The Andy Warhol Diaries

by Andy Warhol

  It was so freezing outside that I decided to stay home. Talked on the phone to John Reinhold for two hours. Fell asleep and then woke up. Then went and broke into Jon’s cinnamon nuts and had them. Drank some cognac. I was sleeping with that kind of sleep where you’re sleeping but you think you’re awake. Then finally from 7:30 to 8:15 I did get some good sleep.

  Was too lazy to put on the humidifier so I woke up with dry mouth and fingers.

  Wednesday, December 21, 1983

  Went to Fiorucci and it’s so much fun there. It’s everything I’ve always wanted, all plastic. And when they run out of something I don’t think they get it again. It’s the cutest kids, too.

  Worked till 7:30 then glued myself and went over to Mick’s party on West 81st, and it was fun. They had a couple of security guys at the door. And it was the first time I saw his new house and I was disappointed because I thought it would be on Riverside Drive, and when I think of all the great houses they were looking at I don’t know why they bought this one. Jed restored it, but the house is just a regular house.

  And just the usual people were there. Ahmet, and Camilla and Earl McGrath, and Jann Wenner and Peter Wolf and Tom Cashin. I decided to sort of booze it up. They had good food. Maybe it was store-bought, but the best store-bought. And Jerry is huge. It’s so funny to see these girls pregnant who were so slim. You can’t believe it’s the same person. It’s like a truck. She had a tiara and a white wedding-type dress on.

  Thursday, December 22, 1983

  Benjamin picked me up and it was raining hard but it had turned warm. I was in a terrible awful Christmas mood. Nobody was in town.

  Paige called and she’d sent me a chocolate TV set she’d had custom-made by one of the advertisers to celebrate our MSG-TV shows. She didn’t know that earlier in the day we had just gotten the letter saying in black and white that the show was being cancelled.

  Friday, December 23, 1983

  Cabbed to Interview to the office party to try to feel Christmasy. Robyn Geddes was there and I could see he was feeling funny. And it seemed like there wasn’t anybody big at the party. Robert Hayes was there and Cisco, his boyfriend, who’s dying of AIDS, and I guess I got really freaked out and I couldn’t deal with it. The kids had all gone to his house—he made Christmas dinner for Jay and Paige and they ate it. He’s made dinner for them before. We used to go to his restaurant all the time.

  Saturday, December 24, 1983

  Halston’s place was really Christmasy. Victor was behaving himself. Bianca was there with Jade, and Peter Beard and Cheryl Tiegs, and Jennifer and Jay from the office, and Halston’s niece. No Steve Rubell. Dinner was delicious, cranberries and turkey, and I porked. Halston gave me an old dress, it weighed like 4,000 pounds. And the presents weren’t really that great—it wasn’t like the other Christmas Eves there. Bianca made a faux pas, she asked me if I was going to Diane Von Furstenberg’s and I hadn’t been invited. So I guess I’m off her list. She must have chosen Bob over me. Well, then she missed a Christmas present. I don’t know, it was never that much fun there anyway. Benjamin was trying to get me to leave so he could go off and have fun, so he got me out of there by 12:00, and walked me home. I just lallied around feeling blue. Took a Valium and forgot about the world.

  Sunday, December 25, 1983

  Got up and it was Sunday. Tried to dye my eyebrows and my hair. I wasn’t in the mood. Went to church. Got not too many phone calls. Actually none, I guess. Tried to wrap presents. I was going to have Peter and Chris over to plan our trip to Aspen the next day. I guess I took all day wrapping presents and I think by the time they came I’d watched a lot of terrible TV. Went through a lot of fuzzy paper.

  Got a picture of Georgia O’Keeffe from Chris and a little painting from Peter and time really flew by. Nobody ate anything.

  Monday, January 2, 1984—Aspen, Colorado—New York

  Got back to New York and got a Scull limo ($20 to the driver). The driver said he’d picked up Jean Michel and drove him to the airport to go to Hawaii for two months. And I hope he paid his rent in advance. Got home and was really tired. Watched TV, took a Valium.

