Andy Warhol (10 page)

The Chelsea Girls
is composed of doublings: two screens, with two different reels of film simultaneously projected, in staggered rhythm. As if picking which twin to love, and having a hard time choosing, the viewer must watch one screen or the other: it is difficult, though exhilarating, to focus on both.
Chelsea Girls
drives home a dilemma: every human being has a limited power to love or absorb others. Daily we endure this Darwinian paucity of the affections; so did Andy. Surrounded by needy exhibitionists, he could not be savior to them all. Instead, sometimes silently, he gave them his nonresistance, and his camera's love. His camera pampered each of them, but not equally: inequality bred rivalries. And if Andy paid attention to them, the world paid more attention to Andy. That was his recompense. One person receives love at another's cost: thus the screens compete for our favor. The viewer, watching
Chelsea Girls
, will be more riveted by one screen than by another, because one image is color, another black-and-white; or because one has sound, while the other is inaudible; or because one is sexier. Stardom, Andy knew, was based on human attention's whimsical infidelity: the eye (or the soul) wants Person A more than it wants Person B. Person A is a star. Person B is not. A is stellar because A can hypnotize—through beauty, seductiveness, recognizability, colorfulness, and, sometimes, as a last resort, through verbal pirouettes, the untoward disclosures of echolalia.

Chelsea Girls
ends with an interminable close-up of Nico crying, the colored lights playing over her face as kind camouflage and cruel scarification. The film also begins with Nico. On the right screen, in a kitchen, she trims her bangs in the presence of her son, Ari, and a gold-tressed, out-of-it young man named Eric Emerson—a flower child, a terpsichorean self-intoxicated druggie whose intentions we presume are pure. What an unlikely nuclear family: Ari, Nico, Eric! Against this queer trio of Virgin Mary (Nico), God (Eric), and the Son (Ari), we see, on the opposite screen, Ondine, known as “the Pope of Greenwich Village,” receiving the confession of Ingrid Superstar, a plain girl from New Jersey who was discovered on Forty-second Street and brought into the Factory to taunt Edie.

(A brief note on Ingrid Superstar: Andy made Ingrid his new Edie, humiliating Edie in the process, and misleading bovine Ingrid with the attention. Ingrid took to the limelight, however, and delivered lucid comic performances. Eventually her mother advertised in a newspaper for the return of her daughter: “Please come back. You do not have to see your father again. Everything's cool now. We all miss you. Your Standel Imperial XV is here. Come back so we can play Morning Dew without feeling sad.” Andy enjoyed torturing her, though he also seemed to love her. In an audiotaped phone conversation from the late 1960s or early 1970s, Andy insinuates that others believe she qualifies not as a superstar but as a “retard,” and though he rescinds the insinuation—“You know I don't call you retarded! Ingrid, no one says you're retarded! You're up there! Ingrid, I was just kidding!”—it's clear that Ingrid was considered the “retarded” superstar, the joke. No one in
Chelsea Girls
, or in any Warhol movie, wants to be a joke; each is shooting for salvation. Ingrid, like the rest of us, may never have attained it. She disappeared in 1986.)

In
Chelsea Girls
, Pope Ondine hears Ingrid's confession, and their screen (the left screen, Nico cutting her bangs on the right) is itself bifurcated: Ondine sits on the right, in his own couch or chair, and Ingrid occupies a separate chair on the left. A line divides them—not only the space between the two chairs, but a vertical line on the Factory wall. Warhol's cinematic images, often static, are always compositionally acute, entitling us to interpret them closely. And the clear line between Ondine and Ingrid communicates the sad fact that he cannot fathom her thoughts, no matter how much she confesses. More tragically, Ondine and Ingrid will never be able to migrate into the adjacent screen and enter the kitchen where Nico, Ari, and Eric perform their masque of happy family. The two rooms do not communicate. Only we, as viewers, hold both in consciousness at once: and our responsibility (Warhol wrote in his
Philosophy
, “I think I'm missing some … responsibility chemicals”) is to pay sufficient attention, and, by absorbing
Chelsea Girls
in all its battering fullness, to build redemptive links between the rooms.

