I Left It on the Mountain: A Memoir (14 page)

Fred, ever dapper, loved to wear Anderson & Sheppard bespoke suits. His face was often flushed and the heat from it seemed to enhance the aroma of his eau de toilette, Penhaligon’s Blenheim Bouquet, which he so liberally splashed on each morning, its notes of pine and black pepper competing with its top ones of lemon and lime and lavender. He favored French cuffs, his gold Swiss Mido wristwatch worn over one of them in the manner of Gianni Agnelli.

On Fred it all seemed, alas, only mannered, for he was the son of a Texas furniture salesman. Fred had, however, caught the eye of art collectors and philanthropists Jean and Dominique de Menil while he was an art history major at the University of St. Thomas, a small Catholic college located in the de Menils’ Houston neighborhood. Still a freshman at the college, Fred was undaunted by the de Menils’ wealth and taste and set out to enhance it, so much so that he became known as “The Dauphin” amongst their social set, which he quickly made his own.

Indeed, a de Menil daughter was the guest of honor back in 1967 at a party thrown by architect Philip Johnson at his glass house in New Canaan, Connecticut, at which Fred was a guest. Andy arrived that day with the Velvet Underground, who had been hired by Johnson to be the entertainment at the party. Henry was also a guest at the party that day, and that was when he had the curatorial matchmaking instincts to introduce Andy to Fred. “And then they walked off into a kind of empyrean,” Henry told me.

The story itself didn’t impress me that much the first time I heard it. Henry often held forth with such stories when we were together. I focused instead on the realm off into which Andy and Fred had walked—an empyrean—not knowing exactly what it meant but wondering if I would ever be able to tell a story myself someday that demanded a sentence with such a lovely word in it.

*   *   *

I’ve often thought about the two reigning Andys of the art world, Wyeth and Warhol, and how one became such a part of my brother’s life and the other became such a part of mine, each in his way early champions of our careers. Two artists—two brothers—could not be more different. We formed a rather disquieting quartet—two polar opposite painters with Pennsylvania roots and polar opposite brothers from the backwoods of Mississippi.

By the time of my friendship with Henry Geldzahler, he and Andy had become polarized themselves. Maybe that was why Andy was giving me the cold shoulder at the beginning of my time at
Interview—
my closeness to Henry. Would too readily accepting me be a kind of forgiveness for Henry? They had once been daily telephone buddies, but when Henry fell in love with Christopher Scott and Chris moved in with him Andy “became jealous that there was another voice that answered the phone,” Henry told me when we were discussing the falling-out. “Then when I curated the 1966 Venice Biennale and didn’t include any Warhols he wouldn’t have much to do with me after that. I miss him. But I guess I deserved it. I rejected his art. I had no art to reject in return. So he rejected me.”

One of the first times I ever visited Henry at his place on 9th Street I noticed he had his portable television sitting on top of one of Warhol’s Brillo boxes that had been exhibited at the Stable Gallery in 1964 when they were still close friends. “Give it a kick,” Henry told me. I did as I was instructed and was astonished to discover Henry had put wheels on the bottom of the box and it coasted across the room toward his bed. “That’s all it’s finally good for,” he told me, laughing, when I asked if he hadn’t ruined the resale value of a piece of Warhol’s art.

Maybe it was Henry’s early influence on me, but I always considered Warhol and his world a bit tacky and was even a bit embarrassed to be working at the Factory. I knew, though, that others would find it glamorous. I was soon, however, caught up in that tacky glamour—as I came to call it—which had as its logical outcome all my years at
Vanity Fair
. Tackiness was more expertly tucked into the glamour at
Vanity Fair
, camouflaged, so highly styled it became a kind of knowing exaltation of it until the exaltation was itself nothing but a lark. The two were seamlessly blended there, their combination resulting in another logical outcome: the celebrity journalism that I not only practiced but also came to define for more than a decade.

