Friday, July 9, 1982
I was invited to a surprise birthday lunch party at a restaurant on 48th Street for Phyllis Diller’s sixty-fifth birthday. So I decided to stay uptown until that at 1:30. When I walked in a lady with glasses said that she still had my mother’s book, and I was trying to think of which lady in my advertising days would I have given one to, and I just couldn’t place who this grandmother-​looking woman was, and then someone said, “Kaye!” and it dawned on me— Kaye Ballard. And so I went running back and had to pretend as if I’d just been out of it. And she was fun, she’s in The Pirates of Penzance. It’s funny, these people were such big TV stars, and then when you lose your ratings, you’re just like a normal person.
And at 2:00 Phyllis Diller arrived. She said that they told her it was a New York Times interview and that they wanted her to wear a bright-​colored dress because it would photograph better, but she hadn’t known why, since the Times was black and white. Tommy Tune arrived and he’s all Southern charm, he said that he still reads the Philosophy book, that it’s made him what he is today, that he picks it up and rereads it for inspiration and he feels good again. The press was there and they took photographs. And it was embarrassing because I’d brought Phyllis a Cow print wrapped in an Interview and she thought the wrapping was the art and she was being so careful with it and she said [imitates], “Faaabulous.”
Excerpt from The Andy Warhol Diaries © The Andy Warhol Foundation. Used with permission.