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323 W. 21ST ST: FRANZISKA BOAS

When Andy Warhol and Philip Pearlstein's sublease was up, they found another apartment through the New York Times classifieds - a large second floor room at 323 W. 21st Street which they rented from the dancer Franziska Marie Boas who shared the space with her friend Jan Gay and their large sheepdog named "Name."¹ Boas was the daughter of the Prussian-born anthropologist, Franz Boas, who was the first professor of anthropology at Columbia University - a position he held for 37 years. In 1927 he had written a book, Primitive Art, which proposed a theory of dance as an emotional outlet and challenged the racial bias of the then prevalent theories of physical anthropology.² His daughter, Franziska, also challenged racial bias by organizing multi-racial dance groups and classes. From 1933 to 1950 she ran the Boas School of Dance, with sessions held at the 21st Street apartment. She had divided the large room with a proscenium arch with Warhol and Pearlstein on one side of the arch and her dance classes on the other side. She was particularly keen on improvisational dance and sometimes invited artists to sketch the dancers while they improvised although it is not known whether Warhol participated in any of these sessions.

74 WEST 103RD ST.

In April 1950 Boas was evicted from the commercially zoned property and Warhol and Pearlstein were, again, forced to move. They went their separate ways. In August 1950, Pearlstein married an ex-classmate from Carnegie Tech, Dorothy Cantor, and Warhol was part of the wedding party. One of the first places that Philip and Dorothy lived in was an apartment they got from the artist Lester Johnson on East 4th Street between Avenues A and B.³ Pearlstein returned to school, studying for a Master of Arts degree at New York University's Institute of Fine Arts with a thesis on the Dada artists, Francis Picabia and Marcel Duchamp.⁴ By the time of Pearlstein's wedding Warhol was living at 74 West 103rd Street.

Warhol shared the 103rd Street apartment with other classmates from Carnegie Tech. The apartment belonged to a dancer Victor Reilly who, like Warhol, had been a member of Carnegie Tech's Modern Dance Club.⁶ Other classmates from Carnegie Tech that lived in the apartment were Ellie Simon and Leila Davis. Although Ellie soon returned to Pittsburgh, Davis stayed in New York and took some rare photographs of Warhol during his early years. Another flatmate was Elaine Finsilver who had met some of the other people living in the apartment at a ballet class. Finsilver remembered that Warhol "shared his room with Tommy Quinland, and when Jack Hudson came, Jack moved in. And depending on who came last, there were three beds in the room. It was just a large, bare room except for usually three unmade beds, and Andy had his drawing table, I remember, on the left as you walked into the room... [The drawing table] was a nice taboret. It was like an architectural draftsman table, and he had a light over it. And all over it, he had all of his pens, and ink things were all neatly placed, and everything was in its place, and a lot of masking tape, and that's all... I used to got to my dance class. They [the other flatmates] usually never got up until two or three in the afternoon. So, by the time I got back, they were ready to have breakfast, which was, like six o'clock in the evening... Andy was not at that point in his life what one would call a 'hard worker.'⁶ Finsilver's characterization of Warhol is the opposite of what Philip Pearlstein remembered when he and Warhol were living together. According to Pearlstein, Warhol was "always a workaholic, obsessive" who worked into the night after Pearlstein had retired to bed.⁷

One of Finsilver's dates, Robert Fleisher, later recalled his own impressions of Warhol and the other people who lived at 103rd Street.

The 103rd Street Gang - New York 1950
Top row (L): Mata (a girlfriend of Victory Reilly's) and Jack Hudson
Second Row: Joey Ross, Victor (Buddy) Reilly,
Tommy Quinlan, Dale Blosser and Ellie Simon
Kneeling front: Jack (Mitch) Beaber and Andy Warhol
(Photo: Leila Davies Singeles)

Robert Fleisher:

"The first time that I ever saw Andy... he was working at this little desk doing sketches that he was trying to show to the editor of Park East. But in the room were very large canvases in oils. Serious painting somewhat... in the late thirties there was a newsreel of a bombing in China... and on the railroad track, there was a baby screaming - world famous... Andy did a version of that in pastel oils. It was a very large canvas... I thought it was spectacular, and it was partly line drawing with the blotted-line, but it was pastel oils. Now that's very early, way before he was a successful illustrator. I mean, when he had one pair of pants and [was] living in a cellar at 104th Street [sic] and Manhattan Avenue with six people... I became part of their crowd through Elaine and I saw them quite often..."⁸

