"Davis’ copious research into the flotsam and jetsam of 1963 establishes the mood: She shows us the billboards lining Route 66, takes us into the motels and truck stops and listens to the pop songs on the radio…A good introduction to Warhol for pop art neophytes, The Trip will also appeal to readers eager to learn more about the Mad Men-era collision between art and advertising."

Autorentext

Deborah Davis

Klappentext

From the author of Strapless and Guest of Honor, a “jaunty romp through American pop-art history” (The Washington Post) about a little-known road trip Andy Warhol took in 1963, and how that journey profoundly influenced his life and art.

In 1963, up-and-coming artist Andy Warhol, along with a colorful group of friends, drove across America. What began as a madcap, drug-fueled romp became a journey that took Warhol on a kaleidoscopic adventure from New York City, across the vast American heartland, all the way to Hollywood, and back.

With locations ranging from a Texas panhandle truck stop to a Beverly Hills mansion, from the beaches of Santa Monica to a photo booth in Albuquerque, The Trip captures how Warhol intersected with Dennis Hopper, Peter Fonda, Marcel Duchamp, Elizabeth Taylor, Elvis Presley, Frank Sinatra, and other bold-faced names of the time. Along the way, Warhol also met rednecks, beach bums, underground filmmakers, artists, poets, socialites, and newly minted hippies—all of them leaving an indelible mark on his psyche.

In The Trip, Andy Warhol’s speeding Ford Falcon is our time machine, transporting us from the last vestiges of the sleepy Eisenhower epoch to the true beginning of the explosive, exciting sixties. Through in-depth, original research, Deborah Davis sheds new light on one of the most enduring figures in the art world and captures a fascinating moment in 1960s America—with Warhol at its center.

Leseprobe
The Trip

Chapter 1

It’s not what you are that counts, it’s what they think you are.

—Andy Warhol

In 1960, Andy Warhol was the opposite of a starving artist. In fact, he was a prosperous illustrator, living in a private townhouse on Lexington Avenue and Eighty-Ninth Street. The block was developed in 1888 by New York’s aristocratic Rhinelander family, wealthy landowners who commissioned the architect Henry Hardenbergh to build six attached Northern Renaissance Revival houses on one of their properties in uptown Manhattan. Hardenbergh had designed the legendary Dakota apartment building on the Upper West Side, and he would go on to build some of the city’s greatest hotels, including the Waldorf and the Plaza, among other landmarks. Decorated with brightly colored stone facades, arches, and balustrades, the buildings he erected for the Rhinelanders looked like dwellings in a fairy-tale village.

Sadly, these storybook houses deteriorated over the years. In 1931, Lexington Avenue was widened, narrowing the sidewalk and forcing the buildings to be stripped of the stairs that led to their parlor-floor entrances. Most of the residences in the row turned into rooming houses and offices, but Andy saw the potential in these quaint old buildings and claimed one as his home. He moved in and filled four floors with his unusual possessions. One of his favorite pastimes was scouring antique stores and art galleries for new acquisitions. His collection included a variety of penny arcade machines that sprayed perfume, tested strength, and dispensed gumballs; carousel horses; stuffed peacocks; a phrenological head; a giant, somewhat sinister-looking Punch figure; a cigar-store Indian; Tiffany lamps; neoclassical furniture; and the beginnings of an art collection, including a distinctive double portrait of Andy and his friend Ted Carey that had been painted by the artist Fairfield Porter. The friends thought that they could cut the painting in half and have two portraits for the price of one, but Porter, anticipating their plan, placed them so close together that it was impossible to separate them.

The parlor floor, the house’s public space, had two rooms—a small one overlooking Lexington Avenue, and a larger, paneled living room in the back. Andy described the rooms as “kind of schizo” because he designated the smaller space for his commercial work, his freelance illustration assignments, while he claimed the bigger room as his art studio and salon, the place where he did his real painting. His mother, Julia, and their ever-growing population of cats named Sam were installed in rooms on the street-level floor of the pale blue building, which contained a homey kitchen and an adjacent bedroom. His bedroom, outfitted with a brand-new four-poster bed, was on the third floor, and the other upstairs rooms were used for additional studio space and storage.

Andy’s Upper East Side address, shopping sprees, and expanding art collection were proof of his success, but he wasn’t satisfied. He still considered himself a work in progress, a man who was going places but had not yet arrived. When one considers where Andy had started in life, the extent to which he had already transformed himself was nothing short of miraculous.

Andy was the youngest son of Julia and her husband, Ondrej Warhola, Eastern European immigrants (specifically, Ruthenians), who came from Miková, a tiny village in the mountains of Slovakia. At the turn of the twentieth century, young Mikovians realized that the only way to move up was to move out. Nineteen-year-old Ondrej did just that in 1906 when, like many of his countrymen, he traveled to America in search of fortune. He worked in Pittsburgh for three years before returning to Miková with his hard-earned bankroll.

Strong, blond, handsome, and prosperous by his village’s standards, he attracted the attentions of every mother with a marriageable daughter. But it was seventeen-year-old Julia Zavacky, a golden-haired spitfire, who immediately caught his eye. Smitten, Ondrej proposed, only to be rejected. Unlike many of her contemporaries, Julia was a free spirit who loved to sing and tell stories, and she was not yet ready to become a wife. Knowing that suitable suitors were hard to come by in Slovakian villages, her practical parents pressured Julia into accepting Ondrej’s proposal.

The couple soon settled into the grinding routine of village life—work, work, and more work. Three years later, Ondrej came to the sobering realization that there was still no future in Miková. In 1912, he returned to America, promising to send for his wife and their infant daughter as soon as he had saved enough money. Nine years passed—years of war, deprivation, and heartbreak for Julia, who lost both her parents and her daughter to illness—before she took matters into her own hands and borrowed the money she needed to join her absent husband.

The Warholas reunited in 1921 and settled in Pittsburgh, a grim, gray, industrial city covered with so much smoke and fog that its inhabitants lived under a cloud of perpetual darkness. They moved into cheap tenement housing with primitive outdoor plumbing, and they struggled to get by on Ondrej’s wages. The couple welcomed a son, Paul, in 1922, followed by John in 1925. Paul and John resembled their stalwart father, but Andrej, the Warholas’ third son, was like a changeling—one of those enchanted infants from gypsy folklore whom the fairies substituted for a human child when the mother wasn’t looking. Baby Andy, who was born on August 6, 1928, was so fair and fragile that he seemed to come from another world. Julia was charmed by her cherubic infant and instantly started spoiling him. Her older boys were born knowing how to take care of themselves and were constantly hatching schemes…