ANDY WARHOL: “Max’s was the exact spot where pop art and pop life came together in the ‘60s.”
MICKEY RUSKIN: “My places have always been my living-room, and every night I throw a party. But at Max’s it went from being just an ordinary salon, and turned into magic.”
MYRA FRIEDMAN: “Max’s was a lot more than a magnet for sex games and drugs. It was an earthy, invigorating hangout and the people who Mickey let stay there for hours and hours were definitely a breed apart, when being ‘apart’ had real meaning in the world. I remember it for lots of conversation with lots of people who had lots and lots to say, and looking back on it now, the hum of the place strikes me as sort of the last hurrah of a genuine American bohemia. Like a great piece of writing, it was airborne from the minute it opened. It had beautiful wings; it soared.”
STEVEN WATSON: “A Frosty Myers clock contraption hung over the bar, but perhaps more famous was his light beam installation. The beam started in Myers’ studio, shot out from his window and into the night, and bounced off a mirror that sent it down Park Avenue and then to another mirror that sent it through the plate glass window of Max’s. The beam hit a small mirror glued to the jukebox, the speaker making the beam vibrate in random patterns determined by the music, and then zoomed just over the heads of the customers, assuming visible form in the smoke-filled room. The laser beam looked like a halo over the people in the back room. An automatic timer turned it on each night at 8:00 p.m. and off at 4:00 a.m. Those were the golden hours at Max’s Kansas City.”
ANDY WARHOL: “The back room at Max’s, lit by Dan Flavin’s red light piece, was where everybody wound up every night. After all the parties were over and all the bars and all the discotheques closed up, you’d go on to Max’s and meet up with everybody – and it was like going home, only better.”
PATTI SMITH: “Dan Flavin had conceived his installation in response to the mounting death toll of the war in Vietnam. No one in the back room was slated to die in Vietnam, though few would survive the cruel plagues of a generation.”
GLENN O’BRIEN: “The back room was thirty by thirty feet square. Everybody in it could see everybody else. All of the tables had red tablecloths and red napkins with wine lists and little bowls of chick peas meant to induce thirst in drinkers, but frequently used as projectiles for flirtation and aggravation. In one corner was a big Flavin fluorescent sculpture which bathed the room in a reddish light, earning it the nickname ‘Bucket of Blood.’ In the opposite corner was the round table, a black vinyl banquette. Like the Round Table of Camelot and the Roundtable at the Algonquin, this table ruled the roost. This is where Andy sat. Andy was there every night, to watch and listen and pick up a few tabs and meet a few new kids. It was an all-Superstar cast. It was the best show in town. The stars of the music scene came. They would watch the show or be in it. It was exciting but anonymous. Jim Morrison could gently nod into oblivion behind his shades, sitting with Nico without anybody asking for autographs. Even Janis Joplin was treated like a lady.”
IGGY POP: “For me there were two Max’s. The first Max’s was the back room, behavioral New York, gay intellectual Andy Warhol credited Max’s. And then there was the other Max’s which was the rock’n’roll venue. I was a kid from the Midwest who had some exposure, mostly through books and records, to both the outrageous and the arts. Coming into that room was kind of like a University of Dementia.”
DANNY FIELDS: “When I wasn’t getting laid elsewhere I went to Max’s Kansas City every night. It was a bar and restaurant two blocks away from where I lived and you could sit there all night and bring yourself coffee. It was free. And you always signed the check and never paid the bill. I had friends that would sign the check ‘Donald Duck’ and ‘Fatty Arbuckle.’”
LOU REED: “Mickey Ruskin was personally responsible for my survival for three years because he fed me every day. It was the tab at Max’s that made it possible for me and a small army of other artists to exist just left of the line that defines more extreme modes of criminality.”
