“And yes, I know that Martina wasn’t a real person—though I was late to hear about that exhibition and everything, and quite frankly I didn’t get it—but I never met X. I only knew Martina. Maybe it’s dumb to think my conversations with Martina were real, that she was actually my friend, but, I don’t know—she was … She treated me like I was her equal. It’s hard to imagine I would have stayed in this industry if it weren’t for her. Sometimes she called me on Sunday mornings because I lived near a church and there were these bells and we’d just sit there, not talking, just listening to the bells together …

A few of these friends repeated the same dull anecdotes about the group crashing parties at Warhol’s factory, but the most commonly told story was how Cassandra scandalized them all by turning down Warren Beatty’s advances. The two apparently met at a dinner party, and when he’d asked her to have a drink with him the next night she said she wasn’t free, and when he’d asked her to tell him when she was free she told him she was free all the time, free every moment of her life, that she was simply too free to go around with a man like him. This apparently enraged Oleg.

when she visited the office of the “dubiously named small press,” she met two employees, “the sort of nebbish folk that flow like tepid blood from one publishing venture to the next.”