Bill Copley

Bill Copley’s appearances in Andy Warhol’s diary turn a volatile marriage into an unfolding domestic drama, first observed as an eccentric arrangement and later shadowed by separation and grave injury. The entries follow Copley from a passing reference in another person’s romantic life to a wedding, a portrait sitting, a wife’s departure, and a fire that left him with third-degree burns. Warhol records not a settled portrait of Copley so much as a relationship whose balance of power repeatedly shifts, while Copley’s own attachment persists after the apparent collapse of their life together.

Identity and Introduction

The earliest glimpse of Copley is brief and social. At a gathering where Susan Johnson was looking for a new partner, Warhol noted that her affair with Billy Copley had not worked out. The entry offers no explanation of their relationship or its ending, but establishes Copley as part of the intimate, overlapping social world in which Warhol’s diary places him.

A fuller portrait comes through Copley’s connection to a play. Warhol reported that Copley had hired a sex worker to appear in it and then kept her on afterward, paying her $200 a week to live in his house on West 89th Street. Copley had once said that he furnished the place to resemble a bar, hoping no woman would want to live there; the irony, as Warhol saw it, was that this very atmosphere suited the woman he had chosen. The domestic arrangement that was meant to discourage a woman instead became the setting for an increasingly consequential relationship.

From Play to Marriage

At first, Copley seemed entertained by the situation. The woman was taking over the house and buying him unusual presents, and he found this interesting, though Warhol could hear uncertainty entering his account. Copley was becoming nervous about her presence even as he remained fascinated by what was happening. The tension between amusement and apprehension became material for Warhol, who proposed recording the pair’s arguments for an art project. They did not fight in public, but Copley was willing to let Warhol tape them.

By September 1980, the relationship had reached marriage. Warhol attended Copley’s wedding party, where a tent had been set up behind the house and Donald Bruce White was catering. The bride wore a string of Tiffany’s pearls valued at $145,000. Warhol deliberately left her name off the present he brought, which was a shoe, making the gesture another of his sly, pointed observations of the occasion. The party was small, but its details suggested a union already carrying a history that outsiders could read in different ways: the woman Copley had once hired for his play was now his wife.

The wedding entry also catches a quieter domestic detail. Copley had a new dachshund, Ludwig, after the earlier dog, little Tommy, had been run over. Warhol fed Ludwig and noted that the dog took to him. In the same account, a man associated with the bride’s circle drew Warhol aside and spoke to him so harshly that he feared the man might strike him. Warhol and John Reinhold left quickly. The unease around the celebration did not amount to evidence about Copley’s own conduct, but it gives the wedding scene a wary edge rather than the uncomplicated air of a social triumph.

Portraits and Household Unease

In October, Copley himself suggested that Warhol make a portrait of his new wife, Marjorie. Vincent Fremont was trying to bring the Copleys to the office so the portrait could be arranged. Warhol’s concern centered on a change in the household: Marjorie had persuaded Copley to dismiss the servants who had worked for him before the marriage. He described the situation as strange and hoped nothing would happen to Copley, a reaction that shows how quickly the diary’s account had moved from amused curiosity to alarm.

When Warhol met Marjorie for the portrait, his first impression complicated that apprehension. Her hair was in pigtails; after she let it down, it fell to her waist, and Warhol noted that it had just been washed. They had lunch. She was attending school and had moved from science toward social sciences; Warhol offered a dismissive opinion of that change, but found her pleasant and willing to follow his directions. She did not seem as pushy or tough as he had expected. The portrait session therefore gave the diary a direct encounter with a woman previously described through other people’s accounts, without resolving Warhol’s concern about the servants or Copley’s home life.

Warhol continued to hope that Copley would become the subject of a taped play about his life. In 1981, he tried calling Copley through the day to arrange a time to record it. That project remained an intention in the diary, not a completed work. The repeated wish to tape Copley’s life is significant because the marriage had already supplied Warhol with a dramatic sequence of reversals, but the entries do not say that the proposed play was ever made.

Departure, Fire, and Aftermath

In March 1981, Fremont relayed a stark account of Marjorie’s departure. She had gone to Tiffany’s, accumulated a large bill, emptied the couple’s bank account, and taken the two portraits Warhol had made of her. Copley waited for her at the airport with roses, expecting her return from Miami to Key West; instead, a man arrived carrying divorce papers. The episode reverses the wedding’s display of expensive pearls: now Tiffany’s appears in the report as part of a costly departure, while Copley is left waiting with flowers and confronted with the end of the marriage.

The same entry describes a fire in Key West that badly injured Copley. According to the account Warhol received, Copley had been smoking in bed while Marjorie slept in another room. Two of her friends, who had flown down with her, went out; when they returned at five in the morning, they found the fire. The house was half burned, and firefighters had to respond. Copley’s body was covered in third-degree burns, and he underwent several operations and skin grafts. The report says Marjorie claimed to have slept through the fire without hearing or smelling anything. Warhol also noted that Copley was often alone after the assistant and secretary had been dismissed, extending the sense of isolation created by the earlier loss of household staff.

Two months later, Copley gave Warhol his own account of the injury. He said that he had set himself on fire while smoking in Key West, had been treated at a hospital and released, and was then served with papers by his wife. The diary preserves both reports without settling their differences. What it does make clear is Copley’s continued attachment: despite the fire, the divorce papers, and the loss of the two portraits, he was still crazy about Marjorie. He had decided to buy the two surplus portraits Warhol had painted, though Warhol did not know what he would do with them. The images taken from the house thus returned to Copley as objects he was willing to reclaim, even as the marriage itself had broken apart.