Jackie Curtis loved the limelight and couldn’t have been happier than when Lou Reed immortalized her in “Walk on the Wild Side,” his best-known song: “Jackie is just speeding away,” Reed sang, “thought she was James Dean for a day.” (Friends and acquaintances tended to use both “she” and “he” pronouns when describing Curtis, which was fitting for someone who insisted, “I’m not a boy, not a girl, not a faggot, not a drag queen, not a transsexual—I’m just me, Jackie.”) “Sometimes he’d kind of have a James Dean style, but ragged,” playwright Robert Heide said of Curtis, “and other times Jackie would dress as Barbara Stanwyck. She would look really good in a red wig or that kind of thing.” Jackie wasn’t the kind of drag queen who tried to pass herself off as a woman and instead developed a sui generis style—as Jane Wagner and Lily Tomlin learned when she would drop by Wagner’s apartment dressed either as a man or woman. “What Jackie did was more like performance art,” Melba LaRose said. “I never thought of him as a woman. He went back and forth so many times. When I met Jackie, he was a little boy with a shopping bag. He had bangs. He was very cute.” “That was the beginning of pansexuality, and David Bowie picked up on that,” said Tony Zanetta, who worked with the glam rock singer. “I find a lot of similarities between Jackie Curtis and David Bowie.” Noting that Jackie had the same DIY aesthetic as John Vaccaro’s Play-House of the Ridiculous, Zanetta added, “Jackie Curtis’s tattered clothes look was do-it-yourself, number one. Like at Warhol’s Factory, it was about how, if you wanted to be an artist, you just basically said you were. Like with punk, if you wanted to be a musician or you wanted to be in a band, well, you didn’t really have to learn how to play an instrument. So Jackie Curtis, the Ridiculous, and punk are all connected.”

From Chapter 17 of The Downtown Pop Underground — order online, or from a local independent bookstore

Jackie Curtis, Candy Darling, and Holly Woodlawn weren’t clinically insane or homicidal, but they still contributed to the Factory’s edgy atmosphere. It was fueled by heavy drug use and hard living, which Warhol mined as grist for his movies Flesh (1968), Trash (1970), and Women in Revolt (1972), which featured this trashy trio. “He took advantage of them, and I didn’t really like that at all,” said Curtis’s friend Melba LaRose. “I always found Andy very cold, and with not much to say. And of course the people around him said all these witty things and then he’d get credit for it. Jackie and Candy were always very witty.” Their exhibitionism, which made for compelling cinema and great PR, stood in contrast to Warhol’s wordless, blank persona. “Jackie, Holly, and Candy had problems with Warhol because he didn’t really pay them,” said another friend, Bruce Eyster. Warhol did give them token money, but they still ended up marching over from Max’s Kansas City to the Factory to scream and beg for more money—something that underscored a genuine divide between Warhol and some of those he mixed with. Even though many vied to be in his social world, Warhol wasn’t revered or respected in the same way as Jack Smith, Harry Koutoukas, and other struggling downtown artists who prioritized art over money. “You wondered if some of the entourage people—Billy Name, Taylor Mead, and so forth—would jump out the window,” Robert Heide added. “They’d go back to their shabby little rooms because there was this double standard going on. I think ultimately that’s one of the reasons I think Andy got shot.”

From Chapter 18 of The Downtown Pop Underground — order online, or from a local independent bookstore

“There was always this sense that something could go terribly wrong at the Factory,” recalled Robert Heide, “like the time Dorothy Podber came up there and shot a stack of Marilyn Monroe silkscreens with a gun.” In the fall of 1964 she walked into the Factory with her Great Dane named Carmen Miranda, motioned to the Monroe silkscreens, and asked, “Can I shoot those?” Andy Warhol said yes—assuming that Podber was going to take a picture—but she instead pulled out a pistol and shot a hole through the canvases. On another occasion a young man came to the studio with a gun and played Russian roulette, fired some shots that missed, then left (a nonplussed Andy said nothing). George Harris III first visited the Factory after he met Warhol in the back room of Max’s Kansas City, but Harris misread the situation and thought it was a date. After he arrived Warhol sat passively while some of his male friends tortured the young man. While Harris begged them to stop, they extinguished cigarettes on his skin and roughed him up—refusing to let him leave and keeping him at the Factory all night. “So when Valerie shot Andy,” Heide said, “it was almost inevitable, because of the people that were surrounding him.”

From Chapter 18 of The Downtown Pop Underground — order online, or from a local independent bookstore

Before Andy Warhol declined to produce Valarie Solanas’s Up Your Ass, she had already approached Charles Stanley and Robert Patrick at Caffe Cino about directing the play. Stanley wanted Patrick to direct the play, but it was a little too extreme and filthy even for his tastes, so Patrick declined. “I remember her look,” he said. “She shot Warhol for not doing that play. I wish I had done it. It might have saved Andy Warhol. I deeply regret it.” Ed Sanders was another man who dashed Solanas’s dreams after she delivered the twenty-one page SCUM Manifesto manuscript to his Peace Eye Bookstore. She hoped he would publish it, but after he sat on it for too long, Solanas left a terse note for him at the bookstore. “She wanted the manuscript back,” Sanders recalled. “I got the impression from the store clerk that she was miffed.” Adding to her frustration, Solanas unsuccessfully approached Realist publisher Paul Krassner about publishing SCUM, yet another male gatekeeper who turned her down. “It didn’t fit whatever my editorial criteria were,” he said, “but I did give her fifty dollars because she was an interesting pamphleteer and I wanted to support her.” She ended up self-publishing the manifesto and sold it at Paperbook Gallery, the Greenwich Village store where Jackie Curtis collaborator Paul Serrato worked. “Valerie would pop in with her SCUM Manifesto and she’d chat, just like anyone else,” Serrato said. “Who knew what she was gonna do, right?” Solanas began showing up at the Factory more frequently, asking for money, so Warhol put her to work by casting her in his 1967 film I, a Man. Over the course of 1968, she became increasingly agitated until she finally snapped on June 3 and shot Warhol.

