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‘Why ask me—ask Andy.’ I said I’d arrange for him to come up to your place and have a look around.”
    Henry came up with Rauschenberg that same evening. The gallery owners Ileana and Michael Sonnabend were there, and David Bourdon, and a young Swedish artist was with them.
    Nothing to do with the art world was ever lost on David, who later recalled the scene for me in detail: “You got out the Marilyns, and then, because Rauschenberg hadn’t ever been tosee your things, you showed him some of the early works, including the wide painting of green Coke bottles repeated hundreds of times across the canvas. It wasn’t even stretched, you didn’t have the room to stretch the big ones and usually you kept them rolled up. You showed him the repeated Coke bottles and told him you were going to crop the picture to make the bottles go right to the edge of the frame. He offered that the alternative was to leave a bare strip of canvas at the edge—if what you wanted was to show people that you meant exactly that many Coke bottles and not an infinite number.” Over the years I came to realize more and more that Rauschenberg was one of the few artists who were generous about new artists’ work. David went on, “He was very interested in the silkscreens and asked where you got them. Up to then he’d been transferring images by putting lighter fluid on magazine and newspaper illustrations and then rubbing it onto the paper—a very painstaking process. He was impressed when he saw that with a silkscreen you could get an image larger than life and use it over and over again.”
    What I remember about that visit was Bob’s leaving, saying he had to meet someone for dinner, and a little while later Henry and I decided to go to Saito, a Japanese restaurant on West 55th Street. When we walked in, who should be there but Bob, sitting with Jasper Johns. It was one of those awkward coincidences, seeing someone right after you’ve just said all your good-byes.
    Not too long after that, Henry brought Jasper by to see me. Jasper was very quiet. I showed him my things and that was that. Of course, I thought it was terrific that Rauschenberg and Johns had both come up; I admired them so much. After Jasper had gone,David Bourdon said, “Well, Henry was trying to be the helpful connection, but Jasper didn’t look too thrilled to be here.”
    â€œWhat do you mean?” I said.
    â€œDid you see his face when you dragged out your pictures? All anguish.”
    â€œWas it really?” I couldn’t tell. And anyway, you never know—sometimes people are just thinking about their own problems. But certainly, compared to Rauschenberg, who was generally so enthusiastic, Jasper seemed like a moody type of person.
    It was De who finally got Eleanor Ward to give me my first New York show, at her Stable Gallery. It was off Madison Avenue by then, but it had once occupied the most beautiful space in New York—on Seventh Avenue and 58th Street, right off Central Park South. It had been an actual stable where rich people kept their horses, and in the spring when the wetness was in the air, you could still smell the horse piss, because that’s a smell that never goes away. For stairs there was a ramp where the horses used to walk. To use a real stable space and call it the Stable Gallery was a very modern idea for the fifties, which generally was a time when people put on airs: usually they remodeled and redecorated, and things like the high school gym at prom time were “made over,” to camouflage what they basically were. But in the sixties, you’d go and play up what a thing really was, you’d leave it “as is.”
    Like, in ’67 when we helped open a discotheque called the Gymnasium; we called it that because it was in what had been a real gym, so we just left all the work-out equipment—the mats and barbells and things—lying