PHILIP LOCASCIO: “Mickey didn’t want Patti Smith in at first because she was too grungy. There was still that very affluent clientele that ate in front and along the side, like Visconti, Fellini, Antonioni, and that was a very sophisticated movie crowd. They enjoyed the costumes that everybody wore, but Mickey still didn’t want anything scrungy around. He had to appeal to these people’s sensibilities. They like to look at it, but they didn’t want to be terrorized by it. That also happened the first night Janis Joplin came to the door. Big Brother had just come in, there were staying at the Chelsea. I was standing at the bar with Mickey and all Mickey saw was the first door open of double doors, and then when the second door opened, this girl was standing there with straggly hair, ugly as sin, coming in, and Mickey said, ‘I don’t want that person in here, tell her you have to dress or it’s reservations only.’ I got up close to her, and I went back to Mickey and said, ‘Mickey, that’s Janis Joplin.’ He said, ‘Then tell her to go home and take a bath.’ Eventually she did get in that night. She came back later with the band.”
BARBARA GOLDSMITH: “At Max’s Kansas City, Viva, Warhol, Ingrid Superstar and Brigid Polk sit at a large round table in the corner. The restaurant accords them celebrity status; Viva sends back her fish, then a steak, meanwhile sniffing methedrine off a spoon. ‘I take it every three hours,’ Brigid says. ‘Don’t let anybody tell you speed kills. I’ve been on it for years.’ ‘I just got out of the hospital,’ Ingrid says, ‘and I’m all set for action.’ She holds up a packet of condoms. Brigid says, ‘Excuse me for a minute, it’s time to wake myself up,’ and she heads for the ladies’ room. Viva puts her head on the table. ‘I’m so tired and this place is depressing me.’”
PATTI SMITH: “Max’s was the social hub of the subterranean universe, when Andy Warhol passively reigned over the round table with his charismatic ermine queen, Edie Sedgwick. The ladies-in-waiting were beautiful, and the circulating knights were the likes of Ondine, Donald Lyons, Rauschenberg, Dali, Billy Name, Lichtenstein, Gerard Malanga, and John Chamberlain. In recent memory the round table had seated such royalty as Bob Dylan, Bob Neuwith, Nico, Tim Buckley, Janis Joplin, Viva, and the Velvet Underground. It was as darkly glamorous as one could wish for. But running through the primary artery, the thing that ultimately accelerated their world and then took them down, was speed. Amphetamine magnified their paranoia, robbed some of their innate powers, drained their confidence, and ravaged their beauty.”
LEEE BLACK CHILDERS: “And so it came to pass that besides the regular bunch of scruffy artists surreptitiously propping up a corner of the bar, Mickey found himself playing host to the likes of Edie Sedgwick in a silver tissue minidress and seven pairs of false eyelashes, Ultra Violet in a black patent-leather body suit with manacles and chains, Baby Jane Holzer dressed like a cheerleader on acid, and a bonanza of others. But instead of complaining, he loved it. If the regular costumers couldn’t eat their steaks with a vampire at the next table, that was their tough luck.”
RUBY LYNN REYNER: “Brigid would stand up on the round table in the back room, the Warhol table, and take out a syringe and plunge it through her clothes into her fat ass and announce, ‘I’m up!’ Then Edie Sedgwick would be sitting there with her head down, nodding at the table with Jim Morrison.”
ANDY WARHOL: “Ondine would sit in a booth with his Magic Markers and write replies to people with sex queries/problems for his column: ‘Beloved Ondine’s Advice to the Shopworn.’”
LEEE BLACK CHILDERS: “You see, everyone was on speed, which lent itself to great dramas and outbursts of emotion. The scenes were always extremely dramatic and publicly dramatic – lots of slappings, drinks in the face, and bottles over the head in the back room of Max’s. I remember seeing Nico hit a man over the head with a champagne bottle. Champagne bottles, unlike the ones in the movies, don’t break, they just knock you out… In some ways, though, it was an innocent time. Brigid Polk would fill up a hypodermic needle and wait for you. You’d walk past the round table and the next thing you knew, she’d stabbed you and you were on speed.”
LOUIE WALDEN: “Nico would bring her boyfriend, Jim Morrison, to the back room. He copied Gerard Malanga’s look, wearing black leather pants. They’d sit there and I’d be sitting with Brigid and she’d be whispering to me, ‘Look at her. She has that awful Doors character with her who pulls his pee pee out on stage.”
