The Purple Decades - a Reader

by Tom Wolfe

  But what a freaking show. Here is some wooden sculpture of some sort, two very tall pillars of wood—and then there is a bunch of drawings. Except that there doesn’t seem to be anything on the paper, just a lot of framed blank paper on the wall. What the hell is this? Scull goes up very close to a drawing and then he can see there is a hard little design on the paper done with a hard pencil, a No. 8 or something, so you can hardly see it. Then down at the bottom, also in this hard pencil, are these poverty-stricken little words: “Water, water, water.”

  So Scull turns to the girl and he says, “I’ve seen a lot of things, but how does this guy think he’s going to sell these?”

  “Well …”

  “I mean, I don’t know what this whole art thing is coming to. You can’t even see what’s on the paper.”

  He looks back at it again and it still says “Water, water, water.” That’s all that’s up there. Well, the girl says, it’s by a young artist, they never handled him before. She shrugs. Scull is really bugged by this whole thing.

  “All right,” he says, finally, “how much is this drawing?”

  She gives him a look—what the hell, this girl never even thought about the price before. Nobody ever asked. Finally she says, “It’s $110.”

  “All right,” says Scull, “I tell you what. This whole thing bugs me. I’ll buy this drawing for $110 if you’ll give me the artist’s name, address and telephone number. I want to see what he has to say about this.”

  So she says all right, and it’s Walter De Maria. So the following week Scull calls up the number. The thing is, the whole thing disturbs him, and so this guy may have something he ought to know about. The telephone conversation disturbs him some more. This Walter De Maria comes to the phone and Scull says, “This is Robert Scull.”

  “Yes.” That’s all he says.

  “Do you know who I am?”

  There’s this long pause. Then this hesitant voice: “Yes. You’re the man who bought my drawing.”

  “That’s right,” Scull says. “I’d like to come to your studio and see some more of your work.”

  There’s a big silence. Scull starts saying, Hello, hello. He thinks the guy must have hung up.

  “I don’t know,” the guy says. “I won’t be available.”

  “Look,” says Scull, “I bought your drawing and I want to see some more of your work. Can’t I even come and look at it?”

  “I don’t know. I’m glad you bought the drawing, but you bought the drawing from the gallery, not from me, and I’m not available.”

  Scull is really rocked by this, but he keeps arguing and finally De Maria gives in and says O.K., come on down to his studio. The studio is downtown up in a loft building, about five flights up, and Scull climbs up there. His heart is banging away from the freaking stairs. There’s a small room and then a bigger room beyond, and in the small room here are these two pale, slender figures, Walter De Maria and his wife. Mrs. De Maria is kind of backed off into a corner. She doesn’t say anything.

  “Well,” says Scull to De Maria, “I’d like to see some more of your drawings.”

  So he shows him one and this time Scull has to put on his glasses to see if there’s anything on paper. He looks up, and by this time De Maria is pacing around the room and running his hands through his hair in a terrible state of agitation.

  What the hell is this? Scull says to himself. You could get a heart attack walking up these freaking stairs, and after you get up here, what’s going on? He’s sorry he even came up. But as a last gesture, he asks De Maria to show him what he had been doing before he did the drawings. Here, says De Maria, that’s what I’ve done. What’s that? says Scull. That’s a sculpture, says De Maria. Here is this Skee-Ball, like in the amusement arcades, on a wooden board, and it says on there, “Place ball in upper hole,” and so Scull dutifully places it in the upper hole and pow! it falls down into a hole at the bottom. Scull stares at the ball. And De Maria, like, he’s watching Scull this whole time, waiting for a reaction, but Scull can’t come up with any, except that he’s still bugged.

  “How long have you been a sculptor?” he says.

  “Six years.”

  “Well, can I see some of your earlier work?”

  “It’s in the other room.”

  The other room is bigger, a studio room, with all white walls and a white floor—and nothing else. It’s empty. Yeah, well, where is it? Scull says. Over here, says De Maria. Over here? De Maria is pointing to a little filing cabinet. He’s done a lot of successful sculptures, he says. The only thing is, he never made them. He never made them? No. He couldn’t afford the materials. Well, yeah, says Scull, then he says, What’s in the file? De Maria riffles through and here are more of these sheets of paper with something on there you can’t even see, a few lines and more “Water, water, water” and so forth.

