Andy Warhol

Andy Warhol’s life in these accounts moves between the production of public images and the meticulous recording of private days. A celebrity portrait could begin with dozens of photographs and end as a carefully adjusted silkscreen; a weekday could be reduced to a phone call about places visited and money spent. Together, those practices show a figure who made visibility into both an artistic method and a daily occupation, while relying on routine and record-keeping to contain the less orderly parts of life.

Public identity and working world

Warhol met Pat Hackett in autumn 1968, eight years after painting his first Pop art canvases and three months after being shot and nearly killed by a woman who had appeared briefly in one of his underground films. That spring, the community associated with The Factory had moved from its original silvered loft on East 47th Street to a white-and-mirrored loft occupying the sixth floor of 33 Union Square West. The contrast between the earlier collective setting and the new space marks a changed working environment at the point when Hackett entered Warhol’s story, though the evidence here does not describe that change as a break with his artistic practice.

By the mid-1970s, Warhol’s work increasingly connected art-making to the machinery of celebrity and print. Interview’s circulation had grown year by year, and by 1976 the magazine had acquired a tone of sophisticated, self-mocking silliness that made celebrities willing to appear in it. Warhol often conducted its cover interviews, sometimes with a staff member. The magazine’s recurring need for fresh people was met by young faces arriving at its office, and the promise of appearing in the magazine had displaced the earlier promise of being in a movie. Its headings for photographs of previously unpublished young men and women—Interman, Viewgirl, Upfront, and First Impression—made the search for new faces part of the publication’s visible structure. Interview became a glamorous outlet where celebrity, discovery, and self-presentation met.

The making of portraits

Warhol’s commissioned portrait process depended on repeated steps of selection and alteration rather than on a single camera exposure. He began by photographing a sitter with Polaroid Big Shot, usually taking about sixty Polaroids. When that camera model was discontinued, he arranged to buy the company’s remaining stock. From the initial photographs he selected four for a screen printer to turn into positive images on eight-by-ten-inch acetates. He then chose one image, determined its crop, and retouched the sitter’s appearance, adjusting such features as neck length, nose, lips, and complexion to make the subject look more attractive.

The chosen image was enlarged to a forty-by-forty-inch acetate, from which the printer made a silkscreen. Meanwhile, assistants prepared rolls of canvas in advance, using one flesh tone for men’s portraits and a pinker shade for women’s. Warhol traced the image onto the painted canvas and added selected colors: hair, eyes, and lips for women; ties and jackets for men. The silkscreened photograph was then aligned with those painted areas. Slight misalignments created the portraits’ characteristic shifting effect, so that the image’s movement came partly from the process of joining photographic detail to hand-painted color. The stated pricing was about $25,000 for the first canvas and $5,000 for each additional one.

This procedure gives concrete form to Warhol’s wider investment in appearance. The photograph supplied a recognizable likeness, but it was not treated as an untouched record: selection, cropping, retouching, color, and registration all intervened. The finished portrait therefore joined the sitter’s public identity to Warhol’s deliberate construction of it. His own celebrity and his business in other people’s images operated in parallel, sustained by a process that could be repeated while still producing small variations.

Routine, circulation, and city life

Warhol protected his weekday routine and departed from it only when circumstances forced him to. After the morning Diary call, he might make or receive more calls, shower, dress, and take his dachshunds Archie and Amos in the elevator from his bedroom on the third floor to the basement kitchen. There he had breakfast with his two housekeepers. He then carried copies of Interview out shopping, generally spending hours around Madison Avenue, auction houses, the jewelry district near 47th Street, and Village antique shops. Giving magazines to shopkeepers was also a form of business cultivation: he hoped they might choose to advertise. When recognized in the street, he handed copies to fans, glad to have something to offer them.

The magazine also served as a practical social object. In 1980, Warhol said that he carried more copies, sometimes leaving them in cabs. Giving one to someone who stopped him in the street helped him leave the encounter; the recipient might imagine they had received a drawing or something similar. A colleague suggested that Warhol sell the copies instead of giving them away, but the account presents the free magazine as part of his habitual way of managing public attention. The gesture joined promotion, generosity, and escape in a single exchange.

His encounters could turn on the same repeated detail. At the Rainbow Room, a doorman initially did not recognize him, while another man who had previously claimed that Warhol still possessed his lobster pot let him inside. Once through the door, the man again demanded its return. Warhol’s account dwells on the recurrence of this familiar routine and his exasperation at being pulled into it; the group eventually got away when the man returned to the entrance. The anecdote makes the city’s social world feel less like a succession of grand occasions than a web of persistent, sometimes absurd encounters.

