Random House publisher Bennett Cerf advanced Philip Roth $250,000, which, after his agent, Candida Donadio, took her 10 percent share, expanded the writer’s bank account a hundred times over. He purchased two first-class tickets on the France, a luxury liner passage to England, for his girlfriend May and himself. It was there in London that he watched the 1968 Democratic National Convention on television, a spectacle that included antiwar riots on the Chicago streets, as well as a near fistfight between Gore Vidal and William F. Buckley Jr. on the little screen. The two pundits had been hired as commentators by ABC to dissect the two national conventions, which the network, unlike NBC and CBS, no longer considered worthy of gavel-to-gavel coverage. Vidal and Buckley were part of ABC’s attempt to package politics in a convenient two-hour nightly program. That concept worked well for the Republican convention, which turned into a near coronation for prodigal son Richard M. Nixon. The Democratic convention turned into something much more.
Despite Vidal’s insistence that his latest novel wasn’t any “different from any other book I’ve written,” he noticeably winced when moderator Howard K. Smith introduced him on-air as the author of Myra Breckinridge and failed to list any of his other novels.
Vidal, of course, knew better. Myra Breckinridge was very different. Briefly, in 1967, Vidal had considered reentering the political fray; he’d run for the elected office of a New York congressional seat, and lost, in 1960. Some supporters wanted him to run again, in 1968, for the California U.S. Senate seat. But with the publication of Myra Breckinridge, he knew it wasn’t possible. “With this book, we won’t be able to get through,” he said of the press’s condemnation of his transsexual-themed novel.
In between the Republican and Democratic confabs that summer, Vidal’s conservative opponent on the ABC telecasts finally got around to reading Myra Breckinridge and immediately trashed it as “pornography.” Buckley found Vidal morally unfit to ponder the political doings of the day, and in their penultimate meeting at the ABC studio, when the streets of Chicago were alive with angry cops and protesters, Buckley proclaimed, “Let Myra Breckinridge go back to his pornography!”
Vidal, for his part, had called Buckley “a crypto-Nazi,” and Buckley had defended himself, saying, “Stop calling me a crypto-Nazi or I’ll sock you in your goddamned face and you’ll stay plastered, you queer.”
“Gentlemen, please!” cautioned their referee, Smith.
For their follow-up interview on the air, a distraught Buckley demanded that a screen be erected between him and Vidal, to keep his homosexual opponent out of eyeshot.
It was a long way from Myra Breckinridge’s Hollywood to LBJ’s Vietnam, but not for Gore Vidal. “I’m all for the breaking down of the sexual stereotypes. That was the theme of Myra Breckinridge,” he explained that long, hot summer. “The United States is filled with fat, flabby men who think of themselves as Gary Cooper—two fisted, he-men—when actually it’s a country of beer-drinking fat men looking at television. American men are the fattest in the world, incidentally, and certainly the weakest physically. Then they have all this machismo poured into their poor fat heads, and the result is . . . that’s why we’re in Vietnam.”
Vidal confronted those men only days later on the equally sweaty streets of New York City.
Shortly before taping The Dick Cavett Show, Vidal witnessed a street protest against the mayor of New York City, John Lindsay. One hard-hat banner shouted, “Lindsay is a faggot!” The incident stuck in Vidal’s mind, and he mentioned it to Cavett on air, and addressing the hard-hats in the TV audience, he told them, “I saw your sign. That was just brilliant, you know, good political thinking, ‘Mayor Lindsay is a faggot.’ You really have added something. Now I know what happens to midnight cowboys when they get too fat to do Forty-Second Street. They become construction workers.”
ANDY WARHOL SPENT THE summer in New York City, recuperating in Columbus Hospital after a near-fatal gunshot wound; it required no fewer than four surgeons to perform a six-and-a half-hour operation on his chest. Before the attack, Andy had been having these strange early-morning phone conversations with this teenager from Santa Barbara who had somehow located his home telephone number and now sent him his perfumed clothes and told him he loved him.
Actually, it was Andy who begged that Lance Loud tell him he loved him. These verbal protestations of love began when Lance told his idol that he wanted to leave his home in Santa Barbara and hang out at the Factory. “Could I please be in one of your movies?” Lance asked. He’d read about Warhol and Edie Sedgwick in Time magazine and seen Chelsea Girls and even dyed his hair silver. Since Andy and Edie were no longer speaking, Lance thought he could be the new Edie Sedgwick.
Andy told Lance that he could come to New York and appear in his movies. “Sure, but you can’t stay at my house, because . . . well, no one stays at my house, because I have a thing about that. But I’ll find you a place to stay,” Andy promised. Then he pleaded in his thin-as-smoke voice, “Oh, tell me you love me.”
“I love you, Andy,” Lance said.
“Oh, say it like you mean it. Oh, tell me again.”
“I love you, Andy.”
In addition to his love, Andy Warhol asked his teenage phone mate for a nude picture of himself. Lance Loud didn’t have a nude picture of himself, but he had one with his shirt off, taken at the beach. He sent him that photo. He also sent him a big package of his underwear that he spray-painted fluorescent pink and soaked in his mother’s perfume and then doused with his father’s after-shave lotion. Lance waited patiently for the box to arrive at the Factory. After a week he called to ask Andy, “Did you get my package?”
“Ugh!” said Andy. “We gave it to people we didn’t like so we’d be able to smell them coming!”
In their last phone conversation, a few days before Andy got shot, Lance told his idol that he’d just seen I, A Man, yet another movie that Andy had wanted to call Fuck.
“Did you like it?” Andy asked.
“Yeah, it was great, but I liked Nude Restaurant better,” said Lance, referring to a Warhol film set in a diner in which everybody, patrons and waitresses, wore nothing but G-strings.
“Uh-huh,” Andy agreed.
“Hey, you know that girl that plays the bull dyke in it?” asked Lance, his mind jumping back to I, a Man.
“Oh, Valerie, yeah,” said Andy.
Valerie Solanas was one of many Factory hangers-on who saw Warhol as her ticket to superstardom. She’d given him her dreadful, albeit very pornographic script “Up Your Ass” to read and hopefully make into a movie. But it was too downbeat, too lesbian for Andy’s apolitical taste. Neither he nor Paul Morrissey wanted anything to do with it. Regardless, Valerie continued her pursuit of Warhol. Like a lot of crazies who congregated at the Factory and thought its owner should pay for their upkeep because they were so fabulous, Valerie kept demanding rent money from Andy. To shut her up, he offered her twenty-five dollars—the going rate for his actors—if she’d appear in I, a Man. The shoot didn’t go well. It was supposed to star Jim Morrison of the Doors and his current girlfriend, Nico. They didn’t have to do much, just have sexual intercourse on a couch at the Factory. But when Morrison’s handlers got word of the movie, they convinced the rocker’s drinking buddy Tom Baker to star instead. Baker agreed but balked at having sex on camera, much less taking off his clothes. So the movie that was supposed to be called Fuck ended up being a string of encounters between Baker and a lot of women, one of them being Valerie Solanas. In her improvisation, Solanas told Baker that she didn’t like his “tits.” He surmised she was a committed lesbian, and wondered aloud, “Wow, man! You’re missing out on a lot of things.”
Lance asked Andy about Valerie. “She seems so mean. Is she really like that?”
“Yes, oh, she hates me, she wants to kill me. We don’t let her come up anymore, she is just too mean.”
The following week, Valerie Solanas made the last of her unwanted visits to the Factory. She’d really been in pursuit of Maurice Girodias, the original French publisher of the much-banned novel Candy. Somewhat more impressed by “Up Your Ass” than either Warhol or Morrissey, Girodias had offered Solanas two thousand dollars in installments for her autobiography. But when she failed to write anything, the installments of money stopped. She in turn called Girodias a “thief and vulture,” and wanted him dead. Fortunately for Girodias, he was away on business in Canada. Unfortunately for Warhol, Solanas went looking for someone else to hate.
When she passed Packard Electronics on the ground floor of 33 Union Square West and rode the elevator up to the Factory on the sixth floor, Andy Warhol was talking on the phone, not with a teenage friend three thousand miles away but rather his superstar actress Viva, who at that moment was having her hair done only a few blocks uptown at Kenneth’s Hair Salon. The epitome of laconic aggression, Viva had never sounded more upbeat as she blurted out the good news.
“Andy, Andy, I’ve got the part. I’m so thrilled!” she cried into the receiver. She didn’t even have to tell him the name of the project. It was John Schlesinger’s new movie, Midnight Cowboy, and Andy knew all about it and how screenwriter Waldo Salt had taken the James Leo Herlihy novel about a Forty-Second Street hustler and added his own subplot in which two Warholesque characters, named Hansel and Gretel, roam the streets of Manhattan looking for strange and photogenic people they can put into a Warholesque movie. Schlesinger wanted Andy to play himself in the movie. Andy passed on the offer but gave his blessing to Viva to play the cinéma vérité director, who, in effect, was him. Schlesinger’s lover, Michael Childers, facilitated the whole thing, him being a good friend of Paul Morrissey, the real director of Warhol’s movies. Childers recalled, “John and I had dinner with Paul and Andy at Max’s Kansas City, and all the Warhol superstar speed freaks were there, along with Salvador Dali and Robert Rauschenberg.”
