Fernanda Eberstadt, granddaughter of Wall Street financier Ferdinand Eberstadt, writes about working at Andy Warhol's Factory in 1977 when she was 16.
From her essay in Granta, titled "Buring Mao."
My parents – New York society people with an interest in downtown art – had first met Andy in the late fifties, when my father was working as a fashion photographer and Andy was still an illustrator dressing windows for Bonwit Teller. My father liked to say that back then he'd thought Andy Warhol an embarrassing little creep whose determination to be famous was clearly doomed. But my mother had a taste for oddball dreamers and she and Andy became friends; she appeared in one of his 1964 Screen Tests.
After begging parents for an introduction, the three of them met Warhol and his date (Bianca Jagger) at a French restaurant. They hit it off and she became part of the Factory. Her essay is full of funny tidbits. Here are a couple:
My favorite moment was at the end of the day when Andy put on his apron, picked up a broom, and swept the floor clean – I liked the monastic discipline, the humility of the act. If I got lucky, I would then share a ride uptown with either him or his business manager Fred Hughes, the enigmatic Texan dandy who was the one I actually had a crush on.
On these taxi rides, I became familiar with Andy's conversational technique, how he negotiated his mix of shyness, curiosity, malice. He was a persistent questioner, and what he wanted to hear was the most shameful thing about whomever it was we both knew, and because I wanted to please him, I inevitably divulged some incriminating tidbit and his reaction was always, 'Oh come on. Really???'
The mid to late 1970s marked a low point both in Andy's reputation and his creative output, and in those days the Factory's chief business seemed to be managing the Warhol brand: racking up corporate sponsorships; drumming up advertisements for Interview; above all, getting portraits commissioned. I too was inducted into the hustle – how many of my parents' rich friends could I persuade to commission a silkscreen portrait? If I succeeded, I would get 25 percent of the price, which I noted as being $25,000.
Previously:
• Andy Warhol's Amiga art floppies found
• Lost Warhol originals extracted from decaying Amiga floppies
• Memories from Warhol's Factory
• The weird story behind Warhol's portrait of Barbie
• Book of rare and previously unpublished photographs of the New York Underground of the 1970s: Bowie, Warhol, Debbie Harry and many others
• Watch how to make prints like Andy Warhol
• Andy Warhol's Interview magazine shuts down after 49 years
• New Andy Warhol documentary narrated by AI Andy Warhol
