“Kill the Shah! Kill the Shah! Kill the Shah!” screamed hundreds of demonstrators in ski masks as cops on horseback pushed them back across Fifth Avenue, away from the Pierre Hotel, where the Empress of Iran was receiving a human-rights award at a July 1977 luncheon given by the Appeal to Conscience Foundation. It was that Imelda Marcos scene all over again, but bigger, nastier, closer to real violence. Again, Andy was frightened, frazzled, and blaming it all on me. And again, he didn’t turn back. There was money to be made, and this time the chase was not in vain. Andy had done Farah Diba’s portrait the year before; now he was hot on the trail of her husband’s.
It was quieter in the Grand Ballroom, where the Empress stood on a receiving line with Governor Carey, Mayor Koch, and Ambassadors Zahedi and Hoveyda, greeting guests with a soft hello. “Your portraits are so beautiful,” she told Andy, “much more beautiful than I am in reality.” As we headed to our table, he told me, “Now is the time to pop the question about the Shah’s portrait to Hoveyda. I mean, his face really lit up when the Empress said that, because it was his idea, so now he’ll want to help us with the next one. Then there’s the three kids, Bob. You could be on easy street, but you better hurry. You heard them yelling out there.” We were seated with Carroll de Portago, Jean Tailer, and Nedda Logan, who said about the demonstrators, “I think they want a little more democracy.”
“But some of them have black hands,” said Andy. “I mean, we were in Iran and they don’t have any blacks there. Do they, Bob?” Andy never ceased to amaze me. We had dashed from the taxi to the door in haste and fear, and yet he’d noticed a pair or two of black hands in the jostling masked mob. After lunch, the Empress gave a speech on the advance of women’s rights in Iran, the reason why she was getting the award. As she spouted statistics on the enormous increase in female high-school and college graduates, a woman from the University of Wisconsin suddenly jumped up and shouted, “Lies! Lies! You’re a liar!” She was immediately pounced upon by Iranian security men in dark suits and dragged from the ballroom with a hand over her mouth. “This is too scary, Bob,” said Andy. “What are we doing here?” “You know what we’re doing here, Andy.” “Oh, I know, but there’s got to be an easier way.”
The politicians, philanthropists, and socialites shifted and coughed; the Empress stuck to her text as if nothing had happened. There was much murmuring and shaking of heads—she was losing the room. But then she surprised everyone with a spontaneous coda. “I would like to say a few words about what happened before,” she said, “because not to would be a little bit ridiculous, I think. I am very sorry for the inconvenience and noise and traffic my presence here today has caused you. Perhaps what I am talking about doesn’t mean much in America, where women have so much freedom. But in my country just the fact that I am even able to be here and speak to you would have been impossible ten years ago for any woman, even the Empress.” A ten-minute standing ovation followed. “Pop the question quick, Bob,” said Andy. “Do it tonight.”
I couldn’t push for the Shah’s portrait at the embassy dinner that night. Hoveyda was too busy introducing the Empress around, and the Empress just smiled and murmured, “Fine,” when I asked her how “His Majesty” was. “You should have told her how handsome His Majesty is,” Andy said.
That was all Andy cared about, selling more portraits. There had been signs that our Iranian business could backfire ever since we returned from Teheran the previous summer, and landed in the middle of a tiff between Hoveyda and Bob Wilson, who had withdrawn from the Shiraz Arts Festival. Hoveyda was sure that Wilson did it “under pressure from the liberal Mafia.” Andy thought it was because Wilson had a better invitation from the Avignon Festival. “I mean, people say they do things for politics, but they just use politics to do what they want,” he said.
The Iranian connection was becoming controversial, and for better or worse we were connected with the Iranians, and getting more connected every day. But Andy didn’t want to see it that way. He preferred to think that we could go on taking their money, without taking the political heat that came with it.
