Editor's note: The Utah Museum of Fine Arts is hosting the exhibit "Andy Warhol's Dream America" through Sunday. The exhibit features nearly 100 of Warhol's screen prints — and recalls some of the story that follows.
Andy Warhol was coming to the University of Utah.
The date was Oct. 2, 1967, and I was editorial assistant on the Daily Utah Chronicle, the U.'s student newspaper. Warhol at the time was a revolutionary artist, a man who was turning convention on its head, the creator of fabulous silk screen prints of JFK and Marilyn Monroe, the Campbell Soup can painter, the director of strange underground films.
Warhol's visit was big news — bigger than the antiwar demonstrations and the protests against tuition hikes that I had been covering.
It was even bigger than the arrival of the vice president, Hubert Humphrey, which I also had covered — sort of — a year before. During a press conference at the airport, I had started to ask Humphrey a question, identifying myself as J. Bauman of the Daily Utah Chronicle. At that moment, in front of hundreds who had gone to the airport to welcome him, in front of Gov. Cal Rampton, Boy Scouts, high school majorettes and band members, and of course TV and print reporters, a reel of my tape recorder flopped off. I bent over and scrambled to retrieve the reel, which just kept unrolling along the tarmac, tape stretching behind.
Not missing a beat, Humphrey had said, "Yes, J.," and patted me on the head.
This time I was going to do it right. I was armed with a complimentary ticket to Warhol's lecture, "Pop Art in Action," and my Mamiya C-3 twin-lens reflex camera. I got a ride to the airport so I could interview him on the way back. And I planned to take a close-up that "the Chrony" could use.
Looking back over 40 years,
among my memory gaps are how I got the ride and how we returned. I have a feeling that the people who ran the Lectures and Concerts Series at the U. had sent a limo to pick up Warhol, and I had hitched a ride with them. Or maybe taxicabs were invoked.
I do recall two events at the airport: first, a cloud of white dust blew off Warhol's hair, which I took to be powder he had sprinkled on as decoration; second, someone with him insisted that I absolutely could not take a photograph. Warhol was far too shy.
You could tell he was shy by his silence, by his vague, evasive murmur if I asked a question, by the dark sunglasses he wore.
I was determined to at least get a photo. Sitting in the back seat next to him, I handed Warhol a page from the Chrony with an article previewing his lecture.
The vehicle rolled along and Warhol studied the page intently. I looked ahead, my camera just above my waist, then looked down. The Mamiya's viewfinder was at the top, and if you folded down the magnifying lens inside you could look at the ground glass and focus. Facing forward, I rotated my camera to the right, focused, and snapped a picture.
We dropped Warhol and company at a hotel and I returned to campus. By 8 p.m. the ranks of folding chairs in the university's Union Building Ballroom were filled. Warhol and an assistant, a man wearing silver shoes with turned-up toes, were fiddling with a movie projector. I sat nearby.
My wife-to-be — a fellow student named Cory Wilcox — arrived with her mother, and they made their way through the crowd. Cory and I weren't dating yet, but I admired her, and I kept my eyes on them as they crossed the room. Suddenly the sound system and projector died, just as I saw Cory trip across the power cord. Minutes of confusion and exclamations followed until the problem was solved and the plug back in.
Warhol showed some excruciating snippets of one or two of his movies — black and white images, grainy film jerking, faces sliding across the screen, streaks and bright splotches, horrible sound quality. The Q-and-A that followed was as bad. Warhol gave brief, pointless answers.
Next stop for Warhol and his student entourage was a dinner in his honor. I believe it was thrown by the art faculty. My recollection is that it was in the Panorama Room in the Union Building. A group of students, including me, trooped in after Warhol and were invited to join in.
The food was delicious, but the conversation was distasteful, even hostile. A professor questioned Warhol closely as he was trying to dine. One question concerned the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. Where in that edifice was a certain famous work of Warhol's? Wasn't it on the (say) eighth floor in a nook between this work and that work?
Warhol agreed that it was.
"Ha! The museum only has (not as many as the question indicated) floors!"
Warhol jumped from his chair and stalked out. Affronted on behalf of our idol, disgusted with these faculty dinosaurs who could not appreciate a modern master, we sycophants jumped up and followed him.
We careened through the night in someone's car, picking up friends as we went, and ended up at a party on the west side of town. I seem to remember it was near Capitol Hill. The house was almost devoid of furnishings. A portable record player on the floor hammered away and we partied '60s-style. (Never mind the details.)
Someone drove me back to the Chronicle, where it was past deadline. The next day I got busy writing an indignant article. But one of the editors killed my story.
Questions, he said, had arisen about whether the man really was Warhol.
On Oct. 4, two days after the lecture, my photo ran on the front page with the headline, "Warhol Flops, 'Fans' Demand Refund." Because of dissatisfaction with the performance, Paul Cracroft of the U.'s Lectures and Concerts Division withheld Warhol's $1,000 speaker's fee.
Almost four months later an art student, Dick Livingstone, wrote a letter to the editor and brought in a recent photograph of Andy Warhol from the Village Voice, a newspaper in New York City. My picture and the Voice's did not seem to show the same man.
A freshman reporter on the Chrony staff, Angelyn Nelson — today Angelyn Hutchinson, an assistant managing editor at the Deseret Morning News — helped launch an investigation. A Chrony story pointed out differences in the facial features.
Nelson and Kay Israel, assistant editor, pursued the hoax with innumerable telephone calls, tracking Warhol lectures at other universities, attempting to contact Warhol and his manager. They went after the story relentlessly.
After their start, other student papers and a daily in Eugene, Ore., jumped on the story. Finally, on Feb. 7, 1968, a confession emerged.
Warhol had sent a young actor, Allen Midgette, to impersonate him on the lecture tour to the University of Utah, Linfield College in Oregon, the University of Oregon and Montana State University. The U. never paid the lecture fee, and Cracroft declined to invite the real Warhol to Utah.
A Chronicle article by Israel and Nelson, dated Feb. 9, 1968, describes how the hoax was unmasked. This segment refers to the University of Oregon student paper, the Daily Emerald, and its editor, Mike Fancher:
"When asked what was responsible for the actions taken by the Daily Emerald, Fancher relied, 'Well, we picked it up from you. ... It turned out that the local paper (The Eugene Register-Guard) called whoever it was in New York and talked to him.'"
Hutchinson recently said that even after having written or edited thousands of articles since her freshman year at the U., the Warhol investigation is still memorable.
The hoax became big news nationally, and it has since been part of the Warhol mystique analyzed in academic papers by art experts.
As for me, I was left with a bitter taste in my mouth — until recently.
The Chronicle reprinted my photo several times in '67 and '68, but as far as I know, only the first time, Oct. 4, 1967, had my credit line. When the hoax was exposed, a national news magazine ran the picture but credited only the Chronicle.
The Utah Museum of Fine Arts is hosting a Warhol exhibit through Sunday, featuring nearly 100 of his extraordinary screen prints. The show also tells the story of the imposture, with photocopies of Chronicle articles from the time.
Amid the artworks are two reproductions of my photo, in a plastic-bound booklet on the reading table and on a large wall display that accompanies the exhibition. Cory visited the exhibit, and then I went with her on a second trip, and we found that these displays did not credit me, even though the Chronicle page they reproduce is the one that had my credit line.
Miffed, but feeling awfully petty, I contacted the museum. Rather than make any argument or disagree with me, rather than remind me of what a small matter it really was, the museum politely looked into my complaint.
Steve Wyatt, curator of exhibitions, later sent me an e-mail:
"I wanted you to know this was fixed several weeks ago. This was an oversight on my part as I inadvertently cropped the credit line when I was making copies using the library's microfilm machine. I also got a new copy of the article (complete with credit line) for the clipping book at the reader table.
"Please accept my apologies for this oversight."
That I do gratefully. The credit was given and is appreciated. It even led to Peter Rosen of KUTV-Ch. 2 including me in a report about the controversy.
After working for a TV station and several weekly papers in the East, and after more than 36 years with the Deseret News, I'm preparing to retire in April.
Somehow it's satisfying that a small adventure from the beginning of my journalism career has reappeared at the end.
If you go . . .
What: "Andy Warhol's Dream America"
Where: Utah Museum of Fine Arts, University of Utah
When: Through Sunday, Jan. 6
Gallery hours: Tuesday-Friday, 10 a.m.-5 p.m.; Saturday and Sunday, 11 a.m.-5 p.m. (Monday, closed)
How much: $5 adults, $3 seniors and youth (ages 6-18), children under 5 are free
Phone: 581-7332
E-mail: bau@desnews.com