Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis

Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis occupies the diary as both a person Warhol encounters and an image around which other people arrange themselves. He admires her beauty and recognizes the force of her presence, but his accounts also register resentment toward the restrictions and protocols surrounding her. Again and again, a social gathering becomes a contest over who may look, photograph, approach, or control the resulting picture.

Public Image and the Camera

At an International Center of Photography benefit, Warhol arrives with Fred Hughes at a mansion for a dinner he finds socially dispiriting. They are seated at an insignificant table, beside people they scarcely know. A young woman tells Warhol that, although he has a camera, he may photograph everyone except Onassis. The instruction initially seems like the nervousness of an event worker; its absurdity becomes clear when Warhol and Hughes leave the room and find four thousand photographers taking pictures of Onassis. The camera ban has not protected her from being photographed. Instead, it has exposed how the rules around her image are themselves part of the spectacle.

That contradiction helps explain her recurring importance in Warhol’s diary. A photograph of Onassis is treated as something to regulate, while the crowd of photographers makes her the event’s unavoidable center. Warhol’s account turns on the difference between ordinary access and celebrity access: he is excluded from taking a picture, yet the room is filled with people doing precisely that. The scene is less a portrait of private character than a record of the machinery required to manage a public image.

Benefits, Theater, and Social Attention

On another evening, Onassis is among the people expected at a performance of The Act. Bianca Jagger has six tickets and changes her plans, disinviting Victor so she can invite Stevie Rubell and her dance teacher. Warhol later learns that Jagger wanted to attend because she had heard Onassis would be there and hoped to be photographed. At the theater, people scan the crowd for Onassis; she, Swifty Lazar, Jack Haley, and Jagger have their pictures taken, while the audience watches. After the performance, Warhol goes backstage to see Liza Minnelli and points his tape recorder toward Onassis, hoping to capture a little of her conversation.

The episode links Onassis’s presence to a chain of social calculation: a guest list shifts, a celebrity audience searches the room, photographs become a public performance, and Warhol tries to record what the camera cannot. His attention is not limited to the official occasion. He also notices the after-party logistics—Jagger making calls to find out who is at the Ice Palace or Elaine’s—and the way the evening continues to be organized around knowing where people are. Onassis’s appearance functions as a gravitational point in a larger culture of being seen and finding out who else is present.

A Complicated Social Relationship

Warhol’s view of Onassis is not simply hostile. At the earlier benefit, he objects to being told not to photograph her, but later he recalls her in terms of beauty and visibility. At a benefit for the Municipal Art Society, he goes with Jagger to the Four Seasons after a Philip Johnson retrospective exhibition. He shakes hands with Onassis and takes the end of their contact personally: she never invites him to her Christmas party again. He calls her a creep and says that, if invited now, he would tell her to mind her own business. Yet he immediately qualifies his bravado. They are the same age, he says, but he feels that she is older—and that he feels this way about everybody.

The entry preserves the tension rather than resolving it. Warhol asserts an equality that would let him answer her back, then admits to a feeling of deference or distance that undercuts the assertion. Onassis is not shown explaining her choices; the reader sees her through Warhol’s account of a handshake, a missing invitation, and his wounded response. That limited perspective makes the slight socially legible without establishing why she acted as she did.

Family, History, and the Wedding

The diary’s references place Onassis within a family network as well as a public one. A caption identifies Lee Radziwill and Onassis as sisters and notes that Lee rented a house from Warhol in the early 1970s; another photograph caption records Truman Capote and Lee as close friends in 1974. These brief archival captions give the diary’s celebrity encounters a longer social memory, connecting its present-tense scenes to relationships and arrangements that preceded them.

Years later, at the wedding of Maria Shriver and Arnold Schwarzenegger, Onassis again draws Warhol’s attention. He observes her receiving communion and walking around the church with John-John, reading the movement as a way of showing herself off. She looks beautiful, he says, but he also calls her sour because she does not smile for the photographers. His account contrasts her with the newlyweds, who, according to Peter, rolled down a car window and smiled and posed for the cameras. The comparison shows how closely Warhol watches the difference between participating in a photographic ritual and refusing its expected gestures.

The wedding also brings Onassis into the practical question of who owns the images. Warhol complains that guests should have been allowed to take photographs for themselves, as at Madonna’s wedding, rather than leaving the pictures to the Kennedys’ own photographer. Bodybuilders with cameras make it difficult for the family to stop every shot, but the Kennedys still direct their photographer to make selected pictures, which then belong to them. Onassis’s presence thus belongs to a wider struggle over private keepsakes, family control, and the possibility that wedding photographs might instead be rushed to the New York Post the next morning.

The Camera’s Politics

Across these encounters, Onassis is repeatedly associated with the terms of visibility: the instruction not to photograph her, the photographers gathered around her, Warhol’s attempt to record her voice, and the family’s control of wedding pictures. The diary does not offer an interior account of her motives. It offers something different: a close record of how her presence reorganizes rooms, plans, and attention, and of how Warhol reacts when the rules of access seem both restrictive and impossible to enforce.

That pattern sharpens the diary’s interest in celebrity as a social arrangement rather than a stable possession. Onassis can be protected from one photographer while surrounded by thousands; admired as beautiful while described as unsmiling; treated as a guest at a benefit and as the center of its photographic spectacle. Warhol’s judgments remain personal and sometimes contradictory, but the recurring camera scenes make the contradiction meaningful. Her public image is not simply seen; it is negotiated, guarded, pursued, and contested.