When Warhol turned his camera on the Empire State Building in Empire (1964), it saw the edifice first as the largest coffin in the world, jutting out of the ground as if dislodged by some seismic activity. As night slowly falls and the floodlights come on, the building becomes a cloaked predator standing colossal over New York City, shoulders sloped by the years, head sprouting a dirigible-mast horn. After that, Warhol had fellow underground film-maker Jack Smith swish a cape over Baby Jane Hudson in the now-lost Batman Dracula (1964). Only tantalizing stills, of Smith with a mouthful of plastic teeth and staring Lon Chaney eyes, remain of this film, which – as with the silver-coated Thirteen Vampires – is perhaps as Andy wanted it. As with Sleep and Empire, the idea is more important than the artefact. It is enough that the films exist; they are not meant actually to be seen all the way through. When Jonas Mekas scheduled Empire at the Film-makers’ Co-Op in 1965, he lured Warhol into the screening room and tied him securely to one of the seats with stout rope, intent on forcing the creator to sit through his creation. When he came back two hours later to check up, he found Warhol had chewed through his bonds – briefly, an incarnation of Batman Dracula – and escaped into the night. In the early sixties, Warhol had begun to file his teeth, sharpening them to piranha-like needle-points.
– Conklin, ibid.
A red-headed vampire girl bumped into her and hissed, displaying pearly fangs. Penelope lowered her dark glasses and gave the chit a neon glare. Cowed, the creature backed away. Intrigued, Penny took the girl by the bare upper arm, and looked into her mouth, like a dentist. Her fangs were real, but shrank as she quivered in Penny’s nosferatu grip. Red swirls dwindled in her eyes, and she was warm again, a frail thing.
Penny understood what the vampire boy was doing in the back room. At once, she was aghast and struck with admiration. She had heard of the warm temporarily taking on vampire attributes by drinking vampire blood without themselves being bitten. There was a story about Katie Reed and a flier in the First World War. But it was rare, and dangerous.
Well, it used to be rare.
All around her, mayfly vampires darted. A youth blundered into her arms and tried to bite her. She firmly pushed him away, breaking the fingers of his right hand to make a point. They would heal instantly, but ache like the Devil when he turned back into a real boy.
A worm of terror curled in her heart. To do such a thing meant having a vision. Vampires, made conservative by centuries, were rarely innovators. She was reminded, again, of Dracula, who had risen among the nosferatu by virtue of his willingness to venture into new, large-scale fields of conquest. Such vampires were always frightening.
Would it really be a good thing for Andy to meet this boy?
She saw the white jacket shining in the darkness. The vampire stood at the bar, with Steve Rubell, ringmaster of 54, and the movie actress Isabelle Adjani. Steve, as usual, was flying, hairstyle falling apart above his bald spot. His pockets bulged with petty cash, taken from the overstuffed tills.
Steve spotted her, understood her nod of interest, and signalled her to come over.
‘Penny darling,’ he said, ‘look at me. I’m like you.’
He had fangs too. And red-smeared lips.
‘I . . . am . . . a vampiah!’
For Steve, it was just a joke. There was a bitemark on Adjani’s neck, which she dabbed with a bar napkin.
‘This is just the biggest thing evah,’ Steve said.
‘Fabulous,’ she agreed.
Her eyes fixed the vampire newcomer. He withstood her gaze. She judged him no longer a newborn but not yet an elder. He was definitely of the Dracula line.
‘Introduce me,’ she demanded, delicately.
Steve’s red eyes focused.
‘Andy is interested?’
Penny nodded. Whatever was swarming in his brain, Steve was sharp.
‘Penelope, this is Johnny Pop. He’s from Transylvania.’
‘I am an American, now,’ he said, with just a hint of accent.
‘Johnny, my boy, this is the witch Penny Churchward.’
Penny extended her knuckles to be kissed. Johnny Pop took her fingers and bowed slightly, an Old World habit.
‘You cut quite a figure,’ she said.
‘You are an elder?’
‘Good grief, no. I’m from the class of eighty-eight. One of the few survivors.’
