POPism (6 page)

Since there were usually as many as forty people out in Old Lyme every weekend, there were never enough beds; but most of the guests didn't sleep anyway. I was awake a lot myself—I'd started taking a fourth of a diet pill a day (Obetrol) that winter after I saw a picture of myself in a magazine where I looked really fat. (I did like to eat a lot—candy and very rare meat. I loved them both. Some days I'd just eat one or the other all day long.) And now, because I was awake so much, I started having more time on my hands.

I could never finally figure out if more things happened in the sixties because there was more awake time for them to happen in
(since so many people were on amphetamine), or if people started taking amphetamine because there were so many things to do that they needed to have more awake time to do them in. It was probably both. I was taking only the small amount of Obetrol for weight loss that my doctor prescribed, but even that much was enough to give you that wired, happy go-go-go feeling in your stomach that made you want to work-work-work, so I could just imagine how incredibly high people who took the straight stuff felt. I only slept two or three hours a night from '65 through '67, but I used to see people who hadn't slept for days at a time and they'd say things like “I'm hitting my ninth day and it's glorious!”

That summer out in Old Lyme was a prelude to all the craziness later. People were up all night wandering around the grounds smoking dope or playing records back at the house. Every weekend was a nonstop party—no one broke the weekend up into days, everything just flowed into everything else.

Seeing everybody so up all the time made me think that sleep was becoming pretty obsolete, so I decided I'd better quickly do a movie of a person sleeping.
Sleep
was the first movie I made when I got my 16-mm Bolex.

John Giorno was a stockbroker who had dropped out and become a poet. (Late in the sixties he started the telephone Dial-A-Poem.) John and I have reminisced about the weekend I shot
Sleep
; it was one of the hottest weekends ever—mosquitoes everywhere. “I came in drunk and passed out,” John says, “and when I woke up in the middle of the night, you were sitting in a chair in the room looking at me in the dark—I could tell it was you by your white hair. I remember asking, ‘Andy, what are you doing here?' and you said, ‘Gee, you sleep so well,' and you
got up and left. Then later, when Marisol and I were riding back to New York on the train with you, you said you were going to buy a camera and make a movie.”

The great thing about staying out at Wynn's was that nobody ever locked their doors—in fact, nobody really had doors to lock, everybody just drifted around and slept wherever. And of course, that made it really convenient to film, since the first thing you do when you want a film star is “check his availability.”

The people who entertained were the ones who really made the sixties, and Wynn Chamberlain entertained a lot, not only out in the country but also at his Bowery place. It was way down near Lil's Bowery Follies, and when you walked in, there was a painting by Wynn of a brown and white shoe with a bubble coming out of it saying, “Palm Beach, blah blah blah.” Everybody used to go to Wynn's parties—all the artists and dancers and underground filmmakers and poets.

When I was with the Stable Gallery from the end of '62 to early '
64
, Marisol and Bob Indiana were, too. We used to go around to openings and parties together, and they were both in some of my early movies. The painting style that everybody accepted and that dominated the art scene was still Abstract Expressionist. The post–Abstract Expressionist painters had come along afterward and the Hard Edge geometries, too, but the last thing to happen in art that was completely accepted was Abstract Expressionism. So when Pop appeared, not even the style it followed had been fully accepted yet! The resentment against Pop artists was something fierce, and it wasn't coming from just art critics or buyers, it was coming from a lot of the older Abstract Expressionist painters themselves.

This attitude was brought home to me in a very dramatic way at a party given by an Abstract Expressionist painter, Yvonne Thomas, mainly for other Abstract Expressionist painters. Marisol had been invited, and she took Bob Indiana and me with her. She was always very sweet to me—for instance, whenever we were out together, she used to insist on taking me home instead of the other way around. When we walked into that room, I looked around and saw that it was chock full of anguished, heavy intellects.

Suddenly the noise level dropped and everyone turned to look at us. (It was like the moment when the little girl in
The Exorcist
walks into her mother's party and pees on the rug.) I saw Mark Rothko take the hostess aside and I heard him accuse her of treachery: “How could you let
them
in?”

