In my small, suburban hometown of Highland Park, New Jersey, there was one family that was not like the other families. They lived in a large, six-bedroom house with clapboard siding painted hot pink. There were 10 of them: a mom and a dad, three boys, and five girls. All of the children were uncommonly beautiful. Even their surname was eccentric: Indri.
The Indri kids were outgoing and raffishly bohemian, romping around town in messy bowl cuts (the boys) or under curtains of long, center-parted hair (the girls). Two of them, Christina and Marisa, worked for a time as fashion models, and we would see their faces in Interview and Mademoiselle. One of the sons was named Che, as in Guevara. This was in the 1970s and early 80s.
There was an occasional visitor to the Indris’ house whose appearance I found disquieting: a tall, sepulchral woman dressed entirely in black, her long, loose tunics swishing exotically as she walked our ordinary town’s ordinary streets. She looked like a Victorian apparition, a character in an Edward Gorey book. Through word of mouth, I eventually learned this woman’s name: Nico.
As I grew older, I came to understand that the Indri kids were connected to someone in Andy Warhol’s circle. Specifically, their mother, Justine, was the elder sibling of Paul Morrissey, who ran the Factory with Warhol from 1965 to 1973, managed the Velvet Underground in their early years, co-founded Interview magazine, and, as a filmmaker, was a fiercely idiosyncratic creative force in his own right, most celebrated for his trilogy of Flesh (1968), Trash (1970), and Heat (1972).
Recently, I spent some time in Paul Morrissey’s apartment on New York’s Upper East Side with the fourth of the Indri children, who is today known as Marisa Crawford. Her uncle died on October 28 at the age of 86, after a long period of infirmity. Fifteen years ago, while trying to cross 86th Street, he was struck in the head by the side mirror of a U-Haul truck and fell to the ground. Thereafter, he was never quite the same, experiencing seizures and suffering from aphasia.
At Morrissey’s memorial service, held on November 4, the music-world macher Danny Fields characterized his late friend as “the grown-up in the room” at the Factory, its de facto C.O.O. and C.F.O. Morrissey’s attention to such details as bookkeeping and inventory allowed Warhol to get on with the job of being Warhol and the Factory’s scene-sters to get on with their job of being broken, glittered, and tragicomic.
Morrissey, it turns out, kept everything: thousands of photos, contact sheets, and film negatives; decades’ worth of correspondence; and all manner of notebooks, ledgers, and day-to-day ephemera from the Factory and his filmmaking career. Taken together, these items are, in all probability, the last great trove of untapped and unseen materials from the world that Morrissey and Warhol built.
Last year, Crawford, who became the trustee of Morrissey’s estate in 2015, hired a professional archivist, Michael Chaiken, to review and catalogue her uncle’s materials, which were stored haphazardly in bags and boxes throughout the apartment. Chaiken has performed similar duties for Bob Dylan, Isabella Rossellini, Nick Tosches, and the Maysles brothers. On a recent morning, he joined us at Morrissey’s apartment and walked me through some of what he has come across.
The Velvet Underground stuff alone is extraordinary. There is a series of scrawly drafts in Morrissey’s hand for flyers promoting the traveling multi-media event that he and Warhol staged with the band and Nico, their German-born chanteuse, in 1966. On scraps of paper, Morrissey toys with a few different turns of phrase—Plastic Limited, Plastic Inevitable, Empty Plastic Inevitable—before landing upon the name that stuck: Exploding Plastic Inevitable.
Morrissey’s attention to such details as bookkeeping and inventory allowed Warhol to get on with the job of being Warhol and the Factory’s scene-sters to get on with their job of being broken, glittered, and tragicomic.
On the flip side of a poster for a Theatre of the Ridiculous production of Ronald Tavel’s The Life of Lady Godiva is Morrissey’s tally of payouts for an early E.P.I. performance: 10 bucks apiece for “Nico, Moe, Lew [sic], John, Sterl” and the dancers “Edie,” as in Sedgwick, and “Gerard,” as in Malanga, the Warhol associate who cracked a bullwhip while the band played “Venus in Furs.” There are also color photos by Morrissey—the only ones known to exist—of the E.P.I. players at their home base, a Polish social hall in the East Village called the Dom.
