JOEL SCHUMAKER: “The more outrageous you were, the more of a hero you became. With clothes, it was almost a contest to see who could come out with the most outrageous thing next. ‘I’m going to make a dress out of neon signs.’ ‘Oh, well, I’m going to make one out of tin cans!’ So you had to show these things off, and not only that, but you had to do it all night. You had to dance… and you had to dance fabulously.”
MARK LANCASTER: “There was some sort of system at the Factory where you were either encouraged to stay on at the end of the day or ignored until you left.”
CHRISTOPHER SCOTT: “You realized that Andy was taking this group of people downtown, and you knew whether you were included or not. Everyone was standing around talking, and then suddenly Andy and his chosen few were in the elevator and the doors closed and they were off. The others were left behind. It was the way high school cliques operate, and it was ugly and destructive.”
ULTRA VIOLET: “In the spring of 1967 I meet Andy at the Cannes Film Festival, where he has already arrived with Paul, Gerard, Lester Persky, and International Velvet, our real, real beauty. We are not part of the main festival, but our purpose is to screen ‘Chelsea Girls’ in one of the smaller viewing rooms, to bring it to the attention of international film distributors. We all dress in menacing black leather, we wear sinister hip boots and dark glasses with enormous lenses. We carry whips, make scenes wherever we go, pretend to bully waiters and ushers. We do anything to get noticed by the distributors and covered by the press.”
GERARD MALANGA: “Ingrid is very unhappy because she feels that she’s fading. Mary was someone I invented, put a whip in her hand, and spread her name around and because of her passiveness allowed herself to be eclipsed by Ingrid Superstar, Nico, and International Velvet. Nico is the true star because she keeps her distance and is socially professional. Andy and I go to meet Velvet and Edie and Mary at El Quixote Restaurant in the Hotel Chelsea. We have a lot to drink. Mary keeps her cool although she’s as insecure as Velvet, and Edie is doing nothing to help herself. I bring up the fact that when Nico comes back from Ibiza she’ll eclipse all the underlings. Velvet is very stoned – gets uptight and leaves the table to go to her room.”
JOHN CALE: “Most of the parties we went to were society affairs where the troupe of ten to fifteen sultry Factory acolytes were either ignored or giggled at for their outlandish behavior and dress. Andy, Gerard and Paul Morrissey would lead the way and soon we would be surrounded by bouffant ladies of the touring class fussing with our long hair and deviant clothing. We were tolerated, I thought, mainly because we would retire into a corner, rushing on speed, and spend the rest of the evening drawing interminably in our trip books. They are no longer to be seen. Ronnie Cutrone, Gerard, Mary Woronov, Ondine and others kept these books that they would show to Andy. Paul would snicker in disbelief that anyone would waste so much of their time with multicoloured scribbles. Andy found one collection of drawings interesting, however. They were small, very clear maps of nonexistent places, for example, the subway system for Atlantis. Andy believed that if they were redrawn on a very large scale he could get a show at Leo Castelli’s for our budding artist. But nothing came of the idea.”
ANONYMOUS: “Well, let me put it this way. It’s one thing to have a bunch of rowdy artists acting up at dinner or marking territory during the cocktail hour, like Jackson Pollock pissing in the fireplace. It’s quite another thing to open your door to Andy’s entourage of street hustlers and drag queens – and if you want Andy, you must. They prance in so grandly, you know, and then spread out, opening doors and drawers, shopping through your possessions. Throughout the evening, you catch glimpses of street urchins tucking bottles of booze under their coats or loading up their pockets with canapés. When they leave, you can stand at the door of your apartment and watch your white fox stole retreating down the hall on the shoulders of a drag queen who looks like Joan Crawford. After they’re gone, you discover that your medicine cabinet has been professionally rifled. There are no more sleeping pills, no more diet pills, no more Demerol, and even the pet tranquillizers are gone. That’s not symbolic resistance. That’s real impudence and absolutely unrepentant, so when people tell me that Andy is a social climber, I say no. Jackson Pollock was a social climber. Andy is pillaging the Upper East Side. He’s playing for keepsies.”
JOHN CALE: “There was a witching hour in that group. I’d go to the Ginger Man, but then I’d go running off to find myself a girlfriend. I would get entertained for a certain period of time, but I really didn’t have the patience with it after a while, and all the bitching and the backbiting. The creative side of it was such a joy, and it was difficult enough with Lou, and holding us together, anyway.”
ANDY WARHOL: “Ari, Nico’s son, was such a beautiful little kid, and he’d say the strangest things, like ‘I want to throw hot snowballs.’”
