California State University, Northridge Exploitation

Home , 3 Coke Bottles, Andy Warhol, Cars (painting), Chuck Wein, Commercial art, Edie Sedgwick

CALIFORNIA STATE UNIVERSITY, NORTHRIDGE

EXPLOITATION, WOMEN AND WARHOL

A thesis submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in

Art

Kathleen Frances Burke

May 1986 The Thesis of Kathleen Frances Burke is approved:

Louise Leyis, M.A.

Dianne E. Irwin, Ph.D.

California State. University, Northridge

ii DEDICATION

This thesis is dedicated to Dr. Mary Kenon

Breazeale, whose tireless efforts have brought it to fruition. She taught me to "see" and interpret art history in a different way, as a feminist, proving that women's perspectives need not always agree with more traditional views. In addition, I've learned that personal politics does not have to be sacrificed, or compartmentalized in my life, but that it can be joined with a professional career and scholarly discipline.

My time as a graduate student with Dr. Breazeale has had a profound effect on my personal life and career, and will continue to do so whatever paths my life travels.

For this I will always be grateful.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

In addition, I would like to acknowledge the other members of my committee: Louise Lewis and Dr. Dianne

Irwin. They provided extensive editorial comments which helped me to express my ideas more clearly and succinctly.

I would like to thank the six branches of the Glendale

iii Public Library and their staffs, in particular: Virginia

Barbieri, Claire Crandall, Fleur Osmanson, Nora Goldsmith,

Cynthia Carr and Joseph Fuchs. They provided me with materials and research assistance for this project.

I would also like to thank the members of my family.

My sister, Eileen M. Burke, who encouraged me to pursue this degree so that I might teach, and my husband, Patrick

W. Kelly, who inspired me to finish it. They were invalu able as "sounding boards" for ideas, and as proofreaders when I simply couldn't read it one more time. Both Eileen and Patrick know more than they ever wanted to about Andy

Warhol. Thanks also goes to my mother-in-law, Rita H.

Kelly, for her assistance in the details of typing this project. Finally, to my parents, Mary Dorothy and

William Vincent Burke, who taught all three of their daughters the value of education and the importance of a woman pursuing a professional career. Thank-you, Mom ·and

Dad, we've made it!

iv TABLE OF CONTENTS

Page

DEDICATION/ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS iii

LIST OF PLATES AND SOURCES .• vi ABSTRACT ..•. viii

INTRODUCTION .. 1 Chapter

1. COMMERCIAL ART: WARHOLTS EARLY EXPOSURE TO WOMEN'S CULTURE. . . . • . • 5

The I. Miller Campaign and Other Shoe-Related Imagery Warhol's Experience with Commercial Art and its Relationship to his Fine Art Production

2. WARHOL AND POP ART 1962-64. 16

Mainstream Critical Analysis of Pop Art Warhol's Pop Art Consumer Imagery Warhol's Pop Art Images of Media Celebrities

3. WARHOL AND THE SUPERSTARS 1964-68 . . . . 32

Warhol's Factory "Baby" Jane Holzer Edie Sedgwick Nico Viva Valerie Solanas Summary

4. CONCLUSION. . 77

PLATES ...• 88 BIBLIOGRAPHY •. 101

v PLATES AND SOURCES

Plates Page

1. Andy Warhol, Crazy Golden Slippers. 12-13

Life Magazine, 21 January 1957

2 0 Andy Warhol, Crazy Golden SliJ2J2ers. 0 0 0 13 Life Magazine, 21 January 1957

3 0 Andy Warhol, 100 SOUJ2 Cans. 0 0 0 0 0 57 John Coplans, Andy Warhol (Greenwich, Conn: New York Graphic Society, 1970)

4 0 Andy Warhol, Coca-Cola Bottles. 0 0 0 0 0 45 John Coplans, Andy Warhol

5. Andy Warhol, The Six Marilyns (Marilyn

Six-Pack) 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 68

John Coplans, Andy Warhol

6 0 Andy Warhol, Liz as Cleo12atra 0 0 0 0 0 0 89

John Coplans, Andy Warhol

7 0 Andy Warhol, 16 Jackies 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 101

John Coplans, Andy Warhol

8 0 Andy Warhol, Jackie 0 w 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 98

John Coplans, Andy Warhol

vi Plates Page

9. "Baby" Jane Holzer in 13 Most Beautiful VV()Tirr~l1 • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • 148

10. Factory Foto, Edie Sedgwick and Andy Warhol. . • . • . . . • . . . n.p. Andy Warhol and Pat Hackett, Popism: The Warhol Sixties (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1980)

11. Paul Morrissey, Nico .... n.p.

Warhol and Hackett, Popism

12. Viva and the Rape, in Lonesome Cowboys. . n.p.

Stephen Koch, Stargazer: Andy Warhol's World and His Films (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1973)

vii ABSTRACT

EXPLOITATION, WOMEN AND WARHOL

Kathleen Frances Burke

Master of Arts in Art

Historians and critics have identified Andy Warhol as an influential force in the world of twentieth century art. As such, the attitudes expressed in his work of the sixties had an effect on the development of contemporary fashionable culture. The goal of this thesis is to de termine Warhol's attitude toward women and the culture that is created by and for women. By using a feminist critical methodology, I hope to establish that Warhol's attitudes are misogynistic, and personally destructive for the women with whom he associates in the mid and late nineteen sixties.

Warhol's misogyny is most clearly expressed in a group of relatively obscure films, which featured prominent female members of the Factory entourage such as,

viii Edie Sedgwick and Viva. The woman-hating content of these

films suggest that Warhol's earlier Pop Art depictions of

female media personalities and consumer objects might also

reflect a similar connected set of exploitative ideas.

By ''re-viewing" Warhol's work as a whole, it becomes clear

that the artist is fascinated with but ultimately repulsed by women.

ix INTRODUCTION

Mainstream art history tells us that Andy Warhol was one of the major forces behind the 1960's explosion known as Pop Art, an art form that glorified the objects of popular culture. Critics reported that Warhol was a master at identifying the most "banal" symbols of that culture and at challenging our perceptions of them. His glorification of the Campbell's soup can and his portraits of Marilyn Monroe are recognized at all levels of society.

Contemporary critical analysis of the sixties chose to view Warhol as a social commentator, one who pointed out the impersonal nature of our machine culture and our love of the vapid beauty queen depicted in popular Hollywood films.

In this thesis, I will attempt to prove that

Warhol's visual images of the sixties are not just a general indictment of heterogeneous consumer culture, but more specifically, that his Pop Art imagery is taken directly from women and the consumerist culture that is associated with them. Furthermore, his use of these images is a negative exploitation of women and the products of culture created by and for women. When one

1 2

looks at Warhol's work from the mid and late sixties,

he moves from a critique of values he seemingly

associates with women to a direct expression of anti

feminism in his exploitation on every level of his young

women "superstars". This is an element of Warhol's work

that has largely been ignored, and thus I am going to use

feminist critical methodology to "re-view" Warhol's work

of 1962-68, analyzing the attitudes toward women implicit

in his art. The key to this analysis is a group of

obscure films, whose women-hating content is obvious and

extreme. But if one is sensitive to it, there is much

subtle sexism in his better known work: the Pop Art

paintings of the early sixties. If one moves beyond

formal..analysis and makes connections between subject

"'>ftia.tter,: historical content and social values, it becomes

~1~2l.·r::'.that Warhol is fascinated with, but ultimately

repulsed by, women.

Warhol began his career as a commercial artist.

It is in his early advertising work that we see the

emergence of two trends that will dominate his career

for the rest of the decade: objects associated with

women as a cultural group and the glamour of Hollywood.

This paper will open with a brief discussion of the

early part of Warhol's career in advertising art. The

purpose of this section is to establish his early involve

ment with women's consumer culture as reflected in the 3

art of this period.

Chapter two will include a discussion of mainstream critical analysis of Warhol's static visual art from

1962-64. The artist's early Pop Art used Campbell's soup cans, S&H Green Stamps and Brillo boxes as its subject matter. By using a feminist analytical method, I hope to establish the association of these objects with female consumerism, motherhood and housewifery. This section will conclude with an analysis of Warhol's portraits of

Hollywood stars. His well-known portrait series of

Marilyn Monroe, Elizabeth Taylor and Jacqueline Kennedy received much critical attention at the time of their completion. However, unlike Warhol's consumer images,

··.these... works were discussed primarily in formal terms, whil.e implications of the content were ignored. I believe this to be a reflection of the more uncomfortable aspects of these works. Critics ignored the parallel between the time of production of the portraits and the specific events occurring in each woman's life at the same time.

Warhol chose to exploit their visages at the "appropriate" moment, when media and, therefore, public interest in them was at its apex.

Chapter three analyzes Warhol's images of women in film. Filmmaking became Warhol's main interest from

1965-68; in fact, he gave up painting to concentrate on his underground movies. These films were made in the 4

artist's studio, known as the Factory. Here, in the

Factory, all the elements central to Warhol's milieu

came together. Wealthy, attractive, young women such as

Edie Sedgwick and Viva (Susan Hoffman) were drawn to

Warhol's circle and soon became "superstars" in his

films. Some of Warhol's most important underground films

will be analyzed in order to determine their role in

Warhol's exploitation of and misogynist attitude toward

women.

The thesis will conclude with a discussion of

some possible reasons why Warhol exploited women's culture

during the decade of the sixties. One consideration is

Warhol's interest in establishing a personal fame at times i . .• :.: . . ~ -. equivalent to the women that he "glorified". Moreover,

some of Warhol's exploitative and destructive attitudes

toward women can be· associated with attitudes found among

gay males, who formed an important cultural element in

Warhol's Factory during the sixties. il '

CHAPTER 1

COMMERCIAL ART:

WARHOL'S EARLY EXPOSURE TO WOMEN'S CULTURE

Andy Warhol first gained recognition for his work as a commercial artist in New York City. He moved to

New York after graduating from the Carnegie Institute of

Technology, where he earned a Bachelor's Degree in pic- 1 tor1a. 1 d es1gn. . According to a recent monograph written by Carter Ratcliff, Warhol had intended to use his degree 2 to teach art in the public school system. This goal was abandoned, however, when elassmate and fellow artist,

Phillip Pearlstein, suggested they move to New York in 3 the summer of 1949.

Once Warhol was settled in Manhattan he began to show his portfolio to prominent art directors in the world 4 of fashion. Tina Fredericks, art director for Glamour,

1 Rainer Crone, Andy Warhol (New York: Praeger Publishers Inc., 1970), p. 12.

2 Carter Ratcliff, Andy Warhol (New York: Abbeville Press, 1983), pp. 12-13. 3 4 Ratcliff, p. 13. Ratcliff, p. 13.

5 6

was among the first to hire Warhol, giving him assign- ments to create short story illustrations. The popularity of his early work is due, in part, to a technique

Warhol developed for the execution of his drawings: a broken and irregular line created through the use of monoprinting. A line drawing was produced in ink on non-absorbent paper, then the drawing was blotted on to an absorbent piece of paper. Impressed by this unique drawing approach, Tina Fredericks encouraged Warhol to take an assignment drawing shoe ads for Glamour. 5

Advertising for this popular woman's magazine was just the beginning of what would become the bulk of Warhol's commercial art work.

The I. Miller Campaign

and Other Shoe-Related Imagery

Throughout the fifties Warhol's reputation as a commercial artist grew, culminating in his successful

1955-57 ad campaign created for the exclusive New York women's shoe stores, I. Miller. 6 In his 1982 dissertation, Patrick Smith documents the importance of Warhol's

5 Ratcliff, p. 13.

6 Patrick Smith, "Art 'in extremis': Andy Warhol and his Art" (Ph.D. diss., Northwestern University, 1982), p. 133. 7

association with the chic women's shoe chain:

Before Warhol worked for I. Miller, he did free lance drawings of shoes and of fashion accessories for Bonwit Teller advertisements and for various fashion magazines, such as Glamour. It was, how ever, his association with I. Miller that linked his name with the presentation of fashionable and chic shoes and that provided him with an income of about 50,000 dollars. 7

During this period when Warhol was creating illustrations for I. Miller, he was restricted from producing ads for any other concern, regardless of the product.

Consequently, the bulk of Warhol's commercial ad designs were concerned with representing women's shoes. While his contract with I. Miller prohibited him from accepting other professional jobs, it did not restrict him from selling the rejected shoe ads from that campaign to private __ ar.t.c.ollectors, thereby allowing him to develop

::. a personal· .cl·ientele in the world of fine art. . . . ~:. Warhol exhibited the rejected I. Miller drawings at the restaurant-boutique, Serendipity. The popularity of these shoe drawings and the fact that they sold on consignment encouraged the owners of the restaurant to commission Warhol for additional work. For them he developed a special series of drawings based on his shoe ads, which were a combination of Warhol's monoprint line drawing, color and decoupage. 8

As the drawings grew more elaborate, each shoe

7 Smith, pp. 133-34. 8 Smith, pp. 135-36. 8

seemed to develop its own "personality". Eventually

these baroque shoe drawings captured the attention of

Life magazine, and in the fall of 1956 the editors com 9 missioned a series of "Gold Shoes". The drawings were

reproduced in the January 21, 1957 issue. Each shoe was

named after a famous personality, both male and female

and were captioned as follows:

Truman Capote was characterized by a plant-filled slipper made to symbolize his play, House of Flowers.

Kate Smith, whom Warhol has always admired because of broadca~ts, evoked a filigree slipper plus golden calf.

Zsa Zsa Gabor provoked a jazzy, spiked-heeled number suggesting her gay social life, her fashionable wardrobe.

Julie Andrews, star of My Fair Lady, evoked a lady like slipper which Warhol feels reflects the show's decor.

Elvis Presley is represented by a buccaneer type of boot with flowery ornamentation to give it a foppish quality.

