BC

Ask me anything you want.

EO

Have you always been strategic?

BC

Yes, I never strategized in a long-term five-year plan type of way, but I was good at navigating office politics. I enjoyed writing the film reviews I was doing for the Village Voice. The first was a review for the Brazilian movie, Antonio Das Mortes (1969). I would always pick these art films that I knew Andrew Sarris would never review, which would give me a better chance of them publishing me. I had always been the teacher’s pet, so Sarris was another teacher. I wanted to be published in the Voice as much as possible, not just to get my name out there but because I did enjoy writing. I was living at my parents’ house after I graduated from Georgetown, when I took a 180 degree turn and decided I wanted to be a filmmaker and not become a diplomat. They were like, “Okay, we’ll send you to Columbia and pay the tuition, but we can’t afford an apartment for you in Manhattan.” So, I was pounding out these reviews of these way-out films from my childhood desk in my bedroom. I never thought about being a writer in any form but in high school whenever I had to write a paper for something, they would say to me, “You write well, you should think about becoming a writer.” I love literature—a certain kind of literature. [Laughter.]

EO

What kind?

BC

Not Shakespeare, you know? I like T.S. Elliot, W.B. Yeats, and if I think back on it, I was very drawn to [Jean] Genet, [Jean] Cocteau, and André Gide. But that was all homosexual literature in a way.

EO

Did you read those as homosexual texts?

BC

Honestly, I didn’t think about it, I just enjoyed reading. I loved [Arthur] Rimbaud, and loved the story of him and Verlaine, but I also like [Charles] Baudelaire. I liked all of the romantic college sweet stuff—William Blake, it was kind of a 1960s thing also, he was a hippie idol, not that I was a hippie in high school. I liked [Gustave] Flaubert’s Madame Bovary. I tried reading Proust a few times, but the sentences were too long for me. [Laughter.] I liked the hard Europe push but over the years through high school and college I read three or four Proust biographies. Jean Cocteau was someone who fascinated me because he was an artist, writer, poet, filmmaker and a part of high society culture. He was Picasso’s bridge to society and Marie-Laure de Noailles. [Laughs.] She was like the Agnes Gund of her time; she entertained a lot, but I forget where the money came from. She had a fabulous hôtel particulier in Paris, and Gertrude Stein would stay there. She mixed the aristocracy with artists and writers, and Cocteau was her Jerry Zipkin.

EO

How did your relationship to reading change when you were at Georgetown, were you reading the same stories; did you have the same beliefs?

BC

I was in the school of Foreign Service, which was very hard to get into, but I did a triple major and there wasn’t a math and science requirement—I loved that. We had to take four semesters of philosophy and four semesters of theology which was standard across the university, but my focus was economics, history, and political sciences. As a boy, I was always fascinated with geography, I had a globe in my room and atlases, a stamp collection—anything really that had to do with travel. In those days, you had to memorize the fifty states, the capitol, and their major product. For me, the School of Foreign Service was a natural fit because I didn’t care about attending Harvard, Princeton, or Yale.

EO

Why not?

BC

I thought they would be too intellectual for me. I really wanted to go to Georgetown, but I got into Haverford College in Connecticut, and when my mother and I went there the kids hadn’t slept and seen sunlight in a couple of weeks and my mom was like, “You’re not going here it’s too depressing.” [Laughter.] I said good, I wanted to go to Georgetown; I love Washington. I was Nixon in my senior high school debate over the PA system.

EO

What did you want going into college?

BC

Going into Georgetown, the plan, which was largely made by my parents, was that I’d become an ambassador. It was unrealistic given that I was coming from an Italian American middle-class family because the foreign service was very WASP-y and it would have taken me forever to become a foreign ambassador, if ever. My father thought I’d come and work for the company that he worked for, which was the Volkart Brothers, a Swiss commodity trading firm based in Winterthur, Switzerland, and owned by the very rich yet secretly rich Reinhardt family who were in coffee, cotton, and cocoa. My father ran their coffee division out of New York, so he was involved buying coffee from South and Latin America and selling it to the roasters who’d then ship it to Europe. He was one of the only Italian Americans to have an executive position in the coffee trade on Wall Street; it was very WASP-y before the war. Like everything after World War II, American society opened up a lot.

EO

How?

BC

The army mixed everybody. I think African Americans were still separated at the time. No, President Truman desegregated the army, so all of these boys from Nebraska and Georgia were getting to meet Italian American and Jewish boys from New York and Chicago. [Laughter.] When people are able to get to know each other, especially if you’re fighting in a war together and in the trenches, you learn to put aside prejudices. I believe very strongly that people are all the same. Human nature doesn’t change because of nationality or skin color. The war also brought women forward, before the war women did not work outside of the house; they were seen as shady if they did. So, my father would often take me to visit his office at 120 Wall Street, and Mister Van Allace, who was the president of the company who had taken a liking to me and was from Belgium. He was impressed with me because I knew geography and had this desire to go to Europe. Most American boys and kids my age at that time were not interested in knowing which countries were part of French Equatorial Africa. He made it clear that there would be a job at the company for me if I ever needed one, but things changed a lot for me when I left for college and was finally on my own.

EO

Beyond geography, what was this fascination with Europe about?

BC

My grandparents were from Europe. My mother’s mother, who I specifically nicknamed the “best grandma," my father’s mother was the “nice grandma." She used to tell me stories of being a child of five and coming from Naples, Italy, and her mother dying of pneumonia as did five of her siblings. She was up on things and had a great memory, which I inherited from her.

EO

Did storytelling drive your interest?

BC

Yes, her storytelling and my general interest in the world. My father would read the New York Times every day in the morning and then he’d come home in the afternoon with the Journal American, but I grew up reading the newspaper when I was around 7-years-old. We were still living in Brooklyn when I read every book in the children’s section of the Bensonhurst branch of the New York Public Library. My mother had to write a permission note to take out books that were adult. The first one that I took out was the History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon. [Laughter.] I was fascinated by the whole idea of decline and fall. To be honest, it was also the illustrations that I was drawn to because it featured all of these Roman men dressed in togas. Looking back, I realized you find a way to find the images that you are looking for, without even knowing it. Another place where that happened, where the first erotic sensations that I had when I was a little older, maybe 11-years-old, was at mass in church, especially the Latin mass—high mass—with incense, priests, taffeta robes, and Gregorian chants. It was like theater; it was the only place in the middle-class suburb that we moved to from Brooklyn named Plainview, which was a brand-new made-up town of split-level houses, it was the only naked man that you saw, you wouldn’t see a naked man in Time or Life magazine; it was Christ on the cross. He was not only naked, but he had a crown of thorns and was bleeding. [Laughs.] Another symbol that Catholics loved was Saint Sebastian with the arrows piercing his torso. It’s why I don’t like identity politics so much because it narrows everyone down to one aspect of their identity, the aspect that is most marginal or crass.

