Carly Simon’s televised portrait session with Andy Warhol

Carly Simon’s televised portrait session with Andy Warhol brought a commissioned portrait into the staged world of an ABC television segment. Across April 10 and 24, the project joined Simon with Warhol, Larry Rivers, and Marisol, while exposing the practical conditions behind the image: payment had to be negotiated, the sitter needed coaxing, and the artists did not all accept the program’s preferred staging. The diary records not a simple unveiling but a production in which portraiture, celebrity, and television each shaped what could be seen.

A commission enters the television studio

The project was an ABC Omnibus program about Carly Simon having her portrait painted by Andy Warhol, Larry Rivers, and Marisol. Warhol had already decided that he would not do another unpaid task. Vincent Fremont arranged a contract with the program, with Simon expected to pay most of the cost. That condition places the television appearance within Warhol’s established business of commissioned portraits, a major source of income for him. He regularly accepted commissions from private clients as well as public figures, and the work formed part of the business that helped support his other activities.

The arrangement mattered to the shape of the event. This was not simply an artist appearing on television to discuss a finished work: the segment centered on the making and presentation of portraits, and the sitter was also paying for much of the work. The diary does not specify the final price or say precisely how the contract divided costs. It does, however, record Warhol’s insistence on being paid and Fremont’s role in turning that insistence into an agreement before filming proceeded.

April 10: preparation and a nervous sitter

The Omnibus team had arrived at Warhol’s office at 7:30 in the morning, after Fremont had worked out the arrangements the previous day. Warhol’s car had been scheduled to collect him at 10. On the way to the office, he rode alone in a limousine and carried a camera because he had decided to photograph the places he visited as proof of his daily movements. With the windows down so he could take pictures, the car drew greetings from people who recognized him on the West Side Highway. Near 23rd Street, a group of young Black men insulted him as a wealthy white person concerned only with money. The encounter frightened him, and the group continued following the car.

At the office, Warhol was wired for the program, and the car was sent back for Simon. She was too nervous to come upstairs at first; wine was sent down to the car, after which she came up and became sociable. The preparations included asking her to put on lipstick. Once they had worked, she was hungry, so the office ordered health sandwiches from Brownies, which she liked. Warhol taped the proceedings. These small details make the sitting feel less like a seamless television performance than a negotiated encounter: the production needed Simon to enter the room and take part, while food, drink, and grooming helped establish the conditions for work.

April 24: portraits and competing ideas of performance

Two weeks later, Warhol, Rivers, and Marisol met at the television studio to show their portraits of Simon. Rivers and Marisol arrived by limousine, and the artists met a director whom Warhol regarded as affected in manner. Rivers turned the director’s questions about where to stand, what to say, and how to look into a deliberately playful interrogation. His response made the instructions themselves part of the performance, rather than allowing the studio to dictate an unexamined display.

Warhol had one portrait at the studio; Rivers had five. One of Rivers’s pictures included a Chinese couple having sex in the background, and the studio required him to remove it. After he complied, the producers wanted to film the artists listening to Simon in front of blank easels. Rivers refused that setup, objecting to what he considered a corny staging after he had already made the requested change. The disagreement shows a limit to the program’s control: the artists could be asked to make their work and themselves legible to television, but Rivers resisted being arranged into an additional, simplified scene.

Warhol thought Simon might have liked his portrait best because she was paying for it. The diary presents this as his interpretation, not as a confirmed judgment by Simon. That uncertainty sits alongside the very visible production choices—the number of portraits on hand, the removal of Rivers’s background image, and the proposed blank-easel tableau—that mediated how the works would appear on screen.

Portraiture as a made image

The broader method behind Warhol’s portrait commissions helps clarify what was at stake, although the diary does not say that every step of that method occurred during Simon’s particular sitting. In his usual process, Warhol took about sixty Polaroid photographs of a sitter, selected four, and had a screen printer turn them into acetate positives. He chose and cropped an image, then altered it cosmetically before it was enlarged for silkscreening. Assistants prepared canvases in advance with different flesh-toned backgrounds for men and women; Warhol transferred the image, painted selected areas, and aligned the silkscreen with those colors. Small shifts in alignment produced the portraits’ characteristic visual effect.

That procedure makes the television episode more than a record of three artists standing beside paintings. Warhol’s portrait practice converted a person’s appearance into a sequence of choices—photographing, selecting, cropping, retouching, coloring, and printing—while the program added another layer of selection through its cameras and staging. The entries establish that Simon’s portrait was part of a paid, filmed project and that the artists’ works were brought before the studio cameras; they do not establish the segment’s eventual broadcast or how viewers received it. What remains clear is the friction between a portrait as a carefully produced image and television’s effort to turn its making into a manageable scene.