Pat Hackett: Andy Warhol's gal Friday talks about her boss's odd work habits and her career as amanuensis, screenwriter, and co-author

Interview, June-July, 2008 by Glenn O'Brien

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One September afternoon in 1968, Pat Hackett took the subway down from the Columbia University campus in Morningside Heights to Union Square in lower Manhattan. She went to No. 33 on the west side of the square and took the elevator to the sixth floor. When the elevator doors opened, there were a few people walking around a long white loft and talking on phones, but sitting right across from the elevator, quietly reading a newspaper, drinking a milk shake, was Andy himself.

GLENN O'BRIEN: So you were going to school up at Barnard and you decided to see if you could get a job at the Factory?

PAT HACKETT: Well, not a real job--just as a volunteer. For fun.

GO: And this was the first time you met Andy?

PH: Yes. I went over to where he was sitting, and we talked. He seemed to like it that I was going to a really good school. When I mentioned that I could type, Andy couldn't wait for me to start--he had piles and piles of tapes that he wanted transcribed.

GO: How many words a minute did you type?

PH: I don't even know. I was always fast but I made a lot of mistakes, which was fine, because Andy's novel a: A Novel had just come out....

GO: And there were so many mistakes in it....

PH: I could certainly improve on that. I don't mean improve, exactly, because it was fun the way it was. But I could certainly match it.

GO: Could Andy type?

PH: I never saw him hit a keyboard.

GO: Didn't you and Andy share an office?

PH: Yes. He put me right into the little room where he dumped all of his stuff and sometimes he'd say, "Take a letter." As a joke he'd blurt it out like Tourette's. I worked on a huge manual typewriter. Typing in those days was exhausting! Those keys were huge, and your fingers had to hit them hard or the letter wouldn't register!

GO: What did he do with all the tapes?

PH: When I first met Andy, it was before cassettes. He had a big tape recorder, which he had at home by his bed. But he carried it around with him like a big briefcase and he'd stick a big microphone in your face. The first cassettes came out right around the time of the first issue of Interview--I don't think the magazine would have been possible without the cassettes. And then eventually, I shaped some of those transcripts into his play called Pork, which was performed in New York and London--David Bowie's people got involved with it in England. And all of the stuff that was on those tapes really wound up being useful to me years later when Andy and I wrote POPism: The Warhol '60s, because anything that I hadn't witnessed myself, I had heard about on those tapes.

GO: In interviews with Andy, when people would ask why he started Interview magazine, he often said, "to give the kids something to do" or "to get into the New York Film Festival." What was the reason?

PH: Andy had a great respect for publishing, because those were the people who started his commercial art career. He wanted to make a place for himself in all the fields that he admired--just like with movies. "I'd love to have a magazine" was surely in his mind when he brought his drawings to the offices of publishing companies. And he could see they had a lot of money to spend. He knew you could make a lot of money in publishing if you did it right, the same way that you could in movies if you did it right. But these things never turned out to be profitable the way Andy did them. They were part of Andy Warhol Enterprises--and the more enterprises you could have, the better. He really believed in horizontal expansion. He never got that vertical, but he had a lot of horizontal.

GO: It seems strange that Andy had been shot and nearly killed in that loft in June of 1968, and yet in September, you were still able to just walk in off the elevator and there he was, sitting right in front of you with no security at all.

PH: Yeah, but that's how it was. A few months later, Jed [Johnson] did build a wall around the elevator, and he put in a Dutch door so that we would at least have to buzz visitors in. But yes, anyone could still come into the loft the same way the assassin, Valerie Solanas, had back in June when she'd walked in and shot Andy.

GO: You'd think the shooting would've changed something about the setup there.

PH: Andy was still listed in the phone book and, if you called his house, he'd answer himself.

GO: You mentioned Jed Johnson. How would you describe what Jed did at the Factory?

PH: In the mornings, Jed would clean the place. Then, for the rest of the day, he would work on the editing machines. He'd taught himself how to edit that summer, and so he edited movies that Andy put out from 1968 on.

GO: Jed directed Andy Warhol's Bad in 1976. And you wrote the screenplay?

PH: I co-wrote it, yeah. And to answer your question about Jed, it's impossible to overestimate the influence that he had on the Factory and at the Factory. His influence was on everybody and everything. Just one personal example of that: By spring of 1969, between studying and going down to the Factory, I wasn't able to work anywhere else, so I was running out of money. My parents paid my tuition, but I had to make spending money myself. So as much as I hated to quit, one Friday as I was leaving I told Jed to please just tell Andy that I wouldn't be able to come in anymore because I needed to go get a paying part-time job. I didn't want to tell Andy myself because I hated goodbyes and I was shy about things like talking about money. So I left and went down into the subway to go back uptown. I was waiting on the platform, and, just as the R train was coming into the station, Jed came running down the stairs and said, "Pat! Wait! I just talked to Andy, and he said he'll start paying you!" If it weren't for Jed doing that, my whole life would've been so different, and Andy's, too. [Jed Johnson was aboard TWA Flight 800 when it crashed in 1996.]