Read I'll Be Your Mirror: The Selected Andy Warhol Interviews Online
Authors: Kenneth Goldsmith
JIM: No, I don’t think I want any.
ANDY: Really? I’ll see if they have some.
Andy goes into the shop.
ANDY: Do you have some cheap perfume?
SHOPKEEPER: No. Sorry we have no perfume.
ANDY: Oh, you really have some great knives.
SHOPKEEPER: Thank you, sir.
Andy and Jim go out, and go past another shop. They stop and look in the window.
ANDY: Those are really nice beetle pins. If I bought you a beetle pin, would you wear it?
JIM: Probably.
Andy goes into the shop and buys a beetle pin. He gives it to Jim who puts it in his pocket. They go on to another store and look in the window.
ANDY: Would you like me to buy you a wedding ring?
JIM: No, I don’t think so.
ANDY: Why not? You may need it.
JIM: Would you like a cigarette?
ANDY: Oh, no thanks.
JIM: Don’t you ever smoke?
ANDY: I used to smoke cigars once because I had some friends that smoked cigars.
JIM: Why don’t you smoke?
Andy: Oh, I guess I’m afraid I’d burn myself up.
Scene: Fillmore Auditorium, San Francisco. Jim comes up the stairs to the ballroom. In the lobby are Mary Woronov, whip dancer in black Levis, big black belt with a steel buckle, black shirt; Nico in a dark shirt, wide belt and red arid white striped bell-bottom Levis; Maureen (a Velvet) in regular Levis and a paisley blouse; the Somebody in bellbottom Levis, monkey-fur jacket and a gold ring in his ear. Teenyboppers, lots of teenyboppers; hairdressers-on-leave and their dates, smart hippies and sloppy hippies: Junior League members, looking uncomfortable in their phosphorescent all-vinyl pants suits are all milling about in the lobby. Jim goes up to Mary, Nico, Maureen and Somebody.
JIM: Hi, where
’s
Andy?
MARY: He’s up on the balcony. Do you have a cigarette?
JIM: Sure.
MAUREEN: Oh, could I have one too?
JIM: Sure.
Jim goes up to the balcony where Andy and Paul are setting up the movie projectors. The alternate band is leaving the stand.
JIM: Hi.
ANDY: Oh, hi. Oh, I tried to call you last night. We were over in Berkeley.
JIM: I was out. How did you like Berkeley?
ANDY: Oh, it was really great. We just sat and looked at the people.
PAUL: We can start if we can find Nico.
JIM: She’s down in the lobby with Mary and Maureen.
Paul goes off to round up the Velvets. Andy starts one of the projectors. Giant picture of Nico eating a candy bar. Andy turns on another projector. Giant picture of Edie Sedgwick in black bra and panties sitting on a unmade bed with a handsome boy wearing jockey shorts. “What do you mean, Andy?” asks Edie’s voice over the loudspeaker. The Velvets set up their equipment. Nico comes out on the stage.
NICO: The song is “I’ll Be Your Mirror.”
Mary and Gerard are writhing together with their whips. The static din takes on a shrill steel sound as Johnny Cale scrapes the electric viola tucked under his long face. On the balcony a crowd forms around Andy. Four boys in electric paisley shirts and tight red pants are seeking his favor. Jim whispers something in Andy’s ear. Andy reaches in one of the pockets of his black suede leather motorcycle jacket and pulls out a yellow package of Juicy Fruit gum. He gives a piece to Jim. Lou, the lead singer, sings “Shiny, shiny, shiny, shiny boots of leather.” Gerard takes off his blue shirt with ruffled sleeves, his greasy, curly blond hair falls over his face, he kneels in front of the strobe light with his arms outstretched. Sev-erin appears on the balcony dressed in black rubber trousers, white shirt, tie and frock coat. A woman in a white vinyl coat pushes toward Andy, with a news photographer behind her. Jim whispers something in Andy’s ear. Blue flash.
