The spring of 1971 was a great time to be working at the Factory. Andy Warhol’s Trash was still filling theaters in New York, California, and Germany; Andy Warhol’s L’Amour was being edited; Andy Warhol’s Women in Revolt was being shot. In April, Andy Warhol’s Pork, the Factory’s first play, opened downtown at La Mama. In May, an Andy Warhol retrospective opened uptown at the Whitney. And Interview, “Andy Warhol’s Film Magazine,” with new, improved logo, layout, paper, and printing, raised its newsstand price from thirty-five cents to half a dollar.

The new, improved Interview—unencumbered of its ink-loving Chinese printer—also boasted its first cover photograph taken exclusively for us: a dreamy black-and-white portrait of L’Amour Superstars Jane Forth and Donna Jordan by Peter Beard. Since that off-center dinner at the Algonquin, I had spent a couple of boozy evenings with Peter. Half Tarzan, half Byron, he always carried his huge leather-bound diaries—collages of his photographs of dead elephants and famous models, with maxims, quotes, and phone numbers scrawled around, between, and sometimes over them—wherever he went. Andy was extremely fascinated by these diaries. Peter always wore the same ancient preppy rags. When he fought with his wife, Minnie, he’d sleep in his collapsing car in a deserted parking lot on Third Avenue and 13th Street, sometimes waking up to find a comatose bum or tired transvestite hooker passed out across his hood. One night, Peter and I sat up drinking gin out of plastic cups and talking, talking, talking. I remember his declaring at one point, “A beautiful woman is so much more beautiful when she’s in danger—tied up to a tree or clinging to the edge of a cliff.”

“Because you want to save her?”

“Because it’s at the exact moment of loss that her beauty is most luminous.”

That night he persuaded me to let him photograph Jane and Donna for the cover.

I couldn’t wait to tell Andy the next day, but his reaction was wary to say the least. “Do we have to pay for the film?” Andy was always wary of Peter, perhaps because he too could fall under his spell—and Andy didn’t like to be under anyone else’s spell. “Peter is such a hustler,” he would occasionally say, and accuse him of living off his uncle Jerome, or his wife.

As it turned out, Andy was right to be wary. The session was set up for a Saturday afternoon at the Factory, when it would be empty and quiet. Jane and Donna were looking forward to working with Peter, who had done fashion pages for Diana Vreeland and was known to be Veruschka’s favorite photographer. Then the blood started to arrive. Cosmetic blood from Helena Rubinstein, addressed to Mr. Peter Beard, c/o Andy Warhol’s Factory. That was Monday. On Tuesday, more blood arrived from Revlon, and on Wednesday a few more gallons from a theatrical makeup company. Andy was beside himself. “I told you Peter Beard is nuts!” he screeched. “Maybe you better call Peter up,” said Paul, “and ask him what he plans to do with all this stuff.” “Just throw it out and tell him it never got here,” said Andy.

When I called Peter, with Andy and Paul hovering over me, he explained enthusiastically that he found the Rubinstein, the Revlon, and the theatrical blood all inadequate. “We might have to go with pig’s blood,” he said. “I think I’ve got a butcher who can send some down tomorrow.”

“He’s sending down some pig’s blood tomorrow,” I whispered to Paul and Andy.

Paul took the phone from me. “Hello, Peter, it’s Paul. Andy was kind of wondering just what you plan to do with all this blood. Oh, you think Jane and Donna should be nude. And you’re going to drip the blood all over them. Well, you know, we just had the place repainted not that long ago. And L’Amour is sort of an attempt to do something a little less nutty, you know, a kind of family comedy, like Lucy and Ethel go to Paris.”

Peter sent the pig’s blood anyway, and Andy ordered Vincent to throw it, and all the rest, out. On Saturday, Andy, Paul, Fred, Vincent, and Joe all turned up at the Factory to make sure Peter didn’t try anything funny. “He better not try to throw any blood at me,” muttered Donna. “I hate blood,” moaned Jane. And Andy, who had always encouraged me to drink more whenever I went to a dinner or party with him, said, “This is all because Bob got drunk with Peter.”

In the end, Peter acquiesced. No nudity. No blood.

Not every day at Interview was like that. There were glamorous moments: I interviewed actress Barbara Loden at home and was asked to stay for dinner with her husband, director Elia Kazan, who told me about making East of Eden with James Dean. On another assignment, out of sheer nerves, I picked a fight with Jack Nicholson about actors versus stars. I was just spouting the Factory party line, of course, but Jack was amazingly good-natured about it—perhaps because he was both an actor and a star.

But mostly, getting out Interview was hard work. Though my title was Managing Editor and Art Director, I spent most of my time sizing photographs and proofreading copy. I didn’t cut copy much, because we had such large pages to fill, and anyway editing wasn’t really Warholian.

Helped immeasurably by Glenn and Jude, I also assigned stories, set up interviews, did interviews, transcribed tapes, opened mail, answered the phone—we didn’t have a receptionist or a secretary, and sending something by messenger was considered a major expense, requiring Factory approval. We did everything but run the printing presses, and really learned how to put a magazine together piece by piece—an invaluable experience I realize now, and not one that we would have had at a large company with its compartmentalized jobs.

Then, my least favorite chore was paste-up. Long sheets of typeset copy were measured, usually by counting lines; cut with razor blades; brushed with paste across the back; then pasted down on the layout board, which was then photo-offset at the printers. The worst part was stripping in corrections—cutting, gluing, and placing single lines of copy, or even individual words, over mistakes—because the glue would get on my hands and the bits of type would smudge or fall into place crookedly and have to be picked off with the corner of a razor blade, then be reset, recut, reglued, and replaced.

One night Glenn and Jude and I were doing paste-up at Rock magazine (we had switched from Other Scenes when John Wilcock’s share was bought out by Jerome Hill and Charles Rydell). It was getting very late; the layout boards were being picked up by the printer at nine the next morning. We misplaced a piece of type, the runover of some interview or other. It couldn’t be reset because Rock’s typesetting crew had long since gone home. We searched and searched for this itsy-bitsy piece of paper, on the layout tables, under the layout tables, on the bulletin boards above the layout tables, in drawers and files and piles and pockets. I was cursing Glenn and he was cursing me and we both were cursing Andy for not spending more money on the magazine so that we could be real editors, lunching with writers, instead of goddamn manual laborers, slaving past midnight.

Finally, there was only one place left to search—the trash can, which was very large and filled with thousands of bits of glue-covered paper, not to mention the remains of sandwiches, pizza, and endless cups of coffee. I refused to do it and ordered Glenn to since he had lost the crucial piece in the first place. He refused and ordered Jude to do it. And she did. She turned the trash can over and, crying, got down on her hands and knees and started sifting through the garbage. Eventually, I calmed down and started to help. But Glenn wouldn’t. He couldn’t admit that it was his fault. Miraculously, Jude found the missing piece and saved us all the embarrassment of running an interview without an end. Later, when we regaled Andy with the story as a joke (and a reproach) at yet another Algonquin dinner, he said that we should have forgotten about the missing piece. “Why do you have to have an end?” he asked.

Andy made it up to us in other ways. Every so often he would give Jude some Bakelite bracelets or pins—not as many as he gave Jane and Donna, but enough to make her feel wanted. These plastic Art Deco trinkets cost next to nothing back then, but they were just coming into fashion and Jude loved showing them off to our Columbia friends. Andy, of course, was tax-deducting them as “costumes” for L’Amour.

Andy gave Glenn a big thrill when he asked him to pose for the cover of the Rolling Stones’ new album, Sticky Fingers. It was a crotch shot of a guy in jeans, with a zipper that unzipped to reveal another crotch shot of a guy in Jockey shorts. Glenn wasn’t the only one Andy photographed for this project. He also shot Jed’s twin brother, Jay, and his best friend, Cory Tippin, who did the makeup for L’Amour. When the album came out, Glenn was certain that it was he on the inside and Jay Johnson on the outside, but Andy would never say exactly whose crotch he had immortalized.

Still, Andy’s attentions to me caused problems with Glenn and Jude. “We work just as hard as you do,” Jude told me one night at their place, “but Andy hardly ever takes us out with him. It’s just not fair.” When I repeated this to Andy, he said, “I never know what to say to Glenn and then he just sits there. And Jude’s too pushy. I mean, she’s really beautiful and, uh, maybe we should use her in a movie. But she’s not as funny as Jane or Donna. They just have that magic.”

