My First Article for Interview Magazine: “I’m a Woman, Darling”: The Life and Times of Warhol Superstar Holly Woodlawn

 

/ Pic: portrait of young Holly Woodlawn by Jack Mitchell, 1970 /

What a trip to be published in Interview (as in, the esteemed Andy Warhol’s Interview magazine, which celebrated its fifty-fifth anniversary last year). Believe me, as a teenager, I used to hungrily devour issues of Interview and the original incarnations of Details and Paper magazines every month! Read my ultra- juicy interview with author Jeff Copeland about his new book Love You Madly, Holly Woodlawn: A Walk on the Wild Side with Andy Warhol’s Most Fabulous Superstar (published this month by Feral House!). Copeland first met Woodlawn in 1989, co-wrote her rollicking 1991 memoirs A Low Life in High Heels and now – almost a decade after her death in 2015 – reflects on their stormy friendship in Love You Madly. Read the article to find out why Copeland calls Woodlawn his “auntie Mame”! 

To whet your appetite, a snippet from my introduction .. 

“Holly Woodlawn was Andy Warhol’s spiciest superstar, the Factory’s own Anna Magnani. Following her volcanic breakthrough performance in the Warhol-produced, Paul Morrissey-directed Trash (1970), the Puerto Rico-born transgender trailblazer would be immortalized by Lou Reed in the lyrics to his 1972 hit “Walk on the Wild Side,” dressed by Halston, photographed by Richard Avedon and feted by Truman Capote as “the face of the seventies” (although rumour has it the writer may have said those exact words to Woodlawn’s peer, Candy Darling, too). By the time the naïve aspiring screenwriter Jeff Copeland encountered Woodlawn in Los Angeles in 1989, the diva’s fortunes had taken a downturn. The odd couple would collaborate on Woodlawn’s 1991 autobiography A Low Life in High Heels and now, almost a decade after Woodlawn’s death, Copeland reflects on their friendship with exasperated affection in his juicy new book Love You Madly, Holly Woodlawn: A Walk on the Wild Side with Andy Warhol’s Most Fabulous Superstar …”

Read my article here. 

Reflections on ... The Velvet Underground documentary (2021)

Recently watched: Todd Haynes’ documentary The Velvet Underground (2021). My quick thoughts!

I found it hypnotic, but it’s intended for Velvet Underground fanatics (my boyfriend Pal and I watched it at The Institute of Contemporary Art. He found it numbing and admitted to almost falling asleep!). The first note of music you hear is the lacerating scrape of John Cale’s viola on “Venus in Furs.” It still sounds alien and abrasive! As the kids would say today, it’s a “deep dive”: Haynes is keen to provide context, so there's an emphasis on the early sixties avant-garde / experimental music and underground cinema subcultures that spawned The Velvet Underground in the first place. (I shuddered in ecstasy when clips from Kenneth Anger's Scorpio Rising and Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures cropped-up). As an unapologetic Nico obsessive, I was thrilled by how respectfully and seriously she’s depicted. (All too often she’s been dismissed as a footnote in The Velvet Underground story). In the past drummer Moe Tucker has spoken contemptuously about Nico, but in the doc, she clearly states that no one sang those three songs better and that it always sounds wrong when anyone else tries. (Tucker isn’t asked about her subsequent embrace of far-right Tea Party politics!). Either Gerard Malanga or Danny Fields notes that when Nico first emerged and wasn't famous yet in her own right, she'd get compared to Dietrich or Garbo as a reference point and that now other singers get compared to her. My interest in the VU peaks with the timeless 1967 debut album and once Warhol, Nico and Cale split, that's it for me. But it does make you wonder: why was Reed such an antagonistic prick? He's still an enigma. But Reed was very cute, sexy and charismatic in his youth so got away with murder. Reed's older sister Merrill - a therapist - is intensely likable. At one point we hear a sixties novelty song called "The Ostrich" that one of Reed's pre-Velvet Underground bands recorded, and she obligingly jumps up and does the dance that went with it! The perennially fierce Warhol superstar Mary Woronov is always a welcome presence. There's a fascinating home movie clip of life at Warhol’s Factory with everyone lounging around acting bored and sullen while a woman reads aloud horoscopes from the newspaper. Everyone pointedly ignores the camera except for International Velvet, who strikes pin-up poses and clearly yearns for attention. At the centre of the documentary is the conflict between “frenemies” Reed and Cale. It’s explained that as a child of the fifties, Reed’s musical imagination was steeped in doo-wop and rockabilly. The collision of that with Cale’s classical / experimental sensibilities resulted in the signature Velvet Underground and Nico sound. Haynes’ greatest triumph is that you completely forget watching it that there is virtually NO concert footage of The Velvet Underground performing in existence. He well and truly overcomes that obstacle.

Reflections on ... the death of Warhol Superstar Ivy Nicholson

/ Pictured: Ivy Nicholson in her 1950s supermodel heyday /

“Ivy Nicholson was a working-class girl from New York City who lit up the 1950s as one of Europe’s top fashion models, married a French count, posed topless for Salvador Dali and became one of the first “superstars” in Andy Warhol’s Factory. It was a flashbulb life built on bravado and sheer magnetism. But it was not a solid life, and when the 1960s ended and the big checks stopped coming, she was left on her own. She spent her last decades in or near poverty, sometimes homeless, telling anyone who would listen that she was on her way back up.” 

