Andy Warhol, Publisher 9780226542980

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ANDY WARHOL, PUBLISHER

ANDY WARHOL, PUBLISHER

LUCY MULRONEY THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS CHICAGO AND LONDON

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2018 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637. Published 2018 Printed in the United States of America 27 26 25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18

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ISBN-13: 978-0-226-54284-3 (cloth) ISBN-13: 978-0-226-54298-0 (e-book) DOI: https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226542980.001.0001 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Mulroney, Lucy, author. Title: Andy Warhol, publisher / Lucy Mulroney. Description: Chicago ; London : The University of Chicago Press, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2018011130 | ISBN 9780226542843 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226542980 (e-book) Subjects: LCSH: Warhol, Andy, 1928–1987. | Publishers and publishing—United States. | Arts—United States. Classification: LCC N6537.W28 M85 2018 | DDC 700.92—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018011130 ♾ This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

F I G M E N T

CONTENTS INT RO D U CTIO N   1

ACK NOW LED G M E N TS   1 5 7 N OTES   15 9 IND EX   185

1 2 3 4

One Blue P ussy

F uck yOu

33

Thr ee Bad BOOks

57

yOung, r ich, inTelligenT, and Willing TO sP end !

5 6

7

89

i’ d r ecOgniz e yOur VOice anyWher e

113

a mer ica

133

A

INTRODUCTION

ndy Warhol famously said, “I want to be a machine.”1 If I were to guess what kind of machine he meant, I would say a printing press. Warhol was always publishing something. In the 1950s, he self-published several illustrated books with his friends and lovers. Throughout the 1960s, he designed covers for underground literary and film journals, including Kulchur, Fuck You, and some/thing. In 1966, he edited an issue of the artists’ magazine Aspen that came in the guise of a Fab detergent box. The following year, he published a deluxe pop-up book with Random House titled Index (Book) that featured a hologram cover, a silver balloon, and an audio recording of the Velvet Underground. His exhibition catalogs were often stunning and unusual. For example, the catalog for his 1968 exhibition at the Moderna Museet was the size of a phone book, printed on newsprint, and wrapped in a bright flower-print cover. It includes no essays or exhibition details, instead reproductions of his paintings repeat across multiple pages. Also in 1968, he published the tape-based novel a with Grove Press, the preeminent publisher of the counterculture. Then, in 1969, he launched his own magazine Interview, whose subtitle evolved from Film Journal to Glamour Gazette. In 1975, he succeeded his novel a with his book of philosophy, originally to be titled THE. Two years before he died, he followed in the footsteps of Walker Evans and Robert Frank, publishing his own photobook of America. And this is only a sampling of his diverse publishing practice. I set out to write about these publications because I thought they were fascinating objects, but in researching them I discovered a cast of editors, assistants, designers, and readers who gave them meaning. Accounting for Warhol as a publisher, I realized, entailed the recognition that publication is a social practice that confers value and visibility on those who take it up, whether or not they happen to find their names on the dust jacket or the masthead. That is why I call Warhol a publisher rather than a bookmaker; the former term encompasses the wider array of activities in which he engaged. Warhol was a publisher in that he self-published his own limited-edition, hand-colored books during the 1950s, and he was listed on the masthead of 1

F I G U RE 1. B. Dalton Books window display for Warhol’s POPism, 1983. Polaroid photograph by Craig Nelson. Collection of The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburg. Courtesy Craig Nelson.

Interview magazine as its publisher. Yet many of his books were the product of established publishing houses— Harcourt, Random House, Harper & Row— therefore, he was also a publisher in a less literal sense. His books and magazines bring into view particular momentary relationships by incorporating the conditions of their creation and manufacture into their content and meaning. Whether the input of an editor, the capacities of the typesetter, the whims of a graphic designer, the concerns of the publisher’s libel lawyer, or the dismay of a newspaper’s book critic, Warhol shows us that these elements of publication were all available for him to appropriate as his art. A handful of scholars have attended to the role of publishing in Warhol’s practice. Thanks to Nina Schleif, we have learned many fascinating things about Warhol’s books of the 1950s.2 Reva Wolf ’s Warhol, Poetry, and Gossip in the 1960s was one of the first studies to acknowledge the importance of the little magazine to Warhol’s Pop art.3 Most recently, the exhibition Warhol by the Book, organized by Matt Wrbican, the chief archivist of the Warhol Museum, offered the opportunity to see and reflect on Warhol’s sustained 2

IntroductIon

interest in books as an illustrator, author, and book collector.4 Yet there remains room for new discoveries— some publishers’ archives have not yet surfaced— and for new approaches to how we write about Warhol’s publications since the traditional methodologies of neither art history nor literary history seem to suffice.

From Artists’ Books to Artist Publisher Artists have participated in making books since the illumination of manuscripts, but the contemporary artist’s book in the United States is understood to be a child of the 1960s, born from that decade’s aesthetic, social, and political transformations.5 In the late 1950s, a new generation of artists rejected the ethos of originality and expression; instead, they embraced chance, mechanical reproduction, and a deskilling of aesthetic craft. Through Robert Rauschenberg photography entered the space of the canvas, through John Cage ambient noise became music, and through a multitude of artists from Robert Smithson to George Brecht language became a key material for artistic manipulation. And, of course, through Andy Warhol the iconography of commodity culture took up residence in the gallery. The artist’s book not only emerged at this moment but also helped define the shift in artistic production. Against the conventional notion of a unique work of art produced by the artist’s hand and displayed within the white-walled gallery, it was inherently multiple, it employed technologies of mass production such as the mimeograph or offset lithography, it circulated out into the world, and it self-consciously took the formal assumptions and conventions of the book as part of its critical subject. Take, for example, Ed Ruscha’s Every Building on the Sunset Strip (1966), where the artist used the book to reproduce both sides of a Los Angeles street in a deadpan manner, and The Xerox Book (1968), which purported to be an exhibition for which each of the seven participating artists created a site-specific work. In 1974, Lucy Lippard wrote one of the first essays on the new genre. She explains: “The artist’s book is a product of several art and non-art phenomena of the last decade, among them a heightened social consciousness, the immense popularity of paperback books, . . . and a rebellion against the increasing elitism of the art world and its planned obsolescence.” Books, she suggests, offered artists an alternative mode for making work within an art world that had been dominated by the bravado of abstract expressionist painting and the elitism of the gallery system. Considering the democratizing possibilities of the artist’s book, she ends her essay on a utopian note. “One day,” she writes, “I’d like to see artists’ books ensconced in supermarkets, drugstores, and airports and, not incidentally, to see artists able to profit economically from broad communication rather than from lack of it.”6 IntroductIon

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In her second essay on the genre, published ten years later, Lippard dramatically changes her tune. She writes: “The artist’s book is/was a great idea whose time has either not come, or come and gone.” She wonders whether artists’ books were not “merely an ineffective and poorly distributed stepchild to big-time publishing.” It seemed as though the radical potential of artists’ books— with their appropriation of the materials and methods of mass culture— also created a problem. How does one tell the self-conscious artists’ books apart from all the other books in circulation? And how exactly are they different? In stating her concern about the precarious status of the artist’s book in relationship to mass culture, Lippard articulates what has become a fundamental issue in the discourse on artists’ books: “The fantasy is an artist’s book at every supermarket checkout counter. . . . The reality is that competing with mass culture comes dangerously close to imitating it, and can lead an artist to sacrifice precisely what made him or her choose art in the first place; and when ‘high art’ tries to compete, it also has to deal with what’s been happening all along on ‘lower’ levels— comics, photo-novels, fanzines, as well as graphic design or so-called commercial art.”7 In other words, how does one ensure that artists’ books stay up there with “high art” and do not fall into the muck of “what’s been happening all along on ‘lower’ levels”?8 Warhol’s publications belong to those lower levels— even if they do so with a nod and a wink— and that is part of what makes them so interesting to study. Warhol’s books and magazines are intriguing material objects, but their objectness is only one aspect of their meaning. I see Warhol’s publications, not as works in themselves, but as components of much larger and complicated projects. Let me draw a few points of comparison to clarify. Just as the striped banners exhibited by Daniel Buren are not so much his work as is the way that they function to reveal institutional frameworks, Warhol’s publications are less the material artifacts than the way these artifacts reveal discursive structures. Just as a photograph of one of Allan Kaprow’s happenings is not the work but its documentation, Warhol’s publications are the documentation of the processes, events, and labor that constitute them. Just as Christo and Jeanne Claude sell little swatches of the fabric used in their installations to the public, through his publications Warhol makes little pieces of his work available for public purchase. But, also, just as Félix González-Torres’s measured heaps of candy are much more poetic and complex than most museumgoers recognize, so too are Warhol’s publications poetic and complex yet easily consumed or overlooked without one ever knowing it. I am not trying to equate Warhol’s publications with any one of these projects; my point in drawing these comparisons is only to clarify how I conceive of his books and magazines as one component of the larger project of publication that Warhol undertook. My analyses of his publications, therefore, build on existing scholarship on the communicative and social aspects of art; in particular, 4

IntroductIon

the work of Ariella Azoulay, Rosalyn Deutsche, Rachel Haidu, Grant Kester, Jennifer Roberts, and Blake Stimson has offered models for reading Warhol’s publications.9 Throughout this book, I frame the social and institutional operations that coincide with the activity of publication as integral elements of Warhol’s work. This approach points to the contested status of the book within a spectrum of disciplines. Not only has the literature on artists’ books expanded our understanding of what might constitute a book beyond the traditional codex; scholars in the field of book history also posit the book as something more dynamic and elusive than simply the material vehicle for texts. The work of Leah Price, Janice Radway, Joan Shelley Rubin, and Michael Suarez, among others, demonstrates how the medium of the book (and all its constituent parts, from paper to typography to means of distribution), the message that it carries, and the modes of reading that it facilitates are inextricably linked.10 Along these lines, Robert Darnton’s articulation of the communications circuit and Thomas R. Adams and Nicolas Barker’s subsequent revision of it have served as important prompts for considering Warhol’s publications as material objects and simultaneously social performances.11 Equally foundational to my interpretations of Warhol’s publications is the scholarship on his work that considers the importance of his gay identity and the queerness of his practice while simultaneously seeking to challenge and question oversimplified or stable notions of identity by Douglas Crimp, Jonathan Flatley, Richard Meyer, and others.12 The thoughtful analyses of literary and artistic community by Sally Banes, Gavin Butt, Daniel Kane, and Lytle Shaw were crucial for thinking about how Warhol’s books circulated and were read.13 As I began to look closely at Warhol’s publishing practice, a passage from Michael Warner’s Publics and Counterpublics (2005) pointed the way forward. Warner tells us: “Public discourse says not only ‘Let a public exist’ but ‘Let it have this character, speak this way, see the world in this way.’ It then goes in search of confirmation that such a public exists, with greater or lesser success— success being further attempts to cite, circulate, and realize the world understanding it articulates.”14 Following Warner’s cue, I have tried to hold onto all the ways in which Warhol’s publications communicate— through their “speech genres, idioms, stylistic markers, address, temporality, mise-en-scène, citational field, interlocutory protocols, lexicon, and so on”— in order to fully understand what they are saying.15 Thus, I treat the entire communications circuit as the work, thereby extending my reading of a specific publication to an analysis of the lifeworld of its creation and circulation. To do this, I begin with a specific publication’s text and texture; then I move outward, tracing where it was made, who helped make it, when it was created, how it was read or not read, marketed, and sold, and how its text may have traveled into different contexts. This IntroductIon

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approach led me to various publishers’ archives where I unearthed fascinating documents— annotations from copyeditors, memos, sales records, newspaper clippings, and much more. It also led me to seek out Warhol’s collaborators, editors, and other forgotten individuals who helped create his publications. It brought me to the archives of the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, where I spent weeks listening to the audiocassette tapes that were source material for his publications, and to the archives and homes of other collectors, poets, publishers, and artists to which Warhol’s publications pointed. This method of study not only brought new materials and relationships to light but suggested that archival research informed by critical theory can help us think beyond the paradigm of the book to larger issues of language and representation, communication and art practices, and the relationship of print culture to the formation of publics.

Six Essays What follows is not a catalogue raisonné of Warhol’s books and magazines, nor is it a cumulative sequence of chapters on the role of publishing within the entirety of Warhol’s oeuvre. Instead, I offer six interlinked essays that focus on specific episodes from Warhol’s publishing practice and are organized roughly by decade: essay 1 looks at the 1950s, essays 2 and 3 the 1960s, essays 4 and 5 the 1970s, and essay 6 the 1980s. The case studies take the form of established publication genres because I wanted to contemplate what happens to these genres when appropriated by Warhol. Thus, essay 1 considers the limited-edition illustrated book, essay 2 the little magazine, essay 3 the novel, the pop-up book, and the exhibition catalog, essay 4 the mass-market magazine, essay 5 the nonfiction trade book, and essay 6 the photobook. Underpinned by an engagement with theories of the public sphere, art history, print culture, and queer studies, each essay attends to the specific technological and social processes that define Warhol’s publications while also historicizing them in relationship to Warhol’s other work, the work of his contemporaries, and the broader spheres of the literary marketplace and American popular culture. At the same time, the essays embrace a poetic latitude not typically found in scholarly texts. As I reflected on my experiences digging through the archives and listening to individuals recall what it was like to work with Warhol, I felt it appropriate to occasionally employ a literary register that would evoke the creative dimension of the works being described. With each publication, Warhol articulates a different way of being in the world and of being with others through the reading, making, and circulating of print culture. Not only do his publications point out the variety in our printed culture, but they also show us the complex ways in which publication facilitates our self-understanding, our public selves, and our social world. 6

IntroductIon

1

ONE BLUE PUSSY

An old photograph shows handsome couples sitting at small tables sipping espresso. Potted plants and baskets of citrus fruit make the café feel light, even though it is in a tenement basement. In addition to serving espresso with your choice of nutmeg, whipped cream, or cinnamon, the café Serendipity 3 specialized in “crescent-shaped pecan cookies and even richer pecan pies and tarts”— it was a tiny boutique where you could top off dinner with something sweet.1 Looking on this scene, I imagine how the whitewashed walls would glow yellow under the Tiffany lampshades. Toward the back of the room, the hands of an enormous antique clock register five to eight. It was here that Warhol and his friends would gather. Little trays of Dr. Martin’s dye would be spread around— pink, blue, yellow, orange, purple, brown— and glasses of water and brushes laid out; then, under the warm glow of antique glass and the smell of cookies, we see Warhol take a handful of prints out of a brown paper bag. He’s not as good-looking as the other men. His clothes are crumpled. Patches of pink swollen skin cover his cheeks and forehead. On his nose, which is bulbous like a root vegetable, sits a pair of thick eyeglasses. He’s only twenty-six, but, already, he’s bald. As he passes around the sheets of paper— each with a drawing printed on it: a kitten, a rabble of butterflies, a pair of cupids— he says something in a whispery, playful voice. Then someone picks up a brush, dips it in the water, dabs it into the pink, and puts down a big wet swash of color onto one of the prints. Someone else puts down some blue. “Oh, I was doing them too carefully, and that’s not a part of the way that he works.” The paper buckles. The color spills outside the lines. Someone else splashes green onto a different sheet. The men trade pictures, filling in different parts. Laughing. “I was laying the dye on and had a ball.” Fingers and shirtsleeves are speckled with color. “I was rather shocked. . . . He could be at home doing this himself . . . but I was having such a good time.”2 When it opened in 1954, Serendipity 3 had four tables, sixteen Thonet chairs, and one antique espresso machine. Located at 234 East 58th Street 7

F I G U RE 2 . The original Serendipity 3 interior with Patch Carradine, Calvin Holt, and Stephen Bruce in the background. Photograph courtesy Stephen Bruce/Serendipity 3.

in Manhattan, the café was part of a cluster of spaces on the Upper East Side where Warhol and his friends worked and socialized.3 Three blocks down from Serendipity 3 was the Hugo Gallery at 26 East 55th Street, which hosted Warhol’s first New York art exhibit and whose clientele included Ballet Russes dancers and the readership of Charles Henri Ford and Parker Tyler’s surrealist magazine View. Two blocks up at 223 East 60th Street was the Bodley Gallery, which presented several exhibitions of Warhol’s work during the 1950s. Four blocks to the west on 5th Avenue were the upscale shops of Bergdorf Goodman and Tiffany & Co., which regularly employed Warhol and his friends to dress windows and design promotional materials. Serendipity 3’s three young proprietors— Stephen Bruce, Calvin Holt, and Patch Carradine— cast themselves as the three princes from the fairy tale of Serendip and, through their own discoveries and accidents, ran a chic dessert boutique where window dressers, dancers, and poets could be seen sipping coffee alongside fashion-magazine editors, socialites, and celebrities. Like a stage set inspired by Lewis Carroll is how some described Serendipity 3.4 It was the perfect place for Warhol to get his start. “Everything was for sale, including the waiters.”5 Open evenings, 5:30 P.m. to 1:30 a.m. Closed Sundays.6

The Early Books It was during these first years in New York City— when Warhol was expanding his circle of gay male friends, creating illustrations of ladies’ fashions, and dressing department-store windows— that he also began to publish his own books.7 By as early as 1952, books served Warhol as a pretext to create collaborative projects with other men and to widen his social and professional networks. At first, the books were aimed at finding a foothold in the children’s-book market. They exuded a playful sensibility through simple rhyming narratives and naive illustrations, yet something about them did not quite fit the nursery room. They were campy, coy, and playfully subversive. Warhol’s books were a means for him and his friends to communicate publicly, albeit not directly— expressing, recognizing, and creatively envisioning themselves and their desires amid the homophobic culture of the 1950s. The first book Warhol published was Love Is a Pink Cake (1952), which he made with his friend Ralph T. Ward, a young poet with curly brown hair whom he met through a former Carnegie Tech classmate.8 Printed on simple blue office paper and staple bound, the book is a modest twenty-six pages. It features poems written by Ward under the pen name Corkie and illustrated by Warhol. On its title page, Cupid holds a flaccid string, rather than an arrow, which dangles above the book’s title and byline: “lOVe is a Pink c ak e by Corkie + Andy.” Inside, Ward’s rhyming couplets play on notorious love affairs and erotic incompatibilities. For example, of George Sand’s one Blue Pussy

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F I G U RE 3. Cover of

Love Is a Pink Cake, by Andy Warhol and Ralph Thomas Ward, 1953. Collection of The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburg, Gift of George Klauber. © 2018 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc./ Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

relationship with Chopin and the rumors of her lesbian affair with Marie Dorval, Ward writes: “Chopin some say loved George Sand, / He tried but once to hold her hand, / For once was enough; this lesson he learned / If your girl smokes cigars you’re apt to be burned.” Ward’s poem about Jean-Jacques Rousseau spins on his Confessions (1789) by hinting at the predicament of the married gay man: “Mr. and Mrs. Jean-Jacques Rousseau / Loved each other and everyone knew so / But to his wife he never confessed / and who can say Jean-Jacques didn’t know best.” Another poem suggests the dilemma of coming of age: “Here is a man who was beguiled / when he was a little child / by the author Oscar Wilde / And as he very oddly grew to / maturity, some said they knew to / what his oddity was due to / Oscar Wilde? Why no, his tutor / and his mother’s handsome suitor.”9 Warhol and Ward were developing a 10

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portfolio of children’s books, and Love Is a Pink Cake was one of the first they pitched to publishers, but it also conveyed a more personal message.10 “Andy had a love affair with me,” Ward later told Victor Bockris, “[but] I was never really attracted to him.”11 Thus, “Corkie + Andy” were also ill-fated lovers. This was not the first time Warhol used a book to express his affection for another man. Earlier that same year, Warhol’s debut New York exhibition at the Hugo Gallery presented a suite of book illustrations based on Truman Capote’s novel Other Voices, Other Rooms (1948). Although the work from this show is now lost, art historians know the exhibition from the two short reviews that were published at the time.12 In his review for Art Digest, James Fitzsimmons described Warhol’s drawings as “fragile impressions” and characterized the work as having “an air of preciosity, of carefully studied perversity. . . . At its best it is an art that depends upon the delicate tour de force, the communication of intangibles and ambivalent feelings.”13 Fitzsimmons may not have wanted to explicate it, but what Warhol’s exhibition communicated was far from ambivalent.14 Warhol was obsessed with Capote, and his suite of illustrations for Capote’s book was a public love letter that followed up on the actual fan letters he had been sending in the mail.15 Thus, the exhibition marks, from his earliest days in New York, the conflation of his personal, professional, and artistic desires in a book project, thereby establishing the modus operandi for the seventeen subsequent book projects he would undertake during the next eight years.16 In addition to Love Is a Pink Cake, Warhol and Ward collaborated on six other books, only one of which was published. Their second book, A Is an Alphabet (1953), appears superficially innocent while it explores the seriousness of gender, identity, and feelings of abandonment and attraction. In its unbound pages, Warhol’s blotted-line drawings are paired with a narrative tinged with loneliness: “A was an albatross / Who when teased by this young man, / Became very cross.” “O was an otter / Who slept in the same bed with this young man, / and there never was an odder otter.” Ward and Warhol’s unpublished books also play on the themes of adolescence and belonging: There Was Snow on the Street and Rain in the Sky (1952) tells the story of two brothers playing inside on a rainy day; The House That Went to Town (1952–53) is a campy rendition of “when the cat’s away the mice will play” in which all the furniture in a house decides to go dancing one night; and Mrs. Cook’s Children (1952–53) tells the tale of ten brothers and sisters who go pick berries. Warhol and Ward’s two other unpublished books are more overtly campy. Their Alphabet of Women (1953) sends up femininity as self-performance in a high-camp mode; in fact, the model for at least one of the women in the book is Warhol’s friend dressed in drag.17 Her caption reads: “M was her mustache removed in our salon.” In Velvet the Poodle (1953), Warhol and Ward offer a story of self-acceptance written from the viewpoint of a female poodle: one Blue Pussy

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I was really named for a marvelous drink of champagne & stout called a Black Velvet, which is really my full name, but I use Velvet for short. As things have turned out it has been very appropriate as I have a velvet-like coat (as they say) of hair. . . . But perhaps I just grew into my name as personalities such as I have a way of doing. In other words, I no doubt feel “I am Velvet” and never cared about growing a bristly coat as it wasn’t the real me anyway.18

During the summer of 1953, Warhol and Ward sent Love Is a Pink Cake and A Is an Alphabet to a handful of publishers— including Farrar, Straus & Young; Harcourt, Brace; and Little, Brown. In their submissions, Warhol played with his identity, portraying himself as Miss Andie Warhol, Mr. Andie Warhol, and simply Andie Warhol.19 But the name changes did not help. Warhol and Ward were not picked up. A letter from Grosset & Dunlap offered yet another rejection.20 Not much more than two years after Warhol and Ward first met, their collaboration ended. But Warhol kept on publishing his own books, which would often employ the same wit and camp naïveté as his books with Ward, but they differ in several significant ways. The books were no longer the collaboration between Warhol and one intimate; they were the product of a whole social circle. With the opening of the café Serendipity 3 in 1954, the books also began to be hand colored. Stephen Bruce remembered how Warhol would regularly bring friends to the café to color his prints and books: He would bring them in, and he would have five or six people with him. He would give them work, art work, to finish. . . . [W]eekly he would come in, and, I remember, one time he had a page of butterflies that he had printed or mimeographed, and he had all the people color in all of the butterflies with no direction or anything like that. . . . People who were, you know, people who he was involved with, and a lot of them were very attractive, very nice people.21

Warhol’s coloring parties must have been delightful affairs, and the stories about them suggest that, if his self-published books take up the “flamboyant tone” of camp in their whimsical blotted-line work, tongue-in-cheek narratives, and delicate hand coloring, then Warhol did not produce that aesthetic alone.22 The collaborative mode of producing these books facilitated a particular kind of discourse that moved beyond the play of double meanings to articulate new forms of affiliation and identification. The colorists became authors too. Over the next six years, 1954– 60, Warhol self-published six more books, all but the last of which included hand-colored pages. 25 Cats Name Sam and 12

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One Blue Pussy (1954) consists of portraits of cats all named Sam, followed by a blue cat with the caption “One Blue Pussy” on the last page of the book. The book’s playful repetition of Sams celebrates difference within similarity. À la Recherche du Shoe Perdu (1955) visually rhymes with 25 Cats and consists of portraits of ladies’ shoes paired with puns on well-known works of literature, songs, and movies, including “Dial M for Shoe,” “My Shoe Is Your Shoe,” and “The Autobiography of Alice B. Shoe.”23 In the Bottom of My Garden (1956) referred to Beatrice Lillie’s then camp classic “There Are Fairies at the Bottom of Our Garden.”24 Playing up the innuendo in Lillie’s song, the book depicts scenes of putti playing with one another in both innocent and erotic scenarios. Next, Warhol published A Gold Book (1957). Printed on gold-coated paper with pink, lilac, and teal tissue laid between the pages, A Gold Book indulges the sensual in both its content and its materiality. It is dedicated to “Boys filles fruits and flowers shoes tc and ew,” referencing both the broader gay subculture to which Warhol belonged, his close friend Ted Carey, and Warhol’s then lover Edward Wallowitch, whose photographs were the basis of several of the drawings in the book.25 Wild Raspberries (1959), coauthored by Warhol’s friend Suzie Frankfurt, is a nonsensical cookbook that they tried, unsuccessfully, to sell through Bloomingdales. Holy Cats (1960), a companion to 25 Cats, features a scraggily set of felines drawn by Warhol’s mother and printed on colored paper. While Warhol was busy self-publishing a new book to give to friends and clients each year, he was also working on three extended projects that were never fully realized as books. These are his notorious “Boy Book,” “Foot Book,” and “Cock Book.”26 The first was presented as an exhibition titled Studies for a Boy Book, which opened at the Bodley Gallery on Valentine’s Day 1956. The show consisted of portraits of handsome young men, some of which were decorated with hearts, suggesting (along with the date of the exhibit) that Warhol’s “Boy Book” was a tribute to the men whom he found attractive.27 The conceit of publishing a “boy book” proposed to make this attraction public and, by connection, publicize these men by putting their portraits in print.28 The “Cock Book” and the “Foot Book” were never presented publicly but existed and circulated only as scandalous proposals. It is unclear which project he started first, but sometime in the 1950s Warhol began trying to access people’s feet in order to draw them. Not any old feet would do. Warhol wanted to make a book of drawings of celebrities’ feet: Shirley MacLaine’s feet, Kim Stanley’s feet, Janice Groel’s feet, Lena Horne’s feet.29 He tried to use his friends’ connections to get to them. One weekend in Philadelphia, he lucked out: “Cecil Beaton was there, and Andy did Cecil Beaton with a rose between his toes.”30 As for his interest in drawing men’s genitals, Warhol seemed to have been less picky. Ted Carey explains: “If he met somebody at a party or something, and he thought they were fascinating or interesting, one Blue Pussy

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F I G U RE 4. Exhibition announcement for In the

Bottom of My Garden, by Andy Warhol, 1958. Collection of The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburg. © 2018 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc./Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

he’d say, ‘Oh, ah, let me draw your cock. I’m doing a cock book.’ And surprising enough, most people were flattered [when] asked to be drawn.”31 Given the series of books that Warhol had published by the mid-1950s, the line was not implausible. Jonathan Flatley places Warhol’s cock drawings within the context of his lifelong habit of collecting and argues that the potential to become part of his collection would have been alluring to many men. It would enable them to become “a Warhol” and thereby be “initiated into a special realm of similars, at once identified with Warhol and liked by him.”32 Building on Flatley’s observation, I think that the publicity provided by publishing plays an important role within Warhol’s queer aesthetic. These books offered an alternative form of publicity that countered the requirements of the official public sphere. Nancy Fraser has described such alternative forms of public speech, participation, and affiliation as subaltern counterpublics, which offer “parallel discursive arenas where members of subordinated social groups invent and circulate counterdiscourses to formulate oppositional interpretations of their identities, interests, and needs.”33 Warhol’s publications helped articulate such counterpublics. In the context of the 1950s and the social milieu in which Warhol’s art was known, the prospect of being in a book might have been equally enticing as becoming “a Warhol.” Being in a book— a book that would circulate among a primarily, but not exclusively, homosexual social and professional world— would also enable these men to be “initiated into a special realm.”34

Appearing in Print p [ at r i c k ] s [ m i t h ] . Going back to the drawings, you said you got the idea of the blot-drawings from college. How did that happen? a [ n dy ] w [ a r h o l ] . Well, it was just that I didn’t like the way I drew. I guess, we had to do an ink blot and do that kind of look, and, then, it would look printed somehow. Ah. And that’s how, I guess, I did it.35

To make a blotted-line drawing, Warhol would draw an image (or, often, trace from a photograph) onto a sheet of blank paper. This sheet of paper would either be folded in half or have another sheet of paper attached to it by a piece of tape that functioned as a hinge. Working slowly, Warhol would ink his drawing in small sections on the first sheet of paper and, while the ink was still wet, fold over the second sheet and blot the drawing. Line by line, Warhol would ink and blot the drawing until the entire image was transferred to the second sheet. The smudges and specs of ink produced by this rudimentary printing process gave the resulting image a spontaneous feel.

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Warhol would then discard the working ink drawing, and the print would serve as his final “drawing.” On the one hand, Warhol’s appropriation of a printed line subverts conventional notions of artistic authorship. He submits the most privileged, intimate aspect of an artist’s practice to the look of something anonymous, massproduced— something that “would look printed somehow.”36 On the other hand, the technique did not relinquish the individuality of his line at all. The blotted line became famous as Warhol’s line, and, despite its simplicity, it was difficult to imitate.37 Warhol’s mechanized drawing technique did not stop signifying his authorship; it gave it a new dimension. As Charles Lisanby recalled: “[Warhol] was always striving, always yearning to become famous, to become recognized, to be noticed, and so on. And he discovered . . . [t]he blotted technique. . . . [T]hose things looked to him as if they were printed. In other words, someone saw a drawing and recognized its worth and printed it.”38 Here, Lisanby suggests that Warhol’s drawing technique was developed, not as the expression of his personality or his unique abilities, nor as a critique of these conventional notions, but through a recognition of the status associated with appearing in print. Warhol’s blotted line bespeaks, not a destruction of originality and authorship, but an elision of the boundary conventionally assumed to lie between publicity and authorship. It reveals the paradox at the heart of the concept of publicity. In its most fundamental sense, publicity conveys a certain visibility; it is the condition of being public, of being offered up for the critical evaluation of “the public.”39 Publicity is what precedes and facilitates a value judgment. But, of course, the condition of public visibility already has value. And, at times, it is a risk. As Michael Warner points out: “Being publically known as homosexual is never the same as being publicly known as heterosexual; the latter always goes without saying and troubles nothing, whereas the former carries echoes of pathologized visibility.”40 Warhol’s self-published books extend the logic of his blotted line because they inhabit these multiple, conflicting functions of publicity. As Rosalyn Deutsche reminds us regarding urban space: “Public space is not a preconstituted entity created for users; it arises only from a practice (or counterpractice) of use by those groups excluded from dominated space.”41 Warhol’s books participate in an equivalent politics of publicness. They circulated as gifts to friends and clients. As Warhol’s friend George Klauber recalled: “People began to collect them, anticipate receiving them.”42 These selfpublished books enabled Warhol and his friends to be publicly seen and to see one another without the all-too-real risk of recording their proper names in print. Whether Warhol’s friends posed for him, provided him with texts, colored his drawings, or received one of his books as a gift, they helped carve

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out a space for themselves at a moment when mainstream publishing became charged with conflicting representations of homosexuality.

▮ ▮ ▮ In 1948, something interesting in American publishing happened that serves as the backdrop to Warhol’s book projects of the 1950s. Two very different books— one scientific, the other literary— ran in tandem for weeks on the best-seller lists. Although they were not linked in the publicity that surrounded each of them, together they brought a new kind of visibility to homosexuality in postwar mass media.43 They were Alfred Kinsey’s groundbreaking report Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (1948) and Truman Capote’s first novel, Other Voices, Other Rooms. Kinsey’s eight-hundred-page report shocked Americans by revealing that homosexuality was, in fact, common. Half the men whom Kinsey interviewed during his extensive research said that they had experienced erotic responses to other men.44 Such news was distressing to the American public in 1948. The New York Times and the Washington Post ran in-depth reviews of Kinsey’s book and reported on where one might be able to pick up a copy since it sold out almost immediately.45 However, some city newspapers refused to run reviews of it. As Edward Alwood explains, Kinsey’s report incited paranoia: “Although Kinsey never estimated the number of gays and lesbians in the United States, police in several cities used the percentages in his books to draw their own conclusions. Fearing their communities were on the verge of becoming havens for homosexuals, police set up special units to crack down on parks, movie houses, and subways where men had been seen engaging in sex.”46 Despite such negative repercussions, Kinsey’s report brought sexuality into public discussion through book reviews, magazine articles, and best-seller lists. On the one hand, such visibility spurred further discrimination. On the other hand, this attention also helped facilitate an alternative imagined community that would continue to develop throughout the following decades as the gay-liberation movement took shape.47 If Kinsey’s report brought a heightened, albeit scientifically coded, presence to homosexuality within American print culture, Truman Capote’s first novel offered a hedonistic embrace of the image of the gay man. The novel is a coming-of-age story that closely resembles the contours of Capote’s own adolescence.48 After losing his mother, the main character, Joel Harrison Knox, is sent off to a little town in Alabama to live with his father, who had deserted him as an infant. In his new home, Joel befriends his eccentric older “cousin” Randolph and a tomboy named Idabel. According to Neil Printz, we witness Joel’s transformation from a boy who had “a girlish tenderness in his eyes” and who was “too pretty, too delicate and fair-skinned” to be a “‘real’

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boy” into an adolescent who can accept himself for who he is.49 More than its Southern Gothic setting and conspicuously gay characters, it was the publicity around Capote and the scandalous photograph of him printed on back of his book, displayed in advertisements, and hung in bookstore windows that sent the public into a frenzy. As Printz writes: “Flaunting local mores and contemporary taboos, Random House conveyed Capote into an arena of publicity, staged his image as a disturbing vehicle of fantasy and desire.”50 Indeed, the photograph of Capote on the back of the book shows an attractive young man who is not afraid to display his sexuality. Capote is presented lying on a couch. He seems in the process of turning, offering himself for our touch. His blond hair is brushed forward, and his eyebrows curl inquisitively as he gazes at his readers. His right hand rests on his crotch, while his left thumb is tucked into his vest pocket. Patrick Smith describes the photograph as “an exquisite affectation”: “Impeccable and deliberately cultivated, the author’s calm, horizontal deportment and dandified vanity may be seen as a deliberate, encouraged, and valued shock to the viewer, whose role becomes either that of a lover or a voyeur.”51 Random House perpetuated the scandal by running advertisements featuring the photo accompanied by the headline “This is Truman Capote.” Through both their subject matter and the publicity surrounding them, Kinsey’s and Capote’s books map a complex field of public interest in homosexuality at this moment in American print culture. This field was defined, not only by Kinsey’s and Capote’s books, but also by the homophobic zealotry of Senator Joseph McCarthy, who aimed to root out gays because he felt they posed a national security risk.52 There were radio programs: “Is the Homosexual Psychopathic?”53 And local roundups: “The police are continuing their drive to rid the city of undesirables.”54 The witch hunt fueled the publication of books about sex, and a backlash against paperbacks ensued. Pocket-sized books, it was reported, were aligned with an “appeal to sensuality, immorality, filth, perversion and degeneracy.”55 As Trevor Fairbrother suggests, there was also a general shift toward “sexual frankness,” as seen in the music of Cole Porter and the circulation of mass-produced homoerotic magazines such as Tomorrow’s Man and Physique Pictorial.56 Grasping for a sense of order, censorship battles over the criteria of obscenity were under way in the Supreme Court.57 Amid these events, Warhol, too, appeared regularly in newspapers and magazines. Since arriving in New York City in 1949, he had made a name for himself as an illustrator and designer. Glamour, Mademoiselle, Charm, Seventeen, Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, Dance Magazine, and Interiors all put his name and work in print. After he landed the I. Miller & Sons campaign in 1955, he became even more visible. A half-page, and sometimes full-page, advertisement featuring Warhol’s drawings of ladies’ shoes ran each week in the society 18

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F I G U R E 5. Advertisement for Truman Capote’s Other Voices, Other Rooms, published in the New York Times on January 19, 1948. Photograph by Harold Halma.

section of the newspaper. It was his “most sustained and successful client relationship,” suggests John Curley. “His award-winning drawings had tremendous visibility— each reproduced more than a million times— as they appeared regularly in the Sunday edition of the New York Times.”58 By 1956, the newspaper could mention Warhol’s name without any explanation needed. In contradistinction to Kinsey’s and Capote’s engagement with the American mass public through the national circulation and reception of their books and Warhol’s own mass-reproduced illustration work, Warhol’s self-published books facilitated a local queer counterpublic. These books elicited a coterie of readers who could understand them as speaking in a distinctively gay vernacular while also circulating within a broader sphere of strangers who could read them literally as what they seemed— sweet books of cats, silly rhymes, cherubs, and so forth meant to publicize Warhol’s commercial art career.59 In this way, Warhol’s books put into circulation— they cleverly publicized— a social world. As George Hartman recalled: Andy was the only one that gave away as gifts his creative product. . . . It was the best sort of self-promotion. . . . [E]verything that Andy gave to you was either glued by his mother or stamped by Andy or folded by Nathan or. . . . It was very tangibly the product of a human being. . . . This is why these things were kept by people. I mean, all the posters done by the other artists or printed on postcards have been burned or thrown away a long time ago. And the things that we kept from Andy are not because we thought he was going to be famous because we had no idea that he was going to be famous. We kept these things because they were personal. They had our names on them. They were numbered. They were beautiful.60

“They had our names on them”— Warhol did often inscribe the books when he gave them away as gifts, but, as Hartman’s recollection reveals, those who received them also knew who had made them. Names were on the books in both visible and invisible ways, not only in the inscriptions, but also in the stories of their production.61 They were personal. They were numbered. They recognized these men as also worthy of being put into print. But in New York City it was still a crime to be gay. There were crackdowns. There were arrests. Public visibility could be dangerous.

25 Cats Name Sam The first hand-colored book Warhol published stands out against the rest. It feels special. On its cover is a big pink cat. Rows of hatched lines cover his body. Running vertically across his belly, over his thigh, and up his arm, they mark him with the pattern of a tabby. And he is a demure tabby cat. His pos20

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ture is languid, head turned up, body rolled halfway back. He reminds me of the image of Capote seductively gazing out at his potential readers. It is as though he is about to flop over and beg for a belly scratch. But this tabby is not alone on the book’s cover. A title, scrawled in the awkward cursive handwriting of Warhol’s mother, wavers from thick to thin as it curls up around his head: 25 Cats Name Sam and One Blue Pussy. Beside his pink paw is Warhol’s byline, under his tail his name, Sam. And in the bottom left corner, in a different ink with a thicker line that is handwritten and not printed, there is another name, a simple inscription: George. Reading this name, I know that I am eavesdropping. Everything about this book— its small size, its soft worn covers, its seductive cat, the personalized handwriting, and the multiple names on the cover— communicates in a way that irrevocably places me on the outside. Yet, however personal, it is so charming and silly, so unassuming, that it speaks to me, too. More than fifty years after it was made, this little book’s rebellious publicness still flickers in my hands.62 25 Cats Name Sam and One Blue Pussy exemplifies the faux naïveté and playful femininity of Warhol’s pre-Pop work. The cats were drawn with Warhol’s blotted-line technique, printed by offset lithography, and then hand colored during one of Warhol’s coloring parties. The book’s premise is simple. Each page depicts a cat of a different shape and size, hand colored in a vibrant hue. Pink, red, golden, furry, frontal and in profile, pensive and curious, fat and cuddly, with lots of whiskers or big paws, young and old— the cats are all named Sam. After this sequence of cats named Sam, we find, on the final page of the book, a blue cat with “One Blue Pussy” printed below him. In the same way that a viewer of one of Warhol’s paintings is confronted by the slips and smears of paint that distort the silk-screened image, or in the way that a viewer of one of Warhol’s films might have to endure a thirtyminute reel shot entirely out of focus, a reader of 25 Cats encounters an array of intentional inaccuracies. Not only does the title printed on the book’s cover leave Mrs. Warhola’s spelling error intact— the cats are name Sam rather than named Sam— but also the book contains only seventeen Sams, not twentyfive. The missing cats may have been caused by the printer’s sheet size, or perhaps Warhol intended the mismatch between the book’s title and its contents, or it is equally possible that he never bothered to count the cats and that their actual number is an unimportant detail. The discrepancies between what the book claims to be and what it actually gives readers are fundamental to how it employs the devices of modern print culture to facilitate an alternative politics of publicness. For example, the book was printed in a small, numbered edition, but the reason for numbering the copies had nothing to do with accurate record keeping. Supposedly, 190 copies of 25 Cats were printed, but Warhol did not number the copies consecutively 1/190, 2/190, up to 190/190.63 Rather, as Warhol’s assistant at the one Blue Pussy

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F IGU RE 6. Cover of 25 Cats Name Sam and One Blue Pussy, by Andy Warhol, 1954. Collection of Williams College Museum of Art. ©

2018 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc./Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

F IGU RE 7. Final page of 25 Cats Name Sam and One Blue Pussy, by Andy Warhol, 1954. Collection of Williams College Museum of

Art. © 2018 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc./Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

time, Nathan Gluck, remembers: “Andy got the idea that everybody wanted to have low numbers.” Yet Warhol did not give every copy of the book a low number. According to Gluck: “He would arbitrarily just write numbers: 190, 17, 16, and so on.”64 Such unorthodox numbering points up the commodity status of the book while also supplanting the value hierarchy of the limited edition with the emotional value of a gift. Nobody, Warhol knew, wants to be number 190 out of 190. On one level, 25 Cats reads like a product catalog. These seventeen tomcats replicate the way that brand-name companies offer a spectrum of slight variations. Would you like the fat orange Sam? Or do you prefer a small brown Sam? Maybe a furry pink Sam would suit you best. Given the book’s status as a self-promotional gift meant to lure potential clients, the display of various cats does showcase Warhol’s virtuosity in illustrating commercial goods.65 But Warhol’s cats are not merely a product line; they are a family, a litter of cats named Sam. And, within the pages of this book, they produce a space of sociality and affiliation that not only reflects the display tactics and serial logic of commodities but also, at the same time, publicizes a way of relating that departs from the norms of the nuclear family.66 In this litter of cats, the members are all male, they all have the same name, and they are gathered together and watched over by one androgynous blue pussy. As Judith Butler writes: “The replication of heterosexual constructs in non-heterosexual frames brings into relief the utterly constructed status of the so-called heterosexual original. Thus, gay is to straight not as copy is to original, but, rather, as copy is to copy.”67 What better way to characterize Warhol’s book— from the blotted lines to the seventeen Sams— than as a copy of a copy. Yet, like each hand-colored copy of the book, each Sam is different. Such divisions between difference and similarity are not only thematized in this book; they are actively destabilized. Reading Mrs. Warhola’s spelling error on the cover, one must also wonder whether more letters are missing from the text. Maybe each cat is not a Sam but, instead, the same. The book might also read: “Same, Same, Same, Same, Same, Same, Same, Same, Same, Same, Same, Same, Same, Same, Same, Same, Same, One Blue Pussy.”

▮ ▮ ▮ 25 Cats not only pokes fun at heteronormative constructs but also parodies the conventions of publishing. This begins with the details of the book’s colophon: This edition consists of 190 copies which have been printed by Seymour Berlin 24

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p.l.g. 8070 This is copy no 75 Andy Warhol 25 cats name sam and one Blue was written by Charles Lisanby

The colophon is a standard element in printed books, and this particular one offers a few key pieces of information: the name of the printer, the number of copies printed, an indication that this is copy 75 of 190, that the text was written by Charles Lisanby, and that the book is a work signed by Andy Warhol. It turns out, however, that most of these facts are counterfactual. Warhol’s 25 Cats denaturalizes such categories as author, writer, and edition. Written in Mrs. Warhola’s cursive hand, the spelling errors from the cover are exaggerated in the colophon. The cats are still name rather than named Sam, but now almost all the majuscule letters have become minuscule, and the pussy has disappeared. The title now reads: 25 cats name sam and one Blue. We know that the number given to this copy is probably fudged, as is the number of copies that the colophon claims were printed. The attribution of the text to Charles Lisanby immediately poses the question, What exactly did Lisanby write? The written components of the book consist of the title, the colophon, the name “Sam” for each of the first seventeen cats, and then “One Blue Pussy” written under the blue cat on the last page of the book. When interviewed about his contribution to the book, Lisanby responded: “Oh, the Cat Book. It was so funny. There is no text. The text is the title, and I wrote the title, which was, I don’t know, an amusing thing. . . . [Warhol] said, ‘What should I call it?’ I just said that. So, he wrote that down, which, I think, is funny.”68 Funny, indeed, because it seems as though Mrs. Warhola has pirated Lisanby’s text and thoroughly reclaimed it as her own through her unusual handwriting and bad spelling. In such ways, Warhol’s 25 Cats speaks in the language of camp. It puts into circulation double entendres and playful misappropriations that create a reading situation that depends utterly on the reader, who will not necessarily be savvy to all the meanings at play as the book’s text makes its way into window displays, greeting cards, magazines, and personal anecdotes. For example, Warhol did own several Siamese cats named Sam. While the cats in the book are not necessarily representations of Warhol’s pets— some are tracings of photographs from Walter Chandoha’s book All Kinds of Cats (1952)— they were an important part of his public persona at the time, so much so that he made a point of mentioning them in public contexts. Take his biographical blurb in the July 1953 issue of Interiors as a case in point: one Blue Pussy

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Andy Warhol couldn’t think of anything much to say except that he has eight cats named Sam, when asked for a character portrait, despite the facts, most of them gleaned elsewhere, that: he studied painting and design at Carnegie Tech in home-town Pittsburgh; came to New York in 1949; found Vogue, Glamour, and Harper’s Bazaar, among others, very pleased with such blotting-paper drawings as the one on Interiors’ cover for May . . . had a show called “15 drawings on the writings of Truman Capote” at the Hugo Gallery last year; and won an Art Directors’ Club medal for a drawing he did for the Columbia Broadcasting System.69

In this blurb, published the year before 25 Cats, the cats named Sam are already linked to Warhol. As Victor Bockris explains: “To most people they became part of his legend: Andy was living in a mad studio with his mother and twenty-one cats. The smell, they said, was something else.”70 Patrick Smith also mentions the cats in his study: “The exaggerated effect of having dozens of loose cats in his apartment was part of Warhol’s notoriety during this period. In fact, in more than 50 of my interviews, Warhol’s many cats were vividly remembered by his friends and professional associates.”71 According to Seymour Berlin, Warhol’s cats were meant to elicit a certain effect: “This is what Andy looked for, this kind of response, ‘Isn’t he wild, having 20 million cats running around!’”72 Berlin seems to have been right since Warhol used the same line about owning several cats named Sam, with a slight variation, in his bio for Interiors the following year, only a few months before he published the cat book: “Andy Warhol, our most omnipresent non-staff cover artist, did some drawings for our Music In Interiors study in this issue, as well as the thematic cover. He also supplied some new biographical facts: he will have a show in October at the Loft Gallery, he has published two picture books—Love Is a Pink Cake, and A Is an Alphabet— and after a thorough housecleaning, he has newly acquired ten cats named Sam.”73 The stories of Warhol’s cats also circulated in more private contexts. For example, the twelve postcards that Tommy Jackson sent to Warhol between 1950 and 1952 from Black Mountain College contain cryptic sexual messages: “andy has a pussy (hermaphrodyke)”; “i knew things was good, / but i didn’t know you had a pussy / and maybe in that case”; “meow / (being catcall).”74 Shifting in tone from aggressive to inquisitive to flirtatious as Jackson’s messages do, it is impossible to know how Warhol received them. If he ever replied, we do not know that either. Nonetheless, these postcards reveal that his staging of himself as the caretaker of multiple cats shaded into his reputation within a social circle of gay men. In addition to Jackson’s erotic postcards, numerous cards and letters in the Warhol Museum Archives mention cats. For example, Diana Vreeland thanks Warhol for “the book I have on my desk of the delicious cats.”75 A greeting card 26

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depicting a little black cat, found in one of Warhol’s time capsules, is unsigned and the printed text crossed out; a single line is circled and underlined— “someone very nice”— accompanied by the handwritten annotation “read only that.”76 A Christmas card from Corky, Harry, and Roy features a tabby kitten.77 Another Christmas card, sent five years later, from the poet and playwright Mercedes de Acosta, also features a little cat, this time juggling ornaments: “Be lighthearted, Be gay— Have a wonderful day!” A pair of gardening gloves accompanied the card, which were meant to protect Warhol’s hands when he cut his roses and to protect him from the “thorns of life.”78 Two months later, de Acosta sent Warhol a letter that specifically addressed his cat book: I want to thank you again for my twenty-five Sams and one beautiful Blue Pussy who surely will take his place in art besides the Blue Boy. But all these pussys [sic] are master-pieces. I have studied each one of them and it seems they have already become part of my life. All of them have such character and one day I would like to write a “character-study” about each one— that is, I would like to write what I feel is the character of each one. I cannot begin to tell you the pleasure they give me.79

Not only does de Acosta afford Warhol’s Blue Pussy a place in art history beside Thomas Gainsborough’s Blue Boy (ca. 1770), but also each of the Sams, she feels, has become part of her life. How might we understand this hyperbolic thank-you note? Warhol was designing a dust jacket for Here Lies the Heart (1960), de Acosta’s memoir of her love affair with Greta Garbo, but their connection seems to have been more than that of customer and client. Like Warhol, de Acosta had suffered a childhood nervous breakdown. Also like Warhol, she was a devout Catholic, a celebrity stalker, a hoarder of letters and ephemera. She had a particular affection for both shoes and animals. She and Warhol would eventually even share the same nickname. Mercedes de Acosta was known as Countess Dracula. In the 1960s, Warhol’s friends would call him Drella— a portmanteau of Dracula and Cinderella. Perhaps, then, Warhol and de Acosta shared something deeper— that is, the sense of being different and of being alone because of it. As a child, de Acosta told a nun: “I am not a boy and I am not a girl, or maybe I am both. . . . And because I don’t know, I will never fit in anywhere and I will be lonely all my life.”80 Warhol may have been able to relate. As Neil Printz puts it: “Loser or loner, Warhol was historically cast— a hapless child in an adult world, a hopeless femme among the butches, the blue pussy.”81 Many years before the publication of 25 Cats, perhaps even before Warhol moved to New York City, he created his own Christmas postcard. It was addressed to Truman Capote but never mailed. Printed on the card’s front side is a film still of Greta Garbo and Robert Taylor in Camille (1936). Above one Blue Pussy

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F I G U RE 8. Mercedes

de Acosta, ca. 1934. Photograph by George Hoyningen-Huene. Collection of the Rosenbach Museum and Library, Philadelphia. Courtesy Estate of HoyningenHuene, © Horst.

