Famous for 15 Minutes Read online

  Ondine throws his paraphernalia into a crumpled brown paper bag. I’ve never set much store by normality, but I’ve never actually met drug users before. I am both fascinated and repelled. I sense an enormous complicity of art, sex, and drugs. I notice a wasted pallor on Ondine’s face. Words are pouring out of Ondine. Andy is recording him. I keep an eye on Ondine and his paraphernalia. I am literally afraid of drugs and I don’t want to share this part of the Factory action.

  Taylor, dear Taylor Mead, poet, vagabond, clown, actor, seizes my attention as he roller-skates into the Factory with a transistor radio dangling between his legs, dangling very low, for the crotch of his accordion pants hangs three inches below his anatomical crotch. Night has fallen, and Taylor appears as a weird, nocturnal creature. The two sides of his face do not match. One eye is bigger, one cheek is higher, his brown hair flares up to the right. As if a tide is pulling his flesh askew, his facial skin hangs asymmetrically. Goya would have loved that face.

  Taylor says, “Je parle français,” with the cutest American accent. Is he Le Poète Maudit Américain?

  We sit on the couch, as broken down as Taylor. The side of his face I am sitting next to is comic; the other side is tragic. He carries a navy blue plastic airline bag from Pan Am. He reaches in with a dirty, childlike hand, pulls out a pill, and pops it.

  “I was gay at nine,” he says. “My mother is high society from Grosse Pointe, Michigan. I’ve been in and out of a dozen jails.”

  “What for?”

  “General principles. Cops arrest me on sight.”

  “Sight unseen?”

  Taylor laughs.

  “What principles?”

  “Jails down South are a piece of cake. But New York jails are a real horror.”

  I repeat, “What principles?”

  “My poetry—they say it’s obscene. Vice squads arrest me in public toilets. Drugs, defiance, the necessity to do anything, not resist anything. Cruising men. I like policemen best, the not straight ones.”

  He speaks sporadically, in an off-and-on manner, starting and stopping. I wonder if his erection also waxes and wanes as he approaches the anal orifice.

  “What was that pill?”

  “A downer.”

  Taylor takes out a small notebook and starts writing.

  He reminds me of the French poet Verlaine, who at age thirty shot Arthur Rimbaud, by then twenty, in the wrist over a lovers’ quarrel. Verlaine was imprisoned for two years. I wonder if these poets of the sixties, Taylor and his friends, are the counterparts of the French poets of the nineteenth century who hoped for a society totally without moral restrictions. Is Baudelaire reembodied on Forty-seventh Street?

  I ask Andy, “What do you like about Taylor?”

  “He exposes himself.”

  Andy, the professor of Pop, finds a pupil of Pop in Gerard Malanga, a student at Wagner College in Staten Island. They first meet at the New School, where Gerard is reading his poetry. Gerard is looking for a summer job. He has had experience with silk screens. His summer job with Andy lasts from 1963 to 1970. Gerard becomes Andy’s minimum-wage assistant, at $1.25 an hour, his homme à tout faire. He paints for Andy, acts for Andy, dances for Andy, undresses for Andy, films for Andy, talks for Andy (as all of us talk for Andy), writes poetry for Andy, recruits pretty boys, pretty girls, and patronesses of the arts for Andy, cracks the whip for Andy, both literally and figuratively. He also photographs for Andy.

  When Gerard gets up to answer the phone for Andy, he has the most peculiar Bronx Zoo walk, swinging his pelvis from right to left. In a nasal accent cultivated in the shadow of Yankee Stadium, he says, “Yeap, hello, hi, Ingrid …” into the receiver of the pay phone installed on the east wall of the glittery loft. I have seen his type of face in the driver’s seat, riding heavy trucks along the highways of Greece. He is at the phone again. “Yeap, Ingrid, we’ll film tomorrow at three. Be here ’n’ wear something sexy.”

  “Is that Ingrid Superstar?”

  “Yeap, she’s sure a Superstar, all right.”

  Gerard wears black leather pants, too short at the ankle, with two stretched baggy pouches below the knees. His hair is rather long, not too clean, vaguely wavy. He wears a black leather coat. I ask Gerard, “What’s Andy really like?”

  “He’s interested in a lot of things: poetry, films, dance. Every night all or some of us go to a reading at St. Mark’s or Café le Metro or Judson Memorial Church.” Every kind of art you can name is detonating all around us.