Chaiken also played for me some of Morrissey’s reel-to-reel recordings that he has had transferred to digital. One is an instrumental demo of the Velvets’ song “I’ll Be Your Mirror” in which John Cale, on viola, plays a guide track for Nico’s vocal over Lou Reed’s strumming. In another recording, taped at the original Factory, on East 47th Street, Nico, accompanied only by Reed or Sterling Morrison on guitar, has a go at the song while, in the background, the phone rings, a dog barks, and Malanga is heard hammering away, stretching a canvas for one of Warhol’s silk screens.
An Inconvenient Trailblazer
What does one do with such a cache of cultural riches? Crawford told me her primary goal is to re-introduce her uncle and his filmmaking oeuvre to the public. Morrissey’s 60s and 70s films have been out of circulation for almost two decades—no streaming, no Blu-ray editions, no Criterion Collection beatification. Yet their absence has not dulled their mystique. The Smiths used a cropped still of Joe Dallesandro’s shirtless hustler character in Flesh as the cover for their debut album, while Reed’s “Walk on the Wild Side” pays homage to the actors whose “superstar” status was minted by Flesh and Trash: Dallesandro (the song’s “Little Joe”), Holly Woodlawn, and Candy Darling.
Morrissey venerated the golden age of Hollywood. In his mind, he was re-creating a Hollywood-style eco-system on a tenement dweller’s budget, using such counterculture oddballs as Woodlawn, Darling, and the drag performer Jackie Curtis as his Greta Garbo, Jean Harlow, and Bette Davis. At least one Old Hollywood titan reciprocated his affection. George Cukor, the director of The Women, The Philadelphia Story, and My Fair Lady, was so taken with Woodlawn’s performance in Trash—as the mothering, responsible girlfriend of Dallesandro’s junkie—that he petitioned the Academy, albeit unsuccessfully, to have her nominated for best actress.
Cukor and Morrissey subsequently became friends, which led to the existence of one of the Morrissey archive’s most surprising assets: about 30 hours of taped conversations between the two men. In 1980, Cukor sought out Morrissey to be his interlocutor for an as-told-to memoir. The book never came to fruition, though the archive includes an unpublished manuscript entitled “My Life and Some Letters: An Autobiography by George Cukor, Compiled by Paul Morrissey.” The tapes themselves find Cukor, less than three years before his death, dishing freely about Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn and getting fired by David O. Selznick from Gone with the Wind.
George Cukor was so taken with Woodlawn’s performance in Trash that he petitioned the Academy, albeit unsuccessfully, to have her nominated for best actress.
Morrissey had the foresight to secure the rights to his own films, so everything from Flesh onward belongs to his estate rather than Warhol’s. In the 80s, he deposited the negatives with the Museum of Modern Art. Crawford is currently working with MoMA’s curator of film, Rajendra Roy, to turn these deposits into a permanent donation, with an eye toward full 4K-resolution restorations.
These low-budget pictures, with their seedy naturalism, homoeroticism, and trans performers, were way ahead of their time. Morrissey could rightfully be called a father of independent film and queer cinema. The problem, at least during his lifetime, was that he detested these labels. He was an inconvenient trailblazer: a straight, politically conservative Roman Catholic who, even while he admired Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, embraced the Warholian demimonde and was keen to capture its occupants’ humanity.
“He loved personalities,” Crawford said. “He’d say, ‘I don’t make gay films—I make films about people.’ He and Holly Woodlawn were very close friends, right until she died in 2015.”
Yet the public-facing Morrissey was not always easy company. An ornery man even in his prime, with a fearsome glare that the photographer Nat Finkelstein likened to that of a New England whaling captain, he became downright combative after his head injury, berating an interviewer as a “stupid son of a bitch” for referring to his films as “Warhol’s films,” and describing Warhol himself as “incompetent, anorexic, illiterate, autistic.”
“The hurt that he felt about having his work constantly assigned to Warhol, that was absolutely real,” Chaiken said. “But it exacerbated itself and came out way more aggressively after the accident.”
Crawford maintains that this paranoid, spiteful version of Paul Morrissey was an ill, changed man beset by brain trauma. “He was a warm, comical man before that,” she said. “He never had kids of his own, but he loved us and made us laugh. Yes, he would talk about ‘Commies,’ but you just knew not to engage with him on that because it was a complete waste of time.”
The archive reveals that Morrissey and Warhol, despite the former’s later vitriol, remained friendly correspondents to the very end of the latter’s life, in 1987. “All through the 80s, Paul never had an unkind word to say about Andy,” Crawford said. “At the time Andy died, they were planning on making a sequel to Trash together.”
