Part V: Edgar Rice Burroughs And The Accreted Personality

Edgar Rice Burroughs

And

The Accreted Personality

Part V

by

R.E. Prindle

Edgar Rice Burroughs

 

Hours In The Library

 

As the fabulous Twentieth Century dawned virtually a new world different than anything that had gone before came into existence requiring a new consciousness. As usual some could adapt and some couldn’t. In an evolutionary sense those that couldn’t adapt disappeared, those that could survived while those born into the new world accepted it as normal.

Many authors who were very successful in the old world faded from importance not because what they had to say was necessarily irrelevant but because it was no longer relevant to a changed consciousness. Even if their message was universal it had to be expressed in new terms. Some like Rider Haggard and Conan Doyle trundled right along until they died two or three decades later. Some like H.G. Wells whose contemporary novels lost significance and sales potential even though in Wells case his sci-fi output of the nineties has survived strongly until today. His omnibus volume Seven Science Fiction Novels has been a strong seller for nearly a hundred years. A dozen or so handsome editions adorn the shelves of second hand dealers where they turn over at a quick rate.

Still, around 1900 a new generation of writers began to move onto the literary field; the next wave after the crop of the eighteen eighties. The new writers were mainly in the age cohort of 1865 to 1876 as was Ed but he would make a late start in 1912. Memory is the key to psychology. If nothing goes into the memory nothing comes out so it is important to include only the beneficial as much as is possible. It is for that reason that pornography is pernicious. It has little social value; its main function being to stroke one’s fixations. In these crucial years Ed filled his memory banks with the works of the current crop of writers. He unerring went, as we all do, to those writers and books that talked around his own fixations thus being capable of being incorporated into his own writing.

While he seems to be almost plagiarizing his sources, by the end of the nineteenth century the body of work available had grown to significant proportions. He was not along in incorporating his reading into his own work. The reading had become part of the social fabric not much different than trolley cars and the soup cans Andy Warhol would later make famous. Burroughs now is part of our mental furniture and while it may not be pertinent to our writing, images and phrases from what we have read may come out of our pen without our realizing it. Almost like saying for dinner I opened a can of Campbell’s tomato soup.

The thousands of movies and records we have seen and know cannot be excluded from our mental processes. So, just as George Du Maurier named his novel Trilby after that of Charles Nodier of the turn of the nineteenth century patterning his story based on that novel that he admired greatly, why shouldn’t Burroughs in his turn do the same. Such referencing was quite common if you read enough and look for it.

It is difficult to know where to begin in listing Ed’s post-1900 reading but as the South formed such a large part of his consciousness it may be well to start with the apostle of the Lost Cause, Thomas Dixon Jr.

Thomas Dixon Jr. (1864-1846)

Thomas Dixon Jr.

 

Dixon’s social views differed quite wildly from those of his contemporary H.G. Wells. Indeed, Dixon was of the class that Wells said must not be allowed to express their views lest they cloud those of the Revolution in the minds of the proletariat that must be forced to accept the official views of Wells’ Open Conspiracy version of socialism. No dissent was to be allowed. In keeping with this dictum Anthony Slide gave the scare title American Racist to his 2004 autobiography of Dixon published by the UKentucky Press in an attempt to make sure Dixon was buried and doesn’t rise again.

Abraham Lincoln

Be that as it may Dixon was extremely popular in the years before the Bolshevik Revolution going into eclipse after his 1919 movie Bolshevism On Trial. So he was both a Southerner, although not a Virginian, and an anti-Communist giving him special appeal to Ed.

Born in 1864 he was old enough to have been aware during the last years of Reconstruction, hence an eyewitness. The grand tragedy of the Civil War for him was that Aryans exterminated Aryans over a worthless cause like Negro slavery. During Reconstruction the Puritan bigots of the North oppressed the Southern Aryans mercilessly so that Dixon made it his goal to reconcile Northern and Southern Aryans, thus the title of his and Griffiths 1915 movie titled The Birth Of A Nation, in other words, The Birth Of The Aryans as a Nation.

While slavery was the proximate cause of the war the issue takes a subordinate place in the minds of romanticists of the South such as Ed. Dixie is the home of courtly manners and magnolia blossoms, decency and self-respect.

Jefferson Davis

That notion of a Utopia is still shared by many of us today.

The men who settled Virginia were the displaced younger sons of English aristocrats who gave their flavor to the Cavalier State. They were the epitome of desired manhood, the quality versus the equality- hence John Carter of Virginia. Carter is not only a man but the apex of what a man should be.

Dixon wrote several Civil War and Reconstruction novels, all rather good literature. His most famous trilogy of the conflict was composed of The Leopard’s Spots (1902), The Clansman (1905), and The Traitor (1907). As The Traitor is found in Burroughs’ surviving library it is not unreasonable to believe he read all three and that before he began writing. Dixon wrote two further volumes, The Southerner: A Romance Of The Real Lincoln and The Victim: A Romance Of The Real Jefferson Davis of 1913 and 14 respectively. I’m sure Ed read them both but they were too late to be formative for his writing. I recommend them both highly for a near contemporary history of the events from the perspective of both sides. While it doesn’t seem to be Dixon’s purpose his presentation leaves no doubt in my mind that the assassination of Lincoln was plotted by a cabal of Northern bigots who really wanted to exterminate Southern Aryans replacing them with what they believed to be a pure Negro Republic.

As the Negroes were not welcome in the North these Northern loonies may have believed with Lincoln that Negroes and Aryans could not live together. They probably believed that by ceding the South to the Negroes they had solved the problem. I’m sure it goes much deeper than current research cares to deal with.

Fortunately that didn’t happen. Reconstruction was overturned and the Jim Crow period took form resulting in the current Negro revolution with the threat of a San Domingo Moment.

In addition Dixon wrote an anti-socialist trilogy composed of One Woman (1903), Comrades (1909) and The Root Of Evil (1911). Other than reflecting the attitude of Ed’s thoughts they don’t seem reflected in his own work before 1919 although they may appear in his 1926 novel The Moon Maid.

After the rejection of Ed’s own 1919 anti-Communist tract Under The Red Flag another work of Dixon’s, The Fall Of A Nation (1916, both book and movie) seem to have been read and seen by Ed. The work would greatly influence Ed’s 1926 novel, The Moon Maid.

So, Thomas Dixon has to be considered a major influence of Ed‘s.

L. Frank Baum (1856-1919)

 

L. Frank Baum- The Wizard Of Oz

A second major influence, not inferior to Dixon, was the great creator of the Wizard Of Oz series, Lyman Frank Baum. Although chronologically belonging to an earlier age cohort of writers he only began writing at the turn of the century, turning out his fabulously successful The Wonderful Wizard Of Oz in 1900. It is said that Oz was based on the White City of the Columbian Exposition of 1893 and most likely was. In those days before movies successful books were turned into equally successful plays as was the case with The Wizard; thus at forty-four Baum was launched on a successful literary career. As with so many writers he squandered his millions ending up virtually broke. He didn’t live long enough for the movies to come to the rescue.

The original Wonderful Wizard Of Oz was written as a political satire which content went missing in 1939’s movie, indeed, it was no longer relevant. Baum should have lived so long.

The Wonderful Wizard Of Oz (1900) was followed by The Marvelous Land Of Oz (1904), Ozma Of Oz (1907), Dorothy And The Wizard Of Oz (1908), The Road To Oz (1909) and the Emerald City Of Oz (1910). These were published before Ed began to write so they highly influenced his Martian Chronicles while subsequently issued titles influenced his later work.

Baum grew tired of the series trying to kill it off in 1910’s Emerald City Of Oz but the clamor urging him to write more resulted in the series being resumed in 1913. These titles in order where The Patchwork Girl Of Oz 1913), Tik Tok Of Oz, 1914, The Scarecrow Of Oz (1915), Rinkitink In Oz, (1916), The Lost Princess Of Oz, (1917), The Tin Woodman Of Oz (1918), The Magic Of Oz, (1919) and Glinda Of Oz (1920). There are an additional dozen or so Oz titles but they were commissioned (pastiches) after Baum’s death to Ruth Plumly Thompson and another writer after her. Nice enough but don’t have the spark.

On might say the Wizard far exceeds John Carter in the American consciousness while matching or even, possibly, exceeding that of Tarzan. Without the Tarzan movies the reputation of the Wizard would be as great while that of Tarzan would be significantly diminished.

Baum also wrote a comic strip of stories in 1905 and The Woggle Bug Book in 1905 that Ed may have seen but I haven’t.

One imagines Ed greatly anticipating each Oz book as it was released, stunned by both the stories and the W.W. Denslow and John R. Neill artwork. Always remember that Ed was a failed artist or cartoonist, so the illustration always remained important to him.

Baum like Ed, after having created, an original framework, unmercifully plundered past literature to give substance to his stories. As Ed would follow in his own Symmes’ Hollow Earth stories Baum wrote an entire Oz novel around a version of the Symmes’s theory.

Ed so completely ingested the Baumian parallel universe that it is impossible to conceive of either Helium or Opar without reference to the Emerald City and hence back to Chicago’s White City. John Carter may be conceived of as a male Dorothy off to see the Wizard except that Helium was on Mars. Carter’s accession to the Warlord of Mars may even be seen as a replacement of the Wizard. One suspects that for Ed Baum was the transcendent imagination.

Another important point, as David Adams points out, is that Baum was a theosophist versed in esoteric lore. Baum was among the writers of his day that Ed went out of the way to meet, to introduce himself. It may even be said that he had a relationship with Baum. Ed first introduced himself to Baum in 1913, driving up to Ozcot in Hollywood. The two men were reunited in 1916 during Ed’s stay in LA and again in 1919 for the few remaining months of Baum’s life. He died in May of that year.

So Baum was a central figure in Ed’s career.

George Barr McCutcheon (1866-1926)

Anthony Hope (1863-1933)

 

George Barr McCutcheon

The third major figure of the decade succeeding 1900 was one George Barr McCutcheon and his Graustark series. Not so well known today he was a major figure in the early years of the century. Reminiscing in the forties in the midst of the disappointment of a second world war in his lifetime Ed remarked that the people then lacked a Graustark so that Ed added that imaginary land to the Oz in his literary memories.

Born in the same year as H.G. Wells, McCutcheon’s first published title Graustark: The Story Of A Love Behind A Throne appeared in 1901 as the century began. Graustark was some Ruritanian paradise located in some imaginary middle European land of wine and waltzes. While a fine imaginary setting I find the novels unappealing. As usual one has the enterprising American lad among torpid European lumpkins.

Of the six Graustark novels three were published before 1912- Graustark (1901), Beverly Of Graustark (1904) and Truxton King: A Story Of Graustark (1909), and three after- The Prince of Graustark (1914), East Of The Setting Sun (1924) and the Inn Of The Hawk And The Raven (1927). Thus only the first three were part of the formation of Ed’s memories when he began writing.

These three were however buttressed by two novels of Anthony Hope the man who invented Ruritanian romances and on whom McCutcheon undoubtedly based Graustark. Hope began his three dozed novel career with the The Prisoner Of Zenda in 1894 followed by the sequel Rupert Of Hentzau in 1898. It would be truly astonishing if you’ve heard of any of the rest of his oeuvre. I certainly never had.

The content of these novelists was directly incorporated into Ed’s two Ruritanian novels The Mad King and HRH The Rider.

The Mad King was a re-courting of Emma that apparently failed.

Booth Tarkington (1869-1946)

Booth Tarkington

 

A man who Ed thought was the greatest American writer when interviewed in the teens was the enchanting Booth Tarkington, one of the favorites of my childhood. I was enthralled by Tarkington’s Tom Sawyer figure Penrod (1914) Scholfield and Penrod and Sam of 1916. The other titles I read back when were Seventeen (1916), The Magnificent Ambersons (1918), and Alice Adams of 1922.

Tarkington was a prolific writer turning out four dozen or so novels during his lifetime, some in collaboration with Harry Leon Wilson of Merton Of The Movies and Ruggles Of Red Gap fame along with several other significant titles of the day. Burroughs had Ruggles and couple others in his library.

Born between Wells and Ed, Tarkington’s first novel, The Gentleman From Indiana appeared in 1899 followed by his Monsieur Beaucaire in 1900. A whole series of novels followed up to 1912 including The Two Vanrevels so Ed probably had imbibed a lot of Tarkington before and much after 1912. Tarkington was a major influence on Ed’s novels such as The Oakdale Affair and the Efficiency Expert of the teens while The Ambersons and Alice Adams influences show up in Ed’s 1924 novel Marcia Of The Doorstep.

Jack London (1876-1916)

Robert Service (1874-1958)

H.H. Knibbs (1874-1945)

 

Jack London

Certainly not to be neglected as an influence is the still well known and often read Jack London. The making of London as a writer was the great Klondike Gold Rush beginning in 1896. In 1897 London packed his gear and went North. His experiences in the land of ice and snow provided the material that made his name. A stream of short stories and adventure novels erupted through his pen beginning in 1898 while the novels began in 1902. The Call Of The Wild of 1903 spoke to the wanderlust in Ed’s soul. London did everything that Ed wanted to do, he ranged freely over the entire world in his yacht The Snark, interestingly named after the great poem of Lewis Carroll…beware lest your Snark be a boo…. He was an eyewitness reporter of the San Francisco earthquake of 1906, like Ed he was a boxing aficionado, he was ringside as a reporter when Jack Johnson put down the great Jim Jeffries to become the first Negro heavyweight champion.

Ed’s fascination with hoboing had never abated since he mingled with them on Madison, Chicago’s Main Stem, on

Herbert Henry Knibbs

which his father’s factory was located. London’s 1907 memoir of his cross country trip with Kelley’s Army, a part of Coxey’s Army in 1894 must have excited Ed enormously. But, Ed was tied to Emma and unable to roam.

In many ways London’s and Ed’s views were in synch as part of the same age cohort. A Negro’s winning of the boxing championship was really too much for either man to bear. London himself was an amateur boxer. The failure of a White man to appear to wrest the championship from the Negro Johnson drove him to distraction as it did Ed. Although living on either side of the country both expressed their anguish at the same time.

London wrote a preliminary study titled The Abysmal Brute following it with a full scale concerning the championship, The Valley Of The Moon in 1913. Ed set down and wrote The Mucker about his own hobo boxer, Billy Byrne also in 1913. One can only wonder how many other stories were written about an imaginary White boxer recapturing the crown.

The second novel of the Mucker Trilogy all but named London as its inspiration. The Return is a very good novel that celebrated the golden age of hoboing.

Robert W. Service

The novel tied in a number of Ed’s literary hobo sources. In addition to London the poet H.H. Knibbs provided a sort of framing device as Ed wove verses of his great poem Out There Somewhere through the story, essentially basing the novel on the poem. He also included snatches of verse from the Kiplingesque Robert W. Service of The Cremation Of Sam McGee fame.

The Return then might be said to be a celebration of the road based on London’s The Road and poems by Knibbs and Service. Byrne was also probably an attempt to create another series based on The Road to supplement Tarzan but it didn’t take.

Zane Grey (1972-1939)

 

Grey might be one of the weaker influences before 1910 but Ed was destined to be thought a rival by his publishers. Grey had the magic touch in being able to pitch his is stories toward women thus garnering the big money of the slick magazines. Grey thus earned enough to buy himself a yacht making him the envy of Ed.

Grey began in 1903 with his story of Betty Zane. This was followed three years later by The Spirit Of The Border, then in 1908’s Last Of The Plainsmen. Nineteen nine brought The Last Trail and The Shortstop. The earlier titles were on small imprints while The Shortstop was publishing by McClurg’s, the future publisher of Burroughs. From McClurg’s Grey went to Harper And Bros. who remained his publisher from then on. One wonders if McClurg’s sold his contract to Harper’s or whether they signed him to a one book deal. They certainly tied Ed up contractually so he couldn’t get away.

Grey’s first book for Harper’s in 1910 is the only story to indicate Ed’s readership, The Heritage Of The Desert concerning the Mormons. That influence showed up in 1913’sThe Cave Girl.

I could never get into Grey as a kid although I was given a copy of The Shortstop that I didn’t read then and never have. Still have it though. Grey broke through in 1912 with Riders Of The Purple Sage. The Rainbow Trail and The Mysterious Rider are found in Ed’s library.

I’ve only read Ed’s two Western novels once so I would have to read them again to see how influenced they were by Grey.

Grey’s stuff is alright I guess but the guy’s a real dud writer as far as I’m concerned.

In addition to these major influences Ed also stuffed his memory with reams of poems and magazine articles. The newspapers which were much different then also provided much grist for his mill.

In the background, of course, was Ed’s interest in mythology. He did read Howard Pyle’s four volume version of the Vulgate-Lancelot that appeared after the turn of the century. The two and a half years he spent at Harvard Latin School undoubtedly gave him a good background while in those formative years conditioning his mind to deal with difficult thought processes. After all the mind has to be trained to manage the mass of memories that make the person.

The question during this period is whether or not he read ancient Greek mythology or learned any Greek. I think not. He may have some familiarity with Homer especially the Odyssey on which many of his stories may be based. He was probably familiar with The Labors Of Hercules but I don’t see any evidence of understanding of The Iliad.

The Iliad is important for psychology as Homer introduces the notion of the infinitely powerful mind of Zeus. Zeus could remember everything while having such a powerful mind that he could order the whole of it in sequence while finding his way through any number of conundrums. The only thing he couldn’t do was set aside what was fated.

What goes into one’s memory or mind is of cardinal importance. Trash goes in, trash comes out. Ed filled his memory banks with useful information and wonderful speculative literature. The question, then, is what does one do with those memories now transformed into knowledge. Remembering is the sine qua non but organization is equally important. The mind must be trained. Remembered and organized, then what? Then comes intelligence and application. A flexible intelligence is probably known as imagination. One can combine, rearrange, and recombine one’s memories into new uses. Make meaningful what was formerly incoherent.

Ed well-satisfied with himself remarked that only one in a hundred thousand had a good imagination in which number he obviously included himself among the elite. I don’t know where he got his stat but I’m sure a mind such as his was rare enough. There really aren’t many who can use their mind as he did. One only has to read the Martian writers who preceded him to see the astonishing distance between their work and his. Wells’ War Of The Worlds for instance is a fairly pedestrian work. A missile shot from a cannon on Mars arrives on Earth and some spindly creatures get out who then mount some tripods that begin walking through London spewing some black gas. Fresh at the time but not wildly imaginative. Ed would challenge Wells when he wrote the first third of The Moon Maid. That book was so imaginative, superior to Wells’ First Men In The Moon, as to be the work of a master taunting an obstreperous pupil.

So, when Ed Began 1912 his memory banks were full of experience and stuffed with literature and scientific knowledge that he was able to use so imaginatively that most people were completely unaware of the amount of learning incorporated into his stories.

Part VI chronicles Ed’s life from the beginning of his success to 1920.

 

 

　

　

Chapter 15: Edie Sedgwick: Maid Of Constant Sorrow

Edie Sedgwick: Maid Of Constant Sorrow

by

R.E. Prindle

Chapter 15

We are now at the beginning of June 1966.  Life was careening very fast for Edie, Andy and Bob.  Oddly enough all three were headed for life threatening experiences.  The first to take a hit was Dylan.  He had his famous spill from his motorcycle in July of that summer.  His back wheel locked up sending him flying over the handlebars.  It has never been made clear how badly he was hurt or if he was even hurt at all but he was observed in a neck brace so a report that he had a cracked vertebra in his neck may be accurate.  He may have come within an ace then of being paralyzed from the neck down or killed.

It seems to me unlikely that the rear wheel accidentally locked up.  As Dylan was one whose conduct from, say, ‘63 to ‘66  should have made him a lot of enemies it seems likely that someone was seeking revenge.  There are strong indications if not evidence that Andy Warhol was the most likely candidate.

