Blind-date dinners

Blind-date dinners were a social experiment Andy Warhol and Paige devised in October 1985: each participant brought a date for someone else, turning a meal into a combination of matchmaking, entertaining advertisers, and widening their circle. The plan made its uneven results part of its appeal. A crystal healer, a wrong-number date that expanded into a three-person arrangement, a missing model, and a succession of introductions all supplied material for Warhol’s attentive, often skeptical account of how people tried to connect.

The premise: dating as social arrangement

On October 8, Warhol and Paige decided to start having blind-date dinners because the gatherings could serve two purposes at once: meeting new people and entertaining advertisers. The idea was not limited to finding romantic matches. It made introductions into an organized social occasion, with each guest helping to supply a person for someone else. Warhol began lining up a Ford model for Paige, while Tama Janowitz was to meet Dr. Bernsohn. He thought Janowitz might find material in meeting the doctor, a possibility that already connected the evening’s matchmaking to her work as a writer.

The next day, Gael arrived worried about finding someone for Janowitz. Warhol wondered why people were so concerned about her getting a new boyfriend, but still regarded the dinners as enjoyable. In his view, a date did not have to be promising for the arrangement to work: guests could be brought together, and an unexpected attraction might develop. That permissive standard made the event less a carefully controlled route to romance than an excuse to assemble unfamiliar people and see what happened.

The first dinner: mismatches and improvisation

Warhol’s private motive for helping organize the dinner was more specific than the general pleasure of introductions: he wanted Janowitz to write about him and wanted to appear in one of her stories. He brought Dr. Bernsohn for her and observed her performance at Mr. Chow’s, where she wore Chinese clothes and crystal earrings, hoping the crystal doctor would examine them. Warhol worried that Janowitz might write about Bernsohn and get him into trouble because he considered crystal healing illegitimate. The episode therefore joined social comedy to a question of representation: the dinner might furnish a writer with material, but writing about a guest could also have consequences for that person.

Janowitz’s own dating situation supplied a more elaborate accident. She had arranged to meet a man who had first called her by mistake while trying to reach an ex-girlfriend. After speaking with Janowitz, he contacted the former girlfriend and told her what had happened; she then joined the date. Warhol presented the development as evidence of how desperate people could become to meet someone, while also recording the practical scale of the occasion: the cab cost five dollars and dinner cost 350 dollars.

The arrangements faltered elsewhere. The doctor originally intended for Warhol had to go on duty at the last minute, leaving him with a Columbia student Paige had met a few nights earlier. Warhol disliked the young man from the outset, and the student left to call his boyfriend. Dr. Bernsohn, meanwhile, initially showed interest in Paige, while Warhol thought Janowitz reminded him of the doctor’s mother. The Ford model selected for Paige disappeared; she was not especially disappointed, since she had found him an airhead who could talk only about modeling. The dinner produced introductions, but not the smoothly matched pairs the planning might have suggested.

A recurring format, not a search for Warhol’s own match

By October 14, Janowitz had gone on another date with Dr. Bernsohn, but Paige reported that the two did not seem to have hit it off. Another dinner was planned for the following week, with a construction-company owner and a doctor being considered for Warhol. He said he did not really want to meet anyone himself; his enjoyment lay in arranging the evenings for the others and acting as “Gramps,” watching the younger people have a good time. This distinction clarifies his role: he was both a participant in the social network and its self-appointed organizer, increasingly more interested in facilitating the gathering than in finding a partner.

He continued to propose candidates for Paige. For the next date, he offered a six-foot-three Black instructor from Lidija’s gym. Paige dismissed the man as not suitable marriage material. Warhol noted that the instructor was straight and wondered whether people should be believed when they described themselves that way. The exchange shows how the dinner’s practical matchmaking depended on judgments about suitability, not simply on whether someone was available. Paige could reject a candidate even when Warhol considered him a plausible introduction.

The dinners also sat alongside the ordinary work of maintaining professional and social ties. In a separate office episode, an advertiser brought chocolates after Paige had told her that everyone there loved them. Paige refused to eat any, Warhol eventually took the chocolates upstairs, and then refused to share them when Paige returned for some. The incident was not itself a blind-date dinner, but it makes visible the same uneasy overlap between hospitality and business that had shaped the original plan: entertaining professional contacts required social gestures, while the people expected to participate did not always behave as the organizer anticipated.

Expanding the circle and the dinner’s significance

A later dinner at the Ritz Café brought together another deliberately varied set of introductions. Paige arranged for a Ford model to meet Warhol. Recently returned from Japan, the model complained about the country and spoke, in Warhol’s assessment, like other models he had met: about motorcycles, modeling, eating, and disliking Japan. Warhol considered the men good-looking but brainless, comparing their near-identical appearance to being made from one mold. The date thus repeated the format while sharpening his distinction between an attractive face and the conversation he wanted from a new acquaintance.

The other pairings were less straightforward. Paige brought Rubin, a Black Jewish lawyer, for Janowitz. Janowitz introduced Paige to a novelist who had published four novels. The novelist resented Janowitz’s appearance in The New Yorker, while Janowitz resented his four published books. Their introductions exposed a competition in which each person possessed the kind of recognition the other lacked. Warhol described the gathering as a search for new faces, brains, and ideas; seated together in a booth for six, the group nevertheless had fun.

The dinners’ significance lies in this mixture of deliberate networking and unpredictable human response. Warhol and Paige began with the practical aim of meeting people and entertaining advertisers, but the gatherings also became a way to circulate writers, models, professionals, and potential partners through the same social space. Their outcomes ranged from vanished dates and unsuitable conversation to mutual envy and a pleasant evening. For Warhol, the format offered not a dependable method for producing romance but a repeatable occasion for observing how people presented themselves, judged one another, and turned social encounters into stories.