From Chapter 18 of The Downtown Pop Underground — order online, or from a local independent bookstore

Both Jackie Curtis and Candy Darling held on to a sincere hope that they would become actual stars, but they were too far ahead of their time to crack the glitter ceiling. When Lily Tomlin was performing in the early 1970s at the popular midtown venue Upstairs at the Downstairs, she got Darling an audition for the nightclub’s musical review. “I thought Candy was really good in the audition,” Tomlin said, but the show’s producer had a more uptight midtown audience to contend with, so he passed. “My frustration is that they couldn’t break through to the mainstream culture,” Jane Wagner added, “but that was what made them unique, so that’s ironic. You wanted them to be accepted in a bigger way because they wanted it so much, but then if they had been, they wouldn’t have been who they were.” In 1974, at the age of twenty-nine, Darling died of lymphoma, perhaps caused by the questionable hormone treatments she received. “By the time you read this I will be gone,” she said in a deathbed letter written to Andy Warhol, which captured the exhaustion that saturated that era. “I am just so bored by everything. You might say bored to death.” By the mid-1970s, the Off-Off-Broadway and Factory scenes were also on life support.

From Chapter 21 of The Downtown Pop Underground — order online, or from a local independent bookstore

Andy Warhol did not appear in television’s first weekly reality series, An American Family, but he was a looming influence behind the scenes. Shot in 1971, the PBS show premiered on January 11, 1973, and became an immediate pop culture sensation. It was discussed by newspaper columnists, debated by television pundits, and taken seriously by respected scholars such as Margaret Mead. In a TV Guide article, the anthropologist declared that the show was “as new and significant as the invention of drama or the novel—a new way in which people can learn to look at life, by seeing the real life of others interpreted by the camera.” Though An American Family primarily took place in the Loud family home in Santa Barbara, California, several key moments were filmed in New York—exposing the likes of Jackie Curtis and Holly Woodlawn to millions. It also introduced audiences to the first openly gay man on television, Lance Loud, who had already forged links with the downtown underground in the mid-1960s. After he saw a Time magazine article about Warhol and Factory superstar Edie Sedgwick at the age of thirteen, Loud dyed his hair silver. He even struck up a long-distance friendship with Warhol—via mail and, eventually, telephone—but the letters and late-night phone calls abruptly ended after Warhol was shot in 1968. “I tried to write him, but the letters came back,” Loud said. “He suddenly became very, very private. He got very scared after that for a long time.”

From Chapter 23 of The Downtown Pop Underground — order online, or from a local independent bookstore

Andy Warhol’s Pork, which debuted at La MaMa, also marked the beginning of the end of his significant ties to the downtown scenes, a transition embodied by the evolution of Interview magazine. Warhol launched it in 1969 as an underground movie magazine printed on cheap black-and-white newsprint—much like what was available in indie bookstores such as the Peace Eye—but by the early 1970s, Interview was reborn as a glossy magazine filled with celebrity photographs and transcripts of verbatim interviews. He traded in downtown companions like Jackie Curtis, Candy Darling, and Holly Woodlawn for the high-rolling glitterati of uptown and Europe, who could afford his art. Anyone could have a Warhol portrait made for $25,000—about $150,000 in today’s dollars—which became the bread and butter of the Factory operation. “If his Factory had been an incubator for many of the experimental tendencies of the New York underground of 1960s,” historian Andreas Killen wrote, “by the early 1970s it had been transformed into an increasingly professionalized operation dedicated to chronicling the lives of celebrities.”

From Chapter 24 of The Downtown Pop Underground — order online, or from a local independent bookstore

With his eye on breaking David Bowie in America, his manager Tony DeFries hired Pork performers Tony Zanetta and Cherry Vanilla to work at the New York offices of MainMan, his management company, alongside photographer and scenester Leee Black Childers. Zanetta became president of MainMan, Childers was vice president, and Vanilla directed publicity. They had absolutely no business experience and were fairly irresponsible, but no matter—DeFries was selling an image one couldn’t learn about in business school. “MainMan was definitely about Tony DeFries wanting to make money,” Zanetta said, “but I was there because I liked David Bowie and I liked what he was doing.” MainMan’s new president became friends with Bowie and toured with him during the Ziggy Stardust era, which further fueled his Warholian infatuation with stardom and image-making. “Once I admitted that to myself,” Zanetta said, “it kind of freed me and the whole world kind of opened up, especially rock ’n’ roll.” Andy Warhol, however, did not receive Bowie quite as enthusiastically. When he paid a visit to the Factory, the artist muttered something about liking his shoes, but things got more awkward when Bowie played him “Andy Warhol,” a rather corny track from his Hunky Dory album. Silence. While visiting New York, Bowie also connected with Iggy Pop, who signed a management contract with MainMan, and Bowie finally got to know his musical hero, Lou Reed.

From Chapter 24 of The Downtown Pop Underground — order online, or from a local independent bookstore