Billy Name and the Warhol Era

by Nan Fogel

The Pop Art Movement of the 1960s and 70s had its origins in the wealth of images in print and electronic media after World War II. Years of frugality during the Depression and WWII gave way to a profusion of commercial products and a new affluence to afford them. At the same time, American society was in upheaval. The 60s were marked by the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Civil Rights Movement, a series of devastating assassinations, the beginning of the Vietnam War, the sexual revolution, race riots, and protests for gay and women's rights. Rebellious artists turned away from traditional art and its latest style of abstract expressionism to create a new kind of realism,"Pop Art—characterized by a focus on popular culture and its symbols, consumer objects and media stars. Bold colors, repetition, and techniques more commonly used in the advertising and publishing industries replaced traditional methods of painting. Of all the artists painting in this shocking new style, none was more famous (or infamous) than Andy Warhol.

Warhol's subject matter included commonplace objects of popular culture: Campbell Soup cans, Coca-Cola bottles and rolls of money. Using techniques of mass production he also made repetitive images of celebrities such as Marilyn Monroe and Jackie Kennedy. By 1964 he was a major figure in the art world, sometimes referred to as "the Pope of Pop." Although he never stopped painting completely, Warhol turned to film in 1964, making some sixty avant garde films between 1963 and 1968.

Warhol's studio in New York became the "in" place for the underground arts community and the rich and famous celebrities Warhol so admired. The studio's decor was created by Poughkeepsie native and lighting designer, Billy Name (born Billy Linich) whose startling work with silver paint and aluminum foil first caught Warhol's eye when he visited Name's East Village apartment. Warhol was so taken with the effect of this decor that he invited Name to create a silver installation at Warhol's new studio, an old hat factory on East 47th Street which became known as the "Silver Factory."

So began their creative relationship as Name moved into the Factory, transforming it with silver, then staying on as a sort of foreman or manager who oversaw the day-to-day operations and provided support for Warhol. When Warhol turned to making films, he designated Name as the official photographer at the Factory. Another member of the Factory circle, author and music promoter Danny Fields later described Billy Name's tremendous influence on Andy Warhol:

Billy Linich was for many years the artistic power behind the throne. He was brilliant and had extraordinary taste...He had incredible influence on Andy...Andy respected him enormously and Andy knew how profound Billy's sensibilities were...'

Billy Name left the Factory in early 1970 and now lives in Poughkeepsie. Nan Fogel writes about history and the arts. She has written for The Conservationist magazine and the Dutchess County Historical Society Year Book, and recently published a book about her great grandparents: A Life in India, James and Mary Barr. She lives in Poughkeepsie.

Nancy Fogel: I'm talking today [April 17, 2010] with Billy Linich, 74 Albany Street, Poughkeepsie. Billy Name is the professional name used by Linich, who was a friend and associate of artist Andy Warhol and the official photographer at Warhol's "Silver Factory" in New York during the 1960s.

Billy Name: It's pronounced "Linick." My grandfather was from Hamburg, Germany. His name originally had two N's in it—Linnich—but when he crossed over to America they somehow dropped an "n." His wife was Fanny Jonker from Berlin, definitely German. On my mother's side, I am Italian. Her father came from Sicily; his name was Jacomo Gusmano, and her mother, Lucie Reivello, was from Naples. They were founding members of Mount Carmel Church. So I'm German and Italian, which was sort of dangerous to be when I was born, around World War II. They were the Western enemies but I was really so young I didn't know what was going on. There were some strange things going on. It was a real war. It wasn't like these little wars they have nowadays that last for years. If we had lost we would have been enslaved as workers. The war wouldn't just have been over and we'd go back to business as usual, because the Nazis and the Japanese were like termites—dictators —who would have enslaved everyone.

NF: ...I understand you were born and grew up in Poughkeepsie—in the 1940s and 50s.

BN: I was born at Vassar Hospital on February 22, 1940. I went to Arlington schools—the grade school on Raymond Avenue and Arlington High School just at the end of Main Street. They were beautiful schools. They were made of oak wood and had real slate blackboards, sort of semi-Colonial styling, very beautiful schools and they remain today.

NF: Yes, they're still nice schools. What was Poughkeepsie like then? Tell me a little bit about your early life here.

BN: Well, Poughkeepsie was the center of the Hudson Valley. It was the shopping center, as Luckey Platt always reminded us with the mileage markers outside Poughkeepsie that would say so many miles to Luckey Platt & Co. Do you remember them?

NF: I do. I'd forgotten about them.

BN: We were the center of the Hudson Valley market and it was very modern in the sense of post-war, lots of new things—new cars, refrigerators—all the things we were denied during the war because of the metal shortage and everything was confiscated, were brought out anew after the war, like refrigerators. They started making cars again, because they didn't make them during the war, and things improved a lot. Everyone became more prosperous with the resurgence of American industry, so it was a very modern, medium-size city. And then IBM came in and built their big plant down on the South Road and almost every other person worked for IBM for a while there. All your friends in school were IBM'ers. We could go with our friends to the IBM Country Club and go swimming. That lasted for a while, for quite a number of years.

Then there was a big change, a change in the overall economy. Poughkeepsie was a nice place to live. There were good neighborhoods, nice schools and good business going on. You could always get a job. When I was a teenager I got a job at the Whelan's drugstore on Main Street and Liberty Street. First I started out as a soda jerk, just like in the movies, and transferred over to the cigarette counter after a while as I became more mature (laughs) in my position. It was fun working at Whelan's. You got to see everybody. It was like, almost like a Judy Garland movie—everyone was nice and life was sweet and great (laughs).

NF: You were eighteen when you left Poughkeepsie for New York [City]. What did you want to do there?

BN: Well, before I graduated high school, I and a friend would go down to Manhattan on weekends and we'd go to Washington Square Park where there's a big circular fountain and people gather to play guitars and bongo drums. It was pretty hippy—it was the end of the Beatnik Era. ...When I did move down there I wanted to join into that culture— the arts culture and the music culture, and it was very exciting because of the freedom it expressed. You're no longer inhibited by the standards and the mores of ordinary culture. You're in a more free world. Not that life is really different, but you're not being bound by all those restrictions. You don't have in mind all the time that I shouldn't do this because so and so would look at me askance. All the things you see in the old movies that I think are funny and inhibiting and restricting and they were. People like me would go to New York to experience the freedom of it.

"Billy Name Hooded "Photo by David Shankbone; GNU Free Documentation License (commons. wikimedia.og)

NF: Did you feel yourself an artist as you were growing up? Did you gravitate toward that?

BN: I did gravitate toward it. I was president of the dramatics club at Arlington High School. I didn't really study art courses. I did well in the one course you are required to take. I was more in that line of thinking.

NF: What did you want to do in the city? What did you think you might do?

BN: Well, it wasn't really thought of in that way because first of all you just want to get there. You want to get out of the small town. And when you get there you start to make connections with people. You develop friendships and then you find out what they are doing and you tend to go into the same lines that they are working in— and if they are working in theater, you start working in theater also. You start working backstage as a stage manager, you know. There were also a lot of contemporary musicians making experimental music, learning new modes, new fashions, and the whole fashion world overlapped with that too. And with photography and photographing models and fashions, because it was an art with the set and the model and the camera and learning the camera; so there were a number of ways you could express yourself if you didn't have a pre-decision of what kind of artist you were.

NF: So is that what you did?

BN: Yes, and then I met these people from a college in North Carolina called Black Mountain College. It had closed and most of the people came to New York, and some from San Francisco, but I met a whole group of them who came to New York and one of them was a lighting designer for the avant-garde dance companies and off-Broadway theaters, so he sort of started teaching me how to do lighting design. And in a sense I became his apprentice and I learned the trade and then I went on to do it on my own. And that was really my first line of work— career, what have you—as a theatrical lighting designer.

NF: You were a close associate of Andy Warhol's in the early 60s. How did that come about?

BN: Well, as I was a lighting designer, there was a church in Washington Square Park called the Judson Memorial Church which sponsored theatrical productions in its open spaces, and they did not only theater, but they did dance and poetry, what have you, and I was doing lighting there for the various productions. And Andy Warhol came there because it was

starting to become a very well known arena for experimental art, searching for new forms, what have you. And I was the lighting designer for the Judson Dance Company which became very well known. So artists would come there for performances and we met.

NF: So you were immersed in the world of art early.

BN: Yes.

NF: I think I read somewhere that Andy Warhol had come to your apartment one time and he'd seen how you had decorated it.

BN: Yeah, I had an apartment on the lower East Side, and I had covered it all in foil and painted what I hadn't covered in silver, so it was a total silver apartment. I was used to working in spaces and this was called an installation. Instead of a minimal artwork it was a maximal artwork. It was maximal in that it used the whole space in a singular tone, so it was a maximal installation of silver. Andy had just gotten a new loft on East 47th Street and he asked me if I would come up and look at it and see if I could do the same thing to his loft as I had done to my apartment. So I agreed to do that and I went up and looked and it was really a decrepit place.

The walls were cement and it was crumbling. The floor was cement. It was previously a hat factory. So I said all right, I'll give it a try. I got all my supplies, the foil and the spray cans of silver paint, buckets of silver paint, and I started hanging the foil along the walls and spraying other areas and painting other areas, and it started to look very elegant and very beautiful, so I continued working on it until I finished it off and it took several months. During that working time, I had to go from my apartment on the lower East side up to East 47th Street and it was getting very tedious to do and it was breaking up my work schedule so I asked Andy for a key so I could work at nighttime and during the early morning hours if necessary. And he gave me a key, so eventually I just moved in and left my apartment. It was his studio which we came to call "The Factory."

NF: How did it get that name?

BN: Well, we were talking one day—Andy and Ondine and I—and we were saying we're not going to call it The Studio or Andy's Studio so

The Silver Factory. Photo by Billy Name. ("Pop Art is for everyone. I don'tthink art should be only for the select few. I think it should be for the mass of American people and they usually accept it anyway. I think Pop Art is a legitimate form of art like any other, Impressionism, etc. It not just a put-on. "—Andy Warhol)

we were wondering what we could call it—The Lodge?—No, and then one or the other of us said the Factory because it had been a factory, but

we all agreed on point, that's what it is. It's the Factoryy and we came to call it "The Silver Factory."

NF: I like the silver. It's perfect for the photography, a great metaphor.

BN: It certainly is, and it's a great reflective element for Andy to work with also in his silk screening and painting; and then eventually it was very good for the filmmaking as well.

NF: I have read that you were inspired by the painting of the Mid-Hudson, now the FDR, Bridge that was painted with aluminum industrial paint and that was what you used at the Factory. Is that right?

BN: Yes. At my apartment I started out experimenting with different cans of colored scraping, trying to see how I would convert my apartment into an art piece. And I tried the blue—Krylon was the brand of the cans that were available—and after going through all the colors I got a can of the silver spray and when I used it, it just looked so stunning and beautiful and complete that I decided not to use colors any more but I'll just use this chrome that includes all the colors and did, went toward the silver and used it exclusively, and up at the Factory I did get the gallons of industrial paint, in fact I did the entire floor in silver as well.

NF: And the walls would be the aluminum foil? You would have to keep doing that?

BN: Yeah, periodically. And even the freight elevator that came up to our floor, I did that totally. And the bathroom. And so anyone who came into the building had to use the silver elevator, whatever floor they were going to. It became our trademark.

NF: That was a good advertisement. And then you became more involved with Andy Warhol, who was into everything at that point—the paintings and the prints and the films...?