EO

It forces them to live in their marginality.

BC

Yes, see, I’m not just gay.

EO

[Laughs.] I hope not.

BC

[Laughs.] My sexuality is not my entire identity and as one grows older it becomes less and less important because it eats up less time whether by choice or not. I don’t like people politicizing my desire. Do you see being Black as the main thing?

EO

No, not at all. I don’t wake up thinking about how I’m Black.

BC

I don’t see being white as my main thing, and I’m not even white I’m an Italian-American. We were called Blacks for a long time but I think being of Italian origin and Italian background, growing up in suburbia in an upwardly mobile family, at an upwardly mobile time in America has shaped me just as my sexual preference. I can see from an early age where my sexual preference found ways to…

EO

Make itself known?

BC

Or lead me to read [André] Gide and prefer Gide to Ernest Hemingway. You see what I mean? I prefer Virginia Woolf to F. Scott Fitzgerald.

EO

Do you feel like your desire led you to who you are?

BC

Well, I think I just related to what they were feeling; my homosexuality was a part of it. Growing up in Brooklyn, when you’re 4 or 5-years-old, when you would play outside on the street or at the park, kids would walk up to you and point and ask, “What are you?”. You’d say you’re either Jewish or Catholic (We didn’t know any Protestants). Then one day this girl said she was Roman Catholic, so I asked my grandmother about it because it hadn’t registered with me yet. She said, “That’s what we are! The reason it’s called the Roman Catholic church is because the Pope lives in Rome, and by the way, Rome is not in Ireland.” [Laughter.] Because in those days, the churches here were dominated by the Irish Catholics, who moved here two or three generations before the Italians. Rome was always in my head as this place where we came from.

EO

I remember reading Joan Didion’s Slouching Toward Bethlehem in high school for summer reading, and then her Year of Magical Thinking, because I wanted to live in the interiority of her writing, but I didn't self-identify as a reader. What’s your relationship to reading? Was it an activity that was very pronounced to you or something that you just did?

BC

Yes, I loved to read. After the World War, there was the housing shortage in America, and it was very acute in New York City. In my first eight years, we lived in a two-family house, and the landlord lived on the first floor, and we lived on the second floor. My mom was terrified that we would be evicted, we children, if my sisters and I made a lot of noise, running and playing around. So, before we even started Kindergarten, she encouraged us to sit at the table to draw, learn math, and read. We were really encouraged to do these things prematurely. When I was about eight, my bedroom was attached to this enclosed terrace, and at night my mom would say, “shut off the lights,” so I’d be reading with a flashlight under the covers. I read all of the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew books. After school, in the afternoon, I’d prefer to sit and read a book or the newspaper than doing sports. [Laughter.] In organized school sports, I was always the one that was picked last for the baseball and football teams, but I never let it bother me. I think because my grandparents and parents were self-sufficient in a way; my mother didn’t take any gruff from anybody. She was really a character.

EO

Was there any other path for you aside from being asked to be the editor in chief of Interview at the age of 22, while attending Columbia's Graduate Schools of Arts?

BC

If I had not been contacted by Andy Warhol based on the film reviews I was writing for the Village Voice, I think I would have become a film critic or more of a cultural writer in mainstream press. The editor of the Arts & Leisure section of the New York Times asked if I could write about Mick Jagger and performance, and of course he was my idol at the time, so I wrote a very over the top review. [Laughs.] And he came back to me and said that this was too much for him to publish in the Times. I don’t know if he meant it was too homoerotic, fabulous in general, or too extravagantly positive. Even after I left Interview, an editor of the Washington Post approached me about doing profiles and interviews. I don’t think Andy Warhol was my only possible option, but he came along right at the moment when I was still in school and not thinking about a job yet.

EO

But was there a before and after Andy transitional moment for you?

BC

Yes, but remember I was also aware of him before. In 1968, when I was 21 and could vote for the first time, it was Nixon v. Johnson. I wrote in Andy Warhol on the ballot. By that point, I had seen Chelsea Girls three or four times in the one art theater in Washington D.C.

EO

What was happening in art at the time?

BC

I didn’t grow up surrounded by art or thinking about art. You know, twice a year we’d go on a school trip to the MoMA or the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I can’t say I was ever art-oriented until Andy Warhol’s Elvis, Marilyn, Jackie, but especially when the Elvis and Marilyn works appeared in Life Magazine. I loved Elvis Presley and Elvis Presley movies. I love Love and Tender; I loved Marilyn Monroe. Some Like It Hot, my mother took us to see that three times. I was like, "Wow, this is art, but it’s art about people that I love—stars." I think Andy was the gateway for millions of American young people into just thinking that art could be cool and it wasn’t just only about knowing who Picasso was.

EO

[Laughs.]

BC

Unless you know something about him you couldn’t really relate. [Laughs.] Look, Cubism didn’t do it for me. And the old masters, I mean the dark Rembrandt paintings and portraits of Dutch burghers, I mean forget it. I mean I guess all of the religious art served a purpose. Saint Sebastian is the one image that I fancied upon. You know what I loved when I was a hippie? Botticelli’s Venus and the pre-Raphaelite’s, but that was later in college years. Well, those paintings appeared in 1963? I was high school. I really thought Andy was so cool because of the movies, the press he got wearing his sun glasses and leather jacket. Truman Capote was also an idol of mine at the time, and the two of them were largely dominating the press—they were of the same world it seemed to me. It just all seemed very fabulous, glamorous, free, and very sexually ambiguous. I preferred thinking of myself as someone into androgyny, like the way Mick Jagger was or Andy’s superstars.

EO

Bowie?

BC

He came a little later, I was already working at The Factory when he was having his moment. I went to Mick’s and the Rolling Stones’ first concert in 1964 at the Forest Hills tennis stadium, when I was in my junior year of high school. I never saw anything like it, there were all these boys there with long hair and the girls were throwing their panties at the stage going wild. Brian Jones [of the Rolling Stones] was still alive and he had this big blonde bouffant and you never saw anything like it in suburban Long Island in 1964. Mick sang "That’s How Strong My Love Is" to Keith Richards, and a boy jumped on stage and grabbed Mick by the leg and wouldn’t let go. I’ll always remember this because two police officers were beating him with a baton—this was before police brutality was a widely acknowledged issue—and Mick was just saying, “Oh dear! What will his mother say?” My mind was blown. I didn’t think men could behave that way, or that these things were allowed to happen. Warhol was mixed up in that for me.

EO

Speaking of society, Marylin Monroe was the most famous person alive at that time. Right?

BC

And Elvis, and The Beatles, probably. Well, in the 1950s—I mean Love Me Tender was probably ‘58, ‘59, Elvis was on the Ed Sullivan show, which we watched probably every Sunday night, and my father would turn the TV off when he started gyrating. There was this sense that men weren’t supposed to be so beautiful. And Elvis was so beautiful, as was Mick—in a much more raw way. They showed their beauty and expressed their sexuality in the way they moved, and that was a threat to men like my father. And to American men. The Ed Sullivan show, when the Rolling Stones appeared, for the first time had to change the words from “Let’s spend the night together” to “Let’s spend time together.” You know, America was very repressed. The puritanical morality that went back to the founding of Massachusetts and Connecticut and Rhode Island really permeated the entirety of the American population.

EO

How did that materialize?

BC

That materialized that even Italians, Italian Americans, who when you went to Italy it was, “Hey, la dolce vita,” you know, “Confess on Saturday and see your mistress on Sunday,” that translated to, you know, sex was never talked about. My aunt got a divorce, she had a nervous breakdown. My grandmother, and my mother, too, were so harsh with her. My mother used to take me to the mental institution that they put her in in Amityville, not too far from Plainview, and she would beg my mother to stop electro-shock treatments. It was not all from her getting a divorce, but it took such courage to do that that it sent her into a schizophrenic tailspin.

EO

What were the effects of the divorce?

BC

There’s always an upside and a downside. Families staying together was probably better than the situation we have now, where we have—dare I use the word— “illegitimate” children. And it’s not just an African American thing, it’s across the board now in America. There is really no morality. The Ten Commandments went out the window a long time ago. But don’t forget, the Ten Commandments used to be allowed to be posted in schools. You did say the Lord’s prayer and the pledge of allegiance. There was much more structure to society—it was more conformist, and it led to all kinds of rebellion, starting with artists’ rebellion. You know, the counterculture, which really was Joan Baez…the whole Hippie thing, the sexual revolution, the counterculture, it was all the hippies, the Doors, Rolling Stones, William Burroughs, Janice Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, this was all a revolution. Rock and Roll started with Elvis. But he was bland compared to Jimi Hendrix and Janice Joplin. Then you had the Kinks, and Bowie was in the next wave.

EO

I’ve been thinking a lot about counterculture—I think it’s going to dominate society.

BC

It is dominant! Did anyone ever say, “culture comes from politics?" No. [Laughs.] On the conservative side, they say “we’ve allowed the Left to control the culture.” Which takes a much larger role in most people’s lives than politics. And that’s why Republicans are now waging a war on the cultural side where they’re attacking “wokeness,” and they see that it works. There are a lot of Americans in the middle of the country, but also some liberals, who feel things have gone too far in the direction of having to call people “They,” etc. I just went to the dermatologist, and they asked for a profile, which included race and ethnicity. There’s got to be 500 choices. Every Indian Tribe is a separate option. It goes on and on and on. And finally, I was scrolling down to find white, and there was “Urban White,” “Country White,” “Mountain White,” “River White.” I asked, “What am I?” and skipped to the next question. Like, we don’t have a category anymore? The problem with the Left in this country is that it’s entirely lost its sense of humor. The far Right had already lost it. Nobody has a sense of humor anymore. This abortion thing is also so depressing, so complicated, it’s so hard to see a solution or a path forward that’s not even more divisive, you know. I don’t have a good feeling lately about things. Ukraine, I mean, that’s scary. This massive land war in Europe. It just feels like WW II has come back—it’s the same places that are being fought over, it’s the same words: Nazis, Communists, the Germans, the Russians, Baltic states. I mean it just seems tense.

EO

Have you changed with the world?

BC

I don’t think I’ve changed much. We talked yesterday about my two-track career, my two-track life, and my personality has always been a little two-track too. My father was a pessimist and my mother was an optimist. But they were almost extreme in that regard. My mother, the hurricane could be battering against the windows. And she’d say, “The news got it wrong. It always exaggerates, it’s going out to sea.” And you’d say “Mom, the windows are about to crash in.” My father would get home from work and get dinner, and he’d sit over on the sofa in the den alone and just sit there. And you’d say “Dad, what are you doing?” And he'd say, “Leave me alone, I’m worrying.” [Laughter.] I can be the world’s biggest worrier, and on the other hand I can say it’s all going to work out in the end. But I don’t know any more about the world, the country, the society. I mean, I guess I take refuge more and more in art. I think there’s so much excitement among what’s being done by young artists, and it has been vastly opened up to women and people of color, but on the basis of talent and creativity. It doesn’t feel like it’s forced, it feels like it’s organic. And therefore, there’s just so much more, you know. There’s such a richness that I find myself just thinking, “I’m glad I work with Vito Schnabel, I’m glad I work with Peter Marino, I’m glad I get to be around art and artists all the time. In a way I guess I’m using it as an escape, but what am I going to do, run for office? And then I come back to, “Well you’re an observer, Bob. It’s your job to clip the newspapers and put the headlines in your document.”

EO

Tell me everything about publishing in New York in the 1970s.

BC

Alright, well first of all [Laughs.] in book publishing you had the big classic publishing houses—not as big as today, they’ve all merged. You had Random House, Simon and Schuster, and Farrar, Straus, and Giroux were very literary, as was Knopf. These were mostly run by the founders or families of the founders. The book world was like a world unto itself, in a way. A club-y world. But as was the art world. The contemporary art world was like a village in New York—it only existed in Paris and New York.

