Bob Colacello and Mel Ottenberg Get Deeply Superficial

Bob Colacello‘s 13-year reign as editor of Interview involved the mighty task of turning Andy Warhol’s many fascinations into a full editorial sensibility. The job spilled far beyond the magazine, taking Colacello from the Factory to endless galas, nightclubs, and dinner parties across Europe, and eventually even to the White House. Along the way, they didn’t just chronicle the glitterati of the ‘70s and early ‘80s, they led it, looking for real personalities in movie stars and artists, politicians, bohemians, socialites, and assorted hangers-on. “I think I have a natural talent for picking people, and that’s really what Interview is about,” Colacello says. “It’s about people.” He eventually put those years of glamour and disarray into Holy Terror: Andy Warhol Close Up, his full-throttle account of life translating Warhol’s vision. He went on to become a longtime special correspondent for Vanity Fair and write Ronnie and Nancy, his sprawling biography of the Reagans. This past summer, Interview’s current editor-in-chief, Mel Ottenberg, sat down with Bob at Sant Ambroeus in the West Village and unearthed some of the juiciest highlights from his tenure, including Warhol’s jewelry fixation, brushes with Trump, and the special alchemy that made, and continues to make, Interview like no other publication around.

WEDNESDAY 1 PM JUL. 22, 2026 NEW YORK CITY

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MEL OTTENBERG: We met at a dinner at Vito [Schnabel]’s house, after Ariana Papademetropoulos’s show.

BOB COLACELLO: Right. I love that story you did on her. What’s the name of the photographer?

OTTENBERG: Richie Shazam.

COLACELLO: She’s great. I met her a few times with the actress who’s her best friend. Not Julianne Moore.

OTTENBERG: Oh, Julia Fox.

COLACELLO: Julia Fox. I met her because she’s the star of Vito’s film, The Trainer.

OTTENBERG: I’ve never seen it.

COLACELLO: It premiered in the Rome Film Festival to rave reviews, but I don’t know if they’ve got a distribution deal. It’s about the ’90s gym culture scene, and a young trainer who thinks he could become a big celebrity like David Barton.

OTTENBERG: I’ve got to see it. I feel like there was a screening recently and some girlfriends of mine were talking about it.

COLACELLO: It’s kind of brilliant, but I could see why mainstream Hollywood wouldn’t get it. I have an MFA in film from Columbia. That’s how I got started with Interview and everything else.

OTTENBERG: What year did you graduate?

COLACELLO: I graduated in ’71, but I started at Interview in 1970.

OTTENBERG: Yes. So wait, you were born where, Bob Colacello?

COLACELLO: I was born in Brooklyn and lived in Bensonhurst first. When I was eight, we moved to Plainview, Long Island. Then we moved to Rockville Centre when I was in my last year of high school.

OTTENBERG: And your interest at that time was what?

COLACELLO: I was always fascinated by maps and globes. My grandfather had this huge atlas and I’d sit with him and he would have me trace the map of the world. My father was the first Italian American to be an executive in the coffee trade on Wall Street. He worked for a Swiss commodities firm running their coffee division out of New York, so he’d go on business trips to coffee-producing countries and bring back souvenirs. I always wished I could go on those trips with him.

OTTENBERG: Yes.

COLACELLO: That’s why I ended up choosing Georgetown’s Walsh School of Foreign Service, where I did graduate, but in the years I was there, ’65 to ’69, everything sort of changed.

OTTENBERG: The world?

COLACELLO: The world, especially my generation. Georgetown was one of the oldest schools in the country, but it was Catholic, and the foreign service school in particular had a lot of boys from wealthy Catholic countries. That was eye-opening because I had grown up in a completely middle-class atmosphere. I remember the student in the room next to me was the nephew of the King of Belgium and he had about 20 different colognes. In America you had Old Spice and you had Canoe. I was like, “Is he gay?” But believe me, he was the least gay guy of all. And if you were Catholic, you were required to say confession to the priest. Every dormitory hall had a priest in the hall.

