What's a Warhol?

"I want to make an orgy movie," Andy Warhol said recently. "The orgy is what's happening now."

In the folklore of the Sixties, Andy Warhol is our hip Jay Gatsby: a shadowy, voyeuristic, vaguely sinister host with albino-chalk skin, silver hair, dark sunglasses and black-leather motorcycle jacket, who presides over a melange of kinky sex, drugs and smoking revolvers.

"The blond guru of a nightmare world, photographing depravity and calling it truth," was how Time characterized the underground-film maker 15 months ago, when two bullets from a .32-caliber automatic—fired by a manhating woman who had played a bit role in one of his films—almost killed him, puncturing his spleen, liver, stomach, esophagus and both lungs. As he underwent a critical six-and-a-half-hour operation by a team of four surgeons at Columbus Hospital in Manhattan, the mass media poured forth stories of how Warhol surrounds himself with "freakily named people—Viva, Ultra Violet, International Velvet, Ingrid Superstar—playing at games of lust, perversion, drug taking and brutality before his crotchety cameras." And when Warhol had recovered sufficiently to attend a roast-pig picnic given last October by friends in Greenwich Village, New York Times critic John Leonard described the artist as "a Moon-Man, a sort of spectral janitor … looking as though he had dropped from a star."

Helping inflame the critical imagination have been such Warhol movies as The Chelsea Girls (1966), with scenes depicting: two homosexuals lolling in Jockey shorts and bathrobe on a crumpled bed; a fat girl shooting speed with a needle into her buttock without bothering to take down her jeans ("It's quicker this way," she smiles into the camera); a willowy Lesbian sadistically bullying three girlfriends by sticking pins into their knees and forcing them to participate in harsh slave–master conversations; a homosexual named Ondine wearing a necklace that looks like Hell's Angels' chains, injecting amphetamine into his veins and announcing that as Pope of Greenwich Village, his flock consists of inverts, perverts and junkies, and then exploding in a tantrum directed against a hostile young girl whose "sins" he's been hearing in confession; and a transvestite in wig, false eyelashes, lipstick and satin evening gown, camping it up and singing in imitation of Hollywood sirens of the Thirties and Forties.

Other Warhol movies show scenes of rape, male prostitution and sadomasochistic bondage involving leather halters and torture masks. Blow Job begins with a trouser fly being unzipped, then focuses for 45 minutes on a man's face as it expresses passivity, then happiness as an act of fellatio is being performed on him. Fuck, or Blue Movie shows a boy and a girl making love in bed and in the bathroom of a New York apartment.

Many establishment critics denounce such Warhol movies as "seamy," "exhibitionistic," "sadistic," "dirty," "half Bosch and half bosh," "sewage," "a peep show," "freakish," "physically filthy," "desperate," "gloomy," "decadent," "Dadaistic provocation," "travelogs of a modern hell," "sordid," "vicious," "too candid," "ruthless," "perverse," "pernicious" and "spontaneous eruptions of the id." Warhol has been scolded as being a commercial purveyor of prurience and a pathetic voyeur—who gets his kicks from peering through a Peeping Tom camera at orgiasts as they soap their bare behinds in showers, exhibit tufts of pubic hair, breasts and limp penises, and engage in teasing sexual foreplay and occasional intrusions into the various bodily orifices.

Other critics and movie aficionados insist that such sick scenes both document and satirize the decadence of American society. Critic Sheldon Renan has opined that Warhol's films collectively comprise a definitive commentary on the socialites, starlets, addicts, homosexuals, fashion models, artists and people on the make in New York's "bizarre demimonde." The New York Times calls the world depicted in his cinema "a searing vision of hell, symptomatic of the corruption of the Great Society, from godlessness to white power, the profit system and napalm."

In addition to their purported social content, Warhol's movies have also been hailed by some for their innovations in cinema technique. For such early films as Eat (1963), the director was awarded in 1964 the Sixth Independent Film Award—sponsored by underground-film maker Jonas Mekas' Film Culture—with this citation: "Andy Warhol is taking cinema back to its origins—to the days of Lumière—for a rejuvenation and a cleansing…. The world becomes transposed, intensified, electrified. We see it sharper than before." What Warhol tries to do with the film is what James Joyce did with the novel, argues former New York Times critic Brian O'Doherty, "and it is a measure of Warhol's achievement that the comparison is not laughable."

