POPism (34 page)

In the sixties, average types started having sex-identity problems, and some people saw a lot of their own questions about themselves being acted out by the drag queens. So then, naturally, people seemed to sort of want them around—almost as if it made them feel better because then they could say to themselves, “I may not know exactly what I am, but at least I know I'm not a drag queen.” That's how in '68, after so many years of being repelled by them, people started accepting drag queens—even courting them, inviting them everywhere. With the new attitude of mind-before-matter / where-your-head-is-at / do-your-own-thing, the drags had the Thing of Things going for them. I mean, it
was
quite a thing, it took up all of their time. “Does she tuck?” the other queens would ask Jackie about Candy, and Jackie would say something oblique like “Listen, even Garbo has to rearrange her jewels.”

Candy herself referred to his penis as “my flaw.” There was always that question of what to call the drags—“him” or “her” or a little bit of both. You usually just did it intuitively. Jackie I always called “him” since I'd known him before he went into drag, and Candy Darling and Holly Woodlawn were “her” because they were already in it when I met up with them.

But if in '68 the drag queens were incorporated into the fun of the general freak scene, in
'67
they were still pretty “queer.” One hot August afternoon during that Love Summer of '67, Fred and I were out walking around the West Village on our way to pick up some pants I was having made up at the Leather Man. There were lots of flower children tripping and lots of tourists watching them trip. Eighth Street was a total carnival. Every store had purple trip books and psychedelic posters and plastic flowers and beads and incense and candles, and there were Spin-Art places
where you squeezed paint onto a spinning wheel and made your own Op Art painting (which the kids loved to do on acid), and pizza parlors and ice cream stands—just like an amusement park.

Walking just ahead of us was a boy about nineteen or twenty with wispy Beatle bangs, and next to him was a tall, sensational blonde drag queen in very high heels and a sundress that she made sure had one strap falling onto her upper arm. The two of them were laughing, and as we turned onto Greenwich Avenue, where the hustlers leaned against the wall, we saw the blonde throw her head back and say loud, for all the cruising fags to hear, “Oh, just look at all these Green Witches.” Then the boy happened to turn around. He recognized me and asked for my autograph on the paper bag he had from the English clothes boutique Countdown. I asked him what was in the bag.

“Satin shorts for the tap-dancing in my new play,
Glamour, Glory, and Gold
. It opens in September; I'll send you an invitation. My name's Jackie Curtis.”

I was taking a closer look at the blonde. She was much more attractive from a distance—up close, I could see that she had real problems with her teeth, but she was still the most striking queen around. Jackie introduced the blonde as “Hope Slattery,” which was the name Candy was using in those days—her real name was Jimmy Slattery and she was from Massapequa, Long Island.

At some point much later on, after I'd gotten to know both of them very well, Jackie told me how he and Candy had gotten together:

“I met her in practically the same spot that we met you—right by Sutter's ice cream parlor—and I told her, ‘There's something, uh, different about you.' And she said, ‘I draw attention
because I'm like women on the screen.' And I looked at her and thought, ‘Now,
please
. Just
who
is this one like on the
screen?
…' Because, Andy, she was a mess. Before she started taking care of herself a little, she looked like the maid in
Dinner at Eight
. Her teeth… Her teeth…” Jackie shook his head in a let's-not-think-about-her-teeth gesture. “To be truthful, she looked more like the fists of Señor Wences than anything else—a blonde wig on a fist with lipstick and two button eyes…. Señor Wences? On
The Ed Sullivan Show?
Anyway, we went into Sutter's and bought a Napoleon. She bit into it and her one good tooth fell out. We stood there staring at it in the palm of her hand, laughing hysterically and going, ‘Oh, my God, oh, my God….' I thought to myself, ‘This woman is incredible.' I walked her back to where she was staying—the Hotel Seventeen on 17th Street between Third Avenue and Stuyvesant Park, a quiet street with little buildings and lots of window boxes and trees. I was so naive, I didn't recognize all the classic signs that she was dodging her bill there—even when I saw that they were holding her stuff down in the lobby. When she saw that, she turned right around on her high heels and ran across the street. When I caught up with her, she was peering into some guy's ground-floor windows. A dog came out to the bars, and she was going, ‘Isn't that dog pret-ty? Pret-ty dog, pret-ty dog….' And I thought to myself, ‘She's trying to convince that
dog
that she's a real woman!' Meanwhile she didn't know how to get her stuff back—she'd crawled out of her window and she was ashamed. They knew her scene, and she really was scared.

