Andy Warhol (11 page)

5. Rupture

THE PREVIOUS CHAPTER IGNORED
Andy's body. His own films stinted it, though they expressed its mechanical desire. During the heyday of Factory torture, his body went underground; it continues to hide from the critic's scalpel. From the start of the 1960s, when Andy moved his atelier from apartment to studio, and cordoned off the superhero scene of artmaking from the milquetoast realm of breakfasts with Julia (orange juice always brought by Mom to Andy's bedside, as Madalen Warhola Hoover, his niece, told me), a rupture grew between home existence and his widely publicized Factory shenanigans; the split between public and private operated as surgically in Andy's case as in the career of a proper Victorian gentleman named Oscar Wilde, whose wife stayed at home while the aphorist invented decadence at dim hotels. Bedtime found Andy returned to Julia's, the townhouse on the Upper East Side, Mother devoting herself to churchgoing and also increasingly to hitting the bottle and presumably growing more histrionic in her narrations, more random in her neighborhood wanderings. None of the Factory family penetrated the townhouse, and Andy rarely mentioned his mother to coworkers. On Sundays he went to church. Other days he hid behind the camera or behind Gerard silkscreening, and nights he dissolved into his klatch at Max's Kansas City near Union Square—Mickey Ruskin's louche
boîte
, which had, Taylor Mead told me, four great years, when it aroused Manhattan's demimonde, and became the temporary host site for the rogue cell of downtown existence. Max's opened in 1965; Andy's crowd reigned in the back room, other artists in the front. The entourage charged their meals to Andy's tab, as recompense for screen work. Randy Bourscheidt, who appeared opposite Nico in a Warhol film called
The Closet
(originally part of
Chelsea Girls
)
, described to me Andy's habit of treating: if not to Max's, he would take the group either to a “dreadful Italian restaurant” in the Village or to a Chinese restaurant “where Andy would preside, paterfamilias, and invariably pay for dinner—a sweet mockery of a royal court. I felt honored to be invited … He was so unemphatic and uncontrolling— it felt like the opposite of a big ego trip. His was the quietest voice at the table, the most unassertive.”

Warhol's body was perpetually in hiding—most deeply sequestered when he sent an impersonator on a lecture tour in 1967. Andy called it an anti-star identity game; it was one of his most elegant and illegal conceptual performances. He reasoned: why should audiences suffer through my pasty, bald, halting, monosyllabic banality, when instead they could see and hear a handsome articulate actor like Allen Midgette, star of Bertolucci's
After the Revolution
, in which he wears a wig—tresses like canary feathers—that prefigures mine? The Midgette/Warhol ruse was eventually discovered, and Andy returned to fulfill some of the faked engagements himself. When I spoke to Midgette, a statuesque man with the magnetic eyes of an alien abductee, he said that to impersonate Andy he hunched his shoulders, slowed down his movements and speech, and tamped his natural explosiveness; in retrospect he faults Andy for not understanding the difference between a real actor and a boy you paid to strip. Today we might think Warhol lazy or dishonest for inserting someone else's body in place of his own, and yet this self-erasure harmonizes with Andy's career-long conduct; forging a more attractive body was among his art's highest purposes. An author photo of Allen in Andy drag appears on the back cover of
Andy Warhol's Index (Book)
, published in 1967. Warhol savored the sexual dimensions of substitutions: casting Allen Midgette's body in the Andy role, and watching the replacement occur, was, for Mr. Paperbag, an erotic act.

Andy Warhol's Index (Book)
marks the beginning of his career as writer. The following year, 1968, he published a more ambitious and exhausting affair,
a: a novel
, composed with a tape recorder on four separate occasions in 1965, 1966, and 1967. (Warhol originally wanted to call it
Cock.
)
Typists transcribed the tapes, and the results were published, typos included; Billy Name, who supervised the process, and ensured that the errors were left intact, composed subtitles for each page, floating headlines that serve as placeholders,
aides-mémoires
, and puncture points, rupturing the egregiously verbose text: “my turds is a person”; “Prella, the shampoo woman” (“Prella” a play on “Drella,” Warhol's nickname); “the tin foil tomb that Billy Name built”; “Maria Callas overwhelms any attempt at conversation”; “Ethel Roosevelt Hotel.” (Although few consider Andy a word artist, his productions offer a grab bag of poetic treats.) The novel's subject is twenty-four hours in the life of Ondine, the most verbally pyrotechnic of the superstars. (They first met at an orgy, where Andy abstained from participation, and so Ondine demanded that the pale, peering man be ejected from the premises.) Just as Allen Midgette substituted for Andy on the lecture circuit, so Ondine subs for Andy on the page: he lends Andy a thrown, florid voice. It is often difficult to know who is talking, for the speakers are identified irregularly, and only by initials or pseudonyms; Ondine's commandeering rant easily bleeds into Andy's plaintive mumbling. Ondine, who declares, “People are not equipped for my filth,” is Andy's logorrheic alter ego, and Andy's mission is to push his microphone further and further into Ondine's consciousness and body. This mike tyrannizes Ondine—following him even into the bathroom, though the besieged talker says he has no wish to “piss” on it. Warhol panics when his recording prosthesis momentarily vanishes: Ondine says, “Drella got the most worried look on his face as if the microphone would nevah come back.” Taping Ondine is like making it with Ondine: Andy speaks of “finishing” a tape of Ondine as if he were bringing him to climax.

