The Downtown Pop Underground

On Cornelia and Fourth Street was a dress shop with a fancy mannequin in front where movie stars sometimes shopped. It was run by Andy Milligan, a designer who also directed some of the earliest shows at Caffe Cino. He later went on to make trashy low-budget movies such as The Ghastly Ones, Vapors, Seeds of Sin, The Body Beneath, The Man with Two Heads, and Torture Dungeon. “Andy was an S&M motorcycle freak, but a good director,” said playwright Paul Foster, who was connected to another Off-Off-Broadway theater, Café La MaMa. “He was outrageous. He would say anything and do anything, which was exciting because it was new. Andy was quite a character.” Robert Patrick added, “Andy Milligan was a dress designer and into S&M, as pretty boys learned when they first hit the Cino.” He staged a homoerotic dance during his production of Jean Genet’s Deathwatch at the Cino, and Milligan’s version of Genet’s The Maids had a lesbian sex scene that was sizzling for its time. From Chapter 1 of The Downtown Pop Underground — order online, or from a local independent bookstore

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The Old Reliable was one of the many Polish-Ukrainian bars scattered throughout the neighborhood—a beer-and-a-shot type of place with a stinky dog named Cornflakes that slept on the sticky floor, amid the peanut shells, spilled beer, and broken glass. Many of the bar’s regulars were likely on welfare or were drawing from a pension, and the large back room had previously been used for dancing on the weekend. “The dancing basically was dry humping,” said playwright Michael McGrinder, who frequented the bar before it became a theater. “Mostly, it was black guys and white girls, and music from an old Wurlitzer jukebox” (the neighborhood had long been a safe zone for interracial couples). The Old Reliable began opening its back room to the Off-Off-Broadway crowd after playwright Jeannine O’Reilly put on shows there. “She invited us over to see them,” Robert Patrick recalled. “So when the Cino closed, there was no question that I would move to the Old Reliable.” The owner, Norman Hartman (also know as “Speedy”), was a thin man in his forties or fifties who spoke with a very heavy Polish accent and outfitted himself in a fedora, along with other snazzy flourishes. “Speedy was an unlikely Off-Off-Broadway producer,” said Walter Michael Harris, who also performed there. “He seemed like, ‘Well, why not? What the heck? Let’s give it a try.’ And so he let all these crazy artists in.” The Old Reliable’s former dance floor was retrofitted with a two-sided stage with an L-shaped seating arrangement that could hold around seventy people. Robert Patrick was gregarious and likable, and he probably made a good impression on Speedy, who was something of a ham. He seized any opportunity to make announcements or play an on-or offstage role. From Chapter 14 of The Downtown Pop Underground — order online, or from a local independent bookstore

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Upset by what was happening to La MaMa and other venues, Ed Sanders used Fuck You/A Magazine of the Arts as a bully pulpit: “Shriek! Shriek! The Goon Squads are loose! We are motherfucking tired of the brickout of books, movies, theatre groups, dope freaks, Times Square gobble scenes, poetry readings, night club acts, etc. in New York. The Department of Licenses, the freaks in the various prosecutors’ offices, the Nazis, the fascists, et al., have joined psychoses for a Goon Stomp.” La MaMa’s 82 Second Street venue opened on June 28, 1963, with Eugène Ionesco’s The Bald Soprano, but by October the theater literally went dark because no one could pay the electric bill. After quitting as a designer for a Brooklyn swimsuit factory, Stewart began working for the fashion label Victor Bijou to pay the bills. Selling instant coffee at La MaMa wasn’t a big moneymaker, but that didn’t stop the Buildings Department from charging her with profiting from the coffee sales, and the city padlocked La MaMa’s doors once again in March 1964. Stewart was finally able to keep her new location open by giving away the coffee for free and turning the theater into a private club. “You paid one dollar dues,” Robert Patrick said. “For that, you got to see all of that week’s shows.” The new twenty-by-eighty-foot loft at 82 Second Street could seat seventy-four people, a big improvement from its original basement location, but it still needed a lot of work. Friends came to build a twenty-by-eight-foot stage, dressing rooms, and a coffee bar, and also installed a light board. They scavenged the streets for tables and old chairs, which furnished the new theater. From Chapter 6 of The Downtown Pop Underground — order online, or from a local independent bookstore