‘My compliments.’
He let her hand go. He had a tall drink on the bar, blood concentrate. He would need to get his blood count up, to judge by all his fluttering get.
Some fellow rose off the dance floor on ungainly, short-lived leather wings. He made it a few feet into the air, flapping furiously. Then there was a ripping and he collapsed onto the rest of the crowd, yelling and bleeding.
Johnny smiled and raised his glass to her.
She would have to think about this development.
‘My friend Andy would like to meet you, Johnny.’
Steve was delighted, and slapped Johnny on the arm.
‘Andy Warhol is the Vampire Queen of New York City,’ he said. ‘You have arrived, my deah!’
Johnny wasn’t impressed. Or was trying hard not to be.
Politely, he said ‘Miss Churchward, I should like to meet your friend Mr Warhol.’
So, this ash-faced creature was coven master of New York. Johnny had seen Andy Warhol before, here and at the Mudd Club, and knew who he was, the man who painted soup cans and made the dirty movies. He hadn’t known Warhol was a vampire, but now it was pointed out, it seemed obvious. What else could such a person be?
Warhol was not an elder but he was unreadable, beyond Johnny’s experience. He would have to be careful, to pay proper homage to this master. It would not do to excite the enmity of the city’s few other vampires; at least, not yet. Warhol’s woman – consort? mistress? slave? – was intriguing, too. She danced on the edge of hostility, radiating prickly suspicion, but he had a hook of a kind in her too. Born to follow, she would trot after him as faithfully as she followed her artist master. He had met her kind before, stranded out of their time, trying to make a way in the world rather than reshape it to suit themselves. It would not do to underestimate her.
‘Gee,’ Warhol said, ‘you must come to the Factory. There are things you could do.’
Johnny didn’t doubt it.
Steve made a sign and a photographer appeared. Johnny noticed Penelope edging out of shot just before the flash went off. Andy, Steve and Johnny were caught in the bleached corner. Steve, grinning with his fresh teeth.
‘Say, Johnny,’ Steve said, ‘we will show up, won’t we? I mean, I’ve still got my image.’
Johnny shrugged. He had no idea whether the drac suck Steve had taken earlier would affect his reflection. That had as much to do with Nancy as him.
‘Wait and see what develops,’ Johnny said.
‘If that’s the way it has to be, that’s the way it is.’
It didn’t do to think too hard about what Americans said.
‘Gee,’ mused Andy, ‘that’s, uh, fa-antastic, that’s a thought.’ Within months, Johnny would rule this city.
From 1964 to 1968, Andy abandoned painting – if silk-screen can be called that-in favour of film. Some have suggested that works like Couch (1964) or The Thirteen Most Beautiful Boys (1965) are just portraits that move; certainly, more people caught them as an ambient backdrop to the Exploding Plastic Inevitable than endured them reverentially at the Co-Op. Movies, not films, they were supposed to play to audiences too busy dancing or speeding or covering their bleeding ears to pay the sort of attention required by Hollywood narrative.
By now, ‘Andy’s vampire movies’ had gone beyond a standing joke – eight hours of the Empire State Building!! – and were taken seriously by genuine underground film-makers like Stan Brakhage (who considered silent speed the stroke of genius). The Film-makers’ Co-Op regularly scheduled Warhol Festivals’ and word got out that the films were, well, dirty, which – of course – pulled in a
udiences. Suck-Job was about as close to vampirism as even the most extreme New York audiences had seen, even if it was silent, black-and-white and slightly out of focus. Isabelle Dufresne, later the supervamp Ultra Violet, saw Suck-Job projected on a sheet at the Factory, and understood at once the strategy of incompletion, whereby the meat of the matter was beyond the frame. In Dead for Fifteen Minutes: My Years With Andy Warhol (1988), Ultra Violet writes: Although my eyes remain focused on the face of the young man receiving the suck 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 % and that’s where the frustration comes in.’