James Dean inspired [a] spurred western boot to convey a rugged character, though he never made [a] cowboy movie. 10 (Plates 1 and 2)

9 Smith, p. 136. 10 There seems to be some controversy regarding the naming of the personality shoes. According to the copy that appeared in the 1957 issue of Life, the six shoes that they reproduced were only a sample of Warhol's work in this vein. Forty additional drawings were part of the series, indicating that Warhol named each shoe as it was created, or that he devised the shoes with specific per sonalities in mind. In an interview conducted for Smith's dissertation, Nathan Gluck, one of Warhol's many assistants, claimed that the shoes came first and then Warhol's friends 9

·Smith devotes a great deal of space to Warhol's

shoe imagery in his dissertation, stating that his only motivation in creating a shoe related imagery, outside of commercial art work, was to establish a name for himself

in the world of fine art. "In my opinion, Warhol realized that his virtual campaign of shoe-related imagery had more to do with his association with I. Miller, which allowed him to capitalize his blotted-line drawings into 11 saleable esthetic products." Smith believes this to be so because Warhol abandoned the shoe images in 1957, at 12 the same time that he stopped working for I. Miller.

While I do not doubt that the ispect of personal fame is one of the driving forces throughout Warhol's career, perhaps there are other factors to consider when assessing his aesthetic decisions. Smith's conclusion is based on the fact that the shoe imagery disappears at the conclusion of the I. Miller ad campaign. However, the shoes do reappear, at least two times, in Warhol's career.

In 1970, the directors of the museum at the Rhode Island

School of Design in Providence asked Warhol to go through their storage facilities and organize a show of the objects that most attracted his attention, the focus being

provided the titles. However, basing his opinion on the phrasing of the captions that appeared in the magazine, Smith believes that the idea for naming the shoes after famous personalities was suggested by an editor at Life.

ll Smith, p. 138. 12 Smith, p. 138. 10

the "eye" of the artist. Warhol provided the gallery with

strict instructions to display the objects in the same

haphazard fashion in which they had been stored. Among

the objects that caught the artist's eye was a collection

of old shoes which were transported and shown in the

gallery as they had been found in their basement storage 13 closets.

As recently as 1982, Warhol was producing drawings

of shoes. Print Collector's Newsletter reported that a

series of silkscreen prints, with shoes as the subject matter, were available for purchase through Castelli

Graphics. Each print, which was decorated with diamond 14 dust, sold for $300o.

Apparently the shoes have a greater personal

significance for Warhol than Smith perceives. For

example, he ignores the possibility that the shoes could 15 f unc t 1on. as a f et1s . h 1tem . f or t h e art1st. . T h e s h oe 1s, .

in the Freudian sense, a typical sexual fetish, which

Warhol may have been attracted to because shoe drawings were the vehicle that allowed him to develop from a

13 Trevor Wyatt Moore, "The Midnight Snack of Andy Warhol" Christian Century, 1 April 1970, 396-97. 14 "Prints and Photographs, published," Print Collector's Newsletter 12 (January-February, 1982), p. 12. 15 The concept of Warhol's personality shoes as fetishes was recognized in Parker Tyler's 1956 review of the drawings when they were on exhibit at the Bodley Gallery. Parker Tyler, "Bodley, New York, exhibit," Art News 55 (December, 1956), 59. 11

"commercial" to a "fine" artist.

In addition Warhol, as a gay male, may have become involved with women's shoes as sexual fetishes. Evidence for this is provided by Stephen Koch, who reports that

Warhol has one of Carmen Miranda's shoes, presumably from one of her films, "enshrined above his fireplace in New

York."16 This is not only an example of Warhol's persistent interest in shoes, but it is a foretaste of his later involvement with various media celebrities.

Perhaps there is another reason for Warhol's abandonment of the shoe as subject matter in his 1960's art, besides the fact that he was no longer associated with I. Miller shoes. His professional career began as a successful commercial artist; this is unusual for a fine arts career in the fifties and sixties. The per- ception of these two branches of the arts as mutually exclusive was more clearly defined at that time. Once

Warhol began to draw the attention of fine art gallery owners and patrons, he realized it would be wise to put the world of commercial art behind him. Therefore, during the early sixties, Warhol discarded the shoe as an image. As Carter Ratcliff suggests, "Though Warhol has never changed his personal style, he did abandon

16 Stephen Koch, Stargazer: Andy Warhol's World and his Films (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1973), p. 62. 12 ,, '

commercial art as decisively as he possibly could. The

line between his first and second careers is astonishingly

sharp."17 With this in mind, it does not seem unusual that Warhol left the shoe image until the 1970's, after he had safely established a fine art reputation.

Warhol's Experience with Commercial Art

and its Relationship to his Fine Art Production

Warhol's commercial art experience is interpreted by Rainer Crone in his monograph on the artist. This scholar believes that the importance of Warhol's years as a commercial artist cannot be overestimated, especially in terms of his personal and artistic development.

According to Crone:

it would be naive to think that his experiences in the blase, hypocritical world of advertising, in cluding work for the exclusive Tiffany and Bonwit Teller, played only a minor role in Warhol's un believably rapid acceptance by the world of the fine arts establishment of New York, or that all he wanted to be was a star .... in the commercial art world of New York Warhol must have seen how men are used as products - how their characters and values are bought and sold as objects .... The product as person - the person as product. 18

Thus Crone sees Warhol's early career as the breeding ground for his later concerns with consumer imagery and

17 Ratcliff, p. 17. 18 Crone, p. 12. 13

movie stars as products of popular culture.

Crone is among the group of perceptive critics who have noted that Warhol's background in commercial art may have had a lot to do with his later critical take on American consumerism. This is true, but the idea needs to be developed further. Was Warhol really exposed to the concept of men being used as products, as Crone suggested?

Most of his commercial art appeared in magazines aimed at a female market such as Glamour and Harper's Bazaar.

Warhol was not just "in merchandising''' he was part of a branch of the advertising and publishing wo~ld that con stituted a separate subculture - marketing to women via very sophisticated techniques emphasizing glamour. His was the world of upscale women's magazines, where adver tising, illustration and editorial content all work together to create an influential set of ideas as to what constitutes femininity.

This idea is documented in a recent article by

Sally Stein which traces the shaping of women as an important consumer market through an analysis of selec tive issues of Ladies Home Journal from 1914-39. Central to this study are six pages which Stein discusses from the October 1939 issue. Three double-page spreads were devoted to marketing clothing and fashion accessories for wealthy, high fashion women, middle class women and finally, lower class women. Each set of ads used photography, drawing and color to impress upon 14

women of differing financial means the possibilities available to them in a fashion world designed to erase those class distinctions. According to Stein:

each of these three spreads spoke to a different strata of the magazine's somewhat diversified readership. But the consistent fact of color on all three double-spreads at the heart of the editorial section of the magazine glossed over these differences and conveyed the editor's con viction that all the readers assigned the same high value to beauty, that the ideal of glamour was democratic and unifying. 19

Additionally, Warhol's experience in the commercial art world was generally directed by women. It is a world where many women are employed in top positions. Tina

Fredericks, who gave Warhol his first commercial assignment, headed Glamour's art department from 1943-53. 20

The art department at Harper's Bazaar was directed by 21 Carmel Snow, and Geraldine Stutz was the art director 22 f or War h o 1 ' s I . M"ll 1 er campa1gn.. . By 1953 , War h o 1 was successful enough to require the services of an agent; he hired a woman, Fritzie Miller. 23 Thus Warhol's experience of consumer culture is the specific experience of women selling a mass audience of other women via

19 Sally Stein, "The Graphic Ordering of Desire: Modernization of A Middle-Class Women's Magazine 1914 1939" Heresies 5 (Issue 18, 1985), p. 15. 20 Smith, p. 570. 21 Ratcliff, p. 14. 22 Smith, p. 860. 23 Ratcliff, p. 14. 15

notions of glamorous femininity.

By examining the history of Warhol's commercial art career more closely, issues emerge that have not been examined by critics writing about Warhol. First there is the fact that gay men have traditionally found a home in this world, when many other areas of the advertising and indeed art world were (and still are) very homophobic.

In addition, Warhol was involved with that area of the commercial art world that sold goods to women, often at a manipulating and condescending level. From a feminist critical viewpoint, which assumes that gender is crucially important in the formation of culture, this is an aspect of Warhol's career that cannot be ignored. However, it is overlooked by most mainstream commentators, who be lieve that culture is not gender determined. Warhol's advertising career is important to this feminist evalua tion of his work because many of the attitudes that he developed during this period toward women as consumers, may carry over to his Pop Art work. CHAPTER 2

WARHOL AND POP ART 1962-64

Warhol's break with his commercial art career was complete by the early nineteen sixties. His transition from the "commercial" to the "fine" art world was unusual because they were perceived as two separate spheres in the late fifties and early sixties. Often this transition was made more difficult by those artists who had already been accepted in the fine art world. For example, Warhol appreciated and collected the work of Jasper Johns and

Robert Rauschenberg, however, this admiration was not mutual. Filmmaker, Emile De Antonio, interviewed by

Warhol, told the artist he was "too swish, and that up- sets them [Rauschenberg and Johns] " and "when they do commercial art - windows and other jobs I find them - they do it just to 'survive.' They don't even use their real names. Whereas you've [Warhol] won prizes! You're famous for it!"l

Although Warhol was a successful commercial artist, he still wanted to become a member of the "serious" fine

1 Andy Warhol and Pat Hackett, Popism: the Warhol '60's, (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1980), pp. 11-12.

16 17

art world. According to Carter Ratcliff:

Warhol put an astounding amount of energy and refinement into work of the most perishable nature. At some point during the middle of the 1950's, he seems to have caught glimpses of the possibility that fine art possessed staying power. Painting, not mere illustration, could lift him out of time and its seasons, and offer a place in history. 2

Eventually Warhol was able to make the transition and in the 1960's he was accepted as a ''fine" artist.

This was the decade he would have shows at major New York galleries and catch the eye of new young collectors. The sixties was the decade of Pop Art, a style defined by its recognizable subject matter borrowed from popular culture, and its impersonal approach in presenting that subject matter.

Critical analysis of Warhol's contribution to the

Pop Art movement suggests that the artist was a socially responsible satirist of heterogeneous American consumer culture. However, much of this analysis focuses on

Warhol's technique rather than the content of his work.

Critics associate Warhol's seemingly arbitrary choice of images with Marcel Duchamp's readymades, claiming that they derive from a similarly innovative attitude toward what is and is not traditionally acceptable subject matter in the art world. Thus, according to the critics, Warhol was able to accomplish two things with his art: assert

2 Carter Ratcliff, Andy Warhol, (New York: Abbeville Press, 1983), p. 18. 18 p '

America's obsession with objects and, in the vein of

Duchamp, challenge traditional concepts about art.

When one views Warhol's paintings and prints

individually, they tend to support the assumption that he

is a sophisticated social critic, choosing almost arbitra rily images that reflect American materialism, and simply

''re-producing" them to show us how we have fetishized consumer goods. But when one looks at his work as a whole, another interpretation suggests itself. Warhol's choices are not all that varied or arbitrary; he concen trates on objects and images which our culture tends to associate with women. Thus, if Warhol is a social critic, his negativity may be largely directed at women.

Mainstream Critical Analysis of Pop Art

Although Warhol was not the first, nor the only member of the new generation of artists interested in the possibility of American popular culture as a basis for art, he certainly gained the greatest amount of media attention. According to some critics, generally those who had invested a great deal of personal energy as well as professional reputation in glorifying the Abstract

Expressionist movement during the fifties, Pop artists had capitulated to some of the worst elements of popular culture. Harold Rosenberg clearly expresses this view. 19

Certainly, Pop Art earned the right to be called a movement through the number of its adherents, its imaginative pressure, the quantity of talk genera ted. Yet if Abstract Expressionism had too much staying power, Pop was likely to have too little. Its congenital superficiality, while having the advantage of permitting the artist an almost limit less range of familiar subjects to exploit (anything from doilies to dining-club cards), resulted in a qualitative monotony that could cause interest in still another gag of this kind to vanish over- night ..• 3

While Rosenberg seems willing to accept the inevitability of Pop Art's impact, he remains convinced that its real

social and artistic value is non-existent.

It was up to a new, younger generation of critics to intellectualize about the new movement. Among its important critical voices were Leo Steinberg and Lawrence

Alloway; in fact, the latter was responsible for coining 4 the term, "Pop Art". Here is Alloway's explanation of the new movement's basic philosophy.

Pop art is neither abstract nor realistic, though it has contacts in both directions. The core of Pop art is at neither frontier; it is, essentially, an art about signs and sign-systems .... Pop art deals with material that already exists as signs: photo graphs, brand goods, comics - that is to say, with preceded material. The subject matter of Pop art, at one level, is known to the spectator in advance of seeing the use the artist makes of it. 5

Consequently, this new art was not interpreted as

3 Harold Rosenberg, The Anxious Object, (London: Thames and Hudson, 1964), pp. 27-28.

4 Tom Wolfe, The Painted Word, (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1975), p. 82.

5 Lawrence Alloway, American Pop Art, (New York: Macmillan Publishing Co. Inc.; 1974), p. 9. 20

being about subject matter in the same way that a Renais- sance painting was about its figurative images. Its socially redeeming value lay in making a social comment about American life in the sixties by examining its sign systems. The critics informed the public that Warhol's art was about the country's obsession with consumerism, whether it be for objects such as money, Coca-cola, or

Campbell's soup or for objectified celebrities like

Marilyn Monroe, Elizabeth Taylor, or Jacqueline Kennedy. 6

Additionally, Warhol's art was viewed as a series of challenges to the traditions of art making in Western culture, particularly because of his use of the silkscreen for reproducing images on canvas. By silkscreening an object or person in large series, critics believed that

Warhol challenged the concept that each work of art must be unique. His choice of subject matter, usually borrowed from photographs in the public domain, brought into question the traditional belief that an art work must be original. In fact, Warhol's apparent lack of involvement with his art production was praised by some writers.

