The Silver Factory

Hang out of high society doyennes and the New York avant-garde, Andy Warhol’s Factory has kept the world enthralled for 40 years. But was it really the creative hub it’s made out to be? YEN spoke with some former Factory-goers to find out

Andy Warhol called it “a place where you could let your problems show and nobody would hate you for it”. Warhol superstar Mark Lancaster said it was “absolutely the most exciting place” he had ever been. Filmmaker Emile de Antonio described it as a “giant theatre”, a studio unlike any other.

The Silver Factory, Andy Warhol’s original Manhattan studio from 1963 to 1968, was the creative home of a motley crew of photographers, actors, writers, filmmakers, society doyennes, musicians, activists, radicals, hustlers, hookers, dealers and misfits. It was the birthplace of a suite of oddball underground films, workshop for Warhol’s famous screen prints and centre of a flurry of random and at times exquisite creative activity. It was the place where Warhol evolved from a commercial artist and observer of the avant-garde to a fully fledged superstar and international leader in the pop art movement.

In a city full of the unexpected and the inspiring, the Factory’s original 231 East 47th Street site is unexpectedly uninspiring, a worn out industrial building wedged between two tall residentials. Yet the events that occurred there and the people behind them continue to inspire. In the second half of this year alone, Factory Girl, a feature film starring Sienna Miller as Edie Sedgwick and Guy Pearce as Andy Warhol, and Factory People, a French-produced documentary series, will hit our screens. Former Factory-goers say they are still bombarded with requests from journalists and those who just want to know “what it was like” 40 years later.


THE FACTORY IS BORN
At first glance, Billy Name looks more like a member of Hells Angels than an avant-garde artiste, with his long graying beard and dark sunglasses. That’s until you see him talk about fashion or, more precisely, what it was like to photograph self-styled superstars like Sedgwick and International Velvet in conversation for the series Factory People. No Hells Angel devotee gets that excited about Betsy Johnson.

Name met Warhol when he was still a teenager, working as a waiter at the legendary Upper East Side coffee house Serendipity 3 in 1959. Warhol, a successful commercial artist, was friends with then owner Steven Bruce. What really brought the two men together though was their mutual love of the avant-garde: music, visual arts and film.

“Andy's roots were melded deep into the New York avant-garde culture,” says Name. “He wasn't just a flash phenomenon, a guy from Pittsburg who came to New York, became a successful commercial artist, started doing fine art and became famous - he was highly integrated into the arts community.”

Name was working in Off Broadway Theatre as a lighting designer, living in the then slums of Alphabet City on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. He began throwing “haircutting parties” in his apartment, which he had decorated silver with aluminium foil and spray paint, “like a fantastic silver cube”. Warhol had started making films, and shot Name giving haircuts in his apartment. When Warhol took out a lease on an old loft on 47th Street in 1963, he asked Name to decorate the new studio the way he had his apartment.

The loft was befitting of a starving avant-garde artist (although Warhol was never starving as an artist - “he had a townhouse, he had bills to pay, he had this new studio,” says Name), with crumbling walls, a concrete floor and no electricity. While Warhol made art, Name made the studio functional, using the skills he’d learned in the theatre to install spotlights, a sound system, spaces for painting and filmmaking, and of course the famous sterling surroundings that gave the studio its name: the Silver Factory.


AN UNREAL REALITY
Name says the partnership was “a perfect meeting”. Warhol wanted to create art, Name had the skills to handle the practicalities that would allow him to do so. Warhol was increasingly absorbed in filmmaking – so he handed his still camera over to Name and made him the in-house photographer. While Warhol continued to live in his Lexington Avenue apartment, Name moved into the Factory and became its foreman. The two were briefly lovers, although Name says they were more wrapped up in the creative energy of their relationship than in its sexual element.

In the early days, the Factory had only a handful of key players: Warhol, Name, Gerard Malanga - a good looking poet who worked as Warhol’s chief assistant and later claimed Jim Morrison stole his image – and Ondine, a Greenwich Village luminary who possessed the wit of Oscar Wilde and the talent of Lawrence Olivier. “Ondine didn't come in as a worker, like Gerard, or as a technical facilitator, like me,” says Name. “He came in as a flaming creature of New York ready to be a star of Warhol movies. It's a whole different level of interaction.”

Warhol’s early films did not have “actors” or plotlines, per se – they were organic reflections of life in New York, whether that was Name cutting hair in his old silver apartment, John Giorno sleeping, an eight hour continuous shot of the Empire State building or Tom Baker receiving oral sex. Like real life, they were often mundane, but according to Warhol, that was the point. “When nothing happens, you have a chance to think about everything,” he said.

Even when the films did have plots, most of the people cast were not actors and performers were expected to improvise their lines (“if an actor can't make up his own lines, he's no good," Paul Morrissey, who worked closely with Warhol from 1966, once declared). Performers were drawn from the art world, from high society and the chemical underground, recruited by Malanga, Name or venturing into the Factory of their own accord.

