These memories and many more flooded back when I was in the Art Institute of Chicago in the summer of 2014. I had been in Colorado—a state where Andy once owned land—and I was in Chicago before a flight back to Paris. Suddenly, I came across a giant Mao and stood still.
Everyone has a favorite Warhol painting or period. Irving Blum mentions the Electric Chairs series (1964–1967). “They were absolutely brilliant and remain so relevant today,” he says. Peter Brant cites Shot Blue Marilyn (1964): “It was my second purchase.” Larry Gagosian enthuses about Atomic Bomb (1965), which he calls “a masterpiece, made in one size and one color.” And Bruno Bischofberger refers to Orange Car Crash Fourteen Times (1963), which is part of the Philip Johnson collection at the Museum of Modern Art.
Like most other art world powerhouses who played a key role in Andy’s career, these four highlight the early work that “changed the entire world of art history,” to quote Rudolf Zwirner, the work the artist referred to as his “rainy-day paintings.” But I am a casual observer who has been emotionally stunned by Warhol’s mammoth-verging-on-monstrous Mao. The portrait equals the Great Wall of China. It’s today. It’s tomorrow. It almost threatens. Painted in 1974, the fifteen-foot-tall painting captures Warhol’s genius, demonstrating that he was a prophetlike artist whose impact continues to surprise and remains omnipresent. His Cheshire cat smile—whether represented by one of his famous sayings or one of his repetitive-imaged silkscreens—lingers and haunts art, fashion, music, and social media.
Among the Andy books, Bob Colacello’s Holy Terror touched me most. An employee who built up Interview magazine into a monthly contender, he yearned for Andy’s respect yet also questioned his modus operandi. Holy Terror is erudite and funny, and it ends with empathy: Colacello admits to feeling sorry for the world-famous artist.
I, on the other hand, have come away feeling more thoroughly impressed by Andy. He was a public figure who remained present. Most successful lives have an element of Julius Caesar’s “Veni, vidi, vici,” and tend to turn either dull or decadent when people have made it. Not so, in the case of Andrew Warhola, as he was born on August 6, 1928. He never became smug or self-indulgent. Forever motivated by curiosity, he was also relentlessly motivated by a work ethic and the inner war cry “I’ve got to keep the lights on.” Financially, he always felt responsible.
A solitary individual—“Warhol’s best friend was probably his work,” offers Christian Louboutin—Andy was detached, thought differently, and was often misjudged for being heartless. True, he was not a saint, but nor was he a sicko. Thanks to Interview magazine and Warhol’s Studio, many young people, ambitious or hapless, found employment. There was the thoughtfulness. To his not exactly wealthy girlfriends, he gave rainy-day paintings—mini versions of the Flowers and Mao—that he knew they would sell, and he was fine with that. There was his strange mating call to certain doll-like girlfriends that consisted of showing the scar where he’d been shot. “Zorro-like, it was carved across his chest,” says Clara Saint. There were his daily prayer sessions at St. Vincent Ferrer, a Catholic church. “We’d sit in the back and pray for ten to fifteen minutes,” recalls Wilfredo Rosado. “There was a comfort level between us and it was a tender moment.” Warhol was also the famous artist who preferred to live surrounded by the paintings of others—his friends Jean-Michel Basquiat, Jasper Johns, Roy Lichtenstein, and Cy Twombly—but who kept his own canvases in the closet. “Andy wasn’t self-congratulatory,” says Bischofberger.
Andy was too poetic for that. There were various stages in his life: the childhood in Pittsburgh; the parents who both encouraged his art; the Factory years with the exciting but uncontrolled; the discovery of Europe’s high society after the assassination attempt; the superstar 1970s and early 1980s; and the period of disappointment with the art world, and of reevaluation of television and film projects.
Peter Brant, a Warhol collector from the age of eighteen, liked the inner circle around Warhol. Andy, he says, was able to “choose and bring out the best in people.” Albeit with a camp sensibility, there was an element of the Knights of the Round Table around Andy. It’s easier to imagine him as Merlin, though he had Arthurian qualities. Andy’s holy grail was the art establishment, always slightly out of his reach. Yet the best of his paintings touched on the religious and mysterious—his self-portraits haunt and are mystical and almost Christ-like. As for his gathering of feisty knights who were mentally prepared to jostle, there was Fred Hughes, who during his heyday won over the European gallery owners, the tycoons and their wives; Vincent Fremont, who kept Camelot together; Jay Shriver, Andy’s official assistant, who ran the studio; Christopher Makos, who accompanied Andy on his pot-of-gold trips to the Rhineland; Alexander Iolas, who exhibited Andy’s first-ever solo show and commissioned his final one, The Last Supper; Wilfredo Rosado, who found the “fright wig” at Fiorucci; and the knights who got away—Jed Johnson and Bob Colacello. There were the Morgan Le Fays—Brigid Berlin and Paige Powell—and the sorcerers from Europe—Andy’s art dealers, including Bruno Bischofberger, Hans Mayer, and Thomas Ammann, who kept “Les Must de Warhol” portraits going.
Diane von Furstenberg’s portrait session happened in the kitchen of her Park Avenue apartment. “He needed a white wall and I only had a small one in the kitchen,” she says. “That is why I put my arm up.”
The portrait of Suzanne Syz, the Swiss German jeweler, was done in the studio. “I didn’t like the result,” she says. “I told Andy that I was a happy person but he made me look sad. He was surprised. I don’t think every sitter was as frank. But two weeks later . . . he’d done my new portrait in three different colors and gave them all to me. I’d only commissioned one.”
Farah Diba Pahlavi’s portrait was painted in the Niavaran Palace in Tehran when she was the empress of Iran. “We’d already met at the White House at a state dinner given for my husband by President Ford,” she remembers. “I was excited to talk to Andy but he kept on running away from me. . . . He was scared that I was going to ask him to dance.”
Farah Diba’s portrait is one of the best—resembling Sophia Loren, it implies a lighthearted existence before her life with the Shah. Irving Blum describes the series of which it is a part as “hits and misses with the occasional wonderful ones.” The best of Les Must include portraits of Gianni Agnelli, Willy Brandt, Diane von Furstenberg, Yves Saint Laurent, Peter Ludwig, Dominique de Menil, and Joseph Beuys. Meanwhile, Bischofberger is quick to point out that prominent art collectors who “only commissioned portraits of their wives and family now regret not being included.”
Sir Norman Rosenthal, who recently curated a show of portraits from the Hall Collection at the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford, stresses that Warhol’s work has held up. “It was because Andy had no fear of honesty. His magic comes down to honesty.”
There was also the talent. “His very early drawings are up there with Egon Schiele,” says Nicky Haslam. Marcel Duchamp is another frequent comparison. Éric de Rothschild, who sat for Warhol in the nude—“I was inspired by a portrait of Louis XV at Versailles, and he needed $20,000 to finish the film Trash”—refers to him as “one of the great, great American artists.” As with Fragonard, “there was more to his work than niceties. Warhol dared to show the anguish.”
Rothschild accompanied the artist to the Surrealist Ball, a legendary society gathering. Andy, he remembers, wore jeans because he didn’t like the pants of the black-tie suit that he had rented for the evening. “And everyone thought it was fantastic.” Later, at Studio 54, Rothschild would watch “as women poured their hearts out to Andy while he remained silent. It was a terrific technique.”
Peter Brant also points to Andy’s way of inciting and inviting assistance. “He played delicate, as if he needed protecting, but he was very competent. To know Andy was to work with Andy.”
Underneath Warhol’s benign presence was a steely force, and his death would lead to a permanent loss in New Yor
k and a descending darkness on his self-created Camelot. Fred Hughes became hideously invalided with MS—“it was a slow, cruel death,” says Gagosian—and as a result of his poor choices of accomplices with regard to the Warhol estate and then the Warhol Foundation, the structure that he envisioned collapsed. Christie’s now takes care of Andy’s diminished inventory.
Meanwhile, with the Warhol museum, the exhibitions in major museums, and the efforts of Vincent Fremont and gallery owners including Larry Gagosian and Thaddaeus Ropac, Andy’s reputation has gained momentum. The appearance of a Warhol artwork is guaranteed to excite the marketplace.
Nevertheless, Christian Louboutin poses a valid question: “What would have happened if Warhol had lived longer? He was the seer of the last century, the man who predicted almost everything, so where would that leave him? Would he have lost his point?” I reckon that Andy would be right where he wanted to be, keeping the lights on.
With my mother and Bertie, our dog, on March 14, 1963, four days after my birth.
Our 1963 Christmas card photo, taken outside our London home: Poppa, Mum, me, Rebecca (left), Flora (right), and Benjie (center).
Held by my father, braving the pebbles of Cooden Beach, Norfolk, in 1965.
This photo was taken in 1965, but I still feel like this. I was wearing the same dress when Bertie attacked my face.
My father and hero, in Biafra in 1967, at the beginning of the civil war.
With novelist Edna O’Brien in Scotland, 1968. I’m wrapped in a Fraser tartan rug.
With Mum and Heather, our nanny, at Penny Ridsdale’s wedding, London, 1969.
My mother and my siblings and me with my aunt Rachel Billington (right), photographed for Life after Mum’s Mary Queen of Scots triumph.
Mum reading to Benjie (looking over her shoulder), Damie, and me in 1970. Her voice gave magic to every book.
On my seventh birthday, wearing Mum’s present, a custom-made pink satin prima ballerina’s outfit.
At my brother Benjie’s tenth-birthday party, March 1971. He was Richard the Lionheart, and I was a devil.
The softest smile, marking my last day at Lady Eden’s School, July 1974.
My father’s general-election photograph, 1974. It was quite far-out for a conservative MP.
With Orlando, outside Buckingham Palace on the Queen’s Silver Jubilee Day, June 6, 1977.
My first time wearing makeup, for Harpers & Queen’s teenage issue, August 1978.
Clive Arrowsmith’s portrait of me, taken for Harpers & Queen’s teenage issue but never used. He was fabulous.
At Barbati Beach, Corfu, in August 1979, weeks before I started Queen’s College, London.
This Vogue shoot, at Atalanta and Stefano Massimo’s home in November 1979, was a blast.
Andy was Nicky Haslam’s guest of honor, but I followed him around, feeling charged by his presence.
A Vogue outtake. I can still remember having Tom Bell fix my cleavage and feeling doll-like.
Front billing in Tina Brown’s September 1980 Tatler article “Faster, Faster, London Girls,” which got me into endless trouble.
When harassed by paparazzi in November 1980, I gave them the British equivalent of the finger.
With Mum and Harold at his fiftieth-birthday party, a memorably amazing occasion.
My only fashion-model shoot, photographed for Harpers & Queen, May 1980.
Accompanying Roberto Shorto in 1981—I’m sporting my seduction outfit, which I wore constantly then.
This portrait was styled by Michael Roberts, whose inspiration was Queen Alexandra, wife of King Edward VII.
Sharing a chair with Guy Rowan-Hamilton at Tokyo Joe’s London opening, 1981.
Hogmanay in 1984, with Ian Irving and Liza Campbell at Mount Stuart, on the Isle of Bute, Scotland.
Photographed for GQ’s “Most Eligible Women in America” series—when my reality was collecting unemployment.
My favorite photo of Fred Hughes: it captures his relationship with Andy and his 1930s-style elegance.
A headshot that ABC’s Gary Pudney requested. I wanted a TV career and he promised to help.
With Michael Austin at Nell’s, the best New York nightclub and one of Andy’s watering holes.
My first “Anglofile” at Interview; the column began in mid-1988 and ended in September 1989.
A later column featured Bret Easton Ellis and Cornelia Guest, an Andy intimate.
James Graham, Kate Betts, and me enjoying Paris, March 1990. Caroline Young, a fellow reveler, took the photo.
Karl Lagerfeld’s personalized New Year’s card for 1991. He achieved my likeness in two minutes.
The famed hairdresser Monsieur Alexandre tries out wigs on me at Chanel in 1990.
Photographed by Paris Match in 1990, accompanying Gilles Dufour, his nieces, and a few French playboys at Les Bains Douches in Paris.
In Cap d’Antibes with Johnny Pigozzi, who was tremendously kind when I arrived in Paris.
Michael Roberts took this photograph at Les Bains Douches in 1992. “Chin up,” he kept saying.
James Graham asked to do my portrait in 1991. I suggested dressing as a man.
Wig moment at the Galerie du Passage in 1991, with Pierre Passebon and Christian Louboutin.
Caught at Davé restaurant by Pamela Hanson, with the producer Robert Fox and Pamela’s husband, George Klarsfeld.
Putting my head through Christian Bérard’s board at Pierre Passebon’s Galerie du Passage, 1992.
Chez Davé, sitting next to Dennis Freedman, W’s art director, a joy to work with.
Spread out on Pamela Hanson’s bed with Madeline Weeks and Christian Louboutin, Paris, 1992.
Attending a Moulin Rouge gala featuring Charles Aznavour in 1992, with Jacques Grange and Pierre Passebon.
Kicking back with Farida Khelfa, Christian Louboutin, Suzanne von Aichinger, and Pascal Greggory in 1992.
Dining with artist Laura Faber at Natacha’s restaurant in Paris, where I went endlessly during the early nineties.
With Rupert Everett, photographed by Karl Lagerfeld at his party for Donatella Versace in January 1994.
Photographed with Diane von Furstenberg in her Paris apartment in 1997, a decade after Andy’s demise.
Warhol continues via Peter Brant, Shelly Dunn Fremont, and Vincent Fremont, my first New York boss.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
After Andy wouldn’t have been possible without Blue Rider’s publisher David Rosenthal and editor in chief Sarah Hochman, who edited this book. Sarah was tireless, encouraging, and fun. I always looked forward to our calls. There were quite a few instances of “Natasha, I’m sure that this was a very important moment for you, but it simply doesn’t work here.” They did make me smile. What a difference a civilized editor makes.
I was extremely fortunate to have interviewed Vincent Fremont on three separate occasions. He is such an Andy expert—he worked for the artist from 1969 to 1987—and is so generous with his time and knowledge.
I am indebted to the following people who were kind enough to give interviews: Abigail Asher, Pierre Bergé, Bruno Bischofberger, Irving Blum, Cristiana Brandolini, Peter Brant, Andrew Braunsberg, Robert Couturier, Peter Frankfurt, Diane von Furstenberg, Larry Gagosian, Jacques Grange, Sabrina Guinness, Geraldine Harmsworth, Nicky Haslam, Catherine Hesketh, Beauregard Houston-Montgomery, Kathryn Ireland, Ian Irving, Anne Lambton, Kenneth Jay Lane, Louis Lefebvre, Christian Louboutin, Christopher Makos, Christopher Mason, Len Morgan, Farah Diba Pahlavi, Thaddaeus Ropac, Wilfredo Rosado, Norman Rosenthal, Éric de Rothschild, Clara Saint, Shelley Wanger, Gordon Watson, and Rudolf Zwirner.
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