POPism (37 page)

The guy ran down the stairs as fast as he could—he didn't wait for the elevator. We looked out the window and saw him get into the passenger side of a big car with its trunk open, and then it drove away.

Taylor said that he'd jumped the guy because he'd been so embarrassed for me, to see me looking so silly, sitting there in a woman's rain bonnet.

We went to see Jackie Curtis's play,
Glamour, Glory, and Gold
, at Bastiano's Cellar Studio on Waverly Place in the Village, and later on that night we were at Salvation on Sheridan Square when Jackie walked in with Candy Darling and two men I didn't know. Jackie came over and sat down at the table where I was talking to three of the Stones—Brian, Keith, and Mick.

Salvation had a sunken dance floor and colored lights, but no live band, just records (a good place for dancing, though—the music was incredibly loud). It had opened in the summer of '67 where a place called the Downtown used to be. Bradley Pierce and Jerry Schatzberg and some other people were backing it, but Bradley was the one who actually ran it, deciding who to let in and who to keep out and who to throw out. He was like a father figure to the little groupies, and you could always count on seeing him over in a corner joking with them and sort of taking care of them—like a popular teacher in high school. The Salvation didn't last that long, but it was great while it did: it gave you someplace to go right before Max's. It was an easy money place for the owners, too—just records and drinks. Minimal—perfect for right then.

Jackie and Candy were obviously trying to dump the two creeps they'd come in with. Candy went straight to the dance floor, and Brian looked over at her and said to me, “Who's that guy?” Right away he knew.

Jackie told me they'd just been at Max's. “Tonight was only my second time there, and Candy's first, and they put us
upstairs,”
he said. In the days before there was dancing there, upstairs was definitely not the place to be at Max's—everybody was either downstairs at the bar or in the back room.
No
body went upstairs.

“Our escorts,” Jackie said sarcastically, nodding toward the two guys, “thought it was just wonderful up there—they did not even
suspect
we were in Siberia. Candy and I were so embarrassed, we rushed to the ladies' room and stayed there. She just kept putting more and more makeup on, and saying, ‘I'm not sitting
there
.'”

“Who are they?” I asked.

“Well, the tall one has been writing checks all week, and let's put it this way—he's got a lot of friends at Chase Manhattan, only none of them has ever heard of him…. Oh, well,” Jackie sighed, “it was nice while it lasted. We just found out. And the short one is a great fan of Judy Garland's who thinks he has a lot in common with Candy, when all it really is, is their genitals, and he can't resist informing everybody, ‘She's a man.'”

I noticed that Jackie was starting to do more femme things than when I'd first met him on the street that summer—he'd probably picked them up from being so close to Candy. “Why aren't you in drag, too?” I came right out and asked him.

“I'm too scared. My family lives around here, you know. People know me.”

Candy came over to Jackie and whispered meaningfully, “Hope is here.”

“Who's Hope?” I asked Jackie after Candy had gone back to the dance floor.

“Hope Stansbury. Over there with the long black hair and the pale, pale skin,” Jackie said, pointing to a girl in a nice-looking forties suit. “Candy moved in with her for a few months behind the Caffe Cino so she could study her, although Candy will never admit that—she gets mad when I even tell people where she got the name ‘Hope'…”

“But she's not using the ‘Hope' anymore.”

“Right.” Jackie said, handing me the cast list from the play where the billing was clearly “Candy Darling.”

There was one very interesting thing about seeing
Glamour, Glory, and Gold that
night—I mean, besides Jackie having written it and Candy being in it. All ten of the male roles were played by Robert De Niro—it was his stage debut. Years later, after he got famous, Jackie explained to me how he happened to be in it.

“He came over to the director's apartment where Candy, Holly Woodlawn, and I were sitting around, and you would have thought he was crazy—
we
did. ‘I gotta be in the play! I gotta be in the play! Please! I'll do anything!' he kept pleading. I said to him, ‘Ten roles?' He said, ‘Yes! And I'll do the posters, too—my mother has a printing press.' I said, ‘My grandmother has a bar, how do you do.' He was fabulous in the play—the
Voice
gave him a rave.”