DANNY FIELDS: “Remember the time Jim Morrison peed in the bottle of wine at the round table, then he told the waitress, ‘We can’t finish this wine, why don’t you take it home?’ and she did?”
MICKEY RUSKIN: “My image of Jim Morrison is him sitting back under the Dan Flavin light sculpture with Nico, lying back with shades covering his eyes, out of his mind.”
PATTI SMITH: “I lived at the Chelsea and every night was a fuckin’ party. Someone was always fighting or Nico was slashing some person.”
LOU REED: “Nico threw a glass that shattered in a mob guy’s face. He thought the man in back of me did it. I loved those after-hours bars…”
JOHN CALE: “I don’t remember whether Nico told me she intended only to throw the drink and not the glass. But anyway…”
NICK KENT: “And Nico, she of the Velvet Underground legend days, now a recluse in Paris, having had to leave New York tres vite after gouging a broken bottle into the face of a girlfriend of the city’s Black Panther leader down at Max’s one night.”
IGGY POP: “She had cut someone with a broken glass about that time. Someone who she thought provoked her, someone very socially correct. She gave him a little slice. It was not as litigious a country at that time, so, I don’t know, maybe there wasn’t serious scarring, but there was this other side of her, you know, a ‘you-better-not-fuck-with-me’ although I never… I mean, she was bigger than me. But she knew how to dress, and she was one cool chick.”
RICHARD MELTZER: “Well, um, uh, okay, okay here’s what happened. Nico was sitting around drinking with Germaine Greer, Pat Hartley, supergroupie Emmaretta, Larissa of the Chelsea and the amazing Patti Smith. To test out Germaine, Patti had decided to compliment her on her looks. To which Germaine replied, ‘Ooh but my hair is such a mess, I haven’t washed it or anything.’ So Patti told Nico that Germaine was a real simp, and under the influence of ethyl alcohol in her belly, the fabulous European blonde decided to make the show memorable. The discussion got around to the forthcoming Billie Holliday movie. Billie’s supposed to be played by Diana Ross and it’s common knowledge that she’s about as suited for the part as Duncan Hines. Well anyway, in terms of the particular clientele on hand, Emmaretta had to be the one to spill the beans: ‘Diana Ross hasn’t suffered enough.’ That clinched it for Nico. ‘Suffered? You think you’ve suffered? I’ve suffered more than any of you!’ And with that she reached for her glass, it got broke or something in the process, and she shoved it into Emmaretta’s eye… uggh. Yup and it required 19 stitches and a vendetta was sworn out immediately so she had to leave the country.”
IGGY POP: “Nico would go crazy, man.”
EILEEN POLK: “I went to Max’s every night. Every single night. At first it was full of Warhol people. During that period you’d see Andy Warhol there with his entourage: Viva, Jane Forth, Joe Dallesandro. Taylor Mead would be hanging out in the corner, drinking. Or some crazy girl with dreadlocks, holding a baby doll, talking to herself.”
EVE BABBITZ: “I introduced Eric Emerson to Andy. Eric was gorgeous – he had this cherubic blonde hair – and everyone would fall in love with him. He opened a shop on Ninth Street that had an aquarium in the window where he put an iguana. Once he went away for two weeks and the iguana died in plain sight of everyone. It was horrible, but that’s what that whole group was like, they were crazy. They would just forget cats and dogs and animals and wives and husbands and clothes and jewelry.”
CHERRY VANILLA: “Eric Emerson was the embodiment of the child-man – a little curly-haired blonde whose features hadn’t yet taken on any of life’s hurts or cruelties. He looked at you full-on, fully open – with the trust, curiosity, and wonder of a five-year-old boy… If someone could wave a magic wand and offer me the gift of youth right now, I don’t think I would take it. Because I know in my heart that I could never really be as young again as all of us were in our hearts and minds back then. And Eric Emerson personified that youth. So much so, that he never even got the chance to – like the rest of us – grow old.”
MARY WORONOV: “Taylor Mead was always fabulous. He was on this new drug that nobody had ever heard of before from France; it had this funny name: Quaaludes. It was the land of amphetamines. Everyone always looked very angsty and wore dark glasses. Warhol was great, the Velvets were great, but when all those people got together, it was probably one of the most impolite, disastrous things that ever happened. But, it was very hot and very sexy. It was a great period in my life.”
