Among the oddballs and exhibitionists who clustered around Andy Warhol in the 1960's and 70's perhaps the scariest was Brigid Berlin, a chubby, motormouthed rebel from an upper-crust New York City family who relished the way her "underground" celebrity embarrassed her proper conservative parents. Her father, Richard Berlin, a friend of Richard M. Nixon and an admirer of Senator Joseph R. McCarthy, ran the Hearst Corporation, which he had helped save from bankruptcy in the 40's. Her mother, Honey, was an elegant, ladies-who-lunch-style socialite of the old school. Ms. Berlin was one of Warhol's favorite telephone companions, and she taped hundreds of hours of their conversations, some of which were adapted into a play called "Pork" that flaunted the Berlin family strife. Like many of Warhol's acolytes, she fancied herself an artist and was one of the first art world personages to work with a portable tape recorder and Polaroid snapshots (she specialized in double exposures). Her more notorious antics included a theatrical performance in which she telephoned her parents from the stage without their knowledge and broadcast live her mother's furious tirade about her lifestyle and choice of friends. That lifestyle included an addiction to speed (in the 1966 Warhol movie, "The Chelsea Girls," she played a pill-pushing lesbian who shoots up in front of the camera) as well as an eating disorder that pushed her weight to 260 pounds. Despite her obesity, Ms. Berlin often appeared nude in Warhol's ...
