1964
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(codes
in parentheses refer to references)
Andy Warhol's first Factory is decorated by Billy Name. Gerard Malanga reads poetry. Lou Reed writes Heroin. Andy Warhol gets raided. Andy Warhol exhibits Brillo Boxes at the Stable Gallery. Andy Warhol exhibits Most Wanted Men at the World's Fair. Lou Reed graduates. Edie Sedgwick moves to New York. Joe Dallesandro is arrested. Freddy Herko commits suicide. Andy Warhol exhibits at the Leo Castelli Gallery. Dorothy Podber shoots Andy Warhol's Marilyns. Holly Woodlawn models. Candy Darling works for investment firm. Andy Warhol films Blow Job, Soap Opera, Batman Dracula, Couch, Empire, Taylor Mead's Ass and Harlot.
JANUARY 17, 1964: ANDY WARHOL SHOOTS FOOTAGE FOR THE THIRTEEN MOST BEAUTIFUL BOYS.
Winthrop Kellogg Edey (Kelly Edey) noted in his diary entry for January 17, 1964, that "This afternoon Andy Warhol made a movie here, a series of portraits of a number of beautiful boys, including Harold Talbot and Denis Deegan and also me." (AD13) Edey came from a wealthy New York family and was known for his collection of clocks which he willed to the Frick museum. Part of his collection is still on public display there. (GBA)
The "13" in the title of The Thirteen Most Beautiful Boys was most likely borrowed from a New York City Police brochure of "The Thirteen Most Wanted" which was also the inspiration for Warhol's mural Thirteen Most Wanted Men at the 1964 World's Fair in Queens. (AD13)
These film portraits were some of the earliest examples of Warhol's Screen Test series. It is interesting to note that they were filmed in Edey's apartment prior to Warhol's move to his silver Factory where most, but not all, of the other Screen Tests were made. Although Gerard Malanga has maintained that the Screen Test series started as a result of him asking Warhol to shoot a headshot of Gerard to use to publicize Malanga's poetry readings, a more likely inspiration for the Screen Tests was the photobooth photography that Warhol started doing in the late spring of 1963. (AD13)
Sometimes Warhol's photobooth photographs would be the basis of a silkscreened portrait. From approximately 1970, when Warhol bought a Polaroid Big Shot camera (AWP157), he would use Polaroid photographs to get an image for his commissioned portraits, but during the sixties he used a photobooth. When Holly Soloman posed for her photobooth pictures in 1966, which were used to create her silkscreen portrait, she recalled that the time spent in the booth was "pretty boring" so she "started to really act in them." (AWP94). The end result was that the photobooth pictures, taken with a still camera, were often more animated than the Screen Tests, taken with a movie camera, where subjects were told to remain as still as possible. In both instances, Warhol removed himself from the process - a type of "automatic" photography/filmmaking reminiscent of the Dada concept of "automatic" writing or painting.
JANUARY 28, 1964: ANDY WARHOL STARTS THE FACTORY. (GMW127)
The first Factory was located on the fifth floor of 231 East 47th Street - across the street from the YMCA and below an antiques place called Connoisseur’s Corner. According to one account given by Gerard Malanga, the first works of art created at the Factory were "a series of food boxes." (POP61/LD188/GMW34)
Gerard Malanga:
"Andy would arrive at the Factory, as it was now called, noon or thereabouts. We would work on and off until about 5:00 or 6:00 pm and then go out to party... The first works created at the Factory were a series of food boxes. Andy was fascinated by the shelves of foodstuffs in supermarkets and the repetitive, machine-like effect they created... He wanted to duplicate the effect but soon discovered that the cardboard surface was not feasible. I located a carpenter in the East Sixties, and Andy hired him out to build plywood boxes that we would then paint and screen, to create the illusion of the real thing... The brand names chosen consisted of two versions of Brillo, Heinz Tomato Ketchup, Kellogg's Corn Flakes, and Mott's Apple Sauce. We obtained cardboard-box samples of each of these products wither from a grocery store or, in the case of the Brillo box, directly from the manufacturer. I'd deliver the cardboard box, at this point flattened out, to the silkscreen manufacturer Harry Golden, who made all of Andy's screens... We were able to get at least two sides done in a day. A hundred or more were produced in a period of a month. They were literally three-dimensional photographs of the actual products." (GMW34)
1964: ANDY WARHOL DESCRIBES HIS 1964 WORK SCHEDULE.
Andy Warhol on 1964: “We usually worked till around midnight, and then we’d go down to the Village, to places like the Cafe Figaro, the Hip Bagel, the Kettle of Fish, the Gaslight, the Cafe Bizarre, or the Cino. I’d get home around four in the morning, make a few phone calls, usually talk to HENRY GELDZAHLER for an hour or so, and then when it started to get light I’d take a Seconal, sleep for a couple of hours and be back at the Factory by early afternoon.” (POP73)
Henry Geldzahler and Billy Name (ca. 1965/6)
(photo: Stephen Shore)1964: BILLY NAME MOVES TO THE FACTORY.
Billy Name and Andy Warhol's relationship changed from "awkward attempts to be lovers to being conspirators in the fine arts" (B). Billy moved into the Factory and created the "silver look" as an "installation for Andy to have a fabulous place to work in." (B)
Billy was inspired to paint the Factory silver by the seven year repainting of the Mid-Hudson-Bridge which was near his family home in Poughkeepsie, New York. The paint used for the bridge was aluminium industrial paint - the same that Billy later used for the Factory. (BN28)
EARLY 1964: ANDY WARHOL FILMS BLOW JOB.
