The Village Voice

The Village Voice appears in the diary not through a continuous account of its newsroom, but through several consequential encounters: a cover story about Studio 54, a former location recalled in connection with Lou Reed, a contested purchase valued in the tens of millions of dollars, and a favorable review of Andy Warhol’s television show. Taken together, these references place the paper at the meeting point of nightlife, urban memory, media ownership, and cultural judgment. They show the kinds of influence the diary registers directly: what the paper chooses to put on its cover, who seeks to own it, and how its reviews enter the working lives of artists and entertainers.

Coverage of Studio 54

In June 1978, the diary notes that the cover of The Village Voice that week was devoted to Studio 54 and the Mafia. The report is not discussed as an abstract piece of journalism: its subject is part of the same immediate social world in which the diarist and his companions are moving. Bob called Stevie Rubell to invite him to dinner, and Stevie made the invitation sound like a favor he was granting Andy. Later, at Halston’s, Stevie proposed going to Studio 54, which was packed. The cover story and the night’s movements sit side by side, connecting a published account of the club to the people who occupied its orbit.

The diary does not describe the article’s reporting, conclusions, or effect on the club, so the significance here lies in the proximity of its subject to the social scene recorded. The Voice could make Studio 54 and its Mafia associations the focus of a cover while its proprietor remained a familiar participant in the diarist’s evenings. That contrast captures the paper’s presence as both an observer of the city’s celebrity culture and a publication read within the same culture. The entry preserves the cover’s subject and the club’s crowdedness, but leaves the newspaper’s claims and their reception outside the frame.

A remembered address

An earlier reference places The Village Voice in the physical geography of downtown Manhattan. When Lou Reed invited the diarist and Catherine Guinness to his home, the apartment was on Christopher Street between Sixth and Seventh, upstairs from a bagel shop. The diarist located it as being roughly where the Voice used to be. The phrasing makes the publication a point of comparison in recalling a neighborhood: a former presence used to orient someone arriving at a new destination.

The entry’s attention is primarily on Reed’s house, not on the paper’s former premises. It describes a six-room, rent-controlled home that Reed had obtained from a girlfriend for $485 a month, including a long, narrow bathroom measuring two by twelve feet. The diarist admired the house’s orderly rooms and electronics, and compared Reed’s life favorably with his own. Those particulars do not establish the Voice’s former office address or its working arrangements; they do show that the paper’s name remained attached to a recognizable place in the city, invoked casually as part of the neighborhood’s remembered layout.

The paper as an object of acquisition

Years later, The Village Voice appears not as a cover or a landmark but as a valuable media property. At a gathering aboard the Forbes boat, Peter Brant told the diarist that he had tried to buy the paper and had wanted it. He said that he lost out when Leonard Stern paid $55 million, after Brant had offered $51 million. The difference recorded in the diary is four million dollars, a compact measure of the scale of the contest.

The account offers no explanation of Brant’s reasons for pursuing the paper, nor does it describe the negotiations or the consequences of the sale for its journalism. Its emphasis is on the disparity between his bid and the successful purchase price, delivered in conversation at a high-profile social gathering. In this episode, the Voice’s significance is represented through ownership and valuation: the publication could command a price large enough to become a striking anecdote among the guests on the boat. The diary records the bid as something Brant disclosed personally, rather than as a reported business story, preserving the conversational route by which the paper’s sale enters its account.

Critical recognition

In October 1985, Vincent Fremont told the diarist that The New York Times was going to write about the television show Fifteen Minutes. The diary then notes that the show had received a great review in The Village Voice that week. The two notices establish distinct kinds of attention around the program: an impending Times feature and an already-published favorable assessment in the Voice. The diary does not quote the review or identify its writer, so its recorded importance is the fact of the praise and its timing.

The entry places that critical response alongside a separate measure of publishing success: returns showed that the Stallone issue of Interview was the magazine’s biggest seller ever. It does not attribute those sales to the Voice review or connect the review to the issue’s performance. Instead, the juxtaposition shows how the diarist tracked recognition through several channels at once—television coverage, newspaper criticism, and magazine sales. Across these scattered appearances, The Village Voice is a publication whose presence is felt in concrete ways: it reports on a club central to the diary’s social world, supplies a remembered coordinate in the city, draws a major purchase bid, and offers a favorable judgment on Warhol’s television work.