Garbo’s head, a speech bubble is drawn that reads, “merry christmas.” Taylor responds, “meow.” On the back of the card, Warhol has typed “me and my cat.”82 Whether there were in actuality eight, ten, seventeen, twenty-one, twenty-five, or twenty million Sams, these cards and letters show us that Warhol’s cat book is more than just a book. From its queer narrative to its personalized inscriptions, 25 Cats Name Sam and One Blue Pussy imagines a different world amid the real one.

Twenty-Six Boys Named Sam It is true that the cats depicted in Warhol’s book are, simply, cats. But, through their idiomatic playfulness and their connection to his home life, 28

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they code Warhol as not only an eccentric but also, as Jackson’s postcard messages reveal, feminized. Such a relay of meaning is what allowed the text of 25 Cats to detach from the book and proliferate in a variety of public and private places— from Jackson’s correspondence to Warhol’s magazine bylines to holiday cards from friends and, even, to the public street. In 1959, Warhol designed a window display based on the French perfume Carnet de Bal by Revillon for the Manhattan department store Bonwit Teller. Playing on the perfume’s name, which translates literally as dance card, and the perfume label’s European origins, the window design takes the form of a medieval coat of arms. The central element of Warhol’s design is the shield, which has been divided into an eighteen-panel grid that depicts a sequence of dancing couples. one Blue Pussy

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F I G U R E 9. Andy Warhol’s Bonwit Teller window display for Carnet de Bal by Revillon, 1959. Photograph by Virginia Roehl.

Above the shield is a knight’s helmet. An arm brandishing a dance card is perched on the helmet and serves as the design’s crest. The motto “Je pouvais danses [sic] toute la nuit” arcs above. On each side of the helmet, a cupid floats in the air while holding a heart with a bottle of perfume inside. At the bottom of the design is the name of the perfume, Carnet de Bal. Typical of Warhol’s commercial work of the time, the cursive handwriting, the fairytale associations of knights in shining armor, and the misspelling in “Je pouvais danses” speak of innocence and femininity. If we return to the shield and the sequence of couples it depicts, we can see that there is something more to Warhol’s design than the iconography of Revillon’s perfume. There is a story. The shield at the center of the design reads like a comic strip with a narrative that unfolds in panels from left to right. At the top left corner of the shield is the first panel, in which we see a man and a woman dancing. To their right, reaching into their space from outside the panel, is a little arm holding a dance card. Their dance is interrupted. The next panel is blank, merely providing display space for a bottle of perfume. The next panel depicts a couple dancing again. Then, in the following panel, we find a ring of dancers reminiscent of Henri Matisse’s La Danse (1909–10). In the next panel, a couple dances, and another little arm holding a dance card reaches in and interrupts them. Another blank panel with a perfume bottle follows. Then, in the next panel, we find the dancing couple again, and another arm holding a dance card interrupts them. The narrative continues from left to right down the front of the shield, with the dancing couple interrupted over and over again by little arms holding little dance cards. It is as though, with each new panel, the female dancer must change partners. At the bottom of the shield, the three final panels present the results of the evening and the conclusion of the narrative. In the bottom left panel, we are shown a dance card resting horizontally across the panel as though dropped from fatigue onto a dresser or the floor. It reads: First dance Sam 2nd dance Sam 3rd dance Sam 4th dance Sam 5th dance Sam 6th dance 30

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Sam 7th dance Sam etc.

Next, at the center, the penultimate panel depicts a whirling ring of dancers. A single female dancer stands at the center surrounded by her male suitors, her Sams. Their fluid bodies form a spiraling, nearly airborne enclosure. Then, in the final panel, at the bottom right of the shield, we are allowed into the most private space of communication. We are shown a page of a diary. As if left open by accident, it reads, dear diary i danced with 26 boys named sam and one blue edgar

One might ask what significance Warhol’s window display has for understanding the politics of his publishing. Is the space of a book not so different from the space of a department-store window that such repetitions become meaningless? But Warhol is not merely repurposing names and themes here; his ability to collapse an intimate scene of reading— first the limited-edition, self-published, hand-colored book and now the page of a diary— with the space of the street, of advertising, and of shop windows is a measure of his ability to shift the way we envision how reading publics come into being. The repetition of the cat book here in ghost form, as one female dancer encircled by so many available Sams, conflates the details of Warhol’s biography, the coding of his sexuality, the scene of the coloring parties, the text of 25 Cats, and the world of shop windows and ladies’ magazines into one seemingly simple story.83 If under the conditions of modern life “true literary activity cannot aspire to take place within a literary framework” but must instead “nurture the inconspicuous forms such as leaflets, placards, brochures, advertisements, and window displays,” as Walter Benjamin has told us, then Warhol’s window display shows that the influence moves the other way, too.84 The logic of publishing— the power that Warhol recognized in seeming printed somehow— feeds his art. He shows us the ways in which gay men were able to “read the culture against the grain” and, in so doing, become “more visible than they were supposed to be.”85 But his self-published books also exceed this specific counterpractice. Warhol reveals publicity to be more than public visibility. His books test the limits of the subject formations and social affiliations available to us as readers. I like to imagine what one of Warhol’s friends— perhaps one of those “very attractive, very one Blue Pussy

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nice people” who helped hand-color 25 Cats— would have thought when he walked down Fifth Avenue and came across this window display.86 What would he have read in the diary entry that divulged to everyone: “I danced with twenty-six boys named Sam and one blue Edgar”? Who might he have imagined as the “I” who danced?

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F U C K YO U

April 2, 1965. Friday morning session. Quincy Mumford, the librarian of Congress, greeted symposium attendees. “Historically the Library of Congress has been the leading collector of materials that reflect the development of American life and thought,” he explained. “In addition to reference and bibliographic services, the Library has presented cultural programs in the form of lectures, exhibits, and conferences, that we might gain a clearer view of the tradition, meaning, and character of our civilization.”1 This symposium was to be such an occasion. Mumford turned the meeting over to Reed Whittemore, the library’s poetry consultant. The title of the symposium was “The Little Magazine and Contemporary Literature,” and the hope was that the two-day gathering would elicit ideas for “redeeming or restoring to health” that principal vehicle of the literary avant-garde, the little magazine.2 Whittemore told the audience that they were, perhaps, witnessing the largest collection of literary editors ever assembled. In retrospect, however, the audience was an unlikely representation of the current literary avant-garde. Only a handful of people in the audience were under age thirty, and almost everyone was affiliated with a university. While there were editors from established little magazines, including the Partisan Review, Poetry, and Kulchur, some of the most important editors and publishers of the contemporary scene were noticeably absent. Donald Allen, David Antin, John Ashbery, Robert Creeley, Diane di Prima, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, LeRoi Jones, and Barney Rosset are nowhere to be found on the list of participants.3 “I am very conscious of the fact that there are a good many editors who are not represented here and who probably should be,” Whittemore told the audience. “To them, those who are not here, we apologize.”4 Now, before launching into the symposium’s first session, Whittemore needed to explicate a few ground rules. He explained, We have three different panel sessions ahead of us. . . . The organization of each session is a simple one. This morning we have Mr. [William] Phillips and Mr. [Karl] Shapiro, who will speak briefly; and then three additional 33

participants will join us on stage, and we’ll have a panel discussion for a time, and then open proceedings for questions and proposals from the floor. I had hoped that the participants— that is, everyone who is wearing a little sign— would come down front, but this doesn’t seem to have happened. So I must ask those of you who are not wearing the little signs not to participate in the discussion.5

The absurdity of his request that only those who had been predesignated as participants—“that is, everyone who is wearing a little sign”— should contribute to the discussion of a medium defined by its role in facilitating unfettered and anticonformist participation seemed to have been lost on Whittemore. Nonetheless, the proceedings of the symposium were filled with polite— if, at times, heated— discussion of the purpose of the little magazine and its relationship to university and institutional subsidies, censorship, and the cultivation of an audience. The general consensus seemed to be that little magazines were— as they always had been— in the midst of a crisis. “The function of the little magazine is greater today than ever before,” stated Shapiro; “more than ever it has to resist the bait of joining society.”6 Henry Rago of Poetry magazine commented: “The little magazine is a form of conversation. It is what we have in this country instead of the cafe. . . . We know each other through the magazines, and we talk to each other through the magazines.”7 Richard Schechner, the thirty-one-year-old editor of the Tulane Drama Review, voiced his opinion: “It is a shame that we don’t seek a larger audience and that we pride ourselves on our littleness, which I can only conceive of as littleness of mind as well as littleness of scope.” He continued: For example, I’ve heard no discussion here of the issues of the day, whether they be Vietnam, or Selma, or what have you. . . . I think all new writers share a profound distaste for American society as it is currently structured, but I think there’s been a profound change from the beats of a few years ago to the people who are writing now. . . . [T]he newer writers are revolutionary in the sense that they don’t want so much to ignore the establishment as to capture it, become it, and reconstruct it.8

Perhaps there were others in the audience who agreed with him, but they were not wearing little signs, so they were not allowed to participate in the discussion.

▮ ▮ ▮ Meanwhile, New York City mayor Robert Wagner had issued another round of summonses to the coffeehouses where poets gathered to read their work

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and distribute their little magazines. The weekend following the Library of Congress symposium, the streets of Greenwich Village were filled with “folk melodies prancing out of the cellars; barkers shouting their rasping pleas; taxi drivers honking their horns; the hoofbeats on asphalt of the mounted police.”9 The center of the little magazine world was under siege. Since the 1920s, city officials used cabaret laws to repress forms of entertainment that were deemed immoral or that otherwise affronted white middle-class taste. These laws required the owners of establishments where live music was played to obtain licenses from the city or be fined and shuttered. In 1961, a new statute required coffeehouses and restaurants that hosted poetry readings to abide by the same regulations.10 Mayor Wagner aimed to end the “carnival atmosphere” of the Village, the New York Times reported. “By 11 P. m . , MacDougal is a melange of teen-agers, sailors, soldiers, motorcycles, panhandlers, students, interracial couples, homosexuals and tourists. Everywhere there are splashes of berets and sandals and khaki and madras and jeans.”11 Police were dispatched to patrol the streets. The symbol of bohemian New York, the Village had been the home of Isadora Duncan, William Faulkner, and Walt Whitman. In the 1960s, Djuna Barnes, William Burroughs, Marcel Duchamp, Allen Ginsberg, Alfred Leslie, and Sun Ra lived there. Cut off from the rest of the city because of a defunct transit system, and filled with squalid rent-controlled tenements, the

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F I G U R E 10.

Pedestrians outside Caffe Borgia at the corner of Bleecker and MacDougal Streets in Manhattan, New York, 1965. Photograph by Robert Walker, published in the New York Times on April 12, 1965. © Robert Walker/The New York Times/Redux.

Village was a haven to those who rejected (and were rejected by) the attitudes and ambitions of the mainstream. In addition to the bars and coffee shops, a network of spaces catered to artists, poets, dancers, filmmakers, and musicians. These spaces extended across Greenwich Village to the Lower East Side and included Judson Memorial Church, the Film-Makers’ Cooperative, the Tenth Street galleries, the Fourth Street Off-Off Broadway theaters, and, of course, all the bookshops: Ted Wilentz’s Eighth Street Bookshop at the corner of MacDougal, Bob Wilson’s Phoenix Bookshop on Cornelia Street, Nick Cernovich’s occult bookstore Orientalia on Twelfth Street, and Ed Sanders’s Peace Eye Bookstore on East Tenth Street. As the publishing headquarters for more than fifty little magazines, downtown Manhattan played a key role in the transformation of the highbrow little magazine into the mimeo revolution. Quicker, rougher, cheaper, mimeo magazines were alive with the poetry being read in the coffee shops. They were mailed by their publishers (often at the risk of being jailed on obscenity charges) or given away freely to those who knew to ask for them from behind the bookstore counters. These little magazines were not subsidized by a university but funded, printed, assembled, and distributed by those who wrote them. “Unlike their academic counterparts, these magazines were determinedly gossipy, often sloppy, and inclusive of ephemera superficially unrelated to poetry,” explains Daniel Kane. “One could turn to these magazines and learn of readings, job openings for secretarial work for Allen Ginsberg, who was sleeping with whom (or who wanted to sleep with whom), directions on growing marijuana, and more.”12 Each issue of each magazine presented a different artistic and social formation, a microcosm of the literary scene. And, like the urban space where they were published, these little magazines, too, offered the opportunity to participate in “a heterotopia more free, more disordered, less ‘perfect’ than the other real spaces of American society, a society, it was felt by some, that was becoming increasingly bureaucratized and technocratic.”13 By the mid-1960s, however, the Village was becoming something of a cliché. Buses were bringing tourists to MacDougal Street to gawk at the beatniks, folksingers, and homosexuals.

▮ ▮ ▮ “I’d been going there since ’61, when it was a lot artier,” Warhol recalled, “a few poets and a lot of fags coming down from the 53rd Street and Third Avenue area. It was a big thing in those days to ‘go to the Village,’ to places like the Gaslight and the Kettle of Fish.” Perhaps Warhol first visited the Village with his lover the photographer Edward Wallowitch, who lived five blocks up from the San Remo Café on Barrow Street. Or maybe he first dropped by during one of his regular gallery outings with his friend and fellow illustrator Ted Carey. We do not really know how or why, but sometime in the early 36

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F IGU RE 1 1. View through the open door of the San Remo Café at the intersection of Bleecker and MacDougal Streets in Greenwich

Village, New York, October 16, 1960. Photograph by Fred W. McDarrah. © Estate of Fred W. McDarrah/Getty Images.

1960s the nexus of his social world shifted from the Upper East Side to the Lower West Side. “I hung around the San Remo a lot and got to know some faces and bodies I’d be seeing drift in and out of the 47th Street Factory day and night during the next few years,” he later recalled.14 The San Remo, run by Betty Santini, a widowed Italian woman, was the antithesis of Serendipity 3. Its corner entrance opened onto a black-andwhite tiled room with wooden booths and a long bar where hustlers would sip draft beers and smoke cigarettes before heading back up MacDougal Street to take their positions on the railing at Washington Square Park. Warhol explained: “Not everyone at the San Remo was gay, of course, but the stars of the place certainly were.” There was “the Duchess,” a notorious “New York post-deb, a part-time lesbian on speed.”15 There was Billy Linich, who had been a waiter at Serendipity 3 and designed the lighting for dance performances at Judson Memorial Church.16 John Cage, Gregory Corso, Merce Cunningham, Judith Malina, and William Burroughs all hung out at the San Remo. As Warhol recalled: “A lot of the San Remo boys used to write for a mimeographed sheet called The Sinking Bear (named after a poetry magazine that was around then called The Floating Bear), which was one of the first underground newsletters/papers.”17 A new kind of art was rearing its head in New York City. Allan Kaprow’s 18 Happenings in 6 Parts (1959) inaugurated the Reuben Gallery.18 Claes Oldenburg and Jim Dine presented The Street (1960), an installation of cardboard scraps, sooty burlap, and papier-mâché objects, in the basement gallery at Judson Memorial Church.19 The dealers Leo Castelli, Richard Bellamy, and Ivan Karp were making the rounds, visiting the studios of Lee Bontecou, Roy Lichtenstein, James Rosenquist, and Frank Stella. Warhol’s work had also changed. Instead of cherubs and pussycats, he drew tabloid headlines, Sunday comics, and fragments of advertisements for wigs and water heaters. The work was no longer fey. It was crude— blown up from the pages of the newspaper and painted with a loose, unresolved brushstroke. This new work fit right in, but no one offered Warhol a show. As many historians have explained, it was not just the galleries that were hesitant to embrace him; the other artists did not seem to accept him either. He was an art collector, a commercial illustrator, and “too swish” to top it off.20 The Tanager Gallery turned him down, and Leo Castelli turned him down, as did Robert Elkon and Sidney Janis. Then, in 1961, his most important commercial client dropped him. The new president of I. Miller Shoes decided that the company’s ad campaign needed a different look.21 Things could not get worse. “He was just so depressed that it was all happening and he was not getting any recognition,” Warhol’s friend Ted Carey explained. Warhol even considered having another show at the Bodley Gallery. “I think that he would have even paid the gallery,” Carey said.22 So Warhol invited David Mann, the owner of the Bod38

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ley, to stop by to see his new paintings. “I thought they were terrible,” Mann said. “I thought they were ridiculous.”23 Rejected by the galleries, dropped by his most important commercial client, dismissed by his fellow artists and now by his friends, Warhol had a stroke of luck when Gene Moore, the art director of Bonwit Teller, let him show his paintings in the shop’s Fifty-Seventh Street windows.24 Five large paintings, hung at different heights, behind five mannequins wearing summer dresses: it was not a real show, but it was better than nothing. Just around that time, the art dealers Walter Hopps and Irving Blum, from Los Angeles, arrived in New York City to scout new talent. The two men set up an appointment with Warhol. They met at Serendipity 3 and then went to Warhol’s home studio at 1324 Lexington Avenue. Warhol showed them several of his new paintings. Blum and Hopps were intrigued; Warhol’s work was interesting, although perhaps not quite ready. When it was time to say goodbye, Warhol pulled out a parting gift for each of them: “a couple of those goofy books,” Hopps remembered, dismissively, “Twenty-Four Cats and One Blue Pussy or whatever.”25

A New Community Against this backdrop of rejection, Warhol became increasingly involved in the Village arts scene, regularly attending underground film screenings, dance performances, and poetry readings. Between 1963 and 1968, he also created cover art for several important little magazines. They were the perfect visual wrapping for the mimeo revolution.26 They were amusing. They were shocking, gritty, and Pop. They were self-promotional, too, of course, but they could no longer be confused with his commercial work. These covers helped Warhol create a new circle of friends, they toyed with those who had rejected him, and they provided him with credibility and visibility as an artist. Yet his contributions to little magazines were not always clear-cut. At times, they were collaboratively produced; at other times, it is unclear whether he was involved in their creation at all. Thus, his participation in the mimeo revolution suggests not only that he “used his art to communicate with people he knew,” as Reva Wolf has argued, but also that his works are marked by alternative notions of community, collaboration, and participation that were being explored in a variety of forms at this time.27 As Daniel Kane explains: “The little [magazine] is a metaphor for a literary community. . . . Drawing together a group of writers in the space of a mimeograph magazine or little [magazine] does not necessarily mean that there is a community prior to publication. Rather, it is the gathering of names, and the conscious decision to repeat those names throughout the various issues, that generates the sense of community.”28 Warhol’s was one of the names Fuck you

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gathered and repeated throughout the various mimeo magazines; thus, it is through and with Warhol that we might ask what kinds of communities these magazines bring to light. How does their precarious materiality— ephemeral, illegal, multiauthored— serve as a metaphor for a different kind of coming together?

▮ ▮ ▮ Warhol’s first cover illustration for an underground poetry journal appeared on the September 1963 issue of C: A Journal of Poetry, published by Ted Berrigan and Joe Brainard. It consists of a silk-screened double portrait. On the front, Warhol’s new assistant Gerard Malanga stands behind the dance critic Edwin Denby. Parodying a domestic portrait of a man and wife, the image signals an intimate and transitory moment: the blotchy, haphazardly applied paint of the silk-screened surface, the domestic trappings of the scene, and the drama of the awkward yet highly composed positioning of the two men. As Reva Wolf has argued, the image of the young, curly-haired Malanga resting his chin atop Denby’s head signaled a change of the guard for the New York poetry world. This symbolism becomes even more palpable as the relationship between Denby and Malanga transforms from a sweet domestic scene to a sexually charged encounter. On the back cover, Denby reaches up to Malanga’s neck to draw him near, the light rakes across Denby’s face, desiccating him, and Malanga delivers a kiss. In her book Andy Warhol, Poetry, and Gossip in the 1960s (1997), Wolf explicates the genesis and reception of Warhol’s cover design for C as well as the subsequent contributions he made to other little magazines. As she explains, Berrigan had met Warhol a few months earlier at a poetry reading by Frank O’Hara and sent him copies of the first two issues of C accompanied by a letter expressing his hope that Warhol would like the magazine. 29 Warhol replied positively and agreed to do a cover.30 It was a strategic move for both Warhol and Berrigan. “Edwin Denby was our private celebrity and intellectual leader,” explained the art and dance critic John Gruen. “Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery, Jimmy Schuyler, and the rest of the young poets we knew clustered about him to discuss Balanchine’s latest ballets, Bill de Kooning’s latest show, or a John Cage concert.”31 By having Warhol do the cover for the Denby issue, Berrigan contrived a confrontation between two artistic communities. As Kane explains: “Some of the writers associated with the Lower East Side poetic community viewed the poets of the New York School as perhaps a little too urbane, witty, and chatty to be welcomed fully into the relatively macho heterosexual scene that initially dominated the Lower East Side scene.” Ted Berrigan and Ron Padgett, Kane suggests, “helped convince the downtown poetic community that New York School poets were part of the alternative poetics scene.”32 Warhol did not 40

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quite fit with either group; thus, his sweet, yet antagonistic, cover design provided a perfect segue between the two communities. Yet it is unclear how involved Warhol really was in these local politics. As Wolf points out, when the Denby issue was in final production, Warhol was on his way to Los Angeles for his show at the Ferus Gallery. He gave the silk screens to Berrigan, who actually made the covers with a group of his friends.33 Berrigan then took the liberty of using the silk screens to print a few pillowcases, which became collector’s items within the poetry community. “This is the only pillow case in the history of western civilisation [sic] which shows Gerard Malanga and Edwin Denby kissing,” read Ed Sanders’s underground mail-order catalog.34 According to Malanga: “That picture caused a scandal . . . amongst the New York School literati. . . . There were people in the circle that felt that Warhol was taking advantage of an old man.”35 Berrigan later recalled: “It was a beautiful cover, and although there were questions of taste raised, especially by those Wynn Chamberlain referred to as ‘Closet Queens,’ Frank O’Hara said the final word at a party when he told me, ‘If it was allright [sic] with Edwin, it certainly wasn’t anyone else’s business to complain. If poetry can’t survive a little faggotism [sic], then I don’t know what can!’”36 Fuck you

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F I G U R E 12 . Back and front covers of C: A Journal of Poetry, vol. 1, no. 4 (September 1963), by Andy Warhol. Collection of the Special Collections Research Center, Syracuse University Libraries; originally from the collection of Dennis Shea, poet and friend of Ted Berrigan and Joe Brainard. Courtesy the Estate of Ted Berrigan. © 2018 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc./ Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Warhol’s contributions were not always so scandalous. Often his involvement was playful and reciprocal. Sometimes Warhol was simply invoked as part of an inside joke. For example, in the October 1963 issue of Diane di Prima’s Floating Bear (guest edited by Billy Linich), he was among several artists quoted in the fictitious “Voices from the Art World (or, bright sayings).” He is asked: “Can you explain why you paint this way?” He answers: “Uh— it gets— uh— very complicated when you— uh— talk about it.”37 His lack of skill as a conversationalist was already good fodder for making fun. If he served as a source of content for the Floating Bear in October, the favor was returned in the November issue, which included “Billy Linich’s Party,” which documents one of Linich’s notorious haircutting parties.38 “I used to cut all my friends’ hair,” Linich recalled. “These hair-cutting sessions turned into hair-cutting parties. . . . I had covered the entire apartment with silver foil; I had some spotlights up. It just looked very cool to me. Andy came once and he asked if I would do the decor for his new studio, the Factory, just the way I had done my apartment.”39 Shortly after the November issue, Warhol made three haircut films starring John Daley, Freddy Herko, Billy Linich (who had changed his name to Billy Name), and James Waring.40 Over the next few months, Warhol appeared in several other little magazines. The December issue of Ray Johnson and Soren Agenoux’s newsletter the Sinking Bear included two quotes attributed to Warhol: “If I put you in my next movie, will you go all the way?” and “Write h O m O s e x u a l 8 times. . . . because homosexual is such a beautiful word. . . . [I]t’s beautiful when it’s written out.”41 As if to celebrate the beginning of the Silver Factory, the winter 1963–64 issue of Adolfas and Jonas Mekas’s Film Culture featured a frame from Warhol’s film Sleep (1963) repeated across its cover. Like the Denby issue of C, Warhol’s Sleep was a controversial topic of conversation. Jonas Mekas wrote in his Village Voice column: “What does Warhol’s Sleep do? What doesn’t it do? Is it cinema? Is this the ultimate extension of Pop Art? . . . An exercise in hypnosis? Test of patience? A Zen joke? If it makes you angry, why? . . . All these questions and many more you could hear in the lobby of the Gramercy Arts Theater last weekend, during the screening of Andy Warhol’s monumental Sleep.”42 Padgett wrote a sonnet about the film, which was published in the February 1964 issue of C.43 It read: Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz 42

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zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

Later that spring, two frames from Warhol’s film Kiss (1963), depicting the French art critic Pierre Restany kissing the experimental filmmaker Naomi Levine, graced the cover of the literary magazine Kulchur.44 This cover further publicized Warhol’s filmmaking but also offered him the opportunity to co-opt the journal in which Frank O’Hara had publicly dismissed his work. As Wolf explains: “One of O’Hara’s responsibilities as the art editor of Kulchur was to select the art for the cover of each issue. For the spring 1964 issue, however, Lita Hornick, the publisher of Kulchur, recalled that ‘Frank O’Hara had not come through with the cover he had promised, and I didn’t dream that Frank and Andy were mortal enemies!’”45 Amid a concerted repression of the poetry, art, and film communities by New York City officials in the buildup to the 1964 World’s Fair, the Village continued to support a fertile creative scene that provided Warhol with ideas (and people) for his work.46 For example, Warhol recalled how he met the poet and playwright Ronald Tavel: Gerard and I were down at Café Le Metro for one of the Wednesday night poetry readings when a writer named Ronnie Tavel was reading passages from his novel and some poems. He seemed to have reams of paper around; I was really impressed with the sheer amount of stuff he’d evidently written. While he was reading, I was thinking how wonderful it was to find someone so prolific just at the point when we were going to need “sounds” for our sound movies. Immediately after the reading I asked Ronnie if he’d come by the Factory and just sit in a lounge chair off-camera and talk while we shot Mario Montez in Harlot [1964], and he said fine. As we left Le Metro, Gerard sneered, “Your standards are really ridiculous sometimes.” I guess he thought I was too impressed with the quantity of stuff Ronnie turned out. But the thing was, I liked the content, too, I thought he was really talented.47

Tavel would go on to write screenplays for a number of Warhol films while also producing his own work as a playwright, thereby linking the worlds of experimental film and theater, the Village poetry community, and the queer underground. As Douglas Crimp has written: “If we add to this the fact that Fuck you

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F I G U RE 1 3. Screen

Test: Ed Sanders (ST294), by Andy Warhol, 1964. 16-millimeter film, black-and-white, silent, 4.5 minutes at 16 frames per second. © 2018 The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, PA, a museum of Carnegie Institute. All rights reserved.

several of Tavel’s Warhol screenplays, staged in the theater, resulted in the invention of the Theater of the Ridiculous both in name and founding style, then we must admit that this was one of the most productive artistic collaborations in the recent history of the avant-garde.”48 Despite such collaborative relationships, the interconnections that existed across different spheres of avant-garde production in the Village remain underanalyzed. In addition to providing cover art and attending readings, Warhol participated in the little magazine community by making film portraits of poets, creating a poster for the Paris Review, and donating paper for Ed Sanders’s Fuck You/a magazine of the arts.49 Published out of an undisclosed location in the Lower East Side, Sanders’s mimeo magazine Fuck You was dedicated to “all those who have been depressed, butchered, or hung up by all these family unit nazis, fascists, war-freaks, department of License creeps, fuzz, jansenists, draft boards, parole boards, judges, academic idiots, & tub-thumpers for the Totalitarian Cancer.”50 In many ways, Sanders’s magazine was like Warhol’s Factory— a space where one could “question and undermine conservative and legalistic approaches to literary copyright, homosexuality, drug use, intergenerational sex,” and other taboos.51 Thus, it makes perfect sense that a frame from

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Warhol’s film Couch (1964) depicting a biracial ménage à trois on the Factory couch would serve as the cover for the anniversary issue of Fuck You. It also comes as no surprise that Billy Name, not Warhol, produced the cover on the Factory’s silver-painted Thermofax.52 Although Warhol had not yet screened the film, everyone would have known about it because everyone was in it. Binghamton Birdie, Rufus Collins, Gregory Corso, Allen Ginsberg, Kate and Piero Heliczer, Baby Jane Holzer, Jack Kerouac, Mark Lancaster, Joe LeSueur, Naomi Levine, Gerard Malanga, Taylor Mead, Billy Name, Ivy Nicholson, Ondine, Peter Orlovsky, John Palmer, Amy Taubin, and Gloria Wood were all in Couch. Thus, while the cover of Fuck You depicted only a single frame of the film— featuring Collins, Kate Heliczer, and Malanga— it telegraphed a whole scene of participants and spectators.53 Over the next year, the scope of Warhol’s participation in 1960s print culture continued to grow and change. In February 1966, Warhol flirted with a mass public by placing an advertisement in the Village Voice: “I’ll endorse with my name any of the following: clothing AC-DC, cigarettes small, tapes, sound equipment, roc k ’n roll r ecor ds, anything, film, and film equipment, Food, Helium, Whips, m O n e y !! love and kisses an dy War h O l , EL 59941.”54 In October, he did a cover for the special New York issue of British poet Lee Harwood’s mimeo journal Tzarad that featured silk-screened double portraits of Malanga and Bob Dylan.55 And he edited the December issue of Aspen: The Magazine in a Box, which came in the guise of Fab detergent.56 Appearing two years after the debut of his infamous Brillo Box sculptures, Warhol’s issue of Aspen included a double-sided flip book of film stills (one side presents Buzzards over Bagdad [1951], directed by Jack Smith, and the other Kiss [1963], directed by Andy Warhol), a faux ten-trip subway-ticket booklet for “users and abusers of LSD” with excerpts from the LSD conference held at Berkeley that year, an issue of the Exploding Plastic Inevitable Newspaper, and a two-sided phono disk of the Velvet Underground, which was touring the country in 1966 and 1967.57 Aspen promoted several facets of Warhol’s current work— his product-based sculptures, his films, and his new multimedia music group— yet the task of putting together the issue was, according to Gwen Allen, “largely delegated to the rock critic David Dalton, who was [Warhol’s] studio assistant at the time (and who would soon go on to become a founding editor of Rolling Stone magazine).”58 Also in 1966, Warhol designed a cover for the anti– Vietnam War issue of some/thing.59 This issue of the journal, which was published by Jerome Rothenberg and David Antin, included contributions from Carolee Schneemann, George Brecht, Jess, and Charles Bukowski. Warhol’s cover took the form of a perforated sheet of stamps with round yellow emblems carrying the prowar message “Bomb Hanoi.” Antin recalled:

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When I went to see Andy I showed him our previous issues and told him about the Vietnam issue we were planning, he said, “Great!” What he’d really like to do was a Vietcong flag. But I said, “What we’d like you to do is take a prowar slogan like ‘b o m b han o i !’ put it on the cover as a button, and fuck it up any way you like.” So Andy said, “Great!” and I thought it was settled. But over the next two weeks I ran into Gerard Malanga twice in the Eighth Street Bookshop, and he told me Andy would really like to do a Vietcong flag. Finally I said, “Look Gerard, I don’t know too much about the Vietcong, and neither do you or Andy. But what we do know about are the American warmongers. So what I want is for Andy to take one of their idiot slogans and fuck it up any way he likes for our cover. That way any member of the American Legion could pick up a copy on a news stand and maybe read it.” Andy finally did it with the image of the b o m b h a n o i button repeated over and over again on a cover that functioned as a page of grungy looking stamps you could tear apart along the perforations and if you felt like it glue on a wall.60

According to Antin’s account, Warhol seems to have had little input on the design of the cover. Like the prowar slogans Antin appropriated and juxtaposed with poems by Allen Ginsberg, Jackson MacLow, and Robert Duncan, he used Warhol as a source— not a contributor, in the true sense— of material for the magazine. Another example of Warhol’s oblique relationship to his little magazine contributions is the 1967 special Warhol issue of Film Culture.61 The first eleven pages of the magazine are filled with Warhol’s photo-booth portraits. The sequence begins with a series of photo-booth strips depicting beautiful women, including Edie Sedgwick and Baby Jane Holzer. As you turn the pages, the images zoom in on a photo of Nico, closer, and closer, through the halftone screen, until her porcelain features are rendered into an abstract field of dots. Invoking the materiality of the print-mediated selfunderstanding that undergirds the mimeo movement, this is, to my eye, one of Warhol’s most beautiful magazine pieces. Yet it was designed entirely by George Maciunas.62 In 1968, Warhol and Malanga edited a special issue of Intransit.63 Published in Eugene, Oregon, by Toad Press, the special “Andy Warhol–Gerard Malanga Monster Issue” coincided with screenings of Warhol’s films in Eugene at the magazine publisher’s barn.64 Featuring poetry, photographs, and experimental texts from artists, critics, poets, and Factory superstars, the issue is a kind of yearbook of the social networks that Warhol had developed over the previous five years. Among the nearly one hundred contributors were Soren Agenoux, Ted Berrigan, Joe Brainard, John Cale, Ronald Cutrone, Edwin Denby, Eric Emerson, Charles Henri Ford, Allen Ginsberg, Piero Heliczer, Willard 46

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Maas, Taylor Mead, Jonas Mekas, Frank O’Hara, Ron Padgett, Diane di Prima, Lou Reed, Rotten Rita, and Ronald Tavel.

Among All the Singular Things in the World It is an active confrontation— working not individually in blithe cooperation but singularly at determined cross-purposes. But neither are these cross-purposes those of the usual competitive relations in which one attempts to outdo, to master, or to abolish the other, but instead are designed to produce a scene that defies relationality as we know it: a radically new scene in which the self finds itself not through identification or disidentification with others, but in its singularity among all the singular things in the world.65

I find Douglas Crimp’s reading of Warhol’s films— and the scenes of relationality that they produced— to be the key to understanding Warhol’s participation in little magazines. Warhol began making films at exactly the same time that he began doing covers for underground magazines. Like his films, his contributions to little magazines were the result of collaboration, but not in the way that one thinks of traditional literary production, which requires a certain level of synchronized effort among writers, editors, typesetters, designers, and publishers.66 The politics of participation and community that these little magazines disclose were simultaneously affirmative and at odds, ephemeral and bodily, often erotic, deviant, or otherwise outlaw. They were little and local and yet aware of their position in relation to an alien, oppressive mass public. In the words of the publisher and poet Jerome Rothenberg, the little magazines were a means of survival: “Of necessity, they existed on the margins, outside of mainstream publication and distribution channels. Of necessity, they invented their own communities and audiences (typically indistinguishable), with a small press or little magazine often serving as the nucleus of both.”67 In this way, they were also like Warhol’s Factory. As Warhol later reflected: “A lot of people thought that it was me everyone at the Factory was hanging around, that I was some kind of big attraction that everyone came to see, but that’s absolutely backward: it was me who was hanging around everyone else. I just paid the rent, and the crowds came simply because the door was open. People weren’t particularly interested in seeing me, they were interested in seeing each other. They came to see who

( NEXT FOU R PAGES) F IGU RES 14 –1 5. Two double-page spreads from Film Culture, no. 45 (Summer 1967), designed by George

Maciunas. Collection of the Syracuse University Libraries. Courtesy Jonas Mekas. © 2018 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc./Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

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came.”68 Thus, in retrospect, each of these spaces— the films, the little magazines, the Factory, the Village— provided opportunities for Warhol and his contemporaries to see one another, to survive, and to imagine how, one day, they might have a different relationship to the establishment. As Richard Schechner told the audience at the Library of Congress symposium, instead of forever being on the margins, they might capture the establishment, reconstruct it, become it.69 For Ed Sanders, it was the hope that “a network of mimeographs steadily publishing, coast to coast, city to town to bookstore to rebel café, could help a nonviolent revolution blossom forth in full bread and roses glory!!!”70 Warhol was not the publisher, distributor, or printer of these little magazines. Only nominally was he sometimes the editor, and often he did not even create the covers or write the texts attributed to him. They are his and not his. Scenes of neither identification nor disidentification, these little magazines document the momentary coalescence of a group of individuals— a series of idiosyncratic endeavors collated, stapled, and sent out into the world with the hope of finding an audience. They were, to borrow a phrase from Dave Hickey, “a mode of social discourse, a participatory republic, an accumulation of small, fragile, social occasions that provide the binding agent of fugitive communities.”71

▮ ▮ ▮ Let us end by imagining one of these small, fragile social occasions: Ed Sanders had finished typing up the stencils for the anniversary issue of Fuck You. It was past midnight, and the man living next door had already pounded on the wall with his broom twice. Correction fluid clung to Sanders’s fingers, and the waxy paper stencils were stacked on the floor. It was time to print. Sanders brushed the ink on the inside of the Speed-o-Print drum, attached a stencil to the outside, smoothed it with his hand, checked the inking, put the paper in the feeding tray, and began to turn the handle. A feeling of elation came over him; he turned the handle, over, and over. “Everything was deity.”72 When he was done printing, Sanders cleared a space on the floor. He spread out the pages in three concentric semicircular piles. Sitting crosslegged in the Bodhisattva position, he worked left to right through the outermost circle of pages, then through the second, then the third. He picked up a sheet of pink paper, the title page, announcing to the reader in handstenciled letters: our third anniversary mad motherfucker issue!

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c o v e r by a n dy wa r h o l ! ! from his evil c o u c h movie

Next, a sheet of yellow paper: the contributors’ page takes the form of a mandala. Occupying the center of the page is an Egyptian-inspired glyph consisting of a winged man and woman accompanied by a mimeo machine, marijuana leaves, a hypodermic needle, a movie camera, a cock-gobbling fish, and a blazing mushroom star, all surrounded by a constellation of names, singular, floating, each accompanied by a water pipe: E. Cowen, A. Fowler, T. Berrigan, C. Pelieu, A. Ginsberg, LeRoi Jones, L. Ferlinghetti, M. McClure, W. H. Auden, G. Corso, E. Sanders, V. Ferrini, G. Malanga, and so on. This universe is composed almost entirely of men. Next, a green sheet of paper contains the front matter: title, motto, dedication, and location of publication. Then a sheet of off-white paper offers a parody of the New Yorker’s dandy Eustace Tilley with his quill, monocle, city skyline, and owl. The text addresses its audience: “We shall freak onward in the Rays of Ra. This is our T h i r d an n i Ve r sary i s s u e & Fuck You/a magazine of the Arts will continue forever.”73 Something between a manifesto, gossip column, and the classifieds, the Fuck You “Talk of the Town” includes both fictitious and factual information, such as an announcement of the formation of the Fugs; helpwanted notices for Fug-press editorial assistants who are willing to sleep with the editor; notices for two new movies, Sanders’s Amphetamine Head— a Study of Power in America (ca. 1959–65) and Harry Fainlight’s 18 Hour Ass-Hole Movie; an ad for Taylor Mead’s “Suck Salon” in Rome; and a note about the cover of this special issue: “— aBO u T T h e c OVe r ; by an dy War h O l from his banned c O u c h m OVi e . It was kindly thermofaxed and glued by William Linich. The superstars are, left to right, Rufus Collins, Kate Helicser [sic] & the fellow leaning down to muff Kate, is, of course, Gerard Malanga.”74 Sanders, still sitting on the floor, passed his arm across the innermost circle of colored paper that surrounded his cross-legged body until a full issue was compiled. This was a big one— over seventy pages total— but it was magnificent. There was Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s poem about the sci-fiinspired polyamorous commune the Kerista and erotic excerpts from Allen Ginsberg’s journals. Michael McClure contributed several pages of “make your own poem” cutout cards, and LeRoi Jones’s poem called President Lyndon Johnson a “mass murderer” and his wife a “hawkbill cracker.”75 There were sonnets by Ted Berrigan and drawings by Peter Orlovsky. The highlight of the issue was a poem by W. H. Auden— published without permission— describing, in rhyming verse, the eminent poet performing fellatio. Sanders

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F I G U RE 1 6. Cover of Fuck You/a magazine of the arts, no. 5 (February 1965). Collection of The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburg. © 2018 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc./Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

included the following acknowledgment: “A Gobble Poem snatched from the notebook of W. H. Auden now believed to be in the Morgan Library.”76 There was also a playful piece “commissioned” by Ronald Tavel titled “Friends of Gerard Malanga” that consisted of two columns of names— one for the men and the other for the women— of Malanga’s lovers. Sanders picked up the last sheet: I tamped each completed issue on the floor along the top and side edges to align the pages for stapling. Slowly the pile of completed issues grew until I finally finished all five hundred. The next and last task was when clunk! clunk! clunk! I stapled each copy three times along the left edge. Whew. Then I addressed, stamped, and mailed out as many magazines as I could afford postage for. I sent the magazine to my poet friends, to a few easily shocked high school buddies in the Midwest, and to those I admired, such as Samuel Beckett, Edward Dahlberg, and Marianne Moore. Plus I always filled up a musette bag to hand out free copies at the 8th Street Bookshop and at the various bars, such as the Cedar and Stanley’s. Stanley Tolkin would take a supply of an issue when it came out to keep copies at the bar to give out to those he knew would dig the magazine.77

For this issue, however, Sanders had a special distribution plan. The thirdanniversary issue of Fuck You was published on the occasion of the grand opening of Sanders’s Peace Eye Bookstore. Sanders had asked Warhol if he would create some banners for the opening. Warhol agreed and told Sanders to go to Orchard Street to get some fabric, on which he silk-screened his poppies.78 “True glyphs of joy,” Sanders thought.79 He hung them on the wall of his new bookstore and sent flyers inviting people to the opening party: Flash! Flash! Flash! . . .  [C]elebrating a) the t h ir d an n ive r s ary is s u e of f u c k you /a magazine of the Arts . . . with cover by Andy Warhol, 70 pages of editorial screams, porn, poetry, & freak-vectors. b) The grand opening of the p e ac e e y e bo o k s t o r e a book scene, freak center, & scrounge-lounge in the lower east side, owned, zapped, and operated by Ed Sanders c) The World Premiere of t h e fu gs !!!! an unbelievable group of singers featuring Tuli Kupferberg on farto-phone, Brillo Box, and finger cymbals, & various percussion Fuck you

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instruments; Ed Sanders on organ, sex-organ, & harmonica; Szabo on Amphetamine Flute & recorder; Ken Weaver on snares and big stomp Buffalo hide drum; & guest stars. Danes, dirty folk spews, rock & roll, poetry, Amphetamine operas, & and other freak beams from their collective existence. There has never been any thing like the FUGS in the history of western civilization!!80

On February 24, 1965, the store was packed. Warhol’s flower banners hung from the wall. Reporters from Time were there. William Burroughs was there. Jason Epstein was there. Then, a limousine arrived and out stepped James Michener. Sanders remembered: “He told me that Andy Warhol had urged him to attend.”81 Sanders had boxes of the anniversary issue of Fuck You with Warhol’s cover ready: “I waited until the place was filled up and then, with Peter Orlovsky’s help, started distributing the free copies to the crowd.”82

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THREE BAD BOOKS

Warhol said he wanted to do a “bad book,” just the way he had done “bad movies” and “bad art,” because, when you do something exactly wrong, something interesting always turns out.1 But he did not just do one bad book; he did three. Each was a different kind of book: a pop-up book, an exhibition catalog, and a novel. None of them were conventional versions of these genres. The pop-up book, titled Andy Warhol’s Index (Book) (1967), was aimed at adults, not kids; the exhibition catalog, Andy Warhol (1968), which simply bore the artist’s name in lieu of a title, was more a conceptual work than the documentation of a show; and the novel a (1968) was purportedly unwritten and unedited. The production stories of these three books lend a broader understanding of the scope of Warhol’s Silver Factory.2 Encompassing not only the performances of his superstars, the ideas of his friends, and the mediating presence of the silk-screen process, Warhol’s Factory included the labor of the editors, typesetters, curators, and designers who helped create and publish his books. Thus, while the “linguistic turn” in 1960s art signaled an investigation of the spatial and material contingency of language— in the work of Joseph Kosuth, Robert Smithson, and Robert Barry, for example— Warhol’s books unleashed such experiments within the world of trade publishing.3

The Pop-Up: Index (Book) In December 1966, Alan Rinzler, an editor working for the Black Star photography agency, sent a letter to Christopher Cerf at Random House explaining that Warhol was under contract for a book. “The idea is to chronicle his activities— the films, the art, the music, the personalities— and, at the same time, create a Warholian ‘object’ in itself,” Rinzler wrote with the hope that Random House would jointly publish the book.4 Cerf was already acquainted with some of Warhol’s coterie, including Brigid “Polk” Berlin, Genevieve Charbon (whom Cerf would later marry), Stephen Shore, and Edie Sedgwick. “I was very into music. I was very into the Vietnam War— being opposed to it,” Cerf recalled. “And I liked the idea of sort of playing with the 57

F I G U RE 1 7.