The first public screening of BLOW JOB took place at Ruth Kligman's Washington Square Gallery in March 1964.
JANUARY 1964: MEMBERS OF JUDSON DANCE THEATER, INCLUDING ROBERT RAUSCHENBERG, PERFORM AT THE STATE UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK.
Judson Dance Theater members who participated included LUCINDA CHILDS and ROBERT RAUSCHENBERG. Rauschenberg's dance piece, Shotput, was one of the new dances on the program which was titled "Concert for New Paltz (Performed by Seven of Judson Dance Theater)." (JD186)
The program notes for the evening noted the link between contemporary visual art and dance: "In the curious way in which the art world changes, painters have made inroads into theatrical performances. Artists find that there are no unacceptable sources for material. The repertoire of Judson Dance Theater reflects the latest of this recent tendency to allow freer play. Dancers, mixed with painters on the stage, point out how there is another quality to bodies than just the arrived at differences dancers have discovered in themselves - there is the whole look of the body, which knows a lot on its own, and whether 'trained' or not, relays much of its history with action." (JD187)
In February and March, the same participants (plus Robert Morris and Albert Reid) presented two different programs on a four-week series at Stage 73 located at 321 East 73rd Street, calling themselves the Surplus Dance Theater. (JD187) The Judson Dance Theater members who were part of the Surplus group (including LUCINDA CHILDS and ROBERT RAUSCHENBERG) also appeared in the Once Festival in Ann Arbor, Michigan on February 27, 1964, with their performances billed on the flyer as "The Cream of the Crop - from the Judson Dance Theater." (JD193)
JAN/FEB 1964: ANDY HAS HIS FIRST EUROPEAN SHOW.
The exhibition was at the Galerie Ileana Sonnabend in Paris. (ILEANA SONNABEND was the ex-wife of art dealer LEO CASTELLI.) (BC28)
FEB. 5, 1964: GERARD MALANGA READS POETRY AT LE METRO. (ATF)
Flyer for Gerard Malanga at Le Metro
The back of the flyer had comments by W.H. Auden,
Richard Eberhart, Howard Hemerow, James Laughlin,
Howard Moss, Barbara Guest, Willard Maas, William Meredith,
Gerrit Lansing and Hugh Corbetc. FEBRUARY 1964: JOHN VACCARO AND FREDDY HERKO PERFORM AT THE NEW YORK POETS THEATRE.
John Vaccaro would later direct theatrical versions of RONALD TAVEL'S Shower and The Life of Juanita Castro at the Coda Gallery for two weekends beginning July 29, 1965 and at the St. Marks Playhouse in September 1965. Other notable experimental productions directed by Vaccaro included Conquest of the Universe at the Bouwerie Lane Theatre in November 1967 and two productions of Cockstrong at La Mama in June 1969 and March 1970. He also directed Son of Cockstrong in February 1970 at La Mama.
The cast of Vaccaro's production of Conquest of the Universe included Warhol stars ULTRA VIOLET, ONDINE, TAYLOR MEAD and MARY WORONOV.
From Playing Underground: A Critical History of the 1960s Off-Off-Broadway Movement
by Stephen J. Bottoms:
"[Alan] Marlowe found the venue for their [the New York Poets Theatre] first production - the 'Off-Bowery Theatre' on East Tenth Street... The company performed two triple bills there, opening in October and December 1961, but subsequently abandoned this obscure, unappealing space. In 1962, they took out a two month lease at the Maidman Theatre on Forty-fourth Street, and mounted a series of happenings, film screenings, and music and poetry recitals, but no plays. It was not until February 1964 that the group - whose members were constantly engaged in a variety of individual projects - organized themselves sufficiently to coordinate their next production. Now performing under a new name, the American Theater for Poets, the group presented a new triple bill at the 'New Bowery Theatre' at 4 St. Mark's Place... After just two months, however, the company was evicted by the police, for reasons that remained unclear even to them.
... When not setting out to shock, the group's emphasis was often on a kind of neodadaist formalism. The February 1964 bill, for example, included di Prima's Murder Cake, a text composed by chance techniques using the I-Ching, and Love's Labor by Frank O'Hara... Di Prima describes Murder Cake as a 'word score' rather than a play 'for a director to do with as s/he wills.' JAMES WARING, who directed it, seems to have been particularly adept at this approach. As a choreographer, he was celebrated for his creation of 'exquisitely lyric' visual forms through the collage-like assembly of abstract movement and everyday materials: dance critic Jill Johnston once described his work as 'a happening' with dance as the protagonist...
