Hello Goodbye Hello: A Circle of 101 Remarkable Meetings (5 page)

Fans gather at dawn to peer through the fence of the White House. At 11 a.m. the South Lawn is thronging with media, along with hundreds of White House staff, most of them clutching cameras.

The President arrives in a navy-blue suit. The First Lady wears a white Adolfo suit with gold buttons, trimmed with gold braid. Jackson wears an oversize military jacket with sequins, plus floppy gold epaulettes and a gold sash, a single white glove, checkered with rhinestones, and droopy dark glasses.

‘Well, isn’t this a thriller?’ chuckles the President, behind his dais. ‘I’m delighted to see you all here. Just think: you all came to see me. No, I know why you’re here, and with good reason – to see one of the most talented, most popular and one of the most exciting superstars in the world today – Michael Jackson. Michael – welcome to the White House.’

After dutifully peppering his speech with the titles of some of Jackson’s hits – ‘Off the Wall’, ‘I Want You Back’ – the jovial President gets down to business. ‘At this stage of his career, when it would seem he has achieved
everything a musical performer can hope for, Michael Jackson is taking time to lead the fight against alcohol and drug abuse ... Michael Jackson is proof of what a young person can accomplish free of drink or drug abuse.
¹⁰
People young and old respect that, and if Americans follow his example then we can face up to the problems of drinking and driving. And we can, in Michael’s words, Beat It.

‘Nancy spends a great deal of her time with young people talking about the problems of drink and drug abuse, so I speak for both of us when I say thank you, Michael, for the example that you’re giving to millions of young Americans ... Your success is an American dream come true.’

Amidst applause, Jackson comes to the podium to receive his award. ‘I’m very, very honoured,’ he says in his high-pitched voice. ‘Thank you very much, Mr President.’ He then giggles to himself before adding, ‘And Mrs Reagan.’

The President and Mrs Reagan usher Jackson inside, leaving him and his entourage to tour the White House. Jackson shows an interest in a portrait of his namesake, the seventh President of the United States, Andrew Jackson, who is in a similar military uniform, though without the sequins.

Afterwards, Jackson is to have a private meeting with the Reagans, along with one or two children of staff members. But when he is ushered into the Diplomatic Reception Room, he is confronted by seventy-five adults.

He turns on his heels, running down the hall into the rest room off the Presidential Library. He locks the door, and refuses to come out. ‘They said there would be kids. But those aren’t kids!’ he protests to Frank Dileo, his manager.

Dileo has a word with a White House aide, who immediately rounds on an assistant. ‘If the First Lady gets a load of this, she’s going to be mad as hell. Now you go get some kids in here, damn it.’

Dileo shouts through the rest-room door, ‘It’s OK, Michael. We’re going to get some kids.’

‘You’ll have to clear all those adults out of there before I come out,’ demands Jackson.

An aide runs into the Reception Room. ‘OK, out! Everybody out!’ A member of Jackson’s entourage arrives in the rest room. ‘Everything is OK.’

‘Are you sure?’ asks Michael.

At this point, Frank Dileo grows edgy. ‘OK, Mike, outta there. I mean it.’

Michael Jackson returns to the freshly vacated Reception Room. A handful of children are waiting. While he signs a copy of
Thriller
for the Transport Secretary, the Reagans arrive. They usher Jackson into the Roosevelt Room to meet a few more aides and their children.

As Jackson talks to the children, Nancy Reagan whispers to one of his staff, ‘I’ve heard he wants to look like Diana Ross, but looking at him up close, he’s so much prettier than she is. Don’t you agree? I mean, I just don’t think she’s that attractive, but
he
certainly is.’

Jackson’s employees are forbidden from discussing their employer, so he does not reply.

‘I just wish he would take off those sunglasses,’ continues Mrs Reagan, adding, ‘Tell me, has he had any surgery on his eyes?’

There is still no reply. ‘Certainly his nose has been done,’ whispers Mrs Reagan, peering hard at Jackson, who is now talking to her husband. ‘More than once, I’d say. I wonder about his cheekbones. Is that make-up, or has he had them done too? It’s all so peculiar, really. A boy who looks just like a girl, who whispers when he speaks, wears a glove on one hand and sunglasses all the time. I just don’t know what to make of it.’ She lifts her eyes to the ceiling and shakes her head.

The Jackson aide begins to think it may be rude to say nothing at all to the First Lady. ‘Listen, you don’t know the half of it,’ he says, with a conspiratorial smile. But the First Lady reacts as though she disdains such idle gossip.