Taking confessions is a mode of torture; Ondine's desire to extract them is as insistent as a craving for drugs (“I want a confession, and now!” he impatiently cries). His practice reaches its climax when a young woman named Rona Page, not a superstar, dares to call him a “phony,” and he lashes out, slapping her: she flees, Ondine has a tantrum, and any illusion that we're watching a mere scripted performance breaks down. Ondine suggests that the filming stop (“I don't want to go on”), but the camera continues to expose Ondine, to exact from him its tincture of truth. Ondine predicts that his explosion—his rupture of the frail fictive frame—will make the film a “historic document.” His abuse of Rona Page is not the only instance of torture in the reel. At the beginning of the reel, he'd tortured—or given pleasure to—himself by injecting speed in his wrist.

Injections drive the Chelsea Girls. The most speed-compelled of the gang is Brigid Berlin, nicknamed Brigid Polk because of her practice of giving “pokes” of amphetamine to herself and to others, often straight through the jeans, and often unrequested. In her reel, which plays on the right screen, while, on the left, a boy lies semi-nude on a hotel bed (whip-wielding Mary Woronov ties up one of them), Brigid generously services herself with pokes and gives a poke to Ingrid Superstar, who has little choice in the matter: says Brigid, “I give pokes where I give them, Mary!” Joking about her own injection, Brigid quips, “And they wondered why I got hepatitis!” Brigid (or the Bridge), a difficult and unconventional woman, of glamorously uncertain erotic tendency, whose father was head of the Hearst Corporation, and who sporadically worked or played, until the end of Warhol's life, as his typist, receptionist, telephone confidante, and fellow Polaroid hound, always acts the aggressor, even if her aggressions, delivered with a manic, high-society wit, fascistically sharp, compulsively honed, were often aimed at herself—her conspicuously large body, which she enjoyed flashing in Factory photos, her breasts (she called them “tits”) employed to make her famous “Tit Prints.” She also made “Cock Books” and “Scar Books,” documenting the physical features of her associates. (Warhol later bought her print of Jasper Johns's penis.)

The crudest of the Chelsea Girls—at least on film—was Mary Woronov, who played the part of Hanoi Hannah. Wearing a butch costume of shirt and tie, brandishing a whip, she has the rare privilege of dominating two screens of
Chelsea Girls
at once—Mary on the right, and Mary on the left, in harmonious twinship. Mary was, for a time, Gerard Malanga's girlfriend, and she assumes that role in another episode of
Chelsea Girls
, known as “The Gerard Malanga Story,” in which Gerard and his mentor, the formidable Marie Mencken, sit together on a bed, while his girlfriend, Mary, sits alone on another single bed in the same hotel room and says not a word to Gerard throughout the reel. Their incommunication, stranded on two separate beds, seconds the division between the two screens. Marie is hard on Gerard, who wears unmanly rebel apparel (striped pants, mesh shirt, beads): she whips the bed, berates him for his “filthy towel,” whips the towel, and scornfully calls it “last night's towel.” How dare he leave last night's towel on the bed! “I wish I had a daughter!” she cries. Marie and Mary are doubles, though they don't address each other, and though Marie's voluble cruelty, ultimately maternal and solicitous, can't rival Mary's silent spite. Mary, more talkative in another reel, imprisons Ingrid Superstar under a desk in a hotel room and verbally tortures a hapless pale nonphotogenic girl named Angelina “Pepper” Davis, who lies in tears beside Mary on the bed and seems just to want a hug. Another young superstar, International Velvet, whose real name was Susan Bottomly, and whom many of the Factory regulars remember as the most beautiful of all the superstars, becomes a victim of playful erotic torture when Hanoi Hannah rips her crochet-mesh top. Pepper is the film's biggest loser; she can't even narrate. As Ondine slaps Rona Page for failing her screen test, so Hanoi Hannah humiliates Pepper for not narrating in sufficient detail the story of her home. Pepper skips some information, and Hanoi interrupts her, shouting, “Skip nothing!”—the Warhol credo. Mary tries to brainwash Pepper into loving home: “Home is beautiful. Your mother is beautiful.”
Chelsea Girls
, Warhol's home story, proves these adages mere placebos.

