I never met Andy Warhol. Yet I’ve alway felt a strange affinity with him

       Andy Warhol paved the way for so much current pop culture it’s impossible to measure his impact. He smudged the line between commercial and fine art with his silkscreen paintings from the early Sixties: the Elvises, Marilyns and Jackies that first made him famous (for longer than fifteen minutes). He envisioned the reality TV concept when he made ad hoc, shot-on-the-cheap, boring-on-purpose underground movies with self-explanatory titles such as Sleep, Kiss, Screen Test and Blow Job. 

      He sponsored The Velvet Underground at the onset of their career, and then watched as they spawned several successive generations of rock and roll musicians. On a broader canvas, Andy Warhol promoted gender fluidity and LGBTQ culture throughout his life. Despite his extreme (at times neurotic) sense of personal privacy, he made no effort to conceal his own gay identity, beginning at a time when homosexuality was far from accepted in the art world let alone America at large. And he foregrounded his deep, obsessive fascination with celebrity; first in his artwork and later in the pages of his magazine, Andy Warhol’s Interview. Throughout the Seventies, Andy tape-recorded conversations at parties while snapping thousands of Polaroid photos — social media posts in search of a platform! Published three years after he died at age 58 in 1987, much of The Andy Warhol Diaries reads like well, uhm, I guess Twitter.

***

      I never met Andy Warhol. Yet I feel an odd affinity with him, a connection that extends beyond appreciating his aesthetic accomplishments. Full disclosure: Andy and I stood in the same room at a Manhattan night club several times during the early-to-mid Eighties. And how many other people can say that? Thousands? Perhaps by then Andy wasn’t quite as choosy about where he hung out as he once had been.

     Now that I’m older (63) than Andy Warhol was when he died for the second and final time (he survived a murder attempt in 1968), I’ve been pondering his legacy beyond the astronomical sums exchanged for his art. 

      In 1964, a couple years after he transitioned from in-demand commercial illustrator to controversy-sparking gallery artist, Andy and three mega-eccentric sidekicks (more on them, and of them, to follow) travelled by car from New York City to Los Angeles for his first big exhibit. The show itself met with mixed reviews while the journey there validated everything Warhol had been doing up til then.

       “The farther west we drove, the more Pop everything looked on the highways. Suddenly we all felt like insiders because even though Pop was everywhere — that was the thing, people took it for granted whereas we were dazzled by it — to us, it was the new Art. Once you got Pop, you could never see a sign the same way again. And once you thought Pop, you could never see America the same way again.” 

     — Andy Warhol (with Pat Hackett) Popism (1980)

   ***   

Since Andy Warhol was, arguably, the first multi-media artist it makes sense that I would discover him through mediums other than painting. As with many baby-boomers, beginning at a tender age, my primary cultural focus fixated on rock and roll. So it’s only natural that I first encountered Andy Warhol on a trio of LP covers.

The Rolling Stones Sticky Fingers (1971)

      

His name was stamped in cursive type on the inner cover.  To my 13-year-old eyes, Andy’s design concept – a crotch shot of tight blue jeans with a working zipper concealing amply-stuffed briefs within – appeared less sexy than gimmicky. I thought it was a rather cheesy visual ploy for “the world’s greatest rock and roll band” (as the Stones were then known), though the sleazy, brooding music itself surely didn’t disappoint. 

The Rolling Stones Love You Live (1977) 

      Six years later, a diffident musical effort (double-disc in-concert placeholder between studio albums) flipped the script on Sticky Fingers. This time the musical content made me instantly regret an impulse purchase while the album cover lingered in my consciousness. Love You Live came enclosed in an attention-getting, luridly colored jacket. This smeary painted-over photo of Mick Jagger marked my first exposure to the silkscreen method that was Andy Warhol’s signature, tracing back to the iconic Sixties work on through to his mercenary portraits in the Seventies and Eighties. 

The Velvet Underground The Velvet Underground And Nico (1967)

      “Andy told me that what we were doing with music was the same thing he was doing with painting and movies and writing, i.e. not kidding around.” — Lou Reed

     Not long after I bought Love You Live, another Warhol-designed cover of an older album amplified my immersion in the music of Lou Reed and John Cale. When I caught up to The Velvet Underground and Nico, the 1967 debut of this now-canonical band had long been out of print. So my import copy carried the infamous “banana” illustration minus the original LP’s peel-it-yourself feature. Still, somehow, the Pop Art irony of the cover art seamlessly merged with the music’s decadent grandeur and ugly beauty. Suddenly the Andy Warhol imprimatur assumed a much richer (if vaguely defined) significance.

