The Andy Warhol Diaries

by Andy Warhol

  Catherine went to Halston’s to pick up her dress, but later she made me call him to say that she’d wanted one slinkier, and he’s going to do it. He thinks I’m paying for it, I guess, but I’m not, Tom Sullivan is.

  Cabbed ($4) to the office and arrived for the lunch for Sam Spiegel. Sam was charming—he was talking about Carole Bouquet and it turns out that her passport or papers expired. When he sees a pretty face he’ll do anything, and he called a friend in Immigration.

  All afternoon Catherine and Bob were getting the party list together for that night’s dinner at Reginette for Margaret Trudeau. Catherine was trying to get O.J. Simpson, but he’d left town.

  At 9:00 Catherine, Tom Sullivan, and Margaret picked me up to go to Regine’s (cab $3.50). When we got there we were so early the photographers hadn’t even gotten there yet. Margaret was just sitting at the bar, and if any photographer had come in he would have gotten great pictures, but they weren’t there.

  Studio 54 is making Regine desperate.

  Margaret told me how much she loved Tom. And she said that she didn’t like Tony Portago, she didn’t like his line. And then she told me Tom’s line and it sounded exactly the same. Tom’s lines were: “I want to thank Pierre Trudeau for making you such a fascinating woman,” and “Good night, Mrs. Trudeau.” And Tony, she said, had said, “Margaret Trudeau, can I dance with you?” And that one she didn’t like. So (laughs) I don’t know. And she said that when she was up in Canada this weekend the prime minister, who’s still her husband, said that her interview in Interview was the best she’s ever done.

  Monday, March 6, 1978

  Jamie Wyeth called and invited me to dinner at “21.”

  Picked up Catherine and went. We had a really great time gossiping about Jamie’s trip to Europe with Bo Polk and Nureyev. Andrew Stein was at the next table with his girlfriend. Catherine ordered Guinness and champagne—a black velvet. Ossie Clark came by. Tom Sullivan arrived just up from Florida where he’d gone with Margaret Trudeau. She was outside in the limo.

  When we got to Studio 54, I thought it was just going to be about fifteen or twenty people for Liz Taylor’s party, but it was more like 2,000, so if Halston was paying, it cost a fortune. It was a good work night for me, because I saw Mrs. Kaiser—Aly—and she said her face would be okay next week to have her picture taken, and we talked about the Joan Crawford sale.

  Liz looked like a—bellybutton. Like a fat little Kewpie doll. John Warner said hello to me. Rod Gilbert was with the cutest new hockey player, a blond, who Catherine fell in love with the other night, and she says she’s going to try to get him but she doesn’t think she’s going to be able to, but she’s going to try. He was with a girl with big tits. And Margaret and Tom didn’t get much fanfare from the photographers, I guess they’re an old couple by now. And Bianca paid no attention to me at all, but then she wanted me to dance with her so that it would be the new kind of picture for the photographers. She was wearing black and white, that’s the current Halston thing, but she just really doesn’t look good in his clothes. And Bianca kept telling me to call Chris Wilding over, and then when he came, she would act like she hadn’t had a thing to do with it, so he’d look at me and say, “Yes?”—like “What did you want?”—and I didn’t have a thing to say, and Bianca would act disinterested, and it was just so dumb.

  Truman Capote was there and he and Bob were dancing all night and the photographers were taking pictures. Truman looks so thin. Diana Vreeland was there, and people were being brought over to Liz—she was the queen. I met a quarterback.

  Bob was watching Bianca take poppers and he said to Diana Vreeland, “It really becomes more like pagan Rome every day,” and she said, “I should hope so—isn’t that what we’re after?”

  The decorations were fabulous, vases as big as people, filled with flowers, and they did a tribute to Liz with pictures on the wall.

  And Monique was there, and we reminisced about the time I met Liz for the first time in Rome around the time we were there making Frankenstein and Dracula.

  Tuesday, March 7, 1978

  The front page of the Post said that Aly Kaiser was robbed of her jewels last night after she went home from the Liz Taylor party. I’m so glad I didn’t talk jewelry with her like I was going to, or I’d be a suspect. But she only has the best, the simplest and the best. It said the necklace was $500,000. What I liked best in the article was that they called her “a divorcée.” I haven’t seen that word in years. I wonder if maybe she was picking the guy up—I wouldn’t be surprised. Like that night when we all went to her house and the two Negro kids were with us—Esther Phillips and the guy she was with—she didn’t just have them because they were with us, I think she had us because we were with them. But Paulette has to be careful—she’s next, because rubies are much more in demand now than diamonds.

  I want to invent a new kind of fast food, and I was thinking, what about a waffle thing that had the food on one side and the drink on the other—like ham and Coke? You could eat and drink at the same time.

  Friday, March 10, 1978

  Stayed uptown in the morning because I was going to interview Kirk Douglas at Quo Vadis for lunch. Nicky Haslam was there with Sybil Burton Christopher, but I didn’t recognize her because she has a different-color hair now. Kirk Douglas looked good. He was charming, so adorable. Lally Weymouth came over and she was Kirk’s best friend and he was stroking her in the lobby. Bobby Zarem surprised us and forked up for the lunch. Kirk said he wanted to go to Studio 54 that night and asked if we’d call and leave his name at the door. For the interview Kirk talked about how Hollywood had at first wanted to putty up his dimple.

  After work dropped off Catherine (cab $4) and changed, then we went all the way down to the Bottom Line (cab $5) to see Lou Reed’s act. There was a line around the block, but then inside it wasn’t crowded, it was nice. Ronnie and Gigi and Clive Davis and Bob Feiden were there, and they wanted to confiscate Catherine’s tape recorder at the door, but she only gave them the batteries. A girl was on before Lou, and then he was late coming out, but then he did and I was (laughs) proud of him. For once, finally, he’s himself, he’s not copying anybody. Finally he’s got his own style. Now everything he does works, he dances better. Because when John Cale and Lou were the Velvets, they really had a style, but when Lou went solo he got bad and was copying people like Mick Jagger. But last night he did his song “I Want to Be Black”—which never was good before but now it is.

  Saturday, March 11, 1978

  I had a lot of dates but I decided to stay home and dye my eyebrows.

  Sunday, March 12, 1978

  Got up and went to church.

  Liza’s birthday party was at Halston’s spread in the Olympic Tower. Catherine was wearing her new Halston, a tight white one, and she looked really good with her hair up. The party wasn’t that great. It was missing people. Muhammad Ali never showed up and Liz Taylor didn’t either. But Carol Channing popped around the corner with Eartha Kitt who she said was dying to meet me, but then we didn’t have anything to say to each other. Melba Moore was there. It was a nice party, though, a live band. Jane Holzer and Bob Denison was there, and a couple of hustlers from Studio 54 who weren’t in black tie, they were in white jumpsuits. Liza was wearing a gold Halston, and she got upset when Dr. Giller pulled down on it because she’d just been in the bathroom to fix it to stay up. It was a funny dress, open from the crotch down to the floor in a V. And the Halston crowd has a new accent, they’re now all talking in a tongue-tied lisp. It’s the new thing. And they all say [imitates] “pussycat.” I met David Mahoney who runs Norton Simon that bought Halston, and Martha Graham took me into a corner and said she’d like to have tea with me. All the pretty girls were in Halstons.

  Diana Vreeland was there and Truman Capote with Bob MacBride. He’s the person that was with Truman even back when I did the Rolling Stone interview with him in 1973. He looks even weirder than ever, there was always something strange about him. But Truman
told me that he couldn’t go for the young ones, meaning that it had to be this type. Bob MacBride is still taking notes—even when I first met him with Truman he was taking notes, but I don’t know what for. He still has the wife and six kids. He’s lost a lot of weight. Actually, he’s lost everything—he looks strange.

  Al Pacino was there and he looked handsome—we’ve heard through the grapevine that he might be interested in renting Montauk, so we’ll see about that. De Niro was there, he looked fat, and Scorsese was with them.

