Famous for 15 Minutes: My Years With Andy Warhol

Famous For 15 Minutes: My Years With Andy Warhol, Ultra Violet, Avon Books, 1988

This is a chronicle of life with Andy Warhol, pop artist and early media personality, written by one of his "inner circle". Violet, born Isabelle Dufresne, was the rebellious daughter of a rich French family.

Because her family didn't know what else to do with her, as a teenager, she was sent to New York City, where she met the artist Salvador Dali. She was his lover for a time before she met Warhol, a shy, gay albino from Pittsburgh.

Soon was created "the Factory", a place where an ever-changing cast of characters came to hang out, do art of various types, indulge in narcotics, and participate in, and watch, art films directed by Warhol. These were the sort of films that were shot in one take and shown through colored filters to enhance the psychedelic effects. One film showed a man's naked rear end. . .for 75 minutes.

Everything changed in 1968, when Warhol was shot, and almost killed, by Valerie Solanas, one of his followers. He survived, but the freedom and living on the edge that characterized Warhol's art and life in the Factory is gone. Warhol becomes a "safer", more commercial artist, and the Factory gains a security guard and locked door.

Violet drifts away from Warhol, and falls madly in love with the painter Edward Ruscha, but he is already married. She eventually breaks off the relationship. Around this time, she begins to physically fall apart, to the point of spending a year in bed. Violet heals herself through alternative medicine and eastern philosophy.

This book does a very good job showing the physical and moral excesses of the World of Warhol. It's rather funny and rather sick, and is a very candid journey through life on the edge, 1950s and 1960s style.