Christopher Cerf in his book-lined office. Photograph by John Littlewood, published in Christian Science Monitor on July 24, 1969. Collection of Columbia University Rare Books and Manuscripts Library, Random House Records. © 1969 Christian Science Monitor. All rights reserved. Used by permission and protected by the copyright laws of the United States. The printing, copying, redistribution, or retransmission of this content without express written permission is prohibited.

radical stuff. But I wasn’t really radical.”5 Chris was the son of Bennett Cerf, the cofounder and then president of Random House, where Chris had the dual role of editing the counterculture books and overseeing the juvenile division, which had recently begun experimenting with pop-up books. Produced by Wally Hunt of Graphics International and printed in Japan, Random House’s new pop-up books were going to “revolutionize the way children learn to read.”6 The first, released in 1965, was a book of riddles by Bennett Cerf that sold as a promotional piece in collaboration with Maxwell House Coffee for $1.00 and two Maxwell House Coffee labels. That same year, media conglomerate RCA acquired Random House. Alongside color television, eight-track tapes, Banquet frozen food, Cornet carpeting, and Hertz rental cars, the publishing house completed RCA’s vertical integration. Almost simultaneously, Hallmark Cards bought out Graphics International. Thus, the American publisher of James Joyce’s Ulysses (1934) now belonged to a media corporation that sold frozen food and carpet while teaming up with Hallmark Cards and Maxwell House Coffee to publish gimmick books aimed at kids. Enter Warhol. Random House picked up Warhol’s book and released it during the 1967 holiday shopping season as a hip gift book. It came in a hologram cover with Campbell’s Tomato Juice endpapers, several 3-D pop-ups, a flexi disk donning Lou Reed’s portrait, and a stream of uncaptioned black-and-white photos. The text was culled and clipped from Warhol’s audiotapes and the Factory press book. The process by which the book came together was so complex— and unusual— that the publisher recounted it in an internal memo that was itself written like a children’s book. The memo reads: 58

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With a nervous deep breath, Christopher Cerf signed up the property, and Rinzler, Cerf, and Random House designer David Paul headed for the Factory to collect materials and ideas. They were met by a barrage of both, and clutching them firmly in hand and mind, David Paul went back to his office to construct a dummy. Soon after, Warhol arrived at the Random House offices, where his eye happened to fall on several of the Random House “Pop-Up” juveniles. “Those are nice,” said Andy. Then and there it was decided to add pop-ups to the book.7

Despite its joking tone, the memo matches Cerf ’s memory of how the book came together. Cerf recalled that Warhol did, in fact, pay him a visit at the Random House offices: “He was just sitting in my office, and I had all these [pop-up] books on my bookshelf. And he starts taking them out and says, ‘I love these, let’s have these.’ And I said, ‘You’ve got to be kidding.’ He asks, ‘Can I have them?’ and I said, ‘Of course you can.’ It was a series of crazy conversations. So I called up Wally Hunt and asked, ‘Do you want to do this?’ and he was totally game.”8 Thus, as the memo recounts, it was decided then and there to add pop-ups to Warhol’s book. A little biplane appropriated from one of Graphic International’s promotional pieces was dropped into a double spread of Factory photos. On another page, a pop-up castle with horses and knights was pulled from a Robin Hood promotional by Hallmark. There’s also an accordion that farts and a pop-up Hunt’s Tomato Paste can. While the pop-up elements sometimes seem random, many of them are inside jokes. For example, the Robin Hood castle referenced Warhol’s 1966 trip to Los Angeles with the Velvet Underground. As Mary Woronov recollected: Nobody came to see us at the Trip, the tiny club on Sunset where we were booked. Without the protective shell of New York we seemed to have lost our magic. The reviews were terrible: “The Velvets should go back underground and practice,” “They will replace nothing except maybe suicide.” On the third night the sheriff’s office shut down the club for disturbing the peace. Meanwhile, down the street, the Whisky A Go Go was packed with the crazed followers of L.A.’s false rock ’n’ roll god, Frank Zappa, who mocked

F IGU RE 1 8. Display advertisement mock-up “Christmas Anyone?” Collection of Columbia University

Rare Books and Manuscripts Library, Random House Records.

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us, and whom we hated. . . . Union rules said that in order to be paid, we had to remain in L.A. whether we performed or not. So Andy was talked into renting the same empty castle that every stranded band got stuck with and we prepared to wait it out.9

The “castle” to which Woronov refers is a mansion that was owned by the brothers Tom Law and John Philip Law in Los Feliz Hills, Los Angeles, and was a gathering place for musicians and artists visiting the city.10 In the Index (Book), the windows of Robin Hood’s castle are filled with photos of Warhol and friends. Along the bottom of the page, printed in oversized type, is the quote: “We’re attacked constantly.” Warhol’s book is full of obscure jokes like these.11 There is a three-page foldout of a rainbow-colored nose that, according to Billy Name, everyone would have recognized as belonging to Bob Dylan.12 The foldout peels away to reveal a smaller, more delicate appendage, in effect enabling the reader to give Dylan a nose job. As for the flexi disk that was inserted into the book, there is no music on it. Instead, it records Nico, Warhol, and others commenting on the design of the Index (Book). Cerf remembered that Warhol and the Velvet Underground came to his apartment to record a really boring conversation.13 The text presents a cacophony of voices, mostly unattributed, many of which were appropriated from newspaper and magazine clippings of bad reviews that Warhol kept in his Factory press book. There’s a long, rambling description of the Factory by Ingrid Superstar, an account of a screening at the Film-Makers’ Cinematheque, and an interview with Warhol conducted by a German reporter.14 The graphic layout of the text often echoes its content. For example, Warhol’s interview with the German reporter is printed in Gothic black-letter script. The piece about the screening at the Film-Makers’ Cinematheque is formatted in two strips of text, cut horizontally and detached, reiterating Warhol’s use of split-screen projections and “the odds and ends from the clipping room floor.”15 Photographs by Billy Name and Nat Finkelstein provide a filmic backdrop for the pop-ups and foldouts found throughout the book. Yet, rather than being reproduced with their luscious gradations of silver, these photographs were run through a Photostat machine before being added to the book— Warhol said that this gave them an “underground look.”16 There’s a rubber-band-rigged projectile designed to hit the reader in the face, a silver balloon, and tear-off pieces of paper that dissolve in water leaving the name “Andy Warhol” floating on the surface. The book came in a transparent plastic sleeve donning a quote from the press in pink ink: “Warhol’s bag is the neatly packaged Saran-wrap society.” According to Cerf, the main point was how things looked on the page, not what was said: “We had to make dummies to figure out what it was. You had 60

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to see them in order to make them.”17 Fortuitously, the Random House memo recounts the iterative process by which they made the dummies, integrated the pop-ups, and figured out the book. It continues: When the dummy was finished, David Paul pronounced that “There is conception and organization here.” Warhol and friends agreed, after a fashion. “Um, but,” said Warhol, and several boxes of new materials were produced from the innards of the Factory. “What’s to be done now?” asked Cerf. “Have you seen Mozart’s opera Cosi Fan Tutte?” answered Billy Name, Warhol photographer supreme. With this helpful remark ringing in his ears, David Paul accepted the new photographs et al., and began work on a second dummy. Meanwhile, Alan Rinzler and Christopher Cerf were putting together the text of the book. . . . By the time the galleys of the printed matter in the book were reaching the Random House offices, with David Paul now hard at work at dummy #3, the problem of legibility came up. “The book is too easy to read,” said Andy in a rare talkative moment. Warhol and friends returned to the Factory, with dummies and galleys in hand, and soon solved that problem.18 At last the book was ready to go to the offices of Graphics International, who would eventually produce the book in Japan. Meanwhile, Warhol struggled with the finishing touches, including the famous “Nose Job” (for which Christopher Cerf xeroxed over 1,000 noses before the artist was satisfied). And even as the book was on press, Warhol was adding details. . . . [T]he final revision of the title page (“for God’s sake, cross out Gerard Malanga’s name”) and the book was ready for production. After a frightening few days while the ship carrying Andy Warhol’s Index was battered by a Pacific typhoon, copies of the book arrived at the Random House warehouse in November of 1967. It is safe to say that, in addition to being a catalogue of the world of Andy Warhol, a n dy wa rh o l ’ s i n d e x ( b o o k ) is a work of art in itself, and as far as we know no two “Indexes” are exactly the same.19

On the title page, we see the social process by which the book was made recounted in graphic detail. Malanga’s name is indeed crossed out, and ( NEXT FOU R PAGES) F IGU RE 1 9. Double-page spread from Andy Warhol’s Index (Book) (New York: Random House, 1967). Collection of the Special Collections Research Center, Syracuse University Libraries. Courtesy the Estate of Nat Finkelstein. © 2018 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc./Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. F IGU RE 2 0. Double-page spread from Andy Warhol’s Index (Book) (New York: Random House, 1967). Collection

of the Special Collections Research Center, Syracuse University Libraries. © Billy Name Estate/Courtesy Dagon James. © 2018 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc./Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

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Shore’s has been added in its place. Finkelstein’s name is also crossed out but then reinserted. A little double-sided arrow with the letters “TR” written beside Rinzler and Cerf ’s names suggests a power struggle between the editor and the agent. At the top of the page is the book’s enigmatic title— an dy War h O l’s i n d e x — with “( BO O k ) ” dropped at a diagonal, as though it were an afterthought. Billy Name recalled that everyone thought the original title The World of Andy Warhol was “tacky”: “So we called it ‘Andy Warhol’s Index,’ after the Catholic Church’s index of the films you are not supposed to see. We have all these photographs of Andy’s films, which you are supposed to see. But Random House said, it’s supposed to be a book. Okay, we said, we’ll put book at the end: Andy Warhol’s Index (and it is a book).”20 Running vertically along the edge of the verso across from the title page is a single explanatory sentence: “Well, Andy loves mistakes, this wasn’t rehearsed.”21 The Random House Records include the memo about how the book was created, notes from Cerf ’s meetings with Warhol at the Factory, and documentation of the legal, technical, and financial concerns of the publishing house. For example, a letter from the Campbell Soup Company gives Random House permission to depict their cans in the book while also expressing the company’s desire to set the record straight: “Now and then we have been asked by some serious student of art, an art critic, or a journalist whether or not our company subsidized Mr. Warhol’s work. . . . I think you should have it on record there that the company has not attempted to influence Mr. Warhol in any way. So far as we know, all his selections of commercial products as art subjects have been entirely his own.”22 We also find out that, since the book was printed in Japan, there were customs and copyright issues and that the popups and other 3-D gimmicks raised a number of design and cost challenges. The archive also contains memos detailing the difficulties the publisher had in garnering advance reviews since there was no way to describe the book without sending a physical dummy of the final version— of which there was only one. The book was most certainly a “Warholian object in itself.”23 The book party was on December 14, 1967— continuing the tradition that Warhol began in the 1950s of publishing his books at Christmas. Twelve typewritten-pages long, the invitation list for the party is extraordinary. It includes, among many others, Barbara Walters and Barney Rosset; the Marshall McLuhan expert Jerome Agel; the composer David Amram; the then editor of Mademoiselle Betsy Blackwell; Truman Capote; Johnny Carson (who declined); Ivan Karp; the photographer Jill Krementz (before she was married to Kurt Vonnegut); Jane Lahr and John Lahr; Norman Mailer (who said yes); Roger Price, the inventor of Droodles and Mad Libs; George Plimpton; Larry Rivers; Gene Shalit, who was then still reviewing the arts for the Ladies’ Home Journal; the sports writer Dick Schaap; and Gay and Nan Talese.24 “The marketing people thought I was crazy,” said Cerf, “but they went along.”25 66

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The book did well commercially— selling over twelve thousand copies in the first three weeks after publication, but the reviews were only lukewarm.26 “A lot of people missed at the time how funny this stuff is,” said Cerf. Looking back, Cerf confessed that he often felt “terrifyingly unhip”: “I would ask questions that were dumb. Like ‘Didn’t the photograph look better this way instead of that way?’” To which Warhol and crew would answer, “Of course it does; that’s why we don’t want it.” Whether the book was great or not, Cerf can’t say. For him, it was just fun: “I get a kick out of it in the same way I like everything Warhol did. And in the end he did do it, despite the fact that all of us did it. He did it. It was what he wanted it to be. And none of us would have ever come up with this. No one would have done a book like this. We were originally going to do a book of really great photographs, but it became an art object.”27

The Catalog: Andy Warhol During the summer of 1967, just as Alan Rinzler, Chris Cerf, David Paul, Billy Name, and the people at Graphics International were putting the final touches on Warhol’s Index (Book), Kasper König, the preeminent German curator of contemporary art, then only twenty-four years old, was hanging around the Factory. It was part of his internship with the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, whose curator Pontus Hultén was planning a retrospective of Warhol’s work. Writing to Hultén that summer, König exults: “Things are cooking in New York. I like the smell of it; it is because of a beautiful coincidence . . . the rich leave the city and the poor people have their time in the summer anyhow. . . . Andy is always on top of what is going on. . . . A month ago I got to know him O.K. Stockholm will be a very beautiful project. . . . Ordered more than 200 fotographs of particular works and I am still chasing the missing ones.”28 In addition to serving as liaison between Hultén and Warhol’s Factory, König was charged with developing the catalog for the Stockholm exhibition. Ivan Karp granted him access to Castelli Gallery’s files and Xerox machine, which König used to produce the catalog. As Willem de Rooij explains: “Many of the available images were photocopied by König several times, and ended up in the book as self-elaborations. Thus a repetitive structure was created that expands beyond Warhol’s (serial) artworks. . . . The book started to become a piece (a multiple) rather than a catalogue, because the mode of production as well as the formal outcome mirrored procedures and politics that were at work at the Factory at the time.”29 A double-page spread reproduces two frames from Warhol’s painting Sixteen Jackies (1964), which then turns into a visual essay consisting of other Warhol images of Jackie Onassis that continues for eighteen pages, followed by sixteen continuous pages of Warhol’s painting 210 Coca-Cola Bottles (1962). A sequence three Bad Books

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of boxes— Brillo, Motts, Campbell’s, and Heinz— gives the book the feel of a manufacturer’s catalog. Vectored through the labor and graphic sensibilities of König, Warhol’s Moderna Museet catalog resonates with contemporaneous serial works by Ed Ruscha and Bernd and Hilla Becher while it radically displaces the authorship of the artist onto the curator, museum, Xerox machine, and publisher.30 Following the reproductions of Warhol works selected and choreographed by König, the catalog contains two additional sequences of photographs. The first consists of 274 photographs by Billy Name, printed full bleed. The second sequence consists of 170 photographs by Stephen Shore that leave the edges of the negatives visible. None of the photographs are captioned, and each photographer was allowed to compose his own sequence. The photographs are printed in both horizontal and vertical orientations, requiring readers to turn the book as they move through it. Rather than an essay or a list of works, the catalog’s text consists solely of quotes. Olle Granath, who worked on the exhibition with Pontus Hultén, explained: One day, Pontus brought me a box . . . and told me that it contained everything written by and about Andy Warhol. . . . My job was to read it all and present a proposal for a manuscript with Swedish translations. After a couple of nights of reading and taking notes I delivered a script to Pontus and awaited his reaction with great anticipation. “Excellent,” Pontus said when he called me, “but there is a quotation missing.” “Which one?” I said. “In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes,” Pontus replied. “If it is in the material I would have spotted it,” I told him. The line went quiet for a moment, and then I heard Pontus say, “If he didn’t say it, he could very well have said it. Let’s put it in.” So we did, and thus Warhol’s perhaps most famous quotation became a fact.31

Wrapped in a fluorescent flower cover (based on Warhol’s flower paintings), the catalog was published on the occasion of the opening of the exhibition in Stockholm in February 1968.32 It was the size of a telephone book and, like a telephone book, printed on cheap newsprint by the printer of the local Swedish newspaper Svenska Dagbladet.33 On the title page, the book and its author are collapsed into one entity: Andy Warhol. At 644 pages with 619 black-andwhite pictures and a sticker price of $2.00, the first ten thousand copies sold out in six months.34 Given Warhol’s minimal involvement in the creation of the catalog, one might question whether it should really count as a Warhol work. A handful of scholars have acknowledged the parallels in the production of the catalog and Warhol’s other creative endeavors. According to Andreas Strobl: “The book is a deliberate attempt to realize the Factory in this medium as a form 68

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of art and of life, and thus is of a value equal to that of the Factory’s other media.”35 For Nina Schleif: “It is precisely Warhol’s low profile in the production process that best expresses his artistic concern.”36 For Matt Wrbican, the proof of this work’s place in Warhol’s oeuvre can be found in the invitation to the exhibition, which lists the catalog as a work.37 For me, the Moderna Museet catalog epitomizes Warhol’s role as a publisher. Warhol did not make a book; he appropriated the entire publication process. He created something beautiful and unusual by letting everyone else do the creating. This approach defines all three of his “bad books,” suggesting a radical rethinking of the artist’s book at the very moment the genre was gaining traction.

The Novel: Warhol’s a In 1966, a few months before Alan Rinzler approached Chris Cerf about publishing a book on Warhol, Helen Lane was faced with writing a reader’s report for a manuscript that she could only halfheartedly recommend. Lane was a foreign editor and translator at Grove Press, and, although the manuscript before her was in English, it was still a translation of sorts. It was a verbatim transcript of a daylong tape recording by Warhol of his friend Ondine popping a few amphetamine pills and wandering around Manhattan. The manuscript called on Lane’s skills as a former cryptographer.38 The text was encoded with pseudonyms, inside jokes, and subcultural slang, yet the book did not fascinate Lane: “Exquisite boredom set in about page 14, and glazing of the eyeballs was complete by page 50.” Fingers on the typewriter, Lane paused and then pecked: Every era has seen the production of types of realism that were both denied as art and deemed dangerous to the sensibilities of the average man. From Victor Hugo’s vulgar “Quelle heure est-il” in Hernani to Zola and Joyce, critics and readers alike have raised the cry of “utter formlessness” and “destruction of the very fabric of society.” This book is sure to raise the same howls, for it too seems purposeless and content-less by ordinary aesthetic standards, and its characters are so blatantly queer as to arouse unconscious hostility in almost any square reader.39

( NEXT FOU R PAGES) F IGU RE 2 1. Double-page spread from the exhibition catalog Andy Warhol (Stockholm: Moderna Museet, 1968).

Collection of the Special Collections Research Center, Syracuse University Libraries. © 2018 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc./Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. F IGU RE 2 2 . Double-page spread from the exhibition catalog Andy Warhol (Stockholm: Moderna Museet, 1968).

Collection of the Special Collections Research Center, Syracuse University Libraries. © Billy Name Estate/Courtesy Dagon James. © 2018 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc./Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

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The “blatantly queer,” utterly boring book was Warhol’s novel a. Not only did Lane find it “purposeless and content-less by ordinary standards,” but she also found its text to be “so low definition as to be simply there.” More than anticipate critics’ lamentations, Lane’s five-page reader’s report oscillates between verbose qualifiers about aesthetics and homophobic slanders. “As for the sort of people who engage in this 98% mindless dialogue,” she typed, “let me say that I loathed them all. Andy and Ondine both come across as campy faggots trying to outdo each other in tante-ish praise of [Maria] Callas, the Les Crane Show, [and] Baby Jane Holzer.” The dialogue, she critiqued, “lingers stickily on the aggressively anal.” Yet, she surmised, the “camp creatures” were likely to arouse the same sort of “queasy fascination” as the stars of Warhol’s underground films. She may have loathed them all, but there they were. Lane made her call: “I reluctantly recommend, I guess, that Grove Press prove itself the publishing house of 1967 by bringing out this shockingly mechanical slice of avant-garde life.”40 The impetus for the novel, Warhol recalled, was provided by a friend who had written him a note saying: “Everybody we knew was writing a book, so that made me want to keep up and do one too. So I bought a tape recorder and I taped the most interesting person I knew at the time, Ondine, for a whole day”: I was determined to stay up all day and all night and tape Ondine, the most talkative and energetic of them all. But somewhere along the line I got tired, so I had to finish taping the rest of the twenty-four hours on a couple of other days. So actually, A, my novel, was a fraud, since it was billed as a consecutive twenty-four-hour tape-recorded “novel,” but it was actually taped on a few separate occasions. I used twenty tapes for it because I was using the small cassettes. And right at that point some kids came by the studio and asked if they could do some work, so I asked them to transcribe and type my novel, and it took them a year and a half to type up one day!41

The scenario is hardly believable: “right at that point” when Warhol stopped taping Ondine, “some kids” came to the Factory asking for work. Young people did often wander into the Factory to see what was going on. And, in fact, on June 30, 1965, the day that Warhol began taping Ondine, a couple of girls arrived at the Factory looking for Gerard Malanga. Malanga was not around, so Ondine tried to hire the girls as receptionists, and at least two of them were eventually put to work transcribing the novel.42 These high school typists were not any good at transcription: they could not spell or punctuate correctly, and they were very slow at their work. Warhol later complained: “They had me convinced that typing was one of the slowest, most painstaking jobs in the world.”43 74

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In late 1967, a young editor at Grove Press by the name of Arnold Leo came across a folder for Warhol in the general editorial files: “It was known that almost anything Andy produced was an immediate commercial success . . . so I see this file and I think, ‘Why is nobody doing anything about this?’ My immediate boss was Richard Seaver— he was an extremely intelligent and gifted literary person— so I said to Dick, ‘Look, if nobody wants to do anything about this Warhol novel could I maybe get it moving?’ Dick said, ‘Yeah go ahead.’”44 But, when Leo got his hands on the manuscript, he was dismayed to find that it was not really a manuscript at all but a badly typed jumble of transcripts from tape recordings.45 He remembered thinking: “Oh my God, this is the worst mess I’ve ever looked at; this is going to be a colossal job straightening this out.” So he wrote to Warhol to request a meeting to discuss the book. During his meeting with Warhol and Billy Name, he recalled telling them, “I’m sure this will be worthwhile to publish,” but he explained that the transcript had so many problems “of spelling and trying to identify who is speaking and where the locale is” that a significant amount of editing would be required. But Warhol and Billy Name did not want to spend the time to correct the mistakes. Leo remembers them saying: “Why do we want to correct all this stuff? Isn’t that what makes it real, that all these mistakes are here? . . . The typists’ mistakes are all part of the process of creating a novel. . . . The manuscript should be reproduced the way it is. And that will save us all a lot of time.” Leo, a meticulous editor, needed some time to come around to Warhol’s idea: “But suddenly, a light went on. I began to see what Andy was about. And it was like the characters he would bring into his movies. He didn’t care how imperfect they were or how much they really just wanted attention and were willing to do anything to get it. That was the reality, you see. It was reality that fascinated him.”46 So Leo went to work elucidating Warhol’s representation of reality. Warhol’s novel was released on December 13, 1968. It would have made the perfect gag gift. The premise of the book— according to both the publicity materials distributed by Grove and the scathing responses to it in the press— is that it reproduces, indexically, twenty-four hours in the life of Ondine, an interesting protagonist not only because of his feverish style of elocution but also because of his deviant lifestyle as a drug user and homosexual.47 Ondine had become an underground star after playing “the Pope of Greenwich Village” in Warhol’s film Chelsea Girls (1966). As the text inside the jacket flap suggests, getting an insider’s view of Ondine’s life was a selling point: “The novel relates one day in Ondine’s life— a day that begins with Ondine popping several amphetamine pills and ends, twenty-four hours later, in an orgy of exhausted confusion.” While the book was originally published with minimal explanation of its unconventional format, the dust jacket offers the reader a clue: “It is three Bad Books

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F I G U RE 2 3. Arnold Leo, ca. 1968. Photograph courtesy Arnold Leo.

[Warhol’s] first basically literary work, but, in the use made of a tape recorder, stems directly from his work in film.” The book itself supports the comparison because of its seemingly unplanned, unedited narrative.48 Its text contains a multitude of spelling errors, garbled lines, and a variety of formatting styles that change arbitrarily throughout the text. Its “chapters” conform to the durational structure of the audiotapes: tape 1/side 1, tape 1/ side 2, and so on. Thus, scholars have identified a postmodern or neo-avantgarde compositional strategy in the novel. Paul Benzon suggests: “a sits at the intersection of two artistic trends of the late twentieth century, namely, the discursive, formal, and ontological play of high postmodernist fiction and the reproductive, found-art images of postmodern pop artists such as Roy Lichtenstein, Robert Rauschenberg, and Warhol himself.”49 Liz Kotz places a within the larger context of artists’ use of language as a creative medium 76

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during the 1960s.50 Expanding on Kotz’s and Benzon’s analyses, I want to suggest that a plays with the apparatuses of its production. Transcribing, editing, typesetting— all these are the conditions and a part of the content of the novel. It fits within the larger scope of Warhol’s error-embracing visual work and his special talent for exploiting the mechanisms of publicity while it also operates within the literary landscape of the time, where fiction and nonfiction became conflated in nonfiction novels, tape-recorder literature, and the subjective reportage of the New Journalism. Moreover, Warhol’s a was published by one of America’s most avant-garde publishing houses, whose reputation was founded on the celebrity status of its “sexually deviant” authors and books. As a publisher known for pushing the limits of acceptable literature— it was notorious for publishing “obscene” works, including D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1959), Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer (1961), and William Burroughs’s Naked Lunch (1962), as well as for publishing political and experimental authors from Samuel Beckett to Malcolm X— Grove Press had a roster that could easily accommodate Warhol’s unusual novel.51 In many ways, Warhol’s a follows the pattern set by Grove’s 1965 edition of Pauline Réage’s Story of O (Histoire d’O, 1955), a novel that is as much about its mysterious mode of production and its author’s identity as it is about the sexual deviancy of its characters.52 A handwritten memo by Seymour Krim, a consulting editor for Grove’s Evergreen Review, suggests that Warhol’s book may actually have been too similar to what other Grove authors were writing at the time, although not in terms of depravity but in terms of technique. In reference to the excerpt from Warhol’s novel that was scheduled to be published in the Evergreen Review in September 1968, Krim wrote to the Review’s managing editor, Fred Jordan: “I’m concerned about the number of tape-recorded pieces and themes (Negro piece, Burroughs, the hippy piece) for this issue. A Warhol excerpt would make four, which is too much.”53 While Grove’s publicity pitch for Warhol’s novel emphasized his ingenuity in the realm of visual art and film, its internal correspondence reveals how seamlessly Warhol fit in with what the press’s other authors were writing. Despite the novel’s accord with the literary zeitgeist, the critics excoriated the book. They called it, among other things, a “put-on,” a “tedious facsimile,” “abominable,” and something to “display as part of your psychedelic collection.”54 B.W. from the Green Bay Press-Gazette offered a typical response: “You could bug the local post, grocery store or foundry and get just as valid a piece of ‘art.’”55 The reviewer from the Detroit Free Press found himself at a loss for words: “This, uh . . . book? . . . is the complete transcript of a tape recording of 24 hours in the life of Ondine, who comes under the heading of the French declension, ‘he, she or it.’”56 Reviewing the book for Newsweek, Robert Scholes wrote: “As near as I can make out, the 451 pages in this volume were printed three Bad Books

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without correction from inaccurate transcriptions made by various typists from poorly recorded tapes. . . . [This] book is not a ‘novel,’ and it is not by Andy Warhol. He has neither edited nor written it; he has merely marketed it.”57 Rather than refute such critiques, Grove appropriated the attacks to promote the book. Warhol’s book was pitched precisely on the grounds that it was scandalously unwritten and unedited. The publicity for a aligned the book with Warhol’s interventions in visual art— echoing both his technologically mediated approach to painting and the seemingly arbitrary, unedited eye of his movie camera. In 1969, Grove ran an advertisement for a in Interview, the magazine that Warhol began publishing the year after his novel was released. The ad shows Warhol with a smirk across his face and a copy of a in his hand. Below his picture the copy reads, “They laughed when he stepped up to the easel . . . and when he picked up a camera . . . and now that he’s written a novel? Nobody’s laughing; they’re screaming! ‘Vile, disgusting, dull, filthy’— the voices cry. The New York Times called ‘a,’ among many other things, ‘the alltime low in pornography.’ Will andy WarhOl again haVe The lasT l au g h ? s e e FO r yO u r s e l F, P i c k u P a c O Py O F a.”58 This mobilization of scandal through print culture— as an advertisement for a Warhol publication within another of Warhol’s publishing ventures— recalls the artist’s paintings of tabloids in the early 1960s and his later silk screens of distressing, gruesome reportage photographs. In light of the publicity program for his novel—“Vile, disgusting, dull, filthy”— the subject of his paintings 129 Die in Jet!, Tunafish Disaster, and Orange Car Crash Ten Times seems less about these specific disasters than the ways in which scandalous events presented through a print-mediated public sphere solicit our attention.59 What Warhol appropriates in these works is not so much images of dreadful events as the entwined mechanisms of publicity and mass media that transform events into public scandals— scandals for which you can “see for yourself.” Warhol shows us the promise that we can satisfy our curiosity and simultaneously claim our disgust. All we need to do is “pick up a copy.”

▮ ▮ ▮ Warhol’s novel opens with a list of sounds: “Rattle, gurgle, clink, tinkle.” They evoke the noise of emptying pockets and medicine bottles, the gurgle of mouthwash, the clink of metal on porcelain, and the tinkle of taking a piss. Are we overhearing someone in the bathroom? We cannot be sure. The novel opens by showing us nothing. We enter the scene through sound alone. The second line sounds less like a person. We hear a machine: “Click, pause, click, ring.” As in the opening line, four verbs express a vague action in an unarticulated space. The third line sounds off: “Dial, dial.” The ringing of the second line now becomes recognizable. A dialing telephone introduces 78

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F IGU RE 24. Display advertisement for Andy Warhol, a (New York: Grove Press, 1968), published in Inter/VIEW, vol. 1, no. 2 (1969). Collection of the Special Collections Research Center, Syracuse University Libraries. Used by permission of Grove/Atlantic, Inc. © 2018 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc./Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

our hero. Ondine speaks. But he is not talking on the phone. He is talking to someone else while trying to make a phone call. His speech is continually interrupted by the mechanical noise produced in the process. On the first page of the published book, the opening lines are as follows: 1

/

1

Rattle, gurgle, clink, tinkle. Click, pause, click, ring. Dial, dial. Ond i ne — You said (dial) that, that, if, if you pick, pick UP the Mayor’s voice on the other end (dial, pause, dial-dial-dial), the Mayor’s sister would know us, be (busy-busy-busy).60

Despite the lack of contextual information in these lines, they are revealing. If we look at them again and read them visually, superficially, certain typographical issues present themselves.61 The first three lines— those poetic fragments of sound— are marked, italicized. When Ondine appears in the text, his name is printed in an initial capital plus small capital letters followed by an em dash. His speech, unlike the sounds that precede it, is attributed. He stutters poetically. A single word is capitalized at midsentence, creating a dramatic effect within his staccato line: “. . . that, that, if, if you pick, pick UP the Mayor’s voice.” Meanwhile, the sounds of the phone and the other diegetic noises and pauses that continually cut into Ondine’s speech are italicized: “dial, pause, dial-dial-dial.”62 Reading the text in this manner, its construction is revealed as anything but arbitrary; it is systematically stylized. The surface of the novel oscillates between bold and italics, capitals and empty tabs of space. The editorial files in the Grove Press Records contain two different copies of the first page of a. The first is a copy of the original manuscript typed by one of the transcribers employed by Warhol. This copy includes strings of X’s typed over unwanted text and also in-text editorial notations by at least two different pens: one set made before the manuscript was copied and one made after. The second copy of the first page of the manuscript has been retyped and partially standardized with the names of the speakers identified; it integrates the edits from the first copy and includes handwritten edits by two different pens. The differences between these two versions of the first page and the final published text suggest a more complex editorial process than was previously thought.63 Several kinds of edits were made to the text of Warhol’s novel before publication. The first page of the novel provides a good example of the types of changes made, although it does not serve as an exhaustive catalog. A key difference between the first copy and the second is the addition of the speakers’ 80

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F IGU RE 2 5. First page of the manuscript for Andy Warhol’s a (New York: Grove Press, 1968). Grove Press Records, Special Collections

Research Center, Syracuse University Libraries. © 1968, 1998, 2018 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc./Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Used by permission of Grove/Atlantic, Inc. Any third-party use of this material, outside this publication, is prohibited.

F I G U RE 2 6. Retyped first page of the manuscript for Andy Warhol’s a (New York: Grove Press, 1968). Grove Press Records, Special Collections Research Center, Syracuse University Libraries. © 1968, 1998, 2018 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc./Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Used by permission of Grove/Atlantic, Inc. Any third-party use of this material, outside this publication, is prohibited.

names. In the first copy, it is not clear who is speaking. In the second copy, the names of the speakers have been added. However, in the published book, the speaker’s name is listed only the first time he speaks. Although Warhol’s and Ondine’s initials were added to the second copy of the manuscript each time they speak, they were deleted before final publication. Such a change highlights that the novel navigates between an interest in appearing unedited and also, ever so gently, helping readers move through the narrative. From the first version of the manuscript to the second, we see a standardization of punctuation and a clarification of language. Line breaks have been inserted between speakers.64 Crossed-out or typed-over text from the first copy has been deleted. Some words have been added, and some have been deleted. For example, line 15 in the first version reads: “Answering service. . . . . Are you cars honking and horns blasting.” In the second version, this line reads: “D— Answering service . . . Are you (cars honking, blasting).” The shift from “cars honking and horns blasting” to “(cars honking, blasting)” makes the line clear and concise. We see the standardization of the ellipses and the marking of the external noise within parentheses and in italics, yet the language is still fragmented and difficult to decipher. The novel still reads like an incomplete transcript. Similar to Warhol’s preference for the “underground look” of the Photostat machine in the design of his Index (Book), memos in the Grove Press Records show that his novel’s ability to seem “purposeless and content-less by ordinary aesthetic standards” was also strategic.65 In one memo, Leo dictates how he would like the novel to be typeset: “We’d like the printer to set the attached copy exactly as it is— complete with all the typing errors, garbled lines, mistakes in spelling, etc. Our object is to get a verbatim text.” However, he was concerned about the length of the manuscript, and he realized it might be easier for readers if it were formatted some way other than as a full page of running text. So he conceived three different formatting styles. Style A took the form of “two columns, with one-em dash hanging indention for the over-run of speeches.” Style B took the form of “a solid, full-measure page” with only a two-em space inserted between speakers. Style C also took the form of a full-measure page but with “a new line for each speech.”66 When he presented Warhol with these three styles as possible options for formatting the book, Warhol said: “Oh, well they’re all nice, let’s use all of them.”67 Thus, the styles are used alternately throughout the novel, cutting and repeating across the tape-based durational structure of the chapters. Not only are the novel’s three formats easily misread as the individual transcription styles of the young typists; other edits support various myths about the book. For example, rather than being arbitrary, the pseudonyms were strategic: “There was a bit of fear that lawsuits could arise or that some of the people who appear in the text would want to be paid,” Leo recalled. “So three Bad Books

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it was decided that we would use initials and different names.”68 But Warhol’s novel is no roman à clef. Sometimes, the pseudonyms were intentionally misattributed during a second round of edits. For example, in the twelfth chapter, Warhol, Moxanne, and Ondine leave the Factory and take a cab. During the cab ride, they enter into a funny conversation with the cabbie about eating “cooked bulls’ balls.”69 The conversation is particularly amusing because of its sexual connotations. According to Craig Dworkin, the whole chapter “can be understood by tracing the progression of resonance and interference between ‘mountain,’ ‘Mounties,’ and ‘mounted.’ Combined with the misheard ‘oysters,’ discarded ‘orchids,’ and nonce ‘orchens’ that punctuate the giddy conversation taking place during a downtown cab ride, these terms all once again triangulate the testicles: the cooked criadillas or Canadian ‘mountain oysters.’”70 But this triangulation of testicle talk takes on a different meaning if one learns that Ondine is not encouraging the cabbie to yell out the window and ask the male pedestrians if they have ever heard of eating “Mounted mountains.”71 The audiotapes reveal that he was left back at the Factory and that it is Chuck Wein in the cab with Moxanne and Warhol. The copies of the transcript from this scene in the Grove Press Records correctly attribute the speech in this section to Wein and contain handwritten edits that intentionally misattribute Wein’s dialogue to Ondine. These edits reveal that narrative continuity— and not simply chance and error— is key to Warhol’s book. As for the tape-based durational structure of the narrative, with the exception of chapter 15, the first eighteen chapters of the novel conform to the structure provided by the tapes.72 Each chapter begins and ends with the corresponding side of a tape. But, starting with chapter 19, the second side of each chapter is missing. This break corresponds with the five tapes that are “missing” from the Warhol Museum Archives.73 Because of the disjunctive narrative and the multiple formatting styles, the missing half of chapters 19– 23 is hardly noticeable. The return to the original structural pattern for the final hour of the novel (24/1, 24/2) makes the omission even less noticeable. This suggests that after the first attempt to record a day in the life of Ondine, which ends at tape 18, Warhol likely recorded a few additional audiotapes and had them transcribed later. In his recollection of the project, Warhol said that he used only twenty tapes and that the novel was “actually taped on a few separate occasions,” but he also explains, as we have seen, that the premise of the book was to record a day in the life of Ondine: “I was determined to stay up all day and all night and tape Ondine. . . . But somewhere along the line I got tired.”74 Yet the book’s twenty-four-hour premise remained through the subsequent recordings and the editorial process. According to Leo: “We all knew that it was not [twenty-four hours], that it was like twenty hours, maybe not even twenty full hours if I recall, but everybody was saying it

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was the life of Ondine, twenty-four hours of Ondine. The original title was 24 Hours.”75 The fact that Warhol’s novel was heavily edited does not negate its embrace of chance and error elucidated by Kotz and by Benzon. Leo’s memo to the printer reveals that retaining the errors of transcription— the intention that the novel be a “verbatim text”— was as important as formatting the text for readability.76 Leo recalled, So the printer did his best to reproduce the garbled mess, and the galleys came back and, of course— being still, at heart, a very meticulous editor— I instructed the proofreaders to read the galleys against the manuscript and make sure that every mistake in the manuscript was faithfully reproduced in the galleys. But Andy and Billy Name said, “Wait, no! Any mistakes the printer made, that’s fine. It doesn’t matter. The printer’s got the right to make mistakes as well.” By this time my meticulous editorial inclination has been completely unhinged, and I’m saying “You’re right, let’s leave them in there.”77

Before the book went to press, Billy Name plucked out some text for the running heads and asked whether Grove had any special features that he could incorporate into the book.78 They had only one ornament, the figure of Mercury, speed. Perfect. Billy Name found an appropriate place in the text block, and the book went to press.

That Was Me Three months before the release of a, Grove published an excerpt in its inhouse literary magazine, the Evergreen Review.79 Illustrated with photographs of Ondine taken by Billy Name, the opening spread shows Ondine standing on a ladder with his arms raised above his head. He is young and slender with thick, dark hair. The sleeves of his shirt are pushed up around his forearms, and his baggy pants lead our eyes down to his dirty boots. Behind him are bare walls, exposed hardware, and painting stretchers stacked along the floor. A small towel hangs around his neck. He looks like he might be working out, doing pull-ups. He gazes beyond the camera that captures him. The scene feels candid, as though the viewer were on a movie set, watching, waiting for something to happen. On the facing page, the text begins with an explanatory subtitle: “An episode from the first novel by the famous artist of the Velvet Underground— a tape-recorded kaleidoscope relating one day in the life of its hero, a passionate, perverse seeker of the meaningful.”80 For each of the next two pages

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F I G U RE 2 7.

Double-page spread from Andy Warhol’s “Ondine’s Mare” in Evergreen Review, vol. 12, no. 58 (September 1968). Collection of the Special Collections Research Center, Syracuse University Libraries. © Billy Name Estate/ Courtesy Dagon James. Excerpt from Evergreen Review, copyright © 1968 by Evergreen Review. Used by permission of Grove/Atlantic, Inc. Any third-party use of this material, outside this publication, is prohibited.

of text, another full-page photograph of Ondine runs alongside. While the narrative, with its lack of biographical or contextual information, gives readers little material with which to construct Ondine’s character, these photographs deliver him to us. The novel is a portrait of Ondine— an insider’s view into “one day in Ondine’s life.”81 Those members of the public who considered themselves part of the underground— the readership of Grove Press— would have been interested in Ondine because of his star role in Chelsea Girls, but the wider general public would have also been curious because of what he represented: he was a social problem, a homosexual drug addict living in pre-Stonewall New York City. As Lane forewarns in her reader’s report, he and his friends were “so blatantly queer” that the novel was sure to raise the cry of “destruction of the fabric of society.”82 The book’s self-proclaimed unedited text elided with its offer to provide an uncensored view into Ondine’s life and the infamous social crowd among whom he circulated. “While Andy Warhol himself, under his ‘private’ name Drella, is one of the major characters in this kaleidoscopic novel,” read Grove’s press release, “its hero is Ondine— a passionate seeker of the meaningful in a world peopled by such characters as Rotten Rita, The Sugar Plum Fairy, The Duchess, Billy Name, Irving du Ball, Paul Paul, Taxine, Moxanne, Ingrid Superstar, and other personalities, new and old, in and around the Velvet Underground. The only common denom86

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inator in this splendiferous cast is their diverse perversity.”83 That Warhol insisted on passivity and detachment in documenting these perverse personalities suggested his novel would provide a more real and truthful view of Ondine and his world. We are undoubtedly voyeurs when reading a— but the person we are spying on knows we are there. Ondine plays with us. He performs for his book. He eats and sings, gossips and flirts, and begins to lose his voice from fatigue. Throughout the novel, he directly addresses his imagined audience, worries aloud about what his readers must think, talks as though they do not exist, and plays with the microphone and its capacity to capture his voice as he kisses, screeches, burps, offers inverted sighs, and chews on the recording device. The novel is thoroughly self-reflexive about its capacity as a representational form: D— Fantastic! Come back Ondine, you’ve got a hundred more pages to go. Come on Ondine. O— Why am I so gay? (Laughs.) So gay. D— Oh. O— May I have that that other piece, honey? The one on your shoulder? D— Oh. O— May I? M— No but, this is a book. D— Something like sixty pages, uh, not thirty, I mean M— If um, three minutes D— Sixty. RR— Minimum. M— Twenty. D— Oh that’s not very much at all. M— That’s 480 pages. D— Oh. O—(he blows into the microphone) That was me.84

“That was me.” How do we understand such an utterance within the text of this novel? We can begin to understand it only in relation to the gap to which it refers that it utters not only in this one line but also throughout the book— in its totality, its publicity, its premise. The book promises its readers a privileged view into a day in the life of Ondine, but, in all the reviews and analyses of Warhol’s novel, Ondine has become nearly invisible. His invisibility is not only the result of the novel’s unreadability— its error-ridden text, multiple formats, and pseudonyms. His invisibility is caught up in a broader politics of representation. “That was me” refers to Ondine but also to three Bad Books

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the high school typists, to Billy Name, Arnold Leo, Helen Lane, Chuck Wein, the typesetter, and the many invisible others who helped create and publish the book. If, with Mikhail Bakhtin, we understand the novel to be “a phenomenon multiform in style and variform in speech and voice,” then the distortion of the cassette tapes, the errors registered by the inattentive ears and fingers of the transcribers, the formatting styles created by the editor, the typographic capacities of the typesetter, and the legal concerns of the publisher are all voices orchestrated within Warhol’s a. But they are not only in his novel; each of Warhol’s three bad books of the 1960s reveals “the rivulets and droplets of social heteroglossia,” layered autonomous voices singing together—“That was me.”85

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YO U N G , R I C H , I N T E L L I G E N T, AND WILLING TO SPEND!

A slow, brown, frozen drizzle fell from the sky. Outside Penn Station, men walked a picket line. Handwritten placards hung over their shoulders—“No Pay, No Mail” and “All I Want Is Enough to Eat.” The letter carriers’ strike began just after midnight on March 18, 1970. The following afternoon, more than six thousand people gathered for the ManhattanBronx Postal Union meeting. By the time the union president, Moe Biller, arrived, fists were raised. In addition to regular union members, there were FBI agents, New York City police officers, Puerto Rican nationalists, Black Panthers, and kids from the Students for a Democratic Society. Biller made his way to the podium. He insisted on a strike vote by secret ballot. The shouting grew louder. Biller refused to take a vote by hand. Chairs were thrown from the balcony. Someone came at Biller with a knife, and he escaped out the back door. Three days later, an official vote was conducted, and the postal workers went on strike. The strike lasted only eight days, but it had a monumental impact. Nearly 200,000 postal workers refused to return to work, paralyzing mail service coast to coast. On day 7, a national emergency was declared, and 30,000 military troops were sent into New York City to sort the mail.1 Years of neglect and mismanagement had left the postal system in disrepair. The relationship between the postal union and Congress, which appointed local postmasters and regulated postal rates, was haunted by conflicts of interest. At the same time, an exponential increase in delivery points and in the volume of printed matter sent through the mail was testing the system. According to John Tierney: “Between 1945 and the start of the postal reform movement in 1967, the annual torrent of mail pouring into the postal system swelled from 38 billion pieces to 78 billion and was projected at the time to reach 100 billion by 1977.”2 A significant portion of this mail consisted of magazines, mail-order products, newspapers, and books. Although second-class postage rates had increased 89 percent over the decade, there was no direct correlation between the cost of delivering the mail and the revenue generated through postal rates. Therefore, neither the postal unions nor the organized mailers (the National Newspaper Association, the Direct 89

F I G U RE 2 8. “Moe Biller Escapes Agitators at Manhattan-Bronx Postal Union (MBPU) Meeting at Statler Hotel, Pre-1970 Strike.” Photograph

by Aaron Feinstein. Collection of American Postal Workers Union, Moe Biller Records, WAG 099. Used by permission of the Tamiment Library/Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives, New York University Libraries.

Mail Advertising Association, and the Magazine Publishers Association) had an incentive to reform the system.3 The strike forced the issue. On August 12, 1970, President Richard Nixon signed into law the Postal Reorganization Act. It states: “The Postal Service shall have as its basic function the obligation to provide postal services to bind the Nation together through the personal, educational, literary, and business correspondence of the people. It shall provide prompt, reliable, and efficient services to patrons in all areas and shall render postal services to all communities. The costs of establishing and maintaining the Postal Service shall not be apportioned to impair the overall value of such service to the people.”4 Taking up the language of nation building and the importance of the literary public sphere, the Postal Reorganization Act fundamentally transformed the US Post Office Department from a public good into a government-operated corporation now called the US Postal Service (USPS).5 On the one hand, the USPS was to serve the public by providing a universally available means of private communication, while, on the other hand, it was also supposed to become a financially self-sustaining business in which operating costs are covered by revenues.6 Within the context of a broader postindustrial shift from manufacturing to information management, the American postal system— with its newly developed zip codes, its role in facilitating the national population and housing census, and now its bottom-line budget structure— was uniquely poised to track, analyze, and subdivide the American public into specific and verifiable markets. Thus, in 1970, under a newly corporatized postal system, the government became complicit in the monetization of the reading public and the transformation of the public sphere into a medium of advertising.7

▮ ▮ ▮ The Factory was undergoing its own corporate transformation. In 1968, Warhol moved his studio to 33 Union Square West. “Everyone could sort of sense that the move downtown was more than just a change of place,” he reminisced.8 The new studio’s decor matched the new ethos. The tinfoil of the Factory was replaced with “conventional office chic.”9 The walls were painted white. There was a screening room and a piano, an Art Deco receptionist’s desk, and big windows that let in the light. Technicolor photos, instead of paintings, hung on the walls, and a stuffed Great Dane stood guard in the entry room behind the bulletproof doors.10 The people had also changed: “Ingrid Superstar, Dorothy Dean, Joe Campbell, Rotten Rita, Mary Woronov— gone.”11 Ondine was not coming around anymore. “He had a steady lover now,” Warhol recalled. “[He] said he was totally off speed, and he was sort of settled down, working as a mailman.”12 Billy Name retreated to a small storage room in the back of the studio and came out only at night when everyone yo u n g , r I c h , I n t e l l I g e n t, a n d w I l l I n g to s P e n d !

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else was away. One morning in the spring of 1970, before anyone had arrived at the studio, he emerged, affixed a note to the door, and walked into the street: “Andy— I am not here anymore but I am fine. Love, Billy.”13 Warhol had the locks changed, a Xerox machine was installed in Billy’s old room, and that was the end of the Silver Factory. It was also the beginning of a new era for Warhol. Although he had incorporated his creative ventures under Andy Warhol Enterprises, Inc., in 1957, he began to consolidate his projects and run the Factory more like a business with the help of his new right-hand man, Fred Hughes, a dapper young Texan with ties to the art patrons John and Dominique de Menil.14 Warhol also started his most complex, longest ongoing project: the publication of Interview magazine. “It was the magazine more than anything else that kept Andy from passing into sixties history,” wrote Pat Hackett. Meeting creative new people— especially young kids— was always important to him; he thrived on it. But he knew that people only come to you if they think you have something to offer them. In the mid-sixties when he was cranking out his early, cheap, “underground” films at the rate, practically, of one a week, it was the possibility of getting into Andy’s movies that drew people to the Factory. By the 1970s, however, with the price of making commercially exhibitable movies becoming prohibitive, Andy had few roles to offer people and not even the certainty that the movie being discussed would ever actually get made. Interview magazine more than filled the void.15

In the wake of the dissolution of the Factory, Warhol used publishing to recreate himself yet again. Initially a film journal, Interview turned its focus to glamour, beauty, wealth, and celebrity culture, thereby returning Warhol to the milieu and practices of his 1950s work, aligning him with the worlds of high fashion and the society pages while also enabling him to cultivate a close-knit group of mostly male assistants. The magazine was instrumental in his ability to expand his social networks and cultivate new audiences. As Gwen Allen has shown generally: “The distinct physical and communicative properties of the magazine— its reproduced, serial format, its collective nature, its inherent publicness, and its close connection with the economies of art and art criticism— made it an especially compelling medium for artists during this period.”16 Although Interview did not define itself against mainstream media in the same way that the other publications of Allen’s study did, it nonetheless assumed the distinct properties of the medium and, in so doing, offers a different perspective on the history of artists’ magazines.

