Sylvester Stallone's union troubles.

Just another anecdote from "The Andy Warhol Diaries." This is from the entry for February 22, 1980:

Stallone is so cute, so adorable. I guess he’s lost sixty pounds. He’s sexy. All the stars usually think they should have their portraits done free, though. He’s intelligent, he’s taken over directorship of the movie and now he’s in trouble because the union has a film of him saying, “Lights, action!” It’s going before a board. Stallone was telling stories about how much trouble he’s had with the union, how there’s this little Irish guy that he just wants to beat up so badly. He said he had this one shot all set up, everybody was in costume and makeup with blood and everything for a fight scene and it was snowing, just perfectly and they said, “Okay, stop, everybody break for dinner,” and he said he practically got down on his knees pleading, “Please, just let’s get this one shot, please, I’m a fellow worker, please, I’m Rocky!” and they wouldn’t let him. They broke for dinner and then he had to start all over again.

Please, I’m Rocky! I love that. The workers should view the director as a proletarian because he played one in a movie. And meanwhile, he imagines he's so elite that the artist should provide him with portraiture gratis. But what kind of elite is that? Royalty patronizes the arts.

It wasn't a Rocky movie they were filming. Don't be confused. It was "Nighthawks."

Andy Warhol hated Frank Zappa.

From "The Andy Warhol Diaries," Thursday, June 16, 1983:

Frank Zappa came to be interviewed for our TV show and I think that after the interview I hated Zappa even more than when it started. I remember when he was so mean to us when the Mothers of Invention played with the Velvet Underground— I think both at the Trip, in L.A., and at the Fillmore in San Francisco. I hated him then and I still don’t like him. And he was awfully strange about Moon. I said how great she was, and he said, “Listen, I created her. I invented her.” Like, “She’s nothing, it’s all me.” And I mean, if it were my daughter I would be saying, “Gee, she’s so smart,” but he’s taking all the credit. It was peculiar.

Here's Moon performing the old 1982 song "Valley Girl." Listening to that today is a completely different experience because back then talking like that was really weird and unbelievably stupid. Today, that kind of speech is so common, perplexingly common. I hear it all the time from people who completely intend to be taken seriously — mainstream journalists, law professors — female and male.

The Moon Museum.

A tiny little tile that might be on the moon.

There are six artworks located on the ceramic tile, each one in black and white only... [T]he last drawing in the upper left is by Andy Warhol. He created a stylized version of his initials which, when viewed at certain angles, can appear as a rocket ship or a crudely drawn penis. "He was being the terrible bad boy." says Myers. Warhol's work is covered by a thumb in the image often associated with Moon Museum, but other images with the drawing visible can be found.

Forrest "Frosty" Myers, who came up with the idea to get six great artists together and make a tiny little museum that would be on the moon." I find it very amusing that a little tile — it's 3/4" X 1/2" of  — should be called a "museum." For some reason, for the longest time, I've had a special love of humor that plays with or flips the largeness and smallness of things.

The discovery of The Moon Museum by chance today — why hadn't I heard of it before? — got me searching for "moon" in Andy Warhol's diaries, and I found this about some party in Aspen in 1982:

Buzz Aldrin came, from the moon. The astronaut. Took a lot of photographs of him. He’s aged but he was cute and glad to meet us. We decided to start lying that night— Chris told people he had a twelve-month-old baby and that he was watching it while his wife was back in New York and they all believed him. And I told them I was a deep-sea fisherman, and this lady invited me to Boca Raton. I haven’t been drinking at all.

"But as I look ahead and think about what may still be relevant in fashion years from now, I think back to eras in style that were defined by freedom."

"I am so happy I was young in the ‘70s and participated in the women’s movement and all it meant. My generation behaved as if it had invented freedom. That was a moment in time, between the discovery of the pill and the arrival of AIDS, when sex was carefree and fun. For design inspiration then, we looked 40 years back, to the 1930s. We loved its furniture and architecture, all minimalist, and the light style of the clothing."

Writes Diane von Furstenberg.

