BILLY NAME: “’65 and ‘66 is a whole new Factory, the real Factory, the exploding Factory. Before that, it’s still Andy’s art studio.”
MARTIN TORGOFF: “The whole world seemed silver that season: the silver tinfoil of the Factory walls, the silver-rinsed hair of Warhol and Edie Sedgwick; Warhol’s silver helium pillows drifting willy-nilly along the ceiling of the Castelli Gallery; the silver hypodermic needle that the Duchess brandished as casually as a toothbrush and poked into the creamy derriere of Ingrid Superstar in reel 3 of ‘The Chelsea Girls.’ ‘Who wants to buy some amphetamine?’ asks the Duchess. ‘It’s like snow in the middle of January on the windowpane. It’s the end!’”
BILLY NAME: “With Andy, you lived and screamed with him. You were all in that burning hell hole of electricity and thunderbolts… I was always going to be there to make sure you didn’t get lost or hurt yourself, so you could experience the peril of chaos but still be at ease with it and experience it. Whatever you were doing, you would get the essence of it, therefore you were still an enlightened person and you weren’t overtaken by it.”
ULTRA VIOLET: “Brigid is walking around with a fat manila envelope full of pills. ‘Distribution time,’ says Eric Emerson. ‘Obetrol or Seconal?’ Brigid asks. ‘Both,’ says Eric. ‘Duenol or Obetrol?’ she asks. ‘Both,’ Eric repeats. Everybody giggles.”
ONDINE: “This is one of the most peaceful, hellish-like days I’ve ever seen.”
WARHOL: “Oh really?”
ONDINE: “I’m in perfect torment.”
ONDINE: “Gerard was one edge of the coin, Billy and I were the other edge. Billy was a conservative experimental intelligent traditionalist. Gerard was a popular fad and fashion what’s-going-on folk element. We were equally important. Warhol walked through both elements and used them both beautifully.”
MARY WORONOV: “Ondine pulled three worn albums to his chest and in a voice that was deathly serious said, ‘If you do this for me you will be saving my life.’ That night Ondine introduced me to Maria Callas, and I realized that Ondine was capable of regenerating himself just by hearing her voice. Some arias were so powerful he went beyond himself and formed wings. Wrapped in his torn cloak and looking like a great jet that could never get off the ground, he flew around the room while I tried to follow by jumping off the table till my ribs were bruised from the continual crash-landings.”
HENRY GELDZAHLER: “Billy’s was a crowd of amphetamine users who were united into a dark family and because of their love of opera. I still find in my record cupboards less well-known works with Billy’s name in ink on the inside cover. It was part of the mystique of these amies de minuit to remove records or velvets from one apartment to another; these were never stolen, only liberated.”
ANDY WARHOL: “All through dinner Julian Schnabel played Maria Callas records. It was incredible. There’s this new collection of forty records of everything she ever did and it comes in two cases and they sell them at newsstands in Italy. And it was just like the sixties. I could almost see Ondine whisking around in the shadows.”
ULTRA VIOLET: “Ondine gives the impression that he is just about to go onstage. In fact, he is always onstage, in a limbo between the real world and the world of drugs. Ondine treats me as if we’ve always known each other. He says, ‘Please pull this tourniquet tight while I, I, I…’ He repeats sounds and syllables when he talks, not in a straight stutter but in a kind of hesitated delivery. I hold the tourniquet in place on his upper arm. I am reminded of my school days, when I played doctor and nurse with my friends – but this is not an innocent game. Ondine closes his fist. Without looking at his arm, but looking me straight in the eyes, he swiftly plunges a shiny needle into his bulging vein, empties the hypodermic syringe of Methedrine with lightning speed, swiftly pulls it out, leaks the needle, releases the tourniquet, swallows his saliva, and the cascade of verbiage resumes. ‘Dear, dear, God, how, how, how much longer do I, I, I have to go? You’re pin, pin, pinning me to, to a wall of fire.’”
ELENORE LESTER: “Andy’s boys and girls find their way to him, the neglected, rejected, overpsychoanalyzed children of the rich, and the runaways from jobs as supermarket checkout clerks in the bleak suburbs of New Jersey. They find their way to the enchanted silver playroom on East 47th Street in Manhattan, to Mother Andy – neutral, cool and withdrawn in goggles and leather jacket… He listens to each one, watches each one, an open shutter. They tell him about a new job, the lost earring that got found, an obscure little shop that sells old uniforms, a problem with the equipment, a problem with a parent, a friend.”
