Andy could not conquer Truman, but he found a host of boyfriends, some of the relationships perhaps not consummated—whatever “consummation,” that dreary yardstick, entails. (I can’t figure out the job description for “Andy’s boyfriend.” If it involves sex, what kind, and how much?) Prime among beaux was the melancholy photographer Edward Wallowitch, whom Andy later called “my first boyfriend.” Together they attended parties and photographed the other guests—foreshadowing Andy’s Studio 54 snapshot practice. Wallowitch took photos of children at play, which Andy recycled in his own sketches—some in his 1957 gold-foil presentation volume, A Gold Book, a James Dean clone on its cover. Before Wallowitch there was Charles Lisanby: the curtly handsome set designer, an associate of Cecil Beaton’s and friend of Julie Andrews’s, traveled with Andy around the world in 1956 (in Cambodia, Andy captioned a sketch “Ankor Wat” and “A. W.,” turning the temple of Angkor Wat, via its initials, into his own double), a trip on which, apparently, Lisanby broke Warhol’s heart by spurning his sexual advances. Another boyfriend, Carl Alfred Willers (also an A. W.), who worked in the Picture Collection of the New York Public Library, was probably the first genuine amour, and supplied source materials for Andy’s art. Other beauties included the male playmates Warhol found to attend his coloring parties and to hang out with him at Serendipity, the fashionable restaurant-cum-boutique on the Upper East Side, where he exhibited drawings among Tiffany lamps. One afternoon, while sitting at Serendipity, Andy did a series of quick infatuated sketches of the coproprietor, Stephen Bruce (his perfectly smooth skin the opposite of Andy’s), preparing for the night’s business, and called the sketchbook Playbook of You S. Bruce from 2:30 to 4:00, as if Bruce, posing for Warhol, had staged a one-man “play”—the word Julia used in Holy Cats to describe events in pussy heaven, a fictitious locale retrofitted for habitation by Andy’s stable of men. (Bruce describes Warhol’s manner as “dancing.”) Other beauties he pursued included the subjects of his drawings: dancer John Butler, sketches of whom Warhol showed in 1954 or 1955 at the Loft Gallery, and the subjects of “Studies for a Boy Book,” which he showed in 1956 at David Mann’s Bodley Gallery. The works, casually called “cock drawings” (for a proposed “cock book”), were not exhibited in his lifetime. With a minimizing, refined line, they prove that his aesthetic aim was documentary; he wanted to document the body’s presence, to capture on paper a consoling sign that the beheld face, limbs, and members actually existed. Art critics call such a sign an “index”—proof of the subject’s reality, usually in the form of a photographic imprint. Andy’s “cock drawings” do not have an “indexical” relation to genitalia—they are not snapshots. And yet they supply an index for his desire—they prove that he wanted to draw the groin, and that he was in the room to witness its unveiling.
The “cock drawings,” like cats and angels playing eternally with themselves in pussy heaven, never call a halt to desire, and so the frolicsome instances multiply: the amorous viewer, who respects the pornographic impulse to build an archive of hunger’s objects, will understand that each body needs to be documented, for every man possesses an individuating detail—a pattern of hairs on the arm, a slope of the nose, a sufficiency of the lips. Andy drew “cocks” so he could pick up tricks without bedding them. In the 1950s he frequently asked handsome men whether they’d let him draw their privates. Many consented. Sometimes he’d draw one man’s penis with a second man present, and the session would lead to a “three-way,” Andy’s role merely to watch and draw. Robert Fleischer, a stationery buyer for Bergdorf Goodman in the 1950s, modeled for Warhol, and he described the encounters in an interview with Patrick S. Smith:
Andy loved to sketch models and very intimate sexual acts. Really! And Andy sketched us screwing a couple of times. Andy would get very, very excited. He wouldn’t quite join in, but he loved watching. He would very often like to draw me nude and see me with an erection, but he never actually touched me. And I think that I never really put myself in a position of letting him [touch me] or leading him on, or [letting him think] that I was interested physically, because I wasn’t. And at one time he said that he got so hot when he saw men with erections that he couldn’t have an orgasm himself. But he started to strip that day. “And wasn’t it all right if he sketched in his Jockey shorts?” And he did. And I was really upset. And it kind of confirmed what I had thought about Andy’s personal habits in those days.