  Never took a bath the whole time in Aspen, never changed clothes. Just lived like a pig. That’s a good story, isn’t it? But my perfume worked and my breathing was good but I was depressed because Jon is so aloof. He says he needs to be his own person, and I always feel like he’s just about to leave, so I never can feel relaxed.

  Wednesday, January 4, 1984

  Vincent was upset because it was in the newspapers that I’m giving a party at Club A for Christopher on January 10, and now everybody is calling the office to get invited and driving him crazy. It’s not my party—I told the person giving it that my name could only be used in a minor way, but the invitations arrived and they say, “Andy Warhol invites you to …”

  Peter called and said it was Chris’s birthday and was I going to take them out to celebrate. I couldn’t face it so I started a fight about that to get out of having to do it.

  Then I took Benjamin as my date to a party at Louise Melhado’s. Jennifer had come to work for five minutes but it was just long enough to give us the wrong address. But we eventually found it. We were both dirty and in our bluejeans and it was hard explaining why Benjamin was there. But it was an old crowd so the old boys wanted to meet him. Decorators.

  Dropped Benjamin (cab $20). I went home and watched Dynasty. Helmut Berger was good. Then went to bed early. But then I remembered the caviar in the kitchen that Calvin had sent so I started down the stairs—I was in my socks—and it was like a comedy, I slipped and fell three times. Just flopped down the stairs. And I got bruised. Macy’s and Zabar’s were having a caviar war this Christmas but Calvin got his at William Poll so he probably paid a lot for it.

  Woke up in the middle of the night thinking of the exposé of my life that I hear Women’s Wear Daily is doing.

  Oh, and David Whitney called and said yesterday that Leo Lerman had been fired from Vanity Fair and the girl in England who does the Tatler was going to be editor. I don’t know, I think they should just make Vanity Fair like what Vogue used to be and downgrade Vogue to the Mademoiselle level and go on down the line downgrading.

  Saturday, January 7, 1984

  Had to go to see the Keith Haring closing (cab $8). Went all the way down there to see what people are doing and I got jealous. Bought Keith memorabilia and posters from the show ($95). This is at the Disco annex of the Tony Shafrazi Gallery. Ran into people and it was weird. This Keith thing reminded me of the old days when I was up-there.

  And then we went to see Lichtenstein’s show, and he did a mural! I just don’t understand that. Right on the wall. Like picking up the graffiti thing from the kids, but I think it’s so silly, why would he want to do that. But somebody told me they’ll put sheetrock over it and it’ll be underneath and then someday they’ll peel it away. So then we went to a duck exhibit, a new kind of old art, primitives like duck decoys.

  And then we went to Peter Bonnier’s gallery and it was Steve Jaffee’s paintings, and there’s a portrait of Jean Michel in it and Jean Michel told me that this guy just does it the way I do— tracing.

  Sunday, January 8, 1984

  Calvin called and wanted to know if it was worth going to Chris’s party at Club A on Tuesday. And I had a fight with Chris because he’s saying that I can’t bring whoever I want. I mean, my name’s on the invitation as the host and I can’t invite anybody I want? And then when I ask Chris who’s coming he tells me the names and it’s every boy he’s ever had.

  Monday, January 9, 1984

  Fred walked in and the first thing he said was that I stole his Christmas scarf, which I did. Brigid must have told him. She told him and she got him all agitated. She has nothing better to do so she just went and told him I stole the scarf that was delivered for him while he was away. I think she’s sick in the head.

  Tuesday, January 10, 1984

  This was the day of Christopher’s grand party at
Club A and so everyone was calling us to get in and Chris was being so grand and saying no no no, that it was so exclusive. Calvin and Steve Rubell called a few times and Calvin was asking (laughs) what he should wear.

  I was waiting for Jerry Hall to come down to take her picture for a portrait, but she was a no-show, and she didn’t call or anything, which was strange. She’s usually reliable, Jerry. I don’t know when the baby is due. Wouldn’t it be awful for Mick if it was another girl? If she has a boy, they’ll get married in a minute, I’m sure.

