Caveat Emptor (4 page)

Andrea was going to entertain us with a record of the original soundtrack from
Peter Pan
sung by Mary Martin. She loved playing the album, especially the songs “I'm Flying” and “I Won't Grow Up.”

The acid kicked in, and Andrea sang and played along with the record again and again until she believed she
was
Peter Pan. Andrea was apparently having a reality crisis in the midst of a drug-induced, hallucinogenic trip. It seemed that the problem she was experiencing in distinguishing reality from whatever metaphysical meteor she'd mounted was leading to a transcendental meltdown.

At one point, we put Tom in his studio chair, which had casters. Every time Mary Martin sang out “I'm Flying,” we'd hurl him across the room. The evening wore on, and the acid magnified awareness a thousandfold. I could see every pore in Tom's face and count the hairs on Andrea's head. I could hardly bear to look at the expressions of others. Everything was grotesquely distorted, hilariously funny one moment and then horribly frightening the next. It all seemed more like a dream than reality.

The following day, I was sitting down with Tom. We were having a chat about the images and impressions of the night before. Tom thought it would be an excellent artistic project if I tried to capture them in a painting—and furthermore suggested that I paint a surreal, psychedelic impression of the Castle, a painting that would depict how people and events looked to me under LSD, part Hieronymus Bosch and part Marquis de Sade. This was the first real artistic challenge I had faced, for now I had to invent a picture rather than just copy one. For the rest of the summer, I sketched people and scenes, real and imaginary, to incorporate into one all-encompassing masterpiece.

Ciao! Manhattan
was to become an underground movie classic. It was based on the life of Edie Sedgwick, who by 1967 had already assumed mythical proportions in the underground society of New York City. Young, glamorous, and beautiful, she came from an old Boston family. She had moved to New York in the sixties and met Andy Warhol, and together their chemistry sparked the beginning of the pop-art underground culture. Their ideas in fashion and art set a trend for decades to come, and
Ciao! Manhattan
was to be Edie's apotheosis.

Andy Warhol was not involved in
Ciao!
and was said to have been quite sore about it. It was shot by Chuck Wein and John Palmer, friends of Andy's who worked with him on movies made at his factory.

As word of the filming spread, half of the Warhol Factory, including Viva, Eric Emerson, and Paul America, invaded the Castle. Andrea and Geraldine were already ensconced. Lionel Goldbart, a poet from the Beat generation, came with his guitar, sunglasses, and bongo drums. He was tall, handsome, extremely intelligent, and hopelessly addicted to heroin. He was working on a new calendar that he claimed would “completely change the world as we know it.”

Chuck Wein and John Palmer arrived in a caravan of limousines bearing Edie Sedgwick, the cast, the camera crew, and an entourage of friends. Two trucks hauling equipment followed behind. Lights, cameras, and boxes full of costumes were carried into rooms below Tom's that opened up onto the lawn.

After Edie and her friends settled into various rooms in the Castle, a party that would last for days got under way. Music blared from Tom's studio, and caterers delivered trays of food and wine by the case. When Tom introduced me to Edie, I thought she was very cool and very hot. She was wearing a lime-green minidress with a large gold zipper right up the middle of it. Her eyes were big and soft, enchanting to look into. She possessed an uncanny hypnotic attraction. Edie was very sweet, but she spoke so softly and so low I thought she was about to fall asleep. I noticed there were pills scattered on the floor. Tom and I headed for a table set up with a buffet of sandwiches and salads.

“What are all those pills doing all over the floor?” I asked him.

“Oh, those,” Tom said. “Well, Edie just threw a handful of them at somebody who didn't bring her the kind of Danish she likes.”

After the crew set up the cameras and equipment for the shoot, people began to appear around the Castle in very strange costumes. The reason was made clear when John Palmer explained the story line to me. According to the script, Edie had been ordered by some mysterious member of the underground to leave Manhattan and go to the Castle, which was designated as a “contact point.” There she would meet the “saucer people”—i.e., friendly beings from outer space who would show her how to save the planet from destruction. That was all logical enough, I thought. But what I found puzzling was that the saucer people weren't limited to just plain old Martians, but included cowboys, drag queens, circus acrobats, soldiers, fashion models, and several who simply defied description. They even had Allen Ginsberg dressed in the beads and robes of an Eastern mystic to greet her.

After a lengthy shoot in Tom's studio, the climax of the filming occurred when Chuck Wein asked everyone to follow Ginsberg, who had shed his robes and was completely naked, down into the caves in the cliffs for a shoot of Allen leading us in a hedonistic chant.

Tony was missing all the excitement, but he wasn't interested in watching the film shoot. Instead, he was making a movie of his own with two young models, even Edie herself, in his bedroom upstairs. “And besides,” he said when I knocked on his door to see if he wanted to come downstairs and get something to eat, “I'm sick of looking at Allen Ginsberg walking around with his dick hangin' out!”

To cap the summer off, Tony got opening-night invitations to the Electric Circus. Heralded as the ultimate psychedelic disco, it was purportedly designed to employ a light show that would mentally induce its patrons into a hallucinogenic trip without the use of drugs.

