Johnson’s series of circular towers was one gigantic, albeit artful, advertisement for New York State. The truth was, New York’s reputation was sinking fast in 1964: Crime was on the rise; and only one month earlier, the Kitty Genovese murder had made headlines around the world. Intended or not, Warhol’s Thirteen Most Wanted Men created yet another link between New York, criminals, and crime at a World’s Fair dedicated to “Peace Through Understanding.”
Whatever had happened behind the scenes at Flushing Meadow, Warhol knew whom he blamed for the fiasco: Moses. The World’s Fair Corporation president had the authority to censor art—or any exhibit—“in cases of extreme bad taste or low standard.” And Moses had just exercised his presidential veto power when he had an oil painting by American artist Walter Keane removed from the Hall of Education. Keane’s Tomorrow Forever depicted scores of haunted, vacant-eyed young children. It was one part creepy and two parts kitsch.
Warhol clearly felt that Moses was involved in his work’s removal, too. When Johnson said he could create another work, Warhol already had one in mind. Instead of twenty-five portraits of wanted criminals, the artist silk-screened twenty-five images of a broadly smiling Moses, using a black-and-white photograph of the World’s Fair Corporation’s president gleaned from the pages of Life. He called it Robert Moses Twenty-Five Times. It would illustrate for the millions who flocked to the Fair what many believed the exhibition was really all about anyway: Robert Moses.
Warhol quickly set about creating silk screens of Moses’ image on Masonite panels at the Factory, where Lancaster found him busy at work. “Andy couldn’t have been doing this out of anything but anger—Moses wouldn’t have gone for it in a million years,” said Lancaster. When he was asked about the painting years later, Warhol deadpanned, “I thought [Moses] would like it.”
Actually, Moses never even heard about the new mural; Johnson censored the idea quickly. “I forbade that,” the architect later confessed, “because I just don’t think it made any sense to thumb our noses. . . . I don’t like Mr. Moses, but inviting more lawsuits by taking potshots at the head of the Fair would seem to me very, very bad taste. Andy and I had a little battle at the time.” Despite his anger at being censored—again—Warhol never complained to the media. When he was asked about the painted-over mural, he claimed yet another reason for its demise. “One of the men labeled ‘wanted’ had been pardoned, you see,” he explained offhandedly. “So the mural wasn’t valid anymore.”
The real truth was that the mural became a political issue within days of being mounted. New York governor Nelson A. Rockefeller, who had hired Johnson to create the pavilion, demanded Warhol’s work be removed. Rockefeller, an avid—and deep-pocketed—collector of modern art (Warhol would eventually paint his portrait), had political reasons for censoring the mural: 1964 was an election year and, once again, Rockefeller was seeking the Republican nomination for the presidency.
After losing to Richard M. Nixon in 1960, the popular governor was considered the GOP front-runner for the 1964 election—President Kennedy had considered Rockefeller to be his toughest potential opponent. But then Rockefeller committed what was then a cardinal sin in politics: He got divorced. What’s more, he quickly got remarried to his former mistress, who gave birth to a son, Nelson Jr.
By the fall of 1963, Rockefeller still had a chance, but was considered damaged goods. Now the unlikely candidate Senator Barry Goldwater, whose right-wing conservatism was far outside the political mainstream, seemed destined to become the Republican candidate who would face President Lyndon B. Johnson in the fall of 1964. Rockefeller could ill afford another controversy. Nor could he risk alienating a key voting bloc like Italian Americans, who might be offended that Warhol’s painting reinforced ethnic stereotypes (seven of the thirteen most wanted men were of Italian descent). There were also claims that some of the men had beaten the charges, making them, in the eyes of the law, innocent.
It would be years before Johnson came clean about Rockefeller’s orders. “Andy’s was the one the governor turned down,” he later admitted. “It was a very sad story. I gave each artist the chance to pick his own subject, and [Warhol] picked—impishly—the most wanted men. And I thought, ‘That would be an absolutely delicious idea. Why not?’” Postmodernist visionary that he was, Johnson couldn’t foresee any controversy erupting. However, when René d’Harnoncourt, the director of the Museum of Modern Art, informed him the governor wanted the mural removed, Johnson immediately capitulated to his powerful patron.