Viva, excited by her mainstream-movie breakthrough, had phoned Andy from Kenneth’s, where she was having her hair dyed and frizzed for the role of Gretel. That’s when she heard Andy’s hideous scream above the hair dryers, “Get that woman away from me!”
Viva had once referred to the denizens of the Factory as “that bunch of perverts” but never let that assessment stop her from taking her clothes off for a Warhol movie.
But he wasn’t pretending. He wasn’t acting. Andy Warhol had been shot by Valerie Solanas, a militant lesbian feminist who wanted Warhol to film “Up Your Ass,” a script that Warhol found so pornographic that he thought the cops had planted it to trap him with an obscenity charge. When Solanas appeared at his door that day, Warhol had forgotten about “Up Your Ass,” misplaced the script somewhere, and spent the last few days trying to avoid her, blow her off. He barely survived the shooting. Surgeons had to open his chest to massage his heart, working over his nearly lifeless body for hours.
During the filming of Midnight Cowboy that summer, Viva channeled her Gretel filmmaker role, and, wielding a tape recorder, she never stopped asking everyone on the set, “Say something to Andy, who’s in the hospital.”
Viva’s big moment in Midnight Cowboy is the party scene where Jon Voight’s hustler Joe Buck arrives and Dustin Hoffman’s tubercular friend Ratso Rizzo negotiates a deal for him to sleep with an uptown matron, played by Brenda Vaccaro. The party might have been screenwriter Waldo Salt’s idea, but it was Michael Childers who enlisted the Warhol troops, including Viva, Ultra Violet from Chelsea Girls, and Paul Morrissey, as well as Hair’s Paul Jabara, to make the trek from downtown way up to the Bronx at the Filmways Studios to act for one hundred dollars a day plus transportation. Not much, but it was seventy-five more than Andy would have paid them.
Morrissey wrangled a few Factory hangers-on for the party scene. “There were a few around in the back of the crowd and you couldn’t see them. All the professional actors knew how to stay in front of the camera,” said Morrissey.
According to Childers, he and Morrissey shot an untitled short film in which Ultra Violet enacts being raped by a young blond boy. Schlesinger found it way too graphic, but Childers told him not to worry. The film would be projected over the bodies of the partygoers, and nobody would be able to tell what the hell was going on.
“It was amazing. The party went on for three, four days,” said Childers. “We weren’t providing drugs.”
Many of the extras, especially the Factory kids, brought their own pharmaceuticals, especially the amphetamines that helped them stay awake for the long, long shoot. And there were other ways to indulge.
“It was like a six-day bacchanal. Pot in vast quantities,” said the film’s producer, Jerome Hellman. “And these kids, floating around, fucking in the toilets, fucking in the dressing rooms, fucking in the wardrobe rooms. We had to establish certain characters, so we were worried about people not coming back. Boy, they were back. They couldn’t wait to get back.”
Even Schlesinger got into the spirit of the Warhol superstars. “Darling, they’re so wonderfully eccentric!” he exclaimed. It was one of the few happy times he experienced on the set of Midnight Cowboy.
Schlesinger had wanted to make a movie of the male-hustler story ever since a friend had given him the Herlihy novel in 1966. “What attracted me to the character of the cowboy was his basic innocence and naïveté and need for love,” he said. Also, the subject of two men in love “had never been really tackled before,” he added. And also, “The idea of a new look at the city is another reason for wanting to make the film.”
The British director never really cared for New York City, and as it turned out, he would like Los Angeles even less when he went there for the first time to open his film Far from the Madding Crowd. After an equally downbeat opening for Crowd in Manhattan, Schlesinger met an MGM publicist on his flight to the West Coast for the premiere there. The flack told him, “You’ve got to be terribly careful what you do next. What is this Midnight Cowboy? I don’t like the sound of it. You’ve got to be very careful.”
Schlesinger had been cautioned before. “It was a book that nobody had wanted to do,” he said of Herlihy’s novel. People were always asking him, “Why are you doing that terrible faggot novel?”
