Bob Colacello

BC

Ask me anything you want.

EO

Have you always been strategic?

BC

Yes. I never strategized in a five-year-plan kind 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 for the Brazilian movie Antonio das Mortes (1969). I’d pick art films I knew Andrew Sarris would never review, which gave me a better chance of getting published. I’d always been the teacher’s pet, so Sarris became another teacher. I wanted to be in the Voice as much as possible—not just to get my name out there, but because I enjoyed writing.

I was living at my parents’ house after graduating from Georgetown when I took a 180-degree turn and decided I wanted to be a filmmaker instead of a diplomat. They said, “Okay, we’ll send you to Columbia and pay the tuition, but we can’t afford an apartment in Manhattan.” So I was pounding out reviews of way-out films from my childhood desk. I never thought about being a writer, but in high school, whenever I had to write a paper, teachers would tell me, “You write well—you should think about becoming a writer.” I love literature—a certain kind of literature. [Laughs.]

EO

What kind?

BC

Not Shakespeare, you know? I liked T.S. Eliot, W.B. Yeats, and, looking back, I was drawn to Jean Genet, Jean Cocteau, and André Gide. 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 Rimbaud, and the story of him and Verlaine, but I also liked Baudelaire. I liked the romantic, collegiate stuff—William Blake, who in the ’60s was a kind of hippie idol, though I wasn’t a hippie in high school. I liked Flaubert’s Madame Bovary. I tried reading Proust a few times, but the sentences were too long for me. [Laughs.] I liked the hard European push, but over the years I read three or four Proust biographies.

Cocteau fascinated me because he was an artist, writer, poet, filmmaker, and part of high society. He was Picasso’s bridge to society and to Marie-Laure de Noailles—like the Agnes Gund of her time. She entertained constantly, though I forget where the money came from. She had a fabulous hôtel particulier in Paris, where Gertrude Stein would stay. 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 or 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 science.

As a boy, I’d always been fascinated with geography. I had a globe in my room, atlases, a stamp collection—anything to do with travel. In those days, you had to memorize the fifty states, their capitals, and their major products. For me, the School of Foreign Service was a natural fit. 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 or seen sunlight in a couple of weeks. My mom said, “You’re not going here—it’s too depressing.” [Laughs.] I said good, I wanted 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—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 forever for me to become an ambassador, if ever.

My father thought I’d come and work for the company he worked for, the Volkart Brothers—a Swiss commodity trading firm based in Winterthur, Switzerland, owned by the very rich yet discreet Reinhardt family, who were in coffee, cotton, and cocoa. My father ran their coffee division out of New York, buying from South and Latin America and selling to roasters who shipped 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. Boys from Nebraska and Georgia were meeting Italian American and Jewish boys from New York and Chicago. [Laughs.] When people 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 didn’t work outside the home; if they did, they were seen as shady.

My father would often take me to visit his office at 120 Wall Street. The president of the company, Mr. Van Allace, was from Belgium and had taken a liking to me. He was impressed that I knew geography and had a desire to go to Europe. Most American boys my age weren’t interested in knowing which countries were part of French Equatorial Africa. He made it clear there would be a job for me if I ever needed one. But things changed 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—whom I nicknamed the “best grandma” (my father’s mother was the “nice grandma”)—used to tell me stories of being five years old, coming from Naples, and losing her mother to pneumonia, as well as five of her siblings. She was sharp, had a great memory, and I think I inherited that from her.

EO

Did storytelling drive your interest?

BC

Yes—her storytelling and my general interest in the world. My father read The New York Times every morning and came home in the afternoon with the Journal American. I started reading the paper when I was around seven. 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 for me to check out adult books. The first was Edward Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. [Laughs.] I was fascinated by the idea of “decline and fall”—but, truthfully, I was also drawn to the illustrations of Roman men in togas. Looking back, you realize you find ways to seek out the images you’re looking for, without knowing it.

Another place that happened was in church, at high mass—with incense, priests in taffeta robes, Gregorian chants. It was theater. In the middle-class suburb we moved to from Brooklyn—Plainview—it was the only naked man you’d see: Christ on the cross. Not only naked, but crowned with thorns and bleeding. [Laughs.] Another favorite Catholic image was Saint Sebastian, pierced with arrows. It’s why I don’t like identity politics—it reduces people to the most marginal or crass part of themselves.

