Edie (33 page)

PAUL AMERICA
 I met Edie Sedgwick at a discotheque called On-dine. It was my first night in New York, actually. A friend of mine had told me to meet him there. I only had two dollars, and the drinks cost two something. So I was waiting at the bar for my friend, realizing my time was short. He turned up and asked me to sit with everybody in the back—Chuck Wein and Andy and Edie; they were having a dinner party because Edie had been on the Johnny Carson show that night. When they went back to the Factory, I went with them, and I stayed for three years. Most people didn’t know I lived there, because I was taking speed—I figured if I took speed, I wouldn’t be paranoid—and I only slept about twice or three times a year. If I felt I needed rest, I’d take a bus somewhere. I would sit down for a few hours. That was enough rest. I’d go up to the Cloisters or down to the Staten Island ferry. Sitting up was more comfortable than lying down. So I’d just sit. It was restful to be in one position knowing I wouldn’t have to move right away.

I put together a motorcycle for Andy. He gave me that name, Paul America. When he gave me the name, I figured it was all right. Except I went through a period of paranoia about it. I mean, every time I saw that word—and it’s everywhere—I related it to
myself.
The country’s problems were
my
problems. I think that if I weren’t called Paul America it would have been easier for me to register in hotels. Most of the time the desk clerks said, “Okay, Mr. America.”

Andy was very secluded. He would come into the Factory and stand off by himself. Sometimes I would go up to him and suggest something that we could do, and he would listen very nicely and ask Gerard to give me his reply. It was pretty strange. He wouldn’t talk with me directly. He looked down on me, I guess. Took me for a fool, which I guess is what a lot of people do. Andy didn’t dig me at the time. Like, every time I opened my mouth he made me feel paranoid. So I laid back. I said, “Go on, you fool,” and I would just sit and watch when I could have helped him a good deal.

HENRY GELDZAHLER
 Paul America was a wasted creature after they had finished with him. They finally washed their hands of him and let him float away. He’s a poor burned-out thing living in a commune in Indiana and trying to pull himself together. Not long ago I sent him a check for two hundred dollars and I got back a big package which looked like a small coffin, about four feet by two feet by two feet. When I opened it, I discovered the cast off his leg. He’d broken it falling out of a tree, or sliding in the snow. It was sort of off-white
and covered with writing which I didn’t read. I opened and closed it and it’s in the back there. I don’t think I’ll ever open it again. I don’t know exactly how to throw it away. It looks like part of somebody, and I’m afraid if I throw it away I’ll be arrested. It’s like the Australian joke about a boomerang: How do you throw it away?

DANNY FIELDS
 No one ever wasted Paul Morrissey! Incredible eye and sense of satire. When he starts carrying on, everything in sight gets knocked down. He is an excellent filmmaker.

VIVA
 Everyone at the Factory was constantly speculating on Paul Morrissey’s sex life. He played the male role of the Virgin Mary in the theological hierarchy, with Andy going as God the Father, and Billy Name as God the Holy Ghost; I never decided who played God the Son.

ONDINE
 Paul Morrissey was the first person to say
outright
to Warhol: “I am your disciple.” Nobody else involved with Warhol would think of saying it that way because Andy was the
queen
of passivity . . . the absolute son of non-existence. He was just divinely not there. Morrissey sold him a bI’ll of goods . . . this commercial shit.

VIVA
 Paul was a real nine-to-fiver—the only one. He wanted to make money, be commercial. He dealt with the press. Paul could deal with everybody. He was quick . . . very quick. That was it. There was nobody else. So he got rid of anyone who was unfashionable or uncommercial. Gerard discovered him, but he says now, “I brought that viper in.”

GERARD MALANGA
 Originally we thought Paul Morrissey could be kind of useful to Andy on a technical level, but he rose very quickly. He became a sort of hatchet man . . . great charm and quite humorous, but from the beginning I think he was maneuvering to get Chuck Wein out of the way. I know one thing that Paul hated was when Chuck put LSD in all the omelets and scrambled eggs after we’d shot
My Hustler.
It was Paul’s first film. Chuck didn’t tell anyone until after we ate the eggs. We were out there on location on Fire Island. A huge vat of scrambled eggs. Paul to this day wI’ll deny getting high on LSD. But he was found under the boardwalk curled up in a fetal position. Andy would also probably deny being high on LSD, yet I found him at six in the morning rummaging through the garbage cans. I asked, “What are you doing?” He said, “I’m looking for something.”

Ondine and Andy

Graffiti in the Factory bathroom

DANNY FIELDS
 Brigid Berlin was another extraordinary part of what was happening in New York in the early Sixties. I hope she gets recognized for the great artist she is. She and her sister, Richie, are the daughters of the Richard Berlins, he was the head of the Hearst Publication empire. Brigid was into all sorts of things—she was into trip books.

Trip books were a big thing. You worked on them when you were on amphetamines. You’d fI’ll in the blank pages. Sometimes you’d get a friend to do a page, or you’d fiddle around—little poems, decorations. Each page was a trip. Beautiful drawings. A collage of photographs from the
National Geographic.
A piece of cotton pasted in. Somebody’s pubic hair. Toothpicks. Spangles. Blotches of color. The books got so fat they wouldn’t close.

