Chelsea Girls, Andy Warhol’s greatest film, is a cold shot. Its three and a half hours actually contain seven hours of color and black-and-white film simultaneously projected on side-by-side screens, giving the viewer a sense that all of these vignettes (which can be screened in any sequence) are occurring simultaneously. Not that anything actually happens in Chelsea Girls: Nico lethargically brushes her hair. Brigid talks speed with a caller who has no idea that their conversation is being filmed. An earthy New Jerseyan, Ingrid Superstar, frequent butt of Factory jokes, discusses her sex life. Brigid gives Ingrid a poke. Mary Woronov tortures her female costars in “Hanoi Hannah, Radio Star,” a Ronnie Tavel scenario loosely based on the story of Tokyo Rose. Eric Emerson, tripping on acid, slowly takes off his clothes, his beautiful body awash in colored spotlights.
Chelsea Girls’s most chilling moment occurs in a scene starring Ondine, a brilliantly demented urchin usually dressed in leather and rags, described by Warhol biographer David Bourdon as “the most flamboyant and mercurial of the Factory’s speed freaks.” After shooting up on camera, Ondine perches on the Factory couch and announces that he is the pope—“My flock consists of homosexuals, perverts of any kind, queens, thieves, criminals of any sort, the rejected of society”—and is ready to hear confessions.
A woman named Rona wanders in as if entering an old-time stag film. She and Ondine ruminate on eternal bliss, but Ondine is impatient for her confession. Rona says that she can’t confess to him, because he’s a phony. Ondine explodes, genuinely enraged. “I’m a phony, am I?” he screams, slapping her hard in the face. Stunned, she demands Ondine stop it, but he hits her again. She runs off camera and he follows her. Warhol’s camera continues to focus on the empty sofa as we hear Ondine scream at her off-camera, calling her “a dumb bitch” and “a filthy whore” for questioning his veracity.
Eventually Ondine walks back into frame, exhausted, and throws himself down on the couch. Warhol, however, insists that he keep talking because there’s still several minutes of film left. Off-camera, Rona continues to sob. Running out of things to say, but unable to leave, Ondine, like all the other characters in Chelsea Girls, appears genuinely trapped in a hell of his own invention, with Warhol’s motionless camera emphasizing a sense of implacability. Many years later, Ondine, his body finally giving out after a lifetime of dissipation, admitted as much to interviewer Patrick S. Smith. “There’s no way out of that film [Chelsea Girls],” he said, because Warhol got “from everybody involved...everything that they could do.”
The film was released only weeks after Warhol finished shooting. Writing in The Village Voice, Jonas Mekas compared it to D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation. Record crowds at the first screenings of Chelsea Girls at the two-hundred-seat Filmmaker’s Cinemathèque led to the most successful commercial release of any underground film ever. In the summer of 1967, Chelsea Girls played to sold-out art houses in big cities across the United States.
In a piece called “American Cool” in the January 1999 Art Issues, Las Vegas–based culture analyst Dave Hickey writes that for the first decade of Andy Warhol’s career, his work was usually described by critics as “ironic and cool.” Both irony and cool, Hickey contends, are “modes of deniable disclosure”—but that’s where the similarities fade. To Hickey, there is something craven about irony; it “is a way of eluding the wrath of your superiors . . . when we use irony, we suppress the sense of what we mean.” Cool, on the other hand, “is a mode of democratic politesse . . . a way of not imposing on your peers.” From Hickey’s point of view, irony is an acknowledgment of servitude, cool a way of leading by example.
Hickey compares Andy Warhol with George Washington, Gertrude Stein, and Henry James. They were all cool, he says, because “presuming to embody their beliefs, they decline to plead them.” To be cool, one does not have to “assert anything. One simply declares some truth to be self-evident on one’s own embodied authority as a citizen without deigning to invest it with fancy justifications, personal explanations, or expressive urgency.” For Hickey, the ultimate “figure of cool” is George Washington at the Second Continental Congress, sitting with his legs crossed and his hands in his lap, saying little or nothing. When the debate grew especially heated or wandered from its purpose, according to Hickey, Washington would redirect discussion by simply shifting his weight in his chair. “That, my friends, is cool.”
In late 1965, Max’s Kansas City opened on Union Square. Its proprietor, Mickey Ruskin, started letting artists run a tab in exchange for artworks, which quickly helped establish Max’s as the preeminent artist hangout of its time in New York. And whereas fifteen years earlier the Cedar Tavern had been barely big enough for Jackson Pollock, Franz Kline, Willem de Kooning, and their friends and lovers, Max’s was big enough to accommodate the wider worlds of film, theater, literature, and, later, rock ’n’ roll.
One of the artists that Ruskin’s arrangement attracted was Andy Warhol. By 1967, he was having trouble feeding his entourage and had become notorious for showing up at dinner parties with seven or eight hungry and uninvited associates. Ruskin allowed Warhol and his entourage to run a tab in exchange for the occasional painting, and the Factory crowd took over Max’s back room.
People who were there reminisce about “Andy’s booth,” or “Andy’s round table,” but Gerard Malanga says that there really wasn’t a particular place: wherever Warhol sat was the center of the room. Eerily illuminated by Dan Flavin’s red fluorescent tubes cantilevered out from the wall to lend the room the flavor of a supermarket rotisserie, the habitués orbited, angling for Warhol’s attention with outrageous acts; studying him out of the corners of their eyes, transfixed. Meanwhile, Danny Fields says, Warhol was like a white hole sucking everything in, giving everybody something to do, something to be.
In hindsight, the summer of 1967 was the end of the Warhol era. A year later, Warhol would be shot by a factory hanger-on named Valerie Solanas, and he never really recovered, psychically or physically, from his wounds. Both his health and his art would decline. The summer of 1967 was the crest of a wave. Paul Morrissey, who was about to take over the actual making of Warhol’s films, was a regular in the backroom at Max’s that summer, usually sticking the velvet knife into the back of Ondine, whom he looked on as a talentless fuck-up. Billy Name and Ingrid Superstar were still around. The dapper Fred Hughes, who would soon take over Warhol’s business enterprises and move the Factory to much more respectable quarters, had started to come by. Nico and the Velvet Underground were going their separate ways by then, but she still showed up. Even if they were too cool to show it, everybody in the room was focused on Warhol—wondering what he was thinking, speculating about what he would do next, trying to understand his meaning, and—though this nearly always went unspoken—gauging where they stood in his world. In my mind’s eye, it was like watching the Last Supper.
The summer of 1967 was a stormy one for me. I was living on St. Marks Place, working at a bookstore, and selling a little pot on the side while my wife modeled at the New School. I got stuck up at knifepoint on Eighth Street that summer, and spent every night I could drinking at Max’s, and though I didn’t know anybody there, I sometimes wandered into the back room. One night, in response to something someone in his inner circle had just murmured to him behind the back of her hand, I caught Warhol mouthing a nearly silent “Oh, wow,” a phrase that Warhol’s old friend Ivan Karp says Warhol often used to express his “perpetual state of amazement, his constant surprise; his admiration.” To me, the silent circle of his mouth, the eyebrow arched in slight surprise represented cool—a universe of emotions from total acceptance to cynical dismissal to utter passivity to final judgment. I saw his ability to take the precise temperature of the room and alter it with a flicker of a smile, and at that moment I experienced a shiver of cool—simply by being there and understanding what I saw.
Bobby Zimmerman was born to be cool, but his was a particularly American cool, less influenced by French surrealism than by rhythm and blues. Late at night with the lights off, mother, father, and younger brother sleeping, the nine-year-old future Bob Dylan would lie in bed in his solid two-story house in a middle-class neighborhood of Hibbing, Minnesota, underneath the covers with his ear up against the speaker of his old Zenith radio, sucking in the sounds of Howlin’ Wolf, B. B. King, Johnny Ace, Chuck Berry, and Jimmy Reed.
For most of us, age fourteen is critical in the birth of a cool. Bobby Zimmerman was fourteen in 1955, the year that James Dean died in his white Porsche Spyder on the way to a sports-car race in Salinas, California. Rebel Without a Cause and Blackboard Jungle hit Hibbing’s Lybba Theater in 1955. In 1955, Bobby was listening to Elvis Presley, Little Richard, and Buddy Holly and started his first band, the Golden Chords. Even when he was playing the Hibbing High Jacket Jamboree Talent Festival, he was telling people he was going to be a rock ’n’ roll star.
Bob Dylan in New York, 1965.
© Daniel Kramer.