by Tom Wolfe
All these things kept happening, Harrison said. His life was always full of this drama, it was like living in the middle of a hurricane. It finally wore him out, he is saying. “It wasn’t the libel suits.
“Some of these people we wrote about would be very indignant at first, but I knew goddamned well it was a beautiful act. What they really wanted was another story in Confidential. It was great publicity for them. You couldn’t put out a magazine like Confidential again. You know why? Because all the movie stars have started writing books about themselves! Look at the stuff Flynn wrote, and Zsa Zsa Gabor, and all of them. They tell all! No magazine can compete with that. That’s what really finished the Confidential type of thing.”
So Harrison retired with his soap-bubble lawsuits and his pile of money to the sedentary life of stock-market investor.
“I got into the stock market quite by accident,” Harrison is saying. “This guy told me of a good stock to invest in, Fairchild Camera, so I bought a thousand shares. I made a quarter of a million dollars the first month! I said to myself, ‘Where the hell has this business been all my life!’ ”
Harrison’s sensational good fortune on the stock market lasted just about that long, one month.
“So I started putting out the one-shots, but there was no continuity in them. So then I got the idea of Inside News”
Suddenly Harrison’s eyes are fixed on the door. There, by god, in the door is Walter Winchell. Winchell has on his snapbrim police reporter’s hat, circa 1924, and an overcoat with the collar turned up. He’s scanning the room, like Wild Bill Hickok entering the Crazy Legs Saloon. Harrison gives him a big smile and a huge wave. “There’s Walter!” he says.
Winchell gives an abrupt wave with his left hand, keeps his lips set like bowstrings and walks off to the opposite side of Lindy’s.
After a while, a waiter comes around, and Harrison says, “Who is Walter with?”
“He’s with his granddaughter.”
By and by Harrison, Reggie and I got up to leave, and at the door Harrison says to the maître d’:
“Where’s Walter?”
“He left a little while ago,” the maître d’ says.
“He was with his granddaughter,” Harrison says.
“Oh, was that who that was,” the maître d’ says.
“Yeah,” says Harrison. “It was his granddaughter. I didn’t want to disturb them.”
In the cab on the way back to the Madison Hotel Harrison says, “You know, we’ve got a hell of a cute story in Inside News about this girl who’s divorcing her husband because all he does at night is watch the Johnny Carson show and then he just falls into bed and goes to sleep and won’t even give her a tumble. It’s a very cute story, very inoffensive.
“Well, I have an idea. I’m going to take this story and show it to Johnny Carson. I think he’ll go for it. Maybe we can work out something. You know, he goes through the audience on the show, and so one night Reggie can be in the audience and she can have this copy of Inside News with her. When he comes by, she can get up and say, ‘Mr. Carson, I see by this newspaper here, Inside News, that your show is breaking up happy marriages,’ or something like that. And then she can hold up Inside News and show him the story and he can make a gag out of it. I think he’ll go for it. What do you think? I think it’ll be a hell of a cute stunt.”
Nobody says anything for a minute, then Harrison says, sort of moodily,
“I’m not putting out Inside News for the money. I just want to prove—there are a lot of people say I was just a flash in the pan. I just want to prove I can do it again.”
Chapter 11
The Girl of the Year
BANGS MANES BOUFFANTS beehives beatle caps butter faces brush-on lashes decal eyes puffy sweaters French thrust bras flailing leather blue jeans stretch pants stretch jeans honeydew bottoms eclair shanks elf boots ballerinas Knight slippers, hundreds of them, these flaming little buds, bobbing and screaming, rocketing around inside the Academy of Music Theater underneath that vast old mouldering cherub dome up there—aren’t they super-marvelous!
“Aren’t they super-marvelous!” says Baby Jane, and then: “Hi, Isabel! Isabel! You want to sit backstage—with the Stones!”
The show hasn’t even started yet, the Rolling Stones aren’t even on the stage, the place is full of a great shabby mouldering dimness, and these flaming little buds.
Girls are reeling this way and that way in the aisle and through their huge black decal eyes, sagging with Tiger Tongue Lick Me brush-on eyelashes and black appliqués, sagging like display window Christmas trees, they keep staring at—her—Baby Jane—on the aisle. What the hell is this? She is gorgeous in the most outrageous way. Her hair rises up from her head in a huge hairy corona, a huge tan mane around a narrow face and two eyes opened—swock!—like umbrellas, with all that hair flowing down over a coat made of … zebra! Those motherless stripes! Oh, damn! Here she is with her friends, looking like some kind of queen bee for all flaming little buds everywhere. She twists around to shout to one of her friends and that incredible mane swings around on her shoulders, over the zebra coat.
“Isabel!” says Baby Jane, “Isabel, hi! I just saw the Stones! They look super-divine!”
That girl on the aisle, Baby Jane, is a fabulous girl. She comprehends what the Rolling Stones mean. Any columnist in New York could tell them who she is … a celebrity of New York’s new era of Wog Hip … Baby Jane Holzer. Jane Holzer in Vogue, Jane Holzer in Life, Jane Holzer in Andy Warhol’s underground movies, Jane Holzer in the world of High Camp, Jane Holzer at the rock and roll, Jane Holzer is—well, how can one put it into words? Jane Holzer is This Year’s Girl, at least, the New Celebrity, none of your old idea of sexpots, prima donnas, romantic tragediennes, she is the girl who knows … The Stones, East End vitality …
“Isabel!” says Jane Holzer in the small, high, excited voice of hers, her Baby Jane voice, “Hi, Isabel! Hi!”
Down the row, Isabel, Isabel Eberstadt, the beautiful socialite who is Ogden Nash’s daughter, has just come in. She doesn’t seem to hear Jane. But she is down the row a ways. Next to Jane is some fellow in a chocolate-colored Borsalino hat, and next there is Andy Warhol, the famous pop artist.
“Isabel!” says Jane.
“What?” says Isabel.
“Hi, Isabel!” says Jane.
“Hello, Jane,” says Isabel.
“You want to go backstage?” says Jane, who has to speak across everybody.
“Backstage?” says Isabel.
“With the Stones!” says Jane. “I was backstage with the Stones. They look divine! You know what Mick said to me? He said, ‘Koom on, love, give us a kiss!’ ”
But Isabel has turned away to say something to somebody.
“Isabel!” says Jane.
And all around, the little buds are batting around in the rococo gloom of the Academy of Arts Theater, trying to crash into good seats or just sit in the aisle near the stage, shrieking. And in the rear the Voice of Fifteen-year-old America cries out in a post-pubertal contralto, apropos of nothing, into the mouldering void: “Yaaaagh! Yuh dirty fag!”
Well, so what; Jane laughs. Then she leans over and says to the fellow in the Borsalino hat:
“Wait’ll you see the Stones! They’re so sexy! They’re pure sex. They’re divine! The Beatles, well, you know, Paul McCartney—sweet Paul McCartney. You know what I mean. He’s such a sweet person. I mean, the Stones are bitter”—the words seem to spring from her lungs like some kind of wonderful lavender-yellow Charles Kingsley bubbles—“they’re all from the working class, you know? the East End. Mick Jagger—well, it’s all Mick. You know what they say about his lips? They say his lips are diabolical. That was in one of the magazines.
“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 fro
m 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 blond 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 languid, 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-uh-tul, 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 basically 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 proper
ty 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, silver-smithery, 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 facade 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.