  The phone rings again. Gerard swings his pelvis laterally and answers. “Yeap, I’ll get him.” He calls out to the other end of the loft. “Andy, it’s Cage.” Then back to the phone. “Hold it.” Gerard lets the receiver hang by the phone. He swings his pelvis back to the broken-down couch.

  Andy, on the phone, says to John Cage, the composer, “Gee … um … ah … woo … really …” Andy listens for a long moment, then says, “Get us invited, ’bye.”

  Gerard gets up and flushes the toilet for Andy, who was in the bathroom when called to the phone.

  Paul Morrissey plays father to the rest of the group. He is pleasant, sensible, the most normal of the crew, and takes care of business. He sees that bills are paid, papers signed, supplies delivered. He has the soul of a social worker—which he was, with a degree from Fordham College, until he became keeper of the menagerie. His uncombed frizzy hair covers his forehead. He has light eyes that constantly dart about. He is thin, tall, dressed in black jeans and a black turtleneck.

  “How come everyone here has a peculiar accent?” I ask him.

  “We’re international.”

  That’s a satisfactory answer if you consider the Bronx a foreign country.

  Irma is her real first name, Ingrid her Factory first name, and Superstar her Factory last name, because she is chronologically the first of the Superstars. But irony rides high, for this star is resplendently ugly. She has a chin like an overshoe, tilted teeth with a wide gap on the upper left, twisted lips, a potato nose, small eyes, a bumpy forehead, and uneven bleached hair. But her eyes have a marvelous twinkle, and I think it’s the twinkle that makes this escapee from Wyckoff, New Jersey, eligible for stardom. Certainly it’s not her taste, for the mixed-up plaids in her jersey outfit are not outrageous enough to be truly camp.

  Unable to carry a tune, she is singing away when I first see her at the Factory, on my third visit there. Andy says, “Keep singing, Ingrid, it’s great.”

  “What song would you like?”

  “Any song.”

  “My mouth is tired.” Her voice is off pitch and out of sync with her lip and hand motions. She never lets go of the cigarette in her hand. She sings, puffs, blows smoke at the same time. She is the original singing-smoking machine. In the glare of a spotlight that would make anyone else blink, Ingrid calls out, “How am I doing?”

  Without looking up from the magazine he has been flipping through for the last half hour, Andy says, “Oh, great.”

  I ask Ingrid, “Are you preparing for an audition?”

  She looks offended. “I never audition. I’m a Superstar. I’ll end up in Hollywood.”

  Baby Jane Holzer, a genuine Jewish-American princess, vaguely reminiscent of the divine, inimitable Brigitte Bardot, has lots of long blond hair, lengthy legs under a miniskirt, a forced smile, an air of playing at femininity and voguishness. She takes a teasing comb out of her clear plastic makeup bag and puffs up the back of her hair. With a red lipliner, she reinforces the outline of her kissy mouth. She blots her lips, puts on more crayon, blots again, pales her lips, blots again, pales again, in a ritual gesture. Her walk is that of a model on a runway. When she speaks, she swings her long blond hair from one side to the other. Her voice sounds smooth and practiced. She asks, “Oooh, what’s happening, aaaaah?” but no one hears her over the thunder of Stravinsky’s Petrouchka. She goes back to her mirror. A dropout from fashionable Finch Junior College, she wants you to understand that she is very contemporary and quite gorgeous. />
  Between two sniffs of white powder, Eric Emerson glances at her and says, “A straight jerk, that Baby Doll.”

  Runaway heiress Brigid Polk, who arrives in 1965, walks around the Factory topless, the roundness of her bare shoulders, back, stomach, breasts forming an obese pink continuum. A red rubber band holds back her skimpy mop of hair in an off-center Yorkshire-terrier hairdo. An artist of sorts, she holds in one hand an autograph book in which famous-infamous people have drawn their cocks and affixed their signatures. In the other hand she holds a hypodermic needle and smacks it through her blue jeans into her round rump, as “Assassino!” crescendos on the record player. By now it’s Tosca, not a bad accompaniment for the nonstop opera that is being staged in the loft.

  “Want some?” Brigid asks me.

  “No, thank you,” and I flee to the other end of the silver cavern.

