Mikhail Baryshnikov

Mikhail Baryshnikov emerges in the diaries not through a continuous biography but through a sequence of sharply observed encounters: as a magnet for attention in a crowded elevator, a long and animated viewer of Liza Minnelli’s portrait, and a star whose appearance could transform a ballet audience’s response. These scenes make his celebrity tangible. It gathers around his body, his movement, and the stories he tells, while the diary records the difference between the public figure and the person glimpsed in conversation.

A Star in the Crowd

At a screening of Pretty Baby, Mikhail Baryshnikov became the center of an impromptu social scene. Barbara Allen had invited the diarist to accompany her, but after meeting him she chose to sit beside him instead. The screening itself brought together affluent and famous guests, including Brooke Shields, Mariel Hemingway, and Milos Forman. Its most revealing after-scene came in the elevator: Mikhail Baryshnikov, Barbara Allen, Milos Forman, Frank Yablans, and Diane von Furstenberg descended together, turning an ordinary ride into a compact display of celebrity and social access.

The diarist’s attention moved between the group’s status and the details of Mikhail Baryshnikov’s appearance. His physique impressed; his voluminous hairstyle drew amused criticism, with the diarist wishing it were cut in a way that seemed more conventionally masculine. The moment records both admiration and the impulse to judge a star’s image. His body could be praised as exceptional, while his hair was treated as a styling choice that did not match the observer’s expectations. In this brief encounter, celebrity appears less like a fixed identity than a surface continually interpreted by other people.

The Portrait and the Stories Behind It

A different encounter began when Halston told the diarist that Liza Minnelli and Mikhail Baryshnikov wanted to see Minnelli’s portrait. They left Studio 54 for Olympic Tower, where the pair admired the paintings. Mikhail Baryshnikov stayed with the subject for hours, talking about the portraits rather than simply passing through as a famous guest. The diary therefore places him in the role of an attentive viewer: his presence mattered socially, but so did the sustained interest he gave to the work.

The diaries elsewhere describe the labor behind Andy Warhol’s portraits. He took about sixty Polaroids of a sitter, selected a smaller group for screen printing, then chose and cosmetically adjusted an image before it was enlarged and transferred to canvas. Assistants prepared flesh-toned backgrounds, and slight misalignments between painted color and screened photographic detail produced the portraits’ characteristic shifting effect. This process supplies context for the portrait encounter without establishing that Mikhail Baryshnikov himself sat for one. At Olympic Tower, the portrait the group had come to see was Minnelli’s. Mikhail Baryshnikov’s documented connection to the scene is his sustained response to the paintings and his conversation about art.

During that visit, he also described an early education in artistic interests. He recalled that his mother had encouraged him, from the age of eight, to take an interest in art, music, makeup, and fashion design; he remembered having Harper’s Bazaar around and knowing about its art director, Brodovitch. The account broadens the image of the dancer beyond performance. In his recollection, the arts and the visual presentation of the body belonged to the same childhood world. The diary preserves this as his account, not as an independently developed history, and the remembered details make the long conversation about portraits feel connected to an interest that began well before this New York gathering.

Love, Memory, and Defection

The conversation also touched on Chrissy Berlin, whom the diarist identified as someone who had helped Mikhail Baryshnikov defect. He played down the significance of their connection, describing her as someone he had liked only briefly and generalizing that his interest in women tended to be short-lived. His answer shifts the account from public reputation to the private explanations he offered for past relationships. It also shows how quickly an intimate question could enter a social conversation about art and celebrity.

He described Makarova as his first love. In his telling, she left her husband for him and later changed her mind and returned to her husband. When she married again the previous year, he attended her wedding in San Francisco as best man, where she married a wealthy man. He said he felt nothing at the event. The sequence carries its own contrast: an earlier relationship remembered as first love ends in a later encounter that he presents as emotionally empty. The diary does not resolve the difference between the intensity of the past and his claim about the wedding; it preserves both within the same conversation.

Performance and the Making of a Star

At a ballet performance, Mikhail Baryshnikov’s absence and presence were both legible. Godunov had sprained his back and could not perform, while Gelsey Kirkland impressed the diarist. Mikhail Baryshnikov then danced Push Comes to Shove, and the audience responded enthusiastically. The diary attributes that reception in part to his status: the spectators loved the number because he was a star. It is a concise account of performance as an encounter between movement and expectation. The audience watched a dancer, but it also recognized the figure whose fame shaped how the performance was received.

Afterward, at a free dinner across the way, Anna Sosenko spoke with the diarist about signing copies of Interview and warned that the signature would lose its value if signed too often. That exchange places Mikhail Baryshnikov’s performance within a wider world where recognition could circulate through dance, photographs, magazines, and autographs. A separate caption identifies him in a photograph taken by Andy Warhol, another small trace of his presence within that visual culture. Together, the entries do not offer a complete portrait of his life; they show how celebrity was made visible in particular rooms, images, conversations, and performances—and how the diary’s close attention could shift from the crowd’s acclaim to the chosen details of a star’s face, hair, and remembered loves.