It was eleven-thirty on a spring morning in 1977 when I arrived at the office, horrendously hung over from the previous night’s blitz of vodka, coke, and Quaaludes, but I wasn’t seeing things. That was a hairy arm stuffed up a hairy anus in the Polaroids neatly arranged across the top of my desk. My shelves were lined with other Big Shots of more predictable combinations: oral-genital, anal-genital, oralanal—all male on male, and in extreme close-up. Even on my chair there were half a dozen shots of an engorged penis entering a mustachioed mouth. Andy had been at it again: photographing sexual acts between street hustlers and call boys arranged by Victor Hugo, Halston’s friend. It was all for art’s sake, of course: the Torso Series, as the paintings made from these photographs came to be called. But around the office we referred to these works in progress as the Cocks, Cunts, and Assholes Series—very light on the cunts.
It wasn’t the first time that Andy had left the results of one of his Polaroid orgies to dry in my office, but I wanted it to be the last. When Andy arrived an hour later I gave him a piece of my mind. “Am I supposed to have an advertising meeting in here with these cocks all over my desk? What about the girls who work here?”
Andy was nonplussed. “Just tell them it’s art, Bob. They’re landscapes.”
“They might resemble landscapes when you get done with them, Andy, but right now they look like porn pictures and I’m sick and tired of finding them on my desk every other morning. What if Jed happened to come by the office, or if Pat saw them and told Jed?”
“Oh, he’s already mad at me, so it doesn’t matter.”
“Well, you have to do what you have to do, but can’t you please do it in the back room, not in my office.” I was trying hard not to shout.
“Oh, we did, but then I put them in here so Victor wouldn’t steal any. I mean, it’s all Victor just wanting to do these things, and I thought, well, maybe it could be a good series, and, uh, it’s really Victor—I don’t have that much to do with it.”
“Andy, is Victor going to sign the paintings, or are you?”
“It is a good idea, Bob. You know it is. I mean, look at this—can you believe how far they stick their arm up their ass?”
“I can believe anything, Andy.”
He was holding the “fist-fucking” shot up to his glasses, examining it as if it were some exotic new gem discovered in the jungles of Brazil. “I mean, it’s so, so … so abstraaaact.”
A few days later, my office was strewn with genitalia again, and this time I shouted at him that I’d tear his “landscapes” into a thousand pieces and then they’d really be “abstract.” More and more, he seemed to be going out of his way to provoke me, as if he wanted me to have a temper tantrum, as if he liked me to look bad in front of the rest of the staff, while he stood there like an unfairly chastised little boy.
I wasn’t the only one, however, shouting at the boss, and coming in later and later, with heavier and heavier hangovers. Fred was even angrier by day, and even more blitzed by night. I recorded one night in October 1977, at Hurrah, that typified what was going on between Andy and Fred then. Andy and I were already at the club with Halston, Victor, and Barbara Allen, when Fred came in with Thomas Ammann. He was obviously drunk, which in Fred’s case meant he assumed the grand theatrical gestures and deep commanding voice of Diana Vreeland. He tore off his jacket and whirled around the dance floor with Barbara.
Then, looking completely disoriented, he staggered toward me, and in an almost tearful voice, said that somebody had stolen his jacket. “I can’t go on anymore,” he said. “People are always stealing things from me. I’m always losing things. I just can’t go on. You’ve got to help me, Bob.” I asked him where he’d put his jacket, and he said on the banquette near Andy, but Andy said he hadn’t seen it. I started searching for it in the dim disco light. “It’s not here,” Andy insisted. “Fred’s so drunk he lost another jacket.” Finally, I made Andy stand up, and there it was: Andy had been sitting on it.
“I think it’s strange,” Jaime Frankfurt told me one night when I was in a complaining mood, “that the two top men in Andy’s organization are so miserable. I think Andy definitely has something to do with it.” Jaime was the son of Andy’s old friend Suzie Frankfurt, and Fred’s assistant at the time, so his words had some weight.
I lit another joint and changed the subject.