One of those people was Joseph Janni, who’d produced Darling, Far from the Madding Crowd, and Schlesinger’s two other movies, Billy Liar and A Kind of Loving. Janni called the novel “faggot stuff” and flatly predicted, “This will destroy your career.”
That’s when Schlesinger approached another producer. “The book had a lot of things against it, especially the sequences of very direct homo-eroticism, but it was a very powerful story,” said Jerome Hellman. “John and I had a very candid conversation . . . and he made it clear he didn’t want to make a gay movie out of it, that he saw it as an oddball love story.”
After Far from the Madding Crowd received its critical dubbing, MGM wanted nothing to do with Schlesinger’s Midnight Cowboy, and the feeling was mutual after a reader at the studio suggested that Midnight Cowboy might be successful if they turned it into a movie musical for Elvis Presley.
In the very beginning, things weren’t that much better over at United Artists, especially when the name Sammy Davis Jr. got tossed around as a possibility to play Ratso Rizzo. But that misfire aside, UA was the perfect home for Midnight Cowboy, perhaps the only home. Its president, David Picker, admired Schlesinger’s work, and, even more important, “it was the only studio that would have made the film, because of its tawdry subject matter,” said Picker. It helped that the UA executive had seen Chelsea Girls and charted its success—a success that not only brought moviegoers into the theaters but now whetted their appetite, in Picker’s opinion, for stronger language, more nudity, homosexual characters, and drug-related subject matter. He wasn’t alone in that opinion. Noting the box-office grosses for Chelsea Girls around the country, the New York Times reported that “commercial filmmakers here and abroad are planning to use homosexual themes in their movies on the theory that sympathetic treatment of this subject is what lures the audiences.”
Commercial filmmakers ready to break a few rules had no more sympathetic playground than UA. The studio had a reputation for taking on risky material and then leaving directors alone to make their risky film. But there was a catch. “My partners here, the older men in the company, aren’t going to understand Midnight Cowboy,” Picker told Hellman. “So it’s got to be $1 million, all-in!”
Where Picker initially mentioned $1 million, the budget soon swelled to $2 million and finally topped out at $3 million. Along the way, there was great consternation from the UA accountants, and while Picker remained committed to the project, as its budget swelled, he asked that Schlesinger, Hellman, and screenwriter Waldo Salt defer much of their salaries in exchange for more profit points. As Hellman recalled, “I was able to keep increasing our percentage because they didn’t think this film would make as much money as it did. At the time, United Artists would rather give us an extra ten percent than an extra ten thousand dollars.”
Hellman and Schlesinger could have solved their budgetary problem by casting a big star to play the cowboy hustler and, indeed, a big star wanted the role. The director’s Malibu houseguest that winter had been Julie Christie, who showed the script to her new movie star boyfriend.
“You must be kidding!” Schlesinger said when Christie gave him the news that Warren Beatty wanted to play Joe Buck. “If he were the male hustler, the lines would be out to Fire Island!” According to Michael Childers, Beatty was so keen to play the role he even asked for a “secret screen test” to put all fears to rest. But Schlesinger resisted the temptation: No one would buy Warren Beatty as a prostitute who failed, and instead Schlesinger cast newcomer Jon Voight.
Midnight Cowboy was Schlesinger’s first made-in-America picture. It’s what attracted him to the project—his dislike of New York City. “It’s grim and it’s more grim than we were able to show,” he later said. All in all, making the film turned into a “miserable” time. In addition to hating the big city, he found himself “always confronted by something worse on the streets than one was putting into the film.” There wasn’t anything in the movie that he hadn’t somehow seen in some way somewhere in America: The man in a business suit lying zonked out in from of Tiffany & Company on Fifth Avenue had actually taken place in front of Bonwit Teller. The boy running a plastic mouse over his mother’s face at an all-night diner was a scene that Schlesinger had witnessed at Canter’s Deli on Fairfax Avenue in Los Angeles.
Prior to making the film, Schlesinger worried obsessively about the New York crew. He was accustomed to British crews that he handpicked. United Artists, however, had assembled the grips, gaffers, and other technicians on Midnight Cowboy.
At the time, Schlesinger was still hiding his sexual orientation from the Hollywood film community. He expressed his fears to his new producer. “He was afraid of an American crew,” said Hellman. “If they found out, would they turn on him, making fag jokes behind his back?”
Hellman finally told him, “John, we’re the bosses here. If someone’s stupid enough to do that, we’ll fire them.”
Some of the fag jokes were told to his face. One of the assistant directors took to calling out, in front of the entire crew, “We’re ready, my queen!”