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Like Rolling Stone but on Movies There are many accounts of why Warhol began publishing his own magazine: “Andy later liked to say in interviews that he’d started a magazine ‘to give Brigid something to do.’”17 “Back in the fall of 1969, frustrated over not being able to get free tickets to the New York Film Festival and looking for something to give Gerard to do, Andy had casually started an underground movie magazine.”18 “It promoted Andy’s own productions, like Flesh [1968] and Trash [1970]. And it quickly proved to be an effective way to get the attention of film stars, directors, and producers Andy and Paul [Morrissey] wanted to meet.”19 “From the beginning, Interview was a tool, a key, a foot into various doors.”20 “His initial impulse was jealousy. The overnight success— Andy’s favorite kind— of Rolling Stone and Screw drove him crazy. ‘Jann Wenner is so powerful. Al Goldstein is so rich.’ He moaned. . . . ‘And both Rolling Stone and Screw use such cheap paper. Let’s just combine the two ideas— kids and sex— and we’ll make a fortune.’”21 In POPism, Warhol recalled: Everyone, absolutely everyone, was tape-recording everyone else. . . . Tapes brought up great possibilities for interviews with all kinds of celebrities, and since we were a long time between movies lately, I began to think about starting a magazine of nothing but taped interviews. Then John Wilcock dropped by one day and asked me if I would start a newspaper with him. I said yes. John was already publishing a magazine on newsprint called Other Scenes, so he had a complete typesetting and printing set up already. Together we brought out the first issue of Interview magazine in the fall of ’69.22

In taking the interview as its namesake— a genre of writing that encompasses the muckraker’s invasive tactics, the entertainment industry’s publicity profile, and the government’s data gathering— Warhol’s magazine purports to be a medium of insight and exposure.23 The first issue of Interview is a cross between a countercultural newspaper and a mass-market tabloid. At the top of the front page the magazine’s title is graphically rendered: inter appears in minuscule letters against a black banner, suggesting— like the narrow slit of space that follows the prefix— that the magazine will offer readers a peek into something hidden. The second half of the magazine’s title is printed in majuscule letters, brandishing the visual lure and shock of a tabloid headline: VIEW.24 Thus, the interview is a trope for the magazine— a trope that it both deploys and circumvents. For example, the feature interview of the debut issue opens with a disclaimer:

yo u n g , r I c h , I n t e l l I g e n t, a n d w I l l I n g to s P e n d !

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The interviewer, Soren Agenoux, does not like the form of

F I G U RE 2 9. Cover of inter/VIEW, vol. 1, no. 1 (1969). Collection of the Special Collections Research Center, Syracuse University Libraries. Courtesy BMP Media Holdings, LLC.

the interview and the implication of the form that the person has information to be given to the interviewer which the interviewer does not have and can not get except by asking. Therefore, the interviewer said to Agnes [Varda]: I prefer arbitrary forms. ag ne s. I also. s o r en. If you take this card: (print of card) And apply its arbitrary form onto each question I ask you, we might get some answers which are better than answers— information, and something else, besides.25

Here Agenoux transforms the interview into a kind of chance-based text piece more akin to the event scores of the artist George Brecht than the journalistic approach of Mike Wallace.26 Other interviews in the magazine’s first issue also deviate from professional journalistic protocols. They are riddled with bad punctuation, misspellings, excessive onomatopoeias, and unidentified participants. They often take the form of tangential or cryptic chitchat, the purpose of which it seems is to fill the duration of the tape. Thus, Warhol’s magazine extends his techniques as an interviewee. As Reva Wolf 94

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writes: “With his seemingly banal answers, Warhol constructed [the space of the interview] for the creativity of the interviewer. He further encouraged such creativity through reversing and otherwise confusing the roles of interviewer and interviewee.”27 On a material level, Interview mimics Screw and Rolling Stone. The cheap paper crumples at your touch; it yellows before your eyes. The ink turns your fingers black. In the debut issue, Amy Sullivan makes the comparison to Rolling Stone when trying to explain the purpose of the magazine during her interview with Daria Halprin and Mark Frechette, the costars of Michelangelo Antonioni’s soon-to-be-released (and panned) film on the counterculture Zabriskie Point (1970): da ri a : What is this interview for? What’s he (Warhol) going to use it for? a m y: Andy’s putting out his paper— along the lines of Rolling Stone, but dealing with film. m a rk: You mean a trade magazine? a m y: Not like Variety— on a smaller scale. I’m not certain about distribution plans. . . .

A little further on they return to the topic: a m y: Do you want to meet Andy first? m a rk: Yeah— bring the recorder. Daria, bring my jacket! a n dy: Hello— can we take some Polaroids? a m y: Daria, this is Andy. a n dy: Your mother’s the dancer isn’t she? I think she’s terrific! I saw her in a program at Hunter College and she was great! da ri a : Yeah. I was there. I saw you backstage for a minute. a n dy: Oh, really! I’m going to take some pictures now. If you take your clothes off you can be on the cover (They looked at each other with a combined look of disgust and fear). m a rk: Can you explain a little about this publication? a n dy: We’re going to try to make a movement of it— like Rolling Stone but on movies. We’ve been talking about it for a long time but then I got shot and by the time I got out of the hospital. . . . Arizona must be a peculiar state. m a rk: It wasn’t Arizona, Death Valley— just a bit in Arizona but nothing important. pa ul (m orris s e y ) : All interviewed up? I hope that something was told that shouldn’t have been. a n dy: Did you ask him how big his cock was? (aside) a m y: No, but Mark asked Daria her breast measurement. yo u n g , r I c h , I n t e l l I g e n t, a n d w I l l I n g to s P e n d !

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andy: Really? On tape? am y: They have a car waiting for them downstairs, so I think they’re going to leave now. ger ar d : Oh, do you both have to go right now? dar i a: No— but I want to!28

Like his entreaties of the 1950s—“Oh, ah, let me draw your cock. I’m doing a cock book”— his questions for Daria and Mark leverage the potential publicity offered by his magazine to test the limits of what he could get others to do.29 The interviews in Warhol’s Interview resonate with his screen tests, which, as Hal Foster describes, were “tests of the capacity of the filmed subject to confront a camera, hold a pose, present an image, and sustain the performance for the duration of the shooting.”30 The interview offered a similar test of self-performance and endurance, but that was not all. As Molly Donovan argues, Warhol’s work continually points “to the commodity status of the news and to our status as its consumers.”31 Thus, Warhol’s magazine brings to light a reading situation that discloses the “real rituals of participation within which mass culture contains and controls it audiences” while also appropriating those same rituals in order to invoke the public audience that Warhol still hoped to cultivate.32

▮ ▮ ▮ Over the eighteen years that Warhol published Interview, it changed dramatically. There were shifts in focus and changes in staff, production, format, funding, and distribution. Even the magazine’s name changed several times: Inter/VIEW: A Monthly Film Journal (1969–70), INTER/VIEW: Andy Warhol’s Film Magazine (1971–72), Andy Warhol’s Interview (1972–77), Andy Warhol’s Interview: The Monthly Glamour Gazette (intermittently in 1975), and, eventually, just plain Interview (1977–). The magazine is so interesting, each issue a complex object within the decades-long serial project, that a whole book could be written about it. Yet there is very little scholarly literature on the subject. There are reasons for this. Not only does the magazine’s size and scope make it nearly impenetrable as an object of study; it also poses several practical challenges to researchers. Although the first issue claimed to be a collector’s item, the magazine was not often collected by institutions, so a complete run is difficult to locate. The frequent changes in staff and the unorthodox manner of publication— it changes from a monthly to a number and issue format and includes several errors in numbering over the years— make it hard to know with certainty what a complete run should look like. Moreover, all the records relating to the magazine were transferred to the publisher Peter Brant when he purchased the magazine after Warhol’s death in 1987; 96

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and, since Interview is still actively being published by Brant Publications, its archives are not open to researchers. There are, however, a few threads to follow. Scattered within the time capsules at the Warhol Museum Archives are a handful of stray documents related to the magazine that offer illuminating, yet partial, glimpses into its history. Descriptions of the magazine have also been offered by some former employees. To date, Bob Colacello’s memoir Holy Terror offers the fullest account, but, as Colacello admits, he was not always privy to the inner workings of the magazine and the financial negotiations of its owners, leaving many questions unanswered.33 So how does one trace the editorial and production history of a magazine without an archive? The only way, I decided, was to look through every issue I could find, page by page, and see what came up. In going through the magazine, tracking whose name appeared and disappeared from the masthead as the issues progressed, trying to grasp how the publication evolved during Warhol’s lifetime, I noticed a text box that seemed different from the rest of the magazine. It was a series of questions and answers, an interview of sorts (what follows is an abbreviated version): 1. Title of Publication 2. Date of Filing 3. Frequency of Issue 4. Location of known office of publication 5. Location of the headquarters or general business offices of the publishers 6. Names and addresses of the publisher, editor, and managing editor 7. OWNER (if owned by a corporation, its name and address must be stated and also immediately thereunder the names and addresses of stockholders, owning or holding 1 percent or more of total amount of stock) 8. Known Bondholders, mortgagees, or other securities 9. For optional completion by publishers mailing at the regular rates 10. For completion by nonprofit organizations authorized to mail at special rates 11. Extent and nature of circulation A. Total no. copies printed (net press run) B. Paid circulation 1. Sales through dealers and carriers, street vendors and counter sales 2. Mail subscriptions C. Total paid circulation D. Free distribution by mail, carrier, or other means 1. Samples, complimentary & other free copies 2. Copies distributed to news agents, but not sold E. Total distribution (sum of C and D) F. Office use, left-over, uncounted, spoiled after printing G. Total (Sum of E & F— should equal net press run shown in A)34 yo u n g , r I c h , I n t e l l I g e n t, a n d w I l l I n g to s P e n d !

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Printed in the magazine itself was a historical accounting: the names and addresses of the owners, the average print run, and the means of distribution. As a direct result of the postal strike and the reorganization of the postal service in 1970, periodical owners were required to publish such details in order to qualify for second-class postage rates. According to US Code, “each owner of a publication having periodical publication mail privileges shall furnish to the Postal Service at least once a year, and shall publish in such publication once a year” the answers to the USPS Statement of Ownership Form 3526, which was developed in order to determine whether a publication qualified for reduced postage rates.35 Publishers were given a five-year period in which to comply with the new law and pay their full share of delivery costs. Thus, beginning in October 1973, Interview printed a statement of ownership in its pages annually and provided me with much sought-after details regarding the size, scope, and ownership of the magazine. Thus, with the masthead, the annual statement of ownership, the fragmentary archival documents from Warhol’s time capsules, and the accounts of former magazine staff in hand, a picture of Interview magazine emerged.

The Editors The first issue of Interview lists four editors on the masthead in the following order: Gerard Malanga, Paul Morrissey, John Wilcock, Andy Warhol.36 Each brought an area of expertise. As a poet, Malanga was involved with several little magazines and had potential contributors at his fingertips; Morrissey brought an interest in the commercial film industry and connections to local movie memorabilia shops, which provided illustrations for the magazine; and Wilcock brought the practical know-how for publishing a magazine. Warhol brought them all together and funded the operation. In 1976, Wilcock told the fashion and celebrity photographer Rose Hartman: Andy complained that he didn’t have enough money to make a million dollar movie. I said, “Why don’t you start a paper?” . . . We agreed that he would pay for the printing, and I’d pay for the typesetting. He took an office on Union Square, hired editors, and we became partners. After a year, my paper Other Scenes, collapsed and I decided to go to Europe. I asked for 10% of the venture. Andy gave me $5000 and two silkscreen flower paintings worth about $500 each at the time; I haven’t had any bad feelings ending the partnership, although I find it surprising that no one knows who I am if I go up to the Factory (Andy’s offices).37

While Warhol’s and Wilcock’s accounts are slightly mismatched, both were diplomatic about the collaboration. A letter in the Warhol Museum Ar98

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chives suggests that the relationship may not have been so easy. Within a year of the first issue, Wilcock’s lawyer wrote to Warhol, stating: John states that the suggestion that inter/VIEW be published by the two of you was his. John agreed to provide typesetting, layout and production, editorial advice and help, the art director and supervision of the printing— using his printer and distributor. It was his understanding that in exchange for these start-up services, he would receive 50% of the ownership of the publication. Typesetting costs for the first two issues were between five and six hundred dollars. . . . John ran two full-page ads (rate—$300.00 per page) free in Other Scenes to promote inter/VIEW. . . . In regard to the future of inter/VIEW, John still believes in the publication, and wants to make an editorial contribution by contacting his worldwide net-work of film people, but he needs to have a definite understanding about this, and particularly, about how material he solicits for the publication will be paid for.38

It is unclear what agreement Warhol and Wilcock arrived at, but Wilcock’s name remained on the masthead until October 1970, and he continued to print the magazine for Warhol until December 1970. The collaboration disintegrated more quickly with Malanga. According to David Bourdon, Malanga had ongoing conflicts with Pat Hackett and Paul Morrissey over the magazine. On the masthead of the third issue, Malanga called Hackett a “pencil pusher.” According to Malanga, this sent Hackett screaming to Warhol, and “Andy came out of his little office and told me I was fired from the magazine.”39 After Malanga’s departure, the actor Charles Rydell became an editor, and Soren Agenoux assumed the newly created position of managing editor. Terry Ork, who worked at Cinemabilia, a movie memorabilia shop in the Village, is listed as art director for a couple of issues until Agenoux assumed the dual role of associate editor and art director. Agenoux then brought in Bob Colacello, who was then a graduate student at Columbia University. Not long after Colacello started, Agenoux was accused of stealing, so Morrissey asked Colacello to step in as editor. He told Colacello: “Putting together a magazine isn’t that big a deal. You just slap some pretty pictures down on the page and you and your friends from school could probably do most of the interviews.” Colacello took the job and, following Morrissey’s advice, hired his best friend Glenn O’Brien as associate editor. Wilcock was still typesetting the magazine. As Colacello recalled: “Other Scenes, where we had to do the layouts and typesetting, was definitely not our scene. John Wilcock and his bearded, beaded staff kindly showed us how to size photos and spec type, but we hated having yo u n g , r I c h , I n t e l l I g e n t, a n d w I l l I n g to s P e n d !

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to wait around in their dark and dirty Village basement.” After creating the pasteups at Other Scenes, Colacello and O’Brien had the magazine printed in Chinatown. The print run was about five thousand, which, Colacello explains, they distributed by taxi “to our four major outlets: the Museum of Modern Art lobby, the Anthology Film Archives lobby, Cinemabilia, and the Memory Shop.”40 A few hundred copies, most of which were complimentary, were mailed to subscribers. By December 1970 (Colacello’s second issue), Charles Rydell and his partner, the artist and filmmaker Jerome Hill, became part owners of the magazine.41 Wilcock’s name disappeared from the masthead, and Colacello and O’Brien started doing the pasteups at Rock magazine instead of Other Scenes.42 Over the next year, Warhol encouraged Colacello to “write less, tape record more,” because “it’s more modern.”43 By the spring of 1971, the magazine had a slightly different title—INTER/VIEW: Andy Warhol’s Film Magazine— better paper, and a new Art Deco logo. The price per issue increased from thirtyfive cents to fifty.44 “From the beginning,” O’Brien recalled, “Bob and I worked hard to make it more professional. We redesigned it to look less underground. . . . We initially wanted to make it a real film magazine . . . not selfindulgent articles by ‘superstars.’”45 For the redesign, O’Brien and Colacello enlisted the help of Steven Heller, the then art director at Rock, whose services were offered free of charge to entice Warhol into using Rock’s typesetting services. As to working with Colacello and O’Brien, Heller recalled: They made choices they knew would please Andy, yet never dictated what typefaces I could use, or prohibited me from using my then-favorite two— Broadway and Busorama— which in retrospect was a big mistake. I still cannot understand why Andy didn’t vet my typography. Before becoming America’s pioneering Pop Artist, he was an accomplished graphic designer/ illustrator (with a distinctive hand-lettering style) and should have been the first to realise that my pairing of Art Deco Broadway type for the nameplate “INTER/view” and the curvaceous Busorama typeface for the subtitle “Andy Warhol’s Film Magazine” was one of the dumbest combinations ever. It was unsuitably retro and inappropriate for a progressive journal; moreover, the two faces lacked any harmony whatsoever. Add that to the heavy oxford rules I placed at the top and bottom of each page, and, if I had been in charge, I would have fired me. Still no one uttered a displeased peep, and the magazine kept my logo for six issues, even after I voluntarily left for greener pastures (at Screw magazine).46

By the end of 1971, Colacello explains: “My old friends Glenn and Jude were constantly on my back, clamoring for higher salaries, better invitations, more power. So I gave into an idea of theirs: Glenn would take over as 100

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F IGU RE 3 0. Cover of inter/VIEW, vol. 2, no. 5 (August 1971). Collection of The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburg. Courtesy BMP Media Holdings, LLC.

managing editor and art director. . . . [M]y new title at Interview would be special contributing editor.” The change in management, he remembered, dovetailed perfectly with the plans of Fred Hughes, who was secretly negotiating the sale of the Jerome Hill and Charles Rydell shares to Peter Brant and Joe Allen, his new best friends— and Andy’s new best clients. Peter Brant and Joe Allen were in their twenties and ran their fathers’ rapidly expanding newsprint company. Bruno Bischofberger, Andy’s new Swiss art dealer, was also part of the complicated transaction, which involved the exchange of paintings, the publication of the Electric Chair prints, tax writeoffs— a typical Fred Hughes deal. And Fred’s name went on the masthead as editor, above those of Paul Morrissey and Andy Warhol.47

O’Brien gave the magazine a completely new look. Now more than forty pages long, it included sections on fashion, art, music, theater, and a new gossip column by Colacello. Heller’s Art Deco logo was dropped, as was the tagline “Andy Warhol’s Film Magazine.” For the May 1972 issue, the cover was in color for the first time and designed by Richard Bernstein— who would continue to do the covers for the next fifteen years.48 The magazine’s new title was rendered in bright blue and red script, like a giant signature: Andy Warhol’s Interview. Bruno Bischofberger was listed as publisher, and the original copyright holder, Poetry on Films, Inc., was replaced with INTER/VIEW, Inc. According to David Bourdon: “Although the magazine reportedly still was not breaking even, its circulation had doubled over the last three years and its advertising pages had tripled. The staff had expanded from three to fifteen, and the fees paid to contributors soared from ten to one hundred dollars.”49 Interview was on its way out of the underground and into the floodlights of celebrity culture. In the words of Colacello: Reading an issue of Interview then was like hanging out in the back room of Max’s Kansas City or going to a private party at Halston’s salon. It was becoming the inside chronicle of celebrity life in the seventies. There was no other magazine quite like it, though one could see the influence of the Village Voice, Rolling Stone, WWD, Modern Screen, and Sixteen. But unlike those publications, we didn’t separate avant-garde culture, rock ’n’ roll, fashion, movies, and TV, which were all rising and mixing in the seventies. We mixed and rose with them, little by little. Our investors, Peter Brant and Joe Allen, and Bruno Bischofberger, were pleased enough with Interview’s progress to spring for better paper— smooth, white-coated stock instead of rough, low-grade newsprint. We were printing about twenty thousand copies a month, not bad considering the first issue print order of only one thousand three years earlier. 102

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Advertising was up, too. Though still far from a profitable level, it had multiplied from that one-eighth-of-a-page trade ad from Cinemabilia into six or seven full pages a month (at $800 a page), mostly from movie and record companies. This was largely due to the tireless efforts of our new director of advertising, Sandy Brant, Peter’s stylish wife. We didn’t see much of Peter, but Sandy came in early every morning and kept calling the advertising executives at the movie and record companies until they gave her appointments.

O’Brien brought in several talented, well-connected contributing editors, regional correspondents, writers, and photographers— all of whom helped expand the magazine’s focus and develop its signature style.50 As the magazine grew, the owners jockeyed for position: in July 1972, Peter Brant became publisher, and Bischofberger was demoted to associate publisher. The following year brought two new staff members: Carole Rogers, who had overseen circulation for the Village Voice, became associate publisher, and the Women’s Wear Daily reporter Rosemary Kent became the new editor in chief. Although Rogers seems to have fit in at Interview, Kent did not. 51 During her brief editorship, O’Brien quit, as did Fran Lebowitz. Distributors in Paris and London picked up Interview, so they began advancing the cover date of each issue by one month “so our European readers will not feel they’re getting stale news.”52 The masthead also changed again. Resembling a corporate board more than a magazine staff, in the September 1973 issue it lists Andy Warhol as president, Fred Hughes as executive vice president, and Peter Brant as publisher. Bischofberger was gone, and Inter/View, Inc., was no longer the publisher. Now the magazine was published by Motion Olympus, Inc., whose stockholders were Andy Warhol, Sandy Brant (the wife of Peter Brant), and Barbara Allen (the wife of Joe Allen).53 The magazine also changed printers from Mt. Kisco, New York, to Vineland, New Jersey. According to Victor Bockris, Interview had undergone so many changes in staff— it had had twelve editors— and was still losing money rather than generating it, Warhol considered canceling publication. Hughes suggested: “Let’s get rid of the idea of doing an underground film magazine written by poets and artists and make a whole different magazine. . . . Let’s make it a magazine for people like us!”54 What us meant in the context of Warhol’s social group had changed dramatically since 1969, and it was about to change again.

▮ ▮ ▮ In August 1974, Warhol moved his studio across Union Square to the corner of Broadway and East 17th Street. At the previous space, Warhol’s studio and the Interview offices were on separate floors; now they shared a floor. The new yo u n g , r I c h , I n t e l l I g e n t, a n d w I l l I n g to s P e n d !

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space was also more secure. A closed-circuit security system was installed and foreign receptionists hired to confuse and frustrate any former Factory friends who might try to call Warhol.55 In September, Colacello returned as executive editor, and the following year Peter Brant sold the magazine back to Warhol for $1,000.56 Fran Lebowitz returned, and the magazine added two key staff members. As O’Brien recalled: Robert Hayes, a young Canadian, was hired as assistant editor, and Marc Balet, a talented young architect and designer, was hired to be art director. Both made an immediate impact on the magazine. Suddenly, Interview looked as glamorous as it had always wanted to be. . . . Under the direction of Hayes and Balet, Interview became an important showcase for innovative photography. . . . Interview was also big. It existed in a brief moment when you could actually distribute a publication larger than 8½ by 11 inches. At its peak size of 11 by 17 inches, and with most photographs running a full page, Interview was truly larger than life. Interview’s covers, paintings made from photographs by Richard Bernstein, were a powerful part of the formula.57

With Warhol again as publisher and the formula and staff established, it was, as Colacello reminisced, “a golden age of creativity and expansion, perhaps even more frenetic and glamorous than the silver nights of the tinfoilFactory era”: “I couldn’t wait to get to work, no matter how late I had been out the night before. There was a new sense of mission, camaraderie, and fun at the new office.”58

Teaching Them What to Want Warhol’s diary entry for Friday, April 15, 1977, reads: Lunch for Diana Vreeland and an Argentinian woman, Bob had invited Michael and Pat York. Carole Rogers and Sally from Interview had invited a hi-fi girl to try to sell her ads. The girl was impressed with Diana and the Yorks, she thought she was just going to have lunch with Carole and Sally. Diana was saying that she’d discovered the museum had turned the lights up and the music down on her Russian costume show— they said it was because some people had complained they couldn’t see anything and the music was too loud. Diana said that you don’t go change something because somebody asks you to, that that’s the trouble with this country, they want to “give the public what it wants.” “Well,” she said, “the public wants what it can’t get, and it’s up to museums to teach them what to want.” And she 104

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F IGU RE 3 1. Cover of Interview, vol. 10, no. 12 (December 1980). Collection of the Special Collections Research Center, Syracuse

University Libraries. Courtesy BMP Media Holdings, LLC.

said that’s the trouble with Vogue magazine and all the other magazines today— except for Interview, she said.59

Warhol’s Diaries record a multitude of sales lunches and dinner parties in which potential portrait clients, cover models, and advertisers comingle. This lunch on Friday afternoon in the spring of 1977 was typical. The occasion was supposedly “for” Diana Vreeland, the former Vogue editor and Warhol’s erstwhile boss. In attendance were actor and International Best Dressed Hall of Famer Michael York and his wife, the photographer Pat York. Joining them was a stereo equipment company representative to whom Carole Rogers and Sally Gilbert were trying to sell ad space in the magazine. And there was Colacello with some unnamed foreign guest, undoubtedly beautiful and loaded. This was Warhol’s editorial approach in motion. “For him, selling ads meant sending a pretty girl to the straight clients and a pretty boy to the gay clients, entertaining them at the right restaurants, getting them into the right discos, introducing them to our famous friends,” explained Colacello. “That’s what most of our lunches were really about: selling ads and selling art, often in tandem, one hand washing the other.”60 Whereas the financial and production history of Interview is frustratingly opaque, its editorial policy was not. “Warhol did not believe in editorial independence,” wrote David Bourdon. “He ceaselessly urged his staff to publish interviews with potential advertisers and portrait clients. In his view, there should have been a more noticeable correlation between who appeared on the cover of the magazine and who commissioned portraits.”61 More than the sales tactics evident in this lunch meeting, what I find intriguing is Vreeland’s complaint that museums and magazines try to appease the public but that Warhol’s Interview did not. Vreeland’s career had been defined by artistic autonomy and excessiveness. Often described as brilliant and eccentric, Vreeland treated her role as editor at Harper’s Bazaar and then as editor in chief at Vogue as that of an artist. Working with talented photographers, shooting in exotic locales, embodying the epitome of style, Vreeland saw fashion as more than putting on clothes. According to Carol Felsenthal, she would spend inordinate sums and require innumerable reshoots to achieve the look she wanted for the magazine.62 Eventually, her creativity got her fired. Her bosses at Vogue found her unorthodox office hours and exorbitant expenses unacceptable in the face of the magazine’s plummeting circulation and revenue. In 1971, she was replaced by Grace Mirabella, who rapidly and dramatically brought the magazine “down to earth, insisting that the clothes in its pages be available in stores and within the realm of purchasing possibility for its readers.”63 As Warhol told the press: “Vogue wanted to go middle class.”64 According to

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Felsenthal: “[Mirabella] recognized that increasing numbers of Vogue readers were working and no longer viewed fashion as fantasy or theater. For these women, fashion was becoming a tool for succeeding in the world of business or for expressing their striving for equality.”65 Thus, Mirabella gave Vogue’s readers what they wanted— utilitarian fashion tips to appear like equals at work— instead of teaching them to want visionary and nonconformist examples of self-performance. While elitist and unrealistic, Vreeland treated the magazine as a truly alternative space and not as a tool for workplace success. After her dismissal from Vogue, she became a consultant at the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and thus the museum’s accession to the public’s request for a more down-to-earth viewing experience— raise the lights, lower the music— must have hit a nerve. Museums were being brought down to earth in more ways than one. In the early 1970s, artists such as Hans Haacke and Daniel Buren and curators and theorists such as Lucy Lippard and Pierre Bourdieu exposed the museum as an apparatus of privilege. While Buren’s installations set in relief the discursive power of the museum and Bourdieu’s research illuminated the role of education in the public’s taste for art, Haacke employed datagathering techniques to reveal the demographic profile of museum visitors and expose the corporate interests of museum board members.66 Yet, even within institutional critique practices and artist advocacy organizations like the Art Workers Coalition (AWC), questions of equal representation and diversity persisted. As Julia Bryan-Wilson writes: “The AWC dissolved after less than three years, partly because of its inability to recognize structural inequalities— including racism and sexism— in its own organization.”67 Paradoxically, while artists, curators, and theorists critiqued the power structure of the art world through participatory practices and data gathering, magazine publishers began to employ these same apparatuses to increase revenues and monetize the reading public. For example, Thomas Maier explains how the Newhouse magazines— which included Vogue, Vanity Fair, Self, House and Garden, and Glamour— used subscriber surveys to guide editorial decisions: “Beginning in the 1970s, the company employed the Mark Clements research firm to conduct market surveys to serve as the eyes and ears of the Newhouse publications. The Clements firm was renowned for its comprehensive surveys, attempting to gauge reactions of readers through elaborate tests that asked for opinions rating different features and story subjects, graphics and design, just about anything involved with selling the magazine.” This research was then applied directly to the publications, “as any other consumer item— like toothpaste, perfume, or dog food.” The research dictated not only a magazine’s content but also its overall style and cover image. “The covers of Si [Newhouse]’s magazines were never the sole

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domain of his editors or journalists,” Maier explains. And the editorial content was always approved by someone from the business side to ensure it would sell. According to Maier: “Diana Vreeland particularly objected to the Newhouse concept and its reliance on marketing rather than artistic considerations or editorial judgment.” For Vreeland: “The real question is whether you’re trying to anticipate what the reader wants, or whether you have a dream of your own that you want to do something about.”68 Surprisingly, Vreeland was right when she suggested that Interview was doing things differently. Unlike the Newhouse magazines, Warhol had not yet used subscriber surveys to guide editorial decisions or dictate the cover image of Interview. This was not because Warhol was against the use of surveys. According to Bob Colacello’s sister Barbara, who joined the sales department at Interview in 1977, surveys were expensive, and Warhol did not want to pay for them.69 Interview used homegrown tactics instead. “Just stick in every name you ever meet and every brand name they’re wearing,” Warhol told Bob Colacello. “And no gossip. We can’t afford to get anybody mad at us yet.”70 Barbara recalled: “Nothing in the advertising department was done in a typical fashion. We had to be very inventive.” For example, she remembered an occasion when Warhol was shopping on Madison Avenue and he tried to barter advertising space in Interview for a pair of leather pants. The staff at Interview knew that people were looking at the magazine and talking about it, but they could not prove it. When she went on sales appointments with potential advertising clients, they would not take her seriously. They would ask: “Was this starched?” Meaning, had a market survey been conducted?71 According to Bob Colacello: “I had quickly learned that Interview didn’t have ‘the numbers,’ or circulation, and what numbers we did have were not ‘ABC audited.’”72 There were other issues as well: luxury-goods companies did not like the cheap paper, and the oversized format required the big ad agencies to resize their advertisements specifically for Interview. Moreover, secondclass postage rates increased by 500 percent between 1970 and 1978.73 To compensate, the staff at Interview sold “ambience, image, art direction, promotion, public relations, social connections, endorsements”: “If an advertiser wanted it, Warhol, Hughes, and Colacello were at their service.” Barbara hand-delivered the magazine to clients all over town. Bob explained: “We really didn’t have a choice: the magazine had to survive.”74 Even Warhol never left the Factory without copies of Interview in hand.75 Almost ten years after the first issue, Warhol gave in and hired Mark Clements Research to conduct a subscriber survey.76 “Our statistics came out great,” said Barbara. So she and Bob decided to print the stats in the magazine as a piece of self-promotion. Barbara explained: “If Andy saw something in print it became more of a fact. We were publishing it, so it became a fact.”77

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▮ ▮ ▮ In January 1978, Interview ran selections from the Mark Clements survey as a full-page advertisement. The advertisement publicized who was reading Interview to potential advertisers while simultaneously incorporating those readers’ identities and class-based habits into the magazine. The advertisement was printed like an editorial interview: Q: Who responds to i n t e rv i e w? A: 336,200* readers who are young, rich, intelligent and willing to spend!78

With its direct address to the reader of the interview, who is, therefore, interpellated as the reader described in the interview, the advertisement facilitates an “affective surge of spectatorial pleasure,” to borrow a phrase from Julia Bryan-Wilson.79 It says, Look! You’re in the in-crowd! For decades, Warhol had observed, appropriated, and deployed the graphic strategies of mass media in his paintings and publications. Now we see him take up its techniques as well. Yet, unlike Newhouse’s approach, Warhol’s made these operations visible.80 The reader of Warhol’s magazine not only reads about himself but also encounters himself as an advertisement, as a fantasy— the product the magazine is selling. We, the readers of Interview, are young, male, single, college-educated, champagne-drinking, disco-dancing, and world-traveling collectors of art, jewelry, antiques, and real estate. Vreeland was right. Interview was different. It did not just try to anticipate what readers wanted. Warhol and Bob and Barbara had their own dream, and they were doing something about it.

An Artist’s Magazine Interview is undeniably “an affirmation of the rich, the powerful, and the glorious,” as Benjamin H. D. Buchloh has described it.81 One could argue that these qualities exclude it from the genre of the artist’s magazine, which is often defined by the capacity to provide a noncommercial alternative space for art.82 Its total embrace of the institutions and techniques that regulate the print public sphere— from its application for second-class mail distribution privileges to its use of a market survey— does indeed set Interview apart from other artists’ magazines. Perhaps this radically overt attempt to merge with the culture industry allowed it to divest itself of the art ambience that so many conceptual works fail to abandon. But did Warhol and the editors of Interview really think they were making an artist’s magazine?

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F I G U RE 3 2 . Display advertisement showing results of subscriber survey published in Interview, vol. 8, no. 1 (January 1978). Collection of the Special Collections Research Center, Syracuse University Libraries. Courtesy BMP Media Holdings, LLC.

Six months before Interview ran the Mark Clements survey as an advertisement, Howardena Pindell, an associate curator in the Department of Prints and Illustrated Books at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, was conducting her own survey. She sent Warhol a letter explaining that she was “preparing a chronology of artists’ periodicals and would like to include Interview.” Enclosed with the letter was a one-page questionnaire. Someone at the Factory— presumably not Warhol— completed it and returned it to Pindell.83 The responses start out factual: “Name of periodical”: “i n T e rVi e W.” “Reason for choice of name, if any”: “i nT e rVi e W interviews.” Some answers are wrong. In response to how many issues had been published as of July 1, 1977, the answer given was “seven,” rather than eighty-seven, probably because the month was July and seven issues had been published that year. Other answers are typically Warholian: “Does your periodical have a specific philosophical direction”: “entertaining reading.” In response to the request for the names of artists who have participated in the magazine, only “Larry Rivers” is given (and then crossed out). The responses to Pindell’s questions disavow any relationship to art. Are the editors artists? “No.” Do you ask artists to submit ideas or manuscripts? Only “sometimes.” The list of the editorial staff gives the familiar names: Bob Colacello, Carole Rogers, Robert Hayes, Catherine Guinness. Floating weirdly above them is “Andy Warhol,” as though added as an afterthought. As to how the magazine is funded, the response provided claims that “all income [is] derived from advertising and circulation,” which was not exactly true since the magazine did not turn a profit until 1987. Until then, Warhol funded the operation through his portrait commissions.84 In the article Pindell wrote from her research, she comments on Interview’s self-professed financial stability: “Some political artists’ periodicals ‘hope to be funded by the people in the near future,’ but it is one of the ironies of life and art that only Andy Warhol’s Interview has had meaningful income from subscriptions and sales, no doubt because its emphasis on Pop culture attracts a far wider audience than the art world.”85 Thus, while Interview turned its own readership survey into an advertisement that would put in print, and thereby actualize, Warhol’s fantasy public, it seems the anonymous respondent to Pindell appropriated her questionnaire and used it to express his or her own wishful thinking too. Whether or not Warhol intended to create an artist’s magazine, I see it as one. I agree with Reva Wolf that Warhol transformed the interview into art— and his magazine is an extension of that practice. As Wolf writes: “It is as though the less serious his answers or his questions were, the more serious the ideas left behind for posterity to sort out; and, the more evasive his utterances, the more profound their implications.”86 The staff, style, and funding of Interview may have changed dramatically over the years, but Warhol’s sustained yo u n g , r I c h , I n t e l l I g e n t, a n d w I l l I n g to s P e n d !

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evocation of the interview as a creative form suggests that we might reconsider a whole host of practices in art, journalism, government data gathering, and marketing. As Soren Agenoux told Agnes Varda in the first issue of Interview: “We might get some answers which are better than answers— information, and something else, besides.”87

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5

I ’ D R E C O G N I Z E YO U R VOICE ANYWHERE

Photographs of Warhol in public often show him clutching his tape recorder close to his body like a security blanket. He brought it with him everywhere, giving it the pet name “my wife.”1 He claimed that it changed his relationship to the world. “The acquisition of my tape recorder really finished whatever emotional life I might have had,” he explained, “but I was glad to see it go. Nothing was ever a problem again, because a problem just meant a good tape, and when a problem transforms itself into a good tape it’s not a problem anymore.”2 Not only did his tape recorder turn problems into good tapes, but these tapes also became material for his many publications— interviews for his magazine, texts for his books. A few years ago, I made my first trip to the archives of the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh to listen to the tapes for Warhol’s novel. Through them I experienced an incredible soundscape of the ambient noise, music, and eccentric personalities of Warhol’s world in 1960s Manhattan. I discovered that the story about his novel not being edited was not exactly true. And I found something else. During one of my breaks from the headache-inducing tapes of Ondine— it may have taken the transcribers a year and a half to type up that one day, but it took me a full week to listen to it— I took a walk through the Warhol Museum’s galleries and came on a letter addressed to Warhol.3 It had to do with another of Warhol’s tape books, his book of philosophy published by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich in 1975. The letter read: Dear Andy: Bill Jovanovich read every world of your book last night and is every bit as pleased by it as I am. “What an incredible potpourri this book is!” he’s written me. “The long chapter of one of the B’s cleaning her apartment and cleaning herself is a masterpiece: the best exposition on the American cult of cleanliness since Franny and Zooey. . . . Andy Warhol has a genius for the incongruous. Not since Oscar Wilde has anyone been better at injecting the unexpected, the immediately illuminating element in a series of sensible things.” How about that? 113

As I told you yesterday on the telephone, I am not going to try to edit the text closely, sentence by sentence. The book needs editing of a different sort (it is too long, certainly): some chunks can be taken out whole, and maybe one or two chapters dropped altogether. We must also think hard about the title. Bill suggests: THE From A to B and Back Again At the moment I am aiming for a publication date at the end of April. . . . I promise to have my work completed by October 1st. The manuscript will very probably have to be retyped. Then we can also talk in some detail about the design. So: I couldn’t be happier, Bill Jovanovich couldn’t be happier. Both of us see a real triumph lying ahead. Your book is funny, your book is true. Some sections are superior to others but even the chapters that are relatively poor have marvelous things in them and they all have perfect pitch (as Mme. Henriette at Côte Basque said to you, “I’d recognize your voice anywhere”— only it had been my voice). It was good to see you last night. I’ll be in touch at the beginning of next week. Yours ever, [Steven M. L. Aronson]4

Written in September 1974 by Warhol’s editor, Steven M. L. Aronson, the letter explains several key facets of Warhol’s best-known, or at least mostquoted, book. His book of philosophy is, in some ways, similar to his novel. Both books were created from audiotapes, the stories of their production and the subjects of their narratives both involved the cast of characters at the Factory, and both books embraced the machinations of trade publishing. Interestingly, Aronson’s letter suggests that the original title for Warhol’s book was not The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (1975), as it is commonly known, but simply THE, a cryptic all-caps tag reminiscent of his novel’s lowercase a.5 Warhol’s novel and philosophy book are also quite different. The letter from Aronson suggests that the publisher and the editor were enthusiastic about the latter because, unlike the former, it was readable, “illuminating.” We read that the character named B is not one person but one of many. The book was to be edited but not closely. It was expected to be a “triumph.” And then, in the final paragraph, Aronson adds: “Even the chapters that are relatively poor have marvelous things in them and they all have perfect pitch (as Mme. Henriette at Côte Basque said to you, ‘I’d recognize your voice anywhere’— only it had been my voice).” 114

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F IGU RE 3 3. Cover of Andy Warhol’s THE Philosophy of Andy Warhol (From A to B and Back Again) (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975). Collection of the Special Collections Research Center, Syracuse University Libraries. © Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Trade Publishing. © 2018 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc./Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

What a bizarre comment, I thought. Is Aronson suggesting that Warhol’s voice in the manuscript is in fact Aronson’s? And who was this Madame Henriette? Had she also read the manuscript and then told Warhol that she recognized his voice, only it was Aronson’s? Is the book perhaps a composite of voices— Aronson’s, B’s, and those of unknown others— presented as Warhol’s? None of these scenarios would be a surprise given the way that Warhol “wrote” his books. The ability to recognize voices, I had learned, was an important facet of understanding Warhol’s books.6 This is in part because the tapes in the Warhol Museum Archives have not been transcribed, many of the persons recorded on them have not been identified, and they are not necessarily dated or labeled accurately. It seems that, as zealous as he was at keeping his recorder running, Warhol did not keep detailed records of who, what, and when he recorded. On top of that, the Andy Warhol Foundation strictly forbids researchers from taking notes while listening to the tapes. Thus, trying not only to figure out who is speaking on the tapes but also to remember what they said becomes a kind of endurance test that, I cannot help feeling, would have pleased Warhol. In listening to the tapes for a, I became familiar with the voices of Ondine, Edie Sedgwick, Warhol, the Sugar Plum Fairy, and Rotten Rita. This sonic familiarization enabled me to discern how Warhol’s novel had been substantively edited in order to sustain the narrative of a day in the life of Ondine, regardless of whom Warhol’s tape recorder followed at any given moment.7 Aronson’s mysterious parenthetical comment about Madame Henriette made me wonder what kind of writing and editing process had taken place in the production of THE Philosophy. I procured a photocopy of Aronson’s letter from the archivist and tucked it away in my notebook, only to return to the archives a few years later to listen to the tapes for THE Philosophy.

Warhol Speaks “Warhol Speaks! High time too,” read the opening lines of Barbara Goldsmith’s review of THE Philosophy in the New York Times. Acknowledging how the critical reception of the book hinged on the perceived authenticity— or inauthenticity— of Warhol’s authorial voice, Goldsmith continues: “Our expectation is that at last Warhol will interpret himself to us. And he does this— by not doing it.” While she describes the parts of the book that tell us about Warhol’s adolescence as “fresh and illuminating,” she is careful to qualify her evaluation. “The word ‘autobiographical’ is not used here,” she writes, “because one can’t be sure that Warhol did the actual writing. It doesn’t really matter, which is his point exactly.”8 It seems the critics— whether at local papers or national magazines— had caught on to Warhol’s 116

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gambit. A critic for the Christian Science Monitor News Service anticipated that his book would be “a splendid performance, rich in narcissism and selfpublicity . . . functioning nicely in that no-man’s-land between social history and put-on.”9 The critic, editor, and magazine publisher Edit DeAk reviewed the book for Art in America, writing: “Warhol’s audience may think that with this book he has come out of the closet of his own myth . . . that at this strategic point of his career, he is revealing the intimate ins and outs of his life in front of the public. But whoever in the general public acquired this opinion did so cheaply, through mere logical deduction, and thus, like a dog thrown a pacifying bone, deserves a happy chew— even though the bone is vinyl.”10 The publicity materials circulated by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich play on the reader’s desire to get the real Warhol. The spring catalog copy reflects Jovanovich’s first impression, contending that the book is not only “an incredible potpourri: astonishing, delighting, puzzling, funny” but also, “above all, true.”11 The brochure for the book, crafted to generate advance purchases from booksellers, went even further: “This surprisingly candid self-portrait reveals a shy, sensible, provocative, and often endearing personality for perhaps the first time ever.”12 The publisher may have pitched the book as a true, revealing self-portrait, but the critics were quick to acknowledge this ploy with a nod and a wink. The book itself incorporates both positions. The introduction is “B and I: How Andy Puts His Warhol On,” suggesting, as Patrick Smith has pointed out, that Warhol’s “persona is literally a daily ‘put-on.’”13 It narrates how Warhol starts his day: “I crawl to the bathroom because I can’t shuffle, shuttle, tippy-toe or cakewalk, with a chocolate-covered cherry caught between my toes. I approach the sink. I raise my body slowly and brace my arms against the stand.” Then, Warhol confides to B, who listens attentively on the other end of the line: “I’m sure I’m going to look in the mirror and see nothing.”14 The plotline is Warholian boilerplate, but is it really Warhol who is giving it to us? The critic and artist Peter Plagens wrote a long review of THE Philosophy for Artforum that he curiously titled “The Story of ‘A.’ ” And, in fact, Plagens’s semidismissive analysis could be applied as easily to Warhol’s novel as to his philosophy book: “The book reads like it’s straight off the dicta-phone [sic], transcribed in Lindy ballpoint drone, as though by an overweight fifteenyear-old White Plains school-girl.” The central issue of the review is not the techniques of transcription and composition, which had been so important to the reception of a, but instead Warhol himself. “A great deal of the public fascination with Warhol,” Plagens writes, “concerns his apparent, blithe gaiety. . . . Does he fuck, suck, get fucked, or get sucked?” These aggressive queries as to Warhol’s sexual predilections suggest that some of the public’s interest in getting at the true Warhol was tied up with a curiosity about his sexuality. Plagens further writes: “We remain interested through all the I’d recognIze your voIce anywhere

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F I G U RE 3 4. Display

advertisement for Andy Warhol’s THE Philosophy of Andy Warhol (From A to B and Back Again) (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975) published in Interview, vol. 6, no. 6 (June 1976). Collection of the Special Collections Research Center, Syracuse University Libraries. © Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Trade Publishing. © 2018 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc./ Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

ploys because one question still remains: does he mean it?” Plagens wants to know: “Are we actually in the presence of weird and original passion, or are we being conned?”15

B Is Anybody All Warhol’s publications are the product and the presentation of multiple voices. From his early illustrated books, which were penned by his mother and hand colored by his friends, to his monthly magazine Interview, Warhol relied on others to provide the content and the labor for his various publishing projects. His Factory, therefore, included not only Gerard Malanga, Billy Name, Brigid Berlin, Pat Hackett, and Bob Colacello, among others, but also an extended network of editors and typesetters, lawyers and publicists, designers and printers, some of whom worked for New York’s most important publishing houses.16 In the case of THE Philosophy, the collaborative mode in which it was produced is signaled at the outset. The book’s dedication page reads: To Pat Hackett, for extracting and redacting my thoughts so intelligently; 118

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To beautiful Brigid Polk [Berlin], for being on the other end; To Bob Colacello, for getting it all together; and To Steven M. L. Aronson, for being a great editor.17

An editorial history in microcosm. We can deduce from this dedication that Pat Hackett worked with the audiotapes, pulling out and cleaning up Warhol’s thoughts, that Brigid Berlin was “on the other end” of all those taperecorded phone calls, that Bob Colacello served as the in-house managing editor, and that Steven Aronson turned the operation into a real book. The duly acknowledged collaborative mode in which THE Philosophy was produced carries over into the narrative. The opening chapter not only signals the playfulness of the book’s premise in relation to Warhol’s public persona but also sets up the framework for what will follow. Warhol’s philosophy will be articulated in the form of a conversation: “From A to B and Back Again” with A standing for Andy and B for one or another of his friends. And, given that two of his closest cohorts at the time had first names beginning with B, readers are left to guess whether B is for Bob or for Brigid. In fact, B switches from a him to a her (and back again) over the course of the book. THE Philosophy begins: I wake up and I call B. B is anybody who helps me kill time. B is anybody and I am nobody. B and I. I need B because I can’t be alone. Except when I sleep. Then I can’t be with anybody. I wake up and call B.18

The book might start out in the bedroom, but it does not give readers like Plagens the kind of lubricious information he believes they are looking for. Warhol makes a point of telling us that he sleeps alone. But there are larger implications in this opening scene. “The genius of Warhol,” as Douglas Crimp has put it, “was not least his uncanny ability always to secure for himself the author-function, and all the more so by protesting that he rarely had all that much to do with making his work, admitting openly that his work was really the yield of others— others’ ideas, others’ designs, others’ images, others’ abilities, others’ labor. But the more Warhol protested, the more he alone was credited.”19 Thus, Warhol’s name alone appears on the cover of THE Philosophy even though the book clarifies from the outset— in its subtitle and on its dedication page— that it is a collaboration. Along those lines, the narrative structure of the book elucidates the ways in which “Warhol’s voice” includes the voices of his collaborators. The I’d recognIze your voIce anywhere

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introduction takes the form of a telephone conversation between Warhol and one of his anonymous (female) Bs. In chapters 1–3, the narrative switches from dialogue to a series of aphoristic observations articulated in the first person as we read Warhol’s thoughts on “Love (Puberty),” “Love (Prime),” and “Love (Senility).” Using the same narrative technique, the next seven chapters claim to reveal Warhol’s perspective on “Beauty,” “Fame,” “Work,” “Time,” “Death,” “Economics,” and “Atmosphere.” After this section, which constitutes about half the book, the narrative returns to a dialogue, although conducted no longer on the phone but rather on the couch. We find ourselves in Italy with A and B (now male) sitting in the lobby of a fancy hotel, watching the hairdressers of famous female actresses follow them around with mirrors. This dialogue continues over the next two chapters as we accompany A and B in Rome, Monte Carlo, and Torino. These three chapters encompass the subjects of “Success,” “Art,” and “Titles.” Then the narrative shifts again, as does the sex of B. A and B are back on the phone. B launches into a monologue on her obsessive-compulsive cleaning routine, which goes on breathlessly for twenty-four pages, ending only when A finally hangs up. In the book’s final chapter, “Underwear Power,” A and B (now male again) go shopping for underwear and jewelry on Saturday morning. Thus, THE Philosophy consists of three narrative voices: the first-person aphorisms, presumably extracted and redacted by Pat Hackett, the phone calls with female Bs (one guesses that this is Brigid Berlin “on the other end”), and the transcripts of sightseeing and shopping with male Bs, as in Bob Colacello. Thus, we might conclude that Warhol’s “philosophy” is as much a composite of Pat Hackett’s ideas, Brigid Berlin’s monologue, and Bob Colacello’s gossipy chitchat as it is the presentation of Warhol’s own thoughts. In this way, the collaborative mash-up that constitutes the text of Warhol’s philosophy book points us back to his experimental films of the 1960s. As Goldsmith points out in her review: “The . . . monologue in which B compulsively cleans her apartment, then herself, and then masturbates with a vibrator, is so reminiscent of ‘The Chelsea Girls’ and passages from ‘a,’ Warhol’s tedious tape recorded ‘novel,’ that it’s downright old-fashioned.”20 But Warhol’s book resembles his films in a different way as well. As the critic and chronicler of contemporary art and film Gregory Battcock wrote in his review of THE Philosophy: The narrational process invented by Warhol is very similar to the filming technique the artist developed in his amateur experimental movies of the mid 1960’s [sic]. A carefully set up situation will be interrupted by a sudden camera shift to a detailed view of, say, an elbow or a fragment of background. And that improbable, though certainly related detail will be quickly erased by another sudden shift as the camera zooms in on the rug. 120

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Thus Warhol’s first serious literary document is, in many ways, thoroughly consistent with his iconographic decisions during the Pop Art days, and also consistent with the irritating, abrupt, disjointed cinematic technique that he explored during the filmmaking period that followed. Yet the book illustrates some unique approaches to trivia. For example, any true literary appreciation of trivia would have to include an appreciation for error. Deliberate error. Warhol’s “Philosophy” is full of mistakes but they are mistakes that do not matter. No mistake could possibly matter in an investigation of the authentically trivial.

