The Girl of the
Year
BANGS MANES BOUFFANTS
BEEHIVES BEATLE CAPS BUTTER faces brush-on lashes decal eyes puffy
sweaters French thrust bras flailing leather blue jeans stretch
pants stretch jeans honeydew bottoms eclair shanks elf boots
ballerinas Knight slippers, hundreds of them, these flaming little
buds, bobbing and screaming, rocketing around inside the Academy of
Music Theater underneath that vast old mouldering cherub dome up
there—aren’t they super-marvelous!
“Aren’t they super-marvelous!” says
Baby Jane, and then: “Hi, Isabel! Isabel! You want to sit
backstage—with the Stones!”
The show hasn’t even started yet, the
Rolling Stones aren’t even on the stage, the place is full of a
great shabby mouldering dimness, and these flaming little
buds.
Girls are reeling this way and that way
in the aisle and through their huge black decal eyes, sagging with
Tiger Tongue Lick Me brush-on eyelashes and black appliques,
sagging like display window Christmas trees, they keep staring
at—her— Baby Jane—on the aisle. What the hell is this? She is
gorgeous in the most outrageous way. Her hair rises up from her
head in a huge hairy corona, a huge tan mane around a narrow face
and two eyes opened—swock!—like umbrellas, with all that hair
flowing down over a coat made of … zebra! Those motherless stripes!
Oh, damn! Here she is with her friends, looking like some kind of
queen bee for all flaming little buds everywhere. She twists around
to shout to one of her friends and that incredible mane swings
around on her shoulders, over the zebra coat.
“Isabel!” says Baby Jane, “Isabel, hi!
I just saw the Stones! They look super-divine!”
That girl on the aisle, Baby Jane, is a
fabulous girl. She comprehends what the Rolling Stones mean. Any columnist in New York could tell them who she
is … a celebrity of New York’s new era of Wog Hip … Baby Jane
Holzer. Jane Holzer in Vogue, Jane Holzer in
Life, Jane Holzer in Andy Warhol’s
underground movies, Jane Holzer in the world of High Camp, Jane
Holzer at the rock and roll, Jane Holzer is—well, how can one put
it into words? Jane Holzer is This Year’s Girl, at least, the New
Celebrity, none of your old idea of sexpots, prima donnas, romantic
tragediennes, she is the girl who knows … The Stones, East End
vitality …
“Isabel!” says Jane Holzer in the
small, high, excited voice of hers, her Baby Jane voice, “Hi,
Isabel! Hi!”
Down the row, Isabel, Isabel Eberstadt,
the beautiful socialite who is Ogden Nash’s daughter, has just come
in. She doesn’t seem to hear Jane. But she is down the row a ways.
Next to Jane is some fellow in a chocolate-colored Borsalino hat,
and next there is Andy Warhol, the famous pop artist.
“Isabel!” says Jane.
“What?” says Isabel.
“Hi, Isabel!” says Jane.
“Hello, Jane,” says
Isabel.
“You want to go backstage?” says Jane,
who has to speak across everybody.
“Backstage?” says Isabel.
“With the Stones!” says Jane. “I was
backstage with the Stones. They look divine!
You know what Mick said to me? He said, ‘Koom on, love, give us a
kiss!’”
But Isabel has turned away to say
something to somebody.
“Isabel!” says Jane.
And all around, the little buds are
batting around in the rococo gloom of the Academy of Arts Theater,
trying to crash into good seats or just sit in the aisle near the
stage, shrieking. And in the rear the Voice of Fifteen-year-old
America cries out in a post-pubertal contralto, apropos of nothing,
into the mouldering void: “Yaaaagh! Yuh dirty fag!”
Well, so what; Jane laughs. Then she
leans over and says to the fellow in the Borsalino
hat:
“Wait’ll you see the Stones! They’re so
sexy! They’re pure sex. They’re divine! The
Beatles, well, you know, Paul McCartney—sweet Paul McCartney. You know what I mean. He’s such a
sweet person. I mean, the Stones are
bitter”—the words seem to spring from her
lungs like some kind of wonderful lavender-yellow Charles Kingsley
bubbles—“they’re all from the working class, you know? the East
End. Mick Jagger—well, it’s all Mick. You know what they say about
his lips? They say his lips are diabolical.
