POPism
Page 8
Jane looked terrific standing there in the new look—pants and a sweater. Her jeans were black—I guess she’d picked that up from Bailey, who’d photographed her a lot while she was over there. I could see that she’d also picked up his way of talking, which, aside from being cockney, was to add “sort-of-thing” at the end of her sentences sort-of-thing. And she talked about the “Switched-On Look,” which was a phrase she said Bailey had coined.
Jane said she couldn’t wait to get back to Europe. (Getting to Europe was a running theme in the sixties—everyone was either just coming back or just about to go or trying to get to go or trying to explain why they weren’t already there.) She was such a gorgeous girl—great skin and hair. And so much enthusiasm—she wanted to do everything. I asked her if she wanted to be in a movie and she got excited: “Sure! Anything beats being a Park Avenue housewife!”
The first movie Jane did for me was Soap Opera, filmed over P. J. Clarke’s, the Third Avenue pub. It was subtitled The Lester Persky Story in tribute to Lester, who eventually became a movie producer. Lester introduced the hour-long commercial on television in the fifties that had Virginia Graham showing you all the different ways you could use Melmac, or Rock Hudson doing vacuum-cleaning demonstrations. Lester let us use footage from his old TV commercials, so we spliced sales-pitch demonstrations of rotisserie broilers and dishware in between the segments of Soap Opera.
When President Kennedy was shot that fall, I heard the news over the radio while I was alone painting in my studio. I don’t think I missed a stroke. I wanted to know what was going on out there, but that was the extent of my reaction.
In a little while Henry Geldzahler called up from his apartment and said that he’d been having lunch at the Orthodox Jewish restaurant on 78th and Madison, downstairs, where everyone from the Met and the NYU Art Institute always ate, and that the waiter had said in Yiddish, “De President is geshtorben,” and Henry had thought he meant the president of the cafeteria.
He was so affected when he found out it was Kennedy that he went right home and now he wanted to know why I wasn’t more upset, so I told him about the time I was walking in India and saw a bunch of people in a clearing having a ball because somebody they really liked had just died and how I realized then that everything was just how you decided to think about it.
I’d been thrilled having Kennedy as president; he was handsome, young, smart—but it didn’t bother me that much that he was dead. What bothered me was the way the television and radio were programming everybody to feel so sad.
It seemed like no matter how hard you tried, you couldn’t get away from the thing. I rounded up a bunch of people and got them to come over and we all went out to one of the Berlin bars on 86th Street for dinner. But it didn’t work, everyone was acting too depressed. David Bourdon was sitting across from Susi Gablik, the art critic, and John Quinn, the playwright, and he was moaning over and over, “But Jackie was the most glamorous First Lady we’ll ever get….” Sam Wagstaff, down from the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, tried to console him, and Ray Johnson, the artist, kept dipping dimes into the mustard we were using on our German frankfurters, then going out to drop the mustard-covered dimes into the telephone slot.
A few months before, I’d gotten the word that the hook and ladder company building would have to be vacated soon, and in November I found another loft, at 281 East 47th Street. Gerard and I moved all my painting equipment—stretchers, canvases, staple guns, paints, brushes, silkscreens, workbenches, radio, rags, everything—over to the space that would soon turn into the Factory.
The neighborhood wasn’t one that most artists would want to have a studio in—right in midtown, not far from Grand Central Station, down the street from the United Nations. My loft was in a dirty brick industrial building—you walked into a gunmetal-gray lobby and to your right was a freight elevator that was just a rising floor with a grate. We were on the next-to-the-top floor; there was an antiques place called the Connoisseur’s Corner on the floor above us. We were right across the street from the YMCA, so there were always guys around with those little bus depot–type valises that probably have socks and shaving cream in them. And there was a modeling agency nearby, so there were plenty of girls with portfolios around, and lots of photography labs in the area.
The Factory was about 50 feet by 100, and it had windows all along 47th Street looking south. It was basically crumbling—the walls especially were in bad shape. I set up my painting area with the workbench near the front by the windows, but I kept most of the light blocked out—that’s the way I liked it.
