Putting out a magazine was, of course, a very big deal. Having an editorial assistant who loved editing and hated assisting didn’t help. Fortunately, Glenn’s wife, Judy O’Brien, volunteered to assist the assistant. She was the first in a long line of girls from good families who worked at the Factory for free. She was so thrilled she instantly changed her name to Jude Jade—she loved the Beatles’ new song “Hey Jude.” She decided this over Black Russians, the In drink at Max’s Kansas City, the In bar for the Superstar set—where we instantly went to celebrate our new positions.
The Superstars, looking less than super under the red glare of the back room’s only light, a Dan Flavin sculpture, greeted us with a mixture of disdain and curiosity. They were waiting to see how much coverage we gave them in the school newspaper, which is what inter/VIEW had been under Gerard Malanga and Soren Agenoux. We tried to appear cool and uncaring. But for us, meeting Eric Emerson (the acid-tripping onanist searching for the meaning of life in The Chelsea Girls) and Candy Darling (the transvestite socialite in Women in Revolt, the movie Paul had started shooting before he took off for Paris), was like hobnobbing with Errol Flynn and Carole Lombard at the Brown Derby.
The next afternoon we got to work. First, we carved some work space out of the mountains of back issues. (Paul had expressly forbidden me to throw any out. “Andy never throws anything out,” he had said.) We plowed through the piles of unopened mail on Soren’s beat-up metal desk: studio press releases, invitations to screenings recently past, and the odd Tom of Finland catalogue. There was also an envelope addressed to me. “Your first fan letter,” Jude suggested cheerfully. It was a letter from Jeremy Dixon’s mother, who wrote that her son had died the previous week. He had gone to a club, mixed too many pills with too much beer, and passed out. His buddies assumed that he had dozed off, but when they realized that he was dead, they left him for the owner to find when the club closed. It was the first time I had heard of Quaaludes, the muscle relaxant with aphrodisiac side effects, which later became as popular as M&Ms. And Jeremy Dixon was the first of my Factory friends to die of unnatural causes.
Down on the sixth floor, Pat Hackett told me that Andy also received a letter from Mrs. Dixon, thanking him for helping her son. “Did I help him?” he said, dropping the letter in a box full of press releases on his way to Paris.
Although Andy and Paul hadn’t given me a deadline for the next issue of inter/VIEW, I wanted to get it out in time for their return from Paris. I took Paul’s advice and assigned as many articles as I could to film-school friends. I also put a Rita Hayworth still on every page, tempering the arbitrariness of this by leading off with “An Untitled Adulation of Rita Hayworth” by Stephan Varble, a Truman Capote figure at Columbia. Glenn insisted on ending the issue, Malanga-like, with a poem, “a vision of st. rita”—“before color/you were golden/before I came/you were there.” Jude was rewarded for fetching coffee with a bylined review of The Mind of Mr. Soames, starring her heart throb, Terence Stamp, and “his peach-coloured cashmere crotch.” My Bertolucci interview was the only piece not incongruously illustrated. I knew that even Paul couldn’t resist Dominique Sanda and Stefania Sandrelli tangoing, which is the still I ran from The Conformist in lieu of yet another ravishing Rita.
Other Scenes, where we had to do the layouts and typesetting, was definitely not our scene. John Wilcock and his bearded, beaded staff kindly showed us how to size photos and spec type, but we hated having to wait around in their dark and dirty Village basement, and we snickered every time one of them used “freak” as a compliment. We also snickered at the copy for the exchange ad Other Scenes ran in inter/VIEW, the one with the cannabis-leaf border. “Other Scenes can be smoked or eaten,” it ran. “It’s the first magazine of the grass generation.”
If Other Scenes was hopelessly hippie, the inter/VIEW printer, located in a dark and dirty garage in Chinatown, was just plain hopeless. He didn’t speak English and he used ink like soy sauce. The first half of our press run emerged black on black, the Rita Hayworth portraits looking like Ad Reinhardt paintings. Throwing away a couple of thousand copies meant less lifting for the circulation department, i.e., Jude Jade.
The second half of our five thousand press run, best read while wearing rubber gloves, was distributed by taxi to our four major outlets: the Museum of Modern Art lobby, the Anthology Film Archives lobby, Cinemabilia, and the Memory Shop (our second stills-for-space “advertiser”). Jonas Mekas, the intellectual guru of the Underground film movement, examined my first issue when we dropped off a few bundles at the Archives. “You have created a whole new look,” he declared. Here, ironically, was a high priest of the avant-garde proclaiming Rita Hayworth stills “a whole new look.” It was as funny as it was inevitable: For one hundred years, since Impressionism, the history of art had been the pursuit of the new; by 1970 it had all been done. Painting itself was dead, Conceptual Art reigned, galleries dealt in treatises, not objects. Indeed, this worship of newness for the sake of newness had overwhelmed the entire culture, from top to bottom, especially in America, the New World, where we were left with minimalist novels, wordless plays, street fashion. And Andy Warhol films: no script, no editing, no movement.
