EXCERPTS: .01


The key to the energy at Max's was the chemistry among the participants. The list of creative personalities who frequented "the store" (as it was known to insiders) is an international who's who of the sixties: Warren Beatty, Jane Fonda, Peter Fonda, Roger Vadim, Faye Dunaway, Mick Jagger, Ed Koch, Allen Ginsberg, Jim Morrison, Richard Avedon, Betsey Johnson, Lou Reed, Tennessee Williams, Timothy Leary, Norman Mailer, Twiggy, and Robert Mapplethorpe, etc. Your waitress might have been Debbie Harry, later of Blondie or Emmylou Harris. The quality of the mix led to such meetings as Andy Warhol and Valerie Solanis, Candy Darling and Divine, Abbie Hoffman and Janis Joplin, Robert Smithson and Tuesday Weld, and David Bowie, Iggy Pop, and Lou Reed. Where else could you find the brilliant feminist, Germaine Greer, wondering who had surreptitiously unsnapped her bra, while at another table, transvestite, Jackie Curtis, shared make-up tips with Kennedy family member, Sargent Shriver. Or the elegantly dressed Duke and Duchess of Windsor, decked out in their couturier duds perusing menus within earshot of matching motorcycle, leather-jacketed, Max's couple of the month, Patti Smith and Sam Shepard. Up front, at the same time, painter, Robert Smithson might be sitting in a booth with Brice Marden, Dorothea Rockburne, and Carl Andre arguing over his theories of conceptual art, too intent to notice Cary Grant and his party, sitting in a booth across the way.

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