by Ultra Violet
Tiger Morse, an almost Superstar who designed clothes for us, was born into a conservative family, but overnight dyed her hair green, pasted on lashes that lit up, and went all-electric. She used to boast, “I’m living proof that speed does not kill.” Not so. She died of an overdose of speed in 1972. I found out later that it was her father, a prominent architect, who had brought out of Germany the Max Jacobson who became the notorious Dr. Feelgood. Dr. Jacobson started the fourteen-year-old Tiger, along with hundreds of other patients, on powerful amphetamines. In 1979 his professional license was revoked.
Dancer Freddy Herko went as far as advertising in the Village Voice that he was available for a “suicide performance.” He danced around rooftops and balanced perilously close to the edge until the audience begged him not to go over. His final pirouette took him through an open window.
Ondine said of his death, “He was the world’s greatest dancer, the total star, dealing with space and time and the avant-garde audience. He wanted to fly. He died in flight, making a terrible commitment to his art. Warhol got from Herko and Herko gave Andy a sense of completion. He died as he wanted to all of his life.”
Mickey Ruskin, the art-collecting impresario of Max’s Kansas City, did not appear to be on drugs in the wild years, but some say he was. Later addicted to cocaine, he suffered a fatal heart attack on May 15, 1984.
Ingrid Superstar, whose real name was Ingrid von Scherven, retired to Kingston, New York, ballooned up to nearly two hundred pounds, floated in and out of prostitution and drug dealing, and was at one point judged mentally disabled. On December 7, 1986, she went out to buy a pack of cigarettes and a newspaper, leaving her fur coat in the closet and her false teeth in the sink. She was never seen again.
Robert Scull, who was once upon a time, with his wife, Ethel, the largest collector of Pop Art, died on January 1, 1986, of diabetes complicated by his abuse of cocaine, LSD, Quaaludes, hashish, and opium.
Barbara and Marco St. John were both so handsome that Viva had a crush first on one, then on the other. He was an actor with Joseph Papp’s Shakespearean troupe; they both hung around with the Warhol crowd. Marco was very apologetic when their little son stepped all over Andy’s painting on the floor of the Factory. Andy’s comment: “He made them more valuable.” Barbara, beaten up and with multiple gunshot wounds, was found dead by their four-year-old-son on June 16, 1971, in their apartment on Perry Street in Greenwich Village. Marco said they were both clean of drugs by then. The murderer was never found.
Taxi, a pre-Superstar, even before Ingrid, was Andy’s favorite in the late 1950s. Drugs took her before she could prove her stardom.
Andrea Wips Feldman, the sweet little lamb, twenty-four years old, plummeted from a skyscraper window on August 8, 1972, clutching her Bible and crucifix wrapped in a rosary and leaving a note for all the people she loved: “I am going for the big time. I hit the jackpot.”
Sam Wagstaff, a friend of Andy’s who often went to concerts with us, died of complications of AIDS.
Jon Jay Gould, a handsome, black-haired young executive with Paramount, met Andy in 1981. They were together on and off until Andy’s death. Stricken by an extended illness at thirty-three, he died on September 17, 1986, in Los Angeles. Everyone I spoke to mentioned AIDS. His death certificate lists cause of death as cryptococcal meningitis and pneumonia plus salmonella bacteremia.
Tom Baker, my starring partner in I a Man, received five hundred dollars from his mother three days before his birthday in 1982. He planned to clean up his act, but in a last celebration bought a speedball, a mixture of coke and heroin, in a shooting gallery in a burned-out Lower East Side building, the kind of end-of-the-line place where you sit in a broken-down chair, rest your arm on a dirty table, and get a shot from a secondhand needle. On September 2, his birthday, he died of drug poisoning in the arms of friends.
Charles Ludlam, cofounder of the Ridiculous Theatrical Company, which produced Conquest of the Universe, in which I starred with Ondine, died on May 28, 1987, of pneumonia brought on by AIDS.
Tinkerbelle, another sixties Warholette, became a regular contributor to Interview. I ran into her in 1985 and barely recognized her. She told me the devil was after her. Her once twinkling, sky-blue eyes were narrow and dim. She seemed burned out. On January 22, 1986, she jumped to her death from a fifth-floor window.