Diana Vreeland had her own take on what was going on with “Andy and you boys.” We dined together tête-à-tête at Ballato’s and she began by tearing into Andy for taking six weeks to say yes to her invitation to the Saul Steinberg opening at the Whitney Museum. “Maybe, as you might have gathered, Bob,” she said, “is not a word of which I’m enamored. I’m very much a yes-or-no kind of girl.” I tried to defend Andy, but she was having none of it. “That’s the trouble with you boys! You protect Andy, you guide Andy, you talk for Andy, you write for Andy, you do business for Andy, you give Andy all your ideas—well, what does Andy do? He takes much too much from Fred and you, Bobby, and it’s not good. That’s why he’s not avant-garde anymore. I don’t mean this as a slight to Fred or you, but you’re not artists. Andy has to stop relying on the two of you for everything and come up with something from his own head again.”
The next day when I told Andy that Diana had said he wasn’t avant-garde anymore, he shot back, “Did you tell her about the Piss Paintings?”
More formally known as the Oxidation Series, these were Andy’s way of declaring himself in the vanguard again. With his unerring sense of timing about his own career, he knew that his traveling portrait-painter act had taken him far enough down the road of conservative commercialism, and that the moment had come to shock again. The Piss Paintings, which he began doing in December 1977, along with the Torso Series, which he had started earlier that year, were meant to do just that.
It was also a message that Andy was hearing from some of his dealers, most of the critics, and Ronnie Cutrone, the sole Factory worker who actually hung out at the artist bars of SoHo and Tribeca, where Andy’s portraits of Mrs. Maslon of Minneapolis and the Empress of Iran were not exactly considered trail-blazing works. There was never any thought at the Factory of abandoning the commissioned-portrait business—that would have been financially impossible in any case. But Andy realized that he needed to be perceived as a real artist, even a way-out artist, for that most bourgeois of businesses to flourish. Part of the appeal of having one’s portrait done by Andy, as opposed to a traditional society portraitist like Alejandro Vidal-Quadras, was that it was thought to be a bit daring, naughty, and intellectual.
Evidence was also mounting that when Andy tried his hardest to be commercial he had his biggest commercial flops. The Cats and Dogs Series, commissioned by the James Mayor Gallery in pet-loving London, bombed when they were shown there in 1976, and bombed again when Mayor arranged for Andy to bring them to Kuwait in January 1977—though that might have had more to do with the fact that most Arabs don’t believe in representational art. Andy had already been paid several hundred thousand pounds by Mayor and his backers, so he wasn’t left holding the kitty litter. But that kind of fiasco did nothing for either his market or his reputation.
The 1977 Athletes Series, a vast number of paintings and prints of sports stars commissioned by Richard Weisman, the investment banker son of L.A. collectors Freddy and Marcia Weisman, also bombed. Andy was paid $800,000 for the portraits of Muhammad Ali, Rod Gilbert, Ron Duguay, Vitas Gerulaitis, Dorothy Hamill, Willie Shoemaker, Tom Seaver, Chris Evert, Pelé, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, and Jack Nicklaus. The last, claimed Andy a bit wistfully, “didn’t even know who I was.” They were shown in New York, London, Toronto, and Cologne, but everywhere the art critics yawned and the sports fans wondered why Andy had painted O. J. Simpson in pistachio and cantaloupe. Finally, eager to recoup some of his investment, Weisman arranged a joint show with the Peter Max of sports portraiture, LeRoy Neiman. Andy and Fred, feeling guilty about the money they had already banked, had no choice but to agree. Again, such exertions did nothing for Andy’s prices or stature.
Andy’s most successful show in 1977 was of his least obviously commercial series, the Hammer & Sickles, at the Daniel Templon Gallery in Paris. These were a tongue-in-cheek response to the Marxist analysis of his work by Italian art critics. In Andy’s hands, the tough symbols of Communism were turned into stunning still lifes, beautiful enough for capitalist titans like Gianni Agnelli to buy for their palatial walls. The show sold out, despite—or perhaps because of—the opening’s being invaded by three hundred Parisian punks in leather, rubber, chains, and razors. Templon served raspberry sorbet and a dry Chablis. The punks used the former to scrawl “HATE” and “WAR” on the gallery walls and chugged the latter so rapidly that they were soon vomiting it all over the gallery floor. Andy hid out in an inner office, and when a couple of young nihilists began peeing pink sherbet and white wine in the vicinity of her bejeweled shoes, São Schlumberger coolly said, “I think I’d better get going to my dinner at Versailles.” When I told Andy, still in his hiding place, he laughed a little and then said, as if noting a new look at the couture collections, “Pee is getting big, Bob.”