BOB RUSSELL: “Dorothy Dean started working the door at one point. She started as sort of an assistant when I was working the door upstairs. She went to Radcliffe. I met her in Boston. There were a whole bunch of people that came to New York from Harvard at the same time that Dorothy did. All those people through Andy were hanging out in the back room. Dorothy was very slight with harlequin glasses, and her purse was half the size she was. She had worked for several magazines, but she drank too much and she was incredibly bitchy. Her obsession was with gay men. She had this one man who she was completely in love with. She used to call him the Sugar Plum Fairy. She was often found in leather bars in the West Village in pursuit of the Sugar Plum Fairy. That was her love, and then Lou Reed became the focus of her life.”
LEEE BLACK CHILDERS: “Max’s had a very strict door policy, believe it or not. There were people who couldn’t get in to Max’s, but these stoned out drag queens wearing trash were welcomed in. Mickey was so fabulous. He let us do anything we wanted to in the back room. Andrea would get up and take her clothes off while Geraldine Smith poured salad dressing all over her.”
LOUIS WALDON: “I took Candy Darling to Max’s Kansas City to meet Andy, and she stopped me at the door and said, ‘I can’t go in there!’ and I said, ‘Why not?’ She says, ‘Because it’s against the law for a man dressed as a woman to go into a New York bar!’ I said, ‘Well, baby, this ain’t old New York, this is the new New York. In fact, you’re going to feel right at home!’”
PATTI SMITH: “Mickey Ruskin allowed us to sit for hours nursing coffee and Coca-Colas and hardly ordering a thing. Some nights were totally dead. We would walk home exhausted and Robert [Mapplethorpe] would say we were never going back. Other nights were desperately animated, a dark cabaret infused with the manic energy of thirties Berlin. Screaming catfights erupted between frustrated actresses and indignant drag queens. They all seemed as if they were auditioning for a phantom, and that phantom was Andy Warhol. I wondered if he cared about them at all.”
DAVE THOMPSON: “The latest game to intrigue the cast of the back room at Max’s was a Jackie Curtis invention called the Outrageous Lie. The rules were simple. You told the most outrageous lie that you could, on the premise that little lies are easily caught, bigger ones can sometimes survive, but a truly outrageous one will become a part of your personal mythos forever. That was the thing about the outrageous lie: not even the other contestants should be certain whether or not it was actually a lie. Maybe Joan Crawford really did give Wayne County that brown silk jacked that he wore whenever he could. Maybe Cyrinda Foxe really did carry the scars from a run-in with the Hell’s Angels. Maybe Nico really did study with Lee Strasberg and hang out with Marilyn Monroe. And maybe Patti Smith, laboring through her teenage pregnancy, really did get kicked so hard by her unborn child that a tiny leg burst out of her stomach and hung there still kicking till the doctor could jam it back in again.”
HOLLY WOODLAWN: “I remember one Friday afternoon, Jackie and I had been doing a lot of speed and we decided to get dressed and do our makeup and go to Max’s. Jackie used one mirror, I went to another. I started making up one eye, and, three hours later, I was still working on it. My arm became so tired I couldn’t hold it up anymore, so we sat down on the couch and worked on each other’s faces. By the time we finally got our faces made up to our satisfaction, we looked at the clock and realized Max’s was closed because it was 4:30 AM. So we just stayed home and listened to Barbra Streisand albums, and the rest is history.”
SUSAN PILE: “People did strange things when they did speed. There was one guy who showed up at Max’s Kansas City with his arm in a sling. Everyone was like, ‘What happened to you?’ He said, ‘Oh, I took a shot of speed and I couldn’t stop brushing my hair for three days.’”
YVONNE SEWALL-RUSKIN: “It seemed as though everyone was on ups. And even those who weren’t, were subject to the rabid new pulse and pace being set by the speed freaks. LSD deepened and enhanced the frenzy. A buck a hit for pure, potent, and plentiful acid. The crazies in the back room dropped it right on top of the speed. They also smoked pot, took downs, and drank. The energy, the rush, ‘the electricity of life’ was at an all-time high. Not since Fitzgerald and Zelda had things been so gloriously out of control. Nightlife was ‘to die for.’ Unfortunately, many did.”
