Brian was visiting The Factory and, on the spur of a moment, Warhol decided that Brian might look good as a face card. But the first attempt didn't work for the painter and he discarded it, allowing Brian to take it away with him. Warhol kept the results of his second try.
The closest I ever got to the artist was socializing with his cousin Barbara, a good-natured, blowsy blonde who loved to party. We were both undergrads at St. John's University. Barbara had retained the original spelling of their last name, "Warhola," but pronounced it the way Andy did after he dropped the final "a."
No doubt Brian had been at The Factory because he knows Warhol's film director, Paul Morrisey. So do I. "Pauley" was one of a motley group of neighborhood high-school squatters on the front porch of my friend, Chip, on First St. in Yonkers. Morrisey, fairly tall and rail-thin, always wore black. He looked like a rather sinister Robert Louis Stevenson character.
Pauley got an undergraduate degree from Fordham University and, for six months, went to work for the New York Metropolitan Life Insurance Co. (now Metlife). But the straight life wasn't for him. He left the job and disappeared into lower Manhattan's East Village which is where I caught up with him on a balmy afternoon as I was taking a break from a sojourn at McSorley's Old Ale House ("We were here before you were born.") on East 7th St.
As I passed an unprepossessing store front, Pauley came out and hailed me. He told me that he inhabited the little store, and ushered me inside.
He'd hung a sheet on the wall opposite the entrance. In front of that "screen" was a collection of folding wooden chairs, borrowed, he said, from a nearby funeral home. Behind the chairs was a high table on which stood a sixteen-millimeter movie projector.
Pauley was making a killing conning the East Village intellectuals with exhibitions of "experimental films." Actually, these were Depression-era Dust Bowl documentaries he'd borrowed from the public library. He cut off the leaders and was in business.
He said he was giving a party that evening to celebrate his success, and invited me. I didn't need to be asked twice.
About eight, I arrived at the store and found Pauley behind a bar he'd set up in the back. I didn't know any of the other guests, least of all a stunning young blonde who came in a few moments after I'd gotten there.
"Who is that?" I asked Pauley.
"That's Constance Bennett's daughter." Constance Bennett was the blonde sister, one of three--Joan Bennett was probably the most famous--who'd starred in early sound movies.
"Please--introduce me."
"No," said Pauley emphatically and pointed to another young female who was following the blonde quite closely. This person, with the build of a bouncer, was dressed in black leather and was dripping with wicked-looking chains that could no doubt serve as weapons in the event of hostilities developing. I abandoned my quest to meet "Constance Bennett's daughter."
Later, smoking on the sidewalk in front of the store, I did meet an interesting young couple, Tom and Katie. They had both worked for Catholic Charities where they'd met and decided to live together without benefit of clergy, more frowned upon then than now, especially by Catholic Charities and its sponsors. When Katie became pregnant, I was told, they decided to eschew abortion and have the baby whom Katie then traded for a chinchilla coat. (I had no way of ascertaining the veracity of this account; Tom and Katie seemed to enjoy shocking people.)
They did shock me when Katie reached into her purse and extracted an exquisite silver miniature of a crucified Christ. She had only the corpus which, she told me, she'd lifted from its cross in a Spanish museum, a few months earlier.
The party wound down a little before dawn. The guests seemed not to be the types to bound early out of bed, even on a weekday.
I haven't seen Pauley since. Shortly thereafter, he and Andy Warhol found each other and made their own art history.
chasgoetz1@juno.com
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