Blake Gopnik - Warhol

Warhol showing the scars from his shooting.

Richard Avedon, Andy Warhol, Artist, New York City, April 5, 1969 (1969). 2020 The Richard Avedon Foundation.

Andy Warhol died, for the first time, at 4:51 P.M. The patients color was newsprint tinged with blue. By any normal measure, this thirty-nine-year-old Caucasian, five foot eight, 145 pounds, was D.O.A.

At the moment that the dead-ish victim was being wheeled in on his gurney, a gifted private-practice surgeon named Giuseppe Rossi, forty years old, was checking on a patient recovering in the intensive care unit. He heard the page on the P.A. and rushed to emergency to see if he was needed. As his juniors filled him in on the case, he reached out to make one final check on the fresh corpse where it lay unmoving, eyes closed, soaking the gurney in blood. He lifted an eyelid and watched as a still-living pupil contracted in the glare of hospital lights. There was work to be done.

Rossi rushed to figure out why his patient, who he took for one of Union Squares tramps, had gone into deep shock.

Warhol was lucky in having Rossi for his doctor that day. The surgeon had immigrated from Italy after the war, when an expanding American medical system let him get training in the new field of open-heart surgery. Since it could still be hard for a foreigner like Rossi to get a staff position, he found gigs in emergency rooms all over New Yorkincluding in Harlem, where he saw plenty of gunshot wounds. Years before hospitals had trauma specialists, by pure chance Warhol had ended up in the hands of a highly trained thoracic surgeon who knew all about bullets.

Residents sliced into the veins in Warhols elbows, pushing in tubes for fluids and blood; they left scars that could have passed for stigmata in the arms of this lifelong churchgoer. Without wasting time on the usual five-minute hand wash, Rossi raced to find the source of the bleeding that was about to turn the body in front of him into a cadaver. He cut open Warhols left chestthe first tissues he sliced through were too drained to bleedand found a nasty rip in the bottom lobe of the lung; a huge metal clamp took care of that for the moment. Even as Rossi worked the anesthetist declared a cardiac arrest. Rossi cut open the sac around Warhols heart, untouched by the bullet, and massaged the organ by hand. Death averted, once again.

Now Rossi cut into Warhols right side, slicing from near the entry wound almost to the breastbone as he hunted for damage. Stories have been told of three or four bullets piercing Warhols body, or of the lead from a single slug ricocheting inside his torso like some hellish pinball game, but Rossi found that a single slug had punched straight through the dying man. He saw where it had nicked the inferior vena cava, a garden-hose vein in the middle of the body that feeds blood from the legs back up to the heart, and that a clot had formed there that was keeping Warhol from instantly bleeding out. Making a new slice into the dying mans chest, down to the bottom of the breastbone then deep through Warhols abs and straight toward his belly button, Rossi ratcheted the mess open with a steel retractor to get a clear look at the damage. Id never seen so much blood in my life, recalled Maurizio Daliana, the chief surgical resident at the time.

Rossi found more destruction: two holes in the arc of the diaphragm muscle, pierced both right and left as the bullet crossed through Warhols body; an esophagus severed from the stomach, so that food and gastric acid were spilling out from below; a liver whose left lobe was mashed and bleeding and a spleen utterly destroyed and spilling more blood than any of the other organs. Solanass bullet had also cut a ragged hole in Warhols intestines, releasing feces and upping the chances of fatal infection.

What was left of the spleen had to go while the livers injured lobe was also a hopeless case. Rossi used huge stitches to seal it off from the bulk of the organ so it could be sliced away without losing more blood, which was still flowing into Warhol as a transfusion and out again through the new holes in his body. By the end of the operation, hed received twelve units of blood; a body without leaks normally holds ten.

Just as things were getting under control, the O.R. was thrown into turmoil again by a visit from the hospitals top doctors. They told the surgeons that the man whose life they had better be saving was the superstar artist Andy Warholthe very man who had made the term superstar famousand a crowd of reporters and groupies was waiting downstairs. He cannot die, said the visitors.

Rossi had barely heard of the artist or his antics.

He returned to the open body and took on the tricky repairs that remained. He tackled the oozing intestines, cutting out the damaged part and stitching together the clean ends. Then there was the severed esophagus to reattach, the most finicky procedure that evening. Rossi had to use the finest silk sutures and make sure the connection to the stomach was perfect. Any misalignment or excess scarring might have left Warhol in misery, unable to swallow properly. He did in fact go on to have trouble eating, remembered one doctor friend.

Exhausted from a long and tense operation, Rossi inserted all the standard tubes for drainage and closed up the body whose innards he had gotten to know.Rossi used huge stitches that gave Warhols torso a network of Frankenstein scars. He showed them off for years to come.

The worst place I have ever been in my life

... with Julia Warhola and big brother John.

Unknown photographer, Julia, John, and Andy Warhola (ca. 1930). The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh; Founding Collection, Contribution The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. 1998.3.5247.

Andy Warholor rather Andrew Warholawas born on the sixth of August 1928, in a grim little flat on Orr Street, in Pittsburghs Soho neighborhood, on a middling-hot day under overcast skies.

Andys eldest brother Paul, who was born in the same room six years earlier, told the story that hed heard his mothers screams and then somebody said, Its half past five was in attendance.

Warhols father was also Andrew (born Andrej or Andrii), a Slav who became an American a few months before his namesake was born.

Andrej was a laborer, like the thousands who worked in the Jones and Laughlin steel mill, a few steps down the hill on the shores of the toxic Monongahela River. He worked there Six decades later, Andy Jr. would die after the same operation.

The screaming young mother was named Julia. She was thirty-six years old, an immigrant housewife with almost no English and a husband and three boys to tend: A middle son named John was three years older than Andy. For weeks or even months at a time her husband would live on construction sites across several states. A 1930 photo shows him and his work crew in Indianapolis, shifting a 12,000-ton building that was still occupied.Heinz brand, of course, a signature Pittsburgh product produced by a family that became patrons of the artist.