Soon after he hit L.A., John Cassavetes got the title role and even directed a few episodes of Johnny Staccato, a 1960 NBC-TV series about a hip private eye who moonlights as a jazz pianist, jamming at the imaginary Waldo’s nightclub in the Village on his nights off. For the next thirty years until he died in 1989, Cassavetes fashioned a career that most actors only dream of; with the money earned from Academy Award–nominated acting jobs in commercial hits like Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby and Robert Aldrich’s The Dirty Dozen, Cassavetes assured himself complete artistic control over a string of self-produced and -directed films, from his first black-and-white L.A. independent feature like Faces to Hollywood studio–distributed films like A Woman Under the Influence and Love Streams. Cassavetes’ vision may have been, as Lelia Goldoni insists, larger and more encompassing than the cool world, but Cassavetes rode cool into Hollywood. The original version of Shadows no longer exists.
Less than a week after a train from Pittsburgh deposited him in Penn Station in the summer of 1949, Andy Warhola, twenty-one, was working. His first shoe drawings, signed—for the first time—“Andy Warhol,” appeared in the September 1949 issue of Glamour magazine. Assignments from Charm and Mademoiselle quickly followed. That he found work so quickly, and in a field involving art, should have surprised no one. Andy Warhol had worked hard all his life. His dad, a Czech immigrant coal miner and construction worker, died when Andy was a kid, leaving three young sons for his wife, Julia, to raise in a house in the shadow of Pittsburgh’s steel mills. And wherever young Andy worked growing up—selling vegetables off the back of a truck, delivering milk, clerking at a five-and-ten—he carried a sketch pad. At the end of each school year at Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Tech, he sold his class projects to the other students. “He had the working-class attitude about money,” notes poet and New Yorker magazine art critic Peter Schjeldahl, who knew Warhol: “GIMMEE!”
His first year in New York, Warhol shared a place on Manhattan Avenue and 103rd Street with some dancers, but as soon as he could afford it—1950 or ’51—he got his own place and brought his mother out from Pittsburgh to keep house. The source of much amusement and speculation among his friends, Mrs. Warhola lived in the back room of her son’s incredibly cluttered floor-through apartment at 242 Lexington, directly above a bar called Florence’s Pinup. She knitted, went to a Czech church, watched I Love Lucy, and took great pride in her son, with whom she shared eight cats, all named Sam.
In those early years, Warhol started publishing titles like A Is an Alphabet and Love Is a Pink Cake, little picture books and portfolios of his own trademark blotted-ink drawings that he gave away as presents to friends and people who could help him. He also built a reputation for doing whatever art directors asked, making changes without sacrificing his own “look.” In the mid-fifties, Warhol’s fancifully drawn, full-page shoe ads in the Sunday New York Times for I. Miller, an established shoe manufacturer that had lost its sense of style, revitalized the company. Though he never seemed to be working hard, he was extremely productive, enlisting friends to help when he got too busy, and earning better than $60,000 a year.
Andy Warhol’s central creation was himself. When he was growing up, Warhol had scarlet fever and St. Vitus’ dance, the combination of which caused a loss of skin pigmentation and made his eyes so light-sensitive that he had to wear shades. He started wearing wigs while still in his early twenties, and had his first plastic surgery around 1956, a moderately successful attempt to correct a congenitally bulbous nose. He dressed in Brooks Brothers chinos, untied shoes, or paint-spattered loafers with mashed-down heels. And even though he was shy, he went to parties every night, sometimes three in an evening, combining business and pleasure, and making himself well-known. “He would try to appear artless and naïve,” a close friend of Warhol’s from the mid-fifties tells Patrick Smith in his Andy Warhol: Conversations About the Artist, “but he really knew the effect he was having. Always. Always.”
From the day it opened in 1953, he hung out at Serendipity 3, a chic restaurant-boutique in the cellar of an Upper East Side brownstone, attracted at least partially by the hot fudge sundaes. Back then, when most people still considered Tiffany lamps junk, Serendipity pioneered mix-and-match Americana—it was perhaps the first store to publicly cater to a camp sensibility. In Warhol: Conversations About the Artist, those who knew him say there was nothing bohemian about Warhol. He and his mother went to St. Thomas More’s, a Catholic church around the corner from where they lived, every Sunday. Once he started making money, he loved treating his friends to lavish dinners, operas, and Broadway shows. “Buying is much more American than thinking,” he would later say, “and I’m as American as they come.”
In the mid-1950s, Gene Moore, the head of display at both Tiffany and Bonwit Teller’s New York store, began commissioning then-unknown young artists like James Rosenquist, Roy Lichtenstein, Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, and Warhol to trim his windows. For probably the first time, Warhol had a chance to observe the great young artists of his generation close-up, and it was a disturbing revelation: Warhol had earned a lot more money and recognition than they had, he’d received the Art Direction Club’s highest awards, and the Museum of Modern Art shop carried his ink-blot cherub-drawing Christmas cards. Yet he completely lacked their authority in the art world. Rauschenberg and Johns would soon join the then up-and-coming Leo Castelli Gallery and make big splashes in MOMA’s 1959 “Sixteen Americans” show, which signaled the emergence of a post–abstract-expressionist American art. Warhol, meanwhile, was still showing at the Bodley, a little-known art gallery for the Serendipity set. Ted Carey, a fabric and textile designer who met Warhol at Serendipity and often accompanied him on shopping sprees, says that Warhol was very affected by Rauschenberg and Johns, “not so much by their produced work but by their personality and their success and their glamour.”
