New Year's Eve celebrations

The New Year's Eve celebrations of December 31, 1978, unfold in Andy Warhol’s account as a passage from work to dinner and then to a crowded Studio 54 that remains active until morning. The entry preserves more than a party itinerary: black-eyed peas become a test of hospitality, the club’s radio broadcast turns arrivals into public spectacle, and the night’s shifting crowd seems to resist the passage of time. The diary’s own recording routine gives this scene its shape, converting a weekend that was not normally dictated in a morning call into a precise, dated record.

The diary behind the date

Before 1976, Pat Hackett kept a sketchy Factory log by collecting reports of office visitors, the previous night’s events, and Andy Warhol’s cash expenses. The aim was practical: to determine what had happened, who had been present, and what it had cost, rather than to record Warhol’s personal view. In 1976, after the filming of Bad, Hackett said she no longer wanted to work at the office. She agreed to continue writing Popism with Warhol, but not to make daily calls around the office for the log. They therefore agreed that Warhol himself would supply the daily accounts, changing the log into a personal narrative.

The weekday morning conversations that followed began around 9 a.m. and could last one or two hours, despite Warhol’s description of the task as five minutes a day. They began with ordinary conversation and questions, then moved to the previous day’s activities and cash expenses. Hackett took notes on a legal pad and typed the account while Warhol’s intonations were fresh; she later attached the loose cab and restaurant receipts to the relevant pages, which were stored in letter boxes. The close attention to expenses also served a practical purpose: the IRS had scrutinized Warhol’s business every year since its first major audit in 1972.

The diary was not normally recorded on weekends. Instead, Monday’s call covered Friday, Saturday, and Sunday in a triple session. When either participant was away, Warhol might call, read from notes scrawled on hotel stationery, or supply a cassette; whatever the arrangement, Hackett said, no day went unrecorded. The published volume is also an edited work: Hackett reduced an original 20,000 pages, cutting whole days, weeks, portions of days, and many names. She removed the private interpersonal dimension of their conversations and, in the few personal references she retained, rendered herself in the third person as PH. That process helps explain how the weekend’s events could appear as a dated entry even though the regular diary call waited until Monday.

An afternoon of work, then dinner

The celebration began with an afternoon at the office. Warhol painted backgrounds, and Walter Steding came over to help. Brigid Berlin stopped by to collect tapes. The working day sits beside, rather than outside, the festivities: on New Year’s Eve Warhol could spend the afternoon painting before moving into the evening’s social circuit.

Warhol and Jed Johnson went to dinner at Halston’s house. Catherine Guinness arrived with Tom Sullivan and Winnie; Halston had agreed to their coming as well. At dinner, Sullivan told Warhol and Guinness that he was giving them points in a movie. A reshoot was needed, he said, and someone had just supplied $150,000 to pay for it. Bianca Jagger was also there, wearing Dior. The account records these film arrangements amid descriptions of clothes, food, and company, letting business news enter the party without changing its conversational pace.

The good-luck peas and the broadcast

Diana Ross had asked Halston over the phone whether he would serve black-eyed peas at midnight, a good-luck tradition. Steve Rubell went around town to get soul food, while Halston cooked ham hocks and ribs. Guests asked Ross whether she wanted to check on the peas, knowing the idea had been hers. She took their concern as an insult and replied, “No, thank you, darling, I think I’ve checked them enough.” The small exchange gives the evening’s hospitality a comic edge: a gesture meant to be considerate becomes, in Ross’s reading, a slight.

While the group was still at Halston’s, the radio carried a broadcast live from Studio 54. The announcer called out Halston, Bianca, and Warhol as they were said to be coming through the club’s door. The party was thus already being narrated for an audience elsewhere, making the guests’ names part of the spectacle before the account describes the group going to the club themselves.

Studio 54 through morning

At Studio 54, the decorations included silver glitter spread across the floor, a trapeze performer, and white balloons. People said Robert De Niro had been there since 10 p.m. for a press party. The room’s glamour was less a static tableau than a moving search: Warhol described the night as a repeated cycle of losing and finding people. John Fairchild Jr. had a crush on Bianca Jagger, so the group looked for her, lost her, found her again, and repeatedly lost track of one another, including Warhol himself.

Warhol was sober and drank Perrier. At 7 a.m. the club was still jumping. Outside, the weather was warm, and people continued to wait to get in as if it were only 1 a.m.; what had changed was the light. That final contrast supplies the entry with its quiet measure of the night’s length. The crowd and the club seemed to continue as before, while daylight made the passage of hours unmistakable. Recorded in a diary made from long conversations, notes, and receipts, the celebration survives not as a complete social register but as a selected sequence of work, food, names, movement, and dawn.