Famous for 15 Minutes Read online

  As soon as I see her, I know that she will be my chief competitor for Superstardom. She has the same reaction, for we constantly upstage one another. I die of jealousy each time I see her picture in the paper with Andy. Luckily Andy has two sides, and the instant a photographer appears on the scene, Viva and I rush over. I maneuver to be on Andy’s right, for then my name will be first in the caption.

  When Viva complains about her relationship with men, Andy tells her, “Wait for when you’re famous. You’ll buy them then. Just get up there, get up there, and then you can have anybody you want.”

  Viva changes the subject. “Andy, I need a hundred dollars to pay for rent.”

  “I don’t have any money.”

  Viva keeps on complaining.

  “Viva, stop complaining. We’ll make you a star.”

  The promise of stardom keeps the hungry actors and actresses alive and hoping. We’re not actors and actresses in the formal sense—none of us attends the Actors Studio or any other serious coaching class. We don’t bother with vocal lessons or dance instructions. Andy wouldn’t have us around if we were more professional—he’d have to pay us. All we’re acting out is our own destiny.

  The one thing that unites us all at the Factory is our urgent, overwhelming need to be noticed. Fame is the goal, rebellion the style, narcissism the aura for the superstars, demi-stars, half-stars, bad-stars, no-stars, men, women, cross-overs, over-sexed, desexed, switch-sexed, decadent, satanic denizens of Warhol’s new utopia.

  Here my rebellion is accepted, even encouraged. They wouldn’t tolerate me if I weren’t rebellious. What’s more, my rebellion is getting attention from the press and I love it. I love seeing my name and my picture in the papers and the magazines. I feel I am at last getting the love and attention I’ve always wanted. If need be, I’ll be crazier than the others, bolder, more daring, to keep eyes and cameras focused on me, me, me.

  BLOW JOB

  In the fall of 1964 I jump at the chance to attend a screening of Blow Job, Andy’s most talked about underground movie. It is a thirty-five-minute black-and-white film, made in 1963. On a Sunday night the audience assembles in the dimly lit Factory, on and around the battered couch, which is so piled with bodies it looks like a lifeboat. The images captured by the sixteen-millimeter Bolex camera are projected onto a white sheet hung between two silvery pillars. We see a rugged guy standing in front of a brick wall, waiting passively for something to happen. The shoulder of a black leather jacket comes into view at the bottom left of the screen, suggesting a man kneeling down—a perverted echo of the Eucharist, befitting our Catholic refugee camp huddled on this life raft on the Lord’s day.

  Then the camera shifts to the standing man, closing in on his face. For the next thirty-five minutes the camera never leaves the man’s face, which is barely moving, as impassive as if dying a slow death. If we had not seen the opening frame, we would have no idea of what is going on. The males watching the film are beginning to swallow hard. The females are holding their breath. Andy, rhythmically ruminating, is chewing gum. His chewing his cud is Blow Job’s only sound track.

  Is it voyeurism? I wonder. Is it pornography? I’m not sure. But it is shocking in a deafening way. What is Andy up to? Does he want to show an aspect of life that is usually camouflaged? Is he promoting homosexuality? Is he only out to shock? Is it just a slice of any day’s life? Why do I expect an answer?

  The repetition of the unseen rhythmic gesture becomes hypnotic. I look around me to shake the spell. I see faces in the audience moving up and down in sync with the unseen protagonist. Is that what you call audience participation? The face of the fellow receiving the fellatio is only faintly moving. There is no intimacy between the two men. There is only anonymity. So much so that it is a demystification of love.

  Warhol is not interested in passion, I think, but the opposite. But what is the opposite? Indifference, frigidity, iciness. Blow Job is a mind-numbing experience. I’m not for it or against it. I’m not repelled, not attracted, not indifferent, not captivated. The silence of the picture creates a vacuum. I begin to long for an explosion to bring an end to this submissive—what can I call it? Treatment, I guess. This treatment is as casual as hair cutting or teeth brushing. As impersonal.

