POPism (12 page)

I'd gotten myself a 35-mm still camera and for a few weeks there I was taking photographs, but it was too complicated for me. I got impatient with the f-stops, the shutter speeds, the light readings, so I dropped it. But Billy started using the camera and his “Factory Fotos” caught the exact mood of everything that was happening—embalmed-in-action: the smoky atmosphere, the parties, the broken bits of mirrors, the silver, the velvets, the planes of faces and bodies, the fights, the clowning, even the
attitudes and the depression. Billy had the magic timing that could get it all at the right split second. We had one of those early copying machines at the Factory, a Verifax—sprayed silver, naturally—and Billy used to fool around copying photographs and negatives on that. At first he sent his pictures out to be developed, but then he got a darkroom together and he took more and more and more. Billy didn't go out too much. If he needed some film or something, either he'd call for it or he'd ask Gerard or somebody to pick it up.

“I adored Billy,” Mark told me years later. “He took all that speed and yet he never changed toward people. He hardly ever said a word, but they knew he was their friend. At the end of the summer, when I was leaving, he gave me a beautiful photograph of himself with a hard-on. He was so very sweet.”

Everybody adored Billy. Henry Geldzahler told me that once when the underground star Paul America gave him (Henry) the first LSD he'd ever taken and then left him, Billy came by and found him all alone on the bathroom floor, freaking out, and he held him in his arms for hours, until the trip was over.

Mark went up to Cape Cod a few times. Dick Smith, the English artist, was honeymooning up there, and Ivan Karp was there; and Motherwell and his wife, Helen Frankenthaler, were living in Provincetown, where Walter Chrysler had his museum in an old church; and Mailer was just down the street from the Motherwells. Mark had fallen in love with Bloomingdale's; he bought all his clothes there, but everyone in Provincetown, as soon as they heard his accent, kept complimenting him on his “fantastic English clothes.” One Monday afternoon at the Factory, he told me that Mailer had walked over to him at a party over the weekend and punched him in the gut.

I was impressed. “Norman Mailer actually punched you?” I said. “How great…. Why?”

“That's what I asked
him
. He said it was for wearing a pink jacket.”

Norman Mailer was one of the few intellectuals that I really enjoyed.

I didn't leave the city on weekends that summer the way I had the one before. I thought, “Where could be more fun than this, with everybody you know coming by all the time, and you're getting work done yet?” It was a constant open house, like the format of a children's TV program—you just hung around and characters you knew dropped in.

Of course, an “open house” has its risks:

One day late in '64, a woman in her thirties, who I thought I'd maybe seen a few times before, came in, walked over to where I'd stacked four square Marilyns against a wall, took out a gun, and shot a hole right through the stack. She looked over at me, smiled, walked to the freight elevator, and left.

I wasn't even scared; it just seemed like I was watching a movie. I asked Billy, “Who was that?” and he told me her name. Ondine and I flipped through the stack and saw that the bullet had passed through two blue Marilyns and an orange one. I said, “But what does she do? Does she have a job?” Ondine and Billy both answered together, “Not that we know of…”

Billy's friends were outrageous. As much as you trusted Billy, that's how much you'd never trust any of the people he knew. There was no problem about it, though, because they never expected anyone to trust them, they knew they were ridiculous. But there were varying degrees of untrustworthiness. Some of
them would go right into your pocket and steal everything you had. Some of them would only steal half of what you had. Some of them would give you a bad check or try to sell you a bad electric typewriter (“All it needs, honestly, is the cord thing”). Some of them would only steal from big chain stores. There were lots of different codes that you could never figure out, and once in a while they'd catch you off guard and you'd think, “This time they mean it, they really will come right back with the change.”

Even when they didn't mean to steal, you'd still be missing things because, like they'd say, “We don't steal, we transfer.” And it was true, they'd take things from you and then in their place you would find other people's stuff. It was as if they thought they lived in an apartment that had four hundred rooms—they didn't distinguish all the apartments they hung around in as separate places. Even Billy was like this—they were all so spaced. They weren't taking things to get money or anything; they would simply, say, take my jacket and leave it at someone's house, and take his gold cigarette lighter and leave it for me on the couch at the Factory—they were just moving objects around the city.

When I first met Rotten Rita, he was still employed, at some factory that made fabrics—velvets or something—and he'd come by with yards of this and swatches of that. This was before he started stealing cars but probably during his bad check period.

In those days, he and Binghamton Birdie always went around together. Rotten was about six feet tall, and he had kind of a collegiate look, like a goofy computer repairman—very sharp, chiseled comic-book features. And Birdie was a good-looking type with big muscles; he looked like something out of a physique magazine.

Billy didn't stay at the Factory all the time; he alternated between there and Henry Geldzahler's apartment in the West Eighties, which he used to house-sit when Henry went out of town. It was crazy that people would trust him so much, but they did—I mean, when you think of the scene he was involved in (of all the people in New York City, his best friends happened to be the ones you were having him there to protect your property against). Henry trusted Billy the way everyone did, including me; there was just something about him that made you feel he was “in charge.”

Rotten and Birdie and Ondine would be over at Henry's house a lot when Billy was house-sitting it. One summer Henry came back from a weekend in Provincetown and walked in and found “a big fat naked woman” lying on his gneiss marble table poking a needle into her ass. (It was summertime and the stone table was the coolest surface to lie on.) That was his introduction to the Duchess.

“At that point,” Henry told me years later, “I thought, ‘I am out of my mind to be letting this happen.' I thought about morality, and then I thought, ‘God. I want to go on going to work and writing articles and giving lectures so this won't happen to me.'” (He was getting up every morning as usual and going to his job at the Metropolitan Museum, and when he'd come home in the evening, his answering service would tell him, “The Mayor called” or “The Duchess will call back”—the operators were very impressed with his social life.)

When Billy house-sat at Henry's, he'd glide around the parlor floor with a cigarette holder between his first and fourth fingers (he looked like he was playing a flute) checking to see that nothing was missing, especially the small Al Hansen Hershey Bar
painting on the wall of the two-by-four kitchen—it was a big favorite of the A-heads. In the living room there was a big Chamberlain car crash sculpture attached to the wall, and a black easy chair where Henry would smoke his cigars. The Duchess would come by the Factory and announce things like “Debbie Drop-out's been at Henry Geldzahler's for a week because Spanish Eddie's trying to kill her.” I never understood how Henry could give those characters the run of his house. I would never go that far—the Factory was a different thing from where I lived—I wouldn't want to go home to that kind of insanity, ever.

Henry had one of the first loft beds around, complete with its own stairs. It was halfway between the floor and the fourteen-foot ceiling. One night he came home and opened the big sliding door to his bedroom and there in his bed were Billy, Ondine, and Silver George swathed in velvet (they were all incredible velvet freaks).
Tosca
was playing at top volume and Ondine sang/shouted “Mar-i-o MAR-I-O!” as he dove off the loft bed onto the floor.

If you looked at Ondine from an angle or from the back, he was very striking because he had beautiful dark Italian hair. He wore the basic jeans–T-shirt uniform that everyone wore, and he usually carried an airline flight bag. His face would have been actually handsome, but there was something too arch about it: the mouth was pure Ondine, a sort of quizzical duck's mouth with deep smile lines around it.

As for Silver George, he looked like an anthropology project—big (over six feet tall), Neanderthal, hairy-chested, and with eye ridges and a Beatle haircut dyed three different shades a month.

Silver George went home to Brooklyn on the day of his mother's funeral that summer and he noticed that his father
looked “depressed,” so when the old man went to the refrigerator for milk, George slipped some Methedrine into his Rice Krispies. His father immediately began darting around the house dusting the rooms. And when Silver George phoned Billy a little later, he reported, “The patient is responding nicely. I'm sure he'll enjoy the funeral enormously.”

Another time, when Henry was traveling in Europe, his secretary stopped by to check on the apartment and discovered Billy shrunken to about ninety pounds. He'd draped the loft bed in black velvet and was lying on top of it like it was a catafalque—it all looked like something out of a Spanish painting. The girl called the psychiatrist Ernie Kafka, who diagnosed a severe case of dehydration and prescribed vitamins.