John Vaccaro, who acted with the company at this time, found Waring's work inspirational because it helped him realize that a director is free to take all kinds of creative license with such open-ended textual material... Vaccaro seems also to have taken direct inspiration... from Alan Marlowe's production of Love's Labor, which turned the piece into a kind of outrageous, transvestite farce (much to the disgust of Waring, who had staged an earlier version of the piece for the Monday Night Series in 1960). With a wild, campy cast including Vaccaro, FRED HERKO, and the drag queen and freak-show artist FRANKIE FRANCINE, the production was, di Prima remembers, 'a great demonstration of harmony in chaos... there were moments when twenty or more people were cavorting separately on that little stage.'" (SB62-64)
FEBRUARY 17, 18, 19, 1964: FREDDY HERKO PERFORMS IN FANTASTIC GARDENS AT THE JUDSON CHURCH
Elaine Summers' mixed-media evening, Fantastic Gardens, was performed in the sanctuary of the church and included film projections (including a split screen projection), dancers, music, sculpture and audience participation. Photography was credited to Elaine Summers, Stan Vanderbeck, Carol Summers, Eugene Friedman, Ka Kwong Hui and Billy Linich (aka BILLY NAME). (JD190) Dancers included FRED HERKO and BIBBE HANSEN'S father, the Fluxus artist Al Hansen. (JD189) A film collage included a recurring image of Herko wearing an overcoat and watering a garbage can until he eventually lifts the cover to find sprouting flowers. (After Herko's suicide in October 1964, Warhol would dedicate one of his FLOWERS paintings to the dancer.)
Elaine Summers:
"Fantastic Gardens was the first full-evening intermedia concert in New York City combining film, dance, music, and sculpture. The concert was presented in three parts with two intermissions. The first section consisted of a film collage of dances, using chance methods inspired by John Cage. In the second section, 'All Around the Hall,' members of the audience were seated around the edge of the Judson Memorial Church in the form of a pyramid. Film images were splashed over the ceiling, floor, walls and audience... In the third section, 'Other People's Gardens,' one of the sculptures, a large metallic 'tree' built of junk, became the instrument played by composer Malcolm Goldstein. Several films were show successively. One of these, a film of Sally Stackhouse dancing, was projected onto a split screen..." (JD189)
Jonas Mekas, in his review of the show in the Village Voice noted that the evening was not the first multimedia experiment - giving as examples the work of Roberts Blossom, Stan Vanderbeek and Robert Whitman - but wrote that Fantastic Gardens was "by far the most successful and most ambitious attempt to use the many possible combinations of film and live action to create an aesthetic experience." (JD190)
FEBRUARY 23, 1964: FREDDY HERKO'S BIRTHDAY.
FORMAL BIRTHDAY POEM: February 23, 1964
by Diane di Primadear Freddie, it's your birthday & you are crazy
really gone now, crazy like any other old queen
showing off your naked limbs a little withered
making fairy tales into not very good balletsI remember you sat on the edge of the bed & Joan cried
you sat wrapped in a blanket night after night by the fire
you sat by the fire & cried, you played the piano
you were truly lovely then, but a little fathow spoiled we all were! we ate hundreds of english muffins
and never thought once about white flour, or bread lines
or calories, or what vitamins we were getting
I guess old junkies just have to be more carefulyes, now you are 28, you are shooting A
you are getting evicted & there is another coldwave
you are worried about your costumes - can you take them
with you & to where? you are late a lot for performanceand not very good, although you are sure you are perfect.
yes, somebody said you thought you were martha graham
and it is a little like that. but blood is thicker
than water, & I am angrywhen I am angry, because you've disgraced the family
another old whore on the streets, another mouth
to feed in emergencies, and we think a lot
about keeping you away from jail & the madhouse1964: LOU REED WRITES WAITING FOR MY MAN AND HEROIN. (LR71)
Reed wrote both songs while still a senior at college.
1964: NICO SINGS.
Nico auditioned as a singer at the Blue Angel in New York. She got the job even though she fainted after the audition. (UT33)
MARCH 1964: ANDY WARHOL GETS RAIDED.
Warhol's three minute film, ANDY WARHOL FILMS JACK SMITH FILMING NORMAL LOVE was screened in New York with Genet's Un Chant d'Amour. The screening was raided by New York police and both films were confiscated. The Warhol film was never returned and apparently "disappeared for good". (DB175)
MARCH - APRIL 1964: JAMES WARING PRESENTS "EVENTS AND ENTERTAINMENTS" AT THE POCKET THEATER.
The seven Monday night concerts, billed as "Events and Entertainments" promised "dances, diversions, and what nots" and featured many participants from the Judson Dance Theater group. (JD194)
APR. 21 - MAY 9, 1964: ANDY HAS HIS FIRST SCULPTURE SHOW.
The exhibition, at Eleanor Ward's Stable Gallery, was titled The Personality of The Artist (GMW148) and included the Brillo boxes, Heinz Tomato Ketchup cases, Kellogg's Corn Flakes and Mott's Apple Sauce. There was a long line of people waiting to get into the gallery which was his last show at the Stable. A few weeks later, Warhol left ELEANOR WARD for LEO CASTELLI. (BC28) The night after the opening, Robert and ETHEL SCULL hosted a part in Warhol's honour at the Factory. (GMW148)
Gerard Malanga:
"On a cold, blistery day in early December, 1963, I found my way to a stepdown storefront at 409 East 70th Street between First & York Avenues. The Havlicek Woodworking Company, Inc... Mr. Havlicek... a burley guy in his midforties... took my order and gave me a smile: 'Several hundred boxes please!' Boxes cut from pine and cut to size, fitted together with tiny wood nails. 17 x 17 x 14 inches, to be exact was one such size, I recall...
