by Ultra Violet
Julia has all the time in the world for her Andy. The older boys are in school. Ondrej, taking what jobs are available as a coal miner, a steelworker, a construction worker, is often away for long periods at distant construction sites or inaccessible mines in the harsh mountains of Pennsylvania. In the late 1930s, Ondrej falls ill. He is chronically debilitated with a wasting sickness that seems to defy diagnosis. Julia believes he has been poisoned by water from a contaminated well in a mine. Whatever the cause of his illness, he never recovers his health. He dies in 1942, when Andy is fourteen.
On his deathbed, he calls his oldest son, Paul, to his side and asks him to take care of his mother and to send Andrew to college. Frail little Andy is the bright hope of the Warhola family. Necessity has forced Paul and John to go to work right after high school. But Andy, the last-born, the odd little fellow, is too bright, too special, to end up digging coal or pumping gas. He deserves an education. Every family has its myths. The Warhola myth, nourished through want and the untimely death of the breadwinner, is that someday the baby, Mama’s special baby, will do something so amazing and astonishing the whole family will be proud of him.
At this time, in the depth of the Depression, the family is desperately poor. Andy remembers his mother adding water and more water to the soup until the vegetables swim in almost clear hot water. In between scrubbing the house and waiting on Andy, Julia augments the family’s earnings by making crepe-paper flowers, pretty, bright-hued blossoms with gracefully rolled edges on the petals. She sells them door to door in her neighborhood to brighten the mantels of those hard-scrabble parlors.
By the time he is twelve, Andy has recovered from three attacks of nervous disorder and is finally attending school regularly. He described to me once how every morning and afternoon he counted the eleven cement steps leading to the entrance door of their house, set between two scraggly bushes. On the long walk to school, he counted the sheets hanging from windows to dry. He liked the repetition of the sheets, like flags in the wind. “The repetition appealed to me,” he said.
His schoolmates call him “Spotty.” He is already losing pigment from his skin. His eyesight is very poor, his coordination uncertain. His classmates—tough, heavily muscled sons of miners and day laborers—tower over this slight, pale boy. On the playground, he hangs around the sidelines. Naturally, he is never chosen for games. Although he is repeatedly shouldered aside, he does not complain in later years of having been assaulted or even picked on. Perhaps his well-muscled older brothers protect him. Or perhaps knowledge of their existence deters bullies. Or maybe, even at that early age, Andy radiates a gentle sweetness that disarms attackers. In any event, he never suffers physical torment. “But I never had a friend,” he recalled years later.
Little Andy does well at Holmes Elementary, so well he is among those selected to participate in the prestigious Saturday art class taught by Tam O’Shanter at Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh, where fifth-to-tenth-grade youngsters from all over the area receive extensive art training. From these classes years later emerge such artists as painter Philip Pearlstein, sculptor Henry Bursztynowicz, industrial designer Irene Pasinski, painter Harry Schwalb, and, most celebrated, Andy himself.
Andy talked to me about those Saturday morning art classes in the music hall of the Carnegie Museum. I think they made a particular impression on him because they gave him his first chance to meet children from neighborhoods beyond his ethnic ghetto and to observe how the well-to-do dress and speak. Several times he mentioned two youngsters who arrived in limousines, one in a long maroon Packard and the other in a Pierce-Arrow. He remembered the mothers who wore expensively tailored clothes and glittery jewels. In the 1930s, before television and with no glossy magazines for poor families like Andy’s to browse through and few trips to the movies, the art classes opened a peephole for Andy to the world of the rich and successful. He never forgot what he saw.
In the museum class, Andy progresses from crayons to oil paints and brushes. He views the paintings in the museum. He sometimes becomes so immersed in his work that he is startled when it is time to leave.
Joseph Fitzpatrick, who taught those classes for many years, never forgot the skinny kid with blond hair who worked so industriously. “I distinctly remember how individual and unique his style was,” Fitzpatrick said, and recalled how impressed he was by the boy’s concentration and the delicacy of his drawing.* Andy could draw with a fine, sensitive line that sometimes broke into tiny droplets, an amazingly personal style. He occasionally outlined an object with dots and dashes, foreshadowing some of the photographic pointillism of his later commercial art.
