Smash Cut: A Memoir of Howard & Art & the '70s & the '80s (9 page)

I spent most of one memorable evening there with three young men from John Jermyn’s contingent. One was David, a young, blond American from Colorado who had done body shots for
Blueboy
magazine two years earlier. Now he was driving a sleek car and was very aggressive and friendly. He managed to find me an extra plate of food and made lines of cocaine for everyone. He distributed the cocaine in one of the bathrooms. His friend Phillip was twenty-one, a better-looking Jerry Lewis with French parents and a mixed-up story. “I compliment you for being over twenty-five and not having turned into a monster,” he said to me. “So many people turn into monsters between the time they are twenty-five and thirty-five.” I responded, illogically, “This is the first time everyone I’m starting to meet is younger than me.” The third, a Frenchman with a New Wave hairdo, told me he took a plane on Mondays to Brittany for work in petrodollars. Anne, passing by, said that we looked as if we had stepped out of the 1950s. A disenfranchised princess with a husky cigarette voice, she was on her way to be introduced by the majordomo to a fat man in red tie, red Adidas, and thick black glasses—an interrogator for the British army in Cairo during World War II. “Anglo-Saxons are the storytellers,” I heard her opining. “While the French excel at memoir.”

David was the oddest guest at his own party. When I first went up to him to say hello he just smiled and didn’t answer. I felt peeved. A few hours later, I walked into the cocaine bathroom by mistake, bowed out, ran into David dressed in his dark-blue corduroy suit, asked where the “real toilet” was, and he draped an arm around me and said he had been wondering when I was going to show up. Then he went off without answering my question. The other David, the blond Coloradoan gigolo, on the way to showing me where the “real toilet” was, showed me David’s bedroom, famous in anecdotes because he had messed up and, having a friend pick patterns for the wallpaper, ceiling, and curtains, ended up with wallpaper from the curtain design and curtains from the bedspread design. I left without saying goodnight near the end of the evening when David, with his fine hands and long thin hair, sat down to play piano. As his guests began to tiptoe up to take their leave, he went on obliviously playing Chopin. Eventually they turned awkwardly away. I especially enjoyed that last sight of David, playing away all the politeness and all the guests, as if he were powerful enough to make them disappear, only because he really didn’t notice. It was a Melinda drawing, or a Paris fairy tale.

For some stretch I hung out with the arch marquess, John Jermyn, and his so-called gangsters, until one night they stood me up. Left with nothing to do, I skulked in my room, virtuously typing on my novel, and then I met Andy Warhol, and had my not fifteen minutes but maybe fifteen hours with him over the next three days. Watching Warhol operate, if that is the right verb for his singular way of tinkering with life and reality, I gradually realized that the fifteen
minutes of fame was the time spent with him, as he shined a bright spotlight on one innocent after another (including half-innocent me) and then moved on, not cynically but with the unerring direction of an id, or force of nature, or, in his case, force of artificiality. This provocation of so much special thought began with a phone call around seven that same evening. “Hello. Is Brad Gooch there? This is Fred Hughes.” Fred, a Texan, a thinner Belmondo, always in a trim suit, ran the business side of Warhol, though we had never met. “I’m calling for William Burke, who is too lazy to get out of his chair.” William, a friend who ran an art gallery, around thirty, receding blond hair, an attractive adolescent bounce, often wore a hooded sweatshirt under his suit jacket for quick, warm exits, was temporarily staying at Fred’s Paris apartment. “I was wondering if you wanted to come here to have drinks with Andy Warhol.” “Yes,” said I, quickened simply by the name.

Though no whistler, I was whistling a Dvořák melody while slicking back my hair with Tenax, the French hair gel of the moment, in front of the mirror. I even took a twenty-franc taxi—my rule was buses to go-sees, taxis to jobs, so I’m not sure how this meeting rated a taxi—to the apartment on Rue du Cherche-Midi. I was relieved not to have to stew about my dinner jilt, making the shock when I arrived not so much meeting Fred and Andy, but finding my original dinner plans—David, the Colorado gigolo, and Jean, the Jerry-Lewis French boy from the Rocksavage party—having
their
drink with Andy. Rather than my appearance stopping the action, I paused near the side while Jean finished telling about his father, elected to the Collège de France for his insect experiments. “I’ve been eating every night in restaurants since I was a boy,” he was regaling everyone. “When my father filled our kitchen with test tubes and glass
containers of living flies, our maid quit and we had to go to restaurants each night.” As soon as I realized they had simply forgotten me, they were just as quickly gone past me out the door, and I slid onto the two-seater couch next to Warhol, an art hero of mine ever since I read in an art magazine in high school about his smart prank of sending look-alikes to deliver his college lectures.

