Billy Name

Billy Name was the photographer behind the silver look of the original Factory on 47th Street, as well as a figure associated with its amphetamine-centered social life. After the Factory moved to Union Square, he retreated into a darkroom at the back of the loft and, years later, resurfaced in Andy Warhol’s diary through a request concerning his photographs and an invitation to reunite with the old circle. His trajectory moves from shaping the Factory’s atmosphere to withdrawing from it, then returning as a voice from a past Warhol said he could not face.

The Factory and the darkroom

Billy Name’s importance at the 47th Street Factory was both visual and social: he was responsible for its distinctive silver appearance and for a social world centered on amphetamines. At the new Factory in Union Square, he established a small darkroom at the back of the loft and began living there. The change in location did not simply relocate him; it marked the beginning of an increasingly private existence within the shared Factory space.

Over several months in 1968 and early 1969, Billy withdrew from daytime activity. He emerged only at night, after everyone else had left. The people at the loft had little evidence of his everyday life beyond empty take-out containers in the trash the following day. The account makes those containers a small, practical sign of continued existence, set against the growing absence of any ordinary contact.

This nocturnal life continued for more than a year. One morning, Jed Johnson arrived as usual to open the loft and found the darkroom door wide open. Billy had gone. The account gives no explanation for his departure, and the open door registers the change without resolving it: a person who had made himself nearly invisible within the Factory was now absent altogether.

Photographs and the Edie book

In March 1982, Warhol received a letter from Billy asking him to give photographs from the original 47th Street Factory to Jean Stein for her biography of Edie Sedgwick. Warhol did not want to hand them over. His resistance was tied to his dislike of Stein and to reports that her book portrayed him as a social climber, a description he insisted was untrue. He said he would be willing to spend the time finding the pictures, but did not want to supply them under those circumstances.

The next day, Paul Morrissey told Warhol that Stein had read him a passage attributed to René Ricard and that Morrissey had threatened to sue if it appeared in the book. Warhol then called Stein himself to ask for a galley and to challenge what he had heard. Stein said the material came from taped interviews, but could not provide a galley. In the exchange, Warhol distinguished his specific grievance from the rest of the biography: he believed that even if other material about him proved fascinating, the label “social climber” was false and particularly troubling.

When Warhol learned that the book had received a six-figure advance from the Book-of-the-Month Club, he reconsidered what Billy’s photographs might mean commercially. Rather than give them to Stein, he thought Billy might make more by publishing his own portfolio of Edie photographs. Warhol planned to write to Billy with the idea; the diary does not establish whether he did so or whether Billy published such a portfolio. The episode nevertheless returns some agency to Billy’s images: they were not only archival material for another author’s biography, but photographs that Warhol imagined Billy could publish himself.

A proposed reunion and an unanswered past

By January 1987, Billy was calling Warhol from Poughkeepsie, where he was organizing a reunion of people from the sixties. He had several jobs there, one of them deputy sheriff, and spoke affectionately to Warhol, saying, “You know how deeply I love you, honey.” He described Gerard Malanga and Ingrid Superstar as part of the gathering and imagined Warhol being picked up and taken to Stephen Shore’s house, where Shore worked at Bard College.

The invitation met not with a reported acceptance or refusal, but with Warhol’s inward resistance: he thought he would have to tell Billy that he could not face the past. The contrast is sharp. Billy was actively assembling the old circle and speaking in terms of love and reunion; Warhol, hearing the invitation, anticipated the difficulty of returning to that history. His diary also pictured Billy arriving by bus with a YMCA satchel and speculated that he might not want to be seen because he was heavier. Those details are Warhol’s imagined image of Billy, not a record of Billy’s appearance or plans.

Absence, memory, and the Factory’s afterlife

Billy’s appearances in the diary are separated by long silences: first the darkroom retreat and departure, then the request about the photographs, and finally the calls from Poughkeepsie. The sequence does not supply a continuous account of his life after leaving the Factory. Instead, it shows how he re-enters Warhol’s world through traces and proposals: the original Factory pictures, the prospect of a self-published portfolio, and the possibility of gathering the old group again.

Those returns also expose different relationships to the past. The photographs make the Factory’s history available to a new book and potentially to Billy as publisher; the reunion would turn that history into a gathering of surviving participants. Warhol’s hesitation leaves the proposed return unresolved. Billy, once responsible for the Factory’s silver image, appears in the later diary as someone trying to reconnect its people, while Warhol remains unsure he can meet the past face to face.