BILLY NAME
to FEBRUARY 22, 1940: BILLY NAME IS BORN
Billy
Name
(Screen Test - 1964)
Haircut
(1963)/Couch (1964)/Harlot (offscreen)
2 Screen Tests (1964) included in:
50 Fantastics & 50 Personalities and
The Thirteen Most Beautiful Boys/
Lupe (1965)/My Hustler II (1965)/Since (1966)
The Nude Restaurant/**** (1967)
Billy Name lives in New York state and continues to do photography. He was interviewed for a BBC Radio 2 program on Warhol and his collaborators in February 2007. His most recent screen appearance was in Andy Warhol - A Documentary Film (2006) directed by Ric Burns. Other recent films he has appeared in include Andy Warhol: The Complete Picture (2002) and the documentary on mail artist Ray Johnson, How to Draw a Bunny, which won the Special Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival in 2002 and was released on DVD in September 2004. In March 2004 he was one of the speakers at the ATOA artists panel on Ray Johnson in New York.
In August 2002, the United States Postal Service issued a stamp featuring a photograph by him of Andy Warhol. (www.usps.com/news/2001/philatelic/sr01_079.htm) His work was also included in the Max's Kansas City exhibition in Copenhagen which took place September 4 - October 24, 2004, the Andy Warhol birthday exhibit at the Shoreham Hotel in New York in August 2005 and the "Bande à part" exhibit in Paris in 2005.
Billy Name was born Billy Linich on February 22, 1940 and moved to New York in 1958. He called himself Billy Name because "People would ask me what my name was and semi-facetiously I would say my name is Name. I thought it was cute and I'd never seen anyone use the name Name for a name." (EDIE204)
Billy met Andy Warhol while working as a waiter at Serendipity 3 at their original location at 234 East 58th Street:
Billy Name:
"Andy and I were hanging around together. I had an apartment on the Lower East Side, where I had haircutting salons... I was famous for giving haircuts, so he said, 'Would you let me do a film of you doing haircuts?' I had covered my entire apartment in silver foil and painted everything silver. Andy said, 'Well I just got a new loft, would you do to it what you've done to your apartment?'... Andy had a still camera, but he had gotten the Bolex. He was going to start to do films, and he gave me the Pentax, and said 'Here Billy, you do the still photography, I'm going to start making films.' I became the in-house photographer and was sort of like the foreman. Eventually I moved in." (VY37)
Not only was Billy Name responsible for the silver look of the Factory, he also discovered the famous sofa that became the focal point of many of the photographs and films (including Couch) during the silver Factory era. During "one of his midnight outings" Billy found the couch "on the sidewalk of 47th Street near Third Avenue, and dragged it back to the Factory." (DB171)
Billy left the Factory in early 1970 because he felt "isolated" and thought he should "find out what was going on the world". He felt that "Paul [Morrissey] and Fred [Hughes] had pretty much taken over the operations. Andy didn't need me anymore... And I went out and started living in the streets. The most money I had ever had in my life until that time was the $300 I got for the third Velvet Underground album cover. I had $300, so I said, 'Well I have $300 I can go out and see what's going on and do it!' (UW43)
Billy Name:
"I started hitchiking around. I went to Washington, D.C. during the big revolutionary movement, and there were thousands of people camped out in the Mall by the Washington Monument. I stayed there a couple of weeks with people in different tents. Then I went to New Orleans and stayed there for a while. Eventually, I got to San Francisco and looked up Diane DiPrima because I had worked with her years before in New York. I was so debilitated from years of not eating food and taking methamphetamine that I was really not well. I went out to the streets again and eventually got a place in a hotel and started working on concrete poetry-type things. Eventually, in 1977, I came back to my hometown, Poughkeepsie, New York... When I came back, I called Andy and we talked. But I was into community activism here - environmental stuff and getting people food. So I joined a bunch of organizations. I went back to college and got a graduate degree in business administration because in order to get on the boards of directors of these community organizations you had to be sophisticated about budgeting and management." (UW43/4)
WARHOLSTARS CHRONOLOGY
FILMS
WEB
BILLY NOW
(link to Billy Name's website)
Andy Warhol Warhol
