Anno Dracula (72 page)

In his fascination with the undead, Andy was in the avant-garde. There were still very few vampires in America, and those American-born or -made tended to flee to a more congenial Europe. There was a vampire panic in the wake of the First World War, as returning veterans brought back the tainted bloodline that burned out in the epidemic of 1919. The lost generation new-borns, who all incubated within their bodies a burning disease that ate them up from the inside within months, were ghastly proof that vampires would never ‘take’ in the New World. Congress passed acts against the spread of vampirism save under impossibly regulated circumstances. J. Edgar Hoover ranked vampires just below communists and well above organised crime as a threat to the American way of life. In the 1930s, New York District Attorney Thomas Dewey led a crusade against an influx of Italian vampires, successfully deporting coven-leader Niccolo Cavalanti and his acolytes. In the South, a resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan viciously curbed a potential renaissance of interlocked vampire
hounforts
in New Orleans and throughout the bayou country.

America, like Julia Warhola, considered all vampires loathsome monsters. Yet, as Andy understood, there was a dreadful glamour. During the Depression, glimpses of the high life lived in another continent and by another species, seemed enticing. The Hungarian Paul Lukas was the first Hollywood actor to specialise in undead roles, from
Scaface
(1932) to
The House of Ruthven
(1937). A few real vampires, even, made it in the movies: Garbo, Malakai, Chevalier Futaine.

With the rise of fascism and the Second World War came a trickle of vampire refugees from the Old World. Laws were revised and certain practices tolerated ‘for the duration’, while Hoover’s FBI - constantly nagged by America’s witch-hunters Cardinal Spellman and Father Coughlin - compiled foot-thick dossiers on elders and new-borns alike. As Nazi eugenicists strived to cleanse his bloodline from the Reich, Dracula himself aligned with the Allies, and a vampire underground in occupied Europe co-operated with the liberating forces.

When the War was over, the climate changed again and a round of blacklistings, arrests and show-trials - notably the prosecution for treason of American-born and -made vampire Benjamin Lathem by Robert F. Kennedy - drove all but those who could ‘pass for warm’ back to Europe. That was the era of the scare movies, with homburg-hatted government men taking crucifix and stake to swarthy, foreign infiltrators:
I Married a Vampire
(1950),
I Was a Vampire for the FBI
(1951),
Blood of Dracula
(1958). Warhol was in New York by now, sketching shoes for ad lay-outs or arranging window displays for Bonwit Teller & Co, making a hundred thousand dollars a year but fretting that he wasn’t taken seriously. Money wasn’t enough for him; he needed to be famous too, as if under the curse described by Fritz Leiber in his short story ‘The Casket Demon’ (1963) - unless known of and talked about, he would fade to nothingness. Like America, he had not outgrown his vampire craze, just learned to keep quiet about it.

In 1956, the year
Around the World in 80 Days
took the Best Picture Oscar, Andy took an extended trip with the frustratingly unforthcoming Charles Lisanby -Hawaii, Japan, India, Egypt, Rome, Paris, London. Throughout that itinerary, he saw vampires living openly, mingling with the warm, as adored as they were feared. Is it too much to suppose that, in a maharajah’s palace or on a Nile paddle-wheeler, spurned by Charles and driven to abase himself before some exotic personage, he was bitten?

Vampires show up in the 1950s fashion drawings, if only through coded symbols: ragged-edged batwing cloaks draped over angular figures; red lipstick mouths on sharp-cheeked black and white faces; tiny, almost unnoticeable, fangs peeping from stretched smiles. These in-jokes are self-criticism, a nervous admission of what had to happen next. To become ‘Andy Warhol’, the illustrator and window-dresser must die and be reborn as an Artist. Those who accuse him of being concerned only with his earnings - which, to be fair, is what he told anyone who would listen - forget that he abandoned a considerable income to devote all his energies to work which initially lost a lot of money.

Shortly before the Coca-Cola Bottle and Campbell’s Soup Can series made him famous, and in a period when he feared he had recovered from one ‘nervous breakdown’ only to be slipping into another, Warhol did a painting - synthetic polymer and crayon on canvas - of ‘
Batman’
(1960), the only vampire ever really to be embraced by America. Though justifiably eclipsed by Lichtenstein’s appropriations from comic strip panels, ‘
Batman
’ is an important work in its own right, an idea seized but abandoned half-finished, the first flash of what would soon come to be called Pop Art. Like much from the period before Warhol hit upon repetition and manufacture as modes of expression, it seems incomplete, childish crayon scribbles across the cowled Bob Kane outline of the classic vampire vigilante. Exhibited at the Castelli Gallery, the work was the first Warhol piece to command a serious price from a private collector -an anonymous buyer on behalf of the Wayne Foundation - which may have encouraged the artist to continue with his personal work.

