The Purple Decades

by Tom Wolfe

  “When Mick comes into the Ad Lib in London—I mean, there’s nothing like the Ad Lib in New York. You can go into the Ad Lib and everybody is there. They’re all young, and they’re taking over, it’s like a whole revolution. I mean, it’s exciting, they’re all from the lower classes, East End-sort-of-thing. There’s nobody exciting from the upper classes anymore, except for Nicole and Alec Londonderry, Alec is a British marquis, the Marquis of Londonderry, and, O.K., Nicole has to put in an appearance at this country fair or something, well, O.K., she does it, but that doesn’t mean—you know what I mean? Alec is so—you should see the way he walks, I could just watch him walk—Undoes-one-ship! They’re young. They’re all young, it’s a whole new thing. It’s not the Beatles. Bailey says the Beatles are passé, because now everybody’s mum pats the Beatles on the head. The Beatles are getting fat. The Beatles—well, John Lennon’s still thin, but Paul McCartney is getting a big bottom. That’s all right, but I don’t particularly care for that. The Stones are thin. I mean, that’s why they’re beautiful, they’re so thin. Mick Jagger—wait’ll you see Mick.”

  Then the show begins. An electronic blast begins, electric guitars, electric bass, enormous speakers up there on a vast yellow-gray stage. Murray the K, the D. J. and M. C., O.K.?, comes out from the wings, doing a kind of twist soft shoe, wiggling around, a stocky chap, thirty-eight years old, wearing Italian pants and a Sun Valley snow lodge sweater and a Stingy Brim straw hat. Murray the K! Girls throw balls of paper at him, and as they arc onto the stage, the stage lights explode off them and they look like falling balls of flame.

  And, finally, the Stones, now—how can one express it? the Stones come on stage—

  “Oh, God, Andy, aren’t they divine!”

  —and spread out over the stage, the five Rolling Stones, from England, who are modeled after the Beatles, only more lower-class-deformed. One, Brian Jones, has an enormous blonde Beatle bouffant.

  “Oh, Andy, look at Mick! Isn’t he beautiful! Mick! Mick!”

  In the center of the stage a short thin boy with a sweat shirt on, the neck of the sweat shirt almost falling over his shoulders, they are so narrow, all surmounted by this … enormous head … with the hair puffing down over the forehead and ears, this boy has exceptional lips. He has two peculiarly gross and extraordinary red lips. They hang off his face like giblets. Slowly his eyes pour over the flaming bud horde soft as Karo syrup and then close and then the lips start spreading into the most lanquid, most confidential, the wettest, most labial, most concupiscent grin imaginable. Nirvana! The buds start shrieking, pawing toward the stage.

  The girls have Their Experience. They stand up on their seats. They begin to ululate, even between songs. The looks on their faces! Rapturous agony! There, right up there, under the sulphur lights, that is them. God, they’re right there! Mick Jagger takes the microphone with his tabescent hands and puts his huge head against it, opens his giblet lips and begins to sing … with the voice of a bull Negro. Bo Diddley. You movung boo meb bee-uhtul, bah-bee, oh vona breemb you’ honey snurks oh crim pulzy yo’ mim down, and, camping again, then turning toward the shrieking girls with his wet giblet lips dissolving …

  And, occasionally, breaking through the ululation:

  “Get off the stage, you finks!”

  “Maybe we ought to scream,” says Jane. Then she says to the fellow in the hat: “Tell me when it’s five o’clock, will you, pussycat? I have to get dressed and go see Sam Spiegel.” And then Baby Jane goes: “Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee

  “eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeyes!” says Diana Vreeland, the editor of Vogue. “Jane Holzer is the most contemporary girl I know.”

  Jane Holzer at the rock and roll—

  Jane Holzer in the underground movies—in Andy’s studio, Andy Warhol, the famous Pop artist, experiencing the rare world of Jonas and Adolph Mekas, truth and culture in a new holy medium, underground movie-making on the lower East Side. And Jane is wearing a Jax shirt, strung like a Christmas tree with Diamonds, and they are making Dracula, or Thirteen Beautiful Women or Soap Opera or Kiss —in which Jane’s lips … but how can one describe an underground movie? It is … avant-garde. “Andy calls everything super,” says Jane. “I’m a super star, he’s a super-director, we make super epics—and I mean, it’s a completely new and natural way of acting. You can’t imagine what really beautiful things can happen!”

