I Left It on the Mountain: A Memoir (15 page)

KS:
Do you remember him as sexy?

BB:
Nooooooo! Are you kidding? I was never an Andy Warhol groupie. I really enjoyed Billy and Ondine and didn’t give a hoot if Andy was along or not. A lot of these girls really had crushes on Andy—Edie, International Velvet, Ivy Nicholson. I just never did. I was never impressed with stardom or stars or who people were. I figured I knew them all already because of the way I grew up. I mean, I felt that Clark Gable and Spencer Tracy were the ultimate, and this was all just something different.

KS:
How crazy was that first Factory? Were there drug parties? Orgies?

BB:
Oh yeah. Everybody was taking speed. We were all on pills. But I never thought of it as “drugs.” When I was sixteen my family doctor prescribed speed for me, but I didn’t know what it was. It was just medicine to help me lose weight. I never smoked grass. I never did LSD. But I loved amphetamines.

KS:
The films started at that first Factory.

BB:
Yeah, but I didn’t get involved until
Chelsea Girls
. That’s when I took the name Brigid Polk, because I was poking amphetamines.

KS:
Were you aware enough back then to know how decadent the whole scene at the Factory would seem to an outsider?

BB:
No. Because I was “up there” all the time on speed I never even thought of the word “decadent.” It was just the way we were living our lives. You know, Andy started taping in those days at the old Factory. That was before these little tape recorders, too. He had some big sort of contraption set up. He’d shove the microphone at me and tell me to go back and sit on the couch and talk. And I’d just do these monologues that would last for hours and hours, talking to nobody. I’d say, “Andy, can I get up now?” And he’d say, “Come on, there’s another reel. Just go to the end of the reel.”

KS:
Would you do anything he told you to do?

BB:
No. I just talked into that tape recorder because I thought it was fun. Plus I was flying. I was running around in these outfits I called my lavalavas. I had cropped hair. Elephant pants. I had the nerve back then to walk around completely topless to Bickford’s down on Second Avenue to pick up the milk shakes. I mean no top on. This was right after Christina Paolozzi had gone topless in
Harper’s Bazaar
in the sixties. That was the new thing, you know.

KS:
What was the reason the original Factory moved down to Union Square?

BB:
We were running out of room. Andy had to have more space to paint. The movies needed more room. Paul Morrissey got this idea that once we moved it should become more like a business. Like Hollywood. Like a movie studio. So they rented this place at 33 Union Square. It had a balcony. We mirrored the place. Made some makeshift desks with file cabinets. There was a reception desk with a phone as you walked in the door. There was this little room that Andy would disappear into. That’s where Pat Hackett began to transcribe Andy’s tapes. By then Andy was taking his tape recorder everywhere. In the back is where we showed the movies and kept the furniture that Fred Hughes had begun collecting in Paris. Billy was then sort of the Factory foreman. He also lived there—in a room no bigger than a closet. It was his darkroom and he also slept there. At night Andy wouldn’t be there, so Billy would have me up there and Rotten Rita and Ondine. The opera would start blaring again. We would come there after a night at Max’s Kansas City.

KS:
Were you there at Union Square when Andy was shot?

BB:
I was on my way to the Factory when it happened. It was a very, very hot day. I had just left my sister. I told the driver to take me on to 33 Union Square West, but I got to 23rd Street and changed my mind. I lived at the George Washington Hotel at that point and I went back and started to dye clothes. I dyed clothes every day in my bathtub. That’s where I got the phone call. I ran to Cabrini Medical Center. It was a madhouse. Everybody was there … Viva, Ultra Violet … everybody was praying. There was this little chapel. Andy never let me up to see him in his hospital room because he thought I’d make him laugh and it would hurt where he’d been sewn up. Or that I might steal pills from the nurses’ station. So I’d sit across the street at a friend’s house—a cashier from Max’s Kansas City—and just write him these long letters about how boring it was without him.