Despite the promoters' claims, we weren't taking any chances, and on the night of the event Tom, Tony, Joyce, and I dropped acid, jumped in the car, and headed for St. Mark's Place. Inside, the place was packed with celebrities and the underground elite in outlandish “otherworldly” fashions. As soon as we entered the main room, we met Allen Ginsberg, beads, robes, and all. To the deafening sound of “Eight Miles High” and “Light My Fire,” we worked our way to the second floor and joined a group of people from
Ciao!
sitting on the floor in a corner. Outtakes from the movie were being projected on the walls. Edie was there, looking spectacularly beautiful. She was made up like a dewy, owl-eyed doll. She wore jeans and a slinky top cut low down the back, revealing her entire spine. Across the expanse of her exposed back, she had scrawled her telephone number in flaming red lipstick.

In 1968, Tony's current girlfriend, Barbara, was tall, sophisticated, and beautiful with long, straight red hair and freckles. She was a model and had been married to a designer for the ultrahip boutique Paraphernalia. One night at Max's, after they had just returned from a trip to upstate New York, Tony and Barbara told Tom and me about a museum they had visited in Lake George. The museum had been the summer residence of Marcella Sembrich, a famous opera singer in the 1930s. It was filled with antiques and artwork she had collected during her life. Many of the pieces had been given to her by wealthy admirers. Tony was desperate for a big score and came up with the idea of cleaning the museum out. Not long after that, I got a call from Tom. He had received a call from “you-know-who,” and he told me to be at the Castle that evening.

That night, Tom and I held a vigil. At 1:00
A.M.,
we spotted a pair of headlights at the end of the road inching slowly up toward the house. We went out on the balcony and held our breath as the car pulled up beneath us. Tony emerged from the car, grinning from ear to ear. He spread his arms wide and took a grand theatrical bow.

Barbara, coolly dressed in skin-tight black leather jeans and a turtleneck, disembarked from the car and sauntered up the steps to the entrance of the house. Hollywood could not have cast a more glamorous pair of art thieves. “You did it!” Tom cried when Tony entered the room. Barbara, the ultimate picture of composure, sank into an easy chair and lit a cigarette.

Tom, Tony, and I went down to the car. It was packed to the headliner with boxes containing all the loot. We lugged everything up to the house and began to unwrap the items and spread them out on Tom's worktables. Our eyes were met with a dazzling array of treasures. There were beautiful Russian cigarette cases by Fabergé, a Tiffany desk lamp, art glass by Lalique, and a complete set of antique Sèvres china, each piece wrapped in newspaper by Barbara's lovely hands. There were eighteenth-century French clocks and Russian icons, even a collection of early bronze figurines. The most breathtaking sight of all came when Barbara unpacked a priceless collection of eighteenth-century ladies' fans of indescribable beauty.

“There was nothing to it,” Tony said, as Tom lit up a joint. Tony explained how they'd checked into a Lake George motel and waited until nightfall to visit the museum. They'd parked in a hidden spot and broken in through a window at the side. Once in, they broke into display cases, grabbing everything in sight and packing the loot into boxes brought in with them. They loaded up the car and sped away into the night.

We were thunderstruck. Tony was really wired and in a dangerous mood. I kept clear of him and spent my time with Barbara, who was serene as a Persian cat.

Unfortunately, Tony hadn't made as clean a job of it as he thought, and the next couple of weeks were frightening. He hadn't used a stolen car as planned, but rather one owned by his brother. Then he created suspicion at the Lake George motel by asking the management a million questions about the museum, before robbing it. They had taken down his license plate number. The FBI traced it and paid a visit to his family in Brooklyn. Then the feds showed up at Max's. It was only a matter of time before they'd reach the Castle. We were all in a state of paranoid shock. Tom urged Tony to leave the area at once, but Tony insisted that he needed to sell some of the goods first. Sure enough, the feds showed up at the Castle. They scared the hell out of Tom, but he managed to stonewall them and claim he hadn't seen Tony for a while.

Amazingly, at that very moment, Tony was coming to terms with a dealer along Third Avenue in the Fifties. The dealer correctly surmised that he was looking at hot merchandise. The whole lot must have been worth a couple of hundred thousand or more. Tony took a lousy ten grand, but at the time it seemed a fortune. Now with the FBI swarming around and crisscrossing paths with Tony, there was no returning to the Castle. He and Barbara decided to take a trip to Mexico and lie low for a while.

Things quieted down, and I finally finished my masterpiece impression of the Castle that I had started months earlier. Although I did most of the drawings at the Castle, I did my painting at home in the garage where I worked on my cars. Tom was very anxious to see it, especially since he'd come up with the idea and this was my first effort that wasn't a copy of an existing painting. On the evening that I was ready to bring it over, Tom assembled the “Castle People,” they lit up joints, and we had an unveiling. The painting, which was to become the first of a series, was a bizarre phantasmagoric scene depicting people, objects, and symbols in a surreal Boschlike landscape of rivers, cliffs, and imaginary buildings. Everyone was stunned. Nobody had thought I was capable of doing anything like that. Tom was at a loss for words. Andrea said it sent her on a “trip.” Lionel Goldbart took me off to the side and said that he had just one question for me. “And what's that?” I asked.

“What planet did you come from?” he inquired.

Meanwhile, a steady stream of postcards and letters arrived from Mexico, describing the idyllic circumstances south of the border where Tony and Barbara were soaking up the sun, living the good life, and sipping margaritas. It sounded to good to be true, and indeed, only a couple of months after they had gone on the lam, trouble in paradise was announced in the form of a collect call from Tony. The story was that they were stranded high and dry, stone-broke, and out of tequila, in a hotel in Mazatlán.