I have always said that of all my three and a half husbands (I’ll explain that later), John Cale was by far my favorite.
Paraphernalia became a particular favorite hangout of The Velvet Underground after they played at the opening night party. I had already met the band some time earlier at Max’s Kansas City and had recently started going out with their lead guitarist, Sterling Morrison. It was nothing serious, just a few dates here and there.
Sometime around 1965, when Paraphernalia really began to take off, was when I made the leap from just hanging out with the band to actually making clothes for all the Velvets: Sterling, Maureen Tucker, John Cale, and Lou Reed, but, oddly enough, not Nico. I tried to get her to wear my designs, but she really liked creating her own. She didn’t make those famous white suits she wore, but she did come up with some very bohemian caftan-y things, like the one she wears on the cover of her Desertshore album. As for Lou, all he ever wanted was a motorcycle jacket and gray suede trousers. His only suggestion was to cut the pants very, very tight through the crotch. He always said that I cut a good crotch.
While I did love the Velvets’ music, I was just as intrigued by their whole scene, and the crazy ways that everyone lived—up all night, sleeping all day. And party after party after party dressed in one fabulous, far-out look after another. The plastic dresses, the paper dresses, the electric dresses! Everything was so new. And didn’t anybody work?! It was the complete opposite of my world. At the Velvets’ shows, inhibitions went right out the window, and people went crazy . . . literally. John read me a review in Variety that called one of their appearances “a three-ring psychosis.” To me that sounded very scary. As much as I was energized by the insanity, I was not at all tempted to dive in.
The Velvets’ show I remember best was at the Dom on St. Marks Place in April 1966. Andy Warhol produced the event, which he called “Andy Warhol Presents—The Exploding Plastic Inevitable.” I had no idea what to expect, but given that Andy had creative control, I figured I’d better be wearing an amazing outfit. Since I was going to the show straight from Paraphernalia, I grabbed one of my Silverfish dresses. That’s the same one that Edie would be photographed in the night of the Chelsea Hotel fire a few months later and Karen Black would totally rock in Easy Rider. I wore the dress with a new pair of silver stack-heeled Mary Janes and pale lipstick. I was ready to sparkle.
The Velvet Underground providing the appropriate electric soundtrack for the Paraphernalia opening
What a trip! I walked into the Dom and plunged into darkness. Andy’s movies were being projected on the walls, the ceiling, and even the crowd, so I was walking through My Hustler and Poor Little Rich Girl as I tried to make my way closer to the stage. When Nico and the band started in with “Femme Fatale” at a deafening volume, the most amazing light show started. Crazy, bright-colored strobes gave me strange, quick bursts of images from the nearly black room. It was like being stuck in a huge kaleidoscope.
The Dom on St. Marks Place. Not my thing.
The strobe lights broke down every moment of the Velvets’ performance into dazzling fractions of a second. Lou or Nico or John would be singled out, mixed in with random faces and bodies in the crowd. I could catch a glimpse now and then of Gerard Malanga and Mary Woronov doing their infamous whip dance—living out their S & M fantasies right onstage. Edie Sedgwick, oblivious to the whip, go-go danced alongside them. With the volume of “All Tomorrow’s Parties” rattling me to the core, I could see flashes in the audience of clothing I had designed and sold just days earlier. My heart was pounding. I almost felt seasick. I wasn’t doing any drugs, but being so disoriented was starting to take a toll on me. Only recently had I started to think of myself as a jaded New Yorker, but as the lights hit another crazy reflector, I started to feel like that small-town girl I didn’t want to lose. I may have been surrounded by ecstatic friends and customers, but some vague notion of designing for a spunky girl who wouldn’t get sucked into the plastic inevitable helped send me to the door.
Edie in my “Snap-Apart” outfit
Outside the chilly April air felt great. Walking back to my loft on LaGuardia Place, my ears still ringing, I couldn’t even begin to process everything I’d seen. But that was okay. I knew I’d be up for work before nine a.m. and perhaps design another version of my stretch silver T-shirt dress that would move on Edie like an alien skin and look great under strobe lights.
