Andy Warhol (3 page)

Nor is desire—Andy's or the viewer's—motionless: my eye enjoys this handsome nude body, and, as the film progresses, I hope that more flesh will be revealed. (As I recall, the camera never entirely sees his penis.) To realize the dozing body's significance takes time. Only after three hours did I recognize it as the dead Andrej recapitulated, finally given his due. At last, Andy performs his filial vigil;
Sleep
is a wake. Furthermore, he turns the horrified, deferred encounter into erotic play: the father's stillness was originally traumatic, but now it is an intimate aesthetic ritual—between Warhol, Giorno (who consents to be filmed), and the viewer (who consents to watch). Andy might have hoped for response—that the father will rise. Erotic anticipation makes the film's long duration bearable: will the sleeper thrill to our watchfulness, or will he remain indifferent? At times the body seems a crucified Christ: the viewer's faithful patience insists that the Lord
will
rise, even if it takes five hours. Erection, resurrection: maybe Andy has a hard-on while he watches John sleep.

Before Andrej Warhola died, he made a decision: there was enough money (in the form of savings bonds) put aside to send one of his sons to college, and the chosen son would be Andy, because of artistic talent already demonstrated—coloring, cutting, sketching. His mother called him a cutting wizard: “Andy always wanted pictures. Comic books I buy him. Cut, cut, cut nice. Cut out pictures.” Andy cuts nice. “Cut!” shouts the director, with a touch of cruelty: censorship, closure. For Andy, “cutting” meant excerpting, stealing—admiring his scissors' conscious, articulate violation of another's image. Andy could cut
out
—he could remove or excerpt an image, crop it, create a composition by omission. Adept at cutting, he was also superstitiously averse to it; refusing to cut junk out of his life, he erased the line between treasure and trash.

A year before Andy enrolled in Carnegie Institute of Technology, he suffered his next trauma: this time it involved his mother's body, not his father's. Julia developed colon cancer, and her bowel system was removed; she wore a colostomy bag for the rest of her life. (Bockris mentions that Andy encouraged her to replace the bag with surgically implanted internal tubes, but she refused.) It seems extraordinary that no critic, to my knowledge, has bothered to connect this maternal trauma with Warhol's art. Consider the colostomy bag and the surgical cuts made in his mother's waste system; consider, as Bockris points out, that Julia regularly gave Andy enemas during his bouts of St. Vitus' Dance, and that her infant daughter died of being unable to move her bowels; consider that Warhol's major artistic contribution was reinterpreting the worth of cultural waste products. Andy—awkward, hyperaesthetic—knew that the interior of his mother's body had been removed, replaced by an external bag, the waste system's secret workings rendered embarrassingly conspicuous. Her inside and outside had been traumatically reversed. He would make his name and fortune through a similarly graphic, unsettling externalization of interior matter. In art, he, too, would bring detritus uncomfortably to the surface. No wonder he identified with bags, and wanted to call himself Andy Paperbag, in echo of her waste bag.

Andy never wrote or said anything, on the public record, about his mother's operation or about her bag. Dropped from sight, it shows up, however. He alludes to it—unintentionally?—in
The Philosophy of Andy Warhol
: “I think about people eating and going to the bathroom all the time, and I wonder why they don't have a tube up their behind that takes all the stuff they eat and recycles it back into their mouth, regenerating it, and then they'd never have to think about buying food or eating it. And they wouldn't even have to see it—it wouldn't even be dirty. If they wanted to, they could artificially color it on the way back in. Pink.” (Thus “Pink Sam,” a page from Andy's homemade book from the 1950s,
25 Cats Name Sam and One Blue Pussy.
Thus his credo of artistic production: expel an image—cut it out—and color it.) He alludes to Mrs. Warhola's surgery in his Before and After paintings, which show a woman's face before and after a nose job, a piece of the body cut out. “Cut, cut, cut nice,” as Julia put it, praising the surgeon's and the son's art. The seam or slash between before and after—temporal­ division­, severing the woman's two images—is itself a cut, as, in a film, one image yields to the next.

Julia's operation made waste real to Andy. Her surgery gave him the idea for Pop. (Andy's version of Pop has more to do with Mom's productions than with Pop's.) As Warhol and Pat Hackett put it, in
POPism
: “Pop Art took the inside and put it outside, took the outside and put it inside.” In the Pop body of Andy and Julia Paperbag, inside made a scarifying emigration to the outside, and then camouflaged itself in another color.

