POPism (36 page)

“I went to three Catholic schools in Brooklyn, and they all threw me out; then I went to Washington Irving High,” she said, nodding her head in the direction of 16th Street and Irving Place, just a few blocks away. “And what about Andrea?” I asked her. “Andrea, she went to this progressive school for theatrical-like kids that cost a lot of money called Quintano's—it was the kind of school you could go to just when you felt like it. It was right near [the discotheque] Ondine.”

I couldn't imagine any of these girls sitting in classes or working at a job. Maybe a couple of days a year, but that was all. So I didn't understand how they always had the best clothes and went everywhere in cabs. That night I came right out and asked Geraldine where they got their money from. She pointed across the room at a girl who looked about their age. “Andrea and I live with Roberta,” she said, “on Park and 31st.”

“And where does Roberta get her money from?” I asked her.

“Her husband is very rich.”

I took another look at Roberta while Geraldine went on: “She had Donyale Luna living there with her, and now she has me and Andrea, and her husband supports us all.” Donyale Luna was one of the first big high-fashion black models and she was gorgeous.

“How old is Roberta?” I asked Geraldine.

“Thirty-three—I swear to God! But you can't tell because she's so tiny.”

Geraldine said that she thought they were all going to get kicked out soon because Donyale was making about five hundred dollars' worth of calls to Europe every month and Roberta's husband was getting mad about the phone bill.

“And Donyale has this crazy boyfriend who came in last night and smashed her over the head with a beer bottle”—Geraldine laughed—“right after she was giving us this big lecture about how disgraceful it was that we were smoking pot and taking LSD.”

“But who buys your clothes?” I asked her, looking over the designer mini-dress she was wearing and the beautiful leather boots.

“We go shopping on Andrea's charge cards—her mother's, I mean. And I don't know…. I can always get people to buy me clothes…”

One of the first times Geraldine came into Manhattan from Brooklyn, she said, was when the Beatles were in town and the whole city was going nuts, with girls yelling and screaming on the TV news and Beatles songs blaring twenty-four hours a day on the radio.

“I was walking down Bleecker Street with a couple of my girl friends,” Geraldine told me, “and this beautiful blonde girl came running over to us and said, ‘Do you want to meet the Beatles?' I thought she was crazy. There was a guy waiting for her in a car, and I thought they were trying to rape us away or something. But they convinced us to trust them and we rode uptown with them to the Warwick Hotel where there were hundreds of girls all lined up in front screaming, like, very insane. We waited downstairs with a man who had some kind of newspaper pass for
about an hour. I kept saying, ‘This is crazy, this is a joke—my mother wants me home to Brooklyn by eleven,' but then we got taken up in a little elevator and the door to a suite opens and there's the Beatles having a party! Another girl who was there, I realized later, was Linda Eastman, but I didn't know her then—I was just out of Brooklyn, all I knew was the Beatles.

“We played spin the bottle with them and all these other games like that, and we watched TV till like five in the morning, and then we passed out. Sometime during the night somebody took a big American flag and draped it over the three of us like a blanket.”

She trailed off as if that were the end of the story, but I wasn't going to let her get away with that.

“Oh, come on, Geraldine!” I insisted. “You must have made it with them. Admit it! Come on, I won't tell.”

“Nooooo! I swear!” She giggled. “The guy who picked us up in the car said to me, ‘Why don't you go in with Paul?' and I said no, because at that time I was a virgin, we were very innocent. And the guy got real mad because I guess he was supposed to pick up girls that would do something…. In the morning we got woken up by screams from outside—we went over to the window and looked down and the street was all girls having fits.

“When I got back to Brooklyn, my mother said, ‘I thought you were dead. Where were you?' That was like the first time I'd ever stayed out all night, so she was real mad. She was sitting there with one of her girl friends and I told her, ‘Ma, you're not gonna believe this, but I was with the Beatles.' She looked at her girl friend, like, ‘She's crazy—she thinks she was with the Beatles.'”

“So who are you making it with now?” I asked her.