Andy was not one to wear his heart on his sleeve but my thinking after reading extensively and thinking deeply is that in his own way Andy was deeply in love with Edie.  Given his homosexuality there was apparently no way for him to express his feelings to her.  Edie on her part remarked to Dylan that she had really tried to get close to Andy.  While Andy strove to appear indifferent he expressed his resentment at David Weisman and his movie Ciao Manhattan that exploited Edie’s fame while destroying whatever was left of her reputation.

At the same time too he resented Dylan for purloining Edie and then discarding her.  Andy was controlled by the notion that there was no stopping a person from following their bent or as he put it:  How do you stop someone from doing what they want to do.  Indeed, all one can do is step out of the way and let them do it.  Thus, while the attitude is callous he was heard to remark that if Edie was going to commit suicide he hoped that she let him film it.  The logic is not unreasonable but the attitude comes across cold.

Bob Dylan

As Edie seemed intent on going with Dylan Andy felt that there was no way to stop her.  It never occurred to him that he himself was exploiting her by using her in his movies.  As he saw it he was creating avenues to success for his people and it was up to them to create their own opportunities from that fame.  Not too much different than he was doing for himself.  It apparently never occurred to him that none of his people had the talent to do anything on their own although some did try.

He does not seem to have been aware that what was fame for him was mere notoriety for them.  He had merely created a clubhouse for drugged out buffoons.  Thus when things began to fall apart in mid-’66 when the mise en scene began to be broken up by Andy’s trip to Hollywood his entourage was merely dispersed with no direction home.

The case with Ondine was as pathetic as that with Edie.  With the accession of Paul Morrissey and Fred Hughes who encouraged Andy to drop the whole A-head and Silver Factory crowd which they correctly saw as a liability the Silver Factory’s days were numbered.  This was made easier by the end of ‘67 when Warhol was advised that his lease would not be renewed.  Everyone was told there would be no place for them at the new quarters.  The Factory building was subsequently torn down in 1969 to make room for the Dag Hammerskjold project.

For Ondine who was completely burned out by the amphetamines this was disastrous.  He ended up at the post office for a while then tried to capitalize on his notoriety by stealing a film in which he starred from Andy trying to make money by exhibiting it while lecturing on his Factory days.  He was apparently pathetic while Andy turned his back on him without a thought.

Gerard Malanga

The same was true of Gerard Malanga who was dumped in 1967.  Andy’s treatment of this most competent and valuable assistant is a real blot on his record.  Malanga was a man of some talent and ability.  I don’t think much of poetry but Malanga has a position in the NYC poetry scene.  He introduced Andy into a milieu beneficial to him that he would not have known otherwise.

At a time when Andy was turning his art in the direction of multiple copies, essentially posters, Malanga who was knowledgeable  in silk screening taught Andy the process.  I am of the opinion that Gerard was essentially a collaborator in Warhol’s art.  He assisted in the screening contributing skill and know how while undoubtedly making good suggestions.  Of course he followed Andy’s lead.  All this time he was paid only the minimum wage so, in a sense, he sacrificed a half dozen of his most valuable  years for little recompense and as it turned out nothing in the way of thanks.  In 1967 he went to Italy in an attempt to further his fortunes.  While there he ran out of money having no way to pay his fare home.  Andy refused his pleas for help, so Gerard who was completely familiar with Andy’s process of selecting photographs, such as the Presleys, selected a photo of Che Guevara and screened a few copies representing them as genuine Warhols.  From my point of view they were authentic Warhols produced without the Master’s hand but still, perhaps, genuine.

When art authorities checked with Warhol, Andy dropped the ball.  He should have confirmed them as no one could tell the difference and rescued Gerard.  Instead he made Gerard guilty of art fraud which gave Gerard some very trying moments with the Italian authorities.  Gerard made it back to New York but now having served as Warhol’s apprentice during his twenties, at thirty he had no marketable skills while being essentially a convicted criminal.    Having no other recourse and some rights in my estimation,  he expropriated, as the Leftist criminals used to say, some of Andy’s multiples and sold them.  In a way in Andy’s mind this acknowledged  his primacy and he didn’t press charges but he did disavow authentic prints as genuine.

We now move to ‘68, Andy under the influence of Morrissey and Hughes while forced to change quarters as his former space was condemned, disavowed the whole former Factory crowd telling them to get lost, that they were no longer welcome at the new Factory.

You can’t do this without making a large number of enemies.  Andy just before his shooting was not so popular a fellow.  And we are not quite there yet.

Edie going into the last half of ‘66 and into ‘67 was in dire straits.  She was now completely unable to function without amphetamines.  Cut off from all sources of income she was forced into thievery to support her habit.  She was caught and did time.  She was to spend more time at public mental hospitals that were quite unlike the posh Silver Hill of Connecticut.  One can only guess the effect this disastrous series of events, a series with no seeming end,  had on her psychology.  Or perhaps we can get a glimmer from the biker group she hung out when she returned to Santa Barbara after the stunning humiliation of Ciao Manhattan.  There she became a biker chick offering herself to all comers for a dose of drugs.  Certainly her self-respect had been obliterated.  Certainly she no longer thought she had any value as a human being.  The mind can only be battered so much before it gives way.  The men in her life had treated her shamefully, her father, Fuzzy, Warhol and Dylan as well as her evil mentor, Chuck Wein.

If, as claimed in the movie Factory Girl, her father had sexual relations with her as a young girl then his obligations extended much further than a paltry allowance that he cut off .  Then he is morally liable for her degradation.  If as Warhol thought there was no way to stop someone from doing what they want to do, then he was under no obligation to provide the ways and means.  In all probability in the environment of NYC of the early and mid-sixties Edie would have drifted into amphetamines anyway.  Indeed, as Andy said, Edie was a regular patron of the feel good doctor, Roberts.

Roberts was a licensed physician as was that other chief Dr. Feelgood, Max Jacobson.  Doesn’t society have to obligation to protect its citizens from charlatans and quacks?  Didn’t they throw some poor innocent Jim Bakker in jail because they disliked his religion?  Didn’t society pursue hapless marijuana smokers and criminalize them by the thousands?  Can the doctors actually claim they didn’t know the deleterious effects of amphetamines when they had the example of the most notorious amphetamine user ever, Adolf Hitler, before them?

Even if they tried they were still were medical malpractitioners and criminally liable.  Read this quote from Edie by Jean Stein for an account of these doctors’ methods and practices.  This is absolutely terrifying.  There is a problem with Stein and Plimpton however.  Apparently there was no Dr. Charles Roberts; Roberts is a name substituted by Stein to ‘protect’ the real doctor, who in any event would likely have been discredited c. 1968 when the Dr. Feelgoods were finally discountenanced.  Also there may be confusion with the Dr. Robert, without an ‘s’ of the Beatles’ song.  He was apparently Dr. Robert Feynman, a sixty year old man who was discredited in 1968.  In any event since Stein and Plimpton didn’t announce the name change their whole history of Edie is compromised more than somewhat.  Who knows what edits the two authors made.   To quote the account, p.261, Edie:

Joel Schmacher reporting:

Joel Schumacher

I’ll give a description of what it was like to go to Dr. Roberts.  The time is two-thirty in the afternoon.  I’m going back for my second shot of the day.  I open the door.  There are twenty-five people in the waiting room; businessmen, beautiful teenagers on the floor with long hair playing guitars, pregnant women with babies in their arms, designers, actors, models, record people, freaks, non-freaks…waiting.  Everyone is waiting for a shot, so the tension in the office is beyond belief.

Lucky you, being a special Dr. Roberts person who can whip right in without waiting.  Naturally there’s a terrible resentful, tense moment as you rush by because you’re going to get your shot.

You attack one of the nurses.  By that I mean you grab her and say, “Listen, Susan!  Give me a shot!”  You’re in the corridor with your pants half off, ready to get the shot in your rear.  Meanwhile Dr. Roberts comes floating by.  Dr. Roberts has had a few shots already, right?  So in the middle of this corridor he decides to tell you his complete plan to rejuvenate the entire earth.  It’s a thirteen part plan, but he has lots of time to tell it to you, and as the shots start to work-Susan having given it to you- you have lots of time to listen.

In Dr. Roberts’s room would be Edie…so thin that she cannot be given her shots standing up; she has to lie down on her stomach.  It was a big shot- all those vitamins, niacin, methedrine. God knows what else- for a little girl she has  to take it lying down.

Meanwhile everyone who’s back in the corridor for the second or third time that day complains that the shots they received that morning haven’t worked.  Out in the waiting room you can hear the people complaining that they haven’t even received their first shot yet.

And Dr. Roberts is still going on.  In the middle of his thirteen-part plan he decides to tell you about a movie he saw on television…in detail.  You however, are telling him your ideas for whatever you are going to do.  But then Dr. Roberts begins to describe his idea for a plastic Kabuki house.  Someone else is showing his sketches for redesigning the Boeing 707 with a psychedelic interior.  Big doings at Dr. Roberts all the time.

Now you decide to go back out through the waiting room, right?  Now you have all the time in the world.  Life is a breeze.  You’ve used the sun lamp, I mean, you were in a great rush when you came in; now, finally, you decide you’ll leave.

But there in the room are all these people who are not Dr. Roberts special people and who still haven’t been served.  They’re there to spend as much money as you have, but they’re not part of the “in” crowd.  So they’re drifting off into craziness because they haven’t gotten their shots.  A couple of people are wandering around…their poor systems are so riddled with the methedrine they got half an hour ago they feel is not working that they’ve come back for what Dr. Roberts call “the booster.”  The basic Dr. Roberts shot goes for from ten dollars to fifteen dollars.  As your resistance to the drug gets to the point of diminishing returns, you move on up.  There is a big shot for twenty-five dollars, and if it doesn’t work you go right back and get the “the booster’ for five dollars.  That’s what some of these poor people are doing- standing out there waiting for the booster.  But  you …you are flying high, having just had your twenty-five dollar special, and you walk out ino the outer office and say:  “Hi, Oh, hi! What a beautiful sweater!  Gee you look wonderful!  How are you?  Oh, hi!  Isn’t it wonderful to see you!  What’s happening?”

Before leaving, I’d often go and find Edie in Dr. Roberts’ sauna.  If we’d been up all night on drugs, the sauna and steam-bath were wonderful things.  We’d go and walk for blocks and blocks…just be together, because we didn’t know what we were saying half the time.

The speed thing was so wonderful because everyone was walking around scared to death…scared because they couldn’t sustain the pace.  And so these shots from Dr. Roberts and all those other speed doctors gave you a false sense of being together.  You cold face everybody when you went out at night.  You could dance all night.  It was like “the answer.”  Nobody knew much about speed in those days.

Once Edie’s mother came to Dr. Roberts!  I remember she was on crutches.  She looked like Betty Crocker-gray hair with a little hairnet, a blue print dress, and little glasses.  She looked like a librarian from the Mid-west standing next to Edie with her cut-off blond hair with the dark roots, thigh-high boots, and mini-skirt, and a kind of chubby fur jacket that looked like it was made out of old cocker spaniels.  There they were- the two of them.  Mrs. Sedgwick had come to see if Dr. Roberts was taking good care of her little girl…and I guess the parents paid for her treatment.  It cost a lot for those shots.

I’m not sure I trust Joel’s memories but that is sure good speed freak talk.  Love it.  And then there’s this from Cherry Vanilla, p. 265:

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 micro-minis.  I saw a micro-mini 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 was surrounded by a lot of gay boys in designing and decorating who would always give me a hand in pulling some look together.  I would go out half-naked with see through things.  You took a scarf and wrapped it around  you and thought you were dressed.

I gave Dr. Roberts a shot once.  In the ass, in his office about five o’ clock in the morning.  I had been playing records at Aux Puce- I was the disc jockey there- and he had come around to visit and said, “If you come back to my office with me, I’ll give you a shot.”  It was a freebie, which was nice because those shots were not cheap.

I really got into having a needle in my ass.  Just the feeling of it.  You get the shot, then this taste in your mouth, and you get a rush and you knew you were getting high.  It was all very sexual in a way, and very “in” and social and stylish to do it.  So I went back to his office with him and I gave him one and he gave me one.

I don’t know what he shot me up with, but it was something I had certainly never had before.  I was really very numbed.  Maybe it was cocaine.  Sometimes he would shoot you with LSD.  You never knew what he was going to shoot you with.  So we got involved in a rather heavy sex encounter.

All of a sudden there was blood everywhere.  I was bleeding like crazy.  He laughed and said, “Oh, I think you should go and see a doctor.”  Very bizarre.  I started freaking out.  I thought, “Oh, my God, this man has done something to me..  He’s killed me.  I’m going to die here in his office, all shot up with drugs, and it’s going to be a disgrace and terrible.”  I told him I had to get out.  He said, “No, no, you can’t leave.  I’ll fix you.  I’ll give you a shot.”  I said, “No, no, no more shots!”  I got dressed.  I never thought he was going to let me out.  Perhaps he was scared I would go to the police.

When I did get out, I ran around the corner to Aux Puces.  Some of the staff used to hang out there very late at night taking LSD.  Sure enough, they were there.  We called doctors.  We couldn’t get anybody.  Then the bleeding began to subside suddenly- about seven in the morning.  I never actually knew what happened.  I had been cut inside- scratched with something, fingernails or jewelry…probably by accident.  I think we both just got carried away.

Exciting times.  And finally we have this from Edie.  This is a transcript from Ciao Manhattan.

It’s hard to choose between the climactic ecstasies of speed and cocaine.  They’re similar.  Oh, they are so fabulous.  That fabulous sexual exhilaration.  Which is better, coke or speed?”  It’s hard to choose.  The purest speed, the purest coke, and sex is a deadlock.

Speeding and booze.  That gets funny.  You get chattering at about fifty miles an hour over the downdraft, and booze kind of cools it.  It can get very funny.  Utterly ridiculous.  It’s a good combination for a party.  Not for an orgy, though.

Speedball!  Speed and heroin.  That was the first time I had a shot in each arm.  Closed my eyes.  Opened my arms.  Closed my fists, and jab, jab.  A shot of cocaine and speed, and a shot of heroin.  Stripped off all my clothes, leapt downstairs, and ran out on Park Avenue and two blocks down it before my friends caught me.  Naked. Naked as a lima bean.  A speedball is from another world.  It’s a little bit dangerous.  Pure coke, pure speed, and pure sex.  Wow!  The ultimate in climax.  Once I went over to Dr. Roberts for a shot of cocaine.  It was very strange because he wouldn’t tell me what it was, and I was playing it cool.  It was my first intravenous shot, and I said, “Well, I don’t feel it.”  And he gave me another one, and all of a sudden I went blind.  I just flipped out of my skull!  I ended up wildly balling him and flipping him out of his skull.  He was probably shot up…he was always shooting up around the corner anyway.

It would appear that Edie was very familiar with drugs and very welcoming to them.  The quote doesn’t tell us whether Edie was first introduced to amphetamines at the Factory and then found Dr. Roberts or vice-versa but we do have an environment at the factory in which Brigit Berlin walked around injecting people with or without their consent.  The question then is how innocent is Andy really.  What sort of milieu had he created for his amusement.

The Factory was a clubhouse for what were essentially lowlife homosexual drug addicts.  This must have been the overriding first impression.  As such the women had to be accessories to attract men and outsiders.    They were there essentially to be abused.  They put the Factory in bad odor.  As Andy says the police were through the Factory so often it might as well have been the precinct house.  Warhol himself was generally known as ‘that creep’ while the more respectable people thought the place poison.

Andy’s genius however did turn it into an ‘in’ place by 1966 where certain celebrities with cachet found the place exciting and for a short period gave it a certain status.

As I have pointed out Warhol was a leader in both the Homosexual Revolution and the Underman Revolution.  By late 1966, early 1967 we are not too far from the Stonewall Riot of  ‘69 that ended restriction and harassment of homosexuals in NYC and the rest of the country.  It was the end of rock n’ roll.  After  Stonewall the period began that homosexuals  called the Candy Store Era.  It was a time when anything went that ended about ten years later when AIDS made its appearance on the scene.  Of course if any of us had heard of the Stonewall Riot we would have missed its significance nor did anyone understand the astounding change that was the Candy Store Era or even know they were in it.  A sub-text of the Homosexual Revolution is the subversion of heterosexuality which goes without saying.  Thus the Factory was a prototype of the nightclub that would realize the ideal of absolutely promiscuous sex- Studio 54.  Thus as the homosexually led nightlife of the Candy Store Era developed Steve Rubell and Ian Schrager created the ultimate Factory in Studio 54.  That club was everything Andy wanted the Factory to be- a celebrity paradise.  The place was filled with celebrities, sexual perversion and drugs.  All inhibitions were down.  Studio 54 became Andy’s clubhouse where he spent his nights as a voyeur.

Rubell and Schrager were not overly discreet so that the Feds, at least, were onto them from the beginning although NYC authorities must have been paid off as they didn’t harass the club.  At Studio 54 the Undermen forged a very destructive attack on elite White America.  According to Anthony Haden-Guest in his book, Studio 54, a concerted assault was made to corrupt prep school youth- boys and girls by using drugs, liquor and sex.  According to Haden-Guest the conspirators were quite successful in debasing both boys and girls in much the same manner Edie had been debauched under Warhol’s tutelage.

This raises the question again of how innocent Andy really was.  His competitor Bob Dylan is supposed to have hated Andy for debauching Edie but that may have been the pot calling the kettle black.

Andy’s record of the treatment of women is not good but in keeping with the homosexual ethos.   The gays dislike women as competitors, as they believe, for men’s favors.  While not considering themselves psychotic they believe that if there were no women all men would be theirs.  The irrationality of the belief shall pass without comment.  Hence they imitate women to attract men.  An inevitable  consequence of their attitude is the need to debase and humiliate women.

While being of this mindset Andy as the little Ruthenian immigrant boy who was himself humiliated and rejected by the upper crust of  Pittsburgh found delight in debasing and humiliating upper crust women.  This runs through his whole career.  Edie came from a very old American family that was very prominent in both Stockbridge, Massachusetts, Boston, from whence they arose and New York City.  Her father had moved West from New York only shortly before she was born.  Although raised as a half wild girl on a vast ranch near Santa Barbara Edie could claim to be a New York society girl.  Indeed, her grandmother still maintained her position on the East Side.

While Andy may indeed have loved Edie it was probably more for her background than for herself.  The prize of an Anglo-American princess must have been beyond Andy’s juvenile dreams.  Indeed, it was through her that Andy first tasted any social success.  If they were inseparable during that glorious summer of ‘65 it was because Andy was basking in Edie’s social glamour.  And yet one doesn’t find reverence or respect for Edie as a person.  Andy allowed her to pick up the check at expensive restaurants not only for himself but his whole entourage of freeloaders.  As these were all Underclass people you may be sure they took full advantage of her largesse.  I am perhaps a trifle old fashioned but to me this is unforgivable in Andy.

While Andy may have been hard pressed financially to maintain his large and growing establishment there appears to have been no gratitude for Edie relieving the strain.  As his entourage grew Andy began to yearn for a restaurant where he could exchange art for food and drink.  This was provided in 1966, after Edie was out of favor, when Mickey Ruskin opened Max’s Kansas City in December of ‘65.

The rest of women at the Factory were treated with disrespect although they submitted to it with stoic resignation.  One reads with horror the treatment of Viva in Tucson during the filming of Warhol’s cowboy parody and putdown, once again a homosexual extravaganza.

