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Authors: Tom Wolfe

BOOK: The Purple Decades
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What are Mom & the
Bonneville & Buddy & Sis
Up against a love like this?
That first night on
the disco floor
She wore a pair
of boxing trunks
While leather punks
and painted lulus,
African queens
and sado-zulus
Paid her court.
I grow old the 1970s way:
Deaf, but from a
Max Q octaphonic beat,
Stroked out, but on
my own two feet,
Disco macho!—for you,
my New Cookie.
B
angs manes bouffants beehives Beatle caps butter faces brush-on lashes decal eyes puffy sweaters French thrust bras flailing leather blue jeans stretch pants stretch jeans honeydew bottoms eclair shanks elf boots ballerinas Knight slippers, hundreds of them, these flaming little buds, bobbing and screaming, rocketing around inside the Academy of Music Theater underneath that vast old mouldering cherub dome up there—aren't they super-marvelous!
“Aren't they super-marvelous!” says Baby Jane, and then: “Hi, Isabel! Isabel! You want to sit backstage—with the Stones!”
The show hasn't even started yet, the Rolling Stones aren't even on the stage, the place is full of a great shabby mouldering dimness, and these flaming little buds.
Girls are reeling this way and that way in the aisle and through their huge black decal eyes, sagging with Tiger Tongue Lick Me brush-on eyelashes and black appliques, sagging like display window Christmas trees, they keep staring at—her—Baby Jane—on the aisle. What the hell is this? She is gorgeous in the most outrageous way. Her hair rises up from her head in a huge hairy corona, a huge tan mane around a narrow face and two eyes opened—swock!—like umbrellas, with all that hair flowing down over a coat made of … zebra! Those motherless stripes! Oh, damn! Here she is with her friends, looking like some kind of queen bee for all flaming little buds everywhere. She twists around to shout to one of her friends and that incredible mane swings around on her shoulders, over the zebra coat.
“Isabel!” says Baby Jane, “Isabel, hi! I just saw the Stones: They look super-divine!”
That girl on the aisle, Baby Jane, is a fabulous girl. She comprehends what the Rolling Stones
mean
. Any columnist in New York could tell them who she is … a celebrity of New York's new era of Wog Hip … Baby Jane Holzer. Jane Holzer in
Vogue
, Jane Holzer in
Life
, Jane Holzer in Andy Warhol's underground movies, Jane Holzer in the world of High Camp, Jane Holzer at the rock and roll, Jane Holzer is—well, how can one put it into words? Jane Holzer is This Year's Girl, at least, the New Celebrity, none of your old idea of sexpots, prima donnas, romantic tragediennes, she is the girl who knows … The Stones, East End vitality …
“Isabel!” says Jane Holzer in the small, high, excited voice of hers, her Baby Jane voice, “Hi, Isabel! Hi!”
Down the row, Isabel, Isabel Eberstadt, the beautiful socialite who is Ogden Nash's daughter, has just come in. She doesn't seem to hear Jane. But she is down the row a ways. Next to Jane is some fellow in a chocolate-colored Borsalino hat, and next there is Andy Warhol, the famous pop artist.
“Isabel!” says Jane.
“What?” says Isabel.
“Hi, Isabel!” says Jane.
“Hello, Jane,” says Isabel.
“You want to go backstage?” says Jane, who has to speak across everybody.
“Backstage?” says Isabel.
“With the Stones!” says Jane. “I was backstage with the Stones. They look
divine!
You know what Mick said to me? He said, ‘Koom on, love, give us a kiss!'”
But Isabel has turned away to say something to somebody.
“Isabel!” says Jane.
And all around, the little buds are batting around in the rococo gloom of the Academy of Arts Theater, trying to crash into good seats or just sit in the aisle near the stage, shrieking. And in the rear the Voice of Fifteen-year-old America cries out in a post-pubertal contralto, apropos of nothing, into the mouldering void: “Yaaaagh! Yuh dirty fag!”
Well, so what; Jane laughs. Then she leans over and says to the fellow in the Borsalino hat:
“Wait'll you see the Stones! They're so sexy! They're pure sex. They're
divine!