BN: Yes. It started out because of my technical skills in electricity from working as a lighting designer in the theater. I knew all about electrical outlets and how to wire the whole place; and when he moved in, there were only sockets on the ceiling with the wires hanging out. There were no lights at all. I had to go to the hardware store and get fixtures and install them all. I installed the sound system for good sound.

NF: And these are all things you taught yourself?

BN: Yes, because I never went to school or had training for any of this except for the lighting. I was apprenticed to Nick Cernovitch who was from Black Mountain College, so I learned from him how to set up and design the lighting show for dance or theater but otherwise I had the knowledge therefore of electricity and how it works in the various poles so I didn't kill myself with all these things. But it was all experiential, my learning and training, yes. It was like, you might say, in the old world...

NF: When you worked at the Silver Factory, after the painting was done, what was your role?

BN: Well, more or less, I was the foreman of the Factory. Because Andy was busy doing his silk screening and he had gotten a movie camera and was just starting to make films, he was totally occupied with his artwork. I had made this space for him as the area for him to work in; so in the first place, I had to maintain it. And in the second place, I had to run it and that had mostly to do with the other people who came in. To see that they were not going to interfere with Andy when he was working, that they were relatively controlled, that they were not damaging anything, or each other, or what have you.

I became the foreman of the Factory. It was like I'd had the apprentice years with Nick Cernovitch and the lighting. Here I had what I would call my journeyman years. I was in charge of the place but it wasn't my place. It was Andy's place, it was his studio. But I had to see that everything ran well. So it wasn't a specific duty, it was everything that made the place run well—whether it had to do with having music playing or the lights in the various situations, or the furniture. I had gotten quite a number of pieces of furniture from here and there. In the basement of that building, which was a 6-story building I think, there was a lot of office furniture, old wooden-type office furniture that other tenants had left when they went bankrupt or whatever.

So I started bringing it up—three beautiful big office desks made of beautiful wood and I sprayed them all silver and I got a really big work table for Andy that was just the perfect size, brought it up and sprayed it silver, and chairs, you know the old curved wood office chairs. And I found some things—a beautiful big sofa—out on the street. It happened

to have castors on it so I just wheeled it into the elevator and up to the Factory. So I was furnishing the place in a working way so that it could be available for people to use.

I would go out buying things with Andy when he bought paints. We bought a big copy machine, one of the first ones. It was called a thermofax machine, made by 3M. It was a heat process. You would pass paper through it with your copy thing on top in layers and then you'd get the image out on new paper, but we used it to experiment—for making silk screens for Andy's paintings, like the flower paintings he did, the first series. He gave me the cover of a magazine that had these images on the cover and told me to run it through several times so it became very high contrast because he didn't want it to look like the image he was using. He just wanted the outline of the flowers. We would experiment with other things on that machine, and there are other things but I don't remember because it was so long ago. I no doubt will skip a few things.

But when he was making films, I would set up the lighting and the sets and coordinate the people, and he would work the camera.', His directing style, as you may have heard was non-existent (laughs), which he learned from—there was another filmmaker named Jack Smith. He did a number of underground films, and we were on the set of Jack's making his film and Andy learned from this very creative person, but who was also non-conventional, that you don't really have to stand there and tell people what to do and direct them in that sense. But you can imply an aesthetic and a whole scenic style simply by choosing the people you are going to have in the film who will be attuned to that and then having them around in the area so they will be free to perform. You don't have to direct them.

NF: Did you give them a story line?

BN: Not usually. We started out without that and then developed into using a script actually. And then developed from using black and white into color films and then into two and three hour color films and we actually did a 24-hour film and the most famous one, Chelsea Girls was.. .1 think like 6 reels on each side of the screen, some in black and white and some in color, some without the sound on and some with, so that they ran simultaneously. Each one was a room in the Chelsea Hotel.

NF: I read about that. That was your idea.

BN: It was all of our idea. You know, we worked very much together in our mentation about what we were going to do. Each one of us would have intuitions or think of things that were so cool and so neat that everybody would join and say, yes, that's perfect. But I wasn't the only idea person. It was a collaborative process. And then Andy would agree and that's what we would do. It was a very striking presentation, Chelsea Girls, and all of the top papers, like the Times and what have you, reviewed it, and so did Newsweek. And Time Magazine wrote about it, and it was quite a sensation at the time and the first time we made any money with the films.

NF: Are these films still being shown?

BN: They are being catalogued by the Museum of Modern Art or being restored. They were catalogued by a person at the Whitney Museum of American Art, a friend of mine, Sally Angel, and she brought out a book of all the screen tests that Andy did. And they are now looking for a publisher for the second volume which is all of the feature films, and it will be a really big book because there are a lot of feature films.

NF: What were the "screen tests" all about?

BN: I'll show you the book. (Pause) When Andy got his camera to start making films, he didn't like the old hand-held, action film-type thing that he was making because it looked like any underground film that anyone could do—the camera would jiggle and people would make believe they were doing things, so he got a tripod. So in our cultural-smart sense— when people would come over to visit—Andy would say, Oh, let us do a screen test of you, like sort of mimicking the Hollywood screen test of an actor or actress. So here's what they would do. They would sit before the camera with a background of photo paper and we would just film them for three minutes and not direct them. And they would say, What should I do, what do you want me to do? (Here he stopped to look at a book of his photographs of Andy making films.) That's my photo over here—these are all my photos. I have a bunch of photos in there of actually doing the filming.

NF: Yes, I saw them in the book you are giving to the historical society. [Billy Name donated the book Billy Name, Stills from the Warhol Films by Debra Miller to the Dutchess County Historical Society Library.]

BN: That whole book was my work, and it was mostly of Andy working and the people in the films. Well, it was all from the films, stills from the Warhol films. And so the screen tests were people sitting before the camera and I've forgotten how many hundreds there are in that book, but that's the initial type of work that Andy was doing. In a sense it was very paradoxical in that it was a film, a motion picture still-life (laughs), having a still life in motion.

