BBC Four
A Day in the Life
of Andy Warhol, presented by Stephen Smith, is on BBC4 on 25 August
as part of the series BBC4 Goes Pop.
A Day in the Life of Andy
Warhol
Stephen Smith meets
with many of Andy Warhol's friends and confidantes to get closer to
the man behind the enigmatic public image, experiencing for himself a
day in the life of the pop art superstar. From recreating Warhol's
intimate early morning chats with Factory star Brigid Polk to
visiting the church where Warhol worshipped with his mother,
discovering new details about the making of the notorious eight-hour
Empire State Building film with assistant Gerard Malanga to spending
time with Warhol's lover and collaborator John Giorno, Smith provides
an entertaining and fresh new portrait of the legendary artist's life
and personality.
Andy
Warhol
'He
loved weightlifting and buying jewels': Andy Warhol's friends reveal
all
He
worked out all the time, loved sex (contrary to popular belief), was
a father figure to rejects – and would chat on the phone for hours.
The people closest to Andy Warhol uncover his hidden side
Stephen Smith
Friday 14 August
2015 13.00 BST /
http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2015/aug/14/andy-warhol-friends-reveal-all
We all know Andy,
the alien in the fright wig with his Marilyns and Elvises, who died
at the age of 58 from complications to gall-bladder surgery. Most
artists are referred to by their proper but distancing surnames –
Constable, Matisse – but he’s one of very few to achieve the
ultimate signifier of fame, recognition on first-name terms (we might
also allow “Vincent” in deference to Don McLean). Most of us
could even manage a thumbnail sketch of the life: pop art, Studio 54,
Mick and Bianca. Warhol was the notorious voyeur who shot sex tapes
avant la lettre, albeit gussied up as art films, all the while
insisting that he himself was a virgin – that’s when you could
prise a word out of him beyond a “Gee!” or a “My!” He was the
seven-stone weakling who hid from the world behind his platinum
toupées and Ray-Bans. He was affectless, amoral, his campy work
emerging haphazardly from the druggy haze of his studio, the Factory,
where a miscellany of misfits and poor little rich kids crashed and
burned while Warhol looked on with what John Updike called his
“deadpan rapture”.
That, at least, is
the boilerplate biography. But after talking to many survivors of
Warhol’s circle in New York, including his relatives as well as an
associate who was close to the artist for many years but has never
spoken at length before, I discovered a very different version of the
man, a long way from the dead-eyed Martian of legend. And I came away
with a renewed respect for his uncanny prescience in anticipating our
fascination with brands, celebrity, even selfies. Warhol was the
painter of modern life.
To start at the top,
with Warhol’s crowning glory: it’s true that he was a great one
for affecting ever bolder, and more unabashedly synthetic,
confections as he grew accustomed to the spotlight. But the first
time he wore a wig, it was out of a very human self-consciousness,
after a nervous illness in his youth left his body completely
hairless. With a flair for publicity which was characteristic and
innate, Warhol eventually parlayed his baldness into a plus.
According to Victor Bockris, an Englishman from Brighton who worked
for Warhol at the Factory in the 1970s, Warhol realised that America
didn’t know its artists. The generation who immediately preceded
him were the abstract expressionists, scowling introspectives such as
Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko. They would only unburden themselves,
if at all, to toney art critics, and even then in terms that lay
readers might struggle to grasp. But Warhol, the man who turned the
everyday of American life into art – dollar bills, soup cans,
Brillo-pad boxes – pulled off the same trick in reverse, making an
artificial or at least contrived version of “Andy Warhol” part of
everyone’s scenery. “What did all Americans immediately get?
Cartoons, comic strips,” Bockris said. “So Andy became a cartoon,
the Donald Duck of art.” He wore the same things every day –
leather jacket, black jeans, sneakers – ensuring that he leapt out
of the paparazzi pictures in the New York Post. “And he looked
after himself,” Bockris said. “Andy worked out. He went to the
gym and lifted weights.”
Andy Warhol worked
out?!
John Richardson, the
acclaimed biographer of Picasso, compared Warhol to a “holy fool”,
a figure associated with the eastern traditions of the remote sliver
of land where the Warhol (originally Warhola) family hailed from,
Carpathian Ruthenia in the former Austro-Hungarian empire. Warhol’s
on-off friend Truman Capote called him “a Sphinx without a secret”.