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A group of Caffe Cino mainstays—Michael Smith, Robert Patrick, Magie Dominic, and Charles Stanley—helped keep the coffeehouse open, but they were getting too many citations and summonses from the city. Even before it permanently closed in 1968, many of the regulars stayed away. “I stopped going to the Cino because I guess I was in mourning without knowing it,” William Hoffman said. “It was such a shock and it was no longer the same place.” During this period, he began going to Norman Hartman’s Old Reliable Theatre Tavern. This old-school bar was located in a volatile neighborhood, on Third Street between Avenues B and C. “In the back room of this smelly bar,” Hoffman recalled, “we put on fantastic plays at the time and I learned how to be a director. I followed Bob Patrick there.” After Patrick’s turbocharged energy was unleashed at Caffe Cino, he became even more prolific at the Old Reliable. Patrick and Hoffman were part of the bohemian migration away from the West Village in search of cheaper rents and new adventures, with ailing bars like the Old Reliable willing to let them do their thing. From Chapter 14 of The Downtown Pop Underground — order online, or from a local independent bookstore

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Eventually, Caffe Cino became known for staging plays based on comic books. This tradition began when someone suggested that they perform scenes from a Wonder Woman comic that was lying around the Cino. Great idea, Robert Patrick thought, so he sent someone out to buy extra copies of the comic at the corner store. “You’re Steve Trevor,” Patrick said, grabbing anyone who was available. “You’re Woozy Winks. You’re Etta Candy.” Diana Prince—aka Wonder Woman—was played by Harry Koutoukas (he eventually put the name “Diana Prince” on his mailbox at 87 Christopher Street). “Within the hour,” Patrick said, “we had The Secret of Taboo Mountain, the Cino’s first comic book play. There were four comic book shows: Wonder Woman, Snow White, Archie and His Friends, and a ‘Classic Comics’ version of Faust.” Koutoukas also appeared in Snow White, where friends and audience members were sometimes recruited minutes before a performance. Robert Shields, the actor who played Grumpy, recalled that the number of dwarves fluctuated from evening to evening. “One night we had something like eighteen to twenty dwarves running back and forth,” he said. “Fred Willard did it one night. Whoever was there, they’d just say ‘Okay, yeah, I’ll do that.’ So occasionally we had more dwarves than we had audience.” From Chapter 9 of The Downtown Pop Underground — order online, or from a local independent bookstore

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On Sundays, Ellen Stewart used her free time to explore the city on the subway, and she eventually stumbled upon a few blocks on the Lower East Side that were overflowing with fabrics sold by vendors. A Jewish merchant with “this little black thing on his head,” as Stewart called it, approached her, looking to make a sale. Abraham Diamond soon realized she had no money, but he could tell she had a talent for design, so he took her under his wing and adopted Ellen as his “artistic daughter and designer.” “Orchard Street is just a couple of blocks south of where La MaMa was,” said playwright Paul Foster, who helped Stewart start Café La MaMa and stuck with her through the years. “That’s where she met her buddy, Papa Diamond. He kept a pushcart in his window, to show everybody what he came from, because he was a peddler. He adored Ellen, and she adored him.” Diamond provided Stewart with fabric, and she would take the subway back to Diamond’s store every Sunday with a new outfit, when her “Papa” ushered her around Orchard Street, praising his “daughter’s” designs. Back at Saks, where she worked from 1950 to 1958, customers saw Stewart in one of her self-designed outfits and thought she was a Balenciaga model. “Somebody finally noticed,” recalled Robert Patrick, “and she wound up with her own little boutique, Miss Ellie’s Boutique at Saks.” From Chapter 6 of The Downtown Pop Underground — order online, or from a local independent bookstore

