MARIO AMAYA
MARIO AMAYA
1933-1986
Mario Amaya was an American art critic, museum director, and magazine editor. He is best known for his association with artist Andy Warhol.
On 3 June 1968, Valerie Solanas went to Andy Warhol’s The Factory (33 Union Square West) at 2:30 pm and was told that Warhol wasn’t there. She leaves and waits outside. Warhol arrives at the Factory at 4:15 pm with his partner Jed Johnson and Solanas meets them outside and joins them and the three enter the building. Even though it’s a hot day, Solanas is wearing a thick turtleneck sweater under a trench coat. Upstairs, Fred Hughes is sitting writing; Paul Morrissey is talking on the phone to actress Viva. Mario Amaya, aged 34, is waiting for Andy in order to discuss an upcoming retrospective in London. Warhol, Johnson, and Solanas arrive, Paul goes to the bathroom, Johnson goes into Warhol’s office and Hughes gets on the phone to speak to Viva.
Amaya, aged 34, was with Warhol inside his office. Solanas takes an automatic weapon and fires a shot, Viva hears the shot over the phone. Warhol screams out, “No, No, Valerie. Don’t do it!” She fires a second time; he falls to the floor and attempts to crawl under his desk. Solanas fires a third time and the bullet enters Andy’s right side and comes out of his back. Believing she had killed Warhol, Solanas turns to Amaya who is crouching on the floor, and fires the fourth shot at him. She misses so she shoots again, hitting him above the hip. The bullet goes through him without damaging any of his organs, and it exits from his back. Amaya gets up and runs to the back room, and uses the weight of his body to hold the door shut. Solanas points the gun at Hughes who is on his knees begging her not to shoot him, “I’m innocent. Please just leave” and she says to him, “I have to shoot you”. Hughes later said that Solanas looked confused and agitated. She then walks over to the elevator and presses the button then returns to him, aiming at his forehead with the gun. She pulls the trigger, but it jams. She grabs a backup gun, from a paper bag but the elevator arrives, and then she leaves.
Viva doesn’t understand what just happened; Hughes tells her that Solanas shot Warhol and then hangs up the phone. Hughes calls for the police and an ambulance. Shortly Gerard Malanga and Angus Maclise arrive 2 minutes at the scene to talk to Warhol about a film.
The ambulance arrives and takes away both Warhol and the wounded Amaya. The driver tells Amaya that it will cost $5 extra to sound the siren, Amaya replies, “Go ahead and sound it.” The men are taken to Columbus Hospital, Warhol is pronounced clinically dead for one and a half minutes before they revive him. They have to operate on him for over five hours and remove his spleen. He survives. Amaya is released from the hospital with minor injuries.
At 8 pm, Solanas walks up to a traffic police officer and says to him, “The police are looking for me and want me.” She hands the guns over to the officer and says, “I shot Andy Warhol” and reasoned it was because “he had too much control of my life”. She is arrested and sent to the hospital for a psychiatric examination. She said, “I just wanted him [Warhol] to pay attention to me. Talking to him was like talking to a chair.”
Solanas had once written a script called ‘Up Your Ass’ and thought that Warhol may be interested in it. She took it to The Factory for him to read. Warhol looked through the script briefly and thought it was ‘dirty’. Warhol lost the script and Solanas wasn’t happy as it was her only copy. Solanas who lived most of her life on the streets started asking Warhol and others for money, Warhol told her to come over and be in one of his movies to earn $25 dollars instead of asking for a handout. Solanas took up Warhol’s offer and came right over and she was filmed for a short scene on a staircase.
Amaya moved and lived in London and wrote books on art. He died from complications of AIDS in 1986 aged 52.
The crime was depicted in the film I SHOT ANDY WARHOL (1996) which stars Lili Taylor, Jared Harris, Stephen Dorff, Martha Plimpton, and Justin Theroux.
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