OTTENBERG: Wow.

COLACELLO: So that was kind of embarrassing. If you said, “I’ve had indecent thoughts,” the priest would ask you what kind of thoughts. So I would fall back on, “I disobeyed my mother and father.” Anyway, you sent me the March, Spring, and Summer issues. I love the way you do the big pull quotes and the almost arbitrary feeling of things because it’s surprising, but it really sucks you in and makes you want to read the stories.

OTTENBERG: The pull quotes, yeah.

COLACELLO: And the headlines. I loved everything full page, full bleed, which was one of Andy’s two requirements when I started as editor. Make every photo full bleed if you can, full page, and don’t put type on photos. You do put type on photos, but you put it so bold and clear that you can actually read it.

OTTENBERG: How do you get people who don’t read anymore to read stuff? We want to suck people in.

COLACELLO: I read the Jack Schlossberg interview, and it’s funny. I always say, “It’s easy to hate a name, but hard to hate a human being.” That’s why socializing is so important, especially with people who are different than you. Because you might think, “Oh, they’re so horrible,” but then you meet them and they’re actually interesting and nice and you end up liking them or at least having a more nuanced feeling about them. I didn’t think much of him, but I thought in the interview he came across pretty well.

OTTENBERG: Yeah.

COLACELLO: Paul Morrissey used to say, “I’m not a Kennedy Democrat. I’m a Bouvier Democrat.” Much more glamorous, his grandmother and gran-gran.

OTTENBERG: I’m rereading The [Andy Warhol] Diaries for the fifth time or something, and RFK Jr. is peripheral. Andy’s always saying, “He could be the one,” or, “He looks really great.”

COLACELLO: Bobby Kennedy Jr.?

OTTENBERG: RFK Jr.

COLACELLO: He was married to Mary Richardson, but that was a little later.

OTTENBERG: Yeah, we’re talking like ’79, ’80, the golden age of Interview. What are your pinnacle moments? What’s your best work?

COLACELLO: Early on, I would say something like the “Death in Venice” issue.

OTTENBERG: Oh, cool.

COLACELLO: It started off with hiring me as editor. I brought in Glenn O’Brien as my deputy, then Andy started realizing, “Bob can talk to anyone. He could help sell the art.” And he started taking me on these trips to Paris, and London, and Zurich, and Italy. I finally said to Andy and Fred [Hughes], “I can’t get the magazine out on a day-to-day basis and also be traveling half the month.”

OTTENBERG: Of course.

COLACELLO: So let’s have Glenn. And Glenn was very influential. He wasn’t there very long and he sort of dropped me immediately. I was supposed to oversee Glenn, but that’s okay. It was Glenn who got us together with Richard Bernstein, and Glenn who really expanded things into the fashion area. But Glenn was not a collaborative personality.

OTTENBERG: It was his way or he quits.

COLACELLO: Yeah. So first he fought with Paul Morrissey, because he refused to put a Joe Dallesandro photo in every issue.

OTTENBERG: Because Paul wanted a Joe story every issue?

COLACELLO: Yeah. Paul was another kind of Irish Catholic, who was so puritanical. Glenn actually once said, “Here’s this guy railing against sex, drugs, and rock and roll, and he’s making these movies featuring Joe Dallesandro’s rear end,” which I called Greco-Roman. [Laughs]

OTTENBERG: It was all sort of a morality tale with him, or not? Like, what? What does Paul Morrissey get into? RIP, but…

COLACELLO: We never knew.

OTTENBERG: Is he gay, and he wants to see him naked?

COLACELLO: There were the stories that he was with a woman for a few years and she left him and he never got over it. But he definitely had an unrequited crush on Joe Dallesandro.

OTTENBERG: Right.

COLACELLO: But he was very puritanical in the way Irish Catholics could be, as opposed to Italian Catholics. So Glenn fought with Paul, then he fought with Peter Brant. Peter Brant and Joe Allen had bought 50 percent of the magazine at that point. I mean, he kind of got on my wrong side. To make a long story short, Peter Brant and Fred Hughes thought Glenn should go, that we should have a real journalist, a real professional, as she loved to call herself—Rosemary Kent from Women’s Wear Daily.

OTTENBERG: Right.

COLACELLO: That was a total disaster, because she just didn’t fit into the Factory.

OTTENBERG: This is ’73?

COLACELLO: Something like that. She was constantly saying, “That’s not very professional, Fred. I’m a professional.” And Fred said, “If I hear the word professional one more time.” Because Fred always liked to say we were amateurs, and when people said, “Interview is superficial,” he said, “Yes, it is deeply superficial.” At that point I’ve learned a lot just from traveling with Andy. I think I was more qualified than when I was first hired, let’s say.

OTTENBERG: Because you got the vibe. You flew around the world with him and you got the humor and the—

COLACELLO: I was very proud of the mix. You’d have Paul Volcker, head of the Federal Reserve, in the same issue that had Jerry Hall on the cover. I always wanted an uptown, downtown mix. I sort of had that in my own life, although I’d never really hung out at the Mudd Club or CBGB’s. I was more hanging out at Area, but it still was a mix.

OTTENBERG: And what was the Cave? Is that like an after-hours club?

COLACELLO: I think so, but I never went.

OTTENBERG: No, you did, I was just rereading it in Holy Terror. It was like a moment where you missed work. You were partying really hard and you went to the Cave and lost your glasses and missed work, and Fred Hughes was like, “Everyone’s entitled to a nervous breakdown every once in a while.” And you thought, “Yes, especially if they work in an insane asylum.”

COLACELLO: [Laughs]

OTTENBERG: It must be really blurry, because I think back to September 11, and there’s a lot about that that I can’t remember. I’m like, “Where was I when the towers fell?” I don’t fucking know. You know what I’m saying?

COLACELLO: I was sober by then.

OTTENBERG: I was very hungover. I was on a walk of shame from a hookup’s apartment. I saw both the towers fall while I was eating a sandwich from—I lived in Chelsea and my hookup was in Chinatown, so I was on a long odyssey home. Where were you?

COLACELLO: I was in East Hampton, working on my Reagan book, and I didn’t have a TV. I was still writing in this little ’60s shack I had in Amagansett. Richie Berlin called me and said, “Turn on the TV, something terrible has happened. A plane just went into the World Trade Center.” It was just bewildering. No one was allowed to go below Canal Street for weeks. I didn’t go into the city for six months, and it definitely helped my writing, because I got that book done in 2004. I was never supposed to have a two-volume Reagan book.

OTTENBERG: But you got swept away with it.

COLACELLO: No, what happened is the publisher said, “Ronald Reagan just died. How much more time do you need to get to the end of this book?” I said, “I’m at the night he’s elected president, and in two years, I could finish.” They said, “Well, we can’t have Vanity Fair publishing a chapter, and then two years later the book comes out.” Because Graydon Carter had paid for a chapter and he wanted it.

OTTENBERG: Right.

COLACELLO: “So why don’t we just do two volumes?” I agreed to that, but it was a major mistake. The second book ended up being a major failure of mine, because I lost my momentum. To make a long story short, I kept doing more and more research, spending more and more time in California with Nancy Reagan, and she and I became really good friends. I got her. I joke that I don’t think there’s anybody else dead or alive who’s equally friendly with Andy Warhol and Nancy Reagan—who hated each other, by the way.

OTTENBERG: So wait, let’s go backward. It’s 1981. You’re a lifelong Republican and are thrilled that Reagan’s elected.

OTTENBERG: You’ve got Nancy on the cover of Interview. They’re oil and water, right? Andy and Nancy?

