Death and Disaster
Paul Alexander
Little, Brown hbk, 272 pgs
Review by Gerald Houghton (1995)
It's the stuff of a TV movie. Born a child of poor Pittsburgh parents, he became the most famous artist in the world. With his friends he created a new form - Pop Art - and a persona to attract eminent moths to his over-bright flame. He formed a Factory to turn out his art; patronised one of the world's most influential bands; made a string of avant garde films.
Then, in 1987, Andy Warhol, for it was he, went into hospital. He'd suffered with his gallbladder for years, and a hernia lingering from 1968 when he was gunned down by S.C.U.M. founder Valerie Solanis. He almost died and was left with a terror of hospitals, convinced that if he ever went in one again he wouldn't come out. On 22nd February 1987, the artist's heart unexpectedly gave out.
The opening third of the book - DEATH - is a painful heart-murmur by urine-analysis by stool-count breakdown of the man's death, interwoven with an account of the Solanis shooting and a Warhol pocket-history. It's tragic and certainly makes a villainess of private nurse Min Cho. (Warhol, it says, could've been saved had she recognised his plight earlier.) But death would be as nothing to DISASTER.
Warhol left a simple Will and long-time business companion Fred Hughes as administrator. Pay-outs would go to his brothers and Hughes, the remaining Estate sold off to fund the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. Hughes appointed celeb lawyer Ed Hayes to handle legal affairs, the two drawing up an agreement that Hayes' fee would be met as a percentage of the final Estate, whatever that Estate was really worth?
The answer was ugly, stupid and pointless. The dapper, extrovert Hughes collapsed with multiple sclerosis in 1988, and fell out with Hayes. Alexander examines the (considerable) evidence that Hughes spirited away much of his employer's jewellery and walls full of art. Bad enough, but the central dilemma that stalled almost seven years - finally settled in a New York court - was the precise dollars and cents worth of Warhol stock.
On one side of the schism Hayes talked-up the value of the Warhol legacy. It was ridiculous, he said, to undervalue the legend, and (an eye to his percentage) tossed figures like $800 million in the ring. On the other, the Foundation established in Warhol's name, terrified that it would be unable to dispense of its annual 5% net worth, paradoxically sided with an woefully paltry valuation from auctioneers Christie's.
The fight saw Warhol's life reduced to numbers (albeit extraordinary ones - 4,100 paintings, 4,500 drawings, 19,000 prints, 60,000 photos, countless video and film) and the final decision by Judge Preminger that the whole kit and caboodle - art and property - be pegged at just over $500 million.
For all that Alexander's book becomes inevitably bogged-down in its latter stages by numbers and cross-arguments, it shines a fascinating light on the vultures that come to feed when a man of wealth and consequence dies. And like a particularly lavish mini series, it's difficult to side with any of the protagonists - the gallery of rich, privileged grotesques. It's flaw - major, inevitable - is the hole Warhol leaves at its centre.
There was, Alexander tells us, a sign that hung in The Factory: "I never wanted to be a painter," it said. "I wanted to be a tap dancer." Death and Disaster has a prophetic ring.