1950s (55a26c10)

The 1950s in Andy Warhol’s diaries are both a lived past and a style that keeps returning. Recalled through early jobs, old acquaintances, and the experience of being shot, the decade also reappears as a set of instantly legible images: fifties cars, hot dogs, hamburgers, and camp brought back for another round. These references do not build a single retrospective history. They make the past visible in fragments, as the present borrows its look and Warhol tests what has changed against what seems never to change.

Early work and social memory

The decade appears first as the setting of Warhol’s working life before the fame and routines recorded in the diary. In the 1950s he had to visit art directors to look for jobs. His later account of that search is strikingly practical: arriving early did not help, because offices were flooded with calls; waiting until lunchtime gave him a better chance, when people were tired and assumed colleagues had gone out. The memory returns not as distant scenery but as knowledge about how opportunity works, retained and applied years later when he is trying to get an advertisement placed.

That professional past also surfaces in a recollection of a short television job. Warhol remembered that Bob Bach had given him work drawing the hand on a weather map for about a week during the Will Rogers, Jr. show on CBS. In 1982, while gathering reference books for Interview, he and Jon Gould went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art to see the Rockefeller Primitive Collection, then walked from 83rd Street to 44th Street and stopped at Barnes and Noble. The errand linked the current demands of the magazine to older contacts and work: research for a new project could bring an incidental job from the 1950s back into view.

Warhol’s social memories of the period were just as specific. At a party in 1978 he saw Helen Hayes, whose appearance he admired, and recalled having once disliked her because she had invited a group of Serendipity children to a swimming-pool party at her house in Nyack in the 1950s, then changed her mind. The old disappointment had not disappeared, but the present encounter softened it: this time he did not hate her. The memory turns a passing party observation into a measure of changed feeling, showing how the diary lets the past intrude without making it final.

Fashions and returns

The decade also comes back as a public style, something later generations can put on and sell. At a 1978 party for the opening of a Superman shop in Bloomingdale’s, Warhol thought the scene looked like the 1960s and wondered how often camp would be revived. The setting was a commercial opening, reached after champagne at the office and a limousine ride; the old-fashioned look arrived as part of an organized promotion, not as an untouched survival from an earlier era. His question catches the tension in these revivals: a style can return precisely because it is recognizable, even when its return makes it feel recycled.

A more elaborate version of that revival accompanied the party for Grease. Warhol and his companions entered through the back of Studio 54, where fifties cars were parked. Waiters were siphoning gasoline from their tanks, apparently because cars could not be brought inside with full tanks. The precautions belonged to the production of the scene as much as the cars did. Hair pomade was being handed out, while the room carried the smell of hot dogs and hamburgers; Warhol also met Nathan of Nathan’s, who was running the hot-dog stand with his wife. The decade had been assembled from vehicles, food, grooming products, and familiar commercial names, turning a party into an immersive, packaged version of the past.

The revival was not merely visual. Warhol’s diary records it through movement and logistics: arriving late, going in by the back door, noticing the gas being removed, and encountering the people staffing the food stand. Details that might otherwise disappear into a themed event become the evidence of how a period is reconstructed. The fifties appear not as a complete world restored, but as a collection of objects and cues arranged for contemporary guests to recognize and enjoy.

Continuity, bodies, and taste

In 1981, the decade offered Warhol a way to think about continuity rather than revival. Chris Stein showed him photographs Weegee had taken in 1950, most of them of a Greenwich Village party. Warhol saw people wearing clothes fastened with safety pins, two boys kissing in a window, and a woman watching. The scene looked to him like a party from the 1980s. What had once been labeled “Living in Greenwich Village,” he observed, could now be called New Wave; the name and moment had changed, but the images of dress and behavior looked familiar. For Warhol, the photographs unsettled the idea that a new label necessarily meant a new social reality.

That comparison gives the 1950s a different force from the deliberately staged fifties party at Studio 54. The Grease event recreated a recognizable period style; the Weegee photographs made an older scene seem already contemporary. One depends on explicit period objects, the other on a likeness across time. Together they show how Warhol’s diary moves between nostalgia and recognition: the past can be marketed as camp, but it can also reveal how quickly the present begins to resemble what came before.

The decade’s working and social codes also continued to shape Warhol’s behavior in later life. In 1986 he agreed to make a cover about Ted Turner for Madison Avenue magazine because Turner had given him one of his first jobs as an art director at Hearst in the 1950s. Fred Hughes shouted at him over the decision, and Warhol felt bad because he had previously turned down a request to make an American flag for the magazine. The old professional connection carried weight in a current negotiation: gratitude for an early opportunity could prompt agreement decades later, even amid disagreement with his business partner.

The diary’s layered past

These memories are not arranged as a separate account of Warhol’s early career. They surface within later conversations, errands, parties, and work decisions, where the 1950s matter because they explain a reaction or give a present-day scene its measure. The decade’s significance therefore accumulates through recurrence: a job-seeking tactic, a forgotten social slight, an old television assignment, a photograph that resembles the New Wave, or a reason to accept a magazine commission.

That recurrence makes the past less like a sealed period than a working store of experience. Warhol could use what he had learned about finding work at lunchtime; recognize old social patterns in Weegee’s pictures; and watch fifties imagery return as a commercial spectacle. The diary holds all three registers together without resolving them into a single judgment. The 1950s are personal memory, professional inheritance, and a style available for reuse—sometimes dated, sometimes startlingly familiar, and always recalled from within the changing present.