That January, Warhol continued to challenge the sexual status quo, but not from his Factory. He left Manhattan to visit Oracle, Arizona, where he was making a new film, a Western, which was of such concern to the men of J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI that they decided to open a file on him. Almost overnight, Chelsea Girls (the title lost its original “the” on its way up from the underground) had turned Warhol into a target, the bureau’s need to rout out revolutionaries no longer limited to just communists.
Warhol’s go-to movie-guy Paul Morrissey doubted that he could ever top those Chelsea Girls reviews in Newsweek (“fleshpots of Caligula’s Rome!”) and Time (“a sewer!”) with this new, as yet untitled movie. And there were other challenges. If three thousand dollars and a four-day shooting schedule were good enough for Chelsea Girls, Warhol thought it would be good enough for the half dozen or so subsequent films that Morrissey was to make, including this new Western that updated Shakespeare’s tale of two star-crossed lovers. “I had this idea of doing Romeo and Juliet with groups of cowboys and cowgirls,” Morrissey explained. “But no girls came because they had a quarrel with Viva.”
Viva, aka Janet Susan Mary Hoffmann, took her name from Viva paper towels. And there were other reasons she morphed into the number-one superstar in the Factory firmament after Warhol fashion icon Edie Sedgwick demanded and got herself removed from Chelsea Girls. In addition to her Garbo-esque beauty, which included none of the great Swede’s discretion or fear of exposure, Viva knew how to get attention in a room, if not a movie, full of flamboyant male homosexuals. As she explained it in her lazy soprano whine, “Take off your clothes!”
She was also one of the first Warhol actors to be called a superstar. “They felt they were doing something special with those movies,” said Joe Dallesandro, who started at the Factory as a doorman and later graduated to appearing before Warhol’s camera, usually stark naked to the delight of everyone except himself. “How can you be doing something special in three or four days?” he asked.
Since a Western, even an Andy Warhol Western, couldn’t be shot in New York City, the movie Morrissey envisioned, about a cowboy Romeo and his cowgirl Juliet, needed the appropriate locale. Morrissey chose Oracle, Arizona, where a few John Wayne pictures had been shot. The citizens of Oracle liked the Duke. They didn’t like Warhol or Morrissey. After all, in what other Western did a woman ride into town with her nurse—her male nurse!—and end up being raped by a few bored cowboys who’d much prefer bedding a handsome male drifter?
Viva put it more succinctly. “The story is I run a whorehouse outside of town,” she said.
Warhol wanted to call it Fuck, then he considered The Glory of the Fuck, but ultimately settled on the more atmospheric, less graphic Lonesome Cowboys.
On the first day of shooting in Oracle, Viva showed up in a very proper English riding habit, complete with a stock and black leather boots. She’d picked the outfit herself, explaining, “I just woke up from a bad LSD trip and I think I’m in Virginia with Jackie Kennedy.” As it turned out, she needed the stock, being the only woman in the company, which turned out not to be quite as one hundred percent gay as she had hoped. “We were staying together at this guest ranch and it just went on all night. Every night I’d change rooms and every night they’d all be in there with me,” she complained to Andy Warhol.
It concerned Andy, especially what was happening off-camera between his leading lady and the film’s cowboy Romeo, an actor named Tom Hompertz. “Stay away from Tom, save it for the movie!” he kept telling Viva.
Viva claimed she was being attacked by other men on the set. “I was just raped again,” she told Andy on morning two of what was only a four-day shoot.
As with every scene in a Paul Morrissey–directed movie, the actors made it up as they went along. Like the scene where five of them rush Viva as she gets off her horse and everybody screams, “Fuck her! Fuck her!” and proceed to tear off her clothes and then mount her.
It was this scene that compelled one resident of Oracle to lodge a complaint with the FBI, which promptly sent an agent or two out west. “There were planes overhead,” Joe Dallesandro said of the shoot. “That was pretty funny.”
The FBI opened a file on Andy Warhol, created under the category “ITOM: Interstate Transportation of Obscene Matter,” and in his report an agent didn’t stint on the details. As he recorded it, “All of the males in the cast displayed homosexual tendencies and conducted themselves toward one another in an effeminate manner. . . .
