Jerry Hall

Jerry Hall is one of the diaries’ most vivid recurring presences: admired for her beauty, watched as a celebrity, and repeatedly drawn into the social world around Andy Warhol. Her story in these entries is not a continuous biography so much as a sequence of encounters—at restaurants, parties, film events, and visits—that traces her changing relationship with Mick Jagger and, eventually, her new life as a mother. The diary’s fascination with her public image sits alongside practical details of work, money, hospitality, and friendship.

Public Image and the Interview World

The diaries first place Jerry Hall within a celebrity culture that was increasingly organized around visibility. By 1976, Interview magazine had become glamorous enough that well-known people wanted to appear in it, while fresh faces continually arrived at the office. The magazine’s pages labeled some of its image-making features for previously unseen young men and women. This account provides context for the attention Hall receives in later entries: she is someone whose appearance can command a room and whose image is considered suitable for a portrait. It does not, however, establish that she appeared on the magazine’s cover or in any specific issue.

Warhol’s portrait process makes the construction behind such images unusually concrete. He took about sixty Polaroids of a sitter with a Polaroid Big Shot, selected four for transfer to acetate, and then chose and cropped one image. He cosmetically adjusted the image before it was enlarged to a forty-inch square and made into a silkscreen. The method—altering features to make a sitter appear more attractive—offers a revealing context for Hall’s later appointment for a portrait. Her beauty is repeatedly noticed by those around her, but the diary also shows that a public image depended on deliberate photographic selection and intervention.

Hall’s appearance is described as an event in itself. At dinner with Peter Beard and others, she arrived with Jagger in a lime-colored suit; later, on a visit to The Carlyle, she came down quickly to meet Warhol. He recorded that people looked at her and that she seemed exceptionally beautiful. Their conversation turned to her background: she said she had left Texas for Paris at sixteen. The entry also records Warhol’s speculation about a future with Jagger—children, marriage, and the possibility that Hall might leave her career to stay home. Those were his expectations, not confirmed plans, and they show how readily the diary turns a brief encounter into a forecast about a celebrity couple’s private life.

Mick Jagger and the Changing Relationship

The early entries treat Hall and Jagger’s relationship as a developing social drama, observed from the outside. At one dinner, Hall said she needed to leave, then declined an offer of help getting a cab and said Jagger would take her. Warhol later recorded that he had heard from Fred Hughes that Jagger was passionately in love with Hall and that there might be trouble for Bianca Jagger. The entry presents the claim as information passed along to the diarist, rather than as direct access to either person’s intentions.

Hall’s place in this shifting circle was not always comfortable. At a lunch with Bianca Jagger present, a guest asked when Hall’s Interview magazine cover would come out. The question brought the two women’s proximity into sharp relief, though the diary does not record Hall’s response. At a later gathering, Bianca Jagger approached Hall and spoke with her for about half an hour. Warhol understood the exchange as an effort to break the ice and also thought Bianca wanted to make Hall nervous. The scene suggests that social relations were being negotiated in public, under the observation of friends and acquaintances.

The diaries also capture Hall and Jagger in less speculative moments. They arrived together at a dinner, with Jagger wearing a beard and Hall wearing pearls he had given her. She was going back and forth to Houston while working on the John Travolta film Urban Cowboy, and she spoke enthusiastically about Travolta. On another occasion, Warhol saw her arriving in Paris from Houston as she prepared to take Jagger to a fashionable restaurant for his birthday. These details place her career and the couple’s plans alongside one another rather than reducing her to a romantic attachment.

By a later visit, the couple had a new apartment on an island in the Seine. Hall invited Warhol and asked him to bring champagne; Jagger was away recording. Another entry places her in an apartment at 135 Central Park West and notes that she had bought a farm in Texas with her own money and wanted a tractor. Jagger was unusually friendly to Warhol that evening, talking about an upcoming departure for Paris to work on Fitzcarraldo. The setting and the farm mark a shift toward shared domestic arrangements and independent possessions, even as the diary continues to register the couple through social visits and conversation.

