The next time Fred returned to Los Angeles it was without Andy. He was there in the late fall of 1985 for the wedding of Tina Gill and Doug Simon, the grandson of Norton Simon, the owner of the museum and one of LA’s non-entertainment multimillionaires. I acted as Fred’s date to the wedding, which was held at the Bel-Air Country Club. Jennifer Jones (the second Mrs. Norton Simon Sr.) was part of the marital cortege. Initially, Fred was taken aback by the simplicity of the former film star’s outfit—it resembled a cashmere jogging outfit—until eyeing the ginormous diamond earrings on her lobes. “Reaaally sporty,” he then said, which was so Fred.
Interested by the gossip surrounding the maids of honor, Fred dared me to speak to a few, to check if they actually were the bride’s personal shoppers. For a West Coast society wedding in the mid-’80s, it was a pretty unusual state of affairs. Most turned out to be, and I duly reported this. Fred was surprised that I had the gumption, but I told him that it had been a laugh. It was!
One thing led to another, and the next time Fred came to Los Angeles, he offered me a job on Andy Warhol’s Fifteen Minutes.
Since it first aired in 1985, the show had widened Andy’s reputation and influence across America and helped the sales of Interview. To add a little female flounce, the program began using excerpts with Blondie’s Debbie Harry and interviews conducted by models like Jerry Hall. But Fred Hughes, a keen Anglophile, wanted to up the content and felt that a British accent would achieve this. He talked about me to Andy, who approved. The only fly in the ointment was Jerry Hall. She was still sore about my dalliance with her boyfriend, Mick Jagger. Jerry gave Andy an ultimatum: “It’s either me or her, choose.” And according to Fred, Andy half teasingly said, “Bye-bye, Jerry.” Then swiftly gave the supermodel her portrait from his defunct Beauty series. Smart Andy.
I was a little nervous around Miss Hall since the incident in the bushes. Another problem was her friendship with Lauren Hutton. The equally beautiful Miss Hutton was still the girlfriend of Malcolm McLaren. She was irritated by my relationship with Talcy Malcy. Fred had seen Lauren and “heard her wrath” but implied that Andy had been rather amused. His attitude being that as long as I kept my cool, all would be fine.
I arrived at the Warhol Studio building, at 22 East Thirty-third Street, for lunch on Thursday, February 19. Andy appeared later. Fred brought me to him and reminded him that I’d be joining the MTV program. I was hired with the idea of researching guests with an exotic element—they might be innovative social types or European VIPs—whom I would eventually interview. Andy was friendly but didn’t want to talk. His complexion was flushed and he seemed scattered. He was going through bags as if searching for something. Fred then became agitated. It felt odd being in close quarters with both of them. I was totally unaware that Andy was going to the hospital. The fact was kept top secret. The next day, he entered New York Hospital under his pseudonym Bob Roberts. Three days later, Andy Warhol would be pronounced dead.
Zara Metcalfe, my roommate, broke the devastating news to me. “Tasha, Andy died,” were her exact words. As if on cue, Fred Hughes then called. “Natasha, please be at the Warhol Studio by nine a.m.,” he said. Naturally, I tried to say how sorry I was, but Fred’s tone was businesslike and unapproachable.
Both Zara and I were in a state of shock. Andy Warhol, the American godfather of Pop art, was dead, over and out, and kaput. He’d gone into hospital for a simple gallbladder operation and died less than forty-eight hours later. I realized why he’d been so jumpy. It was well-known that Andy had a horror of hospitals. He’d even predicted that the next time he checked in, he would die there. The fear stemmed from his eight-week spell at St. Vincent’s in 1968, after Valerie Solanas from SCUM—the Society for Cutting Up Men—had tried to assassinate him. Firing two bullets from a .32 caliber gun, she had managed to hit his stomach, liver, spleen, esophagus, left lung, and right lung. Later, Andy compared the sensation to “a cherry bomb exploding inside.”
Fred had been in the Factory when it happened. He was the one to call for the ambulance. When Valerie had pointed her gun in his direction, he said, “Please! Don’t shoot me. You’d better get out of here right away.” He then said, “There’s the elevator, take the elevator, get out of here.” Strangely enough, Valerie did. And whatever anyone says about the Warhol–Hughes relationship, Fred’s handling of Andy’s thwarted assassin made a lasting impression. He was brave, with super instincts. Fred was also the consummate professional.
