Andy Warhol

Andy Warhol

A Biography

Wayne Koestenbaum

for Steven Marchetti

Contents

Introduction: Meet Andy Paperbag

Before

1. Traumas

2. Pussy Heaven

The Sixties

3. Screens

4. Torture

5. Rupture

After

6. Shadows

7. Endangered Species

SOURCES

About the Author

And when the crowd bent over him at the edge of the coffin, it saw a thin, pale, slightly green face, doubtless the very face of death, but so commonplace in its fixity that I wonder why Death, movie stars, touring­ virtuosi, queens in exile, and banished kings have a body, face, and hands. Their fascination is owing to something other than a human charm, and, without betraying the enthusiasm of the peasant women trying to catch a glimpse of her at the door of her train, Sarah Bernhardt could have appeared in the form of a small box of safety matches.

—JEAN GENET,
Funeral Rites

Introduction:
Meet Andy Paperbag

WORDS TROUBLED AND FAILED Andy Warhol,
although he wrote, with ghostly assistance, many books, and had a speaking style that everyone can recognize because it has become the voice of the United States—halting, empty, breathy, like Jackie's or Marilyn's, whose silent faces sealed his fame. Warhol distrusted language; he didn't understand how grammar unfolded episodically in linear time, rather than in one violent atemporal explosion. Like the rest of us, he advanced chronologically from birth to death; meanwhile, through pictures, he schemed to kill, tease, and rearrange time.

Early in his career, he experimented with the sobriquet “Andy Paperbag”—a reference to his tendency to carry drawings around in a paper bag. In imaginary conversations with him, as I try to reconstruct his life, I greet him as “Andy Paperbag”—Andy, my bag lady, a sack over his head, concealing the features he disliked; Andy, stuffing a world's refuse into tatty, woebegone containers.

Andy Paperbag didn't want to humble himself before words or time. As interpreter, I must make him submit to both. It is paradoxical to write a brief account of a person who pretended never to edit or condense. Every effort in his career as artist and whirlwind, as impresario and irritant, was to give the public too much, more than it wanted. Monumental, the pile of stuff—films, videos, paintings, photographs, prints, drawings, tapes, books—he left behind for his mad widows to sort and comprehend; archivists and scholars will devote decades to unpacking, preserving, analyzing, selling, and quarreling over the mess. He left us too many hypotheses, too many images. Only a maniac or a masochist will want to absorb them all. His world is claustrophobically jam-packed—with people, artworks, collectibles, junk—and so every visit to his sanctum hyperstimulates and exhausts the traveler: possibilities open to the point of electrical short circuit. Compared with Warhol, the other exhausting modern figures (Picasso, Stein, Proust) are manicured miniaturists.

Warhol's self—his paper bag—had an odd shape, color, and consistency. It was slippery, elastic. It liked confusing itself with other bags, female and male, elderly and infantile. It had an imperial sense of domain: anything it saw, it conquered—by copying. It ignored everybody else's puling, tame ideas of normal behavior.

The story of Andy Warhol is the story of his friends, surrogates, and associates. It would be easy to narrate his life without saying much about him at all, for he tried to fade into his entourage. He had a peculiar style of treating people as if they were amoebic emanations of his own watchfulness. In practice, his friends or collaborators often found themselves erased—zapped into nonbeing, crossed off the historical record, their signatures effaced, their experiences absorbed into Warhol's corpus. To work for Warhol was to lose one's name. Nathan Gluck, Warhol's most important assistant from the 1950s, often forged the boss's signature—when the artist's mother, Julia Warhola, wasn't in the mood to do it. Andy liked to entrust others with the task of embodying Andy.

Some members of Warhol's circle were erased; others were given animation, charisma, and a possible immortality by their connection with this near-albino fairy godmother, who sprinkled diamond dust on their foreheads. Other people were the messy experimental material whose din and plumage filled Warhol's empty canvas, screen, and page. He demanded collaborators; for every artistic or social act, he aggressively used other people as instruments and buffers. His work's major theme was interpersonal manipulation, sociability's modules at war; without accomplices to co-opt and hide behind, he would have had no art. Many of the people I've interviewed, who knew or worked with Warhol, seemed damaged or traumatized by the experience. Or so I surmise: they might have been damaged before Warhol got to them. But he had a way of casting light on the ruin—a way of making it spectacular, visible, audible. He didn't consciously harm people, but his presence became the proscenium for traumatic theater. Pain, in his vicinity, rarely proceeded linearly from aggressor to victim; trauma, without instigator, was simply the air everyone around him breathed. To borrow a religious vocabulary, often useful in Warhol's case: he understood that people were fallen. Standing beside him, they appeared more deeply fallen, even if his proximity, the legitimacy he lent, the spark he borrowed and returned, promised them the temporary paradise of renown.

Despite the loyalty, infatuation, and transference that Warhol's associates felt, few seem to have entirely loved him.
Love
may be a vague, rabble-rousing word, but it is impossible to weigh a life without using it. I first understood the loveless vacuum surrounding Andy—a blankness that was his creation, though he was also its victim—when I read some letters written to him in June 1968, while he was convalescing in the hospital from gunshots. (The letters are at the Andy Warhol Museum Archives in Pittsburgh, along with the rest of his papers.) If I had been critically wounded, I would have wanted warmer commiserations; it seems that even his friends imagined Andy to be a bank momentarily closed because of a flood, the account holders congregated grumpily outside. Andy had friends, and many said they loved Andy, but no one (with the possible exception of his mother) could look after him. (Here I fall into sentimentality—the kitschy land where Andy dwelled, despite his reputed coldness and his dread of the corny.) Stars are often isolated; as a consequence of his stardom, Warhol was cut off from reciprocity, like an autistic, or a pet in a box. Abjection suited him; he knew the weirdo's experience of being insulted, rebuffed, and disliked. Nothing overcame this trampled sensation, not even the worldly power he acquired. In fact, his trauma backlog grew. Although his rise to fame in the early 1960s as a Pop artist gave him a lasting notoriety that gratified him, the subsequent decline of his artistic reputation, and the instabilities of his private life, reinforced his fundamental experience of being hated, and ensured that he would leave the earth—prematurely, in 1987—with a conviction that he had never belonged to it.

One mother-lode Warhol managed to acquire was money. Zeal for money dominated his work habits and aesthetics, and led to criticisms that his art was morally compromised, corrupt. More than most artists, he made no secret of his hunger for lucre; procedurally and thematically, it drove his productions.

Art, for Warhol, was not just a means of making money. It was also a means of having sex. The word
sublimation
reductively describes such a practice—implying that sex is the real thing, and art the inferior by-product. Freud claimed that sublimation abetted civilization, and in this sense Warhol, sometimes considered a naive artist, surprises us by epitomizing civilization, since he channeled every impulse, sexual and otherwise, into work. But sublimation fails to explain his method. Warhol didn't sublimate sex; he simply extended its jurisdiction, allowing it to dominate every process and pastime. For Warhol, everything is sexual. Contemplation is sexual. Movement is sexual. Stillness is sexual. Looking and being looked at are sexual. Time is sexual: that is why it must be stopped. Warhol's art was the sexualized body his actual body largely refused to be.

He was frequently called a voyeur. But the word gives me pause, and I don't want to apply it, like a scarlet letter, to Warhol. Pejorative to speak of his aesthetic and erotic tastes as voyeuristic: it presumes a pecking order of concupiscences, and it ignores gazing's mutuality, the sweet interaction between beholder and beheld. The word
voyeurism
stigmatizes sight, declares it a way station where only the immature stop to rest.

Voyeur or not, Warhol was torn between bashfulness and bravado. Indeed, like many in his gang, he liked to flaunt and to conceal. He sought people who performed, who broadcast their sexualities in monologues and unsolicited intimacies. To certain observers, Warhol seemed quiet, passive, catatonic—as if he were holding back his true personality; on the other hand, he made sport of excessive revelation (through the mediation of accomplices). I found, in interviewing Warhol's associates, a consistent contrast between diffidence and exhibitionism, and I began to imagine that this duality reflected Andy's own character. One former Factory member, who sidestepped my questions about Warhol's sexual practices, urinated with the bathroom door open and left a porn magazine lying out in his kitchen; I was puzzled that he couldn't remember seeing physique magazines at Warhol's atelier (I found many in Andy's archives, including porn catalogs addressed to this particular associate, c/o the Factory). Another Warhol collaborator began the interview by showing me a nude photo of himself, but didn't look me in the eye, and typed on the computer and talked on the telephone throughout our conversation, and rather piously denied that Warhol had ever watched him screwing (contra a previous biographer's claim). A putatively heterosexual associate who has sex with men in Warhol films claimed never to have been bisexual. Two other Warhol associates, whom everyone calls gay, won't use that word to refer to themselves. A reluctance to be intimate (as well as, often, a reluctance to admit homosexuality, as if it were tacky) is the sometime undersong to the Warholian love of display and performance. Much of Warhol's work, in fact, turns away from performance, or it makes a spectacle of backing off, avoiding frontal relation.

