With regard to Triad, of course, I burst into hot, angry tears when being told by big Lee Rosenberg that they were terminating my services. Nevertheless, Lee, a handsome-looking powerhouse, was terribly decent. “Listen, this will be the start of something else,” he said. “Clearly, you’re capable and we’ll do everything to find you another job.” But interviews with types such as Alan Greisman, then the producer husband of Sally Field, led nowhere.
Oddly enough, I got further with George Lucas and was counted among the last three candidates. Organized by the screenwriter Menno Meyjes, the first meeting was at the office of Lucas’s lawyer, Barry Hirsch, and the second took place at the famous Skywalker Ranch. It really was a ranch—lots of land, a dark wood interior, and a stalwart staircase—and then there was George. I banged on about films needing to entertain and the relevance of sympathetic baddies. “Sympathetic baddies,” he said. It was then that I admitted that Darth Vader was my favorite Star Wars character. He did smile.
Whereas most of my friends were understanding, Uberto Pasolini, the future producer of The Full Monty, was not. “What do you expect, Natasha, you’re not hungry enough,” he said. True! And I thought of contemporaries such as Gerry Harrington, a junior talent agent, who was signing clients; David Heyman, who was slogging away at Warner Bros. Studio—he was booked up for breakfast three months in advance—and Peter Frankfurt, who was working for the director Richard Donner and was involved in Lethal Weapon, Scrooged, and other films.
Then again, maybe I didn’t always get Hollywood. My first-ever gaffe was saying “No way, San José,” thinking I was being extremely cool in a job interview. The second was thinking that La Cienega Boulevard was more operatic-sounding and rhymed with saga. And then there was my blunder concerning my friend Catherine Oxenberg. She had been the darling of Aaron Spelling, TV’s kingpin, but she was fired. Her sin had been asking for more money, backed up by the fact that Amanda, her character on Dynasty, was immensely popular. Spelling was furious. The kittenish Catherine dug her heels in. And she was unceremoniously dumped. Joan Collins, her colleague from the series and a seasoned pro, advised her to leave Hollywood. But Catherine had other plans. “From now on, I’m going to do feature films,” she said confidently.
I was having dinner with a TV producer when I revealed how Catherine refused to listen to Joan. Though he had been flirtatious, his manner turned steely. “Wake up and smell the coffee, Natasha,” he said. “No one goes against Aaron Spelling. Joan Collins was right.” There was a brief silence, until I laughed, nervously.
When she was riding high at Dynasty, Catherine’s twenty-fifth-birthday party was one of the glitziest soirées that I attended in Hollywood. It was held at the house of George Hamilton—her ex-boyfriend, who had nicknamed her “half a hip”—and every single member of Dynasty, including John Forsythe and Linda Evans, had attended, as had Clint Eastwood and Sammy Davis Jr. George Hamilton was a personal favorite. His film Love at First Bite was one of the great B comedy movies. And his house—a temple to his good-natured narcissism—also demonstrated his sense of self-irony. The main staircase was lined with different portraits of him, dressed as a Second World War pilot and in other dashing poses. Then there was the great man’s bathroom. I picked up his shaving mirror and found a cutout picture of Clark Gable slipped inside. And why not?
A few months later, I was driving with Catherine when we saw George in his pale gold Rolls-Royce that caught the light and enhanced his perma-tan perfectly. We screamed and waved frantically. He waved back, smiled, and barely looked in our direction. “My God, he thinks we’re his fans,” Catherine said. He did, and I’m sure continues to. George Hamilton reveled, and I hope continues to revel, in his life as a star. What a champ!
During my twenty-two months in La-La Land, there were other celebrity or Hollywood moments that could be divided between the surreal and just plain silly. It was perfect preparation for my adventures in Warhol Land. Stewart Granger, for instance, was one of the film heroes of my youth. I’d watched him in endless reruns of films like Scaramouche, The Prisoner of Zenda, and Moonfleet. So, spotting him in a supermarket, I surreptitiously shadowed him. No fool, he soon realized it. “Are you following me?” he said. It was a Hollywood faux pas on every single level. Shameless, I didn’t really care.
Nor did I mind watching a very young and annoyed Winona Ryder deal with her skis and the snow in Utah. It was 1987 and her second film, Square Dance, was being presented at the Sundance Film Festival. Even though her hair was dyed orange, she was as pretty as a young Elizabeth Taylor and was clearly destined for the big time.
Bumping into Rod Stewart was different. A saucepot: he was cheeky, he was sexy, and he had elements of Mick Jagger. So I presumed most rock stars were fun until meeting Don Henley from the Eagles. Talk about self-important and humorless. It wasn’t as if Il Don walked into the party and people stopped talking, which was certainly the case of Warren Beatty in July 1985. It happened at Robert Graham’s studio in Venice: a groovy gathering that included his fellow California artists like Ed Ruscha, Ed Moses, and the actor Dennis Hopper. Warren’s trick, I reckoned, was looking handsome but playing vague yet concerned. Ha—he had every corner covered! Witnessed when a woman sashayed up and said, “Hi, Warren, do you remember me? We met in 1972.” “Why, yesss,” he said. “Why, yesss not,” I felt like squawking, but wisely refrained. Nor was I in great shakes, since I had decided to wear a wide-brimmed straw hat that I’d ordered from Nancy Reagan’s milliner. “That’s quite a hat,” said Vanity Fair’s Wendy Stark as I nearly collided with several of her friends.
Still, nothing beat the embarrassment of visiting Griffin Dunne on the film set of Who’s That Girl. A little voice did say, “Hmm, perhaps you shouldn’t do this?” It was wisdom that was quickly eclipsed by my brief but arduous crush on the actor, whom Tony Richardson jealously described as “that poisoned dwarf.” Griffin was telephoning quite a lot at the time. He did suggest the midnight visit. However, he was costarring with Madonna. A minx who, after seeing me looking pink-cheeked and keen (read: desperate) behind the movie set’s barbed-wire fence, said, “Griiiffin, your girlfriend is here to see you.” Peering through, he looked appalled. The director, James Foley, got annoyed that there was commotion. And I—accompanied by the ever-supportive Annabel—scampered through the floodlit bushes, vowing to forget Griffin and never visit another film set again.
12 Andy Up Close
The next time Andy and I properly saw each other was at a New York benefit in October 1984. Although I’d come as Fred Hughes’s date, I talked to Andy throughout dinner. Dressed in a black wool Max Mara skirt suit (which I ended up wearing to his funeral), I’d become quite different. My hair was longer and back to my natural chestnut-brown color. Andy was interested that I worked for Chatto & Linnit, which represented Torvill and Dean, the Olympic ice-dancing champions. They’d become huge stars when performing to Ravel’s Boléro, and they continued to fill stadiums internationally. “They must make a ton of money,” Andy said. Right as ever: Torvill and Dean made money hand over fist over skate blade. He also guessed that the skaters must seriously annoy the agency’s distinguished thespians. They did, and to an astounding degree. When Alan Bates couldn’t get through to Michael Linnit, his agent, he’d taken to saying, “Well, just say that Torvill and Bates called.” It was surprising behavior from an actor who was pretty even-keeled. But I was equally surprised that Andy tapped in to that. He heard, saw, and understood all, but in public he preferred to camouflage it in a sea of “gees” and “greats.” After bantering about British families we both knew, like the Guinnesses and Lambtons, we talked about The Weaker Vessel, my mother’s book about seventeenth-century women that had unexpectedly hit the New York Times bestseller list. Andy had read Mel Gussow’s lengthy profile about her in The New York Times Magazine. “It must have helped book sales,” he said. Gussow’s article had. Andy then said, “Natasha, you should write a Mommie Dearest about
your childhood.” Somewhat surprised, I replied, “You mean describe how she hit my siblings and me over the head with her books as opposed to wire coat hangers?” He laughed—closing his eyes and tipping his head back—but I did wonder if he was testing me.
The following year, in mid-August, a few months after I had moved, we had dinner at Mr Chow in Los Angeles. The dinner was organized by Wendy Stark—the equivalent of Hollywood royalty, since her grandmother was Fanny Brice and her father was Ray Stark, a producer and former studio head. She’d known Andy and Fred since forever. An excellent friend to have, Wendy was on close terms with everyone, from big stars like Jack Nicholson and Warren Beatty to powerful ladies who lunched such as Betsy Bloomingdale. Wendy had just been in England, where she’d seen the Business perform, a band of upper-class musicians keen to hit the big time. “I went along with Mick [Jagger] and they were very cute and happy about that,” she said. I could only imagine but was more interested in hearing about Madonna and Sean Penn’s wedding. Andy and Fred had attended the nuptials, and it was definitely the hottest ticket in a town that then prided itself on being low-key and private.