Andy Paperbag went to Carnegie Tech and majored in pictorial design. During his first year he flunked out, not because a girl hit him, as on his first day of kindergarten, but because of his traumatic relation to the written word.

The adult Andy Warhol became a prolific author and a memorable aphorist (“In the future, everyone will be world-famous for fifteen minutes”); these successes have obscured the fact that he could not write. The inability went further than the mere dependence on ghostwriters (unexceptional­ in the annals of celebrity authorship) would suggest: he avoided ever writing anything down. I found virtually no correspondence­ in his hand. There are exceptions—postcards­ he sent to his mother when he was traveling around the world in 1956:

Hi im alright

im in Rome now

its real nice here

Bye

me

im OK

im in Japan

Dear mum

I got you letter

im OK. everything

is real nice

here. i write

again

bye

These are letters to a woman whose command of English was minimal, and so he could have been deliberately using a home language for her sake. But almost every sentence in his hand is full of bizarre spelling errors (as well as an affected, arty predilection for the lowercase
i
). Clearly, he was dyslexic, though undiagnosed (I assume dyslexia diagnoses were rare at the time). Some of his errors: “vedio” for “video,” “polorrod” and “poliaroid” for “Polaroid,” “tai-land” for “Thailand,” “scrpit” for “script,” “pastic” for “plastic,” “herion” for “heroin,” and “Leory” for “Leroy.” He had a hard time with simple English. (He was, as well, left-handed, which may have compounded his sense that writing manually—rather than by dictation—was a humiliating obstacle course.) Biographers have suggested that sympathetic female classmates in college helped him compose his papers. But these friendly collaborative efforts weren't enough to see him through the required course in “Thought and Expression” at Carnegie Tech, and he failed his first year.

He managed to be let back in, however, and to win art prizes; he was recognized as an eccentric talent. The school's curriculum was not devoted to helping little Jackson Pollocks discover their ids. Warhol's most prescient work at that time was the painting
The Broad Gave Me My Face, But I Can Pick My Own Nose
. A large head on a spindle-thin body receives a pinkie up the left nostril: pleasurable exploratory surgery. The artist George Grosz, one of the jurors for the Carnegie Tech exhibition, voted to include it; others refused, and the nose picker was finally not picked for the official show. (Andy, who had a problem nose, bulbous, swollen, and red, like W. C. Fields's, opted to get it fixed in 1956 or 1957.) His early painting of a nose picker was his first flamboyant self-depiction—here, as an ungainly, single-minded boy giving himself a little pleasure and relief, as if no one were watching, or as if a boy picking his nose were the most natural, riveting, and erotic sight in the world. So began Warhol's career: he strove to frame solitary bodies picking themselves, redirecting their anatomies with a broad's showy flair.

He graduated from Carnegie Tech in June 1949 and then moved to New York, leaving behind Pittsburgh, despised zone of his past—city of steel, whose color is silver. A year before leaving Pittsburgh, a city he did not pick, he bought himself a cream-colored corduroy suit. Almost no one ever called Andy handsome. Some observed that when he was young, before his nose grew, he looked angelic—in photobooth shots at fourteen or so. But did anyone desire Andy in his cream corduroy suit? To reverse interpretations of Warhol's work as the effluvia of a gawky outsider, assume that he was not an exile from beauty but its first citizen. Picture him, pale skin against cream suit, and conceive that someone wanted to touch him. Julia Warhola created him, but perhaps she, too, thought him physically unappealing. Joseph Giordano, an advertising art director who was a friend of Warhol's in the late 1950s and early 1960s, told the art historian Patrick S. Smith, “She made him feel that he was the ugliest creature that God put on this earth.”