She apologized. “But what can I
do
?” she told Rothko. “They came with Marisol.”

For my second show at the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles—the Liz-Elvis show—I rode cross-country from New York in a station wagon with Wynn, Taylor Mead, and Gerard. It was a beautiful time to be driving across America. I think everyone thought I was afraid to fly, but I wasn't—I'd flown around the world once in the fifties—it was just that I wanted to see the United States; I'd never been west of Pennsylvania on the ground.

Wynn was tall and lanky, a very good Magic Realist painter who was beginning to get a little interested in Pop. Taylor I knew a little, from out at Old Lyme. He was one of the first underground film stars, starting out in North Beach in San Francisco in the fifties in Ron Rice's
The Flower Thief
and Vern Zimmerman's
Lemon Hearts
, which I'd seen over at the Film-Makers' Coop. A couple of days before we were supposed to leave, Henry
came by the studio with Taylor, who he'd bumped into wandering around near the Met. That's what Taylor used to love to do all day—drift all over town in that way he had that people called pixieish or elfin or wistful. He always had a slight smile on his face and in his eyes—one of them drooped, and that was a little trademark. He looked so chronically relaxed you felt that if you lifted him up by the back of his neck, his limbs would just dangle. I mean, he looked like he didn't have a nervous system, that was the attitude he had. He'd never seen any of my work, but he'd just read an article about my Campbell's Soup Cans in
Time
, and when Henry introduced us, he said, “You are the Voltaire of America. You're giving America just what it deserves—a can of soup on the wall!”

Taylor agreed to split the cross-country driving with Wynn—Gerard and I didn't know how to drive. I frankly couldn't believe from looking at Taylor that he really knew how to drive—I've always been surprised at the people who can drive and the people who can't.

I knew the whole thing would be fun, especially since Dennis Hopper had promised us a “Movie Star Party” when we got there.

I'd met Dennis a couple of months earlier through Henry, on the same day that I'd introduced Henry to the young English painter David Hockney. Dennis bought one of my Mona Lisa paintings on the spot and then he and Henry and David and I went up to the sound stage on West 125th Street where Dennis was doing an episode on the TV show “The Defenders.”

Wynn and Taylor and Gerard came to pick me up. We threw a mattress into the back of the station wagon and took off.

The radio was on the whole time—full blast. As a matter of fact, I was the one who insisted on blasting it because I get very nervous about people falling asleep at the wheel. You sure get to know the Top Forty when you make a long trip like that—over and over again, the same songs: Lesley Gore, the Ronettes, the Jaynettes, Garnet Mims and the Enchanters, the Miracles, Bobby Vinton… And there were long stretches where there was lots and lots of country and western. And everywhere we drove through was so different from New York.

James Meredith had enrolled at Ole Miss just the year before, but New York seemed much closer to Europe than to the Deep South. Dancing clubs in Paris were just starting to be called
discothéques
and there were all these new looks—the Chelsea look, Edwardian, Carnaby Street mod. This was the summer when the styles and music and attitudes that would shortly be shipped over as the English Invasion were all happening in London. And with all the nonstop jet flights, people were popping over from Europe all the time, three or four times a year instead of once a year like in the old days when the trip took fourteen hours, and they started buying apartments here, too. The minute their planes touched down, they'd go straight to dancing places like L'Interdit, which had opened in '63, or to Le Club, which was run by Olivier Coquelin for friends of his like the Duke of Bedford, Gianni Agnelli, Noël Coward, Rex Harrison, Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., Igor Cassini, Borden Stevenson—the international swingers. I sat at Le Club one night staring at Jackie Kennedy, who was there in a black chiffon dress down to the floor, with her hair done by Kenneth—thinking how great it was that hairdressers were now going to dinners at the White House.

Ole Miss seemed pretty far removed from what was going on in New York.