I was the first person he let photograph his scars after he got out. We went back to his little room at the Factory and he took off his shirt and I took off my top so he wouldn’t be embarrassed. There I was, topless, photographing Andy’s chest full of scars. I was selling photographs of the scars because I was having my own shows then. But when all the scars were sold, I had to go back to Andy and tell him, “Look, I have to have twenty more pictures. You have to come back in the little room with me. They’re selling like hotcakes. A hundred dollars apiece.” He was really funny about that. He kept letting me do it. I never knew why. He wouldn’t let anybody else.

KS:
Did Andy become a different sort of person after the assassination attempt?

BB:
No. I think the rest of us changed and became more cautious. We started having some security at the Factory. There were so many crazies around. They were just nuts.

KS:
Did you ever see Andy without his wig?

BB:
No. But when the Factory moved over to 860 Broadway the wigmaker used to make deliveries. He once had a store on 42nd Street but had gone out of business. He was still making Andy’s wigs out at his home in Queens somewhere. His name was Mr. Bocchicchio. He’d deliver them in these great big green boxes. Andy would always come out with his check and take the boxes. Once he left one of the boxes in an office and I opened it up. I have pictures of me holding up one of those wigs. I always said if I did a book I’d have that picture on the cover and call it
The Lid Is Off
.

KS:
Was Andy like a parent to you? A husband? A brother? A lesbian lover?

BB:
I’ve always been a part of the Factory, but Andy and I also had a twenty-year telephone relationship. I mean, I got bored with going out with him all the time. But we’d have three-hour phone conversations. We’d tape each other. And that would confuse me—whose tape was the original? I always thought that it was sort of like a work of art—that there were two originals. I still have all those tapes. Fourteen hundred hours’ worth. They cover 1968 through 1976. After I stopped taking speed and straightened myself out, I never thought of making another tape recording.

KS:
Let’s talk about the third Factory—the one at 860 Broadway.

BB:
Well, we still needed more space. Andy had really become a packrat with his collecting and all. The first thing we did was put in a kitchen. It began to be a thing for people to stop by for lunch, although a lot of times we’d just order up box lunches from Brownies, the health food store downstairs, like we did at Union Square. Also, McDonald’s was just getting to be big, and Andy would sit on the windowsill eating his hamburger. He’d sit there folding up the little tissue that the hamburger came in and save it. He just couldn’t throw anything out. All of this began to go in the boxes—you know, the things we called his time capsules. At 860 Broadway this pack-rat part of Andy really got out of hand and drove me nuts. I figured out the only time I could clean the place and throw stuff out was early in the morning before he came in. But then he’d open up the garbage can, see what was in there, and pull out stuff to save—like empty coffee cans. We had so many cockroaches at 860. There was white powder everywhere because we were trying to get them under control, but we never did. One day I decided to clean out all the file drawers because the roaches had even gotten in there. You know, just old paper clips and stuff like that. Well, Andy came in and got so angry. He started yelling at me, “I know you’re an heiress, but who do you think you are, throwing perfectly good paper clips out!” He was really angry. He did have his quirks.

KS:
Any others you can remember?

BB:
Well, after he was shot he never opened a package. And especially he would never eat any food that was sent to him for Christmas. We would have to open the packages for him. I used to say to him, “That’s a helluva thing—you won’t open it because you think a bomb might explode, but you don’t care if we get blown up!”

KS:
How did he get along with your parents?

BB:
Well, my mother never really forgave him for what he did to me in
Chelsea Girls
. She thought he was exploiting me. But in the end she began to come around. She was very sick and dying at the time Andy died. She died two weeks after he did. That was a rough month. About six or seven months before they both died I was coming out of the dentist’s one morning at Fifty-seventh and Madison and ran into Andy. He asked me, “What are you doing up here? Why aren’t you at the Factory working?” So I told him I’d just been to the dentist. Then he changed his tune and started showing concern for me. “It’s such a pretty day,” he said. “Why don’t we go for a walk and buy your mother a present?” We walked across 57th and went into Chanel and he bought her a beautiful pair of earrings. You know, I buried her in those earrings. It’s funny—since my mother’s death I have not been able to picture her alone. But I don’t picture her with my father. I always picture Andy and Mother sitting up there—I guess I do believe in heaven or something—looking down at me and gossiping. “See, she’s fat,” he’ll say to her. Or she’ll say, “See, she’s bad. She’s misbehaving. She’s into a candy box today.”

KS:
You and Andy used to binge on chocolate together, didn’t you. You both told me that once. And once you even let me binge with you. I felt so special—bingeing with Brigid and Andy.

BB:
But Andy would spit it out. He’d chew and chew and chew—and then he’d spit it into a paper towel. A lot of times he’d give me a hundred dollars and say, “Go get the good stuff.” That would mean, if we were here at this Factory on 33rd Street, to go over to B. Altman’s candy department and get the best.

KS:
Who first came up with the name “the Factory”?

BB:
I never really thought that much about it. It was probably Billy Name. So much of it is a blur. It was like one big party.

KS:
Was each Factory very different from the preceding one?

BB:
Yes. But I think a lot of it had to do with maturity. Everything has evolved, of course, from that very beginning on 47th Street to where we are now on East Thirty-third. It has become more of a business over the years—but there still is that sense of family. I still think of it that way, except Andy isn’t here. There’s been a death in the family.

KS:
Which was your favorite Factory?

BB:
I grew to love all of them for different reasons. I mean, it would be a nightmare to go back to 47th Street now. I wouldn’t dream of going back to Union Square. I just can’t conceive of going back. It’s the new generation of kids that is interested in the sixties. Come on, get with it! We’re practically in the nineties now. I can’t dwell on the sixties. I mean, I know I’ve been around longer than anybody who’s left at the Factory. But I just don’t have that kind of feeling about myself. It’s been almost twenty-five years. But do you think I really know what’s going on today? Nooooo. I’ve never been to M.K. Don’t want to. I never even saw the Palladium. My stint ended with Studio 54. I just got sick and tired of being sick and tired.

KS:
Did you always have a job at the Factory or did you just hang out?

BB:
The job part sort of started at 860 Broadway. I never went every day to Union Square. I got involved when
Interview
started up. But I think
Interview
might have begun upstairs at Union Square originally. You know, Andy always said he started
Interview
for me. Because of Daddy. He wanted to have his own Hearst empire.

KS:
Why do you think Andy always had to have people around him at the Factories?

BB:
Because that was part of his art. He had to be stimulated by other people. He used to walk through here every day going, “What am I going to do, Brigid? I need some ideas. I can’t think of any art to do. Everybody else is doing such great things. I’m doing awful stuff.” And I’d say, “You gotta pay me for my ideas, Andy.” Then it would be, “Brig, when is your mother going to have her portrait done by me?” And I’d say, “Andy, my mother would never have her portrait done by you. I don’t want a portrait by you. I can’t stand them. I wouldn’t have one of your portraits hanging on my wall if you paid me a million dollars!” Maybe that’s why we were so close, because I used to tell him the truth. I never liked his art! He used to offer his art to me for Christmas, and I told him I’d rather he get me a washing machine and dryer. And he did! Wasn’t I a fool?

KS:
Forget about the material things. What sort of emotional sustenance did Andy’s friendship give you over the years?

BB:
He just understood. If I was drinking and doing speed, he understood. If I was going to my A.A. meetings, as I do now, he understood. You know, he always wanted to write a book on me. All that taping he did of me all those years was the research he was doing for my life story. So, in a way, I’m really doing my book now for him. I don’t know. What can you call something that you really, really love, that you have near you every single solitary day, but that you’re not even aware of? Some people can be your best friends and you don’t see them all the time, but I saw Andy practically every day for over twenty years. It’s ironic—it’s hard to describe because in reality there was no mystery in it. It was all so comfortable. If I didn’t still come to the Factory every day I’d probably feel very lonely. I was just thinking this morning when I got to the Factory—I get here pretty early—how Andy used to call me around 8:30
A.M.
knowing I was usually alone in the place. Sometimes I really do miss him. He’d call up—especially at 860 Broadway—and say, “Gee, Brig, what’s new? Who’s called?” And I’d say, “Nobody’s called, Andy.” And he’d say again, “What’s new?” I’d say, “Nothing’s new.” “What’s new?” “Nothing’s new.” “What’s new?” “Nothing.”