As for my own wants and needs, I started thinking more about John Cale and less about Sterling. Even if I did leave the Velvets’ shows early, I was becoming more and more attracted to John’s musical genius. He was classically trained but played the edgiest rock keyboards, bass, and viola. John was tall and thin with long dark hair and dark eyes to match. He was quiet—brooding, even—and he was Welsh. He actually grew up speaking only Welsh, and I was just a sucker for that accent. I loved it when he spoke to me in his native tongue. It’s such a brutal-sounding language. When he talked to me that way, I never needed to know what he was saying.
Well, one thing led to another, and Sterling was out, and John was in. I mean, we just clicked. He could make me laugh like no one else, which has always been superimportant to me in a relationship. If you can’t make me laugh, it ain’t gonna happen.
I also loved the way John’s brain worked. He had a hyperactive mind that seemed to know something intriguing about almost everything. After a long day of churning out as many new fashion ideas as possible for Paraphernalia, I found listening to John endlessly amusing. He did sometimes lose me when he went off on one of his conspiracy theories. Remember, this was just a couple of years after the Kennedy assassination, and John had a thousand theories about what had “really” happened. He was more about finding a good story, I think, than delivering any hard-and-fast truth.
Since John was a poet, after all, I designed clothes for him to look the part. There’s something very intimate about making a garment for someone you’re really into. I made him these great black canvas suits that were perfect for his build and some fancy shirts with ruffles. They were gorgeous and fit perfectly with my fantasy of John.
We weren’t dating for long before we knew we were crazy mad about each other. John told me that he liked me because I was a happy person and I made him feel comfortable, which I took as pretty high praise. I think he was looking for me to be a stabilizing factor in his life, which was pretty chaotic. He didn’t want me to be a drug buddy or Warhol fabulous. In a way we were both dreaming much more Norman Rockwell. Almost immediately he moved in with me.
At the time, I was living in a huge loft on LaGuardia Place just a block or so north of Houston Street. This was before Soho was even a thing. There was no reason to go there. It was just a bunch of warehouses. The loft was huge, over three thousand square feet. It was more than big enough for me to have my workshop there and for John to store all of his instruments and use the space as his home office and meeting place. It was basically just a big empty space with the walls and ceiling painted white and the floor painted gray, very raw.
The space was so big that we really only lived in a corner of it, where I built us a kind of dollhouse of a room. It was just tall enough for John to stand up in comfortably. It had a loft bed and lots of space for storing clothes. I may have seen a fairy-tale castle when I squinted at our room, but it was more like a glorified walk-in closet with a door and two windows.
Nico used to visit us pretty often as she and John were really close. In fact, they were roommates right before he moved in. When she’d come over she loved to crouch down in the crawl space beneath the huge industrial sink in the kitchen, relax, and sew her own clothes for hours. Nico had always had a reputation for being cold, but I liked her. I found her to be very sweet. I think the “cold” reputation had more to do with her shyness, being German, and, of course, the language barrier. Her English wasn’t very good, but she had an interesting way of speaking and it added a very distinctive style to her singing. Very Dietrich, very Garbo.
John and I hadn’t been together all that long when one day out of the blue, out of nowhere, I can’t even remember whose idea it was, we decided to get married. But that was typical of the times. Back then everything just seemed to happen in a flash. The pace was quicker, and there was a real feeling of urgency. Everything was now, now, now and about grabbing life and running with it. So we figured, why not? We ran with it.
When I was growing up, I’d always dreamt I would have the fancy church wedding with all the bridesmaids and flowers and of course the big Cinderella dress. But somehow I got talked into tying the knot at drab, dreary City Hall.