That was in one of the magazines.
“When Mick comes into the Ad Lib in
London—I mean, there’s nothing like the Ad Lib in New York. You can
go into the Ad Lib and everybody is there. They’re all young, and
they’re taking over, it’s like a whole revolution. I mean, it’s
exciting, they’re all from the lower
classes, East-End-sort-of-thing. There’s nobody exciting from the
upper classes anymore, except for Nicole and Alec Londonderry, Alec
is a British marquis, the Marquis of Londonderry, and, O.K., Nicole
has to put in an appearance at this country fair or something,
well, O.K., she does it, but that doesn’t mean—you know what I
mean? Alec is so—you should see the way he walks, I could just
watch him walk—Undoes-one-ship! They’re
young. They’re all young, it’s a whole new
thing. It’s not the Beatles. Bailey says the Beatles are
passé, because now everybody’s mum pats the
Beatles on the head. The Beatles are getting fat. The Beatles—well,
John Lennon’s still thin, but Paul McCartney is getting a big
bottom. That’s all right, but I don’t particularly care for that.
The Stones are thin. I mean, that’s why they’re beautiful, they’re
so thin. Mick Jagger—wait’ll you see Mick.”
Then the show begins. An electronic
blast begins, electric guitars, electric bass, enormous speakers up
there on a vast yellow-gray stage. Murray the K, the D.J. and M.C.,
O.K.?, comes out from the wings, doing a kind of twist soft shoe,
wiggling around, a stocky chap, thirty-eight years old, wearing
Italian pants and a Sun Valley snow lodge sweater and a Stingy Brim
straw hat. Murray the K! Girls throw balls of paper at him, and as
they arc onto the stage, the stage lights explode off them and they
look like falling balls of flame.
And, finally, the Stones, now—how can
one express it? the Stones come on stage—
“Oh, God, Andy, aren’t they
divine!”
—and spread out over the stage, the
five Rolling Stones, from England, who are modeled after the
Beatles, only more lower-class-deformed. One, Brian Jones, has an
enormous blond Beatle bouffant.
“Oh, Andy, look at Mick! Isn’t he
beautiful! Mick! Mick!”
In the center of the stage a short thin
boy with a sweat shirt on, the neck of the sweat shirt almost
falling over his shoulders, they are so narrow, all surmounted by
this … enormous head … with the hair puffing down over the forehead
and ears, this boy has exceptional lips. He has two peculiarly
gross and extraordinary red lips. They hang off his face like
giblets. Slowly his eyes pour over the flaming bud horde soft as
Karo syrup and then close and then the lips start spreading into
the most languid, most confidential, the wettest, most labial, most
concupiscent grin imaginable. Nirvana! The buds start shrieking,
pawing toward the stage.
The girls have Their Experience. They
stand up on their seats. They begin to ululate, even between songs.
The looks on their faces! Rapturous agony! There, right up there,
under the sulphur lights, that is them. God,
they’re right there! Mick Jagger takes the microphone with his
tabescent hands and puts his huge head against it, opens his giblet
lips and begins to sing … with the voice of a bull Negro. Bo
Diddley. You movung boo meb bee-uh-tul, bah-bee, oh vona breemb
you’ honey snurks oh crim pulzy yo’ mim down, and, camping again,
then turning toward the shrieking girls with his wet giblet lips
dissolving …
And, occasionally, breaking through the
ululation:
“Get off the stage, you
finks!”
“Maybe we ought to scream,” says Jane.
Then she says to the fellow in the hat: “Tell me when it’s five
o’clock, will you, pussycat? I have to get dressed and go see Sam
Spiegel.” And then Baby Jane goes:
“Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee
“EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEYES!” SAYS DIANA VREELAND,
THE EDITOR of Vogue. “Jane Holzer is the
most contemporary girl I know.”
