Andy Warhol (12 page)

As Andy brings himself indirectly forward by obsessively tracking Ondine in
a
, so do Andy's desires rise to the surface of these nudie films; paradoxically, by dispensing with authority and responsibility, and relying on collaborators, he expressed his own agenda more explicitly. The nudie films together create a portrait of Andy's dilemma (or, conversely, his opportunity): they dwell on the rupture between a beautiful boy and an unbeautiful observer, and they probe this rupture's effect on their experience of time passing, and on our experience of passing time as we watch them. The set-up resembles the situation in Thomas Mann's
Death in Venice
, except, in Warhol's case, both of the parties are young men, a symmetry that makes the dynamic of longing more complex, less patly divisible between old and young. Time moves slowly and strangely when two men are side by side and one desires the other. The more difficult it is to push that desire toward conclusion, and the more the two men resemble each other, the more protracted and profound the sensation of time in their vicinity will be.

Of all the films,
My Hustler
lays out this scenario most nakedly. And it also points out how a woman's presence alters the erotic situation between two men.
My Hustler
, filmed on Fire Island over the Labor Day weekend in 1965, with the assistance of Chuck Wein and Morrissey, features a young blond stud named Paul America (in real life apparently one of Geldzahler's tricks), hired via Dial-a-Hustler by a portly balding john, played by Ed Hood. A sly, articulate woman, Genevieve Charbon, also has her eye on Mr. America; the john and the woman cat-fight over him. Ed calls her a fag hag, and says that fag hags are “meathooks and leeches.” The first reel consists of them watching the stud sunbathe on the beach. The second reel takes place in the bathroom, where Paul and another hustler (Joe Campbell, the “Sugar Plum Fairy” of
a
)
primp, shower, urinate. Their ablutions take forever—an eternity that the viewer, like Warhol, requires: no nude scene overstays its welcome. Joe tries to get Paul to admit that he's a hustler; Paul is cagy. Earlier I described this scene as a paradigm of Warhol's doubled images; indeed, here, in his neatest laboratory demonstration that eros abhors a vacuum, and that beauty is dialogic, he shows that “beauty”—desirability—is never a solo; it takes two bodies, though it seems to quash one of them. The Sugar Plum Fairy may be attractive, but Paul America is young meat of the first order. The fairy wants America's body—touches it whenever possible—but dares not make his desire too explicit. Perhaps Andy, like Sugar Plum, lusts for eidolons as ideal as Mr. America, but I am convinced that Warhol's eye is ensnared not by the viewpoint of the man who fruitlessly pines for another but by their interdependence. Paul America's beauty discovers itself in the Sugar Plum Fairy's admiration; the fairy's fawning creates a pregnant imbalance between the two men, almost as strict and salvific a rupture as sexual difference. As Genevieve intercepted Ed Hood's pursuit of Paul America in the first reel, so Dorothy Dean, at the end of the second, interrupts the flirtatious pas de deux of the two hustlers. She appears outside the bathroom, puts on makeup while looking into a compact mirror (echoing the mirror Paul America gazed into while combing his hair), and makes him an alternate offer: “I'll get you educated. After all, why be carved up by these old faggots?”

The situation that structures the films of 1966 through 1968 resembles Shakespearian (or Greek) stichomythia, defined by the
OED
as “dialogue in alternate lines of verse, used in disputation in Greek drama, and characterized by antithesis and repetition.” Warhol's films don't deploy verse. But the nudies consist of scene after scene of a couple in warring dialogue—argument leading nowhere, the quarreling parties snugly interlocking.
My Hustler
enjoys its rhythms of discord: the two hustlers trade beauty tips and quibble over prostitution's fine points, and the fag hag and the john argue over Dial-a-Hustler's latest delivery. Irresolution—the parties never settle into accord—keeps the atmosphere tense. Like Martha and George in Edward Albee's
Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
the horny couples in the Warhol (and Warhol/Morrissey) nudies never shut up, never stop fighting, and never have sex.

