ANDY WARHOL: “Silver makes everything disappear.”
BILLY NAME: “I was working as a lighting designer off-Broadway and I had an apartment on East Seventh Street. I used to cut all my friends’ hair. These hair-cutting sessions turned into hair-cutting parties. Everybody would crowd in and have a great time. I had covered the entire apartment with silver foil; I had some spotlights up. It just looked very cool to me. Andy came once and he asked if I would do the décor for his new studio, the Factory, just the way I had done my apartment. It took me so long to do the Factory that I just stayed there. I converted one of the two toilets into a darkroom. I slept on the floor. We had sofas and furniture at the Factory, but I was a very erratic person, not terribly conventional. I wasn’t used to sleeping in a bed.”
BILLY NAME: “I was very taken by spray paint, I really liked Krylon Powder Blue. There was a time when Ondine was staying at my apartment and I was so high on amphetamines, if you’re up for like three days, you turn into that mist. I used to love to spray a short spray of Krylon Powder Blue, and it was this blue cloud in the room that was just so divine. Anyway, after trying some of the different colors I was taken by the silver. It was the total, the ultimate chrome… I started doing the walls and moved to the refrigerator and the tub and the toilet and the telephone. So I just did the whole place. I couldn’t keep buying paint cans, I didn’t have that much money, so I got some aluminum foil and I stapled it at the top and let it run down. So I did the walls. And I had some spotlights so I made the place blaze.”
BILLY NAME: “It was like constructing this environment – for me, the whole place was a sculpture. And each time I added a piece to it was like adding another gem to the collection. I never did a specifically articulated thing, I always did a maximal job. But it was the same art thing, it was the same signature, or my tag: the whole silver thing… Conceptually chrome is all colors. It isn’t minimalism, it’s maximalism. It’s electric. It’s synthetic, it’s fusion. It’s out of the ordinary, and it’s tense and it’s hip and it’s cool and it’s spacey. It’s a knock-out Wonderland.”
STEPHEN KOCH: “Silver was perfect too because it was a mirror. It was everything turned inward and imploding and at the same time light, the pallor of Warhol’s face as if it never saw daylight. It was the space of a mirror. Warhol’s responsibilities were the mirror’s responsibilities, his replies the mirror’s replies.”
DAVE THOMPSON: “Yes, the Factory was cloaked in silver. But it was silver foil, supermarket aluminum, and there were rips and tears in it, revealing the dull dishpan paintwork that cowered underneath. Yes, its denizens were beautiful. But only if you took your solace in ugliness, inhaled through the fog of smoke and sex and fast-food morsels that clung to every corner.”
BILLY NAME: “Binghampton Birdy did the porno mural in the bathroom.”
ULTRA VIOLET: “An impression of devastation immediately hits me. The raw barrenness – except for a collapsed couch large enough for a ménage a cinq and a broken wooden slat-back revolving armchair – makes me suspect a fire has taken place. The odor of old smoke remains. Thinking out loud, I hear myself say, ‘There must have been a fire here.’ I hear the sound of tinkling coins and realize Andy is laughing. All around me, silver disintegrating walls, pipes wrapped in aluminum foil, like giant Christmas gifts, silver-sprayed file cabinets and stereo equipment decorate the loft.”
MARY WORONOV: “…it was dim and dirty looking, as if it were underground. The tinfoil walls of the Factory flickered like silver water; the smaller surface fish – visitors and squares, scattered and knotted in excitement; and from out of the aluminum depths glided the larger fish – predators, attracted by the commotion. Billy Name, one of the Great Whites, appeared and disappeared. Often his presence signaled the difference between light play and the heavy hard-core shit.”
STEPHEN KOCH: “The least theatrical of all the central figures was Billy Name, the man who actually ran the strobes and invented the light shows, who took the hundreds of thousands of photographs (literally) of visitors to the palace of narcissism, who made them sit for their film portraits before the Bolex… Within that endlessly ingenious Chinese box of vanity that he had designed in the Factory, its walls silver mirrors, Billy tinkered, perfervid with amphetamine intensity, making it work, transporting it into the self-reflecting otherness that gave it its strange antienergy.”
WILLIAM WILSON: “[Billy Name is] a sorcerer’s apprentice, who asks nothing for himself and may turn out to be more interesting, valid, and authentic than the sorcerer.”
BILLY NAME: “I have little existential angst, because I have no need to control the future. I have settled on the fact that we are just a star in a sky and we will go through our flaming creature stage and burn out and become part of another star. That’s one of the things I started out seeking, and I have settled it. I’m one of the people who have achieved their quest. I can call myself a complete philosopher.”
ANDY WARHOL: “Billy started using my camera and his Factory Fotos caught the exact mood of everything that was happening – embalmed in action: the smoky atmosphere, the parties, the broken bits of mirrors, the silver, the velvets, the planes of faces and bodies, the fights, the clowning, even the attitudes and the depression.”
STEPHEN KOCH: “Gerard Malanga, the hyped, endlessly talkative golden boy of the art world, with his superb arching Italian face, combination superstar and errand boy, the omnipresent voice and body of the master, transporting just a touch of Warhol into every night, the depthlessly narcissistic center of every scene. For six years, Malanga must have attended five parties a night, either in company with the art world’s super star, or as his magical representative.”