The New York Times obituary for erstwhile fashion model and Warhol Superstar Ivy Nicholson (née Irene Nicholson, 22 February 1933 - 25 October 2021) – who has died aged 88 – is compulsory reading! My highlights from her fabulous, messy life: 

“In her 20s Ms Nicholson appeared on the covers of Vogue, Elle, Cosmopolitan, Bazaar and other magazines. She built a reputation: fearlessly inventing characters and looks for her shoots, but often arriving hours late to the studio and refusing to pose until someone brought foie gras or met some other demand.” 

“When Howard Hawks flew her to Egypt in 1954 for a role in his epic movie Land of the Pharaohs, she objected to the studio’s multiyear contract. So, as she later told the story, she bit one of the actors to get out of the deal. Her replacement was Joan Collins.” 

“She went on to get small parts in Italian movies and by her account became obsessed with the actor Anthony Perkins. When he did not return her affections, she later said, she slit her wrists. The suicide attempt cost her a role in Federico Fellini’s 8½, according to her unfinished memoir.” 

Reading it, I was struck by Nicholson’s parallels with her fellow Warhol superstar Nico (another international supermodel in the fifties who actually did appear in a Fellini film) and Maila Nurmi (aka horror movie hostess Vampira), who also heedlessly squandered opportunities and burnt bridges in her prime and later lived in poverty. (Nurmi also romantically pursued Tony Perkins!).  

/ Andy Warhol and Ivy Nicholson in 1964 /

As a frequently homeless older woman, Nicholson maintained her sense of style and looked strikingly ravaged and wraith-like (like Nico, Chet Baker or Anita Pallenberg she exuded ruined glamour). Despite clearly difficult hardships, the admirably resilient Nicholson seemingly lived on her own terms and remained a free spirit until the end. What a woman! 

Read the full obituary here. 

See late-period portraits of Nicholson by photographer Conrad Ventur here. 

A nice insight into what Nicholson was like in her New York bag lady phase. 

Reflections on ... Brigid Berlin (6 September 1939 – 17 July 2020)

/ Portrait of Andy Warhol and his entourage of Superstars by Cecil Beaton, 1969. Left to right: Brigid Berlin, Candy Darling, Warhol and Ultra Violet /

Farewell to one of the last surviving Warhol Superstars (and last links to old-school New York bohemia) Brigid Berlin (sometimes known as Brigid Polk, 6 September 1939 – 17 July 2020), who has died aged 80. 

Like fellow Superstar Edie Sedgwick, Berlin was the wayward daughter from an old money high society family (her father was the chairman of the Hearst media empire) who jettisoned the role of debutante ordained for her to gleefully letting her freak flag fly at the Royal House of Warhol in the sixties and seventies instead. As Berlin herself explained, “My mother wanted me to be a slim respectable socialite … instead I became an overweight troublemaker.” 

/ Portrait of Brigid Berlin by Gerard Malanga, 1971 /

An outsized character in every sense (at one point her weight topped 300 pounds), Berlin is a ferocious, abrasive, frequently naked, sometimes scary and often hilariously funny presence in the underground cinema of Andy Warhol. Her performances in films like Chelsea Girls (1966), Imitation of Christ (1967), and Bad (1977) are rivetingly obnoxious. Berlin was also a notorious speed freak, who terrorized the unsuspecting in the VIP backroom of bohemian haunt Max’s Kansas City by jabbing them with her hypodermic needle of amphetamines. (Warhol films Berlin furiously ranting and shooting-up speed in Chelsea Girls). 

/ Dual Polaroid portrait of Berlin with fellow Warhol Superstar Nico, circa early seventies /

Berlin was also an artist in her own right, using the mediums of Polaroid photography and “tit prints” (dipping her own breasts into paint and pressing them onto paper). Until Warhol’s death, Berlin (who’d kicked amphetamines by this point) worked as the receptionist at his Interview magazine – albeit an extremely unconventional one. (She preferred to eat candy, knit and fuss over her pet dogs than answer telephones). It’s undeniably disillusioning and bizarre to learn that as she aged, the rebellious Berlin gradually reverted to type, ultimately becoming every bit as conservative as her patrician socialite mother. Towards the end of her life, Berlin was even a Trump supporter! I did warm to her, though, when I read that in Berlin’s reclusive housebound later years, she “cleaned obsessively, then cleaned some more.” For me, the unapologetically butch and androgynous Berlin exuded a “big dyke energy”, but the otherwise thorough New York Times obituary doesn’t touch on her sexual preferences or romantic life. Director John Waters was an admirer (Berlin made cameo appearances in Waters’ films Serial Mom (1994) and Pecker (1998) and he wrote the introduction to her coffee table book of Polaroid photography). In the NY Times obit he sweetly recalls, “I was scared of her in the best way.” Berlin is the subject of the 2000 documentary Pie in the Sky: The Brigid Berlin Story, which I clearly need to see.

Reflections on ... Andy Warhol's Heat (1972)

From the Facebook event page:

Together the inspired trio of pop art visionary Andy Warhol, director Paul Morrissey and leading man / homoerotic beefcake icon Joe Dallesandro collaborated on three notorious underground films. Cinema’s Sultan of Sleaze John Waters has hailed Flesh (1968), Trash (1970) and Heat (1972) as “the trilogy that changed the rules of male nudity in modern-day cinema both underground and in Hollywood.”  While all three movies are gritty, sordid classics of style and substance, I’d argue that Heat (the final and most polished of their efforts) is the most entertaining – and it’s this month’s Lobotomy Room film club selection! Wednesday 18 September!