Jane Holzer at the rock and
roll—
Jane Holzer in the underground
movies—in Andy’s studio, Andy Warhol, the famous Pop artist,
experiencing the rare world of Jonas and Adolph Mekas, truth and
culture in a new holy medium, underground movie-making on the Lower
East Side. And Jane is wearing a Jax shirt, strung like a Christmas
tree with Diamonds, and they are making Dracula, or
Thirteen Beautiful Women or Soap Opera or Kiss—in which Jane’s lips … but how can one describe an
underground movie? It is … avant-garde. “Andy calls everything
super,” says Jane. “I’m a super star, he’s a super-director, we
make super epics—and I mean, it’s a completely new and natural way
of acting. You can’t imagine what really beautiful things can
happen!”
Jane Holzer—with The New Artists,
photographers like Jerry Schatzberg, David Bailey and Brian Duffy,
and Nicky Haslam, the art director of Show.
Bailey, Duffy and Haslam are English. Schatzberg says the
photographers are the modern-day equivalents of the Impressionists
in Paris around 1910, the men with a sense of New Art, the
excitement of the salon, the excitement of the artistic style of
life, while all the painters, the old artists, have moved uptown to
West End Avenue and live in apartment buildings with Kwik-Fiks
parquet floors and run around the corner to get a new cover for the
ironing board before the stores close.
Jane in the world of High Camp—a world
of thin young men in an environment, a decor, an atmosphere so—how
can one say it?—so indefinably Yellow Book. Jane in the world of
Teen Savage—Jane modeling here and there—wearing Jean Harlow
dresses for Life and Italian fashions for
Vogue and doing the most fabulous cover for
Nicky at Show, David took the photograph,
showing Jane barebacked wearing a little yacht cap and a pair of
“World’s Fair” sunglasses and holding an American flag in her
teeth, so—so Beyond Pop Art, if you comprehend.
Jane Holzer at the LBJ
Discotheque—where they were handing out aprons with a target design
on them, and Jane Holzer put it on backward so that the target was
behind and then did The Swim, a new
dance.
Jane Holzer—well, there is no easy term
available, Baby Jane has appeared constantly this year in just
about every society and show business column in New York. The
magazines have used her as a kind of combination of model,
celebrity and socialite. And yet none of them have been able to do
much more than, in effect, set down her name, Baby Jane Holzer, and
surround it with a few asterisks and exploding stars, as if to say,
well, here we have … What’s Happening.
She is a socialite in the sense that
she lives in a twelve-room apartment on Park Avenue with a wealthy
husband, Leonard Holzer, heir to a real estate fortune, amid a lot
of old Dutch and Flemish paintings, and she goes to a great many
exciting parties. And yet she is not in Society the way the Good
Book, the Social Register; thinks of
Society, and the list of hostesses who have not thought of inviting
Jane Holzer would be impressive. Furthermore, her stance is that
she doesn’t care, and she would rather be known as a friend of the
Stones, anyway—and here she is at the April in Paris Ball, $150 per
ticket, amid the heaving white and gold swag of the Astor Hotel
ballroom, yelling to somebody: “If you aren’t nice to me, I’ll tell
everybody you were here!”
Jane Holzer—the sum of it is glamor, of
a sort very specific to New York. With her enormous corona of hair
and her long straight nose, Jane Holzer can be quite beautiful, but
she never comes on as A Beauty. “Some people look at my pictures
and say I look very mature and sophisticated,” Jane says. “Some
people say I look like a child, you know, Baby Jane. And, I mean, I
don’t know what I look like, I guess it’s just 1964 Jewish.” She
does not attempt to come on sexy. Her excitement is something else.
It is almost pure excitement. It is the excitement of the New
Style, the New Chic. The press watches Jane Holzer as if she were
an exquisite piece of … radar. It is as if that entire ciliate
corona of hers were spread out as an antenna for new waves of
style. To the magazine editors, the newspaper columnists, the
photographers and art directors, suddenly here is a single
flamboyant girl who sums up everything new and chic in the way of
fashion in the Girl of the Year.
