Andy started a new collection in 1986: pedestals. Wood pedestals, marble pedestals, alabaster pedestals, wood pedestals painted to look like marble and alabaster. They were to be used for the new sculptures he wanted to make: portrait busts. “The whole point,” said Stuart Pivar, a collector who often accompanied Andy on his shopping forays in the mid-eighties, “was to go back to the portrait clients and sell them busts of themselves. He was always debating, Should it be life size? Should it be larger than life?”

Andy was not going to sculpt these busts by hand. “There was this place on Madison Avenue and 57th Street,” Pivar explained, “that had a machine which took your picture and made a portrait bust from it.” When the instant-bust shop went out of business, Andy sent Pivar searching for the machine. He tracked it down to an L.A. garage, where its inventor had stored it in an advanced state of disrepair. “Andy was willing to put it together,” Pivar said, “and just before he died, I worked out a deal for him to buy it for $250,000. He was very excited about it.”

In the first week of November 1986, Andy enjoyed two successful openings at two important New York galleries. At the Dia Art Foundation, Hand-Painted Images, 1960–62—the breakthrough half-Expressionist, half-Pop paintings of cartoons and advertisements—reminded everyone of just how far ahead of the times Andy had been from the start. At the Larry Gagosian Gallery, Oxidation Paintings, 1978, 1986 the titillating but beautiful Piss Paintings shown for the first time since their creation ten years earlier—reminded everyone of just how far ahead of the times Andy still could be. Amusingly, after more than a decade of bad reviews or no reviews, the so-called serious American critics were as gushy about these urinary canvases as their European counterparts had been about Andy’s work all along.

The Dia opening was the first time I had gone to a Warhol show since I’d quit the Factory nearly four years earlier. Andy beckoned me to the corner where he was signing autographs, and when the photographers crowded in on us, we instinctively leaned toward each other, finally friends again, smiling for the cameras. As it turned out, these were the last pictures taken of us together.

“Bob and I have a good relationship now,” Andy had told Thomas Ammann a few weeks before. When Thomas told me, he added, “You know, even when Andy was mad at you for leaving, he always asked me, ‘How’s Bob?’ But he has never once asked me, ‘How’s Jed?’ ”

After he moved out, in 1980, Jed came for the dogs every Sunday, but Andy either hid upstairs, or refused to talk to him. And yet he once showed Sam Bolton the photograph of Jed that he was still carrying in his wallet.

In the same month as his double hit at Gagosian and Dia, Andy’s fleeting relationship with Sam Bolton came to an abrupt end. His crush, as always with Andy, was unrequited, frustrating, possessive, and unhappy. In late November, they had a “big fight,” as Sam put it, after Andy discovered that he had stayed up into the wee hours with Halston and Victor Hugo. “We just watched TV and talked, about Andy actually,” Bolton told me, “but when Andy found out, he got really mad, especially since I didn’t tell him.”

Sam continued going to work every day, but the favorite was suddenly the outcast. Andy and he barely spoke, and he taunted Sam by drawing even closer to Paige. That Thanksgiving, following her lead, Andy ladled out soup to the homeless at the Church of the Heavenly Rest on East 90th Street. And his new line to Paige after advertising dinners was “maybe you should come home with me.” He also asked her to look into adopting a baby for them to raise. Had he finally had it with boys? Was he seriously considering changing his life and settling down with a woman and child? Or was it all part of some convoluted subconscious ploy, so twisted and automatic that even Andy couldn’t figure out what he was really doing?

In early December, some of the old gang—including Andy, Halston, Bianca, Steve Rubell, and I—were reunited at a small dinner given by Liza Minnelli for her new husband, sculptor Mark Gero, after his Madison Avenue gallery opening. The long white walls of Liza’s East Side apartment were lined with Andy’s multiple portraits of her mother, her father, and herself. But despite the decor, it wasn’t like the old days. The hostess had recently graduated from the Betty Ford Center, which meant drugs were out, and on the dot of midnight, she yelped, “Okay, guys! I’ve got to get up at four in the morning to fly to Rome to start a movie. I hate to break up the party, but everybody out!”

“Well, shall we go someplace for a nightcap?” Calvin Klein asked Halston.

“Your place or mine?” asked Halston.

We went to Halston’s. When we arrived, Halston took Calvin and his new wife, Kelly, on a tour of the upper level, Bianca and Dick Cavett sat at one end of the huge living room discussing the Nicaraguan situation, Steve darted from group to group, and Andy, Paige, and I sat at the other end, not knowing what to talk about.

“Do you still keep your diary?” Andy asked me at last, as if he had been waiting for the right moment all along. I said yes, and he told me that I should “make it into a novel.” I tried to change the subject, but Andy persisted. “It’s a greaaaat idea, Bob,” he said again and again and again. “Make it into a novel.” The more he said it, the more I wondered if he knew my secret: After four years of turning down offers, I had finally asked Mort Janklow to get me a deal for a book about Andy.

Vincent and Shelly invited me to their office Christmas party two weeks later, marking my official return into the Factory fold. It was good to see “the kids,” as Andy still called them—Pat Hackett, Chris Makos, Glenn O’Brien, Ronnie Cutrone, Fran Lebowitz—most of whom were edging forty, like me. Fred, who had passed that turning point two years earlier, cornered me with a sad story, half complaint, half confession. It had been a hard year for him, he said. He had had an operation on his knee. “The boss” was driving him crazy. He had been “really bad” at Nell’s—the hot new nightspot—a few nights before and had to write them an apology. He looked more beaten down than ever, weary and frail. Andy arrived rather late, just as I was leaving. “Gee, why are you going, Bob?” he asked. Those would be the last words Andy said to me.