GLENN OBRIEN: “Gerard was the original superstar. Poet, whip dancer with the Velvets, Andy’s Factory muscle, mechanic and pretty boy, a prince among queens. Gerard was an odd man out. He sang courtly love for the ladies in a court of macaroons. He manufactured million dollar art for minimum wage. Not for nothing did he make the great artist’s art. He had an eye of his own, a great eye for beauties, outer and inner, and he met them all and portrayed them classically. Andy loved society but Gerard loved secret society. He documented the genuine pantheon of culture. The real history not the hype. The spirit of the time, the spirit of old New York was fast and loose and quick. It was all about now. No past, no future, just now.”
TONY SCHERMAN: “His competence in the studio only begins to explain Malanga’s usefulness to Andy or the multiple roles he filled during the next few years. As socially deft as Warhol was inept, blessed with the ease and self-confidence of the very handsome, Gerard took the spotlight off Andy – at least one unknowing newspaper columnist mistook him for Andy, which was fine with Warhol. He was as relentless a celebrity chaser as Andy, keeping the latter apprised of, and sometimes introducing him to, the latest fashionable socialite or English rock star. He had a sharp eye for talent and looks: many of the people who entered Warhol’s mid-sixties orbit – the filmmaker Paul Morrissey, the film scenarist Ron Tavel, the actress Mary Woronov, and many others – were brought there by Malanga.”
GERARD MALANGA: “When Andy found the studio, I thought I had a home base. I moved all my books in from my mother’s. I squared out a little area near the telephone with milk crates, those were my bookshelves. Billy kept his things more discreet. He was imaginative and obviously I wasn’t. He created this enclosure in the back with these big wooden folding screens that he also painted silver. And that was where his bed and whatever was. My presence was a little bit larger than Billy’s. I was showing off my butt. So he ended up staying at the Factory, not me.”
ULTRA VIOLET: “Billy named it the Factory – a place that manufactures people, ideas, concepts, films, even art. He became Andy’s official photographer. Just as Louis XIV had Rigaud, his court painter, Andy had a court photographer. If you want your picture in the paper daily, if your existence is validated by the volume of your clippings, then you need a house photographer to keep the newspapers and magazines deluged with photographs. He is also the court astrologer. I often see him with astrological charts in his hand. We are all dying to examine Andy’s chart, for it would reveal his true age. We are sure he is older than he admits. Billy is always dressed in black. His looks are those of a theatrical SS man. One day he says to Andy, ‘I see danger in your chart.’ And says, ‘Huh.’ Billy says, ‘I’m warning you, be careful.’ Andy never listens.”
PAT HARTLEY: “I remember people tried to do things to the mannequin bottom all the time. People tried to have sex with it.”
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NAT FINKELSTEIN: “Andy's strategy was organized like an air-raid though radar-protected territory. He would drop these showers of silver foil out of the plane to deflect the radar. Behind this screen of smoke and mirrors, there was Andy at work. That was the real function of the entourage. It was a way to get the attention away from Andy, while he hid behind them, doing his number. The entourage was there to distract the attention, to titillate and amuse the public, while Andy was doing his very serious work.”
DONALD LYONS: “’I put my genius into my life, my talent into my art.’ That’s Oscar Wilde. It’s something you see in decadent periods. It goes back to the dandy. Certainly for men it went back to the dandies of the thirties and forties. You lived extravagantly… It was a period of great style and extravagance, which is what dandyism is. Expressing energy with style.”
DAVID DALTON: “A New Jerusalem of Drugs and Rant: the Factory has been depicted as a den of iniquity with addicts shooting up, degenerates having deviant sex on every couch, and spiteful drag queens spewing venomous curses… Aside from the megavoltage amphetamines, high camp, and heraldic displays of leather and glare, it was actually a fairly innocuous place.”
DAVID DALTON: “The denizens of the Factory might be asleep on the couch, talking on the phone, shooting up in the bathroom or dancing to ‘My Guy’ played at deafening volume – nevertheless you had to be ready for your close-up. It was like arriving at Versailles or at the court of Queen Elizabeth. A little respect, please! You are entering an exclusive club for misfits, gay speedfreaks, would-be Adonises, and walking skeletons. A sort of halfway house, halfway up to the sacramental fog of a Desoxin high or halfway down to Hell, it was up to you.”
DAVE HICKEY: “In its moment, the Factory manufactured sleazy fame by the carload. Later, when Andy was on top of the world – isolated and terrorized by the fame he sought to give away – that first Factory remained the only subject upon which he would go misty. In every other instance, Andy would opt for glamour over sentiment, chemistry over romance, but the Factory was his baby. It was the best thing he ever made for the best times he ever had, and it was a great American idea: the factory as a salon in which everyone had their fifteen minutes, where representation was everyone’s redemptive right, where being seen was acknowledged as something we all need, deserve, and needn’t qualify for. Ultimately, of course, the scene would die of its own success as fame became more interesting than democracy an Andy became the font of celebrity rather than its enabler.”
