POPism (17 page)

Sixty-five was a friendly year, though, on the whole. Everybody mixed and mingled together all over town. Marisol was at Sam's fur party, and Patty and Claes Oldenburg, and Larry and Clarisse Rivers. Sam walked around feeding people grapes, telling anybody who asked where the furs had come from. That was very sixties—being proud of getting things for free. In the fifties people made believe they'd paid a lot for stuff, but in the sixties they would be embarrassed to admit it if they had.

We filmed a lot of movies over at Edie's place on 63rd Street near Madison. Things like the
Beauty
series that was just Edie with a series of beautiful boys, sort of romping around her apartment, talking to each other—the idea was for her to have her old boyfriends there while she interviewed new ones. All the movies with Edie were so innocent when I think back on them, they had more of a pajama-party atmosphere than anything else.

Edie was incredible on camera—just the way she moved. And she never stopped moving for a second—even when she was sleeping, her hands were wide awake. She was all energy—she didn't know what to do with it when it came to living her life, but it was wonderful to film. The great stars are the ones who are doing something you can watch every second, even if it's just a movement inside their eye.

Whenever you went over to Edie's, you felt like you were about to be arrested or something—there were always a lot of cops patrolling her block (they were guarding some consulate across the street). When I first knew her, she had a limousine and driver parked out front at all times, but after a little while, the limo was gone. Then she stopped buying couture clothes. Someone told me that she'd finally used up her whole trust fund and that from now on she was going to have to live on five hundred dollars a month allowance from home.

But I still couldn't figure out whether she really had money or not. She was wearing dime-store T-shirts instead of designer clothes, but still it was a fabulous look that anyone would have wanted to have. And she was still picking up the checks every night for everybody—she'd sign for everything every place we went. But again, I couldn't figure out if she knew the management or if somebody was paying all her bills or what. I mean, I couldn't figure out if she was the richest person I knew or the poorest. All I knew was that she never had any cash on her, but then that's a sign of being
really
rich.

I filmed a movie—
Poor Little Rich Girl
—of Edie talking about being a debutante who'd just spent her inheritance—talking on the phone, walking back to her bed, showing off the white mink coat that was her trademark.

I always wanted to do a movie of a whole day in Edie's life. But then, that was what I wanted to do with most people. I never liked the idea of picking out certain scenes and pieces of time and putting them together, because then it ends up being different from what really happened—it's just not like life, it seems so corny. What I liked was chunks of time all together, every real moment. Somebody once asked Mario Montez what working
with me was like, did I “rehearse” the actors, etc., and Mario told them that since rehearsing was related to editing, naturally someone who wouldn't edit his movies wouldn't rehearse them either. That was exactly right. I only wanted to find great people and let them be themselves and talk about what they usually talked about and I'd film them for a certain length of time and that would be the movie. In those days we were using Ronnie Tavel scripts for some of the movies, and for others we just had an idea or a theme that we gave people to work with. To play the poor little rich girl in the movie, Edie didn't need a script—if she'd needed a script, she wouldn't have been right for the part.

L'Aventura was a restaurant near Bloomingdale's that we used to hang out at. We went there or to the Ginger Man every night for a while in '65—after the Factory, eight or ten of us, lots of the Cambridge kids, and usually Gerard.

The way it was working out was that Gerard influenced everything we did away from the Factory, while Billy had gotten to be the main influence at the Factory itself. Gerard kept up with fashion and the arts and he was good at inviting all the celebrities we met to come by the Factory. And since he absolutely worshiped fame and beauty, he made the celebs feel good, even if nobody else who was hanging around recognized them.

One May afternoon when we were filming a movie at L'Aventura, a young kid named Stephen Shore came by to take pictures of us. He'd made a short film that was shown at the Film-Makers' Coop the same night in February as my
The Life of Juanita Castro
and afterward he'd come over to me and asked if he could come by the Factory—he was taking still photographs and had heard that there was a lot going on there.

