POPism (43 page)

By September I was back at work.

I had to wear heavy surgical corsets to support my scarred sections, but as glued-together as I felt, I was thrilled to be back at the Factory.

However, every single time I'd hear the elevator in the shaft just about to stop at our floor, I'd get jumpy. I'd wait for the doors to open so I could check who it was. We decided to have an entrance hallway built so we could screen people before we let them into the main area, and in the wall there we put a Dutch door—closed at the bottom, open on top. Of course, these security things were just symbolic—they wouldn't stop anyone who had even a good kicking foot, never mind a gun. Still, the place at
least
looked
like it would be much harder to crack. Anyway, the days when people could just drift in were over.

Everyone around the Factory was more protective of me, too—they could see I still had a lot of fear, so they turned anybody away who was acting at all peculiar. I found myself spending a lot of time in the little office on the side, hiding in there with the door closed, talking to the new typist I'd hired. Before, I'd always loved being with people who looked weird and seemed crazy—I'd thrived on it, really—but now I was terrified that they'd take out a gun and shoot me.

Seeing how I'd changed so much, Paul said, “You know, Andy, you've always encouraged people who operate on… uh…” He looked for the words. “… tenuous mental health to come around here. But it's just trouble, and now
you
,” he said, pointing to my chest and stomach, “know that better than anybody.”

Paul was right, of course: obviously I should avoid unstable types. But choosing between which kids I would see and which ones I wouldn't went completely against my style. And more than that, what I never came right out and confided to anyone in so many words was this: I was afraid that without the crazy, druggy people around jabbering away and doing their insane things, I would lose my creativity. After all, they'd been my total inspiration since '64, and I didn't know if I could make it without them.

I still had to spend a lot of time in bed. Whenever I did go out anywhere after leaving the Factory for the day, I would slip away very early and go home. Then I could wake up at seven all rested and get right on the phone, calling up everyone to see what had
happened after I'd left the party. This vicarious routine suited me as well as actually being there. I started to really enjoy being home in bed, surrounded by candy, watching TV, talking and taping on the phone.

It was easy for me to suddenly stay away from the crazy scenes I'd loved because, actually, there wasn't too much going on anymore. Things had peaked in the summer of '67, and then begun to wind down. Fall '68 was “Hey Jude” time, and everybody was saying how things were more “mellow.”

As for Valerie, as far as we knew she was still in jail. Then on Christmas Eve '68, I answered the phone at the Factory and almost fainted when I heard her voice demanding that I drop all criminal charges against her, pay her twenty thousand dollars for all the manuscripts she'd ever written, put her in more movies, and—she capped the list with every lunatic's biggest dream—get her booked on the Johnny Carson show. If I didn't, she said, she “could always do it again.”

My worst nightmare had come true: Valerie was out. A man with a name we didn't recognize had put up ten thousand dollars' bail for her.

Luckily she'd been threatening other people around New York, too, so when she showed up at court downtown for her hearing on January 9, she was arrested again.

Five months later, just about a year after the shooting, I picked up the
Daily News
and the front page read,
“WARHOL GUN GAL DRAWS
3
YEARS.”
The article reported that Valerie could put the time she'd already spent in jail toward the three years, so that meant that the most the sentence was for was two.

Toward the end of '69 I got a letter from Vera Cruise who wrote that she'd just gotten convicted of car theft. She'd been
sent to Matteawan, too, and she was seeing a lot of Valerie. According to Vera, Valerie talked about “getting Andy Warhol” when she got out.

Right after I got Vera's letter, Matteawan released Valerie, saying she was cured. She called the Factory a few times, but then she stopped—she must have found some other interests because I never saw her again, although occasionally people would say they'd seen her on the street someplace, usually in the Village.

By fall of '68 the mini look was finished. The year had started off with crotch-high hemlines, but by spring you saw all different-length skirts on the fashionable people. And with all the new talk about above-the-knee/midcalf/to-the-floor/wherever, women were wearing more pants suits. This was the season of the great debates about which of the best restaurants would let a lady in with pants on—there were big controversies and interviews with all the matîre d's.

