Edie (31 page)

Andy can’t be alone. That’s what the Factory was really about . . . providing a baffle of friends.

DANNY FIELDS
 There was always a pecking order: who in those caravans of cars went in the car with Andy. There was always the immediate circle—the prime ministers. In Edie’s time it was Chuck Wein. Whatever boy Andy was in love with, whatever superstar women were most in the limelight. Perhaps one new beauty being looked over, someone very young and innocent. No blacks, they weren’t hip enough. A group of boys from the Cuban aristocracy—a bunch of them were discovered in Central Park. It was certainly Action Central. Whoever was supposed to be hot shit could come in. The Duchess of Rothschild would come trotting through with all these fabulous people, the rich, the beautiful, the foreign stars, reporters.

The major figures were all vying for Andy’s affection: who was going to be the beloved object. There was always trouble between the competitors. Andy loved this stuff. It was like a gladiatorial contest. He’d just lick his chops and sit back and watch these people have at each other and pretend he didn’t know anything about it. He would let them crawl all over each other’s egos and bodies and reputations to get closer to him. Quite a collection.

BILLY NAME
 People would ask me what my name was and semi-facetiously I would say my name is Name. I thought it was cute and rd never seen anyone use the name Name for a name. I used to think like that; I would have these spontaneous original ideas.

I was working as a lighting designer off-Broadway and I had an apartment on East Seventh Street. I used to cut all my friends’ hair. These hair-cutting sessions turned into hair-cutting parties. Everybody would crowd in and have a great time. I had covered the entire apartment with silver foil; I had some spotlights up. It just looked very cool to me. Andy came once and he asked if I would do the decor for his new studio, the Factory, just the way I had done my apartment.

It took me so long to do the Factory that I just stayed there. I converted one of the two toilets into a darkroom. I slept on the floor. We had sofas and furniture at the Factory, but I was a very erratic person, not terribly conventional. I wasn’t used to sleeping in bed.

PAUL MORRISSEY
 Billy Name. Such a curious person. He lived in a toilet for four years, a black-painted toilet with no real light inside. He sat in there reading mystical texts and the cabala, things like that. He almost became a leper—totally caked with sores because of a lack of light and vitamins. He was a good photographer because he had a kind of great sensibility. He’d been in the toilet for so long! He’d only come out very late at night so nobody would see him. Every now and then people would get a peek at him. Somebody would say, 1 saw Billy Name. He was coming out of the toilet I” I would complain, “Andy, he’s going to die in there, and the papers are going to say:
ANDY WARHOL LOCKS MAN IN TOILET FIVE YEARS.”
 Poor Andy sort Of inherited him.

ONDINE
 When Billy left the Factory, his mother put him into a retreat, Graymore or someplace like that, for about a week. He was working out there when they asked him to paint a fence. He stopped in the middle of it, because he didn’t know whether the fence wanted to be painted or not. So he couldn’t do it. There are certain
issues
for him. He was possessed by lesser spirits, spirits of the earth. You could hear them, you could hear them raging through his body. His eyes turned yellow; his hair was growing in concentric circles; he was getting scabs on his face; his fingernails grew. There was some kind of fire going on in Billy’s brain. Even his involvement with the Factory finally ended. A note turned up in the back room: “I am fine. Goodbye.”

DANNY FIELDS
 Then there was Gerard Malanga with his bullwhip. Whenever we went to a poetry reading, there would be Gerard with his bullwhip wrapped around his arm. People only knew of Gerard as Andy’s assistant. He was a poor Italian boy from the Bronx who grew up with his own fantasies of possessing the social life and beautiful girls and rich women who were socially above him. Finally, he had access to them.

Andy was very hung up on Gerard and dependent on him. He was certainly the Prime Minister for a long time. Gerard was it, and he was very jealous of anybody who came around.

ISABEL EBERSTADT
 Gerard Malanga hung on by his fingernails. He was a very tenacious character for many years. He really served Andy very well. He was more usable in the end than almost anyone. He had inestimable virtues as a pornographic star, being constantly ready for action of any sort. He had a certain style and taste, he wasn’t a bad writer, so he was a perfect lieutenant. It was just that Andy couldn’t bear having anyone around too long.

ONDINE
 Andy and Gerard would have their fights because Gerard hadn’t painted the silk screen or because he was being lazy. Andy’d say: “Gerard! I’m sick of you laying in bed. I’m not paying you a dollar and twenty cents an hour for nothing!”

GERARD MALANGA
 Andy and I worked on a lot of major artworks together, major in the sense of size because it took more than one person to work on a huge canvas to make a silk screen. I gave Andy some ideas for certain canvases and regarding the processing. On the Elvis Presley silk screens the image appears slightly imposed over itself, maybe three or four times. That was an idea I picked up from a photographic process and introduced to Andy. I gave it a sort of psychedelic strobe effect by shifting the silk screen over just a little bit and screening again so that the second time it would be superimposed over the first, and then doing that again for a third and maybe a fourth time. Cecil Beaton had done something like that in one of his early photograph books—a kind of trick stop-motion effect.

