Andy Warhol Has Been Shot: On Nicole Flattery’s “Nothing Special”
Nicole Flattery | Nothing Special | Bloomsbury Publishing | July 2023 | 240 pages
The artist Andy Warhol, who worked across genres, is largely associated with popular images of the collective American consciousness. Campbell’s soup cans come to mind, as do repeated frames of Marilyn Monroe’s face and the saturated colors of Brillo Pad boxes. But for a period in the Sixties, Warhol was focused on capturing images of people now largely forgotten. He shot roughly 300 of what he called “screen tests,” close-up moving portraits of faces that ran for around three minutes. In his biography Warhol, the art critic Blake Gopnik explains that Warhol hadn’t set out to reveal anything in particular about his subjects with the tests. In fact, he was a detached director. After he started recording, he often trailed off, leaving the person to face the camera alone. What emerged in those minutes of surveilled solitude—be it a persona or a lack thereof—was what he was really interested in, I guess. With Warhol, it seems, we’re always just kind of guessing.
Today, Warhol’s legacy has its own solar system, orbited by many parts: the tales of the Factory, the studio loft he kept in midtown Manhattan on East 47th street for a stretch of the mid-to-late Sixties; his many lovers and enemies; his slightly Batesian mother; his ascension from underground anti-artist to A-list celebrity; the confused, contested nature of his genius. Through his eras, Warhol was rarely alone, and though the people who kept him company brushed with fame, they mostly vanished into time, often with the help of the man himself. There’s only a handful of people who hung around the Factory whose names have withstood the test of history: Lou Reed, Nico, and John Cale, who formed The Velvet Underground; Paul Morrissey, who produced many of Warhol’s films; and then—of course—there was Edie Sedgwick, the It Girl to end them all.
Looking at the work that came out of the Factory, it’s almost impossible to shake off a feeling of imminent doom: it all seems bedeviled, possessed of a cursed force that threatens to overwhelm. It’s present in the distance Warhol himself kept from his work and in the stories told by the people who often produced the work themselves.
The Irish writer Nicole Flattery sets her debut novel, Nothing Special, largely in this period and centers the people who were tasked with producing the art onto which Warhol signed his name. The story follows Mae, a seventeen-year-old who gets a job at the Factory transcribing tapes for the manuscript of a: A Novel, a book of recorded monologues and occasional conversations between Ondine, one of the Factory regulars, and others in the sphere of Warhol’s influence. Her coworker and companion is another teenager, a determined but naive runaway named Shelley whose “pleated pinafores [and] starched collars” contrast with her insatiable hunger for the tapes and their taboo contents.
Flattery’s prose is tight and keen, detached and funny in a declarative way. Mae is a clever teenager, aware of her own machinations. Sitting in an art gallery, trying to look interesting and interested, she announces: “I wanted to have a very profound experience.” After an off-putting encounter with a one-night-stand’s mother, she finds herself in the hands of a creepy doctor with gigantic pupils—based, clearly, on the infamous Dr. Roberts, who gave Edie and many of the Factory’s crew intravenous doses of speed at his clinic—who tells her that she doesn’t need drugs, she needs a job. He directs her to the Factory, where profound experiences abound; it’s just a matter of taking part in them. Not only that, in the studio Mae finds an environment which was in the business of creating the kind of experience she thought she needed in order to sharpen her developing sense of self: “I knew immediately that I could show these women [workers at the Factory] who I was privately, underneath it all, and they would understand,” she says, painfully. “I would have done whatever I was told.”
Mae is moved by a conviction that there is honesty in the Factory’s embrace of vulgarity and naked desire, a courageous willingness to admit to human baseness that is routinely avoided by the world at large. She had come to a breaking point in school when, at a dance performance, a colleague had suffered a seizure. Mae admitted to her then-best-friend Maud that she had found the sight “exciting.” The confession of this voyeuristic, ruthless instinct ruined her social life immediately. At the Factory, such an admission would have been dismissed as child’s play. This was a place where humiliation and passion walked hand in hand; where to be honest was to be bare, exposed, and vulnerable to every kind of cruelty. And it would all be recorded—compulsively documented, filmed, taped, edited and rewound, like a looping, endless nightmare. Flattery’s decision to write the story from the perspective of a seventeen-year-old is an inspired one: you can see how a teenager might fall for this.
