Read I'll Be Your Mirror: The Selected Andy Warhol Interviews Online
Authors: Kenneth Goldsmith
I think it’s going to go on. They keep saying that it’s going to disappear but as they say it gets bigger and bigger. More magazines are produced and more books are being written. I’m so amazed at how many books they do and how few really become successful. But, thousands and thousands of books are being written.
Do you have a favorite poet?
John Ashbery, and Gerard Malanga. Do you know him?
Yes, I knew he was your friend. What is it that you dont like about time? Why do you want it to go by so fast when most people are afraid of the swift passage of time?
To get it over with.
Do you think that reality is more or less an idea in the mind rather than in the world?
I guess it’s in the mind so actually it’s different for everybody. You know everybody just has a different idea and everything is right. When a person is guilty they can be not guilty too. I was just reading in the paper where the jury found a person guilty, but the judge was able to overturn it. I didn’t know that they could do things like that. He said he wasn’t guilty, so the person got freed.
You’ve mentioned a play called “The Beard” I just wondered why that particular play would make you wish that all your films were as beautiful
.
Well, it’s a two character play and I think the person who wrote it, wrote poetry, so the combined art and poetry . . . everything together and it was a great production. It’s about Jean Harlow and a famous cowboy, the James Dean type of his day. I think I’ve seen three productions of it. Did you see it at all? They were going to make a movie of it but I don’t think they ever did.
Why dont you?
I guess I should. Oh, maybe they did make a movie of it, I can’t remember.
In competing with Hollywood there is the loss of the aesthetic and I just wondered how you felt about that, if that was the reason you were going back to making smaller films
.
We just can’t compete with the $50 million movies, so we have to think in another direction. If you can do something unusual on a lower budget then you can do a little more, make it different. It’s just trying to make it different because you can’t compete with movies on such a great scale.
You mentioned that if you ever did a big film, a two or three million dollar film, nobody would have to go and see it
.
Oh, wouldn’t that be great! If you could just make them and not have to feel that you lost money or something like that if people didn’t go to see them. You don’t really lose money because you pay a lot of salaries. They’re always talking about campaigns where people spend so much money when actually so many other people make it.
1
New York City blackout. July 13, 1977.
2
From Warhol’s painting series of drag queens, "Ladies and Gentlemen," 1975.
3
Bar on Eighth Avenue and 45th Street frequented mostly by black and Hispanic transvestites. Most of the models for the “Ladies and Gentlemen” series were found here.
4
Lynda Benglis. Artist, b. 1941.
Warhol biographer Victor Bockris began working freelance for
Interview
magazine in 1973 and became a contributing editor in 1978. During this time, Bockris was also working on a book about the writer William S. Burroughs. His idea, inspired by Warhol and Bob Colacello, was to record a series of meetings between Burroughs and other prominent cultural figures, letting the tape run, and seeing what came out of it. The interviews and writings on Burroughs were collected into a book
, With William Burroughs: A Report from the Bunker (
New York: Seaver Books, 1981
).
Although Warhol and Burroughs were both legends at the time of this interview and had met formally in the 1960s, they had never really connected with one another on more than a superficial level. In January of 1980, Bockris took Burroughs to the Factory to meet Warhol. The meeting went well and Warhol suggested that he take Polaroids of Burroughs as the basis for a potential portrait. Photos were taken a week later and Warhol suggested that they all have dinner at one of his favorite restaurants, 65 Irving Place. Fashion consultant Andre Leon Tally was invited to join them
.
The evening started off with two martinis each, followed during the meal by several bottles of wine shared by the table. “We sat down, ordered drinks and the conversation went off like a brush fire,” recalls Bockris. “It was very light cocktail conversation but it kept moving, occasionally pausing over deeper moments.” The dinner lasted an hour and a half with Bockris acting as the master of ceremonies. “I thought this was a one-time thing and that Yd never get them together again. I wanted to get it all on tape: them being outrageous. If they started wandering off and discussing something boring I would keep them on track
”
The dinner was a success: the next day, Burroughs commented how surprised he was about how open Warhol had been the night before and went on to say how much he enjoyed the meeting. Warhol responded in kind. However, the interview at first proved difficult to place. After several rejections, Bockris hit upon the idea of pitching the story to
Blueboy–
the most successful hardcore gay magazine of its day–as a meeting between two great icons of gay liberation. Initially the magazine showed skepticism that the interview was real. On request Bockris sent the magazine a copy of the tape in which all material not in the interview was edited out to prove its authenticity. They decided to use it in their 15th anniversary edition, published in October of 1980
.
