IN THE 1960S, visitors to the Factory were assaulted by chaos and cacophony from the moment they stepped out of the elevator. The voice of Maria Callas boomed out of one speaker, heavy metal from another, both at top volume. Artist Alan Fenton, a frequent visitor at that time, remembered that Andy Warhol had a telescope at the front windows trained on the weightlifters in the YMCA across the street. Street people, hippies, clean-cut college kids, art dealers and aspiring artists wandered in, hung out, drifted away. In the late 1960s, Manhattan was a dirty and dangerous place. Heroin addicts, in-your-face squeegee guys, beggars and the homeless crowded the streets. Every day, you read about another mugging, robbery or senseless murder.
The city’s toxicity seeped into the Factory. Towards the end of the decade, a rougher and more aggressive crowd began to turn up, driving the arty types and party people away. Warhol’s early supporter, the art dealer Ivan Karp, kept his distance, as did his first superstar, socialite Jane Holzer, who said, ‘there were too many crazy people around. The whole thing freaked me out… I couldn’t take it. Edie [Sedgwick] had arrived, but she was very happy to put up with that sort of ambience.’1
One of the new hangers-on was Valerie Solanas, a failed writer who’d had a small role in one of Warhol’s least watchable films, I, a Man. Mentally unstable and a loud-mouthed exhibitionist, she was not all that different from others in Warhol’s entourage. Styling herself as a ‘radical feminist’, she had founded a one-woman movement called SCUM – the ‘Society for Cutting Up Men’. For months, she’d been pestering Andy to read a terrible play she’d written, called Up Your Ass – but it was so filthy, it could never have been performed legally in the United States. By refusing to accept her calls, Andy became the target of her homicidal rage.
On the afternoon of 3 June 1968, a few months after Warhol moved the Factory to a new location at 33 Union Square, Solanas stepped out of the elevator, pulled a gun from her coat pocket and opened fire. Her first two shots missed Warhol, but one bullet grazed the back of a visiting art dealer, Mario Amaya, who barricaded himself in a back room.2 Andy fell over, pretending to have been hit, then instinctively crawled under a desk to hide, or at least to shield himself. As he crouched there, helpless and terrified, Solanas knelt, pushed the muzzle of the gun into his torso, just below the ribs, and fired at point-blank range. The bullet ripped through his stomach, liver, spleen, oesophagus and both lungs.3 Solanas then turned on Fred Hughes, who was sitting frozen with fear at his desk, near the elevator. Screaming that she was going to shoot him, Solanas held the pistol to his head. He begged for his life; she hesitated for a few seconds and, in that moment, heard the clang of the elevator stopping at the second floor. Seeing her chance, she forgot about Hughes and made her escape. Morrissey, who had witnessed the mayhem, called an ambulance and the police.
On arrival at the hospital, Warhol was pronounced dead. But, over the next four hours, the doctors worked to restart his heart and stitch him together. They saved his life. Two months later, he was able to come home from hospital, but for the rest of his life he wore a surgical corset to support his sagging abdomen. Years later, when the film-maker Emile de Antonio asked him about the shooting, Andy said, ‘I wish I had died… I wouldn’t have had to live through it all. I should have died. It would have been better.’4
A paranoid schizophrenic, Solanas belonged in a hospital for the criminally insane. Instead, she was judged to be rational enough to stand trial for attempted murder; she was found guilty and sentenced to three years in jail. On her release, she stalked Warhol by telephone, making outlandish demands for money and for an appearance on a TV talk show. That got her rearrested, but, once again, she was not detained for long. From the day of the shooting until the day of his death, Warhol lived in constant fear, always aware that she might be out there, and armed.
While he was in the hospital, two of his closest associates, both witnesses to the events of 3 June, kept the studio running. Paul Morrissey oversaw business matters relating to the Factory. He would soon make successful commercial films like Trash, Flesh and Dracula – all released under Warhol’s name. Practical, politically conservative and teetotal, Morrissey changed the locks at the Factory, installed security cameras and drove the crazies away. He also kept methodical accounts and placed the sales records under lock and key. Thanks to him, some semblance of order was now imposed on Warhol’s archive.
The events of that afternoon changed Warhol’s personality, and the direction in which his work subsequently moved. June 1968 became the demarcation date between the first and second halves of his career. The damage Solanas did to his body and mind inevitably impacted on the quality of his art. For all the occasional brilliance of individual paintings or projects in the 1970s and 1980s, he never fully recovered the energy, wit or originality of the work he produced in the years between 1962 and 1968.
In the aftermath of traumatic events, survivors often experience emotional numbness, mentally distancing themselves from reality and becoming hyper-aware of potential dangers. In the months following the shooting, Warhol exhibited all these symptoms. He needed to get back to making art, but had lost the will to do so. This was when Hughes became indispensable. Suave, smart and well-connected, the handsome young Texan had a quick wit and a good head for business. After meeting Andy in 1967, he dedicated himself, body and soul, to the artist’s career. A former art dealer with a sure sense of what would sell, he was largely responsible for the meteoric rise in Warhol’s prices and reputation. At this crucial juncture, he knew exactly what he needed to do to get the artist back to work.
Hughes’s idea was as simple as it was inspired. He turned Warhol’s attention to the one area of his practice that required neither innovation nor imagination: portraiture. Andy had always made portraits and had always accepted commissions. But, before he was shot, commissioned portraiture as a genre had played only a small part in his creative project. With the cool competence that characterised everything he did, Hughes hustled rich friends, like the Houston-based art patrons John and Dominique de Menil and Governor Nelson Rockefeller, into commissioning works, thereby initiating one of the most lucrative – and, to some critics, problematic – parts of Warhol’s studio practice. In the 1970s, he received thousands of portrait commissions, not only from movie stars and socialites, but from wealthy American and European businessmen and their wives. The visual interest of these purely commercial paintings varied greatly, depending on whether he felt some connection with the sitter. But, whatever their overall quality, these commissioned portraits paid for the conspicuous extravagance that characterised Warhol’s later way of living.