“One of the cowboys practiced his ballet and a conversation ensued regarding the misuse of mascara by one of the other cowboys. . . .
“There was no plot to the film and no development of character throughout. It was rather a remotely-connected series of scenes which depicted situations of sexual relationships of homosexual and heterosexual nature.”
Luckily for Warhol and company, Lonesome Cowboys had long wrapped by the time the FBI report made its way back to Washington, D.C.
IF THE FBI CAME lately to the work of Andy Warhol, J. Edgar Hoover’s men had already opened and closed its file on Terry Southern when his novel Candy (written ten years earlier with limited input from the drug-addled Mason Hoffenberg) went into production as a movie that January at the Incom Studios in Rome.
The bureau had opened its Southern investigation in February 1965. Only the year before, G. P. Putnam’s had made Southern’s “dirty book,” about an adventurously promiscuous American girl, legally available in the United States, where it quickly rose to the top of the bestseller lists despite having already sold over twelve million contraband copies under both its original title and Lollipop. The novel got a boost stateside when Publishers Weekly labeled it “sick sex.”
After Candy’s initial publication in France, Southern had gone on to write the screenplay for Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove and been nominated for an Oscar. The FBI, however, didn’t care about awards not won. Its file labeled him a “pornographer,” and Candy, in the bureau’s estimation, was the least of it:
“With reference to [Southern’s] pornographic library of films . . . it is not known to this office whether it is a local violation in Connecticut to display films to ‘guests’ and it is therefore left to the discretion of the bureau as to whether such information should be made available, strictly on a confidential basis, to a local law enforcement agency covering Southern’s place of residence.”
Regarding the novel Candy, the FBI’s internal review found it “not a suitable vehicle for prosecution.” As the file concluded, “ ‘Candy,’ for all its sexual descriptions and foul language, is primarily a satirical parody of the pornographic books which currently flood our newsstands. Whatever erotic impact or prurient appeal it has is thoroughly diluted by the utter absurdity and improbability of the situations described.”
The makers of the Candy movie weren’t quite as liberal as the FBI. They flat out rejected Southern’s script for its sin of inclusion regarding the book’s infamous hunchback character, who performs an unusual sex act at the heroine’s insistence. As it was described in the novel, “The hunchback hesitated, and then lunged headlong toward her, burying his hump between Candy’s legs as she hunched wildly, pulling open her little labias in an absurd effort to get it in her. ‘Your hump! Your hump!’ she kept crying, scratching and clawing at it now.”
In fact, the hunchback pages of Candy (“Give me your hump!”) were second only to the novel’s closing incest scene (“Good Grief—It’s Daddy!”) as required late-night reading at better frat houses everywhere.
Southern just couldn’t bear to lose the hunchback in the movie version. “These scenes were very dear to Terry’s heart because it was the first he wrote for the book,” noted his longtime partner, Gail Gerber. “Holding firm and refusing to delete them from the screenplay, he was fired and lost control over his property.”
The Texas-born Southern, who had been described as having all the charm of a walking hangover, put the controversy a bit more delicate
ly. “I have nothing to do with it,” he said of the movie, “having withdrawn when they insisted on taking out the hunchback.”
Worse than their deleting the hunchback was their hiring director Christian Marquand, who’d never directed a movie before and whose major qualification for the job had something to do with his helping good friend Marlon Brando buy the French Polynesian atoll of Tetiaroa. Brando was nothing if not loyal, and through his efforts Marquand not only landed the Candy gig but was able to hire, at fifty thousand dollars a week per star, other high-profile actors, including Walter Matthau, James Coburn, Ringo Starr, and Richard Burton, who never quite forgave Brando the indignity that was to be Candy, the movie.
“We were all kind of gathered around the idea of doing a 1960s movie,” said Coburn, who played Dr. Krankheit. “Our attitude was ‘Let’s see if we can do it.’ Nudity was beginning to come in, fucking on-screen, and it was all much freer.”