So when the Shah’s twin sister invited him to a ball, not long after the Bob Wilson contretemps, in November 1976, Andy accepted with alacrity. Princess Ashraf had two townhouses, side by side, on Beekman Place—one for herself and her daughter, Princess Nilufar, and one for the various royal aunts, nieces, and cousins who served as their ladies-in-waiting. Andy and I were among the handful of Americans at the ball, along with Congresswoman Bella Abzug, who was the American delegate to a UN commission on women’s rights—Princess Ashraf was its head. All the Iranian women, perhaps fifty or so, were wearing enormous taffeta ballgowns from Saint Laurent’s new “Jewel” collection, in emerald, ruby, sapphire, amethyst, and topaz. Andy was beside himself: “This is the most beautiful party I’ve ever been to,” he said. “I mean, to see all these women in the same dress in different colors. It’s actually more like a movie scene than a real party, and Yves is like the costume designer for the movie, right? Only Marion Javits doesn’t match. And how can Bella wear that hat? She doesn’t know anything, right? God, every one of Yves’s dresses costs $10,000, Bob. Oh, it’s such a glamorous party. I wish every party could look like this. It’s like, uh, a, uh, a dream.”
A dream that was coming to an end. Two days earlier, Jimmy Carter had been elected President and human rights had replaced Realpolitik as the major motif of American foreign policy. The switch did not bode well for our most prominent autocratic ally, the Shah of Iran. Andy had contributed prints to the Carter campaign that year. Was he really for Carter? It’s a complicated question, and our relationship with the Iranians was part of the answer.
The Carter connection was made right after he won the Democratic nomination in August, when the New York Times Magazine commissioned Andy to do a portrait of the candidate for a cover story by Norman Mailer. “Carter’s really quiet,” Andy told me, after he and Fred got back from Plains, Georgia. “She’s the tough one, Rosalynn. She wears the pantsuit. Polyester. And his mother’s so nutty. I don’t think she and Rosalynn get along. They live in the worst house I ever saw, I mean for someone who might be President. It’s like a little ranch house on Long Island—your parents’ house is a lot nicer, Bob. They have wall-to-wall carpeting. Not real wool. None of the furniture is real either. It was all that fake colonial stuff from the big companies in North Carolina. And when we got there, Amy was riding her bicycle around in circles in front of the house. She has that nutty look too. Actually, the one I like the best was the mother, Miz Lillian. She kept saying that she looked like me. She sort of does. It was too nutty.”
After the Carter cover ran on Sunday, September 26, 1976, Tom Beard and Frank Fowler, two Carter fundraisers Andy and Fred had met in Plains, came to the Factory to ask for an edition of prints for the Carter campaign. Fred was all for it, just as he had been for the McGovern prints in 1972. He saw the Democratic party as the aristocratic party, the historic home of Jefferson and Roosevelt, Harriman and Kennedy, Jackie and Lee. Andy saw the Democrats as the party of the immigrants and the poor, the underdog and the outsider. “I know I should be for the Republicans,” he said, “because I hate paying taxes. But I just can’t be a Republican. It wouldn’t be right. I mean, I grew up in the Depression and we were eating salt-and-pepper soup, Bob, and, uh … uh, artists just can’t be Republican, can they?”
What were his real politics? Which was the real Andy? The immigrant’s son, the Depression child, the alienated artist who identified with the downtrodden and the left-out? Or the rich Society portrait painter, the ambitious power worshiper who assiduously pursued presidents and potentates, Democrat and Republican, Windsor and Pahlavi? Perhaps the contradiction was so great it was why he avoided thinking about politics seriously. “Politics and dinner parties don’t go together,” he once told Fred when Katie Schlumberger’s poet husband, Tom Jones, asked if Andy would write a letter to Imelda Marcos for Amnesty International. “I can’t write a letter like that to Imelda Marcos,” he went on. “She’ll never see me again.”
