The Andy Warhol Diaries

by Andy Warhol

  Henry thought of a good quote about Popism: “It’s a real can opener.” Isn’t that great? Oh, and I’m forgetting the most glamorous thing of the day is that Jackie O. called me twice at home and missed me and once at the office, about would I give a quote for Diana Vreeland’s book Allure that’s coming out that’s pictures with captions. She said, “It’s like your book Exposures,” or something like that.

  Saturday, April 26, 1980

  Robert Hayes has been missing a lot of work, and Bob found out it’s because he’s taking a lot of coke, which isn’t like him at all, but the photographers and the stylists just hand it out so freely, to editors especially, because they want the work, and so he’s been calling in a lot and saying he has “a cold” and doing things that he usually doesn’t do.

  I had to go to Lincoln Center to see Clytemnestra. The dance came out good, really great, and Martha was thrilled because she’d been worried about it. Nureyev danced, he was awful. Saw him in the dressing room and said hello. Bianca was wearing a Halston dress with an Ossie Clark coat. And the dress was beautiful, it was flesh-colored in a V on top so it looked low-cut.

  And the best thing was Diana Vreeland eating a banana. This banana was lying around Martha’s dressing room and Diana really wanted it so she peeled it and just ate it right from the peel, and it looked so funny. She’s old enough to look really really funny. She loves bananas.

  Afterwards we went over to Halston’s and had a little supper. We tried to pick up some of the dancers and bring them with us but Halston said Martha wouldn’t like it. So it was just Martha and Bianca and me and Diana and John Bowes-Lyons. And Liza and Mark Gero came over. And an English guy who said he wrote songs for Charles Aznavour. And he had a girl with him—Filipino, I think—and this girl said she’d lived with Michael Caine, and since Bianca had lived with him, too, the girl poured her heart out to Bianca and Bianca dished, too, she said she’d never talked about him before. They agreed that if he got drunk, he’d scream for hours. And this girl said she would just do everything for him, get up at 5:00 and make him breakfast, and then she’d go to the set, and then leave half an hour before he did to go home and make him dinner. They both said that sex with him was “memorable,” but I don’t know if they meant really good or really bad.

  Sunday, April 27, 1980

  Nastassia Kinski came by the office. I wasn’t friendly to her, though, because it turned out she already did the cover of Vogue and now we don’t want to use her for the Interview cover, but she really is beautiful. Picked up Catherine. Cab to Hector’s on Third Avenue and 82nd Street ($4). It’s run by Stuart Lichtenstein, the kid who used to manage Max’s. This was Averil Meyer’s birthday party. She didn’t put us with her, she was at a table with Diana Vreeland and Mick Jagger. And we were waiting to see where she’d put John Samuels who she’d slept with the night before.

  Then Fred invited all the fairies to come afterwards—Robyn and Curley and Curley’s boyfriend and John Scribner and his current girlfriend. Not really fairies, but that feeling. I had a good time with Bill Pitt. I asked him if he still thought he was God and he said yes, but not as much. His father and Averil’s father are best friends. He had a new camera that advances itself.

  And Averil’s father was hitting Catherine, really drunk, and had her dress up practically over her head, and his wife was just standing there. I thought Catherine would be Averil’s new mother, but then he has no money, we found out. And Averil looked funny dancing with John Samuels because she was a foot taller in her shoes.

  Tuesday, April 29, 1980

  Bianca wanted to roller skate so we went to the Roxy in Thomas Ammann’s limo. Bianca really wants to marry Thomas. She brings it up all the time. She’s dying to have him marry her. We skated for about half an hour. Bianca skates like a little kid, and then she reminded me how she’d been on crutches because she’d pulled both her tendons when she was roller skating in L.A. once, and then I vaguely remembered because when she and Mick were starting to get divorced there were all those pictures in the paper of her going into the courtroom in California (laughs) on crutches.

  Bianca figured out that John Samuels was out at Averil’s in Manhasset. She put it together and then I confirmed it. She said that Averil always gets her leftovers, that it’s so predictable. Bianca and John broke up on the night we all went to Martha’s. She said, “He’s a child.”

  Thursday, May 1, 1980

  Calvin Tomkins has a big review of Popism in the New Yorker and it’s a rave. I should tell Harcourt Brace to just go fuck themselves. What are they doing over there? When is the ad going to run in the Times!

