The Big Reveal: Warhol’s Inner Sanctum
Exclusive Photographs by David Gamble
No true disciple, no serious acolyte of Andy Warhol will ever forget where they were when they first heard the shocking news of February 22, 1987 – Andy Warhol was dead. I didn’t find out until that wintry morning of the 23rd when I went to a familiar newsstand by the West 4th Street station off Sixth Avenue to pick up my morning New York Post only to almost faint on the street after seeing the blaring headline that changed everything. It was such a jolt to the psyche of any creative kid in New York City. I know it was. Andy was dead and we were bereft with grief.
As a fifteen-year-old boy in boarding school in the West Indian bush of Jamaica and reading Interview magazine for the first time in my life, it was my Eureka moment. It was at that precise moment I knew what my life’s work and calling had to be. From that day one in my dorm room at Munro College, ‘the Eton of the West Indies’, I began dreaming of one day living in New York City and meeting Andy Warhol and working at The Factory. And guess what? I managed to achieve that early dream.
I always found it personally fascinating that my first apartment in Manhattan, when I finally got here in 1985, was just down the street from St. Marks Place and where Andy Warhol first lived when he arrived in town at the age of twenty-one in 1949. The shock of it all was the fact that I was just really getting to know Andy Warhol when he died. I went out every night in New York City, at every art gallery opening on the Lower East Side and every night spent at the Michael Todd Room of the Palladium nightclub with the single goal in mind of getting to know Andy better. And it was working! By 1986 whenever Andy would see me he would say, “Oh hello George!” And I would quietly shriek with inner glee at the fact that Andy Warhol was finally remembering my name! And then, just like that, he was gone forever– and the city, the zeitgeist, the culture, the scene was plunged into a cataclysmic pallor of grief that truly crescendoed when Jean Michel Basquiat– Warhol’s last somewhat muse– died suddenly too, just a year later. Basquiat never got over Andy’s death and his tragic descent into heroin abuse was made more profound as a result. A year or so later after Andy’s passing I got my first paying job at a magazine when the first Editor in Chief of Interview (after his death) Ingrid Sischy hired GW as a junior writer working with Glenn O’Brien. And as I sat to prep to write this story I felt the urge to trove my archives and diaries from my black books of 1986 and the very last time I saw Andy Warhol alive.
August 21, 1986
The Michael Todd Room: Palladium
It was nothing but a kissy, kissy night tonight at the Todd Room. It’s Thursday night
and the room is buzzing! Dianne Brill is kissy, kissy with Keith (Haring) and kissy, kissy
with Anita (Sarko) and kissy, kissy with club-kid Bella Karolyi and kissy, kissy with
Walter S. from New York Talk magazine.
James St James and Michael Musto just strolled by wearing dresses. Billy Idol just walked in the room! The paparazzi are going nuts! I’ve never seen so many paparazzi in the Todd Room. Steve Rubell must be in a good mood.
Andy is still not here but when I see Basquiat I’ll know he’s in the room. Inseparable of late, those two. Oh shit! There is Baryshnikov! The paparazzi are ecstatic! Paul, the doorman tells me he is “bottled.” I have no idea what he means.
Rudolf Pieper tells me Andy is finally here and I believe him. Because – as is always the case when Andy shows up anywhere – the energy and electric charge in the room takes on a whole new level! There he is by Anita Sarko’s DJ booth with Jean Michel and Tina Chow!
That was the last time I ever saw Andy. And to this day, I just can’t get it out of my head. The sudden death of Warhol rocked the Downtown demimonde to its core. The day Andy died was the day the nightlife went into a depressive funk for years that followed. The scene was never the same again. Just think, as a young poet, a young writer, a young artist– any young creative and free-spirited soul living their dream and moving to New York City in the big ’80s when the first pandemic I survived — the AIDS crisis was ravaging and decimating New York City. I was in my sexual prime and too scared to have sex with anyone. But I still went out every night hoping to meet Andy Warhol. I wanted to work at Interview magazine and The Factory. After surviving the groupie Valerie Solanas’ assassination attempt of 1968 when he was actually declared ‘dead’ on that first operating table only to survive – and truly thrive – after suffering the most gruesome injuries, we all felt Andy Warhol was that blessed deity that would live forever. (Ironically, he has) But for him to go into the hospital for routine gall bladder surgery and never make it back to his Upper East Side townhouse on 57 East 66th Street remains a confounding shock for many of us decades on.
Andy Warhol called himself “a deeply superficial person.” Fran Lebowitz called him “a vampire.” What would that tell us about the ephemera, the decor, the contents of the
mini-mansion Andy Warhol had lived in since 1974? Not many people can tell you what Andy Warhol’s home looked like because he rarely allowed anyone to visit. No one ever saw Warhol’s home unless he was having sex with them. He went out every night, “even to the opening of an envelope”, he often quipped– but no one knew where Warhol lived.
And so, when the original gatekeeper of the Warhol Estate, Fred Hughes, commissioned the photographer David Gamble to document everything in the 8,000 square foot townhouse just the way Andy left it when he died was a seminal moment in pop culture history. For David Gamble, one must assume, it had to be the same exhilarating, eye-popping experience as it was for the archaeologist Howard Carter when he first set eyes on Tutankhamun’s tomb in 1925.
Many of these images of Warhol’s inner sanctum have been under lock and key for decades. What you are about to see are images of Andy Warhol’s home as he left it, some of which are being published for the very first time. We live in a world today where Warhol is as iconic as Michelangelo and so this historic moment in the culture should not be lost on anyone.
Andy was a hoarder, we now realize. Anyone who has had the opportunity to view and detail many of these Warhol estate images from David Gamble will attest to that fact. He was also as odd at home as he was in public. For one, his kitchen was lined with nothing but Tupperware – everywhere. And he also kept a huge neon-suited cardboard-cut-out-image of himself propped prominently in his living room. As for the contents of ‘Drella’s’ medicine cabinet? (‘Drella’ — the nickname given to Andy by his Factory acolytes back in the ’70s.) Well, you will soon see for yourself and much more of the inner sanctum of ”the single most influential artist of the last century” his biographer Blake Gopnik proudly declared.
And so, what better way to absorb these exclusive images than with a thorough oral history from this witness to pop history and the photographer who captured them, David Gamble, who remains one of the world’s leading authorities on Andy Warhol arcana.
