Halston's house on 63rd Street is more than a private residence in these diary episodes: while Halston is away, Victor borrows it for dinners and encounters, and when Halston returns, the rooms become a setting for a social circle whose intimacy is inseparable from performance and public attention. Across two episodes in 1977 and an episode in early 1978, the house shifts from an informal gathering place to a stage where friendship, desire, celebrity, and press scrutiny meet.

A House Lent on Uncertain Terms

In July 1977, Halston was away for the weekend at Joe Eula's place in upstate New York, and Victor was allowed to use the 63rd Street house. The arrangement had a built-in uncertainty: Halston never told Victor when he would return, a practice the diary presents as a way of keeping him alert. The house was therefore available but not entirely Victor's to command. Its hospitality came with the possibility that its owner might walk back in at any moment.

That provisional quality shaped what took place there. Victor invited a large group for dinner, turning the house into a borrowed salon rather than simply a place to stay. On another occasion, he tried to arrange a photographic encounter with a prospective subject, then redirected the evening when the plan was delayed. The residence accommodated dinners, conversations, and plans that might spill elsewhere, while its uncertain availability remained in the background.

The July Dinner and Its Contrasts

At the first dinner, Victor cooked chicken. The house was cold enough that the diary's narrator was the only guest who felt chilled; the others were taking cocaine. Halston's freezer was stocked with vodka, which the narrator compared to liquid oil, and about four small glasses were consumed. These details make the house feel less like a polished showplace than a working social environment: food, cold, drugs, and drink coexist without smoothing over the discomfort.

The guests included people from John Waters's Baltimore circle. One man, who resembled a heavier John Waters, said he had been Divine's roommate. Asked whether he and Divine had been lovers, he answered that, after all those years, one falls in love with the mind. Victor, meanwhile, recounted having sex with someone in a van outside Halston's house because they did not know when Halston would return. The scene moves between a tender account of long familiarity and the practical improvisation prompted by the owner's uncertain arrival; the house's threshold becomes part of the evening's sexual and social geography.

Victor, Halston, and the House's Returning Owner

The following day, Victor and the narrator went through Village shops for pornography to use as research for photographs called “landscapes,” then planned to photograph a prospective subject at Victor's place. When the subject said he would be hours late, they went to Studio 54 instead. The house thus belonged to a wider circuit of work and nightlife: Victor's photographic project began with research in the Village, was meant to continue at home, and gave way to the club when the appointment fell through.

On July 3, the narrator walked over to Victor's at Halston's and encountered Stevie Rubell on the street. Victor was still trying to reach the same prospective subject. Halston arrived just as the narrator was leaving, making the moment awkward. The diary also describes Victor as a frequent presence who was becoming too much to see so often; it urges him to establish his art career rather than rely on sex to advance. These remarks place the borrowed house within a relationship that had grown intense and tiring, even as Victor's access to it depended on Halston's absence.

A Social Stage Under Press Attention

In a later episode, Bianca invited the narrator to Halston's house, where Dr. Giller was already present. After unsuccessful attempts to see Saturday Night Fever, the group watched a Buñuel film and returned to find that Halston had made pasta filled with meat and chicken. Stevie Rubell was there, reading London newspapers and repeating something Mick Jagger had said about Jerry Hall. The narrator suspected that Stevie had passed information to the press; the suspicion was not presented as confirmed fact. Outside the house, numerous English reporters waited for a statement from Bianca or Halston, making the private gathering visibly porous to the public world.

Within that attention, the house also became a place to negotiate how Bianca's relationship with Halston appeared. They seemed to the narrator like a couple, while Bianca was distressed about Mick. When someone asked Halston why he did not marry Bianca, he replied that he was the hostess there. The answer turned a question about marriage into a declaration of his role in the house: he could host, welcome, and shape the gathering without accepting the conventional position the question implied. Later, at The Ice Palace, Bianca said that nobody liked her, and she and Halston tried to persuade Jed Johnson to go home with them. The evening's movement from Halston's house to the club leaves the residence as the scene's social anchor—a place of food and companionship, but also of emotional exposure and a press presence that waited just outside.