On Christmas Day, Andy and Paige served dinner to the homeless again. “I didn’t go home to Portland,” Paige said, “so I could spend the holidays with Andy.” He called her a few minutes after she had dropped him off that night and told her that he was upset. “He said he was thinking about his mother,” Paige recalled, “and how he sent her back to Pittsburgh when she got really sick at the very end and he wished he had kept her with him. He was all choked up talking about it.”

Nineteen eighty-seven began with another artistic triumph for Andy: an exhibition of his photographs at the Robert Miller Gallery. Everyone from Jean-Michel Basquiat to Jerry Zipkin—neither of whom had paid much attention to Andy in the last few years—turned out for the opening, which was so crowded that Andy had to retreat behind a desk, where he sat signing catalogues. It was more like one of his shows in Düsseldorf or Paris than New York. “People came up to Andy,” said John Cheim, the co-director of the gallery, “as if they were paying obeisance to the Pope.”

The 35mm black-and-white photographs, taken between 1982 and 1986, covered almost the entire range of Warholian iconography. There were close-ups of flowered wallpaper and five-and-dime window displays, still-lifes of Fiesta Ware and silverware, portraits of Lana Turner, Brooke Shields, and Truman Capote, a bare-chested weight lifter, another chest in a James Dean T-shirt with a crucifix grazing the neckline, dolls dressed as priests and nuns, the Washington Monument and the Statue of Liberty, the World Trade Center and the Empire State Building, a Mao photo pinned to a Chinese wall. It was as if Andy had stripped the paint and silkscreening ink from his art and for the first time offered up his naked, original images.

But, typically, there was a twist, an old-fashioned human touch that both undercut and emphasized the modernity of the medium. The images were repeated, in groups of four, six, nine, and twelve, and each group was stitched together, by sewing machine, with the leftover thread hanging from the seams of the completed piece. Even more typically, the clever idea was stolen, this time from Chris Makos, who had been experimenting with stitching his own photographs for some time. Most typically, Andy—through his time-tested technique of flattery combined with bribery—was able to make Makos complicit in the theft. Chris arranged for Lance Loud’s younger sister, Michelle, who desperately needed work, to do the sewing for Andy. Chris also printed Andy’s photographs, or had his assistant do them, for a stiff fee, of course. Indeed, after studying the catalogue, I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that some of the photographs were taken by Chris, or at least set up by Chris—that weight lifter, those Venetian blinds, that hotel lamp all look more Makos than Warhol to my eye. When Chris saw the results of this uncredited collaboration hanging on the gallery walls, he reacted like a man waking from a dream to find that his roommate had run off with the rent money. “What a greaaaat idea,” he taunted Andy at the opening. “Where did you get such a greaaaat idea, Andy? Huh, Andy? Huh?”

A few days later there was a rave review in the New York Times—Andy’s first since the sixties—which hailed the stitching in particular as a brilliant visual and conceptual stroke.

I saw Andy for the last time on January 14, 1987, at Nell’s. He was with Paige and Fred at a long table that also included Bob Dylan and Sting. The dinner was being given by Nell for the English actor Ian McKellen. We waved at each other across the crowded room.

Four days later, Andy, Fred, and Chris Makos boarded the Concorde for Paris on their way to Milan for The Last Supper opening. Andy had wanted to take Paige and had told her to tell Fred that she was going. When she’d told Fred, he’d snapped, “Absolutely not.” When she told Andy, “he didn’t do anything,” Paige said. “I was mad—well, I didn’t get mad—but he should have stuck up for me.” So at the last minute, Andy had asked Chris along, even though they weren’t on the best of terms. Apparently, his presence was less threatening to Fred, and there was no thought of Andy’s traveling alone with Fred.

They arrived in Milan the morning before the January 22 opening and checked into the deluxe Hotel Principe di Savoia, where Andy and Chris shared a two-bedroom suite and Fred had a room on another floor. That afternoon, Daniela Morera, Interview’s Italian editor, who had organized their Milan press and social schedules, came to the suite. Andy informed her that he didn’t want to do any interviews, not even the one she had worked weeks to get with La Repubblica, one of Italy’s most prestigious newspapers. He told her that he wasn’t feeling well, that he had pains in his side. Daniela thought it might be his kidneys, but Andy said it was the flu. Nonetheless, he agreed to go to the dinner for two hundred that Mariuccia Mandelli and Aldo Pinto were giving that night to unveil the private theater they had installed in their Krizia fashion house. “But he wouldn’t check his coat,” Daniela recalled. “He said, ‘No, no. I have to keep myself warm.’ He had on a sweatshirt, a sports jacket, and a quilted coat—inside!”

After dinner, Fred went back to the hotel, but Andy and Chris followed Daniela to the penthouse apartment of a potential portrait client, Laura Cerlosoni, the niece of jeweler Marina B. “She has a swimming pool on the terrace,” Daniela elaborated, “and several Breughels. She talked the whole time with Andy about jewelry and portrait prices.”

Andy had pains the next day too, which he still insisted were flu symptoms, especially when he heard that Daniela was recovering from a virus. Still, Daniela said, “he was charming and nice,” all through a long and grueling schedule. In the morning there was a press conference with over two hundred journalists, TV reporters, and photographers. At lunch, designer Gianni Versace asked Andy to paint a pair of heads of Christ for his library. The opening itself, from four in the afternoon until nine in the evening, was followed by a big dinner party given by interior decorator Dino Franzin.