At the same time that we were making the move to 47th Street, Billy Name and Freddy Herko were leaving their apartment downtown. Freddy went to stay somewhere else in the Village and Billy came up to live in the Factory.
The back of the loft space gradually became Billy’s area. Right from the beginning it had an aura about it that was sort of secret; you never really knew what was going on there—strange characters would walk in and say, “Is Billy around?” and I’d point them toward the back.
A lot of them were people I recognized from the San Remo, and after a while I got to know the regulars—Rotten Rita, the Mayor, Binghamton Birdie, the Duchess, Silver George, Stanley the Turtle, and, of course, Pope Ondine. They were always discreet about what they did back there. No one so much as took a pill in front of me, and I definitely never saw anyone shoot up. I never had to spell anything out, either; there was sort of a silent understanding that I didn’t want to know about anything like that, and Billy was always able to keep everything cool. There were a couple of toilets in Billy’s area and a slop sink and a refrigerator that was always stocked with grapefruit juice and orange juice—people on speed crave vitamin C.
The Factory A-men were mostly fags (they knew each other originally from Riis Park in Brooklyn), except for the Duchess, who was a notorious dyke. They were all incredibly skinny, except for the Duchess, who was incredibly fat. And they all mainlined, except for the Duchess, who skin-popped. All this I only found out later, because at the time I was very naive—I mean, if you don’t actually see a person shooting up, you don’t believe they could really be doing it. Oh, I’d hear them call someone on the wall pay phone and say, “Can I come over?” and then they’d leave and I’d just assume they were going to pick up some amphetamine. But where they went I never knew. Years later I asked somebody who’d been around a lot then where exactly all the speed had been coming from, and he said, “At first, they got all their speed from Rotten, but then his speed got so bad he wouldn’t even touch it himself, and from then on, everybody got it from Won-Ton.” That was a name I’d heard a lot, but I’d never laid eyes on him. “Won-Ton was really short and barrel-chested and he never left his apartment—he always answered the door in the same shiny satin latex royal blue Jantzen bathing suit. That was all he ever wore.” Was he a fag? I asked. “Well”—this person laughed—“he was living with a woman, but you got the idea he’d do anything with just about anybody. He worked in construction—he had something to do with the Verrazano Bridge.” But where did Won-Ton get the speed? “That was something you just didn’t ask.”
Billy was different from all the other people on speed because he had a manner that inspired confidence: he was quiet, things were always very proper with him, and you felt like you could trust him to keep everything in line, including all his strange friends. He had this way of getting rid of people immediately if they didn’t belong. If Billy said, “Can I help you?” in a certain way, people would start to actually back out. He was a perfect custodian, literally.
For a while Gerard also lived at the Factory, but that didn’t last too long. Billy and his crowd took over the scene there. The big social thrust behind the Factory from ’64 through ’67 was amphetamine, and Gerard didn’t take it. Gerard was a different type—he was more apt to take a down like Placidyl when he took anything, which he usually didn’t—a few downs, a little acid, some marijuana, but nothing regularly.
Amp
hetamine doesn’t give you peace of mind, but it makes not having it very amusing. Billy used to say that amphetamine had been invented by Hitler to keep his Nazis awake and happy in the trenches, but then Silver George would look up from the intricate geometric patterns he was drawing with his Magic Markers—another classic speed compulsion—and insist that it had been invented by the Japanese so they would export more felt-tip pens. Anyway, they both agreed that it hadn’t been invented by any Allies.
All I knew about Billy was that he had done some lighting at Judson Church and that he’d been a waiter at Serendipity. He gave the impression of being generally creative—he dabbled in lights and papers and artists’ materials. In the beginning he just fussed around like the other A-heads, doing all the busy stuff, fooling with mirrors and feathers and beads, taking hours to paint some little thing like the door to a cabinet—he could only concentrate on a little area at a time—and sometimes he was so high he wouldn’t even realize that he’d just painted it. He wasn’t into astrology and charts and occult things yet.
