Matt Dillon

Matt Dillon enters the diary as both a young actor under observation and a recurring presence in the narrator’s overlapping worlds of publishing, art, and celebrity. The entries track the work around him—an interview, a possible film, a Broadway play—as well as small social gestures that the narrator studies for signs of warmth or distance. Dillon’s acting potential is praised, but his career is also described as needing a timely success; the record preserves that mixture of promise and uncertainty rather than supplying a resolution.

A young actor in the interview room

On October 1, 1983, Dillon arrived at Fred Hughes’s house for an interview arranged by Maura Moynihan. He was nineteen. Maura conducted the conversation, asking the recurring questions she put to interviewees about whether they were Catholic and Irish; Dillon answered yes to both. The narrator anticipated that the resulting profile would be almost exactly the same as the interview with Brooke Shields. The scene places Dillon inside the repeatable machinery of celebrity journalism: even a particular young actor could be approached through a familiar set of questions and expected to yield a familiar feature.

The diary does not recount Dillon’s answers beyond those two confirmations, nor does it report how he reacted to the interview’s routine. Its emphasis instead falls on the format and on his age. That economy is revealing of how he first appears here: not through a detailed account of his background, but as a nineteen-year-old subject whose public image is being assembled through an interview conducted at a private house.

A possible film and an actor’s ear

In March 1984, Dillon came to lunch with Vic Ramos, the casting professional associated with Midnight Cowboy. Jean-Michel Basquiat also came by, hoping to meet Dillon after Dillon had mentioned Basquiat’s art in his interview. The lunch’s purpose remained unclear for two hours. Eventually Dillon began talking about wanting to make a movie about a filmmaker from the underground scene of the 1960s. That proposal connected his interest in a film project to the history of the very milieu in which the narrator and Ramos had moved.

Dillon wore pink shoes he said he had bought on St. Mark’s Place. He also imitated a character from Midnight Cowboy, adopting an affected accent that the narrator heard as British or somewhat like Fred Hughes performing Diana Vreeland. The narrator judged that Dillon had an ear that could make him a very good actor. The assessment is specific: it grows from a demonstration of mimicry, not simply from Dillon’s status or appearance. Ramos, meanwhile, recalled his own role in casting the party scene in Midnight Cowboy, which included Paul Morrissey, Jed Johnson, and Ultra Violet. The narrator noted being absent from that scene because he was in the hospital after being shot in the summer of 1968. Dillon’s proposed project and his performance at lunch thus brought a past film and the narrator’s own history briefly into the same conversation.

Public appearances and career anxiety

At an Area party for Vincent Spano, the narrator expected Dillon and Spano to be the main attractions. Benjamin Liu approached Dillon with the message that Andy Warhol was looking for him. Dillon answered, “Andy who?” The exchange left the narrator describing him as mumbling and looking for women. It also punctured the assumption that the narrator’s name would be enough to command recognition in a crowded social setting.

The narrator’s concern soon turned from recognition to employment. He thought Dillon needed a good movie soon and needed one badly. This was an assessment of his career prospects, not a report that Dillon had failed or lacked talent: earlier, the narrator had praised his ear for acting. The contrast between that confidence in a particular skill and anxiety about the next film gives the diary’s portrait its central tension. Dillon could seem promising in a close conversation while remaining vulnerable, in the narrator’s view, to the uncertain timing of a successful role.

At the narrator’s birthday gathering in August 1985, Keith Haring offered to take him to a softball game on Leroy Street as a birthday present. Glenn O’Brien’s team was playing against a graffiti team associated with Futura, and Dillon was playing. During the game Dillon struck out with three people on base. The narrator still called him cute, keeping personal attraction beside the unsparing detail of the failed at-bat. Wilfredo was so enthusiastic about Dillon that he carried a paperback called The Life of Matt Dillon. The book turned the actor into an object of conspicuous fandom, while the game made him briefly ordinary: a player who could fail in front of friends and spectators.

Performance, manners, and interpretation

In another entry, the narrator went to see Dillon in Boys of Winter. He judged the play’s ending too corny, arguing that its character would not really have killed his friend, and described the production as the gayest play on Broadway because it centered on men caring for one another. These are the narrator’s evaluations of the play, not statements attributed to Dillon. The review nevertheless situates the actor within a work whose emotional relationships became a subject of the narrator’s commentary.

After the performance, at the Hard Rock, Dillon introduced the narrator to his mother. The narrator compared this meeting with their previous encounter, when Dillon had given him a pat on the shoulder and a kiss; this time Dillon only patted his shoulder. The narrator wondered whether the difference reflected his mother’s presence, then offered another possible explanation: Dillon might have been rehearsing the public kiss while preparing for the play. Neither interpretation is confirmed. The moment shows how readily the diary turns a small alteration in greeting into a question about performance, privacy, and the meanings attached to a gesture. Dillon remains partly unknowable in these entries, seen through what he does and through the narrator’s explicitly tentative readings of it.