Warhol’s Muses: The Artists, Misfits, and Superstars Destroyed by the Factory Fame Machine

In this captivating group portrait, biographer Leamer (Capote’s Women) spotlights the “artistic muses who helped turn a Pittsburgh son of Eastern European immigrants into international artist Andy Warhol.” The narrative reveals how Warhol cultivated a stable of attractive, socially prominent women who starred in his Factory films and provided him with emotional support and social access—until they were deemed old news and discarded. Leamer tracks the rise and fall of such “Superstars” as Edie Sedgwick, who emerged from her troubled youth in an old-money family to become an “exuberant queen of nightlife” in 1960s New York. After meeting Warhol in 1964, Sedgwick starred in such films as Poor Little Rich Girl, a 66-minute “exploitation of her troubled life” in which she smoked, took pills, and talked about squandering her inheritance. By her final Factory film, 1972’s Ciao! Manhattan, she’d been institutionalized, gotten hooked on heroin, and come to believe that “those sons-of-bitches took advantage of me.” Leamer paints a vivid portrait of a dark, drug-filled “bohemian New York,” where Warhol’s superstars rebelled against social norms while subordinating their own artistic ambitions to help him assemble his “most enduring creation: himself.” Meticulous research, including interviews with Warhol’s assistants and transcriptions of his tapes, adds fly-on-the-wall immediacy to Leamer’s account. Readers will be riveted. (May)