I certainly wasn’t the only person who was drinking a lot in the seventies (I drank eight or ten vodkas a day, starting at Factory lunches), just as I wasn’t the only person who was making more and more trips to the bathroom for a “sniff,” a “snort,” a “hit,” or a “blow” of “coca-cola,” “vitamin C,” “white magic,” or “snow.” By the middle of the decade, cocaine suddenly was everywhere, or at least everywhere we went, with the possible exception of the Iranian embassy. It went from something people tried to hide, except among close friends, to something people took for granted, and shared openly: from “I must go fix my face, see you in a minute,” to “I must go powder my nose, want to come?”
In my diaries from early 1975, I always took coke with men in men’s rooms; by the end of the year, I was in men’s rooms with women and women’s rooms with men—and there were lines to do lines outside both. What’s amazing was that nobody cared about coming out the wrong door with the wrong sex: We were too high, too happy, too eager to get back to the table and pass the little bottle or the folded foil to the rest of our friends. None of us thought cocaine was really dangerous, or even addictive, back then. Heroin was off limits in our crowd, but coke was like liquor or pot or poppers, fuel for fun, not self-destruction.
I wasn’t only being given cocaine, though for the editor of Interview there were always willing providers, hoping for a mention in “OUT.” More and more I was also buying it. I liked having my own little bottle, so that I could sneak a snort when business dinners became boring, or when I had had one vodka too many and needed to counteract the down with an up. I liked having my own little bottle after the dinners too, at Studio 54, because then I could meet any beauty I wanted with that open sesame of the late seventies, “Want a hit?” And after one snort too many, I needed a shot of vodka to counteract the up with a down. The staircase to oblivion, I called it: a snort, a shot, a snort, a shot … “We were just so high we couldn’t go home” was the refrain of my diary too many mornings.
It was taking its toll, of course. One Saturday night in January 1978, at an Iranian embassy dinner celebrating the engagement of Metromedia Chairman John Kluge to Patricia Gay, I started getting piercing pains in my right side and across the middle of my back. I had been home sick with flu for a few days and it seemed that the fever was coming back too. After dinner, I told Andy that I wanted to go right home. “Oh, shut up,” he snapped back. “You’re such a hypochondriac. Mrs. Lachman said something about having her portrait done. You better go talk to her, Bob, if you want to make a commission.” I grabbed a cognac from the passing tray and made my way to Jacquine Lachman, the third wife of the man who owned a third of Revlon. As she chattered away about Christmas in Acapulco and February in Vail, I stood there stewing over Andy’s callous hypocrisy. He had a double standard for sick employees, I decided, just as he did for everything else. When I wanted Jed to bring me some aspirin that night a few years back, Andy was worried about his bringing home my germs. But when he wanted me to work with him, he forgot about my germs as we taxied around town together. That night, for example, he insisted that I go on with him to Earl and Camilla McGraths’, to meet producer Lucy Jarvis, who was talking about doing a Broadway play based on Andy’s life. (Andy wanted Shaun Cassidy to play him and Kate Smith his mother.)
At Halston’s after the McGraths’, the pain in my side came back stronger than ever. Halston gave me a little blue pill and a glass of milk to wash it down. It was two in the morning when Bianca and Andy decided to go to 54. I said I was going home, as the pill hadn’t helped. “Oh, c’mon, Bob,” said Andy, “you’re such a hypochondriac.”
“I am not a hypochondriac, Andy!” I shouted. “I really have pains! I’m going home!”
Andy called bright and early on Sunday morning. He could barely contain himself. “Oh, God, we saw two famous people together who we weren’t supposed to see together last night” was the way he began. “Oh, Bob, you’re missing all the good stuff. I mean, you’re not sick. Bob. You sound fine. You looked good last night. Oh, God, Liza really looked great. Oh, Bob, you don’t know how exciting it is to see two famous people making it right in front of you.”
It was Andy’s usual way of telling a story, out of order, in breathless dribs and drabs, with lots of blanks where key details should be. He said he wasn’t going to tell me who the other famous person was, but then he immediately added, “Oh, God, Baryshnikov really looked great too.”
“Where was this?” I asked.
“At Halston’s. We weren’t supposed to be there but Bianca had to go back for something and there was Liza with Baryshnikov and Halston.”
“And they were making it, Andy?”
“Well, they were necking. It was so great to see two big stars together like that. But they said he was moody. In the limousine. Halston said he never saw him moody like that before.”
“You mean you went to 54 and left them there?”
“Yeah. Can you believe it? That’s where they do it. You’re missing everything, Bob.”
I wasn’t sure what I was missing. When Andy said “necking” it could mean a peck on the cheek. And “doing it” might be holding hands. I was more concerned with the next call—from Brigid Berlin, who was now working at the Factory full-time. “You’ve got to get back to the office,” she told me. “It’s just going to hell. Catherine’s running wild, giving all-day lunches, falling asleep on the couch in the dining room after lunch. And the other day, when I walked into the dining room to help her clean up, you know, she was making out with that boyfriend of hers who wears those gloves to cover up his burned hands. It was really disgusting.” The Cocaine Cowboy’s hands had been scorched in a light airplane crash. Andy always said that was the real reason Catherine kept trying to get him back from Margaret Trudeau.
By 1978, the Factory seemed to be slipping out of control, or turning into a daytime Studio 54. The phone never stopped ringing, and half the calls were from friends, and strangers, trying to get us to get them in 54 that night. The fake du Pont twins had become semipermanent Factory fixtures, sitting in the windowsills listening to everything that was said and repeating it all over town: “Andy and Bob want Peter Beard on the cover, but Fred wants Isabella Rossellini.” If Brigid wasn’t watching, they’d rifle through the big red book, jotting down the RSVP numbers from Andy’s invitations and calling to say they’d be coming with him. Andy thought it was funny.
Victor Hugo was usually there, with prospective models for the sex paintings, and Chris Makos was usually there too, now, working on layouts for our photo book, Exposures. The two of them could be counted on to devour half the food before the lunch guests arrived. It drove Vincent and me crazy, but Andy didn’t care. He floated through the lunches, saying how glamorous everything was, on his way to his studio to paint. Our swell guests didn’t seem to care about the lack of food either, or the lack of Andy for that matter. It was as if they came to see each other over drinks, at some mad midday cocktail party. When we wanted them to leave we took them on a tour to get them out of the dining room, away from the bar and the bathroom.
