Holly Solomon and her Andy Warhol portrait

Holly Solomon:

"... I asked Andy to do my portrait. We went to Broadway and 47th Street, where they had this photobooth. Andy met me there, and we had a bunch of quarters. He was very particular about which booth. We tried a whole bunch of them... It was very curious because he didn't like this booth and he did like that booth, and he maybe wanted this one, sowe spent about an hour going from booth to booth. We finally decided on a booth. Andy took a few pictures, he stood there with me for a little bit and then he left me on my own. So I did the pictures all by myself. It helped being private and he understood that, too...

Actually, if you're in a photobooth for a long time it gets pretty boring... I got so bored that I started to really act in them. I was a student then of Lee Strasberg, so I started to do all these acting exercises... Fifty dollars is a lot in a photobooth!... Andy was really a great portrait painter and he must have really liked me a lot. He made me into the archetype of the sexually liberated woman of our time...

It [the portrait] really is an icon of this liberated woman, who is trying very hard to be liberated. In the 60s there were rules, if you were an intelligent woman, you were an upset woman... You had to be thin...We were on amphetamines. I was taking Seconals to go to sleep, I weighed 87 pounds...

Andy and I used to talk about art together, and we talked about acting. Andy - I must tell you - has been maligned terribly.He was very generous to people, because what he tried to do was to give people what he thought they wanted... He wanted me to do Lonesome Cowboys. He really did. He'd call me up everyday and say, 'Oh Hol, you'dbe beautiful. I'll put you on a white horse...' And I said 'I can't go to Arizona with 23 of your guys'... It was brilliant of Andy to want to cast me in this film. We all wanted to be in Hollywood. All of us. It never dawned on us that Hollywood was never going to touch us because we were part of the Warhol group, and, therefore, we weren't part of the establishment." (AWP94-99)