by Andy Warhol
Then I made plans to go to dinner with Wilfredo and David LaChapelle, the Interview photographer, and Sophie Xuerbe’s son who I think wants to talk because he read we’re doing a movie of Tama’s book and he wants to be in a movie. So we went to Provence, this is the restaurant that the guy who was at Le Cirque started. We talked about the magazine (cab $6, dinner $180).
Oh, and Dolly Fox called and she’s at the Chateau Marmont because she and Charlie Sheen broke up.
Thursday, February 12, 1987
Paige was having an Interview dinner at Texarkana and I invited Victor Love from Native Son for her. Kenny and Teresa Scharf were coming to the dinner and Wilfredo. Keith is going to South America for the winter.
Ulrik came by to talk about the curtain I’m doing for the New York City Ballet. I’ve got to get working on that, it’s due soon.
So went down to Texarkana (cab $5). Heather Watts was there, and Stephen Sprouse and T.T. Wachtmeister, and Richard Johnson from Page Six and Freddie Sutherland. And Jeff Slonim from Interview he’s Tama’s cousin, and he has perfect teeth, a beautiful toothpaste smile. Oh, and Howard Read from the Miller Gallery has been staying at the Gramercy Park Hotel because his apartment burned down and his cat was killed in the fire.
We were there till 1:00.
Friday, February 13, 1987
Ken picked me up. Went to Bloomingdale’s (phone $.50, newspaper $.70). Lunch at the office was for Pat Patterson and the new president of Henry Bendel’s and he brought me soap.
And Howard Read brought a lady by for a portrait, so that was fun, worked on that. Worked till 8:00. Then the birthday party at Raoul’s for Barry Tubbs didn’t start until 11:00 and what’re you supposed to do until then. Called John Reinhold and Wilfredo. John picked me up and we went to Castellano’s for dinner ($170). Then we went to Raoul’s, and Barry had odd people there—like Larry “Bud” Melman and Judd Nelson and Lynn Redgrave and Tom Cruise’s sister. She’s sort of cute. She looks like (laughs) somebody’s sister. We were there till 1:00.
Saturday, February 14, 1987
A really short day. Nothing much happened. I went shopping, did errands, came home, talked on the phone….Yeah, that’s all. Really. It was a short day.
Sunday, February 15, 1987
The house was freezing. Stayed upstairs in bed watching TV. Stuart kept calling, talked to him about ten times. Sam called and Wilfredo. And John Reinhold. It was a big day on the phone but nothing else. I didn’t go out, didn’t even go to church. It was just so cold. I watched Agnes of God three times and it was so boring. And I saw The Story of Will Rogers with Will Rogers, Jr. and Jane Wyman, and the son played his father. The son was on the Today Show at CBS when I did the weather drawings in the fifties.
Stayed up to watch Andy Warhols Fifteen Minutes on MTV.
Monday, February 16, 1987
I’m reading Dancing on My Grave, the Gelsey Kirkland book, and I’m disappointed, I thought it would be more trashy.
I’m watching Yankee Doodle Dandy right now and you see these big statues of like Abraham Lincoln and you wonder if these movie sets are the things that (laughs) wind up in the antique stores—the things that you don’t know what they are—and then some day somebody finally figures it out and they turn out to be worth fifty cents, not $2 million, and I mean, that’s the art game. When I think of all those French “antiques” I’ve looked at that were probably just props from store windows….
Ken arrived. I can tell what the temperature is outside by the temperature in my kitchen—it’s so cold down there that they’re always the same. Went to the West Side to see Dr. Linda Li (cab $4).
Then went down to the office and Julian Schnabel was there, he was being really charming to Fred, I can’t figure out what he wants out of him. He was nice to Fred once before and I forget what it was he wanted then. He’s being reeeally charming. His book is coming out. Who does he think he is? He’s just pushy and energetic. Well, but that’s all life is, being pushy and energetic. And he was just down in Miami and he met Gael there and he hated her. He came right out and said we should fire Gael and hire his wife to be editor, that Gael was stupid and pretentious and fat.
He took Fred down to his studio. I really wonder what he wants out of Fred.
And Brigid has disappeared for a week. On Friday she ate a whole cake in one second and then she announced she wasn’t coming in the next week because she was going to London to a fat farm. Would she really go all the way to London for that? Well, I mean, she sure ought to be able to afford it—she charges $2,000 for each sweater she knits at the reception desk while she’s supposed to be answering the phones, and she’s selling so many of them—Paige even bought one.
Tuesday, February 17, 1987
In the morning I was preparing myself for my appearance in the fashion show Benjamin coordinated at the Tunnel. They’d sent the clothes over and I look like Liberace in them. Should I just go all the way and be the new Liberace? Snakeskin and rabbit fur. Julian Schnabel (laughs) would be so impressed with these clothes he would start wearing them.