BOBBY ANDERSEN: “In the Factory they all had a special language. Brigid and her sister, Richie, initiated a lot of that lingo. They called it ‘taking a poke,’ an expression made up by Brigid when they took a shot – what the street people called ‘getting it off.’ If you were being bad, you were ‘on a ravage.’ Not able to ‘fold one’s napkin’ was a metaphor for not being able to cope. When anyone went too far, the famous line was ‘The rant runneth over.’ Brigid would say ‘Take a poke, my dear. It’s divine.’ I think that’s why everyone called her Polk, it came from ‘poke.’”
STEVEN WATSON: “That summer of 1965 Brigid came to the Factory, and as Billy Name recalled, the combination of Brigid and Ondine made the presence of amphetamine at the Factory far more palpable. It was Ondine and Brigid who encouraged Billy to leave the Factory; he’d get into a taxi and zip around the city with them, just to listen to the sparks their minds gave off.”
BRIGID BERLIN: “I was never an Andy Warhol groupie. I really enjoyed Billy and Ondine and didn’t give a hoot if Andy was along or not.”
BRIGID BERLIN: “Now, I’m a rapper, and Andy really digs listening. There are lots of people who really get bored with my rapping and my talking and I can’t shut up. Well, I like to listen, too, but sometimes when they’re talking all of a sudden something comes into my head, and I gotta get it out. Andy just wants you to get it out. He just sits there. This is what he wants. I get rid of a lot of my frustrations with him when I call him up, and I scream and yell even. We talk on the phone for hours, Andy and me. Oh, I have so much fun with Andy. Now we’re taking these Polaroids and taking clothes off. It’s hysterical. He just gets so excited when I pull my top off on the street.”
JOHN WATERS: “I don’t remember the first movie I saw Brigid in but she was always my favorite Warhol star. Everyone in the Warhol Factory was generally known for being gorgeous, so Brigid was the one who stood out to me because she would be nude at all times, which I think is great confidence for a fat girl.”
YVONNE SEWALL-RUSKIN: “I learned the hard way that you had to watch what you said around Brigid or on the phone with her. She would call and tape your conversation without your knowledge or consent. She could be vicious. She got me one time, and I wasn’t aware until after the fact. She was asking me questions about Bob Neuwirth like: ‘Was he a good lover?’ ‘Did he have big cock?’ I don’t remember what I said, but a few weeks later, there was a night we were all sitting at Max’s, I think both Neuwirth and Mickey [Ruskin, husband] were there, and she pulls out the tape recorder with this particular conversation and puts it on the table, turns it on, and lets it run. I was flabbergasted, and Neuwirth was not happy. He said, ‘Yvonne, don’t you know she records all her conversations? Never talk to Brigid about anything personal.’ I thought it was very cruel, and embarrassing to say the least. Sometimes she’d wait for you to leave the table then she’d play the tape.”
BRIGID: “When I got married, my father gave me two hundred dollars to buy underwear… but I married a staple gun queen… so….”
WILLOW: “What do you mean?”
BRIGID: “Well, he was JUST THAT! He won Mayor Wagner’s ‘Salute to Spring’ award for the best windows on 5th Avenue.”
VIVA: “He was a window decorator and he used staple guns and he was a fag. Brigid, why did you marry him?”
BRIGID: “Because he wore pin-striped suits!”
STEVEN WATSON: “Chuck Wein met a young woman named Ingrid von Schefflin in the lobby of the St. James Hotel. Ingrid lived in Wyecoff, New Jersey, and worked a day job as an office clerk. At night she hung out in the West Forties, picking up occasional tricks and enjoying the sleazy good-time atmosphere.”
RENE RICARD: “The Warhol people felt Edie was giving them trouble. They were furious with her because she wasn’t cooperating. So they went to a Forty-second Street bar and found Ingrid von Schefflin. They had noticed: ‘Doesn’t this girl look like an ugly Edie? Let’s really teach Edie a lesson. Let’s make a movie with her and tell Edie she’s the big new star.’ They cut her hair like Edie’s. They made her up like Edie. Her name became Ingrid Superstar… just an invention to make Edie feel horrible.”
