Since I’d first met her at the Algonquin, Sylvia Miles had still been dining out on her 1969 Oscar nomination for Midnight Cowboy, while desperately seeking the role that would clinch her stardom. Finally, in the summer of 1971, she had been cast as the female lead in Andy Warhol’s Heat, the Factory’s idea of a Hollywood movie. I had got her the part. But if she had been using me to get closer to Andy and Paul, I had been using her to go to better parties and meet bigger stars.

Sylvia knew everyone and went everywhere. Her philosophy was: “You never know who you might meet who might give you a part.” Sylvia often took me on her nightly nights out—to movie premières, theater openings, gallery openings, boutique openings. If it opened, she went. I was only too happy to escort her, especially to places where Andy hadn’t invited me, like the premiere of Cabaret. He only had two tickets, and he took Jed, but it was nice to surprise him with my presence, to show him I could get invited without him, and to hear him say, “You’re here, Bob? Gee, you’re really getting up there.”

In any case, Sylvia Miles was a natural for the Factory, another one of a kind, full of character and charm. She dressed like a Las Vegas showgirl and played chess like a Russian champion. This was the year of hot pants and bullet belts, and Sylvia would loop the latter around the former, add a low-cut halter, tights, and boots, and go to dinner at Lee and Anna Strasberg’s with Joanne Woodward and Ben Gazzara.

“See,” she said, the first time I picked her up at her studio apartment on Central Park South, showing me her clippings collection. “The top drawer is the late fifties and early sixties when I was doing all that intellectual off-Broadway stuff like The Iceman Cometh at the Circle in the Square in 1957 and Jean Genet’s The Balcony, and Matty and the Moron and Madonna.…  Then comes the middle sixties, when I went Hollywood and did things like Parrish with Troy Donahue—did you see it on the Late, Late Show the other night? Then this whole drawer is just 1969, because that’s the year I did Midnight Cowboy and I got so much publicity from all over the world. And then the bottom one’s the current stuff, but see it’s almost filled up, so I don’t know what to do. Get a bigger chest of drawers, I guess. Either that or a bigger apartment. But I’m kinda attached to this view.”

Sylvia’s apartment was on the nineteenth floor facing the park and she had a small breakfast table and two dining chairs pressed up against the wall of windows. “I made the chairs myself,” she told me. “They’re French. I can also do Early American and Spanish. I learned how at my father’s furniture factory when I was growing up in the Village.” Sylvia actually carried her most recent reviews and other press tidbits around with her, wrapped in Saran Wrap, in her shoulder bag.

“Voilà!” says Sylvia in Heat, giving Joe Dallesandro a tour of her thirty-six-room Hollywood mansion. “If there’s anyone you’d like to impress, you could do it here.” Sylvia plays Sally Todd, “a minor, practically unknown, fading Hollywood movie star”—to quote her ex-husband, a producer played, Factory-style, by producer Lester Persky. Her nearly empty hilltop house is the last symbol of past status, but it’s a step up for Joe, who plays a long-forgotten child star, a former Mouseketeer, trying to make a comeback in rock ’n’ roll.

If Women in Revolt represents Andy’s rejection of the more aggressive side of the Women’s Movement; if L’Amour portrays Andy’s desire to gold-dig his way up the Art Deco altitudes of Paris society, a wish-I-were-there postcard to the Rothschilds and the Saint Laurents; then Andy Warhol’s Heat is his answer to Hollywood, his no-thank-you note for the invitations he never received from MGM and Paramount, Columbia, Warner’s, and Twentieth Century–Fox.