HOLLY WOODLAWN: “Max’s was very ‘Satyricon.’ There was a lot of acid being taken, and everyone would… I would just run around in rags. At one point, I had a purse that was a suitcase, and, you know, just the way people would dress. Oh! They were just very, very crazy. Very ‘up.’”
JEFFREY BRENNAN: “Divine showed up at cocktail hour when all the businessmen were there. She’d come sashaying in with her 250 pounds and five guys would drop their drinks. It was quite a show when the late-night people showed up in the afternoon for free hors d’oeuvres. They lived off the free food, and if they came for afternoon freebies, usually they were there until closing.”
LYNN EDELSON: “At Max’s I got turned on to every sexual perversion that anybody could ever be into, every strange drug.”
LYNN MEYERS: “We would have evenings in Max’s where we would all sit in one of the booths and play, ‘Guess the Drug.’ We would swallow a pill or two and try to figure out what it was we were on. Those drugs were mostly like mescaline. There were some we never did identify.”
DEREK CALLENDER: “There were enough drugs in that back room to cause genetic defects. That was pill city.”
JAYNE COUNTY: “The back room was vicious. Vicious! Everyone was on a different drug, and if you got up to use the bathroom you didn’t dare turn your back. The bathroom was on your left, and you had to back out of the back room to get there, because if you turned your back, people would talk about you. People would say horrible things about you the minute you got up.”
PAUL ROTHCHILD: “The back room at Max’s was pure theater. People dressed for it. Those red fluorescent lights. At the tables – people shooting up coke, speedballs, the great pill contest: ‘How many could you drop at Max’s and still walk out?’”
CHERRY VANILLA: “I became like an acid queen. I loved it. My looks got crazier and crazier. I started getting into things like pink wigs, teasing them up to make them real big and like bubbles. I’d wear goggle glasses and real crazy make-up: spidery lashes and white lips, and microminis. I saw a micromini on Edie and immediately started cutting everything off. Kenneth Jay Lane earrings. Big Robert Indiana LOVE earrings… giant love paintings on my ears. Little bikini undies, a band around the top; and we made these silver dresses that were just silver strings hanging on us. I would go out half naked with see-through things. You took a scarf and wrapped it around you and thought you were dressed.”
YVONNE SEWALL-RUSKIN: “You’d be in the ladies’ room primping, and Jackie Curtis and Holly Woodlawn would be in there with you putting on their makeup, chatting and carrying on like women do about their menstrual cramps and what-not. You’d forget. It was just like talking to one of the girls. I’d walk out of there thinking, I’m very confused.”
CYRINDA FOXE: “I never went for cocktail hour until Jackie Curtis dragged me there for the free chicken wings. Actually, one afternoon I went to the Factory and we came with Jackie and some other people to cocktail hour. I was sitting at the table talking to someone. It was up front right up close to the bar. Gregory Corso came over and sat down and he’s sitting there and staring at me. He’s talking gibberish and crazy. Then he says, ‘You know, I have a present for you.’ He takes his hand out from under the table and he’s jerked off under the table. And he’s blown his wad. I was like, ‘Eeeeewwww you’re so disgusting.’ Mickey just blew. ‘That’s it for Corso.’ He said, ‘You’re out of here.’”
BEBE BUELL: “If I was upset or depressed I could always go to Max’s to my family. Lou Reed was like Dad and Alice Cooper was like Dad. I don’t know who Mom was.”
BEBE BUELL: "The big thing was to get your picture above the cash register for that week. I remember Todd [Rundgren] had gone on the road and I had a fling with Iggy Pop and I thought I would get away with it, and Todd would come home and everything would be normal. Todd and I come walking into Max's and above the cash register, I finally got my wish; it was a photo of me and Iggy Pop blown up the size of a house. And Iggy had Todd's jean cap on."