I was busy doing the Flowers for my Paris show at the end of the month and working on self-portraits and the cow wallpaper. I'd be at the table for hours, cutting up pieces of colored paper to see how things would look in different colors, and Stephen took a lot of pictures of me like that. Gerard was usually over in a corner doing poetry that he based on lines from other people's work, so he would have an open book in one hand and be writing with the other. Billy would just be in the back, picking out opera records from the stack beneath the metal counter where the record player was and talking to his friends when they came by. Occasionally he'd hang up a sign that said
NO HANGING OUT or NO DRUGS ALLOWED ON THE PREMISES
to discourage people who weren't discreet, especially after I'd gotten very upset at seeing a guy I'd never laid eyes on before standing in the middle of the Factory shooting himself up. I definitely did not want any trouble from the police, and Billy knew that.

Stephen could never get over the people at the Factory. I heard him tell someone once, “They just sit there. It's not like they're reading, it's not like they're meditating, it's not even like they're sitting watching: they're just
sitting
—staring into space and waiting for the evening's festivities to begin.”

For my show in Paris, Ileana Sonnabend was going to send me a boat ticket, but instead, I talked her into sending four plane tickets so Edie and Gerard and Chuck Wein could come along with me. Chuck was a tall, good-looking Harvard guy with blond hair and green eyes, and he and Edie were together a lot—he gave her “career advice,” she said.

In France they weren't interested in new art; they'd gone back to liking the Impressionists mostly. That's what made me decide to send them the Flowers; I figured they'd like that.

Ileana was Rumanian. She'd been married to Leo Castelli for many years, and now she had a gallery of her own in Paris. She was glad to send the extra tickets, she said, because she knew that an artist would get more attention—especially in Paris—with a beautiful girl on his arm.

Edie and I had gone to the Metropolitan Museum opening of “Three Centuries of American Painting” in April. Lady Bird Johnson and a whole lot of other swells were there, but the photographers seemed to zero in on us. Edie had her hair cut very, very short and dyed silver to match mine, and that night she looked especially terrific in pink pajamas over just a body stocking. We got a lot of press for that—we even had our picture taken with Lady Bird—so we were eager to get over to Paris and see what would happen there.

We stayed in a suite in a little hotel on the Left Bank, the Royale Bison, where young movie stars like Jane Fonda stayed, near Ileana's gallery at 37 Quai des Grandes-Augustins.

We had fun in Paris, staying up all night, going to nightclubs like Castel's and New Jimmy's, which was Régine's club. At Cas-tel's there was this crazy thing where the music would suddenly stop and everyone would just dive onto the dance floor and feel each other up—a free-for-all grope—skirts pulled up, pants pulled down—this happened three or four times a night. They'd just filmed part of
What's New, Pussycat?
at. Castel's, and it seemed like the whole town was popping with stars like Terence Stamp, Ursula Andress, Peter Sellers, Woody Allen, Romy Schneider, Ca-pucine, Shirley MacLaine, Peter O'Toole, Dali, Zou Zou, Donald Camel, Vadim, Jane Fonda, Catherine Deneuve, Françoise Dorléac, Françoise Sagan, Jean Shrimpton.

Edie had arrived in France wearing a white mink coat over her T-shirt and tights and carrying one little suitcase. When she
“unpacked” at the hotel, I saw that the only thing she'd brought with her was another white mink coat! She wore one of them to Castel's that night and when someone offered to check her coat, she clutched it around her and said, “No! It's all I've got on!” She had a low, husky voice that always sounded like she'd been crying. The French adored her—and she adored Paris; she'd lived there for a while when she was nineteen, studying art.

I was having so much fun in Paris that I decided it was the place to make the announcement I'd been thinking about making for months: I was going to retire from painting.

Art just wasn't fun for me anymore; it was people who were fascinating and I wanted to spend all my time being around them, listening to them, and making movies of them. I told the French press, “I only want to make movies now,” but when I read the papers the next day, they said that I was “going to devote my life to the cinema.” The French have their way with English—I loved it.

We didn't go straight back to New York. Everybody wanted to go to Tangier, so I said fine, and a guy we'd run into in Paris, Waldo Balart, decided to come with us.