Andy, who saw everything as fashion, was not only right but was also putting things into their proper context: piss and punks and leather and whips were all the rage among the sexual extremists of the late seventies, and sadomasochism was le dernier cri of the sexual revolution that was sweeping the West from the Berlin Wall to the Golden Gate Bridge. The women’s and gay-liberation movements had convinced large numbers of people that sex wasn’t a sin but a right, and whatever inhibitions they had left got washed away in the flood of Third World drugs sweeping First World cities. And it was not just the major cities, at least not in America. Tom Wolfe, who also sees everything as fashion, summed it up in a 1977 article, titled “The Sexed-Up, Doped-Up, Hedonistic Heaven of the Boom-Boom 70s”:
By the mid-1970s, anytime I reached a city of 100,000 to 200,000 souls, the movie fare available on a typical evening seemed to be: two theaters showing Jaws, one showing Benji and eleven showing pornography.… Two of the eleven would be drive-in theaters, the better to beam the various stiffened giblets and moist folds and nodules out into the night air to become part of the American Scene.
In New York, always in the lead, the public orgy had begun way back in 1970, at the Continental Baths, which was now Plato’s Retreat, where heterosexual swingers copulated openly in the pool, sauna, steamroom, showers, and bar. Homosexual adventurers had hardly been disenfranchised, however: By 1977, Manhattan boasted at least a dozen thriving gay bathhouses, though they were considered a bit passé compared to the backroom bars of the far West Village, where leather and rubber, bondage and discipline, masters and slaves, indeed every sort of kink and fetish known to man, ruled from midnight to daybreak, when the cobbled old streets and crumbling old warehouses were given back to the traditional commercial activity of the neighborhood: meat packing.
The most fashionable haunts of the sexual fast crowd were the Anvil and the Toilet. The Anvil was famous for its fist-fucking stage show. The Toilet featured tubs and troughs where naked men lay for other naked men to urinate on them. It was like a Robert Mapplethorpe photograph come alive. This was what Andy’s Piss Paintings and Torso Series were really all about: what was going on. He hadn’t anticipated the times—Mapplethorpe did that. His specialty was sensing the times as they happened, and it enabled him not only to join the latest trend but to leap to the head of the line.
Andy only went to the Anvil once, so far as I know, and he never went to the Toilet, though he also once went to the Eagle’s Nest, another West Village leather bar, where he was fascinated, he told me, by a man who urinated in an empty beer bottle and left it on the bar for someone else to drink. “They were all fighting over it,” he said, adding that all-purpose adjective for not making moral judgments, “It was so abstract.” I was with him the night he went to the Anvil, in early 1977, before he had started either the Torso or Oxidation series. We had dinner at Ballato’s with Bianca, Andrea de Portago, Steven Aronson, and Archie, and afterward we decided to see what the talk around town was all about. We piled into Bianca’s long white limo and directed the driver to the corner of West and 14th streets.
It was barely eleven o’clock, which in the far West Village meant everyone was still at home, slipping into their studded dog collars. The front of the Anvil was empty, except for two or three patrons and a big black stud dancing on the bar, totally naked, unless you counted his three gold cock rings. Gingerly we stepped into the pitch darkness of the back room. That was completely empty, though, as our eyes adjusted, we could make out the stage, with its chains and shackles, racks and stretchers. “Gee,” said Andy, clutching Archie, “I wonder if anyone we know was strung up there last night.” He speculated about a certain editor, a certain dancer, and a certain writer who often wrote bitchy things about our crowd.
We wandered back to the front room, where there were now four patrons, and the same black hulk bouncing his balls to Thelma Houston’s “Don’t Leave Me This Way.” Andrea wanted to leave immediately, Bianca was tittering nervously, and Andy stood there, trying to look without us seeing him look. Then the dancer strutted his stuff to our side of the bar and started doing disco knee bends in front of Andy’s face. That’s when Archie gave his shaft a lick, and the bartender, in full leather, asked us to leave. It became one of the standards of our Abbott and Costello act: Archie getting us thrown out of the Anvil, the perfect Andy Warhol anecdote, in which the supposed decadent is revealed as an awkward innocent after all.