While Warhol was amused with the final transcript, he insisted that Bockris “take out some of the stuff about piss and shit.” Both Warhol’s and Burroughs’s handlers were annoyed by the interview when it was published in between photos of large, erect penises, afraid that it would tarnish their public images. However, both Burroughs and Warhol confided separately to Bockris that they found the results entertaining
.
Although a Burroughs portrait was never painted, Bockris arranged for two subsequent dinners that year: one in March at Burroughs’s home with Warhol and Mick Jagger, and another in October with Warhol for a BBC documentary about The Chelsea Hotel. “It was a very happy occasion for me,” remembers Bockris. “It was somehow appropriate: myself, a younger man, bringing these two distinguished older men together and recording them enjoying each other
.”
–KG
William Burroughs and Andy Warhol have several things in common. They both produced major bodies of work that changed the way people saw and lived, while personifying the radical lifestyles their art released. They both became major figures in a cultural revolution, then outgrew that period before it outgrew them and continued producing work that continues to surprise a broad spectrum of the population. They both maintained their sense of humor.
It was a great pleasure to see them together at a dinner table, for, although they’d met several times in public, they never had the opportunity to converse undisturbed, and I was sure they would both enjoy it. Former Fashion Editor at
Womens Wear Daily
, and current social observer on the New York scene, Andre Leon Tally, was also present as a guest of Andy, who gave the dinner party at 65 Irving Place.
ANDY: I still never understand why a boy’s never had a baby. I mean if people are peculiar and stuff. . . .
VICTOR: Well, Allen [Ginsberg] and Peter [Orlovsky] are planning to have a baby together.
ANDY: There must be a way! You know how freaks are around all the time . . . I mean there has to be a freak who is going to have a baby. There are so many different freaks, you know, geniuses. They call a freak a genius, right, because half their brain’s gone, so they discover the atomic bomb or something. There’s always a freak.
BILL: There was a story that Mohammed was supposed to have been reborn from a man.
ANDY: Mohammed who?
BILL: Mohammed The Prophet!
ANDY: Oh. We know a lot of waiters called Mohammed.
BILL: But why bother when you have cloning.
ANDY: Yeah. Cloning’s better. But a man could probably have a baby in a day, or something. How old were you when you first had sex? Thirteen, fourteen?
BILL: Sixteen. Just boarding school boys at Los Alamos ranch school, where they later made the atom bomb.
ANDY: So you had sex when you were sixteen. With who?
BILL: This boy in the next bunk.
ANDY: What did he do?
BILL: Not very much. Mutual masturbation. But during the war this school, which was up on the mesa thirty-seven miles north of Santa Fe, was taken over by the army, and that’s where they made the atom bomb. And the reason why is that Oppenheimer had gone out there for his health and he was staying at a dude ranch near this place and had seen it and said, “Well this is the ideal place.” So it seemed so tight and appropriate somehow that I should have gone there.
ANDY: Was the sex really like an explosion?
BILL: No, no.
ANDY: It was pretty boring? Was it fun?
BILL: No, I don’t remember, it was so long ago.
ANDY: Oh c’mon.
BILL: I don’t!
ANDY: Was it fun?
BILL: Well, it was. . . .
ANDY: Just okay? I think I was twenty-five the first time I had sex.
VICTOR: Then what happened?
ANDY: I stopped at twenty-six. But the first time I ever knew about sex was in Northside, Pittsburgh, under the stairs and they made this funny kid suck this boy off. I never understood what it meant. I was just sitting there watching when I was five years old. But how did you get this kid to do it?
BILL: Oh, I don’t know, sort of a lot of talking back and forth.
ANDRE: Do you think you should charge for sex?
BILL: Well, it depends on the circumstances. You cannot generalize about these things. Who should pay who?
ANDY: I think the girl who’s standing on the street corner should pay the guy who comes up to her, because she’s hot, right? The guy’s not hot, she’s hot, right? She’s the prostitute, but she’s hot, and she should pay the person that wants it. She should be on easy street and pay the person for doing it to her, don’t you think. I think it should be that way. She should just have a lot of money from the city to pay him.
VICTOR: The prostitute should be supported by the city?
ANDY: That’s it. They should be hired by the city. Its part of the city and they should be paid by the city instead of going to jail.
VICTOR: Have you ever found the process of paying for sex heightened the pleasure?
BILL: No.
ANDY: Pleasure of what?
BILL: The only way it could heighten the pleasure would be if you paid in the middle of sex and this is. . . .
ANDY: But you know what I really don’t understand is when white guys have these really great dark cocks.