Unlike Glenn, I never just sat there. Maybe it goes back to my mother making my sisters and me tell her our days, when we sat around the kitchen table having cookies and milk after school. She also encouraged us to mimic our teachers and other students, anything to make her laugh after a day of housework and part-time selling at Saks. I tried to oblige—perhaps that was the key to my relationship with Andy. I was brought up to respect—my parents’ favorite word—authority, and I did. Andy was tape recording all the time now that Sony had come out with a smaller model, and I let him tape record in person, just as I had over the phone. He was particularly fascinated with my ability to recall conversations word for word—again, my mother’s training. “Gee,” he would say, “you remember everything everyone said. I should take you everywhere. If my tape recorder broke, you’d remember everything.”

Unlike Jude, I never asked Andy to take me anywhere. I never asked Andy for anything. Andy didn’t like people who asked him for things, unless it was a fan asking for an autograph. He liked to give things—invitations, trips, presents of prints or little paintings—when he wanted to give them, and only then. And to hold out the promise of better things to come. In his campaign to get me to start selling ads he would sometimes say, “If you work really hard, and make Interview make money, you can uh own part of it someday,” cupping his mouth with his hand for that last part, one of his tricks.

One afternoon that busy, hopeful spring, Andy asked me if I’d like to accompany him uptown to the Whitney Museum, where his retrospective was being hung by David Whitney (a close friend of Philip Johnson and no relation to the museum Whitneys), whom artists like Jasper Johns, Cy Twombly, and Andy always consulted on the hanging of their shows. The Whitney opening was just a few days off, but Andy was still undecided about whether to cover the walls of the museum with his Cow Wallpaper or not. He turned to me and said, “What do you think?” What did I think? As my head swelled, I found myself saying, “I think you should use the wallpaper. Your Marilyns and Campbell’s Soup cans and Electric Chairs will really look different on that background. They’ll look baroque.”

“Baroque,” repeated Andy. “Nobody’s called my work baroque before. Maybe we should use the wallpaper, David. Shouldn’t we?” Of course, I thought I was playing the pivotal role in a momentous decision in the history of art. Later I found out that Andy had also asked Philip Johnson, and Henry Geldzahler, and David Bourdon, the art critic for Life, and Fred and Jed and Vincent and Pat, and Jane and Donna and Jackie Curtis, whether he should use the Cow wallpaper or not. That’s how Andy worked. He would ask almost everyone he met what he should do, what he should paint, what colors he should use, what film he should make, what Superstars he should cast, as if he were taking a poll, and then he would do exactly what he wanted to do. This left an awful lot of people thinking that they had given an idea to Andy Warhol. But when Andy really was getting an idea from somebody else, he never let on. He never said, “That’s what I should do.” He just did it, and denied everything forever more.

After our meeting at the Whitney, Andy took me for hot fudge sundaes at the Schrafft’s on Madison Avenue and East 77th Street, which he said was his favorite restaurant. I remembered the great TV commercial he did for Schrafft’s in 1969: just a sundae revolving slowly under a rainbow of colored light gels, which made it look mouth-wateringly glamorous and Pop, as if Schrafft’s had discovered LSD. “That was so easy to do,” Andy told me. “And we got paid so much for doing it. I wish we could do more commercials. I have a good idea, Bob. When you go to the agencies to sell ads for Interview, you should tell them we’ll design the ads. In the beginning we could do it for free, and then when we get bigger we could charge them extra.”

“But Andy,” I pleaded, “I don’t have enough time to sell ads on top of everything else.”

“Yes, you do. You could be selling an ad right now, instead of sitting here at Schrafft’s. And you’d be so good at it, because you talk so much, and your mother’s a saleslady.”

“But Andy, first we have to make the magazine better and get the circulation up. It’s so small that most advertisers aren’t interested.”

“No, it’s not. Tell them it’s bigger.”

“I just don’t have the time.”

“Then tell Jude to do it.” He licked his spoon like a little boy. “If she slept with those guys at the ad agencies, they wouldn’t care how small the circulation is.”

He was only half joking. Soon Jude Jade was selling ads for Interview. Or trying to anyway, without “paying the price.”

