Laurence Leamer has developed a literary specialty: chronicling the lives of the women behind manipulative male artists. On the heels of Capote's Women and Hitchcock's Blondes comes Warhol's Muses: The Artists, Misfits, and Superstars Destroyed by the Factory Fame Machine, which will burnish Leamer's deserved reputation as a master of the upmarket tawdry.
In the mid-1960s, pop artist Andy Warhol entered the world of filmmaking and needed attractive faces to light up the screen. The bottomlessly researched Warhol's Muses spotlights Baby Jane Holzer, Edie Sedgwick, Viva, Nico, Candy Darling, and five other women who were part of the stable of novice actors Warhol called his "Superstars." Leamer's biographical sketches present the featured muses as disproportionately troubled and vulnerable, and while they're not all tragic figures, the book highlights instances of their drug-abetted self-destruction. Meanwhile, Warhol comes across as someone quite different from the soft-spoken force for good he's often made out to be; here he's something of a calculating social climber (quite a few of the Superstars were women of means). As Leamer sees it, the Superstars "softened [Warhol's] queerness for public consumption and brought him a dose of added glamour, even respectability."
Leamer makes a solid case that, while many of Warhol's women have name recognition, "their contribution to the artistic world they helped to define--and their own artistic ambitions, personal struggles, and occasional triumphs--have been largely overlooked." Warhol's Muses helps redress the injustice. It's a scintillating read that marries two improbable bedfellows: the feminist and the scandalous. --Nell Beram, author and freelance writer