In the end, Adriana Jackson saved me. I had met Brooks and Adriana Jackson when Paul shot the last scene of Heat in their apartment on Second Avenue in the Fifties. Their pet ocelot, Trumba—Italian for mixed-up—the child they didn’t have, was also in the scene with Sylvia, Joe, and the others. As a young woman from a good Milanese family, Adriana had studied painting, won prizes, had shows. They had a fantastic art collection—the fruit of Brooks’s twenty-five years with Iolas: several Magrittes and Max Ernsts, and a major Picasso gouache. A few nights after we’d shot the scene there, a terrible electrical fire swept the apartment, engulfing the silk-lined walls. Brooks saved Trumba, Adriana saved the Picasso, suffering third-degree burns on both hands from the red-hot gilt frame. Bandaged and on painkillers for many weeks, she never complained or blamed Andy and the Factory, even though the fire might have somehow been caused by the film equipment.
Adriana saw herself as my surrogate mother. She was always telling me, “You’re just like all the Americans of your generation: very intelligent and totally ignorant. You must come and spend a summer with me in Italy. First, you meet some whores. Then, I introduce you to the countesses.” Perhaps she was my surrogate Auntie Mame. She knew I had to get away from Andy and the life I was leading. So she arranged a business trip to Mexico for all of us and then announced that I was staying there with her for the summer to recuperate and work on my book. It was hard for Andy to protest, because she had also arranged for me to sell my first commissioned portrait on that trip.
The victim, which is what we half-jokingly called Andy’s portrait clients, was Maria Luisa de Romans, the wife of the Italian ambassador to Mexico. An heiress to the second-largest fortune in Italy, after the Agnellis, she was also an artist herself. She had had an exhibition of paintings at the Iolas Gallery in New York that spring, and Adriana had made sure that Andy and I were always seated near her at dinners then. She didn’t speak English, but she was able to understand Andy telling her, over and over, that he thought her paintings were “just greaaat.”
Maria Luisa and I communicated in Spanish, and at one of the dinner parties in her honor she told me that she was having an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in Mexico City that June and wondered if Andy and I would like to join Adriana and Brooks as her guests for the opening. “Does invited mean first-class tickets?” Andy asked me when I told him about Maria Luisa’s suggestion. “Can I bring Jed? And Fred has to come too. And you should get her to agree to have her portrait done before we agree to go.” Adriana persuaded Maria Luisa that the expense of four first-class plane tickets and rooms at the best hotel in Mexico City would be nothing compared to the prestige and publicity Andy’s presence would bring her.
It didn’t hurt matters when I rushed up to Maria Luisa’s suite at the Regency with a tape recorder and interviewed her for Interview, though Glenn later refused to give the story more than a half page. As for the portrait commission, Adriana thought it would be more diplomatic to wait until we were in Mexico to bring it up, and Fred agreed, despite Andy’s whiny objections.
On June 7, 1972, we flew to Mexico City—Andy, Jed, Fred, and I, plus Brooks, Adriana, and Trumba. On the flight, Fred had a long heart-to-heart with Adriana, which she later repeated to me. She had touched a raw nerve when she told him that she remembered when he first came to the Iolas Gallery in Paris. “You were so full of hope and creativity then,” she said, “and now you only think about business. It’s a little sad, no?” Fred told her that he had discovered that he was good at business and that what he really wanted out of life was to make money, lots and lots of it. He said he planned on making his first million by the time he was thirty, which was only two years off, and by the age of forty, he would be as rich as Howard Hughes, and as important an art collector and patron as Jean de Menil. “That’s creative,” he declared. “Do you really think Andy will let that happen?” Adriana asked. “Of course, because I’ll make him very rich, too,” Fred answered. “I already have made him a lot richer than he was before I came along.”
As for Andy in flight, he sat beside Jed poring over every last page of the New York Times. I found this fascinating, because he made a point in every interview he gave of saying he never read anything but movie-star biographies, and because he asked me every morning when he called, “Is there anything in the paper I should know about?” Now, he managed to find an obscure item on a back page about an outbreak of typhoid fever in Mexico. “There’s a plague in Mexico,” he immediately leaned across the aisle to me. “We have to get the portrait right away and leave as soon as we can.”
