Famous for 15 Minutes

by Ultra Violet

  I am aghast. Where was his entourage of helpers, the crowd of acolytes and assistants that always surrounds him? Alone—how terrible. How unlike him! Yet how inevitable, for when a man is affianced to his tape recorder and married to his camera and has exiled love from his life as beyond his understanding, how can he expect to have a living, loving human being sit at his bedside around the clock? His mother, probably the only person who would have done this for him, is long gone. His brothers are in Pittsburgh.

  Without a wife, without a son, a daughter, a lover of longtime devotion, or even a close, caring friend who is ready to buttonhole the doctors and nag the nurses and ask the questions that urgently need answers, how is a patient to survive the bureaucratic disorder of today’s big-city hospitals?

  What’s more, when Andy was shot in 1968 a bullet tore through seven organs, making him a trauma victim for life. When, nineteen years later, Andy needed gallbladder surgery, a detailed history of his long-standing trauma should have been affixed to his record. Ten months after Andy’s death, the assistant director of the Office of Health Care Services of the State Health Department cited lapses in Andy’s medical care, specifically mentioning an incomplete physical examination and an inadequate medical history.

  The current official version of his death places the blame on the nurse, subsequently dismissed, who failed to monitor his fluid intake and output. The records show an intravenous input of 5,250 cc of fluid. The documented output lists only 915 cc. Not until the malpractice suit brought by his estate against the hospital is tried or settled will more information be revealed.

  Meantime, my imagination leaps into action. Is all this a cover story, and do we have a Mozart-Salieri type plot? Did a jealous artist want Andy out of the way, permanently deposed from the pinnacle of the American art establishment? An intriguing idea. Will we ever know?

  There have been whispers of AIDS, rumors that Warhol was a regular patient at one of the city’s AIDS clinics. When I think back over the freewheeling drug scene of the sixties, the used and reused needles jabbed into parades of buttocks and arms at the Factory, the Dom, at parties and discos, I am amazed that anyone has survived that era. But to my knowledge Andy did not inject drugs. He was happy popping his pills.

  AIDS has claimed several of his reputed lovers from the early period, but it is impossible to know when their contact with Andy began and ended. He was not promiscuous. Ondine always complained that Andy only watched orgies, never joined them. Later, I’d like to believe, he stayed faithful to his true loves, his tape recorder and his camera. AIDS seems unlikely.

  But I am ready for a surprise of any kind. Andy loved surprises, and next year or twenty years from now, a revelation, a memoir, a deathbed confession may cause all of us to exclaim, “Oh, so that’s what happened! We should have known!”

  Andy never lets go, for now we have a strange bit of irony. My mind goes back to teatime in 1974. Dali shows me a minuscule landscape on the outer surface of a metal ring about half an inch wide and a half inch in diameter. He has removed this metal band from a plastic ballpoint pen and soaked it for several days in his own urine. The urine oxidizes a pattern of greenish, reddish blotches on the band, which suggest a vivid outdoor scene.

  Andy attends one of the viewings of the Piss Pen. The idea is bizarre enough to attract him. He has no notion that urine has been used since time immemorial—to clean an adder’s bite in the wilderness, as a potion to enslave a lover, to clear a sty from the rim of the eye.

  Andy must find out now if his penis can produce art as marketable as his hand. Using his own urine (or an assistant’s—who is ever to know?), he leaks it over a canvas previously covered with copper paint. What he gets resembles a large Polaroid picture in the making, a bad Polaroid that stops before the Rorschach-like orange and green blobs resolve into a finished image. He calls the collection of murky images Oxidation Paintings and exhibits them at galleries in Paris and Zurich and at Documenta Seven in Kassel, West Germany, three cities presumably receptive to such experimentation, for they have all provided public urinals for their male citizenry.

  To me, the paintings represent the final decay of established values. I visualize Sotheby’s main auction room packed with future Warhol idolaters, hands rising to drive ever upward the prices of these men’s room masterpieces. But how will the experts, the lawyers, the quarrelsome collectors authenticate the work unless they release the sniffing dogs?

  Such jokes are easy, until you realize that possibly something as commonplace as failure to pass that humble waste fluid may have cost the wily wizard his life. What an absurd and humiliating end for anyone; how particularly distressing for the silvery sorcerer, who waved his magic wand, spoke his incantatory words, and created art, music, books, movies, photographs, style, excitement, scandal, chaos, fun, decadence, and his most imaginative and enduring work of art: Andy Warhol.

