By SHANE DIXON KAVANAUGH

The Oregonian | OregonLive

He combed through the thrift shops of Portland and crashed for the night at a roadside motel off 99W. The cryptic film he showed students at Linfield College and later the University of Oregon left some baffled, others livid.

“Sir, do you give damn?” one student at the UO asked the celebrated pop artist known for his shock of white-blond hair.

To which the artist responded: “About what?”

Fifty years ago this month, Andy Warhol took top billing on a college campus tour that drew headlines and quite a bit of head scratching. But his two days in the state turned into a sensation and minor scandal when, months later, people learned that Warhol sent an actor on the tour in his place.

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The Oregonian

Scholars hail Warhol’s hoax as a piece of performance art true to his playful and subversive style. Those who unwittingly experienced a part of the stunt first-hand offer a different assessment.

“We were completely hoodwinked,” said Robert Heckard, a student at the time who helped bring Warhol to Linfield. “It was a weird experience that, in the end, just got weirder.”

Warhol was a rising, revolutionary artist when a national speaker’s bureau booked him to appear at four universities in the West in October 1967.

His silk screen prints of American cultural icons like Marilyn Monroe and paintings of Campbell Soup cans had earned him international acclaim. His experimental films and close ties with a new band called The Velvet Underground — whose first album Warhol produced just months before — generated bohemian buzz.

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But word of Warhol — or even the growing counterculture movement sweeping the U.S. — had barely reached the bucolic Linfield campus in McMinnville at that time, Heckard said. Instead, the college was still rooted in the conservative ideals of the 1950s and early 1960s.

A farm kid from Molalla, Heckard studied math and physics. He played in the school’s band and orchestra. He also served on student government with his friend, fellow math major and fraternity brother, Frank Molek, who had grown up in a rural area outside Aloha.

“Neither Bob nor I were flaming radicals,” said Molek, now 71 and a development director at the University of Minnesota. “Quite the contrary.”

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Linfield College archives

The pair also knew next to nothing of Warhol or his coterie of so-called “superstars,” the clique of New York City personalities he promoted.

But as student body president and vice president, Molek and Heckard were dispatched to pick up Warhol and Paul Morrissey, the artist’s manager and co-filmmaker, at Portland International Airport.

Clad in black sunglasses and a leather jacket, the blond-haired creator cut a mysterious figure when the young students met him. Warhol seemed quiet, withdrawn and perhaps shorter than Molek had expected, he said.

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The Oregonian

Heckard interpreted Warhol’s aloofness as some Manhattan artist affect.

“We didn’t expect it to not be Andy Warhol,” Molek said.



But the man was actually Allen Midgette, a young actor who had worked with Warhol and appeared in one of his films that year. At 27, he was 10 years younger than the pop artist, who had secretly decided to send Midgette out on the road in his place.



Midgette, playing Warhol, and Morrisey had already delivered film screenings and talks at The University of Utah and University of Montana before arriving in Oregon on Oct. 4.

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Heckard and Molek had planned to ferry their curious company back to Linfield that afternoon for a brown bag lunch and discussion with art faculty and students.

Morrisey and the phony Warhol had other plans. They wanted to go thrift shopping in Portland. The two students had no choice but to reluctantly go along.

All of four of them hit up a Salvation Army on Northeast Union Avenue — now Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard —as well as several bargain shops along Burnside, according to The Oregonian, which had a reporter tag along for what the paper described as a “happening.”

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The Oregonian

The wannabe Warhol and Morrisey bought paintings, sea shells, leather pouches, a choir boy jacket and a velour-covered photo album. Heckard and Molek each bought sports jackets at the Salvation Army.

“It was a God-awful plaid, but it was only three dollars,” Molek said.

The appearance by the New Yorkers that evening at Linfield left a packed crowd bewildered and somewhat amused.

The projector repeatedly broke down as the pair showed an excerpt of “****,” known as “Four Stars,” an indecipherable 25-hour movie that superimposes two film reels on screen. When asked during a question-and-answer session about his art, the faux Warhol mustered only vague or enigmatic responses.