EO

Fran Lebowitz is known for saying that the entire art world used to be able to fit in one room.

BC

[Laughs.] It could fit into a room! The number of artists who were well known was like ten. There was [Robert] Rauschenberg, [Jasper] Johns, [Andy] Warhol, [Roy] Lichtenstein, [Claes] Oldenburg, and the pop artists. And then there was [Willem] de Kooning and [Jackson] Pollock. I mean, Louise Nevelson was like the token woman, you know. But the number of contemporary art galleries was Leo Castelli, Ileana Sonnabend, who was his ex-wife. There was Paula Cooper early on, then there was Marian Goodman, but she was multiples to start out with. Oh, Holly Sullivan—she was like Pop Art. I mean, SoHo didn’t really get off the ground until the late ’70s. And there were no restaurants, you had to go to Bellato’s, which was almost on the Bowery at Houston Street. And there would be prominent collectors—another handful. I mean, that was it. In Europe, there were many more contemporary art collectors. Especially Germany, because Germans—up until the ’70s—were almost afraid to have their own culture after where their own culture had led them. So, they really devoured American culture more than any place else. I mean [Anselm] Kiefer started making work, Joseph Beuys was the first one that had some international acclaim. In terms of filmmakers there was [Michael] Fassbinder. But it was all very limited, you know. I mean, the Italians and the French Cinema were really, probably ‘65-’75 was the golden age of Italian and French avant-garde cinema. With these people Fellini, Antonioni, Godard, and Truffaut were like household names.

EO

What was considered cinema in America? Did it have a presence?

BC

Here cinema was Andy Warhol’s Lonesome Cowboys in like ‘67 or something. Queer cinema was underground, it was Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures. No, not in the mainstream. Jonas Mekas’ Anthology Film Archives was called Underground Cinema because it was underground. In Europe, Bertolucci’s The Conformist with Stefania Sandrelli and Jean-Louis Trintignant.

EO

But those were considered experimental films. I’m talking about—

BC

Mainstream queer theater or cinema? There wasn’t any.

EO

In America, or internationally?

BC

You’re saying Bertolucci was considered art, but those were mainstream. What I’m trying to say is, even in the avant-garde or sophisticated European mind, there weren’t many films that dealt with homosexuality or lesbianism as their subject or where the main characters fit that definition. I’m trying to think of some. I mean [Igmar] Bergman didn’t make movies with gay themes. It finally surfaced with Gus Van Sant's My Private Idaho—but it came a little later. I think Bowie was a breakthrough with his androgyny and role play. But in the ‘70s, the publishing scene, the fashion world, the art world, were all small. Everybody knew everybody else.

EO

What did that mean for you when you started? How were you received as an editor?

BC

When I was made editor of Interview, which was not that long after I started—maybe one year after I published my first Village Voice film review, Leo Lerman, the Features editor of Vogue, contacted me or Andy brought me to one of his [Leo’s] Sunday salons. He was gay and he had everyone from Tallulah Bankhead to Truman Capote at these Sunday afternoon teas. And Leo asked me if he paid me a monthly retainer, and would I meet with him once a month and give him ideas for the section that ran on what people were talking about at the time. At the same time, I went with Andy in ‘73 when he was asked to be in The Driver’s Seat movie. I went in the Summer, and in September I came back and had a meeting with Leo, and he said, “Did you keep a diary of Andy and Liz Taylor when they were together in Rome?” And I said “I did, I’m going back in October.” He said continue a diary, and we’re going to publish it as your diary. And so, my diary was published. But Alexander Liberman, the editorial director of Condé Nast, said “This is gossip, it belongs in Cosmo—not Vogue.” So, we sent it to Helen Gurley Brown, who was a pioneer of putting sex in magazines. And she sent it back to me with a note that said Alex Lieberman is out of his mind—this is way too sophisticated for Cosmo, the only magazine that is sophisticated enough for this is Vogue. So we went back to Alex and said, “You’ve got to publish this.” Doors did open for me, but it was a combination of things. What I wrote was good, if you ever read my Village Voice interviews, you might say “I guess, Bob used to be an intellectual!” But also knowing Andy I knew a lot of the players. So, it was also a matter of “Bob wrote this, oh Bob, the editor of Andy’s magazine, who Andy brought to my cocktail party last week.” I’ve been really lucky; I’ve been really fortunate.

EO

How did it feel doing your job?

BC

I was so thrilled it was what I was doing, I probably had the most swollen head of any 22-or 23-year-old in New York. I was a hot shot. Interview was very small, but it was Andy Warhol’s magazine. And when disco got really big with Le Jardin in ‘54, if Andy went to a club, he paid the club. So, if I came with as the editor of Andy Warhol’s magazine, I was an it-guy. In my twenties! [Laughs.]

EO

So how did that inform the choices you made for the magazine?

BC

Well, it did in that maybe I became the magazine. Certainly, the magazine was no longer what Gerard Malanga started with Andy in ‘69, Inter/View Film Journal. We were no longer writing film reviews. It was all tape recorded because that’s what Andy said was more modern, except for Fran’s [Leibowitz] column and my column. I mean, Fred Hughes came up with this line: “People say we’re superficial. It’s true. We’re deeply superficial.” So, I got more and more caught up in, you know, doing full-page photos that were called, "inter-man and view-girls." Sometimes they were new models, but a lot of times they were just kids from rich or aristocratic families who were beautiful. We became unabashedly look-ist. But on the other hand, I always knew we had to have serious stuff. I cultivated the Washington scene, I loved Washington and I had a few connections there from Georgetown, my friend Christopher Murray had a gallery, he started showing photography, including Andy—I put them together. Annie Liebovitz, Chris Makos, then we met Firooz Zahedi, who went to Georgetown and was the nephew of the Iranian ambassador, Ardeshir Zahedi, who was the number one host in Washington.

EO

Did you make Interview a brand?

