Image

THE ANDY WARHOL DIARIES (page 607)

Tuesday, October 9, 1984 [At Sean Lennon’s Birthday Party]

We went into Sean’s room―and there was a kid there setting up an Apple computer that Sean had gotten as a present, the Macintosh model. I said that once some man had been calling me a lot wanting to give me one, but that I’d never called him back or something, and then the kid looked up and said, “Yeah, that was me. I’m Steve Jobs.” And he looked so young, like a college guy. And he told me that he would still send me one now. And then he gave me a lesson on drawing with it…And then Keith [Haring] and Kenny [Scharf] used it. Keith had already used it once to make a T-shirt, but Kenny was using it for the first time, and I felt so old & out of it with this young whiz guy right there who’d helped invent it.

Note: The Andy Warhol Diaries is a mammoth (807-page) volume covering the period from November 1976 through February 1987 (until a few days before Warhol died at age 58 from complications of gall bladder surgery). As the book jacket states, “The lives and loves — and faux pas — of the rich and famous, as Warhol observed them, make for alternately shocking and hilarious reading.” 

Edited by Pat Hackett, Warhol’s long-time friend and collaborator, and first published in 1989, The Andy Warhol Diaries offers an inside look at New York‘s Bonfires of the Vanities era. In the diaries, Warhol gives a frank assessment of the glitterati, literati, and politicos of the day — Mick Jagger, Truman Capote, Madonna, Fellini, Calvin Klein, John Lennon, Yoko Ono, Elizabeth Taylor, Donald Trump, Bob Dylan, Jackie Onassis, Jack Nicholson, Cher, and Presidents Ford, Carter, and Reagan.

I recently purchased a copy of The Andy Warhol Diaries at a used book store and will send it to the first person who leaves a comment about this post. (U.S. only due to postage rates.) The book includes the inscription: “To Margaret, After you read this, you’ll feel so pure & virtuous. Bonfire of the Vanities lives! Elizabeth.” So if your name is Margaret or Elizabeth, so much the better (but not mandatory).