Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving is a recurring point of orientation in Andy Warhol’s diary, but not a fixed scene of family tradition. Across several years, the holiday brings parades watched on television, meals assembled through invitations and last-minute decisions, and gatherings where affection, status, and irritation can sit at the same table. The changing details make the observance a small annual measure of Warhol’s social world: who is present, who is absent, and what a familiar ritual can no longer quite reproduce.

A holiday built around television and invitations

On Thanksgiving in 1980, Warhol watched the parade on television and recognized Berkeley, the daughter of John Reinhold. Superman’s float came close to the twentieth-floor window where she was watching. The diary’s attention moves readily between the public spectacle and a single person seen within it: the parade is not just a broadcast, but a way to picture where an acquaintance and his child are spending the day.

The rest of that holiday took shape through calls. Warhol worked alone at the office, then received an invitation from Curley, who was preparing dinner at his parents’ Park Avenue apartment. Warhol said he would come after dinner. When Catherine Guinness called, he asked her to join him and help make the evening resemble the previous year. She had just returned from London and had already eaten turkey on the plane. They took a cab to Curley’s. The detail of the short ride and the meal already eaten gives the holiday its particular scale: plans were improvised around other plans, while the wish to recover something of the year before remained present.

Thanksgiving in 1982 begins more uneasily. Warhol woke at four in the morning and turned on the television; a frightening film with Margot Kidder left him disturbed by its unresolved threat. Later, the empty house and the holiday programming kept the day oriented toward screens and absent company. He watched the Macy’s parade, noting its first woman balloon, Olive Oyl, and called Berkeley Reinhold, who was watching from her window while her mother prepared Thanksgiving dinner for the first time. John Reinhold was in Hong Kong, at the Mandarin hotel Warhol remembered from an earlier trip. Warhol’s call to him produced an awkward moment: he mentioned that his wife was making dinner, and John was upset because she had never made one before. The episode turns on a small mistake, but it also shows how holiday arrangements could be relayed across distance and how a seemingly casual update might expose a sensitive family detail.

Dinner as a social portrait

That same year, Warhol went to Halston’s Thanksgiving dinner. Martha Graham was there, appearing frail to him; Steve Rubell arrived, as did Jane Holzer with her son Rusty. Warhol spent much of the evening talking with Rusty, who attended Buckley, maintained a 93 average, and described how he studied after school and again in the morning. Rusty and one other student, Warhol noted, were the only children who knew who had painted Campbell’s Soup Cans. The exchange makes the dinner a portrait of several generations in one room, with Warhol’s art appearing as a point of recognition in a schoolchild’s life.

The gathering also exposed a less comfortable side of sociability. Bianca Jagger arrived with Jade. Warhol encouraged Rusty to greet her, but she did not at first recognize him; Jane explained her manner to Rusty as nervousness. The dinner ended with a detail that would become more consequential the next day: the turkey had come from Jane’s Pennsylvania farm, and Warhol slipped out without saying goodbye. On the following day, he learned that Rusty had spotted a fire that began in a fireplace and spread to a sculpture by Marisol and into a closet. His observation had prevented Halston’s home from burning. In retrospect, the evening’s child who had been discussed for his grades and his conversation had also been the person whose alertness mattered most to the household.

Departures, arguments, and the remains of the meal

By 1984, Thanksgiving again began with a public entertainment. Warhol went to Madison Square Garden with Jean-Michel Basquiat and Cornelia Guest to see Boy George. He could not enjoy the performance because it reminded him of what Jackie Curtis might have become, while Basquiat liked the singer. The group’s different responses were brief, but the evening soon turned toward an older holiday memory: Basquiat remembered Halston’s previous Thanksgiving turkey and wanted to get there, so they left the show by cab.

They arrived at Halston’s after the turkey had been put away and dessert was being served. The hoped-for meal had already passed. The visit then became confrontational: Bianca Jagger struck Warhol and Basquiat, leaving Warhol with a bruise, and shouted that they should contribute to the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Warhol resented being pressed for money and objected to her appeal to artists. His account also dwelt on what he saw as her intimacy with her boyfriend, Glenn Dubin, and questioned what she wanted from him. The episode sharply contrasts with the preceding year’s dinner: the holiday gathering persisted, but the meal could be missed, and the social obligation could become an argument over who should give and who had the right to ask.

In 1985, Halston again invited Warhol for Thanksgiving, with a possible portrait also mentioned. Paige Powell picked him up, and Jane Holzer was there; Bianca Jagger, on crutches, was also present. A woman at the gathering said she had a check for $999 million intended for Revlon, prompting disbelief that lawyers had been available to meet on the holiday and her reply that money talks. The diary records the claim without resolving it, letting its enormous figure and the woman’s explanation stand as part of the dinner’s social theater.

Repetition without a single tradition

The 1985 gathering is remembered through the food as much as the guests. Halston’s mince pie had a circle in the center; nobody ate it, including Halston, although he was the one who liked it. Paige walked Warhol home, and he watched television. A few days later, he ate turkey in his own kitchen, prepared by Nena and Aurora. These scenes do not settle into a single account of Thanksgiving: one year’s meal is already over when the visitors arrive, a prized pie remains untouched, and leftover turkey at home supplies another kind of holiday ending.

Across the entries, Thanksgiving is both repetition and variation. The parade returns on television, dinner depends on who calls and who travels, and familiar hosts and guests recur, but no gathering simply restores the previous year. Warhol’s wish in 1980 to make the evening resemble the year before sits beside the missed turkey of 1984 and the quiet meal at home in 1985. The diary’s holiday record is therefore less a ceremonial account than a sequence of social arrangements in motion, attentive to food, television, small lapses, unexpected acts, and the changing character of the people who gather.