He wasn’t kidding. The minute we landed at the Mexico City airport, where Maria Luisa awaited us with two long limousines with Italian flags waving from their hoods, and a Mexican TV crew, Andy whispered in my ear, “You have to pop the question right now, Bob. You and Adriana should go in the car with her and pop the question, and I’ll go in the other car with Fred and Jed.”
“It’s too rude, Andy.”
“No, it’s not. She has the TV crew here already, doesn’t she?”
For the next three days and nights, at the black-tie museum opening and the stiff diplomatic lunches and dinners before and after, Andy taunted me with the same directive: “Pop the question now, Bob. You’re not here to have fun, Bob. You’re here to work.” He even got Jed on my case. “There’s ten percent in it for you,” Jed pointed out to me as the three of us rode in yet another embassy limo to yet another embassy party. “Ten percent of $25,000 is a lot of money, Bob,” Andy added helpfully. I didn’t dare say that I’d assumed I’d be getting twenty percent, like Fred. “Just get Maria Luisa in a corner at this dinner,” Andy instructed, “and pop the question. She loves you, Bob. I’m sure she’ll say yes.”
Finally, after a week of Andy’s nagging and my resisting, Fred popped the question—on the dance floor of the French ambassador’s residence. Maria Luisa agreed to have four portraits done for a total of $40,000. I offered to waive my commission, but Fred said that since I had made the contact and arranged the trip, he would make sure that Andy gave it to me. He also proposed to the Jacksons that if they brought two more clients to us, Andy would do Adriana’s portrait free.
The next day, Andy rushed right over to the Italian ambassador’s residence with his Big Shot, popped about a dozen rolls of Polaroids, and caught the next plane out with Jed and Fred. “We’ll see you in a couple of weeks, Bob,” he said in farewell. “Maybe you can get some more portraits while you’re here from Maria Luisa’s rich Mexican friends.”
“Leave Robertino alone, Andy,” Adriana chimed in. “He’s coming with me to Puerto Vallarta for the summer. He needs to rest. And write!”
“Oh, really,” said Andy. “See you in a couple of weeks, Bob.”
As much as I needed a rest and wanted to write, I was actually sorry to see Andy leave. I felt that we were closer than we had been before we came. It was the same feeling I’d had after the trip to Germany. Part of it came from spending time together all day every day, but Andy also relaxed a bit on trips. He didn’t have to worry about Valerie Solanis lurking or deal with the demands of his Superstars. His fame, and his fear, were a little less intense away from New York, and he let down his guard, if only slightly.
He was also helpless in hotels, or pretended to be. He was afraid to call room service on his own, terrified when a maid knocked on the door if he was alone, beside himself if he had to answer his phone and it was a reporter or a fan, though he managed to deal with dealers and clients, charming them with gossipy tidbits and avoiding business entanglements with “Oh, let me ask Fred when he gets back.”
In Mexico City, Fred and Jed usually went to museums and antique shops after lunch, leaving me to go back to the Camino Real Hotel with Andy. Typically, Fred found a huge Courbet landscape, for a mere $250, in some junk shop, whose proprietor had no idea what it was. As much as Andy loved to shop, he was always anxious to get back to the hotel to call Vincent in New York, “to see if any checks came in the mail.” These calls could go on for an hour or so, with me just sitting around reading Mexican magazines.
One day, as Andy went on and on, I slipped away to my own room to nap. The phone rang. It was Andy. “I don’t know how to turn the air conditioner off,” he moaned. “Could you come and do it for me?”
I found him sitting on the terrace, pulling hairs out of his arm. I shut the air conditioner off and turned to leave. “Gee, thanks,” Andy said softly, as he came back into the sitting room. “Oh, no, now I let in a moth. Do you think you can kill it? I can’t kill anything.” I murdered the moth and turned toward the door again. “Uh, shouldn’t we order something from room service?” said Andy plaintively.
“I thought I’d take a nap.”