Only one person in this film escapes torture: Eric Emerson. He earns a reel of his own, and it is an island of nonviolent bliss. His charm—like Nico's, Ingrid's, or Andy's—comes from his connection to the mute, the animal, the “retarded.” Much did Andy travel in this realm of inarticulation, which was, in his work, often the locus of ecstasy. In
POPism
, Andy said of Eric: “I never know what to think of Eric: was he retarded or intelligent?” (The same question has often been asked of Warhol.) “Retarded,” though a word now considered offensive, was widely used in his time, and it is an essential term in his lexicon, impossible to avoid. In Warhol's cinema, time is retarded. Time moves at a regular pace in
Chelsea Girls
, which, unlike Warhol's early silent films, is projected at twenty-four frames per second rather than sixteen or eighteen, but because the players are mostly on drugs (amphetamine—speed—might make them the opposite of retarded), their reactions and interactions respect an altered temporality, and the schism between the screens defamiliarizes the passing of time for the viewer. Doubled time is prolonged time. And Eric's reel is the most retarded of them all, though also the most ecstatic. He undulates, by himself, while colored lights play over a body—his own—that he finds supremely desirable, sufficient unto the day: “Do you ever groove on your own body?” he asks, rhetorically. He speaks for himself and to himself, but he is also speaking to Andy the filmmaker, and may be speaking
for
Andy, especially when he says, “Sometimes I hate to be touched.” Eric is saturated with sensation but also seems afloat in a sensory deprivation tank: “I can't see a thing, except me— that's all there is to see, as far as I'm concerned.” Such solipsism might be irritating were it not for Eric's beauty and unpretentiousness, for the bewitching play of blue and red lights on his body as he dances (while, on the adjacent screen, similar colors play over the entire cast), and for the unforced intensity of his self-fascination. It's as if he were discovering a body for the first time; the body happens to be his own.

I don't know what drug Eric was on during his dance, but certainly some substance unleashed his performance. The sense of estranged time in Warhol's work takes root in the drugs his cohorts were taking, and the sensibility that the drugs fostered. In
POPism
, Warhol and Hackett analyze amphetamine consciousness: “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.”

We may no longer be able to remember or recreate the culture in which such surrender to drugs—and the belief in what kinds of consciousness and art they might promote—was a potent strain in the honorable fields of activism and aesthetics. More than any of the other Chelsea Girls, Eric seems quintessentially a creature of the 1960s, a product of that generation's rediscovery of anarchism and surrealism, the poetry of the surrender to chance and to accident. Warhol's 1964 silkscreens of car crashes show the fatal conclusion to many accidents. The sorts of accident that drugs and Warhol's open-ended approach to filmmaking gave his cast a license to explore, however, need not have been lethal, though Eric Emerson, for one, died young in the 1970s. “They found Eric Emerson,” the voice of
POPism
remembers, “one early morning in the middle of Hudson Street. Officially, he was labeled a hit-and-run victim, but we heard rumors that he'd overdosed and just been dumped there—in any case, the bicycle he'd been riding was intact.” While we watch Eric dance in
Chelsea Girls
, his imminent death is not yet scripted; his monologue, heedless of mortality, preaches the value of listening. Warhol was always listening, and audition requires disembodiment. Warhol evacuated his self in order to take on the stories of others. Eric says, “Of course people only listen for so long. I'll listen for the rest of my life.” Warhol would also listen for the rest of his life; the heroine (or Pope) of
Chelsea Girls
is finally Andy, who takes in this flock, to quote Ondine, of “homosexuals, perverts, thieves … the rejected of society,” and nearly loses his body in the process. Our historical distance, now, from Eric's dance, should make us envy him, not condescend to him. It will be many moons before another actor has the audacity to appear on screen as himself, dancing a striptease, grooving on his own sweat, saying, “Sweat's exciting,” saying, “I usually talk to myself, but I don't have anything to say, so I won't say anything, I'll just sit here and groove on myself.” Warhol identified with Eric, but also envied him: Warhol might have liked to be the striptease artist, the body happy to groove on itself. His position behind the camera, administering the torture of screen tests to his willing cast, should not encourage the moralistic reading of his career that books like Jean Stein's and George Plimpton's
Edie
have disseminated—a picture of Warhol as a man who drove his entourage to drugs and self-destruction. Many sources confirm that it was not Warhol who led Edie to her drug addiction. That Warhol viewed human relationships as torture, and that he experienced his own embodiment as torture, do not mean that he consistently inflicted damage, as an aggressor, on others; rather, his films articulate and analyze the bondage that is our daily bread—for any human attachment, Warhol's work darkly illustrates, is a prod, a poke, a whip, a pistol, a paroxysm, a collision, an explosion, an electrocution. Warhol was no saint. But he oddly maintained an even keel amid the havoc, not himself taking too much speed, but turning on the camera and the tape recorder while others did. When I spoke to Holly Solomon, whose portrait Warhol created during the fertile year of
Chelsea Girls
, she emphasized his ethical sense. As if rebutting his posthumous detractors, she said to me, “Andy was a moral man. He never did anything
not nice
.”