Andy couldn’t have been more charming. With his white mop-top hair and serious transparent glasses and mien, he reminded me of being with a definitely gay, even fey, even flirtatious and cute adolescent friend, though with an intelligence that transcended gender and sexuality. He was everyone’s biggest fan, and seemed to evade ordinary critical responses—reminiscent of T. S. Eliot’s judgment of Henry James as having “a mind so fine that no idea could violate it”—and, so, he was a bit of a dandy, closer to Marcel Duchamp than to either the rich people or club kids with whom he was identified (only because he actively identified himself with them, especially as the decade of the eighties that was just beginning was getting rolling). In about ten hot minutes sitting on that love seat (was the heat entirely the heat of fame? No, I don’t think so), Andy said to me:

“We want to do a story on you in
Interview
.” . . .

“You could take Truman Capote’s place. Truman is so busy selling to Hollywood right now. He’s not writing his column.” . . .

“You should do publicity shots for us, shouldn’t he, Fred?” . . .

“A boy named Todd in New York, just your look, looks so beautiful on the new McDonald’s commercials saying, ‘I’m gonna make it big. Big Mac Big.’” . . .

“Does everyone say you look like the young Terence Stamp in
Billy Budd
?” . . .

Everything I said was “Wonderful” or “greeeeat.”

In this single way, Andy reminded me of Melinda. Both were flatterers. Melinda ooh-ed and ahh-ed at everyone at her dinner parties, never snubbing or cutting anyone. At first this power of positive talking is heaven. However, like heaven, if you think about the quality for too long, dark subtleties emerge. You wonder if the barrage of nice is a shield, or a stroking designed to earn strokes in return. Andy did finally receive more attention than the “superstars” he put in front of his flash. I didn’t know about Andy’s or Melinda’s deep motives. But for me, being a fan could be romantic, sexy, a way of putting on lipstick to mask competitive fang teeth. Warhol’s almost camp adoration made the other person an object, a star with less being than a human, and therefore was the most competitive trick going. And it was also a way to learn by drawing people out. It was also a form of love, like a blowjob, or a kiss, or feeding hungry tigers with your body, like the Buddha in one tale. Well, more like a blowjob or a kiss than like the Buddha.

Five of us went on to dinner that first night from the Rue du Cherche-Midi. Andy. Me. Fred. Geraldine Harmsworth, a model whose father, Vere Harmsworth, the third Viscount Rothermere, owned a tabloid newspaper in England, the
Daily Mail
. Christopher Makos, a young photographer friend of Andy’s. Fred asked Andy if he could order a two-hundred-dollar bottle of wine. Andy agreed, with a wince. They brought the wine already poured into a giant old chemistry-class flask (reminding me of Jean’s father’s flies) and put the moss-covered original bottle down next to it. I picked it up and looked blankly at the label: 1966. Somehow I’d been expecting a date closer to 1866. “They probably added food coloring to the wine,” said Andy, in his singsong. Geraldine then told about going to mass at Notre-Dame, even though she couldn’t
speak French. I perked up and we talked about the Catholic Church as white magic, though she ended the discussion by bringing up the topic of her Tarot cards. Still, I was pleased to meet her. David, the Coloradoan, had once put me off Geraldine by saying that she only talked about how her Cardin watch hung on her wrist. She was in that month’s issue of
Interview
, looking just right, stark and sophisticated with pillows of white light behind her body.