During an explosion of creativity that began in 1962 and lasted at least until he was shot, Warhol took a lease on a former hat works at 231 East 47th Street and turned the loft space into the Factory, with the intention of producing art on a production line. At the suggestion of assistant Nathan Gluck, Warhol seized upon the silkscreen process and (‘like a forger’) turned out series of dollar bills, soup cans and Marilyn Monroes. It seemed that he didn’t care what his subjects were, so long as they were famous.

When Henry Geldzahler, assistant curator for 20th Century American Art at the Metropolitan Museum, told him he should apply himself to more ‘serious’ subjects, Warhol began his ‘death and disaster’ series: images of car crashes, suicides and the electric chair. Straddling the trivial and the serious are his vampire portraits:
Carmilla Karnstein
(1962),
Vampire Doll
(1963),
Lucy Westenra
(1963). Red-eyed and jagged-mouthed undead faces, reproduced in sheets like unperforated stamps, vivid greens and oranges for skin-tones, the series reinvents the nineteenth century genre of vampire portraiture. The vampire subjects Andy chose shared one thing: all had been famously destroyed. He produced parallel silkscreens of their true deaths: impalements, decapitations, disintegrations. These are perhaps the first great works, ruined corpses swimming in scarlet blood, untenanted bodies torn apart by grim puritans.

In 1964, Andy delivered a twenty-by-twenty black and white mural called ‘Thirteen Vampires’ to the American pavilion at the New York World’s Fair, where it was to be exhibited beside work by Robert Rauschenberg and Roy Lichtenstein. Among the thirteen, naturally, was Warhol’s first Dracula portrait, though all the other undead notables represented were women. The architect Philip Johnson, who had commissioned the piece, informed Warhol that word had come from the Governor that it was to be removed because there was concern that it was offensive to the God-fearing.

When Warhol’s suggestion that the portraits all be defaced with burning crosses to symbolise the triumph of the Godly was vetoed, he went out to the fair with Geldzahler and another of his assistants, Gerard Malanga, and painted the mural over with a thick layer of undead-banishing silver paint, declaring, ‘And that’ll be my art.’ We can only speculate about that lost Dracula portrait, which none of the few who saw it can describe in detail. Which of the many, many images of the King of the Vampires - then, truly dead for only five years -did Warhol reproduce? The most tantalising suggestion, based on Malanga’s later-retracted version, is that for the only time in his entire career as an artist, Warhol drew on his own imagination rather than copied or reproduced from life. Andy lied constantly, but this is the only occasion when anyone has ever accused him of
making something up.

Warhol’s first experiments with film, conducted in real-time with the co-opted collaboration of whoever happened to be hanging about in the Factory, are steeped in the atmosphere of vampirism. The camera hovers over the exposed throat of John Giorno in
Sleep
(1963) as if ready to pounce. The projection of film shot at twenty-four frames per second at the silent speed of sixteen frames per second gives Giorno’s six-hour night a suggestion of vampire lassitude. The flashes of white leader that mark the change of shots turn dirty sheets into white coffin plush, and the death rattle of the projector is the only soundtrack (aside from the comical yawns and angry ticket-money-back demands of any audience members happening upon the film in a real theatre).

That same year, Warhol shot more explicit studies of vampirism: in
Kiss,
a succession of couples osculate like insects unable to uncouple their complex mouth-parts; in
Eat
, Robert Indiana crams his mouth with unidentifiable meats; and
Suck Job
is an extended (thirty minutes) close-up of the face of a young man who is being nibbled by beings who never intrude into the frame or register on film. For
Suck Job
, Warhol had arranged with Stefan Grlsc, a real vampire, to ‘appear’ but Grlsc didn’t take him seriously and failed to show up at the Factory for the shoot, forcing the artist to substitute pasty-faced but warm hustlers dragged off the street.