Sandy Marsh, Edie’s close friend, had too much money and too much time on her hands, so at 7 a.m. on June 3, 1987 she opened a 28th floor window of her apartment on West 79th Street, facing Central Park, and jumped feet first. No one, not her husband, her children, her maid, her cook, her nanny, could help her find happiness. A regular visitor to the Factory and a pal of Edie’s, she was a drug user for 20 years. In 1969, clutching her Sufi talisman, she took an overdose of pills and was rescued, but only for a time.
Jim Morrison, rock singer and composer for The Doors, was so sexy that all the women at the Factory threw themselves at him. In Los Angeles with Andy in 1967, I saw him swallow three downers with each of the seven screwdrivers he drank. By the end of the evening he switched to poisonous belladonna, a powerful drug that dilated his pupils and put his mind in a trance. His heart gave out on July 31, 1971, in Paris.
Valerie Solanas, crazed would-be assassin, died on April 26, 1988.
Divine, born Harris Glenn Millstead, the three-hundred-pound character actor/actress and impersonator, died on March 6, 1988. He was so determined to achieve fame that along the way he ate dog excrement in the film Pink Flamingos. He finally won national recognition for his two roles in John Waters’s film Hairspray.
I could write pages of obituaries for the many I saw depart. I wish I could have a reunion of the dead by drugs, a kind of ghostly press conference. I wish they could come back to tell the kids of today, “Don’t do it. It’s not worth it.” I wish they could speak of their regret over their lost lives.
I would like this book to tell the living:
May the sour sowing
of our deadly reaping
be for our learning.
ANDY’S END
In 1984 Andy is operating a General Motors of art. He presides as chief executive officer at his headquarters, a five-story block-through building at 22 East 33rd Street, decorated by Fred Hughes in resplendent corporate style. One division of Andy Warhol Enterprises endorses commercial products—Pontiac cars, Absolut vodka, electronics, wine, magazines, Drexel Burnham Lambert financial services. Another division issues prints in such volume that every wall in America is in danger of being Warholed. There is talk of franchising a chain of restaurants—the Andymat.
Still another division publishes the flourishing Interview magazine, which has attained a circulation of 100,000 copies a month and a gross income in the neighborhood of $2 million a year. The portrait business is going strong, and at the rate of $25,000 for a silk-screened blow-up of a Polaroid and $15,000 for a second copy, it earns somewhere between $2.5 and $3.5 million a year. In addition, there’s the income from theater and video distribution of Andy’s earlier films and $10,000 for each of his personal appearances on film or TV.
His real-estate holdings include a twenty-acre estate at Montauk, at the eastern end of Long Island, forty acres near Carbondale, Colorado, a building at 57 Great Jones Street in Greenwich Village, his former town house on Lexington Avenue, and his current town house, at 57 East 66th Street, stuffed to the walls and the roof with his compulsively collected treasures and trash to rival Hearst’s vast accumulation at San Simeon: furniture, art, gold, antiques, jewelry, textiles, rugs, costly flotsam and expensive jetsam—anything that can be bid on at an auction gallery and kept out of the hands of a rival collector.
On December 19, 1986, Andy is busy spending those dollars when I run into him at the Doyle auction gallery on East Eighty-seventh Street. I am shocked at the death mask he is wearing. He is surrounded by a small army of attendants and bodyguards. He is examining African artifacts, medieval religious sculptures, and the like. His crew of
young boys is loading the trunk of a waiting car with old-fashioned doctors’ scales, statuettes, bronzes, and carved wood figures. Although I have not seen Andy for a year, we act as if we’d met only that morning. No fuss. No what-a-long-time or where-have-you-been? I know that Andy likes the coolness of a low-key encounter. I say, “I see you’re buying by the dozens.”
“Yes, everything’s so cheap. And I get fifty percent off. These are Christmas gifts.”
Andy snaps a picture of me, and when he’s finished, he asks, “Oh, can I take your picture? You’re so beautiful.”
Andy has not changed. Before I can say a word either way, the picture has been taken. And he’s still flattering. And his camera is still an integral part of his clothing. Every morning he slings the camera on his shoulder the way a cowboy slings on his pistols. Then he slips his cassette recorder into his pocket, the way a Madison Avenue executive places a handkerchief in his upper jacket pocket. Now he is fully dressed.
