Maria Shriver and Arnold Schwarzenegger’s wedding on April 26, 1986, is recorded by Andy Warhol as a tightly observed collision of family ritual, celebrity spectacle, and image-making. His account follows the journey to the church and the reception, but also tracks the portraits, cameras, and performances through which the wedding became a public event.

Portraits and preparations

Warhol had been preparing drawings of Maria Shriver as a wedding present. His commissions typically began with about sixty Polaroids taken with a Polaroid Big Shot; he selected four images for screen printing, chose and cropped one, then retouched it to flatter the sitter. The enlarged image was transferred to canvas, where painted color and the screened photograph could shift slightly out of alignment. This careful construction of a portrait helps explain why his work could function as both a personal gift and a conspicuous object at a celebrity wedding.

The day before the ceremony, Arnold Schwarzenegger gave the Shriver family a portrait of Maria Shriver by Warhol, presenting it as a wedding gift. At the wedding itself, Warhol brought the drawings he had made for the occasion. After arriving at the family compound, he did not know what to do with them; Eddie Schlossberg offered to put them in the house. The distinction between the portrait already given and the drawings Warhol carried to the event gives the art a continuing role in the celebration, rather than making it merely a backdrop.

The journey and ceremony

Warhol traveled by plane with Grace Jones, with Peter Wise arranging to fly with them and drive them back. The morning began earlier and less smoothly than planned: Wise arrived before Grace Jones, who asked him to return an hour later. The weather was slightly cloudy, and the flight passed through grey fog. Grace Jones changed into a green Azzedine outfit in the airport ladies’ room before they continued by rental car to the church.

Outside, an unusually large crowd shouted for both Grace Jones and Warhol. Inside, folding chairs had been placed near the door, and Oprah Winfrey gave a speech. Jamie Wyeth and Phyllis Wyeth sat in front of Warhol and joked that the visitors had caused too much commotion outside. The service lasted an hour, while the wedding ceremony itself took fifteen minutes and included a singer performing “Ave Maria.” Warhol noted the contrast between the brief central rite and the public attention gathering around it.

Jackie received communion and walked around the church with John F. Kennedy Jr.; Warhol described her appearance as beautiful. After the ceremony, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Maria Shriver posed for photographers from their car, rolling down the window and smiling. Warhol contrasted their cooperation with Jackie’s refusal to smile for the crowd. The episode makes photographic access part of the wedding’s choreography: the couple presented an image to the waiting cameras, while other members of the family set firmer limits.

Reception, cameras, and public image

The reception took place in freezing weather. An Austrian guest led Warhol and the others to a tent where oysters were being prepared for another tent. Grace Jones wanted some immediately; after a plate was brought to her, she ate thirty oysters and then twenty more. The conspicuous appetite punctuates Warhol’s account of a highly managed social occasion with an exuberant, physical detail.

The reception also exposed competing claims over the wedding’s images. Warhol tried to take photographs but could not get close enough. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s bodybuilding friends carried cameras, making it difficult for the Kennedy family to control every picture, while the family had its own photographer and directed him to take specific shots. Warhol compared this restriction unfavorably with the freedom guests had at Madonna’s wedding, suggesting that personal photographs might be kept for later rather than rushed to the New York Post the next morning. His observation turns the camera into more than a souvenir: it is a means of controlling who owns and circulates the record of a supposedly private celebration.

Warhol also recorded a speech in which Arnold Schwarzenegger acknowledged objections to naming Kurt Waldheim, citing the Nazi controversy and the U.N. dispute, but said that he and Maria loved him and thanked him. A sculpture sent by Waldheim was brought in at the wedding and struck Warhol as ugly. The details sit beside the more conventional signs of celebration—good food, dancing, and music—and show how public associations followed the guests into the family event.

The wedding as a social scene

The reception brought family, artists, entertainers, and society figures into the same shifting frame. Warhol mentioned Christopher Kennedy, Joe Kennedy and his wife, Bettina, Marc Bohan, Peter Duchin and his wife, and Nancy Collins, who said she was attending personally rather than covering the wedding. The crowd outside and the photographers inside made celebrity visible, but the diary also records casual conversations and the labor of moving from one group to another.

Grace Jones drew attention again when she began dancing with a little boy and people stopped to watch, a moment Warhol described as cinematic. Later she spoke with Arnold Schwarzenegger about what to do concerning Dolph, whom she said was sleeping with her girlfriends. Warhol advised her to marry Dolph briefly because it would make a spectacular wedding, adding that he often gave her the wrong advice. The exchange is not a revelation about the marriage being celebrated; instead, it shows how the event’s spectacle became a setting for other relationships and private concerns to surface.

The diary’s account ultimately treats the wedding as both an intimate family occasion and a public image in the making. Warhol’s drawings were delivered to the house, a portrait had already been given to the Shrivers, and the guests’ cameras competed with the family photographer’s control. Ceremony, gift, performance, and publicity remain intertwined in his record of the day.