The summer of 1977, when I was sixteen years old, I started work at Andy Warhol’s Factory.
I was a teen stalker, a fantasist who mostly preferred sitting on a stoop opposite someone’s house, noting the street-scene in my diary, to actually meeting the person inside, and Andy had long been one of my simmering obsessions.
My parents – New York society people with an interest in downtown art – had first met Andy in the late fifties, when my father was working as a fashion photographer and Andy was still an illustrator dressing windows for Bonwit Teller. My father liked to say that back then he’d thought Andy Warhol an embarrassing little creep whose determination to be famous was clearly doomed. But my mother had a taste for oddball dreamers and she and Andy became friends; she appeared in one of his 1964 Screen Tests. I’d been raised on her stories of the Factory – the silver-tinfoil-walled spaceship where Andy, pedaling on his exercise bike, swigged codeine-infused cough syrup and watched his superstars squabble and self-destruct. Watched and subtly egged them on. At a certain point, my mother got spooked by how many of his beautiful, lost young creatures ended up dead.
In 1968, Andy was shot by Valerie Solanas and he too, briefly, died. It was a time when America’s chickens, in Malcolm X’s phrase, seemed to be coming home to roost – Andy’s shooting was edged off the front pages by Robert F. Kennedy’s two days later – and when Andy came back from the dead, with his insides shattered and sewn together again, he was seemingly cured of his taste for watching other people detonate.
On 7 December 1976, I finally succeeded in pestering my parents into introducing me to Andy Warhol.
By then, they had devolved into merely social, semi-professional friends who exchanged poinsettia plants at Christmas, and the Andy I had wanted to know – the ghostly cyclist who could mesmerize you for eight hours with a flickery image of a skyscraper – had been supplanted by the art-businessman flanked by pinstripe-suited managers. And I too was in a different phase. By the time I actually made it to the Factory, I was less interested in Andy than in dancing at Studio 54 with his managers.
Our first meeting was at La Grenouille, a fancy French restaurant in Midtown. My parents had invited Andy to dinner, and later that night, I wrote my first impression of him in my diary. Andy was ‘standing there in his dinner jacket and blue jeans, tape recorder tucked under his arm, looking shy and uncertain but friendly’. He had brought as his date Bianca Jagger, gorgeous in a purple fox stole and a gold lamé toque. They ordered oysters and a spinach soufflé, which she sent back because, as she explained to the waiter, it was affreux. ‘Halfway through dinner Mummy asked me to switch places with her so I could talk to Andy. Andy said something about my mother being “mean” not to let me sit next to him before. So we talked the rest of the evening. I was a little shy and ended up feeling oddly depressed and dispirited, sort of drained. He said I looked like a movie star, had I ever thought of being one. That seemed like the sort of thing he says to about five hundred people a week . . . He asked me to bring down my whole class to the studio – that too I found depressing. I asked “Why don’t you come to Brearley [the private girls’ school where I was in eleventh grade]?” He said no, he could never do that, something about being too shy. I said, “Well, a lot of them are really awful.” He said, “Well, bring the awful ones too.” He’s very easy to talk to, I kept saying things I wished I hadn’t.’
My mother had told Andy I was a writer and he asked if there was anyone I wanted to write about for his magazine Interview.
He said they needed something for the January issue. ‘“We want someone young and really new – what have you seen on Broadway, who can you think of” on and on, I was completely stuck. Ludicrously I suggested Mr [Edward] Gorey. Andy said, “Oh come on. He’s creepy – he’s really old. I saw him walking along Park Avenue the other day. He’s too peculiar for me.” That made me laugh. “Too peculiar for you? He’s just a bit moldy. I was obsessed with him for about two years.” Mr Gorey’s star was pretty dim that night.’
I suggested other writers, photographers, film-makers whose work I admired. All too old, too peculiar. Finally, I proposed the choreographer Andy de Groat, who had just collaborated on Philip Glass and Robert Wilson’s Einstein on the Beach.
Andy agreed, ‘though he thought Einstein on the Beach was “stinky”. He wanted some more people. I told him I’d provide some later. Andy said to call A de G tomorrow, and then him. “The piece has to be in really soon.”’
Andy’s description of the evening, published in his Diaries, accords with mine, but he added a nice coda. ‘The Eberstadt daughter didn’t say anything during dinner but then she finally blurted out that she used to go to Union Square and stare up at the Factory, so that was thrilling to hear from this beautiful girl. I told her she should come down and do interviews for Interview and she said, “Good! I need the money.” Isn’t that a great line? I mean, here Freddy’s father died and left him a whole stock brokerage company.’
As a kid, I used to feel this need to be outside in the dark, looking up at lighted windows, imagining the life inside. I still do. But nowadays the lighted window is my own, my husband and children are inside, but something broken and uncured keeps me outside, sniffing the night wind and rain, unable to join the circle by the fire.
The Andy I was drawn to was dogged by this same self-imposed and unassuageable loneliness, though his version of the family fire was the VIP lounge at Studio 54 with Truman Capote, Halston and Liza Minnelli. Yet no matter how famous he became, he was still the ‘embarrassing little creep’ who, when he first arrived in New York, had harassed Truman Capote with daily fan letters, phone calls, and camped out on his doorstep; he was still the balding twenty-something sitting every day at the counter of Chock full o’Nuts, eating the same cream-cheese sandwich on date-nut bread; someone who founded his art on boredom, repetition, because only unvarying sameness could soothe his raging anxiety.
I told Andy the first time we met that this was something we had in common – that although, as he put it in his Diaries, I was a ‘beautiful girl’, a banker’s granddaughter, I was also a freak like him, a person who in some way would rather stand outside staring up at the Factory windows than be invited in.
Even today, it’s this same dividedness in Andy that gives me a pang of fellow feeling, the same compulsion to hide away that
overrules your hunger to belong, a compulsion that then leaves you feeling too lonely, too weird, too left out of everyone else’s fun. And why does the loneliness feel truer, more essential than any love or acclaim?