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 you grow older, it becomes less important—by choice or not. I don’t like people politicizing my desire. Do you see being Black as the main thing? I don’t see being white as my main thing—and I’m not even white, I’m Italian American. We were called “Black” for a long time. But being of Italian origin, growing up in suburbia in an upwardly mobile family during an upwardly mobile time in America—that shaped me as much as my sexuality. From an early age, my sexual preference found ways to—

EO

Make itself known?

BC

Or lead me to read André Gide and prefer Gide to Ernest Hemingway. I prefer Virginia Woolf to F. Scott Fitzgerald.

EO

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

BC

I think I just related to what they were feeling; my homosexuality was part of it. Growing up in Brooklyn, when you were four or five, playing outside or at the park, kids would walk up and ask, “What are you?” You’d say Jewish or Catholic—we didn’t know any Protestants. One day a girl said she was Roman Catholic, so I asked my grandmother about it. 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.” [Laughs.] In those days, churches here were dominated by Irish Catholics, who’d arrived two or three generations before the Italians. Rome was always in my head as the place we came from.

EO

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 war there was a housing shortage in America, especially in New York City. For my first eight years, we lived in a two-family house—the landlord on the first floor, us on the second. My mother was terrified we’d be evicted if my sisters and I made too much noise, so before we even started kindergarten she had us sitting at the table drawing, doing math, reading. We were encouraged to do these things prematurely.

When I was about eight, my bedroom connected to an enclosed terrace. At night my mother would tell me to turn out the lights, so I’d read with a flashlight under the covers. I read all the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew books. After school, I preferred a book or the newspaper to sports. [Laughs.] In gym, I was always picked last for baseball or football, but it never bothered me. My grandparents and parents were self-sufficient—my mother didn’t take gruff from anyone. She was a real character.

EO

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

BC

If Andy hadn’t contacted me after reading my Village Voice film reviews, I think I would have become a film critic or a cultural writer for the mainstream press. The editor of the New York Times Arts & Leisure section once asked if I could write about Mick Jagger and performance—my idol at the time. I wrote a very over-the-top review. [Laughs.] He came back and said it was too much to publish—maybe too homoerotic, maybe just too fabulous, maybe too extravagantly positive. Even after I left Interview, the Washington Post approached me about doing profiles. Andy wasn’t my only possible option, but he came along at the moment when I was still in school and not yet thinking about a job.

EO

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

BC

Yes, but I was aware of him before. In 1968, when I was 21 and could vote for the first time, it was Nixon vs. Johnson. I wrote in Andy Warhol. By then I’d seen Chelsea Girls three or four times at 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. Twice a year we’d go on school trips to MoMA or the Met. I can’t say I was ever art-oriented until Andy Warhol’s Elvis, Marilyn, and Jackie—especially the Elvis and Marilyn works—appeared in Life magazine. I loved Elvis Presley and his movies—Love Me Tender, Jailhouse Rock. I loved Marilyn Monroe—Some Like It Hot—my mother took us to see it three times. I thought: this is art, but it’s art about people I love—stars.

Andy was a gateway for millions of young Americans into thinking art could be cool, that it wasn’t just about knowing Picasso. Unless you knew something about him, you couldn’t really relate. [Laughs.] Cubism didn’t do it for me. The old masters—dark Rembrandts, portraits of Dutch burghers—forget it. Religious art had its purpose. Saint Sebastian was the one image I fancied. When I was a hippie, I loved Botticelli’s Venus and the Pre-Raphaelites—that was later, in college.

By high school, Warhol already seemed cool to me: the movies, the press, the sunglasses, the leather jacket. Truman Capote was another idol. The two of them dominated the press—they seemed to belong to the same world. Fabulous, glamorous, free, sexually ambiguous. I preferred thinking of myself as into androgyny—like Mick Jagger 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 the Rolling Stones’ first concert in 1964 at the Forest Hills tennis stadium, junior year of high school. I’d never seen anything like it: boys with long hair, girls throwing panties at the stage, Brian Jones with a big blond bouffant—nothing like it in suburban Long Island. Mick sang “That’s How Strong My Love Is” to Keith Richards, and a boy jumped on stage, grabbed Mick’s leg, wouldn’t let go. Two police officers beat him with a baton—this was before police brutality was widely acknowledged—and Mick just said, “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. Warhol was mixed up in that for me.

