Andy Warhol by Wayne Koestenbaum

Author:Wayne Koestenbaum
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2014-12-22T18:23:50+00:00

5. Rupture

THE PREVIOUS CHAPTER IGNORED Andy’s body. His own films stinted it, though they expressed its mechanical desire. During the heyday of Factory torture, his body went underground; it continues to hide from the critic’s scalpel. From the start of the 1960s, when Andy moved his atelier from apartment to studio, and cordoned off the superhero scene of artmaking from the milquetoast realm of breakfasts with Julia (orange juice always brought by Mom to Andy’s bedside, as Madalen Warhola Hoover, his niece, told me), a rupture grew between home existence and his widely publicized Factory shenanigans; the split between public and private operated as surgically in Andy’s case as in the career of a proper Victorian gentleman named Oscar Wilde, whose wife stayed at home while the aphorist invented decadence at dim hotels. Bedtime found Andy returned to Julia’s, the townhouse on the Upper East Side, Mother devoting herself to churchgoing and also increasingly to hitting the bottle and presumably growing more histrionic in her narrations, more random in her neighborhood wanderings. None of the Factory family penetrated the townhouse, and Andy rarely mentioned his mother to coworkers. On Sundays he went to church. Other days he hid behind the camera or behind Gerard silkscreening, and nights he dissolved into his klatch at Max’s Kansas City near Union Square—Mickey Ruskin’s louche boîte, which had, Taylor Mead told me, four great years, when it aroused Manhattan’s demimonde, and became the temporary host site for the rogue cell of downtown existence. Max’s opened in 1965; Andy’s crowd reigned in the back room, other artists in the front. The entourage charged their meals to Andy’s tab, as recompense for screen work. Randy Bourscheidt, who appeared opposite Nico in a Warhol film called The Closet (originally part of Chelsea Girls), described to me Andy’s habit of treating: if not to Max’s, he would take the group either to a “dreadful Italian restaurant” in the Village or to a Chinese restaurant “where Andy would preside, paterfamilias, and invariably pay for dinner—a sweet mockery of a royal court. I felt honored to be invited … He was so unemphatic and uncontrolling— it felt like the opposite of a big ego trip. His was the quietest voice at the table, the most unassertive.”

Warhol’s body was perpetually in hiding—most deeply sequestered when he sent an impersonator on a lecture tour in 1967. Andy called it an anti-star identity game; it was one of his most elegant and illegal conceptual performances. He reasoned: why should audiences suffer through my pasty, bald, halting, monosyllabic banality, when instead they could see and hear a handsome articulate actor like Allen Midgette, star of Bertolucci’s After the Revolution, in which he wears a wig—tresses like canary feathers—that prefigures mine? The Midgette/Warhol ruse was eventually discovered, and Andy returned to fulfill some of the faked engagements himself. When I spoke to Midgette, a statuesque man with the magnetic eyes of an alien abductee, he said that to impersonate Andy he hunched his shoulders, slowed

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