Drug-fuelled photographer who chronicled Warhol studio
Norma Milford was born in Whanganui and raised there with an older brother by her mother, a tailor, and her father, a manager of movie theatres.
After her high school years in Palmerston North, Milford got a job at the Post Office. She was one of the first women tellers to work there – a first she would repeat in years to come.
After her engagement to Tracy ended, she eventually began a relationship with Maurice Milford, a New Zealand army man she and Tracy had double dated with. They married in 1948 and had two daughters and a son, whom they raised in the Bay of Plenty and, later, Auckland.
When their children reached high school age, Milford went back to work, again with the Post Office.
She climbed the ranks and in the mid-1970s became New Zealand’s first female postmaster.
It wasn’t easy for the determined, yet gentle Milford. There were times she had to fight her corner to get the job done. The workforce was not ready for a woman to be at the helm, especially at the Post Office which was fairly set in its ways in those days.
She was not a forceful woman but believed she was as able and determined as any man to do the job.
She had to give up a lot, says her daughter Donna.
‘‘She had to miss a lot of school functions because she could not get the time off. There was an expectation that if you were going to work in a man’s world you had to work in a man’s way.’’
Milford and her husband remained happily married for 49 years before Maurice died in 1997.
Tracy, meanwhile, had also moved on with his life.
After being invalided from the war, he returned to his former trade as a printer and married a nurse – also named Norma. They had five children and spent 64 years together.
Milford and Tracy saw one another only once, in 1989, when Tracy and his wife were on holiday in New Zealand.
After his wife’s death, he reconnected with his wartime sweetheart through his Catholic Church in 2011.
Milford received a call from her parish asking her if she had ever been engaged to an American marine. She was surprised and delighted Tracy had tracked her down.
The pair began corresponding and, after a year, Tracy came out to New Zealand. He proposed to her the day after his arrival, Milford’s 89th birthday.
She accepted and the pair became engaged 70 years after they first met.
While they remained living separately in Ohio and Auckland, they would speak on the phone several times a week and correspond by mail. Tracy would often send her a dozen red roses, as he had done when they had first met.
Milford, who is survived by Tracy, 96, her three children, seven grandchildren and one great-grandchild, died at Lynton Lodge Hospital in the Auckland suburb of Westmere, ending the final chapter of a great love story.
Sources: Delwyn Dickey/Stuff, Milford family. Billy Name, photographer: b Poughkeepsie, New York, February 22, 1940; died Hudson, New York, July 18, 2016, aged 76.
As a boy growing up in Poughkeepsie in upstate New York, Billy Linich watched workmen painting the bridge over the Hudson River with silver industrial paint. The image left an imprint in his mind and years later inspired him to decorate Andy Warhol’s Manhattan studio known to the world as the ‘‘Factory’’ - in silver spray paint and aluminium foil. It was in Linich’s shiny, space-age, pop-art installation that Warhol created his films and paintings, and played host to New York’s artistic demimonde.
By then Linich was known as ‘‘Billy Name’’, a Warholian pseudonym he thought of when filling out his name on a form. In addition to being Warhol’s interior designer, he became the artist’s right-hand man. Acting as his secretary, archivist, bouncer, handyman and security guard, he was an indispensable ‘‘can do’’ figure amid the sea of exotic, oddball and frequently unstable characters that Warhol gathered around him.
‘‘I was the Factory foreman and I made things operate,’’ Name said. ‘‘Often, when we went out, I had to rescue him [Warhol] from people who would pin him in a corner of a gallery and start pelting questions at him.’’
Thin and habitually dressed in a T-shirt and tight jeans, Name oozed an ineffable New York hipness. He was for a time ‘‘sort of Andy’s boyfriend’’, as he put it. The relationship progressed from ‘‘awkward attempts to be lovers to being conspirators in the fine arts’’ when Warhol one day handed him a 35mm Honeywell Pentax camera and told him: ‘‘Here, Billy, you do the stills photography.’’
Name knew little about taking pictures but figured that pointing a lens and pressing a shutter button could not be that difficult. ‘‘I didn’t consider myself a photographer until much later,’’ he said. ‘‘I wasn’t influenced by any other photographer and I hadn’t looked at any books or shows. I just took the camera when Andy handed it to me and I went to the store the next day and bought the manual. That’s how it began.’’
