Welcome to the Silver Factory: The Birth of the Pop Art Era

By Catherine O'Sullivan Shorr

The first in a three-part oral history introducing the members of Andy Warhol’s inner circle and their world of art, parties, drugs, and drama.

In the first volume of this fascinating oral history based on her documentary Andy Warhol’s Factory People—now available from libraries via the Kanopy streaming service—Catherine O’Sullivan Shorr illuminates the early years of Andy Warhol’s Factory scene through interviews with the artist’s collaborators, close friends, and many associates who became superstars. Frustrated with advertising work, Warhol set up his legendary studio in 1962 in an abandoned hat factory on Manhattan’s 47th Street. Rechristened and redecorated as the “Silver Factory,” it quickly became the hub of Warhol’s creative endeavors—the place where he constantly worked while an ever-changing cast of characters and muses passed through with their own contributions.
 
Photos by the Factory’s in-house photographer, Billy Name; candid interviews with Factory veterans like Ultra Violet, Mary Woronov, Taylor Mead, and Gerard Malanga; and discussions with chroniclers of the scene such as Victor Bockris and Henry Geldzahler provide revealing glimpses into life with Warhol. Working with silk-screen images of Marilyn Monroe, Campbell’s soup cans, and Brillo boxes, Warhol pioneered Pop Art during the early 1960s, and O’Sullivan’s assemblage of firsthand accounts expose the eccentric, elusive, and obsessive man behind the iconic art.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Media
• Release date: Aug 4, 2015
• ISBN: 9781504010511

Catherine O'Sullivan Shorr

Catherine O’Sullivan Shorr is an award-winning writer, film and sound editor, and documentary filmmaker. She earned an Emmy Award for her editorial work on the TV movie The Day After for ABC, and an Oscar nomination, along with Richard Shorr, for their contributions to the feature film Die Hard. Her motion picture credits also include: Prizzi’s Honor, Predator, A Soldier’s Story, and the César Award–winning film Farinelli. O’Sullivan Shorr’s stories and articles have been published in newspapers and journals both in the United States and abroad, including the Los Angeles Times, the Boston Globe, and the New York Press. She attended St. Lawrence University and the Universidad de las Américas in Mexico City. O’Sullivan Shorr splits her time between Paris and Los Angeles, and she writes in Siesta Key, Florida.

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Welcome to the Silver Factory

Andy Warhol’s Factory People

Catherine O’Sullivan Shorr

In the Silver Factory, Andy stops to show off his Brillo Box to Billy’s cat Ruby. (Photo: Billy Name)

In Memoriam

Ultra Violet, Lou Reed, Taylor Mead, Louis Waldon, ‘Leee’ Black Childers, and Nat ‘the hat’ Finkelstein …

… and for Patrick, for everything.

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

FACTORY FAMILY INTRODUCTIONS

BEYOND THE BEAT GENERATION

IN THE BEGINNING, ANDY CREATED

ALL TOMORROW’S PARTIES

BACK TO WORK

THE TRIANGLE

ANDY MAKES MOVIES … THE SILENT ERA

SILVER FAMILY

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

INTRODUCTION

2014 marked the 50th anniversary of Andy Warhol’s fabled and infamous Silver Factory. Ever wonder what all the fuss was (and still is) about? So much has been written of this art colossus—his obsession with celebrity, his sloppy silk-screens of Marilyn and Liz and Brando, his endless Campbell soup cans and Coca-Cola bottles, his mind-numbing movies—that more than a few feel his fifteen minutes of fame should have been up long ago. Instead, he has become a lasting icon of popular taste. As The New Yorker’s art critic Peter Schjeldahl wrote in his review of the Metropolitan Museum’s huge 2012 show of Warhol and his impact on sixty other artists: Like it or not, we are all Warholian.