Asexuality
is a common way of describing Warhol's purported evasions of physical intimacy. Even people with whom Warhol had dalliances call him asexual. It is his middle name, another of those
a
words (
art, Andy
, and
a: a novel
)
that, like beads on an abacus, account him Andy. I don't know how someone who turned thinking into sex, and sex back again into thinking, could be called asexual. If anything he was ur-sexual: lust was the bottom of his being, and yet he valued the horny realm because it decomposed him, transplanted him out of his body, through sight, into someone else (Marlon Brando, Hedy Lamarr).

Andy is often called asexual as a way to avoid calling him queer. He referred to homosexuality as a “problem”: “Does so-and-so have a problem?” he would ask his friends, hoping the answer would be yes. According to Bob Colacello, editor of
Interview
, Andy was convinced that every married man on Park Avenue had a “problem.” Andy was delighted by hang-ups: problems, he said, made good tapes. He was until recently a sticky subject for gay libbers; the most celebrated part of his career predates the movement's official birth, the Stonewall riots of June 1969, and even though he seems to have coined a “swish” identity as soon as he moved to New York in the late 1940s, neither his pictures nor his oblique manifestos fitted neatly with the radical urgencies of the gay liberation movement and its successors. Indeed, though we may now think of Warhol as the twentieth century's quintessential “queer” artist, during his lifetime his work was deemed irrelevant to the movement. He alienated activists by showing no interest in politics (he voted only once, and never marched), by flaunting conservative affiliations (
Interview
magazine put Nancy Reagan on its cover in December 1981), and by courting the rich and the royal. The men who surrounded him in his studios, many of whom had sex with other men, kept a distance from queer thoroughfares. (There are exceptions, such as Victor Hugo, the designer Halston's muse, though until Andy's Polaroids of hirsute Hugo having sex in the 1970s are exhibited, he will remain a shadowy figure in the Warhol pantheon.) Warhol's Catholicism is often cited as a reason for his reluctance to stand staunchly behind a gay party line, but piety or guilt seem beside the point of Andy's indifference to gay liberation, which many now credit him as helping, with his films and Factory, to invent.

How gay was Warhol? As gay as you can get. He dispersed gleefully offbeat sexuality over every human accomplishment, including sleeping, talking on the phone, and shoplifting lip gloss. More interesting than any earnest attempt to prove that Warhol's art or life was good for gays is to notice, first, the ethical value he placed on male nudity as the one redemption available to him on this meager earth; and, second, to notice that, like another wig artist, Mae West, he infused sex into every sigh, allowing his emulators to understand that nongenital indulgences—gossiping, painting, photographing, dictating, shopping, collecting, filing, remembering—emit their own rude erotic charge.

Some of Warhol's best work skirts the borders of pornography, at least by 1960s standards; he trafficked with unblushing gusto in sexual imagery and content. That his art approaches porn doesn't stop it from being sublime. As a lifelong endeavor, from the time he took photos with a Brownie camera at age nine, to his appearance as fashion-show model a few days before his death, he reconfigured the pornographic impulse into a sage, serious quest for the essence of matter—to approach, more and more closely, the miraculous core of the material world by watching (and reproducing) other people's bodies, especially those of attractive men, in motion and at rest. It's hard to say which Warhol preferred, action or stillness. Perhaps, given his childhood bouts of St. Vitus' Dance (an affliction of uncontrolled shaking), and given the traumatic expatriation of his parents from what was then Czechoslovakia (before his birth), he preferred motionlessness, for the unmoving body, beautifully quiescent, could surrender to slack American immanence: he was comforted by the spectacle of the body going nowhere and therefore generously open to the searching eye. The puritanical moralism that surrounds the contemporary debate over pornography overlooks the honest, near-religious motive for sexually explicit images: curiosity, or the laudable hunger to see more than the eye can hold. Philosophers and saints seek the Good. For Warhol, the Good was male flesh. He wanted to see and draw and film its ends and emissions. He wanted a style of seeing that could get to the bottom of flesh and comprehend its limit. There was no end to the patience of his eye, when confronted with the obdurate material body.