The New Hollywood in Andy Warhol’s Heat is a sleazy motel, frequented by has-been hustlers, sadistic lesbians, and moronic porn stars who masturbate by the pool, and run by a grossly overweight, sexually voracious tyrant in a ponytail and a muumuu (wonderfully played by Pat Ast, whose couture muumuus were made by her boss, Halston). The only escape from this sun-bleached insane asylum is that haunted Hispano-Hollywood horror on the hill, the mortgaged-up manor of the formerly famous Sally Todd. (Actually, the house was formerly Boris Karloff’s.) That’s where Joe ends up, in bed with his hostess. He’s pursued there by her emotionally disturbed daughter, played by Andrea Feldman, another denizen of the motel, where she shares a room with her baby (played by Joe Jr.) and a girlfriend who uses other women’s bodies as ashtrays.

Andy didn’t go to Hollywood for the filming, which lasted two weeks in July 1971. But he had his ways of keeping a degree of control. Paul called the Factory every morning before they started shooting. And Jed called Andy every night at home with a private report of the day’s activities. What’s more, Andy barraged Sylvia, Andrea, and Pat with late-night calls from New York, stirring things up long distance. As usual, he knew exactly what he was doing. The three actresses were meant to hate each other—they were all, in the typical Paul Morrissey schema, after Joe—and after Andy’s calls they did. He made Sylvia jealous of Pat’s Halston muumuus. He made Pat jealous of Sylvia’s star billing. And, as we’ve seen, it didn’t take much to drive poor Andrea crazy.

One night after Sylvia got back from Hollywood, Andy took her and me to dinner at Lüchow’s, the famous old German restaurant on East 14th Street, to discuss additional love scenes to be shot in New York. Walking around Union Square Park on our way to meet Sylvia, Andy said, “We’ve got to get Sylvia to do something different. I don’t know what, but it can’t be the same old love scene with Joe’s ass going up and down over and over again.” Over sauerbraten and red cabbage, he asked Sylvia, “What could be different and new and a little bit strange for you to do with Joe? I mean, I like the scenes you did out there, but it is a lot of shots of Joe’s ass going up and down.”

Sylvia looked pained. “What do you mean, a lot of shots of Joe’s ass—I assume my face is visible in some of the shots too?”

“Oh, it is. You look great, Sylvia. Doesn’t she, Bob? But we need some more scenes, uh, doing something different. Something, uh, more modern.”

“I hope you’re not talking about a blowjob, Andy, because I’m not sure I want to do that on screen. In fact, I know I don’t.”

“You mean you would do it off the screen?”

“Now, Andy.” Sylvia licked her lipstick. “You know how much I love and respect you and Paul and Jed and Robert and everything you all do at the Factory, and how good I’m sure this film is going to be for my career. But I’ve got a reputation to protect, you know. I am a professional, you know, Andy. I’m not Pat Ast, who’s basically a saleslady at a boutique. Or Andrea-whatever-she’s-calling-herself-this-week. I’m not a nut, Andy.”

“Oh, Andrea’s not a nut. Is she, Bob?”

“All right, let’s leave Andrea out of this,” said Sylvia. “The point is that I’ve got a professional reputation to protect, which many professional people, including my agent, Billy Barnes, who also happens to be Tennessee’s agent, warned me I might be risking if I wasn’t careful about what I do in this film. Which, don’t get me wrong, Andy, I’m absolutely thrilled to be in. It’s just that … a blowjob isn’t even very avant-garde. Right, Robert?” Sylvia never called me Bob.

“Oh, I know it isn’t,” whined Andy with an edge. “I never said you should give Joe a blowjob. That’s not new and different. It’s got to be something more peculiar. Something people will talk about.”

“I’m not a transvestite, Andy.”

“There’s gotta be something, uh, something funny that people will remember.”

“Well, you know, Andy, there are only so many things you can do in bed. A man and a woman, I mean.”

“Oh, really? Like what?”

“I’m not going to sit here in Lüchow’s and list them for you, Andy.”

Andy was furious with Sylvia after we dropped her off uptown. “Who does she think she is? If we were still working the old way, with cheap film, we could cut her out and put somebody else in. That’s why I think it’s always better to use our own new kids.”

Andy changed his mind about Sylvia after he saw the dailies of the additional love scenes shot in New York. She had found something different and peculiar to do, something more modern than a blowjob: She brought Joe Dallesandro’s beefy hand to her mouth and sucked his stocky fingers one by one.