San Francisco Chronicle:
large black and white picture of Andy Warhol in black suede leather motorcycle jacket, black turtleneck shirt, silvered hair, faint, shy, wicked smile. Oo, wowl
In May of 1967, Warhol and his entourage headed to the Cannes Film Festival for a screening of Chelsea Girls. The French were great Warhol fans, going so far as to call him “a prime witness of our era’ (Bockris, 269). However, because of the controversy surrounding the film, Cannes officials decided not to show it, upsetting Warhol and increasing his dislike for French film and, in particular, the more recent work of Jean-Luc Godard. Following Cannes, Warhol headed to Paris for the premiere of Chelsea Girls. After a short stop in London, Warhol was back in New York. The day he arrived, he jumped on a plane to Boston for a Velvet Underground concert.
The day after he returned from Boston, Warhol went to Max’s Kansas City, where superstar Ivy Nicholson was making a scene, screaming and throwing food. Horrified, Andy bolted from the restaurant and hailed a cab. The driver happened to be Frederick Ted Castle, an art critic and writer, who had a hidden tape recorder in his cab. Castle recorded this conversation and published it in a column called “Occurrences” in ArtNews nine months later.
Soon after, Castle wrote an experimental novel called Gilbert Green (Kingston, New York: McPherson 6 Company, 1986), upon which the protagonist, Gilbert Green, is to some extent based on Andy Warhol. “I made Gilbert Green into an amalgam of myself and Andy Warhol and what I imagined a great artist and poet might do in those unsettled times [1968]”
–KG
I first met Andy Warhol on St. Valentine’s Eve in 1967. I was working as a cab driver and he hailed my cab. I am not usually a very talkative driver but I had just seen
The Chelsea Girls
and I wanted to tell him that I was glad he made it. I did and we got to talking. He asked me if my writing was abstract. I had never thought about it that way before but I decided that it must be. The next day I wrote a series of two prose poems about the movies called A
Valentine to Andy Warhol
. In the next few months we got to know each other somewhat better. I wrote a useless movie script for him and I saw a lot of movies at his Factory. One day he suggested that since I was a cab driver I ought to install a tape recorder in the cab and record other people’s conversation and transcribe it. He even went so far as to wonder why everyone didn’t write that way. At the time he was getting ready to publish his novel about Ondine which had taken 24 hours to record and two years to transcribe
1
. I find the work of transcription practically unbearable myself, but I did agree that it would be interesting to make some tapes. Without happening to tell Warhol that I was going to do it, I went ahead and for three weeks I kept a record of things mentioned in my presence. One night while I was doing this experiment. Andy Warhol hailed my cab again, and this is exactly what we said to each other during a cab ride back in June.
WARHOL: Oh it’s so good to see you, yes. . . .
CASTLE: Did you have a nice time in France?
WARHOL: Oh, we, sort of. . . .
CASTLE: Not really.
WARHOL: Huh? How did you know?
CASTLE: I don’t know, just. . . .
WARHOL: The only two nice things we did, we had dinner with Brigitte Bardot twice. . . .
CASTLE: Is she a nice girl?
WARHOL: Yes, she’s really beautiful.
CASTLE: I mean is she pleasant to be with?
WARHOL: Oh yeah, yes she is, she’s really very . . . very sweet, really sweet.
CASTLE: Some of these people really aren’t, you know.
WARHOL: Oh, no, no, no, she’s really magic. And uh. . . . You smell like you’ve been drinking.
CASTLE: Well, I had a beer a little while back, it’s been an incredibly dull night.
WARHOL: Oh really? Oh it’s not dull at Max’s!
CASTLE: It isn’t?
WARHOL: No. Ivy was . . . Ivy was, uh, uh . . . do you know where you’re going?
CASTLE: Yeah I do, really. I’m, uh, confused by running into you.
WARHOL: Oh. . . .
CASTLE: These things don’t happen.
