In the fall of 1970, six months after my first visit to inter/VIEW and the Factory, Andy Warhol was sitting at the same desk, eating the same lunch, wearing the same clothes—except that the black turtleneck, the last trace of the Swinging Sixties, had been replaced by a chic brown-on-navy cotton plaid shirt. The same well-groomed young assistants hovered in the background, seeming to do nothing more than keep Andy company. I hadn’t learned yet that keeping Andy company was very hard work—you were expected to provide him with a steady stream of gossip, ideas, and jokes in exchange for an occasional “Gee,” “Wow,” or “Really.” The ultimate chore was confession, which usually began with Andy asking, “What did you do last night?” and turning cold or walking away if he sensed any holding back of juicy personal details.

I had learned the names of these assistants—even the most basic information was rarely volunteered at the Factory—and that they each had a job to do in addition to having their brains picked daily. Pat Hackett transcribed Andy’s tapes and got him lunch from Brownie’s, the kosher health-food restaurant around the corner on East 16th Street. Vincent Fremont was in charge of Andy’s checks, bills, and invoices, and opened the Factory every morning at nine and closed it every evening at seven. Jed Johnson edited Andy’s movies and maintained the brownstone on Lexington Avenue and 89th Street where Andy lived with his mother, Julia. Like most of Andy’s male employees, including Gerard Malanga, Paul Morrissey, and Fred Hughes, Jed had started out sweeping the floor. Two years earlier he had delivered a telegram to the Factory and was offered the job by Paul, who said, “We pay the same as Western Union, but at least you get to stay in one place all day.” The hardwood floor was always extremely clean and shiny. On this particular October afternoon it was being swept by Joe Dallesandro, the muscular Superstar of Andy Warhol’s Trash, which had just opened to surprisingly good reviews, including one by me in the Village Voice.

I had come to the Factory to hand in my latest inter/VIEW assignment, an interview with Bernardo Bertolucci, the young Italian director whose second film, The Conformist, was the hit of that fall’s New York Film Festival. Following the Antonio das Mortes paean, Soren Agenoux published one or two pieces of mine each month, including an acid attack on Hollywood’s idea of a hip flick, The Magic Garden of Stanley Sweetheart, starring the teenage Don Johnson, who was curled up nude in a fetal position on the inter/VIEW cover (Volume 1, Number 8; $1,000 at the Gotham Book Mart).

Thanks to inter/VIEW, I was quickly becoming a mini-star at Columbia Film School and at Nina Needlepoint, where I painted stitching patterns of dogs, cats, and flowers—alongside my former Georgetown classmates and future Factory cohorts Glenn O’Brien and Michael Netter—to pay for the furnished room on West 105th Street I had moved into that summer. For me the real incentive in writing for inter/VIEW was getting to go to the Factory. I always went to the tenth floor to see Soren, who then took me to the sixth floor, where Andy would sign my $25 checks and grope for something to say. Sometimes Paul Morrissey, who never lacked for something to say, engaged me in conversation.

“So,” he would say, “is that liberal, left-wing slime Andrew Sarris still preaching his pretentious auteur theory to all of you spaced-out rich kids up at Columbia?” It was a typical Paul Morrissey greeting. He sat at a huge fake slate desk. Behind him were framed color photographs of four of his favorite Superstars—the most beautiful four: International Velvet, Tom Hompertz, Viva, and Joe Dallesandro. As he spat out his outrageous opinions, he tugged at his sandy brown hair, pulling out individual strands and throwing them over his shoulder. Every so often, he jumped up and Windexed some suddenly noticed smudge from the glass over the Superstar portraits. “I mean, what could be more ridiculous than the pompous, pseudointellectual notion that the director is the most important person on a movie. Everyone knows the most important person on a movie is the star! Everyone except those phony French foreign slime like Godard.”

I had tolerated Paul’s tirade until then—especially since he was the one who had told Soren to call me in the first place. But when he maligned the man who made Weekend, I’d had enough. “Isn’t Andy Warhol the ultimate auteur?” I countered.

“Andy? Andy an auteur? You must be joking. Andy’s idea of making a movie is going to the première.” Paul was the only one who could get away with a crack like that—he was a partner, not an employee. He wasn’t paid a salary but took 50 percent of any movie profits.