Just the love—John’s and my wedding-photo shoot
In the late sixties the unisex trend was very big, so for the occasion, instead of a ballgown, I made myself a beautiful burgundy crushed velvet Edwardian-style pantsuit and a white silk blouse with a bow at the neck. I was so proud of that outfit. I also made John a matching suit in black.
Besides making the clothes, all we really needed to do before the wedding was get a blood test. Since neither of us had a regular doctor, we were happy for a referral to the offices of doctors Bishop and Jacobson. After one of the kind doctors took our blood he gave us a shot of “vitamins.” I don’t know what was in those shots, but by the time we left the office we were out of our minds. We walked all the way downtown from Eighty-Sixth Street, babbling the whole way about how fabulous our marriage was going to be. I found out later that these two physicians were notorious “speed doctors” to the stars. Sitting in the waiting room I should have known something wasn’t right when I saw large canisters filled with pills and people helping themselves by the handful, like they were candy.
But we did get our blood tests, and our wedding day was a week later. John and I got dressed with a whole crowd of friends at the loft. It was quite a group gathered to wish us well: Andy, Nico, Lou, Sterling, Maureen, Viva, Billy Name, Ondine, and a few random models.
Oddly enough my mother and father weren’t there. That’s a good indication of how seriously I took the wedding or how slapdash the whole thing came together. It never occurred to me to invite my family. My parents had met John only a couple of times. I brought him to Connecticut not long after we got together. They didn’t dislike him. How could they? They were actually charmed by him, especially my mother. But they just didn’t know what to make of this longhaired guy wearing Beatle boots and all-black clothing. He certainly didn’t look like the man they had envisioned me marrying. He was from a whole other planet than Leo Macawicz.
When we were dressed and ready for City Hall, we all jumped into taxis and arrived en masse. We were quite the spectacle, and for once it wasn’t about the way people were dressed, as there were no sequins or feather boas. Instead it was the group energy—quirky, kinetic, and loud!
I had butterflies in my stomach—or it could have been the diet pills I had started taking that were making me nervous—but other than that I was happy and excited as we walked inside. Then I realized that John hadn’t thought to bring me flowers, and I just began to cry. Me, of all people, without flowers on my wedding day. Luckily someone had the presence of mind to run out and buy me gardenias from one of the flower vendors who hung around outside City Hall for just that purpose. That helped calm me down.
So there we were, speedily chattering away in a waiting room with a whole bunch of normal people also hoping to see the judge and get married as quickly as possible. Andy was milling around tape recording conversations with some of the other couples and snapping Polaroids. He’d just walk up to them and say something like “Wow! You look fabulous!” They had no idea who he was, even though he was then the most famous artist in New York City.
At last our names were called, and we stood in front of the judge, who was a very stern, serious-looking old man. He scanned our group with a disapproving glance, finally settling his gaze on me, and said in his deep, judgmental voice, “Young lady, I will not marry a girl who is wearing pants!” Can you imagine?
What was I supposed to do? I was heartbroken and more than that, really angry. Of all the things for someone to say on my special day, and a judge no less. But I didn’t realize that this was the norm. I had a real downtown mentality and had no idea that my wearing a pantsuit might be questionable to someone like him. Remember, in 1967 most women still dressed with a 1950s mind-set and wouldn’t go out without their gloves matching their purses.
Then I had an idea. I told John to wait a minute and went to the ladies’ room, where I removed my offending pants, readjusted my tights, pulled my jacket down as far as it would go (which wasn’t very far), examined myself in the mirror, and defiantly walked back out. I took my place next to John (whose jaw, along with everybody else’s, was on the floor) and said all proper, “Okay, your honor, I am not wearing pants. Will you marry us now?” And he did.
After that we all went over to Ratner’s deli and had a huge breakfast. It was a very fitting start for what was to be a rather unconventional marriage.
There was no time for a honeymoon after our wedding day. I had deadlines to meet for Paraphernalia, and John was in rehearsals to go on tour with the band. Strange that we didn’t even think about a honeymoon, because we both loved to travel. Just a few weeks earlier we had gone to Wales to visit John’s parents.