“You don’t want to sleep.”
“I sort of do, Andy.”
“Gee, I wonder where Jed is? It’s getting so late.” He sounded so lonely. I hesitated for a moment; I really was tired and wanted to sleep. Andy stood in front of the mirror over the sofa.
“I look so terrible,” he said.
“It’s the light.”
“No, it’s not. It’s me.”
I stayed and called room service, ordering Andy’s afternoon favorites: tea, chicken sandwiches, sundaes. And we talked. I don’t mean that Andy turned on his tape recorder and I talked. This time we had a real conversation, and Andy told me things he had never told me before.
“It’s just so hard to get up in the morning. It would be so much easier to stay in bed all day, wouldn’t it? I have to take, uh, a pill to get going. I just don’t have any energy since I was shot.”
“What kind of pill?”
“Oh, uh, just a little Dexamyl. It’s nothing.”
He told me, “Life isn’t easy, Bob. I had to sell fruit on street corners to get through school, you know. It wasn’t easy.”
We had visited the great Mexican artist Siqueiros at his studio the day before, and as we spoke, Andy flipped through the catalogue of a recent exhibition that Siqueiros had signed to him. He stopped at a reproduction of a late abstract painting. “Anybody could do this,” he said. “I mean, he could turn out hundreds of paintings a day like this. He just puts on the base. Then takes it off. Then goes crazy a little. It’s just action paintings. Anyway, Pollock was much better. Pollock was a great painter. I wish I had a Pollock. This is nothing. But his wife was funny, wasn’t she? Do you think she’s a lesbian? She could be a lesbian, right? She’s tough.”
I wasn’t surprised in the least by Andy’s off-the-wall sexual speculation. That was typical, everyday Andy. But I was almost shocked to hear him say what he really thought about another artist’s work, especially something so negative and analytical and, in my opinion, right. Andy didn’t talk about art; it wasn’t cool. If asked, he said everything was great, or mocked the questioner, as he did with Barbara Rose.
That afternoon Andy also told me, “I think American Indian art is the greatest art. It’s so simple and beautiful. And it doesn’t matter who made it.”
I’m sure he really meant it and that the Andy I saw that day was the real Andy: wistful, touching, unhappy, and smart. Another afternoon, a newspaper reporter came to interview Andy in the same hotel room and got the fake Andy: cool, coy, campy, and dumb. The Excelsior headline ran: IRONICO, ANDY WARHOL, DICE: “NIXON, EL MEJOR PRESIDENTE PARA EE UU” (The Ironic Andy Warhol Says, “Nixon Is the Best President for the U.S.A.”)
REPORTER: What is the meaning of your art?
WARHOL: It’s decorative.
REPORTER: And your films?
WARHOL: Comedy. The art’s comedy too. And a little bit of politics.
REPORTER: What do you see as the political situation in America?
WARHOL: It’s changing.
REPORTER: In what way?
WARHOL: Angela Davis went free.
REPORTER: What does that signify?
WARHOL: New politics.
REPORTER: What do you mean?
WARHOL: More crime.
REPORTER: Who do you favor for president?
WARHOL: Nixon’s just great.
REPORTER: Why?
WARHOL: He travels so much—like a movie star, a Superstar.
REPORTER: Why is this?
WARHOL: I guess he likes to be on TV. He’s good friends with Bob Hope, Ronald Reagan, Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra, and Shirley Temple.
REPORTER: Why do you talk in monosyllables?
WARHOL: It’s easy to translate.
Well, maybe the fake Warhol wasn’t so dumb.
Another afternoon, like typical tourists, we visited the Shrine to the Virgin of Guadalupe, Mexico’s patron saint, in the poor northern part of the city. Lines of penitents, in crowns of thorns, their bare backs bleeding or scabbed from self-flagellation, crawled on their knees across the vast stone square toward the enormous church. In awed silence we entered the cool, dark shrine. Thousands of votive candles flickered in memory of the dead before at least a dozen side altars, and a wide center aisle of marble swept grandly to the almost grotesquely rococo main altar, dripping with some of the gold that had brought the Spanish conquistadores to Mexico five centuries before.
