Drinking and slutting your way through your twenties on the downtown artclub scene? Party on! But listen, if you get famous, your NYT obituary will most definitely remember you as a wild one. Like Dorothy Podber, "artist and trickster", whose obit ran today. The first sentence tags her as "wild child of the New York art scene in the 1950s and '60s who is probably best known for brandishing a pistol and putting a bullet through the forehead of Marilyn Monroe's likenesses on a stack of Andy Warhol's paintings." That's a helluva reputation, sugar!

"After she left... Andy [Warhol] came over to me and said: 'Please make sure Dorothy doesn't come over here anymore. She's too scary.' "

Many accounts of her life chronicle heavy drinking and drug use. Ms. Ely said that Ms. Podber spoke of being in trouble with the law a few times, once for running an illegal abortion referral service from her apartment.

She was thought to have been married three times, most recently to Lester Schwartz, who died in 1986. She had no children.

Ms. Podber told Ms. Bergmann that when money was low, as it often was, she generally found unorthodox ways to make it. She once ran a service that dispatched maids to doctors' offices, primarily as a way to get the keys to the doctors' drug cabinets. "I never worked much," she said.

Dorothy Podber, 75, Artist and Trickster, Is Dead: NYT
[Photo: Joy Bergmann]