I ask Andy, “What telephone long-distance company are you using?”
There is a pause before he answers. There is always a slight hesitation before the words come out. I’ve so often felt that Andy is a ventriloquist, who only starts to speak after you’ve put a coin in his slot. But maybe now he’s a little surprised by my question. He says, “I don’t know. Call and ask Vincent. Why do you ask?”
“I’m promoting U.S. Sprint.”
“Oh.”
His skin is tight. I wonder how many face-lifts he has had by now and how much silicone he has had injected into incipient lines and wrinkles. It is rumored that he had his first lift when he was in the hospital recovering from the assassination attempt.
“Is your beauty secret still Buf-Puf?” I ask.
Andy once told me that he rubbed his face with Buf-Puf until it bled. It caused a kind of natural peeling and kept his circulation going. I tried it and it tore my skin.
“How is your health?” I ask. He shrugs and takes from his pocket a handful of multifaceted quartz crystals and invites me to pick one. I take a whitish, pinkish stone and put it in my purse.
“I wear crystals all over my body,” he says. Crystals have returned to vogue as healing agents. My mind flashes back to his mother’s Old World faith in the protective Urim she sewed into her small son’s clothes.
“Show me your tongue,” I order. He clamps his jaws tight. “Come on, show me your tongue, like in the bad old days.” He manages a vague smile but does not open his mouth.
I have read in a gossip column that Liberace and Andy recently lunched together. It is widely whispered on the grapevine that Liberace is dying of AIDS. (He dies two months later.) Now I say to Andy, “I hope you didn’t French-kiss Liberace at lunch.”
He pretends he doesn’t hear me and leads his entourage down another aisle of tightly packed furniture and bibelots. He examines various items and puts them aside to buy. I can see that this is going to be a one-sided conversation. I say, “You know, I saw you at the Church of the Heavenly Rest last Thanksgiving. I was picking up lunches for some bedridden Russian people. You were clearing tables.”
In recent years, Andy is reported to spend many hours each week distributing food at the Church of the Heavenly Rest at Fifth Avenue and Ninetieth Street. When I saw him there I wondered if one of his tasks is to ladle out soup from the caldrons that look like oversized cans. It would be appropriate. I noticed that he was scanning the room with quick awareness. When a man carrying a black bag, who could be a member of a television crew, entered, Andy’s eyes followed him. At the time, I shook off my ugly suspicions. Now I reject them again. I ask Andy, “Isn’t it heartbreaking to see all those homeless and loveless people?”
“I don’t know about love.” He lifts up a four-foot-tall African pelican or seagull carved in gray wood. “Ooh, I love that.”
“You do know about love.”
His face tightens as he assembles objects exactly as he paints—in multiples. Andy even does his collecting in multiples. I look at the pelican-seagull and shiver, for much of African art seems to me to have a mortuary quality.
This is our last encounter in the flesh.
On Sunday, February 22, 1987, I am asleep in my bedroom. A dream-vision seizes me. Andy and I are in a setting where the color is reminiscent of the background in a painting by Rembrandt or Van Dyck: shades of moving grays, sliding spindle-tree charcoals, Venetian liquid amber browns, Siena terra-cotta, and subdued eggshell. The scene moves slowly in the tenebrous, Macbethian, misty air, evoking the sorcerers of Salem or Dante’s Inferno. Amadeus’s Requiem echoes in the distance. A light smoke, as in a special effect for a motion picture backdrop, enfumes us. Myriad amorphous shapes surround us.
Andy and I pick our way among a never-ending collection of knee-high objects. The sculptures, ornaments, boxes, crystals, weird birds multiply as we walk. They multiply in the way Andy himself uses multiplication and duplication in his art process. In their infinity, they are too numerous to count.
I say to Andy, “When you go, you take only yourself. The shroud has no pocket.”
Andy seems hesitant, not knowing which objects to choose. He has an ethereal quality. The atmosphere on the tremulous ground around us swirls in constant slow motion. A whirling wind whistles and wails. We faintly feel the rotation of the earth. Above us the air is very still.
