by Ultra Violet
Mailer seizes Torn and bites his ear. They grapple. Now Rey/ Torn is bleeding. Norman is strangling him with both hands. The camera is going. The crowd is shrieking.
Beverly, Norman’s wife, screams in horror. “What’ve you done, you motherfucker!”
Norman’s children wail. Men arrive and separate the two mad dogs. Mailer lunges at Torn and starts strangling him again. Beverly screams again. “Norman, your head is bleeding.”
Norman: “Because he hit me with a hammer, the asshole,” then, to Rip Torn: “I’m pulling that scene from the movie.”
Beverly: “Let me see your head, Norman.”
Norman to his crying children: “It’s all right. It’s all right.”
Torn moves toward Norman. Norman raises his fist. “Get away. I’m going to cold cock you.”
Torn: “It’s what I had to do.”
Beverly, advancing on Torn: “The kids are here—that’s enough.”
Torn, now playing Rey: “Brother—”
Norman: “You’re not my brother anymore.”
Torn: “The picture doesn’t make sense without this.”
Norman: “Fuck you. It’s my picture, and I know what makes sense. You did it in front of my kids—that’s what I can’t forgive. You wanted to assassinate me.”
“That’s in the picture.”
“I saw it in your eyes.”
The camera is still going.
Torn: “I pulled that punch.”
“Not hard enough.”
“I never hurt an actor before.”
They keep trading insults: cocksucker, champ of shit, up yours, kiss off.
Then Norman to the sound man: “Turn off the tape; he’s a very dull talker.”
The cinema vérité now stops.
I head back to New York, still shaken by what I have seen. The battle between Mailer and Torn was so real, so convincing, so full of genuine fury, I was sure one of them was going to die right before my eyes. If they weren’t forcibly dragged apart, the world that afternoon would have lost an important actor or a major novelist, in a tragic, real-life theater of the absurd.
Andy is still in the hospital. I give him a breathless blow-by-blow account of the filming, with emphasis on the Mailer-Torn main event. But I have to stop, because I can see how much it hurts him when he laughs. It’s too bad—Andy laughs so seldom, and I know laughter is good medicine. But not to the extent of pulling out his stitches.
In 1969 Mailer’s The Armies of the Night wins the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. Not quite up to his dream of running for president—I think the filmed assassination attempt really scared him—Mailer campaigns unsuccessfully for mayor of New York City. As for Maidstone, it is widely shown in art theaters and on campuses, and Mailer later writes a book, also called Maidstone, that documents the making of the film.
In 1975 Anthony Portago, great-great-great-grandson of King Alfonso XIII of Spain (or very close to it), invites me to a party at Mailer’s apartment in Brooklyn Heights. From his bay window he has a majestic view of New York Harbor, giant oceangoing vessels, tiny tugboats, and the Statue of Liberty. I find his bluejean eyes immensely attractive. But I remember that he once stabbed a wife. It might be risky to get too close.
I limit myself to a mildly provocative thank-you note: “The everlasting, flaming light of the eternal bearer of truth, the Lady of Liberty, floods its rays into Norman Mailer’s living quarters on Wednesday night, the 10th of December 1975, and I, Lady Violet, bear witness.”
A noncommittal Mailer replies, “Dear Lady Violet, Send me more poems. Happy New Year.”
I let it go at that.
MOONSTRUCK
“The moon is no cheap date,” I tell Andy as we drive on January 10, 1969, to a party given by Life magazine for the three astronauts, Walter M. Schirra, Jr., Donn F. Eisele, and R. Walter Cunningham, who on October 11, 1968, in Apollo 7, began an eleven-day flight that included 163 earth orbits of 4.5 million miles in just over 260 hours. When I say no cheap date, I am referring to the $23 billion and the three human lives already spent on our moon venture.
“Andy, how do you feel about the conquest of space?”
“Gosh, I don’t know.” It is a treat to go out with Andy, for he has been hibernating since his recovery from the shooting.