DANNY FIELDS: “People came from good families, or if they didn’t come from good families, they were wildly brilliant like Ondine, but no one was quite on the level of trailer trash as Ingrid Superstar was when she was invented.”
ANDY WARHOL: “Ingrid was just an ordinarily nice-looking girl from Jersey with big, wide bone structure posing as a glamour figure and a party girl, and what was great was that somehow it worked. She was a riot. She watched all the other girls and would sort of put on airs and try to do what they did. It was so funny to see her sitting there on the couch next to Edie, or, later, Nico and International Velvet, putting on makeup or eyelashes exactly the way they did, trading earrings and things and beauty tips with them. We would tease her endlessly, like tell her she was in the running for the next Girl of the Year.”
PAUL MORRISSEY: “With us, everything is acceptance. Nothing is critical. Everything is amoral. People can be whatever they are, and we record it on film. The one Andy loves is Ingrid Superstar, because Ingrid can’t dissimulate. She couldn’t not be Ingrid. She can do her thing for us because she thinks we’re trash. We treat her like dirt and that’s the way she likes to be treated.”
ANDY WARHOL: “In the middle of all her airs, Ingrid would suddenly come from behind with total honesty that cut right to the point. Deep down, she was absolutely unpretentious. We took her everywhere with us, she was so much fun, so easygoing – the type of girl who’d jump up and do the pony no matter what year it was. And she wore go-go boots and her poems were good, really good, half poetry and half comedy.”
VIVA: “I always used to feel so sorry for Ingrid when she was being groomed to be a superstar because she was afraid she wouldn’t succeed and she’d have to go back to New Jersey and work selling refrigerators.”
INGRID SUPERSTAR: [“Notes on Andy Warhol”] “Very congenial, always agreeing with everything (maybe just to avoid a hassle). Always has a habit of sitting with first two fingers {or sometimes longest finger) under mouth or glasses. Always chews gum, especially when he is up there. Silver gray hair (very distinguishing) to match and portray the Factory. Gig. Usually quiet and observant. Cute smile, appears shy at first. It’s the quiet ones you have to look out for, and the sweet sneaks. You have to know him – his mannerisms, habits, and personality – to understand and appreciate him, his works of art and underground moviemaking, and, most of all, his intentions. Very busy man, always spends time at the Factory or studio, Drella’s Silver Palace… I quote his most famous and most used words: ‘I don’t know… Soon.’ Very vivid and trippy, campy imagination, which shows in his work. It takes a while for hip, groovy cats and chicks to appreciate his art and moviemaking and what he is getting at. Don’t worry, you will get used to it eventually. And when you do…”
ULTRA VIOLET: “Unable to carry a tune, Ingrid is singing away when I first see her at the Factory, on my third visit there. Andy says, ‘Keep singing, Ingrid, it’s great.’ ‘What song would you like?’ ‘Any song.’ ‘My mouth is tired.’ Her voice is off pitch and out of sync with her lip and hand motions. She never lets go of the cigarette in her hand. She sings, puffs, blows smoke at the same time. She is the original singing-smoking machine. In the glare of a spotlight that would make anyone else blink, Ingrid calls out, ‘How am I doing?’ Without looking up from the magazine he has been flipping through for the last half hour, Andy says, ‘Oh, great.’ I ask Ingrid, ‘Are you preparing for an audition?’ She looks offended. ‘I never audition. I’m a Superstar. I’ll end up in Hollywood.’”
DANNY FIELDS: “You had to love Ingrid. She loved her name, Ingrid Superstar. She got it the first day when she walked in, dressed in aqua satin. And you had to feel sorry for her because she didn’t really know that they were making fun of her all the time. Then after a while she became so acceptable that they weren’t making fun of her; they really started to consider her as a human being and someone they liked. It was nice. She got carried away with everything. It was wonderful to see it happen. It was like through a child’s eyes. ‘Oh, I made the columns today.’ To be elevated to any sense of ritziness was just wonderful for her. She was such a good-natured person that it was sort of nice having her around, because all the other girls were socialites or actresses or something, and she was a natural.”
