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He, “Yackety yackety yackety.”
She, “Chatter, chatter, chatter.”
He, “What I said was, yackety yackety yackety.”
She,”And what I said was, chatter, chatter, chatter.”
He, “But can’t you see that I’m saying, ‘Yackety yackety yackety?'”
She, “So!! Well, why won’t you admit that I’m saying, ‘Chatter chatter chatter chatter?”
He, “How can you be so damn stupid?”
She, “My Gawd! You’re the one who’s stupid!”
–from You Can’t Make Me Angry, by “Dr. Paul”
Brigid Berlin and Andy Warhol sure did carry on. They kept up a continuous, laconic, often inane phone conversation for years and recorded much of it. This clip is from a documentary about Berlin, Pie in the Sky, made when she was 60 and fighting off a life-wrecking eating disorder, which is the center of the film.
In the Warhol days, her stage name was Brigid Polk. I read that she came up with the name Polk because she was always giving herself and others injections (“pokes”) of amphetamine and vitamin B, which was “perfectly legal” at the time.
She and Andy had a meta-marriage. In his diaries, in outsider chronicles of the pop-art world, in the eye-witness accounts of Warhol’s porn escapades, Brigid Berlin is always sitting there at her desk in the middle of it all, angry as shit. I guess Andy liked to be on the receiving end of her sarcasm and rage. In the film clips, he is amused.
The Warhol Factory hedonism—the sixties unhinged, unglued, uncensored, no-turning-back, die-before-forty, fully committed and yet commercially savvy—that moment is a bead on a particular evolutionary thread. If you want to understand how brilliant and stupid and sadly human it was, just start asking the question: “Whatever happened to Andy Warhol’s superstars?” Brigid B. was one of them.