Schlesinger played along as best he could. “Won’t be long for you, my boy!” he shot back.
Dustin Hoffman called it a fun production. “There was a lot of frivolity on the set,” he said.
But the crew’s disrespect wore on Schlesinger. It also presented a real concern: A union member couldn’t be fired for harassing a homosexual, regardless of his position on the film. Even worse, the British director could be sent home to England at any moment, since the U.S. Supreme Court had recently ruled in Boutilier v. Immigration and Naturalization Service that homosexuals were, indeed, “psychopathic,” and gay aliens were subject to deportation.
Schlesinger was afraid, but he acted fearlessly nonetheless. He further risked exposure by hiring boyfriend Michael Childers as his assistant on Midnight Cowboy.
Hellman approved the hire. “This is our picture,” he told Schlesinger. “Let’s ride this tiger. Let’s put Michael on the movie and fuck anyone who doesn’t like it.” According to Hellman, Schlesinger was “still taking pains to hide” his sexual orientation. “All of which changed during Midnight Cowboy,” he added. “During the filmmaking, I watched John unfold and come out and declare himself and take his place, and he became more expressive. Part of it was the result of falling in love with Michael, which hadn’t happened to John before.”
The reality of the crew’s homophobia, however, turned out to be every bit as bad as Schlesinger anticipated.
“The crew were these Irish and Italians from Long Island. They were a terrible old boys’ network,” said Childers. “You had to be a son or a nephew to get into the union, which was right-wing and horrible.” According to Schlesinger, the crew was bringing in its own equipment and robbing the production. The camera operators even wanted to be paid overtime for watching the rushes.
“It depressed me,” said Schlesinger, “and finally angered me considerably, because I didn’t think their work was of a high enough standard to warrant that kind of high-handed attitude.”
Then came the expected homophobia.
“The technicians were a tough New York group who regarded me with some suspicion. I think they thought we were making a sleazy film,” said Schlesinger.
Childers felt that the crew worked in a state of “total shock and disgust at the movie.” When they weren’t wishing out loud, saying, “We should be working on a Neil Simon picture,” they rubbed their beer guts and tsked, “We’ve never seen anything like this!”
What disgusted the crew is what attracted Dustin Hoffman to Midnight Cowboy. After his breakthrough film, The Graduate, Hoffman was looking for a role completely different, since he felt that many reviewers had pigeonholed him as “some nebbish Mike Nichols had found who was like Benjamin Braddock,” he said.
Nichols, for one, didn’t like the idea that his Benjamin would be playing a sexually ambivalent lowlife for his follow-up film. He even phoned Hoffman to voice his disapproval. “So I hear you’re going to do this thing, you’re going to play the male prostitute,” he said.
“No, no, I’m going to play the other role,” Hoffman replied.
Nichols couldn’t believe it—that Hoffman would settle for anything less than the starring role. “I made you a star, and you’re going to throw it all away?” Nichols asked. “You’re a leading man and now you’re going to play this? The Graduate was so clean, and this is so dirty.”
Dirty, of course, was the allure for Hoffman, who reveled in looking like a bum who walked with a bad limp and sounded as if he were ready to cough up blood. He even took Schlesinger on a tour of Forty-Second Street to let his director know how much he knew about people like Ratso Rizzo. The actor wanted to make his portrayal more cutting-edge than even Schlesinger desired—or knew he could get away with. Hoffman wanted to know, what exactly was Ratso Rizzo’s relationship with the cowboy hustler Joe Buck? They befriend each other on the mean streets of New York, then move into an abandoned building to weather the winter together. (That dank, ramshackle apartment was built on the tiny studios of Filmways in the Bronx.) One day, Schlesinger gave his two actors some direction. “All right, Dustin’s going to be on the floor and Voight’s going to be on the bed.”
But Hoffman wasn’t buying it. “We’re not just roommates, we’re lovers. Why aren’t we in bed together, they’re lovers.”
Schlesinger shook his head. “I’m sure they are, but you try and get this film financed.”
The topic made the actor wonder about his director’s own private life. One day, early in the production schedule, Hoffman asked Schlesinger, “Are you married? Do you have a girlfriend?”
“Oh no, no, no, dear boy,” Schlesinger replied.
“How come?”
“I just couldn’t bear the idea of waking up in the morning with a woman next to me.”
“I see,” said Hoffman. Years later, to Vanity Fair, the actor would comment on Schlesinger’s response as being “marvelously courageous.”