  Drugs terrify me. I smoked grass once in 1960 at a dinner party in an apartment in Paris near the Étoile. My hostess passed around a cigarette in an elongated cloisonné holder. Ready to try anything, I inhaled deeply twice. I felt nothing and took another two puffs when the cigarette came around again. Still nothing. Later, when I got to my hotel, I found I had left my keys, my purse, everything at the party. The hotel manager paid the taxi driver and let me into my room. I wanted to call my hostess and tell her I’d pick up my bag in the morning, but my mind was too cloudy to recall her name. I was so frightened by the loss of memory that I swore never to try drugs again.

  About the time I met Andy, I went to a birthday party with Dali. Someone had baked a marvelous-looking chocolate cake, very elaborate, with chocolate swirls all over the top and sides. There was a lot of giggling about the cake; I thought people were amused by the extra-fancy decorations. I ate a large piece. Delicious. A half hour later, my face began to go numb, as if anesthetized. In an hour, I had the peculiar sensation that my lips were stretched out like the lips of the Ubangi tribespeople you see in National Geographic illustrations. I raised my hand to six inches in front of my face, expecting to feel my lips, but they weren’t where I thought they would be. Not until morning did I feel normal. Then I remembered the giggling and realized the cake had been laced with marijuana. Once more I swore never again—there was no pleasure for me in drugs and only unpleasant side effects. That’s why, when I was with Andy and his crowd, I never touched drugs.

  Brigid Polk and the druggies in the Factory are talking to a sexy-looking kid who stands motionless in one corner. Brigid says, “I love taking off my clothes. Everybody gets hysterical. When I pull my top off on the street, Andy gets so excited.”

  I wonder how “pasteurized” Andy can get so excited, so I ask him, “What excites you about Brigid’s breasts?”

  “Oh, she’s fabulous,” Andy says as he snaps a picture of Brigid’s breasts hanging rebelliously far apart and looking as if they’ve never been fettered by a bra.

  “A liberated body assumes its overfed shape as beauty,” Eric Emerson shouts. “Ugly is beautiful.”

  “Nudity results in jail,” Taylor warns.

  “Which is the antithesis of liberty,” Gerard reminds us.

  “I’m naked—that’s freedom,” Brigid proclaims.

  Exhibitionism is in the air.

  “Catch the freaky phallic rod while you can,” Brigid croons.

  “Verbal seduction is no longer it,” Gerard contributes.

  “It’s vibration that’s everything,” Brigid says with finality. Suddenly the discussion, or whatever it was, is over.

  Her real name is Brigid Berlin; her father is Richard E. Berlin, president of the Hearst Corporation.

  “That’s what Andy loves,” Eric tells me; “not her, but Hearst.”

  Of course; I should have known. Andy’s secret wish is to become Citizen Kane, a tycoon of fame. He dreams of controlling the media by having his own press, which he does a few years later in 1969, when he launches Interview magazine. I find out before long that he identifies with every minute of the famous Orson Welles film that portrays William Randolph Hearst as an idealist corrupted by power. It gives Andy white goose pimples to have Brigid Berlin, daughter of Hearst’s surrogate, cavorting around the loft, with or without clothes on. It lends tangibility to his dream of power, fortune, glory.

  Like most fat people, Brigid claims she does not eat. “It’s the air that makes me fat,” she confides.

  Oh, sure, I think.

  Later, I go out on an errand and see Brigid sitting at the counter of a coffee shop, working away on a triple ice cream sundae with whipped cream cresting around the dark brown chocolate, the nuts, the red cherry, not forgetting the slices of banana and the cookies at the side of the plate. I cannot resist going in. Brigid says, “I’m not eating it.”

  “I know; you’re drawing it in your autograph book.”

  Brigid gives me the look of a seven-hundred-pound canary starving for sugar. Back at the Factory a little later, Brigid is walking around with a fat manila envelope full of pills. “Distribution time,” says Eric.

  “Obetrol or Seconal?” Brigid asks.

  “Both,” says Eric.

  “Duenol or Obetrol?” she asks.

  “Both,” Eric repeats. Everybody giggles.

  Brigid is nicknamed the Doctor because she carries around every pill ever invented; she is also sometimes called the Duchess, because she distributes her hoard with royal generosity. I call her the Rapper, because, like Ondine, she never stops talking. She raps about everything and nothing.

