Occasionally, Crazy Matty, the resident loony stalker, whose real name was Matthew Reich, would try to come through the Warhol Studio door. Len and I would pretend to cower but enjoyed the drama. Vincent, on the other hand, took his threats seriously, since Crazy Matty had been around in 1969 when he was “involved with the actress Geneviève Waïte.” Obsessed with Andy, he threatened and stalked him from the ’70s onward, and he continued to stalk people after the artist’s death. “Since he was beginning to torture Brigid—he was the type to call all night from a pay phone—I went up to him and said, ‘Listen, it’s over, Andy is gone,’” Vincent says.
I met Matty once. Dark and wiry, he was a John Cassavetes type. Afterward I became “the girl with Ava Gardner’s eyes.” Briefly, I did wonder how mad he really was! Only Jay was intrigued, viewing Crazy Matty as a bona fide original. No one else did. Crazy Matty infuriated Fred, particularly when he hovered around his house on Lexington Avenue. On one occasion, he found Harry Fane, one of my cousins, entertaining Crazy Matty in his kitchen. “I just could not belieeeve that,” Fred later said. Eventually, Ed Hayes took control of the situation. “His private cops took him for a ride and Crazy Matty disappeared for some time,” states Vincent. “I don’t know what they did, but he didn’t bug us for the longest time. At least six months . . .”
Meetings concerning Andy’s memorial took place upstairs and involved Fred, Vincent, and George Trescher, who was organizing the event. Considered the party planner in Manhattan, Trescher was the type to be trusted by Jackie Onassis, Brooke Astor, and Annette Reed (later Mrs. Oscar de la Renta). Nevertheless, Vincent recalls Fred being “the main organizer,” since Ian Schrager, Fred’s friend, offered the space for the lunch. “The crazy thing was that everybody like Robert Isabell, who did the flowers, said, ‘We’ll do it for free,’ and then we got these big bills from everyone.” Meanwhile, Christopher Mason, one of Trescher’s assistants, cracked me up. A fellow Brit, but a Cambridge University graduate, he was such a bow tie–wearing, silver-tongued go-getter. I should have taken lessons from him about managing Manhattan because somehow, after working on the memorial luncheon, he hustled a job from Fred and briefly did Interview’s PR, a newly invented position. Quite a coup, except that after the hire, the New York Post’s Page Six and other gossip columns seemed to mention only Christopher. At the time, he was writing witty songs and performing them for the likes of Reed, Onassis, and Ivana Trump, when “the Donald” acquired Adnan Khashoggi’s yacht and rechristened it Trump Princess.
Fred, ever conscious of column inches, would say: “Mason has been written about again.” And without fail, I’d find Christopher at Interview’s Xerox machine, frantically copying that day’s piece. It was a needed light moment. Ed Hayes had just moved in at the studio. Although we’d met in Los Angeles—he’d taken me out to dinner at Musso and Frank—his telephone conversations were hard to deal with early in the morning. His voice boomed. Friends were also making inquiries. “What exactly is Ed Hayes doing there?” they’d ask, because among a certain set, it was known that Ed was brilliant at making plea deals for drug charges (I knew two people he’d helped) and further skilled at getting people off jury duty. However, he had zilch to do with the art world.
Meanwhile, a rash of Andy’s artwork was appearing at the studio to be verified by Fred and/or Vincent. Some of it was quite surprising—early self-portraits from the 1950s—and some of it was laughingly F for fake. The characters were a mix of hippies who hunted down art at out-and-beyond estate fairs (passionate, they were fascinating to converse with) and intense types who clutched their booty and avoided talking with Chatty Natty!
As far as Andy’s inventory of work that was left upstairs in the studio, not all the canvases were stretched or, indeed, signed. This sounded like a potential problem. Years later, the Andy Warhol Foundation sued Agusto Bugarin, Andy’s former bodyguard and the brother of Nena and Aurora, his devoted Filipino housekeepers, and blocked the selling of a $20 million Liz Taylor portrait that he claimed was a gift from the artist.
Agusto was often in a hopeless state. His dark eyes were pools of despair. Initially I thought it was out of grief. He’d even claimed to have seen Andy’s ghost upstairs in the studio. Naturally, I wanted to believe him. The idea of Andy’s ghost was rather fantastic. Eventually, Vincent fired him.