According to Sam Green: "Warhol is so unconcerned with creative involvement that he prefers not to take credit

6 As this study is intended to examine Warhol's attitude toward women and culture created by and for women, certain of his Pop subjects will not be treated. The Death and Disaster series have been interpreted by several scholars. For a discussion of their placement and importance to Warhol's oeuvre see: Ratcliff, pp. 37-42. 21

for his work and signs it only for the convenience of

identification, cataloguing and saies." 7

The impact of this mass produced subject matter

was even more accentuated by Warhol's ironic statement 8 of his desire to be a machine. Such statements encour-

aged critics to view Warhol as an important social

commentator, insightfully realizing the ultimate irony in

a machine, himself, "mechanically" (in assembly-line

fashion) reproducing machine-made objects. John

Rublowsky, in his book on Pop Art, explains what he takes

to be Warhol's brilliance:

Duplication and repetition are new factors in the world. They occur neither in nature nor in hand crafts. They are a £unction of the machine, and the machine is the dominant influence of the twen tieth century .... How does the artist, with his highly developed sensitivity, express these pheno mena? Andy Warhol has done it by utilizing mechan ical techniques, by using the machine to express the machine. What an audacious solution! What depths of the man are revealed in the gesture! This was not an easy way out. This was an innova tion conceived by a bold original imagination. This was a leap into the new world where old values and standards become meaningless. 9

Thus, early criticism concentrated on the process devel-

oped by Warhol in the creation of his art, the repetitive-

ness of his images and their formal quality. The subject

7 Samuel Adams Green, Andy Warhol, (Pennsylvania: University Institute of Contemporary Art, 1965), np.

8 Gene R. Swenson, "What is Pop Art?" Art News 62 (November, 1963), p. 26.

9 John Rublowsky, Pop Art, (New York: Basic Books, Inc., 1965), pp. 113-14. 22

matter was only discussed generally as it related to

consumer conscious American popular culture.

Warhol's Pop Art Consumer Imagery

Ultimately, as with any viable new art movement,

critics felt compelled to forge links with the past. The

most obvious one lay between Pop Art and Dada Art of the

early twentieth century. Part of the critics' veneration

of Warhol involved connecting him with the much-respected

Duchamp. However, I believe that there are differences,

mainly that Duchamp's early readymades are gender neutral,

whereas Warhol's packaging images generally come from a

world of products having to do with domesticity and oral

consumption, in other words, products our culture general

ly associates with women.

Initially, Warhol's impact on the fine art world was

made with his images of Campbell's soup cans (Plate 3)

which he began reproducing, with slight alterations of the

center gold label, in 1961. He then went on to present

images of Coca-cola bottles (Plate 4) , Brillo soap pad

boxes and S&H Green Stamps in a similar fashion. Why was Warhol drawn to these particular examples of American

consumer products?

As Alloway suggests, Pop Art is about signs and what those signs communicate, not necessarily about 23

objects. Perhaps it would be helpful to consider what the advertisers of Campbell's soup generally want to communicate about their product. Soup is food, which nourishes and, therefore, sustains life; nourishment and sustenance are concepts that are traditionally associated with women, who, until recently, had the sole domestic responsibility of preparing food for the family. More- over, twentieth century advertising forged strong connections between nourishment, security and women's proper roles in the home. Thus, the association with mothering, the preparation of food and Campbell's soup is strong.

If the product is a sign representing motherhood, then

Warhol may be attempting to communicate something about the state of mothering in the sixties.

Moreover, most of Warhol's consumer imagery has to do with food, a fact pointed out by Rublowsky.

most of Warhol's everyday objects - have to do with food. Food is, of course, a basic necessity. The manner in which it is obtained and distributed is elemental to all societies .•.. The agricultural experience has changed little through the centur ies - until now. The machine has intruded, irrev ocably altering the age-old relation of man to earth. What is true of food is true of all other manufactured products we use in our daily lives. We can have all of our material needs satisfied by products untouched by human hands. 10

Is this entirely the case? Someone has to open that can of soup as well as serve it, that person is still generally a woman. Perhaps all of this mechanization in the

10 Rublowsky, p. 114. 24

production of food discussed by Rublowsky is the fault of women in the first place. Afterall, the convenience foods were developed so that women could spend less time in the kitchen. Thus, if Warhol is criticizing consumer culture, isn't it probably women as homemakers that he holds re sponsible for its corruption?

In addition to the content of the artist's work, its presentation is an important issue. Warhol presented his objects in serial imagery, in other words, one

Campbell's soup can screened over and over on one canvas, or he exhibited many canvases, each of which depicted an individual Campbell's soup can. There is an implied

"supermarket•• appearance to his art and, grocery stores are conveniences originally created for women, as consumers, enabling them to purchase all their "machine made" foods in one place. Even Warhol's depiction of

S&H Green Stamps was related to the supermarket concept: the number of green stamps received was directly related to the size of the purchase. The stamps could then be redeemed for additional goods and resulted in a continu ous cycle of purchase and reward.

If Warhol is a social critic, commenting on the mechanization of American life, he has chosen a specific, connected set of images to do it with: food, and con venience packaging. Moreover, he presents those images in a certain way - repetitively multiplying them - so that a certain environment, the supermarket, and maybe the · 25

kitchen, are suggested. One cannot escape the fact that this environment is associated with women. If this is the area of American society Warhol chooses to critique

(as opposed to guns and cars), are women the victims, or are they to blame? The answer to this question becomes clearer as his work progresses.

Warhol's Pop Art Images

of Media Celebrities

Another facet of Warhol's early work centered on images of movie stars and other media-celebrated personalities. Due to his earlier work, the art world assumed that Warhol was sympathetically conunenting on the "packaging" of star .personalities just as he had made his statement about packaged consumer goods. According to

Barbara Rose:

The irony of this mirror-image of the nightmare that the American dream had become, in an age of rampant commercial exploitation and affluence, escaped most of the nouveau-riche collectors who rejoiced in owning the art that mocked them .... Certainly Warhoi's grotesque portraits of his patrons, playing up every feature of their vacu ous narcissism, his grotesquely made-up Marilyn Monroe and tearful Jackie Kennedy will stand as an indictment of American society in the sixties. 11

Evidently Rose wants the reader to believe·that Warhol's

11 Rainer Crone, Andy Warhol, translated from German by John Williams Gabriel, (New York: Praeger Publishers Inc., 1970), p. 14. 26

critique of media celebrities is aimed not at the individual portrayed, but rather, at the society that allows people to be exploited in this manner.

Is Warhol sympathetic, neutral or exploitative and nastily mocking toward these women, in particular

Marilyn Monroe, Elizabeth Taylor and Jacqueline Kennedy?

The answer to this question can be found in the choice of woman he portrayed and the time at which he created the individual pieces.

In addition to Warhol's consumer images, from 1962-

64, he did a series of "portraits" of important media celebrities including female stars Marilyn Monroe and Liz

Taylor, and male stars Elvis Presley and Troy Donahue.

For this study I am primarily interested in the female stars, but it is interesting to note one subtle difference in presentation. The male stars are frequently shown in active poses from their movies, i.e., not really even the star's image but a movie personage, whereas the women are generally depicted in simple, frontal portraits.

Warhol's first series of Marilyn Monroe portraits

(Plate 5) was produced in August of 1962, shortly after the actress's death on August 5, and were exhibitied in 12 the fall of that year at the Stable Gallery. Monroe had always received great media attention because of her sex

12 Ratcliff, pp. 26-28. 27

goddess image and, in the early sixties, this was coupled with innuendo about a sexual affair between herself and

President Kennedy. Rumors regarding the alleged affair also had an impact on the news of her death; twenty years later, theories about Monroe being murdered by the

C.I.A. still abound.

Elizabeth Taylor has been in the news incessantly since the late fifties. In 1960, while filming in London, she became very ill and almost died of pneumonia. Al-. though out of public favor for a time because of her part in the break-up of Eddie Fisher's and Debbie Reynold's marriage, public sympathy swelled for Taylor during her illness. In fact, most Hollywood insiders claim that her

Academy Award for Butterfield 8 was won on a sympathy 13 vote, rather than for the strength of her performance.

Shortly after her recovery, work began on Cleopatra

(Plate 6), which was released in 1963. During production she and Richard Burton met, and once again, she was pro- pelled into the headlines; the on-screen romance between the stars of the film continued into an off-screen love affair. Subsequently, they each divorced their respective spouses and were married in 1964.

In an interview with Gene Swenson, published in the

November issue of Art News, Warhol comments on his choice

13 Ephraim Katz, The Film Encyclopedia, (New York: A Perigee Book, 1979), p. 1123. 28

of Elizabeth Taylor as a subject for his art. Warhol and

Swenson were discussing the "Death'' series when the question of the Taylor pictures emerged.

Swenson: When did you start with the "Death" series?

Warhol: I guess it was the big plane crash picture, the front page of a newspaper: 129 Die. I was also painting Marilyns. I realized that everything I was doing must have been Death. . .•

Swenson: But you're still doing "Elizabeth Taylor" pictures.

Warhol: I started those a long time ago, when she was so sick and everybody said she was go ing to die. Now I'm doing them over, put ting bright colors on her lips and eyes. 14

Warhol's attraction to death and suffering is stated most clearly by his interest in Jacqueline Kennedy during her husband's assassination and funeral (Plates 7 and 8) • The Kennedy administration summed up the character of the sixties: idealism, hopefullness and a certain youthful elegance. For the first time in history, the majority of the population in America was under the age of thirty and the Kennedy's broadest appeal was to this age group. When the President was violently assassinated and it was recorded on film to be subsequently repeated and repeated, the nation was stunned. The four days following his death became one of the greatest media events in television history. The nation watched as Jackie, with her two small children, mourned her husband's death.

14 Swenson, p. 60. 29

When viewed in this way, Warhol's portraits take on a slightly different meaning. He was apparently drawn to these images, not for their intrinsic value, but rather, for the events taking place in the lives of each woman.

In all three cases, the woman was suffering through an extremely tumultuous period in her life, which was record ed by the media for an audience that they created. This audience was also exploited by Warhol.

Another important issue in determining .Warhol's attitude toward these three women is his formal treatment of them on canvas. For Monroe and Taylor, Warhol chose typical publicity stills, created by the Hollywood film industry for promotional reasons. In the case of Jackie

Kennedy, he used newspaper wire photographs taken during

President Kennedy's funeral. These photographs were then made into silkscreens and were reproduced in the same manner that the artist copied Campbell's soup can labels.

Each color was applied separately to the images that were reproduced on canvas as individual portraits, or serially, as many as twenty-five times on one canvas. He concentrated on the face of each woman and, if possible, showed them frontally. Generally the colors were quite garish with extra emphasis placed on the lips and eyelids.

In my opinion, there is nothing in the artistic treatment of these women as subjects that could lead one to believe that Warhol is sympathetic, or that he intends to be a 30

social critic. At best, as suggested by Norbert Lynton, the viewer is left with an ambiguous feeling.

The repetition on canvas of such already mass produced imagery, and in many cases the adding of a layer of more or less arbitrary colour, has curiously ambiguous results. The image becomes both more banal and more appealing or terrible as the case may be; we are both repelled by the bor ingness of it all and made aware of our ready exploitation of people ... lS

In the case of his portraits of Monroe, Taylor and

Kennedy, I believe that there was no intent to present the subjects as victims of a media-hungry society. Warhol is not part of the solution; he is an extension of the original problem, over-exposure and exploitation. He chose these women because of their personal problems and because of the media attention; he could then sit back and ride the wave of hype to the top with the victimized women he portrayed.

Perhaps his training in advertising taught him something about manipulating and utilizing public fascination. As a young artist trying to establish himself in the world of "fine'' art, what better way to gain attention? Even today the general public is far more conscious of his contribution as a Pop artist than that of any of his contemporaries. Isn't this related to the fact that his choice of subject matter was apparently more topical than socially relevant? He meiely had to wait for an

15 Norbert Lynton, The Story of Modern Art, (New York: Cornell University Press, 1980), p. 294. 31

important event to occur and then capitalize on the public attention that it naturally drew.

From a feminist critical viewpoint, it appears that

Warhol's early fine art successes were based on a fasci nation with female consumerism and with women who allowed themselves to be consumed by a media conscious culture.

While these early works, viewed individually, do not appear sexist, seen as a group, it would appear that

Warhol was making some kind of statement about women's place in American society. In his consumer images, he utilizes products associated with women to demonstrate not only America's obsession with objects, but the over processed way in which those goods are offered to the public. With his images of media celebrities, h~ appears to be sympathetic, while showing an equal willingness to exploit them. CHAPTER 3

WARHOL AND THE SUPERSTARS 1964-68

By the mid-sixties, Warhol's reputation in the world of New York galleries and among art collectors was well established. With this goal accomplished, his interest in static painted or printed images waned. Gradually, throughout the mid and late sixties, Warhol explored the arena of underground cinema.

The Factory, which was the artist's studio, also functioned as a gathering place for a group of women and men interested in appearing in Warhol's underground films.

Warhol's unique status as a celebrity allowed him to attract a crowd of groupies, which he absorbed into a kind of extended family. They wanted to be seen and associated with Warhol as a cult figure and as an underground hero and, he in turn needed this steady supply of young, hope ful talent to become a filmmaker.

Seminal to this group of acting hopefuls were

Warhol's "superstars," all of whom were women. Each woman was young, attractive and generally wealthy, and each of them remained with the Warhol Factory crowd for about one year. This study is concerned with these women not only

32 33

as individuals but as a group and documents their experiences while they were associated with Warhol. Their function in Warhol's films and personal life is crucially important in revealing the artist's complex attitudes towards women, attitudes that were to have a profound effect on visual culture during the late sixties and seventies.