  “People get bored with me,” she says, “but I can’t help it. I got to keep talking. I can’t shut up. When people talk, it gives me ideas, and they have to get out of my head. I can’t hold my tongue. Andy just sits there, and I talk. I get rid of a lot of frustration and anger. I scream and yell. Andy is fabulous. I love him; he’s my real father. He tapes me all the time. He never listens to it. It’s just a gimmick to make us talk. How could he listen to all the tapes he has? He always puts you in the spotlight. There’s something childish and fantastic about him.”

  International Velvet is an honest-to-goodness beauty: young, slender, feminine, a real woman, the first real woman I’ve seen in this masquerade of misfits. Her skin is flawless pale pink, her hair abundant and dark. She has style and class. She even has a boyfriend, David Cronland, and he looks normal too. Her father is a prominent lawyer in Boston. She came to New York at seventeen to model.

  I’m fascinated by her makeup. Her eyes are widened by white shadow above her lids and darker shadow in the creases of the: lids. White dots at each corner of the eye create the illusion of eyes opened very wide. Alternating black and white lashes are painted on the skin of her upper and lower lids to amplify her lashes and make her eyes radiate like two stars. She has shadow on her chin and on her cheeks. She dusts talcum powder all over her face and with an extra-large round brush dusts off the surplus white until only a pale cast remains to accentuate her fairness and the transparency of her skin. She is so beautiful she looks unreal. I ask her, “How long have you used talcum?”

  “All my life—first on my behind, now on my face.”

  International Velvet is the only Superstar in Andy’s menage who unquestionably deserves that title. She’s the one who has the real potential to make it in Hollywood.

  On a hot summer night, quite late, I open the door of the Factory and an oh-so-slim sylph dressed in a black leotard cut off at the knees and black desert boots stands there. A shimmering cluster of rhinestones dangles from one ear. Her hair is streaked with silver, and immense eyes engulf the world. Her complexion is milky and angelic; vulnerability seems to exude from every fine pore of her skin. Andy says, “This is Edie.” Yes, I know Edie. We’ve already met, at a party at Lester Persky’s.

  Edie Sedgwick, from a Boston Brahmin family, now a flower child, a delicate flower, soon to be cut down, says, “Hi, Ultra, I love your name.” She smiles as she speaks. Her voice is soft and sweet. Every twelve seconds she dances to the rock beat inside her head. She
is riding high, seven floors above the ground. She is always high. Andy likes high people: they are animated and uninhibited in front of the camera. They will do anything for fun, and they don’t have to be paid. Just give them drinks, drugs, doughnuts, and approval.

  Edie asks me, “Where are you from?”

  “Not from here.”

  “Same here,” and she shows pearly teeth that could be jumbo white polished rice.

  Andy is filming Edie’s life story, starring Edie. They talk in a disjointed way about the film. It’s nearly 3 A.M. My car is waiting outside. I offer to drop them off uptown. In the car, Edie glues her face to the window, her eyes open wide, as if to absorb the whole city. She gets out in the East Sixties. On the way to Andy’s place on Lexington Avenue, he turns to me and says, “If Edie OD’s, we must film it. Stay in close touch with her.”

  To me at that time, OD means only taking too many drugs and getting extra high. The kids are always saying, “Last night I OD’d, wow!” and are ready for another and bigger OD that night. I have no premonition of Edie’s tragic fate.

  Viva joins the Factory regulars in 1967. Her forte is complaining. She complains about having no sex, she complains about restaurants and lousy food, she complains about being depressed, she complains about hating the word “artist,” she complains about people hanging up on her, she complains about male stars who don’t get an erection on film, she complains about male chauvinism, she complains about getting phone calls from weirdos, she complains about Andy’s way of stirring people up to fight. She complains about being called a brainless nincompoop.

  Andy complains about her complaining, but that is ironic, for Andy is the champion of complainers. His main lament, repeated over and over, goes like this: “Other people succeed who have no talent. Here we are with all you gorgeous people, and we can’t make it. Why is that? How come? Oh, it’s so hard. How can we make it? What shall we do?” On and on, for the world has not yet beaten its way to his door and showered him with money and fame.

  Viva is not brainless. She attended Marymount School and the Sorbonne in Paris. Her father is a prominent criminal lawyer in Syracuse, New York. She is a talented painter. One of her large canvases hangs in her one-room apartment; it is sensitive and colorful. Viva is tall and very slim, with big blue eyes, fair skin, high cheekbones, frizzy, blondish hair, and a very personal style. Her allure is Garboesque.