It’s always difficult to pinpoint the moment that an idea jells into art in the artist’s mind, and even more so in Andy’s case because he was a walking Gallup Poll, asking people for ideas, then asking other people what they thought of the ideas. I’m pretty sure that the Piss Paintings idea came from friends telling him about what went on at the Toilet, reinforced perhaps by the punks peeing at his Paris opening. He was also aware of the scene in the 1968 Pasolini movie, Teorema, where an aspiring artist pisses on his paintings. “It’s a parody of Jackson Pollock,” he told me, referring to rumors that Pollock would urinate on a canvas before delivering it to a dealer or client he didn’t like. Andy liked his work to have art-historical references, though if you brought it up, he would pretend he didn’t know what you were talking about. The Torso Series also had art-historical references, of course, and Andy was conscious of at least two that I know of: Picasso and Degas. In fact, he used Picasso’s erotic works as a defense when I yelled at him for leaving his Polaroids on my desk. Nonetheless, the true muse of Andy’s sexual works in 1977–78 was Victor Hugo.
Andy saw Victor as the perfect source for ideas: someone with a fertile imagination who didn’t know what to do with it. (Not unlike Brigid Berlin in the sixties.) The Venezuelan’s own art was going nowhere: He signed rat traps and handed them out at parties; he dipped chickens’ feet in red paint and called their footprints drawings. In the summer of 1976, when Halston rented Peter Beard’s mill in Montauk, Victor let red-legged chickens run amok all over the living room. Even the indulgent Halston found that “piece” a bit too conceptual, especially since he had to pay for the reupholstering of the furniture and the sanding of the floors. Andy found Victor’s antics funny, though when Halston rented his house in Montauk two summers later, Andy was quick to tell Victor, “No chickens, okay?”
Halston claimed, in an interview he and Victor gave me after Andy’s death, that he told Victor to do “sex paintings” for himself, but that Victor turned around “and talked Andy into doing it.” Victor claimed the idea as his own. He also said that he gave Andy the idea for the Piss Paintings. In both cases, Andy paid Victor to be his collaborator: He was Andy’s casting agent and sometime model on the Torsos; Andy’s ghost pisser on the Oxidations. He would come to the Factory to urinate on canvases that had already been primed with copper-based paint by Andy or Ronnie Cutrone, who was a second ghost pisser, much appreciated by Andy, who said that the vitamin B that Ronnie took made a “prettier” color when the acid in the urine turned the copper green. Victor told me that Andy gave him vitamins to take too. “He’d say, you take them at night and you come here every day.”
Did Andy ever use his own urine? My diary shows that when he first began the series, in December 1977, he did—I didn’t witness the act of creation, he referred to it in passing. But he soon turned to Victor and Ronnie, as usual preferring to have others do the repetitive technical work for him. And there were many others: boys who’d come to lunch and drink too much wine, and find it funny or even flattering to be asked to help Andy “paint.” Andy always had a little extra bounce in his walk as he led them to his studio, which was fast becoming the back room in more than name only. Victor was showing up with ever larger numbers of “assistants,” hired by the hour at the Everard and St. Marks Baths.
All the Factory girls, except Catherine Guinness, were afraid to venture back there for a back issue, or to deliver a message to Andy. Finally, Fred had had it, too, and decreed, “No more raunch here, Victor.” After much argument, he persuaded Andy to let Victor take a long roll of prepainted canvas to his new loft, where he could work on it whenever inspiration struck. Andy was afraid that Victor would cut off a piece for himself. Andy was right: Victor did, and when I interviewed him, he told me that Fred wanted to buy it for the Andy Warhol Foundation.