And then there was the ever present sado-masochism that permeated the Factory.  An acceptance and celebration of the perversion.  The attitude was expressed successfully in the films of Paul Morrissey begun while Warhol was recuperating from Valerie Solanas’ assault.  With Andy unable to interfere Morrissey quickly turned out the movie Flesh with Joe Dallesandro which turned out to be a success in Germany.  This gave Andy confidence and Morrissey produced several more movies among them Flesh For Frankenstein.  I have no intention of reviewing the movie here but certain barbarities of the French arch-sadist Gilles de Rais were celebrated.

Women of some prominence played roles in the nude while performing sexually deviant acts.  This rather negative attitude toward women was reflected all through the history of the various Factorys carried on in the most degrading circumstances.

To add insult to injury when Edie was actually falling into her psychological abyss Andy shot The Andy Warhol Story with Rene Ricard and Edie in which both expressed their hatred and revulsion of Andy.  ( http://.warholstars.org/warhol/warhol1/warhol1f/warhol.html )

So by this time she had  been debased more than any man or woman should ever be debased.  Edie herself lay her destruction at the feet of Andy, the great facilitator, the sado-masochistic  doyen of New York.  I think Andy, then bears a great deal of responsibility for Edie’s shame.

Now, it will be noted.  The Andy Warhol Story was filmed at about the same time as his Bob Dylan Story so Edie and Dylan were connected in Andy’s mind.

As I said Warhol and his troupe left for LA in May of ‘66 after a successful month of the EPI.  When he returned to resume this lucrative enterprise he found that his hall, the Dom, had been leased from under him by- Albert Grossman and Bob Dylan.  They turned it into a venue inanely named The Balloon Farm.  Another act of plagiarism by Dylan.  I think this was too much for Warhol.  First Edie and then the Dom.  This was surely provocation asking for trouble, demanding it.

Now, if you’ve watched the post-1968 Warhol movie Bad how far is it from Bad to conjecture that Andy and his crew were responsible for Dylan’s accident?  Bad concerns a woman who runs a clearing house for dirty deeds written by Andy’s amanuensis, Pat Hackett.  Andy had to have been angry at Dylan and Grossman and indeed he filmed a put down of the two.  Quoting Warholstars.org:

Sterling Morrison of the Velvet Underground:

Paul Caruso

“Dylan was always around, giving Nico songs.  There was one film Andy made with Paul Caruso called The Bob Dylan Story.  I don’t think Andy has ever shown it.  It was hysterical.  They got Marlowe Dupont to play Al Grossman.  Paul Caruso not looks like Bob Dylan but as a super caricature he makes even Hendrix look pale by comparison.  This was around 1966 when the film was made and his hair was way out to here…On the eve of the filming, Paul had a change of heart and got his hair cut off- close to his head and he must have removed about a foot so everyone was upset about that.  Then Dylan had his accident and that is why the film was never shown.”

So, in July smarting from the indignities imposed on him by Dylan and Grossman Andy was making a ‘hilarious’ film about the two.  Perhaps Andy thought that was not enough so somewhere during the filming, one conjectures, he conceived this motorcycle rigging.  Thus, in late July Dylan went over the handlebars when his rear wheel locked.  Anything could have happened to him from paralysis to death.  As it was he fractured his neck coming within an ace of serious injury.

Andy hadn’t finished with The Bob Dylan Story.  He wanted to work in the accident.  Probably aggrieved at Dylan’s survival Andy recommenced the film in October of ‘66 probably with the Andy Warhol Story starring Edie in mind.

Warholstars once again:

Susan Pile

Susan Pile speaking:

Andy filmed the Bob Dylan Story starring Paul Caruso…Ingrid Superstar and I were folkrock groupies who rushed in (to Paul Caruso) attacked his body and taped him to the motorcycle…Paul Morrissey suggested all of Paul Caruso’s  lines be from songs, but Andy, knowing it was a good idea (this is a direct relay from Paul Morrissey) vetoed it…My one line (what I wasn’t supposed to say; I was to remain mutely sinister) was “You’re just like P.F. Sloan and all the rest- you want to become famous so you can get rid of those pimples.” (accompanied by quick slaps to P. Caruso’s acne remnanted cheeks.)…

So, what do we have here?  Bear in the mind the subject matter of Bad which is a very violent movie of revenges made in the most casual manner.  Morrison’s account is given before the accident while Pile’s is after.

Pile and Ingrid attack Caruso/Dylan and mockingly tape him to the motorcycle so that he can’t fall off.  (ha, ha, ha).  Pile then delivers a devastating putdown comparing Dylan unfavorably to P.F. Sloan.  Sloan was the guy who wrote the puerile Eve Of Destruction that was very near  to being a humorous parody of Dylan’s songs such as Blowin’ In The Wind.  If Dylan had seen the film he would likely have been enraged.  Pile than calls Dylan’s song ‘pimple music’ another put down as rock n’ roll was derisively called pimple music because teenagers had pimples.  And then Caruso/Dylan is physically abused by having his face slapped while being unable to retort because he is taped to the bike.

Psychologically then what Andy is saying is that he felt the filching of Edie as a slap in the face while when he was in LA he was unable to foil the filching of the Dom.

This combination of Dylan and the motorcycle in a film called The Bob Dylan Story points clearly to Andy as the perp.

And so the final chapter will concern the filming of Ciao Manhattan and the demise of Edie.  I have some other work to be done so there will be a delay before Chapter 16 appears.

A Review: Thomas Kiedrowski, Andy Warhol’s New York City

A Review:

Andy Warhol’s New York City

Four Walks Uptown To Downtown

by

Thomas Kiedrowsky

Review by R.E. Prindle

Kiedrowsky, Thomas, Andy Warhol’s New York City, Four Walks Uptown To Downtown, Little Bookroom, 2011

http://www.warholtour.com/

     A new little informative paperback guide book by Thomas Kiedrowsky has been issued by The Little Bookroom.  Kiedrowski, an ardent Andyphile conducts tours to Warhol sites in NYC.  He has spent a decade or so researching the artist.

     Perhaps because he conducts tours he has failed to include maps for the four tours in order to protect his turf.  They would have been helpful.  He organized his volume into four areas: Upper East Side to 70th St., Upper East Side 57th to 68th sts., Midtown and Downtown.  This admirable little volume successfully embeds Warhol in his milieu clarifying a number of issues.

     Mr. Kiedrowski also turns up some facts I haven’t read before thus supplementing Steven Watson’s Factory Made which provides needed info about Andy’s entourage.

     Mr. Kiedrowski provides the abolutely entrancing story of Andy as a prospective restauranteur quoted here:

Site 18, 1977, 833 Madison Ave. (74th St.)

     The first link in a proposed international chain of Andy Warhol fast food restaurants would have opened at this location in 1977.  The concept of the Andy-Mat, a clever take on the Automat, had Warhol and British entrepreneur Godfrey Leeds in talks since 1974.  Both men had enjoyed dining at Schrafft’s years earlier and had yearned for that type of comfort food they had as kids.  Leeds said that the Andy-Mat would be a “neighborhood restaurant with a varied menu, simple good food, reasonable prices, a place where you don’t have to be embarrassed to take someone- one was never embarrassed to take someone to Schrafft’s.”

     During the Silver Factory days, Warhol and his entourage could often be found at Schrafft’s located at 556 Fifth Avenue and 47th Street, and Warhol was asked to do a commercial for Schrafft’s in 1968.  The 60 second spot shows an image of a red dot, then slowly zooms out to reveal a maraschino cherry and then a melting chocolate ice cream sundae.  At the end a credit line rolls diagonally, “The chocolate sundae was photographed for Schrafft’s by Andy Warhol.

   [As described an artistic success but a  complete waste of advertising money, reviewer.]

     Warhol asked close friend and society hostess Maxine (sic) de la Falaise McKendry (she appeared in Warhol’s Dracula) to prepare a menu for the 115 seat Andy-Mat, which she did with guidance from Tony Berns of  the Restaurant 21.  She often cooked for Warhol’s Factory regulars and at one time was a food columnist for Vogue.  The seventy-five items were to be priced between $1 and $5.75 and included shepherd’s pie, fishcakes, Irish lamb stew, fried onion tart, mashed potatoes, key lime pie, champagne fruit drinks, milk over ice, and a choice among four omelets. (Warhol’s diet regimen at the time.)  Said Andy:  “I really like to eat alone.  I want to start a chain of restaurants for other people who are like me called Andy-Mats- ‘The Restaurant for the Lonely Person.’  You get your food and then you take your tray into a booth and watch television.”

     Apparently 40K had already been spent on development with another million in the pipeline when the plan was aborted.  It’s not difficult for me to see why but then…who knows, it might have worked.

     Mr. Kiedrowski fills his little guide book with such interesting tidbits many of which I had never read before.

     I heartily recommend the book for a very entertaining read at a price under 12.00.  Some nice pictures I haven’t seen before too.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jaf6zF-FJBk  Watch Andy eat a hamburger.

Chapter 14 Edie Sedgwick, Maid Of Constant Sorrow

Chapter 14

Edie Sedgwick, Maid Of Constant Sorrow

by

R.E. Prindle

Edie

In the interest of keeping things in perspective and since a huge part of the readership obviously didn’t experience the sixties, I’d like, if I may, to give a little additional background to understand what happened here.  I hope I don’t offend by mixing in some of my own background, not merely from vanity, but so the reader will have some understanding of both my limitations and strengths in interpreting Edie, Andy and Dylan.

Nearly everything you read about the sixties today is written by former activists, usually Jewish, or dopers of one stripe or another.  Shall we say they skew the period in the direction of their beliefs.  Theirs was only the point of view of small minority.  In fact, they seized the leadership playing a much different game than the majority who were busy getting on with their lives.

The period now coming under discussion is 1966-’68 which changed the direction of the sixties. In mid-’66 Dylan had his motorcycle accident and was effectively removed from the scene for the duration. When he resurfaced in the seventies it was in a much diminished role. The first Bob Dylan was dead and the second was busy being  born. No matter what he’s done since then, compared to his mid-sixties trilogy it has had minimal impact.

Warhol reached his apogee in this period while he was shot by Vallerie Solanas in 1968 which changed the direction of his career when like Dylan he became a corporation while business affairs were managed by other men, most notably Fred Hughes.

Edie was heartbreakingly dragged through the mud in these years until her evil genius, Chuck Wein, connected her to the movie Ciao, Manhattan which was the most degrading, humiliating experience possible.  It eventually killed her.  All three of our participants then suffered life threatening experiences within two or three years of each other.  Edie was the only one not to survive.

Andy, Edie And Friends

The sixties were tumultuous times; it was like walking around with a perpetual thunderstorm over your head.  I was on the West Coast in the San Francisco Bay area till 1966 and at grad school at UOregon in Eugene from ‘66 to ‘68 and then in the record business for the rest of the period.  I got my degree from California State College At Hayward now Cal State U. East Bay in 1966.  It’s a long and irrelevant story but I entered Cal State in ‘64 taking enormous credit loads of up to 24 hours a quarter.  You can do things like that when you’re young and not too bright.  Hayward is just South of UC Berkeley.  Cal State was a new school with a very small library so we were allowed library privileges at Berkeley of which I availed myself so I was around the Free Speech Movement scene but not of it.  I was a first hand observer.

Once in Eugene in the fall of ‘66 things were getting in full swing in our own cultural revolution that would be joined to that of Chairman Mao in ‘68.  I was entranced by the poster art work coming out of San Francisco eventually dropping out of grad school to sell posters and then phonograph records at which I was successful.  Thus I was involved in the scene on an intimate basis from 1967 on.

While other generations were characterized by their literature our, the, generation was depicted by songwriters on phonograph records, thus records were central to the scene, don’t look for it in novels.  The first efflorescence occurred in the US during the mid-fifties while going into an incubation period in England from then until the early sixties when in 1964 the Beatles, Stones and Animals among others provided the transition from fifties Rock n’ Roll to sixties rock.  I don’t know how true it is but for me the revolution really got underway with the breathtaking first Doors LP in ‘66.  The blues bands and the next wave of British bands provided the impetus to move things into the seventies where the creative impulse ended by 1974 although inertia carried things through until sometime in ‘78.  Disco doesn’t count that was the beginning of an entire new ethic based in the homosexual revolution.

Morrison, Densmore, Krieger, Manzarek

When Andy, then in his quest for money, moved into records by managing the Velvet Underground, probably in imitation of Dylan, he did so just before the music scene broke.  New York bands were never that popular on the West Coast and the Velvets were no exception.  Andy, however, was an innovative guy.  Light shows were already news on the West Coast but Andy came up with a new multi-media formulation that blew our minds, as we used to say, while having a very lasting cultural effect.

In the Spring of ‘66 he rented a hall called the Dom in NYC.  Using the Velvets as his house band and his light show he managed to overwhelm the hipsters of the Big Apple.  He would have had a major success had he continued on but he was fixated on movies, wanting to do his Western put down, so the Factory crowd decamped for Tucson, Arizona, thinking to pick up the strand on their return.

While away Albert Grossman and Dylan leased the Dom from under Warhol and opened it as The Balloon Farm.  Between taking Edie from Andy and then the ballroom I’m convinced that Dylan sealed his doom.  I hope there aren’t too many people who think the rear wheel of his motorcycle locking was an accident.  Once again, conclusive proof is lacking, but there are indications that Andy and the Factory crowd did it.

Before The Fall

By late ‘66 Andy’s brief period in the spotlight was over.  His creative burst had run its course and while afloat financially, there was not any great income in sight.  Paul Morrissey had come on board as a filmmaker and his vision was more commercial than Andy’s but Andy was in charge so Paul had to bide his time waiting for his opportunity.  At the same time a man from Houston by the name of Fred Hughes came on board who knew how to monetize Andy’s reputation and art skills and then, Bang! Andy was writhing on the floor in pain.  One of those little zig-zags fate has in store for us sometimes.  The sixties were over for Andy but the change in direction made his future in the seventies and eighties.

Now, let’s go back to ‘64 and take a look at one of the defining members of the decade I’ve slighted till now, Prof. Tim Leary.  I’m convinced Leary was not in his right mind or, if he was, he shouldn’t have been there.  By the time Timmy latched onto psychedelics they were pretty well established.  LSD, discovered in 1938 by Hoffman and brought to prominence in 1943 was almost passe when Leary was turned on.  Aldous Huxley had published his Doors Of Perception in 1954 and Heaven And Hell in ‘56, that celebrated the joys of mescaline.

When I was in high school maybe ‘54 the kids of Scarsdale were notorious for using marijuana, written up in Time if I remember right.  Those were rich kids and by ‘56 our elite were very covertly using it.  In the Navy aboard ship from ‘57 to ‘59 Bennies and other pills were prominent while the occasional heroin addict passed through.  The Marines of Camp Pendleton were heavy into everything, barbiturates, mescaline, peyote buttons, LSD, you name it.  For cryin’ out loud, Hollywood had been the drug capitol of the US for decades.  One only has to read Raymond Chandler.  There wasn’t anything they didn’t know.  Cary Grant had been an old LSD hand for years before Leary, the apostle of acid, made it to town bearing the good news in 1960.  He was received with some amusement.

A very amusing story Leary tells in his autobiography is that Marilyn Monroe fell to his lot at a party.  They were actually in bed together.  As you may know Marilyn knew more about drugs than any pharmacologist.  Probably disgusted by Timmy’s ranting about LSD she handed him a pill and said take this.  Timmy did then decided to get up to go the dresser for something.  ‘Are you sure you want to do that?’ Marilyn asked.  Timmy was.  He took about two steps and seemed to sink through the carpet until only his nose was above the rug.  He lay there inert all night while Marilyn laughed softly from the bed.

From his position on the faculty of Harvard Timmy was a very visible advocate of LSD hogging headlines in Time and other mags that were the envy of Andy.  Tim was to amuse us with his antics all through the sixties.  Now, all this stuff was happening very fast.  It was impossible almost to keep up with the headlines let alone any indepth reporting or analysis.  Besides there was no internet so all news was comparatively old news, perhaps weeks after the occurrence if you heard of it at all.  Also it was impossible to be where it was happening unless it was happening where you were and then you didn’t know it was happening because you were in the middle of it.  I happened on the Free Speech Movement because I was in school but I missed the SF scene going on at the same time because I couldn’t be in two places at once and keep up grades in the third place at the same time.  New York was out of the question, London was across a wide, deep ocean, and LA hadn’t caught on yet.  Thus, I was invited to the Kesey/Dead Trips Festival but passed on it.  For various reasons I only caught the end of the Fillmore/Family Dog scene and then only fleetingly.

Even Morrison and the Doors who can claim to have been in the center could only have caught their small share however central it was.  Nobody got it all.  How could you be in Swinging London, New York, San Francisco and LA at the same time?  Couldn’t be done although there were many who tried spending their time criss crossing the country from West to East and reversed and for all I know popping into London too trying to be jetsetters but they were merely vagrants peripheral to everything.

So marijuana, acid, speed and barbiturates or downers as they were called then made up the pharmacopeia.  Amphetamines were obviously big in NYC from the early sixties and must have been in the West too but my first acquaintance with that was the Speed Kills buttons.  Heroin was a danger drug for the addict type only.  Cocaine came along in the seventies.  At the time little or none of the marijuana crop was home grown.  It came from Mexico and there are smuggling and pot running stories galore.  At first the dealers were amateurs, boys and girls next door, but that slowly turned into the criminal professionals.

Andy’s crew were all what he called A-heads, but you may be sure they smoked and did booze too.  It must have been uproarious in the early years but by ‘66 psychotic and physical reactions were beginning to slow the troops down.  It was hard to keep up that pace.

Now, Edie when she came to New York in late ‘64 was a naif.  Not many of us knew much better but she was a true naif, fresh from the farm, so to speak, while having had her brains addled by electro-shock treatment at Silver Hill Sanitarium.  At Radcliffe-Harvard she had hung out with homosexual men gaining the reputation as a fag hag.  Alright, I suppose, as she didn’t know how to handle herself around boys anyway.  She came down to New York with the group of homosexuals that Andy called the Harvard kids with some distaste.  She associated herself with her evil genius, Chuck Wein, who, as a homosexual, sought her destruction.

The Factory of Andy Warhol she entered was created in Andy’s image.  In reading of it, I was never there, it comes across as a hell hole from which any reasonable person would have fled at first glance.  Many did.  Andy hurt a lot of people being of a sado-masochistic frame of mind.  Outside his circle he was universally referred to as ‘that Warhol creep’ and yet events conspired with him to realize his perverted dreams and triumph over all.

Andy considered himself ugly and descriptions of him by others are unpleasant but whatever everyone and himself saw doesn’t show up so clearly in his pictures.  He may not be the handsomest fellow around but he has a cherubic, pleasant look that I don’t find unattractive.  But, because of this feeling he surrounded himself with beautiful people.  Fred Hughes his business manager was quite handsome.  Morrissey was OK, Malanga had his moments, Edie was considered a knockout, although I can’t see it, and the other women he associated with were quite attractive.

And then, as a little immigrant boy who wasn’t acceptable to mainliners of Pittsburgh Andy was especially pleased to have society women attached to him and especially the titled or rich English girls.  Edie fit in as a beauty, as Andy called her then, and as an old line New York society girl.  The combination was almost too tantalizing  for this lifetime homosexual.  Andy said Edie was as close to love with a woman that he ever got.  He even took her home to meet mom.  Edie apparently missed the import of that.

Andy has been blamed for making an A-head out of Edie.  Once she tasted amphetamines it is clear that there was no stopping her.  In truth the Factory was no place for her and Chuck Wein who introduced her into it must have known that.  Still, as Dylan sang, there’s something going on here and you don’t know what it is, do you?  Most people didn’t including Dylan, and I certainly was out of my depth.  It was disconcerting metaphorically to step on what was once solid ground to feel it giving beneath your feet.

