Andy Warhol Slept Here?: Famous and Infamous Visitors to Utah By Will South Signature Books (Salt Lake City), 1998. Paperback: 81 pages. ISBN: 1-56085-109-0 Suggested retail price: $12.95 (US)
Reviewed by: Eric Eliason

Will South's small and very expertly illustrated book entertains with vignettes about famous visitors to Utah. The question of what those beyond the mountains around us think of "the Mormon state" when they pass through has fascinated the Saints since first settling in the Salt Lake Valley. Utah's LDS residents in particular sport a split consciousness about this issue. At once we heed not what the wicked may say, yet secretly wish that the luminaries of the world would be astute enough to recognize the special variety of truth and beauty that we have nurtured here and praise us using the eloquence and grace for which they gained their fame.

All too often, to our dismay, famous visitors have employed their skills to mock or belittle or condemn our efforts at Zion building. Perhaps even worse, many more according to South's reports, had little to say at all. They simply came, performed, did whatever gallivanting and carousing they would do in any other city, and left. For the famous we were just one more stop on their rounds. This book's unabashedly prosaic and negative answers to its own questions of "What is the secret of Utah's drawing power?" (It's on the way to California) and "What could it possibly matter?" (Not much really) invests the work with a certain hollowness and banality. While the author often indicates that he feels this is the fault of his subjects' destination, many readers will find much that is hollow and banal in the visitors and their actions.

Will South writes uniformly well and in a style that at once offers up insightful quips while at the same time keeps the reader on an easy steady pace. Occasionally his comments smack of an "art crowd" sarcastic condescension toward middle-brow tastes. But remarks such as, "It's not as if [Robert Smithson's SPIRAL JETTY] were a bronze cowboy by Frederick Remington" (p. 69) do not occur often enough to spoil the book. Bright spots such as a clever and informative account of Oscar Wilde's philosophy of "Aestheticism" and the reaction it elicited from three Salt Lake City newspapers balance out the book.

Andy Warhol Slept Here? will leave readers with some memorable images and quotes such as Groucho Marx and Charlie Chaplin leapfrogging Salt Lake City trash cans (p. 26); Vladimir Nabokov playing tennis with Wallace Stegner (p. 43); The Mormon Tabernacle Choir nostalgically singing "Auld Lang Syne" to Maude Adams at a Brooklyn Peter Pan performance for which Utah-born Ms. Adams had secured seats for the entire choir (p. 38); Frank Lloyd Wright's dismissal of the Salt Lake Temple but glowing praise of the Tabernacle as "one of the architectural masterpieces of the country and perhaps the world" (p. 54); Jack Kerouac's singular assessment of Salt Lake City as a square "city of sprinklers" (p. 47); and a fantastic unattributed painting of Joe Hill's execution being watched over by-and overtly likened to-a crucified Christ (p. 33).

For many of his subjects, South has very little to say that is relevant to their stays in Utah This reader wondered why these stories were included while so many other visitors to Utah were left out. What about U.S. government explorer and surveyor Howard Stansbury who brought back the first reports of the Mormon settlement of the Great Basin? or Thomas Kane who is known not only because of his respected abolitionist judge father and Arctic-exploring brother but for his own negotiation of a non-violent resolution to the "Utah War?" or the humorist Artemis Ward? or the painter Thomas Moran -- contemporary and equal to Albert Bierstadt who is mentioned? or western writer Thomas Wolfe whose 1938 A Western Journal contains just the sort of mock praise and acerbic critique that fits the tone of other vistors' writings including observations such as "with some difficulty bought beer in cans, and had two, feeling more and more desolate in this unreal State of Utah?"

South mentions Marian Anderson and her embarrassing use of the freight elevator at the Hotel Utah, but misses the visits of notable African American women who have come here during the 1980s and 1990s such Rosa Parks, Gwendolyn Brooks, and MacArthur grant-winning science fiction writer Octavia Butler.

Perhaps these questions are unfair, since any book such as this will generate "what about so-and-so?" comments. South's focus on figures from the arts and entertainment worlds reflect his position as Research Curator for the University of Utah Museum of Fine Arts.

Some may read this book and come away feeling like it doesn't care enough about itself. This would be a misreading I think. The book doesn't aspire to matter; it aspires to entertain, and it does fine. It is worth taking a look at for its title chapter alone. South's telling of the strange and surprising story of Andy Warhol's "appearance" in Utah is the funniest and most prophetic revelation of the book. More I won't say.

Eric Eliason 
<Eric_Eliason@byu.edu>