View June/July 08

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

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

My friend Benjamin Liu, whose job for a time was walking around with Andy, has a habit of talking about "the boss" in the present tense. He doesn't say, "Andy thought ..." He says, "Andy thinks ..." I've always regarded this usage as a very special way of thinking about someone who was a great artist, a mentor to many of us, and who, let's face it, is still with us in many ways. We live in a world that is, in a way, a great big Warhol. Recently someone said that Benjamin's present tense is a Chinese way of speaking. But I still prefer to think it's his sense of Andy being alive in our minds. Maybe I'll ask him one day.

Anyway, it occurred to me that this August 6 would have been Mr. Warhol's 80th birthday. When I first went to work for him, he was 42, and I remember thinking that was old. Of course, with Andy's white wigs, he always seemed a little older than he was in his ageless way. On the other hand, he also seemed to be getting younger and younger in the '80s. He had his skin fixed, he became incredibly preoccupied with physical fitness and health, and I remember him lecturing us kids about what we ate, not to mention drinking and drugs. The only time I ever saw him angry with me was when I interrupted his aerobics session and laughed when I saw him doing jumping jacks in a sort of leotard. And in the '80s, Andy started hanging out with the young artists on the scene, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring, Kenny Scharf, and George Condo. You could just see him getting livelier.

Sometimes I think that Andy died in the middle of his life. He would refer to his heart stopping on the operating table as being dead. Billy Name talks about how much Andy changed after being shot at the age of 39 in June 1968. He was fragile for a long time after that--he was almost like "a cardboard Andy." But after some years of recovery, he seemed to get his old insouciance and youthful petulance back. I was so surprised when he died after gallbladder surgery at New York Hospital in 1987; I think many of the people who knew him were in absolute shock. Even though he was older, I always sort of felt that he would outlive us all. I guess he will, in a way.

For me, Andy's death left a huge void. It wasn't that I talked to him that regularly. I'd run into him at the Factory when I went up to Interview or see him at parties. Sometimes we talked on the phone about the health of our mutual friend Jean-Michel Basquiat, who ended up outliving him by only a year and a half. In fact, Andy's death had a powerful effect on Basquiat. Losing Andy was something a lot of people felt. I realized that there was no longer anyone out there whose validation really mattered to me. Andy Warhol was kind of the benchmark for what was smart, interesting, or cool. If Andy liked something I wrote or said so, I knew it was good. When Andy went to your party, it was a good party. And then he was gone. And nobody stepped up. Twenty-one years later, Andy Warhol has still not been replaced. Not that we haven't tried. But it takes a lot of people to do his job.

Andy's 80th seemed like a good chance to reconnect this magazine with its roots. In this issue, we talk with people who were there when Interview was launched--Brigid Berlin, Billy Name, John Wilcock, and Pat Hackett. And we've asked a few big questions of a whole lot of his friends, associates, employees, and admirers--from Interview editors Gerard Malanga and Bob Colacello, to superstars Viva, Ultra Violet, Mary Woronov, Taylor Mead, and Rene Ricard, to famous friends like Bryan Ferry, Diana Ross, Elizabeth Taylor, and Diane von Furstenberg.

Andy is still with us because his vision lives on in the eyes of today's artists and designers and everyone who tries to do business like it's an art. I'm thrilled to have artworks from Donald Baechler, Mike Bidlo, George Condo, Urs Fischer, Robert Hawkins, Karen Kilimnik, Jeff Koons, McDermott & McGough, Enoc Perez, Elizabeth Peyton, Richard Prince, Rene Ricard, Ugo Rondinone, Tom Sachs, Billy Sullivan, Donald Sultan, and Jamie Wyeth. We'd like to thank all who participated in this issue. It was a tough project to pull off, as we realized after we'd gotten started, just because Andy's aura is so big. Don't be mad or feel left out, anybody. We did the best we could in a very short time. And Andy will be 81 next year.