POPism by Andy Warhol, Pat Hackett Read Free Book Online Page B

to people on the Bowery—and Larry Rivers played a railroad guy, and Ginsberg and Corso were in there, and Delphine Seyrig was incredibly beautiful in it with the American flag blowing over her. Kerouac was at this dubbing session, claiming he spoke French fluently, but when he began to speak it you could hear his Massachusetts accent—
“Ju swee Jacques Ker-ou-ac”
—and then something about his family being French nobility in the fourteenth century,which had nothing to do with this movie on the Bowery, of course, so it was very funny.
    I went out to Old Lyme, Connecticut, a lot of weekends that summer. Wynn Chamberlain was renting the guest house on Eleanor Ward’s property and he had gangs of his friends out there the whole time. Once, Eleanor visited the guest house and got really, really upset when Taylor Mead came into the living room dressed up in drag and announced to her, “I’m Eleanor Ward. Who are
you?
”
    Jack Smith was filming a lot out there, and I picked something up from him for my own movies—the way he used anyone who happened to be around that day, and also how he just kept shooting until the actors got bored. People would ask him what the movie was about and he would say things that sounded like a takeoff on the “mad artist”—“The appeal of an underground movie is not to the understanding!”
    He would spend years filming a movie and then he’d edit it for years. The preparations for every shooting were like a party—hours and hours of people putting makeup on and getting into costumes and building sets. One weekend he had everyone making a birthday cake the size of a room as a prop for his movie
Normal Love
.
    The second thing I ever shot with a 16-mm camera was a little newsreel of the people out there filming for Jack.
    He was also an actor in other people’s underground movies. He said that he did it for the therapy, because he couldn’t afford “professional help,” and that wasn’t it brave of him to take psychoanalysis in such a public way.
    Jack played the title role in
Dracula
, a movie I shot later in the year. He really got into the part. He claimed that as he puthis makeup on, he was slowly transforming himself, letting his soul pass out through his eyes into the mirror and back into him as Dracula, and he had this theory about how everyone was “vampirical” to a certain extent because they “made unreasonable demands.” The filming went on for months. I remember one scene where my first female superstar, Naomi Levine, was sleeping on a bed and Jack was out on the balcony. He was supposed to sneak in, go over to the bed, and do some little thing—eat a peach or bite into a grape, I can’t remember exactly. David Bourdon was in the scene, and Sam Green, the art dealer, and Mario Montez, who’d just come back from a fashion session somewhere, and Gregory Battcock, the art and film critic, who was in a sailor suit; and they were the four human bedposts holding the canopy up over this bed. I was shooting with my Bolex, little three-minute reels, and everyone was going crazy because we had to shoot the scene over and over because Jack just couldn’t do it: he was so disoriented that his sense of timing was gone, and he just could not figure out how to get from the balcony over to the bed in three minutes. The farthest he ever got was two feet from the pillow.
    Since there were usually as many as forty people out in Old Lyme every weekend, there were never enough beds; but most of the guests didn’t sleep anyway. I was awake a lot myself—I’d started taking a fourth of a diet pill a day (Obetrol) that winter after I saw a picture of myself in a magazine where I looked really fat. (I did like to eat a lot—candy and very rare meat. I loved them both. Some days I’d just eat one or the other all day long.) And now, because I was awake so much, I started having