A freaky and twisted black comedy, Heat is a loose remake Sunset Boulevard (1950) set amidst the desperate low-rent fringes of Hollywood’s underbelly. Dallesandro stars as a coldly calculating wannabe actor and hustler who finds himself caught between an aging washed-up actress (the magnificent Sylvia Miles – who died this June aged 94) and her mentally unstable daughter (doomed Warhol Superstar Andrea Feldman). Trust me - you’ve never seen anything quite like Heat! If you enjoy the squalid early “gutter films” of John Waters, Heat is a must-see!

Lobotomy Room Goes to the Movies is the FREE monthly film club downstairs at Fontaine’s bar (Dalston’s most unique nite spot!) devoted to Bad Movies We Love, specializing in the kitsch, the cult and the camp! Doors to the basement Bamboo Lounge open at 8 pm. Film starts at 8:30 pm prompt! We can accommodate thirty people maximum on film nights. Remember: the film is free so you can buy more cocktails! (One drink minimum).

“The New Hollywood in Andy Warhol’s Heat was a sleazy motel, frequented by has-been hustlers, sadistic lesbians, and moronic porn stars who masturbate by the pool, and run by a grossly overweight, sexually voracious tyrant in a ponytail and muumuu (wonderfully played by Pat Ast, whose couture muumuus were made by her boss, Halston). The only escape from this sun-bleached insane asylum is that haunted Hispano-Hollywood horror on the hill, the mortgaged-up manor of the formerly famous Sally Todd. (Actually, the house was formerly Boris Karloff’s). That’s where Joe ends up, in bed with his hostess. He’s pursued there by her emotionally disturbed daughter played by Andrea Feldman, another denizen of the motel, where she shares a room with her baby and a girlfriend who uses other women’s bodies as ashtrays.”

/ From Bob Colacello’s memoirs Holy Terror: Andy Warhol Close Up (1980) / 

“The film is like an open wound, and Sylvia is a kind of cross between Lana Turner and Gloria Swanson in Sunset Boulevard, eating her way through the movie like an emotional barracuda and leaving everyone around her for fishbait. The film is such a milestone in her career that everything else in her life is now referred to as “B.H.” (Before Heat).”

/ Rex Reed’s review of Heat /

“In [Paul] Morrissey’s Heat (1972), Dallesandro is cast as a washed-up child star angling for a comeback amid the hothouse improvisations of Sylvia Miles and Pat Ast. He has moved even further into a kind of waiting catatonia, but even at his most sedentary and unresponsive, Dallesandro signals that he is always on the make, occasionally throwing out a zinger when you least expect it just to prove that he can pay close attention to what’s going on around him when he wants to (but he usually doesn’t want to).” 

/ Dan Callahan's analysis of Joe Dallesandro’s performance in Heat in of The Chiseler /

(The following essay is cobbled-together from my onstage introduction to Heat, plus some additional random reflections)

Heat - the concluding chapter in the groundbreaking trilogy of frankly homoerotic underground films producer Andy Warhol, director Paul Morrissey and leading man Joe Dallesandro made together - is routinely cited as a parodying Billy Wilder’s macabre valentine to Old Hollywood, Sunset Boulevard (1950). It certainly shares the earlier film’s basic premise: a hungry, cynical young hustler (Joe Davis, played by Dallesandro) latches onto significantly older fading actress Sally Todd (Sylvia Miles) against the backdrop of jaundiced dog-eat-dog Hollywood.

But at least Norma Desmond – the deluded silent movie diva of Sunset Boulevard portrayed by Gloria Swanson – had once been genuine Hollywood royalty. In contrast, the seedy realm of Heat is the grubbier, low-rent fringe show business of minor players, losers, has-beens and never-weres, barely clinging-on. This is the toxic, destructive failure-haunted Hollywood of Nathanael West’s The Day of the Locust, Kenneth Anger’s Hollywood Babylon, the hard-scrabble existence of Edward D Wood Jr, the website Decaying Hollywood Mansions and David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive. Other characters (chiefly her sarcastic ex-husband and Jessie, her wayward daughter played by the doomed Andrea Feldman) derive great pleasure in denigrating Sally Todd as "an aging, practically unknown star," and an untalented one at that. A former child star now unemployed in adulthood, the zenith of Joe’s career was appearing in two TV series: Mousetime USA and the Western The Big Ranch. (The latter evokes Barbara Stanwyck’s 1960s TV Western vehicle The Big Valley, or Bonanza).

For her part, Todd frequently mentions guest-starring on “game shows”, which suggests Hollywood Squares, a kitschy refuge for show business has-beens in the seventies. Can’t you picture Sally slumming it in the square next to fellow panelist Paul Lynde? Todd’s wealth, it is clear, is chiefly as a result of marrying (and divorcing) well rather than her accomplishments as an actress. (This aspect is autobiographical for Miles herself. Married three times, she seemingly scored great divorce settlements and lived in high style in Manhattan in a covetable apartment overlooking Central Park – not the kind of lifestyle afforded by appearing in Warhol films or playing supporting roles in horror movies. After her death, it was reportedly discovered Miles was significantly richer than anyone anticipated).