We stood there, both appalled and dazzled, not knowing quite how to behave, like tourists or believers. Then Andy said in a hushed voice, “I think we should kneel.” We followed him to the last pew, through what he sometimes called “all the Catholic things”—taking holy water, genuflecting, kneeling, praying, making the Sign of the Cross after each step of the Roman ritual. It was the first time I had been in a church with Andy, and I realized then that his religion wasn’t an act, something that sounded good in a cover story.
We took one more excursion during our stay, to the Aztec pyramids at Teotihuacán. Andy didn’t want to go at all but came along because he also didn’t want to stay alone at the hotel. “It’s just a pile of rocks,” he kept saying, as our big black limousine with the Italian flag waving from its chrome-trimmed hood headed down the highway. After forty-five minutes, we arrived at the dust-choked little village, a country crossroads of adobe huts. The entire population, perhaps a hundred people, seemed to be congregated in front of the only store in town, watching the only television set in town. The legendary pyramids, centuries old, loomed above.
“I told you it was just a pile of rocks,” said Andy, pointing at the pyramids. “You can see it from here. Why do we have to get out?”
“Andy,” we scolded in unison, “we came all this way! Stop being silly.”
“I’ll wait in the car,” he insisted. “It’s too hot. And it’s just a pile of rocks.”
We left him alone with the chauffeur and walked through the village to the pyramids. The tallest is about twenty stories. It was too hot, and at that altitude—central Mexico is about 7,000 feet above sea level—we were finding it difficult to climb and breathe at the same time. But we kept going, panting all the way, until we reached the pinnacle. There we were greeted by an urchin peddling a broken bit of clay. “Eet’s a genuine pre-Columbian antique. Only one dollar, meester, please.”
We couldn’t help but laugh and think that maybe Andy had been right after all. It was just a glorified pile of rocks, a tourist trap with a souvenir seller on top. We couldn’t wait to tell him about our letdown and give him the “genuine pre-Columbian antique.” But we were greeted by another surprise when we got back to the car. The limousine was surrounded by the entire population of Teotihuacán, who obviously found it and its occupant much more fascinating than whatever had been on TV. They had encircled the car and were pointing through the windows and laughing at Andy, whose face had turned a vivid crimson from embarrassment, anger, and fear. To make matters worse, the chauffeur was worried about the car overheating, so he had turned off the engine, and the air conditioning. Andy, who never sweated, was sweating right through his Brooks Brothers seersucker jacket, and twitching.
We felt guilty and a little frightened ourselves as we cut through the mob and got into the car with Andy, who didn’t find our story or our souvenir in the least amusing. As we drove off, he said one last time, with vengeance in his voice, “It’s just a pile of rocks.”
A week or two later, Brooks, Adriana, and I were lolling around the pool of the villa they had rented in Puerto Vallarta, watching Trumba chase frogs. “You know,” said Adriana, shaking her head, “I will never forget that scene at the pyramids and that poor man sitting there sweating with all those cretinos pointing and laughing. But, you know, I think he would have rather died from the heat and the embarrassment than admit he was wrong and come with us to see the pile of rocks. It’s really amazing how strong his beliefs are underneath all the joking and posing. He didn’t want to be contaminated by the beauty of an ancient civilization. It might disturb his ridiculous, fanatic belief in the new. No, my little Robertino, this is not a man with whom you can even have an argument—let alone think of winning.
“Better you stay here with me.”
And so while the Jacksons and Trumba took their siestas every afternoon, I sat at my typewriter trying to decipher Andy Warhol’s films. I’d scrutinized the thirty or so silent movies (1963–64), the thirty or so “talkies” (1964–66), and twelve of the seventeen or more features (1965–72), from My Hustler to the as-yet-unreleased Heat, and had also interviewed a slew of Superstars—including Brigid, Nico, Jackie, Candy, Eric, Jane, and Donna—as well as Paul, at great length, twice, and Andy, over the phone, once. I was more overwhelmed by it all than when I had begun the project a year earlier. What did it all mean? And how could I explain it?