  Talked to Rupert and he gave me an idea—a Statue of Liberty portfolio.

  Then had to leave and it was snowing by then. Finally got a cab ($4) and then when I got there, there was really nobody there. This party was supposed to be “Uptown Meets Downtown,” but it was just dumb meets stupid.

  Wednesday, January 11, 1984

  Jerry Hall called and said, “Is this the day I’m supposed to come down?” and I just said yes.

  Jean Michel called from Hawaii. He said it wasn’t so primitive out there, that the first guy he saw said, “Aren’t you Jean Michel Basquiat, the New York City graffiti artist?” And he said he met these hippies out there and mentioned my name and they said, “Oh you mean that death-warmed-over person on drugs?” And I mean, it’s him they should be talking about.

  Jerry came and she had Mick’s daughter by Marsha Hunt with her, but the girl didn’t talk, she just read a newspaper while Jerry and I worked.

  Jean Michel called again from Hawaii. I told him to cut off his ear. He probably will. Went home and met the shiatsu guy for my weekly massage.

  Sunday, January 15, 1984

  I was a judge at the cheerleading tryouts for the New Jersey Generals, the team that Donald Trump bought. They were having them in the basement part of Trump Tower. It was the final tryout, and I was supposed to be there at 12:00 but I took my time and went to church and finally moseyed over there around 2:00. This is because I still hate the Trumps because they never bought the paintings I did of the Trump Tower. So I got there and they were already up to the fiftieth girl and there were only twenty left to go. Another guy had been filling in for me and he handed me his pad and I took over. I didn’t know how to score. The girls didn’t look special because there was no spotlight on them. Once in a while a camera light would go off and flash on one and then she would look good, but that was it. People like LeRoy Neiman were the other judges. He said he voted for anybody who could kick. Ivana voted for any of the girls who looked like her.

  And there were so many different kinds of bodies—some with big hips and small waists and some with boy-type bodies, and some with really skinny legs so there were big spaces between their legs. And this cheerleading would be just something they’d do “for fun,” they don’t get paid. So they’d better get themselves a football player or they’ll walk away with nothing. And somebody told Ivana she’d better watch her husband because she could lose him to these young girls, but then later somebody told me that he fooled around with all the girls anyway. And seeing these young things and then a sophisticated “lady” like Ivana, you’d think that some day they could be like that, too—if they marry right.

  And they all had to dance to “Billie Jean” by Michael Jackson, so we all had to hear “Billie Jean” seventy times during the tryouts, so it was sick.

  Went to Beulah Land on 10th Street and Avenue A (cab $6) to see the photography show of the kids at the office—Benjamin and Paige and Jennifer—and it was right near where I first lived when I came to New York, on St. Mark’s Place and Avenue A. And I thought about how hard it was then, walking all that way home from the subway on Astor Place with my drawings and then dragging them up seven flights of stairs. And when we got to Beulah Land they said that I’d just missed everybody’s mother and father and relatives, and I was so glad I had. Like Jennifer’s mother and father and Paige’s aunts and uncles. And Benjamin’s photos were like my ideas—manhole covers that all looked the same but they were actually all different. And Benjamin is the only one who sold anything—Jeffrey Deitch from Citicorp bought them. And Paige has so much energy, she did the Peter Beard look—writing little things—and it’s almost there but how many things can you do with photographs? Stayed there an hour then went to the party at Pyramid for it. And it was the same crowd there. And these two clubs are the only places I’ve been to where the kids actually do dress the Fiorucci way—like wearing three dresses at once.

  Thursday, January 19, 1984

  After Benjamin picked me up we passed a candy/newspaper shop and the woman said she’d consider getting Interview, and she gave us a box of candy-covered-chocolate-covered peanuts. And then we were passing the park and the pigeons were just going crazy, they were so starving, so we threw them the box of it. Usually they won’t eat candy, but they were so starving they did. Barbara Allen called from Barbados because she’d just been interviewed about the exposé that Women’s Wear Daily is doing on me. She said she said “all the right things,” so I can just imagine. Maybe they won’t run it. She’s still with the same guy, the Polish guy.