Daniela Morera said the opening was “the biggest event that ever happened in Milano. They were expecting five or six hundred people, but there were five or six thousand. One paper said ten thousand. The police had to close off the street, and all the socialites arriving in their limousines couldn’t get in. Every designer was there. Versace. Krizia. Moschino. The whole Missoni family. Every big artist. Every art director. All the graphic artists. And the public, the kids. People came on trains from the suburbs. People sent flowers. Andy was surrounded by white lilies, sitting behind a white Formica table, getting exhausted. He was signing catalogues, posters, magazines, glasses, scarves, gloves. People were pressing, screaming to get things signed, waiting for hours. I was screaming to bring bodyguards. Chris was helping Andy. But Fred wasn’t around. Even that morning, at the press conference, when I asked him if he was coming upstairs, he said, ‘I have nothing to do with that.’ ”

Hanging serenely above this mob scene were two of Andy’s paintings of The Last Supper, each nine feet by twenty-one feet, divided into five panels. One was simple and severe, reminiscent in style of the sixties Disasters series. The other was superimposed with price tags and corporate logos—fifty-nine cents, Dove, GE—not unlike the 1984 collaborations with Basquiat. The setting for these paintings, that mob scene, Andy’s last opening, was eerily appropriate: Palazzo delle Stellini—the Palace of the Stars—an eighteenth-century convent converted into an ultramodern bank. Across the street, in the Church of Santa Maria della Grazie, was Leonardo’s The Last Supper.

“Iolas worked out the deal with the bank,” Daniela said. “Andy told me the whole thing was Iolas’s idea.” It would be Alexander the Greek’s last show too. The sacred-monster art dealer died within months of the sacred-monster artist. “In Italy,” Princess Maria Gabriella di Savoia, the would-be king’s sister, told me later, “we believe that Leonardo da Vinci carries a curse.”

The day after his opening, Andy was feeling so bad that he didn’t leave his hotel suite, though to make Daniela happy he did go through with the interview for La Repubblica, reclining on a couch in a gray sweatsuit. Daniela brought him “homeopathic medicine for pain, because he wouldn’t take chemical medicine. And he said he wanted chocolates, but then he didn’t eat them.” That was a sure sign that Andy knew the pain was from his gallbladder, not the flu, though he kept this to himself. The following morning, cutting his trip short, he flew back to New York with Chris, leaving Fred in Europe.

He was feeling better when he got back to New York, and he plunged into his latest commissions: portraits of Beethoven for Hermann “the German” Wunsche and a big series of paintings and prints, titled The History of TV, for Ronald Feldman. But on February 5 the pain came back. Andy was having dinner at Nippon with his good friend John Reinhold and, for the first time since their break, Sam Bolton. They were supposed to go on to a movie, but in the middle of dinner Andy suddenly said he had to go home. Reinhold asked him what was wrong and Andy said, “Nothing.”

“C’mon,” said Reinhold.

“Oh, it’s just a little pain,” said Andy, dashing out of the restaurant. Later, Reinhold recalled, “You could tell he was really in a lot of pain. Andy just didn’t like to complain about being uncomfortable.”

Reinhold had replaced Fred and me as Andy’s closest confidant. He was a precious-gems dealer in his late thirties, but his friendship with Andy went much deeper than diamonds. Andy would turn down swell dinner parties to go to the movies with Reinhold—and this wasn’t a romance. They had been introduced in 1978 by Reinhold’s cousin, Andy’s sixties confidant Henry Geldzahler. “It was just magic” was the way Reinhold explained their instant rapport, sounding just like Andy. They were alike in many ways. Both were shy, insecure, secretive, lonely worrywarts. And weird. John Reinhold was married, but it was mutually agreed that his wife and Andy would never meet, and in ten years they never did.

Reinhold and Andy often talked two or three times a day, chitchatting for hours, even long distance when Andy was on a trip. Andy often called Reinhold from a pay phone on his way downtown and asked him to meet for what they called “nervous coffee.” They would usually go to a Brew ’n’ Burger near Reinhold’s office and talk about whatever was bothering Andy lately: work problems, love problems, Fred problems, Sam problems.

Had Reinhold noticed a change in Andy in the last year or two of his life?

“Yes,” he said, “first of all, he went out much less in the last few years. It would be dinner and a movie and maybe stop for ice cream. He’d be home by eleven, eleven-thirty. And there was a strong sense of loneliness. I would drop him off at that big house and then we’d speak five minutes later.”

John Reinhold noted one other important change in Andy’s behavior in the last few years: “He started going to doctors like Dr. Li.”

Dr. Linda Li was a chiropractor-nutritionist who treated Andy several times in January and February 1987, at the Li Chiropractic Healing Arts Center on upper Broadway. Andy had first met her in 1984, with Jon Gould. Jon’s death had done nothing to diminish Andy’s belief in the healing power of crystals. He continued seeing another chiropractor recommended by Dr. Li, Dr. Andrew Bernsohn, whom he called “the crystal doctor.” Bernsohn’s therapy consisted of passing pieces of amethyst and quartz over his patients’ bodies, to increase their energy. When Pat Hackett expressed some skepticism about Bernsohn, Andy replied, “I know he believes in crystals himself, because he’s afraid of what happens if you don’t do it right.”

Andy used to laugh when Paulette Goddard went on about the physical effects of wearing emeralds or rubies; now he was placing his life in the hands of semiprecious shamans. The first thing one saw at the last Factory was a giant rock crystal, perhaps two feet wide and almost as high. “Andy had tons of crystals,” Sam Bolton said. “And he wore a lot of crystal necklaces. This one big one was always falling off his neck.”

On Thursday, February 12, Andy was feeling well enough to give a Valentine dinner with Paige at Texarkana. One of their thirty guests was Andy’s long-time physician, Dr. Denton Cox. Though Andy saw Dr. Cox fairly often socially, he had stopped visiting his office for annual physicals in 1984. Cox, talking after Andy’s death, told me Andy didn’t make any mention that night of his latest gallbladder problems. He just said, “I’ve been bad. I’ve been eating chocolate and butter.”

