Paul America

America here filmed for one of Warhol's popular Screen Tests in 1965.

Paul Johnson (born September 7 1945 - ???) and better known as Paul America, was a member of Andy Warhol's Factory group who starred in one Warhol-directed film, My Hustler. He also appeared in Edie Sedgwick's film Ciao! Manhattan and in the documentary Superartist.

Biography

According to most stories, Warhol discovered America at a discotheque called Ondine sometime in mid-1965, and soon invited him to visit The Factory. At first he simply hung around making repairs to a motorcycle, eventually forming close relationship's with the Warhol crowd; living briefly with Chuck Wein and a short lived romance with Edie Sedgwick.

Warhol described America as "unbelievable good looking - look a comic strip drawing of Mr. America, clean cut, handsome, very symmetrical," and also suggested that perhaps he may have gotten his name because of an apartment which had owned at the Hotel America, "a super-funky midtown hotel that was the kind of place Lenny Bruce, say, stayed in." He himself often had problems with the name given:

"I went through a period of paranoia about it. I mean, every time I saw that word - and it's everywhere - I related it to myself. The country's problems were my problems. I think that if I weren't called Paul America it would have been easier for me to register in hotels."

America has seemingly become a gay icon, mainly for his performance in the title role of Warhol's, My Hustler. After My Hustler, America appeared in several other Warhol films from 1965: the unreleased sequels, My Hustler: In Apartment and My Hustler: Ingrid, and also Dan Williams's silent film Harold Stevenson, in which America, Gerard Malanga, Stevenson, Sedgwick, and others converse and drink wine while posing photogenically on a couch in a New York hotel suite. Another four-minute silent portrait of Paul America, shot on the beach during the making of My Hustler, had been found in the "long version" of that film, in the edited montage by Dan Williams that was added to the sixty-six-minute film in 1967.

Also, that same year after a brief stint in the U.S. Army, America obtained legal assistance and convinced Warhol to reimburse him retroactively for his role in the by-then commercially-successful My Hustler. He reportedly received around $1,000 in several installments. America also starred alongside Edie Sedgwick in John Palmer and David Weisman's film Ciao! Manhattan, filmed in-and-through 1967-1971. His role was severely diminished when he was imprisoned on Michigan drug-related charges.

It is known that he was alive until 1982, when he tried to contact Warhol for the last time that July. After that, his exact fate is unknown, but he is generally believed to have spent some time in jail in the midwest and died afterwards. According to one report, he died in a car accident in the 1980s. If still alive (as of 2007), he would be 62 years old.

See also

• Andy Warhol
• The Factory group
• List of people who have disappeared

References

• Stein, Jean - Edie: American Girl, Grove Press 1994, ISBN 0-8021-3410-6

External links

• Paul America at IMDb
• Edie Sedgwick Superstar! Biography of Paul America's erstwhile lover