‘Well, he
is
talented. And I would think that’s all that
you
should be concerned about,’ she snaps.

DISAPPOINTS

The White House, Washington DC

October 15th 1981

‘The funny thing about movie people,’ says Andy Warhol to the First Lady over tea in the White House, ‘is that they talk behind your back before you even leave the room.’

Nancy Reagan’s eyes, already preternaturally wide, grow still wider. She looks at Warhol as though he were unbalanced.

‘
I
am a movie person, Andy,’ she replies.

The interview has been stiff throughout. Mrs Reagan never reacts well to criticism, and can spot it from a great distance. It is written in her stars. ‘Cancers tend to be intuitive, vulnerable, sensitive and fearful of ridicule – all of which, like it or not, I am,’ she explains in her autobiography. ‘The Cancer symbol is the crab shell: Cancers often present a hard exterior to the world, which hides their vulnerability. When they’re hurt, Cancers respond by withdrawing into themselves. That’s me all right.’

Warhol himself has been notably crab-like in his advance on the Reagans. Two months before the 1980 presidential election, he befriended the Reagans’ son Ronald Junior, then their daughter Patti. Both sides are happy: the younger Reagans mix with the most famous artist in America, and in turn Warhol mixes with America’s imminent first family. Warhol likes Ronald Junior. ‘He turned out to be a really nice kid. God, he was so sweet ... and he’s very smart. Lispy and cute.’ At their first lunch together, Warhol is tongue-tied. ‘I didn’t know what to talk to him about. I was too shy and he was too shy.’ Warhol finds himself asking an awkward question about whether or not his father dyes his hair. Ronald Junior tries to change the subject. His mother, Nancy, is, he tells Warhol, ‘very sweet and very adorable’.

Warhol seizes the moment. ‘So then I got sneaky and brought
Ordinary People
up, and I told him how much I hated Mary Tyler Moore, that after
I saw the movie if I saw her on the street I’d just kick her. And at that point he was almost going to say something about Nancy, but then somehow he got the drift of it and changed the subject. Because I think the mother in
Ordinary People
is just like Mrs Reagan. Really cold and shrewd.’

They discuss what to order. Warhol tells Ronald Junior that he has never eaten frogs’ legs, ‘and he was so sweet he ordered them just so I could try it. He’s really sweet, a beautiful body and beautiful eyes. But he just doesn’t have a pretty nose. It’s too long.’

Two weeks later, Patti Davis, Ronald Junior’s older sister, drops by the
Interview
office. ‘She looked sort of pretty to me, but then looking at her later on the video, how could these kids have missed their parents’ good looks? I mean, Dad was so gorgeous.’

Between Ronald Reagan’s election and his inauguration, Andy Warhol goes out with Ronald Reagan Junior and his wife, Doria, to see the movie
Flash Gordon
. By the end of the evening, he has given Doria a job on
Interview
magazine.

Warhol doesn’t encounter Nancy Reagan until March 1981, when, by chance, he spots her eating in the same restaurant. ‘We were leaving and didn’t want to go by the President’s table because it was too groupie-ish – everybody else was stopping at the table – so we went the other way, but then they called us over. Jerry Zipkin was yelling, and I met Mrs Reagan, and she said, “Oh you’re so good to my kids.”’

The possibility of an interview with Nancy Reagan is mooted in September 1981. By now Nancy has taken to ringing Warhol’s sidekick Bob Colacello at the office, fussing about Ron and Doria, ‘causing no end of envy to Andy’. Colacello negotiates with the White House for an interview with Mrs Reagan: they give their approval, thinking it might lighten her imperious image. But, perhaps sensing Colacello has overtaken him on this particular social ladder, Warhol affects to pooh-pooh the idea. ‘I think she is too old and it’s old-fashioned. We should have younger people. What is there to ask her? About her movie career? Oh, it’ll never happen anyway.’

But it does. A month later, Warhol and Colacello leave for Washington. Colacello warns Warhol not to ask her any ‘sex questions’. This upsets Warhol. ‘I just couldn’t believe him. I mean, I just couldn’t believe him. Did he think I was going to sit there and ask her how often do they do it?’

The two of them, plus Doria, arrive early at the White House and are placed in a reception room. There they remain; when the First Lady arrives, she fails to lead them to somewhere more grand or more intimate. Warhol, ever-alert to matters of status, is affronted; a waiter brings them each a glass of water, and Warhol is further affronted.

The interview never really gets going. ‘We talked about drug rehabilitation, and it was boring. I made a couple of mistakes but I didn’t care because I was still so mad at being told by Bob not to ask sex questions.’

Soon, it is all over. Before ushering them out, Nancy Reagan gives Doria a piece of Tupperware (‘not wrapped up or anything’) and socks for Ron Junior. Colacello tells Nancy what a good mother she is, and asks what they are doing for Christmas. Nancy says they will stay at the White House, ‘because nobody ever stays at the White House’.

Warhol leaves feeling he has been snubbed. A glass of water! When he gets home, his phone is ringing. ‘It was Brigid asking me what kind of tea Mrs Reagan served us, and then I started thinking and I got madder. I mean, she could have put on the dog – she could have done it in a good room, she could have used the good
china
! I mean, this was for her daughter-in-law, she could have done something really great for this interview but she didn’t. I got madder and madder thinking about it.’

BLANKS

1040 Fifth Avenue, New York

December 20th 1978

Somehow, Andy Warhol has no luck with Presidents or First Ladies. They never seem to hit it off. After a party for
Newsweek
in 1983, he observes, ‘It was a boring party. No stars. Just Nancy Reagan and President and Mrs Carter.’

But they have their uses. On November 22nd 1963, he was walking through Grand Central Terminal when the news came through that President Kennedy had been assassinated. Warhol paused to absorb this and then, in a matter-of-fact manner, said to his assistant, ‘Well, let’s get to work.’

Within months, he had produced any amount of pictures of Jackie Kennedy, some adapted from a photograph of her smiling just before her husband was shot, some from photographs of her at his funeral, others a combination of the two.

As the years roll by, the paths of America’s most famous widow and America’s most famous artist cross on a regular basis. He is mesmerised by her fame. Possibly as a result, she is often standoffish towards him.
¹¹
This makes him touchy. In 1977, Warhol is invited to a fundraising dinner Jackie has organised. ‘The dinner was a horror. They put us at such a nothing nobody table,’ he records in his diary. ‘So here we were in this room where we didn’t even
recognise
anybody except each other and this girl comes over to me and says, “I know you have a camera, and you can take pictures of everyone here except Mrs Onassis.”’ A few minutes later, Warhol enters the main room and finds not only that ‘there was
everybody
we knew’, but ‘there were 4,000 photographers taking pictures of Jackie. And that horrible girl had come over to tell me
I
couldn’t!’

The following year, Warhol is irritated to hear that Diana Vreeland doesn’t think he is avant-garde any more, and Jackie doesn’t either. That November, he hears that Jackie has thrown a party without inviting him. ‘Robert Kennedy Jr told Fred [Hughes] that they had a big question about whether to invite us and decided not to. Jackie really is awful, I guess.’

A week later, things look up. He receives an invitation to Jackie’s Christmas party. Warhol invites his friend Bob Colacello. They arrive late. ‘Warren Beatty and Diane Keaton were there and Bob heard –
overheard
– Jackie saying that something Warren did in the hall was “disgusting”, but we were never able to find out what it was.’

Over dinner at Mortimer’s afterwards, someone says Beatty has had sex with Jackie. Bianca Jagger says Warren has probably just made it up, because he made up that he slept with
her
, and when she saw him in the Beverly Wilshire she embarrassed him by screaming, ‘Warren, I hear you say you’re fucking me. How can you say that when it’s not true?’

Then Bianca says that Warren has a big cock, and Steve Rubell asks how would she know, and she says all her girlfriends have slept with him. Colacello is ‘in heaven’ because Jackie is so nice to him, even sharing her glass of Perrier with him when the butler forgot to bring his, and saying, ‘It’s
ours
.’

But the next day, Jackie has turned turtle. She calls Warhol three or four times at his office. ‘But I didn’t call back, because the messages were complicated – they were like, “Call me at this number after 5.30, or before 4.00 if it’s not raining.”’ Finally, she catches him at home. She is frosty. ‘She sounded so tough. She said, “Now Andy, when I invited you, I invited
you
– I didn’t invite Bob Colacello.”’ She complains that Colacello ‘writes things’. This leads Warhol to suspect that ‘something must have happened there that she doesn’t want written about. She was thinking about it all day, I guess.’ Could she be referring to the disgusting thing Warren Beatty did in her hall?