COLACELLO: Yeah. We went to interview her at the White House. Cris Alexander was taking the photograph, and Doria [Reagan] came with us. The first thing Andy says to Nancy is, “Hollywood people are so weird. They talk behind your back before you leave the room.” And she said, “Well, Andy, I think I am a Hollywood person.” And it was downhill from there. Andy and I had this kind of Abbott and Costello act, where he played the sort of dumb blonde and I played like the voice of logic. I always said one of my main jobs was translating Andy from English to English. But Nancy didn’t get that. She said, “Every time Bob got started on a good answer, or a good subject, Andy would sabotage him.” And Doria said, “No, that’s what they do.”

OTTENBERG: Your assistant Doria was Nancy’s daughter-in-law?

COLACELLO: Yes.

OTTENBERG: Was the Interview reader angry that you guys put Nancy on the cover?

COLACELLO: It’s not like we got a flood of letters to the editor, but the art world, my downtown friends, were furious with me.

OTTENBERG: Right.

COLACELLO: Helen Marden didn’t speak to me for 10 years. The Village Voice did a parody of Andy and me going to the White House. They had us go to visit Hitler in his bunker, and they had Hitler on the cover, done up Richard Bernstein style.

OTTENBERG: Incredible.

COLACELLO: So that was the reaction.

OTTENBERG: I’m a lifelong Democrat, but we did Spencer Pratt this summer, and I’ve never had so much backlash and anger towards me.

COLACELLO: Well, it’s not cool to be a Republican in, let’s say, creative circles.

OTTENBERG: We were doing it because he’s the most Interview person possible. But, yeah, no one wants a Republican in there.

COLACELLO: A lot of what we did in Interview, maybe everything, was tongue in cheek. It was kind of camp to have Nancy Reagan on the cover of Andy Warhol’s magazine, and to have Andy in the White House asking her stupid questions.

OTTENBERG: Yes.

COLACELLO: So some people got the humor in that but some people didn’t.

OTTENBERG: Yeah, but also, Interview’s not supposed to be for everyone, so if you don’t get it, whatever.

COLACELLO: Right. And we got so much press from that. We were getting a lot of press as the ’70s went on. The Wall Street Journal did a big story, and the pull quote was, “Every issue is a small work of art.” We used that line as much as we could.

OTTENBERG: Hate breeds notoriety too, right? Whenever I’m reading Warhol stuff, I’m always stunned by how much negativity he was getting in the early ’60s about his work, and how it just drove him for more, and that’s so exciting.

COLACELLO: Robert Hughes’s review of Andy’s portrait show at the Whitney in ’79 was like, “Andy’s portraits embalmed his subjects in the back seat of their limousines.” It was vicious. The first good review Andy got in New York, in all the time I was there, was for the stitched photos.

OTTENBERG: What do you mean, the [Chris] Makos-seeming ones?

COLACELLO: The ones where Andy stole the idea from Makos.

OTTENBERG: Right.

COLACELLO: But that was not really known.

OTTENBERG: On this topic, so often people on Instagram write, “Andy Warhol would be rolling over in his grave” about the stupidest shit. It’s always about something funny. What do you think he would be rolling over in his grave about?

COLACELLO: Maybe Donald Trump.

OTTENBERG: Yeah.

COLACELLO: Even though Donald Trump is a very Warholian character.

OTTENBERG: Yes. He was very uneasy about Trump, wasn’t he? About dealing with him.

COLACELLO: There’s some photos of him with Donald and Ivana at a Roy Cohn party, I think. And he did get pissed off, and that’s in the Diaries, when Donald commissioned him to do portraits of Trump Tower, in silver and gold. Vincent Fremont called Donald and said the portraits were ready, when would he like to come down to the Factory? And he said, “Well, I’m not going to go down to Union Square. You have to bring the paintings up to me.” So, Vincent and his assistant brought the paintings to Trump Tower. Donald took one look at them and said, “They’re awful. They make my buildings look ugly.” And sent them back. So Andy hated that, not being paid.

OTTENBERG: And then I think he also said [Angelo] Donghia was doing the Trump interior, and he’s sending swatches to match, and it’s just so not the vibe, the Warhol vibe.

COLACELLO: Right. The way Andy influenced the whole culture, and brought us into the phase of images, when he said everybody will be famous for 15 minutes, where fame and infamy merge, so long as you got your name in the papers. Donald, the Kardashians, they carried this idea of Andy’s, that bad publicity is good publicity, and Donald is the ultimate example of that.

OTTENBERG: Yes.

COLACELLO: I think that’s his driving motivation, and unfortunately, a large part of our population also has the same values.

OTTENBERG: I take it you’re not a fan.

COLACELLO: Well, no. I feel like both parties have gone off the deep end. I think it’s good that Donald effectively closed the border with Mexico and he stopped having hundreds of thousands of undocumented immigrants. I’m all for immigration, I’m the grandson of immigrants, but they came legally. It has to be organized. And under Biden, it got out of control. I’m a traditional Republican, I’m for peace through strength. But with Donald, everything’s helter-skelter. It’s peace through strength one day, it’s bombing Iran the next day with no discussion, no approval, no anything. And just the way he uses the F-word. I think the one thing our presidents have all had in common was they were dignified, or they at least tried to be dignified, but he’s thrown that to the wind. Again, because he’s not operating as a leader, he’s operating as a one-man show. He is the United States of America.

OTTENBERG: Says he.

COLACELLO: Says he.

OTTENBERG: It’s terrifying.

COLACELLO: So, how could I be for this?

OTTENBERG: You mentioned Donald Trump and the Kardashians, but I’m interested in what else you see in modern culture that comes directly from Andy Warhol.

COLACELLO: Well, one thing that is generally recognized by art historians is that Andy really legitimized photography. Photography was considered more like an applied art, like fashion. It wasn’t considered a fine art. There were those who did take it seriously; they were collectors of vintage prints. People, including Andy, were collecting [Henri] Cartier-Bresson or [Eugène] Atget, Man Ray, or Edward Curtis. Andy had all of that. We did an issue of Interview in ’75, I believe, “Is Photography Art?” Andy loaned us a lot of his, but we had Peter Beard, we had Chris Makos, we had Robert Mapplethorpe. We had a whole range. I think in Holy Terror I tell the story where I told [Richard] Avedon to go on the cover, and he said he couldn’t possibly be on the cover of a magazine that had Cher on the cover.

OTTENBERG: Yes.

COLACELLO: And Andy said, “Let’s sue him.” I said, “What are you talking about?” Andy said, “He sold a thousand copies of that photo of me showing my scars,” and he said he never signed a release.

OTTENBERG: Yes.

COLACELLO: He was so pretentious. And I think Andy had an enormous influence on morals. He really did bring homosexuality out of the closet without actually saying, “I’m gay.” It was more effective in a way to not put the label on it but to make a movie like Lonesome Cowboys.

OTTENBERG: Right.

COLACELLO: Or make movies like Women in Revolt. Andy also had a tremendous influence on the next generation of artists. They all clustered around Andy, and they also had Andy’s attitude, which was artists can make films, artists can have a nightclub, artists can make money and be unapologetic about it. Of course, all these artists always wanted to make money, but it wasn’t done. It wasn’t talked about. I think he had huge influence. I think his colors, his use of acrylic and almost psychedelic colors, changed the palette of advertising. Looking at your last three issues, they’re so full of color. You feel you’re looking towards Andy as editor of his magazine?

OTTENBERG: Without a doubt Warhol has always guided us. The tone of the magazine, the wink-wink thing, the camp, the mix. Bernstein is, to me, the most incredible thing I’m not trying to copy, because those days are gone. It would be lame to be knocking that off for covers. But I look at and love Bernstein’s tone and energy. But also Warhol. Bob, when The Andy Warhol Diaries came out, I was in eighth grade. I was 13 and I was bullied all the time, called faggot, blah, blah, blah, and then I was reading the diary and I was like, “Okay, there’s nothing wrong with me. I’m in the wrong surroundings with these stupid fucking people. I’m going to go to New York to work with famous people, and then I’m going to be fun. That’ll be my life.”

COLACELLO: Interview opened the door for a lot of young kids.

OTTENBERG: Yeah. I was reading about you guys and I’m like, that’s fun, and the bullshit I’m dealing with is temporary. But Warhol has always guided us in a way that feels really easy.

COLACELLO: Well, the mix, that’s another thing, a big influence, particularly in magazines. The mix just sort of happened almost naturally.

OTTENBERG: Yes.

COLACELLO: I was hired by Leo Lerman to come to Vanity Fair, and he told me, “Your new editor is Tina Brown from Tatler.” And I was like, “Oh, god, I hope this is going to work.” She called me at nine o’clock the next morning, said, “You’re my first phone call. I love what you did with Interview, I love the mix. I want to have that at Vanity Fair. And I think that’s what you do so well.” Having the [Robert] Pattinson and Zendaya cover followed by Madonna, you cut across generations and fields. I’m not the biggest Madonna fan but she’s really Cindy Sherman on this thing.

OTTENBERG: Yes, you’re right.

COLACELLO: Now she’s turned herself into this matron from Great Neck.

OTTENBERG: Yes, exactly.

COLACELLO: She looks good, actually.

OTTENBERG: She does.

COLACELLO: I loved her quote, “I’m not naked anymore because everybody’s naked.”

OTTENBERG: I love that too. I’ve always been like, “I got to do her.” This is her 11th Interview cover. It’s amazing that it worked out, and it’s totally been a great moment to have done her.

COLACELLO: Yeah. I always was a little prejudiced against her because I did a story on Cyndi Lauper when she was at the height of her fame, and she was like, “Madonna is just ripping me off. I’m furious.” She had a four-octave voice, and Madonna has a terrible voice. Who has a great voice, and is great all around, is Lady Gaga. You’ve had her on the cover?

OTTENBERG: No, she’s never been on the cover. I mean, I would like her to be on the cover.

COLACELLO: Yeah, because she had that meat dress.

OTTENBERG: The meat dress was incredible.

COLACELLO: That was pure surrealism.

OTTENBERG: I’m glad you love that. It’s just the best outfit. Do you remember who were the cover stars you always wanted and never got? Obviously we’ve trash-talked Avedon, that’s perfect. Who else? Because I’m mad about a few people from my era.

COLACELLO: Well, at Vanity Fair I have an eternal grudge against Graydon for not putting Ashton Kutcher on the cover.

OTTENBERG: Okay.

COLACELLO: I thought he was so interesting, the way he was making all this money in tech investments and had That ’70s Show. I thought he was so great-looking. I always judge people on their looks.

OTTENBERG: Is that why Barbra Streisand was never on the cover of Interview, because you thought she was a dog?

COLACELLO: No, she was just annoying. She was like [Robert] De Niro, you know? You’d go to a dinner at Sandy Gallin’s house, everybody’s somebody, I’m the least famous person. She’s sitting on the sofa with her hairdresser and her manager, giving off this vibration like, “Don’t come close to me.” And I’m thinking, “Doesn’t she realize that if I’m here it’s ’cause I’m okay?” But she just gave off that vibe. If you’re going to make yourself work hard to become a big star, give something back, be nice to people. I’ll never forget Harrison Ford. Doris Ammann had a little birthday party for me at her apartment at the Pierre, 20 people, and he arrives with Earl McGrath, and he goes around the room saying to everybody, “Hi, I’m Harrison Ford.” As if you don’t know. And then he proceeds not to talk to Fran Lebowitz, not to talk to Ross Bleckner, not to talk to the known people. There was this young architect and young model girl, those are the two he decides to talk to and really engage. I love that. Bobby De Niro, the same thing. At the wedding of Ed Hayes in Bellport, he’s sitting at a table, smoldering, again, “Don’t come near me.” That’s the reason in my years you didn’t have Dustin Hoffman, you didn’t have Al Pacino, but you did have Jack Nicholson and Warren Beatty and—

OTTENBERG: Mick Jagger, your favorite.