For most of 1978, the walls of the main room were lined with Andy’s hurriedly completed portraits of the Shah, in stately tones of blue and gray, and of Princess Ashraf, in more feminine, but equally restrained, shades of peach and lilac. We were waiting for the checks before shipping them to Teheran, and we waited for a long time. Leaning beside the Pahlavis were twenty-foot versions of the Piss Paintings.
One afternoon about this time, decorator Suzie Frankfurt sent an assistant down for the latest issue of Interview. He happened to be a sixteen-year-old preppy from an old WASP family, handsome and shy. Somehow, Andy, abetted by Chris Makos, got him to strip down to his Jockey shorts and do jumping jacks in the middle of the Factory, while they photographed him. Suzie was furious and she told Fred off. “It’s perverse,” she said. “I stopped seeing Andy in the sixties because he was doing things like this, and I can’t believe you’d let him do them now.” There was “nothing wrong,” Fred told her, “with a young person who has a beautiful body being proud of it. It’s perfectly natural, and Andy was only doing the normal thing for an artist to do by photographing him.”
That was Fred: always defending Andy outside the Factory, yet seething with resentment against him inside. It took a while for that resentment to surface, but it did—though Fred adamantly refused to see the reason for it. Instead, he drank more and more, and it started to show more and more. Fred was also taking cocaine in the late seventies and early eighties, though he was less open about it than the rest of us (and he later put it behind him). One night at Regine’s, Fred coughed up his stash, and he and I ended up having a heart-to-heart about love. “It’s hard for anybody to go out with you, Bob,” he said, “because you’re in this strange position of having a lot of power and no money. So it’s all an illusion and not much reality.”
I thought he was talking about himself, but then it’s always easier to think about other people’s problems than your own. Of course, we were both in the same position, and we didn’t know how to get out of it, or perhaps didn’t want to get out of it. I thought I was happy at the Factory, and, no doubt, Fred thought he was happy there too. It was hard to admit that we weren’t. Meanwhile, at the other end of the table, Andy was “proposing” to Averil Meyer, Fred’s “fiancée” that year. Sooner or later, Andy always proposed to the girls he said Fred was going to marry. He thought it was funny.
He also thought it was funny when Fred pulled his pants down at parties and wasn’t wearing underwear, which Fred was doing more and more. He thought it was funny when Fred pulled the assistants’ pants down or skirts up at the Factory after a drunken Factory lunch, which Fred was doing more and more. He thought it was funny when Fred fell down the stairs at nightclubs and in the Paris apartment, which Fred was doing more and more. “Oh, Fred’s really drunk,” he’d say, not so much concerned as amused.
But he didn’t think it was funny one Thursday in February 1978, when he arrived at the Factory carrying shopping bags full of “space toys,” which he said was his “new collection”—and Fred screamed at him, really ranted and raved at the top of his lungs. “Why don’t you start a pins collection? A needles collection? A scissors collection? A paper-bag collection?” This time I thought it was funny.
That was also the day that Andy unveiled his latest series of self-portraits. He returned to self-portraiture as regularly as Rembrandt, though I never thought he was trying to find himself. It was more like he was trying to leave an image for history of the way he wished he looked. It was another revision, another lie, though lies in their way tell other truths. These were stunning: double and triple exposure of Andy’s profile in negative, white on black, red on black, black on black. He looked like a calm, neat, beautiful ghost. It wasn’t easy working for a ghost, especially one who wanted to be calm, neat, and beautiful, and wasn’t.
But there was something else in these self-portraits too, in the eyes especially, and you only saw it if you looked long enough: the fear, pain, and sadness that were always there, no matter how much Andy tried to silkscreen them out. And it was because I could see that, because I knew it was there, because I felt that whatever anguish I was going through, or Andy was putting me through, he was going through, and putting himself through, ten times more—that’s why I stayed. I think that’s why Fred stayed too. And maybe he stayed to the end, unlike me, because he understood it better than I did all along.
It wasn’t easy. Fred paid a very high price for his devotion and loyalty to Andy. His health. His physical problems started around 1978. Sometimes it only took Fred a couple of glasses of champagne to fall down. He didn’t pass out; he buckled at the knees and crashed to the floor. It was strange, but Fred dismissed it.
Diana Vreeland sensed our serious health problems long before Fred and I did. In late January 1978, after I’d been in bed three more days, she called and said she was worried about her boy around the corner. “You boys have too much on your shoulders,” she told me. “My God, you boys run this city. Whatever Andy says, goes!”
Bernardo Bertolucci put the same idea another way: “A visit to New York wouldn’t be New York without seeing Andy.” The city would have gone on quite nicely without any of us, but Andy was the only artist in the middle of everything that counted in New York—fashion, media, money, politics—and Fred and I helped him get there and stay there. Andy was committed, driven even, to get to the top, get to the bottom, get it all down, and not only for himself, or fame, or wealth, or power, but for his art. He wanted to see everything and record everything, know everyone, and paint, photograph, and interview everyone. It was a daunting, endless task, and it took a lot out of him, and us.
Only those closest to him knew how determined and thorough this project was, because Andy deliberately made everything he did seem effortless—and meaningless. He liked to turn everything, including himself, into a party joke, partially to hide his true intentions, partially because it was the only way he could deal with life. He expected us to get the joke and simultaneously to take it seriously. It was nothing more or less than he expected of himself. We were all walking a tightrope, and Andy’s rope was thinnest and highest of all. “If I think about things too much,” he told me many times, “I’ll have a nervous breakdown.”
Maybe that was one reason why Andy flirted with coke, though he was really sneaky about it. It’s rarely pointed out, but cocaine is not only a stimulant, it’s also a painkiller. The most immediate effect is numbness. And Andy wasn’t taking anywhere near as much as the rest of us because he knew that he had the most addictive personality of all. It came out in his shopping, collecting, painting, pill taking—and in the way he’d throw back four or five straight vodkas in a row when he wanted to “get good and drunk.” Of course, he always denied taking coke. I even heard him deny taking it as he was sticking it up his nose.
One night in April 1978, Andy and I had dinner at La Grenouille with Mick Jagger, Jerry Hall, and Barbara Allen. Then we all went back to Mick and Jerry’s suite at the Pierre Hotel to listen to an advance tape of the new Rolling Stones album, the one with “Miss You,” which Jerry said was written for her while she was away from Mick on a modeling assignment. Mick rolled some joints and poured some coke out on the coffee table. “Should I try it?” asked Andy. “Just this once to see what everybody’s doing? Oh, I can’t, I just can’t.” Then he quickly stuck his finger in it and rubbed some on his gums. “It’s not really taking it,” he said. “It doesn’t get inside, does it? It’s just making my mouth feel funny, like going to the dentist.”
