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First encounter....People talk about him....
The first day I went up to the 47th Street Factory, as Andy Warhol tagged all his studios, the floor was covered with rows of silk screened paintings which his assistant Gerard Malanga was signing "A. Warhol" with a black-tipped brush. Our earlier encounter was when his then-cameraman Buddy Wirtschafter invited me to accompany him as they filmed one day at Willard Maas' place in Brooklyn Heights. Buddy, who had enthused that Andy was "one of the greatest exponents of the art of the idea" suggested nonchalantly, “You can always hold the microphone or something”. As it happened, all I did on that occasion was watch with amused amazement. Andy himself was an impelling presence--I thought it was like being near a dangerous black hole--and I kept as low a profile as possible and spoke only when spoken to.
For some weeks I had been intrigued by this enigmatic artist, ever since at Jonas Mekas’ urging I had attended—against my better judgment--a screening of one of his early movies at Cinemateque. The uproar at that performance had made me realize that even incomprehensible films with bad sound could be impelling. I had actually seen Andy before--at one of those flashy art scene openings featuring all kinds of pop artifacts such as silvery 'chocolates' made of lead. These were being handed out in a Warhol-themed bag by a pretty girl (Sarah Dalton) in a Brillo-patterned dress. There was a tremendous air of excitement around him, which intrigued me and prompted my continuing interest. "What Andy is selling, unlike traditional painters", somebody remarked, "is not art so much as a milieu". Anyway, following this introduction by Buddy to the inner circle, I spent the next few months hanging out at the 47th Street Factory and accompanying them on their various outings. I soon learned that Andy had gotten a taste for filming on that famous trip West, more talkative undoubtedly than he was on public occasions, “as we drove through the West Virginia night in my old Ford Station Wagon”, recalls Wynn Chamberlain, “ with Gerard and Taylor Mead sleeping in the back with all of Andy's Elvis and Liz paintings, (we were) heading for LA and his show at the Ferus Gallery (Which was a terrible flop). There was a concurrent rumor that after Elizabeth Taylor had declined to sit for her portrait that Andy had dragooned Ruth Kligman into service as his model for the work. Elizabeth herself, who, being very smart and very kind, would certainly not (be likely to) interfere with people making millions on her visage...’the new Mona Lisa I suppose’” was the comment of one observer who claimed to know the truth of the matter. Taylor Mead had been hanging around the Village for ages, feeding cats late at night on Lower East Side parking lots, before Andy came into his orbit, subsequently starring him in Tarzan and Jane Regained, Sort of. He was a veteran of a couple of avant garde films by Ron Rice, The Flower Thief and before that, Queen of Sheba Meets the Atom Man. In this 1963 epic he had spread butter on a football and then played the piano while wearing a bear suit. A stage role in a Frank O’Hara movie had earned him an Obie. (By the time of his 80th birthday in 2005, he’d appeared in scores of movies including Jim Jarmusch’s Coffee and Cigarettes. A widely-published poet, Taylor describes himself as a renaissance person. and performs weekly at a poetry club on the Bowery but is reticent about his acting career). “I don’t do anything”, he claims. “I just spontaneously happen into strange situations.” What I hadn’t expected at the beginning was that filming at the factory would turn into an almost daily event, and that it would become so absorbing to watch somebody who obviously knew what he was doing even if it wasn’t the familiar way to do it. I found myself heading up to 47th Street every day and when, on occasion, the door was locked, rather than call up to be allowed in (I was never confident that this would happen) I went in via the fire escape. This was easier than it sounds because it was one of those typical New York fire escapes with a hinged lower part. All that was needed was the crook of an umbrella to reach above my head and pull it down. At first, the camera would remain static during the filming, recording whatever action took place in the narrow spectrum before it. "(Andy) actually said to me once that his contribution was the unmoving camera because no one had done that", confided Ronnie Tavel a poet hired as an assistant after Warhol attended one of his readings. "At that time I'm sure he didn't think he would ever move the camera or edit, or he wouldn't have made such a blunt statement. It was really like turning movies into paintings". Tavel was doing a little bit of everything but excelled as a script writer churning out the stark, realistic scenarios required. (Andy) wanted that modern thing, 'I want it clean', he said. 'I want it simple, I want it plastic, and I want it white '. He always emphasized that, which for me was a new thing because I'm naturally prone to exoticism and fantasy and epic, which he detested. He couldn't tolerate that at all. He really forced me to do (what he wanted) and some of my best stuff comes from doing that, you know, like doing the opposite of what you want is good exercise, and lo and behold, the king got good results, too.