Our last stop was the Factory, where Andy and Paul had just returned from Paris. I couldn’t wait for them to see the issue. Paul flipped through it quickly, making snap judgments and quips. He was particularly pleased with the illustration for an interview with Jean-Luc Godard, then in his High Maoist phase: Rita in a crisp white sailor dress. “I love it,” he squealed. “It really shows how absurd the whole Commie Godard La Chinoise bullshit is.”
Andy stood beside him. “Gee,” he said, and “Oh.” Did that mean he liked what I had done? He only came to life when Paul reached the inside back cover, where we had run Rita’s “What Becomes a Legend Most” ad for Blackglama. “You got a Blackglama ad?” he asked excitedly. “Jude called to ask them for it,” I told him, “but they didn’t want to give it to us, so we ran it for free, just for fun.” “Oh, I bet we get in trouble,” was Andy’s reply.
Crestfallen, back on the tenth floor, Glenn and Jude and I went back to stuffing issues into envelopes for our few hundred subscribers, mostly complimentary. Our biggest thrill came with the discovery that we actually had a paying subscriber in South Dakota. Before leaving at around seven, I went back down, as requested, to give Andy a few copies to take to dinner. “Gee, thanks,” he said. “Uh, maybe I should take you to dinner. It’s Jerome Hill and Charles Rydell. Uh, they’re the new owners of inter/VIEW.”
The new owners?
“Uh, I mean, they own part of it now. I think.”
“But I’m not really dressed for dinner.”
“Yes you are. Gee, that’s such a pretty striped polo shirt. Did your mother get it for you at Saks?”
“Yes, but don’t I need a tie and jacket?”
“Uh, it’s at the Algonquin and they uh live there, so you can wear one of their jackets and uh ties.”
In the taxi uptown Andy grilled me mercilessly about Glenn and Jude’s marriage. “Did he marry her for her money? Oh, she married him for his money? They both have money? How great.” He paused for a minute, then started in again. “Does he cheat on her? He must, right? I mean, he’s so good-looking. And she’s a beauty too. So they must have boyfriends and girlfriends, right? I mean, she could be a lesbian, couldn’t she?”
I tried to keep him interested by telling him that Jude was jealous of Candy Darling.
“You mean Glenn has a problem!” Having a problem was Andy’s code for gay. Sooner or later, he suspected everyone he ever met of having a problem. Or marrying for money.
“I didn’t say Glenn has a problem,” I said. “But he does have a crush on Fred Hughes. But so does Jude.”
“What! They both want to go to bed with Fred?”
“They don’t want to go to bed with him, they just admire the way he dresses. They think he has great style.”
“Oh, c’mon. You’re covering up for them. I’m going to tell Fred they have a crush on him.”
We finally reached the Algonquin, thank God, and went upstairs to the suite that Jerome Hill, the elderly heir to the Northern Pacific railroad fortune, kept for the times he came into the city from his farm in Bridgehampton. We were greeted by Jerome’s long-time best friend, actor Charles Rydell. Before Andy could introduce me, Charles bellowed, “I know who he is! And I’ve seen his first issue. I hate it. All those Rita Hayworth stills are so goddamn campy. Brigid brought it up to me this afternoon. She was going to stay for dinner until she heard you were coming, Andy.” I hadn’t met Brigid Berlin yet because she and Andy were fighting then. “Come in, Robert,” bellowed Charles, “I don’t really hate your first issue. It’s just that Brigid was ranting and raving against all the campy faggots and she got me going. Let me introduce you to Jerome. He’s the real genius in this room. Not the fruitcake you came in with.” Then he bellowed out a giant laugh.
Andy laughed too, and whispered, “Isn’t Charles nutty?” He meant it as a compliment.
Jerome Hill, I soon learned, was not only part owner of inter/VIEW and a patron of the arts but also an artist himself, who painted École de Riviera landscapes at his summer house near Cannes, and directed documentaries about growing up rich in the Middle West. Above all he was a gentleman, simple and kind. He loaned me a jacket and tie, and, even though the jacket was two sizes too large and the paisley tie clashed with my striped shirt, I began to feel more comfortable in this strange new world. Then I met the rest of Charles and Jerome’s Algonquin round table.
First came Taylor Mead, another sometime Superstar who had fallen out with Andy. Like Jerome Hill, he was the scion of a major Middle Western industrial fortune, but a gentleman, simple and kind, he was not. He looked like a Bowery bum and talked like a Village waif. He spent most of dinner staring suspiciously across the table at me.
