Brigid Berlin

Brigid Berlin is one of the most recurrent and complicated figures in Andy Warhol’s diary: a performer and Factory regular who becomes an office worker, a companion whose bluntness provokes both laughter and anger, and a person whose changing health and weight are recorded with unusual persistence. The entries make her neither a fixed celebrity nor simply an employee. She moves between those roles, often in the same scene, while the diary’s comedy leaves visible the affection and irritation that bind her to Warhol and the people around him.

Identity and Background

Also known as Brigid Polk, Berlin was the eldest daughter of Richard E. Berlin, longtime chairman of the Hearst Corporation. She had appeared in Warhol’s film Chelsea Girls and later played Estelle in Bad. Her Factory presence preceded her office job: she visited to record stories about what had happened in the back room at Max’s Kansas City or whom she had spoken to from her small room at the nearby George Washington Hotel. Warhol paid her for these recordings, usually $25 and sometimes as much as $50 after negotiation. The arrangement treated her talk as both performance and paid work, drawing on her place in the social world that the Factory documented.

Her public identity did not disappear when she took a desk job. When the art dealer Lucio Amelio recognized her as the actress from Chelsea Girls, Berlin was embarrassed to be working reception and pointed out that she had also appeared in Bad. Amelio responded as though he had encountered a major star, while Berlin had to continue answering the phones. The contrast captures a recurring condition of her life in the diary: a former performer could be recognized as a celebrity and, moments later, be measured by the mundane duties of the office.

Her body was also central to how others described her, and how she herself appeared in the record. Berlin’s weight-loss efforts repeatedly become a subject of conversation, workplace commentary, and self-consciousness. One entry says she had seen herself in Bad at 300 pounds and had started dieting; Warhol later refers to her as having once weighed 350 pounds and then being down to 125, a remark he deliberately made where she could hear it while she typed. These figures belong to distinct diary moments and are not presented as a consistent medical record. Their shifting emphasis shows how the diary turns her body into a visible, recurring part of her public persona.

From Factory Visitor to Interview Employee

Berlin’s relationship with the office developed within the expanding operation of Interview. As the magazine grew, it drew fresh faces and celebrities who wanted to appear in its pages; its promise of a magazine feature increasingly replaced the promise of a film role. At the same time, the publication’s staff occupied a different status from the people Warhol treated as his personal employees. The diary’s account of the office distinguishes those groups even as Berlin, a friend and social companion, crossed between them.

Warhol offered Berlin a job after she had been away for several weeks. She came to see him at her parents’ Fifth Avenue home, and he described her as looking beautiful, like her mother. He discussed her changing figure with her and offered her work at the office. An earlier offer had not persuaded her to work around the Factory; later entries establish her as a receptionist who also transcribed recordings and handled other office tasks. Her employment did not erase the difference between her celebrity past and the routine labor expected of her. It made that difference a daily source of comedy and friction.

The diary repeatedly tests whether Berlin is doing the work assigned to her. When she was asked to transcribe a Jodie Foster recording, she said she had worked on it for hours; Warhol concluded from her description that she had barely begun and shouted at her. On another occasion, she and Bob Colacello worked on text for a photography book, Social Disease. Warhol felt that both resisted his suggestions and praised the draft too readily, while he still approved of the title and the photographs. The episode places Berlin inside editorial labor but shows that her participation did not guarantee agreement or authority.

Some entries register her as a conspicuously effective worker. During the move from Union Square to a new building, Warhol enjoyed seeing her flustered by the unfamiliar telephone buttons and, in his teasing account, finally working rather than knitting. Elsewhere she forgot to tell him about a lunch appointment, prompting him to yell; she then called the next morning to make sure he knew there was nothing planned for that day. These small reversals give the office relationship its rhythm: she could frustrate him through omissions, but she was also capable of managing the next day’s information efficiently.

Social Life, Humor, and Conflict

Berlin’s social presence was not confined to reception work. She supplied gossip and stories, spoke candidly about people around the Factory, and could be cutting in her judgments. In one anecdote she told Warhol about a woman and her boyfriend picking their noses, an account he found difficult to take seriously. Her talk could also be performative: she had done an imitation of Eartha Kitt for Kitt herself. In a later office quarrel involving Kitt and Ronnie, Berlin’s imitation stands beside the arguments and competing loyalties that made the workplace feel like an unstable social stage rather than a quiet office.

She and Warhol shared the habit of turning other people’s behavior into material for conversation, but the diary’s humor often has an edge. Berlin was described as having become boring during a period of dieting, when she stayed in bed at the George Washington Hotel and seemed to do little besides wait for the weight to come off. Warhol offered her a job answering phones, but the entry says she refused. Later he reported her progress and appearance with close attention, sometimes approvingly, sometimes through teasing remarks. His attention makes her a continuing subject of his observation, but it does not mean the diary gives her an independent account of her own motives.

Berlin’s work and friendship with Warhol also brought moments of exposure and hurt. After she narrowly escaped being hit by a truck while crossing to buy cigarettes, Warhol recalled hearing the impact and running outside to find her on the street, with the vehicle inches from her. She got up laughing and insisted she was all right, though she had been badly frightened; a bystander offered to take her to a hospital, and she declined. Later, while listening to a tape Warhol had given her, she heard herself discussed in a conversation about whether she might leave her job and be replaced. The recording also revisited the truck incident and the ice cream cones Warhol had bought afterward. Berlin became distressed, called her sister to come hold her hand, and disputed Warhol’s count of the cones. The tape turned casual office talk into something she had to hear as a private judgment about her place at work.