MARIO AMAYA
 Andy himself was keeping a record book back in the late Fifties. They were drawings of cocks. He did a foot book, too. In ’68 or ’69 he was doing Polaroid shots of all his friends’ penises. He asked me if I would expose myself and he did a Polaroid shot.

KENNETH JAY LANE
 He did both my cock and my feet. One day after work he came over for tea. He told me, “Oh, I saw Diana Vreeland today. I went up to her on the street and said, ‘Mrs. Vreeland, can I draw your feet?’ She said, ‘Oh, Andy, how are you?’ I said, ‘Can I draw your feet, Mrs. Vreeland?’ She said, ‘Oh, Andy, you don’t want to draw my feet. They’re too small!’”

ANDREAS BROWN
 One night I went out for dinner with a girl friend of mine to a restaurant in the Village. Andy came in with an entourage of ten or twelve people for dinner, Brigid Berlin among them. They sent over a bottle of wine and we sent back a thank-you note. Brigid came over to the table and asked us to autograph one of her famous trip books, her scar book . . . that is to say she wanted to make an impression of any scars my girl and I might have with an ink pad and then transfer them to her book, where we’d sign our names and explain how we got the scars. Communication between the two tables was established. Andy suggested that maybe we’d like to come to a little party they were all. going to for drinks. We went along. A television set was turned on in the living room. Drinks were served. Then people slowly began to disappear into the back room. Andy got his Polaroid out and began taking pictures of people carrying
on sexually back there. It started off with people running around in the nude, but eventually it began to progress. We were encouraged either to participate or just come on in and observe. Andy was in no way participating or showing any enthusiasm; it was almost as if he were bored. He was taking photographs and sort of nodding . . . encouraging the thing to go on, and all the time observing the degree of participation and interest of all those around. Andy was being a cool, detached, aloof observer. But at the same time, he was the ultimate instigator, the person who really held the party together. Without Andy you wouldn’t have had the floating crap game moving from the Factory to the restaurant to the apartment and to the back bedroom. So he was the Big Director in the Sky in one sense: moving everyone around on the set.

TRUMAN CAPOTE
 Actually, if I had to Make A really good guess, I’d say that his thing is being a voyeur. He’s very interested in pornography. I know he has a big collection because he trades—like kids who trade bubble gum cards—with someone I know who has a truly great collection which I’ve seen part of: it would take a month and a half to see it all. I know one of the things the two collect are photographs of famous people in the nude, which isn’t exactly pornography, but they do a lot of trading in that. I’ve seen one collection of these—an album of famous people—and it’s rather amusing because they’re mostly taken of people who didn’t know they were being photographed . . . like in locker rooms.

DANNY FIELDS
 Brigid Berlin was into a whole series of themes with her trip books—her cock books, which had impressions of outlines of people’s cocks on the page, her belly-button books, her scar books. Really incredible! Many people contributed because she asked
everyone
, even her parents’ friends, so that in her trip book she had contributions from J. Edgar Hoover and the Duke of Windsor—not the imprints of their cocks, for God’s sake, but J. Edgar Hoover’s Christmas card, for example, and a note from the Duchess of Windsor to Brigid’s mother.

Brigid was also into tapes—taping orgies and taping herself fucking and other people fucking and stuff like that. Very big on that. I’ve heard them all. Whenever I called her up, I had to listen to those things on the phone—what people said to each other. The most outrageous tapes. Everything is filed and catalogued. It could go into a museum the way it is; they wouldn’t have to hire someone to sort it out.

BOBBY ANDERSEN
 In the Factory they all had a special language. Brigid and her sister, Richie, initiated a lot of that lingo. They called it “taking a poke,” an expression made up by Brigid when they took a shot—what the street people called “getting it off.” If you were being bad, you were on a “ravage.” Not able to “fold one’s napkin” was a metaphor for not being able to cope. When anyone went too far, the famous line was “The rant runneth over.” Brigid would say: “Take a poke, my dear. It’s divine.” I think that’s why everyone called her Polk—it came from “poke.”

It was sort of a children’s game—like little kids playing and showing their behinds. Richie’s ass was famous because no one could get a needle through it.

RICHIE BERLIN
 My sister, Brigid, gave herself a poke in front of everyone in
Chelsea Girls.
If Brigld could be one person in the world, she’d be Andy Warhol or Mrs. Andy Warhol. So she gave herself a poke, and my mother was off on a lah-de-dah about her firstborn playing a “lesbian-pillpopper-Molly-junkie-gopher” and it was, “Really, it was just mortifying!” My mother went to see
Chelsea Girls
in a Carey limousine, unidentified as a person, and said, “Disgraceful.”

DANNY FIELDS
 I loved Richie. Smart and great. She was short and boyish. She wore a mohair kneesock and tied it around her neck in a double Windsor knot in a color coordinated with whatever little outfit she was wearing. Very short hair. No make-up. She was like a wire. I got a kick out of seeing her because she was always into something intense to talk about.

RICHIE BERLIN
 I rarely hold opinions more than a few hours. Finishing leaves me with a despair. But I also make wild, rather intriguing collages that fascinate me by their separateness. Don’t remind me that I turned out wrong because I had a nanny who washed my wee-wee out with Q-tips and I wore hats and coats to match . . . I feel best when alone with pocket money, quite thin, agile, and slightly vicious . . . I’ve always believed in live high, die, and have a wonderful corpse.