Recognizing that Ondine epitomized a generation of unrecognized queer narrative virtuosi, Warhol knew that without the vehicles that the Factory provided, Ondine would never find an appropriate forum. Like the art of many performers who worked with Andy, Ondine's—dispensing the papal bull—is ephemeral and haphazard; its nature is to scatter itself, far from the preserving receptacles of canvas, theater, or film. Andy's
a
is a time capsule of Ondine: an amber cage for the embellishing, self-destructing canary. And yet Ondine's cadenzas assemble not a portrait of himself, but an indirect portrait of Andy, for at the book's heart lie several conversations in which Drella reveals dreads and insecurities: he asks, “Oh when am I going to find someone who will like A.W.” An actor named Joe Campbell, nicknamed the Sugar Plum Fairy, asks Andy pointed questions, and pushes him to admit, “Well I've been hurt so often so I don't even care any more,” and, “Well I want to get to the point where somebody will tell me what to do.” (Andy consistently expressed the desire for a master, a person to give him ideas; he would soon find such a boss.) Though often maddening to read,
a
is not a trivial artifact. Indeed, like Warhol's movies
Empire
and
Sleep
, it is an experiment in time. The novel took twenty-four hours to write or to tape. It took countless hours to transcribe. And though it may not take twenty-four hours to read (a careful student could stretch the experience out to that length)
a
suffocates the reader with time's slowness and turgidity; conversations that might in real life have passed quickly and communicated lightly their burdens, translate into resistant, illegible, and lethargic corpuscles on the page. Warhol's game, throughout his career, was to transpose sensation from one medium to another—to turn a photograph into a painting by silkscreening it; to transform a movie into a sculpture by filming motionless objects and individuals; to transcribe tape-recorded speech into a novel. He prefers to tamper as little as possible with the experience, and thereby to highlight how the act of conversion, from one galaxy to another, disembodies and alienates the material—embalms it, expunging the soul. The personality that Andy reveals, in
a
, is his own: his credo is to suck spirit out of others by tape-recording them, as if the microphone were leeching animation from its victims and then preserving them. Ondine's idiom shines through the formaldehyde: “How can you possibly speak in retrospect; I have never been there.” And yet, although his words are redacted as exactly as the flummoxed typists could manage, the novel communicates the tragic gap—jet lag from which the passenger never recovers—between a living act and its transcription on the dead page.

Brigid Berlin (disguised as the “Duchess”) has madcap moments in
a:
the microphone picks up a conversation from her hospital sickbed to the Factory pay phone—inebriate fioratura, reiterating her role as Mistress Poke: “My pokes in the fannies are beautiful,” she says, and, “three things I dig; my vodka, my poke, and my pillys.” In
a
, Andy uses the microphone as Brigid uses the hypodermic: to administer pokes. His mike flattered
a
's participants, much as Brigid's pokes, injecting communion, exalted its victims. But the tape recorder takes more than it gives: Count Drella's microphone intravenously and promiscuously needles the nervous systems of his entourage and feasts on their blood.