Warhol rarely directs and seldom edits a movie; he simply turns the camera on a bare-chested young man sleeping and exhibits it as a six-hour film called Sleep; or he focuses on the top of the Empire State Building and lets the camera grind away for eight hours, then releases the film as Empire. One day in 1964, he asked Henry Geldzahler—curator of contemporary arts at the Metropolitan Museum of Art—to sit on a couch in his studio. Warhol turned a loaded camera on Geldzahler and then walked away, without imparting a hint of direction. "Andy played a record for an hour or so in the back of the studio," Geldzahler recalls, "and because I was completely alone, I became a kind of still life. Gradually, I went through my entire vocabulary of gestures as I sat smoking a cigar. That movie," he claims, "is the best portrait of me ever done."

Warhol's movies—he's made some 150 since 1963 but exhibits only the few he feels are "interesting"—are just part of his output during the past ten years in a wide range of media. "Whatever Andy does," observes artist Claes Oldenburg, "he tries to be first and best."

Certainly, he defies categorization. Characteristically, he's one of the very few major American artists to begin as a highly successful commercial artist. His elegant, often whimsical illustrations for women's shoe ads prompted Women's Wear Daily to hail him in the late Fifties as "the Leonardo da Vinci of the shoe trade"; in 1957, one of his ads won the coveted Art Directors Club Medal; and his 1961 Lord & Taylor window display featuring paintings of blowups of Dick Tracy comic-strip characters is considered by some the first chapter of the book of Genesis according to pop art.

Soon after the comic-strip paintings, Warhol established himself as a pioneer of pop with cool, clinically exact and scrupulously deadpan paintings of Campbell's soup cans, silk-screen portraits of Marilyn Monroe, Jackie Kennedy and Elvis Presley, sculpture of Brillo boxes and wallpaper displaying multiple, identical busts of a cow. Each of these works had an impersonal, mechanical and even assembly-line character; and each image was done in multiples: 50 paintings of the same can of black-bean soup, 25 identical Brillo boxes, 100 images of the same cow. Impersonality was also evident in the celebrity portraits. Each was made from a tabloid or movie-magazine photo. And frequently, Warhol let assistants complete a painting or a sculpture for him. "The things I want to show are mechanical," he explained. "I think somebody should be able to do all my paintings for me. It would be so great if more people look up silk screens, so that no one would know whether my picture was mine or somebody else's."

Today, Warhol's assembly-line creations are considered collector's items and—by some—even contemporary classics. Next month, an exhibition celebrating the 100th anniversary of the Metropolitan Museum of Art will feature Warhol paintings including 32 Campbell's soup cans and 35 silk-screen portraits of noted pop-art collector Mrs. Ethel Scull based on a four-for-a-quarter Times Square snapshot. "The show will contain some 300 works which I feel are the best done during the past 30 years," explains Henry Geldzahler, who is assembling the exhibition. "Such a show could not be compiled without a representative sample of Andy's art."

"I'm a retired artist," Warhol announced in 1965, at the height of his pop-art fame and success, when soup-can paintings were selling for $5000, a celebrity portrait for $10,000. He began making films full time. From the beginning, his movies were unlike any others in the history of cinema. A customary complaint was—and is—that they are grindingly boring. "Most people would rather hear about a Warhol movie than sit through one," observes David Katzive, film critic and curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago. "But the point is: One relishes Warhol's concept, which is terrific!" The concept was revolutionary, if nothing else: Film the most ordinary subjects at an unvaried pace and then exhibit them for unprecedented lengths of time.

Psychedelic mixed-media entertainment is another art form at which Warhol has dabbled—and pioneered. His 1965-1966 extravaganza of dancers and rock musicians—The Exploding Plastic Inevitable—was one of the first to explore the possibilities of a show combining electronic (continued on page 140)What's a Warhol?(continued from page 134) music, dance, strobe lights and film. "Andy's like a Renaissance artist: He tries everything," observed a Lower East Side poet.

Last winter, Warhol wrote his first "novel." He calls it a. It consists of 451 pages of totally unedited manuscript transcribed from tapes Warhol made as he followed Ondine for 24 hours as he gossiped, quarreled, wooed and talked with friends, lovers, enemies, waitresses and cabdrivers. At first, a strikes most readers as a bore. Most of the time, you can't tell who is talking to whom about what; moreover, all misspellings made by the high school girls who transcribed the tapes were religiously reprinted, as were all typographical errors; and at least a third of the sentences simply make no sense whatsoever. But gradually, two elements begin to fascinate. Ondine emerges as a witty, irreverent and engaging character; and it becomes obvious that this is how most people actually sound as they talk with one another, a is a genuine microcosm of the world of words, fractured sentences, grunts, giggles, commands, pleas, rhetoric, pop-tune titles, squawks from taxi radios, TV-commercial diction, the oblique, sometimes radiantly direct idiom of the heart and the blablabla that surrounds us every day and often far into the night.