Over the years, I sometimes wondered if Andy ever cared about Interview’s circulation at all. He knew, instinctively and because he would ask me to figure out the cost-per-copy every time we upgraded printers or paper quality, that magazines were lucky to break even on circulation, no matter how large. What brought in the money was ads, and from 1970 until the month he died those were the first things Andy counted every month when a new issue of Interview arrived at the Factory. But he refused to make the connection between increasing circulation and increasing advertising. For him, selling ads meant sending a pretty girl to the straight clients and a pretty boy to the gay clients, entertaining them at the right restaurants, getting them into the right discos, introducing them to our famous friends, paying the price one way or another. Eventually, I came to see that he was right, to a point, and helped him develop the technique of entertainment-as-selling (and selling-as-entertainment) into a minor Warhol art form. And, by the end of the seventies, Interview started turning a profit from its advertising.

Until then, Andy’s strategy was perfectly simple and perfectly self-serving: “If we’re not making money on the magazine, then we may as well use it to push the other businesses.” Other businesses meant art and movies—mainly movies. What he, and Paul, wanted was a movie financed by a major studio. Andy also hoped to do portraits of the stars we interviewed, or at least more album jackets.

Since he had announced his “retirement” from painting at a show in Paris in 1965, Andy saw his art as little more than the means to make money for his movie business. Thus, he began doing commissioned portraits of collectors, politicians, and art dealers, and recycling his more successful images, like the Campbell’s Soup can and Marilyn Monroe, into lucrative editions of prints. In 1966, at the Leo Castelli Gallery in New York, Andy bid adieu to art again with a show of Silver Pillows, filled with helium, which were meant to “fly away.” And when he moved from the original silver-foiled Factory of East 47th Street to 33 Union Square West, no place was set aside to paint and no Warhol paintings hung on Warhol’s walls. The man who had wanted to be Matisse now wanted to be Louis B. Mayer.

Indeed, the second Factory was a little studio hoping to happen. The letterhead said “Andy Warhol Film, Inc.” and the first thing visitors saw when they came through the bulletproof door was that stuffed Great Dane. At the small Art Deco receptionist’s desk, where I first saw Andy eating lunch, sat Vincent Fremont, who always seemed to be reading a book about David O. Selznick. Behind that was a small open vestibule decorated with oversize framed Technicolor photographs of Gene Tierney, Norma Shearer, and Dolores Del Rio, and a John Chamberlain car-crash sculpture, the only piece of art in the entire Factory. On the left was a projection booth and on the right a narrow office where Pat Hackett typed Andy’s tapes.

At the end of this vestibule, a pair of ceiling-height doors opened onto the screening room, twenty feet by forty feet, painted chocolate brown. A couple of old velvet-covered couches faced a large silver movie screen, and behind that was a giant Campbell’s Soup can made of cardboard—left over from a sixties Esquire cover. There was also the largest TV available in those days, a very good stereo system, and a baby grand piano, presumably for composing movie scores. And a set of twelve dining chairs by Emile-Jacques Ruhlmann, the master of French Art Deco, whose work Andy and Fred were collecting then—Yves Saint Laurent and Karl Lagerfeld were collecting it too. In fact, Fred followed their lead, and as was often the case, Andy followed Fred’s. Prices for Art Deco were still incredibly low and Andy was tax-deducting it all as L’Amour sets and props anyway. Off to the right was a claustrophobic cubicle where Jed Johnson spent most of 1971 editing L’Amour on a Moviola. Farther back, near the freight elevator, were a bathroom, painted black, and a locked storage room, where Billy Name had been “living” since Andy was shot—he only came out after midnight. He finally left for good in 1971, and Andy had Vincent change the lock just in case Billy decided to come back.

In the front room, opposite Paul’s big black desk was another one just like it, which had been Gerard Malanga’s and was now Fred Hughes’s. But while Paul had Superstar portraits hanging behind his desk, Fred hung Jean Dupas posters advertising furniture and fashion shows from Paris in the twenties. For Fred, making movies was mostly about sets and costumes, an approach Andy appreciated because it meant his growing collections of chairs, old clothes, and jewelry could be tax-deducted. For Paul, movies were first and foremost about stars—his casting-agent approach also appealed to Andy because it meant he had a reason to seek out beauties.

