CHARLES RYDELL, JEROME HILL AND ANDY WARHOL'S BLOW JOB

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When Andy Warhol decided to shoot Blow Job, he rang Charles Rydell and asked him to star in it, telling him that “all he’d have to do was lie back and then about five different boys would come in and keep on blowing him until he came,” but that the film would only show his face. (POP50)

Charles agreed, but when he didn't show up for the following Sunday afternoon shoot, Andy reached him at Jerome Hill’s suite at the Algonquin and screamed into the phone “Charles! Where are you?” Charles responded: "What do you mean, where am I? You know where I am - you called me,” and Andy the said “We’ve got the camera ready and the five boys are all here, everything’s set up!” Charles's shocked reply was: “Are you crazy? I thought you were kidding. I’d never do that!”

They ended up using a “good-looking kid who happened to be hanging around the Factory that day” who, years later, Andy noticed in a Clint Eastwood film. (POP-51) His identity remained unknown until a fellow student from Edinboro State College, where Bookwalter majored in art, identified him as the actor in Blow Job after seeing a screening of the film in 1994 at The Warhol museum. In 2006, Callie Angell confirmed the identity of Bookwalter in the first volume of the Andy Warhol film catalogue raisonné. (AD41)

Charles Rydell and the older Jerome Hill were mentioned as boyfriends in Andy Warhol's diaries from the seventies. They also became part owners of Interview magazine for a period in the early seventies, purchasing John Wilcock's share of the magazine. Jerome Hill's nephew was Peter Beard. (BC42/56)

According to Warhol biographer, Fred Lawrence Guiles, Charles Rydell was a friend of Victor Reilly who Warhol knew from Carnegie Tech's modern dance group. (Other sources have indicated that Warhol was the only male member of the dance group.)

Fred Lawrence Guiles [from Loner at The Ball: The Life of Andy Warhol]:

"One of his [Andy Warhol's] old friends from Carnegie Tech's modern dance group, Victor Reilly, met Andy within hours of his arrival at Penn Station. An actor friend, Charles Rydell, accompanied him, and Andy made no secret of the fact that he though Rydell was sensational-looking... Within a few years Rydell was in the off-Broadway musical The Threepenny Opera, and in the 1960s he was cast as Hercules in the Broadway musical By Jupiter.

He described Andy then as being 'like a machine in that he never said much, although when you got to know him well, he would joke... I do remember we went to a restaurant... then we just walked. I remember us walking along Central Park West and talking, in pouring rain. At Andy's memorial service, I told somebody that I met Andy on his first day in New York and that he was so boring I didn't see him again for ten years. I was just joking...'" (LB49-50)

In 1966, another version of Blow Job was made called Eating Too Fast featuring art critic Gregory Battcock who would later die from multiple stabbing wounds in Puerto Rico in 1980. In a 1978 interview with Patrick Smith, Gregory Battcock described Eating Too Fast, which was filmed in his apartment:

Gregory Battcock:

"That was my apartment when I lived in the Village. Lou Reed was there, and Andy was there. I saw it in the Film-Maker's Co-Operative catalogue and rented it. There wasn't any written dialogue. They would just have the sounds, as so often in the experimental early films. The dialogue was just whatever happened to come up. You know? Sometimes Warhol or somebody would set up provocations, which might stimulate dialogue in one way or another but not direct it." (PS214)

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