Free POPism by Andy Warhol, Pat Hackett

in their own places—everybody stayed right where they “belonged.” I mean, down south Negroes were still riding in the backs of buses.
    By the end of the party, Duchamp had invited Taylor to his table when he realized that he was a famous underground actor/poet. I talked a lot to Duchamp and his wife, Teeny, who were great, and Taylor danced all night with Patty Oldenburg—she and Claes had been living in California for a year “to get the feel of a new environment,” she said, so they could send back a “bedroom” for a group exhibit at the Sidney Janis Gallery in early ’64. (Claes had done
The Store
on the Lower East Side in ’61, and in ’62 he’d changed the name of the Ray Gun Manufacturing Company to the Ray Gun Theater and staged happenings like
Injun
and
World’s Fair
and
Nekropolis
and
Voyages
and
Store Days
down there around all his soft sculpture.)
    They served pink champagne at the party, which tasted so good that I made the mistake of drinking a lot of it, and on the way home we had to pull over to the side of the road so I could throw up on the flora and fauna. In California, in the cool night air, you even felt healthy when you puked—it was so different from New York.
    Somewhere in here the girl who you could call my first female superstar arrived in Los Angeles—Naomi Levine. She was staying with the sculptor John Chamberlain and his wife, Elaine, in Santa Monica. Before we left New York, Gerard and Wynn had introduced us at a performance at the Living Theater on Sixth Avenue and 14th Street, and then we’d all gone up together to a black-tie opening at the Museum of Modern Art. Naomi was working at F. A. O. Schwarz, the Fifth Avenue toy store, but she was also making films; she was very film-studentish. Jonas Mekashad just printed something in his “Movie Journal” column in the
Voice
about one of her movies getting confiscated (and one of Jack Smith’s, too) by a New York film-processing lab for having nudity in it—and they hadn’t merely confiscated it, they’d gone ahead and actually destroyed it! Naomi said she was in L.A. to raise money for the Film-Makers’ Coop. But Gerard and Taylor kept claiming that she was in love with me and that that’s why she’d flown out, that she was disappointed we hadn’t invited her along for the ride.
    Out in Hollywood, I kept thinking about the silly, unreal way the movies there treated sex. After all, the early ones used to have sex and nudity—like Hedy Lamarr in
Ecstasy
—but then they suddenly realized that they were throwing away a good tease, that they should save it for a rainy day. Like, every ten years they would show another part of the body or say another dirty word on screen, and that would stretch out the box office for years, instead of just giving it away all at once. But then when foreign films and underground films started getting big, it threw Hollywood’s timetable off. They would have wanted to have everybody waiting out another twenty years to see total nudity while they milked every square inch of flesh. So Hollywood began to say that they were “protecting the public morality,” when the fact was they were just upset that they were going to be rushed into complete nudity when all along they’d been counting on lots of money from a long-drawn-out striptease.
    By this time I’d confessed to having my Bolex with me, and we decided to shoot a silent Tarzan movie around the bathtub in our suite at the Beverly Hills Hotel—with Taylor as Tarzan and Naomi as Jane.
    Wynn knew a tall, red-headed kid from Harvard named Denis Deegan out there who knew John Houseman, so then we did some filming at John’s house, where we met Jack Larson, who’d been Jimmy Olsen on television’s “Superman” and who at this point was writing operas. We all went down to the pool and Naomi took her clothes right off and