BC

The brand became “the mix.” Tina Brown stole all of this—the mix. The brand became that it was this glamorous, hip thing, where people who seemed like they would never gel would suddenly be paired and thrown together. You never knew who was going to be on the cover next. Joe Dallesandro to Nancy Reagan. And I, of course, loved all of this, and Andy was all “Oh this is all so cool, we’re really up there now, Bob.” Andy was always fascinated by new worlds—high or low. It was a high/low mix, we pioneered a lot of work that later became Tina Brown’s Vanity Fair, and Raymond Carter’s Vanity Fair. This idea of hotness. We never put De Niro or Pacino on the cover because we didn’t think they were glamorous. They were too serious. We had Warren Beatty and Jack Nicholson. It was a fine line, but again, I never felt like I went through a lot of transfigurations. I’ve always felt like I’ve always been me, and that’s been my strength. That’s when I started going to Paris with Andy and Fred Hughes and having lunch with Marie-Helene de Rothschild and Helene Rochas, and they’d ask me where I was from. I said “Brooklyn," I just said I was from Brooklyn. They’d say, “Oh really! What did your parents do?” I said, “Oh, they were both salespeople. My mother works at Saks Fifth Avenue, and that my father’s in the coffee business but he’s really just a glorified salesman. Coffee broker.” I never felt like I had to embellish or anything. Again, my parents were like that and my grandparents were like that, and I just felt—I know the word authenticity is so overused—but I was authentic without thinking about it. I was just me.

EO

Why did this scene matter so much to people?

BC

It mattered then, especially, because it was the most open place in New York, and in a way, the country, where a non-judgmental, open-doors, creative, youthful sort of atmosphere prevailed. Where Andy himself—you know, everything starts with Pop—loved young people, loved ideas. It was the only place in New York where you didn’t have to make an appointment with the art director to show your photography. We had open house on Wednesdays for photographers, and Robert Hayes, the Deputy Editor of Interview under me, and Marc Balet, the Art Director, would look at all these photos and the ones they liked they’d ask the photographer if they could keep until the next week. They’d show the work to me, Fred Hughes, and Andy. We had lunches where the lunch ostensibly was set up for the Chinese ambassador to the UN, who somehow, we’d met, but at [Studio] 54 we’d see two cute boys and a cute girl and tell them to come to lunch tomorrow. And then there’d be Jerry Zipkin, Nancy Reagan’s best friend, with two Greek shipping heiresses who wanted to have their portraits done. And Larry Rivis would come on his motorcycle. It got to the point by the end of the ‘70s that when young people, especially creative and fashionable people, came to New York, there were two things they wanted to do: have lunch at The Factory and come to Studio 54. The whole thing was very open. It wasn’t structured. And even though Andy was always with interviewers and playing this very fey game, saying things like, “I don’t know why I painted Mao with a green face, why did I do that, Bob?” And I would tell him, “Oh Andy, it’s because it’s the only color you had left.” Then he'd go, “Oh yeah, that’s why…” But Andy was dead serious about painting Mao and knew exactly why he painted Mao.

EO

How do you mean?

BC

Bruno Bischofberger said to Andy, “I want you to paint the most famous and important person in the 20th century, Albert Einstein.” And Andy said “No, he’s not the most famous and important. Mao is.” When people said, “Andy, look, you're not a real painter, you're a photographer”— whether it was Gala Dali or Prentice Hale from San Francisco, whose wife wanted her portrait done. That was the same thing that Gala Dali said to prevent Andy from painting Dali's portrait. “No trade oil painting for a photograph,” she said. Andy would be furious. But long term, Andy was more than a painter, more than a photographer, or video maker, or filmmaker. He was a philosopher, which is why he loved the idea of writing a philosophy book. He was also a kind of sociologist—he was someone who was constantly recording our time in every medium he could. John Richardson called him the exterminating recorder. He tape recorded everybody—taxi drivers to Park Avenue socialites. He photographed everybody.

EO

Why do you think?

BC

This was all, as I say, kind of research. The ultimate paintings, the ultimate work, encompassed the time—late 20th century American art. America was the empire, America was the Rome. It may be in its decadent stages, but...

EO

Did you feel that after time?

BC

To a degree, but I see it more and more everyday now.

EO

How do you mean?

BC

Well first of all, when I started doing a little research for Holy Terror in 1989, ‘90, when Andy had died and I was no longer at The Factory—I had agreed to write this memoir. I realized nobody knew much about Andy’s childhood because he had always lied about everything. We just knew the bare bones. So, I went to Pittsburgh and interviewed a lot of Andy’s aunts and uncles, went to the countryside where a whole clan lived, but the minute I walked into the St. John Chrysostom Greek-Russian Catholic Church, and saw the iconostasis, I said this is where Andy’s art comes from. This is where his portraits come from—the Byzantine icons, they're flat, two-dimensional, gold-leaf backgrounds, all in a grid on the screen on the iconostasis that's only opened when the communion is served. And so, these masses are two hours long. And they went to three every Sunday with his mother and Saturday night vespers service, staring at this grid of icons. And it hit me that Andy was making secular—no, religious art for a secular time in a secular culture. Every culture needs something to worship, and Andy fastened upon the objects of worship of again late 20th century America and beyond, including not only Elvis, Marilyn, Liz, and Jackie, who are martyrs which makes them even more like Catholicism, but also the hammer and sickle is an object of worship. The dollar sign is an object of worship. You know, Mao was an object of worship—Lenin was an object of worship.

EO

How do you figure that?

BC

Well, that's the reason for the continuing popularity and fascination with Andy’s work, which is now global. It's because the imagery itself is meant to be worshiped. Every one of those subjects I just mentioned, before Andy painted them, had millions of people, consciously or unconsciously, already relating to them.

EO

What about Basquiat?

BC

What about him? I don't think Basquiat’s as important as Andy, universally. I think Basquiat is like Rambo [Lance De Los Reyes]. Basquiat combined two things: boy genius wunderkind, with being the first young Black artist that became really known nationally. You had Jacob Lawrence, that was it, that people knew about. He was the Black artist, Jacob Lawrence. You know, when Jimmy Carter had his inauguration and they wanted five artists to cover the inauguration and make prints and they chose Andy, I went in Andy’s place because he had to go to Kuwait for a show. So, the people at the time were Andy, [Robert] Rauschenberg, [Roy] Lichtenstein, Jamie Wyeth, mostly like traditional working artists, and Jacob Lawrence. But Basquiat was a breakthrough for Black people, for Black artists. Keith Haring, who I think should have more attention, was a breakthrough for Latinos. And actually, his posse, his pop-up store in SoHo in New York, he had a huge cultural presence. But Basquiat was like Rambo in the sense that he was just born with this incredible talent. This preternatural talent.

