After Andy

by Natasha Fraser-Cavassoni

  Five days later, I crept into the Condé Nast building. Where was Mick’s Elephant Man disguise when I needed it? The position would mean assisting Michael Boodro, who was one of Anna’s chief editors. “Do you like fashion?” Anna asked. “Because you’ll have to like fashion if you work at Vogue.”

  It turned out that quite a few from Interview were jumping ship or planning to—best explained by all the scary rumors about the magazine being put on the block. On May 9 it was officially announced that the magazine had been sold for $12 million to Sandy and Peter Brant, aka Brant & Co, who owned Art in America and Antiques. There was a universal sigh of relief because the Brants were reputed for holding on to the editorial staff. Perhaps, but would they help with my green card and immigration problem, I wondered.

  Alas, my green-card situation put a wrench in the works at Vogue. Sarah Slavin, a Condé Nast harpy, reproved me for not having proper working papers. “I cannot understand how Interview has been employing you all this time,” she said in a tone that reminded me of childhood teachers. Ultimately, I’d have to restart the green-card procedure if I began at Vogue “and with only one year to wait, you’d be foolish to give that up,” she advised. The news was depressing. Anna called a few days later. “Legally we can’t employ you,” she said. “But should you get married, or when you get your green card, we’d be terribly happy to hire you.”

  Around this period, I took Estée Lauder’s photograph at a party. The makeup maven was not pleased. She had even put a gloved hand up to her perfectly powdered face to mark her displeasure. I thought nothing of it until the next morning, when she called my office and threatened to tell the immigration authorities. “I’ve heard that you are working illegally,” she warned. Just as I was about to lose my teeth, give birth to kittens, and burst into tears, I suddenly heard the faint lilt of a Glaswegian accent in “illegally.” It was that rotter Joe McKenna, one of Helmut Newton’s favorite stylists and one of the fashion world’s acknowledged practical jokers.

  Being fired didn’t really pass my mind until late June, when I heard that the editor Robert Walsh and other big cheeses at Interview were being asked about their new offices and all their requirements. Alas, no one pulled me into a corner, but then I never really did have an office. I sat on a stool in the main production room. If the situation was meant to demean me, it didn’t. Indeed, I found it endlessly entertaining since there were always photographers and illustrators going in and out. I remember funny chats with the then unknown David LaChapelle.

  One sadness was losing Kevin to Tina Brown at Vanity Fair. I’d been made privy to all the negotiations. So I was somewhat put out when he chose to have his final hurrah lunch with Brigid Berlin. That was, until they returned. Brigid had slid off the wagon and ordered five margaritas! Fueled by the alcohol, she walked into Shelley’s office, put her feet on her desk, and then discussed all the interviews that she’d taped for Andy, including Truman Capote’s. Shelley handled the situation with characteristic sangfroid, Brigid overstayed her welcome, and childish individuals such as Mark Jacobson and me were literally on the floor, near to tears with laughter.

  The situation with Fred Hughes had become dire. From being the White Rabbit, he had gone from the Mad Hatter to the unreasonable Queen of Hearts. To cope with his multiple sclerosis, he was taking steroids that made him seriously nuts. “People would come and see Fred and be in tears afterward because he was so mean to them,” says Vincent, who became “the damage control.”

  Fred would charge over from his office to Shelley’s aerie. The rattle of his walking stick made everyone hide because he would be on a tirade, yelling and slamming doors or crashing into fire exits. It was tragic to witness someone who had been a droll and graceful dandy morph into a feared mutant. And the more uncomfortable Fred felt, the more violently verbal he became.

  Yet to a certain point, deep pity for Fred and his ailing health protected him from the outcry following Andy’s diaries, which were edited by Pat Hackett. The 807-page book, sold to Warner Books for $1.2 million, lacked an index. A wise decision made by Fred and Ed Hayes, the foundation’s lawyer. So Spy magazine, then run by Graydon Carter, quickly published one. A few of the shockers described Elizabeth Taylor as “a fat little Kewpie doll,” Margaret Trudeau “sitting on the toilet with her pants down and a coke spoon up her nose,” and Halston providing “a bottle of coke, a few sticks of marijuana, a Valium, and four Quaaludes” after Liza Minnelli had arrived, saying, “Give me every drug you’ve got.” Taking a potshot at certain marriages, Andy claimed Bianca Jagger “can’t go to bed with him [Mick] because she just doesn’t think he’s attractive,” and referred to Calvin and Kelly Klein as “a hot media affair.”

  Bianca Jagger sued from England, where the libel laws were more favorable to the plaintiff. “And she won,” recalls Vincent. Halston, on the other hand, “threatened to sue because of the cocaine references,” but stopped when reminded that almost everyone working for Andy had taken coke with him! Meanwhile, Victor Hugo, the designer’s former boyfriend, referred to the journals as “The Satanic Diaries.” “I feel I’ve been gang-raped and beaten by a dead person and a bunch of thugs that work for him,” he told Michael Gross at New York magazine. “It is the most vile, disgusting piece of pulp literature.” Vile, disgusting, and pulp literature probably helped sales!

  A weird mix of blunt, outrageous, funny, banal, and quite self-confessional, Andy’s daily entries were infinitely readable. A kind of exposé of his friends and his world, to quote Ronnie Cutrone, the artist’s former assistant, they revealed that, far from being “passive, shy, anything-for-the-limelight,” Andy was “a time bomb with feelings. He thought [the people he wrote about] were glamorous, but he pitied them,” Cutrone told Gross at New York magazine.

  Nicky Haslam, who met Andy at Vogue in 1962 when he was still a commercial artist and appearing with “sheaths of drawings for the shoe department,” views it differently. “I think Andy was fascinated by the ins and outs of people’s lives and had no compunction to repeat the information.” Bob Colacello also adds another element: “Andy was always trying to find out what love and relations meant.” Since the artist was “not so good at them,” he would “adopt this cynical pose.”

  I was not close to the people who were exposed, like Bianca Jagger. Quoting from Warhol’s entry on December 6, 1976: “Bianca took off her panties and passed them over to me and I faked smelling them and then tucked them in my handkerchief pocket. I still have them.” It was an accusation she vehemently denies. Or like socialite Barbara Allen, who was described as a desperate gold digger with a penchant for married multimillionaires (billionaires not yet being a feature). Or like Catherine Hesketh, who came across as potty-mouthed and raunchy.

  “He was so rude about me in the diaries, and none of it is true,” says Catherine Hesketh, who reckons that “he wanted to be amusing to Pat Hackett. They would talk in the morning and he would say things so that the diary wouldn’t be boring.” Since “Andy liked to put a bad spin on things” and “you can always be rude about everyone if you want to be,” Hesketh advises, “everything in those diaries needs to be taken with a pinch of salt.” Vincent Fremont offers, “Andy didn’t exaggerate but he did have a funny take on things.” Vincent also makes a point that it was a different period, when S&M clubs were the accepted norm. “Dinners were given where the poppers would come out afterward and people changed from business suits to leather gear and then went to the clubs,” he says.

  The diaries were a talking point at almost all the parties that I attended from May onward. No one attacked me about them, thank God. Nevertheless, there was a sense of betrayal with regard to Andy, just as there had been with “La Côte Basque,” the first chapter of Truman Capote’s Answered Prayers, which Esquire had published.

  Indeed, one or two chivalrous types like Kenny Jay Lane expressed concern about the reputation of their spurned girlfriends. The big shock was that the upward
ly mobile Fred didn’t edit the diaries more. Then again, Mr. Hughes hadn’t escaped Andy’s critical eye and was equally skewered for his blind love of the British aristocracy, and drunken and/or grandiose behavior.

  Steven M. L. Aronson, who helped edit the diaries, insisted that they were important and merited the same respect as the writings of Samuel Pepys, Anaïs Nin, and Cecil Beaton. “There was a genuine novelty to anything Andy Warhol did,” he told New York magazine. Aronson made a valid point, because Andy was a VIP insider. Peter Beard, on the other hand, who was also featured in the diaries, called them “existential.” We were at a dinner given by the Robert Miller Gallery in honor of the California artist Robert Graham, and immediately delved into a good-natured argument about his use of the word existential. “Come on, Peter,” I said, aware of Beard’s provocative nature. “‘Existential’ means important questions about life. Hardly the case of Andy’s entries . . .” But the photographer would not budge. And since Andy’s diaries were topical, our entire table joined in. The general feeling seemed to be: True, certain entries were harsh, but nothing stated was probably inaccurate.

  The diaries had been achieved via Pat Hackett, who had talked to Andy every morning for ten years. When working at the Warhol Studio, I had warmed to Pat. Slightly cockatoo in appearance, with reddish spiky hair, greenish eyes, and a glowing Barbra Streisand complexion, she was skinny, always dressed in black, and had that New Yorker’s issue with daily weight gain of about ten grams. I found her without malice. In many ways, Pat was brittle, observant with humor, and what Europeans would term as a hundred percent made in the Big Bagel. She was the ideal scribe for Andy because she shared his cultural references and had no desire to rub shoulders with the people he was describing. This contentment to be a voyeur injected the diaries with a detached element and took a potential bitterness out of the pages. Those who were annoyed by the diaries dismissed Pat as a wannabe. True, she keenly promoted the diaries, which Warhol called her dowry. But as she was paid peanuts when Andy was alive, who can blame her?

  Ed Hayes, however, seized his moment. It helped that Fred refused to talk, and it helped that “Fast Eddie” gave great copy. “I advised Fred [Hughes] that he had an obligation to publish,” Hayes told New York magazine. “Could he give up millions because he didn’t want to discomfort the people he has dinner with?” Hayes continued, and then revealed that he didn’t regret his professional decision in spite of the insults hurled in his direction and how being persona non grata meant eating in “for the next six months.”

  Again and again, I was surprised by what Andy wrote about Fred, and then wondered if the very sick Mr. Hughes cum Mr. Hyde had concentrated on the text. Later, I heard that he was expecting Hayes to wade through the pages. But lazy-daisy Hayes hadn’t, presuming that Fred had done his homework.

  Nearing the end of the book, I found Andy’s attitude pretty depressing and wrote the following in my diary: Jesus, here I am fucked up as hell and he was almost forty years older and worrying if Sean Lennon liked him less than Keith Haring? How pathetic is that? Fame and fortune neither improved his self esteem nor made him less anxious.

  Yet twenty-seven years later, Andy’s impressions and opinions encapsulate the “Me” Decade and beyond. “The diaries were fun,” says Diane von Furstenberg, who didn’t escape criticism. “Mean and fun.” Bruno Bischofberger was equally amused. “Andy described me as driving them all crazy in his studio, and it’s true,” he says. “I would come into New York for a few days and push them to see new work and nobody likes to be pushed.” Meanwhile, Peter Frankfurt, whose mother was constantly attacked for being socially ambitious, thinks the entries “are historical” and “will weather well. I don’t think it was Fred’s job to clean them up,” he says. “Andy was kind of a bitch, but he didn’t say anything about my mother that my brother and I didn’t already tell her. She was a social climber and we’d often say, ‘Why are you doing this?’” In Frankfurt’s opinion, Andy wasn’t judging. “He was recording and keeping the camera running.” His argument being, “If you’re upset by them, you don’t get Andy.” With regard to his mother, “she was just happy to be in them.”

  Ultimately, I was won over by Andy’s tremendous work ethic and his self-effacement. He was the type to admit that when he declared, “I hate Richard Avedon because he uses everyone,” his entire entourage turned on him and yelled, “So do you, Andy.”

  20 Headed for Paris

  When writing about French personalities for Interview’s “What Ever Happened To . . .” column, I cast my thoughts back to Paris. Having fallen in love with the city in 1976, I remembered shaking the sugar in my first citron pressé, the smell of the baking baguettes wafting in the afternoon, and the blunt bangs of a little girl sucking a lollipop.

  I’d rather had it with Manhattan. It was not a place to be poor and unconcerned with accumulating wealth. This hit home when being entertained by Gayfryd and Saul Steinberg in their 17,000-square-foot Park Avenue apartment. They had just rented Eilean Aigas—my former family home in Scotland—and reached out to make contact. Saul was a jolly bon vivant, but Gayfryd was hard to gauge. Unlike Nan Kempner, C. Z. Guest, and the old guard of socialites I’d met, she didn’t appreciate my questions or British sense of humor. Strange, when she looked lively in photographs and personified Snow White in person. I struggled to talk to her about her numerous charitable causes—there were quite a few—and hopelessly failed. It was excruciating for both of us. I was longing to escape the gilded and cathedral-sized cage, and she must have been relieved to see the back of me.

  In the meantime, I kept finding examples of Manhattan’s misery in strange corners. Walking to work one morning, I found a bedroom slipper in a pool of blood. I looked up at the apartment building and decided that the slipper’s owner had jumped. There was no other evidence, but it demonstrated my mind-set. When walking to a swimming pool on the far Upper West Side, I witnessed Jed Johnson and Alan Wanzenberg having a furious screaming match on the corner. Usually both beauties were so calm. It was also strange because I’d just seen them at an intimate New York City Ballet fund-raising event.

  Every time I left the city, I felt better. My brother Damian’s graduation from the Harvard Kennedy School put me in an optimistic mood. Benazir Bhutto gave the commencement address. It was an uplifting experience furthered by my discovery of the dancer and choreographer Mark Morris, who was performing for the Boston Ballet. His production of Dido and Aeneas was life-changing. Morris was a large lad, possessing a massive torso and tree-trunk thighs, but his delicacy of technique and understanding of music transformed him into an enchanting woman. There and then, I realized that belief was what counted and everything else followed. And I started to think about the possibility of moving to Paris.

  Not that my life in New York was so bad. I had moved into the Upper West Side apartment of Carrie Minot, Zara Metcalfe’s great friend, who worked on David Letterman’s show. It was through Carrie that I discovered the Victorian art of decoupage, which would give me peace of mind. I was also making necklaces out of semiprecious stones and charms or bits and bobs that I owned. My very first necklace broke on Amsterdam Avenue; I hadn’t mastered the importance of weight and the clasp. When I finally did, I gave them to friends such as the novelist Susan Minot, Carrie’s sister, who wore my necklace when reading from her book Lust and Other Stories, and Quintana Roo Dunne, Joan Didion’s daughter, who sported hers at her graduation party. Meetings about my necklaces were also organized at Ralph Lauren and Oscar de la Renta, even though both fashion houses deemed them too “ethnic.”

  Making the jewelry was much more satisfying than writing. It was just as well, because after Sandy Brant’s dictates, my “What Ever Happened To . . .” column was terminated, and I gathered from snippets of conversation that our new boss didn’t rate “Anglofile” either.

  Nevertheless, my decision to leave Interview had nothing to do with the Brants. It happened because Wa
rhol Studio was “no longer responsible” for sponsoring my green card, or so Fred Hughes informed me. Sitting in his blood-red office, I could not believe my ears. When I tried to reason with him that they initially employed me and so forth, Fred exploded with an Exorcist-like tirade of mumbo jumbo. Scary to witness! But I forgave him because he looked so green and ill.

  In the middle, Vincent came in and then swiftly disappeared. I’d heard that it was happening a lot, the whole business of tiptoeing around Fred and his tsunami moods. In desperation, I went to see Ed Hayes, who repeated Fred’s company line. I breathed in and channeled my best Susan Hayward. “This is my life on the line,” I began. “I’m in desperate need of help.” He didn’t budge. His dark eyes looked sharklike, and that’s when I decided that Paris beckoned.

  For the following two weeks, I used the Interview phones and worked on Parisian connections. I went to see Kenny Jay Lane, who dismissed my necklaces—“You can buy the equivalent for tuppence on a street in Paris,” he said—but set me up with Leo Lerman at Condé Nast and with Grace Mirabella, who then ran her namesake magazine. Kenny was firm about continuing to write. “You’re talented,” he said. “No talent should ever go to waste.”

  I had dinner with Ed Epstein, a Francophile, who said that it was “essential to find a place to live.” I thought of Fred. He owned a Paris apartment. In his diaries, Andy frequently referred to the place. During his European portrait-painting jaunts, he and Fred would stay there. I briefly wondered whether I should ask Monsieur Hughes about borrowing the place. But an attempt to do so misfired. I caught him in another foul mood and he screamed and shouted. Saddened by the episode, I thought of Shelley’s prediction: “Soon he’ll be in a wheelchair.”