Sue Mengers

Sue Mengers is a recurring presence in Andy Warhol’s diary as a Hollywood agent who could help open professional doors and command attention in celebrity circles, yet whose sharp manner repeatedly became part of the story. The entries show her arranging practical help for Warhol’s film, moving easily among powerful figures, and handling tense encounters with conspicuous bluntness. They do not offer her own account; instead, her character emerges through Warhol’s gossip, comic detail, and sometimes unflattering judgments.

Agent and professional ally

When Warhol’s film Bad was being screened in California in December 1976 in the hope of finding a distributor, Mengers was helping with the effort. The immediate obstacle was financial: distributors were unwilling to provide advance money. The diary gives no account of whether Mengers overcame that resistance, but her involvement places her in a practical role at a crucial stage in the film’s search for commercial support. Her value to Warhol here is not simply that she belonged to the same glamorous social world as his subjects; she was someone he could call upon when a project needed industry connections.

That professional connection sits beside an account of her efforts to represent John Travolta. Warhol records Mengers saying that she had recently pursued him as a client, only for Travolta to remind her that she had previously turned him down when he was appearing on television in Welcome Back, Kotter. She initially did not remember refusing him. Later, she recalled the rejection while sitting on a toilet seat. The episode gives her pursuit a comic reversal: the agent trying to secure a rising star had once dismissed him, and the memory surfaced belatedly rather than during the conversation. Warhol presents the story as a small, telling collision between professional ambition and fallible memory, not as evidence that the earlier rejection had any particular consequence for Travolta’s career.

Status, dinners, and social friction

Mengers’s standing is conveyed through the company and occasions around her. At a dinner party she hosted for Sidney Lumet, Warhol noted that Lumet greeted other guests warmly but stopped short of greeting him. The account is less a profile of Mengers than a glimpse of the social terrain she occupied: her home or party could gather prominent figures, while Warhol watched alliances, slights, and manners as closely as the formal purpose of the evening. The dinner’s most theatrical incident came when a maid carrying additional food fell across the room, scattering food among the guests. Warhol thought Mengers looked concerned, then interpreted that concern as worry about being sued. That suspicion belongs to his narration; the diary does not establish what Mengers was actually thinking.

At another dinner, hosted by Diane von Furstenberg in Mengers’s honor, Warhol felt ignored while trying to talk to the assembled guests. Bianca Jagger, who was there too, spoke critically of both the hostess and Mengers, while allowing that Mengers could sometimes be funny. Warhol understood the invitation partly as repayment for an Interview cover, an interpretation that reflects his sensitivity to the transactional exchanges behind social invitations. He also recorded that Mengers was preparing to travel to Europe to see her husband, whom, as Warhol understood it, she saw only every couple of months. The detail briefly opens a private dimension, but only through secondhand diary observation: Mengers’s marriage is not otherwise explained.

A separate evening shows the distance between celebrity prestige and ordinary convenience. Before going to see Diana Ross, Mengers suggested stopping at Burger King because there would be no dinner. Warhol found the ordering system—speaking to a machine—strange, and noticed Mengers worrying whether a double Whopper cost more than two separate hamburgers. The small calculation punctures the glamour of the evening without erasing it: the party still ended backstage at a major concert, but the route there passed through fast food and a question of price.

The Diana Ross concert and its aftermath

At the concert, Mengers announced herself backstage as Ross’s agent. Warhol records her serving as a social intermediary and being present around the singer’s performance, but the decisive scene came after the show. Ross began to cry and wanted another rehearsal the following day. Berry Gordy refused to spend money on one, and Ross wanted Mengers to take her side. Mengers said that the matter was outside her area; she then told Warhol they should leave.

The exchange exposes the limits of Mengers’s apparent authority. She could accompany Ross backstage and be identified as her agent, but when the dispute turned to another rehearsal and its cost, she declined to intervene. The diary does not say whether she lacked power to change Gordy’s decision or simply chose not to become involved. What it does show is Ross asking for support, Mengers refusing the requested role, and Warhol being ushered away from the confrontation. The contrast with her active assistance on Bad is instructive: her usefulness in one professional situation does not make her a universal fixer in another.

Mengers’s own interactions with the people around the concert were also presented as abrasive. Warhol says she treated the driver contemptuously and portrays her as someone who could end a relationship over a remark she disliked. He also records her resentment toward Jerry Hall, connected to a story that Mengers had wanted to take an acid trip with Timothy Leary. In Warhol’s telling, Mengers objected that the story damaged her reputation. These episodes establish the diary’s impression of a person alert to how others talk about her, but they remain Warhol’s account and his assessment of her behavior, not an independent judgment of her character.

A portrait filtered through Warhol

The diary’s Sue Mengers is built from abrupt changes of scale: help with film distribution, an attempt to sign a television star, dinners among celebrities, a fast-food stop, and a backstage argument over rehearsal expenses. Warhol’s attention falls especially on the details that puncture self-importance—the forgotten rejection, the comparison of hamburger prices, the spilled food, and the departure when Ross asks for support. These scenes make Mengers legible through action and anecdote rather than biography.

That method also limits the portrait. Warhol often records his own irritation, social insecurity, and delight in gossip, and his descriptions of Mengers can be openly uncharitable. Even so, the entries do not reduce her to a single role. She is a professional ally in the effort to place Bad, an agent pursuing Travolta, a host of gatherings, a figure whose reputation matters to her, and a participant who draws a boundary when Ross presses her to intervene with Gordy. The resulting character is defined by proximity to power, practical usefulness, and sharply observed moments when influence either works—or stops.