From Yonkers to Eothen
Warhol brought Morrissey into the Factory fold in 1965, after the two men were introduced by Malanga. Five years earlier, while still a reservist in the U.S. Army, Morrissey, a native of Yonkers and a graduate of Fordham University, had settled in the East Village, where he busied himself making 16-mm. comedy shorts and running an underground cinematheque. Warhol was impressed by Morrissey’s technical acumen and came to increasingly rely upon him. In 1968, after he was shot and gravely wounded by Valerie Solanas, Warhol effectively ceded the reins of the Factory’s filmmaking operations to the younger man.
Crawford and her elder siblings were frequent visitors to the Factory in this period. They even attended an Exploding Plastic Inevitable performance at the Dom as small children. Theirs was not, however, a debauched hippie upbringing. Mario and Justine Indri, an engineer and a homemaker, were churchgoing, martini-drinking straights who happened to be broad-minded about the weirdos in Justine’s brother’s circle.
“My parents took us everywhere,” Crawford said. “They would load us into the station wagon, a Ford Country Squire. I remember lying on my back and knowing we had reached New York when I started seeing skyscrapers. Andy was so welcoming. He gave us tours. He was always saying to Paul, ‘You should make a new Little Rascals with them.’”
In 1971, the surprise European box-office success of Trash allowed Morrissey and Warhol to go in fifty-fifty on a Montauk beachfront compound known as both the Church Estate and Eothen, originally built as a fishing camp by heirs to the Arm & Hammer fortune. It, too, became a playground for the Indri kids, along with the children of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis and Lee Radziwill. (As well as such figures as Truman Capote, Halston, John and Yoko, and the Rolling Stones, who spent the summer of 1975 there rehearsing for a tour.)
Morrissey’s archive includes a wealth of personal photos that he and Peter Beard, his Montauk neighbor, took at the compound. One is a tender black-and-white portrait of a wet-haired tween boy huddled in an oversize beach robe. On its flip side is the inscription “Church Estate, Montauk, N.Y. 1972 Photo by Paul Morrissey.” A companion photo finds Morrissey standing in the spot previously occupied by the boy, wearing a black turtleneck, his arms folded. Its inscription reveals that the tables have been turned: “Photo of P. Morrissey by JFK Jr.”
“He loved personalities. He’d say, ‘I don’t make gay films—I make films about people.’”
For all their transgressiveness, the Factory’s denizens found comfort in the embrace of the Indris, whose enlightened suburban household offered respite from city life. Jackie Curtis, who starred in Morrissey’s Flesh and Women in Revolt, was particularly close to Justine Indri, while Nico, née Christa Päffgen, who lived primarily in Europe in her post-Factory years, stayed with the family when she had business in New York. It sounds like the premise of an absurdist sitcom called All Tomorrow’s Indris: tortured, existentialist German singer shacks up with wholesome family of 10—with hilarious consequences!
“My mother would let her have my sister Jessica’s room on the third floor,” Crawford said. “She would talk to me about love while she was putting on her Chinese face powder and applying her little kohl pencil. She would ask [deep German-accented voice], ‘Marisa, haf you ever been in lahv?’ I was probably 11 years old! Then she’d take the bus into the Port Authority and get her methadone treatment or whatever it was she was doing.”
Chaiken showed me a 1979 letter he had unearthed, sent by Nico to Morrissey from the Indris’ house. Written improbably on cute Sandra Boynton cat notepaper, it begins, “Dear Paul: Today I just had to come here to Jersey. Yesterday I was 41 but that sounds like a hoax indeed.” Nico goes on to lament how “atrocious” she looked in a recent magazine photo shoot and says that she has begun a regimen of “pills for my metabolism” in hopes of bringing her famous cheekbones back to the fore. She eventually got clean but died in 1988 of a cerebral hemorrhage suffered while she was riding a bicycle.
Crawford has no immediate plans to sell or donate the Morrissey archive. Rather, she and her family intend to make its contents available to museums, scholars, documentarians, and perhaps publishers eager to mine its contents for books. “People are so obsessed with that time and that place. But they haven’t gotten a lot of it right, and Paul never shared any of what he had,” she said. “So that’s what we’re trying to do. Saying, ‘This is what really happened. This is what it really looked like.’”
David Kamp is a Writer at Large at AIR MAIL and the author of several books, including Sunny Days: The Children’s Television Revolution That Changed America