2. Pussy Heaven

ANDY, WHO USED THE NAME
“Warhol” for the first time in 1949, moved that year to New York City with the painter Philip Pearlstein—a fellow realist and aficionado of nudes. Over the next decade Mr. Paperbag would transform himself into one of New York's most successful commercial artists. He won three Art Directors Club Awards for ad images and earned enough money to buy, at the end of the decade, a townhouse, on Lexington Avenue between Eighty-ninth and Ninetieth Streets, for which he paid sixty-seven thousand dollars. Despite his eccentric appearance, he begat himself as a member of New York's topflight gay milieu: he attended the Metropolitan Opera and aspired to a queer identity defined by upper-crust men with Europhilic tastes, even if some looked down on him as uncultivated, as shamefully working class. (In revenge, a few years later he'd return populism, or at least its appearance, to the dominant gay-male image repertoire.) After trying to live with roommates, first Pearlstein, then some dancers, he settled in 1950 at 216 East Seventy-fifth Street, and his mother shortly thereafter moved in with him, preparing him bologna sandwiches with “mayon-eggs” (her word for mayonnaise), tomato soup, and mushroom and barley soup, and sleeping on the floor on a single mattress beside her son's, in an apartment without beds or furniture but with more than twenty cats. Mother and son lived frugally: they ate their first Thanksgiving dinner in New York together at a Woolworth counter. Julia spent a lot of her time assembling packages of stuff to send back to the old country. As for Andy, he sprinkled birdseed on the pavement and told friends he wanted to make birds grow. He met Greta Garbo and gave her a butterfly drawing, which she crumpled up. He retrieved it and retitled it
Crumpled Butterfly by Greta Garbo:
Julia Warhola inscribed the words herself.

In the 1950s, Andy tackled some body problems. Having lost much of his hair by the end of college, he bought his first wig in 1953, when he was twenty-five. He had his nose sanded, though the results disappointed him—he'd hoped to become a veritable beauty. To strengthen his eyes, he affected, for a time, pinhole cardboard glasses. In 1954 he went with a friend to a gym. The results were unclear.

Andy divided his labors between commercial assignments, for which he enlisted the help of a series of assistants, including his mother; and fine-art projects, comprising freehand sketches, hand-colored prints, collages (many using gold foil), and homemade books. Critics segregate the work of the two periods, the 1950s and the 1960s: the record and book jackets and ads were for money, while the Pop paintings and the movies were for eternity. However, the division is not simple, because Andy continued to do commercial work (while keeping it secret) in the 1960s, well into his Pop period; and because after 1968 he resumed commissioned projects explicitly for profit, calling them “business art,” though he continued to market them as fine art. Ironically, the enormous number of drawings and books that he produced in the 1950s—for galleries, gifts, private consumption, and social and career advancement—fall more conventionally in the tradition of fine art than do his Pop paintings, which pretend to trash as many aesthetic rules as possible. In fact, Andy was more of a fine artist in the 1950s (if we demand the presence of the “hand” in fine art) than after he actually became one in approximately 1960. That many viewers will be inclined to dismiss or devalue his 1950s work, especially his sketches of nude “boys” (actually they were grown men) or his gold-leaf drawings of celebrity shoes, because these early pieces seem sentimental, soft, kittenish—by the hard standards of Franz Kline, Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Frank Stella—suggests that the first step in understanding Andy Paperbag is getting to the bottom of what he means by “pussy.”

In his
Diaries
, published posthumously, the phrase “pussy heaven” occurs in the entry for September 16, 1980: he remembers the death of a beloved female cat and suggests that this bereavement catapulted him from the 1950s to the 1960s, as if the pussy died so Pop could be born. He mentions that he should have begun
POPism
,
his memoir of the 1960s, with this cat's death, a trauma that fashioned him into a cold and legitimate artist. Before she died, he had emotions. Afterward, he gave them up. The entry begins with a description of a party attended by a bunch of “old bags.” At the time, Andy Paperbag was only fifty-two, but he, too, felt like an old bag (his father had died at fifty-five). At the party, Andy recognized a man with a woman's name, Bettie:

I saw Bettie Barnes who let my cat die. It's a man. B-E-T-T-I-E. I once gave him a kitten and the kitten was crying and I thought it wanted its mother so I gave him the mother. We had two cats left, my mother and I had given away twenty-five already. This was the early sixties. And after I gave him the mother he took her to be spayed and she died under the knife. My darling Hester. She went to pussy heaven. And I've felt guilty ever since. That's how we should have started
Popism.
That's when I gave up caring. I don't want to think about it. If I had had her spayed myself I just know she would have lived, but
he
let her die.