EO

Sensibility, wrought sensibility.

BC

He couldn't make a bad painting, you know. But the cliché about Andy is that Picasso was the most important artist of the first half of the 20th century. And Andy of the second half. And I agree with that, even though it's a cliche at this point, I would say Basquiat might be the second most important artist of the 20th century. I think Jeff Koons is very much the Mannerist stage of pop art. Well Mannerism is always like the last gasp of something that starts off primitive and goes into its classical mode. This is old fashioned art history. And then you have the Baroque. Kant makes everything more complicated. And then get to the Mannerist which is kind of the decrement phase. I mean, but El Greco was a Mannerist, you know, so it's not a bad thing. Basquiat paired the primitive aspect of his work by introducing new ideas in a classical way by putting it in proper form, let’s say.

EO

Speak more about Koons.

BC

Well, Jeff Koons, he's a friend of mine, I actually like him a lot. And I like his work a lot. And he would be the first to admit that he's very derived from Andy. And I don't think there's an artist who came after him that isn't in some way influenced by Andy’s work. Like the whole “Pictures Generation” which is composed of people like Cindy Sherman to Richard Prince. It goes on and on. But I think Koons has that ability that Andy had to be high and low at the same time, to make art like these huge sculptures in Versailles, and the public's like, coming in droves, while critics and historians can write lots about it. There's a certain calculation, like there was in what Andy did. Like Andy, Koons’ works hide the calculation. In public images, Andy’s like “I didn't know what I was doing. That was the only color I had left.” Koons is like, “No, my art is just about bringing people together. It's about love.” It’s like, Jeff… [Laughs.]

EO

What do you think are the benefits of hiding the calculation?

BC

I think that's part of cool. It's not cool to brag about yourself. Donald Trump is not cool. Before he was President, he was never cool, right? He was a character. He was amusing. But he wasn't cool. Or hip, you know. Well, first of all, I think that the true artists, the real artists, great artists are always kind of insecure. And great writers. I mean, Truman Capote was one of the most insecure people I ever met. I had the privilege of spending a week with Paul Choose and he wouldn't even call himself an artist. He said he was a craftsman. That it was such a history to decipher what the artist was. And that’s false modesty, but...

EO

It’s funny that you say that, because I was recently watching the Kanye West documentary trilogy. And it showcases his early days working as a producer—he’s successful, but he's successful to people for something else. You know that feeling when people are like, “This is who you are!” And you're like, “No, this is what I can do. But this isn't what I want. This isn’t all I am.” He’s in his early 20s, trying to break into the music industry. At this point he’s rapped for years for his mom, since when he was a kid. And one night they’re sitting in the kitchen and he raps to her while a friend is recording him on camera and she's like, “Most giants look in the mirror and see nothing. But everyone else can recognize that person is a giant.” It’s a shame that these people who are really influential are the most insecure.

BC

I mean, of course they see nothing. Well, that's what was written a lot about Andy—that he was a vacuum, he was a vampire.

EO

But you can’t see yourself when you’re one of those people.

BC

So therefore, he opened himself up for people to read whatever they wanted—to project themselves into the blank mirror. Maybe it just was his personality, but he cultivated it. You know, he said, “I want to be a machine. I don’t want to have feelings.” Certainly, in public. You could read 1,000 of his interviews, he really doesn't give much away. It's all like, “I’m just this traveling society boy from Maine. Oh, I just follow my hairdresser, Fred Hughes.” But I think Jeff Koons in a way is like that too. It's almost he a blank mirror. And his art involves reflection—you see yourself.

EO

It has everything to do with postmodernist architecture and consumer history. You know, being reflected back to yourself.

BC

Well, it has a lot to do with capitalism and marketing. Again, Andy’s the biggest capitalist artist. Andy’s art is all about capitalism. And Andy was about marketing, he was focused on selling from the moment when he woke up. You know, he always said, “I'm a business artist.”

EO

How was New York on the ground in the financial crash in the ’70s?

BC

I was mugged twice up at Columbia University by teenage junkies who had a knife and were shaking as they held me up. I would show them that there’s a $20 bill on top which was just enough for them to buy a hit or something. There was a recession, inflation, and high interest rates. And everyone read about it all the time. If you wanted to buy an apartment, you had to pay 20% interest. But we were kids. I think Andy knew more about those things—he was frugal. He grew up not knowing where his next meal was coming from. They were really poor—not working class but they were poor. We were in our 20s and five of us would pile into a Checker Cab, which would be $5 to go from the Upper East Side to Union Square. So it was $1 each which didn’t seem to effect us much. It wasn’t as bad as it is portrayed, but the crime was really horrible. It got even worse in the ’80s until Mayor Giuliani came in. Cars were stolen all the time on Third Avenue and in the East 70s. Everyone got their car stolen. If they couldn’t steal the car, at the very least they would break the window and steal the stereo.

EO

Can you talk about the presence of art?

BC

In the 70s, it became apparent that art was becoming one of New York City's big businesses along with fashion, finance, media, and publishing. You had the first big auction of contemporary art—the Scull auction—in like in ‘74 or ‘75, at Sotheby’s Parke-Bernet. Robert Scull was an early pop art collector. Ethel Scull had her portrait done by Andy before anyone. But he didn’t even have a Polaroid then. Then they went into a dime photo booth, and he made a portrait out of that strip of four photos. So after ten years of collecting all these pop artists, and getting really great prices, and buying directly from the artists and even getting gifts from these artists—you know, Warhol, Rauschenberg, Lichtenstein, [Claes] Oldenburg—they decided to auction the whole thing off at Sotheby’s. No one had ever done that. People only auction things off because of inheritance tax, or, you know, a divorce, but generally collectors kept things forever and passed them onto their children. So, this was like a shock. It was a scandal. Rauschenberg organized a group of artists to picket the night of the auction. I went to the auction, it was like pandemonium—the rich collectors were filing in, and they were almost being accosted by the artists waving signs that said, you know, “Stop raping artists,” or “Give us a cut.”

EO

How old were you when this happened?

BC

Well, this was ‘75, I was 26 or something.

EO

And how did that change your understanding of your positionality?