"Well, I learned about directing, I learned about actors, about why certain people were photogenic and others were not, what registered dramatically. He knew (instinctively) about directing and where else could I have learned so quickly? He had this incredible showcase 'cause it was instant films; two weeks after I wrote the script it was showing in a movie house. Andy has a magnificent belief in himself that he can create an audience, and he did. It took him a great many years of work on his part to do that: the publicity thing was really a fantastic effort to create an intellectual and artistic audience. I always had the feeling that the conceptual idea of what he did was so much more important than the actual thing. You could say that about Goya and Rembrandt --it's the concept that is their genius and not the actual product". I asked Ronnie why Warhol was misunderstood by so many people who kept insisting that he was putting them on. "Andy has the stigma of not being serious, but you create for yourself, you don't create for a public. Life is very short, who goes about putting on themselves? And that's all there is to say. And at this point I think it's shocking to have him accused of being a put-on...he's one of the major artists of our time". After several scripts, including The Chelsea Girls, Tavel was getting frustrated. He wanted to get more complex, to rehearse before shooting. "I felt we had outgrown our use for each other. I thought that he didn't need scripts any more and he could do his best work without them, that they were holding him back. I don't think writing should be part of that medium because words mean something and the script should not mean anything, the meaning should come from the film". Long before this time, I was having problems of my own--but for entirely the opposite reason. I was fascinated by the ambiguity of the Warhol scene and the sheer fascination of hanging around. I loved the way that every time I went up there would be something going on, some inexplicable drama that seemed unfathomable, a photo shoot by some German magazine, a letter from the Rolling Stones asking Andy to design an album cover or some avant garde movie director like Henry Jaglom basking in the ambiance. I later attended one of Henry's screenings and it was met with such cries of outrage that next time he came over to the Factory I told him he must be a genius. Among Andy’s occasional visitors was Arnold Schwartzenegger who, in the early sixties was a young hunk about town who subsequently made his mark with a body building demonstration at—of all places—the Whitney Museum. He was officially "discovered" by Jamie Wyeth, son of painter Andre Wyeth, who introduced him to Andy who photographed him in detail. “I would imagine that those negatives are in the Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh”, my anonymous informant told me. “I liked Arnie: deeply kinky, yet compassionate; I liked him then and I like him now. He's probably the only Republican left with any juice, which I suspect he picks up by being married to Maria Schreiber”. There were always surprises at the Factory. During one of the frequent parties, I casually glanced at a television monitor that seemed to be displaying the scene but something seemed a little off-kilter. I quickly realized that what was appearing was the party of a few minutes before, the whole thing on a tape-delay which was totally new to me. Most of us, but especially me, were naïve about the new technology in those days and a similar gotcha! moment occurred the night we went to meet the Velvet Underground. "We were taken to this grungry bar—sawdust on the floor—on West Third Street by Barbara Ruben, a young filmmaker whose recent movie had been composed of hundreds of single frames linked together to create the fastest montage it was possible to imagine. (Most movies unspool at 24 frames per second, at least three of which are usually devoted to each image giving it time to register). We sat in the front row at the Bizarre, a few feet from the horrendous noise of the musicians which sounded to my ears like a hurricane. (Lou Reed later chided me that I’d read a newspaper all during the gig). What I found most astonishing about the performance, however, was that when the musicians left the stage, the sound was still playing. Thus, my first acquaintance with the concept of 'feedback'.
