Fame, celebrity culture, and public recognition

Fame, celebrity culture, and public recognition in the diaries are not fixed properties of famous people but ongoing effects of circulation: an interview, a photograph, a magazine cover, a television appearance, or a stranger’s sudden recognition can make a person visible, while the public’s attention can move on just as quickly. Interview became one of the central instruments of this process, supplying new faces and renewing contact with celebrity. The diaries also show how images were made, sold, encountered, and eventually forgotten—and how the account of that culture was itself edited into a public narrative.

Interview as a machinery of visibility

After Andy Warhol became Interview’s full owner and publisher in 1975, the magazine drew him into its daily business. He began looking over art director Marc Balet’s layouts and arranging lunches to pitch advertisers. Its value to him extended beyond publishing: as commercially exhibitable films became too expensive to make regularly, Interview offered a continuing reason for new people, especially young people, to come to the office. The magazine thus took over some of the social function once served by the possibility of appearing in one of his films.

By 1976, Interview’s circulation was growing and its deliberately sophisticated, self-mocking tone had become a draw for celebrities. Warhol and staff members often conducted cover interviews, and the need to fill each issue brought a steady stream of fresh faces to the office. The promise of being included in the magazine increasingly replaced the promise of appearing in a movie. Headings such as “Interman,” “Viewgirl,” “Upfront,” and “First Impression” organized photographs of young people who had not previously appeared in print. Visibility was not only bestowed on established stars; it could be extended to unfamiliar faces and made part of the magazine’s glamour.

The diaries capture that visibility as commercial work as well as social currency. In 1983, Warhol told Robert Hayes that he had secured Matt Dillon for a cover and proposed Shirley MacLaine as another way to sell copies to an audience he associated with daytime talk shows. At Trump Tower, he laid out stacks of Interview and watched people take them; one woman trembled as she asked for his autograph. The scene joins two kinds of public recognition: Warhol used the magazine to circulate his name and work, while a stranger’s response confirmed his own celebrity in person.

Making the celebrity image

Warhol’s commissioned portraits made the construction of a public likeness concrete. The process began with about sixty Polaroid photographs of the subject, taken with a Polaroid Big Shot. He selected four images for a screen printer to turn into positive images on eight-by-ten-inch acetate, then chose one, determined its crop, and adjusted its features to make the sitter appear more attractive. He might lengthen a neck, trim a nose, enlarge lips, or clear a complexion. The chosen image was enlarged to a forty-by-forty-inch acetate and made into a silkscreen.

The finished portrait depended on coordination between photographic image and painted surface. Assistants prepared canvas in flesh-toned backgrounds, using a pinker shade for women. Warhol traced the enlarged image onto the canvas, painted selected areas such as hair, eyes, lips, ties, and jackets, and then aligned the silkscreened details with those colors. Slight differences in alignment produced the portraits’ characteristic shifting appearance. The work translated a person’s appearance into a reproducible image, but it did not simply reproduce the photograph: cropping, retouching, color, and imperfect registration all helped shape the public-facing likeness. The first canvas generally cost about $25,000, with each additional canvas priced at about $5,000, joining image-making to the business of celebrity portraiture.

The gap between a managed image and behavior in public also appears in Warhol’s account of interviewing Shaun Cassidy. Cassidy gave clean, stock answers because his young fans required a carefully limited public persona. Yet, after the interview, walking through a hotel lobby crowded with screaming girls, he seemed to change; later, when Barry McKinley photographed him, he appeared to become absorbed in his own image. The account distinguishes the interview’s controlled answers from the responses elicited by fans and by the camera. Celebrity here is not merely what a person is, but what changes when an audience or lens arrives.

Recognition, disappearance, and the public

Public recognition could be exhilarating, awkward, or unstable. On a spring day in 1984, a woman approached Warhol in a park, identified herself as Mary Rosenberg, and credited him with once giving her useful advice. He did not recognize her. As he continued through the park, people pointed him out as a famous artist. The encounter reverses the usual direction of recognition: a stranger remembers Warhol’s past words, while he cannot place her, even as other passersby identify him by reputation.

A later diary entry makes the fragility of that reputation explicit. While Vincent Fremont filmed Joanne Winship discussing her annual charity event, Warhol reflected that people could be seen by millions and then forgotten within minutes. The example was not an abstract theory of celebrity but a contrast between a person’s extended visibility and the speed with which public attention could lapse. Against that fear of being forgotten, Interview’s regular production of covers and its circulation among shops and passersby offered a practical means of remaining present.

The images could also travel beyond their original setting. In 1984, Warhol noticed that MTV videos used his paintings, including his portraits of Elizabeth Taylor and Joseph Beuys. Their appearance in music videos carried his work into a new medium and audience, demonstrating that recognition could attach both to a person and to an image. The diary records this circulation from the artist’s perspective: the paintings were not confined to galleries or commissioned portraits but reappeared in popular television culture.

The diary as a record of celebrity

The account of fame is shaped by the diary’s own production. Before 1976, Pat Hackett kept a sketchy log based on business visitors, events, and expenses, often gathering different people’s versions of the previous night. After she stopped working at the office, Warhol agreed to provide the daily accounts himself. Their weekday morning phone calls began as a way to record his movements and business expenses, including very small cash costs, but became a personal diary as well as a record kept with tax audits in mind. The arrangement preserved everyday details alongside encounters with prominent figures, making celebrity culture part of an ordinary routine of calls, receipts, and appointments.

The published diary is not an uncut transcript of that routine. Hackett reduced an original 20,000 pages, removing whole days or weeks and selecting among names and events to create narrative flow rather than a social-column roll call. She also eliminated much of the interpersonal exchange between herself and Warhol, sometimes translating references to herself into the third person. The resulting account therefore records fame while also mediating it: it selects who remains visible on the page, just as Interview selected whom to place before its readers. That parallel gives the diaries’ observations of recognition and forgetting an additional force. Celebrity depends on attention, but every record of it depends on choices about what—and whom—to show.