EO

Speaking of society—Marilyn Monroe was the most famous person alive at that time, right?

BC

And Elvis. And the Beatles, probably. In the 1950s—Love Me Tender was ’56 or ’57—Elvis was on The Ed Sullivan Show every Sunday night. My father would turn the TV off when he started gyrating. Men weren’t supposed to be so beautiful. Elvis was beautiful; so was Mick—in a much rawer way. They expressed their sexuality in movement, which was threatening to men like my father—and to American men in general.

When the Rolling Stones went on Ed Sullivan, they had to change the words from “Let’s spend the night together” to “Let’s spend time together.” America was very repressed. That Puritan morality from Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island still permeated the country.

EO

How did that materialize?

BC

Even for Italians and Italian Americans—where, if you went to Italy, it was “Hey, la dolce vita,” you know, “Confess on Saturday, see your mistress on Sunday”—sex was never talked about. My aunt got a divorce and 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 in Amityville, not far from Plainview, and my aunt would beg her to stop the electroshock treatments. It wasn’t only from the divorce, but the courage it took to leave 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 what we have now, with—dare I use the word—“illegitimate” children. And it’s not just an African American thing—it’s across the board in America. There’s really no morality. The Ten Commandments went out the window a long time ago. They used to be posted in schools. You said the Lord’s Prayer and the Pledge of Allegiance. Society was more structured, more conformist—which led to all kinds of rebellion.

The counterculture came out of that—Joan Baez, the hippies, the sexual revolution, the Doors, the Rolling Stones, William Burroughs, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix. Rock and roll started with Elvis, but he was bland compared to Hendrix or Joplin. Then you had the Kinks. Bowie came in the next wave.

EO

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

BC

It already does. 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.” And culture shapes most people’s lives more than politics does. That’s why Republicans are waging a war on “wokeness”—and it works. There are plenty of Americans, even some liberals, who feel things have gone too far.

I just went to the dermatologist, filled out a profile with race and ethnicity, and there were hundreds of choices—every Native American tribe listed separately. Then I get to “white” and it’s “Urban White,” “Country White,” “Mountain White,” “River White.” I asked, “What am I?” and skipped to the next question. We don’t even have a category anymore. The Left has lost its sense of humor. The far Right lost it long ago.

The abortion debate is depressing and intractable—no solution that isn’t more divisive. Ukraine is terrifying—a massive land war in Europe, the same territories fought over in WWII, the same words: Nazis, Communists, Germans, Russians, Baltic states. It all feels tense.

EO

Have you changed with the world?

BC

I don’t think I’ve changed much. Like we talked about yesterday, I’ve had a two-track career and a two-track personality. My father was a pessimist; my mother an optimist—extremely so. My mother could be in a hurricane and insist the news had it wrong. My father would sit in the den after dinner and say, “Leave me alone, I’m worrying.” [Laughs.]

I can be the world’s biggest worrier, and at the same time think it’ll all work out. But I don’t know anymore about the world. I take refuge in art. There’s excitement in what young artists are doing, and the field has opened up to women and people of color on the basis of talent—it feels organic, not forced. There’s such richness. I’m glad I work with Vito Schnabel, with Peter Marino, that I’m around art and artists. Maybe I’m using it as an escape, but what am I going to do, run for office? I come back to: “You’re an observer, Bob. It’s your job to clip the newspapers and put the headlines in your file.”

EO

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

BC

Alright—first of all, [Laughs.] in book publishing you had the big classic houses—not as big as today; they’ve all merged. Random House, Simon & Schuster, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Knopf. Farrar and Knopf were very literary. Most were still run by the founders or their families. The book world was its own world—a clubby world. So was the art world. The contemporary art world was like a village, and in those days it really only existed in Paris and New York.

EO

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

BC

[Laughs.] It could fit into a room. The number of well-known artists was maybe ten—Rauschenberg, Johns, Warhol, Lichtenstein, Oldenburg and the other pop artists, plus de Kooning and Pollock. Louise Nevelson was the token woman. The number of contemporary art galleries was just as small: Leo Castelli, Ileana Sonnabend—his ex-wife—Paula Cooper early on, Marian Goodman (who started with multiples), Holly Solomon.

