Richard Weisman

Richard Weisman is a recurring presence in Andy Warhol’s diaries as a collector and commissioner, a host, and a social organizer whose interests joined sports celebrities to the art and entertainment worlds. Through Weisman, Warhol encountered tennis champions, professional athletes, and Hollywood figures; the relationship also gave the commissioned athlete portraits practical routes to exhibitions, sales, and charitable fundraising. The entries show not a single continuous project so much as a succession of vivid appointments, parties, matches, and negotiations, with Weisman repeatedly arranging the next meeting.

Sports, parties, and a social network

In August 1977, Warhol went with Susan Johnson and Jed Johnson to Weisman’s home, where the group watched a Wimbledon match between Björn Borg and Vitas Gerulaitis. The players had been dining together before the match, but neither was there when the viewing began. Gerulaitis arrived later with a girlfriend; Borg had already gone home. The match lasted three hours, while the conversation around it turned the players’ contrasting public images into a running joke: Borg was associated with a spare routine of sleep and tennis, Gerulaitis with tennis followed by hours at discos. Weisman’s gathering made a sporting contest part of the evening’s social theater. The same entry notes that Gerulaitis was training and left early after eating only a plum, a detail that sits neatly beside the party’s drinking and joking.

Weisman’s sporting connections also shaped Warhol’s travel. In September 1977, he told Warhol that Gerulaitis had recently been to Columbus and had identified a motel and women to contact. After landing there with Weisman, Warhol watched him arrange a midnight meeting before the party went on to the motel recommended by Gerulaitis and then to meet Jack Nicklaus. The episode presents Weisman as a practical intermediary, translating an athlete’s local knowledge into an itinerary for the visiting group.

At a November party Weisman gave for Gerulaitis, he arrived in a nervous mood and objected to Warhol’s new approach to a portrait of Chris Evert: instead of one large image, Warhol had made many smaller pictures. When a Newsweek interviewer present at the studio admired the work, Weisman repeatedly called Warhol through the day to apologize. The reversal is revealing in its modest scale: Weisman’s judgment mattered, but he could retreat from it when another viewer’s response changed the atmosphere around the work.

The diaries place Weisman at several other sporting gatherings. In April 1978 he accompanied Warhol to a Yankees banquet at the Hotel Americana, where the team entered together and guests sought Reggie Jackson’s autograph. Mickey Mantle received an award, and the master of ceremonies introduced Warhol as a Pop artist—a public label Warhol connected to Weisman’s efforts to sell the paintings. That summer, Weisman left early for a tennis match at Forest Hills because of an ABC television obligation; Warhol watched Vitas Gerulaitis defeat Nastase on television, then joined Weisman and others for a dinner Gerulaitis hosted at the River Café. At dinner, Weisman thought Barbara Allen was being foolish to feel hurt when Nastase arrived with a model, given that he was married and had children. Truman Capote offered a consoling alternative: a wealthy man, three planes, and a house in Mexico. Weisman’s brisk assessment and Capote’s extravagant reassurance expose the group’s habit of treating romance as both personal disappointment and social negotiation.

Commissioning and promoting the athlete portraits

Weisman’s most substantial professional role in the diary entries was his involvement in Warhol’s athlete portraits. In September 1977 he came to Warhol’s office with Fred Hughes and arranged for Warhol to travel to Columbus to photograph Jack Nicklaus. Weisman and Hughes discussed a series of sports-star portraits that Weisman had commissioned. After Warhol left the meeting, the plan took a more definite form: an exhibition in December of ten selected portraits. Warhol thought January would be a better time, so the record preserves both the intended schedule and his reservation about it.

The project continued to surface in social settings, where art and sales were rarely separate from the evening’s other business. At the Yankees banquet, Warhol understood his introduction as a Pop artist in light of Weisman’s push to get the paintings sold. In October 1980, Weisman asked Warhol to invite women to a dinner at the 21 Club before Muhammad Ali’s fight; the guests then moved from the restaurant to Radio City Music Hall to watch the bout and returned for a late supper. Weisman’s invitations placed Warhol inside the orbit of major sporting spectacles, while the paintings and the artist’s public identity traveled with him into those rooms.

In July 1984, Weisman was involved in a celebrity auction in Aspen, where Howard Cosell conducted the sale. The auction sold a $400,000 apartment, as well as four Warhol portraits that brought in $160,000 for cerebral palsy. The next day, Warhol was congratulated on the contribution. John Forsythe told him that he had bid on a portrait but stopped at $25,000; Warhol saw a possible commercial consequence in the result, reasoning that a portrait’s $40,000 auction price could make a $25,000 purchase seem like a bargain to Hollywood buyers. The sale thus joined charity to market-making: the money raised was concrete, and the public price could also serve as evidence of the portraits’ value. Warhol immediately recognized that someone in Los Angeles would need to follow up with potential buyers, and thought Bob Colacello would have been well suited to the task.