To hear him tell it, the death-by-surgery of a female cat spayed him of tender feelings; perhaps pussy Hester was named after Hester Prynne, who wears the scarlet
A
, Andy's own, in
The Scarlet Letter.
A man without feelings, Bettie Barnes, freezes Andy's heart by annihilating his mother pussy. “Pussy heaven”—an insensitive, jocular phrase—sounds like misogynist slang for a brothel or harem, where homo Andy would hardly have felt at ease. Thus when he says “pussy heaven”—with a mocking, faux-naive pretense that the word “pussy” refers only to cats and not to vaginas or effeminate men—he projects an afterlife in which Julia Warhola and their beloved kitties survive, a locale of keen emotion, where there is no need for Pop, the anesthetic for death-by-spaying.

Andy's flights to pussy heaven always involved his mother's aid, for they lived together, in the 1950s and thereafter, surrounded by smelly cats. (One friend, however, claims that the cats did
not
stink, and that Mrs. Warhola was a “fastidious housekeeper.”) Pussycats had sexual and aesthetic significance: they offered him a
gemütlich
paradigm for mechanical reproduction. In little love poems he typed as postcards (and probably never sent) to Tommy Jackson, a printer at Black Mountain College, in early 1951, Andy mentioned a kitty, perhaps Hester: “my kittys going to have a baby,” and “my kitty lies between my legs.”
Andy had a pussy:
this fantasy impelled his gargantuan productivity.

The pussycats star in two books collaboratively engineered by Julia and Andy. The book, as medium, spans Warhol's entire career, and mattered to him nearly as much as painting did; he produced many folios in the 1950s— strange, remarkable, self-published works of art. A standard press run was approximately two hundred, though he gave each copy a low number, often a suggestive 69, to flatter recipients; he bestowed them on friends, and on art directors and editors who might thus remember his excellence and offer him assignments. The first pussy book, printed in 1954, was
25 Cats Name Sam and One Blue Pussy;
his intimate friend Charles Lisanby wrote the text, which consists of the word
Sam
repeated seventeen times and, as climax, the phrase “One Blue Pussy.” The Sams are colored various shades (red, pink, orange) of Doctor Martin's concentrated dyes; Andy's comely male friends gathered for “coloring parties” to hand-tint the pages. The pussy is blue because it is sad—alone with its unique coloration, nameless and final in a world of same Sams. “Sam” seems a misprint for “Same,” the word that defines not only Andy's sexual preference (same-sex love) but the technique of his mature artwork (repetitions of the same image). In fact, Julia named all their cats Sam. She wrote out the book's words herself—thus she can take credit for misspelling “Named”
(25 Cats Name Sam)
, an error that points out the eccentricity of Julia-and-Andy Paperbag's naming process, which extended to the Silver Factory, where superstars rebaptised themselves with screen names, and where studio proprietor Billy Linich was called Billy Name. Warhol savored the magical arbitrariness of nomenclature—whether brands (Campbell's, Heinz, Brillo), animals (Hester, Sam), or people (Andy Paperbag, International Velvet).

The second pussy book,
Holy Cats by Andy Warhols' mother
(the apostrophe errantly placed, instating a plurality of Andy Warhols), materialized in 1957, a year or so before Julia received an Art Directors Club medal, under the name “Andy Warhol's Mother,” for her design of a Prestige Records cover for
The Story of Moondog.
On the
Holy Cats
dedication page, her quaint, estranging calligraphy announces, “This little book is for my little Hester who left for pussy heaven.” Although Andy later claimed that Hester died in the early 1960s, clearly she had expired by 1957; the trauma of her departure, like any Paperbag disaster, jumps around temporally. Hester, in Christ's fashion, dies repeatedly—martyred anew each time Andy remembers the failure to have her spayed himself. There was only one Hester, but many Sams: perhaps Julia tolerated or appreciated Andy's sexual tastes because a household of same-sex and same-name Sams was, to her, second nature.

Did Julia know about Andy's homosexuality? If she knew, did she care? She wrote out the words of
Holy Cats
, even if she didn't originate them, so we can take them as her endorsement of Andy's perversities, her happy blessing bestowed on every erotic errand. The book advertises the charms of pussy heaven: “Some pussys up there love her/Some don't/ … Some like it day/Some like it night/ … Some talk to angels/Some talk to themselves/Some know they are pussycats so they dont talk at all/Some play with angels/Some play with boys/Some play with themselves/Some don't play with nobody … .” Andy played with boys and with himself; sometimes he didn't play with nobody. Julia and Andy cherished
playing with themselves
as a high-voltage, legal, paradisaical category of pussy behavior—an ethical act of self-companionship, chummy when compared with the truly isolated rite of
playing with nobody.

