Andy Warhol (19 page)

Warhol fulfilled modeling assignments for Zoli and later for the Ford agency; in the Frederick Wiseman documentary
Model
, Warhol interviewed naked male models (he aspired to join their ranks) in a New York hotel room. Cuddling Robert Rauschenberg at a Leo Castelli bash in 1982, Andy was delighted to discover that his former rival and role model had “a bad body.” Though Warhol felt, looking at video footage of himself, that he was a freak (“I can't change it. I'm too unusual”), he appeared, as freak, as himself, on episodes of
The Love Boat
and
Saturday Night Live;
he considered running, in
Artforum
, a fold-out ad for his modeling career. Fred Hughes and others condescended to Andy's modeling ambitions, but he felt righteous and rigorous about his new passion, this attempt to “get a good body”: he told the diary that he wished he'd started exercising when he was young so he could have had a good body all his life. He was pleased to report that “I think I finally look like people want Andy Warhol to look again.”

In 1986 he visited cadaver dissections at an art school: he was investigating possibilities for sculpture casts as an alternative to painted portraiture. Despite the renovations to his body during the 1980s, incarnation—living as an empty box or bag—demoralized him. He still marveled at other people's bodies (he made affectionate nude portraits of the art dealer Pat Hearn in 1985, in which she resembles a young Katharine Hepburn); and yet his
Diaries
, from which I draw this paragraph's account of Andy's inner life, declare his sense that someone else was living within his skin's hotel, his organs a disintegrating network now vulnerable to hackers and hijackers, vandals and assailants. If the body is armor, resistance to the diseased, arrowed world, then his shield had flaws. Even his breathing felt wrong: he said his lungs were “still funny from being shot.” Someone noxious had walked into his body: “It happens if you're having this trauma or if you're sick or something. And you know, when I was little I remember I was really sick and didn't like school and had to be dragged there and then one day I changed—after that I loved school and everything, so I think somebody may have walked into me then. … I'm not clear on who the walk-ins are. Souls. And I'm not clear on where they come from.” Entered by a foreign spirit, Andy's body developed into a ruptured thing, not his property; and it—the space where Andrew Warhola used to be—was visited by thoughts of invaders. He dreamed in April 1981 that Billy Name and others wearing “colorful costumes” invaded his house and took over his life. After the Factory's open-door policy, he may have feared that visitors would never leave. Billy Name was a beloved touchstone of Andy's past, and yet when Billy started calling him in 1987, suggesting a Factory reunion, Andy had severe reservations. “I'm going to just have to tell Billy that I can't face the past. And I'd walked into the house and didn't look where I stepped and so I was talking to him with dog poop all over my shoes.”

Another invasion, however, was not a dream, and its traumatic intensity rivaled the departure of Jed and the death of Jon Gould: a woman—a stranger—pulled off his wig while he was autographing copies of his book
America
at the Rizzoli store in SoHo on October 30, 1985. Andy didn't stop signing; pretending that he didn't care, he pulled his jacket's hood over his head. But the trespass cut him. He said: “It hurt. Physically. And it hurt that nobody had warned me.” He'd hoped his crystal could have prevented the assault; his chiropractor told him, a few days later, that the crystal “had been invaded,” and he remarked, “I think what invaded was the girl.” The girl seemed a second Valerie Solanas: “It was like getting shot again, it wasn't real. I was just the comedian there, pleasing the people.” Home that evening, he fixed himself Campbell's dry soup; soup, his oldest friend, consoled. Andy's wig was his name tag, as well as his shield against humiliation; when this “girl” pulled it off, his personality lost scaffolding. Later, she dared to call the office to talk to Warhol—as Valerie had continued to pester him after the shooting.

A few days after the Rizzoli disaster, he worried that AIDS would lead authorities to incarcerate gays in concentration camps: “All the fags will have to get married so they won't have to go away to camps. It'll be like for a green card.” The prospect of sick “fags” sent away to camps may have recalled, for him, the time he reluctantly sent his senile mother, at the end of her life, back to Pittsburgh: four days after the wig trauma, he told the diary, “My mother was the age I am now, when she came to New York. And at the time I thought she was really old. But then she didn't die until she was eighty. And she had a lot of energy.” The next Easter, when Andy served food to the homeless at the Church of the Heavenly Rest, he noticed that many of the women resembled his mother.