SoHo didn’t really get going until the late ’70s, and there were no restaurants—you went to Bellato’s, almost on the Bowery at Houston Street. Prominent collectors were another handful. In Europe there were more—especially Germany, where, up until the ’70s, many were almost afraid to assert their own culture after where it had led them. They devoured American culture. Kiefer started making work, Beuys had some international acclaim, Fassbinder was making films. But it was all limited. Italian and French cinema—Fellini, Antonioni, Godard, Truffaut—had a golden age between about 1965 and 1975. They were household names.

EO

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

BC

Here, cinema was Andy Warhol’s Lonesome Cowboys in ’67. Queer cinema was underground—Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures. Jonas Mekas’ Anthology Film Archives was called Underground Cinema because it was literally underground. In Europe, there was 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

Even in the avant-garde European mind, there weren’t many films with homosexuality or lesbianism as the central subject, or where the main characters fit that definition. Bergman never did it. It finally surfaced with Gus Van Sant’s My Own Private Idaho—but that was later. Bowie was a breakthrough with his androgyny and role-play. In the ’70s, the publishing scene, the fashion world, the art world—they were all small. Everybody knew everybody.

EO

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

BC

I became editor of Interview maybe a year after my first Village Voice film review. Leo Lerman, the features editor of Vogue, either contacted me or Andy brought me to one of his Sunday salons. Leo was gay and had everyone from Tallulah Bankhead to Truman Capote at these teas. He offered me a monthly retainer to meet with him once a month and give him ideas for what people were talking about.

In ’73 I went with Andy when he was cast in The Driver’s Seat. That summer in Rome, I kept a diary of Andy and Liz Taylor. When I came back, Leo asked if I’d kept one—told me to continue it—and published it as my diary. Alexander Liberman, Condé Nast’s editorial director, said, “This is gossip, it belongs in Cosmo, not Vogue.” We sent it to Helen Gurley Brown, who wrote back, “Alex Liberman is out of his mind—this is too sophisticated for Cosmo. The only magazine sophisticated enough is Vogue.” So back it went to Alex, and they published it.

Doors opened for me because the writing was good—if you read my Voice interviews, you might even say I used to be an intellectual. But also because I knew a lot of the players through Andy. “Bob wrote this… Bob, the editor of Andy’s magazine, who Andy brought to my cocktail party last week.” I’ve been lucky.

EO

How did it feel doing your job?

BC

I was thrilled. I probably had the most swollen head of any 22- or 23-year-old in New York. Interview was small, but it was Andy Warhol’s magazine. When disco got big with Le Jardin in ’54, if Andy went to a club, they paid him to be there. If I came along as the editor of Andy’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

It did. I maybe became the magazine. It was no longer what Gerard Malanga started with Andy in ’69, Inter/View Film Journal. We weren’t reviewing films. Everything was tape-recorded—Andy thought it was more modern—except for Fran Lebowitz’s column and mine. Fred Hughes came up with the line: “People say we’re superficial. It’s true. We’re deeply superficial.”

I got caught up in full-page photo spreads—“inter-men” and “view-girls.” Sometimes they were new models, but often they were beautiful kids from rich or aristocratic families. We were unabashedly look-ist. But I also knew we needed serious content. I cultivated the Washington scene—I loved Washington—and had connections from Georgetown. My friend Christopher Murray had a gallery and started showing photography, including Andy. I connected him with Annie Leibovitz, Chris Makos, and later Firooz Zahedi, who’d gone to Georgetown and was the nephew of Ardeshir Zahedi, the Iranian ambassador and Washington’s top host.

EO

Did you make Interview a brand?

BC

The brand became “the mix.” Tina Brown stole that—the mix. It was glamorous, hip, unpredictable. People who seemed like they’d never belong in the same room suddenly shared a cover. Joe Dallesandro to Nancy Reagan. Andy loved it: “Oh, this is so cool, we’re really up there now, Bob.”

