The Andy Warhol Diaries

"No biographer can avoid using them extensively as primary source material, at least for Warhol’s life in the later 1970s and the 1980s. I also got access to some unpublished segments from the early -70s which yielded a few choice nuggets – of fact, and of insight. The problem is that you can’t really use the Diaries to get final answers to your questions, because you can never tell the precise extent to which they are true. We assume that Andy knew that they might be published, and he may have wanted them to be published—and so would have controlled and manipulated their content. And these weren’t diaries in the normal sense. Remember, he’s always talking to someone else, since they were recorded and transcribed by his assistant Pat Hackett. He didn’t scribble these entries down in a notebook, for his own eyes only. So you never know if he’s speaking to posterity in order to falsify the record – or at least to construct a record – or whether the Diaries are actually giving you a genuine insight into the man himself, not only into his psyche but also into his actions and behaviours. There are incidents mentioned in the Diaries that his friends say are absolutely and simply untrue. “You’d think that he’d be a biographer’s easiest subject. In fact, the opposite is true” Throughout Warhol’s life and his art you actually can never settle on a single meaning – his life and his art are deeply indeterminate, even deliberately underdetermined. The Diaries are the ultimate example of that: Here is a document that is supposed to be something like the definitive statement of Warhol on Warhol, and you can never be sure if things are as they appear. I’ve listened to a lot of his interviews and conversations, and what I would observe is that you rarely glimpse his intelligence in the Diaries in the way you do in some of his recorded conversations. After all, in the Diaries he’s rarely talking with someone, he’s talking at someone. When he’s actually in conversation you get the impression of a much livelier mind. It also is an important corrective to his other two books, POPism and The Philosophy of Andy Warhol , neither of which capture the real tone of Warhol because they’re mostly ghost-written, whereas the Diaries are not ghost-written in any full sense. The other thing about the published Diaries of course is they represent only a small percentage of the material available on the diary tapes that exist, none of which are accessible for another 20 years or so, since they are all embargoed. It’s hard not to wonder what’s on those tapes that is not in the Diaries . If you ever want to confuse posterity just leave a lot of information about yourself! Warhol is arguably the best-documented artist in history, because of all the records and ephemera he left behind, so you’d think that he’d be a biographer’s easiest subject. In fact, the opposite is true. While drowning in material, somehow you have to translate this enormous accumulation of reportage, gossip, and incidental information into a narrative – which is of course the fun of it as well. This was a dream project. I can’t imagine a better way to spend seven years of one’s life. It was an absolute gift to pass this time in the company of such a genius. I’m not a superstitious person in the least, but I felt Andy looking down on me with a smile. Every time I needed to find some particularly arcane document, to prove a point, what I need would miraculously appear. Every time I felt I was about to hit a brick wall, it magically disappeared and I was able to move forward with the biography. So the one person I have to thank above all is Andy Warhol himself."