One Saturday afternoon in the late fifties, Warhol and Carey dropped into the Museum of Modern Art’s Art Lending Service, where they came across a small Robert Rauschenberg collage that contained a cut-off portion of a man’s shirt sleeve. “Oh, that is fabulous,” Carey exclaimed. “I think that’s awful,” Warhol responded cattily. “Anyone can do that. I can do that.” “So,” Carey challenged his friend, “why don’t you?”
Warhol did. By the beginning of the sixties, Warhol was doing well enough to afford a four-story, thirteen-room townhouse on the Upper East Side, at 1342 Lexington Avenue near the southwest corner of Eighty-ninth Street, which he began to fill with his growing holdings—cabinets full of Fiestaware, hundreds of cookie jars, grocery bags full of unmounted semiprecious stones, and piles of Navajo rugs and Kwakiutl masks, to name just a few of the objects he collected. While a trusted assistant, Nathan Gluck, fulfilled Warhol’s obligations to I. Miller, Warhol concentrated—for the only time in his life—on drawing and painting, turning for inspiration to the things that were most familiar and comforting to him as a child: comic books and food.
Warhol used an opaque projector to superimpose and enlarge cartoon characters like Superman, Popeye, the Little King, Nancy, and Dick Tracy on canvases. He then he traced in their outlines, covering sections of the images with paint. He gave much the same treatment to comfort foods, employing magazine and newspaper display ads for Del Monte peach halves, Kellogg’s corn flakes, and Coca-Cola (which Warhol would later praise as America’s most “democratic” product because everybody, rich and poor, buys the same drink at the same price), and Campbell’s soup.
An English art critic who later became a Guggenheim Museum curator, Lawrence Alloway, coined the term “pop art” in the mid-fifties to describe what he saw as paintings’ increasing use of “popular art sources” like “movie stills, science fiction, advertisements, game boards, [and] heroes of the mass media,” but pop as art or sensibility didn’t begin to reach the general public until 1962. That year, in conjunction with the Sidney Janis Gallery’s “New Realists” show, which featured work by Claes Oldenburg, Wayne Thiebaud, Roy Lichtenstein, James Rosenquist, and Tom Wesselmann alongside Warhol’s 200 Campbell Soup Cans, the Museum of Modern Art held the first Symposium on Pop Art. Inspired by Thiebaud’s yummy-looking painting Bakery Counter, Time magazine dubbed Janis’s “New Realists” as the “Slice-of-Cake School,” but the only painter pictured in the article was Warhol, pretending to eat out of an open Campbell’s soup can.
Warhol had his first pop art show that same summer, with a wall of little canvases with Campbell’s soup cans painted on each of them at the Ferus Gallery on La Cienega Boulevard in Los Angeles. The show caused a ruckus among L.A.’s tiny gallery-going public when an art space up the street started selling genuine Campbell’s soup for 99 cents. The Ferus’s young director, Irving Blum, sold a few of the soup canvases for a hundred bucks each, but ultimately he withdrew the sales and hung on to the pieces, a wise aesthetic and economic decision, as things turned out. The art world had only recently accepted action painting’s aesthetic—that the canvas held the evidence of an almost holy struggle. It wasn’t ready for Warhol’s view of art as a commodity; but time has proven him correct. “Warhol understood that America meant mass culture,” as Peter Schjeldahl observes. “If fine art was going to exist in America, it would exist as mass culture.”
As a good capitalist, Warhol was eager to find ways to produce more art faster. Initially, he produced serial images on a single canvas, using, for example, ink and carved gum erasers to produce a set of larger-than-life-size seven-cent U.S. airmail stamps. Quickly, however, he turned to silk-screening, a technique borrowed from advertising in which paint is squeegeed through a screen onto a canvas. In Warhol, David Bourdon, an art critic and long-time friend of the artist, says that Warhol was well-known for asking people what kind of art he should do next. In 1962, Ted Carey introduced Warhol to a gallery owner named Muriel Latow, hoping that she would give Warhol a show. According to Carey, Latow told Warhol that she knew what he ought to paint next, but it would cost him fifty dollars to find out. Warhol ran for his checkbook. What means more to you than anything else in the world, she wanted to know. “Money!” Warhol replied instantly. “Money!”
“It wasn’t that he was greedy,” explains poet and photographer Gerard Malanga, who went to work making silkscreen frames for Warhol in June 1963 and stayed for seven years. “The dollar bill was a symbol of his dream”—of becoming somebody, like the people in Variety Photoplay, and the other movie magazines he loved to pore over before he was even in his teens. Warhol started drawing money as an act of mimetic magic, first a dollar at a time, then a wad of cash stuffed into an empty Campbell’s can. But he needed more. He silkscreened 80 Two-Dollar Bills, then 200 One-Dollar Bills. For Warhol, Malanga says, money and fame “went hand in hand.”
“Even when he was already becoming media famous, celebrity-famous, he was like, ‘Oh! Here comes Elizabeth Taylor! There goes Liza Minnelli!’—like he couldn’t believe it.” Warhol’s friend and biographer David Bourdon agrees: Warhol, he says, “loved nothing better than being recognized and asked for his autograph.” Warhol had always worshipped fame, but Truman Capote—a gay outsider from the provinces only two years older than himself who’d become a celebrity overnight with the 1949 publication of his book Other Voices, Other Rooms—was the first celebrity with whom Warhol could truly identify. Warhol kept a framed copy of Other Voices’s famous back cover photo, featuring its author stretched languorously across a divan, in his bedroom. In the early fifties, Warhol wrote Capote letters every day for a year, and, when he got no response, took to loitering outside Capote’s apartment building. In 1969 when Warhol started Interview magazine, the first journal dedicated to the study of fame, Capote was one of the first people he brought on board.
Marilyn Monroe died on the same day Warhol’s Ferus Gallery show closed—August 5, 1962—and a few days later, in New York, Warhol produced his first garish silkscreened portrait of her by enlarging a 1950s publicity still and tarting it up with off-register acrylic red lips, yellow hair, blue eye shadow, and pink-purple skin. With the help of Gerard Malanga, working in a decommissioned fire station on Eighty-seventh Street that the city was selling off, without electricity or running water, lit only by daylight, they turned out a steady stream of large-scale silkscreened movie-star portraits—gun-toting Elvises from the western Flaming Star, blue Elizabeth Taylors from Cleopatra, silver Marlon Brandos from The Wild One.
The fire station was sold at the end of 1963. In February of the following year, Warhol took over the premises of a shuttered hat factory in a commercial building at 231 East Forty-seventh Street. “The Factory,” as people almost immediately began calling the fifty-by-one-hundred-foot-fourth floor loft, soon became the epicenter of pop culture. “It was seductive,” remembers one visitor fondly of the Factory era. “It was that feeling of being really where the action was.” The windows were painted black so no light could get in or out, and everything else—the walls, the pipes, the fixtures—Billy Name, a reclusive photographer who lived in a Factory closet and functioned as its majordomo, and his crew of amphetamine heads either spray-painted metallic silver or covered with tinfoil. The creaking freight elevator disgorged visitors from all classes and social milieus—some famous, some not, some invited, most not—at all hours of the day and night.
“The point was to be fabulous,” remembers Danny Fields, a long-time New York music industry entrepreneur and Factory regular who now works for the Rock ’n’ Roll Hall of Fame. “If you were an outsider and weren’t sure what was going on,” Fields says, it was critical to be cool, “to behave minimally,” to “let people wonder what was on your mind.” As psychodramas raged all around him, Warhol, fueled by diet pills and the sinuous rhythms of the Jaynettes’ hit 45 “Sally Go ’Round the Roses” playing over and over again at maximum volume, worked with Malanga on his Disaster silkscreens—lavender electric chairs and orange car crashes and black-and-white images of Jackie Kennedy in her widow’s weeds at the funeral of her husband. He aspired to become an emotionlessly efficient machine: “Machines have less problems.” He signed his art with a rubber stamp; he sent Alan Midgette, a tanned, dark-haired, part–Cherokee Indian actor who looked nothing like him to colleges and art museum to screen Warhol films and lecture as Andy Warhol. He suggested that an interviewer “just tell me the words he wants me to say and I’ll repeat them after him.” He encouraged the already overwrought personalities of the Factory regulars because they allowed Warhol to put aside any personality of his own and coolly drain his life of all emotions. “I like being a vacuum,” he told one reporter, because “it leaves me alone to work.”
Danny Fields says it was Malanga who introduced Andy Warhol to the Velvet Underground—Sterling Morrison, bass; Lou Reed, guitar; John Cale, guitar and electric viola; Maureen Tucker, drums—at the Café Bizarre in the Village. “The first thing that I liked about Andy,” Lou Reed says in Malanga and Victor Bockris’s Up-Tight: The Velvet Underground Story, “was that he was very real.” In the backseat of a limousine on their way uptown to the Apollo Theater to see James Brown on New Year’s Eve, 1965, Warhol and the Velvets sealed their deal. Warhol bought the Velvet Underground new amplifiers and let them rehearse at the Factory. He also introduced them to Nico, a German (though everyone thought she was Yugoslavian-Spanish) ice goddess who sang in a velvety monotone, a beautiful heroin addict who’d made her first splash at fifteen in Federico Fellini’s film La Dolce Vita. The Velvets became the house band at the Exploding Plastic Inevitable.