Rex Reed is astute in referencing Lana Turner as well as Gloria Swanson in his review. Two queens of a certain age with a profound understanding of camp, both Morrissey and Warhol were well-versed in Golden Age Hollywood cinema and wittily draw-upon that knowledge in Heat. To Joe’s indifference, Sally occasionally launches into grand, wistful soliloquies about the demands of being an actress and how it compromised her maternal responsibilities. In these grandiose monologues (tinged with a Tennessee Williams flavor), Sally recalls Turner’s similar speeches in Douglas Sirk’s 1959 masterpiece Imitation of Life (which also covers the fractious relationship between an actress mother and her adolescent daughter, with both vying for the affections of the same man. Also, in real life Turner shared Sally Todd's erotic interest in Italian-American rough trade: recall her ill-fated romance with Johnny Stompanato).

/ Sylvia Miles as Sally Todd. Andrea Feldman as her daughter Jessie /

Interestingly, Morrissey himself has claimed that Heat was primarily inspired by The Blue Angel (1930), Josef von Sternberg’s cruel Weimar Republic-era study of sexual humiliation. In Morrissey’s gender-fucked variation, he positions Sally as a substitute for the pompous professor played by Emil Jannings, whose bourgeois life and stability is destroyed after a dalliance with an amoral heartbreaker (Joe standing-in for Marlene Dietrich’s jaded nightclub chanteuse Lola Lola. The comparison with Dietrich is illuminating: Morrissey’s camera obsessively fixates on Dallesandro’s enigmatic beauty just as surely Sternberg’s did with his glamourpuss muse decades earlier).

One more possible allusion to Sunset Boulevard too delicious not to mention: when she takes Joe on a tour of her mansion, Sally mentions that at one point it belonged to a crazy old silent actress from the 1920s with a huge menagerie of cats. That passing reference can’t help but conjure the phantom of Norma Desmond.

Some further fun facts about Heat: the film was rated X, but – unlike Flesh and Trash – there is no full-frontal nudity this time.  Warhol’s infamous trio of drag queen Superstars (Candy Darling, Holly Woodlawn, Jackie Curtis) are also notably absent.

/ Examining this photo more closely: is it just me, or was Miles originally topless in this shot and a censor scribbled-on a black "boob tube" with a Sharpie marker? /

Sally Todd’s palatial 36-roomed mansion formerly belonged to Boris Karloff (aka horror movie icon and the screen’s definitive Frankenstein's monster).

The soundtrack is composed by John Cale of The Velvet Underground.

Jess’s much-neglected baby is played by Joe Dallesandro, Jr – Joe Dallesandro’s own son.

The filming of Heat took place on location in Hollywood in July 1971 (an anomaly for a Warhol film, which were usually made in New York) and lasted two weeks.

Warhol himself wasn’t present for the filming in Los Angeles (he was occupied with business at The Factory). His creative contribution was to phone the three lead actresses every night to anger them up and pit them against each other. The ploy worked beautifully: their interactions onscreen seethe with palpable hostility.

The emphasis on glistening, rippling sun-dappled blue swimming pools – and beautiful semi-naked men swimming in them – rivals anything found in a David Hockney painting from the same period.

In commercial terms, Heat was a triumph. It cost somewhere between $50,000 - $100,000 to make and recouped a reported $2 million at the US box office alone. But this success never led to any interest from major studios. Perhaps the oeuvre of Paul Morrissey, Andy Warhol and Joe Dallesandro was simply too barbed, abrasively strange and flagrantly queer to assimilate into mainstream Hollywood.

Thoughts on the main players in Heat: bear in mind that the dialogue is improvised. Morrissey would sketch out the action and what was required in a scene, and the actors adlibbed the rest. The performances are genuinely remarkable. Let’s examine the lead actors in greater depth.

Here’s the tribute I wrote online when Sylvia Miles death was announced in June 2019:  

Sad to read that wild, volatile and utterly distinctive character actress and New York scene-maker Sylvia Miles (9 September 1924 - 12 June 2019) has died aged 94. Instantly recognizable for her nasal nicotine-stained rasp, lion’s mane of disheveled bouffant blonde hair and raw-boned jolie laide beauty, Miles could give masterclasses in scene-stealing and had the volcanic, uninhibited disposition of an American version of Mediterranean actresses like Anna Magnani or Melina Mercouri. Like Magnani, Miles is one of those actresses who never seemed to be young: she didn’t get her big break until she was middle-aged and she is forever fixed in the popular imagination as the overtly sexual, borderline shrew-ish “woman of a certain age”. (I joked when introducing Heat, it’s easy to believe Miles was born already aged 42, with a cigarette in her mouth). 

Miles, of course, made an indelible impression (and won an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actress) for her six-minute appearance as a brassy middle-aged hooker in Midnight Cowboy (1969). (“I'm one hell of a gorgeous chick!” she furiously raves, correctly). I have no affection for Midnight Cowboy (overrated, sentimental, casually homophobic and misogynistic film with a condescending attitude towards the Warhol underground milieu) but for me Miles slays it! Forget Jon Voight and Dustin Hoffman: I wish the film had been all about her!

