Andy Warhol and Truman Capote's friendship and collaboration

Andy Warhol and Truman Capote’s friendship and collaboration appear in these diary entries as an intimate but increasingly uncertain working relationship. Capote’s shifting availability—first distant, then briefly engaged, then difficult to reach—left Warhol trying to distinguish renewed cooperation from another broken promise.

A strained working partnership

On February 1, 1980, Warhol was going to Diane von Furstenberg’s birthday party for Barry Diller. He had invited Catherine and planned to pick up Capote as well. The social occasion became a measure of their changed rapport: Warhol found Capote distant and unfriendly, and his attempt to tape him for material yielded nothing. Capote said he would contribute something to Interview’s April issue, but offered no substance when Warhol tried to record him. Warhol described him as seeming like the same person transformed into someone else, and noted that Capote appeared older and seemed no longer to care about his appearance. The estrangement was difficult for Warhol to interpret because Capote remained present in the relationship while no longer behaving as he once had.

Promises and withdrawal

By February 27, Capote had told Warhol that he would provide no more articles. He explained that he would give them Answered Prayers when it was finished in October. Warhol told Bob Colacello that he thought Capote was lying; to him, the promise of a future book did not make up for the immediate withdrawal from their magazine work. He felt Capote had dropped them and recorded that he could not understand why. The episode exposes the practical stakes of their friendship: personal access and literary collaboration were intertwined, so Capote’s retreat from contributing to Interview also registered as a rupture in their relationship.

Renewed contact and an uneasy afterlife

On April 8, Capote sounded like his old self when he called and said he had been working hard. He told Warhol that his Chameleon book would be in the Book-of-the-Month Club; when Warhol asked how he had secured that, Capote joked that it was because he was a good writer. The exchange briefly restored the familiar ease of their talk, but did not resolve the question of whether Capote would resume writing for Interview.

The distance persisted into August. Warhol missed a Today Show appearance with Capote, while Brigid Berlin tried unsuccessfully to reach him by telephone. Warhol also noted that a review of Music for Chameleons in the Times failed to mention that some of its stories had come from Interview. The omission sharpened the contrast running through the entries: Capote’s work was gaining public recognition, while the magazine’s contribution went unacknowledged. Their connection thus remained active in calls, broadcasts, and shared literary history, but cooperation no longer meant dependable access or credit.