The films gave Warhol’s performers gave these performers (described as “sad, disappointed, frustrated, unfulfilled, perverted, outcast, eccentric, egocentric underground stars” by filmmaker and Warhol imprimatur Jonas Mekas) an unprecedented opportunity to express themselves. For Warhol, it made everything - including emotion, which he had always found difficult - easier to deal with. “Nothing was ever a problem again, because a problem just meant a good tape, and when a problem transforms itself into a good it's not a problem any more,” he said. “An interesting problem was an interesting tape.”

Warhol was incessant – he felt compelled to record every detail, and his subjects were only too happy to be recorded, exposing every neurosis in front of his camera. “You couldn't tell which problems were real and which problems were performed for the tape,” he observed. “Better yet, the people telling you the problems couldn't decide any more if they were really having the problems or just performing.”

But such openness had its downsides. Many of Warhol’s performers were unstable and fashion model Ivy Nicholson once tried to slit her wrists in front of the camera. Alan Midgette, one of the few professional actors Warhol used in his films, observed: “Those kinds of people get demented when they become involved with movies, because they don't understand how powerful they can be. Something gets triggered off because they're not really acting. They start pulling these weird things out of their psyches and throwing them at the camera.”

When they weren’t smashing taboos, the films were often unremarkable, like outtakes from an episode of Big Brother. Name estimates that only around 1.5 per cent of the reels were truly impressive. “But it's like panning for gold in a stream, and Andy became acclimated to that,” he says. “He knew that everything wasn't going to be fabulous every day. The whole thing of Warhol being into boredom and tedium and all that, it’s because that's what he was experiencing, attempting to cull those few nuggets.”


THE WARHOL SUPERSTARS
As Warhol achieved increasing recognition as an artist and filmmaker, his ambitions increased. Warhol had always been fascinated by movie stars and glamour. Growing up in a working class immigrant family during the Great Depression, movie stars were a symbol of hope. Contemporary symbols of capitalism, like Coca Cola, were symbols of equality and democracy: everyone, whether they were the President of United States or “the bum on the corner”, Warhol reasoned, got the same thing when they opened a bottle of Coke.

As he began to collaborate with Paul Morrissey and the films coming out of the Factory started to take more form, Warhol developed a desire not just to produce art, but to produce stars. He dreamt of making a Hollywood film, but the studios were unwilling to invest in something they didn’t understand. He was more successful when it came to creating icons.

The most enduring of these icons was Edie Sedgwick, an old money society girl who came to New York from Massachusetts in 1964. She met Warhol in January 1965. Warhol was immediately intrigued by Sedgwick, remarking, “I could see she had more problems than anyone I had ever met,” and the two quickly became inseparable.

Warhol wasn’t the only one charmed by Sedgwick. Jane Holzer said, “Everything she did was perfect. She was amazing. Amazing!” Bob Dylan wrote songs about her. Even Warhol’s initial meeting with her was orchestrated by someone else - Chuck Wein, a friend of Sedgwick’s from Cambridge who was convinced that despite her lack of ambition, she had star quality. Gerard Malanga remarked, “Edie had no active goals other than to enjoy herself to the fullest. [But] she had the one ingredient essential to be a star – glamour. Glamour is aura. The person who possesses aura becomes beautiful. Andy was deeply fascinated by glamour on this level. He had an eye for it.”

But Name says Warhol didn’t play favourites when it came to his superstars – he valued them not for whether he liked them, but for their ability to contribute to his art. “If you watch the whole series of Chelsea Girls, it's the product, it's the final film that’s Andy's favourite. There are a lot of Edie Sedgwick films that Andy would say - ‘Oh, she didn't really do anything’ - but there are some where she's just so the divine Edie that it doesn't matter, it does work. But it's the art piece that results that is his favourite.”

Warhol also valued the superstars for what they had that he lacked. “Andy made his inadequacies into strengths by surrounding himself with people who could give what he did not have,” says Steven Watson, author of the book Factory Made. “He surrounded himself with people who were beautiful, people who talked a lot, people who were socially connected, people who were sexy - and he was none of those. He found in others what he did not have himself.”

But for all his timidity, Warhol was an expert in the art of self-promotion. He understood that in an age of mass media, people did not become famous for what they did, but for the simple act of being visible. He understood the importance of image, and of embodying that image 24 hours a day. And he understood that fame was a business and could be engineered - every morning when he arrived at the Factory he would call his press agent to fill him in on what he’d been up to.


THE LATER YEARS
Penny Arcade, a small, charismatic, feisty woman whose blonde hair and high cheekbones recall Blondie’s Debbie Harry, met and began working with Warhol in 1968. She believes that, in its later years, the Factory lost some of its spark. “The idea that the Factory was some foreign legion for freaks that people hung out at was only true in the very first years,” she says.