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Joe Cino opened it after giving up on his dream of being a dancer, for he was too heavyset to make it in the dance world. “Joe wore sweatshirts on the street, like dancers did,” recalled Robert Patrick, another Cino regular-turned-playwright who entered the fold in 1961. “He wore them backwards for the high neck. He was an affected faggot before it was fashionable.” He could be found behind the espresso machine—which served some of the best coffee in town—surrounded by photos of James Dean, Jean Harlow, Marilyn Monroe, and other movie stars. Joe didn’t bother reading scripts; he read people’s faces instead, or asked them their astrological sign. “The Cino was one of a number of little coffeehouses and alternative spaces,” said Michael Smith, “and I liked that it was so intimate. There was no proscenium. You were not separated from the play by some kind of frame. It was happening in the room with you. It was a very free atmosphere. Joe Cino was very supportive and just encouraged people to be themselves and be free. It’s quite unique that way, and I’ve never really been in another theater that was quite as supportive.” Cino sometimes spoke in a very high-cultured purr, though he also employed a pseudo-Italian language that was kind of campy—like, “Mamma mia! Here’s another group of lost boys!” He liked eccentric people with wild personas and wanted to create an open atmosphere that was like an ongoing party, blasting Maria Callas and other opera divas at top volume on the phonograph. Joe loved the 1940s pop singer Kate Smith, and sometimes wrapped himself in the American flag—occasionally completely naked—while playing the famed contralto’s rendition of “God Bless America” at top volume, just standing there. From Chapter 1 of The Downtown Pop Underground — order online, or from a local independent bookstore

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After Grandmother Is in the Strawberry Patch, Harry Koutoukas had another big row with Ellen Stewart. Both had strong personalities, and they clashed several times over the years, culminating in him sending her tumbling down a few stairs—though because this legendary incident had been embellished over the years, who knows exactly what happened. Real life often blended with fantasy, especially when highly theatrical people got involved. The story resonated because it reminded some on the scene of an over-the-top moment from the 1947 film noir classic Kiss of Death, in which Richard Widmark rolled a wheelchair-bound woman down a flight of stairs. “I was there the night Harry threw Ellen down the stairs of La MaMa,” playwright Robert Patrick recalled, “and she forgave him. Everybody forgave Harry for everything. He was the most extreme example of what we all were—dropouts, freaks, originals, or ‘gargoyles,’ as he would put it.” Koutoukas finally returned to the La MaMa fold on Christmas day 1975 for a presentation of his play Star Followers in an Ancient Land. Because Agosto Machado was friends with Koutoukas and had known Stewart from La MaMa’s early days in the basement of East Ninth Street, he was asked to help smooth things over. “Ellen was so pleased,” he said, “and Harry was so honored to be back at La MaMa, because it really was important to him.” Machado also performed in Star Followers, as did Koutoukas’s friend Bruce Eyster. “One day I was walking around,” he recalled, “and Harry came up to me and said, ‘You’re going to be in my Christmas show.’ And I said, ‘Oh, really? Well, okay.’ ” Eyster played a Heavenly Body, Machado was one of the Three Wise Men, and Koutoukas once again cast Mary Boylan, who was given lines from the Bible. “Harry, you didn’t write this,” she told him. “Well, no,” Harry replied, “but if you’re going to plagiarize, I believe you should plagiarize from the best.” From Chapter 29 of The Downtown Pop Underground — order online, or from a local independent bookstore