STEVEN WATSON: “Over the cash register was a changing series of photographs. At first it was Brigid Berlin’s blown-up Polaroids, and later, Anton Perich put up a new photo each week, always portraits of the people who came into Max’s – especially the people in the back room, which Perich considered his personal photography studio.”
RITTY DODGE: “One good thing about working the back room was when the lights came up, you could pick up enough pills to last you the week. At the end of the night when I told the backroom characters that it was closing time and to pay up, absolutely everything would come flying at me. You had to duck!”
IGGY POP: “Jackie Curtis, Leee Black Childers, and Glenn O’Brien… maybe in another era these people would have been young preppies, working as interns at the White House, or maybe they would have been Senate pages. They would be doing their internships in this twisted place and wearing dresses every other day. They had a certain WASPish good sense behind it all, and a very youthful sensitivity. And then there were the rock people that tended to come in less and be more musicianly. Probably in Lou and my case, a little more peaks and valleys.”
DICK FOUNTAIN: “So here I was in New York, and with no bread. So I have to get a job. (A defeat in itself). I get a job as a busboy in Max’s Kansas city, a restaurant of some repute in Union Square. Nature of clientele: rich hippies, rich artists, rich fags, fag hippies, hippie artists, arty fags, underground film stars, underground artists, underground rich hippie artists, rock stars and their dogs, rich underground arty dogs, etc. Nature of busboy: one who cleans up tables, lays new tablecloths, serves coffee, trips over rock stars’ fucking Great Danes and spills coffee on rich arty underground floor. Wears long hair and Mickey Mouse t-shirt. To set the scene: 1 A.M., low ceiling, dark rooms faintly lit by red lights on the tables. Crowded with long hair, patent leather, buck-skin, lurex tights. Air filled with cries of ‘Too Much! Dynamite! Darling, you can’t mean…! Eat shit! Look it’s Warren! Over here Taylor! I said sour fucking cream and chives! Hey, that bastard hasn’t paid!’ The vibes run somewhere between a mental institution and a film set. Jackie Curtis and Candy Darling sweep in fluttering false eyelashes and being charming all over the place. In the back room ten or so of Wendy Ashol’s ‘Factory’ discuss heatedly a Shakespearean sonnet, of which none of them can recite a line. Taylor Mead, of rich underground arty film fame, awakes suddenly as a waitress treads on his drooping eyelid. Behind on the wall, a large pink and purple photoscreen print of a girl getting fucked with her knees up to her ears, smiling sweetly. (For years I thought Burroughs had a lurid imagination. He cheated. He wrote it all down from life.) The waitresses rush around in black, harassed. They come in two sorts, hard and soft. The soft ones often crack up. They busboys come in three sorts. Fast ones who come in on speed. Slow ones who come in on smack. Spaced out ones who smoke grass in the Gents. I went in straight once or twice.”
MICHAEL POLLARD: “Once I threw a drink in Lou Reed’s lap. I was a little stewed. He was really mad. He said, ‘Let’s go outside,’ and when we got there neither of us could remember what we went outside for, so we went back in and continued to drink.”
ANTON PERICH: “There was this enormous gravity there, holding all these angels grounded. At any other place in the world they would simply detach and fly away into the starry night.”
LEEE BLACK CHILDERS: “Peter O’Toole came into the back room one time and was just sitting there drinking and the usual crowd was there. Ingrid Superstar was doing some number and there was a photographer in the room taking pictures and the flash would go off. Peter O’Toole was getting visibly crazier and crazier and started to appear very irritated. Mickey walked into the back room and Peter O’Toole called Mickey over to his table. ‘Excuse me, but could you tell those photographers enough is enough. I am here privately and do not wish to be harassed. Mickey said, ‘You’re here privately, what does that mean?’ He said, ‘Those photographers, they keep taking pictures of me.’ Mickey said, ‘They aren’t taking pictures of you, they’re taking pictures of Ingrid.’ He said, ‘But I’m Peter O’Toole.’ To which Mickey replied, ‘Oh, are you a painter?’”
LEEE BLACK CHILDERS: “I remember Holly Woodlawn once saying, ‘No one will ever believe all these people were in the same room on the same night,’ and that was night after night after night. The back room was lit entirely in red lights. It makes anyone look beautiful. And as soon as you heard ‘Sometimes it’s hard to be a woman,’ he’d go click and the whole room would glow white, and, honey, those platform shoes were heading for the door, as fast as they could get out of there!”