The Beatles, well, you know, Paul McCartney—
sweet
Paul McCartney. You know what I mean. He's such a
sweet person
. I mean, the Stones are
bitter—”
the words seem to spring from her lungs like some kind of wonderful lavender-yellow Charles Kingsley bubbles “—they're all from the working class, you know? the East End. Mick Jagger—well, it's all Mick. You know what they say about
his lips? They say his lips are
diabolical
. That was in one of the magazines.
“When Mick comes into the Ad Lib in London—I mean, there's nothing like the Ad Lib in New York. You can go into the Ad Lib and everybody is there. They're all young, and they're taking over, it's like a whole revolution. I mean, it's
exciting
, they're all from the lower classes, East End-sort-of-thing. There's nobody exciting from the upper classes anymore, except for Nicole and Alec Londonderry, Alec is a British marquis, the Marquis of Londonderry, and, O.K., Nicole has to put in an appearance at this country fair or something, well, O.K., she does it, but that doesn't mean—you know what I mean? Alec is so—you should see the way he walks, I could just watch him walk—
Undoes-one-ship!
They're
young
. They're all young, it's a whole new thing. It's not the Beatles. Bailey says the Beatles are
passé,
because now everybody's mum pats the Beatles on the head. 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.”
Then the show begins. An electronic blast begins, electric guitars, electric bass, enormous speakers up there on a vast yellow-gray stage. Murray the K, the D. J. and M. C., O.K.?, comes out from the wings, doing a kind of twist soft shoe, wiggling around, a stocky chap, thirty-eight years old, wearing Italian pants and a Sun Valley snow lodge sweater and a Stingy Brim straw hat. Murray the K! Girls throw balls of paper at him, and as they arc onto the stage, the stage lights explode off them and they look like falling balls of flame.
And, finally, the Stones, now—how can one express it? the Stones come on stage—
“Oh, God, Andy, aren't they
divine!”
—and spread out over the stage, the five Rolling Stones, from England, who are modeled after the Beatles, only more lower-class-deformed. One, Brian Jones, has an enormous blonde Beatle bouffant.
“Oh, Andy, look at Mick! Isn't he
beauti
ful! Mick! Mick!”
In the center of the stage a short thin boy with a sweat shirt on, the neck of the sweat shirt almost falling over his shoulders, they are so narrow, all surmounted by this … enormous head … with the hair puffing down over the forehead and ears, this boy has exceptional lips. He has two peculiarly gross and extraordinary red lips. They hang off his face like giblets. Slowly his eyes pour over the flaming bud horde soft as Karo syrup and then close and then the lips start spreading into the most lanquid, most confidential, the wettest, most labial, most concupiscent grin imaginable. Nirvana! The buds start shrieking, pawing toward the stage.
The girls have Their Experience. They stand up on their seats. They begin to ululate, even between songs. The looks on their faces! Rapturous agony! There, right up there, under the sulphur lights, that is
them
. God, they're right there! Mick Jagger takes the microphone with his tabescent hands and puts his huge head against it, opens his giblet lips and begins to sing … with the voice of a bull Negro. Bo Diddley. You movung boo meb bee-uhtul, bah-bee, oh vona breemb you' honey snurks oh crim pulzy yo' mim down, and, camping again, then turning toward the shrieking girls with his wet giblet lips dissolving …
And, occasionally, breaking through the ululation:
“Get off the stage, you finks!”
“Maybe we ought to scream,” says Jane. Then she says to the fellow in the hat: “Tell me when it's five o'clock, will you, pussycat? I have to get dressed and go see Sam Spiegel.” And then Baby Jane goes: “Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee
 
“eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeyes!” says Diana Vreeland, the editor of
Vogue
. “Jane Holzer is the most contemporary girl I know.”
Jane Holzer at the rock and roll—
Jane Holzer in the underground movies—in Andy's studio, Andy Warhol, the famous Pop artist, experiencing the rare world of Jonas and Adolph Mekas, truth and culture in a new holy medium, underground movie-making on the lower East Side. And Jane is wearing a Jax shirt, strung like a Christmas tree with Diamonds, and they are making
Dracula,
or
Thirteen Beautiful Women or Soap Opera
or
Kiss
—in which Jane's lips … but how can one describe an underground movie? It
is
… avant-garde. “Andy calls everything super,” says Jane. “I'm a super star, he's a super-director, we make super epics—and I mean, it's a completely new and natural way of acting. You can't imagine what really beautiful things can happen!”