The Pop Art Assembly Line & Assembled Cast of Characters 

    After graduating from art college in Pittsburgh, Andy Warhol moved to New York City. During the Fifties, he worked from his Manhattan home, producing commercial illustrations for department stores and fashion magazines (shoes were a specialty). His first art studio was an abandoned firehouse on the Upper East Side; when that building was condemned he rented an industrial loft space on East 47th Street near the United Nations. This was the most notorious of several Warhol workspaces known as The Factory.  The studio felt like a factory due to the mechanical nature of Andy’s art practice, and the cast of charters he assembled to assist and inspire his labors. Not to mention the myriad people who just turned up there to “make the scene.”

What follows is a quick, handy guide to the most famous or infamous of many Factory helpers, hangers-on, kindred spirits, superstars, advisers, muses, devotees and deadbeats. During the late Sixties, inviting Andy Warhol to your party or event meant admitting a cast of dozens — the artist plus his entourage. 

Gerard Malanga – Bronx-born poet who dropped out of college to become Warhol’s art assistant. Danced and wielded a whip on stage with the The Velvet Underground.

      Ondine aka the Pope – Amphetamine-fueled raconteur and opera buff who presided over a sketchy backroom scene that Andy (mostly) ignored. 

      Billy Name – Custodian who lived in the back of Warhol’s loft studio. Billy covered the entire space in tinfoil, hence the name The Silver Factory.  

      Edie Sedgwick – Pixie party girl with old-school WASP roots and an appetite for self-destruction who became Andy’s constant social companion during 1965-66.

      Nico (Christa Paffgen) – German-born actress/model/chanteuse who Andy recruited to sing with the Velvet Underground, later a solo performer. 

      Paul Morrissey – Filmmaker with a prickly, contrarian personality who collaborated with Andy on his movies and gradually became sole director.   

      Valerie Solanas – Radical feminist pamphleteer (S.C.U.M. Manifesto) and failed playwright who shot Andy Warhol on June 3, 1968. To be fair, Valerie Solanas was an extremely peripheral player in The Factory drama, the fringe of the fringe, until the fateful day she exited the Factory elevator and fired a gun. Warhol survived the attempted murder, though his life and art would be transformed over the following decades. Everyone who knew him seems to agree that Andy was never the same afterwards.

      In 1968, just before Andy Warhol was shot, two young men gravitated to the Factory (by then located in Union Square, north of East 14th Street) who went on to perform essential roles in the remainder of Andy’s life.

Fred Hughes was an aspiring aesthete from Texas, a protege of the art-collecting de Menil family. He became Warhol’s business representative and chargé d’affaires. Hughes continued working for the Andy Warhol estate until his own death in 1998.

Jed Johnson, a recent NYC arrival from California in his late teens, was initially recruited by Paul Morrissey as an assistant and all-around go-fer at the Factory. Johnson eventually became Andy’s romantic partner, cohabiting with the artist in his Upper East Side townhouse until 1980. In the ensuing decade, Jed Johnson established himself as an interior designer; he died in the 1996 TWA Flight 800 crash.

      In the wake of his near-death experience in 1968, Andy Warhol insisted on a veneer of professionalism for staff at The Factory, sharply turning away from the excess-is-best aesthetic of his Sixties acolytes. 

Meeting Andy at the Movies     

       The name Andy Warhol kept popping up (so to speak) on my limited radar throughout the Seventies, first sneaking into the cultural mainstream alongside glam-rock.

Andy Warhol’s Frankenstein (1973) and Andy Warhol’s Dracula (1974), a pair of low-budget horror spoofs directed by Paul Morrissey, played at a multiplex near my Cincinnati suburb — no doubt on the smallest screen. Frankly, I was far more interested in The Exorcist. But four years later, in full thrall to Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground, I kicked myself for missing a rare campus showing of Andy Warhol’s double-screen opus Chelsea Girls (1966). His preceding movies from the Sixties existed (if at all) as punchlines in the public mind at that point. At any rate they weren’t readily viewable. Eventually, I caught up with Andy’s late-period cinematic oeuvre when another campus film society screened the Paul Morrissey-directed Trash (1970).