We worked with very basic principles like that because we wanted to find out how things worked, and you don't just jump into complexity. You start with your basics. What does the camera do and you learn about the f-stops and timing and film speed and all that and you find out what do people do. Some people will just sit before the camera—if you tell them you sit before the camera and have a screen test made—where other people will start to do things and wander and have various tools and things, whatever. That's how that started.

Then we moved into coupling people or having groups of people and then we moved into.. .instead of simply having a stylistic set, we would move into having concepts of what they were doing and tell them and

Andy Warhol. Photo by Billy Name. ('Y was trying to think the other day about what you do now in America if you want to be successful. Before, you were dependable and wore a good suit. Looking around, /guess that today you have to do all the same things but not wear a good suit. 1 guess that all it is. Think rich. Look Poor. "—Andy Warhol)

that moved into having scripted scenes. So it was simply progression from deciding you're not just going to do hand-held films, you're going to find out what all the tools are about.

NF: Was there a lot of underground filmmaking going on at the time?

BN: Yes, there was a whole underground filmmaking world with known filmmakers, and I had known a lot of them before Andy when I worked with Nick because he lived in that world. Nick Cernovitch knew everybody in the avant-garde cultural world in New York. And so we would go to different filmmakers' studios or lofts—Stan Van Der Beek, Stan Brakhage and Jack Smith. And so when I was working with Andy I had the opportunity to introduce him to these filmmakers so that he could find out when he got his camera what it was all about and how it worked. Filming became throughout the 60s his prime modus operandi. This was after he had become famous as a painter with his silk screens, and he became more interested in making films. He still did paintings when people would commission him to do one because he needed the income. And he enjoyed painting too, but eventually he stopped filmmaking— when he got shot by Valerie Solanas in 1968, when we moved into the second Factory on Union Square.

It was such a trauma, and it was very painful. We thought he was going to die in the hospital. There was another person—a gallery dealer who was at the Factory when Andy got shot—and he also was grazed in the back by a bullet and he was awake with Andy in the emergency room. There were a couple of doctors standing over Andy saying, well, the bullet went through and bounced around the ribs and into the liver, the spleen, the stomach, and everything. This guy is DOA. So they were letting him die, because it would be too complex for him to survive that.

So the other guy—the gallery dealer—sat up on his bed and said you can't let him die. He's a famous artist and he's rich. So they called in a specialist who he came in with a team of doctors and saved him. It took hours to save him. The bullet had gone through every organ but his heart. And so, because that one guy was there with Andy and spoke up, they saved him.

After that Andy never wanted to go to hospitals. When we told him the story that they had actually let him die and that he had to be revived, he wanted nothing to do with hospitals from then on. And eventually when

he did die, it was because he needed gall bladder surgery. He had gall stones that weren't passing, and he wouldn't go to the hospital. He'd go to Chinese acupuncture doctors and others. But finally the pain got so great he was convinced by people he was working with that he had to go to the hospital.

So he went in and they hired a private nurse who didn't really attend to him after the operation, which was successful. During the early morning hours she didn't change his fluids, he got dehydrated and died in the morning of a heart attack from dehydration. So there was some kind of jinx going on there with hospitals. First time they let him die but revived him, this time they just let him die. Now if they hadn't hired a private nurse he would have had the regular staff nurses who would have, during their rounds, changed his fluids and taken care of him. So it's not always a good idea to get a private nurse (laughs). It's not always a good idea to go to a hospital.

NF: If you can help it.. .And did you remain as the main photographer?

Andy Warhol and Tennessee Williams. Photo by James Kayo/liner, 1967. Library of Congress.

BN: Oh, I did. I remained as the anchor in the Factory. A lot of times they would travel and I would stay there, to protect the works for one thing. But I was more of a behind the scenes type of person and I stayed behind and took care of the place and the people continued to come...

NF: Well, how many people would be there at any one time?

BN: Well, occasionally we'd have a party. We had a party for Judy Garland one night. So there were 75 or 100 people there for Judy. Actually, there was a guy named Lester Persky, who worked in television producing ads, and he was a friend of Tennessee Williams so he became a friend of Andy's also, and they decided that, I guess Judy had a birthday coming up and why don't we have a party at the Factory for Judy.

They came about 7 o'clock to the Factory and, you know, people don't expect anything to happen until ten or eleven or twelve so they came up on the freight elevator and Andy and I were standing by his work table and hearing the elevator coming up and the door opened and there were Lester Persky and Tennessee Williams with their hands formed in a cradle with Judy Garland sitting on top of that cradle. And they walked into the Factory like everyone was supposed to applaud but there was no one there yet (laughs). So they just put her down quickly and acted like nothing happened. That was the first time we had alcohol at the Factory because Judy drank highballs, so we had to have a set-up for her there near the couch on a little table...

NF: Was Andy working while all these people were milling around?

BN: No, he was just socializing then. But on a regular day we could have a half a dozen people over, never really more than that in the daytime, a half dozen guests who would be actors in the films or friends or business people, someone who wanted to make a deal with Andy or what have you.

NF: Some of the subjects for his artwork were electric chairs, automobile accidents, knives, and skulls.

BN: This was called the Death and Disaster series.

NF: Why did he choose those?

BN: After he did the earliest pop art imagery, the icons like the Campbell Soup cans, and Marilyn Monroe and the Brillo boxes, he was talking to Henry Geldzahler—they talked a lot together—they were very close friends—and Andy would say, Oh, Henry, I'm getting tired of doing popular images, what should I do next? Henry took it very seriously and said, "You have to take a very deep move because you've been on the surface of American culture. Now you have to go deeper into American culture and do a death and disaster series." So there were the electric chairs, the automobile accidents, people jumping off buildings committing suicide, and race riots in the South, etc. So he did that type of work for quite a while, but it was a special series.

