by Andy Warhol
Anyway, I missed my girl-lunch with David, I didn’t get any gossip (lunch $35). Patti lives over One Fifth and so she went upstairs and David and I walked over to Mays to get some supplies for the office ($32.89, $2.79). I got tired from walking in the sun.
And the hot water here on 66th Street is overheating and leaking and I have a vision of an explosion and the guy won’t come.
Tuesday, May 30, 1978
I called Doc Cox and wanted to ask about the gallbladder medicine, but he wasn’t there, I guess he’s too busy with his garden party.
François de Menil called and invited Fred and me for dinner, but then later on he called and said he had to make it for just drinks. He’s just back from Hollywood where he signed a deal with a woman named Hannah Weinstein to produce four movies and so we were going to talk movie-talk with him (cab $4). François looked heavier and happier. He told us his mother was starting a museum, that she was giving $5 million. God, it’s so incredible, to have that much money, it’s so abstract. You just sit there and try to think of how to be creative with it. We stayed there until 8:30.
I began watching The Valachi Papers on TV with Charles Bronson, and then I fell asleep, and then I woke up and ran to the window when I heard a voice say, “Open up, it’s the narcotics squad,” and then I realized it was on the TV. It was scary to think that when you dream, you’re dreaming what’s on TV, and it’s so real. I really thought the narcotics squad was right there.
Wednesday, May 31, 1978
There was an event up at Gracie Mansion. Left at 6:30 and the traffic was bad, it took an hour to get there (cab $5.50). The Mayor wasn’t there yet, but Arts Commissioner Henry Geldzahler was, and the first thing he said was, “I don’t have any of your art up here.” He had Bob Indiana there, and George Segal, and a lot of creepy people. It looked like the people who work at the city Welfare Department.
Thursday, June 1, 1978
It turned out it was Catherine’s birthday. And Robbie Robertson from The Band called, wanting me to do a poster for The Last Waltz, and so Fred and I were going up there to meet him at his place at the Sherry Netherland to talk about it, and when Catherine found out, she said that that could be her birthday present. So we all cabbed up at 6:30, traffic was bad ($4).
We went up to the Scorsese-Robertson suite—Marty was in Rome visiting (laughs) the grave of Roberto Rossellini. Robbie gave us champagne, and then it was the same thing, they always say, “Well, will you do this art poster for us and then we will sell it for you and isn’t that wonderful?” And it’s mixed in with hippie talk and phrases, and then everyone was too embarrassed to talk about money, so finally Fred said, “Look, man, what’s in it for Andy?” (laughs) Yeah, he really said “man.” Oh, and the butler who answered the door was that kid Marty’s making the movie about, Steven Prince.
Then cabbed up to Suzie Frankfurt’s ($3.10). Fred and Catherine had a big fight because she was putting down the Jews saying again that if only Hitler had won … Fred told her how could she say that because she was in a Jewish house. I honestly don’t know if Suzie’s Jewish or not. I mean, she’s Catholic now—she got baptized this year. But why would she turn Catholic unless she were Jewish? I don’t know, I think she’s just crazy.
Cabbed to the Eberstadts’ ($2.00). When we got there only Lord “Brookie” was there, Harrison Ford and Earl McGrath. Fred was chasing me, trying to kiss me, I don’t know why, he was acting out of it, weird. And Keiko Carimati broke an antique nutcracker they had, it was in three pieces, and we didn’t know whether we should say anything or not. And then Catherine dropped a champagne glass and within a minute Fred dropped one, too, and there was champagne and glass all over and it was embarrassing. They’ll probably never ask us over again.
Friday, June 2, 1978
Robert Kennedy, Jr. was on TV for the tenth anniversary of when his father was shot, so it’s ten years since I was shot, too—he was the day after me. He’s been staying at Fred’s house for two weeks, Robert. With the Fraser girl, Rebecca. They’re heavy in love.