The entries also show Berlin taking part in office disputes and sometimes escalating them. She fought with colleagues over a grapefruit that had been taken, while another employee complained about a missing scarf. She told Fred Hughes that Warhol had taken a Christmas scarf intended for him, helping to agitate the dispute. In another episode she discarded a doodle that Warhol considered important because it was meant to become a painting for Michael Viner’s wife, Deborah Raffin; Warhol said he yelled at her. The diary records these incidents from his perspective, turning ordinary objects—a grapefruit, a scarf, a piece of paper—into measures of trust, responsibility, and the irritation of shared work.

Health, Weight, and Care

Berlin’s weight-loss efforts recur across years, but the diary does not offer a neat story of steady improvement. Warhol noted her at 197 pounds, later at 140 and then 120; after the truck incident, he recorded her at 166½ pounds. In one entry she was caught eating fried potatoes, fried scallops, and mayonnaise while preparing for an opening. In another, she went out for cigarettes and returned after eating ice cream, which Warhol guessed from chocolate he pretended to see on her mouth. The details are comic in his telling, but their repetition shows how eating and weight became a persistent subject through which colleagues watched and judged her.

The diary also records food as a shared pleasure rather than only a test of willpower. At a theater event, Halston sent a cake shaped like a shoe, and Berlin ate the whole cake. After her encounter with the truck, Warhol said he had bought her ice cream; the disagreement over whether there had been three, four, or five cones became part of the distressing tape she later heard. Appetite in these episodes is at once a joke, a source of comfort, and a fact that the office repeatedly turns into commentary.

Medical problems eventually made the body-focused banter more consequential. Berlin called after leaving the hospital with gallstones described as the size of grape nuts. Doctors wanted to operate; Warhol was skeptical of the recommendation and told her to ask for pain relief, while she said the doctors wanted evidence of pain before proceeding. He suggested waiting until September unless the pain became severe. Later she returned to work after an operation. Warhol called her radiant and remarked on how faint the staple marks were in her gallbladder scar, then listened for an hour as she described the attack and surgery. His earlier suspicion gave way, in this account, to attentive interest in her recovery.

Care also appears in her attachment to animals and her responsibilities at home. Warhol criticized her after she had her cat Jimmy put to sleep, saying she had not sought a second opinion and had not told Rupert Smith about his offer to take the cat to Pennsylvania. Berlin had been giving the cat daily injections for kidney problems and feared it would begin urinating on her rug. Earlier, she had given up another sick cat, Billy, and Warhol called her heartless. His judgments are severe, but the entries also preserve the practical burden and worry surrounding the animals’ illnesses. Near the end of the diary material, Berlin leaves work to give her mother a morphine injection and returns a couple of hours later. She is upset by the prospect of her mother dying in winter and wishes the funeral could be in spring, a private fear that cuts through the office’s usual banter.

Work, Withdrawal, and the Diary’s Portrait

Knitting became one of Berlin’s distinctive activities at the reception desk. Warhol compared her to Madame Defarge as she knitted, and described her sweaters as selling for $2,000 each even while she was supposed to answer the phones. The craft made the desk a site of divided attention: Berlin was an employee, but she also pursued a profitable activity of her own. Her knitting could provoke Warhol’s teasing, yet its commercial success complicates the idea that she was simply failing to work.

The diary registers other stretches in which Berlin withdrew from ordinary office life. She attended EST for a full day, where participants surrendered their watches; she did not get home until five in the morning. Warhol’s account of the gathering, with its 200 participants and deliberately confrontational exercises, reduces her involvement to a comic report, but the length of the session marks a real interruption to her routine. In the final entries, she disappears from work for a week after announcing that she would travel to an English fat farm. Warhol noted that she had eaten a whole cake just before leaving and wondered whether she would really make the trip. He threatened to fire her on her return, extending the joke to her dogs, Fame and Fortune; the diary does not establish that he actually did so.

Berlin’s story is shaped by the diary’s production as well as by the events it records. Pat Hackett explains that she first kept a sketchy Factory log focused on visitors, parties, and expenses, then began weekday morning calls with Warhol in fall 1976. The calls became a diary but retained their original practical purpose of documenting activity and cash expenses, down to ten-cent calls from street payphones. Hackett took notes and typed them immediately after the conversations. The original record filled 20,000 pages; for publication, she removed whole days and weeks, shortened many entries, and cut names to preserve narrative flow. She also removed much of the personal exchange between herself and Warhol, recasting the few retained references to herself in the third person.

Berlin therefore appears through an intimate but mediated record: Warhol’s observations, recollections, jokes, and complaints as selected and shaped by Hackett. The diary gives her a vivid recurring presence through work routines, disputes, illness, food, animals, and family care, but it does not claim to be her own account. That tension is central to her portrayal. She is at once a former screen performer recognized by visitors, a receptionist whose labor is scrutinized, a friend who can be confided in or hurt by what she hears, and a person whose private difficulties repeatedly cross the threshold into the office. The result is not a resolved character arc so much as an accumulating portrait, built from the ordinary details that keep drawing her back into view.