Sam Green was an art director and man about town of whom Andy Warhol wrote: “Sam Green was in everybody’s life, such a big part — he’s had Yoko Ono and John Lennon and Cecil Beaton and Greta Garbo and me.”
Green was certainly ubiquitous. He was variously an art director, adviser and friend to John Lennon and Yoko Ono, early promoter of Warhol, travelling companion of Beaton, and confidant of Garbo. One of the bright sparks of the 1960s, he was a pivotal figure at the heart of the explosion of modern art in the US, the Warhol phenomenon and beyond.
Samuel Adams Green was born in Boston in 1940, the son of “nouveau pauvre” academics. He claimed to be a cousin of Henry McIllhenny, the Philadelphia art collector. After art school he gravitated to New York and from 1962 worked at the Green Gallery, where he did not contradict the assumption that he was the Mr Green of that gallery.
One day an unprepossessing man came in and announced himself as Andy Warhol. He asked if they might be interested in showing his work. Green empathised with Warhol, claiming that the chief trait they had in common was social climbing — a wish to meet everyone important.
It was a wish that both more than fulfilled. Green included some of Warhol’s work in an exhibition principally dedicated to Roy Lichtenstein. One summer he and Warhol filmed naked models in New York bathrooms.
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From 1964 to 1968 Green was director of the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia. In 1965 he arranged a sensational retrospective exhibition of Warhol’s work. At the press preview TV lights fell on to the pictures and they realised that for the private view it was too risky to display the pictures. It did not matter. Green invited 3,000 people and the evening became a mob, with people clamouring for Warhol as if he were a pop star. The doomed socialite Edie Sedgwick called out into a microphone: “Oh I’m so glad you all came tonight, aren’t we all having a wonderful time? And isn’t Andy Warhol the most wonderful artist?” Crowds outside chanted: “Edie and Andy! Andy and Edie!”
Green became a friend of Cecil Beaton — “a guide for Cecil’s prowls through the avant-garde” — and in one afternoon he introduced Beaton, Babe Paley, Diana Vreeland and Cécile de Rothschild to all the gallery owners with whom he did business. He staged exhibitions for Roy Lichtenstein, Claes Oldenberg, James Rosenquist, of Pop Art, Tony Smith and Barnett Newman’s monumental sculpture. He brought Agnes Martin out of permanent retirement to paint again.
Meanwhile, for two years he was landlord to Candy Darling, alias “Jimmy” Lawrence Slattery, the transvestite socialite in Warhol’s film Women in Revolt. Candy called Green “a true friend and noble person”.
In 1968 Green rescued Easter Island from being turned into a jet aircraft refuelling station, transferring a moai, one of the island’s typical stone figures, to the Seagram Plaza in New York to attract attention to the island’s plight. In 1969 he embarked on a scheme to help Venice in Peril, working with the World Monument Fund. This involved artists designing ties and scarves to be sold in aid of Venice. Picasso, Miró, Dalí and Beaton agreed to design, but the project floundered, as Green explained, due to “some greedy intrigue that misfired”.
Once he turned the whole of downtown Philadelphia into a huge sculpture site, as a result of which he was invited by Mayor John Lindsay to advise him on culture in New York. He repeated the operation in New York City, and staged the musical Hair! for free in Central Park.
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Green lived his life on the edge. At times he was flush, at others he faced near ruin. His art dealing secured him a lovely 16th-century home in Cartagena. His mercurial nature helped him weather many storms. He became closely involved with John Lennon and sold him and Yoko many Egyptian artefacts, not always of great merit. At one time, to his horror, the Lennons announced that they wished to see where these came from, and Green had to arrange a spontaneous dig in the Egyptian desert.
Green viewed Yoko with some misgivings. After Lennon’s death he found himself guardian of Sean, their son.
He became a long-time friend and confidant of Greta Garbo and one of a handful admitted to her private apartment in New York. Meeting him with her friend, Cécile de Rothschild, Garbo said: “Mr Green, I’ve been so looking forward to meeting you. I’m sure we are going to have the most wonderful time together.”
For about 20 years he travelled with her extensively in Europe and accompanied her on her lonely walks in Central Park. During their friendship, which eventually ended abruptly as always happened with Garbo, he taped many telephone conversations with her, which he placed at Wesleyan University Film Archives in Middletown, Connecticut, and some of which were later put at the disposal of biographers.
Green’s early friendships and romantic liaisons landed him in two films, not always to his liking. He was portrayed by Carey Elwes in Factory Girl, the tragic life of Edie Sedgwick, the Warhol socialite superstar for whom Bob Dylan wrote Just Like a Woman. Elwes shadowed Green for three days in preparation for his role in the film (in which Sienna Miller played Edie and Guy Pearce was Warhol).
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Less pleasing to him was his portrayal in Savage Grace (2007), directed by Tom Kalin. It concerned the Baekeland murder. In 1969 Green, aged 29, had a holiday fling with the 47-year-old former model Barbara Daly Baekeland. She became obsessed by him to the point that she once crossed Central Park barefoot and naked under a lynx coat to sit outside his apartment late at night demanding admission. The Baekeland fortune had come from plastics (Bakelite).
In November 1972 Barbara was stabbed to death by her deranged son Antony in a penthouse in Cadogan Square, Chelsea. When the police arrived they found Tony on the telephone ordering a Chinese take-away. On release from Broadmoor Tony was sent to live with his grandmother and proceeded to stab her eight times. He was confined to Riker’s Island where, in 1981, he committed suicide by smothering himself in a dry cleaner bag.
Green commented wryly that the book on all this should not have been called Savage Grace but “Plastic to Plastic”. He was extremely displeased to find himself depicted (by Hugh Dancy) as the lover of both mother (played by Julianne Moore) and son (Eddie Redmayne) in the film and entered into litigation with the film company.
Green never fulfilled his early promise, being an inspired instigator but lacking the staying power that might have turned him into an important art director. It was as though many and much passed through his hands, but he failed to capitalise and consolidate. He was a high liver, wildly good company when at his best, but eventually his good living caught up with him and his health suddenly collapsed.
In recent years he was the founder of the Landmarks Foundation, which undertakes projects in Turkey, South and Central America and Cuba. The foundation — motto, “Protecting sacred sites globally” — was the main focus of his last working decade. He relished the restoration work and raising funds for it as a way of doing good, while combining it with his joint loves — exotic travel and elitist social climbing.
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Sam Green, art director and socialite, was born on May 20, 1940. He died on March 4, 2011, aged 70