Actually there were several revolutions going on which would result in massive social changes.  Those of us firmly grounded could only see the so-called change as a rising tide of insanity.  Aided by drugs these revolutionists became totally  dissociated from reality.  Drugs alone cause a withdrawal into an inner fantasy world of wishful thinking.  The external world appears as something that wishful thinking can manipulate to one’s desires in some magical way.  When the two got really out of sync as they inevitably must you ended up in Bellevue psychiatric wards as happened to a heavy user like Edie many times while most of Warhol’s crew checked in at least once.

Andy, who used these people for entertainment and self-aggrandizement, provided a hospitable retreat or club house where the cognitive dissociation wasn’t quite so apparent or, at least, normal.  The scene must have been incoherent.  A reading of Warhol’s so-called novel, ‘a’,  shows that by 1966 his crew was indeed incoherent.  Ostensibly a tape recording of Ondine’s conversation over twenty-four hours, whose conversation Andy found engaging, the tapes show Ondine unable to complete a sentence along with Rotten Rita and the rest of the crew including Edie.

Further the whole bunch were absolute thieves.  In Edie’s decline through sixty-six they walked into her apartment and chose their favorites from her collection of fur coats along with anything else of value.  In her demented state all she could say is that everyone was wearing her coats.  One wonders how much internal anguish there was as she knew there was nothing she could do about it.

At the same time Andy was a leader of the Homosexual and Underman revolutions.  Perhaps nobody knew what was going on but Warhol, Rotten and others were working for homosexual liberation which they achieved with the Stonewall Riot of 1969.

New York was unique in that for decades homosexuals from the South and Midwest flowed into New York each year in a great internal migration.  The chief destination was the Village.  Christopher Street was the  main fag drag.  The Stonewall Tavern was on Christopher.  Why the cops would disturb the lads in their own colony is beyond me, but they did and then gave up without a fight.

Perhaps the most astounding revolution of all was that of the Undermen.  Untermensch in German.  While Warhol’s crew was a prime example of the Other Half rising to control the direction of society, the main impetus seems to have been the West Coast, San Francisco and Haight-Ashbury, specifically the Hippies.  It was really there that the poverty look took hold, torn, faded jeans and whatever.  LA never really went for it but it spread up the coast to Eugene, Portland and Seattle.  The Sorority and Fraternity look went out the window with millionaire’s kids posing as the down and out.

I would imagine a naïve thing like Edie got caught up in the so-called sexual revolution too.  We’re not talking Feminist Movement here but the sexual aspect of the Communist Revolution in which women are common property to be had anytime or anyplace by whoever.  The Pill that came along in 1960 really facilitated the change in sexual mores.  Nothing exemplified that more than the mini-skirt.  So you’ve got drugs, the Pill, the Mini Skirt and the Ideology.  The world was not so slowly turning upside down.

All these revolutions might have gotten not too far but they were all collected and subsumed under the directing force of the Communist Revolution under the leadership of Chairman Mao and the Chinese Party.  The money really flowed in after 1968.  Driving the whole thing and what made the turmoil possible was the Viet Nam War.  It served the Communist cause more than the American as while taking a beating in Viet Nam the Communists subverted the United States.  Strangely Viet Nam had no effect on Warhol at all.  His disaster paintings ignored Viet Nam  while a couple napalm drops would have made a terrific topic.

In the early days of the war it was filmed like a reality TV show with the daily haps relayed on TV to the US.  The reality of napalm drops while our soldiers cheered and howled while a couple dozen Vietnamese where incinerated  was too much for the entertainment starved public to take. I sure couldn’t handle it.   The films were quickly removed.  The reality of war is a private thing between the armies, not quite like the Super Bowl.

I don’t recall a single mention of Viet Nam in Andy’s Diaries, Philosophy From A To B or ‘a’.  The war appears in none of the biographies or auto-biographies or even novels written by various denizens of the Factory.  Rather strange, but then I can recall no references to it in Dylan’s songs either.

The Communist Revolution connection developed when John and Yoko arrived in NYC in 1971.  The two of them were clearly involved  in revolutionary activities linking various art and entertainment figures with them including, Dylan, Warhol, David Bowie and others.  What exactly they were doing isn’t clear to me yet.  Yoko was and is on some Feminist rag.

So, in 1966 while an apparent apex for Warhol, his world was actually coming apart while Edie’s was descending like a Stuka dive bomber.

The period from December ‘65 to Easter of ‘66 must have been traumatic for a crazed and confused A-head like Edie.  She sacrificed her position with Andy, seduced by the fallacious promises of Dylan and Grossman  who certainly had no plans to make a movie, and if they did, to put Edie in it.

Velvet Underground & Nico

Warhol had all the sadistic cruelty characteristic of homosexuals that he turned on to the distraught girl.  Edie must have been thoroughly crushed when Dylan rejected her love while passing her on to Neuwirth.  Edie was not at her wit’s end with no money, cut off by her parents who objected to this life style, while having no means to make money to support the station in life she had seemingly attained.  Both Dylan and Warhol abandoned her after accepting her largesse for several months.  Warhol is especially reprehensible.  Dylan sure is a close second.

Her heavy dependence on amphetamines was literally eating away her brain, her body and her personality.

I really can’t believe that Edie loved Neuwirth as she claimed.  I  don’t think either was capable of love.  Yet, she abandoned her body to him claiming she could make love for forty-eight hours straight but crashed whenever he left her.  That is a sign of despair and fear.  I can only imagine the horror she felt when she looked into the future and saw only a blank wall.  As Dylan was to sing of her:  Time will tell just who has fell and who’s been left behind.

Perhaps the cruelest trick of all was played on Edie by Dylan, Grossman and Neuwirth at the Easter Parade of 1966 when Neuwirth filmed the promised movie.

In a November issue of Life Magazine in 1965 Edie had been photographed standing on top of a toy leather rhinoceros about two feet high and three feet long, popular at the time.  Whether the three of them, Grossman, Dylan and Neuwirth, put their heads together to come up with this or Dylan brainstormed it by himself, Neuwirth persuaded Edie to pull the rhino down Fifth Avenue as the parade progressed, filming as they went.  Then Bobby tied the rhino to a parking meter and persuaded a passing cop to write Edie a ticket.  Thus Grossman and Dylan fulfilled their obligation to put Edie in a movie while mocking her cruelly.  Those guys had a reputation for cruel put downs.  They live up to it here.

It was just after Easter that Warhol opened the Dom to stage his Exploding Plastic Inevitable.  The reports we got of it on the West Coast made it sound absolutely astounding.  If any one thing characterized the sixties I would have to say it was the Exploding Plastic Inevitable.  It brought everything the era valued together.  As usual with Warhol he couldn’t resist turning it into a sado-masochistic experience.  The chaos must have been extraordinary.  One can imagine the scene with dope peddlers trying to push their drugs on you, the lights flashing, strobing and pulsing, the howling music, the bodies bumping against each other, Malanga doing his whip dance, Edie bopping around the stage with her odd skip and step.  They talk about the Velvet Underground being loud but they must mean for the times.  Blue Cheer with its wall of Marshalls was just around the corner while the electronics improved almost daily until the sound passed the limits of endurance.  Created a whole generation of deaf Beethovens.  Musicians literally without ears.

I actually promoted the Underground once in either ‘68 ot ‘69, might have been pre-Blue Cheer.  BC’s main claim to fame was that they were the first mega blasters, loudest band alive for their brief moment.  Sort of a Great Divide in Rock music.

Things were still building but it wasn’t that the Velvets were that loud; they were just super strange.  Reed was the original one-note man, he played it over and over fast.  Sterling was there but he must have been background noise because I don’t remember much of an effect there.  Whatever Cale was doing passed over my head but it must have been some kind of La Monte Young dynamo hum, all the songs were.  I was most fascinated by Mo on drum.  Yeah, right, drum, in the singular.  She had a six inch deep tom with an under slung mallet.  The mallet hammered away at the bottom skin while Mo pounded the upper skin with the sticks.  In keeping with the dynamo hum she never varied the beat once but she was right on time just in case time was important.  Quite an experience.  You shoulda been there, and paid at the door.  I wouldn’t have lost as much money.

Andy made a bundle in the month long run and then he made what would have been the mistake of his life in leaving for Arizona, or would have been if he hadn’t been shot.  While he was out of it Hughes and Morrissey put together the means to put Andy over the top.

Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out

Chaper 15 follows.

Exhuming Bob XXX: Pt. II, A Review Of Masked And Anonymous

Exhuming Bob XXX

A Review: Part II

Masked And Anonymous

by

R.E. Prindle

Desolation Row

Aww, Sing It , Bob

   When Dylan left home in the summer of ’59 for UMinnesota he would have been at the bottom of his despondency in its raw form.  His subconscious would have been in possession of his mind.  He manifested this condition at UMinnesota by a burst of degraded behavior, drunkeness and an inability to study.  He did know his salvation lay in his music.  He then practiced hard and assiduously.  He apparently realized that he wasn’t rock n’ roll material while Folk Music was the rage, at the height of its popularity, although the slough of its despond could be seen from the heights.  It was petering out even as Dylan rode it to fame and fortune.  As he says in the revised Shelton he always knew that Folk Music was a shuck but he could do it and use it as a springboard.

     Using his friends and acquaintances in Minneapolis to educate him he learned to sing and play quickly.  Still deep in the throes of depression, ruled by his subconscious, he left for New York to try his luck there.  It was two months after his arrival in New York before he turned up in Greenwich Village.  He has said that during those two months he was hustling in Times Square.  No one knows whether to take him seriously but given his state of mind he may have attempted to degrade himself beyond redemption to satisfy his father’s prophesy.  He remained a heavy drinker in New York adding drugs to his repertoire.  According to Andy Warhol who should have known an A Head when he saw

A. Warhol

one Dylan was racing on amphetamines.  It wouldn’t have been hard to do as nearly everyone in New York at the time was.  The Village was a tough place and getting much tougher as Dylan went along.

     He took up his station at a bar called the Kettle Of Fish which was a Mafia owned bar and undoubtedly tough enough.  It may have been there that he and Andy Warhol first crossed paths as Andy frequented the place also.  While it has not been recognized, they were actually competitors for the role of  King of Bohemia.  Although Warhol was much older they both began their rise at the same time coming to an apex simultaneously.  A war of sorts ensued in which Dylan’s base was Downtown and Warhol’s base Midtown.  Later Lennon and Ono would form an Uptown base but by that time Dylan had moved along although he continued to associate with Ono at least through the eighties.  They may still meet but I haven’t come across any references.

     Despondent people usually see the world as a Zoo, an insane asylum, a desert, a hole or in Dylan’s case as a state of desolation.  In 1965 he wrote the song Desolation Row as he fought to free himself from his depression.  He has retained this despondent state of mind from then to the present if his movie Masked And Anonymous is any indication.  Thus the movie is a visualization of a tour of Desolation Row with ‘all the clowns and jugglers doing their tricks for you.’   The movie is a real side show if seen from that perspective.  Indeed Dylan depicts a side show carnival act of The Man Eating Chicken which when you part the curtain shows a man eating chicken.  My favorite memory of the midway was the Black Widow Spider Woman.  Had a little chat with her too.  At any rate Dylan hasn’t really advanced beyond 1959 when he left home.

      There is nothing attractive in the movie.  The lighting is usually dark and depressing.  I don’t remember one scene in which the sun was out.  The streets are vile, everything is a shambles or broken as he said in his song, Everything’s Broken.  That means that he views himself as a broken man, beyond repair.    One can see why Suze Rotolo was fearful.  She had every right  to be if one judges from the way Dylan treated his madonna, Sara.  After psychologically abusing her for a decade she had no choice but to leave when she came down for breakfast one day and found her husband carousing with another woman.  Dylan hasn’t been able to change his self-destructive behavior; if he weren’t able to make the money he does he himself would have been a bum on Desolation Row long ago.

     Thus we are treated to a longish filmed tour down skid row to look into the blank despairing faces of derelicts as if they were the norm.  Normal people do not exist to Dylan’s mind.  The streets were dotted with burning oil drums, the streets look pockmarked and unkempt left by a society unable to care and incapable of maintaining its infrastructure.  Echoes of Greil Marcus and David Lynch abound.

     Dylan injects his religious fundamentalism into the story where the desk of the Editor bears a copy of the statue of the monkey reading Darwin’s Origin Of Species prominently displayed.  Again, the building beside which the rundown bar cum TV studio is placed is the Masonic Hall on LA’s preeminent Whilshire Blvd, one of the great streets of the world.  The Masons who once shaped the world and were the founders of the United States Of America, competitors with Judaism for rule of the world have fallen on hard times.  Members have drifted away and no new ones recruited so the magnificent building stands empty.  That old Masonic Lodge is vacant now with  its grand ideals inscribed on its outside walls, as are Masonic Lodges across the country.  Ours has been taken over by the museum.

     Dylan in his Hibbing days was trained for the his Bar Mitzvah by an Orthodox Jewish Rabbi of the Lubavitcher sect brought in by his father who was powerful both among the Jews and Gentiles of Hibbing.  Dylan has never lost his Lubavitcher or at least Orthodox sympathies so that the use of the Temple is a mockery of Freemasonry by Judaism in Dylan’s hands.  Behold the winner, he says.

     At the same time, for the duration of the movie Dylan was able to make a stink pit of the grand Wilshire Miracle Mile making it reflect his vision of reality.  He was to project his psycological miasma on it to obliterate the beauty.

     As I say, to him, everything is broken down.  At one point he borrows his buddy , Bobby Cupid’s car which is a broken down old monster from Detroit’s golden era of the fifties and sixties.  He is on the way to visit a Black prostitute.  He crashes the car into a telphone pole walking away leaving it there smoking.  Once again this is dark, even though night it is a duller dark than need be, a Halloween night before the demons are released from hell to reclaim the night for their annual visit.

     The fallen woman, the Negro prostitute, lives in what once was a fine old mansion but now has fallen on hard times itself.  What was once a grand approach is now a ruins blending in with the shadows that have no bottom.  You can hear the earth groan as Dylan steps on it.  The effect is so repulsive and unredeemable that one has no sympathy with the movie or Dylan and Larry Charles.

     I could go on describing each degraded, broken scene but the record of that depressing aura would bring me down as well as yourself.

2.

     Let us take a look at the way Dylan uses his extras who populate the movie.  If you thought the locations were depressing the cast is even more desolated.

     The racial composition of the movie is of interest if this is how Dylan sees reality.  There are no obvious Jews in the movie.  Of course one knows that Dylan is Jewish but he is disguised as a goy cowboy, an incarnation of Rambling Jack Elliott.  Perhaps Dylan has patterned this stage of his life  after that of Jack Elliott after whom he patterned his early career also, actually studying and imitating him to the point where people said:  ‘Look Jack, he’s stealing your act.’  As Elliott had priority in the persona Dylan might almost be perceived as Jack’s doppelganger although more successful.  His character is named Jack.  Elliott is also a Brooklyn Jewish cowboy.

     The main actors are all White except for Penelope Cruz’ Pagan Lace who appears to be Mexican while apparently being a devout Catholic is no pagan.  The bit players and extras are predominantly Mexican.  They all have a bracero appearance, the kind of look that used to seen as typically Mexican.  On Fate’s bus ride to the City the entire bus is filled with Mexicans which means, I suppose, the place was either Mexico or LA.

     The Muzak of the background seems to always be a group singing Dylan’s songs in Spanish, rather puzzling.  As mentioned, Fate’s father inexplicably seems to be Mexican while Fate’s mother also looks Mexican.   The Micky Rourke character, who is apparently Fate’s half brother, is  Mexican.  Rourke muses that his people began as servants but own the big house now while they are taking over the country.

     In the barroom scenes those enraptured by Dylan’s Country and Western tunes are improbably Mexicans and Negroes.  To watch them bop out the rhythm rapturously to Dylan’s version of Dixie  (I wish I was in the land of cotton…) is a sight to behold- defies all reason and experience.  Who ever saw an African American at a Dylan concert?  One wonders what Dylan was smoking, snorting, shooting, drinking or perhaps doing a combination of all four.

     The manner in which our old Civil Rights activist portrays Blacks is also astounding.  They are all thugs, criminals and prostitutes without exception.  Well, except for the little mulatto girl who sings The Times They Are A  Changin’.  However she has a mean, nasty White mother in combat boots.  The mother says that her daughter has memorized all of Fate’s songs.  Fate asks:  ‘Why did you do that, honey?’  The mean, nasty White mother interjects:  ‘Because I made her, that’s why.’  Almost made me ashamed to be White.  I had to brush up on my nasty act.  The little girl launches into the song while everyone listens rapturously, enthralled at truth coming from the mouth of a babe.    I know she is supposed to be a scene stealer but the kid was only passable.  Not only was she no threat to the reputation of the young Michael Jackson, she wasn’t even a threat to Donnie Osmond.  But, this is Dylan’s movie.

     The first Negroes we see are two loan enforcers who are explaining the facts of life to Uncle Meat, excuse me, Uncle Sweetheart who owes more than he can pay.  The Blacks give him a good beating informing him that they’ll be back.

     The next Negroes we are introduced to improbably run the TV Network, possibly CBS,  which also seems to be a stretcher.  Not only do the Mexicans look like they missed high school but the Black Pres. of the Network acts like he left school after the sixth grade.

     The head of the Network conducts business with a loaded .45 automatic on the conference table.

     I don’t know what number this is in Dylan’s list of bad dreams but one does wonder what he ate before he climbed into bed.  Dylan seems to search out freaks for his Desolation Row.  He has a close up after the Animal Lover scene of a guy’s face that looks like a very bad case of scabies after being run over by a truck.  I don’t know whether he was made up or Dylan found him somewhere and gave him scale and all the pot he could smoke.

     If this movie is Dylan’s version of reality then the congressmen and senators should gather around and lend him a helping hand.   Thank god Dylan doesn’t strive for verisimilitude, the whole movie is acted like Jr. High kids playing adults while filming it in the basement.  It would help if they were mixing up some medicine.  Since everything is fake you don’t have to run from the theatre screaming although I’m told that many did.  I’m tough, I’ve sat through ten showings of this thing but, yes, I do believe I’ve had enough.

Part III follows in the next post.

Chap. 13: Edie Sedgwick, Maid Of Constant Sorrow

Edie Sedgwick

Maid Of Constant Sorrow

by

R.E. Prindle

http://idynamo.wordpress.com/2010/12/27/exhuming-bob-xxviii-visions-of-johanna-decoded/

http://idynamo.wordpress.com/2010/07/01/exhuming-bob-xxvi-bob-and-edie-sooner-or-later-everyone-must-know/

Chapter 13

Blonde On Blonde

Her Fogs, Her Amphetamines And Her Pearls

     One can only guess at Edie’s feelings when Dylan dismissed her so brutally  from the lines of One Of Us Must Know (Sooner Or Later).  She must have intuited if not known that her short and glorious career as the toast of New York was going nowhere.  She came to New York with a handsome inheritance that she squandered in a trice, her parents disapproved of her conduct to the the point that they cut her off from support leaving her as Dylan had sneered in Like A Rolling Stone, a poor little rich girl ‘who had never lived out on the streets but now she was going to have to get used to it.’  Screamingly in pain from amphetamines one can only imagine her bewilderment with no way to rectify the situation.  Whatever golden opportunities she may have had were now gone forever.  Frome here to her death in 1971 would be one long wailing ‘horrorous’ nosedive that is terrifying to relive as a writer even.  My stomach quakes as I try to organize the course of events.

