Andy Warhol Was a Hoarder (9 page)

He was also cultivating a passion for stuff. A lot of it. Looking back, it's interesting to note that Warhol had a thing for multiplicity in almost every area of his life—more was always better than less. His silk screens are clearly defined by their repetitions: 100 Marilyn Monroes, 210 Coca-Cola bottles, 14 orange images of a mangled vehicle. Art critics have probed the esoteric meaning of this—the commodification of celebrity, the dulling down of horror—but in a most simplistic way, Warhol's serial images flaunted the artist's preoccupation with abundance. He sought numbers in people, too. Lonely as a child, he amassed flocks of “associates,” showing up at social events with many of them in tow. “He became notorious for taking his entourage everywhere, most annoyingly to private gatherings,” wrote Bourdon, who was a friend and part of Warhol's inner circle. “If a hostess thought she had invited Andy by himself, she was likely to be aghast when he walked in followed by several companions.” As Warhol admitted, “It was like one whole party walking into another one whenever we arrived.”

It was Warhol's accumulation of physical items, however, that shocked his closest companions and triggered spirited debates about the motivation behind his “possession obsession,” as the Warhol Museum aptly dubbed one of its exhibits. By his own admission, the artist had trouble getting rid of anything: “My conscience won't let me throw anything out, even when I don't want it for myself,” he wrote in his 1975 book
The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (From A to B and Back Again)
. Nothing exemplified this better than his 610 Time Capsules, which Warhol began filling in 1974. The boxes were initially intended to store items during a
relocation of his studio, known as the Factory. But for years after the move, Warhol continued to use them as a place to stash everyday items that he swept off his desk: lunch receipts, tickets stubs, doctors' bills, letters, postage stamps. “At the Factory, he often drove his colleagues crazy by saving virtually everything, from the canceled stamps on incoming mail to the exhausted batteries in his tape recorder,” according to Bourdon. The boxes were an easy out, because Warhol never had to get rid of anything. It all went in—even junk he picked out of the trash—and was shipped off to storage. Later, Warhol wrote: “I want to throw things right out the window as they're handed to me, but instead I say thank you and drop them into the box-of-the-month.”

A persistent inability to part with belongings is one of the defining characteristics of hoarding disorder, a mental health condition that appears as a distinct diagnosis for the first time in the most recent edition of the
DSM
. Soon after he moved in to an apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan in the 1950s, Warhol began filling it with furniture, artwork, books, and decorative objects, including a stuffed peacock he discovered in a taxidermy shop. “Clutter was an indispensable element of Warhol's habitats, and his parlor-floor apartment came to resemble a scavenger's pleasure palace,” wrote Bourdon. Collecting, which harkened back to Warhol's childhood fascination with celebrity photos, soon became a passion for accoutrements high and low, whether it was a kitschy cookie jar or a painting by Paul Klee. A tireless shopper, Warhol hit every kind of marketplace—flea markets, antique dealers, galleries, Saks Fifth Avenue. One of his favorite targets was Lamston's, the old Manhattan variety store, where he'd buy a 30-cent shopping bag and see how much he could cram in. At home, he'd lay out the contents on his bed and rub the prices off with Comet. “Then, the minute you've put all the stuff away,” he wrote, “you want to go shopping again.”

Plenty of people like to browse and buy, but Warhol's zealousness was unparalleled. The extent of his acquisitions became starkly apparent after his death in 1987. Hired to handle his estate, Sotheby's appraisers set up shop as best they could to document the goods in his home, a five-story brownstone he had moved to on East 66th Street. Staffers found rooms jammed with boxes and shopping bags. A Picasso was stashed in a closet; gems were found tucked away in the bed. There were heaps of cheap watches, dozens of perfume bottles, 175 cookie jars, as well as Tiffany lamps and paintings by Lichtenstein, Johns, and Rauschenberg.