By the time Mae arrived at the Factory in the winter of 1967, the tide was beginning to turn for Warhol. That was the last year on East 47th before he moved to a new, glitzier studio, and he had all but abandoned painting, focusing on films and portraits instead. At that point, “at least when it came to traditional painting and sculpture,” Gopnik writes, “he was truly the ex-artist he had claimed to be.” Drug abuse, especially of speed, was spinning out of control, teetering dangerously on the edge of complete abandon. Baby Jane Holzer, the first Factory superstar, had tapped out two years before: “It was getting very scary… there were too many crazy people around who were stoned and using too many drugs… The whole thing freaked me out.” In the Fall of ’67, according to Gopnik, came “the height—or nadir—of the chaos that gripped the Factory.” A “strung-out, gun-toting” friend-of-a-friend came into the studio, lined up those who were there on the couch, removed all but one of the bullets from his gun and kept shooting until the money he needed to “settle a drug debt” appeared in his hands. Warhol himself had embarked on a disturbing, physically abusive relationship with a man named Rod La Rod.
At first, Mae and Shelley feel a real sense of purpose in their work, in the thrill of being part of something big and in service of people whom they revere. However, they slowly become disturbed by the emergence of that cursed, dark current. Mae starts her task with tapes recorded in 1965, when the mood was still one of gleeful abandon: Edie dancing all night, Warhol selling paintings on paintings, the aluminum-foil silver that coated every surface of the Factory still intact. As the months go by and she comes closer to the present, the contents of the tapes start to turn unshakably troubling. Mae is perturbed by the sound of people “asking for the tape recorder to be turned off… worst of all—the quivering, fearful pitch of their voices.” They haunt her just enough to instill a sense of imminent catastrophe, but not enough to change the fact that bearing witness to their deterioration was “only the best thing to have ever happened” to her. Sometimes, sitting in front of the typewriter all day long, listening to the despair of people captured but never helped by the vampiric man recording them, Mae feels a need to give up and walk away, “as if [she’d] just developed a conscience.” But she knows she’s lying to herself. “Who was this little show of integrity for? As if I hadn’t known all along what was happening… There was nothing exploitative about it,” she says, slipping back into self-effacement. “These people were exhibitionists; if the tape recorder wasn’t in front of them they would have found some other way to humiliate themselves. It was stupid of me to have any doubts. It was really pedestrian.”
It’s Mae’s saving grace that she develops a conscience every once in a while—but she knows, if only in broad strokes, what she’s in for, who these people are and what they’re after. She knows to keep her own self-interest ahead of the Factory’s, that “if you didn’t have your own private agenda… you could feel lonely, abandoned.” She knows, too, to be suspicious of Warhol, and to resist the temptation to follow him blindly. She can tell that he “put in [effort] to make it seem like he had no power at all,” that the tapes “firmly planted” in her mind “ideas of humiliation and cruelty,” teaching her that “somebody else had to be pulled down for you to rise.” In short, she doesn’t harbor any delusion about the way the cogs in the Factory’s machine turn, and she is hyper-aware of her role in it. “There were blue days when I felt none of it meant anything,” she says. “Then there were days when I felt like God.”
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Nothing Special is a novel layered with disillusionment, though it’s one of its strengths that the truths revealed aren’t obvious. As an adult reading a book about a teenager infatuated with Andy Warhol, you might expect that teenager to be disappointed by Warhol’s exploitative, cruel method; by his indifference to the drug abuse that escalated in his studio; by the shattering realization that self-interest moves many artists more than the impulse to produce art. But Mae is attuned to the artifice of performance from the very start, and she knows to protect herself against the notion that anyone in the Factory—let alone Andy Warhol—would be able to see more than a palm in front of themselves.
Shelley, on the other hand, is hopelessly naive. Her attempts at a performance that would please Warhol and his crowd are painfully belabored. At parties, she doesn’t quite realize that the adults move somewhere else while the girls stay behind. When late one night somebody paints an ugly butterfly on her cheek, she can’t recognize the mockery of the gesture. Her efforts at creating a shtick—an identifiable mode to be recognized by—fall flat. Despite her trying, she’s still “unshakably suburban,” which makes her look “exactly [how] they didn’t want to look.” It’s part of Shelley’s misguidedness that she doesn’t realize that this display of steadfastness—this particular commitment to the idea of the suburban runaway girl who gets mixed up with the art freaks—doesn't endow her with the same kind of mysterious aura that Edie, another suburban girl who got mixed up with the art freaks, had. What Shelley saw in Edie was permission, not realizing that the embrace of authenticity, in the world of the Factory, was a charade; Edie was acting too.
So, maybe inevitably, Shelley is humiliated. One night, Mae finds Shelley “In front of a screen, sitting on a high stool… She was doing a curious thing: taking a scoop of ice cream, then looking up at the camera with her eyes looking huge and affected, pausing and then repeating the process.” Mae is paralyzed by the scene, unable to step forward and rescue her friend even as “the people watching made a mockery of her longing.” Feeling “betrayed and embarrassed,” Mae watches Shelley “slip out of her dress… [and] take it, withstand it all.” She was witnessing Shelley's screen test. Though she had pretended that her commitment was solely to the tapes and their “shared creative gifts,” deriding the actresses that strolled in and out of the studio, Shelley had been secretly pining for a chance to get in front of the camera all along—just like everyone else.
