Famous for 15 Minutes

by Ultra Violet

  On the publicity front, we succeed. We take home bagfuls of clippings in a dozen languages from papers all over the world. On the distribution front, we strike out. Chelsea Girls does not get shown at the festival, even in a phone booth. But we judge the trip a success. We upstage Brigitte Bardot. And by sheer brashness, we put Andy on the map as an underground filmmaker, now blinking his unmatched eyes behind their heavy shades in the aboveground glare as we fly our act to Paris and London.

  I go along when Andy takes Chelsea Girls on a tour of college campuses in the fall of 1967. In San Francisco, we’re a smash. The students, who are already in an uproar over Vietnam and civil rights, clasp us to their bosom. They can’t get enough of Chelsea Girls and us. The press, on cue, heats up the furor. When they’ve written all they can, praising and damning the film, the papers turn to feature stories about the Warhol entourage.

  Rod La Rod, Andy’s lover at the time, is described as “an Alabaman with shoulder-length brown hair. He claims to have two gods, Governor Wallace and Warhol, whom he calls ‘The Great White Father.’”

  I am described as “a vibrant girl with frizzy black hair and heavily pencilled green eyes. Her credits include the recent notorious stage production in St. Tropez of Picasso’s ‘Desire Caught by the Tail,’ in which she plays a dual role of a nude prostitute and a piece of drapery.”

  The truth about that is more charming than shocking. Picasso’s fable, written for his children, was dramatized outdoors in a tent in St. Tropez, where it ran for the month of July 1967. In it, wearing a body stocking, I play the drapery. Someone else plays the prostitute. Various actors play a table, a big foot, a chair, a rug. John Chamberlain, wearing copious violet eye shadow, wanted to play the rod of my drapery. One night he came onstage but was so drunk he crashed my drapery to the floor. That ended his stage career. The biggest hit was Taylor Mead, with his sad, hound expression, who, more nude than not, wearing two long, drooping ears and a long, dragging tail, played a dog.

  Warhol tells a reporter, “It’s hard to say what is real and what is fake in my films. It’s true that I never edit anything. But I’m learning about editing while running the camera.” He goes on to reveal that he has just finished his first sexploitation film, I a Man, Tom Baker, which he made to raise money, and he adds slyly, “It’s really dirty.”

  The reporter takes the bait: “Dirtier than Chelsea Girls?”

  Andy nods and reminds him that Chelsea Girls was banned in Boston and Chicago. “The new one has more close-ups,” Andy says, guaranteeing a headline in the next day’s paper.

  SEX?

  When Andy was a sickly eight-year-old, he was confined to bed all summer long. He listened to the radio in the company of his Charlie McCarthy doll.

  I ask, “Did you play with dolls?”

  “Gosh, no.”

  “Who were your heroes?”

  “Dick Tracy. I Scotch-taped his photograph on the bedroom wall.”

  “Why Dick Tracy?”

  “Sex appeal.”

  “You just stared at him?”

  “I fantasized about Dick’s dick.”

  “What?”

  “I fantasized it was lollipop.”

  I think to myself: A lollipop goes in and out of a mouth, usually a child’s mouth.

  Andy laughs. “Yes, Dick’s lollipop.” He adds, “I had two sex idols—Dick Tracy and Popeye.” (Warhol paints portraits of Dick Tracy and Popeye.)

  “Did you also fantasize about Popeye?”

  “My mother caught me one day playing with myself and looking at a Popeye cartoon.”

  “Why Popeye and Tracy?”

  “They were stars. So was Charlie McCarthy. I wanted to make it with stars. I fantasized I was in bed with Dick and Popeye. Charlie would rub against me and seduce me.”

  I ask, “Were they father images to you?”

  “Don’t know. I barely knew my father. He died when I was fourteen.”

  “Why do you prefer men to women?”

  No answer. Even though Andy is open in his own circle about his homosexuality, he tries to keep it secret from the public. “I did a cock book,” he says.

  “A cook book?”

  Laughing: “You’re naive.”

