Former NYC socialite, Warhol friend

Danny Fields, a member of Andy Warhol’s inner circle, remembered meeting Brigid Berlin, a former socialite who became one of Warhol’s closest friends and a figure in the New York art world of the 1960s and ’70s.

She acted in Warhol films. She recorded the Velvet Underground. She befriended Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, John Chamberlain and Larry Rivers, who all embraced her as a fellow artist, even as she rejected the label for herself.

“As near as you can get to the genesis of the art of the ’60s,” Fields said in an interview, “she was there.”

Berlin died on Friday at a hospital in Manhattan, after several years of health problems that largely confined her to her bed. She was 80.

In a New York scene filled with large, self-invented characters, Berlin — also known as Brigid Polk, because she liked to administer amphetamine injections, or pokes, to herself and others — was a runaway freight train, oversized both physically and in her personality, which alternately terrorized and delighted people.

The daughter of Richard E. Berlin, who ran the Hearst publishing empire for more than 30 years, and Muriel Berlin, an uptown socialite known as Honey, Berlin flamboyantly celebrated everything her parents opposed, and sold family artifacts to buy drugs.

She once rejected a Christmas gift of a Warhol painting, saying she would rather have a washer-dryer.

Brigid Emmett Berlin, the oldest of four children, was born in Manhattan on Sept. 6, 1939. She grew up on Fifth Avenue in a home frequented by political figures, including Presidents Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon and FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover.