Famous for 15 Minutes

My Years with Andy Warhol

Ultra Violet

• Publisher: Open Road Media
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781497680760
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Science Biographies
• Index: Social Sciences

One of Andy Warhol's superstars recalls the birth of an art movement—and the death of an icon In this audacious tell-all memoir, Ultra Violet, born Isabelle Collin Dufresne, relives her years with Andy Warhol at the Factory and all of the madness that accompanied the sometimes-violent delivery of pop art. Starting with her botched seduction of the "shy, near-blind, bald, gay albino" from Pittsburgh, Ultra Violet installs herself in Warhol's world, becoming his muse for years to come. But she does more than just inspire; she also watches, listens, and remembers, revealing herself to be an ideal tour guide to the "assembly line for art, sex, drugs, and film" that is the Factory. Famous for 15 Minutes drips with juicy details about celebrities and cultural figures in vignettes filled with surreptitious cocaine spoons, shameless sex, and insights into perhaps the most recognizable but least intimately known artist in the world. Beyond the legendary artist himself are the throngs of Factory "regulars"—Billy Name, Baby Jane Holzer, Brigid Polk—and the more transient celebrities who make appearances—Bob Dylan, Jane Fonda, Jimi Hendrix, John Lennon. Delightfully bizarre and always entertaining, filled with colorful scenes and larger-than-life personalities, this dishy page-turner is shot through with the author's vivid imagery and piercing observations of a cultural idol and his eclectic, voyeuristic, altogether riveting world.

SEX?

When Andy was a sickly eight-year-old, he was confined to bed all summer long. He listened to the radio in the company of his Charlie McCarthy doll.

I ask, “Did you play with dolls?”

“Gosh, no.”

“Who were your heroes?”

“Dick Tracy. I Scotch-taped his photograph on the bedroom wall.”

“Why Dick Tracy?”

“Sex appeal.”

“You just stared at him?”

“I fantasized about Dick’s dick.”

“What?”

“I fantasized it was lollipop.”

I think to myself: A lollipop goes in and out of a mouth, usually a child’s mouth.

Andy laughs. “Yes, Dick’s lollipop.” He adds, “I had two sex idols—Dick Tracy and Popeye.” (Warhol paints portraits of Dick Tracy and Popeye.)

“Did you also fantasize about Popeye?”

“My mother caught me one day playing with myself and looking at a Popeye cartoon.”

“Why Popeye and Tracy?”

“They were stars. So was Charlie McCarthy. I wanted to make it with stars. I fantasized I was in bed with Dick and Popeye. Charlie would rub against me and seduce me.”

I ask, “Were they father images to you?”

“Don’t know. I barely knew my father. He died when I was fourteen.”

“Why do you prefer men to women?”

No answer. Even though Andy is open in his own circle about his homosexuality, he tries to keep it secret from the public. “I did a cock book,” he says.

“A cook book?”

Laughing: “You’re naive.”

A gallery director, Mario Amaya, editor of the London publication Art and Artists and a friend of Andy’s, explains that in 1957 Andy went around town painting dancers’ feet. Later, he moved on to cocks, drawing everybody’s cock. Hence the cock book. Andy is attracted to boys who are delinquent and perverse. He is a voyeur and wants people to expose themselves. All painters are, by definition, voyeurs; I have met hundreds of painter-voyeurs in my life. But Andy extends the boundaries of voyeurism.

When kids drop in from the street, Andy asks, “Can you take off your clothes? I’d like to take a picture of you.”

Either the kids are on drugs—in which case they do not know whether they are dressed or not—or they take off their clothes to be hip and liberated. Nude theatrical performances are going on all over town, so in the Factory it is taken for granted that you strip, or you don’t belong on the scene.

Especially to the boys, Andy says, “Bend down. I’d like to Polaroid your ass.” The kids are either embarrassed or amused. They have never had such an open proposition. If they are embarrassed, they are shown Polaroids of other kids. Close-ups of genitalia are very abstract. You cannot recognize anyone by those close-ups. So who cares? You cannot be blackmailed. You may recognize someone’s nose, because you’ve seen it. How can you recognize genitals you’ve never seen before?

One day in 1965, when I step out of the elevator into the silvery Factory on East Forty-seventh Street, Maria Callas’s voice is blasting on the stereo. Ondine, the great fan of classical music in the Warhol crowd, is pulling his clothes together. Rod La Rod, another member of the circle, is handcuffed. The handcuff is the current gadget. If kids get too wild, we handcuff them.

Ondine says, “We threw Andy out of our orgy.”

“Why?”

“All he did was watch.”

I ask Ondine, “How often do you have an orgy?”

“It’s an everyday orgy.”

“How many people?”

“Twelve, four, one—who knows?”

“Male or female?”

“Both.”

Andy is the passive voyeur, the receiver. He is feminine.

Another time I’m talking to Andy about Truman Capote. “When you were with Capote, who was the female?”

“With Truman we had a hard time.”

“In what way?”

“Getting it on and/or up.”

“But who was the female?”

“Both.”

“Your mother, does she suspect anything?”

“My mother says, ‘Don’t worry about love, Andy. Just get married.’”

I laugh. “How did it start with Capote?”