Saturday, June 3, 1978
Ran into Dino Fabio on the street, the one who sold the house in L.A. to the Arabs, who I met in Milan where he had the house with machine gunners around it. While I was talking to him about five cars of people yelled my name so he was impressed. One of them said, “I’m Andy Anka and I’m personally inviting you to the Copa.” He’s Paul’s brother, but I don’t know what he does yet.
Fred told me about his scene with Freddy and Isabel Eberstadt after I left on Thursday. Freddy started picking on him about Nenna or something, and Fred started crying uncontrollably, he couldn’t stop. Isabel and Freddy had to take him home. Fred was in such a strange mood that night.
Averil Meyer told me she was bored, she said she wanted something to do, so I invited her to a job at the office. I asked her to be a volunteer. She’s supposed to come in on Monday, but she won’t show up. She’s too rich.
Sunday, June 4, 1978
Watched the Tonys on TV on the phone with Brigid. Liza was there with Halston, and she won for Best Singer in a Musical, and when they called her name Stevie Rubell jumped out of his seat next to Halston. Liza was running against Eartha Kitt in Timbuktu and Madeline Kahn in Twentieth Century.
Catherine called and said that Steve Aronson came over to her house the night before—the lady he was going to visit in Southampton wouldn’t let him bring his big dog so he didn’t go at all—so he and Catherine were both depressed together. Catherine is in love with Tom but doesn’t want to go out to Montauk and be a maid and Tom doesn’t want to be serious, and she once told me that she would never get serious about it but she is, so she was depressed. And Margaret Trudeau’s run off with Jack Nicholson or something. And we’re upset if there was a party for Liza and we weren’t invited. Yeah, I’m sure there was.
Monday, June 5, 1978
Walked along Madison handing out Interviews. People really know me now, they think I’m the regular newspaperman (cab $3.50). Worked till 6:40 then went home (cab $3.50) and glued myself and went to the Carlyle (cab $2.25) to pick up Jerry Hall to take her to the dinner Hoveyda was giving for the Shah’s brother way down at Windows on the World.
Mick opened the door. I thought he wouldn’t be there. He was on his way up to Woodstock. I asked him if it was true that he’d bought 200 acres up there and he said no, that he was just living upstairs from a dump. He showed me their new album and the cover looked good, pull-out, die-cut, but they were back in drag again! Isn’t that something?
After we left the Carlyle I told Jerry I thought Mick had ruined the Love You Live cover I did for them by writing all over it—it’s his handwriting, and he wrote so big. The kids who buy the album would have a good piece of art if he hadn’t spoiled it. And Stevie got it into Earl Wilson’s column that Bianca was “so touched” by the “Miss You” song that she “slowed down divorce proceedings,” but Jerry said the song was really written about her. She was wearing the same green Oscar de la Renta dress she wore the last time I went out with her, and when we got into the elevator I noticed that she had underarm b.o., like she hadn’t taken a shower before she got dressed. So I guess Mick must like b.o. I didn’t have a limo but she didn’t mind. I told Jerry that Barbara Allen had called from England where she went with Bryan Ferry. Bryan never gave Jerry her clothes back after she left him for Mick—he said he was keeping them because he knew she’d come back—and after Barbara had been over there once, she told Jerry she’d been trying on her clothes, and that did upset Jerry, but she said she hopes Bryan and Barbara make it as a couple (cab $10). Down at the World Trade Center the wind was really blowing so that’s when I was really noticing the b.o…. We went up to the 107th floor and our ears popped. The Secret Service was there because of the Shah’s brother, and Peter Beard said the waitress and the bartender were S.S. because he’d heard them talking on the way in. Hoveyda really fell for Jerry, making her kiss him on the lips.
The food was rotten but the suns
et was so beautiful. Everybody was trying to make Jerry. On the way home in a limo we picked up out front, she told me her philosophy of How to Keep a Man: “Even if you only have two seconds, drop everything and give him a blow job. That way he won’t really want sex with anyone else.” And then she said, “I know I can tell that to you (laughs) because you won’t tell anybody.” She’s so funny, she says such stupid things. But then she’ll be able to rattle off the names of every single person she met when she was in Iran. It’s what talking to Jane Forth used to be like (limo $20).
