Chapter 2
Matthew brought us up to his penthouse suite in the hotel, which featured a view of Pittsburgh’s skyline and the Allegheny River.
Our director, Kathryn Johnson—tall but still wore heels, blond hair cut into a bob—was there, and Matthew poured everyone champagne, except he’d bought sparkling grape juice for me because he knew that I didn’t drink. Of course he knew.
After a while, we sat down on a huge U-shaped couch, where Matthew and Kathryn started talking about Andy. Kai, sitting next to me, asked, “What do you know about Carly?”
I liked that Kai put it that way. Directors often ask, What’s your thought process here, or What’s your impulse, because they don’t want to accept that you, a mere actor, might know the character in a way no one else can.
“She’s self-destructive,” I said, “but she’s also dedicated. She knows you have to want it worse than everyone else. What do you know about him?” I asked. Kai’s character, Jude, was an intern for Andy at Interview magazine.
“I think he would rather feel almost anything than feel alone,” Kai answered. I had expected Kai to be a sort of a standard Hollywood Guy, but in that moment I knew I was dealing with something else entirely.
“Yeah,” I said finally.
Next to us, Matthew Malone was talking. “Every industry is in the business of eating human time and consciousness and shitting out money, but in Hollywood, they’re not using your labor to turn iron into steel or whatever; they’re using your labor to turn you into something.
They’re turning you into movie tickets or Netflix subscriptions.
You’re not just the labor; you’re also the raw material. ”
I pulled out the little notebook I always kept with me and wrote.
Not just the labor but also the raw material. Like that for Carly as well. Women are often seen as A Thing That Will Transform Him, A Thing He Must Save to Become His Full Self. How thrilling to meet someone like Andy, who wants things from you but not those things.
Matthew was still talking, and I was enthralled.
This comic book actor obviously thought so deeply about craft, about the relationship between art and the artist, and how strange that relationship becomes when your own body is both your canvas and your paint.
“Warhol was fascinated and repulsed by his own humanity,” he was saying.
“Fascinated and repulsed by feeling in extremis. And that is my point of connection with him.”
_____
After Matthew ordered room service, Kathryn had us watch an old Alfred Hitchcock movie called Vertigo.
Matthew told us all about the movie’s star, Jimmy Stewart, who was already a celebrity when World War II broke out but insisted on signing up for the most dangerous form of combat duty in the European Theater—flying B-24 bombers over Nazi-controlled territory.
“I’ve been thinking a lot about Stewart in preparing for this role,” he told us.
“What was it like for him being a public figure in a setting like a crowded barracks? How strange it must’ve been for someone like Andy Warhol to be in a hospital bed, without his wigs, without his clothing, getting gallbladder surgery.
Fame is a kind of armor, and you need the armor to survive fame.
What does it look like to refashion yourself into a normal person, like Stewart was willing to do but Warhol never was? ”
“What does it mean to adhere to the true self?” Kathryn added.
“Warhol was making himself the whole time. That was the real art project. The constant construction of the self.”
I felt lucky just to be in this sprawling hotel suite where Kathryn had pulled all the shades so we could see the movie in a manner befitting its purported greatness, a room where Matthew Malone said things like “the constant construction of the self.” What a job for actors, or for anyone, to construct selves.
Kai was sitting next to me, close enough that I could smell his skin.
He was as silent as I was, taking in the surreality of being in Matthew Malone’s suite with promising young filmmaker Kathryn Johnson. Like, what lottery had we won?
Vertigo felt, well, vertiginous. I kept thinking about the class I’d taken, Modernism at Night, which explored how modernist writers and artists captured nighttime.
How do you paint night when it is essentially invisible?
How do you display, or articulate, what can’t be seen or heard or smelled or felt?
In the class, we’d read Gertrude Stein and Jean Toomer and looked at paintings by Jean-Francois Millet and Anita Malfatti and J.
M. W. Turner. I loved college, but I also knew that Hollywood forgets about you quickly.
In my business, when your last project is An A- in a Class at UCLA, that’s a sign of weakening demand for your face.
There’d be time for school when the Industry retired me.
Kathryn kept pausing the film to point out this Jungian metaphor or that innovative shot.
But I was mostly watching the actors, especially Kim Novak, who plays two different women in the film who are intended to be mirrors of each other, and whose personalities are quite different even as their appearances are obviously similar.
It was fascinating to watch a film where the male protagonist is trying to destroy the individuality of a woman but never quite manages to.
For Novak, it was a complicated trick to pull off, and I was disappointed to learn that she wasn’t even nominated for an Oscar.
Never been easy to be a Bright Young Thing in Hollywood.
It was past midnight when the party broke up. Kai and I shared an Uber back to our building. “Do you want a quiet day before rehearsals or a busy one?” he asked.
“Quiet, I think. I might try to find some art, or go to a record store to buy some album covers. I need something on the walls of my apartment. Right now it’s too depressing.”
He opened up his backpack, reached in, and found his notebook. He carefully tore out the page containing his sketch of me and said, “Here’s a start.”