I step forth from the shadows...
Enter Bobby the Waif, Exit Robert the Triumphant - Dylan Day
The joint was a-twitter, the denizens agog. 'Bobby's coming, Bobby's coming!' Barbara Rubin, groupie, was pacing up and back, looking like it was her eldest son's Bar Mitzvah and the stuffed derma was late. This was Barbara's party. Her ego, if not her head, would roll if things didn't go smoothly - she was on thin ice here. Paul Morrissey, the Factory negativity, was against it (as he was against everything he couldn't claim credit for). Possibly he was worried that people might enjoy themselves. The sound of laughter was for Paul like the smell of garlic to Count Dracula. Busy, busy, the Factory hummed: 'Bobby's coming, Bobby's coming.'
All along the fire escape groupies kept the view. Andy was in the paintings storage section making a selection. Stephen Shore was sweeping the floor and Gerard Malanga was in the bathroom searching for the perfect pose. The most obviously blatant of the weirdos were banned for the event. Morrissey was nowhere to be seen. I imagined him in the basement, praying to the Celtic god of ennui for a no-show. There was no place for life-negating Paul amongst the freewheeling, heavy-partying, wet-fingered Dylan mob: who needs a doorman when the walls have been breached. This was Barbara's make or break day. The Dylans and the Warhols were the Guelphs and the Ghibelines of the New York underground scene, engaged in a fraternal rumble deep in that insulated New York Culture Womb. A battle was being waged for photogenic campfollowers and media-space.
Imagine the Dalai Lama and the Pope in an 'holier-than-thou' contest... I could smell it coming, but Barbara's brain was transfixed with the grandiose idea that SHE was going to bring these two titans together, and somehow, someway, the world would be a better place for it.
'I think I see his car,' called a groupie lookout, and Barbara made it to the window in .02 of a second. Barbara's behind twitched in from out of the window and she murmured: 'He's coming, He's coming, He's coming.' - Down in the basement a phantom bagpipe wailed a dirge, Paul started baying at the moon and hanging garlic - 'He's here, He's here,' cried the groupies on the watchtower and a horde of little glitterboppers detached themselves from Andy and ran to the windows to hang out like teenie Mollie Goldbergs, while Andy made a moue and Gerard had an erection. After a while the elevator made retching sounds to signal its ascent, the doors parted and the multitudes came forth. First came this big, broad back, leaning forward like it was about to genuflect or maybe... ROLL OUT A CARPET!! But no, it was only a cameraman with an ubiquitous Ariflex. Next came two Levites carrying a sungun, a pause, and then the hordes debouched like out of Groucho Marx's stateroom in 'A Night at the Opera'.
LeacockPennybakkerAlAronowitzJonseyTerrySimonNeuwirthBetty, myrmidons of Dylanitescampfollowers, scriptpeoplecameramen and groupies. They reminded me of a Visigoth army: the men big and hairy, the women small and plain, arranged so as to set off Bobby like a rhinestone on an ass's forehead. The circus had come to town, carefully contrived and well orchestrated. Up in Woodstock, Albert Grossman started counting shekels and eating honey, while in the basement Paul Morrissey entered a coffin and slowly, slowly closed the lid, content in the knowledge that something would g wrong. I prowled the sidelines, here a click, there a click. I tried to figure out what was what... then I suddenly flashed that those people were there only for my camera. They were sitting together, but their existence was predicated on being recorded. Children of darkness, vivified by my lights. I seized my moment, put the spots directly on them, obliterating all shades and background. IT WAS MY STAGE. Did these people want exposure, boy would I give them exposure: all the exposure that the floods would allow. I told Bobby and Andy to put on shades and look directly into the camera, I told Gerard to look at the side. Gerard tried to upstage everybody with a headback profile pose which left him looking like he had whiplash from giving too much head the night before. None related to the other, and I shot them that way. Andy gave Bobby a great double image of Elvis (which Bobby later traded to Grossman for a couch), Bobby gave Andy short shrift. Shooting and plundering finished and the Dylan gang headed for the door, me and my Nikon at their heels. They departed having tied the Elvis image to the top of a Woodstock station wagon, like a deer poached out of season."Andy Warhol: the Factory Years 1964-1967."
by Nat Finkelstein
London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1989
no pagination, no chapter nos., (7 pages of photos accompany this chapter), folio
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