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“I stepped into the new century my first day in New York when I stepped into Caffe Cino,” playwright Robert Patrick said. “There was no question that I was in the most important place in the world. I know Harry Koutoukas felt like that. Whenever nothing else was booked, Joe Cino would say, ‘Harry, you’ve got something?’ and Harry would give him a title. Then Joe would put the title in the Voice.” Though Koutoukas had been hanging around the Cino for a few years, his career as a playwright began in December 1964 with Only a Countess May Dance When She’s Crazy (an Historical Camp), which he wrote and directed at Caffe Cino. The script has the Countess shouting, “Bring me MY TIERRA—The one with the fewest jewels. . . . Oh there is no one to bring it—NO ONE TO BRING IT! NO ONE SHALL BRING IT OR CAN—I shall bring it unto myself! Even if I have to get it myself.” When the Countess returns with her “tierra,” she is interrupted by the ringing of a telephone, followed by the lowering of the paper cup on a string, which she answers. (When Koutoukas was asked why he couldn’t just use a prop telephone, the playwright snapped, “In a Koutoukas production, it’s paper cups.”) This provocateur, poet, and playwright had a knack for wordplay that spilled over into the titles of his “camps” (Koutoukas’s preferred term for plays), such as Tidy Passions, or Kill, Kaleidoscope, Kill (an Epic Camp) and Awful People Are Coming Over So We Must Be Pretending to Be Hard at Work and Hope They Will Go Away. From Chapter 9 of The Downtown Pop Underground — order online, or from a local independent bookstore

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“I think we were a little bit of an anomaly at the Cino and at La MaMa," said Walter Michael Harris, "because we were so young. Here’s this family with kids who were all involved in whatever these artists were up to, in these magic places.” An Off-Off-Broadway director could cast a multitude of parts—a mom, a teenager, a boy, a girl—in one fell swoop. “If you needed a kid,” recalled Robert Patrick, “you called the Harris family. We just took them for granted.” Eloise Harris got her Equity card at the age of nine performing in Invitation to a Beheading at Joseph Papp’s Public Theater, and Jayne Anne Harris could be seen serenading Lanford Wilson in a production of Claris Nelson’s The Clown at Caffe Cino (she was cast as a boy). The roles kept coming, with the kids doing theater at night and going to school by day. The family queued for meals around the clock to maintain their varied production schedules, and Ann helped the kids with homework and ran lines with them.

From Chapter 7 of The Downtown Pop Underground — order online, or from a local independent bookstore

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“We were raised in an America that hated art, sex, and intellect,” Robert Patrick recalled, “and sex was not the worst offense.” He was beaten up in grade school, junior high school, and high school not for being gay—which he was—but for carrying too many books. “Once we all left the small town to hit the big city, we were ready to explode. There were people at the Cino who were versed in every aspect of history, arts, science. Nobody beat you up for it there.” Patrick surrounded himself with creative, forward-looking people who were smart, friendly, and supportive. “Most of us had never been part of a group where we came from, so it was rather intoxicating to be in one.” Sitting around having coffee, they shared their frustrations and aspirations with each other, so it wasn’t much of a stretch for them to say, “Hey, let’s act this out—let’s put on a show!” Every night at Caffe Cino, Joe Cino walked from the espresso machine to his makeshift stage, rang chimes, and announced, “Welcome ladies and gentlemen, it’s magic time!” When the lights went down, a different reality materialized: “It was the magic and ingenuity of Off-Off-Broadway,” Agosto Machado said. “You had to suspend belief, because you wanted to, and you’re enjoying it. If you didn’t have money, you used your ingenuity. It was so magical, so special. It was a playhouse for yourself and the selective group of people who were seeing this.” From Chapter 1 of The Downtown Pop Underground — order online, or from a local independent bookstore

