B: Hospitals are unbelievable.
A: When I was dying I had to write my name on a check.
Before I was shot, I always thought that I was more half-there than all-there—I always suspected that I was watching TV instead of living life. People sometimes say that the way things happen in the movies is unreal, but actually it's the way things happen to you in life that's unreal. The movies make emotions look so strong and real, whereas when things really do happen to you, it's like watching television—you don't feel anything.
Right when I was being shot and ever since, I knew that I was watching television. The channels switch, but it's all television. When you're really really involved with something, you're usually thinking about something else. When something's happening, you fantasize about other things. When I woke up somewhere—I didn't know it was at the hospital and that Bobby Kennedy had been shot the day after I was— I heard fantasy words about thousands of people being in St. Patrick's Cathedral praying and carrying on, and then I heard the word "Kennedy" and that brought me back to the television world again because then I realized, well, here I was, in pain.
So I was shot at my place of business: Andy Warhol Enterprises. At that point, in 1968, Andy Warhol Enterprises consisted of a few people who worked for me on a fairly regular basis, a lot of what you might call free-lancers who worked on specific projects, and a lot of "superstars" or "hyperstars" or whatever you can call all the people who are very talented, but whose talents are hard to define and almost impossible to market. That was the "staff" of Andy Warhol Enterprises in those days. An interviewer asked me a lot of questions about how I ran my office and I tried to explain to him that I don't really run it, it runs me. I used a lot of phrases like "bring home the bacon" so he didn't really understand what I was talking about.
The whole time I was in the hospital, the "staff" kept on doing things, so I realized I really did have a kinetic business, because it was going on without me. I liked realizing that, because I had by that time decided that "business" was the best art.
Business art is the step that comes after Art. I started as a commercial artist, and I want to finish as a business artist. After I did the thing called "art" or whatever it's called, I went into business art. I wanted to be an Art Businessman or a Business Artist. Being good in business is the most fascinating kind of art. During the hippie era people put down the idea of business—they'd say, "Money is bad," and "Working is bad," but making money is art and working is art and good business is the best art.
In the beginning not everything in Andy Warhol Enterprises was organized too well. We went from art right into business when we made an agreement to provide a certain theater with one movie a week. This made our movie-making commercial, and led us from short movies into long movies into feature movies. We learned a little bit about distribution and soon we started trying to distribute the movies ourselves, but we found out that that was just too hard. I didn't expect the movies we were doing to be commercial. It was enough that the art had gone into the stream of commerce, out into the real world. It was very heady to be able to look and see our movie out there in the real world en a marquee instead of in there in the art world. Business art. Art business. The Business Art Business.
I always like to work on leftovers, doing the leftover things. Things that were discarded, that everybody knew were no good, I always thought had a great potential to be funny. It was like recycling work. I always thought there was a lot of humor in leftovers. When I see an old Esther Williams movie and a hundred girls are jumping off their swings, I think of what the auditions must have been like and about all the takes where maybe one girl didn't have the nerve to jump when she was supposed to, and I think about her left over on the swing. So that take of the scene was a leftover on the editing-room floor—an out-take—and the girl was probably a leftover at that point—she was probably fired— so the whole scene is much funnier than the real scene where everything went right, and the girl who didn't jump is the star of the out-take.
I'm not saying that popular taste is bad so that what's left over from the bad taste is good: I'm saying that what's left over is probably bad, but if you can take it and make it good or at least interesting, then you're not wasting as much as you would otherwise. You're recycling work and you're recycling people, and you're running your business as a byproduct of other businesses. Of other directly competitive businesses, as a matter of fact. So that's a very economical operating procedure. It's also the funniest operating procedure because, as I said, leftovers are inherently funny.
Living in New York City gives people real incentives to want things that nobody else wants—to want all the leftover things. There are so many people here to compete with that changing your tastes to what other people don't want is your only hope of getting anything. For instance, on beautiful, sunny days in New York, it gets so crowded outside you can't even see Central Park through all the bodies. But very early on Sunday mornings in horrible rainy weather, when no one wants to get up and no one wants to get out even if they are up, you can go out and walk all over and have the streets to yourself and it's wonderful.
When we didn't have the money to do feature movies with thousands of cuts and retakes, etc., I tried to simplify the movie-making procedure, so I made movies where we used every foot of film that we shot, because it was cheaper, and easier and funnier. Also so we wouldn't have any leftovers ourselves. Then in 1969 we started editing our movies, but even with our own movies, I still love the leftovers best. The out-takes are all great. I'm scrupulously saving them.
I deviate from my philosophy of using leftovers in two areas: (1) my pet, and (2) my food.
I know I should have gone to the pound for a pet, but instead I bought one. It just happened. I saw him and I fell in love with him and I bought him, so there my emotions made me abandon my style.
I also have to admit that I can't tolerate eating leftovers. Food is my great extravagance. I really spoil myself, but then I try to compensate by scrupulously saving all of my food leftovers and bringing them into the office or leaving them in the street and recycling them there. My conscience won't let me throw anything out, even when I don't want it for myself. As I said, I really spoil myself in the food area, so my leftovers are often grand—my hairdresser's cat eats pate at least twice a week. The leftovers usually turn out to be meat because I'll buy a huge piece of meat, cook it up for dinner, and then right before it's done I'll break down and have what I wanted for dinner in the first place—bread and jam. I'm only kidding myself when I go through the motions of cooking protein: all I ever really want is sugar. The rest is strictly for appearances, i.e., you can't take a princess to dinner and order a cookie for starters, no matter how much you crave one. People expect you to eat protein and you do so they won't talk. (If you decided to be stubborn and ordered the cookie, you'd wind up having to talk about why you want it and your philosophy of eating a cookie for dinner. And that would be too much trouble, so you order lamb and forget about what you really want.)
I did my first tape recording in 1964. I'm trying right now to remember the exact circumstances of what I made my first tape recording of. i remember who it was of, but I can't remember why I was carrying a tape recorder around with me that day or even why I had gone out and bought one. I think it all started because I was trying to do a book. A friend had written me a note saying that everybody we knew was writing a book, so that made me want to keep up and do one too. So I bought that tape recorder and I taped the most interesting person I knew at the time, Ondine, for a whole day. I was curious about all these new people I was meeting who could stay up for weeks at a time without ever going to sleep. I thought, "These people are so imaginative. I just want to know what they do, why they're so imaginative and creative, talking all the time, always busy, full of energy . . . how come they can stay up so late and not be tired," and pretty soon it would be four days later. I was determined to stay up all day and all night and tape Ondine, the most talkative and energetic of them all. But somewhere along the line I got tired, so I had to finish taping the rest of the twenty-four hours on a couple of other days. So actually, A, my novel, was a fraud, since it was billed as a consecutive twenty-four-hour tape-recorded "novel," but it was actually taped on a few separate occasions. I used twenty tapes for it because I was using the small cassettes. And right at that point some kids came by the studio and asked if they could do some work, so I asked them to transcribe and type my novel, and it took them a year and a half to type up one day! That seems incredible to me now because I know that if they'd been any good they could have finished it in a week. I would glance over at them sometimes with admiration because they had me convinced that typing was one of the slowest, most painstaking jobs in the world. Now I realize that what I had were leftover typists, but I didn't know it then. Maybe they just liked being around all the people who hung around at the studio.
Another thing I couldn't understand was all those people who never slept who were always announcing, "Oh I'm hitting my ninth day and it's glorious!" So I thought, "Maybe it's time to do a movie about somebody who sleeps all night. But I only had a camera that had three minutes on it, so I had to change the camera every three minutes to shoot three minutes. I slowed down the movie to make up for all the three minutes I lost changing the film, and we ran it at a slower speed to make up for the film I didn't shoot.
I suppose I have a realty loose interpretation of "work," because I think that just being alive is so much work at something you don't always want to do. Being born is like being kidnapped. And then sold into slavery. People are working every minute. The machinery is always going. Even when you sleep.
The hardest work I ever had to do mentally was go to court and get insulted by a lawyer. You're really on your own when you're up there on the witness stand and your friends can't stand up for you and everything's quiet except for you and the lawyer, and the lawyer's insulting you and you have to let him.
I loved working when I worked at commercial art and they told you what to do and how to do it and all you had to do was correct it and they'd say yes or no. The hard thing is when you have to dream up the tasteless things to do on your own. When I think about what sort of person I would most like to have on a retainer, I think it would be a boss. A boss who could tell me what to do, because that makes everything easy when you're working.
Unless you have a job where you have to do what somebody else tells you to do, then the only "person" qualified to be your boss would be a computer that was programmed especially for you, that would take into consideration all of your finances, prejudices, quirks, idea potential, temper tantrums, talents, personality conflicts, growth rate desired, amount and nature of competition, what you'll eat for breakfast on the day you have to fulfill a contract, who you're jealous of, etc. A lot of people could help me with parts and segments of the business, but only a computer would be totally useful to me.
If I had a good computer I could catch up with my thoughts over the weekend if I ever got behind myself. A computer would be a very qualified boss.
Something I'm not doing these days that I should be doing is meeting more science people. I think that the best dinner party would be where each guest was required to bring a new piece of science news to the dinner table with him. Afterwards, you wouldn't feel you'd wasted any time feeding your machinery with just pieces of food. Nothing about diseases, though. Just pure science news.
People send me so many presents in the mail, but I wish that instead of all the presents and art mailers I would get science mailers in language I could understand. That would make me want to open my mail again.
When I'm working on a business project, I expect bad things to happen all the time. I always expect deals to fail through in the biggest, worst way possible. I guess I shouldn't worry, though. If something's going to happen for you, it will, you can't make it happen. And it never does happen until you're past the point where you care whether it happens or not. An actress friend told me that after she didn't want money any more and after she didn't want jewels any more, that's when she got money and jewels. I guess it's for our own good that it always happens that way, because after you stop wanting things is when having them won't make you go crazy. After you stop wanting them is when you can handle having them. Or before. But never during. If you get things when you really want them, you go crazy. Everything becomes distorted when something you really want is sitting in your lap.
After being alive, the next hardest work is having sex. Of course, for some people it isn't work because they need the exercise and they've got the energy for the sex and the sex gives them even more energy. Some people get energy from sex and some people lose energy from sex. I have found that it's too much work. But if you have the time for it, and if you need that exercise—then you should do it. But you could really save yourself a lot of trouble either way by first figuring out whether you're an energy-getter or an energy-loser. As I said, I'm an energy-loser. But I can understand it when I see people running around trying to get some.
It's just as much work for an attractive person not to have sex as for an unattractive person to have sex, so it's helpful if the attractive people happen to get energy from sex and if the unattractive people happen to lose energy from sex, because then their wants will fit in with the direction that people are pushing them in.
Along with having sex, being sexed is also hard work. I wonder whether it's harder for (1) a man to be a man, (2) a man to be a woman, (3) a woman to be a woman, or (4) a woman to be a man. I don't really know the answer, but from watching all the different types, I know that the people who think they're working the hardest are the men who are trying to be women. They do double-time. They do all the double things: they think about shaving and not shaving, of primping and not primping, of buying men's clothes and women's clothes. I guess it's interesting to try to be another sex, but it can be exciting to just be your own sex.
A friend really hit it when he said, "Frigid people really make it." Frigid people don't have the standard emotional problems that hold so many people back and keep them from making it. When I was in my early twenties and had just gotten out of school, I could see that I wasn't frigid enough to not let problems keep me from working.
I thought that young people had more problems than old people, and I hoped I could last until I was older so I wouldn't have all those problems. Then I looked around and saw that everybody who looked young had young problems and that everybody who looked old had old problems. The "old" problems to me looked easier to take than the "young" problems. So I decided to go gray so nobody would know now old I was and I would look younger to them than how old they thought I was. I would gain a lot by going gray: (1) I would have old problems, which were easier to take than young problems, (2) everyone would be impressed by how young I looked, and (3) I would be relieved of the responsibility of acting young—I could occasionally lapse into eccentricity or senility and no one would think anything of it because of my gray hair. When you've got gray hair, every move you make seems "young" and "spry," instead of just being normally active. It's like you're getting a new talent. So I dyed my hair gray when I was about twenty-three or twenty-four.
Something that I look for in an associate is a certain amount of misunderstanding of what I'm trying to do. Not a fundamental misunderstanding; just minor misunderstandings here and there. When someone doesn't quite completely understand what you want from them, or when they didn't quite hear what you told them to do, or when the tape is bad, or when their own fantasies start coming through, I often wind up liking what comes out of it all better than I liked my original idea. Then if you take what the first person who misunderstood you did, and you give that to someone else and tell them to make it more like how they know you would want it, that's good, too. If people never misunderstand you, and if they do everything exactly the way you tell them to, they're just transmitters of your ideas, and you get bored with that. But when you work with people who misunderstand you, instead of getting transmissions you get transmutations, and that's much more interesting in the long run.
I like the people who work for me to have their own ideas about things so they don't bore me, but then I like them to be enough like me to keep me company. I like to be tucked in, but I don't like to be tucked away.
They should have a college course now for maids and call it something glamorous, I think. People don't want to work at something unless there's a glamorous name tagged to it. The idea of America is theoretically so great because we've gotten rid of maids and janitors, but then, somebody still has to do it. I always think that even very intelligent people could get a lot out of being maids because they'd see so many interesting people and be working in the most beautiful houses. I mean, everybody does something for everybody else—your shoemaker does your shoes for you, and you do entertainment for him—it's always an exchange, and if it weren't for the stigma we give certain jobs, the exchange would always be equal. A mother is always doing things for her child, so what's wrong with a person off the street doing things for you? But there'll always be people who don't clean who think they're better than the people who do clean.
I've always thought that the President could do so much here to help change images. If the President would go into a public bathroom in the Capitol, and have the TV cameras film him cleaning the toilets and saying "Why not? Somebody's got to do it!" then that would do so much for the morale of the people who do the wonderful job of keeping the toilets clean. I mean, it is a wonderful thing that they're doing.
The President has so much good publicity potential that hasn't been exploited. He should just sit down one day and make a list of all the things that people are embarrassed to do that they shouldn't be embarrassed to do, and then do them all on television.
Sometimes B and I fantasize about what I would do if I were President—how I would use my TV time.
Airline stewardesses have the best public image—hostesses in the air. Their work is actually what the waitresses in Bickford's do, plus a few additional duties. I don't want to put down the airline stewardesses, i just want to put up the Bickford ladies. The difference is that airline stewardessing is a New World job that never had to contend with any class stigmas left over from the Old World peasant-aristocracy syndrome.
What's great about this country is that America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest. You can be watching TV and see Coca-Cola, and you can know that the President drinks Coke, Liz Taylor drinks Coke, and just think, you can drink Coke, too. A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking. AM the Cokes are the same and all the Cokes are good. Liz Taylor knows it, the President knows it, the bum knows it, and you know it.
In Europe the royalty and the aristocracy used to eat a lot better than the peasants—they weren't eating the same things at all. It was either partridge or porridge, and each class stuck to its own food. But when Queen Elizabeth came here and President Eisenhower bought her a hot dog I'm sure he felt confident that she couldn't have had delivered to Buckingham Palace a better hot dog than that one he bought her for maybe twenty cents at the ballpark. Because there is no better hot dog than a ballpark hot dog. Not for a dollar, not for ten dollars, not for a hundred thousand dollars could she get a better hot dog. She could get one for twenty cents and so could anybody else.
Sometimes you fantasize that people who are really up-there and rich and living it up have something you don't have, that their things must be better than your things because they have more money than you. But they drink the same Cokes and eat the same hot dogs and wear the same ILGWU clothes and see the same TV shows and the same movies. Rich people can't see a sillier version of Truth or Consequences, or a scarier version of The Exorcist. You can get just as revolted as they can—you can have the same nightmares. All of this is really American.
The idea of America is so wonderful because the more equal something is, the more American it is. For instance, a lot of places give you special treatment when you're famous, but that's not really American. The other day something very American happened to me. I was going into an auction at Parke-Bernet and they wouldn't let me in because I had my dog with me, so I had to wait in the lobby for the friend I was meeting there to tell him I'd been turned away. And while I was waiting in the lobby I signed autographs. It was a really American situation to be in.
(Also, by the way, the "special treatment" sometimes works in reverse when you're famous. Sometimes people are mean to me because I'm Andy Warhol.)
Wherever it's possible, you should try to pay people in measurements that are the most suitable for their talent or job. A writer may want to get paid by the word, by the page, by the number of times the reader breaks down crying or bursts out laughing, by the chapter, by the number of new ideas introduced, by the book, or by the year, just to name a few possible categories. A director may want to get paid by the movie or by the foot or by the number of times a Chevrolet appears in the frames.
I'm still thinking about maids. It really has to do with how you're raised. Some people just aren't embarrassed by the idea of somebody else cleaning up after them, and, even though I talk about being a maid not being any different from any other job—because I know it shouldn't be considered any different from any other job—still, somehow, deep down, I'm truly embarrassed at the idea of somebody cleaning up after me. If I were really able to think about being a maid the same way I think about, say, being a dentist, I wouldn't be any more embarrassed to let a maid clean up after me than I would be to let a dentist fix my teeth. (Actually, "dentist" is a bad example, because I am embarrassed to let a dentist fix my teeth, especially if my skin is broken out and I'm sitting under those green lights. But I'll stick with that example because the embarrassment I feel about letting someone clean my teeth is nowhere near the embarrassment I feel when someone is around cleaning up after me.)
I confront the problem of how to look at a maid only when I'm staying at a European hotel or when I'm a guest at somebody else's house. It's so awkward when you come face to face with a maid. I've never been able to pull it off. Some people I know are very comfortable looking at maids and even telling them what they'd like done, but I can't handle it. When I go to a hotel, I find myself trying to stay there all day so the maid can't come in. I make a point of it. Because I just don't know where to put my eyes, where to look, what to be doing while they're cleaning. It's actually a lot of work, avoiding the maid, when I think about it.