The Max's kids wore more thrift store clothes. The Pakistani-Indian-international-jet-set-hippie look—all embroidered and brocaded—was big. People spent a lot of time in flea markets and antique and secondhand stores, and that look was also showing up—not only in closets but in their apartments and houses. It was as if everyone suddenly realized that “labor” was becoming a thing of the past, that you'd never be able to get the same kind of details in clothes or furniture or anything else ever again.

The tapes the new typist was busy transcribing for me were all the hours and hours I'd been recording over the phone and in person since the first ones of Ondine and company back in '65.

Those Ondine tapes were collected to make a book,
a
, which Grove Press brought out at the end of '68. We called it a “novel by Andy Warhol” but it was actually just transcriptions of all the Ondine tapes with some of the names changed (for example, Ondine was Ondine, and Rotten was Rotten, but I was “Drella” and Edie was “Taxine”).

Billy worked with Grove Press, making sure that the pages in the book matched the way the high-school typist had transcribed them, right down to the last spelling mistake. I wanted to do a “bad book,” just the way I'd done “bad movies” and “bad art,” because when you do something exactly wrong, you always turn up something.

The reviews for
a
weren't all that good. (My favorite bad review described the book as “a bacchanalian coffee klatsch.”) All I wanted was for someone in Hollywood to buy the rights, so Ondine and I could see great-looking actors like Troy Donahue and Tab Hunter playing us. I mentioned this to Lester Persky, who'd just gotten his first big movie-producing credit (
Boom
, the movie Judy Garland had wanted to star in so badly—the one she'd fought with Lester and Tennessee about at the Factory back in '65—had finally come out, starring Elizabeth Taylor).
“Please
, Andy,” Lester groaned when I asked if he'd like to buy the movie rights to
a
. “I'm trying to forget where I came from. It's literary
properties
I'm looking for—not atrocities…”

At the end of July I took Ondine and Candy up to the round-the-block line for Judy Garland at Frank Campbell's Funeral Home on 81st and Madison. I wanted to tape-record them as they were waiting to go past the casket. I knew all Judy's fans would be there crying and carrying on about how much she'd meant to them. I had it in my head that this would make a great
play—Ondine and Candy in a line stretching across the stage with criers and laughers all over the place, and everybody telling each other what'd brought them there. I knew it would be just the kind of thing Judy herself would have thought was hysterically funny.

But being with Ondine that day was really strange; it was like being with a normal person. He hadn't been coming around the Factory much. He had a steady lover now, he said he was totally off speed, and he was sort of settled down, working as a mailman—actually delivering letters for the U.S. Postal Service in Brooklyn! As we stood on Judy's line, I must have just gaped at him—I couldn't believe that he was the same person who'd babbled and screeched his way through
a
on speed, laughing and stuttering and being outrageous. He was saying chatty, conventional things, like “It's very hot out, isn't it?” and he moved normally—no lurching or lunging or foaming at the mouth.

For weeks I couldn't stop thinking about this new nonpersonality of Ondine's. Talking to him now was like talking to your Aunt Tillie. Sure, it was good he was off drugs (I supposed), and I was glad for him (I supposed), but it was
so boring:
there was no getting around that. The brilliance was all gone.

After Billy finished working on the galleys of
a
, he did something very weird: he went into his darkroom and didn't come out. Nobody saw him during the day anymore. In the mornings we would find take-out containers and yogurt cups in the trash, but we never knew whether he went out himself at night to get food or whether some of his friends brought it in to him.

At first it didn't seem like a big deal, just a phase he was going through, but then when it got to be spring and he still
hadn't come out, everyone started wondering exactly what was going on in there.

