Andrea Feldman was born April 1, 1948, a native New Yorker, which already tells you something. New York doesn’t raise people gently. It raises them loud, restless, sharp around the edges. The city gives you a thousand stages and never once asks if you’re ready.
Andrea went to Quintano’s School for Young Professionals, a performing arts high school — the kind of place where teenagers learn early that life is either a spotlight or nothing. You’re sixteen and already auditioning for survival. Already building a persona because the real self feels too fragile to bring outside.
She didn’t end up on Broadway.
She ended up in Warhol’s world.
And Warhol’s world wasn’t about talent the way old Hollywood was about talent. It wasn’t even about acting. It was about being. About showing up, being strange, being damaged in an interesting way, being beautiful and broken enough for the camera to stare at.
Andrea became a Warhol superstar, which is a glamorous phrase until you realize it mostly means: you are on display.
She starred in three Warhol films — Imitation of Christ, Trash, Heat. Those titles sound like confessions. Warhol didn’t make movies so much as he filmed people unraveling. And Andrea fit perfectly into that unraveling.
She was a regular at Max’s Kansas City, that legendary Factory hangout where everyone was half-drunk, half-famous, and pretending it was art instead of just desperation with good lighting. In the back room she pioneered something she called “Showtime,” stripping on the round table in the center like it was her private altar.
That’s the thing about Andrea: she didn’t enter rooms quietly. She performed her existence. She made herself the event.
But behind the bravado was drugs. Amphetamines. Speed. The chemical version of Warhol’s pace — always faster, always wired, always burning through the night like sleep was for ordinary people.
In the documentary Groupies in 1970, she called herself Andrea “Whips” Feldman. The Warhol crowd gave everyone nicknames like souvenirs, like branding. She sometimes referred to herself as “Andrea Warhol,” as if proximity could become identity.
Her friends called her “Crazy Andy.”
Penny Arcade said something brutal and true: lots of people in the Warhol scene pretended to be crazy, but Andrea really was. She had endless money for everything except mental health.
That line cuts. Endless money, endless nightlife, endless costumes — but no peace.
Her suicide came before Heat was even released. She had a bigger role in it, and critics noticed. Judith Crist wrote about her performance as flat-voiced, freaked-out, heartbreaking — psychotic confusion made visible. Imagine being praised for your collapse.
That’s Warhol’s America: where your damage becomes your best review.
Several days after returning from Europe, Andrea called ex-boyfriends to her parents’ apartment and told them they were about to witness her “final starring role.” Even the end had to be theatrical. Even death had to be framed as art.
On August 8, 1972, she jumped from 51 Fifth Avenue.
She was holding a Bible and a crucifix, though she was Jewish. That detail feels like pure Andrea — symbolism piled on symbolism, confusion wrapped in ritual, a girl trying to find meaning in whatever props were nearby.
Leee Black Childers, her boyfriend at the time, said she’d been acting strange. Engaged, maybe, almost serious, almost stable — but stability was never really her element. Her parents would commit her to Bellevue sometimes, trying to contain her. Trying to control the uncontrollable.
The day before she died, she stood on a chair holding a picture of Marilyn Monroe over her head and said, “Marilyn died; love me while you can.”
That’s one of the saddest sentences imaginable. A woman already gone, begging in advance to be missed.
Geraldine Smith said Andrea left a note saying she loved everyone, that she’d hit the jackpot, going for the big time. Others said the note was nastier, aimed at Warhol. Rumors became part of the mythology, because death in that scene always turned into gossip.
Some said Warhol wasn’t to blame. Some said Andrea blamed him anyway. Smith believed childhood trauma haunted her — abandonment at two years old, hospitalizations, suicide always planned like a script she couldn’t stop rewriting.
Andrea Feldman was twenty-four.
That’s the real shock. Twenty-four. Barely begun, already finished.
Her filmography is short: a few Warhol films, a documentary, some cameos in underground cinema. But her legend is bigger than her credits because she embodied something raw in that era — the way the Factory chewed up youth and called it art.
Andrea was not a polished actress.
She was a wound in motion.
A girl who turned herself into a spectacle because she didn’t know another way to be seen.
And in the end, she made herself the final spectacle.
The Warhol scene went on. Max’s went on. The cameras went on.
Andrea didn’t.
She’s frozen now in those films — flat-voiced, freaked-out, infantile, heartbreaking — a mass of confusion that never got the chance to grow old enough to become anything else.
