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in chocolate, then photographs them, then prints the photo and makes the photographs into an addi- tional print.
The second one is Sanford Biggers, an African- American artist who is known for taking quilts that were made by Black women in the South in the 1900s and turning them into sculptures and wall reliefs, and now he is doing much more complex sculptures in bronze and marble. I’ve had a few din- ners with Sanford. He and his wife, Arana Hankin, live in Sag Harbor, which has a long-standing African-American community. He is great, and he is extremely charismatic.
Then in August it will be Jean-Michel Othoniel, who makes these gigantic necklaces. He is Paris- based and his husband, Johan Creten, does giant ceramic sculptures.
How’s your side career as a photographer going?
I am an accidental photographer; I haven’t taken
a picture since 1982. I used to take these pho- tographs—when you worked with Andy you did everything. I was editor of Interview, I sold portraits, I wrote his books with Pat Hackett [e.g., The Philos- ophy of Andy Warhol], but I also took photographs for my Out column for many years and once I left Interview I said I am never taking another photo- graph at a party.
I certainly don’t think my work is art; I think it has evolved into kind of documents of lost time, let’s say, but I have had exhibitions at Mary Boone, Steven Kasher, the Boca Raton Museum of Art, the Newport Museum of Art, and the Vito Schnabel Gallery. My new photo book from my last exhibition [at Elena Foster’s Ivorypress in Madrid] is called
It Just Happened. I have a few more lined up. Peter Marino had a book signing for me in Southampton on June 16.
Which photos of yours are your favorites?
I love Diana Vreeland waving her hand in front of Consuelo Crespi’s face,
but the one that I think is
the most popular is André
Leon Talley, Steve Rubell,
and Andy at Mortimer’s.
They are looking extremely
mischievous.
the same beautiful beaches. I have always loved
the beach and swimming in the ocean, but I really didn’t discover the Hamptons proper until my last year of Georgetown. I was friends with a boy whose grandmother had a big house on Further Lane next to the Maidstone Club and he invited me to come out with him Memorial Day weekend in probably 1969.
I remember turning off 27 into Dunemere Lane and there was this overwhelming scent of lilacs in bloom and it was so lush and green and we went past the Maidstone, which is still, I think, one of the most beautiful clubs in America.
We got to his grandmother’s huge, rambling, 10-bedroom shingle-style house next door, which has since been torn down, and I thought, I want to have a house here someday. So from 2005 to 2019 I did and then I moved up or down or sideways to Southampton.
I love the Hamptons. Winter, I get to write a lot; summer, I get to run around a lot, and now that I have a summer job with Peter Marino, my summers are more structured, and I like mixing work and life. One gives the other a purpose and vice versa.
How do you handle it when someone Out East says, “Oh, I hear you’re a Republican”?
Southampton is solidly Republican. That’s why I moved there. No one really cared very much until
I put Nancy Reagan on the cover of Interview in December 1981. Half the art world freaked out and Helen Marden did not speak to me for 10 years until Holy Terror came out and she told me, “Oh, I real- ized that you have a sense of humor.” It’s hard to talk about Republicans now because it is so intertwined with Trump.
How could anyone hate Nancy Reagan that much?
Women of the baby-boomer generation saw in Nancy Reagan their mothers, with the bulletproof hairdos, with everything having to be perfect. Marie
Brenner and Sally Quinn wrote vicious articles
about Nancy.
They were all feminists
and feminism was really big in the ’70s, of course, and along comes Nancy Reagan gazing lovingly at her husband a thousand times during the same speech, saying, “My life began when I met Ronnie.”
What they really re- sented was that she was
against the ERA and she was an anti-feminist. She was against abortion. She said repeatedly that her life revolved around her husband and that certainly was not what women, what Betty Ford and Rosalyn Carter, were saying.
Ever since it was announced in Liz Smith’s column that I was doing a Reagan book, people, including Liz, said, “How do you go from Warhol to Reagan?” I don’t think they were that different. One was the Pope of Pop and the other was the first Pop Presi- dent. I think they were two major figures of the late 20th-century American culture.
You said you write in your diary every morning. How long have you been doing that?
I started keeping a diary when I started working at Interview and the Factory. I would just occasionally write some notes, thinking, Wow, I am seeing all of these people that are pretty well known, and then Andy saw me doing that and said, “Oh, you should write my diary.”
I would be typing this diary where I could have been Andy or it could have been me and then finally Andy said, “Oh, we should both just call Pat Hackett and dictate to her.”
Diana Vreeland and Countess Consuelo Crespi, New York Photo by Bob Colacello
Bob Colacello, Peter Marino, and Vik Muniz at the Peter Marino Art Foundation
Photo by Warren Elgort
The IRS had told him he had to keep a diary to keep track of his expenses because he’d been audited in 1972. Pat would call him, and they would chat for a little while and then she would call me. So that’s my diary. I used a lot of that in Holy Terror, and then I never stopped doing a diary. For a while I was dic- tating to Brigid Berlin and then I just started writing it myself and I still do keep it. It’s thousands and thousands of pages.
Wait, so you have unpublished diaries from 1982 when you left Interview to the present?
Leo Lerman told me: “Keep a diary, it will be your retirement fund.” It’s sort of at a crossroads right now. I don’t know whether I will move ahead with the second Reagan book, which has been quite chal- lenging. I have been told often that I should write a memoir and because of this Netflix series, where I am sort of in it more than anybody else, I am getting everyone, from people on the streets stopping me and saying, “When are you going to write your own blockbuster memoir?”—and that doesn’t usually hap- pen to me—to Leonard Lauder giving me a talk the other night at a dinner party, saying, “You’ve got to tell your own story. Put the Reagans into your mem- oir.” So who knows? I am thinking things through. Will you write about your life prior to Warhol?
I have always wanted to write about growing up Italian-American in Brooklyn and Long Island and I always joke that I never had to social climb: I landed on Mount Olympus in Andy’s helicopter overnight.
I met everybody, but the funny thing I discovered pretty early on was that people are people and that these grand Parisienne ladies sitting around having lunch—the conversation is not that much different from my grandmother in Brooklyn, my mom, and my aunt Jenny. They were telling stories about other people to entertain each other. It is a very Italian thing, too, to turn life into a commedia dell’arte, the divine comedy.
So you have that built-in tape recorder?
Well, some people will remember every painting they saw at someone’s apartment, and someone else will remember every dress that every woman was wearing at some dinner party. But I remember the conversations. That is why Andy always said, “Oh, they won’t let me tape record here but you could be my tape recorder, my human tape recorder.” n
My best memory was Yves Saint Laurent kiss-kissing Halston
in the basement [of Studio 54] and Truman Capote telling me, “You have just witnessed one
They were just having
a good time, and know-
ing those three, there
was probably a sex joke
or something. Steve was
probably telling them about his orgy from the night before. They are all laughing uproariously, including Andy, and you never saw Andy laughing uproariously in a photograph. As soon as there was a photogra- pher present, he put on his frozen, cool, hard look, no feelings, no emotions, the machine look. He didn’t care because I wasn’t a photographer; I was Bob taking a couple of pictures.
Best and worst memory at Studio 54?
I have no idea how many nights in a row I went, but I told Vogue at the time, “I live at Studio 54.” My best memory was Yves Saint Laurent kiss-kissing Halston in the basement and Truman Capote telling me, “You have just witnessed one of the greatest moments in the history of fashion.” He paused, then added, “That is, if you care about the history of fashion.” My worst was being caught making out with Steve Rubell’s boyfriend and being banned for a week.
What were the Hamptons like for you growing up in Plainview, Long Island?
When I was a kid we went for a couple of summers in the early ’60s for a week or two. Montauk was
not the Hamptons and was not a rich people’s resort like Southampton and East Hampton, but it was
of the greatest moments in the history of fashion.”
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