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Alison Stewart: This is All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. Full Bio is our monthly book series where we spend a few days with the author of a deeply researched biography to get a fuller understanding of the subject. Radiant: The Life and Line of Keith Haring is the story of a fourth-grade student who wanted to be a "artist in France". Keith Haring grew up to work in France, Germany, Italy, New York, and beyond, becoming a famous artist in the 1980s, creating murals around the world as well as sculptures and paintings. His line drawings and bright colors became a symbol for street culture and later for activism, including his famous Silence=Death logo, created during the AIDS crisis, which claimed his life at 31.

Haring was born on May 4, 1958, in Reading, Pennsylvania, and raised in Kutztown. His family was conservative but artistic, especially his father. He trained a young Keith in the work of Disney and Doctor Seuss. That didn't mean Keith didn't rebel. He was a person who would get obsessed: God, drugs, and wanderlust. Brad Gooch is the author of Radiant, and he will be our guest for this edition of Full Bio.

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Alison Stewart: Brad, I'm going to start out with the title, Radiant: The Life and Line of Keith Haring. How did you come up with the title?

Brad Gooch: It was a hiding in plain sight title. There were a lot of books, plays, articles about Keith Haring called Radiant Child, Radiant Soul, Radiant Baby, and it's his most prominent mark, tag, or image, and then after about two years of sifting through all these, then the word "radiant" came to me, and it seemed to be multivalent. It referred to the work. It also referred to him. I was interviewing his doctor from later in his life when he had AIDS, and he said when Keith walked into the waiting room, he had a kind of radiance, so I thought it applied to lots of things at once and covered everything and hadn't been used.

Alison Stewart: Let's talk about his backstory. Let's talk about his parents. Joan and Alan Haring got married because she was pregnant and that's the way things were done. Were they headed that way anyway, towards marriage?

Brad Gooch: No, they definitely were. They were high school sweethearts, and he had been the designer of the yearbook and she was a cheerleader, and they had that kind of small-town Pennsylvania relationship going on. She had been, I guess, going out with his best friend for a while, and then they got together, so their life bit this template, I think, from that time. They stayed together, and I knew them then and interviewed them over my years of writing this book. They were great together, and they had simultaneously a Leave It to Beaver kind of cleanness to them, especially the dad, Al, who I became close with. He was also an amateur artist and cartoonist, and he had gotten Keith involved in drawing when he was four years old, so he had a sensibility that could toggle a little bit between Kutztown, Pennsylvania, and then this life that his son created and the legacy that his son created.

Alison Stewart: Keith Haring was born on May 4th, 1958, in Reading, Pennsylvania, raised in Kutztown. What was Kutztown like in the late '50s, early '60s?

Brad Gooch: I recognized that I was from Wilkesbury, Pennsylvania, similar, and it was very white, and everyone went to church on Sundays as a social event. It was in a part of Pennsylvania that had farms mainly around it, and farm kids would be trucked in to school every day. It was also then this small town that was going through the kind of transition, I think, that happened in the '50s and '60s, and Keith, who then was very much part of being in both those worlds. In some ways, he was this crew-cut kid with those round glasses, the look that he kept throughout his life.

At the same time, he was really, especially at his grandmother's house, discovering television and then colored television and then cartoons and then Life magazine, reading about 1968 and what was going on at the Democratic convention, so all these influences were hitting him all at once, and I think television, if we're talking about his aesthetic, becomes almost the most enduring.

Alison Stewart: His dad had many sides. On one side, he joined the Marine Corps. On the other side, he was an artist. How did he nurture Keith Haring's talent as a little kid?

Brad Gooch: Interesting. He would draw with him after supper, and this was first Keith in high chair doing scribbles, and then at around age four, doing more drawings. He introduces him then to Doctor Seuss and Walt Disney, and Keith Haring later goes on to say that Andy Warhol and Picasso and Walt Disney were the three great 20th-century artists. Just there, you have an important influence. His dad, when he was stationed in the Marines in California, would always go to Disneyland and had an infatuation with it, and Keith gained that infatuation pretty easily.

I think, also, though, his father didn't just encourage him to mimic these cartoons or do his own Donald Ducks, he encouraged him to do original cartoons, and that becomes also a big and important influence on Keith Haring, because you can really see a lot of that work as original cartoons, and he eventually makes up his own imagery.