It was a high/low mix, and we pioneered a lot of what became Tina Brown’s Vanity Fair—even Graydon Carter’s version. The idea of hotness. We never put De Niro or Pacino on the cover; too serious, not glamorous. We had Warren Beatty, Jack Nicholson. I’ve always been me—that’s been my strength. When I started going to Paris with Andy and Fred Hughes, having lunch with Marie-Hélène de Rothschild or Hélène Rochas, they’d ask where I was from. “Brooklyn.” My parents? “My mother works at Saks, my father’s a coffee broker.” No embellishment. Authenticity before it was a buzzword.

EO

Why did this scene matter so much to people?

BC

Because it was the most open place in New York—maybe in the country. Non-judgmental, open-doors, creative, youthful. You didn’t need an appointment to show your work. Wednesdays were open house for photographers. Robert Hayes, our deputy editor, and Marc Balet, our art director, would review portfolios, keep the ones they liked, then show them to me, Fred, and Andy.

Lunches were the same mix: the Chinese ambassador to the UN alongside two cute boys and a girl from Studio 54, Jerry Zipkin with Greek shipping heiresses, Larry Rivers arriving on his motorcycle. By the end of the ’70s, young creative people coming to New York wanted two things: lunch at the Factory and a night at Studio 54.

Andy played the fey game—“I don’t know why I painted Mao with a green face, why did I do that, Bob?” I’d say, “Because it’s the only color you had left.” “Oh yeah, that’s why…” But he was dead serious.

EO

How do you mean?

BC

When Bruno Bischofberger suggested he paint the most important person of the 20th century—Einstein—Andy said, “No, Mao.” He hated being told he wasn’t a real painter, just a photographer. Gala Dalí refused to trade an oil portrait for a photograph; it infuriated him. But Andy was more than a painter or filmmaker—he was a philosopher, a sociologist. John Richardson called him “the exterminating recorder.” He recorded everything—taxi drivers to Park Avenue socialites.

EO

Why do you think?

BC

Research. The ultimate paintings encompassed the time—late 20th-century American art, when America was the empire, the Rome.

EO

Did you feel that then?

BC

Somewhat. I feel it more now.

EO

How do you mean?

BC

When I began researching Holy Terror after Andy died, I realized nobody knew much about his childhood. In Pittsburgh, I visited his family’s church—St. John Chrysostom Greek-Catholic—and saw the iconostasis. That’s where the portraits come from: Byzantine icons, flat, gold-leaf backgrounds, gridded. Andy sat through hours of services staring at those grids.

He was making religious art for a secular time. Every culture needs something to worship; Andy chose the objects of late-20th-century worship—Elvis, Marilyn, Liz, Jackie as martyrs; Mao, Lenin, the hammer and sickle, the dollar sign.

EO

How do you figure that?

BC

Because the imagery is meant to be worshiped. All those subjects already had millions of devotees before Andy painted them.

EO

What about Basquiat?

BC

Not as important as Andy, universally. Basquiat was a boy genius—the first young Black artist to be nationally known. Before him, it was Jacob Lawrence. When Carter’s inauguration needed artists, they chose Andy, Rauschenberg, Lichtenstein, Jamie Wyeth, and Jacob Lawrence.

Basquiat was a breakthrough for Black artists; Keith Haring, for Latinos. Basquiat had a preternatural talent—he couldn’t make a bad painting. Picasso is said to be the most important artist of the first half of the 20th century; Andy of the second. I’d put Basquiat second to Andy. Jeff Koons is the Mannerist stage of Pop—Mannerism being the elaborate final phase of a style. Basquiat paired the primitive with the classical, placing it in proper form.

EO

Sensibility—wrought sensibility.

BC

Exactly. He couldn’t make a bad painting. And yes, the cliché holds: Picasso first half, Andy second half of the century. Basquiat might be the second most important artist of that half. Koons is very much the Mannerist stage of Pop. In art history, Mannerism is the last gasp of something that begins primitive, moves into its classical mode, then the Baroque, and then becomes more mannered. It’s not a bad thing—El Greco was a Mannerist. Basquiat paired the primitive aspect of his work with new ideas in a classical framework.

EO

Speak more about Koons.

BC

Jeff’s a friend. I like him and his work. He’d be the first to admit he’s derived from Andy—and I don’t think there’s an artist after Andy who isn’t influenced by him. The whole Pictures Generation—Cindy Sherman, Richard Prince—comes out of that lineage.