I can’t understand his indifference to space exploration. I am really fired up about the program and the impending landing on the moon. From years of reading science fiction, I am on intimate terms with the galaxies. As a reader of romantic poetry, I am a confirmed moon lover. The mystery of the full moon and its relation to madness has always fascinated me. And then, as a woman, I feel akin to the moon, for the twenty-eight-day lunar tides control my ovarian cycle. The moon’s longtime association with femininity convinces me that the Mount of Venus must be located among its deserts and valleys.
Now the moon is moving within our reach. One of us, an ordinary, down-to-earth fellow citizen from this planet (too bad it has to be a man—surely a woman would feel more at home on that ghostly landscape), is about to set foot on the lunar surface.
The imagination of the nation has been triggered by the fiery vessels lifting off in columns of smoke. The challenge of putting an American on the moon, proposed by President Kennedy at the start of the decade, confirms our world supremacy. Those clean, crew-cut young Americans, risking the unknown dangers, become national heroes. How can anyone not be intoxicated with excitement? Yet here is Andy, cool and indifferent.
I say, “I’m interested in knowing if there’s life on other planets.”
“It’s hard enough to be famous here.”
“Sometimes I think it’s wonderful we’re going to the moon. Other times, I feel the moon will be raped and despoiled and its romance demystified.”
Andy’s only answer: “Gee, Ultra, what imagination.”
I persist. “Tell me now, what’s your reaction to man walking on the moon?”
“One of my works will be up there.”
As part of an art project, six artists—Rauschenberg, Oldenburg, Warhol, Chamberlain, Novoros, and Myers—are each making a drawing on a grid of six ceramic and tantalum squares. These tributes from our culture are to be printed on a tiny rectangular computer chip, which will be clandestinely attached (Andy tells me the project is not sanctioned by NASA) to the hatch of the Apollo 12 lunar module, which is scheduled for launching in November 1969. As usual, Andy has been asking everyone, “What shall I do for the moon project?” He eventually settles for a calligraphic squiggle of his initials. “Just in case there are people up there,” he says, “might as well start the PR now.”
We are attending the Life party as guests of our friend David Bourdon, Life’s art editor. David has both an openness and a shy reserve that remind me of Andy, as if they might be far distant cousins. But his good, rich laugh sets him apart from Andy, and I particularly like him because a lot of the things I say he finds very funny, responding with great merriment. David greets us and introduces us to some of his colleagues on the magazine.
I can see that they are having a hard time with me. Because I view this as a very festive occasion, I am dressed to the nines and beyond. I am wearing a semi-see-through black synthetic dress I bought at Klein’s on Union Square for three dollars. When I tried it on earlier in the day at home, I found it too loose. So I turned it around back to front. That way it has a much tighter fit. Much. I wear the belt tied around my neck rather than at my waist. I have on gold-coin gypsy earrings so huge they could easily be mistaken for left-over earphones. Andy is wearing his usual black turtleneck, black slacks, and black jacket.
Life is putting on a greatest-show-on-earth party. Among the many celebrities and entertainers I spot Mike Wallace, Henny Youngman, James Earl Jones, and girls from the cast of Hair. When I see Schirra, I tell Andy, “I think he still has some moon dust on his shoulders.”
“No,” Andy said, “it’s dandruff.” When we get closer, I see he’s right. Schirra wears one of the ug
liest ties I’ve ever seen. His hair is parted on the right. Walter Cunningham has a triple crew cut, exposing his powerful neck muscles. He, too, wears a really awful tie, with two big squares of color. He has a five-o’clock-shadow beard, a look not then fashionable, and very bushy eyebrows. I never get to see Donn Eisele in the crush of people.
Andy asks, “Can you get their autographs for me?” He is too shy to ask for himself. I take Andy’s autograph book over to Cunningham and ask him to draw a picture of the moon.
“Where are you from?” he asks. He looks meaningfully at my out-of-space outfit, trying not to focus his eyes on my breasts. “There’s nothing like you out in space.”
He looks like a very average man. In my romantic imagination I expected a more dramatic look and really dashing style. I ask him, “How are you different now compared to before your one hundred sixty-three earth orbits?”
“Just the same.”
I am disappointed. I say, “Andy and I and the people at the Factory expected you would return with permanent changes.”
“Like what?”