  A gallery director, Mario Amaya, editor of the London publication Art and Artists and a friend of Andy’s, explains that in 1957 Andy went around town painting dancers’ feet. Later, he moved on to cocks, drawing everybody’s cock. Hence the cock book. Andy is attracted to boys who are delinquent and perverse. He is a voyeur and wants people to expose themselves. All painters are, by definition, voyeurs; I have met hundreds of painter-voyeurs in my life. But Andy extends the boundaries of voyeurism.

  When kids drop in from the street, Andy asks, “Can you take off your clothes? I’d like to take a picture of you.”

  Either the kids are on drugs—in which case they do not know whether they are dressed or not—or they take off their clothes to be hip and liberated. Nude theatrical performances are going on all over town, so in the Factory it is taken for granted that you strip, or you don’t belong on the scene.

  Especially to the boys, Andy says, “Bend down. I’d like to Polaroid your ass.” The kids are either embarrassed or amused. They have never had such an open proposition. If they are embarrassed, they are shown Polaroids of other kids. Close-ups of genitalia are very abstract. You cannot recognize anyone by those close-ups. So who cares? You cannot be blackmailed. You may recognize someone’s nose, because you’ve seen it. How can you recognize genitals you’ve never seen before?

  One day in 1965, when I step out of the elevator into the silvery Factory on East Forty-seventh Street, Maria Callas’s voice is blasting on the stereo. Ondine, the great fan of classical music in the Warhol crowd, is pulling his clothes together. Rod La Rod, another member of the circle, is handcuffed. The handcuff is the current gadget. If kids get too wild, we handcuff them.

  Ondine says, “We threw Andy out of our orgy.”

  “Why?”

  “All he did was watch.”

  I ask Ondine, “How often do you have an orgy?”

  “It’s an everyday orgy.”

  “How many people?”

  “Twelve, four, one—who knows?”

  “Male or female?”

  “Both.”

  Andy is the passive voyeur, the receiver. He is feminine.

  Another time I’m talking to Andy about Truman Capote. “When you were with Capote, who was the female?”

  “With Truman we had a hard time.”

  “In what way?”

  “Getting it on and/or up.”

  “But who was the female?”

  “Both.”

  “Your mother, does she suspect anything?”

  “My mother says, ‘Don’t worry about love, Andy. Just get married.’”

  I laugh. “How did it start with Capote?”

  “I was in love with him before I met him in 1951. I wrote him every single day for a year.”

  “Did he reply?”

  “Hmmm. I was engaged to Truman for ten years. A secret engagement.”

  “Did you exchange rings? Or earrings?”

  Andy laughs. “We exchanged photographs. I made fifteen drawings to illustrate The Stories of Truman Capote. That was my first solo exhibit.”

  “What kinds of photographs did you exchange?”

  “Photos of us kissing and making it naked with each other.”

  Andy is fascinated by the naked body. He has an extensive collection of photographs of naked people. He delights in the fact that every organ of the body varies immensely in shape, form, and color from one individual to the next. Just as one torso or one face tells a different story from another, so, to Andy, one penis or one ass tells a different story from another.

  In 1964 Andy films Taylor Mead’s Ass. The seventy-minute silent film in black and white is not famous for its action. The camera focuses for seventy minutes on the actor’s ass, which requires unmatched patience from the unpa
id Taylor. While it is shooting, Andy walks around the studio, talks on the telephone, goes to the bathroom. The film is insolent. With a thumb of his nose, Andy says “Bottoms up” to society.

  Many artists have that impulse. I remember Marcel Duchamp showing me a naked photo of himself standing as a statue perched on a pedestal. His body was superbly proportioned. It had a rhythm that reminded me of his Nude Descending a Staircase.