Andy had obviously done this before, and he had figured out a way in his mind to take it without taking it, just like sucking on chocolates and spitting them out and saying that wasn’t “eating” them. Then, when he thought I wasn’t looking, he stuck his finger in the pile and sniffed the coke up his nose. “You took it, Andy,” I said. “I did not, Bob. You’re making it up.” Everyone laughed, including Andy, and when Mick went into the bedroom for a minute, he nudged me and said, “Do you think Mick will mind if we take some more?” He rubbed some more on his gums, saying again, “This isn’t really taking it.”
Later that same evening, we stopped off at a small party on our way to Studio 54, and another guest took out some cocaine. “Oh, I’ve never had it,” Andy told him. “Can you teach me how to use it? Explain every step to me. It’s so fascinating.” So he showed Andy how you chopped it up, put it in lines … and then most of us dipped in, including Andy.
Finally, at three in the morning, we made it to 54, where Andy ended up in the basement, playing pinball with a press scion in a boiler room. Andy asked me to get more coke, and when I came back with a gram, he said, “Oh, let’s take it here, so nobody sees us.” I told him that everybody had seen him take it at the Pierre and the party, and he said, “But I didn’t take any anywhere, Bob.” Then he rubbed his white-tipped fingers across his gums. “I’m not taking it, Bob. I’m really not. You can’t say I did.”
I started calling him a new nickname in my diary: The Great Denier. In February 1978, there was another scene he denied, or at least his raunchy role in it. Vincent and Shelly gave a party in their new apartment near Washington Square. The entire Factory was there, except Jed, mixing and mingling in the downstairs living room with Shelly’s friends from Bonwit Teller, where she designed ads. Andy hung out in an upstairs bedroom with Victor Hugo, Chris Makos, and Ronnie Cutrone, who seemed to be having a gross-out contest for the boss’s benefit. The boss loved it. They were bragging about how much their penises weighed, and Chris dared Andy to give him a blowjob. “C’mon, Andy,” he said, “suck me off. You know that’s what you really love.” Andy tittered, and rubbed his tape recorder against Chris’s crotch, as Chris necked with his new boyfriend, Peter Wise. Then Victor Hugo grabbed his latest discovery, and Andy held poor Sony between their grinding groins as he photographed the action with his free hand. I couldn’t believe any of this was happening at Vincent and Shelly’s joint office party. Even Catherine was disgusted. The three of us took a taxi uptown, and when Catherine and I called Andy on his tacky behavior, he said, “I didn’t do anything bad, it was all Chris Makos.” What about tape recording their crotches, I asked. “You’re imagining things, Bob.”
Vincent and Shelly had married secretly in August 1977 in Montauk. He had wooed her away from Larry Rivers, and perhaps they were afraid the hot-tempered artist might show up. But then Vincent was secretive about everything, including how to change the paper on the Xerox machine. Needless to say, it was a quality that Andy appreciated. Vincent was privy to the contents of Andy’s will. He kept the books, opened and closed the office, collected on Fred’s art deals and Paul Morrissey’s old movie-distribution deals, dealt with Montauk, the lawyers, the company pension plan, insurance coverage, bank accounts, and tax audits. In his spare time, he tried to produce Andy’s TV show, which in 1978 was still in the experimental stage.
Andy was the best man at Vincent and Shelly’s wedding. And he never made fun of their marriage, as he did of any romance the rest of us had. He wanted Vincent’s life to be stable and homebound, to keep him doing all the dull tasks nobody else at the Factory would do. Andy was also the godfather to their first daughter, Austin Grey, born in 1982.
In many ways, Vincent was Andy’s favorite “son.” He was the one who started calling Andy “Dad” and “Pop.” Vincent never yelled at Andy, like Fred and me, never mocked him in front of other people, like Brigid and Catherine. Sometimes Andy encouraged that behavior in his kids, to prove he could get our goats, but he also resented it. Vincent had great patience with Andy, and an enviable ability to shrug off his most childish pranks with a smile. He could even get Andy to pay the bills—which was like pulling teeth from a wild rhinoceros. He’d write out the checks in advance, so that all Andy had to do was sign them, and then sit there and quietly answer every one of Andy’s penny-ante questions. He was Mr. Reliable, Vincent Straight-Arrow in his horn-rimmed glasses, company man to the core, hard-working, diligent, loyal, good.
Every so often, Vincent and I got high together on vodka. Invariably, we ended up talking about office problems for hour upon hour. He complained that our latest Park Avenue volunteer, Robyn Geddes, took too long to get the lunches from Balducci’s. I complained that Chris Makos took too long to lay out the Exposures book. And we both wished Victor Hugo would go away for good. But whenever I pointed out that only Andy could do something about these problems and never would because he liked rivalries, confusion, and craziness, Vincent always stopped talking.
By spring 1978 we had all had it with the relentless antics of Victor Hugo, except Andy. He was more enthralled than ever. “Look at these greaaat photographs from Victor’s party,” he told me one day at the Factory. They were pictures of Edwige, “The Queen of Paris Punks,” slitting her wrists. “Victor says it’s punk jewelry,” said Andy. “We’re not running them in Interview,” I said, before he could suggest it.
Andy loved it when Victor showed up at 54 in a jockstrap or at a Halston party in a Halston dress, in both cases much to Halston’s embarrassment. Victor later told me that Andy actually paid him to do these things. He said Andy would slip him some cash and tell him, “Okay, whore, go out there and do something.” According to Victor, “Whenever I went to Studio in my jockstrap, the next day he’d give me a $20,000 painting. Andy must have given me a million dollars in artwork when he was alive.” Perhaps Victor was exaggerating.