It had happened on Saturday, August 16—Madonna’s twenty-seventh birthday—and everything, including the location in Malibu, was meant to be top secret. Even though I was living in the flats of Beverly Hills, I could still hear those helicopters filled with paparazzi photographers headed for the beach. They were that loud. Andy had enjoyed that detail—suitably weird—as well as the fact that the photographers had actually been hanging out, desperate to get images.
The Madonna and Sean Penn event was major. In fact, during my two years of living in Hollywood, nothing got the media more riled up than the marriage of those dramatic lovebirds. I asked Fred about Madonna’s outfit. Her contemporary-styled Edwardian outfit won his approval. “I liked the little bowler,” he said, referring to the hat topping off the wedding veil. “That was cute.” I knew what he meant and was surprised to see Andy make a face. It was a bit unkind. And I then wondered about the relationship between Fred and Andy.
During all the Madonna–Penn wedding media coverage, Andy was mentioned as one of the guests. True, his white blond wig was hard to miss. Still, it captured how he had become a full-blown celebrity outside the art world. He had signed up with the Zoli modeling agency, he was endorsing eye frames for l.a.Eyeworks, he had appeared on the cover of New York magazine with celebrity impersonators under the headline “Social Climbing: How to Do It in the ’80s,” and eventually appeared on the two hundredth episode of The Love Boat in October 1985. Although Andy was much more of a star than when we first met in 1980, there was never a sense that he’d sold out or gone too far. Being in the business of being famous—that’s what he did—was the attitude of his friends. Everyone accepted his behavior and almost basked in the glow of his performance. There was just a little problem, to quote Peter Brant: “Most of his friends didn’t think to collect Warhol. And often they were well-known and wealthy.” Nor did articles by Robert Hughes, Time magazine’s revered art critic, help matters.
No question of a doubt, Robert Hughes did irreparable damage to Andy’s reputation as an artist when he wrote “The Rise of Andy Warhol” in The New York Review of Books in February 1982. A memorably brilliant and blistering attack, it presented Andy as having sold out on every level: a business artist who was commercial but “still unloved by the world at large.” Indeed, Hughes not only claimed that Andy did his best work in the years 1962–1968, but he also exposed Andy’s entourage as pretentious toadies, described Interview as “a social-climbing device for its owner and staff,” and dismissed his recent exhibitions.
“Fatuous” was how Hughes termed the 1979 Whitney show, Andy Warhol: Portraits of the 70s. Then he asked, “What other ‘serious’ artist . . . would contemplate doing a series called ‘Ten Portraits of Jews of the Twentieth Century’ [exhibited at the Jewish Museum in New York in 1980]?” Continuing with: “There is a big market for bird prints, dog prints, racing prints, hunting prints, yachting prints; why not Jew prints?” A portrait show of sports stars at the Los Angeles Institute of Contemporary Art in 1981, underwritten by Playboy Enterprises, was dissed as “a promotional stunt” and “peculiar.” And Andy Warhol: A Print Retrospective at Castelli Graphics at the end of the year chilled because of its “transparent cynicism” and “Franklin Mint approach.”
The problem about Hughes’s thoroughly researched piece was the emperor’s-new-clothes tone and the underlined message being: Don’t be fooled by Andy Warhol. It would send repercussions throughout the art world, which was infinitely smaller then than it is today. Collectors were also an elite, select breed who took the opinion of people like Hughes into consideration.
Not that Hughes’s article gave painter’s block to Andy, who never stopped churning out his lucrative portraits. Nor did the glamorous people stop posing for him. In 1985, for instance, he did portraits of dancer Martha Graham, actress Joan Collins, style icon Tina Chow, and Princess Caroline of Monaco, Grace Kelly’s daughter.