The darkroom was right next to the bathroom that we all used—the rooms were actually linked by a high, painted-over transom window in the wall, and sounds passed through easily so that when you were in the john, if Billy was moving around and doing things, you could hear—and naturally he heard all the pissing and shitting and running water and flushing all day.

Occasionally he'd let someone who stopped by to see him into the darkroom but mostly he wouldn't even answer their knocks.

Everybody expected me to try to somehow get Billy to come out, but I didn't. So many people said to me, “Don't you think he's waiting for
you
to
ask
him to come out?” But I had no idea what had made him go in, so how could I get him to come out? And even if I could, why should I? I felt it wasn't really right to interfere like that. Billy had always seemed to know exactly what he was doing, and I just didn't want to butt in; he'd come out when he wanted to, I figured—when he was ready to.

By November '69 he'd been in the closet just about a year. New people thought it was all very strange that we had this person living in a darkroom who we never saw. But when a situation develops gradually, no matter how weird that situation is, you get used to it. Occasionally we'd ask him through the door if there was anything he needed. I didn't even know if he was still taking amphetamine. But then one day Lou Reed came by and spent three whole hours in the darkroom with Billy. When he came out, he looked really spooked.

“I should never have given him that book last year,” Lou said, shaking his head.

I didn't know what he was talking about.

“The Alice Bailey book,” he said. “Actually, I gave him
three
of them.”

I'd heard that name before. Ondine used to mention her a lot; she wrote occult books.

“I was reading one of her books,” Lou said, “but it was so difficult, I thought, why not have Billy read them and tell me, you know, the interesting parts? The next thing I knew he was in the closet and not coming out. He's shaved his head completely—he said the hairs were growing in, not out—and he's only eating whole-wheat wafers and rice crackers.”

“But I thought he goes out at night after we leave and gets stuff from Brownies.” Brownies was the health food store around the corner.

“Not anymore,” Lou said. “Now he's following the white magic book that shows you how to rebuild your cell structure—you play with the cell centers and eat, like this yogurt. I asked him to tell me how to do it, and he said it could be really dangerous, that he'd only tell me part of it because if I made a mistake and did something wrong, I could end up like him.”

“What was the part he told you?”

“It was just, like, a chant—
Ahhhhhmmmmmmmn
”

Things kept getting weirder and weirder with Billy. In the john we'd hear talking on the other side of the wall, and for a while we thought another person had moved in there with him. It turned out that both voices were Billy's. But I still felt he should work whatever it was out for himself, and I believed that, somehow, he would.

For me, the most confusing period of the whole sixties was the last sixteen months. I was taping and Polaroiding everything in sight, but I didn't know what to make of it all.

In '69 there were big California earthquake predictions, and Danny Fields went out there and rented a house as close as he could find to whatever fault line it was, because, he told us, “I want to be in a Disaster. I've been seeing movies about them for so long, I really want to know what it feels like.” People were so bored that they wanted something big to happen—in the media, in the earth crust, anywhere, anything.

I went down to the Factory compulsively every afternoon and spent four to six hours there, yet I was confused because I wasn't painting there and I wasn't filming there. I would just sit in my tiny office and peek out toward the front at Paul and Fred taking care of business. When harmless-looking friends or friends of friends stopped by, I'd step out and tape and photograph them, and then I'd go back into my office and wait for somebody else to drop by.

Now that I think back on it, I guess it was all the mechanical action that was the big thing for me at the Factory at the end of the sixties. I may have felt confused myself, but the sounds of phones and buzzers and camera shutters and flashbulb pops and the Moviola going and slides clicking through viewers, and most of all, the typewriter and the sounds of voices off the tapes being transcribed—all those things were reassuring to me. I knew that work was going on, even if I didn't have any idea what the work would come to. I'd get jealous whenever I'd hear about other low-budget people suddenly coming into big bucks, getting money from sources that sometimes would even leave them completely alone to do their art. I still felt that our films, full of the strange, funny people we picked up on, were unique, and I couldn't understand why no big studio had come forward to push us forward.