POPism (19 page)

I remember one afternoon a group of us, including Edie and Gerard and Mel and Ingrid Superstar, a big tall blonde from New Jersey who'd just come on the scene, all walked over to the opening of
Darling
at the Lincoln Art Theater on West 57th Street. As usual, the movie was over by the time we got there. Mel pointed at two bottles of champagne with six paper cups set on a table out in the lobby and laughed—“This is
easily
the tackiest party of the season….” And as if that weren't bad enough, the manager was just getting up to make a speech—with a microphone yet—to a group of people who'd sort of wandered in off the street. Somebody must have told him, “Edie and Andy are here,” because he spent two minutes giving a warm welcome to “Edie and Andy,” thanking them profusely for coming, before he looked around, blank, and said, “Now, uh, will Andy and Edie please step forward?” He had absolutely no idea which ones we were. So Edie and I pushed Ingrid and Gerard toward him,
and the manager thanked them some more. It was a case of “We're thrilled to have you. Who
are
you?” But that was the way it was all over town—people were glad to have us at their parties, but they weren't exactly sure why they should be glad. It was a lot of fun because it made absolutely no sense.

After that gala opening, we went down to a place on Christopher Street called the Masque that only lasted a couple of weeks. Everybody there dressed in tinfoil and the only thing they served was Coca-Cola. The guy who ran it had asked Brigid to work as the official hostess, but she'd refused. Before the Masque closed down for good, Ingrid got to give a poetry reading there, and she was thrilled when Dylan wandered into it.

Ingrid was just an ordinarily nice-looking girl from Jersey with big, wide bone structure posing as a glamour figure and a party girl, and what was great was that somehow it worked. She was a riot. She watched all the other girls and would sort of put on airs and try to do what they did. It was so funny to see her sitting there on the couch next to Edie or, later, Nico and International Velvet, putting on makeup or eyelashes exactly the way they did, trading earrings and things and beauty tips with them. It was like watching Judy Holliday, say, with Verushka. We would tease her endlessly, like tell her she was in the running for the next Girl of the Year.

“Fabulous!” Ingrid said. “What do I have to do to make it?”

“Go into seclusion,” somebody advised her.

“I can't go into
seclusion
—I'm lonely enough as it
is
!”

In the middle of all her airs, she'd suddenly come from behind like that with total honesty that cut right to the point. Deep down, Ingrid was absolutely unpretentious.

We took her everywhere with us, she was so much fun, so easygoing—the type of girl who'd jump up and do the pony no
matter what year it was. And she wore go-go boots, she really did, and her poems were good, really good, half poetry and half comedy. And everywhere we went, she thought she knew somebody. You know the routine: “Is that—? That guy looks like this guy I—Is it?… Is it? No, it really
looks
just like him, though…”

During the summer and fall, Edie started saying she was unhappy being in underground movies. One night she asked Mel and me to meet her at the Russian Tea Room for a “conference.” She wanted him to arbitrate while she explained to me how she felt about her career. That was one of her standard ploys—getting everyone involved in whether she should do this or that. And you really did get involved. That night she said she'd decided that she definitely was going to quit doing movies for the Factory.

Jonas Mekas had just offered us a lot of consecutive nights' screenings at the Cinemathèque to do whatever we wanted with, and we thought it would be fabulous to have an Edie Sedgwick Retrospective—meaning, all of her films from the last eight months. When we'd first thought of it, we all thought it was hilarious, including Edie. In fact, I think Edie was the one who thought of it. But now, this night at dinner, she was claiming that we only wanted to make a fool out of her. The waiter moved the Moscow Mules aside and put our dinners down, but Edie pushed the plate aside and lit up a cigarette.

“Everybody in New York is laughing at me,” she said. “I'm too embarrassed to even leave my apartment. These movies are making a complete fool out of me! Everybody knows I just stand around in them doing nothing and you film it and what kind of talent is that? Try to imagine how I feel!” Mel reminded her that she was the envy of every girl in New York at that moment,
which she absolutely was—I mean, everybody was copying her look and her style.