“I used to torture him,” Victor went on. “He tortured me. But you know what it was—the Catholic thing. I come from Catholic background. But Andy have that guilt thing. I tell him, ‘Andy, you better stop making money, because if not, you’ll go to the other side from where your mother went.’ He used to call me sometimes and say, ‘Where did my mother went? Where she went?’ I never forgot that. ‘Where did my mother went?’ And I said, ‘Well, your mother went to the right side and you know which side is the right side. And I’m not going to name it to you.’ ”
I only saw Andy get mad at Victor once. Victor “got a little crazy” late one night and painted over Andy’s portrait of him (commissioned by Halston) with graffitilike swirls and squiggles, thinking this defacement was as important a moment in art history as Rauschenberg’s rebellious erasure of a de Kooning drawing. Victor showed up at the Factory the next day with his handiwork. “You ruined them, Victor!” Andy railed, slipping out of his Pop persona for a second and revealing that he cared about his art. Then he slipped right back in and added, “It’s forty thousand down the drain, Victor. Did you think of that?” Victor tried to tell Andy that they were “more interesting this way, more an idea now,” and even had the nerve to suggest trading them for a pair of fresh portraits. “I’m not doing new ones for you, Victor,” said Andy, stomping off.
But Victor was soon forgiven. Andy gave him a lunch at the Factory for his thirtieth birthday on April 4, 1978. He also came up with a present only he could find: a big box of antique burglar alarms. For the rest of the afternoon, sirens were ringing through the Factory.
Because of Victor, Halston had become a major client, right up there with the de Menils, the Brants, the Weismans, and the Iranians. But also because of Victor that relationship was increasingly at risk. Victor and Andy couldn’t resist staging their Polaroid orgies at Halston’s pristine house when Halston was out of town. Fred and I both warned Andy that he was getting carried away with Victor, and that sooner or later their capers would backfire.
Halston was also encouraging his star friends to collect Warhols. That winter, for example, he helped me get Liza’s portrait, and later she commissioned portraits of her mother and father, too. When I first discussed it with her, on the dance floor at Regine’s, Liza wanted a full-length portrait. She said I should tell Andy that I envisioned her that way and not to tell him that she told me to say that. I told him, knowing that he would hate the idea whether it came from me or her, and he did.
Halston put in a good word for the standard head shot and Liza came down to the Factory to sit for her Polaroids, looking frazzled, an hour late. When it was time for her to leave, Brigid asked her to sign the guest book, Andy’s latest idea for further IRS documentation. “Because/because/because/because,” she wrote. “You’re a great poet,” gushed Andy. “We’ll publish your poems in Interview, won’t we, Bob?” Liza looked amazed. “It’s from The Wizard of Oz,” she said. “Oh, you should put your poems to music,” said Andy. Was he nervous? Playing dumb? Being funny? Saying anything to ingratiate himself with a star and client?
The portraits were ready six weeks later. It didn’t really take that long, but Fred said clients wouldn’t like it if they thought it only took a couple of weeks, so we always waited to deliver them. Liza wanted hers delivered to Halston’s office, as she was in and out of town. There were four, in Liza’s colors, red, white, and black. Andy was too nervous to be there when she first saw them, so I went up to the Olympic Tower. Liza arrived with her English secretary, Diana Wemble, carrying a little gray French poodle. She looked more frazzled than the day she had posed at the Factory, shakier, paler, down. But she came to life when she saw the portraits, which made her look happy, healthy, strong, and sexy. “I love them!” she screeched. She turned them sideways and upside down and said she loved them that way too. “Are you beautiful, or are you beautiful?” raved Halston. “Tell Andy,” he told me, “I think they’re his best since the Marilyns.” Liza took all four.
That night, Andy and I had dinner with Lorna Luft. She was really worried about Liza, she said. Andy didn’t say anything. He was afraid it might get back to Liza, or Halston, and as he always said, “We don’t have the check yet, Bob.” In this case the check was for $70,000, and Liza paid promptly.
Elsa Peretti was also falling apart. And taking too much coke. And having her portrait done by Andy, who made her look happy, healthy, strong, and sexy. But she wasn’t buying Warhols on Halston’s advice anymore. She was almost doing it to spite him, to show him that she could afford anything he could, and that his friend Andy was her friend too. She was also pulling Victor Hugo away from Halston, or maybe Victor was encouraging their feud for his own advantage. It’s hard to say exactly why Elsa and Halston fell out in 1978, after so many years of being the closest friends and creative collaborators. He sometimes said that he had launched her as a jewelry designer, which was true, and that she dropped him now that her Tiffany line was such a huge hit, which wasn’t quite as true. She sometimes said that she had loved him, which was true, and that he dropped her now that he was surrounded by bigger stars like Liza and Liz, which wasn’t quite as true.
The big break, everyone agreed, had come the night she threw the sable coat he had given her for Christmas 1977 into his fireplace in front of his eyes. Whenever Elsa’s name came up after that for years and years, Andy, who was at Halston’s that night, never failed to mention the incident, always adding, “$35,000 up in flames, just like that.” Then he’d snap his fingers, as if to say, How cool. But he was afraid of Elsa, and worried that her squabble with Halston would spill over into our business, which it did.
I always liked Elsa. She was earthy, soft-hearted, intelligent, sometimes even brilliant. But she was an extremely demanding friend, especially when the coke got out of control, which, by 1978, it had. It’s hard to write a sentence like that about a friend whose coke I took, gladly, often, in quantity. But what happened to Elsa that spring sooner or later happened to many of us, including me that fall. The coke took over and damaged some vital human part, the brain, the heart, the liver. She was just the first, that’s all, as she was in many other things. She was also one of the first to get better. Some never did.
In April 1978, a few days after Victor Hugo’s birthday lunch at the Factory, Elsa asked me to be her date at a dinner Harry Platt, the old-guard chairman of Tiffany, was giving at Pearl’s. As we left, Mr. Platt said he was counting on me to get Elsa home early, because he was expecting her at work first thing in the morning. Elsa didn’t want to go home early. She wanted to go to 54. She gave me a snort in her limo and then I wanted to go to 54, too. We got there, went down to the basement, and ran right into Halston. He was with Steve Rubell and David Geffen, the young entertainment tycoon and art collector.
At first everything was okay, but then Steve said to Elsa, “Have another vodka, honeypie.” “How dare you call me honeypie,” Elsa snarled. “I’m not your girlfriend. You can’t fuck me.” David Geffen tried to explain that honeypie was a sweet American term, but Elsa told him to shut up, that she didn’t even know him. Then she started screaming, “I am not American! I am European!” “Now listen here, Elsa,” said Halston. “These are my friends, we were having a nice time, you came down here, Steve was nice enough to get you a bottle of vodka. I was happy to see you, but this is why I don’t want to see you.”