Mae feels betrayed by Shelley’s ulterior motives, and Shelley, for her part, has to bear the weight of her humiliation. The girls can’t recover from this rupture. Finally, Shelley has had enough. She destroys one of the tapes, having “ripped out its insides, dug her fingernails underneath the plastic and left long black ribbons unspooling.” When the manuscript is completed, Mae takes responsibility for the missing tape. She tells Anita, the Factory’s general manager of sorts, that her mother had found it and, disgusted by its contents, had destroyed it. Mae doesn’t come back to the studio. A few weeks later, the artist and activist Valerie Solanas, enraged by what she interpreted as his indifference, shot Warhol. The event that marked the beginning of the end of the underground era.
Shelley’s screen test is the high point of the novel, crafted like a hair-raising thriller that is all the more horrifying because you know exactly what will happen next. In the aftermath, Mae tries to “summon the contempt Shelley had” for Warhol, but finds that she can’t. Mae’s ultimate disappointment, endlessly more surprising than the realization that the people she looked up to might ruthlessly humiliate her friend, is that she was wrong about Shelley, who she thought was driven by earnestness and virtue. It’s shattering for Mae to realize that Shelley, for whom the reader feels real pity, is nothing special: a girl with the same “banal desire” she had attributed to others. More than that, Mae comes face to face with her own limitations, and is disappointed by what she sees: “I was a coward: that’s who I was. All this time I’d been wondering.” At least in that sense, she’s not unlike Warhol, whom Ondine once called “the queen of passivity.” Taking responsibility for the missing tape is in part an effort to redeem herself of this learned indifference. When Shelley destroys the tape, she knows she’s going for the jugular—it’s the one way the girls, in their powerlessness, might make an impact on the façade of imperviousness behind which Warhol hid. Their ability to react is the one thing he can’t take from them.
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The default emotional core of any coming-of-age tale is the loss of innocence, often stolen by a cruel, inflexible world. Much rarer is a coming of age tale in which the protagonist’s disillusionment isn’t with the world but with themselves. There’s nothing quite as painful, or as defining, as realizing that the person we are when push comes to shove is not the person we hope to be. Flattery handles this pain deftly, with an emotional resonance that prowls silently before it attacks. Mae’s deadpan humor distracts the reader from anticipating the full force of the disaster. Reading her, a person might remember being seventeen or eighteen, when we knew everything and no one else knew anything at all; at least not until something like what happened with Shelley happens, and we’re back to the drawing board, wondering how we could have gotten everything so wrong.
The novel is also finely attuned to that particular morbid hum of the Factory in the mid-to-late Sixties, which emerges clearly in Edie’s screen test. In her “Note on the Sources,” Flattery writes that “there is no other book on earth quite like Edie: American Girl by Jean Stein,” a book to which she is clearly indebted. That book, an indelible representation of the violence and glitz that walked hand in hand in the Sixties, did much to peel back the veneer of glamor that enveloped Warhol’s legacy. By the Eighties, when it came out, Warhol’s celebrity had glossed over the murkier, more disturbing details of his underground period. Stein’s oral history, which functions as a biography-by-accounts of Edie Sedgwick, brings them all to the surface.
Edie is, truly, a singular book. It upset me constantly, but I couldn’t put it down. It doesn’t expose or denounce Warhol as a monster as much as it chronicles how an aura might be composed and communicated; how it might be used to conceal the uglier truths of its bearer. The stories in it are completely submerged in that creepy, skin-crawling sense of dread Mae becomes aware of listening to the tapes.
In Edie’s screen test, taken in 1965, her face appears with an open expression. Her enormous eyes are both expectant and at ease; she looks as if, at any moment, she will crack a smile. There’s playfulness in her gaze, a defiance of the camera’s seriousness. She had arrived in New York not long before, having outgrown the provinciality of Cambridge, Massachusetts, where she had been at work on a never-completed horse sculpture. Edie had been a horse girl since she was little. From the way she holds herself in the screen test, it’s easy to imagine what she looked like at home on her family's ranch in Santa Barbara, trotting towards a visitor, casually owning everything. I can’t quite stand the whole three minutes. Watching her watch me like that, knowing what I do about her life, makes me queasy. Every time I walk around downtown Manhattan or put on mascara her face flashes in my mind, like I’m being haunted.