Then she attacked the idea of the Edie Retrospective specifically, saying that it was just another way for us to make a fool out of her. By now I was getting red in the face; she was making me so upset I could hardly talk.

I told her, “But don't you
understand?
These movies are art!” (Mel told me later that he was floored when he heard me say that: “Because your usual position was to let other people say that your movies were works of art,” he said, “but not to say it yourself.”) I tried to make her understand that if she acted in enough of these underground movies, a Hollywood person might see her and put her in a big movie—that the important thing was just to be up there on the screen and let everybody see how good she was. But she wouldn't accept that. She insisted we were out to make a fool of her.

The funny thing about all this was that the whole idea behind making those movies in the first place was to be ridiculous. I mean, Edie and I both knew they were a joke—that was why we were doing them! But now she was saying that if they really were ridiculous, she didn't want to be in them. She was driving me nuts. I kept reminding her that
any
publicity was good publicity. Then, around midnight, I was so crazy from all the dumb arguing that I walked out.

Mel and Edie stayed up talking until dawn, and finally she made some sort of “decision.” “But you could never expect anything too systematic from Edie's thinking,” Mel told me later, “because the next afternoon when I called her, everything she'd ‘decided' was all changed around.”

That was essentially the problem with Edie: the mood shifts
and the mind changes. Of course, all the drugs she was taking by now had a lot to do with that.

Anyway, she did make some more movies with us.

We were showing our films like
Screen Test
, the
Beauty
series, and
Vinyl
all that summer at the Factory and at the Film-Makers' Coop, which was now down on Lafayette Street. Even though we never knew ourselves till the very last minute which films we were going to screen, somehow, as if by magic, the people who were in the movie, or friends of theirs, would always know to turn up. (
Screen Test
was Ronnie Tavel off-camera interviewing Mario Montez in drag—and finally getting him to admit he's a man. And
Vinyl was
our interpretation of
A Clockwork Orange
with Gerard as a juvenile delinquent in leather saying lines like “Yeah, I'm a J.D.—so what.”)

Over the Labor Day weekend we went out to Fire Island to shoot
My Hustler
starring Paul America. Lester Persky had “discovered” Paul at the discotheque Ondine and brought him around to the Factory. Paul was unbelievably good-looking—like a comic-strip drawing of Mr.America, clean-cut, handsome, very symmetrical (he seemed to be exactly six feet tall and weigh some nice round number). I don't remember how he got the name Paul America, unless it was because he was staying at the Hotel America on West 46th Street between Sixth and Seventh avenues, a super-funky midtown hotel that was the kind of place Lenny Bruce, say, stayed in.

The minute we got off the Fire Island ferry, lugging our movie equipment in all those heavy metal suitcases, we had to rush to meet a friend of Rotten Rita's called the Sugar Plum Fairy
in a gay bar in Cherry Grove so he could show us the way to the house we were supposed to be staying at. As the two Pauls—Morrissey and America—walked through the bar holding the suitcases high over their heads and maneuvered their way through the crowd, someone yelled, “Oh, look! Honeymooners!”

We filmed
My Hustler
in black and white. It was the story of an old fag who brings a butch blond hustler out to Fire Island for the weekend and his neighbors all try to lure the hustler away.

Years later I read an interview with Paul America in
The New York Times
where he stated that he'd been on LSD all during the shooting. I didn't know that, specifically, at the time, but what I did know was that there was a
lot
of it out there that weekend. We were with the Cambridge kids again, and they were slipping it into everything. I made sure I only drank tap water, and I only ate candy bars where I could tell if the seal had been broken. Believe me, I knew these people well enough to know that if you spent a weekend with them, you'd get a dose of acid if you weren't careful.

