Radio City Music Hall recurs in the diary as a place where a concert is only one part of the night: celebrity encounters, backstage movement, and the company surrounding a performance shape each visit. Across the recorded episodes, the venue hosts the Beach Boys, Madonna, and Johnny Mathis, while the narrator’s responses range from social unease to delight and boredom.

Concerts and company

In March 1979, an art-interested agent or manager of the Beach Boys invited the narrator to their concert at Radio City, and the narrator asked Tom Cashin to come along. A phone call seemed at first to be from Dennis Wilson, but the caller turned out to be Dennis Hopper; once he learned the Beach Boys were in town, he was directed to meet them at the hall. The narrator began the concert among the band’s children beside the stage, then crossed to Dennis Hopper, who was joking around with girlfriends and wives whom the diary wryly identified as groupies in their late thirties.

The visit did not end with the performance. The narrator slipped out at intermission and later heard that a stage announcement had identified the narrator as being in attendance, prompting the anxious thought that the band must now hate the narrator. The group was headed to a dinner Salvador Dalí had organized for about forty people, then to a party for Pelé at Xenon. Radio City thus appears as one stop in a tightly linked evening of music, recognition, dinner, and nightlife.

Madonna’s performance and after-hours scene

In June 1985, the narrator went to Radio City Music Hall for Madonna’s concert and found the show simple, sexy, and excellent. The diary also registered Madonna’s appearance: she seemed pretty and thinner. After the concert, the narrator went downstairs to a private party, where Madonna appeared with Jean-Michel Basquiat, apparently having gone backstage. She mentioned that she might go to the Palladium and might attend Keith Haring’s dinner.

The night continued at a gathering at Iso, on Eleventh Street and Second Avenue, where Madonna arrived in a truck and was seated beside the narrator. Guests teased her about her false eyelashes, comparing their size to Louise Nevelson’s; the waiters were so thrilled that they were on the floor, and Madonna drew phallic pictures on Futura’s pants. The concert at Radio City therefore opens onto a sequence of informal encounters in which the star moves from stage to private party to another social gathering.

A contrasting night at the hall

The later diary records a very different response to Radio City. Before seeing Johnny Mathis, the narrator went to a flea market with Stuart Pivar, who collected old clothes and books, including a Museum of Modern Art catalog from 1962. The narrator had also arranged tickets for Alba Clemente and John Reinhold. Paige Powell arrived at the narrator’s door with pineapples after the narrator had already locked up, leaving them in the hallway, and joined the outing with conspicuous enthusiasm.

At Radio City, Henry Mancini opened with two hours of familiar hits, which the narrator found intensely boring; Paige, by contrast, kept insisting that it was great. The mismatch sharpened the narrator’s irritation. Johnny Mathis eventually came on, and the narrator admired that his voice had endured, while noticing how much the sound depended on how the microphone was held. Mathis returned for an encore before the group left. In this account, the hall is not a guaranteed source of glamour: the same venue that frames an exhilarating Madonna show can also hold a long, tedious wait before a singer the narrator genuinely appreciates.

A recurring performance setting

The entries define Radio City less through architectural description than through what happens around its performances. A concert draws people together, but the diary keeps tracking who arrives, where they move, what happens after the show, and whether the experience meets expectation. The Beach Boys episode turns on an unexpected caller and the social consequences of being publicly announced; Madonna’s concert spills into a chain of intimate, comic encounters; Johnny Mathis’s appearance emerges from a night dominated by boredom and impatience.

Together, these visits make Radio City a recurring junction between mass entertainment and the narrator’s celebrity-filled social world. Its significance lies in that contrast: a famous stage may provide a memorable performance, but the surrounding company, backstage access, and the narrator’s shifting judgment make each visit a different kind of event.