by Andy Warhol
Eventually he stole my drink. He served black bean soup, and he insisted it had to be served lukewarm, so after all that cooking in the kitchen the soup was cold. And it looked grey. I didn’t really eat any of it, but Bob—Bob Colacello—thought it was great. I dumped my bean soup in the bathroom. Nobody saw me. I had to run around the apartment a little before I finally made it to the bathroom with the soup so they wouldn’t notice. Truman was getting more and more loaded. I taped all afternoon. He told us he went one night to Flamingo with Liza and Stevie and there were all these sex acts with boys in cages and they went into the owner’s office and it was a really straight-looking guy about thirty-five and Truman asked him, “Why did you start this place?” And before he told us the guy’s answer, Truman looked at us and really built it up, he said, “This has got to be the greatest line in history.” Then he said, “The guy looks at me and says, ‘Sometimes I get horny.’ “ And Truman kept repeating that all afternoon and laughing at it (cab $2).
Sunday, October 16, 1978
I was invited to dinner at Le Premier by the daughter of the Bruno Pagliai man who was married to Merle Oberon, Marie-José Pagliai (cab uptown, dropped Rupert and Todd $4.50). The invitation said 8:30 so I thought there would be drinks first and I took my time and got there at 9:00, and I was so embarrassed, everyone was sitting down already. Marie-José was scared that I wasn’t going to show up at all. Andrew Young and his wife were there.
The thing that was most interesting—it was all I could think about once she told me—was Marie-José’s dogs. She was talking about her black and white scotties and she confessed that the black one was a scottie but that the white one was just a dog done up to look like a matching scottie! She had the hair done that way, she said it was something she’d always wanted.
The dinner party was for Marie’s father, Bruno, who never showed up because it was raining.
Tuesday, October 17, 1978
Well, I spent the evening with Dolly Parton. She’s a Halston girl now, she’s on the arm of Halston.
The Thurn und Taxis guy and Pierre de Malleray picked us up to go downtown to dinner at Ballato’s. The Taxis guy got drunk and he told a lot of stories. He’s the richest guy in Germany, he’s got a great body but his face is a little puffy, he’s old. He said some Negroes came up to him by his hotel and started to follow him with a baseball bat, they were calling him a faggot, and he turned around and said, “Listen here, you black niggers,” something like that, he told them off and they were so stunned that they went away. He said you have to fight back or you don’t survive.
We went to Halston’s and Dolly was there wearing the most horrible dress, a Halston that just looked awful. She’s fat, she likes to eat.
Thursday, October 19, 1978
Watched Steve Martin on the Donahue Show. He looked good. I wonder if he asked for that angle.
Thursday, October 26, 1978
Our limo driver showed us a clipping of himself from the newspaper. He’d been acquitted of kidnapping a bar owner’s cat who was a lookalike for Morris the Cat who’d just died. The bar was on Ninth Avenue in the 50s. The driver said that he just fed the cat, then let it out like he always did, only this time the cat didn’t go back to the bar and the owner accused him of trying to sell it as a replacement for Morris. The jury deliberated for three hours before finding him innocent, so he felt he was a celebrity.
Saturday, October 28, 1978
Thomas Ammann called. He’s staying at Fred’s house. We went to Christie’s and got catalogues, because some of my old drawings are up for sale. They’re from Bill Cecil, who was killed in a car crash. His family was in the American antiques business. I think that’s how I started collecting American stuff—I got my first cupboard from them, the cupboard that’s now in the Interview office, the one they keep the pencils and rubber cement in (catalogues $6, $22, $8, $10).
Victor said that Halston had been trying to reach me to invite me to the benefit for John Warner that Liz Taylor Warner was having that night. Liz looked very fat, but very beautiful. Chen, her secretary, was there. But John Warner wasn’t even there. Liz was upset at how awful the party was. Halston told her he would have just given her the $10,000 if that’s all she was getting from it. Some face doctor that said I’d met him in California three years ago started talking to me, he said he was screwing all day and had come seven times. I don’t know why he was telling me. He asked me how old I was and I said, “Thirty-five,” and he said I looked forty-five. He said (laughs) that if I go to him I can look like “a normal thirty-five-year-old,” because he would do nutrition and things. I guess that’s why he was telling me he was screwing, that I could come seven times if I went to him, too.
