Warhol's Wife

Andy Warhol's intimate relationship with a special something.

A commonly held stereotype of Andy Warhol is that he never said anything except 'oh … oh really'. Laconic one liners such as 'I never fall apart because I never fall together', and 'Just being alive is working at a part you don't want to do', were a verbal smokescreen, disguising a man who, like Lewis Carroll, constructed his own Wonderland full of mirrors and metaphors. Warhol — who cited 'being shy at the office' as the hardest physical work he had had to do — has left us a legacy in the archives in Pittsburgh, thousands of audio tapes harvested from his crop of disparate celebrities, acquaintances, friends and obsessive talkers. In contrast to his many self-portraits the audio tapes are a multi-faceted representation of the artist, which, far from being flat and repetitive, could be articulate, playful, humorous, inquisitive, dismissive, laconic, ironic, or bored.

Warhol acquired his first tape recorder (a reel to reel) in the mid 50s. In the summer of 1965 he engineered a deal with Norelco to acquire one of their cassette audio recorders. This acquisition began his relationships with faithful machines that were both surrogates and mediators. He referred to the tape recorder as his 'wife' and quipped that 'when I say "we" I mean my tape recorder and me'. He declared that his tape recorder finished whatever emotional life he had; an interesting problem 'was an interesting tape'. Terrified by death, driven by curiosity about how people lived their lives, Warhol stockpiled a knowledge system, an anthropological and sociological portrait of 'lived lives'.

Warhol hated waste, he loathed throwing things away, he collected and stored. He made it his business to listen to people and he turned those conversations into work. 'Leftovers', throwaway lines and banality could become novels and plays and fuel ideas for enterprises such as Interview magazine (launched in 1969 as a film journal). His first novel A: a novel, published in 1968 a few months after he had been shot by Valerie Solanas, was constructed from transcripts taken from four different sessions that recorded a day in the life of Ondine, one of his most celebrated talkers. The book was Warhol's knowing response to James Joyce's Ulysses, and according to Billy Name (his factory photographer) the title was a homage to ee cummings. Warhol's drive had been his curiosity to see what people do, particularly those who without sleep were 'hitting their ninth day and it's glorious'. The partial erasure and misregistering of what is being said are consistent with Warhol's artistic methods at the time. Listening to some of the taping sessions for the book with the cacophony of opera in the background and a multiplicity of audio layers and voices illustrates that, however faithfully transcribed, it is the voices that remain poignantly present. Victor Bockris observed that 'the book found its own voice' when four different women transcribed the 24 one-hour tapes. A: a novel was not the first book that Warhol published that was related to sound. The Index Book, published in 1967, physically included sounds of the silver factory (his first Factory space at 231 East 47th Street) recorded as various people look through the book. Nico (of the Velvet Underground) asks, perplexed, 'What is this supposed to be that plastic?' She is told 'it's a record, we're making it at this very moment.' 'Oh you're making it', she responds dubiously, 'What is supposed to be on it? … oh us talking right … coughing.'

Warhol professed to prefer talkers to beauties; he spoke for hours on the telephone, often with Brigid Berlin, one of his 'lifers' who taped him taping her. 'So once I said "well that means that there are two originals" and there can never be two originals of anything.' One of Brigid's taped monologues appears in The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (From A to B and back again) as 'The Tingle' about her obsessive cleaning habits. Warhol is fascinated by her daily 'stream of consciousness' thoughts, from 'high society', related to Warhol in her conspiratorial tones. When she began obsessively taping her socialite mother on the telephone from her room in the George Washington hotel, Bob Colacello accused Andy of listening to the tapes like 'a thirsty man'.

Warhol turned his shy nature into a trope, often frustrating the desires of interviewers, but he confessed that he wished he wasn't so shy in public 'They asked me questions [the Overseas Press Corps] all directed at me and I wasn't prepared, so I just said "yes" or "no". But afterwards I regretted doing my same old shy act, when I should have used the situation for practice — I'd love to be able to talk more and give little speeches. I want to work on that.'

In the Andy Warhol Diaries — which he dictated in monologue mode to Pat Hackett on the telephone each morning and were edited and published after his death — he often talked about taping and his desires and ambitions in his quest for the voice. 'Someone called Bianca and she was on the phone for an hour talking about her problems and I wished I had listened or taped', or 'I pointed my tape recorder in Jackie's direction and I hope I got a little breathy talk'. The diaries also reveal him chasing interviews for Interview magazine, with its concept of celebrities interviewing other celebrities and transcribed with every 'um' and 'er' intact. Bob Colacello, Interview's editor, admits that keeping Warhol company was very hard work: you were expected to provide him with a steady stream of gossip, ideas and jokes in exchange for the occasional 'Gee', 'Wow' or 'Really'. The ultimate chore was 'confession' which usually 'began with Andy asking "what did you do last night?".' Warhol admitted that he loved it when something dramatic happened for the tape. 'I told him I wanted to tape them (Bill Copley and his girlfriend) fighting … They don't fight in public but he'll do it for art.' Sometimes, commented Colacello, the diplomatic dance between Warhol and potential Interview subjects got very complicated. When Warhol taped John and Yoko for his editorial with them, he asked 'not a dumb question but a non question'.

Andy: We thought maybe you could just talk to yourself on the tape and ask yourself your questions.
Yoko Ono: Good idea.

The audio tapes are a Holy Grail and their purpose appears to have been to use the raw material as books or scripts for plays. They are part of Warhol's artistic œuvre. He hated it if he forgot his tape recorder or mislaid it, particularly if there were celebrity voice portraits to capture. Eddy Devolder in his Conversation with Andy Warhol acknowledged that after each of his questions he remained 'absolutely silent, moving the small cassette-player which has been running since his arrival towards the microphone of my large tape-recorder'. Devolder questions Warhol, 'Does the cassette-player represent an artistic tool by which daily life is transformed into narrative?'… but receives no answer. 'Am I supposed to infer that his silence stands for a reply and that the empty tape running between the two questions is the actual spokesman.'

The enigma that is Warhol, his working methods and multifaceted character, emerge slowly and in real time from the tape archive, the lure of Citizen Kane's whispered 'rosebud' both a cautionary tale and a challenge.

This article by Jean Wainwright was originally published in March 2002 / No 254, pp39-40.