Andy Warhol’s loneliness and low spirits after separating from Jed Johnson

Andy Warhol’s loneliness after Jed Johnson moved out was not a single reaction but an unsettled state: he could feel relieved to be alone and yet dread the quiet of his large house. The diary records that contradiction alongside a sense that ordinary actions had lost their meaning, a new and emotionally difficult crush on Jon Gould, episodes of crying, and a startling encounter that made Warhol feel old. Its significance lies in the way separation becomes a lens through which work, affection, solitude, and age all seem newly uncertain.

The Separation and Its Immediate Conditions

On December 21, 1980, Warhol recorded that Jed had decided to move out. The apartment Jed had bought on West 67th Street for work was now to become his home as well. Warhol said he did not want to talk about the decision. In the same entry, he noted going to church, working in a freezing office, and deciding not to send in the rent. The diary does not explain that financial decision or explicitly connect it to the separation; instead, these details sit beside the news, giving the day the compressed, unresolved quality of a record that names practical circumstances without unfolding the feelings behind them.

Months later, Warhol returned to the previous Christmas as the point when Jed moved out and when their fights had become too difficult to discuss. He admitted that he had put off telling the diary about his emotional problems. By April 1981, he was living alone, and his account held two responses together: some relief at the changed situation, and a wish not to be by himself in the big house. The presence of Nena, Aurora, Archie, and Amos did not erase that sense of isolation. The contrast between a house occupied by familiar companions and the feeling of being alone shows that the diary treats loneliness as more than simply having no one nearby.

Aimlessness and the Attempt to Fall in Love

Warhol described this period as strange and questioned what his actions meant: one could do something, then wonder what it amounted to, and do the same with the next thing. He called the resulting feelings desperate and said that nothing seemed to mean anything. The diary does not present this as a settled conclusion. It records a mind turning over the value of work and activity while searching for another source of attachment.

Warhol’s proposed answer was to try to fall in love with Jon Gould. But even as he described the crush, he doubted what it could offer. Thinking about someone constantly could begin as fantasy, he wrote, and then become so involved that seeing the person all the time felt like another job. The comparison is especially revealing in the context of his fear that life had become meaningless: the hoped-for romance might itself acquire the repetitive, labor-like character he associated with work.

At the same time, Warhol described Jon as a good person to be in love with partly because Jon had his own career. He could develop movie ideas with him, and Jon might persuade Paramount to advertise in Interview. Warhol wryly connected the crush to a possible business benefit, imagining that it could be good for business. That practical calculation does not cancel the expressed longing; it makes the longing harder to separate from the professional world that filled Warhol’s life. Romance appears both as a desired emotional escape and as something he immediately measures against work.

Recurrent Depression and the Easter Entries

The diary’s April entries make the low mood concrete through repeated, differently situated episodes. On one occasion, Warhol said he was depressed and passed out copies of Interview before going to the office. He worked until 6:30, declined Rupert’s invitation to an all-boy party on Bleecker Street because he was too depressed, ate at the Brasserie, and went home lonely and despondent. He associated that particular misery with the feeling that nobody loved him and with Easter; he cried.

The next day, news of Chris Makos enjoying the sun in Palm Beach with his boyfriend Peter depressed Warhol again. He moped around, said his mind was elsewhere, and contrasted Rupert’s thirty phone calls with receiving none himself. These details give loneliness a social dimension: other people’s apparent happiness and attention sharpened Warhol’s sense of being left out. They do not establish that anyone had rejected him; they show how the diary registers ordinary comparisons as painful during this period.

On Easter Sunday, Warhol wrote that he was in a really depressed mood. Jed came to take the dogs for the day, as he did on Sundays, and Warhol cried three times. He then decided to pull himself together and go to church. The entry brings separation into a recurring arrangement: Jed is no longer living with Warhol, but remains present through the weekly visit for the dogs. Warhol’s decision to go to church marks an action taken amid distress, not evidence that the distress had passed.

Aging and the Shape of the Record

A separate encounter at the ballet gave Warhol another explanation for his problems. A woman, Lila Davies, recognized him and recalled their time together at Carnegie Tech and in a group who had lived on 103rd Street in the 1950s. She was there with her eighteen-year-old son; she and her son lived in Cleveland. Seeing the son resemble the woman as Warhol remembered her made the passage of time suddenly visible to him. He felt old, grey, tired, and out of it, and began to think that all his problems came from feeling old. Seeing young people just beginning to come into their own, he said he had pinpointed the problem.

The diary does not resolve the loneliness that follows Jed’s departure, nor does it establish that Warhol’s interpretation of aging was definitive. Instead, it preserves successive explanations and counterpressures: the absent partner, the populated but lonely house, the difficult crush, other people’s apparent ease, and the jolt of recognizing the years between an old classmate and her son. The movement between intimate distress and sharply particular daily observations is itself consequential. Warhol records feelings he had initially avoided discussing, but the entries remain uneven and event-bound; a church visit, a workday, a missed party, a dog handoff, or a face from the past can each bring the underlying uncertainty into view without supplying a final answer.