POPism (5 page)

I was doing a lot of work—I'd been in a group show down in the Washington, D.C., Gallery of Modern Art in April, and I was going to have another show at the Ferus in September, and I had another at the Stable coming up. I definitely needed some help and in June '63 I asked Charles Henri again if he knew of anybody who could help with the silkscreen process. Charles said he did know someone, Gerard Malanga, a student at Wagner College on Staten Island, and he brought us together at a poetry reading at the New School. Gerard, a young kid from Brooklyn, came to play a big role in our life at the Factory. Marie and Willard were sort of godparents to him.

I liked Gerard; he looked like a sweet kid, in sort of a permanent reverie, it seemed—he made you want to snap your fingers in front of his face occasionally to bring him around. He wrote a lot of poetry. He'd met a lot of intellectuals through Willard and Marie. The great thing, though, was that he really did seem to know about silkscreening. He started working for me
right away—for $1.25 an hour, which he always reminds me was the New York State minimum wage at the time. In his first days with me I overheard him on the phone telling Charles Henri that he found me frightening—the way I looked and everything—and then I heard him lower his voice even more and confide to Charles, “Frankly, I think he's going to put the make on me.”

The structure in the hook and ladder company was pretty scary. You literally had to hopscotch over the holes in the floor. And the roof leaked. But we didn't really notice all that much, we were busy getting the Elvises and the Liz Taylor silkscreens ready to ship out to California. One night that summer there was a terrible thunderstorm and when I came in the next morning, the Elvises were sopping wet—I had to do them all over again.

Those were the quiet days. I didn't talk much. Neither did Gerard. He'd take poetry breaks where he'd go off and write in a corner, and sometimes when people came by to see my work, he'd give a reading to them. I'd hear him intoning lines like “The whole situation here seems precarious/…”

Gerard kept up with every arty event and movement in the city—all the things that sent out fliers or advertised in the
Voice
. He took me to a lot of dank, musty basements where plays were put on, movies screened, poetry read—he was an influence on me in that way. He talked sometimes in sort of an archaic literary dialect that he must have picked up reading old poems, and sometimes in a sort of Brooklyn-Boston accent, dropping his
r
's.

We went out to Coney Island a few times that summer (my first time on a roller coaster), groups of whoever was around—people like Gerard; Jack Smith, the underground filmmakeractor;
Taylor Mead, the underground actor; Wynn Chamberlain, the Magic Realist painter; and Nicky Haslam, a new art director at
Vogue
. Nicky had come over from London the year before when his friend, the photographer David Bailey, was bringing his newest model, Jean Shrimpton, over to work for
Vogue
. (Only
Vogue
hadn't used his photographs right away; at first, they had him working just at
Glamour
, where Jean Shrimpton modeled junior clothes.)

It was from Nicky that we first started really hearing about the mod fashion revolution in England that had started in '59 or '60. Nicky may actually have started the frilly men's shirt look because I remember him getting curtain lace at Bloomingdale's and tucking it up his sleeves and everybody would be asking him where he got the “great shirt” because they'd never seen anything like it. He made us aware of the new men's fashions—the short Italian jackets and the pointed shoes (“winklepickers”)—and of the way the cockneys now were mingling with the upper classes and things were getting all mixed in and wild and fun. Nicky would remark that there weren't really any
young
people here like there were in England—that kids here went from being juveniles straight into “young adults,” whereas in England the kids eighteen and nineteen were having a ball. Or starting to, anyway—it was a new age classification.

We all went to the Brooklyn Fox together, too. I hadn't been there with Ivan in quite a while. In fact, I wasn't seeing so much of Ivan now, because I was more on the filmmaking and literary circuit, going to all those holes-in-the-walls with Gerard. But I was still visiting all the galleries and keeping up with the art scene too.

• • •

In those days I didn't have a real fashion look yet. I just wore black stretch jeans, pointed black boots that were usually all splattered with paint, and button-down-oxford-cloth shirts under a Wagner College sweatshirt that Gerard had given me. Eventually I picked up some style from Wynn, who was one of the first to go in for the S & M leather look.

