1965: The Most Revolutionary Year in Music (18 page)

In the middle were the Factory regulars, such as Warhol’s assistant Gerard Malanga, who helped with the silkscreen and sculpture. Billy Name was the speed freak photographer who “silverized” the Factory and lived in the dark room. Warhol befriended the catty actor Ondine after he had Warhol thrown out of an orgy for not participating. Andy’s own mother lived downstairs, cooking roasts covered with radishes and applesauce. And soup, of course. His mother had always fed him the soup, which was why he’d painted Campbell’s Soup cans three years before.

It was the combination of the chic and the sordid that informed the milieu of songs by the Factory house band the Velvet Underground, and perhaps some of Dylan’s albums
Highway 61 Revisited
and
Blonde on Blonde.
In the decades to follow, the legend of the Factory loomed large in the minds of black-clad art students, as it combined the youthful love of parties and popularity with the adolescent romanticism of decadence, of addictions leading one closer to death. Warhol filmed the drug abuse and S/M orgies and found black humor in them, and his nihilism was another way in which he was punk’s forerunner.

His movies started out as a way to top his soup can joke:
Empire
was one shot of the Empire State Building that lasted eight hours.
Couch
displayed different people having sex on said piece of furniture. In 1965 he made approximately twenty-eight films, including versions of
Batman
and
A Clockwork Orange.
Viewed today on the Internet, with their bad acting and long takes, they’re on par with video camera sketches made by naughty teenagers. But some were screened in underground theaters such as New York City’s Gramercy Arts Theatre, either because of their conceptual humor or their sexual content, alongside other experimental films like Kenneth Anger’s homoerotic biker/occult films (
Scorpio Rising
and
Kustom Kar Kommandos
). If someone edited them all down to a thirty-minute compilation, it might make an entertainingly debauched reality show.

But hand in hand with the darkness and inanity came Warhol’s bravery in pushing the envelope. It was a decade where books such as William Burroughs’s
Naked Lunch
and Henry Miller’s
Tropic of Cancer
still went on trial for obscenity.

Warhol lived as an “out” gay man making films that celebrated all forms of LGBT difference in an era of immense legal and cultural oppression. The U.S. Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 banned homosexuality, and it was listed in the American Psychiatric Association’s
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders
. Sodomy was a felony in every U.S. state except Illinois. You could get fifteen years for it in Michigan and a life sentence in Idaho. It was also illegal in Britain.

In 1924 the Society for Human Rights had formed in Chicago to fight for “homosexual emancipation” but disbanded only months later due to the arrest of many of its members. It would be nearly thirty years before another gay rights organization was formed, the Mattachine Society by Harry Hay, followed by the first lesbian organization five years later, the Daughters of Bilitis, and the Janus Society in the early 1960s. Influenced by the civil rights struggle, these organizations teamed up to form ECHO (East Coast Homophile Organizations).

On April 25, approximately 150 demonstrators held a sit-in at Dewey’s Restaurant for refusing service to people who the manager believed looked gay.
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On May 29, seven men and three women picketed the White House to call attention to the fact that gays were being denied civil rights and were blocked from “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Numerous demonstrations followed throughout the summer, at sites including the Pentagon and the United Nations. ECHO’s July 4 protest at Philadelphia’s Independence Hall became a yearly event, the Annual Reminder for gay rights, until the Stonewall riots of 1969, at which point it was replaced by the annual Christopher Street Day celebration. But while the battle for gay equality had begun, legal protection was a long way off.

