The Trip: Andy Warhol's Plastic Fantastic Cross-Country Adventure - Hardcover

Davis, Deborah

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1476703515 ISBN 13: 9781476703510

Publisher: Atria Books, 2015

Synopsis

From the author of Strapless and Guest of Honor, a book about a little-known road trip Andy Warhol took from New York to LA in 1963, and how that journey—and the numerous artists and celebrities he encountered—profoundly influenced his life and art.

In 1963, up-and-coming artist Andy Warhol took a road trip across America. What began as a madcap, drug-fueled romp became a journey that took Warhol on a kaleidoscopic adventure from New York City, across the vast American heartland, all the way to Hollywood and back.

With locations ranging from a Texas panhandle truck stop to a Beverly Hills mansion, from the beaches of Santa Monica to a Photomat booth in Albuquerque, The Trip captures Warhol’s interactions with Dennis Hopper, Peter Fonda, Marcel Duchamp, Elizabeth Taylor, Elvis Presley, and Frank Sinatra. Along the way he also met rednecks, beach bums, underground filmmakers, artists, poets, socialites, and newly minted hippies, and they each left an indelible mark on his psyche.

In The Trip, Andy Warhol’s speeding Ford Falcon is our time machine, transporting us from the last vestiges of the sleepy Eisenhower epoch to the true beginning of the explosive, exciting ’60s. Through in-depth, original research, Deborah Davis sheds new light on one of the most enduring figures in the art world and captures a fascinating moment in 1960s America—with Warhol at its center.

About this title

About the Author:

Deborah Davis is the author of Fabritius and the Goldfinch; Guest of Honor: Booker T. Washington, Theodore Roosevelt, and the White House Dinner That Shocked a Nation; Strapless: John Singer Sargent and the Fall of Madame X; Party of the Century; and Gilded. She formerly worked as an executive, story editor, and story analyst for several major film companies. For more information, visit www.WarholRoadTrip.com and follow along on Instagram @WarholRoadTrip.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

The Trip Chapter 1

It’s not what you are that counts, it’s what they think you are.

—Andy Warhol

In 1960, Andy Warhol was the opposite of a starving artist. In fact, he was a prosperous illustrator, living in a private townhouse on Lexington Avenue and Eighty-Ninth Street. The block was developed in 1888 by New York’s aristocratic Rhinelander family, wealthy landowners who commissioned the architect Henry Hardenbergh to build six attached Northern Renaissance Revival houses on one of their properties in uptown Manhattan. Hardenbergh had designed the legendary Dakota apartment building on the Upper West Side, and he would go on to build some of the city’s greatest hotels, including the Waldorf and the Plaza, among other landmarks. Decorated with brightly colored stone facades, arches, and balustrades, the buildings he erected for the Rhinelanders looked like dwellings in a fairy-tale village.

Sadly, these storybook houses deteriorated over the years. In 1931, Lexington Avenue was widened, narrowing the sidewalk and forcing the buildings to be stripped of the stairs that led to their parlor-floor entrances. Most of the residences in the row turned into rooming houses and offices, but Andy saw the potential in these quaint old buildings and claimed one as his home. He moved in and filled four floors with his unusual possessions. One of his favorite pastimes was scouring antique stores and art galleries for new acquisitions. His collection included a variety of penny arcade machines that sprayed perfume, tested strength, and dispensed gumballs; carousel horses; stuffed peacocks; a phrenological head; a giant, somewhat sinister-looking Punch figure; a cigar-store Indian; Tiffany lamps; neoclassical furniture; and the beginnings of an art collection, including a distinctive double portrait of Andy and his friend Ted Carey that had been painted by the artist Fairfield Porter. The friends thought that they could cut the painting in half and have two portraits for the price of one, but Porter, anticipating their plan, placed them so close together that it was impossible to separate them.

