High life
Spite after death
Taki
New York 0 h, dear. Andy Warhol has suddenly struck from beyond the grave, and his 'Satanic Diaries', the oversized 807-page book that chronicles his life from 1976 up until his death in 1987, has trendy Big Bagelites doing a collective Orlando Furioso. Worse, in keeping with his prankster image, the publishers have not included an index, forcing people like me to buy the ghastly thing and waste the better part of a day looking for their moniker.
I guess it is the ultimate irony. Warhol was so gentle while alive, he bordered on the ridiculous, but in death he emerges as a bitch of the first order, a cynical, money- grabbing queen whose highest thought centres on toupee-snatching. Very few people emerge unscathed. True, he has kind words for our beloved Spectator's benevolent proprietor, Mr Conrad Black, as well for as yours truly. Unfortunately, he also liked Ted Kennedy and some other low-lifers and assorted queers. Be that as it may, his crime is in kissing and telling on his close friends, an act that will do for trust among the beautiful people what the Gulag did for winter sports in the Soviet Union.
And what a cast it is. Elizabeth Taylor is described as a fat kewpie doll, Martin Scorsese as a coke freak (he must have taken bad stuff when he did the blasphe- mous Last Temptation), Liza Minnelli as a non-stop drug-taker, and Isabella Naylor- Leyland as a non-stop nose-picker . . .
Warhol, however, reserves his sharpest arrows for his closest friend, Bianca Jag- ger. He describes her as a sex-glutton who chases rich and famous men like Captain Ahab pursuing the whale (my simile), a woman who gorges herself on poppers (being friendly with Ortega must do this to people) and an all-round mess. Now as everyone who has ever heard of tin-pot dictators knows, I'm no friend of La Bianca, but she deserves better from her best friend.
Not that I disagree with everything he writes. Far from it. Margaret Trudeau `sitting on the toilet with her pants down and a coke spoon up her nose' is an apt description of a Sixties flower child whom the press took seriously for a while. Starlet Marisa Berenson's husband, one Richard Golub, is described as 'just another guy looking for a girl to get him into the Papers'. But it's the utter emptiness of his life that shocks. The desperation for money, the fear of cancer, the obsessive horror of being alone, the veneration of the superficial. Last but not least, the low blows against people who are down, like Halston, or Steve Rubell who went to jail and whose hospitality Warhol accepted every night for three years.
Given the fact that I knew Andy and always thought his silences meant pro- fundity, I feel the biggest fool of all. When he died I wrote a nice obituary giving him the benefit of the doubt. How little I knew. He was as empty of ideas as he was of passion (close friends die and he describes who was in a night-club) and fear seems the only emotion that touches him. At least this is what his diaries show.
Jagger aside, another very close friend of his whom he stabs in the back is Barbara Allen, a pretty and nice girl whose only crime was to be his friend. The diaries came out last week as she was getting married to Henrik Kwiatowski, a rich polo enthusiast. I went to her wedding and to probably the best party of the year follow- ing it. Nobody spoke of Warhol, because his kind were not invited. It was the best revenge.
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