Paulette Goddard

Paulette Goddard is a recurring presence in Andy Warhol’s diaries, where the former screen star’s jewels, clothes, wit, grievances, and sudden displays of distress register the shifting moods of a tightly observed social world. She arrives as a figure whose fame and history precede her, but the entries also catch her in less polished moments: negotiating a book’s worth, objecting to an apartment’s decoration, and asking to hide at a dinner as political upheaval shadows the room. Her appearances make celebrity tangible not as a fixed image but as a performance that can turn, within a single evening, from sparkle to irritation or alarm.

Identity and Social Presence

At the opening at Castelli Gallery on January 11, 1977, Goddard entered a gathering that had begun with an empty room and champagne around the bar before the crowd filled in. She asked Warhol to make her a Hammer & Sickle pin, a request that joined the evening’s fashionable sociability to the exhibition’s defining image. Her presence was part of the opening’s social spectacle, yet the diary also records Warhol’s disappointment that Elizabeth Taylor had not come. Halston brought a small painting Taylor had made for him to give Warhol, a substitute that made Goddard’s arrival one element in a larger constellation of celebrity and expectation.

The next day, Goddard met Warhol and Jamie Wyeth at Elaine’s wearing her jewelry and joking about what might have been had Warhol played his cards better: the jewels, she suggested, could have been his. The remark combines teasing intimacy with an awareness of their value. Warhol’s mind turned from the joke to the hours he and Bob Colacello had spent recording her life for a proposed book. He imagined the stories she might tell as a Hollywood star married to Charlie Chaplin, Burgess Meredith, and Erich Maria Remarque. In that contrast, she is both a witty companion in the present and the keeper of a past whose stories Warhol had hoped to capture.

Fashion, Money, and Self-Presentation

Goddard’s clothing and jewelry recur as concrete markers of how she presented herself. In January 1978, Warhol picked her up at the Ritz Towers for an evening at the Waldorf Towers. Asked about a new Halston outfit, she said she had returned it because it made her look too fat; instead, she wore a Yves Saint Laurent dress that she knew suited her, with rubies that Warhol estimated at about a million dollars. Her selection reads as both a practical judgment about appearance and a display of extraordinary wealth. When their car diverted around anti-Iranian demonstrators, a stranger asked Warhol about torture in Iran. Goddard answered by turning the accusation into a complaint about her own decorator, Valerian Rybar, who had been working on her apartment for a year.

The same combination of luxury and dissatisfaction surfaces elsewhere. At a party, she told Warhol that she had sold no rugs at Parke Bernet because, in her view, dealers had joined against her; he thought they probably had, adding that the rugs were excellent. The diary does not independently establish what happened at the sale, but it preserves her account and Warhol’s sympathetic response. At another event, she wore rubies he valued at roughly three million dollars and said she wanted to sell some of her paintings. Her wealth is visible, but so is her attention to how objects are priced, sold, chosen, and made to reflect on their owner.

Wit, Irritation, and Relationships

Goddard’s humor often arrives as a quick counterattack. At the Waldorf Towers dinner, while her apartment was still under renovation, she answered a question about torture in Iran by comparing it to what she felt Rybar was doing to her in New York. Another guest whose apartment was also being decorated by him reassured her that the work had taken even longer in her case. The exchange turns a public political question into a private complaint, while also showing Goddard’s readiness to make her own predicament the sharper punchline.

Her relationship with Warhol’s circle was not confined to ceremonial appearances. At Elaine’s, Warhol observed that she seemed to be falling in love with Victor while calculating how many Halston outfits she might obtain through him. That is Warhol’s wry reading of her behavior, not an account of her own stated motive; it shows how the diary turns attraction and fashion into overlapping currencies of social life. Goddard also had a pointed history with Evelyn Keyes. After Warhol told her that Keyes admired her and had copied her hair and voice, Goddard replied that Keyes had also taken her boyfriends, including the last one, after which she dropped her. The recollection gives her admiration a competitive edge: imitation, in her telling, crossed into rivalry over men.

At a separate dinner, her place in the group was managed through arrangements as much as conversation. For a dinner honoring her at the Iranian embassy, Bob Colacello had drawn up the guest list and seating, but Goddard had determined who and what she wanted. Warhol found the company uninteresting, despite the fresh caviar, and was bored by the guest list. The episode reveals both her influence over the occasion and the limits of that influence: she could shape the dinner around her preferences, while Warhol judged the result by his own standards of social excitement.

Distress and the Public Scene

Goddard’s public composure could give way to behavior that unsettled people around her. On December 22, 1978, the Shah’s possible abdication and his son’s succession were reported in the papers as she and Warhol arrived at the Iranian embassy with Bob. Warhol described her as acting strangely and recalled her speaking about her legs being machine-gunned. When a gust of wind blew open doors during dinner, she rose and tried to leave the dining room for the buffet room, saying she wanted to hide. The evening seemed morbid to her because the Iranians were looking for new jobs. The political uncertainty was not abstract background: it entered her speech and shaped the atmosphere she perceived at the table. The diary records her alarm without establishing its cause or inviting a diagnosis.

A different kind of public discomposure appears in the account of a Cartier event. Goddard wore an immense quantity of rubies and wanted a man’s watch rather than the woman’s watch offered to her. Marion Javits, unaware that the person she was addressing was Cartier’s president, called the watches poor; when she learned his identity, she was unable to escape the awkwardness. Warhol tried to ease the moment with a joke about how memorable the evening would be for the president. Goddard’s jewelry and insistence on the watch she wanted frame a scene in which status is both performed and exposed to comic miscalculation.

Affection and Later Appearances

Warhol’s account of Goddard also records tenderness in the group around her. After Bob and Warhol took her home, Bob became sentimental and told her he loved her. Warhol joked that Bob never said the same to him. Later, after Warhol had gone to bed, Bob called to say that he loved him too, though he had never said so before. Goddard is not merely the occasion for this exchange: her presence prompts a moment in which Warhol’s joking complaint gives Bob an opening to voice affection. The diary’s comic timing carries a genuine change in what Bob is willing to say.

In December 1979, Warhol picked Goddard up in a limousine for Halston’s show. She made a striking entrance in a white fur coat; at the event, Warhol noticed Martha Graham looking old without makeup and encountered Liza Minnelli, whose miscarriage he did not know how to discuss. Minnelli told him she was all right. Goddard’s own appearance again supplies the immediate visual focus, but the diary places it among moments of aging, illness, and personal vulnerability. Across these entries, she remains sharply recognizable through her style and wit, while the record also preserves irritation, anxiety, and the social bonds formed around her. The entries do not offer a final resolution to her story; they leave her as an active, changing presence in the encounters Warhol chose to remember.