When I was a child I never had a fantasy about having a maid, what I had a fantasy about having was candy. As I matured that fantasy translated itself into "make money to have candy," because as you get older, of course, you get more realistic. Then, after my third nervous breakdown and I still didn't have that extra candy, my career started to pick up, and I started getting more and more candy, and now I have a roomful of candy all in shopping bags. So, as I'm thinking about it now, my success got me a candy room instead of a maid's room. As I said, it all depends on what your fantasies as a kid were, whether you're able to look at a maid or not. Because of what my fantasies were, I'm now a lot more comfortable looking at a Hershey Bar.
It's strange the way having money isn't much. You take three people to a restaurant and you pay three hundred dollars. Okay. Then you take those same three people to a corner shop—shoppe—and get everything there. You got just as filled at the corner shoppe as at the grand restaurant—more, actually—and it cost you only fifteen or twenty dollars, and you had basically the same food.
I was trying to think the other day about what you do now in America if you want to be successful. Before, you were dependable and wore a good suit. Looking around, I guess that today you have to do all the same things but not wear a good suit. I guess that's all it is. Think rich. Look poor.
7. Time
A: I always think about the people who build buildings and then they're not around any more. Or a movie with a crowd scene and everybody's dead. It's frightening.
I try to think of what time is and all I can think is . . . "Time is time was."
People say "time on my hands." Well, I looked at my hands and I saw a lot of lines. And then somebody told me that some people don't have lines. I didn't believe her. We were sitting in a restaurant and she said, "How can you say that? Look at that waiter over there!" She called him over, "Honey! Honey? Can you bring me a glass of water?" and when he brought it she grabbed his hand and showed it to me and it had no lines! Just the three main ones. And she said, "See? I told you. Some people like that waiter have no lines." And I thought, "Gee, I wish I was a waiter."
If the lines on your hands are wrinkles, it must mean your hands worry a lot.
Sometimes you're invited to a big ball and for months you think about how glamorous and exciting it's going to be. Then you fly to Europe and you go to the ball and when you think back on it a couple of months later what you remember is maybe the car ride to the ball, you can't remember the ball at all. Sometimes the little times you don't think are anything while they're happening turn out to be what marks a whole period of your life. I should have been dreaming for months about the car ride to the ball and getting dressed for the car ride, and buying my ticket to Europe so I could take the car ride. Then, who knows, maybe I could have remembered the ball.
Some people decide to be old and then they do exactly what old people are supposed to do. But when they were twenty years old they were doing what twenty-year-olds are supposed to do. And then there are those other people who look twenty all their lives. It's thrilling to see movie stars— since they're more involved in that than most people—who have worked on their beauty, who still have all their energy because they're still working with their young selves.
Since people are going to be living longer and getting older, they'll just have to learn how to be babies longer. I think that's what's happening now. Some kids I know personally are staying babies longer.
I was standing on a street in Paris once and this old lady was looking at me, and I thought, "Oh she's probably staring at me because she's English," because English people always know me from a London television disaster that somehow starred me. So I sort of looked away and she said, "Aren't you Andy?" I said yes and she said, "You came to my house in Provincetown twenty-eight and a half years ago. You were wearing a sunhat. You don't even remember me, but I'll never forget you in that sunhat. You see, you couldn't take any sun." I felt so strange because I couldn't remember at all and she remembered to the month. Because to remember "twenty-eight and a half years ago" without even stopping to calculate must mean that she really kept track and would say, "Well it's nineteen years now since he was here in the sunhat." It was very peculiar—her husband was there and they were disagreeing about how long it was. He said, "No no no. We weren't married yet, remember? So it must have been twenty-six and three-quarter years ago."
Some people say Paris is more esthetic than New York. Well, in New York you don't have time to have an esthetic because it takes half the day to go downtown and half the day to go uptown.
Then there's time in the street, when you run into somebody you haven't seen in, say, five years, and you play it ail on one level. When you see each other and you don't even lose a beat, that's when it's the best. You don't say "What have you been doing?"—you don't try to catch up. Maybe you mention that you're on your way to 8th Street to get a frozen custard and maybe they mention which movie they're on their way to see, but that's it. Just a casual check-in. Very light, cool, off-hand, very American. Nobody's fazed, nobody's thrown out of time, nobody gets hysterical, nobody loses a beat. That's when it's good. And then when somebody asks you whatever happened to so-and-so you just say, "Yes, I saw him having a malted on 53rd Street." Just play it all on one level, like everything was yesterday.
I think I'm missing some chemicals and that's why I have this tendency to be more of a—mama's boy. A—sissy. No, a mama's boy. A "butterboy." I think I'm missing some responsibility chemicals and some reproductive chemicals. If I had them I would probably think more about aging the right way and being married four times and having a family—wives and children and dogs. I'm immature, but maybe something could happen to my chemicals and I could get mature. I could start getting wrinkles and stop wearing my wings.
They always say that time changes things, but you actually have to change them yourself.
Sometimes people let the same problem make them miserable for years when they could just say, "So what." That's one of my favorite things to say. "So what."
"My mother didn't love me." So what.
"My husband won't ball me." So what.
"I'm a success but I'm still alone." So what.
I don't know how I made it through all the years before I learned how to do that trick. It took a long time for me to learn it, but once you do, you never forget.
What makes a person spend time being sad when they could be happy? I was in the Far East and I was walking down a path and there was a big happy party going on, and actually they were burning a person to death. They were having a party and they were happy, singing and dancing.
Then the other day I was on the Bowery and a person in a flophouse jumped out of the window and died, and a crowd went around the body, and then a bum staggered over and said, "Did you see the comedy across the street?"
I'm not saying you should be happy when a person dies, but just that it's curious to see cases that prove you don't have to be sad about it, depending on what you think it means, and what you think about what you think it means.
A person can cry or laugh. Always when you're crying you could be laughing, you have the choice. Crazy people know how to do this best because their minds are loose. So you can take the flexibility your mind is capable of and make it work for you. You decide what you want to do and how you want to spend your time. Remember, though, that I think I'm missing some chemicals, so it's easier for me than for a person who has a lot of responsibility chemicals, but the same principle could still be applied in a lot of instances.
At the end of my time, when I die, I don't want to leave any leftovers. And I don't want to be a leftover. I was watching TV this week and I saw a lady go into a ray machine and disappear. That was wonderful, because matter is energy and she just dispersed. That could be a really American invention, the best American invention—to be able to disappear. I mean, that way they couldn't say you died, they couldn't say you were murdered, they couldn't say you committed suicide over somebody.
The worst thing that could happen to you after the end of your time would be to be embalmed and laid up in a pyramid. I'm repulsed when I think about the Egyptians taking each organ and embalming it separately in its own receptacle. I want my machinery to disappear.
Still, I do really like the idea of people turning into sand or something, so the machinery keeps working after you die. I guess disappearing would be shirking work that your machinery still had left to do. Since I believe in work, I guess I shouldn't think about disappearing when I die. And anyway, it would be very glamorous to be reincarnated as a big ring on Pauline de Rothschild's finger.
I really do live for the future, because when I'm eating a box of candy, I can't wait to taste the last piece. I don't even taste any of the other pieces, I just want to finish and throw the box away and not have to have it on my mind any more.
I would rather either have it now or know I'll never have it so I don't have to think about it.
That's why some days I wish I were very very old-looking so I wouldn't have to think about getting old-looking.
I really look awful, and I never bother to primp up or try to be appealing because I just don't want anyone to get involved with me. And that's the truth. I play down my good features and play up the bad ones. So I look awful and I wear the wrong pants and the wrong shoes and I come at the wrong time with the wrong friends, and I say the wrong things and I talk to the wrong person, and then still sometimes somebody gets interested and I freak out and I wonder, "What did I do wrong?" So then I go home and try to figure it out. "Well I must be wearing something that somebody thinks is attractive. I'd better change it. Before things get too far. So I go over to my three-way mirror and I study myself and I see that I have fifteen new pimples on my face and ordinarily that should have stopped them. So I think, "How weird. I know I look bad. I made myself look especially bad— especially wrong—because I knew a lot of the right people would be there, and still someone somehow got interested . . . " Then I start to panic because I think I don't know what's attractive that I should eliminate before it starts causing me any more trouble. You see, to get to know one more person is just too hard, because each new person takes up more time and space. The way to keep some of your time to yourself is to maintain yourself so unattractively that nobody else is interested in any of it
I look at professional people like comedians in nightclubs, and I'm always impressed with their perfect timing, but I could never understand how they can bear to say exactly the same thing all the time. Then I realized what's the difference, because you're always repeating your same things all the time anyway, whether or not somebody asks you or it's your job. You're usually making the same mistakes. You apply your usual mistakes to every new category or field you go into.
Whenever I'm interested in something, I know the timing's off, because I'm always interested in the right thing at the wrong time. I should just be getting interested after I'm not interested any more, because right after I'm embarrassed to still be thinking about a certain idea, that's when the idea is just about to make somebody a few million dollars. My same good mistakes.
I learned something about time when I used to have to go around New York and see people by appointment in their offices. Somebody would give me an appointment at ten o'clock, so I'd beat my brains out to get there at exactly ten, and I would get there and they wouldn't see me until five minutes to one. So when you go through this a hundred times and you hear, "Ten o'clock?" you say, "Weeeellll, that sounds funny, I think I'll show up at five minutes to one." So I used to show up at five minutes to one and it always worked. That's when I would see the person. So I learned. It was like being a laboratory rat and they put you through all those tests and you get rewarded when you do it right, and when you do it wrong you're kicked back, so you learn. So I learned when people would be around.
The only time my system didn't work was with Liz Taylor. I was in Rome appearing in a movie with her and for a week every day she was hours late for shooting, and finally I thought, "Well listen, let's just take our time tomorrow and not get up at six-thirty." So that day she got there before everybody else. She was there before the wardrobe lady and the key grip. She practically had the coffee perking. She really keeps you on your toes. She did the same thing I did, in reverse, and I was thrown off because I didn't know her well enough to predict her. Liz Taylor, in being late fifty times and then early once, must be applying the same principle that I do by having my hair gray so when I do something with a normal amount of energy it seems "young." Liz Taylor when she's on time seems "early." It's like you get a new talent all of a sudden by being so bad at something for so long, and then suddenly one day being not quite so bad.
I like the idea that people in New York now have to wait in line for movies. You go by so many theaters where there are long, long lines. But nobody looks unhappy about it. It costs so much money just to live now, and if you're on a date, you can spend your whole date time in line, and that way it saves you money because you don't have to think of other things to do while you're waiting and you get to know your person, and you suffer a little together, and then you're entertained for two hours. So you've gotten very close, you've shared a complete experience. And the idea of waiting for something makes it more exciting anyway. Never getting in is the most exciting, but after that waiting to get in is the most exciting.
If I only had time for one vacation every ten years I still don't think I'd want to go anywhere. I'd probably just go to my room, fluff up the pillow, turn on a couple of TVs, open a box of Ritz crackers, break the seal on a box of Russell Stovers, sit down with the latest issue of every magazine except TV Guide from the corner newsstand, then pick up the phone and call everybody I know to ask them to look in their TV Guides to tell me what's on, what's been on, what's going to be on. I also enjoy rereading the newspaper. Especially in Paris. I can't reread the international Herald Tribune enough when I'm in Paris. I love to while away the hours while other people do their meanwhiles, as long as they call in to report. In my room, time moves so slowly for me, it's only outside that everything is happening so fast.
I don't like to travel, because I really like slow time and for a plane you have to leave three or four hours ahead of time, so that's a day right there. If you really want your life to pass like a movie in front of you, just travel, you can forget your life.
I like a rut. People call me up and say, "I hope I'm not disturbing your rut, calling you up like this." They know how much I like it.
One mistake I make time after time is not following the Golden Rule: I hold elevators. Also, even though I try to throw things away and simplify my life, I palm things off on other people.
What makes a movie fast is when you see it, and then when you see it a second time it goes really fast. If you really want to suffer, go see something and then go see it again. You'll see that your suffering goes by quicker the second time.
I can see a murder mystery one night, and then see it a second time the next night and still not know who did it until the very last minute. So I know there's something really
wrong with me. I mean, if I can sit there and watch another Thin Man and watch it again the next night, and still not know who the murderer is again until the very last minute . . . And I'll be just as curious and just as on-the-edge-of-my-chair waiting to find out, and just as shocked as I was the night before. If I've seen it fifteen times, then maybe one time out of the fifteen it'll come back to me and I might get a glimmer of who did it. I guess time is actually the best plot— the suspense of seeing if you'll remember.
Digital clocks and watches really show me that there's a new time on my hand. And it's sort of frightening. Somebody has thought of a new way to show time, so I guess we won't be saying one "o'clock" too much longer, because that's "of the clock" or "by the clock" and there won't be any more clocks: it'll be "one time" instead of "one o'clock" and "three-thirty time" and "four-forty-five time."
When I was little and I was sick a lot, those sick times were like little intermissions. Innermissions. Playing with dolls.
I never used to cut out my cut-out dolls. Some people who've worked with me might suggest that I had someone else cut them out for me, but really the reason I didn't cut them out was that I didn't want to ruin the nice pages they were on. I always left my cut-out dolls in my cut-out books.
About Time
From time to time
Do time
Time yourself
weekends.
In time
In no time
In good time
Between time
Time and again
Lifetime
Time-worn
Pass time
Mark time
Buy time
Keep time
On time
In time
Time off
Time out
Time in
Time card
Time lapse
Time zone
The beforetime
The meantime
The aftertime
The All-time—
When I look around today, the biggest anachronism I see is pregnancy. I just can't believe that people are still pregnant.
The best time for me is when I don't have any problems that I can't buy my way out of.
I try to think of what time is and all I can think is . . . "Time is time was."
People say "time on my hands." Well, I looked at my hands and I saw a lot of lines. And then somebody told me that some people don't have lines. I didn't believe her. We were sitting in a restaurant and she said, "How can you say that? Look at that waiter over there!" She called him over, "Honey! Honey? Can you bring me a glass of water?" and when he brought it she grabbed his hand and showed it to me and it had no lines! Just the three main ones. And she said, "See? I told you. Some people like that waiter have no lines." And I thought, "Gee, I wish I was a waiter."
If the lines on your hands are wrinkles, it must mean your hands worry a lot.
Sometimes you're invited to a big ball and for months you think about how glamorous and exciting it's going to be. Then you fly to Europe and you go to the ball and when you think back on it a couple of months later what you remember is maybe the car ride to the ball, you can't remember the ball at all. Sometimes the little times you don't think are anything while they're happening turn out to be what marks a whole period of your life. I should have been dreaming for months about the car ride to the ball and getting dressed for the car ride, and buying my ticket to Europe so I could take the car ride. Then, who knows, maybe I could have remembered the ball.
Some people decide to be old and then they do exactly what old people are supposed to do. But when they were twenty years old they were doing what twenty-year-olds are supposed to do. And then there are those other people who look twenty all their lives. It's thrilling to see movie stars— since they're more involved in that than most people—who have worked on their beauty, who still have all their energy because they're still working with their young selves.
Since people are going to be living longer and getting older, they'll just have to learn how to be babies longer. I think that's what's happening now. Some kids I know personally are staying babies longer.
I was standing on a street in Paris once and this old lady was looking at me, and I thought, "Oh she's probably staring at me because she's English," because English people always know me from a London television disaster that somehow starred me. So I sort of looked away and she said, "Aren't you Andy?" I said yes and she said, "You came to my house in Provincetown twenty-eight and a half years ago. You were wearing a sunhat. You don't even remember me, but I'll never forget you in that sunhat. You see, you couldn't take any sun." I felt so strange because I couldn't remember at all and she remembered to the month. Because to remember "twenty-eight and a half years ago" without even stopping to calculate must mean that she really kept track and would say, "Well it's nineteen years now since he was here in the sunhat." It was very peculiar—her husband was there and they were disagreeing about how long it was. He said, "No no no. We weren't married yet, remember? So it must have been twenty-six and three-quarter years ago."
Some people say Paris is more esthetic than New York. Well, in New York you don't have time to have an esthetic because it takes half the day to go downtown and half the day to go uptown.
Then there's time in the street, when you run into somebody you haven't seen in, say, five years, and you play it ail on one level. When you see each other and you don't even lose a beat, that's when it's the best. You don't say "What have you been doing?"—you don't try to catch up. Maybe you mention that you're on your way to 8th Street to get a frozen custard and maybe they mention which movie they're on their way to see, but that's it. Just a casual check-in. Very light, cool, off-hand, very American. Nobody's fazed, nobody's thrown out of time, nobody gets hysterical, nobody loses a beat. That's when it's good. And then when somebody asks you whatever happened to so-and-so you just say, "Yes, I saw him having a malted on 53rd Street." Just play it all on one level, like everything was yesterday.
I think I'm missing some chemicals and that's why I have this tendency to be more of a—mama's boy. A—sissy. No, a mama's boy. A "butterboy." I think I'm missing some responsibility chemicals and some reproductive chemicals. If I had them I would probably think more about aging the right way and being married four times and having a family—wives and children and dogs. I'm immature, but maybe something could happen to my chemicals and I could get mature. I could start getting wrinkles and stop wearing my wings.
They always say that time changes things, but you actually have to change them yourself.
Sometimes people let the same problem make them miserable for years when they could just say, "So what." That's one of my favorite things to say. "So what."
"My mother didn't love me." So what.
"My husband won't ball me." So what.
"I'm a success but I'm still alone." So what.
I don't know how I made it through all the years before I learned how to do that trick. It took a long time for me to learn it, but once you do, you never forget.
What makes a person spend time being sad when they could be happy? I was in the Far East and I was walking down a path and there was a big happy party going on, and actually they were burning a person to death. They were having a party and they were happy, singing and dancing.
Then the other day I was on the Bowery and a person in a flophouse jumped out of the window and died, and a crowd went around the body, and then a bum staggered over and said, "Did you see the comedy across the street?"