At the time, Michael Childers saw a different motivation in Hoffman’s questioning, one that had little to do with blind naïveté. “Dustin was prodding,” said Childers. “He knew me, and he knew John and I were living together. I was a friend of his ballet wife, Anne Byrne, whom I’d photographed. Dustin was trying to get John to admit he was a faggot.”
Schlesinger took a dim view of such provocations, and harbored a long-held theory about young male actors, who he believed were much vainer than their female counterparts. “They also like to create a stir around somebody they know to be gay, playing games with them, wanting me to in a way fall for them, which I certainly didn’t. I felt that I was being tested all the time,” he said.
The other actors in Midnight Cowboy were less challenging, but a challenge nonetheless.
Filming on Fifth Avenue, Schlesinger needed to see Jon Voight tail a prospective female client as the two of them passed a bank. “I wanted the bank vault to open, just as he was following a particular woman across the street. That’s all I was really concerned about—the cuing.” Schlesinger was ready to shoot the scene when Voight sent a message via one of the assistants, asking, “What is my motivation?” Schlesinger, stationed with the film crew farther up the street, sent back the reply: “A good fuck and plenty of dollars at the end of it.”
Then there was Brenda Vaccaro, who had agreed to play her sex scene with Voight in the nude. But after being cast, she had second thoughts about getting naked on camera. “In those days nobody did that. This was one of the first [American films] to do nudity,” Vaccaro said of Midnight Cowboy.
The actress had other problems, too. As she told costume designer Ann Roth, “Oh my God, I’m not thin, I’m not skinny, I don’t look gorgeous.”
Schlesinger thought she looked fine. He wanted her naked. “Oh, good God! Everybody thinks I’m doing a blue movie!” he exclaimed. For him, nudity wasn’t a big deal. He’d directed other actresses who’d performed without the protection of clothes. He told Vaccaro a story about shooting Darling: “Julie Christie wore these fucking pasties, and then in the middle of the scene she hated them, so she pulled them off.” Maybe Vaccaro would also have a similar change of mind once they started filming the scene. But she didn’t. Finally, “Well, do what you must,” he told her.
Voight consented to doing the sex scene in the nude. Almost. A flap of cloth covered his genitals and had to be glued on. “It was a mess,” said Childers.
Vaccaro played the scene wearing a fox fur, which was Roth’s solution to the problem. Schlesinger ended up loving the costume compromise. “Oh love. Fucked in fox!” he exclaimed. The scene required that Vaccaro’s character taunt Joe Buck for being gay when he couldn’t get an erection. Finally, tired of being called “gay,” the hustler character practically rapes his female client. Schlesinger hand-held the camera over Vaccaro’s face as she writhed to Joe Buck’s violent thrusts. “Come now, darling. Do it now. Come, darling,” he directed.
In a way, the gay-straight reversal that the scene depicted also played offscreen during the production when Schlesinger and his boyfriend got into a “tiff,” as Michael Childers described it. They’d rented a house at Fire Island Pines for the summer, but Childers was so angry about something his new boyfriend had done that he refused to go one weekend. Instead, Schlesinger took his photographer friend Joe Santorum and Viva. When Schlesinger returned Sunday night, Childers asked him, “So did you have a lovely time?”
Schlesinger laughed. “We all got stoned and I got so stoned I fucked Viva!”
“That’s the saddest thing I ever heard,” said Childers.
It did wonders for Schlesinger’s reputation on the set, however. Viva told everyone, “Absolutely one of the three best fucks I’ve ever had in my life!”
That veneer of heterosexual respectability faded as soon as Schlesinger came to what was called “the blowjob scene.” It elicited some of the more violent reactions from the crew, which had taken to calling Midnight Cowboy “this faggot film.” The blowjob scene marked Bob Balaban’s entrée to the movies. When his parents asked him about his momentous debut, the twenty-year-old actor told them it was only one scene, with Jon Voight. They’d heard of Voight, who’d appeared in an Off-Broadway revival of A View from the Bridge at around the time Balaban starred in You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown. Of course, they wanted to know all about their son’s scene in Midnight Cowboy with Voight.
“Well, it’s in a movie. We kind of meet in the bathroom,” he told them.
“Do you have many lines?” they asked.
“No, not many lines.”
“So it’s a walk-on?”
“Well, at least it’s with the star. I give him a blowjob.”