It can also be argued that Andy’s rare political decisions were nothing more than shrewd public-relations moves. The Carter prints balanced the Farah Diba portraits—as Fred put it, “It’ll get the art world intellectuals and the liberals in the press off our backs about this Iran thing.” Andy contributed an edition of fifty Jimmy Carter prints to the Democratic National Committee during the election campaign, then a second edition of 125, plus a Miz Lillian edition of 50, to help pay off the campaign debt after the election. But he didn’t vote for Jimmy Carter. He didn’t vote for anyone. Ever. And he skipped Carter’s inauguration on January 20, 1977, to be at the opening of the Cats and Dogs show in Kuwait. There was a chance, it seemed, of Andy getting the portrait of the Emir. So Andy sent me instead, with my little Minox, to record Andy Warhol’s “Impression of the Inauguration,” which along with those of Rauschenberg, Lichtenstein, Jacob Lawrence, and Jamie Wyeth would make up Carter’s latest fund-raising portfolio.
Andy did see the new President in February. Ambassador Zahedi gave a Valentine’s party, with Andy as guest of honor, and he invited our Carter contacts. Tom Beard said he was looking forward to “the big bash at the Eye-ranians. I’ve heard about the mountains of caviar.” He arranged for us to have lunch that day at the White House mess, the private dining room for senior staff. Our party took up two of the eight tables in the wood-paneled room. Catherine ordered a Bloody Mary and was served a Virgin Mary—Southern Baptist style. “The food is like Schrafft’s,” Andy whispered.
After lunch, we were given a tour of the real power center: the West Wing. In the Cabinet Room, each place at the table was set with White House notepads, pencils, and matchbooks, which an aide handed out to Catherine, Fred, Shelly, Vincent, et al. Andy wanted us to turn them all over to him. Then Andy got a surprise invitation to meet with Carter in the Oval Office. He looked panicky as he was led off—and sure enough, the special assistant was back a minute later, saying Andy wanted me along to take pictures. In the antechamber, the secretary was having lunch at her desk. “Gee,” said Andy, “here we are in the President’s office, Bob, and the secretary is eating the same smelly tunafish sandwich that they eat in every office, with the same smelly pickle.” He was trying to be funny, but he was trembling like a leaf.
A man in a gray suit strode through the Rose Garden outside the window, and then suddenly he was standing before us, right hand outstretched. It was the President. Andy and I jumped up. “Hi, Andy, good to see you again,” said Carter, and ushered us into the Oval office. Conversation was stilted, and Andy stood there shaking, not knowing how to break the ice. The President thanked Andy for his prints. “It was a big help,” he said. “Oh, gee, thanks,” said Andy, making it sound like goodbye. In fairness to Andy, it must be said that Carter was almost as awkward as he was. “He’s no Nelson Rockefeller” was the way Andy put it later.
There was no caviar at the Iranian embassy that night. Zahedi thought that would please our Carter friends. It didn’t.
In New York, we continued going to Ambassador Hoveyda’s dinners: for the new Swedish ambassador to the UN; for the new American ambassador to Italy; for the new president of the General Assembly. When Hoveyda saluted Andy as “a symbol of freedom,” in a toast at one dinner, Andy whispered to me, “That’s why I’m here, Bob. As a symbol of freedom.”
In November 1977, one year after her Beekman Place dream ball, Princess Ashraf sat for her portrait at an embassy dinner in her honor. “Why not take the Polaroids now,” suggested Hoveyda, “before she changes her mind or goes back to Teheran?” Andy, as always, had his Big Shot ready and loaded, with plenty of extra film in his bag. The guest list was very cultural, as usual: Milos Forman, Elia Kazan and Barbara Loden, Frank Perry and Barbara Goldsmith, Lester Persky, Elliot Kastner. Andy said, “They’re all hoping the Iranians will finance their movies, right?” Later, Princess Ashraf’s Women’s Lib cell showed up—Bella Abzug, Shirley MacLaine, Margaret Trudeau—and they had a nice consciousness-raising session in the little mirrored salon. “What a great party,” Andy said when we left. “Hoveyda was so great to get her to sit right there. He really is our friend. I wish all the portraits could happen like that.”