Then Aline Franzen who was in charge of the party decided to do her auction thing but nobody at this thing was about to buy anything—they were all just wearing the teentsyest jewel you could buy at Bulgari, or something. Aline said, “This is my painting that I did myself with my whole heart and who will bid on it?” And nobody did. Finally Liz hit me and said, “You better bid on it,” and I said no, that I wanted to bid on the two tickets to Studio 54, and finally Liz screamed, “All right, I’ll take it myself,” and Aline said, “No, Liz, you can’t” and Aline threw herself on the floor and was crying and it was such a comedy and then Liz’s secretary Chen said she would take it, and Liz screamed, “No, Chen, you can’t, you don’t have any money.” And Lee Grant was an auctioneer, too, she auctioned off two teeth, porcelain ones I think, for $2. I’m telling you, nobody in this crowd was going to buy a thing. Oh, poor Liz. And Aline said, “You rich people are being cheap.” And then John Cabot Lodge got up and made a peculiar speech because he talked about the Red Enemy, and it was so weird. Then Halston and Liz said they would meet afterwards at his house.
So Halston and I went to his house together. Liz sneaked in later and he gave her some coke and she got high and happy. I told her, “Look, you’ve got nine days until the election, you’ve got to really get down and talk to the Negroes.” I said, “This lady stuff isn’t going to work.” And she said, “Oh lawdy lawdy lawdy.” And I told her, “Listen, if you lose the election and you leave your husband, I want you to play Truman Capote for me on Broadway.” So she started laughing and went into a trance and tried to talk like Truman, but she couldn’t remember how he talked.
Then Victor and I went into the kitchen and I fed Linda potato chips under the table which I wasn’t supposed to do, which was fun, and Halston and Liz were talking intimately in the other room and he told me later that John Warner wasn’t fucking her.
I told her, “Elizabeth”—you really do have to call her Elizabeth—I said, “Elizabeth, it would be so great to see you in the White House.” And she was cute, she said, “Oh but I just want to be a senator’s wife, I mean, can you imagine me in the White House? A Jew and married seven times?”
Sunday, October 29, 1978
Woke up at 10:30 but it was really 9:30. Daylight saving time.
Then Bob called and said he was at Averil’s and that we were supposed to meet Mike Nichols and the “Dr. Warhol” that Nichols was insisting I had to meet who was from Poland who said he was my long-lost cousin. I didn’t want to go—I can’t stand Mike Nichols—but we had to go because Ara Gallant had set it up. We were supposed to have Sunday lunch at the Carlyle, but then it was moved downtown to Lady Astor’s.
I went to church and then picked up Ara and Bob and Averil ($5.). When we got there Mike Nichols had left. His assistant said Nichols was mad because we were fifteen minutes late. What nerve to leave after making me go down there, and oh, it was awful—this doctor guy telling me I’m Polish. He spells his name W-a-r-c-h-o-l. This Polish fairy asking me questions like did I live alone. He invited us to Poland next September. Mike Nichols met him because he collects Arabian horses—he has 120 horses in Connecticut—and when he goes to Communist Poland every September to get more this Dr. Warchol helps him.
I went to bed early. Talked to Jed’s dec
orating-business partner Judith Hollander about furniture restoration and about the fights I’ve been having lately with Jed.
Wednesday, November 1, 1978
Tom Sullivan came by to show Cocaine Cowboys to us on a Betamax. He was smoking marijuana, and it was funny to smell it at the office. Paul Morrissey watched a little of it and said it was too slow, and Brigid was in and out and thought so, too, but I liked it.
And I decided I’m not so bad in it. They only let me do one take and I think if I’d been able to do more I would have gotten better. But I was better than in “my first film,” The Driver’s Seat. And Cocaine Cowboys has some good music in it. It’s a dumb story, though. These dealers drop cocaine from a plane and a maid and a secretary find it and steal it. Tom said it cost him $950,000 to make it, but I don’t see how, it was non-union.
Ed Walsh came by to show us architectural plans for the building we own on Great Jones Street [Andy bought this carriage house at 57 Great Jones Street as well as a four-story building around the corner —referred to as “342” or “the Bowery”—in 1970]. We’re going to fix it up and then maybe rent it out.
Friday, November 3, 1978
The Elvis at the Parke Bernet auction on Thursday went for $85,000. It was estimated to go between 100 to 125. The market’s peaked for contemporary art. Todd Brassner said the Mao was about to go for $4,000 and he bid it up to $5,000 and then somebody else got it so he was thrilled.
Thomas picked me up in the limo and we went to La Grenouille. I saw the lady who runs La Grenouille and she said that her son was getting married. Her son went to school with my nephew James at Carnegie Tech, my brother Paul’s son. James is in New York now trying to be an artist, and I won’t help him out. Because, well, I never liked the mother, so I would feel funny helping the kid. I took him out to Montauk a few times, and he just … I don’t know.
Saturday, November 4, 1978
After we saw Platinum we picked up a limo outside the theater ($15) and guess who was our driver! The catnapper!! The one from a couple of weeks ago!
Monday, November 6, 1978
Rupert came by and we worked on the Grapes. Cab down to Maxime de la Falaise’s loft on Fifth Avenue and 19th Street ($4). Everybody’d been eating dinner. Susan Bottomly—International Velvet—was there. São was there and Patrick O’Higgins, and John Richardson and Boaz Mazor and Amina came in from a fashion show benefit at Studio 54 and she looked beautiful. She said she was writing a play about men who put themselves down in a bar and I told her that everybody does that, why not make them fashion models who put themselves down at a fashion show, and she said that was a great idea, that she’d just make the men girls.
Ricky Clifton gave me the most beautiful earrings, little John Travolta earrings. And this guy who I’ve met before who did a movie about people who drill holes in their heads was there with his girlfriend and they’d both drilled holes in their heads.
John was telling me that Boaz, when he first met him, was the star of Oliver Stone’s first feature movie. It was called Michael and Mary. Boaz was Michael. They were shooting it on weekends and John said it was like Cocteau—beauties falling all over the place—and Oliver’s mother, Jacqueline, gave all the kids in the movie poppers to make them act better. Boaz said it was shown at the Thalia for a couple of weeks once.
Susan Bottomly looks very skinny. She’s left her boyfriend in Wales, she said she couldn’t take it anymore. He wanted to have a baby and she didn’t.
Tuesday, November 7, 1978
It was Election Day, so many places were closed. Catherine called and wanted to do something. We stayed at the office until 6:30 or 6:45 and then went up to 725 Fifth Avenue to the Robert Miller Gallery for Juan Hamilton’s opening there (cab $4). And just when I got there a guy came in and served Juan papers. It was charges from the woman that used to work for Georgia O’Keeffe for years, saying that he was conspiring to get all Georgia’s paintings.
I left Rupert on 66th and went home and glued. I’d invited the Hoveydas out, things are so bad in Iran, and the du Pont girl and Paul Jenkins. And then Bob invited Lily Auchincloss—her husband Douglas just left her for Kay Kay Larkin.
We went over to Quo Vadis. Hoveyda got a phone call and they told him that the phone lines from Iran to Paris and New York were out, and the Shah’s put the military out stronger. The Hoveydas looked worried.
Then around the corner we saw Truman. He was fixing Barbara Allen up with a millionaire. I think it was actually his Jewish lawyer or something. And Truman is a completely different person from last week. Do you think they’ve found a new drug to give him? Really, this week he’s so dapper and last week he was an alcoholic.
Wednesday, November 8, 1978
Dotson Rader is on TV right now on one of the morning shows. He’s awful. I’ve always thought he worked for the CIA and I still do. I just can’t take it. Hold on, I’m going to shut it off…. There, I feel so much better now.
