Piero Heliczer, born in Rome 1937, is today a more or less forgotten 1960/70s Underground figure. Yet he knew and worked with most of the main people made those years so creative. He collaborated and acted in several of Andy Warhol’s films, including Dust, Joan of Arc, Touch and Screen Test. He aided and abetted performances and publications by Jack Smith, William Burroughs, and La Monte Young. His amazing talent to sniff out the avant-garde got Velvet Underground, an almost unknown group of musicians, to do the music for his experimental films, Satisfaction and Venus in Furs. Lou Reed, poet and singer of the Velvet Underground, admitted Piero was one of few people who were captivated by their music at the time. “Piero gave us a new context in which to perform. Last but not least, he introduced us to Warhol.”
Piero was a small, rather beautiful man of twenty-three when I first met him in 1960. His history is both intriguing and impressive. Not only because of his deep involvement in the Paris subculture, but in 1959, with partners Angus MacLise and Olivia de Haulleville, he founded the Dead Language Press, a small poetry magazine publishing noteworthy and unusual poetry by unknown artists who later became known.
With little or no money, they published Jack Smith’s The Beautiful Book and Gregory Corso’s A Pulp Magazine For The Dead Generation as well as the work of other poets. An astonishing accomplishment, especially as the paper they used was often printer’s discards. Piero used whatever type he could scrounge for free, often incomplete alphabets and broken typefaces. Words in lower and upper-case, with no punctuation. All of which made for a difficult read, but worth the effort as his choice of words was like opening up a chest of buried treasure. Simple words reborn, as the images they once were. This mixture of typefaces made Dead Language Press publications amazing chefs-d’oeuvre of breathtaking beauty and originality. They are now collector’s items, if one can find them.
Recently Patrick Bard a French novelist, living in Normandy, wrote l’arme de reve, a book about Piero. Piero’s life is well documented, and his work exists both on the page and on the screen, even if his own films are deteriorating in cans under the roof of the Filmmakers Co-Op in London. Piero’s history is remarkable, so remarkable I question how much is myth and how much is true. His mother Sabine, a German Jew, worked in a solicitor’s office in Austria. After discovering the restriction about to be proposed against the Jews, she and her husband convert to Catholicism. Sill frightened they pulled up stakes and fled to Rome.. Piero rarely mentioned that particular period of his life, saying he didn’t remember much except his mother giving German lessons to feed the family. This amazing twist of fate is easily verified. Piero and his brother attended a Catholic school where Piero was chosen for the Fascist propaganda films, Acqua di Primavera and Benghazi as the ideal embodiment of the perfect Fascist child. The contradiction is unimaginable.
In Benghazi Piero, the child hero, is carried in the arms of the beautiful Alida Valli through the ranks of men dressed as captured British soldiers, a rough lot with dirty faces. At one point a soldier spits in the face of the young hero which was meant to make the audience gasp. The Italian state forbids the showing these Fascist movies, so Piero’s role is known only by the poster. Alida Valli was censured for her closeness to Goebbels. But remained beloved by film fans until her death in the 80s.
When Mussolini lost power and the Nazi’s took over hunting down Jews, Piero’s parents fled to the Abruzzi mountains. When Piero’s father was shot him for helping wounded partisans, Sabine made dash out the back door and was shot in the knee.
After the war Sabine refused to let Piero continue his Italian film career. She took both boys off to America. Perhaps it was Piero’s years hiding his identity, perhaps it was being obliged at the age of seven to identify the broken and tortured body his father that had a destabilizing mental effect on him. Whatever the cause, this brilliant student who attended Harvard on a scholarship was never quite normal. After a couple of years at Harvard he bunked off to France claiming the American promise of a bright future held little significance for him.
The real story begins with his return to Europe. His return began in a rather dramatic manner. When the boat docked in Le Havre he jumped overboard and was immediately arrested. Why did he jump? Needless to say, the authorities found his explanation hard to accept. “I was so excited to arrive back in Europe, I couldn’t contain my joy. I had to taste the water.” One is inclined to laugh but I don’t think he did it for a laugh.
My first visit to the Dead Language Press and the room where Piero lived, 18 rue Descartes, in the 5th arrondissement was memorable. The building looked as if it had slipped slightly downhill. I’d picked my way gingerly up a steep staircase that tilted precariously, over cracked and broken tiles to the fourth floor. The light on a timer and went out, leaving me to feel the rest of the way along a dark corridor to his room. Little did I know at the time that Hundertwasser, an Austrian painter, already quite famous, would ask Piero to look after his house in Normandy. In exchange for my flea market army sweater (obviously it had special significance for him) Piero would persuade the landlady to accept me as a tenant. The landlady’s name was Madame Loyer, literally Mrs Rent.