Fleisher, as the stationery and gift buyer for Bergdorf Goodman, would later commission Warhol to design stationery for the department store. Henry Kaiser (of Kaiser Aluminum) was so impressed by Warhol's butterfly stationery that he purchased all of the first 60 boxes.⁹

Robert Fleisher:

"I was a buyer at Bergdorf. When I became the stationery buyer, I thought it would be great for Andy to do stuff for us... I had bought the Butterflies from Andy myself for my own personal collection. I think they were 10 dollars. They were among those that I helped hand paint myself. He had a stack of Butterflies this high, and we were all sitting there filling in, and so forth. But, I remember waking up one morning, racking my brain for a stationery design, looking at the wall, and there was this Andy Butterfly thing, and I said, 'Oh, my god!' and called Andy and he said we would love to do it. And we fixed a price, which Bergdorf paid. And we decided that he would do some party invitations and Christmas cards, and so forth, and he got paid and got the cards - a certain amount of stationery cards and invitations that he wanted for his own use. He complained bitterly for weeks afterwards that he had been taken advantage of and that we had to pay him more after he had signed and agreed and everything was fine. He did that over and over and over again - that he was being cheated, that he should have gotten more, that he had done it as a favor, blah-blah-blah."¹⁰

Another person who shared the apartment was Margery Beddow who, like Victor Reilly and Elaine Finsilver, was a dancer. Reilly and Beddow would appear together in the Broadway musical revue Two on the Aisle, which ran from July 1951 to March 1952. Prior to appearing in that production, Reilly had also appeared in the musical comedy, Where's Charley, at the Broadway Theatre. Beddow, who would later write a book on choreographer Bob Fosse, remembered Warhol sketching his roommates and then surprising them with a gift of the drawings in a loose-leaf notebook.¹¹

24TH STREET

According to another ex-student from Carnegie Tech., Joseph Groell, Warhol moved in with him for "a month or two" beginning in November 1950, "until his mother came to New York and he found an apartment, I think in the 70s." According to Groell, "Andy was stuck paying the rent [at 103rd Street] and I think he was the primary tenant. And there were all these bizarre people who came and went and ran up a huge phone bill. And finally Andy, I guess, had too much of it, and couldn't cope with it, and he moved into my place."¹²

Groell's apartment was located at 24th Street between First and Second Avenue. He remembered Warhol adopting a novel approach when phoning art directors for work. Groell heard Warhol begin his telephone conversations with "Hello, I'm just sitting on my bed here, playing with my yo-yo," and joking with potential employers before asking for commissions: "I planted some bird seed in the park yesterday... would you like to order a bird? And do you have any work for me?"¹³ By adopting such novel approaches Warhol guaranteed that his name would be remembered by art directors in the highly competitive field of commercial illustration.

1951 - 1952: EAST 75TH STREET

By June 1951, Warhol was living in another apartment registered in Victor Reilly's name at 218 East 75th Street.¹⁴ By 1952, Warhol was living next door at 216 East 75th Street. It was while he was living on 75th Street that his mother, Julia, moved in with him from Pittsburgh. She would continue to live with Warhol until the autumn of 1970 when she returned to Pittsburgh for health reasons.¹⁵ In June 1952 Warhol had his first exhibition in New York at the Hugo Gallery.

JUNE 1952: THE HUGO GALLERY

Andy Warhol's first pre-Pop exhibition featured a series of drawings inspired by Truman Capote's short stories. Capote's first book, Other Voices, Other Rooms was published in 1948 when Warhol was still at college. Two months prior to Warhol's exhibit at the Hugo, Capote's play, The Grass Harp, had premiered on Broadway at the Martin Beck Theater, with sets and costumes designed by Cecil Beaton.

TRUMAN CAPOTE

Photograph of Truman Capote used on the
book jacket of Other Voices, Other Rooms
(Photo: Harold Halma)

Truman Capote:

"When he was a child, Andy Warhol had this obsession about me and used to write me from Pittsburgh... When he came to New York, he used to stand outside my house, just stand out there all day waiting for me to come out. He wanted to become a friend of mine, wanted to speak to me, to talk to me. He nearly drove me crazy."¹⁶

The photograph of Truman that appeared on the dust jacket for Other Voices Other Rooms showing him seductively staring at the camera with his right hand resting above his groin, generated a considerable amount of controversy when it was published. According to Robert Fleisher Warhol was "madly in love" with Capote and "there was a photograph of Truman Capote on a couch, stretched out in a plaid vest, and that's what sent him [Warhol] off provisionally. As I remember, he had that around all the time and talked about it... it's from the back of Other Voices, Other Rooms..."^16a

Truman Capote:

"I started writing when I was eight - out of the blue, uninspired by any example. I'd never known anyone who wrote; indeed, I knew few people who read... By the time I was seventeen, I was an accomplished writer... I sent off stories to the principal literary quarterlies, as well as to the national magazines... and stories by me duly appeared in those publications. Then, in 1948, I published a novel: Other Voices, Other Rooms. It was well received critically, and was a best seller. it was also, due to an exotic photograph of the author on the dust jacket, the start of a certain notoriety that has kept close step with me these many years. Indeed, many people attributed the commercial success of the novel to the photograph."^16b

Warhol and Capote did eventually become friends. In 1973 Rolling Stone magazine commissioned Capote to write an article about the band, The Rolling Stones, and sent him on tour with them. When he came back without having written anything, the magazine asked Warhol to interview Capote about the tour. Warhol was accompanied by Bob Colacello who was, at the time, a contributing editor of Interview magazine. Early in the interview Warhol explains to Colacello that, "I used to write to Truman every day for years until his mother told me to stop it." When Truman says that he doesn't remember his mother doing that, Warhol responds, "She did. She called me up and said it. She was really sweet." Capote then replies, "She was drunk."¹⁷ Later in the interview Capote explains his reaction to Warhol's questioning:

Truman Capote: "You said something to me that really startled me when you came to the house today... You said that my mother telephoned you. I was absolutely startled. Really startled."

Andy Warhol: "You were? Why?"

Truman Capote: "Because my mother really was an alcoholic."

Andy Warhol: "But I met your mother."

Truman Capote: "I know you met my mother. But my mother was a very ill woman, and a total alcoholic... she was an alcoholic when you met her. She had been an alcoholic since I was 16, so she was an alcoholic when you met her... she had this sort of sweet thing, and then suddenly she'd - well you know she committed suicide."

Andy Warhol: "She did? Oh, I didn't know that. I thought she just got sick."

Truman Capote: "No, no, no, no. She committed suicide."¹⁸

It is interesting to note that neither Andy nor Truman mention meeting each other prior to the death of Capote's mother, Nina, who committed suicide in 1954.¹⁹ In the Rolling Stone interview, Warhol says that he met Capote's mother but does not claim to have met Truman during the same period. Yet several Warhol biographers have maintained that they did meet each other during Warhol's early years in New York.

THE WARHOL BIOGRAPHIES

The three main biographies on Warhol were all published in 1989 and each gives slightly different versions of Warhol meeting Truman through Nina. David Bourdon claims in Warhol that "one day Capote came home and was startled to find Warhol inside his apartment, talking to the author's intoxicated mother. Warhol had apparently approached her on the street and she had invited him in."²⁰ In The Life and Death of Andy Warhol, Victor Bockris writes that Warhol had sent Truman some of his drawings and when the artist rang Truman he "got the author's mother on the line." She invited him to the Blarney Stone bar for drinks and afterwards they retired to her apartment and Truman found them there "when he entered the apartment later that afternoon."²¹ In Loner At the Ball, Fred Lawrence Guiles writes that Truman "remembered" meeting Warhol after "Andy had found the building where he lived with his mother and stepfather, Nina and Joe Capote" and Truman saw Andy on the street "leaning against a lamppost" in front of their building. Nina felt sorry for Warhol and went down to the street and invited him up "where Andy met a rather frosty Truman."²²

Although I have used information from the Warhol biographies in this essay, I have tried to use information that has been confirmed by other sources. The information about Truman meeting Warhol in his early days in New York is unconfirmed by other sources and it is difficult to know where Warhol's biographers got their information from as their books are poorly footnoted. The Guiles book contains no footnotes, even for direct quotes. The Bockris book has a list of sources per chapter, but does not specify what information the sources refer to. The Bourdon book is better footnoted in general, but does not contain any footnotes supporting the claim that Warhol and Capote actually met at this time. The quotes attributed to Warhol by Guiles in regard to meeting Capote through Nina are from the book Andy Warhol's Exposures, published in 1979.

ANDY WARHOL'S EXPOSURES

Exposures was written in the first person as though Warhol wrote it himself. However, Bob Colacello actually wrote it, with the help of Brigid Berlin.

