Andy Warhol and Mick Jagger's relationship

Andy Warhol and Mick Jagger’s relationship was a social and artistic connection, recorded less through declarations than through shared evenings, music, and a disagreement over a record cover. Warhol’s work on Love You Live made the connection especially tangible: Mick wanted to share new music with him, while Warhol regarded the cover as his own artwork and objected when Mick wrote across it.

Shared evenings and social life

On April 8, 1978, Warhol and Bob Colacello invited Mick and Jerry Hall to dinner at La Grenouille. The dinner cost $320; Warhol recalled that they had a good time and got drunk. Afterward, they went with Mick to The Pierre, where he wanted to take off his sneakers. Hall complained that the hotel kept addressing her as Miss Hall, and she and Mick decided they should move to The Carlyle. Their choice had a history: Mick had stayed at The Pierre with Bianca Jagger, and Warhol observed that it had taken the couple a while to recognize the association.

Music continued the evening’s social exchange. Mick wanted Warhol and the others to hear his new record, so they went to Earl McGrath’s house, where it was, and then continued to Studio 54. The entry captures Mick not just as a celebrated guest but as someone who actively brought his work into Warhol’s company.

Love You Live and a dispute over authorship

By June, the connection had taken on a more pointed artistic dimension. At The Carlyle, Mick answered the door while preparing to go to Woodstock and showed Warhol the Rolling Stones’ new album. Warhol admired the cover’s pull-out, die-cut design, but disliked that the band was back in drag. More personally, he later told Jerry Hall that Mick had ruined the Love You Live cover Warhol had made for the group by writing over it in oversized handwriting. Warhol thought the buyers could have had a good piece of art if Mick had left it alone.

The complaint reveals a difference in how the two men treated the object: Mick’s handwriting became part of the album’s presentation, while Warhol saw it as an intrusion on a visual work he had created. The disagreement did not prevent their social contact, but it shows that Warhol’s relationship with Mick included artistic expectations as well as celebrity sociability.

Bianca Jagger, Jerry Hall, and public stories

Warhol’s conversations around Mick also involved the women in his life. At the June encounter, he recalled Mick’s earlier stays at The Pierre with Bianca. He also noted a report in Earl Wilson’s column that Bianca was so touched by the song Miss You that she had slowed divorce proceedings; Hall told him the song had actually been written about her. Warhol’s diary preserves the gap between the public account and Hall’s version without resolving it.

In May, Warhol described Bianca as treating Barbara Allen badly in retaliation over Mick and turning Halston against Barbara. He responded by teasing Bianca about an Ossie Clark fashion show and the clothes he thought would suit her better. These episodes place Warhol inside the shifting social circle around Mick, Bianca, and Hall: he watched their rivalries, repeated their stories, and sometimes intervened through jokes, while his own most direct connection with Mick remained grounded in evenings together and the shared business of making—and judging—images.