“Like a rewired brain or extraterrestrial perception. I hoped you could read my fortune.” I extend my hand. He takes an hors d’oeuvre from the tray of a passing waiter and deposits a hard-boiled egg in my hand. In my palm it feels like an ovarian egg of the future.
“What factory do you work in?” he asks.
“A people factory.”
“What’s its name?”
“Factory.”
He gives me a puzzled look and goes off to find someone more sensible to talk to.
On the way home, Andy and I are raking over the guests and the party. “Did you see Cunningham’s tie?” I ask.
“Do you expect taste in an astronaut?”
That summer, on July 20, 1969, 600 million human breaths are suspended on this earth as Command Pilot Neil Armstrong radios to earth the historic words: “The Eagle has landed.” The breathing resumes. But not for long. Our breathing stops again as the landing craft hatch opens and the camera aboard the lunar module aims at the steps leading down to the surface of the Sea of Tranquillity.
And then Armstrong’s words that will echo through time: “That’s one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.”
In Central Park, 100,000 New Yorkers are gathered on the Sheep Meadow to watch the Sunday night moon walk in a live telecast on three screens, each nine by twelve feet, supplied by the three networks and bordered with the legend LIVE FROM THE SURFACE OF THE MOON. Most of the crowd are dressed in white and silver lamé. Children are selling moon food, yellowish wafers, for a quarter. There is parachute art, a taped lecture by Buckminster Fuller, a synthetic aurora borealis. Moon music plays on the synthesizer.
The next day in the New York Post, Alfred G. Aronowitz describes the lunar rites which began early that hot, historic Sunday and continued far into the night: “Who has never wanted to reach up and touch the moon? One day we’ll see lights flashing on it without giving them a second thought. Will the tides still ride the same way? The greatest show is the sun. Beneath it, Doris Freedman, director of the Cultural Affairs Department, is wilting bravely in white vinyl pants and a slick white jacket belted with wide star-spangled leather. They should have gotten Ultra Violet.”
Where is Andy? He no longer ventures out into huge crowds of strangers in public places. He is at home, glued to his television.
And where is Ultra Violet? I am at New York’s ground zero, on the Sheep Meadow that Sunday night, far beneath the silvery moon, actively engaged, amid some shrubbery, with a male rock star in our own private lunar rites. As he enters me, up there on the three screens Armstrong steps out of the module, arousing a worldwide climax, including my own.
So impressed am I with my lunar orgasm that I write a song entitled “Moon Rock.” It is a rock-and-roll tune about the rocks found on the moon. Several weeks later, I perform the song in a punk rock gospel style of my own invention in a garage on the Lower East Side. It is there I meet Olivier Grief, a young French composer, a musical genius, first-prize winner in piano and composition at the Paris Conservatory, who has studied privately with Olivier Messiaen and Luciano Berio, giants of modern classical music. Messiaen converses with the birds and with all of creation. I thought of him when, years later in California, I told a group of young spiritual groupies who were dabbling in awareness, “Reincarnation is for the birds.” A cute little groupie asked, “Do you mean that only the birds are being reincarnated?”
Grief invites me to be the only soloist for a modern opera he has composed. The performance takes place at the Juilliard School of Music. I go wild that night. I flip a live cat in the air. I show my breasts. I sing arias, scales. I improvise. The audience is transported—in two directions. Half applaud madly. Half hiss loudly. Olivier has to apologize for my lamentable behavior. It takes me three days to recover from that extravaganza. My only excuse is that I was moonstruck.
EDIE
Edie Sedgwick touched my life and will forever haunt my memory. Born in 1943, she hastens to get back to heaven in 1971. A society darling, a debutante listed in the Social Register, with her youth, wealth, beauty, jaunty intelligence, and American neon-blue blood from Massachusetts, she perfectly embodies the beautiful people. A John Singer Sargent portrait of Edith Minturn Stokes, an ancestor for whom Edie is named, bears witness that perfection of form runs in the family.