Cocktails at Tatiana Liberman’s were fun. Barbara Rose was there, sitting in all these clothes that were so expensive, but she still has no style. I told her we’d rent her a fag and he could take her around and tell her what to buy and how to put it together. I said, “Well, you’re living in a chic building now, Barbara”—in the Galleria—“so you should really start to look chic.” I tried to be diplomatic, but everything just came out like the truth.
C.Z. Guest had a dinner at Le Cirque. Kim D’Estainville and Hélène Rochas were there, they said that they’d just been in California and they drove miles to the Venice galleries because they wanted to see some “regional” art, and then when they got there, there was my porno show! So they had a good laugh. They loved Big Sur.
Oh, and David Whitney called and said he was going out to California and Philip Johnson had given him a first-class ticket and he said, “Oh Philip, you shouldn’t have. I don’t need it,” and so Philip cashed it in for coach!
At dinner I was next to Doris Duke. She was great. Then afterwards everyone was going to Studio 54 and Bob took most of the ladies in his silver limo, and Doris Duke had a station wagon, it was so chic. We got into that. Then when we got there she wanted to leave—she didn’t want her picture taken—so I took her to her car and went back. I saw the John Scribner boy and Robyn, and James Curley—he’s a Mellon—he’s the cute kid whose father was ambassador to Ireland. Catherine was there and she’s unhappy with her job at Viva. She said she wished she were back at Interview with Bob screaming at her, she said every article has to have a dozen meetings about it. I said I’d take her home. It was around 2:00 (cab $4).
Friday, November 10, 1978
Adriana Jackson came down and I took some pictures of her and a Swiss lady for a portrait. Gigi did the makeup, so we now have someone making the faces white so the wrinkles don’t show and they print up better and make up into better screens and also it seems to the people like you’re doing something more special for them. The pictures really do come out better. The Swiss lady didn’t like her nose, which actually was a nice one, so it was hard to take a picture that she liked her nose in.
Bob Markell from Grosset & Dunlap came to the office. He said the photo book Bob and I are doing should be out by May 31, and then he started talking about me going on TV and I just looked at him and ran out of the room. He’d been saying how everyone in Europe loved all these “intimate pictures” of the people we know, so then I got nervous—(laughs) what if they are intimate?
Monday, November 13, 1978
I think I may try brushing the piss on the Piss paintings now.
Went over to Jamie and Phyllis Wyeth’s at 1 East 66th Street for Phyllis’s birthday party that Jamie had called that afternoon to invite me to. Joanne du Pont’s name came up. I don’t think Jamie likes her much, but I don’t know why not—I mean, he married into the du Ponts, too.
Nan Kempner arrived. Bo Polk arrived and everyone was thrilled that Barry Landau wasn’t with him. Then Barry arrived. And Bo should really be careful, because Barry
even takes Polaroids now, and it could hurt the people if someday somebody showed pictures of everybody at his bathtub parties. Because at the time it’s just all fun, but if it got printed in the papers it would look like something else.
Tuesday, November 14, 1978
Truman Capote stopped by, he was visiting Bob MacBride in his studio at 33 Union Square. Truman may be on Lithium, because suddenly he’s happy. But my real theory is that he went out to Long Island and saw Jack Dunphy and that Jack Dunphy finally agreed to write Answered Prayers for him. And he had the most chic coat on. Courrèges. One big zipper and two zippers for the pockets. He said it was a few years old. But his hands are cold. Which drug is that?
I worked at the office until 7:30. Rupert was helping me try to paint with a brush, the piss on the brush, but it was hard. Dropped Rupert ($4).
Ann Lambton’s in town. She’s about to go cross-country visiting the Americans she’s met in London the past couple of years. It’s incredible what a figure she has now.
Wednesday, November 15, 1978
After work we decided to open a bottle of champagne at the office and get drunk. This was 6:30. So Averil and Vincent and I got drunk, and then we left. Averil stopped a limo and asked how much it would be to take us to Bloomingdale’s and he said $10, so we got in. Averil said that all the Kennedy kids would be at this opening of the Superman shop. We got there to the Superman shop and it looked like the sixties again. How many times are they going to bring back camp?