      A few steps removed from the Factory scene associated with Edie, Nico, Lou and the Velvets, this plotless wallow in depravity follows a junkie male prostitute (Joe Dallesandro) and his transvestite roommate (Holly Woodlawn) on their daily rounds. To say Trash transported my Midwestern sensibility to an unexplored continent would be obvious, and beside the point. What struck and stayed with me was the scene where Holly and Joe retrieve battered furniture from the street – garbage picking. Somehow I found this ineffably moving, even tragic, while everyone else seated nearby erupted in laughter. And it turned out to be prescient. Two years later I encountered another, even craftier urban scavenger living downstairs in my first Manhattan apartment building. Appropriating old couches, appliances and housewares from the city streets was apparently a New York thing: a hobby for some and others, a métier.

Interrogating Interview

Interviewer: “Do you see yourself as a creator, or more as a magnet that attracts other talents?”

Andy Warhol: “More like a pencil sharpener.”

      As a student journalist in the late Seventies, I soon became aware of the print-media arm of Andy Warhol’s empire. In theory, Interview magazine should have been right up my alley as it covered rising pop culture personalities, with a busy side hustle in New York City nightlife. In practice, however, by 1977 I was captivated by the rock and roll demimonde and mildly repulsed by the movie stars and socialites blankly staring from the pages of Interview. A subscriber to The Village Voice from afar, I couldn’t reconcile the uptown versus downtown socioeconomic divide, exemplified by these two competing arbiters of cool. Still, two regular features of Interview caught my eye whenever I flipped through an issue; Glenn O’Brien’s up-to-the minute music columns, and the deadpan-delivery interview questions, seemingly random and/or dumb, deployed by the magazine’s titular head.     

      As I learned more about magazine publishing during the Eighties, two canny commercial strategies retrospectively revealed themselves on Interview’s pages. One: those pages were newsprint – cheap paper – though the content itself radiated the glossy shine of a high-end fashion periodical. Two: though his name appeared above in smaller type, the monthly was actually identified on the cover as Andy Warhol’s Interview.

The Andy Warhol Library

Forty years ago, you’d find a row of storefront used-book shops on Fourth Avenue just below 14th Street in Manhattan. I killed time there on summer Saturday afternoons, browsing and occasionally buying. In fact I still own a half-dozen of those musty paperbacks with prices penciled on the inside flap. Sadly, my $1 copy of Andy Warhol’s a: A Novel got misplaced or borrowed along the way. It’s not as if I pulled it off the shelf with any frequency; even for the Warhol completist, a is tough sledding. Committing Andy’s compulsive tape-recording to the printed page results in what he called a “taped novel”: amphetamine-fueled jabbering from Sixties Factory stalwarts such as Ondine and Rotten Rita. If you think that might be remotely interesting, then you’ve never been around people high on speed.  However, Sonic Youth made excellent use of an Eric Emerson monologue from a in their song “Eric’s Trip” (on Daydream Nation). There might be more good bits such as that in a’s 384 pages but to be honest I never got far enough to find out.

Right around that time, I also read, and easily finished Popism: The Warhol Sixties. Written by Andy and his longtime text collaborator Pat Hackett, Popism offers a straightforward account of The Silver Factory years from a decade’s distance. Unlike the preceding The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (From A to B and Back Again) (1975), also written with Pat Hackett, Popism is short on bitchy insider jokes and cryptic gossip. Instead Popism goes long on Andy’s ideas about art and the artist’s life (his philosophy you might say) while offering a shopping bag full of succinct, elucidating anecdotes from that breathless period when people stayed awake on amphetamines in part so they wouldn’t miss a thing. 

      Throughout the summer of 1982, Edie: An American Biography was read everywhere, so it seemed, downtown and uptown, on subways and accessible-by-train beaches. Curated by Jean Stein, this oral history documents the fast-lane life and rapid off-ramp decline of the aforementioned Warhol superstar Edie Sedgwick. When she died of a barbiturate overdose in 1971, Andy and The Factory had long receded in her rear-view mirror. Edie was the tome that people carried around and gossiped about during my second summer in Manhattan – people fascinated by Andy and his world, anyway. Sometimes it seemed as though everyone I met in New York City was to some extent intrigued by and/or irritated by Warhol. He hovered over a subset of young people in much the same iconic way that Elvis Presley had for our older siblings. 

      That said, I didn’t think about Warhol as the Eighties unfolded. His presence was felt; on those nights he turned up at Area and the Pyramid, a sub-verbal buzz circulated through the crowd. Andy’s here. And as a casual follower of the downtown art scene, I was aware of his friendship/collaborations with Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat as well as his varying yet persistent affect on dozens of other rising artists. 