When Warhol turned his camera on the Empire State Building in
Empire
(1964), it saw the edifice first as the largest coffin in the world, jutting out of the ground as if dislodged by seismic activity. As night slowly falls and the floodlights come on, the building becomes a cloaked predator standing colossal over New York City, shoulders sloped by the years, head sprouting a dirigible-mast horn. After that, Warhol had fellow underground filmmaker Jack Smith swish a cape over Baby Jane Hudson in the now-lost
Batman Dracula
(1964). Only tantalising stills of Smith with a mouthful of plastic teeth and staring Lon Chaney eyes, remain of this film, which - as with the silver-coated ‘Thirteen Vampires’ - is perhaps as Andy wanted it. As with
Sleep
and
Empire,
the idea is more important than the artefact. It is enough that the films exist; they are not meant actually to be seen all the way through. When Jonas Mekas scheduled
Empire
at the Filmmakers’ Co-Op in 1965, he lured Warhol into the screening room and tied him securely to one of the seats with stout rope, intent on forcing the creator to sit through his creation. When he came back two hours later to check up on him, he found Warhol had chewed through his bonds - briefly, an incarnation of Batman Dracula - and escaped into the night. In the early sixties, Warhol had begun to file his teeth, sharpening them to piranha-like needle-points.

From 1964 to 1968, Andy abandoned painting - if silkscreen can be called that - in favour of film. Some have suggested that works like
Couch
(1964) or
The Thirteen Most Beautiful Boys
(1965) are just portraits that move; certainly, more people caught them as an ambient backdrop to the Exploding Plastic Inevitable than endured them reverentially at the Co-Op.
Movies,
not films, they were supposed to play to audiences too busy dancing or speeding or covering their bleeding ears to pay the sort of attention demanded by Hollywood narrative.

By now, ‘Andy’s vampire movies’ had gone beyond a standing joke -
Eight hours of the Empire State Building!!
- and were taken seriously by genuine underground filmmakers like Stan Brakhage (who considered silent speed the stroke of genius). The Filmmakers’ Co-Op regularly scheduled ‘Warhol Festivals’ and word got out that the films were, well,
dirty,
which - of course - pulled in audiences.
Suck Job
was about as close to vampirism as even the most extreme New York audiences had seen, even if it was silent, black-and-white and slightly out of focus. Isabelle Dufresne, later the supervamp Ultra Violet, saw
Suck Job
projected on a sheet at the Factory, and understood at once the strategy of incompletion, whereby the meat of the matter was beyond the frame. In
Dead for Fifteen Minutes: My Years With Andy Warhol
(1988), Ultra Violet writes: ‘Although my eyes remain focused on the face of the young man receiving the suck job, my attention is constantly drawn to the empty space on the sheet below the screen. I am being visually assaulted and insulted at the same time. It is unnerving: I want to get up and seize the camera and focus it downward to capture the action. But I can’t, and that’s where the frustration comes in.’

Ultra Violet also reports that during that screening some Factory hangers-on present relieved the frustration by nibbling each other, drawing squeals of pain and streaks of quick-drying blood. Such tentative pretend-vampirism was common among the Mole People, the night-time characters Andy gathered to help make ‘his’ movies and turned into his private coven in the back room of Max’s Kansas City nightclub.

With no genuine undead available, Andy made do with self-made supervamps, who showed up on film if not at rehearsals: Pope Ondine (who drew real blood), Brigid (Berlin) Polk, Baby Jane Hudson (who had once been a real-live movie star), Gerald Malanga’s muse Mary Woronov, Carmillo Karnstein, Ingrid Supervamp. Brian Stableford would later coin the term ‘lifestyle fantasists’ for these people and their modern avatars, the goth murgatroyds. Like Andy, the Mole People already lived like vampires: shunning daylight, speeding all night, filing their teeth, developing pasty complexions, sampling each other’s drug-laced blood.

The butcher’s bill came in early. The dancer Freddie Herko, who appears in
Kiss
(1963) and
Dance Movie/Roller Skates
(1963), read in Montague Summers’
The Vampire: His Kith and Kin
(1928) that those who committed suicide spectacularly enough ‘without fear’ were reborn as ‘powerful vampires’. Just before Hallowe’en 1964, Herko danced across a friend’s Greenwich Village apartment, trailing a ten-foot Batman/Dracula cloak, and sailed elegantly out of a fifth-floor window. Having skim-read the Summers and not bothered to form a Pact with the Devil, an essential part of the immortality-through-self-slaughter gambit, Herko did not rise from the dead.