WORKING WITH WARHOL—'Like ABBOTT and Costello, but More Modern

Portrait of the artist as boss, by BOB COLACELLO, who is writing a memoir of his thirteen years at Andy's right hand

I suppose when the end comes, you think about the beginning. I first met Andy Warhol in the spring of 1970, at his studio on Union Square West, the second of his four famous Factories. He was sitting at an Art Deco desk just beyond the entrance, which was "guarded" by a stuffed Great Dane said to have belonged to Cecil B. DeMille (though DeMille's daughter once wrote a letter denying this, saying the only thing her father ever stuffed dogs with was food). He was wearing a brown printed-velvet jacket from Jean de Noyer on East Sixtieth Street, Levi's 501s, and expensive lizard boots from Paris. Only the black turtleneck echoed his sinister sixties look. He was eating lunch, vegetable

purees from Brownies health-food restaurant, out of plastic containers with a plastic fork.

He was also opening the mail, although there were several assistants standing around doing nothing. He did it systematically: first he brought each piece of mail extremely close to his eyes and examined it intently, as if he were trying to see through the envelope or analyze the handwriting in the address. Then he tore the canceled stamps off each and every piece, domestic and foreign, and stuffed them into a large manila envelope. This was his "stamp collection." As he did this, he sorted the mail into separate piles—invitations, bills, checks, and everything else from press releases to fan letters, which he dropped into a cardboard box at his feet. When a box was full of such miscellaneous memorabilia, it would be sealed, dated, and stored as a "time capsule."

Nothing was thrown away. Andy was a hoarder, which is different from a collector, though he was that too. Collecting is about investment or possession or greed. Hoarding is about fear and control. And as the years went on, Andy hoarded more and more. He hoarded everything from loose diamonds to every front page of the Daily News day by day for twenty years. He kept the used batteries from his tape recorder and cameras—they contained copper and copper might go up. He saved the coffee tins from the Factory lunches—tin might go up. In fact, he once caught Brigid Berlin, his oldest employee, absentmindedly throwing a coffee tin away and almost fired her on the spot. His anger at that moment was unbelievable, and Andy was a man who hated to show that he was even slightly upset. Nor did he ever fire anyone. He let someone else do it, or if no one would, just hired a replacement anyway.

I was the replacement for Gerard Malanga, although I didn't know it at the time and the succession was indirect. That was Andy's way too. In 1969, Andy had founded his magazine inter/VIEW (as it was first spelled), along with Gerard Malanga, his assistant silk-screener/superstar/poet-in-residence, and Paul Morrissey, who directed Andy's films. Months of musical editorships followed as Paul struggled to take control from Gerard, with

Andy in the background, watching, prodding, instigating, manipulating, and, of course, denying he was doing any such thing. By mid-1970 the improbably named Soren Agenoux, a film-buff acquaintance of Paul's, was in the key position of managing editor and art director, and Gerard was on his way to Europe.

It was Soren Agenoux who noticed a review I had written in an underground paper called New Times and tracked me down at my parents' house in Rockville Centre, Long Island. After graduating Georgetown University School of Foreign Service, I was back living with my parents and commuting to the city, where I studied film criticism at Columbia under Andrew Sarris of the Village Voice. Like most of the hip half of the sixties generation, my idols included Mick Jagger, Timothy Leary, Marshall McLuhan, Jean-Luc Godard, and, above all, Andy Warhol. As a teenager, I had seen reproductions of Andy's Marilyns and Liz's in Time and Life and thought, If this is art, then I like art. When The Chelsea Girls, Andy's threehour split-screen psychedelic extravaganza, came to Washington, D.C., I sat through it three times. I even wrote in Andy Warhol for president in 1968, the first time I was old enough to vote. For me, a call from the Factory was like a call from MGM to a small-town fanzine addict in 1930. I'll never forget the early-spring day when Soren Agenoux called—I can still see the fruit bowl on the kitchen table filled with a mix of real and plastic apples, oranges, bananas, and grapes, my mother's solution to seasonal unavailability marring her idea of the perfect arrangement. Would I be willing to write reviews for inter/VIEW, the new film magazine Andy Warhol had started, Soren asked. Would I be willing? Would Lana Turner wear a sweater? My father, who had been through World War II instead of college and had worked his way up from clerk to executive at a Wall Street commodities firm, reacted with considerably less enthusiasm. "You mean I worked so hard all these years to put you through Georgetown and now Columbia so you could end up working for that creep, Andy Warhol!" My mother, who sold evening dresses at Saks Fifth Avenue's Garden City branch, tried to calm him down. "Didn't I read somewhere," she said, "that Andy Warhol

painted Nelson Rockefeller's portrait?"