       When Andy Warhol passed away suddenly on February 22, 1987, I was on assignment for Rolling Stone magazine in London. So I bought an armful of tabloid newspapers that day, relishing the melodramatic headlines that heralded the artist’s death. Andy expired in a Manhattan hospital, while he recovered from what should have been routine (though long-postponed) gall-bladder surgery. Learning of his death in a city other than New York, on an ambitious mission of my own, magnified its import and impact.

***      

      “I had a death threat. I’ll get to it.” 

      — Monday May 4 1981, The Andy Warhol Diaries 

      Memorials and memoirs, reminiscences and revisionist histories, mash notes and poison pen letters began to accumulate on the Andy Warhol shelf in the years following his death. I might’ve ignored The Andy Warhol Diaries, edited by Pat Hackett, if not for The New York Times Book Review cover review by Martin Amis in June 1989. 

      “On most mornings, Andy Warhol called his former secretary, Pat Hackett, and rambled on for a while about what he did the day before. She made ‘extensive notes,’ she explains, and ‘typed them up while Andy’s intonations were fresh in my mind.’  So that’s what we’re looking at here: 800 pages, half a million words, of Andy’s intonations. But it works, somehow.”

      Martin Amis’ review of The Andy Warhol Diaries works both as a critical assessment of this singular volume and its sui generis author as well as a wide-roaming, brilliantly articulated essay that touches down on art, social aspiration, masculinity, and the cultural differences between the Seventies and Eighties while nailing the poignance and ambivalence of Andy’s public persona. (It’s available in the Amis collection The War Against Cliche.) 

      “And after awhile you begin to trust the voice — Andy’s voice, this wavering mumble, this ruined slur. It would seem that The Andy Warhol Diaries thrives on the banal, for in the daily grind of citizenship and dwindling mortality, the nobody and somebody are one. Meanwhile, here comes everybody, or at least everybody who is somebody.” 

      Andy’s Diaries resonate for me as a touchstone: the granular document of a rarified but not uncommon Manhattan lifestyle and a cautionary tale for young strivers just setting out in the city. The early pages are unpromising. Beginning in 1976, the chronological entries find Andy spending much of his time on the make, hustling portrait commissions from the upper crust in Europe and the Upper East Side of Manhattan, accompanied by Fred Hughes and/or Interview editor Bob Colacello, often supplemented by a well-born female companion. 

The Diaries find their rhythm during 1977-78, as the disco era reaches a dizzying peak and Studio 54 commands national media attention. Andy’s morning-after recounts of his nights out with the gang — Halston, Liza Minelli, Bianca Jagger, Truman Capote, Steve Rubell — spill over with dishy bon mots and astringent social observations. It’s the most entertaining section by far though not immune to a subtle, mounting sense of disquiet. Warhol’s admitted use of substances — slyly rubbing cocaine on his gums and quaffing a comped vodka or three — gets eclipsed by the gargantuan intake of almost everybody else he hangs out with. Lurking around the corner is an extended hangover, aka the Eighties.

      Andy’s next decade gets off to a rocky start. Calling Warhol emotionally reticent is a gross understatement, so the fact that he mentions his breakup with Jed Johnson at all is remarkable, and characteristically the acknowledgments are terse. Tension between the couple had already surfaced throughout the disco years, yet these premonitions are scant preparation for readers and, one senses, the author himself. From Sunday, December 21, 1980: 

      “Jed’s decided to move out and I don’t want to talk about it.”

      Despite their twenty year age difference, Jed Johnson by all accounts had grown exhausted and alienated by his middle-aged partner’s ceaseless social whirl and longed for a more stable home life and career, which he found. 

      Andy Warhol, judging from the Diaries, spent the remaining seven years of his life emotionally adrift. He pursued unrequited, borderline-obsessive romances with increasingly younger men, most notably the thirtyish film executive Jon Gould, and fell back on that tried-and-true big city method of filling one’s life: going out too much. Martin Amis, again: “Andy went everyplace that was anyplace — or not even.” 

