When The Andy Warhol Diaries came out, in 1989, readers of the 807-page chronicle of daily Warholian doings, gossip, and tabulations of expenditures down to the penny were perhaps surprised to discover that the book effectively begins in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania. Page one finds Warhol and a couple of associates, including boyfriend Jed Johnson, road-tripping (gas $19.97, tolls $3.40) to that arcadian corner of the Brandywine Valley, about 30 miles southwest of Philadelphia. They would be spending Thanksgiving 1976 with the artist’s latest friend and pet obsession: the painter Jamie Wyeth—son of Andrew (Christina’s World et al.), grandson of N.C. (the protean book illustrator), and 30-year-old scion of America’s first family of paint.
It was the photographer Peter Beard, a mutual acquaintance, who’d first introduced Wyeth and Warhol, bringing them together at Warhol’s Factory at some point in the late 1960s. “He’d really like to meet you,” Beard told Wyeth, “and you ought to meet him.”
