Andy Warhol

by Arthur C. Danto

  Linich was the only one who actually lived there—he took possession of one of the bathrooms, which he also used as a darkroom for developing the photographs he took, chronicling life in the Silver Factory as it evolved. It says a great deal that of Warhol’s two lieutenants, Billy Linich and Gerard Malanga, Malanga received a salary, however minimal, while Billy Name was merely given spending money. Malanga was a grown-up, a jobholder, identified with the photographic silk-screening process and the mass production of the grocery boxes; Billy Name had the ambition of a perpetual adolescent, living at home, helping with household chores, and making do with an allowance for his personal needs.

  Most of those who used the Silver Factory as their “club” would not have lived there. Either they lived at home and hung out in the Silver Factory, or they had money and lived independent, urbane lives. But they believed in the life that the Silver Factory emblematized, of freedom spiced by the license that bohemia claimed for itself. They were often celebrities. A friend of Andy’s hosted a Beautiful People Party in the spring of 1965, where Judy Garland, Rudolph Nureyev, Tennessee Williams, and Montgomery Clift came as invited guests. Andy by that time was himself a Beautiful Person—a star and indeed an icon. But none of the Silver Factory regulars had quite the necessary glitter for that. They were young, good-looking people with whatever allotment of talent may have given them hope for stardom, and who had been brought to the Silver Factory by Malanga or by Linich, who had access to different pools of recruits, or by Andy himself, who spotted what he thought might be talent at the nightly parties he attended.

  Billy Name makes an appearance on Ric Burns’s four-hour television special on Warhol, aired in 2006, in which he declares, with a kind of gleeful cackle, that he was the one responsible for the downtown presence in the Silver Factory. He had come to New York in the late 1950s—an attractive young man, lean and dark, drawn to bookstores and a certain kind of gay bohemia, where he made friends and looked for protectors. He became part of a group that came to be called—that called themselves—the Mole People—people of a certain talent, early users of speed, with a taste for grand opera and a marked anarchistic lifestyle, and gifted with a rude and cutting wit, a free and open sex life, and a dedication to mischief. The “Pope” of the Mole People was Bob Olivo, whose Factory Name was Ondine—an inspired monologist and lip-syncher, a compellingly original and bizarre personality.

  Here is a picture of Ondine and of the Mole People from Mary Woronov’s memoir, Swimming Underground: My Years in the Warhol Factory:

  Ondine was like the Cyclone—he thrilled and terrified me though I knew I was in an amusement park. Rooms grew old when he left, and after talking to him I couldn’t bear normal conversation. I started going places to be around him, the gayest bars, the most bizarre parties. I was fearless and it was only a matter of time before I was introduced into an extremely narrow circle that surrounded Warhol during the days of the Silver Factory on 47th Street: the Mole People. Mole because they were only seen at night wearing sunglasses and a skin pallor that had to be the result of years of underground existence; Mole because they were known to be tunneling toward some greater insanity that no one but this inner circle was aware of. Some of the Great White Moles were Ondine, the Pope; Rotten Rita, the dealer; Orion, the witch; and of course Billy Name, the protector of the Factory. . . . Drella warned me to steer clear of the Mole People, so I kept my distance until one night Ronnie invited me to get high with them. Ronnie was a rather handsome straight looking but totally speed crazed homosexual whose last name was Vile in case anyone was fooled by his pleasant manner. He said that for the last five days the Moles had been cooped up in an uptown apartment making necklaces, and all I could think of was that they must have some powerful dope to keep that bunch stringing beads for a week. But the real reason I got in the cab with Ronnie was because he said Ondine would be there. [Woronov, 62–63]

  In the course of that evening, Woronov, an actress and writer, with a certain touch of sadism and an unmistakable courage, was finally captured by the perpetual Walpurgisnacht that was Mole reality. She ultimately left the party and went home. “But I didn’t belong. I had changed. There were no outward signs, but I knew it. It was no longer them, it was us. Their rules were mine, their insanity my reality, and as for the rest of the world, it just didn’t matter. I was a Mole” (72).