Like Andy, Koons works high and low at the same time. He makes giant sculptures for Versailles that the public flocks to see, while critics and historians write reams about them. There’s calculation, as there was in Andy’s work, but it’s hidden. Andy would say, “I didn’t know what I was doing. That was the only color I had left.” Koons will say, “My art is about bringing people together. It’s about love.” And I’m like—Jeff… [Laughs.]

EO

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

BC

That’s part of being cool. It’s not cool to brag about yourself. Donald Trump is not cool—before the presidency, he was a character, amusing maybe, but not cool. Great artists, great writers—they’re often insecure. Truman Capote was one of the most insecure people I ever met. I once spent a week with Paul Choos and he wouldn’t even call himself an artist—he said he was a craftsman. That’s false modesty, but still.

EO

It’s funny you say that. I was watching the Kanye West documentary trilogy. In the early days he’s known as a producer, but wants to be a rapper. One night he’s in the kitchen with his mom, rapping, and she says, “Most giants look in the mirror and see nothing. But everyone else can recognize that person is a giant.” It’s a shame that the most influential people are often the most insecure.

BC

Of course they see nothing. That’s what was written about Andy—that he was a vacuum, a vampire.

EO

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

BC

Right. So you open yourself up for people to project whatever they want onto the blank mirror. Andy cultivated that—“I want to be a machine. I don’t want to have feelings.” In public, he gave nothing away. You could read a thousand interviews and get only lines like, “I’m just this traveling society boy from Maine. I follow my hairdresser, Fred Hughes.”

Koons, in a way, is like that too—a blank mirror. His art literally involves reflection. You see yourself.

EO

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

BC

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

EO

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

BC

I was mugged twice up at Columbia by teenage junkies with knives—hands shaking as they held me up. I’d show them the $20 on top, just enough for a hit. There was a recession, inflation, high interest rates—everyone read about it constantly. If you wanted to buy an apartment, the interest rate was 20%.

But we were kids. Andy knew more about those things—he was frugal. He’d grown up not knowing where his next meal was coming from. We’d pile five people into a Checker Cab from the Upper East Side to Union Square—$5 total, $1 each. It didn’t affect us much. It wasn’t as bad as it’s portrayed, but the crime was horrible. It got worse in the ’80s until Giuliani. Cars were stolen constantly—even in the East 70s. If they couldn’t steal it, they’d break the window and take the stereo.

EO

Can you talk about the presence of art?

BC

By the ’70s, art was becoming one of New York’s big businesses—alongside fashion, finance, media, publishing. The first big auction of contemporary art—the Scull auction—was in ’74 or ’75 at Sotheby’s Parke-Bernet. Robert Scull was an early Pop collector. Ethel Scull had her portrait done by Andy before anyone; no Polaroid then, so they used a dime photo booth strip.

After ten years of collecting Pop—buying directly from the artists, even getting gifts—they decided to auction it all. No one had done that. Auctions were for estate tax or divorce. Collectors kept art forever, passed it to their kids. This was a shock—a scandal. Rauschenberg organized artists to picket the auction. I went—it was pandemonium. Rich collectors filed in while artists waved signs: “Stop raping artists,” “Give us a cut.”

EO

How old were you?

BC

’75—I was twenty-six.

EO

And how did that change your understanding of your positionality?

BC

Like everyone else, I thought, “I guess so.” Art was suddenly public—newsworthy. It started a buildup that really flowered in ’79–’80.

The problem in the ’70s was that the art-world establishment—intellectuals, curators, critics, museum directors—insisted everything had to be conceptual. “Meaning is dead.” The only acceptable painting was Minimalism. No figurative work, no representation. Video was coming in, performance art too. What was there to buy or sell?

EO

Well, that’s the thing—it’s about the ephemera.

BC

Exactly—it became about artists like Joseph Kosuth, who’d type pages, perform, then frame them. Art as literature, in a bespoke way. It forgot what art had always been—painting, sculpture, drawing—things you could live with, things museums could show. It was boring to look at. [Laughs.] Pages typed up by Joseph Kosuth. Or a performance that ended after ninety minutes, and that was it.

