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Barbara Allen, journalist, Warhol acolyte and leading light of the New York scene – obituary

Barbara Allen with Andy Warhol in 1977 - Ron Galella/Ron Galella Collection via Getty Images
Barbara Allen with Andy Warhol in 1977 - Ron Galella/Ron Galella Collection via Getty Images

Barbara Allen, who has died aged 69, was an American of enormous beauty who was for many years an investor, interviewer and photographer for Interview magazine, and a great friend of Andy Warhol and his chief adviser, Fred Hughes.

She was part of the gang at Warhol’s famous Factory at 860 Broadway in the 1970s, when he preferred good-looking, well-connected girls to the wilder characters of the 1960s. She had small parts in films such as Bad (1976), was his “Girl of the Year” in 1977, and tried her hand at modelling and acting. Her looks reminded some admirers of Ava Gardner’s in Night of the Iguana.

Barbara Allen’s name was linked, rightly or wrongly, with a number of famous figures, the tabloids citing Warren Beatty and Jack Nicholson as lovers, as well as Mick Jagger, who wrote: “She leaves me speechless.” The designer Halston said: “Men adore her because she doesn’t pull any of that feminine crap,” while Arnold Schwarzenegger left no doubt as to his intentions, which remained ungratified: “I think she’s a very, very, very sexy girl … I imagine everything possible that one can do with her, and that’s what I want to do with her.”

Though Barbara Allen did enjoy a number of well-publicised love affairs, much of it was a myth, as she explained in later life: “It was difficult being a popular girl. Everyone was after you, and I didn’t like that. In retrospect, I think: ‘Gee, how great.’ But no, I did not make it with all those people. It seemed like I did, but I didn’t. ’Cause I’m a real regular kinda girl.”

With Andy Warhol at a Studio 54 New Year's Eve party in 1977  - Ron Galella/Ron Galella Collection via Getty Images
With Andy Warhol at a Studio 54 New Year's Eve party in 1977 - Ron Galella/Ron Galella Collection via Getty Images

She even took refuge with Andy Warhol’s friend, Fred Hughes, to escape the attentions of Gianni Agnelli and others. And yet not all of it was a myth. The Andy Warhol archive of contacts contain numerous images of her at the Factory happily displaying her breasts.

She was born Barbara Tanner in Roswell, New Mexico, on 29 March 1951; her father was an American Air Force officer. The family moved to Suffolk, and later to Paris, her father dying when she was 20.

She was educated at Finch College on New York’s Upper East Side. In 1971 she married Joe Allen, 10 years her senior, who ran an expanding newspaper empire with his fellow publisher Peter Brant.

In 1970 they became investors in Interview magazine, founded by Andy Warhol the previous year, Joe Allen putting his share in Barbara’s name.

The arrival of Warhol in Barbara’s life soon undermined her marriage. In 1973 her husband’s editor-in-chief, Rosemary Kent, sent her out to Montauk to photograph the wildlife photographer, Peter Beard, for Interview; they clicked immediately.

Barbara Allen, far right, in 1977 with, back row, l-r, the actresses Teri Garr and Carrie Fisher and the film producer Lester Persky, and, front row, the actress Amy Irving and dancer Mikhail Baryshnikov - Ron Galella/Ron Galella Collection via Getty Images
Barbara Allen, far right, in 1977 with, back row, l-r, the actresses Teri Garr and Carrie Fisher and the film producer Lester Persky, and, front row, the actress Amy Irving and dancer Mikhail Baryshnikov - Ron Galella/Ron Galella Collection via Getty Images

Rosemary Kent advised her to leave her husband for Beard – advice she took – then claimed spikily that Barbara had only married Allen to get Yves St Laurent dresses. Presently Barbara was on safari with Beard, shooting cobras.

She was still with Beard in 1975, while he worked on his book, Longing for Darkness. She wrote a shopping column, “Good News”, for Interview, and was a cover girl, though she thought her image made her look fat.

She became a model, sporting a Tic-Tac T-shirt or parading for Pierre Cardin or Valentino – though the social columns were more interested in her boyfriends than her career, noting wryly that she only dated millionaires, without ever netting one.

By the summer of 1976 she had been swept off her feet by another, Philippe Niarchos, and was soon summering on Stavros Niarchos’s yacht, Atlantis, and wintering in a chalet called “Relaxez-Vous” in St Moritz.

As a gift to Philippe, she had the lower part of her face with her fabulous lips moulded into a Pharaonic replica in yellow jasper. But young Niarchos was soon accusing her of affairs with Warren Beatty, Jack Nicholson, and Mick Jagger, while he admitted to linking up with Manuela Papatakis (daughter of the actress Anouk Aimée), not to mention various hookers.