/ Sylvia Miles in Midnight Cowboy (1969) /

Infinitely superior is the Andy Warhol-produced, Paul Morrissey-directed black comedy Heat (1972), a loose remake of Sunset Boulevard with Miles in the Gloria Swanson role as an aging, insecure actress hustled by unscrupulous young stud Joe Dallesandro. Both Miles and Dallesandro spend long swathes of the film in various stages of nudity, and both are fearless and magnificent. In fact, I need to play Heat at one of my Lobotomy Room film clubs – it’s essential! The last thing I ever recall seeing Miles in was a 2002 episode of Sex and The City as a geriatric borderline bag lady in a diner, sprinkling lithium on her chocolate ice cream. She’s meant to represent a warning to Carrie Bradshaw (if she grows old and single in New York, this could be her fate). I’d argue you could do a lot worse than grow old to be Sylvia Miles! "I have always had the temperament of an actress, which is just an excuse for volatile behavior,” Miles explained to People magazine in 1976. What a woman! If you only read one obituary for Miles, read New York gossip columnist Michael Musto’s frank, funny and affectionate eulogy. He recounts a possibly apocryphal anecdote about Miles at New York’s Russian Tea Room: “a waiter allegedly asked, "How do you like your coffee, Miss Miles?" Sylvia saucily replied, "Like I like my men." The waiter shot back: "Sorry, we don't serve gay coffee.”” 

/ Sylvia Miles as Sally Todd in Heat (1972). Visible in background: Andrea Feldman as Jessie /

As I argue above, Miles is fearless in Heat in multiple ways: she’s unafraid appear nude onscreen – with her lush but mature and imperfect body - opposite the impossibly buff, considerably younger Joe Dallesandro. But she’s also unafraid to risk looking desperate, needy, shrill and even grotesque (see also: Susan Tyrrell). Her performance is a torrent of raw emotion and Heat is Miles’ finest moment.

It’s difficult to conceive of anyone but Miles as woman-on-the-verge-of-a-nervous-breakdown Sally Todd, but apparently at one point desiccated, hard-drinking Golden Age Hollywood casualty Veronica Lake was considered for the part. At the time erstwhile 1940s film noir femme fatale Lake was emerging from her destitute and alcoholic wilderness years (her autobiography was published in 1969. She appeared in her last-ever film – the mortifying low-budget horror movie Flesh Feast – in 1970). Pictured above: Lake at a cocktail party with Warhol, Superstar Candy Darling and Paul Morrissey in 1971, presumably discussing Heat. Fascinating as the thought of Lake as Sally is (would she have consented to the nude love scenes with Dallesandro?), ultimately Miles owns the part. Lake died in 1973 aged 50.

Joe Dallesandro – the Marlon Brando or more accurately, the taciturn Robert Mitchum of Warhol’s Factory – is now 70 and the sole star of Heat still alive. In his youth Dallesandro was dismissed by critics as a male bimbo or mere eye candy, but in recent years he has been reappraised as a genuinely compelling actor. Onscreen he is a gloriously deadpan, utterly casual and riveting presence: just try to tear your eyes from him.  Conventional mainstream actors like Brad Pitt, Ben Affleck or Matt Damon would kill to possess an iota of Dallesandro’s nonchalance and effortless animal grace. In his lyrical appreciation of Dallesandro’s persona, Dan Callahan of The Chiseler notes that “Like Marilyn Monroe and James Dean, Dallesandro knew exactly what to offer to a still camera, assuming all the attitudes from Back Off to Come Hither to Take Care Of Me. And always, essentially, he is distant and removed, which is his real trick, the thing that keeps people coming back for more. Often fully naked on screen, Dallesandro offers all of that bounty to the camera, but he keeps himself to himself.” In contrast to the histrionic performances of the women in Heat, as predatory stud Joe he is an oasis of calm. Dallesandro is far too cool to ever project or emote.

/ Joe Dallesandro and Pat Ast in Heat / 

Briefly: before falling into Warhol’s orbit in 1967, Dallesandro (born 1948) had already endured a bumpily eventful life as a tough Italian-American teenage juvenile delinquent (according to Wikipedia: "at age 15, he was expelled from school for punching the school principal"), who stole cars, clashed with the police and spent stints in foster homes and reform schools. Sigh. Who doesn’t love a bad boy? Of course, Dallesandro was blessed with sensational looks and a muscled physique so exquisite it recalled Michelangelo’s David (but with tattoos, and if David spoke with a surly Noo Yawk accent). No wonder Morrisey and Warhol were instantly awe-struck by him. As a teenager he may have hustled older gay men for money (Lou Reed certainly implies this in the lyrics to “Walk on the Wild Side”. I think Dallesandro has gone on the record to dispute he was ever a sex worker). But Dallesandro certainly modeled nude and baby-oiled for vintage beefcake homo porn photographers like Bob Mizer of Athletic Model Guild. 

/ Dallesandro by Bob Mizer of Athletic Model Guild /

Post-Heat, Morrissey and Dallesandro would collaborate on two gruesome Euro-horror films (Flesh for Frankenstein and Blood for Dracula, both 1974). Then Dallesandro would remain in the Continent, working in intriguing low-budget European art and exploitation films. These obscurities are frequently difficult to see, but I do have fond memories of Je t’aime, moi non plus (1976) directed by none other than France’s dissolute Marquis de Sade of pop, Serge Gainsbourg. Back in the US, Dallesandro would struggle with alcoholism, heroin addiction and periods of obscurity and poverty. (Being an underground film cult figure and gay icon isn’t lucrative – who knew?). In the 1980s when the acting gigs dried-up Dallesandro made ends meet working as a chauffeur. Happily married and now a grandfather, today he manages an apartment building in Los Angeles.

