I first heard the name Carlton Willers while interviewing author Victor Bockris, when Bockris was in Philadelphia to introduce an early (and bad) Andy Warhol film entitled “Kitchen.” Willers, Bockris told me, was Andy’s first intimate friend. Not only that, but Willers actually lived in Philadelphia. A few days later I found Willers’ name in the white pages and called him to introduce myself.  

 Talking with Willers in a Center City café, I tried to imagine what Andy Warhol saw in him so many years ago when the two met in the New York Public Library. When they met, Willers was 20 years old and working as the secretary for the curator in the picture collection. Andy used to come to the library all the time to borrow photographs for his work.

 “Lots of artists came in there. Andy was one of them and that’s how I met him,” Willers said. “One day he came up to me and said, ‘You wanna go on a picnic with some people in Central Park?’”

 The year was 1953. After the picnic, Willers says he went to Andy’s apartment almost every evening.

 “I often stayed there because Andy would work all night,” Willers said. “He was doing ad work in those days and making lots of money doing it. There weren’t that many galleries then. It was a lot of fun for me and I helped him with a lot of that, as did a lot of people. He loved to go out to the theater. He would never go alone and I would always go with him. He liked the wonderful musicals of the 1950s. It was a lot of fun for me, a kid from Iowa, who entered the Air Force, then went straight to New York. Andy was a lot of fun in those days. He was playful.”

 In those days Andy was living in a top-floor apartment with his mother, Julia. Willers remembers Julia as being extremely funny and kind. He said that everybody loved her because she was even more playful than Andy.

 “She was innocent and spoke this broken English and was always taking care of Andy,” Willers recalled. “She was this old Czech lady. She was as funny as Andy and she loved to laugh at funny things. Andy had many cats then, eighteen of them. They were all named Sam. Some of them were inbred and many of them were getting a little queer; they were cross-eyed, some of them. In those days Andy had a mess of stuff around him. There was always paper and art work because he was busy doing advertising and the cats would come along and knock over whole bottles of India ink, but Andy never got upset. Then his mother would come in with this big bucket and mop — she just looked like a Czech chore woman. She had her bedroom in the back and she’d go to her Byzantine Catholic church every Sunday.”

 Willers says that Julia would cook, though she’d never eat with him and Andy. “She was always very nice to me but the only time Andy and me had any time together was late at night after she had gone to bed and fallen asleep in the bedroom in the back,” Willers said. “She also called me Andy’s boyfriend. To her a boyfriend was just a chum. To her, I was just staying over because I was helping him with his work. She was special because I don’t think she understood much about Andy’s world. I don’t think she understood the gay thing at all.”

 Julia, of course, had just come to New York one day on a visit and never left. She also kept trying to get Andy interested in girls. “Andy thought this was hilarious,” Willers said. “Sometimes people would come to the studio and she’d see them and point out a girl and say, ‘Andy, why don’t you get married to her?’”

 “Andy’s ad drawings were very elegant and beautiful in those days and everyone knew it. Here’s this little boy — he really was a boy in those days with his cap on… literally, his shoe laces would always be broken and his tie would be askew but he’d walk into the Bonwit and Teller Ad Department and everybody loved him. He already had an image of himself, a persona,” Willers said.

 Willers believes that he was Andy’s only authentic boyfriend. “He was kind of asexual, but gay. He didn’t have a gay life though, he had a thing about beautiful people. I think he might have intimidated people — I wasn’t intimidated. I saw there was no line there. I just went right across it and I think he was very touched by it in a way,” Willers said, adding that, “He was certainly not passionate. He was more passionate about food and eating. He loved going to certain restaurants where he liked the people. I think he loved having me there every night because otherwise he was alone with his mother.”

 Willers said that once in a while, while cuddling, Andy would cry. “This would usually come unexpectedly or spontaneously about something in his past that was sad,” he said. “And he did have a somewhat sad past. They were very poor. His mother was always kind to him though. He was her favorite.”

 Sometimes when Willers was with Andy there would be mild arguments but these happened when friends of Andy’s would say, ‘Let’s go to this party,’ and Andy would say no because he would not like somebody who was going to be there.

 Andy was obsessed with becoming famous and he’d often say, “Gee, I wish I could be famous,” though Willers doesn’t think that Andy ever thought he’d become as famous as he did.

 He was also insecure about his looks. “I thought he was much too self-conscious. He hated being bald and his tendency to put on weight. He liked sweets a lot. Often after he was out running around the town he’d buy all these voluptuous cakes and pastries and he liked ice cream, and that got him through the night sometimes.” To hide his baldness, Andy wore caps in the 1950s. “He wouldn’t take the cap off,” Willers says. “We’d go to rather nice dinner parties with rather nice prestigious people and he wouldn’t take his hat off. He wouldn’t even take his cap off in the theater. One day I said, ‘Andy, why don’t you get a hairpiece or something?’ He actually did. He went to some place and got a very nice, well-matched hairpiece. He looked great in it. It looked like his real hair. Later, as his hair got completely white, he started going for white hairpieces.”

 Willers said that when he started at Columbia he didn’t see Andy on a regular basis, that he was too busy studying and working. When he finished at Columbia he was offered a teaching job at Carnegie Tech, Andy’s old alma mater. “Andy was intrigued by this. When I went out there I’d get cards from him and I’d visit him when I visited New York.”

 But something had changed. Andy was no longer the little blond boy with the untied shoe laces walking around with his ad drawings, but had taken up with a film crowd and was now dressing in leather. “He remade himself,” Willers said. “He didn’t really look good in leather. He was a totally different person. People who had known him before didn’t know how to treat him because he wasn’t the old Andy. They realized they were part of Andy’s old world and not a part of the new world. It didn’t bother me. He was starting to get famous for his pop art work and then started to make these films. The film people changed him. He almost didn’t want to recognize you in the street when he ran into you. That happened to me several times but it truly didn’t bother me because I didn’t want to be in that world anyway. I knew he had to be in that world. But I still ran into him from time to time when he wasn’t with those people and he was still the same old Andy.”

 After this, Willers said, the wigs got crazier and crazier.

 When Willers moved back to New York and opened a small art gallery, Andy came to visit from time to time. Willers would also run into him a lot at auctions. “He would often be alone, buying art. That’s when I would run into him and we would talk and he was very much the same.”

 When Andy died, Willers was invited to the private memorial mass at Saint Patrick’s cathedral but opted not to go. He wasn’t ready for all the hoopla. “Once you get to a certain point,” he said, talking about Andy’s fame, “it feeds on itself and it gets bigger and bigger. Andy didn’t deal well with this towards the end of his life. He tried to keep up this persona. Had he lived to be old, where would that have gone? How could he take off these masks and be himself again? This would have been very difficult… everybody wanted him to be Andy Warhol. I think this happens to people who become famous and some people deal with it well and some don’t.”