In Battcock’s estimation, Warhol’s philosophy fails to “provide the seriousness that could suitably frame and illuminate his trivia.” It is true that Warhol’s philosophy book is a parade of trivialities, but I disagree with Battcock that within this investigation of the authentically trivial “no mistake could possibly matter.”21 Whether in film, painting, or publishing, Warhol embraced errors big and small. From his mother’s incorrect spelling on the cover of 25 Cats Name Sam (1954) to the typists’ mistakes in transcribing his novel, other people’s errors became contributions. Outcasts, outtakes, mistakes— they were core to Warhol’s art. “I always liked to work on leftovers, doing the leftover things. Things that were discarded, that everybody knew were no good,” he wrote. “If I ever have to cast an acting role, I want the wrong person for the part.”22 In Warhol’s world, problems became good tapes, and there was no mistake that did not matter. Perhaps the more trivial the mistake was, the more significant was its meaning. As Warhol would write about his friend the actress Candy Darling: “Candy didn’t want to be a perfect woman— that would be too simple, and besides it would give her away. What she wanted was to be a woman with all the little problems that a woman has to deal with. . . . It was as if the more real she could make the little problems, the less real the big one— her cock— would be.” The people at the Factory, he would explain, “were all odds-and-ends misfits, somehow misfitting together.”23 Thus, when Ondine described working with Warhol, he said that it gave him the “greatest sense of completion”: “[Warhol] wasn’t featuring people doing things. He was allowing people to mirror himself in a way. . . . I mean, he allowed me to create myself, and I allowed him to create himself. It’s the same kind of thing.”24 It seems to me that Warhol’s philosophy book facilitated a similar kind of creative space in which Hackett, Berlin, and Colacello would create themselves— perform their roles as Bs— and, in so doing, allowed Warhol to create himself. Yet this does not mean that all Warhol’s collaborators would feel as reaffirmed by working with him as Ondine had. When New York magazine published excerpts from THE Philosophy and put Warhol on the cover, Colacello felt eclipsed: “They posed him in a closet, sitting at a typewriter, I’d recognIze your voIce anywhere

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under a headline that read: ‘an dy War h O l’s g r e aT e sT s e c r e T : h e l ikes TO WriTe.’ It finally hit me then— I was part of a big lie, and while it had lined my pockets, it robbed my ego of any hope of recognition.”25

If Anyone Has a Philosophy On the one hand, THE Philosophy can be understood as the sequel to a. Warhol planned to do a book every five years after a, with b as the first sequel. Taping for b began in 1969, and Warhol recorded about seven hours of material, which included Ondine standing in line at Judy Garland’s funeral, going to Ultra Violet’s apartment and putting on makeup with Candy Darling, and ending up at some bar called Beef ’n Brew. “And that’s where we just decided it was just not feasible,” recalled Ondine. “The first book was done on speed, and the second book wasn’t.”26 So they abandoned it. On the other hand, THE Philosophy is totally different than a. The idea for it came serendipitously. Warhol and Colacello were standing in the buffet line at a holiday brunch hosted by the interior designer Ellen Lehman McCluskey; behind them was Patrick O’Higgins— a longtime Warhol friend and the author of Madame, the best-selling biography of the cosmetics tycooness Helena Rubenstein— who introduced them to his literary agent, Roz (Mrs. Carlton) Cole. Colacello recalled: “Roz told Andy that he should write his autobiography.” Warhol responded that Colacello was already writing his biography. “Roz was very quick on her feet,” answering Warhol: “Well, why don’t you write your philosophy. I mean, if anyone has a philosophy, it’s got to be you.” Warhol loved the idea and assigned Colacello to be the ghostwriter with this simple directive: “Philosophy is anything, Bob. Just make it up.”27 While the stories surrounding the taping and transcription of Warhol’s novel added to the scandal of that book, the details about how his philosophy book came to be written were not public knowledge. Years later, Pat Hackett would explain: “I did eight separate interviews with Andy on the basis of which I wrote chapters 1 through 8 and chapter 10. Then, using material from conversations Andy had taped between himself and Bob Colacello and Brigid Berlin, I wrote the introductory chapter and chapters 9, 11, 12, 13, and 14.”28 Colacello’s account is a bit more complicated: Andy and I started tape-recording in hotels, lobbies, and suites, in between appointments. . . . Andy always wanted to tape-record the “Sex” chapter and the “Love” chapter, and I was like, “Andy you know, we’ve got to do philosophy: like space, and time, and ethics.” . . . Andy would give the tapes that he and I made to Pat Hackett. She was typing up the tapes and then I was supposed to start writing the first chapter. And I wrote a draft of the first chapter. Pat had this idea. She said, “Well, maybe we can use all 122

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of these clips of all these terrible things that people say about Andy.” . . . I wrote the first chapter based on the tapes, . . . and then Andy typically gave it to Pat, who rewrote it, and then he read the rewrite to Brigid Berlin and tape-recorded that, gave that tape to Pat, and she integrated Brigid’s comments. And so now it was becoming more and more like A and B. Because I was sort of the original B, but then Brigid became like another B. . . . There’s one chapter . . . where B is like me and Vincent [Fremont] combined. . . . But I don’t want to take anything away from Pat because I think she actually did do, in the end, more work than me. . . . The cleaning chapter was just straight from Brigid in the Hotel Washington. That was a total Brigid monologue, which she is completely capable of. The “Shopping for Underwear” chapter, that’s me and Vincent with Andy. We went to Gimbels and Macy’s because they were across from each other on 34th Street, and, again it was Pat who transcribed the tapes and Pat who got them into a more literary form. Although, I did that, I know, on the chapters that we did in Monte Carlo. As I recall, the way they were published was pretty much the way that I transcribed them because as I was transcribing, I was shaping them in a way. You know it is hard to remember exactly. But it was definitely a collaboration, like so many of Andy’s things beyond just paintings, and even some of his paintings.29

And, then, there was the editor, Steven M. L. Aronson: I expunged whole hunks of the book that, since I can’t recall them, must have been as unmemorable as they are unrememberable. Then I proceeded to hire a freelance typist who sat outside my office on the ninth floor of HBJ clicking way, because I didn’t want to let the manuscript out of the building. Andy and Bob voiced no objection to any of the cuts, and so then I sat down to do the line-work. . . . Whatever I said or did went. And Andy always claimed he was very happy with the way it read.30

Before turning the manuscript over to Aronson, Warhol had also been involved with the shaping and editing of the text. According to Colacello, he and Warhol had worked together on the manuscript, and Warhol would tear it apart “with amazing clarity of vision sometimes, fumbling abstract intuition other times, always making it better.”31 In addition, Aronson recalls: “Warhol surprised me in being interested in every aspect of the publishing process.” So much so that he became a nuisance, calling regularly for status updates.32 The process by which THE Philosophy was published, then, involved taping, transcribing, retaping, retranscribing, editing, retyping, formatting the manuscript, and also running it by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich’s libel I’d recognIze your voIce anywhere

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lawyer, Paul Gitlin, to ensure that nothing in the book would prompt a lawsuit against the publisher. Gitlin raised a number of concerns, including the identity of “Taxi” (whom critics recognized as a thinly veiled Edie Sedgwick), references made to famous personalities, and the use of shrimp to describe Ursula Andress’s stature. Aronson responded to Gitlin’s points in writing: “No one will be able to come forward and say she is Taxi.” A true statement, given that Sedgwick had passed away three years earlier. Aronson informs Gitlin: “Franco Rossellini has given us written permission to publish the reference to him.” He also notes that the statement “Bobby Beausoleil who’s in jail for the Charles Manson murders is one of the most handsome people I’ve ever seen” has been deleted. He continues: “With your permission, we have substituted ‘midget’ for ‘shrimp’ each time it appears in these pages. After our conversation yesterday afternoon, I told Warhol that under no circumstances could ‘shrimp’ be reinstated.”33 However, neither shrimp nor midget is used in the published book; in the end, it was for some reason decided that it was safer to describe Ursula Andress as a “peanut.”34 From the prompt by the literary agent to the conversations captured by Warhol’s tape recorder, from the multiple transcribers to the multiple ghostwriters, from the editor to the libel lawyer, Warhol’s philosophy encompasses the voices of a number of people who worked with him in what was a highly complex process of publication. The book is credibly, as Jovanovich described it, an “incredible potpourri.”

Put That in My Language When I returned to the archives at the Warhol Museum to listen to the tapes for THE Philosophy, I came with the assumption that I would not hear Warhol himself on them. On the audiotapes for a, he had been almost mute, offering only the periodic “oh, really” and “come on, Ondine.” To date, only fourteen of the thousands of cassette tapes in the archives have been identified as relating to the philosophy book. The first tape that I listened to was of Warhol, Fred Hughes, Bob Colacello, Vincent Fremont, and Pat Hackett having lunch and discussing some of the great modern philosophers: Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Schopenhauer, and Kant. Then Angelica Houston and Jack Nicholson show up, and the conversation shifts. As far as I could tell, nothing from this tape made its way into the book. The next tape was of Brigid Berlin and Colacello talking on the phone. Colacello keeps saying that the tape is bad and that they are not getting anything done. Colacello impersonates Warhol for a while, and then he and Brigid talk about royal families and whether Warhol wants to be a part of high society. Clearly, they are trying to develop material for Warhol’s book, although, as far as I could tell, nothing from this tape made it into the book either. The next tape was of a party at Halston’s. Warhol 124

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is there, presumably holding the tape recorder. He is talking to a Brazilian model named Sylvia. Music throbs in the background, and there are lots of kissing sounds and laughter. Warhol asks Sylvia for her thoughts on beauty. Sylvia tells him: “You want to be like the photograph of you, and you can’t ever look that way. And so you start to copy the photograph.” These lines are actually in THE Philosophy, but the rest of the paragraph before and after is not spoken by Sylvia, or anyone else, on the tape. A little later, Warhol tells Sylvia that Diana Vreeland is a really great person. Sylvia interjects that Vreeland “is one of the most beautiful women in the world,” which also appears in the book, but the rest of the sentence in the book is not spoken by Warhol or Sylvia on the tape.35 Other tapes, like this one, may include snippets that made it into THE Philosophy. On one tape, Nikki Weymouth and Paloma Picasso discuss their dreams; on another, a live rock band plays songs in which the lyrics are things like “Warhol puts it on” and “Warhol is nothing, does nothing.” I was beginning to think that there was no way of unraveling the relationship between the tapes and the text produced from them. Then, the sixth tape I listened to surprised me. This one was labeled “Wed July 3 1974 Philosophy AW and PH on time.” Chapter 7 of THE Philosophy is titled “Time,” which was a good sign. On the tape, I heard two voices: those of Warhol and Hackett. She is asking him all sorts of questions, and he starts talking. They are having a real conversation. They are laughing. And he is saying things that are in the book, such as: “People say ‘time on my hands.’ Well, I looked at my hands and I saw a lot of lines.” When the conversation gets slow or Warhol gets stuck, Hackett offers some answers to her own questions, and he says: “Oh, that’s great, can you put that in my language?” Near the end of the tape, he begins to improvise: From time to time Do time Time yourself weekends. In time In no time. . . .36

The tapes for THE Philosophy not only record what Warhol and others said but also convey the tone in which these statements are made. Consider the cynical mantra: “Business art is the step that comes after Art. . . . Being good in business is the most fascinating kind of art.” This sounded, to me, like a sincere, conceptual project. In contrast, Warhol could not have sounded more I’d recognIze your voIce anywhere

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F I G U RE 3 5. Page 136 of the manuscript for Andy Warhol’s THE Philosophy of Andy Warhol (From A to B and Back Again) (New York:

Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975). Collection of The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburg. © Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Trade Publishing. © 2018 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc./Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

mocking of the pretensions of fellow painters when he delivers an affectation of how he himself paints: I look at my canvas and I space it out right. I think, “Well, over here in this corner it looks like it sort of belongs,” and so I say, “Oh yes, that’s where it belongs, all right.” So I look at it again and I say, “The space in that corner there needs a little blue,” and so I put my blue up there and then, then I look over there and it looks blue over there so I take my brush and I move it over there and I make it blue over there, too. And then it needs to be more spaced, so I take my little blue brush and I blue it over there, and then I take my green brush and I put my green brush on it and I green it there, and then I walk back and I look at it and see if it’s spaced right.37

So, it was Warhol. It was also, of course, Pat Hackett, Brigid Berlin, Bob Colacello, Vincent Fremont, and Sylvia, among many others. During the week that I spent in the archives, I recognized many voices, but I never did deduce who was Madame Henriette— the woman whom Aronson had invoked in his letter, the woman who had said to Warhol: “I’d recognize your voice anywhere.” Who, I continued to wonder, was this Madame Henriette? And what was her role in Warhol’s book?

I Like That Level, It’s a Great Level “In September 1974 I wanted to take Andy somewhere ‘special’ to mark the occasion of his having turned in the book more or less on time,” Aronson recounted: I suggested La Grenouille, the most fashionable restaurant in America, but he wanted to go to La Cote Basque. I made the reservation myself— in his name rather than mine, since I wasn’t known there. I happened to arrive the same time as Andy and Bob, and as we all went in together, the hostess, Madame Henriette, greeted Andy with, “Monsieur Warhol, you didn’t even have to say your name for me yesterday on the telephone, I would recognize your voice anywhere.” At that, I couldn’t contain myself— I said to her, “Apparently not— it was my voice.” She just glared at me, while Andy stood there looking— what? Embarrassed? Amused? Neither? Both? Madame Henriette, by the way, was a legendary figure in the annals of classic New York dining— she had started out as the coat-check girl and cashier at Henri Soule’s Pavillon, of which La Cote Basque was a slightly less expensive offshoot— his “Pavillon for the Poor,” he called it. She was also Soule’s girlfriend, and she wound up inheriting the restaurant from him. She was one tough number, and there must have been a touch of I’d recognIze your voIce anywhere

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Spartacus to the young me to have dared to engage her in that manner. But then, what did I have to lose— unlike Andy, I preferred La Grenouille. No sooner were we seated than Andy told me I had to help him come up with a new opening line for the book. He said he had just been reading the columnist Rona Barrett’s autobiography whose first line recounted how a Hollywood actor— Andy had heard it was Kirk Douglas— had begged her, “Just an inch, Miss Rona, just let me put it in an inch!” I told him, “Rona Barrett is a gossipist— you are an artist and a would-be philosophist. You don’t want to stoop to her level.” He said, “I like that level— it’s a great level.” I said, “Forget it,” and, mercifully, he did.38

On what level does one place THE Philosophy? It might be above the level of Miss Rona (1974), but, in truth, it seems closer to Truman Capote’s Answered Prayers (1986) than to the contemporaneous exposés by Warhol’s fellow artist Hans Haacke.39 Whereas both Capote and Haacke publicly scandalized the social and economic elite— albeit in radically different ways— Warhol’s entanglement with the politics of the upper class seemed to be moving in a different direction. And the significance of Madame Henriette’s remark, it turned out, was just another mistake so easily enveloped by Warhol’s art. At the same time that Warhol signed the contract to publish THE Philosophy with Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, he also signed a contract to collaborate with Paulette Goddard on her memoirs— the beautiful movie star had been married to Charlie Chaplin, Burgess Meredith, and Eric Maria Remarque (All Quiet on the Western Front, 1929) and at one time or another been involved with Diego Rivera, H. G. Wells, General George Patton, and Clark Gable, among others. As Aronson recalled: “Bob produced a tantalizing outline— Andy would tape Paulette nonstop as she spilled the beans, and the result would be an ‘audio-documentary.’”40 The books were, to some extent, a package deal. Colacello explained: “They were to be titled THE and HER, respectively. (And if and when Andy did an autobiography, that would be called ME.)”41 But, whenever the tape recorder was running, Goddard refused to reveal anything remotely intimate. “At the end of a year Andy handed me 700 pages’ worth of essentially worthless stuff,” Aronson said. “A welter of idle conversation about her best— and in fact only— friends: Persian carpets, Beluga caviar, Impressionist pictures, furs, jewels.”42 The manuscript was a bore, and the book was rejected. Meanwhile, THE Philosophy was having its own problems— it was failing to generate enough heat in the marketplace. “The original plan was to publish it in April 1975 but in February we decided to postpone it until September,” Aronson explained, “because booksellers weren’t ordering in sufficient numbers and there was no interest to speak of from book clubs and paperback reprint houses.”43 Given that the United States was in a reces128

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sion and Saigon fell to the People’s Army on April 30, 1975, it is no surprise that a tongue-in-cheek book of philosophy by the Pope of Pop was not being roundly embraced.44 Aronson asked Jovanovich to reassure Warhol, which he did in a three-page handwritten letter. “We are not at fault; neither are you,” Jovanovich explained. It was only that the reprint publishers and book clubs “do not believe your name will ‘draw’ in the field of books”: “Now we will seek to change their minds!”45 The publishing house did everything it could to promote Warhol’s book. Excerpts from THE Philosophy appeared in magazines as diverse as Cosmopolitan, Playboy Enterprises’ Oui, and New York magazine.46 They also appeared in the New York Times “on the Op-ed page, where quotes about hair were picked because it was during the serious local metropolitan hair crisis and hairdresser fad.”47 According to Colacello, Warhol signed thousands of copies of the first printing of the book, and, when those sold out, he went back to the warehouse to sign more. Aronson secured blurbs from Tina Turner, Rudolf Nureyev, and Truman Capote. Leo Castelli and Halston threw book parties.48 And then Warhol toured— eight cities in sixteen days— accompanied by Colacello, Fred Hughes, Jed Johnson, and Lady Ann Lambton.49 “Our first stop was Baltimore, where two thousand fans mobbed the Museum of Fine Art to see Andy. . . . They wanted him to sign their hands, their arms, their I’d recognIze your voIce anywhere

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F I G U R E 36.

Paulette Goddard, Bob Colacello, and Andy Warhol, ca. 1973. Photograph by Cosmos Andrew Sarchiapone. Collection of The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburg.

F IGU RE 3 7. Andy Warhol, Halston, and Victor Hugo in a Halston window display designed by Warhol and Hugo, ca. 1975. Photo-

graph by Pat Hackett, courtesy Pat Hackett.

F I G U R E 38. Handwrit-

ten letter from Rick Stanton to Andy Warhol, posted February 8, 1976, Cleveland. Collection of The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburg.

foreheads, their clothes, and their money.” Then, in St. Louis: “Andy was put on display in the corner window of the Stix, Baer, Fuller department store, with a table piled with books. . . . Giant speakers blasted the Velvet Underground’s ‘Heroin’ out into the downtown streets.”50 Not all the cities greeted Warhol with such enthusiasm. In San Francisco, someone left a death threat for him at the Fairmont Hotel. At the book signing, some fans wanted to know “why [he] hadn’t ‘come out’ in his Philosophy book, why he’d ‘sold out’ to business art.” Colacello recalled: “One particularly belligerent fellow in a work shirt came up to Fred and me and demanded to know why we were wearing ties. ‘The tie is a symbol of capitalist oppression,’ he insisted. ‘And Andy used to stand for liberation. You guys are nothing but a bunch of Fascists.’”51 I’d recognIze your voIce anywhere

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Fan letters in the archives tell a different story. Some readers really identified with Warhol’s book. For example, John Waters sent Warhol a postcard on which he wrote: “Andy— your book was the nicest smile of the summer.” 52 One of Warhol’s old friends from New York City’s Bodley Gallery expressed his happiness for him and his anticipation of the new book.53 Someone named Roxanne wrote Warhol a letter after reading the excerpt in Cosmopolitan: “The section titled ‘Love’ was great. First of all, there sitting on the page was my favorite word, schizophrenia. I really lOVe schizophrenia. It’s so misunderstood.”54 And there was Rick from Cleveland, Ohio, who crafted a letter to Warhol in an “A to B and Back Again” dialogue to ask for help in finding a job.55 Yet the book never quite caught on. It wound up selling a respectable number of copies but fell far short of becoming a best seller as Warhol had hoped. Nor did it find a place within the text-based art practices of the 1970s. Aronson recounted: There came a day, a month or two later, when Andy called and asked me impatiently, “What can I do to make the book a best seller?” I told him that it was all over. Then he asked me point-blank if it was “a dud.” I said, “No, I wouldn’t describe it that way.” . . . No book of Andy’s, it turned out, would ever appeal to the masses. Maybe the philosophy book would have caught on if Andy had been willing— and able— to go on TV or even radio and give interviews expressing his philosophy— it clearly wasn’t enough just to embody it. . . . No one had ever known what Andy really thought, or how he thought, or even if he thought— and whatever you want to say about THE, it did add up to the most extensive personal statement he made in his lifetime. . . . He told me that he felt the book could give people a way that they could think, too, and that they could use it to help solve their own problems. He said he saw it as a kind of self-help book— which turned out to be funny, given that it didn’t help any of us.56

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6

AMERICA

Slick, paperback covers, oversized format. The Statue of Liberty in silhouette against a silver sky. Our vantage point is from below and several yards away. She looms before us, larger than life, yet the scene fails to communicate the glory and promise this national icon is meant to symbolize. Instead, on the cover of Warhol’s 1985 photobook, Lady Liberty is hardly discernible; she is featureless, cocooned in scaffolding, and nearly eclipsed by the glare of a new day’s sun. After one hundred years of exposure to salt water and air pollution, her copper sheathing was wearing thin.1 At the top of the book’s cover, printed in all capital letters, is “andy WarhOl.” Below her feet is the book’s title, “america.” The title page inverts the composition of the cover. Here, Liberty is pictured from behind and above rather than frontally from below. The scaffolding has disappeared, and the sun shines upon her back, overexposing her copper skin against a black ocean. We gaze down on her as though passing above in an airplane. At the top of the page, above her outstretched arm, “america” is printed, below her feet “an dy War h Ol.” Despite the monumentality of its subject and the significance of its place in the chronology of Warhol’s publishing practice—America was the last book Warhol would publish before his untimely death in 1987— the book feels light, empty, a little cheap. It begins in a television studio. The illustration is cropped, giving us only a few contextual details. In the foreground, at the book’s gutter, a weatherman in a suit and tie stands before a large screen depicting a low-resolution map of the United States. He is turned away from us and gestures toward the map with his hand. Around him, the dark space of the studio suggests the black frame of an old television set. A few letters of text “c O n  . . .” run over the top edge of the page and onto the next like captions scrolling across a screen. “I just wanted to shoot the whole book from TV; it would have been just easier because, you see, America on TV is so much easier,” Warhol told Bob Edwards on National Public Radio during the book tour.2

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F I G U RE 3 9. Cover of Andy Warhol’s America (New York: Harper & Row, 1985). Collection of the Syracuse University Libraries. Copyright © 1985, 2018 by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc./Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Used by permission of Grove/ Atlantic, Inc. Any third-party use of this material, outside this publication, is prohibited.

F IGU RE 40. Title page of Andy Warhol’s America (New York: Harper & Row, 1985). Collection of the Syracuse University Libraries. Excerpt from America by Andy Warhol, copyright © 1985, 2018 by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc./Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Used by permission of Grove/Atlantic, Inc. Any third-party use of this material, outside this publication, is prohibited.

▮ ▮ ▮ America programmatically follows the conventions of publishing— cover image, title page, epigraph, and table of contents— yet it also plays with these conventions. The reversal of title and author on the cover and title page brings our attention to their relationship: Is it one of subject and author, cause and effect, product and producer? By 1985, had Andy and America become synonymous? The book’s design mimics a scrapbook. Photographs are printed at various angles and in various sizes, overlapping each other and bleeding over the margins, as if tossed haphazardly across the page in the rush from one exciting event to the next. Although the layout suggests an accumulation of personal mementos, the chapters blithely point to the trade of mass-market publishing. Six of the chapters take their titles directly from popular magazines: “People,” “Physique Pictorial,” “National Geographic,” “Natural History,” “Vogue,” and “Life.” Even the choice of typeface— modeled on an optical character recognition font— suggests a mediated mode of communication. Thus, with his America, Warhol follows in the footsteps of Walker Evans’s American Photographs (1938) and Robert Frank’s The Americans (1958), but, in so doing, he diverts the trajectory of the modernist photobook, turning it into an utterly commercial and feminized book object: the personal scrapbook sold in the form of a mass-produced picture book. On the book’s back cover, a small photograph depicts Warhol riding in a convertible. He looks back at us from the passenger’s seat— not the driver’s— and the promotional copy reads: “From the camera that never leaves his side now comes a love letter, a remembrance and an astonishing portrait of modern life: America. Culled from his ten-year archives, it is a work of blinding insight, a book of strange beauty and enormous contradictions.” The “contradictions” and “strange beauty” that characterize America, it turns out, are as much about Warhol and his mode of picturing as they are about the subjects he depicts. “Everybody,” Warhol’s book begins, has their own America, and then they have the pieces of a fantasy America that they think is out there but they can’t see. When I was little, I never left Pennsylvania, and I used to have fantasies about things that I thought were happening in the Midwest, or down South, or in Texas, that I felt I was missing out on. But you can only live in one place at a time. And your own life while it’s happening to you never has any atmosphere until it’s a memory. So the fantasy corners of America seem so atmospheric because you’ve pieced them together from scenes in movies and music and lines in books. And you live in your dream America that you’ve custom-made from art and schmaltz and emotions just as much as you live in your real one.3

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Playing up the classic first-person voice (“When I was little . . .”), with its direct address to the reader (“But you can only live . . .”) and its evocation of a confessional (“I used to have fantasies . . .”), Warhol’s book follows the autobiographical conventions of the scrapbook. Yet it does not quite work. The text reads more like a fantasy Warhol than the real one. While some elements of the opening paragraph point to factual details of Warhol’s life (he did grow up in Pittsburgh), the sincerity of his authorial voice is hard to believe, and the critics were skeptical. “Warhol’s worldview has never stayed in focus as well as it does here,” wrote Larry Frascella in his review for Aperture. Yet, Frascella suggests, “there’s a studied contrast between the childlike acceptance of the text and the indifferent cynicism of the photographs.”4 Warhol’s book not only contained contradictions but contradicted the Warhol critics knew. Raphael Kadushin, described Warhol as “sounding as wide-eyed as Gomer Pyle” while he also identified “a deeper, sarcastic strain” in the book’s text. Warning readers against taking the book too seriously, Kadushin wrote: “Warhol, never as innocent as he sounds, lathers on the bloated, disingenuous schmaltz the way he churns out portraits of pop personalities.”5 The reviewer for People was equally unconvinced: “While Warhol’s talent may lie in convincing people that fraudulence itself is art, he’ll have a hard time persuading anyone this book is anything but dreary.”6 Not only was America a hard sell with the critics, who were reluctant to buy its “apple-pie patriotism,” but Warhol too seemed to disavow the book.7 During the national publicity tour, he deflected questions with “Ah, gee, I have no memory. . . . I can’t remember what I said” and “I can’t remember the pictures either.”8 Like the photograph of Lady Liberty on its cover, Warhol’s last book shows us the fantasy and the scaffolding required to keep it up. “Claiming superficiality in superficial terms,” as Jean Baudrillard would say.9

The Pitch Warhol first mentions America in his Diaries on Saturday, September 24, 1983: “Worked with Benjamin till 7:00 (cab $6). Then the guy from Harper & Row who wants me to do the America book called and said he wanted to take me to dinner at Texarkana and we said we’d meet at 9:00. Cabbed there ($6). It’ll be a book of photographs with just a little text— maybe just captions.” Warhol’s account of the dinner date foreshadows the fraught circumstances soon to follow: “So after I’d sat there so long with this Harper & Row guy, Craig Nelson, he still hadn’t gotten the check and how long can you wait, so I asked for the check and he didn’t offer to pay it. It was $100 with tip.”10 Maybe Nelson did not want the evening to end. While growing up in the Houston suburbs, he considered Warhol “a spiritual hero,” so, when Warhol’s

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agent, Roz Cole, told the Harper & Row editor Larry Ashmead that Warhol was looking for a book, Nelson told Ashmead they should go meet Warhol.11 After the meeting, Nelson sent Warhol a letter explaining he had an idea for a book to be titled America, which he would like to propose to his colleagues at the publishing house. Attached to Nelson’s letter was a three-page proposal suggesting “how I believe your AMERICA will take shape, and the basic way in which I’d like to present it to Harper & Row”: “Please let me know anything you’d like to add or change here, whether in content or tone.”12 Although Nelson offered the opportunity to revise the book proposal, Warhol seems to have ceded authorial control to the young editor. The proposal articulates Warhol’s “aims as an artist,” which, according to Nelson, are “to create a synthesis of fine art, social commentary, and mass-market gossip.” The idea for the book, Nelson writes, came from another Warhol publication: “As his last book, Exposures [1979], so amply proves, Warhol’s world includes the justly famous from an enormous variety of backgrounds: movies, the theater, music, the literary world, politics, sports, art and the very rich.”13 Aiming to take advantage of Warhol’s social milieu in the same way that Exposures did, Nelson explains how this book will differ from the previous: “While Exposures profiled the people themselves, AMERICA will focus on the landscapes, the places, and the way of life behind the names we all know so well.” However, only a handful of American locales were ultimately selected to represent the nation: Montauk, New York City, Aspen, Newport, Lenox, Kentucky, Texas, California, and Washington, DC. While his pitch hinges on Warhol’s proximity to the rich and famous, Nelson is quick to qualify how the book “will also include his take on the more quotidian aspects of American life.”14 What those quotidian aspects consist of, however, Nelson does not make clear. The final line of the proposal reveals the scope of the young editor’s ambitions: “It will be an insider’s look at a hidden society; a patriot’s look at a country he loves so much; a collection of strong social commentary; and a fascinating work of art.”15 A year goes by before Nelson and the book are mentioned again in the Diaries. On November 26, 1984, the entry reads: “Had a talk with the Harper & Row editor, Craig Nelson, and had to tell him what I thought of what he’d written for the America book: He can’t write.”16 It’s hard to know how much weight one should give Warhol’s diary entries. Other primary source documentation on the circumstances of the book’s production and on Warhol’s relationship with Nelson is sparse.17 A few pieces of correspondence about America in the time capsules at the Andy Warhol Museum Archives are enlightening— we are lucky Warhol never threw anything away. Yet the finding aids for the time capsules are not publicly accessible, so one must rely on the time, interest, and generosity of the archivists to search for relevant material. Thus, Warhol’s Diaries provides the most detailed account of his last decade, but we should not take it as the whole story. 138

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As Nelson lamented: “I don’t think I ever met Pat Hackett, but for some reason she decided she was going to use the Diaries to get back at me and Bob Colacello. So she put every nasty thing she could come up with in the book. And then you’ll have scenes where Andy and I had such a great day. We did this and this and this, and he’s doing all of this with me, but she took my name out.”18

▮ ▮ ▮ America was published during the period of Warhol’s career in which he pursued a number of corporate endorsements and promotional gimmicks; thus, many critics doubted the sincerity of his authorial voice, although no one seemed to doubt that the book presented his point of view. For example, according to Frascella: “Warhol presents the sights through ironic cliches (palm trees with twisted trunks = California; the Watergate hotel = Washington) or disturbing self-projections (the Texas state cake or the cowboy at the auto show).”19 Trevor Fairbrother described America as an “elliptical, deceptively chitchatty rumination” on the nation, and he interpreted different passages in the book to be indicative of the artist’s state of mind. “It is a covert self-portrait,” he concluded, “born at a time of personal doubt— middle age, professional anxiety about his standing in relation to the newest generation of art stars, lousy romances, poor health, and AIDS paranoia.” At the same time, he reminds us: “It is important to remember that America was a commercial product with a business strategy: Warhol’s name plus nationalist sentiment equal best-seller.”20 The publishing house may well have been attracted by the lucrative possibility of combining Warhol’s fame with Regan-era nationalism, but the deal was meant to be reciprocal. These were the salad days of the art star. As Alison Pearlman explains: “During the Wall Street boom (peaking from 1983 to 1987), journalists and critics exploited tempting parallels among the dramas of the stock market, the rapid rise to prominence of young artists, and the current clichés and symbols describing the careerism and aggressive affluence of the 1980s middle and upper-middle classes.”21 According to Nelson: “Warhol was in a trough in his work at that time.” Consequently, the aim of the book was “to try to help get his visibility back a little bit.” Warhol signed a three-book deal with Harper & Row that included a new edition of POPism, America, and a third book to be determined. America also built on existing successes at the publishing house. Nelson had secured a contract with the artist Laurie Anderson to publish a book version of her critically acclaimed multimedia performance United States, which premiered at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in February 1983. “Laurie was a very big artist then, so I was able to use that book to get Andy to want to work with me,” he explained.22 amerIca

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United States was Anderson’s magnum opus. “A compilation of material from almost a decade’s worth of songs, texts, still images, and film footage, elaborately and seamlessly spliced together into an eight-hour production,” the work became a signpost for postmodern art and established Anderson as an artist of extraordinary talent.23 As Louis Menand later reflected: “The monologues in United States mostly expressed a mild neurosis about living in a world filled with airplanes and answering machines; but the work itself exuded control. A petite androgyne, done up in punk chic— black suit, red socks, Vaseline-spiked hair— and manipulating her voice to sound, alternately, like a Midwestern ingenue and a solemnly goofy Ronald Reagan, dominated the room for eight hours. . . . Feminism was not exactly the center of Anderson’s material, but it was part of the message.”24 For Craig Owens, Anderson’s artistic practice was representative of the “allegorical impulse” of postmodernism: “Although she employs, in addition to lyrics and spoken texts, photographs, drawings, films, and music, all of these are implicated in a general thematics of reading that extends far beyond the limits of the written text. For Anderson, the world is a vast network of signs and, as such, continually elicits reading, interpretation. Consciousness, being in the world, is in fact identified with reading— an identification which is not, however, unproblematic, for the legibility of signs is always uncertain. And it is to the problem of illegibility that Anderson’s work is addressed.”25 Indeed, Anderson’s United States addresses issues of reading and misreading, identity politics, and technocratic control, yet it is Warhol’s America that best articulates the problem of illegibility. The two books were designed by the same designer, edited by the same editor, and published by the same publisher. Both take the nation as their subject, and both use the theme of the road trip to elucidate it. Both employ the techniques of appropriation, quotation, repetition, accumulation, photographic reproduction, and irony. They were released a year apart. Despite these similarities, Warhol’s America remains merely a picture book, “a kind of hodgepodge of the garish, the perverse and the beautiful.”26 “A collection of photographs of the fey and famous.”27 “It’s a diary,” Warhol told the Washington Post.28 His fifteen minutes were up— his career on the decline.29 Along with his late paintings and prints, Warhol’s last book was just another one of the “phoned-in flailings of a tired talent.”30 But Warhol’s America is more than the publishing house’s less-successful sequel to Anderson’s United States. Whereas the calculated theatricality of Anderson’s project strikes me as disingenuous in its denial of authorial presence, Warhol’s America shimmers in its soft silver covers like the ghost of a lost alternative— an allegory of a different kind of relation to the world.31 For me, Warhol’s book embodies of the lessons that Anderson dictates. 140

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On the Road Chapter 6 of America opens with a double spread of the nose of an airplane. At the top left, running across the gutter and onto the facing page, then over the right-hand margin and onto the following verso, is the chapter’s title: “n aT i O n al g e O   . . .” In the bottom left corner, below the wing of the airplane, the text begins: “For my second show at the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles— the Liz-Elvis show (1963)— I rode cross-country from New York in a station wagon with Wynn Chamberlain, Taylor Mead and Gerard Malanga. It was a beautiful time to be driving across America; I’d never been west of Pennsylvania on the ground before.”32 On the next page, the remainder of the chapter title runs across the top left margin—“. . . graP h i c ”— and we find ourselves inside an airplane. On the right edge of the spread is an aerial view of beach houses in Montauk. The photograph bleeds over onto the next two-page spread, and we are presented with two different, yet conjoined, aerial views of the beach. As the photographs narrate plane travel, the text retells the story of Warhol’s American road trip. “The farther west we drove,” Warhol writes, “the more Pop everything looked on the highways. Suddenly we all felt like insiders because even though Pop was everywhere— that was the thing about it, most people still took it for granted whereas we were dazzled by it— to us, it was the new Art. Once you ‘got’ Pop, you could never see a sign the same way again. And once you thought Pop, you could never see America the same way again.”33 Jonathan Flatley has elucidated the political dimensions of Warhol’s “Pop way of seeing” the world. “Seeing and thinking ‘Pop’ not only made everything look different but also allowed [Warhol] and his queer friends to feel ‘suddenly’ like ‘insiders,’” he explains. It was a kind of survival strategy. “After all,” Flatley writes, “a faggy, pasty-white, working-class queer from Pittsburgh such as Warhol was as unlikely as anyone to find representations of himself, his desires, or his experiences ‘inside’ the public sphere.”34 Anderson also takes to the road in United States. But, rather than being dazzled, she gets lost: You’re driving alone at night. And it’s dark and it’s raining.

( NEXT TWO PAGES) F IGU RE 4 1. Double-page spread from Andy Warhol’s America (New York: Harper & Row, 1985). Collection of

the Syracuse University Libraries. Excerpt from America by Andy Warhol, copyright © 1985, 2018 by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc./Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Used by permission of Grove/ Atlantic, Inc. Any third-party use of this material, outside this publication, is prohibited.

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And you took a turn back there and you’re not sure now that it was the right turn, but you took the turn anyway and you just keep going in this direction. Eventually, it starts to get light and you look out and you realize you have absolutely no idea where you are.35

According to Craig Owens, Anderson’s “befuddlement is the result of her failure to ‘read the signs’— a failure which is not, however, attributed to a subject who has either neglected or misread directional signals, but to the fundamental unreadability of the signs themselves.”36 For both Warhol and Anderson, then, the condition of reading defines the experience of being on the road, which, Owens points out, also serves as a metaphor for consciousness. These two metaphors, however, could not be more different. For Warhol, the indeterminacy of meanings conveyed by the signs along the highways propels him and his friends forward toward a new way of seeing and of being dazzled by the world, while Anderson pulls over and gets out at the next gas station to ask, “Hello. Excuse me. Can you tell me where I am?”37

▮ ▮ ▮ The car. The road. America. From Francis Picabia’s Portrait d’une jeune fille Americaine dans l’état de nudité (1915) to Warhol’s Silver Car Crash (Double Disaster) (1963), the automobile was “the supreme embodiment of American modernity.” In the early twentieth century, David Campany explains, “the camera would both record the road trip experience and help to define it.”38 Thus, the road trip became the classic subject of the American photobook. Premised on a survey by a photographer who has taken to the road and traveled through its towns and cities, visited its bathrooms and barbeques, and witnessed its social climate from political rallies and dilapidated billboards to lunch counters and convenience stores, the nation is represented through the lens of the mobile (and often male) photographing subject. While photographic accounts of the United States date back to the governmentsponsored geological surveys of the mid-nineteenth century, today there are two seminal American photobooks: Walker Evans’s American Photographs and Robert Frank’s The Americans, both of which “remain perpetually in print like the classics of literature.”39 Craig Nelson would have been familiar with the entwined history of the photobook and the road trip because he studied photography under Gary Winogrand at the University of Texas in the 1970s.40 Winogrand received a Guggenheim grant in 1964 to photograph the nation. He recalled: “I saw Walker Evans’s American Photographs for the first time in

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1955. I was planning a slow, zig-zagging, across-the-country car trip, to see, and to photograph.”41 Blake Stimson suggests that, while Evans “might be said to have looked out onto the world with the means of straight photography only to recoil into the aesthetic,” Frank’s book “shifted the primary locus of attention of documentary photography from object to subject, from objects to be photographed— people, places, and things, social conditions and history as lived by the photographic subjects— to the photographer’s own experience along the way.” Thus, Frank helped “redefine the road trip as a genre of experience and representation.”42 Whether they are “windows” onto the world or “mirrors” of the photographer’s vision, Evans’s and Frank’s books established the standard format of the modern photobook.43 As Tod Papageorge describes them: “Both books were bound in black (Evans’ in bible cloth, the cover of hymnals), and were almost the same size—American Photographs a bit taller, The Americans slightly longer, to accommodate the different shapes of their pictures. Evans’ book contained eighty-seven photographs, Frank’s eightythree. And, of course, the titles of the two books— as well as the block layout of their title pages— echoed one another.”44 However, the significance of each of book’s design has been read differently: “Where the blank opposing pages in Evans’s American Photographs set each image off with the distance, framing, respect, and elegance suitable for the propriety and distance of Evans’s detached style— like the white cube of the modernist gallery— that blankness in The Americans served to signify a sign of isolation and grim dehumanization, of identity that lacks a living, vital, generous sense of community, of a collective social form that had become brittle and without the rejuvenation of fresh human connection.”45 Warhol’s cross-country ride follows Frank and Evans: “From the camera that never leaves his side. . . . Here are the very private world of wealth and celebrity, the young Americans of today with their sexy, muscular bodies and the street world of America’s poorest people.”46 But there are no blank pages in Warhol’s America. Snapshots of celebrities fill its pages. We see Michael Jackson, Sylvester Stallone, Boy George, Dolly Parton, Pee-Wee Herman, Liberace, Grace Jones, Liza Minnelli. Its cover is silver rather than black, its format magazine size, its binding glued, its paper slick, its typography the opposite of elegant. Whereas Evans’s book has no text (the image captions and an essay by Lincoln Kirstein are included in the back of the book as supplements) and Frank’s includes only image captions and Kerouac’s introduction, Warhol’s book deploys a faux naive autobiographical narrative largely composed of “clippings” from his other published books.47 Thus, operating under the same rubric as Evans’s and Frank’s books, Warhol’s America, we might say, shifts the locus of attention yet again. America presents the photographing

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subject as object, or, rather, as a subject who can be reified and sold in the form of a mass-produced scrapbook.

Golden Oldies Ellen Gruber Garvey has written about how scrapbooks “open a window into the lives and thoughts of people who did not respond to their world with their own writing.”48 During the late eighteenth century and the early nineteenth, the practice of scrapbooking was facilitated by the advancement of printing technologies that made printed matter widely accessible. Often seen as a gendered practice associated with women and girls, scrapbooks combine mass-produced printed matter with autographs, letters, personal anecdotes, and photographs.49 According to Katherine Ott, Susan Tucker, and Patricia P. Buckler, scrapbooks “hold historical accounts in print and images that tell how events and lives were understood and told to others, how individuality spars with the public and the commercial.” Thus, at the same time that scrapbooks “fit seamlessly into the rituals of consumption” that defined the rising class of bourgeoisie, they were “a mass-produced object marketed, without irony or improbity, as unique and individualized.”50 From his soup cans to his movie stars, Warhol employed the scrapbooker’s craft: he culled, clipped, saved, and recirculated the printed matter around him. He was an auteur but of other people’s pictures, words, and ideas. In the 1980s, he even began to recirculate his own material. According to Joseph Ketner, Warhol’s friend and fellow artist Larry Rivers “told Warhol that his dealer had encouraged him to re-create some of his popular ‘golden oldies.’” On hearing this, Warhol began painting his Retrospectives and Reversals series, “in which he mined the iconography of his Pop period, reproducing images such as the Campbell’s soup cans, Corn Flakes, cows, Marilyn, and Mona Lisa.”51 A similar technique was used to write the text for America, although it was not necessarily Warhol doing the clipping and pasting. As Nelson explains: “I pulled stuff that I came across from writings that he had done and wrote original stuff myself. Then he went through the whole thing and fiddled with it.”52 For example, the account of Warhol’s road trip is pulled from POPism.53 The book’s epigraph—“America / really is / The Beautiful”— is clipped from THE Philosophy, published ten years before.54 In the first chapter of America, Warhol writes about shopping and all the choices available to consumers. After a paragraph-long list of beverages that one might choose if “let’s say you’re thirsty,” Warhol explains: And not only are there all these choices, but it’s all democratic. You can see a billboard for Tab and think: Nancy Reagan drinks Tab, Gloria Vanderbilt drinks Tab, Jackie Onassis drinks Tab, Katharine Hepburn drinks Tab, and 146

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just think, you can drink Tab too. Tab is Tab and no matter how rich you are, you can’t get a better one than the one the homeless woman on the corner is drinking. All the Tabs are just the same. And all the Tabs are good. Nancy Reagan knows it, Gloria Vanderbilt knows it, Jackie Onassis knows it, Katharine Hepburn knows it, the baglady knows it and you know it.55

In THE Philosophy, Warhol also wrote of the democracy of American consumerism: What’s great about this country is that America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest. You can be watching TV and see Coca-Cola, and you can know that the President drinks Coke, Liz Taylor drinks Coke, and just think, you can drink Coke too. A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking. All the Cokes are the same and all the Cokes are good. Liz Taylor knows it, the President knows it, the bum knows it, and you know it.56

Ten years after it was first published, Warhol’s tongue-in-cheek take on American democracy has lost its edge, not least of all because of the lame joke embedded in making the consumers all women and having them drink Tab, a diet soft drink produced by Coca-Cola for those consumers who wanted to keep “tabs” on their weight. Not only was the text of America a patchwork of “golden oldies” and new ventriloquisms by his editor; the premise that the images were culled from Warhol’s archive was also a hoax. “Actually, an awful lot of the pictures turned out to be not that interesting in the archives,” explained Nelson. I assumed that there would be all this stuff and you would have all these things to choose from but, in fact, it was the same type of stuff that we had already seen in Interview magazine. So a lot of my work was actually dragging Andy out to do things to take new pictures for the book to give him a fresher, more interesting look. So, for the wrestlers, I took him to a wrestling show. And then I took him to see the Statue of Liberty for the cover. . . . So a huge number of images in that book were actually created just for the book instead of the archives even though I did go through the fucking archives.57 ( NEXT TWO PAGES) F IGU RE 4 2 . Double-page spread from Andy Warhol’s America (New York: Harper & Row, 1985). Collection of

the Syracuse University Libraries. Excerpt from America by Andy Warhol, copyright © 1985, 2018 by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc./Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Used by permission of Grove/ Atlantic, Inc. Any third-party use of this material, outside this publication, is prohibited.