Oh, and Brigid is at the English fat farm and she’s going to be fired when she gets back. I’ll give her a pink slip. I’ll give her dogs pink slips—Fame and Fortune will be fired!
Vincent was going to tape the fashion show and he called to say a car would pick me up at the office at 2:00. Ken came and we went downtown (cab $6). Worked hard at the office.
Then went over to the Tunnel and they gave us the best dressing room, but still it was absolutely freezing. I had all my makeup with me. Miles Davis was there and he has such delicate fingers. They’re the same length as mine but half the width. I’d gone with Jean Michel last year to see his show at the Beacon, and I’d met him in the sixties at that store on Christopher Street, Hernando’s, where we used to go get leather pants. I reminded him that I’d met him there and he said he remembered. Miles is a clotheshorse. And we made a deal that we’d trade ten minutes of him playing music for me, for me doing his portrait. He gave me his address and a drawing— he draws while he gets his hair done. His hairdresser does the hair weaving, the extensions.
They did a $5,000 custom outfit for Miles with gold musical notes on it and everything, and they didn’t do a thing for me, they were so mean. They could’ve made me a gold palette or something. So I looked like the poor stepchild, and in the end they even (laughs) told me I walked too slow.
And the clothes in the show really stank. Alligator, fur, and lace. And I really worked my ass off. The Japanese crew was more interested in me than in Miles. They were doing the show again at 10:00 but I didn’t have to do the second one, I was only in the one that was for the press. And then afterwards Vincent had a taxi come.
When I got home I called Fred and explained that I was just too exhausted to go to the Fendi dinner, so when he called them to say I wouldn’t be coming with him and that he’d bring a girl instead, they said don’t bother, that they didn’t want him without me.
Got into bed and Wilfredo called and then Sam called and then I fell asleep. But I woke up at 6:30 and I couldn’t get back to sleep, so I took some Valium and a Seconal and two aspirin, and I was sleeping so heavily that I didn’t wake up when PH called at nine o’clock. And when I didn’t answer she got scared because that had never happened before, so she called on the other line and Aurora answered in the kitchen, and PH made her come up to my bedroom to shake me but I wish she’d just let me sleep.
[Andy did not tell the Diary, but on Saturday, February 14, he went to Dr. Karen Burke’s for a collagen treatment; during the visit he complained of pains in his gallbladder. On Sunday, Andy stayed in bed all day and the pain subsided. On Monday he kept his appointment with Dr. Linda M. Li at the Li Chiropractic Healing Arts Center. That night Dr. Burke called Andy to see how he was and when he admitted that he was again feeling the sharp pains, she urged him to see his regular doctor, Dr. Denton Cox. Although on Tuesday he made his “celebrity appearance” in the Japanese fashion show, he was in pa
in for the rest of the night. Finally at 6:30 A.M. he took a painkiller and sleeping pill which made him sleep through the Wednesday 9 A.M. Diary phone call. On Thursday, when Andy answered the phone at 9 A.M. he was breathing heavily. He told me hehad seen Dr. Cox and that he was going to “the place” to have “it” done (Andy’s fear of hospitals and operations was so great that he couldn’t bring himself to say those specific words) because “they told me I’ll die if I don’t.” He said he would resume doing the Diary after “it” was over, that he would call me from “the place.”
On Friday, February 20, Andy was admitted to New York Hospital as an “ambulatory emergency patient.” On Saturday his gallbladder was removed, and he appeared to be recovering well from the surgery—he watched television, and made phone calls to friends. But early Sunday morning, for reasons that are in litigation, he died.
A few weeks later, the woman who had admitted him to the hospital told me that Andy was the only person in her experience who had ever remembered his Blue Cross and health insurance identification-card numbers by heart.]
“A REMARKABLE LITERARY ACHIEVEMENT”.
—New York Magazine
“Warhol on Warhol, as dictated by Warhol…noble in its obsessiveness…”
—New York Times
“The diaries go far beyond idle gossip. They are a re-creation of a time and a place in America,. Endlessly fascinating…the Warhol diaries will stand for at least a century, if not more.”
—Detroit News
“Warhol’s observations about the stream of people around him are rarely less than brilliant”
—Details
“Cruel, sexy, and sometimes heartbreaking… Like classic literary diarists—Pepys, Byron—Warhol is no neutral observer, but a character in his own right… People may pick up The Andy Warhol Diaries to see celebrities with (literally) pants down and spoons up their noses… But they’ll remember the strange creature who watched it all happen”.
—Newsweek
“No study of Manhattan society in the strobe-lit 1970s or in the shadow of AIDS will be possible without consideration of The Andy Warhol Diaries, which provides an unforgettable portrait of what a set of people imagined themselves to be and of what they really were”
—Baltimore Sun