I'm not saying you should be happy when a person dies, but just that it's curious to see cases that prove you don't have to be sad about it, depending on what you think it means, and what you think about what you think it means.
A person can cry or laugh. Always when you're crying you could be laughing, you have the choice. Crazy people know how to do this best because their minds are loose. So you can take the flexibility your mind is capable of and make it work for you. You decide what you want to do and how you want to spend your time. Remember, though, that I think I'm missing some chemicals, so it's easier for me than for a person who has a lot of responsibility chemicals, but the same principle could still be applied in a lot of instances.
At the end of my time, when I die, I don't want to leave any leftovers. And I don't want to be a leftover. I was watching TV this week and I saw a lady go into a ray machine and disappear. That was wonderful, because matter is energy and she just dispersed. That could be a really American invention, the best American invention—to be able to disappear. I mean, that way they couldn't say you died, they couldn't say you were murdered, they couldn't say you committed suicide over somebody.
The worst thing that could happen to you after the end of your time would be to be embalmed and laid up in a pyramid. I'm repulsed when I think about the Egyptians taking each organ and embalming it separately in its own receptacle. I want my machinery to disappear.
Still, I do really like the idea of people turning into sand or something, so the machinery keeps working after you die. I guess disappearing would be shirking work that your machinery still had left to do. Since I believe in work, I guess I shouldn't think about disappearing when I die. And anyway, it would be very glamorous to be reincarnated as a big ring on Pauline de Rothschild's finger.
I really do live for the future, because when I'm eating a box of candy, I can't wait to taste the last piece. I don't even taste any of the other pieces, I just want to finish and throw the box away and not have to have it on my mind any more.
I would rather either have it now or know I'll never have it so I don't have to think about it.
That's why some days I wish I were very very old-looking so I wouldn't have to think about getting old-looking.
I really look awful, and I never bother to primp up or try to be appealing because I just don't want anyone to get involved with me. And that's the truth. I play down my good features and play up the bad ones. So I look awful and I wear the wrong pants and the wrong shoes and I come at the wrong time with the wrong friends, and I say the wrong things and I talk to the wrong person, and then still sometimes somebody gets interested and I freak out and I wonder, "What did I do wrong?" So then I go home and try to figure it out. "Well I must be wearing something that somebody thinks is attractive. I'd better change it. Before things get too far. So I go over to my three-way mirror and I study myself and I see that I have fifteen new pimples on my face and ordinarily that should have stopped them. So I think, "How weird. I know I look bad. I made myself look especially bad— especially wrong—because I knew a lot of the right people would be there, and still someone somehow got interested . . . " Then I start to panic because I think I don't know what's attractive that I should eliminate before it starts causing me any more trouble. You see, to get to know one more person is just too hard, because each new person takes up more time and space. The way to keep some of your time to yourself is to maintain yourself so unattractively that nobody else is interested in any of it
I look at professional people like comedians in nightclubs, and I'm always impressed with their perfect timing, but I could never understand how they can bear to say exactly the same thing all the time. Then I realized what's the difference, because you're always repeating your same things all the time anyway, whether or not somebody asks you or it's your job. You're usually making the same mistakes. You apply your usual mistakes to every new category or field you go into.
Whenever I'm interested in something, I know the timing's off, because I'm always interested in the right thing at the wrong time. I should just be getting interested after I'm not interested any more, because right after I'm embarrassed to still be thinking about a certain idea, that's when the idea is just about to make somebody a few million dollars. My same good mistakes.
I learned something about time when I used to have to go around New York and see people by appointment in their offices. Somebody would give me an appointment at ten o'clock, so I'd beat my brains out to get there at exactly ten, and I would get there and they wouldn't see me until five minutes to one. So when you go through this a hundred times and you hear, "Ten o'clock?" you say, "Weeeellll, that sounds funny, I think I'll show up at five minutes to one." So I used to show up at five minutes to one and it always worked. That's when I would see the person. So I learned. It was like being a laboratory rat and they put you through all those tests and you get rewarded when you do it right, and when you do it wrong you're kicked back, so you learn. So I learned when people would be around.
The only time my system didn't work was with Liz Taylor. I was in Rome appearing in a movie with her and for a week every day she was hours late for shooting, and finally I thought, "Well listen, let's just take our time tomorrow and not get up at six-thirty." So that day she got there before everybody else. She was there before the wardrobe lady and the key grip. She practically had the coffee perking. She really keeps you on your toes. She did the same thing I did, in reverse, and I was thrown off because I didn't know her well enough to predict her. Liz Taylor, in being late fifty times and then early once, must be applying the same principle that I do by having my hair gray so when I do something with a normal amount of energy it seems "young." Liz Taylor when she's on time seems "early." It's like you get a new talent all of a sudden by being so bad at something for so long, and then suddenly one day being not quite so bad.
I like the idea that people in New York now have to wait in line for movies. You go by so many theaters where there are long, long lines. But nobody looks unhappy about it. It costs so much money just to live now, and if you're on a date, you can spend your whole date time in line, and that way it saves you money because you don't have to think of other things to do while you're waiting and you get to know your person, and you suffer a little together, and then you're entertained for two hours. So you've gotten very close, you've shared a complete experience. And the idea of waiting for something makes it more exciting anyway. Never getting in is the most exciting, but after that waiting to get in is the most exciting.
If I only had time for one vacation every ten years I still don't think I'd want to go anywhere. I'd probably just go to my room, fluff up the pillow, turn on a couple of TVs, open a box of Ritz crackers, break the seal on a box of Russell Stovers, sit down with the latest issue of every magazine except TV Guide from the corner newsstand, then pick up the phone and call everybody I know to ask them to look in their TV Guides to tell me what's on, what's been on, what's going to be on. I also enjoy rereading the newspaper. Especially in Paris. I can't reread the international Herald Tribune enough when I'm in Paris. I love to while away the hours while other people do their meanwhiles, as long as they call in to report. In my room, time moves so slowly for me, it's only outside that everything is happening so fast.
I don't like to travel, because I really like slow time and for a plane you have to leave three or four hours ahead of time, so that's a day right there. If you really want your life to pass like a movie in front of you, just travel, you can forget your life.
I like a rut. People call me up and say, "I hope I'm not disturbing your rut, calling you up like this." They know how much I like it.
One mistake I make time after time is not following the Golden Rule: I hold elevators. Also, even though I try to throw things away and simplify my life, I palm things off on other people.
What makes a movie fast is when you see it, and then when you see it a second time it goes really fast. If you really want to suffer, go see something and then go see it again. You'll see that your suffering goes by quicker the second time.
I can see a murder mystery one night, and then see it a second time the next night and still not know who did it until the very last minute. So I know there's something really
wrong with me. I mean, if I can sit there and watch another Thin Man and watch it again the next night, and still not know who the murderer is again until the very last minute . . . And I'll be just as curious and just as on-the-edge-of-my-chair waiting to find out, and just as shocked as I was the night before. If I've seen it fifteen times, then maybe one time out of the fifteen it'll come back to me and I might get a glimmer of who did it. I guess time is actually the best plot— the suspense of seeing if you'll remember.
Digital clocks and watches really show me that there's a new time on my hand. And it's sort of frightening. Somebody has thought of a new way to show time, so I guess we won't be saying one "o'clock" too much longer, because that's "of the clock" or "by the clock" and there won't be any more clocks: it'll be "one time" instead of "one o'clock" and "three-thirty time" and "four-forty-five time."
When I was little and I was sick a lot, those sick times were like little intermissions. Innermissions. Playing with dolls.
I never used to cut out my cut-out dolls. Some people who've worked with me might suggest that I had someone else cut them out for me, but really the reason I didn't cut them out was that I didn't want to ruin the nice pages they were on. I always left my cut-out dolls in my cut-out books.
About Time
From time to time
Do time
Time yourself
weekends.
In time
In no time
In good time
Between time
Time and again
Lifetime
Time-worn
Pass time
Mark time
Buy time
Keep time
On time
In time
Time off
Time out
Time in
Time card
Time lapse
Time zone
The beforetime
The meantime
The aftertime
The All-time—
When I look around today, the biggest anachronism I see is pregnancy. I just can't believe that people are still pregnant.
The best time for me is when I don't have any problems that I can't buy my way out of.
8. Death
A: I'm so sorry to hear about it. I just thought that things were magic and that it would never happen.
I don't believe in it, because you're not around to know that it's happened. I can't say anything about it because I'm not prepared for it.
I don't believe in it, because you're not around to know that it's happened. I can't say anything about it because I'm not prepared for it.
9. Economics
A: If you're a Rockefeller, New York is really your town. Can you imagine?
I don't understand anything except GREEN BILLS. Not negotiable bonds, not personal checks, not Traveller's Checks.
And if you give anybody a hundred-dollar bill in the SUPERMARKET, they call the manager.
Money is SUSPICIOUS, because people think you're not supposed to have it, even if you do have it.
I'm PARANOID now when I go to D'Agostino's because I always have another SHOPPING BAG with me and they tell you that you have to check it, but I won't. A lady doesn't have to check her pocketbook, so I won't check my bag. It's principle. So then I'm paranoid they'll think I'm stealing, so I hold my head up high and LOOK RICH. Because I don't steal. I go right to the dairy counter with all my money and I'm so happy because I'm going to go down all the counters and buy things for my windowsill in my bedroom.
Rich people don't carry their money in wallets or Gucci this-es or Valentino thats. They carry their money in a business envelope. In a long, business envelope. And the tens have a paper clip on them, so do the fives and twenties. And the money is usually new. It's sent over by special messenger from the bank offices—or their husbands' offices. They just sign for it. And it stays there until they have to dish out a twenty to their daughter.
The best way I like to carry money, actually, is messily. Crumpled wads. A paper bag is good.
One day I was having lunch with a princess and she had this little SCOTCH PURSE that was in the motif of a PLAID CAP with a POM-POM. We were at the Women's Exchange on Madison Avenue. And she took this crisp money out of her purse and she said, "You see? I fold it in the Rothschild manner. It lasts longer that way. I've been doing it all my life." She folded each bill separately, lengthwise, and then folded it again lengthwise. All new money. All in a little stack. The theory is that it lasts longer. That's the Rothschild way of folding money—that you can't see it.
That's The Rothschild Story.
I had a very good French wallet that I bought in Germany for a hundred and fifty dollars. For the big money. The big-size foreign money. But then in New York it ripped and I took it to the shoemaker and by mistake he stitched up the part where you put the paper money, so I can only use it now for change.
Cash. I just am not happy when I don't have it. The minute I have it i have to spend it. And I just buy STUPID THINGS.
Checks aren't money.
When I have fifty or sixty dollars in my pocket, I can go into Brentano's and buy The Life Of Rose Kennedy and say, "May I please have a register receipt?"
And the more receipts I get, the bigger the thrill. They're even getting to be like money to me now.
And when I go to the numbers-racket newspaper greeting card store in the neighborhood because it's late and everything else is closed, I go in and I'm very CHIC. Because I have money. I buy Harper's Bazaar and then I ask for a receipt. The newsboy yells at me and then he writes it on plain white paper. I won't accept that. "List the magazines, please. And put the date. And write the name of the store at the top." That makes it feel even more like money. The reason for doing it is I want that man to know I am an HONEST CITIZEN, and I SAVE MY STUBS and I PAY MY TAXES.
Then I go and eat, just because I have money, not because I'm hungry. I have it and I have to spend it before I go to sleep. So if it's one in the morning and I'm still awake, I take a cab to the all-night pharmacy and buy whatever I've been brainwashed with that night on TV.
I'll buy anything in a drugstore in the middle of the night. I'll make the store stay open a little late for me while I finish up, because they know I have money, so that's prestige. Right? The next step is getting to know the store so well they let me charge. I tell the store I don't like to get bills in the mail because it DEPRESSES ME. "Just tell me what I owe you now," I say, "and I'll come back next week when I have more cash and pay you. Give me a bill, and when I bring it back you can mark it PAID."
After you PAY SOMEBODY BACK you never run into them any more. But before that, they're EVERYWHERE.
When I have a lot of money, my tips are just ridiculous. If the fare comes to a dollar thirty, you know, I say just keep two dollars . . . But if I don't have money, I ask for twenty cents back.
I gave a cab driver a hundred dollars once. In the dark I thought it was a dollar. The fare was sixty cents (this is before the fares went up the last time) and I told him to keep it. And that's always depressed me.
I sometimes get into a cab without money and go someplace to pick up some money. To the bank or to the office or to pick up some that's been left for me with a doorman. Now, on the way up in the cab without any money, I would have to do such an act with the cab driver. He's got that plastic divider-shield up which automatically makes you feel like a criminal—that you're going to shoot him or hold him up. So you've got to really convince that guy and make him like you, that you're just picking up an envelope with the doorman. So I say, "I'll leave my paper bag with you." But then I write down their license number in case they split and I run in to get my envelope. On a certain run that I make a lot, I usually pick up the envelope and then go next door to the stationery store to cash it. If they can't cash it, I have to go next door to Riker's. They can never cash it. Then the tie shop. They can always cash it. Then I get back in and I say to the driver, "Take me back where I came from." Well, that little trip has cost me half of what I've gone to pick up (with the tip that I'd already promised the driver). So then I have to go and blow money in a health food store. I blow some on pink organic toothpaste, because it brought back memories of Elizabeth Arden's pink toothpaste. I want to find something that tastes like the old-fashioned Ipana in the yellow tube.
I only take cabs because I like to talk. If they don't put the meter on, halfway through the ride I ask them, "Why don't you turn the meter on?" "Well, it's such a short trip, I thought—" I say, "You thought, you thought! If you had said to me, 'Can I make it on my own?' I would have said sure, given you what it would have cost and a tip besides. Now we're here, and there's nothing on the meter, and by rights I don't owe you anything." And at that they have to say, "No . . ." So I drop a quarter in. I say, "You see? It's better to ask. You can't beat the system."
You can't talk on the news yet about how to beat the system, and that's what people want to know about.
It's great to buy friends. I don't think there's anything wrong with having a lot of money and attracting people with it. Look who you're attracting: EVERYBODY!
I know somebody who is very rich and all day long his paranoia is that people are only around him for his money. But then, he's always the first to tell you he's just flown in his private plane to Washington, D.C., but took a commercial airline to LA.
If you look like a rag, but if you've got fifteen dollars in your pocket, you can still impress people that you've got money. All you have to do is go down to the liquor store and buy a bottle of champagne. You can impress a whole roomful of people and with luck maybe you'll never see them again, so they'll always think you've got money. I never can have money and pretend I'm poor. I can only be poor and pretend I'm rich.
I know a woman who calls somebody up every afternoon and says, "I'll pay you a hundred dollars to fuck me." Fabulous. She makes sure they're very attractive and from good families and everything, but they need maybe a few more dollars to spend on wheels for their Mercedes. This girl does not have diamonds, nothing she wears costs that much, and yet there's "money" in her nose and in her ears and in her brain. It's in her cheekbones, too, it gives her structure. A delivery man from the coffee shop might come in and you could ask him, "Look at her. Is she poor or rich?" And he'd know. Because the face is "money." She can be walking down the street smoking a cigarette and she can hail a cab in just such a dainty way that the whole affair changes.
I hate Sundays: there's nothing open except plant stores and bookstores.
Money is money. It doesn't matter if I've worked hard or easy for it. I spend if the same.
I like money on the wall. Say you were going to buy a $200,000 painting. I think you should take that money, tie it up, and hang it on the wall. Then when someone visited you the first thing they would see is the money on the wall.
I don't think everybody should have money. It shouldn't be for everybody—you wouldn't know who was important. How boring. Who would you gossip about? Who would you put down? Never that great feeling of somebody saying "Can I borrow twenty-five dollars?"
Christmas is when you have to go to the bank and get crisp money to put in envelopes from the stationery store for tips. After you tip the doorman, he goes on sick leave or quits and the new one isn't impressed.
I love to get the best orchestra seat for a Broadway show, leave after the first act, and catch the end of the show next door, the best seat there, too. And I have two stubs. That's work because I'm "covering" it.
I was never interested in a plain checkbook—I only wanted the desk model because that has a lot of status, I think.
LYING IN THE BATHTUB WITH A PILLOW BEHIND MY HEAD MAKES ME FEEL VERY RICH—the pillow that I sent away for for $3.95 and a boxtop. Maybe it's an illusion. Of grandeur. But when you pay the phone bills every month that I do, you know you have the money.
It's fun to buy a lot of things for a little. To get a big shopping bag in Lamston's—to pay the thirty cents for the bag, and then to fill it. You've blown maybe sixty dollars in Lamston's, and you get home and you put everything on the bed and you take the Comet and you wash the prices on the tops off where it's written "$1.69." Then, the minute you've put all the stuff away, you want to go shopping again. So you go to the Village. You turn your nose up at one plant shop because you want them to think you're going to the expensive plant shop across the street. And then you want to impress that plant man, so you go in and you say, "I'll take it." Then you bring those home and your room is filled with flowers. That makes you feel so rich you want to leave your door open just a crack so the people across the hall can see you're rich. Not enough so you think they're going to rob you, though.
When I had a lot of cash once, I sprang for my first color television. The "tingle" in black and white was driving me crazy. I thought maybe if I saw all the commercials in color they'd look new and I'd have more things to go out and buy again.
Korvettes. In cash. I even wanted remote control, but that was in another department. I started taking it home, but then I got paranoid. The box said "Sony" and "Korvettes" and I wanted it to say "Lamston's," because I was taking it up my elevator, up my hall, into my apartment, and with that wrapping, and with having to throw out the white styrofoam that shows its shape, I thought, "I won't have this for long."
Can't I deduct liquor if I have to get high to talk and talking's my business?
I have a Fantasy about Money: I'm walking down the street and I hear somebody say—in a whisper—"There goes the richest person in the world."