One of these films,
The Loves of Ondine
, shot in 1967, featured a scene-stealing performance by a new superstar, Susan Hoffman, known as Viva, a frizzy-haired, skinny, sharp-nosed, articulate, whine-voiced comedienne, her features spacious as a lost Praxiteles statue of Athena. Warhol once said, of Viva, that he never knew a voice could express so much tedium; like Brigid Berlin, she could sustain forever a monologue about her life's minutiae, and wasn't afraid to strip whenever necessary. Viva liked to talk about her Catholic girlhood, as did another superstar of the period, Ultra Violet, her real name Isabelle Collin Dufresne, a French aristocrat, schooled in a convent. Viva recounts her childhood's seamy side in her roman à clef,
Superstar
, revealing a prurient sensibility perfectly in sync with Andy's. In
The Loves of Ondine
she lies abed, topless, beside Ondine, her nipples covered by Band-Aids; she will only remove them if Ondine pays her. Viva, an off-kilter Pre-Raphaelite beauty, conveys serious levity: she delivers her improvised speeches in an affectless, cadenced monotone, as if she's intoning mass or reading a list of war dead, even if her narration is invariably bawdy. The disconnection of her bland voice from the rough nature of her revelations resembles Warhol's split between tone and content: lurid subject, cool presentation.

Another superstar debuted in
The Loves of Ondine:
Joe Dallesandro, émigré from Bob Mizer's AMG, beefcake capital of California. Everyone called him “Little Joe.” Small-statured, he had a perfect body and a serene disposition, and no one could ever pin him down to anything: vacillation and spaced-out contemplativeness were Warholian virtues. Curiosity and desire never flicker across Little Joe's adolescent face; he makes heterosexuality and homosexuality seem irrelevant digressions, wastes of energy, compared with the pleasure of letting the chips fall as they may. His beauty, however, is an action, whether or not Joe ever seems to act. His good looks overpower the wisecracks of Ondine, whose manic stream of talk runs out when he shares the screen with lovely Little Joe. Word (Ondine) and image (Joe) do not gel; Mr. Paperbag knows—and is traumatized by—the gulf between. Here is the essential Warhol dilemma: speech can never catch up—no matter how much of it the tape recorder collects—to the assured and masculine stillness of visual presence. Stillness, for Warhol, was always virile, even if it took the form of a female face: stillness conjured the masculine imperturbability of the dead father.

The Loves of Ondine
, as well as several other films from this period, had a dual existence as a separate feature and as a segment of an ambitious and nearly unrealizable project, known as
Four Stars
, or ****, or
Twenty-Four Hour Movie
, or
Twenty-Five Hour Movie.
It was only shown once, on December 15 and 16, 1967, at New York's New Cinema Playhouse. For
The Chelsea Girls
, Andy utilized the double projection format. He modified it, in
Four Stars
, by projecting the two reels not side by side, but superimposed, one on top of the other. I cannot begin to imagine the blinding results: two meshed films for twenty-four or more hours seems a venture at the farthest edge of the possible. Callie Angell, adjunct curator of the Andy Warhol Film Project, is at work reassembling
Four Stars;
when completed, it promises to be Warhol's
Finnegans Wake
or
120 Days of Sodom
—hubristic compendium and enclosure, an encyclopedia of every transfiguration he ever dreamed, final as a mausoleum and fanatical as a menagerie. A number of the films included in
Four Stars
have never been seen since that original screening—including
Since
, about the Kennedy assassination, starring Mary Woronov as Jack, International Velvet as Jackie, Ingrid Superstar as Lady Bird, and Ondine as LBJ; and
Mrs. Warhol
, featuring Julia Warhola in the part of an aging peroxide-dyed actress with many husbands, each of whom she's killed. (According to Bockris, Andy said of the film, “I'm trying to bring back old people”—bring them back into fashion but also restore their youth.) One eight-hour chunk of
Four Stars
is
Imitation of Christ
, of which I have seen the 105-minute version: its subversions of Holy Family values include a sequence with Brigid Berlin and Ondine as the parents of a young stoned superstar named Patrick Tilden Close (who Taylor Mead told me could have been the James Dean of the underground). Brigid says, “What more of a family could there be but Ondine and me?” Their ménage rivals Bethlehem; Ondine shoots up in bed with Brigid—the couple's “morning poke.” Their impersonation of parents is scary but also Utopian: we know it's a joke, but it also seems to be Warhol's seriously proffered alternative to the heterosexual nuclear family.