Was Drella giving or receiving pokes himself? He took his Obetrol orally. I'm not sure what kind of sex he was having in the sixties, and who knows whether it took the form of penile pokes, given or received, but certainly, for an asexual guy, he had plenty of boyfriends during this period, though virtually none have written memoirs or recounted details. (An exception is John Giorno, star of
Sleep.
He wrote about their affair: “Andy had a fragile and delicate approach to sex. I jerked off while Andy kissed my legs and sniffed my crotch. Then Andy licked the big gobs of white cum from my hand and stomach. Andy had a hard-on in his black jeans. I wanted to finish him off, but he said, “I'll take care of it.'” Giorno describes Warhol as a voyeur: “He wanted to see it, he didn't want to touch it. He wanted to look. Occasionally, I let him suck my cock, out of compassion for his suffering.” Catch the tone: Andy the poor ugly creep.) In the last two chapters I haven't mentioned boyfriends because Warhol's experiences with them are underdocumented, and because the boyfriends seem only loosely integrated into Factory life. Randy Bourscheidt told me: “If the subject of Andy's sexuality—his sexual practice—was ever mentioned, it would be to repeat the common view that he had no boyfriend. That's what amphetamine does—you're only interested in scoring [drugs], not in sex.” (Nonetheless, he remembers Andy's camera focusing on his crotch during the filming of
The Closet
.)
Although sex may have been superficially absent from Andy's life at the Factory, five crushes stick out from the pack: Philip Fagan, a punkish package captured in photobooth portraits and countless screen tests, who lived in Andy's townhouse in 1964 or 1965; Kip Stagg, a wild child seen wrestling with Andy (Kip on the bottom) in a photograph by Stephen Shore; Danny Williams, a bespectacled refinement who ran the strobe lights for Exploding Plastic Inevitable and Andy Warhol Uptight performances and who lived with the artist in 1965; the mysterious Richard Rheem, who appears in screen tests and in an unrestored film, known as
Mrs. Warhol
, playing Julia's husband or lover; and Rodney La Rod, whom Warhol describes in
POPism
as “a young kid,” “over six feet tall,” who “greased his hair and wore bell-bottoms that were too short.” Ronnie Cutrone told me that Rod La Rod—a comically phallic name—often engaged Warhol in playful physical fights, wrestling and tussling in front of others at the Factory; Rod would sit on Andy's chest, and the two would trade comments like “Hee hee, I saw your pee pee.” Cutrone called it “kid stuff.” Warhol, in
POPism
, tries to neutralize the relationship's erotic content but fails: Rod would “stomp around the Factory, grab me, and rough me up—and it was so outrageous that I loved it, I thought it was really exciting to have him around, lots of action.”

Horsing around with Rod La Rod may have looked like kid stuff, but the erotic work Andy was doing with his Polaroid camera in the 1960s was hardly juvenile, and
POPism
doesn't bother sanitizing it: “During this period I took thousands of Polaroids of genitals. Whenever somebody came up to the Factory, no matter how straight-looking he was, I'd ask him to take his pants off so I could photograph his cock and balls. … Personally, I loved porno and I bought lots of it all the time—the really dirty, exciting stuff. All you had to do was figure out what turned you on, and then just buy the dirty magazines and movie prints that are right for you, the way you'd go for the right pills or the right cans of food.” Warhol's vision of the porn cornucopia resembles his painted Campbell soup larder: find your flavor, among the thirty-two, and stick to it. American food manufacture affords a democracy of choice as bountiful as the populism of porn, its multiflavored openhandedness toward all comers.

Andy's erotic quest came to fruition in the films he made in the years 1967 and 1968—a series of “nudie” features, geared to the sexploitation market, which included a host of gay viewers who knew they could turn to Warhol films for up-front homoeroticism. He had an arrangement with the Hudson Theater, near Times Square: the Hudson guaranteed booking, and he tailored the films to this permissive locale, where his superstars would appear live at screenings to discuss such topics as “Pornography versus Reality.” These films have not received sympathetic treatment, even by Warhol's staunchest fans. Stephen­ Koch, whose influential study of Warhol's cinema,
Stargazer
(1974), was the first to take Warhol's movies seriously and to do them the honor of eloquent analysis, condescends to these nudie films of 1967–68, and describes them as antithetical to the artistic films of 1963–66. Indeed, the nudies differ from the films that precede
Chelsea Girls;
they are not abstract studies of a single face or action (
Eat
,
Henry Geldzahler
,
Sleep
,
Blow Job
)
, nor are they absurdist melodramas like Warhol's collaborations with Ronald Tavel (
More Milk Yvette
,
Hedy
,
Harlot
,
The Life of Juanita Castro
).
Instead, they are comic, talky, down-to-earth; they are in color; the composition of their shots lacks the stylized care of the early films. The nudies depended on the collaborative assistance of an attractive, antic, fast-talking young filmmaker, Paul Morrissey, who began working for Warhol in the fall of 1965, became an indispensable part of his cinematic machine, and eventually took over all directorial duties. Morrissey himself claims a large role in the making of many of Warhol's films; he told me that he was Andy's manager from 1965 through 1973–74, and that the movies of this period were never
by
Andy, who was, Paul said, “not capable of giving the slightest direction.” Other Warhol associates contest Morrissey's jaundiced verdict on the collaboration; undeniably, however, Morrissey's work on the films, beginning in 1965 with
My Hustler
, made them more accessible, pushing them toward satiric incident and away from abstraction.