Andy Warhol and Jed Johnson

Andy Warhol and Jed Johnson’s relationship took shape across two closely connected settings: the collaborative work of The Factory and the East 66th Street townhouse that Johnson found for Warhol. The surviving account makes their intimacy most legible through these shared spaces and changing work arrangements. It follows Johnson from his first practical assignments at the Factory to film collaborations and, after Bad, a life beyond the office that remained tied to the house.

Arrival and Work at The Factory

Johnson arrived in town from Sacramento in the spring with his twin brother, Jay Shriver, and soon began working at The Factory. His first jobs were practical: stripping paint from wooden window frames overlooking Union Square and building shelves in the back of the loft to store film cans. The account presents this labor as his entry into a working environment organized around filmmaking, rather than as an introduction through a formal artistic role.

In his spare time, Johnson learned to edit film on the Factory’s Moviola, experimenting with reels of San Diego Surf and Lonesome Cowboys. Both films had been made by Warhol during a Factory filmmaking trip to Arizona and California, before Warhol was shot. Johnson’s self-directed practice connected his initial maintenance work to the studio’s existing body of films: he began by handling the space and its storage, then learned to work with the footage itself.

Collaborative Film Projects

Johnson’s place in the Factory’s filmmaking widened through projects involving Warhol, Paul Morrissey, and Fred Hughes. Women in Revolt and L’Amour were collaborative Factory productions, with all four involved in casting, shooting, and editing. The account describes shared participation across several stages of production, giving Johnson a role within a collective process rather than presenting him only as a technician or assistant.

In 1974, Morrissey went to Italy to direct two films for Carlo Ponti’s production company, which Warhol ultimately presented as Andy Warhol’s Frankenstein and Andy Warhol’s Dracula. Johnson and the diarist went to Italy to work on them. Morrissey remained in Europe after the films were finished, effectively ending his role as a major influence at the Factory. Johnson’s participation in the Italian work therefore belongs to a period when the Factory’s collaborations were extending beyond New York even as one of its central creative relationships was winding down.

The Townhouse and Everyday Context

The East 66th Street townhouse links Johnson’s working history with Warhol to their domestic circumstances. Johnson had found the Federal-style house for Warhol, who moved into it in 1974. Johnson continued to live on its fourth floor even after he stopped working at the Factory office. The account thus records a change in professional proximity without presenting it as an immediate break in shared surroundings: Johnson left the office, but remained in the building associated with Warhol’s home.

Warhol’s weekday routine offers a view of the household around that address. After his morning diary call, he would take his dachshunds, Archie and Amos, from the third floor, where his bedroom was, down to the basement kitchen for breakfast with his Filipino housekeepers, sisters Nena and Aurora Bugarin. The routine establishes the house as a lived-in, vertically organized setting, with Warhol’s daily movements crossing floors and involving both staff and dogs. It does not specify Johnson’s part in these mornings, so the significance of the detail is contextual: the townhouse continued to structure Warhol’s everyday life while Johnson lived upstairs.

Leaving the Office, Not the House

After Bad received critical success, Johnson never returned to work at the Factory office. He began buying and selling antiques and then started his own decorating business. The shift marks a distinct change in the relationship’s documented working dimension: Johnson moved from Factory film and office activity toward independent work in antiques and interiors. The account does not describe this career change as a consequence of conflict between the two men, and it offers no explicit explanation for why he stopped working at the office.

Johnson’s continued residence on the townhouse’s fourth floor complicates any simple account of departure. Warhol eventually vacated the Lexington house, and Fred Hughes moved there from his apartment on East 16th Street; Johnson, meanwhile, remained in the East 66th Street townhouse he had originally found for Warhol. The narrative therefore gives the relationship an uneven ending in practical terms: Johnson left the Factory’s work life after Bad, but the residence that had connected him to Warhol persisted as a place in his own life. The record emphasizes this overlap of collaboration, home, and changed careers, while leaving the private emotional meaning of the transition unstated.