  Would it be more tolerable if they had passion? I for one prefer that these men not share any passion. I want passion reserved for a woman and a man. I do not want to feel bypassed. On the other hand, maybe these men are not as passionate as I am. Maybe they don’t even know what is missing from their … treatment.

  Ingrid breaks the monotony with a loud sneeze, then says, “Excuse me.” All the women are relieved. You hear their sighs and a little laughter, for the timely sneeze has come at a minor paroxysm of the fellatio, which then continues as before.

  “Who’s in the picture?” someone asks.

  “Two hustlers,” another voice responds.

  After a while I say, “That blow job is really a job.”

  A voice asks, “How much did you pay them?”

  There is no answer.

  The recipient looks like an all-American boy, an outdoor type, about to enter adulthood. He is just discovering the body he owns and can sell.

  After a while Ondine says, “There’s really nothing to look at.”

  I am beginning to feel like a Peeping Tom without a keyhole. Malanga must be having the same reaction, for he says, “The real action is taking place offscreen.”

  Ingrid says, “The film is a tease. The action is three feet below the camera.”

  She is right. Although my eyes remain focused on the face of the young man receiving the blow job, my attention is constantly drawn to the empty space on the sheet below the screen. I am being visually assaulted and insulted at the same time. It is unnerving: I want to get up and seize the camera and focus it downward to capture the action. But I can’t, and that’s where the frustration comes in.

  Andy remains silent, impassively carrying on his affair with his chewing gum. We are nearing the end of the reel. The film is flapping. I see Eric in full action, not faking anything, just finishing a fellation on a male hustler who happens to be sitting next to him. Eric is always ready for whatever; he leaves no zipper unzipped, no button unbuttoned.

  After the screening I tell Andy his film reminds me of the two Zen Buddhist monks who are walking in a forest during a time of retreat. They come upon a brook and see a naked woman standing on the bank, unable to swim across. One of the monks volunteers to carry her to the other side. He takes her in his arms and deposits her on the other bank. The monks resume their walk in silence. Twenty minutes later, one monk says, “You know we’re not supposed to touch a woman while on our retreat.”

  The other turns to him and says, “I picked up that woman and dropped her twenty minutes ago. You’ve been carrying her ever since.”

  “Andy, what’s the point of the picture?” I ask.

  “I like things that blow up and pop up,” he says.

  “It would be better if this one really did blow up,” I tell him.

  Someone asks him who the two guys are. He tells us he had invited Charles Rydell, a well-known and respected actor, to star in his next movie. Andy told him he would just have to stand there while five guys kept blowing him until he came. The camera would be only on his face. He agreed, but the Sunday they had the camera ready and the five guys lined up, Charles did not appear. When Andy tracked him down, Charles said, “I thought you were kidding. I’d never do a thing like that.” So Andy used a kid who happened to be hanging around that day.

  “Andy, did you go to church before the shooting that Sunday?” I ask.

  “Of course.”

  “Why did you go? What’s the point?”

  Silence.

  Among the girls, we talk about Blow Job for days. It takes us a while to recover.

  Ingrid says, “The unseen sucking drives me crazy.”

  I say, “Denying us the sight of the real object is what I feel is most perver
se.”

  Ingrid says, “Come to think of it, what’s avant-garde about two fairies sucking?”

  I say, “Warhol deals in frustration and evasion. That’s his trip. I think the Obetrol makes him evade even more.”

  Ingrid says, “It’s a farce. Who’s going to sit through all that? You wait interminably for nothing to happen.”

  I say to Andy, “You know that Blow Job is boring?”

  He says, “I like boring things.”

  That same autumn evening, Andy has nothing to do. He asks me what I’m doing. I tell him I’m going to a party at the St. Regis to meet some rich Europeans. “Do you want to come along?”

  “Oh, yes, yes.”

  This is years before Andy progresses to intimate terms with tycoons and moguls. He does not own fancy clothes. I notice, without really being aware of it, that his shoes are unshined, his tie crooked, his pants stained with paint, his wig tilted. On his own turf, Andy is the lord of all he surveys, no matter how disheveled he looks. But when we get to the party, I see him through the eyes of my European friends and realize that he is now a housefly among butterflies.

