Inside the Dream Palace: The Life and Times of New York's Legendary Chelsea Hotel

by Sherill Tippins

  To write songs like that, Dylan acknowledged, “You’ve got to have power and dominion over the spirits.” You had to be able to “see into things, the truth of things—not metaphorically, either, but really see . . . with hard words and vicious insights.” Even at the time, the singer was aware that he was hitting a peak. He would continue making records, he told a friend after recording “Visions of Johanna,” but “they’re not gonna be any better from now on.”

  All he wanted to do was write and sing. But the strain of living under constant observation was wearing on Dylan’s nerves, sharpening his aggression. Egged on by Neuwirth, who had his own “taste for provocation,” Dylan taunted his folksinger friends about his success, digging at their hidden envy. He suggested to Phil Ochs, his neighbor at the Chelsea, that he find a new line of work, maybe as a standup comedian. But when Ochs dared to suggest that one of Dylan’s recent songs was okay but not brilliant, he was kicked out of his friend’s limousine and cut off with no possibility of appeal.

  Dylan and Neuwirth were still in the thick of this nihilistic phase when someone suggested Neuwirth look up a “terrific girl” named Edie Sedgwick. A Warhol superstar seemed perfect fodder for the two provocateurs’ tests of character, so one night from their Village hangout the Kettle of Fish, Dylan and Neuwirth gave her a call. When Edie took her limousine downtown to join them, they found her perfectly capable of holding her own. “We spent an hour or two, all laughing and giggling, having a terrific time,” Neuwirth recalled.

  Dylan later acknowledged, somewhat diffidently, that Edie was an “exciting girl, very enthusiastic.” But Neuwirth in particular saw something unique. Edie, he said, had “a tremendous compassion” for those “who had seen the big sadness.” He continued to pull the actress into their orbit, encouraging her to believe that she might have a future in the Hollywood films that everyone assumed Dylan would make. For Sedgwick, a film role with Dylan seemed the perfect way out of Warhol’s Factory. Years later, Edie’s brother Jonathan would recall that Edie “called me up and said she’d met this folk singer in the Chelsea, and she thinks she’s falling in love. I could tell the difference in her, just from her voice. She sounded so joyful instead of sad.”

  The possibility of the pairing crossed more than one observer’s mind, as Dylan’s and Warhol’s rival enclaves rubbed up against each other that winter at Ondine’s and the Scene, and as Dylan dropped in at the Factory long enough to do a Screen Test. But in Dylan’s world, events were unfolding that would solidify his life’s direction. Sara was pregnant, and the magician had to decide whether it was time to lay his cards down.

  Ten years later, when his marriage to Sara was beginning to fall apart, Dylan would reflect back on this time of decision at the Hotel Chelsea, where, he claimed in his 1975 song “Sara,” the first images in his haunting masterpiece “Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands” surfaced in his mind. Women had always played an important, creative role in his life. Suze Rotolo had taught him much of what he loved most about New York. Joan Baez had given him a musical education along with her professional blessing. Edie Sedgwick, the subterranean princess, was undoubtedly interesting and fun. But Sedgwick longed for a prince to rescue her. Sara could take care of herself. “The one thing about [Sara] that I always loved,” Dylan wrote, “was that she was never one of those people who thinks that someone else is the answer to her happiness. Me or anybody else.”

  The Chelsea’s thick walls had been built to protect a poet who was contemplating his fate, asking the question, with the music of an ancient folk song running through his head, “Sad-eyed lady, should I wait?” He took his time. As he would later write, quoting Johnny Cash, “I keep a close watch on this heart of mine.” But his decision came clear, and on November 22, in a private civil ceremony at a judge’s home on Long Island, Dylan and Sara Lowndes were secretly married.

  Dylan flew to California with Neuwirth and his band less than two weeks later and performed at the Berkeley Community Theater for Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and an auditorium full of professors, poets, and enthusiastic students. “Dylan’s band went over like the discovery of gold,” reported one witness. Ginsberg was ecstatic. In recent months, the poet, like many others, had become obsessed with the worsening situation in Vietnam. With a hundred thousand protesters attending a recent demonstration in Washington, DC, Ginsberg hoped Dylan might be ready to lend his name to the protest. But the songwriter stuck to his resolve to look beyond topical issues and push ahead with his own work in his own way, and he retreated to New York.