     Chuck Wein, one of the Harvard homosexuals she had associated with and who had come to New York with her was her evil genius, some say Svengali, who had guided her to Warhol and the

The Poet

Factory and then presided over her self-destruction.    Then for that brief glorious summer of ’65 she had set New York on its ear as a companion to Andy Warhol.  Made her feel giddy and indestructible.  Andy was apparently in love with her but as a self-centered homosexual was too flaky to work out a relationship that would give her dignity while he was unable to support her more than extravagant tastes.

     Behind Warhol was Dylan competing for Edie’s favors which he won in December of ’65 and then discarded her like an old shoe.  He recorded the course of his relationship with Edie in various songs from mid-1965 to the completion of Blonde On Blonde in the Spring of ’66.  His own career course was changed dramatically in July of ’66 when he had his motorcycle accident.

     It might be well to review the songs that comprise Blonde On Blonde now.  The song list of Blonde On Blonde is as follows:

1.  Rainy Day Women #12 And 35

2.  Pledging My Time

3.  Visions Of Johanna

4.    One Of Us Must Know (Sooner Or Later)

5.  I Want You

6.  Stuck Inside Of Mobile With The Memphis Blues Again

7.  Leopard Sking Pillbox Hat

8.  Just Like A Woman

9.  Most Likely You Go Your Way And I’ll Go Mine

10.  Temporary Like Achilles

11. Absolutely Sweet Marie

12.  Fourth Time Around

13.  Obviously Five Believers

14.  Sad Eyed Lady Of The Low Lands

     With a knowledge of the lyrics the titles themselves read consecutively tell story while the lyrics confirm the tale.  The story hinges on who the two women are.  One is Dylan’s mother who blasted herson’s psyche when at about the age of twelve she told him in so many words that he had ruined her life by being born.  Apparently it was more than Dylan could handle because it was then that his lifelong misogyny began.  It is forbidden for a son to revenge himself on his mother so his only recourse was to take it out on another woman or women.  Dylan has been a serial misogynist.

     One of the women he chose to vent his spleen on was Edie Sedgwick.  Thus the two rainy day women most likely are his mother and Edie.  All the time Dylan was bedeviling Edie he was courting Sara Lowndes who he eventually married in November of ’65.  It was a quiet wedding that didn’t became known for several months and not widely known until later than that.  He married just before he succeeded in abstracting Edie from Andy’s entourage so there is no doubt that he was only toying with Edie as a surrogate for his mother.

     He may actually have cherished her vulnerability from drugs, inexperience in the world and low self-esteem.  She would have been as helpless as a baby, almost like shot gunning fish in a barrel.  Sara was his Madonna, Edie his whore.  He waits to the very end of Blonde On Blonde to mention Sara and then he wrote Sad Eyed Lady Of The Low Lands for her.  Of course, this was all very mysterious  for us back in ’66 because we knew nothing of what was happening in New York.  None of us had even heard of Sara Lowndes until she showed up as Dylan’s wife

     As blogger Jim De Rogatis says, when he sat down to listen to Blonde:  What I discovered was an artist who sneered and snarled with more venom and conviction than Johnny Rotten, and

The Artist

finally it dawned on me:  Dylan was a punk…

     Jim wasn’t there at the creation as I was, he is a younger man.  I guess my soul was so canchred at the time that I welcomed the sneering and snarling as an expression of my own trauma while today I find the venom is so grating that I can no longer listen to Dylan’s records.  Besides he borrows nearly everything.

     The album opens on a note of forced sardonic merriment as though in a house of ill fame and ends with the dirge dedicated to his wife, Sara.  I leave the interpretation of that up to you.  I can’t pretend at this date to understand the lyrics to Sad Eyed Lady.  One would have to know more of her and Dylan’s courtship.  Dylan thought she was supposed to be impressed that he wrote a song for her with a title that sounds like another of his caustic insults.

     To take the songs in order:  Rainy Day Women is a raucous, very noisy mocking song along the lines of Like A Rolling Stone with its refrain of ‘How does it feel?’  On release the song was so noisy it was nearly unlistenable, certainly objectionable and barely music.  Time has conditioned our ears.  The refrain here:  Everyboyd must get stoned, has layers of possible meaning.  While the allegory of stoned meaning pelted with rocks is present, stoned can also have a secondary meaning of smoking marijuana.  I don’t think the meaning has anything to do with getting ‘stoned’ from dope.  I think it’s a combination of the first meaning and what was perceived by Dylan as a devastating insult from his mother.

     The refrain must refer on one hand to his mothers perceived ‘stoning’ of Dylan by her announcement to him that he had been basically unwanted.  That stoning is turned around to apply to his ‘stoning’ of Edie in vengeance.  He then gleefully taunts and mocks her with the refrain:  Do not feel so all alone, everybody must get stoned (How does it feel?) which refers back to his earlier song about Edie, Like A Rolling Stone.

     In order to make ‘poetry’ of his taunt, our incipient ‘Shakespeare’ gives several poetic references that have nothing to do with rocks or joints.  For instance the line ‘They’ll stone you when you’re riding in your car’ must refer to radio DJs pitching products.  Thus stoning is meant as a verbal assault.  One can compare that line with the Rolling Stone’s Mick Jagger’s lyrics to his song Satisfaction:

When I’m drivin’ in my car

And that man comes on the radio

The Singer

He’s tellin’ me more and more

About some useless information

Supposed to fire my imagination

I can’t get no, Oh, no, no, no

Hey, hey, hey, that’ what I say

I can’t get no

Satisfaction

     So Dylan’s use of ‘stoning’ is giving or getting unpleasant information.

     Song #2, Pledging My Time merely means he is obsessed with  his mother’s ‘information’ that he was unwanted which is reflected in song #3, Visions Of Johanna when he sings:  These visions of Johanna have conquered my mind.  Johanna being his mother.  Then there is discussion about Andy and Edie.  (see my essay at     http://idynamo.wordpress.com/2010/12/27/exhuming-bob-xxviii-visions-of-johanna-decoded/    for a full discussion.)

     Song#4 Sooner Or Later mocks Edie who he ‘really did try to get close to’ as he dismisses here as he would have like to have dismissed his mother.   Song #5 is self-explanatory.

http://idynamo.wordpress.com/2010/07/01/exhuming-bob-xxvi-bob-and-edie-sooner-or-later-everyone-must-know/

     Song #6, Stuck Inside Of Mobile With The Memphis Blues Again awhile the lyrics are unclear must refer back to I Want You on one hand and forward to Leopard Skin Pill Box Hat and Just Like A Woman on the other.  He’s stuck inside of Mobile, i.e. he wants his mother with the Memphis Blues, i.e. he want his vengeance on Edie is a possible interpretation.  At any rate it is placed between I Want You and the two Edie songs so it must be related to all three.

     Then come two really unnecessarily vicious songs that everyone agrees are about Edie- Leopard Skin Pill Box Hat and Just Like A Woman.  There are no obvious reasons for Dylan to express such vehement, disfiguring hatred of the poor girl unless he’s visiting his repressed hatred of his mother on her.

     Song #10 Temporary Like Achilles involves Edie and Andy and himself.  I doubt if Dylan had any understanding of the Iliad, if he had even read it, so apart from Achilles short life and the seven month interruption of his relationship with Edie by Warhol an interpretation is somewhat of a hazard.

     Songs 11, 12, 13, Absolutely Sweet Marie, Fourth Time Around, and Obviously 5 Believers seem to wander off topic.  I have read one interpretation in which the blogger thought Obviously 5 Believers was a response to the Beatles Norwegian Wood.  Or possibly they lead into song #14 Sad Eyed Lady Of The Low Lands that Dylan says he wrote about Sara Loundes.  The lyrics of this ‘poem’ are incomprehensible but if I had been Sara I wouldn’t have taken the title as a compliment, especially not after being locked out of a discussion about Dylan, Edie and his mother.  After all, this is a married man lashing out at Edie.

     After completing the LP Dylan left for his 1966 tour of England in which there was such a violent reaction to his electric backup band.  I don’t remember their being a violent reaction made on the West Coast.  For myself I welcome it.  I never did like that faux folk crap he did anyway.  Apparently Dylan didn’t either.  A new expanded edition, lots of new material. of Robert Shelton’s biography, No Direction Home, just released by Omnibus Press is available, speaking in 1965 Shelton quotes Dylan thusly:  ‘There never was any change.  No instrument will ever change love, death in any soul.  My music is my music.  Folk music was such a shuck.  I never recorded a folk song.’  He did however call himself a folk singer.

     So, whoever shouted Judas at the Manchester concert knew what he was talking about.  I never listened to those nauseous early Dylan records anyway.  Blonde On Blonde was released in June of 1966 while Dylan was thrown by his ‘chrome horse’ on 7/29/66 thus putting an end to the first phase of his career.

     I don’t know what Edie thought wen she heard the record that summer but one supposes she would have recognized herself as the topic of the conversation.  Warhol certainly did and he was not amused.  Knew something about motorcycles too.

     Both Edie and Dylan were so heavily into amphetamines that they probably were not responsible for their actions.  Drugs tend to put one into an internal state in which the outside world assumes a subordinate position, almost irrelevant, to one’s interior reality.  A person functions in his own mind as a sort of magician who can comman the world to his own world.  A certain type of insanity I suppose.  Right and wrong are merely expressions of one’s own subconscious will.  As Dylan confused Edie with his mother who he subconsciously wished to punish he transferred those feelings, that resentment, that hatret onto Edie as his surrogate mother thus gaining his revenge.  How much satisfaction he got isn’t known and he’s not telling.

     Edie herself was so far gone into amphetamines as to be oblivious to what was happening in her life.  As far as she could dissociate her life from reality she could obviously make black white and vice versa.

   Having dealt with Dylan’s relationship with Edie, let us return to January of ’66 to take up again the story from there.

Chap. 14 has been posted as of 6/23/11

Exhuming Bob XXIX: Dylan And His Blonde Problems

Exhuming Bob XXIX:  Dylan And His Blonde Problems

by

R.E. Prindle

An Examination Of Temporary Like Achilles

Searching For Inspiration

Temporary Like Achilles is another ’64-’66 piece.  It has the feel of being improvisational, out of focus.  I believe it is a companion piece to Visions Of Johanna while it might be connected to Rainy Day Women #12 & 35.

Dylan always said that he had no physical relations with the song’s subject Edie Sedgwick.  I’m certainly in no position to say but if this song is accurate then Edie for some reason played the virgin for him.  Either that or because she represented his mother to him it would have been an incestuous situation.  Edie did say she was pregnant by Dylan but then she says that she was in the psycho ward and that the doctor’s held her down and aborted the baby.  Of course she must have been delusional at that time having over dosed on amphetamines.  God, how she punished her mind.  I’m of the opinion that she probably was not pregnant by Dylan although there may be hospital records.

If one takes the last verse first:

Achilles is in your alleyway

He don’t want me here, he does brag

He’s pointing to the sky

And he’s hungry, like a man in drag.

How come you get someone like him to be your guard

You know I want your lovin’

Honey why are you so hard.

Warhol, the man in drag is obviously Achilles, perhaps meant humorously.  Achilles of course lived a short but glorious life.  Warhol is temporary because Dylan is moving in on Edie.

In answer to the refrain ‘you know I want your lovin, honey why are you so hard’, it is probably that Edie wanted to marry Dylan but in the way of women wanted to pose as a virgin so as to come to him pure.

When she was at Harvard in Boston she was known as a premier fag hag.  The men she knew were all gay so one presumes her chastity was safe there.  Of course, Andy Warhol, known here as Achilles here was gay.  Insofar as she associated with Andy, and he apparently really was smitten by her, as close to being in love as he could get with anyone, as he put it, her chastity was safe with him too.  Perhaps that is why Dylan has Achilles in Edie’s allegory, near but not close sexually.

As there was rivalry between Dylan and Warhol for Edie it follows that ‘he don’t want me here he does brag.’  The line

Her fogs, her amphetamines and her pearls.

would point to the situation as it stood in August or September of ’65.  He’s hungry like a man in drag may refer to his homosexuality which prevents him from satisfying his lust  I don’t know why he’s pointing at the sky but Dylan says disgustedly ‘how come you get someone (a fag) like him to be your guard.  Dylan was known to be macho at the time.

The first verse points to a period perhaps November-December of ’65.  Dylan, of course, married Sara in November of ’65 so that at this point Dylan would be playing with Edie as perhaps he thought she was playing with him before.

Hence:

Standing on your window, honey

Yes. I’ve been here before

Feeling so harmless

I’m looking at your second door

How come you don’t send me no regards?

You know I want you lovin’

Honey why are you so hard?

Here is a reference to Dylan and Edie’s first meeting in December of ’64.  And then in March Chuck Wein introduced Edie to the Factory although she had met Warhol a couple weeks after Dylan in January of ’65.   Dylan may have been too busy at the beginning of ’65 to actively pursue Edie, he also did have to pay attention to Sara who he was courting at the same time, plus engagements and whatever.

Andy

At any rate Edie teamed up with Warhol from March to about December of ’65.  At that point Dylan who was wooing Edie and Grossman his manager were promising to make Edie a star at something.  If as a star, she couldn’t sing, but then that didn’t stop Dylan from having a career.

Now, Andy had been trying to make Edie his movie star.  According to Ronnie Tavel who scripted many of Andy’s movies Andy saw Edie as his ticket to breaking into Hollywood.  That was one of Andy’s chief ambitions that was never realized.  Tavel says that he and Andy used to coach Edie in her lines.  When time to film came she always dosed herself with amphetamines before hand and, of course, uncoached herself.  Thus in Andy’s account of his appearance at the psychiatrists’ banquet in January of ’66 he remarks that it was futile for Dylan and Grossman to work with her because she was unable to concentrate long to get anything done.  Edie wouldn’t work hence no career.   Andy might have been able to get her something if she had.  He sounds rueful and hurt.

So in late ’65 this was Dylan’s second attempt to connect with Edie.

The second verse:

Kneeling ‘neith your ceiling

Yes, I guess I’ll be here for a while

I’m trying to read your portrait, but

I’m helpless, like a rich man’s child.

How come you send someone out to have me barred:

You know I want your lovin’

Honey, why are you so hard?

Kneeling ‘neath your ceiling fits in with standing in your window and looking at your second door.  Kneeling ‘neath your ceiling is probably somewhat like Paul Simon’s ‘One man’s ceiling is another man’s floor or Tony Orlando’s Stomp three time on the floor.  In other words Dylan is in the room beneath Edie unable to get to her unless she calls him.

Thus the addendum to verse two:

Like a poor fool in his prime

Yes’ I know you can hear me walk

But is our heart made out of stone, or is it lime

Or is it just solid rock?

In other words Edie knows he’s down there pacing anxiously back and forth but a hard hearted woman she refuses to call him to her, stomping three times on the floor.

The fourth verse:

Well, I rush into your hallway

Lean against your velvet door

I watch upon your scorpion

Who crawls across your circus floor

Just what do you think you have to guard?

You know I want your lovin’

Honey why are you so hard?

The ardent and frustrated would be lover can’t breach Edie’s window, door. ceiling, hallway, velvet door.  The scorpion/circus reference escapes me except that Edie may have appeared to be leading some circus life as does Ophelia in Desolation Row.

Apparently this was a throw away song for Dylan as other than recording it he has never played it in concert.  It was one of my favorites on the album however.  Perhaps after Dylan’s motorcycle accident the song became irrelevant to him.  Too topical, not universal enough as was its counterpart Visions of Johanna.

As far as Blonde On Blonde goes I’m tentatively of the opinion that Rainy Day Women #12 & 35 refers to Edie and his mother.  The only reference to Sara in the album would be Sad Eyed Lady Of The Lowlands.

Your secrets are safe with me, Bob, of course you don’t have anything to hide.

Exhuming Bob XXVIII: Visions Of Johanna Decoded

Exhuming Bob XXVIII

Visions of Johanna Decoded

by

R.E. Prindle

This is an attempt to place Visions Of Johanna in a context of Dylan, Andy Warhol and Edie Sedgwick.  In this interpretation Louise is Edie, Johanna is Dylan’s mother, Louise’s lover is Andy Warhol and the narrator is Dylan,

Visions of Johanna

Ain’t it just like the night to play tricks when you’re trying to be so quiet?

We sit here stranded though we’re doing our best to deny it.

I.e. we’re alone in the night of the universe doing our best to pretend we aren’t.  A night without dawn and we find the situation intolerable.

And Louise holds a handful of rain, temptin’ you to defy it.

Rain is a symbol for the misery of life that one finds inescapable. ‘Raindrops keep falling on my head.’  etc.  Louise/Edie who is a bearer of pain mixed with love offers a handful of rain to Dylan  essentially saying take it or leave it.  If Bob takes it he has to find a way around the pain of loving Louise/Edie.

Lights flicker from the opposite loft

In this room the heat pipes just cough

The country station plays soft

But there’s nothing really, nothing to turn off.

It looks brighter in the opposite loft, greener grass on the other side of the fence, but it is freezing in Dylan’s room where no heat comes from the pipes that just cough.  ‘Seems like a freezeout.’  C&W is a lot of songs about love gone wrong so let it play softly in the background.

Just Louise and her lover so entwined

And these visions of Johanna that conquer my mind.

Dylan has a real problem with his mother who he says in his movie Masked and Anonymous rejected him because he upset her life by being born.  Thus his love for his mother was turned to dust and his life made miserable.  He has confused Edie with his mother who he thinks she resembles.  Edie after seeming to be found as a mother surrogate in the first quarter of 1965 then seemingly abandoned him for ‘her lover’ Warhol with whom she is ‘entwined.’  In his confusion and resentment of Edie he sees ’these visions of Johanna that conquer his mind.’  He looks at Edie and sees his mother.  His resentment at his mother’s rejection then turns to hatred of Edie.  As a son he can’t revenge himself on his mother but he can on Edie who has become his mother surrogate.

After his father’s death in 1968 Dylan is able to step into his father’s shoes as his mother’s  support.  Pleading poverty, which was probably real, shortly after her husband’s death Dylan wrote her a five figure check to tide her over.  There’s more, but…I’ll save that for the review of Masked And Anonymous.

 

The Ghost Of Electricity

In the empty lot where the ladies play blind man’s bluff with the key chain

And the all night girls they whisper of escapades out on the “D” train

We can hear the night watchman click his flashlight

Ask himself if it’s him or them that’s really insane

Verbiage setting up the next six lines that get to the heart of the matter:

Louise, she’s all right, she’s just near

She’s delicate and seems like the mirror

But she just makes it all too concise and too clear

That Johanna’s not here.

Here the physically delicate Edie is present but she seems like a reflection of Johanna/Dylan’s mother.  Dylan has so identified Edie/Louise with this mother/Johanna that Edie makes it ‘too concise and that too clear’ that Mother/Johanna is not here.

The ghost of ‘lectricity howls in the bones of her face (Edie’s)

Where these visions of Johanna have now taken my place.

Ghosts of electricity is ambiguous but may refer to the traces left by the electro-shock treatments which undoubtedly scarred Edie’s mind indelibly while Dylan has now completely blended Edie/Louise and Mother/Johanna into one.

Now, little boy lost, he takes himself so seriously

He brags of his misery, he likes to live dangerously,

This obviously refers to Warhol of whom it’s a pretty good description.  Living dangerously probably refers to the hoodlums hanging around the Factory.

Muttering small talk at the wall while I’m in the hall

How can I explain?

Oh, it’s so hard to get on

And these visions of Johanna, they kept me up past dawn

 

Dapper Andy

Dylan mutters small talk at the wall where he is placed outside the relationship with Edie in the hall ‘while visions of Mother/Johanna trouble him into the small hours of the night.

