Lincoln Center appears repeatedly in the diary as a place where different kinds of public performance meet: Truman Capote reads to an audience of friends, dancers take the stage, Barbara Stanwyck is honored through film clips, and Andy Warhol faces a live computer demonstration. The visits, recorded between December 1980 and October 1985, make the complex a recurring point in the diary’s social and working life. They also show how an evening there could shift between spectacle and practical concern: who had come, who was missing, what a ticket cost, and whether a performance went as hoped.

A recurring setting for public appearances

Lincoln Center does not serve one function in these entries. The diary locates a literary reading at the Mitzi Newhouse Theater, a Barbara Stanwyck program at Alice Tully Hall, an ABT opening, a Lincoln Center appearance for Commodore Computers, and a film festival. That range gives the place a distinctive role in the recorded period: it is repeatedly where an occasion becomes public, whether the central figure is an established performer, an honored screen actor, a dancer, or Warhol himself.

The entries preserve the practical details around those occasions. Limos and cabs provide transport; a publicist controls access to a sought-after event; good seats can coexist with anger over the price paid to obtain them. The diary’s attention to these arrangements makes Lincoln Center more than a backdrop. It is a setting in which cultural events are experienced through invitations, tickets, companions, timing, and the uncertain outcome of going onstage.

Capote’s reading and the absent friend

On December 16, 1980, Warhol attended Truman Capote’s reading at the Mitzi Newhouse Theater. He sat in the fourth row, center, beside Halston and Martha Graham. The audience was not quite sold out but was substantially present; among those in attendance were Lester Persky, Suzie Frankfurt, and Rex Reed. Capote introduced each piece, then read and acted out its parts. He performed the maid story, “A Christmas Memory,” and several other works. Warhol especially enjoyed the moment when Capote rose onto his toes and snapped his fingers, turning the gesture into something like disco.

The reading’s social aftermath mattered as much as its performance. Friends praised Capote afterward, and Rex Reed told him that the reading had touched his soul. Capote was shaking. His first question to Warhol was where Brigid Berlin was. Berlin had decided not to attend because she felt too fat, but she had made Warhol promise to say she was there if Capote asked. Warhol did so, then explained that she had to go home when Capote pressed him about her whereabouts. He suspected Capote knew the explanation was false. At Lincoln Center, the public occasion therefore held a private absence at its center: Berlin’s effort to avoid being seen and Warhol’s awkward attempt to protect her from the consequences of staying away.

Dance, memory, and the cost of access

In April 1981, Janet Villella offered to pick Warhol up in her limousine for the ABT opening at Lincoln Center. The diary records the invitation and the preparations, including Warhol’s search for a black tie, before turning to an unexpected encounter. At the ballet, Lila Davies introduced herself. She had gone to Carnegie Tech with Warhol and had shared a 103rd Street living arrangement with him and others in the 1950s. Now living in Cleveland, she was there with her eighteen-year-old son. Seeing him, Warhol felt old: the son looked as Davies had when he knew her. Warhol invited her to lunch at the office and connected the encounter to a broader sense that age was behind his problems, especially as he watched younger people just beginning their lives.

The performance itself produced a different mixture of disappointment and excitement. Godunov had sprained his back and was out; Gelsey Kirkland was very good, and Mikhail Baryshnikov performed “Push Comes to Shove,” which the audience loved because he was a star. At the free dinner afterward, Warhol met Sondra and Chris Gilman and Anna Sosenko. Sosenko, who had written songs for Hildegarde and was then in the autograph business, advised him to stop signing so many copies of Interview, warning that his signature would become worthless. The entry sets the ballet’s immediate pleasures against the passing of time and the commercial value attached to a famous name.

Access took a sharper, more expensive form at another Lincoln Center event. Warhol wanted to see Barbara Stanwyck receive the Film Society annual award and called publicist Sue Salter for a ticket. Salter said the event was sold out. Warhol protested that he and his associates had done a great deal for her; Salter eventually offered two tickets for $250, and he accepted. He reasoned that paying might keep people from asking him for further favors, contrasting the purchase with the free tickets he had received the previous year.

Jon Gould asked Warhol to pick him up, and Warhol and Chris Makos went with him to Alice Tully Hall. Despite the claim that everything was sold out, they saw many empty seats and had good places in row J, which intensified Warhol’s resentment toward Salter. The Stanwyck clips were excellent at first, though the program grew boring when it reused the same ones too often. The entry makes ticket access and the event itself inseparable: the evening’s value was shaped both by the films on screen and by the price, negotiation, and apparent scarcity that preceded them.

A stage for work and film

In July 1985, Lincoln Center became the site of a live appearance for Commodore Computers. The previous evening, Warhol had gone home early to dye his hair and eyebrows black for the public appearance. On the day itself, he woke from dreams feeling dread and fear, rose at 7:30, and took a cab to arrive by nine. Debbie Harry was already there, blonde again and having lost more weight; she wore an outfit by Stephen Sprouse, with shoes attached to the leg stockings. They rehearsed and were told to return at 5:30.

Warhol spent the day nervous, telling himself that getting good at appearances like this might let him earn money without painting. When he returned and went on, he thought he might pass out and focused on the next job he could get if he did. His drawing came out badly, but he called it a masterpiece and joked that he wanted to be Walt Disney, adding that he could have made it if he had had the machine ten years earlier. Afterward, people mistook the portraits of Debbie Harry for Xerox copies. The scene records Lincoln Center as a workplace as well as a venue: the live demonstration put Warhol’s ability to perform publicly, and his hope of earning through such work, under immediate pressure.

The last recorded visit in this selection came on October 13, 1985, when Warhol called Stephen Bluttal of the Museum of Modern Art and accepted an invitation to the closing night of the Lincoln Center Film Festival. The film joined five stories through the figure of a bird with a bell and was set in beautiful, empty Italian towns used as filming locations. The diary supplies no further account of the screening or the festival’s conclusion. That brief description nevertheless extends Lincoln Center’s recurring place in these entries: its events range from live reading and dance to film, while the diary registers each through the particular people, images, arrangements, and reactions that accompany it.