Andy Warhol Was a Hoarder (8 page)

Hughes never had the benefit of any kind of therapy. “Obsessive-compulsive reaction,” as it was previously called, was known to exist in Hughes's day, but there is no evidence that he was ever diagnosed or received appropriate care for his debilitating illness. In the late 1960s, researchers began testing an early antidepressant called clomipramine in patients with symptoms of OCD; it was later approved as a beneficial medication. But Hughes's timing was off by about ten years, says Schwartz. Instead, he became addicted to painkillers, which were first prescribed to
him after his 1946 plane crash. For decades, he used codeine on a regular basis, often at dangerously high doses. “In his later years when he had little left except his vast wealth,” wrote Fowler, the psychologist, “he clung to his drugs because, as he said, they were his only pleasure.”

Hughes might have benefited from a mindfulness approach to OCD early on, Schwartz posits. He had an engineer's mind, and the capacity to think about problems and organize solutions. Above all, he had a strong will. “He was an ideal therapeutic candidate,” says Schwartz. But Hughes's OCD spiraled out of control until the chaos started to look like order—perhaps because there was no urgency to make it stop. Most people suffering from OCD struggle to keep their symptoms in check so they can support themselves or their families. They don't have a choice; they must function so that they can bring home a paycheck. Schwartz speculates that because of Hughes's powerful position—he never endured financial hardship and always had people obeying his controlling edicts—he had little motivation to fend off his urges. “Not only did he not resist them, he indulged them,” Schwartz says. “That is a prescription for getting disastrous OCD.”

T
HROUGHOUT HIS LIFE
, Howard Hughes suffered tremendous pain, both physical and emotional. Scores of people worked with him, and he had numerous relationships with Hollywood stars, from Katharine Hepburn to Ava Gardner and Ginger Rogers. He married and divorced twice. But nobody, in the end, could save him.

In his final days, Hughes holed himself up at the Acapulco Princess Hotel in Mexico in a state of delirium and dehydration, hooked on codeine. After suffering a seizure that rendered him
unconscious, Hughes was put on a stretcher and carried out to a small jet bound for Houston, the city of his birth. He never made it. During the course of the flight, on April 5, 1976, Hughes's heart stopped. He was 70 years old and weighed just 93 pounds. Two days later, he was buried next to his mother and father in Houston's Glenwood Cemetery.

In an interview after
The Aviator
debuted, Leonardo DiCaprio talked about his reaction to first seeing the film script and wondering how such a brilliant and successful man could also be so troubled. Hughes had “all the resources in the world, but was somehow unable to find any sense of peace or happiness,” DiCaprio said. He could soar to great heights, but he could not, in the end, leave his troubles behind.

T
HE
A
NDY
W
ARHOL
M
USEUM
, housed in an old warehouse building with an ornate terra- cotta facade, sits across the Alle gheny River from Pittsburgh's downtown business center. Step inside and you are transported back to the rousing art world of the 1960s and '70s, encapsulated in Warhol's innovative and rebellious work: the Campbell's Soup silk screens, the Brillo box installation, the “Silver Clouds” balloons, the silk screens of skulls and celebrities, the haunting self-portraits with spiky hair, and the artist's infamous “oxidation” works—created in a medium described by Christie's auction house as “copper metallic pigment and urine on canvas.”

But one rainy September afternoon in 2013, it was what was
not
on display that enticed a band of Warhol enthusiasts to splash
through puddles on Sandusky Street and grab a seat in the museum's theater. There, museum catalogers were about to unveil the contents of one of the artist's famed Time Capsules, a sprawling collection of Warhol memorabilia housed in 569 cardboard boxes, 40 filing cabinets, and one large trunk. Other capsules, which museum staff members had been diligently documenting and archiving, contained empty toothbrush boxes, silverware swiped from the Concorde, photographs, restaurant bills, Campbell's Soup cans, worn underwear—and even a mummified human foot. As the theater lights dimmed, anticipation surged. “I heard there was a slice of Caroline Kennedy's 16th birthday cake in one of the boxes!” one man whispered.

On stage, a somewhat worn cardboard box dated “1967–1969” sat ceremoniously under a spotlight, like a black hat on a magician's table. “Aren't you guys excited?” a museum cataloger asked as she pulled back the cardboard flaps, her hands covered in blue protective gloves. Over the course of an hour, she and a colleague dug into the box in front of their rapt audience, pulling out a seemingly random assortment of items: a prescription for 250 milligrams of tetracycline; a Christmas card; a query from
Playboy
asking Warhol what he'd do first if he were elected president;
Newsweek
and
Time
magazines; a letter from a wannabe actor who hankered to be in one of Warhol's films; a news clipping about Valerie Solanas, the actress who pleaded guilty to shooting Warhol in 1968; a past-due $3,000 bill from Dr. Giuseppe Rossi, the surgeon who saved Warhol's life; and a handful of carbon copies of old checks so brittle they were practically falling apart. “These are not the kinds of things that you're meant to keep forever,” the cataloger said.