  In the morning I picked up Bianca and Victor and went to the Olympic Tower because I had an appointment with Halston to see his sportswear line ($4.50). Bianca had a great Halston top on and a blue bottom and her ass really was wide. She had on Manolo shoes and an Elsa Peretti belt. We got there just in time. Halston keeps using his aging models because he feels they were loyal to him so now he’ll be loyal to them.

  Cabbed to 860 ($5.50). Catherine was having a lunch for Alexander Cockburn and the P.J. O’Rourke guy from the National Lampoon. A writer-photographer from Stern wanted to be photographed with me for the preface for his book, and Henry Wolf, an old friend of mine, was there to take a picture. He was the art director of Harper’s Bazaar in 1960 and he changed the look of the magazine. It was either him or Marvin Israel, I can’t figure out which, who first used ugly girls with big noses and things. And I guess Mrs. Vreeland probably encouraged it because actually it was, now that I think about it, just like putting herself on the cover.

  Then the limo came at 2:30 to take us to Princeton for a book signing that Wilson Kidde set up for us. Ian Maxtone Graham from Brown came with us.

  They had a place set up to sign outside. It wasn’t a rich bookstore like the Harvard Coop. This was more just like a little bookstore in a building, so it was better being outside because the kids going by would see a crowd and go up to see. Then we had a tour of the campus. Really rich-looking. A naked rugby team ran by doing their numbers, just wearing jockstraps, some kind of initiation or something.

  Then Wilson took us to an all-male club for dinner, the Ivy Club, and just a few girls came by for drinks. Champagne punch. All these rich kids. The grandson of Seabrook frozen vegetables. The son of J.D. Salinger, Matt. He was really good-looking. He’s trying to be a photographer and he writes. A cousin of Frolic Weymouth’s from Chadds Ford was there. And a kid who didn’t belong to the club, Ritt, who was a model for Elite, but he didn’t look like one—he had a big nose and beautiful eyes but he was short.

  I bought books. One was the Liddy book ($20.92).

  Dinner at this all-male club was leftovers. Like spaghetti al dente, cheese on top. Baked alaska with Häagen-Dazs that was 2’ X l’ that Ritt made. Four bottles of wine.

  Went back at 9:00, the drive was nice.

  Friday, May 2, 1980

  I’m still not sure if we’ll take the 25 percent that that Hollywood guy, the one who works for Alan Ladd, is offering for Trash II, which Paul is now calling Trash-ier.

  Worked all day. Rupert was there. Till 9:00 or 9:30. Dropped Rupert ($5). Then Jed had a temperature of 104 and thought he was maybe having a heart attack, so at 4:00 in the morning I had to take him to New York Hospital and Doc Cox was waiting there, but it was just chest pains like the flu, and he’s at home but his temperature is still high.

  Sunday, May 18, 1980

  John Powers called and told me the prices at the art auctions, and the Triple Elvis went for $75,000 and he said he thought that was a fair price so I felt okay, but then he told me that the Lichtenstein went for $250,000 so I felt bad. Oh, and the three Jackies went for only $8,000, so that was a bargain.

  Monday, May 19, 1980

  I watched the Today Show and saw the volcano erupting. The man at the volcano who wouldn’t come down must have been killed, they couldn’t find him.

  Gerry Ayres called and he’s writing a movie
called Painting—he wrote Jodie Foster’s movie, Foxes. He’s the studio person that brought us out to Hollywood in ‘69. And he wanted to meet Henry Geldzahler. And so I made a lunch with Henry for Wednesday.

  I met Bob in front of his house and we walked to the Plaza for the JOB Ball—Just One Break—and we’d missed the cocktail hour. All the old bags came out for this. Nan Kempner was there with Jerry Zipkin. Robyn’s mother was very sweet. She and Bob chatted, they’re having the same problem—somebody is signing them up for all these magazine subscriptions and they keep coming in the mail. I sat next to Mrs. Tony Curtis. And so I said, “Oh, I wish I was home watching Tony Curtis on Moviola.” And she said yes, that she liked Tony a lot but that they were just breaking up. They’d been married twelve years. She was nice.