The next day, Friday, February 13, the pains came back. Andy was exercising with his trainer, Keith Peterson, when he complained of pains in his side. Thinking it might be a muscle spasm, Peterson told him to stop exercising and said he’d see him on Monday. A little later, Andy buzzed Brigid on the intercom and asked her to come up to his studio. “I have the best chocolates from Sweden,” he said, leading her into temptation. Brigid was leaving for a fat farm near London the next day—she hadn’t told Andy because she knew he’d say she couldn’t have a vacation—and was in the mood for one last binge anyway. So she tossed down a bunch of bonbons and passed the box back to Andy. “I want some soooo bad,” he said, “but I’ve got a bad pain.” He pointed to his right side.

Brigid, who’d had her gallbladder removed in 1979, had encouraged Andy to do the same ever since. “I must have shown him my scar a million times,” she said, “so that he could see it was just a hairline. ‘Just get it out and get it over with,’ I always told him. ‘It’s no big deal.’ But he just wouldn’t listen. You know how stubborn he could be. So when I started in again that day, he told me, ‘Oh, shut up. It’ll be okay. Want another piece of candy?’ Anything to change the subject, as usual.”

And anything to avoid hospitalization. “Whenever he would pass a hospital,” Benjamin Liu said, “he would cover his eyes or block his view. And he’d get mad at me if we passed the Columbus–Mother Cabrini Hospital.”

“I don’t know how Andy could stand the pain,” Brigid continued. “It’s like having a heart attack. He did carry Demerol around with him ever since that time he collapsed at Elsie Woodward’s in the seventies.” Sam said that Andy had started taking painkillers after their dinner at Nippon the previous week.

Andy stayed in bed most of that weekend, watching TV—including “Andy Warhol’s Fifteen Minutes,” which had recently premiered on MTV—his own TV show at last. On Saturday, February 14, he went to see his dermatologist, Dr. Karen Burke, who had been giving him collagen injections to fill in his wrinkles, and told her about his gallbladder pain—only Andy would consult a skin doctor about a gallbladder problem. Burke told him to go see Dr. Cox as soon as possible. Andy told her he would call him Monday. On Monday, February 16, he canceled his exercise classes for the entire week, but he didn’t call Dr. Cox. Instead, he went to see Dr. Li, who massaged his side vigorously.

Andy was feeling much worse on Tuesday, February 17, but after work—the last day he came to the Factory—he rushed off to the Tunnel, where he was booked to model the avant-garde menswear of Japanese designer Koshin Satoh in a celebrity fashion show. Despite how bad he felt, there was no way Andy was going to miss a modeling job. Andy had switched agencies to Ford after Zoli died of AIDS. “Andy loved being a Ford model,” says Sam. “I think he loved it more than anything else.”

“Andy stood in a cold dressing room for hours,” said Stuart Pivar, who had taken him to the Tunnel in his limo, “waiting to model. He was in terrible pain.” In the last photograph of Andy ever taken, coming down the runway with Miles Davis, his eyes were alight with the thrill of stardom, but his lips were tense and taut, as if he were holding on for dear life. “Get me out of here, Stuart,” he gasped backstage. “I feel like I’m going to die.” Although Pivar said Andy’s pockets were filled with crystals, they couldn’t stop the pain. That night, Andy told Pat Hackett the next morning, dictating his last diary entry, he had taken Seconal, Valium, and aspirin to knock himself out.

Andy finally called Dr. Cox Wednesday morning, February 18. He arrived at his office just as Mrs. Nicholas Ruwe, the wife of the American ambassador to Iceland, was leaving. “She was thrilled to meet Andy,” Dr. Cox said. “And Andy asked her about a show he had in Reykjavik and she told him how great it was and Andy was charming. Here he was in so much pain and he was, well, working.” The moment he was alone with Dr. Cox, however, Andy dropped the charm. “I’m not afraid of death,” he told Cox straight off, “but I don’t want to go into the hospital. You have to help me stay out of the hospital.”

Dr. Cox gave Andy a complete examination. According to Cox, “everything was fine,” except his gallbladder, of course. Dr. Cox told him “the sonogram showed that it was so acutely infected that it was in danger of becoming gangrenous.” He recommended immediate surgery, but Andy wouldn’t hear of it. Because of the severity of his condition, Dr. Cox had Andy see Dr. Bjorn Thorbjarnavson, who had operated on the Shah’s gallbladder, that afternoon. He also recommended immediate surgery.

John Reinhold called him later: “I knew something was wrong, because he was rambling on. He must have been on something.” But Andy told his closest friend nothing about his desperate condition.

Brigid also spoke to Andy that day. She had called the Factory from London, and when they said that Andy wasn’t coming in, she called him at home and asked if anything was wrong. “Oh, nothing,” Andy said, “just a little flu.” Then, to throw her off, he joked, “and you’re fired and so are your dogs.” She was more surprised when he asked for her sister Chrissie’s number, because she and Andy weren’t really friends. But she didn’t make the connection: Chrissie’s gallbladder had burst a few years before and she had miraculously survived. Andy called Chrissie and stunned her by asking her to come over—even Brigid had never been in Andy’s house. Chrissie told him that she was dashing out to an ice-skating party, but Andy kept her on the phone for almost an hour, bringing up a new subject every time she thought the conversation was finished, never mentioning anything about his gallbladder, just murmuring vaguely about “not feeling well.”

On Thursday, February 19, in more pain than ever, Andy went to see Dr. Cox again, who repeated the sonogram that showed his gallbladder getting worse. Andy insisted on seeing a “nonsurgical” physician, so Dr. Cox sent him to Dr. Michael Schmerin. He also told Andy that he had to be operated on as soon as possible, that his gallbladder might burst at any moment, causing peritonitis and almost certain death. All three doctors urged Andy to check into New York Hospital that afternoon, so that Andy could have the operation first thing Friday morning. Andy insisted on putting it off for another day. Moving the operation to Saturday might have been a fatal error—many medical professionals say hospitals, especially Manhattan hospitals, are not as well staffed on weekends.

