Review: 'Loner at the Ball: The Life of Andy Warhol'

Andy Warhol was the most famous artist of his generation, but he was often criticized as an empty vessel replicating vacuous images of soup cans and celebrities. He was the best-known artist, but he was also seemingly unknowable. He was instantly recognizable because of his iconic look (wan demeanor, white skin, white wig) that seemed to be as much about personal branding as it was about personal style, but he was stoic, and when he did become relatively chatty during interviews, he tended to spin yarns or sell others’ stories as his own just as he sold the Campbell’s company’s designs as his. 

In his 1988 book, Loner at the Ball: The Life of Andy Warhol, serial celebrity biographer Fred Lawrence Guiles took on the sizable task of digging under the Warhol façade. Guiles performed new research to discover Warhol’s actual birthday, worked to dispel certain unsavory myths about the artist (Guiles revealed that Warhol was not the one who introduced friend and fellow icon Edie Sedgwick to the drugs that killed her, as her own biographer suggested), and most importantly, repositioned the spotlight onto Warhol’s sexuality and his fearlessness as a great gay icon. Warhol’s ability to hobnob with the ickily conservative likes of Nancy Reagan, while also having created a great deal of explicit gay pornography, was a feat worthy of some trickster rabbit of mythology. If nothing else, Guiles painted Warhol as ingratiating, which is also amazing considering how atypical his icy charisma was. And though Guiles reveals a great deal about Warhol’s life, the artist still remains at a curious remove, he still remains a seemingly empty vessel, an unknowable icon—which is strangely satisfying, at least for those of us who believe a mystery unsolved is infinitely more interesting than the other option.

Turner Publishing is now republishing Loner at the Ball: The Life of Andy Warhol as part of an ongoing series that has also seen Guiles’s biographies of Marilyn Monroe, Jane Fonda, Tyrone Power, Stan Laurel, Marion Davies, and Joan Crawford.