They lived in a small town called Garnant. It was very industrial and, well, to call it bleak would be a compliment. The landscape was what I would describe as gothic. It was filled with large twisted trees, like the set of an old black-and-white horror movie. And it was cold. There was no heat in the house, and we had to bring a hot water bottle to bed with us to keep from freezing.
John’s mom was a schoolteacher, and his father was a coal miner, which is what all the men in town seemed to do for a living. His hands were permanently stained black. I knew it was a hard life, but I didn’t know what to make of his parents sitting down at night to watch Tom and Jerry cartoons on television. John assured me that his mother was crazy about me, although I wouldn’t have known because she spoke only Welsh—and coming from her, it was hardly the romance language it was coming from John.
We stayed about a week, and it was interesting to see John on his home turf, although he hadn’t lived there since he was about seventeen. He didn’t seem very close with his parents—not like the way I was with mine—and especially not with his father, who would rather pick up a newspaper than have a conversation. We spent a lot of time alone walking through the countryside, which I found isolating and depressing compared to my storybook memories of my home in Connecticut.
But the trip was romantic in its own Wuthering Heights kind of way. I felt I got more insight into John and his music. I recall thinking, My God, if this surreal landscape is his home, it’s no wonder his music is so out there!
For someone who was becoming a real city girl, I still had those small-town values deeply instilled in me and had it in my head that John and I were going to have a “normal” marriage. I wanted to make pot roast every Sunday night just like my mom did. Even John said that he wanted a real “pipe and slippers” kind of home life. Well, that lasted about two weeks. We could not stick to a regular routine. I was a day person, and John was a real night owl. A rock musician doesn’t keep regular hours and show up at home just because I happen to make a roast. Not that I was immune myself to staying up all night occasionally to meet deadlines.
I was aware when I met John that he was taking drugs. That was no surprise and certainly not unusual. In that period absolutely everyone was on something, except me, if you don’t count the diet pills. It was a huge, huge part of the culture. But that druggy aspect of the whole scene actually scared me. So many people would be around for a while and then one day they’d suddenly be gone. If you asked what had happened to them, the answer was always the same: either they’d OD’d, or they were put away in an institution, or in some cases both. And that scared the hell out of me.
While I was frightened by John’s drug use, I’d be lying if I said that I didn’t also find it intriguing, and even sexy. Before meeting John and his crowd, I didn’t know people who did drugs. And maybe I was making excuses for him but I viewed it through a twisted lens and in my mind dubbed him a tortured artist.
As for my own “weight-loss medications,” I convinced myself that was different. After all, they were prescribed by a doctor. It wasn’t like I bought them in a back alley. I had to go way, way out on the subway to somewhere in Queens to get the drugs. It was a really sketchy set-up. Now that I think back, I’m sure the guy dispensing the stuff wasn’t a doctor at all. Sometimes it was pills, and other times he’d give me this liquid that I had to take two drops of in the morning and two drops in the afternoon. The truth is, I was buzzing around day and night just as much as everyone on the scene who was shooting amphetamines, so who was I to judge?
John was never really open with me about the drugs, but I would sometimes find a needle in our bathroom, or see him conspiring in a corner backstage before one of the Velvets’ shows. It wasn’t long before I realized he was practically living the lyrics to Lou’s song “Heroin,” with its line that goes “Heroin, it’s my life and it’s my wife.” That seemed to sum up our relationship perfectly around our third month of marriage. I guess I assumed it was his business, I knew what I was getting into when we met, so there was really nothing I could say. I started going to work every day wondering if he’d be alive when I got home and the stress of all that uncertainty began to take its toll on me.
