It just happened to be a head of Marilyn Monroe’Īfterwards, I received more invitations to be part of Andy’s entourage, and to star in his films (he told me he really needed to work with some people who weren’t crazy). He chose the silkscreen acetate proof on top of the pile. Andy supervised the assistant’s silkscreening of these large heads. This portrait was shot in early 1964, during Kennedy’s first photo session with Warhol: ‘The project they were working on involved a series of 24in x 30in canvases spread out on the Factory floor. Everyone was just sitting quietly, drinking as much as they could swallow, and I was relieved when my fellow superstars and I could escape in our rented limo. ![]() There is nothing to it.” A few days later, I was summoned to a party at the mansion of actor Burgess Meredith. You will just go there and stand around being fabulous. Rich people will rent superstars to make their parties more interesting. “I want you to be part of Rent-a-Superstar. People drifted by our table staring at Andy, hoping to be noticed. A quasi-comfortable stillness descended as I submitted to the silence. When the bishop slapped my cheek during the ceremony, proclaiming me Natalia in Latin, I had loudly shouted, “No, Natalie!” Andy’s eyebrows went up and he laughed, turning his head towards me, two fingers touching his lip, his palm cupping his chin, but he said nothing. Then I told him that as a child I had chosen the name Natalie for my confirmation name, inspired by the actor Natalie Wood. He invited me to visit the Factory to begin to make plans to photograph him’ I was about to make some sarcastic remarks and hang up, but the softness and sincerity of the caller’s tones stopped me. ‘I thought it was one of my friends kidding around, as I had mentioned my meeting with Warhol to some of them. The caller identified himself as Andy Warhol,’ said Kennedy. The more I talked about the mill town of my birth, the more uncomfortable he became. I thought it would be a good opening conversation with Andy. I was absorbed in the differences between the narrow-minded, puritanical, ethnic, immigrant working class I came from and this new free world I had discovered seemingly by accident. I had known other pale, blond, Eastern-Rite Catholic gay boys who lived with their mothers and went to mass in the morning and gay bars at night. I was the child of Italian immigrants who settled in the factory town of New Britain, Connecticut, so Andy seemed familiar to me. He thinks you are FABULOUSSSSSSS!” Jackie delivered me to a meeting with Andy. “Andy wants you to be in his new movie! He loved you on stage. One afternoon Jackie Curtis phoned me excitedly. As he recovered, suddenly Andy was everywhere, at the legendary parties at Vaccaro’s loft and at performances in different underground theatres, where my star had risen as I became known for my acrobatic performances. ![]() Warhol’s attempted assassination was on everyone’s lips by the summer of 1968, that year of assassinations. I would come up with very creative ideas to capture his enthusiasm’ ![]() ‘I would just arrive and always found him very much involved in whatever the art project he was working on. ‘I didn’t have appointments for photo sessions with Andy,’ said Kennedy. Warhol’s Campbell’s soup can painting had been launched, but it was shrouded in irony, and in some ways contempt, that did not attach to other pop artists like Claes Oldenburg or Roy Lichtenstein, who were far more famous. When I washed up on the shores of New York City’s East Village in 1967, Andy’s name was one of many that was tossed around by the cognoscenti in training, the queer teens who gravitated towards art in downtown NY. Andy and his cohorts didn’t strike me as that different from the people I already knew, because, although underage, I was already hanging out in gay bars as a “mascot” to older gay men. The first place I saw Andy Warhol was in a magazine, Life or Look, I don’t remember which, wedged in between articles on the Vietnam war and ads for the latest stereo equipment. The answer is: I’m doing OK, because I have exquisite memories to fall back on.Īs told to Gabrielle Schwarz Penny Arcade, a Warhol ‘superstar’ Through all our adventures, Bill and I were wonderfully happy together. Now his photographs – of two great artists on the threshold of fame – are getting the attention they deserve. When we left New York for Miami in the 80s, Bill nearly threw the box out. Gallerist Holly Solomon, circa 1970, left and Robert Indiana with his Love print, in his studio, circa 1964įor decades, Bill kept the negatives, contact sheets and transparencies from the shoots in a box in a closet.
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