Andy took an instant liking to me, as he did to anybody chatty, pretty, or rich enough to commission a portrait. (I was obviously in category one.) And he liked to take people he liked wherever he went, even when it was inappropriate or unexpected. Not long after we met, for example, he asked if I'd like to accompany him uptown to the Whitney Museum, where a retrospective of his sixties work was being hung by David Whitney (no relation to the museum Whitneys). Andy was still undecided about whether to cover the walls of the Whitney with his Cow Wallpaper or not. What did I think, he wanted to know. What did I think? As my head swelled, I found myself saying, "I think you should use the wallpaper. Your paintings will really look different on that background. They'll look Baroque."

"Baroque," repeated Andy. "Nobody's called my work Baroque before. Maybe we should use the wallpaper, David. Shouldn't we?" Of course, I thought I was taking part in one of the momentous decisions in the history of art; soon I would find out that Andy asked almost everybody he met what he should do, as if he were taking a poll, and then did exactly what he wanted to do. This left an awful lot of people thinking they had given an idea to Andy Warhol, but woe to those who said such a thing within earshot of the master. Or to a journalist. "Who does she think she is?" was Andy's typical reaction.

One day I turned up at inter/VIEW with my latest assignment, an interview with Bernardo Bertolucci, and found that Soren Agenoux had been dismissed. "You should talk to Paul," Andy told me. Paul offered me the job of managing editor and art director. I was stunned and said I didn't have any idea of how to edit a magazine. "Just take these old Rita Hayworth stills," Paul told me, "and put one on every page." He said that I could continue working toward my master's degree at Columbia and that they would pay me forty dollars a week. I asked for fifty and for permission to hire Glenn O'Brien, a friend from Georgetown and Columbia, as my assistant. Not long after, Glenn discovered an itinerant cabdriver from New Jersey named Fran Lebowitz smoking up a storm in the back room of Max's Kansas City—and the new Interview team was off. We were part of the seventies generation of "Andy's kids,'' including Fred Hughes (who'd started selling portraits in 1967), Jed Johnson and his twin brother Jay, Pat Hackett and Peter Marino, Vincent Fremont, Ronnie Cutrone, and Barbara Allen, all of whom worked for Andy or went out with Andy or both. Unlike the sixties generation of "superstars,'' who were mostly rich kids gone bad (Viva, Brigid Berlin) or street kids gone public (Jackie Curtis, Joe Dallesandro), we were mostly college-educated children of the suburban middle class—romantically avantgarde, out for adventure, even wild at times, but basically bourgeois. After Andy was shot and almost killed in 1968 by a fanatic feminist and sometime superstar named Valerie Solanas, he deliberately limited his involvement with the mad and nutty to wellborn English eccentrics, such as the Lambton sisters and Catherine Guinness, who, like the rest of us, weren't really that mad or nutty at all.

What was it like working for Andy Warhol? What wasn't it like would be easier to answer. It wasn't boring. Or simple. Andy encouraged everyone to do everything, which led to confusion and conflict—and a lot of people doing a lot for Andy. He adored having three right-hand men, arm-wrestling behind his back, or, better yet, in front of him. Like a peasant mother, he was expert at keeping his "kids" in a state of constant competition. I once spent hours selling the Greek art dealer Iolas, only to have Andy throw the commission to Fred Hughes, because I had been in the bathroom at the moment Iolas decided between two canvases I had shown him.

Yes, I ran Interview, but I also peddled pictures and served lunch. My job description was chief editor/social secretary/headwaiter. Interviewing Cher one day, pouring coffee for a South American moneybags the next. But because Andy allowed—demanded—such latitude, working at the Factory taught me to do everything from proofreading to placement, to deal with everyone from Pakistani newsdealers to Park Avenue hostesses. Park Avenue is a long way from Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, where I was bom. Thanks to Andy, I never had to climb that tricky slope. I was dropped (Continued on page 127) (Continued from page 78) on top by his helicopter.

Working with Warhol

And I tried hard to repay the favor. He was particularly impressed with my memory: I might forget what was on the wall or who wore what, but I always remembered who said what, line for line. "Geeee," Andy would say, "I should take you everywhere. If my tape recorder broke, you'd remember everything." So I'd call him at home the morning after the night before, and tell him everything, even though I knew when he said, "Oh, oh, wait a minute, just a minute," he was scrambling to plug his Sony into the telephone, or to turn the cassette over. Gossip made Andy happy, recording it made him even happier. (Once I infiltrated Grey Gardens and taped Jackie Onassis's

wacky aunt and cousin, Big and Little Edie Beale, and gave the tape to Andy for his birthday.) And everyone around Andy wanted to please him, not only because he was our boss, or because we were grateful for the glamour of it all, but because he had a way of making you feel sorry for him. He seemed so weak and helpless. In fact, he was the strongest, most willful person I have known.

