The 49th Academy Awards appears in Andy Warhol’s diary as both a Hollywood party and an awards-night account increasingly shadowed by danger. At Dani Janssen’s gathering in Century City, the results and a room full of actors and filmmakers provided the evening’s social spectacle; afterward, Martin Scorsese revealed a bomb threat connected to the awards, leaving Warhol unsettled.

The Century City Party

Alana Hamilton picked Warhol up at 7:45 and drove him to Dani Janssen’s apartment building, a new and very rich-looking place overlooking Hollywood. A $10 betting pool on the awards cost Warhol $20. The party’s hosts were each facing divorce: Dani Janssen from David, and Alana from George. The evening’s glamorous setting thus contained a less celebratory undercurrent of separations and unsettled relationships.

The guests brought their own stories and ambitions. Jack Haley said Liza Minnelli was in Detroit with her show and would return the following day. Valerie Perrine recounted a painful past engagement; when Martin Scorsese arrived, she quickly sought him out to ask about work. Brenda Vaccaro was upset to see her former fiancé Michael Douglas with his new wife, while Warhol noted a wider Hollywood pattern of men marrying much younger women. Roman Polanski was also present, out on bail in connection with a case involving a thirteen-year-old girl; he made an aggressive threat toward Alana. The diary records the incident without elaborating on it.

The Awards and Their Results

The awards themselves supplied a sharp contrast between ceremony and loss. Rocky won Best Picture, and Peter Finch received Best Actor despite being dead. The Academy asked Paddy Chayefsky to accept Finch’s award. Warhol also noted that Nelson Lyon was there with Finch’s wife, Eletha. The award’s presentation made an absent winner central to a crowded, highly social night.

Other encounters kept the party moving between celebrity, work, and private disappointment. Burgess Meredith attended with a date and spoke with Warhol about his former wife, Paulette Goddard. Brenda Vaccaro’s distress over Michael Douglas’s new marriage and Valerie Perrine’s attempt to find work through Scorsese showed how personal circumstances and professional opportunity surfaced amid the awards gathering.

The Bomb Threat and the Journey Back

Julia Scorsese said her husband would take Warhol and Fred Hughes in his limousine. She was drunk and shouting about death threats, a subject Warhol did not then understand. Once they were in the car, Martin Scorsese explained that he had received a bomb threat: the note said he would die one minute after midnight if Jodie Foster won an Academy Award.

It was already 2:00 a.m. Scorsese planned to go to MGM to work on New York, New York, alone on a dark, deserted lot. The disclosure transformed the evening’s earlier talk of threats into a concrete danger, and Warhol recorded feeling paranoid. At the hotel, Esther Phillips called repeatedly, including once at 2:00 a.m. Warhol did not answer because her calls had begun to frighten him. The diary’s account therefore closes not on the winners but on the way the awards night’s excitement gave way to suspicion and fear.