And there were other things that had not been seen or even suggested in a mainstream American movie. Although audiences who saw the finished film weren’t always sure what was going on in the film’s flashbacks, Childers offered a behind-the-scenes analysis of what Schlesinger and Waldo Salt intended and what the crew filmed:
“Joe, the cowboy, was abandoned by his mother and left with his grandmother, but she was a floozy and drinking Jack Daniel’s with another cowboy, and she gave [the young] Joe an enema, which carries over to Joe’s male fear of anal rape from this high school gang of four guys in a convertible who are cruising around looking for trouble and they find Joe with his girlfriend and they rape her and rape him anally,” Childers explained.
Those flashbacks were filmed at the end of production, after the cast and crew had finished with the New York City locations. Dustin Hoffman, Viva, and the other Warhol superstars had gone on to other pursuits by the time Schlesinger called “Action!” and Jon Voight went running down a Texas road to chase an ambulance. When they’d completed the shot, the actor found his director behind one of the trailers. Schlesinger was shaking uncontrollably. “What’s wrong?” Voight asked.
“What will they think of this?” Schlesinger asked. “It’s about a dishwasher who goes to New York to fuck a lot of women. What will they think?”
That fear didn’t let up all through the long, arduous editing process at the historic Brill Building, just north of Times Square. Next door, editors were working on Arthur Penn’s Alice’s Restaurant. The film adaptation of Arlo Guthrie’s song about avoiding the draft was Broadway producer Hillard Elkins’s first foray into the movies, and while he was still busy finishing up production on that movie, Elkins juggled his next venture: a new sex revue that Kenneth Tynan wanted him to produce. Elkins met Michael Childers, who made daily trips to the Brill Building to visit Schlesinger, and he asked if the young photographer was interested in meeting Tynan.
“I like your photography,” Elkins told him. “There might be something for you with this new show I’m doing with Tynan. It’s called Oh! Calcutta!”
AS HE CONTINUED TO recuperate at Columbus Hospital, Andy Warhol was both intrigued and stressed by reports regarding Midnight Cowboy. Maybe if he’d accepted John Schlesinger’s offer to play the underground filmmaker in the movie, then he, rather than Viva, would have been getting his silver wig coiffed. Instead, he’d been nearly murdered by Valerie Solanas.
Curiously, Viva was also having her own violent run-ins. At the closing-night party of the New York Film Festival that September, she found herself roughed up by security guards when they mistook her date’s dance moves for his simulating oral sex on her. Suddenly no one was safe, it seemed, in New York City. Until Andy Warhol’s near-death encounter with Solanas, the Midnight Cowboy party scene with its rape film sounded like something the king of pop art would have found fun. But now, sequestered away in a hospital bed for weeks, it bothered him that his whole persona, scene, shtick, and entourage of superstars were being used without any compensation to him.
“Why didn’t they give us the money?” he asked Paul Morrissey. “We would have done it so real for them.” Warhol meant the party, not the rape movie.
Ondine, who played the pope in Chelsea Girls, was one superstar who refused to appear in Midnight Cowboy, out of loyalty to Andy, whom he’d known for years, ever since they met at an orgy and Ondine asked Andy, an inveterate voyeur, to leave the premises if he wasn’t going to actively participate. Ondine wanted nothing to do with John Schlesinger or his big-budget movie. “How dare you accept the $25 a day in blood money to go and make fun of Andy? He’s the reason why you’re even here! Don’t you have any feelings?” said Ondine, unaware that the party extras in Schlesinger’s movie had actually been paid a hundred dollars a day.
Midnight Cowboy did give Warhol an idea, maybe even two ideas, if both of them didn’t originate with Morrissey. If Schlesinger was going to rip off their world, they could in turn appropriate his. Their cowboy movie, shot in January, still languished without a theater. Maybe if they called it Lonesome Cowboys it would be close enough to Schlesinger’s title to goose interest. And better yet, maybe they could make another film, one that would be a portrait of a male hustler, like Midnight Cowboy, and quickly get it into theaters to beat Schlesinger at his own game.
“I vaguely knew what they were doing with Midnight Cowboy,” said Morrissey. “When I had a chance to do Flesh, I thought, I’ll do something like Midnight Cowboy, but I didn’t know how Midnight Cowboy was handling the subject.”
Morrissey thought he had a new superstar in this kid who’d appeared briefly in Lonesome Cowboys. Joe Dallesandro wasn’t like the other superstars. He wasn’t weird or show-offy or even gay. In the following decade, the legendary film director George Cukor would say of him, “Joe Dallesandro does some enormously difficult things . . . like walking around in the nude in a completely unselfconscious way.”
