ve covered the windows with aluminum foil. Where is your natural light?”

  “Electricity is more artificial.”

  “You’re certainly breaking with tradition. Maybe what you’re creating is artifact, not art.”

  I think of traditional European studios, with their wide skylights to the north. Vermeer comes to mind. In the northern hemisphere, artists have always preferred light admitted solely from the north. It is more neutral in color and has fewer variations than light from any other direction.

  A door opens onto a fire escape and daylight. Stepping outside, I lean on the railing and look around to reassure myself that the outside world is still the same as it was when I left it only a few moments ago. A second look confirms that there is a real silver cloud in the real blue sky. I reenter the silver loft, convinced that this hybrid albino is an extraterrestrial. I am fascinated. I am determined to undress him figuratively as well as physically. What kind of lover is this gaudy deity? He must have liquid mercury for sperm.

  I say, “Andy, I am an artist too. I’d like to sketch you.”

  “Don’t bother; take a picture of me.”

  “It’s not the same. I like the feeling of the pencil in my hand.”

  “Feeling?” He laughs.

  “The miracle of the moment. The hand moves on the paper and a form, a sensitive form with the characteristic of the individual, comes alive.…”

  “Photography is more real.”

  “But it’s impersonal—you have nothing to do with it.”

  “It’s better.”

  “Anyone can take a photo, but not just anyone can do a drawing that conveys life and accuracy. Like a Poussin drawing …”

  “Poussin?”

  “You don’t know Poussin, one of France’s greatest artists of the nineteenth century? You have no art culture.”

  “Don’t have to know art. I make art.”

  “Feelings are everywhere. We can’t exist without them. Here there is a feeling of silver dreams.”

  “That’s amphetamine.”

  I grasp a piece of Mylar floating loose from a silver speaker. “This Mylar …”

  “It’s very high grade.”

  “It makes me think of astronauts. Are you a launching pad?”

  Andy moans.

  “There’s also a feeling here of memories,” I say. “Do you know why?”

  “No.”

  “Mirrors—they have the most memories.” I am quoting John Graham. “This place is a giant reflector. Do you have memories?”

  “No, I don’t remember anything. Each day is another day.”

  I laugh and say, “Oh, that goes pretty far. How do you feel about mirrors?”

  “I’m a mirror. Look at yourself in me.”

  I look at Andy, my face close to his. I look right into his eyes and I see radar. Two parabolic metal disks, revolving slowly on themselves, scan the visual field. I see two of me each time his radar lays eyes on me. I say, “I recognize you. I myself see beyond the spectrum of light.”

  By now I am under Andy’s spell. After all, I left France deliberately to break with family and tradition. I’ve
had my turn with Graham, with Dali, with many others. Andy is up my alley. He is an extremist, a fantasist. That is what I love. My romances have been eccentric, each a new adventure. Now I feel that this conjurer will take me to an even newer dimension. Entering a new age, a silver age, I am excited about the future. I am suddenly wild about Andy. In a low tungsten key, he is amusing, even thrilling. I must seduce him. That is the only way to find out if he is real, if he is a man or just a silver-plated robot.

  “Are you alone here?”

  Andy gestures to the door at the northern end of the Factory. “Billy is in the closet.”

  “Who’s Billy?”

  “Billy Name.”

  “That’s his name?”

  “Yes.”

  “When will he come out of the closet?”

  “He’s been there two months.”

  “Maybe he’s dead.”

  “No, it would smell.”

  “How does he eat?”

  “Probably goes out at night.”

  “What does he do?”

  “He’s a photographer.”

  I am determined to have this silver sorcerer at my feet. But how can I get him to sit on the couch? On second thought, the couch looks too much like a run-down bed. It would be too obvious. I hear a miaou. I turn around. A silver-sprayed cat looks at me with a spaced-out expression. I go to pick it up, but I change my mind, thinking I’ll get silver on my hands.

  I ask Andy, “What is that strange building across the street?”

