by Andy Warhol
Schnabel has so much energy and balls, he really does. We drank red wine. It’s the newest thing to drink red wine all through the meal, you don’t have to have white wine with fish and things anymore. It’s such a camp when they do the tasting and the lip-smacking. So then we went over to Clemente’s.
The table there was one that Schnabel had made and actually it was great. The legs were all from different things and the top is hand-colored plaster. And all through dinner they played Maria Callas records! It was incredible. There’s this new collection of forty records of everything she ever did and it comes in two cases and they sell them at newsstands in Italy. And it was just like the sixties. I could almost see Ondine whisking around in the shadows. And you could hear all the booing and the clapping on the record.
The food was good and it smelled so terrific. Alba Clemente did it. She could be the best movie star, her voice is so low and so loud and so sexy and interesting and she’s pretty. And the talk was all about art. Julian was putting down de Kooning and I said oh no, that he was wrong, that de Kooning was a great painter, and then finally Clemente said yes, that he really was.
Thomas Ammann called and said that it was really cold in Switzerland. Bruno wants me to go there for Jean Michel’s opening. Someone was saying that when all these dealers heard there was a really talented black artist who would probably die off soon from drugs, that they hurried to buy his things and now I guess they’re frustrated because he’s staying alive. I think Jean Michel will be the most famous black artist after this New York Times thing comes out.
Saturday, January 12, 1985
Jean Michel called and said he was coming by to work and he did, and he brought his mother. Jean-Michel’s mother is a sweet mother, she brought him a birthday present that said from Marni—M-A-M-I. Then we went to Shafrazi’s and Ronnie Cutrone was there with his girlfriend Tama Janowitz who they said just wrote a novel that some publishers are interested in. Ronnie said it was like Terms of Endearment but then other people said it was about downtown, which was what interested me. Ronnie was in a red Day-Glo Stephen Sprouse jacket.
Wednesday, January 16, 1985
The office got busy. I get so much exercise running up and down those stairs.
I talked to Jean Michel and invited him to the party that Fred was giving for Natasha Grenfell at Le Club. And he asked if he could bring—he said, “My girlfriend,” and I was shocked. I said he’d never called anybody that before, and he said her body was so hot that he would come five times in a night. This is a black girl he met who works at Comme des Garçons. Worked till 8:00.
Thursday, January 17, 1985
I heard snow shovels hitting the pavement at 6 A.M. And there’s a big bus of students coming up from Carnegie-Mellon for a tour of the office. They probably got up at 6:30 and they’re zipping along on the highway right now. Oh God, oh God …
I talked to Gael for about an hour and she said, “Tell me how wonderful I am,” and so I said, “How wonderful you are.” And she said she turned down a big job with cable TV and if it was big, she should’Ve taken it, but if I’d said that to her she would’ve gone home crying.
Tuesday, January 22, 1985
Talked to Jean Michel and he was in a funny mood. He thinks his “girlfriend” doesn’t love him and so he’s taking heroin again. The black girl. Charlotte. I told him I would come and visit him. Cabbed to pick him up ($8).
We went to Odeon and had two tables and there were twelve of us. Boy George had that boy Marilyn with him. Jean Michel was nodding out. There was a little kid with Keith who didn’t say anything, and Keith didn’t say much, and I didn’t say anything, so Boy George had to do all the talking and he’s really intelligent, really a smart kid, and he does talk a lot.
He said he doesn’t know who his friends really are. Like he doesn’t know if Joan Rivers really is a friend or not, so he thinks some day he’ll call her up “just to talk” and then he’ll find out. He didn’t like the line about him and his boyfriend in her interview in Interview and I said that I hadn’t wanted that to go in. He takes out a powder puff all the time and puffs his face. His eye makeup was done beautifully.
Friday, January 25, 1985
Cabbed to 74th Street ($2) to see Dr. Bernsohn and he was going on about his phones being tapped by the FBI. Are these crystal things real or not? Dr. Reese is from near Kansas City. He’s a chiropractor and so is Dr. Bernsohn. And the crystals come from Arkansas, and they’re supposed to heal you. The Czech cut-glass one that I wear is to protect me. It’s a “third eye” (cab $6).