Another portion of
Four Stars
with an independent existence is the rarely seen
Tub Girls
, in which he presents a series of doubles in a tub, duos who parallel Paul America­ and the Sugar Plum Fairy flirting in the Fire Island bathroom­—a diptych­ of unresolvable tensions, ambiguous as a metaphysical poem whose central conceit never comes clean. The tub, like a Campbell soup can condensing a meal within its silver cylinder, condenses the drama of a human dialogue, and, more effectively than theft or intercourse, seals the couple together. Not everyone in the tub is a girl: Viva bathes with a man, and, underwater, below the camera's horizon line, appears to have sex with him. The best scene pairs Viva in the tub with Abigail Rosen, a black woman—their blackness and whiteness reiterated by the Vermeer-like checkerboard linoleum floor on which the transparent tub rests. A bird in a cage chirps behind them. Viva accuses Abigail of having dirty feet, and the water grows dark from the grapes and watermelon the girls are eating—as if the tub were condensing racial difference, the water's transparency clouding into a complex, dark hybrid. Viva is always happy to couple on film, while Brigid remains aloof from touch, except from her own pokes. She drifts in and out of lesbianism as if in and out of coma: she refers to lesbian life as something she is profoundly
over.
Warhol films often conclude with a kaleidoscopically resonant image or phrase, as if the players, realizing that the reel is running out, deliberately shift to loaded ground.
Tub Girls
ends with Brigid talking about healing baths at Lourdes, to remind us that the tub is, after all, a site of baptism, and that the most fleshly and irreverent of Warhol's offhand conceptions hide spiritual ramifications.

In the nudies, words vie with images. These vociferous films, like the novel
a
, celebrate the loquacity of his entourage. In
The Nude Restaurant
(1967), Viva and Taylor Mead discuss the Vietnam War while they sit unclothed at the Mad Hatter, a restaurant distinguished by the nudity of staff and customers: this colloquy was enough, in Warhol's mind, to qualify the film as an antiwar picture. In
Bike Boy
(1967), Ingrid Superstar, in a kitchen, delivers a monologue about the different ways of cooking eggs. And
I
,
A Man
(1967) features the hyperverbal Valerie Solanas, author of the unproduced screenplay
Up Your Ass.
Her style of delivery is winningly flat and streetwise, and a viewer can't be blamed for thinking her a sweetheart when she says, “I'm a pushover for a squooshy ass” and “I want to go home, I want to beat my meat.”

Two other films,
Lonesome Cowboys
and
San Diego Surf
, made during the era of the nudies, had more ambitious narrative dimensions, and were actually edited. (The earlier nudies were edited in camera through the use of a strobe cut, a device that Warhol first employed in
Bufferin
, a 1966 film of Gerard Malanga reciting his poetry. To insert a strobe cut, the camera and sound recorder stop and then start again, creating a gap in continuity, a rupture marked by a beeping noise.)
Lonesome Cowboys
was filmed on location in Arizona in January 1968; it had a wide release in 1969, and may be his best-known film from this period. In an interview, he referred to it as his “first completely outdoor movie,” and added: “It's based on Romeo and Juliet. If they won't let us call it ‘The Glory of the Fuck' I think we'll call it ‘Cowboy Movie.'” So scandalized were members of the local community by the excesses of Warhol's cast and crew that the FBI, duly notified, began surveillance of his activities and compiled a file on him, which includes this naively muckraking account of
Lonesome Cowboys:

The sheriff in one scene was shown dressing in woman's clothing and later being held on the lap of another cowboy. Also, the male nurse was pictured in the arms of the sheriff. In one scene where VIVA was attempting to persuade one of the cowboys to take off his clothes and join her in her nudity, the discussion was centered around the Catholic Church's liturgical songs. She finally persuaded him to remove all of his clothes and he then fondled her breasts and rolled on top of her naked body. … Another scene depicted a cowboy fondling the nipples of another cowboy.

The film was confiscated in an Atlanta showing in 1969 because, according to the criminal court solicitor, of its “absolute filth”—“just the type of thing that, in my opinion, would make the ordinary person sick.”

The second movie that Warhol filmed on location was
San Diego Surf
—shot in revolutionary May 1968 in California, that golden state where, four years before, he'd met Duchamp and Troy Donahue, and exhibited Elvises.
San Diego Surf
features the square-jawed, meditative, limestone Tom Hompertz, who'd debuted in
Lonesome Cowboys;
here he is a surfer, opposite Taylor Mead, who plays Viva's husband. She opens with a diatribe exposing the connection between homosexuality and surfing, and notes that she can't tell the difference between unfilmed reality and those unreal moments when Warhol's camera is observing her. Long shots of the Pacific Ocean remind the viewer how distant from the natural world the Warhol films have been. In the scene that most closely conforms to Warhol's desire, Mead lies facedown on a surfboard and begs Hompertz to piss on him: “Tom, will you piss on me? I want to be initiated. I want to be a real surfer. Don't you want to piss on a respectable middle-class husband?” Not that Warhol liked boys to piss on him: I doubt he did. And yet the split between Tom (surfer stud) and Taylor (faggy clown), who may, through abject baptism, transubstantiate into surferhood, cuts to the quick of Warhol's method and substance.