After Andy by Natasha Fraser-Cavassoni

Author:Natasha Fraser-Cavassoni
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2017-08-01T04:00:00+00:00

13 Frederick W. Hughes

Fred Hughes was the first person to be told by New York Hospital that Andy Warhol had died. It made sense, since Warhol had named him next of kin. As Andy’s will revealed, Fred was named the sole executor of Warhol’s estate—viewed as one of the largest amassed by an artist. To quote again from Bob Colacello’s profile for Vanity Fair, it would give him “financial security, social prestige, and real power in the upper-most echelons of the international art world.” Indeed, it was felt that after having been Andy’s shadow—in photographs he was the slight, slick-haired, 1930s-styled gent by the artist’s side—finally Fred was front and center, dangling the keys to the kingdom.

Having worked at the Factory since 1967, Fred had quickly won the artist’s trust by being efficient and reliable. Then he’d seamlessly evolved into a private manager-dealer who took ten- or twenty-percent commission instead of the fifty percent that Leo Castelli demanded. When asked by Bob Colacello if he had ever added up the value of what he sold for Warhol, Fred initially said, “Yes, but I don’t want to say the wrong thing,” and then answered, “It’s decades of millions.” This was vintage Fred. To know and love Fred, aka Frederick W. Hughes, aka Fritzie to pals like Marisa Berenson and Diana Vreeland, was to appreciate his quips. They were frequent and demonstrated his lively mind, rich imagination, and heightened wit. When attending Peter Frankfurt’s surprise nineteenth-birthday party, he appeared with Mick Jagger. “Frankfurt, Mick is your present,” he said. “You can have Mick and do what you want with him.”

Fred was a one-off who may have been born on July 29, 1943, in Dallas, Texas, but was completely self-created. He first came to prominence via Dominique de Menil, the French-born, Houston-based art collector, internationally renowned for her taste. On occasion, Fred referred to the de Menil connection as his “dowry.” His tightness with the family certainly impressed Warhol. Fred persuaded Dominique and her husband, John de Menil, to finance Andy’s movie Sunset for $20,000. Following Fred’s lead, the de Menil children also collected Warhol’s work.

Like many a prismatic character, Fred was closer in style to his grandparents than to his handsome father, who was nicknamed “Honest Hughes” and was a hardworking traveling representative for various furniture manufacturers. Fred’s paternal grandparents owned a steel-equipment factory in Muncie, Indiana, and lived in a Victorian house crammed with Oriental carpets and European antiques. “They were insatiable collectors,” he told Colacello for his Vanity Fair profile. Meanwhile, his maternal grandmother, “Flaming Mamie,” was a twice-married bon vivant from New Orleans. A fervent Fred fan, she spoiled him madly, taking him to Disneyland and Las Vegas, and this probably explained his sensational confidence with the female sex. Few could tease as mercilessly as Fred yet get away with it.

In a bid to protect him from his bouts of childhood asthma, his grandmother tried to send him to boarding school in Arizona, but his father insisted on a Catholic education, hence his enrollment at St.

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