Way back in 1959, when I left my spacious Morningside Heights apartment and moved into a shabby little room on West 14th Street, so I could be near the Beatnik scene on McDougal Street, I first encountered him, a thirtyish poet name Taylor Mead who could be seen roaming about the streets clutching a shaggy manuscript to his chest. He was skinny, cleanshaven, and dark-haired, with a long, narrow face and a high forehead, but what most caught my eye was the depraved look he had about him. What do I mean by “depraved”? Over the hill, past the point of no return, lost, lost, lost. When I heard him read at the Gaslight Café, his stuff was mostly unmemorable, but he was not. If he was heckled or interrupted or otherwise annoyed, he screamed at the offender, which settled the matter, since Taylor Mead could outscream anyone. Which encouraged me to keep my distance.
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| Taylor Mead (right) with Andy Warhol. |
Fast forward a
few months to 1960, when I had followed the Beatnik scene and my own restlessness
out to San Francisco and settled into a small room in an SRO on Broadway,
conveniently near to Chinatown for cheap meals, and to North Beach and the
Beatniks. Attending a poetry reading
with my newfound friend Floyd at the Mission, a welcoming place on Grant Street
run by a young minister who served a free meal once a week and otherwise
catered to the Beats, I saw Taylor Mead again, the same lost look, the same
shaggy manuscript pressed tight to his chest.
“I know that guy,”
I told Floyd, meaning of course that I knew of
him. “I heard him read in New York.”
When Taylor Mead
plunked himself down on a chair right behind us, Floyd, with a sly grin, turned
to him and said, “Hi there! My friend here heard you read in New
York. He loves your stuff.”
Taylor Mead
flashed instantly the warmest smile.
“Why, thank you. My poetry isn’t
just surface. It has real meaning, it
has depth.”
To date, I hadn’t
sensed much depth in his poems, just a lot of ragged surface. But this was a different Taylor Mead:
relaxed, not defensive, even charming.
I don’t recall if
Taylor Mead read at that reading, but soon afterward I heard him read at the
Co-existence Bagel Shop, the chief Beatnik hangout of the time, where Beats and
tourists mingled cheerily, or not so cheerily.
Taylor’s first line was memorable: “I was a cocksucker in Arcady…” What followed I barely recall; that first
line was hard to top. Mostly I remember
a passing reference to his wealthy father, against whom he was obviously in
vehement revolt. But I also recall the
comments of those around me.
Two well-dressed
men of middle years, obviously out of their element. “He’s not that good,” one said, softly. “I’ve heard homosexuals of real talent read.” His friend concurred.
“Give him a
chance,” said a black man. “He’s doing
his best.”
Overhearing them,
a woman remarked, “In this place I keep my opinions to myself.”
The next I knew
of Taylor Mead was once again at the Mission, where a fragment of a film in
progress was shown, with pleas for contributions so the fund-strapped project
could be finished. It was an amateurish
effort in black and white, though not without charm, featuring Taylor wandering
haphazardly through the city. The high
point came when, at one point, his pants dropped, exposing his bare bottom; the
audience roared. I don’t recall if I was
inspired to donate; I rather doubt it.
That summer I
went to Mexico and, returning to San Francisco, I found that most of the Beats
had decamped. By then I had tasted of
their scene sufficiently to know that it wasn’t for me; I’m too neat, too
practical, too work-oriented. But from
them I had learned both positive and negative lessons, one being, in the words
of a knowledgeable friend who had also tasted of bohemia, “Get to know these
people a little, learn from them, but don’t let them into your life. They can destroy you!”
The unexpected
offer of a teaching job brought me back to New York and I saw Taylor Mead no
more. So what was my final impression of
him at that time? An aging adolescent
given to temper tantrums but also capable of charm. He needed attention, craved it, was irate if
he didn’t get it. A lost soul, almost an
innocent, but a calculating innocent, if such a thing can be. And certainly a free spirit, but paying a
price for it. I assumed he was on some
kind of drug, didn’t think he’d last to enjoy a ripe old age.
Fast forward
fifty-three years to today. Imagine my
surprise when, researching my recent post on the Bowery, I went to the website
of the Bowery Poetry Club and encountered the name of Taylor Mead, who had
often read his poetry there. Clicking on
a link, I learned that, a longtime resident of the Lower East Side, at age 88 he
had died in May of this year during a visit to a niece in Denver and had
received obits in the New York Times and Los Angeles Times and numerous blogs
that hailed him as a poet, actor, exuberant bohemian, and star of underground
films. “An elfin figure with kewpie-doll
eyes,” said the L.A. Times. (Elfin perhaps, but I never noticed the
kewpie-doll eyes.) Imagine too my shock
on seeing recent photos of him: the skinny young poet with a depraved look had
turned into a little old man, wrinkled and bent, who walked with a cane, an old
man capable of smiles but who, far from exposing his anatomy, was well bundled
up even in mild weather. So he had
survived into old age and was even older than me! I then went on to learn more about him so as
to update and correct my earlier impression; what I learned follows here.
