The Andy Warhol Diaries Read online

  At 33 Union Square West, the magazine offices had been two rooms on the tenth floor, four floors away from the Factory, but after the move to 860 Broadway they were on the same floor as Andy’s office and painting area, separated from these only by a wall. Andy seemed to regard the employees of Interview as stepchildren, different from the people who worked directly for him, who were “family.” (One visitor, noticing the psychological distance from Andy between his personal employees and the staff of his magazine, observed, only half-joking, “I get the feeling that if the people who work for Interview were asked to name the one celebrity in the world they’d most like to meet, they’d all say, ‘Andy Warhol.’ “ There were exceptions: Crossovers who worked at Interview but were also Andy’s personal friends who went out with him socially—people like Bob Colacello and Catherine Guinness, a member of the Anglo-Irish brewery family—but generally, to Andy, the Interview people were part of his business life but not his emotional life. He referred to them as “them,” and to us as “us.”

  While Andy’s social life in the late sixties and early seventies was steered mainly by Fred, by 1975 Bob Colacello was also initiating many social occasions and some business deals. (All deals, however, had to be cleared with Fred.) From the growing circle of rich people he was becoming friendly with, Bob delivered a lot of portrait commissions, and he also got Andy publishing contracts. On the first book, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (From A to B and Back Again), I did eight separate interviews with Andy on the basis of which I wrote chapters 1 through 8 and chapter 10. Then, using material from conversations Andy had taped between himself and Bob Colacello and Brigid Berlin, I wrote the introductory chapter and chapters 9, 11, 12, 13 and 14. It was the first major project Andy and I had worked on together, and after the book was published, in 1975, he asked me to co-author the second book with him—his memoirs of the sixties, which we decided to call Popism.

  From 1975 on, the magazine was a great source of activity for Andy. That was the year he bought out newsprint manufacturer/art collector Peter Brant to become full owner and publisher, with Fred assuming the title of president. Until this point Andy had remained pretty much aloof from the day-to-day operation of the magazine, but now suddenly he was running in to look at art director Marc Balet’s layouts or scheduling lunches in the conference room to pitch Interview to prospective advertisers.

  It was the magazine more than anything else that kept Andy from passing into sixties history. Meeting creative new people—especially young kids—was always important to him; he thrived on it. But he knew that people only come to you if they think you have something to offer them. In the mid-sixties when he was cranking out his early, cheap, “underground” films at the rate, practically, of one a week, it was the possibility of getting into Andy’s movies that drew people to the Factory. By the 1970s, however, with the price of making commercially exhibitable movies becoming prohibitive, Andy had few roles to offer people and not even the certainty that the movie being discussed would ever actually get made. Interview magazine more than filled the void.

  Circulation had been growing every year. By 1976 Interview had a cachet of sophisticated self-mocking silliness that made celebrities actually want to be in it. Often Andy, usually with someone on the staff, did the cover interview himself. Every issue had to be stocked with people, and this was the new supply of fresh faces now coming by the office constantly. “We’ll put you in the magazine” replaced “We’ll put you in a movie” as Andy’s most frequent promise. The terms “Interman,” “Viewgirl,” “Upfront,” and “First Impression” were all Interview page headings for pictures of young, never-before-seen-in-print male and female beauties. Interview became the most glamorous magazine around. I once heard Bob on the phone reassuring a society matron: “Don’t worry about your photograph—we retouch anyone over twenty.”

  1976 was also the year that Andy Warhol’s Bad was shot in New York, in 35mm and with a union crew. The cast was a combination of our own “studio stars”—people like Geraldine Smith from Flesh and Cyrinda Foxe from around the corner on East 17th Street—and Hollywood professionals like Carroll Baker and Perry King. Jed directed Bad—I had co-written the screenplay—and it was well-received. (Vincent Canby’s review in the New York Times said it was “more aware of what it’s up to than any Warhol film … to date.”)

  Despite the movie’s critical success, after making Bad, Jed never went back to work at the Factory—“the office”—again. He began buying and selling antiques, and then started his own decorating business, although he continued to live on the fourth floor of the Federal-style town-house on East 66th Street that he had found for Andy and that Andy had moved into in 1974. Fred, meanwhile, had moved from his apartment on East 16th Street into the house on Lexington that Andy had just vacated.

