1970s

In The Andy Warhol Diaries, the 1970s are not a sealed historical period so much as a working present in which Andy Warhol’s public life changed its machinery. Movies gave way to Interview as his most reliable invitation to new people; portrait commissions joined the magazine as a major source of business; and the social world that supplied both work and spectacle was recorded in quick, sometimes comic judgments. Looking back, the decade appears at once as a scene of glamour and commercial adaptation, and as a period in which Warhol himself gradually became less interested in provoking people and more in keeping them close.

A decade of changing work

The shift was already visible by 1975. Bob Colacello, who had begun initiating social occasions and some business deals, brought Warhol portrait commissions from an expanding circle of wealthy acquaintances and helped secure publishing contracts. Fred Hughes still had to approve the deals. For The Philosophy of Andy Warhol, Pat Hackett conducted eight separate interviews with Warhol and wrote chapters from them, then used recorded conversations between Warhol, Colacello, and Brigid Berlin to assemble other chapters. The collaboration became a turning point: after the book appeared in 1975, Warhol asked Hackett to co-author Popism, his memoir of the sixties. The decade’s work thus included not only new business, but also the shaping of an account of the period immediately before it.

That same year, Warhol bought out Peter Brant and became Interview’s sole owner and publisher; Hughes became its president. Warhol had previously kept at a distance from the magazine’s day-to-day operation. After taking control, he began looking at art director Marc Balet’s layouts and arranging conference-room lunches to pitch potential advertisers. The change made the magazine more than a title he owned: it became a place where he actively worked, met people, and kept his cultural position current.

Interview also replaced a particular promise once associated with the Factory. In the mid-sixties, people came hoping to appear in Warhol’s inexpensive underground films, made at a pace approaching one a week. By the seventies, commercially exhibitable movies had become too costly for that steady supply of roles to continue, and a proposed film no longer guaranteed anyone a part—or even that the film would be made. The magazine filled the gap. As its circulation grew, its cultivated, self-mocking silliness made celebrities eager to appear in it; photographs of previously unpublished young men and women filled recurring departments. The promise of being put in the magazine took the place of being put in a movie, keeping a flow of fresh faces moving through the office.

Portraits as art and business

Portrait commissions were another durable structure of the decade, providing a large share of Warhol’s annual income. They continued alongside canvases intended for gallery and museum exhibitions, with portraits underway in corners of the loft. A dealer, friend, or employee who brought in a commission received a commission in return. Ronnie Cutrone described the commercial context: Pop Art had passed from the center of attention, new movements had appeared, and Warhol still had an office to run and a magazine he felt needed his financial support. Moving from portraits of famous entertainers to private or non-show-business clients was, in Cutrone’s account, a way of making those clients equal in some sense to the legends. Warhol had made a smaller number of portraits of non-stars even in the sixties, including Ethel Scull, Holly Solomon, and Happy Rockefeller. Hughes recalled that commissioned portraiture struck the art establishment as unconventional, but Warhol liked the work and wanted more commissions once the first ones came in.

The process was systematic, and its details joined the image of the artist to the practical requirements of steady production. Warhol photographed each subject with a Polaroid Big Shot, taking about sixty pictures. After the camera was discontinued, he arranged to buy the company’s unused stock. He selected four photographs for a screen printer to turn into positive images on eight-by-ten-inch acetates, then chose one image and adjusted its crop and features. He might lengthen a neck, trim a nose, enlarge lips, or clear a complexion before the image was enlarged to a forty-by-forty-inch acetate for the silkscreen.

Assistants prepared rolls of canvas in advance, using one flesh-toned background for men and a pinker shade for women. Warhol transferred the image onto the canvas, painted selected color areas, and aligned the silkscreen with them. Small discrepancies between the printed image and the painted areas produced the portraits’ characteristic shifting effect. The first canvas generally cost about $25,000, with each additional canvas about $5,000. The method made the portrait at once a repeatable product and an individually adjusted image: clients were brought into a recognizable visual system, but their features were modified to suit an ideal of attractiveness.

Glamour, performance, and social judgment

The diary’s seventies social world is presented through encounters in which public identity and private behavior do not quite match. In August 1978, Warhol and colleagues interviewed Shaun Cassidy, whose answers about being a teen idol remained carefully clean for his young fans. Warhol noted the change when Cassidy passed screaming admirers in a hotel lobby and then rode in a limousine; later, during a photograph session, he saw Cassidy become newly absorbed in his own image. The interview, crowd, car, and camera register distinct stages of a star persona being maintained and performed.

Other scenes make the same social world look less polished. After drinking champagne at the office, Warhol, Averil, and Vincent took a ten-dollar limousine ride to Bloomingdale’s for the opening of a Superman shop, which reminded him of the sixties and prompted his impatience with camp’s repeated return. At a fashion gathering, he teased Bianca Jagger about clothes that, in his view, did not suit her proportions, recommending extravagant alternatives instead. His judgments could be cutting, but they also reveal how closely he watched the fit between a person’s image, clothing, and social role. By 1981, he was noting that models of both sexes seemed to speak in the same baby talk; a cab fare dispute prompted him to check the time himself and resolve to keep receipts. Such small observations place fashionable performance beside the ordinary calculations of daily life.

The decade’s remembered scenes could also turn on embarrassment and retrospective amusement. At a 1985 party, Warhol recalled an early-seventies visit by Troy Donahue to the Interview office: a broken elevator had sent Donahue up a freight lift, which opened into a dark room where a film was being screened. Donahue remembered stumbling through the audience while on acid. The recollection turns the office into a cramped threshold between celebrity glamour and the disorienting, improvised culture of Warhol’s earlier filmmaking years.

Personal change and the decade’s afterlife

Hackett’s account complicates the sharpness of some diary judgments by describing a change in Warhol. In the sixties and early seventies, he could provoke people deliberately, forming cliques and rivalries for the entertainment of watching them compete for his attention. Hackett relates this behavior to a late adolescence: Warhol had devoted much of his twenties to commercial art and, in her view, did not take much time to have fun until his thirties. Toward the end of the seventies, she says, he began to mellow. He more often tried to calm people than incite them, while his own personal and emotional difficulties made comfort more important to him than drama. She remembers him as kinder and easier to be around in the last year of his life than at any point since their first meeting. The diary’s passing judgments therefore sit beside a longer account of changing temperament, not a claim that his character remained fixed.

Later entries show the seventies becoming a subject of memory. In 1985, Warhol discussed former acquaintances and the changing lives of figures associated with earlier scenes; an account of Ivy Nicholson in People prompted him to reflect on the enduring force of her beauty and style. In 1987, Fred Hughes told him that Bob Colacello was writing a book about the seventies. These moments do not simply restore the decade as it was: they show it being reconsidered through old friendships, magazine coverage, and the later fates of people once encountered in its social circuits.

The decade’s importance also survives beyond Warhol’s own retrospective remarks. A Baltimore Sun assessment of The Andy Warhol Diaries argued that no study of Manhattan society in the strobe-lit seventies, or in the shadow of AIDS, could omit the book’s portrait of the gap between what a social world imagined itself to be and what it was. In the diary, that gap is often made visible through work: a magazine promise, a retouched photograph, a client’s portrait, or a celebrity’s change of manner in front of a crowd. The 1970s endure not as a single mood but as the period in which those forms of seeing, selling, and recording became central to Warhol’s daily life.