POPism (38 page)

The hippie musical
Hair
opened downtown at the New York Shakespeare Festival in November, and also that month the first issue of
Rolling Stone
magazine from San Francisco—aimed at sort of college-oriented rock and rollers—turned up on newsstands and in the head shops. (Another—even more intellectual—rock magazine,
Crawdaddy
, had been publishing out of Boston since the beginning of the year.) Both
Hair
and
Rolling Stone
hit the right mixture of counterculture and slick commercialism to cash in big on the new youth market.

Hair
spread the idea that the big new youth cult had happened thanks to the Piscean Age finishing and the Aquarian Age coming in—and it certainly did look like the kids were taking over. There were so many new business markets to explore, so many new types of people needing magazines and movies and music to identify with. By now all the smart business people had figured out that kids weren't really growing up anymore, that
they were staying part of the youth market. And a lot of the smart people figuring that out were the kids themselves—now that they were staying young longer, when they graduated from college they could become executive groupies if they wanted to.

In the middle of November, the Play-House of the Ridiculous production of
Conquest of the Universe
opened at the Bouwerie Lane Theater downtown. It was like a big social event in the underground because a lot of people from our movies and from the Max's crowd were in it—people like Taylor Mead, Ondine, Ultra Violet, Claude Purvis, Beverly Grant, Mary Woronov, Lynn Reyner, Frankie Francine.

Hair
and
Conquest
had been in rehearsal downtown at the same time.
Conquest
had a short, modestly successful run and then closed.
Hair
, of course, turned out to be a huge commercial hit, moving uptown after a few months to the Biltmore Theater on Broadway, where it kept on playing for years. It marked a crucial turning point in the history of the theater, just the way the following year
Midnight Cowboy
would in film.

Now it was clear that there were two types of people doing counterculture-type things—the ones who wanted to be commercial and successful and move right up into the mainstream of society with their stuff, and the ones who wanted to stay where they were, outside society. The way to be counterculture and have mass commercial success was to say and do radical things in a conservative format. Like have a well-choreographed, well-scored, anti-Establishment “hippie be-in” in a well-ventilated, well-located theater. Or like McLuhan had done—write a book saying books were obsolete.

The other people—the ones who didn't care at all about mass commercial success—did radical things in a radical format,
and if the audience didn't happen to get the content or the form, then that was that.

Hair
was very straight, because even though it dealt with a hippie lifestyle, it wasn't a part of it—sure, it may have started out as part of it with people like Jim Rado and Gerome Ragni writing the story and the lyrics and Tom O'Horgan directing, but it was very quickly put into the hands of people who knew how to do the slick things that would make it go over with the masses.

Candy Darling was around much more after
Glamour, Glory, and Gold
, and she and Jackie started coming by Max's a lot—they weren't getting ignored and put upstairs any longer. In November when the Stones' album
Their Satanic Majesties Request
was just out, Candy and I were in the back room at the round table together, and when “In the Citadel” came on the juke box, she said, “Oh, listen. This is the song Mick wrote for me and my girl friend Taffy. Listen to the words!” Taffy was another drag queen around town, but I hadn't met her yet. Candy didn't care one bit about rock and roll—her mind was always back in the thirties and forties and the cinema fifties—so it was really strange to hear her use her Kim Novak voice to talk about rock lyrics. Since I could never understand a thing over those really loud sound systems, I asked her what the words were saying.

“Here it comes now! Listen! ‘Candy and Taffy / Hope you both are well / Please come see me / In the Citadel.' Did you
hear
it? We met them in the Hotel Albert.” The Albert was a cheap hotel down on 10th Street and Fifth Avenue. “We were on the floor above them and we dangled a bunch of grapes down on a string outside their window. You see, the Citadel is New York and the song is a message to
us
—Taffy and me.”

“Then how come you didn't say hello to Mick that night at Salvation?”

“I was too embarrassed,” Candy said, “because I can't tell those Stones apart. Which one is Mick?”

