WHEN THINGS WERE MAGIC : Recalling New York Days With a Guy Named Andy

Twenty years ago in New York City I met Andy Warhol. To me he was probably the most innovative American film maker of the time, and meeting him was overwhelming for a green kid from Texas.

A year earlier in 1966, as head of the University of Texas Cinema 40 Film Society in Austin, I had put together the first Andy Warhol Film Festival. His early films struck me as quite iconoclastic and funny. After all, “Vinyl” (his unauthorized version of author Anthony Burgess’ “A Clockwork Orange”) shot with a 16-millimeter Auricon sound camera, still strikes me as more spirited than Stanley Kubrick’s later studio version.

While I was in New York, Andy was filming his most outrageous film experiment, the 25-hour movie “” (“Four Star”). I had made friends with Gerard Malanga, Andy’s poet assistant, who represented the artist because he didn’t speak or appear in public then. Malanga in turn had invited me to visit Andy’s aluminum-foil covered Factory on 47th Street.

Andy would arrive at the Factory at noon and work until midnight. Somehow Andy’s Czech Catholic background kept him to that working-class ethos. Inside the Factory, one could hear “Carmina Burana” on the stereo more often than Warhol’s house band, the Velvet Underground. Factory regulars worked on a variety of tasks--from typing to gossiping.

But the Factory days were coming to an end when I was there. Andy by that time had gained a certain respectability and was preparing to make a move uptown on the heels of his ground-breaking and successful “Chelsea Girls,” a two-screen film about the occupants of the Chelsea Hotel. On the days I was at the Factory, I’d help Malanga clean up. I’d even get a push broom and sweep discarded silk screens of Jackie Kennedy or whatever was on the floor. Everyone knew that Andy did the commercial art to make the money necessary to finance his film projects, which attracted attention but made little money. Once I asked Andy to sign some battered silk screens I had rescued from the trash bins. He refused. “Oh, but they’d be worth so much money then, Gregg.” He had a disarming way about him--almost testing you into believing money wasn’t important.

Well, in those days, it wasn’t.

Hardly anyone connected with the Factory crowd got paid--at least not enough to live on. But it didn’t seem to matter, since working with Andy in the midst of that cultural upheaval was rewarding enough.

I lived in the Chelsea Hotel that summer and more than often some of Andy’s gang would come over and crash. That Fourth of July, we all went to Long Island, but without Andy because he didn’t want to get sunburned. His pallor contrasted sharply with his dark black jeans and jacket patterned after Malanga’s de rigueur black-vinyl look.

Nightly, Andy would hold court until dawn in the backroom at a watering hole known as Max’s Kansas City. All of Andy’s “superstars” and visiting members of the in-crowd--including this “kid from Texas” as I was pegged by the group--would naturally gravitate to his table.

Another night, I told him about how mesmerized Texas students were at Edie Sedgwick’s performance in his film “Lupe” (based on the suicide of actress Lupe Velez).

“Did they (the audience) laugh when she died?” he asked. I told him that they hadn’t.

A year later, his question to me seemed ironic, for many people laughed when he himself was shot and nearly killed by disenchanted writer Valerie Solanas. One Doubting Thomas even told me: “What a put-on that guy is! Was his shooting some kind of happening?”

Andy changed after his close escape with death. He no longer seemed to take the chances he had once taken in his art. The movies soon became director Paul Morrissey’s domain while Andy took Kodak Instamatic photos of his scarred body for Esquire magazine and tape recorded everything for posterity. He lost the monosyllabic awe that typified his earlier work. He learned to talk big bucks. His art statement became: “Good art is commercial art.” I thought it was a bit of Barnum & Dali with billboard pizzazz. Later, when two autobiographical books were published, the Andy I had known in the Factory of the ‘60s was missing.

In 1981, he came to Los Angeles to promote his book of society celebs, “Exposures.” He was pleased to see me when I showed up at a nearly empty Hollywood bookstore. I took the opportunity to remind him that I was never paid for articles I had written for his “Interview” magazine in the early ‘70s. He apologized and proceeded to sign every memento that I had brought along (including the old Jackie silk-screens). I was skeptical when he told me also to expect something in the mail.

Nevertheless, shortly afterwards I received a rare 16-millimeter reel from his “.” It was the last time I heard from him. Yet I’ll always relish his thoughts on death from one of his books: “I’m so sorry to hear about it. I just thought that things were magic and that it would never happen.”

Ditto, Andy.