POPism Read online

  The first time I went out to their house with Charles Henri, Marie was the only person there who’d ever heard of me. She introduced me to the poets Frank O’Hara and Kenneth Koch and she had her arms around me and was telling them how famous I was going to be someday, and that sounded great to me. Naturally I thought she was wonderful. Later on I put her in a lot of my movies like Chelsea Girls and The Life of Juanita Castro. Mario Montez, the underground film star, used to insist that Marie looked just like Broderick Crawford in drag. Now I know you can say that about a lot of women who are past a certain age, but Marie’s resemblance to Broderick Crawford was remarkable.

  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.

  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.