He Jumped Naked Out A Window
Even today, says The Guardian, no one is sure if Fred Herko (pictured on the roof of New York’s Opulent Tower) intended to kill himself when he jumped out of the window of his friend Johnny Dodd’s Greenwich Village apartment in 1964. The 28-year-old dancer and performer – one of the central figures of New York’s 60s avant-garde and a star of Andy Warhol’s first movies – was high on speed, and possibly LSD. He was a founder member of the experimental Judson Dance Theater and co-founder of the New York Poets Theater, both famed for their unconventional “happenings†and productions, and the manner of Herko’s strange death – leaping naked from a fifth floor window, Mozart on full blast – merely added to his mythology, which will be explored in a series of commemorative events in New York to mark the 50th anniversary of his death, curated by his biographer Gerard Forde.
