Nastassja Kinski

Nastassja Kinski enters The Andy Warhol Diaries at the intersection of celebrity journalism and rumor. Interview planned to feature her on a February cover after Jodie Foster offered the magazine an interview she had conducted with Kinski for the Yale Daily News; later, Rob Lowe’s account of filming in Canada placed Kinski at the center of a story about his private life. Neither episode gives Kinski a direct voice in the diary, so her presence is mediated by editorial plans and other people’s reports.

Interview and the Planned Cover

By December 1982, Interview had become a glamorous magazine whose celebrity appeal helped draw prominent people into its pages. In that setting, Foster called Andy Warhol to say that the Yale Daily News did not want her interview with Kinski and to ask whether Interview would use it. Warhol agreed to run the piece with Kinski on the cover for February. The diary records the practical decision and the intended prominence of the feature, but not the interview itself or Kinski’s response to the plan.

A Rumor from a Film Set

During the account of a rain-interrupted Diana Ross concert in Central Park, Warhol relayed what Lowe had told him about filming Hotel New Hampshire in Canada. According to Lowe, Kinski had been staying in his room; his girlfriend, calling the location, was told by an operator that he was in Kinski’s room. Lowe later said that his phone had been out of order, an explanation his girlfriend did not believe. The diary thus preserves the incident as a story reported by Lowe, not as independently established fact or as Kinski’s own description of their relationship.

Warhol also noted Lowe’s denial that he was in love with Kinski, describing the connection as casual. He playfully wondered whether Lowe’s joke involving a toy snake referred to Kinski, but the diary offers no confirmation that it did. The juxtaposition leaves the rumor unresolved: Kinski is made significant in the passage through Lowe’s claims and Warhol’s speculation, while her own perspective remains absent.

The Diary’s Frame and Limits

These appearances belong to a publication assembled from a much larger record. Pat Hackett describes cutting the original 20,000 pages substantially for the published volume, including omissions of days, events, and names; she also explains that personal references were sometimes recast in the third person. The account of Kinski should therefore be read as a selective diary record, shaped by Warhol’s conversations and Hackett’s editing, rather than as a complete record of her activities or views.

That mediation is especially consequential in the film-set anecdote: its chain of reporting runs through Lowe and Warhol, and the text supplies no independent confirmation from Kinski. By contrast, the proposed Interview cover is a concrete editorial decision recorded directly in the diary. Together, the two episodes show how the published account places Kinski within celebrity culture—as a planned magazine subject and as a name around which others’ stories gather—without developing her into a fully observed character.