The key feature distinguishing hoarding disorder from run-of-the-mill cluttering is that living spaces become so deluged with possessions they cannot be used for their intended purpose. A striking photograph of Warhol's dining room, taken shortly after he died, shows complete disarray with boxes piled high in front of a fireplace, paintings leaning against a wall, and a table laden with books, papers, bowls, and heaps of other objects. “There, in the spacious dining room, was a handsome Federal dining table, surrounded by a dozen Art Deco chairs. Underneath lay a luxurious carpet—obviously an Aubusson,” writes biographer Victor Bockris in
Warhol
. “But entrance to the room was blocked. Occupying every inch of floor, table and sideboard space were so many boxes, shopping bags and wrapped packages—so much sheer stuff—that the appraisers could not penetrate further. This was not a room where anyone had dined, at least not in years.” By the time Warhol died, he was living largely in his bedroom, where he stacked his wigs next to the TV and slept in a four-poster canopied bed.

What drove Warhol to amass such a monumental cache? Was he a compulsive hoarder? Or a collector with an appreciation for all things beautiful, no matter how mundane? In many ways, Warhol masterfully inhabited the role of both. “To me, it's a fascinating
blurred line,” says Dr. Carolyn Rodriguez, director of the Hoarding Disorder Research Program at Stanford University. Warhol amassed an astounding collection of art deco, American Indian artifacts, folk art, and works by Duchamp and Man Ray. And yet he made no effort to display his items in any organized way—one of the hallmarks that differentiates collecting from hoarding. Collectors delight in showing off their goods; hoarders keep their stuff under wraps. This was certainly true of Warhol, who was notorious for keeping visitors out. “Some of the stuff he bought was never unpacked,” Sotheby's chairman John Marion told
New York
magazine after Warhol died. “The thrill of the chase was more interesting to him than presenting what he bought.” When asked in a 1975 newspaper interview how he decorated his house, Warhol responded: “Just with junk. Paper and boxes. Things I bring home and leave around and never pick up.”

The sheer number of items doesn't differentiate collecting from hoarding—what matters is whether or not there's any logic to the arrangement and how well the objects are maintained. A hundred shiny teacups in a glass cabinet constitutes a collection; a hundred bags filled with gum wrappers, paychecks, and newspaper clippings, a hoard. Warhol's Time Capsules are a prime example. They contain a jumble of rare photographs alongside suppository boxes. And he paid little attention to the condition of individual items. “Warhol threw things in the boxes without any regard for physical well-being,” says archivist Wrbican. Since the museum began cataloging the Time Capsules, staffers have unfurled balled-up clothing and textiles and found cans of leaking Campbell's soup and desiccated pizza dough. A piece of decayed orange-nut bread, sent to Warhol by his niece, showed up in one box, as did his signature wigs, which one museum worker told
Carnegie
magazine “looked like road kill.”

Warhol considered exhibiting the capsules in a gallery, and he toyed with selling them for as much as $4,000 each, but it never happened. Procrastination is a classic characteristic of hoarders, says Robin Zasio, a clinical psychologist who worked as a therapist on the TV show
Hoarders
. “They have great plans, but they never get to them because the hoard is so great and so overwhelming.” Still, given Warhol's intentions and the historic value of the contents, the Warhol Museum considers the Time Capsules one continuous work of art comprising serial components that are an integral part of the museum's collection; several boxes have traveled to galleries abroad for exhibition. Even if their scrambled contents exemplify hoarding, the Time Capsules as a whole can be viewed as representing
something
artistically meaningful: a scrapbook of social history, a testimonial to consumerism, a celebration of the ordinary. “Warhol was endlessly in love with the day-to-day,” says Wrbican.

He was not, however, always in love with his stuff. As much as he relished the hunt, a part of Warhol pined to be a neat freak. “I believe that everyone should live in one big empty space. It can be a small space, as long as it's clean and empty,” he wrote. Distress is a key component of hoarding disorder, and Warhol seems to have experienced the feeling both when he was confronted with throwing something out and when he got fed up with his jam-packed surroundings. “I'm so sick of the way I live, of all this junk, and always dragging more home,” he declared in
The Andy Warhol Diaries
. “Just white walls and a clean floor, that's all I want.”

T
HE HUMAN IMPULSE TO HOARD
is rooted in evolution and has lingered in our brains. “Since the caveman days, we've been hunting,
gathering, and collecting,” says Stanford's Rodriguez. “It's normal human behavior.” It is a compulsion we share with a wide range of animals, from honeybees to the Barbados green monkeys. Wild rats, it turns out, collect not just food but inedible objects, too—stuff they ostensibly don't
need
to survive—which may help explain why “pack rat,” the name for a bushy-tailed rat that drags anything and everything into its den, is used in reference to people, too.

A lot of us are bad at throwing stuff out. We hold on to movie stubs, shoe boxes, and magazines. Homework piles propagate on our kitchen tables. We stuff too many Band-Aid boxes into our medicine cabinets and hang on to old phone books—things we think might come in handy one day but that we don't really need. Although we pledge to be better organized, we never have the time or energy to do it. We may casually refer to ourselves as “hoarders,” but in reality we'd probably qualify as midrange messy on a cluttering continuum that starts with what Zasio calls “clear and clean” and ends with borderline hoarding. The next step up, a diagnosable case of hoarding disorder, requires many more piles and much more life disruption than most of us will ever face. In extreme cases, hoarders' homes look like domestic war zones, with inhabitants navigating mountains of clothing, moldy newspapers, rotting sandwiches, and cat feces.

This level of hazardous hoarding was catapulted into the modern American consciousness by two reclusive Columbia-educated brothers, Homer and Langley Collyer. On March 21, 1947, an anonymous tipster called the New York City police to report a dead man inside a mansion on Fifth Avenue at 128th Street. The cops broke in and uncovered a shocking scene: rooms and hallways crammed with busted baby carriages, broken musical instruments, car parts, and rat-infested debris. Homer, who was blind and cared for by his younger brother, was found dressed in a
ragged bathrobe. He had died from a heart attack and starvation. Three weeks later, after hauling more than 100 tons of possessions out of the home—including 14 pianos and a 2,500-volume law library—police uncovered Langley's partially decomposed, rat-chewed corpse under stacks of newspapers. He had triggered one of his own booby traps, set to deter intruders, and suffocated about ten feet away from his brother. Crowds gathered to watch workmen remove the belongings; newspapers published photographs of the squalor. It was mesmerizingly awful: two brothers from an upper-crust New York family, buried by their junk.

Hoarding, it soon became clear, could be anyone's problem: rich or poor, privileged or neglected, famous or unknown. Jackie Kennedy Onassis's aunt, Edith Ewing Bouvier Beale (known as “Big Edie”), and Beale's daughter, Edith (known as “Little Edie”), also started out with well-to-do upbringings in New York City. Big Edie was married at St. Patrick's Cathedral and aspired to a singing career. Little Edie attended private schools, made her society debut at the Pierre Hotel in 1936, and had a successful stint as a model. A cousin called her “the most beautiful Bouvier girl of them all.” But health inspectors who raided the pair's broken-down East Hampton mansion in 1971, where they lived with dozens of feral cats, found a five-foot mountain of empty cans in the dining room, and human waste upstairs.

The women were spared eviction after Onassis offered to pay for a cleanup; later, they agreed to be the subjects of a documentary film made in 1975. The critically acclaimed
Grey Gardens
, which developed a cult following, exposed the Beales' bizarre living conditions. In one scene, Little Edie goes into what was once her brother's dingy room and sifts through some of his belongings. “I feel so strongly about mementoes and everything because of Mother that I'm never able to ever clean out these desk drawers
and throw this stuff away,” she says. In another clip, she sets out biscuits for raccoons that have infiltrated the attic.