NF: But it was someone else's idea.

BN: Well, frequently things were someone else's idea because Andy would always ask other people, Oh, what should I do, what should I do?

NF: I find that interesting.

BN: Well, a lot of people do because it's so unauthentic of art and artists to do that and the previous set of American artists would never think of doing that. They'd be embarrassed if somebody found out they did that. But Andy always asked people things like that—it was his natural habit. He grew up like that, saying, oh, what should I do next, what would be good? (laughs) So he made a conspiracy out of it with whoever he was working with.

NF: I also read that he was obsessed with fame and making money. Is that accurate?

BN: I really don't think that obsessed is the correct word. I think he was driven to make money because of necessity. He had a town house down on Lexington Avenue which, if it wasn't all paid for, I don't know, would have meant a mortgage and other expenses, and all of the paintings— those big silk screens cost lots of money to make. So in order to continue to do what he wanted to do creatively, he had to make money. It was more of a necessity than an obsession. He knew he had to make money to continue his creative style and his lifestyle. Now, the fame part was just a dream. It's an all-American dream. All Americans dream of one day being famous, and he lived it as a lifestyle. It's like his subconscious

thought all the time. And once it started to happen, it just drove on and became bigger and bigger and bigger like it was a natural thing that he should become famous (laughs).

NF: And he did.

BN: He did (laughs). He became more famous than his work. He became the famous artist, and a lot of people didn't know what his artwork was. But he enjoyed fame and he knew that, unless it came to someone accidentally, he knew it came from being wealthy, or having money to operate with. And secondly, it came from power. Because there was a glamour associated with money and power. For instance, Hollywood movie stars, he always admired them because they had so much glamour it was like a magic. It could make people fall in love with them or do anything they asked them to do.

He was very rich in the sense of creating glamour in his paintings. Using icons like Marilyn Monroe and Jackie Kennedy and all these famous people, attracted people to his paintings as well. But it was some magic that he had because anybody could paint a picture of Marilyn Monroe or Jackie Kennedy and wouldn't necessarily become famous. But Andy had a magic, wizard thing about him that seems to have come from his family. They were from Ruthenia, which is part of Czechoslovakia. They came here; they were very poor. His father worked in coal mines in Pittsburgh and other similar labor things, and the mother when they were so poor, she would save empty tin cans and make flowers from them and sell them in the neighborhood. She took care of Andy when he was sick, when he had St. Vitus Dance, a neurological disease. She took close care of him and got him coloring books, and she was making her various art things.

Somehow, from his family and their original country, he became a wizard and he had this magic sense, literally, I'm talking about. Why did he become the number one famous artist, why did his paintings become so...like the last sale was $100,000,000 for a Serial Elvis? One hundred million dollars! It has to do with Andy's magic.

NF: How would you define that magic?

BN: It's very difficult to do. The attempt to define him and what he does has been so ambiguous to people that they've tried and haven't suc-

ceeded because you can't really write about the magical spirit. All I can tell you is that it was there. There was a magical spirit that influenced people to come under his spell. And his work had that too and I've never seen it in anyone else. I've never heard of anyone else, it's like a. ..who is the guy in Russia who had the Czarina under his spell? Rasputin. It's like a Rasputin-type of thing in that he doesn't really exercise it or work magic—it happens from within him. The magic happens, and people become spellbound.

NF: That's so interesting.

Soup can pillars on the exterior of the Royal Scottish Academy marking the 20th anniversary of Warhol 's death in 2007. Photo by Tom Rolfe. Creative Commons Attribution - Share Alike License. (creati vecommons. org.)

BN: That's why I stayed with him so long—he was just magic.

NF: I've seen him on the American Masters Series. I saw you too. Sometimes he looks like a little boy, with his fingers in his mouth.. .he didn't focus.. .But what you're saying is that he was intuitive...

BN: Oh, he was totally intuitive. He was not at all articulate in an intel-

lectual way. He was totally intuitive, and he delighted in what he was doing. He absolutely loved what he was doing in his creative work, whether it was painting, film or what have you. He was aware that things were happening that he wasn't directing to happen. Just like in his films. He would tell the people he was going to start the camera and then he would walk away and the film would be being made by the camera.

NF: A lot of people couldn't be that open.

BN: I know. He was very unusual. I can't explain where it comes from other than the inward thing, inward spiritual.. .As far as his making the icons—of the soup cans, of the movie stars, of the supermarket boxes, and in his screen tests he made people into icons—stems from.. .Well, he went to church every Sunday. ...I went to his church in Pittsburgh. There are icons all over the place, and I think that's where he got his ideas from—as icons, because that's what he saw as he was growing up, every Sunday, all through his childhood, the middle years, and that became what art should be to him so that's what he reproduced creatively— everything would be an icon.

NF: So maybe the Church and his mother...

BN: The Roman Church sponsored a mass for him at St. Patrick's Cathedral after he died and all these famous people went, so even the Roman Church sponsored him even though he had all these strange things attributed to him through his life—of all the sexual things he had in his films, rock & roll music, all these things that you wouldn't think Rome would sanction. But because he was Andy Warhol, they had the mass at St. Patrick's Cathedral. It had to be that spiritual magic that was inside of him. We could go on and continue to talk about it but it would be pointless because if you haven't experienced it, you only hear what someone is saying about it. It was a real spirit magic thing, where he could enrapture anyone or anything or whole cultures.

NF: Do you think that is peculiar to artists in general?

BN: No, I think it was peculiar to Andy. I never saw it in other artists. I saw the capacity to inspire people in other artists, but never to enchant or enrapture people and whole cultures.

NF: Did you say someone has written about this quality in Andy?

BN: I can't think of anyone specific who wrote at any length. They may have mentioned it.

NF: Why don't you?

