Andy Warhol and Pat Hackett

Andy Warhol and Pat Hackett’s collaboration joined routine office work, co-authorship, friendship, and the making of a diary. What began when Hackett sought a part-time typing job at The Factory developed into a sustained exchange: she recorded Warhol’s accounts of his days, and later shaped those conversations into a publishable narrative. The resulting diary was neither simply a private record nor an unmediated transcript; it was built through their recurring conversations and Hackett’s editorial decisions.

An Introduction at The Factory

While an undergraduate at Barnard, Pat Hackett went to The Factory to ask whether Andy Warhol needed a part-time typist. Warhol suggested that she work whenever she could, so she began visiting several days a week after classes. They shared a cramped office measuring four by ten feet, piled with clutter. As Hackett typed, Warhol read newspapers and drank carrot juice from Brownies, a health-food store around the corner on 16th Street.

Their early work included transcribing tapes of Warhol’s telephone conversations. He had made the recordings while recuperating, first in hospital and then at home in the narrow four-story house he shared with his mother. The task placed Hackett close to both the practical routine of his work and the spoken material that would later become important to their writing together. Her position was not initially that of a biographer or independent observer: she was a young employee fitting into the Factory’s daily activity.

From Office Work to Co-Authorship

By the mid-1970s, Hackett’s responsibilities had widened beyond typing. In 1975, she conducted eight separate interviews with Warhol for The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (From A to B and Back Again), writing chapters one through eight and chapter ten from those sessions. For the introduction and chapters nine and eleven through fourteen, she worked from conversations Warhol had recorded with Bob Colacello and Brigid Berlin. The book was the first major project the two worked on together.

After its publication in 1975, Warhol asked Hackett to co-author another book: a memoir of the 1960s that they decided to call Popism. The collaboration continued even as her role at the office changed. In 1976, after the filming of Bad, Hackett told Warhol that she no longer wanted to work at the office but would keep writing Popism with him. Their work therefore did not depend on her remaining a regular office employee. It moved from a shared workplace into a more focused partnership, maintained through writing and conversation.

The Daily Calls Become a Diary

Before 1976, Hackett had kept a general, sketchy Factory log for Warhol. She listed business visitors and the principal events of the previous night, sometimes asking different attendees for their accounts of the same dinner or opening. The purpose was to establish what had happened, who had been present, and what Warhol had spent—not to capture his personal perspective. Often she simply asked him to supply his expenses.

When Hackett said she wanted to leave the office, Warhol asked her to continue keeping the log and itemizing his personal expenses, describing it as a “five-minutes-a-day job.” Hackett objected that she did not want to keep calling around the office to reconstruct each day; if she had to do that, she might as well still be working there. They agreed that Warhol himself would provide the daily account. In the fall of 1976, their weekday morning phone calls established the method: Hackett asked about his activities and expenses, but the accounting gradually became a diary in which Warhol examined his life.

The record also served a practical purpose. Warhol was conscious of tax scrutiny that had begun with a major audit in 1972 and continued annually; Hackett recorded even the ten-cent calls he made from street payphones. She usually called around 9 a.m., no later than 9:30. If she overslept, Warhol might wake her with a playful reprimand, calling her “Miss Diary” or threatening that she was fired. After some conversation—he might ask about her breakfast, the television, or how to clean a can opener—he would recount the previous day and night and list his cash expenses. The sessions often lasted one or two hours, rather than five minutes.

Every other week or so, Hackett brought typed entries to the office and attached the loose taxi and restaurant receipts Warhol had left for her. The amounts on the receipts corresponded to the figures he had already given over the phone; the pages and receipts were stored in letter boxes. The diary was made Monday through Friday. Weekend activity was collected in a triple session on Monday, when Warhol recounted Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. Hackett took notes on a legal pad and typed the entry soon after each call, while his intonations remained fresh in her mind.

A Flexible Record and a Friendship

Travel did not interrupt the daily record. When Warhol was away, he could call from his destination or send notes, often scrawled on hotel stationery, which he read to Hackett after returning. He sometimes had to stop to decipher his own handwriting. On other occasions he recorded a cassette for her. If Hackett was away, she might call and have Warhol read his notes to her. The process varied, but, as Hackett described it, no day went unrecorded.

The diary calls were only one part of their contact. When they were working on Popism, they might speak several times in a day; as friends, they also called whenever something amused or angered them. Hackett remembered arguing and laughing as central to their time together. In conversations outside the regular diary session, and sometimes face to face, Warhol would add to or correct an earlier account and tell her to “put that in the Diary.” The text thus accumulated through repeated telling and revision rather than through a single, fixed deposition.

Editing the Spoken Record

For publication, Hackett reduced an original diary of 20,000 pages to a single volume. She sometimes removed entire days or weeks, and more often selected only parts of a day; a day involving five parties might appear through just one. She also cut many names, retaining those whose conversations or actions received the most attention. These omissions were not marked in the text, because Hackett believed that drawing attention to each cut would disrupt the narrative flow.

She also removed the interpersonal dimension of the calls: direct references to herself and material meaningful only to the two participants. In the few personal references she retained, she converted herself into a third-person figure identified by her initials, PH. Her stated aim was to preserve the casual intimacy of Warhol’s morning accounts while allowing readers to occupy the place of the person listening on the other end of the phone. That editorial transformation is central to the collaboration’s legacy: Warhol supplied the daily voice and recollection, while Hackett’s recording, organization, and selective shaping made those conversations into the published diary.