gone2soon

[gone2soon]

Andrea Feldman 1 April 1948 - 8 August 1972

Some would describe true star quality as when the audience can’t tell when you’re acting. That’s what Penny Arcade artist and friend said of Andrea Feldman, “A lot of people in the Warhol scene pretended to be crazy, but Andrea really was.”

She was a rich girl, with a long list of inpatient stays at state hospitals. After a nervous breakdown in the interim of the release of Andy Warhol produced Heat, the third film in the Paul Morrissey directed Trash trilogy, (where she had a co-starring role, as a psychotic, masochistic, lesbian) Penny remembers Andrea’s nervous breakdown, her physician adamantly telling her parents that, that all Andrea needed to stop the hysterics was a real job. To which Andrea told Penny, “What am I supposed to do? Be a waitress?!” She believed she was destined for stardom and after starring in Heat, not just any old star, but a Superstar. Andrea would commit suicide shortly before the film’s release.

Before Heat, Andrea had had a co-starring role in Trash. Where she plays an ex-debutante Rich Girl looking to score some acid from her heroin-addicted conquest Joe Dallesandro, “Is it acid? Is it acid?! Is it acid?!?!” she asks him while he shoots up, in a high-pitched affected upper east-side / British drawl. She rattles on about how she’s never done drugs, was a virgin before her marriage to her husband and has never seen anyone shoot up. She invites Joe to rape her, in a cuckolding of her husband, but he’s impotent. An immovable and disengaged force, an unapologetic junkie. A total counter to the Rich Girl’s fast-talking neuroticism. Feldman’s character is indicative of a housewife looking for some excitement. Asking if this is all there is, why can’t I have more? 

Andy Warhol never attended the filming of Heat instead he kept in contact with the cast and crew via telephone. All the actors provided were members of Warhol’s Factory and the principal shooting took place in Los Angeles for two weeks in July 1971. This distance allowed Warhol to stir the pot. Bob Colacello, writer and editor of Interview magazine and Warhol’s right-hand man said: “...Andy barraged Sylvia [Mills], Andrea, and Pat [Ast] with late-night calls from New York, stirring things up long distance.” He made Sylvia jealous of Pat’s high fashion (she wore expensive muumuus designed by Halston), Pat jealous of Sylvia’s star-billing, “and... it didn’t take much to drive poor Andrea crazy.”

Andrea was a native New Yorker who attended Quintano’s a well-known, private performing arts high school in mid-town New York, that groomed its students for a career in the spotlight. Some well-known alumni included Mary Weiss from the heartbreak girl group the Shangri-Las and queen of the stage and screen Bernadette Peters. But the education provided there was subject to criticism, a letter from New York’s Division for School Regulation and Supervision observed pointedly, “there is no science laboratory, no library, and no gymnasium.” 

From the mid-1960s onwards, Quintano’s was the school of choice for rich kids who had faced expulsion or flunked out of their previous schools for non-attendance or anti-social behaviour. One previous attendee described the mix of students as “...the students who were there because they had real careers and you had the fuck ups.” It seemed, especially during the drug-fuelled days of the 1960s, that as long as the incredibly expensive tuition fees were paid, drug use and dealing were ignored by the faculty.

Andrea pioneered a performance called “Showtime”, where she performed a striptease on a round table in the centre of Max’s Kansas City, and received her nickname “Whips”, after a dance she did with them for Warhol’s multimedia art event The Exploding Plastic Inevitable between 1966 and 1967. The event included music from The Velvet Underground & Nico who Warhol promoted as “The Pop Girl of ‘66″. Andrea craved Andy’s attention referring to herself as “Ms. Warhol”. Warhol was known for the flitting of his affections based on whose persona he found interesting at the time. Nico’s unaffected, stoic-german, coolness stood in stark contrast to Andrea who was known as “Crazy Andy” amongst her friends.

Leee Black Childers, photographer at the Factory and Andrea’s boyfriend before her untimely death remembers an incident in which after a short absence documenting Andy Warhol’s Pork at the Roundhouse in London. “...She stood up on a chair and held a picture of Marilyn Monroe over her head... After a long time of just standing there, she said, ‘Marilyn died; love me while you can!’” Her suicide note would read “I’m headed for the big time. I’m on my way up there with James Dean and Marilyn Monroe”. She jumped to her death from the fourteenth-floor window of her uncle’s apartment, a few days after the tenth anniversary of Marilyn Monroe’s death at the age of 24. Perhaps Andrea identified with Monroe as like her she would later allege mistreatment by directors, depression, and the inability to be taken seriously as an actress.

On the 8th of July 1972, Andrea made dates with all her ex-boyfriends so that they would be on the sidewalk below when she jumped. Geraldine Smith who had written Andrea’s Village Voice obituary sympathetically excluded this detail, and detailed how Andrea’s final message to her friends was one of love. According to Bob Colacello, and his connections at The Factory, Smith made no mention of the more scathing portions of Andrea’s suicide note, where she cursed Andy Warhol and Paul Morrissey, claiming abuse. She had conducted an interview in July 1972 with George Ford for Interview magazine, which never made it to print. “They just throw you in front of a camera - they don’t care what you look like. They just use you, and abuse you, and step on you, and they don’t pay you anything... I’m a damn good actress and I’ve been brought down by Warhol and I’ve been mistreated by them.”

She died three weeks before the release of Heat, holding either “a rosary and a can of coke” or “a bible and a crucifix” on her descent. Judith Crist of the New Yorker described her performance in the film as “in large part non-performance, comes from the late Andrea Feldman, as the flat voiced, freaked-out daughter, a mass of psychotic confusion, infantile and heart-breaking.”