The diary as collaboration and edited record

Before 1976, Hackett kept a sketchy Factory log, listing business visitors and the main events of the preceding night. For parties or openings, she sometimes asked different people for their versions of the same occasion. The log’s purpose was practical: to establish what had happened, who had been present, and how much Warhol had spent in cash, rather than to convey his personal view. Often, she simply asked him about expenses and left his contribution at that.

After the filming of Bad, Hackett told Warhol that she no longer wanted to work at the office, although she would continue writing Popism with him. He asked her to keep the log and itemize his personal expenses. She objected to the daily labor of contacting everyone at the office to reconstruct events, and they agreed that Warhol himself would provide the daily accounts. In autumn 1976, they began speaking by telephone on weekday mornings. What began as a record of the previous day and night, including cash business expenses, became a diary: a way for Warhol to examine his life as well as document it.

The financial record remained important. Warhol kept track even of ten-cent calls from street payphones, against the background of repeated IRS scrutiny that had begun with a major audit in 1972. The daily entries were made Monday through Friday, not on weekends. On Monday, Hackett recorded a triple session in which Warhol recounted Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. She took notes on a legal pad and typed them soon after the calls, while she still remembered his intonations. The resulting narrative was thus created through a regular exchange: Warhol supplied the account, and Hackett’s listening and transcription gave it written form.

The published diary was further shaped by editing. Hackett reduced an original twenty thousand pages to a single volume, sometimes omitting whole days or weeks and often selecting only part of a day. A day of five parties might appear through only one. She also cut names to prevent the entries from becoming crowded social columns, generally retaining people Warhol had spoken with or discussed at length. She removed much of the personal dimension of their conversations, including references intelligible only to the two of them; when a personal reference remained, she sometimes recast herself in the third person as PH. These choices made the reader seem like the person at the other end of Warhol’s daily call, while making clear that the intimacy of the published diary was shaped by selection and editorial craft.

Public performance, private strain, and ending

Warhol’s attention to public image extended beyond portraits. When interviewing Shaun Cassidy, he observed that the singer gave clean, safe answers suited to his young fans. In the hotel lobby, Cassidy insisted that being an idol did not change a person; as he passed through a crowd of screaming girls and entered his limousine, Warhol saw his manner change. The episode turns an interview into a small study of the distance between a rehearsed public answer and behavior in the presence of an audience.

Warhol also assessed his own appearances and work with a practical, sometimes self-deprecating eye. After acting in Cocaine Cowboys, he thought he was better in it than in his first film, The Driver’s Seat, though he believed one take had limited his performance. He liked some of the music but considered the story foolish, and questioned how its reported $950,000 cost could be explained when the production was non-union. His response combines participation in filmmaking with a habit of evaluating the result as both performance and business undertaking.

The record also catches moments when the steady public round was interrupted by private distress. Warhol later said that he had delayed telling the Diary about his emotional problems during the period when Jed Johnson moved out. Living alone brought some relief, but he also dreaded being by himself in the large house with his housekeepers and dogs. He described a sense that nothing meant anything and his attempt to fall in love with Jon Gould. That attachment, as he represented it, brought constant thought and a fantasy that became difficult to sustain; he also connected seeing Jon frequently with developing movie ideas together. The diary preserves the tension between emotional dependence and the familiar work-oriented habit of turning relationships into possible projects, without resolving the tension into a settled account of the relationship.

Near the end of the record, illness interrupted even the weekday calls. After a collagen treatment on February 14, Warhol complained of gallbladder pain. He spent the following Sunday in bed as the pain eased, kept a chiropractic appointment on Monday, and later reported that the sharp pain had returned. He appeared at a Japanese fashion show on Tuesday but remained in pain that night. After taking a painkiller and sleeping pill, he slept through the next morning’s Diary call. When he spoke with Hackett the following day, he said he had seen his regular doctor and needed to go to the hospital for an operation, which he found difficult even to name.

Warhol entered New York Hospital on February 20 as an ambulatory emergency patient. His gallbladder was removed the next day, and at first he seemed to be recovering: he watched television and called friends. He died early Sunday morning, for reasons described as being in litigation. A few weeks later, a hospital employee told Hackett that Warhol was the only patient she had encountered who remembered his Blue Cross and health-insurance identification numbers by heart. The detail returns the story to the habits that had governed his days: attention to names, numbers, transactions, and records. Yet the final interruption of the Diary leaves those routines unable to contain the event they had documented so carefully.