  Our hosts are Prince Philiberto de Bourbon, who is associated with Van Cleef and Arpels, the jewelers, and the Marqués Cristóbal and Marquesa Carmen de Villaverde. Carmen is the daughter of Generalissimo Franco. I met them the previous summer while I was cruising on the yacht of Ricardo Sicre, a Spanish-American who has a huge floating houseboat anchored in Monte Carlo. On board I also met Princess Grace of Monaco, Orson Welles, Prince Alexander of Yugoslavia, Princess Ira von Furstenberg, Empress Soraya of Iran, and a few other royal heads, most of them crowned with a garland but without a country to govern.

  I introduce Andy to my friends at the St. Regis, all of them in splendid evening clothes. They shake hands very formally, but Andy doesn’t know how to treat the hands that are extended to him. He remembers from movies he’s seen that hands are sometimes kissed, especially when nobility is involved, but he isn’t sure who does the kissing and who get kissed. When Philiberto’s hand is offered, Andy gestures halfway to kiss it, realizes he’s making a mistake, pulls back, and actually blushes. This is the only time I have ever seen him blush, and I find it rather endearing. He must have something human in him after all.

  To cover his embarrassment, I explain to my friends, “His name is Andy Warhol. He is an American artist.” This makes no impression on anyone. We are asked what we want to drink. Andy says, “No, thanks, I’ll just have a pill.” He pops another Obetrol. My friends try not to stare.

  Cristóbal asks me to dance. He is very handsome, with deeply bronzed skin. As we dance, he sings flirtatiously in my ear, “El toro enamorado de la luna,” a song we sang on the Mediterranean. I momentarily forget about Andy. I assume he can manage on his own. But soon I spot him all alone in a corner, embarrassed and sulky. I interrupt my dance and introduce him to Alfonso Fierro and his wife. Alfonso owns a bank. They take a look at my strange new friend, and the expressions on their faces tell me that they don’t approve of this ungroomed, untalkative, out-of-place character.

  At dinner, several people speak of the ball they recently attended in Venice at the Palazzo Grassi and of the Feria in Seville, where Orson Welles flamenco-danced with a seven-year-old. Andy is mute. He was panting to meet these glittering people, but in front of them he is paralyzed. To make up for his incommunicativeness, I tell Philiberto, “Andy is a painter of Pop Art.”

  He says, “What art?”

  I say, “Pop Art.”

  Several of them repeat “Pop Art” and nod their heads.

  I tell them that Andy recently painted a Campbell soup can.

  They repeat, “Campbell soup can,” not quite understanding what that means.

  Later, Alfonso takes me aside and says, “Isabelle, you’re wasting your time. Get married to a rich man. Don’t hang around with housepainters.”

  “Andy is rich in ideas.”

  Alfonso lifts his eyes to the ceiling.

  On the way home, Andy says, “I watched those society people. You know, they can eat and drink and talk at the same time. They know how to store food under their tongue while they talk. If I did that I’d choke. I just don’t eat when I’m with society people.”

  At this stage in his life, Andy is not yet a hit with the international set. But a dozen years later, these same people will pay $25,000 for portraits which that night they could have bought for a handful of crumpled small bills.

  ANDY’S BEGINNINGS

  For Andy, it begins in 1909, when handsome, blond, twenty-year-old Ondrej Warhola marries shy, seventeen-year-old Julia Zavacky, both from the tiny Carpathian mountain village of Míková in northeastern Slovakia, now part of Czechoslovakia. The wedding is celebrated with flowing bottles of spirits, trays of meat, and hand-shaped loaves of bread, with dancing and singing that lasts all day and all night. Andy, of course, is not there to observe for himself, but he has heard the scene described many times in his childhood, and he seems to like it when I ask him questions about his family. He answers in his usual verbal shorthand, then nods approvingly when I play the scenes back to him in my tzigane renditions, which are always more true than fictive.