  Ken Harrison the porno star was at my table. Bianca and Stevie brought out a big birthday cake and Liza started singing “New York, New York” but then Sterling St. Jacques went over and joined her singing and (laughs) she got upset and moved over to another microphone and sang some more. And then I asked Marty Scorsese if he’d ever met Margaret Trudeau and he said no, and so I went and got her, I was pushing her as an actress. Marty told me Julia sends her love. I told him they should get back together and he said he couldn’t, that they were just friends now. He’s so short. God. Halston was kissing Liza and Bianca was lost somewhere with Federico De Laurentiis, and the photographers were photographing and it looked unreal, like a big movie scene.

  Monday, March 13, 1978

  The Post had a picture of Halston and Liza and Ken Harrison. But all I could look at was the way Ken Harrison was holding his glass. Because I have nude pictures of him with Victor. And Fred said what was wrong with Halston’s party was that it looked like the funny restaurant that you walk into when you’re out of town in some city, and you find it on top of a building—that’s what Halston’s office place looks like, all the mirrors. I spent most of the party out in the hallway because I couldn’t find Catherine. Someday somebody is going to walk smack into a mirror there. The mirrors are what made the party seem so full.

  Cabbed down to Chembank ($4) and then walked over to the office where Mr. and Mrs. Carimati were coming for lunch. Bob is staying longer at the office these days because Kevin’s out of the picture now, so I dropped him and Catherine off (cab $3.50). Then Charlotte Ford called me and invited me to a party for her book at some restaurant on 58th and Third, and that sounded like work so I invited Bob. The party was at 7:00 but we didn’t get there until 8:00 (cab $2.50). Charlotte said that it wasn’t actually for her whole book, just for the part of it that had just come out in the Ladies’ Home Journal. And then a lady came over and said “I’m Mrs. Hershey, and I used to work at McCall’s, I remember you and your drawings.” And I asked her what she was doing now and she said, “Listen, I’m giving this party, I’m the editor-in-chief of Ladies’ Home Journal.” The party was a lot of squares you never see around. It was black tie and Bob and I were in black tie, but Tom Armstrong wasn’t, and I’m noticing that a lot of people don’t come in black tie when it says to, so I’m giving that a lot of thought.

  I turned around and there was a beautiful beautiful lady near me, and it turned out to be Rocky Converse, and Bob was next to her husband. We had a really really good time, I talked to her and Bob talked to her husband. She was married to Gary Cooper and she’s the mother of Maria Cooper Janis. She said she doesn’t believe in the mystic ESP stuff that her daughter does, though. She said her husband’s had three heart attacks, but that he’s still the best plastic surgeon in town, and that he was going to die with his boots on. She said that Pat Buckley told her she should wear her hair pulled back and she pulled it back and she looked beautiful. It was like looking at Joan Crawford.

  Wednesday, March 15, 1978

  Cabbed down to University Place to look around ($3.50). Walked over to the office, arrived at the same time Rocky Converse did.

  Lunch at the office was for her and some other chic people, and Gigi saw Bob being nice to this older woman, so she decided to pitch in and help out, thinking that it was someone we were hustling to get their portrait done. She was giving her all this attention and special treatment and finally Bob said, “What are you doing? This is my mother.” It was so funny.

  Thursday, March 16, 1978

  I forgot to say something that Aly Kaiser was telling me when I saw her at the Joan Crawford auction—that Joan Crawford was madly in love with her, and that she had mash letters from Joan to prove it. I’ve never heard that about Joan and it’s hard to believe, but I didn’t want to say that, because she said, “I’ll show you the love letters, you can see for yourself.” So I just—maybe she doesn’t know the difference between lesbian and … Oh, I don’t know. It’s good gossip, that’s all.

  Friday, March 17, 1978

  The St. Patrick’s Day parade was starting up so the traffic was bad. Everybody was wearing green and staggering and it was like seeing the old days of New York when everybody used to be drunk all the time instead of on drugs, swaying down the street.

  And have I said in the Diary yet that we didn’t get a deal for our TV show? The project Vincent was trying to get a deal for. They didn’t think I was big enough for Middle America. ABC turned it down.

  Sunday, March 19, 1978

  Palm Sunday. I went to church, but some lady had gone around and taken all the palms. Walked down to Laurent on 56th Street for lunch. Chris Makos was just in a leather jacket and his boyfriend didn’t have a tie, and it looked like a good restaurant, but they were prepared for Dali’s crowd so they didn’t care.

  Ultra Violet was sitting next to Dali and she did something great—she wore the exact same outfit as the day we met her in the sixties—a pink Chanel miniskirt suit with the same boots and her hair the same way. And she had a bracelet that was a Brillo pad, she said that after she was done using it as jewelry she would clean her pot with it. And she had another bracelet made out of eight inches of the corrugated cardboard that they wrap bottles in, sprayed gold, and glued together. It looked great. I guess Ultra is creative in a way. She said I told her the last time I saw her that she should start a new look—“Park Avenue Punk”—and she said that’s what gave her the idea to do “Christian Punk”—and now she sings the Lord’s Prayer and puts in the word “asshole” which I think is disgusting. She’s going to do her act at the Riverboat, and I told her she should start at CBGB. I’d brought two copies of the Dali book so Dali could sign them and it turned out that one of them had already been signed “To Fred” so Dali re-signed it to me. Dali is so full of ideas, and he’s ahead in some things, but then he’s behind in others. It’s odd. He was telling me about a book that’s just been written in Paris about a brother and sister who were so in love that the brother (laughs) ate her shit. He said that my idea of piss-painting was old-fashioned because it’d been in the movie Teorema which (laughs) is true, it was. I knew that. And then he said something great—he said that the punks are the “Shit Children,” because they’re descendents of the beatniks and the hippies, and he’s right. Isn’t that great? The Shit Children. He is smart. Dali told me that he was looking for “beautiful freaks” and I told him (laughs) I’d send him Walter Steding. Walter was performing on his “magic violin” later that night at Max’s. And Dali was really sweet, he’d brought a plastic bag full of his used-up palettes as a (laughs) present to me.

  And I’ve got to get some holy water for the house. I forgot. They give it to you free in the church lobby.

  Tuesday, March 21, 1978

  Bob was working on Truman to host the party that Interview is giving for Polaroid on the night of the Academy Awards at Studio 54—Truman said he’d only do it if he didn’t have to do any work, if Polaroid would give him a movie camera and if he didn’t have any “old bags like Gloria Swanson there, trading off my name.” He said, “Get me Candy Bergen!”

  And Bob showed me a review that Fran Lebowitz’s book got in The New York Times by John Leonard, and I can’t understand it. Is her writing funny? Some girl we know gave her a long rave in the Sunday Times, and now John Leonard and I mean, her stuff—all the put-downs and complaining—it’s just not my sense of humor. I don’t know what’s the point. So Bob wanted to prove that other people d
on’t feel like I do about it, that she’s an asset to Interview.

  Thursday, March 23, 1978

  Yesterday I watched the Flying Wallenda on the news fall from the highwire and get killed. You saw it all—he was walking, and he got to the middle, and a wind came from Miami, and—he was just—he fell, and then the cameras went close in, they showed him lying there.

  The BMW company wants me to paint the outside of a car—Stella’s done it and Lichtenstein.

  Sunday, March 26, 1978

  Easter Sunday. It was raining really hard, cold and windy. I didn’t watch the Easter parade because there wasn’t any. But television is smart, they showed Easter parades in England, where the people were doing what people are supposed to do—walk around in their hats.

  Went to church. I took a peanut jar with me to get holy water and I spent a couple of hours doing that. You go in and you press a button and holy water comes out and you fill up your jar and take it home. It took another couple of hours to put it all over the house.

  And Nelson called me from L.A. He said that he’d been in the hospital because on St. Patrick’s Day he and Bobby De Niro started eating a five-pound cheddar cheese with Jack Daniel’s and day by day that’s all Nelson was eating until finally he had pains and he went to the hospital and they said that the cheese had turned to rock and they gave him a laxative to break it up. He wanted to find out when we were coming out there. In May, I guess.

  Thursday, March 30, 1978