(Fleischer mentions that Andy “didn’t bathe terribly regularly,” perhaps because the bathtub was “filled with dyes and water” used for making paper.) Biographer Fred Lawrence Guiles claims that Andy and his friend Ted Carey—with whom Andy commissioned a double self-portrait by Fairfield Porter in 1960—arranged for three-ways in which Andy sketched Ted and a partner having sex. The first few times Andy made “cock drawings,” he’d run away, flustered, when the action got too hot (one participant reports that Andy screamed, “I can’t take any more!”), just as, in the 1970s, he would disappear from a session of shooting nude Polaroids, associates recall, by retreating into the bathroom to have a private “organza.”
The erotic drawings did not stop at penises. Warhol’s line captured feet or other body parts, sometimes juxtaposed with mundane or outré objects, such as the score of Samuel Barber’s opera Vanessa: in one undated drawing he paired two feet with a can of Campbell’s Vegetable Beef Soup. The image originated in Julia’s larder: she served him Campbell soups for years. The Campbell soup cans that Andy painted and silkscreened in the 1960s, which helped make him famous, are usually interpreted as commentaries on mechanical reproduction. However, displacement and other metaphoric processes contributed to his choice of Campbell soup as subject, and connected the image to his erotic hungers. Indeed, cans, in Warhol’s work, continue the task of the “cock drawings,” for cans allude to the sexual body, and to limbs iconically isolated from the whole: as a foot (in his drawings) is divorced from the body, or a penis (in his “cock drawings”) is featured in relative isolation from the face and torso, so the can is alienated from the act of eating that it nonetheless announces as a purchasable possibility. The can’s most arresting word—the eye ignores it for the first hundred times—is condensed: “Campbell’s Condensed.” Condensation is a property of dreams and the unconscious; the soup-can fetish condenses Andy’s unspeakable interior procedures, and gives them a shopwindow’s attractiveness. “Can” means “ass” (“He’s got a nice can!”); Andy’s career in advertising, in the 1950s, gave him a working knowledge of the subliminal substitutions that Vance Packard claimed, in his book The Hidden Persuaders (1957), sparked the marketing of commodities. Andy Paperbag liked receptacles—cans, bags, boxes—and aimed to disguise whether they were full or empty. His Heinz Ketchup never pours. No hand ever reaches the bottom of his bag.
In the 1950s, Warhol had a professional stake in feet. His most successful advertising images were for the I. Miller shoe stores, an award-winning campaign that appeared weekly in the New York Times. The feet and shoes he drew were sleek as spinal cords. He also painted and decorated freestanding lasts—wooden shoe forms—and made a series of golden shoe drawings (“the golden slipper show or Shoes shoe in america” reads Julia’s handwritten script on the invitation) exhibited at the Bodley Gallery in December 1956 and featured in Life magazine in early 1957 under the title Crazy Golden Slippers. He haphazardly assigned the shoes to celebrities—Elvis Presley, Kate Smith, Zsa Zsa Gabor, Truman Capote, Mae West, Judy Garland, Diana Vreeland, Helena Rubinstein, Christine Jorgensen, Julie Andrews: a lavender pantheon. Warhol also made a presentation book, entitled A la Recherche du Shoe Perdu; shoe drawings accompanied “shoe poems” composed by friend Ralph Pomeroy, such as “The autobiography of alice B. shoe.” Whether or not he had read Marcel Proust and Gertrude Stein, Andy announced himself their fellow traveler.
In 1956 he crafted a book entitled In the Bottom of My Garden, a second rendering of pussy heaven—angels, cherubs, sailors, pussies, dowagers, and oth
er disporting animals. “Do you see my little Pussy,” reads one caption, below a drawing of a girl with a kitty tucked crotch-level into her dress pocket; we only see the cat’s pink head. The words the End decorate the bottom of a cherub, back turned to the viewer; across a blank chasm, this final cherub observes a girl and boy angel embracing. (The spied-on boy’s tiny penis and testicles are a mere squiggle.) We cannot judge whether the outcast—whose line-drawn buttock curves form the Warholian W—interrupts the boy and girl’s love play or whether they fornicate specially for him.
