Suzie Frankfurt's cookbook
At lunch-silver dollar-size cheeseburgers and diet Cokes-Mrs. Frankfurt said she was a bit embarrassed by Wild Raspberries. “It’s really beautiful, and I’m thrilled it’s been republished, but it’s a little dippy,” she said, speaking in her happily bemused, deadpan way. She reconsidered. “Maybe it’s not. I guess the world has evolved so people are almost only always getting takeout. That’s what the book is, ‘Roll the chauffeur over to Trader Vic’s side entrance and pick up a suckling pig. Order two fighting gefilte fish in the Bronx.’ It’s a joke, perfect for Christmas presents” …
“So we did the book, Andy with his Dr. Martin’s dyes and Mrs. Warhol [Andy’s mother], her calligraphy. She was gifted and untutored, and we left all the spelling mistakes. I wrote the recipes.” Schoolboys were hired to hand-color the books, a wonderful shiny paper was selected for the covers, and the books were brought to rabbis on the Lower East Side for binding. “There were two versions, colored” of which there were 34, “and semicolored. We thought it would be a masterpiece and we’d sell thousands. I think we sold 20.”
By 1962, Mrs. Frankfurt couldn’t “cope with the Factory scene. It was too horrible for me. I was trying to be an Upper East Side wife.” She didn’t see Warhol again until he was shot in 1968. In 1974, her parents died 10 days apart from each other, and “I consoled myself in my garden with lots of gin and Valium,” she said. Suzie Frankfurt went to Silver Hill, a private hospital in Connecticut, to detox from the Valium.
“Andy visited twice. He told me he came because he heard Silver Hill had great ice cream, and they did,” she said, laughing. “When they let me out,” she continued, “I went home and drank five bottles of red wine and never drew a sober breath” until one day in 1976 when she was hospitalized after falling at home and breaking her collarbone.
“Was I tipsy in the house?” Suzie Frankfurt repeated. “I could write a book called Tipsy in the House.” Mrs. Frankfurt has been sober for 10 years, she said. “I really consider that my greatest achievement, other than my sons.” Not allergic to society, Mrs. Frankfurt enjoyed friendships with all sorts, from Jerome Zipkin to Robert Mapplethorpe, and occasionally Nancy Reagan. “That line by Edna St. Vincent Millay sums me right up. ‘And never shall one room contain me quite,’” she said. Her association with Warhol continued until his death in 1987, as his diaries attest with dozens of mentions of Mrs. Frankfurt. “It was Suzie Frankfurt’s birthday,” Warhol reported on Aug. 21, 1980, “so we were having a lunch for her. She invited everybody she wanted (party decorations $84).”
From introducing Gianni Versace to Andy Warhol in New York, to meeting the Pope with Andy in Rome, they went all over together. “The reason they took me is because I’m so boring. No, really. I wasn’t drinking, neither was Andy.” Mrs. Frankfurt almost always wore gray flannel. “I was doing a dress line which was very pretty if you wanted to wear gray flannel all the time. Another failed enterprise, but Andy loved them. He was very goofy.”