The girls that summer in Brooklyn looked really great. It was the summer of the Liz-Taylor-in-
Cleopatra
look—long, straight, dark, shiny hair with bangs and Egyptian-looking eye makeup. The Brooklyn counterpart to the Greenwich Village scene around Sixth Avenue and 8th Street was Flatbush Avenue, which was divided mostly between the collegiate-looking kids and the “hitters.” And then over on Kings Highway were the kids who lived with their parents and went to high school in Brooklyn and then hung around the Village on weekends.

This was the summer before the Motown sound got really big, and it was also the last summer before the English Invasion. The show at the Fox had the Ronettes, the Shangri-Las, the Kinks, and Little Stevie Wonder. Also, we were watching Murray the K before he got to be super-famous for being the American disk jockey who had the best rapport with the Beatles.

It was a great summer. The folk-singer look was in—the young girls with the bangs were wearing shifts and sandals and burlapy things; but looking back, I can see that maybe by way of the Cleopatra look, folk evolved into something slick and fashionable that would eventually become the geometric look. But this summer, at least, folk and hip were blending.

President Kennedy was over by the Wall in West Berlin saying
“Ich bin ein Berliner,”
and the two “Career Girls” were murdered—they
lived down the street from me and I remember passing all the police cars. And this was the summer, too, before the first bombing in Vietnam, the summer of civil rights marches down south, the summer right before the sixties went all crazy for me, before I moved my work space to the 47th Street Factory and the media started writing me up in the new setting with all the superstars. But in this summer of '63 there were no superstars yet; in fact, I'd only just gotten my first 16-mm camera, a Bolex.

Although I didn't buy a movie camera till some time in '63, it had certainly occurred to me to be a do-it-yourself filmmaker long before then, probably because of De. His interest had started to shift from art to movies around '60. For five hundred dollars he'd managed to produce a movie called
Sunday
that a friend of his, Dan Drasin, had made about the Sunday the police had suddenly outlawed folk singing in Washington Square Park because they said it brought out a lot of undesirable types—meaning blacks and folk singers—and so everybody had congregated down there to protest. It was one of the first “rebellions” of the sixties. De had taken me over to the Film-Makers' Co-operative to see a screening of
Sunday
.

The Film-Makers' Coop was run by a young Lithuanian refugee by the name of Jonas Mekas. It was in a loft on the corner of Park Avenue South and 29th Street, across from the Belmore Cafeteria where the cabbies hung out day and night. And day and night there were screenings going on at the Coop. Jonas actually lived there, in one of the corners: he once told me he slept under the table. Although I didn't come to know him personally until late '63, I went to a lot of his screenings at the Coop
and also down at the Charles Theater on East 12th Street, a meeting place for underground filmmakers, and then midnights at the Bleecker Street Cinema.

One night as I was walking home from the art supply store with some brushes, past the little old German ladies in Yorkville sweeping their sidewalks, I realized I'd forgotten to get my mother her Czech newspaper. I turned back and ran into De, who said he'd just delivered fifty thousand dollars to CBS. When he'd first approached them about the documentary he wanted to do called
Point of Order
about the McCarthy hearings, they'd denied that they had any of the original footage of the hearings, but when he told them he could prove that they had all 185 hours of it stored away in their warehouse in Fort Lee, New Jersey, they admitted it, but they still refused to sell him the rights to use it in a film because why raise that old issue. Later Dick Salant from CBS called De and said they had changed their mind, that they would sell after all, for fifty thousand dollars plus fifty cents on every dollar of profit. De said okay—provided they agreed never to use more than three minutes of footage without his permission.

I asked De where he'd gotten the fifty thousand dollars from—those were the things that really interested me—and he said from Eliot Pratt of the Standard Oil/Pratt Institute Pratts. “Eliot Pratt is a left-wing liberal who hates McCarthy,” De explained. “We had lunch and I just told him about the movie and that I didn't know exactly how much it would end up costing, and he said, ‘I'll write you a check for a hundred thousand. Will that be enough to start with?' The bill for our hamburgers came to four dollars. Eliot left a ten-cent tip for the waiter. Then we
went back to his house to work out the financing.” Rich people are so strange about money.