Ultra Violet also reports that, during that screening, some Factory hangers-on present relieved the frustration by nibbling each other, drawing squeals of pain and streaks of quick-drying blood. Such tentative pretend-vampirism was common among the Mole People, the night-time characters Andy gathered to help make ‘his’ movies and turned into his private coven in the back room of Max’s Kansas City. With no genuine undead available, Andy made do with self-made supervamps, who showed up on film if not at rehearsals: Pope Ondine (who drew real blood), Brigid (Berlin) Polk, Baby Jane Hudson (who had once been a real live movie star), Malanga’s muse Mary Woronov, Carmillo Karnstein, Ingrid Supervamp. Brian Stableford would later coin the term ‘lifestyle fantasists’ for these people and their modern avatars, the goth murgatroyds. Like Andy, the Mole People already lived like vampires: shunning daylight, speeding all night, filing their teeth, developing pasty complexions, sampling each other’s drug-laced blood.
The butcher’s bill came in early. The dancer Freddie Herko, who appears in Kiss (1963) and Dance Movie/Roller Skates (1963), read in Montague Summers’s The Vampire: His Kith and Kin (1928) that those who committed suicide spectacularly enough ‘without fear’ were reborn as powerful vampires’. Just before Hallowe’en 1964, Herko danced across a friend’s Greenwich Village apartment, trailing a ten-foot Batman/Dracula cloak, and sailed elegantly out of a fifth-floor window. Having skim-read the Summers and not bothered to form a Pact with the Devil, an essential part of the immortality-through-self-slaughter gambit, Herko did not rise from the dead. When he heard of Herko’s defenestration, Warhol was almost irritated. ‘Gee,’ he sighed, ‘why didn’t he tell me he was going to do it? We could have gone down there and filmed it. ‘Herko was just the first of the Warhol death cluster, his personal disaster series: Edie Sedgwick (1971), Tiger Morse (1972), Andrea Feldman (1972), Candy Darling (1974), Eric Emerson (1975), Gregory Battcock (1980), Tom Baker (1982), Jackie Curtis (1985), Valerie Solanas (1989), Ondine (1989). And Warhol himself (1968?). Only Andy made it back, of course. He had to be the vampire they all would have been, even Valerie.
In 1965, the term ‘vampire movies’ took on another layer of meaning at the Factory, with the arrivals of Ronald Tavel, a playwright hired to contribute situations (if not scripts) for the films, and Edie Sedgwick, a blue-blood blonde who was, in many ways, Andy’s ultimate supervamp. Movies like The Death of Radu the Handsome (1965), with Ondine as Vlad the Impaler’s gay brother, and Poor Little Dead Girl (1965), with Edie as the Vampire Claudia, run seventy minutes (two uninterrupted thirty-five minute takes, the length of a film magazine, stuck together), have intermittently audible soundtracks and mimic Hollywood to the extent of having something approaching narrative. Were it not for the incandescent personalities of the supervamps, the beautiful and the damned, these efforts would be more like ‘zombie movies’, shambling gestures of mimesis, constantly tripping up as the immobile image (Andy had the most stoned Mole Person handle the camera) goes in and out of focus or the walk-on ‘victims’ run out of things to do and say. Ondine, Edie and a few others understand that the films are their own shot at vampire immortality. With dime-store plastic fangs and shrouds from the dress-up chest, these living beings cavort, preserved on film while their bodies are long in the grave, flickering in undeath. For Andy, the film camera, like the silk-screen or the Polaroid, was a vampire machine, a process for turning life into frozen death, perfect and reproducible. Hurting people was always so interesting, and left the most fabulous Rorschach stain patterns on the sheets.
Edie cut her hair to match Andy’s wigs and took to wearing imitations of his outfits, especially for photographs and openings. They looked like asexual twins or clones, but were really trying to model themselves on that most terrifying denizen of the world of darkness, the old vampire couple. R.D. Laing’s study Helga and Heinrich (1970) suggests that, after centuries together, vampire couples mingle identities, sharing a consciousness between two frail-seeming bodies, finishing each other’s sentences as the mind flickers between two skulls, moving in on their victims in an instinctive pincer movement. If one partner is destroyed, the other rots in sympathy. Edie would probably have gone that far – she did eventually commit suicide – but Andy was too self-contained to commit anything or commit to anything. He saw her as the mirror he didn’t like to look in – his reflection reminded him that he was alive, after all – and would often play the mimic game, patterned after Harpo Marx, with her, triumphantly squirting milk from his mouth or producing a walnut from a fist to show that he was the original and she the copy. When he said he wanted everyone to be alike, he was expressing a solipsist not an egalitarian ideal: everyone was to be like him, but he was still to be the mould.