Tuesday, June 6, 1978
Adriana Jackson and Clarisse Rivers and Princess Marina of I guess Greece came to lunch (cab downtown $3) and they told about going the night before to the enema doctor who Sam Green and Kenny Lane and Maxime have been going to who also (laughs) does readings. And they all looked into the crystal ball the guy had and nobody could see anything because there was so much shit and dirt and candlelight. The guy told Nicky Weymouth he saw a plane crash but later she got on the Concorde anyway, although she was shaking, and it didn’t crash. But they all say they’re going back to him anyway. How can people go back when they know that what the person said didn’t happen?
Christopher Sykes came by, too, and he sang the newspaper in falsetto and opera, which I’ve always wanted to do. He sang the story about the girl going to the erotic dentist and another story about a chicken. I told him I would manage him and book him at Reno Sweeney’s and Trax, but he said he only performs for friends. He’s another poor-rich English kid.
At Trax, Tom Sullivan told Catherine that yes, they’re boyfriend and girlfriend, but that they shouldn’t let it show in public because it cramps his style with other girls.
Rupert’s assistant told me that blonds aren’t big in the gay world anymore, and it’s true—it’s the hot tamales like Victor who make out now.
The new club called Xenon is opening tonight. Stevie called Bob and asked him to spy there for him.
Wednesday, June 7, 1978
In the morning a guy with a foreign accent called the office and said there’d be a “bomb at the party” that night. But we didn’t know (laughs) which party. So I started getting a headache. We were going to parties at Fiorucci and then Barbetta’s and then MOMA.
The cover of the Voice this week is “Studio 54 and the Mafia,” and when Bob called Stevie to invite him to dinner, Stevie made it seem like he was doing us a big favor—“Oh yeah, I’ll come, I’ll do anything for Andy.”
We ended up the night at Halston’s (cab $4). Stevie was going to be there and Catherine had said we should show loyalty on the competition’s opening night. Stevie said, “Let’s go to Studio.” It was jammed.
And forgot to say that the other day Doc Cox told me that Dr. Jacobs said I couldn’t take this new medicine after all—the one that dissolves gallstones—because my stones are too hard on the outside.
Sunday, June 11, 1978
Went to church, got magazines ($6) and went to the office (cab $3) because Rupert was bringing by the Flower things. I decided I won’t sign the fake ones that’re turning up all over Europe—the ones the people told us they bought from Gerard. Maybe I should do new ones and make good on the fakes in Europe. I don’t know, I’ll see. I dropped Rupert (cab $3.50) and stayed home.
And I forgot to say that last week when Jed and I were walking on Madison we ran into Dustin Hoffman in his beard with his little girl. He was carrying lots of record albums from the house that he and his wife, Anne, live in behind the Cerfs’ house, carrying them up to 75th Street. I didn’t know then that he was leaving home, which I just read in the paper.
Tuesday, June 13, 1978
When I got to the office Phyllis Diller was already there with Barry Landau eating lunch. She looks really old, but she was great. I don’t think the facelift did much for her, but then again, maybe it did. Averil had invited her mother Sandra Payson and her brother Blair Meyer, and John Reinhold was there, too.
Dropped Vincent (cab $4) and then cabbed with Jed ($4.50) to the opening of Grease. Edd Byrnes came over and said hello, and Randal Kleiser, the director. It turns out he’s the kid who wrote Jed letters from California and then was the assistant assistant director on Heat when Paul and Jed filmed it in L.A. in 1972.
Fatso Allan Carr was there. What a butterball—if you pushed him over he’d roll. Catherine was there with Stevie Rubell who was cool to me, I guess because he read in New York magazine that I was standing in line to get into Xenon, which I wasn’t. The movie’s great, Travolta’s so good. In some camera angles he looks like a turtle, but with the right ones, he looks like the new Rudolph Valentino. Stockard Channing is actually pretty but one side of her face is much better than the other.