  The whole thing now has Scull so bugged he says, “Look—if I commission you to do one for me and I get you the materials, will you make one?”

  De Maria says O.K. A couple of months go by and finally De Maria says he has completed a design and he’ll need a large plate of silver. Silver? says Scull. Why can’t he use stainless steel. It’s got to be silver, says De Maria. So Scull gets him the silver. Through all this Bob and Spike get to know De Maria a little better, but it’s an unusual relationship. Sometimes one of them says something and there is no response, nothing at all. Other times, they’re all out on the street and De Maria walks way ahead, as if he didn’t know them. Who are these people following him? Bob says to himself: Ah, he’s been through a lot of excitement because of all this. That’s all it is.

  Then three and a half or four more months go by, and—nothing. Bob is on the verge of going back there and getting his silver back. But then one day De Maria calls up and says the sculpture is ready. He brings it up in a truck, and they bring it up into the apartment; it’s the big moment and everything, and here is this big object with a velvet drapery over it. Bob pulls a string and opens up the drapes—and there it is, the piece of silver, the original plate of silver, with nothing on it. Bob stares at the piece of silver. De Maria is watching him just like he did the first day with the Skee-Ball.

  “What is it?” says Scull.

  “Look on the back.”

  On the back is a little piece of chrome inscribed “Nov. 5, 1965, made for Mr. and Mrs. Robert C. Scull.” There are also instructions to photograph the plate of silver every three months and keep the pictures in a photograph album. The sculpture is entitled The Portrait of Dorian Gray. The thing is, says De Maria, the silver will tarnish, and the plate will get blacker and more and more corroded and the film will record the whole process. Every three months until 1975, presumably, Bob or Spike will pull the velvet drapes and take a picture of this piece of corroded metal and then paste it in the scrapbook. The Portrait of Dorian Gray! But of course!

  “I was overwhelmed by it,” Scull told me later. “It’s impossible to describe what happens to a collector when he commissions something and it turns out right.

  Bob and Spike went out to New Jersey to the studio of George Segal. Segal is famous for his plaster-cast sculptures. Bob and Spike commissioned him to make one of them. So Segal started encasing them in the plaster. It was kind of a wild time. Sometimes the plaster starts sticking to the skin when it dries. Spike lost one of her Courrèges boots in the struggle to get out, and Bob—they had to pull his Levi’s off him to keep him from being a permanent living cast. The shape of history, all right. Bob and Spike decided to unveil the sculpture at a party for a couple of hundred celebrities, artists, columnists, and editors. They didn’t even know half of them—but they would come, they would come.

  The afternoon before the party, Jasper Johns’s latest show opened at the Leo Castelli gallery, 4 East 77th Street. There were four huge paintings in the show and Bob wasn’t going to get any of them. For a variety of reasons. For one thing, three of them had been spoken for, by museums. Nevertheless, Bob was in a good mood. Spike
didn’t even show up, but Bob was in a good mood. Castelli’s, especially at an opening like this, was where it was at. You could tell that at a glance. Not by the paintings, but by the Culture buds. They were all there, all these gorgeous little Culture buds, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24 years old, along in there, their little montes Veneris in the sweet honey grip of Jax slax that finger into every fissure, their serious little Culture pouts hooded in Sassoon thrusts and black Egypt eyes—their lubricous presence, like that of the whalebird, indicating where the biggest fish in the sea is.

  Out in the middle of the bud coveys Bob is talking to Leo Castelli. Castelli, New York’s number-one dealer in avant-garde art, is a small, trim man in his late fifties. Bob is Leo’s number-one customer. Leo is the eternal Continental diplomat, with a Louis-salon accent that is no longer Italian; rather, Continental. Every word he utters slips through a small velvet Mediterranean smile. His voice is soft, suave, and slightly humid, like a cross between Peter Lorre and the first secretary of a French embassy.

  “Leo,” says Bob, “you remember what you told me at Jap’s last show?”

  “Noooooooo———”

  “You told me—I was vulgar!”—only Bob says it with his eyes turned up bright, as if Leo should agree and they can have a marvelous laugh over it.

