Elizabeth Hand: Black Light

MY MOTHER CLAIMED TO have been on the set of Darkness Visible when Axel Kern fired a revolver into the air, not to goad his actors but out of frustration with a scriptgirl who repeatedly handed him the wrong pages. My mother had, indeed, very briefly worked as a scriptgirl for Kern—this was before she settled into her eternal and prosperous run as Livia on Perilous Lives —so it wasn’t considered good form to doubt her, or even to demonstrate normal curiosity upon hearing the anecdote repeated whenever the subject of artistic temperaments arose; which, in our family, was often.

My father was friends with Kern long before Axel became a world-famous director. When I was born in 1957, Kern was my godfather. When I was a child he was around our house a good deal, and my parents dined often at Bolerium, his vast decaying estate atop Muscanth Mountain. But as I grew older Kern stayed less often in Kamensic, and by the time I was a teenager it had been years since I’d seen him. He and my father had a long history, as drinking buddies and fellow members of a loosely allied, free-floating group of bibulous Broadway and Hollywood people. Most of them are dead now; certainly their vices have gone out of style, except as veteris vestigia flammce. Only Kern made the leap gracefully from the old Hollywood to the new, which in those days wasn’t Hollywood at all, but New York: Radical Chic New York, Andy Warhol’s Factory New York, Black Light New York.

He was always a seeker after the main chance, my godfather. When, for a moment in the late ’60s it looked as though the movie industry was turning back to the city—where, of course, it had begun when the century was new, in warehouses and a brownstone on East Fourteenth Street—well, then Axel moved back, too, inhabiting a corner of a Bowery block that could best be described not so much as crumbling as collapsed. Exposed beams and girders laced with rust, sagging tin ceilings that exposed the building’s innards: particle board and oak beams riddled with dry rot and carpenter ants. The place was infested with vermin, rats and mice and bugs and stray cats; but there were also people living in the rafters, extras from the stream of low-budget experimental films Axel was filming in the city. Some had followed Axel out from the West Coast, but most of them were young people who had been living on the street, or in tenth-floor walk-ups in a part of the city that was light-years away from being gentrified. Speed freaks with noms du cinema like Joey Face and Electric Velvet; trust-fund junkies like Caresse “Kissy” Hardwick and her lover Angelique; a bouquet of sometime prostitutes, male and female, who named themselves after flowers: Liatris, CeCe Anemone, Hazy Clover. They were young enough, and there were enough of them, that Rex Reed christened Axel’s production space the Nursery. The name stuck.

In the movies Axel shot back then— Skag, Creep, House of the Sleeping Beauties —you can see how a lot of those people were barely out of junior high school. Joey Face for one, and CeCe, were only a few years older than I was, with acne scars still visible beneath their Bonne Bell makeup and eyeliner inexpertly applied. None of them were beauties, except for Kissy Hardwick, who possessed the fragile greyhound bone structure and bedrock eccentricity of very old New England money. Axel seemed drawn to them solely by virtue of their youth and appetites: for food (the gloriously obese Wanda LaFlame); for amphetamines and heroin (Kissy, Joey, Page Franchini); for sex (everybody). In Hollywood, Axel had been legendary for always bringing his projects in under budget; quite a feat when you consider movies like Saragossa or You Come, Too , with their lavish costumes and soundstages that recreated Málaga during the Inquisition or fifteenth century Venice. Now, in New York, he was famous for letting a Super 8 camera run for six hours at a stretch in a blighted tenement loft, and having the results look as garishly archaic as Fellini Satyricon.

I visited the Nursery only once, for a Christmas party when I was twelve. Traditionally my parents held a party at our house in Kamensic, rich plum pudding-y parties where the children ran around in velvet dresses and miniature suit jackets and the grownups drank homemade eggnog so heavily spiked with brandy that a single glass was enough to set them off, playing riotously at blindman’s buff and charades, singing show tunes and “The Wessex Mummer’s Carol.” Axel Kern was usually a guest at these holiday gatherings, but by 1969 he had set up shop at the Nursery and wanted to throw his own party there. In keeping with the pagan tenor of the times, it was a solstice celebration and not a Christmas party; but really it wasn’t even that. It was a rout.

This was before my father achieved his commercial success as TV’s Uncle Cosmo. He was signed to do summer rep at the Avalon Shakespeare Theater in Connecticut, and my mother was on one of her infrequent sabbaticals from Perilous Lives, Livia having shaved her raven tresses and joined an Ursuline convent in the French countryside. The birth of a new decade, 1969 swandiving into 1970, seemed almost as propitious as the birth of a new century. Radio DJs rifled through the hits of the last ten years and analyzed them as though they were tarot cards. In health class we watched grainy films that showed teenagers who took LSD, staring transfixed at candle flames (“look at the pretty blue flower!”) before they went mad and were trundled off to the loony bin in an ambulance. To my parents, the prospect of Axel Kern’s party must have seemed as much anthropological exercise as social obligation. So they put their own annual gathering on hold and we traipsed down to Axel’s place on Chrystie Street, with high hopes of an urban adventure.

In fact, the Nursery was disgusting. Even my father, who had holed up with Axel in a ruined East End London warehouse while he shot The Age of Ignorance, was hard put to conceal his revulsion at the broken furniture and overflowing trash cans, the rats skittering in the stairwells and longhaired boys nodding out in corners. Still, neither he nor my mother would leave. At the time I thought that this was some form of grownup loyalty, on a par with playing bridge with people you hated or taking roles in plays that were doomed to flop.

But I was frightened, and only slightly reassured when numerous adult friends from Kamensic showed up as the afternoon progressed. None of them brought their children, though. None of my own friends were there, and that was odd. People in Kamensic were not usually inclined to shield their young from the kind of bohemian horrors that the rest of the country was reading about in cautionary Life magazine articles.