I don't look at dates on nickels. It could be from 1910, I wouldn't save it. I'd spend it with a dime for a Clark Bar.
I hate PENNIES. I wish they'd stop making them altogether. I would never save them. I don't have the time. I like to say in stores, "Oh forget it, keep those pennies, it makes my French wallet too heavy."
CHANGE can get to be a burden, but it can also come in very handy when you have no money. You hunt for it, you look under the BED, you go through all the COAT POCKETS, saying, "Maybe I left a quarter there or there . . ." sometimes it can be the difference between buying a PACK OF CIGARETTES or not, to only be able to dig up sixty nine cents instead of seventy cents. You HUNT and HUNT and HUNT for that LAST PENNY. The only time YOU LIKE A PENNY is when you need ONE MORE.
And then they ask you in the stores, "Do you have a penny?" and then you have to go SCROUNGING. Or else you do have a penny but you just don't feel like looking . . .
I asked a cabbie the other day what money meant to him. "Good times," he said. "I take my wife out, I enjoy my wife, I enjoy going out with her, so when I have money I take her out."
I feel the same way.
Then I asked this cabbie how he felt when people gave him pennies. "Pennies? I never get pennies.—No, wait. 1 shouldn't say that. I got five pennies the other day from Gina Lollobrigida."
I asked him to tell me about it.
"There's nothing to tell, she's a very nice person, she likes New York, she doesn't like Hollywood, she's traveling all over, I think she's left now, and she's writing a book."
GINA LOLLOBRIGIDA.
If they made everything work out to be an even amount, pennies could be the weights on the bottom of the flowerpots.
Money is the MOMENT to me. Money is my MOOD.
To some people money is to buy today what they think will have value tomorrow. GET IT CHEAP, they say. Well, I don't have anything that goes below 1955. I swear. Nothing. Maybe a pencil I borrow from somebody might be from 1947. You don't know.
American money is very well-designed, really. I like it better than any other kind of money. I've thrown it in the East River down by the Staten Island Ferry just to see it float.
What we're all looking for is someone who doesn't live there, just pays for it.
If I think something I buy is worth more money than I pay, and if I like the people I'm buying from, I have to tell them they're undercharging me. I don't feel right until I tell them. If I buy a sandwich that's very very filling, and if the person I buy it from doesn't know how great it is, I have to tell him.
I don't feel like I get germs when I hold money. Money has a certain kind of amnesty. I feel, when I'm holding money, that the dollar bill has no more germs on it than my hands do. When I pass my hand over money, it becomes perfectly clean to me. I don't know where it's been—who's touched it and with what—but that's all erased the moment I touch it.
I don't understand anything except GREEN BILLS. Not negotiable bonds, not personal checks, not Traveller's Checks.
And if you give anybody a hundred-dollar bill in the SUPERMARKET, they call the manager.
Money is SUSPICIOUS, because people think you're not supposed to have it, even if you do have it.
I'm PARANOID now when I go to D'Agostino's because I always have another SHOPPING BAG with me and they tell you that you have to check it, but I won't. A lady doesn't have to check her pocketbook, so I won't check my bag. It's principle. So then I'm paranoid they'll think I'm stealing, so I hold my head up high and LOOK RICH. Because I don't steal. I go right to the dairy counter with all my money and I'm so happy because I'm going to go down all the counters and buy things for my windowsill in my bedroom.
Rich people don't carry their money in wallets or Gucci this-es or Valentino thats. They carry their money in a business envelope. In a long, business envelope. And the tens have a paper clip on them, so do the fives and twenties. And the money is usually new. It's sent over by special messenger from the bank offices—or their husbands' offices. They just sign for it. And it stays there until they have to dish out a twenty to their daughter.
The best way I like to carry money, actually, is messily. Crumpled wads. A paper bag is good.
One day I was having lunch with a princess and she had this little SCOTCH PURSE that was in the motif of a PLAID CAP with a POM-POM. We were at the Women's Exchange on Madison Avenue. And she took this crisp money out of her purse and she said, "You see? I fold it in the Rothschild manner. It lasts longer that way. I've been doing it all my life." She folded each bill separately, lengthwise, and then folded it again lengthwise. All new money. All in a little stack. The theory is that it lasts longer. That's the Rothschild way of folding money—that you can't see it.
That's The Rothschild Story.
I had a very good French wallet that I bought in Germany for a hundred and fifty dollars. For the big money. The big-size foreign money. But then in New York it ripped and I took it to the shoemaker and by mistake he stitched up the part where you put the paper money, so I can only use it now for change.
Cash. I just am not happy when I don't have it. The minute I have it i have to spend it. And I just buy STUPID THINGS.
Checks aren't money.
When I have fifty or sixty dollars in my pocket, I can go into Brentano's and buy The Life Of Rose Kennedy and say, "May I please have a register receipt?"
And the more receipts I get, the bigger the thrill. They're even getting to be like money to me now.
And when I go to the numbers-racket newspaper greeting card store in the neighborhood because it's late and everything else is closed, I go in and I'm very CHIC. Because I have money. I buy Harper's Bazaar and then I ask for a receipt. The newsboy yells at me and then he writes it on plain white paper. I won't accept that. "List the magazines, please. And put the date. And write the name of the store at the top." That makes it feel even more like money. The reason for doing it is I want that man to know I am an HONEST CITIZEN, and I SAVE MY STUBS and I PAY MY TAXES.
Then I go and eat, just because I have money, not because I'm hungry. I have it and I have to spend it before I go to sleep. So if it's one in the morning and I'm still awake, I take a cab to the all-night pharmacy and buy whatever I've been brainwashed with that night on TV.
I'll buy anything in a drugstore in the middle of the night. I'll make the store stay open a little late for me while I finish up, because they know I have money, so that's prestige. Right? The next step is getting to know the store so well they let me charge. I tell the store I don't like to get bills in the mail because it DEPRESSES ME. "Just tell me what I owe you now," I say, "and I'll come back next week when I have more cash and pay you. Give me a bill, and when I bring it back you can mark it PAID."
After you PAY SOMEBODY BACK you never run into them any more. But before that, they're EVERYWHERE.
When I have a lot of money, my tips are just ridiculous. If the fare comes to a dollar thirty, you know, I say just keep two dollars . . . But if I don't have money, I ask for twenty cents back.
I gave a cab driver a hundred dollars once. In the dark I thought it was a dollar. The fare was sixty cents (this is before the fares went up the last time) and I told him to keep it. And that's always depressed me.
I sometimes get into a cab without money and go someplace to pick up some money. To the bank or to the office or to pick up some that's been left for me with a doorman. Now, on the way up in the cab without any money, I would have to do such an act with the cab driver. He's got that plastic divider-shield up which automatically makes you feel like a criminal—that you're going to shoot him or hold him up. So you've got to really convince that guy and make him like you, that you're just picking up an envelope with the doorman. So I say, "I'll leave my paper bag with you." But then I write down their license number in case they split and I run in to get my envelope. On a certain run that I make a lot, I usually pick up the envelope and then go next door to the stationery store to cash it. If they can't cash it, I have to go next door to Riker's. They can never cash it. Then the tie shop. They can always cash it. Then I get back in and I say to the driver, "Take me back where I came from." Well, that little trip has cost me half of what I've gone to pick up (with the tip that I'd already promised the driver). So then I have to go and blow money in a health food store. I blow some on pink organic toothpaste, because it brought back memories of Elizabeth Arden's pink toothpaste. I want to find something that tastes like the old-fashioned Ipana in the yellow tube.
I only take cabs because I like to talk. If they don't put the meter on, halfway through the ride I ask them, "Why don't you turn the meter on?" "Well, it's such a short trip, I thought—" I say, "You thought, you thought! If you had said to me, 'Can I make it on my own?' I would have said sure, given you what it would have cost and a tip besides. Now we're here, and there's nothing on the meter, and by rights I don't owe you anything." And at that they have to say, "No . . ." So I drop a quarter in. I say, "You see? It's better to ask. You can't beat the system."
You can't talk on the news yet about how to beat the system, and that's what people want to know about.
It's great to buy friends. I don't think there's anything wrong with having a lot of money and attracting people with it. Look who you're attracting: EVERYBODY!
I know somebody who is very rich and all day long his paranoia is that people are only around him for his money. But then, he's always the first to tell you he's just flown in his private plane to Washington, D.C., but took a commercial airline to LA.
If you look like a rag, but if you've got fifteen dollars in your pocket, you can still impress people that you've got money. All you have to do is go down to the liquor store and buy a bottle of champagne. You can impress a whole roomful of people and with luck maybe you'll never see them again, so they'll always think you've got money. I never can have money and pretend I'm poor. I can only be poor and pretend I'm rich.
I know a woman who calls somebody up every afternoon and says, "I'll pay you a hundred dollars to fuck me." Fabulous. She makes sure they're very attractive and from good families and everything, but they need maybe a few more dollars to spend on wheels for their Mercedes. This girl does not have diamonds, nothing she wears costs that much, and yet there's "money" in her nose and in her ears and in her brain. It's in her cheekbones, too, it gives her structure. A delivery man from the coffee shop might come in and you could ask him, "Look at her. Is she poor or rich?" And he'd know. Because the face is "money." She can be walking down the street smoking a cigarette and she can hail a cab in just such a dainty way that the whole affair changes.
I hate Sundays: there's nothing open except plant stores and bookstores.
Money is money. It doesn't matter if I've worked hard or easy for it. I spend if the same.
I like money on the wall. Say you were going to buy a $200,000 painting. I think you should take that money, tie it up, and hang it on the wall. Then when someone visited you the first thing they would see is the money on the wall.
I don't think everybody should have money. It shouldn't be for everybody—you wouldn't know who was important. How boring. Who would you gossip about? Who would you put down? Never that great feeling of somebody saying "Can I borrow twenty-five dollars?"
Christmas is when you have to go to the bank and get crisp money to put in envelopes from the stationery store for tips. After you tip the doorman, he goes on sick leave or quits and the new one isn't impressed.
I love to get the best orchestra seat for a Broadway show, leave after the first act, and catch the end of the show next door, the best seat there, too. And I have two stubs. That's work because I'm "covering" it.
I was never interested in a plain checkbook—I only wanted the desk model because that has a lot of status, I think.
LYING IN THE BATHTUB WITH A PILLOW BEHIND MY HEAD MAKES ME FEEL VERY RICH—the pillow that I sent away for for $3.95 and a boxtop. Maybe it's an illusion. Of grandeur. But when you pay the phone bills every month that I do, you know you have the money.
It's fun to buy a lot of things for a little. To get a big shopping bag in Lamston's—to pay the thirty cents for the bag, and then to fill it. You've blown maybe sixty dollars in Lamston's, and you get home and you put everything on the bed and you take the Comet and you wash the prices on the tops off where it's written "$1.69." Then, the minute you've put all the stuff away, you want to go shopping again. So you go to the Village. You turn your nose up at one plant shop because you want them to think you're going to the expensive plant shop across the street. And then you want to impress that plant man, so you go in and you say, "I'll take it." Then you bring those home and your room is filled with flowers. That makes you feel so rich you want to leave your door open just a crack so the people across the hall can see you're rich. Not enough so you think they're going to rob you, though.
When I had a lot of cash once, I sprang for my first color television. The "tingle" in black and white was driving me crazy. I thought maybe if I saw all the commercials in color they'd look new and I'd have more things to go out and buy again.
Korvettes. In cash. I even wanted remote control, but that was in another department. I started taking it home, but then I got paranoid. The box said "Sony" and "Korvettes" and I wanted it to say "Lamston's," because I was taking it up my elevator, up my hall, into my apartment, and with that wrapping, and with having to throw out the white styrofoam that shows its shape, I thought, "I won't have this for long."
Can't I deduct liquor if I have to get high to talk and talking's my business?
I have a Fantasy about Money: I'm walking down the street and I hear somebody say—in a whisper—"There goes the richest person in the world."
I don't look at dates on nickels. It could be from 1910, I wouldn't save it. I'd spend it with a dime for a Clark Bar.
I hate PENNIES. I wish they'd stop making them altogether. I would never save them. I don't have the time. I like to say in stores, "Oh forget it, keep those pennies, it makes my French wallet too heavy."
CHANGE can get to be a burden, but it can also come in very handy when you have no money. You hunt for it, you look under the BED, you go through all the COAT POCKETS, saying, "Maybe I left a quarter there or there . . ." sometimes it can be the difference between buying a PACK OF CIGARETTES or not, to only be able to dig up sixty nine cents instead of seventy cents. You HUNT and HUNT and HUNT for that LAST PENNY. The only time YOU LIKE A PENNY is when you need ONE MORE.
And then they ask you in the stores, "Do you have a penny?" and then you have to go SCROUNGING. Or else you do have a penny but you just don't feel like looking . . .
I asked a cabbie the other day what money meant to him. "Good times," he said. "I take my wife out, I enjoy my wife, I enjoy going out with her, so when I have money I take her out."
I feel the same way.
Then I asked this cabbie how he felt when people gave him pennies. "Pennies? I never get pennies.—No, wait. 1 shouldn't say that. I got five pennies the other day from Gina Lollobrigida."
I asked him to tell me about it.
"There's nothing to tell, she's a very nice person, she likes New York, she doesn't like Hollywood, she's traveling all over, I think she's left now, and she's writing a book."
GINA LOLLOBRIGIDA.
If they made everything work out to be an even amount, pennies could be the weights on the bottom of the flowerpots.
Money is the MOMENT to me. Money is my MOOD.
To some people money is to buy today what they think will have value tomorrow. GET IT CHEAP, they say. Well, I don't have anything that goes below 1955. I swear. Nothing. Maybe a pencil I borrow from somebody might be from 1947. You don't know.
American money is very well-designed, really. I like it better than any other kind of money. I've thrown it in the East River down by the Staten Island Ferry just to see it float.
What we're all looking for is someone who doesn't live there, just pays for it.
If I think something I buy is worth more money than I pay, and if I like the people I'm buying from, I have to tell them they're undercharging me. I don't feel right until I tell them. If I buy a sandwich that's very very filling, and if the person I buy it from doesn't know how great it is, I have to tell him.
I don't feel like I get germs when I hold money. Money has a certain kind of amnesty. I feel, when I'm holding money, that the dollar bill has no more germs on it than my hands do. When I pass my hand over money, it becomes perfectly clean to me. I don't know where it's been—who's touched it and with what—but that's all erased the moment I touch it.
10. Atmosphere
B: I wanted to make a film that showed how sad and lyrical it is for those two old ladies to be living in those rooms full of newspapers and cats.
A: You shouldn't make it sad. You should just say, "This is how people today are doing things."
Space is all one space and thought is all one thought, but my mind divides its spaces into spaces into spaces and thoughts into thoughts into thoughts. Like a large condominium. Occasionally I think about the one Space and the one Thought, but usually I don't. Usually I think about my condominium.
The condominium has hot and cold running water, a few Heinz pickles thrown in, some chocolate-covered cherries, and when the Woolworth's hot fudge sundae switch goes on, then I know I really have something.
(This condominium meditates a lot: it's usually closed for the afternoon, evening, and morning.)
Your mind makes spaces into spaces. It's a lot of hard work. A lot of hard spaces. As you get older you get more spaces, and more compartments. And more things to put in the compartments.
To be really rich, I believe, is to have one space. One big empty space.
I really believe in empty spaces, although, as an artist, I make a lot of junk.
Empty space is never-wasted space. Wasted space is any space that has art in it.
An artist is somebody who produces things that people don't need to have but that he—for some reason—thinks it would be a good idea to give them.
Business Art is a much better thing to be making than Art Art, because Art Art doesn't support the space it takes up, whereas Business Art does. (If Business Art doesn't support its own space it goes out-of-business.)
So on the one hand I really believe in empty spaces, but on the other hand, because I'm still making some art, I'm still making junk for people to put in their spaces that I believe should be empty: i.e., I'm helping people waste their space when what I really want to do is help them empty their space.
I go even further in not following my own philosophy, because I can't even empty my own spaces. It's not that my philosophy is failing me, it's that I am failing my own philosophy. I breach what I preach more than I practice it.
When I look at things, I always see the space they occupy. I always want the space to reappear, to make a comeback, because it's lost space when there's something in it. If I see a chair in a beautiful space, no matter how beautiful the chair is, it can never be as beautiful to me as the plain space.
My favorite piece of sculpture is a solid wall with a hole in it to frame the space on the other side.
I believe that everyone should live in one big empty space. It can be a small space, as long as it's clean and empty. I like the Japanese way of rolling everything up and locking it away in cupboards. But I wouldn't even have the cupboards, because that's hypocritical. But if you can't go all the way and you really feel you need a closet, then your closet should be a totally separate piece of space so you don't use it as a crutch too much. If you live in New York, your closet should be, at the very least, in New Jersey. Aside from false dependency, another reason for keeping your cfoset at a good distance from where you live is that you don't want to feel you're living next door to your own dump. Another person's dump wouldn't bother you so much because you wouldn't Know exactly what was in it, but thinking about your own closet, and knowing every little thing that's in it, could drive you crazy.
Everything in your closet should have an expiration date on it the way milk and bread and magazines and newspapers do, and once something passes its expiration date, you should throw it out.
What you should do is get a box for a month, and drop everything in it and at the end of the month lock it up. Then date it and send it over to Jersey. You should try to keep track of it, but if you can't and you lose it, that's fine, because it's one less thing to think about, another load off your mind.
Tennessee Williams saves everything up in a trunk and then sends it out to a storage place. I started off myself with trunks and the odd pieces of furniture, but then I went around shopping for something better and now I just drop everything into the same-size brown cardboard boxes that have a color patch on the side for the month of the year. I really hate nostalgia, though, so deep down I hope they all get lost and I never have to look at them again. That's another conflict. I want to throw things right out the window as they're handed to me, but instead I say thank you and drop them into the box-of-the-month. But my other outlook is that I really do want to save things so they can be used again someday.
