In March 2022, Netflix aired a six-part series, The Andy Warhol Diaries, based upon Pat Hackett’s 1989 book of the same title. Each episode was a hodge-podge of archival footage and photographs, current comments from people who were close to Warhol or who knew someone who was, recreated scenes, repeated current shots of places mentioned (such as Warhol’s house), and, throughout, an AI-generated version of Warhol’s voice, saying lines that almost never went beyond banal and trivial. Many also seemed familiar. I remembered that I’d read Hackett’s book when it came out and then had reviewed it for the Buffalo News (July 2, 1989). It was one of those pieces I did and promptly forgot, in part because the News arts editor mangled it, especially the ending, which he cut off after the first sentence of the final paragraph, so the piece just stopped rather than ended. I found the manuscript, which restores what I actually wrote.
The vampire has no mirror image; the Andy Warhol of The Andy Warhol Diaries (ed. Pat Hackett, New York: Warner Books, 1989) has no other. His primary interest is in being and having been seen; his life is defined and preserved in other people’s eyes. His triumphs are requests from strangers for autographs, and invitations to parties and any form of social recognition by the currently-famous or fabulously wealthy. Small wonder that even his diary was written by someone else.
Nearly every weekday from the day before Thanksgiving 1976 until a few days before his death on 21 February 1987 (a day after what seemed to have been an ordinary gall bladder operation), Andy Warhol telephoned his longtime assistant Pat Hackett to dictate a tax record of his expenses and movements of the previous day or weekend. She “made extensive notes on a legal pad as we talked, and right after we hung up, while Andy’s intonations were fresh in my mind, I’d sit at the typewriter and get it all down on paper” (xvii). When Warhol talked Hackett into taking on the job, he had promised that the work would take only a few minutes a day, but the calls usually ran one to two hours. Mondays they’d have what Hackett calls a “triple session” (xvii). Her notes on the conversations eventually ran 20,000 double-spaced typed pages.
Would Warhol have written or directed the writing of a book based on these notes? “Sure,” one longtime friend of his told me, “but this is Pat Hackett’s book, not Andy’s. Andy wasn’t planning to die.” Hackett claims perfect neutrality in her selections, but that’s unlikely. She knew most of the players. Some unstated editorial principles, some personal likes and dislikes drove Hackett in this work. You don’t extract 1600 manuscript pages from 20,000 pages of notes without some guiding principles, some of them aesthetic and some of them personal and substantive. She seems, for example, to have it in for the beautiful model Jerry Hall, Mick Jagger’s paramour. It wasn’t Warhol who selected the photograph of Hall with her mouth screwed up like the Joker’s and a run in her pantyhose from her ankle to her thigh.
The book is outrageously overlong. There are gems here, but you must wade through hundreds of repetitive accounts of vapid encounters to find them. The same material could have been the basis for a delightful 250-page book with the best of the gossip, anecdotes, pithy lines, and enough name-dropping to give us a sense of Warhol’s world. Instead, we have an 807-page four-pound monster, a coffee-table book that few people will ever read all the way through. And it doesn’t even have an index.
The entry for January 31, 1977, is typical: “Worked until 7:30. Went to Regine’s. Warren Beatty was there looking a little older and heavier. Jack Nicholson was there looking a little older and heavier. Anjelica Huston and Apollonia the model were there. I like Apollonia now, she’s really sweet. And Catherine Deneuve was there, who the party was for. Warren was dating Iman, the black model.”
A few people appear throughout the book or with some consistency (Halston, Truman Capote, Warhol’s staff), but most of the rich and famous names appear as people who gave or attended a party to which Warhol was or was not invited. “Richard Gere was there… Paul Schrader was there… Mr. and Mrs. Helen Gurley Brown were there…” (1 Feb 80) (I think the phrase most repeated in the book is “____ was there.”) After a 1979 New Year’s eve dinner at Halston’s, Bianca Jagger takes him to Woody Allen’s party at 3:00 a.m. “Woody’s was the best party, wall-to-wall famous people, we should have gone earlier.” (31 Dec 79) The book is a litany of The Names: Martin Scorsese, Jackie O (invited Andy to one party, not to another), Arnold Schwarzenegger (didn’t invite Andy to his party for the Statue of Liberty), Sue Mengers, Ringo Starr, Alice Cooper, Andrew Young, William Burroughs, Liza Minelli and Baryshnikov (he describes them taking cocaine), Margaret Trudeau (on a toilet seat “with her pants down and a coke spoon up her nose”), Elizabeth Taylor (who “looked like a—bellybutton. Like a fat little Kewpie doll. John Warner said hello to me”), Sophia Loren, Mick and Bianca Jagger, Jerry Hall (had BO, philosophizes about oral sex), Truman Capote, Raquel Welch, Diana Ross, Diana Vreeland, Bob Dylan (“I asked Dylan’s manager if Dylan was Christian now or Jewish again, and he said Dylan’s Orthodox and that’s why he wasn’t doing a show the next night—that he didn’t work Friday nights unless the money was really good” (17 July 86).