Jane Holzer—with The New Artists, photographers like Jerry Schatzberg, David Bailey and Brian Duffy, and Nicky Haslam, the art director of
Show.
Bailey, Duffy and Haslam are English. Schatzberg says the photographers are the modern-day equivalents of the Impressionists in Paris around 1910, the men with a sense of New Art, the excitement of the salon, the excitement of the artistic style of life, while all the painters, the old artists, have moved uptown to West End Avenue and live in apartment buildings with Kwik-Fiks parquet floors and run around the corner to get a new cover for the ironing board before the stores close.
Jane in the world of High Camp—a world of thin young men in an environment, a decor, an atmosphere so—how can one say it?—so indefinably Yellow Book. Jane in the world of Teen Savage—Jane
modeling here and there—wearing Jean Harlow dresses for
Life
and Italian fashions for
Vogue
and doing the most fabulous cover for Nicky at
Show
. David took the photograph, showing Jane barebacked wearing a little yacht cap and a pair of “World's Fair” sunglasses and holding an American flag in her teeth, so—so Beyond Pop Art, if you comprehend.
Jane Holzer at the LBJ Discotheque—where they were handing out aprons with a target design on them, and Jane Holzer put it on backward so that the target was behind and
then
did The Swim, a new dance.
Jane Holzer—well, there is no easy term available, Baby Jane has appeared constantly this year in just about every society and show business column in New York. The magazines have used her as a kind of combination of model, celebrity and socialite. And yet none of them have been able to do much more than, in effect, set down her name, Baby Jane Holzer, and surround it with a few asterisks and exploding stars, as if to say, well, here we have … What's Happening.
She is a socialite in the sense that she lives in a twelve-room apartment on Park Avenue with a wealthy husband, Leonard Holzer, heir to a real estate fortune, amid a lot of old Dutch and Flemish paintings, and she goes to a great many exciting parties. And yet she is not in Society the way the Good Book, the
Social Register
, thinks of Society, and the list of hostesses who have not thought of inviting Jane Holzer would be impressive. Furthermore, her stance is that she doesn't care, and she would rather be known as a friend of the Stones, anyway —and here she is at the April in Paris Ball, $150 per ticket, amid the heaving white and gold swag of the Astor Hotel ballroom, yelling to somebody: “If you aren't nice to me, I'll tell everybody you were here!”
Jane Holzer—the sum of it is glamor, of a sort very specific to New York. With her enormous corona of hair and her long straight nose, Jane Holzer can be quite beautiful, but she never comes on as A Beauty. “Some people look at my pictures and say I look very mature and sophisticated,” Jane says. “Some people say I look like a child, you know, Baby Jane. And, I mean, I don't know what I look like, I guess it's just 1964 Jewish.” She does not attempt to come on sexy. Her excitement is something else. It is almost pure excitement. It is the excitement of the New Style, the New Chic. The press watches Jane Holzer as if she were an exquisite piece of … radar. It is as if that entire ciliate corona of hers were spread out as an antenna for new waves of style. To the magazine editors, the newspaper columnists, the photographers and art directors, suddenly here is a single flamboyant girl who sums up everything new and chic in the way of fashion in the Girl of the Year.
How can one explain the Girl of the Year? The Girl of the Year is a symbolic figure the press has looked for annually in New York since World War I because of the breakdown of conventional High Society. The old establishment still holds forth, it still has its clubs, cotillions and coming-out balls, it is still basically Protestant and it still rules two enormously powerful areas of New York, finance and corporate law. But alongside it, all the while, there has existed a large and ever more dazzling society, Café Society it was called in the twenties and thirties, made up of people whose status rests not on property and ancestry but on various brilliant ephemera, show business, advertising, public relations, the arts, journalism or simply new money of various sorts, people with a great deal of ambition who have congregated in New York to satisfy it and who look for styles to symbolize it.

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