In Warhol’s Muses (Putnam, May), the biographer profiles the “superstars” who helped catapult Andy Warhol from obscurity to stardom.
You write that Warhol’s superstars were a chosen family whose members sought emotional support. Yet Warhol thrived on manipulating their wounds.
All of us are a little bit calculating in certain parts of our lives. Andy was calculating every single moment of his life. To begin in his incredibly modest circumstances and reach for the heights, you have to be calculating. So yes, he manipulated the superstars—he used them.
He comes across as someone who could read people and yet lacked empathy for them.
Yes, exactly. He read them extremely well, but he didn’t have deep empathy. He didn’t ask them about their problems. He didn’t care. They were there to advance him, to advance his fame. That was what he was about—becoming famous. He is the precursor
to the celebrity world that we have now.
Several superstars came from the upper rungs of society. Their proximity gave Warhol legitimacy. What did they get out of it?
It was a time when the establishment was slowly collapsing, in part because its youngest members were bored to death and thought it was corrupt. These women wanted out of that world, and they chose Andy. In some ways, it was a big mistake because so many of them ended up poorly. But they wanted it. That’s the reason why Andy’s parties were full of the elite. Five years earlier, nobody in that league would have shown up at a place like the Factory.
There’s a fly-on-the-wall quality to many scenes in the book. How did you develop that sense of immediacy?
I just attempt to enter into these lives as closely as I can. I try to imagine myself there at that moment, let this other part of my psyche that I don’t understand take over. I think the major ideas build out of tiny details. The smaller and more valid it is, the better it is. The reader will figure this out on different levels.
Warhol’s muses were the original influencers decades before the internet. Would Warhol have needed his muses today?
Yes, to get to fame in a different way. To get to the places he wanted to go. He believed he was an ugly gay man, and he knew he needed other means to rise past that. Andy Warhol is the most celebrated, most famous artist of the 20th century. And these women were part of it, yet they’ve been ignored. You can’t understand Andy Warhol, you can’t understand women at that time, and you can’t understand American popular culture without understanding this story.
