Warhol’s weekday diary-recording rule

Warhol’s weekday diary-recording rule was a practical arrangement that became the foundation of a personal narrative: from the fall of 1976, Pat Hackett called Andy Warhol each weekday morning to record what he had done and spent the day before. The routine joined conversational intimacy to meticulous accounting. It also had two authors in different senses: Warhol supplied the daily account, while Hackett transcribed, organized, selected, and edited it for publication.

From office log to personal account

For several years before 1976, Hackett had kept a sketchy office log for Warhol. She listed business visitors and the main events of the previous night, often asking different attendees for their versions of a dinner or art opening. The aim was to establish what had happened, who had been present, and how much Warhol had spent—not to capture his personal perspective. Often his contribution was simply to report his expenses.

After the filming of Bad in 1976, Hackett told Warhol that she no longer wanted to work at the office, though she would continue working with him on Popism. He asked her to keep the log and itemize his personal expenses, describing the task as something that would take only five minutes a day. Hackett objected that canvassing the office for news would effectively keep her in her old job. They therefore agreed that Warhol himself would provide the daily accounts. In the fall of 1976, their weekday morning calls established the new method: the office log became Warhol’s own narrative.

The arrangement retained a plainly practical purpose. Warhol’s business was under sustained IRS scrutiny: after a major audit in 1972, the scrutiny continued annually until his death. He believed the audits had been prompted by someone in the Nixon administration because his 1972 campaign poster for George McGovern showed Richard M. Nixon with a green face and the words “Vote McGovern.” Warhol recorded even ten-cent calls from street payphones. The diary could examine daily life, but accounting remained part of its design.

The call and the working day

Hackett called at about 9 a.m., never later than 9:30. Sometimes she woke Warhol; sometimes he had already been awake for hours. The calls began with conversation, as he asked questions about ordinary matters, before he recounted the previous day and night and listed his cash expenses. Although he called it Hackett’s “five-minutes-a-day job,” a session could last one or two hours. The discrepancy captures the routine’s double character: a bookkeeping task expanded into a daily exchange shaped by Warhol’s curiosity and attention to small details.

The call came at the opening of a carefully repeated weekday schedule. After the diary conversation, Warhol might make more calls, shower, dress, and have breakfast at home before going out shopping. He generally reached the office between one and three in the afternoon, checked the appointment books, returned calls, and reviewed the incoming mail. His habit of recording and sorting extended beyond speech: letters, invitations, gifts, and magazines could be placed in brown cardboard boxes measuring ten by eighteen by fourteen inches, then sealed, dated, and stored. He kept or gave away less than one percent of what arrived; the rest went “for the box.” The diary was one record of the day, alongside this extensive preservation of its objects and traces.

Hackett took notes on a legal pad and typed the entry immediately after each call, while Warhol’s intonations remained fresh. Every other week or so she brought the typed pages to the office and stapled to each one the loose taxi and restaurant receipts Warhol had left for her. The receipts matched the amounts he had already reported by phone; the pages were then stored in letter boxes. Talk, written transcription, and paper proof thus formed a single working record.

Weekends, travel, and corrections

The calls took place Monday through Friday, not on weekends. If Warhol and Hackett spoke or saw each other on Saturday or Sunday, the diary still waited until Monday, when he recounted Friday, Saturday, and Sunday in one extended session. The rule governed the recording schedule, not the frequency of their contact.

Travel changed the means of transmission but not the expectation that the days would be recorded. When away, Warhol might call Hackett from his destination or write notes, usually on hotel stationery, then read them to her after returning; he sometimes had to pause to decipher his handwriting. On occasion he recorded himself and gave her the cassette. When Hackett traveled, she might call him periodically so he could read the notes he had kept. Their procedures varied, but no day was left unrecorded.

The scheduled call was not their only opportunity to revise an entry. They also spoke while working on projects or simply as friends, calling when something amused or angered them. During these conversations, and sometimes in person, Warhol might add to or correct what he had said that morning and ask Hackett to “put that in the Diary.” The published account therefore grew through more than a single morning’s recollection: its record could be supplemented after the formal session.

The diary as an edited publication

Hackett’s account of the routine also makes clear why the published diary is not an unmediated transcript. She distilled an original 20,000 pages, cutting entire days or weeks and, more often, portions of individual days. If Warhol attended five parties, she might include only one. She also reduced lists of names, often retaining only the people he spoke with or described in detail. These omissions were not marked in the text, because Hackett believed notices of them would distract from its flow.

She kept explanatory bracketed material to a minimum so that Warhol’s voice and unusual turns of phrase would remain prominent. Some relationships can consequently be difficult to place at first, and Hackett recommended reading the entries in sequence. She also removed the private, interpersonal dimension of their conversations: where a personal reference remained, she recast herself in the third person as PH. Her stated aim was to preserve the casual intimacy of the morning calls while allowing readers to occupy the position of the person listening at the other end of the phone.

The rule thus produced both a disciplined record and a distinctive reading experience. Its weekday rhythm supplied continuity; travel notes, receipts, later corrections, and Monday catch-up sessions filled out that rhythm. But the book readers encounter is also the result of Hackett’s decisions about what to retain and how to present it. Warhol’s daily voice is central to the diary, yet its surviving shape reflects the collaboration that made that voice recordable and publishable.