FAMOUS FOR 15 MINUTES My Years With Andy Warhol <i> by Ultra Violet (Avon: $8.95, illustrated)</i>

This chronicle of life among the denizens of Andy Warhol’s famous Factory holds a morbid fascination for art historians--and readers of People. Former “superstar” Ultra Violet ( nee Isabelle Collin Dufresne) delves beneath the vapid surface of Warhol and his hangers-on to reveal the underlying reservoirs of vacuousness. “Famous” offers plenty of drugs and sex (although you have to read between the gender lines for the latter), and famous names drop like dead moths from a porch light.

Warhol and his gang seem to have been driven by a desperate, almost pathological need for publicity: not recognition for any artistic achievement, but appearances in newspaper gossip columns, as if a few lines of smudged ink in a tabloid somehow validated their existence. “A day with no mention of ourselves (in the papers) is a lost day,” she declares. Ultra Violet inverts Hannah Arendt’s famous dictum and shows her readers the mind-numbing evil of banality.