  MASS

  St. Patrick’s Cathedral, April 1, 1987: the memorial service for Andy continues. Father Anthony Dalla Villa reads from the Mass for the Dead: “‘Lord God, Almighty Father, you have made the cross for us a sign of strength and marked us as yours in the sacrament of the resurrection. Now that you have freed our brother Andy Warhol from this mortal life, make him one with your saints in heaven. We ask this through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, forever and ever.’”

  We reply, “Amen.”

  I never thought I would see the day when I would say in hearty invocation an Amen for Andy.

  A musical interlude follows, “Louange à l’lmmortalité de Jésus,” “Praise to the Immortality of Jesus,” by Olivier Messiaen. What a perfect choice! We are here to pray for the immortality of Andy. And it happens that Messiaen is my favorite modern composer. So impressed was I by his spirituality when I met him some years back that I have collected recordings of his entire musical works. Now I think back to a conversation we once had about Zion National Park in Utah, which the composer had just visited. I remember vividly that he commented on the wondrous colors, the pink, white, mauve, red, black cliffs, the green trees and the limpid river. He saw the park as a symbol of paradise, bearing in mind that Mount Zion is synonymous with the Celestial Jerusalem.

  A woman walks up the steps to the lectern to read from the Book of Wisdom. I have to rub my eyes to believe what I see. The program identifies the reader as Brigid Berlin. Is this poised, lovely woman our Brigid Polk, with her exposed, protuberant breasts and her fat folder of drugs?

  She reads: “‘But the souls of the just are in God’s hand and torment shall not touch them. In the eyes of foolish men they seemed to be dead; their departure was reckoned as defeat, and their going from us as disaster. But they are at peace, for though in the sight of men they may be punished, they have a sure hope of immortality; and after a little chastisement they will receive great blessings, because God has tested them and found them worthy to be his … grace and mercy shall be theirs.’”

  The words are deeply comforting to me, and so is the sight of Brigid, reborn, living proof of God’s mercy.

  Now art critic John Richardson speaks. He says, “I’d like to recall a side of Andy’s character that he hid from all but closest friends: his spiritual side.…”

  Is he serious? But what can you say at St. Patrick’s? You have to glorify the dead. Is it possible that Andy changed?

  I think of his last work, The Last Supper, painted exclusively in red, as if sealed in Andy’s blood, his final legacy. What was its meaning; was it serious or a mockery? Andy told a friend of mine, Pierre Restany, France’s foremost art critic, “I am serious about this painting.” That was in Milan in 1986, while they were both standing in front of Andy’s interpretation of Leonardo’s Last Supper, which was exhibited a few blocks away from the original. How uncanny, I think, that he crowned his commercial career in 1959 with the title “the Leonardo of the shoe.”

  I remember that Dali did a stupendous Last Supper, now in the National
Gallery in Washington, at the head of the monumental steps leading to the second floor. Marisol did another Last Supper in wood, twenty feet long, now on view at the Metropolitan Museum in New York.

  Why does Andy’s Last Supper contain two Jesus figures? Why are some of the images upside down? Is it really worth looking high and low for meaning?

  Yoko Ono, dressed all in black, wearing very high heels, semidark glasses, and long hair, steps to the microphone. She says, “So many people’s lives were touched by Andy in a very personal way.…”

  That certainly applies to me. He turned my life downside up. He had a magical, omnipresent quality. To me, he was a personification of the sixties, as difficult to explain as the period itself, conveying what is scary, true, tasteless, ephemeral, and everlasting. His own life was a “state of pop art.” Now his death is the final burial of the dark side of the sixties. The load of the sixties is lifted up off my shoulders. I feel free.

  All of a sudden I feel a rush of love for Andy, that he cared enough about his time and work, which was our time and work too, to keep those relentlessly unedited, unrehearsed, uncropped records of a time and place, and that he left us his countless films, paintings, books, photos, tapes, collections.

  Nicholas Love, a good-looking young actor from Hollywood, another of the million friends of Andy, reads from Andy’s writings. He is the most moving of the speakers, for it is just like old Andy himself speaking: “When I die, I don’t want to leave any leftovers.… I like to disappear. People wouldn’t say, ‘He died today,’ they’d say, ‘He disappeared.’ But I do like the idea of people turning into dust or sand. And it would be very glamorous to be reincarnated as a giant big ring on Elizabeth Taylor’s finger.”

  The Bible I hold in my hand speaks of resurrection. Andy made up his own Bible as he went along; his Bible is not like mine. Nothing about Andy is like anyone else, because Andy was and will always be the first real plastic man. Plastic, when it first became available, was always disguised as another material. In the sixties it became unashamedly plastic; it became real. If plastic is real, it follows that plastic people can also be real. Andy made up his mind to become the first real plastic man. It is not a put-on. It is authentic. It is the truth of Warhol.

  A plastic man is essentially a robot. He picks up on the robotization of the environment. He is exquisitely in tune with his times. He is pleased when someone describes his work as synthetic. Will Andy be the first robot to be admitted to heaven?

  At communion, there is a rush of people to the front of the cathedral. Claus von Bulow is at the head of the line. Mourners and sightseers—it is hard to tell them apart—jostle each other to get next to Don Johnson or two feet from Bianca Jagger. The music takes me back to my childhood convent. I see the chorus of nuns chanting, “She’s possessed, she’s possessed, she must be exorcised.” Well, their exorcism did not work. My sins multiplied and amplified with Warhol. It is only after Edie’s death and my own collapse and my reading of the Scripture that I am saved, saved, yes, saved by the grace of God alone.

  As if on cue, singer Latasha Spencer soars into “Amazing Grace.” Tears flow down my face. Each word of the traditional gospel song moves my soul:

  Amazing grace, how sweet the sound

  That saved a wretch like me.

  I once was lost, but now am found,

  Was blind, but now I see.

  Through many dangers, toils and snares,

  I have already come.

  ’Tis grace has brought me safe thus far,

  And grace will lead me home.

  Yes, I have gone through many dangers, toils, and snares. I have been brought safe, I feel, to tell this story. To tell about the psychological and sociological devastation, the errant activities, the public sex, the hedonism, the anything-goes films in which the performers were stoned on drugs. Then, to make it worse, we exposed our exploits before young students and encouraged them to get as stoned as our performers. Even though for me sexual immorality was but the despairing side of the search for emotional security, I have to acknowledge that I participated in a movement that helped lay the basis for the explosion of hardcore pornography, drug pestilence, and the AIDS plague. Most of us have paid a heavy price, some with our lives, some with our health, others with years squandered. I feel I was luckier than most, for in the seventies, when death brushed me, I repented and found my way to inner peace.

  Now a feeling of release comes over me. My long-lost brother Andy rests in peace. Perhaps at this very moment he is telling St. Peter about it all. St. Peter, of course, will not believe him. He will not believe a word Andy says. Because it is unbelievable. So were our lives. So were those sixties. Not just unbelievable—unthinkable. But it did happen, all of it. I am so utterly relieved now to seal the book of my life’s past and to look at tomorrow marching forward on the feet of little children.

  I watch the crowd empty the cathedral. It is a crowd of all kinds of people, all types. The Warhola clan is there, recognizable by their noses, reddish, bumpy, protuberant, and their non-New York clothes: his oldest brother, Paul Warhola, with his wife, Ann, and six of their seven children: Martin, Madalen, James, Mary Lou, Eva, and Paul; his middle brother, John, with his wife, Marj, and their three children: Don, Marc, and Jeff; five first cousins: Jean King, Julia Zavacky, John Zavacky, Michael Warhola, and Emy Passarelli; and two second cousins, Julie Rekich and Catherine Warhola. I see neatly dressed secretaries, little old ladies, acned teenagers, Madison Avenue executives, hookers, bellboys, a policeman, a baby in his mother’s arms, more gays than I’ve ever seen under one Gothic roof. Everyone looks at everyone. As in the sixties, the people are still it. In Andy’s phrase, “They came to see who came.”

  The names are all here.

  From the early Factory days, I spot Viva, dressed as the Veuve Joyeuse, in black suit, black veil à la Jackie Kennedy for Jack’s funeral, black hat with a bow the size of helicopter wings; Gerard Malanga in a T-shirt silk-screened with Andy’s face; Baby Jane Holzer with flying hair and aviator sunglasses; Billy Name; Paul Morrissey, looking very distinguished, who stood all through the service.