COLACELLO: Mick Jagger was my favorite. Mick to this day looks great.

OTTENBERG: Yeah, he looks amazing.

COLACELLO: Mick I always admired, because unlike Keith Richards and unlike, I may as well say myself, he always kept things under control in terms of the party favors, the coke and stuff. He was always into exercise. I guess he just doesn’t have an addictive personality.

OTTENBERG: You do.

COLACELLO: I do.

OTTENBERG: I do as well. I’m also sober. So back in the disco days—

COLACELLO: Which covers did I want and not get?

OTTENBERG: Yeah, I still need to know. No Donna Summer, because Diana Ross would have been mad? Or she wasn’t pretty enough?

COLACELLO: I don’t even know if we tried.

OTTENBERG: Okay. There’s my answer. One other question I wanted to ask you was, when you described Andy’s jewelry in Holy Terror, it really was interesting because I was thinking how he wears jewelry discreetly, probably wearing a turtleneck but he has a diamond necklace underneath.

COLACELLO: Yeah, that’s how he’d wear them.

OTTENBERG: You were talking about that a lot in Holy Terror. And then this guy in an antique store told me recently, “Andy used to walk around with $25,000 in cash in a D’Agostino bag—”

COLACELLO: The European money.

OTTENBERG: Oh, the European money to pay cash at the antiques dealers.

COLACELLO: Well, the Europeans love paying cash.

OTTENBERG: Got it, got it, got it. He was also telling me that one night he was at Area, and Andy was like, “Hey, do you want to come here?” And he says, “Yeah.” And he’s like, “I want to show you something.” And he opened his plain black jacket, and it was all blinding diamond brooches, and he said, “I just show this to people I like.”

COLACELLO: Andy would call me and say, “Do you want to jewelry-shop on the way to the Factory?” We’d walk down Park Avenue to Seaman Schepps, which was a jewelry shop that was famous in the ’40s and ’50s. Andy loved their designs, and they featured big stones, big citrines, big amethysts. Andy would rather have a 40-carat citrine or amethyst than a perfect five-carat diamond.

OTTENBERG: We’re talking about big stones.

COLACELLO: Big stones in elaborate settings. He had a lot of Art Deco Cartier necklaces and bracelets, which are just rubies, emeralds, and diamonds, all the same stone, rectangular, just very simple. He would wear those necklaces under his button-down shirt, his Brooks Brothers shirt, and then he would unbutton his shirt and say, “Look at my jewelry.” Ladies knew to wear their jewelry for Andy because he loved looking at it, trying it on. And so we’d go to Seaman Schepps, then we’d get a taxi over to the Diamond District, 47th Street. Andy called it the street of dreams.

OTTENBERG: Oh, wow.

COLACELLO: And it was all Hasidic Jews with their individual tables and they would all have their yarmulkes and they all would go, “Hi, Andy.” And the one he liked the most, I forget his name, but he had a hook, because his hand had been amputated.

OTTENBERG: Wow.

COLACELLO: And he would say, “Andy, do I have something for you.” And he would go under the table and pull out, and hanging from his hook was a Cartier bracelet. It was surreal.

OTTENBERG: Wow. That sounds incredible.

COLACELLO: Andy loved all that. In L.A., he used to go jewelry shopping with Joan [Agajanian] Quinn.

OTTENBERG: Yes. The West Coast editor.

COLACELLO: Andy loved the idea of trading a portrait for jewelry, and very often, these ladies, one of their husbands would pay for a portrait, and Andy said, “Oh, if they don’t want to pay for it, I’ll take some of your jewelry.”

OTTENBERG: Yes.

COLACELLO: I remember going to the Gilded Grape, taking São Schlumberger and Marie-Hélène de Rothschild, a couple of these fancy rich ladies, to the Gilded Grape, which is where we found the drag queens.

OTTENBERG: Yes, for Ladies and Gentlemen.

