The Iranian Embassy in New York appears in Andy Warhol’s diary as more than a diplomatic address: it is a recurring meeting place where royal portraiture, film-world sociability, and private flirtations overlap. Across several visits, Warhol moves between formal encounters with Farah Pahlavi and Princess Ashraf Pahlavi and the looser business of watching people meet, assess one another, and become useful connections. The embassy’s significance lies in this double function: it lends the encounters official ceremony while making them part of Warhol’s everyday social and artistic circuit.

A recurring destination

Warhol’s visits register the embassy as a regular stop in his New York routine. On one occasion he cabbed there for $2.50 after meeting Ronnie to look at uncut stones for his Diamond paintings. The diary’s precise fare gives the visit the scale of an ordinary errand, even though the destination was an embassy and the people encountered there included public figures. On another trip, he again noted the $2.50 cab ride and found no demonstrators outside. The repeated journey makes the location feel less like a once-only ceremonial backdrop than a place Warhol could return to as part of a busy social itinerary.

That absence of demonstrators is notable beside a separate lunch held in honor of Farah Pahlavi at the Pierre Hotel. Masked demonstrators gathered outside that event, and a woman in the press section interrupted the empress’s speech before being removed. Farah Pahlavi continued reading and later apologized for the disruption, speaking about the significance of women’s rights in Iran. The embassy visit was a distinct occasion: Warhol explicitly observed that there were no demonstrators at its entrance. The contrast places the embassy within a tense political moment without confusing the separate settings or events.

Royal portraits and the work of looking

At the embassy, Warhol posed for photographs with Farah Pahlavi in front of his portrait of her. She remarked that she was jealous of Amir Abbas Hoveyda because he had eight Warhols while she had four. Warhol also noted that the queen was taller than he was. The exchange brings the portrait into the room as both an artwork and a measure of status: the number of works each person possessed became part of the conversation, while the image itself supplied the setting for a new photograph.

A later embassy visit turned portrait-making into an immediate activity. Ambassador Amir Abbas Hoveyda suggested that Warhol take Polaroids of Princess Ashraf Pahlavi then and there, so the work could be got over with. Warhol found the process easy and remarked on how well the pictures came out when kept very white, linking the result to the skill of Iranian plastic surgeons. The comment records his practical attention to photographic appearance, not just the diplomatic occasion. The sitting made the embassy a temporary portrait studio, with the ambassador initiating the session and the princess becoming its subject.

That improvised sitting belonged to a broader, carefully organized practice. For portraits, Warhol usually took about sixty Polaroid photographs with a Polaroid Big Shot, selected four for a screen printer, then chose and cropped one image. He might alter features to make a sitter appear more attractive before enlarging the image to a forty-inch square acetate for silkscreening. Assistants prepared canvases in flesh-toned backgrounds, and slight misalignment between painted color and screened detail produced the portraits’ characteristic shifting effect. The diary does not establish that every step of this procedure occurred at the embassy; it does show why an embassy portrait session could be both a social encounter and part of a sustained, methodical artistic enterprise.

A crowded film-world salon

On another visit, the embassy was full of movie directors and producers—about thirty or forty people, among them Elia Kazan, Elliot Kastner, Milos Forman, Lester Persky, and Barbara Loden. The concentration of film professionals made the reception a gathering point for people whose work and reputations mattered to Warhol. The embassy was not simply a backdrop for royalty: it also brought together the film industry and the artist’s own network of acquaintances.

The evening included a dinner that Warhol remembered as the best he had had there. Princess Ashraf Pahlavi told him that she and her companions had seen almost everything in town, from films to plays, including Outrageous. After dinner, guests went upstairs, where Barry Landau arrived with Margaret Trudeau, gaining entry by presenting himself as Warhol’s closest friend. Bella Abzug and her husband Martin also came with Shirley MacLaine. These details give the reception its social texture: a formal diplomatic gathering expands into a mobile party whose guests arrive through personal claims and overlapping affiliations.

Introductions and personal encounters

The embassy also figures in Warhol’s account of introducing Bianca Jagger to Maximilian Schell. Schell told Warhol that he had first seen Flesh and hated it, then returned to see it repeatedly and came to love it. He said the film had made him think that if this counted as a movie, he too could make one. Warhol, unsure how to respond, introduced him to Bianca; the two were immediately taken with each other. The encounter turns the embassy into a place where Warhol’s film history and social matchmaking briefly meet.

The connection continued beyond the reception. Later, at Halston’s, Bianca told Warhol that for the first time she had fallen for an older man; she also said she had to leave to prepare dinner for Halston. The diary thus traces the introduction from an embassy gathering into a later private conversation, showing how a formal event could generate relationships that continued elsewhere. In its recurring appearances, the Iranian Embassy in New York links official ceremony to Warhol’s working methods and social life: a royal portrait can be posed in front of, a photographic sitting arranged on the spot, and a new personal connection begun amid a roomful of directors, producers, and guests.