I was in the Warhol Studio hot seat. However, instead of my being groomed for the cameras, my first Monday meant fielding calls about Andy and sitting outside Fred’s office. The premier person to telephone was Diane von Furstenberg. “My first instinct was to call Andy on the phone,” she now recalls. “I listened to his voice on the answering machine! I was shocked.” Everyone else I then spoke to sounded in an equivalent state. Thaddaeus Ropac, an unknown twenty-six-year-old gallery owner who had a brand-new Warhol show slated for August 1987, had called from a Swiss gas station. He was driving in a snowstorm, and his car radio kept cutting out. “Then it suddenly announced that Andy Warhol had died in New York and I was like, ‘It’s not possible.’” With each call, Fred became more clipped. He was just repeating the same information. Andy was dead. It was awful, but he had little else to add.
And so began my career at Andy Warhol Enterprises, a career that lasted two and a half years. Historically, I was the last person to be hired under Andy’s reign. Actually, make that the last of the English Muffins, described by Vincent Fremont as “a great cycle of women” with a whiff of family scandal. The tradition was born in 1971 with the Lady Anne Lambton, a cheeky seventeen-year-old armed with a gravelly voice who happened to be my father’s goddaughter. Her father was Lord Lambton, the disgraced Tory minister. He’d resigned from the Conservative government after being linked to prostitutes and drugs. The tradition continued with the Honorable Catherine Hesketh, a friend of my sisters. She was bright and bold and straight out of Trinity College Dublin, the renowned Irish establishment; her grandmother was Diana Mosley, the beautiful Mitford sister who had married Oswald Mosley, the leader of the British Union of Fascists. (Hitler had attended the nuptials.) The other well-heeled blue bloods were the Lady Isabella Lambton (sister of Anne) and the Honorable Geraldine Harmsworth, whose mother, Pat “Bubbles” Rothermere, was hard to miss in her Zandra Rhodes frilly dresses and could get feisty. “Call me Bubbles again and I’ll knee you in the nuts,” she warned one aristocrat, in front of the Princess of Wales.
Kenneth Jay Lane views the English Muffins as “a rather nice ploy. Rather than adding silly American girls, Andy had well-born English girls,” he says. “It was part of the mystique there.” Taking it further, Sabrina Guinness opines, “Andy liked Englishwomen because we were living, not thinking of our nest egg, prising paintings from him. Otherwise Anne Lambton would have tons of Warhols!”
It was probably Fred Hughes who invented the nickname English Muffins. “It was his sensibility,” Anne Lambton says. Still, the term annoyed her because “English muffins didn’t exist in England.” It was one of her obsessions, along with New York’s old-fashioned plumbing and thinking that ten dollars equaled one pound. “I thought everything like champagne was really cheap, and that spooked Andy dreadfully,” she recalls. Anne also presumed that the Factory was a pea-processing factory. “So when Fred invited me to work there, I was furious and said I have better things to do with my time than watch peas on a conveyor belt.” At first, Anne distrusted Andy. “I thought he was a pervert and wanker because of his tape recorder,” she admits. They then bonded over their love of John Wayne. “Andy and I were the same age, really,” she says. “It was like having another innocent.” In 1975, when Warhol traveled around America, promoting his book The Philosophy of Andy Warhol, she became his bodyguard. “It was a very clever concept to have me protecting him because I was small, furious, and English and would say, ‘Don’t you understand
Mr. Warhol doesn’t want to talk to you,’” Lambton recalls. “And you know how Americans are intrinsically polite, even crazy ones, they’d say, ‘Oh sorry, ma’am,’ and leave, whereas if it had been a big burly person they would have tried to go on.” Still, the Lady Anne had her limits. “Andy would say, ‘Gee, what would you do if someone came at me?’ and I’d say, ‘Get out of the way.’ And he’d say, ‘But you’d do something,’ and I’d say, ‘No, really I adore you, but I really wouldn’t.’”
In spite of being “a real liability”—her own admission: “I wouldn’t let Lou Reed and Bob Dylan into the Factory, I couldn’t take messages, and sobbed because I didn’t know how to work the Xerox machine”—Andy et al. cherished Anne. An account was even set up for her at Halston to buy clothes, but what Anne really wanted were a pair of Yves Saint Laurent rimless rose-colored sunglasses with her initials in diamonds. Thanks to Bob Colacello, Interview’s editor in chief, she finally acquired them. However, supper at home with Liza Minnelli and Lorna Luft—“Every time they opened the fridge, it would set them off into another show tune”—put an end to the glasses. When Anne was leaving, Minnelli grabbed and hugged her, and Anne felt the glasses “crumble down” her face.