Victor’s loft was on lower Fifth Avenue at 19th Street, just three blocks from 860 Broadway. It was a long, narrow white space, which Victor left undivided, so that you could see the king-size mattress on the floor at the far end as soon as you stepped off the elevator. The only enclosed space was the bathroom, which featured a gym-style group shower. Victor’s loft became the new venue for Andy’s Polaroid sex sessions. He was bouncier when he toddled off to those too. “I’m just going to Victor’s for a little while,” he’d say, around three in the afternoon, his customary time to get working on his art. “Don’t go uptown without me, Bob.” That meant I would have to listen to his broken record, “Sex Is So Abstract,” all the way up Park Avenue. “I’d better hide these someplace Jed won’t see them,” he said one afternoon, shuffling his deck of dirty pictures. “Jed’s so grumpy lately,” he went on, sounding hurt. “But he should know that I’m not doing anything with all these guys. It’s all Victor. It’s all work.”
It was all very bewildering. If one topic was taboo at the Factory, it was Andy’s sex life. He wanted—demanded—to know every detail of ours, but his was strictly off limits. But then we were the kids and he was Pop—that was our nickname for him. And whoever heard of kids asking their parents about their sex lives? In a Catholic family? Now Pop was making a public display of it.
After ten years of being good, since the shooting, Andy was being bad—tinfoil-Factory style—again. And somehow it was sad. Victor described those Polaroid sessions to me, and Andy’s role, or lack of it, in them. I can’t say I was surprised. “I remember,” Victor said, “that many times when the guys saw Andy they were suddenly so shy. I’d say, ‘C’mon, I’m paying you.’ And Andy saw them … and he’d escape. He disappeared suddenly. Then he’d come back and say, ‘It’s finished.’ ‘Andy, we’ve just begun.’ ”
Halston added, “Victor used to tell me, when they were doing all that posing, that Andy would break out in those terrible sweats and get nervous and shake and have to go to the bathroom. He was having an organza in there.” Only Halston could come up with that code word. Victor agreed, recalling how Andy always dashed to the bathroom and locked himself in after taking a few rolls of Polaroids of his naked models performing oral and anal intercourse. The Big Shot camera, it should be noted, focused only at three feet from the subject. Victor said that Andy never touched a model. And when he emerged from the bathroom, pale and cool again, he showed much less interest in the work at hand. “So, I realize,” said Victor, “like Halston say, Andy must have had the organza.” At his own orgy, Andy was the outsider.
Andy was the outsider everywhere. Even at home, even within his Factory family. On August 6, 1977, we celebrated his forty-ninth birthday at Montauk. It was just Andy and the kids—Fred, Jed, Pat, Catherine, Vincent with his fiancée, Shelly Dunn, Jay Johnson with Tom Cashin, Susan Johnson with her beau, Billy Copley. We had a casual dinner around the big picnic table in the kitchen: barbecued chicken from the local deli, birthday cake from Andy’s favorite Manhattan bakers, Les Délices de la Côte Basque, champagne and Negronis, the Montauk house drink, Campari and vodka, heavy on the vodka. We put some old rock ’n’ roll records on the stereo in the living room. Fred grabbed Shelly, Vincent grabbed Catherine, I grabbed Pat—we were all dancing, in quickly shifting couples and groups. Except Andy. He stood on the edge of the room, snapping an occasional Minox, looking a little bored and very lonely. I tried to pull him into our sock hop, but he pulled back and whimpered, “You know I can’t dance, Bob.” I stood with him for a few minutes, so that he wouldn’t be the only wallflower at his own birthday party. “Gee,” he said, in that wistful tone he used when he was feeling sorry for himself, “you kids get along so well.” Then he slipped away to bed, leaving us to twist and shout.
That Thanksgiving, after a big fight, Jed persuaded Andy to have a few of us to dinner at the 66th Street house. It was a scene as poignant as Andy’s birthday party. There was a huge, half-carved turkey in the center of the kitchen table—Jed had lost the battle to serve dinner in the beautifully decorated dining room, which Andy insisted was “too fancy to really eat in”—and seated around it were Catherine, Barbara Allen, Susan Johnson, Billy Copley, and Jed, all chatting and laughing. Andy had his chair turned away from the table. He was dead drunk and watching TV. “Have some 1952 Rothschild, Bob,” he said, slurring, turning the sound up. That, it seemed, was his idea of entertaining at home on a holiday.