But his reputation for mute inscrutability isn’t altogether
justified. Yes, it won him that priceless fascination that we reserve
for the silent – Kate Moss, the Queen. Warhol let the praise and
abuse heaped on his art and his person go without comment in public,
but it was a different matter behind closed doors, according to his
nephew, James Warhola. In his childhood, James and his brothers often
stayed at their uncle’s townhouse on Lexington Avenue, a cabinet of
curiosities, as he remembered it, with “carousel horses and
cigar-store Indians”. A lithe and youthful 60, James has inherited
something of the dreamy wonder of his famous relative. “When we
were all together as a family, my mom would sometimes question Uncle
Andy about his art. You know, ‘What’s that meant to be?’, or
even ‘Why are you wasting your time on this?’ And he would give
as good as he got – not in a hostile way, but saying that this was
his work, it had value and importance for him. He had studied art and
was very knowledgeable.”
We were sitting in a
pew at the Church of St Thomas More, a block or so from Andy’s old
home. It was a slightly ersatz copy of an English parish church, the
sodium lighting giving the interior an embalmed quality. “My uncle
would sometimes bring us here,” James said. It in no way put Warhol
off that his fellow worshippers included some of the most
distinguished old-money families of Manhattan. But he came to church
because he was faithful to the old religion of his mother country,
Byzantine Catholicism (the Roman version was the next best thing, and
more conveniently situated for Lexington Avenue). James said there
were crucifixes in every room of his uncle’s house, including one
above his (four-poster) bed. The first time Richardson called on
Warhol at home, he was struck by “the gleam, the hush, and the
peace of a presbytery”.
The artist never
talked about religion, any more than he did about anything else. But
it’s often overlooked that he wrote half a dozen books, including a
novel and some 1,200 pages of diaries, admittedly with the help of
ghostwriters (“he dictated every word of it himself”, Bockris
pointed out). In fact, Warhol is perhaps the most quotable artist of
all time, with a line on everything from his supposedly non-existent
love life to his thoughts on everyday products. “What’s great
about this country is that America started the tradition where the
richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest. You
can be watching TV and see Coca-Cola, and you know that the President
drinks Coke, Liz Taylor drinks Coke, and just think, you can drink
Coke, too. A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a
better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking.”
Incidentally, it’s hard to read that paean to the downhome American
values of apple pie and K-Mart as the ravings of a degenerate fag, as
J Edgar Hoover might have put it. (The FBI boss once dispatched two
of his men to the San Francisco film festival, to scrutinise Warhol’s
allegedly subversive movie, Lonesome Cowboys, made in 1968. “There
was no plot to the film and no development of characters,” noted
the Feds.)
And what about the
films? There’s no doubt about the period shock value of Warhol’s
Blow Job (1964), for example. Except the viewer only sees the lucky
or otherwise recipient, a man by the name of DeVeren Bookwalter, from
the waist up. Warhol liked to provoke, but what he really wanted was
to be taken seriously by the big boys in Hollywood, and perhaps even
to join them one day; to hear the name of the Factory uttered in the
same breath as Universal and Warner Brothers.
At his apartment in
Brooklyn, the veteran film-maker Jonas Mekas and I spooled through
rushes he shot back in the 70s and had never shown anyone before. On
the magic lantern of his ancient Moviola screen, Andy Warhol sprang
to life once more – brick-red polo-neck, slacks, wig. He was
operating his movie camera on a beach at Cape Cod, filming a couple
of boys playing rough and tumble. One of them was John Kennedy Jr,
JFK’s son. Warhol is known for his awestruck, fan’s-eye-view
silkscreen prints of John Jr’s mother, Jackie, but it’s forgotten
now that this “freak” who hung out with junkies and losers was
also a habitué of Camelot, JFK’s inner circle.
Mekas, the
92-year-old doyen of New York’s underground film scene, was the
first to screen Warhol’s releases, patiently lacing up mile upon
mile of Warhol’s unblinking cinematography. He told me: “I don’t
know about his art, but he is a genius of film.” Just as an old
master picture shows us what paint can do, so Warhol’s fanatically
unhurried cinema – Empire (1964) consists of a single shot of the
Empire State Building running to eight hours and five minutes –
demonstrates to the viewer the penetrating insight of the camera. To
those who can stick it out, that is. “At the premiere, I insisted
that Andy must watch the film like everyone else. Because he is
always so busy, he will go after some minutes.” Mekas produced a
length of rope and ran it through his fingers. The still sinewy
auteur began looping it around my chair. “So I tied him up – like
this! Of course when I looked at Andy later, he had freed himself and
he was gone.”
What about Warhol’s
relationships with others? According to art world lore, he looked on
with a kind of glassy ecstasy at the self-harming antics of the
low-lifes and bored heiresses who gravitated to his studio, some of
whom met premature deaths.