I took that as my cue to take Elsa upstairs, but when I suggested it, she only shouted louder at Halston, “I am not going to be thrown out of a basement by a faggot queen like you! You’re nothing but a no-culture cheap faggot dressmaker!” “And you’re nothing but a low-class cheap jewelry designer for Tiffany,” Halston snapped back. “Get off your high horse.” “Faggot, faggot, faggot!” Elsa kept screaming. “All right, Elsa,” Halston said, “if you won’t leave, I will.” But before he could take a step, Elsa poured the bottle of vodka all over his shoes and then she threw it on the ground in front of him, where it shattered. At that, Halston, Steve, and David Geffen went running.
“I’ve done it!” Elsa bellowed in triumph. “I’m finished with them! I’m finally free!” Then she fell to the floor amidst the shards of glass and started crying. I tried to comfort her, but she hurled names at me and said I’d rather be with Halston than with her. She staggered over to a pile of pillows in a corner and passed out. There was no way I could move her, so I decided to let her be; she had a smile on her face and was snoring softly. I went upstairs and found Halston, who asked if Elsa was all right. I went back downstairs to check on her, and finally, at five in the morning, I was able to get her up. “I’m taking you home,” I said. Just as I promised Henry Platt, I thought, real early.
When I woke up later that afternoon, I called Andy at the office to tell him what had happened. He had already heard, as had half the town. “Radio Rubell,” we sometimes called it. “Oh, I just know Halston is going to blame this on you, Bob,” Andy said. “And then he’ll get mad at me. You should’ve never gone out with Elsa. Why did you?” To get Tiffany ads, I reminded him. “Oh, I know. It’s just too hard. Everything’s so mixed up now. And Jed’s mad at me because of Victor. And Victor’s fighting with Halston, because Halston says he’s working for me more than he’s working for him. And I just know Halston’s going to use this Elsa thing to get mad at us, and then he’ll send back all the paintings he, uh, hasn’t paid for yet.”
Four days later, Halston called me at the Factory. “That was some night with Miss Peretti, wasn’t it?” Halston said. I said I had stayed in bed the whole next day to recover, and he said he wished he could have done that, but he had a collection to do. I wished the call would end, but Halston suddenly took on a severe tone and asked, “Who really does business for Andy down there?” I said Fred, but asked if I could help in any way. He said he’d call Fred. I immediately got Fred and Andy and told them I thought the shit was going to hit the fan. Victor was lurking nearby and he jumped on my line with glee. “The sheet ees going to heet the fan!” I wondered why he was clapping his fists together rapidly, like a kid expecting candy.
“Hi, H, what’s up?” Fred said as cheerfully as he could when Halston called a minute later. We were all around the phone, Andy, Victor, Vincent, me. Halston told Fred that he was fed up with Victor’s going around town saying that Andy was fed up with Halston’s not paying his bills and that if Andy needed the money why didn’t he ask Halston for it in the right way and if Victor was Andy’s business agent then Halston didn’t want to have anything to do with Andy anymore. Fred tried to interject a calming word, but Halston was obviously on a roll.
Fred said that Halston wanted to know exactly how much money he owed, and Vincent went to his files and came back with the figure $70,000. Halston said it was too much, he was sending the paintings back. Fred said he’d try to work something out, and get back to him. But before he could even discuss it with Andy, Halston called back and asked for Victor. That was the big mistake: to let Victor take the call, to let Halston know he was there and had heard it all.
Victor, of course, was only too happy to let Halston know, and was thrilled at the opportunity to shout at him in front of the entire Factory staff. Sounding a lot like Elsa, he called Halston a tacky dressmaker and said how dare he hold money over the heads of real artists like him and Andy. When he hung up, he proclaimed that Halston was finished and he didn’t care, he was in the money now with Elsa, and he was going to take Elsa to 54 that night and get her to make another big scene. For good measure, he announced that he was taking an ad for himself on the back cover of next month’s Interview, to reserve the space. It would just be his name, he said, under his defaced portrait by Andy.
Portraits and ads, ads and portraits.
Meanwhile, Fred was back on the phone with Halston, trying to calm him down. Andy was hiding out in Vincent’s office, wailing, “I’m staying in for the rest of my life. I just don’t want to see anybody anymore. People are too crazy. I’m never going out.”
When Victor left, Andy came back into the front room and said to Fred and me, in an unusually contrite tone, “I have to get a divorce from Victor. But how am I going to do it?”
Fred screamed at him: “I told you all along not to get this involved with Victor!”
“But he was the one who really taught Halston about modern art, Fred,” said Andy. “And I thought I was helping to get Victor out of Halston’s hair by giving him work with us. Oh, what are we going to do? Halston’s going to send all those paintings back.”
Seventy thousand was a sizable loss, the equivalent, more or less, of Interview’s printing bills for three months, or a year’s rent at the Factory. On the other hand, Andy probably spent that much in one month of daily shopping, and 1978 was the year of the $800,000 Portraits of Athletes commission from Richard Weisman, just for starters.
And, in the end, Halston’s paintings didn’t come back. Fred and I worked things out with him at our after-hours office, Studio 54.
Andy stayed in for two more nights. Then he couldn’t take the reports from Radio Rubell about Ryan O’Neal bringing Tatum to 54 two nights in a row and everything else he was missing, and he gave up his self-imposed house arrest. His first night out, after a couple of Park Avenue dinners and a couple of hours at 54, Andy and I ended up with Halston, Liza, and Baryshnikov on the twenty-first floor of the Olympic Tower at three in the morning. I helped Halston serve drinks, Liza turned her portraits every which way for Misha, and Andy stood there beaming. “This is such a great night, Bob,” he kept saying. “Gee, thanks for taking me out.” At four we all went to Hurrah, and at five, when I saw Andy and Halston leave together, chatting and laughing, I finally felt that my work day was over. I remembered the name and address of an after-hours bar, the Cave, on East 22nd Street, where someone told me all the disco bartenders and waiters went when they got off work. It was seven in the morning when I got home, as blitzed as blitzed could be.
I didn’t come to until I heard the doorbell ringing—it was Brigid. She said Andy and Fred had started worrying when I still hadn’t shown up at two in the afternoon, especially since it was deadline day at Interview. I felt like an old man as she made me coffee, then took me down to the office in a taxi. Fred sent out for lunch for me, and when I told him that I couldn’t remember anything I’d done at the Cave, but somehow had lost my glasses, he said, “Everybody’s entitled to a nervous breakdown now and then.” “Especially if you work at an insane asylum,” I thought. I went back to Andy’s studio and apologized for being so late on deadline day. “That’s okay,” he said. “You did such a good job making up with Halston.” He paused to dip his brush into different-color paints, then said, “I just hope Bianca doesn’t find out we’re putting Jerry on the cover, Bob. Because if she gets mad at us, Halston will too.”