Taylor Mead was
born in Grosse Pointe, Michigan, a Detroit suburb that, as a Midwesterner, I
know to be an enclave of the rich and privileged. His father was a wealthy businessman and
influential figure in the Democratic Party in Michigan, and his mother a
socialite; they divorced before he was born.
He endured a private high school (“brainwashing for the bourgeoisie,” he
later termed it), and, through his father’s influence, got a job with Merrill
Lynch in Detroit, but soon found that he had no inclination for finance. Taylor Mead at Merrill Lynch -- the very idea
boggles the mind! He soon left, and left
Detroit as well, needing to put space – a lot of it – between himself and his
family. Knowing from the age of 12 that
he was gay probably had a lot to do with it.
I won’t recount
every phase and detail of his life; that can be left to a future biographer. Having read Jack Kerouac’s On the Road and, inspired by it, hitchhiked
across the country more than once, he came to New York to be anonymous, to have
a private life. By this, I think he
meant to live freely, as he could not do back in Michigan. Which reminds me how Quentin Crisp, author of
The Naked Civil Servant, came here
decades later to live more freely than he felt he could in his native
England. (A future post will “do”
Quentin Crisp.) But Taylor Mead wanted
only a degree of anonymity. His whole
life and career were fueled by a desperate desire for attention; he took to
notoriety as a wasp takes to jam.
When I first
encountered him in New York in 1959, he was reading his poetry in bars and
coffee houses, but he had yet to achieve real fame. When I encountered him again in North Beach,
San Francisco, in 1960, his career as an underground film performer was
beginning. The fragment of film I saw
him in was obviously the first segment of The
Flower Thief, an experimental low-budget black-and-white film using war
surplus film stock and a hand-held camera, and directed by Ron Rice. Taylor says of Rice that he was stealing his
girlfriends’ support checks, running off with theater receipts, and chasing
people down the street trying to film them, but that everybody loved him. In the film Taylor, a bedraggled Chaplinesque
innocent, wanders around the city with
three precious possessions: a stolen gardenia, an American flag, and a teddy
bear. Hardly acting, he is playing
himself. Film historian P. Adams Sitney
called the film “the purest expression of the Beat sensibility in cinema.” According to Taylor, he and Rice were to
split the proceeds of the film 50/50, but Rice eloped with all the money.
After that Andy
Warhol “discovered” him and, back in New York, he began starring in Warhol’s
underground films. In the first one, Tarzan and Jane Regained … Sort Of (1964),
Taylor played – unbelievably – the heroic Tarzan, whose sarong kept falling off
as Tarzan was climbing trees, prompting one critic to state that he did not
care to see any more two-hour films of Taylor Mead’s behind. The star and Warhol then searched the Warhol
archives and, finding no such film, decided to rectify the matter. The result was Taylor Mead’s Ass (1964), an hour-long silent epic of the star
performing just with that part of his anatomy.
I haven’t seen it, but it should now be obvious why underground films
stay underground. (Taylor himself later
remarked, “Only a sicko would watch the whole thing.”) During the 1960s he made eleven films with
Warhol, their collaboration ending in 1968, when a radical feminist writer who
had grievances against Warhol shot and seriously wounded him.
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| Taylor on the Tarzan set with Dennis Hopper. Taylor was a very winsome Tarzan. |
In 1966, while
living in Europe (how financed? one wonders), Taylor heckled a Living Theatre
performance in Southern France that he found “communal to the point of
sameness.” Irritated by actor and
cofounder Julian Beck’s repetition of “End the war in Vietnam,” Taylor began
shouting “A bas les intellectuels!” and “Vive la guerre de Vietnam!” (A future post will “do” the Living Theatre
as well.)
Subsequently
Taylor made numerous other underground films, some of them so spontaneous that
they involved only one take. Always he
was playing himself, since his art was his life, and his life was his art.
Note on me and
Andy: I saw several Warhol films
back in the 1960s, though none with Taylor Mead. They were unstructured, haphazard, a series
of improvisations. There were some
charming and humorous moments, but in general they violated the Supreme
Commandment of Performing Arts: Thou shalt not bore.
The obits and online
sources are curiously silent about the next thirty years, so that a big middle
chunk is missing from the arc of Taylor’s life.
