Reflections on ... Brigid Berlin (6 September 1939 – 17 July 2020)

/ Portrait of Andy Warhol and his entourage of Superstars by Cecil Beaton, 1969. Left to right: Brigid Berlin, Candy Darling, Warhol and Ultra Violet /

Farewell to one of the last surviving Warhol Superstars (and last links to old-school New York bohemia) Brigid Berlin (sometimes known as Brigid Polk, 6 September 1939 – 17 July 2020), who has died aged 80. 

Like fellow Superstar Edie Sedgwick, Berlin was the wayward daughter from an old money high society family (her father was the chairman of the Hearst media empire) who jettisoned the role of debutante ordained for her to gleefully letting her freak flag fly at the Royal House of Warhol in the sixties and seventies instead. As Berlin herself explained, “My mother wanted me to be a slim respectable socialite … instead I became an overweight troublemaker.” 

/ Portrait of Brigid Berlin by Gerard Malanga, 1971 /

An outsized character in every sense (at one point her weight topped 300 pounds), Berlin is a ferocious, abrasive, frequently naked, sometimes scary and often hilariously funny presence in the underground cinema of Andy Warhol. Her performances in films like Chelsea Girls (1966), Imitation of Christ (1967), and Bad (1977) are rivetingly obnoxious. Berlin was also a notorious speed freak, who terrorized the unsuspecting in the VIP backroom of bohemian haunt Max’s Kansas City by jabbing them with her hypodermic needle of amphetamines. (Warhol films Berlin furiously ranting and shooting-up speed in Chelsea Girls). 

/ Dual Polaroid portrait of Berlin with fellow Warhol Superstar Nico, circa early seventies /

Berlin was also an artist in her own right, using the mediums of Polaroid photography and “tit prints” (dipping her own breasts into paint and pressing them onto paper). Until Warhol’s death, Berlin (who’d kicked amphetamines by this point) worked as the receptionist at his Interview magazine – albeit an extremely unconventional one. (She preferred to eat candy, knit and fuss over her pet dogs than answer telephones). It’s undeniably disillusioning and bizarre to learn that as she aged, the rebellious Berlin gradually reverted to type, ultimately becoming every bit as conservative as her patrician socialite mother. Towards the end of her life, Berlin was even a Trump supporter! I did warm to her, though, when I read that in Berlin’s reclusive housebound later years, she “cleaned obsessively, then cleaned some more.” For me, the unapologetically butch and androgynous Berlin exuded a “big dyke energy”, but the otherwise thorough New York Times obituary doesn’t touch on her sexual preferences or romantic life. Director John Waters was an admirer (Berlin made cameo appearances in Waters’ films Serial Mom (1994) and Pecker (1998) and he wrote the introduction to her coffee table book of Polaroid photography). In the NY Times obit he sweetly recalls, “I was scared of her in the best way.” Berlin is the subject of the 2000 documentary Pie in the Sky: The Brigid Berlin Story, which I clearly need to see.