The Andy Warhol Diaries

by Andy Warhol

  Have I said that I lost the bet to Ralph Destino about where Rita Hayworth was born—she was born in Brooklyn and so now I have to do the portrait of the woman he’s going to marry.

  Saturday, September 27, 1980

  Got up at 9:00. Had to glue myself together to meet Fred Dryer to interview him at Quo Vadis. He’s the Los Angeles Ram. He arrived and he wasn’t wearing a shirt or tie, and he had two bruisers with him who weren’t, either, but we got the restaurant to give us the back table, the one we had when we interviewed Burt Reynolds. Fred Dryer’s 6’6” and he’s so good-looking I fell in love with him. He wants to go into acting. I was embarrassed when he asked me what number he was and I didn’t know. He had four salads and meat.

  Sunday, September 28, 1980

  Brigid was at EST all day. They took their watches away. She didn’t get home till 5:00 in the morning. They had 200 people and it sounds smelly. They looked in people’s eyes and farted. They called each other assholes, so now Brigid’s a big asshole. It’s just ridiculous.

  Wednesday, October 1, 1980

  I decided to stay at the office and get some work done with Rupert on the diamond dust. If it were real, it would cost $5 a carat and that would be $30,000 or $40,000 for each painting for the diamond dust alone. Then John Reinhold picked us up to see Charles Ludlam’s Ridiculous Theatrical Company’s play Reverse Psychology down on Sheridan Square (cab $6, tickets $32).

  We had good seats and the play was good because it was so real. It’s about a man and a woman psychiatrist who have a couple of patients who go off to an island and take a drug called PU which makes them love whoever they didn’t, and vice versa, and it was fun, worth going to see because the fights were so real.

  John and I decided to go see what Bobby Short was really like so we went to the Carlyle (cab $4.50) and Bobby was there singing away, and I was reminiscing about seeing him in the old days when John brought me back to reality—he told me that Shirley Goldfarb went to heaven. Then Bobby was starting to come over so we paid up and ran out quickly ($68.30). Got home about 1:30.

  Thursday, October 2, 1980

  Nelson Lyon came over with Michael O’Donoghue, the writer on Saturday Night Live, and he’s a funny guy but he doesn’t look Irish. He said that at a party I took a picture of him, but I must have been aiming at somebody behind him. He looks like he wants to be Buck Henry. I hadn’t invited them for lunch and they saw all the leftover food from the big lunch Bob had just had, so I had to make some excuse, and Nelson’s so paranoid, anyway.

  Richard Weisman said he needed some girls for the “21” thing before the Ali fight so I invited Barbara Allen. And she wanted to bring John Samuels so I asked Richard and he said yes.

  Worked till 7:30 on portraits with Rupert. I found out the fight didn’t start till 11:00 so I wondered why we had to get to “21” at 7:30. I answered the phones. Then cabbed uptown ($5).

  “21” was doing this special thing for its good customers, I guess, it was cocktails at 7:30 and dinner at 8:30. Then they gave us tickets to go over to Radio City Music Hall and see the fight and invited us back to “21” for a light supper afterwards. John McEnroe, Sr. was there with a friend from the Paul Weiss office who said he was our lawyer but I didn’t know him. There were Ali posters and “I Am the Greatest” buttons. I was trying not to drink too much. They kicked us out when they said we were going to miss the fight. We went through the Warner’s building and over to Radio City. The Spinks fight was on and then the Muhammad Ali fight came on and I couldn’t watch it, I ate all my fingers on one side. The audience couldn’t believe it when he lost. It was too unreal. And he had makeup on, he looked so handsome, it was like white makeup and his face wasn’t shiny and Holmes’s face was black and shiny. Then we went back to “21” and I introduced Barbara Allen to John Coleman. John Samuels fell in love with Walter Cronkite and was talking to him at the bar and I got John away because he was drunk.

  Then Richard wanted to take us to a new singles-swingles restaurant and he invited three blonde girls along and Barbara didn’t like that. She was talking about John Samuels, saying, “Oh look, he’s just like Peter Beard—he walks like Peter, he talks like Peter, oh look, he runs like Peter, he eats like Peter!” I said, “What are you talking about?” Because, I mean, they’re nothing alike.