I picked up a lot from Billy, actually—just studying him. He didn’t say much, and when he did, it was either very practical and mundane or very enigmatic—like if he was ordering from the Bickford’s coffee shop downstairs, he’d be completely lucid, but if you asked him what he thought of something, he’d quietly say things like “You cannot be yes without also being no.”
• • •
Billy was a good trasher; he furnished the whole Factory from things he found out on the street. The huge curved couch that would be photographed so much in the next few years—the hairy red one that we used in so many of our movies—Billy found right out in front of the “Y.”
In the sixties good trashing was a skill. Knowing how to use what somebody else didn’t, was a knack you could really be proud of. In other decades people had sneaked into Salvation Armies and Goodwills, embarrassed that somebody might see them, but in the sixties people weren’t embarrassed at all, they bragged about what they could scavenge here and there. And nobody seemed to mind when a thing was dirty—I’d see people, kids especially, drinking right out of a cup they’d just found in the trash.
One day Billy brought in a phonograph from somewhere. He had a big collection of opera records—I think it was On-dine who started him on that. They both knew every obscure opera singer—I mean, singers no one had ever heard of—and they haunted the record stores for all the out-of-prints and private recordings. They loved Maria Callas best of all, though. They always said how great they thought it was that she was killing her voice and not holding anything back, not saving anything for tomorrow. They could really identify with that. When they’d go on and on about her, I’d think of Freddy Herko, the way he would just dance and dance until he dropped. The amphetamine people believed in throwing themselves into every extreme—sing until you choke, dance until you drop, brush your hair till you sprain your arm.
The opera records at the Factory were all mixed in with the 45’s I did my painting to, and most times I’d have the radio on while the opera was going, and so songs like “Sugar Shack” or “Blue Velvet” or “Louie, Louie”—whatever was around then—were blended in with the arias.
Billy was responsible for the silver at the Factory. He covered the crumbling walls and the pipes in different grades of silver foil—regular tinfoil in some areas, and a higher grade of Mylar in others. He bought cans of silver paint and sprayed everything with it, right down to the toilet bowl.
Why he loved silver so much I don’t know. It must have been an amphetamine thing—everything always went back to that. But it was great, it was the perfect time to think silver. Silver was the future, it was spacy—the astronauts wore silver suits—Shepard, Grissom, and Glenn had already been up in them, and their equipment was silver, too. And silver was also the past—the Silver Screen—Hollywood actresses photographed in silver sets.
And maybe more than anything, silver was narcissism—mirrors were backed with silver.
Billy loved reflecting surfaces—he’d prop broken bits of mirror here and there and paste little sections of them onto everything. This was all amphetamine busywork, but the interesting thing was that Billy could communicate the atmosphere to people who weren’t even taking drugs: usually people on speed created things that only looked good to them. But what Billy did went past the drugs. The only things that ever came even close to conveying the look and feel of the Factory then, aside from the movies we shot there, were the still photographs Billy took.
The mirrors weren’t just decoration. They got used a lot by everybody primping for parties. Billy especially spent a lot of time looking at himself. He positioned the mirrors so he could see his face and body from every angle. He had a dancer’s strut that he liked to check in motion.
1964
Everything went young in ’64.
The kids were throwing out all the preppy outfits and the dress-up clothes that made them look like their mothers and fathers, and suddenly everything was reversed—the mothers and fathers were trying to look like their kids. Even at art openings, the new bright-colored short dresses were stealing the show away from the paintings hanging on the walls. To go with the new clothes, hairdressers were doing either cropped, slick little cuts or incredibly huge teased-out jobs; and as for makeup, lipstick was finished and the big thing was eye makeup—iridescent, pearlized, goldenized—stuff that gleamed at night.
Generally speaking, girls were still pretty chubby, but with the new slim clothes coming in, they all went on diets. This was the first year I can remember seeing loads of people drink low-calorie sodas. (Amazingly, lots of the people who got thinner looked better and younger ten years later at the end of the sixties than they had at the beginning. And of course, tits and muscles were on the way out along with fat, because they bulged too much in clothes, too.) Since diet pills are made out of amphetamine, that was one reason speed was as popular with Society women as it was with street people. And these Society women would pass out the pills to their whole family, too—to their sons and daughters to help them lose weight, and to their husbands to help them work harder or stay out later. There were so many people from every level on amphetamine, and although it sounds strange, I think a lot of it was because of the new fashions—everyone wanted to stay thin and stay up late to show off their new looks at all the new clubs.
The Beatles’ first U.S. tour was that summer, and all of a sudden everybody was trying to be English. The British pop groups like the Beatles, the Dave Clark Five, the Rolling Stones, Herman’s Hermits, Gerry and the Pacemakers, the Kinks, the Hollies, the Searchers, the Animals, the Yardbirds, and so forth, came along and changed everybody’s idea of what was hip from the last vestiges of the tough, big-city teenage look into mod and Edwardian. American boys would fake cockney accents to pick up girls, and whenever they found a real person from London, they’d try to keep him talking and talking so they could get his accent down.
All that summer a young English kid named Mark Lancaster—the English Pop artist Richard Hamilton, whom we’d met at the Duchamp party in Pasadena the year before, had told him to look me up—was coming to the Factory every day, so I got to watch the Anglophilia up close. People would come over to talk to him as he helped me stretch the Flowers for my first show at Castelli coming up in the fall, and the small black and blue Jackies, the funeral image, and some big square Marilyns with different-color backgrounds, and one Jackie-Liz-Marilyn combo. Mark and I would work with Lesley Gore singing “You Don’t Own Me” and Dionne Warwick doing “A House Is Not a Home” and bouncy hits by Gary Lewis and the Playboys and Bobby Vee playing.
Technically, Mark didn’t have a cockney accent, or even a London one; he was from Yorkshire. Still, the first thing kids would ask him was “Do you know the Beatles?”—which surprised him because by then the hottest ticket in England was the Rolling Stones; the Beatles had been the summer before’s thing.
When Mark walked into the Factory for the first time, fresh
from his student flight, he couldn’t get over the fact that the “lift” was silver and self-service and that the girl who had gotten on right after him, Baby Jane, had this huge head of hair and these high little boots.
We were right in the middle of shooting another scene for Dracula. I was sitting on a couch with Jack Smith and Billy; and Rufus Collins, the dancer, and Ondine were around in the background, and Gerard and Jane. Jack was busy with his usual elaborate preshoot preparations, getting a set of fruits and baskets together, and Naomi Levine was darting around, looking very busy and excited.
The first thing I asked Mark was did he want to be in the movie, and he said sure, then everybody started taking off their clothes. He got out of his suit and joined the group molding silver foil jock straps around their underwear. It was so funny to watch people running off to answer the phones in their silver diapers. Gregory Battcock, the art and film critic, had come in, and Sam Wagstaff, who looked like an ageless Clark Kent, and Sam Green, who was working at the Green Gallery that summer. (He loved the way everyone assumed it was his gallery when he said he was “Sam Green from the Green Gallery.” Actually, it was run by Dick Bellamy, who was backed by Bob Scull.)
Since Jack was doing the organizing, there were at least ten people in and out of the movie that day. I ran the camera and did the zoom thing, and after we finished, everyone just sat around in foil for a while. Then, as Mark remembers it, he thought, “Well, that was very nice,” and put his suit back on and came over to thank me for letting him come by. I just said, “See you tomorrow”—I always just said, “See you tomorrow”—so after that he kept coming back every afternoon, and since it was boring to just hang around, he began helping me stretch paintings.
We were still doing Kiss movies that summer and Mark did one with Gerard.
I had fun introducing Mark to people in the art world because then after he’d meet them we’d have more people to gossip about while we stretched. He’d come back from Frank Stella’s studio down on Orchard Street and tell me about the big shaped metallic paintings Stella was doing, or about how Marisol sat down next to him at the Cedar bar and asked him, “Do you think I should go to Sidney Janis?” or about who was down at Bob Indiana’s loft, or about Roy Lichtenstein’s seascapes with clouds and horizons and his new series of landscapes.