Maura Moynihan

Maura Moynihan is presented in Andy Warhol’s diaries as both a working colleague at Interview and the center of several unfinished creative ideas. She interviews actors alongside Warhol, works at the New York Post, and becomes the subject of tapes for a musical that shifts from Runaway to Music Hotel. Her two boyfriends, their shared band history, and the crowded building where they live give Warhol material for a love-story premise; the diaries, however, record plans and conversations rather than a completed work. Maura’s appearances also reveal how closely the magazine’s professional world and Warhol’s habit of turning people into images and projects could overlap.

Interview and the Public Image

Maura’s work with Interview places her within a magazine that had become a prominent source of new faces and celebrity encounters. Warhol’s account of the magazine describes its growing circulation and glamorous reputation, with cover interviews and photographic features helping attract people who wanted to appear in print. Maura participates in that editorial world as an interviewer, including in conversations conducted with Warhol. The diary offers glimpses of the labor behind such encounters rather than a full account of her job or responsibilities.

In May 1981, Maura told Warhol that she loved her Interview cover, which had been designed by Richard Bernstein. She particularly liked that it did not look like her. The comment captures a tension central to the magazine’s portrait culture: a cover could please its subject precisely by transforming her appearance. In Warhol’s wider account of portrait-making, photographic selection and cosmetic alteration were deliberate parts of producing an image. Maura’s response records her own pleasure in the distance between the published likeness and her familiar self, rather than treating the cover as a straightforward likeness.

Her interviewing work could also involve negotiating the gap between public performance and private behavior. In August 1978, Warhol described interviewing Shaun Cassidy at the Plaza, where Cassidy initially gave clean, predictable answers because his fans were young. Warhol noted that Cassidy’s manner changed as they passed screaming fans in the lobby and again when the limousine arrived. The account then follows a separate photographic session and a later backstage encounter; it does not establish that Maura was present at those moments. Such scenes provide context for the celebrity-interview environment in which Maura worked, where a polished public persona could shift with the audience and setting.

Work, Home, and the Two Boyfriends

In 1981, Maura told Warhol she had left a band in which both of the young men she liked were members. One was straight and one bisexual; she wanted both, and the two men were best friends who were fighting over her. Warhol’s diary records this as the situation she described, not as a settled relationship arrangement. The men’s band and their rivalry became the starting point for his interest in making a musical around her.

Maura lived at Louise Westergaard’s home, where Westergaard produced with Sondra Gilman. In exchange for a place to live, Maura helped care for the children and had to get up early to get them off to school. Warhol’s account of visiting the boyfriends’ building contrasts this domestic responsibility with the noisy, improvised setting he imagined for a stage work. He and Maura went there to record dialogue, climbed several floors, and encountered musicians who identified themselves by their band names when doors opened. The residents paid $480 a month for small rooms, while roughly sixty rock bands occupied the building. Warhol thought its crowded corridors and constant noise could provide the setting for a story about which boyfriend Maura would choose.

The visit also included an ordinary, intimate detail: the straight boyfriend asked Maura whether he could go home with her, she agreed, and the two kissed repeatedly. The diary’s attention to the exchange makes Maura’s relationships more than a premise for a musical, while still keeping them within Warhol’s observing and recording perspective. He also told the bisexual boyfriend he would try to get him David Bowie, after the man said he would leave Maura if Warhol could arrange it. The episode shows how celebrity access, romantic bargaining, and creative ambition could converge in the same conversation.

From Runaway to Music Hotel

Warhol initially called the proposed Broadway musical Runaway. He taped Maura for dialogue and imagined placing the love story in the musicians’ building, with the plot turning on her choice between the two men. The tapes supplied material, but the project remained tentative. When Warhol read them, he found them uninteresting, while Brigid Berlin thought they were; he speculated that the young men took hallucinogenic drugs, including acid and magic mushrooms. That remark records his suspicion, not confirmed information about the boyfriends or the contents of the tapes.

By March 1982, the project had acquired another title: Music Hotel. Warhol invited Maura to join him at Radio City Music Hall during its fiftieth-anniversary evening, partly so they could continue working on the tapes about her and her boyfriends. The event itself bored him, and Maura’s boyfriends were not home when she called them. By then, she was working at the Post, earning $100 a day for about three days a week, reading and editing material. Her paid work and Warhol’s proposed musical thus appear side by side, but the diaries do not say that the project advanced beyond the taped material or establish what happened to it afterward.

Interviews and Changing Appraisals

Maura continued to interview people with Warhol. In June 1983, she and Warhol interviewed Timothy Hutton after he had finished Daniel. Warhol perceived that Maura was not especially attracted to Hutton, while he himself found the actor appealing. The contrast is a small but revealing instance of their different responses to the same interview subject; the diary offers no further account of Maura’s view beyond that observation.

A month later, Maura picked Warhol up so they could interview Richard Gere at Astoria Studios, where Cotton Club was being filmed. She had read Stanislavsky, and the pair anticipated that the interview might be difficult. They walked through the sets before finding Gere watching old films on television. Warhol described Gere as uncooperative and recounted that he claimed his first movie was Days of Heaven, a statement Warhol knew was incorrect. The more substantial answer concerned Gere’s time filming The Honorary Consul: he had been hospitalized in Mexico with dysentery and connected to an intravenous line, returning to work when he could. Gere liked Maura, but her friendship with Silvinha complicated the situation. The entry leaves that complication unexplained, preserving it as a limit in the record rather than resolving it.

Warhol’s diary therefore depicts Maura less through a continuous personal biography than through recurring scenes of work and observation: an Interview cover she liked because it altered her likeness, tapes intended for a musical, a band-building visit, and interviews in which professional composure met attraction, resistance, or personal complication. She is at once a colleague who helps gather material and a person whose relationships become material themselves. The proposed musical never receives a recorded ending in these entries, leaving Maura’s clearest arc as a movement between her own working life and the unfinished stories others tried to make from it.