Then in ’79–’80, out of the art schools in California and New York, came a new generation saying, “Fuck them! They say we can’t paint—so we’re going to paint. We’ll paint figures. We’ll paint any subject we want. Some abstract, but mostly images again.” That was novel. Salle, Eric Fischl, Francesco Clemente.

EO

What happened?

BC

These artists were painting whatever they wanted. They were called the Neo-Expressionists as a group, but there was also Basquiat and Haring—the graffiti artists—painting faces. They weren’t abstract, and they certainly weren’t conceptual. This set off a boom: more for the press to write about, more for collectors to buy. It led to new galleries like Mary Boone, who was of the same generation as the artists. She showed Eric Fischl, Ross Bleckner, Philip Taaffe, Donald Baechler later.

It’s like fashion. In the ’50s, ’60s, and into the ’70s, Paris dominated. Rome had Valentino and a few Vatican designers. Then Milan emerged—Armani, Versace, Krizia, Walter Albini, Gianfranco Ferré—ready-to-wear, not couture. It set off an explosion. More product means more buyers, more press, more stores. I missed the boat. I should have bought a Basquiat or a Haring when they first showed at PS1.

EO

When you wrote Holy Terror, what story did you feel you had to tell?

BC

Honestly, by the time I left Interview in early ’83, I’d jumped to my political and society track. I wasn’t in the midst of the ’80s art scene, except through Thomas Ammann. Holy Terror wasn’t about the ’80s—it was about revealing Andy as a human being. By then I’d done six years of Vanity Fair profiles, and my talent was humanizing big names.

EO

That’s the project at hand—humanizing people who seem untouchable.

BC

Andy taught me to be nonjudgmental. Journalists shouldn’t act as judge and jury, as if we’ve never smoked pot, slept with the wrong person, or said something stupid. Just tell the story. For me, Holy Terror was telling the Warhol story through the eyes of a young suburban kid.

EO

Did you become disillusioned by Warhol?

BC

I never stopped thinking Andy was a genius. But I did leave in anger, thinking, “Andy’s a jerk.” I was very disappointed when he and Jed [Johnson] broke up—I was pro-Jed. It was personal.

EO

Why so personal?

BC

We were like a little family. I didn’t like John Gould, frankly, and I thought Andy used him against me. I told Andy, “You never showed Jed any feelings. Now you’re going overboard with John because we told you to be nicer to Jed and stop complaining about how much he spends on your house.”

Graydon Carter, then editor of Spy, reviewed Holy Terror in Vogue—eight pages, quoting whole funny paragraphs, but ending with: “Bob Colacello’s too close to the trees to see the forest.” I agreed. The book is called Andy Warhol Close Up. It’s not art criticism; it’s a memoir.

Writing it was fun. I was in Rhode Island; my Vanity Fair editor visited every other weekend to read what I’d done. I wanted people to laugh. The whole thing was absurd.

EO

Yes, of course. I’m familiar!

BC

[Laughs.] You know C☆ndy, right? Luis Venegas’s trans glamour magazine. In the new issue they photocopied my “Candy Darling” chapter—six pages—with photos. I feel lucky a young guy in Madrid cares about something I wrote decades ago. I knew I wanted to write a good book—funny, and an accurate portrait of Andy.

EO

Did you write much for Interview while you were editing?

BC

Oh yeah. Andy and I did his interviews together—the cover stories were usually the two of us, sometimes Bridget Berlin. But I didn’t do many one-on-one interviews. My plate was full: putting out the magazine, going to parties with Andy or alone, selling portraits. Andy wanted me to travel to Europe with him ten times a year. I had my own column—dictating my diary to Pat Hearn, then shaping each day into something printable and funny.

I’m having them scanned now—maybe they’ll become a quick book of diary pages. Writing again felt good. I hoped to make my way back. I thought Condé Nast might make me editor of one of their magazines. I probably could have become editor of GQ after three years—but I blew it, sniffing cocaine with Calvin Klein at the Met while I was Estée Lauder’s date.

EO

Did you ever want one of those positions?

