Warhol's Muses by Laurence Leamer
'Warhol's Muses' by Laurence Leamer
Sex looked pretty boring in Andy Warhol’s movies. So writes Laurence Leamer, with good reason, describing Couch (1964), one of Warhol’s early Factory productions. Leamer’s latest book, Warhol’s Muses, isn’t focused on Warhol as filmmaker, but the celebrity artist’s motion pictures are a recurring motif. “Making films continued to be an exquisite device for getting Warhol into the homes and lives of the rich,” Leamer continues. Hollywood wasn’t calling, but underground filmmaking had achieved cultural cachet in early ‘60s New York, thanks in part to Jonas Meklas’ Filmmakers Cinematheque. Many of Warhol’s flicks were screened there, but Couch was so excruciating, according to Leamer, that Meklas turned it down.
With Warhol’s Muses, Leamer turns his scope on Warhol’s lust for fame and the women who helped him into the spotlight. “He was, by his own admission, a weird-looking gay man in a world and an era that wasn’t hospitable to such as him,” Leamer writes. In the ‘60s paparazzi pop culture, he “realized he needed to be around stunning women” whose presence “would raise his social cachet dramatically and bring him the publicity and public adulation he so desired.” A succession of women, he called them “superstars,” helped cement Warhol’s presence in the media and society.
Warhol’s first “superstar,” “Baby Jane” Holzer, was a young Park Avenue nouveau riche who had the good fortune of visiting London as it started to swing and befriending Mick Jagger and company. Warhol went to her rock star parties as a quiet observer, “constantly sweeping the room, picking up useful scraps” of ideas. He was a gifted and energetic imitator, and like the great artists of the Renaissance, he didn’t work in a lonely garret but in an assembly-line studio he called, with poker-faced honesty, the Factory.
Holzer said yes when asked to star in his underground film (albeit he disliked being called “underground”), Kiss (1964). In the Factory milieu, Leamer writes, “women were generally treated like decorative items to be moved around and positioned for dramatic and aesthetic effect, and in Kiss, Holzer’s role was no different.”
And so it continued as Warhol knocked off motion pictures in between his increasingly profitable lines of reproduceable pictures suitable for hanging above the expensive sofas of the rich. Often, he worked like a circa 1899 director, setting a camera before a situation and letting it roll. “Many of Warhol’s films are full of such repetition and tedium that the average moviegoer would have thrown popcorn at the screen,” Leamer observes.
One of Warhols’ inspired casting decisions was to team Nico, a glacial German beauty and aspiring chanteuse, with the Velvet Underground, whose first album he produced. Warhol starred one of his sadder muses, the depressed and sexually abused Edie Sedgwick, in Vinyl (1965). As “one cruel scene after another occurs next to her, she appears bored with the whole business,” yet “she exudes an irresistible aura that draws the eyes away” from the sadomasochistic goings on. After militant feminist Valerie Solanas shot Warhol in 1968, following his rejection of her screenplay, Warhol largely withdrew from filmmaking and turned his camera over to protégé Paul Morrissey, deemed by Leamer as a more coherent filmmaker.
Leamer gathers ample evidence that Warhol gained much more from his “superstar” women than they received in return. By 1974, “two of the muses had died, three were addicts, and a fourth fought for mental equilibrium.” He assaulted none of them physically and forced them to do nothing against their will, yet “the climate around him was full of madness and danger and he reveled in that,” creating a toxic social experiment with him as the lab-coated technician, taking careful notes.
Warhol’s Muses: The Artists, Misfits, and Superstars Destroyed by the Factory Fame Machine is published by Putnam.
