All of us still living at the Chelsea remember Rene Ricard—because who could forget him? And we all have our share of more or less scandalous anecdotes to relate concerning the famously brilliant wild man, who lived here for (approximately) the last two decades of his life. But for those of you who don’t know, Rene was the Warhol superstar who almost starred in Chelsea Girls, but for the fact that he couldn’t stop criticizing Andy on camera, and who later rose to prominence as the art critic who discovered Jean Michel Basquiat. Rene was also an accomplished poet and painter in his own right, and was much sought after for his charm and sparkling wit.
Rand’s new book (published by Osprey Press) is excerpted from his “diary” entries of the eighties and early nineties, and concerns his personal and collaborative relationship with Rene over a ten year period. So this is before Rene’s tenure at the Chelsea, when he was, despite being, as Rand says, “the most famous art critic in the world”, for all intents and purposes a homeless junkie. Here’s how Rand describes him: “. . .his hair is greasy and matted, he’s wearing worn out slippers. He is not human. A Dracula in his abhorrence of daylight, a gargoyle wearing a human soul. . .” (p. 10) And: “. . .ragged and haunted, tired and rabid. He is a fallen star, and he carries the atmosphere of rebellion and dead ashes in his wake. People have a funny way of dying around him.” (p. 13)
The Chelsea does play a large role in the book, however, for at one point Rand rents two rooms here, installing Rene in one of them—complete with crackhead supermodel boytoy for inspiration and steady infusions of cash for the apparent purchase of drugs—with instructions to produce a critical essay on Rand’s paintings for his upcoming show at the 56 Bleeker Gallery. Rand himself takes the room across the hall to make sure Rene completes the essay before leaving the hotel. Well, to make a long story short, Rene does produce an essay, which turns out to be a rambling meditation on darkness and evil:
When we look at William Rand’s paintings with their turbid and densely painted supersaturated backgrounds we are not so much confronted with a dark void as we are with enigmatic occurrences cloaked in shade and the mystery of these paintings is in the puzzlement of these presences. (p. 43)
Rand is quite an accomplished painter, and though his paintings are quite dark—both in physical appearance and in subject matter—what struck me most was how his lighter colored figures seem to emerge from the dark, stygian depths, almost rising up out of the canvases, giving the works a profoundly spiritual and redemptive dimension. I think Rene sees this too, for toward the end of his essay he writes of “pus-colored weirdoes” emerging from the depths of a stream, and white explorers being disgorged from a plane into the heart of darkest Africa, although for him even the white paint forebodes evil.
In one of the most exciting incidents in the book, Rene leads Rand into a dark, deserted park on the Lower East Side. There, unsurprisingly, they are mugged by a group of thugs, who hold knives to their throats, search them top-to-bottom, and even turn their socks inside out. Though Rand is understandably terrified, Rene seems to think nothing of it, and afterwards callously laughs at Rand for begging for his life. (It almost seems as if Rene has set Rand up, either in cahoots with the thugs, or—more likely—just for the sheer hell of it.) The next day, perhaps in revenge, Rand reports the incident to Page 6 of the New York Post, who are all too happy to cover it, since it concerns Rene. When he sees the article, Rene is furious, but not for any of the reasons one might expect, certainly not because it makes him look like a fool or a lunatic or a crook—none of that makes any difference to him—but because it mentions that Rand paid him to write the essay for his show! (It’s important to note that at this point, Rene was sleeping in a coal chute.) There’s a couple of other incidents like this in the book as well, including one in which Rene turns down $20,000 to authenticate some fake Basquiat paintings. The man may have been a homeless junkie, but he had his integrity.
Even though Rene wasn’t living here at the time, the Chelsea Hotel pops up again and again in Rand’s book. Just to give you a taste: on page 38, Rene tells us how, when Andy Warhol was filming Chelsea Girls at the hotel, he gave everyone speed so they were all “. . .UP UP UP for days. Of course we were fighting. Of course there were arguments. Everyone was on edge, and there he stood in his white wig with the camera rolling. He did not want to miss a thing.” (Also, though it doesn’t take place at the Chelsea, I can’t help mentioning it: In one notable episode Rene tells how he’s mad at Andy, so when Andy is casting for Blowjob, Rene auditions all the actors on the stairs, giving them each a blowjob so they can’t get it up when they get upstairs.)
There’s no index in the book, but I’m not above name-dropping the various Chelsea people who grace its pages: Raymond Foye (who also edited the book, and is credited as being a very sixties person. Rand says of him: “I want to drive to the mountains in a blizzard with him in a Volkswagen Beetle, because he is like that, really sixties”); art critic Edit DeAk; Michele Zalopany (at a gallery in the East Village, critics walk through the show of another artist (Sherrie Levine) to get to hers); poet Ira Cohen; painter Julian Schnabel (he teaches Rene a lesson by making him stay overnight in jail—at least according to Rene—Rene pays him back by breaking up his marriage to Jacqueline); Jacqueline, Lola, Stella, and Vito Schnabel; painter Donald Baechler (he paints potatoes to mock Rene for his modest upbringing); Jimi Hendrix (he steals Rene’s velvet pants at an orgy); Warhol Superstars Ondine and Jackie Curtis; mail artist Ray Johnson; writer Quentin Crisp; painter Larry Rivers; painter Joe Andoe; Edie Sedgwick ( “. . .sooooooooo beautiful,” Rene says. “Give her the right combination of drugs and she was like diamonds in heels”); fashion designer Charles James; Madonna; writer Eileen Myles; painter Philip Taaffe; painter Bill de Kooning; director Paul Morrissey; and gallerist Robert Miller.
As mentioned, Rene did eventually find a permanent home at the Chelsea Hotel, living out the final years of his life here until he died of cancer in 2014 at age 67. This was certainly the proper place for him (rather than a coal chute!), as it remains the proper place for others like him, of which there are undoubtedly a few out there (though not many). Even here in Bohemian Paradise it wasn’t all roses for Rene, however, and he wrote a poem in 1987 which seems, in light of the recent upheaval at the hotel, somehow oddly prescient:
The Unhappily
Dead
Suddenly cabs don’t stop
for you
Your job gets lost. You end
up living off your
friends
If they see you
You’re always hungry and
Keep losing weight. You
Move into a room in a huge
Bldg. in Chelsea. It takes
An eternity to realize you are
in hell. RR
[Rene/William Rand/New York Diaries (Osprey Press, 2022) is available at Village Works Bookshop & Art Gallery at 90 E 3rd St. in the East Village, and at other fine literary establishments]
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