Andy didn’t have a desk of his own. He liked to use everyone else’s and go through whatever they had on it. He’d open the mail at Vincent’s desk, pay his bills at Pat’s, talk on the telephone at Paul’s or Fred’s. Between their desks and Vincent’s sat the spectacular desk Fred had bought for Andy in Paris, made of shiny brass with a black marble top, supposedly from the Normandie. Andy said it was “too fancy,” and “I don’t need a desk.” I thought he was being modest, but it was also his way of telling all the aspiring moguls who worked for him that he was the real head of this mini-MGM in the making and that all the desks were his.

Tucked into a corner behind Fred’s desk was the Factory’s new video equipment. Just as Andy had bought a movie camera and started making movies, then a tape recorder and turned out a, a novel, he now bought a videocam and monitor and announced that he was going into the TV business. Toward that end, he hired Michael Netter, my friend from Georgetown, and Nina Needlepoint, who had a bit of experience with video and, just as important, was willing to work for Factory wages. Michael would come by every afternoon and shoot whatever was going on.

Paul saw the video equipment as a way of trying out ideas for movies. After the commercial success of Trash, both Constantin-Film and Cinema Five (which distributed it in the U.S.) were eager to finance the next Factory movie—though they weren’t wild about Women in Revolt, the transvestite Women’s Lib takeoff Paul was shooting on weekends in New York that spring. Nor were they crazy about his idea for a Civil War comedy starring Allen Ginsberg as Walt Whitman and Joe Dallesandro as the wounded soldier he nurses back to health. Cinema Five thought it was time for something really commercial.

Andy and Paul were desperate to come up with an idea. So Andy taped everyone who would let him and badgered Pat to figure out a way to transform the transcripts into movie scripts. Paul bought Vincent more Hollywood biographies, hoping he’d find the seed of a script in one of them. Whenever an Interview writer came by, Paul and Andy would ask if they had any ideas for movies. “We’ve got some people in Hollywood interested,” Paul would say. “Oh, oh, we’ll give you a percentage if they use your script,” Andy would add.

I decided to write a film treatment in lieu of a master’s thesis, which Columbia accepted but the Factory didn’t. It was a comedy set in a Mafia nightclub in the thirties, with leading roles for Joe Dallesandro to please Paul, Candy Darling to please Andy, and Sylvia Miles to keep her quiet. I also wrote a big part for Rod Steiger, because Andy and Paul said he told them at a party how much he admired their movies. They also rejected another proposal of mine—a musical comedy based on the life of Evita Perón, with Candy Darling in the title role and a song called “There’s a Charming Dictator Living South of the Equator,” which Paul found funny but Andy hated. “Nobody cares about South America except you, Bob,” he said.

I was momentarily disappointed, but all in all I had no complaints about working at the Factory that spring. After my graduation from Columbia in June, I told Andy and Paul that I was available “full time” and given a raise—to $90 a week. I moved to a $275-a-month studio apartment on East 76th Street, opposite the Carlyle Hotel. What’s more, on April 22, 1971, I signed a contract with Dutton to write a book on Andy Warhol’s films. The $6,000 advance, with one-third paid on signing, seemed enormous.

Paul Morrissey had really encouraged me to write the book. I still have the letter of recommendation he wrote for me, dated August 31, 1970. Paul helped me get an agent, Ellen Levine at Curtis Brown, and let me see all the sixties films, some at the Factory and some at Anthology Film Archives, where Jonas Mekas would often join me as I sat transfixed through hour upon hour of Empire and Eat and Kiss. This was a bigger favor than it seems, because in many cases there weren’t any dupe prints, only originals, which are risky to project. And he let me do this before I had the Dutton deal.

Andy, on the other hand, told me I was wasting my time, that those films were too boring, that instead of writing a book I should be out selling ads—“That’s the way to become rich, Bob.” When I persisted no matter what he said during our almost daily phone calls, he’d say, “Oh, I have a great idea. You should do your whole book on the phone. Just tape record it. It would be so modern.”

“I think the publisher wants more criticism, Andy.”

“Oh, really. But criticism is so old-fashioned. Why don’t you just put in a lot of gossip about Glenn and Jude.”

“I think they want a lot of gossip about you, Andy.”

“Oh, really. So what film did you see today.”

“Bike Boy. I thought it was good.”

“It was good. But it was a mistake. We used Valerie. That was a mistake.”

It was the first time Andy had mentioned the name of Valerie Solanis to me but he quickly changed the subject. I couldn’t help but feel sorry for him.

