Andy Warhol (11 page)

Warhol died in 1987, leaving a question of how far Andy Warhol TV Productions might have gone had he lived. It is always difficult to predict the creative trajectory of an artist, let alone an artist of such tremendous originality as Warhol, but there is a certain consistency within his work, whatever medium he worked with. His subject was the common consciousness of his time—the ordinary life-world, as phenomenologists designate the world in which we are all at home. Warhol shows what everyone who shares this world already knows, without having to be told what they are looking at. The stars are an important component of our common consciousness, so he painted Marilyn and Liz and Jackie, and Elvis. He would have filmed them had they come to the Factory, just as he filmed the stars that did happen to come along. Everyone is interested in stars. So his television would be interesting if it did little more than show the stars, himself, of course, included. As a person, Warhol was obsessed with glamour, beauty, parties, shopping, and sex. There is a memorable episode in which his head rolls off (one of the things painting cannot show). The disembodied head says, “Have a good time at all the parties!” which could have been his parting message to the world. Unquestionably, being a TV producer and the host of his own TV program gave him even greater access to these things.
Warhol seems to have known from within what everyone would like to see.

But to make the kinds of shows that common audiences would actually find entertaining, a lot of technology would have to be in place. And this implies a certain internal limit on how far his television could go. It is interesting to compare the credits for the earliest of Warhol's videos with those for
Andy Warhol's Fifteen Minutes.
At the beginning there was just Warhol and Fremont. Don Monroe was added as director in 1979, when the work began to take on a professional allure.
Andy Warhol's Fifteen Minutes
credits, in addition to Warhol, Fremont, and Monroe, a whole production team: a production manager, a production coordinator, a number of production assistants, editors, graphic artists, music researchers, composers, as well as the stars. Warhol had come a long way from what he was able to do single-handedly with a Norelco I camera in 1965. His TV attained a quality that justified its being shown in an MTV time slot. But the productive capabilities of the Factory were probably too limited to go much further, or even to sustain a season of shows. For this, more money and perhaps a lot more money would be required. But this exposed Warhol to something he had not reckoned with when he struck a Faustian bargain to make commercial TV: the intervention into his artistic decisions by others over whom he had no control.

There is an instructive passage in Colacello's book
Holy Terror
—a memoir of his life as part of the Factory. A meeting had
been arranged between Warhol and Lorne Michaels, the creator of
Saturday Night Live.
Michaels was very excited by the prospect of Warhol TV. He offered development money and a prime-time Saturday night slot. “They could do whatever they wanted: He would protect them from the network bosses who might question some of their more experimental ideas.” Through all of this, Warhol said not a word, and Vincent Fremont saw immediately that nothing could come of this offer. “Andy could not stand paternalism in any form. Behind his passive façade, he had to be in control.” His “passive façade” was a way of exercising control. In this respect, Andy Warhol TV Productions had to be essentially a Factory operation. There could be TV only so long as Warhol need involve no one else in the integrity of his art. In that sense the Factory as TV studio was little different from the Factory as art studio or movie studio. And that is what makes Andy Warhol TV so uniquely his and so completely him. He went as far as he could in commercial television without surrendering his autonomy. His television is the unlikely product of two different imperatives—the imperatives of commercial entertainment, and the imperatives of a fiercely independent artist, responsible to no one but himself.

The story of life in New York City is the story of real estate, and real estate, accordingly, is as absorbing a narrative topic as love: the story of where one lives or might have lived is as compelling as the story of how you met the person you live with—or, alas, no longer live with. That is the premise of Tama Janowitz's comic masterpiece,
Slaves of New York
, wryly recounted in the first person by a downtown woman somewhat older than a sullen painter whose fictional name is “Stash”—and whose name in real life is Ronnie Cutrone, who was Andy Warhol's studio assistant from 1972 to 1982, though he was a hanger-on at the Silver Factory beginning around 1965. In view of the way that Warhol was often dependent on those around him for his ideas, Cutrone played an important role in the later phase of Andy's artistic career. If Stash is a fair portrait of Cutrone, Eleanor, the “slave of New York,” had
her work cut out for her, since not only does he hold the lease on the space they cohabit, but he has a roving eye for sexually attractive chicks. Eleanor is largely penniless—her “creativity” consists of designing original hats for East Village women—so she lives on the brink of homelessness unless she continues to find favor in Stash's faithless eyes. Whether the stories were a true mirror of New York life in the 1970s, they constituted a metaphor that every New Yorker understood. Unless they held the lease themselves, every New Yorker, man or woman, married or unmarried, was in bondage to the leaseholder they lived with.