Paul Morrissey was an odd but appealing character. He was thirty-two years old but he seemed much older—perhaps because the three things he hated even more than the auteur theory were sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll. He reveled in his counter-counter-cultural contrariness. Only Paul Morrissey, for example, could tell Rolling Stone “musicians should be heard and not seen, like children should be seen and not heard. Musicians should be heard, but not from or about. I mean, who is Led Zeppelin? Is Eric Clapton really that interesting?”

For Paul, rock stars were “drug trash,” a recurring term in his rapid-fire patter, applied to everything and everyone he found morally repugnant. His original title for Trash, the story of a hustler who can’t perform sexually because he’s a junkie, was Drug Trash, but he decided it was too obvious. And in every conversation I had with him, he would sooner or later ask, in his high-pitched bark, “Why do you kids say you’re experimenting with drugs? You’re experimenting with ill health. Now that polio and all the other childhood diseases have been eradicated, you kids take drugs to find out what it’s like to be sick!”

Glenn O’Brien says Paul was “an extreme prude making X-rated movies.” Though Paul worshipped physical beauty, considering it a talent in itself—and featured Joe Dallesandro’s chiseled torso prominently in Flesh and Trash—his attitude toward sex was decidedly Irish Catholic, i.e., repressed. In fact, I have never met anyone more stereotypically Irish Catholic than Paul Morrissey. Narrow-minded, self-righteous, guilt-ridden, and word-mad: he was almost a parody. Paul’s hilarious sense of humor was also extremely Irish Catholic—black-on-black.

After a totally parochial-school education in the Bronx, he went to the Jesuit-run Fordham University, where he made his first 8mm one-reeler: a priest saying mass on a cliff, then shoving the altar boy off it. His right-wing views were no doubt reinforced by his first job—as a social worker on the Lower East Side, where he also bought a small house. Paul loved being close to the things he hated.

In 1965, through the Underground film scene then thriving in the East Village, Paul met Gerard Malanga, then Andy. Soon he was hanging out at the Factory, offering to clean up, and helping with the sound on My Hustler. By the time I got to the Factory, Paul Morrissey was definitely the rightest of the right-hand men. Rightest politically too: In that same 1971 Rolling Stone interview, he attacked “junk democracy” and when asked what system of government he’d prefer, replied, “Why not give royalty a chance?” His choice for the throne, he often said, was John-John Kennedy, with Jackie as regent; he brushed aside the Kennedys’ liberalism because they were Irish and Catholic. “Besides,” he would say, “John-John’s not really a Kennedy. He’s more of a Bouvier-Onassis.”

He would often chuckle to himself after he made a particularly off-the-wall remark, and laugh out loud as he read his own quotes. “Did I really say that?” he’d say.

When I turned in my inter/VIEW articles, Paul invariably found them “too intellectual. You’re letting that Andrew Sarris brainwash you.” But the day I handed in my Bertolucci story, I wasn’t too worried about a run-in with Paul, because I had finally connected with Andy. The week before I had run into him at Lincoln Center, waiting for a Film Festival press screening. We were both early and alone.

“Oh, hi,” he said.

“Hi, Andy.”

“Gee, your articles are so good. I wish I could be so intellectual.”

“Paul says they’re too intellectual.”

“Oh, Paul’s just being funny.”

There was a long pause. Andy had run out of words and I had run out of nerve. Then he looked at the plastic shopping bag from Brownie’s he was carrying, as if he had just realized it was in his hand.

“Oh, I know what I should do,” he said. “I should take your picture.”

He pulled his Polaroid Big Shot from the Brownie’s bag and told me to sit on a bench with my back toward him.

“Now turn your head my way. That’s right. Not too much. Look down a little. A little more. Oh, oh, that’s good.”

The camera was glued to his glasses and he pivoted it up and down and sideways very slightly, searching for my best angle—something I was sure I didn’t have. He had chosen a bench against the window, so sunlight streamed across my face. I felt warm and wanted.

“That’s good,” said Andy softly. “Oh, oh, don’t move now.”

He snapped, pulled out the picture and snapped again. I stood up and waited beside him for my image to develop. As it did, Andy sighed, “Gee, you’re a beauty.”

A beauty? I looked at the pictures. It was amazing. Somehow my face had angles and bones, where I knew there were only curves and mounds. My chubby nose was aquiline. Of course, the softness of the Polaroid image, and the extreme overexposure, helped a lot.

“Oh, let me take one more. Sit in the same spot but look straight at me this time.”

I did as I was told and again the result was miraculous. I looked like Elvis Presley. Before Las Vegas. I asked Andy if I could have it.

