Fred Herko

By late 1964, Herko had begun behaving erratically due to an addiction to amphetamines and was homeless. He was also suffering from pain in his ankles impairing his ability to dance. Photographer and Factory regular Billy Name would later say that he felt Herko became despondent over his inability to dance as well as he had before. He said, “Freddie was a very demanding person about life. It had to be great.”

On October 27, 1964, Johnny Dodd saw Herko wildly dancing on the counter at Joe's Dinette in Greenwich Village. Dodd invited Herko to his apartment a few blocks away on Cornelia Street. Dodd would later say Herko told him he hadn't taken any drugs for three days. According to Dodd, after arriving at his apartment, Herko went straight into his bathroom where he drew a bath, poured a bottle of Dodd's perfume into it and began to bathe. Meanwhile, Dodd had put on a record of Mozart's Coronation Mass. Herko emerged from the bath and went into the living room where he toweled off. He then began dancing naked and, according to Dodd, "occasionally making a run toward the windows. At the time, Dodd wondered whether this was going to be the "suicide performance" that Herko had been promising his friends during the weeks prior: "It was obvious that Freddy had to do it now: the time and the place were right, the decor was right, the music was right." As the music climaxed, Herko leapt through the open window landing five flights down below.

Herko soon earned a four-year scholarship to the American Ballet Theater School (now known as the Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis School). He studied classical ballet under Valentina Pereyaslavec and took additional dance classes with Merce Cunningham and James Waring. In the late 1950s he was a regular member of James Waring's dance company and also danced with Katherine Litz and Aileen Passloff. He was a member of the Judson Dance Theater, contributing two pieces to the group's inaugural concert on July 6, 1962. He performed in Frank O'Hara's Love's Labor and several of Andy Warhol's earliest films including: Haircut (No. 1), Kiss, The Thirteen Most Beautiful Boys, and Rollerskate (also known as Dance Movie).

1962) at the first Judson Dance Theater Concert of Dance

Born in New York City, Herko's father was a diner manager and his mother was a homemaker. The family first lived on the Lower East Side before moving to Brooklyn. When Herko was two years old, the family settled in Ossining, New York. As a child, Herko exhibited a talent for music and became a proficient pianist and flautist. Upon graduating from high school, Herko attended the Juilliard School and planned to be a concert pianist. In 1954, Herko attended a staging of Giselle and became fascinated with the Russian lead, Igor Youskevitch. Herko soon decided to pursue a career as a ballet dancer. When Herko told his parents of his decision, his “macho, working-class” father became enraged and beat him.

Herko was a close friend of Diane di Prima, who writes of him in her biography Recollections of my Life as a Woman. She met him in 1954 as he sat on a bench in the rain in Washington Square Park. He was "crying because autumn always made him sad." Later he would tell di Prima that, "He needed speed to push his body so he could dance the way he wanted to. He felt otherwise he didn't have a chance; he had come to dancing too late in life to make it work for him."

Herko was associated with a group of habitués to Warhol's Silver Factory on 47th Street including Ondine, Rotten Rita, and Billy Name. Nicknamed "mole people" on account of their intensive speed usage and subterranean habits — "mole because they were known to be tunneling towards some greater insanity that no one but this inner circle was aware of" — members of this group performed their manias and drug routines in a life/art blurring spectacle in crash pads and stages throughout the city. They are best remembered for their roles in many of Warhol's experimental films.

Frederick Charles "Freddie" Herko (February 23, 1936 – October 27, 1964) was an American artist, musician, actor, dancer, choreographer and teacher.