“Blame it on me,” I told Andy wearily. “Jerry Hall is a hot story right now, and I’ve got a magazine to run.” I didn’t always put the portrait business ahead of the magazine, even though Andy wanted it that way. But just in case, I instructed the Interview staff to keep quiet about Jerry’s cover, at least until Bianca left for London after her birthday party on May 2.
Bianca cut her 54 cake between Ryan O’Neal and Baryshnikov that year. The year before it had been Mick and Baryshnikov. Andy kept whispering in my ear, “I hope she doesn’t find out about the cover, Bob,” and “Do you think Steve knows?” I finally snapped, “Not unless you told him!” and went off to dance with Truman, who was wearing a white hat, white scarf, white shirt, white sweater, white pants, and white shoes, and was extremely drunk on white vodka. A little while later, I was at the bar, trying to get a drink for Nan Kempner, when Truman tugged at my jacket and asked me to dance again. “Wait a second, Truman,” I said, not thinking, “I’m getting Nan a drink.”
“You mean that bitch Nan Kempner—Jerry Zipkin’s best friend?” She heard what he said, and kept her back turned to him. “Come and dance,” Truman ordered.
“C’mon, Truman,” I said. “You’re both my friends and I want you to make up. C’mon, Nan, turn around.”
“Don’t ask me to talk to that stupid bitch!” Truman screeched, slapping me across the face and knocking my glasses into my eye, which later turned black. I eventually put Truman in a taxi that night, and headed down to the Cave again, getting home sometime after ten in the morning.
Somehow I made it downstairs to Quo Vadis for lunch with an Interview advertiser, then I crawled back into bed. That night at a John Richardson party, Fred decided to have a “man-to-man talk” with me. “You can’t keep going to crazy places like the Cave. You’ve got a great career ahead of you, Bob, and you’re throwing it away.” Then he suggested going to 54, where we ran into Little Eddie, who found some coke. We ended up at the Cave—talking about why I shouldn’t go to the Cave, and other pressing office problems, like Brigid versus Catherine, Vincent versus Ronnie, Victor versus Halston, Bianca versus Jerry, and Jed versus Andy. Little Eddie tapped me on the shoulder. “I just wanted to ask you, Do they always have police in this place?” I turned around, and sure enough, the place was being busted. The lights went on, the music went off, and I told Fred and Little Eddie to follow me quickly; I knew a secret exit.
The next birthday party that May was mine. It was at Diane von Furstenberg’s big new apartment on Fifth Avenue. I was thirty-one years old, though Jerry Zipkin insisted that my sixty-one-year-old father looked more like my brother. My parents had the time of their lives, or so I like to think. Eleanor Lambert told my mother the Factory was actually the most fashionable place to have lunch in New York. Ambassador Hoveyda told my father that he was arranging an embassy for me in my old age. My mother told Halston that he put American fashion on the map. Halston walked me into a walk-in closet and gave me my (sparkling white) birthday present. Bianca told me she had put off her departure for London for me. I felt guilty about the Jerry Hall cover, until I heard that David Bowie was waiting in his limo downstairs for her. Little Eddie accidentally burned my sister Barbara with a joint. Tommy Kempner told me to tell Truman, who didn’t show up, that if he bothered Nan again he’d send his six-foot-two son after him. Andy came late and left early, but I didn’t care and I didn’t take too much coke, or go to the Cave.
Two days later, I was rushing to get down to work, when Victor Hugo called and asked me why nobody wanted his ad in Interview. He had abandoned the idea of using Andy’s portrait of him, but his new layout was almost worse: a Polaroid of Victor showing off his hairy armpit, with type exactly like Halston’s ads. I tried an indirect response, saying that even Andy thought Victor was wasting his money advertising nothing in particular. “Eet’s not Andy,” he lashed out, “eet’s you, you asshole licker. If you want to lick an asshole, lick mine—I have a bigger asshole than Halston! I am artist! You and your Interview lackeys are nothing, you’re shit, you’re assholes!” I knew Victor was calling from the Factory, and most of this was just another performance for his drinking buddy Ronnie Cutrone and the rest of the staff, just like his harangue at Halston. I had brought the phone into the bathroom with me and was actually sitting on the john as Victor hurled the scatological insults at me, so when he hung up mid-asshole, I just flushed the toilet and thought, that’s the end of Victor Hugo for me, flushed, gone.
I was mad at Andy for starting up with Victor again, for not just telling him himself that we weren’t running the ad because it was an insult to Halston and inappropriate for a magazine that was chasing after Bonwits and Bergdorfs, Bulgari and Carimati, and starting to get them. So when I got to the office I marched into the front room, where Andy was sitting on the windowsill reading Liz Smith and Suzy. “Listen, Andy,” I said, “I’m sick and tired of Victor. He’s not an artist, he’s a window dresser who once read a book on Dadaism and I can’t believe that you think he has good ideas. And if he thinks I’m going to go through another fight with Halston so he can do some stupid self-indulgent ad, he can just forget it. And you can forget it too.”
Andy finally put his paper down. “Just because Victor yelled at you,” he said, “doesn’t mean you have to yell at me.” I said that U.S. News & World Report had just committed to four ads in the summer issues, and that I wanted to put those on the back covers. Fred said that was a good idea, but Andy huffed off. The next day he came into my office and said, “Do you really want to ruin a person’s life, Bob? I mean, Victor says we’ll be ruining his life if we don’t run this ad.” I told Andy that if we did run it he’d be ruining my life, and he’d have to choose. Andy said that Fred would have to work it out. Fred took one look at Victor’s hairy armpit photo and said there was no way that could be the back cover. Andy said that Fred would have to call Victor with the bad news. “I’m staying out of it,” he announced so Ronnie could hear. “It’s you and Bob who are doing this, Fred. Not me.”
That was on a Friday. On Monday, Victor called the Factory from San Francisco, where he had gone with Elsa for a Tiffany promotion. His message said he was going to get back at Halston and Andy, and he mentioned Valerie Solanis.
Fortunately, Victor stayed in San Francisco most of that summer. Halston rented a house in Fire Island with Steve Rubell. Andy rented Montauk to the Cocaine Cowboy. The whole gang, including Victor, got back together in August for the fiftieth birthday party Halston gave Andy at the 63rd Street townhouse. Steve Rubell gave Andy a silver garbage pail filled with one thousand brand-new dollar bills, and he and Victor dumped it over Andy’s head. Andy scrambled to pick up every single single off Halston’s floor.