We are between matter and spirit, between life and non-life. The architecture where we stand is grandiose, on the scale of a cathedral. A vaulted ceiling of whitish arched stone fades into the twilight of the sky. A mood of mild suspense suggests that a mystery is in progress. There is no threat. It is a place of transient waiting. It is the last magic movie, a finite place. Yet, if you look out, it is infinite. Andy is becoming invisible.
I wake up and look at the bedside clock. It is 5 A.M. I am shivering under my blankets. I am awake, yet not fully awake. I feel strangely peaceful, not at all apprehensive. The shivering stops. My body returns to its normal warmth. Sleep overtakes me. When I awaken in the morning, the dream has retreated. I know it was about Andy, but I can’t summon it back.
A little later, I am in my kitchen, making breakfast. The radio is tuned to a news program. I hear Andy’s name. The announcer says that Andy Warhol is dead. He suffered heart failure at 5:30 A.M. at New York Hospital—Cornell Medical Center on East Sixty-eighth Street in Manhattan. He was pronounced clinically dead at 6:31 A.M. I drop into the nearest chair. I cannot believe it. The announcer is launched on a quick review of Andy’s career. There is no way Andy can be dead. He is too alive. Despite his death-mask look and his unearthly pallor, he is more alive than anyone I have ever known.
I switch stations. The news of his death is all over the dial. My phone rings. A dealer asks, “Do you want to sell your Marilyn Monroe portrait?” Poor Andy’s body is not yet cold, but his paintings are hot. At first I am furious that anyone can be so crass. Then I remember that Andy did his first painting of Marilyn just hours after her death. “Timing is all,” he said then.
I disconnect my phone, to meditate on Andy. My dream of the night before comes vividly back to me. Once again, I am walking with Andy in the tenebrous air among the multiplying objects, and now I know what the mystery was that enveloped me in the night—the earthly body of Andy Warhol was passing into the shades beyond the spectrum of light.
I pull a coat around me and walk out onto my terrace and recall the first time Andy stood there with me. I had sent him a postcard of the Guggenheim Museum, Frank Lloyd Wright’s chambered nautilus in concrete, reviled when it went up but now, nearly thirty years later, mightily defended against additions and alterations as a treasure to be left inviolate. On the card I circled in violet my bedroom window, which overlooks the rotunda of the museum, and marked in green the huge terrace where I now stand, gazing past the museum to a sweeping New York vista. Every year I mail a picture of the museum, with my windows circled, as my Christmas card.
Andy did not believe I really commanded such a splendid view. “Come a
nd see,” I said.
We went up to the top floor in the elevator, walked up a flight of stairs, stepped outdoors onto the huge terrace. Andy looked, clicked his Polaroid ten times to capture the entire panorama of Manhattan, from the Empire State Building to the Central Park reservoir shimmering in its frame of green to the George Washington Bridge swooping gracefully toward the Jersey shore and the hills in the far distance. He spoke just one word: “Gee.”
That was not enough for me. I consider my home an extension of myself. I have had to fight for it through endless municipal mazes and half the law courts in New York when my ownership was threatened. I needed a more enthusiastic response from Andy.
“Isn’t it great?” I demanded.
Andy clicked again, leaned over the parapet to look down into the street, made one more click at the Empire State Building, and finally gave his blessing. “Fabulous, just fabulous! We’ll have to shoot a movie here.”
Now some other words of Andy’s ring randomly in my ears. “I am the media’s medium.” “There is no evil; good is whatever makes it to the press.” “Record everything.” “Polaroid everything.” I see the glitter of the all-silver Factory the first day I walked in, the nightly pandemonium at the Dom, an entire wall of lipsticked Marilyns smiling at me.
I still can’t grasp the idea that Andy is gone. It is several days before I can piece together the story of what happened.
On Friday, February 20, 1987, Andy entered New York Hospital for gallbladder surgery. The surgery was performed the next day and was successful. But that night, almost at morning, at the very hour of his birth, Andy died in his sleep. Again I recall the line from the Bible: “And the light shineth in the darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not.”
At the moment of his death, was his private duty nurse awake, asleep, absent? There was no other witness.