Three days later, Andy marched into my office and threw the Village Voice down on my desk. “I knew this would happen someday,” he announced, pointing at the cover. There was Andy with the Empress of Iran, standing together under his portrait of her at the Iranian Embassy. “THE BEAUTIFUL BUTCHERS,” said the headline, and the story began with the line “Torture tastes better with caviar.” There were more party pictures inside, of the Kissingers, Elizabeth Taylor, and Liza Minnelli, all with Ardeshir Zahedi. Diana Vreeland was caught kissing the ambassador at his Valentine’s Day dance, and the caption under the photo noted the alleged number of political prisoners in Iranian jails. It was red yellow journalism, left-wing McCarthyism. I couldn’t take it seriously, and told Andy so, when I saw that it was written by Alexander Cockburn, who, as the son of a well-known British Communist, should have known better than to indulge in guilt by association. Fred dismissed the article too, and didn’t let it stop Andy and him from attending Jimmy Carter’s state dinner for the Shah the following week.
A few nights later, I was defending their decision to Henry Geldzahler, who had just been named New York City’s Commissioner of Culture by the newly elected Mayor Koch. “I warned Andy not to go to that dinner for the Shah,” said Henry, amused by the fact that the President and the Shah had been accidentally tear-gassed during the welcoming ceremony on the South Lawn, as the police repelled eight thousand demonstrators trying to storm the White House grounds. “How could you let Andy get mixed up with the Iranians, Bob? I can see Fred allowing something like that to happen for money, but you should have known better, you studied foreign affairs.” I said that was why I knew that the Shah’s government was relatively progressive and open, given the history of his country and the politics of the region. “What’s wrong with Andy anyway?” Henry wanted to know. “He only talks about diamonds now and how he has to make more money every year than the year before. I think he’s very unhappy.” I now realize that Andy’s old friend had made a connection that was true—between Andy’s greed and Andy’s unhappiness—but then I gave him the standard, and equally true, company line: rising Factory overhead. Henry said that it didn’t excuse Andy’s dealing with the “murderous” Shah.
Several days after Commissioner Geldzahler’s scolding, Andy threw another piece of paper down on my desk and looked at me as if to say, “What do I do now?” It was a Xerox of a petition that Allen Ginsberg had sent for him to sign. It alleged, among other things, that in 1962 Princess Ashraf supposedly had been caught smuggling several million dollars’ worth of heroin into this country. “Can this be true?” asked Andy. “I mean, are we really going to get into trouble for doing her portrait?” He put the Xerox of the petition in that month’s time capsule along with the fan mail, the hate mail, the nut mail, and the record-company press releases, saying only, “I hope Allen Ginsberg doesn’t call me about it.”
In February 1978, Ambassador Hoveyda told us that the Shah’s portrait was definitely on, and I went up to his office to look through files of official photographs, as His Imperial Highness was not available for Big Shots by Andy. I took about twenty photographs back to the Factory and Andy said that the Shah looked “scary” in most of them and he wished he could take his own Polaroids. With Fred’s help, he settled on a shot of the Shah in formal military dress, a white jacket with gold-braided epaulets. Fred said it was “the most elegant” shot, and Andy liked it because the Shah was smiling, very slightly. “I guess I can make him look good,” Andy said, as he gave his choice to Rupert Smith to blow up, “but it’s not going to be easy. Don’t make the negative too dark, Rupert.” Rupert Smith had replaced Alex Heinrici as Andy’s silkscreen printer in 1977.
“I wouldn’t be too free with the eye shadow and the lipstick,” Gisela Hoveyda advised Andy over dinner at Ballato’s. “I mean, it should be your style, but … ” “Oh, no, no, I know,” Andy quickly concurred, “no lipstick.” “Keep it casual but conservative,” the ambassador suggested. I said that Andy was “trying to project the image of a modern monarch” with the Shah’s portrait. The Hoveydas loved that line, and so did Andy. “I’ve got to remember it,” he told me. “We should use it all the time.”
