Did Andy Warhol Exploit His Superstars? A New Book Says Yes.
Laurence Leamer in “Warhol’s Muses” sets out to explore the lives of 10 women in the artist’s orbit whose cultural contributions, “artistic ambitions, personal struggles and occasional triumphs” have been “largely overlooked.” The veteran author has successfully carried off this kind of self-imposed rescue mission before, in well-researched books including “Hitchcock’s Blondes,” “The Kennedy Women” and “Capote’s Women,” the delicious source material for the latest installment of Ryan Murphy’s “Feud” anthology. On this go-round, however, the formula leaves Leamer with little to offer aside from the expected tour through the Warholian fun house of Brillo boxes, tinfoil, amphetamines, cheap glamour and high society given by so many before him.
Baby Jane Holzer, Edie Sedgwick and Nico are among the first “muses” (or Superstars, as Warhol dubbed them) to be considered. None qualifies as overlooked. Tom Wolfe was looking straight at Holzer in 1964, diagnosing her in real time as a new breed of It Girl. (Leamer himself acknowledges that Wolfe’s piece on Holzer, “The Girl of the Year,” caused “a sensation” on its publication.) Jean Stein’s “Edie: American Girl,” edited by George Plimpton, a foundational work of oral history and an international best seller, took Sedgwick’s ambitions, struggles and triumphs seriously, as have, in Nico’s case, several biographies and documentaries placing the musician at the unsteady center of the zeitgeist. More recently, the transgender actress and icon Candy Darling, another of Leamer’s subjects, was the focus of Cynthia Carr’s exquisite biography. And Blake Gopnik’s “Warhol” hardly skimped on the Superstars over its more than 900 pages.
Leamer wants depth but sacrifices it for breadth. Dipping in and out of so many lives in such a slim book yields the kind of surface treatment and repetitive clichés that might work as provocation in a Warhol screen print but make for a prose style unlikely to be anyone’s cup of soup. Each woman is introduced with a few sentences: One is “sophisticated beyond her years,” another “game for almost anything,” and another the product of “decidedly humble circumstances.” Holzer has a “party pooper of a husband.” Valerie Solanas is “deadly serious” about killing Warhol. Nico is judged “statuesque” twice in the same paragraph. She is “transcendently beautiful,” and a page later trades on her “transcendent beauty.” Warhol fares no better. At a party he is “like a Roomba, constantly sweeping the room, picking up useful scraps.”
Leamer is undeniably excellent at setting a scene, especially a louche one. He knows just when to have someone wonder if he’s caught crabs from a couch or a crotch. And Leamer is very good on rich people playing at being disheveled, tuned to the comic possibilities of that particular brand of tourism. (Holzer, of Florida real estate wealth, announces after seeing the Stones for the first time that “they’re all from the lower classes. … There is no class anymore. Everyone is equal.” Leamer adds that Holzer’s “maid and butler might have disagreed.”) Nearly every page has at least one great sleazy anecdote or pinch of gossip.
The problem is that so many of these scenes, however expertly set, are variations on the same stale theme of boomers getting up to wild stuff because the times they were a-changin’. Does anyone still need reminding that “the ’60s was a decade of radical political and cultural dissent”? Or that it was once considered shocking that a high-culture figure such as Rudolf Nureyev could go straight from a performance of “Swan Lake” to dancing “to rock ’n’ roll in a nightclub wearing dungarees. Dungarees! Not a suit and tie like some uptight New York businessman”? Reading this book felt akin to being trapped in an endless Time-Life loop of jingle jangle mornings, lazy Sunday afternoons and warm San Franciscan nights, the author providing the stentorian voice-over as the usual footage rolls by: Bob Dylan “would soon emerge as the poetic troubadour of the ’60s”; Brian Jones, “addicted to drugs and sex … was on a short road to an early death”; Jim Morrison, “a troubadour of the counterculture … wrote poetic lyrics that chronicled the lives of his generation.”
Such minor sins might have been forgiven had I ultimately gleaned some deep or unforeseen insight into the lives of the book’s subjects — a group that includes Ultra Violet, Ingrid Superstar, Brigid Berlin and other Factory figures — or, failing that, into Andy Warhol’s work. But I got neither. Nor was I convinced by the whopping claim that “without his Superstars, Warhol might never have become a world-celebrated artist.”
Meeting these 10 historical actors in roughly chronological order as they enter Warhol’s life, one has a view of the artist and his milieu that actually narrows rather than widens. Warhol, a shape-shifter so manic and intense that he could slide into several personas in the span of a single season, is here reduced to a necessarily static figure so that the women can bounce off him. Which is fine as a narrative strategy, but then not much happens to the women, either. As each one flickers into view, her upbringing (often troubled) is dutifully covered before she provides some service to Warhol — as entertainment, as emotional consort, as visual material, as key holder to Park Avenue penthouses — and then fades out to make room for the next one. (Sedgwick is the exception, a frequent and always beguiling presence; Solanas, the would-be assassin, and not one of the 10 Superstars, stands out as foil rather than helpmeet, but appears only briefly.)
Rarely is there any sense of genuine collaboration or exchange. The book’s subtitle gives away the game: In the end, these women of varied backgrounds, with their respective dreams and desires, are all here to play the same passive role — to be inevitably and unsurprisingly “destroyed by the Factory fame machine.”
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