The Andy Warhol Diaries, a six-part docuseries streaming now on Netflix, explores the complex life of the multi-faceted artist Andy Warhol. Produced by Ryan Murphy and directed by Andrew Rossi, the series explores Warhol’s artistic and personal life, starting with his childhood in Pittsburgh and continuing through all of Warhol’s artistic movements.

Mary Lucia joins Jill Riley this week to talk about The Andy Warhol Diaries. Listen to their conversation in the audio player above, and read a transcript below.

Transcript

Edited for clarity.

Jill Riley: You're listening to The Current it is Friday morning; Friday mornings, I'm joined by my friend and your friend, afternoon drive host Mary Lucia.

Mary Lucia: Good morning, Jill.

Jill Riley: So today's topic, Andy Warhol.

Mary Lucia: Oh man, The Andy Warhol Diaries has been made into a Netflix series. Whoo, whoo!

Jill Riley: The more that I learned about him and not necessarily about who he was, but his connection to the Velvet Underground and the Campbell's soup can! But just this larger than life, pop culture figure.

Mary Lucia: Yes.

Jill Riley: And it's there's so much to learn about him. And so Mary, where does it start?

Mary Lucia: It starts — okay, there actually was a diary that was published two years after he passed away. And it literally was him at first thinking he was keeping a ledger of like, "I took $10 cab rides here. I got to get this down for my taxes." So he had like a secretary, Pat Hackett, who is the author of this biography, he would literally call her every morning on the telephone. Instead of having a tape recorder, he would, she would transcribe what he did the night before. And that's how it all started. And it literally went through a decade of his life.

Jill Riley: It's not necessarily like the diary he wrote when he was a kid. I mean, this was later on. This was—

Mary Lucia: It's like, "Went to Studio 54; Jerry Hall had B.O. in the cab," you know, I mean, seriously! "I tipped the guy $5 and had a..." Yeah.

Jill Riley: I made it through two of them. So two of the episodes, and the footage is incredible.

Mary Lucia: Unbelievable. Well, as you know, he documented just about everything as well, with Polaroid cameras, with tape recorders, with film. And so he is really well documented and the people around him, and there's quite a few of them who are still alive that were around during the Factory time, Interview magazine, people who worked with him in the galleries, and his personal life, which is really what I think this whole documentary is about. He was born at a time as a gay man feeling that he didn't fit in, not even into the New York art world, which is crazy. But he looked at something like gay pride as an oxymoron. There was nothing to be proud about. He felt shamed. He was brought up Catholic. It really does do a deep dive, I think into that guilt. And people kept saying, "Well, surely Andy Warhol was out." And all his friends go, "Well, you know, he was never really in."

Jill Riley: Yeah, I love that line.

Mary Lucia: Yeah, but it was sort of like he wasn't waving the flag and leading the parade. It's a really, really vulnerable examination of now he's been since embraced by the LGBTQ community, but he never really did wave that flag because of all of the guilt and shame he had as a kid.

Jill Riley: They really dig into some of those personal relationships.

Mary Lucia: Yes, he had several and some were more out in the open; one was an executive at Paramount Studios who did not want to be out. So he had to sort of keep that on the DL. He did have relationships, and the whole thing about Andy was that he portrayed as a sort of asexual kind of person. But he had been shot by a woman named Valerie Solanas, she wrote the Scum Manifesto, she walked up into the Factory one day with a gun and put like three bullets into him. He then, of course, had PTSD after that, and was completely fearful of just normal things, then, of course, AIDS came up. And at that time, they didn't know what it was. They called it "the gay cancer." He was fearful of everyone in his circle, they didn't know how it was transmitted. So that just sort of added to the anxiety he already had.

Jill Riley: And he seemed like a really isolated person, I mean, even as a child, and they do go into some background about, you know, where he grew up, and what it was like, for him to be a kid and a teenager. And there is, there is such a difference between, you know, isolation and being alone or being lonely, but I got the impression that, you know, later on in life that he was feeling really lonely.

Mary Lucia: Absolutely, Jill. He lived in this amazing world that he had created. He befriended Jean-Michel Basquiat, who was an up-and-coming artist. And then while at the same time being nurturing and friendly, he was very competitive and felt very threatened because of the age difference and thinking, "Well, I'm yesterday's news." And so there's a lot of push-pull between the artists, and of course — sadly, sadly — does it always take somebody's death before people truly understand them as a person? And as an artist?

Jill Riley: Now The Andy Warhol Diaries on Netflix, and Mary before we started talking, I was playing "Nature Boy."

Mary Lucia: Oh!

Jill Riley: Nat King Cole.

Mary Lucia: Gah!

Jill Riley: And that song is used beautifully in this docuseries.

Mary Lucia: Ryan Murphy made this series, and he's got his finger on everything interesting in my world, just Google and see what he's done. He has produced some of the most compelling television, and using "Nature Boy" as a theme song works. You're almost in tears before the thing starts. And you said you watched two episodes. I, like a maniac, powered through six because we're up all night to get lucky. So I watched them all. Yes.

Jill Riley: There are a lot of people talking about Andy Warhol in the series, but you also get some Warhol narration. How did they do that?

Mary Lucia: Okay, so it's that crazy newfangled AI kind of digital reproduction of Andy's voice. So that makes it extra haunting because you talk about that loneliness. You can hear it in this computer-generated-but-based-on-Andy's voice, reading passages from his diary. It's so effective.

Jill Riley: David Bowie has a song called "Andy Warhol." Did the two of them know each other? Were they friends?

Mary Lucia: Okay, so David Bowie wrote this song and played it for Andy. Andy hated it.

Jill Riley: Oh gosh.

Mary Lucia: And Julian Schnabel years later made a movie about Jean-Michel Basquiat and cast David Bowie as Andy Warhol.

Jill Riley: Oh right! Okay.

Mary Lucia: And he was able to even wear one of Andy's authentic wigs. And a lot of people, including Lou Reed, had said, you know, "That was about as close a portrayal of Andy as I've ever seen," because lots of people have tried to portray him, but they said Bowie's was the best.

Jill Riley: Here's David Bowie with a song that—

Mary Lucia: Andy hated!

Jill Riley: I'm sure he was a huge fan of Andy Warhol and what he was all about, went on down to the Factory. I'm going to play you this song. Did not get the reception he was hoping for. Here it is on The Current. Thank you, Mary.

Mary Lucia: Thank you.

External Link

The Andy Warhol Diaries - Netflix