The room was barely adequate but better than most of the rooms of my friends. There was just enough space for me to paint and sleep and a tiny alcove with a cold-water sink, no heating and a hole-in-the-floor toilet off the stairs. For some reason those toilets were known as a ‘Turkish toilets’. They had two raised areas for one’s feet and an overhead cast iron cistern which brought down a cascade of water likely to soak one’s feet. Practically all the toilets in cafés and cheap restaurants were frightful, smelly, damp holes in courtyards or off stairs. If they had lights, they were on timers that shut off unexpectedly, leaving one stranded. The most perfect description of those toilets is by the main character in Our Lady of the Flowers a book by Jean Genet. He describes various toilets in his search through Paris for a decent sit-down one.
My friend Cy said Piero tried to live in Normandy like it was the Middle Ages. He carried a book about like a priest, Varieties of Religious Experience by William James. And Malory’s Morte D’Arthur, like a hymnbook. He lived a sort of Saint Francis of Assisi existence, taking pleasure in his poverty and expecting to be looked after by those around him. Later, when the German government gave him a fairly reasonable sum of money in reparation for having killed his father, he gave part of it away, and kept only enough to buy rundown house in the wilds of Normandy. Why he didn’t use some of the money for his Ritual Happenings is beyond me. They were very original and could have been as commendable as Andy Warhol’s later copies, had they not been quite so threadbare.
Hundertwasser was forced by the mayor of his Normandy village to banished Piero. It was too much for the villagers: his parading nude, playing his flute in the streets at six in the morning and stealing flowers from the graveyard. I was not surprised. Piero might have been a magical publisher and talented poet, but he was also what the French call an emmerdeur. Typically, he had given up his room but kept a key which he used to sneak in and eat my food and steal my things, claiming he had simply forgotten them.
The year 1965 was perhaps the most important year for much of New York’s Underground innovative activities and the many films made mostly due to the militaries sell off their film equipment at a cheap price. For Piero as well it was his high point in creativity and eminence. His Ritual Happenings, staged with Velvet Underground, were both exceptional and eccentric with all sorts of floaty veils hung in front of the screens with colored lights and slides superimposed on them. It caught the attention of Walter Cronkite of the CBS News who decided to make a film about Underground films. Cronkite did a six-minute news program, ‘The Making of an Underground Film’ on Piero’s poetic film Venus in Furs with Velvet Underground playing in the background.
It was also the beginning of London’s prominence in the hippie movement. the. At one of the many poetry reading, I bumped into one of Piero Heliczer’s ex-wifes, Kate. She was accompanied by Andy Warhol. “So pleased to see you again,” she said in her astonishing voice, almost identical to the Queen’s, with whom she’d supposedly shared elocution lessons. With her conventional manner and upper class background Kate always struck me as a most surprising recruit to the avant-guard art scene. Even more astonishing, she had acted; performed would be a better word, in Warhol’s art film, The Couch (two people having sex). Her blowjob, perhaps the first in an art film, pushed the limit of what the Underground could get away with. The Couch was not in the least pornographic. It likely reminded people of sex that had not only been bad, but pathetically depressing. All the same, I couldn’t help laughing at the idea of her Queen-like voice being used in that sex scene.
Ron Terril one of Cy’s friends saw an image dramatic enough to catch his eye, in the Toronto Star, of Piero with Andy Warhol and Edie Sedgewick, Ron’s deep-down worry was wasting his time with too many Unknowns. Which is why he and his friend, typical post-Beat generation types, came to hit the road for Normandy in search of a celebrity. Piero believed his farmhouse to be “the first Museum of the Future.” His ancient cast iron Dead Language Press, and Albion monster, was stacked in a barn, hidden behind a rusted 1940 Citroen 2 CV. He rented his house to people foolish enough to pay. I can well imagine Ron and his old school friend’s shock and horror when they saw the farmhouse they’d rented. Its roof beams exposed to the elements and piles of tiles lying in the field. They began the risky work of carrying the roof tiles up the ancient ladder while Piero sat above it all, high on the roof playing his flute and smoking a joint. A few days later the neighbor reclaimed his ladder; all work on the roof ceased. Ron’s last sight of Piero was of him sitting on the half-finished roof.
Cy said the roof was never finished. He had visited Piero’s house in 1993 with his family – two of Piero’s widows and his beautiful eighty-year-old mother who had flown in from New York for Piero’s funeral. Piero had been under medical care for schizophrenia and alcoholism for years but had nothing to do with his death under the wheels of a Trans-Europe wagon, while returning to Normandy on his Mobillette on the Paris/Chartres motorway. It was simply an unfortunate circumstance. Cy said Piero’s last words on a card sent from Paris were, “busy building a red castle.” Words are metaphors, lying in wait like film in a camera. They brought up the image of an enigmatic painting by De Chirico called Red Fort.