With her snarling, eye-rolling and bitchily acidic line deliveries as Lydia the sexually insatiable hotel proprietoress, Pat Ast (1941 - 2001) strikingly anticipates the shout-y antagonistic acting style associated with the cinema of John Waters.  (Ast would have slotted effortlessly into a Waters film like Desperate Living (1977). Watching her as Lydia, you can easily imagine Divine playing this role). Ast was a character actress and model / muse of the fashion designer Halston in the disco-era (like Divine, Ast knew how to rock a caftan). Aside from Heat, probably her most noteworthy other film is the women-in-prison exploitation film Reform School Girls (1986). (She portrays a sadistic lesbian prison matron, needless to say). Ast more than holds her own in Heat, whether flirting outrageously with Dallesandro or in in her furious show-downs with Miles and Feldman. Sadly, she died aged 59 from diabetes complications. What a fierce presence Pat Ast was! Heat is a testament to her talent and charisma.

/ Not exactly mother of the year: Andrea Feldman as neglectful mommy Jessie /

Andrea Feldman (1948 – 1972) plays Jessie, Sally Todd’s bratty daughter. Like Edie Sedgwick before her, Feldman was a profoundly troubled poor little rich girl with drug and mental health problems whose parents couldn’t cope with her and who latched onto Warhol’s Factory scene as a surrogate family. Also like Sedgwick, she was doomed to die young.  Feldman first encountered Warhol in 1967 and had already played small roles in a few Warhol films before Heat (as a young starlet on the ascent she makes vivid appearances in Imitation of Christ (1967) and Trash (1970)). Off-screen Feldman was a notorious amphetamine-addled exhibitionist whose penchant for black or blue lipstick prefigured punk fashion. As a fixture in the grungy New York nightclub Max’s Kansas City she used to climb atop tables, belt-out “Everything’s Coming Up Roses” and strip naked for attention. She committed suicide aged 24 on 8 August 1972, three weeks before the premiere of Heat, leaping from the 14th floor window of 51 Fifth Avenue in New York at 4:30 pm. Feldman reportedly jumped clutching a Bible and a crucifix (accounts vary: some say she held a can of Coke in one hand and a rosary in the other), so her suicide was evidently staged as a kind of pop  / performance art statement. (Apparently, her suicide note declared, “I’m going for the big time! I hit the jackpot!”).

Warhol, is of course, routinely accused of exploiting his vulnerable superstars and many find Feldman in Heat problematic. Certainly, when we see Feldman very convincingly cracking-up in Heat, it’s hard to gauge whether it’s acting or real distress. What can’t be denied is that the feral Feldman is a genuinely funny, strange and original comedic performer.  That flat, irritating whiny voice! The whiplash mood swings! She’s a freaky naïve “outsider actress” in the same elite tradition as John Waters regular Edith Massey. No drama school on earth could teach someone to act like Massey, or like Feldman does in Heat.  Who knows what Feldman could have achieved post-Heat? Her acting garnered mostly positive reviews (Judith Christ of New York magazine praised her performance as “a mass of psychotic confusion, infantile and heart-breaking”). All these decades later, Andrea Feldman still confounds.

The most disturbing actor in Heat arguably isn’t Feldman, though – it’s the impish Eric Emerson (1945 – 1975) as the most perverse resident of Lydia’s hotel complex. (The cute but seemingly perennially stoned Emerson had already appeared in Warhol’s Chelsea Girls (1967) and Lonesome Cowboys (1968)). As “Eric”, he plays one of two brothers who perform an x-rated nightclub act where they have sex together onstage. The hunky other brother emerges as relatively sane, but Emerson plays his role as a creepily childlike, mute village idiot unselfconsciously jerking-off poolside while wearing knee-socks and a white babydoll dress. (His androgynous little girl attire heralds the “kinderwhore” style that Courtney Love would sport in the 1990s. The golden-haired Emerson is considerably prettier than Love, though). In the context of Heat, Emerson would appear to embody what Morrissey and Warhol interpret as Hollywood’s corrupt id.

In conclusion: in my introduction, I suggested that if there was sufficient demand I'd happily screen Flesh and Trash at future Lobotomy Room film clubs. Considering only four (yes, four) people came to our presentation of Heat, that won't be happening! I'm still glad I showed Heat, though.

The next Lobotomy Room film club:

Attention, Scream Queens! In honour of Halloween, for the October Lobotomy Room film club presentation we’ve scheduled the apogee of the “hagsploitation” genre Hush ... Hush, Sweet Charlotte (1964) starring Bette Davis at her most frenzied! Wednesday 16 October! Come and settle-in for an evening of spine-tingling Southern Gothic horror in the Tiki splendour of Fontaine's Bamboo Lounge!

Lobotomy Room Goes to the Movies is the FREE monthly film club downstairs at Fontaine’s bar (Dalston’s most unique nite spot!) devoted to Bad Movies We Love, specializing in the kitsch, the cult and the queer! (Our motto: Bad Movies for Bad People!). Remember: admission is FREE so that you can buy more cocktails! (One drink minimum).

Event page

Further reading:

Read my reflections on Andy Warhol's BAD (1977) here.

In August 2018 I spoke my brains to To Do List magazine about the wild, wild world of Lobotomy Room, the monthly cinema club – and my lonely one-man mission to return a bit of raunch, sleaze and “adult situations” to London’s nightlife! Read it - if you must - here. 

