The Metropolitan Museum of Art recurs in the diary as a place where public culture and private social theater occupy the same rooms. Its exhibitions draw crowds of artists, designers, politicians, and society figures, while the narrator registers both the institution’s displays and the small, revealing gestures around them: a long fashion show, an awkward attempt to join an elegant lunch, a child’s response to a photograph, or news of a murder interrupting an opening-night dinner. Over nearly a decade, the museum becomes a changing backdrop against which glamour, historical display, and contemporary life meet.

Exhibitions and social occasions

The museum first enters this sequence through the opening of Diana Vreeland’s Russian-themed exhibition. In December 1976, the narrator joined a party traveling there from Halston’s home, where the evening had already taken the form of a carefully assembled social occasion. Halston’s guests and associates gathered before departing in four limousines; among them were Bianca Jagger, Marisa Berenson, and Mrs. Henry J. Kaiser. At the museum, the assembled guests kissed Vreeland as she passed. The narrator describes the occasion as the largest event the museum had ever held, making the exhibition’s opening a conspicuous meeting of museum ceremony and high-society performance.

A later museum dinner brought a different kind of fashion spectacle. At the Cardin fashion show dinner, C.Z. Guest drove the narrator and others to the museum. The show seemed almost impossibly long: the narrator was astonished by the number of dresses and wondered whether the designer had kept every garment he had made. The ladies were bored, despite the scale of the display. Around the show, the narrator noticed Bill Paley, Barbara Allen, and Slim Keith, and regretted not taking photographs of the assembled company. The museum setting thus mattered not only for what was exhibited, but also for the unusually concentrated gathering of people the narrator considered the right company.

The museum’s Costume Institute occasions likewise made fashion itself the subject and atmosphere of the gathering. At a later dinner, Halston arrived with ten models and six limousines; photographers were present as Marisa Berenson filmed a segment for Entertainment Tonight. The narrator saw a room full of conspicuously dressed guests, including Brooke Astor, Enid Haupt, and Raquel Welch. The exhibition featured eighteenth-century clothing, especially dresses with skirts so wide that their wearers could not pass through doorways. The diary’s comic speculation about the practical purpose of those skirts, including whether they offered privacy when using the bathroom, turns historical costume into a prompt for everyday bodily questions. A remark once made by Patti LuPone supplies one possible answer, puncturing the distance between period display and ordinary experience.

Glamour, discomfort, and interruption

The museum’s social world could also leave the narrator feeling conspicuously out of place. At a lunch there in November 1980, the other guests seemed classy, elegant, intelligent, rich, young, glamorous, and English. The narrator tried to contribute small comments but felt that nobody listened. A martini with a little vodka served as courage before Prince and Princess Michael of Kent arrived. The princess was friendly, showed a photograph of her eighteen-month-old baby, and explained that she was pregnant; the narrator admired the prince’s well-cut suit and its transformative effect. The diary’s attention shifts between social intimidation and the tactile details of clothing, revealing how the museum’s gathering is experienced not simply as a public event but as a test of ease and belonging.

On another opening night, the museum’s ceremonial setting became the place where news of violence spread through a crowd. The narrator went with Halston’s party to Diana Vreeland’s Costume Institute dinner, where roughly 650 familiar faces had gathered. Someone arriving announced that John Lennon had been shot. The report seemed unbelievable, so someone called the Daily News, which confirmed it. The news became the subject of conversation throughout the dinner; after returning home, the narrator turned on the television and heard that Lennon had been murdered by someone to whom he had given an autograph earlier that evening. The contrast is stark: limousines, fashion, and a vast social gathering are suddenly reorganized around a killing outside Lennon’s home. The museum does not shelter the guests from the news; the event enters the room and overwhelms its occasion.

Collections and encounters with the past

In March 1982, the narrator and Jon went to see the new Rockefeller Primitive Collection. The display was described as consisting mostly of African material, alongside American Indian, Mexican, and South American works, and the installation impressed the narrator. The visit also produced an overheard response to photographs of Michael Rockefeller, who had been eaten: a boy and girl looking at one image said he looked like a hippie. The brief comment places a contemporary youth label against a museum photograph and the violent history attached to it. The diary records both the collection’s range and the visitors’ passing reaction, allowing the experience of the exhibition to include not only its contents but the way its images are seen by people in the gallery.

The museum beyond the galleries

A recollection from 1985 shows how a museum exhibition could extend into the narrator’s working relationships and into the afterlife of an object. The narrator had bought a pink elephant for Diana Vreeland’s costume show, intended for Marilyn Monroe to ride. After the exhibition, it went to Fred Hughes at The Factory. Jean-Michel Basquiat and Victor painted on it, though the narrator felt Basquiat had done little; the narrator nevertheless would have kept it as a Basquiat. Fred instead thought it would work better as a Keith Haring, and arranged for Keith to paint it after it had been painted white. The elephant’s successive transformations—from exhibition prop to studio object and proposed Keith Haring work—make the museum’s influence tangible beyond the event itself. Its displays could set objects and collaborations in motion, while the diary preserves the narrator’s disagreement over what the object should become.