The screening we had of **** in December at the Cinemathèque—the one and only time we ever screened all twenty-five consecutive hours of it—brought back all our early days of shooting movies just for the fun and beauty of getting down what was happening with the people we knew. (As one reviewer pointed out, our movies may have looked like home movies, but then our
home
wasn't like anybody else's.) At the time I didn't think of that screening as any kind of milestone, but looking back, I can see that it marked the end of the period when we made movies just to make them.

We sat there in the dark at the Cinemathèque watching reel after reel of footage we'd shot all that year, every place we'd been—San Francisco, Sausalito, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Boston, East Hampton, and all over New York, of friends like Ondine, Edie, Ingrid, Nico, Tiger, Ultra, Taylor, Andrea, Patrick, Tally Brown, Eric, Susan Bottomly, Ivy Nicholson, Brigid, Gerard, Rene, Allen Midgette, Orion, Katrina, Viva, Joe Dallesandro, Tom Baker, David Croland, the Bananas. Seeing it all together that night somehow made it seem more real to me (I mean, more
un
real, which was actually more real) than it had when it was happening—to see Edie and Ondine huddled together on a windy deserted beach on a gray day, with only the sound of the camera, and their voices getting blown away over the sand dunes while they tried to light their cigarettes. Some people stayed through the entire screening, some drifted in and out, some were asleep out in the lobby, some were asleep in their seats, and some
were like me, they couldn't take their eyes off the screen for a single second. The strange thing was, this was the first time I was seeing it all myself—we'd just come straight to the theater with all the reels. I knew we'd never screen it in this long way again, so it was like life, our lives, flashing in front of us—it would just go by once and we'd never see it again.

The next day the Cinemathèque began showing a two-hour version of the twenty-five-hour movie and that was it—most of the reels went into storage, and from then on we began to think mainly about ideas for feature-length movies that regular theaters would want to show.

At the beginning of the year you could pick up your phone and Dial-A-Poem, and by June, you'd be able to even Dial-A-Demonstration—you called a number and a recording actually told you where the public protests around town were that day. The star of my movie
Sleep
, John Giorno, the stockbroker-turned-poet, was the Dial-A-Poem organizer, and the Architectural League was the sponsor. John told me that it was the porno poems that got the most calls.

Astrology and other occult things like numerology and phrenology and palmistry were getting more popular all the time—I mean, there were suddenly Zodiac signs everywhere.

The new style was violence—hippie love was already old-fashioned. In '68 Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert Kennedy both got assassinated, the students at Columbia took over the whole campus and fought with the police, kids jammed Chicago for the Democratic National Convention, and I got shot. Altogether, it was a pretty violent year.

One afternoon in January as I walked into the Factory, I heard things crashing in the back, then I saw Susan over in a corner crying. “What's going on?” I asked her. “Who's in the back?”

She blew her nose. “Ondine and Jimmy Smith. They're having a big fight.”

Before I met Jimmy Smith, I'd heard lots of stories about him, and they all made the same point, that he was insane—a menace, but a fascinating one.

Jimmy Smith was a legend—he was a speed freak and a “second-story man” who'd steal anything, but he only ripped off people he knew. He did it in such a crazy way, though, that most of them wound up being intrigued with him. One night Brigid called me and said:

“Jimmy Smith just paid a call.” (She was living on Madison then, in an apartment over Paraphernalia.)

“What did he take?”

“Well, I haven't finished the inventory yet, but let's just say, ‘Anything that was of any importance to me whatsoever at this point in my life.'”

“Why did you let him in?”

“He was banging on my door, that's why! I said, ‘Go away, Jimmy!' So he broke the door in. Then he quickly handed me two dozen red roses, a pound of Beluga caviar, and a book of poems—and within two minutes he'd ripped off everything in the place.”

“But why didn't you just stop him?”

“Because,” she reminded me, “he's violent.”