Andy told Pat Hackett that he was going to “the place” to have “it” done—he couldn’t bring himself to say the words “hospital” and “operation.” He also told her, “Don’t tell anyone. I’ll give you the story after,” which made her laugh, because he made it sound like an exclusive scoop she had to protect. “Andy didn’t want anyone to know he was in the hospital,” Vincent later told me, and, in fact, on Thursday only Pat, Vincent, and Fred knew that Andy was going into the hospital the next day. “The worst thing,” Paige Powell said right after Andy’s death, “is that Andy didn’t tell me he was going into the hospital. And I’m so mad at Vincent and Fred for not telling me. Because I would have gone to the hospital and stayed with him.”

On Friday, February 20, Sam Bolton somehow found out and called Andy around eleven to wish him luck. “Andy was really rushed,” he said. “He was running around hiding things.” A little later, Ken Leland, a young friend of Chris Makos who had recently taken Benjamin Liu’s job of picking Andy up in the morning and accompanying him on his shopping route to work, arrived in Stuart Pivar’s limousine—Andy had refused to go in an ambulance because it reminded him of when he was shot. Leland found Andy “rummaging through his stuff” in the dining room, a mounting stack of bags and boxes filled with gems and junk. It seemed that was one of the reasons why Andy hadn’t wanted to go into the hospital immediately: He needed time to stash his vast and scattered collection of jewelry and other valuables in the safe he kept in his bedroom and other hiding places.

At New York Hospital, Andy, dressed all in black with a gray scarf around his neck, checked in as “Bob Robert.” He was greeted by the staffer who had gotten friendly with him when Jon Gould was there and he gave her the latest Interview, an Interview T-shirt, and an Interview silk scarf. He told her several times that he didn’t want any visitors or any calls. “He looked good,” she said, “and he was in good spirits.”

“We just took the elevator up to his room,” Ken Leland later told Details, “and turned on the TV. I got him flowers for his room and he said, ‘What did you do that for?’ I also got him an assortment of his favorite things, like the National Enquirer, TV Guide, the Post, and the News …  also Dreamgirl by Mary Wilson and His Way by Kitty Kelley. We sat and watched Divorce Court and he was rooting for the guy who actually lost.”

It sounds like traveling with Andy: He moaned and groaned for days before the trip and all the way to the airport, but once he was on the plane, he opened a movie-star bio and accepted his fate without complaint. “He saw it wasn’t so horrible,” said Dr. Cox, who visited him that afternoon. “He liked his room and the nurses and wasn’t terrified at all.”

After Dr. Cox left, however, Andy called Dr. Burke and told her, “Well, Dr. Cox has got to save me now.” According to Burke, he said it like a dare, and that sounds familiar too. He was always saying to Fred or me, “Well, you got me into this, now you have to get me out of it.”

Before he fell asleep that night, at one in the morning, Andy called Paige and asked her to run some errands for him the next day. He still didn’t tell her where he was.

The next morning, Saturday, February 21, John Reinhold called Andy’s house and was told by either Nena or Aurora that Andy was “on a trip.” He knew that couldn’t be true, so he called Vincent, who told him not to worry, Andy was all right. But Vincent, following orders, wouldn’t say where Andy was.

Andy was all right. The three-hour operation, which had begun at 8:45 A.M., was a success. Andy’s gallbladder—it was gangrenous—was removed without complications. After another three hours in recovery, Andy was brought back to his room and he called Vincent to say he was fine. Then he called Fred. They visited him later that afternoon, as did Dr. Cox, who told them that Andy was doing so well he would probably be able to go home sooner than expected.

About the same time that Fred and Vincent were secretly visiting Andy in the hospital, I left New York for Zürich, to meet São Schlumberger and go to Thomas Ammann’s châlet in Gstaad. I couldn’t wait to tell my news: Mort Janklow had sealed the deal on my book, this book.

“The timing is perfect,” Thomas said. “Andy is having a kind of revival lately. Important people in the art world in America who never liked him are changing their minds, and in Europe Andy just gets bigger and bigger.” He said that Andy had major museum shows coming up in Germany and Austria, and that now Mary Boone, the hottest art dealer in New York, wanted to give him a show, of the 1984 Rorschachs paintings.

“In Paris too,” São agreed, “people who know about art speak about Andy differently in the past year or so. They accept his real importance. Finally.”

“And you’re getting along with Andy again,” Thomas added, “which is good. Because you don’t want to write just a putdown.”

I didn’t. That’s why I had let some time pass. But I was mad at Andy again, I told them, because the same day Mort had called to say my deal was done, Fred had called Mort and asked him to represent Andy’s diaries.

Thomas and São were incredulous. Andy could never publish his diaries while he was still alive, they both said, looking ever so slightly worried. He was just playing with me, as usual, they said. I wasn’t so sure. I knew how competitive and cutthroat Andy could be. “Andy will end up loving your book,” Thomas tried to reassure me, “because it will make him more famous. I think it’s great that you do it now, while he’s on top. Why wait until Andy dies, twenty, thirty years from now?”

Two hours after I slid into a deep jet-lagged nap, Thomas woke me. “Bob, I have something to tell you.”

I opened my eyes.

“Andy died.”

I closed my eyes.

A call from New York, a gallbladder operation, heart failure … I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. I just wanted to go back to sleep. I felt guilty, angry, and lost.

The phone started ringing and it didn’t stop for the rest of the night: art dealers wanting Warhol paintings from Thomas, newspaper reporters wanting Warhol quotes from me. William Norwich of the Daily News told me that Andy’s New York friends were all “devastated,” especially Paige. She had laughed out loud when Tama Janowitz called with the shocking news, but when she called Andy’s house and Fred answered, she knew it was true.