Other activities included hanging out with the Rolling Stones to check that they weren’t wrecking Montauk, Andy’s newly acquired house. Jade Jagger was there “with a matchbox full of bugs.” Or going to the studio and diverting Andy when he was painting. “I made him laugh,” she says. “Sometimes he’d say, ‘Gee, do you want to go to the Anvil?’ and describe naked men stirring their drinks with their cocks, and I’d say, ‘I’d rather die.’” In spite of being “feisty and wild,” Anne had “a sixth sense that Andy should never see anything I did. I was very careful to maintain my privacy,” she says. Meanwhile, although Andy’s radar “would occasionally disappear with beautiful boys,” the experience changed her life. “Andy gave me the impression that I could do anything that I wanted,” she says.
Peter Frankfurt senses that Anne and the other English Muffins were Fred’s way of cleaning up “the downtown freak-show business” and changing the atmosphere at the Factory. As Fred was “an Anglophile, hiring English girls like Catherine [Hesketh], who was insane entertainment, and then having all these English beauties around was part of his fantasy,” he says.
Robert Mapplethorpe introduced Catherine Hesketh to Andy. “I was having lunch with him,” she recalls. “And he was taking a portrait that he had done for Interview up to the Factory in 1975.” In spite of letters of introduction to powerhouses in American television, she could not find a job “for love or money.” That was until Fred suggested Interview and staying at his house on Lexington Avenue. “The first day, Fred said, ‘I’ll show you how to use the subway, it’s only two stops away,’ and we ended up in Harlem,” she says. “He had no idea himself!”
A few weeks beforehand, Robert Hayes had started at Interview. “So Robert and I were dealing with subscriptions and things like that, very lowly,” Catherine says. “Then we climbed our way up.” Dinners organized by Fred and/or Bob Colacello led to Hesketh’s befriending the artist. “Andy was very clever,” she says. “He got everything before you even said it.” As for the financial side, “Fred was meant to be the business one, but he and Andy very much discussed everything: the pair of them together.”
A love of film stars and collecting “everything we could lay our hands on” bonded Warhol and Hesketh. “Everyone thought it was really weird of us to steal ashtrays from hotels,” she says. “But then they were social climbing and I was social descending, I hoped. I wanted to meet the weird people.” Warhol, on the other hand, “didn’t like weird people at all. Amanda Feilding and Joey Mellen came around with photos of them trepanning—drilling a hole in their skull—and Andy thought it was the most disgusting thing ever.” As for his reputation suggesting the contrary, Catherine says, “He allowed people to do their weirdness but he just wasn’t into it.” People were always giving drugs to the artist “but he would pass them on to someone else. I don’t think Andy ever did drugs,” she notes.
When Catherine’s friends hit Manhattan, they were invited to the Factory on Union Square for lunch. The Factory lunches that usually came from Balducci’s became quite the tradition. “I remember one lunch at the Factory with Rachel Ward and her sister [Tracy Ward]—they were total babes,” says Peter Frankfurt. Even if Hesketh was “inviting people who would amuse Andy,” the main aim of the Factory lunches was to gather more commissions for portraits. “Andy needed to make money,” she states. There was also the artist’s permanent hunt for ideas. “Andy never knew what to paint and was always trying to find people to give him inspiration,” she says.
Whereas Andy admired Hesketh’s late-night stamina, she was impressed by his way of “always working.” “A cute kid to interview, meeting people for a portrait, going to a nightclub, there was always a point and it made such a difference. I was never bored.” They went to Studio 54 a lot. “It was like all nightclubs, absolutely ghastly,” she says. “We’d go to the back room that was literally the basement covered in rubble with pipes, and Halston, Liza Minnelli, Steve Rubell, Andy, and I would sit there having a lovely time.” Rubell was very hyper and “New Yorky.” “We loved him because he gave us free VIP tickets and looked after us.” According to Robert Couturier, the interior designer, “Andy wanted to see what a million dollars looked like and so Steve laid out bags and bags of cash on a table to show him.”