After tutoring himself he became Warhol’s in-house photographer and converted a bathroom at the Factory into a darkroom. He went on to take thousands of pictures chronicling the day-to-day happenings on Planet Warhol and photographing a cast of characters that included the coterie of ‘‘superstars’’ from Warhol’s films such as Edie Sedgwick, Candy Darling, Baby Jane Holzer and Joe Dallesandro, as well as visiting musicians including Bob Dylan and Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground.
The result was a unique portfolio of black and white pictures that captured the creative fecundity of a time and place that has since attained almost mythic status in the history of popular culture.
Subsequently exhibited in galleries and anthologised in coffee-table books, Name’s photographs also appeared on the sleeves of the Velvet Underground’s records and his portrait of Warhol was printed on a US postage stamp.
‘‘The only things that ever came even close to conveying the look and feel of the Factory then, aside from the movies we shot there, were the still photographs Billy took,’’ Warhol wrote in a 1980 memoir.
Name worked for Warhol for six years, throughout his most mercurial and productive period from 1964 to 1970. Four years after decorating the original Warhol ‘‘Silver Factory’’ on East 47th Street, in Midtown Manhattan, he helped the artist to move the studio to the Decker Building on Union Square. Addicted to the amphetamines that were common currency among Warhol’s circle, Name took up residency in a tiny darkroom and became a virtual recluse.
In a foreword to a book of his photographs, the Velvet Underground’s John Cale described him as a pimpernel, ‘‘disappearing into his room for months at a time only to emerge, to take pictures, then retreat back into silent oblivion’’. Those who listened at his locked door heard him talking to himself in two different voices, while Warhol reported finding take-out containers and yoghurt pots in the trash outside his room, but never being sure ‘‘whether he went out himself at night to get food or whether friends brought it in to him’’.
On June 3, 1968, the sound of gun shots rudely forced him to emerge from the darkroom. To his shock he found Warhol lying in a pool of blood: he had been shot by Valerie Solanas, a feminist playwright suffering from paranoid schizophrenia who was convinced Warhol was stealing her ideas. ‘‘I went to him and took him up in my arms and I started crying,’’ Name recalled. His former lover told him: ‘‘Oh Billy, don’t make me laugh, it hurts too much.’’
Warhol pulled through after a five-hour operation but, according to Name, he was never the same again and lived in fear of further attacks. ‘‘It was the cardboard Andy, not the Andy I could love and play with,’’ Name said. ‘‘He was so sensitised you couldn’t put your hand on him without him jumping. I couldn’t even love him anymore, because it hurt him to touch him.’’ He left the Factory two years later, leaving a note pinned to the door that read, ‘‘Dear Andy, I am not here anymore, but I am fine. With love, Billy.’’
William Linich Jr was born in 1940 to Mary (nee Gusmano) and Carlton Linich, a barber. He grew up as an ‘‘average repressed young American’’, engineering his escape from ‘‘the mediocrity of middle-class life in Poughkeepsie’’ by fleeing in his late teens to Manhattan. There he immersed himself in Greenwich Village’s bohemian art scene. He worked as a theatre lighting designer and in his spare time would throw ‘‘hairdressing parties’’ in his loft.
He met Warhol in 1959 while working a second job as a waiter at the restaurant Serendipity 3 and invited him back to his apartment - where the artist was impressed to find everything had been painted silver, the prototype of the look he later applied to the Factory.
He also wrote and performed concrete poetry at events at which he met John Cage and Yoko Ono and the like.
After he left the Factory he moved to New Orleans and later to California. He became a Buddhist, exchanging the lean New York hipster look for a flowing Allen Ginsberg-style beard. He spent his final years back in Poughkeepsie living in assisted housing in reduced circumstances, although his photographs continued to provide a residual income. Friends suspected that he never recovered from finding Warhol with his gunshot wound and his drug use took its toll on his mental health.
In his final interview in 2015, when an exhibition of his photography was staged at the Serena Morton gallery in London (entitled Billy Name - The Silver Age), he said that he missed the 1960s ‘‘when I was really free’’ but that he did not regret escaping the druggy, claustrophobic atmosphere of Warhol’s Factory. ‘‘I was just saturated,’’ he noted. ‘‘I wanted to breathe the air outside, so I said, ‘I’ll go out and see what the planet is doing’. ’’ The Times