BRIGID BERLIN, a sometime receptionist at Andy Warhol’s Factory and a rabble-rousing habitué of New York’s ’60s and ’70s art scene, has a nasty cold. The 76-year-old is receiving guests en repose in her bedroom in an ostentatiously decorated apartment near Gramercy Park that she’s lived in since 1986. Wearing a baby-blue nightgown and holding a coffee that a maid fetched from a nearby deli, she declares, “I want to get one thing straight: I am not an artist! I’ve always liked art supplies better than art.”
This month, Brigid Berlin publishes polaroids from Warhol days; these personal snapshots will be shown at Lower East Side gallery Invisible-Exports and in the book Brigid Berlin Polaroids, which reads like a beta version of Instagram: a manic feed of pictures of Warhol and contemporaries Lou Reed, Diana Vreeland, Patti Smith, Dennis Hopper and Roy Lichtenstein, with selfies, too. Berlin became reacquainted with the images as she was digitizing her meticulously maintained archives—like Warhol, she has thousands of hours of taped conversations—and they reminded her of her id-driven youth. “When I looked at the Polaroids, it reinforced the idea that in my whole life I never did anything for any reason,” she says.
Berlin was one of Warhol’s superstars. Born and raised on Fifth Avenue, she was the daughter of Richard Berlin, the CEO of Hearst Corporation, and his wife, Honey, a popular socialite; Berlin shocked her parents by first marrying a gay window dresser and then devoting her life to the Factory. In Warhol’s 1966 film Chelsea Girls, she delivers a monologue about the joys of speed and then self-administers a shot of amphetamines on her hip. But Berlin was never a groupie, as filmmaker John Waters points out in his foreword to the book. Until his death in 1987, Warhol would call her late at night and they’d spend hours on the phone. She and Warhol even called themselves Mr. and Mrs. Pork.
In many ways, Warhol and Berlin were polar opposites. Warhol was a pack rat, while Berlin compulsively organizes. (Collections of porcelain tchotchkes are lined up perfectly on shelves all over the apartment.) “I never wanted to be famous,” Berlin says in reference to Warhol’s infamous line about everyone’s 15 minutes. “And I never wanted a Warhol painting. Andy used to ask me what I wanted for Christmas and I’d say, ‘Andy, anything, but not a painting.’ So I got a vacuum cleaner.”
Berlin was also the first person whom Warhol allowed to photograph his disfigured torso after a 1968 assassination attempt. The resulting pictures are intimate but not salacious. “I never wanted to expose Andy. Never,” says Berlin. “I can honestly tell you that he was my closest friend. I loved him more than anyone.”
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