1981 New Year's Eve

1981 New Year's Eve appears in Andy Warhol’s diary as both a public spectacle and a sequence of sharply observed personal encounters. The Aspen entry for December 31, 1981, moves from a snow-covered wedding to a midnight gathering in the town square; a second New Year’s Eve entry, for December 31, 1986, follows parties and fireworks in New York before ending with Warhol’s regret at staying out late. Across the two scenes, celebration is less a single climax than a route through people, places, and the small incidents that make a night memorable.

Aspen: A Wedding and the Midnight Square

The 1981 account begins at Sonny’s wedding. Warhol and his companions arrive after the ceremony has started, find the church, and stand to watch. A mistake by the preacher briefly changes the room’s mood: he says, “I pronounce you, Sonny and Cherie,” using the wrong name for the bride. The audience gasps; Susie corrects him, and he repeatedly says “Sonny and Susie” for the remainder of the ceremony. The mishap becomes part of an otherwise affectionate picture: candles are lit, Chastity is the flower girl, snow falls outside, and Sonny cries. Warhol calls the ceremony beautiful, recording both the error and its surrounding tenderness rather than allowing one to cancel the other.

The night then branches among invitations. Cathy Lee Crosby has invited them to a party for Sonny, but Warhol and his companions instead go to a hall where Jimmy Buffett and his wife are hosting a New Year’s Eve party. There, Lisa Taylor tells Warhol that she has just broken up with John McEnroe. She is drinking tequila and Coke from a shot glass and says it gets her drunk quickly. Warhol also greets Jack Nicholson and Anjelica. Newspaper coverage supplies another thread of relationship gossip: Margaret Trudeau has discussed her affair with Jack in a new book, while, as Warhol notes, the book does not mention that her former partner Tom Sullivan died. The celebration is thus filtered through talk about breakups, affairs, and what a published account leaves out.

For midnight, Warhol chooses not to be inside anyone’s house. As the group walks, they decide to remain in the square and let the others go ahead. The scene is an improvised, outdoor alternative to the party: Aspen’s young people are drunk, blowing horns, drooling, and falling in the middle of town. Warhol compares the square to a small version of Times Square, then finds the crowd both charming and artificial, like “La Boheme” and “more fake than the real thing.” The contrast gives the countdown its character: it imitates a grand urban ritual on a smaller scale, with the town’s unruly crowd making the imitation its own.

New York: Fireworks Between Parties

The December 31, 1986, entry starts earlier in the day with Warhol’s preparations and social arrangements. He visits Bernsohn alone and describes himself as having been cured for a moment. Paige Powell is concerned that no attractive men are coming to their New Year’s party. She repeatedly frames the search as finding someone for Tama Janowitz, though Warhol suspects Paige also wants to meet the men herself. Stephen Sprouse is expected to come, but Warhol thinks he is frightened by the attention directed at him. Even before the evening begins, the holiday is organized around who will attend, who might meet someone, and who feels uneasy about being pursued.

At Steven Greenberg’s black-tie party at the River Café, Warhol is conscious of the mismatch between the dress code and his own “crummy scarf.” The group leaves at 11:55, and the trip across the Brooklyn Bridge becomes, in Warhol’s telling, the best part of the night. Paige urges Harold, the driver, to honk louder and makes her piercing whistle as fireworks go off above the bridge. The movement through the city briefly takes precedence over the destination: the ride, the noise, and the fireworks form a vivid interlude between gatherings.

Tama arrives in another car with news that Steven Greenberg and Elizabeth Ray have had a fight. Warhol later asks Steven whether they have fought yet, and Steven laughs as he denies it. The exchange turns a reported quarrel into a small social performance, with the earlier news and the later answer held in comic tension. At Scott Asen’s home in Turtle Bay, by contrast, Warhol finds little happening. Peter Martins is using the telephone in the toilet; Martins’s son is leaving, and Warhol notices his beauty and dancing. Sirio from Le Cirque is there, and the group takes him along to Nell’s.

The Long Night and Its Ordinary Ending

At Nell’s, the atmosphere becomes more theatrical. Nell Campbell takes off some of her clothes and throws herself onto a table for a photograph. Warhol tells Sirio that he should do the same if he wants to make Le Cirque the fashionable place. Sirio explains that his wife and children are away and that he is spending New Year’s on his own; he invites the group to dinner on Sunday. The party’s playful photographic display sits beside this account of temporary solitude, while the invitation carries the night forward into an ordinary future appointment.

Paige and Tama continue on to The Tunnel. Warhol’s party circuit ends at home around four in the morning, after he and his companions walk the dogs. His final response is not triumph or exhaustion alone but irritation with his own choice: staying out late simply because it is New Year’s has thrown off his whole day. The following day, January 1, is rainy, and he stays in to rest. The holiday’s aftereffect is therefore practical and bodily—a disrupted routine followed by a quiet recovery—rather than a grand resolution.

The Diary’s Form and the Holiday’s Recurrence

The two entries make New Year’s Eve legible through Warhol’s characteristic accumulation of incident: a wrong name at a wedding, an exasperated guest, a newspaper revelation, a driver’s horn, fireworks, a photograph, an invitation, and the dogs at the end of the night. Their differences matter. Aspen’s central image is the square and its crowd, a public countdown that Warhol sees as both charming and imitation; the 1986 account moves by car between private gatherings, with the bridge ride briefly outshining the parties themselves. In both, the holiday produces spectacle, but the diary keeps returning to the individuals and conversations inside it.

These scenes belong to a record built from conversation as well as writing. Pat Hackett describes calling Warhol on weekday mornings to collect his account of the day and night before, along with his expenses. The calls could last one or two hours, and she took notes before typing the entries; weekend activity was gathered in a triple session on Monday. When either of them travelled, notes, calls, and sometimes recordings helped preserve the daily account. The published diary was also selectively edited from about 20,000 pages: whole days, parts of days, and many names were removed to give the book narrative flow. That context clarifies the entries’ texture without making them a neutral transcript. New Year’s Eve reaches the reader as Warhol’s own succession of remembered observations, shaped into a legible narrative that retains the holiday’s social abundance while ending, in 1986, on the modest cost of having stayed out too late.