“Listen, those
people would have been dead earlier if it wasn’t for Andy Warhol,”
Mekas said. “He was the only one who would take them in. He was the
perfect father – he didn’t judge people who had been judged and
rejected by everybody else.”
‘Baby’ Jane
Holzer is referenced in Roxy Music’s ‘Virginia Plain’
One person who’s
in a position to know is “Baby” Jane Holzer, one of Andy’s
“superstars” – an actor who appeared in three of his movies and
was a denizen of the Factory. The daughter of a real-estate investor,
she married the heir to a New York property fortune. She was hymned
by Roxy Music in their hit “Virginia Plain” (“Baby Jane’s in
Acapulco / We are flying down to Rio”) and immortalised by Tom
Wolfe as “The Girl of the Year” in his groundbreaking book of
essays, The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby. Now a
formidable art patron, Holzer still trails a hint of mischief behind
her, like prom night perfume. We met at Bloomingdale’s, where the
management had set an entire floor aside for their valued customer.
She first ran into Warhol when she was shopping with David Bailey and
Nicky Haslam, and the pair of them hailed Warhol across the street.
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Why did you hang out
with him? “It was better than being a bored housewife,” she
deadpans. What did he shop for? “Jewels, darling. He adored
jewels.”
Holzer was renowned
for her sex appeal back in the day. Wasn’t she afraid of being hit
on at the Factory? “Actually, I found it restful,” she said. “I
would go there to sleep.”
Factory insiders
told me that far from being a den of iniquity, it was more like the
art faculty at the University of Life. Joseph Freeman first attended
aged 13, and was soon exposed to amphetamine-users injecting
themselves “in the tush”. But to Little Joey, as he then was, a
streetwise kid growing up just after the era of the Sharks and Jets
of West Side Story, it was all so much water off a DA haircut. “It
was one of the best times of my life.” These days, Freeman is a
businessman leasing out kit to TV crews. He has seldom spoken of his
days with Warhol. The unlikely pair bonded over a shared interest in
hi-fi. “I was a dork and the dorky thing back then was taping. I
saw Andy on the cover of my favourite hi-fi magazine and I knew I had
to meet him,” Freeman said. It was his job to rouse Warhol and get
him to work on time. “He was turning up at the Factory at 6pm. It
was too late – people needed to see him, he had to take care of
business.”
He loved talking on
the phone ... He just seemed to understand what would make teenage
boys kill themselves laughing
Fortified by a
breakfast of Cheerios, Warhol would hail a taxi, or at least try to.
On a Lexington kerbside, Freeman mimed a frail dowager shooing wasps.
“That’s why he needed me with him” – the pint-sized Joey
would cajole or menace cabbies into pulling over. Freeman told me
that he and a pal used to phone Warhol on Sunday mornings. “He was
at home then and he loved talking on the phone. He’d talk for
hours. We’d say: ‘What are you doing, Andy?’ and he’d say:
‘Oh, I’m sucking cock.’ I mean, we fell about.”
That was hardly an
appropriate thing to tell a 13-year-old boy. “I guess not. But he
just seemed to understand what would make teenage boys kill
themselves laughing.”
Warhol appeared to
be obsessed with other people’s sex lives, asking female friends
about their dates and how well-endowed they were. But he wasn’t the
frustrated virgin of his own myth-making. John Giorno, a poet and
artist, was the star of his first film, Sleep (1963): five hours of
the male lead catching zeds.
“You’ve been
described as Warhol’s ‘close friend’?”
Giorno smiled.
“Yes.”
“But you were
lovers?”
“Yes.” Tall and
distinguished, with a lived-in Roman face and a corona of white hair,
Giorno spoke to me at his loft in the Bowery. It was once home to the
trigger-happy writer William Burroughs, whose perforated firing-range
targets still bared their stigmata on the walls. Giorno told me the
most extraordinary and moving thing about Warhol. “You know, he had
a beautiful body. He was taking diet pills – basically, speed –
and he was working all the time, working with his hands, making the
silkscreen prints, which is quite a physical job. So he was slim and
he had really good muscle definition. Plus he had no hair, and his
origins were in eastern Europe, so he had really pale skin.”
But he always
thought of himself as very ugly?
“That’s right,
but he was like a Renaissance statue,” said Giorno.
This was Warhol’s
greatest secret. The artist whose career ran in parallel with the
cold war was a double agent. He was as American as Donald Duck, but
true to his eastern ancestry, he was really a Russian doll, and
inside the cartoon character was a man with the beauty and grace of a
ballet dancer.
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