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For Nelson, the fact that the material in the book was not all by Warhol did not mean that the book did not express Warhol’s vision since, even though the pictures in the book were “not necessarily taken by Andy,” they were “taken because of Andy.” Regarding how he selected the images for the book, Nelson explained: “I was only trying to get across the artist’s point of view. . . . I don’t think that it’s me so much as me trying to think: What would Andy do?”58 Whether it was actually Warhol’s point of view— or Nelson’s attempt to express it— the book queers some of America’s most masculine icons. For example, in the section on New York City, Warhol writes: “The other day I was walking through Rockefeller Center with the big murals on the walls, and I was thinking about it. I love that kind of WPA art; the big, tough peasant look. The big strong men with the work-muscles and the sweat, doing their jobs and building America.” The chapter titled “Physique Pictorial” features young men lifting weights and underwear models posing before the camera. In “All Stars,” Warhol explains that wrestling is worth watching “just to hear all the great names, like Hulk Hogan, Gorilla Monsoon, Brutus Beefcake, Mister Wonderful, Sgt. Slaughter and The Wild Samoans.” In America, Robert Frank’s “Rodeo— New York City” becomes Warhol’s Texas hustler.59 After Nelson finished selecting the images and organizing them into thematic sections, they were handed over to the book’s designer, Barbara Richer. “It was fun because I was really given free rein,” explained Richer. The photos came to her in several boxes, and she designed the whole book as one piece over a weekend: “These were snapshots he took. Just daily diary snapshots. It was invigorating to play with scale and juxtaposition. . . . I wanted to give the pages a feeling of spontaneity and surprise so that the book had the sense of fun I think Warhol had snapping the photos.”60

▮ ▮ ▮ Warhol’s America not only perpetuated the cliché of the road trip; it necessitated he go on one.61 The promotional tour for the book was nothing short of a grueling disaster. It began with pressure from Nelson. In a letter to Warhol dated September 25, 1985, Nelson writes: “Here’s your large quantity sales report (places ordering 10 copies or more) for your book. As you’ll look under the number of copies ordered (QTY), you’ll see why we’re so anxious to clear up when you want to go to Texas and California.”62 The attached spreadsheet shows that Bookstop, Inc., in Austin, Texas, ordered 665 copies of America. Nearly two hundred other bookstores and distributors placed orders for the book, about a dozen of them for more than a hundred copies. The goal was to take advantage of this interest. The tour lasted from late October to early December and included interviews with the press, radio appearances, autographing sessions at bookstores and museums, champagne receptions, slide presentations, and a recording session for an in-flight audio magazine.63 150

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“There were a lot of menacing things that happened to us on the tour,” Nelson recalled. “For example, in Chicago, as he was autographing, this group of really Goth looking punk people stood behind the books and pushed apart the books so that they could stare at us through the books.”64 The tour began in New York City on a Monday at B. Dalton’s. The event was well attended, but Warhol was disappointed. His diary entry for that day reads: It wasn’t a big, shoving crowd, it was orderly the whole time, a long spaghetti line that lasted for two and a half hours and we sold 150 books, and Craig Nelson from Harper & Row was acting like a star. Chris Makos came by and he was impressed with my popularity. And Christopher was looking at the America book and saying, “Oh God, half these pictures were taken in Europe!” (laughs) And he was so right! And it was so nice to hear him putting down Craig. I enjoyed it. And the book costs $16.95 and there was a 10 percent discount and one girl bought six copies and I had to sign long things for her like, “Dear Harry, I hope you have a good season in the Adirondacks. . . .”65

The next book signing took place on the second floor of the Rizzoli Bookstore in SoHo. There was a large crowd, and it was not shoving either. Nelson stepped out to smoke a cigarette, and then something happened. A young woman had been waiting in line, and, when it was her turn, she handed Warhol her book but, rather than asking for his signature, yanked the wig off Warhol’s head and tossed it over the balcony to an accomplice who ran out of the store. The staff at Rizzoli asked Warhol if he wanted to stop, but there were still people in line, so he pulled the hood of his coat over his head and kept signing. For three days, Warhol postponed recording his account of the event in his Diaries. Only after he read Liz Smith’s gossip column in the Daily News did he amend his diary with the description of what happened. “I guess I can’t put off talking about it any longer,” the entry begins: Okay, let’s get it over with. Wednesday. The day my biggest nightmare came true. The day started with Benjamin not picking me up (phone $2, magazines $2). I didn’t go to the Matsuda fashion show. I’m just going to talk through this quickly because otherwise I can’t face it. Nobody from the office would go with me to the Rizzoli Bookstore in Soho. . . . I’d been signing America books for an hour or so when this girl in line handed me hers to sign and then she— did what she did. The Diary can write itself here. amerIca

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At this point, a note to the reader is inserted in brackets, and Pat Hackett describes the attack. Then Warhol resumes his account: I don’t know what held me back from pushing her over the balcony. She was so pretty and well-dressed. I guess I called her a bitch or something and asked how she could do it. But it’s okay, I don’t care— if a picture gets published, it does. There were so many people with cameras. Maybe it’ll be on the cover of Details, I don’t know. . . . I usually stand up at those things but there I was sitting down and the people were above me and the setup was all wrong and I was so worn out and hating Craig Nelson and I wasn’t fast enough and it just happened so fast. . . . It was too unusual. I guess these people had gone around telling everybody they were going to do it, because a lot of people later said they’d heard things. It was so shocking. It hurt. Physically. And it hurt that nobody had warned me. . . . It was like in a movie. I signed for one and a half hours more I guess, pretending it didn’t mean anything, and eventually it doesn’t. . . . It was like getting shot again, it wasn’t real. I was just the comedian there, pleasing the people.66

When Warhol narrates the event for his diary, he does so with the assumption that the reader already knows what happened. Perhaps this is because he dictated his diary over the phone to Hackett and she certainly knew what had happened. But, then, why relive the humiliation at all? The business expense “(phone $2, magazines $2)” could not have been worth the retelling; Warhol did not have to put it in his diary. Nevertheless, he expresses a sense of obligation to record the event—“I guess I can’t put it off any longer.” Yet he never actually says what happened to him. The girl “did what she did.” “It was too unusual.” “It was so shocking.” “It hurt.” But what was it? “It was like a movie.” “It was like getting shot again.” In regard to Liz Smith’s Daily News account of what happened, Warhol said: “It was nice, she did it in a nice way.”67 It seems that Warhol could come to terms with the violence he experienced only as a witness to someone else’s tragedy, as if he were one of the infinite other imagined witnesses who saw what happened or read about it in the paper: “There were so many people with cameras.” Witnessing disaster— in this case, a personal disaster in the form of public humiliation— is one of the primary ways in which the contradictory requirements of embodiment and abstraction that structure the public sphere come into view. “It is at the very moment of recognizing ourselves as the mass subject,” Michael Warner writes, “that we also recognize ourselves as minority subjects.”68

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F IGU RE 4 3. Display advertisement for a book signing at Rizzoli Bookstore for Andy Warhol’s America (New York: Harper & Row, 1985). Collection of The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburg. © 2018 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc./Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

The End Dying is the most embarrassing thing that can ever happen to you, because someone’s got to take care of all your details. You’ve died and someone’s got to take care of the body, make the funeral arrangements, pick out the casket and the service and the cemetery and the clothes for you to wear and get someone to style you and do the makeup. You’d like to help them, and most of all you’d like to do the whole thing yourself, but you’re dead so you can’t. Here you’ve spent your whole life trying to make enough money to take care of yourself so you won’t bother anybody else with your problems, and then you wind up dumping the biggest problem ever in somebody’s lap anyway. It’s a shame. I never understood why when you died, you didn’t just vanish, and everything could just keep going the way it was only you just wouldn’t be there. I always thought I’d like my own tombstone to be blank. No epitaph, and no name. Well, actually, I’d like it to say “figment.”69

Warhol left a lot of stuff behind when he died, a fact that the popular press called much attention to and that art historians and archivists continue to reckon with. His house was so full of furniture, art, jewelry, and other collectibles that it took Sotheby’s a six-volume catalog to describe the auction lots.70 There were also hundreds of time capsules, thousands of cassette tapes, the films, photographs, and paintings. There was the magazine business. And there was, of course, his diary as kept by Pat Hackett. Steven Aronson recalled Warhol once saying to him: “When I pop off, Pat’s gonna have a really big dowry.”71 Beginning in 1976, Hackett would telephone Warhol every morning, and he would recount his activities from the previous day, noting all his business expenses. “I made extensive notes on a legal pad as we talked,” Hackett explained, “and right after we hung up, while Andy’s intonations were fresh in my mind, I’d sit at the typewriter and get it all down on paper.” Warhol would keep his receipts, and every couple of weeks Hackett would gather them and staple them to the back of her transcripts of their conversations. Warhol had been audited by the IRS in 1972 and was audited every year thereafter until his death. Thus, the Diaries were his method of bookkeeping and also part of his daily routine. As Hackett explains: “Ostensibly still for the purpose of getting down on record everything he had done and every place he had gone the day and night before and logging the cash business expenses he had incurred in the process, this account of daily activity came to have the larger function of letting Andy examine life. In a word, it was a diary.”72 After War154

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hol’s death, Aronson introduced Hackett and Fred Hughes, the executor of Warhol’s estate, to his then literary agent, Lynn Nesbit, who sold the Diaries to Warner Books for $1.2 million in June 1987.73 Aronson and Hackett edited the over twenty thousand typed pages into a publishable book. “We chose the material that was most revealing about Andy himself and the people he worked and socialized with, and that featured his on-and-off thoughts, which were both spot-on and off-beat, about the culture and the world,” Aronson explained. Nearly two years after the editing began, the book was released. The first edition did not include an index of names. “Having no index was a strategic decision that helped send the Diaries straight to the bestseller list,” Aronson explained. “Thousands of people unable to spend time standing in bookstores and looking themselves up were forced to invest in it, take it home, and sit down and read until they came to their names, or didn’t.”74 Some of Warhol’s friends were upset by what was written. “He never wanted to have to answer for (the diaries),” Hackett told USA Today. “If he did, he would have said these things publicly when he was alive. That is the whole point.”75 The publicity was huge. “A vivid picture of this enigmatic man,” declared the Philadelphia Inquirer. “The ultimate self-portrait,” claimed the Boston Globe.76 The first printing of 110,000 copies sold out. Warhol finally got his best seller. The Diaries may well be as close as we can get to knowing what Warhol thought. But, for me, it is not the Diaries. It is America— with its weird cast of characters, its fraught production history, its incident of violation, and its enduring misreadings— that stands as the allegory of a life.77 “The graying lips. The shaggy silver-white hair, soft and metallic. The cords of the neck standing out around the big Adam’s apple. It’s all there, B. Nothing is missing. I’m everything my scrapbook says I am.”78

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Mark and I moved to Rochester, New York, from Berkeley, California. We had never lived outside California before. We hadn’t really experienced snow— not in the way we know it now. I hadn’t planned on writing about Andy Warhol. I was thinking about going to culinary school in Mexico City. But, then, there was Douglas. He gave me his car while he was away, and that’s how this book began. In Douglas’s car, I drove down the thruway and ended up in the archive. David Antin and Colin Gardner taught me how to see. Their lectures were bewildering and exciting. Lisa Robertson, Renee Gladman, Mel Freilicher, and John Granger made me want to be a writer. Bill Berkson made me fall in love with poetry. Anthony Rizzuto gave me a job at Moe’s Books, which felt more like oxygen than employment. Douglas Crimp, Rachel Haidu, and Joan Shelley Rubin embraced me and pushed me to be rigorous and attentive. Then Sean Quimby and Nicolette Dobrowolski showed me how much there was to explore. They let me into the stacks. Along the way, Sheelagh Bevan, Ruth Blacksell, Valentina Branchini, Becky Burditt, Stephen Bury, Jonathan Flatley, Roger Hallas, Jessica Horton, Jason Middleton, Shota Ogawa, Joab Saab, and Nina Schleif made me a better scholar and a more thoughtful writer. Warhol’s friends and collaborators let me into their lives and memories, for which I am so very grateful. Susan Bielstein believed in the book from the start and made it so much better in the end, while James Toftness answered my thousands of questions with patience and kindness. Through it all, there was Mark. Without you, there’d be no point.

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NOTES INTRODUCTION

1. G[ene] R. Swenson, “What Is Pop Art? Answers from 8 Painters, Part I,” in I’ll Be Your Mirror: The Selected Andy Warhol Interviews, 1962– 1987, ed. Kenneth Goldsmith (New York: Carroll & Graf, 2004), 15–20, 18. 2. Nina Schleif, “Clever Frivolity in Excelsis: Warhol’s Promotional Books,” in Reading Andy Warhol: Author Illustrator Publisher, ed. Nina Schleif (Munich: Museum Brandhorst/Hatje Cantz, 2013), 78–133. 3. Reva Wolf, Andy Warhol, Poetry, and Gossip in the 1960s (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997). See also Phyllis Rose, “Literary Warhol,” Yale Review 79, no. 1 (May 1990): 21–33; Lynn Teresa Thorpe, “Andy Warhol: Critical Evaluation of His Images and Books” (PhD diss., Cornell University, 1980); and Reva Wolf, “Collaboration as Social Exchange: Screen Tests/A Diary by Gerard Malanga and Andy Warhol,” Art Journal 52, no. 4 (Winter 1993): 59–66. 4. The exhibition Warhol by the Book traveled to Williams College Museum of Art in Williamstown, MA, the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, PA, and the Morgan Library in New York City. I extend many thanks to Matt Wrbican, Katie Price, and Sheelagh Bevan for the opportunity to share my research in the public programming for the exhibition. 5. The literature on artists’ books, livres d’artiste, and avant-garde book design is quite diverse in its parameters, approaches, stakes, and conclusions. See, e.g., Anna Sigrídur Arnar, The Book as Instrument: Stéphane Mallarmé, the Artist’s Book, and the Transformation of Print Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011); Stephen Bury, Artists’ Books: The Book as a Work of Art, 1963–2000 (London: Quatrich, 2015); Riva Castleman, A Century of Artists Books (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1994); Johanna Drucker, The Century of Artists’ Books (1994; 2nd ed., New York: Granary, 2004); Renée Riese Hubert, Surrealism and the Book (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1988); Joan Lyons, ed., Artists’ Books: A Critical Anthology and Sourcebook (Rochester, NY: Visual Studies Workshop Press, 1985); Ralph Jentsch, The Artist and the Book in Twentieth-Century Italy (Turin: Umberto Allemandi, 1992); Robert Flynn Johnson and Donna Stein, Artists’ Books in the Modern Era, 1870–2000: The Reva and David Logan Collection of Illustrated Books (San Francisco: Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, 2001); Rob Perrée, ed., Cover to Cover: The Artist’s Book in Perspective (Rotterdam: NAi, 2002); and Margit Rowell and Deborah Wye, The Russian Avant-Garde Book, 1910–1934 (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2002). 6. Lucy Lippard, “The Artist’s Book Goes Public,” Art in America 65, no. 1 (January 1977): 40–41 (reprinted in Lyons, ed., Artists’ Books, 45–48). 7. Lucy Lippard, “Conspicuous Consumption: New Artists’ Books,” in Lyons, ed., Artists’ Books, 49–57, 49, 51, 50–51. 8. Drucker’s The Century of Artists’ Books stands as the definitive text on the role of books within modern and contemporary artistic practices. Drucker defines artists’ books in distinction from, on the one hand, the trade-published book (whether visual or textual), which is produced for commercial, literary, or political reasons and does not intentionally participate in the discourse of art, and, on the other hand, the fine art folio, illustrated book, or livre d’artiste, which situates itself within the traditions of art and is highly crafted

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but does not self-consciously interrogate the form of the book on a material or thematic level. Ariella Azoulay, The Civil Contract of Photography (New York: Zone, 2008); Rosalyn Deutsche, Evictions: Art and Spatial Politics (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996); Rachel Haidu, The Absence of Work: Marcel Broodthaers, 1964– 1976 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010); Grant Kester, Conversation Pieces: Community and Communication in Modern Art (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2004); Jennifer Roberts, Transporting Visions: The Movement of Images in Early America (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2014); and Blake Stimson and Gregory Sholette, eds., Collectivism after Modernism: The Art of Social Imagination after 1945 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007). For an overview of the literature on the history of the book, see David Finkelstein and Alistair McCleery, eds., The Book History Reader (New York: Routledge, 2002); and Michael Suarez and H[enry] R. Woudhuysen, eds., The Oxford Companion to the Book (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). See also George Bornstein, Representing Modernist Texts: Editing as Interpretation (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1991); Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin, The Coming of the Book: The Impact of Printing, 1450–1800 (London: Verso, 1997); D[onald] F. McKenzie, Making Meaning: “Printers of the Mind” and Other Essays, ed. Peter McDonald and Michael Suarez (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2002); Leah Price, How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012); Janice Radway, A Feeling for Books: The Book-of-the-Month Club, Literary Taste, and Middle-Class Desire (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), and Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984); and Joan Shelley Rubin, Songs of Ourselves: Uses of Poetry in America (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007). Robert Darnton, “‘What Is the History of Books?’ Revisited,” Modern Intellectual History 4, no. 3 (November 2007): 495– 508, 495; and Thomas R. Adams and Nicolas Barker, “A New Model for the Study of the Book,” in A Potencie of Life: Books in Society, ed. Nicolas Barker (London: British Library, 1993), 5–43. Douglas Crimp, “Our Kind of Movie”: The Films of Andy Warhol (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012), and “Getting the Warhol We Deserve,” Social Text 59, no. 2 (Summer 1999): 49– 66; Jennifer Doyle, Jonathan Flatley, and José Esteban Muñoz, eds., Pop Out: Queer Warhol (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996); Jonathan Flatley, “Like: Collecting and Collectivity,” October, no. 132 (Spring 2010): 71–98; Richard Meyer, Outlaw Representation: Censorship and Homosexuality in Twentieth-Century American Art (Boston: Beacon, 2002); Marc Siegel, “Doing It for Andy,” Art Journal 62, no. 1 (Spring 2003): 6–13; and Simon Watney, “The Warhol Effect,” in The Work of Andy Warhol, ed. Gary Garrels (Seattle: Bay, 1989), 115–23. Sally Banes, Greenwich Village 1963: Avant-Garde Performance and the Effervescent Body (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993); Gavin Butt, Between You and Me: Queer Disclosures in the New York Art World, 1948–1963 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005); Daniel Kane, All Poets Welcome: The Lower East Side Poetry Scene in the 1960s (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2003); and Lytle Shaw, Frank O’Hara: The Poetics of Coterie (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2006). Michael Warner, Publics and Counterpublics (New York: Zone, 2005), 114. The full passage reads: “There is no speech or performance addressed to a public that does not try to specify in advance, in countless highly condensed ways, the lifeworld of its circulation: not just through its discursive claims— of the kind that can be said to be oriented to understanding— but through the pragmatics of its speech genres, idioms, stylistic markers, address, temporality, mise-en-scène, citational field, interlocutory protocols, lexicon, and so on. Its circulatory fate is the realization of that world. Public discourse says not only ‘Let a public exist’ but ‘Let it have this character, speak this way, see the world in this way.’ It then goes in search of confirmation that such a public exists, with greater or lesser success— success being further attempts to cite, circulate, and realize the world understanding it articulates. Run it up the flagpole and see who salutes. Put on a show and see who shows up.”

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The theorization of the public sphere has long been grounded in print culture and thereby offers a signpost for how we might approach artists’ publications differently. See Immanuel Kant, “An Answer to the Question: What Is Enlightenment?” in The Idea of the Public Sphere: A Reader, ed. Jostein Gripsrud, Hallvard Moe, Anders Molander, and Graham Murdock (Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2010), 3–8; Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987); Nancy Fraser, “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy,” in Habermas and the Public Sphere, ed. Craig Calhoun (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999), 109–42; and Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge, Public Sphere and Experience: Toward an Analysis of the Bourgeois and Proletarian Public Sphere (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993). 15. Warner, Publics and Counterpublics, 114. ONE

1. Jane Nickerson, “News of Food,” New York Times, February 15, 1955, 24. 2. Tom Lacy quoted in Patrick Smith, Warhol: Conversations about the Artist (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research, 1988), 151. 3. Sometimes Warhol hosted coloring parties at his apartment, but often they took place at Serendipity 3. For more on Serendipity 3, see Nickerson, “News of Food,” 24; “‘General Store’ at New Location,” New York Times, July 10, 1958, 24; Craig Claiborne, “Food News: Restaurants Get Smaller,” New York Times, November 14, 1958, 34; Wendy Hung, “Interview with Stephen Bruce: Frrrozen Hot Chocolate Dreams of Serendipity 3,” September 21, 2012, http://jetsettimes.com/2012/09/21/interview-with-stephen-bruce-frrrozen-hot-chocolate -dreams-of-serendipity-3; Victor Bockris, Warhol: The Biography (New York: Da Capo, 1997), 104–5; and Patrick Smith, Andy Warhol’s Art and Films (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research, 1986). 4. Claiborne, “Food News.” 5. “History,” Serendipity 3, http://www.serendipity3.com/history.htm. 6. Nickerson, “News of Food,” 24. 7. Rainer Crone, Trevor Fairbrother, Richard Meyer, and Neil Printz were among the first to pay critical attention to Warhol’s pre-Pop work. See Rainer Crone, Andy Warhol: A Picture Show by the Artist— the Early Work, 1942–1962 (New York: Rizzoli, 1987); Trevor Fairbrother, “Tomorrow’s Man,” in Success Is a Job in New York: The Early Art and Business of Andy Warhol, ed. Donna De Salvo (New York: Grey Art Gallery & Study Center/Pittsburgh: Carnegie Museum of Art, 1989), 55–74; Meyer, Outlaw Representation; and Neil Printz, “‘Other Voices, Other Rooms’: Between Andy Warhol and Truman Capote, 1948–1961” (PhD diss., City University of New York, 2000). 8. For more on Ward, see George Klauber, in Smith, Conversations about the Artist, 26; and Bockris, Warhol, 94. For more on Warhol and publishing, see Nina Schleif, “Carefully Unplanned: Books in Andy Warhol’s Oeuvre,” in Schleif, ed., Reading Andy Warhol, 10–77. 9. As George Chauncey explains: “[Gay men] developed cultural resources and subcultural strategies that allowed them to undermine the authority of the dominant culture more directly and to create more affirmative conceptions of themselves. One prime way they did this was to create gay histories, and in particular to claim that heroic figures from the past were gay.” George Chauncey, Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890–1940 (New York: Basic, 1994), 283. 10. The year that Warhol and Ward published Love Is a Pink Cake, New Directions published Maude Hutchins’s Love Is a Pie with a dust jacket designed by Warhol. According to Anaïs Nin, Hutchins offered minute studies of “unusual relationships, adolescents who discover their bodies, and the hypocrisy of adults.” Warhol and Ward’s book was also a study of “unusual relationships” in both its content and its conceit. Anaïs Nin, The Novel of the Future (New York: Collier, 1968), 178–79. Warhol reused the portrait he created for Hutchins’s Love Is a Pie in his next book with Ward, A Is an Alphabet. 11. Ward quoted in Bockris, Warhol, 94. Bockris suggests: “A close enough friendship did ensue, however, to make others wonder if they were lovers.” See also Marshall Reese,

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“Ralph’s Story” (unpublished manuscript, 1995), Marshall Reese Collection, Andy Warhol Museum Archives, Pittsburgh. 12. J.F. [James Fitzsimmons], “Irving Sherman, Andy Warhol,” Art Digest 26, no. 18 (July 1952): 19; and B.G. [Barbara Guest], “Warhol and Sherman,” Art News 51, no. 5 (September 1952): 47; both cited in Meyer, Outlaw Representation, 109–11. Fairbrother also discusses Fitzsimmons’s review. See Fairbrother, “Tomorrow’s Man.” 13. [Fitzsimmons], “Irving Sherman, Andy Warhol,” 19, quoted in Meyer, Outlaw Representation, 109. 14. As Meyer explains: “The artistic lineage invoked by the review—‘Beardsley, Lautrec, Demuth, Balthus, and Cocteau’— suggests a dizzying array of sexual and pictorial eccentricity. But what, one wonders, are Fitzsimmons’s ‘various reasons’ for summoning these particular artists? . . . Even as the review describes the ‘perversity’ that pervades Warhol’s drawings, it never veers too close to defining the nature of that perversity.” Meyer, Outlaw Representation, 110. 15. For more on Warhol and Capote, see Printz, “‘Other Voices, Other Rooms.’” 16. I have followed Nina Schleif ’s chronology of these works. See Schleif, ed., Reading Andy Warhol, 293–95. 17. Anna Rühl, “A Was a Lady: Warhol’s Alphabet of Women,” in Schleif, ed., Reading Andy Warhol, 146–55, 151. 18. Velvet the Poodle quoted in Schleif, “Clever Frivolity,” 78–133, 89–92. The narrative of this book is stylistically distinct from Ward’s rhyming texts and thus may have been written by someone else. 19. Grosset & Dunlap to Miss Andie Warhol, August 10, 1953, Farrar, Straus & Young to Mr. Andie Warhol, postcard, postmark August 10, 1953, Harcourt, Brace and Company to Mr. Andie Warhol, August 10, 1953, and Little, Brown & Company to Andie Warhol, August 10, 1953, all in the private collection of Marshall Reese. Richard Meyer posits: “Warhol’s professional association with femininity occasionally shaded into a form of camp identification. In 1952, for example, when he received his first Art Director’s Club metal, the handwritten inscription on the envelope read, ‘Andrew Warhol, her medal.’” Meyer, Outlaw Representation, 103. See also the discussion of Warhol’s window design for “Miss Dior” in Printz, “‘Other Voices, Other Rooms,’” 207. 20. See Grosset & Dunlap to Miss Andie Warhol, August 10, 1953, private collection of Marshall Reese. 21. Stephen Bruce quoted in Smith, Andy Warhol’s Art and Films, 32. 22. Richard Meyer writes: “Even when it was not openly homoerotic, Warhol’s pre-Pop art took up the flamboyant tone and exaggerated effects of what was already known by this time as ‘camp.’” Meyer, Outlaw Representation, 99. 23. The text for À la Recherche du Shoe Perdu was written by the poet Ralph Pomeroy. Pomeroy was included in Ian Young, ed., The Male Muse: A Gay Anthology (Trumansburg, NY: Crossing, 1973). 24. For more on the homoerotic qualities of this book and the allusion to Beatrice Lillie’s song, see Printz, “‘Other Voices, Other Rooms,’” 244–48. For more on other references in the book, see Crone, Andy Warhol, 58; and Smith, Andy Warhol’s Art and Films, 55–64. For more on Lillie’s song, see Chauncey, Gay New York, 288. 25. Smith, Andy Warhol’s Art and Films, 67. The colophon attributes the book’s design to a Miss Georgie Duffee, the pseudonym of Raymond Braun, the owner of the Bodley Gallery. 26. Between 1954 and 1960, Warhol also created Playbook of You S Bruce from 2:30 to 4:00, which consists of drawings of Stephen Bruce, one of the owners of Serendipity 3, Horoscopes for the Coc[k]tail Hour, which pairs each sign of the zodiac with a drink recipe, and So, which consists of sayings, such as “so sweet” and “I love you so,” illustrated with strawberries, hearts, and stars. 27. Meyer, Outlaw Representation, 123. 28. Neil Printz revealed that both Joe Giordano and Charles Lisanby identified themselves as the subject of the same portrait, suggesting that the social space created by Warhol’s pub-

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lications was based not necessarily only on consensus and unity but also on conflict and particularity. See Printz, “‘Other Voices, Other Rooms,’” 301–3. 29. Robert Galster quoted in Smith, Conversations about the Artist, 154–55. 30. Ted Carey quoted in Smith, Andy Warhol’s Art and Films, 260. 31. Ted Carey quoted in Smith, Conversations about the Artist, 94. 32. Flatley, “Like,” 86. 33. Fraser, “Rethinking the Public Sphere,” 123. Michael Warner defines a counterpublic as “a scene where a dominated group aspires to re-create itself as a public and in doing so finds itself in conflict not only with the dominant social group but with the norms that constitute the dominant culture as a public.” Warner, Publics and Counterpublics, 112. 34. Flatley, “Like,” 86. 35. Smith, Andy Warhol’s Art and Films, 14–15. 36. Warhol quoted in ibid., 15. 37. Warhol’s fellow commercial artist Robert Galster remembered: “I tried blotting a few lines, and it didn’t work for me at all. [Laughs.] Mine didn’t look like fake Andy Warhols. They looked just like blotty lines.” Galster quoted in Smith, Andy Warhol’s Art and Films, 16. 38. Lisanby quoted in Smith, Conversations about the Artist, 134. 39. As Jürgen Habermas explains: “Whatever was submitted to the judgment of the public gained Publizität (publicity).” Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, 26. 40. Warner, Publics and Counterpublics, 52–53. Warner explains that publicity connotes “not merely publicness or openness but the use of media, an instrumental publicness associated most with advertising and public relations.” Ibid., 30. Warhol’s drawing technique appropriates and exploits what Michel Foucault calls the author-function. See Michel Foucault, “What Is an Author?” in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977), 113–38. 41. Deutsche, Evictions, xvi. 42. Klauber quoted in Smith, Conversations about the Artist, 29. Nina Schleif was the first to show that, beginning in 1952, Warhol gave his friends and clients a self-published book each year as a Christmas gift. See Schleif, “Clever Frivolity,” 79. 43. For more on the sexual politics of publishing during the Cold War, see Donald A. Downs, “Government Censorship since 1945,” in The History of the Book in America, vol. 5, The Enduring Book: Print Culture in Postwar America, ed. David Paul Nord, Joan Shelley Rubin, David D. Hall, and Michael Schudson (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), 135– 50; and James P. Danky, “The Oppositional Press,” in ibid., 269–85. 44. Edward Alwood, Straight News: Gays, Lesbians, and the News Media (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 21. 45. Howard A. Rusk, “Concerning Man’s Basic Drive,” New York Times, January 4, 1948, BR3; “People Who Read and Write,” New York Times, January 25, 1948, BR8; and George Gallup, “Kinsey Survey of Sex Habits Is Widely Approved by Public,” Washington Post, February 21, 1948, 11. 46. Alwood, Straight News, 26. See also Chauncey, Gay New York, 8. 47. I borrow the term imagined community from Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983). For Harry Hay, Kinsey’s report provided “the sense of belonging to a group.” Hay quoted in Michael Schudson, “General Introduction: The Enduring Book in a Multimedia Age,” in Nord et al., The History of the Book, 1– 22, 5. For a different take, see Georges Bataille, “Kinsey, the Underworld and Work,” in Eroticism: Death and Sensuality (San Francisco: City Lights, 1986), 149–63. 48. For more on the parallels between Capote’s life that of his novel’s protagonist, see Printz, “‘Other Voices, Other Rooms,’” 130–63. 49. Truman Capote, Other Voices, Other Rooms (New York: Signet, 1948), 6. See also Printz, “‘Other Voices, Other Rooms,’” 130–63. 50. Printz, “‘Other Voices, Other Rooms,’” 139.

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51. Smith, Andy Warhol’s Art and Films, 4. 52. See, e.g., “Perverts Called Government Peril,” New York Times, April 19, 1950, 25; William S. White, “Inquiry by Senate on Perverts Asked,” New York Times, May 20, 1950, 8; “Federal Vigilance on Perverts Asked,” New York Times, December 16, 1950; “126 Perverts Discharged,” March 26, 1952, 25; and “U.S. Ousted 425 on Morals,” New York Times, April 13, 1953, 20. 53. “9–9:30— Psychologically Speaking: ‘Is the Homosexual Psychopathic?’ Otto Schlesinger, Mrs. Adele Kenyon, Mrs. Lee. R. Steiner—(WEVD)” (public radio program schedule), New York Times, April 26, 1956, 67. 54. “Police Continue Crime Round-Up: Total of 243 Arrested since Friday— Many Are Freed by Week-End Courts,” New York Times, June 16, 1957, 67. 55. E[zekiel] C. Gathings quoted in Jay Walz, “Publisher Defends Lurid Paper Books,” New York Times, December 2, 1952, 33. 56. Fairbrother, “Tomorrow’s Man,” 60. 57. See Loren Glass, Counterculture Colophon: Grove Press, the Evergreen Review, and the Incorporation of the Avant-Garde (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2013), 101–44 (“The End of Obscenity”); and Jay A. Gertzman, Samuel Roth: Infamous Modernist (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2013). 58. John Curley, “Breaking It Down: Warhol’s Newspaper Allegories,” in Warhol: Headlines, ed. Molly Donovan (Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 2011), 26–35, 27. 59. I am not suggesting that only gay male readers could participate in the social space facilitated by Warhol’s books. Rather, Warhol’s books reveal how meaning is tied to one’s position as a reader. I agree with Trevor Fairbrother that “the degree to which one could see, understand, and enjoy this aspect [of Warhol’s art] depended on the specific example and on the awareness and openness of the viewer to the insider’s world of gay subculture.” Fairbrother, “Tomorrow’s Man,” 56. 60. George Hartman quoted in Smith, Conversations about the Artist, 125. 61. In this sense, Warhol’s books cast him as a coterie artist. For Lytle Shaw, coterie not only designates an intended audience but also, and more importantly, offers “an invented form of kinship that uses the name, in particular, to reimagine the social logics that allow group formations in the first place.” Shaw, Frank O’Hara, 37. 62. My observations are based on the copy of 25 Cats held at Williams College Museum of Art in Williamstown, MA. In other copies of this book, the sequencing of the pages, the coloring of the cats, and the inscriptions vary. 63. Patrick Smith writes: “According to Warhol’s printer, Seymour Berlin, 150 copies were printed, but the colophon lists 190.” Smith, Andy Warhol’s Art and Films, 70. 64. Nathan Gluck, in ibid. 65. Seymour Berlin explained that Warhol used the cat book, “not to sell, but as a means of giving it out to different customers to promote himself.” Berlin in Smith, Conversations about the Artist, 156. 66. To borrow from Jonathan Flatley, we might say that the cat book presents “an effort to make room for a conception of queer sexual attraction . . . that tries to move beyond the homosexual (love of the same) heterosexual (love of the different) distinction itself.” Flatley, “Like,” 76. My reading of 25 Cats is also informed by Douglas Crimp’s study of the ways in which Warhol’s films make queer forms of sociality visible. See Crimp, “Our Kind of Movie.” 67. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1999), 43. 68. Lisanby in Smith, Andy Warhol’s Art and Films, 372. 69. “Interiors’ Cover Artists,” Interiors 112, no. 12 (July 1953): 8. 70. Bockris, Warhol, 102. 71. Smith, Andy Warhol’s Art and Films, 70. 72. Berlin in Smith, Andy Warhol’s Art and Films, 70. 73. “Cover Artists,” Interiors 114, no. 2 (September 1954): 10, cited in Printz, “‘Other Voices, Other Rooms,’” 255.

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74. Tommy Jackson to Andy Warhol, postmark July 2, 1951, postcards, Time Capsule 55, Andy Warhol Museum Archives. 75. Diana Vreeland to Andy Warhol, January 8, 1957, reproduced in De Salvo, ed., Success Is a Job in New York, 19. 76. Unsigned greeting card, n.d., Time Capsule 21, Andy Warhol Museum Archives. 77. Corky, Harry, and Roy to André Warhola, postmark December 10, 1954, Christmas card, Time Capsule 20, Andy Warhol Museum Archives. 78. Mercedes de Acosta to Andy Warhol, [December 1958?], Christmas card, Time Capsule 20, Andy Warhol Museum Archives. 79. Mercedes de Acosta to Andy Warhol, February 21, 1959, Time Capsule 55, Andy Warhol Museum Archives. 80. Mercedes de Acosta quoted in Lisa Cohen, All We Know: Three Lives (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 2012), 161. 81. Printz, “‘Other Voices, Other Rooms,’” 256. 82. Ibid., 120. The postcard resides in the Andy Warhol Museum Archives. 83. I find a parallel in Esther Newton’s description of female impersonators: “Professional impersonators place themselves as a group at the bottom of the show business world. But socially, their self-image can be represented in its simplest form as three concentric circles. The impersonators, or drag queens, are the inner circle. Surrounding them are the queens, ordinary gay men. The straights are the outer circle. In this way, impersonators are ‘a society within a society.’” Esther Newton, Mother Camp: Female Impersonators in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), 99. 84. Walter Benjamin, “One-Way Street,” in Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writing, ed. Peter Demetz (1978; reprint, New York: Schocken, 2007), 61–94, 61. For a discussion of Benjamin’s theorization of reading in relation to art, see Haidu, The Absence of Work, 84. 85. Chauncey, Gay New York, 288. 86. Bruce in Smith, Andy Warhol’s Art and Films, 32. TWO

1. Quincy Mumford, “Greetings,” in The Little Magazine and Contemporary Literature: A Symposium Held at the Library of Congress, 2 and 3 April 1965 (New York: Modern Language Association, 1966), 3–4, 3. 2. Reed Whittemore, foreword to ibid., v–vi, vi. 3. Index of participants in ibid., 119. 4. Reed Whittemore, “Opening Remarks,” in ibid., 5–6, 5. 5. Ibid. 6. Karl Shapiro in “Discussion,” in ibid., 21–38, 22. 7. Henry Rago in ibid. 8. Richard Schechner in ibid., 31. 9. Jack Newfield, “MacDougal and Midnight: A Street under Pressure,” Village Voice, April 8, 1965, 1. 10. See Kane, All Poets Welcome, 49. 11. Bernard Weinraud, “Nightmare Hours: Saturday Night on MacDougal Street,” New York Times, April 12, 1965, 37. 12. Kane, All Poets Welcome, xvii. 13. Banes, Greenwich Village, 14. 14. Andy Warhol and Pat Hackett, POPism: The Warhol Sixties (New York: Harcourt, 1980), 69– 70, 71. 15. Ibid., 70–71. “The Duchess” was one of Brigid Berlin’s nicknames. 16. Warhol writes: “The San Remo Coffee Shop . . . was where I met Billy Name and Freddy Herko.” Ibid., 69. See also Randy Kennedy, “Billy Name, Who Glazed Warhol’s Factory in Silver, Dies at 76,” New York Times, July 21, 2016, A24. 17. Warhol and Hackett, POPism, 70.

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18. Allen Kaprow’s 18 Happenings in 6 Parts took place in October 1959 at the Reuben Gallery. For more on the history of Pop art, see Mario Amaya, Pop Art, and After (New York: Viking, 1965); Lucy Lippard, Pop Art (London: Thames & Hudson, 1966); and John Rublowsky, Pop Art (New York: Basic, 1965). 19. Claes Oldenburg presented The Street at the Judson Gallery in January 1960. 20. See Warhol and Hackett, POPism, 13–14. 21. David Bourdon, Warhol (New York: Harry Abrams, 1989), 86–87. 22. Ted Carey quoted in Smith, Conversations about the Artist, 90. 23. David Mann quoted in Bourdon, Warhol, 87. Warhol’s friend Tom Lacy recalled first seeing the Campbell’s Soup paintings: “I remember being embarrassed for him, knowing how good he was, thinking, ‘Why would you do this?’” Quoted in Tony Scherman and David Dalton, Pop: The Genius of Warhol (New York: Harper, 2009), 91. 24. Ted Carey recalled: “Andy couldn’t get anybody to show his early cartoon paintings, so I went to Gene Moore, and Gene Moore said, ‘Well, I can put the paintings in the windows.’” Carey quoted in Smith, Conversations about the Artist, 89. For more on Gene Moore and Warhol’s window designs, see Printz, “‘Other Voices, Other Rooms,’” 187–220 (“Between Painting and Decoration”). Nina Schleif also discusses Warhol’s window displays. See Schleif, “Carefully Unplanned,” 46. 25. Walter Hopps quoted in Scherman and Dalton, Pop, 62. 26. The mimeo revolution refers to the rise in books and magazines that were self-published by poets between 1960 and 1980 by using increasingly available cheap printing technologies. In this chapter, I use the terms underground magazine, little magazine, and mimeo magazine interchangeably. As Jerome Rothenberg explains: “The ‘mimeo revolution,’ as a term, is a bit of a misnomer in the sense that well over half the materials produced under its banner were not strictly produced on the mimeograph machine.” See Jerome Rothenberg, “A Little History of the Mimeograph Revolution,” in A Secret Location on the Lower East Side: Adventures in Writing, 1960–1980, ed. Steven Clay and Rodney Phillips (New York: New York Public Library/Granary, 1998), 12–54, 15. See also Gwen Allen, Artists’ Magazines: An Alternative Space for Art (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011); Stephen Duncombe, Notes from the Underground: Zines and the Politics of Alternative Culture (Bloomington, IN: Microcosm, 2008); Mark Morrison, The Public Face of Modernism: Little Magazines, Audiences, and Reception, 1905–1920 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2001); and John Campbell McMillan, Smoking Typewriters: The Sixties Underground Press and the Rise of Alternative Media in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011). 27. Wolf, Andy Warhol, Poetry, and Gossip, 1. See also Wolf, “Collaboration as Social Exchange.” The theorizations of sociality in art and literature by Lytle Shaw, Gavin Butt, and Grant Kester have been crucial in my thinking about Warhol’s role in little magazines. Shaw warns us about how an “interest in community often gives rise to an archival project that tends to valorize traditional concepts of biography.” Shaw, Frank O’Hara, 7. Butt approaches gossip “both as object of study and as form of knowledge.” Butt, Between You and Me, 4. Kester offers “a new aesthetic and theoretical paradigm of the work of art as a process— a locus of discursive exchange and negotiation” (Conversation Pieces, 12). 28. Kane, All Poets Welcome, 63. 29. Wolf, Andy Warhol, Poetry, and Gossip, 22. For an overview of Warhol’s magazine work, see Paul Maréchal, Andy Warhol: The Complete Commissioned Magazine Work, 1948–1987 (Munich: Prestel, 2014). 30. Ted Berrigan recalled: “Gerry [Malanga] had said that Andy would do a cover for ‘C’ if I liked. I did, and asked him, and he said he would.” Berrigan, “Some Notes about ‘C’” (unpublished manuscript, May 1964, Ted Berrigan Papers, Special Collections Research Center [hereafter SCRC], Syracuse University Libraries, Syracuse, NY), 9. 31. John Gruen quoted in Wolf, Andy Warhol, Poetry, and Gossip, 20–21. 32. Kane, All Poets Welcome, 41–42. 33. In a letter to Ted Berrigan, Gerard Malanga inquires: “How is ‘C’ coming along? Andy was wondering whether you finished the cover.” Malanga to Berrigan, October 6, 1963, handwritten letter, Berrigan Papers, SCRC. Berrigan recalled: “Andy made a silkscreen of two of

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the photos, and supervised its application to the paper, while it was applied in turn by me, Gerry, Pat, Padgett, Sandy, most of the covers being done by Pat. The idea was for every cover to be different, to utilize inexperience to produce happenings.” Berrigan, “Some Notes about ‘C,’” 9. 34. Ed Sanders, Catalogue #1 (June–July 1964), n.p. (item 48), Fales Library, New York University. For more on the pillowcases, see Wolf, Andy Warhol, Poetry, and Gossip, 30–36. 35. Gerard Malanga quoted in Wolf, Andy Warhol, Poetry, and Gossip, 24. 36. Berrigan, “Some Notes about ‘C,’” 9–10. A few months after the issue’s release, Berrigan wrote in his diary: “C is a big success, although everyone (except me) hated Warhol’s cover for the E.D. issue. Hmmmm!” Berrigan quoted in Wolf, Andy Warhol, Poetry, and Gossip, 24. 37. Warhol quoted in Floating Bear 26 (October 1963): n.p. 38. Floating Bear 27 (November 1963). 39. Billy Name (Billy Linich) quoted in Jean Stein, Edie: American Girl, ed. George Plimpton (New York: Grove, 1982), 204. 40. Also included in the November 1963 issue of the Floating Bear were notices for a “literary arts magazine” by Warhol and Malanga called Stable, a special poetry issue of Wagner that would include “Marilyn at the palace by Stuart Byron with paintings by Andy Warhol,” and the Edwin Denby issue of C that boasted: “Each issue contains a different painting on the cover by Andy Warhol.” Floating Bear, no. 27 (November 1963). 41. The Sinking Bear: A Newsletter, no. 2 (December 1963): 6, 4, Time Capsule 39, Andy Warhol Museum Archives. 42. Jonas Mekas, “On Andy Warhol’s Sleep,” Village Voice, January 30, 1964, 17, reprinted in Jonas Mekas, Movie Journal: The Rise of a New American Cinema, 1959–1971 (New York: Collier, 1972), 116. 43. Ron Padgett, “Sonnet/To Andy Warhol,” C: A Journal of Poetry 1, no. 7 (February 1964): n.p. 44. Kulchur 4, no. 13 (Spring 1964). 45. Lita Hornick quoted in Wolf, Andy Warhol, Poetry, and Gossip, 31. 46. The New York City License Department closed the Gramercy Arts Theater in March 1964, and Jonas Mekas moved his screenings to the New Bowery Theater, where he was arrested for showing Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures. See Banes, Greenwich Village, 75. The next month, Warhol installed his Thirteen Most Wanted Men on the exterior of the 1963 New York Fair Pavilion’s Theaterama, and the authorities ordered it painted over. See Meyer, Outlaw Representation, 128–56. 47. Warhol and Hackett, POPism, 114. 48. Crimp, “Our Kind of Movie,” 48. 49. Between 1964 and 1966, Warhol made hundreds of black-and-white silent-film portrait screen tests of individuals associated with the New York avant-garde. For more information on Warhol’s screen tests, see Callie Angell, Andy Warhol Screen Tests: The Films of Andy Warhol Catalogue Raisonné (New York: Abrams/Whitney Museum of American Art, 2006), vol. 1. Regarding Warhol’s donation of paper for the “Flaming Cock” issue of Fuck You, see Ed Sanders to Andy Warhol, n.d., typewritten thank-you letter, Time Capsule 76, Andy Warhol Museum Archives. 50. Fuck You/a magazine of the arts, no. 5 (“Mad Motherfucker Issue”) (February 1965). The full dedication statement for this issue reads: “Dedicated to: pacifism, national defense through nonviolent resistance, dope-law defiance, freedom for hallucinogens, the Stroboscopic Mind Zap, street-fucking, the LSD Communarium [sic], the Witness of the flaming Ra cock, Acapulco Gold, Honduras Brown, Panamanian Red, Bucks County Mauve, Iowa Chartreuse, dope cactus, the slithering psychopathic Lower East Side young lady pacifist snapping pussy, the Jergens Lotion freak-bugger, multilateral indiscriminate apertural [sic] conjugation, Total Assault On The Culture, & to all those groped by J. Edgar Hoover in the silent halls of congress. Dedicated also to all those who have been depressed, butchered, or hung up by all these family unit nazis, fascists, war-freaks, department of License creeps, fuzz, jansenists, draft boards, parole boards, judges, academic idiots, & tub-thumpers for the Totalitarian Cancer.” The dedication statement changed slightly with each issue. For more information on Sanders and his publications, see Ed Sanders, Fug You:

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An Informal History of the Peace Eye Bookstore, the Fuck You Press, the Fugs, and the Counterculture in the Lower East Side (Philadelphia: Da Capo, 2011). 51. Kane, All Poets Welcome, 65. 52. See Ed Sanders, “Talk of the Town,” Fuck You, no. 5 (February 1965), n.p. 53. For a description of Couch, see J. J. Murphy, The Black Hole of the Camera: The Films of Andy Warhol (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2012), 42–45. 54. Warhol quoted in Smith, Andy Warhol’s Art and Films, 167. 55. Tzarad, no. 2 (October 1966). 56. Aspen 1, no. 3 (December 1966). For more on Aspen, see Allen, Artists’ Magazines, 43–67. 57. Aspen 1, no. 3 (December 1966); and Allen, Artists’ Magazines, 47. 58. Allen, Artists’ Magazines, 47. 59. some/thing 2, no. 1 (special Vietnam issue) (Winter 1966). 60. David Antin, Radical Coherency: Selected Essays on Art and Literature, 1966 to 2005 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 3–4. 61. Jonas Mekas, ed., and Gerard Malanga, guest ed., Film Culture, no. 45 (Andy Warhol issue) (Summer 1967). 62. Jonas Mekas, interview with the author, January 27, 2016. 63. Andy Warhol and Gerard Malanga, eds., Intransit: The Andy Warhol–Gerard Malanga Monster Issue (Eugene, OR: Toad, 1968). 64. “The Northwest’s First Camp Meeting,” ca. May 1968, flyer, Gerard Malanga Papers, SCRC. 65. Crimp, “Our Kind of Movie,” 66. Marc Siegel suggests that we understand the “ethical, erotic, and intimate exchange literalized in Warhol’s cinema as a form of cooperation”— specifically, “a form of cooperation on an aesthetic project of publicizing (queer) countercultural differences and singularities.” Siegel, “Doing It for Andy,” 13. 66. I am paralleling Crimp’s description of the Warhol-Tavel films as “the consequence of the collaboration, a collaboration that must be differentiated from the usual condition of filmmaking, which perforce entails teamwork among writers, directors, producers, technicians, and actors.” Crimp, “Our Kind of Movie,” 50. 67. Rothenberg, “A Little History,” 13–14. 68. Warhol and Hackett, POPism, 93. Sally Banes suggests: “Perhaps the epitome of the alternative communal site was Andy Warhol’s Factory.” Banes, Greenwich Village, 36. 69. Schechner, “Discussion.” 70. Sanders, Fug You, 3. 71. Dave Hickey, Air Guitar: Essays on Art and Democracy (Los Angeles: Art Issues, 1997), 154. 72. Sanders, Fug You, 29. My description is based on Sanders’s accounts of putting together the magazine and his description of the “Bodhisattva Collating Method.” See ibid., 28–31. 73. Sanders, “Talk of the Town,” Fuck You, no. 5 (February 1965), n.p. 74. Ibid. 75. Michael McClure, “Cutout Poems— Make Your Own Poem!!!” and LeRoi Jones, “Word from the Right Wing,” Fuck You, no. 5 (February 1965), n.p. 76. Fuck You, no. 5 (February 1965), n.p. 77. Sanders, Fug You, 31. 78. Sanders identifies Warhol’s flowers as poppies, although they are hibiscus flowers photographed by Patricia Caulfield. As Michael Lobel explains, Warhol’s flowers were hard for viewers to pin down: “In the New York Herald Tribune they were identified as anemones, in the Village Voice as nasturtiums, and in both Arts and Art News as pansies.” See Michael Lobel, “In Transition: Warhol’s Flowers,” in Andy Warhol’s Flowers (New York: Eykyn Maclean, 2012), n.p. Within the psychedelic milieu of Sanders’s readership, the association of Warhol’s flowers with poppies makes sense. See Sanders, Fug You, 128. 79. Sanders, Fug You, 128. 80. The flyer is reproduced in ibid., 129. 81. Ibid. 82. Ibid., 130.

