Interview

RP: It's interesting how people who were once fairly radical can become, later in life, kind of conservative and not just in terms of politics-how if you're an artist, you can start out being somewhat avant-garde and then end up doing landscapes. Sometimes the opposite can happen, but it's usually the other way around. I mean, look what happened with Kerouac. You know, he really became kind of a Republican.

GO: Some people say he was always sort of a Republican. He was a mama's boy.

RP: Well, some of the best artists-I mean, [Paul] Cézanne and [Giorgio] de Chirico come to mind-basically lived with their mothers.

GO: Andy [Warhol], too. But with Kerouac, I don't know. A lot of people who took amphetamines became half brain-dead.

RP: But I think that people underestimated how intelligent Kerouac was and how well-read he was, and I think that really got to him. It's somewhat like what happened to Jackson Pollock, too, where what he did became part of some comedian's act-you know, how they started calling him Jack the Dripper. The term beatnik came out of what Kerouac referred to as beat, and then it became kind of like an advertising thing. There's that famous Truman Capote quote about Kerouac: "That's not writing-that's typewriting." So Kerouac had to deal with that. And if you're someone who already has a predilection to drink alcohol, it exacerbates the whole problem. I mean, these guys were pretty thin-skinned to begin with. They didn't particularly embrace the criticism.

GO: Being famous was different then too. Now, there are degrees of fame. There's, like, the cable-TV degree of fame, and then there's big fame. But back then there were maybe something like 200 celebrities and you went from complete obscurity to being on the cover of Life magazine. It was extreme. There wasn't much mid-level fame.

RP: Well, some people are better at handling the limelight than others. I mean, you take a guy like J.D. Salinger who basically has been off the grid for 30, 40 years-has no use for it, doesn't care about it. And then, of course, it absolutely destroyed someone like Pollock. And, in a strange way, it wasn't so much the media that did it, but just the idea of making it and becoming successful. Look at the rock 'n' rollers-that's a whole other level. You can name so many who died very soon after they had any success, whether it's Jimi Hendrix or Gram Parsons or Jim Morrison or Janis Joplin or Kurt Cobain . . .

GO: But don't you think that while part of that is sensitivity, part of it also has to do with how being a junkie or an alcoholic has been sensationalized? You see all the pictures of Keith Richards holding a bottle of Jack Daniel's, and it makes people think, Well, if I want that, then that's what I have to do.

RP: And it's amazing how many people do it, too, how many artists and musicians and people in cinema go down that road.

GO: Maybe the difference between then and now is that the abstract expressionists were all drinking gin, and today we're drinking barrel-fermented chardonnay.

RP: Kerouac and his buddies drank Sterno-I mean cheap, cheap stuff.

GO: In Big Sur, they drink white port, which is sort of like a grape-based paint thinner.

RP: I was just reading about this drug that I'd never heard about, this herb that you chew on or something and you have an out-of-body experience for five to 10 minutes. My stepson knew all about it.

GO: Is it divine sage?

RP: It's something like that, yeah. It was in The New York Times the other day. But, of course, where we live in upstate New York, it's all about these meth labs. People are mixing up the medicine, cooking it in their kitchen, and getting really strung out.

GO: Everybody thinks that heroin is the most dangerous drug, but I think most of the celebrities who've died have died from mixing alcohol and barbiturates. That's what Marilyn Monroe and Hendrix died from.

RP: Yeah, it's sort of a strange way to die.

GO: So what else have you been collecting? I heard you bought Brigid Berlin's cock-print book.

RP: Yeah. There were, like, three volumes that I bought. I don't know how many volumes of the Cock Book she did-she might have done more than three. But they're these huge compendiums of Polaroids and prints of people's cocks. -Everybody from Brice Marden and Jean-Michel Basquiat to Victor Hugo and Andy are in there. It kind of reminds me of Cynthia Plaster Caster.

GO: What do you think happened to those casts that Cynthia Plaster Caster did?

RP: I have one.

GO: You do?

RP: I have a Hendrix cast.

GO: Really?

RP: Yeah. She still makes them but I don't know if you can buy them from her. She has a website.

GO: Is it a limited edition?

RP: I don't know if it's a limited edition. All I know is that it's signed by her on the bottom, and it stands up like a paperweight. I was thinking, maybe down the line I would curate a show about the male physique. At this point, I have a fairly significant collection of pieces featuring the male nude. I have a Mapplethorpe. Molinier could be in there. I have Tom of Finland drawings. It's just a subject that kind of took on a life of its own. So when the Cock Book came up, I just went for it, thinking that maybe it could be part of the exhibition someday.

GO: So you've lost interest in this penis exhibition?

RP: Well, I mean, that's probably the defining area of the male anatomy that the exhibition would be about, but there was also a nice torso.

GO: You could call the exhibition "Little Richard."

RP: "Little Richard" would be a great title.

GO: When I was in college, there was always this rumor that you could go to the Armed Forces Medical Museum in D.C. and see John Dillinger's penis. It was supposed to be in a jar.

RP: That's what I've heard, too.

GO: And it was supposed to be, like, 20 inches long or something like that.

RP: The things people save.

GO: So what's the weirdest thing that you've collected?

RP: The weirdest? God, that's a good question. I just bought a wax head of Leonard Nimoy as Mr. Spock. I bought it at an auction in Texas. It's a life-size head, and it has the dirtiest, nattiest, most ugly hairpiece with the pointed ears attached to it. I had an entire kitchen built to house the head in the refrigerator. But probably the strangest thing I would've had, had I bid enough money on it, was a fence-it was the picket fence that the shooters who assassinated John F. Kennedy supposedly stood behind.

GO: On the grassy knoll.

RP: On the grassy knoll. It was taken down by some sanitation worker in the '60s and then apparently put up for auction at a little place on Long Island. I was actually going to take that picket fence and put it up on its own little grassy knoll. But I didn't get it.

GO: How would you authenticate something like that? Did E. Howard Hunt come with it?

RP: I don't know-there are markings. But the whole idea of a conspiracy is so interesting. I have a copy of the Warren -Report, signed to Darryl F. Zanuck [the film producer]. And then I have these strange films of people who have been given doses of LSD in a controlled environment. But probably the strangest book I own is a copy of Morey Amsterdam's Keep Laughing because it was read by the CIA and it was all marked up.

GO: Really?

RP: I don't know if anybody remembers the premise for Three Days of the Condor [1975] but the guy in the film basically read books for the CIA for a living. This is the only book in 30 years that I've ever found that I know was actually read and marked. And of all books, it was one by Morey Amsterdam.

GO: When I arrived at the Factory, Interview had published, like, six or seven issues and I was looking through the subscription list, and CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, had a subscription to Interview. I guess the FBI had a big Warhol file. But I thought it was so weird that our little magazine was being read by those readers.