Jean Stein

Jean Stein is a recurring but fragmentarily rendered presence in Andy Warhol’s diary: she is associated with his McGovern campaign poster, with a conversation about her biography Edie, and with a spiteful impulse to send her a passage from someone else’s diary. The record offers no sustained portrait of her; instead, it shows how Warhol’s changing recollections and resentments place her in the orbit of his work and social life.

Appearances in Warhol’s social world

At a party, Jean Stein was present while Warhol spoke with the art critic Peter Schjeldahl, whom he believed disliked him. Warhol says he was trying hard to win Schjeldahl over, and that the conversation turned to Ted Berrigan’s death. He then links Stein to the exchange by observing that Schjeldahl seemed to believe everything in Edie. The entry records her presence and the association with the book, but does not explain what she said or establish her view of the conversation.

The McGovern poster and Warhol’s suspicion

In a later recollection, Warhol connects Stein and Brooke Hayward to the political poster he made for George McGovern in 1972. When Hayward calls to interview him about Mick, Warhol reacts angrily to her manner and dismisses her prospects as an author. He then recalls that she and Stein had asked him to make the poster, which featured a green-faced Richard M. Nixon beneath the words “Vote McGovern.” Warhol says he wanted to make something clever and attributes the IRS’s ensuing interest in him to that decision.

This is Warhol’s explanation, not an independently established cause of the audits. Elsewhere, Pat Hackett describes the audits as recurring scrutiny that began with a major examination in 1972 and continued annually. She also records Warhol’s conviction that someone in the Nixon administration had prompted them because of the poster. Stein’s place in this account is therefore specific but limited: Warhol names her as one of the people who requested the work, while the political motive behind the audits remains his suspicion.

A retaliatory impulse

In another entry, Warhol reads a passage in Ned Rorem’s diary about a woman named Jean Stein being deeply in love with him. He considers mailing her the page anonymously so that she could experience what it felt like to be put down in print, and says he thinks he will do so. The diary documents the impulse, not its completion; it does not establish that Stein received the page. The moment casts her as the imagined target of Warhol’s retaliation, while revealing how readily private writing and public embarrassment enter his account of social relations.

A mediated, selective portrait

Stein’s appearances should be read within the diary’s editorial frame. Pat Hackett explains that the original record ran to 20,000 pages and that she cut whole days or weeks, as well as many names, to shape a more readable narrative. She also describes how the daily entries were made: after their weekday phone calls, she typed Warhol’s account of the preceding day, with weekends generally recounted together on Monday. The published diary is thus both Warhol’s personal narrative and a selection shaped by Hackett’s editorial decisions.

Hackett further says that she removed much of the interpersonal dimension of their conversations and recast the relatively few retained references to herself in the third person. That policy, together with the unmarked omissions, helps explain why Stein emerges in brief, sharply angled episodes rather than as a fully developed biographical subject. What remains is a portrait of her through Warhol’s attention: connected to a politically charged commission, a book that provoked a remark about belief, and an unconfirmed threat of anonymous literary payback.