  Then there was the time Salvador Dali did a plaster imprint of my breasts. A specialist in statuary replicas for the Metropolitan Museum of Art came to the St. Regis at teatime. Dali and I were having tea with the Marquesa de Cuevas, who was born Marguerite Rockefeller. After our first cup of tea, Dali and I excused ourselves and went up to the mezzanine floor, to the office of the jeweler Carlos Alemany. I undressed. The castmaker fiddled with my breasts, his hands trembling as he applied plaster. It would take a while for the plaster to set, so I threw a violet cape, trimmed with gold, around me, and Dali and I rushed back to the King Cole Room to rejoin the marquesa.

  Listening to the violins playing “O Sole Mio” as the plaster dried, tightening and tingling on my breasts, Dali and I exchanged mischievous glances. I delighted in the moment.

  I want to know more about Andy and Capote. I ask, “Are you still involved with him?”

  “Only on the telephone.”

  “On the telephone?”

  “I don’t like my hair messed up.”

  I always wondered how Andy’s wig withstood really rough treatment in the sack, even with its secret snap to his skull. I could not imagine Andy taking off his wig. I suspect even the stoned kids would have been scared out of their wits at the sight of that whitish cranium.

  “Yes, sex-phone,” Andy continues.

  “You make love on the telephone?”

  “You know I only want to be a machine.”

  (Before you read any further, please answer the following question: How would a man who is a machine make love? Close your eyes and come up with an answer, no matter how wild it might be. Only after you’ve answered the question should you read on, because Warhol’s sex life will then make some sense.)

  “Why sex-phone?”

  “You don’t get dirtied.”

  “If you blush, they can’t see you, is that it?”

  “You don’t get wet by urine.”

  “You don’t like to be touched?”

  “No.”

  I recall the day we had lunch in a health food store on East Fifty-seventh Street. As I was returning Andy’s change, my hand accidentally touched his. Andy flinched and drew back.

  “What’s the matter?” I asked.

  “You touched me.”

  “So?”

  “I don’t like to be touched.”

  “Why?”

  “Except by my mother.”

  “You don’t want to be involved emotionally?”

  “No, I don’t.”

  Now, still pressing him about Capote: “You went from physical lovemaking to long-distance lovemaking with Capote?”

  “He became a problem. Hangovers, amphetamines, AA meetings.”

  “Bad morning breath?”

  He shrugs. “That’s when I got married to my tape recorder.” This is one of Andy’s famous quotes.

  Later, on a rainy day: “Do you record all your sex-phone conversations?”

  “Gee, sure.”

  “What are you planning to do with the tapes?”

  “Sell them or make them into a play.”

  “Explain to me how you get off on sex-phone.”

  “Sex is so nothing. The last time Truman put his cock in my mouth, I felt nothing.”

  One night Andy takes me, along with Gerard, Paul, and Rod La Rod, to see a Forty-second Street movie. Andy buys big ice cream cones and popcorn for everyone. I have never seen a commercial porno film, one that exploits sex, aberrational or otherwise, with the sole aim of arousing the viewer. In Andy’s movies, which years later are shown in the world’s most prestigious museums, the intention is to film the realities of our lives as they unfold. We film eating, sleeping, making love, going to the bathroom, taking drugs, beating each other up, whatever the entourage is up to at a given moment. We seek vérité rather than ejaculation under a folded newspaper.

  Now I am horrified at the utter cruelty and brutality onscreen, the blatant rawness of the sex, the bloody reds and pinks, the nasty and animalistic approach. At one revoltingly vile scene of torture, I vomit all over Andy. I have to leave the movie house. Exposure to that film turns me back into a virgin for a whole season.

  Andy is always cool. Only once do I see him lose his temper. Little Andrea Wips wants to be in a particular movie, and he does not include her. She is on drugs and she is furious. She screeches, “You fag, you asshole, you Warhole, asshole, Warhole …”

  “Get her out of here, out, out—and never come back!” Andy screams.

  On another rainy day when we are sitting around, I ask Andy, “How old were you when you first had sex?”

  “About twenty-three or so.”

  “Did you know about it before?”

  “When I was six I saw kids in school suck off a boy.”

  “What did you think of that?”

  “Gee, I don’t know.”

  “Does it bother you that two men together can’t conceive?”