ADDED: Her penultimate paragraph is "Who saw this coming? An icon of the ‘70s: Andy Warhol," which was especially funny to me because as I was reading, I was planning to search for "Diane von Furstenberg" in my copy of "The Andy Warhol Diaries." She's all over the place in there. Sample:

Bianca [Jagger] was there. I thought she’d already left for Paris. She was saying out loud everything I was thinking— what two bitches Diane Von Furstenberg and Sue Mengers were— and she said, “At least Sue can be funny sometimes.” Sue was on her way to Europe to meet her husband, who only lets her see him once every couple of months, I think.

Another one:

And Diane Von Furstenberg was there and she lives in Eleanor Lambert’s building so she invited Bob and me down for dinner and to watch Holocaust. So we went down and Diane’s mother was there, and Marina Cicogna. Diane’s mother had been in Auschwitz, and when the concentration camps came on she was laughing— she said that they made it so much more glamorous than it was when she was there, that all the women had crewcuts and it was a lot more crowded, that where the movie had 20 people there were really 300,000. And it was weird to be seeing this with Marina Cicogna whose family was so involved with Mussolini. Before it was over, Diane was ready to go out, she was calling for a limousine.

And:

There was a mob scene around where Barry Diller and I were sitting because John Travolta sat down two inches away. His eyes are just like— dyed— blue-green. I mean, really deep blue. And he has the most beautiful smile. His teeth must be polished every day. And his skin is beautiful. And he’s so nice. And he says nice things to everyone. And he was talking the most to this girl he thought was with us, but she was a DVF groupie. And Diane is so desperate to be recognized that if one person says, “You’re Diane Von Furstenberg, I love you,” she says, “Come with me,” and she makes them follow her around for the rest of the night so that she can have a following, and then she gives them presents— she carries lipsticks and compacts with her to give out, and she autographs them.

And:

Sondra looked great in this beautiful bright yellow silk dress— the color I used on the Debbie Harry portrait— and it made her look so young, eight years old, and we asked her who made it because it was really pretty and she said, “You’ll fall over if I tell you.” So she told us and Bob and I did fall over— it was a Diane Von Furstenberg. Off the rack for $ 120. It really was pretty.

Also:

Diane Von Furstenberg was having a party for her boyfriend, Alain Elkann, who was married to the Agnelli daughter. He’s French. He’s written four books, and in France if you’re an intellectual, you don’t have to work, they just treat you like this big—“ intellectual.” Like Loulou de la Falaise’s husband who’s supposed to be a novelist but I don’t think he’s ever finished anything. So Diane’s going the Marilyn Monroe route of marrying one person for the name, and now she’s going with this guy who’ll write books about her.

If you want your wearable computer in wig form...

... Sony has invented it for you.

"We think one of the biggest reasons is the style... the focus has been function, not style," said Hiroaki Tobita and Takuya Kuzi.

This was a quote from 2 guys, speaking — what? — in unison? Were they aided by a SmartWig?

"The goal of SmartWig is to achieve both natural and practical wearable devices," they said, adding the "natural appearance" of their invention -- which can be made from human hair -- could prove a selling point.

I agree. I've been waiting decades for the trend that — back in the 60s — Andy Warhol seemed to be doing a fine job of making seem hip and cool.

"Farrah Fawcett called and said she was on her way down to Union Square, and she arrived in half an hour with Ryan O’Neal."

"They looked at her portrait and I didn’t think Farrah liked it, but then she studied them for about half an hour and finally said she loved it. I had Bob come down because I thought he could talk them into doing a cover, and she said she would. And she looked pretty, her hair was all washed, and she looked very very nice. She’s sweet. So then they left and I stayed alone with Rupert. Dropped him off (cab $ 4). Then glued myself together because I was invited to Prince Abudi’s dinner for Marion Javits."

From "The Andy Warhol Diaries," which I downloaded today after writing about that Andy Warhol painting of Farrah Fawcett. I wanted to be able to search the text — for Farrah Fawcett and, as time goes on, other celebrities. And I love Andy's writing style. Then glued myself together, indeed.


Farrah appears later in the diaries. Andy goes to see her in the stage play "Extremities" in July 1983:

Farrah was good, but not as good as Susan Sarandon had been...

Then after the play we saw Farrah and Ryan backstage and they were gushy. It’s so hard to talk to actors, all they want is to talk about themselves. And Ryan looks a little older, he’s getting the same lines I have... And he really wants the part of Dick Tracy that Warren Beatty’s supposed to get.