“Candy touched me so much because I saw myself in her—I was so up-in-the-air myself. I wrote
Glamour, Glory, and Gold
right away and put her in it that fall.”

When you hear a person say they're from New York City, you expect them to be really hip and all that. So when Jackie talked about himself as being “naive,” it was hard to believe, because after all, he'd grown up on Second Avenue and 10th Street—the upper Lower East Side—living with his grandmother, Slugger Ann, who owned a bar there.

I said to him, “Come
on
, Jackie, how can you talk about ‘naive' when you grew up in the East Village?”

“Yeah, well,” he said, giving me a look, “that's not exactly Greenwich Village, you know.”

I saw his point. For a kid, the West Village street scene was a lot farther away than just the few blocks in physical distance.

Jackie and Candy hung around together for the rest of the summer, and Slugger Ann even gave Candy a job as a barmaid.

“My grandmother,” Jackie said, “did not know that Candy was no genetic female. And she certainly did not know Candy would come to work in a slip! But having her there did draw in some new customers—a few fairies from the West Village who couldn't believe she really had a job.”

Getting a job in a bar was a dream come true for Candy. She wanted to be the kind of woman you'd find in a diner on Tenth Avenue “slinging hash”—that was maybe her favorite fantasy. Either that or a female whore that men slapped around and treated like dirt. Or even a lesbian—she liked that, too. Anything but a man.

Candy didn't want to be a perfect woman—that would be too simple, and besides it would give her away. What she wanted was to be a woman with all the little problems that a woman has to deal with—runs in her stocking, runny mascara, men that
left her. She would even ask to borrow Tampaxes, explaining that she had a terrible emergency. It was as if the more real she could make the little problems, the less real the big one—her cock—would be.

Eric once told me that he'd known Candy from way back in '64. “I used to see her and Rona walking around Bleecker Street. They rode in on the train together from Massapequa and they'd pretend to be girl friends—lesbians.” Rona was another Max's girl. “Candy was going to this German doctor on 79th and Fifth that we all went to,” he said. “It was like a dating agency there—everybody knew everybody. Candy was just starting to sprout little rosebuds underneath her blouse from the hormones he was giving her.”

The Beatles'
Sgt. Pepper
music was the main strain you heard all through the summer; you'd hear it playing absolutely everywhere. And the
Sgt. Pepper
jacket was the general uniform for the boys at this point—the high-collar military jacket with red epaulets and piping that they wore with stovepipe pants—nobody was wearing bell-bottoms anymore. As for hair, lots of the boys had theirs Keith Richard–style—spiky and all different lengths.

Edie was still around town, living at the Chelsea, but she rarely came by the Factory anymore. One time right after Edie had been there, Susan Pile opened up her pocketbook to take out a phenobarbital and found her pill vial empty—except for an I.O.U. that Edie had stuck in it.

On August 4 the designer Betsey Johnson, who was now engaged to John Cale, had a party for “The Return of Leo” at her
place on West Broadway. There was dancing—lots of the Rascals (“Groovin'”) and Aretha Franklin (“Respect”) and the Jefferson Airplane (“Somebody to Love”). Every time the Doors' “Light My Fire” went on—which it did a lot, the long version—Gerard's expression went sour. He'd never gotten over the fact that Jim Morrison had copied his leather look, never mind that he'd made it a pop hit: the more famous Jim Morrison got, the more cheated Gerard felt.