“Oh,” he said, carefully slipping my beautiful image into his plastic bag. “Maybe I can give you one the next time you come to the office.”

A few days later I interviewed Bernardo Bertolucci at the Algonquin Hotel. A pretty English girl translated his pronouncements: “Antonioni makes films about ashtrays.” “Satyricon is like a big cadaver that doesn’t smell.” “Pasolini is so decadent in real life [that] he tries to cover it up by making his films austere.” I used a bulky borrowed tape recorder, but refused to let the transcript run, à la Warhol, in raw Q&A form, insisting instead on “writing it up.” It was my first interview and, visions of New Yorker profiles dancing in my head, I wanted to make a “literary” impression.

Several rewrites later, I headed downtown to Union Square. The inter/VIEW office was not only locked but chained. Soren Agenoux and his cherubic assistant, Jeremy Dixon, were always there in the early afternoon—where were they? I went down to the sixth floor to see if they were there and found Andy eating lunch at his Deco desk. “Is Soren around?” I asked.

“Oh, uh, something happened,” said Andy vaguely. “I think Paul wants to talk to you. Gee, your Trash review in the Voice was really great.”

Paul also liked it. “A little intellectual,” he told me, “but I liked the line about Holly [Woodlawn] looking like ‘an amphetamined El Greco.’ And Joe’s ‘Greco-Roman ass’—that was pretty funny. And it was very perceptive of you to make the comparison with Our Lady of the Flowers—’cause if anybody’s more Catholic than Genet, it’s us. We’re not as perverse, though.”

Then he got down to business. Would I like to be editor of inter/VIEW? Soren had been let go. Paul explained that Andy and he had been “too busy” to read the last three issues, “and then the other day, I started reading them and I realized Soren was putting out a silly scandal sheet.”

“But I don’t know anything about editing a magazine,” I said, stunned. “And I’ve still got another semester to go at Columbia.”

Paul assured me that “putting together a magazine isn’t that big a deal. You just slap some pretty pictures down on the page and you and your friends from school could probably do most of the interviews. Why don’t you ask Andrew Sarris if they’ll give you some college credits for working for us?”

Paul also offered me a salary: $40 a week. I told him I’d think it over and gave him the Bertolucci interview, which he read rapidly. “Andy,” he called across the room, “listen to this wonderful compliment Bertolucci gave you.” Andy looked up from his purées as Paul read: “ ‘Everyone says in Hollywood there is psychological direction of actors, but Howard Hawks films are just like Andy Warhol films. Humphrey Bogart is always Humphrey Bogart. And Garbo always plays Garbo. It is the American independent cinema that went wrong—they are the sons who have not understood anything about the fathers.’ ”

“Gee, that’s really great,” said Andy.

“Isn’t it? But what I don’t get is how someone as intelligent as Bertolucci obviously is can call himself a Communist. It’s really a joke. And why does he insist on saying ‘film’ and ‘cinema’? It’s so pretentious. You know what you have to do—every time he says ‘film,’ change it to ‘movies.’ The translator probably got it wrong anyway.”

On my way out, I asked Andy if I could have one of the Polaroids he took of me at Lincoln Center. “Oh,” he moaned, “I think I left them at home.”

In the next few days I discussed Paul’s offer with Andrew Sarris, who advised me to be careful; with Arthur Barron, the head of Columbia Film School, who approved my request to count working at inter/VIEW as two courses; with my father, who threatened to smash the Super-8 movie camera he had given me for Christmas if I took the job; and with my best friend from Georgetown, Columbia, and Nina Needlepoint, Glenn O’Brien, who said he’d love to be my assistant. I had tried to call Jeremy Dixon to ask him what had really happened with Soren and if he wanted to stay on, but there was never any answer at his apartment near Times Square.

Finally, I went back to the Factory and told Paul I would take the job if I was paid $50 a week. He agreed. He let me hire Glenn—at $40 a week. Those were very high salaries, he noted, for “part-time jobs.” Then he announced that he and Andy were leaving the next morning for Paris to shoot a new movie called L’Amour. He gave me the key to the inter/VIEW office and the phone number of Other Scenes, where the magazine was laid out and typeset. He also handed me a stack of Rita Hayworth stills from the forties and fifties. “Just run one of these on every page,” he said. “It doesn’t matter if they go with the articles or not.”

Somehow, I knew he wasn’t joking.