We used it to headline an imperial interview—“Farah Pahlavi: Modern Monarch”—in our March 1978 issue. But we put Margaret Trudeau, not the Empress, on the cover. Some of our Iranian friends thought we had slighted their country. “How could you put that Canadian bitch on the cover,” said Naz Alam, the daughter of the Minister of Court and a portrait client, “and my queen on page two?” I told her that the Trudeau interview had been done by Andy, and his interviews were always the cover stories. The interview with Farah Diba had been done by Rita Christopher, a freelance Washington journalist. It had been arranged by Ambassador Zahedi on the condition that he had approval of the transcript. I hated giving anyone approval of the transcript, but this was one case where what was right for the magazine was not necessarily good for the portrait business—and Andy had made it perfectly clear which he considered more important.
Fortunately, the interview was not a total puff piece; the Empress specifically addressed the demonstrations that had plagued her recent American visits. She blamed them, accurately as it turned out, not only on Communists but also “ultra-rightist fanatics in Iran who disapprove of some of our reforms, like the emancipation of women.” Still, I wasn’t thrilled when Zahedi called from Washington on deadline day to ask me to delete “one little thing.” There goes the good stuff, I thought, preparing myself to be, as Andy was always instructing, “really aggressive but really charming.” But he only wanted one line removed from the introduction—“She drinks Coca-Cola and smokes cigarettes.” Those were “not very nice things for an Empress to do,” he said. What he didn’t say, but perhaps was thinking, was that they were not things a Moslem Empress should do. But then, it was easy to forget that she, and all the Iranians we knew, were officially Moslems.
As the political situation in Iran grew increasingly tense and murky that spring—the streets of Teheran running with demonstrators carrying photographs of the exiled Ayatollah Khomeini—Ambassador Hoveyda tried to put a good face on things in New York by stepping up his cultural entertainments. At the Hoveydas’ cocktail party for the Metropolitan Museum’s proposed cinematheque, Andy was surprised to find his old mentor from the late fifties, Emile de Antonio. “What are you doing here?” he asked de Antonio, who was avidly left-wing (and had become known for his anti-Nixon and anti-McCarthy films in the sixties). “I came with Renata Adler,” said de Antonio. “I won’t ask you what you’re doing here, Andy.” “Oh, I came with Bob,” said Andy.
Though I’d heard about him and read about him, this was the first time I’d met de Antonio and I found it fascinating to watch how Andy and he slid back into their old collaborative relationship after so many years. “You’ve got to give me a title for my next book,” Andy pleaded. “My Life as a Fiction,” de Antonio proposed off the top of his head. “What a great title!” gasped Andy, jotting it right down on a matchbook cover. “You can’t have it,” said de Antonio. “I’m keeping it for myself.”
Later, Andy decided, that “Dee,” as he called him, “was being mean to me because of the Iran thing. But he should know it’s just business. I mean, he was there because if the Iranians give money for the cinematheque, he’ll have another place to show his documentaries, right?”
It was and it wasn’t just business. Over the years, we had developed personal bonds with our Iranian friends, particularly Fereydoun and Gisela Hoveyda, so that even if Andy had considered dropping the Iranian business—which he never did—it wouldn’t have been so easy. In March, Ambassador Hoveyda gave a birthday party for Barbara Allen. That was the first night we noticed how skimpy the caviar portions had become. “It was such a small bowl,” said Andy, “and they only passed it around once. Maybe things really are getting bad.” Fred thought otherwise. “Fereydoun doesn’t want to be loved for his caviar,” he said. He had a point: In times of trouble one does tend to test friends. But it also seemed symbolic of something larger, especially as the year went on and the situation in Teheran worsened and the sturgeon eggs at the Caviar Club became rarer and rarer, smaller and smaller, blacker and blacker.
One day in May 1978, our involvement with the Iranians turned into something more than a topic for verbal jousting at Manhattan parties: A man with a Middle Eastern accent called the Factory and said, “Tell Andy to be careful tonight. There’s a bomb at the party.” Andy was going to four parties that night, including one he was hosting and another in his honor, all publicized in advance. The first was a promotional cocktail party for Interview at Fiorucci, which had sent out two thousand invitations using Andy’s name. Second was Dr. Denton Cox’s dinner for Andy at Barbetta, which Suzy’s column had written up the day before, including Ambassador Hoveyda’s name. The papers had also noted Andy’s expected appearance at the two big bashes of the night: MoMA’s annual Party in the Garden and the opening of the disco Xenon.
