New Jersey Generals

The New Jersey Generals enter Andy Warhol’s diary through a cheerleading tryout rather than a game: on January 15, 1984, Warhol judged the final round in the basement of Trump Tower, the team’s owner Donald Trump’s building. The scene gives the organization a distinctly social and commercial presence, filtered through an event where young women performed for unpaid roles and prominent judges watched them.

Identity and Setting

The New Jersey Generals were the football team Donald Trump had bought. The diary’s account focuses on the team’s cheerleading rather than its players, matches, or administration. Its basement tryout at Trump Tower becomes the setting for Warhol’s brief involvement with the organization: he was expected at noon but arrived around 2 p.m., after going to church and taking his time.

Warhol explained his reluctance through a personal grievance: he still disliked the Trumps because they had not bought the paintings he made of Trump Tower. The team’s appearance in the diary is therefore colored from the outset by the overlap between its owner’s business, Warhol’s art, and his social judgments.

The Final Cheerleading Tryout

By the time Warhol arrived, the judges had reached the fiftieth contestant, with twenty girls still to come. Another man had been filling in; he handed Warhol his scoring pad, and Warhol took over despite not knowing how to score. He found the contestants difficult to distinguish in the unlit space: when a camera flashed on one of them, she briefly looked good, but otherwise none seemed special to him. The passing camera light, rather than a sustained spotlight, supplied the scene’s momentary glamour.

Other judges included LeRoy Neiman, who said he voted for anyone who could kick. Ivana favored girls who looked like her. The contestants danced to Michael Jackson’s Billie Jean so many times—seventy, by Warhol’s count—that the repeated song became part of the ordeal of watching. The tryout thus comes across as both an evaluation and a repetitive spectacle, with different judges applying their own quick, personal standards.

Unpaid Performance and Social Commentary

The cheerleading was unpaid and presented as something the girls would do for fun. Warhol responded with a cynical account of the economic and romantic stakes: he thought they would need to find a football player or leave with nothing. He also recorded the contradictory gossip around Ivana: someone warned her that she could lose her husband to the young contestants, while a later report claimed that Donald Trump fooled around with all of them. These remain remarks and hearsay in the diary, not established facts about the team or its owner.

Warhol noted the range of the contestants’ bodies, contrasting women with broad hips and narrow waists with boyish figures and very thin legs. He then set the young contestants against Ivana, whom he described as a sophisticated lady, and imagined that they might someday become like her if they married well. That comparison makes the tryout more than an account of athletic judging: it exposes the gendered assumptions through which the diary views beauty, marriage, money, and the prospects attached to an unpaid performance role.