The only thing “underground” about American underground movies—I mean, in the strict political sense of having to hide from some authority—was that in the early sixties there was the big censorship problem with nudity. The fifties had been
Lolita
-scandal time—even as late as '59 there was the big deal about Grove Press publishing
Lady Chatterley's Lover
and later on about Henry Miller's
Tropic of Cancer
. The censorship policies in this country have always completely baffled me because there was never a time when you couldn't walk into any 42nd Street peep show and see all the cocks and cunts and tits and asses you wanted, then suddenly out of the blue the courts would single out one popular movie with a few racy scenes in it for “obscenity.”

Some underground filmmakers actually kind of hoped the police would seize their movies so they'd get in all the papers for being persecuted for “freedom of expression,” and that was always considered a worthy cause. But it was pretty much a fluke
who the police arrested and who they didn't and after a certain point it all got boring for everyone.

The first movie of mine that was seized was a two-minute-forty-five-second one-reeler that I'd shot out in Old Lyme of everybody during the filming of Jack Smith's
Normal Love
—the one where the cast made a room-size cake and got on top of it. Actually, it was seized by mistake—what the police were out to get was Jack's
Flaming Creatures
.

Jonas's Coop had moved from the Gramercy Arts Theater to the building Diane di Prima and some of the other poets used on St. Mark's Place on the southeast corner of the Bowery. After
Flaming Creatures
was seized, the screenings there stopped for a little while. Then Jonas rented the Writers Stage on 4th Street between Second Avenue and the Bowery and he screened Genet's
Un Chant d'amour
there. “I knew that Jack's would be a difficult case to fight,” Jonas told me, “with nobody really knowing who he was, and I felt that Genet—for the right or wrong reasons—would be a better case because he was a famous writer. And I was right—when they clubbed us that time for obscenity, we won.”

After all the court cases Jonas realized that he needed some type of umbrella nonprofit organization, so he created the Film Culture Non-Profit Organization, which published
Film Culture
magazine and sponsored screenings and other things. During that period they had screenings in “respectable” places—like that Washington Square art gallery of Ruth Kligman's—so they wouldn't be closed down again by the police. Ruth's was where Jonas showed a lot of Marie Menken's films and in the fall we showed
Blow Job
there publicly for the first time.

Jonas had screened his film of the Living Theater's production of
The Brig
in that building on St. Mark's and the Bowery before
the police seized
Flaming Creatures
there. I was intrigued with the equipment he'd used—for nine hundred dollars he'd shot the whole thing in sync sound. It was eighty minutes long, and he'd done it with the Auricon camera that was used by journalists a lot to shoot live situations since it recorded sound directly on the film—all you had to do was hold the camera. The quality of the sound was primitive, of course, but still it was sync sound. Jonas showed me how to operate the Auricon and I used it right away to film, of all things,
Empire
, which had no dialogue. A boy named John Palmer gave me the idea: we shot the Empire State Building from an office in the Time-Life Building that belonged to a friend named Henry Romney, who around that time was trying to buy the rights to
A Clockwork Orange
, saying that he wanted me to film it using Nureyev, Mick Jagger, and Baby Jane Holzer as stars.

In June of '64 the Rolling Stones had come over to play some American cities and the tour was a big disappointment to them. They'd wound it up at Carnegie Hall on a bill with Bobby Goldsboro and Jay and the Americans. They had a big hit with “Tell Me,” and they did have a following, but they were no supergroup yet in the United States—all anybody cared about over here was the Beatles. In October they came back for another try—they played the Academy of Music down on 14th Street and on the twenty-fifth they were slated for
The Ed Sullivan Show
for the first time. With the idea to get more publicity for them—which was what they badly needed—Nicky Haslam and some other friends of theirs planned a party at Jerry Schatzberg's photography studio on Park Avenue South for the Friday night before the Sullivan show. (Ed Sullivan must have learned his lesson after he turned down young Elvis in the fifties when he
could have had him cheap, only to pay a record price for him later on, because in the sixties Ed was the first with all the English pop groups.) That was also Baby Jane Holzer's twenty-fourth birthday, so what it evolved into was a party for her with the Stones as the star guests. Jane had just started to appear in big
Vogue
fashion spreads, and Clay Felker, the editor of the
New York Herald Tribune
Sunday magazine supplement (he revived it as
New York
magazine a couple of years after the
Tribune
folded) had assigned Tom Wolfe to write a piece on her.