  Jane Holzer—with The New Artists, photographers like Jerry Schatzberg, David Bailey and Brian Duffy, and Nicky Haslam, the art director of Show. Bailey, Duffy and Haslam are English. Schatzberg says the photographers are the modern-day equivalents of the Impressionists in Paris around 1910, the men with a sense of New Art, the excitement of the salon, the excitement of the artistic style of life, while all the painters, the old artists, have moved uptown to West End Avenue and live in apartment buildings with Kwik-Fiks parquet floors and run around the corner to get a new cover for the ironing board before the stores close.

  Jane in the world of High Camp—a world of thin young men in an environment, a decor, an atmosphere so—how can one say it?—so indefinably Yellow Book. Jane in the world of Teen Savage—Jane modeling here and there—wearing Jean Harlow dresses for Life and Italian fashions for Vogue and doing the most fabulous cover for Nicky at Show. David took the photograph, showing Jane barebacked wearing a little yacht cap and a pair of “World’s Fair” sunglasses and holding an American flag in her teeth, so—so Beyond Pop Art, if you comprehend.

  Jane Holzer at the LBJ Discotheque—where they were handing out aprons with a target design on them, and Jane Holzer put it on backward so that the target was behind and then did The Swim, a new dance.

  Jane Holzer—well, there is no easy term available, Baby Jane has appeared constantly this year in just about every society and show business column in New York. The magazines have used her as a kind of combination of model, celebrity and socialite. And yet none of them have been able to do much more than, in effect, set down her name, Baby Jane Holzer, and surround it with a few asterisks and exploding stars, as if to say, well, here we have … What’s Happening.

  She is a socialite in the sense that she lives in a twelve-room apartment on Park Avenue with a wealthy husband, Leonard Holzer, heir to a real estate fortune, amid a lot of old Dutch and Flemish paintings, and she goes to a great many exciting parties. And yet she is not in Society the way the Good Book, the Social Register, thinks of Society, and the list of hostesses who have not thought of inviting Jane Holzer would be impressive. Furthermore, her stance is that she doesn’t care, and she would rather be known as a friend of the Stones, anyway —and here she is at the April in Paris Ball, $150 per ticket, amid the heaving white and gold swag of the Astor Hotel ballroom, yelling to somebody: “If you aren’t nice to me, I’ll tell everybody you were here!”

  Jane Holzer—the sum of it is glamor, of a sort very specific to New York. With her enormous corona of hair and her long straight nose, Jane Holzer can be quite beautiful, but she never comes on as A Beauty. “Some people look at my pictures and say I look very mature and sophisticated,” Jane says. “Some people say I look like a child, you know, Baby Jane. And, I mean, I don’t know what I look like, I guess it’s just 1964 Jewish.” She does not attempt to come on sexy. Her excitement is something else. It is almost pure excitement. It is the excitement of the New Style, the New Chic. The press watches Jane Holzer as if she were an exquisite piece of … radar. It is as if that entire ciliate corona of hers were spread out as an antenna for new waves of style. To the magazine editors, the newspaper columnists, the photographers and art directors, suddenly here is a single flamboyant girl who sums up everything new and chic in the way of fashion in the Girl of the Year.

  How can one explain the Girl of the Year? The Girl of the Year is a symbolic figure the press has looked for annually in New York since World War I because of the breakdown of conventional High Society. The old establishment still holds forth, it still has its clubs, cotillions and coming-out balls, it is still basical
ly Protestant and it still rules two enormously powerful areas of New York, finance and corporate law. But alongside it, all the while, there has existed a large and ever more dazzling society, Café Society it was called in the twenties and thirties, made up of people whose status rests not on property and ancestry but on various brilliant ephemera, show business, advertising, public relations, the arts, journalism or simply new money of various sorts, people with a great deal of ambition who have congregated in New York to satisfy it and who look for styles to symbolize it.

  The establishment’s own styles—well, for one thing they were too dull. And those understated clothes, dark woods, high ceilings, silversmithery, respectable nannies, and so forth and so on. For centuries their kind of power created styles—Palladian buildings, starched cravats—but with the thickening democratic façade of American life, it has degenerated to various esoteric understatements, often cryptic—Topsiders instead of tennis sneakers, calling cards with “Mr.” preceding the name, the right fork.