What I did best for Andy, I think, was sell him. I don't mean his paintings, but him. I explained him to the clients and the ladies, to the press and my parents' friends. When they said he got Edie Sedgwick on drugs, I told them how he got Brigid Berlin off them. If they said he was evil, I said he went to church every Sunday. He became my cause. I translated his "Gee"s and "Wow"s, his "Really"s and "Great"s into sentences outsiders could understand. Andy could be very verbal within his inner circle, dishing away like a decadent fishwife, but at dinner parties he would go mute, partially out of shyness and also because he preferred watching to being watched. Often, he would give me the cue to tell an amusing anecdote about Truman Capote, or Paulette Goddard, or Diana Vreeland, and I would launch into a long, densely detailed story complete with mimicked dialogue right up until the punch line, which Andy was primed to deliver. "Gee," he would say the next morning on the phone, "they really liked us last night at the Prince and Princess de BeauvauCraons' [which he pronounced "BoboCrayons"]. Maybe we should go on TV and tell funny stories. You could be the straight guy and I could be the nut. Like Abbott and Costello, but different. More modem." Andy always said he wanted to be more modem, different, but deep down, I think he wanted to be normal. For me he was, and I tried to make people who didn't really know him see that as well. Finally, I tired of selling Andy. I wanted to sell myself. When 1 quit in 1983, Brigid Berlin told me, "I always knew you weren't a lifer."

Working with Warhol

For a long time, however, I did think of the Factory as my family and my job as my life. By the mid-seventies, working with Warhol had fallen into a steady rhythm and it never occurred to me that the beat wouldn't go on forever. One second after nine in the morning, Andy would call me and without introduction ask, "So what time did you get home last night? Was Bianca still there when you left? Who was she with? Oh, really." When he was sure I could no longer fall back to sleep, he'd terminate the call as abruptly as he started it. "Oh, oh, I've got to call Pat," he'd say. (Pat Hackett, his secretary/ screenwriter/redactor, co-authored POPism and the forthcoming Andy Warhol party book, I Will Attend, completed before he died.) Andy loved talking on the telephone, and on the rare night he stayed home, he'd call Brigid Berlin and "watch TV" over the phone with her, commenting on whatever program they both had on.

As we lived three blocks apart in the

East Sixties, we'd sometimes share a cab to the Factory—a word we never used, for us it was "the office." But usually Andy preferred to slowly shop his way downtown, stopping in the diamond district, handing out leftover back issues of Interview along the way. I'd dash down an hour or so ahead of him, meet with the Interview staff, and, most important, organize lunch. We had moved across Union Square to 860 Broadway by then, and the new Factory (number three) boasted a comer room with wood paneling flown over from England by the previous tenant. John Richardson had sent down a huge moose head, which was hung over the fireplace, and Fred Hughes, who had eclipsed Paul Morrissey as the Tightest of the right-hand men, installed a large oval dining table by the French Art Deco master Ruhlmann; an Irish PreRaphaelite painting of a windswept redhead; a neo-Egyptian pedestal by Carlo Bugatti, the father of the Italian automobile designer; and several Swahili ancestor-worship poles. It was like no other dining room in New York, and the lunches we gave there were just as unique. And eclectic. The typical cast: two socialites, two male models, one Hollywood starlet, one European title—and the victim, someone we were trying to sell a portrait or an ad. The strategy was simple: so dazzle the prospective client with our glamorous friends that he or she would buy something in hope of being asked to lunch again. Actually, if they didn't bite the first time, Andy was quick to extend another invitation. "Halston is coming for lunch tomorrow," he would say. "You should meet him. He's really great."

At first, we always served watercress, smoked salmon, and caviar sandwiches from William Poll, just like Diana Vreeland did at the Met, but Andy found that too expensive. Eventually we settled on a three-tier system of menus, which I would discuss with Vincent Fremont, vice president/TV producer/bookkeeper, after confirming that our star victim was coming. For potential portrait clients, we'd order from Balducci's, the grand Greenwich Village delicatessen—usually pasta salads, which were just coming into fashion. Potential advertisers got pates and quiches, which were on their way out, from a nearby French take-out place, whose name translated as the Three Lit-

tle Pigs. If no clients were coming, just Halston's friend Victor Hugo and some kids we'd met at Studio 54 the night before, we'd send out for Big Macs and Chicken McNuggets from the McDonald's across the street. There was always an open bar, stocked with the best brands, from Stolichnaya to Cuervo gold, and all the strange new liqueurs advertised in Interview and sent to us for promotional purposes. And medium-priced French wines, which Andy often poured himself, greatly impressing the guests. Usually, it was difficult to get people to leave.