There should be supermarkets that sell things and supermarkets that buy things back, and until that equalizes, there'll be more waste than there should be. Everybody would always have something to sell back, so everybody would have money, because everybody would have something to sell. We all have something, but most of what we have isn't salable, there's such a preference today for brand new things. People should be able to sell their old cans, their old chicken bones, their old shampoo bottles, their old magazines. We have to get more organized. People who tell you we're running out of things are just making the prices go up higher. How can we be running out of anything when there's always, if I'm not mistaken, the same amount of matter in the Universe, with the exception of what goes into the black holes?
I think about people eating and going to the bathroom all the time, and I wonder why they don't have a tube up their behind that takes all the stuff they eat and recycles it back into their mouth, regenerating it, and then they'd never have to think about buying food or eating it. And they wouldn't even have to see it—it wouldn't even be dirty. If they wanted to, they could artificially color it on the way back in. Pink. (I got the idea from thinking that bees shit honey, but then I found out that honey isn't bee-shit, it's bee regurgitation, so the honeycombs aren't bee bathrooms as I had previously thought. The bees therefore must run off somewhere else to do it.)
Free countries are great, because you can actually sit in somebody else's space for a while and pretend you're a part of it. You can sit in the Plaza Hotel and you don't even have to live there. You can just sit and watch the people go by.
There are different ways for individual people to take over space—to command space. Very shy people don't even want to take up the space that their body actually takes up, whereas very outgoing people want to take up as much space as they can get.
Before media there used to be a physical limit on how much space one person could take up by themselves. People, I think, are the only things that know how to take up more space than the space they're actually in, because with media you can sit back and still let yourself fill up space on records, in the movies, most exclusively on the telephone and least exclusively on television.
Some people must go crazy when they realize how much space they've managed to command. If you were the star of the biggest show on television and took a walk down an average American street one night while you were on the air, and if you looked through windows and saw yourself on television in everybody's living room, taking up some of their space, can you imagine how you would feel?
I don't think anybody, no matter how famous they are in other fields, could ever feel as peculiar as a television star. Not even the biggest rock star whose records are playing on sound systems everywhere he goes could feel as peculiar as someone who knows he's on everybody's television regularly. No matter how small he is, he has all the space anyone could ever want, right there in the television box.
You should have contact with your closest friends through the most intimate and exclusive of all media—the telephone.
I've always had a conflict because I'm shy and yet I like to take up a lot of personal space. Mom always said, "Don't be pushy, but let everybody know you're around." I wanted to command more space than I was commanding, but then I knew I was too shy to know what to do with the attention if I did manage to get it. That's why I love television. That's why I feel that television is the media I'd most like to shine in. I'm really jealous of everybody who's got their own show on television.
As I said, I want a show of my own—called Nothing Special.
I'm impressed with people who can create new spaces with the right words. I only know one language, and sometimes in the middle of a sentence I feel like a foreigner trying to talk it because I have word spasms where the parts of some words begin to sound peculiar to me and in the middle of saying the word I'll think, "Oh, this can't be right—this sounds very peculiar, I don't know if I should try to finish up this word or try to make it into something else, because if it comes out good it'll be right, but if it comes out bad it'll sound retarded," and so in the middle of words that are over one syllable, I sometimes get confused and try to graft other words on top of them. Sometimes this makes good journalism and when they quote me it looks good in print, and other times it's very embarrassing. You can never predict what will come out when the words you're saying start to sound strange to you and you start to patch.
I really love English—like I love everything else that's American—it's just that I don't do that well with it. My hairdresser keeps telling me that learning foreign languages is good for business (he knows five, but then the little kids in Europe giggle when he talks, so I don't know how well he really knows them) and he tells me I should learn at least one, but I just can't. I can hardly talk what I already talk, so I don't want to branch out.
I admire people who do well with words, though, and I thought Truman Capote filled up space with words so well that when I first got to New York I began writing short fan letters to him and calling him on the phone every day until his mother told me to quit it.
I think a lot about "space writers"—the writers who get paid by how much they write. I always think quantity is the best gauge on anything (because you're always doing the same thing, even if it looks like you're doing something else), so I set my sights on becoming a "space artist." When Picasso died I read in a magazine that he had made four thousand masterpieces in his lifetime and I thought, "Gee, I could do that in a day." So I started. And then I found out, "Gee, it takes more than a day to do four thousand pictures." You see, the way I do them, with my technique, I really thought I could do four thousand in a day. And they'd all be masterpieces because they'd all be the same painting. And I started and I got up to about five hundred and then I stopped. But it took more than a day, I think it took a month. So at five hundred a month, it would have taken me about eight months to do four thousand masterpieces—to be a "space artist" and fill up spaces that I don't believe should be filled up anyway. It was disillusioning for me, to realize it would take me that long.
I like painting on a square because you don't have to decide whether it should be longer-longer or shorter-shorter or longer-shorter: it's just a square. I always wanted to do nothing but the same-size picture, but then somebody always comes along and says, "You have to do it a little bit bigger," or "A little bit smaller." You see, I think every painting should be the same size and the same color so they're all interchangeable and nobody thinks they have a better painting or a worse painting. And if the one "master painting" is good, they're all good. Besides, even when the subject is different, people always paint the same painting.
When I have to think about it, I know the picture is wrong. And sizing is a form of thinking, and coloring is too. My instinct about painting says, "If you don't think about it, it's right." As soon as you have to decide and choose, it's wrong. And the more you decide about, the more wrong it gets. Some people, they paint abstract, so they sit there thinking about it because their thinking makes them feel they're doing something. But my thinking never makes me feel I'm doing anything. Leonardo da Vinci used to convince his patrons that his thinking time was worth something—worth even more than his painting time—and that may have been true for him, but I know that my thinking time isn't worth anything. I only expect to get paid for my "doing" time.
When I paint:
I look at my canvas and I space it out right. I think, "Well, over here in this corner it looks like it sort of belongs," and so I say, "Oh yes, that's where it belongs, all right." So I look at it again and I say, "The space in that corner there needs a little blue," and so I put my blue up there and then, then I look over there and it looks blue over there so I take my brush and I move it over there and I make it blue over there, too. And then it needs to be more spaced, so I take my little blue brush and I blue it over there, and then I take my green brush and I put my green brush on it and I green it there, and then I walk back and I look at it and see if it's spaced right. And then—sometimes it's not spaced right—I take my colors and I put another little green over there and then if it's spaced right I leave it alone.
Usually, all I need is tracing paper and a good light. I can't understand why I was never an abstract expressionist, because with my shaking hand I would have been a natural.
I got a little into technology a couple of times. One of the times was when I thought it was the end of my art. I thought I was really really finished, so to mark the end of my art career I made silver pillows that you could just fill up with balloons and let fly away. I made them for a performance of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company. And then it turned out they didn't float away and we were stuck with them, so I guessed I wasn't really finished with art, since there I was, back again, putting anchors on the pillows. I had actually announced I was retiring from art. But then the Silver Space Pillows didn't float away and my career didn't float away, either. Incidentally, I've always said that silver was my favorite color because it reminded me of space, but now I'm thinking that over.
Another way to take up more space is with perfume.
I really love wearing perfume.
I'm not exactly a snob about the bottle a cologne comes in, but I am impressed with a good-looking presentation. It gives you confidence when you're picking up a well-designed bottle.
People have told me that the lighter your skin, the lighter the color perfume you should use. And vice-versa. But I can't limit myself to one range. (Besides, I'm sure hormones have a lot to do with how a perfume smells on your skin—I'm sure the right hormones can make Chanel No. 5 smell very butch.)
I switch perfumes all the time. If I've been wearing one perfume for three months, I force myself to give it up, even if I still feel like wearing it, so whenever I smell it again it will always remind me of those three months. I never go back to wearing it again; it becomes part of my permanent smell collection.
Sometimes at parties I slip away to the bathroom just to see what colognes they've got. I never look at anything else— I don't snoop—but I'm compulsive about seeing if there's some obscure perfume I haven't tried yet, or a good old favorite I haven't smelled in a long time. If I see something interesting, I can't stop myself from pouring it on. But then for the rest of the evening, I'm paranoid that the host or hostess will get a whiff of me and notice that I smell like somebody-they-know.
Of the five senses, smell has the closest thing to the full power of the past. Smell really is transporting. Seeing, hearing, touching, tasting are just not as powerful as smelling if you want your whole being to go back for a second to something. Usually I don't want to, but by having smells stopped up in bottles, I can be in control and can only smell the smells I want to, when I want to, to get the memories I'm in the mood to have. Just for a second. The good thing about a smell-memory is that the feeling of being transported stops the instant you stop smelling, so there are no aftereffects. It's a neat way to reminisce.
My collection of semi-used perfumes is very big by now, although I didn't start wearing lots of them until the early 60s. Before that the smells in my life were all just whatever happened to hit my nose by chance. But then I realized I had to have a kind of smell museum so certain smells wouldn't get lost forever. I loved the way the lobby of the Paramount Theater on Broadway used to smell. I would close my eyes and breathe deep whenever I was in it. Then they tore it down. I can look all I want at a picture of that lobby, but so what? i can't ever smell it again. Sometimes I picture a botany book in the future saying something like, "The lilac is now extinct. Its fragrance is thought to have been similar to—?" and then what can they say? Maybe they'll be able to give it as a chemical formula. Maybe they already can.
I used to be afraid I would eventually run through and use up all the good colognes and there'd be nothing left but things like "Grape" and "Musk." But now that I've been to the profumerias of Europe and seen all the colognes and perfumes they have there, I don't worry any more.
I get very excited when I read advertisements for perfume in the fashion magazines that were published in the 30s and 40s. I try to imagine from their names what they smelled like and I go crazy because I want to smell them all so much:
Guerlain's: "Sous le Vent"
Lucien Le Long's: "Jabot," "Gardenia," "Mon Image,"
"Opening Night" Prince Matchabelli's: "Princess of Wales" in memory
of Alexandra Ciro's: "Surrender," "Reflexions" Lentheric's: "A Bientot," "Shanghai," "Gardenia de
Tahiti" Worth's: "Imprudence"
Marcel Rochas': "Avenue Matignon," "Air Jeune"
D'Orsay's: "Trophee," "Le Dandy," "Toujours Fidele," "Belle de Jour"
Coty's: "A Suma," "La Fougeraie au Crepuscule" (Fernery at Twilight)
Corday's: "Tzigane," "Possession," "Orchidee Bleue," "Voyage a Paris"
Chanel's: brisk "Cuir de Russie" (Russian Leather); romantic "Glamour"; melting "Jasmine"; tender "Gardenia"
Molinelle's: "Venez Voir"
Houbigant's: "Countryclub," "Demi-Jour" (Twilight)
Bonwit Teller's: "721"
Helena Rubinstein's: "Town," "Country"
Weil's: Eau de Cologne "Carbonique"
Kathleen Mary Quinlan's: "Rhythm"
Lengyel's (pronounced "len-jel"): "Imperiale Russe"
Chevalier Garde's: "H.R.R.," "Fleur de Perse," "Roi
de Rome" Saravel's: "White Christmas"
When I'm walking around New York I'm always aware of the smells around me: the rubber mats in office buildings; upholstered seats in movie theaters; pizza; Orange Julius; espresso-garlic-oregano; burgers; dry cotton tee-shirts; neighborhood grocery stores; chic grocery stores; the hot dogs and sauerkraut carts; hardware store smell; stationery store smell; souvlaki; the leather and rugs at Dunhill, Mark Cross, Gucci; the Moroccan-tanned leather on the streetracks; new magazines, back-issue magazines; typewriter stores; Chinese import stores (the mildew from the freighter); India import stores; Japanese import stores; record stores; health food stores; soda-fountain drugstores; cut-rate drugstores; barber shops; beauty parlors; delicatessens; lumber yards; the wood chairs and tables in the N.Y. Public Library; the donuts, pretzels, gum, and grape soda in the subways; kitchen appliance departments; photo labs; shoe stores; bicycle stores; the paper and printing inks in Scribner's, Bren-tano's, Doubleday's, Rizzoli, Marboro, Bookmasters, Barnes & Noble; shoe-shine stands; grease-batter; hair pomade; the good cheap candy smell in the front of Woolworth's and the dry-goods smell in the back; the horses by the Plaza Hotel; bus and truck exhaust; architects' blueprints; cumin, fenugreek, soy sauce, cinnamon; fried platanos; the train tracks in Grand Central Station; the banana smell of dry cleaners; exhausts from apartment house laundry rooms; East Side bars (creams); West Side bars (sweat); newspaper stands; record stores; fruit stands in all the different seasons—strawberry, watermelon, plum, peach, kiwi, cherry, Concord grape, tangerine, murcot, pineapple, apple—and I love the way the smell of each fruit gets into the rough wood of the crates and into the tissue-paper wrappings.
I know from experience that I prefer city space to country space. I love the idea of being in the country, but then when I get there it comes back to me that:
I love to walk but I can't
I love to swim but I can't
I love to sit in the sun but I can't
I love to smell the flowers but I can't
I love to play tennis but I can't
I love to water-ski but I can't
The list could run longer, but that's the idea, and the reason "I can't" is simply because I'm not the type. You just can't do things that you're not the type to do. You can say things that you're not the type to say, but you can't do things that you're not the type to do. It's a bad idea.
Also, when I'm in the country, I love to watch television but I can't, because the reception is usually too bad.
(By the way, people will often try to convince you to do something by saying that it doesn't matter if you're not the type, or that you could be the type if you wanted to be, but don't break down and try to do something that you're not the type to do, because you know what type you are, nobody else does.)
I'm a city boy. In the big cities they've set it up so you can go to a park and be in a miniature countryside, but in the countryside they don't have any patches of big city, so I get very homesick.
Another reason I like the city better than the country is that in the city everything is geared to working, and in the country everything is geared to relaxation. I like working better than relaxing. In the city, even the trees in the parks work hard because the number of people they have to make oxygen and chlorophyll for is staggering. If you lived in Canada you might have a million trees making oxygen for you alone, so each of those trees isn't working that hard. Whereas a tree in a treepot in Times Square has to make oxygen for a million people. In New York you really do have to hustle, and the trees know this, too—just look at them. The other day on 57th Street, I was walking and I was looking at the new, sloping Solow building across the street and I walked straight into a treepot. I was embarrassed because there was no way at all to carry it off. I just fell on top of this tree on West 57th Street because I wasn't ready for it to be there.
Somehow, the way life works, people usually wind up either in crowded subways and elevators, or in big rooms all by themselves. Everybody should have a big room they can go to and everybody should also ride the crowded subways.
Usually people are very tired when they ride on a subway, so they can't sing and dance, but I think if they could sing and dance on a subway, they'd really enjoy it.
The kids who spray graffiti all over the subway cars at night have learned how to recycle city space very well. They go back into the subway yards in the middle of the night when the cars are empty and that's when they do their singing and their dancing on the subway. The subways are like palaces at night with all that space just for you.
Ghetto space is wrong for America. It's wrong for people who are the same type to go and live together. There shouldn't be any huddling together in the same groups with the same food. In America it's got to mix 'n' mingle. If I were President, I'd make people mix 'n' mingle more. But the thing is America's a free country and I couldn't make them.
I believe in living in one room. One empty room with just a bed, a tray, and a suitcase. You can do everything either from your bed or in your bed—eat, sleep, think, get exercise, smoke—and you would have a bathroom and a telephone right next to the bed.
Everything is more glamorous when you do it in bed, anyway. Even peeling potatoes.
Suitcase space is so efficient. A suitcase full of everything you need:
One spoon
One fork
One plate
One cup
One shirt
One underwear
One sock
One shoe
One suitcase and one empty room. Terrific. Perfect.
By living in one room you eliminate a lot of worries. But the basic worries, unfortunately, remain:
Are the lights on or off?
Is the water off?
Are the cigarettes out?
Is the back door closed?
Is the elevator working?
Is there anyone in the lobby?
Who's that sitting in my lap?
People are sleeping in pyramid-shaped spaces a lot now because they think it will keep them young and vital and stop the aging process. I'm not worried about that because I have my wings. However, my ideal too is the pyramid-look, because you don't have to think about a ceiling. You want to have a roof over your head, so why not let your walls also be your ceiling, so you have one less thing to think about—one less surface to look at, one less surface to clean, one less surface to paint. The tepee-dwelling Indians had the right idea. A cone might be nice if circles didn't exclude the edges and if you could find the right round sink, but I prefer an equilateral-triangular pyramidal-shaped enclosure even more than a square-based pyramid shape, because with a triangular base you have one less wall to think about, and one less corner to dust.
My ideal city would be one long Main Street with no cross streets or side streets to jam up traffic. Just one long oneway street. With one tall vertical building where everybody lived with:
One elevator
One doorman
One mailbox
One washing machine
One garbage can
One tree out front
One movie theater next door
Main Street would be very very wide, and all you'd have to say to someone to make them feel good is, "I saw you on Main Street today."
And you'd fill your car up with gas and drive across the street.
My ideal city would be completely new. No antiques. All the buildings would be new. Old buildings are unnatural spaces. Buildings should be built to last for a short time. And if they're older than ten years, I say get rid of them. I'd build new buildings every fourteen years. The building and the tearing down would keep people busy, and the water wouldn't be rusty from old pipes.
Rome, Italy, is an example of what happens when the buildings in a city last too long.
They call Rome "The Eternal City" because everything is so old and everything is still standing. They always say, "Rome wasn't built in a day." Well, I say maybe it should have been, because the quicker you build something, the shorter a time it lasts, and the shorter a time it lasts, the sooner people have jobs again, replacing it. Replacing necessities keeps people busy. The necessities, they always say, are food, shelter, and clothing. Now, in Italy they make a lot of food, and they make a lot of clothing, but food and clothing are only two-thirds of the necessities, the other third is shelter—and they're not making that because it's already been made. So what's happened in Rome is that the women wind up in the kitchens making all the food and in the factories sewing all the clothes, while the men don't do anything because the buildings are already built and they're not falling down! Their buildings were originally built too well and they've never corrected the situation. This is why you see so many men on the streets of Rome, Italy, at all hours of the day and night.