Actually, I felt sorry for Andy a lot. He looked so pale and frail, and afraid. Whenever I’d walk someplace with Andy, and he’d see someone coming toward us, a bum or a bag lady or just a leftover hippie, suddenly he’d dart into a store, any store, saying, “He looked all doped up, didn’t he? Let’s just stand in here until he goes by.” Often I’d wonder just who he was talking about.

Feeling sorry for him was certainly part of the reason why I put up with his goading, and teasing, and coldness, with the low salary and the hard work. That, and the glamour, the proximity to fame and fortune. In some ways being close to fame and fortune is more fun, and certainly easier, than having it yourself.

Friday, April 30, 1971, was a particularly exciting day for me. I was at home packing for my move when Andy called and asked if I would take Candy Darling to the opening of his Whitney retrospective that night. “She lives right around the corner from the museum,” he said. “And I already have too many people in my car—they’re all calling, Viva, Ultra, Brigid, Jackie, Holly. They all want to come with me and I’m just going crazy. It’s too scary. I wish I could stay home.”

Candy Darling was the most glamorous date I could have for Andy’s big opening. She—I was hip enough never to call a transvestite “he”—was then my favorite Superstar, witty, striking, sweet, the Kim Novak of the Factory. I put on my most Pop shirt, white printed with red lipstick kisses, and taxied over to the East 77th Street floor-through that Candy shared with a lawyer and a garment center heir who kept her in coats and dresses. Candy was late. Fortunately, Andy was later, so we waited outside the museum for him to arrive, as Candy wanted to make her entrance with him. So did Ultra Violet, who had arrived on her own. Ultra, whose ultra-brief Factory heyday had been in the sixties, and Candy, who was the lead in the current Factory production, Women in Revolt, stood there on Madison Avenue trading catty remarks and dirty looks, two Superstars waiting for the studio boss.

Finally, Andy’s long black limousine pulled up, and Ultra and Candy and I rushed to greet it, three steps ahead of the paparazzi. The door opened and out popped Andy—and Viva, Brigid, Nico, Holly, Jackie, Jane, Donna, and Andrea “Whips” Feldman, all jockeying to get closest to Andy. Ultra, in a dress so sheer that you could see her nipples and pubic hair, grabbed one of Andy’s arms, and Andrea, in a cowboy hat and a belt with a big rhinestone heart buckle, grabbed the other. Andy’s silvery wig looked different. It was longer than usual on one side and draped partially over one eye, à la Veronica Lake. Later I learned that he had new wigs with slightly different styles made up regularly. He was carrying his Brownie’s bag in one hand and his Sony in the other. And he didn’t look scared at all as he flashed a boyish smile for the three television crews, the score of photographers, the dozens of reporters, and the four thousand guests. He looked very, very happy.

Andy had good reason to be happy. The Whitney show, said the press release, was the last stop of “a triumphal four-star tour of world art capitals.” It had originated in May 1970, at the Pasadena Museum of Art in California, and traveled to the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago; the Stedelijk Museum in Eindhoven, the Netherlands; the Musée d’Art Moderne in Paris; and the Tate in London, where it broke all attendance records. Andy loved the way his Cow wallpaper—a dumb magenta cow’s head repeated in vertical rows on an insipid yellow background—made the Soupcans and Brillo Boxes, the Jackies and Marilyns, the Car Crashes and Electric Chairs—look different than they had in all the other museums. “We fixed it like this so people could catch the show in a minute and leave,” he told New York Times reporter Grace Glueck, who knew that he was joking. And he was so thrilled with the opening-night mob scene, with the flashbulbs and microphones and TV cameras, that he told art critic Barbara Rose he had changed his name to John Doe. “I’m too famous,” he said. “Legally?” she asked, taking him seriously. “Uh-huh,” said Andy.

Rose, who wrote for Vogue, New York, and various art magazines, took everything seriously. Too seriously, thought Andy, who loved to put her on when he saw her and put her down when she wasn’t around. “She pretends she’s such an intellectual,” he often said, “and that her ex-husband Frank Stella is such an intellectual artist, when everybody knows that she just writes those great things about him so all the paintings he gave her will be worth more.”

