Free POPism by Andy Warhol, Pat Hackett Page A

jumped in the water. Taylor was supposed to climb a tree but he couldn’t, so he yelled for a stunt man. Dennis appeared and climbed the tree to get a coconut for him. (When Taylor saw the rushes back in New York, he said, “You know, I’ve always liked Dennis’s acting, but it’s usually so rigid. This is the most relaxed on camera I’ve ever seen him.” In ’69 when
Easy Rider
came out, Taylor reminded me of that day again. “I think that afternoon by the pool was a turning point for Dennis,” he said. “It opened up new possibilities for him.” Maybe so, I thought. You never know where people will pick things up and where they won’t.)
    We moved out of the Beverly Hills Hotel to the Venice Pier where Taylor had lived when he was going to the Pasadena Playhouse in the fifties. He still knew a lot of people there. We threw a party by the carousel that Taylor sort of planned and since he was a vegetarian, it was all cheese. But it was hot weather and the cheese was smelly and it ran all over everything, and people were hopping around picking the splinters they’d gotten from the wooden horses out of themselves and wiping the runny cheese off their hands.
    Another party that I especially remember from the two weeks we were in California was given for us by a sort of eccentric Green Stamps heir at the house of a friend of his. Louis Beech Marvin III was building his own house out there, an enormous round thing called Moonfire Ranch in Topanga Canyon with a bed that went up on pylons twenty or thirty feet in theair—he had fourteen white German shepherds guarding the place. (What he really wanted to do, he said, was buy an island and have it be like Noah’s Ark, with a pair of every animal on it. He did get his island, and he got a lot of the animals, too, but they were always dying on him.) Meanwhile, while he was building this incredible house, he lived on the grounds in a trailer filled with dirty laundry.
    For a while there in the early sixties, it looked like a real solid art scene was developing in California. Even Henry Geldzahler felt he had to make a trip out once a year to check on what was happening. But there weren’t enough dealers there and the museums weren’t active enough, and the people just weren’t buying art—they were satisfied looking at the scenery, I guess.
    We took the
Easy Rider
route back, through Vegas, then down through the southern states.
    Right after we got back to New York we sent the
Tarzan
film to the lab. (We used to give our film to a go-between, a little old lady, who would bring it over to Kodak for us.) When the rushes came back, Taylor decided he would edit it himself, so he worked on cutting and splicing it and he put a sound-on-tape sound track on and we went over to Jerome Hill’s at the Algonquin Hotel one night to screen it.
    Jerome was the grandson of the Minnesota railroad magnate James Hill and he was as generous as he was rich. He was busy shooting
Open the Door and See All the People
in 16-mm, which Taylor had been in, too. He had also made
Sand Castles
, and through his private foundation he supported a lot of artistic projects—groups like the Living Theater.
    A young actor by the name of Charles Rydell was at that
Tarzan
screening. We had a mutual friend named Nancy Marchwho’d introduced us in the pouring rain on my first day in New York years before. Charles had been working in Nedick’s then, and I was just off the bus from Pittsburgh, but I hadn’t seen him—at least, not to talk to—since. However, I’d happened to catch his performance in
Lady in the Dark
with Kitty Carlisle at the Bucks County Playhouse, and I told him so right away. He thought I was putting him on—he looked at me as if to say, “Oh, come on—
no
body saw me in that.” He was a very big man with a big temper and a great sense of humor. He could really bellow, and he had the