Warhol is also entering television. His recent widely discussed commercial for Schrafft's restaurant chain was a long, voluptuous panning shot of a chocolate sundae, with "all the mistakes TV can make kept in," the artist explained. "It's blurry, shady, out of focus." NBC has since invited Warhol to produce a six-hour special. "In New York, apartments have a channel five which allows you to watch anybody who enters the front door. That will be my show: people walking past the camera," he says. "We'll call it Nothing Special."

Not all fellow artists agree that Warhol's art is either fresh or first-rate. One sculptor feels that he is too anemic: "Andy hasn't got any balls," he claims. "If Warhol's art were the only art around, we'd starve to death." And an underground-film maker charges: "His movies lack the personal involvement and vision that make or break a good movie. Warhol hides behind his camera."

Indeed, Warhol himself is usually as anonymous as his camera. Although internationally famous, he remains enigmatic and mostly in the background; as one of his friends says, "He's the Cheshire cat. Just when you're sure he'll be somewhere, he vanishes." In October 1967, Warhol sent an actor—disguised behind dyed silver hair, sunglasses and leather jacket—to impersonate him on a lecture tour of four West Coast colleges; his explanation, once the impersonation was discovered, was that the actor was more like what people expect Andy Warhol to be than he himself could possibly be. A few years ago, he made a movie called The Andy Warhol Story, with a young poet and a fragile debutante both playing the role of Andy Warhol. And he does nothing to clear up the confusion about his biography: Various sources list his birth date as 1927, 1930 and 1931, and the place of birth as Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, MeKeesport, Pennsylvania, and Providence, Rhode Island. Warhol is apt to suggest that an interviewer make up his own biography of the artist; or he'll say about his life: "It's always been like a dream, I guess"; or about himself: "If you want to know all about Andy Warhol, just look at the surface of my paintings and films and me, and there I am. There's nothing behind it."

Warhol's studio—which he calls the Factory—is even more oddly impersonal than the paintings and films. It is located on the sixth floor of an office building in Manhattan.

One steps from the elevator into a large business office with empty white walls and big windows opening onto Union Square. A gigantic John Chamberlain sculpture—a car squashed for scrap metal?—dominates the room. Two Plexiglas desks face each other near the windows. Manning one desk is 30-year-old Paul Morrissey, the lanky and affable executive director of Warhol Films, Inc. "Most of our calls are business," Morrissey explains, hanging up the phone that rings constantly on his desk. "We're doing all our own distributing now," he continues, describing plans to visit Europe in hopes of selling movies to distributors in Germany and England. Morrissey has been with Warhol since 1965. One of a big Irish Catholic family in the Bronx and a graduate of Fordham, Morrissey is probably sick of hearing it, but he resembles a priest—asexual and fatherly; he's also maternal, particularly when he fusses around Warhol, whom he seems to feed with a constant, animated supply of information, gossip, opinion and moral support.

Taking care of business at the other desk is Gerard Malanga. Wearing a blue puff-sleeved shirt and leather pants, Malanga, who has worked with Warhol since 1963, is an extremely photogenic young poet, actor, film maker and celebrity in the international pop art–high fashion–hip taste world. "My education began with Andy," Malanga reports. "He's got this great way of brushing things aside with power: What you thought was beautiful changes in front of your eyes. He particularly dislikes and puts down 'arty' things for being sentimental and corny. Andy likes clean, plastic images," says Malanga, turning so that his Neapolitan profile will be prominent. Like many in Warhol's group, Malanga is self-absorbed, and it seems to require great effort for him to talk about Warhol. "People say Andy's not serious. It's not true," Malanga continues. "Andy works terribly hard at everything he does—and we both work every day, trying to make our lives into works of art."

Like other members of the Factory, Malanga seems a bit protective of Warhol—and not simply because everybody is nervous about a threatened second attempt on Warhol's life. Quite apart from this understandable concern for his safety, his friends often treat Warhol like a child. Yet, clearly, he's the center of the complex operation, on whom all depend for both livelihood and identity.

Warhol steps from the elevator. "I'm sorry I'm late," he says shyly, explaining that he's been visiting his mother in the hospital. Warhol is slight, about five feet, ten inches tall, around 40 years old. Although indoors, he keeps on his black bullskin coat and tall olive fedora whose brim has been turned down all around and which looks like a tall Pilgrim hat.