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On the morning of March 30, 1967, the phone rang at Johnny Dodd and Michael Smith’s apartment down the street. “Joe was killing himself, and he was calling Johnny Dodd,” Smith said. “I picked up the phone because I was awake and Johnny was asleep. That was the reason I walked in on his death.” Smith let himself into Caffe Cino and saw Joe on the floor surrounded by blood, lit only by the dawn sunlight and the café’s twinkling Christmas lights. Joe picked up one of the other knives on the floor, but his hands were so slippery with blood that he could barely hold on to it. Smith screamed for him to stop and tried to pry the knife from his hands, to no avail. An ambulance finally came and took Cino to St. Vincent’s hospital, where he survived the day and was given antibiotics. Ellen Stewart stood vigil the whole time as dozens came to donate blood, but he died three days later. “After Joe killed himself,” Robert Patrick said, “both Harry Koutoukas and Ondine came to me in tears saying that they had killed Joe by slipping him some drugs. They had gotten some terrifically good, superior acid, and each of them had dropped a tablet of it in his drink. They never knew the other had, by the way. Each of them thought they had killed Joe.” From Chapter 14 of The Downtown Pop Underground — order online, or from a local independent bookstore

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The links between the downtown underground and the midtown mainstream can be seen in Walter Michael Harris’s varied creative outlets. “I managed to simultaneously be in Hair and also participated in a Bob Patrick show at the Old Reliable at the same time,” he said. “We had already collaborated on a few things, and he asked me if I would help him with the music to an Easter pageant he wrote. The first one was Dynel and the second one was Joyce Dynel, which opened on April 7, 1969—which was exactly one week after I left Hair.” Joyce Dynel began like a piñata explosion as street kids gathered on an East Village corner one Easter evening. “Feathers, fringe, serapes, boleros, bells, beads, incense and streaming hair,” the stage notes explain. “No flowers—that was the West Side! And this is the East Side, the Lower East Side, of Greater Babylon.” The actors playing America’s Street Children passed around joints and begged the audience for money until two actors playing police officers emerged in glittering blue jumpsuits, twirling their nightsticks: “Rrrrrroutine duties to attend to, tend to.” Robert Patrick wrote each scene within the framework of Christ’s story, giving it an absurd spin, and Harris helped him arrange the music in his tiny loft on Second Avenue, between Third and Fourth Streets. “My one window looked out to the large window of the Hare Krishna temple across the street,” Harris recalled. “Each morning I awoke to pleasant chanting by the devotees, and incense wafted my way if the wind was right.” Much of this East Village atmosphere was incorporated into Joyce Dynel, which featured Mary (who wore chic white “swinger” garb), God, and their long-haired, guitar-playing hippie son, Jesus Christ. From Chapter 20 of The Downtown Pop Underground — order online, or from a local independent bookstore

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During the Caffe Cino production of The Death of Tintagiles, Harry Koutoukas stirred up trouble as he sat by the stage wearing his cape with the fake parrot on his shoulder. “It was supposed to be a serious play,” said cast member Jayne Anne Harris, “but, well, Harry was kind of a force of nature, even from the audience.” The trouble began when the lead actress pushed open a set door with her pinky, even though it was supposed to be heavy, which Koutoukas found endlessly amusing. “She was a Method actress, and she was a pain in the ass,” Harris recalled. “If you laugh one more time, I will cut you,” she declared, which only made Koutoukas laugh harder. “If you laugh one more time, I WILL CUT YOU!” she said again in a very dramatic Shakespearean voice, while holding a sword over her head. Koutoukas laughed again. Robdert Patrick, who was managing Caffe Cino that night, recalled that “she buried her sword in Harry’s table and stormed out.” The Death of Tintagiles’s run abruptly ended, so the café crowd quickly threw together a new show—a common occurrence at Caffe Cino. From Chapter 9 of The Downtown Pop Underground — order online, or from a local independent bookstore