  We both step out onto the narrow metal platform of the fire escape. I grab Andy. He moans. His body is cool and it seems to become colder and colder by the instant. I say, “Andy, let’s make love.” I reach for him, but he wriggles out of my embrace. When I move closer and try to clasp him to me, he stiffens and resists. He moans loudly. A passerby lifts up his head and screams, seeing us suspended in the air, wrestling on the perforated metal platform. Andy turns icy cold, except for the back of his neck. Believing that he is afraid of heights, I let go of my prey. Andy climbs back into the loft, white as death.

  It takes me a few minutes to realize that it is Andy’s hairpiece that keeps his neckline warm, the sole part of his anatomy at body temperature. It takes me several days to realize that he is not afraid of heights. He is afraid of me.

  Back in the loft, we are both shaken by this non-seduction scene. I push my hair back into place. Andy’s hair is in disarray. I don’t mean to stare as he adjusts it, but I am unable to pull my eyes away when I see a snap, a metallic snap, embedded in the front part of his skull. He snaps his hair into place.

  This lover boy is not made for love. At least not for me.

  “Andy, show me your paintings,” I say.

  ENTOURAGE

  The original Factory, at 231 East 47th Street from 1963 to 1967, is constantly visited by the police. That is easily understandable, for the door is always open, and stoned kids float in and out. Anything goes in the dark end of the loft: needles, sodomy, handcuffs, beatings, chains. The police are never able to put their finger on any precise crime. Sometimes I wonder if they’re looking to get in on the action.

  Plenty of other people drop by to gawk, or say hello, then rush off to print or broadcast what they see at our assembly line for art, sex, drugs, and film. Celebrities are often on hand, to party with us or just hang out. Sooner or later you might run into Rudolf Nureyev, Jane Fonda, Montgomery Clift, Tennessee Williams, Bob Dylan, the Rolling Stones, Jim Morrison, Judy Garland, William Burroughs.

  But I find the Factory regulars more colorful and fascinating than the big-name visitors. The first person I learn about is Billy Name, the man in the dark closet at the rear. Is it an omen that he is in the closet? When will he come out? His name is an alias. It is a Pop name. He took the name Name because it is basic and instantly recognizable. He is the originator of all the freak naming. As bad Catholics—and for no reason that I can explain, it turns out that we are almost all, with very few exceptions, lapsed Catholics—we get rebaptized as we enter the Warholian deep water.

  Billy is an A-head. That means he is an amphetamine freak. Amphetamines are his principal food, both physical and psychological.

  When Andy saw Billy’s apartment, decorated with silver foil from floor to ceiling, he said, “Do the same for us on Forty-seventh Street.” And so Billy moved into the dark closet in the Factory and, little by little, covered every square inch of walls, floor, ceiling, toilet bowl, electric bulbs with silvery foil or silver spray paint. He even painted the silverware. And Andy’s wig went silver. The whole studio turned into a giant glaring mirror.

  Billy named it the Factory—a place that manufactures people, ideas, concepts, films, even art. He became Andy’s official photographer. Just as Louis XIV had Rigaud, his court painter, Andy had a court photographer. If you want your picture in the paper daily, if your existence is validated by the volume of your clippings, then you need a house photographer to keep the newspapers and magazines deluged with photographs.

  Andy is not the first artist to have a house photographer. Salvador Dali always has a photographer or two standing in the wings at the St. Regis Hotel, just in case a celebrity passes through. When his mustached antenna detects a newsworthy presence within a hundred yards, Dali slides to the side of the celebrity. Snap, snap, snap, and next day his picture is in the paper.

  When I eventually see Billy Name, three months later, he has three cameras hanging around his neck, and the first thing he says to me is “Krenk, krenk, krenk.”

  I reply, “Ku, Klux, Klan.” I’ve never before heard whatever language this is. I think for a moment it may be Middle Irish. After he repeats “Krenk, krenk, krenk,” he cocks his head, cranks his camera, and snaps a picture of me. I get the idea.