He stands waiting for someone to take the initiative. "How do you feel about that woman being on the loose again?" he's asked. "Oh, they caught her, I just heard," he says. Once again, silence. The silence isn't hostile; it's like a vacuum waiting to be filled.

"Andy's idea of conversation is that somebody should talk to him," Henry Geldzahler has observed. A few years ago, the artist phoned Geldzahler around one A.M. "We've got to talk! We've got to talk!" he said by way of apology. "Well, what do you want to talk about?'' Geldzahler asked, after the two met in a bar and the artist just sat there, mute. "Say something!" Warhol pleaded.

Around Warhol, you either do the talking or stare back at him. His appearance is unique—old, yet boyish; New York hip, yet old-country European. High cheekbones give a slightly Slavic look. (His parents emigrated in 1921 from Mikova, Czechoslovakia, to Pennsylvania, where his father found work as a coal miner; he died in 1942.)

Throughout the visit, Warhol keeps clutching a shopping bag, which, combined with fur coat and hat, suggests the appearance of an aging European woman. It's as if he were trying to keep his mother well by emulating her. It also becomes clear that the artist keeps on coat and hat in a calculated attempt to convey the impression—an accurate one—that Andy Warhol is mysterious, odd, even a bit bizarre. His outfit, of course, is not what one expects: no sunglasses nor black-leather jacket. On other occasions—equally unexpected—he does wear the jacket, usually zipped up over a navy-blue blazer or tux jacket.

"Everything Andy does is to attract (continued on page 278)What's a Warhol?(continued from page 140) publicity; he craves it," one veteran observer of the New York art scene has said. "He wants you to think he's an oracle—or something." The artist himself has admitted, "I prefer to remain a mystery."

Warhol sits down on a couch in the big, barnlike, black-walled back room, where films are screened and occasional silk-screen portraits are made. Asked what he's been doing lately, he replies, in a low voice: "Oh, I've been thinking about the philosophy of the fragile," which he then declines to explain or elaborate. What does he cherish? "I used to like ice cream a lot."

He's famous for such remarks. Many people feel they're smart-ass put-ons. Sometimes they are. But the Warhol aphorisms—"I like boring things," "I want to be a machine," "In the future, everybody will be world famous for 15 minutes," "Everything is pretty"—are also concise and accurate expressions of exactly what the artist means. Such aphorisms are as direct and economical as the visual images he creates. Moreover, the aphoristic one-liner is also a kind of armor Warhol wears to protect himself from the public and the press and to conserve energy for his art and his life.

Making films is what Warhol talks about with the most openness and ease. "Films are more interesting than paintings," he feels. "They're really like portraits, anyway.

"Everybody seems to be making films now," Warhol continues. "A few years ago, underground films were like visual poems. Now they're turning into novels." He seems acutely interested in the fact that Norman Mailer has begun making movies, as well as Susan Sontag, who recently finished her first film in Sweden.

Warhol is full of plans for more movies. Soon, he says, he'll take his actors and superstars around the world to shoot in Japan, India and perhaps Paris. Moreover, Columbia Pictures wants him to make a Hollywood film.

How does he discover the young men and women who act in his movies? "Oh, they're just people we meet. Sometimes, one just comes by the Factory; or we'll meet another at a party; or a friend will tell us about one. It just happens." Of the many males who have appeared in his films, only one has had any previous acting experience: Taylor Meade, the homosexual clown of underground cinema and theater. Warhol never encourages one of his discoveries to take acting lessons; he wants them to act in front of the camera as they do in everyday life.

"Actually, I want to make a movie now using straighter people than the unusual ones we've used," Warhol continues. "Next summer, we'll get five or six people living together for a couple of weeks out in the country, and just shoot everything that happens between them as they get complicated with one another." But he says he wants to shoot his orgy movie first.

In all probability, Orgy will be another innovation of sorts. If it's in the spirit of Warhol's other films, it will simply depict couples, threesomes, quartets or sextets going about their sexual business.

Where does the money come from to finance the films and to meet a fairly big payroll? Profits, he declares, are finally coming in from The Chelsea Girls—the first underground movie to be exhibited in commercial theaters. It has grossed an estimated $500,000. "But making movies is so expensive," Warhol explains. "We still have to do a portrait once in a while to get money so I can keep experimenting."