  And Barbara was saying she couldn’t wait until Bianca came back and found her with John— “What do you think Bianca will think? What will she say? Well, maybe I’ll let her have him when she gets back. What will she think, though?” And here John had just said to me, “I can’t wait till Averil gets back—I’m going to meet her at the airport.”

  Bob had gotten Barbara a joint because she asked him and she was more thrilled with that than anything else. So we left and started to walk home, this is around 79th Street, and then we heard all these cop cars and we saw a crowd and John ran right up and into it and it was a dead person on the street. So we asked people and finally a doorman told us that three guys had just walked by and he thought they looked strange, and then they had picked on an undercover cop and tried to rob him and the cop had shot and killed one of them. And John just wanted to be in the thick of it, and Barbara was upset. And it was just awful, seeing the Ali fight, and that was violent, and then this, and so we got a cab and the driver seemed crazy to me. Barbara said he was Greek but I think he was Puerto Rican and saying crazy things because he thought it was a Puerto Rican that’d got shot. So I dropped Barbara off and watched her go into her building and then just as we were driving past Lenox Hill Hospital the body was going in that we’d just seen lying on the street (cab $4)!

  When I got home I didn’t have Barbara’s number to call her and tell her I got home safely, so I called Bob to get it, and he told me that Barbara had told him that everyone was after John Samuels—“especially Andy”—and I told him to call her up and tell her off—that if I’d wanted John Samuels I knew him before she did, and I’d only invited him to this thing because I thought it would make her happier. And that actually Richard had wanted another girl, not her. So there!

  Sunday, October 5, 1980

  Church. Diana Vreeland called and thanked me for buying ten copies of her book Allure. I walked the dog and thought I passed a lady flasher—she had on a raincoat and nothing else, you could just tell. She passed me and then came back down the block. She looked strange but maybe she’d just had a fight with somebody and left the house. If you read the Post, everybody starts to look strange.

  Monday, October 6, 1980

  Cornelia Guest came down. She was drinking and she’s only fifteen but she’s beautiful.

  Vincent was putting together a one-hour show from six hours and it looks great, really professional. Don Munroe went off to a video conference in Nice. Worked till 5:30 (cab $7). Went home and glued myself and put on black tie. Went to C.Z. Guest’s for drinks. A guy there told me, “We have someone in common.” He said that his family owned all the brandy and sherry in Spain and that in the sixties Nico was the girl in all their advertisements in all the posters and subways and magazines, that she was famous all over Spain. He wanted to know where this beautiful girl was now and I said that it was a whole other person, that he’d never believe it, that she was fat and a heroin addict. He wanted to see her and I said that if she was still playing at the Squat Theater we could go see her.

  C.Z. took the station wagon and drove us to the Met to the Cardin fashion show dinner. It was the longest fashion show in the world. I was so surprised, I think he’s kept every dress he ever made, there were so many of them. I liked the show but the ladies were bored. I saw Bill Paley and Barbara Allen and Slim Keith. I wish I’d taken pictures, it was all the right people together.

  I thought the diamonds in the eyes of Sao’s foxes were real, but she said they weren’t. She asked where she could get an inexpensive ruby bracelet and I told her I’d seen one for $42,000. She said it was for a man and I guessed Patrice Calmette, because that’s who she’s been seeing, she’s broke
n up with Naguib, she said he made her too emotional.

  Bob Denison was there with his new girlfriend China Machado, and I’m going to do a million faux pas with her because I just know I’ll never recognize her. Catherine Oxenberg’s mother, Princess Elisabeth of Yugoslavia, was there. She’s beautiful, and I knew it was her from the moment she opened her mouth, they talk just alike, the voice. She was wearing one of Carolina Herrera’s dresses. And I talked to Paloma’s mother, Françoise Gilot.

  I talked orchids with C.Z. Her gardening column is syndicated in six newspapers now. I had a lot of fun. We were taking São home to the Carlyle, we were outside getting a cab when André Oliver insisted we take his limo. I saw Pierre Cardin at the end and told him his show was great—I did like it because he’d kept so many dresses, from 1950-1980.

  Oh and the dinner was in the Temple of Dendur room and they gave everyone Temple of Dendur books and chocolate truffles and I squashed some truffles between the pages of a couple of the books and it looked like shit and São loved it. And a guy lost his book so I gave him mine and when he opens it it’s going to look like shit. São had me autograph hers. We dropped São and then me and then Princess Polignac who does P.R. for Cardin, and then Bob. Home around 12:30.

  Tuesday, October 7, 1980

  Hermann-the-German said he’s 90 percent sure he has the pope for me to do. And the other night at a party Mario D’Urso said, “I’ve been working on getting the pope for you.” Everybody thinks I want to do the pope so badly. Well I do, but I’m not desperate.

  I turned down doing the Ronald Reagan cover for New York. The papers have me down as a One-Night Republican.

  Worked on backgrounds. Rupert was back from being out looking for Mickey Mouse pictures for the New Myths series for Ron Feldman—Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, the Shadow. We’ll have to do something different like throw diamond dust on them.

  Glued myself together then picked up Carolina Herrera and we decided to walk to Halston’s. She took her earrings off and gave them to me. We had drinks. Victor was in his samurai pants, really big. Then we got in two limos and went to the B. Altman dinner honoring American designers, it was a New York Public Library benefit. Mary Lasker was there, and Estée Lauder and Mary McFadden. I talked to “Suzy”—Aileen Mehle. She looked beautiful, she had her two tits pushed up so you could look down.

  I was sitting with Halston. We decided I should only take pictures of the twenty waiters. Victor and I went to the bathroom and he took off his samurai pants and I wore them as a cape. We thought the bathroom was empty but as we were leaving everybody came out of the stalls. April Axton was there with Sam Wagstaff who looked older. I accused April of being Jewish and she said how could she be since I’ve seen her at my church, St. Vincent Ferrer. I brought up about how April once accused me of raping her dog in a bathroom. The dog had followed me in and then when I came out, he came out with me. She’s awful but she is funny. I told her again that those photographs she gave Sam that I took of her in the sixties were now worth $1,000,1 rubbed it in.

  Then Carolina and I went to Carmen D’Alessio’s dinner for her forty friends at Mr. Chow’s. Lester Persky was giving millions of toasts, he was drunk. He toasted Henry Geldzahler who wasn’t even there. Then he forced me to give a toast, so my toast was, “Free drinks from Lester for everybody.”

  Wednesday, October 8, 1980—New York—Port Jervis, New York—New York

  Picked Brigid up (cab $7). We were driving up to Charles Rydell’s house in Port Jervis to interview him on his bit part in Union City. Then went to pick up Doc Cox on 72nd Street, he was late. Doc Cox was driving us up there in his Rolls. He told Brigid she couldn’t smoke in the car, that it would ruin the smell of the good leather, and she started to go crazy—when she wanted to have a cigarette she had to lean her head out, so she was in a bad mood.

  We got there and the Doc mixed martinis and Brigid had one, her first of the day. I took pictures. Brigid ran out to pick “fresh tom-ah-toes,” but by the end of the day she was drunk and they were just tom-ay-toes. I went out and picked plums and we were eating them—even though they did have so much bug spray on them, they were so good. I had about ten. Then I picked cherry tomatoes and real tomatoes. Brigid was drinking martinis out in the tomato patch and she lost her martini glass in the patch.

  Brigid and Charles kept talking about “lunch at Flo-Jean, lunch at Flo-Jean,” and saying, “You’ve never seen anything like it in your life.” And the more they kept saying that, the more you just wanted to hate it. But we got there and, well, you’ve never seen anything like it in your life. It’s the sickest restaurant I think I’ve ever been to. A big rambling restaurant run by Flo and Jean and filled with baby dolls, a million of them. All colors. Because the place is very colorful. Napkins that’re pink and green and yellow—just really a lot of color. Either Flo or Jean said her husband died in 1929. The food was the worst, but there was a lot of it. I gained four pounds and all I had was mashed potatoes and sweet relish. We had a lot of drinks there, Brigid went on with her martinis. Charles paid for the lunch but I bought souvenirs. Everybody had a good time. This restaurant had rooms and rooms that just went on and on, and they have weddings and parties there. It took up like a fourth of the Delaware River.