  There, with Dylan still unmarried and romantically available, as far as anyone knew, rumors spread that Sedgwick herself had turned up in California and that she was involved in a love affair with Dylan, or Neuwirth, or both. The rumors gained credibility: the actress was occasionally sighted with one or both men at the Kettle of Fish and was even seen in Dylan’s Woodstock studio. At the Factory, to everyone’s irritation, Sedgwick obsessively dropped Dylan’s name, and as she spent more and more of her time at the Hotel Chelsea with Dylan’s entourage, Warhol was put in the humiliating position of having to telephone their rooms from the lobby, searching for his superstar.

  Warhol was furious with what he considered a complete betrayal. The damage was not just personal and creative, but financial as well. It might be true that in Hollywood, people ate, as Warhol had quipped in Paris, but New York’s avant-garde more commonly starved. Struggling to feed his tribe on the money brought in from a curtailed art career while enduring constant demands for cash by Factory denizens who couldn’t believe that their filmed performances weren’t making him rich, Warhol went so far as to place an ad in the Village Voice that winter announcing, “I’ll endorse with my name any of the following: clothing, AC-DC, cigarettes, small tapes, sound equipment, ROCK ’N’ ROLL RECORDS, film, and film equipment, Food, Helium, Whips, MONEY; love and kisses Andy Warhol. EL5-9941.”

  It was not surprising, then, that Warhol responded with alacrity to a commission from entrepreneur Michael Mayerberg to provide some sort of floorshow for a disco he planned to open that spring. As the artist cast about for suitable entertainment, Barbara Rubin—now Warhol’s close confidante as well as Ginsberg’s, Smith’s, Mekas’s, and Dylan’s—suggested he feature a rock band and make some extra money by becoming the band’s manager. The band she had in mind had been called the Warlocks when it performed in a series of “ritual happenings” staged earlier that year at the Filmmakers’ Cinémathèque. The multimedia events featured underground filmmaker Piero Heliczer’s moving images projected through colorfully lit veils onto a movie screen as dancers swirled around to the Warlocks’ strange, droning, addictive music drifting out from behind the screen.

  Warhol would like this band, Rubin assured him. She had known its dreamy, long-haired violist, John Cale, since 1963, when she’d filmed Christmas on Earth in his Lower East Side loft. The Welsh musician, raised on the Celtic spells of his native village near Dylan Thomas’s Swansea, had been lured to America by the music of John Cage and was happy to subsist on oatmeal and chicken giblets for the chance to explore the scientific and mystical qualities of drones and chants with the minimalist composer La Monte Young. The guitarist was Lou Reed, a curly-haired, gum-chewing rock-and-roller who had studied poetry in college under Delmore Schwartz, who was known to be a raving paranoiac but was still capable of inspiring two of Reed’s best compositions, “Heroin” and “I’m Waiting for My Man,” before the songwriter in training had even graduated. Reed moved into Cale’s loft on Ludlow Street, where they developed a friendship and a musical aesthetic based on “a shared interest in music and heroin” and progressed from playing for change on 125th Street to performing with guitarist Sterling Morrison and drummer Angus MacLise at the downtown happenings. Still, the Warlocks remained even more obscure than the filmmakers for whom they played. Their audience was so small that when their friend Tony Conrad dropped by with a pulp paperback he’d found on the sidewalk called The Velvet Underground—its cover f
eaturing a black high-heeled boot, a whip, a black mask, and a key—the band casually took the book’s title as their new name. They figured no one would notice or care anyway.

  The band did not sound promising, but Rubin and her friend Rosebud managed to get Warhol, his assistant Gerard Malanga, and a few other friends to check them out at the Café Bizarre, the tiny Village tourist trap where they were performing, a couple of days before Christmas. Knowing that Malanga loved to dance and having seen him playing with a whip at one of the Fugs’ performances, Rubin suggested he bring the whip along. When Malanga got up in front of the tourists in his black leather pants and started gyrating with his whip to the rhythm of the black-clad musicians’ dystopian songs, Warhol realized this was something he could work with. And it appealed to his ironic sensibility to answer Sedgwick’s defection to Dylan with a rock band of his own.

