Barbra Streisand

Barbra Streisand enters the diary through a single, sharply observed dinner at Sue Mengers’s home in Los Angeles in 1985. The scene presents her as a major celebrity negotiating the value of art and fame, while Warhol’s account measures the distance between public recognition and personal memory: Streisand asks about a portrait, discusses costly diamonds, and fails to remember having met him before.

The dinner at Sue Mengers’s

After working on the set of The Love Boat until 9:30, Andy Warhol joined Fred Hughes for dinner at Sue Mengers’s, where Streisand was also a guest. She talked about the sculptor Archipenko and said that Steve Ross sent her valuable works after she admired them in his home. When she asked the price of a portrait, Warhol declined to discuss it himself; Fred Hughes supplied the figure of $25,000. Streisand responded that it sounded inexpensive and suggested to her unnamed boyfriend that they might buy one for Steve. The exchange records interest, not a completed commission.

Streisand’s appearance and conversation are noted with the same attention. Warhol described her as very thin, with straight hair and a dress that suited her, and observed that she ate three helpings of curry. Her boyfriend was called her Baskin-Robbins boyfriend in the diary. Warhol thought he might have directed the video for her current song, Emotion, but explicitly was not sure. Sean Connery was at the dinner, though Warhol did not speak with him; Alan Ladd, Jr. also attended and struck him as looking sensational.

Portraits, price, and image-making

The portrait question had a specific commercial context. Commissioned portraits were a major source of Andy Warhol’s income, and his standard price was approximately $25,000 for the first canvas and $5,000 for each additional one. Producing one involved a process of selection and retouching: Warhol took about sixty Polaroid photographs, chose four for screen-printing preparation, then selected and cropped an image and cosmetically altered it before it became a finished silkscreen portrait. The alterations could lengthen a neck, trim a nose, enlarge lips, or clear a complexion. The price named at dinner thus stood behind a carefully managed transformation of a sitter’s likeness. Nothing in the account says that Streisand or her boyfriend went on to buy a portrait.

Recognition and the remembered party

The dinner also returned to an earlier encounter. Streisand was suing over a leaking roof at her New York building, near 92nd Street and Central Park West. When Warhol recalled that she had invited him to a party there seven or nine years earlier, which he attended with Jed Johnson, she did not remember him and asked whether he had been famous then. Warhol recalled that the party’s food had been labeled with delicatessen-style names, including chopped liver, gefilte fish, and halvah. He considered reminding her of those details, but the diary records no such retort. The moment makes fame feel less like a stable bond than a shifting test of who remembers whom.

Celebrity as performance and social currency

Streisand’s brief appearance connects to the diary’s wider account of Interview, where celebrity images were actively made and circulated. By 1976, the magazine’s growing circulation and glamorous reputation made celebrities eager to appear in it; Andy Warhol’s promise to put someone in the magazine had taken the place of his earlier offer of a film role. The dinner similarly moves between image and value: a portrait becomes a price, a remembered party becomes a question of fame, and diamonds become a story of a market that could fall from $60,000 to $20,000 per carat in a day. Warhol advised that, once the price dropped, the buyer should have bought three more and cut the losses. The diary also notes that the guests discussed Jews trying to be WASPs and criticized Mia Farrow while talking about Woody Allen. Streisand is recorded not through a sustained biography but through these exchanges, in which celebrity is at once appearance, commerce, social talk, and uncertain recognition.