Jim had just been in town playing the Scene and he was supposed to be in our movie,
I, a Man
. That summer Nico, who we were always trying to get to do a feature-length movie with us, finally said, “All right. I'll do a movie for you, but it has to be with Jim.” She had a big crush on him then. When she asked him, he said sure; he said he knew all about underground movies, that he'd been a film student and all that. But then Nico showed up with a Hollywood actor named Tom Baker instead. “Jim's manager told him he can't do it,” she said, “but this is a good friend of Jim's from L.A. and he wants to,” and we thought why not.

We'd finished shooting
I, a Man
a few days before the party at Betsey's and it was scheduled to go into the Hudson Theater very shortly (our last movie to play there was
My Hustler
).
I, a Man
was a series of scenes of this guy, Tom, seeing six different women in one day in New York, having sex with some, talking with some, fighting with some. Maybe it was hearing about our having so many girls in a movie for a change that gave Viva the idea that she'd like to be in our next one, because she cornered me at Betsey's party and asked me if she could be.

This was only the third time I'd ever had a conversation with Viva. She'd come over and introduced herself to me at some art opening around '63, when she was living with a photographer
and trying to become a fashion illustrator. I don't remember what we talked about then—art, maybe (she knew a lot of artists). Louis Waldon, an easygoing actor we knew, had run into her for the first time down in the Village around '60, and he once told me about that:

“I met Viva in Joe's Dinette on West 4th Street. She had scabs all over her head. She'd just gotten out of a mental institution for a nervous breakdown and she was picking at the scabs and trying not to. She asked me what I did,” Louis said, “and I told her, ‘I'm an actor.' She looked me over and said, ‘You're a what? You don't look like an actor.' I said, ‘Well, I am.' She said, ‘No, I don't think you
are.'
At that time she was painting. She'd been a model in Paris, but she just couldn't make it there, so she went home to upstate New York and her parents put her in a mental institution.”

I was surprised to hear that Viva had actually had a nervous breakdown—all I'd ever heard her talk about was that she was
about
to.

“When did she recover?” I asked him.

Louis gave me a look and said, “Listen, has she
ever?”

“Oh, but she was never that bad, was she?” I said.

“No, that's the whole thing with Viva—she's never
that bad
. She's bad enough to drive you nuts and sane enough to keep it up….” Louis and Viva fought constantly (they were an even match) and yet they really liked each other a lot.

But the night of Betsey's party I didn't know much more about her than what I was seeing right in front of me. She had a face that was so striking you had the choice of whether to call her beautiful or ugly. I happened to love the way she looked, and I was impressed with all the references she kept dropping to literature and politics. She talked constantly, and she had the most
tiresome voice I'd ever heard—it was incredible to me that one woman's voice could convey so much tedium. She told me that she'd just done a nude scene in a movie Chuck Wein was filming,
Ciao, Manhattan
, and she asked me if I was planning to do a new movie soon. I told her that we were shooting another one the following day, and I gave her the address so she could show up if she wanted to.

I knew that we were probably going to have more trouble with the censors soon—at least if our movies kept getting attention—and I guess I must have known in the back of my mind that it would be a smart idea to have at least one really articulate performer in each movie. The legal definition of “obscenity” had that “without redeeming social value” phrase in it, and it occurred to me that if you found someone who could look beautiful, take off her clothes, step into a bathtub, and talk as intellectually as Viva did (“You know, Churchill spent six hours a day in his tub”), you'd have a better chance with the censors than if you had a giggly teenager saying, “Let me feel your cock.” It was all just silly legal startegy, though, because to me they were all great, all just people being their real selves on camera and I liked them all the same.

Viva told me that night at the Leo party that she was madly in love with John Chamberlain, the sculptor, but that he was in love with Ultra Violet. She asked me what I knew about Ultra, what her secret was, that so many men were crazy about her, and I said I didn't know anything at all about her. Then I asked her what
she
knew about her.

“Absolutely nothing,” Viva said. “Where does she get her money?”

I didn't know that, either, then, but because that was usually the first thing people wanted to know about Ultra—after
all, she dressed expensively and had that big Lincoln and lived in that Fifth Avenue penthouse—I wasn't surprised at Viva's question. Later on, however, as I got to know her better, I found that this was the first thing Viva wanted to know about
every
body: “Where do they get their money?”