Paige

Paige is a recurring presence in The Andy Warhol Diaries as both a colleague in Andy Warhol’s working world and a friend whose attentiveness could turn into hurt when she felt overlooked. She helps arrange dinners and manage advertiser relationships, but the diary also records more intimate exchanges: a quarrel over a Paris trip, a period of estrangement, and, later, soup and bread brought to Andy when he was unwell. Together these episodes show a relationship sustained by practical cooperation and personal expectation, without resolving into a simple account of either workplace friendship or private intimacy.

A Colleague in Andy’s Social and Working World

Paige appears in the diary as someone connected to the office and its advertisers, and as a partner in organizing social events. In October 1985, she and Andy decided to hold blind-date dinners: the scheme could introduce them to new people while entertaining advertisers. Paige was to arrange a Ford model as Andy’s date, while Tama Janowitz would meet Dr. Bernsohn. The plan made social life serve several purposes at once—company, introductions, and the cultivation of professional contacts.

The dinner also showed Paige’s role in bringing people together. At the gathering at Mr. Chow’s, she had found a Columbia student as Andy’s date. Andy disliked him immediately, but the episode still places Paige in the position of helping assemble the occasion and supply its participants. Andy’s own reason for staging the dinner was less purely social: he hoped Tama would write about him. The event therefore joined Paige’s practical matchmaking to Andy’s interest in being material for a writer, a mixture of sociability and self-presentation characteristic of their shared world.

Paige’s involvement was not limited to a single planned dinner. At Sam Bolton’s birthday gathering at The Odeon in April 1986, she brought advertisers, helping turn a personal celebration into an occasion that also accommodated business. The evening had been preceded by tension between her and Andy, but it became enjoyable rather than strained. Paige’s work and friendship were not neatly separated in these accounts: the same office connections that shaped her responsibilities also entered the couple’s social arrangements.

Attention, Disappointment, and Reconciliation

The diary makes clear that Paige expected a degree of consideration from Andy beyond what a purely professional relationship would imply. In April 1986, she was angry that he had not called while he was in Europe. She also believed he had left open the possibility that she would join a Paris trip, only for Chris Makos to go instead. Andy explained the practical reasoning behind the decision: Fred Hughes did not want the additional work that would have meant arranging a suitable hotel for Paige, collecting her, and including her in dinners and advertiser meetings. The logistical explanation did not erase the hurt. Paige had understood the possibility as a commitment, while Andy described a decision shaped by the inconvenience of the trip.

Their disagreement affected the ordinary business of the office. Paige initially told Andy she was too busy to talk, and when she encountered him with Jean-Michel Basquiat, the atmosphere was tense. She nevertheless agreed to organize the dinner for Sam Bolton’s birthday, though she said she would not attend and left work early. After someone at the office explained her grievance to Andy, the two made up. The episode ends in reconciliation, but not in a dismissal of the underlying expectation: Andy noted that Paige became emotional about him, while her complaint centered on the care and reciprocity she felt she had shown him.

A month later, a conversation with Tama Janowitz renewed Andy’s uncertainty about Paige’s feelings. At another blind-date business dinner, Tama asked him about children and marriage, then suggested that the subject might be too personal to pursue. Andy wondered whether Tama had put such ideas into Paige’s head, but also considered that Tama might be speaking for herself. He did not settle on an explanation. In May he was avoiding Paige because the conversation had made him feel strange; by July he wrote that she still seemed angry and that she might now be living her own life. His response—that this was better—registers distance as a possible relief, but also marks a change from the earlier effort to repair their quarrel.

Everyday Friction and Acts of Care

Paige’s closeness to Andy could make small office encounters unusually charged. In October 1985, a woman brought chocolates to the office, apparently expecting the staff to enjoy them after Paige had said they liked chocolate. Paige refused to eat any, despite Andy urging her to try one; she laughed and shrieked as she continued to decline. Andy ate several pieces, then took the chocolates upstairs. When Paige later came asking for some, he refused to give them to her. The exchange is playful but pointed: an advertiser’s gift becomes a minor contest between two people whose familiarity permits teasing and retaliation in the middle of office life.

Andy also recorded advice from Fred Hughes that he should not become so involved with people from the office. The remark gives the chocolate quarrel a broader context: colleagues were not only coworkers, and the closeness that made their interactions lively could make boundaries difficult. The diary does not establish a formal resolution to that tension; instead, it preserves the successive moments in which work and personal feeling overlap.

By January 1987, the diary offers a different measure of Paige’s involvement. When Andy was unwell, she brought him soup, bread, and dessert from Café Condotti. He praised her energy and her habit of going out of her way for other people, distinguishing her generosity from what he described as Chris Makos’s more self-directed care. The gesture contrasts with the earlier complaints and awkwardness without canceling them. Paige’s attentiveness was not merely a feature of event planning: in this instance it took the direct, domestic form of bringing food to someone who was ill.

A Relationship Seen Through an Edited Diary

Paige’s portrait is conveyed largely through Andy’s recollections and judgments rather than through an independent account of her inner life. Pat Hackett explains that the diary began as a sketchy log of office visitors, evening events, and expenses, then became Andy’s own daily narrative after he and Hackett agreed that he would report his activities himself. Their weekday morning calls could last one or two hours; Hackett took notes and typed the entries, while weekend events were recounted together on Monday. The published voice is therefore intimate but mediated: it records Andy’s perspective through a process of conversation and transcription.

That process also shaped what readers can know about Paige. Hackett says the original diary ran to 20,000 pages and that publication required cutting whole days, parts of days, and many names. The resulting account is not a complete record of every interaction, and Paige’s appearances cannot be treated as a full biography or as her own testimony. Within those limits, her recurring presence is significant: she helps make Andy’s social and professional arrangements happen, challenges him when she feels excluded, withdraws when hurt, and returns in gestures of practical kindness. The diary’s fragments preserve a relationship whose closeness is visible precisely because it repeatedly crosses the boundary between the office and personal life.