BN: I'm not a writer. People always tell me I should write a narrative of my life and I always say, well, find someone who will do it and they can do it. I am definitely not a writer. I try to write things and I feel like I'm in school again and have to turn in the paper and I get so wrought up about it—it's all scrambled up. It's just not for me.

NF: Well, you have a lot of other talents.

BN: I'm very articulate, and I can explain things and I can talk well.

NF: That's what surprises me when you say you can't write.

BN: I know, I know. It's probably because I learned most of what I know on my own. I learned what you learn in high school but it wasn't very challenging, so after I got out of high school I continued to read books, go to the libraries. My mind was like.. .look at the books here on my table that I'm reading. I'm just a voracious reader, and that's how I learn but I never write it.

NF: Plus your hands-on learning.

BN: I'm an absorber (laughs).

NF: Is that what you call it? (laughs) I think I've asked you what life was like at the Factory because it sounded so chaotic to me.

BN: Well, it was a lot of the time. And there was a woman who was one of our film stars—her name was Mary Woronov. She did other movies like in Rock and Roll High School, she was the high school principal. She did a number of films, but when she wrote one of her biographicaltype books, it was called Swimming Underground, and I did the photos in it and she referred to me at the Factory as the "Keeper of the Chaos" (laughs). So I dealt with it all the time but it was part of my life too, so it wasn't unusual or strange to me in the sense that I lived that same way. I had the skills that enabled me to keep it stable, keep it going, and to have things happen rather than for the chaos to just fall apart. So I see the

chaos as a living factor that you simply continue to live in that realm...

NF: I wanted to ask you about the pop art movement in general. The pop art movement was shocking to a lot of people. Was that, do you think, in part a reaction to elitist art?

BN: No, I don't think it was a reaction against elitist art. I think the cultural situation in that period—in the early and mid-60s—was a breaking open into an American art period. Now the previous major movement in the art world was Abstract Expressionism. It was all abstract strokes, colors, textures, paints and the paint itself as the art. So what pop art did and became was a neo-realism. It wasn't real realism but it was a neo-realism in the sense that, for instance in Warhol's paintings you don't have all abstract strokes in the beginning years. You have a tin can of soup, you know. It's very realistic but it's painted so it's like a neo-realism. ...all these artists [Rauschenberg, Johns, Oldenberg] were the second generation of America.. .and they didn't heed the Eurocentric thing at all—they completely disregarded it—painted what was in their subconscious or conscious or what appealed to them or what they thought was wonderful or marvelous. There were all these different styles, like Rauschenberg and Johns were the transition from the expressionists' mode into the pop mode because they had elements of both. They had beer cans, they had goats, tires, industrials, street cones, as well as paint as simply expression. So they were the transition.

And then Warhol and Lichtenstein, people who tended to be more in the cartoon world and then Warhol into the iconography world. They were totally independent in their own mind, but they also didn't follow anyone. They weren't being impressed by a leader of a group of artists like Picasso was or became in his later years when he became a marketing factor also. So the new pop art is simply popping out of the subconscious of young American artists. You know they were raised on reading cartoons and comic books. They were raised with movie stars and singers and Elvis and all that. All the imagery that was in their psyches came forward and they began to paint all these things, and that's where pop art came from—the second generation of America on their own turf.

NF: But surrounded by commercialism or a materialistic society they would choose objects to...

BN: They would choose what they were bombarded with all their lives.

NF: It wasn't a criticism then of the commercial?

BN: No, no, it was more a glamorizing of it, and saying hey, this is what we've known all our lives, what we've seen, what's in our brains, our minds. And when we start to think of an idea, a supermarket box comes out—Kellogg's or something—so we might as well glamorize these things. Specifically with Andy, in the old Eurocentric the artist turned his back on commercial culture because it was considered surface, had no value and you didn't pay any attention to it.

That did a complete 180, turned totally around with Warhol doing Campbell soup cans and Marilyn Monroe, where he would, say, instead ofturning his back on the—what do you call the culture, ordinary culture?— turning his back on ordinary culture he would look at it and say, this stuff is crazy and it's irrational and strange. Why don't we take it over? So instead of turning back on ordinary culture, the young American artists appropriated it. Now appropriation art was at a certain time something that was very popular, where people would take what other artists had done and simply appropriate it and put it into their venues. But Warhol was the number one appropriation artist. He appropriated Brillo boxes, Campbell soup cans, movie stars, what have you. Anything that's way out there, far out, they'll jump on and do it until it's done excellently.

NF: He wanted to be known as a fine artist, didn't he, rather than as an illustrator and yet he used the illustrator's mode.

BN: Yes, right. He also had to succeed as an illustrator for his financial security.

NF: And he did.

BN: He did. Enough to buy a town house on Lexington Avenue, you know. And so, having secured himself financially, he moved on to secure his career as a fine artist. He already had very good connections in the New York cultural world, having worked for newspapers and magazines doing commercial ads. So he was well connected in the syndicate, so to speak, and he had studied art at Carnegie Tech in Pittsburgh. He knew the art world and what it was, how to make it and make art and all. So he doesn't just jump from commercial art into the fine arts. He continued to do commercial art throughout the beginning of his fine art career. He didn't disdain it and say, oh, now I can finally get rid of it, you know,

which was that Eurocentric attitude toward what's beneath you or not as good as you. He kept both of them. He always did this. He took care of everything he involved himself in and didn't bum any bridges. He kept them up...

NF: ...You've spoken about.. .how Andy almost died...

BN: Yes.

NF: Did that change him?

BN: It changed the whole Factory. He became more of a cardboard Andy. You know when you have a new movie opening and you have a cardboard figure of the star outside the theater with something holding it up. Well, Andy, I feel, became more of a cardboard Andy. The trauma was so intense and he did die and had to be brought back.

NF: His heart did stop?