Warhol's Factory

Warhol began renting a loft at 231 East Forty 1 seventh Street in late 1963. By this time, his own home. which was also his studio, had become "unworkably clut tered,"2 and in particular, the size and number of repro- ductions Warhol created in silkscreen form forced him to seek this new, larger space. It was this Forty-seventh

Street loft that was known as the Factory. 3

1 Andy Warhol and Pat Hackett, Popism: the Warhol Sixties (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1980), p. 61. 2 Warhol first abandoned his townhouse-studio, which he shared with his mother, early in 1963. According to Ratcliff, his first studio was an abandoned firehouse on East Eighty-seventh Street. He didn't move into the studio on East Forty-seventh Street until the following year. Carter Ratcliff, Andy Warhol (New York: Abbeville Press, 1983), p. 33. 3 The building had once been a factory, thus the name of the studio. As Danny Fields recalls it, Warhol didn't name the studio, but rather people just started calling it the Factory. This worked in Warhol's favor in terms of art criticism and his developing persona. He 34

In addition to the new accommodations, Warhol began looking for assistants to run his silkscreen reproduc- tions. In June 1963, he was introduced to Gerard Malanga, who had just finished college and was looking for a job.

They met at a poetry reading and Warhol hired him on the spot. Malanga intended to work for Warhol during the summer of 1963 and then pursue his career as a poet, but he 4 stayed at the Factory until 1969.

Another of Warhol's assistants during this period was Billy Linich, who called himself Billy Narne. 5 Linich worked as a lighting designer off-Broadway and lived in an apartment which he had decorated with silver foil and spotlights. According to Linich, "Andy carne once [to

Linich's apartment] and asked if I would do the decor for his studio, the Factory, just the way I had done my apart- rnent. It took me so long to do the Factory that I just 6 stayed there."

said that he wanted to be a machine, and what better place for a machine to work but in a factory. The name was per fect and it stuck. Jean Stein, Edie: an American Biography, ed. George Plimpton, (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 19 8 2) , p. 2 0 0.

4 John Wilcock, The Autobiography and Sex Life of Andy Warhol (New York: Other Scenes, 1971), np.

5 Stein, p. 204.

6 Warhol's recollection of Linich's reasons for de corating and moving into the Factory are different. He claimed that Linich moved in after he and his roommate left their downtown apartment. Warhol also says that Billy got the idea to decorate the Factory after he moved 35

Warhol loved the face-lift that Linich gave the

Factory. When the artist moved into the loft space the building was in very poor condition, especially the walls. 7 Warhol felt that the silver treatment to the walls and exposed pipes was symbolic of the early sixties.

It was great, it was the perfect time to think silver. Silver was the future, it was spacy - the astronauts wore silver suits - Shepard, Grissom, and Glenn had already been up in them, and their equipment was silver too. And silver was also the past - the Silver Screen - Hollywood actresses photographed in silver sets. And maybe more than anything, silver was narcissism - mirrors were backed with silver. 8

Malanga and Linich were the only people in the

Factory crowd to actually live at the studio for a time. 9

Eventually Malanga moved out, leaving Linich as the only full-time resident; he remained until 1969. As Warhol remembers it:

Billy and his crowd took over the scene there. The big social thrust behind the Factory from '64 through '67 was amphetamine and Gerard didn't take it. Gerard was a different type - he was more apt to take a down like Placidyl when he took anything, which he usually didn't - a few downs, a little

into the studio, and that he didn't know why Linich was so attracted to silver, but felt that it related to his am phetamine addiction. However, the silver studio is a possible reflection of Warhol's own silver hair which con nects him with the Factory space. I believe that Linich may more accurately recall the sequence of events that led to the silver foil decoration of the Factory. Stein, p. 204.

7 Warhol and Hackett, p. 64. 8 Warhol and Hackett, pp. 64-65. 9 Warhol and Hackett, P· 61. 36

acid, some marijuana, but nothing regularly. 10

Even Warhol admits to some indulgence in uppers during the early sixties, although he is careful to emphasize that his drugs were prescribed by a physician.

I was taking only the small amount of Obetrol for weight loss that my doctor prescribed, but even that much was enough to give you that weird, happy go-go-go feeling in your stomach that made you want to work-work-work, so I could just imagine how in credibly high people who took straight stuff felt. 11

The function of the Factory began to change; it was more than just a place for Warhol to work on his silkscreen paintings. It became a social center for an underground culture that was primarily interested in social gatherings and drugs. This phenomenon is documented by

Stephen Koch in his book Stargazer.

Access was easy during la Belle Epoque, all you needed to do was get into the freight elevator (the Factory had once been a real factory) and groan with it to the fourth floor. The silver room was crowded with a-heads, street geniuses, poor little rich girls, the very chic, the desper ately unknown, hustlers and call boys, prostitutes, museum curators, art dealers, rich collectors, the best artists of the time, and the worst hangers-on. Within those silver-covered walls, all the dreadful things outsiders imagined were really done with the air of kids squirting each other with garden hoses. The people "in" thought the place had everything: intensity without demands, class without snobbery, glamour without trying. Not to mention a lot of sex, a lot of art, a lot of amphetamines, a lot

10 Warhol and Hackett, p. 63. 11 Warhol and Hackett, p. 33. 37 ,, '

fame. And the door was always open. 12

The Factory was the center of the subculture's chic

society with Warhol as the main attraction, and most of

its activity was focused on him. Henry Geldzahler, a

curator at the IYletropoli tan Museum of Art during the

sixties, remembers the Factory as a clubhouse "with every-

body trying to attract Andy's attention. Andy's very

royal. It was like Louis XV getting up in the morning.

The big question was who would Andy notice ... 13

The question of whom Andy would notice became more

urgent as Warhol became enamored with filmmaking. In

1963, Warhol purchased his first movie camera, a 16mm 14 Bolex. That Warhol is fascinated by Hollywood is appar-

ent when one looks at his concentration on Hollywood stars

in his early Pop Art. So filmmaking was a logical step

for the artist, and as the Factory entourage grew, he was provided with ample "stars" to develop into film personal-

ities.

Warhol's early movies, made in late 1963 and '64 were silent and generally filmed with a stationary camera 15 shot. The most critically acclaimed films of this genre

12 Stephen Koch, Stargazer: Andy Warhol's World and his Films (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1973), pp. 3-4. 13 Stein, p. 201. 14 Warhol and Hackett, p. 29. 15 Rainer Crone, Andy Warhol, translated from German by John William Gabriel, (New York: Praeger Publishers Inc., 1973), p. 31. 38

. 16 are S 1 eep and Emp1re. They achieved their degree of celebrity, not only because of their subject matter, but because of the screening time of each film.

Sleep is a filmic record of ex-stockbroker turned poet, John Giorno, slumbering; it lasts for six hours. 17

Empire was shot from the 44th floor of the Time-Life building and records eight hours in the "life" of the 18 Emp1re. s tate Bu1 . ld.1ng. These are Warhol's critically admired films because they are formally innovative, and as such easily related to his Pop Art production; they ele- vate the everyday to artistic status. However, the films that are important to this study are those which feature the female superstars. Interestingly, they are among

Warhol's more obscure films, yet it is with them that he makes his most obvious woman-hating statements.

"Baby" Jane Holzer

Some of Warhol's early silent films, which appear to be non-sexist compared to the later sound films, featured members of the growing Factory entourage. In the summer of 1963, Jane Holzer, who was the first of Warhol's superstars, appeared in the movie Kiss, which runs for

16 Empire is alternately known as Star.

17 Warhol and Hackett, p. 33.

18 Koch, P. 59. 39

fifty minutes and records the long, sensuous kisses of 19 several heterosexual couples. Holzer remained with the Factory crowd for approximately one year, appearing in five Warhol silents. Her association with this new underground chic culture was, in part, responsible for the media attention she attracted in the sixties.

During the summer of 1964, social critic and satirist Tom Wolfe was commissioned by the New York Herald

Tribune to write an article detailing the media interest surrounding Jane Holzer. Wolfe, quite accurately, dubbed

Holzer "The Girl of the Year." His article dealt with the details of Holzer's life as well as the cultural life of the period that acted to propel her into the spotlight.

At the time of publication, Jane Holzer was nick- named "Baby Jane" perhaps due to the delicate facial features which gave her a ch~ld-like appearance (Plate 9) .

After a shopping trip to Paris in the fall of 1964, she was featured in Vogue because of her bouffant hairdo which was promoted as the new way for women to wear their hair. 20 Holzer was wealthy and lived in a twelve-room apartment on Park Avenue with her husband, Leonard,

19 Koch, p. 17.

20 "Mrs. Leonard Holzer arid the Paris She Stopped Cold," Vogue, 1 October 1964, p. 147. 40

''surrounded by alot of old Dutch and Flemish paintings," 21

(her father made a fortune in Florida real estate and she

was the heiress to his money) . Wolfe believed that Holzer

gained media attention because of several factors: she

was able to walk a tightrope between high society, due to

her money, and popular culture due to her acquaintances.

In addition, her association with the Rolling Stones, mo-

deling for Vogue magazine and appearances in Andy Warhol's

early underground movies helped·to develop her image as a

purveyor of popular "chic" culture, what Wolfe termed, 22 "Wog Hip."

The article concludes with Wolfe's theories re-

garding the general phenomenon of the "Girl of the Year."

He believes that she was the creation of the press begin-

ning after the World War I breakdown of high society.

What replaced the values of high society was a new Other

Society or Cafe Society, which functioned as that part of

culture that determines popular culture's taste in

clothes, music, movies, etc. Even sophisticated wealthy

society took its cue from CafeSociety, and the Girl of

the Year was the foremost spokesperson of that style.

She listened to the music, attended the concerts and was

frequently acquainted with the performers; she modeled

21 Tom Wolfe, "Girl of the Year," Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby, (New York: Farrar, Strauss, Giroux, 1965), p. 210. 22 Wolfe, p. 205. 41

the clothes and sometimes even starred in the films. 23

In the mid-sixties this Cafe Society was intimately

related to Andy Warhol's Factory, where its denizens lived

and partied. A succession of young, often wealthy and

generally trendsetting women, such as Holzer, were attrac-

ted to Warhol's sphere of influence and, apparently, they

hoped to share the spotlight that shed its glow on Warhol

and everything he touched. Warhol benefited as well from

his association with the superstars. Each of the "girls

of the year" brought with them a certain fame and media

celebrity that helped to increase Warhol's own identifica-

tion with a world of glamour in the popular press.

Many of these girls were aging debutantes with

really nothing else to do, so the position of girl of

the year was probably a welcome one. Coming from wealthy

families, they generally didn't work and thought nothing

of flying to Paris for a shopping expedition, in fact

this glamorously irresponsible behavior was almost ex-

pected of them. If one is represented in the popular

press as a style-maker, one generally feels compelled to

play, and perhaps even enjoys playing, that role. This

combination of wealth and beauty also opens a great many doors. The average concert-goer isn't going to be invi- ted backstage to meet Mick Jagger, but these women were recognized as celebrities so, in a sense, it was a

23· Wolfe, pp. 211-12. 42

meeting of equals. Most importantly, women who did not

work, like Holzer, could spend the entire day and night

at the Factory, always ready to take advantage of the

spontaneity associated with Warhol's studio. Afterall,

one never knew when Warhol would throw a party or make a movie.

Edie Sedgwick

Edie Sedgwick was the next "Girl of the Year" and,

she stayed with the Warhol entourage longer than any other

female superstar, holding her title from January 1965 through the summer of 1966. Apparently she was not aware of the fact that she was filling the void left by the gradual departure of 1964's girl of the year, Jane Holzer.

In an article in Time magazine, Sedgwick said, "I didn't know I was replacing Jane. In fact- I'd never even heard of her. I hardly ever read the papers." 24

There was no specific argument between Holzer and

Warholj just a general parting of the ways. Apparently her look was no longer in vogue, which reflects the natu ral turnover factor in fashion/glamour leadership posi tions. Andy Warhol could stay on top as long as he had a new "girl" every so often~ From Holzer's viewpoint, she was not sorry to leave Warhol's Factory scene.

24 "Edie and Andy," Time, 27 August 1965, p. 67. 43 ,, '

It was getting very scary at the Factory. There were too many crazy people around who were stoned and using too many drugs. They had some laughing gas that everybody was sniffing. The whole thing freaked me out, and I figured it was becoming too faggy and sick and druggy. I couldn't take it. Edie had arrived, but she was very happy to put up with that sort of ambience. 25

Sedgwick was a boon to Warhol's developing film production, which included dialogue and were more ambi- tious than any of his previous films. David Bourdon describes the period as follows:

The second phase of Warhol's vision began in 1965, when he started experimenting with sound, color, camera movement, action, narrative and editing. In this phase, the performers became interesting as personalities. Warhol presented a highly selective gallery of gorgeously gaunt, stylishly garbed and imaginatively barbed young men and women who languorously display[ed] themselves. 26

It was natural for Warhol to begin this phase of his work by looking for someone to supply scripts and, while attending a poetry reading with Gerard Malanga at the Cafe Le Metro he met Ronald Tavel. 27 However, the job of Factory scenarist was not an easy one because

Warhol's concept of a script was not the precisely dia- logued story of a traditional commercial film. In his book on Warhol's films. Stephen Koch explains the approach to sound movies at the Factory.

25 Stein, p. 228.

26 David Bourdon, "Warhol as Filmmaker," Art in America 59:3 (May-June 1971), p. 49.

27 Warhol and Hackett, p. 90. 44

The idea was always to evoke the presence and responses of the superstars. Just as in the balmy Hollywood of old, the screenplays were invariably envisioned as "vehicles" for this or that Factory celebrity. They were never indulged as works of interest in their own right, just as many a major film was written strictly as a pretext to get Joan Crawford back in those wedgies and crying. 28

Tavel's first ·experience at the Factory was during

the filming of Harlot, which starred a transvestite, Mario 29 Montez, as "Gene" Harlow. In this first sound vehicle,

Tavel was exposed to one of Warhol's film strategies, off-

camera dialogue. Tavel, Linich and poet Henry Fainlight

carried on a conversation, off-screen, about great female

movie stars. 30

Since, as Koch suggests, Warhol's sound films were

really about the people in the Factory and concerned with

getting those people to expose themselves both physically

and emotionally, this off-camera dialogue technique could

be quite useful. As a result, some of Tavel's responsi-

bilities were different from those of his counterparts in

Hollywood. According to Koch:

One of his assigned tasks as a scriptwriter was to interview potential superstars and discover personal secrets that could then be surreptitiously inserted into a script to induce the inevitable

28 Koch, p. 64.

29 Ratcliff, p. 51. 30 The first "sound" film was Empire, but it included no dialogue, therefore it is classified as a silent film. Harlot is the first film with dialogue. Koch, p. 64. 45

responses of shock or anger or shame or confusion for the camera's placidly witnessing eye. 31

In addition to the gathering of personal informa- tion, Warhol's own passivity encouraged the superstars to behave in certain ways. Nothing could be more challenging than the attempt to break that placid facade. According to Warhol:

I learned when I was little that whenever I got aggressive and tried to tell someone what to do, nothing happened - I just couldn't carry it off. I learned that you actually have more power when you shut up, because at least that way people will start to maybe doubt themselves. 32

Emile De Antonio also remembers the impact of Warhol's passive power.

