Carnegie Hall is a recurring social and performance venue in Andy Warhol’s diary, recorded through two nights four years apart. A packed blues concert in 1979 brought spectacle, celebrity encounters, and an unexpected quarrel into the same evening; a 1983 Joan Rivers show made the hall a stage for celebrity humor and the audience’s response to it.

Concerts and social encounters

On April 10, 1979, Christophe de Menil invited Andy Warhol to a blues concert at Carnegie Hall. Warhol took a cab for four dollars, invited Curley, and met him at the hall. The place was jammed, but they had good seats. Allen Ginsberg, there with Peter Orlovsky, greeted Warhol with a big kiss, placing an intimate social encounter amid the crowd and concertgoing.

Warhol recorded the audience’s enthusiasm: everybody loved the show. He also dwelled on the musicians’ appearance, admiring the black blues performers’ hats, beautiful clothes, visible gold teeth, and jewelry. Their bearing suggested to him that they were major stars, and he wondered whether blues could become very big. The entry thus preserves both the concert’s immediate success and Warhol’s eye for how performers’ dress and public attention signal celebrity.

A quarrel in the crowd

The evening’s social atmosphere did not make Warhol’s own party harmonious. At Carnegie Hall, Curley called a boy over to meet him. Warhol became angry and concluded that he would never take Curley anywhere again, dismissing him as a rich freeloader. The concert account therefore turns quickly from collective enjoyment to a private judgment: the hall gathers people for a show, but their conduct together determines whether Warhol wants their company again.

Joan Rivers and the audience

On February 4, 1983, Steve Rubell called to say that he was sending tickets to the Joan Rivers show at Carnegie Hall and invited Warhol for drinks beforehand at Calvin Klein’s. After the drinks, the group went to the hall in limousines. Rubell gave Warhol and his companions two seats far off to the side, apart from the center seats he had for himself, making the seating arrangement another visible mark of social positioning within the evening.

Rivers came on with a boa. Warhol found her funny, while also wondering how she could make such cutting jokes without being sued. Her material included a joke about Richard Simmons carrying Rex Reed’s baby, an insult about Christina Onassis’s appearance, and a routine about Nancy Reagan picking her nose with a breadstick. Afterward, people were talking like Rivers; for Warhol, that imitation was evidence of her popularity. Carnegie Hall appears here not only as a venue for a performance but as a place where a comedian’s provocation travels into the audience’s conversation.