  For most of the seventies and continuing right up until Andy’s death, finding people to commission him to do portraits was a major activity, since it brought in a big share of his annual income. No matter what other canvases he was working on for museum and gallery shows, there were always portraits in the works in some corner of the loft. Anyone—gallery dealers, friends, or employees—who brought in a commission got a commission. As artist Ronnie Cutrone, a dancer with the Exploding Plastic Inevitable in the sixties and Andy’s painting assistant in the seventies, once put it: “Pop Art was over, and there was a bunch of new movements. Meanwhile he had an office to keep running and a magazine that he felt still needed subsidizing from him. After doing his Pop celebrity portraits in the sixties—the Marilyns, Lizzes, Elvises, Marlons, etc.—it was a natural evolution to do portraits of private—or at least non-show business—people, therefore making them equal, in some sense, to the legends.” And actually, even in the sixties, on a much smaller scale, Andy had done some commissioned portraits of non-star subjects like art collector Ethel Scull, gallery owner Holly Solomon, and Happy Rockefeller. Fred Hughes adds: “The art establishment found the idea of Andy doing commissioned portraits very unconventional—artists weren’t supposed to be doing this kind of thing. But Andy was always unconventional. And the fact is, he liked doing them—after we got the first few commissions he said to me, “ ‘Oh get some more.’ “

  Andy’s procedure for making a portrait was elaborate. It began with the subject posing while he took approximately sixty Polaroid photos. (He used Polaroid’s Big Shot camera exclusively, and after that model was discontinued he made a special arrangement with the company to buy all the unused stock they had.) Then, from those sixty shots he would choose four and give them to a screen printer (he worked exclusively with one printer at a time—before 1977, his silkscreener was Alex Heinrici; after that, it was Rupert Smith) to make into positive images on 8” X 10” acetates. When those came back to him he would choose one image, decide where to crop it, and then doctor it cosmetically in order to make the subject appear as attractive as possible—he’d elongate necks, trim noses, enlarge lips, and clear up complexions as he saw fit; in short, he would do unto others as he would wish others to do unto him. Then he would have the cropped, doctored image on the 8” X 10” blown up to a 40” X 40” acetate, and from that the screen printer would make a silkscreen.

  To always be prepared for the steady stream of portraits, Andy had his assistants prepaint rolls of canvas in one of two background shades: flesh tone for men’s portraits and a different, pinker flesh tone for women’s. Using a carbon transfer under tracing paper, he’d trace the image from the 40” X 40” acetate onto the flesh-tone-painted canvas and then paint in the colored areas like hair, eyes, lips on women, and ties and jackets on men. When the silkscreen was ready, the detailed image would be lined up with the prepainted colored areas and the details of the photograph would be screened onto the canvas. It was the slight variations in the alignment of the image with the painted colors underneath that gave Warhol portraits their characteristic “shifting” look. The portraits, as a rule, cost approximately $25,000 for the first canvas and $5,000 for each add
itional one.

  Keeping to his beloved weekday “rut” was so important to Andy that he veered from it only when he was forced to. After “doing the Diary” with me on the phone, he’d make or take a few more phone calls, shower, get dressed, take his cherished dachshunds Archie and Amos into the elevator with him and go from the third floor of his house, where his bedroom was, to the basement kitchen where he’d have breakfast with his two Filipino housekeepers, sisters Nena and Aurora Bugarin. Then he’d tuck some copies of Interview under his arm and go out shopping for a few hours, usually along Madison Avenue, then in the auction houses, the jewelry district around 47th Street, and the Village antique shops. He’d pass out the magazine to shopkeepers (in the hope that they would decide to advertise) and to fans who recognized him in the street and stopped him—he felt good always having something to give them.

  He’d get to the office between one and three o’clock, depending on whether there was a business advertising lunch there or not. Upon arrival he’d reach into his pocket—or his boot—for some cash and send one of the kids out to Brownies down the block for snacks. Then while he was drinking his carrot juice or tea he’d check the appointment books for that afternoon’s and night’s events, return calls, and take some of the calls that came in as he was standing there. He would also open the stacks of mail he got every day, deciding just which letters, invitations, gifts, and magazines to drop into a “Time Capsule,” meaning one of the hundreds of 10” x 18” x 14” brown cardboard boxes, which would be sealed, dated, put into storage, and instantly replaced with an identical empty box. Less than one percent of all the items that he was constantly being sent or given did he keep for himself or give away. All the rest were “for the box": things he considered “interesting,” which to Andy, who was interested in everything, meant literally everything.

  A written communication from Andy was a rarity. You’d often see him holding a pen and his hand would be moving, but it was almost always just to sign his name, be it as an autograph or on a work of art or at the bottom of a contract. He did scribble phone numbers on scraps of paper but they were never organized into an address book. And when he wrote a note it was rarely more than a phrase—something like “Pat—use this” attached to a newspaper clipping that he thought would be helpful for a project we were working on. An exception was when someone would dictate words they wanted him to write—on a gift card, for example—and then he would be happy to keep writing, but only until the dictation stopped.

  He’d stay in the main reception area for an hour or two talking to people around the office about their love-lives, diets, and where they’d gone the night before. Then he’d move to the sunny window ledge by the phones and read the day’s newspapers, leaf through magazines, take a few more random phone calls, talk a little business with Fred and Vincent. Eventually he’d goto his working area in the back part of the loft near the freight elevator and there he would paint, draw, cut, move images around, etc., until the end of the day when he would sit down with Vincent and pay bills and talk on the phone to friends, locking in the night’s itinerary.