Andy's like the Marquis de Sade in the sense that his very presence was a releasing agent which released people so they could live out their fantasies and get undressed, or, in some cases, do very violent things to get Andy to watch them .... He was able to bring that out in a lot of people - people do weird things in those early films who wouldn't have done what they were doing for money or D.W. Griffith or anybody else 33

Gerard Malanga was one of the principal male stars in Warhol's.movies during this period, and one of his triumphs as an underground movie star was Warhol's Vinyl.

The film was based on Anthony Burgess's novel, A Clockwork

Orange; it was also the first film in which Edie Sedgwick appeared.

31 Koch, p. 68.

32 Warhol and Hackett, p. 108. 33 Stein, p. 239. 46

Warhol had been introduced to Sedgwick at a party hosted by Lester Persky, and this first encounter is recorded in Edie: an American Biography.

Andy would arrive with his crowd. He was busy having superstars, of course. He had Baby Jane Holzer, but she was sort of running out of speed. I told him: "You've got to have a new superstar. You've got to meet this girl Edie Sedgwick. She will be your new superstar." I arranged to have Edie at this party. She had a friend in tow, Chuck Wein, and they wanted to be involved in film and in the theater. She had a certain quiet dignity and a beauty that was quite extraordinary .... And it was at my house, at this marble table, that I brought the two - Andy and Edie - together. Andy, as I recall, sucked in his breath and did the usual popeye thing and said, "Oh she's so bee-you-ti-ful," making every single letter sound like a whole sylla ble, as he does. He was very impressed. 34

Warhol wanted to get her into a film immediately and he happened to be working on Vinyl when Sedgwick started visiting the studio. Malanga was upset by

Warhol's decision to put Sedgwick into the movie, for up until that time Vinyl featured an all-male cast. Malanga recalls Warhol's excuse for the change in casting:

In Vinyl I was giving my long juvenile delinquent's soliloquy when Andy threw Edie into the film at the last minute. I was a bit peeved at the idea because it was an all-male cast. Andy said, "It's okay. She looks like a boy." 35

Although most of Warhol's films were made at the

Factory, occasionally he went "on location." One of the places he frequented in 1965 was Sedgwick's New York

34 Stein, p. 180. 35 Stein, p. 232. 47

apartment, where he concentrated on a group of related films called the Beauty series. According to Warhol:

We filmed alot of movies over at Edie's place on 63rd Street near Madison. Things like the Beauty series that was just Edie with a series of beauti ful·boys, sort of romping around her apartment, talking to each other - the idea was for her to have her old boyfriends there while she interviewed new ones. 36

In his book Stargazer, Stephen Koch analysizes the films that Warhol directed in the sixties and reports that one of the films from this series, Beauty #2, although relatively unknown, even at the time it was made, is "one of the strongest films from any period of his career."37

What is interesting and useful to this study about Koch's description of the action is that he apparently reports the scenes as they really appear. There is the accuracy of a reporter about his commentary. His purpose is to acknowledge the advances Warhol's films made to underground cinema as well as the impact of filmmaking on Warhol's career. Although Koch overlooks the impact of Warhol's exploitation of the Factory's film stars, his reporting of that exploitation is useful here:

Sedgwick sits on the edge of a bed, ice cubes in her glass tinkling ..• Beside her on the bed is Gino Peschio, playing presumably a kind of gigolo supplied by Chuck Wein, whose voice is heard along with Malanga's out of frame, throughout the film. Chuck Wein is a former lover, her Beauty #1, and, in the triangular situation, he has brought her

36 Warhol and Hackett, p. 109. 37 Koch, p. 66. 48

this Beauty #2 .... Lithe and small breasted, she's wearing a pair of black bikini panties, her long legs alternately girlish and regal. Her movements are nothing but business: sipping her drink, fid dling with her pack of cigarettes, patting the overly friendly dog, until such small stuff at last resolves itself into an attempt at love-making with the silent Peschio •.. 38

Perhaps the most important action occurs entirely off-screen in the dialogue between Wein and Malanga. Un- like the off-screen chatter in Harlot, Malanga and Wein are speaking to Sedgwick and certain parts of this dialogue were apparently intended to bait her and created certain emotional responses. At one point she was direc 39 ted to "taste his brown sweat," referring to Peschio.

According to Koch:

remarks being made to her [Sedgwick] are ... ideal illustration of a much favored mode in the Factory at that time: Taunt and betrayal ..•. Under the influences of this technique, the conversation in Beauty #2 moves from trivia to desperation. There is even a terrible moment near the end in which Sedgwick speaks more or less inaudibly, but from real fear of her horror of death. In other places, certain things are said off-camera that plainly hurt and offend her; later, as the lovemaking de manded by the scenario begins, a series of cutting, catty remarks from the kibbitzers at last make her abruptly pull herself up, fold her arms around her knees and stop in unflustered, but visible, fury. 40

It was for this "taunt and betrayal'' technique that

38 Koch, pp. 67-68. 39 Stein, p. 242. 40 Apparently Koch admires this film as a "living portrait." It is difficult from his commentary to deter mine whether or not he approved of the method used to create it. Koch, p. 68. 49

Tavel's discovery of the superstars' secrets and personal weaknesses was so important. Those who played the off camera parts could be coached about the star's fears and anxieties, which could then be incorporated into the movie and strategically played out in order to maintain the in terest and shocked reactions of the superstar being filmed.

The unavailability of Warhol's films from this period makes it difficult to determine if this technique was used on both males and females. Based on research alone, it appears that male stars had a bit more freedom.

Malanga, for example, does not seem to have been subjected to taunt and betrayal and, in fact, was often involved in taunting and betraying other stars, as in Beauty #2. It would have been difficult to try this technique on some one who had already played the off-camera part. The only other case where it is discussed is in the film Harlot.

Here the star is a transvestite, a man playing a woman, but the off-camera dialogue is not directed at the actor, it does not attempt to create an environment against which he will react.

Koch appreciated these films for their qualities as living portraits; the stars go through a range of emotions elicited by the taunt and betrayal technique. Koch's opinion of Warhol's films serves as a paradigm for most critics who appreciate the films as portraits but say little about the methods employed to create them. Even 50 ~ '

Ronald Tavel considered them historically valuable, and therefore, seemingly worth the price of the superstars' self-esteem.

You feel that the films are very much history .•. the most authentic history books we have. They record infallibly how people think, because when you watch them [the superstars] in those silly stories per forming, what you really watch is the flesh at work, and the mentality, the thought that is behind the drooping of the eyelid, what is behind the inad- vertent. 41 ·

Can this taunt and betrayal technique really be jus- tified for the sake of a living portrait? Why is this verbal abuse condoned for the sake of art? Afterall, the superstars were not playing the parts of "characters" in the traditional Hollywood sense, rather, they were themselves thrown into a situation they could not control.

Part of Warhol's theory was that spontaneity was far su- 42 per1or. to a we 11 -re h earse d an d scr1pte ' d f'l1 m. Alth oug h

Sedgwick agreed to appear in Warhol's films, she could not have predicted their finished appearance or that she would be betrayed during filming by people she trusted.

Sedgwick was the kind of star material that Warhol wanted in his movies; she had a presence and appeal that enthralled all of the Factory regulars, and most especially Warhol. Henry Geldzahler reports that,

41 Koch, pp. 68-69.

42 Apparently Warhol took great pleasure in disrup ting Tavel's script rehearsals for Vinyl. Perhaps this can be used as a paradigm for Warhol's attitude toward spontaneity in his films. Koch, pp. 69-70. 51 Q '

Andy always picks people because they have an amaz ing sort of essential flame, and he brings it out for the purposes of his films ..•• What he did was recognize that Edie was this amazing creature, and he was able to make her more Edie so that when he got it on camera it would be available to every body. 43

Perhaps the acquisition of a personality like

Sedgwick gave Warhol the courage to make an announcement he had been contemplating for some time: he was going to stop painting. In 1965, Warhol exhibited his Cow Wall- paper and Flower paintings at Ileana Sonnabend's gallery in Paris. Attending the opening with him were Sedgwick, 44 Malanga, and Wein. Warhol recalls the Paris trip:

I was having so much fun in Paris that I decided it was the place to make the announcement I'd been thinking about making for months: I was going to re tire from painting. Art just wasn't fun for me any more; it was people who were fascinating and I wanted to spend all my time being around them, lis tening to them, and making movies of them. 45

Edie and Andy were beginning to get a lot of press as the couple about town. Originally Sonnabend was going to send Warhol a boat ticket as his transportation to the

Paris opening, instead he convinced her to purchase four airplane tickets so that he could bring Sedgwick, Malanga and Wein. Apparently Sonnabend didn't require much convincing because, "she knew that an artist would get more attention - especially in Paris - with a beautiful girl

43 Stein, p. 229.

44 Warhol and Hackett, p. 112.

45 Warhol and Hackett, p. 113. 52

46 on his arm."

Edie and Andy even began to look alike, especially after Sedgwick had her hair cut short and dyed silver to 47 match Warhol's coiffeur (Plate 10). The poet Rene

Ricard, who appeared with Sedgwick in the Warhol film

Kitchen, remembers the similarity in their appearance.

Edie and Andy! You should have seen them .... Both wearing the same sort of thing - boat-necked, strip ed Tee-shirts. Andy wore black corduroy jeans, ba nana-shaped high-heeled boots ... Edie was pasted up to look just like him - but looking so good. The Tee-shirt. The black stockings. Long earrings. Just the most devastating, ravishing beauty. 48

According to one Factory member, "Andy was as taken with her [Edie] as I think it was possible for him to be 49 with a woman." This impression of Warhol's feelings for

S~dgwick seems to be born out by the artist himself in his book, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol: from A to B and Back

Again. The book is a diary-like recitation of Warhol's thoughts on a variety of topics ranging from sex to business; the subject of chapter two is love. In this chapter

Warhol discusses a woman, whom he calls Taxi. He intro- duces the chapter by saying, "one person in the sixties fascinated me more than anybody I had ever known. And that fascination I experienced was probably very close to

46 Warhol and Hackett, p. 112. 47 Warhol and Hackett, p. 112. 48 Stein, P· 182. 49 Stein, p. 228. 53

50 a certain kind of love." Although some of the facts and

the name have been changed, the person to whom Warhol

refers seems to be Edie Sedgwick, the only person to whom

Warhol devotes an entire chapter in his Philosophy book.

Truman Capote, a friend of Warhol's from his early

commercial art days, recounts his impressions of Warhol's

relationship with Sedgwick:

I think Edie was something Andy would like to have been; he was transposing himself into her ·~ la Pygmalion. Have you ever noticed a certain type of man who always wants to go along with his wife to pick out her clothes? I've always thought that's because he wants to wear them himself. Andy Warhol would like to have been Edie Sedgwick. He would like to have been a charming, well-born debutante from Boston. 51

Ethel Scull was witness to an incident that bears out

.Capote's assessment.

Edie and Andy were at an opening at Lincoln Center with the cameramen as hysterical as if Mrs. Kennedy were making an entrance, lunging at the pair of them. Edie just preened •.. absolutely enjoying ev ery minute of it. So did Andy, who sat humbly with his head down, wearing his leather jacket, and whis pering up to Edie what to do. Directing her. I could hear him say: "Stand up. Move around. Pose for them." He knew just the right moment for her to say, "We must go in. vle must leave." 52

At the height of the media attention, Edie and Andy

were viewed as mutual assets. Time magazine claimed that,

50 Andy Warhol I The Philosophy of Andy vlarhol (From A to B and Back Again) (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich

1975) 1 P• 27 o 51 Stein, p. 183. 52 Stein, p. 250. 54

"Edie and Andy opened doors for each other - she the doors to the Park Avenue patrons of his paintings, he the doors to the world of art and cinema where she hopes to 53 make her way."

The culminating event in this wave of media hype showered on Edie and Andy was the Warhol retrospective in

Philadelphia. Sam Green, director of exhibits at the

Institute of Contemporary Art on the campus of the Univer- sity of Pennsylvania, convinced the advisory board of the gallery to host an Andy Warhol retrospective and remembers 54 the hysteria of opening night vividly.

For the preview the press came with their television cameras. It was the biggest thing that happened in Philadelphia ever ... terribly sensational, with lots of cameras and people. The television lights in the crush began to fall into the paintings and tear them; people were crushed up against them ..•. At the last minute I decided the only thing to do was take down all the pictures so the paintings wouldn't be ruined. So the grand opening was in fact just people! Andy was mobbed •..• we arrived late from drinks and thousands were jammed into the museum •... Somehow, once inside, we managed to get to an old iron staircase that led up to the ceiling ... Edie was astonishing. She was really in show business, giving all those people something to look at ... and it was crucial because they had been get ting more and more unruly for hours, angry, first of all, because there were no pictures on the wall. So she, in fact, became the exhibition. Andy was just terrified, white with fear. Edie was scared to death but she was adoring every minute. She was in her element. 55

53 II "Edie and Andy, p. 67. 54 Warhol and Hackett, p. 128. 55 Stein, pp. 252-54. 55

As a media couple they had what Warhol's art world

peers did not: widespread c~lebrity status. Roy

Lictenstein, with whom Warhol competed for space in Leo

Castelli's gallery, recalls the Edie and Andy phenomenon.

