Burning Mao

Summary

The summer of 1977, when I was sixteen years old, I started work at Andy Warhol’s Factory. I was a teen stalker, a fantasist who mostly preferred sitting on a stoop opposite someone’s house, noting the street-scene in my diary, to actually meeting the person inside, and Andy had long been one of my simmering obsessions. My parents – New York society people with an interest in downtown art – had first met Andy in the late fifties, when my father was working as a fashion photographer and Andy was still an illustrator dressing windows for Bonwit Teller. My father liked to say that back then he’d thought Andy Warhol an embarrassing little creep whose determination to be famous was clearly doomed. But my mother had a taste for oddball dreamers and she and Andy became friends; she appeared in one of his 1964 Screen Tests. I’d been raised on her stories of the Factory – the silver-tinfoil-walled spaceship where Andy, pedaling on his exercise bike, swigged codeine-infused cough syrup and watched his superstars squabble and self-destruct. Watched and subtly egged them on. At a certain point, my mother got spooked by how many of his beautiful, lost young creatures ended up dead. In 1968, Andy was shot by Valerie Solanas and he too, briefly, died. It was a time when America’s chickens, in Malcolm X’s phrase, seemed to be coming home to roost – Andy’s shooting was edged off the front pages by Robert F. Kennedy’s two days later – and when Andy came back from the dead, with his insides shattered and sewn together again, he was seemingly cured of his taste for watching other people detonate. On 7 December 1976, I finally succeeded in pestering my parents into introducing me to Andy Warhol. By then, they had devolved into merely social, semi-professional friends who exchanged poinsettia plants at Christmas, and the Andy I had wanted to know – the ghostly cyclist who could mesmerize you for eight hours with a flickery image of a skyscraper – had been supplanted by the art-businessma...