Andy Warhol: 1928-1987
By March, the Velvets were on the road with a touring mixed-media rock circus Warhol called the Exploding Plastic Inevitable. The EPI had flashing strobes, light shows, film projections –— all the things that would soon become rock theater. With the help of Tom Wilson, a producer who worked with Bob Dylan, Warhol produced the Velvets’ classic first album and designed its famous cover, which featured a peelable banana. That same year Warhol produced his cow wallpaper and his split-screen epic The Chelsea Girls and added to his iconic Jackie series —– screen prints of newspaper photos of President Kennedy’s widow. His energies seemed endless. “He had a very intense work ethic that he was always drumming into us,” says Lou Reed. “If I wrote a song, he’d say, Why didn’t you write five songs?’ He said, ‘Work is everything. Work is the entire thing.'”
In 1967, Andy helped launch a discotheque called the Gymnasium and pulled off a startling bit of nonperformance art by retaining a Factory actor, Allen Midgette, to spray his hair silver and impersonate Warhol for a series of lecture dates —– one of the great Sixties put-ons. In the space of five years, Warhol had largely created a whole new multimedia avant-garde – one with vast commercial as well as artistic potential. As Andy later said, “Being good in business is the most fascinating kind of art.”
By this time, the Factory had become a magnet for all who aspired to be with-it –— a place where Judy Garland might dance the twist with Rudolph Nureyev and still be outshone by the resident Warhol superstars. But the Factory’s open-door policy was flooding the place with freaks. Baby Jane Holzer had dropped out, complaining about “too many crazy people” and “too many drugs.” In 1968, Warhol moved the Factory into more elegant quarters downtown, at 33 Union Square West, not far from Max’s Kansas City, the rock-and-art bar where Andy and his entourage held court in a fabled back room. (“He paid for all the food,” recalls Iggy Pop, who first met David Bowie there.) Warhol was at the height of his fame when, on June 3rd, a disturbed woman named Valerie Solanis walked into the new Factory, pulled out a gun, fired two bullets into Warhol’s stomach and nearly killed him. At one point, he was pronounced dead on the operating table. He lived, but it was the end of an era.
Warhol spent the rest of the year –— the rest of the Sixties, in fact —– recovering from massive internal injuries, and from a sudden mortal fear. New locks and security measures were installed at the Factory. Warhol started no new films or major paintings. (After 1968, he largely limited his film involvement to the role of producer.) In the fall of 1969, with the Seventies impending, he unveiled Interview, a magazine inspired, he said, by Rolling Stone but devoted entirely to the arts, gossip and taped ramblings by this or that month’s reigning celebrity – essentially more gossip. The magazine had undeniable zing. In the Seventies, as Andy may have suspected, gossip itself would become an art form – most notably in the work of his friend Truman Capote, whom he interviewed for Rolling Stone in 1973. (Andy’s association with this magazine was in fact ongoing: in 1977, he created a screen-print Bella Abzug cover for RS 249, and three years later he was commissioned to design the cover of a Rolling Stone coffee-table book on the Beatles.)
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The Andy Warhol of the Seventies was himself a full-fledged celebrity. The Rolling Stones asked him to do the cover of their 1971 album Sticky Fingers (the celebrated crotch-and-zipper concoction). Bianca Jagger became his pal. So did Halston, the celebrity designer, and Diana Vreeland, the celebrity editor of Vogue. Andy became a fixture at Studio 54. He hung out with Liz Taylor, Liza Minnelli, all the usual fabsters. “I have Social Disease,” Andy quipped. “I have to go out every night.” (“But I think he went home a lot very early, too,” says designer friend Diane Von Furstenberg.)
Susan Blond, an early Interview staffer and latter-day Factory actress, remembers introducing Andy one night to Michael Jackson, who became an early Interview cover subject. “He asked Michael if he had saved all his performance clothes from when he was a kid,” Blond recalls, “and Michael had. Andy really liked that —– both of them collected everything, right? We ate at Regine’s, and I asked Michael to dance, and he said, ‘Oh, no, I don’t dance. That’s work.’ The both of them had weird, interesting views on what was work and what wasn’t, you know? They really hit it off immediately. Oh –— and Michael asked Andy if he had children. Michael has always asked that question. Andy said no.” Andy Warhol
Embarking on his nightly celebrity wallows, Warhol always brought along his Polaroid camera and his little tape machine to document the fun, or whatever. “He was absolutely crazy about collecting images,” says Mick Jagger with a fond laugh. “He would take millions of pictures –— which is very annoying when you’re eating your soup and you’ve just blurped a piece of minestrone down your chin. And he always had a tape recorder on the table to collect the inanities of the night.”
Andy Warhol: 1928-1987, Page 4 of 5