Alison Stewart: My guest is Brad Gooch. He's the author of Radiant: The Life and Line of Keith Haring. It's our choice for Full Bio. Keith was always into art from the beginning. In the fourth grade, you write, "He wrote a note that said, 'When I grow up, I would like to be an artist in France. The reason is because I like to draw. I would like to get my money from pictures I want would sell. I hope I will be one.'" Who else saw the vision of himself in this school? Considering, to your point, it was a Leave it to Beaver kind of environment.

Brad Gooch: It was, but he managed to-- He had a friend, Kermit Oswald, and they became art buddies. It's interesting how advanced in this environment these kids could be. They had an art studio, and then the art teachers in the school. We can all remember one art teacher, and Keith had that purple-haired art teacher, and she had a big influence on him. Also, even then, his art teachers noticed that he would not take direction easily. He had an idea what he wanted to do, and he would go ahead and do it and spent all of his time pretty much in the art room and begins to move beyond just seeing himself as doing cartoony things to having bigger ideas of being an artist.

A lot of Keith Haring is intact from that early Kutztown period, and that's why it's nice talking with you about it, in a sense. Because even what you just read, that you have Keith haring in fourth grade having a vision of what he wants his life to be and then pretty much realizes it. He winds up staying at the Ritz in Paris using it almost as an apartment away from home by the end of his life, when he's become an international art star.

Alison Stewart: As a teenager, Keith went through a period of intense religiosity. He developed this love for Jesus. How did he show his love for Jesus?

Brad Gooch: Now, that was a really fascinating period. He gets evacuated. It's pretty much the Jesus freak movement at that point, and it was a funny crossover of conservative christian gospel ideas with the hippie movement, and he then becomes, as he often did later in life, he becomes obsessed, and he starts putting all over Kutztown these one way stickers, which is the one way is Jesus, and there's an image with the finger pointing upwards, so he's very earnest about this, also very comic about it. He decides to rate all the psalms as if they were records on American Bandstand. He believes, and he's influenced by these apocalyptic ideas that the world will end and that we have to do something about it.

For that period, which is only about a year, he looks like a character from Godspell and is very much preaching that word, and when he begins to come out of it, moving on to his next infatuation, which is pot and drugs and things like that, he then looks back and says that he thought that a lot of his attraction to that was the imagery, the visuals of it in a certain way, but something always stays with Haring. He's always a bit of a preacher, and he's always naive and idealistic and taking up causes.

At the end of his life is also one of his last pieces, is a last judgment triptych that he did at Yoko on his apartment, and you can see at the cathedral of St. John the Divine that has the Jesus baby with radiant lines coming out of it, which we can see in his notebook when he was 16 years old.

Alison Stewart: After Jesus, he discovered a love of drugs. He thought acid seemed to open his mind. What did he think being high did for him in his art?

Brad Gooch: He explains it most clearly in a letter to Timothy Leary, later becomes, perfectly enough, a friend of his. He had a separate room downstairs. He was very much a misfit kid in a certain way, and revolting, and trouble for his parents, even his Jesus saves, that plastering of these signs all over Kutztown was more an embarrassment to them. They were vanilla and chocolate Methodist church-going people. He begins then experimenting with drugs, and with acid, he then has this opening up of abstraction, really. He's writing in his in a journal, and he starts following this line, and so it opens him up to the world of shapes and lines. He sees those same shapes and lines, tripping often, in the hills around Kutztown, looking up at the sky and the clouds.

He has that very hippie redolent moment, but it definitely opens him up also to the idea of being an artist with a capital A. He really finds his sense of his vocation in a different way at that time, so he shifts from simply doing cartoons, and even though he's a big Monkees fan and he did a fanzine around it and that kind of art and comic art, but he also then begins doing more abstract shapes and experimenting even more.

Alison Stewart: The drugs caused a rift with his parents. Practically, what did the drugs do? Then, really symbolically, what did they do?

Brad Gooch: Practically, I just think, as I was saying, these are conservative people. They were shocked and didn't know quite what to do with Keith. Before he went to school, he would be in the little playhouse they had in the backyard smoking joints, and then he would skip school, and then the school would call, and his mother would have to get him. He had a newspaper route, and then he would be stealing things, so this was all, and he got in with this crowd of other pot-smoking rebels with causes or without causes, and going to rock concerts and things like that.