Halston also gave a “drag party” that summer. The boys came as girls, and the girls came as boys. Fred and I weren’t invited. Andy blamed it on Halston, but Halston later told me that Andy didn’t want anyone from the Factory there, except Catherine—who went as a 54 busboy, in satin shorts and no shirt. Andy went as Dolly Parton.
The Factory summer was bracketed by two trips, during which all the pressures and tension of the office burst into the open. In June, we went to London for the opening of Andy’s Athletes exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Art, and Fred’s drinking problem became undeniable. In September, we went to Los Angeles for the opening of Andy’s Torso show at the Ace Gallery, and my liver problem became undeniable. Andy denied both.
The London trip got off to a bad start when Jed refused to go at the last moment. After the limo picked up a sullen, silent Andy, we headed uptown to Fred’s, then took the Concorde to Paris—we always stopped in Paris whenever we went to Europe, and Andy always flew the Concorde now. After the first time, in 1977, when the residents of Howard Beach, near JFK, were still trying to get supersonic flights banned because of the noise, he said, “It’s the only way to fly. Everyone looks really beautiful and has great luggage. It’s just like going to lunch in the best French restaurant, and just when you’re finishing your cognac, you land. They should give all those people in Queens a free ride and then they wouldn’t be against it.” By the summer of 1978, five or six flights later, he was blasé about the Concorde—and stealing the streamlined silverware. He probably had service for forty-eight by the time he died. His only comment this trip was “Gee, every seat is full. Except Jed’s.”
The minute we got to the Rue du Cherche-Midi apartment, he said he wanted to go home. And he wouldn’t go to Club Sept to check out the town, as he always did our first night in Paris. “You and Bob can do it for me,” he said to Fred, handing him $200. “See where the money is and then I’ll go with you tomorrow night.”
Andy picked up as we got into our usual social swirl—lunch at São’s, drinks at Yves’s, dinner next door at André Oliver’s, where a royal princess gave Fred a pill because she thought he looked depressed. Andy blamed that one pill for Fred’s strange behavior during the rest of the trip, not too much champagne—or too much Andy.
The next night Florence Grinda, one of our best Paris friends, arranged for us to take Rod Stewart and Alana Hamilton to dinner at Maxim’s. Rod and Andy had never met, and they were both obviously thrilled to be in each other’s limelight. Rod was wearing a white suit with a black-and-white polka-dot bowtie and white open-toed sandals, and all eyes were on us as we slipped into the number-one table. Fred ordered champagne and caviar to start. Then, out of the blue, Fred started kissing Andy. On his cheek. On his neck. On his shoulder. And telling him how much he loved him. “Stop it, Fred,” said Andy, turning as red as borscht. “You don’t believe me, do you?” persisted Fred, giving Andy another peck. The whole restaurant was watching. “Fred, stop it!” But Fred wouldn’t stop, and he continued bussing Andy as we headed for Regine’s in Rod’s Rolls. Fred got crazier at the nightclub, throwing himself all over Andy and trying to kiss him on the lips. Andy turned his face away, but otherwise he just sat there, saying nothing, pretending this wasn’t happening, as Fred giddily told him, “I really love you, Andy. I really, really love you.”
The next day Fred was kissing Andy again at lunch at Yves Saint Laurent’s. And the day after that, in London, he made a big scene on King’s Road. It was hard to tell if he was being funny, or flipping out. We had lunch with Bianca, and then when we were windowshopping, Fred started pointing at Bianca and Andy and shouting like some circus barker, “You’ve read about them! You’ve heard about them! You’ve seen them on TV! Now meet them in the flesh! Andy Warhol and Bianca Jagger! Autographs only fifty pence!” Two punk kids actually stopped, but they told Fred they didn’t want to pay. Meanwhile, Bianca was so embarrassed she was hiding out in a shop. And Andy just stood there, not knowing what to do.
Fred really flipped out the next night at a grand ball at the Turf Club. As we pulled up to the stately neo-Classical building, Andy said, “Gee, this is so much bigger than the White House.” He and Bianca headed up the marble staircase to the Duchess of Marlborough’s table. Fred and I hung back at the bar. Fred slipped into his high-toned tourguide mode, going on about the club’s history and architecture. Then, suddenly, he started crying, and saying that he couldn’t take it anymore, all his great friends from the nineteenth century had died. Nick Scott, Jade Jagger’s tutor, and I tried to get him back on track, but he started screeching, “You don’t understand! You don’t understand!” We steered him out to the garden and tried to calm him down. “All my friends are dead,” he sobbed. I shook him and shouted, “Fred, this is the twentieth century! Forget all this crap about the past. We’re living in the best time ever.” I was trying to snap him back to reality, but I was also fed up with years of Fred’s nostalgic poses and fantasies. “They’re all dead,” he kept sobbing, “everyone I ever loved.”
I left him with Nick while I tried to find someone with coke, thinking that would sober him up—I know, I know, but I wasn’t all that sane myself at that point. When I couldn’t, I decided the best thing to do was tell Andy we had to take Fred back to the hotel. It was quite late anyway—this was our third party that night. Andy and Bianca were holding court for a bevy of young Guinnesses—Sabrina, Miranda, Hugo, and Erskine. I told them to meet me at the front door in about ten minutes. Then I went back downstairs and out to the garden to get Fred, who was in a daze, and Nick, who said he’d drive us back to the Dorchester. Finally, we were all in the car—Andy, Bianca, Fred, Nick, and I and an antique chair that Nick was delivering to his girlfriend—and about to take off, when Fred threw open the door and lurched out. “Fred,” I shouted, as he literally skipped back into the Turf Club in his natty tuxedo. “Oh, you have to get him, Bob,” said Andy. “I’m not getting him, Andy,” I said. “I’ve had it.”
Fred was very late for the lunch we were giving the next day at the Dorchester, and Andy was worried. Not about Fred, who was on the way down from his room, but about the message we had received from the manager that morning, asking us to check out right after lunch, two days early. “What could Fred have done to make them so mad at us?” Andy wondered. One of the girls at lunch said that she had been among the last to leave the Turf Club at five in the morning and she had seen Fred lying on the marble floor, raving at a servant who was asking him to leave, “I will not leave my house! This is my house! You don’t understand!” She claimed that the servant swept Fred out the door with a broom, and that made Andy laugh.
