Up early, beautiful day. Went down to Subkoff's Antiques to see ideas (cab $3). Walked over to the office. Bob was there, looking through pictures for the photo book Bob and I are doing. Vincent went out and got the paper, and that's where the headline was: "MOVIE DIRECTOR CHARGED WITH RAPE." Roman Polanski. With a thirteen-year-old-girl he took to a party at Jack Nicholson's house, and when the police went over to Jack's the next day after the girl's parents called them, they searched the house and Anjelica got arrested for coke.
Victor had told me that I absolutely had to watch the Dinner with Halston show on channel 5 -- Metromedia.
This is the idea that we submitted to Larry Freeberg at Metromedia and they turned down, and now they’re doing with other people. Halston’s guests were Bianca, Joe Eula, the acupuncture doctor—Giller, Jane Holzer, Victor. It was very boring. They’d asked me to go on this show and I said no because they’d ripped off my idea.
It was a live dinner with a seven-second delay. Joe Eula said "bullshit" once and it was cut. The only real-life thing missing at the table was coke, and no runs to the bathroom. Victor was the life of the dinner, he took his fake mustache off. He used to have a real one but he’d shaved it off probably because he hates the acupuncture doctor who has one, but he put one on for the show. He also had a plastic chicken with him and kept talking to it, telling it to "say hello to Andy." Joe Eula and Victor had a tiff at the table, something about me. Joe told Victor, "Let Andy speak for himself, why he’s not here," and that’s when Victor—on Metromedia—said that Metromedia had ripped me off. So he was great.
Jane didn’t have the right makeup on so she didn’t look good, and they kept referring to her as "the renowned fashion model." The dinner degenerated into throwing drinks. Maybe they’d decided on that because they’re supposed to be the "wild set." Jane threw champagne in the air and then everybody started but it looked so lame, and so Victor poured his in her lap. Victor and Halston were having a quarrel—you could tell because Victor announced that he wasn’t going to do Halston’s windows anymore, that he was now "an artist for hire," and the camera went close on Halston’s hard face. At one point Halston or Bianca or somebody actually said, "Let’s take this hour and a half and just go with it!" And that’s when most people probably shut their TVs off, the thought of something like that dragging on for an hour and a half must’ve made them gag.
And meanwhile who should Fred be at dinner with but Larry Freeberg, who’d stolen the idea from me in the first place. They were all at the Hermitage, at a dinner for Nureyev, and Freeberg was with Lee Radziwill—they’re planning to do a channel 5 dinner with her, too.
Halston was having a "cast party" at his place after the show. When I got there, Mick had come by. He was cute—he told Bianca how good she was on the show, but around 4:00 he wanted to leave and she didn’t so she stayed. Everyone was mad at Victor, saying he’d ruined the show, so he’d already left to go barring.
Warhol, A. (1989). The Andy Warhol Diaries (P. Hackett, Ed.). Pg. 30-31. New York: Warner Books.