  The magazines and newspapers began looking for heroines to symbolize the Other Society, Café Society, or whatever it should be called. At first, in the twenties, they chose the more flamboyant debutantes, girls with social credentials who also moved in Café Society. But the Other Society’s styles began to shift and change at a madder and madder rate, and the Flaming Deb idea no longer worked. The last of the Flaming Debs, the kind of Deb who made The Cover of Life, was Brenda Frazier, and Brenda Frazier and Brenda Frazierism went out with the thirties. More recently the Girl of the Year has had to be more and more exotic … and extraordinary. Christina Paolozzi! Her exploits! Christina Paolozzi threw a twenty-first birthday party for herself at a Puerto Rican pachanga palace, the Palladium, and after that the spinning got faster and faster until with one last grand centripetal gesture she appeared in the nude, face on, in Harper’s Bazaar. Some became Girls of the Year because their fame suddenly shed a light on their style of life, and their style of life could be easily exhibited, such as Jackie Kennedy and Barbra Streisand.

  But Baby Jane Holzer is a purer manifestation. Her style of life has created her fame—rock and roll, underground movies, decaying lofts, models, photographers, Living Pop Art, the twist, the frug, the mashed potatoes, stretch pants, pre-Raphaelite hair, Le Style Camp. All of it has a common denominator. Once it was power that created high style. But now high styles come from low places, from people who have no power, who slink away from it, in fact, who are marginal, who carve out worlds for themselves in the nether depths, in tainted “undergrounds.” The Rolling Stones, like rock and roll itself and the twist—they come out of the netherworld of modern teen-age life, out of what was for years the marginal outcast corner of the world of art, photography, populated by poor boys, pretenders. “Underground” movies—a mixture of camp and Artistic Alienation, with Jonas Mekas crying out like some foggy echo from Harold Stearn’s last boat for Le Havre in 1921: “You filthy bourgeois pseudo-culturati! You say you love art—then why don’t you give us money to buy the films to make our masterpieces and stop blubbering about the naked asses we show?—you mucky pseuds.” Teen-agers, bohos, camp culturati, photographers—they have won by default, because, after all, they do create styles. And now the Other Society goes to them for styles, like the decadenti of another age going down to the wharves in Rio to find those raw-vital devils, damn their potent hides, those proles, doing the tango. Yes! Oh my God, those raw-vital proles!

  The ice floe is breaking, and can’t one see, as Jane Holzer sees, that all these people—well, they feel, they are alive, and what does it mean simply to be sitting up in her Park Avenue apartment in the room with two Rubenses on the wall, worth half a million dollars, if they are firmly authenticated? It means almost nothing. One doesn’t feel it.

  Jane has on a “Poor” sweater, clinging to the ribs, a new fashion, with short sleeves. Her hair is up in rollers. She is wearing tight slacks. Her hips are very small. She has a boyish body. She has thin arms and long, long fingers. She sits twisted about on a couch, up in her apartment on Park Avenue, talking on the telephone.

  “Oh, I know what you mean,” she says, “but, I mean, couldn’t you wait just two weeks? I’m expecting something to jell, it’s a movie, and then you’d have a real story. You know what I mean? I mean you would have something to write about and not just Baby Jane sitting up in her Park Avenue apartment with her gotrocks. You know what I mean? … well, all right, but I think you’ll have more of a story— … well, all right … bye, pussycat.”

  Then she hangs up and swings around and says, “That makes me mad. That was———. He wants to do a story about me and do you know what he told me? ‘We want to do a story about you,’ he told me, ‘because you’re very big this year.’ Do you know what that made me feel like? That made me feel like, All right, Baby Jane, we’ll let you play this year, so get out there and dance, but next year, well, it’s all over for you next year, Baby Jane. I mean,—! You know? I mean, I felt like telling him, ‘Well, pussycat, you’re the Editor of the Minute, and you know what? Your minute’s up.’”

  The thought leaves Jane looking excited but worried. Usually she looks excited about things but open, happy, her eyes wide open and taking it all in. Now she looks worried, as if the world could be such a simple and exhilarating place if there weren’t so many old and arteriosclerotic people around to muck it up. There are two dogs on the floor at her feet, a toy poodle and a Yorkshire terrier, who rise up from time to time in some kind of secret needle-toothed fury, barking coloratura.