Andy surrounded himself with boys in the 1950s. His list of conquests leads me to wonder how he gained the friendship of beautiful boys, and why he found them indispensable. Beauties congregate with beauties. How did Andy break in? A gifted listener, he knew how to flatter; he was already a well-known commercial artist; his urchin appearance brought out protective instincts in others. And he understood the physics of beauty: he knew that his plainness was mysteriously fundamental to the good looks of others, as land depends on ocean to know it is land, or France depends on Germany to know it is France. Bordered by beautiful men (and, later, by beautiful women), he began to resemble them, to sign or own their radiance; it's hard to imagine Andy without the presence of nearby stunners, whose countenances cross over into his, as if they existed solely to frame and escort him. Warhol sought contiguity, the state of standing next to: being next to a beauty, he could body swap.

The list of beauties that Andy stood next to and hoped to resemble begins with Truman Capote; Warhol devoted his first New York art show to images of the young author and attempted to meet him, but only made it as far as the novelist's drunken mother. Warhol was captivated by Capote's portrait—odalisque ephebe—on the back cover of
Other Voices, Other Rooms;
this pose, among the most homoerotically provocative author photos in the history of publishing, intended to attract fans like Andy, who took its solicitation literally.

Andy could not conquer Truman, but he found a host of boyfriends, some of the relationships perhaps not consummated—whatever “consummation,” that dreary yardstick, entails. (I can't figure out the job description for “Andy's boyfriend.” If it involves sex, what kind, and how much?) Prime among beaux was the melancholy photographer Edward Wallowitch, whom Andy later called “my first boyfriend.” Together they attended parties and photographed the other guests—foreshadowing Andy's Studio 54 snapshot practice. Wallowitch took photos of children at play, which Andy recycled in his own sketches—some in his 1957 gold-foil presentation volume,
A Gold Book
,
a James Dean clone on its cover. Before Wallowitch there was Charles Lisanby: the curtly handsome set designer, an associate of Cecil Beaton's and friend of Julie Andrews's, traveled with Andy around the world in 1956 (in Cambodia, Andy captioned a sketch “Ankor Wat” and “A. W.,” turning the temple of Angkor Wat, via its initials, into his own double), a trip on which, apparently, Lisanby broke Warhol's heart by spurning his sexual advances. Another boyfriend, Carl Alfred Willers (also an A. W.), who worked in the Picture Collection of the New York Public Library, was probably the first genuine amour, and supplied source materials for Andy's art. Other beauties included the male playmates Warhol found to attend his coloring parties and to hang out with him at Serendipity, the fashionable restaurant-cum-boutique on the Upper East Side, where he exhibited drawings among Tiffany lamps. One afternoon, while sitting at Serendipity, Andy did a series of quick infatuated sketches of the coproprietor, Stephen Bruce (his perfectly smooth skin the opposite of Andy's), preparing for the night's business, and called the sketchbook
Playbook of You S. Bruce from 2:30 to 4:00
, as if Bruce, posing for Warhol, had staged a one-man “play”—the word Julia used in
Holy Cats
to describe events in pussy heaven, a fictitious locale retrofitted for habitation by Andy's stable of men. (Bruce describes Warhol's manner as “dancing.”) Other beauties he pursued included the subjects of his drawings: dancer John Butler, sketches of whom Warhol showed in 1954 or 1955 at the Loft Gallery, and the subjects of “Studies for a Boy Book,” which he showed in 1956 at David Mann's Bodley Gallery. The works, casually called “cock drawings” (for a proposed “cock book”), were not exhibited in his lifetime. With a minimizing, refined line, they prove that his aesthetic aim was documentary; he wanted to document the body's presence, to capture on paper a consoling sign that the beheld face, limbs, and members actually existed. Art critics call such a sign an “index”—proof of the subject's reality, usually in the form of a photographic imprint. Andy's “cock drawings” do not have an “indexical” relation to genitalia—they are not snapshots. And yet they supply an index for his desire—they prove that he wanted to draw the groin, and that he was in the room to witness its unveiling.