Verses four and five seem to be verbiage that sounds meaningful and may be to Dylan but escape me.  The song is copyrighted 1966 which would be after Dylan had taken his vengeance on Edie so the lines of the last verse:

But like Louise always says

“Ya can’t look at much, can ya man?”

As she herself prepares for him

And Madonna, she still has not showed

We see the empty cage now corrode

Where her cape of the stage once had flowed

The fiddler, he now steps to the road

He writes ev’rything’s been returned which was owed.

Edie/Louise is preparing for ‘him’ who might be Warhol or Neuwirth but it isn’t made clear.

Dylan referred to Sara as a Madonna so she is probably the Madonna referred to.  ‘Empty cage’ is personal to Dylan, no idea, anyway he was already married to Sara.  So having crushed Edie as his mother had crushed him and passed her to Neuwirth he thinks he has settled his score with Mother/Johanna.  ’Ev’rything’s been returned which was owed.’  Edie has repaid his mother’s debt  but he apparently feels some guilt ‘as his conscience explodes.’

After the ball was over, after the dance was through’ these visions of Johanna are now all that remain.’  So, if the song means anything, written in 1966 it must refer to Edie who Dylan has confused with his mother in his mind.  While songs like Like A Rolling Stone and She’s Your Lover Now read clearly once you have the Edie key, Johanna is a little more ambigious but while I con’t guarantee this reading as yet, I think it is on whole accurate.

 

 

 

Chaps. 9, 10, 11, 12: Edie Sedgwick, Maid Of Constant Sorrow

Edie Sedgwick

Maid Of Constant Sorrow

Chapters 9,10, 11, 12

by

R.E. Prindle

Chapter 9

Leavin’ On A Jet Plane

by

R.E. Prindle

 

 

The 707

 

DC 6B

 

There are arguments about the psychological duration of the sixties mentality.  The limits run from 1956  at the beginning to 1974 at the end.  There are reasonable arguments for those parameters.  I would argue that the sixties began on August  26, 1959 when Pan American World Airways inaugurated non-stop jet service from New York to London, and ending with Altamont in 1969.  Before was merely prologue and post-Altamont merely aftermath.

The sixties are unthinkable without the arrival of trans-Atlantic jet service.  With the jets, the Jet Set came into existence.  The Jet Set was the envy of the entire generation.  There’s little we wouldn’t have done to have been part of it.  Thus when Pan-Am put the first 707-320 into the air the conditions for the sixties were in place.

Boeing won the race to commercial jets and what a plane the 707 was.  In late 1956 I was sent from Philly to San Francisco via a DC6B.  The DC7 was the reigning prop plane at the time but the 6B was just behind.  The 707 not only added jets but dimension.  The DC 6B was just a flying cigar with about a 50 passenger capacity.  Very narrow, claustrophobic and I don’t suffer from claustrophobia.  At somewhat less than 300 miles an hour the 2600 miles from Philly to the West Coast took a major part of the day.  We left Philly at about 6:00 PM and arrried the next day just after sun-up.  The pressurization was terrible; I arrived with my ear drums bursting while the pain lasted well into the week.  I thought I was permanently damaged.  It wasn’t a great experience.

By contrast the 707 was twice as fast with a feeling of roominess and excellent pressurization.  Pan Am’s 707-120 flight that refueled in Newfoundland carried 111 passengers the most ever on a commercial flight.  So the modern era of flight was innaugurated.  A, if not the, future had arried and it actually did work.  Not only worked but exploded.

The Jet Set could now commute between New York and London over the weekend, or even one could fly to New York, have lunch and be back in London to sleep in your own bed that night.  For people with money the expense was negligible.  All of a sudden travel posters appeared in everyone’s appartment.  London, Paris, Rome, Swiss skiing.  It was a sign of our desires, a longing to travel that was soon fulfilled whether you could afford it or not.  Along with the jet need came other needs that had to be fulfilled, a new outlook, new clothes, new hairstyles.  Whole new economic vistas opened up for the uninfranchised who had the vision: Mary Quant, Vidal Sassoon and a host of others.  Did we need advertising to create those needs?  Not by a long shot.

It took ages for the established firms to catch on.  Meanwhile the portals of opportunity were blown wide open.  Perhaps the phenomenal  response to the Beatles was merely a symptom of those new ideas.  The Beatles clothes, the haircuts, their naive insouciance.  They just epitomized the new attitude as the Rolling Stones nor any other group ever could.  It didn’t have anything to do with the music itself.

Thus by the time Andy set up his headquartes at the Silver Factory things were shifting into high gear of which he was a beneficiary, but then he had the style too.  The defining Pop moment for Warhol was the incredible visit of Pope John VI made possible by the big 707 jets.  But let Andy give his breathless account from Popism, pp. 134-135:

A week or so after Philadelphia I got a real lesson in show business and Pop style..  Just when you think you’re getting famous, somebody comes along and makes you look like a warm up act for amateur night.  Pope Paul VI, talk about advance PR- I mean, for centuries.

Definitely the most Pop public appearance tour of the sixties was that isit of the Pope to New York City.  He did it all in one day- October, 15, 1965.  It was the most well-planned media covered personal appearance in religious (and probably show business) history.  “Never Before in This Country!  One Day Only!  The Pope in New York City!”

The funny thing for us, of course, was that Ondine was known in our crowd as “the Pope,” and one of his most famous routines was “giving the papal bull.”

The (real) Pope and his entourage of aides, press and photographers left Rome early that morning on an Alitalia DC-8.  Eight hours and twenty minutes later, they got off the plane at Kennedy with the Pope’s shiny robes blowing in the wind.  They drove inn a motorcade through Queens- the streets were lined with people- through Harlem crowds, and then down to the jammed- for blocks St. Patrick’s Cathedral area in the Fifties- where the Pope seemed to want to go out in ‘the audience” but you could see his aides talking him out of it.  After all the stuff in the cathedral he ran down the street to the Waldorf-Astoria where President Johnson was waiting.  They exchanged gifts and talked for a little under an hour aout world troubles.  Then it was over to address the UN General Assembly (essentially he said, “Peace, disarmament and no birth control”) out to Yankee Stadium to say Mass in front of ninety thousand people, over to the closing World’s Fair to see Michelangelo’s Pieta in its Pop context before it went back to the Vatican, and back out to Kennedy and onto a TWA plane, saying, when the reporters asked him what he liked best about New York, “Tutti Buoni” (Everything is good”) which was the Pop philosophy exactly.  He was back in Rome that same night.  To do that muh in that short a time with that kind of style- I can’t imagine anything more Pop than that.

Yes, left Andy breathless and why not?  I wasn’t there but as the motorcade passed by the Factory and Andy looked down on the scene perhaps it was the or a defining moment of the sixties.  Certainlyit was a masterpiece of planning and execution for what would have been a small army.

Andy himself had joined the Jet Set back in May when he was summoned to Paris for an art exhibition.  Originally sent a ticket for an ocean voyage Andy asked his sponsors for a change to four air tickets taking a small entourage with him including Edie  One can only imagine his elation as the big jet liner lifted off the tarmac.  Certainly a defining moment of the sixties for Andy.  By the seventies and eighties Andy and his entourage were part of the Jet Set flying back and forth repeatedly.

Chapter 10.

The System Of Dr. Tarr And Professor Fether

The Heyday Of Andy And Edie

For those of us out in the provinces Warhol and his Factory were an ongoing phenomenon.  It all seemed sort of crazy or insane but inescapable.  His movies while perhaps being experimental were too bizarre to contemplate.  The ‘superstars’ with names like Ultra Violent and International Velvet who were merely girls and not stars of anything were viewed with amazement.  Quite frankly, we didn’t know what to think but had the cool to act like we were with it.  If there was something happening here we thought we knew what it was.

Obviously New Yorkers themselves had different understandings of the phenomenon.  Unaware of the meaning of the rise of Warhol some were condescending to this outre individual and his entourages but curious.  Andy’s strengths were of course in the art world and the homosexual  community more than in the straight world.  Thus at the beginning of 1966 the New York Society For Clinical Psychiatry extended an invitation to Andy to speak at their annual banquet.  This was a dangerous invitation for them to make to a group of quasi-maniacs for Andy wouldn’t come alone while I suspect the invitation was made in bad faith.  I think the psychiatrists thought they would amuse themselves at Andy’s expense.  It’s not improbable that Andy suspected this intent.  As the program chairman, Dr. Robert Campbell, said post-banquet in a NYTimes interview:  Creativity and the artist have always held a fascination for the serious student of human behavior.  And we’re fascinated by the mass communications activities of Warhol and his group.  In that statement I think the tone of the question and answer segment would have been set.

It is not like certain people in the Warhol entourage hadn’t experience with the psychiatric establishment of New York.  Several of them may very likely have been in the hands of psychiatrists there they recognized.  While the psychiatrists considered their methods quite reasonable those who had suffered at their hands had somewhat different sentiments.  One of the more bizarre of their methods and one that Dr. Mengele would have envied was electro-shock therapy.

Edie And Andy- Sitting On Top Of The World

To a layman like myself the rationale of electro-shock seems quite absurd.  How sending electricity coursing through someone’s brain is supposed to change that someone’s psychology in the direction desired by the doctors is beyond my understanding.  In point of fact it didn’t change anyone’s psychology, not that of Edie Sedgwick nor that of Lou Reed, two of Andy’s entourage, anyway.  While Edie was more passive about it, Reed was enraged.  Andy sympathized with Reed which didn’t bode well for the psychiatrists.

Nineteen ninety-six was a swing year for the sixties.  At that time right at the peak things began to go sour leading up to the twin disasters of Stonewall and Altamont.  Drugs were at the heart of the problem.  As the year began the amphetamine users had been on the stufff for six years or more.  And they we’re taking massive doses.  Edie was already over the edge while Andy’s A-men like Ondine and Rotten Rita were on the point of unraveling.

This use of speed had been mixed with alcohol and marijuana.  In addition the psychedelics that had been gaining in prominence since the fifties were becoming ubiquitous and multiplying.  Aldous Huxley’s psychedelic bible, The Doors Of Perception, celebrating the virtues of mescaline had appeared in 1954 when it was well received by dopers.  Psilocybin and peyote were available for the more adventurous and knowledgeable while the greatest hit of all, LSD, had been increasing in popularity.  Already well established on the West Coast and in Hollywood well before Dr. Timothy Leary became its proselytizer after 1960, the psychedelic was becoming endemic.

Heck, in the fifties the CIA was using hookers in San Francisco to dose Johns with the stuff unbeknownst to the Johns.  Agents behind two way mirrors were doubling over in laughter watching the action.  And of course the chemists were busy rearranging molecules to creat new sensations.  Look out below!

Along with the use of drugs came the inevitable separation from both reality and morality.  As Warhol said:  If you don’t like what’s happening to you pretend it’s a movie.  And people did.  All of a sudden people were walking around in buckskins like they were actors in a Western movie.  Don’t Bogart that joint was a tribute to Humphrey Bogart’s smokings style.  Bette Davis eyes….  I knew one guy who thought prison movies were a joke.  He got himself arrested on drug charges thinking it was a lark, just another scene in his movie.  Two or three years later he came back and found the joke was on him.  His former cronies who all seemed to have been in on the joke at the time now wouldn’t have anything to do with an ex-con.  The guy’s movie turned from a comedy into a tragedy.  It was painful to watch.

As people drugged out, subconscious desires rose to the surface, they attempted to become what they couldn’t be thus islolating themselves and destroying their lives.  As Andy also said:  During the sixties people forgot what emotions were supposed to be and he  didn’t think they ever remembered.  At the same time morality became confused with what the individual wanted at the moment.

The psychiatrists were no more immune to drugs than the street people.  Lou Reed wanted some kind of revenge for the suffering he had endured at the hands of the psychiatrists.  Of course when Dr. Campbell extended the invitation to Andy he had no idea what that would include.  Dr. Tarr was to meet Professor Fether.

One can’t be certain what the psychiatrists were thinking when they invited Andy to speak; it’s not exactly clear what they thought he would talk about although the banquet was billed as  ‘The Chic Mystique Of Andy Warhol.’  Andy on his part saw the invitation as an opportunity to ‘epater les pyschiatristes’, and he did.

Velvet Underground And Nico

The two chief accounts of the banquet are Andy’s own as recorded in POPism and a review published in the NYTimes ( http://www.warholstars.org/warhol/warhol/andy/loureed.html )

The event took place on either 1/10 or 1/13 while the Times account was published on 1/14.  The writer, Grace Glueck, does not appear to have been present but relies on reports from other persons.  She quotes Dr. Robert Campbell, the organizaer, as saying he ‘was fascinated by the mass communications activities of Warhol and his group.’

Miss Glueck goes on to record the reactions of some of the psychiatrists in attendance:

‘I suppose you could call this gathering a spontaneous eruption of the id.’

‘…a repetition of the concrete quite akin to the L.S.D. experience.’

‘Why are they exposing us to these nuts?’

And finally:

‘Put it down to decadent Dada.  It was ridiculous, outrageous, painful.  It seemed like a whole (psycho) ward has escaped.’

Edgar Deep In Thought

Yes, the inmates had taken charge of the asylum.  The scene was quite reminiscent of the dinner in Edgar Allan Poe’s famous story:  The System Of Doctor Tarr And Professor Fether.  One might describe it as Lou Reed intended it, as shock treatment for the psychiatrists as well as the repetition of the concrete electro-shock therapy.  As John Cale, the violinist of the group, was to admit a few decades later:  That was revenge- Lou’s revenge…and I was all for it.  So evidently was Andy Warhol.

At the time Andy seemed to be enamored of his crowd but in his subconscious other feelings were stirring.  On page 370 of his diary referring to the Factory years Andy says:

I’d dreamt about Billy Name, that he was living under the stairs of my house and doing sommersaults and everything was very colorful.  It was so weird, because his friends sort of invaded my house and were acting crazy in colorful costumes and jumping up and down having so much fun and they took over, they took over my life.  It was so weird.  It was like clowns.

Everybody was a clown in a funny way, and they were just living there without letting me know, they’d come out in the morning when I wasn’t there and they’d have a lot of fun and then they’d go back and live in the closet.

Malanga and Dylan

It almost sounds like Andy confounded the banquet with Name and his friends actually living in the Factory inhabiting hislife, or house psychologically.  So Andy was uncomfortable with his situation but as he equates terrorism of the sort inflicted on the psychiatrists as ‘having fun’ he was amused.  Nevertheless when the Factory moved in 1968 he cut these people off from him.

Andy’s account of the banquet was recorded in his memoir POPism pp.  146-147:

I was invited to speak at the annual banquet of the New York Society For Clinical Psychiatry by the doctor who was chairman of the event.  I told him I’d be glad to ‘speak’ if I could do it though movies, that I’d show Harlot and Henry Geldzahler and he said fine.  Then when I met the Velvets I decided that I wanted to speak with them instead, and he said fine to that too.

So one evening in the middle of January everybody in the Factory went over to the Delmonico Hotel where the banquet was taking place.  We got there just as it just was starting.  There were about three hundred pychiatrists and their mates and dates- and all they’d been told was that they were going to see movies after dinner.  The second the main course was served, the Velvets started to blast and Nico started to wail.  Gerard and Edie jumped up on the stage and started dancing, and the doors flew open and Jonas Mekas and Barbara Rudin with her crew of people with cameras and bright lights came storming into the room and rushing over to the psychiatrists asking them questions like:

‘What does her vagina feel like?’

‘Is his penis big enough?’

‘Do you eat her out?  Why are you getting embarrassed?  You’re a psychiatrist; you’re not supposed to get embarrassed!

Edie had come with Bobby Neuwirth.  While the crews filmed and Nico sang her Dylan song, (I’ll Keep It With Mine) Gerard noticed (and he told me this later) that Edie was trying to sing, too, but even in that incredible din, it was obvious she didn’t have a voice.  He always looked back to that night as the last she ever went out with us in public, except for a party here and there.  He thought she’d felt upstaged that night, that she’d realized that Nico was the new girl in town.

Edie and Nico were so different, there was no good reason to compare them, really.  Nico was so cool, and Edie was so bubbly.  But the sad thing was, Edie was taking a lot of heavy drugs, and she was getting vaguer and vaguer.  Her society lady attitude toward pills had changed to an addict attitude.  Some of her good friends tried to help her, but she couldn’t listen to them.  She said she wanted a “career” and that she’d get one since Grossman was managing her.  But how can you have a career when you don’t have the discipline to work at anything?

Gerard had noticed how lost Edie looked at that psychiatrists’ banquet, but I can’t say I noticed; I was too busy watching the psychiatrists.  They were really upset and some of them started to leave, the ladies in their long dresses and the men in their black ties.  As if the music- the feedback actually- that the Velvets were playing wasn’t enough to drive them out, the movie lights were blinding them and the questions were making them turn red and stutter because the kids wouldn’t let up, they just kept asking for more.  And Gerard did his notorious whip dance.  I loved it all.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iNwp4nNTeJg Clip of performance.

And there we have Andy’s version recalled fifteen years later.     His account can be divided into two parts.  On the one hand the banquet and on the other Andy’s blighted relationship, call it an affair of the heart, with Edie.  Andy devotes 22 lines to the banquet and 15 to Edie.

Regardless of what Bob Dylan might now say there was intense competition between he and Andy for the possession of Edie.  That competition complicated by Warhol’s homosexuality and Dylan’s committment in marriage to so Sara Lowndes.  It is doubtful that Warhol could have maintained a relationship without paying physical attention to Edie although it is not impossible that some modus vivendi could have been worked out.  Certainly in the case of P.G. Wodehouse and his wife such an arrangement was worked out.

Dylan’s intentions were entirely dishonorable.  He was too self-centered to maintain a relationship with any woman except wholly on his terms.  Not only would he consider marriage only with a Jewish woman

Dylan

and that solely to fulfull a religious obligation to be fruitful and multiply, but he divided women into two classes, Madonnas and sluts.  Sara was his Madonna and all other women were sluts to be used solely for his pleasure.  Thus he could not have respected Edie.

He also had a serious mother problem.  Sometime around puberty his mother told him that he had blighted her plans for living life as she wanted by being born.  In other words he was an encumbrance to her life as a free spirit.  Thus his attitude toward himself and life took a dark turn about the age of twelve.  For some reason, perhaps ‘her fogs, her amphetamines and her pearls’ Edie reminded Dylan of his mother’s wish for the high life.  Now, it is absolutely taboo for a man to punish his mother so men take out their animosity to their mothers  on other women, hence all these serial killers of women, mother surrogates.  So, Dylan was essentially punishing his mother through Edie.

Neuwirth

Edie had walked out on Andy in December of ’65 when she jumped to the Dylan camp in the expectation that Dylan and Grossman were going to do something for her in the way of a ‘career’, especially something that involved a large paycheck.  As I have pointed out elsewhere there were many things that could have been done to capitalize on Edie’s extraordinary unearned fame.  There was money to be made there but either Grossman and Dylan lacked the imagination or they merely wanted to remove the girl from Warhol’s sphere and then to hell with her.

The latter is what was done.  Dylan had passed her to his sidekick Bobby Neuwirth and thus it was Neuwirth who escorted Edie to the banquet.  Warhol notes this then ruefully mentions that Nico, who was now in his camp, was singing the song Dylan wrote and gave to her.

Dylan had met Nico in Greece a couple years earlier when she was really depressed.  He wrote I’ll Keep It With Mine and gave it to her as her song.  In the video clip linked above the Velvet Underground are playing Venus In Furs.  The cacophany would have driven the psychiatrists out so I doubt they would have listened to more than one song.  Andy is misremembering and projecting.  Dylan had been a thorn in his side and would continue to be.  Indeed, after Neuwirth and Edie reported the spectacular doings at the banquet Dylan showed up at the Factory a couple of days later to get a fuller report.

