Andy Warhol—Robert Hayes professional relationship

Andy Warhol and Robert Hayes’s professional relationship took shape at Interview, where editorial choices joined the practical business of selling the magazine. Their exchanges reveal Warhol relying on Hayes’s judgment while also pushing his own ideas about covers and readership. In 1984, that working connection acquired a more personal dimension: Warhol followed Hayes’s serious illness and, at Brigid Berlin’s urging, sent him a note before Hayes went home to Canada to die.

Interview as a shared workplace

Interview became a central part of Warhol’s working life after he bought out Peter Brant in 1975 and became the magazine’s full owner and publisher; Fred Hughes took the title of president. Warhol, previously distant from the magazine’s daily operation, began looking in on layouts and arranging lunches to pitch advertisers. By 1976 its circulation was growing, and its self-aware glamour made it an attractive place for celebrities to appear. The magazine offered Warhol a continuing stream of people and editorial possibilities, as well as a practical business whose success depended on attracting readers and advertisers.

The diary places Hayes inside this editorial environment through concrete decisions rather than a formal account of his job. Warhol called him to discuss cover subjects, and Hayes expressed preferences of his own. Their connection therefore appears as a working exchange between people involved in shaping Interview: Warhol supplied ideas and pursued sales, while Hayes could respond with enthusiasm or disagreement. The surviving entries do not describe the beginning of their association or spell out its full division of responsibilities, but they show that Warhol treated Hayes as a colleague whose editorial response mattered.

Covers, readers, and sales

In September 1983, Warhol called Hayes about securing Matt Dillon for a cover. Hayes was excited by the prospect, but he did not approve Warhol’s idea of putting Shirley MacLaine on another cover. Warhol explained the commercial logic behind his proposal: he hoped that women who watched television talk shows might buy Interview if they saw MacLaine on the cover. The disagreement thus joined two kinds of editorial judgment—the appeal of a particular celebrity and Warhol’s effort to reach an audience beyond the magazine’s established circle.

Warhol’s note of the exchange is revealing because it does not present cover selection as a purely aesthetic matter. The possible Dillon cover elicited Hayes’s enthusiasm; the MacLaine suggestion met resistance; and Warhol defended the latter by imagining new buyers. The brief call records colleagues negotiating the magazine’s identity through decisions that were simultaneously editorial and commercial. It also shows Warhol explaining his reasoning to Hayes rather than treating the cover choice as a decision made in isolation.

This concern with the public face of Interview belonged to a larger pattern. The magazine depended on recognizable names and fresh subjects, while Warhol’s own work included commissioned portraits and repeated attention to the construction of public images. The diary does not establish that Hayes participated in Warhol’s portrait process, so the two activities should not be conflated. What it does show is that the magazine’s covers gave Warhol and Hayes a shared arena in which celebrity appeal and readership could be considered together.

Hayes’s illness and Warhol’s response

By April 1984, the subject of Warhol’s contact with Hayes had changed sharply. Warhol recorded that Hayes was in intensive care, that his mother was coming down from Canada, and that pneumonia was dangerous. Hayes had been coughing for weeks and had spent a period at home believing he had a bad flu. He had even attended a business lunch during that time. Warhol recalled noticing small round bandages on Hayes and accepting the explanation that he had had moles removed. That earlier, ordinary explanation became troubling in retrospect once Hayes’s condition was known to be severe.

The illness continued into May. Hayes remained in the hospital and still had a temperature. His family had been there for a month and a half, and Warhol worried about the cost of the stay: even with insurance expected to cover most of it, he estimated that the bill might reach five hundred dollars a day. The diary records these details as practical concerns—duration, family presence, fever, and expense—rather than offering a medical account. Their accumulation conveys how an ongoing professional relationship was now being lived through updates about a colleague’s precarious condition.

Warhol’s entries also preserve the limits of what he knew. John Reinhold had called Hayes, but Hayes’s mother would not let him speak with her son. The note does not explain her reasons or say whether Warhol himself was able to visit or talk to Hayes. It does show that access to Hayes had become constrained as the illness continued, and that information about him reached Warhol through calls and other people.

The final note

In June, Brigid Berlin made Warhol write a note to Hayes. Warhol copied down the wording she supplied, and she sent it. The diary gives no text for the note, so its message and tone cannot be recovered from this account. It does establish the gesture and the circumstances: the communication was prompted by Berlin, written out by Warhol, and dispatched while Hayes was preparing to leave the hospital and return to Canada to die.

The contrast with the earlier cover discussions is stark. In 1983, Warhol and Hayes’s recorded exchanges concerned which celebrities might bring readers to Interview; by the summer of 1984, the surviving account turns to illness, family, expense, and a last written message. The diary does not report Hayes’s death or describe what followed after his departure for Canada. Its record of the relationship ends instead with the act of sending the note, leaving the professional connection visible at the point where routine editorial collaboration gives way to a final acknowledgment.