This was very troubling to his conservative, button-down parents, and his father told me that that just made them try to screw the screws more tightly with him, and then I remember his dad said to me, "We discovered later that that was the opposite of the way to deal with Keith." They also didn't really understand what he was doing as an artist. They didn't see artist as a viable career path, especially at that time, and he always, in some way, I think, resented that. That was the middle of their relationship and caused a lot of trouble, so then Keith would leave home.

He left home for an entire summer and went to live at the Jersey Shore, so he was very out there in his need for freedom, and I think you could again see this need for freedom in the kind of person he becomes and the kind of career that he has and the moment of gay liberation that meant so much to him when he gets to New York City.

Alison Stewart: My guest is Brad Gooch, Radiant: The Life and Line of Keith Haring is his book. It's our choice for Full Bio. This blew me away, that his early work, Keith Haring's early work was lost. It was on top of a car that took off. How did his work end up on top of the car, and what did that do to him?

Brad Gooch: First he was hitchhiking. Then hitchhiking, again, is something that brings back that era to us. He winds up hitchhiking across the country later, and at this point, it's the period I was talking about where he escapes to the Jersey Shore and he's working a job and he's tripping, and he's drawing and painting. At some point, he enters his work in a show. This was on the boardwalk, and he brings, basically, all that he has to the show and then goes home, hitchhikes home. On the way, the driver decides to change direction. He's not going to Philadelphia any longer. He's turning South, so Keith has to jump out of the car and he leaves the work behind.

Then he realizes what he's done. It's too late. He runs after the car. He never hears from the person again. He never sees that work again, and he's very upset. Within a couple of days, though, he decides, "Well, I'm just going to do it all again," and so he does a big amount of work and decides that it's better than what he had before, and this also becomes important to him. Not being obsessed with the product in a way, and also having confidence, I think, that he would continue to produce, and I think that he always had a feeling that this was all flowing through him and he really develops.

Part of the reason we have 10,000 works by Keith Haring is that he has confidence that when he picks up his magic marker, something is going to come out. His sister did a graphic book for kids called The Boy Who Couldn't Stop Drawing, and that was her experience of him as his sister, and that remains, again, everyone's experience with Keith Haring. He was always working, always drawing, and basically, that's why I called the book The Life and Line of Keith Haring. There's a way in which it's like one single line that he just continues because he's doing it every day.

Alison Stewart: Coming up after the break, how Pittsburgh became an incubator for Keith Haring's talent and why it was a deadhead.

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Alison Stewart: This is All Of It on WNYC, I'm Alison Stewart. We continue our Full Bio conversation about Radiant: The Life and Line of Keith Haring by Brad Gooch. We pick up with Keith Haring's first attempt at art school.

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Alison Stewart: Keith Haring earned money by newspaper delivery, art winnings. He had the idea he would go to the Ivy School of Professional Art in Pittsburgh. Tell us a little bit about the goal of that school. What happened to students who went there?

Brad Gooch: That was really, in a way, to satisfy his parents. The Ivy school, it was in Pittsburgh. It wasn't Paris, which is his original plan, and was a combination commercial art and fine arts school, and so he does go there. It is interesting that Kutztown seems so unpromising, a town to engender a major 20th-century artist, but actually a lot of these Pennsylvania towns were like that. Andy Warhol was from Pittsburgh. Franz Kline was from Wilkes-Barre, where I'm from. Jeff Koons was from York County in the North. Calder was from a town outside of Harrisburg.

Keith goes to Pittsburgh, to this smaller school, not the Carnegie, and tries it for a while, but Pittsburgh becomes more interesting. He drops out of the art school and deciding it's really not for him, and he has a girlfriend in Kutztown, Susie, who I spoke to extensively, but interesting about that time, which hadn't really been covered in other accounts of Keith Haring's life, including his own accounts of his life. Those two years I found really interesting because based on whatever was around him, he was starting to put together his own aesthetic, his idea of what an artist was or what kind of artist he could be.

Part of this is he becomes infatuated with El Lissitzky. El Lissitzky's a European artist who has a show that year at the Carnegie Museum of Art. Dubuffet is a big influence on Keith Haring. You can still see those blues and reds and blacks, but Dubuffet had a big sculpture in the lobby of the Carnegie Museum. Christo, a huge effect on Haring in terms of doing public art, and there was a showing of the documentary about Christo the year that he was there. You can watch him seeing what's 30 feet away from him and really absorbing it and figuring out how it could be useful to him or what it would mean to him.