How can one explain the Girl of the
Year? The Girl of the Year is a symbolic figure the press has
looked for annually in New York since World War I because of the
breakdown of conventional High Society. The old establishment still
holds forth, it still has its clubs, cotillions and coming-out
balls, it is still basically Protestant and it still rules two
enormously powerful areas of New York, finance and corporate law.
But alongside it, all the while, there has existed a large and ever
more dazzling society, Café Society it was called in the twenties
and thirties, made up of people whose status rests not on property
and ancestry but on various brilliant ephemera, show business,
advertising, public relations, the arts, journalism or simply new
money of various sorts, people with a great deal of ambition who
have congregated in New York to satisfy it and who look for styles
to symbolize it.
The establishment’s own styles—well,
for one thing they were too dull. And those understated clothes,
dark woods, high ceilings, silver-smithery, respectable nannies,
and so forth and so on. For centuries their kind of power created
styles—Palladian buildings, starched cravats—but with the
thickening democratic facade of American life, it has degenerated
to various esoteric understatements, often cryptic—Topsiders
instead of tennis sneakers, calling cards with “Mr.” preceding the
name, the right fork.
The magazines and newspapers began
looking for heroines to symbolize the Other Society, Café Society,
or whatever it should be called. At first, in the twenties, they
chose the more flamboyant debutantes, girls with social credentials
who also moved in Café Society. But the Other Society’s styles
began to shift and change at a madder and madder rate, and the
Flaming Deb idea no longer worked. The last of the Flaming Debs,
the kind of Deb who made The Cover of Life,
was Brenda Frazier, and Brenda Frazier and Brenda Frazierism went
out with the thirties. More recently the Girl of the Year has had
to be more and more exotic … . and extraordinary. Christina
Paolozzi! Her exploits! Christina Paolozzi threw a
twenty-first-birthday party for herself at a Puerto Rican pachanga
palace, the Palladium, and after that the spinning got faster and
faster until with one last grand centripetal gesture she appeared
in the nude, face on, in Harper’s Bazaar.
Some became Girls of the Year because their fame suddenly shed a
light on their style of life, and their style of life could be
easily exhibited, such as Jackie Kennedy and Barbra
Streisand.
But Baby Jane Holzer is a purer
manifestation. Her style of life has created her fame—rock and
roll, underground movies, decaying lofts, models, photographers,
Living Pop Art, the twist, the frug, the mashed potatoes, stretch
pants, pre-Raphaelite hair, Le Style Camp. All of it has a common
denominator. Once it was power that created high style. But. now
high styles come from low places, from people who have no power,
who slink away from it, in fact, who are marginal, who carve out
worlds for themselves in the nether depths, in tainted
“undergrounds.” The Rolling Stones, like rock and roll itself and
the twist—they come out of the netherworld of modern teen-age life,
out of what was for years the marginal outcast corner of the world
of art, photography, populated by poor boys, pretenders.
“Underground” movies—a mixture of camp and Artistic Alienation,
with Jonas Mekas crying out like some foggy echo from Harold
Stearn’s last boat for Le Havre in 1921: “You filthy bourgeois
pseudo-culturati! You say you love art—then why don’t you give us
money to buy the film to make our masterpieces and stop blubbering
about the naked asses we show?—you mucky pseuds.” Teen-agers,
bohos, camp culturati, photographers—they have won by default,
because, after all, they do create styles.
And now the Other Society goes to them for styles, like the
decadenti of another age going down to the wharves in Rio to find
those raw-vital devils, damn their potent hides, those proles,
doing the tango. Yes! Oh my God, those raw-vital
proles!
The ice floe is breaking, and can’t one
see, as Jane Holzer sees, that all these people—well, they
feel, they are alive, and what does it mean
simply to be sitting up in her Park Avenue apartment in the room
with the two Rubenses on the wall, worth half a million dollars, if
they are firmly authenticated? It means almost nothing. One doesn’t
feel it.