  By now, Edie had added heroin and cocaine to her daily drug cocktails, and perhaps this was why she toppled into a six-week affair with Cale even as Warhol and the Velvets negotiated a management deal. Over the prior weeks, she had grown increasingly desperate as Dylan’s attention and a Hollywood film offer had become equally elusive. One night, high, she stripped off all her clothes and ran down Park Avenue “naked as a lima bean,” generating the kind of gossip-column items that quickly killed any hope for a modeling career. In January, when Lou Reed gave in to Warhol’s pressure to incorporate Nico, a tall, Nordic ex-girlfriend of Dylan’s, into the band, Sedgwick drifted back from the East Side to the Chelsea to hang out with Neuwirth and drop acid with Gregory Corso, who was newly arrived from Paris.

  Dylan, his secret wife now tucked out of sight with their infant son, remained evasive and preoccupied—this time with the first recording sessions for his album Blonde on Blonde—but he seemed to have Edie on his mind. He launched the sessions with “She’s Your Lover Now,” a sneering dismissal of a friend and a former lover, then moved on to “Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat,” whose teasing references to Edie’s well-known fashion preference were guaranteed to start tongues wagging. Next, he tried “One of Us Must Know (Sooner or Later),” with its sad assurance that the singer “didn’t mean to make you so sad,” that he “really did try to get close to you.” But something wasn’t working. After scheduling studio time in Nashville for mid-February, he departed on tour with the Hawks—but without Neuwirth.

  The week Dylan’s tour began, an Edie Sedgwick film retrospective was scheduled at the Cinémathèque, but when Sedgwick balked at Warhol’s suggestion to have the Velvet Underground provide a soundtrack, Warhol canceled the event. Rubin, jumping at the chance to try something more radical, urged Warhol to replace the retrospective with a multimedia happening using films, colored lights, dancers, and music by the Velvet Underground, but with his own twist. Instead of staging the euphoric, consciousness-altering rituals of the past, Andy Warhol, Up-Tight would channel the speed-enhanced anxiety seeping through the city as it passed the decade’s midpoint: the jangled nerves manifested in Dylan’s sarcastic new songs, Warhol’s white plastic Kitchen, Arthur C. Clarke’s murderous HAL 9000, Bertolt Brecht’s grating Mahagonny on Harry Smith’s record player, and William Burroughs’s battles with the word virus.

  Staged at the Filmmakers’ Cinémathèque, now in a small avant-garde movie house on West Forty-First Street, Andy Warhol, Up-Tight opened with the film Lupe, starring Edie Sedgwick as the Mexican actress Lupe Vélez who dies from an overdose of barbiturates, drowning in her own vomit with her head in a toilet bowl. As the film ended, the Velvet Underground assembled on the darkened stage before the stunned audience, turned up their amps as high as they would go, and began blasting out songs of addiction and subjugation while silent torture scenes from Vinyl and images of utopian lovemaking from Christmas on Earth played over their dark forms. Sedgwick and Malanga joined in as dancers, miming sadomasochistic rituals and gyrating to the beat, and Factory denizen Nat Finkelstein roamed the theater taking photographs of uptight audience members, all of them illuminated by a kaleidoscope of colored lights projected by another Factory regular, Danny Williams. As the noise and vibration built to a chaotic, nerve-shattering climax, Barbara Rubin appeared with her movie camera and a blinding sun gun and zoomed in on individuals, screaming, “Is your penis big enough?” and “Does he eat you out?,” shocking them into a state of near hypnosis and giving them an experience they would never forget.

  This was the ultimate act of making the private public—of forcing into the light the most private aspects of strangers’ lives—and it served as a culmination of everything that Warhol, the Velvets, and the filmmakers had been doing for the past half a dozen years. The sense of empowerment was thrilling for the performers. “We all went out to dinner after each show,” Malanga said. “Andy’s question to everybody was always the same, ‘How can we make it more interesting?’” This art wasn’t beautiful, but it felt profoundly truthful. It signified “the last stand of the ego, before it either breaks down or goes to the other side.” The best part of the experiment, Lou Reed pointed out, was that “it wasn’t Andy putting it all together.” Everyone collaborated, using all art forms in combination, a twentieth-century incarnation of Fourier’s communal opera adapted to the social conditions of the times.