  “Noooooo, Bob”

  “Listen, Leo! I got news———”

  “Nooooooo, Bob, I didn’t———”

  “I got news for you, Leo

  “Nooooooooooo, Bob, I merely said———” Nobody says No like Leo Castelli. He utters it as if no word in the entire language could be more pleasing to the listener. His lips purse into a small lubricated O, and the Nooooooo comes out like a strand of tiny, perfect satinywhite pearls …

  “Leo, I got news for you———”

  “Nooooooooo, Bob, I merely said that at that stage of Johns’s career, it would be wrong—”

  “Vulgar you said, Leo—”

  “—would be wrong for one collector to buy up the whole show—”

  “You said it was vulgar, Leo, and you know what?”

  “What, Bob?”

  “I got news for you—you were right! It was vulgar!” Bob’s eyes now shine like two megawatt beacons of truth; triumphant, for the truth now shines in the land. For one of the few times in his life, Castelli stares back blank; in velvet stupefaction.

  That night, the big party—it was freezing. For a start, Spike was very icy on the subject of Jasper Johns; another of their personal tiffs, and Johns wasn’t coming to the party. But enjoy! Who else is even in a position to have tiffs with the great of the avant garde? It was also cold as hell outside, about 17 degrees, and all these people in tuxedos and mini-evening dresses came up into the Sculls’ apartment at 1010 Fifth Avenue with frozen heads and—kheeew!—right inside the door is a dark velvet settee with a slightly larger than life plaster cast of Ethel Scull sitting on it, legs crossed, and Bob standing behind it. Standing next to it, here in the foyer, are the real Bob and Spike, beaming, laughing, greeting everybody—Gong—the apartment has been turned into a gallery of Bob’s most spectacular acquisitions.

  Everywhere, on these great smooth white walls, are de Koonings, Newmans, Jasper Johns’s targets and flags, John Chamberlain’s sculpture of crushed automobile parts, Andy Warhol’s portrait of Spike made of thirty-five blown-up photos from the Photo-Matic machine in the pinball arcade at 52nd Street and Broadway, op art by Larry Poons with color spots that vibrate so hard you can turn your head and still, literally, see spots in front of your eyes. That is on the dining room walls. There used to be a Rosenquist billboard-style painting in there with huge automobile tire treads showing. Tonight there is a painting by James Rosenquist on the ceiling, a painting of a floor plan, the original idea being that the Sculls could wake up in the morning and look over their bed and see the floor plan and orient themselves for the day. Over the headboard of their king-size bed is an “American nude” by Tom Wesselmann with two erect nipples sitting up like hot cherries.

  Many prominent people are moving about in the hubbub, talking, drinking, staring: George Segal the movie actor, George Segal the sculptor, Leonard Lyons the columnist, Aileen Mehle, who is Suzy Knickerbocker the columnist; Alex Liberman; Mrs. Jacob Javits; Robert Kintner. Larry Poons comes in with his great curly head hung solemnly, wearing a terry cloth Hawaiian shirt with a picture of a shark on it. Poonsy! Spike calls him Poonsy. Her voice penetrates. It goes right through this boilup of heads, throats, tuxedoes. She says this is a big concession for Poonsy. She is talking about the Hawaiian shirt. This is formal for Poonsy. To some parties he wears a T-shirt and a pair of clodhoppers with Kelly green paint sloshed on them. Awash. People are pouring through all the rooms. Gong—the World’s Fair. Everybody leaves the apartment and goes downstairs to where they have three Campus Coach Line buses out on Fifth Avenue to take everybody out to the World’s Fair, out in Flushing.

  The World’s Fair is over, but the Top o’ the Fair restaurant is still going, up in the top of a big mushroom tower. The wreckage of the fair, the half-demolished buildings, are all hulking around it in silhouette, like some gigantic magnified city dump. The restaurant itself, up there at the top, turns out to be a great piece of 1930’s Mo-dren elegance, great slabs of glass, curved wood, wall-to-wall, and, everywhere, huge plate-glass views of the borough of Queens at night.

  Scull has taken over half the big complex at the top of the tower, including a whole bandstand and dance floor with tables around it, sort of like the old Tropicana night club in Havana, Cuba.

  After dinner a rock ‘n’ roll band starts playing and people start dancing. Mrs. Claes Oldenburg, a pretty, petite girl in a silver minidress, does a dance, the newest boogaloo, with Robert Rauschenberg, the artist. The band plays “Hang on, Sloopy.” Rauschenberg has had an outrageous smile on all evening and he ululates to himself from time to time—Ooooooooooo—Gong—the dancing stops and everybody is shepherded into a convention hall.