Had to meet a lady for her portrait. She’s just somebody who saw somebody else’s. I don’t know her name. She was pretty. And Jon interviewed Shirley MacLaine for the cover of Interview’s Health issue, he’s transcribing it himself so he can edit it, I guess, before he gives it in.
It was a day of running up and down stairs. I was looking at Fred to see if he still had a hangover, to see if he could still do the business. I don’t know. I was going to tell him that his face fell.
Wednesday, January 30, 1985
It was Benjamin’s last day before going off to L.A. for a week to visit his mother.
I found out that I’d missed the Kansai lunch at the Four Seasons where I would have sat next to Kansai because Brigid forgot to tell me about it. I screamed at her, so now this morning she just called and very efficiently woke me up to tell me that there was nothing to do today. (laughs) To make sure I knew.
Jean Michel invited me to dinner with his father at Odeon (cab $6). And the father was this thin normal-looking man in a business suit, smart, and so you can see where Jean Michel gets his smartness.
And now Jean Michel doesn’t even like his girlfriend from Comme des Garçons, Charlotte, because she borrowed money from him. He likes to give people money but then he resents them for taking it. He’ll say, “They’re using me.” It’s a funny attitude. And in a moment of passion once he told her he loved her and she told him that she was a “free woman,” so he tied her up and told her how dare she think that he meant it.
Friday, February 1, 1985
Tab Hunter called about going to the screening of Lust in the Dust that John Springer was doing for him and Divine (cab $4). The movie was awful but I had to lie to Tab and say I loved it. He was literally trying to act! He tried to be Clint Eastwood when all he should have done was be Tab Hunter.
Tuesday, February 12, 1985
Washed and went to the Waldorf for the Barbie doll party (cab $4). Oscar de la Renta was there, he was doing the clothes for the Barbie doll. It’s so sick, this whole world so involved with this stupid little doll. I was at table 1 by the runway. Sat with Joan Kron and also at the table was Beauregard something, a Southern not-quite-in-drag queen who writes for Details, he’s smart, like a Jackie Curtis-type but meeker. He told me when Joan left that he lives with Joan Kron’s stepson.
Friday, February 15, 1985
Dolly Fox came by to see me. She’s back from living in L.A. with these two other girls. And one of them is going to marry Bruce Springsteen. And the other one is her blonde girlfriend Dana, and she introduced her to Eric Roberts and now Eric Roberts left Sandy Dennis for her.
And Gael is upset because one of the Interview editors is leaving for a better job. Jane Sarkin. She’s going to Vanity Fair. But Interview has so many people now that I can’t even figure out what each one does, so to me they’re all dispensable. Except for Paige. I really like Paige. And Marc Balet. I would miss Marc—he’s talented and he does a lot, although he’d do even more if he weren’t so busy with all his freelance stuff, the Armani ads and things.
Wednesday, February 20, 1985
This life insurance doctor came to examine me. Another one of those weird doctors giving me a weird insurance exam. The same old questions about your mother and your father and I lie all the time, I always give them different answers. And he asked me my age and I said I couldn’t face saying my age, that I would leave the room and he could ask Vincent. Th
en I noticed that he was wearing a bracelet and I said, “Why are you wearing a bracelet?” and he said, “Well, I will tell you why I am wearing a bracelet.” And then he started this long thing about how in 1592 something happened, and how this is somehow related to why the pope was shot, and why the Russians shot down the Korean airliner because they’d lost 200 people in some Siberian explosion, and all this went on for twenty minutes. And then I asked him where he got his bracelet, and he said, “Teepee Town.” And I said, “Teepee Town went out of business.” And he said, “No, it just moved off 42nd Street—now it’s in the Port Authority bus terminal.” And then he told me to put my urine in this little bottle. And I just could think that he probably goes to the Port Authority and collects urine in bottles. He’s about 6’6” and his eyes are weird, like a little brain-damaged or milky. He took my blood pressure and did my heart. It was the most fun part of the day. Worked till 7:30.