Geraldine giggled and pointed across the room to a handsome blond guy who was new in the crowd then. “I'm having
an affair with Joe Dallesandro, actually. He's asked me to marry him.”

I'd heard that Joe was already married, to the daughter of the woman his father was living with, or something.

“But Joe's already married, isn't he?”

“Yeah,” she said with a wave of her hand, “but you know with him, that doesn't matter….” Then her expression turned serious. “He's very much in love with me,” she said. Then in one split second the seriousness turned into a fit of hysterical laughing.

We'd met Joe Dallesandro when he wandered by mistake into the apartment in the Village where we were shooting a reel for
Loves of Ondine
—he was on his way to visit somebody in another apartment in the building. But when we saw the reel with him in it developed, he turned out to have a screen look and a hot-cold personality that Paul got very excited about.

Paul was always studying faces—how to light them, how to photograph them. He'd walk by with a picture of Jackie Kennedy, murmuring, “Did you ever see a photographer's dream like this face—look how wide apart the eyes are.” He used to study Eric and tell me, “Eric has one of the few perfectly symmetrical faces I've ever seen.” But something he admired even more than a person with a perfect face was a person with a flaw who knew how to play it down: “Elvis,” he pointed out to me once, holding a still from
Loving You
, “has absolutely no chin—that's why he's so intelligent to wear these high collars that stand up.”

Paul seemed to see Joe as another Brando or James Dean—a person with the kind of screen magic that'd appeal to both men and women. When I saw Paul one day looking Joe's face over critically, holding his hair back so he could pick out his “bad
side,” I could tell that Paul was really interested in making movies with him.

Of course, Paul wasn't doing any of the photography on our movies yet—I was still doing it all. But the next year when I was in the hospital, he made
Flesh
by himself, and Joe was the star. Eventually, he became Paul's main star. (“Don't try to act, Joe—just stand there,” I heard Paul yell at him during the shooting of
Trash
. “Stop the Method moping—just talk. And whatever you do, don't smile unless you
don't mean it
!”)

So Joe was just starting to be around now, and he was in Max's that night, across from Jim Morrison, who'd come in with a pretty new girl. At another table was Billy Sullivan and Matty—two Brooklyn kids—talking to Amy Goodman—her father owned Marvel Comics—and Matty was telling them that people shouldn't have houses anymore, that they should just have “rest depots.” And right beyond them was Jimi Hendrix with one of those beautiful black girls—Devon or Pat Hartley or Emeretta, I can't remember which one, they were all friends. At about three in the morning, Andrea came tearing into the back room in a velvet miniskirt up to her crotch and a big-brimmed velvet hat. She climbed up onto the big round table where we were sitting, ripped her blouse open, and screamed, “It's
Show Time!
And everything's coming up
roses!
Marilyn's gone
five years, so love me while you can, I've got a heart of gold!
”

This was her basic routine. Some nights she'd get too crazy and get into fights, and Mickey would throw her out for a few weeks. But if all she did was stand on the table, rip open her blouse, and sing a couple of numbers, that was fine. Usually, she'd also grab her tits and tell everyone, “I'm a real woman—look at these grapefruits! I'm gonna be
on top tonight!
” Geraldine
would always egg her on, screaming, “More! Take more off! More! More!” Then Andrea would go find some guy and tease him till he got fairly interested—and then freak out if he even so much as touched her. Patti was over in the corner, and I heard her telling a boy named Robin, a “security guard” at Tiger Morse's boutique where there'd been a lot of shoplifting (“At least
half the
stock leaves without saying good-bye,” Tiger once told me), “I don't believe in wearing clothes,
anyway
, so why should I
pay
for them?”

As I said, I tried to imagine these kids at school or work. I tried really hard, but I couldn't—I couldn't imagine them anywhere but right there in Max's back room.

When Taylor Mead left New York in
'64
to go live in Europe, he was a little disappointed in my filmmaking style; he felt I wasn't being sensitive enough to actors' performances. I remember how annoyed he was once when I filmed a reel of Jack Ker-ouac, Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, and him on the couch at the Factory—that I did it from the side and you couldn't really see who was who—and then on top of that, we lost the reel. He thought that was just too irresponsible, and I heard he was calling me “incompetent.”