Andy was beside himself: “Oh, now this is great. Oh, Sylvia really is good. I mean, it’s like a baby sucking, uh, somebody else’s finger. It really is great. It really is peculiar. This is the best scene. You have to use it a lot, Paul. Don’t cut it too much, Jed. Uh, do you have Sylvia’s number, Bob? I’m going to call her.”

He did, right then, and sang her praises, which Sylvia, like all of us, couldn’t get enough of, even if it was for sucking fingers. The real point was that Sylvia had done what Andy wanted, even though he wasn’t quite sure what that was himself. That’s how Andy worked. He prodded and he poked, he nagged, turned cold and mean, dropped hints and clues—until the actor, or director, or editor, or co-author, or assistant silkscreener, figured out what Andy wanted to express, but couldn’t.

Andy asked me to help organize the New York premiere of Heat, on October 5 at the Lincoln Center Film Festival. He told me that he and Fred had to be in Europe on that date “to do some work for Bruno Bischofberger”—the work turned out to be commissioned portraits of the German industrialist Gunther Sachs and his then wife, Brigitte Bardot. “We’ll pay you for it,” Andy said, determined to get me back to work at the Factory, especially as assistant social director, the capacity at which he thought I was most useful. Why not? I reasoned—I could use the money, it would be fun to make the list, and it would just be for a couple of weeks anyway, and then right back to Bridgehampton and the book.

Sylvia was very happy to hear that I was making arrangements for what she considered her big night. Even though she had already enjoyed triumphal receptions at the Cannes and Venice film festivals, every giddy moment of which had been recounted in vivid detail back in the New York Daily News by Rex Reed, she still wanted to make a big splash in her hometown—and get yet another full-page rave from Rex. Indeed, as far as Sylvia was concerned, every showing of Heat anywhere should be heralded with klieg lights—and reviewed by Rex:

The film is like an open wound, and Sylvia is a kind of cross between Lana Turner and Gloria Swanson in “Sunset Boulevard,” eating her way through the movie like an emotional barracuda and leaving everyone around her for fishbait. The film is such a milestone in her career that everything else in her life is now referred to as “B.H.” (Before “Heat”). It cost only $50,000 to make—a far cry from all the waste and hoopla of her previous film, Dennis Hopper’s “The Last Movie”—but it has finally made Sylvia a star.

Unfortunately, after Andrea Feldman’s suicide, Andy, Paul, and Fred decided that Heat’s New York opening at the Film Festival should be a “quiet number,” a decision not at all to Sylvia’s liking, and she enlisted her archrival, Pat Ast, in her effort not to let Andrea’s ghost haunt “our premiere,” as Sylvia put it. La Ast, who had Halston whipping up his most magnificent muumuu yet for her big night, couldn’t have agreed more. The two of them called me several times a day to try to reverse the Factory decision. When that didn’t work, they lobbied the most patient man ever to do public relations for movie stars, John Springer, who handled everyone from Joan Crawford and Bette Davis to Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. They got him so enthused that he came up with the brainstorm of inviting another of his glamorous clients to this remake of Sunset Boulevard, Gloria Swanson herself. Sylvia hated that idea. No, Gloria Swanson, or any other big star, would not be asked after all.

Well, Jack Nicholson and Warren Beatty were invited, but they were friends and potential leading men for Sylvia now that she was a leading lady. And Rex Reed, Eugenia Sheppard, Suzy, Rosemary Kent, Francesco Scavullo, Giorgio di Sant’Angelo, Diane and Egon von Furstenberg, Ruth Ford and Dotson Rader, Tennessee Williams … Sylvia was constantly calling with “just one more name.” And that name’s date.