And yet Warhol did just that. He could not help himself. With his silver wig, skinny jeans, and provocative work, the artist's
public persona exuded image, drama, sexuality, and edginess. He was a paragon of counterculture, the face of pop art and its brash embrace of consumerism. But behind the cameras and canvases, Warhol had another, less celebrated preoccupation: He was an accumulator of epic proportions. The man loved to shop, and he did it whenever and wherever he could—five-and-dime stores, antique stores, high-end galleries. “He was a voracious consumer of just about everything,” says Matt Wrbican, the Warhol Museum's chief archivist. In addition to the 610 Time Capsules, which he packed with some 300,000 items, the artist crammed his Manhattan home with so much stuff—pearl necklaces, Miss Piggy memorabilia, Bakelite bracelets, Lichtenstein drawings—that “you had to climb over things” to get around, one visitor told
New York
magazine after his death.

Hoarding has existed for at least as long as Dante's 14th-century epic poem:
The Divine Comedy
condemned hoarders to the fourth circle of hell, where they would spend eternity at war with their nemeses, the wasters. Today, many of us use the word nonchalantly to describe a bad habit that junks up our living rooms with magazines and our closets with shoes. Warhol's cache was in a league all its own. With his vast array of goods, he was one of the most important collectors of the 20th century, but he also displayed classic characteristics of hoarding.

What makes Warhol's story so captivating is that he luxuriated in such divergent worlds—the upscale and the mundane—and left behind a monumental mix of both. For most of us, it's difficult to fathom accumulating Picassos and American Empire furniture. But junk mail, old checks, and outdated catalogs? We can identify with that. It's a little bit of all of us.

I
T IS HARD TO IMAGINE
A
NDY
W
ARHOL
living anywhere other than the artsy mecca of New York City. But his childhood began and ended on the gritty streets of working-class Pittsburgh. Andrew Warhola (he later dropped the “a”) was born on August 6, 1928, to Ondrej and Julia Warhola, Czechoslovakian immigrants and churchgoing Catholics. The youngest of three boys, Andy stood out as a shy, effeminate, and artistic child. He was also sickly. At the age of eight, he suffered the first of several bouts of Sydenham's chorea, a neurological disease caused by infection. The illness triggers involuntary muscle movements and can discolor the skin. Warhol developed blotches on his face and was self-conscious about his appearance throughout his life. Often unwell and socially isolated, he found comfort in comic books, celebrity magazines, and drawing—a talent he may have inherited from his mother, who made handicrafts out of tin cans and crepe paper when she wasn't earning much needed cash cleaning homes.

Life for the Warhola family was often a struggle—his father, a construction worker, traveled frequently; the Depression weighed heavily—but young Warhol found joy in the faraway world of stardom and the arts. Passionate about movies, he created a photo scrapbook of Hollywood stars, including Henry Fonda, Mae West, and his beloved Shirley Temple. As a teenager, he took free classes at the Carnegie Museum of Art on Saturday afternoons and later enrolled in the Carnegie Institute of Technology, paid for by savings left by his father, who, after spending much of his life traveling to coal mines, died after drinking contaminated water when Warhol was just 13. At art school, Warhol developed an ink-blotting technique that would become one of his signature styles early on. But he also provoked his instructors with unconventional approaches, once cutting a painting into four parts and presenting them as separate projects, according to art critic David Bourdon
in his biography,
Warhol
. A memorable incident occurred in early 1949, when the young artist submitted a painting of a man with his finger up one nostril to the annual exhibition of the Associated Artists of Pittsburgh. The piece, titled
The Broad Gave Me My Face, But I Can Pick My Own Nose
, was rejected.

In the summer of 1949, after graduating with a degree in pictorial design, Warhol moved to New York City to seek work as a commercial artist. Within just a few months, he had published a series of drawings to accompany an article in
Glamour
magazine, and was quickly sought after for his energetic and playful illustrations. A diligent artist and persistent networker, Warhol developed an active and diverse freelance business in the 1950s, drawing pictures for the major fashion magazines, designing sprightly Christmas cards for Tiffany & Co., illustrating album covers for Vladimir Horowitz, Arturo Toscanini, and Count Basie, and winning awards for his jaunty depictions of footwear featured in advertisements by the I. Miller shoe company. He even made a published artist out of his mother, who lived with him in Manhattan for almost 20 years before her death in 1972. Julia Warhola's elegant handwriting accompanied many of her son's early illustrations, and he published a series of her feline drawings in a small book titled
Holy Cats by Andy Warhol's Mother
.

By 1960, Warhol's success in commercial art allowed him the freedom to experiment with new ideas. By then, Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns were remaking abstract expressionism and covering canvases with familiar imagery—newspapers, photos, the American flag. Warhol shifted his focus from whimsical illustrations to groundbreaking pop images of consumer goods: Coca-Cola bottles, Brillo pads, Del Monte peach tins, and his iconic Campbell's Soup cans. Using silk screen on canvas, the artist found a new niche with his eclectic representations of Jackie Kennedy,
Elizabeth Taylor, Elvis Presley, baseball, car crashes—even the electric chair. Suddenly, the skinny, socially challenged kid from the Iron City was whipping up controversy and achieving what he sought most of all: fame.