Every week when the teacher reviews the best work, shy Andy makes his way through the crowd and blushingly holds up his drawing or painting for the other students. Their admiration is delicious to him.
In 1942 he enrolls in Schenley High School. There, he gets straight A’s in art and does almost as well in English. Again, miraculously, the other students do not torment him, although he remains a loner. After school he works at odd jobs, turning the money over to Julia. When he sells fruit from a truck, the customers always buy from him. His undernourished, pathetic look is hard to resist.
He works in a five-and-dime. “The store was beautiful, like heaven,” he told me years later. I can just see his eyes popping open wider and wider to take in all the goodies, the toys, the household gadgets, the toiletries, the candles, the hardware, the crockery. The array of objects dazzles him.
In May 1945, just before Andy’s graduation from high school, there is a moment of suspense when a birth certificate is required. It turns out that Julia had never registered the birth of her precious baby. To certify his birth at this stage, she must submit a notarized affidavit, along with the signature of a witness to the birth. On May 3, 1945, she submits her own signature and that of her neighbor Katrena Elachko. The state’s Division of Vital Records accepts the delayed registration, making Andy, at last, a person and a citizen.
Andy graduates from Schenley High among the top twenty of his class. That year he does a painting, in Van Gogh style, of the living room of the family house on Dawson Street. The painting shows a couch covered by a length of fabric, an armchair similarly covered by a piece of casually tossed cloth, a rocker, a painted white wooden chair, two tilted lampshades on bases, a radio, and a foot-high Christ in white nailed to a dark wood cross. There is no art, not even a calendar, on the walls.
The house has an indoor bathtub, a luxury not enjoyed by all the houses on the block, and small front and back yards, where Julia tends her tomatoes, string beans, squashes, and onions, and joins in the chatter of the women across the fences, which is conducted in a lingua franca of Slavic, Italian, Jewish, Irish, and English.
I once teasingly asked Andy to imitate the various voices and accents. His Slavic was convincing, for that was the language he spoke with his mother. But he was not a good enough mimic to catch the rhythm of the other languages.
The summer before he enters college, Andy draws portraits of the children and some of the adults in the neighborhood. His partner, Julia, writes out the names of the subjects in her beautiful script. He sells them up and down the block.
That fall, true to his promise to his father, Paul provides the money necessary to supplement the scholarship Andy wins at Carnegie Tech in Pittsburgh, where he gets what is probably the best art education offered in the United States at that time. Still a loner, he serves as art editor on the student magazine and in the summer of 1947 decorates windows for Joseph Home, a Pittsburgh department store.
After graduation in 1949, Andy leaves Pittsburgh with a single suitcase and heads for New York with his classmate Philip Pearlstein. They move into an apartment on St. Mark’s Place off Avenue A, on the Lower East Side. Andy is so obviously talented he has only to show his art school portfolio to get work as a commercial artist. He lays out advertisements, illustrates magazine stories, decorates show windows, and designs shoes.
His roommate
, Pearlstein, is quickly recognized as a serious painter. He develops a new style known as Super Realism, in which human figures are painted in exaggerated detail. It is a daring antidote to the ruling Abstract Expressionism. Philip’s success fires Andy with envy. He is making more money, but Pearlstein is gaining fame.
In 1950, I. Miller, a leading shoe chain, hires Andy as its in-house shoe designer. Andy designs fanciful shoes, which women buy recklessly. He sketches imaginative layouts and eye-catching packages. Now that he has a steady income, he sends for his mother. Julia arrives, with her flowered dresses, her flowered head scarves, her busy hands. In the brownstone town house at 1435 Lexington Avenue, at Eighty-ninth Street, Andy’s first purchase of New York real estate, Julia for the first time in her life has comfort, ease, and twenty-four hours a day to mother her baby.
Andy refused to tell me how much he paid for the house, but I learned that the going price for a brownstone in that neighborhood at that time was under $25,000. At such a price, the down payment is easy and the carrying charge manageable for Andy, who is taking on free-lance assignments in addition to his job, and Julia, handy with paintbrush and pencil, helps expand his output. She becomes his assistant, filling in color, making copies, hand lettering captions, keeping track of assignments.