BN: Yes, he literally did die and had to be brought back. So it was a real trauma for his physical and mental and spiritual body. I loved him, and I was very close to him so I was totally traumatized. And that's the reason why I eventually left The Factory because it didn't go back to what it was. It was mostly an artist's scene, but it became more of cardboard Andy in the sense of doing commercials and commercial work, reinventing commercial work in terms of art work and commissions like Mercedes-Benz. They commissioned him to do a whole series of cars.

NF: More of a focus on business and not art?

BN: Yes, and Andy would be saying, business is the greatest art. But I didn't feel it was really an art scene for me to work out in as it had been previously. It was becoming more commercialized so I became more alienated from it and only came out at night, out of the darkroom.

NF: Really?

BN: Oh, I did a couple things, like the album covers for the Velvet Underground albums but mostly I stayed in. And so in 1970, I said I'm so saturated with the Factory, I have to go out and see what's going on in the rest of the world. And I did. I left a note on the door of the darkroom:

"Dear Andy, I am not here anymore but I am fine. Love, Billy."

NF: And what did you do then?

BN: Well, I went out into the world. I lived on the streets—in New York, in the Village and the East Village. And then I went down south and I worked on a farm that a group of Black people were starting up—a working farm situation. They asked people to volunteer and come down and help.

NF: This was when the Civil Rights movement was still going on?

BN: Still going on, the Vietnam War was going on, the various sexual revolutions, the gay revolution, the women's revolution, the Black revolution and the general sexual revolution were all going on concurrently. Civil rights and political revolution were going on. It was a revolutionary period. And it was culturally rich, and it was exciting in that it was authentic. Whoever was part of the revolution felt deeply about it. They weren't just espousing a cause; they were living it. So it was a very exciting and real time.

After the farmers in Georgia, I went on to New Orleans and stayed there for a whole summer with people who had a house. I don't know what you would call it because they weren't hippies. Hippies are really a West Coast phenomenon, but I guess it went all through the culture, didn't it? But I guess you could call them hippies. I was older than that. I was born pre-World War II. I'm not a baby boomer. I'm a pre-war baby so all of that stuff was younger than me. Everything that was happening in that social wave is something I was older then, so I mostly viewed and experienced those things. But I stayed with those people and it was very interesting. And there were a lot of magicians and magic people, all within the drug culture and the music culture.

I went on to Boulder, Colorado. I was hitchhiking all the time, with no money to cross the United States. I was picked up by people going to Boulder and that's where I was going. They took me to their house and had me stay overnight with them and in the morning gave me breakfast and took me to church with them and then I went on my way.

And one time when I was going through Utah, I'd just entered a small town and the sheriff there picked me up and told me I couldn't hitchhike

through his town. It was getting dark and he said he would put me up overnight in the jail if I wanted to do that, and I did because otherwise I'd be sleeping outside. He said he had to lock it because those were the rules (laughs). So I slept in the jail overnight. And then in the morning he got me out and took me to a diner and bought me this wonderful breakfast and drove me out of their town lines and let me go.

NF: That was nice, wasn't it?

BN: Yeah, there are some wonderful people who are willing to help other people, but there are other people who are mean and nasty and like snakes.

NF: You met a few of them then?

BN: Yeah, they're just happy to step on your toes and make jokes out of you and you're a fool or a bum, or you're no good. So you fight your way through the world, the good and the bad. And I finally ended up in San Francisco. I was looking for a friend of mine from New York who had become a Zen master at the Zen Center.

NF: Were you interested in that?

BN: Oh, I was interested in Buddhism since my late teenage years.

NF: Really?

BN: Yes, I had always read Buddhist literature and felt an attunement there because I always felt I could be in the Buddhist line because I totally, intellectually, agreed with it and what it espoused,—which is basically clarity, not getting involved in thought processes that would make me neurotic, and worrying, and all these things that were irrelevant to real life. It's a very clear way of being and I'm still a Buddhist today. You can see my statue of Buddha here.

NF: I see.

BN: I also wanted to find Diane di Prima, who was one of the Beat Poets and lived in San Francisco. So I found both of them and didn't feel I was really attuned to what they were doing. And I didn't want to just forge my way into their scene, so I went back out and lived in the streets. And I

lived in a hotel. I had numerous episodes which are anywhere from brilliant and marvelous to tragic and sinister, but that's another story—the San Francisco story. There was this old TV show called "The Streets of San Francisco." So I said, this must be San Francisco because I'm living out in the streets.

NF: Did you pick up jobs now and then?

BN: I don't remember—probably, possibly. It was all so mysterious. So finally I did decide to come back.. .1 felt the Hudson Valley pulling me like a big magnet—to go back home. I called my family and asked

"Billy Name in his Kitchen Discussing Astrology. 'Photo by David Shnnkbone. GNU Free Distribution License (commons.wikimedia.org)

them if it was okay to come back home and they said, surc, I was always welcome. So I came back to Poughkeepsie.

NF: When was that?

BN: July 7, 1977. 7-7-77 (laughs). I was surprised when I got here that it was that consistent number thing. I've always had a good arrangement with numbers. When I look at a clock it will be 11:11 (laughs) or it's 12:12. So when I got back here and found a place to live, I got involved in community activism and I also worked with the Clearwater. For a couple summers I was on the boat all summer with the teaching crew.

One weekend I went from the South Street Seaport all the way up to Albany. We didn't pick up anybody. The boat was down in New York and we had to get it to Albany, so we did the whole Hudson River in those two beautiful days. And it was sunny and gorgeous both days, and I got to steer the boat and I went under every bridge on the Hudson River. It was a thrilling thing to do. What a wonderful thing to experience in your life —a beautiful weekend with the whole Hudson River.

NF: I would love to do that.

