The Andy Warhol Diaries

by Andy Warhol

  We went to John Addison’s new club, Bonds, the huge clothes store on Broadway that they turned into a disco. We looked around for him but the place is huge and we didn’t see him. It was free, but I tipped the waiter ($20). The stairs are musical. It’s very beautiful.

  Saturday, June 28, 1980

  I called Bob to see if the interview with Paloma Picasso was on—it was, Lester Persky was going to do it at Quo Vadis. And Paloma really likes Patti LuPone, so we called to see if there was still a table for us at her show at Les Mouches.

  I walked over to Quo Vadis. I was there first, then Bob arrived, then Lester and Paloma. I was on my diet so I just had melon and arugula, but the chicken that Bob and Paloma split looked good. What do restaurants do with the meat that’s left like on the backbone? Do they throw it out or do they use it to make hash?

  Lester interviewed Paloma and she’s great, she just tells everything. And she said that we could do the end portion of the interview at the MOMA Picasso exhibit with her and she’ll talk while we walk through. After dinner we went to Un Deux Trois, the place on 44th Street that’s supposed to be like La Coupole.

  Then it was too early to go to Bonds. So we went to Les Mouches. And they made Bob pay. Bob still hated Patti LuPone, but not quite as much. If she had come over and said, “Oh Bob, you’re the editor of Interview I love Intervieni” he would have loved her. I’m the same way, though, I guess. And Ron Duguay was there. At first he wasn’t interested in Patti—these athletes all just like the same blonde types all the time—but I told him, “She really wants you and she’s great.” And afterwards she came and sat with him. Patti’s funny, she does these sophisticated songs and then she gets nervous so she sticks out her tongue like Donald Duck or something. I like her, I think she’s great.

  Monday, June 30, 1980

  A little man from Munich arrived at 4:00 to see his portrait and he was startled when he saw it, it had so much character. Because Fred’s been telling me not to take out the wrinkles and everything too much on these old people, that it’s nice to leave some in. So the man from Munich had red veins but I made them black, and I gave him bright clothes colors whereas he underplays his clothes. I made his daughter really beautiful, though, really elegant. And Fred was really nervous when the man was looking at them because he felt responsible for the look. The guy was cute, though, really nice.

  Stephen Mueller and Ronnie were there, stretching. Robyn was trying to sell a portfolio to two ladies he’d picked up the night before and he sold one print at a discount and he was thrilled. I was at the office till 7:00.

  Cabbed ($2.10) to 76th Street and Fifth to Leonard Stern’s. He’s the Hartz-Mountain guy. He just got the house and it wasn’t air-conditioned, and it was odd meeting him at 8:00 because it wasn’t for dinner, although we’d thought it was going to be. He wants two very big Flower paintings for two walls and he wants them by September 16th because he’s having a party then. He just left his wife. She’s keeping the house on Park in the 70s which he renovated eight years ago. It was embarrassing because I called him Mr. Stein and Fred called him Mr. Stein, too. When he was finished with us we went around the corner and decided to stop in at Barbara Allen’s on 77th Street. She had Whitney Tower there and he’s put on weight, he’s trying to be not so skinny and crazy because he wants his grandmother who’s a Whitney to give him some dough. You know these rich kids go and say, “Oh Granny darling, it costs money to get married and have children and do all the things you’d like to see me do.”

  Tuesday, July 1, 1980

  Got up early in the morning in order to meet Bob in order to meet Paloma and Lester at MOMA (cab $3). We went around the exhibit with Paloma, she was talking and Lester was being funny, and it was exhausting, it’s three floors. A guy in a wheelchair asked me for my autograph, and I said, “Don’t you want Paloma Picasso’s?” And he said yes, so Paloma signed and then I signed and then we had to leave because Paloma had to get back to Tiffany’s where they sell her jewelry.

  Old Mrs. Newhouse came to see the portraits of her husband, but her son was with her and he fell in love with the diamond-dust ones.

  Oh, and David Whitney came by, we’re talking to him about maybe redoing the Jewish Museum show and I’m doing a portrait of him because he’s been so nice. He brought his tux, he really looked cute in it. He invited me to Thursday dinner with Philip Johnson, he said he’ll send a car for me, that anyone as big as I am should have a car—he was being funny.