BC

The thing about drugs is they start off innocently. Drinking, doing cocaine—that was normal. Coke erased those puritanical inhibitions, and for a while it was fun. Then it became addiction, autopilot. It started to hurt my career—or at least make people see me differently. Tina Brown would say, “Oh, I love you when you’re tipsy.” Sure, of course you do. But if I wanted anyone to think of giving me a magazine, I had to get my act together. By then, I don’t know. I try not to look back in regret.

EO

How do you feel now?

BC

I’m glad I became more of a writer. When I really get into it, I enjoy 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. Andy thought writing was passé—tape recording was it. What I was doing at Interview was more than a full-time job. I’d lose patience and scream at people in the office—probably because I was hungover—but they understood. Robin Hayes, Gael Love, they’d say, “We don’t know how you do it—charm everyone at parties, sell ads and portraits, and still show up the next day.”

EO

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

BC

I wasn’t always nice, but they knew why. Selling ads and portraits was funding Interview. In a way, I was paying my own salary—and everyone else’s. That was Andy’s cleverness: you could be editor if you figured out how to pay for it.

In terms of a through-line from then to now, it’s clear with my photographs. I started with a little Minox camera we picked up in Germany in ’76, right before I left Interview. After that, I never took another picture.

EO

Because?

BC

It felt too “Andy Warhol” to pull out a camera at a party. I wanted to be a serious Vanity Fair, Condé Nast type. Plus, I was at different events—you couldn’t take snapshots at Bill and Pat Buckley’s dinner parties.

EO

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

BC

Yes. I rejoined the political society track. I became a pet of the Reagan crowd, which had already started in the late ’70s. Their closest friends—Jerry Zipkin, a New York bachelor raconteur who promoted a lot of young people; Bill and Pat Buckley; on the West Coast, Betsy and Alfred Bloomingdale—basically adopted me. They thought it was amusing that I worked for Warhol but was a rock-ribbed Republican, and they trusted me. I tagged along to everything.

In that context, taking pictures felt wrong. I might photograph Pat Buckley at the Met Gala, but not much else. And now, decades later, galleries are showing those photographs and they’re selling. Mary Boone was first, then Steven Kasher, Peter Marino, and Vito Schnabel, which led to Elena Forster and another book. I’m lucky.

EO

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

BC

[Laughs.] Bohemian feels like an old-fashioned word now. Technically, Bohemia is a place—it’s part of the former Czechoslovakia, with Prague as its capital—but culturally, it’s always meant something else. I’ve always operated on two tracks. I was, and still am, very bourgeois—drawn to bohemia but never losing my bourgeois fetishes: neatness, good manners, putting money in the bank. Sometimes I didn’t take risks because of that.

EO

Why?

BC

Because I opted for safety over risk. When I was drunk or high, I took risks—like going to Crisco Disco at four in the morning—but in general I came from a safe, bourgeois place. My family was upwardly mobile, Italian-American Catholic. My grandparents went from white-collar working class to solidly bourgeois. My mother worked at Saks Fifth Avenue. I was the teacher’s pet. I wasn’t good at sports, so my father couldn’t brag about that, but he could say, “Robert’s been reading The New York Times since he was eight. Robert, tell us what you think about the civil war in the Congo.” And these Wall Street guys would say, “Wow!” I was fourteen.

Georgetown was my first freedom from strict parents who knew everything I did. Within months, I was hanging out with prep school boys from Long Island who had a band called Rave Maggots. They were into R&B—through them I discovered Muddy Waters and B.B. King. We’d go to Black clubs on 14th and 7th Streets in D.C., and the musicians thought it was funny that these white Georgetown boys knew their music. They got us into pot. I thought I was very cool, smoking on the steps of the U.S. Treasury Building next to the White House. I saw James Brown about five times—he’d change capes ten times in a show. I protested the Vietnam War, went to sit-ins, took LSD. The bohemian side was ascendant.

From an early age I was drawn to Cocteau, maybe because of the subconscious gay thing. Also Dalí and Buñuel. I didn’t like the Beatles; I liked Mick Jagger and the Rolling Stones—they were bohemian, avant-garde. The real bohemians were the late 19th-century Impressionists, the Bloomsbury Group. Later it was Kerouac, another idol of mine, and Ginsberg—the beatniks. It’s that whole line, from beats to hippies to hipsters. Bohemia is the arts that push boundaries, outside bourgeois society.