– Conklin, ibid.
He fed often now, less for sustenance than for business. This one, seized just before sunrise, was the last of three taken throughout a single April night. He had waylaid the Greek girl, a seamstress in the garment district, on her way to a long day’s work. She was too terrified to make a sound as Johnny ripped into her throat. Blood poured into his gaping mouth, and he swallowed. He fed his lust, his need. It wasn’t just blood, it was money.
The girl, dragged off the street into an alley, had huge, startled eyes. Her ghost was in him as he bled her. She was called Thana, Death. The name stuck in his craw, clogging the lizard stem of his brain that always came alive as he fed. She should have been called Zoë, Life. Was something wrong with her blood? She had no drugs, no disease, no madness. She started to fight him, mentally. The girl knew about her ghost, could struggle with him on a plane beyond the physical. Her unexpected skill shocked him.
He broke the bloody communion and dropped her onto some cardboard boxes. He was exhilarated and terrified. Thana’s ghost snapped out of his mind and fell back into her. She sobbed soundlessly, mouth agape.
‘Death,’ he said, exorcizing her.
Her blood made him full to the point of bursting. The swollen veins around his mouth and neck throbbed like painful erections. Just after a big feed, he was unattractively jowly, turgid sacs under his jawline, purplish flush to his cheeks and chest. He couldn’t completely close his mouth, crowded as it was with blocky, jagged fangs.
He thought about wasting Thana, fulfilling the prophecy of her name.
No. He must not kill while feeding. Johnny was taking more victims but drinking less from each, holding back from killing. If people had to be killed, he’d do it without taking blood, much as it went against the Father’s warrior instinct that subjugation of the vanquished should be commemorated at least by a mouthful of hot blood. This was America and things were different.
Who’d have thought that there’d be such a fuss about Nancy and Sid? He was surprised by the extensive news coverage of another drab death at the Chelsea. Sid, a slave who could never finger Johnny without burning out his brain completely, was charged with murder. Out on bail, he was remanded back to jail for bottling Patti Smith’s brother. On Riker’s Island, he found out ‘punk’ had another meaning in prison. Kicked loose again, he had turned up dead of an overdose, with a suntan that struck witnesses as being unusual for February. It was either down to the political situation in Iran or Johnny’s own enterprise: in the weeks when
Sid was locked up and kicking, heroin had become infinitely purer, perhaps thanks to Persians getting their money out in drugs, perhaps dealers competing with drac. Because Sid was well-known, the ragged end of his life was picked apart by a continuing police investigation. Loose ends could turn up; someone like Rockets Redglare, who had dealt in Room 100, might remember seeing Sid and Nancy with a vampire on the night of the killing. Johnny had no idea that a singer who couldn’t sing would be so famous. Even Andy was impressed by the headlines, and wondered whether he should do a Sid picture to catch the moment.
Johnny knelt by Thana, holding her scarf to her throat wound. He took her hand and put it up to the makeshift dressing, indicating where she should press. In her hating eyes, he had no reflection. To her, he was nothing.
Fine.
Johnny left the girl and looked for a cab.
He had a penthouse apartment now, rent paid in cash every month, at the Bramford, a Victorian brownstone of some reputation. A good address was important. He needed somewhere to keep his clothes, and a coffin lined with Transylvanian dirt. At heart, Johnny was a traditionalist. Andy was the same, prizing American antique furniture – American antique, hah! – and art deco bric-a-brac, filling his town house with the prizes of the past while throwing out the art of the future in his Factory.
The Mammoth Book of Vampires: New edition (Mammoth Books) Page 80