Pop go the 60s: Warhol superstar Baby Jane Holzer on ‘Hullaballo’ (& ‘Batman’)

Pop go the 60s: Warhol superstar Baby Jane Holzer on ‘Hullaballo’ (& ‘Batman’): "

Yesterday when I was looking for images for the Nico post, I came across the famous photo of Nico and Andy Warhol dressed as Batman and Robin, and that led me, in short order, to Roy Lichtenstein’s Batman TV Guide cover and then to this video clip, a (nearly!) musical performance by one-time fashion model, “It Girl,” Warhol superstar and wealthy young Park Avenue housewife, Baby Jane Holzer, singing on the Hullabaloo TV show.

I suppose you could look at this the same way as Paris Hilton’s short-lived pop music career.

Below, Baby Jane Holzer sings Frankie Valli’s “(You’re Gonna) Hurt Yourself” on HullaballoMarch 28, 1966:

Holzer was famously photographed by David Bailey, she made the cover of Vogue and appeared in a handful of Warhol’s early films, such as Couch and The Thirteen Most Beautiful Women. She was largely absent from The Factory scene after Edie Sedgewick’s arrival, when Warhol’s entourage became too druggy for her tastes,although she and the artist stayed close friends. The essay “Girl of the Year” from Tom Wolfe’s anthology The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby is about Jane Holzer and Roxy Music later referenced her in the the lyrics to “Virginia Plain” (“Baby Jane’s in Acapulco / We are flying down to Rio” and “Can’t you see that Holzer mane?”). She is now a real-estate developer in Manhattan and an avid and celebrated art collector.







To tie this back into Batman again, there was actually a character based on Baby Jane Holzer, in an episode called “Pop Goes the Joker.” “Baby Jane Towser” is a rich girl preyed upon by The Joker (who has inadvertently becomes an acclaimed Warhol-esque pop artist after defacing some art ala Marcel Duchamp) to lure in millionaire patrons to buy the Joker’s art! It’s obvious that the writers for the (arguably) most “pop art” TV show in history were well aware of the “Pope of Pop’s” movements.







Part one of “Pop Goes the Joker” is below, the rest follow on YouTube. The second half of this typical Batman cliff-hanger was called “Flop Goes the Joker.”

Below, one more Batman/Warhol/Baby Jane Holzer tie-in: In this excerpt from Batman/Dracula a long-thought lost collaboration between Andy Warhol and that icon of the perverse, Jack Smith, Baby Jane Holzer plays, one can assume, “Catwoman,” with Smith in the title role. This pre-dates the 1966 Batman series by two years.

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