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Sam Shepard lived in the Lower East Side at the time with his roommate, Charlie Mingus Jr., a painter and the son of jazz legend Charles Mingus. Shepard was also a musician who often incorporated rock ’n’ roll in his plays and, in 1966, he joined the Holy Modal Rounders as their drummer (which is how he later met Patti Smith, with whom he cowrote the play Cowboy Mouth). Shepard and Mingus lived in a condemned cold-water apartment on Avenue C, past the Old Reliable. The two young men saw it as an urban frontier, and would act out “cowboys and Indians” games on the streets. These sorts of scenarios—along with tales of revolutionary street-fighting men and rough-and-tumble masculinity—made their way into several of Shepard’s early plays. Theatre Genesis’s bare-bones, no-nonsense space was an ideal setting for the butch plays that Shepard, Anthony Barsha, and their peers wrote. “Genesis was distinguished by being much more heterosexual than any of the other places,” said Robert Patrick. “Sam Shepherd, Murray Mednick—a lot of their plays had references to cowboy movies, and westerns, and things like that.” Their shows veered toward what one reviewer dubbed “Macho Americano,” and they thought of themselves as the “Hells Angels of the Off-Off-Broadway scene,” as Barsha put it. “Off-Off-Broadway started with the gays at Cino, so it was pretty much a gay scene,” he observed. “Ralph Cook and Leonard Melfi, Kevin O’Connor, Sam Shepard, myself, Murray Mednick, and Walter Hadler—we’re all straight guys. It was that kind of a scene. A lot of pot, and a lot of women, and a lot of messing around in that area, so Genesis definitely had that reputation, and rightly so.” From Chapter 14 of The Downtown Pop Underground — order online, or from a local independent bookstore

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“Do what you have to do,” said Joe Cino, who gave this small group of outsiders a literal stage to act out new ways of presenting themselves in public. Together, they transformed social life by performing openly gay identities in ways that had been suppressed elsewhere in the country. “All the gay guys bought muscle magazines like Young Physique,” Robert Patrick recalled. “At one point, I dared bring in a photo of one of the most popular models, a blond in just the tiniest white bikini. I tacked it on the wall, which is like saying, ‘Yes! We’re gay.’ But we were actually worried if I could legally put a picture of a young man in a bathing suit on a wall.” Over time, this motley crew grew more confident and confrontational, such as when Patrick and his fellow Cino playwright William Hoffman were attacked in the neighborhood by a group of teenage boys. Patrick and Hoffman turned the tables on the homophobes by breaking off a car antenna and chased them through the streets with it. “I would have killed them,” Hoffman said, vividly recalling this pre-Stonewall memory a half century later. “It was very empowering.” F. Story Talbot, who had an apartment on Cornelia Street, was one of the token straight guys who hung around the Cino in its early days. “All the guys down there who worked there were making semi-passes at me,” he said, “and we would laugh about it.” From Chapter 1 of The Downtown Pop Underground — order online, or from a local independent bookstore

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When Robert Patrick began hanging out at Caffe Cino in 1961, he had no grand design to become a playwright. It was his friend Wilson who helped inspire him to begin writing The Haunted Host, a play that was set on Christopher Street and also featured an openly gay character. “We went around to a diner called Joe’s for lunch, and I reached for a napkin,” he recalled. “I started writing The Haunted Host, but I would never have thought of writing the play if I hadn’t already been part of the Cino.” When Patrick asked Joe Cino to put on the show, he just threw the script over his shoulder and into the garbage. “You don’t want to be a playwright. Playwrights are terrible people,” Cino said, motioning to his star scribes—Lanford Wilson, David Starkweather, and Tom Eyen. “Oh, all right,” Patrick replied, dropping the issue. “Joe, you should do Bob’s play,” Wilson interjected. “He pulls his weight around here and you should do his little play.” Cino said, “No. He’ll thank me someday.” Wilson then insisted, “If you don’t do Bob’s play, none of us will do plays here anymore.” The other two playwrights looked at Wilson with raised eyebrows until Joe said, “Oh, all right, if it’s going to be a palace revolution.” The Haunted Host was a hit, kicking off Patrick’s wildly prolific career. From Chapter 9 of The Downtown Pop Underground — order online, or from a local independent bookstore

