Nancy Reagan

Nancy Reagan enters Andy Warhol’s diary through a planned Interview magazine cover interview that turns from a prospect he doubts will happen into a meeting at the White House. The account presents her through a tightly bounded encounter: a discussion of drug rehabilitation, an assistant taking notes, small gifts, and Warhol’s mounting frustration over the interview’s setting and hospitality. Its significance lies as much in that mismatch of expectations as in the limited facts it provides about Nancy Reagan herself; the episode is Warhol’s recorded perspective, not a comprehensive portrait or an independent account of her intentions.

The proposed interview

On September 16, 1981, Warhol recorded that Bob Colacello was getting closer to arranging an interview with Nancy Reagan. Warhol doubted it would happen and judged her, from his own perspective, as too old-fashioned for the magazine’s needs. He wondered what could be asked about her movie career, but the diary does not establish whether that subject was raised or what Nancy Reagan thought about it. The entry chiefly captures Warhol’s skepticism before the meeting, rather than a judgment based on any personal encounter with her.

By October, the interview was being arranged as a cover assignment. Before the trip, Colacello warned Warhol not to ask Nancy Reagan questions of an intimate or private nature. Warhol was taken aback by the warning. The exchange shows that the interview’s boundaries were a point of tension even before the White House meeting began. Colacello also criticized Warhol’s appearance during his modeling work, saying it made his own job harder when Warhol looked foolish. Warhol said he did not care, while Colacello insisted that he did. The diary records this disagreement immediately before the trip, placing Warhol’s irritation with his colleague alongside his resistance to being instructed about how to conduct the interview.

The White House meeting

On October 15, Warhol and Colacello arrived early at the White House. Nancy Reagan came into the room where they were waiting, accompanied by Doria. A waiter brought four glasses of water, and the conversation turned to drug rehabilitation. Warhol characterized the discussion as boring, but the entry offers no further account of Nancy Reagan’s views or the specific points raised. It records the subject and Warhol’s reaction, not a transcript of the exchange.

Nancy Reagan had an assistant present who took notes. The party said it was not making its own tape of the interview, though Warhol suspected otherwise. Colacello brought a tape recorder, Warhol brought his own, and Warhol took four photographs. These details place the encounter between a formal interview and a managed public appearance: the participants were recording and documenting it, while the diary leaves the spoken conversation largely undescribed.

The account also notes two practical gifts. Nancy Reagan gave Doria a piece of Tupperware and three boxes of socks for Ronald Reagan. She told the visitors that the Reagans planned to spend Christmas at the White House, explaining that nobody ever stayed there. At 4:30 the interview ended. Nancy Reagan and Doria continued talking for about fifteen minutes while Colacello and Warhol waited to the side, after which the visitors took a cab to the airport. The brief post-interview conversation is recorded, but its subject is not.

Warhol’s response to the setting

After returning to New York, Warhol called Jon Gould at the office. When he arrived home, Brigid Berlin called to ask what kind of tea Nancy Reagan had served. The question turned Warhol’s attention back to the visit and intensified his anger. He felt that the interview could have been staged in a better room and accompanied by more formal hospitality, including the use of good china. His complaint was not simply that the meeting had been dull: he believed the occasion called for a more carefully produced setting. The diary records this expectation as Warhol’s own, without establishing what arrangements Nancy Reagan had considered or why the interview took place in that room.

The next day, Berlin was transcribing the interview and told Warhol it was awful. Warhol and Berlin then asked Doria whether it had been peculiar that they had not been offered tea or treated differently from ordinary visitors. Doria’s explanation shifted attention from Nancy Reagan to her secretary: she thought the secretary was the real problem and believed Nancy Reagan might have intended to conduct the interview upstairs before the secretary changed the plan. This remains Doria’s interpretation, as reported by Warhol; the diary does not confirm that Nancy Reagan had made such an arrangement. The contrasting accounts leave the episode unresolved: Warhol experienced the meeting as poorly staged, while Doria attributed the disappointing reception to an intermediary.

Diary perspective and limits

The episode’s shape reflects the diary’s method. Warhol and Pat Hackett spoke by telephone on weekday mornings, often for one or two hours, as Hackett recorded his activities and expenses. She took notes during their conversations and typed the entries soon afterward; when either was away, they used calls, written notes, or occasionally a tape recording. Warhol could also add or correct details in later conversations. The account of Nancy Reagan thus reaches the reader through a recurring process of oral recollection and transcription, rather than through an unmediated record of the interview.

Hackett explained that the published diary removed the interpersonal dimension of her conversations with Warhol and recast the few retained personal references in the third person. Her editorial aim was to preserve the casual intimacy of the morning calls while making the reader feel like the person listening at the other end of the phone. That framing matters here: the entries preserve Warhol’s immediate skepticism, his irritation over the interview rules, and his later dissatisfaction with the reception, but they do not supply Nancy Reagan’s private account of the encounter. The result is a sharply particular view of a public figure, defined less by biography than by the expectations the meeting failed, in Warhol’s eyes, to fulfill.