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Reflections on ... Nico in The Closet (1966)

/ Nico and Randy Bourscheidt in The Closet (1966) /

(In honour of what would have been Nico’s 80^th birthday (16 October 1938), here – a day late! – is my analysis of her first-ever Andy Warhol film collaboration, The Closet (1966). I saw it many years ago when the British Film Institute held a comprehensive retrospective season of Warhol films).

The Closet (1966) was Nico's first film with Pop Art visionary Andy Warhol and represents her cinematic unveiling as a Warhol Superstar. It would be a fruitful relationship. As the Factory's inscrutable Garbo / Dietrich equivalent she would star in several more Warhol films (most famously Chelsea Girls) while also featuring as chanteuse for Warhol's "house band" The Velvet Underground.

The "plot" is absurdist and minimal: a couple living in a closet kill the time (they make small talk, split a sandwich, share a cigarette, kvetch about their cramped surroundings) and contemplate leaving but never do.

For the first few moments the camera is focused on the exterior of the shut closet door in grainy black and white as we hear only their voices (audible but muffled; in fact the sound remains muffled for the rest of the film, poor sound quality being a stylistic trademark of Warhol's films at the time). Creeping horror that the entire 66-minute film will stay like this is averted when the door belatedly does open and we are finally permitted to see Nico and leading man Randy Bourscheidt (a preppy, cute art student-type) seated inside the closet surrounded by hangers, ties, clothes, etc. While the couple talk or sit in silence, Warhol's camera either sits totally stationary or prowls restlessly and randomly.

The film is unscripted: instead we get an improvised, wandering conversation between the duo who have obviously been instructed to ad-lib for the 66-minute duration. Most Warhol Superstars were amphetamine-fueled, garrulous exhibitionists; Nico and Bourscheidt are atypically more reticent. Both seem shy and hesitant and their conversation is often stilted but characterized by a genuine sweetness on both parts. Some viewers have deciphered the hint of a physical attraction between them which is complicated by the pretty, long-lashed and collegiate-looking Bourscheidt's apparent homosexuality (I could be wrong about this. The expression "coming out of the closet" was probably already in use in the 1960s and could be a relevant coded meaning to the film's title).

Certainly Bourscheidt seems dazzled by Nico, which is understandable: The Closet presents her at the height of her flaxen-haired beauty. It also reveals the complexity of her persona. The performers in Warhol films are essentially playing themselves, so The Closet is a snapshot of Nico the woman at this particular point in her life rather than an actress performing a role. She looks like a statuesque Nordic Amazon but is wispily-spoken, reserved and uncertain rather than intimidating or forbidding -- her sweetness dispels the cliché of Nico as ice maiden. And her voice - routinely described as guttural or "Germanic" - is infinitely softer than you expect.

As an avant-garde filmmaker Warhol withholds most of the conventional pleasures audiences expect from films (narrative, character development, editing, technical proficiency , etc) but with his Superstars in lead roles he does provide one of the enduring attractions of film-watching: scrutinizing beautiful people. So while "nothing happens" in The Closet, we do get to appreciate the physical attractiveness and hip wardrobes of both Nico and Bourscheidt at great length. Nico wears what was then her signature look: an androgynous white pants suit, turtle neck and boots combo that would be the pride of any Mod boy, feminized by a curtain of long blonde hair.

Nico would have been in her late twenties by the time of The Closet, and Bourscheidt (at a guess) between 19 and 22. She speaks to him in tones that are somewhere between maternal concern and big sister-ly teasing. Both seem vaguely embarrassed and self-conscious on screen, but unlike Bourscheidt Nico has the poised armour of sophistication: by 1965 she had already modeled since her teens, spoke several languages, acted in films like La Dolce Vita (1959) and Strip-Tease (1963) in Europe, was the mother of a young son, and had started her singing career.

She also has the skills of a fashion model: she is clearly un-phased by the camera's roaming gaze and is skilled at graceful self-presentation. She has a neat trick of looking down moodily so that her long blonde bangs obscure most of her face and then suddenly looking up and tilting her head, dramatically revealing sculpted cheekbones, Bardot lips and sweeping false eyelashes.

"Are you afraid of me?" Nico suddenly asks Bourscheidt towards the end of their awkward filmic encounter. He looks startled and doesn't know how to reply. "I'm not trying to embarrass you!" She assures.

At the the film's conclusion Bourscheidt teasingly asks Nico if she's forgotten his name. She has, and tries to cover by asking him, "Is it Romeo?" He says no and she says, "Why not?" He asks if she wants him to be Romeo and should he get down on one knee. She replies, "Oh, no. You be Juliet and I'll be Romeo."

Further reading:

I’ve blogged about the Nico - the doomed chain-smoking Edith Piaf of the Blank Generation - many times: her contemporary Marianne Faithfull reflects on Nico; the historic encounter When John Waters Met Nico; Nico’s 1960s modelling days; how the old jazz standard “My Funny Valentine” (and heroin) connects Nico with Chet Baker; When Patti Smith Met Nico; Nico in the film Le Bleu des origines; Nico in the Warhol film Ari and Mario; Leonard Cohen's personal and musical fixation on Nico.  

