POPism (9 page)

Almost every group event in the sixties eventually got called a “happening”—to the point where the Supremes even did a song by that name. Happenings were started by the artists, but the fashion designer Tiger Morse made them more pop and less art—by having fashion shows in swimming pools and just generally staging big crazy parties and calling them “happenings.”

I guess I went down to my first Judson Church “happening” because of Rauschenberg—he was arranging the lighting
there and I wanted to see it. I called up David Bourdon and told him to come with me to this beautiful concert there by Yvonne Rainer called
Terrain
, and later David said it was the most modern dance thing he'd ever been to.

After one of those Judson concerts, David and I walked over to a party at Claes Oldenberg's on East 2nd Street that was more like a happening. It was a pleasant Sunday afternoon and everybody sort of drifted up to the roof—Rosenquist, Ruth Kligman, Ray Johnson, a whole bunch of people. That afternoon, Claes started getting a little aggressive up there on the roof, and it was scary because he was so huge and there were no railings on this roof and people were drinking a lot and sort of shoving each other. Claes took a pair of scissors out and cut the pocket right off Rosenquist's shirt, then he held it up in the scissors and said, “This is Rosenquist's heart,” sort of brandishing the little patch of cloth at us all. Then he walked over to the edge of the roof and opened the scissors. He released the cloth, and we all watched it flutter slowly down to the street.

I was still working in the firehouse studio and going down to the Judson Church a lot with Gerard and Charles Henri Ford and other friends to see the dance concerts there, and that's where I first saw the James Waring Experimental Dance Company that was doing a new kind of “underground,” low-budget ballet.

Jimmy made all his own costumes out of beads and feathers, just putting the materials together as he went along. He lived on Tompkins Square on the Lower East Side where you could still rent whole floors of rooms for just thirty or forty dollars a month. I'd lived in that part of town myself when I first got to New York, on Avenue A and St. Mark's Place. Even just a little bit of work a month could pay your rent down there. Right up
till the summer of '67, before drugs came in, the East Village was, in a way, a very peaceful place, full of European immigrants, artists, jazzy blacks, Puerto Ricans—everybody all hanging around doorstoops and out the windows. The creative people there weren't hustling work, they weren't “upwardly mobile,” they were happy just to drift around the streets looking at everything, enjoying everything—Ratner's, Gem's Spa, Polish restaurants, junk stores, dry goods stores—maybe go home and write in a diary about what they'd enjoyed that day or choreograph something they'd gotten an idea about. They used to say that the East Village was the bedroom of the West Village, that the West Village was the action and the East Village was the place you rested up in.

By the early sixties the Judson dance concerts were a full-time dance theater. They could stage a whole ballet for no more than fifty dollars—the kids in the company would ransack friends' apartments for props and go down to Orchard Street and pick through materials for costumes. The same went for the plays done at places like the Café La Mama and the Caffe Cino, where a lot of the Judson dancers performed when they weren't waiting on tables.

Everything was low-budget to the point of no-budget in those places. Joe Cino probably never made a profit of over fifty dollars in his whole time there. At the end of the month he'd pass the hat for rent—but he loved it that way. He was a nice person—short and hairy, always fighting his pasta fat with diet pills.

Around the Judson Church I ran into somebody I knew named Stanley Amos. (We had a friend in common who'd taught art history to policemen at City College so that when somebody's Georgian silver, say, was stolen, the police would know
how to spot what they were out there looking for. This friend got busted for something like “sodomy in a steam bath” and lost his teaching job. The incident was written up in all the papers, and I always guessed that it inspired a few subsequent popular plays.) Stanley had come over from London where he'd been the publisher of a literary magazine called
Nimbus
. Now he was the New York art critic for an Italian newspaper. We'd been part of the same gang when we ran along the Tuesday night art gallery party circuit together. We'd break from 57th Street and go over to the Café Winslow on 55th to get away from the crowd for a little bit. Then we'd go back onto the circuit and then out to dinner or more drinks with people we'd bumped into along the way. When I first met Stanley, he was trying to get backing for an art gallery of his own, and it looked like he'd found his pot of butter, but then the rich backer, who was from a Michigan toilet company family, died and Stanley moved downtown into an apartment on West 3rd Street around the corner from the Judson. The front part of the floor he lived on was Tom O'Horgan's loft. Tom was then a musicologist or something (later he directed the musical
Hair
); he was interested in ancient instruments and had reconstructed a lot of them all by himself. (A couple of years later, the Velvet Underground had a loose subletting arrangement there, so Stanley's place became the scene for a lot of parties and movie shootings.)