Johnson once admitted his greatest ambition was to be l’architecte du roi—the king’s architect, the person responsible for creating public architecture, the kind that lasted decades, if not centuries. In 1964 alone, Johnson opened three major works in New York City: the State Pavilion in Flushing Meadow, the New York State Theater at Lincoln Center, and a new wing at the Museum of Modern Art. The Rockefellers had played important roles in all three. Johnson was not about to speak truth—or defend censored art—to power. “Whoever commissions buildings buys me,” he once claimed. “I’m for sale. I’m a whore. I’m an artist.”
For all these reasons, Warhol’s Thirteen Most Wanted Men and the work that he created to replace it, Robert Moses Twenty-Five Times, were rejected, making Warhol the only artist to have two works—both specifically created for the World’s Fair—censored. For someone who didn’t like Moses, Johnson certainly had a couple of Moseslike traits: an outsize ego and even larger ambition. But there was one key difference between the two men: Moses spoke truth—or his version of it, anyway—to whomever he damned well pleased.
In the end, Warhol would have the last laugh. The controversy surrounding his World’s Fair mural gave an extra bit of publicity to his latest show, which debuted at the Stable Gallery on April 21—the night before the World’s Fair opened. Now Warhol’s fame was spreading outside downtown hipster cliques and art world sophisticates. The line to get into the Stable stretched down West 58th Street as viewers waited to glimpse the four hundred sculptures of painted plywood boxes carefully stacked almost all the way to the ceiling: Some looked like boxes of Brillo pads, Campbell’s tomato juice, and Heinz ketchup; others were painted to look like Mott’s apple juice, Kellogg’s Corn Flakes, and Del Monte peaches. Despite some of the inevitable carping (“Is this an art gallery or Gristede’s warehouse?” quipped one attendee) and critical complaints (“Anti-Art with capital A’s” lamented one reviewer), collectors snapped up the “sculptures,” which ranged from $200 to $400; one collector plopped down $6,000 for twenty boxes.
Ironically, the artist who had designed the original Brillo box in 1961, painter Jim Harvey, a commercial artist by day and abstract expressionist by night, attended the opening show. He didn’t think much of Warhol’s sculptural simulacrums of his design as serious art. “A good commercial design,” he told a reporter of his original Campbell soup can label, “but that’s all.” Not that Warhol cared. That night after the opening he celebrated his triumph with a party at the Factory, where he held court along with his fellow pop stars such as Lichtenstein and Rosenquist.
Whatever the critics—or Moses and Rockefeller—thought of his art, Warhol was breaking boundaries and creating works that, like the best pop art, forced his audience to reconsider the very definition of art and corporate consumer culture; the same corporate consumer culture that the World’s Fair would put on display in Flushing Meadow. Moses’ World’s Fair and Warhol’s art were more alike than probably either would care to admit. But thanks in part to the controversy his art caused at (or rather, just before) Moses’ “Olympics of Progress,” Warhol was well on his way to superstardom, which would last for far longer than his allotted fifteen minutes.
19.
What does it mean to be found obscene in New York? This is the most sophisticated city in the country. . . . If anyone is . . . found obscene in New York, he must feel utterly depraved.
—Lenny Bruce
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By the spring of 1964, the crackdown on homosexual bars that had begun the year before had bloomed into a campaign of political persecution of the downtown cultural scene and its iconoclastic denizens. In an attempt to “clean up” New York City before millions of tourists arrived for the World’s Fair, the administration of Mayor Robert F. Wagner Jr. heeded the voices of the city’s most reactionary religious authorities and began busting artists, performers, and bohemians of every stripe.
By the time the Fair opened its gates on the morning of April 22, New York was waging an all-out war on nonconformists such as Jack Smith, the underground filmmaker; Jonas Mekas, the director, archivist, and film critic; Julian Beck and Judith Malina, the founders of the politically radical Living Theatre; Lenny Bruce, the most outrageous of the new so-called sick comedians; and Greenwich Village coffeehouses such as Le Metro Café, where poets Allen Ginsberg and Frank O’Hara, among others, frequently read.