Against a wall in the back room of the Factory—ready for delivery—stands a silk-screen portrait consisting of a dozen identical images based on a photo of Mrs. Nelson Rockefeller, which the governor commissioned. It is a companion piece to a Warhol portrait of Rockefeller commissioned by his wife last year.

"The new art is really a business," Warhol feels. "We want to sell shares of our company on the Wall Street stock market." A prominent investor has approached Warhol with a proposal to establish a company built on Warhol's art, as well as on his status as a celebrity. "Andy Warhol is selling not art but a milieu," observes journalist John Wilcock.

Talking about the problems involved in financing his movies, Warhol becomes almost animated; but any question about his personal feelings is invariably met with a cold response. One of the few revealing remarks Warhol has ever made about himself occurs in an episode in a, in which a man named the Sugar Plum Fairy is interrogating the artist. "Why do you avoid yourself?" he asks bluntly; and refusing to be satisfied with Warhol's "Huh?," keeps after his prey with even more direct questions. Eventually, Warhol confesses: "Well, I've been hurt so often I don't even care anymore." When the Sugar Plum Fairy protests that it's nice to have feelings, Warhol objects: "No, I don't really think so. It's too sad…. And I'm always, uh, afraid to feel happy because, uh, it just never lasts."

Hints of Warhol's hard-core melancholia appear from time to time, but his unhappiness is never expressed verbally; rather, it manifests itself in a remote, at times quietly desperate expression on his face. One night last winter, Warhol and some of his friends were eating dinner at Casey's—a restaurant in Greenwich Village, where on any night you see a river of marvelous-, often astonishing-looking New Yorkers flowing in and out, table-hopping. On this night, they were coolly craning necks to observe Warhol. He sat at a prominent table, silently taping with portable recorder one of his superstars, gathering a chapter for b or c or d. At one point, a handsome but rather sharkish youth—who'd sat down and introduced himself as an actor—came on with a strong but guarded homosexual flirtation. The actor seemed only the latest in what must have been a multitude over the years. Warhol shares the plague of most celebrities—the knowledge that many men and women will prostitute themselves in any way in order to become well known by association with him. For a fleeting second, Warhol's face lost its customary interested but noncommittal cool; he looked sad, even frightened. He was polite to the young actor, but he soon turned back to his superstar and the tape recorder.

The artist's sly, understated, ironic wit is as much a part of him as his sadness. "I never wanted to be an artist," he has said. "I wanted to be a tap dancer." "I don't believe in paintings on walls anymore: I like empty walls." Such deadpan remarks spoof generations of earnest teachers and critics who pontificate about the commitment of the artist.

"Andy's got such special fun," exclaims Bridget Polk, the cherubic shooter of amphetamine in The Chelsea Girls. "He'll phone me at four A.M. and whisper, 'Wasted space. Wasted space. What's in your mind? Wasted space.' "

Fun and gossip are staple ingredients around the Factory. As Warhol sat talking with a visitor on the couch in the screening room, Ingrid Superstar came over to confide that a famous Hollywood beauty from the Thirties and Forties had the hots for her and kept pestering her to visit. "Oh, Ingrid just wants me to talk about her!" Warhol teased. "Is it true you're slightly retarded, Ingrid?" he joked, with a sarcastic edge. Ingrid stuck her tongue out at him and said: "You're boss man around here, baby"; and then, with infectious buffoonery, she mimicked a star being interviewed: "Actually, I love working in Andy's films, because he lets me do whatever's natural. In Bike Boy, I pulled one teat out and started talking about fried eggs, garbage soup and garlic milk."

Ingrid, a lanky, pretty girl in her early 20s, joined the group in the mid-Sixties, having moved to New York from New Jersey, where she'd been raised in a middle-class family and had worked as a secretary. In many ways, she reminds you of the girl you necked with in the back seat after Friday-night high school football games.

Backbiting remarks about one another are common among the Warhol group. One was accused of being money crazy and a puritan faggot. "A mirror walking in motorcycle boots, looking for his own face to admire" was the comic valentine given to another. "Andy encourages rivalry among us," says Malanga. "It keeps things from getting dull—and we often do a better job because of it."

Friendship and occasional love, however, are also apparent in the relationships among members of the Warhol scene. When one has been away, he is welcomed with warmth back into the family. One Sunday afternoon, Nico—another of his superstars—returned from Paris and joined Warhol with four of his family in a big booth in the back room of Max's Kansas City steak house, the unofficial club of New York artists, underground-film makers, rock musicians, poets and pop intelligentsia. By way of welcome, Bridget Polk interrupted a tape she was making with Warhol about her Cock Book (for which she has invited famous artists to draw their reproductive organs) to lean over and playfully bite and kiss Nico's long, graceful arm.

