Andy Warhol—Roy Cohn

Andy Warhol’s friendship with Roy Cohn appears in the diary less as a privately narrated bond than as a public association made visible by Cohn’s death. Warhol mentioned Cohn at a party shortly before his death; afterward, obituaries identified Warhol as one of Cohn’s good friends, a connection that troubled Fred Hughes.

A Friendship Made Public

At a party on June 19, 1986, Warhol brought Cohn up in conversation. Cindy Adams said Cohn was already gravely ill when she saw him at a small cocktail party: he had needed help to reach the podium, and when she shook his hand, his weight fell against her. The diary records no extended exchange between Warhol and Cohn there, but the later public description of their friendship gives the brief mention added significance.

Cohn’s Death and Warhol’s Obituaries

Warhol read Adams’s obituary of Cohn and noted that his own name was linked with Cohn’s in the obituaries as that of one of Cohn’s good friends. Fred Hughes was angry about this association. The entry thus captures two distinct responses to the friendship’s public framing: Warhol recorded the connection as a fact of the coverage, while Fred objected to its prominence.

The Relationship in the Diary

The surviving account establishes the friendship and its public consequences, but offers little detail about how the relationship began or what it involved privately. Its emphasis falls instead on how Cohn was remembered: Warhol compared the likely contents of Cohn’s auction to Rock Hudson’s, describing both as collections of strange, unexplained gifts, and contrasted Cohn’s run-down town house with his more heavily decorated house in Greenwich. These domestic details, alongside the obituary references, show how the diary registers the friendship through news, social memory, and the material traces left behind.