“All New York is here,” said a festival regular, according to Village Voice reporter Arthur Bell, who went on to note:

Sylvia Miles made her entrance to Alice Tully Hall with director Paul Morrissey and co-star Joe Dallesandro, “It’s the greatest moment of my life,” she said, before I asked. One must take her seriously now. Carole Lombard with schmaltz boleroing in and out of bed with Joe as George Raft in a ponytail. Chemistry.

The lights go on. A baby spot shines on an opera box where Sylvia and Paul and Joe are joined by other members of the cast. A standing ovation, and an announcement that there’ll be a panel discussion with Sylvia and Paul Morrissey and Otto Preminger. Sylvia slinks to the stage. She slowly, seductively, slips off her fur. The panel begins. Otto Preminger isn’t sure about the picture. Heat doesn’t represent Hollywood as he knows it. Retired movie stars are decent. There are no decent people in Heat.

Elia Kazan, in the audience, states from his seat that he found the movie moving and especially enjoyed the area of mystery where motivation is not explained and over-simplified. Paul says his direction is really non-direction and it’s an easy road to keep direction out of his films. Characters are cast to type and left to their own devices. “When you cast the young man who masturbated [Eric Emerson], did you audition him?” asks Preminger.…

We all got a big laugh out of Preminger’s line later, at “the small subdued” party that I persuaded Candy Darling to hostess at Sam Green’s. As Arthur Bell’s Voice report continued:

Holly and Zouzou and Women’s Wear Daily crowd under a Lichtenstein and After Dark and Alice Cooper and Tally and Bob Colaciello and Scavullo and Warren Beatty and Rex and Lauren Hutton and Jack Nicholson, sip and smoke and small talk. Sylvia holds court on a couch.… A press agent says Heat got the biggest reaction ever in the ten years of the festival. Tally Brown says her wig is made of cotton candy. Holly Woodlawn says she loves everybody and kisses Jim Jacobs. Eric Emerson says he can get a hard-on at a moment’s notice, which makes his Heat work cinema vérité. John Springer says, “Don’t we have good times.” Jude O’Brien says she’s leaving for Japan tomorrow. Paul Morrissey says Andrea Feldman loved performing more than anybody he ever knew. Sylvia Miles stands on the stairwell and says, “Ask me if it was worth it. It was. Every bit of it.” And the press agent to my left says, “What movie is that from?”

Of course, I was thrilled to find myself mentioned in the same sentence as Jack Nicholson, Warren Beatty, Lauren Hutton, and Alice Cooper, as were my parents in Rockville Centre and my grandmothers in Borough Park.

Andy came back from doing Brigitte Bardot’s portrait in Europe and said that I’d done such a good job that he thought I should fly out to Los Angeles with them the following week, for the Hollywood preview of Heat. Why didn’t I see if I could cover it for the Voice, he suggested, and they would see if the producers would cough up an extra plane ticket and room at the Beverly Hills Hotel for me. It was my first trip to Hollywood.

The “special celebrity preview” of Heat at the Directors Guild was, in Paul’s words, “a great occasion for comedy.”

All afternoon, producer Herb Pickman had been assuring Andy that “lots of big stars” were coming to the preview, and bit player John Hallowell had been calling too, with hourly star-watch bulletins: “Rita’s coming. Lana’s coming. Lucy’s coming.” But now, as the Directors Guild lobby filled with hordes of P.R. people from all the studios who wouldn’t finance a Warhol movie, Andy was feeling let down. “Oh, there are no big stars here,” he moaned. “I’m going back to the hotel.”

Then, in rapid succession, Lorne Greene, George Cukor, and Rona Barrett arrived, and Andy felt better. He took Polaroids of each, in lieu of shaking hands, and said, “Oh, gee,” when they said they were happy to meet him, quickly followed by, “Oh, do you think you could sign my Polaroid?”

Rona positioned herself between Andy and Sylvia and wasn’t about to budge. Unfortunately, for the first time since I’d met her, Sylvia had too much to drink, and was hiccuping loudly. I steered her to the bar to get a glass of water. She started winking at the handsome young bartenders. A professional autograph hound, the kind that crash openings and hang out by stage doors collecting multiples of celebrities’ autographs to sell or trade, approached Sylvia for her autograph. After she signed his book, I asked him what her autograph was worth on the open market. “Not much,” he said. And Andy Warhol’s? “Even less.”