Reflections on … Ari and Mario (1966)

/ The ever-inscrutable Nico (1938 - 1988): Warhol Superstar, Velvet Underground chanteuse, heroin-ravaged diva and “possessor of the most haunting wraith cheekbones of the 20th century” (thank you, James Wolcott of Vanity Fair) /

What's a busy single mother and Warhol Superstar to do? Nico needs to go out so, naturally, calls on Puerto Rican drag queen / underground film starlet Mario Montez to baby-sit her young son Ari Boulogne at her cramped apartment in New York's louche Chelsea Hotel.

/ Ari and Nico: this is very much how they appear in Ari and Mario /

High jinks ensue: cherub-faced Ari is adorable but so hyperactive and wild he is virtually feral. Montez offers to read to him, sing to him and dance for him, but Ari is oblivious to her charms and more interested in alternately pretending to be a crocodile and a cowboy and shooting her with his toy gun (towards the end Montez finally snaps, "Can't you find something else to shoot at?"). Off-screen from behind the camera director Andy Warhol himself is frequently audible encouraging urging Ari to misbehave.

All the "action" takes place within the confined space of the tiny kitchen and there is no editing. The film feels like a home movie (it’s filmed in grainy Super 8 but in grunge-y bleached-out colour instead of black and white), albeit a home movie with an exceptionally hip and stylish bohemian cast.

/ Andy Warhol and Mario Montez during the making of The Chelsea Girls (1966) /

In lieu of narrative the film is primarily an affectionate character study of the unlikely duo of three-year-old boy and transvestite. Warhol's more famous Superstar transvestites Candy Darling, Jackie Curtis and Holly Woodlawn emerged later; the rather swarthy Mario Montez (1935-2013) can be seen as their precursor. Montez (real name: Rene Rivera from Brooklyn, with a day job at the post office) was the then-reigning drag queen of choice for underground filmmakers in the early sixties: she'd already worked with Jack Smith in the notorious Flaming Creatures (1963) and appeared in off-Broadway plays; Montez and Nico would both subsequently feature in Warhol's The Chelsea Girls (1966), also set at the Chelsea Hotel. For her baby-sitting assignment Montez chooses to wear an incongruous ensemble of long powder-blue taffeta evening gown, blonde bouffant wig, dangling earrings and heavily-layered clown-like make-up.

/ Pioneering Warhol drag queen superstar Mario Montez /

Ari (born 1962) was the son Nico claimed was fathered by the European art cinema heartthrob Alain Delon (to this day Delon denies paternity). Certainly, if Ari is the offspring of Nico and Delon he inherited their looks: he is an exceptionally beautiful child.

Montez, befitting an exhibitionistic, attention-seeking Warhol Superstar, is acutely conscious of being filmed and is eager to seize the opportunity to perform but when she offers to entertain Ari by singing for him, Ari shakes his head no. She sings "Ten Little Indians" anyway; Ari stonily ignores her. In keeping with the cowboys and Indians theme, when Montez improvises an interpretative Indian squaw dance, Ari hides his face behind a curtain rather than watch her. It's Montez's exasperated attempts to both try to relate to Ari and to maintain her sweet-voiced, lady-like demeanor that make Ari and Mario one of Warhol's funniest and most likable films.

Early in the film the actress, jazz singer and fellow Chelsea Hotel habitué Tally Brown (another veteran of both Warhol and Jack Smith films) makes a brief but vivid appearance. She drops by to use Nico's phone: hers has been cut off because hasn't paid the bill. A charismatic figure in a fur hat and suede go-go boots, she speaks to Ari in French with genuine warmth, asking if he knows any songs. When Ari answers No, Tally points out, “Your mother is a singer” but Ari doesn't reply.

/ Above: Tally Brown photographed by Billy Name at Max's Kansas City in the sixties /

When Nico returns from her outing she sits on the floor and talks casually in her whisper-soft German accent to Montez while Ari tears around, sometimes playing with the off-screen Warhol. The film captures a radiantly beautiful Nico with almost waist-length pale blonde hair, looking fashion model-elegant in a man's navy-blue pea coat over a turtleneck sweater and pinstriped hipster trousers.

Knowledge of Nico's biography foreshadows Ari and Mario with a tragic extra resonance. She has been routinely vilified in print for her parenting ability, with some justification. Not long after the film Nico would hand Ari over to Alain Delon's parents in France to raise and descend into heroin addiction. More damningly, the general consensus is that later in life when they were reunited Nico initiated the adult Ari into heroin use.

In Ari and Mario, though, we see only relaxed, unaffected affection between Nico and her young son. Pouring him orange juice, Nico teases, "Ari doesn't love me anymore." At one point Ari approaches and spontaneously plants a kiss on the side of Nico's face then goes back to careening around like a Tasmanian devil. The sight of Nico and Ari at this point in their lives when there would seemingly be so much potential and optimism ahead for them, you can't help but feel a wave of sadness for the despair, addiction and premature death that awaits them both in the future. (Nico died in 1988 aged 49).

Devoid of his usual cocktail of sadomasochism and amphetamines, Ari and Mario's emphasis on innocence and domesticity is a sweet exception in the Warhol canon.

I've blogged about "the Marlene Dietrich of Punk" Nico many times over the years: her contemporary Marianne Faithfull reflects on Nico here; the historic encounter When John Waters Met Nico; Nico’s 1960s modelling days; how the old jazz standard “My Funny Valentine” (and heroin) connects Nico with Chet Baker; When Patti Smith Met Nico and finally, the relationship between Leonard Cohen and Nico.