Brigid Berlin: a Warhol superstar looks, back, with a friend who knows a thing or two about notoriety - Gee! It's A Documentary - Interview

Interview, Nov, 2001 by Patricia Hearst Shaw

In 1988, when I first started working at Interview, the magazine was still housed in the last of the Warhol Factories. On my first day at work, I noticed two small pugs who seemed to have the run of the castle. They belonged to a woman who sat behind the front desk every day from 9:00 to 5:00, but who never seemed to answer the phone. Instead, she compulsively knitted, ate bags of candy and tended lovingly to the dogs. A few months later I learned that this mysterious woman was Brigid Berlin, the star of classic Andy Warhol movies including Chelsea Girls (1967), and an accomplished artist in her own right.

In addition to having been one of Warhol's closest confidants, Berlin became friends with Patricia Hearst, with whom she shared a childhood of privilege (her father, Richard Emmett Berlin, was president of the Hearst Corporation) and early adulthood on the edge. Here, the two look back on Berlin's years in the Factory, a scene that's also the subject of a documentary, Pie in the Sky: The Brigid Berlin Story, directed by fellow Factory member Vincent Fremont and his wife Shelly Dunn Fremont, to screen this month on the Sundance Channel. DIMITRI EHRLICH PATRICIA HEARST: When I told you a few weeks ago how much I enjoyed Pie in the Sky, you said that you regretted everything. What did you mean?

BRIGID BERLIN: Well, when I do films, I think that they'll never come out. This has been a repetitive thing with me. I really never believed Chelsea Girls would be shown. After I first saw it on a TV monitor in some editing studio downtown, I didn't feel anything. I forgot it.

PH: I know that feeling completely, of watching yourself do something and it's a blank.

BB: I still look on it as not being real, you know.

PH: Your life or the film?

BB: My life. The film brings up that I spend my whole life preparing to live life. To me it's all a dress rehearsal for the next thing. You know, actually, when I saw my closet in the film, I decided to redecorate.

PH: Oh, I love your closet! It's so clean, so organized, you can find everything. It's the polar opposite of my house, your closet.

BB: Well, I haven't been in it in a year. Nothing in there fits me.

PH: Hmmm. I hadn't realized your relationship with key lime pie had been so intense for quite so long.

BB: That key lime pie thing, I don't know how it started, and how it's remained for such a long time. You know, every time I think about it, I don't remember what it tastes like, I just know it's the best thing I've ever had. It really haunts me, Patty, it haunts me. It's always about whether I'm going to do it or not, and if I do, well, then they better have two or three pies in the shop.

PH: What if they only had one?

BB: I'd finish that one, then go to Starbucks and have some pumpkin cheesecake with whipped cream and then to Baskin-Robbins for a triple scoop of pralines and cream ice cream with hot fudge. You know, Patty, I haven't had a drink in 15 years. I never even think of it. My real drug of choice--since the day I was born--is sweets. It has nothing to do with food: It's sugar.

PH: My God. But I want to get on to your Polaroids, which I had no idea you did. They were just amazing! I knew about the cock book--

BB: Which wasn't pornography!

PH: No, it was art! It was incredible. It was so ahead of its time. I mean the size of it, that was the most amazing thing! I loved one piece you had in the book, all the penises in their chairs watching the sausage.

BB: Oh, I had more fun doing that than anything I've ever done in my life. I would come home, stoned from being up at Max's [Kansas City, a now-defunct New York club] and I would sit on the floor and work on the book. [laughs]

PH: So funny. You know, I have one of your tit prints. I love my tit print.

BB: Thank you.

PH: [laughs] My prized possession. Now, the film brought up a question: I've never quite understood what you did at the Factory. What exactly did you do? Did Andy pay you?

BB: I became a permanent employee in 1975. I had just spent a year at home in my apartment losing 160 pounds, and every day Andy would call me up and tell me to come to work, that I could lose the rest of it there, but I didn't want him to see me. I had knocked off 160 pounds all by myself, no drugs, no nothing--all I did was drink bouillon and tea. The most exciting day of the week was Monday when Time, Newsweek and the Enquirer would come out and I'd have a stash to read. And I watched television--Barbara Walters on The Today Show--every single solitary day. And I would clip any mention of Andy, because he used to pay me 50 cents for each time I clipped his name out of a newspaper.

PH: You were his clipping service. [laughs] But what did you do at the Factory?

BB: I would transcribe interviews, and then for many years I didn't do anything. I used to knit and needlepoint under the desk. It wasn't like a job, so that's why I stayed there for so long. I was the first one there in the morning, but as soon as I got there I would watch the clock all day till I could leave. And every year I left five minutes earlier, and Andy used to look down at his watch and say, "Where are you going?" I'd say, "I'm going home." "Well, the fun's just beginning," he'd say. And then he'd give me a hundred dollars and tell me to go to the liquor store and get some Irish whiskey and I'd come back and make Irish coffee, get smashed, tell Andy he was a slob and that I hated him. [laughs]