And yet I never really considered myself a journalist. I considered myself a writer who could carry on a conversation and shape a narrative. I had lucked out. My only two jobs in the magazine world were at
Interview
and
Vanity Fair
. I never had to earn my stripes in the journalistic trenches. If I had considered myself a journalist I would have had a real inferiority complex, which I had to fight as it was—especially at
Vanity Fair,
where tackiness and glamour were sutured together by the high caliber and seriousness of much of the reporting and other writing within its pages. Don’t get me wrong. I knew I was good at my job and my cover stories helped newsstand sales. But, as I once told my
Vanity Fair
colleague James Wolcott, “I’m the trailer park section here. I know my place.”

Any time Tina Brown or Graydon Carter, the two editors I worked for at
Vanity Fair,
were criticized it was because of the celebrity angle of the magazine. All editors in chief want to be taken seriously by others in the insular journalism world of New York, and my stories served as the cudgel their critics could so easily use against them. When they looked at me what they couldn’t help but see was a cudgel with a crew cut. I was that person in the mirror they too stared at after they’d close their own office bathroom doors and stare at their own darkly circled eyes when the stress got too much, having struck the bargain to edit
Vanity Fair
with its editorial recipe of celebrity, scandal, crime, and the many ways the wealthy won’t let us forget they are in our midst. I had become to them the tacky reflection of their glamorously serious selves that they hated facing.

*   *   *

The person I was drawn to the most during my time as a Factory worker was the receptionist on “Andy’s side,” as we at the magazine labeled the part of the Factory reserved for Warhol’s art empire. Each morning after I poured myself some coffee I’d stop by her desk to see what new item she was knitting. Her name was Brigid and her back was usually tight from all the incessant working of those knitting needles, so many mornings I’d even give her a massage.

“You don’t feel any tumors?” she’d always whisper with the harried hope of a true but lovable hypochondriac.

After the massage I’d offer a bit of my morning cranberry muffin to her ever-present pug puppies, Fame and Fortune. The former was given to her by Andy; the latter was given its name as yet another way for her glibly to look upon her own. After a month of massages I discovered that Brigid was Brigid Berlin (or, for Warhol aficionados, Brigid Polk). Working at the Factory had still not turned me into a Warhol aficionado myself; therefore, Vincent Fremont, another person on the art side of the Factory who had been quite welcoming and friendly to me, had to explain exactly who she was. To me, she was just Brigid the receptionist, the person there who had been the nicest to me after my arrival.

She had once been known, explained Vincent—who began working there himself around 1969 and had risen to the VP of Andy Warhol Enterprises before later being named the executor of Andy’s estate and exclusive sales agent of his works—as Brigid Polk because she’d poke herself with a needle full of amphetamines in the early Factory days. “Hard to believe looking at her now, huh,” Vincent had said, smiling at my astonishment. He was right. I did have a hard time equating that old Brigid with the one I was getting to know and love. Over twenty years later, sitting with her knitting at the reception desk, she was now a sober version of herself. Even matronly. I loved to talk to her as she knitted. There was a Zen-like comfort I found watching her hands in a world of their own with those other kind of needles they now held. Needles, it seemed, had become the center of her sobriety just as they had once been the center of her addiction.

The daughter of Richard and Honey Berlin, Brigid grew up in New York at 834 Fifth Avenue. Her father worked for the Hearst Corporation for fifty-two years, the last twenty-three as the president and chief executive officer. Her mother was a social figure on the New York scene and was renowned for her extravagant parties. Brigid grew up around her parents’ best friends—everyone from the Duke and Duchess of Windsor to the Richard Nixons and the Lyndon Johnsons.

“I attended a long list of boarding schools, but I didn’t go to college,” she told me one morning as I watched the needles. “I was sent off to finishing school, where they tried to finish me off.”

Brigid’s life changed in her early twenties when she met Andy Warhol, just as mine had when I was in my early thirties. Each of the succeeding Factories had been her second home, their inhabitants her extended family. In the early years, as a participant in such films as
Chelsea Girls
and
Ciao! Manhattan, Tub Girls, Four stars (****)
, and
Imitation of Christ,
she was yet another bauble of a society girl Warhol could add to his collection. As the years passed, however, she became his confidante and best friend.