  Brigid went on a candy binge. She said she was going out for cigarettes but Robyn noticed that she took more money than she’d need for cigarettes, so when she got back I said, “I see chocolate on your mouth.” I didn’t really see any, but that worked and she admitted she’d had ice cream.

  Glued myself together and went to Côte Basque to help Suzie Frankfurt celebrate—she just got almost a million for her house and she bought a cheaper one. Mr. and Mrs. Law arrived. I think Mrs. Law is Standard Oil rich and I don’t know exactly what her husband does, maybe he invests her money. That’s what usually happens when you marry a rich woman. Or maybe he’s rich himself, who knows. She wants me to retouch her portrait because now she’s made her hair lighter. It’ll probably turn out to be one of those “living portraits” where I have to to keep doing things to it.

  We went over to Bonds. And John Samuels was there and he’s so mean to me now. I think he tries to be nice, but he can’t help himself, he says mean things. I’ll have to ask him why. We were there for a few minutes. Mr. Law was dancing around and his wife said that he would get a heart attack. Oh, and Bob was there and he looked so sour. He feels he can’t have fun unless he has a drink. And he and Fred are the same—if there’s no princes, they look so bored.

  Thursday, July 3, 1980

  Was picked up by Philip Johnson and David Whitney to go to La Côte Basque. They had martinis and so I did, too. Philip’s doing the new AT&T building at 56th on Madison. After dinner we went up to the apartment where David and Philip are living on Fifth, opposite the Met, the one that Philip did the front of. And Philip and David are unhappy with their apartment—it’s small, there’s no room for paintings, but they have my Cows in the bedroom and twenty Jasper Johns prints up. I like the apartment, it’s neat and orderly. David’s really good about throwing things out—if he buys five new shirts he throws five old ones away. And their places always have nothing in them, no knick-knacks, no flowers, no food in the refrigerator. Oh, but I did see some underwear on a chair, and I was going to say something about it because it was the first time I’ve ever seen a piece of clutter in their apartment. Their limo dropped us.

  Friday, July 4, 1980

  Cab to meet Debbie Harry at 7:30 at her and Chris Stein’s apartment at 200 West 58th Street. The penthouse. It took an hour to get there because everybody was merging into Central Park for the fireworks later at 9:00. The traffic was really bad (cab $4). When we got there Chris and Victor Bockris had their tapes on. Debbie has beautiful eyes.

  Debbie had worked all day trying to find an interesting place to have dinner, and (laughs) she did. We went up to 119th Street and Morningside Drive to that restaurant with the big view. The food was as good as La Côte Basque. I don’t know how people up there can afford it, though, because it’s so expensive. Maybe doctors and professors.

  But first we had drinks at Debbie’s. She’s gotten really rich from the Vanderbilt jeans ad and they’re going to buy a building. Chris wants to rent an apartment on the Lower East Side to give interviews in because they don’t want to spoil their low-life image, and Debbie will have to give interviews there, too. I think he’s really going to do it. But if you saw their apartment—and he’s saying he doesn’t want people to know how (laughs) well they live. It’s so junky. It seems like one room made into eighteen rooms. Maybe it used to be a storage floor. There are at least 100 gold records on the wall, I don’t know why there’s so many—oh, maybe duplicates, I guess. But there’s a good doorman.

  Saturday, July 5,
1980

  Had an appointment to meet Rupert. Nobody was in town so it was an easy cab ride ($4.50). I was doing Flower paintings again and it was so sweltering and I got a funny feeling, like a flashback to 1964 because it was the same Flowers and the same heat and the same mood as when I first made them that summer. I asked Rupert how it felt to see me painting these famous sixties images. He said it didn’t feel like anything. But to me it did. These are a commission. I’ll do something different with them, though—maybe put diamond dust on them.