One afternoon when we were screening
Imitation of Christ
, a nice-looking guy named Paul Solomon from
The Merv Griffin Show
came by “hunting for talent.” Brigid immediately got a
crush on him and he immediately got a crush on Viva and Nico. And that's how Merv got into his period of having quite a few “underground freaks” on his show. Ultra Violet had already been on a few times, and the people over there had liked her a lot—she was articulate, so I guess they thought that on the whole she was a pretty reasonable freak—and she paved the way for the other girls.

Viva was also pretty good on television. But the two TV talk show disasters from our group were Brigid and Nico. When Nico was on, she played a little number on her little portable organ, which was fine, but then when Merv tried to talk to her afterward, she just sat there, saying absolutely nothing. He got so exasperated that right on the air he sent for somebody in production to come out onstage and explain to him exactly who this girl was and why she'd been booked on the show. This was
after
he'd crawled under his chair. That was Nico.

And then there was Brigid. Brigid in those days was incredibly hostile. (After playing the Duchess in
Chelsea Girls
, she actually stayed in that character for a couple of years.) They'd asked me to go on
The Merv Griffin Show
, and I said no, like I always did to television. So I offered them Brigid instead, and I talked her into going on, I even promised to escort her to the studio and be right there in the audience for support.

I went to pick her up at the George Washington Hotel on 23rd and Lexington where she was living. She was in a pink corduroy jacket and jeans and shiny black patent leather shoes, and she had little ribbon bows in her hair. It was raining hard outside, and she was afraid she was going to get her hair all wet, and she was moaning, “Oh, why did I ever say yes….” I called a cab to take us over to the taping at the Little Theater on West 44th Street, but when we passed Howard Johnson's on Broadway she
tried to bolt, pleading, “Let's just split and have a malted.” (Brigid wasn't too fat then, just sort of chubby with a beautiful baby face, and she never passed up a chance to eat if she could. She used to tell me stories about when she was little and her mother would bribe her to lose weight—fifteen dollars for every pound she lost—and how she'd just stuff socks under the doctor's scale in her bedroom to lower the reading—and how Nora the housekeeper would find oatmeal bowls under her bed—minus the oatmeal—and how later on when she was married, she'd go out to dinner with friends and then go right home and have another dinner with her husband.) I told her we could go to Howard Johnson's
after
the show.

Backstage in the makeup room at the Little Theater, Dr. Joyce Brothers, another guest on the show that day, was being made up. They told Brigid that the makeup man would do her next, but being Brigid and being hostile, she told them very haughtily, “No,” as if to say that everybody
else
might be so plastic as to need makeup, but that
she
was
real
and didn't need it! (But I noticed her slip out a Blush-on compact and dust herself when she thought no one was looking.) Then Bill Cosby and Vincent Price walked by, and I left Brigid alone and went down into the audience.

When Brigid came out onstage, Merv tried to open the conversation up with a little mention of Ultra—probably thinking that the underground was one big happy family, or else that superstars would be smart enough to at least
pretend
that it was when they were on television, the way Hollywood people always did (“I had a lot of fun making the picture”). Instead, Brigid put Ultra down—way down. And Merv began to get nervous that Brigid wasn't going to be so nice. He was right. Her attitude toward him was like he was a stranger annoying her in a bus
depot—she was really giving him hostile looks there, and once she even threw a pure amphetamine glare straight into the camera. Merv tried everything pleasant he could think of, but still she wouldn't change. The only good thing that happened was when he looked over her outfit and asked, “Who's your designer?” and Brigid stood up and announced, “You can always tell by the little gold button: Levi Strauss.” Then Merv, a little encouraged, asked her what she did all day every day since she'd said she didn't work, and Brigid told him the truth: “I dye every day. I go from beige to another color. I take beige jeans and I dye them in my bathtub.”

The second the show was finished, Brigid marched off the stage down into the audience to get me. She asked me how she'd done, and when I told her the truth, “Horrible,” she didn't believe me! I asked her how many pokes of amphetamine she'd had before going on and she wouldn't answer me. We went over to the Factory and watched the show with everybody there, and even seeing it, she was still so high she didn't realize how bad she was. (She had absolutely no regrets about it at all until years later when she got off speed and finally got embarrassed.)

