White Light, White Heat

HARVEY COHEN: “Amphetamine is very much an overachiever’s type of chemical. Methedrine rolls back the stone from the mouth of the cave. It is the most profound of all drugs, the most unexplored and the freakiest. It can be so many things; there’s always a place to go behind methedrine that you’ve never been before.”

MARY WORONOV: “The power, the energy. Oh, you were like God, so thrilled with yourself that you could spend 24 hours hearing yourself talk. Of course, someone not on amphetamine might find everything coming out of your mouth extremely stupid, but who the fuck cared? You could think more and the rush was like sexual orgasm. It was about being bigger, better, stronger, smarter, and quicker.”

MARTIN TORGOFF: “There was a certain high-camp theatricality about the A men, a sense that every minute of their lives was the premiere of some great opera or Hollywood movie in which they were the glorious stars.”

VICTOR BOCKRIS: “These characters, who sound as if they had woken up in a novel by Genet or Burroughs and crept off its pages, were talented misfits, most of them gay, who shared two important characteristics: they embodied a camp sensibility, marked by a spirit of theatrical extravagance, outrage, and excess; and they lived on speed.”

DANNY FIELDS: “The methamphetamine crowd of great geniuses. I was always terrified of Ondine, because he was so fabulous. I would stare at him, then he would start screaming ‘Who’s that person staring at me,’ and he would point and I would just want to die. If you can imagine Ondine in an amphetamine rage, pointing across the bar, screaming ‘Who’s that person!’”

MARY WORONOV: “Ondine was different, filled with opposites, he carried chaos around with him like a pet. People loved him and feared him, calling him both decadent and moral. His profile looked like it should have been on the back of a Roman coin, but instead it was surrounded by ruin: restless black hair and clothes that were ill fitting, borrowed, and thrown on a body that looked powerful but off balance.”

BILLY NAME: “Andy could be considered an angel, but Ondine was definitely an archangel.”

MARTIN TORGOFF: “Daybreak was the trickiest time of all when you were crashing. They called it the Dawn Patrol, when they would find themselves caught outdoors and the morning sun would send them scurrying for cover, pasty faced and cowering in doorways down on the Lower East Side. The verbal acrobatics and comic bitchiness that always seemed to animate conversation could suddenly erupt into the most searing cruelties. With the clubs closed and the parties long over, this vicious, amphetamine-fueled abuse of each other was a strange but compelling form of entertainment for them where there was really no place else to go, when there was nothing left to do but seek refuge in an early-morning coffee shop as far away as possible from the rush-hour throngs on their way to work, whose very existence seemed a brutal assault to their senses.”

MARY WORONOV: “It was so much fun, nobody ever went to sleep. I used to go back to my house in Brooklyn and drop into my childhood bed and go to sleep for a little while and go right back. Some of the A men did not sleep at all – they would die, they would go crazy. But it was unbelievable, the energy. Every time it started to flag, Ondine just dove for it – he just never, ever stopped! He was this very special person with an enormous generosity and talent but also clearly trying to destroy himself. It was like the A men were intentionally trying to burn themselves out. Nobody wanted to see old age – we thought it was stupid.”

MARY WORONOV: “Ondine was like The Cyclone – he thrilled and terrified me even though I knew I was in an amusement park. Rooms grew old when he left and after talking to him I couldn’t bear normal conversation.”

BILLY NAME: “Ondine was also a high-power intellect. He could be so cruel and didactic about what he thought was wrong or right, sometimes people just looked at this dragon monster and missed the whole point of the aesthetic dissertation he was giving them.”

ONDINE: “You can’t blame anybody for your drug use. You take drugs and you abuse yourself. Everybody abuses themselves. They say drugs destroy the mind. Drugs destroy the body. You have to have a mind to destroy.”

VICTOR BOCKRIS: “Brigid Berlin was one of the few women among the Mole People. Brigid’s claim to fame, apart from her high-society heritage (her father was president of the Hearst Corporation) was that she was said to have squirted Nikita Khrushchev in the face with a water pistol when he visited the United Nations in 1960. She was known as ‘the Duchess’ or ‘the Doctor’ because, she boasted, she would give anyone who asked for it a poke of amphetamine through the seat of their pants. She shot speed several times a day, gorged on food, and was at times grotesquely overweight. She was also highly emotional, given to screaming tirades.”