Jane has on a “Poor” sweater, clinging
to the ribs, a new fashion, with short sleeves. Her hair is up in
rollers. She is wearing tight slacks. Her hips are very small. She
has a boyish body. She has thin arms and long, long fingers. She
sits twisted about on a couch, up in her apartment on Park Avenue,
talking on the telephone.
“Oh, I know what you mean,” she says,
“but, I mean, couldn’t you wait just two weeks? I’m expecting
something to jell, it’s a movie, and then you’d have a real story.
You know what I mean? I mean you would have something to write
about and not just Baby Jane sitting up in her Park Avenue
apartment with her gotrocks. You know what I mean? … well, all
right, but I think you’ll have more of a story— … well, all right …
bye, pussycat.”
Then she hangs up and swings around and
says, “That makes me mad. That was————. He wants to do a story
about me and do you know what he told me? ‘We want to do a story
about you,’ he told me, ‘because you’re very big this year.’ Do you
know what that made me feel like? That made me feel like, All
right, Baby Jane, we’ll let you play this year, so get out there
and dance, but next year, well, it’s all over for you next year,
Baby Jane. I mean,—! You know? I mean, I felt like telling him,
‘Well, pussycat, you’re the Editor of the Minute, and you know
what? Your minute’s up.’”
The thought leaves Jane looking excited
but worried. Usually she looks excited about things but open,
happy, her eyes wide open and taking it all in. Now she looks
worried, as if the world could be such a simple and exhilarating
place if there weren’t so many old and arteriosclerotic people
around to muck it up. There are two dogs on the floor at her feet,
a toy poodle and a Yorkshire terrier, who rise up from time to time
in some kind of secret needle-toothed fury, barking
coloratura.
“Oh,———,” says Jane, and then, “You
know, if you have anything at all, there are so many bitchy people
just waiting to carve you up. I mean, I went
to the opening of the Met and I wore a white mink coat, and do you
know what a woman did? A woman called up a columnist and said, ‘Ha,
ha, Baby Jane rented that coat she went to the Met in. Baby Jane
rents her clothes.’ That’s how bitchy they are. Well, that coat
happens to be a coat my mother gave me two years ago when I was
married. I mean, I don’t care if somebody thinks I rent clothes.
O.K.———! Who cares?”
Inez, the maid, brings in lunch on a
tray, one rare hamburger, one cheeseburger and a glass of tomato
juice. Jane tastes the tomato juice.
“Oh,———!” she says. “It’s
diet.”
The Girl of the Year. It is as though
nobody wants to give anyone credit for anything. They’re only a
phenomenon. Well, Jane Holzer did a great
deal of modeling before she got married and still models, for that
matter, and now some very wonderful things may be about to happen
in the movies. Some of it, well, she cannot go into it exactly,
because it is at that precarious stage—you know? But she has one of
the best managers, a woman who manages the McGuire Sisters. And
there has been talk about Baby Jane for Who’s
Afraid of Virginia Woolf, the movie, and Candy—
“Well, I haven’t heard anything about
it—but I’d love to play Candy.”
And this afternoon, later on, she is
going over to see Sam Spiegel, the producer.
“He’s wonderful. He’s, you know, sort
of advising me on things at this point.”
And somewhere out there in the
apartment the dogs are loose in a midget coloratura rage amid
patina-green walls and paintings by old Lowland masters. There is a
great atmosphere in the apartment, an atmosphere of patina-green,
faded plush and the ashy light of Park Avenue reflecting on the
great black and umber slicks of the paintings. All that stretches
on for twelve rooms. The apartment belongs to the Holzers, who have
built a lot of New York’s new apartment houses. Jane’s husband,
Leonard, is a slim, good-looking young man. He went to Princeton.
He and Jane were married two years ago. Jane came from Florida,
where her father, Carl Brookenfeld, also made a lot of money in
real estate. But in a way they were from New York, too, because
they were always coming to New York and her father had a place
here. There was something so stimulating, so flamboyant, about New
York, you know? Fine men with anointed blue jowls combed their hair
straight back and had their shirts made at Sulka’s or
Nica-Rattner’s, and their wives had copper-gold hair, real chignons
and things, and heavy apricot voices that said the funniest
things—“Honey, I’ve got news for you, you’re crazy!”— things like
that, and they went to El Morocco. Jane went to Cherry Lawn School
in Darien, Connecticut. It was a progressive school.