  My mind’s eye sees it all as an operetta: While an elegant ball is held in the big house on the hill, ablaze with a thousand candles in crystal chandeliers, down in the hollow, under strung-out lanterns, the peasants and artisans celebrate Julia’s and Ondrej’s nuptials with gypsy music. Shyly flirtatious girls in long flowered dresses and with flowers in their hair dance in and out of the dappled moonlight. Strong young men with rough cotton trousers stuffed into thick-soled boots toss the girls high into the air. Stout matrons gossip behind their work-worn hands, their hair wrapped in babushkas. Older men boast of past conquests as they finger full, drooping mustaches.

  Three years later, unrest in the dying Austro-Hungarian empire and the rumbles of the worldwide war that is to break out in two short years send the young bridegroom across the border to Poland and then to America, to western Pennsylvania, where he is welcomed by his older brother Joseph, who emigrated three years earlier. The Warhola brothers settle in a rugged area called Soho, outside Pittsburgh, where they labor in the coal mines. Ondrej plans to send for his bride almost immediately, but World War I and the vast postwar confusion of shifting populations in the perpetually troubled Balkan region delay Julia’s arrival until 1921.

  With much emotion, Julia kisses twice all the welcoming red cheeks of her now Americanized relatives from Míková, resumes married life with Ondrej, and dutifully produces a baby in exactly nine months. The boy is named Paul. Three years later, John is born. Three years after that, on August 6, 1928, without a nova exploding in the sky or magi pounding on the door, Julia gives birth to a third son, Andrew. Fittingly, little Andy is born at 6:30 A.M., as the day takes over from the night. When I think of that hour of dark giving way to light, a line from the King James Bible comes to mind: “And the light shineth in the darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not.”

  It is not easy for the family to comprehend Julia’s new baby. Where her other sons are strapping infants even at birth, as little Andy enters the world he still looks unborn. He weighs a slight four pounds, two ounces. He has no hair. His skin is unnaturally pale. In the umbilical cord there is a knot. Julia takes the knot as a mystical sign. The attending doctor murmurs as he cuts the cord, “A Gordian knot all over again.”

  All the family gathers around Julia’s bed to stare at the newly arrived alien, who stares impassively back at them.

  The three boys are raised in the Greek Catholic Byzantine tradition in a strongly religious household. They attend St. John Chrysostom Church. The parents speak Carpatho-Rusyn to each other and to their older relatives and sometimes to their children.

  In 1932, when Andy is four, his mother sews a Urim—a protective, magical stone—into his pocket, and his big brother Paul takes him by the hand to his first day at Soho Elementary School. Andy, undersized and a ne
ar albino, cannot bear being away from his mother. He cries so desperately that Mama takes him out of school and keeps him home with her.

  Two years later, in 1934, when the family is living in a two-family brick house at 3252 Dawson Street in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, another attempt is made at schooling. Six-year-old Andy is entered as a first grader at Holmes Elementary School. This time his resistance is expressed in the form of a nervous disorder, a shaking of the face and hands at that time diagnosed as Saint Vitus’ Dance and now called chorea.

  He is confined to bed, with Mama at his side day and night, bringing him coloring books, cutout dolls, candy, crayons. She reads him the funny papers until he falls asleep. She tells him stories in her heavy Slovak accent. She sings to him in a pure, sweet voice.

  For hours at a time they draw pictures together. He crayons diligently in his numbered coloring books—1 for pink, 2 for blue, 3 for yellow. Julia hands him a small Hershey bar each time he finishes a page. He says, “Dăkujem, Mama”—“Thank you, Mama.” They listen endlessly to the radio in those radio days, laughing at the comedians, crying at the misadventures in the soap operas. At the end of the day, she tucks him in and says, “Dobrú noc”—“Good night.”

  He responds, “Dobrú noc, Mama.”

  One of the first things Andy draws, outside of the coloring books, is a copy of a Maybelline ad starring Hedy Lamarr. In the spring, Andy helps his mother paint floral Easter eggs. Andy’s bed becomes a nonstop festival. Who would ever want to get out of such a bed? When he is ten Julia buys her baby his first Brownie camera. Fascinated by the magic of the box, Andy teaches himself to develop his own film in the kitchen sink.