Easter

Easter in Andy Warhol’s diary is less a single episode than a recurring measure of how ordinary life changes from one holiday to the next. Across separate entries, the day accompanies a troubling dream, a memory of meals at home, a hope for intimacy, a solitary spell of sadness, and a demanding meal service at a church. The contrast gives the holiday a distinctive place in the record: it is a calendar observance, but also a setting in which Warhol’s social attachments, vulnerability, and attention to other people become visible.

A holiday preserved in conversation

The diary’s account of Easter belongs to a particular method of recording. Pat Hackett describes calling Warhol around nine in the morning on weekdays and taking extensive notes as he recounted the previous day and night. The regular calls could last one or two hours, rather than the five minutes Warhol jokingly assigned them. Since the diary was not recorded on weekends, Monday’s call gathered Friday, Saturday, and Sunday into a single session. Easter Sunday, then, entered a record whose usual rhythm depended on recollection after the holiday rather than a contemporaneous weekend entry.

The process was flexible when Warhol travelled: he might telephone, read from notes made on hotel stationery, or provide a cassette recording. Hackett typed the account soon after the call, while its intonations remained fresh, and attached receipts to the relevant pages. This method helps explain the diary’s mixture of private feeling and practical particulars. Easter can appear beside a meal, an errand, a party invitation, or the cost of dinner, without those details being separated into different kinds of record.

Hackett also explains that the published diary removes much of the personal exchange between herself and Warhol. In some retained references she recast herself in the third person, so that readers could occupy the position of the listener on the other end of the telephone. Easter’s recurring entries are therefore not only records of the holiday; they are recollections shaped by a daily conversation and then edited for readers.

Dreams, memory, and social detail

One Easter entry begins with a bad night and two nightmares involving planes breaking open and people falling from them. The entry then shifts away from Warhol’s dream to Fred Hughes’s outing and a small family detail relayed by Shirley Goldfarb: her eighty-eight-year-old mother in Miami Beach had sent the twenty-five dollars she sent each Passover for matzoh balls. Easter is thus recorded not as an isolated religious subject but as a day in a social world where holidays, family habits, and friends’ movements come together in brief succession. The juxtaposition preserves the particular detail of another family’s annual observance without claiming that it was Warhol’s own practice.

In another Easter passage, the holiday awakens a memory of Pat Hackett cooking cabbage with caraway seeds and onions at Warhol’s home. He prepares an early dinner, and Jon Gould arrives late after returning sheets to Macy’s, bringing an Easter basket. Warhol gives him a tour of the house and hints that it could all be his, pointing to a room with his name on it. The basket is described as plain, but the scene’s emotional emphasis falls on the tour and the offered room: domestic space becomes a way of expressing a hope for closeness.

Isolation and the turn toward church

A separate Easter entry carries a sharply different mood. Warhol declines Rupert’s invitation to an all-boy party on Bleecker Street because he is too depressed. He eats at the Brasserie, goes home lonely and despondent, and cries. The holiday does not automatically produce company or celebration; its social expectations make solitude more pronounced in this account.

In another Sunday entry, Warhol says he is in a very depressed mood and cries three times. Jed Johnson has come to take the dogs for the day. Warhol then decides to pull himself together and go to church. The account records a concrete change in action without claiming that the visit resolves his sadness. Set beside the Easter dinner with Jon Gould, it shows the holiday recurring under different domestic circumstances: one entry turns toward an imagined shared home, while another records a solitary decision to leave the house for church.

Service and the holiday’s practical work

A later Easter Sunday is described through a meal service at the Church of the Heavenly Rest, at 90th Street and Fifth Avenue. Warhol goes with Paige and Wilfredo, and Stephen Sprouse is expected to join them. They turn out to be needed: without their help, there would not have been enough people to serve the meal. Warhol notes his discomfort at making eye contact with those receiving food, but also records that the work went well and that Wilfredo worked hard handing out ham.

The particulars make the service more than a general gesture of charity. Six restaurant urns of coffee were used. People collected oranges, apples, Easter eggs, cups, and plastic cutlery; one woman brought in a potted plant and exchanged it for a better one. Warhol notices that many of the women reminded him of his mother. He also records a woman’s alarm when someone began clearing away a napkin containing her dentures, a small moment that makes clear how easily the practical routines of serving and clearing could intersect with a guest’s possessions. The entry ends with the group outside in bright weather after they had run out of supplies, and with the adjacent news that James Cagney had died.

Across these passages, Easter holds together details that resist a single emotional meaning. It can bring back a familiar meal, sharpen a sense of loneliness, occasion a turn toward church, or require sustained work among strangers. The diary’s form preserves those changes in scale—from a remembered kitchen to a room offered to Jon Gould, from a restaurant bill to six urns of coffee—without making the holiday’s significance uniform.