Buck Henry wrote the screenplay—or, more aptly, was in the process of writing it as the production progressed. Southern kept calling him that “sit-com writer,” referring to Henry’s Get Smart days, unaware that Henry had also recently enjoyed a fair degree of success with his screenplay for The Graduate.
Henry returned the insult by saying that the direction of his screenplay would be “every one conceivable away from the book.”
When Coburn’s week of work on the film approached that January, he flew to Rome, only to be met at the airport by the film’s novice director. “Well, there’s been a little problem,” Marquand informed him. “We’ll probably have to close down for a week, or at least until we can do some shooting that Ewa isn’t in.”
Ewa was Ewa Aulin, an unknown Scandinavian actress who’d been cast as the all-American girl Candy. Her accent didn’t matter, Marquand insisted. She would be dubbed.
As Coburn and Marquand spoke on the tarmac, Ewa Aulin was no longer in Rome, having undergone what was politely being called a “rest cure,” which had something to with her being put “to sleep out in a little resort town on the coast, Taormina.”
Aulin had trouble playing her scenes opposite Marlon Brando, cast as the Great Guru Grindl, who, outfitted in Indian robes and long black wig, seduces Candy in a big semi-truck that doubles as his meditation room as he roams America. Brando couldn’t stop wanting to have sex with Aulin, and Aulin couldn’t stop laughing at Brando.
“She had a wonderful ass, man, and Marlon just couldn’t resist,” said Coburn. “He’d started coming on to her pretty strong, turning on his great charm, even during their scenes together. . . . She would look at him in this fright wig, and just get hysterical. He was so funny and ingratiating to begin with—only now he wanted to fuck her, so that was the icing on the cake. It was overwhelming. She just went over the edge.”
Stuck away in a hotel in Taormina, Aulin was given injections to keep her sedated until she ceased giggling. “Soon, rumors reached Hollywood that the decadent production had kept Aulin high just for the fun of it,” reported Southern’s son, Nile.
No one knew how the movie—or, for that matter, the production—would end. “We’re keeping it a secret,” said Buck Henry.
Brando described the ensuing chaos more graphically. “This movie makes as much sense as a rat fucking a grapefruit,” he said.
IT WAS NOT GORE VIDAL’S intention to top Terry Southern or Andy Warhol, who was less than a year away from bringing transsexuals, in Flesh and then Trash, to America’s movie theaters. In fact, Vidal’s impetus, if not his inspiration, for creating the trannie character Myra Breckinridge came from the other side of the sexual divide. At that moment in time, the strictly heterosexual Kenneth Tynan was conceiving his own carnal entertainment, one that was to be militant in its exclusion of homosexuality, if not all things sexually adventurous.
Vidal, flush from the Broadway success of his political drama The Best Man, was not averse to currying the favor of London’s most famous theater critic, which Tynan arguably was before leaving his post at the Observer to become literary manager of Sir Laurence Olivier’s National Theatre. Those two lofty posts, first at the Observer and then the National, helped to propel Vidal’s generosity when it came to his caustic theater friend. Vidal lent Tynan one thousand British pounds shortly after the critic remarried and found himself financially strapped due to exorbitant alimony payments to the first Mrs. Tynan, writer Elaine Dundy, who confessed that she had once been “madly in love” with Vidal.
In their literary circle, Vidal was well-known for being bisexual and Tynan was equally well-known for being a philanderer. And not just any old philanderer, as his ex-wife explained when giving the reason for their divorce. “To cane a woman on her bare buttocks, to hurt and humiliate her, was what gave him his greatest sexual satisfaction,” Dundy recalled with her usual novelistic precision. Perhaps more injurious to their union was Tynan’s severe double standard when it came to Dundy’s replication of his chronic infidelity—like the time he returned home to find a naked man in the kitchen with Dundy, and promptly threw the man’s clothes down the elevator shaft.
