Grace Jones, Andy Warhol and an awkward encounter at Arnold Schwarzenegger’s wedding
The invitations to Arnold Schwarzenegger‘s lavish wedding had one strict requirement: no dates or plus ones unless it was with someone already attending. A strange request, but one that seemed to push guests out of their comfort zone, including a characteristically quiet and reserved Andy Warhol, who honestly considered not going at all.
Celebrity weddings are always a cause for blowing grand showmanship and decorative aesthetics out of the water, but they rarely serve as large-scale opportunities for celebrities from different industries to meet and mingle. Schwarzenegger’s marriage to Maria Shriver was to be a strangely tight-nit affair with a touch of elegance and simplicity, with a handful of high-profile guests from the entertainment industry and political circles.
Amid his confusion and trepidation about attending such an important event while trying to find an appropriate date from the list of attendees, Warhol considered one particular name – Grace Jones – but assumed that her unreliability would likely result in her failing to appear. That, or she would end up making a scene by “bringing her own people anyway” and destroying any plan to go together.
Later, having resigned himself to the fact he wasn’t going to attend because he had no one to choose as his comrade, Warhol found out from a newspaper article that Jones and her team had been sneaky and told the press she was planning on bringing Warhol as her date in her own private jet. Likely after a huge sigh, he decided to go, knowing full well that attending with someone like Jones wasn’t going to be as easy as turning up, engaging in some small talk, then sneaking home.
On the day of the ceremony, Warhol’s anxieties began early. Throwing on a black biker jacket and tucking his Polaroid camera into his backpack, he readied himself for whatever mishap was afoot. Clearly, his predictions were right as he soon learned that Jones had requested that Warhol’s studio director, Peter Wise, grant her an extra hour in bed, which made them late to the airport.
After a tense flight, Jones departed the plane and headed for a nearby bathroom so she could apply her makeup and get changed into a green Azzedine Alaïa dress. According to Jones’ recollection of events in I’ll Never Write My Memoirs, their lateness was due to “the weather and the traffic” and not impacted by any of her choices that morning at all. However, they were still late for whatever reason, and when they finally arrived at the ceremony, their perils were far from over.
“Andy and I got into this jeep that had come to get us, no limo, and we arrived at the church, a charming little white wooden building, and everyone is cheering and screaming outside and we enter the church. Late,” Jones recalled. At precisely the moment the bride and groom were wrapping up their “special, intimate ceremony,” Jones and Warhol arrived and “the doors noisily cracked open”, causing all eyes to fall on them. “They didn’t say anything,” Jones said. “But you could see from the looks on their faces that they were not at all impressed.”
From the moment they arrived, Warhol’s observational tendencies were sky-high. After finally relaxing from the stresses of travelling, which were already way behind schedule, certain hostilities exuded from Jackie Kennedy, and a broader atmosphere emerged that made Warhol feel something was amiss. Ever the one to pay special attention to the nuances of intonation, facial expressions, social interactions, and general behaviours, Warhol knew this matrimony was temporary.
Warhol had known Schwarzenegger since working together on some shoots back in 1977. He had scored an invite to his wedding equipped with the unspoken role of capturing various timeless moments for the happy couple. However, he couldn’t evade his instinctual reservations even in his plight to immortalise fleeting memories. “And watching this storybook wedding,” he later said, “You just wonder what it’ll be like when the divorce comes.”