Openings at galleries and museums meant traveling with Andy, Fred, and often Bob Colacello around the United States. “The local grandees would have us to these dinners,” says Hesketh. Once they flew to Las Vegas to give Paul Anka his portrait. “The next day, he didn’t summon Andy or pick up the picture,” she recalls. “It was so bizarre. Like keeping a head of state in an anteroom. Andy was a bit put out.” To kill time, they gambled with Telly Savalas and watched magicians.
Catherine had watched Jed Johnson, Andy’s boyfriend, direct Bad, a film made for Factory Films. Even if the couple was getting on really badly and bickering. On the weekends, Hesketh would stop by the Factory and find the artist “painting on the floor, quietly at the back. I would go and talk to him,” she says. “On Sundays, after church, Andy was always nicer about people.”
Among the Factory team, Vincent was “the steady one.” “Andy trusted him and he didn’t trust everyone,” she says. “Fred was kind au fond but would have hangovers or flip out. One time I said, ‘Well, I just assumed,’ and he said, ‘Never assume.’” Bob was a brilliant editor, but according to Hesketh, he loved his vodka. And Brigid Berlin, who had “disappeared to her house for a year to lose weight,” was “a cow.” “She was just so jealous,” Hesketh says. “Andy was hers.”
In general, Brigid, who was one of Andy’s Superstars—a clique of New York personalities during the 1960s that included Baby Jane Holzer, Edie Sedgwick, Nico, Viva, and Candy Darling—did not take to the English Muffins, including yours truly. That is, apart from Geraldine Harmsworth. “Brigid used to take me to the hairdressers to get my hair untangled,” she says.
Geraldine followed Isabella Lambton, the third English Muffin, who had been “fired by Fred for letting in Crazy Matty,” the resident loony stalker. Unlike her sister, Isabella had hated the Factory experience. “She thought the whole thing was dreadful, and ended up working in a deli on Lexington Avenue,” Anne says. “She fell in love with Vincent, but I don’t think she ever saw Andy’s point.”
Geraldine, on the other hand, was at the Factory because “Andy asked me and I liked him.” They had met in Paris through Bob Colacello. She was then modeling for photographers like Guy Bourdin and living with her father, the British press baron Vere Rothermere, on the Ile Saint-Louis. Once when Andy was picking her up, she introduced him to her father. “Andy was charming and Daddy was thrilled because he had quite a quiet life.” On another occasion, Warhol had shown her “his scars” from his
assassination attempt “when he was getting into a taxi.” “I was so shocked,” she says. “Years later, I twigged what it was.”
Afterward, Warhol kept in touch with Geraldine. “He’d say, ‘You must come and work for me in New York.’” The moment arrived when her father was going to New York at the beginning of 1979 and offered to take her on the Concorde. “He said, ‘This is your one chance.’” Geraldine worked at the Interview offices. “I would let people in and occasionally type,” she says. However, when sent out on errands, she was terrified of getting mugged. “Union Square was full of drug addicts and really run-down,” she recalls. “It was like the film Serpico.”
During the period, Geraldine barely owned any clothes. “I had one Pucci shirt and this embarrassingly awful shocking-pink trouser suit—it had a quilted jacket and quilted trousers—that I had bought in Jaipur,” she says. When Andy took her to see the musical Sugar Babies, she wore the “embarrassingly awful” outfit. Sometimes they would talk. “I would say that I was annoyed with my mother or something had happened, and Andy would say, ‘Well, they can’t have done too much wrong because you’re so amazing.’ It was really nice.”
Like all English Muffins, she made mistakes. “One day, I buzzed in two loonies from the 1960s,” Geraldine recalls. “They went straight into the Factory and I got into total hell. So the place was in shutdown. No one could leave until we got rid of them.” The other occasion involved Richard Gere. “Either I lost the call or said Bob [Colacello] was on the loo,” she says. “Anyway, Bob came out and had a massive tantrum with me. He said, ‘That was Richard Gere. What are you doing?’” After this episode, she was “put into this tiny broom cupboard” where all the original Interviews were kept. “I had to go through and write down how many celebrities were mentioned,” she says. “It was the equivalent of doing lines at school except that I loved reading all the early Interviews and seeing Fred and Bob with long hippie hair.” After that, Interview asked her to be fashion editor.
After Andy Page 14