Attempted assassination of Ronald Reagan (e31d8fe3)

The Attempted assassination of Ronald Reagan appears in the diary not as a full account of the attack but as a remembered warning, voiced on May 13, 1981, when news came that the pope had been shot. Andy Warhol’s alarm centered on the prospect of losing another portrait opportunity: the shooting had already, in his words, cost one. The brief recollection makes the attempted assassination legible through the working world and anxieties recorded in the diary.

The Shooting Recalled

The dated entry places Warhol at a noon lunch. When he arrived, the others were gathered around the television, and he learned that the pope had been shot. The diary gives no details of Ronald Reagan’s shooting itself; it records Warhol invoking it in response to this new report. He began screaming: “We lost a portrait that day when Reagan was shot and I don’t want it to happen again! Turn that TV off!” His words turn a reference to political violence into an urgent fear of a second interruption to portrait work.

Portrait Work and Immediate Aftermath

The entry moves straight from the television to the portraits. Sid and Anne Bass arrived and looked at theirs; Warhol noted that he had to change some lips and make a number of new ones. The juxtaposition supplies the practical stakes behind his outburst: the lunch was already a work appointment, and the portraits remained to be revised. The account does not explain which portrait was lost when Reagan was shot, or what happened to it. It does show Warhol describing the earlier shooting as having cost the studio a portrait, and resisting the possibility of another such loss.

From Factory Log to Personal Record

The passage belongs to a diary-making routine that had changed in 1976. Pat Hackett had previously kept a sketchy Factory log, assembling business visitors and accounts of the previous night from several people’s versions. After she told Warhol she would leave the office but continue working with him on Popism, they agreed that the daily account would come from him. What had been an expense-and-activity log thus became Warhol’s personal narrative, while retaining its practical purpose of documenting business costs for tax scrutiny.

Their weekday morning calls supplied the record. Hackett took notes as Warhol recounted the previous day and night, then typed the entry; weekend activities were gathered in a longer Monday session. The routine meant that a major news report could enter the diary alongside the day’s ordinary work and expenses. Here, the pope’s shooting and Warhol’s recollection of Reagan’s shooting are recorded in the same account as the Bass portraits and their revisions.

The Published Account

The printed diary is an edited version of a much larger record. Hackett says the original ran to 20,000 pages and that publication required cutting whole days, weeks, and portions of days, as well as many names. She also removed most of the interpersonal exchanges between herself and Warhol, recasting the few retained personal references in the third person. The May 13 entry therefore reaches readers within a selected and shaped text, not as an unmediated transcript of every conversation around the event.

Within that form, the recollection remains sharply specific: a television in the room, Warhol’s demand that it be turned off, and the portraits waiting to be inspected and changed. The diary does not expand the reference into a history of the attempted assassination. Instead, it preserves how Warhol connected the shooting to a concrete consequence for his work, and how news of another shooting brought that remembered consequence back into the day.