       Every night, there was something to do — especially if you were Andy Warhol. With his every-shifting crew of companions (mostly Interview staffers in their twenties), Andy turns up at benefits, concerts, movie screenings, art openings, dinner parties and all manner of hazily defined “events” at nightclubs. As the decade lumbers on, Andy had less time for his peers and old pals (and vice versa), perhaps understandably preferring the energy and input of people young enough to be his children. Broadly speaking, Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat were his children; they incorporated and furthered his legacy before their own brief, brilliant careers both ended in tragedy.  

       And we don’t have to regard Andy Warhol as a vampire or bad influence to observe that his two main inheritors, alongside his encouragement, also on occasion received his snarky wasp-stings.

      Tuesday, October 2 1984 : “Jean-Michel came over to the office to paint but he fell asleep on the floor. He looked like a bum lying there. But I woke him up and he did two masterpieces that were great.”

      Monday October 29 1984: “So we drove up to 90th Street and East River Drive to see the mural that Keith had done. It’s like 2 1/2 feet wide and 200 feet long, like three blocks long. He painted it white and sprayed little black and red figures, but it would have been better just silver. It doesn’t make the city look better, really.”

      As the Diaries wind down, and as the paparazzi cameras point elsewhere and the flood of invites slows to a trickling stream, Andy retreats into obsessive antique collecting and binge-watching cable TV (ever the early adopter). Spasms of self-pity appear more frequently, as do self-admonishments about working harder at his art. Well, there’s that. Andy’s art practice gets short shrift throughout the Diaries because, aside from the intriguing “Shadow” paintings in the late Seventies, there’s not a hell of a lot to say about it. Commissioned portraits and hastily conceived series keep him busy day-to-day, if nothing else, right up until the end.

***

A couple years after first reading The Andy Warhol Diaries, I attended a party hosted by a former neighbor in the East Village. By this time, the early Nineties, I was newly married and living across town, pursuing a less hectic social life than I had during the Eighties. I was happy to see my friend though as the night progressed, or devolved, it appeared that she (and I) were roughly ten years older than most of the guests at her party. Without judging her, or assuming everyone should tread the same traditional path through life, I half-consciously decided right then and there not to conduct my thirties in the same way as I had my twenties. 

      Getting stuck in a youthful moment — longing to live on the cusp of ambition, clinging to that all-things-are-possible flash of pure unrealized potential — is the unenviable fate of the middle-aged bohemian. The last pages of The Andy Warhol Diaries illuminate this dilemma. By the end Andy sleepwalks, dutifully trudging across the Manhattan club circuit, miming the nightly charade of fabulousness. Living vicariously through ever-younger friends, no matter how devoted they are, comes with a set of severe built-in limitations. The emotional returns only diminish over time. 

***

      During the spring of 1989, I viewed Andy Warhol: A Retrospective at the The Museum of Modern Art. My abiding interest in Warhol was scant preparation for the palpable physical shock of standing before Andy’s Sixties paintings — especially the “Disasters”, the electric chairs and race riots, but the familiar Coke bottles and Brillo pad boxes too. The scale and scope was astounding. Thirty years later, the Whitney Museum presented an even deeper retrospective: Andy Warhol From A to B and Back Again. By now I was familiar with his oeuvre and as it happened, surprisingly, not yet saturated. The Whitney show revealed some fascinating early work as well as a room devoted to the much-maligned portraits-for-hire. 

      In the 21st Century, revelations from Andy Warhol were in short supply but I was nevertheless floored by the magnificent Mao taking up most of an entire wall. The Chinese Communist dictator impassively stared down at museum-goers, his malevolent legacy oddly amplified by the artist’s disarming color choices: bizarrely, Mao looks as if he’s wearing make-up. And the Warhol/Basquiat collaborations, dismissed in 1985, now resemble successful duets, not cynical marriages of convenience.

The commissioned portraits exude a puzzling allure. Juxtaposing the artist’s mother, Julia Warhola, and Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, the Shah of Iran, suggests much about the Andy Warhol enigma while revealing little or nothing. Which, perhaps, is just what he intended.

*** 

Roaming the Upper West Side of Manhattan on an undistinguished day during the pandemic year of 2020, I walked past a public middle school. It was closed but student art projects were visible behind a fence. “Haring and Basquiat” read the sign above, though that was unnecessary as the graffiti-inspired sculpture and Godzilla-with-crown painting on display made for instantly recognizable homages to the two deceased artists. I realized that my peers Keith and Jean-Michael, gone more than thirty years now, were no longer Andy Warhol’s inheritors but his stand-ins, the definition of an artist for today’s kids: the new Warhols. Art is eternal, even if artists aren’t.