He eventually has his first one-person show in Pittsburgh also, and before he then decides that he needs to go to a real art school, which is School of Visual Arts in New York City.

Alison Stewart: I want to talk a little bit about Susie. He chooses to drive across the country with her, his girlfriend. They follow the Dead. What was it about Jerry Garcia and the Dead that inspired him?

Brad Gooch: Jerry Garcia and the Dead says so much. One, I think, he was the approach of the Grateful Dead they would give away their bootleg tapes and they had these t-shirts, and part of this-- and it becomes part of the engine of their popularity. I think that this appeals to Keith and that it influences, in a way, the way he approaches his own career later. He does do these Grateful Dead t-shirts, and like classic deadheads, he and Susie hitchhike across the country, sell Grateful Dead t-shirts at their concerts. There's also something of the fanboy about Keith Haring. He had earlier been a fan of The Monkees television show, and then he was a fan of Jesus, and he's a fan of the Grateful Dead in a certain way.

I think he liked the melding, certainly the psychedelic aspect to it, the utopianism of it. The way in which it was a whole immersive life that was raised up to this by music and style. All of this appealed to him, and especially as a teenager. His relationship with Susie was fascinating to me. No one had ever talked to her. I interviewed her first, which no one had done, and it was a little bit formal. Then I discovered that she liked to DM on Facebook, [laughter] so new biographers tool, a Ping-Pong game of this DMing over [unintelligible 00:25:20]-

Alison Stewart: Oh, interesting.

Brad Gooch: -I found out a lot, so that becomes a rich period for me.

Alison Stewart: That period was interesting beause it was [unintelligible 00:25:27] with them. They were in Berkeley and San Francisco, and there's this story where a young gentleman is hitting on him and he clings to Susie, but he recognizes that there's something up. What was the relationship with Susie, and when did he start to recognize that he was queer?

Brad Gooch: Interesting. I think that he definitely, again, having grown up in a town like that, in that era and being gay, there's almost a double bookkeeping that you would do where you're not aware that you were gay and you were aware of all these urges and attractions that you have. First of all, there was no name for them, particularly. The New York Times wasn't even using the word "gay". In Pennsylvania, you could be jailed for sodomy, so it was a don't ask, don't even think about it atmosphere, so I think he was probably aware as a boy, and he remembered attractions he had had to other boys at camp and in school, but he wasn't completely aware of them, and also with Susie, it was an authentic relationship they had. She said, "If he'd been faking it, I would have known."

There was a legitimate relationship going on between them, and it was based in some way on love of art, and she was pretty supportive of him. During that time, then eventually, he starts realizing. They come to it together. It's not like he's hiding from her and she discovers it. I think it's that they evolved together to realizing that he's gay and the relationship frays in that way. Also, he starts then going out to gay bars and cruising areas, mainly Black dance bars in Pittsburgh at the time, so all this just becomes together with wanting to go to an art school, he wants to come out. New York City, 1978, is a perfect destination for both of those.

Alison Stewart: Before we leave Pittsburgh and go to New York, I want to talk about the mattress factory, what went on there, because he comes back and he took up work at the mattress factory.

Brad Gooch: Right. The mattress factory now is very established environment art space, and at the time, it was just beginning. It was that place where he and Susie could crash, basically, and Keith could have a studio, so it's just it's a place for about six months where they get by, and also Keith is creating work and the right environment for them in an experimental, bohemian setting in a sliding neighborhood in Pittsburgh. It was interesting to me when I was there, though, that no one in Pittsburgh seems to be aware of Haring's time among them.

No one knew about it at the mattress factory when I was there, and I was in the Carnegie Museum, they have a huge, beautiful tarp, early Haring, hanging, and the posting on the wall says that Keith Haring is an artist from Kutztown, Pennsylvania, who went to New York City and became an artist. They managed to skip.

Alison Stewart: That's really interesting. Reading your book, it seemed like Pittsburgh was a bit of an incubator for him.

Brad Gooch: It absolutely was an incubator for him. Hopefully, from my book, people in Pittsburgh will realize this and accent it a little bit more, I would think.

Alison Stewart: Tomorrow in Full Bio, Keith Haring makes his way to New York City.

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