But what about the forgotten Factory people behind Warhol’s unprecedented rise to spectacular success, who linked their destinies to his, when, as a frustrated graphic artist, he decided to start Pop art because he hated Abstract Expressionism …

In a tale reminiscent of ‘Lord of the Flies,’ this book uncovers what is left of the shroud of secrecy and mystique that surrounded this enigmatic personality, and exposes the bizarre, exploitive inside world of the shy, physically fragile, fanatically self-absorbed man that some say was not just a creator of art, but also a destroyer of art—and of people. Only those who survived really knew what lay beneath the pale make-up and fright wig.

For them, it all began in the early sixties. A slight, fey, blotchy-faced character from the Mad Men world of advertising had decided to ‘go downtown,’ where he would encounter and enlist the help of those soon to become his colorful entourage of misfits and muses—culled from the cutting edge of New York’s art scene—destined to create his Silver Factory … This wild collection of characters became the first to be dubbed Famous for Fifteen Minutes.

The ‘Andy Warhol’s Factory People’ book, based on my three-hour documentary series of the same name, is the culmination of shooting fifty hours of their interviews, screening over a hundred hours of Warhol’s movies and screen tests, collecting rare archive and news footage, sifting through thousands of candid photos, and running up copious bar tabs in New York, Los Angeles, Paris and London.

Clockwise: Andy with Nico’s son, Ari, Lou Reed, Nico, John Cale, Mo Tucker, Mary Woronov, Sterling Morrison and Gerard Malanga (Photo: Billy Name)

Though much of Warhol’s life and career may have been already minutely examined by a multitude of worthy and worldly experts, ‘Factory People’ deals with those essential early dreamers, the amphetamine-fueled avant-gardes who had been at the Silver Factory from the beginning and had followed Warhol’s phenomenal trajectory into fame and notoriety. Finding some of them proved to be elusive, since they had rarely reaped any material and social benefits from their proximity to the man considered to be one of most influential artists of the 20th century.

Perhaps the most important person you’ll meet is Billy Name, who created Warhol’s cavernous work space, slathered it all in aluminum foil, and became the official in-house photographer, the only one allowed to actually live there. He helped to create the essence of this book, with his cache of candid photographs taken in the throes of around-the-clock work marathons, all-night filming marathons, and, of course, bacchanalian parties. Poet and handsome ‘Factory stud’ Gerard Malanga, also in thrall to serious speed, worked full-time as Warhol’s main assistant, while recruiting future ‘Superstars’ of all sexes for Warhol’s home movies, which often featured Ondine, the wild mad jester of Warhol’s royal court, puckish Taylor Mead, reigning underground star, an abundant, ever-changing assortment of accommodating males, and an abundance of heiresses and over-the-top females, among them edgy cult star Mary Woronov, sultry raven-haired Ultra Violet, loopy fashion model Ivy Nicholson, blonde, big-haired Baby Jane Holzer, baby-faced Bibbe Hansen, the charismatic and doomed Edie Sedgwick, ethereal ice queen Nico, chubby, hilarious Brigid ‘Polk’ Berlin and beautiful clever Viva, all of whom need no introduction. (If they do, you may want to stop about now.) Their pithy comments on Life with Andy made the film possible. As Viva, the vivacious (sometime vicious) ‘Lucille Ball of underground movies’ would cackle: "Andy? He’s the Queen of Pop Art! As six-foot Mary ‘Whips’ Woronov would snarl: Oh, this is fabulous, a soup can, ha ha ha! I hate it, now."

The Warhol soup cans—along with the cokes, cows, fatal car crashes, flowers and Brillo boxes—became ubiquitous in our ‘Factory People’ project, which spanned the years 1964 to 1968, arguably Warhol’s busiest and most creative period. Not coincidentally, it also took us four frenzied years to complete our TV show, waaaaay past our network’s deadline, having endured a stunning series of mishaps, meltdowns and sheer madness—documented here in gory detail—that felt downright ‘Warholian,’ and made me want to take up drugs again.

Instead, I decided to write about it, and remember my own fifteen minutes in 1966, when Andy, Nico with her toddler son Ari, and the Velvet Underground came to Cape Cod, to Provincetown for a concert (cancelled) and wound up staying with me.

The Silver Factory, 231 E. 47th Street (Photo: Billy Name)

The different entourages that dominated the sixties, like Leary’s, or Ginsberg’s, or Warhol’s or Dylan’s, had to do with drugs and people’s attitudes toward drugs.

—Victor Bockris, Biographer, ‘Andy Warhol’

In the sixties, I had the strange luck (and no lack of drugs) to drop in and out of those fluctuating entourages following Leary, Ginsberg and Dylan. Yet in the summer of ’66 I found myself inadvertently a part of Warhol’s ‘Family’ when the Silver Factory came to Provincetown, Mass. A mellow folk-singing stint at the Blues Bag had given me the chance to befriend Richie Havens and Muddy Waters and learn open E-chord tuning (one could smoke and not screw up). Then Warhol and the Velvet Underground, (as The Exploding Plastic Inevitable) came to play the Chrysler Museum. Not so mellow—the police closed the show. I didn’t care; I was just thrilled to have them visit my place on the beach. It turned out that the toilets in their rental house had backed up, so they basically needed facilities. The Velvets did appear a bit sinister for summer, all dressed in black and looking like the death crew, as Warhol star Mary Woronov would say. They had nothing but amused disdain for our tie-dyed psychedelica, Buddhist bells and sandals. But that’s what was wonderful and indicative of the time—you could change, at a moment’s notice, into someone else, even if you were already famous. Steve McQueen was racing Walter Chrysler’s prototype Turbo down the road to Land’s End, where Marlon Brando was holed up with his pal Wally Cox. We somehow all wound up there. Warhol was not a fan of hippies, or of a certain Dylan song that had supposedly been directed at him. Our ‘Napoleon in Rags’ sequestered himself in the bathroom and powdered his blotchy, pockmarked face and blonde wig with talcum, leaving a residue which I mistook for cocaine and snorted off the toilet seat. I didn’t realize at the time that Warhol considered himself unattractive, and was thus drawn to pale, frail-looking people like himself (Edie Sedgwick), or aloof Teutonic blondes (Baby Jane Holzer, Nico) because he wanted to literally be them. Well, we all wanted to be Nico, except, it turned out, Nico. Born in Nazi Germany, she’d escaped to Paris and Rome, and appeared in Fellini’s ‘La Dolce Vita’ at fifteen. I worshipped Nico—the Irish tend to get on with Germans for reasons best left to British history—and took her succinct advice about wayward boyfriends and babies. I was happy to babysit Ari, her toddler by French actor Alain Delon, who would toddle off toward the ocean and worry everyone except his nonchalant mother. Nico, like the whole Warhol crowd, was older, mysterious, impossibly cool. Her flat baritone and surreal beauty seemed in perfect sync with Lou Reed’s nihilistic lyrics. We copied her platinum curtain of hair, bleaching and ironing our locks into submission until the dank marine layer moved in and undid it all … Warhol had no such problem; I was told he wore his wigs attached to imbedded clips, and had a peroxide bottle handy for infection, which everyone used.

Lights! Cameras! Multimedia! The Velvet Underground as ‘The Exploding Plastic Inevitable.’

The Velvet Underground at a performance at the Dom on St. Mark’s Place in Greenwich Village. (Photos: Billy Name)

… Warhol’s previous gilded ‘Girl of the Year’ Edie Sedgwick, with her tiny dresses, boyish hair, and huge chandelier earrings had dropped from favor. According to Warhol, who equated stardom and glamour with its inevitable demise, the anointed ‘Girl of the Year’ would only last that long in the spotlight before succumbing to exhaustion, drugs, or insanity. He was usually proven right. His women were beautiful and usually from good families, generous free spirits who ran through their trust funds with wild abandon. The men, on the other

Reviews for Welcome to the Silver Factory

[Adriana · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Was interesting; a good read to past the time and know a little more about Mr. Warhola