And then she went to Finch Junior
College:
“Oh, that was just ghastly. I wanted to
flunk out and go to work. If you miss too many classes, they campus
you, if you have a messy room, they campus you, they were always
campusing me, and I always sneaked out. The last spring term I
didn’t spend one night there. I was supposed to be campused and I’d
be out dancing at El Morocco. I didn’t take my exams because I
wanted to flunk out, but do you know what they did? They just said
I was out, period. I didn’t care about that, because I wanted to
flunk out and go to work anyway—but the way they did it. I have a
lot of good paintings to give away, and it’s too bad, they’re not
getting any. They were not educators. They
could have at least kept the door open. They could have said,
‘You’re not ready to be a serious student, but when you decide to
settle down and be a serious student, the door will be open.’ I
mean, I had already paid for the whole term, they had the money. I always wanted to go there and tell
them, well, ha ha, too bad, you’re not getting any of the
paintings. So henceforth, Princeton, which was super-marvelous,
will get all the paintings.”
Jane’s spirits pick up over that.
Princeton! Well, Jane left Finch and then she did quite a bit of
modeling. Then she married Lennie, and she still did some modeling,
but the real break—well, the whole thing
started in summer in London, the summer of 1963.
“Bailey is fantastic,” says Jane.
“Bailey created four girls that summer. He created Jean Shrimpton,
he created me, he created Angela Howard and Susan Murray. There’s
no photographer like that in America. Avedon hasn’t done that for a
girl, Penn hasn’t, and Bailey created four girls in one summer. He
did some pictures of me for the English Vogue, and that was all it took.”
But how does one really explain about
the Stones, about Bailey, Shrimp and Mick—well, it’s not so much
what they do, that’s such an old idea, what
people do—it’s what they are, it’s a revolution, and it’s the kids from the East
End, Cockneys, if you want, who are making it.
“I mean today Drexel Duke sits next to
Weinstein, and why shouldn’t he? They both made their money the
same way, you know? The furniture king sits next to the catsup
king, and why shouldn’t he-sort-of-thing. I mean, that’s the way it
was at the opening of the Met. A friend of mine was going to write
an article about it.
“I mean, we don’t lie to ourselves. Our
mothers taught us to be pure and you’ll fall in love and get
married and stay in love with one man all your life. O.K. But we
know it doesn’t happen that way and we don’t lie to ourselves about
it. Maybe you won’t ever find anybody you love. Or maybe you find
somebody you love four minutes, maybe ten minutes. But I mean, why
lie to yourself? We know we’re not going to love one man all our
lives. Maybe it’s the Bomb—we know it could all be over tomorrow,
so why try to fool yourself today. Shrimp was talking about that
last night. She’s here now, she’ll be at the party
tonight—”
The two dogs, the toy poodle and the
Yorkshire terrier, are yapping, in the patina-green. Inez is
looking for something besides diet. The two Rubenses hang up on the
walls. A couple of horns come up through the ashy light of Park
Avenue. The high wind of East End London is in the
air—whhhooooooooo
OOOOOOOOOOOOOSH! BABY JANE BLOWS OUT ALL THE
CANDLES. It is her twenty-fourth birthday. She and everybody,
Shrimp, Nicky, Jerry, everybody but Bailey, who is off in Egypt or
something, they are all up in Jerry Schatzberg’s … pad … his lavish apartment at 333 Park Avenue South, up
above his studio. There is a skylight. The cook brings out the cake
and Jane blows out the candles. Twenty-four! Jerry and Nicky are
giving a huge party, a dance, in honor of the Stones, and already
the people are coming into the studio downstairs. But it is also
Jane’s birthday. She is wearing a black velvet jump suit by Luis
Estevez, the designer. It has huge bell-bottom pants. She puts her
legs together … it looks like an evening dress. But she can also
spread them apart, like so, and strike very Jane-like poses. This
is like the Upper Room or something. Downstairs, they’re all coming
in for the party, all those people one sees at parties, everybody
who goes to the parties in New York, but up here it is like a
tableau, like a tableau of … Us. Shrimp is sitting there with her
glorious pout and her textured white stockings, Barbara Steele, who
was so terrific in 8½, with thin black lips and wrought-iron
eyelashes. Nicky Haslam is there with his Byron shirt on and his
tiger skin vest and blue jeans and boots. Jerry is there with his
hair flowing back in curls. Lennie, Jane’s husband, is there in a
British suit and a dark blue shirt he bought on 42nd Street for
this party, because this is a party for the Rolling Stones. The
Stones are not here yet, but here in the upper room are Goldie and
the Gingerbreads, four girls in gold lamé tights who will play the
rock and roll for the party. Nicky discovered them at the Wagon
Wheel. Gold lame, can you imagine? Goldie, the leader, is a young
girl with a husky voice and nice kind of slightly thick—you
know—glorious sort of East End features,
only she is from New York—ah, the delicacy of minor grossness,
unabashed. The Stones’ music is playing over the
hi-fi.