De had gotten interested in filmmaking initially because of a movie called
Pull My Daisy
. Robert Frank, the underground filmmaker, and Alfred Leslie, the Abstract Expressionist painter, had gotten together to do it with Jack Kerouac, who'd had the original idea, and there were always fights about whose film it was—the ads said something different every time. De told me, “Robert shot it and it's in his style, but he didn't know how to put a film together, so Alfred got involved in the final cutting and now they both take credit for all of it. But like most films, it's the work of more than one person.” A stockbroker named Walter Gutman put up the twelve thousand dollars to make it. (He used to write a great Wall Street market letter as if it were a personal letter—he'd say, “Buy AT&T, and I think Rothko's paintings are going to go up, too.”)

Robert Frank had called De up and said, “I hate articulate people, but I happen to like you and we need help. We think we want to dub this film into French. Can you come over?” I went over there with De and they ran the film for him. David Amram the composer was in it, and Dick Bellamy the art dealer—he played a bishop preaching to people on the Bowery—and Larry Rivers played a railroad guy, and Ginsberg and Corso were in there, and Delphine Seyrig was incredibly beautiful in it with the American flag blowing over her. Kerouac was at this dubbing session, claiming he spoke French fluently, but when he began to speak it you could hear his Massachusetts accent—
“Ju swee Jacques Ker-ou-ac”
—and then something about his family being French nobility in the fourteenth century,
which had nothing to do with this movie on the Bowery, of course, so it was very funny.

I went out to Old Lyme, Connecticut, a lot of weekends that summer. Wynn Chamberlain was renting the guest house on Eleanor Ward's property and he had gangs of his friends out there the whole time. Once, Eleanor visited the guest house and got really, really upset when Taylor Mead came into the living room dressed up in drag and announced to her, “I'm Eleanor Ward. Who are
you?
”

Jack Smith was filming a lot out there, and I picked something up from him for my own movies—the way he used anyone who happened to be around that day, and also how he just kept shooting until the actors got bored. People would ask him what the movie was about and he would say things that sounded like a takeoff on the “mad artist”—“The appeal of an underground movie is not to the understanding!”

He would spend years filming a movie and then he'd edit it for years. The preparations for every shooting were like a party—hours and hours of people putting makeup on and getting into costumes and building sets. One weekend he had everyone making a birthday cake the size of a room as a prop for his movie
Normal Love
.

The second thing I ever shot with a 16-mm camera was a little newsreel of the people out there filming for Jack.

He was also an actor in other people's underground movies. He said that he did it for the therapy, because he couldn't afford “professional help,” and that wasn't it brave of him to take psychoanalysis in such a public way.

Jack played the title role in
Dracula
, a movie I shot later in the year. He really got into the part. He claimed that as he put
his makeup on, he was slowly transforming himself, letting his soul pass out through his eyes into the mirror and back into him as Dracula, and he had this theory about how everyone was “vampirical” to a certain extent because they “made unreasonable demands.” The filming went on for months. I remember one scene where my first female superstar, Naomi Levine, was sleeping on a bed and Jack was out on the balcony. He was supposed to sneak in, go over to the bed, and do some little thing—eat a peach or bite into a grape, I can't remember exactly. David Bourdon was in the scene, and Sam Green, the art dealer, and Mario Montez, who'd just come back from a fashion session somewhere, and Gregory Battcock, the art and film critic, who was in a sailor suit; and they were the four human bedposts holding the canopy up over this bed. I was shooting with my Bolex, little three-minute reels, and everyone was going crazy because we had to shoot the scene over and over because Jack just couldn't do it: he was so disoriented that his sense of timing was gone, and he just could not figure out how to get from the balcony over to the bed in three minutes. The farthest he ever got was two feet from the pillow.