1970s (05b08c8a)

The 1970s appear in Andy Warhol’s diary not as a sealed decade but as a changing record: daily routines and social encounters were written down close to the moment, while later entries and captions looked back on the period from a distance. The contrast matters. What readers encounter is both Warhol’s account of his days and a published narrative assembled by Pat Hackett from an original archive of roughly 20,000 pages.

The Diary as a Record of the Decade

Before 1976, Hackett kept a sketchy Factory log, listing business visitors and notable events from the previous night. To establish what had happened, she sometimes compared different people’s versions of the same dinner or opening and recorded Warhol’s cash expenses. The method collected information about his activities, but it was not yet intended to convey his personal view of them.

That changed in 1976, after the filming of Bad. Hackett no longer wanted to work at the office, though she agreed to continue writing Popism with Warhol. Rather than keep calling colleagues to reconstruct each day, she and Warhol agreed that he would supply the daily accounts himself. A log that had depended on outside reports thus became a first-person record, with his own recollections and judgments at its center.

Their weekday morning calls made the record routine. Hackett usually called at about nine, and Warhol recounted the previous day and night as well as his expenses. The nominal five-minute task could last one or two hours: the conversation included ordinary questions and details that might otherwise have seemed too small to record. On weekends there were no diary calls; Monday’s account gathered together Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. Hackett took notes, then typed the entry while Warhol’s intonations were still fresh in her mind. Receipts were attached to the typed pages, which were stored in stationery boxes. In this way, the decade’s social life and business dealings entered the archive alongside the mundane costs of moving through the city.

A Decade in Retrospect

Later references make the 1970s visible as a period people remember, not only one they had inhabited. In 1984, Vic Ramos’s unease at lunch with Matt Dillon and Jean-Michel Basquiat reached back to an apartment break-in and vandalism by a graffiti artist during the previous decade. Ramos said that paint still remained on his belongings. The past persisted here as physical damage, brought into the present through a recollection of what had been reported in the papers.

Other backward glances turn the decade into a social image. A photograph caption identifies Steve Aronson and his Newfoundland, Magnus, on a beach at Montauk in 1974; another places Liz Taylor in the kitchen of the main house in 1976. Captions also locate a gathering with friends in Kuwait in 1976 and identify Truman Capote and Lee Radziwill as best friends in 1974. These brief labels do not narrate the events in detail, but they preserve dates, settings, and relationships as points in a wider social landscape.

In 1986, the decade returns in more openly nostalgic form. At Grace Jones’s birthday party, a neon dance floor and costumed partygoers made the scene feel like a return to the seventies. With no dinner available, the group went to Caffè Roma for something quick and quiet, only to find a large dinner for Prince Albert, with Bob Colacello and Cornelia Guest among the many people gathered there. The abrupt movement from a crowded party to an unexpected social scene makes the past feel less like a distant period than a style and social atmosphere that could reappear in the present.

A separate 1986 recollection, relayed by Fred, concerned an old-fashioned birthday cake covered in hundreds of phallic decorations, with one for every guest. Its shock value and the group’s recognition of it as a seventies custom show how remembered objects could stand in for a period’s party culture. The detail is comic, but it also gives the decade a material trace: a cake remembered years later as an emblem of a particular kind of gathering.

Recording, Selection, and Point of View

The diary’s documentary texture was tied to practical concerns as well as recollection. Warhol’s accounts included even ten-cent calls from street payphones because the records also served the purpose of documenting expenses. The IRS had subjected his business to a major audit in 1972 and continued scrutinizing it each year. Warhol believed the scrutiny might have been connected to his campaign poster for George McGovern, which depicted Richard Nixon with a green face. Thus, the diary’s small sums and daily itineraries belonged to a decade in which private routine and business accountability were recorded together.

The published diary is not identical to that record. Hackett reduced its original length of 20,000 pages by cutting whole days, sometimes weeks, and often portions of individual days. From a night that might have included five parties, she could retain just one; from a list of ten people, she might keep only those Warhol spoke with or discussed at length. She did not mark every omission, believing that doing so would interrupt the narrative. The resulting account therefore preserves selected encounters rather than offering a complete social ledger.

Hackett also resisted supplying a glossary that would assign every person a fixed place in Warhol’s world. The diary’s social categories were deliberately porous: the term superstar could encompass both a celebrated model and a delivery boy who happened to enter a film. She kept editorial explanations to a minimum and removed much of the interpersonal exchange between herself and Warhol. Where personal references remained, she recast herself in the third person as PH, so readers could occupy the position of the person listening at the other end of the morning call. The 1970s as presented in the diary are consequently intimate but mediated: a voice recorded through a friendship, then shaped by an editor who chose what to preserve.

The Decade’s Shape in the Archive

The diary was recorded on weekdays, but its calendar never simply stopped when Warhol traveled or Hackett was away. He might call from another city, read notes scrawled on hotel stationery, or return with a cassette; when Hackett traveled, she might call and hear the notes he had kept. Their procedures varied, but they aimed to leave no day unrecorded. Later additions and corrections could also enter through conversations outside the regular diary call. The archive therefore accumulated through repeated telling, not through a single unchanging act of transcription.

That process gives the decade two complementary forms. The daily entries preserve the immediate particulars of expenses, outings, and conversations; later memories and photographic captions isolate scenes that acquired significance with time. Editorial cuts, omitted names, and restrained explanations shape how those materials meet the reader. The result is not a comprehensive history of the 1970s, but a layered view of how its routines and social world were recorded, remembered, and made legible in the diary.