BOB COLACELLO: “I used to joke with Brigid that she moved from the heart of darkness to the heart of darkness.  She went from one evil empire to another.”

ANDY WARHOL: “Brigid is a conceptual thinker from a good family. Though she has moved to the wrong side of the tracks, her good breeding still shows.”

MARY WORONOV: “She shoplifted in only the best stores with the composure of a right-wing Republican and shot up in the finest restaurants, slamming the spike through her jeans, through her skin, and into her system as casually as if she were fixing her lipstick after dinner. Her greatest talent, however, was gossip; every drawer and shelf of her little room in the Washington Hotel was filled with tapes of conversations and polaroids.”

BRIGID BERLIN: “I got so thin, but it made me shop. Oh my God. My sister Richie and I would leave and beeline it to Bloomingdale’s, and we’d change our outfits as we went through the store. We’d just leave whatever we were wearing in the dressing room, but the new thing, charge it to our parents. It was charge to one, send to the other.”

ULTRA VIOLET: “Brigid Berlin was another easy character who claimed she never ate and one day I saw her at a drugstore having a triple ice cream soda; and she was so very upset that I saw her, so she claimed she was gaining weight just by being in the Factory, breathing the air, electric air.”

BRIGID BERLIN:  “I thought it was very chic to sell drugs, to have my bicycle, and to wear my double-breasted blazer with gold buttons, and I had a secretary, Pixie, who I paid $30 a day, cash. And I lied! I told everyone in town that I had three pounds of heroin. I would make grass deals all over the telephone and didn’t have the grass to sell them. I just was trying to be a big shot. I would just ride around on by bike and stuff, and when Andy came in that day, I had a manila envelope full of pills. I wasn’t paranoid then. I didn’t know the meaning of the word paranoia. We never heard it in those years. I used to go to the Factory with a make-up thing, like a traveling bag, and I had a bottle of every different kind of pill there was. An Obetrol for those who like that, Tuinal for those who like Tuinal, Seconal, everything. They called me the Doctor, remember? That was when I was the Duchess. There was no paranoia.”

STEVEN WATSON: “Brigid spent long stretches of time in Rotten Rita’s apartment in the West Eighties. She knew that when she left the house, it could be days before she returned, so everything necessary for a stay was lodged into neat compartments in a large basket. It always contained a set of rapidograph pens with the finest points possible, a selection of Magic Markers, Winsor & Newton watercolors paints, trip books with blank pages, and a bottle of Majorska vodka.”

BILLY NAME: “He was the Mayor and she was the Duchess, an equal and a peer.”

ONDINE: “You stupid cock-sucker, if you die, you’re gonna die like a pig!”

ORION: “Oh Ondine, you’re so intuitive.”

ONDINE: “Isn’t she a fiend? God bless her, she’s fabulous.”

ALAN MIDGETTE: “When I arrived on set, Orion was already on pretty strong acid and then I took acid. I knew that this was one of those scenes that was going to be heavy duty. Orion said, ‘Darling, the stipulation was that I could do anything I wanted to do so just shut up and listen to the music.’ And we continued to look into each other’s eyes. Finally, Paul started saying to Orion, ‘It’s very boring. We gotta do something. You gotta have sex or something or fight with each other.’ Orion just looked at him and she said, ‘Oh, really?’ There was a machete on the wall and she picked it up and hit the chandelier and the glass went flying. I will never forget the image of Warhol standing behind the camera, whiter than he normally was, frozen behind the camera with little pieces of glass on his shoulders and he could not even speak, he was so terrified.”

ONDINE: “I’ve been talking to Orion. She thinks everybody’s against her.”

ROTTEN RITA: “Then she’s one of the sensible people in the world.”

STEVEN WATSON: “Ondine recalled first seeing her when he walked into Norman Billiardball’s apartment and noticed in the corner a beautiful woman in fantastic garb with a staff in her hand. Ondine had an immediate reaction: he insisted Norman throw her out. ‘I’ll beat the shit out of you,’ Ondine said. ‘Get the hell out of here.’ She took her staff to leave and said, ‘He’s divine, his violent.’ The voltage between the two of them was immediate; they had found an outrageous kindred spirit who shared wit, amphetamine, and extreme actions. Ondine said, ‘We used to make life so unbearable for people; it was just so wonderful.’ There was no question that Orion considered herself and the Mole People to be at the top of a hierarchy that was divorced from the real world. When Billy Name, playing with the idea of the demimonde, once observed that they were demigods, she drew herself up regally and exploded. ‘Demigods! We’re gods!’”

LOU REED: “A friend of mine was turned away from customs for witchcraft because she was covered with rat’s tales. That’s Orion, she was the female Ondine… a witch.”

MARY WORONOV: “Even Ondine hated Orion’s suicide altar, where she surrounded Jesus with pictures of famous suicides and anonymous kamikaze pilots. Ondine hated black magic and death worship, but he loved Orion. She carried a long black staff and a dark sense of power, and I had to admit she was beautiful and strange. When she was high, black feathers fell from her fingers like the shadows of stilettos. Ondine said one time she was so mad that all the feathers collected in the middle of the floor and turned into a big black crow that attacked him.”

MARY WORONOV: “Orion… some say she married an English lord, but Ondine said she had turned into a bird and sometimes she haunted him… Even in her disappeared state her powers remained; people told stories of apartments spontaneously combusting after she left them, and about how Silver George’s friend got meningitis when she looked at him.”

MARY WORONOV: “They were known as the Mole People. Mole because they were only seen at night, wearing sunglasses and a skin pallor that had to be the result of years of subterranean existence; Mole because they were known to be tunneling towards some greater insanity that no one but this inner circle was aware of.”

Blonde on Blonde

EDIE SEDGWICK: “I lived a very isolated life. When you start at twenty, you have a lot of nonsense to work out of your system.”

GORDON BALDWIN: “I helped her pack and drove her to New York in her Mercedes-Benz. The car was completely filled with mismatched luggage, boxes, parcels, and such miscellaneous objects as stuffed animals, straw baskets, and a large collection of unpacked hats. On one of the turnpikes Edie pulled into a Howard Johnson’s under the impression that it was a long row of phone booths. Her visibility may have been bad with all that luggage, but that was typical of Edie’s kind of vagueness.”

DANNY FIELDS: “She came to New York as the darling of Cambridge, and these were all rich kids. What she learned of New York, then? I don’t know. She learned how to use the telephone and how to fill ashtrays and steal jars of Listerine.”

DAVID DALTON: “With a sense of desperation, of things catching up with her, she entered the disenchanted circle of New York’s phosphorescent nightworld to take her place as its rightful queen… Edie zoned in on the hot spots, the places where the magma rose to the surface from sulfurous underground springs fed by restlessness, perversion, and amphetamines. Exquisite rooms in which hot house creatures lounged and dreamed and talked in fantastic stream-of-consciousness raps that short-circuited themselves and set off brush fires in the mind.”

DAVID DALTON: “Edie enters the Factory in her otherworldly daze. She is at once natural and a creature of pure artifice. Everything about her – her tights, her long legs, her high heels, her preternaturally skinny body, her huge eyes – seems to drift upwards as if the cigarette she is smoking were made of helium.”

DAVID DALTON: “With Edie Sedgwick, Andy was going to introduce the concept of the superstar into the murky, anonymous casting system of underground movies. A pop oxymoron, a kind of superlative diminutive, the word superstar is so camp, so over the top and silly. A tatty wig, heels, swaths of rouge, and a lot of amphetamine and – voila! – you were a superstar performing in a tawdry, incomprehensible tableau.”

ANDY WARHOL: “Edie had arrived in France wearing a white mink coat over her T-shirt and tights and carrying one little suitcase. When she ‘unpacked’ at the hotel, I saw that the only thing she’d brought with her was another white mink coat! She wore one of them to Castel’s that night and when someone offered to check her coat, she clutched it around her and said, ‘No! it’s all I’ve got on!’ She had a low, husky voice that always sounded like she’d been crying.”

DAVE THOMPSON: “Warhol was a star too, and he caught people’s eye, if only because it was so hard not to stare at him. But it was his companion Edie Sedgwick who conquered their hearts. Elfin and boyish, wide-eyed but not yet the legless tragedy of future legend, bubbling with charm and the innocent beauty that so enraptured Warhol that he wound up destroying it. The previous evening, dining with Salvador Dali at the Crazy Horse Saloon, it was Edie who broke the ice between the artists when she leaned over to the grandfather of surrealism and asked, ‘How does it feel to be such a famous writer?’”