Then came Sylvia Miles, spouting the box-office figures of Midnight Cowboy, the hit film of the moment, in which she played a hooker with a heart of brass. Andy resented the success of the John Schlesinger film. He said it was a “rip-off” of Flesh, and that Schlesinger wasted the Factory’s time for days shooting the party scene and then cutting it to shreds.
“Andy,” rasped Sylvia, “I loved Joe Dallesandro in Trash. I was thinking, we should really work together. In fact, I’ve got a script right here in my bag that would be perfect for the two of us. I’m carrying it around because I just came from a drink with my agent, Billy Barnes—you know Billy, he handles Tennessee—and he wanted to discuss it, and then when I told him I would be dining with you later in the evening he said … ”
“Oh, uh, you should talk to Paul,” said Andy.
Finally, with the third round of cocktails came Jerome Hill’s nephew, Peter Beard. With his wife, Minnie Cushing, of the Newport Cushings. And their pet snake, all coiled up in Minnie’s large straw bag. They were just back from their honeymoon in Kenya and looked as if they hadn’t had time to change their clothes. Peter wasn’t even wearing socks, and this was November in New York.
“Aren’t they beautiful?” Andy whispered. “Don’t you wish you could be that beautiful?”
“Oh, Andy,” bellowed Charles, “stop acting like such a goddamn fucking faggot. No wonder Brigid can’t stand to be around you anymore.”
Andy said Charles was just being nutty, Sylvia said she had a great idea for a movie starring Charles and her, Peter passed around his latest photographs of dead elephants, Minnie petted her snake, Taylor stared suspiciously, and Jerome asked me if I’d like another drink. “Yes,” I said. “A double vodka on the rocks, please.”
I don’t remember much more about that first dinner party, except that Andy started taking Polaroids of the eager Greek waiter and Charles proposed that we all—including the waiter and the snake—go back up to Jerome’s suite, whereupon Sylvia announced that she had an early script meeting with a major director and needed me to escort her home. I gave Jerome his jacket back, but he insisted I keep the tie, which I still have, a souvenir of the beginning of a decade of dinner parties in hotels around the world. Somehow I hailed a taxi, dropped Sylvia off on Central Park South—“Tell Paul to call me about the script Andy wants him to read”—and made it home to my furnished room.
At precisely nine the next morning, Andy called. “You were a big hit with Charles and Jerome,” he said. “Isn’t Peter great-looking? And it’s great the way he talks so fast. Except I never know what he’s talking about. Do you think he has a problem?” Eventually he got to inter/VIEW. “It was pretty good,” he said. “But maybe Charles was right. Doing just Rita does look too campy. But then Charles is the biggest camp of all, right? So I never know.”
Had he read my Bertolucci interview, I asked.
“Oh, uh, a little bit. I think you should write less and tape record more. It’s more modern.”
It was a cutting remark, especially to a twenty-three-year-old who thought he was hot stuff because his increasingly frequent reviews in the Village Voice had prompted a letter from Seymour Peck, the Arts and Leisure editor of the New York Times, asking him to write for them. But I was too excited to feel hurt: This was the first time Andy had called me at home. And the first time he had expressed a direct opinion about the contents of my first issue. He added that he didn’t really like Glenn O’Brien’s ode to Rita Hayworth—“Poetry is so old-fashioned.” He repeated all his questions about the O’Briens’ sex life, then in the middle of an answer he panted, “Oh, oh, I’ve got to go now. Call me later if anything happens. Four-two-seven, six-four-two-oh.” Then, without saying goodbye, he hung up.
It was a seductive performance. He had slighted my writing, but he had called me and given me his home number. That meant we were friends, didn’t it? It meant that he liked me, right? It felt so cool, so hip, so great to turn to “W” in my phone book and write, “Andy, 427-6420, home.” I couldn’t wait to get to Columbia that morning to tell my film-school buddies: God called and gave me the number to heaven.
My second issue of inter/VIEW, in December 1970, contained a single tape-recorded interview (with Costa-Gavras and Yves Montand) among a dozen reviews and articles. And a poem. By me. It was an ode to Elvis Presley. I had put a fifties photograph of Elvis on the cover and old Elvis stills throughout the issue, capriciously decorating reviews of Love Story, Ryan’s Daughter, and Brewster McCloud, as well as “Museum Film Trips” by Lil Piccard, a Dr. Ruth type who covered the artsy Jonas Mekas beat for us.