Meanwhile, Ann Miller tap-danced in and Andy took Polaroids of Ann Miller tap-dancing in and Ann Miller signed Andy’s Polaroids of Ann Miller tap-dancing in. He had also collected signed Polaroids of Russ Tamblyn (“You missed Russ Tamblyn, Bob. He’s a big star.”); Goldie Hawn, in an old leather jacket, jeans, and a peace-sign T-shirt; and Lucie Arnaz, holding hands with her then beau, Jim Bailey, who was famous for his “impressions” of Judy Garland, Peggy Lee, and Barbra Streisand, but who was never to be called a “female impersonator,” let alone a transvestite. Andy was fascinated by this Hollywood version of Jackie Curtis, and happy with his growing collection of signed star photographs.

Andy used the word “star” in the broadest sense possible, to encompass anyone who had ever appeared in a movie, play, TV show, radio show, fashion show, ballet, opera, or any other type of performance, no matter how obscure, for any length of time, no matter how brief, and including anyone who was or had been married to anyone who had. “Gee, Christina Kauffman is so beautiful,” he sighed over his Polaroid of the ex–Mrs. Tony Curtis arriving. “Who?” I asked, and got the same reply I always got whenever I asked who somebody was whom nobody had ever heard of but him: “You don’t know who Christina Kauffman is, Bob?!? Christina Kauffman is a big star!”

Suddenly, a swarm of paparazzi flew in from the klieg-lit boulevard, shouting in unison: “Mae is coming! Mae is coming! Mae is coming!”

“Mae West is coming!” gasped Andy.

“You didn’t tell me Mae West was coming!” rasped Sylvia.

“Yes, I did,” piped up Paul. “I told you to wear an uplift bra.”

A long black stretch limo bearing a bevy of Mr. America contestants had pulled up outside the Directors Guild, but when the platinum-topped Raisinette of a woman squeezed between these slabs of beefcake saw the waiting photographers, she waved to her chauffeur to drive on. Was it really Mae West? Later a rumor circulated that she had driven around the block, changed into a brown wig, and walked back to the theater unnoticed. As much as Andy wanted to believe it, even he had his doubts. “What did she do with the six musclemen?” he wondered. “Do you think she left through the fire exit before the movie was over?”

Heat was a big hit with the Hollywood crowd. Rona told Sylvia she was a cinch for an Oscar and Sylvia hiccuped her thanks. George Cukor, the famous director and Paul’s idol, told Paul it was a great film, and Christopher Isherwood, the famous writer, posed for and signed a whole roll of Polaroids for Andy. Ann Miller did another little tap dance and pronounced Heat “kicky.” Lorne Greene found the film “funny, but don’t ask me why.” Only Lucie Arnaz and Jim Bailey were unenthusiastic. He thought Heat was “unbelievable,” and she concurred. “I can’t say I liked it. The characters were too strange.”

“But her boyfriend’s a drag queen,” Andy kept muttering.

“Impressionist, Andy, impressionist,” Paul jokingly reminded him.

“Listen, Paul, I know a drag queen when I see one, and she’s got a lot of nerve calling our movie strange.”

“Oh, well,” said Paul. “It’s nice to have the stars’ kids, but it would have been nicer if big Lucy had come.”

Somehow, even though Heat cost somewhere between $50,000 and $100,000 to make, took in about $2 million in the United States alone, and was praised by the established critics from Cannes to Venice and from New York to Los Angeles, the studios remained unimpressed. And Andy knew it, and I think he knew why. As he told Joyce Haber, the powerful gossip of the Los Angeles Times, at lunch, “We like Hollywood so much, you know. We’ve always wanted to work here. It’s been our dream. But they think we’re putting them down.”