Fred had got the news first, shortly after Andy was pronounced dead at 6:31 A.M. on Sunday, February 22. Andy had listed him as “next of kin” on the hospital registration form. Fred immediately called Ed Hayes, the dapper criminal lawyer he had recently met through Reinaldo Herrera, and asked him to represent the Warhol estate, of which Fred was executor. Then Fred, Vincent, and Ed Hayes went directly to Andy’s house. Andy’s brothers learned of the death when John Warhola made his usual Sunday call to Andy and, like Paige, got Fred instead.

When Thomas called Andy’s house, Fred told him that the funeral would be in Pittsburgh and the family wanted it to be small and private; there would be a memorial service in New York later. Thomas said that Fred sounded “in control, very businesslike.” But later that night, a source told me, Fred went home and drank an entire bottle of vodka with Sam Bolton. “He was half in shock,” Sam confirmed, “and half giddy.”

I could understand why. As much as I mourned Andy’s death, there was an element of relief in my feelings too—and, unlike Fred, I hadn’t worked for him in some time. That night, however, as we watched the Swiss TV coverage, studded with the English words that Andy had added to the international lexicon, “Factory,” “Superstars,” “Underground Films,” and “Business Art,” we remembered Andy’s good side, his gentleness, his humor, his humility. Thomas said that Andy was the only artist he knew who didn’t hang his own work—there wasn’t a single Warhol hanging at Andy’s house. And I laughed a little when I realized that Andy had died on George Washington’s birthday.

“POP ART KING DIES” ran the banner on Monday morning’s Daily News. Andy’s death was front-page news from Los Angeles to West Berlin, but even in death there was still a difference in the way he was perceived on the opposite sides of the Atlantic. In Europe, the press treated Andy’s death like Picasso’s, saying that the art world would never be the same without him. In America, they treated it more like Elsa Maxwell’s, saying nightlife would never be the same without him.

Inevitably, rumors about the cause of his death crisscrossed the ocean too. One West German paper, Bild Zeitung, quoted unnamed New York Hospital sources who said that Andy had had AIDS. Thomas’s sister Doris had a friend who knew a doctor at the hospital who said that Andy hadn’t taken his prescribed medication after the operation. Suzie Frankfurt said she had a friend who knew the technician who did the tests on Andy before the operation and nothing was wrong with his heart. Paul Warhola came to suspect that “one of the Factory kids” visited Andy in the hospital late Saturday night and gave him some unspecified pills.

Over the following weeks and months, the controversy would grow, leading to investigations by both New York City and New York State, and a lawsuit by the Warhol estate against New York Hospital, alleging negligence and inadequate care. Ed Hayes claimed Andy’s intravenous liquid intake and outtake weren’t properly monitored, leading to overhydration, respiratory arrest, and cardiac arrest. “Drowning is the simplest way to put it,” Hayes said. The lawsuit is still pending, but it is perhaps worth noting, as M. A. Farber and Lawrence K. Altman said in a major New York Times Magazine piece, that Andy “was among the two-tenths of 1 percent of patients under age 60 who die while hospitalized after routine gallbladder surgery in New York State.”

Drs. Cox and Burke lashed out publicly at Dr. Li for “mashing” Andy’s gallbladder, and New York Hospital barred the private nurse they recommended to Andy in the first place. Everyone wanted to know why she waited until 5:45 A.M., when she said she noticed that Andy had turned blue, to call for help. Had she dozed off? Or left the room? “On Warhol’s chart,” the Times story said, “there are entries at 4:30 A.M. that he looked ‘pale’ and, 45 minutes later, that he looked ‘paler’—as well as an entry that he ‘slept most of the night.’ But state investigators say they suspect these notes by Ms. [Min] Cho, who told the hospital that she was reading her Bible in Warhol’s room, were actually written after the artist died.”

Min Cho’s lawyer accused the hospital of making her the scapegoat. And even if she had been asleep or away when Andy died, the question still remains: Why did his heart stop? “There’s something called ‘voodoo death,’ ” a doctor associated with New York Hospital told me. “When witch doctors have people so scared, they say, ‘You will die!’—and you do, on the spot.” He speculated that Andy could have awoken in the middle of the night and, finding himself alone in a strange place, died of fright. I can’t help thinking that this theory, laughable in most cases, might have applied to Andy. Maybe it was fear that got him in the end.

Back in Gstaad, the phone kept ringing all day Monday. Liza Minnelli wanted to know what to say about Andy’s art on the “Today” show. Marina Schiano railed against the hospital and told me that Jed was “really cracked up at first, but he’s a little better now.” Steve Rubell said that the night Andy died “Francesco Clemente walked into Odeon and started crying.” He also said that Elizabeth Taylor had called him and wanted to know who had Andy’s tapes. “She was worried,” Steve said, “because Andy used to get her to tell him everything when she was drinking, like how big all her husbands’ cocks were and how they were in bed.”

I called Paulette Goddard at her Locarno house, which she rarely left anymore, except for the occasional visit to Zürich to switch her money from one bank to another. “Isn’t it wonderful the way the world loves Andy?” she said. “The whole world. He’s page one in Milano, Zürich, Paris, New York, everywhere. They got the message. Isn’t that nice? I’m so happy for Andy. And for you too, because you had a lot to do with that. Aren’t you proud? Andy’s on the list of ten. The all-time greats. There’s Jesus and Charlie and Andy.” She never told me the other seven.

Perhaps the most touching reaction to Andy’s death was Stephen Sprouse’s: “Who will we do things for now?”

At the Factory, it was their first Monday without Andy. Ronnie Cutrone stopped by and later he said that “everyone was acting like nothing happened. Agusto was painting and drying paintings with a hair dryer, because there was work that was unfinished when Andy died. It was strange. Andy’s studio hadn’t been touched yet and I noticed a little painting on the side that said, ‘Heaven and Hell are just one breath away.’ I think it was the last thing Andy had painted.”