  Andy was so captivated by Ondine’s style of wit that he pursued him with a tape recorder for twenty-four hours in an attempt to preserve everything that Ondine said in that interval. At least that is what he assumes. One might be able through textual detective work to identify the actual date—the way one can find out that June 16, 1904, is Bloomsday: the actual twenty-four hours lived through by Joyce’s hero, Leopold Bloom. But of course Joyce did not write the book in that twenty-four-hour interval. Warhol wanted it to be a “bad book”—the way, I suppose, his movies were bad movies and his paintings bad paintings, according to initial criticism. When the transcription of his tapes was given to him, it was full of errors and inconsistencies, but, true to character, he decided to publish it just as it was, saying, “This is fantastic. This is great!” And in a way it is fantastic and great: it really refuses to distinguish what people say from the circumambient noises that the tape recorder picked up, and which somehow got transcribed. Like “Rattle, gurgle, clink, tinkle. / Click, pause, click, ring. / Dial, dial”—with which the book begins. But these are names of noises, not noises themselves, which we would hear if we listened to the tapes. The book can certainly be considered avant-garde literature (the huge “A” at the beginning of the book is obviously meant to remind the reader of a typographical peculiarity of Ulysses). But it does not do what Warhol meant for it to do, namely, give us a sense of Ondine’s wit! Compare A with the voice of “lui” in Diderot’s masterpiece, Rameau’s Nephew, who knows that he is gifted but not a genius like his uncle, though no one—and certainly not his uncle—could duplicate the nephew’s wild way with language and sound, which Hegel transcribes in a passage in the Phenomenology of Mind:

  This style of speech is the madness of the musician, “who piled and mixed up together some thirty airs, Italian, French, tragic, comic, of all sorts and kinds; now, with a deep bass, he descends to the depths of hell, then, contracting his throat to a high piping falsetto, he rent the vault of the skies, raving and soothed, haughtily imperious and mockingly jeering by turns . . . a fantastic mixture of wisdom and folly, a melee of as much skill as low cunningly composed of ideas as likely to be right as wrong, with as complete a perversion of sentiment, with as much consummate shamefulness in it, as absolute frankness, candor, and truth.” [Hegel, 543–54]

  A: A Novel was not published until 1968. But somehow one feels as if the spirit of Warhol’s failed experiment is what underlaid Willem de Kooning’s admittedly drunk diatribe at a party in 1969: “You’re a killer of art, you’re a killer of beauty, and you’re even a killer of laughter. I can’t bear your work” (Bockris, 320). Even if one takes A: A Novel to be a philosophical demonstration that avant-garde literature, as practiced by a tape recorder, is impossible, he managed to kill laughter. Joyce, after all, said of Finnegan’s Wake that it was written for the laughter of mankind. And one can get from Warhol’s various biographers a pretty good sense of Ondine’s wit. On page 190 of A: A Novel, one can get a sense of Ondine as a raconteur. But it is an agony to read that far. One of the episodes in Chelsea Girls tracks Ondine through an epic tantrum that made him a Superstar.

  One could not be a Mole Person without paying a price, if only because one cannot more or less subsist on drugs and not pay a price. This would particularly have been the case with speed, which gives those who live it a sense that they have no need to either sleep or eat. Beautiful Freddy Herk
o, a dancer, exemplified the Mole agenda, in that he had an immense sense of greatness, accompanied by limited gifts. Ondine described him as “a total star dealing with space and time and dealing with his audience, and dealing with everything in that little thing called the avantgarde. But that was nowhere to go for Freddy Herko. Herko was involved in bigger things. He wanted to be seen. Fred Herko wanted to fly” (57). Somehow performing a minimally choreographed dance routine in the background of an avant-garde film, like Warhol’s Haircut, while Billy Name cut someone’s hair in the foreground, was insufficient glory for someone whose self-image was as vast as Herko’s. The world ultimately closed in on him. A friend, seeing him dancing out of control on a restaurant counter, took him home. He bathed, then danced through an open window on the fifth floor as he listened to Mozart’s Coronation Mass: fly he finally did. Andy famously said afterward that he wished he had been able to film Herko’s death leap. But Herko’s mind and soul had become entirely engaged with bead stringing, the Mole Person’s defining occupation. Everyone knew that, in the value scheme of the Silver Factory, he had done the right thing.