  “Oh,———,” says Jane, and then, “You know, if you have anything at all, there are so many bitchy people just waiting to carve you up. I mean, I went to the opening of the Met and I wore a white mink coat, and do you know what a woman did? A woman called up a columnist and said, ‘Ha, ha, Baby Jane rented that coat she went to the Met in. Baby Jane rents her clothes.’ That’s how bitchy they are. Well, that coat happens to be a coat my mother gave me two years ago when I was married. I mean, I don’t care if somebody thinks I rent clothes. O.K.————! Who cares?”

  Inez, the maid, brings in lunch on a tray, one rare hamburger, one cheeseburger and a glass of tomato juice. Jane tastes the tomato juice.

  “Oh,———!” she says. “It’s diet.”

  The Girl of the Year. It is as though nobody wants to give anyone credit for anything. They’re only a phenomenon. Well, Jane Holzer did a great deal of modeling before she got married and still models, for that matter, and now some very wonderful things may be about to happen in the movies. Some of it, well, she cannot go into it exactly, because it is at that precarious stage—you know? But she has one of the best managers, a woman who manages the McGuire Sisters. And there has been talk about Baby Jane for Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, the movie, and Candy—

  “Well, I haven’t heard anything about it—but I’d love to play Candy.”

  And this afternoon, later on, she is going over to see Sam Spiegel, the producer.

  “He’s wonderful. He’s, you know, sort of advising me on things at this point.”

  And somewhere out there in the apartment the dogs are loose in a midget coloratura rage amid patina-green walls and paintings by old Lowland masters. There is a great atmosphere in the apartment, an atmosphere of patina-green, faded plush and the ashy light of Park Avenue reflecting on the great black and umber slicks of the paintings. All that stretches on for twelve rooms. The apartment belongs to the Holzers, who have built a lot of New York’s new apartment houses. Jane’s husband, Leonard, is a slim, good-looking young man. He went to Princeton. He and Jane were married two years ago. Jane came from Florida, where her father, Carl Brookenfeld, also made a lot of money in real estate. But in a way they were from New York, too, because they were always coming to New York and her father had a place here. There was something so stimulating, so flamboyant, about New York, you know? Fine men with anointed blue jowls combed their hair straight back and had their shirts made at Sulka’s or Nica-Rattn
er’s, and their wives had copper-gold hair, real chignons and things, and heavy apricot voices that said the funniest things—“Honey, I’ve got news for you, you’re crazy!”—things like that, and they went to El Morocco. Jane went to Cherry Lawn School in Darien, Connecticut. It was a progressive school.

  And then she went to Finch Junior College:

  “Oh, that was just ghastly. I wanted to flunk out and go to work. If you miss too many classes, they campus you, if you have a messy room, they campus you, they were always campusing me, and I always sneaked out. The last spring term I didn’t spend one night there. I was supposed to be campused and I’d be out dancing at El Morocco. I didn’t take my exams because I wanted to flunk out, but do you know what they did? They just said I was out, period. I didn’t care about that, because I wanted to flunk out and go to work anyway—but the way they did it. I have a lot of good paintings to give away, and it’s too bad, they’re not getting any. They were not educators. They could have at least kept the door open. They could have said, ‘You’re not ready to be a serious student, but when you decide to settle down and be a serious student, the door will be open.’ I mean, I had already paid for the whole term, they had the money. I always wanted to go there and tell them, well, ha ha, too bad, you’re not getting any of the paintings. So henceforth, Princeton, which was super-marvelous, will get all the paintings.”

  Jane’s spirits pick up over that. Princeton! Well, Jane left Finch and then she did quite a bit of modeling. Then she married Lennie, and she still did some modeling, but the real break—well the whole thing started in summer in London, the summer of 1963.

  “Bailey is fantastic,” says Jane. “Bailey created four girls that summer. He created Jean Shrimpton, he created me, he created Angela Howard and Susan Murray. There’s no photographer like that in America. Avedon hasn’t done that for a girl, Penn hasn’t, and Bailey created four girls in one summer. He did some pictures of me for the English Vogue, and that was all it took.”