Andy Warhol and A Local Mystery

When I was in high school I was kind of fascinated by Andy Warhol. Not because of his art specifically and certainly not because of the mystique of depravity that was so much a part of his persona and the people he surrounded himself with. No, my fascination with Warhol had to do with the fact that he was from Pittsburgh --- a place I knew well, had spent a lot of time in over the years of growing up and loved. The very notion that a guy from Pittsburgh, where there were skeletons of dinosaurs and a stuffed dodo bird and a weirdly beautiful aviary, could become a famous artist of all things just astonished me.

I didn't really know a lot about him but whenever there would be an article in any of the magazines my parents got --- Life and Look in particular because they had huge pictures --- I would read every word, save the pictures and hang them on the back of my bedroom door and spend a lot of time studying the art that he was so famous for. I didn't really understand it but I liked it.

Recently I watched a documentary called A Walk Into the Sea; Danny Williams and the Warhol Factory. I watched it because it was about Warhol --- sort of. Over the years I've gained a somewhat different perspective on him. I know more about his manipulative and self-aggrandizing behaviors but, maybe not too much to my credit, those things never bother me in artists. I've always figured that real geniuses have so much to cope with that they can't always be judged by more mundane standards but that's a discussion for another day.

What surprised me about the film is that the titular event, the walk that Danny Williams took into the sea happened right here in a place I know well. In a place where I have walked into the sea --- only I remembered to walk back out. Pigeon Cove is a beautiful place with a stone breakwater that shelters a small cove where lots of lobstermen moor their boats. I have spent a lot of hours there and both drawn and painted the fishing shacks that line the wall below the breakwater. There was one memorable fishing shack that was absolutely covered with climbing roses. Whichever lobsterman owned that shack had planted roses around it and it was a wonderful sight, this little fish shack drenched in roses with lobster buoys hanging from it. Peter Prybot writes about Pigeon Cove in his book, Lobstering Off Cape Ann.

So anyway in 1966 Danny Williams, a Rockport boy who had dropped out of Harvard to go to New York where he had fallen in with the Warhol crowd, came home to visit his mother in Rockport. One evening after supper he borrowed her car, drove to Pigeon Cove and parked it and was never seen again. Did he indeed walk into the sea? Or did he turn in another direction and hitchhike off into America. Nobody knows for sure but the first scenario seems the most likely.

The documentary, made by his niece, is an interesting piece of work. She interviews members of their family as well as some of the surviving Warhol luminaries --- luminous for little more than having hung around with Andy Warhol, with the exception of John Cale. Naturally none of them have an answer to what happened but there is a certain weird fascination in watching these aged hipsters sitting around reminiscing and, in some cases, venting their bitterness about lives that became relatively pointless once Warhol up and died. Cale is probably the most insightful when he refers to the Warhol crowd as a “bunch of nobodies” who leeched off of Warhol That's not entirely accurate.

The way I have it figured is that the Warhol Factory was a symbiotic relationship. Warhol supported a bunch of people who may have had creative potential but who lacked he ability to take that potential very far. He gave them importance and community and took a lot of ideas in return. Is this right? Who can say. It's gone on forever in creative circles from the studios of the great artists of the Renaissance through Gertrude Stein's salons into the present time. Wherever there is a lot of creative energy being generated there will be those who are drawn to that. Some will flourish and come out of it energized.

So Danny Williams, who may or may not have become a great filmmaker, became part of Warhol's crowd. There is also speculation that he and Warhol were lovers. And for whatever reason he left New York, came back to Cape Ann and disappeared. Now 42 years later all that remains of him, a few pieces of film and an interesting documentary made by his niece, just fuel another local mystery among the lobster buoys and the roses and the hulls of lost ships.

Thanks for reading.