Diahnne Abbott

Diahnne Abbott enters Andy Warhol’s diary through Interview, where the prospect of featuring her as a cover subject led to repeated efforts to interview her. The encounters reveal both the magazine’s pursuit of celebrity access and the strain that could arise when its questions turned personal. The account culminates not in a polished interview but in an evening at Abbott’s apartment, where conversation, hospitality, and Warhol’s uncertain reading of her welcome briefly brought the magazine’s visitors into her private life.

A proposed Interview cover

In June 1977, Robert Hayes suggested Abbott as a possible Interview cover girl. When the magazine called, she said she was thrilled, but wanted a day to think about it. Warhol guessed that she might be concerned Robert De Niro would give her a hard time. His entry records her hesitation as a possibility, not as an explanation Abbott herself supplied.

Interview’s appeal rested in part on the promise of bringing people into print: by 1976, its circulation was growing, celebrities wanted to appear in it, and the magazine had become a source of new faces for Warhol and the staff. Abbott’s proposed cover placed her within that system, but the diary also records how an invitation to be featured could carry personal considerations beyond the magazine’s plans.

An interview that went off course

A few days later, Warhol went with Catherine Guinness to interview Abbott because no one else was available from the office. He judged the interview unsuccessful and took responsibility for it. Instead of keeping its focus on Abbott, the conversation drifted toward her young daughter, whom Warhol describes as about nine and as having been born before Abbott married Robert De Niro. He also reasoned that, because Abbott was a friend of Nelson Lyon’s, she must be intelligent; the entry presents that assumption as part of his self-reproach over failing to conduct a good interview.

The attempt resumed in August over dinner at Quo Vadis, with Catherine Guinness and Bob Colacello present. Colacello repeatedly asked Abbott how it felt to be Black, framing the question in several different ways and pressing it toward her skin, dancing, and intimacy with Robert De Niro. Warhol’s record makes the interview’s imbalance plain: the questioning narrowed Abbott to race and marriage rather than opening out into a wider account of her life. He suspected she might have slipped Colacello cocaine when he went to the bathroom and returned dazed, but this is Warhol’s speculation, not a confirmed explanation for Colacello’s behavior.

Dinner, nightlife, and a private welcome

The dinner did not end the evening. Diana Vreeland was seated behind the group with Alessandro Albrizzi; as they were leaving, Warhol introduced Abbott to Vreeland, who told her she was madly in love with her husband. Abbott then drove the group to Studio 54. She disliked the music and wanted to leave, so they went to Elaine’s, where she played songs on the jukebox that she had not been able to hear at the club. Colacello continued asking her how it felt to be Black, and Warhol noted that even his political questions and references kept returning to race.

Abbott then invited the group to her Barrow Street apartment, a gesture Warhol read as a sign that she was accepting them. Clothes were scattered around, and she said she and Robert De Niro were looking for a new apartment but had an image to protect when Warhol suggested Park Avenue. She served Dom Perignon and showed them baby pictures. She also let the limousine go, which Warhol considered tacky; the group took a cab home instead. The evening thus shifted from a strained professional interview to an encounter inside Abbott’s home, while Warhol continued to register the visit through his own judgments about hospitality, status, and access.