Finally, Fred appeared, looking remarkably fit and elegant. He said that he had worked out everything with the manager and we wouldn’t have to change hotels. “I reminded him of just who you were,” he told Andy, “and just how much money we’ve spent in his hotel over the years.” His accent was at its most clipped and English. “But why would they want us to leave early, Fred?” persisted Andy. “What did you do that was so bad?” Anyone else would have waited until he was alone with Fred, rather than ask in front of a table of twelve. But that was a Warhol specialty: public humiliation as entertainment.
Fred handled it as well as anyone could under the circumstances, casting his embarrassing confession as a perfectly normal night of fun and games. He said that he had “insulted a few more silly English debs at the Turf Club.”
“We heard you were pushed out with a broom, Fred,” Andy interrupted.
“I wasn’t pushed out with a broom, Andy,” said Fred, and continued his tale. He had decided to walk back to the hotel because it was such a nice night. On his way he passed an open café. That was his word for it. Café. At five in the morning. There he met five Scottish construction workers and invited them back to the hotel for a drink. When he arrived at the hotel, he checked his watch and wallet at the desk, a perfectly normal thing to do, though for some odd reason the stuffy staff seemed shocked. At that point his story skipped to its conclusion: He was missing his key and his shoes.
“You mean your handmade Lobb’s shoes, Fred?” asked Andy mercilessly.
“Yes, my Lobb’s shoes, Andy.”
“You mean, your shoes fit some Scottish construction worker?”
At that, everybody laughed. Even Fred. What else could he do? He was crying out for help, in his own mixed-up way, and kept getting his pleas thrown back in his face as jokes.
A few nights later, back in Paris, he was screaming at the deejay at Castel’s for playing a foxtrot when he had requested a waltz. “I deserve better treatment than this!” he shouted. “I’ve been coming to this dump since I was twelve years old!” Was Castel’s even open, I wondered, in 1955?
Whenever I tried to say to Andy that I thought Fred had a problem, he either looked at me like I was nuts, or accused me of hating Fred. And it was difficult for me to talk to Fred about his behavior as he was supposed to be my boss. If I brought it up when he was sober, he became so embarrassed and dismissive I had to stop. If I brought it up when he was drunk, he became terrifyingly belligerent.
Plus I was having pretty serious problems of my own.
It was 98 degrees in Los Angeles when we arrived in September, but dry, as the Angelenos say, and the pain in my side was intense. We had to rush to lunch with Freddy and Marcia Weisman at the Hillcrest Country Club, where the Athletes portraits commissioned by their son Richard were hanging in the Men’s Grill. Various members told Andy, “They really are, what’s the word I’m looking for, unique,” and, “It’s a highly unusual way of looking at sports.” Andy whispered to me, “Nobody said they liked them, Bob.”
Freddy Weisman offered to lend us a Rolls-Royce for me to drive while we were in town, as neither Andy nor Fred had a license, but I said I was in too much pain to drive, especially a borrowed Rolls. Freddy Weisman said it sounded like a liver problem, but Andy said, “Bob is a hypochondriac.” He accused me of being lazy and spoiled as we rushed in a limo to the opening of Fiorucci’s Beverly Hills branch. “This car costs a fortune,” he said, “and we could be riding for free.” I pointed out that I had arranged for Fiorucci to pay for the limo.
My pains didn’t go away, as I sat beside Andy in a crush of five thousand kids, while he signed free copies of Interview. Before the end of the night, I still had to get through the Gianni Versace charity fashion show at Bullock’s Wilshire and a “Kiddie Party” at Carole Mallory’s, and there was no question of going back to the hotel early, no matter how bad I felt. Andy wanted me wherever he was, even though he also had Fred with him, and Joan Quinn, now Interview’s L.A. editor.
It was 101 degrees, but dry, the next day in L.A., and the pain was still there in my side, throbbing, sometimes dull, sometimes stronger. Wendy Stark played chauffeur in her Mercedes that day, saving Andy the dread limousine bill. We rushed from lunch in Venice with Andy’s dealer, Doug Christmas, whom we called Doug Xmas, to drinks at Polly Bergen’s (possible portrait), to dinner with Sue Mengers (possible portrait, or movie part for Andy), to more drinks at Claudia Ruspoli’s (possible everything).
It was one in the morning when Wendy suggested going to see the former Bugsy Siegel house some friends of hers were trying to sell, and I told Andy I didn’t want to go. I was feeling worse than ever and having a very hard time not drinking and not taking drugs when all around me people were partying the night away. “Go get a blow,” Andy told me. “I can’t have a blow!” I replied. “I’m sick.” He told Wendy I was mad at her, and to convince her I wasn’t, I went on until three.
It was 103 degrees, but dry, the third day, and the pain was still there in my side, sort of like Andy. Dagny Corcoran provided our free transportation, a long yellow limo, and we rushed from lunch at Tony and Kiki Kaiser’s house in Santa Monica (possible portraits or movie deal), to the L’Ermitage Hotel to change, to Frederick Nicholas’s house for dinner (possible portrait), to Andy’s opening at the Ace Gallery out in Venice. Three thousand five hundred art addicts, kids, punks, bums, winos, weightlifters, and other assorted denizens of Venice Beach filled Market Street. Andy arrived in a cavalcade of limos and Mercedeses, because Fred and I had arranged for Tony Perkins and Berry Berenson, Marisa Berenson, Ursula Andress, Polly Bergen, Sue Mengers, Wendy Stark, the Weismans, and the Quinns to follow us out to the beach. We had to fight our way into the gallery, which was so crowded we then had to fight our way into the back office, where we were barricaded to prevent Andy’s wilder fans from knocking down the door.
There was a dinner for several hundred at Robert’s a few blocks away, and getting Andy and his star-studded entourage to the restaurant was another feat of tactics and security. Somehow Pat Ast got left behind and it was quite a sight watching her, in red-and-white Halston elephant-print pants and cape, being pulled and squeezed through a slit in the door—it couldn’t be opened wide or the mob would have surged in. By that time I was downing Stolichnaya at a rapid pace, and taking coke from all comers, and the pain in my side was going the way of my money, morals, and mind. Still it was hard to forget the sight of Andy autographing “the biggest cock in L.A.,” while Sue Mengers and Marisa Berenson looked on. Oh well, it was still the seventies, and this was Andy’s Cocks, Cunts, and Assholes opening, his biggest so far.