A few days after the move to our [Gerard Malanga and Andy Warhol] workspace, January 28th, a truckload of wood boxes arrive, individually wrapped and taped in clear plastic sheeting. And so would begin the arduous task of taping the floor with rolls of brown paper and setting out each box in a gridlike pattern of eight rows lengthwise... Billy Name and I would take turns painting with Liquitex all six sides of each box - which numbered nearly 80 - the Campbell's tomato juice for starters, by turning each box around on its side. We waited until the paint dried. Andy and I repeated this process silkscreening all five sides again down the line. The sixth side - the bottom side - remained blank... Completing the work took nearly six weeks, from early February well into mid-April." (GMW147-8)
APRIL 27, 1964: ROBERT RAUSCHENBERG PARTICIPATES IN THE JUDSON DANCE THEATER'S CONCERT #14.
Rauschenberg danced in an untitled improvisation by Deborah Hay. Other dancers in Hay's work included LUCINDA CHILDS and Yvonne Rainer. (JD195)
APRIL 28, 1964: JUDSON DANCE THEATER'S CONCERT #15.
Included was the choreographic debut (titled Plus) of Tony Holder who would, during the summer of 1964, work for ROBERT RAUSCHENBERG, taking care of his loft and printing silkscreens for him while Rauschenberg was in Europe.
Tony Holder:
"It blew my mind to watch him (Robert Rauschenberg) work. I would arrive at ten in the morning, and he would already be drinking vodka and orange juice. And then he'd start painting, and the dog would walk across the painting, and he would erase three of the footsteps and not the others. Then he left [for Europe] and paid me to print the silkscreens on paper and then destroy the screens." (JD200)
Rauschenberg designed Holder's costume for Plus. Holder recalls that the costume "looked like a bacon, lettuce and tomato sandwich. It was green and red and white. I thought the vest looked like bread; it was a white canvas vest." (JD201)
Also on the bill was David Gordon's Silver Pieces, previously danced in Philadelphia under the name, Fragments.
David Gordon:
"We sat on the stage, watched TV, and every now and then we got up to do things. In Philadelphia, I took the TV out of the student lounge... At Judson, I took our own TV, sprayed it silver, sprayed gray leotards and tights silver, had us wear children's plastic wigs sprayed silver, and performed the dance under the name Silver Pieces. It included things like Grape Jokes, like the Empire Grape Building." (JD201-2)
APRIL 29, 1964: FREDDY HERKO PARTICIPATES IN JUDSON DANCE THEATER'S CONCERT #16.
Herko's dance, Villanelle, which opened the concert, was one of the sections of his full-length The Palace of the Dragon Prince performed at the Judson Chuch on May 1st and 2nd (although not under the auspices of the Judson Dance Theater). (JD202)
Carla Blank [one of the dancers in Herko's dance]:
"It was technically beyond most of us, I think. It really called for toe dancers. [Herko] had a vision that was very nineteenth century, a kind of Theater of Marvels... [Herko] always reminded me of Nureyev in his own movement. There was something about the use of the head and arms and back. It was influenced by JAMES WARING, but it was even more balletic, I think.
I remember a lot of jumps and stretched feet. Everything was very extended, high-energy, stretching everything out as much as possible. A lot of the piece was done as uison work, but I think Deborah Lee was the soloist. She had a very perfect body, very correct in terms of ballet lines. There were a lot of movements in line formations, four in a line, and I remember him running wildly through it. He didn't do much in the dance, as I recall." (JD203)
Other dances included LUCINDA CHILD'S Carnation and Deborah Hay's Three Here. Hay's piece was performed to John Cage's Williams MIx #5. (JD205)
MAY 1/2, 1964: FRED HERKO PRESENTS THE PALACE OF THE DRAGON PRINCE AT THE JUDSON CHURCH.
Herko's ballet (not a production of the Judson Dance Theater) was performed to music by Berlioz and St. Saens by dancers Carla Blank, FRED HERKO, Robert Holloway, Deborah Lee, Elsene Sorrentino, Sandra Neels, Phoebe Neville, Abigail Ewert and Terry Foreman. (JD208)
MAY 19, 1964: THE MADNESS OF LADY BRIGHT DIRECTED BY DENIS DEEGAN OPENS AT THE CAFFE CINO.
(http://www.tosos2.org/LadyBrightReview.htm/SB54)DENIS DEEGAN was one of Andy Warhol's "Thirteen Most Beautiful Boys" (see January 17, 1964 above). It was Deegan who introduced Warhol to NICO in Paris in 1965 where Deegan was then living. Deegan returned to New York in 1966 where Warhol also shot him for Dentist: Nico, Ivy, Denis and Ivy and Denis 1 and II. (AD61)
The Madness of Lady Bright was written by Caffe Cino playwright Lanford Wilson. According to Stephen J. Bottoms in Playing Underground: A Critical History of the 1960s Off-Off-Broadway Movement
From Playing Underground: A Critical History of the 1960s Off-Off-Broadway Movement by Stephen J. Bottoms:
"Wilson's most acclaimed and controversial Cino play was The Madness of Lady Bright... Lady Bright's portrait of an aging drag queen... slowly going mad in his own apartment, succeeds in deftly evoking sympathy and understanding for a figure taught by society to loathe himself. Based loosely on a hilariously queeny desk clerk with whom Wilson then worked at the Americana Hotel, the play is a roller-coaster monologue of emotional highs and lows... Leslie Bright constantly theatricalizes himself, conducting coversations with imaginary companions and talking to himself in his mirror: 'Mirror, you are - I am sorry to report - cracking up... I am losing my mind. I am. I am losing my faggot mind." (SB53)
SPRING 1964: MOST WANTED MEN AT THE WORLD'S FAIR.