Later that year, in September, Andy runs into Ryan and Farrah in a restaurant: "Farrah was also so peculiar. She made Keith [Haring] draw on her arm. And then Ryan and Farrah were nervous so they took a walk around the block to smoke a joint."

I read the Warhol diaries when they came out in book form in 1989. It's nice to look at them again. One can be seduced by the writing style, but Andy wasn't writing. He was talking to his secretary on the telephone, and we're seeing the words in the form rendered by the secretary, but it's so hard not to feel you're hearing Andy's voice:  Then glued myself together because....

Ryan O’Neal, fighting for an Andy Warhol painting that Farrah Fawcett left to the University of Texas...

... submits to a deposition and has to admit that Farrah caught him in bed with another woman in the bedroom the couple shared, which explains her motivation to give the painting to Texas. But, he says, she did not take the painting when she left — because wouldn't grab ya painting worth millions if you were running out in a rage — as you might rip your treasured Farrah Fawcett poster of the wall — if it was yours? Answer: No. Moving an expensive painting is a big deal.

And in fact, a year later, the painting was moved to Fawcett's place. How does O'Neal explain that? He says it was sent away "for safe keeping because his new girlfriend did not like having the image of Farrah on the wall 'staring down at her' all the time."

If you're already out of sympathy with O'Neal, check out the photo at the link of him leaning toward a torso mannequin wearing what appears to be Farrah's iconic orange bathing suit, while, in the background the dead actress smiles in her eternally popular poster. The less-famous image of Farrah is this:



That's the Warhol that was hanging over the couple's bed. Imagine cheating on her under that. Imagine having sex with the man who got off having sex with you under that picture of her.

The picture, which Farrah left to her old school, had been missing but was found because O'Neal did a reality show in 2011, in which it could be seen hanging on the wall. At the time O'Neal murmured about how Farrah "permeated my mind and my being" and "still does" and "The things that are nice in my house are the things that she got me."

"Rare candid shots by Andy Warhol..."

"... released."

"A dropout from a life of privilege, [Taylor] Mead allied himself with Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac and other early leaders of the San Francisco Beat scene of the 1950s..."

"... before settling in New York to eke out a living as a member of its thriving arts underground." I loved this man. I'm glad to see he lived to the very old age of 88.

Indie auteur Jim Jarmusch, who cast Mead in a moving vignette that closed his 2003 film "Coffee and Cigarettes," considered Mead one of his heroes.

One of my favorite movies. Here's the movie that made me a big fan: Andy Warhol's "Lonesome Cowboys."

He was a familiar face on Manhattan's Lower East Side, where he wandered the streets with a notebook, read his poetry in coffeehouses – often against a background of a Charles Mingus recording – and fed feral cats in the predawn hours....

Born on the last day of 1924 in Grosse Pointe, Mich., Mead was the son of a wealthy businessman and his socialite wife who divorced before he was born. He floated through boarding schools and a number of colleges before his father found him a job in a brokerage house, which was not to his liking...

Here, you can watch the Taylor Mead segment of "Coffee and Cigarettes" on YouTube, but it will look a lot better — and the entire movie is recommended — on Amazon instant video or DVD.

Goodbye to Taylor Mead. Real tears shed for you here at Meadhouse.

ADDED: "Let's pretend this coffee is champagne... to celebrate life... like the rich, classy people do."

IN THE COMMENTS: betamax3000 said:

I was feeding apple slices to the baby alligators in the sewer through an open manhole cover when the headlights came upon me like two drunk angels. The police had beaten my dead horse before, and I sure was not going to stick around this time for another pony ride. Through the alley I went, past the passed-out vagrants and the virgin hookers and the baking-powder salesman who looked like Woodrow Wilson, then down the stairs to the jazz club in the basement below the Italian restaurant that served great Chinese if you asked right. I had my usual -- gin with an orange marmalade chaser -- when I heard someone call my name above the honk-and-skitter of the saxophone trio: it was Speedy Johnny, free from jail. The cops had busted him for contributing to the delinquency of minors with intent to double-park, and now he looked as pale as a night-school oyster.

More in that vein, inside.