  Friday, January 20, 1984

  At 12:30 Mrs. Tisch was coming to be photographed for a portrait. At last someone I met from a party was getting a portrait done (cab to meet Lidija $6). She came in all her jewelry. She has such a bad nose job though. When I first saw her I didn’t know it was one, but it is. And you think, with all that money, why can’t they make it right? Why can’t they fix what went wrong? She’s pencil-thin and she doesn’t like red lips because she says her jaw is big, but she wasn’t much of a problem. Worked all afternoon.

  Monday, January 23, 1984

  Joan Quinn sent Vincent a clipping from the Los Angeles Times that said Ronnie Levin was arrested for stealing all this video equipment. Actually, he’d charged it to credit cards, though—some kind of scam.

  And Jean Michel is meeting all these women in Hawaii and he’s going to L.A. to paint Richard Pryor and then going back to Hawaii. And Paige is going out there and I told her that she should make sure he’s really going to be there when she gets there. I mean, she’ll make all these plans and she’ll get there and he’ll be gone.

  Oh, and this kid came up who said he was Rupert Murdoch’s nephew, and Jay, after his mistake with Sidney Poitier’s “son,” was saying this time, “He’s a fake, I know it.” But I think it was a real nephew because he left quickly, he didn’t stay on and on.

  Friday, January 27, 1984

  We cabbed down to the Castelli Gallery to see the Jasper Johns show. When we got there Jasper was at the door letting some people out and I told him we were crashing and he let us in. I wasn’t invited, I don’t think—I never saw an invitation. Or to the lunch they had either. The paintings were wonderful, and every one was like $600,000. I think Jasper owns most of them, just sells one when he has to. Then we left there and went to the South Street Seaport to take pictures there, and that was strange, because right where Jasper and Bob Rauschenberg and Bob Indiana used to live, now there’s this whole fake town with 100 million stores. Stopped at a Greek coffee shop ($24).

  Saturday, January 28, 1984

  Wandered to the East Village. Took a couple of rolls of film. Ran into René Ricard who’s the George Sanders of the Lower East Side, the Rex Reed of the art world—he was with some Puerto Rican boyfriend with a name like a cigarette. We went to the Fun Gallery, then went to the Lochran Gallery which used to be a furniture store and now they’ve thrown paintings on the wall and it’s a gallery. And then we went to Mary Garage. What’s the name of that gallery? Gracie Mansion. On Avenue A. And there were five fakes of mine there. Electric Chairs. And some Jackson Pollock fakes. I didn’t say anything. Left there and saw a sign that said “Funeral Home,” and I thought it was a discotheque and started to go in, but then they were actually bringing a body in and I freaked out and crossed to the other side of the street.

  Sunday, January 29, 1984

  No one was available to accompany me to the office, and I w
as afraid the elevator would get stuck, so I didn’t go down. Paige made it to Hawaii. Jean Michel did make it back from Los Angeles to meet her there, I guess, and they were going off to some ranch.

  Tuesday, January 31, 1984

  Dr. Karen Burke arrived, she thinks she knows what’s making Brigid scratch, she thinks it’s the cats. So she waited until Brigid went home at 5:00 and went with her. And I said to Brigid what if it turned out the cats had something and she said, “Oh, I’ll just get rid of them, then.” I don’t know, she has no feelings.

  Saturday, February 4, 1984

  Did a personal errand with Jon, but he made me promise not to put anything personal about him in the Diary. [Jon Gould was admitted to New York Hospital with pneumonia on February 4, 1984, and released on February 22. He was readmitted the next day, however, and released again on March 7. On that day Andy instructed his housekeepers Nena and Aurora: “From now on, wash Jon’s dishes and clothes separate from mine.”]

  Monday, February 6, 1984

  Was picked up by Benjamin and it was a beautiful day. This was the first of me taking photographs for my assignment from French Vogue. I’m being paid $250 a day.