  Sharon Hammond was there with her new beau, Lord Sondes. She’s gained five or six pounds and she was porking it up. And the lord has a potbelly, too. I couldn’t believe it when I saw her eat a whole roll. I took it away from her.

  All the old presidents of the ball got up there, São and Chessy Patcevitch and Sharon’s mother Mrs. Long and Nan and Jean Tailer and a couple of other heavy-duty ladies. They gave door prizes.

  Then Bob and I went to Linda Stein’s party for our agent Joan Hyler. When we got to the party one of the photographers told me, “You’re the biggest one here,” so that’s always a letdown. Paul Morrissey was there with his two nieces and Susan Blond and Sylvia Miles, and Sylvia said, “You’ve got to hear my songs,” and I said, “Oh yeah, I can’t wait.” And she said, “You don’t have to—I’ve got them right here in my bag.” So I had Linda Stein put them on the record player and they sounded good to me but there were eight different record people there and they didn’t react. And then Linda came over to Paul and said, “Oh listen, I mean, you’re the only person here who realized that I’m wearing emerald earrings and have Regency furniture and Lalique, and if it wasn’t for you telling them, they would think it was junk. So thank you.”

  Legs McNeil who started Punk magazine was there.

  Wednesday, May 21, 1980

  Henry Geldzahler’s using the yellow and green print for the New York City poster, and he said Milton Glaser is working on it, and I hate his kind of designs. Henry was at the office for lunch so that Gerry Ayres could meet him and soak up the art world. Jerry’s script that he’s writing is actually called The Painter—not Painting—and he’s writing it for Jack Nicholson. I should tip Jack off that he should just buy the Jackson Pollock story.

  Rupert Everett was there, he just got kicked out of the Blackstone and now he’s at the L’Elysée, or vice versa. Henry had his new lover with him that he’d picked up from NYU, and he was having me take pictures of them kissing. He’s going out to California soon to see his old boyfriend Raymond who’s out there posing for David Hockney—Raymond takes planes just to go pose. At the end of the lunch Henry said to Gerry Ayres, “But what’s the painter going to paint? I mean, that’s the story, so what’s it going to be?”

  Cabbed uptown ($4.50) to glue and then walked to Sharon Hammond’s. I was met at the door by Tony Curtis’s wife, Leslie, who was staying with Sharon, she was really looped. She said she was a rich society girl from Boston and how could she marry an actor and a Jew. Sharon was in the bathroom. Her boyfriend Lord Sondes had just left town and they’d been eating all the time, and this was Sharon’s first time in the John after all the food, and Leslie said she’d walked in on her doing her grunts. And then Sharon’s so meticulous with her makeup that it takes forever, too. Sharon was surprised when I said I would have a vodka. She has big tits.

  I’d brought a copy of Popism to give to Marty Bregman who we were seeing later because I thought he might be interested in producing a movie of it, but of course I had to give it to Leslie. Cabbed to East 57th Street ($3) to Marty Bregman and Cornelia Sharpe’s apartment. We went up to the penthouse. It was one of those funny parties with aging girls and sort of funny people. I guess people there were somebodies, but stars today look so mousy you just don’t notice them. For half an hour I didn’t notice Al Pacino sitting in the corner.

  I wasn’t letting Sharon eat because she’d gained weight. I introduced her to Al Pacino, and so she liked that. He said, “Hi, Andy.” Leslie picked up a guy with big hands. He was a hometown friend of Cornelia’s and she said, “Don’t worry”—(laughs)—“she’s in good hands.” Cornelia looked fat. And Alan Alda was there with this lady with dark circles and it turned out to be his wife. She looked like Anna Magnani. She’s not the wife you’d think he would have, but she looked nice—I’m sure she must be if they’re still married. We rode down in the elevator with them. We left Leslie with a stiff drink in her hand. Dropped Sharon ($3).

  Thursday, May 22, 1980

  A tall skinny Japanese boy came to interview me, and he was cute, he was so nervous, just shaking, he said he was meeting the star of his life. He’s from Studio Voice, the Japanese Interview. He brought me a T-shirt.

  I was reworking Lynn Wyatt’s portrait. Sent flowers to Sharon Hammond and Cornelia Sharpe.