  Between six and seven o’clock, once the rush-hour traffic was over, he’d walk over to Park Avenue and get a cab uptown. He’d spend a few minutes at home doing what he called “gluing”—washing his face, adjusting the silver “hair” that was his trademark, and maybe, maybe changing his clothes, but only if it was an especially “heavy” evening. Then he’d check to make sure there was film in his instant camera. (From the mid-sixties to the mid-seventies, Andy was notorious for endlessly tape-recording his friends. But by the end of the seventies he’d gotten bored with random taping and usually would record people only for a specific reason—that is, if he felt he could use what they said as dialogue for a play or movie script.) Then he’d leave for the night—sometimes to multiple dinners and parties, sometimes just to an early movie and dinner. But no matter how late he stayed out, he was always ready for the Diary again early the next morning.

  For a few years before 1976 I had kept a general and very sketchy Factory log for Andy. I’d make a list of the business visitors who had come to the office during the day, and then another list of the main events of the previous night—even if I’d been to some or all of them myself, I’d have different people give me their versions of the same dinner party or art opening. The point was simply to determine what had happened, who was there, and how much it had cost Andy in cash expenses—not to get Andy’s personal view of it. Very often I’d just ask him what his expenses had been and leave his contribution to the log at that.

  In 1976, after the filming of Bad, I told Andy that I didn’t want to work at the office anymore but that I would still write Popism with him. He asked me if I would continue to keep the log and itemize his personal expenses—“It’ll only take you five minutes a day,” he said. I told him that I didn’t want to have to continue calling everyone at the office every day to find out what had happened the day before—that if I were going to do that, I might as well still be working there. So we agreed that from then on, the daily accounts would come from Andy himself. At this point the log became Andy’s own personal narrative.

  In the fall of 1976 Andy and I established a weekday morning routine of talking to each other on the phone. Ostensibly still for the purpose of getting down on record everything he had done and every place he had gone the day and night before and logging the cash business expenses he had incurred in the process, this account of daily activity came to have the larger function of letting Andy examine life. In a word, it was a diary. But whatever its broader objective, its narrow one, to satisfy tax auditors, was always on Andy’s mind. The record he kept included even the ten-cent calls he made from street payphones. It wasn’t that he was being overly cautious—the IRS had subjected his business to its first major audit in 1972 and continued the scrutiny every year right up until his death. Andy was convinced these audits were triggered by someone in the Nixon administration because the campaign poster he’d done for George McGovern in 1972 featured a green-faced Richard M. Nixon and the words “Vote McGovern.” (Philosophically, Andy was a liberal Democrat, although he never voted because, he said, he didn’t want to get called up for jury duty. He did, however, offer his employees bribes of Election Days off if they gave their word they’d vote Democratic.)

  I’d call Andy around 9 A.M., never later than 9:30. Sometimes I’d be waking him up, sometimes he’d say he’d been awake for hours. If I happened to oversleep he’d call me and say something like, “Good morning, Miss Diary—what’s wrong with you?” or “Sweetheart! You’re fired!” The calls were always conversations. We’d warm up for a while just chatting—he was always curious about everything, he’d ask a million questions: “What are you having for breakfast? Do you have channel 7 on? How can I clean my can opener—should I do it with a toothbrush?” Then he’d give me his cash expenses and tell me all about the day and night before. Nothing was too insignificant for him to tell the Diary. These sessions—what he referred to as my “five-minutes-a-day job”—would actually take anywhere from one to two hours. Every other week or so, I’d go over to the office with the typed pages of each day’s entry and I’d staple to the back of every page all the loose cab and restaurant receipts he’d left for me in the interim—receipts that corresponded to the amounts he’d already told me over the phone. The pages were then stored in letter boxes from the stationery store.

  The Diary was done every morning Monday through Friday, but never on the weekends even if Andy and I happened to talk on the phone or see each other. The Diary would always wait until Monday morning when we’d do a triple session and he’d recount Friday-Saturday-and-Sunday’s activities. I made extensive notes on a legal pad as we talked, and right after we hung up, while Andy’s intonations were fresh in my mind, I’d sit at the typewriter and get it all down on paper.

  When Andy was out of town, he’d either call me from where he was, or scrawl notes, usually on hotel stationery, and he’d read
them to me over the phone when he got back, often having to stop to decipher them—and on these occasions the going was slower, so I usually had time to type them as he read. (Occasionally he’d talk into a tape recorder and give me the cassette when he got back.) When I went away, the arrangements would vary—sometimes I would call him periodically from where I was and he would read me the notes he’d kept. Whatever the procedure, no day was left un-Diarized.

  The Diary calls weren’t, necessarily, the only times Andy and I would talk to each other during the day. If we were working on a project together—writing Popism, for example—we might speak a few times during the day and evening. And business aside, we were friends, the kind of friends who would call each other whenever we felt like it—when something funny happened or when we were mad about something. (Actually, arguing and laughing are the two things I remember doing most with Andy.) Many times during these non-Diary calls, and occasionally in person, Andy would add to or correct something he’d told me during the regular morning call and he would tell me to “put that in the Diary.”