Not all our lunches were successful. Some were disasters. Once, Sondra Gilman, the wife of Charles Gilman of the art-collecting Gilman Paper Company, brought Somoza's daughter for lunch. Sondra had already been painted by Andy, as had her husband and her children—only their horses were left, and Andy kept pushing me to tell Sondra to have those painted too. "Tell them I'm doing Peter Brant's horses," he said. Peter Brant was also in the paper business. Anyway, Sondra thought that Somoza's daughter might have her portrait done, and Andy was more than willing. Although Andy was a liberal, and had contributed limited-edition prints to the campaigns of George McGovern, Jimmy Carter, Ted Kennedy, and Tom Hayden, he did not consider it a humanrights violation to take money from right-wing dictators. In 1976, we traveled to Teheran, where Empress Farah Diba sat for her portrait, and Andy also painted the shah's portrait from photographs provided by the embassy in Washington. These were never delivered, as the revolution came before the check. And we spent many nights chasing Imelda Marcos, to no avail.

Everything was going fine with Somoza's daughter until John Chamberlain, the hard-drinking car-crash sculptor, arrived. Sondra said not to tell him that Somoza's daughter was Somoza's daughter, but we did introduce her as a friend from Nicaragua. "I always judge a country by two things," said Chamberlain. "The tailors and the comedians. Do you have good tailors in Nicaragua?"

"I wouldn't know," said Somoza's daughter. "The dressmaker we have at home is very good."

"What about the comedians," said Chamberlain, taking another swig of tequila, "are they any good?" Somoza's daughter said she didn't know what he was talking about. I tried to help her out by suggesting that there was only one comedian in Nicaragua, meaning Bianca Jagger. Unfortunately, she thought I was referring to her father. Even more unfortunately, a big box from the Erotic Baker arrived for Andy at that very moment. "What is it? Who is it from?" asked Andy.

It was a very large, very phallic chocolate cake. John Chamberlain couldn't wait to cut it. "Would you like the head," he said to Somoza's daughter, with a polite flourish of the knife, "or do you prefer the balls?"

Somoza's daughter fled in tears, followed by Sondra Gilman. She didn't have her portrait done by Andy, and neither did the Gilmans' horses.

After lunch, Andy would retreat to the back room, behind where the "time capsules" were stacked, and paint. One or two assistants helped him stretch canvases, outline faces in masking tape, even paint flat backgrounds. But mostly they kept him company, because Andy didn't like to be alone. Sometimes the radio was on, sometimes not. Andy almost always stopped to take phone calls, especially if they were from an antiques dealer with something like a new cache of fifties chairs and desks found in an abandoned public school in Queens. Sometimes he would stick his head through the door between his studio and my office and say something like "Did Calvin call about the six-page spread yet? He's only taking four! Why don't you call him back and say if he takes five, we'll give him one for free?"

But most of our discussions about Interview took place in the taxi heading uptown, around seven in the evening. Andy wanted to know everything, from how many subscriptions came in that day and whether the checks were deposited, to whom the assistant art director was dating and why. ("Is he rich? Is he cute?") I was executive editor by then, which meant I got to sell ads as well as cut transcripts. Andy definitely did not believe in the concept of editorial independence: he constantly pushed for interviews with potential advertisers. And potential portrait clients. Sometimes the latter made sense: e.g., Diana Ross, who, after her second Interview cover, had Andy paint herself and her three children, and sat down and wrote a check

for $105,000 on the spot. But more often than not it meant giving valuable editorial space to the wives of European industrialists who painted a bit on the side. Andy didn't care about that. He knew we would be lucky to clear a dollar a year on every Interview subscription; commissioned portraits started at $25,000. They were Andy's bread and butter, and the profits were reinvested in expensive projects like his cable-TV show and Interview, which didn't break even until 1980. And I was not above taking the 20 percent commission he paid for selling portraits. But, boy, could he be relentless. "You're going out with Lily Auchincloss tonight? You've got to tell her to hurry up and have her portrait done, while she still looks good."

