The Big A. (Books).

Stone, Martha E.

Andy Warhol

by Wayne Koestenbaum

Penguin "Brief Lives Series" (Viking)

224 pages, $21.95

FIFTEEN years after his death, Andy Warhol remains a presence in our daily lives. The 2001 calendar that I just replaced featured twelve of Warhol's divas, and I recently used up my Warhol-shoe-motif wrapping paper. We send Christmas cards and stationery with facsimiles of Warhol's art; and we still hear on occasion the music of the Velvet Underground, the group that originated at Warhol's Factory. We attend major retrospectives at the Whitney and the Smithsonian, not to mention the Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh. We read any of the hundreds of books and exhibition catalogs by and about Warhol and his crowd, and scarcely a day goes by when someone in the media doesn't make a reference to "fifteen minutes of fame."

Thirty-seven years ago, Newsweek magazine (12/7/64) quoted art dealer Ivan Karp as saying, "While other pop artists depict common things, Andy is in a sense a victim of common things: he genuinely admires them. How can you describe him--he's like a saint--Saint Andrew." Describing Warhol's first New York show in 1962, Wayne Koestenbaum declares that "to bestow fame was charity, like feeding a neglected child. ...[H]e wanted to place glamour communion on the tongues of the world's fame-starved communicants." Koestenbaum recounts that near the end of Warhol's life--he died in 1987 after gall bladder surgery--he "wanted to disappear while remaining a static image, to make his eroded body an emblem."

In the Warhol Last Supper--The Big C series, exhibited in Milan across the street from Da Vinci's painting, Koestenbaum portrays Factory characters as the disciples at the Last Supper. Warhol, of course, is Christ; Valerie Solanas (who shot Warhol in 1968) is the betrayer figure a la Judas. The "flame pink" of these Leonardo derivatives is, Koestenbaum says, "nelly spirituality." He continues: "[T]he words The Big C, emblazoned large in the bottom middle of the canvas, suggest that Warhol has finally moved beyond A and B (his two preoccupying letters) to a third term, C, perhaps the C of the copyright logo (Andy always eroticized trademarks), or the C of Christ, or simply the C that is the terminus beyond A and B's stichomythia." Interestingly enough, Koestenbaum does not mention the possibility of C for Cancer, "the big C," as it was once euphemistically called. Nor does he mention by name Warhol's The Philosophy of Andy Warhol: (From A to B and Back Again) (1975). (The "B" in this book is Warhol's close fri end, the beautiful socialite-drug addict Brigid (nee Berlin) Polk, whose nom-e-Factory came from her predilection for "poking" herself and others with a syringe).

Wayne Koestenbaum, a chronicler of culture high and low- earlier monographs have covered the lives of Maria Callas and Jackie Kennedy Onassis--has a gift for taking the most trivial facts and investing them with elevated meaning and mystique. Thus he's the ideal person to document the life of Andy Warhol in this latest entry in the Penguin "Brief Lives" series. There's no shortage of musings about Warhol's homosexuality, but Koestenbaum argues for influences other than sexual orientation, such as his mother's ailments, physical disabilities follow-in the attempt on his life in 1968 (a day before Robert Kennedy was assassinated), and even his longstanding, almost morbid, love of cats. He quotes from and seamlessly synthesizes the major Warhol biographies. All the important aspects of Warhol's life are here, but there's more stress than usual on each of Warhol's boyfriends--and on those he desired but didn't get, such as Truman Capote.

Warhol began making films in the early 1960's and withdrew his films from public viewing in 1972. Proclaims Koestenbaum: "Watching Warhol films is a pleasure, and I want to proselytize." Despite the fact that "little or nothing" happens in Warhol's early films, Koestenbaum says he felt incapable of doing anything but stare at the screen, "so entirely was I hypnotized by minute gradations of light and shadow, anger and lust." Koestenbaum lingers on 1963's Haircut (No. 1), starring Billy Name, who stared life as a waiter and became the Factory's studio manager (he "mastered Andy's mise-en-scene") and Warhol's "kept boy." Name, argues Koestenbaum, brings "butch power" to the role of hairdresser, and "approaches it as a Zen meditation." He finds it "a covert portrait of Billy taking care of Andy. ... Billy's focused, entranced haircutting is an act of erotic ministration to a passive, suppliant man [John Daley], whose vaguely Slavic features resemble Warhol's." Freddy Herko is the dancer who strips during the hai rcut. Finally, since "few hairs seem to fall," one is left to wonder how much of the film is a joke and how much it merits such close analysis.

It is perhaps a painful truth that some of these films are "bad to a degree that is barely credible," as Stephen Koch said in Stargazer: Andy Warhol's World and His Films (1973), though one would never imagine it to read Koestenbaum's resolutely smart tributes. Of late there have been TV commercials for Progresso that bill it as the soup for you "now that you've grown up." Would Warhol, who left behind his Campbell's soup label screen prints in the 1960's, have taken up the challenge and progressed to Progresso? Koestenbaum, whose biography of Warhol amounts to something of an homage, has made that determination in the affirmative.