But this time she got him. Her review in New York magazine began:

Can a boy from a poor Czech mining family in Pennsylvania find happiness in life as the wealthy and fabulous queen of the New York art and fashion world? Apparently so, if the boy’s name is Andy Warhola, alias Andy Warhol, alias—as of the opening of his current retrospective at the Whitney Museum, when he legally changed his name—John Doe.

“She called me a queen!” gasped Andy when he read it. “I hate Barbara Rose. I really do.” It was the first time I had seen him upset by anything written about him. He usually laughed off his bad press, or commented favorably on how much space they had given him. He was so mad that he dismissed the rest of Rose’s three-page review when in fact she went on to confirm his importance:

As usual, Andy’s timing is flawless.… He can afford to change his name to John Doe and still be recognized as Andy Warhol on any street corner in the Western world. His genius for manipulating the media is only part of the reason Andy is probably the most famous artist in the twentieth century.… Andy Warhol creates fashion, and others follow him. Merging life and art more closely than any Dadaist or Surrealist could imagine, Andy is the Zeitgeist incarnate. The images he leaves will be the permanent record of America in the sixties: mechanical, vulgar, violent, commercial, deadly and destructive.

Dreaming the American dream, Andy not only creates but lives the American myths.… Last week at the Whitney, he was flanked by superstars, old and new, dressed in bizarre thrift-shop drag and enough wigs to prove that the decadence of a society can be measured by how many people are wearing other people’s hair. Thronged by the press and gaping public, at last the center of attraction at his own canonization, he is the most important art object on view. For to talk of Warhol’s art without talking of his life is to miss the point of his endeavor to make them literally identical. Andy’s middle name should be reductio ad absurdum. In all matters, including the art-life dialogue, he has taken the most extreme position. While not too difficult to occupy, perhaps, the extreme position takes a genius to find these days. But Andy does it again, turning the Whitney into a boutique covered with wallpaper of cows—the stock subject of popular academic middle-class genre painting. Of course, the museum has been a boutique for a long time, and people have been treating paintings like wallpaper even longer, but Andy spells it out with his usual cruel clarity. Stripping our cultural illusions from us, he reveals the hypocritical reality beneath the surface pretensions.

Warhol is a social phenomenon of major importance as well as an artist of real consequence, for the paintings themselves survive even Andy’s own subversive tactics and remain fresh and brilliant.… Someday these portraits will appear as grotesque as Goya’s paintings of the Spanish court. Like Goya, Warhol is a reporter, not a judge, for it was not obvious to Goya’s contemporaries that they were deformed either.

“She really thinks we’re still back in the sixties, with all the freaks and hippies, doesn’t she?” said Paul. “Andy’s portraits are more like Sargent’s or Boldini’s than Goya’s,” said Fred. “I hate her,” said Andy.

Andy got his revenge a few months later when Barbara Rose interviewed him for a documentary by Lana Jokel. The interview was done at Philip Johnson’s house on East 53rd Street, with the famous old architect sitting silent as an owl between Barbara and Andy, who played cat and mouse. She never caught him, never came close.

He mocked her, and everything she believed in, mercilessly. He told her he liked abstract painting, which she favored, better than “mechanical” paintings, which is what she called his art. “You can be messy and drip paint all over the place,” he said, straight-faced. “It’s easier. I like it better now.”

She asked him what he thought of Jasper Johns, idol of the art establishment, of which Barbara Rose was, and is, a pillar. “I think he’s great,” said Andy.

“Why?” Barbara Rose always asked why.

“Ohhh, uh, he makes such great lunches.” This brought a little gasp from the otherwise imperturbable Philip Johnson, who had arranged for Johns to invite Andy to lunch for the first time not long before. Andy smiled at the camera and added, “He does this great thing with chicken. He puts parsley inside the chicken.”

She persisted, asking him what he thought of fame.

“Oh, it’s just being at the right place or being at the wrong place. Being at the right time or the wrong time. Being in, or being out.”

“How do you know if you are?”

“I don’t think anybody ever knows,” Andy answered thoughtfully.

“Just history,” said Barbara.

Andy looked at her incredulously. “Oh, you don’t believe in history, do you Bar-ba-ra?”

Andy was much less bothered by John Canaday’s review in the New York Times. “Manipulation is the key to the Warhol story,” wrote Canaday. “What does that mean, Bob?” said Andy, pressing the newspaper against his pink-framed welfare glasses.