Saturday, February 23, 1985
Got up and it was one of the most beautiful days in the world. Madison Avenue was five-deep every step. Called Jon and picked him up and asked him what was new in Hollywood. Nothing, he said.
And everybody keeps saying what’s wrong with Steve Rubell, because his hair has fallen out and his eyebrows, too, because that’s what happens when you get chemotherapy.
Tuesday, February 26, 1985
I don’t understand why Jackie O. thinks she’s so grand that she doesn’t owe it to the public to have another great marriage to somebody big. You’d think she’d want to scheme and connive to get into history again.
And Gael had a fight with Glenn O’Brien because he sold the same interview he did for Interview to the new magazine, Spin, that Bob Guccione’s son is doing that’s competing with Rolling Stone, and Glenn’s telling her it was all the stuff that she had cut out, so what difference did it make.
I invited Benjamin to this Forbes opening at their building on 13th and Fifth Avenue now that they’ve turned the lobby into a museum (cab $4). Malcolm Forbes was there and I gave him a Dollar Sign painting and he was thrilled, he loved it. Talked to a kid who worked there and told him that what I wanted for Christmas was Malcolm Forbes’s junk mail, and he said he’d get me some. I wish Truman had given me his junk mail like he promised he would.
Friday, March 1,1985
The other day a call came collect from Ingrid Superstar. I didn’t take it. I mean, if she’s still calling collect … I couldn’t face hearing about her life—kids/no kids, married/not married. And David White called and asked me if it was okay with me if Rauschenberg sold the Popeye for a million dollars that I gave him in ‘62. I said sure … I don’t know to who. David said that after the deal’s done he’ll tell me. So we can sell whoever it is something, too.
Wednesday, March 6, 1985
Harper & Row called me at work and said that Jane Fonda had sent a turn-down for our request to use her picture in the America book. I just couldn’t believe it! What nerve! I mean, just wait —the next time she calls up and wants something for free, it’s just going to be HO.
Gaetana Enders called about eight times to see if our dinner at Le Cirque was still on. She drives me crazy, but she’s working for us getting portraits, so … she smokes this tiny cigar and she thinks she’s this big man’s woman, so smart and tough and great—this twerp! I mean, her husband’s 6’6” and she’s 2’2”. I don’t know where she gets this idea of herself. I can’t even think of who to say it’s like. A little like Diane Von Furstenberg. Where you think you’re so smart and beautiful.
Saturday, March 9, 1985
Talked to Jean Michel and he said he was straight, but he sounded like he was on something. He was with Jennifer, Eric Goode from Area’s sister, who’s his new girlfriend. He’s got three or four girls on the string now, but he’s only still in love with Charlotte, from Comme des Garçons.
And Jean Michel was complaining about the show that we’re having with Bruno … oh, I don’t know, I think that whole period is over, with him coming up to paint. He hasn’t come that much to the new building, just a few times, and—well, he’s feeling on top now that his show is running downtown, but I don’t know if he’s working.
Tuesday, March 12, 1985
Went up to Sotheby’s to look at the art and the lady there stopped me and asked if I had a few minutes to look at a few paintings of mine for authenticity, so I did, and one of them was one of those fake Electric Chairs, the ones Gerard denies doing. A blue one. It wasn’t stretched right. The people get greedy and they want a bigger picture, so it’s got a border on it. They’d buy it rolled and then stretch it that way. And there were four big Flower paintings. I guess everybody’s selling my work, getting rid of it (phone $1.50, newspapers $3). Cabbed to meet Lidija ($4).
Thursday, March 14, 1985
It was the night of Dino De Laurentiis’s dinner at Alo Alo. And I called Cornelia to see if she wanted to go.
The new issue of Interview came in, the Health issue, and it’s thick and serious. It looks good.