Edie, on the the video clip, does look a little lost on stage but as it was crowded so does Malanga.  If Nico was trying to sing there was no chance she could have been heard.  Andy is clearly still suffering from Edie’s abandonment.  In his diary for 1977 he mentions meeting Neuwirth at a party where they discuss a couple of Neuwirth’s old girl firends, one of which was Edie.  As Edie was as close to love as Andy could get he had to resent Dylan for taking her away.

The situation with the psychiatrists was evidently secondary in his mind to Edie, but the event had been carefully planned, nothing that happened there was accidental.  This event would set the tone for the next few decades; a new direction in impolite social discourse had been established.  Nor was this an isolated event without consequences, the psychiatrists must have gone away steaming with vengeance on their minds.

Chapter 11

From Out Of The Looney Bin

The Man Of A Thousand Faces

In a different context Sam Cooke was singing A Change Is Gonna Come while Bob Dylan was singing The Times They Are A Changin’ and it may have been the Byrds who were chanting Change Is Now, all normal conditions.  Currently there’s a song which has a video that simulates an insane asylum in which the inmate screams:  ‘There’s nothing wrong with me, there’s nothing wrong with me, there’s nothing wrong with me and then the lead singer comes in screaming four times ‘Somthing’s gotta give, somthing’s gotta give, somethings’s gotta give, somethings gotta give.  The banquet was where these two worlds collided…Worlds In Collision.  The irresistible force met the immovable object.

There was a premonition of this evolution  a year or so earlier when Dylan got up to receive the Tom Paine award from the pre-Khruschev Communists and roundly insulted them as old fogies.  Well, you know, the times they were a changin’.

Sigmund Alone Is His Study

Let’s take a look at the psychiatriests.  First it may be necessary to explain the difference between Depth or Freudian psychology and psychiatry.  You don’t need a medical degree to practice psychology, you do to practice psychiatry.  Freudians essentially believe that there is a gap between perception and reality in the mind caused by cognitive dissonance while psychiatrists believe the gap is caused by a physical malfunction somewhere in the brain that can be solved by surgical means, drugs or some external stimulation like electro-shock therapy, to what is an internal perceptual problem.

Hence Edie who really had nothing wrong with her except inexperience with the world was subjected to electro-shock therapy; Lou Reed whose homosexuality was beyond medical treatment was also subjected to electro-shock.  The psychiatrists at one time thought that teeth caused mental problems proposing to alleviate the symptoms by pulling all a poor wretches teeth.  In addition some perverted genius came up with the idea of pre-frontal lobotomies, and he wasn’t a Nazi doctor either, while one had a choice between electro-shock and the equally if not more bizarre insulin shock therapy.

In addition the drugs psychiatrists give to their patients have side effects more serious than the original ailment.  One has to remember that the Dr. Feelgoods such as Max Jacobson and Dr. Roberts, MDs while not psychiatrists, were giving super massive doses of amphetamines to everyone from the President of the United States on down.  Edie received massive doses from Dr. Roberts who was himself

Her Fogs Her Amphetamines And Her Pearls

befuddled by drugs.  Dr. Max Jacobson is a horror story.

Is it any wonder that the Factory hands were rebelling against the pyschiatrists?  Who were these psychiatrists?  As this was 1966 it must be true that over half were Jews, the so-called smartest people in the world, while of those Jews, I’m only guessing, fully half must have been Central and East European Jews who had emigrated during the Hitler years, many probably with very doubtful credentials.  The difference between Dr. Mengele and the Nazi doctors with these psychiatrists is minimal in my mind.

What sort of madmen would subject victims to massive electrical charges and expect beneficial results?  Besides these guys were probably all on drugs anyway.  And these psychiatrists had absolute authority, no different than the Nazi doctors, over those committed to their care.  I mean, there was no way for a patient to question or appeal his treatment.

Now, who were the Factory people.  What exactly are we dealing with here?  A bunch of loonies with Andy Warhol presiding as the Magister Ludi.  Andy, a pervert of the first magnitude.

When Warhol came to New York in 1950 from Pittsburgh he was no longer willing to conceal his homosexuality as he had had to do back home.  He arrived in New York an open homo.  Nor was he ever willing to compromise on what he was.  The avant garde of NYC was homo almost to a man.  The painters Warhol most wanted to impress were also homos but they abjured the lisp and mince not feeling the need to display their sexuality on their sleeves.  They rejected Andy because he did.

One, there’s nothing wrong with me.

Two, there’s nothing wrong with me.

Three, there’s nothing wrong with me.

Four, there’s nothing wrong with me.

Andy bore the insults but he patiently worked to impose his values as well as his art on society.

One, something’s got to give.

Two, something’s got to give.

Three, something’s got to give.

Four, something’s got to give.

In line with that approach he organized the Factory which was a homosexual clubhouse and promotional tool.  Essentially that is what the psychiatrists wanted to question.  While the posters, or paintings if you prefer, were more sexually neutral as soon as Andy had the necessary celebrity he began to make prodigiously boring movies that weren’t that avant gardists felt obliged to respect.  I mean, there are boring movies and then there are politically correct boring movies.  The audacity of his film Blow Job, the title was enough to undermine then morality, forced his notions on at least the college generation.  Whether the blower was seen, was male or female, was irrelevant;  Andy was promoting oral sex.  In his later years his picture would become even more openly homosexually erotic.

The impact of that movie, whether you’d seen it or not, was enormous, liberating many repressed eyes.  So Warhol and his fellow fags, viz.  Rotten Rita, at the Factory were revolutionists leading up to the sharp, short battle of the Stonewall Tavern on Christopher Street, the ultimate fag street in the world, in 1969 that overthrew the entire restrictive attitude toward homosexuals in one fell swoop across the entire United States.  It was one of the worst things that ever happened.

The homo revolution didn’t stop there.  Pyschiatrists and psychologists still recognized homosexuality for what it is, a mental psychosis.

One, there’s nothing wrong with me.

Two, something’s got to give.

Three, let the bodies hit the floor.

The idea that they were ‘sick’ oppressed the homosexual psyche so they mau-mau’d psychiatrists in much the same manner Warhol had except that they were much more violent.  Just as the lesbians took over the feminist movement by showing up with baseball bats and threatening to beat the shit out of anyone who disgreed with them, so the homos treated the pyschologists compelling the wimps to drop the psychosis business.

Let the bodies hit the floor.

Let the bodies hit the floor.

Let the bodies hit the floor.

Let the bodies hit the floor.

So, as the psychiatrists let Warhol in the door he decided to take full advantage of them giving them a dose of their own medicine, so to speak.  At first he apparently intended to bore them to death with his stupid movies, but then, as he said, when he associated himself with the Velvet Underground a new plan took shape in his mind.  A new form of electro-shock therapy at 180 decibels.

The Velvets were a product of the avant garde.  John Cale the violinist was a protogee of the terminally boring ‘One Note’ La Monte Young.  Young was a devotee of the dynamo hum.  As a child he used to stand around the old transmission stations and listen to the transformers hum.   In those days the transformers sued to spark and keep up a stead unvarying hum.  It was really something to hear.  The sparking and hum would probably have reminded Lou Reed of the juice flowing through him.  It was a great sound, very mesmerizing, but I never became as obsessed with it as La Monte Young.  Anyway Young’s avant gardism was based on the dynamo hum and the Velvets one chord music was based on La Monte Young.  I’m sure there’s a joke in there somewhere but I haven’t found it yet.  It is laughable though.

The good news is, through the wonders of the internet time machine you can listen to the Velvet’s

Lou Running A Temperature

performance (here).  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iNwp4nNTeJg

While warhol informed Dr. Campbell of the movies and the Velvets he didn’t say anything to them about Jonas Mekas and Barbara Rubin or the mocking Factory hands.

Jonas Mekas is an interesting character.  He came to the United States after WWII.  He had moved through various Displaced Persons camps in West Germany in the vile post-war years before emigrating.  I’m not clear on his ethnicity but he’s probably Jewish.  Once in NY, arriving at nearly the same time as Andy, he associated himself with the avant garde eventually emulating the Cinematheque Francaise when the experimental film makers of NY began creating a body of work.

A cinematheque is a library of films.  The French version was begun in the 1930s by Henri Langlois.  After a period of vicisssitudes caused by the war the archives of the Cinematheque Francaise has become a major archive of tens of thousands of films.  Mekas began collecting avant garde NY films on a much smaller scale of course but Warhol’s films were so marginal that many thought Mekas should exclude them  Mekas stood up for Andy exhibiting his films without which help Warhol films would have been consigned then and there to the dustbin of history.   Even more so than they have been.

Mekas at this time was employing a Jewish woman named Barbara Rubin as his assistant.  Rubin was marginally sane exhibiting all the sexual obsessions of the unbalanced.  The previous year she had made a film entitled Christmas On Earth.  Her Christmas on earth was envisioned as a huge sexual orgy, not with a cast of thousands, but a lot.  A few stills are available on the internet but I haven’t found any video clips.   Interestingly Andy’s assistant and collaborator, Gerard Malanga, had a prominent role.

Mekas did film this psychiatric spectacle but the film is locked away from human eyes.  God only knows why.

John Cale as Old Hipster Contemplating The Dynamo Hum

It might be appropriate to say something here about Gerard Malanga.  I might have to repeat myself at some later date but, you know, I’m 73 and there might not be a later date so I’ll say it now and perhaps later if I’m still around to tell the tale.  Malanga at this time at the beginning of 1966 was being placed in a difficult situation.  Within New York circles he was considered a poet of some distinction, he wasn’t just Andy’s helper.  He added luster to the Factory being much more than one of Andy’s vagrant perverts.  He was instrumental in the success of Warhol’s silk screen period.  As I’ve mentioned before Andy’s silk screens are little more than posters.  Andy was very lucky in finding associates who could advance his projects.  I mean Malanga, Mekas, Edie, Bob Colacello, Fred Hughes, Paul Morrissey, how lucky can you get?

When modern (60s) posters began they were travel posters fostered by jet setting.  During the early sixties they were de riguer, everyone had a couple.  Then the big personality posters came in with the Benday dots.  These were really impressive and something, 36×24 and only cost a dollar.  Of course, a dollar back then was really something too, but what a bargain.  Then the Fillmore and Family Dog posters began appearing coupled with the fabulous East Totem West.  These were all printed.  Now, when I emphasize these posters don’t think they were universally accepted, they pervaded only the hip or Bohemian culture.  The were looked on aghast by the straight world.  Strangelk, as though from another planet.

By 1966-67 black light designs were becoming prominent, those were mostly silk screened in flourescent colors and then they added flocking a little later.  Under a black light you were talking mind blowing.  With fluorescent colors and silk screen paints some fabulous designs were produced, usually priced at 3.00 but big.  These things really flipped the straights.

So when Andy began silk screening about 1963 he knew next to nothing of the process, however Gerard

Gerard

Malanga, who he now hired as his assistant, did.  There were mechanically operated screening machines capable of turning out unlimited quantities of copies but Warhol and Malanga used a manual method allowing for more variations in results.  At this stage then, Malanga became a collaborator making material suggestions as well as supplying knowledgeable labor.

Gerard also took Andy around to cultural events, poetry readings, and such thus broadening Andy’s rather limited cultural background.  Andy hired Gerard at the minimum wage and never over the years did he raise wages over the minimum wage level.

Gerard profited by his association with Andy becoming something of a figure in the avant garde scene without ever becoming the celebrity that Edie became.  He was in several of Andy’s movies as well as the Rubin sexcapade.  However as his fame and presence in the New York scene grew he faced the same problem Edie had.  He didn’t have the money to enjoy his celebrity.  Sixty dollars a week or so wasn’t going to take him very far.  So, what to do?

Andy ran off large numbers of impressions of his posters, none of these were originals.  For an exhibition at the Ferus Gallery in LA ( there’s a movie available on the Ferus and the LA avant garde)  he sent off a two hundred foot roll of Presleys advising them to cut it up as they saw fit.  He had a stack of Marilyns leaning against the wall that a women came in and put a bullet through Marilyns forehead through the whole stack.  Andy occasionally gave pictures away.  He either gave or let Bob Dylan appropriate one for his screen test.

There was value in these copies laying around so Gerard felt himself entitled to take some to supplement his income.  When he was stranded in Europe he even created an original, the Che Guevara Warhol and sold them.

How is one to view this?  In my estimation one has two types of Warhols.  One has on the one side Warhol-Malangas and on the other Malanga-Warhols.  In one case the screens are collaborative efforts, on the other Malanga originals.  While the Guevaras are considered fakes or counterfeits I think they have every claim to authenticity as Warhols even though they were conceived and executed in whole by Malanga.  Gerard also later either took or produced other posters which he sold.  These are now considered fakes by the Warhol Trust under Fred Hughes.  Maybe.  But Gerard was entitled to better compensation than Andy was giving him while the screens or posters were as much Gerard’s labor and input as Andy’s.

So, whatever, but beginning in 1966 and the move into the performance art of Andy’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable and trips to LA Gerard was woefully underpaid.  He was virtually a Warhol partner in my estimation.

At the banquet he performed his whip dance while Edie bopped around.

Thus, just as the waiters brought around the roast beef, string beans and new potatoes, and they called that a banquet, the inmates of the asylum burst through the doors, this is the entire Factory crowd of reprobates, to harass the unsuspecting psychiatrists.  They threw down their knives and forks streaming for the doors.

Miss Glueck in the NYTimes began spreading what was an amazing story via her commentary in the paper.  This was sensational.

Chapter 12

A Scandal In Bohemia

Andy And Gerard

I’m sure Andy’s audacious incivility was the talk of the town for a few days.  While not exactly getting away with a crime the whole fabric of civil discourse was shredded.  The word of what Andy had gotten away with quickly spread across the country in homosexual and/or revolutionary circles.  It was learned that you could disrupt anything without consequences and in the long run it would prove that these disrupters and obstructionists would profit mightily.  Certainly by the turn of the century there were few of them  who weren’t in enviable positions.  With the election of Obama the  Weather terror underground was in control of the country.  They had gotten away with it and pulled it off under the very eyes of the authorities.  Andy himself died in 1987 a very wealthy man.  Today his estate under the management of Fred Hughes is worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

A plethora of people and organizations emerged who were quite willing to disregard everyone else’s rights and desires to impose their own on all.  This may have begun with the Berkeley Free Speech Movement, which had nothing to do with free speech, in which a small group of dissidents upset the University of California bringing education to a halt.  They were accommodated.  In the end the dissidents were in control, not the regents, temporarily at least.  Today, of course, the student body of UC is nearly entirely Asian and the whole brouhaha has absolutely no relevance.  It’s their university, now.  That magnficent library of the European heritage has absolutely no relevance to them.  The Asian library is terrific too.

Bomber Billy Ayers

The Free Speech Movement was expanded out into the terrorist organization Students For A Democratic Society, which had nothing to do with democracy, but the imposition of a narrow view of bigots,  and an assault was made on the entire university system of the country.  This attempt failed, most notably at the Chicago Democratic Convention of ’68 where they made fools of themselves, but from which came the criminal and evil Bomber Billy Ayers and his Weather Underground which today has captured the Presidency of the United States.  The dissidents are now distributing the largess in an authoritarian manner.

While symptomatic of the larger picture and part of that picture on the local level in New York, Andy was even more influential.  New York Bohemianism itself has managed to impose its ideals on the entire culture and that largely through Warhol’s efforts.  It is interesting however to note that George Du Maurier, the late nineteenth century author, thought that such an event would be beneficial.  Boy, did George get that wrong.

I haven’t read an account of Bohemia that wasn’t written by a Bohemian or someone sympathetic to Bohemia.  Thus the romance of Behemia supplants the reality.  This is not recent either, the roots are deep into the nineteenth century.  Henri Murger’s The Bohemians Of The Latin Quarter celebrates Bohemianism in early nineteenth century Paris.  Puccini based his opera, La Vie Boheme on Murger’s book.  Dumas and Balzac both have a Bohemian outlook.  Perhaps the most famous celebrator and believer in Bohemianism was the late nineteenth century author George Du Maurier.  His three novels- Peter Ibbetson, Trilby and The Martian are a pefect example of sentimental Bohemianism and well worth reading.

Du Maurier’s Bohemia and Bohemianism was before drugs became ubiquitous or Freudian sexual attitudes became predominate although something like them existed at the time, but there was a civility of sorts that prevailed but has since disappeared.   As Warhol put it, in the sixties people forgot what emotions were and haven’t recovered them since.

With the sixties civility came to an end.  The criminal element and mentality prevailed in the Bohemia of Warhol’s time while Andy himself had a sadistic attitude.  His term for disruptive or anti-social behavior was ‘having fun.’

Perhaps Edie is symptomatic of the descent into madness, a modern day La Dame Aux Camellias.  the scene in the Village was an embarrassment for ‘respectable’ New Yorkers.  Underneath the antics of the Bohos real crime seethed, child brothels flourished, the drug scene was no laughing matter as movies like the French Connection attest.  The scene was mild compared to what it would become after Stonewall and the invasion of what New Yorkers called Eurotrash into the seventies and eighties.  The degenerate behavior was called ‘partying.’   As the saying goes:  they really did kick out the jams.

Still the early sixties was bad enough that the city authorized the police to clean up the Village for the ’64 World’s Fair so as not to offend the tourists.  So things weren’t just a little offbeat.  As I said, by ’66 the more destruction aspects of drug use was beginning to tell.  It’s not that people were beginning to lose self-control, Andy’s emotions, they had forgotten what controls were.  A process of devolution was in effect that would be recognized by the 70′s rock band, Devo.  They asked the musical question, echoing the refrain of the vivisected beasts on H.G. Wells’ Island Of Dr. Moreau, Are We Not Men?  the band Devo’s answer was no, we are not evolving we are devolving.  But, the country had a seemingly infinite capacity to assimilate any kind of outrageous behavior without making any move to correct it.  A moral paralysis had set in.  Everyone joined it, the money men would loot the entire Savings and Loan industry of every last dollar and nobody even seemed interested in who got that trillion dollars.  So what, hey?

Thus, when Andy mau-mau’d the psychiatrists in what was an unheard of way at the time without so much as a reproof the word rippled down the line and the rowdies, posing as revolutionists or whatever, sat up and took notice.  Their day had come.   The day of the locust.

Andy And Fred Hughes

In some ways the Stonewall Riot of ’69 in which the homos faced down the NYPD was an extension of Warhol’s mau-mauing the psychiatrists and from then on society had no method devised to counter it.  In reaction to this deviant and puerile behavior for which there was apparently no legal remedy a spirit of vigilantism invaded society compounding the chaos.  Dirty Harry, the lone avenger, made his appearance on the screen; Charles Bronson’s Death Wish movies captured the imagination of put upon society turning a legion of nut cakes loose.  Bomber Billy Ayers and his Weather Underground vented his and their personal frustrations on society.  But, then, society had already been corrupted.

I watched the corruption develop with Du Maurier’s sentimental Bohemianism in mind as partially seen through Maynard Krebs of the Dobie Gillis TV series and I recognized that the problems were emanating from New York but I wasn’t quick enough to see the difference between sentimental and practical Bohemianism.  Perhaps if I had read William S. Burroughs at the time I would have seen the danger more clearly.  As Dylan sang:  There’s something happening here but you don’t know what it is, do you.  He didn’t either although he may have thought he did.  Let the bodies the hit the floor.

