Manic images of Andy Warhol and Truman Capote enjoying a very unholy Christmas
At Christmas time, I enjoy a drink as much as the next guy, unless the next guy happens to be Truman Capote, the famed writer who was positively entranced by decadence. Andy Warhol, however, did not enjoy a drink all that much—the devout Catholic might have used Absolut vodka as a rather bizarre aftershave and was apparently partial to a Jack Daniels, but for the most part, he defied the reputation of the Factory on this front.
This implies he had one hell of a propensity to put up with people completely out of their gauds when he was sound of mind in his. This incredibly rare characteristic put him in good stead one very strange Christmas when he met up with his old friend Capote.
High Times, a monthly magazine and cannabis brand with offices in Los Angeles and New York City, was founded in 1974 by Tom Forçade, who originally envisaged the publication as a joke, a single-issue piss-take of Playboy and substituted sex for weed, put the pair together. The magazine flourished in the decadent age of the ‘70s, and Capote naturally got on board.
They barely had to ask him whether he would partake in a special Christmas edition with Warhol. He was, in fact, just meeting up with his biggest fans, who became one of his best friends. As Capote recalled in an interview with Rolling Stone, Warhol used to write him letters for “quite a long time. He used to send me lots of pictures and drawings and things. But I don’t remember when we first met. I don’t have any clear visual memory of it at all.”
He continued: “I do remember him sitting in my living room the first time I saw him, and him telling me about his mother and how he lived with his mother downtown and they had 28 cats and he seemed a very shy, pale person, rather like he is today. Only much shyer. That’s my first memory of him. I can see him in the room sitting on this pink couch, but I don’t remember how he got there.”
There is a lot that Capote had muddled memories of throughout their relationship, as drinking frequently caused upheaval. No documented moment captures that with more fidelity than the time the pair met up for the High Life shoot and the famed In Cold Blood writer was half-cut.
Urban myth has it that High Life initially planned to have Capote wearing a “little girl outfit” on the cover, but he supposedly turned up to the shoot too drunk to play around. It’s not quite clear why an Elf outfit was suddenly deemed more suitable.
The finer details of the manic event that followed are recalled by the Andy Warhol Museum, who state: “Their photo shoot took place on Sept. 26, 1978 and is detailed in Warhol’s entry that day in his book The Andy Warhol Diaries. As he recounted later that day: ‘[Toni, from High Times] had a Santa costume for me and a little girl outfit for Truman. But Truman wasn’t in the mood to go into drag, he said that he was already dressed like a little boy. Truman was really drunk, hugging around.”
The classic soup can artist continued: “Truman was coming to the Factory at 3:00 for the High Times Christmas cover photograph of him and me. Truman was early, 2:30. Paul Morrissey was down, and he and Truman talked all afternoon about scripts and things. Then Toni arrived four hours late.” By that point, Truman was completely inebriated.
Nevertheless, that didn’t put an end to the shoot. Toni decided to simply snap away as an elf swayed, hanging off the shoulder of a pop art pioneer dressed as Santa Claus. The result is not only a nutty depiction of Christmas gone awry but an inadvertently illuminating depiction of the strange relationship two of the most prominent American artists of the 20th century shared.