*   *   *

Warhol dubbed the outrageous characters
who populated his films “superstars,” and one of the earliest prototypes was model and society girl Baby Jane Holzer, the Paris Hilton of her day.
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She appeared in Warhol’s films
Batman Dracula
,
Soap Opera
, and
Couch
. Tom Wolfe dubbed her “The Girl of the Year” in a famous profile for
New York Magazine
, in which Holzer opines, “The Beatles are getting fat. The Beatles—well, John Lennon’s still thin, but Paul McCartney is getting a big bottom. That’s all right, but I don’t particularly care for that. The Stones are thin. I mean, that’s why they’re beautiful, they’re so thin. Mick Jagger—wait’ll you see Mick.”
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But Holzer receded in the spring. “It was getting very scary at the Factory. There were too many crazy people around who were stoned and using too many drugs. They had some laughing gas that everybody was sniffing. The whole thing freaked me out, and I figured it was becoming too faggy and sick and druggy.”
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At some point between January and March, Warhol met Edie Sedgwick and became entranced by her beauty and vivacious personality. “He was probably in love with Edie,” future superstar Viva later theorized. “A sexless kind of love, but he would take up your whole life so you had no time for any other man.”
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Some Factory denizens pinpoint Tennessee Williams’s birthday party as the evening where Warhol befriended Sedgwick. If so, it was a fitting locale, as Sedgwick’s tale was as tragic as that of any of Williams’s doomed heroines. She was born in 1943 to an heiress mother and a rancher-sculptor father who struck oil. Sedgwick’s father had suffered three nervous breakdowns in his youth, and she later maintained that he made advances on her when she was seven. He was a ruthless womanizer, seducing the friends of his wife and children. Once, Sedgwick walked in on him cheating and tried to tell her mother, but he denied it and got a doctor to put Edie on tranquilizers. In boarding school, she developed anorexia and spent time in various psychiatric hospitals. Her beloved brother Francis hanged himself when she was twenty.
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In 1964 Sedgwick moved to New York City to pursue modeling, living in her grandmother’s fourteen-room Park Avenue apartment until her trust fund kicked in and allowed her to get her own place. She developed a unique waiflike “look”: short hair, heavy black eyeliner, large chandelier earrings, long legs in black leotards, mini dresses, striped shirts, and leopard-skin coats.

In December 1964, Bob Dylan’s right-hand man, Bobby Neuwirth, heard there was a wild beauty whom he and Dylan had to meet. They called Sedgwick, and she met them at the Kettle of Fish on MacDougal Street, arriving in a limo. They had a great evening, walking together through the snow down Houston Street, laughing and looking at the church displays. Along with the humor, Neuwirth saw that Sedgwick had a “tremendous compassion” for those “who had seen the big sadness.”
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The same month she met Dylan and Neuwirth, another brother, Robert, was carried out of Harvard in a straitjacket and taken to Bellevue. When he got out, he crashed his Harley into a bus on New Year’s Eve. He died from the injuries on January 12.

After meeting Warhol sometime in early 1965, Sedgwick started hanging out regularly at the Factory and had nonspeaking roles in his films
Vinyl
and
Bitch.
In April she appeared in
Horse
, which centered on cowboys in jockstraps on poppers (akin to laughing gas) playing strip poker with a horse in the room. A cue card instructed people to “Approach the Horse Sexually Everybody,” and the horse kicked one of the actors, Tosh Carillo, in the head.

Warhol decided to make a film built around Sedgwick. In April’s
Poor Little Rich Girl
, she puts on makeup, smokes cigarettes, tries on outfits, and talks on the phone about how she blew through her inheritance in six months. The main drawing point of the film was that she was in her underwear, though the first reel was out of focus.
Kitchen
followed in June. Again, half the film is out of focus. She is in her lingerie and talks with other actors until one of them strangles her on the kitchen table.

Critical consensus is that the high point of her oeuvre is
Beauty No. 2
, in which she reclines almost naked in skimpy underwear on a bed with a young man from the Factory named Gino Piserchio. For sixty-five minutes Piserchio gropes her legs and makes out with her, while, off camera, Sedgwick’s friend Chuck Wein asks her increasingly hostile and personal questions until she finally throws an ashtray at him. The film premiered at New York’s Cinematheque on July 17, and nine days later the
New York Times
ran the article “Edie Pops Up as Newest Star”:

For the restless hedonists who purport to lead the new, fashionable society, novelty is the staff of life. Last fall, they raised up a new goddess after she had been suitably baptized in the pages of
Vogue
and christened her Baby Jane. Before six months were over, they were whispering the obsolescence of Baby Jane. Now on Page 91 of the Aug. 1 issue of
Vogue
, her successor can be found. The magazine … has a full-page photograph of Miss Edith Minturn Sedgwick, 22, doing an arabesque in her living room.
Vogue
labels her a Youthquaker.
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In November,
Life
ran a fashion spread on her, proclaiming, “The cropped-mop girl with the eloquent legs is doing more for black tights than anybody since Hamlet.”

