SOAP OPERA

This spring of 63 I had met a just-married, twenty-two-year-old beauty named Jane Holzer. Nicky Haslam took me to a dinner at her Park Avenue apartment. David Bailey was there, and hed brought the lead singer in a rock-and-roll group called The Rolling Stones that was then playing the northern cities of England. Mick Jagger was a friend of Baileys and Nickys and he was staying down at Nickys apartment on East 19th Street at the time.

The next time I ran into Jane, on Madison Avenue, she was just back from the big 63 summer in London when everything had really started to happen there. She couldnt stop raving about a club in Soho in back of Leicester Square, the Ad Lib, where the Beatles would walk by your table the kind of place where, say, Princess Margaret could come in and nobody would even bother to look up, the beginning of the melting pot in class-conscious London.

Jane said she couldnt wait to get back to Europe. (Getting to Europe was a running theme in the Sixties everyone was either just coming back or just about to go or trying to get to go or trying to explain why they werent already there.) She was such a gorgeous girl great skin and hair. And so much enthusiasm she wanted to do everything. I asked her if she wanted to be in a movie and she got excited: «Sure! Anything beats being a Park Avenue housewife!»

The first movie Jane did for me was <i>Soap Opera,</i> filmed over P. J. Clarkes, the Third Avenue pub. It was subtitled <i>The Lester Persky Story </i>in tribute to Lester, who eventually became a movie producer. Lester introduced the hour-long commercial on television in the Fifties that had Virginia Graham showing you all the different ways you could use Melmac, or Rock Hudson doing vacuum-cleaning demonstrations. Lester let us use footage from his old TV commercials, so we spliced sales-pitch demonstrations of rotisserie broilers and dishware in between the segments of <i>Soap Opera.</i>

Andy Warhol,
«POPism: The Warhol 60s»,
Warhol and Hackett, N.Y. 1980