BN: It wasn't scheduled. I just happened to be on the boat at the time. I got involved with the Dutchess County Community Action Agency. I always found out who my representatives were in local government and I would ask them—for those agencies I was interested in working for— I would ask them to appoint me to the board. Because I knew, having started out doing those things, if you work for a not-for-profit agency and you are not on the board, you're just someone who is told what to do. And I wasn't going to settle for that because I wanted to do policy and all this other stuff. I went back to college, at Dutchess Community College, and got a degree in business administration so I knew how to do management, budgeting and all these financial things you need to know to be on a board....

Eventually I became the chairman of the community development board and was doing that for a while. I had spent a couple of years with the Clearwater and the Community Action Agency, so I had a full plate of public service which I hadn't performed previously. Well, I actually did it from 1980 to 1995, and I told myself it was my public service time. But I was finding out that it was so intransigent, so unrewarding...

Oh, and the Community Action Agency had an office on Catharine Street too, and there we were trying to find homes for people and food for people and we didn't find anything... .Finding homes for families and people was opposed by the Common Council because they didn't want more

poor people moving into Poughkeepsie and being supported. They literally said they didn't want more people coming up here from Westchester because they hear they can get free housing and food. They just didn't want a big wave of people because they were providing public services. We weren't doing anything that extravagant. We were just trying to find homes for homeless families. ...So I learned a lesson. ...I always had the feeling that everyone should have the opportunity to give public service. But then when I learned that people knock other people down and don't even allow them to get there, that was a new lesson for me.

I'm always generally optimistic and pretty fair-minded, so when these things happen then I have to take into account the factor that people aren't even going to have the chance to serve on the board—they get knocked off before they get on it. So that was a whole learning experience. Things like that and not being able to find homes for people and the discontinuation of the food program, made me say, well, I've had my stint of public service. I see it's incorrigible and I'm not going to make any headway. And I'm not going to drive myself to the wall anymore and wear myself out because it's fruitless. .. .So I said I might as well go back into the art world. After all, it's still there. Andy had died and people had started reading books about him. And they started seeing about me and that I was in these books and asking me if I knew Edie Sedgwick.

NF: Did you ever see Andy again, between the time you left the Factory and the time he died?

BN: No, but I talked to him on the phone a number of times...

NF: I wanted to ask you what Andy Warhol was like. Was he a good friend, someone you could be close to?

BN: I was close to him and he was a good friend. I think we got closest to what he was like when we talked about the spirit magic thing. You can just make a note that I said he was a good friend and I was very close to him and I was really traumatized when he was shot. And that's why I left the Factory.

NF: What have you been doing the last ten years?

BN: I've been in a number of art shows around the world...So life goes on...

NF: That's exciting. Could you have imagined all this?

BN: No, not originally because you know I go places, and I have to sign autographs. And the first time someone asked me to sign my autograph it was like, wow, this is cool, man (laughs). In my life I've achieved the status where I have to sign autographs. I thought it was great. Boy, I've really accomplished something in this life. So it's great to be...I'm not really famous, I'm infamous in the art world, you know. I'm known throughout the art world as having created The Silver Factory for Warhol and as a photographer, and as being a very nice guy too.

NF: I would agree with that.

BN: Yeah, I have a reputation of being a very cool guy and somebody who is worth knowing, you know. "Oh, you'll really like Billy when you meet him," people tell people that. So because I'm not trying to be like that, I feel sort of proud of it because I'm naturally like that. So I don't have to figure out how to do it.

NF: Are you still photographing? I wondered about that.

BN: Oh, yes, yes.. .1 spent thirty-five years in film photography and now I'm ready to explore this type of photography [digital].

NF: What type of photography do you do now? I mean, what is your subject matter?

BN: Well, I do architecture somewhat, but I still do people. I do portraits and for instance on May 2 at the Chelsea Hotel I have a set-up where I'm going to be doing portraits of people who have signed up with my agent to have a portrait done. It's called a Billy Name Pop Portrait. And so we're starting out at a very modest fee of $400...

NF: That's a lot.

BN: ...to have your portrait done. I mean it's more than Olin Mills (laughs) but as far as my photo work goes, it's a very modest price because I sell a print for a minimum of $1500.

NF: Really?

BN: Yes, so we want to build up a portrait business, just to have a regular income assured in a sense. So I do mostly portraiture, either posed or during live action, at art galleries or events.

NF: I think it was Ondine speaking in a book Patrick Smith wrote about different people who had been at the Factory, who spoke about how you and Andy Warhol had a kind of simpatico relationship working together.

BN: We were very well synchronized. Well, during the whole first year at the Factory, we mostly worked alone together. Maybe Gerard was there sometimes cleaning silk screens, and Ondine started to come visiting either that year or the next year. But in the beginning we were synchronized so well that we spent all the time working. We loved it. It was such a wonderful experience because when you're creating things and it comes out exactly the way it should, there's a certain moment when you see it and it clicks, it happens. The art piece becomes a creative, wonderful expression. It's just thrilling.

NF: It must be satisfying.

BN: You know it. When your work comes out consistently just as you expected it and hoped for.. .and it does, you don't have to hope anymore—it just comes out great. Same thing with photography. Well, with film, when you are developing a print and you put it in a tray of chemistry—and then you see the image come out and you see it's exactly what you wanted to create and you know it's your baby. You had that child and nobody else did and it looks like yours. It's just great. Art is a wonderful feeling.

NF: Well thank you, Billy, for talking to us.

BN: You're very welcome. The Dutchess County Historical Society is my own county society. And I love my home and I love the Hudson Valley.

End Notes: 1 Patrick S. Smith, Warhol, Conversations About the Artist. Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1988.

Other Sources: Andy Warhol, Touchstone of American Culture. PBS American Masters Series, 2006. Morera, Daniela. The Andy Warhol Show. Triennale di Milano, 22 settembre 2004-8 gennaio 2005. (Curated by Gianni Mercurio and Daniela Morera) Skira: 2004. Lippard, Lucy R. Pop Art. New York: F. A. Praeger, 1966. Umland, Anne. Pop Art, Selections from The Museum of Modern Art, New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1998.