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THREE

1. Warhol and Hackett, POPism, 362. 2. See Steve Watson, Factory Made: Warhol and the Sixties (New York: Pantheon, 2003). 3. See Alexander Alberro, Conceptual Art and the Politics of Publicity (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003), 84–101 (“The Linguistic Turn”); and Liz Kotz, Words to Be Looked At: Language in 1960s Art (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007). 4. Alan Rinzler to Christopher Cerf, December 19, 1966, typewritten letter, Random House Records, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University, New York. 5. Christopher Cerf, interview with the author, October 24, 2013. 6. Promotional material, n.d., Random House Records. 7. Memorandum, n.p., n.d., Random House Records. Two drafts of this memorandum reside in the Random House Records. 8. Cerf, interview. 9. Mary Woronov, Swimming Underground: My Years in the Warhol Factory (Boston: Journey, 1995), 36–37. For Warhol’s account of their stay in the Castle, see Warhol and Hackett, POPism, 209–12. 10. See Joan Jeffers McCleary, The Hippie Dictionary: A Cultural Encyclopedia (and Phraseicon) of the 1960s and 1970s (Berkeley, CA: Ten Speed, 2004), 86, s.v. the Castle. 11. For more on Warhol’s “love of the interactive put-on . . . games of open secrets and winking covers,” see Thomas Waugh, “Cockteaser,” in Doyle, Flatley, and Muñoz, eds., Pop Out, 51–77. 12. Billy Name, interview with the author, April 17, 2011. 13. Cerf, interview. 14. Other texts in the Index (Book) include “Notes on Myepic,” purportedly explanations of Warhol’s art and films in the artist’s own words, a discussion between Ingrid Superstar and International Velvet about the Velvet Underground, and an excerpt of an interview with Warhol that was originally published in Art Voices in December 1962. 15. “Reprinted from the Fire Island News,” in Warhol, Index (Book). 16. Christopher Cerf to David Paul and Alan Rinzler, “Notes on Our Wednesday Meeting with Andy,” April 20, 1967, typewritten memorandum, Random House Records. Three dummies of the book held in the Williams College Museum of Art suggest that numerous design decisions were made to give the book a less crafty aesthetic. For example, previous iterations of the design included torn newspaper clippings and a paper doll of Ingrid Superstar. 17. Cerf, interview. 18. According Billy Name, he, not Warhol, determined the placement of the pop-up elements: “It was a week before it was to go to the printer. . . . I met with Chris Cerf. . . . They brought out all these things and I just found appropriate places.” Billy Name, interview. I think it is likely that Billy Name became involved after Warhol’s first meeting with Cerf, perhaps when the second dummy was shown to Warhol as described in the memorandum. 19. Memorandum, n.d. The reference to Mozart’s opera Così fan tutte is printed on the third page of Index (Book). For similarly playful queerings in Warhol’s 1950s books, see chapter 1. Whether “no two ‘Indexes’ are exactly the same” is unclear from a manufacturing perspective. However, the physical act of reading the book would make each copy unique. As Lynn Theresa Thorpe explains: “Along with the pop-up objects Warhol includes another group of objects in his book, which redefines the reader’s role. These objects engage the viewer in a way that connects his space with the book space, [and] his role as reader becomes, additionally, one of author-performer. The reader has to remove these objects from the book and literally perform with them. There is a record to be played, a piece of paper to submerge in water, and a balloon to blow up.” Thorpe, “Andy Warhol,” 188. 20. Name, interview. 21. This quote is pulled from Ingrid Superstar’s description of the Factory that is printed later in the book. 22. William C. Parker to Christopher Cerf, August 4, 1967, typewritten signed letter, Random House Records. Permissions were also obtained from Hunts and Baby Ruth.

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23. Alan Rinzler to Christopher Cerf, December 19, 1966. 24. “Andy Warhol Party,” invitation list, ca. November 1967, Random House Records. 25. Cerf, interview. 26. See John Dorsey, “A Little Warhol Is Too Much,” Baltimore Sun, January 14, 1968; Tom Fensch, “Warhol’s New Book Moves, Acts, but Something Is Missing— Feeling,” Daily Iowan, January 5, 1968; and William C. Glackin, “Andy Warhol’s New Book (?) Goes Pop,” Sacramento Bee, January 7, 1968. 27. Cerf, interview. 28. Kasper König to Pontus Hultén, n.d., handwritten letter, Moderna Museet Archives, Stockholm. 29. Willem de Rooij, “Willem de Rooij on Andy Warhol,” in Andy Warhol: A Guide to 706 Items in 2 Hours 56 Minutes, ed. Eva Meyer-Hermann, Matt Wrbican, and Andy Warhol (Rotterdam: NAi, 2001), 02:30:00. 30. See Ed Ruscha, Twenty-Six Gasoline Stations (1963), and Every Building on the Sunset Strip (1966). Bernd and Hilla Becher’s Anonyme Skulpturen: Eine Typologie technischer Bauten was published in 1969, the year after Warhol’s Moderna Museet catalog. In regard to the Xerox machine as an artistic medium, Géza Perneczky writes: “The creative application of the xerox machine starts in earnest at the moment when we first make use of the copier’s peculiar feature that it ‘sees’ everything with the same ‘xerox eye’ and puts the images on paper in the same ‘xerox style.’ . . . The copiers apply the same texture everywhere. The copiers have their own ‘initials.’” Géza Perneczky, The Magazine Network: The Trends of Alternative Art in the Light of Their Periodicals, 1968–1988 (Cologne: Soft Geometry, 1993), 89. 31. Olle Granath, “With Andy Warhol 1968,” in Meyer-Hermann, Wrbican, and Warhol, eds., Andy Warhol, 00:13:00. Correspondence in the Moderna Museet Archives suggests that König gathered the clippings about Warhol for Hultén. Hultén writes to König: “The texts at the beginning are going to be only Andy’s own statements, we tried to use some of the other texts but the spirit in them is so different that it really broke the unity of the book. With only Andy’s statements everything is on the same level which is very important in this case, I think.” Hultén to König, December 20, 1967, typewritten letter, Moderna Museet Archives. 32. Hultén and König had trouble deciding on the book’s cover. They discussed using a passenger ticket for the image, or making an inflatable pillow, or having a shiny silver cover that Warhol could stamp when he arrived in Sweden. Eventually, they ran out of time, and Hultén chose the flowers for the cover. Correspondence between Hultén and König, November 1967–January 1968, Moderna Museet Archives. A Swedish Airline ticket was made into a large poster for the show. 33. Gösta Svensson to Pontus Hultén, November 20, 1967, Moderna Museet Archives. Many thanks to Ann Skiold for translating the Swedish for me. 34. Pontus Hultén to George Wittenborn, February 7, 1968, letter articulating the sale price, Moderna Museet Archives. The original print run was twelve thousand. Gösta Svensson to Olle Granath, January 17, 1968, Moderna Museet Archives. When Hultén was approached about printing a second edition, he was enthusiastic because the ten thousand copies of the first edition had sold out in six months. Hultén to Eva Kroy Wisbar of Worldwide Books, January 22, 1969, Moderna Museet Archives. The choice of Warhol’s flower print for the cover, the use of a Xerox machine, and the lowbrow aesthetic of newsprint paper combined to make Andy Warhol more a countercultural object than a traditional exhibition catalog. For a discussion of Warhol’s flower prints, see chapter 2. 35. Andreas Strobl quoted in Schleif, “Carefully Unplanned,” 59. 36. Ibid. 37. Matt Wrbican, conversation with the author, November 14, 2015. 38. For more information on Lane, see Ronald Christ, “The Translator’s Voice: An Interview with Helen R. Lane,” Translation Review 5, no. 1 (1980): 6–18, and “Helen Lane, 1921–2004,” Context, no. 16, http://www.dalkeyarchive.com/helen-lane-1921-2004. 39. Helen R. Lane, Reader’s Report, March 1966, Grove Press Records, SCRC. 40. Ibid.

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41. Andy Warhol, THE Philosophy of Andy Warhol (From A to B and Back Again) (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1988), 95. Warhol says he began taping in 1964, but we know it was July 30, 1965 because the novel documents the delivery of the Norelco camera to the Factory. The most well-known description of Warhol’s novel is the explanatory “Glossary” written by his biographer Victor Bockris, which was added to the back of the 1998 edition of the book. See Bockris, “a: A Glossary,” in Andy Warhol, a: A Novel (1968; reprint, New York: Grove, 1998), 453–58. 42. The manuscript for the novel in the Grove Press Records reveals that these girls are Cathy (“Cappy”) Naso, Iris (“Rosilie”) Weinstein, and Brooky (“Gooki”) whose last name is unclear. Manuscript, Grove Press Records. The audiotapes at the Andy Warhol Museum confirm these names. 43. Warhol, THE Philosophy, 95. 44. Arnold Leo, phone interview with the author, January 27, 2011. 45. The book proposal in the Grove Press Records indicates that the manuscript was due April 1967. Lane’s report is dated March 1966; therefore, it is likely that Warhol submitted the transcripts of the first taping session to Grove, then conducted three separate taping sessions in the summer of 1966 and a final session in May 1967. At some point, Maureen Tucker and Susan Pile were hired to transcribe tapes. Susan Pile confirmed that she was one of the transcribers and that there were transcribers before her. Susan Pile, phone interview with the author, March 30, 2011. The transcripts of the later taping sessions were probably not delivered until Arnold Leo contacted Warhol to begin working on the book. In her report, Lane refers to the manuscript as a “typewritten, word-for-word transcription of an eight-hour tape recording.” Reader’s Report. 46. Leo, phone interview. 47. Press release, ca. November 1968, Grove Press Records. 48. For a discussion of how Warhol’s films were edited to appear unedited, see Branden Joseph, “The Play of Repetition: Andy Warhol’s Sleep,” Grey Room 19 (Spring 2005): 22–53; and Scherman and Dalton, Pop, 179–80. 49. Paul Benzon, “Lost in Transcription: Postwar Typewriting Culture, Andy Warhol’s Bad Book, and the Standardization of Error,” PMLA 125, no. 1 (January 2010): 92–106, 98. 50. Kotz, Words to Be Looked At, 263–65. See also Craig Dworkin, “Whereof One Cannot Speak,” Grey Room, no. 21 (Fall 2005): 46– 69; Peter Krapp, “Andy’s Wedding: Reading Warhol,” in Déjà Vu: Aberrations of Cultural Memory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004), 71–96; Tan Lin, “Warhol’s Aura and the Language of Writing,” Cabinet, no. 4 (Fall 2001), http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/4/lin.php; and Lynne Tillman, “The Last Words Are Andy Warhol,” Grey Room, no. 21 (Fall 2005): 38–45. 51. For more on Grove Press, see Glass, Counterculture Colophon; and Maarten van Gageldonk, “Transatlantic Mediators: Grove Press, Evergreen Review, and Postwar European Literature” (PhD diss., Radboud University, 2016). 52. As Patrick Smith points out: “Throughout a, Ondine is referred to as being ‘O,’ and in a sense, a is a homoerotic Story of O.” Smith, Warhol’s Art and Films, 177. 53. Seymour Krim to Fred Jordan, June 13, 1967, handwritten memorandum, Grove Press Records. Peter Wollen differentiates Warhol’s and Burroughs’s use of the tape recorder: “Burroughs’s paranoid fear of being taken over by alien words and images is the exact converse of Warhol’s ‘reverse-paranoid’ desire to be taken over.” Peter Wollen, “Raiding the Icebox,” in Andy Warhol: Film Factory, ed. Michael O’Pray (London: BFI, 1989), 14–27, 22. 54. Hugh Clark, “The Put-On,” Camden New Jersey Courier-Post, December 18, 1968; “Worst Bet: A Is for Abominable,” New York Magazine, November 25, 1968, 21. John A Weigel refers to a as a “tedious facsimile” and as “something to display as part of your psychedelic collection.” John A Weigel, “‘a’ Day in the Life of Andy Warhol,” Cincinnati Enquirer, January 2, 1969. All newspaper and magazine reviews cited here come from the publicity files of the Grove Press Records. 55. B.W., “Nuts to You, Warhol,” Green Bay (WI) Press-Gazette, April 18, 1969. 56. “A Freaked-Out Life Style, and Andy Warhol’s Thing: ‘a,’” Detroit Free Press, December 15, 1968.

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57. Robert Scholes, review of a, Newsweek, December 2, 1968, excerpted in Book Review Digest, March 1968. 58. Advertisement for a, Inter/VIEW 1, no. 2 (1969): 21. This ad parodies the 1925 ad campaign by Ruthrauff & Ryan for the US School of Music: “They laughed when I sat down at the piano, but when I started to play!” Many thanks to Joan Shelley Rubin for pointing this out. 59. Drawing on the scholarship of Shoshana Felman, Rachel Haidu suggests this reading of Warhol’s tabloid paintings. She writes: “A graphic portrait of the reading-effect of these headlines, rather than the words themselves, is what Warhol is ‘painting’ in this manner.” Haidu, The Absence of Work, 82. 60. Warhol, a (New York: Grove, 1968), 1. All quotations from the novel are from this edition. 61. My interest in skimming the “surface” of this text in order to elicit a new reading of the novel was inspired by Douglas Crimp’s analysis of surface and depth in Warhol’s films. See Crimp, “Our Kind of Movie,” 68–94 (“Spacious”). 62. Warhol, a, 1. 63. Copy of original manuscript and retyped manuscript, Grove Press Records. For previous accounts of the editorial process, see Bockris, “a: A Glossary,” 453; and Warhol and Hackett, POPism, 362. 64. These line breaks were removed before the final printing to bring the text in line with the book’s three formatting styles, which I discuss in the text associated with n. 66. 65. Lane, Reader’s Report. 66. Arnold Leo to J.A., “Re: Test Sample Pages for Andy Warhol’s T We n Ty * FO u r h O u r s ,” n.d., typewritten memorandum, Grove Press Records. 67. Leo, phone interview. 68. Ibid. During the interview, Leo noted that a similar issue arose regarding song lyrics. Music plays in the background of the audiotapes, and the song lyrics are present in the manuscript. On realizing that printing the lyrics would be costly, Leo had them deleted. Thus, throughout the text, we find spans of blank space between parentheses where the lyrics had previously been typed. Leo’s memos about the song lyrics are in the Grove Press Records. 69. Warhol, a, 269–75. 70. Dworkin, “Whereof One Cannot Speak,” 52. 71. Warhol, a, 271. 72. In his “a: A Glossary,” Victor Bockris identifies tape 15 as the one thrown out by the transcriber’s mother. For Warhol’s account of the mother throwing out the tape, see Warhol and Hackett, POPism, 260. The corresponding chapter is only two pages long. Tape 15 is held in the Andy Warhol Museum, and the conversation it records does not correspond to the text in the published chapter. Instead, tape 15 is a continuation of the conversation from side 2 of tape 14. The source for the text in chapter 15 is unknown. 73. The Andy Warhol Museum has identified eighteen tapes for Warhol’s novel. 74. Warhol, THE Philosophy, 95. 75. Leo, phone interview. 76. Arnold Leo to J.A., n.d., typewritten memorandum, Grove Press Records. 77. Leo, phone interview. 78. Billy Name, interview. In a letter to Warhol, Billy Name explains: “The spaces for running heads at the top of the odd-numbered pages were left open to be inserted on these proofs.” Billy Name to Warhol, n.d., handwritten letter, Time Capsule 13, Andy Warhol Museum Archives. 79. Andy Warhol, “Ondine’s Mare,” Evergreen Review 12, no. 58 (September 1968): 26–31, 77. 80. Ibid., 27. 81. Warhol, a, dust jacket. 82. Two years before Warhol began taping Ondine, on December 17, 1963, the New York Times ran a story with the headline “Growth of Overt Homosexuality in City Provokes Wide Concern.” The cause for worry seemed to be less that homosexuals were living in New York City than that they were not hiding their desires and behaviors. See Martin Duberman,

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About Time: Exploring the Gay Past (New York: Meridian, 1986), 238. Duberman reprints the article. 83. Press release, ca. November 1968, Grove Press Records. 84. Warhol, a, 253. 85. Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 261, 263. Bakhtin writes: “The stylistic uniqueness of the novel as a genre consists precisely in the combination of these subordinated, yet still relatively autonomous unities (even at times comprised of different languages) into the higher unity of the work as a whole: the style of a novel is to be found in the combination of its styles; the language of a novel is the system of its ‘languages.’” FOUR

1. The strike was covered extensively in the press. See Damon Stetson, “Mail Carriers Go on Strike in Manhattan and Bronx,” New York Times, March 18, 1970, 1; Robert J. Cole, “City’s Economy Worsens in 2d Day of Postal Strike,” New York Times, March 20, 1970, 1; Homer Bigart, “Walkout Widens: Almost Half of Nation Is Affected— Clerks Here Vote Strike,” New York Times, March 22, 1970, 1; Thomas J. Foley, “N.Y. Mail Sorting by Troops Begins,” Los Angeles Times, March 24, 1970, 1; and Michael T. Kaufman, “Strikers Reject Aid of Young Radicals,” New York Times, March 24, 1970, 36. See also John Walsh and Garth Mangum, Labor Struggle in the Post Office: From Selective Lobbying to Collective Bargaining (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1992). 2. John Tierney, U.S. Postal Service: Status and Prospects of a Public Enterprise (Boston: Auburn, 1988), 11–12. See also John Tierney, Postal Reorganization (Boston: Auburn, 1981). 3. Tierney, U.S. Postal Service, 16–18. The post office was funded by government appropriations rather than its own revenues. 4. 39 U.S.C. §101 (1970). 5. The new law removed the post office from the president’s cabinet and ended the authority of Congress to set wages and postage rates. See Tierney, U.S. Postal Service, and Postal Reorganization; and Walsh and Mangum, Labor Struggle. In regard to the role of the postal service in the public sphere, George Washington wrote: “Magazines, as well as common Gazettes, might spread through every city, town and village in America. I consider such easy vehicles of knowledge, more happily calculated than any other, to preserve the liberty, stimulate the industry and meliorate the morals of an enlightened and free People.” George Washington to Mathew Carey, June 25, 1788, quoted in “Postage Rates for Periodicals: A Narrative History” (Washington, DC: US Postal Service, June 2010), https://about .usps.com/who-we-are/postal-history/periodicals-postage-history.pdf. 6. Tierney, U.S. Postal Service, 28. 7. As Jürgen Habermas explains: “In the course of the shift from a journalism of private men of letters to the public services of the mass media, the sphere of the public was altered by the influx of private interests that received privileged exposure in it— although they were by no means eo ipso representative of the interests of private people as the public. . . . In this process, to be sure, the transformation of the public sphere into a medium of advertising was met halfway by the commercialization of the press.” Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, 188–89. 8. Warhol and Hackett, POPism, 333. 9. Dalton, Pop, 433. 10. Bob Colacello, Holy Terror: Andy Warhol Close Up (New York: Cooper Square, 1990), 60. 11. Dalton, Pop, 433. 12. Warhol and Hackett, POPism, 363. 13. Billy Name to Andy Warhol, n.d., handwritten note on page proof for Warhol’s novel a, Time Capsule 94, Andy Warhol Museum Archives. 14. See Frank DiGiacomo, “A Farewell to Dapper Fred Hughes: He Oversaw Andy’s Factory Empire,” Observer, January 29, 2001; and Warhol and Hackett, POPism, 271–73.

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15. Pat Hackett, introduction to The Andy Warhol Diaries, ed. Pat Hackett (New York: Warner, 1989), xi–xxi, xv. 16. Allen, Artists’ Magazines, 8. 17. Colacello, Holy Terror, 6. 18. Bockris, Warhol, 369–70. Fred Hughes told Patrick Smith: “Gerard was working for us, and Andy had a lot of friends because they were poets or writers, who he thought should be published, and the thought that this was something that was particularly suitable for Gerard to do. . . . Gerard did start it with another friend, Soren Agenoux.” Quoted in Smith, Andy Warhol’s Art and Films, 345. 19. Glenn O’Brien, “Fashioning Interview,” in The Warhol Look: Glamour, Style, Fashion, ed. Mark Francis and Margery King (Boston: Bulfinch, 1997), 232–59, 234. 20. Ibid., 232. 21. Colacello, Holy Terror, 5. 22. Warhol and Hackett, POPism, 367–68. 23. For more on Warhol’s creative subversion of the interview as a form, see Reva Wolf, “Through the Looking Glass,” in Goldsmith, ed., I’ll Be Your Mirror, xi–xxxi. 24. This poetic play on words was Gerard Malanga’s idea. According to Malanga, inter/VIEW was inspired by Charles Henri Ford’s magazine View. As Malanga explained: “Part of View’s editorial success should be credited to Parker Tyler, its Managing Editor. . . . There was always a tension and sense of competition on Charles’s part towards Parker, but what Charles lacked of Parker’s intellectual acumen, he made up for it with his exquisite ontarget eye.” In retrospect, Malanga’s description of Tyler and Ford reads as a metaphor for his collaborative partnership with Warhol, which dissolved soon after the launch of Interview in the fall of 1969. Gerard Malanga, correspondence with the author, August 13, 2013. For more on Warhol’s connection with Charles Henri Ford, see Wolf, Andy Warhol, Poetry, and Gossip, and “I’m OK— You’re OK.” For more on View, see Charles Henri Ford, ed., View: Parade of the Avant-Garde; An Anthology of “View” Magazine (1940–1947) (New York: Thunder’s Mouth, 1991). 25. Soren Agenoux and Agnes Varda, “Lions Love,” Inter/VIEW 1, no. 1 (1969): n.p. 26. The Mike Wallace Interview was a national prime-time television show that ran from 1956 to 1960. In 1968, Wallace cohosted the inaugural broadcast of 60 Minutes. See Mike Wallace and Gary Paul Gates, Between You and Me: A Memoir (New York: Hyperion, 2005). For more on the artist George Brecht, see Kotz, Words to Be Looked At, 59– 98 (“Post-Cagean Aesthetics and the Event Score”). 27. Wolf, “Through the Looking Glass,” xvii. 28. Amy Sullivan, “Interview with Mark Frechette and Daria Halprin,” Inter/VIEW 1, no. 1 (November 1969): n.p. 29. Ted Carey quoted in Smith, Conversations about the Artist, 94. 30. Hal Foster, “Test Subjects,” October, no. 132 (Spring 2010): 30–42, 39. For a sustained analysis of Warhol’s screen tests, see Angell, Andy Warhol Screen Tests. 31. Donovan, ed., Warhol: Headlines, 3. For a related discussion of Warhol’s use of media tactics, see David Joselit, “Yippie Pop: Abbie Hoffman, Andy Warhol, and Sixties Media Politics,” Grey Room, no. 8 (Summer 2002): 62–79. 32. Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, “Andy Warhol’s One-Dimensional Art: 1956–1966,” in Andy Warhol, ed. Annette Michelson (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001), 1–46, 14. 33. See Colacello, Holy Terror; O’Brien, “Fashioning Interview”; Andreas Killen, 1973 Nervous Breakdown: Watergate, Warhol, and the Birth of Post-Sixties America (New York: Bloomsbury, 2006), 137–62 (“Warholism”); Antje Krause-Wahl, “Andy Warhol’s Inter/VIEW— Arbiter of (Queer) Style,” in Fashion Theory: Journal of Dress, Body, and Culture 20, no. 1 (January 2016): 51–80; and Ingrid Sischy and Sandra Brant, eds., Andy Warhol’s Interview: The Crystal Ball of Pop Culture (New York: Steidl/Editions 7L, 2004). 34. “U.S. Postal Service: Statement of Ownership, Management and Circulation,” Andy Warhol’s Interview Magazine 3, no. 10 (October 1973): 46. 35. 39 U.S.C. §3685 (1970). See also “Postage Rates for Periodicals.” 36. Inter/VIEW 1, no. 1 (November 1969): n.p.

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37. John Wilcock quoted in Rose Hartman, “Inside Andy Warhol’s Interview,” Alternative Media 9, no. 4 (July–August 1976): 9–11, 10. See also John Wilcock, The Autobiography and Sex Life of Andy Warhol (New York: Trela Media, 2010), 17. The first edition of Wilcock’s book was published by Other Scenes in 1971, but he originally pitched the book to Chris Cerf at Random House. John Wilcock to Chris Cerf, n.d., typewritten letter, Random House Records. 38. Oscar Collier to Andy Warhol, December 8, 1969, typewritten letter, Time Capsule 10, Andy Warhol Museum Archives. 39. Bourdon, Warhol, 307. I did not see a reference to Hackett as a “pencil pusher” in the issue. If Malanga inserted this comment, perhaps it was deleted before printing. 40. Colacello, Holy Terror, 7–9, 37 (first quote), 40 (second quote). It is unclear whether they also used Wilcock’s distributor as Collier claimed. See Collier to Warhol, n.d., typewritten letter, Andy Warhol Museum Archives. 41. Colacello, Holy Terror, 41, 56. See also Warhol and Hackett, POPism, 58. Charles Rydell was involved with Warhol’s films. See Angell, Andy Warhol Screen Tests, 1:169–70. Jerome Hill’s nephew was Peter Beard, who would be an Interview contributing photographer for many years. 42. Rock was a biweekly newspaper founded in New York City in August 1969 by Larry Marshak, the business manager of the Drifters and the Marvelettes. For a description of how Interview used Rock’s typesetting services, see Colacello, Holy Terror, 56. 43. Warhol quoted in ibid., 44. 44. Ibid., 54. 45. O’Brien, “Fashioning Interview,” 234–35. 46. Steven Heller, “Almost Famous,” Grafik Magazine, no. 166 (2008): 55, http://www.heller books.com/docs/magazines_other.html. 47. Colacello, Holy Terror, 102. For more on Brant-Allen Industries, see David Segal, “For Richer or for . . . Not Quite as Rich,” New York Times, January 23, 2010. 48. See Richard Bernstein, Megastar (New York: Indigo, 1984); and Frank DiGiacomo, “Richard Bernstein, 1939–2002,” New York Observer, November 4, 2002. 49. Bourdon, Warhol, 326. 50. Colacello, Holy Terror, 140 (quote), 139, 256. 51. In July 1974, Peter Lester edited the special British issue of Interview, bumping Rosemary Kent from the masthead, to which she would never return. According to Rose Hartman, within a year of editing the magazine, “Policy differences (as well as her not quite fitting Interview’s image of beauty and elegance) caused Kent to be replaced.” Hartman, “Inside Andy Warhol’s Interview,” 11. 52. Andy Warhol’s Interview, no. 30 (March 1973): front matter. 53. Andy Warhol’s Interview [3, no. 10] (October 1973): statement of ownership. 54. Bockris, Warhol, 370. 55. Bob Colacello, interview with the author, September 7, 2012. 56. In a letter to Hughes, Brant writes: “I am sorry that we could not wait it out with your magazine . . . but the carrying costs became overwhelming and we just could not handle this any longer.” Peter Brant to Fred Hughes, September 25, 1975, typewritten letter, Andy Warhol Archives. See also Colacello, Holy Terror, 262. 57. O’Brien, “Fashioning Interview,” 244– 48. Regular contributing photographers included Greg Gorman, Michael Halsband, David LaChapelle, Erica Lennard, Christopher Makos, Robert Mapplethorpe, Herb Ritts, Michael Tighe, and Bruce Weber. 58. Colacello, Holy Terror, 247. 59. Warhol, Andy Warhol Diaries, 43. 60. Colacello, Holy Terror, 59, 260. 61. Bourdon, Warhol, 327. 62. Carol Felsenthal, Citizen Newhouse: Portrait of a Media Merchant (New York: Seven Stories, 1998), 169. 63. Ibid., 192. 64. Warhol quoted in ibid. For more on Warhol and the fashion world, see Francis and King, eds., The Warhol Look; Stephen Gundle, Glamour: A History (Oxford: Oxford University

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Press, 2008), 306–46 (“Style, Pastiche, and Excess”); Rose Hartman, Birds of Paradise: An Intimate View of the New York Fashion World (New York: Dell, 1980); and Benjamin Stein, “What Bianca Wore at Diana’s Party,” Wall Street Journal, January 31, 1975, 5. 65. Felsenthal, Citizen Newhouse, 192. 66. See Julia Bryan-Wilson, Art Workers: Radical Practice in the Vietnam War Era (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2009); Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, “Conceptual Art, 1962–1969: From the Aesthetic of Administration to the Critique of Institutions,” October, no. 55 (Winter 1990): 105–43; Kirsi Peltomäki, “Affect and Spectatorial Agency: Viewing Institutional Critique in the 1970s,” Art Journal 66, no. 4 (Winter 2007): 36–51; and Ruth Blacksell, “From Looking to Reading: Text-Based Conceptual Art and Typographic Discourse,” Design Issues 29, no. 2 (Spring 2013): 60–81. 67. Bryan-Wilson, Art Workers, 25. 68. Thomas Maier, Newhouse: All the Glitter, Power, and Glory of America’s Richest Media Empire and the Secretive Man behind It (New York: St. Martin’s, 1994), 62, 66, 63, 63– 64 (quoting Vreeland). 69. Barbara Colacello, phone interview with the author, March 2, 2015. 70. Warhol quoted in Colacello, Holy Terror, 239. 71. Barbara Colacello, phone interview with the author. 72. Colacello, Holy Terror, 262. The staff tried running their own survey in the magazine: “Interview would like to interview you. Send in answers.” Andy Warhol’s Interview 4, no. 1 (January 1974): 46. According to the Alliance for Audited Media, Interview was not audited until 1987 and is no longer a member. Diane Giovenco, correspondence with the author, July 13, 2015. 73. Tierney, Postal Reorganization, 139. 74. Colacello, Holy Terror, 262. 75. Pat Hackett recollected: “He’d pass out the magazine to shopkeepers (in hope that they would decide to advertise) and to fans who recognized him in the street and stopped him— he felt good always having something to give them.” Hackett, introduction to The Andy Warhol Diaries, xvii. 76. I have been unable to locate a copy of the survey but believe it was conducted in 1977. Patrick Smith writes: “Two mailings (with autographed publicity photographs of Warhol) were sent to 1,000 subscribers, to which a large number (619, or 64.6 percent) responded.” Smith suggests that Warhol commissioned the survey in 1967, which must be a typo as he dates the survey to 1977 in his footnotes. See Smith, Andy Warhol’s Art and Films, 185, 528 n. 148. A copy of the survey is not held in the Warhol Museum Archives because all documents pertaining to Interview were transferred to Peter Brant when he acquired the magazine after Warhol’s death. I contacted Mark Clements Research, but the survey is no longer in their files. They did confirm that a survey of one thousand subscribers was typical and that the client and the research firm devise the survey questions together. Martin J. Feldman, phone conversation and correspondence with the author, May 31, 2013. 77. Barbara Colacello, phone interview with the author. 78. A closer look at the advertisement explains the asterisk: “Each of 82,000 average monthly copies sold are read by 4.1 people.” Interview 8, no. 1 (January 1978): n.p. 79. Bryan-Wilson, Art Workers, 180. Bryan-Wilson is here drawing on the work of Kirsi Peltomäki. 80. Andreas Killen suggests: “Part of the success of Interview can be traced to the fact that it used unparalleled access to allow the reader to glimpse not merely the image but the work that went into the construction of the image.” Killen, 1973 Nervous Breakdown, 141. Kirsi Peltomäki discusses how institutional critique called on viewers to “detect specific connections between the art institution and the broader social context— a frame that included the viewers themselves.” Peltomäki, “Affect and Spectatorial Agency,” 39. Thus, the reading situation created by Warhol’s magazine and the spectatorial environments of institutional critique are not as different as we may have thought. 81. Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, “Discussion,” in The Work of Andy Warhol, edited by Gary Garrels (Seattle: Bay, 1989), 133.

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82. See Allen, Artists’ Magazines; Victor Brand, In Numbers: Serial Publications by Artists since 1955 (New York: JPR Ringier, 2009); and Perneczky, The Magazine Network. 83. Typewritten questionnaire, n.d., Howardena Pindell Papers, Museum of Modern Art, New York City. Pindell is discussed at length in Allen, Artists’ Magazines. 84. See Smith, Andy Warhol’s Art and Films, 185. 85. Howardena Pindell, “Alternative Space: Artists’ Periodicals,” Print Collectors Newsletter 4 (September–October 1977): 96–109, 120–21, 98. 86. Wolf, “Through the Looking Glass,” xi. 87. Agenoux and Varda, “Lions Love,” n.p. FIVE

1. Warhol, THE Philosophy, 26. For more information on Warhol’s relationship with his tape recorder, see Jean Wainwright, “Warhol’s Wife,” Art Monthly, no. 254 (March 2002): 39–40. Warhol described having intimate relationships with other technologies as well. He said that he “started an affair” with his television, and his acquaintances recalled that he called his telephone his “best friend.” See Bockris, Warhol, 93. 2. Warhol, THE Philosophy, 26. 3. The letter was included in the exhibition Twisted Pair: Marcel Duchamp/Andy Warhol, curated by Matt Wrbican, Warhol Museum, May 23–September 12, 2010. 4. Steven M. L. Aronson to Andy Warhol, September 10, 1974, typewritten letter, Time Capsule 95, Andy Warhol Museum Archives. Aronson was the acquirer and editor of Warhol’s book. William Jovanovich was the longtime chairman of Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. 5. Bob Colacello explains: “We were very insistent on that capitalized THE— we saw it as the real title and the perfect follow-up to Andy’s 1968 novel, a.” Colacello, Holy Terror, 184. When I spoke with Colacello, he reiterated: “The philosophy was just going to be called THE.” Bob Colacello, interview with the author. When I asked Aronson about the title, he explained: “The title was completely theirs.” Steven M. L. Aronson, correspondence with the author, March 14, 2012, June 15, 2017. In POPism, Warhol explains that it was Tennessee Williams who gave them the title “The for free.” Warhol and Hackett, POPism, 171. Thus, I read William Jovanovich’s suggestion for the title as an effort to nuance the original oneword title with a descriptive subtitle: From A to B and Back Again. When Philosophy was added to the subtitle and whose suggestion it was to do so are still unclear. 6. For a discussion of the voice as an object of study, see Mladen Dolar, A Voice and Nothing More (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006). From a different perspective, Michel Chion’s analysis of the relationship between sound and image on screen offers an interesting prompt for thinking about the relationship between voice and text in Warhol’s books. See Michel Chion, Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994). 7. For a discussion of a, see chapter 3. 8. Barbara Goldsmith, “Affectless but Effective: The Philosophy of Andy Warhol,” New York Times, September 14, 1975, 238. 9. Melvin Maddocks, “How to Define an American,” Derrick, April 12, 1975, 4. 10. Edit DeAk, “Autobiography,” Art in America, no. 64 (November–December 1975): 21–23, 23. For more information on DeAk, see Allen, Artists’ Magazines, 121–46 (“The Magazine as an Alternative Space: Art-Rite, 1973–1978”). 11. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich sales catalog, Spring 1975, Time Capsule 108, Andy Warhol Museum Archives. 12. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich promotional brochure, n.d., Time Capsule 137, Andy Warhol Museum Archives. 13. Smith, Andy Warhol’s Art and Films, 581 n. 125. 14. Warhol, THE Philosophy, 7. 15. Peter Plagens, “The Story of A,” Artforum 14 (January 1976): 40–42, 40, 42. 16. These include, among others, Steven M. L. Aronson at Harcourt Brace Jovanovich for THE Philosophy, Peter Brant of Brant Publications for Interview, Christopher Cerf at Random House for the Index (Book), Arnold Leo at Grove Press for a, Craig Nelson at Harper & Row

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for America, and Joseph Wolfson at Grosset & Dunlap for an abandoned series of Andy Warhol books. 17. Warhol, THE Philosophy, front matter. 18. Ibid., 5. 19. Crimp, “Our Kind of Movie,” 46–66 (“Coming Together to Stay Apart”), 48. Gavin Butt also suggests that Warhol’s “peculiar brand of persona building is founded upon getting others to do the talking for him.” Butt, Between You and Me, 108. It is worth noting, however, that, in the case of POPism (1975), Pat Hackett’s name does appear on the cover alongside Warhol’s as coauthor and that, for Andy Warhol’s Exposures (1979), the title page indicates that the text is “by Andy Warhol with Bob Colacello.” 20. Goldsmith, “Affectless but Effective,” 238. 21. Gregory Battcock, “Warhol: Un libro, à la recherche du temps trivial, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol,” Domus, no. 553 (December 1975): 52. Battcock began his career as a painter, starred in several of Warhol’s films, and wrote on a wide range of topics. For more information on him, see Gregory Battcock, Oceans of Love: The Uncontainable Gregory Battcock (New York: Printed Matter/Koenig/Grazer Kunstverein, 2016). 22. Warhol, THE Philosophy, 93, 83. 23. Warhol and Hackett, POPism, 285–86, 276. 24. Ondine quoted in Smith, Andy Warhol’s Art and Films, 430, 429–30. 25. Colacello, Holy Terror, 308. 26. Ondine quoted in Smith, Andy Warhol’s Art and Films, 437–38. 27. Colacello, Holy Terror, 184. 28. Hackett, introduction to The Andy Warhol Diaries, xv. 29. Bob Colacello, interview with the author. In his book, Bob Colacello adds: “A literary assembly line was set up: Bob to Andy to Brigid to Pat to Andy to HBJ [Harcourt Brace Jovanovich], with a quick stop at Fred’s desk, to make sure we didn’t put in anything ‘funny’ about Lee Radziwill or Jackie Onassis.” Colacello, Holy Terror, 208. Patrick Smith also recounts: “Pat Hackett told me she redacted the tapes Warhol had given her. In addition, she used passages from Warhol’s personal scrapbooks of past interviews and criticism. Warhol’s Philosophy represents, then, a careful assemblage of his own ‘readymade’ and ‘found’ material.” Smith, Andy Warhol’s Art and Films, 183, 581 n. 127. 30. Aronson, correspondence with the author. 31. Colacello, Holy Terror, 210. 32. Aronson, correspondence with the author. 33. Steven M. L. Aronson to Paul Gitlin, December 12, 1974, typewritten letter, Time Capsule 101, Andy Warhol Museum Archives. 34. Warhol, THE Philosophy, 170. 35. Ibid., 63, 66. 36. Ibid., 109, On the tape, Warhol speaks in the present tense. One example of Hackett providing an answer to her own question is when she asks Warhol what the most anachronistic thing in existence is today. She comes up with the answer “pregnancy.” Ibid., 117. 37. Ibid., 92, 149. 38. Aronson, correspondence with the author. 39. See Truman Capote, Answered Prayers: The Unfinished Novel (New York: Random House, 1987), 137–80 (“La Côte Basque”). For more information on Haacke, see Brian Wallis, ed., Hans Haacke: Unfinished Business (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1986); and Bryan-Wilson, Art Workers, 173–213 (“Hans Haacke’s Paperwork”). 40. Aronson, correspondence with the author. 41. Colacello, Holy Terror, 207. 42. Aronson, correspondence with the author. 43. Ibid. 44. For more information on the political and economic climate of the time, see Bruce Schulman and Julian Zelizer, Rightward Bound: Making America Conservative in the 1970s (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008). The recession was particularly visible in Manhattan. As Douglas Crimp explains: “New York was going bankrupt, and its infra-

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structure was badly deteriorating, visibly symbolized in late 1973 by the collapse of a section of the elevated West Side Highway under the weight of an asphalt-laden repair truck.” Douglas Crimp, “Action around the Edges,” in Mixed Use, Manhattan: Photography and Related Practices, 1970s to the Present (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010), 83–129, 117. 45. Bill Jovanovich to Andy Warhol, February 26, 1975, handwritten letter, Time Capsule 113, Andy Warhol Museum Archives. 46. See Andy Warhol, “Secrets of My Life,” New York, March 31, 1975, “Inside Andy Warhol,” Cosmopolitan, September 1975, 187– 89, 194, and “Love Is Never Having to Say Anything,” Oui, May 1975, 59–60, 131–33. 47. DeAk, “Autobiography,” 21, 23. 48. Leo Castelli gave the kickoff party on September 10 at his gallery on West Broadway. Bob Colacello writes about the Castelli party: “[There was a] conspicuous absence of Leo’s other star artists— Rauschenberg, Johns, Lichtenstein, and Stella. My diary records only one artist, David Hockney, with Henry Geldzahler as usual; two writers, Fran Lebowitz and Jonathan Lieberson; and enough interior decorators to furnish every loft in the neighborhood.” Colacello, Holy Terror, 309. According to Steven M. L. Aronson: “Three days later Halston turned his spectacular Paul Rudolph house on East 63 Street into a discothequecum-supper-club to fête Andy and the book— I remember that Elton John, Valentino, John Schlesinger, Baron von Krupp, Elsie Woodward, and Elsa Peretti were all there.” Correspondence with the author. 49. According to Bob Colacello, Pat wasn’t invited on the tour because Andy worried that “she might start saying she wrote it.” Colacello, Holy Terror, 308. 50. Ibid., 309–10, 311. 51. Ibid., 315. 52. John Waters to Andy Warhol, August 25, 1975, handwritten postcard, Time Capsule 113, Andy Warhol Museum Archives. 53. David Mann to Andy Warhol, September 10, 1975, handwritten letter, Time Capsule 137, Andy Warhol Museum Archives. 54. Roxanne [no surname given] to Andy Warhol, August 21, 1975, handwritten letter, Time Capsule 113, Andy Warhol Museum Archives. 55. Rick Santon to Andy Warhol, postmark February 8, 1976, Cleveland, handwritten letter, Time Capsule 138, Andy Warhol Museum Archives. 56. Aronson, correspondence with the author. SIX

1. “On the eve of its centennial, one of America’s most important national symbols, the Statue of Liberty, is being restored through a public-private partnership that is expecting to raise $265 million.” Report to the Chairman, Subcommittee on National Parks and Recreation, Committee on Interior and Insular Affairs, House of Representatives (Washington, DC: US General Accounting Office, June 1986). See also “Statue of Liberty Will Be Closed for Restoration in 1984 for as Long as a Year,” New York Times, November 7, 1982, 50; and Martin Gottlieb, “Statue of Liberty’s Repair: A Marketing Saga: A Corporate Marketing Effort Fuels Fund Drive for the Statue of Liberty,” New York Times, November 3, 1985, 1. 2. Andy Warhol, radio interview with Bob Edwards, broadcast November 14, 1985, National Public Radio Archives, Special Collections in Mass Media and Culture, University of Maryland, College Park, MD. One of Warhol’s early jobs was creating weather drawings for CBS. See Hackett, ed., The Andy Warhol Diaries, 805. For more on Warhol and television, see Lynn Spigel, “Warhol TV: From Media Scandals to Everyday Boredom,” in TV by Design: Modern Art and the Rise of Network Television (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 251–83. 3. Andy Warhol, America (New York: Harper & Row, 1985), book cover, 8. 4. Larry Frascella, review of “Andy Warhol’s America,” Aperture, no. 103 (Summer 1986): 12– 14, 13. Warhol more typically used we rather than I when discussing his life and work. For more on Warhol and the interview format, see Wolf, “Through the Looking Glass.” 5. Raphael Kadushin, “Will the Real American Patriot Please Stand Up,” Capital Times,

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November 9, 1985, 9. Kadushin goes on to suggest: “This self-professed love-letter to America is really a parody, a swift kick in the New Patriot’s pants.” Ibid. 6. R.N., “America by Andy Warhol,” People, November 18, 1985, 18. 7. Trevor Fairbrother, “Mirror, Shadow, Figment: Andy Warhol’s America,” in Andy Warhol Social Observer, curated by Jonathan P. Binstock (Philadelphia: Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, 2000), 33. 8. Andy Warhol, radio interview with Bob Edwards. 9. Jean Baudrillard writes: “Therein lies all the duplicity of contemporary art: asserting nullity, insignificance, meaninglessness, striving for nullity when already null and void. Striving for emptiness when already empty. Claiming superficiality in superficial terms. . . . The poetic operation is to make Nothingness rise from the power of signs— not banality or indifference toward reality but radical illusion. Warhol is thus truly null, in the sense that he reintroduces nothingness into the heart of the image. He turns nullity and insignificance into an event that he changes into a fatal strategy of the image.” Jean Baudrillard, The Conspiracy of Art (New York: Semiotexte, 2005), 27–28. From a different angle, John Michael writes: “In discourse, at least, the United States remains the land of opportunity, the home of the free, the world’s greatest democracy. In reality, the history and legacy of exclusion, oppression, and disenfranchisement of blacks, women, and the poor indicate the nation’s failure to fulfill its promise. The peculiarity of identity in the United State emerges in the contestations between those prescribed identities, the injustices they have borne, and a national identity promising justice to all.” John Michael, Identity and the Failure of America: From Thomas Jefferson to the War on Terror (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 3. 10. Warhol, Andy Warhol Diaries, 530. 11. Craig Nelson, interview with the author, October 25, 2013. 12. Craig Nelson to Andy Warhol, July 13, 1983, typewritten letter and proposal, Time Capsule 370, Andy Warhol Museum Archives. 13. Ibid. Exposures is a book of photographs of celebrities by Warhol with text by Warhol and Bob Colacello, designed by Chris Makos, and published by Grosset & Dunlap in 1980. Exposures was to be the first in a series of books that Warhol and Grosset & Dunlap would jointly publish. See Richard R. Lingeman, “Publishing: Warhol Productions,” New York Times, August 6, 1976, C17. 14. Nelson to Warhol, typewritten letter and proposal. Coincidentally, the television show Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous debuted the year after Nelson’s proposal and the year before the publication of Warhol’s book. 15. Nelson to Warhol, typewritten letter and proposal. 16. Warhol, Andy Warhol Diaries, 617. 17. The archives of most major publishing houses drop off in the 1970s and 1980s, presumably because the office records for books published during those years are still active (living authors still receiving royalties, titles still in print) and, therefore, the files have not yet been transferred to scholarly repositories. The Harper & Row Publishers Records, which are held by Columbia University’s Rare Books and Manuscript Library, end in 1973. 18. Craig Nelson, interview with the author. 19. Frascella, review of “Andy Warhol’s America,” 13. 20. Fairbrother, “Mirror, Shadow, Figment,” 34, 37, 36. 21. Alison Pearlman, Unpacking Art of the 1980s (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 9. 22. Craig Nelson, interview with the author. Laurie Anderson’s “O Superman” rose to number two on the British pop charts in 1981, and she signed a six-record deal with Warner Brothers Records. As Sara Laschever reported: “Now, using photographs of the stage show, specially designed graphics and what is presumably the text of the original work, she has tried to repeat that success in a book—UNITED STATES (Harper & Row, Cloth, $29.95. Paper, $19.95).” New York Times, August 12, 1984, 7. 23. RoseLee Goldberg, Laurie Anderson (New York: Harry Abrams, 2000), 86, 12. 24. Louis Menand, “Laurie Anderson’s America,” in American Studies (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 2002), 239–43, 242–43.