  Gael Malkenson said she’s getting married this Saturday. In a Catholic church. But she always says things that I don’t know if they’re true. Worked till 7:00. A kooky girl followed me to Park Avenue when I left, she was like one of those kooky girls you meet when you first come to New York. Dropped Rupert ($4) and got home around 8:00.

  I looked through my things for something for Marisol for her birthday and finally decided to give her a little painting, but when I went to pick Victor up he wanted it, so I gave it to him. We went down to Chanterelle in Soho, that restaurant that everybody raves about and says how small it is and how hard to get into. Well, it wasn’t so small, it looked big, really. And the food was just okay, it wasn’t so hot. Marisol kept saying this was the first party she ever gave, and Halston assured her it was really great. The first person I talked to was Ruth Kligman, and she’s now a born-again Christian. And she was different. Very nice and calm, but then I began telling her about Gerry Ayres’s movie The Painter that he was writing for Jack Nicholson, and then she was more like her old nervous self. She said, “Should—do you think I should call Jack?” and “Do you think my lawyer should call Gerry Ayres?” and I said, “It’s only a fiction thing he’s writing! Relax. After he does that, artists’ stories will be more popular and you can really sell your book Love Affair for a movie.” Ruth said maybe she could get Nick Nolte to play Jackson Pollock. And she explained that when you’re born-again you just get a clean slate wipeout, that nothing you did before counts. So it’s just like confession, that’s all it is except you can go to confession every day and I guess you can only be born again once.

  John Cage was there and Merce Cunningham and Louise Nevelson who came at the end of the dinner but had a special place saved for her. George Segal and his wife. Joe Brainard. It was nice to see him again after all these years, but I didn’t get to talk to him much, really.

  Marisol looks good for fifty. She made the birthday cake in the afternoon and it was really just beautiful—beautiful marzipan figures, beautiful beautiful figures fucking, and she gave me one and Halston one and they were like little jewels.

  We told Marisol she shouldn’t tell her age because people would never know and she said she thought they already knew because it’s always in all the catalogues and I told her people don’t read the catalogues, and she said (laughs) well that then only the forty people or so that were there at dinner would know.

  Friday, May 23, 1980

  I forgot to say the most important person at Marisol’s dinner, he sat next to her—Edward Albee. He was tight-lipped, but I tried to get him to loosen up and talk, but nothing really happened. He said he read where I’d said his last play, the one with Irene Worth, was “the best play I’ve ever seen,” and he thanked me. I guess I said it to one of the papers. I told him he should write Marisol a play for her birthday.

  Lunch at the office was supposed to be for Lewis Allen, but he forg
ot about it. It was going to be a lunch for him to sign the play contracts, but he had a play opening the night before and got tired and forgot, he said he’d sign on Tuesday.

  Monday, May 26, 1980

  Memorial Day. No traffic around. Went to the office. Worked on about six or seven portraits.

  Curley was back from his brother’s wedding. And did I say that the other day Senator Kennedy called me at the office and I couldn’t get him off the phone and I didn’t know what to talk to him about. I guess he didn’t have anything to do. But Fred was explaining why he’s stayed in the race—to raise money for the Democratic pot. His Smith sister called me the other day but I didn’t take the call, I knew it’d be to want me to give a donation for something.

  Did I remember to say that at the Empire Strikes Back movie there was a black kid about fifteen or sixteen sucking his thumb in the row ahead of me with his parents? I don’t think he was retarded. He didn’t look retarded.

  Tuesday, May 27, 1980

  Lewis Allen came by and he wants to do the play, Evening with Andy Warhol, with a dummy of me on stage saying dialogue based on the Philosophy book and Exposures.

  Friday, May 30, 1980

  Stayed uptown because I had to meet Nicola Bulgari at 12:30 with Bob. After we saw the jewel collection he took us to the Knickerbocker Club which was really great. It’s across from where the Dodge house was that’s now torn down. The food was great there, mashed potatoes and rice pudding and eggs. Bulgari was saying things like “Hide the tape” and “They won’t let you do that if they see that,” and he was acting like “this isn’t that kind of a place, it’s too high-class.” Like he didn’t want to get voted out. It was too corny. After lunch we went into another room for an hour. I don’t know why, he just wanted to blabber. He’s (laughs) against Communism.