BC

Like everyone else, it was like, “I guess so.” You know, art was becoming more public. It was in the news. This made many more people talk about art. It really started a buildup that really flowered around ‘79, ‘80. The problem with the art in the ’70s was that then, the art world, the art intellectuals, the curators, the critics, museum directors, said everything had to be conceptual. Meaning was dead. The only acceptable form of painting was minimalism. Nothing figurative, nothing representational. Video was coming in, and so was performance art. So, what was there to buy and sell?

EO

Well, that’s the thing. It’s about the ephemera.

BC

Well, it became more about artists like Joseph Kosuth, who typed up pages, performed, and then framed them. It became almost about the literature in a bespoke way. It forgot what art always was, painting and sculpture, and drawing, things that people can have in their house or that a museum could show. You know, it was really boring to look at. [Laughs.] Pages typed up by Joseph Kosuth. Or you know, you went to a performance and after an hour and a half that was the end of it. And then in 1979, 1980, out of the art schools of California and New York came this new generation that said, “Fuck them! They're telling us we can’t paint; we're going to paint any way we want to paint. We're going to paint a new way. We're going to paint figures. We're going to paint any subject we want to paint. Some abstract, but mainly we're going to paint images again.” That was novel. That was Salle, Eric Fischl, and Francesco Clemente.

EO

What happened?

BC

These people were all painting whatever they wanted to. They were called the Neo-Expressionists as a large group. But there was also Basquiat and Haring, the graffiti artists, and they were painting faces. You know, they were not abstract painters, they certainly weren't conceptual painters. And this set off a boom. It gave the press so much more to write about, it gave collectors so much more to buy, it led to new galleries like Mary Boone, that were of the generation of the artists. Mary Boone showed Eric Fischl, Ross Lechner, Phillip Taaffe, Donald Bachelor later. You know, it's like fashion. Fashion was dominated by Paris all through the 50s, 60s, and into the 70s. And a little bit in Rome, Valentino, and a few designers who were working for the Vatican. But suddenly in Milan, there was a new generation that did great ready-to-wear. They were not couturiers. Armani, Versace, Krizia, Walter Albini, Gianfrango Ferre. That set off an explosion in fashion, because now you have Milan, not just Rome. And that also shifted focus more to London. It's like, if you have new product—to put it in capitalistic terms—you have new buyers, new market, more press, stores, and more everything. But I missed the boat. I should have bought a Basquiat, I should have bought a Haring, when they were at the first show in New York at PS1.

EO

When you wrote that book [Holy Terror], what story did you feel like you had to tell?

BC

Well, I have to be honest with you. We talked about my two tracks—when I left Interview, in early ‘83, I kind of jumped. I went much more onto my political, society track. I was not in the midst of all the '80s artists, except through Thomas Amman. When I was writing Holy Terror, I wasn't really thinking of the '80s. I was telling my story as a way of revealing what Andy was like as a human being, first and foremost. By that point I had six years of Vanity Fair profiles behind me, and my talent was humanizing big names.

EO

That’s the project at hand—humanizing these people who seem like untouchables.

BC

I did learn from Andy to be non-judgmental, because I think journalists shouldn't set themselves up as the judge and the jury as if we never smoked pot or never slept with the wrong person. As if we’ve never said something stupid. You know, just tell the story. And so, for me, Holy Terror was trying to tell the Warhol story, but through the eyes of a young suburban kid.

EO

Did you become disillusioned by Warhol?

BC

Well, I never stopped thinking Andy was a genius, no. I did leave in anger and thinking, “Andy's a jerk.” I was very disappointed in Jed [Johnson] and Andy breaking up. I was a totally pro-Jed person. I mean, it was all very personal.

EO

Why was it so personal?

BC

I mean, because we were like a little family. I had my own family, but I didn't like John Gould, quite frankly. And I thought Andy was using him against me. One day I was like, “Andy, you never showed Jed any feelings, so now you're going overboard with John because we all told you that maybe you should be a little nicer to Jed and stop complaining about how much money he's spending on your house.” Graydon Carter actually reviewed Holy Terror in Vogue when he was editor of Spy. And we had never met or anything. I liked Spy, but he wrote like an eight-page review in Vogue and went on quoting whole paragraphs that were really funny paragraphs from Holy Terror. The last line, though, was for all the humor, all the insights, whatever, he was like, “Bob Colacello’s too close to the trees to see the forest.” And I agreed with that. It is called Holy Terror: Andy Warhol Close Up. For the most part, the book is very close up. Every so often I do stay back and do some interpretation of what the art meant at the time, or how it was seen, or how I saw it. But you know, it's not an art historical critical work. It's a memoir. When I was writing that I was actually having fun. I was mostly up in Rhode Island, away from everything, and my editor for Vanity Fair would come up every other weekend and read what I wrote. I wanted people to laugh. It was so absurd. There’s this magazine called C☆ndy in Madrid, which is like basically…

EO

Yes, of course. I’m familiar!

BC

[Laughs.] You know, C☆ndy, right? It's kind of a trans Glamour book. It’s done by Luis Venegas. In the new issue, they photocopied my “Candy Darling” chapter from and it says, Holy Terror, page 141. It's like six pages of just the “Candy Darling” chapter and they have some cool photos of Candy. You know, I feel so lucky that some young guy in Madrid would even care about what I wrote about Candy Darling a long, long time ago. But I think I knew what I was doing. I wanted to write a really good book. I wanted it to be funny. I wanted to paint an accurate portrait of Andy.

EO

Did you write for Interview much at all throughout your years of editing?

BC

Oh yeah, Andy and I would do his interviews together. The cover stories would usually be Andy and me, or maybe Bridget Berlin, but I didn’t do many one-on-one interviews on my own. There was just a limit to what I could do. I mean, I had to put the magazine together every month. I had to go to all these parties with Andy, or on my own. I was selling portraits. And Andy wanted me to go to Europe with them all the time, that was ten trips a year let’s say. And I had my own column—I was dictating my diary to Pat Hearn. And then I would take that at the end of the month and shape each day into something printable and funny, I hoped. I’m having them all scanned now because I'm hoping a quick book that could be just pages out of the diary. But it was good to get back to writing. I was hoping to make my way back. I was hoping Condé Nast would make me editor of one of the magazines. And I probably could have been editor of GQ after about three years, but I blew it by sniffing cocaine with Calvin Klein at the Metropolitan Museum while I was the date of Estée Lauder.