Andy may have done the “cock drawings” by himself—with the aid of live models—but he employed assistants to help with commercial illustrations. His first was Vito Giallo, who looks, in pictures, like friendly “rough trade.” That Vito’s father was a well-known gangster interested Andy, whose fascination with glamorous criminality would bear fruit in many later projects, including the film More Milk Yvette (1965), which touches on Lana Turner’s scandalous affair with mobster Johnny Stompanato, who was killed by her daughter, Cheryl. (Andy saw a lot of himself in Lana, a fake blonde who gave up caring.) In John O’Connor and Benjamin Liu’s book Unseen Warhol, Giallo recalls the limits of Warhol’s cordiality:
Once, [Andy] was taking sex lessons. There was a woman named Valerie and she had a sailor boyfriend. Every Wednesday night, Andy said he would go over for “sex lessons.” They would give him lessons in how to have sex. I guess they would just show him what they did and how they did it. He loved to watch. He wanted me to go with him one time. I refused, and he got very upset. So I didn’t hear from him for a long time.
Giallo told me that Andy never saw him socially again after he’d refused to attend the sex lessons, though they continued to work together. (Vito felt sorry for Julia; she seemed to have no friends. He remembers: the TV was on while Andy worked—and Andy wasn’t unattractive, merely pale.)
Warhol’s productivity escalated after he discovered that he could make more money by having assistants do his work while he drummed up new business; beneath this convenience lay the insight that transformed him into a mixture of Picasso and Henry Ford—the realization that the artist’s atelier could be turned into a factory by mechanizing reproduction and minimizing manual touch. Warhol’s work, though full of desire, is not full of feeling; the work is not touching because, with the exception of the line drawings, he rarely touched it. For his advertising work and his presentation books, he used a blotting technique, a forerunner of silkscreening: he drew on one piece of paper, and his assistant traced this drawing onto another page and then inked the drawing and pressed it onto yet another sheet. Andy would discard the originals and keep the third-generation imprint. (So, too, would Andy wish to speed as quickly—and artificially—as possible past the stigma of being a first-generation immigrant: blotting, a process that hides the image’s “touching” or sentimental roots, was Andy’s model for successful Americanization.)
Vito was Andy’s first assistant; the next, Nathan Gluck, would prove the most important to Warhol’s early career. Andy hired him in fall 1955, and they continued to work together until 1965. Soft-spoken, erudite, Gluck was perhaps the gentlest of Warhol’s many collaborators. Interviewing him, I experienced his old-fashioned niceness, a sweetness at odds with the Warhol manner; perhaps Andy needed to put “feelings” behind him if he wanted to turn, like Lana Turner or Henri Matisse, into a myth. If he’d taken his assistant’s advice, Warhol would never have become famous, for Gluck disapproved of the misregistration in Pop paintings—the silkscreened photo-based image not lining up with the separately applied colors. His tastes ran toward Jean Cocteau, Paul Klee, André Gide. Before Andy went to the opera, Nathan explained the plots, though Andy archly botched the titles—“Ariadne Obnoxious” for Ariadne auf Naxos.
Gluck did the work that enabled Warhol to circulate among design-world professionals and land more assignments; content to be merely an employee, he never socialized with the boss—except for Christmas parties at the apartment Gluck shared with his companion, Clinton Hawkins, who worked as window dresser at Bonwit Teller. (Today, looking at a photo of the three of them, Nathan points to the expressive looseness of Andy’s wrist—an angle that men in the 1950s would call limp, nelly, pussy— and says, “The wrist is very Andy.”) Nathan buttressed Andy’s faltering sense of family, and was the last assistant to work in the Warhol residence rather than the studio: Nathan, ten years older than Andy, sat at home with Julia during the day, re-inking drawings, making art-gum stamps, composing ads, painting shoe lasts, listening to her sing Czech folk songs into the tape recorder—Andy’s gift—and then play back the tape and sing along with herself in duet. Nathan heard Andy shout, “Where’s my tie? Where’s my shoes?” to his mother in the morning, and saw Andy scissor off the bottoms of his long cravats (rather than simply retie them for a proper fit) and store the cut-off ends in a box. (Andy had mixed feelings about size; he glorified it, but he was also troubled by it.) Every morning Julia put Andy together: she found his clothes and brought him orange juice. Nathan helped inspire Andy to collect, for Nathan’s apartment was (and still is) an archive of multiples—masks, canned foods, European drawings, Asian and African artifacts, toilet bowl fresheners—a compendium that I would call “Warholian” if the Warholian did not already depend on the Gluckian.
