Nell Campbell

Nell Campbell is presented in Andy Warhol’s diaries as the hostess of Nell’s, a new restaurant and nightclub on 14th Street, and as a figure whose judgments and availability mattered to Warhol’s social and promotional world. Her appearances connect the practical choices behind a downtown venue—its admission price, layout, and clientele—to the diary’s recurring attention to access, reputation, and publicity.

Role and Setting

Warhol encountered Nell Campbell in connection with Nell’s, which Keith McNally was opening near 14th Street and Eighth Avenue. The club was conceived with a disco downstairs and a quieter upstairs area; Campbell, known from The Rocky Horror Picture Show, was to serve as its hostess. The combination gave her a visible role in a venture that aimed to draw the downtown crowd while also making its hospitality and identity legible to a broader nightlife public.

Before the opening, McNally asked Warhol to assess the food and consider whether admission should cost fifteen dollars or five. Warhol advised that downtown patrons would resent a cover charge and that the club would become a disco rather than a private club or a more elevated kind of gathering. He also thought the downstairs looked like a fire hazard. These comments record the club as a space still being negotiated: its design and pricing could shape not only who came in, but what sort of place it would become.

Opening Night and Public Persona

At Nell’s opening, Campbell welcomed Warhol and told him he would be the only person allowed to take photographs. The permission positioned him as a privileged observer, though he did not want to move around the room taking pictures. Her gesture suggests a personal accommodation within the club’s public launch, while also underscoring that access to images and to the event itself was being managed.

The opening drew a substantial gathering of people associated with the Odeon and the downtown art and social scene. Rupert Everett arrived with a costar; Bianca, Lauren Hutton, Julian Schnabel, and others were there, while Paige went downstairs to dance with Benjamin Liu, Schnabel, and Alba Clemente. Peter Beard arrived with an entourage. Campbell’s role as hostess placed her at the center of a busy room in which familiar names and new arrivals helped establish the club’s social standing.

The admission price settled at five dollars. Warhol wondered whether downtown patrons, accustomed to getting in free, would object. His earlier concern that a fee might define the place differently therefore remained relevant at the opening: Nell’s was testing whether a modest charge could coexist with the informal downtown scene it hoped to attract. Warhol also noticed Campbell and Steven Greenberg repeatedly carrying hairbrushes and brushing their hair. The small, shared gesture became part of his portrait of the night’s performed public style, alongside his mixed impression of Greenberg as generous but difficult for him to read.

Social Ties and Reputation

Campbell’s connection with Warhol was both social and practical. He was asked for advice about Nell’s before it opened, and at the opening she granted him unusual freedom to photograph. Later, Sam relayed gossip that Fred Hughes had written Campbell an apologetic letter after an embarrassing incident at the club. The diary offers this only as secondhand talk, not as an account from Campbell herself; its significance is that Nell’s had become a setting in which the conduct and reputations of Warhol’s circle circulated as readily as its nightlife.

The Television Invitation

Warhol later asked Campbell to emcee an episode of his television show. When he first called, she said she was speaking on another line with Australia and would call back, but she did not. When he raised the invitation again, she said she would have to check with her partners. Warhol interpreted the delay as hesitation about committing herself and compared it to what he saw as a reluctance to give away exposure, though that judgment belongs to his perspective rather than to any explanation Campbell supplied.

The exchange leaves the invitation unresolved: the diary records neither a definite acceptance nor a final refusal. It does, however, show Warhol treating television exposure as an offer with practical value, and Campbell weighing a public appearance that involved her partners as well as herself. Across these brief encounters, she emerges less through private biography than through the roles she occupied—as hostess, adviser to a new venue, and potential on-camera participant—in a social world where access and visibility were continually negotiated.