Told Cornelia 8:30 and she came in a limo ($25). And Dino’s new restaurant, this one that he’s done with the guy from Club A, it’s in the Trump Plaza on 62nd Street and Third. And Géraldine Smith was there, she was with some producer guy and she looks cute still. And Cornelia was working the room. Chris Walken was there and then Mickey Rourke arrived and he told me about the part in his Interview interview that PH cut out where he had a big fight with her. PH had already told me all about it, but I played dumb. And Géraldine said she wished she had interviewed Mickey Rourke because she loves him and I reminded her of her interview with Harrison Ford when she was sitting on his lap for twenty minutes before she figured out he was the person she was supposed to interview. She was fun. And Mickey is just so adorable. Dumb, but with some magic. And then these girls came in for him and they were all the same types, about 5’4” and pretty, but nothing special. And he and Chris Walken kissed each other goodbye on the lips so tenderly, it looked so gay. And Chris Walken was really drunk, he said he was tired of his hair, he’d dyed it blond, and now it needed retouching, and Cornelia gave him the name of a hair place to go to.
Monday, March 18, 1985
I’m getting more nervous by the minute about being on The Love Boat. It turns out I’m going to be there for ten days. Now that Jon’s working in L.A. most of the time, he’s buying Joan Hackett’s old house on Angelo Drive in Benedict Canyon. It’s cheap for Beverly Hills, only $100,000, next to really expensive ones—Jon said the son of Charles Bludhorn, the chairman of Gulf + Western, got one on the same block for $1.2 million.
Time magazine sent down the Iacocca picture, and if I can only make a great portrait out of this picture then I could get a lot of corporation presidents. If they use it they have to pay a lot, but if they don’t use it they just pay a little bit.
Tuesday, March 19, 1985
Paige said she had tickets for Desperately Seeking Susan, which was screening on 86th Street. So she waited and then we went to Nippon (cab $4). Madonna doesn’t have much to do. She doesn’t talk in the first part. But later on she does some good things, she sleeps in the bathtub and dresses up and shoplifts. It’s like those sixties movies but the opposite—the sixties movies had too much sixties and not enough story, and this has too much story and not enough eighties. It was boring.
Wednesday, March 20, 1985
Amos has a crushed vertebra. At first the vet said it was a sore leg and then he said a slipped disc. So I slept on the floor with him last night. I’m on the floor now, still, with the phone, being a martyr.
So then I was working on the Joan Collins portrait and on some other stuff, and then a big four-page telegram came from The Love Boat saying that they wanted to show all my art on The Love Boat, too. The story is that I go on The Love Boat and there’s a girl on the boat named Mary with her husband, and she used to be a superstar of mine, and she doesn’t want her husband to know that she used to be “Marina Del Rey.” And I just have a few lines, things like
“Hello, Mary.” But one of the lines I have to say is something like “Art is crass commercialism,” which I don’t want to say.
PH will be in L.A. then, too, so we can do some work there on the Party book—photograph the Academy Awards and the Love Boat thing. I’ll be at the Bel Air.
Then went to the Whitney for the opening of the Biennial and waited outside for Jean Michel. He had a new smile on his face. We went downstairs and upstairs and saw Kenny Scharf and his wife and it was wall-to-wall four floors. And a woman stopped Jean Michel and was raving and raving about him saying, “This is my favorite artist. My husband and I, you’re our favorite artist,” and I’m standing there, and I offer her an autographed Interview and she says, “No.”
Then we went down to this place on Eighth Avenue and 14th Street, where Jean Michel gets rice and beans, just one of those dirty ratholes that I say I would never eat in, but it was so good that I did.
And then we called up Paul, the exercise trainer who works for Lidija, and we were right near his apartment which is right off Abingdon Square down there, a nice neighborhood, and so we went over there, and God, it’s so strange when you finally see where a person lives, and it’s just so … I mean, it’s this one room, and he’s been subletting it for a year or so, and now the woman who he sublet it from is back and she’s about forty, and like a hippie who wants to get backing for a restaurant, and their beds are just like next to each other, and they aren’t in the apartment at the same time, like you feel you can’t go home when the other one is there, so you feel like you’re not really living anyplaceI guess that that’s when your life is really interesting, though, because it keeps you out there in action and getting into weird situations. But I mean, I go from that, and then I come back up here to (laughs) this, it’s so abstract. You know? But I don’t understand why he could leave the place like such a dump. They should just get futons and not waste space with the beds. And it would really only have taken a couple of hours to pick the place up once while she was gone in Europe all that time.