The parlor floor, the house’s public space, had two rooms—a small one overlooking Lexington Avenue, and a larger, paneled living room in the back. Andy described the rooms as “kind of schizo” because he designated the smaller space for his commercial work, his freelance illustration assignments, while he claimed the bigger room as his art studio and salon, the place where he did his real painting. His mother, Julia, and their ever-growing population of cats named Sam were installed in rooms on the street-level floor of the pale blue building, which contained a homey kitchen and an adjacent bedroom. His bedroom, outfitted with a brand-new four-poster bed, was on the third floor, and the other upstairs rooms were used for additional studio space and storage.

Andy’s Upper East Side address, shopping sprees, and expanding art collection were proof of his success, but he wasn’t satisfied. He still considered himself a work in progress, a man who was going places but had not yet arrived. When one considers where Andy had started in life, the extent to which he had already transformed himself was nothing short of miraculous.

Andy was the youngest son of Julia and her husband, Ondrej Warhola, Eastern European immigrants (specifically, Ruthenians), who came from Miková, a tiny village in the mountains of Slovakia. At the turn of the twentieth century, young Mikovians realized that the only way to move up was to move out. Nineteen-year-old Ondrej did just that in 1906 when, like many of his countrymen, he traveled to America in search of fortune. He worked in Pittsburgh for three years before returning to Miková with his hard-earned bankroll.

Strong, blond, handsome, and prosperous by his village’s standards, he attracted the attentions of every mother with a marriageable daughter. But it was seventeen-year-old Julia Zavacky, a golden-haired spitfire, who immediately caught his eye. Smitten, Ondrej proposed, only to be rejected. Unlike many of her contemporaries, Julia was a free spirit who loved to sing and tell stories, and she was not yet ready to become a wife. Knowing that suitable suitors were hard to come by in Slovakian villages, her practical parents pressured Julia into accepting Ondrej’s proposal.

The couple soon settled into the grinding routine of village life—work, work, and more work. Three years later, Ondrej came to the sobering realization that there was still no future in Miková. In 1912, he returned to America, promising to send for his wife and their infant daughter as soon as he had saved enough money. Nine years passed—years of war, deprivation, and heartbreak for Julia, who lost both her parents and her daughter to illness—before she took matters into her own hands and borrowed the money she needed to join her absent husband.

The Warholas reunited in 1921 and settled in Pittsburgh, a grim, gray, industrial city covered with so much smoke and fog that its inhabitants lived under a cloud of perpetual darkness. They moved into cheap tenement housing with primitive outdoor plumbing, and they struggled to get by on Ondrej’s wages. The couple welcomed a son, Paul, in 1922, followed by John in 1925. Paul and John resembled their stalwart father, but Andrej, the Warholas’ third son, was like a changeling—one of those enchanted infants from gypsy folklore whom the fairies substituted for a human child when the mother wasn’t looking. Baby Andy, who was born on August 6, 1928, was so fair and fragile that he seemed to come from another world. Julia was charmed by her cherubic infant and instantly started spoiling him. Her older boys were born knowing how to take care of themselves and were constantly hatching schemes to make money, whether selling newspapers or delivering ice. Andy, on the other hand, was a delicate, introspective child who needed all the special attention that Julia gladly gave him.

Despite his mother’s coddling, Andy learned early that hard work and thrift were the key to survival in Depression-era Pittsburgh. When Ondrej lost his job, forcing him to tighten his already taut belt, the hard times only made him work harder at whatever job he could find, and to save even more of what little he earned. By 1934 he had put aside enough money to buy half of a two-family house on Dawson Street, in the working-class section of Oakland. The Warholas rented their second floor to generate income, but the rest of the small house and yard, including a garden in the back for Julia, was their palace, an immigrant family’s American dream come true.