  John Reinhold called and invited me to see his apartment that Michael Graves just did. It was raining like crazy. Henry Geldzahler was meeting us for dinner at a place called Petit Robert, which sounded familiar, but I didn’t want to think about it. It turned out that it was the restaurant of Robert Biret who I’ve known since 1948. He gave me work at Glamour and Bonwit Teller and he was my best friend, we used to have dinner together in the fifties. I met Halston for the first time at his house. Then Robert left New York and went to Paris. This place is way over on 11th Street. I talked mostly to Robert, he looks pretty good. We talked about our mothers. I think his went back to France. There was a lot of garlic in the food. I ate cooked beef with garlic and later I was sorry, I could feel it in the morning, still.

  Sunday, July 6, 1980

  I got up and was trying to avoid Tom Sullivan’s calls. He’s been making up stories about friends being in the hospital and needing a few dollars so I think he’s out of money. I think he maybe spent everything he had on Cocaine Cowboys. I mean, if he only had a couple of million it wouldn’t’ve lasted him long the way he was living so high on the hog, traveling every minute.

  I glued myself and went to Mt. Sinai to visit Sandy Brant who’s expecting triplets, 101st and Fifth. Cabbed ($3) up Madison and it seems like they’re reclaiming some of the blocks as white. They’re putting up tall buildings and the whites are slowly moving uptown. They’re selling apartments there for a couple of hundred thousand now.

  We weren’t going to tell Sandy about the fire at their stable in Greenwich that destroyed the stable and nine horses, but she told us about it. They think it might have been set. There’s a guard there twenty-four hours a day now. They didn’t have a sprinkler system. We were there about forty-five minutes, till 9:00. Then worked at home. No phone calls. I watched the all-day news on Ted Turner’s station.

  The weather changed and was cool and windy and beautiful, my hair was flying all over. Fred went out to Manhasset with the Paysons for a big house party that Averil was giving for the Fourth of July weekend at Greentree.

  Wednesday, July 9, 1980—Paris

  Went to Castel’s for dinner and we sat downstairs and we ran into Jean, the boyfriend of Clara Sant, and Clara told Fred that her boyfriend had had a bad time at our studio in New York because we didn’t pay much attention to him. He didn’t understand that that was our style, that everybody gets ignored, but then I was sorry we didn’t really make an effort, like have a lot of beautiful girls and interesting people for him, because when people are really nice to us in Europe we should pay them back in New York. I paid for dinner, and it was expensive ($400).

  Thursday, July 10, 1980—Paris—Monte Carlo

  I didn’t sleep a wink that night because we left Fred drinking at Castel’s and I knew he wouldn’t be able to get us up in the morning so I had two cups of coffee. And then about 6:00 I heard fumbling at the door and it was Fred trying to get his keys into the lock and it took him half an hour to make it in, and I was going to get up and tell him off but I was in a stupor.

  It was raining, horrible and grey and cold, really freezing. We were going to Monte Carlo for the joint show of Jamie Wyeth and me. Finally we got there and it was sunny and beautiful. And the first people we ran into were Pam Combemale—her unmarried name is Woolworth—and Jamie Wyeth, they had just come in on the Concorde. And they’d lost Jamie’s clothes and Phyllis’s luggage, so she had nothing to wear.

  Went down to the lobby at 6:00 and saw the exhibition, they were putting it together. I did an interview for Time magazine, and then we went to this restaurant that looks just like Trader Vic’s, called Mona’s. The Portanovas were there, and Liz Smith and Iris Love, and the Larsens, and there was a lot of dancing going on and Jamie was so great, he was dancing with Phyllis and I was drunk so I went over to them and I fell down. With them. And then I was dancing with everybody else—all the girls—and it was a new thing for me. I’d had two vodkas, and that must have set me off.

  Jamie’s so much fun because he’s a troublemaker. He’s always saying mean things about people—like he said this one lady’s pockmarks made her face look like a used dartboard. He just goes right down the line tearing everybody apart, he’s very funny.

  Friday, July 11, 1980—Monte Carlo

  We picked up Jamie and Phyllis and I apologized to Phyllis for pushing her over the night before. I told her she and Jamie were dancing so beautifully that I got jealous. When I started to dance with Phyllis I didn’t know that she can’t go backwards so I fell on her and then Jamie fell on her, and we were all caught by somebody but it was just too nutty. So I apologized and we all got in the car and went out to Cap Ferrât to see Lynn Wyatt who now has Somerset Maugham’s old house, the Villa Mauresque that I just read about in the biography, and it was just everything I really wanted to see and look at. It took us a while to get there, the traffic was bad.

  Lynn was wearing a dress that was split up the sides and you could see all her breasts and she just had a little bikini on and she looked beautiful, she has a great body. I think she was trying to get Jamie excited. And they have sort of the same last name. Everybody thinks it’s her son who’s having a show there.

  And then Sandra Hochman walked in and she was just so boring, rattling on and on, she told me she’s had a boyfriend who’s just bought an apartment in Monte Carlo. She said he discovered fast food—he owns Tad’s Steak Houses—and she told me any time I wanted to give a chic party there she’d fix it up for me.

  I asked Lynn to do an interview for Interview because David Niven and his wife came in and I told David that I’d just been reading all about him in the papers because he’s been suing David Merrick. He was great-looking, he was so thin, and his wife was pencil-thin. And Sandra was just yapping away about all her books and she was so pushy we couldn’t understand how she knew Lynn and it turns out she went to Bennington with her.

  David Niven was so cute, he told us good stories and Jamie fell in love with him. Then we had to get back to the hotel because we were meeting Princess Grace at 4:00 in the lobby to show her the exhibition, it was down in one of the dining rooms.

  We went up to our rooms and glued ourselves together, and then we came down. Just Jamie and Phyllis and Freddy Woolworth and Fred were invited, Jed was still at the beach. And we had to get in line to meet Princess Grace. I was the first one, and we were just all making funny jokes about standing in line and finally when we turned around there she was, and she had a little tummy. We were supposed to kiss her hand but I refused to kiss her hand and so we shook hands, and she didn’t really like me, she just liked Jamie. And then when Grace found out that Phyllis was a big du Pont, she was really social climbing, so she was really nice. And then we had to go show her the pictures, and I was trying to be funny but it just didn’t go over too well. And we chit-chatted about Cousteau and the fish museum that’s up near her palace and Jamie said that his father knew her father, they live in New Jersey now, they don’t live in Philadelphia. And we were talking about, I don’t know, just really boring things, she never let her hair down. And I told her that I heard she paints, and she said she just does collages, she had a big show in France that was a sell-out. And I asked her what else was she doing, and finally she told me that she’s on the lecture circuit in the United States reading poetry. She does a circuit tour like Truman for a couple of weeks so she brings home the bucks. And finally after forty-five minutes of chitchat she decided to go. And when she left she thoug
ht the security guard that has the revolver and watches the paintings for the Coe Kerr Gallery was Freddy Woolworth. So it was really funny, she told him she loved the show.

  Fred and I had to go upstairs because I was doing a portrait. Mrs. Benedetti, who thought she looked like Marilyn Monroe. And I made her take off her clothes and put on white makeup. She kept posing like Marilyn with her mouth open and stuff and she was old, but she came out really easy, I had my contacts in and I couldn’t really see but everything was fine.

  Went off to a couple of cocktail parties down at the Loews, which is a hotel that was decorated by Sharon Hammond’s mother Mrs. Long but they have private apartments there, too. Douglas Cooper was giving a party and this lady named Madame Plesch—Ettie Plesch—was giving one, too, and they’re not talking to each other so you had to be careful and not say that you went to the other one.

  Then Regine invited us all down to Jimmy’z and John Larsen was there with his wife and he’s that really great guy, an old friend of Edie Sedgwick’s and mine from years ago, and now he’s really Jamie’s friend. He and Jamie are great dancers. And it was getting late and I was tired. And then Bo Polk arrived and he brought this beautiful girl along with him and then Phyllis saw Jamie dancing cheek-to-cheek with the girl and she went up to them on the dance floor and hit Jamie with her cane. And he got embarrassed because he was really dancing close.

  I got home and I didn’t have a key so I had to wake the chambermaid and so she put me in, it was about 3:00.

  Saturday, July 12, 1980—Monte Carlo