Andy made his reputation as an artist specializing in repetitions, and so it is no surprise that repetitions—hauntings­—offered him a ledger for accounting intimate terrors­. Repeated again and again was the event of being “put down,” invaded, and humiliated. He loved when commodities or countenances repeated, but not when shame recurred: he told the diary in May 1986, “I wish I were twenty and could go through all this again but I never want to go through anything or anybody again in my whole life.” He wanted to avoid the revival of miserable unspeakables—wounds, holes, distensions; stretchmarks­ of his pre-fame, cramped embodiment. These moments of repetition he described as “walk-ins”: breaches, when another spirit, a double from somewhere unknown, walked into his body, replacing his own personality, which vanished in a propitiatory, shielding instant. All of his painted, drawn, and filmed images of doubles try to represent his experience of being walked in on, ceding to an out-of-towner, friend or stranger—surrendering to Edie, to Julia, to Viva, to Nico, to a stalker, or to any attractive man he'd rather be. Andy dwelled on the figure of the double because he himself was two people: the invader who walked in, and the exile who walked out. One reason why he filled his days and nights with personalities, and why he cluttered his house with collectibles, and why he exerted himself past exhaustion to stuff the world with paintings and prints and photographs and tapes and films and videos and magazines, was to
open the door
to walk-ins, to tell potential intruders that his body was a salon, a public terminal, a machine, not a person with the usual limits and blinders. Becoming automated, or identifying with auto­matons, allowed Warhol to admit walk-ins during a trauma, to go vacant so that other people—squatters­—could overtake his rooms. Becoming a machine inoculated him against traumatic emptiness but also recirculated the vacancy, this time as anesthesia. Opposed to these icy interludes was his favorite drug, overstimulation—antidote to blankness, to the experience of willpower deserting him, like Jed walking out of the collection-crammed dollhouse.

Here are a few events of the 1970s and 1980s that repeated the “put-down,” “walk-in,” out-of-body, twinned experience: sending his mother away to Pittsburgh; her death; Jed's rejection; Jon's rejection, and then his death; the AIDS epidemic, and the bodily fears it instilled; the memory of Valerie, and the wounds she left behind. Any insult or humiliation (especially the wig episode) recalled her assault; even the departure and death of Mrs. Warhola, soon after the shooting, recapitulated it. Many gay men had reason to be terrified of viral invasion in the 1980s; Andy feared viruses but also the invasions and damages committed, in fact or imagination, by “the girl”—the girl who taunted him on his first day of school, then Valerie, then the wig despoiler. And there must have been others, walking in. I wonder if his mother was one of those “girls” who walked in, and whether the dream of Billy Name—moving into Andy's house, living under the stairs, wearing “colorful” costumes—reflects his long co-residence with Julia; in the 1950s she invaded his nelly New York sphere, even if her steady presence abetted—fed soup to—his renegade impulses.

It may seem odd, so late in Andy's life, to be talking about his mother, but Andy, in this true story, is now going to die, and the world of death, hospitals, and old bodies was, for him, the old country, Julia's country, to which she'd departed nearly sixteen years before he joined her there. We are sad to be leaving Andy, but it is time for him to go. He walked out of his body quickly, without preparation (unless we consider the Last Supper paintings to be last rites).

Andy had needed gallbladder surgery since 1973, but he avoided it because he was afraid of hospitals. He associated them with the disaster of his own near-death in 1968, but also with the disaster of birth. He wrote in
The Philosophy
:
“Being born is like being kidnapped. And then sold into slavery.” In his 1963 silkscreen painting
Hospital
, a doctor holds upside down a newborn infant, though a nurse-nun, face surgically masked, a forbidding cross around her neck, dominates the composition; the religious nurse summarized terror for Warhol, and she would return at the very end.

He only agreed to enter the hospital for surgery when his doctor, Denton Cox, as well as other specialists whom Warhol consulted, told him that he'd die if he didn't: the gallbladder—his bag—was in imminent danger of rupturing, flooding his body with toxins, like the Vesuvian lava he'd painted two years earlier. White, weak, he did a final modeling gig (with Miles Davis) at a club called the Tunnel, and on Friday, February 20, 1987, he checked himself into New York Hospital. He brought two books with him: Kitty Kelley's biography of Frank Sinatra, and a volume of Jean Cocteau's diaries. Checking in, Andy chose the pseudonym “Bob Roberts” only after he was forbidden his first choice, “Barbara”; he knew his health insurance ID numbers by heart, although he forgot his own home telephone number after the surgery was successfully completed (his hernia repaired, too, a bonus, so he'd never again need to wear an abdominal harness). He kept on his wig throughout the operation. The nurse, Min Cho, whose English was imperfect, and who didn't know her patient was a famous artist, kept watch over him, though she may have heeded more closely the Bible she was reading. In the early morning, Min Cho realized that Andy had suffered cardiac arrest, perhaps from a fear-related surge of adrenaline. She called in other staff, and after they spent an hour trying to revive him, he was pronounced dead at 6:31 A.M. He was only fifty-eight years old. According to Paul Alexander, in his book
Death and Disaster
, the nurse then cleaned Andy's dead body, washed off the blood, and “gathered up two garbage bags full of soiled material.”