In Morrissey’s Flesh, Dallesandro would be naked a lot in his role as a male prostitute whose bisexual wife needs him to earn two hundred dollars to pay for her girlfriend’s abortion. It wasn’t all acting for Dallesandro, who was raised in foster care after his mother went to the federal penitentiary for interstate auto theft and who supported himself for a time by posing nude for pseudo-gay publications like Athletic Model Guild.
Dallesandro was never a hustler. But he knew the modus operandi of those who did hustle. “When you’re young and beautiful, you do get a lot of propositions,” he told reporters. “I always said it wasn’t about a hustle. It was about how you got people who wanted to be a part of your life. The pay was that they became a part of your life, even if for a short time.”
In the hothouse world of the Factory, Dallesandro was a breath of heterosexual air but also someone who never denigrated the homosexuals who flocked around him. “If it hadn’t been for the gay men and how well they treated me, I would have killed somebody,” he claimed.
Dallesandro actually felt a little sorry for the drag queens that Morrissey cast as women in Flesh, men like Jackie Curtis and Candy Darling, who almost never appeared out of makeup. “I always felt that it is hard enough just wanting to be an actor or an actress,” he said. “What roles can these people do? They can only play a person in drag. For the moment that I had to be with them, why should I burst their bubble? They were women for that moment.”
Morrissey also cast a few real women as women in Flesh: Geraldine Smith as Joe’s bisexual wife, Patti D’Arbanville as her pregnant girlfriend, Geri Miller as a stripper, Jane Forth as a customer-wife who wants Joe to have sex with her husband. Dallesandro really wasn’t much of an actor, but his broad shoulders created a dramatic V shape that ended in a bubble butt in an age before gyms were as ubiquitous as Citibank branches and Starbucks. He also knew instinctively what not to do.
“Joe was not an improviser,” said Morrissey. “He was a quiet person, the eye of the storm, and this lunacy going on around him therefore became very dramatic.”
Andy Warhol described Dallesandro’s appeal even more succinctly. “Everybody loves Joe,” he said.
Sometimes it seemed everybody at the Factory wanted to see Joe naked. “There was always a reason to take my clothes off,” said Dallesandro. “I was very young. What are we doing? I was uncomfortable.”
Morrissey filmed Flesh over a period of six weekends at friends’ apartments in New York City. As with Chelsea Girls and the newly titled, and as yet unreleased, Lonesome Cowboys, Warhol gave Morrissey a budget of three thousand dollars, and he got every penny of it back in gossip from the set of Flesh.
Still stationed at Columbus Hospital, Andy broke out laughing when Geri Miller said how her striptease so turned Joe Dallesandro on that he got aroused and she tied a big bow around his erection. Of course, it was all improvised, like everything in the movie, and Morrissey obliged by keeping the camera running.
True to plan, Warhol and Morrissey opened their Flesh that autumn at the Garrick Theatre while John Schlesinger continued to edit and fret over Midnight Cowboy. The little picture did very well for itself, playing the Garrick for seven months and grossing an average of $2,000 a week on its $3,000 budget. Where Chelsea Girls offered a couple of seconds of flaccid penis, Flesh gave audiences a few minutes to inspect Dallesandro’s erection, as well as many more minutes of his bare buttocks. Morrissey was surprised that the erection footage didn’t cause censorship problems; maybe it even disappointed him. At his urging, friends phoned the police to complain.
“He’d have these plants go in and do this. It was just to get all this publicity and coverage, and it worked,” said Dallesandro, who never quite understood all the commotion. “I was pretty amazed, because I couldn’t sit and watch it,” he said of the finished film.
Like Dallesandro, Morrissey was an odd bird in the Warhol menagerie—but for different reasons. Like Warhol and Viva, he was raised Catholic and proud of it. His conservatism, however, extended beyond mere religious practice, and the Factory stalwarts alternately described him as “a real nine-to-fiver” and “a very typical young man in a hurry.”
More important, he also didn’t do drugs. Ever. And not only didn’t he do drugs, but he railed against them. “Think of the millions of kids who must have died from drugs in the United States. I never knew anybody who had a relative in the Vietnam War. Yet all those hippies who were screaming against the war were hypocrites,” he used to say. “Don’t let the children be killed by war, but if they’re killed by drugs, it’s OK. The priorities are a bit strange.”
Regarding the abundance of sex and drugs in Flesh, he didn’t see a contradiction. Morrissey insisted, “I was making fun of people who accepted the hippie life of sex and drugs and rock ’n’ roll.”