Introductions, invitations, and artistic connections

Weisman’s social life repeatedly intersected with Warhol’s work. In February 1980 he asked whether Warhol wanted to meet Sylvester Stallone over lunch on the set of a film, because Stallone might be interested in having a portrait made. Two days later Weisman confirmed that lunch was scheduled for 12:30. Warhol went to the First Avenue set, where roughly 300 extras were gathered for the production, then thought to be called Hawks. Weisman’s introduction brought portrait-making into contact with a film set and its surrounding publicity, extending the same pattern visible in the athlete commissions: a social invitation could become a possible art commission.

Weisman also appeared within Warhol’s circle of working relationships. When Warhol met him and Catherine Guinness at the Mayfair House, Guinness had been working for Weisman and told him that she was quitting. Warhol understood the job as an easy one in which she bought presents for Weisman, but the entry records that the two were arguing and that she had decided to leave. Later at a party hosted by Diane von Furstenberg, Weisman accompanied Guinness as her date even though he had not himself been invited. Warhol described him as acting like a host and as insecure, while also acknowledging that he was nice. The episode captures a distinction that recurs in the diaries: Weisman could command a place in a social setting through confidence and familiarity, even when his formal invitation was uncertain.

At a Broadway gathering, Weisman was with Patti LuPone and was present when Warhol introduced her to Bob Wilson. LuPone, delighted by the introduction, asked Warhol for career advice after winning a Tony. He urged her to remain with Evita, arguing that she was the production’s major star and would grow in prominence through it. Later, at dinner with Weisman, LuPone, Ann Miller, and Phil Esposito at the 21 Club, Warhol persuaded Bob Colacello to put LuPone on the cover of Interview. Colacello eventually became enthusiastic about the idea. Weisman’s invitations therefore did more than assemble recognizable names: they created occasions where Warhol could observe performers, offer advice, and turn an encounter into magazine work.

The entries also register Weisman’s wide access to entertainment and sporting figures without making every appearance into a business transaction. He invited Warhol to a party for photographer George Hurrell at Doubles, where Warhol met Hurrell and asked to photograph him. At a birthday party for Catherine Oxenberg at Le Club, Warhol took pictures of the birthday girl. A later photograph caption identifies Weisman with Oxenberg and her mother, Princess Elizabeth of Yugoslavia. In December 1983, Weisman sent tickets to a hockey game after Wayne Gretzky invited the group; Warhol, feeling guilty after a call to Jean-Michel Basquiat about overdue rent, invited Basquiat to come too. Such details show the social invitations moving outward from Weisman, with Warhol sometimes using them to include someone else.

From sporting celebrity to marriage

By January 1986, Weisman had told Warhol that he was getting married. Warhol attended the wedding in black tie at United Nations Plaza. The entry emphasizes how suddenly the plan seemed to have taken shape: Weisman had lived with another woman for about five years without marrying her, then met a new partner and decided to marry quickly. His bride was a model described as half American and half Korean. Warhol records that Weisman seemed somewhat out of it, and that the ceremony passed in a moment, with little more than the formal question and his affirmative answer. The guests had not been sure the wedding would actually happen; John Martin of ABC had called shortly before dressing to check that it was still on.

The wedding’s surrounding details make it less a ceremonious culmination than another episode in Weisman’s swiftly changing social world. His new wife said the wedding present she most wanted was a trip to the Super Bowl. Suzie Frankfurt was absent after a falling-out with Weisman over $20,000 he had given her to remove stucco from walls, work she had not completed. Even the lobby provided an afterpiece: a man Warhol regarded as an eccentric was still there, and the doorman explained that he worked for Interview. The day gathers Weisman’s personal life, money, social obligations, and Warhol’s magazine world into the same compressed scene.

Narrative role

Weisman’s diary presence is built through recurrence rather than through a narrated biography. He appears first as the host of a tennis viewing, then as the organizer of travel, portraits, dinners, and access to athletes and performers; years later, he is connected to a charity auction whose prices Warhol immediately evaluates for their future sales potential. The entries rarely pause to explain Weisman beyond what a particular encounter reveals. His character emerges instead from the repeated movement between invitation and transaction, friendship and promotion, social confidence and insecurity. In Warhol’s record, a party can lead to an exhibition, a sports match to a portrait commission, and a wedding to a story about unpaid renovation money. Weisman matters because he helps make those crossings possible.