Although Andy was bright, he was also shy and fearful, and he preferred quiet games with the neighborhood girls to the rough-and-tumble activities his brothers enjoyed with other boys. The children’s school, Holmes Elementary, was down the street from their house, so the brothers came home for lunch every day. Julia usually served Campbell’s Soup, and tomato was Andy’s favorite variety. When not in school, he spent his time drawing, coloring, and cutting out paper dolls. His mother rewarded his best pictures with praise and Hershey bars, promoting an insatiable sweet tooth that would stay with him the rest of his life. Julia thought of herself as an artist, too, and she made colorful floral bouquets out of paper and tin cans that she sold to housewives looking for decorative touches for their modest homes.

The Warholas acknowledged that Andy was spoiled, but no one in the family seemed to mind his favored status. When, at the age of seven, he asked for a movie projector, his brothers were taken aback by the unusual request, but were not at all surprised when their resourceful mother found the money to buy one secondhand. Andy projected cartoons on the wall, turning the modest Dawson Street living room into his own private picture palace.

Watching cartoons at home was no substitute for seeing stars on the big screen, and Saturdays brought happy outings to the local movie theater. It was there that Shirley Temple flashed her dimples and dazzled devoted fans like Andy with her adorable song-and-dance routines. The fabled child star had a lot to sing about in 1936: her movies, including Bright Eyes, The Little Colonel, Captain January, and her most recent hit, The Poor Little Rich Girl, were so popular that Twentieth Century Fox was paying her an astonishing $50,000 per film.

As much as Andy enjoyed the star’s fanciful movies, he always dreaded the inevitable moment when a father, or some other parental stand-in, would rush in at the end of the film to claim the curly-topped little girl. “It ruined everything,” he complained. “I don’t want to know who the father is.” Even at an early age, Andy preferred fantasy to reality.

Shirley Temple had poise, charm, beauty, talent, celebrity, wealth, and an unlimited variety of happy endings. Of course Andy wanted to be just like her. “Morningstar,” “Andy Morningstar”—that’s what he called himself in his fantasies. He picked the name because it suggested bright beginnings, brilliance, fame. Alas, Andy was stuck with the less glamorous “Warhola,” and the decidedly prosaic life that went with it. “Being born is like being kidnapped . . . and sold into slavery,” he lamented when he was older.

Andy escaped to the movies most Saturdays, but he spent every Sunday in church. Located in a neighborhood called Ruska Dolina, or the Rusyn Valley, Saint John Chrysostom Byzantine Catholic Church was founded in 1910 by Carpatho-Rusyn immigrants who longed for the religious traditions they practiced in the old country. On Sundays, Julia and Andy rose early and walked a vigorous mile to make the first Mass at 7:00 a.m. They stayed at church the entire day, praying, socializing, and attending two more masses. Andy dutifully sat with his mother, staring at the magnificent iconostasis—a wall of hand-painted icons that had been commissioned for the church’s interior.

Painted in vivid gold, blue, red, and other rich colors, the icons were beautiful to look at, but they were meant to be much more than pretty pictures. Icons were “scripture to the illiterate,” according to Saint Gregory the Dialogist, one of the early Roman popes. “What writing presents to readers, this a picture presents to the unlearned,” he explained. The images of saints and religious scenes had a visual language all their own—an oversized forehead symbolized wisdom, full lips suggested eloquence, and large ears were the mark of a compassionate listener. The bright gold backgrounds haloing oversized heads indicated divine light, or heaven. Every aspect of an icon, including its color and scale, was infused with meaning and story.

The Warhola routine was interrupted in 1936, when eight-year-old Andy contracted rheumatic fever. It was a common illness in Pittsburgh, especially in the poorer neighborhoods, where children sometimes played near open sewage. But Andy’s recovery was unusually slow, and there were complications. His hands shook, his legs were weak, his speech was slurred, and he had difficulty concentrating. Worse still, he couldn’t stop fidgeting, and his limbs and torso constantly twitched in every direction. Eventually, the Warholas realized that something was terribly wrong. Only then did their doctor confirm that Andy’s rheumatic fever had developed into Sydenham’s chorea, a neurological disorder more commonly known as Saint Vitus’ Dance, a cruel name for an illness that causes its victims to move in an awkward parody of dancing.

