How a teenager bought J. Edgar Hoovers cookie jar for $1.50 and traded it with Andy Warhol for iconic prints

Marc Cheshire’s picture currently hangs in the Whitney Museum of Art, thanks to Andy Warhol, J.Edgar Hoover and a cookie jar.His is among 732 Polaroid pictures taken by Warhol entitled “Family Album,” which also includes Bianca Jagger, Yves Saint Laurent and Princess Caroline of Monaco.Marc appears alongside his late mother Maxine Cheshire, a one-time columnist for the Washington Post, in the pictures.

How it all happened is an unlikely encounter.The episode — which Warhol majordomo Vincent Fremont characterized as “the Mao-cookie jar trade” — began in March 1973, when Marc, a self-described “precocious kid,” joined his mother at an estate sale for the recently deceased Hoover, the notorious director of the FBI.Marc snagged the spook’s pig-shaped cookie jar.To him, this made perfect, if cheeky, sense: “It was close enough to the ‘60s, when FBI [agents] were known as pigs.

Stamped on the bottom was USA.And I thought, what could be better for Hoover?”Purchased for just $1.50, it was a cool memento.

Then society publicist R.Couri Hay — another Warhol insider — stepped in and noted his pop artist pal’s penchant for cookie jars.“I told Maxine, ‘Well, I can arrange to get you a cow [one of the cow wallpaper images Warhol was then making] in exchange for your wonderful, rare cookie jar,’” Hay told The Post.He then recalled telling Warhol, “I think we should trade one of the prints for the cookie jar to add to your collection.

Then Maxine will come up [to New York] and maybe she’ll write a story.”That October, the Cheshires took the DC-to-LaGuardia shuttle and cabbed to Warhol’s infamous Factory, located on the then-dicey Union Square West.Marc, now 70 and working in the rare documents business, recalled to The Post how, by this time, they had carefully packed the now-valuable cookie jar into a box with newspaper cushioning.Hay, who had tagged along, recalled their entrance to the Warhol wonderland, saying, “Maxine was ...