Nico is the most ethereal and lovely of Warhol's superstars. Seeing her in her floor-length cape and listening to her musical, remote talk, one gets the impression of a medieval German madonna glimpsed in a dream full of images of spring and sunlight. Others in the Warhol group treat Nico as if she were quite fragile, and all seem to have a deep affection for her.

The Warhol superstars—often collectively classified as weirdos—are actually quite distinct from one another. Nico expresses herself in an extremely European style—elusive, mysterious, dignified, feminine in the traditional manner. So does Ultra Violet, except that she is far more cerebral. On the other hand, both Ingrid and Bridget Polk frequently call on a rowdy, straight-from-the-bosom idiom—the swinging Sixties version of the girl next door as buddy. Viva talks in an idiom all her own. In Bike Boy, she ad-libs that she'd dig making love on the handle bars of a motorcycle careening along at 90 miles per hour.

Meanwhile, back at the Factory, Ultra Violet joins Warhol on the couch. With a face like Hedy Lamarr's in Ecstasy, U. V., who looks in her early 30s, is wearing a violet-satin pants suit, and her brown hair falls in ringlets around her shoulders. She takes pains to explain that she is the daughter of a well-known French family that manufactures gloves and that for years she was deeply involved in Parisian social and charity affairs and that her good friend is Salvador Dali. Her voice is throaty, rich and velvety, and she strives to produce intelligent, informed quotes for magazine articles and posterity.

"Andy works like a psychoanalyst," Ultra Violet says, after Warhol has excused himself and gone into the front room to talk with a manufacturer who supplies him with Plexiglas. "His camera keeps listening and listening. The actors learn to trust, open up, and it becomes very real. His films show what's happening in people's minds. They're terribly objective reflections of our times."

Other superstars—past and present—also come from wealthy or socially prominent families. Baby Jane Holzer belongs to Park Avenue Jewish society; Viva, daughter of a well-known Syracuse criminal lawyer, attended fashionable Marymount College and the Sorbonne; gorgeous Susan Bottomley, who acts as International Velvet, is a Boston debutante; and Edie Sedgwick is the great-niece of the late Atlantic Monthly editor Ellery Sedgwick and great-granddaughter of the founder of Groton, the Reverend Endicott Peabody.

Taylor Mead comes from a wealthy Grosse Pointe, Michigan, family. Most of the other male actors, however, are products of tough, lower-class backgrounds. Ondine grew up in the violent Red Hook district of Brooklyn; young Joe D'Allesandro comes from a New York tenement. Almost every young man in Warhol movies portrays a street arab, tough but tender and wounded—like the young Marlon Brando in On the Waterfront and The Wild One. On film, all of these lads convey either bisexual ambivalence or overt homosexual appeal. Invariably, they are the real stars of Warhol's movies; the women usually provide little more than comic relief. Nobody accuses Warhol of being the new Minsky.

After Warhol says goodbye to the Plexiglas manufacturer—who's been telling him how his son is worried about his future after college—Morrissey asks his advice about some detail in connection with shipment of The Chelsea Girls to a Detroit theater. Malanga calls across the room, asking Warhol if he wants to accept an invitation to a party. Ultra Violet begins showing him some photographs of herself taken by Philippe Halsman, asking which photo would make the best publicity shot. Morrissey begins telling him about an article in a forthcoming film quarterly.

"Oh, really! How interesting," Warhol says. It is his most characteristic response. He appears genuinely interested, even astonished, no matter how humdrum the event or information.

"Astonishment at the scene—not necessarily celebration but wonderment at the spectacle: That's Andy's whole philosophy," observes Ivan Karp, pop-art novelist and assistant director of the Leo Castelli Gallery. Bridget Polk agrees: "Even a cookie or a chocolate sundae excites him."

Like everything else about him, Warhol's astonishment is basically passive. At times, he reminds one of an existential angel, observing and documenting ordinary reality without imposing his own ideological, aesthetic or emotional preconception or opinion on the Brillo box, on the tabloid photo of President Kennedy's widow at Arlington National Cemetery or on Taylor Mead doing a whimsical St. Vitus' dance in slow motion in front of the camera.