  Slightly older, and as manic as any Mole but probably too old to be a Mole Person herself, was Dorothy Podber, whom the Moles esteemed as a genius. She said, “I’ve been bad all my life. Playing dirty tricks on people is my specialty.” Warhol wanted to put her into a film. Instead, she enacted a kind of happening, which was the crowning achievement of a life that lasted until her death in 2008. She turned up at the Silver Factory one day in leather pants and sunglasses, accompanied by her Great Dane. Warhol was shooting a picture and was too preoccupied to talk with her. The story is frequently told. Podber asked if she could shoot some pictures, and Warhol said sure. She took a silver pistol from her belt, and sent a bullet through a stack of portraits of Marilyn Monroe, right between the eyes. Warhol exhibited them as “Shot Marilyns,” but Dorothy Podber was persona non grata at the Silver Factory from that point on. The episode was inseparable from her life, and it was the main remembrance in her obituary.

  Valerie Solanas, Warhol’s failed assassin, was not a Mole Person. Her craziness was of another order. The new Factory—no longer the Silver Factory, since its shiny décor belonged to an era now past—was intended to screen out the kind of person the Mole People exemplified. By 1968, Warhol’s inner administrative circle had changed. It now consisted of Fred Hughes, who sold Warhol’s art at something like its market value, and who got portrait commissions for Andy, which he used to finance his movies; and Paul Morrissey, who more or less took over the filming and steered Warhol’s movies into an increasingly narrative direction, beginning with My Hustler. Gerard Malanga was in disgrace, and Billy Name was more and more marginal, no longer clear what his mandate was in the new Factory, now that silver, in fact and in meaning, was passé. The day of the Mole People was largely past, much to Andy’s regret after the assassination attempt: “I realized that it was just timing that nothing terrible had ever happened to any of us before now. Crazy people had always fascinated me because they were so creative. They were incapable of doing things normally. Usually they would never hurt anybody, they were just disturbed themselves; but how would I ever know again which was which?” (Bockris, 306).

  The feminist theorist Ti-Grace Atkinson, at the time—June 3, 1968—president of the New York chapter of NOW, truly believed that no woman was crazy as such. If some woman behaved crazily, that was due, she felt, to something that had been done to the woman by some man. It was a feminist version of the liberal explanation of crime: that human beings are caused to be criminals by external, economic circumstances. Years later, she said, wryly, that Valerie Solanas taught her otherwise. She really was crazy to the core.

  Solanas was an educated woman. She majored in psychology at the University of Maryland, where she came to the view that men were genetically defective, lacking a crucial chromosome. She was, or believed she was, sexually molested by her father, who administered oral sex when she was a child. She had a child when she was in high school.

  Steven Watson, who wrote Factory-Made: Warhol and the Sixties, tracked down her high school yearbook, where she was praised for her brainpower and her spirit. Oddly, her views were not that different from Atkinson’s: men were defective, not women. Solanas formed a society called SCUM—an acronym for “Society for Cutting Up Men”—and in a manifesto, unread until she became a celebrity, she explains on genetic grounds that society would not be good until the men were eliminated. (That was not, of course, Atkinson’s view.) She was a lesbian, and eked out a living by posing with other women, performing sex.

  The story of her involvement with Warhol has frequently been told. In 1967, she phoned him, offering a film script with the title Up Your Ass, which proved to be too dirty even for him. He actually imagined that she may have been a female cop, engaged in an act of entrapment. He then seems to have lost the script. Solanas pestered him for money. Warhol’s response was to offer her money for acting in his current film, I, a Man, in which she actually performed with considerable if gross wit. In any case, Solanas’s resentment was not extinguished, and she persisted in her demands that the hopelessly lost script be returned. By June 3, she made up her mind to punish him. She waited for him to arrive at the new Factory, and even rode up in the elevator with him, wearing makeup and a heavy fleece-lined coat, with a handgun in each pocket. The heaviness of the coat was doubtless intended to disguise the presence of the weapons, rather than to call attention to itself, which of course it did. (A suspect in the London subway bombings was killed precisely because he was wearing an unseasonably heavy coat!)

