Andy Warhol (12 page)

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 Herko, 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 Paris 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.

It is worth asking oneself how many other American artists would have made headlines had they been shot. The
New York Post
informed its readers that “Andy Warhol Fights for Life,” on the assumption that its readers would know who was being talked about, and would have bought a copy of the paper to find out more. Of no other artist in America would this have been true. The
Post's
readers would have known that he was the guy who painted
Campbell's Soup Cans.
Even if he had given up painting, he remained an artist in the public mind. The fact that he now
made movies instead of paintings meant that he was an artist who made movies. He had expanded the concept of the artist as someone who no longer limited his product to one particular medium. There would have been no other American artist of whom something like that was true. He really reinvented the concept of the artist as free to use whatever medium presented itself. Even the most creative artists lived conventional artists' lives in comparison with his. He persisted in his view that painting, in his own case at least, was a finished phase, without this meaning that he was not continuing to be an artist. He had simply found ways of continuing to be an artist who no longer painted. That did not mean that he felt comfortable about where he was, as Leo Castelli said about him. It just meant that feeling comfortable was no part of being an artist as he understood it.

In 1970, he discussed the idea of a traveling retrospective exhibition with the curator John Coplans of the Pasadena Museum of Art. It was to conclude its itinerary at the Whitney Museum of Art in spring 1971. He pointedly excluded from the retrospective what Donna di Salvo designated “Hand Painted Pop,” which included the work that he showed a decade earlier in the window at Bonwit's. He wanted it to contain series only, like the soup can and the grocery boxes, the portraits of icons and the images of disasters, and, finally, the
Flower
paintings. It was as though, after all, he was what he said he wanted to be—a machine: a machine that produced not single works, but only series. So what was he to do now? In a way, Warhol seems to have sensed that the 1960s
were over, and that the decade newly entered upon was a kind of blank. In fairness, it must be said that no one quite seemed to know what was next. Painting, as people liked to say, was in trouble. Eric Fischl, a student in 1970 at Cal Arts, recalls that the faculty looked to the students to say where art was headed and what it should be. Drawing, for example, was frowned upon, though there was no clear sense of what was to take its place. Fischl described the atmosphere in what was one of the most advanced art schools of the time: