by Olivia Laing
Upstairs, people were working, among them Warhol’s collaborator Paul Morrissey and his business manager Fred Hughes. Andy sat down at his desk and took a call from Viva, Susan Bottomley, who was having her hair dyed in Kenneth’s Hair Salon. As they chatted, Valerie pulled out the .32 Beretta and fired twice. No one but Andy saw where the shots had come from. He tried to climb under the desk, but she stood over him and shot again, this time hitting him at close range. Blood was gushing through his t-shirt, splattering the white cord of the phone. ‘I felt horrible, horrible pain,’ he remembered later, ‘like a cherry bomb exploding inside me.’ Next, Solanas shot the art critic Mario Amaya, wounding him superficially. She was about to fire at a pleading Fred Hughes when the elevator door opened and she was persuaded to step inside. ‘There’s the elevator, Valerie. Just take it.’
By then Warhol was crumpled on the floor in a pool of his own blood. He kept saying he couldn’t breathe. When Billy Name bent over him, shaking and heaving, Warhol thought he was laughing and started to laugh too. ‘Don’t laugh, oh, please don’t make me laugh,’ he said, but Billy was crying. The bullet had ricocheted sideways through Andy’s abdomen, passing through both his lungs, his oesophagus, gall bladder, liver, intestines and spleen, leaving a gaping exit wound in his right flank. His lungs were punctured and he was fighting for air.
It took a long time to get him out. Everything dragging, everything lagging. The stretcher wouldn’t fit in the elevator and so he had to be carried down six flights of steep stairs, a journey so distressing that he lost consciousness. Mario had to tip the ambulance driver $15 to put the siren on, and once Warhol was finally in the operating room, it seemed anyway that they were too late. Both he and Mario distinctly heard the doctors muttering No chance. ‘Don’t you know who this is?’ Mario screamed. ‘It’s Andy Warhol. He’s famous. And he’s rich. He can afford to pay for an operation. For Christ’s sake, do something.’
Inspired perhaps by the mention of fame and riches, the surgeons did decide to operate, but as they opened up Andy’s chest his heart stopped beating. Though they managed to resuscitate, Warhol was clinically dead for one and a half minutes, flung out of life altogether by the least regarded of all the voice artists who’d collected around him: a journey he later said he could never be totally certain he had returned from.
*
Everyone always got Valerie wrong. When she was arrested (giving herself up to a traffic cop in Times Square at around the time Andy was having his spleen removed), she told the throng of journalists at the Thirteenth Precinct station house that the answer to why she’d shot Andy Warhol would be found in her manifesto. ‘Read my manifesto,’ she insisted. ‘It will tell you what I am.’ Evidently no one did, since she was misidentified on the front page of the Daily News the next morning. The famous headline ran: ACTRESS SHOOTS ANDY WARHOL. Furious, she demanded a retraction, and the evening edition of the story included her correction: ‘I’m a writer, not an actress.’
It would become increasingly hard to maintain control of her own story, dismaying considering she claimed she’d shot Warhol because he had too much control over her life. Now she had to contend with the full apparatus of the state; to spend three years shuttling back and forth between courts, mental hospitals and prisons, among them the notoriously filthy and brutal Matteawan State Hospital for the Criminally Insane (where Edie Sedgwick was also a patient at the time), Bellevue Psychiatric Hospital (where Valerie’s uterus was removed), and the Women’s House of Detention.
Her case became a cause célèbre among feminists, but she quickly fell out with the women who flocked to her defence. She didn’t want anyone speaking for her, or co-opting her ideas. Nor did she stop her attacks on Warhol. During the years of her incarceration, she kept sending him letters, some threatening or coercive, some conciliatory, even chummy. Briefly at liberty in the winter of 1968, she reinstituted her campaign of telephone harassment. In POPism, Warhol remembered answering the phone to her on Christmas Eve, and almost fainting when he heard her voice. She threatened, he said, to ‘do it again . . . My worst nightmare had come true.’
Instead, she went back to prison. By the time she re-emerged, she was quieter, more subdued, as you might expect from someone who’d been trapped in places where sexual and physical assaults were common, where prisoners were expected to survive on a slice of bread and a single filthy cup of coffee a day, and were frequently locked as punishment into cells devoid of furnishings or light.
Back in New York, Valerie spent much of her time hunting for food and a place to sleep. People who knew her in that period attest to the way she was excluded from communes and women’s groups, both of whom had become wary of her hostility, her savage tongue. Strangers avoided her in the street. She was frequently spat at and thrown out of cafés, not because she was recognised as Warhol’s putative assassin, but because she gave off a tang of difference, a silent signal of being somehow outcast, undesirable, even blemished. She drifted around the Village, a miserable, skinny figure, huddled in layers of winter clothes. She was still fixated with the idea that people were stealing her words, only now she thought a transmitter had been hidden in her uterus.
The loneliness of the second half of Solanas’s life was a product of many factors. The most obvious and frequently stated was her growing loss of touch with consensual reality. Paranoia is isolating in itself, by its own mechanisms of mistrust and withdrawal, but it also carries a stigma, as does time spent in prison. People pick up on these perceived markers of abnormality. They sidestep the street mutterer and shun the former criminal, isolating them if not submitting them to actual violence. What I am trying to say is that the vicious circle by which loneliness proceeds does not happen in isolation, but rather as an interplay between the individual and the society in which they are embedded, a process perhaps worsened if they are already a sharp critic of that society’s inequities.
All the same, there was a period in the 1970s in which Valerie’s life improved. She developed a loving relationship (with a man, as it happens) and found an apartment on East 3rd Street. Later, I realised her building had backed directly on to mine, and that she too must have spent her days listening to the bells of the Most Holy Redeemer tolling off the hours. She found work on a feminist magazine, and enjoyed the business of collaboration. A stable, even a pleasant time, until in 1977 she finally succeeded in self-publishing SCUM. It was a total failure, a dead and abject loss. Of all the things that happened to Valerie, it was this that finally broke her ability to form relationships with other people: not the imprisonment, not the shooting, but the final, incontrovertible evidence of her failure to make contact by way of words.
From then on, her paranoia became overwhelming. She thought her enemies were trying to communicate with her through her bed-sheets. She gave up her apartment and her relationship, becoming homeless once again. Her abiding, driving fear in her last years was the same old, increasingly ironic one: that her words were going to be stolen. In the end this paranoia isolated her from everyone in her life. She refused to speak, writing in code and mumbling or humming, trying to avoid the necessity of opening her mouth. Eventually she left New York altogether and drifted west. She died of pneumonia in April 1988, in Room 420 of a welfare hotel in San Francisco. Her body wasn’t found for three days, and was crawling with maggots by the time the super noticed her rent was late.
This is about as lonely as death gets. It’s the death of someone who has tumbled out of the world of language altogether; who has severed not just the ties of friendship and love but also the many small verbal bonds that hold each person within the social order, tethering them in place. Solanas had pinned her hopes on language, believing implicitly in its capacity for changing the world. Perhaps in the end it was better, safer, less devastating to think of it as a medium in which her own stock was so high, so in demand that she no longer dared participate, rather than accepting that she had simply failed in her expression: that she was unintelligible, Wittgenstein’s
great fear, or worse, that what she had to say was not wanted at all.
But it wasn’t only Valerie who became more isolated in the wake of the shooting. In hospital, on a drip, with his spleen and part of his right lung removed, Andy felt sure that he had already died, that he was occupying a dream space, parked in a corridor between realms. On the third day, he heard on the hospital television that Robert Kennedy had been shot, the eroding surf of the news deposing him from the front page.
Already wary of contact, already uncertain about the virtues of embodiment, he now had to deal with the catastrophic wreckage of his physical form. His abdomen had been carved to pieces and he would spend the rest of his life in surgical corsets (they made him feel ‘glued-together’, a term he also used for his wigs, and which attests to how deeply he relied on physical objects for a sense of wholeness and cohesion). He was exhausted, in acute physical pain and suffering from what would now be diagnosed as post-traumatic stress disorder, which came by way of surges of overwhelming anxiety and terror.
He reacted by withdrawing, going numb, retreating inside himself. In an interview conducted two weeks after the shooting he said, as he had to the Sugar Plum Fairy: ‘It’s too hard to care . . . I don’t want to get too involved in other people’s lives . . . I don’t want to get too close . . . I don’t like to touch things . . . That’s why my work is so distant from myself.’
He was so weak that he had to stay home for months, nursed by his mother. When he finally returned to the Factory, it was autumn. It was wonderful to be back; it was just that he didn’t quite know what he should do there. He hid out in his office, not painting, not making films. The only one of his old occupations he still enjoyed was taping, but even that was a problem now. After the shooting he’d developed a terror of being around the sort of people whose conversation had previously been so entertaining and desirable. ‘What I never came right out and confided to anyone in so many words,’ he wrote in POPism, ‘was this: I was afraid that without the crazy, druggy people around jabbering away and doing their insane thing, I’d lose my creativity. After all, they’d been my total inspiration since ’64, and I didn’t know if I could make it without them.’
The one thing he did find soothing was listening to his old tapes being transcribed. Andy found all mechanical noise reassuring – shutters and flashbulbs, ringtones and buzzers – but his favourite by far was the click-clack of typewriters accompanied by the sound of sequestered voices released into the air, liberated at last from their dangerous bodies. That autumn, the Factory typists were working on a, and so he could sit in his office, glued together by his corset, listening to the manic chatter of Ondine and Taxi, the swell of those old, beloved voices drifting through the room.
Like SCUM Manifesto, the publication of a would not be a success, either in terms of sales or reviews. All the same, listening to the tapes roll on, Warhol finally got the idea for his next creative venture. He’d make a magazine, entirely comprised of people talking to one another. He called it Interview, and it has survived right through to the present day, a symphony of human speech, made by someone who knew exactly how much words cost and what consequences they can have: how they can start but also stop the opened organ of the heart.
4
IN LOVING HIM
HALLOWEEN. IT HAD BEEN A bad day, I don’t know why. At seven I got up from whatever I was or wasn’t doing, ringed my eyes in kohl, put on a black dress covered in small black sequins, drank down a glass of bourbon and went out into the night, heading for the parade in the West Village. Cold smoky dark, walking past the big brownstones, their stoops and sills covered in a garish litter of pumpkins, skulls and spun white spider webs. I thought it would be cheering to stand in a crowd, but it wasn’t, not really. Looking at my photos from that night I think that what I was in search of was a sensation of smear, of the collapsing boundaries that come with festivity or intoxication. All my pictures are blurred; they all show a whirl of bright objects colliding in space. Giant skeletons, giant eyeballs on stalks, a dozen flashbulbs, a glowing silver suit. A flatbed truck came chugging up Sixth Avenue, bearing a cotillion of zombies snapping and twitching in unison to Michael Jackson’s ‘Thriller’.
All that evening, I was dogged by the exhausting sense of being too visible, sticking out like a sore thumb among the coupled and conjoined, the jaunty, tipsy groups of friends. I bitterly regretted not having bought a mask in Party City: a cat face or Spider-Man. I wanted to be anonymous, to pass through the city unseen; not invisible exactly, but concealed, my pained, anxious, all too declarative face hidden from view, relieved from the burden of needing to look unconcerned, or worse, appealing.
What is it about masks and loneliness? The obvious answer is that they offer relief from exposure, from the burden of being seen – what is described in the German as Maskenfreiheit, the freedom conveyed by masks. To refuse scrutiny is to dodge the possibility of rejection, though also the possibility of acceptance, the balm of love. This is what makes masks so poignant as well as so uncanny, sinister, unnerving. Think of the Phantom of the Opera or the Man in the Iron Mask; or Michael Jackson himself, for that matter, his exquisite face half-concealed by a black or white surgical veil that begs the question of whether he is the victim or perpetrator of his own disfigurement.
Masks amplify the way in which skin is a barrier or wall, acting as a marker of separation, singularity, distance. They are protective, yes, but a masked face is also frightening. What lies behind it? Something monstrous, something awful beyond bearing. We’re known by our faces; they reveal our intentions and betray our emotional weather. All those horror films that feature masked killers – Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Silence of the Lambs, Halloween – play on a terror of facelessness, of not being able to make an appeal, to speak as we say face to face, mortal to mortal.
These films often also articulate the deforming, dehumanising, monster-making horror our culture considers loneliness to be. Here donning the mask signifies a definitive rejection of the human state, a prelude to wreaking revenge on the community, the mass, the excluding group. (The same message delivered in a lighter envelope week after week on Scooby-Doo: the ghoul’s mask plucked from the villain to reveal the lonely caretaker, the cantankerous isolate who can’t bear those insufferably sunny, agglomerate kids.)
Masks also beg the question of the public self: the set, frozen features of politeness and conformity, behind which real desires writhe and twist. Maintaining a surface, pretending to be someone you are not, living in the closet: these imperatives breed a gangrenous sense of being unknown, of going unregarded. And then of course there are masks as a cover for illegal or deviant activity, and being unmasked, and being surrounded by a masked mob, like the terrifyingly pastoral animal heads worn by the villagers in The Wicker Man, or the zombie army in ‘Thriller’, a video I’d found unwatchably frightening as a child.
Many of these currents circulate through one of the most striking masked images I’ve ever seen, made by an artist who in the 1980s lived a block away from my apartment on East 2nd. It’s a black and white photograph of a man standing outside the 7th Avenue exit of the Times Square subway. He’s wearing a sleeveless denim jacket, a white t-shirt and a paper mask of the French poet Arthur Rimbaud, a life-sized Xerox of the famous portrait on the cover of Illuminations. Behind him a guy with an Afro is jaywalking in a billowing white shirt and flared black pants. The camera has caught him mid-bounce, one shoe still in the air. Both sides of the street are lined with big old-timey cars and cinemas. MOONRAKER is on at the New Amsterdam, AMITYVILLE HORROR at the Harris, while the sign at the Victory, just above Rimbaud’s head, promises in big black letters RATED X.
The picture was taken in 1979, when New York was passing through one of its periodic phases of decline. Rimbaud is standing at the sleazy epicentre of the city: on the Deuce, the old name for that stretch of 42nd Street that runs between 6th and 8th Avenue – standing, in fact, right where Valerie Solanas was arrested eleven years before. The
street was wild even then, but by the 1970s New York was on the verge of bankruptcy and Times Square was overrun by violence and crime, a teeming haven for prostitutes, dealers, muggers and pimps. The Beaux Arts theatres – the same places Hopper had celebrated in New York Movie, his famous painting of a uniformed movie attendant slouched against a wall – had been transformed into porn cinemas and cruising grounds, the old economy of covert glances and desirable images growing more explicit, more flagrant by the day.
What better place for Rimbaud, who was drawn to crime and squalor, who spilled his talent liberally and fast, burning through the precincts of nineteenth-century Paris like a comet? He looks entirely at home there, his paper face expressionless, the gutter glinting at his feet. In other images from the series, which is entitled Arthur Rimbaud in New York, he shoots heroin, rides the subway, masturbates in bed, eats in a diner, poses with carcasses at a slaughterhouse and wanders through the wreckage of the Hudson piers, lounging with outstretched arms in front of a wall spray-painted with the words THE SILENCE OF MARCEL DUCHAMP IS OVERRATED.
No matter how large the crowd through which he moves, Rimbaud is always on his own; always unlike the people who surround him. Sometimes he’s looking for sex, or maybe to sell himself, slouching outside the Port Authority bus terminal, where the hustlers go to display their wares. Sometimes he even has companions, like the one of him standing at night with two laughing homeless men, their arms slung around each other’s shoulders, one of them holding a toy pistol, a trashcan fire burning at their feet. All the same, the mask marks him out as separate: a wanderer or voyeur, unable or unwilling to display his real face.
The Rimbaud series was conceived, orchestrated and shot in its entirety by David Wojnarowicz (generally pronounced Wonna-row-vich), a then entirely unknown twenty-four-year-old New Yorker who would in a few years become one of the stars of the East Village art scene, alongside contemporaries like Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring, Nan Goldin and Kiki Smith. His work, which includes paintings, installations, photography, music, films, books and performances, turns on issues of connection and aloneness, focusing in particular on how an individual can survive within an antagonistic society, a society that might plausibly want them dead rather than tolerate their existence. It’s passionately in favour of diversity; acutely aware of how isolating a homogeneous world can be.