Bob Colacello:

"... I didn't sit down to churn out the final draft [of Exposures] until January 1979, mainly because I dreaded it so much. I finally finished the Bianca Jagger and Paulette Goddard chapters on my own, but then I drafted Brigid [Berlin] to help me. Almost every night that winter, she came to my place, or I went to hers, and after I smoked two or three joints, I dictated to her, turning myself into Andy, imitating the way he talked and, as best I could, the way he thought. Every so often, Brigid would snap, 'That's you, not Andy. He'd never say that.' I'd take another puff and get back into character."²³

According to Colacello, when Warhol was shown the finished text of Exposures at the end of February 1979, he said it was "boring. But I guess that's because I've heard all those stories a million times."²⁴

POPISM
THE PHILOSOPHY of ANDY WARHOL (FROM A TO B AND BACK AGAIN)

Two other "autobiographical" books about Warhol - Popism and The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (From A to B and Back Again) refer to the artist's early obsession with Capote, but neither makes the claim that Warhol actually met Capote at the time. In Popism, Warhol says "In the fifties, in my pre-Pop days, I wanted to illustrate his [Truman Capote's] short stories so badly I used to pester him with phone calls all the time till one day his mother told me to cut it out."²⁵ Although Popism is, like Exposures, written in the first person as though Warhol wrote it himself, it was mostly written by Pat Hackett who worked as Warhol's secretary from 1968 to 1976.²⁶ According to Bob Colacello, "The most credible portions of that book, Popism, were based on her [Hackett's] interviews with Henry Geldzahler, Emile De Antonio, and other sixties players, not Andy. He emitted a long litany of lines about drugs and sex at the Factory like 'I never knew what was going on,' and 'I never knew what was really happening.'"²⁷

In The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (From A to B and Back Again), again written in the first-person, Warhol does not claim to have met Capote during his first years in New York. He merely says, " "... I thought Truman Capote filled up space with words so well that when I first got to New York I began writing short fan letters to him and calling him on the phone every day until his mother told me to quit it."²⁸ Although quotes from the Philosophy book are often attributed directly to Warhol, the book was a collaborative effort and, as with Popism, mostly written by Pat Hackett.

Pat Hackett:

"On the first book, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (From A to B and Back Again), I did eight separate interviews with Andy on the basis of which I wrote chapters 1 through 8 and chapter 10. Then, using material from conversations Andy had taped between himself and Bob Colacello and Brigid Berlin, I wrote the introductory chapter and chapters 9, 11, 12, 13 and 14."²⁹

Pat Hackett became involved with writing the book after Bob Colacello, who had written the original proposal and outline, showed Warhol an early draft of one of the chapters.

Bob Colacello:

"When I finished the chapter, I handed it to Andy. He counted the pages, as he counted the ads in Interview, and said, 'Only twelve?' He took it home that night and read it over the phone to Brigid Berlin, taping her reaction. Then he gave the tape to Pat Hackett, telling her to 'make it better.' So now the ghostwriter had a ghostwriter, Factory-style. A literary assembly line was set up: Bob to Andy to Brigid to Pat to Andy to HBJ [Harcourt Brace Jovanovich], with a quick stop at Fred's desk, to make sure we didn't put in anything 'funny' about Lee Radziwill or Jackie Onassis... Pat ended up writing more of the Philosophy book than I did, and I ended up paying her half of my half of the advance. She deserved a percentage of its future income as well, but Andy absolutely refused to consider it."³⁰

PATRICK SMITH

During a 1978 interview with Charles Lisanby who befriended Warhol in the 1950s, Patrick Smith, the author of the two most reliable biographical books on Warhol - Andy Warhol's Art and Films and Warhol: Conversations about the Artist, asked Lisanby about Warhol and Capote:

Patrick Smith: "A question: someone told me that Andy, when he arrived in New York, would write fan letters?"

Charles Lisanby: "That's true."

Patrick Smith: "Did he continue writing fan letters, as you remember?"

Charles Lisanby: "Oh yes. He wanted very much to meet Truman Capote. He had a strange feeling that he looked like Truman Capote, and Truman Capote was very famous at an early age. And he wanted to do the same thing. He wanted to meet Cecil Beaton for the same reason. Truman Capote and Cecil Beaton were friends at about that time. I knew Cecil Beaton. I worked for Cecil Beaton as an assistant on a lot of things that he did in this country, such as Vanessa.³¹ I was his assistant for that and for other things that he did.. I never knew Truman Capote at that time, but I do know that Andy wrote him fan letters. And they did get to know each other."³²

Lisanby does not mention when Warhol and Capote got "to know each other." Although they did eventually become friends during the 1970s, it was well after Warhol's exhibition of Capote drawings at the Hugo Gallery. Lisanby first met Warhol at some time between the summer of 1953 and before the publication of a limited edition book that Lisanby collaborated on with Warhol in 1954.³³ He did not know Warhol "when he arrived in New York" and his confirmation that Warhol wrote fan letters to Truman upon his arrival in New York in 1949 was not based on Lisanby's direct experience. During much of 1949 Truman lived in Europe. He had moved out of his mother's apartment at 1060 Park Avenue in 1948.