“I guess I've always been what might be called a bohemian,” Stanley once reflected. “I've lived on the fringes of the art world and not contributed very much to it.” But Stanley was effacing himself too much, because he was another one who opened his doors wide to all the creative people around. At Stanley's there were always playwrights scribbling in a corner and Judson dancers rehearsing and people sewing their costumes up. He
didn't have much money—he bought and sold a few antiques and did some freelance articles—but he couldn't have been more generous with his time and living space.

When you say that the Judson performers were a “dance company,” it makes them sound much more established than they were. The company was always pulled together just when they had a performance coming up, but in the time between, they did odd jobs and took a lot of classes. It's always surprising to me to think how small the downtown New York City avant-garde scene was in relation to how much influence it eventually had. A generous estimate would be five hundred people, and that would include friends of friends of friends—the audience as well as the performers. If you got an audience of more than fifty, it was considered large.

South of 14th Street things were always informal. The
Village Voice
was a community newspaper then, with a distinct community to cover—a certain number of square blocks in Greenwich Village plus the entire liberal-thinking world, from flower boxes on MacDougal Street to pornography in Denmark. The combination of extremely local news with international news worked well for the
Voice
because the Village intellectuals were as interested in what was happening in the world as in what was going on around the corner, and the liberals all over the world were interested in the Village as if it were a second home.

Two major feeders of personalities and ideas into the early Factory were the San Remo/Judson Church crowd and the Harvard/Cambridge crowd. The San Remo Coffee Shop on the corner of MacDougal and Bleecker streets in the Village was where I met Billy Name and Freddy Herko. I'd been going there
since '61, when it was a lot artier—a few poets and a lot of fags coming down from the 53rd Street and Third Avenue area. It was a big thing in those days to “go to the Village,” to places like the Gaslight and the Kettle of Fish. But around '63 when you walked into the San Remo through the frosted glass doors with flower designs, past the long bar and the booths, it was all full of hustlers who usually sat on the railing of Washington Square Park who'd been taken to the San Remo for one-draft beer. All the amphetamine men—“A-men”—fags on speed who would howl laughing at the very thought of going to a “gay bar,” loved the San Remo because it wasn't really a gay bar, there were very few gay-world clichés there.

Not everyone at the San Remo was gay, of course, but the stars of the place certainly were. Most of the customers were just there to watch the performance. A lot of the San Remo boys used to write for a mimeographed sheet called
The Sinking Bear
(named after a poetry magazine that was around then called
The Floating Bear
), which was one of the first underground newsletter/papers. One of these was Ondine—or “Pope Ondine,” as he was occasionally called. Ondine would sit in a booth with his Magic Markers and write replies to people with sex queries/problems for his column, “Beloved Ondine's Advice to the Shopworn,” and the “problems” would be coming to him on notes passed from the other booths as fast as he could reply. One afternoon Ondine rushed in with an “appalled” look on his face, and as he put his flight bag down on the table, he pointed back toward Washington Square Park and said, incredulously, “A guy just said to me, ‘Would you like to go to a gay bar?'!” Ondine shook his head, laughing in disbelief, “
Horrible
experience….” The San Remo was almost entirely A-men. I say “almost entirely,” because I remember being introduced to the Duchess for
the first time there, and a few minutes later, the owner came over and asked me, “Do you know her?” and when I said yes, he told me, “Then take your friend and get out.” I never did find out what she'd done, she was such a terror. She was a well-known New York post-deb, a part-time lesbian on speed who could put even the A-men in their places. I hung around the San Remo a lot and got to know some faces and bodies I'd be seeing drift in and out of the 47th Street Factory day and night during the next few years.

