Jane Fonda

Jane Fonda is a recurring figure in Andy Warhol’s diary as both a subject for his portrait business and a celebrity seeking images for political use. Her appearances trace a practical, uneven exchange: she asked Warhol for free work to support her husband Tom Hayden’s campaign, while Warhol later recorded that she declined to let a picture of herself appear in his book. Across the years, the entries shift from accommodating a request to registering resentment at what he saw as a pattern of asking for favors without reciprocation.

Identity and Appearance in the Diary

Fonda enters the narrative through specific encounters rather than an extended account of her life. The diary identifies her as an actress, associates her political requests with her husband’s election campaign, and recalls her earlier contact with Warhol’s Factory circle. It offers no sustained account of her career or political beliefs; instead, it shows how Warhol’s daily record notices the practical details of an appointment and the uses to which a celebrity image might be put.

That perspective is important to the portrait the entries create. Fonda is seen in settings where access, appearance, and work are closely connected: she calls to ask for a portrait, arrives with her own hairdresser and makeup artist, and later seeks paintings Warhol has made of her for campaign-related purposes. The diary’s emphasis is not on a public biography but on the movement between personal contact and professional request.

The Campaign Portrait Request

In February 1982, Fonda called seeking a free portrait that could be used to make posters for fundraising for Hayden’s election campaign. Warhol recorded that Fred Hughes could not decide whether he should agree. The uncertainty placed the request within the realities of Warhol’s portrait practice: a portrait was not simply a friendly gift, but work with potential commercial value and a place in a business sustained by commissions.

Warhol initially decided to do the portrait after Hughes read Hayden’s biography and political ideas and advised him to proceed. When Fonda came to sit for him in April, the appointment took place amid a disagreement between Warhol and Hughes about the makeup person. Fonda arrived on crutches and brought her own hairdresser and makeup artist. Warhol described her as especially charming because she wanted something for free, making the graciousness of the encounter, in his account, inseparable from the favor she was seeking.

During the sitting, Fonda asked about Geraldine Smith and Eric Emerson, whom she and Roger Vadim had once taken back to their hotel room after meeting them at the Factory. Warhol answered that Emerson was dead and that Smith could be found in the phone book. The exchange briefly joined Fonda’s earlier passage through Warhol’s social and artistic world to the present-day portrait session. Rather than develop into reminiscence, it returned to the business of the visit: Fonda was there to obtain an image she could use.

Portraits as Work and Political Images

The diary describes portraiture as a major part of Warhol’s income, carried on alongside his other artistic work. His general process began with a sitting and a large set of Polaroid photographs; he selected images, chose a crop, and cosmetically altered features before turning the image into a silkscreen portrait. The account does not specify which steps or arrangements applied to Fonda’s portraits, but it makes clear why a request for a free image involved more than a casual favor: the portrait was a deliberately produced artwork, and its image could be reproduced for another purpose.

In Fonda’s case, that purpose was political fundraising. Warhol’s later recollection confirms that he made paintings of her, that she had borrowed one and returned it, and that prints had been made to sell for Hayden’s campaign. By August 1984, he was still being asked to travel to Boston with the paintings. He questioned whether Hayden was running again and remembered the campaign as an earlier undertaking. The paintings therefore remained part of a continuing practical negotiation after the original sitting, rather than a one-time exchange completed in the studio.

Refusal and the Change in Tone

By 1985, Warhol’s account of the relationship had hardened. Harper & Row informed him that Fonda had turned down his request to use her picture in the America book. He reacted with disbelief and anger, explicitly connecting the refusal to her earlier requests for free work. His entry turns the denied permission into a reversal: the person who had sought images for her own political project would not, in this instance, allow Warhol to use her image in his.

The diary records Warhol’s stated intention to refuse the next favor she requested. That response does not establish what happened in any later encounter, but it marks a clear change in the terms as he understood them. The earlier portrait and campaign work had been granted after Hughes’s encouragement; the later refusal made Warhol recast that accommodation as part of an unequal pattern. His sharp reaction is evidence of his perception, not an independent account of Fonda’s reasons for withholding permission.

Narrative Role and Limits of the Record

Fonda’s significance in these entries lies in the way her image moves between artistic, commercial, and political uses. A portrait could be an artwork made by Warhol, a source for campaign posters and fundraising prints, or a photograph whose publication required permission. The sequence makes celebrity likeness look less like a fixed possession than an object whose circulation is repeatedly negotiated among artist, subject, publisher, and political campaign.

The account also remains deliberately close to Warhol’s viewpoint. These are diary entries shaped by his attention to requests, costs, favors, and social encounters; they do not supply Fonda’s account of the arrangements or explain her later decision. Read with that limitation in mind, the episodes preserve both sides of a compact tension: Warhol was willing to make images that could serve Fonda’s campaign, but he expected some measure of reciprocity, and the refusal to grant him use of her picture made that expectation visible.