I know John originally wanted to marry me because, in his words, I was a “nice” girl. And apparently there was a shortage of nice girls around. But nice is no reason to get married and nice can get a relationship only so far. I did try to interject normalcy when I could, but after a while he just wasn’t receptive. By the time of our first anniversary, John and I hardly talked and the sex that had been a huge part of our relationship at the beginning was nonexistent. I threw myself into my work and tried to ignore what had become of my marriage because I had no idea how to fix it.
Our marriage problems weren’t confined to our home life. They spilled over into John’s professional life as well. I knew that Lou Reed thought that I had come between him and John. I’ve joked in the past that I was the Yoko Ono of The Velvet Underground even though I wasn’t trying to steal John away from anyone. But Lou had always been a little bit in love with John and hated it when John’s attentions were not 100 percent on the band. I always felt uncomfortable with the negative vibe I got from Lou. It’s no secret that there was never any love lost between the two of us after John and I got together. Lou never directly confronted me, and we had no arguments, but there might be a sneer or a dirty look from him when I walked into the room or a dismissive reference to me as “that girl who makes the clothes.” And that hurt. I worked too hard to be referred to that way.
Not long after John and I were married Lou called a band meeting without inviting John and told Maureen and Sterling that either John went or he would. I think we all know which way that wind ended up blowing. John was out. Lou called it creative differences. They each had their own ideas about the future direction of the band. This much was definitely true: Lou wanted commercial success, and the stuff John wanted to do was not often radio friendly, which was key back then to hitting it big.
I think Lou was envious of John’s musical virtuosity as well. At the end of the day, Lou owed a great deal to John, who brought a very distinctive sound to the band. You can hear it if you listen to some of John’s early work, for example, “The Theater of Eternal Music.” There’s a specific drone that he got from the modified viola that he played. You can hear the same sound in songs like “Venus in Furs” and also the piano part that he played on “All Tomorrow’s Parties.” Without John, the Velvets would have been just a straightforward rock band. A good rock band, mind you. Lou was a great musician and an amazing lyricist. A line like “Different colors made of tears”? That’s brilliant. But without John, the Velvets wouldn’t have had that experimental avant-garde sound that set them apart from all the other bands.
John, of course, was devastated that the Velvets had kicked him out, and because we weren’t communicating with each other very much, I didn’t know how to make it better. John decided that he needed to go to California to try to get clean and figure out what to do next. I thought to myself, Well, that doesn’t make any sense. They have drugs out there, too.
We both knew I couldn’t go with him—not that I was even invited. My work was in New York, and I wouldn’t leave it for him. He had to go and do this on his own. After John left we’d talk on the phone, but in those days three thousand miles seemed a lot farther away than it does today. It wasn’t long before the calls became fewer and farther between.
I don’t know who made the decision to finalize the split. It seemed obvious to both of us. There was no blame game. When it came time to sign the divorce papers, I got on a plane and brought them out to California myself. At that point John was living with another woman, and I was seeing someone, too. I told myself I could handle it. I was even planning to stay with John and Cindy, who would soon become his next wife.
John shortly after our divorce
When I arrived I tried to be upbeat and in control, but it didn’t work. Cindy knew enough not to be around, and that night John and I hung out alone in his living room. He lit candles, we drank wine, and he ended up playing piano for me. It was a very tender gesture and almost more than I could bear. This was the John I had fallen in love with. This is who John really is. But I was crushed. He was still on drugs, and I couldn’t deal with the fact that he was with someone else (even though I was, too). We signed the papers, and I left the next day.
My mother’s way of acknowledging the breakup was to send me a box of chocolate chip cookies that she had baked herself. I’m sure I could not bear to eat them.
After all these years I’ve remained close with John. We went years without speaking, but our paths eventually began to cross. I would see him in New York at some event or other and I’ve always loved and followed his music. This past year I went with him to the Grammys, where he received his lifetime achievement award for his work with the Velvets. The press credited me as “The Velvet Underground fashion designer,” and I couldn’t be prouder of that title or of the relationship I have with John now. Like I said earlier, he was my favorite husband.