Martin Scorsese

Martin Scorsese emerges in Andy Warhol’s diary as both a filmmaker on the rise and a figure whose personal and professional worlds overlapped with Warhol’s. Across dinners, a film screening, magazine interviews, and social gossip, Warhol follows Scorsese’s work and relationships while wondering what his own presence means to him. The account is revealing but partial: it combines direct encounters with reports passed along by others, and its uncertainties are part of the portrait.

Introduction and social circle

Warhol’s first substantial recorded contact with Scorsese in this sequence comes through Julia Scorsese. In June 1977, she called Warhol after he had spent time with Victor and invited him to dinner at the Sherry Netherland, encouraging him to bring Catherine Guinness and her brother. The gathering brought together Scorsese’s parents, agents, a nurse and baby, and Robert De Niro with his wife, Diahnne Abbott. Warhol noted Scorsese’s recent weight loss and watched the evening’s shifts in presentation: Scorsese appeared in white, then changed into black before the group went downstairs to eat. These details place him within a busy family-and-industry circle rather than isolating him as a public name.

After a screening of New York, New York, Warhol attended a crowded party at the Sherry. Julia repeatedly urged him to stay and asked him to be a close companion to Martin, explaining that he had few friends. Warhol sensed that Scorsese attached particular significance to their being together, almost as though his presence symbolized something, but admitted that he could not work out what. That uncertainty gives their connection its distinctive shape in the diary: Warhol registers the emotional importance Julia assigns to it without claiming to understand Scorsese’s expectations himself.

Work, celebrity, and competing accounts

The diary also records a difference in how Warhol and Julia described the making of films. Over dinner, Julia explained that Scorsese’s productions used rehearsals and videotapes, with scenes and even the plot being reshaped during shooting. She said that she had contributed substantially to Taxi Driver and described her husband as the person who had created performers such as Robert De Niro and Harvey Keitel. Warhol pushed back, arguing that new faces and stars were what audiences wanted to see. The exchange turns a disagreement about credit into a contrast between two accounts of how a director’s work becomes visible: Julia emphasized Scorsese’s role in forming actors, while Warhol foregrounded the appeal of the performers themselves.

Their later meeting around The Last Waltz brought that interest in artistic process closer to Warhol’s own practice. Catherine Guinness was eager to meet Scorsese and Robbie Robertson, and the interview took place in Scorsese’s large suite, with a publicist and Steven Prince also present. Scorsese told Warhol that he was making a feature-length film centered on Prince’s face and storytelling, and credited the idea to Warhol. The conversation also ranged beyond the interview: Scorsese and Robertson were looking for a house, and Warhol suggested places to consider. He understood their proposed spending of about $500,000, their household arrangements, and the scale of the plan as signs that Scorsese was building a substantial operation of his own. His comparison to a new Factory frames Scorsese’s ambitions through the model Warhol knew best: a workspace and social world organized around creative production.

Affection, rumors, and strained circumstances

The personal material is less settled. During a late-night drive after an awards gathering, Scorsese told Warhol and Fred Hughes that he had received a bomb threat. The note, as Scorsese described it, warned that he would die shortly after midnight if Jodie Foster won the Academy Award. At two in the morning, he was heading to MGM to work alone on New York, New York. Julia had already been shouting about death threats while drunk, though Warhol had not known what she meant; hearing Scorsese explain the threat made the danger more concrete and left Warhol frightened on the ride. The episode offers a sharp counterpoint to the glamour of the awards scene: a public figure’s night out gives way to an alarming threat and work on a deserted lot.

Other claims arrive as hearsay and should remain attributed to their sources. Julia told Warhol that Scorsese had a cocaine problem and had suffered blood poisoning, after which he was taking medication. On another occasion, Halston recounted a story about Liza Minnelli seeking drugs and then leaving with Scorsese; Warhol recorded it as Halston’s account, not as independently confirmed fact. Sue Mengers later told Warhol that Scorsese and Isabella Rossellini had been living together for two months, another report within the diary’s circulating social gossip. The entries show how celebrity life becomes a chain of stories passed between acquaintances, with Warhol recording them but not establishing their truth.

Relationship and narrative significance

Scorsese’s relationship with Julia also appears to change in Warhol’s account. At a later gathering, Warhol asked whether Scorsese had met Margaret Trudeau and brought her over, hoping to promote her as an actress. Scorsese said that Julia sent her love, but that he and Julia could not get back together and were now only friends. This brief exchange gives a later, more definite form to the earlier scenes in which Julia acted as host and intermediary, presenting their separation through Scorsese’s own reported words.

The diary’s recurring interest is not simply whether Scorsese is successful, but how filmmaking, friendship, and celebrity reinforce one another. Warhol watches a director surrounded by collaborators, actors, publicists, and rumors, then measures that activity against his own experience of bringing people together through art and media. His account remains close to the social surfaces—who invited whom, who changed clothes, who was present, what was said—yet those surfaces reveal a meaningful connection: Warhol recognizes Scorsese as a creative figure with an expanding world, while still being unsure what place Scorsese wants him to occupy within it.