Work, Parties, and Social Performance

Hall’s public life extended beyond the parties where she was seen with Jagger. At a Houston premiere for Urban Cowboy, she and Warhol posed for photographs amid a crowd of fans and paparazzi. The local television presentation introduced Hall and Cyndy Hall as stars of the film, and Hall participated in the public-facing spectacle around the event. The diary’s account places her in the center of a media scene, not merely beside a famous partner: she was part of the film’s promotion and visibly recognized by the crowd.

Other entries emphasize the work of maintaining social ties. Hall sent thank-you notes after receiving birthday presents. Warhol noticed that his note and those received by Jed Johnson and Averil were identical, down to the wording and spacing, and imagined collecting them as a comic book. The episode is small but characteristic of the diary’s attention to the mechanics of celebrity courtesy: gratitude arrives in a personal-looking form, while repetition exposes its standardized quality.

Hall also appears as a connector among people whose relationships overlapped. At a gathering where Bianca Jagger spoke about Bob Dylan, Hall was part of the larger social setting surrounding the conversation. At another dinner, Hall and a woman who had lived with Michael Caine compared experiences of his behavior when drinking and of the demands of domestic life around him. The diary records their candid exchange as a moment of mutual recognition, though it offers no broader account of their friendship. Such scenes show Hall participating in conversations among women about relationships and everyday obligations, rather than serving only as a subject of other people’s observation.

The contrast between public glamour and ordinary exchange recurs in Warhol’s descriptions. He admired Hall’s looks and reported that Tennessee Williams had called her the prettiest woman he had met since Candy Darling. Yet the diary also dwells on gifts, travel, dinner arrangements, and the repeated social labor of showing up. At a later birthday celebration, Hall’s parties had, in Warhol’s view, become more hard-edged over the years: they had once centered on model friends and their partners, while the newer gathering drew a different, tougher crowd. The observation records a change in the composition of her social world without explaining its cause.

Portraits, Motherhood, and Later Encounters

Hall’s connection to Warhol’s portrait practice brought their relationship into a more explicitly professional setting. On one occasion, he waited for her to come down so he could photograph her for a portrait, but she did not appear or call. He considered the absence unusual because he regarded her as reliable. The missed appointment is a small but clear interruption in their otherwise active pattern of meetings: her availability could not be assumed, even when Warhol expected her as a sitter.

The diary had already registered pregnancy as a practical change in how others imagined Hall’s future. Halston asked again about meeting her because he wanted to make Bianca Jagger jealous, but Warhol added that dressing Hall would become difficult now that she was pregnant. The remark is Halston’s social purpose filtered through the diary, and it reduces a major change in Hall’s life to a fashion problem. The subsequent birth entry is blunt: Hall and Jagger had a daughter, Elizabeth Scarlett. The child’s arrival makes concrete the earlier talk about whether the couple would have children, while leaving marriage and the family’s future unresolved in these passages.

At a later lunch at Mr. Chow’s, Hall appeared more voluptuous and showed photographs of the baby, whom Warhol thought looked just like Jagger. Hall discussed a proposed beauty salon and clothing business: she estimated that it would require a million dollars, with travel to Europe for dresses and beauty treatments. She said Jagger would not provide the money and had told her that obtaining it from him would be too easy; Warhol treated the prospect of investing as the joke of the day. The exchange presents Hall thinking about a business of her own, alongside the financial limits and negotiations within her relationship.

The entries continue to place her among familiar friends. At a birthday party, Warhol sat with Hall and Jagger while fireworks passed over the boat carrying the guests around the tip of Manhattan and toward its usual Hudson River dock near 23rd Street. The boat traveled at fourteen miles an hour. The precise itinerary and speed give the scene the diary’s characteristic documentary texture, while the couple’s presence together offers a later image of their continuing social connection. Across these encounters, Hall remains both intensely visible and only partly knowable: the diary records what people say about her, what she does in public, and the domestic and professional details she chooses to share, without turning those glimpses into a complete account of her private life.