There is little evidence to suggest that Warhol met Truman during these early years in New York. Warhol never directly made the claim that he met Capote through Capote's mother - the claim was made by a stoned Bob Colacello pretending to be Warhol while writing Andy Warhol's Exposures.

By the time that Exposures was written, however, the social lives of Warhol and Capote often intersected. Both were regulars at Studio 54 after it opened in April 1977. In January 1979 Warhol put Capote on the cover of Interview magazine and 10 of the 14 stories in Capote's Music for Chameleons first appeared in Interview, beginning with the February 1979 issue. Capote died in Los Angeles in 1984 at the home of Joanne Carson, the ex-wife of the TV talk show host, Johnny Carson. The cause of death was liver disease, complicated by phlebitis and "multiple drug intoxication."³⁴ Capote, like his mother, was a drinker and his drinking was often supplemented with other recreational drugs.

ALEXANDRE IOLAS

The exhibition of Warhol's Capote inspired drawings ran at the Hugo Gallery from June 16 - July 3, 1952. The Hugo had been founded in 1944 by Robert Rothschild, Elizabeth Arden and Maria Hugo who was married to author Victor Hugo's grandson. In 1947 the gallery had hosted Bloodflames, a show of Surrealists which included work by Gorky and Matta. At the time of Warhol's show, the director of the gallery was Alexandre Iolas, assisted by David Mann, the gallery's manager. Iolas would also be responsible for Warhol's last exhibition when, in January 1987, he showed Warhol's Last Supper paintings in Milan at the Palazzo delle Stelline, across from the Church of Santa Maria della Grazie which housed Leonardo's Last Supper. Iolas had commissioned Warhol to do his version of Leonardo's painting in early 1986.

Alexandre Iolas
As a dancer in 1929(L)/With his doberman, Frida (R)

Alexandre Iolas (ca. 1984):

"Early on, I did an exhibition of Andy Warhol in my gallery... The boy is a very important artist, Andy, because he helped America. He mixes very much with youth, and with all the chic people - you know, the bums. When you have such a stupid expression as Andy has - when he is being silent, before the smile starts - when you look like that, you can do anything you want in the world. As Christ said to all those priests, 'Suffer the little children to come unto me,' and Warhol is a horrible child. He has helped America to get rid of its puritanism, either with his half-pornographic, half esthetic films or else with his portraits of the fake stars he has around him and the real stars he has always liked. He's an amazing person, and probably someday he will be considered a saint."³⁵

Iolas, born in Alexandria, Egypt in 1908, came from a dance background. After studying ballet in Berlin he fled to Paris during Hitler's rise to power in the 1930s. In Paris he continued to study dance and socialized with artists such as Jean Cocteau, Georges Braque, Pablo Picasso, Max Ernst and Man Ray. After moving to New York he was able to draw on these artistic contacts when he quit dancing in order to concentrate on his career as an art dealer. After working at the Hugo gallery, he founded the Jackson-Iolas Gallery in 1955 with former dancer, Brooks Jackson and later opened galleries in Paris, Milan, Madrid and Mexico City. He died of AIDs in June 1987 - just four months after Warhol had died in the same hospital in New York.

At the time of his death, Iolas was embroiled in his own Greek tragedy. Anonis Nikolaou, a transvestite who called himself Maria Kallas, had been employed by Iolas at his home in Greece. In 1985 Iolas fired Kallas for "acute alcoholism, pathological lying," and stealing "small but valuable" objects from Iolas' collection. Kallas fought back. He publicly accused Iolas of "antiquities smuggling, drug peddling, and the prostitution of young men," naming the former president, Konstantine Karamanlis, as a frequent visitor to orgies hosted by Iolas. The Greek daily newspaper, Avriani, published Iolas' home number and urged readers to phone him and "curse" him. Greek film director, Costa Gavras circulated an open letter in support of the art dealer signed by 150 cultural and political heavyweights, including French president Francois Mitterand. In spite of this, the district attorney told Iolas that he would be charged with prostitution, possession of drugs and smuggling antiquities. He was ordered to present himself to the Greek courts on July 17, 1987, but by the time the court date came up, he was already dead.³⁸

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