I wonder about Andy's last thoughts and last words; no one transcribed them. The night before, he called his house­keepers. He refused a pain shot from the dull nurse. And then he turned off the hospital-room television.

The funeral was held in Pittsburgh on February 26, 1987; he was buried in Saint John the Baptist Byzantine Cemetery, beside Julia and Andrej Warhola. One of Andy's confidantes, Paige Powell, tossed a flask of scent (Estée Lauder) and copies of
Interview
in the open grave. A memorial service took place in New York City, at Saint Patrick's Cathedral, on April Fools' Day. A pianist played a passage from Mozart's
Magic Flute
—the entrance of the high priest, Sarastro, who understood the clandestine unity of antitheses. Brigid Berlin read aloud from the Book of Wisdom.

After an investigation, the New York State Department of Health alleged lapses in Warhol's postoperative care. His estate lodged a wrongful death suit; the case was settled, and the hospital­ paid the estate three million dollars. Thus began the posthumous tedium, full and empty as any Pop box—accounting­, haggling, buying and selling, institutionalizing. An auction of his collections, held at Sotheby's from April 23 to May 3, 1988, brought $25,333,368. The Museum of Modern Art, which ignored him during his lifetime, gave him a retrospective­ in 1989. The Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh opened in 1994. Andy is anywhere, everywhere, embodied in critics, curators­, dealers; The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts; The Andy Warhol Film Project; tchotchkes, T-shirts, appropriations. Through these emissaries, the Factory­ lives on—a belated Internationale of a thousand faithful, who handle­, disperse, restore, catalog, and explain his treasure chest, and ensure that it continues to bear fractious fruit.

Like Ingrid Superstar, Andy disappeared. Someone walked into his body, and he walked out. His death, a vanishing act, defied the auguries; it left a vacuum that we may enjoy and not strive to fill. He practiced the art of making nothing happen (“I can tell when one of them is glad to see me walk in the door, because something's happening, and they can't wait for me to make nothing happen”): now that he is gone, we are free to confront the substantial nothingness he left behind. For Warhol had “a mind of winter,” his hair wintry, too, like the snow man in the Wallace Stevens poem: “nothing himself,” he “beholds/Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.”

It is false to say that Andy Warhol left nothing behind. He left behind his own example, the gestures and actions of a comic, heroic life; he'd rather have been called a heroine, but he was less Lois Lane and more Superman, transforming his alien self into a costumed, metropolitan ubiquity. As well known for his odd verbal style as for his art, he stands before us as a formalist, an abstract thinker who reformed the way we see concepts, names, species, and categories. He was an organization man: interested in organisms, in originality, in organs, and in how the mind organizes cognition and memory. By collecting and socializing, by making amused cameo appearances, by producing abundant sculptures, paintings, prints, drawings, films, photographs, videos, time capsules, and books, Andy organized and boxed the world into digestible units, modular perceptual containers that can be stacked, repeated, and counted, and that might last forever. Above all, he was a maker, in love with productivity: without apparent self-consciousness or inhibition, he produced, ceaselessly. The seed of great art is impulse, not restraint. Andy wanted art to be easy, but only so that he could make more of it, and more quickly. Easy Street, easy art: he wanted to ease—to lubricate—the wheels of production, to make fabrication a more accessible, democratic, and openhearted realm of conduct. Enough of war, of rivalry; Warhol's practice suggests that art can be as direct, pacifying, and clarifying as a cool glass of water—what Ed Hood, in
My Hustler
, calls a “water cocktail.” It is not heroic to deprive the world of the artifacts one has the ability to make. Warhol did not hold back his largesse. He could have truly retired from painting. He could have fired all the kids in the Factory and closed it down. He could have moved to a tropical island and paid for the company of boys. He could have hired bodyguards and become a recluse. Instead, he stayed in New York, walked its streets, and worked. In a time of artistic meanness, when creators stint posterity by refusing to produce, and by masquerading their drought as good manners, Warhol threw away decorum and worked. He was one of the most magnanimous producers of the twentieth century, putting art forward again and again, working to salvage
work
—his favorite category—and to teach us, in a deathless didactic act, that incarnation is hard labor, with no time left over for love.