Free Andy Warhol by Wayne Koestenbaum Page B

September 1963—a few months before filming Haircut (No. 1) —Warhol drove across the country to Los Angeles to see his Elvis paintings exhibited at the Ferus Gallery; with him in the car were the underground film actor Taylor Mead, the painter Wynn Chamberlin, and Gerard Malanga. (Warhol himself didn’t drive; he sat in the backseat.) While in Los Angeles he met Marcel Duchamp, attended the Duchamp retrospective at the Pasadena Art Museum, as well as a movie-star party thrown in his honor by Dennis Hopper; among the guests were Suzanne Pleshette, Russ Tamblyn, Sal Mineo, and Troy Donahue, subject already of a Warhol silkscreen. Andy had crashed through the wall separating star from fan; at last he was mingling with screen glamour. He loved California. In an interview he said, “I think the people in California are good because, well, they’re more naked.” In POPism , he expressed the pleasures of Hollywood, his visionary ideal: “Vacant, vacuous Hollywood was everything I ever wanted to mold my life into. Plastic. White-on-white. I wanted to live my life at the level of the script of The Carpetbaggers —it looked like it would be so easy to just walk into a room the way those actors did and say those wonderful plastic lines.” California was easy. On this trip, in a hotel room, Andy took out his penis and asked Taylor to suck it; Taylor was offended.
    The thwarted pass, no insult, formed part of Andy’s concerted homage to offbeat, dissident manhood, a tribute that climaxed in the films he made with Taylor as star. Taylor was already known to followers of hidden cinema for his roles as a deaf-mute drug pusher in a 1959 film, Too Young, Too Immoral , and in the experimental filmmaker Ron Rice’s The Flower Thief (1960). As Mead said to me, “Andy Warhol didn’t create me as a Superstar. I was a Superstar.” He was also, like Malanga and Giorno, a poet. One eye sags downward; Taylor’s features, a dolorous Stan Laurel’s, droop from mirth at the impossibility of expressing grief.
    Warhol loved Adonises, but he also appreciated men who were, like him, odd-looking. His films didn’t merely reiterate the physical ideals promulgated by classical art and later by the nudie output of Robert Mizer’s Athletic Model Guild, the Los Angeles house of flesh, which gave work to Joe Dallesandro before he entered the Warhol Factory; rather, Warhol pitted muscular studs against avowedly (and proudly) “nelly” comedians like Mead.
    The Mattachine Society’s Newsletter , house organ of the homophilic organization, precursor to gay lib, was not pleased with Warhol’s cinematic oeuvre (“How dare they present their horseplay to an audience looking for Art?”), but its reviewer aptly summarized the action of Tarzan and Jane Regained. . .  Sort Of, the first film that Warhol made with Mead, shot in Los Angeles in late September or early October 1963: the film, “a loosely connected series of self-consciously cute episodes, stars Taylor Mead, whose major problem as an underfed yet amazingly athletic Tarzan, involves keeping his scanty leopard-skin briefs from falling below the knees.” (Mead edited the film.) In one scene, he takes a dump, roadside, and wipes himself: the movie, loving the infantile and the unfettered, dwells on Taylor’s rear end. In the second reel, Andy himself appears on screen; directing, he smacks Taylor’s ass. The briefs (or loincloth) continue to drop and drop, an entropy toward nudity that expresses Warhol’s own ideological preference for nakedness in others. As he said in an interview, “I don’t really believe in clothes.”
    The next Warhol/Mead film more explicitly celebrated—even as it mocked—Taylor’s body. Entitled Taylor Mead’s Ass , it was a response to a filmmaker who wrote to the Village Voice to complain about a Warhol movie featuring two hours of Taylor