In addition, one wonders about how he supported himself (even a legend
has to pay rent), and about his sex life. Fame was what Warhol offered him, not cash. He evidently got a little income from his father’s estate – just enough
to survive on -- and as for sex, he probably reaped it haphazardly, being too
much in love with himself to sustain a long-term relationship. In the 1970s Gary Weiss made some short films
of him talking to his cat in the kitchen of his Ludlow Street apartment; one of
the films, in which he expatiated on the virtues of constant television
watching, was later aired on Saturday
Night Live.
Certainly Taylor
Mead became a beloved icon of the Lower East Side, where he lived for years in
a rent-stabilized fifth-floor apartment at 163 Ludlow Street. He read his poetry in various venues, took up
painting and got his work shown in various galleries, and fed stray cats in a
Second Avenue cemetery and elsewhere during his nocturnal prowls. The snippets of his poetry that I’ve seen
online are prosy and rambling, and rich in non sequiturs and four-letter words
– in other words, just what you’d expect.
As for his paintings, they seem to have been bold and splotchy.
Though a
nonsmoker and vegetarian, he did drugs like the opiate Vicodin, but seems to have
kept free of the heavy stuff so prevalent in the Warhol entourage. Having a great propensity for booze, he hung out
in bars where he sometimes got free drinks.
His block was full of drug dealers, but the dealers in and around his
building looked out for him when he came home drunk at 4 a.m., or when he went
out in the early morning hours to feed the cats. Some minor strokes finally limited his
walking, so he had to give up feeding felines, turning the task over to an
elderly lady. But he loved his
neighborhood, drugs and all; when he went out, people always recognized him and
said hello, and young people helped him out of cabs and up the stairs. When the Bowery Poetry Club opened in 2002,
he read there regularly, amusing audiences with his vivid comments on sex,
death, genius, and himself.
He was also, it
would seem, a clutterbug. William
Kirkley’s 2005 documentary Excavating
Taylor Mead shows him trying to clean up his apartment, crammed with the
ephemera of his colorful life, including thousands of loose manuscript pages
and his vivid paintings, so as to avoid eviction by the city authorities, who
had probably condemned it as a firetrap.
In the same year his volume of poetry A Simple Country Girl was published, with the memorable line, “I am
a national treasure / If there were such a thing.”
Not everyone who
encountered him hailed him as a beloved icon or a treasure. When someone pointed him out to a friend of
mine at a gathering circa 1970, my friend’s reaction was, What is that? And novelist
and poet Eamon Loingsigh has told of entering a dark Lower East Side bar one
afternoon a few years ago and finding “an old, creepy looking man leaning on
the bar, crouching like a frail spider among a few smarmy-dressed women.” The spider screeched at times, sipped his
beer, flirted with the newcomer, and called for champagne, but the bartender merely
smiled. The spider was obviously the
center of attention, his wit and spontaneity eliciting cackles from the
fiftyish ladies. The visitor thought the
old man’s face looked familiar, but he couldn’t quite place him. Loingsigh left the bar after an hour and only
later, seeing some Warhol films, did he recognize the screeching spider as a
young man and realize that he was Taylor Mead.
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| Taylor in his Ludlow Street apartment, March 2013, minus heat. Clayton Patterson |
Taylor’s last
months in New York were consumed by a battle with his new landlord, who was
converting all the other apartments in the building to market-rate rentals. Taylor clung to his home of thirty-four
years, where he paid only $380 a month, while workers hammered outside his door
from 7 a.m. until evening, and plaster fell from the walls, roaches crawled up
his legs, and the kitchen sink didn’t work.
Finally, no longer able to navigate the stairs, he agreed to move out in return for a financial settlement. He then went to stay with a niece in Denver,
but was planning a trip to New Orleans and ultimately a return to New York when
he succumbed to a stroke.
So where do I end
up? I don’t think my initial take on
Taylor was wrong, except for doubt that he would make it to a ripe old
age. He was an exhibitionist and narcissist
for sure, a free spirit and perhaps a lost soul, but in the losing he found
himself, he became Taylor Mead. An
almost innocent of considerable charm who both took himself very seriously and
chuckled at his own quirks and pretensions.
Said Susan Sontag in Partisan
Review, “The source of his art is the deepest and purest of all: he just
gives himself, wholly and without reserve, to some bizarre autistic
fantasy. Nothing is more attractive in a
person, but it is extremely rare after the age of 4.” Yes, Taylor Mead gave himself and in so doing
became the one and only thing that mattered to him, his chief object in life and
supreme accomplishment: Taylor Mead. I
too mourn his loss.
Unless, of
course, a biographer comes along, peels away the legend, and reveals some raw,
hard truths.
Coming soon: Rediscovering New York: West 12th Street and Columbus Circle; and Brooke Astor, Aristocrat of the People. In the works: Quentin Crisp, the Living Theatre; personal anecdotes or impressions concerning either are welcome.
© 2013 Clifford Browder
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