The Judson dancer I was absolutely fascinated with was a very intense, handsome guy in his twenties named Freddy Herko who conceived of everything in terms of dance. He was one of those sweet guys that everybody loved to do things for simply because he never remembered to do anything for himself.

He could do so many things well, but he couldn't support himself on his dancing or any of his other talents. He was brilliant but not disciplined—the exact type of person I would become involved with over and over and over again during the sixties. You had to love these people more because they loved themselves less. Freddy eventually just burned himself out with amphetamine; his talent was too much for his temperament. At the end of '64 he choreographed his own death and danced out a window on Cornelia Street.

The people I loved were the ones like Freddy, the leftovers of show business, turned down at auditions all over town. They couldn't do something more than once, but their one time was better than anyone else's. They had star quality but no star ego—they didn't know how to push themselves. They were too gifted to lead “regular lives,” but they were also too unsure of themselves to ever become real professionals.

Still, I used to wonder how Freddy could be so talented and not be on Broadway or in a big dance company. “Can't they see how incredible he is?” I'd think to myself.

He didn't start taking dancing lessons till he was nineteen. After he graduated from high school in a small town just north of New York City, he enrolled in NYU night school—during the day he gave piano lessons. Eventually, he transferred to Juilliard School of Music, but he didn't do well there; he kept missing classes and exams. But when he saw the American Ballet Theater's performance of
Giselle
—which was the first dancing he'd ever seen aside from on television—he suddenly felt he had to become a dancer. He applied for a scholarship to the American Ballet Theater School, got one, and within a year was choreographing himself in one of their programs. He was involved in some off-Broadway productions, too—going on tour in New England and up to Canada. Pretty soon he was on one of those Sunday morning dance shows on television.

Then he went on “The Ed Sullivan Show” and got stage fright.

The scary thing is how you could dance in front of so many small audiences so often and never even have it occur to you that dancing in front of national television cameras might completely freak you. When Freddy got out onto Ed Sullivan's stage, all of a sudden, he confided to me, he felt as if the blood in his wrists had stopped flowing, and he had to ask someone from the back row to trade places with him in the front line. Afterward he ran out of the theater and back down to the Village, to the security he felt there.

By then he was taking so much amphetamine. He had the classic symptom: intense concentration
but
! only on minutiae. That's what happens to you on speed—your teeth might be
falling out of your head, the landlord might be evicting you, your brother might be dropping dead right next to you,
but
! you would have to, say, get your address book recopied and you couldn't let any of that other stuff “distract” you. And that's what happened to Freddy—instead of concentrating on the main idea of his dance pieces, he'd get all involved with fixing an arrangement of feathers or mirrors or beads on a costume, and he was never able to see his choreography jobs through to the finish. At one point when he really needed money, he decided to sell marijuana, but he couldn't concentrate on that, either, and wound up handing it all away to friends.

The whole Village dance scene was really moving by '62. Judson Church was putting on concert after concert, and Jill Johnston was reviewing dance for the
Voice
.

And it wasn't only “dance pieces” that were being put on at the Judson Church. Tom O'Horgan, for example, did a wonderful oratorio in two parts there called
The Garden of Earthly Faucets
. The first part was supposed to get everybody involved in the action, and the second part was the action itself. A guy with his lower half encased in a box advanced across the church. Inside the box was somebody giving him a blow job. While he was being blown, he gave signals to a prearranged group of people to join in a paean of choruses and dances and light changes—the audience was all waving things and throwing them, with every theatrical device you could think of all coming together at the point where he came in the box.