WARHOL: I know, isn’t it funny? So Ivy was, you know, she called me up and said uh, you know, uh I’m going to Mexico right now and you know can you give me some money I’m getting a divorce and Fm coming back and marrying you and I said what? you know and I decided that you know everything is going wrong and I decided that we’re going to get organized and really do things right and try to you know and nobody can sit at the factory they have to sweep or clean up or if they don’t they have to leave and and so you know everything goes wrong. I lost my the or somebody stole the un, um, our microphone, so. . . .
CASTLE: What a drag!
WARHOL: So, I, oh, I don’t know, it someplace, it’s either, I misput it somewhere or something, it’s around someplace or somebody took it, I mean, so it took me five hours and I wore myself out before we shot the movie and then um I’ve decided to really be straight with Ivy and tell her that you know she’s crazy you know like you know let’s not go on and it’s fun and blah so I you know so I just told her that and so we I was taking everybody to dinner at Max’s and we got there and here she was throwing her, you know, she just happened to see us and she began throwing her food and you know carrying on and so she just turned her back and I ran out because I didn’t you know like I didn’t want there to be a scene and the other kids had already stayed and were sort of ordering so I guess they had to stay on but, but that’s not going to be the end of it because she’s really just going to. . ..
CASTLE: Are you still taking pictures of her?
WARHOL: Well, yeah, we wanted to finish it, we wanted to shoot her babies and her but I think now maybe we’ll just call it quits and uh. But I mean then you know. . . . Well, I don’t know what she wants, you know, I mean I really don’t. I can’t figure out what she really, really wants.
CASTLE: It’s very hard to know what women want. I think that usually you might as well decide . . . they hardly care. . . .
WARHOL: I mean I hardly ever see her, I haven’t seen her for four weeks . . . I really haven’t. . . .
CASTLE: I think they really usually want somebody to decide what they want for them you know, and then they get all screwed up because nobody does. . . .
WARHOL: Oh. . . . What have you been doing?
CASTLE: Oh, let’s see, writing . . .
WARHOL: Oh that’s good.
CASTLE: . . . walking around . . . working . . . not much actually I mean you know nothing new and exciting . . . how long were you away?
WARHOL: Oh, about three weeks and then we came back three days ago and we had to go to Boston so we came back from Boston yesterday. . . .
CASTLE: How do they like the film up in Boston?
WARHOL: Well, uh, the Velvets were playing up there and then somehow we got this television she I mean Nico and I got this television show with Al Capp. . . .
CASTLE: That’s supposed to be a fairly good show.
WARHOL: Oh yes! He was very nice to us, yes. Jimmy Breslin was on and I had always liked him and to meet him it was great to meet him.
CASTLE: Oh and you and Nico and Jimmy Breslin and Al Capp, wow!
WARHOL: Yes and he was very nice to us. You know usually everybody said that he probably would have been just so evil but uh he’s really nice! He really liked us, it was so strange! And then they had a love-in in the park yesterday . . . and we stayed there and it was sort of fun and then the Velvets worked at the Tea Party. . . .
CASTLE: What’s that?
WARHOL: The Tea Party there and they’re sort of a psychedelic . . . well, Boston is really like San Francisco it’s getting so big you know and uh, New York can’t seem to do the same thing that Boston and San Francisco do. . . .
CASTLE: It’s not the same type of. . . I mean everything’s very commercial here, you know?
WARHOL: Yeah but I mean. . . .
CASTLE: There isn’t so much sort of extracurricular dedication for it.
WARHOL: Oh, yes, well, I guess so. That must be it. Then they’re both school towns, you know, so it just means uh. . . .
CASTLE: A lot of kids who’re not just children, exactly, not just sort of being trained to be some sort of office person–people who are actually in operation. . . . The last few months we’ve had quite a few people from Boston at our house, I don’t know why that is. . . .
WARHOL: Oh really? Oh. . . .
CASTLE: You know, people call up and say so and so blah-blah and so then they come by and uh really it’s uh things seem to be happening there, nothing actually is happening there I think in both San Francisco and Boston it’s always sort of a mirage. . . . Everything looks great, you know, but nothing’s actually going on. You know what I mean by that?