Creepiest of all is that choked giggle, the sense of an un-upsettable sense of wonder—like a little girl who had unexpectedly found herself in a playground. Edie is repeatedly described by friends, family, and acquaintances as childlike; sometimes as childish, but more often as a person who was clueless about simple tasks, like how to tip at a restaurant, even as she managed to procure and consume unthinkable doses of narcotics and constantly have sex. By the end of her life, she was something of a nuisance to the people around her, having been passed off from hand to hand like a crying baby. No one could commit to taking care of her full-time, not at least until her husband, Michael Post, came along. They were married for less than a year when she died, suffocating in her sleep, in 1971. She was twenty-eight years old.
The Sedgwick family was haunted by a dark destiny reminiscent of the Kennedy curse—plagued by addiction, premature death, and difficult people, their mythologies seem arched towards a merciless fate. Edie was one of eight children, and the third to die in part due to self-destruction. A heightened, conscious sense of tragedy and destiny was part of the Sedgwick lore: “There was a strong classical tradition in our family. We knew the myths from early on, and my parents and their life seemed somehow suffused with the same light and feeling as gods,” Edie’s sister Saucie told Stein in Edie. This intuitive association with beauty, tragedy, and symbolism, I think, goes a long way toward explaining Edie’s influence in the Sixties—that magnetic pull that convinces an awestruck Shelley to leave her small town after seeing Edie’s picture in a magazine—and the lasting impression of her legacy.
That magnetism is necessarily slippery; one of the non-negotiable requisites in the composition of a bonafide It Girl. Nothing Special trafficks consciously in this kind of mystique—Mae herself can be quite withholding, and the novel gets by somewhat on the reader’s trained allowance for the kind of opacity that characterizes It-ness. But if it’s impossible to determine the combination of forces that might elevate a woman to the status of It Girl, that doesn’t mean we have ever stopped trying. It’s there in Mae and Shelley’s determination to lift the hood on the tapes, and in Stein’s effort to puzzle together a coherent narrative about Edie’s life. (It’s impossible; that’s the imperitive of Stein’s method. There was no other way to piece Edie’s life into a narrative. It had to be through fragments that often contradict each other, in themselves fumbling attempts to grasp who she really was.)
In the spring of this year, New York magazine dedicated a whole issue to the question of what makes an It Girl. One of the eight cover stars was, of course, Edie. In his deep dive, Matthew Schneier wrote that “‘It’ fame offers a girl-shaped reflection of the spirit, fears, and aspirations of the day,” a zeitgeist phenomenon by definition. In that respect, Edie Sedgwick is an ominous reflection of the Sixties’ final balance: her center couldn’t hold, and her body finally gave out, exhausted by the weight of the times.
Warhol himself painted a different, if equally poignant, picture of the decade: he knew when to get out. The Factory moved to its new address on Union Square in 1968, and by 1970 he had founded Interview magazine and was dedicated to what called his new “Business Art.”
A mix of nostalgia and bitterness informs many of the stories told in Edie, accompanied by the tsk-tsking of people who might have done differently if only they’d known better. Edie was, it seems, authentically herself, but what that meant was up to each person's interpretation. Schneier wrote that “the “It” girl has been defined not by herself… but by her chroniclers: magazine writers, newspaper columnists, photographers”; by artists and their notions. In Edie, this chorus of spectators composes our picture of Edie. Sometimes, Stein uses bits of tapes that survived the chaos of the Factory to bring in Edie’s own voice, as if she were speaking to us from beyond. The overall effect is that though time may have passed, the lasting impact of a generation that didn’t know how to pull the brakes remains; and it hurts, even after all this time. On its own terms, Nothing Special serves both as a mirror and as a challenge to the generation Flattery writes for. We are as obsessed with celebrity as ever—Bob Colacello, an early editor at Interview, told Schneier that were Warhol alive today, “he would be dating Kim Kardashian and telling me I had to put her on the cover of Interview.” But we are also obsessed with the taxonomy of power in the spaces where it is wielded recklessly, with questioning male genius, and with rescuing women from the footnotes of history.
It’s a testament to her skill that Flattery manages to tackle all of these themes without writing a heavy-handed, preachy novel. It would be easy to say that it is a novel about “female friendship,” centering on the women without whom the art that Warhol made wouldn’t exist; or dedicated to the exposure of the cruel (and often gendered) fallout that attends the kind of support male genius requires. But Flattery knows better than to gesture vaguely, and she creates her own thing when she writes characters that feel real, rather than like symbols. They are, after all, kids. They’re misguided and naive and it doesn’t even cross their minds to try to reconcile the art with the artist. What they have is the life that is in front of them: and they take it, and take it.