ANDY HIMSELF WAS ever an enigma, always friendly but never volunteering anything. He seemed at first intimidating to be around but I quickly learned that although he loves to have everybody telling him things he was unwilling, or perhaps unable, to answer direct questions. He'd hmn and hah and somehow end up saying nothing at all. So prudence dictated that one didn't ask questions but tried to figure out what was going on. Understandably, this prompted endless conversations away from the factory. Why, for example did he wear a wig? "When you've got grey hair" he'd once said , "every move you make seems 'young' and 'spry' instead of just being normally active. It's like you're getting a new talent. So I dyed my hair grey when I was about twenty three or twenty four". Okay, but why the wig? I never dared to ask. Buddy had given me some pointers about how to behave: "Andy never explains to you what he is about and he surrounds himself with people who don't need to be told what he is about, or understand it without direct communication. If you ask Andy a question, such as 'what is it you want?', which I have on many occasions, you'll get an answer something like, "Well, what do you think?'" But although I had learned the other essential rule--to be part of the coterie, you had to produce (although providing information was an acceptable substitute)--I was not in actuality doing anything. Matters came to a head the day that Gerard offhandedly asked, "Andy was wondering when you were going to be writing something about us?" There was an undertone of mild threat which I interpreted as A reporter is part of our gang on sufferance. If he's not actually providing any publicity for us, why is he around? Terrified of being dismissed, I rushed to the Voice that same day to compose, at white heat, a piece that described what I thought had been happening. Warhol, I wrote, was learning--but really teaching--something new about film-making. "If Warhol has any specific point of view about his films," I wrote in the Village Voice of May 6, 1965, "It is probably that what happens happens. He's having a ball learning how to make movies and it's merely gravy to him that if the movies become valuable art works because he happens to have made them...meanwhile the movies--screened once--pile up in silver cans in his silvered studio. "The filming is fun. Like most amateur movie-making it casts that extraordinary spell that makes the onlookers believe they can go in and out of the action at will. For Horse, Warhol took a horse up in the elevator to his fourth-floor studio, stationing it near the door eating a pile of hay, enacting a parody Western in front of it complete with hokey hamming, drawled insults between the Cisco Kid and the sheriff, fist fights, a game of strip poker and facial mugging to an opera sound track. The horse, a stolid, black background, munches unconcernedly through the filming. The authentic Warhol touch comes from the characters peering through the lights to read their lines from scrawled shirt cardboards held up off camera". Mysteriously, all this took place so near the entrance that anybody coming up in the elevator was obliged to walk through the set after stepping out of the door, thus making an unscheduled appearance on film as did anybody who went over to use, or answer, the telephone. It was this kind of thing that prompted endless speculation among those of us not in the know (if, indeed, anybody was): were such interruptions planned or accidental? 
Fun at the Factory Credit: picture by Billy Name Some THINGS WERE easier to fathom as, for example, when Andy would turn the camera off during shooting producing a similar effect to turning off an old television set and watching the picture whirlpool into a white bubble at the center of the screen. Every professional filmmaker would have edited this out but Andy didn't, thereby producing an oddly distinctive kind of punctuation between segments. The strangest thing was that he almost never seemed to be doing anything other than standing there watching other people produce. Yet he had this incredible capacity to make people produce, although of course when you're standing script-less in front of a camera that grinds inexorably away, it emanates a pressure all of its own to say or do something. But it always seemed that Andy was the eye of the storm, the calm centre around which everything else raged and roared while he retained absolutely equanimity. I remembered the time I had stood with him in the gallery of the Dom, the decrepit former Polish dancehall on St. Marks Place to whose circling 'glitter ball' in the ceiling Andy had added films projected on all the walls simultaneously, yards of neon tape, a leather-clad, torch-waving Gerard dancing to the wailing of The Velvet Underground. It was a prototype of the early discotheque and both Andy and Paul were enthusiastic about the prospects the first time we all inspected the hall. As we strolled across the gallery on the opening night of the Exploding Plastic Inevitable and looked down on the frenzied scene, somebody operating one of the spotlights said he needed to leave his post for a few moments. Without a pause Andy grabbed the nearest person and commanded him to take over. The new recruit grabbed the spotlight apprehensively and shone it decorously upon Gerard and the Velvets. But almost immediately the neophyte discovered the color gels, and then the strobe light, and within seconds was blasting away in all directions, with all colors, with all speeds and with an intensity that made him appear to have done it all his life. Creativity, as Ronnie Tavel had said, can often be forced. Every few days there would be a field trip. The entire entourage would pile into a limousine to go on location, usually at some elegant apartment whose owner had unwittingly responded to a request by Paul Morrissey to allow the Warhol crew—along with masses of equipment—to film. Each adventure would begin with an encounter at the door at which Paul would politely introduce Andy and remind the would-be host of an earlier promise to allow her premises for filming. Then, almost before introductions were over, Paul would have sidled past the still-smiling host, checked out her apartment and returned in time to be ushered in with the rest of the group. It was an impressive performance. The welcoming smile on our host’s face, however, would long have faded by the time the crew left hours later, furniture rearranged, pictures knocked from the walls, the hardwood floors scuffed by cables, the refrigerator denuded of anything to drink and the bathroom closet cleaned of every conceivable pill as though a plague of locusts had passed through. More than any time before or since I found myself defending the Warhol scene from people who knew nothing about Andy except what they'd read in the papers. One day as I was talking to the actress Viva, I asked her why so many people put down the factory crowd for being--what they erroneously assumed--was sexually licentious. Her answer surprised me. "It's because most people are all so guilty that their country is committing genocide" Viva explained. "They can't face the fact that they're all like Nazi Germany. They've got to work off their guilt on something else so they try to find something wrong with the morals of the country. So they can feel they should be complaining about something, when they should be complaining about the war". It was an interesting point because it had already occurred to a lot of people that everything that was going wrong with America was centrally linked yet the advocates of "bombing the gooks out of existence in Vietnam" were continually trying to say they were unconnected, the best example being when Martin Luther King had tried to fuse the plight of the black working class with the anti-war movement or when Leary's acidheads found common ground with Dick Gregory's battles against racism. Interestingly enough, the Left --or the Movement as it was rapidly becoming--was itself polarized, as I subsequently discovered was always the case.
(From The Autobiography & Sex Life
EARLY IN MY association with the Factory scene, Andy decided to take the show on the road, having received invitations from Rutgers College Film Society and the college at Ann Arbor. Eleven people, including myself, piled into a rented minibus to make the 1,500-mile round trip, with the blonde singer Nico at the wheel and two separate breakdowns on the Ohio Turnpike. As we dallied in a coffee shop for hamburgers en route, while I sat next to Andy I observed how little talent I had as an artist and how I envied their ability to draw something that was recognizable. Grabbing a paper napkin, Andy proceeded to give me a simple art lesson which I studied but was unable to duplicate with any accuracy. Ah, if only I’d possessed a video camera in those days. And then, in an act of unwitting ignorance, I crumpled up the napkin and threw it away. We arrived at Rutgers to find the campus a hive of apathy: a mere 200 of the 1,000 available seats had been sold and most of the posters advertising the event had been torn down by ill-wishers. That was all that was needed to goad Barbara Rubin into action. The 20-year-old filmmaker who had introduced us all to the Velvet Underground one night in a Greenwich Village cafe had a unique method of filming which consisted of jumping up and down with her camera more or less in synch with whatever moving objects she happened to be filming and if her subjects tended to be motionless when she arrived, her provocative style soon got them, if not hopping mad, at least hopping. Accompanied by a slender, golden-haired girl named Susan whose beauty, hair-trigger mind and appealing simplicity invariably reduced strong men to jelly she set off for the cafeteria where, after helping herself to tidbits from diners' plates, soon found herself surrounded by a score of admiring, questioning college boys. Sniping away with his camera all the while, Nat Finkelstein--a photographer who had arrived at the Factory to do a magazine feature the previous year and had hung around ever since--soon got into a raucous argument with the officious cafeteria manager who threw us all out. It didn't take long for word of the cafeteria contretemps to get around and the first show that night was packed although, as always, it took some time for the audience to decide whether they were being conned or not. Usually what helped this decision was the magic moment when they decided that as the technical quality of the films was so atrocious--compared to what they had become used to--there must be more going on than met the eye. What they then had to decide was whether the atrociousness was intentional or not, a conclusion that Warhol audiences could rarely be certain about.
By the time the second show was due to begin, Barbara Rubin had discovered that the screen was retractable so the movies could be screened on a constantly shifting background. "Fantastic!" said Andy as she flickered colored gels in front of the main projector. Three other projectors were operating simultaneously from different parts of the hall. There were movies on movies on top of people who were appearing in movies...Nico's face, Nico's mouth, Nico sideways, backwards, superimposed on the walls, on the ceiling, on Nico herself as she stood impassively on stage singing. Dancing onstage with Ingrid Superstar was Gerard, blond locks falling across his face as his head rose and fell with the jerky movements. Two foot-long flashlights in his hands probed and stabbed randomly at the audience. Susan, the golden girl, and a tall student were fighting a duel in the aisles with movie cameras, turning away from each other and then rushing back both cameras blazing furiously. Upfront, a man stood up ostentatiously, pushed his way past all the people in his row and slinging his coat defiantly over his shoulder walked to the exit door and slammed it loudly behind him. At the back a girl was leaving, too, but as I unobtrusively followed I saw her walk onto the campus, toss off her shoes and do a little dance on the grass beneath the trees. Her red dress shimmered in the moonlight. I smoked a joint and went back in to see Andy, in black suede suit, his right hand rhythmically tapping his rear pocket, seize one of the projectors and sweep a beam of light across the US flag beside the stage. Some of the audience was getting hostile. "Speak English--if you can " heckled a gruff voice as Nico announced a number in her slightly guttural tones. After the briefest of intermissions, the Velvet Underground went on, their most notable attribute (I wrote at the time) "a repetitive, howling lamentation which conjures up images of a schooner breaking up on the rocks. Their sound, punctuated with whatever screeches, whines, whistles and wails can be coaxed out of the amplifier envelopes the audience with disploding decibels, a sound two and a half times as loud as anybody thought they could stand".. (Explaining their association with Warhol some time later, Lou Reed told me; "Well, obviously he loved the music. We were doing what he was doing except we were using music and he was doing it with lights. But people don't understand him, they think he's strange, he's this or that. They don't understand that they're talking about a very, very good person. A very honest person who's enormously talented".) Before the show was over, the fire alarm went off, a monotonous bell tone synchronized with the winking of a red ceiling light. "It's all the smoke, happens all the time" said a student calmly. But the English professor who had staged the show was skeptical. "Some of the kids found out how easy it is to hold a match near the alarm" he explained. "They do it all the time when they want to be disruptive".
“Warhol studies can plausibly be said to have begun in 1970, the year in which the first two scholarly monographs devoted to his work-Rainer Crone's Andy Warhol and John Coplans's widely distributed catalogue of the same name--were published. Although both represent serious attempts to provide art historical analyses, in retrospect it seems to have been John Wilcock's unassuming, slightly irreverent, and virtually self-published The Autobiography and Sex Life of Andy Warhol (1971) that succeeded in setting the tone for a majority of subsequent Warhol literature. “The method Wilcock pioneered in assembling a collection of interviews and statements by the artist's associates and superstars has become a staple within the field. The work of Patrick Smlth, Lynne Tillman, and most recently (although less successfully) John O'Connor and Benjamin Liu are all reminiscent of its structure.' Indeed, many of the book-length personal memoirs and biographical recollections of life at the Factory can be seen as larger entries within the same category. “Wilcock's title promises a revelation of Warhol's true character, a claim that, on reading, reveals itself as false sensationalism, the unfulfilled promise of consumer desire. Yet, by weaving his book around this premise, Wilcock cleverly engaged with Warhol's self-fashioned image, reinforcing the impression that Warhol had nothing to say on his own behalf, that there was, behind the surface, nothing there. In the place where an interview with the artist might have appeared, Wilcock cleverly inserted an image of Warhol (appropriated from the cover of Coplans's book) and added an empty speech balloon issuing forth from his mouth”. --Branden W. Joseph, Review: One-Dimensional Man, Art Journal, Vol. 57, No. 4. (Winter, 1998)
AT THE FACTORY there was filming every day, or almost every day, and I tried to be there as often as possible. I was usually the only one holding --though goodness only knows what kind of stimulants the more outré cast members were on--and ever willing to share the joint with whoever asked. There seemed to be a general perception in the outside world that drugs were always part of the scene but as I didn't indulge in anything stronger than the weed I was never conscious of it. In any case, hard drugs were never in evidence and I suspect that uppers and downers were about the extent of it. I dimly remember that when I passed a joint to Andy one day that he took a drag but I can't say for certain. I may just have imagined it. In any case, I didn't do so again although most people there were happy to partake. Edie Sedgwick was always grabbing the joint from my hand and, for that matter, seemed to give her best performances when stoned although 'performing' may not be the correct word for the Poor Little Rich Girl she portrayed while reading, smoking, chatting on the phone, making coffee, lounging on her bed and--the first time Andy moved the camera --leaping up to go to the refrigerator. Apart from commercial successes such as The Chelsea Girls and Lonesome Cowboy, most of the movies were shown once and then stockpiled away in Andy's house and one day I asked Gerard what he planned to do with them. "He's got