“I was in love with him before I met him in 1951. I wrote him every single day for a year.”

“Did he reply?”

“Hmmm. I was engaged to Truman for ten years. A secret engagement.”

“Did you exchange rings? Or earrings?”

Andy laughs. “We exchanged photographs. I made fifteen drawings to illustrate The Stories of Truman Capote. That was my first solo exhibit.”

“What kinds of photographs did you exchange?”

“Photos of us kissing and making it naked with each other.”

Andy is fascinated by the naked body. He has an extensive collection of photographs of naked people. He delights in the fact that every organ of the body varies immensely in shape, form, and color from one individual to the next. Just as one torso or one face tells a different story from another, so, to Andy, one penis or one ass tells a different story from another.

In 1964 Andy films Taylor Mead’s Ass. The seventy-minute silent film in black and white is not famous for its action. The camera focuses for seventy minutes on the actor’s ass, which requires unmatched patience from the unpaid Taylor. While it is shooting, Andy walks around the studio, talks on the telephone, goes to the bathroom. The film is insolent. With a thumb of his nose, Andy says “Bottoms up” to society.

Many artists have that impulse. I remember Marcel Duchamp showing me a naked photo of himself standing as a statue perched on a pedestal. His body was superbly proportioned. It had a rhythm that reminded me of his Nude Descending a Staircase.

Then there was the time Salvador Dali did a plaster imprint of my breasts. A specialist in statuary replicas for the Metropolitan Museum of Art came to the St. Regis at teatime. Dali and I were having tea with the Marquesa de Cuevas, who was born Marguerite Rockefeller. After our first cup of tea, Dali and I excused ourselves and went up to the mezzanine floor, to the office of the jeweler Carlos Alemany. I undressed. The castmaker fiddled with my breasts, his hands trembling as he applied plaster. It would take a while for the plaster to set, so I threw a violet cape, trimmed with gold, around me, and Dali and I rushed back to the King Cole Room to rejoin the marquesa.

Listening to the violins playing “O Sole Mio” as the plaster dried, tightening and tingling on my breasts, Dali and I exchanged mischievous glances. I delighted in the moment.

I want to know more about Andy and Capote. I ask, “Are you still involved with him?”

“Only on the telephone.”

“On the telephone?”

“I don’t like my hair messed up.”

I always wondered how Andy’s wig withstood really rough treatment in the sack, even with its secret snap to his skull. I could not imagine Andy taking off his wig. I suspect even the stoned kids would have been scared out of their wits at the sight of that whitish cranium.

“Yes, sex-phone,” Andy continues.

“You make love on the telephone?”

“You know I only want to be a machine.”

(Before you read any further, please answer the following question: How would a man who is a machine make love? Close your eyes and come up with an answer, no matter how wild it might be. Only after you’ve answered the question should you read on, because Warhol’s sex life will then make some sense.)

“Why sex-phone?”

“You don’t get dirtied.”

“If you blush, they can’t see you, is that it?”

“You don’t get wet by urine.”

“You don’t like to be touched?”

“No.”

I recall the day we had lunch in a health food store on East Fifty-seventh Street. As I was returning Andy’s change, my hand accidentally touched his. Andy flinched and drew back.

“What’s the matter?” I asked.

“You touched me.”

“So?”

“I don’t like to be touched.”

“Why?”

“Except by my mother.”

“You don’t want to be involved emotionally?”

“No, I don’t.”

Now, still pressing him about Capote: “You went from physical lovemaking to long-distance lovemaking with Capote?”

“He became a problem. Hangovers, amphetamines, AA meetings.”

“Bad morning breath?”

He shrugs. “That’s when I got married to my tape recorder.” This is one of Andy’s famous quotes.

Later, on a rainy day: “Do you record all your sex-phone conversations?”

“Gee, sure.”

“What are you planning to do with the tapes?”

“Sell them or make them into a play.”

“Explain to me how you get off on sex-phone.”

“Sex is so nothing. The last time Truman put his cock in my mouth, I felt nothing.”

One night Andy takes me, along with Gerard, Paul, and Rod La Rod, to see a Forty-second Street movie. Andy buys big ice cream cones and popcorn for everyone. I have never seen a commercial porno film, one that exploits sex, aberrational or otherwise, with the sole aim of arousing the viewer. In Andy’s movies, which years later are shown in the world’s most prestigious museums, the intention is to film the realities of our lives as they unfold. We film eating, sleepin...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• Disclaimer
• Dramatis Personae
• Memorial
• The Factory
• Entourage
• Blow Job
• Andy’s Beginnings
• Isabelle’s Childhood
• Escape from France
• The Dali Years
• Ultra, the Girl in Andy Warhol’s Soup
• Pop Art
• Rock Beat
• Underground Hollywood
• High Living
• Transvestites
• 24 Hours
• Julia Warhola
• Chelsea Girls
• Sex?
• The Shooting
• Recovery
• Valerie Solanas
• Parties of the Night
• Moonstruck
• Edie
• In Love
• Reform or Perish
• Home, Sweetest Home
• The Sobering Seventies
• Survivors
• Andy’s End
• Mass
• Postmortem: The Kingdom of Kitsch
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author
• Copyright Page