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25. Craig Owens, Beyond Recognition: Representation, Power, and Culture (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1992), 71– 72. Owens is discussing Laurie Anderson’s Americans on the Move, which was presented at the Kitchen Center for Video, Music, and Dance in April 1979. In October 1980 at the Orpheum Theatre, Anderson repurposed material from that performance in United States, Part II, which Owens reviewed for Art in America. See Craig Owens, “Amplifications: Laurie Anderson,” Art in America 69, no. 3 (March 1981): 121–23. Anderson presented the material again in her performance of United States at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in February 1983, the performance on which her book was based. The “allegorical impulse,” according to Owens, is defined by strategies of “appropriation, site specificity, impermanence, accumulation, discursivity, hybridization.” Owens, Beyond Recognition, 58. See also Bart Testa, “The Epic of Concatenation: On Amerika and United States,” C Magazine: International Contemporary Art, no. 10 (Summer 1986): 46– 55. 26. Marilyn Sanders, “Gift Books 1985 Photography,” Los Angeles Times, December 22, 1985, 4. 27. Mary Battiata, “Warhol and Remembrance: The Picture Book,” Washington Post, November 1, 1985, B1. 28. Warhol quoted in ibid. 29. Cheryl Lavin, “The Soup Can Kid: Artist Andy Warhol Says His 15 Minutes of Fame Are Over,” Winnipeg Free Press, December 7, 1985, 17. 30. Here, Peter Schjeldahl is describing how the art world often viewed Warhol’s later art, an attitude that certainly characterizes the reception of America, in his review of the exhibition Andy Warhol: The Last Decade. See Peter Schjeldahl, “Late Great,” New Yorker, August 9, 2010, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/08/09/late-great. 31. Craig Owens writes of the “unavoidable necessity of participating in the very activity that is being denounced precisely in order to denounce it.” Owens, Beyond Recognition, 85. While I agree with Owens, some of Laurie Anderson’s works and comments strike me as unsympathetically egotistic. For example, Anderson told David Sterritt of the Christian Science Monitor: “At first I didn’t know how people would take my work, but it’s turned out very well. Audiences are smarter than I thought.” David Sterritt, “Laurie Anderson’s Multimedia Blitz,” Christian Science Monitor, January 31, 1983. 32. Warhol, America, 110. This text first appeared in Warhol and Hackett, POPism, 44. 33. Warhol, America, 112. 34. Jonathan Flatley, “Warhol Gives Good Face: Publicity and the Politics of Prosopopoeia,” in Doyle, Flatley, and Muñoz, eds., Pop Out, 101–33, 101, 102. 35. Laurie Anderson, “Part One: Say Hello,” in United States (New York: Harper & Row, 1984), n.p. 36. Owens, Beyond Recognition, 70. Owens quotes the earlier version of Anderson’s text from Americans on the Move, which was published in October 8 (Spring 1979): 45–57. That version reads: “You know when you’re driving at night like this it can suddenly occur to you that maybe you’re going in completely the wrong direction. That turn you took back there . . . you were really tired and it was dark and raining and you took the turn and you just started going that way and then the rain stops and it starts to get light and you look around and absolutely everything is completely unfamiliar. You know you’ve never been here before and you pull into the next station and you feel so awkward saying, ‘Excuse me, can you tell me where I am?’” 37. Anderson, “Part One,” n.p. 38. David Campany, The Open Road: Photography and the American Road Trip (New York: Aperture, 2014), 13, 8. 39. Martin Parr and Gerry Badger, The Photobook: A History, 3 vols. (London: Phaidon, 2004– 14), 1:4. 40. Nelson, interview with the author. 41. Winogrand quoted in Campany, The Open Road, 82. 42. Blake Stimson, The Pivot of the World: Photography and Its Nation (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), 111, 109. See also Sarah Greenough, Looking In: Robert Frank’s “The Americans” (Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 2009); and Tod Papageorge, Walker Evans and Robert Frank: An Essay on Influence (New Haven, CT: Yale University Art Gallery, 1981). Grove

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Press published the first American edition of Frank’s The Americans in 1959 and then, in 2015, Grove Atlantic published a modified edition of Warhol’s America. 43. I am here borrowing John Szarkowski’s famous formulation of the two modes of photographic practice. See John Szarkowski, Mirrors and Windows: America Photography since 1960 (New York: Little, Brown, 1978). 44. Papageorge, Walker Evans and Robert Frank, 4. 45. Stimson, The Pivot of the World, 114–15. 46. Warhol, America, book cover. 47. The layout of the first edition of Frank’s book was not as minimal as the canonical Grove Press edition. First published in France in 1958 by Robert Delpire under the title Les Americains, Frank’s photographs were accompanied by excerpts of texts by several notable writers, including Simone de Beauvoir, William Faulkner, and John Steinbeck. 48. Ellen Gruber Garvey, Writing with Scissors: American Scrapbooks from the Civil War to the Harlem Renaissance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 4. 49. See Ellen Gruber Garvey, The Adman in the Parlor: Magazines and the Gendering of Consumer Culture, 1880s to 1910s (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996). 50. Katherine Ott, Susan Tucker, and Patricia P. Buckler, History of the Scrapbook in American Life (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2006), 3, 10. 51. Joseph D. Ketner et al., eds., Andy Warhol: The Last Decade (Milwaukee: Milwaukee Art Museum, 2009), 22. 52. Nelson, interview with the author. 53. See Warhol and Hackett, POPism, 44–52. 54. “America is really The Beautiful. But it would be more beautiful if everybody had enough money to live. Beautiful jails for Beautiful People.” Warhol, THE Philosophy, 71. 55. Warhol, America, 21–22. 56. Warhol, THE Philosophy, 100–101. 57. Nelson, interview with the author. 58. Ibid. According to Nelson, America includes photographs by Chris Makos, Paige Powell, the paparazzo Ron Galella, the socialite Cornelia Guest, and Nelson himself. Trevor Fairbrother explains: “Like many of his other projects, Warhol inspired rather than conceived America.” Fairbrother, “Mirror, Shadow, Figment,” 33. 59. Warhol, America, 131, 99, 165. See Robert Frank, The Americans (New York: Grove, 1959), n.p. 60. Barbara Richer, interview with the author, December 12, 2015, June 5, 2017. 61. Warhol agreed to a minimum of three weeks of book promotion. In exchange, Harper & Row agreed to provide first-class accommodations for him and an assistant, and he was given $25,000 as a promotional guarantee. Craig Nelson to Mrs. Carlton Cole, September 12, 1983, typewritten letter, Time Capsule 422, Andy Warhol Museum Archives. 62. Craig Nelson to Andy Warhol, September 25, 1985, typewritten letter, Time Capsule 84, Andy Warhol Museum Archives. 63. Craig Nelson to Andy Warhol, n.d., typewritten letter with attached publicity-tour itinerary, Time Capsule 451, Andy Warhol Museum Archives. 64. Nelson, interview with the author. 65. Warhol, Andy Warhol Diaries, 688. 66. Ibid., 689. 67. Ibid., 691. 68. Warner, Publics and Counterpublics, 171. Mark Seltzer suggests: “The spectacle of violent crime provides a point of attraction and identification, an intense individualization of these social conditions, albeit a socialization via the media spectacle of wounding and victimization.” Mark Seltzer, True Crime: Observations on Violence and Modernity (New York: Routledge, 2007), 10. Susan Sontag writes: “Photographs objectify: they turn an event or a person into something that can be possessed.” Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 2003), 81. 69. Warhol, America, 126–29. 70. See Andy Warhol and John L. Marion, The Andy Warhol Collection: Sold for the Benefit of the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, 6 vols. (New York: Sotheby’s, 1988). See also Cath-

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71. 72. 73.

74.

75. 76. 77.

78.

leen McGuigan, “The Selling of Andy Warhol,” Newsweek, April 18, 1988; and John Smith, ed., Possession Obsession: Andy Warhol and Collecting (Pittsburgh: Andy Warhol Museum, 2002). Steven M. L. Aronson, correspondence with the author, December 15, 2015, June 15, 2017. Hackett, introduction to The Andy Warhol Diaries, xix, xviii. Aronson, correspondence with the author, December 15, 2015. See also “Warner Books Acquires Andy Warhol Diaries,” New York Times, June 6, 1987, 54; and Edwin McDowell, “Book Notes,” New York Times, May 24, 1989, C22. Aronson, correspondence with the author, December 15, 2015, June 15, 2017. Others supplied an index within months. USA Today reported: “Fame’s September issue includes an index to the 807-page book that’s designed to be torn out and inserted in the Memoir.” Tom Gliatto, “Finally, a Warhol Index,” USA Today, July 6, 1989. Spy magazine also published an unauthorized index to Warhol’s diaries that was sponsored by Absolute Vodka and titled “Think of All the Random Bitchiness in Andy Warhol’s Published Diaries. Imagine If They Had an Index. Well, Now They Do.” Spy, August 1989. The sale of Interview magazine was timed to coincide with the release of the Diaries. “A source close to the Interview negotiations said the price was about $10 million. Mrs. [Sandra] Brant will become the publisher of the magazine, replacing Fred Hughes.” Financial Desk, “Interview Magazine Is Sold,” New York Times, May 9, 1989, D22. Pat Hackett quoted in Ann Trebble, “Andy’s ‘Diaries’ Stirs Up the Town,” USA Today, May 16, 1989. These quotes are printed on the cover of the trade edition of the Diaries. Craig Owens’s discussion of allegory as “the fragmentary, the imperfect, the incomplete” inspired my thinking about Warhol’s last book. Owens points to a passage in Walter Benjamin’s Origin of Tragic Drama that poetically articulates how I view Warhol’s America: “In allegory the observer is confronted with the facies hippocratica of history as a petrified, primordial landscape. Everything about history that, from the very beginning, had been untimely, sorrowful, unsuccessful, is expressed in a face— or rather in a death’s head. And although such a thing lacks all ‘symbolic’ freedom of expression, all classical proportion, all humanity— nevertheless, this is the form in which man’s subjection to nature is most obvious and it significantly gives rise to not only the enigmatic question of the nature of human existence as such, but also of the biographical historicity of the individual. This is the heart of the allegorical way of seeing.” Quoted in Owens, Beyond Recognition, 55. Warhol, THE Philosophy, 10.

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INDEX Page numbers in italics refer to illustrations. a (Warhol novel), 1; appearance of being unplanned and unedited, 57, 76, 83; and chance and error, 85, 121; critical reception, 77–78; deleted song lyrics, 172n68; display advertisement for in Interview, 79; double-page spread of in Evergreen Review, 85–86, 86; editing for narrative continuity, 84, 116; formatting styles, 83, 172n64; and glossary by Bockris, 171n41, 172n63, 172n72; Grove’s press release for, 86–87; impetus for, 74; list of sounds, 78, 80; Ondine’s performance and invisibility in, 87–88; original title, 85; premise of, 74–75, 84, 86; production elements as part of content, 77; promotion of, 78; scholarly views of, 76–77; strategic pseudonyms, 83–84; stylized text, 80; tape-based durational structure, 84; transcribers of tapes, 74, 171n42, 171n45; two differing copies of first page showing editorial process, 80–84, 81–82 Adams, Thomas R., 5 Agenoux, Soren, 42, 46, 94, 99, 112, 174n18 Allen, Barbara, 103 Allen, Donald, 33 Allen, Gwen, 45 Allen, Joe, 102, 103 Alwood, Edward, 17 America (Warhol photobook), 1, 6; as allegory of a life, 155, 183n77; and authorial voice, 137, 139; as autobiographical narrative, 145–46; and conventions of publishing, 136; cover and title page of (Statue of Liberty), 133, 134–35; display advertisement for book signing at Rizzoli Bookstore, 153; double-page spread from (chapter 6, National Geo), 142–43; doublepage spread from (wrestlers), 148–49; “golden oldies,” 146–47; photographs by various individuals, 182n58; photographs of celebrities, 145; process of composing, 147, 150; production of, 137–39; Rizzoli Bookstore incident, 151–52; road trip theme, 140–46, 150; scrapbook design in form of mass-market picture book, 136–37; on shopping and consumer

choices, 146–47; typeface, 136; Warhol’s promotional tour for, 137, 150–52, 182n61 Amphetamine Head— a Study of Power in America (Sanders film), 53 Anderson, Benedict, 163n47 Anderson, Laurie, 181n31; Americans on the Move, 181n25, 181n36; United States, 139–40, 141, 144, 180n22, 181n25 Andress, Ursula, 124 Andy Warhol (exhibition catalog), 1, 6, 57; described as a work in invitation to exhibition, 69; double page spreads from, 70–73; flower print on cover, 68, 170n34; minimal involvement of Warhol in creation of, 68–69; sequences of photographs by Billy Name and Stephen Shore, 68; use of Xerox machine, 67–68, 170n34 Andy Warhol Enterprises, Inc., 92 Andy Warhol Foundation, 116 Andy Warhol Museum Archives, 6, 113, 116, 138 Andy Warhol’s Exposures (Warhol and Colacello), 138, 178n19, 180n13 Andy Warhol’s Index (Book), 1, 6, 57–67; book party invitation list, 66; design decisions, 169n16; display advertisement mock-up for (“Christmas Anyone?”), 59; double-page spreads from, 62–65; “Nose Job,” 60, 61; objects that redefine role of reader, 169n19; process of making, 61; reference to Cosi fan tutte, 169n19; Robin Hood’s castle pop-up, 60; texts of, 169n14; title page, 61, 66 Anthology Film Archives, 100 Antin, David, 33, 45–46 Antonioni, Michelangelo, 95 Aronson, Steven M. L.: and Warhol’s Diaries, 154–55; and Warhol’s rejected collaboration with Goddard, 128; and Warhol’s THE Philosophy, 113–14, 116, 119, 123, 124, 127–29, 177n4 artists’ books, 3–6; defined, 159n8; emergence of in 1960s, 3; linking of medium, message, and mode of reading, 5; and mass culture, 4; Warhol’s radical rethinking of, 69

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Art Workers Coalition (AWC), 107 Ashbery, John, 33, 40 Ashmead, Larry, 138 Aspen, Warhol’s issue, 1, 45 Auden, W. H., 53, 55 automobile, and American modernity, 144 Azoulay, Ariella, 5 “bad books.” See a (Warhol novel); Andy Warhol (exhibition catalog); Andy Warhol’s Index (Book) Bakhtin, Mikhail, 88, 173n85 Balet, Marc, 104 Banes, Sally, 5, 165n13 Barker, Nicolas, 5 Barnes, Djuna, 35 Barrett, Rona, 128 Barry, Robert, 57 Battcock, Gregory, 120–21, 178n21 Baudrillard, Jean, 137, 180n9 B. Dalton Books window display for Warhol’s POPism, 2 Beard, Peter, 175n41 Beaton, Cecil, 13 Beausoleil, Bobby, 124 Becher, Bernd and Hilla, 68, 170n30 Beckett, Samuel, 77 Bellamy, Richard, 38 Benjamin, Walter, 31, 183n77 Benzon, Paul, 76, 85 Bergdorf Goodman, 9 Berlin, Brigid “Polk,” 57, 118–19, 120, 122–23, 124, 127, 165n15. See also “Duchess, the” Berlin, Seymour, 164n63, 164n65 Bernstein, Richard, 102, 104 Berrigan, Ted, 40, 41, 46, 53, 166n30, 166n33 Biller, Moe, 89, 90 Binghamton Birdie, 45 Bischofberger, Bruno, 102, 103 blotted-line drawing, 11; method of, 15–16; subversion of ideas of artistic authorship, 16 Blum, Irving, 39 Bockris, Victor: “a: A Glossary,” 171n41, 172n63, 172n72; Warhol, 11, 26, 103, 161n11 Bodley Gallery, New York, 9, 38–39, 132; Studies for a Boy Book, Warhol exhibition, 13 Bontecou, Lee, 38 Bonwit Teller: Warhol’s paintings in FiftySeventh Street windows, 39; Warhol’s window display for Carnet de Bal by Revillon, 29–32, 29 Bourdieu, Pierre, 107 Bourdon, David, 99, 102, 106 “Boy Book” (unpublished Warhol book), 13. See also Studies for a Boy Book, Warhol exhibition, Bodley Gallery Brainard, Joe, 40, 46 Brant, Peter, 96–97, 102, 103, 104, 175n56

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Index

Brant, Sandy, 103, 183n74 Braun, Raymond, 162n26 Brecht, George, 3, 45, 94 Brillo Box sculptures (Warhol), 45, 68 Bruce, Stephen, 8, 9, 12, 162n26 Bryan-Wilson, Julia, 107, 109 Buchloh, Benjamin H. D., 109 Buckler, Patricia P., 146 Bukowski, Charles, 45 Buren, Daniel, 4, 107 Burroughs, William, 35, 38, 56, 77, 171n53; Naked Lunch, 77 Butler, Judith, 24 Butt, Gavin, 5, 166n27, 178n19 Buzzards over Bagdad (Jack Smith film), 45 cabaret laws, New York City, 35 Caffe Borgia, New York, 35 Cage, John, 3, 38 C: A Journal of Poetry: Padgett’s sonnet about Warhol’s film Sleep, 42–43; Warhol’s back and front covers of Denby issue, 40–41, 41, 166n30, 166n33, 167n36, 167n40 Cale, John, 46 Campany, David, 144 Campbell, Joe, 91 Campbell Soup Company, 66 Campbell Soup paintings (Warhol), 66, 146, 166n23 Capote, Truman: Answered Prayers, 128; blurb for Warhol’s THE Philosophy, 129; Other Voices, Other Rooms, 11, 17–18, 19; Warhol’s suite of book illustrations based on Other Voices, Other Rooms, 11 Carey, Ted, 13, 15, 36, 38, 166n24 Carradine, Patch, 8, 9 Castelli, Leo, 38, 129, 179n48 cats: mentioned in cards and letters, 26–28; and Warhol’s public persona, 25–26. See also 25 Cats Name Sam and One Blue Pussy (Warhol) Caulfield, Patricia, 168n78 Cerf, Bennett, 58 Cerf, Christopher, and Andy Warhol’s Index (Book), 57–61, 58, 66–67, 69, 169n18 Cernovich, Nick, 36 Chamberlain, Wynn, 41, 141 Chauncey, George, 161n9 Chelsea Girls (Warhol film), 75, 120 Chion, Michel, 177n6 Chopin, Frédéric, 10 Christo, 4 Cinemabilia (movie memorabilia shop), 99, 100 “Cock Book” (unpublished Warhol book), 13, 15 Colacello, Barbara, 108–9 Colacello, Bob: Holy Terror, 97; and Interview magazine, 99–102, 104, 106, 108–9, 111; and Warhol’s Exposures, 178n19, 180n13; and Warhol’s Factory, 118; and Warhol’s rejected

collaboration with Goddard, 128; and Warhol’s THE Philosophy, 119, 120, 121–23, 177n5, 178n29 Cole, Roz, 122, 138 Collins, Rufus, 45, 53, 54 “communications circuit,” 5 Corso, Gregory, 38, 45 Couch (Warhol film), 45, 53; on the cover of Fuck You, 54 counterpublics, 15, 20, 163n33 cover designs for journals. See little magazines, Warhol’s participation in Creeley, Robert, 33 Crimp, Douglas, 5, 43–44, 47, 119, 157, 164n66, 168n66, 172n61, 178n44 Cunningham, Merce, 38 Curley, John, 20 Cutrone, Ronald, 46 Daley, John, 42 Dalton, David, 45, 166n23 Darling, Candy, 121, 122 Darnton, Robert, 5 de Acosta, Mercedes, 27, 28 DeAk, Edit, 117 Dean, Dorothy, 91 de Menil, John and Dominique, 92 Denby, Edwin: on cover of C, 40–41, 41; in special issue of Intransit, 46 de Rooij, Willem, 67 Deutsche, Rosalyn, 5, 16 Diaries (Warhol): and America, 137–38; best seller, 155; and Hackett, 139, 152, 154–55; indexes to, 183n74; and Interview, 104, 106; process of writing, 154–55 Dine, Jim, 38 di Prima, Diane, 33, 42, 47 Donovan, Molly, 96 Dorval, Marie, 10 Drucker, Johanna, The Century of Artists’ Books, 159n8 du Ball, Irving, 86 Duberman, Martin, 172n82 Duchamp, Marcel, 35 “Duchess, the,” 38, 86. See also Berlin, Brigid “Polk” Duncan, Isadora, 35 Duncan, Robert, 46 Dworkin, Craig, 84 Dylan, Bob, 45, 60 edited magazine issues. See little magazines, Warhol’s participation in Edwards, Bob, 133 Eighth Street Bookshop, 36 Electric Chair prints (Warhol), 102 Elkon, Robert, 38 Emerson, Eric, 46

Epstein, Jason, 56 Evans, Walker, American Photographs, 1, 136, 144–45 Evergreen Review, 77; double-page spread on Warhol’s a, 85–86, 86 exhibition catalog. See Andy Warhol (exhibition catalog) Exploding Plastic Inevitable Newspaper, 45 Exposures (Warhol and Colacello). See Andy Warhol’s Exposures (Warhol and Colacello) Fainlight, Harry, 53 Fairbrother, Trevor, 18, 139, 164n59, 182n58 Faulkner, William, 35 Felman, Shoshana, 172n59 Felsenthal, Carol, 106–7 female impersonators, 165n83 Ferlinghetti, Lawrence, 33, 53 Ferus Gallery, Los Angeles, 41, 141 Film Culture: frame from Warhol’s film Sleep on cover, 42; 1967 special Warhol issue, 46, 48–51 Film-Makers’ Cooperative, 36 Fitzsimmons, James, 11, 162n14 Flatley, Jonathan, 5, 15, 141, 164n66 Flesh (Warhol film), 93 Floating Bear, The, 38; “Billy Linich’s Party,” 42; Warhol’s involvement with, 42, 167n40 “Foot Book” (unpublished Warhol book), 13 Ford, Charles Henri, 9, 46, 174n24 Foster, Hal, 96 Foucault, Michel, and author-function, 163n40 Frank, Robert, The Americans, 1, 136, 144–45, 181n42, 182n47 Frankfurt, Suzie, 13 Frascella, Larry, 137, 139 Fraser, Nancy, 15 Frechette, Mark, 95 Fremont, Vincent, 123, 124, 127 Fuck You/a magazine of the arts: anniversary issue, 45, 52–56; dedication statement, 167n50; frame from Warhol’s Couch on cover of anniversary issue, 1, 45, 53, 54; “Talk of the Town,” 53; Warhol’s involvement with, 1, 44–45, 167n49 Gainsborough, Thomas, Blue Boy, 27 Galella, Ron, 182n58 Galster, Robert, 163n37 Garbo, Greta, 27 Garvey, Ellen Gruber, 146 gay-liberation movement, 17 gay men: and affirmative concepts of selves, 161n9; and the Kinsey report, 17; in postwar mass media, 17–18; and theorization of Warhol’s work, 5; and visibility, 31; and Ward’s poem about Rousseau, 10; and Warhol’s selfpublished books, 20, 164n59. See also Capote, Truman: Other Voices, Other Rooms

Index

187

Gilbert, Sally, 106 Ginsberg, Allen, 35, 45, 46, 53 Giordano, Joe, 162n28 Gitlin, Paul, 124 Gluck, Nathan, 24 Goddard, Paulette: with Colacello and Warhol, ca. 1973, 129; Warhol’s contract to collaborate on her memoirs, 128 Goldsmith, Barbara, review of Warhol’s THE Philosophy, 116, 120 Goldstein, Al, 93 González-Torres, Félix, 4 Graphics International, 58, 59, 61 Greenwich Village, 35–36 Grosset & Dunlap, 180n13 Grove Press, 1, 69, 77–78, 85, 86–87, 181n42 Gruen, John, 40 Guest, Cornelia, 182n58 Guinness, Catherine, 111 Haacke, Hans, 107, 128 Habermas, Jürgen, 163n39, 173n7 Hackett, Pat, 92, 99, 176n75; and THE Philosophy, 118–20, 122–24, 125, 127, 179n49; and Warhol’s Diaries, 139, 152, 154–55 Haidu, Rachel, 5, 172n59 haircut films (Warhol), 42 Hallmark Cards, acquisition of Graphics International, 58 Halprin, Daria, 95–96 Halston, 129, 130, 179n48 Halston window display, designed by Warhol and Hugo, 130 Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 2; display ad for THE Philosophy in Interview, 118; manuscript page for THE Philosophy, 126; and THE Philosophy, 113–14, 117, 123–24, 128–29 Harlot (Warhol film), 43 Harper & Row: and Warhol’s America, 137–39; Warhol’s three-book deal with, 139 Hartman, George, 20 Hartman, Rose, 98, 175n51 Harwood, Lee, 45 Hayes, Robert, 104, 111 Heliczer, Kate, 45, 53, 54 Heliczer, Piero, 45, 46 Heller, Steven, 100, 102 Herko, Freddy, 42 Hickey, Dave, 52 Hill, Jerome, 100, 102, 175n41 Holt, Calvin, 8, 9 Holzer, Baby Jane, 45, 46, 74 homoerotic magazines, 18 homosexuality, public interest in postwar era, 17–18 Hopps, Walter, 39 Hornick, Lita, 43

188

Index

Horoscopes for the Coc[k]tail Hour (Warhol book), 162n26 Houston, Angelica, 124 Hughes, Fred, 92, 102, 103, 108, 124, 129, 155 Hugo Gallery, Warhol’s debut New York exhibition, suite of book illustrations based on Capote’s Other Voices, Other Rooms, 9, 11 Hultén, Pontus, 67–68, 170nn31–32, 170n34 Hunt, Wally, 58, 59 Hutchins, Maude, Love Is a Pie, 161n10 identity: in the United States, 145, 180n9; Warhol’s exploration of, 5, 11, 12, 77 illustrated books, Warhol, 1, 6; Á la Recherche du Shoe Perdu (with Ralph Pomeroy), 13, 162n23; as collaborative product of Warhol’s social circle, 12, 118; conflation of Warhol’s personal, professional, and artistic desires, 11; A Gold Book, 13, 162n25; Holy Cats, 13; Horoscopes for the Coc[k]tail Hour, 162n26; inscribed and numbered, 20; In the Bottom of My Garden, 13, 14; means of public communication among Warhol and friends, 9, 20; Playbook of You S Bruce from 2:30 to 4:00, 162n26; and politics of publicness, 16–17; self-published, 12–13, 16, 20; So, 162n26; Wild Raspberries (with Frankfurt), 13. See also 25 Cats Name Sam and One Blue Pussy (Warhol) illustrated books, Warhol, in collaboration with Ralph Ward: Alphabet of Women, 11; The House That Went to Town, 11; A Is an Alphabet, 11, 12; Love Is a Pink Cake, 9–11, 10, 12, 161n10; Mrs. Cook’s Children, 11; There Was Snow on the Street and Rain in the Sky, 11; Velvet the Poodle, 11–12, 162n18 imagined community, 17, 163n47 I. Miller & Sons shoe campaign, Warhol’s drawings for, 18, 20, 38 information management, postindustrial shift from manufacturing to, 91 Ingrid Superstar, 60, 86, 91, 169n14 Interiors, Warhol’s biographies for, 26 International Velvet, 169n14 Interview magazine, 1, 2; advertisement for a, 78, 79, 172n58; advertisement for THE Philosophy, 118; as artist’s magazine, 92, 109–12; circulation and advertising revenue in 1972, 102–3; continued publication by Brant Publications, 96–97; contributing editors, correspondents, and writers, 92–112; cover for August 1971 issue, 101; cover for December 1980 issue, 105; cover of first issue, 94; deviation from journalistic protocols, 94–96; distribution, 100, 108; editorial policy, 106; editors, 98–104; first issue, 93–94; focus on celebrity life in seventies, 92, 102; funded by Warhol, 98, 99, 111; information about in USPS Statement of

Ownership Form, 97–98; and the interview as a creative form, 94–95, 111–12; material similarity to Rolling Stone and Screw, 95; name changes, 1, 96, 100, 102; price per issue, 100; sale of, 183n74; as showcase for innovative photography, 104; special British issue of, 175n51; strategies to increase circulation and advertising revenue, 108; subscriber surveys, 108–9, 110, 176n72, 176n76; success of, 176n80; unorthodox publication schedule, 96; and Warhol’s expansion of social networks and audiences, 92–93 In the Bottom of My Garden (Warhol), 13; exhibition announcement for, 14 Intransit, “Andy Warhol–Gerard Malanga Monster Issue,” 46 Jackson, Tommy, 26, 29 Janis, Sidney, 38 Jeanne Claude, 4 Jess, 45 Johnson, Jed, 129 Johnson, Ray, 42 Jones, LeRoi, 33, 53 Jordan, Fred, 77 Jovanovich, William, 113–14, 124, 129, 177n4 Judson Memorial Church, New York, 36, 38 Kadushin, Raphael, 137, 179n5 Kane, Daniel, 5, 36, 39, 40 Kaprow, Allan: 18 Happenings in 6 Parts, 38, 166n18; happenings, 4 Karp, Ivan, 67 Kent, Rosemary, 103, 175n51 Kerouac, Jack, 45, 145 Kester, Grant, 5, 166n27 Ketner, Joseph, 146 Killen, Andreas, 176n80 Kinsey, Alfred, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, 17 Kirstein, Lincoln, 145 Kiss (Warhol film), 43, 45 Klauber, George, 16 König, Kasper, 67–68, 170nn31–32 Kosuth, Joseph, 57 Kotz, Liz, 76–77, 85 Krim, Seymour, 77 Kulchur, 33; frames from Warhol’s film Kiss on cover, 1, 43 La Cote Basque, New York, 127–28 Lacy, Tom, 166n23 Lambton, Lady Ann, 129 Lancaster, Mark, 45 Lane, Helen, 69, 74, 86, 88, 171n45 Law, John Philip, 60 Law, Tom, 60

Lawrence, D. H., Lady Chatterley’s Lover, 77 Lebowitz, Fran, 103, 104 Leo, Arnold, 75, 76, 83–85, 171n45, 172n68 Leslie, Alfred, 35 Lester, Peter, 175n51 LeSueur, Joe, 45 Levine, Naomi, 43, 45 Lichtenstein, Roy, 38, 76 Lillie, Beatrice, “There Are Fairies at the Bottom of Our Garden,” 13, 162n24 linguistic turn, 1960s art, 57 Linich, Billy (later Billy Name), 38, 42, 53. See also Name, Billy Lippard, Lucy, 3–4, 107 Lisanby, Charles, 16, 25, 162n28 “Little Magazine and Contemporary Literature, The” (Library of Congress symposium), 33– 34, 52 little magazines: as literary community, 39, 47; and mimeo revolution, 36, 39–40, 166n26 little magazines, Warhol’s participation in: “Andy Warhol-Gerard Malanga Monster Issue” of Intransit, 46–47; Denby issue of C, 40–41, 166n30, 166n33, 167n36, 167n40; film portraits of poets, 44; frame from Couch on cover of Fuck You, 45, 54; frame from Sleep on cover of Film Culture, 42; frames from Kiss on cover of Kulchur, 43; and mimeo revolution, 39–40; and politics of community and collaboration, 39, 44, 47, 166n27; poster for Paris Review, 44; quotes in Floating Bear and Sinking Bear, 42; special Warhol issue of Film Culture, 46, 47, 48–51; Warhol’s cover for anti–Vietnam War issue of some/thing, 45– 46; Warhol’s cover for special New York issue of Tzarad, 45 Lobel, Michael, “In Transition: Warhol’s Flowers,” 168n78 Lower East Side poetic community, and New York School poets, 40 Maas, Willard, 46–47 Maciunas, George, 46, 47 MacLow, Jackson, 46 Madame Henriette, 114, 127–28 Maier, Thomas, 107 Makos, Christopher, 151, 180n13, 182n58 Malanga, Gerard: and Andy Warhol’s Index (Book), 61; attendance at poetry readings with Warhol, 43; and Couch, 45; on cover of C, 40–41, 41, 166n33; on cover of Fuck You, 53, 54; and cover of some/thing, 46; on cover of Tzarad, 45; and Interview magazine, 93, 96, 98, 99, 174n18, 174n24; and road trip with Warhol, 141; and special issue of Intransit, 46; and Warhol’s Factory, 118 Malcolm X, 77

Index

189

Malina, Judith, 38 Mann, David, 38–39, 132 Mark Clements research firm, 107–8, 176n76 mass production, technologies of, 3 Matisse, Henri, La Danse, 30 McCarthy, Joseph, 18 McClure, Michael, 53 McCluskey, Ellen Lehman, 122 Mead, Taylor, 45, 47, 53, 141 Mekas, Adolfas, 42 Mekas, Jonas, 42, 47, 167n46 Memory Shop, New York, 100 Menand, Louis, 140 Meyer, Richard, 5, 162n14, 162n19, 162n22 Michael, John, 180n9 Michener, James, 56 Miller, Henry, Tropic of Cancer, 77 mimeo revolution, 36, 39–40, 166n26 Mirabella, Grace, 106 Moderna Museet, Warhol retrospective and exhibition catalog, 1. See also Andy Warhol (exhibition catalog) Modern Screen, 102 “Moe Biller Escapes Agitators at ManhattanBronx Postal Union Meeting at Statler Hotel, Pre-1970 Strike,” 90 Montez, Mario, 43 Moore, Gene, 39, 166n24 Morrissey, Paul, 93, 95, 98, 99, 102 Motion Olympus, Inc., 103 Moxanne, 84, 86 Mumford, Quincy, 33 Museum of Modern Art, 100 museums, and questions of equal representation and diversity, 107 Name, Billy: and a (Warhol novel), 75, 85, 86, 172n78; and Andy Warhol’s Index (Book), 60, 61, 66, 67, 169n18; and Couch, 45; and cover for anniversary issue of Fuck You, 45; departure from Warhol studio, 91–92; photography by in Andy Warhol (exhibition catalog), 68, 72–73; and Warhol’s Factory, 118; and Warhol’s haircut films, 42 Nelson, Craig, and Warhol’s America, 137–38, 144, 146, 147, 150–51; and photograph of book display at B. Dalton, 2 Nesbit, Lynn, 155 Newhouse magazines, and subscriber surveys to guide editorial decisions, 107–8 New Journalism, 77 Newton, Esther, 165n83 New York City, official repression of artistic communities before 1964 World’s Fair, 43 New York School poets: and Lower East Side poetic community, 40; and Warhol’s cover for Denby issue of C, 41 Nicholson, Ivy, 45

190

Index

Nicholson, Jack, 124 Nico, 46, 60 Nin, Anaïs, 161n10 Nixon, Richard, 91 nonfiction trade book. See Philosophy of Andy Warhol, THE novel. See a (Warhol novel) Nureyev, Rudolf, 129 O’Brien, Glenn, 99–104 obscenity, legal battles over criteria of, 18 O’Hara, Frank, 40, 41, 43, 47 O’Higgins, Patrick, Madame, 122 Oldenburg, Claes, The Street, 38, 166n19 Onassis, Jackie, 67 Ondine, 91, 121; and a (Warhol novel), 74–75, 77, 80, 84–88, 116; and abandonment of b, 122; and Couch, 45; photograph of in Evergreen, 86; star role in Chelsea Girls, 75, 86 129 Die in Jet! (Warhol painting), 78 Orange Car Crash Ten Times (Warhol painting), 78 Orientalia bookstore, New York, 36 Ork, Terry, 99 Orlovsky, Peter, 45, 53, 56 Other Scenes (newspaper), 98–100, 175n37 Ott, Katherine, 146 Owens, Craig, 140, 144, 181n25, 181n31, 183n77 Padgett, Ron, 40, 47; sonnet about Warhol’s film Sleep, 42–43 Palmer, John, 45 Papageorge, Tod, 145 paperback books, backlash against in postwar era, 18 Paris Review, Warhol’s poster for, 44 Partisan Review, 33 Paul, David, 59, 61, 67 Paul Paul, 86 Peace Eye Bookstore, New York, 36, 55 Pearlman, Alison, 139 Peltomäki, Kirsi, 176n80 Perneczky, Géza, 170n30 Phillips, William, 33 Philosophy of Andy Warhol, THE, (From A to B and Back Again), 1; and American consumerism, 147; collaborative production of, 118–24, 178n29; cover, 115; credited to Warhol alone, 119, 121–22; critical reception and perceived authenticity of Warhol’s authorial voice, 116– 17; dedication page, 118–19; display advertisement for in Interview, 118; excerpts from in New York magazine, 121–22; fan letters, 132; in form of conversation, 119, 178n36; kickoff party for, 179n48; low interest for in marketplace, 128–29, 132; original title, 114; page 136 of manuscript, 126; process of publishing, 123–24; publicity by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 117, 118; as sequel to and different

from a, 122; tape-recorded work, 113, 119, 121–22, 124–27; and title, 177n5; Warhol’s book tour for, 129, 131; and Warhol’s films of 1960s, 120–21 Phoenix Bookshop, 36 photobook. See America (Warhol photobook) photo-booth portraits, Warhol, 46 Photostat machine, in design of Index (Book), 60, 83 Picabia, Francis, Portrait d’une jeune fille Americaine dans l’état de nudité, 144 Picasso, Paloma, 125 Pile, Susan, 171n45 Pindell, Howardena, 111 Plagens, Peter, 117–18, 119 Playbook of You S Bruce from 2:30 to 4:00 (Warhol book), 162n26 Poetry magazine, 33 Poetry on Films, Inc., 102 Pomeroy, Ralph, 162n23 POPism (Warhol and Hackett), 2, 93, 172n63, 172n72, 178n19 pop-up book. See Andy Warhol’s Index (Book) Porter, Cole, 18 Postal Reorganization Act, 91, 98, 173n5 postal workers’ strike of 1970, 89–90, 173n1 Powell, Paige, 182n58 Price, Leah, 5 Printz, Neil, 17–18, 27, 162n28 publicity: concept of, 16; Warhol’s alternative form of, 15, 31 public sphere: role of postal service in, 173n5; theorization of, 160n14; transformation into medium of advertising, 173n7. See also counterpublics Radway, Janice, 4 Rago, Henry, 34 Random House: and Andy Warhol’s Index (Book), 57–61, 66–67; pop-up books, 58 Rauschenberg, Robert, 3, 76 RCA, acquisition of Random House, 58 Réage, Pauline, Story of O, 77 Reed, Lou, 47 Restany, Pierre, 43 Retrospectives and Reversals series (Warhol), 146 Reuben Gallery, New York, 38 Richer, Barbara, 150 Rinzler, Alan, 57, 59, 61, 67, 69 Rivers, Larry, 146 road trip, as subject of American photobook, 144–46 Roberts, Jennifer, 5 Rock magazine, 100, 175n42 Rogers, Carole, 103, 106, 111 Rolling Stone magazine, 45, 93, 95, 102 Rosenquist, James, 38

Rossellini, Franco, 124 Rosset, Barney, 33 Rothenberg, Jerome, 47, 166n26 Rotten Rita, 47, 91, 116 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 10 Rubenstein, Helena, 122 Rubin, Joan Shelley, 5 Ruscha, Ed, 68; Every Building on the Sunset Strip, 3; The Xerox Book, 3 Rydell, Charles, 99, 100, 102, 175n41 Sand, George, 9–10 Sanders, Ed, 41; and anniversary issue of Fuck You, 52–56, 54, 168n72; mimeo magazine Fuck You, 44; Peace Eye Bookstore, 36, 55; Warhol’s screen test of, 44 San Remo Café, New York, 36–38, 37 Santini, Betty, 38 Schechner, Richard, 34, 52 Schjeldahl, Peter, 181n30 Schleif, Nina, 2, 69, 162n16, 163n42 Schneemann, Carolee, 45 Scholes, Robert, 77–78 Schuyler, Jimmy, 40 scrapbooking, 146 Screen Test: Ed Sanders (Warhol film), 44 screen tests, Warhol, 96, 167n49 Screw magazine, 93, 95 Seaver, Richard, 75 Sedgwick, Edie, 46, 57, 116, 124 Seltzer, Mark, 182n68 Serendipity 3 (Upper East Side café), 7–9, 8; and Warhol’s coloring parties, 12, 161n3 Shapiro, Karl, 33–34 Shaw, Lytle, 5, 164n61, 166n27 Shore, Stephen, 57, 66, 68 Siegel, Marc, 168n65 Silver Car Crash (Warhol serigraph), 144 Silver Factory: beginning of, 42; and creation and publishing of Warhol’s books, 57, 118; end of, 91–92; and politics of community, 47, 52 Sinking Bear, The, 38; quotes attributed to Warhol, 42 Sixteen Jackies (Warhol painting), 67 Sixteen magazine, 102 Sleep (Warhol film), 42–43 Smith, Jack, Flaming Creatures, 167n46 Smith, Liz, 151, 152 Smith, Patrick, 18, 26, 117, 164n63, 171n45, 176n76 Smithson, Robert, 3, 57 So (Warhol book), 162n26 some/thing, Warhol’s cover for anti–Vietnam War issue, 1, 45–46 Sontag, Susan, 182n68 Soule, Henri, 127, 128 Stanton, Rick, letter to Warhol, 1976, 131 Stella, Frank, 38 Stimson, Blake, 5, 145

Index

191

Street, The (Oldenburg and Dine), 38 Strobl, Andreas, 68–69 Studies for a Boy Book, Warhol exhibition, Bodley Gallery, 13 Suarez, Michael, 5 Sugar Plum Fairy, 86, 116 Sullivan, Amy, 95–96 Sun Ra, 35 Svenska Dagbladet, 68 Sylvia (Brazilian model), 126–27 Szarkowski, John, 182n43 Tanager Gallery, New York, 38 Taubin, Amy, 45 Tavel, Ronald: “Friends of Gerard Malanga” in Fuck You, 55; screenplays for Warhol films, 43–44; and special issue of Intransit, 47 Taxine, 86. See also Sedgwick, Edie Taylor, Robert, 27 THE (Warhol book). See Philosophy of Andy Warhol, THE Theater of the Ridiculous, 44 Thirteen Most Wanted Men (Warhol installation), 167n46 Thorpe, Lynn Theresa, 169n19 Tierney, John, 89 Tiffany & Co., 9 Tilley, Eustace, 53 Toad Press, 46 Tolkin, Stanley, 55 Trash (Warhol film), 93 Tucker, Maureen, 171n45 Tucker, Susan, 146 Tunafish Disaster (Warhol painting), 78 Turner, Tina, 129 25 Cats Name Sam and One Blue Pussy (Warhol), 12–13, 20–28, 39, 164n62, 164n66; blotted-line technique, 21; and Bonwit Teller window display for Carnet de Bal, 28–32; cover, 20–21, 22; departure from norms of nuclear family, 24; and differences within similarities, 13, 24; final page, 23; first hand-colored book, 20, 21; intentional inaccuracies, 21, 121; parodies of publishing conventions, 24–25; printed by offset lithography, 21; as self-promotion for Warhol, 164n65; use of modern print culture devices and alternative politics of publicness, 21, 24, 164n63 210 Coca-Cola Bottles (Warhol painting), 67, 70–71 Tyler, Parker, 9, 174n24 Tzarad, Warhol’s cover for special New York issue, 45 Ultra Violet, 122 underground newsletters/papers, 1, 38, 40, 47, 166n26. See also little magazines US Postal Service (USPS), 91

192

Index

Varda, Agnes, 94, 112 Velvet Underground, 45, 59–60, 86, 169n14 View magazine, 174n24 Village Voice: influence on Interview, 102; Warhol’s advertisement to endorse material items, 45 Vogue, 106–7 Vreeland, Diana, 26, 104–7, 105, 108, 109, 125 Wagner, Robert, 34–35 Wallowitch, Edward, 13, 36 Ward, Ralph T. (Corkie), 9–11 Warhol, Andy: beginning of new era in 1968, 91–92; and camp identification, 162n19, 162n22; cats as part of public persona, 25–28; cinema as form of cooperation, 168nn65–66; as collector, 15; and craft of scrapbooking, 146; cross-country road trip, 141, 145; on dying, 154; embrace of error, 21, 25, 66, 75– 76, 121; exploration of identity, 5, 11, 12, 77; with Halston and Hugo in Halston window display designed by Warhol and Hugo, 130; lack of acceptance by artists in early 1960s, 38; nickname of Drella, 27; participation in little magazines as alternative spaces, 47, 52; “Pop way of seeing,” 141; regular appearance in newspapers and magazines, 18, 20; relationship to tape recorder, 113, 171n53, 177n1; shift in artistic production in 1950s, 3; studio locations, 91–92, 103–4; and the Village arts scene, 36, 38, 39, 43–44 Warhol, Andy, publications: as alternative form of publicity, 15, 31; as material objects and as social performances, 5; and multiple voices, 118; relationship between voice and text in, 177n6; relationship to his art, 31; tape-recorded works, 74–77, 84, 113, 116; and Warhol as coterie artist, 164n61; works as inclusive of entire “communications circuit” involved in production, 4–6. See also a (Warhol novel); America (Warhol photobook); Andy Warhol (exhibition catalog); Andy Warhol’s Index (Book); illustrated books, Warhol; Interview magazine; little magazines, Warhol’s participation in; Philosophy of Andy Warhol, THE Warhol by the Book (exhibition), 2, 159n4 Waring, James, 42 Warner, Michael, Publics and Counterpublics, 5, 16, 152, 160n14, 163n33, 163n40 Waters, John, 132 Weigel, John A., 171n54 Wein, Chuck, 84 Wenner, Jann, 93 Weymouth, Nikki, 125 Whitman, Walt, 35 Whittemore, Reed, 33–34

Wilcock, John, 93, 98–99, 175n37 Wilentz, Ted, 36 Wilson, Bob, 36 Winogrand, Gary, 144–45 Wolf, Reva, Andy Warhol, Poetry, and Gossip in the 1960s, 2, 39, 40, 41, 43, 94–95, 111–12 Wollen, Peter, 171n45 Wood, Gloria, 45 Woronov, Mary, 59–60, 91 Wrbican, Matt, 2, 69 WWD, 102

Xerox machine, as artistic medium, 170n30, 170n34 York, Michael, 104, 106 York, Pat, 104, 106 Zabriskie Point (Antonioni), 95 Zappa, Frank, 59–60

Index

193