1980s decade

The 1980s decade in The Andy Warhol Diaries is registered in fragments: a comparison between photographs from 1950 and a party in 1981, a strained friendship in 1983, travel and reflection in 1984, and photographs from 1985 through 1987. These entries make the period visible at the scale of ordinary encounters and changing relationships. They do not claim to survey the decade as a whole. Their particular force comes from the diary’s close attention to social detail—and from the editorial choices that made a very large private record into a selective published account.

The diary as a record of the decade

The 1980s material belongs to a weekday routine established by Andy Warhol and Pat Hackett in the fall of 1976. Hackett called around 9 a.m., usually no later than 9:30, and Warhol recounted the previous day and night as well as his cash expenses. The calls began with conversation, but even an apparently minor detail could enter the diary; what Warhol described as a five-minute job often lasted one or two hours. The entries were not simply a social calendar: from the earlier Factory log, which depended on office visitors and other people’s versions of events, the record had become Warhol’s own account.

The procedure left a material trail. Hackett took extensive notes on a legal pad, typed the account immediately after each call, and, every other week or so, attached the cab and restaurant receipts Warhol had left for her. The pages went into stationery-store letter boxes. The diary was made Monday through Friday, not on weekends; on Monday, the two of them worked through a triple session covering Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. Travel complicated the process without ending it. Warhol might call from away, read notes written on hotel stationery after returning, or bring back a tape; when Hackett was away, she sometimes called and heard his notes. The intention was that no day be left undiarized.

This daily practice also served the business record. Warhol reported even ten-cent calls from street payphones while the IRS continued auditing his business, scrutiny he believed had begun because of his 1972 campaign poster for George McGovern. As a result, the diary’s small sums and receipts sit beside parties, work, and personal observations. Its account of the 1980s is intimate, but it is also shaped by the need to document expenses.

Continuity and change in social life

A June 1981 entry turns the past into a comparison rather than a distant backdrop. Chris Stein showed Warhol photographs taken by Weegee in 1950, many depicting a Greenwich Village party. Warhol recognized in them something that looked like a party of the 1980s: clothes fastened with safety pins, two boys kissing in a window, and a woman watching. The earlier scene had been called “Living in Greenwich Village”; the corresponding style now had another label, “New Wave.” The names had changed, he observed, but the people and gestures seemed familiar. In this brief juxtaposition, the decade appears not as a clean break with an earlier era but as a new description laid over a recurring social scene.

An August 1983 entry records change on a more personal scale. Chris came to the office crying and wanted their relationship to return to what it had been, when Warhol gave him a great deal of work. Warhol did not know what to tell him and admitted that he no longer called. He also connected his distance to his own preoccupation with boys when he associated with Chris. The encounter holds two facts together: Chris remembered a former closeness expressed through work, while Warhol acknowledged that he was not maintaining it. The diary preserves the gap between the request to restore the old arrangement and his uncertainty about how to answer it.

Travel, memory, and private impressions

In April 1984, Warhol spent Easter in Hampton Beach, New Hampshire, with Katy Dobbs, an old friend of Jon Gould, near the beach house belonging to Jon’s family. The setting prompted a wish of his own: he wanted a house there, comparing the place to Montauk. He noted the ocean view, the enlarged windows, and the houses being winterized. Because the curtains were too difficult to lower, he left them up, and the morning sun woke him early. These domestic particulars make the visit more than a destination in a travel itinerary: the account records a possible home imagined through its view and daily light.

Reading also shaped the visit. Warhol had brought Ned Rorem’s diaries from the 1960s through 1971. He felt that Rorem had missed the scene in which Warhol and his circle had participated, remaining instead in what he called the elegant forties and fifties; he also noted that Rorem put him down a couple of times. The passage sets one diarist’s account beside another’s and makes the act of reading part of the record: the past is not merely recalled but measured against a different social world and a personal judgment of its author.

A trip to Milan in October 1983 supplies a different kind of recollection, one built around surprise and companionship. Jean-Michel Basquiat arrived at the airport after Warhol had not expected him to come. Basquiat said he had not slept for four days and would watch Warhol sleep; Warhol described his runny nose and his use of paper bags to blow it. He also observed that Paige had made him something of a gentleman because he was now taking baths. The group reached Milan practically on time. The diary’s attention to these undignified and affectionate details records both Basquiat’s unannounced arrival and Warhol’s amused, familiar way of describing him.

The published record and its limits

The entries and photographs offer points of contact across the decade, not a comprehensive inventory of its people or events. Hackett reduced the original 20,000 pages to a single volume, cutting whole days, sometimes entire weeks, and often parts of days. She might retain one party from a night when Warhol had attended five, or select only some of the people he mentioned. Those omissions were not marked in the published text. The resulting account therefore reflects not only what Warhol reported but also Hackett’s decisions about which material best represented him and sustained a readable narrative.

The editorial framing also altered how the relationship between speaker and recorder appeared on the page. Hackett removed many of Warhol’s direct references to her and to matters meaningful only to the two of them; in the few personal references she kept, she rendered herself in the third person by her initials, PH. Her stated aim was to preserve the casual intimacy of the morning calls while allowing the reader to occupy the position of the person listening at the other end of the phone. The entries’ immediacy thus depends on a process of transcription, selection, and presentation.

Photographic captions extend that fragmentary record. They identify Peter Martins in January 1987; in 1985, Tama Janowitz and Ronnie Cutrone appear in matching Stephen Sprouse jackets at an art opening; and a 1986 caption names Steven Greenberg and Tama Janowitz. These brief identifications preserve dates, people, and visible associations without explaining them away. Taken with the diary scenes, they make the decade legible through snapshots and encounters: a style compared with an older one, an old working closeness sought again, an unplanned companion on a trip, and images that mark who was present. The 1980s decade emerges as Warhol and Hackett’s edited sequence of lived particulars, not as a single, uninterrupted panorama.