JOHN SEDGWICK: “For Andy, Edie was a brand name only, whose selling power came, aside from her cover-girl beauty, from being steeped in subliminal associations with old money, New England prep schools, European aesthetics, fine art, generations of breeding, and a certain knowingness – everything, in short, that Edie ran away from as nothing at all. But it was everything to a bewigged, asexual, pale-faced, hollow-hearted immigrant’s kid from the steel town of McKeesport, Pennsylvania who had, along with an innovative brilliance, an uncanny feel for the class consciousness that underlay a big part of the 1960s zeitgeist. He destroyed her, but he made her first.”

JOHN SEDGWICK: “To keep an eye on her, my father invited her several times to Sunday dinner, a tedious affair with roast beef, cheap sangria, and the same Churchill stories. She came only once, arriving behind the wheel of a gray Mercedes her parents, in a moment of weakness, had bought for her, the sort of car my parents would never own. It was a hot, bright day, and she wore sunglasses, a tight blouse, and short pants. I was spellbound. Edie livened the lunch up considerably, though, by skipping out on dessert to slip out through the French doors to the backyard, where she stripped down to her panties to sunbathe half naked. I remember nothing but a sense of spectacular whiteness against the green lawn – while the grown-ups sipped coffee from demitasse cups, unaware.”

GERARD MALANGA: “Edie was the personification of the poor little rich girl. Her features, slight and symmetrical with no outstanding facial bone structure were brightened by the vivid and penetrating eyes, full of small timidities, which recorded perhaps the shock that too great an honesty expects from life. Most of her wardrobe consisted of shirts with tails hanging out and leotards. She knew how to wear them with a style and grace unachieved by anyone else. She liked to wear large earrings. She applied a great deal of make-up before going out. When she spoke she made sense. She could not be the fool or be made to look foolish.”

DAVID DALTON: “The usual drone of cocktail party chatter, ‘Eight Days a Week’ playing softly in the background. Suddenly, a strange girl in black tights, striped t-shirt and giant earrings enters the room. With her odd birdlike gait, she twirls into the very center of the room and remains there, simply… twirling. A few giggles. Someone wonders what she’s on, poor thing. But as they’re talking, right under their very noses, the room begins to spin.”

JOHN PALMER: “It’s childlike in one sense. You’re going in somewhere that’s forbidden, in the sense that you’re being invited into somewhere that’s kind of mysterious and special.”

PATTI SMITH: “Black-eyed, ermine-haired Edie Sedgwick in her white, white furs. There was something about her. It wasn't necessarily sexuality but a charismatic energy that seemed as much rooted in intelligence as beauty. She seemed completely connected with the moment. There was something international about her. She made everywhere seem like Paris. She had a sweet, expressive face like Monroe but possessed a slim, modern body. She was edgy yet so fresh that even her false eyelashes came off as real.”

ULTRA VIOLET: “On a hot summer eve, I open the door of the Factory. I am facing a vision. A slim, oh-so-slim sylph silhouette, dressed in a black leotard cut above the knees. Its hair is streaked with silver. Wearing black desert boots, it seems to walk on air. Could this hermaphrodite be, if not a twin, an offspring of Andy’s? This mannequin turns around. It has striking beauty and immense eyes engulfing the world, now! An angelic and milky complexion adorns it. Vulnerability exudes from every fine pore of its skin. Its smile is held open like the curtains of a Broadway stage. Spotlights seem to follow this creature wherever it turns. Andy addresses me: ‘This is Edie Sedgwick. You have not met before.’ A shimmering cluster of rhinestones hangs from one ear. Her skin reminds me of the tender skin of a famous Spanish matador Dali and I once visited in his dressing room. Dali and I touched the matador’s skin right before he entered the arena. We frantically brushed his skin as one would a reliquary. Half an hour later, that same skin was torn and spattered with blood.”

ULTRA VIOLET: “Andy says to Edie, ‘Are you in a mood to be filmed? Remember, we are doing your life story on film.’ Edie maintains her smile. ‘It’s getting late,’ she says. ‘My chauffeur is waiting outside.’ Edie, Andy and I hop in the backseat. Edie has her face pressed to the window, her eyes open wide, oh so wide, as if to comprehend and absorb the whole city. We drop her off in the East Sixties. On the way to Andy’s place, he turns to me and says, ‘Should Edie OD, we must film it. Stay in close touch with her.’”

ULTRA VIOLET: “Vulnerability exuded from every pore of her skin. Like a precocious preppy puppet, she rocked and rolled unconsciously to the sound of a radio station inside her head. She was always high. And Andy liked high people.”