Warhol's Muses
The Artists, Misfits, and Superstars Destroyed by the Factory Fame Machine
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From the New York Times bestselling author of Capote’s Women comes an astonishing account of the revolutionary artist Andy Warhol and his scandalous relationships with the ten women he deemed his “Superstars”.
“Now and then, someone would accuse me of being evil,” Andy Warhol confessed, “of letting people destroy themselves while I watched, just so I could film them.” Obsessed with celebrity, the silver-wigged artistic icon created an ever-evolving entourage of stunning women he dubbed his “Superstars”—Baby Jane Holzer, Edie Sedgwick, Nico, Ultra Violet, Viva, Brigid Berlin, Ingrid Superstar, International Velvet, Mary Woronov, and Candy Darling. He gave several of them new names and manipulated their beauty and talent for his art and social status with no regard for their safety, their dignity, or their lives.
In Warhol’s Muses, bestselling biographer Laurence Leamer shines a spotlight on the complex women who inspired and starred in Warhol’s legendary underground films—The Chelsea Girls, The Nude Restaurant, and Blue Movie, among others. Drawn by the siren call of Manhattan life in the sixties, they each left their protected enclaves and ventured to a new world, Warhol’s famed Factory, having no sense that they would never be able to return to their old homes and familiar ways again. Sex was casual, drugs were ubiquitous, parties were wild, and to Warhol, everyone was transient, temporary, and replaceable. It was a dangerous game he played with the women around him, and on a warm June day in 1968, someone entered the Factory and shot him, changing his life forever.
Warhol’s Muses explores the lives of ten endlessly intriguing women, transports us to a turbulent and transformative era, and uncovers the life and work of one of the most legendary artists of all time.
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In this captivating group portrait, biographer Leamer (Capote's Women) spotlights the "artistic muses who helped turn a Pittsburgh son of Eastern European immigrants into international artist Andy Warhol." The narrative reveals how Warhol cultivated a stable of attractive, socially prominent women who starred in his Factory films and provided him with emotional support and social access—until they were deemed old news and discarded. Leamer tracks the rise and fall of such "Superstars" as Edie Sedgwick, who emerged from her troubled youth in an old-money family to become an "exuberant queen of nightlife" in 1960s New York. After meeting Warhol in 1964, Sedgwick starred in such films as Poor Little Rich Girl, a 66-minute "exploitation of her troubled life" in which she smoked, took pills, and talked about squandering her inheritance. By her final Factory film, 1972's Ciao! Manhattan, she'd been institutionalized, gotten hooked on heroin, and come to believe that "those sons-of-bitches took advantage of me." Leamer paints a vivid portrait of a dark, drug-filled "bohemian New York," where Warhol's superstars rebelled against social norms while subordinating their own artistic ambitions to help him assemble his "most enduring creation: himself." Meticulous research, including interviews with Warhol's assistants and transcriptions of his tapes, adds fly-on-the-wall immediacy to Leamer's account. Readers will be riveted.
