Taylor Mead, 1924–2013

Actor and poet Taylor Mead embodied the bohemian ideal, drifting from the San Francisco Beat scene of the 1950s to Andy Warhol’s Factory in the 1960s and ’70s and on to the grimy allure of Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Along the way, he starred in some 130 art movies, making him, in the words of film critic J. Hoberman, “the first underground movie star.”

Mead was a “dropout from a life of privilege,” said the Los Angeles Times, the son of a wealthy Grosse Point, Mich., businessman and his socialite wife. After attending a string of boarding schools and colleges and jettisoning a job his father found him in a brokerage house, Mead fled in the 1950s to the West Coast, where he communed with Beat poets and artists. In 1960 he starred in Ron Rice’s The Flower Thief, an improvised film that featured Mead wandering around San Francisco carrying a flower, an American flag, and a teddy bear.

Mead’s quirky charm soon came to Andy Warhol’s attention, said The New York Times. The pair made several 16 mm movies, including a Tarzan spoof in which the puny Mead cavorted in a loincloth. One film reviewer noted that he didn’t need to see more films featuring Taylor Mead’s posterior, prompting Warhol to make a “brashly experimental” film showing “precisely what the critic did not want to see”—for 76 minutes.

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Mead was later a fixture on the Lower East Side, where he wandered the streets reciting poetry, said The Daily Telegraph (U.K.). A 2005 documentary, Excavating Taylor Mead, depicted him as a “lonely barfly fighting eviction” and feeding feral cats.