  There is a movie screen in here and rows of seats. The lights go out. The first movie is called Camp, by Andy Warhol. A group of men and women in evening clothes are sitting in a very formal pose in a loft. One of them is Jane Holzer. A fat boy in some kind of Wagnerian opera costume comes out in front of them and does some ballet leaps, sagging and flopping about. The men and women in the evening clothes watch very stiffly and respectfully. Another fat boy comes out with a yo-yo act. A man in drag, looking like a faded Argentinian torch singer, comes out and does a crazy dance. The basic idea is pretty funny, all these people in evening clothes watching stiffly and respectfully while the performers come out and go into insane acts. It is also exquisitely boring. People start drifting out of the convention hall in the darkness at the Top o’ the Fair. So they stop that film, and the lights go on and a young man named Robert Whitman comes up and puts on his film, which has no title.

  This one is more elaborate. It involves three screens and three projectors. The lights go out. On the left screen, in color, a slender, good-looking girl, kind of a nude Culture bud, with long pre-Raphaelite hair and good beach skin, is taking a shower, turning this way and that. At first water comes out of the nozzle, and then something black, like oil, and then something red, like wine. She keeps waffling around. On the righthand screen, also in color, some nice-looking buds are lying on the floor with their mouths open. You’re looking down at their faces. Food and liquid start falling, cascading down, into their mouths, onto their faces, onto their noses, their eyes, all this stuff, something soft and mushy like pancake mix, then a thin liquid like pineapple juice, then chopped meat, chopped liver or something, raw liver, red and runny, all hitting the old bud face there or going straight down the gullet. Only they keep smiling. Then the whole thing goes in reverse and all the stuff comes back up out of their mouths, like they’re vomiting, only they’re smiling out of these pretty faces the whole time.

  On the center screen, all this time, in black and white—nobody can tell what the hell is going on at
first. There are these sort of, well, abstract shapes, some fissures, folds, creases, apertures, some kind of rim, and some liquid that comes from somewhere. But it doesn’t add up to anything. Of course, it could be some of the abstract forms that Stan Brakhage uses in his films, or—but then, after about fifteen minutes, while Black-haired Beauty on the left waffles in the shower and the Open-jawed Beauties on the right grin into eternal ingestion, it adds up—the girl who was sitting on the rim gets up, and then some large testicles lower into view, and then the organism begins to defecate. The film has somehow been made by slicing off the bottom of a toilet bowl and putting a glass shield in place and photographing straight up from inside the bowl. Black-haired Beauty pivots in the shower, luxuriating in oil, Strawberry Beauty smiles and luxuriates in chopped liver.

  And here, descending head-on into the faces of the 200 celebrities, artists, columnists, editors … is an enormous human turd.

  Marvelous! The lights go on. All these illuminati are sitting here in their tuxedos and mini-evening dresses at the Top o’ the Fair above grand old Nighttime City Lights New York City, above the frozen city-dump silhouette of the New York World’s Fair, like an assembly of poleaxed lambs.

  Walter De Maria! Walter De Maria is on the drums, high up on the Tropicana bandstand, snares, brushes, blond wood, those sturdy five-story loft walkup arms going like hell—Walter De Maria is on the rise. Bob Scull patronized him, helped him out, and De Maria is now among the rising young sculptors. Blam! He beats the hell out of the drums. On the dance floor they’ve seized all the equipment at the Top o’ the Fair, the artists. The band looks on from the side. Walter De Maria has the drums, Claes Oldenburg has a tambourine, his wife Pat, in the silver dress, has a microphone, and Rauschenberg has a microphone. Rauschenberg’s friend Steve Paxton, the dancer, is dancing, waffling, by himself. Rauschenberg and Pat Oldenburg are both ululating into the microphones, wild loon wails—Sloopy!—filling up this whole mushroom-head glass building overlooking frozen Queens. Where are the poleaxed lambs? They have been drifting off. The Campus Coach Line buses have been leaving every half hour, like a bus route. The pop artists, the op artists, the primary artists, have the place: De Maria, Rauschenberg, Rosenquist, Segal, Poons, Oldenburg, they have the Top o’ the Fair. Larry Poons pulls off his shark terry cloth Hawaiian shirt and strips down to his Ford Motor Company Cobra T-shirt, with the word COBRA stacked up the front about eight times. Poons waffles about on the edge of the dance floor, with his head down but grinning.