Andy Warhol's Thirteen Most Wanted Men was displayed on the side of the New York State Pavilion at the 1964 Worlds Fair in Flushing Meadow.
The architect who designed the Pavilion was Philip Johnson. He invited various artists, including Robert Rauschenberg, Roy Lichtenstein, Robert Indiana, John Chamberlain and Andy Warhol to create art for the exterior of the building. (DB181/4)
However, there were objections to Warhol's work from government officials. On April 16, Philip Johnson told Warhol that he had 24 hours to replace or remove the "most wanted men" mural as the governor thought it might be insulting to his Italian constituents because most of the "wanted men" were Italians. (LD198)
Warhol blamed Robert Moses, the city's planner and president of the 1964-65 World's Fair. Warhol proceeded to silkscreen twenty-five identical portraits "of a ferociously smiling Moses" to use as a substitute for the "most wanted men". Philip Johnson rejected the idea, not wishing to offend the festival's president.
Eventually, the "most wanted men" panels remained in place but were covered with a coat of silver paint. (DB181-4)
Although Warhol's mural is often referred to as the Thirteen Most Wanted Men, he referred to it as the Ten Most Wanted Men in his book, Popism.
Andy Warhol with Philip Johnson at Johnson's
Glass House in New Canaan, Connecticut (1964)
(photo: David McCabe)Andy Warhol (via Pat Hackett in Popism):
"The World's Fair was out in Flushing Meadow that summer with my mural of the Ten Most Wanted Men on the outside of the building that Philip Johnson designed. Philip gave me the assignment, but because of some political thing I never understood, the officials had it whitewashed out. A bunch of us went out to Flushing Meadow to have a look at it, but by the time we got there you could only see the images faintly coming through the paint they'd just put over them.
In one way I was glad the mural was gone: now I wouldn't have to feel responsible if one of the criminals ever got turned in to t he FBI because someone had recognized him from my pictures... But since I had the Ten Most Wanted screens already made up, I decided to go ahead and do paintings of them anyway. (The ten certainly weren't going to get caught from the kind of exposure they'd get at the Factory)." (POP71-2)
MAY 19/20: FRED HERKO AND LUCINDA CHILDS PERFORM WITH JAMES WARING AND DANCE COMPANY AT THE JUDSON CHURCH.
In addition to Waring, Herko and Childs, dancers included Arlene Rothlein, Deborah Hay, Deborah Lee, Yvonne Rainer, Gary Gross, Toby Armour, Vincent Warren and Diana Cernovich. (JD208)
EARLY SUMMER 1964: FREDDY HERKO APPEARS IN HOME MOVIES AT THE JUDSON CHURCH.
Home Movies was a play by Rosalyn Drexler presented by the Judson Poets' Theater at the Judson Memorial Church. In addition to Freddy Herko playing a raging queen named Peter Peterouter, the cast also included Judson minister Al Carmines as a randy priest, Father Shenanagan. (SB157)
From Playing Underground: A Critical History of the 1960s Off-Off-Broadway Movement
"The roles in the play [Home Movies] thus became inextricable from the people playing them, and Drexler made various textual adjustments in response to material the performers developed in rehearsal. 'Watch me metamorph into a mannered and pompous queen,' Peter Peterouter declares at one point in the script, and the following stage directions describe him 'pranc[ing] around making grotesque faces at the audience,' while stripping off his outer clothes to reveal a rhinestone necklace and knee-length red dress... Sadly, Herko did not appear again at Judson: he committed suicide later that year by dancing out of the second floor window of Johnny Dodd's Cornelia Street apartment." (SB157-8)
JUNE 1964: LOU REED GRADUATES FROM COLLEGE.
Reed graduated from the Syracuse College of Arts and Sciences with a bachelor of arts degree and moved back to his parent's home in Freeport. From September 1964 - February 1965 he worked for a bargain basement recording company, Pickwick International, in Long Island City, writing "made-to-order pop songs" for $25.00 a week and no rights to any of the material. (LR73/77)
At Pickwick Lou Reed met John Cale. Terry Phillips, one of the owners of Pickwick met John at a party and asked him to the studios with the possibility of being in a band with Lou to perform what Pickwick hoped would be a hit dance craze single, The Ostrich, which Reed had written for Pickwick. The single bombed, but Lou Reed and John continued their friendship.
Lou Reed:
"There were four of us literally locked in a room writing songs. They would say, 'Write ten California songs, ten Detroit songs,' they we'd go down into the studio for an hour or two and cut three or four albums really quickly which came in handy later because I knew my way around a studio, not well enough but I could work really fast. One day I was stoned and (after reading in Eugenia Sheppard's column that ostrich feathers were big that season) just for laughs - I decided to make up a dance. So I said, 'You put your head on the floor and have somebody step on it!' It was years ahead of its time. And another thing called Sneaky Pete. And when they heard it they thought it could be a single, so we needed people who could be a group to out and promote it."