Thomas Sydenham, a famous seventeenth-century physician, first described the disorder in 1686, calling it “a kind of convulsion . . . a constellation of involuntary, purposeless, rapid movements of the limbs; muscular weakness; and emotional lability.” Two hundred and fifty years later, the treatment for Saint Vitus’ Dance was no more sophisticated than it was in Sydenham’s time: patients had to endure a slow recuperation in a quiet environment, more commonly known as “bed rest.”

Staying in bed for ten weeks would have been a challenging experience for most eight-year-old boys, but not for Andy. To him, the term “bed rest” sounded luxurious, something that would be prescribed for movie stars, not an ordinary child like Andy Warhola. Julia moved her son’s bed into the first-floor dining room, where she and Ondrej normally slept, and showered him with attention, supplying comic books (Popeye and Dick Tracy were his favorites), movie magazines, candy, whatever he wanted. With his brothers’ help, Andy wrote to movie stars—Bob Hope, Abbott and Costello, Alice Faye, Carmen Miranda—requesting publicity stills and autographed pictures, which, when received, he carefully pasted into a special scrapbook. Julia also encouraged Andy to do art projects, hoping such activities would help improve his motor skills.

Eventually Andy recovered, but he had been transformed by his illness. He seemed even paler and more fragile than before, and the rashes that accompanied Sydenham’s chorea affected his fair skin, which became so blotchy and irregular as he matured that the neighborhood children called him “Andy the Red-Nosed Warhola.” There were other changes, too. Andy had gone Hollywood during his “intermission.” He was starstruck by the celebrity stories he had read in all those movie magazines, and the photographs he collected, including a signed, tinted headshot of Shirley Temple (dedicated sweetly, if incorrectly, to “Andrew Worhola”), were his prized possessions.

Post bed rest, Andy enjoyed drawing more than ever. Eventually, one of his teachers recognized that the odd little boy had real talent and arranged for him to attend free art classes at the Carnegie Museum on Saturday mornings. Although the museum was only a mile or so from Andy’s house, it stood at the center of a completely different world from the working-class one he occupied. That part of Oakland, nicknamed “the city beautiful,” was Pittsburgh’s showplace and cultural center, as well as a playground for its privileged millionaires.

Every Saturday, Andy went to the museum to study art with his fellow Tam O’Shanters, the name given to the group to honor its late Scottish American benefactor, the millionaire philanthropist Andrew Carnegie. He was envious of the pampered rich students who arrived at school in limousines—fancy Packards and Pierce-Arrows. Yet when class started, talent was the great equalizer, and Andy quickly proved that he was “more equal” than the other students. The instructor, Joseph Fitzpatrick, called his work “individual and unique,” and he frequently held it up for the other students to admire. Even Ondrej recognized that his youngest son was a promising artist who was not destined to remain on Dawson Street. He planned accordingly, secretly putting aside money to fulfill another immigrant dream: Andy would be the first member of the Warhola family to go to college.

Ondrej did not live long enough to see that dream come true. He became ill, possibly from a liver infection, and when he knew he was dying, he told Paul and John about Andy’s college fund. It was understood that the older boys would take care of their gifted younger brother. Ondrej passed away in 1942, and two years later, the family faced another crisis when Julia was diagnosed with colon cancer. She underwent a colostomy, recovered, and continued to look after her three industrious sons. Paul and John went to work so they could support the family, while Andy raced through high school and finished in three years. Upon graduation, he announced that he would use his father’s savings to study commercial art at the Carnegie Institute of ...

About this edition

• Publisher: Atria Books
• Publication date: 2015
• ISBN 10: 1476703515
• ISBN 13: 9781476703510
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 336