One project, encouraged by Bruno Bischofberger, Andy’s Zurich-based dealer, was his small Retrospectives and Reversals group, produced in the early ’80s. Andy essentially made negatives and reversed the color scheme of his famous icons such as Flowers, Marilyns, Campbell’s Soup Cans, and Death and Disasters. The paintings were safe and summed up characteristic in a way that Andy’s Rorschach (inkblot) paintings in 1984—abstract and expressionist in style—were daring and innovative. Viewing the work as contemporary, Abigail Asher says, “it is hard not to think of Christopher Wool and his black-and-white repetitions.”
Asher describes his abstract and minimalist Shadow paintings of the late 1970s as “ahead of the curve of many artists of the 1990s.” She also views his Self-Portraits (Fright Wigs) as outstanding. “Before Andy died, there was a return to Sturm und Drang—paint and expressionism—in the art world when he was not doing his most insightful work,” she offers. “There again, it is possible that he was anticipating something extraordinary.” The tide can also turn against an artist. “De Kooning’s late work was shunned,” she states. “Apart from Picasso, no artist sustains a popular period all the time.”
Larry Gagosian represented Willem de Kooning when critics attacked his later work and even suggested that the artist should give up. “But that moving work is some of the best that he ever did,” Gagosian says. “Critics can get it wrong.” Artists too. Gagosian was in the Factory having a tuna sandwich lunch with Andy and Fred Hughes when he noticed paintings “rolled up like a carpet with plastic.” Gagosian asked what they were. They were the Oxidation paintings, which the artist referred to as the “Piss paintings,” since they were achieved by pissing on the canvas. “Nobody wants them,” said Andy. However, Gagosian found them interesting. “Do you think you could sell them?” Andy asked. Gagosian succeeded in selling all of the twenty-foot canvases, which were shown in a truck dock on West Twenty-third Street, for between $200,000 and $300,000 each. “Andy came to the opening, he was a big sport,” Gagosian recalls.
Andy also attended the show for his collaborations with Jean-Michel Basquiat. Exhibited at the Tony Shafrazi Gallery in 1985, the paintings, which were Bischofberger’s idea, did not sell. “I was disappointed,” admits Bischofberger. Thirty-two years later, opinion continues to be divided between those who dismiss the paintings and those who don’t. Asher finds them “pathetically weak,” putting them down to “an old man falling for a handsome drug addict,” whereas Thaddaeus Ropac says he “still cannot understand why they’re not more successful.”
With hindsight, Bischofberger offers, “The problem with a collaboration is it’s neither fish nor fowl and people only think in market terms.” Whatever the reason, it’s obvious from Andy’s final exhibition, The Last Supper, in January 1987, that he was in charge, even if he collaborated with Basquiat on the ten punching bags, hanging on chains, that were painted with different versions of Jesus’ fac
e.
Although Andy played bland and acted as if he didn’t care about his work and so forth, he did desperately. “He often complained that his work was not considered,” says Ropac. “You have to understand that people were really not looking at Warhol in the 1980s.” Wilfredo Rosado recalls Warhol’s fear about his age. “He had this conflict that he was not considered the hot artist anymore.” However, Andy’s chief complaint to Vincent Fremont was that he was undervalued.
“Andy was so clever and so knowledgeable, but he ruined his reputation by painting whatever you gave him—cars, cats,” says the art dealer Rudolf Zwirner, who exhibited Warhol in Cologne in the early 1960s. “It became a problem for MoMA and others.”
The interior designer Jacques Grange recalls the rejection of Andy, just before his death. “There was this attitude, ‘He’s become so manufactured’ and ‘He’s going a little gaga.’” However, Warhol continued to have a strong presence in Paris. “We were not like the New Yorkers,” Grange says. “It was always Andy, Andy, Andy.”
Ever aware of the situation, Andy did have a professional trick up his sleeve. “He wanted to get back into filmmaking,” says Vincent. Hence making the deal with Tama and her book Slaves of New York. “But he did say, ‘Don’t tell Fred.’ This was because Fred wanted Andy to stick to painting and got annoyed about outside projects.” On one occasion, Andy had almost given $50,000 to Nunsense, an off-Broadway production about nuns. “Fred exploded when he heard,” says Fremont. “The musical became a huge success and would have made Andy’s money back.”
After Andy Page 13