Andy learned something from everyone he worked with, and he may have learned the most from Nathan; he learned how gay taste tended, in 1950s New York, toward multiplication and archiving. In the bleak McCarthy era, gay culture paradoxically flourished in the home—safer than police-threatened bars and tearooms. The private apartment—or townhouse—became a Joseph Cornell shadow box, a vitrine, an inside-out Brillo carton; in domiciles, queers amassed artworks, cleansers, masks, records, and receipts, with a curatorial intensity that Warhol would translate into an art of serial and repeated imagery, and into the collections (cookie jars, jewelry, superstars, drawings, cardboard-boxed time capsules) that were his signature, his incarceration, and his bid for immortality. Warhol’s mature practice takes its cue from the urban gay fetish of “interiors”—such as Nathan Gluck’s apartment of serial objects, or Stephen Bruce’s restaurant decor (Andy paid the “Serendipity boys” to recreate that look—proto-Pop Americana, a Mobil Gas sign’s winged horse—in the Warhol apartment). Many of these men never became famous artists, but they reconsecrated their apartments as galleries, temples, artisanal havens, and warehouses. Andy’s 1960s studios continued this 1950s domestic vanguardism; the Factory—an ambient artwork, a living museum that replaced the Museum of Modern Art and those other institutions that would remain unsympathetic to Warhol’s experiments during his lifetime—extended the apartment philosophy he first learned from decor-conscious gays. (Indeed, Warhol’s concern for physiological interiors corresponds to his passion for architectural interiors.) In the company of men I would call “design queens” if they were not also, and more important, rigorous conceptual artists, pioneers in understanding how perverse sexuality interrupts the distinction between public and private space, Warhol learned how to collect, how to decorate, where to put the couch, how silver foil—a Heloise hint, nearly—can double as wallpaper. (Martha Stewart owes a lot to Andy Warhol. Coincidentally, she recently purchased Vito Giallo’s entire antique collection.)
Andy’s beloved mother cat, Hester, went to pussy heaven after she died under the knife. Afterward, he stopped caring—but he didn’t stop caring about pussy heaven. He wanted to copy it. He wanted it to be a real locale, with a telephone number, an address, and a guest list. Though he proposed it as a comic, Utopian vision of kitties playing together eternally in a land of flowers and bottoms and clouds, he hoped to prove the fiction genuine, as a transsexual yearns for surgery. Pussy heaven, at first a fantasy, became, in the 1960s, a factory.
The Sixties
3. Screens
HOW DID ANDY WARHOL become a painter? One answer he concocted: “When I was nine years old I had St. Vitus Dance.
I painted a picture of Hedy Lamarr from a Maybelline ad. It was no good, and I threw it away. I realized I couldn’t paint.” That flip response diverts attention from his secret seriousness; his verbal deflections are always deep. Paradox: Warhol was not a painter, although he painted.
The story of how he became—sort of—a painter is mechanical and oft repeated (it is well told in David Bourdon’s monograph) and so can be dispensed as automatically as a tuna sandwich from an Automat. More heartfelt is the tale of the human relations behind the Pop paintings—intimacies that spring to life in his films. Each painting, too, reveals a friendship, betrays an interaction, transmits a newsflash of interpersonal desire. Whether his subject is soup, a HANDLE WITH CARE—GLASS—THANK YOU label, S&H Green Stamps, dollar bills, or do-it-yourself paint-by-number art kits, each canvas asks: Do you desire me? Will you destroy me? Will you participate in my ritual? Each image, while hoping to repel death, engineers its erotic arrival.
At the beginning of the 1960s Andy Warhol decided again to be a painter. For subjects, he chose comic strips, advertisements: Popeye, Nancy, Coca-Cola, Dick Tracy, Batman, Superman—images of childhood heroism, thirsts quenched, fantastically draped he-men standing up to insult. He told superstar Ultra Violet one origin of this iconography: “I had sex idols—Dick Tracy and Popeye. … My mother caught me one day playing with myself and looking at a Popeye cartoon. … I fantasized I was in bed with Dick and Popeye.” His dilemma—a pretend conflict?—was whether to render these figures expressionistically with drips and overt signs of the hand, or flatly, without personality. He showed his paintings to curators and dealers, and solicited opinions about the direction his work should move—toward “feeling” (wild marks), or toward “coldness” (mechanical reproduction).
Andy Warhol Page 4