MARY WORONOV: “Everyone loved Ingrid. But I didn’t. I hated her. She was so eager to act stupid, like it was her job; actually she was Andy’s invention to get back at Edie. Both girls had the same thin body with short dyed blonde hair and big earrings, but Ingrid was Edie’s opposite: ugly, low class, and stupid. It was as if Edie was Dorian Gray, and Ingrid was her portrait. After Edie’s banishment, for reasons that I never understood, Ingrid remained as a sad reminder of who wins in this game. Her last name was Superstar because without that label you wouldn’t know she was one – and also, I thought, as a warning. She was what Andy really thought superstars were – ugly, cheap, and annoying.”
PATTI SMITH: “There were strange stories circulating about Edie. She suffered a swift decline. It was said that she consumed so much amphetamine it consumed her. Her hands shook so much that while applying her long, famous eyelashes, she knocked over a candle and set fire to her room. There were stories of her dark departure. Of Bob Dylan disappearing. Of Andy turning his back. Her shattered mirror had less than seven years' bad luck ahead.”
SALLY KIRKLAND: “There were problems. The others would turn off Edie and not give her the attention she needed. Part of her understood, but she was still very hurt by it. I can see her in my mind’s eye at the back of the Factory, where there was a bathroom, back there alone, abandoned, and she’d be dancing around, spaced out, weird.”
DANNY FIELDS: “When there were drugs, Edie was like a police dog. The Drug Enforcement Agency would have employed her to work airports. She was better than any dogs I’ve ever seen in action. She just knew where they were, and she took them.”
IVAN KARP: “There were sparks flying off her brain!”
DAVID DALTON: “The whole middle section of ‘a’ is a dialogue between Edie and Ondine. Edie and Ondine are working on a board game about the hierarchy of Fame or the pecking order of the Divine Spark (amphetamine has, for all intents and purposes, elided the distinction between the two). Edie and Ondine debate for pages and pages how the manna of the unworthy individual diminishes as he slips down the rungs of the Ladder of Renown, so that, by #5, he’s relegated to the Vegas Lounge Lizard level of fame, here called ‘Louis Prima Two.’ The two of them rant on about Dylan, Pop Art, habits, LSD, Dante, hippopotamuses, salad, Irving the Wallow, vitamins, movies, Dorothy Killgalen, speech itself, and t-t-tomorrow. ‘And we’re not stopping here,’ someone announces mid rant. ‘In fact, we better start drawing a diagram for the different levels of New York hell.’ And on and on they go, epic talkers all, and repetitious to the point of delirium.”
SARAH LEGON: “Edie wanted us to be friends – she felt somehow that I would be a ‘good, reliable’ friend. She talked a lot. I remember her saying she believed you could physically move from one spot to another just by thinking about it – telekinesis, I think it was. ‘Like remote viewing,’ she said, ‘where you can use your mind to go to distant places and see what’s there. It was developed by the CIA to obtain information on an unconscious level. If we just let the mind follow its own intuitive powers we can do anything. We’re just atoms, so why couldn’t we transport our bodies to anywhere we focus on? San Francisco or Tokyo or Mount Everest. We’re just not evolved enough yet.’ Anyway, this was a big thing to her and she believed it could and would happen.”
BILLY NAME: “She would get involved in these elaborate games that speed freaks get into – and she was into all this cosmic stuff. She didn’t have an ordinary mind, didn’t really yak or chit-chat or gossip. She was just extraordinarily brilliant. And this is the reason why the whole thing of her life became a tragedy, because there was no receptacle for her brilliance. People were always wanting to photograph her, but beauty you can always find. It was her mind that didn’t have an order, it didn’t have a place to express itself other that with amphetamine heads and that’s the tragedy of it – only amphetamine heads would talk to her that way. And then you get ruined on the drug. But I loved her. She was a brilliant little angel incarnate.”
NAT FINKELSTEIN: “Andy bestrode the world like a bleached blond colossus. I witnessed the birth of a monster: a silver sprayed black widow spider: fucking them over, sucking them dry and spitting them out.”
EMILE DE ANTONIO: “Andy liked to see people dying. This is what the Factory was about. Andy was the Angel of Death’s Apprentice as these people went through their shabby lives with drugs and weird sex and group sex and mass sex. So Andy looked and Andy as voyeur par excellence was the devil, because he got bored just looking.”