For Warhol there must have been consequences to his insulting the psychiatrists.  When the inmates seize control there must be a reaction.  The Factory’s reputation was becoming more tarnished with every passing day.  Even Warhol tried to escape by leaving for LA  with the Velvets and then Arizona to make one of his porn movies.  Nineteen sixty-five had been the Factory’s apogee.  But as that party ended a new party was beginning but I suspect the offended psychiatrists used what influence they had to gain revenge.  When Warhol’s lease came up for renewel in 1968 the City condemned the building forcing Warhol out.  Fortunately for Andy New York was in decline with landlords walking away from unleaseable buildings.  These empty buildings created ‘squats’ which the indigents possessed as public property on ‘squatters rights.’  These empty buildings figure prominently in the movie Midnight Cowboy.

Warhol had no trouble finding other quarters.  Although an inconvenience, the forced move worked to Andy’s advantage.  Andy had already determined it was time to move on and leave the fantasy of the Silver Factory behind.  A new approach was evolving in his mind.  Fred Hughes knew there was money to be made from Andy’s reputation and he was going after it.  He should have been there when Edie was worth money.

Unfortunately at this time in mid-sixty-eight Andy’s dangerous sadistic game playing of the past rose up to haunt him in the form of Valerie Solanis.  She showed up at the new ‘White’ factory and put a bullet or two into Andy’s body.  The body hit the floor.  It was a terrible shooting.  A bullet managed to pass through nearly every organ  except the heart.  The shots from her gun actually did kill Andy.  He was legally dead for a minute and a half before the doctors got his electricity flowing again.

Nineteen sixty-eight was the year of the big revolution.  The only problem with that was that it only happened in the minds of the the so-called revolutionaries; still a change of direction did take place.  Andy departed one world and awoke in another.  He was born again.

For Edie 1966 ended her brief but glorious reign as The Girl Of The Year and began her terrifically horrorous spiral into oblivion.  Her fame would destroy her.

All The Fame Anybody Needs

Tell 'em Andy

Chaps. 6,7,8: Edie Sedgwick, Maid Of Constant Sorrow

Edie Sedgwick:  Maid Of Constant Sorrow

Chs. 6,7,8

Chapter 6

The Pillow That We Dreamed On

 

Revolt Of The Undermen

 While this is a history it is also a history I lived through.  Thus, while history from a distance in time loses much detail it gains in perspective.  While these events were transpiring in New York an interpretation of them was being dispersed throughout the country by magazines.  While I have no first hand knowledge of the scene in New York my reality at the time was formed by magazine reports.  I considered myself pretty well informed from those magazines and in an intra-social sense I guess I was although that only made me less superficial than some others.

The sixties was a fabulous time for magazines.  Endless specialized titles came and went after only a few issues, or even a single issue.  One of my favorites was the long lasting Horizon, a hard cover quarterly boasting a whole hundred thousand subscribers.  Obviously it was for the fortunate few.  Of the big bombers chief of all was Time-Life.  The two magazines were probably the backbone of American culture during the fifties and sixties.  Time lost its credibility during the sixties.

Time was founded by Henry and Clair Booth Luce in 1923.  By the fifties it was not only a money machine but gave the Luces a position from which they could actually direct the course of American culture.  A heady responsibility.  The Luce’s always claimed to be Conservatives but their publications always seemed to have a decidedly leftward bend.

For me the 60s was a most exciting intellectual period.  Things were moving fast and generally opening up the American mind.  Time-Life publications, all those mail order books.  I love mail order.  I especially love getting books through the mail.  The sixties was my time.   Horizon had annual volumes I cherish.  Time-Life published a series of paperbacks, actually linoleum like covers, called the  Time-Life Library, sent out four titles a quarter, complete set of 108.  I completed it.  They did delete one title replacing it with another that I don’t have.

However the titles seemed to further a Left agenda.  Biographies of Marx  and others with the explanation that it was important to know how the enemy thought.  True enough, I’m sure, and I bought it at the time but they issued precious little concerning other political angles.  I soured on Time-Life as it went.

I also discontinued subscribing to Time sometime in the mid-sixties although it was impossible to stop reading the magazine as there was always a copy lying around somewhere.  I became revolted when I read a marvelous piece describing Howard Hughes exit from Las Vegas.  It was an astonishing eye witness piece.  Then we learned that the whole account was fiction; it never happened.  Not only inaccurate but it never happened.  They just made it up.  That ended my fascination with Time.  Still it was where I continued to get most of my information while it had formed my mind for over a decade.

The magazines- Time, Life- were where I got my information on the NYC art scene.  Time was especially attentive to it.  Pop Art was covered pretty extensively by both magazines.  A complete collection of both Time and Life is available on line for reference.

On the West Coast where I was,  then, my personal knowledge of Warhol and the art scene pretty much came from Time-Life as did that of most others.  Probably not that many were actually interested.  Time was a big weekly magazine, how much of it could you actually read.  One looked at the magnitude of the weekend NYTimes, sniffed, and just walked away.  Who could even begin to read it.

When Edie hooked up with Warhol she gained a national recognition second to none for a nonentity, quite astounding in retrospect.

In August of ‘65 she and Warhol received a good write up in the Arts section of Time while as late as November she received a very nice photo essay in Life.  She hadn’t even done anything but hang out with Warhol.  Judging from what I read on the internet these articles impressed a number of people giving Edie a national reputation, at least in some circles.  This is quite startling because she was only a cute girl, nothing more.  She could never have achieved this without her association with Warhol.  And she was in a position to turn her allure and fame to account.

Warhol was not going to pay her for the movies.  His position was that he had given her this fame so that it was her responsibility to do something with it.  There were things she could have done to retrieve her fortunes.  Supposedly Chuck Wein was on the lookout  to make her into something.  He was useless.  He should have given his brain an enema and looked at things more clearly.  There were things that could have been attempted.  It wouldn’t have been impossible for her to set up an advice column such as Edie Says, or What Would Edie Do.  My god, she was in NYC.  The idea could have been sold to the NYTimes and from there perhaps syndicated.  She wouldn’t even have had to do anything but collect the money.  Others could have handled everything.

Edie had already modeled so she was in Fashion.  So…a line called Edie Sedgwick Party Clothes, Casual Fashion, you name it.  Heck, Warhol should have been on the ball and taken his cut, led the way, instead of stupidly taking Ondine’s chat for a novel called ‘a’.  Who bought it?

Having raised Edie then to near iconic status within just a few months Warhol, Wein and Edie let the opportunity of a life time slip through their hands.  Perhaps it was the drugs.

Chapter 7

Hatred In His Heart

 

But She Breaks Just Like A Little Girl

At the beginning of May Dylan left for a tour of England.  At the same time Warhol took Edie along with Gerard Malanga and Chuck Wein for a gallery show in Paris.   Warhol, Edie and Dylan were in Europe at the same time.  Whether this influenced Dylan’s rage or not isn’t known but in June shortly after his return he began to vent his rage as he began the composition of Like A Rolling Stone.

Now, Edie’s brother Jonathon told a story he says he got from Edie that she was impregnated by Dylan and carried his baby.  There is no time frame for this story.  According to Jonathon Edie was determined to have Dylan’s child.  As she told it it took four men to hold her down for the abortion to be performed.  If true, this is an interesting situation.  For one thing abortions were illegal at the time, so a rogue doctor was required.  Edie says that she was adamant about having the baby so that she would have had to have been either lured to the doctor or essentially kidnapped.  If she resisted and four men, who happened to be in attendance, were required to subdue her then we have a crime of some magnitude.

Bear in mind that all the alleged participants are whacked out of their minds on amphetamines so no one is thinking clearly.  At any event Dylan was committed to marry Sara if this is before the wedding or married to her if after.  Edie is a celebrity of some distinction who in all likelihood would tell everyone it was Dylan’s love child.  What effect this might have on Sara can’t be known but it might possibly have disturbed Dylan’s plans.  If he’s like the rest of us he would have held Edie responsible for getting pregnant.

The gist of it is Jonathon Sedgwick says Edie told him the story.  It is a possibility, after all if you’re having sex with somebody as she undoubtedly was with Dylan, the possibility of pregnancy is there.  But that’s in the background.

During the summer while Dylan stewed Edie and Andy’s star was rising.  New York dailies ran stories on the pair that told of Edie drawing Andy into uptown society; and then in late November Life ran its photo essay on Edie.  Let’s let Andy recap the period as he told it in his autobiography Popism, recalled in 1980, p. 107:

(At the party) There were a few guys in the latest velvets and silk shirts, but not too many- the boys were still mostly in blue jeans and button-down shirts.  Edie brought Bob Dylan to the party and they huddled by themselves over in a corner.  Dylan was spending a  lot of time then up at his manager Al Grossman’s place near Woodstock, and Edie was somehow involved with Grossman too- she said he was going to manage her career.

I’d met Dylan through the MacDougal Street/Kettle Of Fish/Café Rienzi/Hip Bagel/ Café Figaro scene, which Danny Fields claims got started when he and Donald Lyons saw Eric Andersen, they went up and asked if he wanted to be in an Andy Warhol movie.  “How many times did we all use that one?”  Danny laughed.  And after that Eric got interested in Edie and suddenly we were all around the Village together.  But I think Edie actually knew Dylan because of Bobby Neuwirth.  Bobby was a painter who originally started singing and guitar playing up in Cambridge just to make money to paint with, he told me once.  Then he hooked up with Dylan and became part of that group- he was something like Dylan’s road manager-confidant.  And Bobby was a friend of Edie’s.

At Sam’s party Dylan was in blue jeans and high-heeled boots and a sports jacket, and his hair was sort of long.  He had deep circles under his eyes, and even when he was standing he was all hunched in.  He was around twenty-four then and the kids were all just starting to talk and act and dress and swagger like he did.  But not many people except Dylan could ever pull that anti-act off- and if he wasn’t in the right mood, he couldn’t either. He was already slightly flashy when I met him, definitely not folksy anymore- I mean, he was wearing satin polka-dot shirts.  He’d released Bringing It All Back Home, so he’d already started his rock sound at this point, but he hadn’t played the Newport Folk Festival yet, or Forest Hills, the places where the old-style folk people booed him for going electric, but where the kids started getting really crazy for him.  This was just before “Like A Rolling Stone” came out.  I liked Dylan, the way he’d created a brilliant new style.  He didn’t spend his career doing homage to the past, he had to do things his own way, and that was just what I respected.  I even gave him one of my silver Elvis paintings in the days when he was first around.  Later on, though, I got paranoid when I heard rumors that he had used the Elvis as a dart board up in the country.  When I’d ask, “Why would he do that.”  I’d invariably get hearsay answers like “I hear he feels you destroyed Edie,” or “Listen to ‘Like A Rolling Stone’- I think you’re the ‘diplomat on the chrome horse’, man.”  I didn’t know exactly what they meant by that- I never listened much to the words of songs- but I got the tenor of what people were saying- that Dylan didn’t like me, that he blamed me for Edie’s drugs.

So it is quite clear from Andy’s recollection that he had known Dylan from the early Spring of ‘65 and that Edie was quite clearly dating him.  Whether the pregnancy story comes from this time would be an interesting question.  After the release of Highway 61 Revisited Dylan conceived a plan to take Edie away from Andy.  It would seem quite clear from the bags under Dylan’s eyes that he was no stranger to drugs.

Perhaps the August Time article on Andy and Edie was the high point of their relationship although the October art exhibit at UPennsylvania was still to come.  That show was astonishing in that Warhol was treated like a rock star with apparently the same crowd attending.  Of course, Andy’s pal Sam Green had masterfully whipped up enthusiasm with his promotion of the show preceding it by several weeks.  The show was probably the first time an artist received such adulation.

Though Andy was enough of a rage that a big crowd would come out for him.  I was in attendance at the UOregon lecture in Fall ’67 when Allen Midgette impersonated him and a crowd of about 1500 paid to see him.  It isn’t true that Midgette’s impersonation was that good.

I was standing at the end of the line waiting to enter when Midgette and Morrissey were brought in to the elevator just behind me.  The guy in front of me asked if that was him.

I was watching Midgette who was a midget, little skinny short guy.  There was a superficial resemblance but he seemed too short and he wasn’t wearing a wig.  I said, ‘It looks like him but I don’t think it is.’  Midgette raised his eyebrows while Morrissey looked like the jig was up but the admins ignored me.

During the so-called lecture there were several groups of us dispersed throughout the audience loudly debating the issue.  They got away with it but later the school learned they had been pranked and demanded their money back.  I always thought that was rude.  What did they expect of Warhol.  He had a reputation.  Didn’t the administration read Time?

In September of ‘65 Dylan began to court Edie with promises, one believes, of a good income from movies, recording or such.  One is amazed that geniuses like Dylan, Grossman and Neuwirth couldn’t come up with something more inventive to promote Edie.

Edie was torn between two lovers, Andy and Bob.  It must have been quite head turning to be the object of contention between the number one celebrity artist of the time and one of the most famous recording and performing acts at the same time as receiving national exposure in Time and Life.

Warhol, even though a homosexual, said that he was as close to in love with Edie as he had been with any other person in his life, he even took her home to meet his mother.  Mrs. Warhola who had been urging her son to marry would certainly have taken Edie’s appearance as an indication that Andy was serious about her.

Having committed himself even that far would mean that her receptiveness to Dylan was a crushing rejection of himself as, say, a male object, while her abscontsion to Dylan’s camp would be a traitorous act.  Unforgivable in his eyes.

Thus as Edie wavered between Dylan and Andy her life at the Factory became untenable.  Andy quietly brought in other superstars including Dylan’s old flame, Nico.  Whether conscious of it or not Andy was displacing Edie.  She was mocked and reviled.  While this was happening at the Factory Edie was evidently taken to Woodstock where Albert Grossman was talking contract to her as her manager.  Dylan had had his May gig in England filmed although it would be a while before it was released.  There was talk of another film of which Edie would have the starring role.  That film apparently wasn’t made for several decades until Dylan finally got it together to make Masked And Anonymous.  Perhaps the blond female lead was meant to remind the viewer of Edie.

So, rejected by her family who disapproved of her modeling as well as scorning her association with Warhol, desperately in need of money Edie was in an agonizing mental dilemma.  Remember that by this time she was a national figure having appeared in Time and even as her position disintegrated featured in Life, yet she had no money to back her celebrity status.    She couldn’t participate in the social life.

We don’t know what Dylan was promising her personally whether he hinted at marriage or stated it but it seems clear from the evidence of One Of Us Must Know (Sooner Or Later) and Most Likely You Go Your Way And I’ll Go Mine that Edie believed Dylan was serious about her.

Dylan married Sara in November of ‘65 secretly but how to keep a secret.  Warhol learned of the marriage tauntingly informing Edie of it in December.  Edie was incredulous.  It follows, and can’t be otherwise, that she confronted Dylan with the alleged fact.  This was undoubtedly a moment of triumph for Dylan as he could now reject Edie as he believed she had rejected him in March.

One can imagine Edie demanding of Dylan whether he was with her or Sara.  The intense mocking derision of Sooner Or Later when Dylan sings:  I couldn’t believe what I did hear- was I leaving with you or her?

At that time Edie’s game was up.  Warhol had destroyed her reputation; she could no longer get modeling jobs; she was broke with no hope of a good encore.  With a loud sneer Dylan passed her to his sidekick, Bobby Neuwirth then a song to commemorate it:  She’s Your Lover Now.

Chapter 8

Down The Trail Of Broken Hearts

 

Dylan Lifting Off

The motivations of the actors are difficult to determine.  However that insofar as any actions relate to the others than the actions of any of the others are interrelated.  Thus Andy had Edie and wished to keep her as she was as close to love as he ever came.  Perhaps he realized that he would need money to do so while perhaps his various activities from the Factory to filmmaking were keeping him financially strapped so that even if he wished to he couldn’t pay Edie.  He had expenses.

Of course today an authenticated Warhol may go for millions up to the one hundred millions paid for the Eight Elvises picture but at the time you could have scooped up several paintings for under ten thousand dollars that might have been worth tens of millions twenty to thirty years on.

Dylan is ridiculed for trading his Presley taken from Warhol for a sofa but at the time that wasn’t necessarily a bad deal depending on the sofa.  Warhol would give his actors the choice between a painting and a hundred dollars cash.  The Factoryites elected the cash over the picture.  So, it’s not like Warhol could just sell a painting anytime he needed to  raise the ready.  His question was how to raise some cash, he had overhead.

His adversaries were Dylan and Albert Grossman, one a recording artist the other a manager both swimming in cash.  There seemed like a pot of gold at the end of that particular rainbow.  Andy thought about it and came up with what he thought was a winning formula, and it actually was but he let it slip away.

Taking his cue from Bobby and Albert then Andy decided to manage a band.  He also conceived at the same time an artistic light show to create an even more unique and exciting ambience, The Exploding Plastic Inevitable.  When the student is ready the teacher will appear.  And so it was.  Andy’s scouts went looking for a band and came back with a group called the Warlocks who were renamed The Velvet Underground.  An SM band extraordinaire whose chief songs were Heroin and Waiting For My Man.  Only Andy could have shouted Eureka! at such a find.

The band came straight out of the avant garde.  The chief instrumentalist, John Cale, had belonged to the John Cage/La Monte Young musical circle.  The ostensible leader, Lou Reed, another survivor of electro-shock therapy, not much of a musician, was the group’s songwriter and lead singer.  Between Warhol, the Factory hands and the Velvets they were a Happening of the first order.

Andy now had his band and his concept but no venue.  No way to present the package for popular consumption.  But, that too appeared when someone suggested a hall called the Dom.  Andy rented the hall but, here’s the catch, he didn’t lease it.  He cautiously wanted to try it out first.  The trial was a major success, wowing hip New York while also bringing in an astonishing amount of cash for a three or four week run.  Should have been a hint.

Now, Andy negotiated a recording contract for the Velvet Underground and the band actually recorded its SM anthems Heroin and Waiting For My Man.  Remember the Velvets had no history and horrible songs but Andy’s influence was so great this unknown band was given a recording contract.  Not so bad.  Of course the record wasn’t released until 1967 but it fell flat as one would have expected with an eighteen minute song called Heroin.  Also the record was released as Andy Warhol Presents The Velvet Underground.  Andy’s credibility wasn’t too great outside NYC and I, for one, looked at the record as a probable joke, especially as the cover was a peel away banana.  After listening to the record I knew it was a joke.

A couple years earlier Dylan had been in Greece where he met a German woman going by the name of Nico.  They apparently had a short fling and he wrote the song I’ll Keep It With Mine for her.  Time passes and paths meander.  Having passed through London Nico showed up in New York City at this time where, as chance would have it, she hooked up with Warhol and became a Factory girl.  Andy in his usual way foisted her on the Velvets as a chanteuse, Nico And The Velvet Underground, did I mention that before?  So, not only did one ask what the hell was a velvet underground but who the hell was Nico?  We knew who Andy Warhol was.  And how.

Dylan undoubtedly thought of Nico as his, thus he showed up in Warhol’s scene to push songs on Nico with the intent no doubt to woo her away as he had done Edie.  The contest between Andy, Bobby and Albert was heating up.

I think it probably came to a head over the Dom.  Andy and the Velvets left for a gig in LA and when they returned they attempted to resume their shows at the Dom.  Lo and behold they found that Albert Grossman had leased the venue from under them.  They had the winning formula but once again no venue.  Albert called his place something stupid like The Balloon Farm but under different management it became The Electric Circus.  Andy was offered the light show but didn’t take it, but by then light show paraphenalia was being manufactured as a commercial product.

From my point of view the most astonishing and impressive thing Andy ever did was the Exploding Plastic Inevitable.  It had a long lasting effect.  Of course by this time the whole light show paraphernalia had turned into an industry and anyone could do it.

Toward the end of ‘65 Edie had become peripheral to both Andy and Dylan.

Chapters 9,10,11 and 12 are now up on one post.