My wife Dorothy, and I went to a Halloween costume party ... dressed as Andy Warhol and Edie ..•. I sprayed my hair with silver paint and I powdered my face to look pale •..• Dorothy wore hot pants and very high heels and put on a lot of silver glitter. She had short hair like Edie's. Andy does exactly what I don't do. He was his art. His studio was his art. Edie was-part of his art, and a lot of other people. I was an old-fashioned artist com~ pared with him. When I looked at Andy, I looked at him as a tourist would. I guess ... with won derment. How glamourous. How strange. 56

Even with all the celebrity Sedgwick brought to

Warhol, her time as the "greatest superstar" had to come

to an end. When she realized that Warhol's underground

films were not necessarily the key to commercial

Hollywood films, she slowly separated herself from the

Factory entourage. Warhol discusses Sedgwick's change of

heart in Popism.

Edie started saying she was unhappy being in under ground movies ..•. I tried to make her understand that if she acted in enough of these underground movies, a Hollywood person might see her and put her in a big movie - that the important thing was

56 Lictenstein was associated with Castelli's gallery in 1961 and Castelli was afraid that the two artists' work might be too similar. Therefore, he decided not to pick up Warhol as an artist for his gallery. Warhol showed at Eleanor Ward's Stable Gallery, but eventually, in 1964, after Warhol was well-established, Castelli realized that his gallery did have room to support both artists. In that year, Warhol left the Stable Gallery to go with Castelli. Stein, pp. 245-46. 56

just to be up there on the screen and let everybody see how good she was. But she wouldn't accept that. She insisted we were out to make a fool of her. 57

Warhol attempted to convince Sedgwick not only to

stay within the fold but to continue in her role as the

female Factory superstar. Eventually Sedgwick was phased out of the Factory entourage and, according to Rene

Ricard, her replacement was easily found.

The Warhol people felt Edie was giving them trou ble - they were furious with her because she wasn't cooperating. So they went to a Forty-second Street bar and found Ingrid von Schefflin. They had no ticed: "Doesn't this girl look like an ugly Edie? Let's really teach Edie a lesson. Let's make a movie with her and tell Edie she's the big new star." They cut her hair like Edie's. They made her up like Edie. Her name became Ingrid Super star ... just an invention to make Edie feel horrible. 58

Gradually, Sedgwick removed herself from the Factory scene and requested that Warhol no longer show her f 1'l ms. 59 Even Sedgwick recognized that the relationship was destructive for her personally as well as for many others associated with the Warhol entourage.

Warhol really fucked up a great many people's - young people's - lives. My introduction to heavy drugs came through the Factory. I liked the intro duction to drugs I received. I was a good target for the scene, I blossomed into a healthy young drug addict. 60

57 Warhol and Hackett, p. 123. 58 Stein, p. 282. 59 Stein, p. 283. 60 Stein, p. 302. 57 {l •

Warhol wasn't totally unaffected by Sedgwick's departure. Viva, Warhol's next major superstar, specu- lates on the impact of Sedgwick's leaving:

It must have had an effect on Andy - Edie leaving him ... He was probably in love with Edie, with all of us - a sexless kind of love, but he would take up your whole life so that you had no time for any other man. When Edie left ... that was betrayal, and he was furious ..• a lover betrayed by his mistress. 61

Nico

The next girl of the year was different from both

Sedgwick and Holzer; even her responsibilities within the world of the Factory were dissimilar from those of her predecessors. Perhaps to escape the disappointment Warhol suffered in his relationship with Sedgwick, he purposely searched for a woman with a different look and attitude.

According to Warhol, "Nico was a new type of female superstar, Baby Jane and Edie were both outgoing, American, social, bright, excited, chatty - whereas Nico was weird and untalkative." 62 (Plate 11)

Nico never became the film star that Warhol made of

Sedgwick. Instead she was used to develop Warhol's latest interest in 1966, rock music bands, another of Warhol's attempts to generate income in order to support his

61 Stein, p. 285.

62 Warhol and Hackett, p. 146. 58

filmmaking. Paul Morrissey, who has been responsible

for the Factory's film production since 1969 and has been

a full-time member of the Warhol entourage since 1965,

recalls this part of Warhol's career.

It was a very peculiar period. Andy was going through a transition. He was always trying to make more money to support his filmmaking, and he had gotten involved with a new discotheque and was managing a new band, the Velvet Underground. We let them rehearse at the Factory. Suddenly they were taking up more and more time .... They needed a singer, and by accident we ran into this girl named Nico ... 63

So Nice's primary role at the Factory was actually

an activity that supported Warhol's filmmaking interest,

rather than as a film superstar. She did, for a time,

fill the void that was created by Sedgwick's departure.

In fact, Nico even replaced Edie in one of Warhol's films.

S~dgwick's last film for Warhol was his financially sue-

cessful Chelsea Girls, but Sedgwick returned to the

Factory and requested that her part be removed from the 64 movie. According to Morrissey,

Andy never showed her [Sedgwick's] films any more. He took out her piece of Chelsea Girls and we substituted a little thing with Nico with colored lights going across her face - an abstract kind of totally minimal film of Nico looking for a half hour into the camera. It's got some Velvet Under ground music with it. It's the best thing in Chelsea Girls, a very beautiful ending. 65

63 Stein, p. 283-84.

64 Stein, p. 283.

65 Stein, p. 284. 59

Nico may have been beautiful, but Warhol's films

relied heavily on the non-stop chatter of superstars like

Sedgwick, and Nico's brooding silence made work for

Ronald Tavel impossible. How could you ascertain secrets

from a person who was unwilling to talk about herself?

As the singer for the Velvet Underground, Nico was valua-

ble, but Warhol needed another type of woman for his

filmmaking.

Viva

Warhol would not have to go looking for his next

female star. His reputation as an underground moviemaker

.~ '· . _,: •' was ·:rsuch that she would find him. That superstar was

Susan Hoffmann, but everybody called her Viva.

Apparently Viva was familiar with Warhol's films

and hoped if she could secure a part in the moviemaking

scene at the Factory, it might be just the break she

needed to make it in commercial films. She was aware of

her predecessors, such as Sedgwick, and hoped she would

also be able to cash in on the media attention that hover-

ed around Warhol and his entourage. Viva recalls her

desire to join the Factory crowd.

Andy was at this party. I screwed up my courage and asked him if I could make a movie. I thought I'd make a few Warhol movies and become a big Hollywood star - starting at the bottom, with Andy my first step toward my ultimate~ incredible glory and fame and riches and stardom. Andy said, "If 60

you want to take off your blouse, you can make a movie tomorrow. If you don't want to take it off, you can make another one." I was afraid if I didn't take off my blouse that very next day he would forget me completely. So I put these round Band-Aids on my nipples and took off my blouse. They loved me; they all thought it was an incredible acting technique they were seeing. 66

Warhol was quite taken with his latest superstar.

Although he had met Viva two or three times earlier, it wasn't until that party in 1967 that he was convinced of her future possibilities as a Factory superstar. After the silence of Nico, Viva had just what Warhol needed, verbosity. Warhol also remembers the party where he finally recognized her potential.

The night of Betsy's party I didn't know much about her [Viva] than what I was seeing right in front of me. She had a face that was so striking you had the choice of whether to call her beautiful or ugly. I happened to love the way she looked, and I was impressed with all the references she kept dropping to literature and politics. She talked constantly, and she had the most tiresome voice I'd ever heard it was incredible to me that one woman's voice could convey so much tedium •... she asked me if I was planning to do a movie soon. I told her that we were shooting another one the following day, and I gave her the address so she could show up if she wanted to. 67

It is interesting to note that in Warhol's recollection of their meeting at this party, no reference is made to his request that Viva remove her blouse. This disparity, on Warhol's part is understandable, since the request was both exploitative and intimidating. By her

66 Stein, pp. 220-21.

67 Warhol and Hackett, p. 229. 61

own admission, Viva believed that an appearance in a

Warhol film would lead to greater things for her career and she was afraid, if she did not comply, Warhol would find someone else. In addition, she encountered Warhol on two previous occasions at which he overlooked her.

She didn't want to blow her third and perhaps final chance with this artist. Moreover, by phrasing it as he did,

Warhol forced Viva to make the decision, even though it was an obvious one.

Once again Warhol's passive power was invaluable for creating the situation he wanted, while simultaneously leaving him guiltless. He could always refute Viva's recollection of the incident or, say that the choice was hers.

Viva remained with the Warhol entourage through

1968 and starred in approximately seven films; the most notorious was Lonesome Cowboys, which was shot on location 68 in Tucson, Arizona. The film received its notoriety for several reasons, but not necessarily because it was a good film. In fact, according to Stephen Koch,

Warhol's Western is a bad film, even an abominably bad film. It is sloppily made. It does not do what it wants to do. It is very boring. But, even though it is bad, it is among the most critically interesting of Warhol's bad films, because it is a pivotal work in his career both as a filmmaker and as a public personality. It is the last film he completed before being shot, the last film properly

68 Warhol and Hackett, p. 260. 62

attributed to him rather than Paul Morrissey, the last he directed entirely on his own. 69

As he stated, Koch is interested in the film because

of the events surrounding its creation, rather than by any

intrinsic qualities. He is fascinated by what the movie

tells us about Warhol's personal vision. Koch asserts

that the film has an ''anthropology," that shows us, the

audience, the filmmaker's ideas regarding the relation-

ships between the sexes, specifically, in the case of

Lonesome Cowboys, men to men and women to men. Koch re-

ports that this anthropology reveals itself as follows:

"Relations between men and women are filled with hatred,

contempt, violence, humiliation, and disgust. Relations

between men and men are filled with tenderness, comfort,

spontaneity, joy, freedom." 70

As with so many of Warhol's films, Lonesome Cowboys

is really about homosexuality. Although most of the

previous films that dealt with this subject matter used

the city as a backdrop, this film tries to promote some

of Warhol's thoughts on homosexuality and the Hollywood 71 Western. Viva's role in the film was the foil against

69 Paul Morrissey was introduced to Warhol in 1965 by Malanga. After Warhol was shot, Malanga was gradually forced out of the Factory and Morrissey took his place as Warhol's first assistant. Koch, p. 105. 7 ° Koch, P. 107. 71 Other examples of films in which Warhol addresses the issue of male homosexuality are: Horse, Vinyl and ~ 63

which the male cast members could react; she played the

evil woman who taunted the males about their sexuality

and was eventually punished for her verbal abuse by being

gang raped by the cast. During this scene the men do not

remove their clothes for the purpose of "raping" Viva.

Koch suggests that the clothes represent a false "macho"

identity that the cowboys assume to mask their true

selves. Their real identity is revealed only when the

actors are nude and their homosexuality is expressed

freely. Thus Viva is treated as a non-person, insignifi-

cant to the point that she is only confronted by the

cowboys while they sport their false identities. Accor-

"ding to Koch: ..,;. r -;~~-:, Since the violent macho identity is false, the men are unable to remove their clothes to rape ... This is no display of violent cruel passion. Its function is purely negative. It attempts to associate aggression with precisely nothing at all. Under the facade of rape, the episode is finally a statement of how deeply Viva is not wanted, is an insistent assertion that she does not effectively exist. 72 (Plate 12)

Some similarities exist in the ways Warhol used Viva

in this film and Sedgwick in Beauty #2. For example, both

women were the only representative of their sex in each

film. In Sedgwick's case, she appeared on screen with

Hustler. For a discussion of the films and their specific place in Warhol's oeuvre as a filmmaker see: Stephen Koch Stargazer. Koch, pp. 105-06.

72 Koch, pp. 107-10. 64 Q •

Gino Peschio, while she was manipulated by the off-camera commentary of Malanga and Wein. Viva appears in Lonesome

Cowboys with eight men, who treat her, as Koch suggests, as if she is non-existent. Both women are, in effect, cast to act as the object of male manipulation and abuse:

Sedgwick is taunted by off-camera dialogue and Viva is

"gang raped" by her fellow cast members.

By Viva's time, the role of female superstar was well-defined. Not only did she star in his movies, but she also regularly appeared as Warhol's social companion about town. Warhol remembers his personal relationship with Viva in Popisrn.

I was so fond of Viva then; there was something really sweet about her in spite of all her corn plaints and put-downs. Just when you least ex pected it, she would turn very modest and get all unsure about herself - which made her an even more appealing person .... Those months between August, when she was first in our movies and February, when we moved downtown, Viva and I were inseparable - we made movies, gave lectures, and did interviews and photography sittings together. She seemed like the ultimate superstar, the one we'd always been hoping to find: very intelligent, but also good at saying the most outrageous things with a straight on beautiful gaze and that weary voice of hers, the dreariest, driest voice in the world. 73

According to Viva, Warhol even chose men for her to date, as if he wanted to control the time·when they were not together, or as Viva suggests, perhaps Warhol wanted to be Viva just as he wanted to be Sedgwick.

73 Warhol and Hackett, pp. 266-67. 65 Q •

Andy Warhol would try to pick out men for me. He'd say, "Now go out with this one, go with that one." All these men in who I had no interest whatsoever. He was always coming up with these guys I think he was interested in. He would try to get me to go off with them. He'd say, "Big cock, big dick. He's got a big cock, go with him." 74

As with her predecessors, eventually Viva's time

as a Factory superstar would also be up. She fell out of

favor with Warhol, who could, as in the past, find a less

contentious woman to star in his films and act as his

companion. Warhol recalls the incident that precipitated

Viva's decline in the Factory entourage.

