Kenneth Anger

Kenneth Anger is a briefly glimpsed but unsettling presence in Andy Warhol’s diary: he is associated with paint thrown at Fred Hughes’s door and with the belief that Warhol is the Devil. Because the account is confined to Warhol’s observations and other people’s reports, Anger’s own motives and view of the conflict remain unknown.

The Paint at Fred Hughes’s Door

On January 2, 1980, Warhol recorded a call from Whitney Tower: Anger had thrown paint at Fred Hughes’s door on 89th Street and Lexington Avenue again. The recurrence is part of the significance—the act was not presented as an isolated incident. Warhol surmised that Anger thought he still lived there, and connected the episode to Anger’s claim that Warhol was the Devil, though he admitted he did not understand the problem.

The address makes the hostility indirect as well as personal: the paint landed at Hughes’s door, while Warhol understood himself to be the person Anger was targeting or imagining there. The diary does not establish why Anger threw the paint or confirm that Warhol’s explanation was correct; it records the incident and the diarist’s uncertain attempt to make sense of it.

Reports from 94th Street

In a later entry, Warhol recounted meeting a woman named Marcia, who said she had been photographing Anger at his apartment on 94th Street. According to her description, the apartment was entirely red, with pictures of everybody displayed there, and Anger put everybody down. These details reach the reader as reported observations, not as Warhol’s firsthand account of the apartment.

Warhol cautioned Marcia not to mention his name, fearing Anger might beat her up because Anger thought he was the Devil. The warning conveys how seriously Warhol took the possibility of violence, even as the diary offers no independent confirmation of Anger’s intentions. Across the entries, Anger is thus defined less through biography than through a pattern of reported acts, an alarming accusation, and the apprehension those accounts produced in Warhol.