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Robert Patrick was another bohemian immigrant who was drawn to Caffe Cino. After working a dishwashing job at a summer stock theater in Maine in 1961, he made a stopover in Greenwich Village on his way back home to Santa Fe, New Mexico, on a Greyhound bus. As he walked down West Fourth Street, Patrick saw a young long-haired man with jewelry around his neck who was clearly not wearing underwear. “His name was Johnny Dodd,” he said of Caffe Cino’s genius lighting technician. “So I followed what I call the ‘other brick road’ down to Sheridan Square. I followed him a couple of blocks and he looked over his shoulder at me and turned the corner.” Patrick continued down Cornelia Street, which had a little art gallery and bookstore, then followed Dodd into the Cino—which was dark and smelly. Actor Neil Flanagan and director Andy Milligan were in the midst of rehearsing a show, so the newcomer sat down, watched, and basically never left Caffe Cino until it shut down in 1968. From Chapter 1 of The Downtown Pop Underground — order online, or from a local independent bookstore

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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

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Caffe Cino became an alternative to Off-Broadway, which emerged in response to the conservatism of Broadway—whose producers, even then, were loath to take risks and instead relied on revivals of established hit shows that could guarantee a return on their investments. Off-Broadway shifted American theater from its midtown Manhattan roots after venues such as Cherry Lane Theatre drew audiences further downtown. This new theater movement created a low-budget style that offered artistic freedom, but by the end of the 1950s Off-Broadway’s budgets rose and its theaters followed the same cautious logic of Broadway producers. The time was ripe for Off-Off-Broadway. “There was no way to get a show on Broadway,” said Michael Smith. “At that point in time it cost a lot of money to put a show on Off-Broadway. You would have to go raising money, and a lot of the budgets at that point were $20,000. That was a lot of money.” Instead, Caffe Cino staged shows for a few dollars or for nothing (when Smith staged his first play there, he dragged his own bed down Cornelia Street to be used as part of the set). Off-Off-Broadway locales were akin to the barebones venues where punk rock developed in the mid-1970s—introducing the idea that one could simply do it yourself, without waiting for funding or the approval of cultural gatekeepers. “Arrogant peacocks like Harry Koutoukas were a product of the Off-Off Broadway milieu,” recalled Robert Patrick. “Since nobody was making any money and hardly ever getting reviewed at that time, it was the first time in history that theater became this totally self-expressive art form. A playwright could produce whatever they wanted.” Koutoukas was free to craft his playful, poetic wordplay and unconventional scenarios that never could have made their way to Off-Broadway, much less Broadway, and he immediately attached himself to Joe Cino. “Harry just worshiped Joe,” Patrick said. “Most of my Cino memories of Harry are him at Joe’s side, or talking to Joe by the counter, or at a table with him.” From Chapter 1 of The Downtown Pop Underground — order online, or from a local independent bookstore

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In 1968, Michael McGrinder staged his first play, The Foreigners, at the Old Reliable, and it quickly became a second home for him. “Michael McGrinder was very rare in those circles,” Robert Patrick recalled. “He’s a heterosexual. That was an amazingly gay crowd at the Old Reliable.” As for the clientele in the front bar—which was mostly composed of straight truckers and dockworkers who came by for cheap booze and friendly girls—that didn’t really change. And for the most part, the two groups maintained a peaceful coexistence. “I think everybody, including the drinking workingmen, appreciated the surreal aspect of it,” Patrick said. “If I did some crazy musical where actors would be entering from the bar, you’d just be leaning on the bar itself in between two Polish laborers to support your costume, or headdress. And when it was time for your entrance you said, ‘See you later, fellas.’ And they’d say, ‘See ya.’ ” As Paul Foster observed, “I find that blue-collar people don’t give a damn what you do as long as you pay your way and don’t try to get sassy with them.” From Chapter 14 of The Downtown Pop Underground — order online, or from a local independent bookstore