an ego predicament to solve", Gerard said. "He knows they're of value and he knows they're in demand and that's why he's holding them back. Although he's basically a voyeur and wants everybody to expose themselves completely, he won't expose himself. He likes to keep a lot of mystery. If he didn't have all those films, then there wouldn't be anything to hide." In the opinion of Charles Henri Ford, who first met him at his sister's party in 1962, Andy had always been financially secure. "That's one reason why Andy is where he is; if he'd been a poor, starving artist I don't think he would have gotten anywhere. It's really investing in himself that's got him where he is today." "He brought shamelessness into the artist going commercial or in columns or fashion magazines; he took away the stigma of artists not doing anything for publicity or for commercial reasons. "You get what you ask for. Picasso was an integrator of all styles, the greatest artist of his time because he could integrate everybody's style including 16th, 17th century, ancient Greek and God knows what. He turned everything into Picasso which doesn't mean he invented all those things but they came to him. They already existed and he transforms them by his own alchemy, his own magician-ship, into Picasso. Well, Andy has done more or less the same thing. Andy living on a desert island wouldn't be Andy." I suggested that the atmosphere around him was almost like a school because although he learnt a lot from other people they also learned a lot from him. He appeared as such a strong character that people tended to emulate his way of handling things. “Yes," Charles agreed, “because of his flair for picking out things that are in the air, which are bound to congeal in the future. Andy is a combination of flair, luck and publicity. Without one of those elements he wouldn't exist”. A longtime Warhol friend, Sam Green, offered a similar viewpoint. "As conscious as he is about style, and all those visual things, I really don't think he thinks of his life as a work of art”, Sam explained. “I know he thinks ahead, a long-term plan. I think he's always had an all-encompassing desire to be well-known, to be conspicuous. A lot of people have that, all of the people around him, that's what they're doing it for. They don't want peace, they don't want security, they don't want money, they don't want possessions. All they want is when they walk down the street is for people to turn around and say, 'Oh Gosh, I saw her picture in Life last week' I mean, who cares? But they're driven by that sort of thing." Various members of the Warhol entourage have offered reasons over the years for the genesis of Interview. Gerard Malanga, for example, has told interviewers it was because they wanted to go to parties. But of course the Factory already had more party invitations than it could handle. On one occasion, as a matter of fact, I collected a sheaf of invitations that Andy agreed he wouldn't be accepting and went to the parties myself, allowing me to devote one of my monthly High Times columns to "The Parties Andy Warhol Didn't Go To". The way Interview began was with one of the occasional phone calls Andy made to me in which he--once again--was bitching about how Hollywood wouldn't give him a million dollars to go out there and make a movie. Off-handedly I said, "Well Andy, all my friends publish newspapers; why don't you produce a paper?" It was met with a noncommittal grunt, but ten minutes later Andy called again. "What kind of a paper?" he asked in that querulous, uncertain voice. I remember telling him that a film paper would be an obvious choice and offering to put up the typesetting (via my wife's Ambertype, which was already providing the typesetting for many of Manhattan's underground papers). Typesetting and printing bills would be about equal, I said, and thus we could share ownership of the paper. At the time I was busy producing Other Scenes, a semi-radical tabloid I had begun a year or two previously, and as my travel writing job was still necessitating regular trips to Japan and Greece I was too busy to even think of getting involved editorially.
But I did suggest that he follow the example of Art D'Lugoff's Village Gate and call the paper Andy Warhol's inter/VIEW (he had come up with that title). No, he replied, he didn't want his name on it, nor did he want it printed in color. What style would the paper follow? I asked, figuring that anything Andy came up with would be imaginatively innovative. "I want it to look like Rolling Stone ", he said determinedly, to my surprise. And thus Interview was born and Andy began to carry a tape recorder with him everywhere he went. But I was getting increasingly unhappy with New York and about a year later, before I packed up and left for Europe, I told Andy that I'd like to sell out my share of Interview, while retaining a small percentage in case it was ever successful. Some years earlier, after being a cofounder of The Village Voice, for which I had written a weekly column for 10 years, I had left with nothing and I didn't care for the experience to be repeated. But Andy was adamant that it had to be all or nothing (as usual with Andy's business dealings, there was nothing on paper) and asked me to give him a bill for the year's typesetting. I assessed this at cost, a meager $6,000. When it came time to leave and he still owed me $1,000 I asked him to settle up with me by giving me one of his pictures. He signed over to me a couple of the big flower paintings that had just returned from being exhibited at the Tate Gallery. At the time any dealer would have valued them at $500 apiece because they were on paper, not on canvas, which would have doubled their value. As I was just about to leave the country, I traded them to my dealer for a substantial amount of smoke. Interview, subsequently edited by a man I always thought of as 'Bob the Snob', went on to become a great success, largely due to the Snob's sycophantic worship of the rich and socially connected which increasingly became Andy's chosen milieu. I never did read the magazine again and only saw Andy rarely afterwards.
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