GLR July-August 2024

form of serigraph portraits of Elvis, Marilyn, Jackie O., and Liz, and it led to the launch of his tabloid-format magazine Interview , Warhol’s answer to People .At first it was a money pit, with sales and advertising never fully offsetting overhead. But by the 1980s, it began to take off. The quest for interviewees for the magazine cover was parallel to Warhol’s constant trawling for new portrait commissions. He seems to have set the fame bar rather low, granting celeb status to anyone in the movie or TV business, anyone socially prominent in New York, anyone in the fashion industry with name recog nition, rock stars, visual artists in vogue, higher-ups in government, and of course Superstars famous for being famous. In one of his diary entries, his description of a party he attended is summed up in the comment: “Everybody was somebody.” It’s a perspective that lines up well with his best-known pronouncement: “In the fu ture, everyone will be world famous for 15 minutes.” § U NLIKE T RUMAN C APOTE , Warhol was never fully in corporated into New York’s upper crust, never, for example, on intimate terms with the likes of the Wrightsmans or the Paleys. But he was content to operate at its periphery. It’s a milieu that en joys having a gay court jester, and Capote was brilliant at being one until the publication of Answered Prayers . The mordant satire of his socialite friends in the book foreclosed on his privileged position among them. He was still a star in Warhol’s eyes, though, and a request for a regular Capote column in Interview was ac cepted. After all, Capote’s reputation had by then come down sev eral pegs, whereas Warhol had become world famous. Most of the pieces in Capote’s Music for Chameleons were first published in Interview , and he was given the cover for one of the issues. Because of his international reach and his association with multimillionaires, Warhol’s portraits eventually moved beyond showbiz subjects and Chairman Mao, landing commissions from heads of state or at least their wives, among them Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter. Word spread. In those years Fereydoon Hoyveda, the Iranian ambassador to the UN for the Pahlavi regime, was a notable figure in New York’s café society and several times gave parties for Warhol and his friends at the Iran ian consulate. Champagne flowed and golden caviar was scooped up by guests who somehow managed not to be aware of the Shah’s human rights violations, his prisons, and torture squads. Friendship with the ambassador resulted in an invita tion to Iran’s Festival of the Avant-Garde and eventually a por trait commission from the Empress Farah Pahlavi. The portrait series was completed but never paid for because, with little warning, the Iranian Revolution erupted, upending the Peacock Throne and sending the Shah into exile. Other clouds were gathering. In 1979, Studio 54 was raided and shut down on drug charges. Steve Rubell took a plea deal for tax evasion but still had to do time. On his release, he opened the Palladium on 14 th Street, which Warhol also frequented, though it never achieved 54’s iconic status. With the early 1980s came the AIDS epidemic, taking the life of Jon Gould, Halston, and eventually Rubell. Candy Darling died of cancer, other Super stars drifted away, and Warhol’s health declined. A brief artistic springtime blossomed when Jean-Michel Basquiat signed on at

Hervé Gloaguen. Andy Warhol, NY 1966. (With Nico, Gérard Malanga, and Paul Morissey) on the set of “Tiger Morse.”

able nightlife led to further portrait commissions. It dawned on him that clubbing, too, was Art, one that counterintuitively boosted its sister occupation, Business. Surveying Warhol’s activities as reported in the’70s diary calls to mind the What ever-Happened-To and Where-Are-They-Now parlor games. Survivors from that era will smile at the mention of Le Jardin, Bianca Jagger, Taylor Mead, Régine, Egon von Fürstenberg, Sylvia Miles, Lance Loud, Fiorucci, Tama Janowitz, the Cock ettes, Jerry Hall, Elaine’s, Nan Kempner, Nell’s, Peter Beard, and Steve Rubell. Studio 54 founder Rubell has since died, but the 54 survives in the history of New York City nightlife. It opened in April 1977 to an enthusiastic swarm of scene-mak ers, a crowd that included Ivana and Donald, always eager to boost the Trump brand. Within weeks, the 54 had become a hangout favored not only by Warhol and the Factory but by the entire Halston ret inue, its most prominent members being Liza Minelli, Elsa Peretti, and Venezuelan-born artist Victor Hugo. The latter de volved into a sort of shuttlecock between Halston, who discov ered him, and Warhol, who found him intriguing and fun. Hugo had moved up in Manhattan gay circles, propelled by wild am bition and a zeal to be zany, all of it supported by good looks and other physical endowments. Under Hugo’s influence, Warhol produced his “Landscapes” series, which began as Po laroids of sex acts performed by hustlers Hugo brought to the Factory, producing images that were then transferred to silkscreen. Factory assistants disliked Hugo and disapproved of a visual series they considered pornographic, but Warhol had seen what Robert Mapplethorpe was up to and wanted a piece of the action, which in any case he found titillating. Unfortu nately, this sudden new interest in “landscapes” alienated his handsome partner Jed Johnson, whose objections went unheard. Without much warning, Jed left Warhol’s East 66 th Street town house and settled down with someone else. Warhol pretended not to be surprised or to mind, but close friends could see it was one of those occasions when he’d have preferred to be a robot with no feelings. The ironic mirroring of American celebrity culture took the

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