  Brigid was drunk, she kissed all the waitresses. Then she began telling me food stories she’d never told before, like how she once went to the Oyster Bar in Grand Central Station and ordered a three-pound lobster and a nice waitress brought it to her but it didn’t look like three pounds to Brigid. Brigid said, “I am a compulsive eater and I know my food and this is not a three-pound lobster.” This lobster was costing like $39. The waitress said, “Oh, I’m sure it is.” So Brigid said, “Then let’s go weigh it, and if this lobster is three pounds I’ll give you $10.” So they went into the kitchen and put it on a scale and it weighed less than one pound! So the waitress was really embarrassed and said they wouldn’t charge her.

  Brigid was by now wacko, drunk, really drunk. I watched TV on Charles’s Betamax. Charles has porno movies but they’re all straight porno movies like the Debbie Dallas one. He only likes straight porno because he (laughs) only likes straight guys. So I watched those.

  We’d finished lunch at 5:30 but Charles was taking us to dinner at 6:00.

  Oh, and it turned out Brigid made out with the farmhand down the road once when she visited Charles. Charles said to her, “Did you fuck the farmboy down the road? He’s been acting different with me ever since you were here.” And she confessed that she had. It was one afternoon when she was alone and only 125 pounds. She decided she wanted some crème fraîche and that she’d go right to the cows. So she walked and walked and she came upon a farmhand. And now this farmhand acts funny with Charles because he thinks it was Charles’s wife or girlfriend that he fucked.

  And a hustler came by who only charges $30 because it’s just a small town. It’s really a gay Peyton Place.

  Doc Cox drove us back and dropped us off.

  Friday, October 10, 1980

  Bob called and said that Jamie Kabler had cancelled going out to Brooklyn College that night to see Ron Reagan dance, so we didn’t know how we were going to get there. But then Bob called back and said a limo would pick us up at 6:30. We sat through three ballets waiting for Ron. The creative crappy stuff. Then Ron did his things, he was okay. After telling Bob that he didn’t do jazz he was doing a jazz number and he was good at that. He could actually be a good song-and-dance man, probably, like that blond guy who was popular during the war, you know, Van Johnson.

  It was raining out. A girl from the Reagan committee came over to Bob and said she’d been calling him all day, that his interview with Patti Davis, the Reagan daughter, could happen tomorrow, so Bob was thrilled. Patti’s the one who lived with the Eagles. Then she came over herself and she was tall and sort of pretty, I thought, but she was wearing funny clothes, a sweater and something. Vincent videotaped her. I said to her that when we did the actual interview, maybe she could w
ear some fancy clothes, and she said, “These are my fancy clothes.” I said. “Well then maybe you could wear something with a good label in them.” And she said, “No I’ll probably come even more casual to be interviewed.” So I gave up and said, “Oh forget it.” So she looked sort of pretty to me, but then looking at her later on the video, how could these kids have missed their parents’ good looks? I mean, Dad was so gorgeous.

  Monday, October 13, 1980

  I left the office and walked toward the big Columbus Day parade. Walked to 42nd and Sixth Avenue (cab $5.50).

  The day was really depressing because I had to talk to the accountants about taxes all morning. I ate crackers and coffee.

  Bob picked me up in a limo and we picked up São to go to the Jackie O. party for Diana Vreeland’s book Allure at the International Center for Photography at 94th and Fifth. It was a small party, only seventy people were allowed. São said that a robbery was just foiled at the Carlyle. Three gunmen at 4 A.M. I scared her when I told her they were probably there because they knew she was. And I believe that.

  Jackie O. arrived. I was afraid to take pictures so I gave one of the newspaper photographers my camera to take a picture with. Chris Hemphill who worked on the book was in heaven, he made it so that I had to sit next to him. He’s just always rubbed me the wrong way. And on the jacket it said he was (laughs) “associated with Andy Warhol.” His date was Deborah Turbeville. A trembling kid behind a stairway asked if he could take my picture. He said, “I’m an artist.”