The opening of Diana Vreeland’s Russian-themed exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art was presented in Andy Warhol’s diary as both a major museum occasion and an evening of unusually personal social encounters. The formal dinner, reached in a procession of limousines, provided a grand public setting; around it, flirtation, jokes, fashion, and private exchanges kept interrupting the ceremony.

The evening’s arrangements

The gathering took place on the evening after Monday, December 6, 1976, when Freddy Eberstadt invited Warhol to an event at La Grenouille. Warhol said he already had a date with Bianca Jagger and asked whether he could bring her; Eberstadt agreed. On the night itself, Warhol left the office early to dress formally and dropped Catherine Guinness off before walking to Halston’s home. Victor had told him there would be room at Halston’s table for the group attending the museum opening.

The dinner was exceptionally large by the museum’s standards: Warhol described it as the biggest such occasion the institution had held. The party travelled to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in four limousines. When Diana Vreeland came through, the assembled guests kissed her, turning the opening into a personal welcome as well as a formal public event.

Fashion, introductions, and social comedy

Before the museum, Warhol encountered Aly, Mrs. Henry J. Kaiser, at Halston’s home. She wore a blue-green Halston outfit with emeralds and appeared interested in him. Halston encouraged Warhol to take her upstairs to see the portraits he had made of Halston. After that visit, Aly lost interest, a small reversal that Warhol rendered with self-mocking brevity. Later, he spoke with her at the dinner and learned that she lived at United Nations Plaza and was a friend of Brigid Berlin’s mother, Honey Berlin.

The guests’ clothing and appearance supplied a parallel procession to the limousines. Barbara Allen was the only woman in the group not wearing Halston; she wore an off-the-shoulder Christian Dior dress bought during a Paris shopping trip the previous month, when Philip Niarchos was buying. Marisa Berenson arrived with her hair piled to one side in a style Warhol likened to that of an old-time movie star. Bianca Jagger brought the purple fox she had been wearing in recent weeks. These specific details make fashion not background decoration but a means by which the diary records distinction, repetition, and social recognition.

The evening’s polished arrangements were repeatedly punctured by jokes and gestures. In the garage, Victor showed Warhol his latest artwork: Mona Lisas dressed in Halston designs. Warhol found the idea funny and encouraged him. At the table, Bianca’s date, Joe Eula, shook hands with Halston and passed something into his palm; Halston responded that it had saved his life. The diary does not identify the object, leaving the exchange’s practical meaning unstated while preserving its effect as a private joke amid the formal dinner.

Private disclosures and the diary’s close

A conversation with Aly moved abruptly from social introductions to sexual candor. She said she was looking for a sexual partner; Warhol replied that New York was the wrong town because everyone was gay. Aly said that did not matter and described having had good luck there. She also recounted an incident at the Berlin home: when Dick Berlin, then senile, approached a mirror and tried to shake hands with his reflection, she recognized what was happening and offered her own hand for him to shake. The anecdote places care and cognitive decline inside the same society gathering that otherwise dwells on clothes and flirtation.

The most intimate gesture came at the dinner table. Bianca Jagger took off her panties and passed them to Warhol. He pretended to smell them, then tucked them into his handkerchief pocket; he recorded that he still had them. The episode gives the account its private, almost talismanic ending: the grand museum occasion concludes not with a description of the exhibition but with a concealed object retained by the diarist. That shift from public ceremony to personal possession captures the diary’s characteristic attention to the small exchange that survives the spectacle.