The best, most temporal way of making a building that I ever heard of is by making it with light. The Fascists did a lot of this "light architecture." If you build buildings with lights outside, you can make them indefinite, and then when you're through using them you shut the lights off and they disappear. Hitler always needed buildings in a hurry to make speeches from, so his architect created these "buildings" for him that were illusion buildings, completely constructed by lighting effects, where he defined a very big space.
Holograms are going to be exciting, I think. You can really, finally, with holograms, pick your own atmosphere. They'll be televising a party, and you want to be there, and with holograms, you will be there. You'll be able to have this 3-D party in your house, you'll be able to pretend you're there and walk in with the people. You can even rent a party. You can have anybody famous that you want sitting right next to you.
I like to be the right thing in the wrong space and the wrong thing in the right space. But when you hit one of the two, people turn the lights out on you, or spit on you, or write bad reviews of you, or beat you up, or mug you, or say you're "climbing." But usually being the right thing in the wrong space and the wrong thing in the right space is worth it, because something funny always happens. Believe me, because I've made a career out of being the right thing in the wrong space and the wrong thing in the right space. That's one thing I really do know about.
When people have a cool, calm atmosphere about them, they're usually spaced. They have those right kind of eyes, and they sit around and not bother anybody. Some people are like that naturally because of their chemicals, and other people are like that because of drugs. They think they're thinking—about something.
Energy helps you fill up more space, but if I had more energy than usual, I'd probably not want to fill up more space—I'd be in my room cleaning a lot. I'll say this for diet pills: they make you think small, and when you think small, you do a lot of cleaning up. Real energy makes you want to run down the beach doing cartwheels even if you can't do them. But diet-pill energy helps you fill up less space because it makes you want to recopy address books while you talk for an hour about running down the beach doing cartwheels. Diet pills make you want to dust and flush things down the john.
In New York you have to clean so much, and when you're finished, it's not-dirty. In Europe people clean so much, and when they're finished, it's not just not-dirty, it's clean. Also, it seems so much easier to entertain in Europe than in New York. You just throw open the doors to the garden and eat out in the open air with flowers and trees all around. Whereas New York is funny, most of the time things just don't come off. In Europe, even having tea in the back yard can be wonderful. But in New York it's complicated—if the restaurant is nice, the food can be bad and if the food is good, the lighting can be bad, and if the lighting is good, the air circulation can be bad.
And New York restaurants now have a new thing—they don't sell their food, they sell their atmosphere. They say, "How dare you say we don't have good food, when we never said we had good food. We have good atmosphere." They caught on that what people really care about is changing their atmosphere for a couple of hours. That's why they can get away with just selling their atmosphere with a minimum of actual food. Pretty soon when food prices go really up, they'll be selling only atmosphere. If people are really all that hungry, they can bring food with them when they go out to dinner, but otherwise, instead of "going out to dinner" they'll just be "going out to atmosphere."
My favorite restaurant atmosphere has always been the atmosphere of the good, plain, American lunchroom or even the good plain American lunchcounter. The old-style Schrafft's and the old-style Chock Full O' Nuts are absolutely the only things in the world that I'm truly nostalgic for. The days were carefree in the 1940s and 1950s when I could go into a Chocks for my cream cheese sandwich with nuts on date-nut bread and not worry about a thing. No matter what changes or how fast, the one thing we all always need is real good food so we can know what the changes are and how fast they're coming. Progress is very important and exciting in everything except food. When you say you want an orange, you don't want someone asking you, "An orange what?"
I really like to eat alone. I want to start a chain of restaurants for other people who are like me called ANDY-MATS—"The Restaurant for the Lonely Person." You get your food and then you take your tray into a booth and watch television.
Today my favorite kind of atmosphere is the airport atmosphere. If I didn't have to think about the idea that airplanes go up in the air and fly it would be my perfect atmosphere. Airplanes and airports have my favorite kind of food service, my favorite kind of bathrooms, my favorite peppermint Life Savers, my favorite kinds of entertainment, my favorite loudspeaker address systems, my favorite conveyor belts, my favorite graphics and colors, the best security checks, the best views, the best perfume shops, the best employees, and the best optimism. I love the way you don't have to think about where you're going, someone else is doing that, but I just can't get over the crazy feeling I get when I look out and see the clouds and know I'm really up-there. The atmosphere is great, it's the idea of flying that I question. I guess I'm not an air person, but I'm on an air schedule, so I have to live an air life. I'm embarrassed that I don't like to fly because I love to be modern, but I compensate by loving airports and airplanes so much.
The best atmosphere I can think of is film, because it's three-dimensional physically and two-dimensional emotionally.
A: You shouldn't make it sad. You should just say, "This is how people today are doing things."
Space is all one space and thought is all one thought, but my mind divides its spaces into spaces into spaces and thoughts into thoughts into thoughts. Like a large condominium. Occasionally I think about the one Space and the one Thought, but usually I don't. Usually I think about my condominium.
The condominium has hot and cold running water, a few Heinz pickles thrown in, some chocolate-covered cherries, and when the Woolworth's hot fudge sundae switch goes on, then I know I really have something.
(This condominium meditates a lot: it's usually closed for the afternoon, evening, and morning.)
Your mind makes spaces into spaces. It's a lot of hard work. A lot of hard spaces. As you get older you get more spaces, and more compartments. And more things to put in the compartments.
To be really rich, I believe, is to have one space. One big empty space.
I really believe in empty spaces, although, as an artist, I make a lot of junk.
Empty space is never-wasted space. Wasted space is any space that has art in it.
An artist is somebody who produces things that people don't need to have but that he—for some reason—thinks it would be a good idea to give them.
Business Art is a much better thing to be making than Art Art, because Art Art doesn't support the space it takes up, whereas Business Art does. (If Business Art doesn't support its own space it goes out-of-business.)
So on the one hand I really believe in empty spaces, but on the other hand, because I'm still making some art, I'm still making junk for people to put in their spaces that I believe should be empty: i.e., I'm helping people waste their space when what I really want to do is help them empty their space.
I go even further in not following my own philosophy, because I can't even empty my own spaces. It's not that my philosophy is failing me, it's that I am failing my own philosophy. I breach what I preach more than I practice it.
When I look at things, I always see the space they occupy. I always want the space to reappear, to make a comeback, because it's lost space when there's something in it. If I see a chair in a beautiful space, no matter how beautiful the chair is, it can never be as beautiful to me as the plain space.
My favorite piece of sculpture is a solid wall with a hole in it to frame the space on the other side.
I believe that everyone should live in one big empty space. It can be a small space, as long as it's clean and empty. I like the Japanese way of rolling everything up and locking it away in cupboards. But I wouldn't even have the cupboards, because that's hypocritical. But if you can't go all the way and you really feel you need a closet, then your closet should be a totally separate piece of space so you don't use it as a crutch too much. If you live in New York, your closet should be, at the very least, in New Jersey. Aside from false dependency, another reason for keeping your cfoset at a good distance from where you live is that you don't want to feel you're living next door to your own dump. Another person's dump wouldn't bother you so much because you wouldn't Know exactly what was in it, but thinking about your own closet, and knowing every little thing that's in it, could drive you crazy.
Everything in your closet should have an expiration date on it the way milk and bread and magazines and newspapers do, and once something passes its expiration date, you should throw it out.
What you should do is get a box for a month, and drop everything in it and at the end of the month lock it up. Then date it and send it over to Jersey. You should try to keep track of it, but if you can't and you lose it, that's fine, because it's one less thing to think about, another load off your mind.
Tennessee Williams saves everything up in a trunk and then sends it out to a storage place. I started off myself with trunks and the odd pieces of furniture, but then I went around shopping for something better and now I just drop everything into the same-size brown cardboard boxes that have a color patch on the side for the month of the year. I really hate nostalgia, though, so deep down I hope they all get lost and I never have to look at them again. That's another conflict. I want to throw things right out the window as they're handed to me, but instead I say thank you and drop them into the box-of-the-month. But my other outlook is that I really do want to save things so they can be used again someday.
There should be supermarkets that sell things and supermarkets that buy things back, and until that equalizes, there'll be more waste than there should be. Everybody would always have something to sell back, so everybody would have money, because everybody would have something to sell. We all have something, but most of what we have isn't salable, there's such a preference today for brand new things. People should be able to sell their old cans, their old chicken bones, their old shampoo bottles, their old magazines. We have to get more organized. People who tell you we're running out of things are just making the prices go up higher. How can we be running out of anything when there's always, if I'm not mistaken, the same amount of matter in the Universe, with the exception of what goes into the black holes?
I think about people eating and going to the bathroom all the time, and I wonder why they don't have a tube up their behind that takes all the stuff they eat and recycles it back into their mouth, regenerating it, and then they'd never have to think about buying food or eating it. And they wouldn't even have to see it—it wouldn't even be dirty. If they wanted to, they could artificially color it on the way back in. Pink. (I got the idea from thinking that bees shit honey, but then I found out that honey isn't bee-shit, it's bee regurgitation, so the honeycombs aren't bee bathrooms as I had previously thought. The bees therefore must run off somewhere else to do it.)
Free countries are great, because you can actually sit in somebody else's space for a while and pretend you're a part of it. You can sit in the Plaza Hotel and you don't even have to live there. You can just sit and watch the people go by.
There are different ways for individual people to take over space—to command space. Very shy people don't even want to take up the space that their body actually takes up, whereas very outgoing people want to take up as much space as they can get.
Before media there used to be a physical limit on how much space one person could take up by themselves. People, I think, are the only things that know how to take up more space than the space they're actually in, because with media you can sit back and still let yourself fill up space on records, in the movies, most exclusively on the telephone and least exclusively on television.
Some people must go crazy when they realize how much space they've managed to command. If you were the star of the biggest show on television and took a walk down an average American street one night while you were on the air, and if you looked through windows and saw yourself on television in everybody's living room, taking up some of their space, can you imagine how you would feel?
I don't think anybody, no matter how famous they are in other fields, could ever feel as peculiar as a television star. Not even the biggest rock star whose records are playing on sound systems everywhere he goes could feel as peculiar as someone who knows he's on everybody's television regularly. No matter how small he is, he has all the space anyone could ever want, right there in the television box.
You should have contact with your closest friends through the most intimate and exclusive of all media—the telephone.
I've always had a conflict because I'm shy and yet I like to take up a lot of personal space. Mom always said, "Don't be pushy, but let everybody know you're around." I wanted to command more space than I was commanding, but then I knew I was too shy to know what to do with the attention if I did manage to get it. That's why I love television. That's why I feel that television is the media I'd most like to shine in. I'm really jealous of everybody who's got their own show on television.
As I said, I want a show of my own—called Nothing Special.
I'm impressed with people who can create new spaces with the right words. I only know one language, and sometimes in the middle of a sentence I feel like a foreigner trying to talk it because I have word spasms where the parts of some words begin to sound peculiar to me and in the middle of saying the word I'll think, "Oh, this can't be right—this sounds very peculiar, I don't know if I should try to finish up this word or try to make it into something else, because if it comes out good it'll be right, but if it comes out bad it'll sound retarded," and so in the middle of words that are over one syllable, I sometimes get confused and try to graft other words on top of them. Sometimes this makes good journalism and when they quote me it looks good in print, and other times it's very embarrassing. You can never predict what will come out when the words you're saying start to sound strange to you and you start to patch.
I really love English—like I love everything else that's American—it's just that I don't do that well with it. My hairdresser keeps telling me that learning foreign languages is good for business (he knows five, but then the little kids in Europe giggle when he talks, so I don't know how well he really knows them) and he tells me I should learn at least one, but I just can't. I can hardly talk what I already talk, so I don't want to branch out.
I admire people who do well with words, though, and I thought Truman Capote filled up space with words so well that when I first got to New York I began writing short fan letters to him and calling him on the phone every day until his mother told me to quit it.
I think a lot about "space writers"—the writers who get paid by how much they write. I always think quantity is the best gauge on anything (because you're always doing the same thing, even if it looks like you're doing something else), so I set my sights on becoming a "space artist." When Picasso died I read in a magazine that he had made four thousand masterpieces in his lifetime and I thought, "Gee, I could do that in a day." So I started. And then I found out, "Gee, it takes more than a day to do four thousand pictures." You see, the way I do them, with my technique, I really thought I could do four thousand in a day. And they'd all be masterpieces because they'd all be the same painting. And I started and I got up to about five hundred and then I stopped. But it took more than a day, I think it took a month. So at five hundred a month, it would have taken me about eight months to do four thousand masterpieces—to be a "space artist" and fill up spaces that I don't believe should be filled up anyway. It was disillusioning for me, to realize it would take me that long.
I like painting on a square because you don't have to decide whether it should be longer-longer or shorter-shorter or longer-shorter: it's just a square. I always wanted to do nothing but the same-size picture, but then somebody always comes along and says, "You have to do it a little bit bigger," or "A little bit smaller." You see, I think every painting should be the same size and the same color so they're all interchangeable and nobody thinks they have a better painting or a worse painting. And if the one "master painting" is good, they're all good. Besides, even when the subject is different, people always paint the same painting.
When I have to think about it, I know the picture is wrong. And sizing is a form of thinking, and coloring is too. My instinct about painting says, "If you don't think about it, it's right." As soon as you have to decide and choose, it's wrong. And the more you decide about, the more wrong it gets. Some people, they paint abstract, so they sit there thinking about it because their thinking makes them feel they're doing something. But my thinking never makes me feel I'm doing anything. Leonardo da Vinci used to convince his patrons that his thinking time was worth something—worth even more than his painting time—and that may have been true for him, but I know that my thinking time isn't worth anything. I only expect to get paid for my "doing" time.
When I paint:
I look at my canvas and I space it out right. I think, "Well, over here in this corner it looks like it sort of belongs," and so I say, "Oh yes, that's where it belongs, all right." So I look at it again and I say, "The space in that corner there needs a little blue," and so I put my blue up there and then, then I look over there and it looks blue over there so I take my brush and I move it over there and I make it blue over there, too. And then it needs to be more spaced, so I take my little blue brush and I blue it over there, and then I take my green brush and I put my green brush on it and I green it there, and then I walk back and I look at it and see if it's spaced right. And then—sometimes it's not spaced right—I take my colors and I put another little green over there and then if it's spaced right I leave it alone.
Usually, all I need is tracing paper and a good light. I can't understand why I was never an abstract expressionist, because with my shaking hand I would have been a natural.
I got a little into technology a couple of times. One of the times was when I thought it was the end of my art. I thought I was really really finished, so to mark the end of my art career I made silver pillows that you could just fill up with balloons and let fly away. I made them for a performance of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company. And then it turned out they didn't float away and we were stuck with them, so I guessed I wasn't really finished with art, since there I was, back again, putting anchors on the pillows. I had actually announced I was retiring from art. But then the Silver Space Pillows didn't float away and my career didn't float away, either. Incidentally, I've always said that silver was my favorite color because it reminded me of space, but now I'm thinking that over.
Another way to take up more space is with perfume.
I really love wearing perfume.
I'm not exactly a snob about the bottle a cologne comes in, but I am impressed with a good-looking presentation. It gives you confidence when you're picking up a well-designed bottle.
People have told me that the lighter your skin, the lighter the color perfume you should use. And vice-versa. But I can't limit myself to one range. (Besides, I'm sure hormones have a lot to do with how a perfume smells on your skin—I'm sure the right hormones can make Chanel No. 5 smell very butch.)
I switch perfumes all the time. If I've been wearing one perfume for three months, I force myself to give it up, even if I still feel like wearing it, so whenever I smell it again it will always remind me of those three months. I never go back to wearing it again; it becomes part of my permanent smell collection.
Sometimes at parties I slip away to the bathroom just to see what colognes they've got. I never look at anything else— I don't snoop—but I'm compulsive about seeing if there's some obscure perfume I haven't tried yet, or a good old favorite I haven't smelled in a long time. If I see something interesting, I can't stop myself from pouring it on. But then for the rest of the evening, I'm paranoid that the host or hostess will get a whiff of me and notice that I smell like somebody-they-know.
Of the five senses, smell has the closest thing to the full power of the past. Smell really is transporting. Seeing, hearing, touching, tasting are just not as powerful as smelling if you want your whole being to go back for a second to something. Usually I don't want to, but by having smells stopped up in bottles, I can be in control and can only smell the smells I want to, when I want to, to get the memories I'm in the mood to have. Just for a second. The good thing about a smell-memory is that the feeling of being transported stops the instant you stop smelling, so there are no aftereffects. It's a neat way to reminisce.
My collection of semi-used perfumes is very big by now, although I didn't start wearing lots of them until the early 60s. Before that the smells in my life were all just whatever happened to hit my nose by chance. But then I realized I had to have a kind of smell museum so certain smells wouldn't get lost forever. I loved the way the lobby of the Paramount Theater on Broadway used to smell. I would close my eyes and breathe deep whenever I was in it. Then they tore it down. I can look all I want at a picture of that lobby, but so what? i can't ever smell it again. Sometimes I picture a botany book in the future saying something like, "The lilac is now extinct. Its fragrance is thought to have been similar to—?" and then what can they say? Maybe they'll be able to give it as a chemical formula. Maybe they already can.
I used to be afraid I would eventually run through and use up all the good colognes and there'd be nothing left but things like "Grape" and "Musk." But now that I've been to the profumerias of Europe and seen all the colognes and perfumes they have there, I don't worry any more.