Finally the Stones come in, in blue
jeans, sweat shirts, the usual, and people get up and Mick Jagger
comes in with his mouth open and his eyes down, faintly weary with
success, and everybody goes downstairs to the studio, where people
are now piling in, hundreds of them. Goldie and the Gingerbreads
are on a stand at one end of the studio, all electric, electric
guitars, electric bass, drums, loudspeakers, and a couple of
spotlights exploding off the gold lamé. Baby baby
baby where did our love go. The music suddenly fills up the
room like a giant egg slicer. Sally Kirkland, Jr., a young actress,
is out on the studio floor in a leopard print dress with her vast
mane flying, doing the frug with Jerry Schatzberg. And then the
other Girl of the Year, Caterine Milinaire, is out there in a black
dress, and then Baby Jane is out there with her incredible mane and
her Luis Estevez jump suit, frugging, and then everybody is out
there. Suddenly it is very odd. Suddenly everybody is out there in
the gloaming, bobbing up and down with the music plugged into
Baby baby baby. The whole floor of the
studio begins to bounce up and down, like a trampoline, the whole
floor, some people are afraid and edge off to the side, but most
keep bobbing in the gloaming, and—pow!—glasses begin to hit the
floor, but every one keeps bouncing up and down, crushing the glass
underfoot, while the brown whiskey slicks around. So many heads
bobbing, so many bodies jiggling, so many giblets jiggling, so much
anointed flesh shaking and jiggling this way and that, so many
faces one wanted so desperately to see, and here they are, red the
color of dried peppers in the gloaming, bouncing up and down with
just a few fights, wrenching in the gloaming, until 5
A.M.—gleeeang—Goldie pulls all the electric cords out and the
studio is suddenly just a dim ochre studio with broken glass all
over the floor, crushed underfoot, and the sweet high smell of
brown whiskey rising from the floor.
Monday’s papers will record it as the
Mods and Rockers Ball, as the Party of the Year, but that is
Monday, a long way off. So they all decide they should go to the
Brasserie. It is the only place in town where anybody would still
be around. So they all get into cabs and go up to the Brasserie, up
on 53rd Street between Park and Lexington. The Brasserie is the
right place, all right. The Brasserie has a great entrance,
elevated over the tables like a fashion show almost. There are,
what?, 35 people in the Brasserie. They all look up, and as the
first salmon light of dawn comes through the front window, here
come … four teen-age girls in gold lame tights, and a chap in a
tiger skin vest and blue jeans and a gentleman in an English suit
who seems to be wearing a 42nd Street hood shirt and a fellow in a
sweater who has flowing curly hair … and then, a girl with an
incredible mane, a vast tawny corona, wearing a black velvet jump
suit. One never knows who is in the Brasserie at this hour—but are
there any so dead in here that they do not get the point? Girl of
the Year? Listen, they will never
forget.