DANNY FIELDS: “The first thing you saw when you walked into Max’s Kansas City was a Chamberlain car wreck, you know, squashed, and then standing next to it, Edie Sedgwick sort of rotating on an invisible pedestal. Two symbols of destruction.”
LEEE BLACK CHILDERS: “Each night was different and each night was proclaimed the last good night of Max’s for years – and of course it only got better and better. No one, including Andy Warhol, thought that any of this was important, much less that anyone was going to remember it. Everything was of itself the minute it was happening and then it was over and that’s how the whole back room was. That’s how I remember it – in flashes.”
ANDY WARHOL: “At about 3 AM, Andrea Whips Feldman came tearing into the back room in a velvet miniskirt up to her crotch and a big-brimmed velvet hat. She climbed up onto the big round table where we were sitting, ripped her blouse open, and screamed, ‘It’s Show Time! And everything’s coming up roses! Marilyn’s gone five years, so love me while you can, I’ve got a heart of gold!’”
MARY WORONOV: “It was sort of fun except that Andrea was crazy, well, only slightly crazy; she was at the point where she could only talk to people’s reflections in the little hand mirror she carried around.”
CHERRY VANILLA: “Andrea growling in her deep, demonic rasp, her beautiful wobbly legs straddling the huge bowl of salad in the middle of the table. It’s ‘showtime!’ And she began to strip. 'A-a-acid,' Andrea bellowed in a voice that seemed to come from one possessed. ‘Has anybody got any a-a-a-acid?’ The forty or fifty people in the room sat transfixed. She was in some ways so tragic, this rich girl who’d run away from home and fucked up her chromosomes so badly. But she was also so electric, so immediate, so confronting… just like the era itself. ‘It’s Showtime,’ Andrea cooed, wrenching her young pastel body in a spastically sensual self-caress. Light from red fluorescent tubes fell on her shoulders. Chick peas rolled around her black stiletto heels. Some were broken and smashed into the red tablecloth. ‘The Be-e-e-e-e-eatles,’ she wailed, plie-ing precariously over the romaine. ‘I want the Be-e-eatles!’ Then suddenly she jolted up with outstretched arms, smiled a child’s smile, and took a bow. The room broke into cat calls and worshipful applause. This was Andrea Whips, a SUPERSTAR!”
CHERRY VANILLA: “There’s a play called ‘Niteclub’ by Ken Bernard in which a bunch of people dying in an air-raid shelter perform for each other until the last drop of oxygen is gone. It was like that in the back room in this era. Everyone knew a certain age of innocence was dying, and everyone was out to give it its last hurrah. It was a divine improvisation which could not go on forever, for soon the very air of it would be gone.”
LEEE BLACK CHILDERS: “It was a bar. All bars are made to make you feel welcome. It’s been in a million movies, it’s been in a million plays before that. Greta Garbo saying, ‘Gimme a viskey and don’t be stingy, baby.’ A bar is where you… can sit down if you’ve got the price of a drink – and you’re okay. Well, that’s all Max’s was. A bar. The fact that it’s gone down in history as legendary, neither owner intended and neither owner even encouraged. It was a bar. You’d go in there, you’d sit down, you knew you were welcome. You might sit next to David Johansen; you might sit next to Patti Smith; you might sit next to Nancy Spungen, and she would be talking to you very frankly, like people do in bars all up and down Third Avenue. That’s what happens in bars. People talk to each other very frankly. The big difference in Max’s was all the people who went on to become famous. So the fact the Nancy Spungen was a junkie with track marks all up and down her arms and bleached blonde hair with roots and was talking with me about, ‘Oh, Jerry Nolan won’t fuck me, what’s his problem?’ while drool was coming out of her mouth and she was sloshing her drink off on the bar… visually, she wasn’t any different from any other junkie prostitute all up and down Third Avenue, except she went on to become one of the most famous murder victims of history. That’s it. I solved it. That’s what made Max’s famous.”