Warhol's art, films and novels can be seen, in fact, as a poignant, almost hopeless but curiously heroic effort to preserve that most perishable of events: the moment as it happens. "Andy's read a at least 40 times," Ondine reports. "He keeps reading it because it happened: He was there." In this, Warhol's art reflects how fragile our grasp of each moment of our lives really is and how inexorably each life passes into oblivion. Warhol seems to understand in his bones the aphorism of the late Argentinian poet Antonio Porchia: "One lives in the hope of becoming a memory." His art is instant memory, preserving reality as it is and as it happens.

Once he's chosen something from the chaos of everyday reality to preserve in his art—particularly in his paintings and sculpture—Warhol works extremely hard "at getting the image absolutely right," says Leo Castelli. "He doesn't simply arrive at an image easily and then repeat it senselessly—as many think. That cow wallpaper took him over a year to define."

Almost exclusively, the cool, stark, deadpan images Warhol records in his art come from the ordinary American world: the world of mass-consumer products, mass-circulation magazines, newspapers, TV programs and the world of motorcycle gangs, drug addicts, homosexuals and society girls. In this sense, his art is a vast museum of things as they exist at this time and in this land.

In another sense, Warhol's images reveal a tragic vision, documenting the American way of death: Marilyn Monroe's suicide, Jackie Kennedy's anguish, mangled corpses hanging from car crashes, the atomic cloud, the electric chair at Sing-Sing, a suicide hurtling from an office window, vicious sheriff's dogs mangling Negroes in Selma, Alabama, addicts punishing their bodies with needles and their emotions with drugs.

Also documented are the tragedies of love: a West Coast bike boy unable to establish any rapport with hip Lower East Side girls; homosexuals raping a woman in rage; the bleak, monotonous rituals of sadists and masochists: the pathos of girls who make clowns of themselves by exhibiting scarecrow bodies and unappetizing breasts; the nomadic loneliness of the male whore: the sad, Babylonian fantasy of the transvestite; the desperate failure of those in the gay world to find the Fountain of Youth. Love and sexuality in Warhol's art are basically tragic. No joy. No consummation. No lasting love. Only a deeply ingrained sadness that communicates the pathos of being unable to find in the present some Eden of infancy or early adolescence.

Warhol's movies also parody and poke fun at sex and heterosexual love. They remind us that our libidinous acts and antics are frequently silly to the point of buffoonery. The old Hollywood's glamorized falsification of sex is mocked outrageously in Warhol's movie Screen Test, in which the frothy posturing of a transvestite, actor Mario Montez, lays the clichéed role of the gushing innocent ingenue to its long-overdue rest.

Lonesome Cowboys, Warhol's most recent release, makes merry at the expense of that archetype of American masculinity, the Hollywood Western. Cowboys brings the Western full cycle, according to the Los Angeles Advocate: "In the first horse operas, the cowboy could love only his horse. Psychological Westerns showed the villains as not all bad. Sadistic Westerns depicted the hero as not all good. Realistic Westerns revealed sex as not bad at all. And in Lonesome Cowboys, Viva observes that horses are better than men."

Warhol's art is also a comic, often sarcastic comment on the affluent society, with its ceaseless production and consumption of goods and celebrities. The America of Warhol's art is one in which endless soup cans, tooth-paste tubes and Brillo boxes invade our attention as ceaselessly as the parade of celebrity faces at whom we gaze forever on TV, in magazines and on jumbo posters. On a more biting level, such multiple, identical celebrity portraits as Jackie in widow's black or Marilyn with garish magenta lipstick illuminate and indict the brute fact that the tragedy of each lady made a lot of money for a lot of people in the media.

Andy Warhol is often described as a child of media—a personification of technology. Indeed, he seems most at home when surrounded by the latest tape recorder, electric typewriter, silk-screen equipment, cameras and TV sets. When he's in the Factory or in Max's Kansas City or in Casey's or walking across Union Square, his portable Uher-4000 tape recorder is never far from him. He's most content when he can sit for hours recording the talk of one of his friends. Or when he can gaze through the camera lens, shooting whatever happens.

Warhol today, the cool embodiment of technological miracles, impassive behind shades and hard-boiled motorcycle jacket, is a far cry from the extravagant dandy he was in the 1950s. "He was so full of fun, so popular—nothing like the rather lugubrious, heavy personality he's become," recalls David Mann, director of New York's Bodley Gallery and Warhol's first dealer. "In those years, his house was always filled with the most amusing, fun people: Andy gave the best parties. He had Tiffany fixtures everywhere—long before they became camp."