It was the day that big "family photograph" of the Factory crowd was being taken for Eye, the new pop magazine that the Hearst Corporation was launching aimed right at the big youth market. I went down to the Factory and when I got out of the cab on 16th Street, there was Viva in the pouring rain, pound ing at the door to the building and kicking at it, jerking furiously at the handle. She looked up and saw me - her face had a crazed expression. She screamed hysterically that she demanded keys to the Factory, that only the men had the keys: "I don't get any respect because-r'm a woman and you're all a bunch of fags!" And then, before I could duck, her pocketbook knocked me in the head: she'd thrown it at me - I mean, I couldn't believe she'd actually done it. I was stunned for a second. I kicked it back at her feet, I was so mad. "You're crazy, Viva!" I screamed. It upset me a lot to see Viva lose control. After a scene like that, you can never trust a person in the same way again, because from that point on, you have to look at them with the idea that they might do a repeat and freak out again. 75

In an interview with John Wilcock, Viva discusses the "key incident" and reports that she visited the

74 Stein, p. 226. 75 Warhol and Hackett, pp. 267-68. 66

76 F ac t ory very l 1'ttl e a ft er 1't occurred. History repeated itself with Viva; as soon as she became difficult, she was eased out of the Factory entourage. Losing a superstar wasn't a problem, Viva could easily be replaced by the next young woman anxious to get to Hollywood.

Valerie Solanas

Warhol's search for a new female Superstar was arrested by the events of June 4, 1968. On that date,

Warhol and art critic Mario Amaya, who was visiting the artist at his studio, were shot and wounded by Valerie

Solanas, who had appeared in one of Warhol's films.

Apparently Solanas had been waiting for Warhol to arrive at the Factory on June 4, and when he did the two of them rode up in the elevator together to the sixth floor. 77 As Warhol stepped into the studio, the phone was ringing. It was Viva, who wanted to tell Andy all about her role in Midnight Cowboy. Warhol, tired of the conversation, motioned for Fred Hughes, another Factory regular, to pick up an extension and take his place on the phone. Just then Warhol heard what was the first of five shots. 78

76 Wilcock, np.

77 Warhol and Hackett, p. 277.

78 Warhol and Hackett, P• 272. 67

I saw Valerie pointing a gun at me and I realized she'd just fired it. I said, "No! No, Valerie! Don't do it!" and she shot me again. I dropped down to the floor as if I'd been hit -I didn't know if I actually was or not. I tried to crawl under the desk. She moved in closer, fired again, and then I felt horrible, horrible pain, like a cherry bomb exploding inside me. 79

In addition to Warhol, Mario Amaya was shot in the back; the bullet just missed his spine but he escaped further injury by hiding behind a pair of double doors at the back of the Factory. 80

Finally, Solanas exited the same way that she had entered, calmly taking the elevator back down to the street and a few hours later turned herself in to "A rookie cop in Times Square. Handing him the .32 automa- tic plus a .22 revolver, she said: 'The police are looking for me. I am a flower child. He had too much 81 control over my life! '" Solanas was referring to

Warhol, who had made a series of mistakes in dealing with her, and she replied with this violent confrontation.

Just as Warhol's successes as an underground moviemaker brought Viva to the Factory, apparently Solanas was unaware of Warhol's reputation and made contact with him by submitting a script for him to read and hopefully produce. Warhol reviewed the script, but refused to

79 Warhol and Hackett, p. 273. 80 Stein, p. 289. 81 "The Sweet Assassin," Newsweek, 17 June 1968,p.86. 68

consider it for one of his films. According to Warhol,

"it was called Up Your Ass. I looked through it briefly and it was so dirty I suddenly thought she might be working for the police department and this was some kind of entrapment." 82 Although a decision had been reached regarding the fate of Solanas's script, Warhol did not return it to the author. In fact, he went to the Cannes film festival to show his one commercial success of the period, The Chelsea Girls.

The Chelsea Girls is the most recognized of Warhol's underground films from the sixties. The film chronicles the lives of people living in New York City's Chelsea

Hotel and is composed of several sections featuring different stories. "Residents" were played by Factory regulars, some of whom, such as Viva and Brigid Polk, ac 83 tually lived in the hotel. The revolutionary aspect of the movie was not its subject matter or its filming, which was typical Warhol of the period, but rather in the projection techniques. Warhol produced eight hours of film, but two reels are shown simultaneously so that its projection time is four hours. Each segment has its own sound track and the segments were generally shown in a

"phased relationship that separates the beginning of each

82 Warhol and Hackett, p. 271. 83 Koch, p. 87. 69

84 by about five minutes ... Theoretically, the segments can be shown in any order, so that each screening is potentially different. The general subject matter of the film, and a potentially new viewing experience each time one saw the movie, combined to make it the only financially successful Warhol film of the sixties. Appar- ently this single venture did more for Warhol's reputation and fame than all his previous work combined. According to Koch: The Chelsea Girls was being both talked about and seen. There were actually lines at the theatres, Variety began to list the gross, and Warhol's fame began to radiate into regions where his paint ings and early films could never have made him visible. 85

Along with an increase in prestige and fame came money and a new responsibility for Warhol. Nobody was concerned about finances or getting a cut with the earlier films, but now that the money was pouring in, questions regarding its distribution arose. Koch believes that this was a major turning point in the status quo at the Factory.

The Chelsea Girls had really done it, was going to make it big, this was the real thing. But something was changing in the Factory's inter nal life. The change was at first imperceptible, and the sequence of events is difficult, perhaps impossible, to reconstruct. Warhol and the entour age left on a national tour with the film, and

84 Koch, p. 89. 85 Koch, p. 98. 70

certain tensions began to be felt. One hears vague stories of a ferocious quarrel in San Francisco, especially about money. The earlier films without prospects of income, had been indulgences. But now there was real money flowing in, and very little of it was flowing in the direction of the superstars.86

Warhol, not used to paying people for their work in his

films, apparently never thought of sharing the proceeds,

and besides he needed the money to finance future film

projects. Perhaps Warhol believed that the exposure his

films provided the superstars was payment enough.

It was probably because of the media attention

focused on Warhol, as well as the financial returns being

reported on The Chelsea Girls, that Solanas contacted him with her film ideas. Since Warhol's movies were now making money, he could afford to buy scripts written by

those who were outside of the Factory family, so Solanas

took a chance. However, she received neither money for her work nor was the rejected script returned. Once

Warhol and his entourage returned from France, Solanas began calling the Factory asking -for her script; apparent-

ly Warhol had received the original and perhaps only copy.

Warhol remembers Solanas's persistance in the matter:

After we got back to New York, she started calling the Factory asking for her script back. I'd left it lying around somewhere, and I couldn't find it - somebody must have thrown it out while we were off in Cannes. When I finally admitted to her that it was lost, she started asking me for money. She was staying at the Chelsea Hotel, she said, and she needed money to pay her rent. One afternoon in

86 Koch, pp. 98-99. 71 Q '

September when she called, we were in the middle of shooting a sequence for I, A Man, so I said why didn't she come over and be in the movies and earn twenty-five dollars instead of asking for a hand out. She carne right over and we filmed her in a short scene on a staircase and she was actually funny and that was that. The main thing was, she only called occasionally after that, with those same man-hating s.c.u.M. speeches, but she didn't bother me so much anymore •.. 87

SCUM was the name of the organization founded by

Solanas, who was also its only member. For her organization, Solanas wrote a manifesto in which she states her beliefs about male dominated society and how women can usurp the male power base and thus straighten out the world. In essence, Solanas believed that the world would be a better place in which to live without men and she advocated the destruction of men who did not support 88 Scum's goals.

Although parts of the manifesto suggest ideas that even the most radical feminists couldn't support, other sections are quite insightful, demonstrating Solanas's potential as a feminist theorist. For example, she states that men are acutely aware of women's individuality which frightens them, and therefore they try to deny it;

[proceeding] to define everyone in terms of his or her function or use, assigning to himself, of

87 The initials, s.c.u.M., have come to mean, Soci iety for Cutting Up Men. However, Solanas asserts this interpretation was given to the letters by the first man to publish her manifesto. Warhol and Hackett, p. 271 88 Valerie Solanas, Scum Manifesto (London: The Matriarchy Study Group, 1983), pp. 37-38. 72

course, the most important functions - doctor, president, scientist - thereby providing himself with an identity, if not individuality, and tries to convince himself and women (he's succeeded best at convincing women) that the female function is to bear and raise children and to relax, comfort and boost the ego of the male; that her function is such as to make her interchangeable with every other female. 89

Interestingly, Solanas does extended commentary on

"Great Art" and "Great Artists" which is perhaps the re-

sult of her association with Warhol, who, at that time,

was already critically acclaimed as such. She claims that

the male artist creates an artificial world in which the male is portrayed heroically, while "the female is re

duced to highly limited, insipid subordinate roles." 90

Furthermore, society puts faith in the ideas of these men

because they are perceived to be extraordinarily sensi-

tive.

This allows the "artist" to be set up as one possessing superior feelings, perceptions, insights and judgements, thereby undermining the faith of insecure women in the value and validity of their own feelings, perceptions, insights and judge ments. 91

Perhaps because of Solanas's radical critique of male culture, Warhol cast her in the role of a lesbian

for his film, I, A Man, associating her with all that is

threatening about feminism. Even though he v-Tas aware of

89 Solanas, pp. 12-13. 90 Solanas, p. 23. 91 Solanas, p. 25. 73

her fanaticism in this regard, he exploited Solanas as he

had many of the women with whom he associated. When her

script was lost, it did not matter because he wasn't going

to use it anyway. Only when Warhol was caught by Solanas•s

persistance about wanting the script returned, did he ad-

mit that it had been destroyed, and still he was unwilling

to compensate her monetarily for the loss. Instead he

offered her money for appearing in a movie. This was

unusual and perhaps an indication of whatever guilt Warhol may have felt about being caught in the lie about

Solanas's script. But while paying her to appear in a

film may have assuaged Warhol's guilt, it did not allevi-

ate Solanas's anger. She took violent revenge against

the man who had ripped her off.

Art historian, Barbara Rose believes that the shoot-

ing was inevitable.

He [Warhol] became another person after the shooting. He didn't take another risk after that. Up until that time he lived a life of extreme risk. There's no question the shooting was a suicide attempt; he provoked it. He was waiting to be shot. Oh, the whole thing was set up for Andy to be killed. It was part of the kind of closet theater that went on there. It was inevitable, absolutely · inevitable. 92

Warhol's life changed after the shooting. Even

though most of the work he created in the sixties

92 Stein, p. 294. 74

revolved around strange, but interesting people like

Valerie Solanas, it apparently was not worth the risk of being shot again. Warhol said:

crazy people had always fascinated me because they were so creative - they were incapable of doing things normally. Usually they would never hurt anybody, they were just disturbed themselves; but how would I ever know again which was which? The fear of getting shot again made me think that I'd never again enjoy talking to somebody whose eyes looked weird. But when I thought about that, I got confused, because it included almost every body I really enjoyed. 93

Gradually life at the Factory changed. Even long time friends and associates like Gerard Malanga and Billy

Linich were phased out of the inner circle and the era of the great superstars was brought to an abrupt close.

Solanas is just one of a number of women that Andy

Warhol treated in a sexist way; however, she is the one who retaliated. She is also the only one who, instead of being a passive art groupie, was and is a woman with an articulated feminist stance. Solanas could not be ex- plaited without recognizing it, as had been the case with the female superstars.

92 Stein, p. 294.

93 Warhol and Hackett, p. 279. 75

Summary

Just as Monroe, Taylor and Kennedy exemplified the

American ideal for popular culture in the early sixties,

Jane Holzer, Edie Sedgwick and Viva represented that ideal

for underground culture, which is generally associated with

the fashion/glamour industry, in the mid and late sixties.

They were able to garner media attention not only because

of their physical appearance, but also due to their status

as wealthy young women. This, in turn, gave Warhol, as

the man who had "chosen" them, power and influence.

·Publicity was an essential part of the Warhol phenomenon,

and if you can't get publicity yourself, ~urround yourself

with people who can. Such surrogate relationships have

been important throughout Warhol's career.

Unfortunately the women associated with Warhol were

not able to share in his lasting fame and success as a

cultural figure. Neither Sedgwick nor Viva achieved any

permanent success from the sacrifices they made to involve

themselves with Warhol and his filmmaking. In some cases

the effects were personally destructive. Sedgwick was

introduced to a new and wider variety of sources for her

developing drug depenqency while she was with the Warhol

Factory entourage. In 1971 she died of an accidental

barbiturate overdose. Viva appeared as a minor character 76

in Midnight Cowboy, but never achieved her "ultimate glory" in Hollywood. Occasionally she appears on talk shows, usually to discuss her time as a Factory superstar, as if her life began and ended in 1968, which, according to the media, it did. Apparently only Warhol reaped any lasting benefits from his exploitation of the women who were a part of his creative life in the sixties. And that may have been his ultimate goal, to attain the kind of fame even his art world peers didn't have, in other words, the kind of fame one had if one was a Hollywood celebrity.

Should he want to, Warhol could spend the rest of his life living on the carefully cultivated reputation he estab lished in the sixties. CHAPTER 4

CONCLUSION

The goal of this paper has been to establish Andy

Warhol's attitude towards women as it is revealed in his

earliest professional experience with women and feminine

consumer culture during the fifties, and his Pop Art and

filmed images of women created during the sixties. This

re-examination of Warhol's early career suggests that the

artist's attitude towards women is exploitative on a

professional level and destructive, on a personal level,

for the women.

Warhol's commercial art career focused on the

production of ads for magazines catering to the interests

and concerns of upper and middle class women, ads which

promoted women's clothing accessories. Due to Warhol's work for the exclusive women's shoe stores, I. Miller,

the bulk of his commercial art concentrated on women's

shoes. He made this association with shoe imagery work

for him by developing a series of "personality shoes," which were sold to art collectors. This same imagery helped introduce Warhol to the world of New York art

77 78 0 '

galleries.

The similarity between Warhol's Pop Art images and those of his commercial career are often underestimated in discussions of the artist's work of the sixties, yet connections exist. Warhol came out of a commercial art background that focused on the depiction of women's consumer items, as opposed to male consumer objects or a combination of both representing society at large. A re-examination of his early Pop Art images suggests that these subjects have a similar source.

