Vail is the setting for a short Christmas 1979 visit in which a mountain holiday shifts between physical discomfort, social expectation, and ordinary interruptions. The diary’s concrete landmarks are Jed Johnson’s house, an exhausting walk uphill, a cocktail party with no guests, and the ski-town rooms where Warhol is noticed but not always served.

Arrival and the house

On December 21, Warhol and Catherine Guinness flew to Denver, where they arrived at 5:30, then continued by van to Vail. At Jed Johnson’s house, reached at 7:40, the altitude brought Warhol terrible chest pains. He connected the pain to his earlier shooting, noting that he had felt something similar in Mexico City, though not as severely; Denver, at a lower elevation, had not affected him in the same way.

The house gave the stay a carefully composed domestic setting. Johnson had bought it with Peter Brant and Sandy Brant. Warhol described its wood construction, clean simplicity, and Stickley furniture, as well as its unusual vertical arrangement: bedrooms on the second floor, the kitchen on the third, and the living room on the fourth. He compared the house as a whole to a large sauna.

Dinner, distance, and the empty party

Warhol and Catherine walked into town to the Left Bank restaurant, where dinner cost $200 and drinks $30. Fran and Ray Stark were there. Bob Colacello knew they were Republicans and told Kennedy jokes, then invited them to cocktails on Monday. Ray Stark was enthusiastic about Paul Morrissey, who was writing a script for him. After dinner, the walk back up the hill felt horrible to Warhol: he became light-headed and felt extremely unwell, making the physical cost of Vail’s elevation recur beyond his first evening in the house.

The promised holiday gathering did not materialize. On December 24, Aurora cooked both ham and turkey for the cocktail party, but nobody came. Mercedes Kellogg called to say she had a cold, and the Starks simply did not show. The preparations and the empty room make the social failure specific: the holiday was not only quiet but organized around guests who never arrived.

Town life and the return to New York

During the remaining days, Warhol passed out copies of Interview and noted that Vail offered good places to conduct interviews. Three people asked for his autograph, and passersby stared at him in his Halston wolf parka. Yet recognition did not guarantee attention: at a bar showing ski movies, no one came to take the group’s drink order, so they watched without drinking and left. The same stretch of the visit included dinner with Nan Kempner and Warhol’s reading of Dress Gray, whose character names struck him as convincing.

On December 26, Warhol was back in New York, arriving at the office in time to find Vincent Fremont still there at six. The quick return closes the Vail episode without resolving its contrasts: the trip offered a striking house and public recognition, but also chest pain, difficult uphill walks, an unattended bar, and a holiday party without guests.