City Safari: Andy Warhol Wed, Oct 28, 2020 By Thom Nickels Contributing Editor
When the new biography of Andy Warhol crossed my desk—Warholby Blake Gopnik—I had every intention of reading it on the fly as incidental fluff reading the way one would read mystery or romance novels. After all, there’s serious reading and then there are the ‘breeze-thru-books. I thought I had reached my Warhol saturation point years ago after I interviewed Victor Bockris on his own Warhol bio, but Gopnik reveals things about Warhol, I had never read before. Gopnik strips a lot of Warhol’s blithe comments (or lies) and then reveals the truth underneath them. He destroys the myth that Warhol was asexual. Warhol, in fact, was a kind of Linda Lovelace, famous for his "technique.”
The Warhol as teetotaler myth is also debunked. The artist loved whiskey and champagne and would often have 4 or more drinks a day. These and other ‘fun’ facts come to the reader as delicious ‘party favors,’ such as the fact that when he was a young man in New York Warhol had a nose job, a cheap nose job one as it turns out (barely $500.00) which left him with a slightly smaller nose but with enlarged, unsightly pores. (Warhol was disappointed that the operation did not transform him into an Adonis.) Gopnik downplays Warhol’s Byzantine Catholicism when he quotes the artist on several occasions as saying that he did not believe in an afterlife, which, in the light of his other obfuscations, is no doubt another lie since Warhol often attended church and compulsively sprinkled his townhouse with holy water. Warhol knew his audience: to come out and proclaim a devout Christianity would have seemed uncool, especially from the creator of films like "Blow Job” and "Lonesome Cowboys.”
Of special interest to me is Warhol’s visit to Philadelphia in 1965 for his first museum survey at the Institute of Contemporary Art. The exhibition was produced as if it was a show business venture, resulting in 1,600 people pouring into the gallery during the first hour. A "private” viewing the night before had resulted in some damage to the art on the walls so for the official opening there was almost no art at all, just nails in the wall. Warhol came dressed as a motorcyclist. Reporters from local TV stations identified Edie Sedgwick, as Warhol’s girlfriend. The adoring mob forced Warhol and his entourage to take flight—"The crush of people pushed three fans out a window, and into the hospital,” Gopnik writes—with people shouting "We want Andy!” and "Get his clothing!”
Warhol had to be rescued by firefighters who opened a trapdoor near the ceiling so they could escape the mob. Warhol’s group was guided down a fire escape and into waiting police cars. Typical of the city at that time, gay-bashers planned to raid the opening. "A gang of leather-clad, switchblade-wielding hoodlums had planned to break up the opening…but backed down at the last moment. Some of the city’s elites preferred verbal mugging. Penn students climbed on their high horses, declaring the show, and Warhol’s followers, ‘weird’ and ‘disgusting.’” David Bourdon, art critic for the Village Voice, covered the ICA event but devoted his column not to Warhol’s art but to his personality. After Warhol’s death on February 22, 1987, New York City fell into a kind of arts slump. The 1980s was a time of plague (AIDS) and social unrest. Around 1988 a new social phenomenon began to emerge, the Club Kid circuit. ‘Club Kid,’ coined by New York Magazinethat same year, hit Manhattan like a tsunami, spawning night time revelers who called themselves party promoters and dressed up in flamboyant costumes.
Hedonistic glory days had finally replaced the lackluster arts scene after Warhol’s death. Its pope was Michael Alig, who came to Manhattan from South Bend, Indiana, where as a teen he often had to run and hide from antigay bullies. In Philadelphia, the Club Kid scene was not as prominent, probably because it was too gay identified. In Philadelphia the demarcation lines between gay and straight were especially strict in the 1980s. There were punk rock/new wave private membership clubs in the city, such as the East Side Club at 1229 Chestnut, the Kennel Club, Ripley’s and the Trocadero. Leather, chains and Mohawk haircuts identified many of the punks. Philly Club Kids generally headed to New York City where there were more gays and bisexuals. There was certainly no Philadelphia version of Michael Alig, who in retrospect, was really the New York version of Philadelphia’s Ira Einhorn, a charismatic leader with a very un-Club like sensibility who was able to win over a large number of humane venture capitalists with a penchant for ecology.
Einhorn murdered his girlfriend Holly Maddux and stuffed her body in a trunk which he kept in his Powelton Village apartment, while Alig and a friend, Robert "Freze” Riggs,’ killed their drug dealer compatriot, Angel Melendez in 1996 (in self-defense, they claimed), and kept his body in the bathtub of their apartment for almost two weeks (the decomposing smell muted with Drano and massive amounts of Eternity cologne) while they held heroin and cocaine parties in the adjoining rooms with guests complaining of "the smell.” Riggs and Alig cut up Melendez and stuffed his body into a box and tossed the box into the Hudson River, forgetting to puncture a small hole in the box so that it would sink and not float out into wider waters and wind up on a beach somewhere where it would be discovered by a beachcomber, which is what happened. Alig and Riggs then went into hiding but their cover was soon blown. Both pleaded guilty to the killing of Melendez. Riggs was sentenced to federal prison and released in 2019; Alig was released in 2014.
Many of Alig’s friends, including former Club Kid and writer, James St. James, hosted a party for Alig upon his release. (Interestingly enough, former Alig friend, Village Voicewriter Michael Musto, absented himself from Alig’s social orbit after the murder.) Post prison, Alig went on to pursue an art career and as an occasional party promoter. Ira Einhorn, by contrast, didn’t have any friends willing to go public or proclaim his innocence. There was certainly nobody in Philadelphia willing or able to host a "coming home” party for him after his capture by a relentless DA Lynn Abraham. Einhorn died in prison, his death far from front page news. While Alig lost many fans due to the Melendez murder, over time and especially through the popularity of the film Party Monsterwith Macaulay Culkin, which is loosely based on his life, he has managed to transform the brutality of the Melendez murder into the realm of a theatrical party trick, somehow making it seem less real. Alig still has adoring fans who write him notes saying, "I love you.” It was Michael Alig, after all, who once boasted, "I am the one who decides. I am the estate of Andy Warhol.”