During this time she auditioned for Nicholson’s film, Goin’ South, but he gave the part to an unknown instead. In his diaries Warhol suggested that Barbara had sex with Jagger to console him after Bianca had left him, though she preferred the story that the pop star attempted to climb through her window and ended up in the bedroom of the writer Bob Colacello instead.

Barbara Allen in Haiti in 1981 - Slim Aarons/Getty Images
Barbara Allen in Haiti in 1981 - Slim Aarons/Getty Images

Hardly a week went by when she did not feature in Suzy Knickerbocker’s column in the New York Daily News. She was generally spotted attending the latest first night party, mixing with Liza Minnelli, George Hamilton or Margaret Trudeau, dancing at Studio 54, or attending a theatre reading of A Christmas Memory by Truman Capote (with whom she stayed close even after he was ostracised following the publication in Esquire of “La Côte Basque 1965”, a chapter of an unfinished warts-and-all roman-à-clef).

In April 1978 the press said that Ryan O’Neal had replaced Niarchos, while in July it was Ilie Nastase who was staying in her apartment. In December that year, Taki beat her door down in jealousy, then in April 1980 she was with Mick Flick, the Mercedes Benz heir.

Meanwhile she arranged parties at the Factory with people like Leni Riefenstahl as guests, and when she modelled Helen Arpel shoes, they instantly became fashionable.

In September 1980 she was hailed in The New York Times as one of the city’s most eligible women alongside Caroline Kennedy and Brooke Hayward. In March 1981 she tested for a role in ABC’s Scruples, a miniseries adapted from a novel by Judith Krantz.

For all her liaisons, by December 1982 Barbara Allen had settled for the recently divorced Henryk de Kwiatkowski, who had made a fortune as a broker of used aircraft in Canada. He was 31 years her senior, a keen polo player and had at one time been involved with the socialite CZ Guest.

With the film producer Robert Evans in 1979 - Ron Galella/Ron Galella Collection via Getty Images
With the film producer Robert Evans in 1979 - Ron Galella/Ron Galella Collection via Getty Images

The pair embarked on a sometimes tempestuous romance, but were seldom apart thereafter, weekending in Palm Beach or spending the New Year at his Lyford Cay home in Nassau. In 1983 Warhol noted a new maturity – she was changing from a girl into a society woman, but he was upset that Kwiatkowski sported capped teeth.

Presently Barbara gave birth to her only son, Nicholas. Soon afterwards, in May 1989, she married her Polish millionaire in Greenwich, Connecticut, in a dress designed by Victor Edelstein. The socialite Nan Kempner was overheard asking if Barbara had signed a prenup. The answer was that a document the size of the Yellow Pages had been produced.

Just before the wedding, Warhol’s diaries were published which exposed some of her early antics, but Kwiatkowski rose above this, declaring that he loved her regardless. She became chatelaine of his numerous residences: a duplex apartment at One Beekman Place in New York, overlooking the East River; Conyers Farm, a 100-acre estate in Greenwich; the horse-breeding farm Calumet in Kentucky (which he owned from 1992), which had produced nine Kentucky Derby winners’ and the Lyford Cay house. There were private jets – and, as she said: “My life was polo.”

With the Hollywood agent Swifty Lazar at a party given by Pierre Cardin in 1980   - Ron Galella/Ron Galella Collection via Getty Images
With the Hollywood agent Swifty Lazar at a party given by Pierre Cardin in 1980 - Ron Galella/Ron Galella Collection via Getty Images

Kwiatkowsi lost $215 million trading currency futures between 1994 and 1995, on account of advice given by Bear Stearns. He was awarded compensation of $164.5 million, but this was overturned on appeal. He died in Lyford Cay in 2003, aged 85, following which there were the inevitable disagreements between the offspring of his first marriage and their stepmother.

Barbara stayed on in the various houses; one of Warhol’s portraits of Chairman Mao, copiously dedicated to her, adorned the wall at Beekman Place. The Duchess of York was so impressed by the Greenwich house that she commissioned the designer Sister Parish to decorate her Sunningdale home. In 2014, the conservationist Mark Shand stayed with her in New York for six months but one night, out on the town, he collapsed and died.

Latterly she lived in Locust Valley on Long Island. In the last week of her life she was reading Blake Gopnik’s new biography of Warhol. It did not mention her, but nevertheless she professed to have enjoyed a “really fun, fabulous and exceptional” life. “In a way, things happened to me,” she said. “It’s not like I went after them. They just happened.”

Barbara Allen is survived by her son.

Barbara Allen de Kwiatkowski, born March 29 1951, died June 8 2020