Although Andy Warhol called
NAOMI LEVINE his first superstar, Baby Jane Holzer was the first of Warhol's superstars to attract a lot of media attention.
Jane Holzer was born Jane Brookenfeld on October 23, 1940
(imdb). Jane's father, Carl Brookenfeld, had made his fortune in real estate. Although Jane was raised in Florida, her father also had a place in New York where they spent a lot of time. Jane went to Cherry Lawn School in Darien, Connecticut and then to Finch Junior College until she was expelled, preferring dancing at El Morrocco to studying. After Finch, she started modeling and was catapulted to fame when David Bailey took her photographs for English
Vogue in the summer of 1963.
(KT165-6) Jane Brookenfeld became Jane Holzer when she married Leonard Holzer - the heir to a large real estate fortune. Their home in New York was a twelve room apartment on Park Avenue.
According to Jane, she was introduced to Warhol by Nicky Haslam who, at that time, was the editor for
Show magazine. Jane thought that Nicky might have introduced her to Warhol on the corner of 59th Street, in front of Bloomingdales. According to Holzer, Warhol told her that he was making a movie called
Soap Opera, and asked her if she would like to be in it. Shortly thereafter Jane had a dinner at her father-in-laws house on Park Avenue where she was staying and Warhol came to the dinner. Also at her dinner were David Bailey, Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, David McEwen and Nicky Haslam.
(UW47)
In
Popism, Andy Warhol recollected their meeting slightly differently, saying that the dinner came first, and that he then ran into her on Madison Avenue when she had just got back from "the big '63 summer in London when everything had really started to happen there." According to Warhol, "she couldn't stop raving about a club in Soho in back of Leicester Square, the Ad Lib, where the Beatles would walk by your table - the kind of place where, say Princess Margaret could come in and nobody would even bother to loook up, the beginning of the melting pot in class-conscious London."
(POP59)
Jane was nicknamed "Baby Jane" by columnist Carol Bjorkman. The film,
Whatever Happened to Baby Jane, had just come out and although the columnist had not seen the film, she used the name for Jane Holzer. Jane hadn't seen the film either, but when she did, she "wanted to die" but the name stuck.
(UW47/48)
According to Jane,
Soap Opera was the Warhol first film she worked on - with Jerry Benjamin and Sam Green. She also made a
Screen Test where Warhol just turned on the camera and told her not to blink. She also remembered making a film where she was eating a banana, and then
Batman Dracula.
(UW47)