By April O’Hara, who had just published his most celebrated work, Lunch Poems, the month before, had had enough. “In preparation for the World’s Fair, New York has been undergoing a horrible cleanup (I wonder what they think people are really coming to NYC for, anyway?). All the queer bars except one are already closed,” he complained in a letter to his on-again, off-again lover, the painter Larry Rivers. “The Fair itself, or its preparations are too ridiculous and boring to go into, except for the amusing fact that Moses flies over it in a helicopter every day to inspect progress. And CORE has promised to totally stop traffic the first day by lying down on the highway. I hope they do.”
O’Hara’s frustration with New York’s oppressive climate and his joy that the proposed stall-in by the Brooklyn chapter of CORE would upstage Robert Moses’ opening day were perfectly blended in a playfully surreal poem he wrote around the same time, titled “Here in New York We Are Having a Lot of Trouble with the World’s Fair.”
This moral crackdown had actually been in the works since 1960, when Mayor Wagner, egged on by religious leaders, instigated a fight against “obscene magazines.” That December, in cooperation with the city’s five district attorneys and the License Department, the mayor had ordered 140 police officers to serve legal papers throughout the city—to distributors, publishers, and point-of-sale businesses (from luncheonettes to newsstands)—making it illegal to sell “girlie magazines” such as Adam Bedside Reader, Cloud 9, Bare, and Mr. Cool to anyone under the age of eighteen. It was all part of a plan, Wagner said, “to rid our city of those publications which, in my opinion, have contributed significantly toward juvenile delinquency and have played a major part in encouraging criminal acts and the increase of crime.”
By October 1962 the city’s antipornography campaign had led to the creation of Operation: Yorkville, a new advocacy group formed by a trio of religious leaders from Manhattan’s Yorkville neighborhood, the same Upper East Side district where Wagner had grown up. Founded by Reverend Morton A. Hill, SJ, a Roman Catholic priest; Rabbi Julius G. Neumann; and Reverend Robert Wiltenburg, a Lutheran minister, the group aimed “to keep obscene literature out of the hands of children.” By 1963 the New York Police Department had launched its own Operation: Pornography, a coordinated attempt to battle the growing number of porn shops, strip clubs, and bathhouses in the city, particularly in Times Square. From April to August 1963, the police made 166 obscenity-related arrests—all but 36 of them in or around Times Square. But for some religious leaders, Wagner’s efforts weren’t enough.
On Sunday, May 5, 1963, an irate Monsignor Joseph A. McCaffrey took to the pulpit of Holy Cross Church, on West 42nd Street, at that morning’s 11:15 mass to berate “broad-minded” judges who, he said, were obstructing attempts to cleanse the city of smut. The result of such malicious jurisprudence, he told his parishioners, resulted in “the disgrace that is Times Square.” No sooner had New York’s Finest—whom McCaffrey absolved from blame—executed raids and arrested filth peddlers, than judges set them free or liberal defense attorneys claimed the First Amendment was being trampled upon. The Founding Fathers, Monsignor McCaffrey claimed, did not “anticipate giving free rein to the publication of pornographic literature when they established the principle of a free press.”
Monsignor McCaffrey wanted Times Square cleaned up now. Aiming squarely at the jugulars of the mayor and the World’s Fair management, he noted that in a year’s time, millions of tourists would descend upon New York City—with millions of dollars in their pockets—only to come face to face with the smut of Times Square. The worst thing that could happen, McCaffrey said, was that visitors would think New York “is wide open”—an amoral town where anything goes. Without being explicit, he got his point across: Smut and obscenity would damage the World’s Fair and its bottom line.
The mayor got the message. Within two months of McCaffrey’s outburst, Wagner announced that he was ratcheting up his antiobscenity campaign into a crusade that would include a new four-pronged attack, which featured an antipornography police unit and even “a special court” devoted to dealing with such cases. But like many of Wagner’s announcements, there was little to no follow-up. Wagner’s father, the late Senator Robert F. Wagner Sr., had often cautioned his son, “When in doubt, don’t”; it was sage advice that the mayor had turned into a political art form.
Political inaction—creating a committee to placate unhappy constituents and then just hoping the problem would go away—was Wagner’s specialty. Although he was a liberal Democrat and a strong supporter of civil rights, young militant members of CORE grew so frustrated with Wagner’s inaction that they staged an audacious bit of political street theater and “arrested” him on the steps of City Hall in July 1964. Likewise, the religious leaders of Operation: Yorkville understood it would take a grand gesture to force Wagner’s hand.
Five months later, dissatisfied with Wagner’s efforts, Reverend Hill made just such a gesture. On Sunday, October 27, during his sermon at St. Ignatius Loyola on 84th Street and Park Avenue, Hill announced that he was on a hunger strike—“a black fast” he called it. Since 6:00 p.m. the previous Friday, he had subsisted solely on water and would continue to do so until Wagner made good on his promises. The mayor had done nothing, declared Reverend Hill, while he had been busy screening Perversion for Profit, a thirty-minute film about the dangers of exposing children to pornography, to local community groups. The sale of pornographic literature to children was a violation of “parental civil rights” said the Jesuit, who believed that nude or even seminude photos could lead impressionable minds down the path of sexual violence and even drugs. “[It] sows the idea of perversion that soon leads to experimentation and finally fixation,” he claimed.
The hunger strike was a public relations disaster for Wagner, a popular Democrat and a Catholic. With the next mayoral election just two years away, such actions and charges by a moral crusader like Reverend Hill could eat away at Wagner’s electoral base. The mayor immediately released a statement that he was directing Deputy Mayor Edward F. Cavanagh Jr. to head up the city’s antiobscenity efforts. He also made it clear that his administration welcomed the help of Operation: Yorkville or any “religious or civic leaders in rooting out this evil.”
The next day Reverend Hill ended his seventy-five-hour fast, and the following week the members of Operation: Yorkville were invited to City Hall. But the deputy mayor wanted to stress that although the city was embarking on a theologically fueled crusade against evil—specifically the evil of selling porn to minors—adults were free to do as they like. “We are not out to trample on civil liberties,” he told reporters. “We are not book burners.”
It didn’t seem that way to some. Ralph Ginzburg, the Bronx-born journalist and publisher of Eros, a high-end erotic literary magazine that had published the work of Norman Mailer and Salvador Dalí, among others, announced on October 28 that he too was going on a hunger strike to dispute “the obscenity panic that is plaguing our city and the country.’” Just five m
onths earlier Ginzburg had been sentenced to five years in prison by a Philadelphia federal court for mailing obscene materials. The charges had been leveled against him in 1963 by US Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy after Eros printed a photo essay featuring a pair of nude dancers—a black man and white woman.
Kennedy found it offensive; he was certain this was a plot to derail his brother’s civil rights legislation, then dying a slow death in the Senate. Miscegenation, or the mixing of the races, after all, was what segregationist senators feared most; in fact, antimiscegenation statutes were still the law of sixteen states in the nation (and would be until a 1967 US Supreme Court decision). “We are really dealing with something akin to witchery because obscenity is neither measurable nor definable nor worthy of the law,” argued Ginzburg, who was appealing his conviction. Other antiobscenity leaders heaped scorn on Ginzburg. Dr. William P. Riley, the New York–based vice president of the National Organization of Citizens for Decent Literature, declared Ginzburg a “homegrown leftist,” who along with Playboy publisher Hugh Hefner wanted “to destroy the Judeo-Christian concepts upon which the world has been built.”
Ginzburg, who would serve two years in jail, was hardly the only victim of New York’s—and the nation’s—politically motivated morality campaign. Manhattan bookstore owner John Downs was facing criminal charges for selling illicit material to a minor that same month. At the behest of Operation: Yorkville members, sixteen-year-old Kathleen Keegan purchased a hardcover copy of Fanny Hill: The Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, an eighteenth-century erotic novel, at Downs’s Lexington Avenue bookstore. While she never read the novel, she took it home to her mother, who after perusing just two pages, proclaimed it “horrible filth.” The next day Downs and the clerk who sold her the book were arrested and charged with selling illicit materials to a minor.
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