Nobody did opaque like Andy Warhol. The dark glasses, the sleepy utterances—he didn’t just immortalize the soup can, he practically was one, inanimate and sealed tight. But as such, was he also a kind of passive destroyer? That’s the premise of Warhol’s Muses, by Laurence Leamer, whose earlier group portrait, Capote’s Women, was the basis for last year’s FX series Feud: Capote vs. the Swans.
His new book is a mixed bag. His prose is adequate, if you ignore the clichés. (In the space of just three pages, we learn that Warhol golden girl Edie Sedgwick had “a wit as sharp as a surgeon’s scalpel” and that people “were drawn to her like flies to sugar.”) But his mission to consider Warhol through his dealings with a succession of devoted women and “superstars,” including “Baby Jane” Holzer, Ultra Violet, Viva, and the beautiful, doomed Edie, is illuminating—up to a point.
