Carroll Baker

Carroll Baker enters the diary in two concrete settings: as a Hollywood professional in the cast of the 1976 film Bad, and as a guest at Fred Hughes’s Christmas Eve dinner with her daughter, Blanche. These brief appearances connect her to the film work and office-centered social world around Andy Warhol, while leaving the particulars of her role and her personal relationship with the diarist unstated.

Film work

In 1976, Bad was shot in New York in 35mm with a union crew. Its cast brought together people associated with The Factory, including Geraldine Smith and Cyrinda Foxe, and Hollywood professionals, among them Carroll Baker and Perry King. Jed Johnson directed the film, and the diarist had co-written its screenplay. The film was well received, though the account does not identify Baker’s character or describe her work on set.

The production belonged to a changing phase of Warhol’s filmmaking: Bad was made with the scale and professional crew of a commercial feature, rather than the inexpensive, rapidly produced underground films that had once drawn people to Warhol’s movies. Baker’s inclusion in the cast marks her presence in that professional ensemble, but the diary offers no further account of her contribution.

The Christmas Eve gathering

On December 24, 1976, Baker attended Fred Hughes’s Christmas dinner at 1342 Lexington, arriving with her daughter, Blanche. The diarist noted that Blanche had slimmed down and had become a beauty in recent months. The detail records a change in her appearance, while Baker herself is identified as Hughes’s invited guest.

The dinner had the character of an office gathering: among those present were Jed Johnson, Jed’s siblings Jay and Susan, the art dealer Anselmino, photographer Chris Makos, and Interview assistant editor Robert Hayes. Baker’s presence therefore places her in a social circle that joined Warhol’s film and art-world connections with the magazine’s staff. The diary records her attendance and her daughter’s presence, but does not describe a conversation between Baker and Warhol.

What the appearances establish

The two entries give Baker a limited but distinct place in the diary. In the film account, she is named as one of the established Hollywood professionals alongside whom Warhol-associated performers worked; at Hughes’s dinner, she appears as a guest accompanied by her daughter. Together, these mentions show her crossing both a production context and a private social occasion around Warhol’s circle, without supplying evidence for a broader personal or working relationship.