Ultra Violet

Ultra Violet emerges in Andy Warhol’s diary as both a vivid social presence and a woman marked by an earlier emotional and physical crisis. At a dinner in March 1980, her familiar sixties dress and heavy gold coins set the scene for a lively reunion; in a conversation soon after, she described the consuming love and bodily harm she associated with her past. Warhol’s later contrast between her nighttime glamour and her daylight appearance leaves the portrait suspended between performance and vulnerability.

Reappearance and Social Presence

On March 15, 1980, Ultra Violet arrived at Prince Abudi’s dinner for Marion Javits wearing the same dress and gold coins Warhol remembered from the sixties. He warned that coins once treated as camp jewelry had become valuable, saying they were then worth $775 apiece. She explained that she had sold most of her better pieces and was wearing only her heavy pesos. The old outfit was therefore more than a visual callback: its weight and changing value connected her recognizable style to the practical loss of possessions.

Warhol spent the evening with her because he found the party awful. He wondered how she had been invited and thought she might be a good friend of Marion’s; he also speculated, without claiming knowledge, that she might accompany older men. The diary records that conjecture as his impression, not as an established fact about her. The party itself offered little companionship: Prince Abudi was quiet, and, in Warhol’s telling, no young princesses were present. Ultra Violet’s company gave the evening its social focus.

Ruscha and the Account of Illness

During the gathering, Ultra Violet said she planned to write her memoir and told Warhol how she had become ill. In her account, she had fallen deeply in love with the artist Ed Ruscha, who was married and unable to manage the situation. She described herself as having become so overwhelmed that her nervous system fell apart. The diary thus presents the illness through a story she told Warhol, rather than through an independent account of its causes.

She also connected that period to eating a piece of gold every day. Someone had told her that Indian people ate gold, she said, and the practice eventually made a hole in her stomach. The detail joins an exotic remedy to a concrete bodily consequence: the coins worn as jewelry at the dinner recalled gold as adornment, while her story made it an instrument of injury. Warhol reported that Ruscha no longer had a wife, but that things between them were no longer the same; Ultra Violet, he added, was looking for another young someone. The account ends not in reconciliation but in an altered relationship and an uncertain search for a new attachment.

Appearance in Daylight

On March 18, Warhol had invited Ultra Violet to lunch. He thought she looked like an old woman in daylight, but that at night, with makeup, she looked gorgeous. The contrast belongs to his changing view of her, not to a neutral description: the same person could appear aged in one setting and glamorous in another. Set beside the remembered dress and coins, this observation makes appearance a recurring part of the diary portrait, while the illness she recounted prevents glamour from standing as the whole story.

Narrative Role

Ultra Violet is drawn through brief encounters rather than a continuous account of her life: a reunion at a disappointing dinner, an intimate disclosure, and a lunch three days later. The movement between them shifts the portrait from comic social detail to physical vulnerability and then back to the surface of appearance. Warhol’s uncertainties and judgments remain visible throughout, so the diary offers not a definitive biography but a record of how her presence, self-report, and his impressions came together in a few days.