I get very excited when I read advertisements for perfume in the fashion magazines that were published in the 30s and 40s. I try to imagine from their names what they smelled like and I go crazy because I want to smell them all so much:
Guerlain's: "Sous le Vent"
Lucien Le Long's: "Jabot," "Gardenia," "Mon Image,"
"Opening Night" Prince Matchabelli's: "Princess of Wales" in memory
of Alexandra Ciro's: "Surrender," "Reflexions" Lentheric's: "A Bientot," "Shanghai," "Gardenia de
Tahiti" Worth's: "Imprudence"
Marcel Rochas': "Avenue Matignon," "Air Jeune"
D'Orsay's: "Trophee," "Le Dandy," "Toujours Fidele," "Belle de Jour"
Coty's: "A Suma," "La Fougeraie au Crepuscule" (Fernery at Twilight)
Corday's: "Tzigane," "Possession," "Orchidee Bleue," "Voyage a Paris"
Chanel's: brisk "Cuir de Russie" (Russian Leather); romantic "Glamour"; melting "Jasmine"; tender "Gardenia"
Molinelle's: "Venez Voir"
Houbigant's: "Countryclub," "Demi-Jour" (Twilight)
Bonwit Teller's: "721"
Helena Rubinstein's: "Town," "Country"
Weil's: Eau de Cologne "Carbonique"
Kathleen Mary Quinlan's: "Rhythm"
Lengyel's (pronounced "len-jel"): "Imperiale Russe"
Chevalier Garde's: "H.R.R.," "Fleur de Perse," "Roi
de Rome" Saravel's: "White Christmas"
When I'm walking around New York I'm always aware of the smells around me: the rubber mats in office buildings; upholstered seats in movie theaters; pizza; Orange Julius; espresso-garlic-oregano; burgers; dry cotton tee-shirts; neighborhood grocery stores; chic grocery stores; the hot dogs and sauerkraut carts; hardware store smell; stationery store smell; souvlaki; the leather and rugs at Dunhill, Mark Cross, Gucci; the Moroccan-tanned leather on the streetracks; new magazines, back-issue magazines; typewriter stores; Chinese import stores (the mildew from the freighter); India import stores; Japanese import stores; record stores; health food stores; soda-fountain drugstores; cut-rate drugstores; barber shops; beauty parlors; delicatessens; lumber yards; the wood chairs and tables in the N.Y. Public Library; the donuts, pretzels, gum, and grape soda in the subways; kitchen appliance departments; photo labs; shoe stores; bicycle stores; the paper and printing inks in Scribner's, Bren-tano's, Doubleday's, Rizzoli, Marboro, Bookmasters, Barnes & Noble; shoe-shine stands; grease-batter; hair pomade; the good cheap candy smell in the front of Woolworth's and the dry-goods smell in the back; the horses by the Plaza Hotel; bus and truck exhaust; architects' blueprints; cumin, fenugreek, soy sauce, cinnamon; fried platanos; the train tracks in Grand Central Station; the banana smell of dry cleaners; exhausts from apartment house laundry rooms; East Side bars (creams); West Side bars (sweat); newspaper stands; record stores; fruit stands in all the different seasons—strawberry, watermelon, plum, peach, kiwi, cherry, Concord grape, tangerine, murcot, pineapple, apple—and I love the way the smell of each fruit gets into the rough wood of the crates and into the tissue-paper wrappings.
I know from experience that I prefer city space to country space. I love the idea of being in the country, but then when I get there it comes back to me that:
I love to walk but I can't
I love to swim but I can't
I love to sit in the sun but I can't
I love to smell the flowers but I can't
I love to play tennis but I can't
I love to water-ski but I can't
The list could run longer, but that's the idea, and the reason "I can't" is simply because I'm not the type. You just can't do things that you're not the type to do. You can say things that you're not the type to say, but you can't do things that you're not the type to do. It's a bad idea.
Also, when I'm in the country, I love to watch television but I can't, because the reception is usually too bad.
(By the way, people will often try to convince you to do something by saying that it doesn't matter if you're not the type, or that you could be the type if you wanted to be, but don't break down and try to do something that you're not the type to do, because you know what type you are, nobody else does.)
I'm a city boy. In the big cities they've set it up so you can go to a park and be in a miniature countryside, but in the countryside they don't have any patches of big city, so I get very homesick.
Another reason I like the city better than the country is that in the city everything is geared to working, and in the country everything is geared to relaxation. I like working better than relaxing. In the city, even the trees in the parks work hard because the number of people they have to make oxygen and chlorophyll for is staggering. If you lived in Canada you might have a million trees making oxygen for you alone, so each of those trees isn't working that hard. Whereas a tree in a treepot in Times Square has to make oxygen for a million people. In New York you really do have to hustle, and the trees know this, too—just look at them. The other day on 57th Street, I was walking and I was looking at the new, sloping Solow building across the street and I walked straight into a treepot. I was embarrassed because there was no way at all to carry it off. I just fell on top of this tree on West 57th Street because I wasn't ready for it to be there.
Somehow, the way life works, people usually wind up either in crowded subways and elevators, or in big rooms all by themselves. Everybody should have a big room they can go to and everybody should also ride the crowded subways.
Usually people are very tired when they ride on a subway, so they can't sing and dance, but I think if they could sing and dance on a subway, they'd really enjoy it.
The kids who spray graffiti all over the subway cars at night have learned how to recycle city space very well. They go back into the subway yards in the middle of the night when the cars are empty and that's when they do their singing and their dancing on the subway. The subways are like palaces at night with all that space just for you.
Ghetto space is wrong for America. It's wrong for people who are the same type to go and live together. There shouldn't be any huddling together in the same groups with the same food. In America it's got to mix 'n' mingle. If I were President, I'd make people mix 'n' mingle more. But the thing is America's a free country and I couldn't make them.
I believe in living in one room. One empty room with just a bed, a tray, and a suitcase. You can do everything either from your bed or in your bed—eat, sleep, think, get exercise, smoke—and you would have a bathroom and a telephone right next to the bed.
Everything is more glamorous when you do it in bed, anyway. Even peeling potatoes.
Suitcase space is so efficient. A suitcase full of everything you need:
One spoon
One fork
One plate
One cup
One shirt
One underwear
One sock
One shoe
One suitcase and one empty room. Terrific. Perfect.
By living in one room you eliminate a lot of worries. But the basic worries, unfortunately, remain:
Are the lights on or off?
Is the water off?
Are the cigarettes out?
Is the back door closed?
Is the elevator working?
Is there anyone in the lobby?
Who's that sitting in my lap?
People are sleeping in pyramid-shaped spaces a lot now because they think it will keep them young and vital and stop the aging process. I'm not worried about that because I have my wings. However, my ideal too is the pyramid-look, because you don't have to think about a ceiling. You want to have a roof over your head, so why not let your walls also be your ceiling, so you have one less thing to think about—one less surface to look at, one less surface to clean, one less surface to paint. The tepee-dwelling Indians had the right idea. A cone might be nice if circles didn't exclude the edges and if you could find the right round sink, but I prefer an equilateral-triangular pyramidal-shaped enclosure even more than a square-based pyramid shape, because with a triangular base you have one less wall to think about, and one less corner to dust.
My ideal city would be one long Main Street with no cross streets or side streets to jam up traffic. Just one long oneway street. With one tall vertical building where everybody lived with:
One elevator
One doorman
One mailbox
One washing machine
One garbage can
One tree out front
One movie theater next door
Main Street would be very very wide, and all you'd have to say to someone to make them feel good is, "I saw you on Main Street today."
And you'd fill your car up with gas and drive across the street.
My ideal city would be completely new. No antiques. All the buildings would be new. Old buildings are unnatural spaces. Buildings should be built to last for a short time. And if they're older than ten years, I say get rid of them. I'd build new buildings every fourteen years. The building and the tearing down would keep people busy, and the water wouldn't be rusty from old pipes.
Rome, Italy, is an example of what happens when the buildings in a city last too long.
They call Rome "The Eternal City" because everything is so old and everything is still standing. They always say, "Rome wasn't built in a day." Well, I say maybe it should have been, because the quicker you build something, the shorter a time it lasts, and the shorter a time it lasts, the sooner people have jobs again, replacing it. Replacing necessities keeps people busy. The necessities, they always say, are food, shelter, and clothing. Now, in Italy they make a lot of food, and they make a lot of clothing, but food and clothing are only two-thirds of the necessities, the other third is shelter—and they're not making that because it's already been made. So what's happened in Rome is that the women wind up in the kitchens making all the food and in the factories sewing all the clothes, while the men don't do anything because the buildings are already built and they're not falling down! Their buildings were originally built too well and they've never corrected the situation. This is why you see so many men on the streets of Rome, Italy, at all hours of the day and night.
The best, most temporal way of making a building that I ever heard of is by making it with light. The Fascists did a lot of this "light architecture." If you build buildings with lights outside, you can make them indefinite, and then when you're through using them you shut the lights off and they disappear. Hitler always needed buildings in a hurry to make speeches from, so his architect created these "buildings" for him that were illusion buildings, completely constructed by lighting effects, where he defined a very big space.
Holograms are going to be exciting, I think. You can really, finally, with holograms, pick your own atmosphere. They'll be televising a party, and you want to be there, and with holograms, you will be there. You'll be able to have this 3-D party in your house, you'll be able to pretend you're there and walk in with the people. You can even rent a party. You can have anybody famous that you want sitting right next to you.
I like to be the right thing in the wrong space and the wrong thing in the right space. But when you hit one of the two, people turn the lights out on you, or spit on you, or write bad reviews of you, or beat you up, or mug you, or say you're "climbing." But usually being the right thing in the wrong space and the wrong thing in the right space is worth it, because something funny always happens. Believe me, because I've made a career out of being the right thing in the wrong space and the wrong thing in the right space. That's one thing I really do know about.
When people have a cool, calm atmosphere about them, they're usually spaced. They have those right kind of eyes, and they sit around and not bother anybody. Some people are like that naturally because of their chemicals, and other people are like that because of drugs. They think they're thinking—about something.
Energy helps you fill up more space, but if I had more energy than usual, I'd probably not want to fill up more space—I'd be in my room cleaning a lot. I'll say this for diet pills: they make you think small, and when you think small, you do a lot of cleaning up. Real energy makes you want to run down the beach doing cartwheels even if you can't do them. But diet-pill energy helps you fill up less space because it makes you want to recopy address books while you talk for an hour about running down the beach doing cartwheels. Diet pills make you want to dust and flush things down the john.
In New York you have to clean so much, and when you're finished, it's not-dirty. In Europe people clean so much, and when they're finished, it's not just not-dirty, it's clean. Also, it seems so much easier to entertain in Europe than in New York. You just throw open the doors to the garden and eat out in the open air with flowers and trees all around. Whereas New York is funny, most of the time things just don't come off. In Europe, even having tea in the back yard can be wonderful. But in New York it's complicated—if the restaurant is nice, the food can be bad and if the food is good, the lighting can be bad, and if the lighting is good, the air circulation can be bad.
And New York restaurants now have a new thing—they don't sell their food, they sell their atmosphere. They say, "How dare you say we don't have good food, when we never said we had good food. We have good atmosphere." They caught on that what people really care about is changing their atmosphere for a couple of hours. That's why they can get away with just selling their atmosphere with a minimum of actual food. Pretty soon when food prices go really up, they'll be selling only atmosphere. If people are really all that hungry, they can bring food with them when they go out to dinner, but otherwise, instead of "going out to dinner" they'll just be "going out to atmosphere."
My favorite restaurant atmosphere has always been the atmosphere of the good, plain, American lunchroom or even the good plain American lunchcounter. The old-style Schrafft's and the old-style Chock Full O' Nuts are absolutely the only things in the world that I'm truly nostalgic for. The days were carefree in the 1940s and 1950s when I could go into a Chocks for my cream cheese sandwich with nuts on date-nut bread and not worry about a thing. No matter what changes or how fast, the one thing we all always need is real good food so we can know what the changes are and how fast they're coming. Progress is very important and exciting in everything except food. When you say you want an orange, you don't want someone asking you, "An orange what?"
I really like to eat alone. I want to start a chain of restaurants for other people who are like me called ANDY-MATS—"The Restaurant for the Lonely Person." You get your food and then you take your tray into a booth and watch television.
Today my favorite kind of atmosphere is the airport atmosphere. If I didn't have to think about the idea that airplanes go up in the air and fly it would be my perfect atmosphere. Airplanes and airports have my favorite kind of food service, my favorite kind of bathrooms, my favorite peppermint Life Savers, my favorite kinds of entertainment, my favorite loudspeaker address systems, my favorite conveyor belts, my favorite graphics and colors, the best security checks, the best views, the best perfume shops, the best employees, and the best optimism. I love the way you don't have to think about where you're going, someone else is doing that, but I just can't get over the crazy feeling I get when I look out and see the clouds and know I'm really up-there. The atmosphere is great, it's the idea of flying that I question. I guess I'm not an air person, but I'm on an air schedule, so I have to live an air life. I'm embarrassed that I don't like to fly because I love to be modern, but I compensate by loving airports and airplanes so much.
The best atmosphere I can think of is film, because it's three-dimensional physically and two-dimensional emotionally.
11. Success
B: Is it raining?
A: I think they're spitting at us.
B and I spent the afternoon sitting on a couch in the lobby of the Grand Hotel in Rome, watching the Stars and their hairdressers go up and down the marble staircase. It was just like watching a play.
I'd been flown to Rome for an Event that evening which had pulled a lot of big stars into town. We were celebrity-spotting. B compared us to Lucy Ricardo and Ethel Mertz in the lobby of the Beverly Hills. I'd been saying for years that Rome is the new celebrity center, the new Hollywood.
B was feeling very grand. "This means you've really made it," he said, "when they fly you in and we can sit around all day in a glamorous lobby like this, watching everybody we've ever seen in every magazine and every movie . . ."
At that moment I was more impressed with the couch than I was with the stars on the stairs. The tireder you are, the less impressed you are. With anything. If I'd gotten some sleep on the plane I might have been excited too.
"We've sat in hotel lobbies all over New York and all over the world, and it's always nice," I said. The lobbies are always the best-looking place in the hotel—you wish you could bring out a cot and sleep in them. Compared to the lobby, your room always looks like a closet.
"No," B said, "but there's something about traveling thousands of miles—" "—to sit in a lobby."
"—of traveling thousands of miles to sit in a place like this. If it were just down the block I wouldn't think it was that great, but the fact that we came all this way makes it exciting."
I told B that if it weren't for the plane ordeal I'd like to be in Europe one day a week. But somehow I can't be one of those people who doesn't think about what it means to be up there and flying. Airports and airplanes have my favorite kind of food, my favorite kind of bathroom, my favorite kind of nonservile service, my favorite peppermint Life Savers, my favorite kinds of entertainment, my favorite kind of lack of responsibility for your own direction, my favorite shops, my favorite graphics—my favorite everything. I even love the security checks. But I just can't get over hating to fly.
"Just think of all the exciting things you're missing," B said.
Actually, I jade very quickly. Once is usually enough. Either once only, or every day. If you do something once it's exciting, and if you do it every day it's exciting. But if you do it, say, twice or just almost every day, it's not good any more. Nothing in-between is as good as once or every day.
A tall handsome man walked into the lobby from outside. He was wearing red slacks and a red shirt with a white patent belt and matching espadrilles. He was Liz Taylor's hairdresser.
"He likes red," B noted.
"He looks good in red. He looks different than he did the last time. I guess he's lost weight," I said, trying to pinpoint the improvement. "Let's tell him."
"Here comes Franco," said B. "He's always scratching his balls, do you think he has crabs?"
"No, he's just Italian." Franco Rossellini was our host for the Event that night and had taken care of all the details for travel and accommodations. Franco has a way of being always solicitous and at the same time totally distracted. He asked us if everything was okay with our tickets and our room, while his eyes darted around the lobby looking for signs of Liz. I asked him if he could pull some strings and get us rooms for a few additional days because we had to stay on after the Event to do some business art. We were having trouble getting an extension because there was an Other Event happening two days after the Event, so our rooms were only reserved for us for the following day and after that we were on our own. When Franco realized what "pull a few strings" meant he got dramatic:
"Do you know they called me for a room for Elizabeth Taylor because there is not even a room for her! And it takes her two days to unpack! With the Other Event coming in, everything is a disaster!"
Just then a Milanese journalist wandered by and asked me how I liked Rome.
Well, I really like Rome because it's a kind of museum the way Bloomingdale's is a kind of museum, but I was too tired to talk that way. Besides, he seemed nice, but almost every journalist never wants to know what you really think— they just want the answers that fit the questions that fit the story they want to write, and their idea usually is that you shouldn't let your own personality butt in on the article they're writing about you or else they'll really hate you for sure for giving them more work, because the more answers you give, the more answers they have to twist to fit their story. So it's better just to smile and say you like Rome and let them give their reasons that they have for you to like it. And anyway, I was tired. I was glad to see Franco coming back over. He always breaks up tension.
"I'm back," he announced. "I've just been posing for the paparazzi. I shouldn't do that."
I told Franco that B had fallen in love in Bulgari's with a girl behind a diamond display who he said looked like Dominique Sanda. Franco understands about "love" and knew the symptoms: "So now are you running into the store all of the time buying all of Bulgari? That's expensive. You should fall in love with a waitress; that's not so expensive."
"It's not expensive because I'm not buying anything. I'm just going in and out, in and out," said B.
Franco made himself world-weary long enough to say, "In-and-out in-and-out . . . What else is there to do . . ." Then he rushed off to talk to some director.
B spotted Liz Taylor walking on the other side of the lobby and tried to make me paranoid by suggesting that she was avoiding me. I could see her out of the corner of my eye.
Then Sergio, one of Franco's assistants, came up and asked B if I could be ready a half hour early so I could go with Liz to meet Princess Grace so we could all walk into the Event together. That was the plan. B was jealous that he wasn't going with us, so as soon as Sergio walked away he said, "He says that like it's so important. He's so used to dealing with Liz through her hairdresser that he thinks he has to talk to you through me, even when you're standing right here."
