| Warhol, Marilyn and Travel Writing in Mexico |
Conversations with Legendary Underground Publisher, John Wilcock
by Tamara Weaver
April 2004
When I first met John Wilcock he asked me if I had any scotch tape. A somewhat twitchy man wearing chartreuse socks, Wilcock was not what I expected. He absently lifted a tattered canvas tote bag as he continued scanning the restaurant expecting the tape to manifest in a flowerpot somewhere. The bag, already patched significantly with the desired material hung precariously threadbare. I had no scotch tape. Running his hand through a floppy white head of hair, Wilcock patted his face with a handkerchief and shrugged. Considering how things have appeared for Wilcock throughout his successful life as a writer and publisher, perhaps scotch tape should have magically appeared right then.
One of the original founders of the Village Voice, Andy Warhol’s original partner in Interview magazine, co-author of the Witches Almanac, 40 year veteran travel writer, author of 4 of the Frommer’s “On $5 a day” series (Greece, Japan, India and Mexico) along with several travel books for the Insight guides; Wilcock is a master of storytelling.
With the re-release of his biography on Andy Warhol this spring, Wilcock took some time just to relax in Zihuatanejo, his yearly destination and one of the many landscapes he has graced with his unassuming presence.
Wilcock first started coming to Mexico in the early 60’s. “That was when I came to write my book for Frommer’s, Mexico on $5 a Day. It was my first visit and I was totally new to the country. I slept on hammocks on the beach in Tehuamtepec for a peso a night. I’m on a budget myself doing a budget book, usually traveling with my neighbor’s chicken on my lap. There weren’t that many things around in those days.”
At this time, Wilcock discovered Zihuatanejo when meeting up with friend Timothy Leary who had just moved into the area after being kicked out of Harvard for his infamous drug experiments and was writing an underground manifesto of his own.
But Wilcock was by no means a budding writer at that time. He had already been making his mark interviewing such cultural icons as Marilyn Monroe, Marlena Dietrich, Leonard Bernstein and Milton Berle.
When asked about Monroe, Wilcock smiles fondly and vividly recalls his interview with America’s favorite blond. Having just been suspended by 20th Century Fox and recently divorced from Joe DiMaggio, Monroe’s reputation had already started to suffer. “She wanted to play Grushenka in Brothers Karamazov. I said something like, ‘I suppose when you look good people don’t take you very seriously.’ She says, ‘Oh, I don’t know. You look nice and I’m sure you’re a good writer.’ She was just so natural. That’s what struck me the most, how incredibly natural she was, not at all like a movies star.”
Monroe was perhaps the perfect introduction for what would come later in Wilcock’s life, his biography on Andy Warhol. Before and during his time as a writer in Mexico, Wilcock had landed himself in the Big Apple where with four others he founded America’s first underground paper, a paper which has since been accepted into the mainstream as a cultural icon unto itself, The Village Voice.
It was during the latter part of his time at The Voice that Wilcock met and befriended Warhol and started to watch him make his early movies.
“He would persuade some rich lady on the Upper East Side to let them come film in her apartment—this big spacey apartment. Warhol and his whole entourage of superstars would descend on this poor lady’s apartment, eat everything in the bathroom medicine cabinet and make a movie.”
Fascinated by Warhol and his studio, “The Factory,” Wilcock found that he couldn’t keep away. And as he became more and more entrenched, Wilcock began recording conversations, which later turned into his book, The Sex Life and Autobiography of Andy Warhol. “Warhol was a very mysterious character, enigmatic, never volunteered anything. He was genial but never volunteered any information. Most of his conversation consisted of ‘really?…. oh?…. really?…. wow.’ One knew better than to approach this rather imposing character and ask him any questions. So I got in the habit of tape recording everyone close to him, superstars, art dealers, museum curators, including Lou Reed of the Velvet Underground. Everyone was mad about Andy. I interviewed all these people without any intention of doing anything with this stuff except to get it down on record.”
As Warhol’s popularity continued to grow, Wilcock observed more and more situations like this that made a compelling story.
“There was a time when colleges kept pestering him, so he agreed to make a tour. He sent a guy in his place with a Warhol-esque wig, Allen Midgette, pretending to be Andy. I don’t know how many people caught on before they got the joke. All this stuff ended up as a book, which was just entirely conversations between me and these people close to Andy.”
The book has since been considered as playing a major role in setting the tone for all Warhol studies since. “The word that comes to mind when I think of Andy, the word more than any other word is “mirror” i.e. a mirror that people would play back what people expected. ”
Printing 5,000 copies of his book in 1971, The Autobiography and Sex Life of Andy Warhol, Wilcock never saw a penny from his efforts. “You know it was the Hollywood method of accounting because they said there was never any profit.”
In 1974, Wilcock received a phone call from a wealthy moviemaker friend. “He says, ‘You know that book you wrote? It’s on sale at The Strand bookstore, in the rare books section for $100 a copy.’ So he bought me a copy.” But, this wasn’t the end of Wilcock’s journey with the book. Nearly thirty years later in 2000, a man by the name of Chris Trela, came across the book as well, and liked it so much that he persuaded a friend to start a publishing house in order to re-release the book.
In addition to persuading Wilcock to write an introduction summarizing the whole story, Trela was able to involve the original photographer who had taken photos of Warhol from the era. Now being printed in Hong Kong, the $40 book will be released in 300 museum shops across America this spring, under its original title The Autobiography and Sex Life of Andy Warhol. As Wilcock explains, “the joke being it isn’t an autobiography, and there isn’t any sex in it.”
While in Zihuatanejo, Wilcock spends most of his time working on his independent publication, “The Ojai Orange” and writing a column which he titles “The Column of Lasting Insignificance.” Since starting the column for The Village Voice, which at present runs in The Montecito Journal, Wilcock obsessively monitors everything in print, and makes commentary in his column. “I find that most of the world’s information can be condensed very succinctly and sometimes a sentence can tell you as much as a long story. Especially if its predictive…Its often the very tiny things that have great implications.” Those tiny things have made John Wilcock a virtual legend in underground publishing. From the chartreuse socks, to the scotch tape patched tote bag, Wilcock surely has been a frontrunner in shaping America’s underground press though you might never guess it upon meeting him. He was pleased to note by pure coincidence my pants happened to match those chartreuse socks. Baffled, he spontaneously recited a nursery rhyme. (Well, wouldn’t you?) Who knows when the social implications of chartreuse will need to be unraveled. For Wilcock the lasting insignificance of such things will always be open for exploration. |
|
Contents | Previous | Next
|
|