The day after the show, fifty pairs of large beige corduroy jeans arrived at the Factory addressed to her—courtesy of Levi Strauss & Co. for the plug she'd given them on the air.

In October I got into trouble over some college lectures that the big lecture bureau I was signed up with had booked me to do out west. I always took a group of superstars with me to the colleges where I had “speaking engagements” because I was too shy and scared to talk myself—the superstars would do all the talking and answer all the questions from the audience and I would just be sitting quietly up there onstage like a good mystique. I
brought along people like Viva and Paul and Brigid and Ultra and Allen Midgette, a great-looking dancer we'd used in a few movies, and the colleges always seemed to be satisfied, even though it wasn't exactly a “lecture” we were giving—it was more like a talk show with a dummied-up host.

One night in Max's, I was sitting between Paul and Allen—we were all supposed to be leaving the next day to give a few lectures out west, and I suddenly just didn't feel like going, I had a lot of work to do. After I'd been complaining about it for a while, Allen suggested, “Well, why don't I just go as you?” The few moments after he said that were like one of those classic movie scenes where everybody hears a dumb idea that they then slowly realize maybe isn't so dumb. We all looked at each other and thought, “Why not?” Allen was so good-looking that they might even enjoy him more. All he'd have to do was keep quiet the way I did and let Paul do all the talking. And we'd been playing switch-the-superstar at parties and openings around New York for years, telling people that Viva was Ultra and Edie was me and I was Gerard—sometimes people would get mixed up all by themselves between people like Tom Baker
(I, a Man)
and Joe Spencer
(Bike Boy)
and we just wouldn't bother to correct them, it was too much fun to let them go on getting it all wrong—it seemed like a joke to us. So these antistar identity games were something we were doing anyway, as a matter of course.

The next day, Paul and Allen with his hair sprayed silver flew out to Utah and Oregon and a couple of other places to give the lectures, and when they came back, they said that it had all gone really well.

It wasn't until about four months later that somebody at one of the colleges happened to see a picture of me in the
Voice
and compared it to the one he'd taken of Allen on the podium and
we had to give them their money back. When the local newspaper out west called me for a statement, what could I say except, “It seemed like a good idea at the time.” But the whole situation got even more absurd. Like, once I was on the phone with an official from one of the other colleges on that tour, telling him how really sorry I was when suddenly he turned paranoid and said:

“How can I even be sure this is really you on the phone
now?”

After a pause while I gave that some thought, I had to admit, “I don't know.”

We went back to the colleges that wanted us to redo the lectures, but some of the places didn't want us anymore—one college said, “We've had all we can take of that guy.”

But I still thought that Allen made a much better Andy Warhol than I did—he had high, high cheekbones and a full mouth and sharp, arched eyebrows, and he was a raving beauty and fifteen/twenty years younger. Like I always wanted Tab Hunter to play me in a story of my life—people would be so much happier imagining that I was as handsome as Allen and Tab were. I mean, the real Bonnie and Clyde sure didn't look like Faye and Warren. Who wants the truth? That's what show business is for—to prove that it's not what you are that counts, it's what they
think
you are.

I should have learned my lesson from that experience, though— that the days of no-fault put-ons were over, that now that we were signing things like contracts, like with the lecture bureau, what we thought of as a joke was what some people could call “fraud.” So all of a sudden we had to start acting more grown-up.

(But later on—in '69, yet—I made another big put-on
faux pas
when I told a West Coast magazine something outrageous
like “I don't even do my own paintings—Brigid Polk does them for me,” which wasn't true, I just thought I was being funny. Joyce Haber picked it up for her syndicated newspaper column and from there it got into the national magazines, and then, worst of all, the German press started calling about my “statement” because collectors over there who had so much of my art were panicking that they might have Polks instead of Warhols, etc., etc. So I had to make a public retraction. Fred screamed at me for days because he was so tired of taking transatlantic calls and telling people who'd invested hundreds of thousands of dollars in my work that ha-ha, I'd only been kidding. At that point I think I finally learned once and for all that the wrong flip remark in the press can cause just as many problems as a broken contract.)