Lou was still living with his parents in Freeport when he first started working at Pickwick - but would spend a lot of time at John Cale's apartment at 56 Ludlow Street in Manhattan. Their mutual interests were music and heroin. When John Cale's flatmate moved out, Lou moved in. (LR81-5) Their neighbour was Angus MacLise, a Scotsman who often played drums in La Monte Young's Theatre of Eternal Music - who Cale also worked with. It was Angus who introduced Lou to methamphetamine hydrochloride ("speed").
Lou Reed (from a tape made by Nat Finkelstein at the Factory in Autumn 1966):
"We were playing together a long time ago, in a $30-a-month apartment and we really didn't have any money, and we used to eat oatmeal all day and all night and give blood... or pose for these nickel or 15 cent tabloids they have every week. And when I posed for them, my picture came out and it said I was a sex maniac killer that had killed 14 children and tape recorded it and played it in a barn in Kansas at midnight. And when John's picture came out in the paper, it said he had killed his lover because his lover was going to marry his sister, and he didn't want his sister to marry a fag.
And then we decided that since we were playing all the time anyway, why not try to get paid for it, so we ended up at a terrible coffee house working six sets a night, seven nights a week, $5 a man a night, and that lasted a week-and-a-half and we were fired, because they hated our music so much. And then we met Andy. And we're now able to play the kind of stuff we really like to play...." (UT91-2)
SUMMER 1964: EDIE SEDGWICK MOVES TO NEW YORK.
Eddie arrived in New York in her gray Mercedes Benz in the company of GORDON BALDWIN and moved into her bedridden grandmother’s fourteen room apartment on Park Avenue and 71st Street. She modeled for a teen magazine and dined at L’Aventura, spending her nights partying at the “in spots - Harlow, Shepheard’s, Ondine, Arthur or Steve Paul’s The Scene.” (UV205)
1964: BABY JANE HOLZER APPEARS IN HER FIRST WARHOL MOVIE.
Baby Jane's first Warhol film was SOAP OPERA - filmed over P.J. Clarke’s, the Third Avenue pub. It was subtitled THE LESTER PERSKY STORY in tribute to Andy's friend who would eventually became a movie producer. Andy spliced parts of the commercials that Lester made into segments of SOAP OPERA. (POP60) Jane Holzer was “the beautiful young Park Avenue socialite wife of a wealthy businessman.” (L&D194)
JULY 1964: ANDY WARHOL FILMS BATMAN DRACULA.
Andy Warhol's film, Batman Dracula, was a collaboration with Jack Smith which was never finished. (CB) It featured GREGORY BATTCOCK, DAVID BOURDON, RUFUS COLLINS, BABY JANE HOLZER, MARK LANCASTER, GERARD MALANGA, IVY NICHOLSON, MARIO MONTEZ, ONDINE, JACK SMITH and NAOMI LEVINE who Andy called his "first female superstar." (POP32) Wynne Chamberlain and Gerard Malanga had introduced Naomi Levine to Andy Warhol at a performance at the Living Theater on Sixth Avenue and 14th Street, and they they all went to a black-tie opening at the Museum of Modern Art. Naomi was very “film studentish” - working at F.A.O. Schwarz, the toy store on Fifth Avenue, but also making films. One of her films was confiscated and destroyed by a New York lab because of the nudity in it. (POP43/44)
to filmography
SUMMER 1964: MARK LANCASTER AND GERARD MALANGA STAR IN A KISS MOVIE. (POP71)
Although Stephen Koch's filmography which was based on Jonas Mekas' filmography dates the Kiss films Nov/Dec 1963, Warhol noted in Popism that they were still shooting KISS films in the summer of 1964.
JULY 1964: ANDY WARHOL FILMS COUCH.
Andy Warhol shooting a scene for Couch
with Gerard Malanga behind the cameraJULY 25 - 26, 1964: ANDY WARHOL FILMS EMPIRE.
Warhol used an Auricon camera after seeing JONAS MEKAS’ The Brig which was filmed with an Auricon movie camera.
The Auricon was often used by journalists to shoot live events because the camera recorded sound directly on the film - a "single system" camera. The sound quality was primitive but it had sync sound.
Jonas Mekas: "He [Warhol] decided to shoot Empire, which was mostly John Palmer's idea. And since it needed long takes - it's a long film - he asked me what he should use, and I said, 'Why don't you use - you know - we can use Auricon. That's the cheapest. I already had rented [one]. We can, you know, just take it.' And he [Warhol] was interested because he wanted to get used to it because he wanted, he said, he wanted to go and shoot sound films with it. You know - in the way of The Brig. And since I knew how to operate it, I became the camera man for it." (PS416)
JOHN PALMER who Mekas credited with the idea for Empire would later co-direct/write the non-Warhol film Ciao Manhattan, starring Edie Sedgwick.
Warhol and entourage shot the Empire State building from an office in the Time-Life Building that belonged to HENRY ROMNEY who was also trying to buy the rights to the book A Clockwork Orange so that Andy could film it using NUREYEV, MICK JAGGER and BABY JANE HOLZER. (POP80) Warhol would later make his own version of A Clockwork Orange - VINYL starring Gerard Malanga and Edie Sedgwick.
Gerard Malanga walks past the projector
during the Factory preview of Empire (1964)
(photo: David McCabe)1964: JOE DALLESANDRO IS ARRESTED.