Tony, Agusto’s younger brother, could not have been more different. Short and boyish, he was energetic, helpful, and a source of pride to his older sisters, who had become housekeepers for Jed Johnson, Andy’s former boyfriend. Tony and I often talked. It was usually about his female conquests. To judge from his descriptions, he was clearly the diminutive type who liked big, bouncy blonds.
George Malley, the studio’s superintendent, was another sweetheart with a lovely, calm energy. Having been a bartender at the Waldorf Astoria, he worked for Andy et al. for years. “George’s great claim to fame was that he served a drink to Marilyn Monroe,” recalls Vincent. “I don’t know how he got to us. We always picked up strays.”
13 Frederick W. Hughes
Fred Hughes was the first person to be told by New York Hospital that Andy Warhol had died. It made sense, since Warhol had named him next of kin. As Andy’s will revealed, Fred was named the sole executor of Warhol’s estate—viewed as one of the largest amassed by an artist. To quote again from Bob Colacello’s profile for Vanity Fair, it would give him “financial security, social prestige, and real power in the upper-most echelons of the international art world.” Indeed, it was felt that after having been Andy’s shadow—in photographs he was the slight, slick-haired, 1930s-styled gent by the artist’s side—finally Fred was front and center, dangling the keys to the kingdom.
Having worked at the Factory since 1967, Fred had quickly won the artist’s trust by being efficient and reliable. Then he’d seamlessly evolved into a private manager-dealer who took ten- or twenty-percent commission instead of the fifty percent that Leo Castelli demanded. When asked by Bob Colacello if he had ever added up the value of what he sold for Warhol, Fred initially said, “Yes, but I don’t want to say the wrong thing,” and then answered, “It’s decades of millions.” This was vintage Fred. To know and love Fred, aka Frederick W. Hughes, aka Fritzie to pals like Marisa Berenson and Diana Vreeland, was to appreciate his quips. They were frequent and demonstrated his lively mind, rich imagination, and heightened wit. When attending Peter Frankfurt’s surprise nineteenth-birthday party, he appeared with Mick Jagger. “Frankfurt, Mick is your present,” he said. “You can have Mick and do what you want with him.”
Fred was a one-off who may have been born on July 29, 1943, in Dallas, Texas, but was completely self-created. He first came to prominence via Dominique de Menil, the French-born, Houston-based art collector, internationally renowned for her taste. On occasion, Fred referred to the de Menil connection as his “dowry.” His tightness with the family certainly impressed Warhol. Fred persuaded Dominique and her husband, John de Menil, to finance Andy’s movie Sunset for $20,000. Following Fred’s lead, the de Menil children also collected Warhol’s work.
Like many a prismatic character, Fred was closer in style to his grandparents than to his handsome father, who was nicknamed “Honest Hughes” and was a hardworking traveling representative for various furniture manufacturers. Fred’s paternal grandparents owned a steel-equipment factory in Muncie, Indiana, and lived in a Victorian house crammed with Oriental carpets and European antiques. “They were insatiable collectors,” he told Colacello for his Vanity Fair profile. Meanwhile, his maternal grandmother, “Flaming Mamie,” was a twice-married bon vivant from New Orleans. A fervent Fred fan, she spoiled him madly, taking him to Disneyland and Las Vegas, and this probably explained his sensational confidence with the female sex. Few could tease as mercilessly as Fred yet get away with it.
In a bid to protect him from his bouts of childhood asthma, his grandmother tried to send him to boarding school in Arizona, but his father
insisted on a Catholic education, hence his enrollment at St. Thomas High School in Houston, where, according to Colacello, he made the honor roll.
When Fred began at the Factory, there was slight amazement, on a par with “What’s a nice boy like you doing in a place like this?” Except that, to Fred’s mind, the Factory seemed like “small-time loony stuff” in comparison to what he endured and witnessed with his high school’s “Scottish priests of the Order of Saint Basil” and “boys studying to be priests. There’s nothing like the Catholic element to bring surreality into your life,” he told Colacello.
It was in the early 1960s, while majoring in art history at Houston’s University of St. Thomas, that Fred met John and Dominique de Menil. Armed by a family fortune that stemmed from the Schlumberger oil-equipment company, they were the town’s most committed art patrons, later renowned for creating the Rothko Chapel in the 1970s. With characteristic generosity, the de Menils financed the university’s art department, which consisted of about seven students in Fred’s day. It was run by Dr. Jermayne MacAgy, who curated innovative biannual exhibitions that her students both catalogued and installed.
When MacAgy died in 1964, she had been hanging a show, and that was when Dominique de Menil stepped in and took over her duties. According to Louise Ferrari, then MacAgy’s assistant, Fred and the de Menils “clicked immediately. They loved the same old things—oddball things, far-out things, avant-garde things, things that were exquisite: art.” The de Menil children also accepted Fred. Far from being perceived as a rival, he was swiftly adopted as a member of the family.
Within no time, Fred was taken on art-buying trips to New York and Europe, as well as being entrusted with the run of their Manhattan town house and securing his first job at the legendary Alexander Iolas gallery in Paris, which represented the Surrealist artists René Magritte and Max Ernst. In 1952, when running the Hugo Gallery, Iolas had shown Fifteen Drawings Based on the Writings of Truman Capote, Andy Warhol’s first solo exhibition, which had been inspired by his obsession with the American writer.
Fred would work for Iolas—who was rarely called Alexander—for several years. An ideal mentor, he was cultured, took risks (he championed Roberto Matta, Victor Brauner, Joseph Cornell, Yves Klein, and Niki de Saint Phalle, among other artists), and understood the mentality of the rich. The de Menils and many others relied on Iolas’s opinion. Born privileged in Alexandria, Egypt, he was one of those chic Greeks; his father controlled the premium on Egyptian cotton, considered the ultimate in luxurious quality. Having trained to be a musician in Berlin, Iolas became a ballet dancer in Theodora Roosevelt’s company and then the Marquis de Cuevas’s fairly eccentric troupe. Since ballet wasn’t his physical calling, he began the Hugo Gallery in New York during the Second World War. The grandson of Victor Hugo financed the venture. Iolas then arrived in Paris, where he became known for his extravagant appearance, memorable openings, and exquisite catalogues. “Iolas had wonderful cocktail parties because he was popular with all the Surrealist artists and the fun people in Paris,” says designer Gilles Dufour.
When he first appeared in Paris, Fred was shy and rather plump. “But we immediately took him under our wing because he knew no one, was touching in spirit, and learned French within a few months,” recalls André Mourges, Iolas’s boyfriend. At the time, society hostesses like Jacqueline de Ribes and Marie-Hélène de Rothschild were being written about in newspapers and magazines. “Fred asked all these questions,” says Mourgues. “He had that ‘Who?’ and ‘Why?’ mentality that went with his nose for people and his instinct for art.” Within no time, Fred understood the inner workings of Paris. “The hierarchy appealed,” reckons Mourgues. Yet he was a loner. One time, Mourgues took him to Castel’s, an exclusive nightclub frequented by the well-born, fashionable, and elegant. “Afterward, Fred would often go there alone, taking in the scene.”
Those years in Paris completed Fred’s education that had begun with Dominique de Menil. “Returning to New York, he became an aesthete—severe and thin,” says Mourgues. Still, there was the continued charm. “At a Factory lunch, there were the daughters of the March Spanish banking family,” says Mourgues. “Fred turned to me and whispered, ‘Aren’t they so Velázquez?’ They were.” Another time, when Andy gave a Campbell’s Soup Can drawing to Mourgues, Fred said, “This shows how much we love you.” Nevertheless, there was a social insecurity that hovered. “He could be cruel,” says Mourgues. “Particularly if he felt that a woman was vulgar.” It would never be the case of Dominique de Menil, who was as admired for her taste as she was for her appearance.
It had been Fred’s idea that Warhol’s band, the Velvet Underground, play at a benefit for the Merce Cunningham Dance Company (underwritten by the de Menils) to be held at Philip Johnson’s Glass House in New Canaan, Connecticut. It was also Fred’s idea to meet Andy.
Andy was piqued that Fred was in his early twenties and had both the ear and the trust of the de Menils. Naturally, it was appealing that Fred had bought one of his paintings and had arranged for some of his movies to be screened down in Houston. Andy was also intrigued by Fred’s dandy-like appearance. “He was so perfectly tailored—like something out of another era,” he wrote in POPism. Firmly an uptown boy, Fred’s first trip to the Factory on Forty-seventh Street was the farthest south he had ever gone in Manhattan. So that dinner with Andy in the Village felt “like an expedition.”
Magnetically drawn to the Factory, Fred would divide his days between the de Menil Foundation and meeting with bigwigs like Nelson Rockefeller and MoMA’s Alfred Barr Jr., then returning to sweep floors for Andy et al. With time, the artist noticed his future business manager getting “more and more outrageously elegant—black jackets with braiding on them, shirts with bow ties to match.”
Fred’s sartorial elegance was much admired. “Timmy Stanton [another Fred friend] and I used to sneak upstairs and go through Fred’s closet, he was so legendary,” recalls Peter Frankfurt. Len Morgan, on the other hand, was struck by the subtle preparation in the late ’80s. “The suits would come from his tailor, Mr. Nicolosi, and a day or two later Fred would have worn the edges with a razor blade so that they didn’t seem too new,” he says.
There was also his way of attracting young people. When Frankfurt was sixteen, Fred had taken him to Le Jardin, Studio 54’s precursor. “Le Jardin was gay, but it had the best-looking women that I had ever seen in my life,” Frankfurt recalls. That very night, he met Barbara Allen, a Warhol intimate and good-natured party girl, admired for her sensational figure. “Being with Fred made you feel cool,” says Frankfurt. “He was friendly with so many beauties.”
Staying at his home at 1342 Lexington Avenue felt “cool” too. Each bedroom was quite dark and nineteenth-century in ambience. In one of them, the Egyptian cotton sheets were crisp and the bed was comfortable, and there was an attached bathroom: a luxury that I certainly didn’t have back home in London. Hazel, his African American housekeeper, was a wise bird who was incapable of being shocked. On one occasion, junkies from a smart family tribe had left dirty needles lying about. “So Mr. Hughes says, ‘Hazel, I’m very sorry about this, they are diabetics,’” she recalled. “Nooow, I think he’s forgetting that I’m from Harlem!” Our talks would always take place in the kitchen, where her cousin would be pressing Fred’s shirts.
On form, Fred was the ideal companion from beginning to end. Describing him as “fearless with total conviction,” Peter Frankfurt always felt as if he “was in a movie with him.” Fred gave off an undercurrent of glamour and romance as he introduced people, made funny little asides, and kept the conversation light at the table. “I’m deeply superficial” was a favorite Fred line.
For Fred, who was best in the company of women, humor or a shared joke was key to the relationship. Our somewhat extended joke was called “the Lady Antonia Fraser look-alike contest.” In a nutshell, at parties, we hunted down blonds who were the dire opposite of my mother
. Quite suggestive in their getup—sparkling halter necks were a favorite, as was a mass of pastel eye shadow—they were either floozies at the table or wildly enthusiastic on the dance floor. Extremely silly, it gave a charge to the evening.
There were also his Frederick of Union Square sessions that had begun in the Factory in the 1970s and continued at the Warhol Studio. Using tape, he gave nose jobs and face-lifts to anyone who happened to be standing nearby. His urge to give aesthetic improvements tended to happen at the end of the day. Fred enjoyed giving me a little piggy snout. “Natasha, this reaaally does wonders,” he’d say. On one occasion, I got so used to my Frederick of Union Square lift that I forgot to remove the tape when Bruno Bischofberger and his beautiful wife, Yoyo, arrived. Defining the art-world power couple, he was in a somber suit and she was decked out in an ivory-colored Chanel suit. I was in an L.L. Bean stripy turtleneck with tape on my face.
That was the delightful, whimsical side of Fred. As was his wistfully looking at a band of yelling kids waiting outside the Plaza for Michael Jackson, who was staying at the hotel. “Awww, that’s sweet,” he said. “I love young fans.” As was Fred’s need to draw cigarettes on every face in Interview when he was trying to give up smoking. We were on a train whizzing toward his teeny country house and he was determined to stop his daily rate of Marlboros: an impossible task for him.
When the Marquess of Worcester, Harry Somerset, married Tracy Ward in England, Fred naturally went. He returned triumphant with his Princess Diana tale. “So she arrives on the dance floor,” Fred began. “Looking so beautiful, that skin, those eyes, the teeth, the body, and then she begins dancing like a . . . truck driver.” Naturally, he imitated her, showing elbows out and bended knees. It was a hit to every type of audience.
After Andy Page 16