When Andy’s colleagues drop by to sample Julia’s splendid pastries, they are handed crayons, charcoal, a paintbrush, and their visits turn into coloring parties. Vitto Giallo and Nathan Gluck are among his assistants in those years. Night after night, his friends work on his commercial assignments. He provides the food and liquor. His mother piles the plates up with her delicacies. In Tom Sawyer style, he cajoles his unpaid assembly line into expanding his production. No one complains, because he is not bossy. On the contrary, he encourages people to do their own thing, color their own way. If he likes an original bit someone executes, he copies it. Someone else’s creativity becomes his creativity. And the friend whose work he cribs is flattered and honored. Always there is fun. Otherwise the workers will not return to the free-labor camp to double and triple Andy’s output. After everyone is gone, he says, “Mám ťa rád, Mama”—“I love you, Mama.” They kiss each other good night.
Sometimes I think the City of New York should have annexed Andy as a municipal resource. He would have taken everybody off the streets, created jobs, cleared the slums, and rebuilt the south Bronx. How did he acquire his astonishing entrepreneurial spirit? I think back over his life and decide he learned to maneuver in his cradle. Still a baby, he put his mother to work around the clock, nursing him, singing him lullabies, showing him picture books, coloring for him, telling him stories. Thus was the twig bent.
There’s only one thing wrong with Andy’s spectacular commercial success. It turns to ashes in his mind because he craves recognition as a true artist. He wants the power and adulation of shows in Madison Avenue galleries, purchases by blue-blood collectors, exhibits in major museums, reviews in highbrow periodicals. He prowls the galleries, trying to unravel the secrets of painters who have won access to their envied walls. He paints and draws constantly, fills stacks of sketchbooks, shows his work to dealers, but no breakthrough.
Andy, who is prone to hero worship, at this time has three main crushes: Cecil Beaton, Jean Cocteau, and Truman Capote—all gay, all artists, all dandies. They are his role models. Since Truman is the most accessible, Andy, like a lovelorn suitor, stands for hours outside his door. Truman’s mother has to push him aside when she goes out. Andy begins writing daily letters to Truman. He writes him for a year, until in 1951 the two meet at an art gallery and begin a long history of loving and teasing. Andy does fifteen drawings in ink to illustrate a collection of Truman’s short stories. In the summer of 1952 these drawings earn Andy his first solo exhibit, at the Hugo Gallery. That show is Andy’s initial small step upward from commercial art into the treacherous, elite world of Art.
Andy is increasingly frustrated by his appearance. Every day there is a new pimple on his reddish, round nose. He is getting bald. To remedy this, Andy begins with a small hairpiece. The toupee evolves into a modest-size wig. The wig makes Andy, a Leo, look like a stuffed lion. That is a fair counterpoint to Salvador Dali, the most headlined of contemporary painters, a Taurus, who impersonates a mad Spanish bull. But even with a lion’s mane on his head, Andy cannot compete with Dali’s mustache, which spikes upward to his eyeballs. He studies the master’s technique—not so much his painting style but rather his creation of a persona.
Julia and Andy both make charming sketches of the twenty-five cats in the household, all named Sam except for the one named Blue. Some wear big hats, others are decorated with feathers, all are delightful. Two little companion volumes are published, 25 Cats by Andy Warhol, Holy Cats by Andy Warhol’s Mother. They win a prize.
In 1956, twenty-eight-year-old Andy makes a trip around the world with Charles Lisanby, a television set designer. Andy is fascinated by Charles, for he knows Hollywood stars, in particular James Dean. Their trip is the equivalent of a proper debutante’s grand tour. Andy visits the museums and monuments of the Old World. Because of tensions in the Suez area, he must bypass Egypt. He is disappointed because he envisioned coming face to face with the Sphinx.
(The Sphinx in Giza, the one he misses, has the head of a man—a pharaoh—and the body of a lion. But in Greek mythology the creature is a winged monster with the head of a woman and the body of a lion, which destroys all who cannot answer its riddle. What a lost opportunity for a young man whose life will be one prolonged riddle and whose sex will epitomize ambiguity. Later, Truman Capote declares that Andy is a sphinx without a riddle.)