Andy got his subjects from all over. He had a friend who worked for a girlie magazine that had gone out of business. He gave Andy his complete file of what were actually UPI photographs—eight-by-ten glossies. A lot of Andy’s work came out of that file—the Marilyn Monroe portrait, the disaster series, the electric chair. I found his cow on the corner of Seventh and Twenty-third Street in a bookstore which burned down some time back. It was in one of those trade books for farmers with pictures of agricultural equipment and new ways of milking cows. I figured Andy wanted a sweet-looking cow, and I found one in there.

He found his famous flowers in a botanical catalogue. He said, “Here, get this made into a silk screen.” A woman recognized her photograph of the poppies and felt she deserved something from him. I could understand her feelings about the matter. It was years before the whole thing was settled out of court.

Andy on the Factory couch

Billy Name cutting Edie’s hair on the Factory fire escape, with Ondine tape-recording

ISABEL EBERSTADT
 When I first knew Andy they were working on the Marilyn Monroes. Malanga and Billy Name did most of the work. Cutting things. Placing the screens. Andy would walk along the rows and ask, “What color do you think would be nice?”

ONDINE
 How he made those paintings was so helter-skelter. Do you remember Harriet Teacher? She was one of the queens of the avant-garde. Very weird girl. Very small. Intense. Controlled. She always had a dog with her—a huge dog named Carmen Miranda. One day she came up to the Factory with Carmen Miranda and asked Andy if he would mind if she shot his Marilyn Monroe paintings. He said no, it was okay.

There were about seven Monroe canvases stacked one against the other on the floor. Harriet put on a pair of white gloves, took a pistol out of her motorcycle jacket, aimed it at the middle of Marilyn Monroe’s forehead—standing about fifty feet away—and shot a hole through all those canvases. Right in the middle of the temple. Perfectly on target. Lots of people were watching . . . Billy Name, Morrissey, Warhol . . . no one could believe it. It was a small, beautiful German pistol; it was just lovely. After she’d fired it, she said, “Thank you,” and sat down. Warhol came over to Name and me and he said, “I didn’t think she’d do it. My God!” After a while Harriet left with Carmen Miranda. She put the white gloves in the pockets of her motorcycle jacket. She was very neat about the whole thing.

Marilyn Monroe looked marvelous after she’d been shot. Just beautiful. The holes in all the heads were clean. Real clean. Andy sold them, of course. There’s nothing he doesn’t sell.

DANNY FIELDS
 Ondine was around a lot at this period, always ready for some Factory party with the cowboy hat and the vinyl boots. Ondine? A brilliant actor-comedian. Very brilliant. From Queens or Brooklyn; he’s from an Italian family, a doting mother. He was one of the first great Mole People—those who moved through a transitional stage from beatnik into a more stylized and campy version. We called them Mole People because they only seemed to come out at night; they all wore black—black turtlenecks, pants. Some leather. Their skins were light, and they were very intense. A lot of them were into dance. A sort of severe kind of New York nighttime creative craziness. Ondine came out of that.

It was the violent speed era, and people could fly off the handle at anything. They were into intense paranoia and could easily strike. Violent people. A lot of them died young: they jumped off roofs, or slit their throats; cracked up cars and motorcycles.

Andy used Ondine as the Pope in
Chelsea Girls.
I gave him his name—Pope—because to me he was very regal, always in command, a very high authority. He had his ups and downs. Later on, Andy helped him get this job at Carnegie Tech. He’s very together now. He’s mellowed out. Drinks a little bit, but no more speed.

ONDINE
 I’m called Ondine after the character in the Giraudoux play. I came out of the water one day at Riis Park with seashells on, and they called me Ondine.

The first time I met Warhol I had him thrown out of an apartment. I said, “I do not want this voyeur in here.” He looked like a gray specter. I didn’t give a good goddam who he was. There were the beginnings of an orgy and he was staring. What does Warhol stare at? He stares at the world. But that night he was staring at what was starting and I just thought that was unfair: there was a certain look in his eye; it wasn’t wonder, or wanting to get involved, or not being able to be involved . . . he was just
watching
with this watching eye, and I said, “Get him out of here, man. I don’t want to see him I He’s putting a damper on the whole party.” They got rid of him. That made him love me in a strange way. I had put my foot down.

I was the Pope in
Chelsea Girls
when Andy had reached his golden throne, when he had absolutely a halo. People recognized me from the film. They’d walk up to me on the street and say, “Hiya, Pope!” Just anybody. I mean, four Negroes in the subway. “Hiya, Pope!”

DANNY FIELDS
 The other noted figure at the Factory from Harvard was Chuck Wein. He represented Edie’s past and present somewhat the way Andy represented her future. They both resented that they weren’t more of the other. Andy wanted to be in her immediate past, her rich, powerful, Waspy past, and Chuck wanted to be a part of her future. They fought for her soul and her loyalty and her attention. She turned more and more to Andy because he moved in the New York circle, and away from Chuck, who represented Cambridge and that crowd. But Chuck, though transitional, was not to be overlooked. He was very powerful within the structure of the Factory itself—the prime minister. He had walked around the world to see the bottom of volcanoes; he was mystical and talked about extraterrestrial beings and astral parapsychology and synchronicity and vortexes. A snow job I But he was really good at it—smart, magnetic, and very sexy. He thought of Edie as a Trilby kind of creation; he was going to be her von Sternberg. But I’m sure he was in love with her. He needed her as much as she needed him.