Brigid got involved with Jimmy Smith because occasionally she'd let his girl friend, Debbie Dropout, hide in her apartment. Jimmy and Debbie's whole number was one of those chase-and-hide/“please-don't-beat-me” relationships where she would “escape” to somewhere in the city and he would go around to everybody they knew, looking to re-“capture” her. She would run to, say, Brigid's, and scream, “Brigid, let me in!
Please
. Jimmy's after me!” Brigid would tell her, “No, Debbie, no!” But naturally she'd let her in; it was part of the game. And pretty soon Jimmy would show up and drag her home, where he'd chain her
to a radiator so she couldn't leave him again, and then he'd bring nine or ten jazz bongo players in to jam with him—he'd supply the speed and they'd all drum for two or three days. Debbie would be pleading, “Please, Jimmy, please, I just want to go back to the hotel to get some clothes,” and eventually he'd give in and say, “Okay, I'll meet you there in an hour.” In an hour he'd go there, and naturally she'd be gone. Or another scenario was that she'd convince him to go out for Chicken Delight or something, and when he'd get back, even though he'd locked her in, she'd be gone—out the window—and the chase would start all over again. That was the basic plot of their game.

Brigid called Debbie Dropout the “Queen of the Hotel Scene” because she'd sit in bed in hotel rooms while at least three girls waited on her hand and foot. No one could figure out what powers she had over them.

Debbie was blonde and pretty. Before she got involved with Jimmy Smith, she'd been going with Paul America. Her mother owned a lot of buildings in the Village, and for a while Debbie lived near Abingdon Square in the West Village in a second-floor apartment that was kind of a crash pad.

Christopher Scott, who was very close to that scene in those days, told me something a few years later that I hadn't been aware of at the time: “Those kids were enthralled with the Factory and the inner ‘Warhol world,' ” he said, “but they felt very much on the edge of it. They didn't have any first-string contact with it, and so they were in eleventh heaven if they ever got inside the Factory—whenever one of them would get there, they'd live off the
aura
of that for the next few months. The group over at Debbie's apartment even had two cats named Gerard and
Drella. They all used to wait for you at that ice cream place on the corner of West 4th and Charles because they knew that you and Henry [Geldzahler] went there sometimes.”

But about Jimmy Smith and the big fist fight going on at the Factory between him and Ondine: when Ondine saw Susan so upset, he gave Jimmy another belt, then ran over to reassure her: “Don't cry, Susan, it's only Jimmy Smith and he's
fabulous
!'

Susan already knew Jimmy, though. He'd walked into the Factory one day and told her, “I'll steal all your money.” She thought it was just a line and forgot about it. But later when she was leaving, she discovered every penny gone from her pocketbook.

Ronnie Cutrone and his girl friend knew Jimmy because their place, which was over a Bronco Burger on 22nd Street and Third Avenue, was a real crackerbox and Jimmy used to break in all the time and rob them. “Since we knew it was him,” Ronnie said, “we used to just let him in—we had to, because if we didn't, he would've broken in, anyway. He'd do nutty things like walk in and trip over every bucket of paint, every coffee can, every jar of mustard, dump everything in a pile in the middle of the floor, and ask you, ‘Isn't it beautiful?' But then, just when you were so fed up with it all, he'd do something incredible like hand Betsy a diamond ring.

“You'd be walking down the street with him, and he'd suddenly duck into an alley, and the next thing you knew, he'd be speeding by in a Pontiac he just stole out of a lot. Then he'd just leave it at a light and walk away from it, with the door wide open and the motor running.

“One day he really freaked out at our place. He shoved me against a wall and said,
‘Gimme the shoes!'
I didn't know what he
was talking about. He tore the place apart till he found a pair of miniature brown and white plastic spectator shoes off my father's birthday cake that I'd brought back from Brooklyn…”

The afternoon of the fist fight in the Factory was the first time I'd ever looked really closely at Jimmy. He was short, with dark curly hair, and it was hard to picture him terrorizing so many people—I mean, he looked pretty harmless. As he walked over to where I was sitting, he pulled a strip of material out of the pocket of his leather coat: it was a miniskirt, but it was huge, about a size eighteen or twenty. “It's for Brigid,” he said, and we all started to laugh, because it was such a strange shape for a miniskirt—a long, long rectangle. Ondine took it to the back to show Billy, and Jimmy forgot about it and left.