“There clearly was some disappointment because there was never any obvious insight to his answers,” said Heckard, who is 70 and a mathematics professor at Pennsylvania State University.

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The Oregonian

The headline in The Oregonian read: “Warhol Guards Message Like Nugget.”

After the event, the two Linfield students dropped Midgette and Morrisey off for the night at the Safari Motel — now the McMinnville Inn — on 99W near Northeast Evans Street. They never saw them again.

The next night at the University of Oregon drew a similar, skeptical reception. More than 1,500 people packed into the Erb Memorial Union Ballroom to view the same film excerpt and receive a similar dose of confusion.

The projectors broke down once again. Some audience members grew hostile with the man pretending to be Warhol and his puzzling presence, which led the one student to ask if the artist gave a damn about anything.

“With a two-track movie and an untracked message, Andy Warhol came to Eugene Thursday,” wrote the city’s Register-Guard newspaper.

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The bizarre campus appearances began to arouse suspicion soon after the Warhol tour ended. Student journalists at the University of Utah concluded they had likely been visited on Oct. 2 by a man posing as Warhol after photos of him didn’t appear to match those of the actual artist.

Final confirmation of the hoax, however, would take several more months when a reporter with The Register-Guard caught a lucky break in February 1968. Don Bishoff had heard rumors of the suspected stunt and began digging into them. He soon decided that he needed to go directly to the source.

“I started musing aloud in the newsroom about how I was going to be able to get Andy Warhol,” Bishoff told The Oregonian/OregonLive in an interview.

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Archival photo

Just then, a copy editor at the paper, whom Bishoff described as an “aging hippie,” chimed in and said that he happened to have the number of the payphone inside “The Factory,” Warhol’s Manhattan studio.

“Our managing editor at the time in those days was not fond of hippies, if I recall,” Bishoff said.

Still, he tried the number on Feb. 6. Within a few minutes he was speaking with Andy Warhol — the real one, he was told.

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The Oregonian

“Oh, well, we just did it, well, I, uh, because, uh, I don’t really have that much to say,” Warhol told Bishoff, according to the story he published in the newspaper.

“He was what the people expected,” Warhol said of his alter ego Midgette. “They liked him better than they would have me.”

Bishoff then wanted to know how he could be sure he was speaking with the real Warhol, a question that seemed to stump the artist. Warhol put his hand over the phone and turned to Morrissey, his manager, who was standing beside him. “Paul, how does he know it’s me?”

Two weeks later, Warhol — the real one — returned to the UO as a kind of mea culpa. Once again, the artist screened the perplexing excerpt from “Four Stars” and gave rambling, enigmatic answers to questions. More than 1,000 people showed up for his appearance, The Register-Guard reported.

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Looking back, Bishoff, who is now 80 and retired, said his Warhol scoop was one of the most memorable and unusual stories of his 40-year career at the newspaper.

Heckard and Molek, who later learned of the hoax from an Oregonian reporter, each said the episode was an amusing one that they remember fondly now.

Molek said he kept his plaid jacket for years after and would break it out at cocktail parties.

Midgette and Morrisey, who are both still alive, couldn’t be reached for this article despite multiple phone calls and emails.

Some Warhol scholars contend that the hoax should be viewed as more than just an amusing anecdote in the artist’s life.

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Wayne Koestenbaum (City University of New York)

“It was a fascinating performance piece, putting into question the nature of an artist's identity, and dramatizing Warhol's complex representations of what it meant to dwell inside a body,” said Wayne Koestenbaum, a professor of English at the City University of New York Graduate Center and author of “Andy Warhol,” a biography.

“Embodiment was his life-long subject, problem, concern, quest, medium.”

Bishoff said Warhol’s work never really captured his attention. “I’m still not a big fan,” he said. “But I guess that doesn’t mean he didn’t have some relevance in the art world.”



-- Shane Dixon Kavanaugh

skavanaugh@oregonian.com

503-294-7632 II @shanedkavanaugh