At the age of sixteen, Joe Dallesandro, living with his father in Queens, stole a car (one of many) and crashed through the toll gate at Holland Tunnel, pursued by six squad cars. The cops stopped the speeding vehicle with a road block. The officers came out of their cars with their weapons drawn.
When Joe opened the door and started to step out of the stolen car, one of the officers opened fire, the others followed, and Joe retreated back into the car which he then proceeded to drive straight at them. One of their bullets wounded him above the kneecap in his right leg. He managed to escape the cops, sinking the car in the Hudson River, and stole another car which he drove back to his father’s house.
His father took him to the hospital and he was arrested and charged as a juvenile. He was sentenced to four months in the Camp Cass Rehabilitation Center for Boys in the Catskills, where (according to him) he tattooed himself with the Little Joe tattoo.
He escaped from the center, returned to his father and received a “dishonorable parole” from the authorities stating that if he committed another crime before turning 21, he would have to finish the time he still had to do at Camp Cass, plus time for the new crime.
1964: JOE DALLESANDRO GOES TO MEXICO.
Joe and a friend named Stanley ended up going to Mexico (Ciudad Juarez) with money Joe stole from the safe of an RKO theatre in Brooklyn managed by a gay friend. In Mexico, Joe Dallesandro worked as a busboy and dishwasher in exchange for breakfast, lunch and cigarettes. (JOE16-7)
FALL 1964: EDIE SEDGWICK MOVES TO HER OWN APARTMENT.
Edie's apartment was on E. 63rd Street between Fifth and Madison. She hired a friend from Cambridge, TOM GOODWIN, as a chauffeur for $100 a week. After he crashed Edie's car in front of the Seagram Building, she leased a limo from Bermuda Service, tipping the driver handsomely, but rarely paying her bills. (UV205)
1964: ANDY WARHOL THROWS A SURPRISE PARTY
Warhol hosted a surprise party at the Factory to celebrate the 1963 marriage of Billy Klüver and Olga Adorno. Klüver collaborated with Warhol on the Silver Clouds. Warhol filmed two Screen Tests of Olga - one of which was included in The Thirteen Most Beautiful Women. Olga was an artist and performer who appeared in early Happenings. She also appeared in Allan Kaprow's presentation of Stockhausen's Originale at the Judson in NY and had her leg cast in plaster by Jasper Johns for Watchman (1964) (AD110)
SEPTEMBER 1964: ANDY FILMS TAYLOR'S ASS.
Warhol filmed Taylor Mead's ass and appropriately called the 70 minute film, TAYLOR MEAD’S ASS (70mins/16 fps/black & white/silent). (UV157/SG145)
to filmography
Andy Warhol shooting Taylor Mead
at the Factory on September 5, 1964
(photo: Fred W. McDarrah)OCTOBER 1, 1964: BABY JANE HOLZER APPEARS IN VOGUE
Jane's mane of big hair created a new fashion trend. (AD97)
OCTOBER 1964: THE ROLLING STONES HAVE A PARTY. (SO DOES BABY JANE.)
The party was arranged by NICKY HASLAM and friends at JERRY SCHATZBERG’s photography studio on Park Avenue South to generate publicity for THE ROLLING STONES who are in New York to appear on the Ed Sullivan Show and play at the Academy of Music on 14th Street. It was also JANE HOLZER’s 24th birthday and the event became a birthday party for her, with the Stones as the star guests. Jane had been modeling for Vogue magazine so TOM WOLF was sent to cover the event for the New York Herald Tribune Sunday magazine supplement. He wrote his Girl of the Year article about Jane which was included in his book Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby. (POP80/81) The article was originally published in the December 1964 issue of New York magazine.
OCTOBER 26, 1964: HOLLY WOODLAWN IS ALMOST DRAFTED.
Holly was called up for the draft on her eighteenth birthday during the Vietnam War. (S)he showed up at the draft board wearing “hot pants and sandals, with a dab of blush for color," and was excused from service when the doctor noticed that (s)he had breasts (as a result of hormone treatments). (HW83)
OCTOBER 27, 1964: FREDDY HERKO COMMITS SUICIDE.
Andy Warhol (via Pat Hackett in POPism: The Warhol Sixties)
:
"Freddy spent the months before he died with a girl dancer over in an apartment near St. Mark's Church, taking more and more amphetamine... One night he showed up at Diane di Prima's to borrow a record and invited everyone there to a performance; he said he was going to leap off the top of his building downtown.
A few days later, on October 27, he turned up at an apartment on Cornelia Street that belonged to Johnny Dodd, who did the lighting for the Judson Church concerts... What Freddy did when he got inside was go and take a bath... After his bath, Freddy put Mozart's Coronation Mass on the hi-fi... As the record got to the 'Sanctus,' he danced out the open window with a leap so huge he was carried halfway down the block onto Cornelia Street five stories below." (POP85)
Front row: Binghamton Birdie, Freddy Herko (looking upward) and 'Dino'
Back row left to right: John Daley (standing), Gerard Malanga, Michael Smith,
Ron Gronhord, Jack Champlin, Gregory Darnopuk, obscured personMiddle row: Dale Joe, Ondine, Norman Billiard Balls, Billy Name,
Charles Stanley, Dorothy Podber
(photo: Michael Katz)NOVEMBER 5, 1964: A MEMORIAL SERVICE IS HELD AT THE JUDSON CHURCH FOR FREDDY HERKO. (JD209)
NOV. 21 - DEC. 17, 1964: ANDY WARHOL'S FIRST SHOW AT CASTELLI'S.
