Joe Dallesandro

Joe Dallesandro’s appearances in Andy Warhol’s account connect Factory filmmaking to a private family grief that emerges only after a change in what he is willing to disclose. In Paul Morrissey’s 1968 film Flesh, he played a male hustler trying to raise money for his girlfriend’s abortion; years later, at lunch with Warhol, he revealed that his brother Bobby had died by suicide, not by accident as he had first said.

Factory Performer and Flesh

In 1968, the Factory’s main activity was making feature-length 16mm films, later enlarged to 35mm for commercial release. Dallesandro was then the Factory’s handsome receptionist and bouncer, and Flesh made him its central figure: an irresistible hustler trying to find money for his girlfriend’s abortion. The role placed him at the center of a story driven by need and money, while his work at the Factory situated him within the informal community around its filmmaking.

Paul Morrissey, who had assisted on Andy Warhol’s Factory films before Warhol was shot, made Flesh himself while Warhol was recovering at home. Jed Johnson assisted Morrissey on the production. When the film began a long commercial run at the Garrick Theater on Bleecker Street in fall 1968, Dallesandro’s Factory role had become a prominent screen part in a film reaching a wider audience.

Two Family Deaths

In late January 1977, the diary records that Dallesandro’s foster mother had died on Long Island the previous week, two weeks after his brother Bobby’s death. Dallesandro was still in the United States and had not yet returned to Europe. The brief report leaves his reasons for remaining there unstated, but places him amid two closely spaced losses.

At lunch with Warhol on February 1, Dallesandro was asked how Bobby had really died. He changed his earlier account, which had described the death as an accident, and said that Bobby had hanged himself. The disclosure is presented without elaboration about the circumstances or motive; the diary instead records Dallesandro’s quietness at lunch. That restraint marks the weight of the revelation without claiming access to more than the scene provides.

Public Role and Private Disclosure

The contrast between Dallesandro’s screen role and the lunch encounter is striking but does not make the film a key to his private life. Flesh gives him a forceful fictional part, defined by a hustler’s effort to raise money; the 1977 entry gives only a small, specific glimpse of a man sharing painful news. The account’s emphasis falls not on an explanation of his grief but on the changed story and his silence after telling it.

Dallesandro thus appears in two different registers: as a Factory performer whose film moved into a sustained commercial run, and as a person whose family losses surface in fragments in Warhol’s diary. The shift from the public visibility of Flesh to the subdued lunch scene gives his brief appearances their particular narrative shape.