Halloween

Halloween in Andy Warhol’s diary is both a night of personal excess and a growing public spectacle. In 1977, a party at Studio 54 ends in drugged, overlong revelry and an unexpected encounter between two of Warhol’s boyfriends; by 1986, he describes Halloween as a holiday that has spread across the city, with costumed guests filling Paige’s surprise party at Nell’s. The contrast also shows how the diary preserves small, vivid incidents—an uncomfortable necklace, a near-spoiled surprise, a face wrapped in foil—alongside its broader observations of changing nightlife.

Halloween in the diary

The two entries are separated by nine years and place Halloween in markedly different frames. The 1977 account centers on what happened to Warhol over the course of one night: drinks, a Quaalude, a cab ride home, and a meeting between his boyfriends. In 1986, the holiday becomes the setting for a carefully organized social event and a wider city scene, where costumes make familiar people temporarily unrecognizable. Warhol’s observation that Halloween had become a holiday for the whole city, rather than only for children, gives the later entry its sense of change.

These snapshots survive through a weekday diary routine established by Warhol and Pat Hackett. Hackett usually called around nine in the morning, took notes as Warhol recounted the previous day and night, and typed the entry soon after the call; sessions often lasted one or two hours, despite Warhol’s joking description of the work as a five-minute job. The diary was recorded Monday through Friday, with a Monday session covering the weekend. When either of them was away, they used calls, notes on hotel stationery, or occasionally a tape recording, so that no day was left unrecorded.

Studio 54 and the 1977 party

At the Halloween party at Studio 54, Stevie Rubell kept giving Warhol drinks. Someone put a Quaalude in Warhol’s mouth; he tried to push it aside, but it stuck, and vodka carried it down. Warhol called that a serious mistake. The entry makes the night’s physical discomfort unusually concrete: his diamond choker pinched his neck, and he wondered how women endured jewelry. The party’s glamour is present, but so is the bodily cost of remaining in it.

Warhol took a cab home and arrived around 6:30 in the morning. His boyfriend Peter came upstairs and found him with his boyfriend Danny. Warhol introduced the two men as his boyfriends; the introduction caught their interest, and they went off together. The encounter turns the night’s disorder into an unexpected social outcome: what might have been an awkward discovery instead redirects the two men toward one another. The entry delivers that reversal matter-of-factly, amid the account of intoxication and the long journey home.

A citywide celebration in 1986

On October 31, 1986, Warhol went to Nell’s for a surprise birthday party that Steven Greenberg was giving for Paige. The preparations had occupied him for days: he shuffled papers and tried to help Tama Janowitz assemble a guest list, but could not bring it together. Gael took over and organized it quickly. Paige believed she was going to a blind-date dinner, and the surprise held until the group reached the club.

The secret nearly came undone outside the door. Glenn O’Brien’s wife, Barbara, got out of a cab and greeted Paige by saying that they were there for her surprise party. Paige was distracted enough that the remark did not register; inside, the guests shouted their greeting, and the surprise finally landed. Gael’s rapid rescue of the preparations and the near-revelation at the entrance give the party its sequence of anxiety and release.

The celebration filled Nell’s street-level floor. At ten o’clock the public was admitted, but sent downstairs, leaving the party on the main floor. Warhol described the room as dark, with stuffed furniture, and noted the fashion for restaurants to cultivate a supposedly rich look. His account places the birthday gathering within a commercial nightlife setting even as Halloween supplies its disorderly, theatrical atmosphere.

Costumes, recognition, and the diary’s frame

For Warhol, the holiday’s expansion was visible in its guests. Drag queens came to the party, and he initially failed to recognize Kenny Scharf. He eventually identified Joey Arias, while Jean-Michel Basquiat arrived late with his face wrapped in tin foil. No one recognized him, and even Paige spoke to him without knowing who he was. Disguise here is not merely decoration: it briefly unsettles recognition among people who know one another, turning the club into a place where identity is both displayed and hidden.

The guest list also carries a more somber note. Warhol wanted Martin Burgoyne to attend, but Burgoyne said he had cancer throughout his body; Warhol recorded that this was sad. The detail sits beside the costumed arrivals and party chatter without being resolved or explained, preserving the mixture of festivity and private worry in the same social record.

Hackett’s editorial choices shaped the intimacy of that record. In preparing the diary for publication, she removed Warhol’s direct references to her and other details meaningful only to the two of them; in the few retained personal references, she recast herself in the third person as PH. Her stated aim was for readers to occupy the position of the person on the other end of Warhol’s phone. The Halloween entries therefore arrive as personal recollections made public: close in their attention to discomfort, timing, and embarrassment, yet presented through a deliberately edited voice.