EO

Did you ever want one of those positions?

BC

Well, the thing about drugs, it always starts off kind of innocently. You know, drinking and doing cocaine was normal. Coke got rid of all those puritanical inhibitions, and for a long time it was fun. But then it became an addiction. It became like going on autopilot. And it started hurting my career. Or it made people see me a certain way—like Tina Brown would say, “Oh, I love you when you're tipsy.” You know, of course. Yeah, you love me when I’m tipsy. But I had to get my act together if they were going to ever think of giving me a magazine, but by that point, I don’t know. I don't want to look back and regret things.

EO

How do you feel now?

BC

I feel it’s really good that I became more of a writer. I really do enjoy writing when I really get into it. At some point it just starts happening.

EO

Were you blinded by your circumstances when you were editor?

BC

I had no time to write. You know, like I said, Andy said writing was passé, tape recording was it. What I was doing was more than a full-time job. In fact, I’d get impatient and scream at some of the people in the office, probably because I was so hungover. But they sort of all understood—I mean, Robin Hayes, Gael Love, they would all say to me, “We don't know how you do everything you do. We don't know how you actually function at all these parties where you charm everybody, and you're under pressure to sell ads and portraits, and to show up the next day.”

EO

[Laughs.] Being nice, being a person, showering…showing up. It’s a lot.

BC

But I wasn't always nice, but they understood the reason I wasn’t nice was because I was under so much pressure, essentially. My selling ads, and selling portraits, was funding Interview magazine. I was paying my own salary, in a way. And everybody else’s on the staff. So, they knew that and they saw it. That was the cleverness of Andy's business structure. You could be the editor of Interview if you figure out how to pay for it. In terms of an arc of connection from the past to the present, that's happened quite clearly with my photographs. I noticed when I was taking these pictures with a little Minox camera that we got in Germany in ’76, right before I left for Interview, I never took a picture again. I didn't think of them as my photography.

EO

Because?

BC

It was too “Andy Warhol” to take my camera out at a party. I wanted to be a serious Vanity Fair, Condé Nast type person. And also, I was at different events. I couldn't take little pictures of Bill and Pat Buckley’s dinner parties.

EO

So, you ducked out and went back to high society?

BC

Yes, I went back onto the political society track. I was the pet of the Reagan group which had started already in the late '70s. The closest friends of the Reagan's were Jerry Zipkin, this New York gay bachelor who was a great raconteur, and actually promoted a lot of young people—and he promoted me, that's for sure. It was Jerry Zipkin, Bill and Pat Buckley, on the West Coast Betsy and Alfred Bloomingdale—they all basically adopted me. They thought it was amusing that here I was working for Andy Warhol, but I was a rock-ribbed Republican, and they trusted me. I just tagged along with them a lot. So, taking pictures in that context didn’t seem appropriate—I took pictures of Pat Buckley at the Metropolitan Gala, but not anywhere else. It’s just funny to me that all these years later galleries will show my photographs and I’m actually selling. Mary Boone was the first, way back when, but then Steven Kasher Gallery, Peter Marino, and Vito [Schnabel Gallery] giving me a big show, which set off Elena Forster giving me a show and another book. It’s just another way of me saying I'm really lucky.

EO

[Laughs.] Remember how someone recently told me I was bohemian and I didn’t know how to respond. You said you the most insightful thing. What was it again?

BC

[Laughs.] Well, bohemian is I guess now kind of old-fashioned. I guess bohemia meant being “Woke.” Well, no, because Bohemia is a place, it's part of Czechoslovakia. And Prague is the capital of Bohemia. I know I said it much better yesterday. I always operated on these two tracks. I was both bourgeois, very bourgeois—I'm still bourgeois—and also bohemian, and was attracted to bohemia without ever really losing some of my bourgeois fetishes, like for neatness, good manners, and putting money in the bank. But sometimes I didn't take risks because I was too bourgeois.

EO

Why?

BC

Because I always opted for safety over risk, I guess. When I was drunk and high, I took all kinds of risks, just by going to Crisco Disco at four in the morning. Well, I don't want to say I'm a boho, but I think that I come from a very bourgeois place. I come from an upwardly mobile, Italian-American Catholic family whose grandparents went from being white collar working class, let's say, like many families, but then ended up very bourgeois. My mother worked at Saks Fifth Avenue for God's sake. [Laughs.] And I was the teacher’s pet. I wasn’t good at sports so my father couldn't brag about that. But he can say to his friends, “Robert has been reading the New York Times since he's eight years old. Robert, tell us what you think about the civil war in the Congo.” And these Wallstreet guys go, “Wow!” I was 14-years-old. When I went to Georgetown it was the first time I was free from living with highly strict parents who knew everything I did. Suddenly, within a couple of months in Georgetown, I was hanging out with his group of prep school boys from the North Shore of Long Island who had a band called Rave Maggots. And they were into Rhythm and Blues. And through them I heard learned about Muddy Waters and BB King. We'd go to African American bars and clubs on 14th Street and Seventh Street in Washington, and the musicians thought it was amusing in a way that these white Georgetown boys knew about them. They got us into pot. And I remember feeling really cool smoking pot on the steps of the US Treasury Building, you know, just next door to the White House. I went to see James Brown about five times, he’d have these shows where he changed capes ten times. I was protesting the Vietnam War like everybody else; I was going to sit-ins. I took LSD, you know, so the bohemian side was ascendant.

From an early age, I was attracted to [Jean] Cocteau. For some reason, maybe it was the underlying subconscious gay thing, I was attracted to Cocteau, [Salvador] Dali and [Luis] Buñuel. I didn't like the Beatles, I liked Mick Jagger. I liked The Rolling Stones. They were bohemian. They were avant-garde. I mean bohemian is more of a word that is late 19th century—really, the Impressionists were avant-garde. They were real bohemians. The Bloomsbury Group were bohemians. You could say Jack Kerouac, who is another idol of mine, and Allen Ginsberg. That was bohemia and they called them beatniks. It's that whole line that goes from being mixed to hippies to hipsters. Bohemia is a word for that world in and of itself, which is the arts—but the arts that are pushing the boundaries, removed from bourgeois society.