POPism (33 page)

• • •

In those days the picnic lunches from the Brasserie with the red-and-white-checked napkins were the big rage. The people out at Philip's, who'd all paid a hundred dollars a ticket, got those box lunches for their money—plus a dose of the Velvet Underground and a dance concert by the Cunningham dancers to a John Cage score for viola, gong, radio, and the door-slams, windshield-wipes, and engine-turnovers of three cars. Jasper Johns was there, and I heard him say that in the fall he was moving downtown to Houston Street into a huge building that had been a bank, and that Susan Sontag was going to take over his Riverside Drive apartment.

I couldn't wait to look through Philip's underground art museum. Gerard was carrying his whip that day because he was dancing onstage with the Velvets, Paul was in an eighteenth-century jacket and a lace shirt, I was wearing blue jeans and a leather jacket, and Fred was in a collegiate outfit—a Shetland pullover sweater or something. The four of us looked like extras in different movies as we wandered through the museum together. We were the only ones there at that point, and Paul started giving one of his oral essays on modern art which everyone at the Factory knew almost by heart—Fred was the only one who hadn't been exposed to it yet. In any case, Paul always had a few new put-downs to throw in:

“Modern art is nothing but atrocious
graphics,”
he said, stopping in front of a very good abstract painting. “The days of true art are over and I'm afraid they have been for quite some time. Now, if these atrocities were
good
graphics, people would recognize them as such; but they can't, because they're ugly and garish and banal. There
is
no art anymore; there's just bad graphic design, which people are trying desperately to imbue
with some meaning. I mean, if you want to see real abstract designs, you can go up to Harlem and stare at old linoleum! All modern art is, is graphics and slabs being overanalyzed by a bunch of morons.”

Fred was gaping; he'd obviously never heard anyone talk that way, let alone someone who worked for an artist. In front of the artist, yet. And one of my Self-Portraits was hanging nearby. Fred looked like he wanted to disagree, but he didn't say anything—he just stared, amazed, while Paul continued:

“Unless you paint a picture of a man, a woman, a cat, a dog, or a tree, you're not making art,” Paul said. “You go into a gallery today and you look at some drippings and you ask one of those pretentious gallery people, ‘What is this? Is it a candle? Is it a post?' and instead, they tell you the artist's
name
. ‘It's a Pollock.' They tell you the artist's name! So
what!
All it comes down to is people looking at price tags in galleries and buying whatever bad graphics they can afford.

“It's like reading architecture criticism.” Paul lowered his voice a little since, after all, we were in a famous architect's house. “You read all those words in all those pathetic magazines—about the windowpanes and doors that're on these modern glass slabs. The buildings are practically nothing, so they go and invent language to make them sound like something.”

The great thing about Paul was that however ridiculous his arguments were, you couldn't help being entertained by them. He could be telling you that
you
were a moron and you probably wouldn't mind—in fact, usually you'd be laughing—because he'd find some outrageous way to make his case.

“Let's go find the Velvet Underwear,” Paul suggested, and we went back outside. It was dark now, but the lights from inside the Glass House were shining out on the trees and grass, and
there were picnic baskets scattered all around. The Velvets were already starting to play, and Gerard rushed to join them. I was reflecting that most people thought the Factory was a place where everybody had the same attitudes about everything; the truth was, we were all odds-and-ends misfits, somehow misfitting together.

Fred got caught up in the scene completely. He moved from the beautiful de Menil house where he'd been staying into the Henry Hudson Hotel way over on West 57th, where a lot of our people were living then. He chucked his glamorous, privileged setup for a bare-essentials West Side hotel room—he was fascinated with the kind of seedy glamour he was seeing at the Factory and wanted a heavier dose. The first night he ever went to Max's—or, rather, tried to—he was wearing his big ten-gallon Tom Mix hat and Mickey blocked him at the door and told him, “We don't know you.” Fred confided to me later that he was so crushed when that happened that he just said, “Oh, okay,” and left and went uptown on the rebound to exclusive El Morocco. (And nothing makes you feel dumber in an embarrassing situation than being in a funny hat.)

People say that you always want the things you can't have, that “the grass is greener” and all that, but in the mid-sixties I never, never, never felt that way for a single minute. I was so happy doing what I was doing, with the people I was doing it all with. Certainly, at other times in my life I'd wanted lots of things I didn't have and been envious of other people for having them. But right then I felt like I was finally the right type in the right place at the right time. It was all luck and it was all fabulous. Whatever I didn't have that I wanted, I felt that it was just a
matter of any day now. I had no anxieties about anything—everything just seemed to be coming to us.

The Montreal Expo had opened in May on the banks of the St. Lawrence River with six of my Self-Portraits up there at the U.S. Pavilion, and I flew up to Canada with John de Menil and Fred in Mr. de Menil's jet to see them.

The American pavilion was Buckminster Fuller's big geodesic dome, with its aluminum shades catching the sun, and an Apollo space capsule and a long free-span escalator. Those were things like you'd expect to find at an international exposition. What was unusual was that the rest of the American show was almost completely Pop—it was called Creative America. I remember thinking as I looked around it that there weren't two separate societies in the United States anymore—one official and heavy and “meaningful” and the other frivolous and Pop. People used to pretend that the millions of rock-and-roll 45's the kids bought every year somehow didn't count, but that what an economist at Harvard or some other place like that said, did. So this U.S. exhibit was like an official acknowledgment that people would rather see media celebrities than anything else.

In the way of art there were works by Rauschenberg and Stella and Poons and Zox and Motherwell and D'Arcangelo and Dine and Rosenquist and Johns and Oldenburg. But a lot of the show was pop culture itself—movies and blow-ups of stars, and props and folk art and American Indian art and Elvis Presley's guitar and Joan Baez's guitar. And these things weren't just
part
of the exhibit; they
were
the exhibit—Pop America
was
America, completely.