WARHOL: Yeah. Well I’m sort of wondering you know like now everybody you know they want to freak out so they just put on funny clothes and stuff like that–then they become like everybody else.
CASTLE: Very true.
WARHOL: And then I don’t understand what all that means. You know like and then it seems like they become like everybody else it’s like and then with drugs you know it’s really more plastic or more, you know, I mean somebody could take over, you know, and begin telling people what to do! And that’s probably what they want!
CASTLE: Well Leary is doing his best, I suppose.
WARHOL: Well, I guess so, you know but then I don’t know.
CASTLE: You know what I mean? And he started in Boston and now he’s here if he’s not in jail. . . . What do you think about making a movie about yourself?
WARHOL: Oh. Who would play it?
CASTLE: Ha-ha!
WARHOL: We did one, we did
The Andy Warhol Story
with Rene Ricard, you know, he was the most awful person I, but it didn’t come out. Somehow. I’ll show it to you.
CASTLE: What?
WARHOL: We did one with Rene Ricard, I don’t know if you know him, he’s really sort of awful. . . .
CASTLE: I don’t know him.
WARHOL: And uh. . . .
CASTLE: Actually trying to play you, so to speak?
WARHOL: Yes, and then Edie was playing me or something like that, but it just wasn’t, it was when I was moving the camera and stuff like that but then we had used him earlier that evening and then by the time we did that he was so tired that it just wasn’t clever or anything, everything was wrong, sort of, uh. . . . Wow, everything is so boring in Europe!
CASTLE: Yeah, I know what you mean.
WARHOL: It’s so great here.
CASTLE: Everything is very attractive and very boring at the same time in Europe. . . .
WARHOL: Yes.
CASTLE: There’s so much that’s very pleasant about it you know the food is good and all that sort of thing, you know. . . .
WARHOL: Yes, oh, yeah. It’s fantastic, yeah.
CASTLE: But wow . . . I haven’t been to Europe in five years now, I feel like going again.
WARHOL: Oh. Well, Paris is different now because they really are, well, Americans don’t go there any more and uh you know they have four drug stores, you know, called drug stores, and a lot of English new shops, it’s really getting very scary. Because I guess they have to accept you know the Americans and uh, and they still don’t want to and you know we heard de Gaulle speak for three hours, and uh. . . .
CASTLE: Did you hear that?
WARHOL: Oh yes, yeah, I don’t know what he was saying but he just he. . ..
CASTLE: What?
WARHOL: He had a lot of style and it was sort of great.
CASTLE: I like de Gaulle a lot.
WARHOL: But I mean it was just like, uh, you know, they still, they’re missing something, they still think they’re still–you know, they’ve lost it. They still want to hold on to something you know they don’t want to change and it’s funny, you know, it really is so peculiar. Because they really want to be something and or. . . .
CASTLE: Somebody’s writing or editing a book about Jean-Luc Godard.
WARHOL: Oh really?
CASTLE: Asked me to write a chapter about it and I’ve been writing away and I’ve got about twelve pages of the most insane bullshit I’ve ever read.
WARHOL: Oh we saw the last one, well he did two, we didn’t see the last one, we saw
Made in USA
and it’s so bad!
CASTLE: Was it made in USA?
WARHOL: No, it was called
Made in USA
.
CASTLE: But it wasn’t made in USA.
WARHOL: Oh, it was so bad! I mean it was–well, maybe I didn’t think it was so bad, but everybody with me were, you know, got me so nervous that they made it, like you know they all walked out but you know it was really boring and Anna Karina looks terribly ugly, and oh. The only thing I liked about it that I thought was interesting was that he does them so fast and he keeps the same people you know it’s like actually a diary. And that’s what I really like maybe about his movies. . . .
CASTLE: You know, I def. . . I do like his movies.
WARHOL: And he gets girls that look like her, and, then, uh. . . .
CASTLE: But also he’s not afraid to say things, to have people say things, you know?