If Vidal had any objections to Tynan’s conduct, it would have been that his critic friend had gotten married—and not once but twice. Vidal strenuously objected to the institution of marriage—and not because it excluded homosexuals. He credited his own lifelong partnership with Howard Austen to the fact that the two men never had sex a second time after their first meeting in a New York City bathhouse in 1950. An ardent believer in quick, anonymous sex—and the more the better, regardless of the cost—Vidal had a thing for whores. “I love prostitution,” he once said. “I think it’s just absolutely the greatest institution there is and it’s the most honest.”
Their reputations for being libertines—or at least indulging in a lot of sex—made Vidal a natural contributor to Tynan’s new theater endeavor.
Like so many critics, Tynan didn’t write plays. He wrote about plays. If he could have written plays, he would have. But since he couldn’t, he didn’t, and instead he asked several other writers to write his play for him. What Tynan had in mind wasn’t a play at all but a revue, each element of which would carry a sex theme. Since Vidal was one of the first writers he approached, Tynan was a bit vague on the concept. “If you have any comment to make on the erotic relationship between men and women, write it down. It can be a skit, a song,” he offered.
That Tynan was to go public with his sexual obsession came as no surprise to Vidal. First off, Tynan needed the money. And second, Tynan had long been a major foe of censorship in any form, and in recent months was no longer best known for his reviews or his job at the National Theatre but rather for being the first man to utter the word “fuck” on TV. It happened on November 13, 1965, on a late-night live show, BBC-3. The on-air commentator had wondered if censorship should be abolished and if Tynan, as literary manager of the National Theatre, could conceivably see producing a play in which a couple had sexual intercourse onstage. “Oh I think so, certainly,” Tynan replied without hesitation, except for, perhaps, the pauses caused by his incessant stutter. “I doubt if there are very many rational people in this world to whom the word ‘fuck’ is particularly diabolical or revolting or totally forbidden.”
In time, the hard-driving, chain-smoking, sadomasochistic Tynan would regret the “fuck” remark. “So that’s my obit? This is what I’m going to be remembered for, having said ‘fuck’ on television?” he used to complain—that is, until his sex revue, Oh! Calcutta!, became as familiar a title as Hello, Dolly! or Mary Poppins.
Back in the late 1960s, Tynan’s show didn’t have a name. It was just an idea, and not a very specific one as Tynan further explained it to Vidal for the first time.
“It’s to be an erotic evening with no purpose except to titillate, arouse, and provoke,” he said. The whole thing, Tynan believed, would be “very elegant and perverse, every heterosexual fetish fully catered for. And no crap about art.”
Well, maybe just a little crap. Tynan did stress
that no less an estimable talent than playwright Harold Pinter, author of The Birthday Party, would be “co-devising and co-directing” his erotic show. And thanks to the connections of his London-based producer, Michael White, he’d been able to secure a promise from Samuel Beckett that he’d write something for the show. (White recalled meeting the absurdist playwright at a pub near the Royal Court Theatre in London. “He knew I was a fan, in absolute awe of him,” said the producer. “I’d been at the world premiere of Waiting for Godot in Paris in 1953.”) Other famous names were also bandied about to provide the skits: Tennessee Williams, Edna O’Brien, Jules Feiffer—impressive, prestigious writers.
Vidal was intrigued, and in the correspondence that followed Tynan offered one vague sex scenario to his writer-friend-lender, now living in Rome. In a letter, Tynan suggested that Vidal write “a sketch on the organization of an orgy.” Back in London, Tynan was already having a good time of it, collecting ideas for skits from a number of celebrities who came to his flat to drink, carouse and fantasize. John Lennon offered one inspired bit. “You know the idea,” the soon-to-be ex-Beatle began, “four fellows wanking, giving each other images—descriptions—it should be ad-libbed anyway. They should even really wank, which would be great.”
Perhaps that wasn’t the kind of orgy Tynan had in mind when he suggested a skit about group sex to Vidal. He made it clear to other potential participants that only “non-queers” would be involved in the production of his sex revue. Fantasies and fetishes of every stripe would be depicted, with only one caveat: no homosexuality. “There’s been enough of that around,” he told more than one invitee to the project. He saw the show as an aphrodisiac, a “gentle stimulation, where a fellow can take a girl he is trying to woo.”
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