Waldo's sister had been married to Fidel Castro, who divorced her right before he became premier. There were glamorous rumors that Waldo had escaped from Cuba with a million dollars in a suitcase. (He was very generous and he certainly did support a lot of people, so if the suitcase really existed, there were a lot of people living out of it.) We'd shot
The Life of Juanita Castro
over at his house on West 10th Street in the Village early that year, with a Ronnie Tavel script inspired by Waldo, and Waldo was also in it. Cuba was a running political topic at the time. That past December Che Guevara had been down the
street from the Factory at the United Nations giving a speech. (They'd just installed the Marc Chagall stained-glass windows there, I remember.)

Our movie had a group of people talking about “fags on the sugar plantation.” Everyone adored the idea that Raul, the real-life brother of Fidel, who was a defense minister or something like that, was supposed to be a transvestite, so that was a big camp. And even campier were Fidel's on-the-record attempts to become a Hollywood star—we tried to pick him out in an Esther Williams movie that Waldo swore he'd appeared in as an extra.

I was happy as we left Paris for Tangier, because I felt sure, what with all the publicity we'd just gotten in the French press, that Picasso must have heard of us at last. (One afternoon as we were sitting at a sidewalk café, little Paloma Picasso had walked by. Gerard recognized her immediately from seeing her picture in
Vogue
.) Picasso was the artist I admired most in all of history, because he was so prolific.

Tangier smelled everywhere like piss and shit, but naturally everyone thought it was great because of all the drugs.

When we finally got on the plane to go back to New York—we had our seat belts fastened and everything—Chuck leaped up and said, “Wait a minute, I'll be right back.” He ran down the steps of the plane and disappeared. We took off. All the way across the Atlantic, I wondered if there was something he knew that we didn't, like, say, that there was a bomb on the plane or drugs in our baggage. When we got to customs, they really checked me out, coming in from Tangier and all that. I was positive they'd give Edie duty problems about the two white mink coats—I mean, after all, it was
June
—but they never even checked her.

Chuck came in on the next flight. I realized he might have bolted just because he'd gotten one of those cosmic flashes that our plane was going to crash. He was from Harvard, after all, which was early LSD country. I never did find out for sure, though.

We brought back a lot of burnouses from Tangier—striped ones that turn up on a lot of people in our photographs and movies from that period.

We drove straight from the airport down to the Village for a double bill of
A Hard Day's Night
and
Goldfinger
and then over to Arthur—we didn't even bother to drop our bags off, we just kept the car.

When you walked into Arthur, straight in front of you was the restaurant and the dancing room was to the right. It was all dark brightness. It was Sybil Burton Christopher's club, of course, and Sybil was an upbeat, outgoing woman—everything was fun! wit-ty! a ball!—the energetic English type that wants everybody to have fun. I met so many stars at Arthur—Sophia Loren, Bette Davis—everybody but Liz Taylor Burton—but the most thrilling thing was meeting an astronaut, Scott Carpenter. (Right in the beginning of June '65, the U.S. space program had two astronauts orbiting who'd just done the first “walk in space” outside their capsule.)

When I got settled being back in New York, Ivan and I had a talk about my decision to retire from painting. I told him as a friend, “I've really stopped painting, Ivan. Maybe I'll do a commission or a portrait once in a while, but at this point I'm bored.” Ivan understood what I meant—that I didn't want to keep repainting successful themes. He told me how remarkable
it was that I'd been able to make another career for myself, in movies. I asked him again if he wanted to be in one someday, and he said, “Oh, no, Andy, I'm much too wholesome.”

At the time I announced my retirement, Pop Art was finally getting serious attention from art historians and museums.

At the end of June, one really hot night, there was a big party at the Factory for John Rublowsky and Ken Heyman's book,
Pop Art
, and the loft was stifling. The girl next to me in a plastic Courtèges dress, sweating, said that wearing it was like sitting naked on a kitchen chair; it was sticking to her. She had a copy of the book and asked me to autograph it. As I leafed through the pages and looked at the colorplates, I was completely satisfied with being retired: the basic Pop statements had already been made.