After Andy’s death in 1987 I had moved up the masthead to executive editor at
Interview
and we put his picture on the cover of the February 1989 issue in order to celebrate the retrospective of his career that was opening that month at the Museum of Modern Art. I conducted an interview with my buddy Brigid, who gave me her own history of the Factory and Andy. The title of the piece was “Factory Days” and in it Brigid recalled the behind-the-scenes life of the world Warhol created for himself. I was shocked when I saw the layout and realized my name was the first to appear in the well of an issue devoted to the very conception of the Factory. And it was in that moment that I was embarrassed at ever having been embarrassed about working there. I cherish those memories now. I cherish too the memory of serving as an usher at Andy’s funeral at St. Patrick’s Cathedral. I cherish the tears I shed that day when I remembered how sweetly he said the words, “Welcome to the Factory,” to me and had listened to me read him a poem by John Keats then, not knowing he’d soon be buried, told me where Keats had been buried in Rome. I cherish the following interview I did with Brigid after Andy’s burial in which she makes so clear how much she missed him, how much we all did.

KEVIN SESSUMS TALKS TO BRIGID BERLIN

KEVIN SESSUMS:
Do you remember the very first time you met Andy?

BRIGID BERLIN:
I have two recollections about how I met Andy and I’m not sure which is the right one. Around 1961 or ’62 I happened to know all the window-display decorators in New York. My future husband, to whom I was married for seven months, was the design director at Tailored Woman, which later became a part of Bergdorf’s. Thursday night was window-dressing night in New York. I’d make plans to meet some of the decorators after they did their windows, which was around midnight or one in the morning. If I walked up either side of Fifth Avenue on a Thursday night, I knew everybody in the windows. Andy was then doing the windows for I. Miller Shoes.

I also had a house on Fire Island one summer. I had got a small inheritance from a friend of my father’s. My father wanted to put some of it away for me—I was twenty-one at the time—but I demanded the entire thing. I had just married the guy from Tailored Woman, and we didn’t really have any of our own money, so I took the inheritance and rented a house in Cherry Grove, which I called Brigid Dune. All I did was give parties. I gave luncheons for three-hundred people, sent out invitations on Tiffany cards with “No swimsuits allowed” engraved on the bottom, and ordered four hundred lobsters from Sayville. I was very, very grand. I’d hire private seaplanes to take me into New York to pick up my mail. On the return I’d ask the pilot to circle very low over my house so I could drop emerald cuff links and other kinds of jewelry into the pool so my husband could dive for them. And I think I met Ondine out at Cherry Grove at the Sea Shack. He thought I was one of the truly outrageously funny people. He might have been the first to take me to the Factory.

KS:
Tell me a little about that first Factory. It was on East 47th Street.

BB:
Yes. Between Second and First Avenues. On the corner of Second Avenue there was a Bickford’s coffee shop—that’s where all the food used to come from. Andy loved vanilla milk shakes and cheeseburgers. The Factory was like a big loft, but in those days we didn’t call them lofts. It was one vast floor, which you got to by a freight elevator. It was always breaking down. There were three enormous windows that overlooked 47th Street. There were pillars holding up whatever pillars hold up. Billy Name started to live there and he was the one who painted it silver. When he started he just sprayed everything. Then we covered the ceiling with foil. Even the toilet was silver. There was no kitchen or anything—it was a broken-down kind of place. There was old furniture around. A ratty old couch.

Andy started doing his paintings—the flowers, the soup cans—up in front by the windows. He’d rope off the area with a string when he was working, and he’d always yell at me to get away from him when I was smoking my cigarettes because I could have blown up the place with all that flammable paint around.

KS:
Did Andy demand quiet while he worked? Or did he like all the activity?

BB:
Oh, there was always a racket going on. Billy Name loved the opera—
Madame Butterfly, Tosca,
always Maria Callas. It was like a show. I was there. Ondine. Rotten Rita. Billy was very tall and thin and elegant with his gold chains around his neck and a long cigarette holder.

KS:
What was Andy’s attraction to you?

BB:
He was impressed by who my parents were. Especially my father and the whole idea of Hearst. He was intrigued if you were from a good family. We had such a good time. Such fun. We’d always go out from the Factory. We’d meet up late at night after Andy would get through working. We’d head for an ice-cream parlor around the corner called the Flick, or we’d go to Ondine’s disco or the one that Richard Burton’s wife owned. We used to go to the Village a lot. Andy was into wearing his black leather jacket and black chino pants.