In Zürich, on that same day, Parkett, the Swiss art journal, received a package from the Factory that they thought contained Andy’s last work. They were planning a special Warhol issue for April, and for months there had been discussions with Andy about a limited-edition print that would be inserted in 120 deluxe copies. He wanted to do something Swiss, he said, and Thomas’s office had been sending him materials for ideas: pictures of cuckoo clocks, postcards of the Matterhorn, packages of Toblerone chocolate. So everyone was surprised when they opened the package sent just before Andy went into the hospital: It contained four stitched-together photographs of skeletons.

“Death was very much on his mind,” Thomas told me after the Parkett people called him. “He was so sensitive, Andy, so instinctive. He must have known.”

I called the Factory that Wednesday, and got Brigid. “We’re all okay,” she said, sounding shaky. “It’ll go on, it’ll go on. Fred’s been wonderful.” I asked to speak to him, but she said he was locked up with Ed Hayes, deciding what to do about the hospital. “It’s too abstract,” she told me, “just like Andy always said, ‘It’s too abstract. It’s like shopping at Bloomingdale’s.’ ”

She said that Vincent had taken her to Andy’s house, because she had wanted to see it, “just once, right? It was unbelievable. I wanted to puke. You couldn’t get in the dining room, there were so many shopping bags and boxes and statues. It was disgusting. Sad. The only thing I could think was ‘Has Jed seen this?’ And then I went upstairs to Jon Gould’s room and when Jon left Andy didn’t move one thing. Andy’s Valentine’s Day cards to Jon were still in the drawer. And the whole house was filled with shopping bags filled with Andy’s collections. It was so sick. I mean, you could really see from looking at the house just how fucked up Andy was, how sick and unhappy. Because it was all consumption and possession and just that, just having things to have them, not to make the house look good or anything.”

I asked Brigid when the funeral was and who was going, but she was vague and said I should talk to Vincent. I thought there might still be time to fly back for it, because the autopsy that the Warhol estate had demanded would delay it a day or two. Vincent was vague too. He said he “thought” the funeral was on the following day, Thursday, but the family wanted it very private and he wasn’t sure whether even Fred and he would go.

The entire Factory, most of the Interview staff, and Ed Hayes, who had never met Andy, flew to Pittsburgh the next day. Andy’s brothers later denied that they ever wanted to keep the funeral small or private—that decision was Fred’s, and Fred’s alone, with Vincent still following orders. In fact, Andy’s relatives couldn’t understand why his glamorous friends had snubbed him in the end. They were thrilled by the flowers sent by Mick Jagger and Jerry Hall, but wondered why they were the only ones, not knowing that Fred hadn’t allowed the name and address of the funeral parlor to be given to anyone else. Fred was furious when Joan Quinn turned up from Los Angeles, having been slipped the location of the funeral by an Interview staffer, saying that her “crazy red hair” might upset the pious Warholas.

“It seems at times he wandered far away from the church,” Monsignor Peter Tay told the one hundred mourners assembled in the onion-domed Holy Ghost Byzantine Rite Catholic Church on Pittsburgh’s working-class North Side, “but we do not judge him, we do not condemn him.” The monsignor went on to quote Luke 23: 39–43, “Jesus forgave the thief on his right. He did not forgive the thief on his left.”

The burial followed in the tiny, snow-covered St. John the Baptist Cemetery, overlooking a highway junction in suburban Bethel Park. Andy was laid to rest a few feet downhill from the double gravesite of his mother and father. His housekeepers, Nena and Aurora, wept. His silkscreener, Rupert Smith, stood off to one side, “looking really forlorn,” according to Joan Quinn. “And Paige really went crazy. She wanted them to open the big bronze coffin, but they wouldn’t, so she flung a copy of Interview, an Interview T-shirt, and a bottle of Estée Lauder’s Beautiful perfume into the grave.” The last was a touching choice: When Lauder launched her new product the year before with a promotion lunch for “the one hundred most beautiful men in New York,” Andy was thrilled to be on the list, a beauty in someone’s eyes at last.

Then everyone went to the $7.95-per-head chicken-and-dumpling lunch arranged by Andy’s sister-in-law Margaret Warhola at a nearby restaurant called the Mona Lisa Lounge. And the Factory contingent flew back to New York and got to work on the memorial service, which was set for April 1, April Fool’s Day.

The memorial service at Manhattan’s St. Patrick’s Cathedral was stirring and stately, festive and sad, lovely and grand. A legion of fellow artists came out to pay him homage: Oldenburg, Lichtenstein, Hockney, Serra, Sonnier, Arman, Christo, Marisol, Schnabel, Clemente, Chia, Basquiat, Haring, Scharf, and Jamie Wyeth—though Andy would have noted the absence of the two he would have wanted most, Rauschenberg and Johns. Still, as everyone said, he would have loved it. Don Johnson of “Miami Vice” (and an early Interview cover) and Patti D’Arbanville, the mother of his child (and star of Andy Warhol’s Flesh), received communion. So did Claus von Bülow. Jerry Zipkin and Regine seized front-pew seats. “How could D.D. Ryan wear a red coat?” muttered São Schlumberger. “How could Bianca wear a hat so big it blocks everyone’s view?” groused D.D. Ryan. Halston and Liza sat in the right nave, Calvin and Kelly Klein sat in the left nave, and Steve Rubell darted from one to the other. Fran Lebowitz complained about the pack of journalists on the cathedral steps asking her for a comment. “I told you what to say,” rock writer Lisa Robinson, another Max’s Kansas City veteran, told Fran. “I’m too grieved to talk today.” From ex-Baby Jane Holzer to ex-Ambassador Fereydoun Hoveyda, they were all there, three generations of Superstars, covergirls, portraits, advertisers, dealers, collaborators, friends.