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By the mid-1960s, musician and director Tom O’Horgan had become part of the La MaMa family. “Tom came into the Cino,” playwright Robert Patrick recalled, “moping and sulking that his life was over and he wasn’t getting anywhere, and that he was a woebegone, middle-aged gay musician. Then Joe Cino said, ‘Here, you can have the floor.’ Tom did two rather conventional nightclub-type reviews with eccentric touches. After Paul Foster saw that, he brought him to La MaMa, where Ellen supported him.” He eventually directed some sixty plays at Stewart’s theater and had even greater success directing the Broadway debuts of Hair in 1968 and Jesus Christ Superstar in 1971. Much earlier, in 1964, O’Horgan had directed an important production of The Maids, the first to cast men in the two pivotal female roles (as playwright Jean Genet intended). “I played the Madame,” said Mari-Claire Charba, who was also cast in The Maids. “We presented it at La MaMa, and it was a big success. That was the beginning of his directing career, because before that he was really a composer and a musician.” Charba’s earliest memory of O’Horgan was at a Happening he orchestrated at Judson Church. “He did this thing where everybody was inside the Judson,” she said, “and then they all came out onto Fourth Street where all these drag queens were.” From Chapter 16 of The Downtown Pop Underground — order online, or from a local independent bookstore

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 Vain Victory brought in rich people who were trying to “slum it” downtown, sometimes inviting Jackie and the rest of the cast to their fancy uptown residences. Agosto Machado said it was like inviting a sideshow performer to dinner for your friends to gawk at, something that Lily Tomlin also found troubling. “You just felt that someone was bringing them to be amused,” she said, “or be hip or to rub elbows with that culture—but not really take it in or embrace it totally. I just felt that it was kind of exploitative.” “The Ridiculous people—and Jackie, Holly, and Candy—were always getting invited to these big uptown parties,” Tony Zanetta said. “They were kind of like toys of the rich people, these little social freaks.” Despite the patronizing attitudes, Machado and his friends made the most of it. “It was such a novelty for many of us, being invited uptown. You could tell they were from different classes because they had nice teeth and could afford dentists. People who were like us, we didn’t have manicures.” The last time Robert Patrick saw Candy Darling, he was cruising around Times Square with friends in a baby-blue Thunderbird convertible when they saw her on the sidewalk looking distraught. “We stopped and said, ‘What’s wrong, Candy?’ She said, ‘Well, I’m supposed to go to this party and I get $500 for going to a party now, but my ride hasn’t come.’ ” When they offered to take Candy, she hopped in the back of the convertible with the grace and poise of a beauty pageant winner. “She sat up on the backseat,” Patrick said, “and waved at people like Miss America as we drove her to a party.” From Chapter 21 of The Downtown Pop Underground — order online, or from a local independent bookstore

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“The Cino was becoming well known,” Robert Patrick said, “and it attracted people who just cared about publicity—i.e., the Warhol people. The first was Soren Agenoux, who did a crazy gay Christmas Carol.” Vinyl, Ronald Tavel’s loose adaptation of the novel A Clockwork Orange, was also staged at the Cino in 1967 after Warhol shot his own filmed version. In both the movie and stage versions, Mary Woronov played the doctor and Gerard Malanga was the victim. “I started doing movies for Andy Warhol when Ronnie Tavel was also working for Andy Warhol,” Woronov recalled. “That’s when I met Ronnie, and he used me constantly in his plays. That’s how I ended up at Caffe Cino, La MaMa, and other Off-Off-Broadway places.” Actor Norman Marshall, who also appeared in the Cino version of Vinyl, said that Woronov was a convincing S&M sadist: “She was really torturing the poor guy.” Many at Caffe Cino felt that the presence of the Warhol people fundamentally changed its character. “Soren Agenoux’s shows were absolutely nonsense,” playwright William Hoffman said. “They were doing plays that were gibberish, very speed-oriented.” There was the feeling that, well, Maybe the play might make sense on drugs? Or not. “The Warhol crowd was what it was,” Robert Patrick added. “I don’t know whether to blame Warhol. He was surrounded by freaks, creeps—some of them were okay people, some were not. Mostly, it was just a freak show and cultivated as such.” From Chapter 12 of The Downtown Pop Underground — order online, or from a local independent bookstore

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