In recent years, Warhol has become fiercely private. Almost no one gets invited to visit his brownstone on 87th and Lexington. "Andy's been my best friend for years, but I only saw his home on the night he was shot, when Viva and I went to stay with his mother," Bridget Polk admits. "Was I surprised! The house is nothing like you'd think Andy Warhol's home would be. No pop art. Blessed Virgin statues all around the living room. And he's got a big four-poster bed with a night table covered by a lace doily."

Warhol's mother has lived for several years in a basement apartment in the brownstone. "The night he was shot, his mother kept muttering, 'My Andy, they hurt my little Andy!' " Bridget continues. "Actually, it's like Andy really lives with her. She tells him what to do. When you call, she'll eavesdrop on another phone and Andy'll say, 'Hey, Mom, get off the phone!' "

Yet outside the house, Warhol and his friends go everywhere together. When it's time to leave the Factory for dinner, absent members are phoned and informed where and when everybody will be that night. Warhol needs his friends as much as they need him. "I can't do anything alone," he admits. Everybody, including Warhol, constantly refers to "we": "We made this cowboy movie in Arizona." "We're going to a party." "We want to write another novel."

"If Andy had died from those bullets," Malanga observes, "work at the Factory would continue in much the same way Walt Disney Productions keeps operating. Andy's become an institution."

Not everyone is so heartened by the power of his persona. "Sometimes I think Andy's just like Satan," Viva admits. "He gets you and you can't get away. I can't seem to go anywhere or make the simplest decision without him." That was also the reason given by the woman who tried to murder him. Poet Gregory Corso once berated Warhol for being evil because he allows women to fall in love with him, makes them superstars and, according to Corso, gives them drugs, then drops them cold.

Warhol doesn't supply drugs, claim others intimate with the Factory scene. In fact, he doesn't take drugs at all. "I don't believe in them," he claims. With or without his help, however, other members of the Factory have suffered from "drug abuse"; and two are acknowledged amphetamine addicts. After she left Warhol's group. Edie Sedgwick suffered a nervous breakdown, allegedly from drug abuse, and was institutionalized. Another superstar is a regular on inpatient hospital lists to cure her drug habits.

Nervous breakdowns occur with alarming regularity at the Factory. One girl commits herself every summer to the psychiatric ward at Bellevue Hospital. "The casualty rate," observes journalist Elenore Lester, "is probably somewhat higher than the national average."

In addition to the dark cloud of emotional instability hanging over the Factory, there's also a chronic adolescent restlessness among members of the Warhol group. For most of them, the Factory is the most stable element in their lives. Otherwise, they seem adrift. None is currently married and only Ondine has a steady lover—a young painter. Ivy Nicholson, who admits she wants to marry Warhol, has had four children and four divorces; Nico's son lives with his father in Paris; and Bridget Polk is also a divorcee. Casual affairs, celibacy or occasional sex with one another—"You owe me a fuck, Gerard!" Ingrid announced in a cab last winter—are the lot of the majority of them.

In addition to their nomadic sex lives, few of Warhol's group have permanent homes. Most move from one cheap hotel to another, usually in the Union Square area; a few share apartments; and Ultra Violet lives in a penthouse on the Upper East Side. One member, a brilliant technician and photographer who calls himself Billy Name, has retreated to a small, pitch-black room at the Factory. "He's working things out in his head," says Ondine, "and someday he'll come out again."

One night last February, I found the Warhol group eating dinner in an East Indian restaurant near Union Square. Their table was festive and familial: a lot of civilized and sometimes bitchy gossip about the New York art scene and its regulars, with some high-spirited gibing at one another's expense. Warhol saw to it that everybody got enough to eat. In particular, he fed a new young friend named Jed, an extremely rangy, mute Californian. "Take some of my curry," he'd say, shyly—as shyly as Jed would take some and thank him. And Warhol insisted on paying the bill. This is a habitual gesture.

After dinner, everybody went his own way into the night. Warhol hailed a cab, saying he was going home to watch TV. "Orson Welles is on the Late Show in Touch of Evil. I want to see those terrific abstract cuts again."

Is he an important artist? Or even a good one? Perhaps. Perhaps not. I think he's a major artist, and there is certainly no doubting his curiously colorless charisma and his artfully nurtured notoriety, for whatever they may be worth. Watching his cab disappear into the ceaseless traffic circling Union Square, a friend remembered what an anonymous Manhattan voice had said to him a few days before. "Who? Warhol? Nobody by that there name lives here, mister," rasped the voice of the woman who'd answered the number he'd dialed by mistake in an effort to reach the artist. Then she said, nasally: "Oh, Andy Warhol! He's probably off someplace making a movie." Click!