Speaking of acid, Gerard took his first trip shortly after we moved to the Factory in January of '64. I walked in one day and there he was with a broom in his hand, crying and sweeping up the loft. Now this—the sweeping—was the kind of thing Gerard never did. He was a good worker as far as stretching and crating went, but one of his big shortcomings was that he could be very slobby (you'd open up his desk drawer and mixed in with notebooks and papers would be his dirty laundry), so when I saw him actually sweeping up, I was stunned. I said to Billy, “What's wrong with him?” And Billy lifted his head up and turned to me slowly and said, “He's… tripping.” Apparently Billy was, too.

Everybody has different stories about who had acid that weekend and who didn't. All anyone agrees on is that we had a Crystals record called “He Hit Me (and It Felt Like a Kiss)” playing over and over day and night, which everyone loved because the lyrics were so sick. Gerard said that the acid was in the eggs and that everybody ate the eggs, including him. Stephen Shore said that he saw the Sugar Plum Fairy put it in the orange juice and that everybody drank the juice, except him. For months afterward Gerard insisted that the acid was in the scrambled eggs and that I had some. We had long fights about it.

“Everybody ate the scrambled eggs, Andy.
Paul
ate the eggs,
I
ate the eggs,
you
ate the eggs—we
all
ate the eggs! I
saw
you eat them. Admit it!”

“I did
not,”
I'd insist. “I knew they were going to put it in the eggs, so of course
I didn't eat any
. I wasn't eating anything there anyway!”

“Andy, I
saw
you eat them.”

“You were tripping, right? So then you hallucinated it, because
I
didn't have any.”

“Why don't you just admit it,” Gerard would keep saying. “It was beautiful, a beautiful trip. No one had a bad trip, not even Paul
Morrissey
! I mean, when we found him beside the boardwalk in the fetal position, he was
smiling…
.”

“Look, Gerard, maybe
Paul
ate the eggs, maybe
you
ate the eggs, maybe
everybody in Cherry Grove
ate the eggs, but
I
did
not!”

“Andy. We came into the kitchen and you were on the floor picking up the garbage and putting it into bags in a very childish, very peculiar way.”

Gerard obviously thought people only cleaned when they tripped. I could never convince him that I absolutely hadn't had
anything that was going around, that I was really living off candy bars and tap water the whole weekend.

It was funny to watch them all tripping, though. The night everyone was on acid, they marched in a pilgrimage from the house to the beach, pretending they were Columbus or Balboa or, anyway, someone out to discover the New World—and it was all very primal until somebody looked down at the Fire Island shoreline and saw a jar of Vaseline.

This is the only time I know of that Paul Morrissey apparently got dosed with LSD and I noticed he was much more careful about what he ate at parties after that weekend. As I said, Paul was against
all
drugs and he definitely hadn't wanted to take any LSD, so he was embarrassed about it to the point where he began to deny the whole thing. However, I saw him in the fetal position beside the boardwalk, and, to tell you the truth, he
was
smiling.

By now we were obsessed with the mystique of Hollywood, the camp of it all. One of the last movies we made with Edie was called
Lupe
. We did Edie up as the title role and filmed it at Panna Grady's apartment in the great old Dakota on Central Park West and 72nd. Panna was a hostess of the sixties who put uptown intellectuals together with Lower East Side types—she seemed to adore the drug-related writers in particular. We'd all heard the stories about Lupe Velez, the Mexican Spitfire, who lived in a Mexican-style palazzo in Hollywood and decided to commit the most beautiful Bird of Paradise suicide ever, complete with an altar and burning candles. So she set it all up and then took poison and lay down to wait for this beautiful death to overtake her, but then at the last minute she started to vomit
and died with her head wrapped around the toilet bowl. We thought it was wonderful.

Edie would still vacillate between enjoying the camp of making movies with us and worrying about her image, and by vacillate I mean she'd go back and forth from hour to hour. She could be standing, talking to a reporter, and she'd look over at us and giggle, then tell him something arch like “I don't mind being a public fool—as long as I'm communicating myself and reaching people.” That was one side of her, putting the media on like that. But then fifteen minutes later, she'd be having a dead serious tantrum that she wasn't being taken seriously as an actress. It was a little insane.