I was at home changing when Vincent called with the news. He said it was probably “just some nut”—threatening calls weren’t exactly uncommon at the Factory—but perhaps we should alert Fiorucci and Barbetta just in case. Andy picked up on another line and wailed, “What are we going to do, Bob? Should I stay home? Should we call the police? I knew this was going to happen someday.” And I knew he was going to say that when it did.
I called the manager of Fiorucci. He was reluctant to call the police, saying he’d have his own people search the place. Then I went to pick up Andy in the limousine that Fiorucci had sent for us. He was, of course, a nervous wreck. He said he didn’t want to go, but he was going. He wasn’t wailing or whining anymore, but frozen in silence. That was Andy in a crisis: not so much calm as quietly fatalistic.
A thousand kids, and three plainclothes cops, were waiting for us at Fiorucci. Andy hid behind tall Averil Meyer and short Whitney Tower, Jr., while I dealt with the police. They had searched the place but had found nothing and asked for Andy’s schedule for the rest of the night. They advised me to alert the West Side precinct that policed Barbetta’s neighborhood. Which I did. I found Andy in the crowd, talking to a strange-looking kid who he said was “São’s son.” I thought that was odd as São Schlumberger’s son was fifteen years old and in boarding school in France. “Your mother told me you were still in school,” I said. “What are you doing in New York?” He said that he was working at a bank “that prints up all the world’s currency.” That sounded even odder, so I asked him where his mother was at the moment. He said she was at Xenon, and when I pointed out that Xenon wasn’t opening until much later that night, he accused me of being paranoid. I was beginning to think that he was the anonymous caller. The fact that he, of all the kids in the place, was the one Andy was talking to only heightened my suspicion.
There were five uniformed policemen outside Barbetta when we arrived, and five inside searching the place. Andy scurried to the private room where the dinner was being held, while Vincent and I talked to the police. Ambassador Hoveyda looked weary as he said that he was sure the threat was due to his presence. In any case, there was no bomb to be found.
After dinner, Andy, Catherine, and I went to the MoMA garden party. A minute after we arrived and Andy was photographed, he said, “I can go now. They know I came,” and dashed off with Catherine to Halston’s house, where they were meeting Steve Rubell. Although he said that he wasn’t worried about competition from Xenon—which was owned by the well-connected Peppo Vanini and Howard Stein—Steve wasn’t taking any chances. He wanted his mainstays, Andy and Halston, at his club that night.
At Xenon the mob was unbelievable and the only one who was up for fighting it was Sylvia Miles, who plunged into the crowd shouting, “Sylvia Miles coming through!” Brigid Berlin, Jed, and I decided to give up, and took a taxi to 54. It wasn’t too crowded for a change and soon we were all dancing in a circle. Andy appeared on the edge of the dance floor—and Jed grabbed Brigid and ran out of the club. Andy just stood there, pretending not to notice. I went over to him and he said in a woozy voice, full of vodka, Valium, and Quaalude, “Oh, I met the cutest busboy. You should put him in Interview, Bob. Tell him you’ll make him a big star.”
It was one of Andy’s standard lines. I used to find it funny, but after nine years it was beginning to drive me bananas. Still, I couldn’t get mad at Andy that night. I was just so happy that we were both among the living, not bombed to smithereens by some Iranian lunatic, or São Schlumberger’s fake son. Down in the basement I ran into Halston. Back upstairs I danced with Lorna Luft. I spotted Andy, half-hidden behind a big speaker, feeling up the busboy. Everywhere there were people I knew, and people I didn’t know, all of them, it seemed, thrusting poppers and coke at my bobbing nose. It was a crazy all-night night, like so many then.