  He is also the court astrologer. I often see him with astrological charts in his hand. We are all dying to examine Andy’s chart, for it would reveal his true age. We are sure he is older than he admits. We girls are not admitted into the darkroom, which is Billy’s domain. Billy has the keys to the Factory—a sign of ultimate trust. None of the girls has ever had a key. Yes, even here it is a man’s world—a gay man’s world.

  Billy is always dressed in black. He is extremely thin, with a bony face, recessed eyes, dark eyebrows, a prominent jawbone. His looks are those of a theatrical SS man. One day he says to Andy, “I see danger in your chart.”

  Andy says, “Huh.”

  Billy says, “I’m warning you, be careful.” Andy never listens.

  Billy, who truly loves Andy, is an artist, trained in the spirit of Black Mountain. Billy tells me about Black Mountain, a school in North Carolina started in the 1930s as an early center of counterculture, with a back-to-the-land philosophy. “All of us carried Rimbaud under our arms,” Billy tells me. “We had our own system of education. Rauschenberg was there, John Chamberlain, Josef Albers. They were all freethinkers.”

  Billy is also a lighting designer. He brought to the Factory the mirrored ball that revolves and reflects flashes of light. Later there would be one in every disco.

  The next person I meet is pretty startling. He is Eric Emerson. He is dressed, rodeo rider style, in a cowboy hat, black scarf around his neck, black leather vest. He is not wearing pants, and his exposed genitals are sprayed gold. His pubic hair, like golden angel’s hair, shines beautifully, framed by black leather chaps. He is a vision of golden cherub mixed with macho far West. Or far out. His testicles are gold golf balls, so regularly textured they seem unreal. His teeth are a good white. His smile is sweet.

  Eric is on amphetamine. As he walks, his golden genitalia swing upward, seeming to defy the laws of gravity. At times he picks up his right leg, encased in a black leather boot, and raises it to the vertical, like a dancer. Then he repeats the movement with his left leg. At other times he does the split. His gold genitals land on the silver floor like shiny Christmas tree ornaments falling onto a foil-wrapped gift box. He appears charmingly deranged. He is a pretty street boy, a midnight cowbo
y.

  “Hi, Ultra. Hi, Ultra,” he says each time he does the split.

  Another regular, there every day, is Ondine, an amiable, loquacious amphetamine freak. A superfluity of language flows out of him whether he is alone or in company. He keeps a journal of his drug taking. There are countless pages in the book. He listens constantly to Maria Callas records, turned up to overpowering decibels.

  He has well-formed lips, the lower one sensuous, the mouth’s corners turned up. He has dark hair and a strong nose. He gives the impression that he is just about to go onstage. In fact, he is always onstage, in a limbo between the real world and the world of drugs.

  Ondine treats me as if we’ve always known each other. He says, “Please pull this tourniquet tight while I, I, I …” He repeats sounds and syllables when he talks, not in a straight stutter but in a kind of hesitated delivery. I hold the tourniquet in place on his upper arm. I am reminded of my school days, when I played doctor and nurse with my friends—but this is not an innocent game. Ondine closes his fist. Without looking at his arm, but looking me straight in the eyes, he swiftly plunges a shiny needle into his bulging vein, empties the hypodermic syringe of Methedrine with lightning speed, swiftly pulls it out, leaks the needle, releases the tourniquet, swallows his saliva, and the cascade of verbiage resumes.

  “Dear, dear, God, how, how, how much longer do I, I, I have to go? You’re pin, pin, pin, pinning me to, to a wall of fire.”

  Ondine readjusts his robe. He does not wear slacks; it seems to me he has nothing under his robe. I identify his accent as a Bronx honk. He tells me, “I live in the rough, rough, roughest part of the Bronx.” He belches ostentatiously, adopting the pose of a bel canto prima donna.

  “You can’t stop the flow of his talk,” I say to Andy.

  “Ideal for recording,” he replies. Later Andy records Ondine for twenty-four hours. The transcription becomes A, Andy’s first Pop book, published in 1968.