Taylor had planned to stay in Europe until the Vietnam war was over, but already in'67 he was beginning to get tired of France, and when he saw
Chelsea Girls
screened at the Cinemathèque in Paris, he called me right up at the Factory.

“I've been in
La Dolce Vita
land too long, Andy,” he said.
“Chelsea Girls
is the real thing. I'm coming home.”

He came immediately, and the very day he got back here we filmed him with Brigid and Nico and a former child actor named Patrick Tilden Close (who'd played the boy Elliot Roosevelt in
Sunrise at Campobello
with Ralph Bellamy and Greer Garson) in a segment titled
Imitation of Christ
for the twenty-five-hour movie.

Taylor couldn't wait to tell me what had happened at the Paris screening of
Chelsea Girls
to make him come straight home.

“Half the French audience walked out,” he said. “I was sitting next to the man who was supposed to be the most far-out person in Paris, and even he got up and left! That whole supposedly sophisticated audience was spooked. That's when I decided that the United States has the worst
and the
best.”

It was a typical scene at the Factory: Fred was over in a corner looking at some of Billy Name's photographs that were going to go into the Swedish catalog for my art show in Stockholm the following February; Gerard was reading a letter from a friend in London about Brian Epstein's death from an overdose; Susan Pile was sitting in front of her typewriter looking over the first issue of
Cheetah
magazine (the one with the nude Mama Cass centerfold on the bed of daisies); the radio was playing “Funky Broadway”; Paul was on the phone to a theater manager, telling him we'd have a new movie ready soon called
Nude Restaurant
, and clipping reviews of I,
a Man
and
Bike Boy
out of a stack of newspapers in front of him (Paul was obsessive about cutting articles and mentions out of the papers and pasting them into scrapbooks—his first job had been with an insurance company, cutting out clauses from one policy and pasting them into others so they could be photocopied, and he said that cutting and pasting was something he still liked to do); and I was busy signing some of the posters that I'd done that year for the Fifth New York Film Festival at Lincoln Center's Philharmonic Hall. We were all just finishing up and getting ready to go out to a movie—Fred was reading out a list of what was playing around
town:
Point Blank!, Privilege, Games, To Sir with Love, A Man for All Seasons, A Man and a Woman, Bonnie and Clyde, Ulysses, In the Heat of the Night.…
”

As he got to
Thoroughly Modern Millie
, the grate to the elevator opened and a guy came in with a gun.

Just like the time that woman came in and shot a hole through my Marilyns, again it just didn't seem real to me. The guy made us all sit together on the couch: me, Taylor, Paul, Gerard, Patrick, Fred, Billy, Nico, Susan. It seemed to me like he was auditioning for one of our movies—I mean, subconsciously I thought he had to be joking. He started screaming that some guy who owed him five hundred dollars had told him to come to the Factory to collect it from us. Then he pointed the gun at Paul's head and pulled the trigger—and nothing happened. (“See,” I thought, “he really
is
joking.”) Then he pointed it to the ceiling and pulled it again, and this time it went off. The shot seemed to surprise him, too—he got all confused and handed the gun to Patrick—and Patrick, like a good nonviolent flower child, said, “I don't want it, man,” and handed it back to him. Then the guy took a woman's plastic rain bonnet out of his pocket and put it on my head. “Expressway to Your Heart” was coming out of the radio. Everybody just sat there, too scared to say anything, except for Paul, who told the guy that the police would be coming any second now because of the shot. But the guy said he had to get his five hundred before he would leave—and now he was demanding movie equipment and a “hostage,” too.

Suddenly Taylor jumped up onto his back. (Later Taylor said, “It felt like jumping a steel statue, he was so strong.”)

As Taylor was hanging on his back, the guy started to open up a folding knife. Taylor slid off him, grabbed the rainhat from my head, ran to the window with it over his fist, and broke the
glass, screaming to the YMCA across the way, “Help! Help! Police!”