When The Andy Warhol Diaries was published, I gathered from reviews that the book was just the vacuous ramblings of a star-fucker. But twenty years late to the party, I’ve been reading it, and it’s hugely, constantly entertaining. You don’t get much sense of Warhol’s artistic process from it, true. Instead, you get top-notch dish from 1976 to 1987: Warhol was dishy, funny (in a totally deadpan way), and he knew everybody. A strong man might be able to resist quoting liberally from the book. I am not that man.

Tuesday, January 3, 1978:
Halston and Bianca were in the kitchen together cooking, and he said he had so much energy he wanted to go dancing. He told me lots of gossip–he said that the night before when the doorbell rang it was Liza Minnelli. Her life’s very complicated now. Like she was walking down the street with Jack Haley her husband and they’d run into Martin Scorsese who she’s now having an affair with, and Marty confronted her that she was also having an affair with Baryshnikov and Marty said how could she. This is going on with her husband, Jack Haley, standing there! And Halston said that it was all true, and he also said that Jack Haley wasn’t gay. You see? I was right, I didn’t think so. Halston said Jack likes Liza but that what he really goes for is big curvy blonde women. So when the doorbell rang the night before, it was Liza in a hat pulled down so nobody would recognize her, and she said to Halston, “Give me every drug you’ve got.” So he gave her a bottle of coke, a few sticks of marijuana, a Valium, four Quaaludes, and they were all wrapped in a tiny box, and then a little figure in a white hat came up on the stoop and kissed Halston, and it was Marty Scorsese, he’d been hiding around the corner, and then he and Liza went off to have their affair on all the drugs.

The tone’s so conversational because the diaries were really intended as tax documents: after a night out at Studio 54, Warhol would call a staffer and relate the previous night’s expenses (and gossip). You can buy the book here.

posted 2 March 2009 in Excerpts and tagged Andy Warhol, Liza Minnelli, Martin Scorsese. 2 comments