In India and Japan, Andy is influenced by the Eastern religions. An aura of Zen envelops him. Passivity versus action, enlightenment by experience and by intuitive insight—these concepts direct him more sharply toward paradox and more firmly away from logic.
The same year, a drawing of Andy’s is included in a Museum of Modern Art exhibit of famous people’s slippers rendered by commercial artists. Andy is absolutely thrilled to have his work displayed under the same roof as paintings by Picasso, Braque, Mondrian, Dali.
By the end of the 1950s, Andy is the most highly regarded and paid commercial artist in New York. He collects award after award for his designs. Women’s Wear Daily calls him “the Leonardo of the shoe.” When Andy is included among advertising artists in a directory of “1,000 Names in New York and Where to Drop Them,” his phone rings nonstop.
At the top of his profession, earning top dollars, he is ready to move on. Up to now he has used his undeniable and unique talent to huckster the products of others. From this point, he will concentrate on his primary product: himself.
*Quoted by Robert D. Tomsho, Pittsburger magazine, May 1980.
ISABELLE’S CHILDHOOD
If I were looking for a childhood the exact opposite of Andy’s, I would choose my own. He is poor; I am rich. His family is confined to a narrow ethnic ghetto; mine moves about freely in privileged circles. Andy spends his entire life trying to make up for his childhood; I can’t wait to escape my upbringing. He is totally enveloped by the caresses of an adoring mother; I pine for a loving touch from my austere father.
I am born—left foot first—in the town of Grenoble in southeastern France in 1935. At the age of four, I run away from home, accompanied by my four-year-old cousin, Beatrix Didier. I convince her to walk with me to Paris, a mere five hundred miles away, where she can have her hair curled like mine. We are caught by our parents four hundred feet from home, as we are about to enter the highway.
Our home in summer is La Gaillarde, an extraordinary, one-story, chalk-white modem mansion in the classic style, with large terraces facing the Mediterranean Sea. My paternal grandfather, Marcel Collin Dufresne, designed and built it on twelve miles of coast. The mansion rises amid allées of mimosa and oleander. The earth is sprinkled with mica rocks, which tease me with their glitter until I collect them. At night I hear the sounds of enamored cicadas.
Next to our property is an inn called Les Cigales. Our motorized fisherman’s boat is called La Marotte, its name painted on its side in blue and gray. Our Dalmatian dog is Taillot. Theo, the caretaker of the villa, runs the boat for us. We have a harbor with a boathouse, where we store the boat in winter.
There is a total of sixteen mouths to feed every day for the months of June, July, August, and September: my mother, father, brother, two sisters, paternal grandfather and grandmother; Lucienne, a faithful servant; Monique Didier, my father’s sister; Noel Didier, her husband, and their three children; Alice Duron, my father’s widowed sister, and her son, Jean.
My grandfather is nicknamed Le Beau Marcel. He is a magnificent man, with seductive, porcelain-blue eyes, a majestic, tan, Roman-emperor face. He is always dressed impeccably in a three-piece white linen suit. I believe he never worked a day in his life. We are told that at one time he was an ambassador. Could his tan cover up some gypsy blood, which I inherited? He has a passion for motorized caravans. He has built many, according to his own design. One of them unfolds and rises two stories. Another is made to fly, somewhat tentatively. His very first caravan was pulled by horses in the style of Bohemian caravans; at stops along the way, Grandfather’s coachman pulled on white gloves so that the horse’s sweat would not stain the Sèvres cup in which he served coffee out of a massive, engraved Louis XV silver pot.
My grandmother, Edith Collin Dufresne, is a holy woman. She goes to mass every morning at six o’clock and is back in time to serve her husband breakfast in bed at eight.
My brother, Yves, is eight years old, my sister, Catherine, is seven, and I am five. We look up to our cousin Jean, who is fifteen. He has a girlfriend, whom he meets in secret at sunset in the woods behind the mansion. We three sneak out with my grandfather’s binoculars, and sitting on the white wooden pole that has to be raised to permit entry of my grandfather’s Hispano-Suiza, we inspect the jungle, trying to follow the amorous motions of our Tarzan.