  Not surprisingly, after a single night at the Cinémathèque, Mayerberg decided that Warhol’s circus would not do for his discotheque, but a number of college film departments called to book Andy Warhol, Up-Tight on the strength of Warhol’s reputation as a filmmaker. As Warhol and his new assistant Paul Morrissey began planning a college tour, however, Sedgwick began to crack under the strain of her increasingly straitened circumstances. Her trust fund was gone, spent on drugs and dinners and limousines. A final flurry of photo spreads appeared in the New York Times Magazine and Vogue, but she was growing desperate for money. Her connection to Dylan seemed to offer the best chance for escape, and she clung to that possibility even as the songwriter drifted away.

  The situation reached a crisis one evening near the end of February 1966 as Sedgwick, Warhol, the Velvet Underground band members, and other Factory regulars were dining at the Ginger Man—the same West Side restaurant where Sedgwick had regularly treated everyone to dinner and drinks only a year before. But now her childlike carelessness was gone, and her voice was shrill as she demanded that Andy tell her what her role was with the band and when she would be paid for her film work. When Warhol replied that she had to be patient, she snapped, “I can’t be patient. I just have nothing to live on.” Hoping to provoke him, she added that she’d signed a contract with Albert Grossman and that he’d advised her not to hang around with Andy because it was bad for her reputation. She didn’t want Warhol to show her films anymore either, since she would be starring in a movie with Bob Dylan soon.

  Sedgwick was unaware that with that last remark, she had presented Warhol with an irresistible opportunity to take revenge for her poor treatment of him in recent months. Half smiling, he remarked in his deadpan manner that that was funny, because just that day he had been in his lawyer’s office and had overheard him say that Dylan had been secretly married to Sara Lowndes for months.

  As his words penetrated the noisy dining room, the table went silent and Edie turned pale. “What? I don’t believe it! What?” she stammered. Watching her, it dawned on the others that Edie really had seen herself as a potential partner for Dylan and that they were witnessing the death of her Hollywood dream.

  Sedgwick was rarely seen again in the company of the Factory regulars. But in the real world outside, she found few people willing to come to her aid. For a while, she managed to get work as a fitting model for Betsey Johnson, the young designer who had featured her in her photo shoot for Mademoiselle—only a year before, though it seemed a lifetime ago—and who was now the in-house designer for the ultra-hip Paraphernalia boutique on Madison Avenue.

  As Sedgwick posed in Paraphernalia’s cellophane minis, personifying, in the words of its house designer, “the total essence of the fr
agmentation, the explosion, the uncertainty, the madness” of the sixties, and as Up-Tight embarked on its cross-country tour, Dylan huddled with his musicians at Columbia’s Music Row Studios in Nashville re-creating the Hotel Chelsea’s multihued, reckless, carnival-like atmosphere for Blonde on Blonde. His first act on arrival there, on Valentine’s Day 1966, was to dismiss the musicians and spend six hours alone in the studio, getting down on paper the songs he wanted to record. “I just started writing and I couldn’t stop,” he later recalled. Over the next two days, including one overnight session, brilliant renditions of “Fourth Time Around,” “Visions of Johanna” and “Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands” were produced. “Just listen to that! That’s old-time religious carnival music!” Dylan cried out when he listened one last time to that tribute to Sara before the album’s release in July. He himself did not know where this music had come from or how he had managed to produce it. As a whole, the double album, from the raucous pronouncement that “everybody must get stoned,” to the teasing references to a “pill-box hat,” to the shattered woman with “her amphetamines and her pearls,” was as close as anyone would get to the fully American form of musical expression that Virgil Thomson had predicted—the kind of music that could provide a voice for a generation.

  With Blonde on Blonde completed, Dylan ventured west to resume his own tour—just as Andy Warhol, Up-Tight returned to New York, bringing its speedy images, strobes, and over-amped sounds with it. If Dylan’s album had emerged from the outsider past of Harry Smith’s Anthology, Up-Tight plugged into the pharmaceutical-drenched, dystopian future reflected in Smith’s and the other underground filmmakers’ current works. Through the sheer force of sound waves, its black-draped musicians blasted apart any remnants of hope or idealism, while their dancers got out the whips and chains. This was no game, Lou Reed said. “We were doing a specific thing that was very, very real.”