Warhol's early interest in depicting what critics generally viewed as objects of heterogeneous American consumer culture was, in fact, an extension of his com mercial art subjects depicted in a "fine art" context.

His most famous images from this period include Campbell's soup cans, Coca-cola bottles and boxes for Brillo soap pads, usually presented in a large series, as if the gallery itself was being transformed into a supermarket.

Critics of the sixties were quick to recognize Warhol's art as a more or less serious and satirical comment on fetishized consumer goods and the society that created them. What the critics overlooked was that Warhol's criticism, if it is criticism, seems to be specifically directed at women and their use of prepackaged foods that are placed in supermarkets for the convenience of one-stop shopping. 79

If Warhol were criticizing society in general with

his Pop Art images, why didn't he depict objects that were

more closely identified with male consumer culture? For

example, the American love affair with the car could use

some recognition, and why did he choose Campbell's soup

and not cans of Budweiser beer? This is not intended to

imply that men do not eat or purchase soup or that women

do not drink beer. However, these products tend to be

associated primarily with one sex or the other, especially

by the companies who "target" them for sales. Even after

the modern women's movement, commercial art still targets

women as the primary consumers of prepared foods and

__household cleaning products, and men as the primary con

sumers of beer, guns and sports cars. In the early and

mid 1960's, these products were even more blatantly and

exclusively depicted in advertising as sex stereotyped.

Warhol's own experience in the commercial art world

suggests that he must have been aware of the gender

specific choices he made in his Pop Art imagery.

Further evidence of Warhol's exploitation of

glamorous femininity is found in his Pop Art portraits of

media celebrities. Marilyn Monroe, Elizabeth Taylor and

Jacqueline Kennedy embodied the American ideal of youth,

beauty and wealth which captured the imagination of the

public during the sixties. They were packaged and mar

keted similarly to many other products of the day, but

they were addressing a male audience and defining what the 80

ideal American woman was. Furthermore, the intimation was

that all American women should and could fit this media

defined ideal. It was only natural that Warhol was

attracted to them as consumer objects. He was interested

in them not only because of the images the media spawned

of all three women, but by the personal tragedy that

touched each of their lives. It appears that Warhol made

each tragedy work in his favor, creating the portraits of

Monroe, Taylor and Kennedy when media attention focused

on them was at its zenith. Naturally, this further ex

ploitation of each woman when the market was "ripe" also

increased his own fame.

In the mid-sixties when Warhol's interests turned

to filmmaking, he had at least fifteen years of experience

exploiting women as glamorous cultural objects. Usually

this exploitation resulted in positive reinforcement for his ideas, in the form of a salary for his commercial art

and both money and fame for his Pop Art. Logically, if

something works, one generally continues in the same vein

and this is what Warhol did in his early films.

The women that starred in Warhol's films were called the "Superstars" and, each of them was drawn into the

Factory entourage for the same reasons: to appear in

Warhol's films and to act as the female center of the

Factory circle in counterpoint to Warhol's male lead.

Some of Warhol's attitudes towards women first depicted 81

in his early silkscreens are stated more clearly in these mid and late sixties films. Repeatedly, he develops a

11 love" relationship with each superstar i.e., the love of a fan, a distant love, an unfulfillable love. He appears to be sympathetic and caring; yet he exploits them by using their desires "to make it in Hollywood" as the hook and bait to induce them to appear in his films.

On film, Warhol forced the superstars to expose themselves physically and emotionally by betraying per sonal secrets and fears expressed in confidence either to Warhol himself, or another member of the Factory staff, for the sake of capturing "true emotion." Warhol was able to convince his female superstars that all this pain would eventually pay off when they were discovered by big

Hollywood producers. Fortunately for Holzer, she escaped before the Factory scene got too crazy. The bulk of

Warhol's attention was focused on Edie Sedgwick in 1965-66 and Viva in 1967-68. Not only did they appear in Warhol's underground films, thereby allowing him to expand his fame and reputation into the-area of filmmaking, but they also acted as personal companions. As such, Warhol's control over their lives extended into all areas. He was not afraid to tell his superstars what to do, when to do it, how to do it and with whom. These women were more than just companions, they were possessions and even more im portantly, surrogates who supplied Warhol with considerable 82

vicarious pleasure.

As Truman Capote suggested, Warhol wanted to be

Edie Sedgwick. He was attracted to her, in part, because she was from a wealthy New England family, and she had the type of personal energy and beauty that drew the attention of chic society. Since it was quite impossible for Warhol to be Sedgwick, he did the next best thing.

That is, he attempted to control her in whatever way possible. Eventually Sedgwick couldn't take anymore abuse from Warhol and his entourage; the more difficult she became, the more cruelly she was treated. This was typical in the evolution of the Warholian superstar.

While they were cooperative, they were indispensable.

As soon as they showed any sign of independent thought, the-superstars learned just how very easily dispensable they were.

In the final analysis, the superstars' film roles were a parody of their relationship with Warhol. He manipulated these women on film and in their personal lives in order to increase his own fame. Furthermore, he abused them, at least mentally, to achieve his own personal goals. If the superstars gained anything from their association with Warhol, it was momentary, lasting only as long as they stayed with him.

Warhol's attitude towards women is made apparent - through his art and film production during the sixties.

The reasons behind this attitude are no doubt quite 83

complex. However, it might be helpful to suggest some of

the possible motivations for that exploitation.

On one level, it seems Warhol believed that this

kind of exploitation was the way to achieve the success

he constantly strove for throughout his career. That he

was and is interested in the development of personal fame

is undeniable. As an artist, he is far more recognizable

than most of his contemporaries, which appears to have

little to do with his art in general, but rather with the

opportunities he makes for himself outside of traditional

art circles. For example, Warhol appeared in a 1985 epi

sode of the Love Boat in which he played himself, and

ironically recreated his sixties cultural role of under-

>:. g;round filmmaker. Marion Ross played opposite him as a

mature woman who was afraid that her conservative husband

would discover her youthful association with and her

appearance in Warhol's underground cult films as starlet,

"Marina del Rey." In addition, Warhol directed and ap

peared in the music video for the Cars' "Hello Again."

This is important because music videos are one of the cur

rent vehicles through which directors are hired for major

Hollywood productions. This is further evidence of his

interest in and attraction to the fame that is accorded

Hollywood stars and moviemakers. It also helps to explain

his interest in film stars such as Monroe and Taylor as

well as his own desire to be a moviemaker surrounded by 84

young hopeful starlets.

Another factor influencing Warhol is his personal

and political association with gay male culture. Some of

Warhol's attitudes are intrinsic to that culture and this

is most clearly revealed in his films and relationships

with Sedgwick and Viva.

When Warhol included Sedgwick in the all-male cast

of Vinyl, he explained her presence by saying she looked

like a boy. She had an interesting appeal to the gay

male element that existed at the Factory. This element

admired her for her money and historical family back

ground as much as they did for her personality, style and

.physical appearance. In the biography on Sedgwick's life,

it iscsuggested that the gays at the Factory wanted to be

her lovers just as often as the straight males. They ad

mired her small breasts, thin straight figure and those

long "legs that wouldn't quit." Yet this concentration

regarding her physical characteristics was on those things

that, in fact, made her more masculine and therefore, more

appealing to gay males. They wanted to love her, and yet

they could not because she was a woman. In a sense, she

had to be punished for the physical promise she made to

be their perfect young male lover and the equal denial of

the same. So she was cast in the Beauty series where

these same men found Sedgwick new lovers, as if to enjoy

sex with her vicariously, while taunting her with her own 85 Q '

fears about life. She was encouraged to make love to the beauties and then interrupted by her tormentors.

Viva was, in a sense, the antithesis of Sedgwick.

She was absolutely all that the gay male would associate with a stereotypical idea of a woman. That is, her constant talking, that boring voice and always talking about herself and the problems women had, for example the menstrual cycle, cramps, etc. Viva understood and was far more aware of the gay male element in the Factory than

Sedgwick. As such, she was cast in a different kind of role for Warhol's films. In Viva's case, she was the tormentor who chided the gay males for their lack of ma.,s:cu.!bini ty. However, the result was the same. She too had to be punished; consequently, she was gang raped in

Lonesome Cowboys. Even if, as Stephen Koch suggests,

Warhol used the rape to assert Viva's non-existence, it is still a violent crime against women. In both

Sedgwick's and Viva's cases, it was Warhol's creative force that operated behind the scenes, encouraging and condoning such behavior.

Warhol assumes a gay male attitude toward women in his Pop Art and films of the nineteen sixties. Under the circumstances, this is not unusual, since many of the creative personalities Warhol admired were gay i.e.,

Truman Capote and Tennessee Williams. Warhol spent a good deal of time with Henry Geldzahler until Geldzahler 86 " '

developed a lasting relationship with a male lover. After

that, according to Geldzahler, Warhol withdrew from their

relationship as if he had been hurt at being replaced in

Geldzahler's affections. It would not at all be unusual

to infer that close relationships with these men influ

enced Warhol's attitudes in many areas. Women was proba

bly one of them.

As with many gay males, Warhol's attitudes towards

women is full of ambiguity and confused emotion. He

wanted to be Edie Sedgwick and Viva, so much so that he

engineered their lives. When they were in public to

gether, Warhol gave Sedgwick instructions on when to

·.- ~.,' . ·st.and, when to sit, how to talk to reporters, etc. For

Viva--"he chose men; even she realized that it was Warhol

who really wanted to go out with them. He lived his life

through them while being envious of the things they had

that he did not. Andy Warhol tried to assume his super

stars' identities, control their lives, yet he had no

real personal affection for them. He found it easy to

discard them.

Women are a critical part of Warhol's work and his

world. That his attitude toward women is exploitative as

well as destructive, and was influential to his career and

society in general has been established by this study.

Due to his success, at least a part of society accepted

his attitudes and definition of desirable femininity. 87

This had a lot to do with fashionable social attitudes during the sixties. The role model he provided for women was one of the androgynous art groupie.

Warhol took advantage of the times. Given the progress that women have made in the last ten years, I question whether Warhol could be as influential today as he was in the past, using the same methods and stress ing the same attitudes. Fortunately, today women are beginning to make inroads in the art world and in films, providing their own definitions of women and the culture that is created by and for women. We no longer rely solely on the sometimes distorted views provided for us by fashionable cultural figures such as Andy Warhol. PLATES

88 89

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Plate 1

Andy Warhol Crazy Golden Slippers: Truman Capote, Kate Smith, Zsa Zsa Gabor, Julie Andrews, 1957 Life Magazine 90

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Plate 2

Andy Warhol Crazy Golden Slippers: Elvis Presley, James Dean, 1957 Life Magazine 91 p •

Plate 3 Andy Warhol 100 Soup Cans, 1962 72x52" Collection Dr. Karl Stroher, Darmstadt, Germany 92

Plate 4

Andy Warhol Coca-Cola Bottles, 1962 82~xl05" Collection Harry N. Abrams Family, New York 93

Plate 5

Andy Warhol The Six Marilyns (Marilyn Six-Pack) , 1962 43x22~" Collection Carter Burden, New York 94

Plate 6

Andy Warhol Liz as Cleopatra, 1962 72x60 11 Collection Dagny Janss, Malibu, California 95

Plate 7

Andy Warhol 16 Jackies, 1964 80x64" Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota 96

Plate 8

Andy Warhol Jackie, 1965 80x64" Dunkelman Gallery, Toronto, Canada 97

p •

. -_;:

Plate 9

"Baby" Jane Holzer in 13 Most Beautiful Women, 1964 98 p .

Plate 10

Edie Sedgwick and Andy Warhol Factory Foto 99

Plate 11

Nico Photo by Paul Morrissey 100

Plate 12

Viva and "The Rape" in Lonesome Cowboys BIBLIOGRAPHY

PRIMARY SOURCES

Books

Lichtenstein, Roy and Warhol, Andy. From Pop Art to Anti Art. Cassette. North Hollywood, California: Masters of Modern Art, n.d.

Solanas, Valerie. Scum Manifesto. London: The Matriarchy Study Group, 1983. Stein, Jean. Edie: an American Biography. Ed. with George Plimpton. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1982.

Warhol, Andy. The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (From A to B and Back Again). New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975.

WarhoL., Andy and Hackett, Pat. Popism: the ~varhol '60's. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1980.

Wilcock, John. The Autobiography and Sex Life of Andy Warhol. New York: Other Scenes, Inc., 1971.

Periodicals

"An Andy Warhol Sketch of our 'Soup Can Culture'". u.s. News and World Report. 27 June 1977, p. 57. Andre, Michael. "Andy Gets You Unawares." Art News 75 (February 1967), 26.

Blinderman, Barry. "Modern Myths: an Interview with Andy Warhol." Arts Magazine 56 (October 1981) 144-147. Bourdon, David. "Andy Warhol's 'Exhibition'". Art News 68 (October 1969), 44-45 plus. castle, Frederick. "Occurrences." Art News 66 (February 1968), 46-47 plus.

101 102

Grossberger, Lew. "Arts and Crafts with Andy Warhol." New Yorker, 17 November 1979, pp. 53-55 plus.

Junker, Howard. "Andy Warhol, Movie Maker." Nation, 22 February 1965, pp. 206-208.

Kent, Leticia. "Andy Warhol, Movieman: It's Hard to be Your Own Script." Vogue, 1 February 1973, pp.228-233.

Swenson, Gene R., "What Is Pop Art?" Art News 62 (November 1963), 24-60 plus.

"The '60's Over and Out: an Epitaph by Seven Young Survivors." Mademoiselle, August 1967, p. 325.

Tuchman, Phylliss. "Pop! Interviews with George Segal, Andy vvarhol, Roy Lichtenstein, James Rosenquist, and Robert Indiana." Art News 73 (May 1974), 26.

Warhol, Andy and Malanga, Gerard. "My Favorite Superstar: Notes on My Epic 'Chelsea Girls.'" Arts Magazine 41 (February 1967), 26.

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~1 •

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