Attempted assassination of Andy Warhol

The attempted assassination of Andy Warhol in 1968 became, in Pat Hackett’s account, not only a near-fatal event but a fact that remained present in his daily life. Warhol was shot by Valerie Solanas, a woman who had appeared briefly in one of his underground films. When Hackett met him that autumn, about three months later, he was still healing; friends returned to The Factory to ask how he was, and Warhol understood himself as someone who had come back from death.

The shooting and its immediate aftermath

Hackett places the event at a turning point in Warhol’s working life. The shooting came after his rise as an artist and filmmaker, and only months before Hackett began working beside him. The available account gives no detailed chronology of the attack itself, and it does not explain Solanas’s motive. Its emphasis instead falls on how close Warhol came to dying and on the long shadow of that fact after he survived.

At the hospital, just before doctors managed to revive him, they believed he was gone. In a semi-conscious state, Warhol heard words to that effect. Hackett presents this as the source of his enduring sense that he was officially back from the dead from June 1968 onward. Survival, in this recollection, was not an abstract turning point assigned to him later: it was bound to what he had heard while near death, and to the knowledge that the people around him had briefly believed he was lost.

A return to The Factory

The spring of 1968 had already brought a major change in the setting of Warhol’s work. The Factory moved from its original silvered loft on East 47th Street to a white, mirrored loft occupying the sixth floor of 33 Union Square West. By the time Hackett met Warhol that autumn, this new space had become the scene of his return to work and social life. The move was not described as a consequence of the shooting, but it frames the post-shooting period: Warhol was recovering in a changed workplace, amid familiar colleagues and visitors.

In Hackett’s first weeks there, friends who had not seen Warhol since before the shooting came by to check on him. Viva, Ondine, Nico, Lou Reed, and other members of the Velvet Underground were among those who visited. Warhol generally reassured them that he was doing well, sometimes answering with a joke about his hands. The brief exchanges made the ordinary act of greeting him carry an added weight: these visitors were encountering someone whose survival had recently been uncertain, while Warhol was seeing people he had feared he might not see again.

Brigid Berlin also came to The Factory, where she recorded stories for Warhol about the previous night at Max’s Kansas City or the calls she had received from her small room at the nearby George Washington Hotel. Warhol paid her for these performances, usually twenty-five dollars and sometimes as much as fifty after negotiation. Her visits show the Factory’s familiar social and working patterns continuing around him. The events and gossip of the scene still supplied material, and everyday work resumed, even as the reunions carried the private significance of his recovery.

Visible recovery and changed perception

Warhol’s recovery was still physically evident when Hackett began transcribing for him. The two initially spoke little: Hackett typed at a manual typewriter a few feet away while Warhol read or took phone calls. His face often seemed impassive, and his movements struck Hackett as unusual. She later understood that his chest was still wrapped in surgical tape and that he was not fully healed. The account records the injuries only through these practical signs of convalescence, rather than through a description of the attack.

Hackett also recalls that when Warhol laughed, the change in his face made him seem more approachable. That moment sits beside the difficulty of reading his expression and movement: the person returning to the Factory could seem strange to a new employee, yet laughter briefly dissolved that distance. The shooting did not make him a wholly different person in this account; it altered the circumstances in which his familiar reserve, humor, and work habits were encountered.

Memory, recurrence, and significance

Ten years later, Warhol connected the anniversary of Robert Kennedy’s shooting with his own, noting that he had been shot the day after Kennedy. The entry makes the passage of time visible through a public anniversary, but Warhol’s comparison turns the date back toward his own survival. The shooting remained a personal measure of time, one he could recall in relation to another widely remembered act of violence.

The Factory’s history also kept the event from becoming a story about Warhol alone. In 1979, Warhol encountered Mario Amaya, who had stopped by The Factory in 1968 and had been shot in the arm by Valerie Solanas during the attack on Warhol. Amaya was then leaving his job at the Chrysler Museum in Norfolk. His presence in the later diary briefly reconnects the past to a person who had also been injured in the episode, without supplying further details about his experience.

Together, the recollections establish the event through its aftermath rather than through a reconstructed scene of violence: the doctors’ belief that Warhol had died, his prolonged recovery, friends’ visits, a decade-later anniversary, and the later reappearance of another person wounded in the same attack. In Hackett’s narrative, the shooting is consequential because it made survival part of Warhol’s self-understanding and gave ordinary reunions a specific resonance. The account preserves that meaning while leaving the attack itself largely undescribed.