The Andy Warhol Diaries’ editorial policy

The Andy Warhol Diaries’ editorial policy governs both how Andy Warhol’s daily record was made and how Pat Hackett transformed it into a book. The published diary is not an untouched transcript of everyday life: it descends from a practical record of events and expenses, then passes through extensive selection and editorial shaping. Hackett’s aim was to preserve the immediacy of Warhol’s voice and the fluid, sometimes confusing social world it records, while trusting readers to make connections over time.

From office log to personal diary

Before 1976, Hackett kept a general, sketchy log for Warhol. It listed business visitors and the principal events of the previous night, drawing on different people’s accounts when Hackett had attended those gatherings herself. The log established what had happened, who was present, and how much Warhol had spent; it was not designed to capture his personal interpretation. Often, Hackett simply asked him about expenses and left his contribution at that.

The arrangement changed after the filming of Bad. Hackett told Warhol she no longer wanted to work at the office, though she would continue collaborating with him on Popism. When he asked her to keep the log and itemize his personal expenses, she resisted the daily work of calling around to reconstruct events. They agreed that Warhol himself would provide the accounts. The log thereby shifted from an externally assembled business record into his own narrative of the preceding day and night.

Their weekday morning calls began in the fall of 1976. The stated purposes were to record Warhol’s activities and places visited and to itemize cash business expenses, but the conversations also became a way for him to examine life: in Hackett’s description, the record had become a diary. Its accounting function remained important. Warhol reported even ten-cent calls from street payphones, against the background of an IRS audit that began in 1972 and continued annually until his death. He believed the scrutiny might have been prompted by his 1972 campaign poster for George McGovern, which showed a green-faced Richard M. Nixon.

The routine had a precise working rhythm. Hackett called around nine in the morning, never later than 9:30; after some informal conversation, Warhol recounted his expenses and the previous day’s events. A session described as a five-minute job could last one or two hours. Hackett took extensive notes and typed the entry immediately after hanging up, while Warhol’s intonations were still fresh. Every other week or so she brought typed pages to the office and attached the loose cab and restaurant receipts that matched the amounts he had reported; the pages were stored in letter boxes.

The diary was made Monday through Friday, not on weekends. On Monday, the pair held a triple session covering Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. Travel required adjustments: Warhol might call from out of town, read notes he had scrawled on hotel stationery after returning, or hand over a cassette on which he had spoken his account. When Hackett traveled, she sometimes called him and he read his notes to her. The method varied, but the stated rule was that no day would be left unrecorded. Their other calls, whether about a shared project or simply to laugh or argue, could also produce additions or corrections to the regular entry.

Selection and compression for publication

Hackett says that she reduced the Diary’s original 20,000 pages to the material she considered both best and most representative of Warhol. The reduction removed whole days and sometimes entire weeks, but more often cut portions of individual days. A day on which Warhol attended five parties might be represented by only one. These omissions are not signaled in the text: Hackett judged that marking them would distract readers and slow the narrative.

She applied a similar principle to names. When an account mentioned many people, she retained those Warhol conversed with or discussed in the most detail, rather than reproducing every name. Her illustrative example is a passage mentioning ten people that might be reduced to three. This editing avoids turning the book into a succession of social-column lists whose names may mean little to a reader. It also means that the published narrative is selective by design: the presence of a person reflects an editorial choice, while the absence of a name cannot by itself establish that the person was absent from the original account.

Preserving a world without fixed categories

The decision not to include a glossary follows the same approach. Hackett argues that simple explanations of who people were in relation to Warhol would work against the sensibility of the diary and the unstructured world around him. Warhol’s social vocabulary resisted stable classification. His 1960s underground-film participants were called superstars, a label that could encompass a celebrated model as well as a delivery boy who brought her cigarettes and ended up in front of the camera. The category’s looseness is part of what the book preserves, not a puzzle the editor intends to settle with definitions.

That openness extends to the diary’s uneven clarity. Hackett recalls that Warhol became exasperated when asked to repeat or rephrase something for the sake of comprehension. His 1968 book a offered an earlier example of how the roughness of recorded speech could become part of a finished work: conversations taped with friends and superstars were transcribed by amateur typists, whose guesses introduced technical and conceptual errors that Warhol insisted be reproduced, typo for typo. Hackett’s editorial ideal was not to regularize every irregularity into explanatory prose.

Voice, explanation, and the reader

Hackett kept bracketed explanations to a minimum so the movement and peculiar locutions of Warhol’s voice would not be repeatedly interrupted. She recognized that readers might need effort to grasp the exact nature of some relationships. Rather than supply editorial asides at every point of uncertainty, she treated that effort as part of reading a diary: life unfolds in sequence, with occasional confusion. To help contain that confusion without eliminating it, she advised reading the entries in order.

She also removed the interpersonal dimension of the original conversations: Warhol’s direct references to Hackett and material that would make sense only to her. Where personal references remained, she recast Hackett in the third person, using her initials, PH. This edit changed the address of the text. Instead of presenting a private exchange whose meaning depended on the editor’s presence, the published diary invites the reader into the position of the person listening on the other end of the morning phone call.

The result is an editorial policy built around a tension: the book is carefully compressed and mediated, yet it aims to feel casual and intimate. Hackett’s cuts shape what can be seen, while her restraint with glossaries and explanations leaves relationships and meanings open to gradual recognition. The Diary therefore preserves neither every recorded detail nor an authoritative map of Warhol’s world; it offers a selected sequence in which voice, omission, and unresolved connection are all part of the reading experience.