When we drove cross-country that October of '63, the girls were still wearing cashmere sweaters with little round necklines and tight, straight fifties skirts. There was a time gap in those days of up to three years between when new fashions showed up in New York City and when they filtered out to the rest of America. (By the end of the sixties, though, with media life-style pop coverage so fast and furious, this gap had almost closed.)

The movie marquees we passed were featuring titles like
Cleopatra, Dr. No
, and my favorite,
The Carpetbaggers
, which I'd seen three times before I left New York.

We stopped to eat at all the Carte Blanche places. That was the credit card I had, and those were the places I trusted, anyway. But Taylor got bored with that. Somewhere around Kansas he began screaming over the “honey-loves” on the radio, “I'm leaving this tour right now if we don't eat where
I
want to eat for a change!” He had a big thing about truck stops and truck drivers.

Taylor had a slow, easy, if-anyone-happens-to-care delivery. He would just very occasionally glance at Wynn or Gerard or me as he talked, and always, as he got to the endings of his little stories, he'd lift his chin up up and away and stare out the car window into the distance as he finished up. He told us about all the poetry readings he gave in '60 down on MacDougal Street in a basement theater run by a guy who sat around during performances with a shotgun on his lap because the authorities were trying to close him down. One night, Taylor said, Leonard
Lyons, the newspaper columnist, came in with Anna Magnani, Tennessee Williams, and Frankie Merlow, Tennessee's longtime lover. Taylor stood up and read his poem “Fuck Fame,” and Lyons wrote a whole column on him. And then another time Frankie came in and handed Taylor a couple of checks for a hundred dollars each, signed by Tennessee. Taylor talked about all the poets and performers who were around in those Village places, names I had scarcely heard of then—like a guy with shoulder-length hair who played the ukulele named Tiny Tim, and a young folk singer named Bob Dylan, who had one or two albums out by this time but wasn't a big name yet.

“I gave Bob Dylan a book of my poems a couple of years ago,” Taylor said, “right after the first time I saw him perform. I thought he was a great poet and I told him so.” A Woody Guthrie song playing on the radio, “So Long, It's Been Good to Know You,” had prompted Taylor's story. “And
now,”
Taylor started to laugh, “now when he's a big sensation and everything, he asked me for a free copy of my second book. I said, ‘But you're
rich
now—you can afford to
buy
it!' And he said, ‘But I only get paid quarterly.'”

(Taylor confessed to me a couple of years later, “The minute I heard Bob Dylan with his guitar, I thought, ‘That's it, that's what's coming in, the poets have
had
it.'”)

When he was twenty-two, Taylor had quit his job as a broker at Merrill Lynch in Detroit. I wondered what Taylor had been doing at a job like that in the first place. “Well, my father, Harry Mead, was the political boss of Michigan,” he explained. “He was one of Roosevelt's favorites, and his official title was Wayne County Democratic Chairman, but he was also head of the Liquor Control Commission and the WPA in the Detroit area.
He'd made the resident partner of Merrill Lynch in Detroit the state treasurer, and so the treasurer felt obligated to give Harry Mead's son a job.” Taylor spent most of his time there studying graphs on how to beat the market. “I finally figured out a system,” he said, “and it really spooked the boys at Merrill Lynch.” I asked him what kind of a system. “I could have made a fortune,” he said. “I told my father about it. The only trouble was he didn't get around to buying the stock I'd recommended until after the point when I would have already
sold
it! And
that
,” Taylor said dryly, “was the only opportunity my father ever gave me to prove myself.”

I couldn't imagine Taylor poring over stock market graphs and charts, but then, I couldn't imagine him driving, either, and there he was, at the wheel.

When Taylor left his stockbroker job in Detroit, he had just fifty dollars in his pocket. “Kerouac's
On the Road
put me on the road,” he said, “and Allen's
Howl
, which had just come out, had a big effect on me.”

Taylor was in San Francisco in '56 when the beat poetry scene got going. One day he stood up on a bar and over the noise all the drunks were making, started screaming some poems he'd written. Ron Rice saw that scene and began following him around, filming him with black and white war surplus film stock.