Time magazine

Time magazine enters the diary through a revealing tension: it offered Andy Warhol a national platform for his image-making, but that platform remained subject to the news cycle, editorial choices, and sales expectations. The Michael Jackson cover was first set aside after a primary upset, then finished and published; around the same period, Warhol also encountered the magazine as a powerful commercial institution with interests extending beyond a single cover.

The Michael Jackson Cover and the News Cycle

In February 1984, Time sent Warhol a picture of Michael Jackson for a cover. He was preparing to do it when Gary Hart’s upset of Walter Mondale in the New Hampshire primary changed the magazine’s plans: the Jackson cover was dropped, with the possibility that it might be used another week. Warhol suspected the explanation might also have been a way of avoiding his price, though he acknowledged that Time was a news magazine and might have had a genuine news reason to change course. The episode placed an artist’s commission inside the magazine’s immediate competition for topical attention.

By March, Warhol had completed the Jackson cover. He disliked the result, while the staff at his office approved of it. About forty people from Time came to look at the work, and they discussed its potential to increase newsstand sales by 400. A representative later told Warhol that the magazine would use the cover; Warhol hoped it would not be displaced before publication. When the issue appeared, the cover had survived the editorial process. Warhol thought it should have contained more blue and noted that the magazine had chosen a different style from the one he had proposed, drawing on his earlier Jane Fonda cover for Time.

The cover’s accompanying article further illustrates the magazine’s handling of celebrity image and public speculation. It raised a question about a possible sex-change operation, which Jackson denied. For Warhol, the issue was not only a finished portrait but a package in which the cover image, the magazine’s editorial framing, and the subject’s public identity met before a mass readership.

Commercial Calculations and Media Power

Time’s interest in the Jackson image was explicitly linked to newsstand sales. The visitors from the magazine assessed the cover in terms of its expected commercial effect, while Warhol’s own attention remained on its color, style, and likelihood of making it into print. Those different measures—an image’s visual qualities and its capacity to sell copies—coexisted in the same encounter. The cover gave Warhol visibility, but its route to readers depended on decisions made within a news organization responsive to current events and market expectations.

The diary also situates Time within a broader publishing world. In July 1984, Warhol attended a Time magazine dinner during the Democratic Convention and sat beside Jesse Jackson, whom he found overly serious. The brief entry offers no account of the dinner’s agenda, but it records Time as a setting where political figures and cultural personalities shared space, and where Warhol observed the social presentation of those around him.

Time and the Future of Interview

A day before Si Newhouse visited Warhol to discuss Interview, Warhol expected that Newhouse might want to talk about the magazine. He considered receiving him at the nearly empty 860 Broadway premises rather than at the more impressive new building, in case Newhouse was interested in buying it. Warhol also considered offering him art instead. Newhouse, who owned Vogue and Vanity Fair as well as many newspapers, did offer to buy Interview at the following lunch. Warhol wondered whether the purpose might be to remove a competitor, but did not hear the offer’s terms: Fred Hughes was away and Vincent Fremont was at lunch, and Warhol preferred to have Fred present for the next conversation.

This proposed purchase was not an offer by Time magazine itself, and the diary does not establish that Time was involved in it. Its relevance lies in the larger publishing landscape the entries expose: Time’s cover could turn Warhol’s image into newsstand attraction, while the discussion over Interview made ownership, competition, and the value of a magazine part of his daily business concerns. Together, the episodes show a media institution encountered both as an editor of public attention and as part of a market in which images and publications had measurable commercial value.