Jams

Jams is a restaurant at 79th Street and Lexington Avenue that appears repeatedly in Andy Warhol’s diary as a place for both social dinners and work-related conversations. Its role is defined less by description of the room than by what happens around its tables: an unusually smooth birthday gathering, exchanges about art and money, an encounter with a familiar face, and a dinner that dissolves into workplace complaints.

Setting and Use

Warhol first describes discovering Jams despite often passing by it. He found it chic and expensive, with food he considered exceptionally good. The meal recalled the Four Seasons as he remembered it, including the restaurant’s former connection to a man who grew vegetables in his own garden in Connecticut. Jams therefore entered his account as more than a convenient address: it offered a polished setting whose quality he measured through both the food and his memories of another restaurant.

Gatherings and Personal Ties

At a birthday dinner there, Paige, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and other guests gathered around a meal that cost $550. Basquiat ordered champagne and offered to pay, but Warhol refused. The evening remained deliberately low-key: nobody announced the birthday, Paige wore a strapless pink dress and took her camera into the kitchen to make movies, and the dinner proceeded smoothly. On the drive afterward, Warhol and Basquiat discussed Paige’s past support for Basquiat’s career, including helping him secure his first uptown exhibition and selling many of his paintings. The restaurant scene thus holds together celebration and a frank reckoning with the loyalties behind artistic success.

Jams also hosted a dinner with Keith Haring and others at which the conversation ranged from designing a one-room house to money: everyone present said they were short of it. The meal cost $400. In the same conversation, Warhol asked Philip about an airplane crash from years earlier; Philip described the experience as exciting and said the plane had landed in cherry trees, while he alone escaped injury. At Jams, ordinary dinner talk could turn abruptly from practical financial constraints to an extraordinary anecdote.

Celebrity and Work

At another dinner with the Brants, Warhol noticed Robert Redford seated behind him, apparently with family members. He chose not to approach him, judging that it would not be appropriate in the moment. After reading an old interview with Redford at home, however, he learned that Redford had once tried to be a painter and had worked as a magazine art director in New York. Warhol then reconsidered: those experiences might have given Redford a reason to recognize him. Jams became the setting for a small missed encounter whose significance only emerged afterward.

A later dinner with Fred Hughes and Gael Love turned Jams into an extension of the office. The discussion concerned printing costs and upcoming magazine covers, including issues planned around Mick Jagger, health, and Mickey Rourke. Warhol found the meal frustrating, felt that he had complained rather than encouraged his colleagues, and concluded that little had been accomplished. The contrast with the smooth birthday dinner is telling: Jams could shelter sociability, but it could not make difficult business conversations easy.