In the summer of 1964, Edie packs her hatboxes, makeup basket, stuffed animals, and artist’s materials, leaving behind her unfinished horse sculpture, covered with damp towels to keep it moist in her absence, and races to New York in her gray Mercedes-Benz in the company of Gordon Baldwin. She unpacks at Park Avenue and Seventy-first Street, in the fourteen-room apartment of her bedridden grandmother. She models for a teen magazine. An exquisite dancer, she rocks-and-rolls all night. She says, “I’ve got to dance things out.” She performs for hours, creating her own choreography, borrowing from the fox-trot and the twist. As she spins, sparks of glamour fly off to an admiring crowd of young men with floppy neckties and flipped-up handkerchiefs in their breast pockets, who hang around her.
Edie becomes the new girl in town.
Since sixties people worship the rock singer more than the song and the dancer more than the dance, everyone stares at the beaming energy of Edie, trotting with youth on her thoroughbred legs. After dinner at L’Avventura (the restaurant of the minute, where she always orders salmon), she ends her night at one of the in spots—Harlow, Shepheard’s, Ondine, Arthur, or Steve Paul’s The Scene.
In the fall of ’64 she moves to her own apartment, on East Sixty-third Street between Fifth and Madison. Tom Goodwin, a friend from Cambridge, who is her hired chauffeur for one hundred dollars a week, zaps her gray Mercedes to rubble in front of the Seagram Building. Edie leases a limousine from the Bermuda Service. The driver loves her forty-dollar tips, but she never pays her bills. Whenever her credit runs out, she switches companies.
Early in 1965, Andy takes me to a party at the East Fifty-ninth Street penthouse of Lester Persky, a successful producer of commercials, who is a compulsive party-giver. He is a charming host and has a Japanese cook. Around his marble table in the formal dining room, lit exclusively by candles, the Grecian faces of the young boys glisten with lust as in a Platonic retreat. The penthouse is a place of rendezvous over the years for Tennessee Williams, Judy Garland (already crumbling under the effect of booze and drugs), Montgomery Clift, Gore Vidal, William Inge, and Truman Capote.
That night we meet Edie Sedgwick. I am struck by her dazzling beauty. “Glamour she inhales, glamour she exhales. The word ‘glamour’ is coined for her,” I say to Andy.
Before the evening is over, Andy asks her to come by the Factory the next day. He speaks the routine phrase: “We’ll put you in a movie.”
I see her again when she arrives at the Factory, in her above-the-knee leotard and her black desert boots. A few weeks later, her Black-Capped Chickadee’s voice is on the other end of
my telephone. “I want you to help me with my new hairdo. Can you come over?” Her apartment is a gallery of clothes, fur coats—red fox, leopard—fur scatter rugs, embroidered pillows. I see huge peacock-feather earrings, tens of dozens of tights, a complete line of cosmetics. She has drawn on the wall right above her bed the life-size galloping Arabian stallion she left behind in Cambridge.
Sitting on a huge leather rhinoceros amid her canvases and easels, I admire her drawings of marmosets, harvest mice, rats, muskrats, squirrels, all absolutely adorable. She perfectly captures the tenderness of those sweet creatures. She offers me an opossum gently carrying with her incisors her newborn across the drawing page. The little one looks so helpless and innocent, yet human, that it has the same delicate vulnerability Edie herself generates. I cannot help but fall in love with both the small animals and Edie.
One of the mice in a drawing is wearing a top hat. “Why not?” she says. It reminds me of the cats Andy’s mother published in the early fifties. One of them wore a plumed hat, above the caption, “Some wore chapeaux.”
She calls Reuben’s restaurant and says, “Please, caviar and blinis, immediately.” She turns to me and says, “To be eaten with vodka or champagne.”
Dancing to the sound of Ornette Coleman, she says, “I am dyeing my hair silver.” She cuts it shorter and applies a mauve glittery lotion with one of her paintbrushes. “To match Andy’s.”
As I watch, I ask idly, “Do you have a boyfriend?”
“When I was a child, my father tried to sleep with me, and one of my brothers tried too. I wouldn’t go for that. I just didn’t want to.”
Poor white ermine, I think.
“One day I found my father making love to another lady in the sitting room. That sight sent me spinning.”
“Poor lamb,” I say.
“I tried to tell my mother. My father screamed, ‘You’re insane.’ My father called the doctor. They gave me so many tranquilizers I lost all my feelings. Mummy wouldn’t believe me either.”