Paige Powell

Paige Powell emerges in Andy Warhol’s diaries as both an effective Interview advertising seller and a friend whom he liked and relied on. Her work connected the magazine to advertisers and its social world; her concern for Jean-Michel Basquiat, whose paintings she helped sell, gave her a more vulnerable presence in the record. Across business lunches, office flare-ups, and a troubled romance, Paige is shown as capable and devoted, but not in control of the people or circumstances she tried to help.

Work at Interview

By the time Paige appears in the diary, Interview had become a glamorous magazine with a growing circulation and a steady flow of people hoping to be included. Its appeal depended partly on access to fashionable and celebrity company. Paige’s role was on the advertising side: she met clients, cultivated them, and helped turn those relationships into revenue. Andy specifically admired her enjoyment of the people she encountered through selling ads. He considered that social ease unusual and connected it to her success in bringing business to the magazine.

The diaries show the practical labor behind that skill. Paige met Andy at the Berkshire Hotel during a menswear convention, which she regarded as a useful place to approach potential advertisers for Interview. The venue offered five floors of clothing, but Andy’s impression was that the jackets and sweaters all looked alike. His observation makes a contrast between the sameness of the goods on display and the relationship-building Paige was there to do: her value lay less in the merchandise than in her ability to meet and entertain the people who might buy advertising.

That work could compete with the rest of Andy’s day. On one occasion Paige arranged an important advertising lunch, and she became angry when he failed to attend because he was elsewhere taking photographs for a show. Andy acknowledged that the pictures were work and that he was trying to keep the business running, but Paige’s protest exposed a recurring tension between the magazine’s different demands. Ad sales required time, attention, and face-to-face contact; Andy’s own photography and other projects also claimed those resources. Her irritation was not simply an office dispute: it reflected the practical pressure of having to secure income for a busy operation.

Paige also helped organize or attend business dinners and promotional events. She told Andy about major advertising dinners scheduled for Wednesday and Thursday, while invitations to parties at The Tunnel offered competing ways to spend those evenings. He recognized the trade-off: a dinner might consume a night without producing an advertisement, yet the contact could lead to other work. At a perfume event for Dionne Warwick, Paige brought an Interview issue that featured coverage of the perfume, intending to present it to Warwick. Jacques Bellini took the magazine from her before she could do so, frustrating the intended gesture. The episode shows Paige treating the magazine as a tool for maintaining professional relationships, not merely as a publication to sell.

Friendship and everyday dealings

Andy’s references to Paige are often affectionate, even when the entries record conflict. He says that he likes her, and he describes her as charming. She also appears in the ordinary arrangements of his social life: she chose a place for dinner, and he invited Jay. The evening’s planning became awkward when Jay asked whether he could bring Kate Harrington, who had left work at Interview saying she was ill. Andy suspected Jay was trying to provoke a reaction, while Benjamin answered him without indulging the implied test. Paige’s choice of restaurant places her among the people who helped shape these gatherings, even when the diary’s attention shifts to someone else’s behavior.

Their relationship also had its moments of friction and repair. In an office episode, Andy told Paige to confront whoever had left food lying around. The person responsible turned out to be a new employee whom Andy found sweet and considerate; he had been embarrassed by the confrontation and denied that he had directed Paige to make it. The account is comic in its reversals, but it also records how quickly Andy’s temper could make Paige an intermediary in an office problem—and how readily he tried to distance himself once the target proved likable. It presents their working relationship as close enough for him to enlist her, but informal enough that his instructions could be followed by awkward improvisation.

Paige’s professional and personal roles sometimes overlapped. She was an advertising seller at Interview, but her association with Basquiat also brought him into Andy’s orbit. In the diary, her attachment to him is not presented as a separate private life sealed off from work: his presence at the office, the sale of his paintings, and her distress about his well-being all intersect with Andy’s business and social world.

Paige Powell and Jean-Michel Basquiat

The diary’s most consequential account of Paige concerns her involvement with Jean-Michel Basquiat. Andy records that she was upset because Basquiat was using heroin and crying as she urged him to do something. He did not believe he could intervene effectively. The passage places Paige in the position of someone seeking help for a person whose choices she could not direct. Her concern was not abstract: she was emotionally affected by his condition, while Andy could offer neither a solution nor assurance that the situation would change.

Paige’s connection to Basquiat also included concrete support for his career. Andy says she had arranged a major uptown art show for him and was one reason Basquiat had been around the office. In later entries, she is described as selling his paintings, an activity she had been doing for some time. The diary contrasts the economics of that work with Basquiat’s gallery arrangements: Andy notes that Mary Boone had taken 50 percent, while Paige took 10 percent, and that Basquiat remained with Bruno Bischofberger. The comparison makes clear that Paige’s involvement was not simply romantic; she was participating in the business of placing and selling the work while another dealer continued to show it.

Their relationship was unstable. Basquiat once came to exercise with Andy and made a point of mentioning that Paige had arrived at work on time, a remark Andy understood as a way of telling him about her. Basquiat had thought Paige was Jay’s girlfriend, which she had been at one point, before he asked her out. The diary recounts one date in which the pair rented a U-Haul, drove to Brooklyn, ate eight hamburgers at White Castle, and were frightened when two people entered carrying large sticks. Andy called it an unusual date, but the incident also captures the erratic, exposed quality of the relationship as it appears in his account.

The next recorded difficulties are less adventurous and more painful. Basquiat and Paige fought after he arrived four hours late for a date they had arranged for nine o’clock. Later, Paige was upset that he had not called her, and Andy noted that he had not called the others either. She said she might give up on him and described the choice as having to be all or nothing. Andy, despite relaying her resolve, doubted that declarations would end the attachment: people continued to love one another even when they knew better. His observation frames the relationship as a cycle in which Paige’s attempts to withdraw were undercut by continuing affection.

Another episode sharpened that pattern. Basquiat told Andy he did not want to take Paige with him to Vassar because he expected to pursue other women there. When Paige was left waiting for a ride that never came, Robert Hayes told Andy that she was hysterical. Andy called Basquiat’s behavior mean, then offered to take Paige out for drinks and arranged for Sean McKeon to join them, saying that company from someone who liked him made it easier for him to handle the situation. In the same account, Andy advised Paige that life went that way. The scene shows him responding to her distress with companionship, while the central decision and its hurt remained outside his control.

Work, care, and the published record

Paige’s life in these pages is visible through a diary that was itself shaped by a working arrangement. Pat Hackett recorded Andy’s account during weekday morning phone calls, taking notes and typing them soon after each conversation; weekends were covered in a combined Monday session. The original record ran to 20,000 pages, and Hackett later selected and edited material for publication, sometimes cutting whole days or weeks and reducing long lists of names. She also removed much of the personal exchange between herself and Andy, recasting occasional references to herself in the third person. Paige’s portrait therefore comes through Andy’s narrated perspective and Hackett’s later editorial choices, rather than through a first-person account from Paige.

That perspective preserves both professional admiration and personal limits. Andy valued Paige’s ability to make advertisers feel welcome, noticed the effort she put into business, and liked her company. He also witnessed her distress over Basquiat without claiming to resolve it. A photograph caption identifies Paige and Basquiat together in Hawaii in February 1984, a compact visual record of a relationship that the entries elsewhere present through work, devotion, missed commitments, and arguments. In the diary’s wider portrait of Interview, Paige is one of the people who made the magazine’s social glamour function as a business; in its account of Basquiat, she is a supporter whose care persisted even when care could not secure reciprocity or stability.