Brigid, looking like a lady in the pearls she inherited from her mother, who had died three weeks after Andy, read from the Scriptures. John Richardson compared Andy to “that Russian phenomenon, the holy fool: the simpleton whose quasi-divine naiveté protects him from an inimical world.” Yoko Ono gave a eulogy—someone had suggested Liza Minnelli but Fred said no. And Nicholas Love, a young friend of Fred’s whom Andy hadn’t known but would surely have pronounced “a real beauty,” read from THE Philosophy of Andy Warhol—Pat had wanted to, but Fred said no; Brigid had proposed me, but Fred said no. But none of that mattered at St. Patrick’s. We were all there to praise and to pray for Andy, together: “Our Father who art in Heaven … ”

This rare camaraderie carried on to the lunch that followed in what was once Billy Rose’s Diamond Horseshoe nightclub below the Century Plaza Hotel, Steve Rubell and Ian Schrager’s newest hotel acquisition. Fred and Gerard Malanga walked arm in arm around the room, which had been painted silver for the occasion. Viva proposed marriage to Paul Morrissey. Sylvia Miles kissed Monique van Vooren. Jed was there with Jay and Susan, and for a moment I remembered how great it felt to be young and carefree and spending the summer in Rome. And Philip Johnson, Andy’s long-time champion, in his owl frames, beamed with the word that the Museum of Modern Art was going to give Andy a retrospective, finally.

Andy’s estate was first estimated at $15 million, but as the paintings were counted, the real estate tallied, and the shopping bags emptied, it was revised upward toward the $100 million mark. His will named Fred Hughes as sole executor and as president of the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, the beneficiary of practically his entire fortune. There was a $250,000 bequest to Fred. Andy’s brothers were to be given an amount no larger than $250,000, at the discretion of the executor. Fred could have given them nothing, but each of them ultimately received about $600,000, including $334,000 each from pension plans said to have been found in Andy’s home safe, and they signed waivers agreeing not to contest the will. John Warhola was named vice-president of the foundation and Vincent Fremont was named alternate executor of the estate and director of the foundation. Unlike Fred, Vincent wasn’t left any money. Some insiders think that the money Fred was left was repayment for his Bad investment. If true, that means that Andy didn’t leave anybody anything.

A few weeks after the memorial, Lana Jokel showed her 1972 Warhol documentary for a few of Andy’s friends. I arrived shortly after Sylvia Miles, who was wearing layers of shiny black satin and Spandex, and fake ponyskin boots. “Guess who I ran into on 57th Street today. Peter Frampton!” was how she greeted me. “You remember Peter Frampton?” I remembered a very long, very late night in a Studio 54 sideroom with the seventies rock star and eleven of his groupies.

Then came Dr. Denton Cox with Charles Rydell, one of the original Interview investors and, along with the late Jerome Hill, host of so many Algonquin dinners and Bridgehampton weekends at Windy Hill. Sylvia immediately pounced on Dr. Cox about Andy’s death, saying, “We’re all going to grill you separately so you may as well just tell us now what really happened and then you can enjoy the rest of the evening.”

Before Dr. Cox could say anything, there were two more arrivals: David Bourdon, the former Life magazine art critic, who was writing a book on Andy’s art; and Taylor Mead, the former Superstar, who was writing a book titled Son of Warhol. They sat down beside me, and there we were, three biographers on a couch, facing poor Dr. Cox, who asked for “a big Scotch.” He took a deep breath and said that he had loved Andy, as we all had, and had gone over and over what he could have done to treat Andy better, and that he was resolved in his own mind that he had done everything right. He said Andy had ignored his advice to have his gallbladder out for years and that on the day Andy had finally come to see him, he had examined him thoroughly, including a rectal examination. “Well, I shouldn’t say something about the rectal examination that isn’t really relevant.”

“Yes, you should,” Charles commanded forcefully. “Tell them what Andy said, because it proves you did the goddamn rectal examination.”

“Well, Andy said when I performed the rectal examination, ‘Nobody’s been there for a long time.’ ”

Just then Jed arrived, now one of New York’s four or five top decorators. Then came Paul Morrissey.

Dr. Cox continued, saying he had run through every scenario of how it could have been different. “Intensive care,” he claimed, “the hospital would never have gone for in Andy’s case, even though he was a celebrity. I could have put Andy in a ward, where there’s more supervision, but you just don’t do that with people who can afford a private room. I even offered to move Andy to a corner room when it opened up, but Andy said no. And the private nurse was Korean, just like all the staff nurses. She had been on staff herself, so they all knew her; she was part of the group.”

Cox was careful to note that the hospital recommended the private nurse, not he. He attacked the New York State report slapping the hospital as “slipshod.” And he seemed particularly upset that the New York Times printed his name when the state report came out, saying it was the only newspaper to do so. “That’s why I call it the Kremlin Times,” said Paul, laughing.

Lana showed her documentary. As Andy demolished Barbara Rose on the VCR, I watched Jed watching Andy. I noticed how much his hands looked like Andy’s, and how he was twisting his long fingers as Andy always did when he was nervous. When the film was over, Jed left.

The rest of us stayed for dinner, and eventually Paul and I left together and walked up Madison Avenue, talking about Andy. Or rather, Paul talked and I listened.

“Andy always wanted to do what everybody else wasn’t,” he said. “That was his basic impulse: ‘Movies have plots, so I’ll make movies without plots.’ He’d get that far. But then he didn’t know what to do next. He could make that first leap, but he couldn’t take the second step. He had to find someone to do that for him.

“Andy was the strongest-willed person I knew. He willed himself an artist, a famous celebrity, a society figure, a rich man. But Andy wasn’t happy with all his money. Fred says he was, but I didn’t think Andy looked like he was enjoying life when I saw him.

“You know what Andy really was: a primitive in a sophisticated world. That’s why people were attracted to him. John Richardson was onto something about Andy being a Russian village idiot/saint type. Andy was a holy fool.”

And a holy terror.