But then, more and more frequently, when I’d refer to “your house” in passing, he’d snap back, “You mean Jed’s house.” He often complained that “everything’s the way Jed wants it. I’d never have a house that looks like this.” Another constant refrain: “All I do is pay the bills around here. That’s what I call love, when someone pays the bill for you now and then.” Bad had missed at the box office when it opened in early 1977, but the way Andy went on you’d think he’d lost a million dollars on it—instead of Peter Brant, Joe Allen, and Fred Hughes. Jed was now trying to launch an interior-decorating business. Andy kept saying that he hoped Jed “gets some jobs quick,” but he made it more difficult by refusing to let anyone see the best job Jed had done: his house.
Christmas was no happier than Thanksgiving. Jed turned up at the office Christmas lunch with a bruise on his forehead where Andy had slammed a door in his face. Fred, Vincent, and I joined forces to persuade Andy to dole out Electric Chair prints, which we could barely sell for $200 to clients then, for the staff. We decided to include two bottles of Moët et Chandon with each gift, vintage 1971, the same year as the prints—one of those nice Fred Hughes touches—without telling Andy in advance. He didn’t mind when he found out, though he did say we should have ordered nonvintage, which was a few dollars less per bottle. The day before Andy had gone to Tony’s Florist and ordered expensive miniature Christmas trees to be sent to Rex Reed, Liz Smith, Aileen “Suzy” Mehle, Eugenia Sheppard, Earl Blackwell, Elaine of Elaine’s, Pearl of Pearl’s, Mr. and Mrs. Ballato, Lee Radziwill, Diana Vreeland, Kitty Miller, Carroll de Portago, C.Z. Guest, the Heinzes, the Hammonds, Mrs. Long, the Jacksons, the Hoveydas, the Carimatis, Eleanor Lambert, Carrie Donovan, Estée Lauder, Calvin Klein, Diane von Furstenberg, Elsa Peretti, Marina Schiano, Joe Eula, Jane Holzer, Halston, Anita Loos, and Paulette Goddard, among others. The next day he sent me back to send an additional twenty or so to more journalists, hostesses, and potential portrait clients—the list kept growing. “Send a tree to John Schumacher,” he instructed me, referring to the recently dismissed chairman of Bonwit Teller. How sweet of Andy to be nice to someone when he was down, I thought, until Andy added: “He was the first department-store person to give us an ad, and he’s bound to get a big new job somewhere, right?” Is it any wonder that we Factory kids rolled out another nickname for Andy every holiday season: Scrooge.
Jed, as usual, bought a big tree for the house and decorated it with antique ornaments he’d collected all year. But Andy, as usual, wouldn’t let him have a Christmas party at home—just Fred, Barbara Allen, and me for a quick glass of champagne before Halston’s Christmas Eve dinner. That was a strained affair too, though it wasn’t Halston’s fault. We all knew that Mick Jagger and Jerry Hall were holed up in a London hotel, but nobody dared mention it to Bianca, who was putting up a good front. Jed, still bruised, was trying to avoid Victor, whom he hated for getting Andy involved in the sex paintings. And Andy, who had the flu, drank the larger part of a bottle of cognac, claiming it would make him better.
Not long after that, Andy and I went to Adriana Jackson’s to meet a Milanese couple who collected Pop Art. They went on about how their teenage children “loved” Andy. “I wish I was as loved at home,” he sighed, “as I am here tonight.”
The more unloved Andy felt at home, the more he made Halston’s house his home away from home. “This is the way I wish my house looked,” Andy told me almost every time I went with him to a dinner or a party there. “Really modern and really empty.”
“Andy had a special love affair with this place,” Victor Hugo said in our interview. “This was like his fun house. He’d take a couple of vodkas and loosen up a bit.”
“Don’t forget the Valium,” added Halston. They both denied that Andy ever took cocaine there, but I recall one occasion when I gave him some there. Whatever he took and however much he relaxed on his nights at Halston’s, he was still the nerd amidst the beauties, the groupie amongst the stars—Liza and Liz and Bianca and Marisa and Barbara. Drinking and drugs didn’t make Andy forget himself, they made him more himself, more relentless, pushy, grabby, infantile, and troublesome. Even among his own In crowd, Andy was still the outsider.