The Elvis issue was my idea, inspired by Andy’s 1962 Elvis paintings. Paul had grudgingly granted his permission. He disapproved of the King of Rock ’n’ Roll for overwhelming the melodious harmony of white American music with throbbing black African rhythm. I saw Elvis as an avatar of the new sexuality, and made that point visually by running a photo of Elvis in Viva Las Vegas opposite a photograph of Mick Jagger in Gimme Shelter. I theorized that many of the major sex symbols of the fifties and sixties, with their full sensual features, particularly lips, all looked alike: Marilyn, Elvis, Bardot, Jagger, Nureyev, even El Cordobes, the Spanish bullfighter. Paul had a different theory: “All the big sex symbols,” he said, “have last names ending in ‘o’—Garbo, Harlow, Monroe, Brando, Dallesandro.” The Rita and Elvis issues seemed to set off an avalanche of nostalgia for glamour in the media, fashion, and film. But, because inter/VIEW was Andy Warhol’s magazine, nostalgia was perceived as new, the rejection of the avant-garde as the height of avant-garde. Of course, this was Paul’s doing.
Paul certainly acted like the boss, issuing orders and opinions with an intensity and absoluteness that made it clear he cared what went into inter/VIEW. It was easy to assume that Andy, with his vague “Ohs” and “Maybes,” didn’t. Perhaps that’s why I ignored his putdown of poetry, and his hint about taping instead of writing. I wrote a long piece for the Elvis issue on the ten best films of 1970, starting with Trash and ending with Satyricon.
Andy was much less vague and benevolent when Glenn and I brought the Elvis issue back from Chinatown to the Factory. Like the previous time, he silently flipped through the issue, emitting the slightest of sighs and “Oh”s—until he reached my poem, entitled “From Memphis Tennessee Where Every Little Breeze Seems to Whisper Please Pop a Poem for Elvis.” In front of everyone gathered around Paul’s desk—Pat, Jed, Joe—he looked at me directly and said firmly, “No more poetry.” Then he walked off without bothering to look at the rest of the issue.
He also stopped calling me at home. Since that first call in October, he had been calling me a few times a week, usually in the morning, always greeting me with, “Oh, hi. So what did you do last night?” Or, if it was night—he stayed home a lot then—“Gee, why aren’t you out kicking up your heels?” I would call him too, but only if I had fresh gossip, not just about Glenn and Jude, but also about my new best friends, Charles Rydell, Peter Beard, and Sylvia Miles, or news from the back room at Max’s Kansas City. I also told him a lot more than I should have about my own follies and affairs (usually one and the same thing). The fact is that Andy loved to hear gossip about anyone, from Candy Darling and Holly Woodlawn to my grandmother in Brooklyn. (“She moved out of your aunt’s house?!? Gee.”)
Whenever I called Andy, his first words were, “Oh, oh, can you hold on a minute.” I knew he was quickly plugging in his telephone-taping device, but I put aside any worries I had about his recording because I sensed that if I objected there would be no more calls. Andy opened up on the phone in a way that he rarely did in person. In fact, he loved talking on the phone more than anyone I’ve ever known. He spent most of the morning on the phone, checking in with all the kids, and many evenings “watching TV over the phone,” usually with Brigid, when they weren’t fighting. And when he started keeping a diary with Pat Hackett later in the seventies, he did that over the phone as well.
Sometimes I’d run out of news to tell him and want to hang up, but he wouldn’t let me, asking the same question over and over again, like a child, usually starting with why. (“Why did your grandmother move out?”) Sometimes I had a lot to say and he’d suddenly grow uninterested, claiming that Jed was calling him or his mother needed him, or the bell was ringing, or he had to go out and was late—even though I knew by then that he didn’t care about being on time. That fall I felt I was getting to know Andy on the phone, and I was upset when he stopped calling. Fortunately, Christmas soon rolled around and I was just as suddenly forgiven. Andy gave me a Cow poster and signed it, “To Robert C. with love.” The next day he called to ask me where “the kids” went after the office party. “Did you stay out late? Did Glenn and Jude leave together? Was Fred there too?”
One morning in January 1971, I called Andy and told him that I had been robbed near the Columbia campus. This time, I taped the conversation—I had finally acquired a tape recorder and was trying it out.
BC: I was held up last night.
AW: Really … I mean, how did it happen?
BC: I was in a Volkswagen bus with some friends on 110th Street.
AW: 110th and Broadway?
BC: No, Amsterdam. It was outside school, we were waiting for this guy who forgot his gloves, and all of a sudden, these two black junkies were in the bus …
BC: Yes, and they put a knife to this one guy’s …
AW: They had knives!
BC: Yes, we didn’t …
AW: Oh, I’m freaking out, it’s just too scary. I mean, I don’t feel like going out anymore, it’s too crazy.
Until then, I had seen only Andy’s insatiable curiosity, and a bit of his peevishness. Now, I felt the full force of his fear.