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The first and only time I interviewed Warhol was in 1969, a little more than a year after [his near-fatal shooting by Valerie
Solanas]. The interview was in connection with a piece that I was doing for the catalogue of his 1970 retrospective at the Pasadena Art Museum. Warhol wasn’t anything like what I had expected. Instead of a barely articulate, slightly sinister manipulator of troubled souls -- "a Sphinx with no secret," as Truman Capote once called him -- he came across as playful, sly, funny, and very alert. He had his own tape recorder going throughout the interview -- he taped everyone in those days -- and he asked the first question, which was "Do you have a big cock?" I wasn’t as thrown as I might have been, because I thought he’d said "clock" -- "Not especially," I replied, glancing at my wrist -- but we both understood right away who was in charge. He said he had tried, unsuccessfully, to persuade John
Coplans, who was organizing the retrospective, to limit it to a single painting. "It doesn’t really matter if you show one picture or fifty," Warhol told me, "and it would be so much more elegant to show just one." He went on to say he wished there was a way to make money without working. "I thought after I was shot maybe I wouldn’t have to work anymore, but I do," he confided. "And it’s so hard to get ideas." He talked about Frank Stella ("That’s where I got my idea of repetition") and about why he admired Jasper Johns (because "he gets five hundred dollars for a drawing -- even Picasso didn’t get that much"), and he asked if I could get into my article the fact that Eleanor Ward, his former dealer, had a painting of his that she didn’t own and wouldn’t give back. At the end of the interview, he said, "Have I lied enough?"
-- Calvin Tompkins in the New Yorker
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