We walked over to Studio for the Grease party and went in the back door where all the fifties cars were parked and the waiters were siphoning the gas out of the tanks because I guess you’re not allowed to bring cars with full gas tanks into buildings. John Philip Law was behind us. They were giving out hair pomade, and the place smelled so good—just hot dogs and hamburgers, everything from the fifties. Met Mr. Nathan of “Nathan’s,” he and his wife were doing the hot dog stand.
Sunday, June 18, 1978—London
Staying at the Dorchester in a big ugly Spanish-style suite overlooking the park. Ran over to Sotheby’s to see the Von Hirsch collection, the biggest since Scull.
Monday, June 19, 1978—London
Lunch at La Famiglia. Chris Hemphill came for coffee. He always manages to say that one wrong thing. With Bianca sitting right there he asks me, “When is Jerry Hall’s cover coming out?”
Walked on the King’s Road. Fred was hawking, trying to sell Bianca’s autograph and mine for 50p but no one was interested. Bianca got very embarrassed.
At the Turf Club Ball Fred evidently flipped out—he started crying about the passing of the nineteenth century—how there were so many beautiful things done in it and how the people who did it were now all gone—and a girl took him into a room alone. I was upstairs with Bianca. Later we found out that Fred stopped in a bar on the way home and met five Scots and they ended up stealing his shoes from outside his door.
Tuesday, June 20, 1978—London
The phone operators at the Dorchester were so great, very sharp. One said, “There’s a fake Mrs. Jagger on the line. Do you want to talk to her?” I said, “Okay,” but when I said hello the girl hung up. The operators screen every call and they know where you are every minute, they don’t have to look it up. I mean, if the whole world were British it would run so great. London this time was so much fun, better than New York in the sixties. But all the great people only were there for these two big weeks of events, so …
At lunch we were teasing Bianca that it had somehow made it into the newspaper that Fred was trying to sell her autograph on the King’s Road and that nobody had wanted it, and she believed us and got upset all over again.
Nicky Haslam gave us a memorable party, really paid us back for entertaining him in New York. It was at Pat Harmsworth’s on Eaton Square. Her husband owns Esquire and Soho News and the Evening Standard. The English girls are so beautiful, I don’t know how the English made so many aristocratic-looking people. Had a good time talking dirty to Clarissa Baring and talked to a guy who said he invented the waterbed, but that now everybody’s copied it so he’s on to a floating cloud bed. The Gilmans were in town because of Ascot, and Sondra was talking about (laughs) “meeting Elizabeth.” I talked to the widow of Laurence Harvey. Jimmy Connors was cute, going around asking every girl if she wanted to go home with him and fuck. Fred keeps on being so peculiar—trying to kiss me and crawl in bed with me, so goony.
We went over to Nona Gordon Summers’s party on Glebe Place. She bought a row of houses behind some other houses and turned it into one big one with a one-way glass roof. I never used to like her, but I do now. She’s elegant and nice. Her party was for Bob Dylan, and Bianca was raving about him and how he’s after her. He had his bus parked ou
tside. Nona told him he should buy a painting of mine and he came right out and said he’d already had one—the Silver Elvis I gave him—and that he’d traded it for a sofa. So what Robbie Robertson told me a few weeks ago was true. And then Dylan said that if I ever gave him another one, he’d never do it again. He kept introducing me to the girls around him—really beautiful, dykey girls who were lying all over Nona’s floor. Like Ronee Blakley types. It was sort of like Arabian Nights because that’s the kind of house Nona’s is. Later on, Bianca was complaining that Dylan had wanted to take her in the bus, and how insulted she was that he hadn’t gotten a limo for her.
Wednesday, June 21, 1978—London
Sat around reading newspapers and we couldn’t believe it—the Evening Standard actually did have an item about Fred trying to sell Bianca’s autograph. Room service didn’t answer.
Cabbed to the ICA press conference ($4). Huge crowd, the show looked really terrible. Did twenty interviews and some pictures. Then we went to Marguerite Littman’s for lunch to meet Rock Hudson but his plane was delayed and I had to leave to do more interviews. Marguerite invented something great for dessert—chocolate soup! It’s orange juice and Grand Marnier and chocolate, hot. Back to hotel (cab $4).