  “With scientific progress, someday men will.”

  “The male-female attraction is so powerful,” I say. “It’s as inevitable as day and night.”

  “How can a man know what a woman feels?” he asks. “It’s too different.”

  Is it so different? Or is this an area in which Andy’s imagination fails him totally?

  Another time when we’re talking, I ask, “How do you feel about prostitutes?”

  “It should be the other way around. She should pay the guy. She’s hot.”

  “What makes you think she’s hot? Maybe she needs the money. Maybe it’s just a job.”

  “The way they look is very hot.”

  “Andy, you’re too much of an artist.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You’re too visual.”

  Andy’s answer makes me realize what an unbridgeable gulf exists between the sexes. What woman today believes hookers choose their work because they really like it? But many men cling to this fantasy.

  At the Factory, the boys go in and out of the darkroom in the back, where Billy Name prints his photographs. I know that it’s quick sex in, quick sex out. I am never admitted to the darkroom.

  It is all so casual. Go into the back room, suck some dick, have a drink, go back to work. It’s completely ordinary in this group, in this time of demystification of sex. It’s hip to believe that sex is nothing special, hardly worth mentioning.

  One day I tell Andy, “You know what capote means in French?”

  “No.”

  “It means condom.”

  “Hmmm.”

  “We should design a condom for gays that pops when you come.”

  “Why?”

  “For entertainment.” I know I’m talking nonsense.

  In the same spirit, he says, “I’ll autograph ‘Andy’ across each head.”

  Andy is interested in unexplored, highly theatrical territory for his movies. Arthur, a very young, devastatingly beautiful man, is a specialist in sadomasochism. In his small Upper East Side apartment, lit by candles, Andy and I sit on the edge of a torture rack. We are investigating the scene as a possible movie set.

  Arthur says, “I’d like to put both of you on the rack.”

  I look for the door.

  “It’s a gentle treatment,” he tells us reassuringly.

  I keep my eye on the exit.

  Before Andy knows it, he is on the rack and his fly is opened. I try to look out the window, but the glass has been darkened.

  “I’ll rub you with wood alcohol to make you feel good,” Arthur offers. Andy moans. “I’ll get a match,” Arthur continues.

  I
rush through the door and run for my life.

  Later that night, I call Andy. There is no answer. I call again. At 3 A.M., he finally answers. His voice has more delay than ever before. “I’m through with sex,” he moans.

  “What happened?”

  “Those kids, they’re crazy. I’ll stay married to my TV.”

  “What’s on TV?” I ask.

  “A Joan Crawford movie.”

  We both watch TV all the time and call each other to describe the movie that’s on. Sometimes we’re watching different movies, describing the action to each other, frame by frame.

  Andy’s real obsession is money, not sex. It is as a device to make money that he toys with the elaborate concept of sex-phone.

  The idea is: (1) a credit card agency verifies the caller’s account and (2) telephone operators, girls or boys, on different extensions, carry on sex fantasies with the caller. Three-way, even seven-way, conversations are possible on different extensions. He says, “You can believe you’re making it with anyone or having an orgy with Elsa Maxwell, Cleopatra, James Dean, Queen Elizabeth, anyone.”

  “Tiny Tim,” I suggest.

  “The living or the dead—makes no difference.”

  “The dead should cost more, because the operators have to do research to know about them.”

  “Gosh, it’s easy to make people believe that Groucho Marx is on the other end of the phone.”

  “Or a centerfold bunny,” I suggest. “And you can pretend to be anywhere, like in your mother’s bed.”

  “Or the White House or a factory.”

  “A canning factory like Campbell’s.”

  He laughs.

  I say, “Inside a shopping bag, if you’re a bag lady.”

  “That’s what gay couples do when they go into a men’s room together,” Andy explains. “They take a shopping bag along. One stands in the bag, and all you see below the partition is a man with a shopping bag.”

  “What do they do?”

  “A blow job.”

  “One of them has to be an acrobat,” I say.

  “I wish I were a robot.”

  “Why?”