Many, many nights, Andy and I would go out together, to dinners and discos, hunting portraits, ads, and beauties to photograph for the "Interman" and "Viewgirl" pages. An hour or so after he dropped me off from work, I'd walk up Madison to his house on East Sixty-sixth Street. One of his Filipino housekeepers, Nena or Aurora, would open the door a crack and I'd slip in and wait in the front hall with its American Empire furniture and American Primitive portraits. Andy was never ready. And when he did emerge from the tiny elevator, he would always announce that he'd forgotten his tapes, or his batteries, or his Interviews, and back upstairs he'd go. Then he'd stuff his pockets with the tools of his trade until they bulged, and stand in front of the hall mirror, smoothing his wig, straightening his tie.

"Do I look O.K.?" he'd plead.

"You look fine, Andy."

"But it's black-tie, isn't it? Can I wear jeans? I mean, it's too late to change, right?"

I'd assure him that he could wear whatever he wanted and that he actually looked quite good, but he wouldn't buy it.

"You mean, whatever I wear won't look good, right? Oh, Bob, why can't I dress right? What's wrong with me? I mean, why can't I look good?"

I couldn't accept the fact that Andy had died for a long time after it happened. I had always assumed that Andy—ageless, childlike Andy—would outlive us all. How could he be dead? It was only after his memorial at St. Patrick's Cathedral that I knew it was true. But I wasn't sad then, because Andy was finally receiving the honor he deserved, and in his own city, in his own country. It wasn't that way while he was alive. Not in New York, not in America. The Museum of Modem Art, for example, has never had a Warhol exhibition. Now there is talk of a Warhol retrospective at MOMA in 1989. The Tate in London gave Andy a retrospective in 1971. Indeed, there is hardly a major museum in Europe that hasn't shown Andy. But then, in Europe, Warhol was seen as a great artist from the first Campbell's soup can. America found it easier to deal with Andy as its party mascot, perhaps because he revealed more about ourselves than we cared to know.

Working with Warhol

So it was amazing to see the prophet come home to be praised in the temple of governors and cardinals. He probably would have been more amazed than any of us. Amazed at the legion of artists who turned out to pay him homage: Oldenburg, Lichtenstein, Hockney, Serra, Sonnier, Christo, Marisol, Schnabel, Clemente, Chia, Scharf, Haring, Basquiat—artists he respected and, in most cases, collected. Amazed at Brigid Berlin, who had come so far from the days when she shot amphetamines into asses through

blue jeans, standing tall at the pulpit, reading from the Scriptures (though he probably would have found something to tease her about, like her hair). Amazed at Claus von Biilow receiving Communion, and Don Johnson.

The luncheon afterward, arranged by Steve Rubell in the nightclub of the Century Paramount Hotel, was amazing too. It was like some kind of college reunion. There were Gerard Malanga, Paul Morrissey, Jed Johnson, Fred Hughes (and me), all getting along. Come to think of it, Andy might not have liked that. He would have liked Yoko Ono's eulogy. He would have laughed to himself, as I did, when she told the story of Andy offering to paint her son Sean's portrait every year.

"Andy visited me at home,'' Yoko recalled, "and he noticed on a wall five photographs of Sean, each representing a year of his life. Andy wanted to know why the photographs stopped when Sean was five years old. I told him that it was John's project and when John died it stopped. 'I'll finish the project if you want,' Andy said. 'I'll paint Sean every year.' "

Yoko, of course, didn't mention that Andy's offer would have cost her $30,000 per annum, but I could just see him jumping, in his quiet way, at the opportunity to finish "John's project.'' Year in and year out, again and again, 1 had seen him angle for such a commission, to paint someone every year. And

never get it. He had tried with Halston, with Liza Minnelli, and once almost snared Joanne du Pont's son. Sao Schlumberger, the wife of the French oil-equipment magnate, was always considered a likely candidate. Shortly after he introduced me to her in Paris, he started saying, in his indirect way, "You should marry Sao." Sao is married, I would tell him. "But she really likes you, and if you married her, you'd be on easy street." I don't want to marry anyone, Andy. "But, Bob, you know how hard it is to work hard. Wouldn't you rather be on easy street? And if you married Sao you could get her to have her portrait done." You already did her portrait, Andy. "I know, but if you were her husband you could commission me to do a new one every year. 1 could show her hairdos change. It's a great idea, Bob." (Don't forget that this was an artist whose early masterpieces include the nose-job series, Before and After.)

Sean Ono Lennon did sit for the Polaroids, but Andy went into the hospital for his gallbladder operation before the portrait was completed. How ironic that a project that was to take a lifetime should be stillborn. And how poignant that the man who had risen from a desperately poor childhood in the coalfields of Pennsylvania to become one of the richest and most celebrated artists of his time should still have seen himself as a freelancer in need of a steady income. □