“Andy, at least after he was shot, was not really drawn to very bright people. I felt that the people that Andy seemed to be most interested in were kind of empty, kind of canvases,” she continues. “My relationship was really with Jackie [Curtis] and Candy [Darling] and Ondine and people like that who were doing theatre. These other people weren’t doing anything, they were sort of mannequins, you know, like the type of celebrities that are popular today.” Like Paris Hilton or Nicole Richie? “Exactly.”

Nor, she says, was the Factory the vibrant creative hub it’s made out to be. She tells how one afternoon Warhol called her and asked her to come to the Factory to participate in a shoot. She was doing a photo shoot and interview with a magazine and wasn’t able to leave right away. Warhol kept calling, and when Arcade arrived six hours later, no progress had been made at all. “They’d been there the entire day and they hadn’t done anything,” she says. “It was that kind of atmosphere. It wasn’t like ‘let’s get together and do a bunch of projects’. It was boring, because nothing was ever organised.”

Arcade’s assessment fits with Billy Name’s - that when the Factory did create something great it was more out of coincidence or sheer synergy than because of any forward planning. It wasn’t something that happened every day. Name says that Factory became more organised in the later years, as Morrissey’s influence increased. “He wouldn't let Ondine come around, because Andy had shot so many reels with Ondine in them that were nothing. But there were these few that were exquisite,” he says. “Paul was like an economics professor, saying, ‘he's only producing 1.5% success with his films, so we don't want him around’.”

The Factory changed in other ways too, as performers’ expectations rose and superstars grew bitter. “It's the same old story: if you weren't there to do the work and build something, you have no idea what it cost to produce,” says Name. “People would come into it and say, ‘Oh wow, Warhol can make me famous - and he's supposed pay me, isn't he?’”

“No. I mean, they were supposed to come in and be made famous or make themselves famous by having this arena to operate in. It's not like a Hollywood studio where we select you and you come in, you get paid and you do this stuff. No, here's the Roman arena, you come in as the gladiator and conquer the whole thing if you can. I mean, it's fine with us, if you want to be the superstar and overtake everything, do it to us. It was that type of free enterprise impresario that Warhol was.”

Edie Sedgwick left the Factory in February 1966, saying she felt exploited by Warhol and that Bob Dylan and his manager Robert Grossman had promised to make her a star. Taylor Meade left on similarly bad terms, as did Ultra Violet and former Interview editor Bob Colacello, both of whom released books damning Warhol as manipulative and hedonistic.

Morrissey too is cynical about the Factory’s legacy. “There is a journalistic fiction that some sort of creative activity went on there,” he says. “The Factory was an office. I’d do the films and Andy would present them. The only creative person there was me.” But then, as Name pointed out, Morrissey made the Factory an office. Morrissey says Warhol was “a nice guy”, but, “He didn’t sing, he didn’t dance, he didn’t do anything. He didn’t make his magazine or do his own interviews – he had other people do it all for him. They just want to imagine. Like the Wizard of Oz, they imagine that he’s doing all these things, and they don’t want to know that he’s not doing them.”

Factory People director Patrick Nagle, who recorded 50 hours of interviews with former Factory-goers for the series (to be screened in Australia in 2007), is dismissive of Morrissey’s and Arcade’s cynicism. “They would [be cynical],” he says. “Neither of them were there until the end of the period.”


THE LEGACY
Perhaps Warhol is best appreciated not for what he did himself, but for what he enabled others to do. Both Name and Watson describe Warhol as a legitimiser, a facilitator of creativity rather than as a creator himself. “Warhol allowed [what happened at the Factory] to happen, he financed it,” Watson says. “He created an atmosphere of permission, and that is not nothing.”

Says Name: “Warhol allowed confusion and chaos to occur in a semi-controlled situation. If you were at an opening at an art gallery and Andy came in, all of a sudden the entire gallery would be galvanised. Everyone felt the same electricity and fusion. It was something that allowed people to be just what they were.” Arcade says Warhol always supported her ideas and creative work, even when other Factory and theatre people didn’t.

In amongst the countless hours of useless film footage shot at the Factory lie a body of work – and icons – that have stood the test of time: the Marilyn screen prints, Chelsea Girls, pop art, the Warhol superstars. Edie Sedgwick. Warhol’s personal influence goes even beyond that, to shape the way we understand art, pop culture and celebrity. Debatably, he invented reality TV.

And the Factory lives on in our collective imagination. “What the Factory does is fulfill the longing people have that there’s something going on that they weren’t part of,” says Arcade. “In the late sixties and seventies and eighties you’d always hear people say, ‘oh this thing with Warhol’s going to go away’.”

“And it’s never gone away. It’s like a helium balloon. It just gets further and further away into the world’s imagination. Because when you have somebody who doesn’t really make a statement about what they believe and who they are, you can project all sorts of things.”

Just as Warhol might have put it himself.

- Rachel Hills

Published in YEN, October/November 2006.