On the Cusp of Superstars: Andy Warhol's Silver Factory as Underground

This is part two of Kenneth King's recollections of his years around the Warhol Factory. Part 1 appeared in PAJ 108 in 2014.

1

Andy Warhol is world famous today, but in 1964 he inhabited an underground scene populated by strange and unusual creatures. The infamous Jack Smith, a seminal New American Cinema filmmaker, had a big impact on Andy; he coined the euphemism "superstar," meaning fabulous, beautiful, or outrageous. Jack was also in Gregory Markopoulos's movie The Iliac Passion, playing Orpheus, poet of the Underworld. I entered this downtown scene while still a student at Antioch College, during my last work-study project. Just before I left Yellow Springs, Ohio, two student filmmakers told me Markopoulos needed actors for his movie and that I should look him up. I got the part of Adonis, paired with Tally Brown, a 350-pound chanteuse playing Venus. What I didn't know was that Andy was also in Gregory's movie as Poseidon.

Markopoulos moved through the network of underground filmmakers and knew everyone. He was of medium height, trim, with a large head of curly hair, penetrating eyes, prototypical Greek features, and almost always dressed in a suit and tie. He was articulate and intelligent, fastidious in his work habits, congenial and conversant, well read, and an admirer of André Gide. He lived Spartan-style in a charming top-floor apartment in an elegant town house at 40 West 11th Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. Clara Hoover was his benefactress, who doled out grants to keep his film projects afloat.

One afternoon we filmed a scene for The Iliac Passion at the triangular intersection of Sixth Avenue, 8th and Christopher Streets surrounded by ongoing traffic, and at night we wandered around the Village. That day on Christopher Street Markopoulos said, "Look, there's Djuna Barnes." Quite old, the famous author was out alone shopping, dressed impeccably in a dowdy vintage dark blue suit with hat and veil from decades ago, looking like a stately eccentric out of her celebrated novel Nightwood. She lived a block or so away at Patchen Place, where E.E. Cummings also resided.

Cummings was my favorite poet. Decades before Andy, Cummings was incorporating found art, snippets of magazine advertising, pop minutiae, and billboard desiderata into his poems. Cummings employed a radical collage technique that fragmented words and letters and arranged them in strange typographies that wrested new meanings and structural possibilities for poetic form. In my senior year of high school I watched him read his mysterious poems at Hofstra College in Hempstead, Long Island.

The afternoon I met Andy Warhol at Gregory Battcock's apartment, he asked for my phone number. Shortly afterwards he called and asked me if I would like to be in one of his movies. I thought movies might be a way to supplement my interest in acting. After starting out in a variety of character roles in high school plays, right after graduation I was cast as the Scarecrow in a production of The Wizard of Oz. The director insisted I take dance classes for the part. That's how I became a dancer. Andy and Gregory's movies offered another experience for learning about performing in front of the camera, quite different than projecting on stage. Neither filmmaker really needed or wanted actors per se. Movies presented another performative challenge than the stage—you had to recalibrate everything you did, less was more, and the director depended on the tiny aperture to create something more than you were able to conceive. These early Warhol film experiments occurred before superstars Edie Sedgwick, Nico, Candy Darling, and manager Fred Hughes arrived on the scene, but during the period that Jack Smith, Gregory Markopoulos, and Warhol were interacting.

2

After we began rehearsals for The Wizard of Oz, a fey elfin boy, Jimmy Slattery, was cast as one of the munchkins. He lived near the theatre in North Massapequa, which was in a prefab building located on a large tract of barren land. I remember him standing outside in an open...