The National Enquirer

The National Enquirer enters Andy Warhol’s diaries as a prominent maker and circulator of celebrity stories, repeatedly bringing fame into view through covers, gossip, and television advertising. Its appearances range from Warhol’s joking fantasy of a deliberately false Rock Hudson interview to his suspicion that Carroll Baker’s dramatic account of Africa was invented. Taken together, these moments show the publication as both a source of comic material and an object of doubt: its stories could amplify a star’s image while leaving their truth unsettled.

A conspicuous presence in celebrity news

By August 1985, The National Enquirer was among several publications whose covers featured Rock Hudson. Warhol noted that The Enquirer, Star, People, Newsweek, and Time had all put Hudson on their covers. The convergence mattered to him not simply as a measure of press attention but as a missed opportunity for Interview: he imagined that his own magazine could have run a knowingly fake Hudson interview, visible alongside the coverage filling newsstands. The joke depends on readers recognizing the gap between a celebrity’s public persona and the kind of story that the press might attach to it. In Warhol’s version, the falsehood would be part of the entertainment, not a claim to be believed.

The Enquirer’s presence also appears in Warhol’s record of celebrity imagery. In August 1985 he looked at a television kiss between Linda Evans and Hudson as featured in the paper. The brief note gives no account of the image’s reception or of the story around it, but its inclusion places The Enquirer among the places where a performed or broadcast celebrity moment could be encountered again as print. A kiss on television became something to look at in the paper: public images did not remain confined to the medium in which they first appeared.

Aging, intimacy, and celebrity gossip

In October 1985, The Enquirer’s reporting on Frank Sinatra’s lawsuit became a point of personal reflection for Warhol. The article, as he described it, said that Sinatra worried about aging and asked his wife Barbara how he looked in the morning. Warhol’s response turned from the story to a memory of his own youth: he recalled walking into Pittsburgh alone to see Sinatra sing with Tommy Dorsey, expecting to find the girls swooning, but finding no such scene. The contrast links an account of a famous older man’s anxiety about appearance with Warhol’s early encounter with the distance between a star’s reputation and what he actually saw. The article’s interest in a private question about looking well also echoes the public scrutiny that celebrity status invites.

The paper’s Rock Hudson coverage, as reported to Warhol in October, offered a more salacious version of private life. The stories claimed that two baseball stars had figured in Hudson’s life, alongside forty truck drivers. Warhol relayed the numbers with amusement; the diary does not establish whether the claims were true. That distinction is central to the episode: the Enquirer stories matter here as circulating allegations and as a spectacle of gossip, not as verified information about Hudson. The celebrity’s intimate life is made legible through rumor, while the diary preserves the rumor’s circulation without confirming it.

Sensation and suspicion

By March 1986, The Enquirer was also advertising on television through commercials featuring Carroll Baker. The commercials promoted a book about her experiences in Africa in 1970, including a story in which she had supposedly been so hungry that she bit off a lizard’s head and drank its fluid. Warhol doubted the account and speculated that Baker might have drawn on a nature book or transformed another experience into an extravagant tale. His suspicion was not proof that the story was fabricated; it records his disbelief, sharpened by the lurid detail that made the account memorable.

This episode complicates the publication’s role in the diaries. The Enquirer was not only a printed destination for celebrity pictures and reports but also a presence on television, promoting a celebrity’s own dramatic narrative. Baker’s commercial joined the press outlet, the book, and the performer’s public account in one promotional circuit. Warhol responded by questioning the story’s credibility, treating its vividness as a reason for skepticism rather than evidence of truth.

Warhol’s view of the publication

Across these entries, The National Enquirer is associated with celebrity visibility at moments when appearance, age, intimacy, and personal history become news. Warhol could imagine using a fake interview as a joke, notice a celebrity kiss reproduced in print, and follow reports whose claims he considered doubtful. His responses do not amount to a single judgment on the publication: they move between amusement, professional comparison, curiosity, and mistrust.

That range makes The Enquirer significant in the diary not as a fully described institution but as a recurring feature of the media world Warhol observed. Its covers could join a crowded field of competing outlets; its stories could turn a private fear or alleged relationship into public conversation; and its advertising could carry a sensational anecdote from print into television. In Warhol’s account, celebrity was never simply a fixed identity. It was continually reshaped by images and claims whose reach could be unmistakable even when their reliability remained in question.