To begin with, Andy was Victor’s friend, not Halston’s. And Victor, with his hairy pranks, was an outsider in this group too. Victor was selling more and more of Andy’s art to Halston, an arrangement that was also advantageous to Halston, because it was a way for Victor to make money, in commissions, without stretching the payroll of Halston Enterprises. When Victor talked Halston into renting Montauk, starting in 1978, the designer became Andy’s tenant, as well as client, making Andy even more the supplicant, waiting for the rent.
The truth of the matter is that Andy envied Halston his success, his glamour, his tall, smooth, handsome look. He carried the envy with him from the fifties, when Halston the hatmaker hobnobbed with Bunny Mellon and Babe Paley, and Raggedy Andy couldn’t make it past the boys from Serendipity. It was the same envy that had come through when I called him in 1973 to say I’d heard Halston was being bought by Norton Simon for $20 million: Andy had insisted that it must be $2 million, and was all “just paper anyway.” He wasn’t jumping for joy when Halston took the entire twenty-first floor at the Olympic Tower, in 1977, for his couture operation and administrative offices, and expanded the 68th Street boutique up two more floors. “Halston’s so grand now,” he said, as if he hadn’t been using that adjective to describe Halston to me ever since he first took me to that party at Joe Eula’s in 1971. And he couldn’t help being jealous that it was Halston who sat in the center of the circle of movie stars and glamour girls who flocked to his parties and his house, even though Andy wouldn’t dream of letting them through his own front door. As Halston told me, “Andy came to my house maybe ten thousand times. I never went to his house.” Never? “Only the entrance.” Bianca and Liza never even made it that far.
“Gee,” Andy said again and again and again. “Halston really does have all the greatest girls at his house.” At the Factory, we jokingly called it “Halston’s House for Wayward Women.” Bianca moved in after she left Mick. Liza was divorcing Jack Haley, Jr., Marisa was divorcing James Randall, and Barbara Allen had broken up with Philip Niarchos, after a three-year courtship. They all came to Halston for a shoulder to cry on, and new dresses to wear in pursuit of new beaus. They weren’t wildly promiscuous—just modern women playing the field, hoping to find a love that would last. They mostly dated one guy at a time—though sometimes it was the same guy. Ryan O’Neal certainly made the rounds.
Andy was almost obsessively fascinated by the romantic adventures of Liza, Bianca, Barbara, and Marisa. At Halston’s little parties for six or eight close friends, the girls spun out their tales of marital woes and divorce-court complications, and Andy, playing the good Catholic to the hilt, always vociferously encouraged them to go back to their husbands. “Halston wants them to get divorced,” he told me time and again, “so he can have them all around him, but I told them to stay married.” Of course, in his priestly mode, he also tried to get them to confess their sins, and hung on every juicy detail he could coax out of their hearts and into his tape recorder. Sometimes they made things up, especially about each other—just as I sometimes did about the O’Briens and the Netters when I first met Andy—to get Sony off their cases, and to laugh at Andy as he went into paroxysms of “What!”s and “Really?”s Then he’d act hurt and tell them, “You never told me that when it happened! And I thought you were a friend.” (There was a good reason why Andy was often the last person to find out the real gossip in our group: Everyone knew that the minute he was told he’d repeat it to the person it was about, usually revealing the source in the process.)
Halston told me, “I said some of the raunchiest, most horrible things just to get a rise out of Andy. Just made it up, you know, with Bianca, Liza, whomever. Gory things that Andy would have on tape. And I know someday someone is going to think it’s real. And it wasn’t. It was just playing games.”
The constant taping and picture taking gave Andy a role to play at Halston’s parties, but it was a role that put more distance between him and the other players. It made the stars feel more starlike to have Andy lurking on the edge of the action, stealing glances through his Minox, nudging his Sony closer to catch their every breath. But it also put them off, tired them out, made them weary of Andy and his presumptuous intrusiveness. It can be exciting to know that the fly on the wall is watching, but when the fly lands in a drink … There were many nights when Andy wasn’t wanted, and wasn’t invited, no matter how much Victor pressed Halston to have him. Andy’s presence could ruin a bash, as much as it could make it. He was both an instigator and an inhibitor. Or, as I often wrote in my diary in those days, “Andy was the life and death of the party.”