T Magazine|Brigid Berlin, Andy Warhol’s Most Enduring Friend
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/18/t-magazine/brigid-berlin-andy-warhol.html
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T’s 2021 Art Issue
Berlin, who died last year, was a great artist in her own right, and her New York apartment, which is being sold, is a window into a bygone era in the city’s history.
A circa 1970 Polaroid of Brigid Berlin, who was a pioneer of the selfie.Credit...Brigid Berlin, "Untitled (Bridget with Flowers)" (circa 1970), © Vincent Fremont/Vincent Fremont Enterprises, rights reserved
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By Nancy Hass
In 2001, soon after he moved into the small prewar doorman building on East 28th Street where he still lives, Rob Vaczy met a 60-year-old Brigid Berlin as he was waiting for the elevator. His new neighbors had warned the multimedia producer about the nutty lady on the ninth floor — every building has one, they joked — with her querulous duo of pug dogs toted in a baby carriage, and nonstop pronouncements issued in an archaic highbrow accent straight out of “The Philadelphia Story.” Vaczy, then 36, was instantly enchanted. Growing up in a working-class Long Island family, he had been involved in the early 1980s punk scene and was familiar with Berlin’s lore of the Pop movement, though it took him a while to connect the dots, to figure out that the woman who lived four floors above him had starred in Andy Warhol’s films and was in his inner circle for more than 20 years. Vaczy knew her as the society girl manquée who got fat expressly to spite a controlling mother, and who earned the nickname Brigid Polk at the Factory, Warhol’s studio, because she loved to “poke” herself — and anyone in the vicinity — with a hypodermic needle of amphetamines. She had always scoffed at the idea that she was an artist, but friends like Robert Rauschenberg and the sculptor John Chamberlain regarded her as an equal. John Waters once described her as “big, often naked and ornery as hell.” That afternoon at the elevator she asked Vaczy if he wanted to come up to her apartment for five minutes. “But with Brigid, there was no five minutes,” he says. “We wound up drinking all night and watching ‘Dr. Zhivago.’”
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T’s 2021 Art Issue
A look at the soul of the art world, and where it’s headed.
- Experts weigh in on how to buy a work of art, and artists share which artists to keep an eye on.
- How TriBeCa became New York’s hottest new gallery district, home to PPOW and more — and where to find notable galleries outside of New York and Los Angeles.
- The down-to-earth guy with one of the most exciting collections around …
- … And the optimistic artist who turned the Met’s rooftop into a “Sesame Street” fantasy.
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That was the beginning of an unconventional, two-decade-long relationship during which Vaczy briefly became Berlin’s lover, then her confidante and companion and, later, her caretaker. Together, they watched a lot of television (her favorite: documentaries about poor little rich girls like Barbara Hutton) and smoked a lot of Marlboro Lights. When they weren’t together — he lives on the fifth floor — they were often on the phone. As it was for Warhol — with whom she spoke every morning around 9 a.m. from 1964, when they met at a party at the Factory, until days before his 1987 death from complications after gallbladder surgery — talking on the phone was a favorite activity of Berlin’s. She and Vaczy also went to gallery openings and parties, where she was hailed as a doyen of a much cooler era. Before she convinced the hard-drinking Vaczy to get sober a decade ago — her own sobriety was touch and go through the years — they also bar hopped like mad. As Warhol often had observed, she was an unparalleled social critic, a magpie with a beak sharp enough to hack through any pretensions. “On top of that, she had a memory like a meat locker,” says Vaczy. She could pontificate as brilliantly, and for just as long, on her recent colonoscopy as on the minutiae of shooting Warhol’s “Chelsea Girls” (1966), in which she famously injects speed into her buttocks through her jeans. “There was never a moment,” Vaczy says, “when she was inauthentic.”
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