MARY WORONOV: “People were calling us the undead, vampires, me and my little brothers of the night, with our lips pressed against the neck of the city, sucking the energy out of scene after scene. We left each party behind like a wasted corpse, raped and carelessly tossed aside. I couldn’t believe it – the richer, more intelligent the party, the happier they were to see us. You could vomit words or dinner, it didn’t matter, they treated it like art. We never ate, we laughed at their food. Sneering at their jokes and snickering when they were serious, we stole useless objects (priceless to them) and combed their medicine cabinets for drugs. Andy was the worst, taking on five and six parties a night. He even looked like a vampire: white, empty, waiting to be filled, incapable of satisfaction. He was the white worm – always hungry, always cold, never still, always twisting. His favorite lair was still the balcony of the Dom, and my favorite place was right next to him, watching the sea of swirling bodies flop about below us like fish in a net.”
TONY SCHERMAN: “Andy’s currency was notoriety – and, to a large extent, food. Ever since he had developed an entourage it had been his practice to round up a select crew for dinner after a day’s filming, and he unfailingly picked up the tab. You might not earn enough as a Warhol superstar to afford an apartment, but you didn’t starve.”
RENE RICARD: “Andy never ate, he was so high all the time. I remember seeing him once at Emilio’s, where we used to go, and he’d have to order food, you know, because everybody’s eating… I saw him cut a black olive into 32 slices with a knife and fork.”
ANDY WARHOL: “I was standing with International Velvet at a party for David Croland. She pointed him out to her Cambridge roommate and told him to ‘get him.’ Il Mio had low chandeliers and the first thing David did was pick two crystal drops with the chairs attached and adapt them right there into beautiful earrings for Velvet. After Il Mio, we all walked over to a party in an apartment on Fifth Avenue, and Velvet and David locked themselves into the bathroom. When they came out finally, she informed the people who were screaming to know what they’d been doing in there all that time, ‘Fucking.’ Velvet and David wound up living together for two years. David decided that those crystal earrings looked so good that he’d include them in his line for Paraphernalia, and so after a couple of months, the chandeliers at Il Mio were looking pretty bleak.”
ANDY WARHOL: “International Velvet was beautiful, and she wore the short sixties clothes so perfectly, but still her body was womanly. Then when she opened her mouth, she sounded sort of dumb – which made her even more perfect. Like a lot of the girls, she carried a few changes of clothes around with her – just tucked a few dresses or skirts into her pocketbook before she went out – so onlookers would be peeking at a black disco dress she had in her bag, in with all her eye makeup and earrings. Velvet’s voice was the strangest thing to hear coming out of this girl. Everyone went around doing imitations of her. It was a monotone, but not at all like Nico’s: Velvet’s was a low-pitched American monotone. What she was like was a very beautiful, sexy cow.”
ULTRA VIOLET: “We taxi uptown, to Park Avenue and Fifty-Third Street, for breakfast at the Brasserie, in the Seagram Building. On the way we stop at a newsstand to pick up the morning papers and a stack of new magazines. The early morning sun is just hitting the windows on the eastern walls of Park Avenue’s towers. They glow in pale orange rectangles. We order big breakfasts – bacon, eggs, French fries. We spread out our reading material, turn to the gossip columns first. I say, ‘Let’s see if we’re alive today.’ I flip through the pages. My name is mentioned once, Andy’s twice, but there are no pictures of us. That makes it only a fair day. A day with no mention of ourselves is a lost day.”
ULTRA VIOLET: “We check the list of art and movie openings, figure out how to crash those we’re not invited to. Invitations and announcements arrive by the stackful every day. We feel we must go everywhere, do everything. If we’re not invited, we walk in anyway. The whole game is people: meeting them, getting them involved, asking them for money, pulling them into our orbit, being invited to their parties and events. Every new person is a new possibility, a link in an ever-lengthening chain, an ever-climbing ladder.”
ANDY WARHOL: “There was always a party somewhere: if there wasn’t a party in a cellar, there was one on a roof, if there wasn’t a party in a subway, there was one on a bus; if there wasn’t one on a boat, there was one in the Statue of Liberty. People were always getting dressed up for a party. In those days everything was extravagant. You had to be rich to be able to afford pop clothes from boutiques like Paraphernalia or from designers like Tiger Morse. In the 60s everybody got interested in everybody else. Drugs helped a little there. Everybody was equal suddenly – debutantes and chauffeurs, waitresses and governors.”
NICO: “I was so in love with Jim Morrison that I made my own hair red, after a while. I wanted to please his taste. It was silly, no? Like a teenager or something.”
STEPHEN DAVIS: “When Jim saw this, Nico said later, it made him cry. She asked him to propose marriage to her. He laughed so hard he fell off his chair, so she hit him.”
