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A wild interview with Andy Warhol’s Factory legend Brigid Berlin — who died this month — is to be published next week. In the chat, the socialite-turned-Warhol-superstar, who died Jul. 17, revealed, among other things, that she left her first husband after he had an affair with designer Bill Blass. Berlin — also known as …
A wild interview with Andy Warhol’s Factory legend Brigid Berlin — who died this month — is to be published next week.
In the chat, the socialite-turned-Warhol-superstar, who died Jul. 17, revealed, among other things, that she left her first husband after he had an affair with designer Bill Blass.
Berlin — also known as Brigid Polk because of her tendency to liberally inject, or ‘poke,’ pals with speed — was briefly married to window dresser John Parker, whom she wed in 1960. But in her conversation with preeminent downtown chronicler, Gillian McCain, Berlin said of Parker, “he was really, really talented but then I found out he was cheating on me. I mean, I slept with him and everything, but he was having an affair with Bill Blass.”
She also claimed that Lyndon B. Johnson got her a place in a “diet farm” in Mexico when she was 22 — but she was forced to leave because she was discovered to be having affairs with three different doctors who worked at the facility.
Meanwhile, Berlin — whose father was CEO of the Hearst Foundation and counted Richard Nixon and J. Edgar Hoover as friends — said that she inherited $150,000 (about $1.3 million today) from a pal of her dad’s, and blew it on Cartier jewelry… and “poppers.”
“I had seaplanes and a house in Cherry Grove [on Fire Island]. I would be so outrageous that I’d go to Cartier to buy sapphire cufflinks for the husband and drop them out of the seaplane into the swimming pool.”
She added, “I ordered a hundred cold lobsters from Seville… I also ordered like a hundred boxes of poppers.”
Polk was one of Warhol’s closest confidantes, starred in many of his works and was a prolific artist in her own right.
The interview will be published on PleaseKillMe.com, a blog named after the classic oral history of punk that McCain wrote with Legs McNeil.