Initially, Sedgwick’s folks had disapproved of her modeling. Then, when they got wind that she was being groped in freaky art films in her underwear, they pleaded with her to go back to modeling. But by now, Sedgwick and Warhol were the “it couple” of New York, her hair dyed silver to match his, both wearing boat-necked, striped T-shirts, jetting to his exhibit in Paris. In October, they appeared on
The Merv Griffin Show
to the strains of “Pop Goes the Weasel.” Sedgwick wore her scandalous tights. The gum-chewing Warhol refused to speak, instead whispering to Sedgwick his responses to Merv’s questions.

That month they attended an exhibit of his in Philadelphia, and screaming kids mobbed the scene requesting autographs. (Warhol let Sedgwick sign his name.) The paintings had to be taken off the walls to protect them from being damaged. Warhol was delighted—an art opening with no art. The couple took refuge at the top of a stairwell. To make their getaway, they had to cross the roof to the fire escape next door. It was the closest the art world got to Beatlemania.

Warhol announced he had abandoned painting because films were “easier”—which, considering he didn’t even focus the camera half the time, was definitely true. His new dream was to go to Hollywood, and he believed Sedgwick could be his ticket. He began to think his film team should start developing coherent narratives for her.

Rumor had it that Sedgwick had also served as the muse for the song Dylan released three days after
Beauty No. 2
’s premiere, a song
Rolling Stone
would later rank as the greatest rock song of all time.

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Masterpiece Highs and the Boos of Newport

Dylan shatters the rules of pop music with “Like a Rolling Stone,” released July 20; outrages the Newport Folk Festival by going electric on July 25; and records
Highway 61 Revisited
from July 29 to August 4.

Bob Dylan’s early singles
covered the civil rights movement. Then “Subterranean Homesick Blues” turned darkly comic and grappled with whether to live in the straight world or the counterculture. Then came the cautionary “Like a Rolling Stone,” the story of “Miss Lonely” who used to have it made. She used to attend the finest school, wore the finest clothes, casually gave and received gifts. She tossed the bums change and laughed about them. She partied too much, ignoring her friends’ warnings that she was heading for trouble.

In Dylan’s song, Miss Lonely goes out with a diplomat who takes everything from her that he can steal, like Holly Golightly in
Breakfast at Tiffany’s
. In the Hollywood film, a Brazilian diplomat strings Golightly along as his mistress before abandoning her. The struggling writer Paul Varjak (George Peppard) yells at Golightly that she needs to wake up and accept
his
true love. “You call yourself a free spirit, a wild thing, and you’re terrified somebody’s going to stick you in a cage. Baby, you’re already in that cage. You built it yourself.”
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She finally grows up, and they kiss in the rain. At last, she’s found a home in Peppard’s arms.

But “Like a Rolling Stone” sounds like Dylan made his appeal to Miss Lonely and she still spurned him, so he takes gleeful vengeance in spelling out what awaits her as soon as her looks and money run out. She ends up broke and homeless, pawning her diamond ring and making deals with “mystery tramps” with vacuum eyes and “Napoleon in rags.”

The deals could be drug deals—or the kind made by the real-life inspiration for Holly Golightly in Truman Capote’s book. Capote said she “was not precisely a call girl. She had no job but accompanied expense-account men to the best restaurants and night clubs with the understanding that her escort was obligated to give her some sort of gift, perhaps jewelry or a check … If she felt like it, she might take her escort home for the night.”
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If Dylan’s Miss Lonely has any reservations about making such deals, she soon realizes she doesn’t even have a reputation to lose anymore, because she’s fallen so far she’s been forgotten.

Since the song’s release, many have speculated that it was inspired by Sedgwick, who shared some of Hepburn/Golightly’s poise and slender glamour. Sedgwick had gone to fine boarding schools like the character, she did blow her inheritance (on limos), and she would die from drug addiction. Films such as
Factory Girl
and
I’m Not There
suggest that Dylan had an affair with her. The latter film portrays Sedgwick as a heartbroken mess because Dylan ignores her after hooking up with her. She finds comfort in the arms of his friend-assistant, the Bobby Neuwirth character, a “betrayal” that antagonizes Dylan. Whether that is true, in real life she did become Neuwirth’s girlfriend at some point during the year, until her addiction to barbiturates became too much for him to handle and, in 1967, he broke up with her. Dylan scholar Greil Marcus said, “I heard a lecture by Thomas Crow, an art historian, about ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ being about Edie Sedgwick within Andy Warhol’s circle, as something that Dylan saw from the outside, not being personally involved with either of them, but as something he saw and was scared by and saw disaster looming and wrote a song as a warning, and it was compelling.”
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