Memorial Day

Memorial Day is recorded not as a ceremonial occasion but as a quiet workday in Andy Warhol’s diary: there was no traffic around, he went to the office, and he worked on about six or seven portraits. The entry offers no further account of the observance, making its small particulars—an empty-feeling day and continued studio work—the full extent of what the diary says about it.

The Day in the Diary

The entry begins with Memorial Day and moves directly to the conditions of the day and Warhol’s work. Its reference to the lack of traffic gives the holiday a practical presence: the surrounding city was unusually quiet. Warhol nevertheless went to the office and worked on portraits. The record does not identify the year, describe a ceremony, or explain whether the quiet changed his plans; those details cannot be supplied from the entry.

The number is approximate rather than exact: Warhol worked on about six or seven portraits. That modest qualification is characteristic of a record organized around what happened in the course of a day, rather than a retrospective account of the holiday’s broader meaning. The entry sets ordinary work against the calendar observance without turning either into a larger event.

From Factory Log to Diary

The Memorial Day note belongs to a record-keeping practice that developed over time. For several years before 1976, Pat Hackett kept a sketchy general log for Warhol, listing business visitors at The Factory and the main events of the previous night. She sometimes sought different accounts of the same dinner or art opening, but the purpose was to establish what had happened, who had been present, and how much Warhol had spent in cash—not to capture his personal view.

In the fall of 1976, Hackett and Warhol began speaking by telephone on weekday mornings. The calls still recorded the previous day’s movements and business expenses, but the account expanded into what Hackett described as a diary through which Warhol could examine life. Its practical purpose remained close at hand: Warhol kept track even of ten-cent calls from street payphones because the IRS had subjected his business to a major audit in 1972 and continued scrutinizing it every year until his death. The diary thus joined personal daily narration to the pressure of documenting expenses.

How the Daily Record Was Made

Hackett generally called between 9 and 9:30 in the morning. The sessions began with conversation and questions, then moved to Warhol’s cash expenses and his account of the previous day and night. Though he called it her five-minutes-a-day job, the conversations could last one to two hours. Hackett took extensive notes and typed them soon after the calls, while Warhol’s intonations were still fresh in her mind.

Every other week or so, she brought typed entries to the office and attached the loose cab and restaurant receipts that corresponded to the amounts Warhol had reported. The pages were stored in letter boxes. The diary was recorded Monday through Friday, not on weekends; when a weekend passed without an entry, Hackett and Warhol made a longer Monday session covering Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. This routine explains the documentary framework around the Memorial Day record, but the available entry does not specify how that particular note was gathered.

The Published Record and Its Limits

The printed diary is a selection from an original record of 20,000 pages. Hackett cut whole days, sometimes entire weeks, and more often portions of days. She might include one party from a day on which Warhol attended five; she also reduced lists of names to preserve narrative flow rather than reproduce a social column. The omissions are not marked in the published text. The brief Memorial Day entry therefore documents what the published version retains, not necessarily everything that happened that day.

Hackett also removed much of the personal exchange between herself and Warhol, including references that would have mattered only to the two of them. In the few retained instances, she rendered herself in the third person as PH, explaining that she wanted readers to occupy the position of the person on the other end of the morning phone call. The result is a diary shaped both by Warhol’s daily accounts and by Hackett’s later editorial choices: even a spare note about Memorial Day arrives through a process of recording, transcription, selection, and publication.