The old idea used to be that intellectuals didn't know what was going on in the other society—popular culture. Those
scenes in early rock-and-roll movies were so dated now, where the old fogies would hear rock and roll for the first time and start tapping their feet and say, “That's catchy. What did you say you called it? ‘Rock and…
roll?' ”
When Thomas Hoving, the director of the Metropolitan, talked about an exhibit there that included three busts of ancient Egyptian princesses, he referred to them offhandedly as “The Supremes.” Everybody was part of the same culture now. Pop references let people know that
they
were what was happening, that they didn't have to
read
a book to be part of culture—all they had to do was
buy
it (or a record or a TV set or a movie ticket).

Paul thought the Factory should be more under control, more like a regular office. He wanted it to become a real moviemaking-moneymaking business enterprise, and he never could see the point of having all the young kids and old kids hanging around all the time for no particular reason. He wanted to phase out the drop-in, lounging habits of the past few years. This was inevitable, really—we'd gotten to know so many people all over town that our small circle had expanded to hundreds and hundreds, and we just couldn't have the all-day-all-night “open house” anymore, it had gotten too crazy.

Paul turned out to be a good office manager. He was the one who'd talk to business people, read
Variety
, and look around for good-looking or funny (ideally, both) kids to be in our movies. He'd dream up theories to throw out to the interviewers—for instance, he had a whole presentation about how similar our organization was to the old MGM star system. “We only believe in stars, and our kids are actually very similar to the Walt Disney kids, except of course that they're
modern
children, so naturally they take drugs and have sex.”

• • •

Most things Paul told the newspapers looked outrageous in print. At first, it was only a comment here and there, but by the end of the next year, interviews about us were full of his quotable spiels. The early Factory style had come out of Pop Art, where you didn't talk, you just did outrageous things, and when you spoke to the press, it was with “gestures,” which was more artistic. But now that style was all played out—everyone was ready for some articulation, and Paul was nothing if not articulate.

To make the Factory into more of the “business office” he had in mind, Paul put partitions up around one-third of the floor space, dividing the loft into little cubicles. The intention was to let people know that the Factory was now a place where actual business was conducted—typewriter/paper clip/manila envelope/filing cabinet business. It didn't exactly work out the way he'd envisioned it, though: people started using the cubicles for sex.

Meanwhile, we were becoming the target for some very aggressive attacks on drugs and homosexuality. If the attacks were done in a clever, funny way, I enjoyed reading them as much as anybody. But if someone in the press put us down, without humor, on “moral grounds,” I would think, “Why are they attacking
us?
Why aren't they out there attacking, say, Broadway musicals, where there are probably more fags in any one production than there are at the whole Factory? Why aren't they attacking dancers and fashion designers and interior decorators? Why
us?
when all I have to do is turn on my TV to see hundreds of actors who are so gay you can't believe your eyes and nobody bothers
them
. Why
us
, when you could meet your favorite matinee idols from Hollywood who gave out interviews all the time on what their
dream girls were like—and they'd all have their
boyfriends
with them?”

Naturally, the Factory had fags; we were in the entertainment business and—That's Entertainment! Naturally, the Factory had more gays than, say, Congress, but it probably wasn't even as gay as your favorite TV police show. The Factory was a place where you could let your “problems” show and nobody would hate you for it. And if you worked your problems up into entertaining routines, people would like you even more for being strong enough to say you were different and actually have fun with it. What I mean is, there was no hypocrisy at the Factory, and I think the reason we were attacked so much and so vehemently was because we refused to play along and be hypocritical and covert. That really incensed a lot of people who wanted the old stereotypes to stay around. I often wondered, “Don't the people who play those image games care about all the miserable people in the world who just can't fit into stock roles?”

When kids we knew would have nervous breakdowns or commit suicide, people would go, “See? See? Look what you did to them! They were fine until they met
you!”
Well, all I can say to that is, if a person was “fine” when they met us, then they stayed fine, and if they had bad problems—sometimes nothing and no one could fix them up. I mean, there's always been an awful lot of people out there on the streets talking to themselves. It wasn't like someone was issuing me newborn babies with good chemicals and letting me raise them.

And there were a lot of sexually straight people around the Factory, too, anyway. The gay thing was what was flamboyant, so it got attention, but there were a lot of guys hanging around because of all the beautiful girls.

Of course, people said the Factory was degenerate just because “anything went” there, but I think that was really a very good thing. As one straight kid said to me, “It's nice not to be
trapped
into something, even if that's what you are.” For example, if a man sees two guys having sex, he finds out one of two things: either he's turned on or he's turned off—so then he knows where he stands in life. I think people should see absolutely
everything
and then decide for themselves—not let other people decide for them. Whatever else it did, the Factory definitely helped a lot of people decide.

This was the summer I met Candy Darling.

Most people would probably think of the following year, '68, as the time we were getting involved with the drag queens who were around downtown, because it wasn't until then that they first cropped up in our movies, when Paul used Jackie Curtis and Candy in
Flesh
. Of course we'd had Mario Montez in a few of our early films, but since Mario only dressed up as a woman for performances—out in the world, he would never be in drag—he was more like a show business transvestite than the social-sexual phenomenon the true drags were.

As late as '67 drag queens still weren't accepted in the mainstream freak circles. They were still hanging around where they'd always hung around—on the fringes, around the big cities, usually in crummy little hotels, sticking to their own circles—outcasts with bad teeth and body odor and cheap makeup and creepy clothes. But then, just like drugs had come into the average person's life, sexual blurs did, too, and people began identifying a little more with drag queens, seeing them more as “sexual radicals” than as depressing losers.