  No one in the Factory thought of Valerie as someone to be frightened of, which confirms Warhol’s view that crazy people do not as a general rule do much harm to others. To any reasonable person, Valerie was just a nuisance. And Valerie made no threats, gave no warning. She merely opened fire, missing Warhol on the first shot, then firing into his body when he threw himself under his desk. Valerie shot Mario Amayo, an art professional who lived part of the time in London, and she hesitated whether to shoot Fred Hughes. The elevator opened and Hughes said, “There’s the elevator. Just leave!” And Valerie left, leaving chaos in the Factory, and uncertainty as to whether Warhol would live. She surrendered herself at seven that evening, to a traffic policeman. She shot Andy Warhol, she explained, because he had too much control over her life.

  At her hearing, Solanas was praised by high-ranking feminists, like Atkinson, who called her the “first outstanding champion of women’s rights.” Atkinson came from southern aristocracy, and knew how to behave in high circles. Betty Friedan felt that she had left the New York chapter of NOW in good hands when she managed to get Atkinson elected president. She was a feminist revolutionary with elegant manners. So it came as a shock when Friedan read in the New York Times that Atkinson, speaking as the head of the chapter, defended Solanas in court. Valerie was unrepentant: she even demanded that Warhol pay her $20,000 for her papers. She spent the rest of her life in and out of prison and mental institutions, and said that she could always pursue Warhol again.

  Warhol actually died—or was clinically dead—until brought back to life by open-heart massage.

  Solanas’s bullet could scarcely have done more harm: the bullet went in through his right side, passed through his lung, ricocheted through his throat, gallbladder, liver, spleen, and intestines, leaving a huge hole in his left side. There are some famous images of his scars, by Richard Avedon and the great portraitist Alice Neel. Bobby Kennedy was assassinated the night of Valerie’s arraignment, driving the attack on Andy off the front page. (Kennedy’s assassination, along with the fatal shooting of Martin Luther King Jr. on April 4, gave the world the impression that everything was falling apart in 1968. That and the student riots in New York and Par
is in April and May.)

  Warhol spent part of his convalescence editing Lonesome Cowboys. Ironically, John Schlesinger’s Academy Award-winning Midnight Cowboy appropriates some of Warhol’s ideas, especially the romanticized idea of the hustler—and even incorporates what would have been seen as a “Warhol Party,” actually using certain Warhol characters to play parts in it, with Viva playing the role of underground filmmaker. Morrissey made an underground parody of Midnight Cowboy, involving a hustler, and called it a tribute to John Ford. For a friendly moment, there was a dialogue between underground and Hollywood cinema, which in the end meant something to insiders, but it came to very little, mainly because the underground film movement was itself on the way out.

  It is hardly matter for wonder that Warhol should have come through the experience a shaken man. He really feared a chance encounter with Valerie Solanas on the street. He poignantly said that he had never been afraid before, but that now he wasn’t sure, having gone through a death, whether he was really alive. “Like I can’t say hello or good bye to people. Life’s like a dream” (Bockris, 311). He was no longer allowed to take Obitrol, the appetite suppressant that was a mild amphetamine. Whether or not his giving up drugs at this point in his life explains things, it is widely conceded that the shooting marked a profound change in his life as an artist. He was a different person after dying, to put the matter somewhat surrealistically. That leaves the question that is impossible to answer, namely, how great a role in Warhol’s art can we explain through even the mild level of amphetamines he took between 1961 and 1968? Since many in his circle were on amphetamines during those years, are we to say that the Age of Warhol is the Age of Speed? It does not help to say that he took so little and did so much—or perhaps it does. Billy Name took dilute amounts of the drug—and how much good did it do him? Subtracting the amphetamines leaves the difference between Warhol as a genius and Billy Name as muddlehead intact.