Office space, obviously, is a different, less heartbreaking kind of story. But the “culture” of a commercial space is more dependent on what makes real estate real than mere architectural truth. Silvering the Silver Factory eloquently expresses the spirit of New York artistic life of the mid-1960s, and it did not survive the next move that Andy Warhol Enterprises was to make at the end of 1967, when, as leaseholder, he was told that he was going to have to vacate, since the building the Silver Factory was in was scheduled to be demolished and replaced by a contemporary apartment building. The silvering went with the youth culture of its occupants, the music they danced to, the kind of drugs they got high on or addicted to, and with their sexual looseness or uptightness, even their language, if one follows Wittgenstein's dictum that to imagine a language is to imagine a form of life. The space “made a statement,” and the statement was internally related to the art produced and responded to there, mainly underground movies.
Painting the Factory silver was the idea of Billy Linich—or “Billy Name,” as he came to be called—who first silvered his apartment when someone administered amphetamines to release him from a sort of lingering torpor that had robbed him of energy. It was Andy who subsequently proposed that Billy silver his new studio, and Andy that gave an interpretation of the statement he felt that silvering it made: “It was the perfect time for silver. Silver was the future . . . the astronauts wore silver suits. And silver was also the past—the silver screen—Hollywood actresses photographed in silver sets.” Silver was the color of the “Silver Surfer” and of the platinum blondes of Art Deco times.

Linich was the only one who actually lived there—he took possession of one of the bathrooms, which he also used as a darkroom for developing the photographs he took, chronicling life in the Silver Factory as it evolved. It says a great deal that of Warhol's two lieutenants, Billy Linich and Gerard Malanga, Malanga received a salary, however minimal, while Billy Name was merely given spending money. Malanga was a grown-up, a jobholder, identified with the photographic silk-screening process and the mass production of the grocery boxes; Billy Name had the ambition of a perpetual adolescent, living at home, helping with household chores, and making do with an allowance for his personal needs.

Most of those who used the Silver Factory as their “club” would not have lived there. Either they lived at home and hung out in the Silver Factory, or they had money and lived independent,
urbane lives. But they believed in the life that the Silver Factory emblematized, of freedom spiced by the license that bohemia claimed for itself. They were often celebrities. A friend of Andy's hosted a Beautiful People Party in the spring of 1965, where Judy Garland, Rudolph Nureyev, Tennessee Williams, and Montgomery Clift came as invited guests. Andy by that time was himself a Beautiful Person—a star and indeed an icon. But none of the Silver Factory regulars had quite the necessary glitter for that. They were young, good-looking people with whatever allotment of talent may have given them hope for stardom, and who had been brought to the Silver Factory by Malanga or by Linich, who had access to different pools of recruits, or by Andy himself, who spotted what he thought might be talent at the nightly parties he attended.

Billy Name makes an appearance on Ric Burns's four-hour television special on Warhol, aired in 2006, in which he declares, with a kind of gleeful cackle, that he was the one responsible for the downtown presence in the Silver Factory. He had come to New York in the late 1950s—an attractive young man, lean and dark, drawn to bookstores and a certain kind of gay bohemia, where he made friends and looked for protectors. He became part of a group that came to be called—that called themselves—the Mole People—people of a certain talent, early users of speed, with a taste for grand opera and a marked anarchistic lifestyle, and gifted with a rude and cutting wit, a free and open sex life, and a dedication to mischief. The “Pope” of the Mole People
was Bob Olivo, whose Factory Name was Ondine—an inspired monologist and lip-syncher, a compellingly original and bizarre personality.

Here is a picture of Ondine and of the Mole People from Mary Woronov's memoir,
Swimming Underground: My Years in the Warhol Factory:

In the course of that evening, Woronov, an actress and writer, with a certain touch of sadism and an unmistakable courage, was finally captured by the perpetual Walpurgisnacht that was Mole reality. She ultimately left the party and went home. “But I didn't belong. I had changed. There were no outward signs, but I knew it. It was no longer them, it was us. Their rules were mine, their insanity my reality, and as for the rest of the world, it just didn't matter. I was a Mole” (72).

Andy was so captivated by Ondine's style of wit that he pursued him with a tape recorder for twenty-four hours in an attempt to preserve everything that Ondine said in that interval. At least that is what he assumes. One might be able through textual detective work to identify the actual date—the way one can find out that June 16, 1904, is Bloomsday: the actual twenty-four hours lived through by Joyce's hero, Leopold Bloom. But of course Joyce did not write the book in that twenty-four-hour interval. Warhol wanted it to be a “bad book”—the way, I suppose, his movies were bad movies and his paintings bad paintings, according to
initial criticism. When the transcription of his tapes was given to him, it was full of errors and inconsistencies, but, true to character, he decided to publish it just as it was, saying, “This is fantastic. This is great!” And in a way it is fantastic and great: it really refuses to distinguish what people say from the circumambient noises that the tape recorder picked up, and which somehow got transcribed. Like “Rattle, gurgle, clink, tinkle. / Click, pause, click, ring. / Dial, dial”—with which the book begins. But these are names of noises, not noises themselves, which we would hear if we listened to the tapes. The book can certainly be considered avant-garde literature (the huge “A” at the beginning of the book is obviously meant to remind the reader of a typographical peculiarity of
Ulysses).
But it does not do what Warhol meant for it to do, namely, give us a sense of Ondine's wit! Compare
A
with the voice of “lui” in Diderot's masterpiece,
Rameau's Nephew
, who knows that he is gifted but not a genius like his uncle, though no one—and certainly not his uncle—could duplicate the nephew's wild way with language and sound, which Hegel transcribes in a passage in the
Phenomenology of Mind: