Andy Warhol once gifted Sean Lennon a dead cat
Andy Warhol freaked out Sean Lennon by giving him a taxidermied pet cat for his eighth birthday.
When asked what Warhol was “going for” when he chose the gift, Lennon told Page Six, “I really don’t know.”
The singer revealed that when he unwrapped the gift, his mother, Yoko Ono, was “kind of disturbed despite her love of cats” and that the family’s (living) felines were “immediately enraged.”
In the story — revealed for the first time in an exhibit called “Letters to Andy Warhol” that just opened at the Cadillac House — Lennon writes, “After a brief time on a shelf in my bedroom, it was decided that Andy’s cat should reside permanently in the window of the office on the ground floor,” where it stayed until “neighbors complained and we had to take it down.”
He added, “Each day on my way to school I would walk by the office and wonder why it was that Andy gave me that cat.”
Asked if Warhol had run the idea by his parents before giving their son a dead cat, Lennon said, “My dad [John Lennon] wasn’t around at the time — it was just me and my mom — and I don’t know if they had a plan, but judging from my mom’s surprise, I don’t think she knew about it ahead of time.”
Lennon — who considered the pop artist a “surrogate uncle” — told us he wanted to tell the story to show how Warhol never “explained himself too much.”
By: Oli Coleman
Source: Page Six
