POPism (10 page)

One of the dances that Freddy Herko choreographed for the Judson was a Mozart ballet where the audience was confined to
two rows in the outer perimeter so that there would be a very large space open in the center. The sound over the loudspeaker was a phonograph needle being put on a record, and then a Mozart pastorale kind of music started playing. Shepherdesses appeared in romantic tutus and overdraped classical Watteau-like outfits and began to dance. But then the phonograph went wrong and they had to start all over again, only this time they couldn't seem to get anywhere. The rest of the dancers came in anyway, but finally they got so mad they just ignored the phonograph completely and suddenly it was the sound of their own drumming feet that was getting them going and instead of dancing the formal dances, they turned into a circle of runners around the church and, little by little, they pulled the whole audience into a snake coiling around and around till gradually they all slowed down and… stopped.

For another of his ballets Freddy canvassed the shops that sold window-display material till he got the glitter he wanted—the idea of using cheap, sleazy elements was unusual at the time because of the cliché aspect. Freddy's piece started from a soft note on the organ in the darkened church. A little light appeared in the center of the balcony, and as the organ note swelled, the light grew till you saw a woman leaning over the light base. She was draped in chiffon and looked more like a mound of light with a face on top of it than a real woman. Slowly, she lifted her arms, picking up a little glitter, and as the crescendo increased, so did the glitter until she became a cloud of glitter in a light. Then she faded away into silence and darkness.

Stanley told me, “One night, I was walking with Billy Name and Freddy on the Lower East Side. There was no wind, but it was very cold, it was winter. We came to a group of buildings
that were being razed. One of them was a church. There was sort of an altar place you could just make out in the rubble. Freddy rushed across the street into a store that was still open and bought a penny candle, came back and took all his clothes off, lit the candle, and danced through the set for the life of the candle.”

This spring of '63 I had met a just-married, twenty-two-year-old beauty named Jane Holzer. Nicky Haslam took me to a dinner at her Park Avenue apartment. David Bailey was there, and he'd brought the lead singer in a rock-and-roll group called the Rolling Stones that was then playing the northern cities of England. Mick Jagger was a friend of Bailey's and Nicky's and he was staying down at Nicky's apartment on East 19th Street at the time.

“We met him when he was Chrissy Shrimpton's maid,” Nicky told me, “Jean's younger sister. She put an ad in the paper—‘Cleaner wanted'—and up turned Mick. He was a student at the London School of Economics; he was just cleaning flats to pay his way. And then she fell in love with him. We kept telling her, ‘But Chrissy, he's so awful looking,' and she'd say, ‘Not really.'”

This is a little like prehistory, because almost nobody in America then had heard of the Rolling Stones—or the Beatles. At Jane Holzer's dinner I'd noticed Bailey and Mick. They each had a distinctive way of dressing: Bailey all in black, and Mick in light-colored, unlined suits with very tight hip trousers and striped T-shirts, just regular Carnaby Street sport clothes, nothing expensive, but it was the way he put things together that was so great—this pair of shoes with that pair of pants that no one else would have thought to wear. And, of course, Bailey and
Mick were both wearing boots by Anello and Davide, the dance shoemaker in London.

The next time I ran into Jane, on Madison Avenue, she was just back from the big '63 summer in London when everything had really started to happen there. She couldn't stop raving about a club in Soho in back of Leicester Square, the Ad Lib, where the Beatles would walk by your table—the kind of place where, say, Princess Margaret could come in and nobody would even bother to look up, the beginning of the melting pot in class-conscious London.

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.

Amphetamine 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.”