Andy grilled Christopher about what he had done in Germany after they left him there, teasing, with a tinge, I felt, of jealousy, insecurity, for Andy was weirdly, transparently needy and vulnerable for a dandy, both in the game and out of it. Makos, in black leather jacket with American flag pin on the collar wouldn’t say. Then Andy mused, “I wonder what Cecil Beaton’s sex life was like.” “I threw away a picture Beaton took of me when I was a teenager because it wasn’t any good,” offered Geraldine. “Andy, you’re showing an excessive interest in sex these days,” said Fred, drily. Lots of Minox spy camera pictures were taken of the boy cooking our lamb in the fireplace. He wore a white toque and had a German-looking haircut with blond hairs cut evenly all around in a reverse bowl. The wine turned out to be vinegar, so Fred turned sheepishly away when he handed the check to Andy. We went on to Privilege, a more exclusive part of the club of the moment, Le Palace. On the way, the notion of fake coloring came up again as we drove past La Tour Eiffel in the wash of its spotlights. “Look, they’ve painted the Eiffel Tower white!” exulted Andy, of the structure actually painted a shade of brown. “No, no, no,” others objected, “it’s the lighting,” though I was sure they were all being fooled by sphinx-faced Warhol, who pretended not to be convinced that it had not been repainted white.

The next day, under the influence, I found myself trying to
out-Andy Andy in my world of models, who were mostly of the personality type susceptible to those strokes. At one go-see I ran into dark-skinned, unselfconscious, twenty-year-old, bound-to-go-far Richard, a model the bookers at the Glamour Halloween party, at a club named—with some overreach—Apocalypse, had dressed in a costume of Scotch-taped models’ composite cards, then blindfolded with “Glamour” mailing stickers, and sent out to dance on the laser-lit dance floor, until other models ripped the cards off and he was down to briefs.

RICHARD
: Gee. It’s been raining for days. And just today, when I had my first outside shoot—editorial—it’s beautiful out.

ME
: Great. How did the shoot go, Richard?

RICHARD
(his eyes going deep and bright): Wonderful. They gave me the best clothes. I did all the single shots. When they put me and another guy in a shot they always put me in front.

ME
: A star.

RICHARD
(reflecting): Well, no. I just need tear sheets for my book.

Or this conversation with a French model the same week—

FRENCH
(singing a pop song): I have an audition tomorrow so I have to practice.

ME
: Really? An audition for what?

FRENCH
: I’m a singer. Just look at this face. Can’t you see me as a singer?

ME
: You’d look great on a record cover. I can see it.

FRENCH
: You’ll be asking me for my autograph in a couple years.

ME
: A star.

FRENCH
(reflecting): Well, you never know what’s going to happen.

That next night was a big party in someone’s enormous house in honor of somebody’s wedding. The fireplace was twice as tall as me. You needed to stand by it if you had a cold, which I did, beginning to drag from the partying, since the room was big and stony, like a wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Lots of oval tables with white tablecloths were set up and we sat at one where one of the English “tax deductions” started doodling with his black pen on the tablecloth. Andy leaned over. “Oh, that’s verrry good. Are you an artist? You should think of being an artist!” I was seated next to Rudolf Nureyev and squeezed his thigh, which felt like marble. David Rocksavage was at our table, too. Andy plied him with questions while snapping more flash pictures.

ANDY
: Which books do you like these days, David?

DAVID
: I like
The Glass Bead Game
by Herman Hesse and
The Magic Mountain
by Thomas Mann.

ANDY
: So, then you like thick books?

DAVID
: No. I don’t like Tolkien’s books and they’re thick.

ANDY
: Who are your favorite poets?

DAVID
: Ted Hughes. T. S. Eliot. Sylvia Plath.

ANDY
: Oh, I like rock-music lyrics. They’re the real poetry. They’re better than T. S. Eliot.

On the last of my Warhol nights that week, a group of ten of us went to an expensive restaurant, maybe La Tour d’Argent. Near the end of the meal, a lively queen at the table boasted, “My
boyfriend has very big pecs.” “That might be true,” said Andy, “but I’m sure that Christopher’s are bigger.” “My boyfriend’s pecs are definitely bigger than Christopher’s,” said the queen. “I’ll bet you the price of the meal on that.” Andy, not tsking at a bargain, asked Christopher if he would unbutton. Both did, and Christopher turned out to have the more developed chest. Much uproar. Free meal for Andy and gang. The wager motif. Another Paris fairy tale. On the way out and down the street, going again to Le Palace, Andy was listening to his Sony Walkman, a ubiquitous yellow accessory that models on the streets in Paris were sporting, among the first because they were returning from jobs in Tokyo. Models in those days were like camels on the Silk Road, carrying new technology, and fashion, around the world. “What are you listening to?” I asked. He put the plugs into my ear and I heard, not Roxie Music or Lou Reed, as I expected, but the soprano princess’s “Three Questions” from Puccini’s
Turandot
.