Wedding of Charles, Prince of Wales, and Lady Diana Spencer

The Wedding of Charles, Prince of Wales, and Lady Diana Spencer enters Andy Warhol’s diary through an invitation rather than a scene of the ceremony itself. During dinner with Jon Gould, Rita Lachman showed them a photocopy of her invitation and said that the original was kept in a vault. Warhol immediately imagined the invitation being withdrawn as a mistake, making the wedding a focus of speculation about access as well as a passing item of social news.

The Invitation at Dinner

The wedding comes up on June 22, 1981, during an evening that had begun with a more personal concern. After Jon Gould called to apologize for not visiting, he and Warhol arranged to have dinner and then spoke seriously at Warhol’s home. They went to Le Relais, where Gould arrived in a running suit and the restaurant accepted him in that clothing. Seated beside Edmund Gaultney, they were approached by Rita Lachman, who displayed a Xerox of her invitation to the wedding. The original, she said, was stored in a vault. Warhol’s immediate response was to predict that the invitation might be revoked on the grounds that it had been sent by mistake. The diary records no confirmation that this happened.

The wedding therefore remains at the edge of the entry: its importance is conveyed through the physical evidence of an invitation and the question of whether its recipient would retain access. Rather than recounting the ceremony or its participants, the passage preserves the small social drama that the invitation produced at dinner.

A Public Event in a Private Record

The diary’s account of the invitation sits beside the evening’s more intimate conversation. Earlier, Gould had told Warhol that he did not seem serious enough and tended to answer significant remarks with light comments. Warhol said he would try to be more serious; they also discussed Gould’s difficult position between Barry Diller and another boss. The wedding reference follows this exchange without displacing it. A prominent public occasion is folded into the same account as a relationship conversation, restaurant details, and the evening’s expense.

That juxtaposition reflects the diary’s practical origins. Pat Hackett had previously kept a general Factory log, but after she stopped working at the office in 1976, the daily accounts began to come from Warhol himself. Their weekday morning telephone conversations recorded his activities and cash expenses, and the record also served the practical purpose of documenting costs for tax scrutiny. The diary’s daily form could thus place a wedding invitation alongside an ordinary dinner without turning either into a separate report.

What the Published Diary Preserves

Hackett described the calls as extended conversations rather than simple dictation: Warhol supplied his expenses and recounted the previous day, while she took notes and typed the entry. Weekend activities were gathered in a Monday session, and when either of them traveled, they used calls, hotel-stationery notes, or occasionally a tape recording. The entry about the invitation belongs to this process of spoken recollection shaped into a written daily account.

The published diary is also a selected version of a much larger record. Hackett reduced the original 20,000 pages, sometimes removing whole days or weeks and often cutting portions of an individual day. She also omitted many names to avoid overwhelming the narrative with social lists. The wedding reference is therefore best understood as the surviving detail of one evening, not a comprehensive account of Warhol’s contact with the event. Its limited scope is significant: the diary captures how the wedding briefly appeared in his social world while leaving the ceremony itself outside the account.