I told B that what we should have bought him in Bulgari's was a big gold comb. "You should have a giant hairdresser's gold comb. The kind of comb they use for teasing. In gold." B and I laughed about our faux pas in going into Bulgari's and asking for something in silver. We were so nervous because they had us sit down, and then there was nothing to look at—we didn't know what to do with our eyes—and we didn't want to say that we wanted the cheapest thing they had, so B had thought quickly and asked for a swizzle stick in silver, and the girl he was in love with said, "I'm sorry, we have nothing in silver here," so love went down the drain.
"Love went down the drain," agreed B. "I didn't like her any more after she said that anyway. And up close she didn't look that much like Dominique Sanda."
Just then B and I both heard a hissing noise from a corner of the lobby, and B told me not to get paranoid, that it was just a waxing machine. He asked me what I'd do if I got hissed at the Event that night. I told him that I'd been hissed before. He asked me when that was and I told him about getting hissed on college tours.
Then a horrible thought occurred to me—what if I was expected to make a speech at the Event. After all, it was a very official Event, and a benefit yet, and usually at benefits they have speeches.
B decided that we should write a speech right now just in case. We decided I would get up and say what a great thrill and honor it was to work with Liz Taylor's hairdressers —"Let's hear it for Ramon and Gianni!" And then I'd ask Liz to introduce B—I'd say, "Liz Taylor has changed my life: now I, too, have my own hairdressers. I've taken my business manager and my photographer and my redactor and my social secretary and made them all hairdressers."
Elsa Martinelli came by to ask us if we were wearing black jackets or white jackets tonight because her husband Willy had forgotten his black one and wondered if a white one would be all right, because he didn't want to be the only one in a white jacket or else people would be mistaking him for a waiter and asking him for drinks. B said that the best he could do would be to wear his white pants because he didn't have a white jacket, and Elsa thought that that would make Willy feel better. B asked Elsa what her tee-shirt had embroidered on it. Her explanation was something like:
"Oh, this is a crazy Neapolitan thing. He doesn't know how to speak English very well, so for him—the designer— this means, 47, that's forty—means 'fuck' in Neapolitan— seven—"
Christian De Sica tapped Elsa on the shoulder and they went into the restaurant. "Ciao." "Ciao."
We were quiet for a few minutes, and I started to think about face images. B asked me what I was thinking about and I told him I was thinking about "portraits."
The waxing machine was on our side of the lobby now. "Poptarts?" B asked. You see, he couldn't hear.
I liked that. "Yes. Poptarts. It's funny because if someone gets a poptart when they're old, then is the artist supposed to make them look 'younger'? It's really hard to know. I've seen poptarts done by famous artists who painted old people looking old. So then, should you have your poptart done when you're very young so that will be the image that's left? But that would be strange, too . . ."
This B's idea of a wonderful date would be to take out the most eccentric, most rich, most old lady he could find, so he was in favor of Age before Beauty. "A person's personality doesn't show in their face until they're old. There's something about the force of a personality that comes through. So a 'poptart should be flattering, in the sense that it's a reflection of a positive part of the person's personality."
Just then Ursula Andress appeared at the top of the stairs. She looked beautiful. She was talking to her hairdresser. I could tell that they were talking about her hair. He was making gestures around it as if he were giving ideas. It was a very glamorous scene.
B and I started to argue over how tall she was. I said she was short and B said she wasn't so short.
B said, "She looks great. She doesn't look short."
I said, "No. She's very short."
B said, "But she doesn't look short."
I said, "She has shoes on."
B said, "She has underarm perspiration. Look! She's smelling under her arms!"
I said, "That's right, but she's smart not to use deodorant because it's poison, and also you never know when you're really nervous. She's smart to want to know when she's nervous."
B said, "She still doesn't look short to me."
I said, "I know she doesn't look it. I didn't used to think she was so short either until I saw pictures of her."
B screamed, "BUT YOU'RE LOOKING AT THE ACTUAL GIRL! DOES SHE LOOK SHORT TO YOU??"
I said, "She's standing next to her hairdresser, and her hairdresser's short too, so you can't tell."
She started down the staircase.
I said, "Look, she's two steps up from him and she's not staring down at him! Come on, B, admit it, she's a peanut!"
B wouldn't admit it. "All right," he said, "she's not tall, but she's not a peanut."
I said, "I bet she's even shorter than I think. I bet she has those big high shoes on. We can't see them because her pants come right down to the rug, but I bet she has four-inch clogs on."
B said, "But her look is so long. She's certainly not as short as some people."
"Yes she is," I said. "She's shorter."
B started to go crazy. "YOU'RE DETERMINED TO BELIEVE SHE'S A PEANUT!"
I said, "I MET HER, B! YOU MET HER TOO! YOU KNOW HOW SHORT SHE IS!"
"SHE WAS SITTING DOWN!"
"No," I said softly, "she got up."
"She wasn't that short." This B was stubborn. He said it in a final way, as if now that was that.
I said in an even more final way, "She's a peanut." I stared at B. He was tired of arguing. I'd won.
Then while his defenses were down I said, "Look, if you were doing your job you would have gone over there and asked her for an interview."
"What should I do, run over and interview her on how it feels to be the shortest woman in the world???"
"Well, she is short ..." I said. "There's no getting away from that."
Ursula came down another step and B started up again, "Look, she just came down a step and you can see her heels and they're not that high. She's got short heels on. She's actually quite tall."
I said, "B . . . Next to that guy she's tall, because he's a bigger peanut than she is. Don't worry, B—Liz Taylor is also very short. All the great stars are short!"
B started laughing. "But Liz is shaped like that blue vase over there, with her hair being the flowers and her hips being the table . . ."
I said, "You know, B, one of these days Liz will pay attention to you or say something nice to you, and you'll end up really liking her."
B said, "I do like her, but she is shaped like that vase, and her hair is like those flowers in it."
"B, she'll come up to me someday and say, 'I hear you have the best hairdresser in the world,' and then she'll look at you and say, 'How would you like to work for me? And take ten per cent of everything I make." "
I yawned. "I feel like two old ladies," I told B.
B said, "Oh this is too much under one roof—Liz, Paulette, Ursula, Elsa, Sylvie, Marina Cognate, Sao Schlum-berger . . ."
"You're naming off the biggest stars in the world, B. And don't forget Mrs. Rochas."
B went on, ". . . Mrs. Rochas, Christina Ford, Betty Catroux, Guido Mannari—all in one room. Christian De Sica . . ."
"Oh," I said, "he's adorable. Is it okay for guys to be adorable?"
"It's okay for anybody to be adorable," B said. My wife was running low and I was tired: time to go up to my room and snooze before getting dressed for the Event.
A: I think they're spitting at us.
B and I spent the afternoon sitting on a couch in the lobby of the Grand Hotel in Rome, watching the Stars and their hairdressers go up and down the marble staircase. It was just like watching a play.
I'd been flown to Rome for an Event that evening which had pulled a lot of big stars into town. We were celebrity-spotting. B compared us to Lucy Ricardo and Ethel Mertz in the lobby of the Beverly Hills. I'd been saying for years that Rome is the new celebrity center, the new Hollywood.
B was feeling very grand. "This means you've really made it," he said, "when they fly you in and we can sit around all day in a glamorous lobby like this, watching everybody we've ever seen in every magazine and every movie . . ."
At that moment I was more impressed with the couch than I was with the stars on the stairs. The tireder you are, the less impressed you are. With anything. If I'd gotten some sleep on the plane I might have been excited too.
"We've sat in hotel lobbies all over New York and all over the world, and it's always nice," I said. The lobbies are always the best-looking place in the hotel—you wish you could bring out a cot and sleep in them. Compared to the lobby, your room always looks like a closet.
"No," B said, "but there's something about traveling thousands of miles—" "—to sit in a lobby."
"—of traveling thousands of miles to sit in a place like this. If it were just down the block I wouldn't think it was that great, but the fact that we came all this way makes it exciting."
I told B that if it weren't for the plane ordeal I'd like to be in Europe one day a week. But somehow I can't be one of those people who doesn't think about what it means to be up there and flying. Airports and airplanes have my favorite kind of food, my favorite kind of bathroom, my favorite kind of nonservile service, my favorite peppermint Life Savers, my favorite kinds of entertainment, my favorite kind of lack of responsibility for your own direction, my favorite shops, my favorite graphics—my favorite everything. I even love the security checks. But I just can't get over hating to fly.
"Just think of all the exciting things you're missing," B said.
Actually, I jade very quickly. Once is usually enough. Either once only, or every day. If you do something once it's exciting, and if you do it every day it's exciting. But if you do it, say, twice or just almost every day, it's not good any more. Nothing in-between is as good as once or every day.
A tall handsome man walked into the lobby from outside. He was wearing red slacks and a red shirt with a white patent belt and matching espadrilles. He was Liz Taylor's hairdresser.
"He likes red," B noted.
"He looks good in red. He looks different than he did the last time. I guess he's lost weight," I said, trying to pinpoint the improvement. "Let's tell him."
"Here comes Franco," said B. "He's always scratching his balls, do you think he has crabs?"
"No, he's just Italian." Franco Rossellini was our host for the Event that night and had taken care of all the details for travel and accommodations. Franco has a way of being always solicitous and at the same time totally distracted. He asked us if everything was okay with our tickets and our room, while his eyes darted around the lobby looking for signs of Liz. I asked him if he could pull some strings and get us rooms for a few additional days because we had to stay on after the Event to do some business art. We were having trouble getting an extension because there was an Other Event happening two days after the Event, so our rooms were only reserved for us for the following day and after that we were on our own. When Franco realized what "pull a few strings" meant he got dramatic:
"Do you know they called me for a room for Elizabeth Taylor because there is not even a room for her! And it takes her two days to unpack! With the Other Event coming in, everything is a disaster!"
Just then a Milanese journalist wandered by and asked me how I liked Rome.
Well, I really like Rome because it's a kind of museum the way Bloomingdale's is a kind of museum, but I was too tired to talk that way. Besides, he seemed nice, but almost every journalist never wants to know what you really think— they just want the answers that fit the questions that fit the story they want to write, and their idea usually is that you shouldn't let your own personality butt in on the article they're writing about you or else they'll really hate you for sure for giving them more work, because the more answers you give, the more answers they have to twist to fit their story. So it's better just to smile and say you like Rome and let them give their reasons that they have for you to like it. And anyway, I was tired. I was glad to see Franco coming back over. He always breaks up tension.
"I'm back," he announced. "I've just been posing for the paparazzi. I shouldn't do that."
I told Franco that B had fallen in love in Bulgari's with a girl behind a diamond display who he said looked like Dominique Sanda. Franco understands about "love" and knew the symptoms: "So now are you running into the store all of the time buying all of Bulgari? That's expensive. You should fall in love with a waitress; that's not so expensive."
"It's not expensive because I'm not buying anything. I'm just going in and out, in and out," said B.
Franco made himself world-weary long enough to say, "In-and-out in-and-out . . . What else is there to do . . ." Then he rushed off to talk to some director.
B spotted Liz Taylor walking on the other side of the lobby and tried to make me paranoid by suggesting that she was avoiding me. I could see her out of the corner of my eye.
Then Sergio, one of Franco's assistants, came up and asked B if I could be ready a half hour early so I could go with Liz to meet Princess Grace so we could all walk into the Event together. That was the plan. B was jealous that he wasn't going with us, so as soon as Sergio walked away he said, "He says that like it's so important. He's so used to dealing with Liz through her hairdresser that he thinks he has to talk to you through me, even when you're standing right here."
I told B that what we should have bought him in Bulgari's was a big gold comb. "You should have a giant hairdresser's gold comb. The kind of comb they use for teasing. In gold." B and I laughed about our faux pas in going into Bulgari's and asking for something in silver. We were so nervous because they had us sit down, and then there was nothing to look at—we didn't know what to do with our eyes—and we didn't want to say that we wanted the cheapest thing they had, so B had thought quickly and asked for a swizzle stick in silver, and the girl he was in love with said, "I'm sorry, we have nothing in silver here," so love went down the drain.
"Love went down the drain," agreed B. "I didn't like her any more after she said that anyway. And up close she didn't look that much like Dominique Sanda."
Just then B and I both heard a hissing noise from a corner of the lobby, and B told me not to get paranoid, that it was just a waxing machine. He asked me what I'd do if I got hissed at the Event that night. I told him that I'd been hissed before. He asked me when that was and I told him about getting hissed on college tours.
Then a horrible thought occurred to me—what if I was expected to make a speech at the Event. After all, it was a very official Event, and a benefit yet, and usually at benefits they have speeches.
B decided that we should write a speech right now just in case. We decided I would get up and say what a great thrill and honor it was to work with Liz Taylor's hairdressers —"Let's hear it for Ramon and Gianni!" And then I'd ask Liz to introduce B—I'd say, "Liz Taylor has changed my life: now I, too, have my own hairdressers. I've taken my business manager and my photographer and my redactor and my social secretary and made them all hairdressers."
Elsa Martinelli came by to ask us if we were wearing black jackets or white jackets tonight because her husband Willy had forgotten his black one and wondered if a white one would be all right, because he didn't want to be the only one in a white jacket or else people would be mistaking him for a waiter and asking him for drinks. B said that the best he could do would be to wear his white pants because he didn't have a white jacket, and Elsa thought that that would make Willy feel better. B asked Elsa what her tee-shirt had embroidered on it. Her explanation was something like:
"Oh, this is a crazy Neapolitan thing. He doesn't know how to speak English very well, so for him—the designer— this means, 47, that's forty—means 'fuck' in Neapolitan— seven—"
Christian De Sica tapped Elsa on the shoulder and they went into the restaurant. "Ciao." "Ciao."
We were quiet for a few minutes, and I started to think about face images. B asked me what I was thinking about and I told him I was thinking about "portraits."
The waxing machine was on our side of the lobby now. "Poptarts?" B asked. You see, he couldn't hear.
I liked that. "Yes. Poptarts. It's funny because if someone gets a poptart when they're old, then is the artist supposed to make them look 'younger'? It's really hard to know. I've seen poptarts done by famous artists who painted old people looking old. So then, should you have your poptart done when you're very young so that will be the image that's left? But that would be strange, too . . ."
This B's idea of a wonderful date would be to take out the most eccentric, most rich, most old lady he could find, so he was in favor of Age before Beauty. "A person's personality doesn't show in their face until they're old. There's something about the force of a personality that comes through. So a 'poptart should be flattering, in the sense that it's a reflection of a positive part of the person's personality."
Just then Ursula Andress appeared at the top of the stairs. She looked beautiful. She was talking to her hairdresser. I could tell that they were talking about her hair. He was making gestures around it as if he were giving ideas. It was a very glamorous scene.
B and I started to argue over how tall she was. I said she was short and B said she wasn't so short.
B said, "She looks great. She doesn't look short."
I said, "No. She's very short."
B said, "But she doesn't look short."
I said, "She has shoes on."
B said, "She has underarm perspiration. Look! She's smelling under her arms!"
I said, "That's right, but she's smart not to use deodorant because it's poison, and also you never know when you're really nervous. She's smart to want to know when she's nervous."
B said, "She still doesn't look short to me."
I said, "I know she doesn't look it. I didn't used to think she was so short either until I saw pictures of her."
B screamed, "BUT YOU'RE LOOKING AT THE ACTUAL GIRL! DOES SHE LOOK SHORT TO YOU??"
I said, "She's standing next to her hairdresser, and her hairdresser's short too, so you can't tell."
She started down the staircase.
I said, "Look, she's two steps up from him and she's not staring down at him! Come on, B, admit it, she's a peanut!"
B wouldn't admit it. "All right," he said, "she's not tall, but she's not a peanut."
I said, "I bet she's even shorter than I think. I bet she has those big high shoes on. We can't see them because her pants come right down to the rug, but I bet she has four-inch clogs on."
B said, "But her look is so long. She's certainly not as short as some people."
"Yes she is," I said. "She's shorter."
B started to go crazy. "YOU'RE DETERMINED TO BELIEVE SHE'S A PEANUT!"
I said, "I MET HER, B! YOU MET HER TOO! YOU KNOW HOW SHORT SHE IS!"
"SHE WAS SITTING DOWN!"
"No," I said softly, "she got up."
"She wasn't that short." This B was stubborn. He said it in a final way, as if now that was that.
I said in an even more final way, "She's a peanut." I stared at B. He was tired of arguing. I'd won.
Then while his defenses were down I said, "Look, if you were doing your job you would have gone over there and asked her for an interview."
"What should I do, run over and interview her on how it feels to be the shortest woman in the world???"
"Well, she is short ..." I said. "There's no getting away from that."
Ursula came down another step and B started up again, "Look, she just came down a step and you can see her heels and they're not that high. She's got short heels on. She's actually quite tall."
I said, "B . . . Next to that guy she's tall, because he's a bigger peanut than she is. Don't worry, B—Liz Taylor is also very short. All the great stars are short!"
B started laughing. "But Liz is shaped like that blue vase over there, with her hair being the flowers and her hips being the table . . ."
I said, "You know, B, one of these days Liz will pay attention to you or say something nice to you, and you'll end up really liking her."
B said, "I do like her, but she is shaped like that vase, and her hair is like those flowers in it."
"B, she'll come up to me someday and say, 'I hear you have the best hairdresser in the world,' and then she'll look at you and say, 'How would you like to work for me? And take ten per cent of everything I make." "
I yawned. "I feel like two old ladies," I told B.
B said, "Oh this is too much under one roof—Liz, Paulette, Ursula, Elsa, Sylvie, Marina Cognate, Sao Schlum-berger . . ."
"You're naming off the biggest stars in the world, B. And don't forget Mrs. Rochas."
B went on, ". . . Mrs. Rochas, Christina Ford, Betty Catroux, Guido Mannari—all in one room. Christian De Sica . . ."
"Oh," I said, "he's adorable. Is it okay for guys to be adorable?"
"It's okay for anybody to be adorable," B said. My wife was running low and I was tired: time to go up to my room and snooze before getting dressed for the Event.
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