Warhol's first exhibition at the gallery of his new dealer, Leo Castelli, included his first series of flower paintings - ranging in size from 10 ft. by 10 ft. to 6 inch squares. (UW39)
LATE 1964: DOROTHY PODBER SHOOTS MARILYN(S).
Dorothy Podber, “a woman in her thirties” (POP75) and “a veteran of the avant-garde of the mid-1950s... dressed in leather” (UV185/6) arrived at the Factory, walked over to four Marilyn paintings that Andy had stacked against a wall, took out a gun and shot a hole through the stack. The bullet passed through four of the paintings. Dorothy smiled at Andy and left in the freight elevator. (POP75) One of the paintings, the Shot Red Marilyn set a record at Christie's when it was auctioned in 1989 for $ 4.1 million - the highest price ever paid for a Warhol at the time. (DD206)
According to Victor Bockris, Dorothy Podber was a witch that hung out with the mole people, also known as the "amphetamine rapture group." Its members included Ondine, Freddy Herko, Rotten Rita, the Mayor, the Duchess, Mr. Clean, the Sugar Plum Fairy and other friends of Billy Name. According to the Bockris account of the shot Marilyns, Dorothy had arrived at the Factory with her dog, Carmen Miranda, and asked Andy Warhol if she could shoot the paintings. When he said he didn't mind, she put on a pair of white gloves and took a small German pistol out of her pocket which she used to shoot the paintings. After she left, Andy said to Ondine who was there at the time, "Your friend just blew a hole through...," to which Ondine replied "But you just said she could." In the Bockris account, four Marilyns were shot and then renamed, Shot Red Marilyn, Shot Light Blue Marilyn, Shot Orange Marilyn, and Shot Sage Blue Marilyn. (L&D200/1)
1964: HOLLY WOODLAWN GETS A JOB.
Holly worked at JC Penney’s on Seventh Avenue and Sixty-first Street as a (female) file clerk to pay off debts from using her boyfriend's credit card, after quitting a school where she was training to become a key punch operator. (HW87) She later got a job as a salesgirl in the Seventh Heaven Boutique at Saks Fifth Avenue and eventually did floor modeling for Saks, participating in private fashion shows for the more exclusive clients. Fed up with the negative comments from the clientele at Saks, she found jobs modeling at different fashion houses, including Morris Metzger’s where she modeled sportswear for buyers. Eventually, she left modeling completely to become a file clerk in the Hounds Department at the American Kennel Club. (HW90-91)
1964: CANDY DARLING GETS A JOB.
Candy worked as a (female) file clerk at an investment firm on Wall Street. She did so well that she got an advancement to front-office receptionist. She went through an intellectual phase carrying a copy of Tolstoy’s War and Peace wherever she went. (HW88)
DEC. 7, 1964: ANDY WARHOL RECEIVES THE INDEPENDENT FILMMAKERS' AWARD.
The award, from Film Culture magazine, was for SLEEP, HAIRCUT, EAT, KISS and EMPIRE. (PS419/DB193)
The event took place at the New Yorker Theater on 89th Street and Broadway. The original idea was to show some of Warhol's films, and then present him with the award onstage. However, Warhol did not want a public presentation so Jonas Mekas filmed him at the Factory and then showed the film at the New Yorker Theater ceremony.
Mekas' 12 minute film was appropriately called Award Presentation to Andy Warhol and featured Warhol handing out fruit to a group that included Baby Jane Holzer, Gerard Malanga, Ivy Nicholson (and her young son), Naomi Levine, Gregory Battcock, Gregory Markopoulos and Kenneth King. Holzer got a banana which she peeled and ate in the film. (VWB3/4)
The independent filmmaker, Stan Brakhage, resigned from the Film-Makers' Co-op when Andy Warhol won the award. In a letter to Jonas Mekas, he wrote, "I cannot in good conscience continue to accept the help of institutions which have come to propagate advertisements for forces which I recognize as among the most destructive in the world today: "dope", self-centred Love, unqualified Hatred, Nihilism, violence to self and society." (LD212)
DECEMBER 1964: ANDY WARHOL SHOOTS HARLOT.
Using the Auricon, Andy Warhol made HARLOT, his “first sound movie with sound.” The world premiere of the film took place on January 10, 1965 at the Cafe au Go Go on Bleecker Street. (AF247)
Warhol realized that if they were going to have sync sound, they would need a lot of dialogue. When he saw RONNIE TAVEL at a Wednesday night poetry reading at the Cafe Le Metro, Warhol was impressed by the reams of paper that Ronnie was surrounded by and invited him to the Factory to sit in a lounge chair off-camera and talk while they shot MARIO MONTEZ in Harlot.
Mario was in a lot of off-off-Broadway plays and “doing a lot of underground acting for JACK SMITH and RON RICE and JOSE RODRIGUEZ-SOLTERO and BILL VEHR,” in addition to his regular job working for the post office. (POP90-91)
After Harlot, RONNIE TAVEL continued to write scenarios for Andy, including THE LIFE OF JUANITA CASTRO, HORSE, VINYL, HEDY, and KITCHEN. (POP91) He also wrote a musical for Warhol called Piano but the project failed to materialize. (AWM56).
