Liz Taylor running the bases during a softball game on the front lawn was just another Saturday afternoon at Andy Warhol’s Montauk compound. Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis brought young John-John and Caroline when she visited her sister Lee Radziwill who spent the summer of 1971 at Eothen. Mick Jagger and Keith Richards stayed at hotel Andy as they prepared for a 1975 tour. If there was anything more important to Warhol than his art, it was fame, and his prominence as an artist helped him enlist a wide circle of famous friends. In the 1960s his studio, the Factory, was where Andy gathered them, filmed, photographed and painted them, and avoided the solitude that appeared to be his biggest anxiety. The artist thrived on the frenetic energy of the city; though shy, he felt a need to be constantly surrounded by people and he went out nearly every night, driven by the fear that he might miss something if he stayed home.

Not surprisingly, many were puzzled when in 1971 Warhol headed out to the Hamptons with Paul Morrissey, his longtime film collaborator, looking for a house to buy. Tina Fredericks, a former art director at Glamour magazine and an early champion of Warhol’s illustrations when he was fresh from Pittsburgh, loaded the pair into her car and began the tour through the estate sections of Southampton and East Hampton. Fredericks had left the magazine business and moved to the Hamptons to start a real estate business and it wasn’t long before she earned the moniker, “broker to the stars.”

Warhol was unimpressed with the Hamptons until they arrived in Montauk. There, he found the casual, slightly quirky town appealing as well as the perfect setting for a hideaway on the bluffs above the ocean. Bob Colacello, who was the editor of Warhol’s Interview magazine for many years, was staying in Bridgehampton at the time and he recounts his first impressions of the property in his book about Warhol, Holy Terror.

“One Sunday Paul Morrissey called from Montauk to invite us out to see the place he and Andy had bought. Eothen turned out to be an impressive, if understated, compound of five white clapboard houses built in the 1930s, sitting at the end of a long and winding private road on about 20-acres of unspoiled land directly facing the open sea. It was known locally at ‘the Church estate’ after the original owners, an Idaho family, who only used it a couple of weeks each September when the bass fishing was best. Andy and Paul had paid $235,000, 50 percent each, and it’s now worth nearly 20 times that.” Of course, Colacello’s calculation is now outdated: the house is currently on the market, listed with Brown Harris Stevens for $40 million—more than 170 times what Morrissey and Warhol originally paid for the property.
Considering Warhol’s predilections, the purchase of a remote hideway seemed to be out of character. So when he did head out to Montauk, and his 20 acres of open land, it was most often in the company of the tight-knit circle that he had formed by the early ‘70s. It was a group that included Mick and Bianca Jagger, Truman Capote, Pat Ast, Marisa and Berry Berenson, Loulou de la Falaise, Elsa Peretti, Mariana Schiano, Anjelica Houston, Liza Minnelli, Halston, Fred Hughes, Paul Morrissey, and a colorful handful of others. Liz Taylor even made the trip out to Montauk, suggesting that Andy might have the chance to photograph her out there. “‘The natural light might be nice, don’t you think?’” she said to Colacello. “‘God knows, I need all the help I can get.’” Colacello recalled that she was a very different person while staying at Eothen. “She was so relaxed in Montauk that she joined in our softball games and ran around the bases like a big, happy kid.”

The first summer he owned the property, the ever-money conscious Warhol rented the main cottage to Jackie Onassis’s sister, Lee Radziwill. Of that period, Lee wrote in her book, Happy Times: “He was almost allergic to fresh air, but once in a while he felt obliged to leave the city and check in on the happenings at his place in Montauk. Here, a somewhat different person was on display. He loved children and was inventive with them, creating activities in which they became totally absorbed, such as when he sat them down at a large round table in the living room to show them how to edit film in a simple way. He was something of a pied piper, always keeping their attention, always admiring and encouraging them at whatever they did.” Andy clearly couldn’t have been happier about having the former First Lady as a guest and often joked about putting up “gold plaques saying ‘Jackie slept here’ and ‘Lee slept here.’”

Radziwill also spent the better part of that summer with her cousins, the Beales, in East Hampton trying to restore Grey Gardens. It was actually Radziwill who had the idea of making a documentary about Little Edie and Big Edie, enlisting the Maysles brothers to film the two eccentric sisters on the heels of the film, Gimme Shelter, a documentary the brothers made about the Rolling Stones’s fateful Altamont concert.

“We spent long lazy afternoons on the beach,” Radziwill wrote about the time, “talking and burying each other in the sand. At times like this, Andy was as strange as he initially seemed, but revealed himself as a keen subtle observer of everything around him. Often, Truman Capote drove over from Bridgehampton to lunch and gossip for the rest of the day, and Peter Beard was forever doing his collages, moving a windmill from Montauk to the cliffs near the point.”

Even with the colorful characters who would come and go, it never seemed that Warhol was completely comfortable in Montauk. “Andy was an outsider everywhere. Even at home, even within his Factory family,” Colacello wrote. In August of 1977, Warhol’s close friends from the Factory threw him a 49th birthday party in Montauk. “We had a casual dinner around the big picnic table in the kitchen: barbecued chicken from the local deli, birthday cake from Andy’s favorite Manhattan bakers, Les Delices de la Cote Basque, champagne and Negronis, the Montauk house drink, Campari and vodka, heavy on the vodka. We put some old rock ‘n’ roll records on the stereo in the living room…. We were all dancing, in quickly shifting couples and groups. Except Andy. He stood on the edge of the room, snapping an occasional Minox, looking a little bored and very lonely.”
Over the course of the ‘70s, summers saw a never-ending stream of guests to the property, though none probably caused as much of a stir as when the Rolling Stones rented the compound before their ’75 tour. Warhol had first met the Stones in the early ‘60s when they played Baby Jane Holzer’s birthday party and he actually designed the iconic Stones tongue logo as well as the album cover for Sticky Fingers. Mick Jagger had become good friends with Peter Beard when he shot one of their tours—which Truman Capote also covered—and Beard owned a stone cottage just down the beach from Warhol’s property. Following the Stones’s ’72 tour, they had spent a few days recuperating at Beard’s house. They fell in love with Montauk, and as they were gearing up for their ’75 tour they decided to take some time to rehearse and relax out at Warhol’s place. They rented the house for $5,000 a month and the longtime Montauk locals still remember the scene they caused in town.

It didn’t take long for word to get out that the Stones were rehearsing in Montauk and the hotels in town soon filled up with groupies. Late into the night the band could be heard rehearsing far down the beach towards Ditch Plains and it wasn’t uncommon for the estate’s grounds keeper to find fans hiding in the bushes. It was always an event when the band would head into town and stop off for a drink. Jagger and his wife, Bianca, would often go to the Shagwong where they had a decent jukebox and a pool table. “Bianca would waltz into the kitchen to pick out dinner, and kibitz with the crew,” said Jimmy Hewitt, who owned the Shagwong. “She’d roll up the sleeves of her Yves Saint Laurent dress and open clams.” Of course, when most people think of the Stones and Montauk, they recall one of the band’s most popular tunes, Memory Motel, named for a hotel in town. Though their stay in Montauk was brief, the Rolling Stones—like their quirky, reclusive host—couldn’t help but put a permanent imprint on the beach community at the far end of Long Island.

Many people consider Warhol’s greatest art to have been the life he led and the coterie of people he gathered like a lightning rod. While his days and nights in New York have been relentlessly chronicled and examined, his Montauk adventuring and the home that was stage to it, represents a rarified glimpse into the artist’s life as art form.