VICTOR: The cock is darker than the rest of the skin?
ANDY: Oh, really dark sometimes.
VICTOR: Well, Bill said Arabic boys have wedge-shaped cocks.
ANDY: Wedge-shaped! What do you mean wedge-shaped?
BILL: Well, yeah. There’s a sort of wider–wedge shaped, but it isn’t at all uniform. My dear, it’s not all that different. Some of them tend to be a little bit, ah, you know, shaped wide.
ANDRE: The tip? The head?
ANDY: It’s hard to get the head in then, isn’t it? Here, draw it.
BILL: My dear, I can’t, it’s not so well defined. Victor has misled you to think that there’s anything very special about this. Actually it has nothing to do with the nationality. There are a lot of people like that.
ANDY: Bill has a big cock.
ANDRE: How do
you
know?
ANDY: Well he does. Huh?
BILL: Average, average.
VICTOR: Average.
ANDRE: Average average.
VICTOR: Do you have an average. . . .
ANDY: Yeah.
BILL: Everybody’s got an average cock.
ANDY: Andre’s got a really big cock.
ANDRE: Andy’s so sure that I have a big cock! It’s not true.
ANDY: Oh come on.
BILL: He said he had an average average.
ANDRE: It’s all right to be average.
ANDY: I only fall in love with kids who have what’s-it-called ejaculation.
ANDRE: You mean premature ejaculation.
ANDY: Yeah. That’s my favorite trick. Are you one?
BILL: What?
ANDY: Are you a premature ejaculator?
BILL: Uhmmm, pretty quick, pretty quick!
ANDY: Really?
VICTOR: I figure sex should be right away.
BILL: I do too, but see, women have different cycles.
ANDY: Bill is not a premature ejaculator!
BILL: Well certainly I am.
ANDY: Are you really? What do you mean–seconds?
BILL: Nnnnnooooo, twenty seconds, twenty seconds. . . .
ANDY: What, just petting?
BILL: Well no no no, you have to get a little beyond that.
VICTOR: Petting and then ah. . . .
ANDY: Oh, no no no, I. . . .
VICTOR: No, but once it’s in. . . .
ANDY: No no no,
not
in. I mean, it’s premature!
VICTOR: Before it gets in?
ANDY: Yeah, you just sort of go like this and. . . .
VICTOR: Don’t you find it harder to get sex though?
ANDY: Yes, really really hard.
BILL: Harder than when?
VICTOR: Ten years ago when you were a young febrile personality jumping around. Don’t you find it harder now?
BILL: Well, I just say harder than when?
VICTOR: It’s harder than ten years ago when you were a young febrile personality jumping around, don’t you think?
BILL: I suppose presumably it gets more difficult as you get older. That seems to be what they tell me.
VICTOR: Is it not true? See, actually it’s not. . . it’s easier for Bill to get sex now.
ANDY: Oh it is?
VICTOR: He gets more sex now than ever.
ANDY: Yeah, ‘cause he’s good-looking and adorable.
VICTOR: Yes, he is good-looking.
ANDY: He is good-looking. He’s adorable.
VICTOR: And very together.
ANDY: He’s charming and. . . .
VICTOR: . . . he travels and. . . .
ANDY: Yeah, he’s great. You’re the one that should be worried! You like shit and piss. You do!
VICTOR: I like shit and piss?
ANDY. The smell of shit and piss. [
Turning to Bill
] He’s English.
BILL: Yes, I’d forgotten. That would do it, that would do it. . . .
ANDY: And leather. Leather, shit and piss. I mean, that’s synonymous with. . . .
BILL:
Absolutely
.
ANDY: In G.B. You know,
Great Britain
. Shit, Piss and Leather.
VICTOR: It’s odd, I have to admit the British are very strange sexually. . . .
ANDY: They’re really odd, but they’re so sophisticated that’s why they. . . .
BILL: Like to be beaten with rulers and hairbrushes.
VICTOR: And pissing and ejaculation on their faces.
ANDY: No! Really? God. . . .
BILL: Absolutely, yes. . . .
VICTOR: But I think the English. . . .
ANDY: Are the sexiest people. . . . Good sex.
VICTOR: Did you ever have any really good sex in England?
ANDY: Oh yeah, the best.
BILL: Yeeessss. . . .
VICTOR: Well, Bill, you had good sex there too? And Andy, you had the best sex in England?
ANDY: No, the best one was when this guy bit off this guy’s nose. That was the best sex.
BILL: I heard about that.
ANDY: Wasn’t that the best sex, Bill?
BILL: Ah yes. I imagine so.