Glenn O’Brien: Do you still go to church? Andy Warhol: Yeah. I just sneak in at funny hours. GO: Do you go to Catholic church? AW: Yeah, they’re the prettiest. GO: Do you believe in God? AW: I guess I do. I like church. It’s empty when I go. I walk around. There are so many beautiful Catholic churches in New York. I used to go to some Episcopal churches too. 1
“We were brought up to believe that prayers are the only thing that are going to help you and it seemed that when he had nowhere else to turn Andy got closer to God”. 2 (Andy’s brother John Warhola) On Wednesday, 1 April 1987, around 2000 people assembled in St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York City. What brought this large group of, amongst others, leading representatives for the art world, the cultural elite and international jet-setters was Andy Warhol’s memorial service. The program 3 was illustrated with a reproduction of Warhol’s painting Raphael Madonna - $6.99 from 1985, which the artist had based on Raphael’s famous Sistine Madonna. The program also contained the information that Yoko Ono was one of the speakers at the memorial service and that the music included Amazing Grace and Louange a l´ Immortalite de Jesu.
rity-fixated member of the international jet-set. This image, however, becomes clearer with a closer look at Warhol’s private life at the time. Disappointed about how a handful of personal relationships had ebbed away during the first half of the 1980s, Warhol increasingly adopted an attitude towards life that was marked by depression and questioning. After Warhol’s death, the gallerist, curator and art collector Heiner Bastian commented that: “More than anyone else I ever knew, Andy talked about being let down by someone, or being disappointed by someone and in the last two years of his life I thought he was more miserable”. 4
Andy especially liked the little old ladies who hung around the soup kitchen, another friend recalled, because they reminded him of his mother. 7 In his diaries Warhol mentions one visit to the church:
The mind boggles when one tries to imagine how Warhol, after accomplishing his duties amongst New York’s poor and homeless, returned to his five-storey high Georgian-style town house on 57 East 66th Street. It was here, in the heart of the exclusive Upper East Side, that Warhol came to spend more and more lonely evenings in his large house, luxuriously furnished in Art Deco and Empire styles:
Five hundred homeless and hungry New Yorkers will assemble on Easter Day at the Church of the Heavenly Rest, on Fifth Avenue at 90th Street. They will be served a delicious meal, and they will be treated as honored guests by some eighty volunteers. They will also be saddened by the absence of one who, with dedicated regularity, greeted them on Thanksgiving, Christmas and Easter.
Hildesley’s description of how Warhol served food on a regular basis to homeless people in one of the city’s many churches doesn’t really fit in with the general image of Warhol as a celeb-
A group of little black kids came in late and he ran into the kitchen and took aluminium foil and wrapped up all the extra cupcakes and stuff and gave it to the mother for them to take home. That was the first time I ever saw him in an environment where no one else knew who he was, and he just loved it.
Thursday, December 25, 1986. I got up early and walked to Paige’s and she and Stephen Sprouse and I went to the Church of the Heavenly rest to pass out Interviews and feed the poor. It wasn’t as crowded as it was at Thanksgiving. […] Stephen dropped me. Got a lot of calls to go to Christmas parties but I just decided to stay in and I loved it. 8
Perhaps the most interesting information in the program, which probably surprised most of the visitors, was under the heading “A lesser-known element in the portrait of Andy Warhol”, where the Reverend C. Hugh Hildesley, of the Church of the Heavenly Rest, wrote:
Andy poured coffee, served food and helped clean up. More than that he was a true friend to these friendless. He loved these nameless New Yorkers and they loved him back. We will pause to remember Andy this Easter, confident that he will be feasting with us at a Heavenly Banquet, because he had heard another Homeless Person who said: “I was hungry and you gave me food…Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these, my brothers and sisters, you did it to me”.
‘He just loved doing it’, said Warhols assistant Wilfredo:
These feelings expressed themselves perhaps most of all during traditional holidays. Warhol’s associate and friend Paige Powell (who was employed by Interview 1981-1994 and was Jean-Michel Basquiat’s girlfriend) did her best to distract Warhol: Knowing how much he hated holidays, Paige Powell arranged for him to visit the Church of Heavenly Rest on Thanksgiving, Christmas and Easter to serve the homeless dinners with Wilfredo and Stephen Sprouse. ’Andy dragged round garbage cans and poured coffee’, she recalled. ‘And he did something that wasn’t on the programme – he found Saran Wrap so people could take food home’. 6
Andy was suffering from some kind of terminal melancholia. For all the frantic activity around him, he was increasingly alone. Evenings often ended early as he returned to his bedroom to watch television, play with his make-up or try on one of his four hundred wigs in the large oval mirror of his dressing table, cared for now only by the two well-paid Filipino maids, Nena and Aurora, to whom he rarely spoke. 9 What this magnificent home actually looked like was in principle a secret since few were admitted into it. Nevertheless, most visitors would have reacted over how this private sphere departed from the public image of the most famous representative of pop art. The art historian Sir John Richardson, described the artist’s bedroom in an article in Vanity Fair, soon after Warhol’s death: a n dy wa r hol l a st su ppe r 7