  The artists include Roy Lichtenstein, Claes Oldenburg, Marisol, Jean Michel Basquiat, Richard Serra, Leroy Neiman, Jamie Wyeth, David Hockney, Julian Schnabel, Keith Haring, dealer Leo Castelli.

  Among the writers are Tom Wolfe, Terry Southern, Jesse Kornbluth, Fran Lebowitz, George Plimpton, Taki, Brendan Gill, Bob Colacello.

  The wealthy socialites include Anne Bass, D.D. Ryan, Ahmet Ertegun, Lynn Wyatt, Christophe and Dominique de Menil, Consuelo Crespi, Philippe Niarchos, Sao Schlumberger.

  From fashion come Mary McFadden, Calvin Klein, Diane von Furstenberg, Halston, Beverly Johnson, Stephen Sprouse, Giorgio Sant’Angelo, Carolina Herrera.

  Music is represented by Bianca Jagger, Grace Jones, Yoko Ono, Lou Reed, John Cale, Ric Ocasek.

  Hollywood, Broadway, and TV have sent a large contingent: Liza Minnelli, Richard Gere, Don Johnson, Irene Worth, Swifty Lazar, Sylvia Miles, Peter Allen, Patti D’Arbanville, Eric Anderson.

  Photographers: Francesco Scavullo, Robert Mapplethorpe.

  Designers and architects: Andree Putman, Philip Johnson.

  Also: Timothy Leary, Dianne Brill, Anita Sarko, Rudolf, Nell Campbell, Ann Magnuson, Regine, Paloma Picasso, Henry Geldzahler, Steve Rubell, Susan Blond, Jerome Zipkin, John Waters, Lou Christie, Johnny Dynel, Vivienne Westwood, Debbie Harry. More, many more.

  As I cross the vestibule, the photographers’ flashes await us. It’s just like a museum opening. The show must go on. Singer Grace Jones poses, smiling. All heads turn for Raquel Welch.

  Outside, the vox pop of the street and the bright colors are all about Warhol: the yellow taxicabs with their horns honking, the red and green traffic lights, the beautifully made up women, the blue sky, the walking-talking people, the flashbulbs popping, the laughter, the blue jeans, the henna-dyed hair, the lettering above the storefronts, the silk-screened photos on the magazines and the trademarks
in the newspapers under the arms of hurrying people, the shopping cart ladies rolling their plastic bags, the radio blasting out of the black Cadillac, the wigged mannequins in the store windows, the pink flowers of the street vendors, a dirty truck on the side street carrying boxes of Mott’s apple juice and Brillo, the dark sunglasses, people taking pictures of people, the sexy kids, the dollar bill exchanged at the corner for a hot dog, people’s feet walking the pavement as in a dance diagram, almost the same diagrams Andy painted way back in 1961 in Fox Trot and in 1962 in Tango, two of his earliest Pop paintings, the two gays holding hands, the big red Marilyn Monroe lips of the Kiss ad for a radio station on the side of a bus.

  Stuart Pivar, a collector and a longtime friend of Andy’s, asks me, “Are you coming to Steve Rubell’s new disco?”

  “Yes, I am.”

  Four hundred people have been invited to a luncheon at the former Billy Rose Diamond Horseshoe nightclub on West Forty-sixth Street.

  I hop into Stuart’s limousine. Off to the last Warhol party.

  POSTMORTEM: THE KINGDOM OF KITSCH

  Andy collected through all the stages and phases of his life. There were the awards as a commercial artist in the early days, the Pop Art of the Factory years, always press clippings, and, compulsively, art, artifacts, trash, treasures, the detritus of all the centuries of history.

  In the 1960s, on our way to the movies, Andy and I often stopped in junk stores, where he bought plastic Art Deco bracelets, rings and brooches and Bakelite bibelots. Still, I hardly suspected the full dimension and passion of his collecting.

  After Andy’s death, I visit and photcgraph his 1911 Georgian-style town house at 57 East 66th Street, where his possessions pile up to the chandeliers, objects of breathtaking beauty hoarded in tandem with rummage-sale discards.

  As I wander through the crammed corridors and gaze at the fantastic array of possessions he kept out of the hands of competing collectors, I try to reconstruct in my mind Andy’s days and nights in this house, more warehouse than home, loaded to the rafters with the spoils of the echoing past: