Pie in the Sky :: Essays Papers

Pie in the SkyAmong the oddballs and exhibitionists who clustered around Andy Warhol in the 1960s and70s perhaps the scariest was Brigid Berlin, a chubby, motormouthed rebel from an upper-crust New York urban center family who relished the way her underground celebrity embarrassed her proper conservative parents. Her father, Richard Berlin, a friend of Richard M. Nixon and an admirer of Senator Joseph R. McC cheathy, ran the Hearst Corporation, which he had helped save from bankruptcy in the 40s. Her mother, H singley, was an elegant,ladies-who-lunch-style socialite of the old school.Ms. Berlin was one of Warhols favorite telephone companions, and she taped hundreds of hours of their conversations, some of which were adapted into a play called Pork that flaunted the Berlin family strife. Like many of Warhols acolytes, she fancied herself an artist and was one of the first art world personages to work with a portable tape recorder and Polaroid snapshots (she specialized in double exp osures).Her more notorious antics included a theatrical carrying out in which she telephoned her parents from the stage without their knowledge and broadcast live her mothers furious tirade about her lifestyle and choice of friends. That lifestyle included an addiction to speed (in the 1966 Warhol movie, The Chelsea Girls, she vie a pill-pushing lesbian who shoots up in front of the camera) as well as an eating disorder that pushed her weight to 260 pounds. Despite her obesity, Ms. Berlin often appeared nude in Warhols movies, displaying not a trace of self-consciousness.Excerpts from her taped conversations with Warhol and with her mother run through Pie in the Sky The Brigid Berlin Story, Shelly Dunn Fremont and Vincent Fremonts unsettling close-up portrait of Ms. Berlin, which opens today at the Film Forum. This fascinating except somewhat repellent documentary repeatedly contrasts interviews with Ms. Berlin filmed two years ago when she turned 60 with excerpts from the mos tly black-and-white Warhol films in which she radiated the aggressive fury of a B-movie prison matron.Much slimmer today than in the Warhol years, Ms. Berlin, who lives on the East Side of Manhattan with two dogs, looks sleek and matronly at 60. But when she reminisces, it becomes clear that she retains a lust for the spotlight along with a continuing inability to edit what comes out of her mouth. As she chattily recounts a life of squandered privilege and use opportunity, the movie casts a bitter chill.