International Herald Tribune

International Herald Tribune enters Andy Warhol’s diaries as both a marker of the cultural world around him and a source of writing about his own public image. One mention places its journalist Hebe Dorsey beside a fashion-world conversation; another finds Warhol, ill and traveling home, no longer caring enough about an article featuring him to save it.

A publication in the fashion and art circuit

At a June 1986 fashion show at The Pierre, Warhol sat beside Hebe Dorsey, who wrote for International Herald Tribune. She praised architect and designer Peter Marino, while Warhol delighted in her name, repeating its sound to himself and imagining it for a child. The brief encounter places the publication within the social circuit of fashion, journalism, and design that Warhol observed at such events.

An article about Warhol

In January 1987, traveling by plane from Milan to New York and feeling unwell, Warhol noticed that he was in International Herald Tribune. He did not clip the article. He described this lack of interest as a milestone: even allowing that illness might have affected him, he recognized that something in his response had changed.

Chris Makos sharpened the episode by pointing out that a woman who had interviewed Warhol in Milan, and had seemed kind and glamorous, had written harshly about him. The contrast between the interviewer’s manner and the article’s tone made the newspaper appearance more than a simple record of recognition: it was also an instance of the gap between a public encounter and its printed account.

Recognition and indifference

The two appearances give International Herald Tribune a small but distinct place in the diaries. In 1986, it is associated with a journalist’s cultural standing and Warhol’s lively attention to her; months later, it carries an article about him that he cannot bring himself to preserve. His indifference may have been partly the product of feeling sick, as he acknowledged, but he still treated not clipping the article as evidence that his relation to publicity had reached a new point.