Warhol never talks about his art in these pages, and he says little about his past. Scattered through the party reports are bits and pieces of Warhol’s life. He believed what he read in the Enquirer (29 March 1983). He feared he had a brain tumor and was convinced he got pneumonia from a daiquiri (18 June 1981). He regularly had painful injections of collagen to make his skin pretty. He dyed his eyebrows. He exercised diligently and in 1981 got his weight down to 115 pounds (12 August 1981). He was Catholic and went to church most Sundays, but the diary never describes him taking communion or going to confession. When he wanted spiritual forces to influence the world he turned to quack doctors who sold him “crystals” guaranteed to bring him good health and good fortune and even to keep cockroaches out of his kitchen. When he got sick, had his wig ripped off in a humiliating scene in a New York bookshop, and the roaches kept coming, he bought bigger and stronger crystals because, he said, he had to believe in something (30 November 1985).
Unless he was mentioned in them, he rarely read books. He liked films with no or few women, such as The Lords of Discipline and The Outsiders. His favorite television programs seem to have been I Love Lucy, Today, Dynasty, and Donahue (though he didn’t watch Donahue’s programs on aging homosexuals [12 August 1981] or AIDS [19 November 1982], which made him nervous). He stole from restaurants, airplanes, and friends. When traveling in Europe, he didn’t change clothes or take showers (18 Jan 87).
He was repulsed by older women and fat, poor, and unknown people of either gender. “When you go to places where people are sort of nobodies and you have to think of what to say to them, it’s so hard” (29 April 1979). He did a lousy portrait of Gary Trudeau because he didn’t know Trudeau was famous (23 June 1980). (Trudeau got his revenge: a full week of his Doonesbury comic strip parodied characters in the Warhol Diary) (23 June 80). Fame, wealth, and beauty were everything. About a dinner party at Yoko Ono’s: “I couldn’t recognize anybody but everybody was somebody.” (10 April 1984)
He was innocent of politics, literature, music, and he seems to have cared little for art—but he was vitally interested in how much the other guys were getting for their paintings. He was rich, but money was a constant obsession. “Some blacks recognized me a few times this weekend, and I’m trying to figure out what they recognize so I can somehow sell it to them, whatever it is” (3 July 1977). He voted once, but couldn’t figure out how to work the machine so he pulled the wrong lever; he never voted again because he didn’t want to be called for jury duty (16 July 1980). He considered himself a Democrat.
He had become known in the 1960s for his pop-art portraits of celebrities: Marilyn Monroe, Elizabeth Taylor, Elvis Presley, and, most of all, the Campbell’s soup can. His primary source of income in the 1970s seems to have been doing similar portraits for people who weren’t known but who were instead rich. In the last few years of his life, Andy Warhol spent most of his time hustling rich portrait commissions (at $25,000 per, and he did a lot of them), hustling ads for his magazine Interview, and going to parties.
He sometimes had comic trouble managing reality. When a water pipe broke he could do nothing about it until a friend returned from a trip (15 December 1980). When he got a death threat he bought a camouflage hunter’s hat and was astonished to find that people still recognized him. At a gallery show, he saw someone on a ladder and thought it part of the exhibit; it was one of the owners fixing a fuse (23 May 1984). He wandered into a funeral parlor thinking it was a new concept in art galleries. A friend’s brother is executed in Iran and he doesn’t send flowers or a card because Bob Colacello, who usually handled such things for him, was out of town (9 April 1979).
There is an indifference to the pain of the world and the needs of others. He avoided his friends who got AIDS (he wouldn’t sit with Robert Mapplethorpe at a dinner, because “he’s sick” for example [16 Jan 1987], and he rarely attended the funerals and memorial services. He wouldn’t go on the Live Aid program because “when you’re with that many big celebrities you never get any publicity” (13 July 1985). The day the pope was shot he ordered the staff to turn off the office TV: “We lost a portrait that day when Reagan was shot and I don’t want it to happen again!” (13 May 1981). The Achille Lauro hijacking and murder mattered because it might affect how many people would watch his bit on The Love Boat the same week (9 Oct 1985). When the father of one of his oldest employees died, he refused to give her the day off. The mass suicide of the People’s Temple group in Guyana in 1978 didn’t bother him, but he was very upset when “The news . . . showed pictures of all the houses that people had signed over to the People’s Temple when they joined. Oh God, that’s the hardest thing, how could people give away their things?” (29 Nov 78)
The human encounters in the Andy Warhol Diaries occur at such an epidermal level it is difficult to feel much sympathy or empathy for or about anyone in them. That may reflect Warhol’s own lack of feeling, or it may be a numbing in the reader worn down by the thousands of bits of redundant trivia. One of the most poignant moments involves Warhol’s two dachshunds, who spend weekends with Jed, Andy’s romantic attachment before the diaries begin. Warhol was walking across Central Park when he “ran into Archie and Amos on their day off and they didn’t even recognize me. I was—crushed. They were off their leashes and they were with Jed and they didn’t give me a thought” (14 March 1985).
Things go sour about 1982, the year AIDS begins doing horrible things to many of Warhol’s beautiful people. He begins noting the “gay cancer” on 6 February 1982; the acronym “AIDS” first appears nearly a year later, on 28 January 1983. The other characters are as wealthy as ever, but they seem duller and meaner. Warhol still grinds out portraits and portfolios, but there’s a flatness to his life. He walks a street and no one asks for an autograph, he leaves a party and no photographer follows him outside, he learns of important parties days after they’ve taken place. We don’t know if the pretty world Warhol loved in the 1970s has disappeared or if it has just moved elsewhere, leaving him behind. But even without the fact of Warhol’s absurd death, there’s a feeling that something was over anyway.