COLACELLO: The waiters were all dressed as sailors with no shirts.

OTTENBERG: Wow.

COLACELLO: And Andy got a plastic bag, a Brownies bag, stolen from under his chair that night. This was before that. And São’s driver said to her, “Mrs. Schlumberger, you cannot go in that club wearing this jewelry. You better take it off and hold it in the car.” Andy just loved that.

OTTENBERG: You just mentioned Brownies, the health food store. Was the food good?

COLACELLO: It was good. It was health food. They had spinach puree, carrot puree. Pat Hackett and Jed Johnson would have lunch there every day, and when they finally invited me, I knew I was in.

OTTENBERG: Got it.

COLACELLO: Andy was eating a lot of purees then because his whole digestive system was torn apart.

OTTENBERG: It must have been a fucked-up stomach.

COLACELLO: He was shot at close range.

OTTENBERG: Right.

COLACELLO: When he went to dinner parties, he moved the food around on his plate. Sometimes, if I was next to him, he would sometimes land a few things on my plate to make it look like he had eaten something when the hostesses weren’t there. I admire the way he really didn’t complain.

OTTENBERG: Right.

COLACELLO: Now that I’m having a few health issues myself, I realize I’m not dealing well with them in any way compared to Andy. When you think of how hard he worked, after the shooting in ’68, it was pretty amazing how he never stopped.

OTTENBERG: Yes.

COLACELLO: And you couldn’t complain that you were working too hard to Andy because he was working harder. I tried to get sober and it lasted a couple of weeks. Then I went out worse than ever for a couple of months and then I realized I had it. I was like 45 at that point. I just couldn’t take this up-all-night thing.

OTTENBERG: Right, right, right.

COLACELLO: It’s sunrise and my heart would be palpitating. My friends would be gone and I’d be swilling scotch out of the bottle to try to stop my heart from beating so fast.

OTTENBERG: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

COLACELLO: It’s funny how you substitute kinds of addictions. In my case, I spent a little too much time reading newspapers, keeping files on different people.

OTTENBERG: What are you going to do with all those files?

COLACELLO: I have a huge archive. I have a box and fill it every year with all my Christmas cards, these fancy Christmas cards. It could be from John Waters, some Park Avenue people, invitations to everything, art galleries, engraved dinner party invitations, benefits. I once asked someone from the New York Historical Society, “Should I be keeping all this stuff?” He said, “That is social history.”

OTTENBERG: Who was the prettiest, the richest, the saddest, and the meanest? Okay. Let’s start with who was the most glam.

COLACELLO: Oh god. I don’t want to keep falling back on Bianca.

OTTENBERG: She can be the one.

COLACELLO: Yeah, in a way, Bianca Jagger.

OTTENBERG: Okay. Who was the prettiest?

COLACELLO: Candy Darling. She really had something.

OTTENBERG: Who was the richest?

COLACELLO: In those days, São Schlumberger. The money was from Schlumberger Oil Equipment Company and in the ’70s their income, São and her husband, Pierre, was like 40 million a year.

OTTENBERG: Who was the saddest?

COLACELLO: The saddest?

OTTENBERG: Yeah.

COLACELLO: Elsa Peretti.

OTTENBERG: Oh.

COLACELLO: I have a photograph of her in tears. She would beat herself up a lot. She would beat other people up a lot. I mean, psychologically.

OTTENBERG: Who was the meanest?

COLACELLO: The meanest? People in Paris. Elsa could turn very mean when she had too much to drink and too much coke. Loulou de la Falaise could be mean and a troublemaker, but I hesitate to say she was the meanest for me.

OTTENBERG: Okay. Thanks. Now I’m truly done. Thanks, Bob.

COLACELLO: Thank you.

OTTENBERG: It was so fun to do this with you.

COLACELLO: I know, we should do it frequently. Let’s just hang out.

OTTENBERG: I’ll take you out to lunch next time. We’ll be off the record.

COLACELLO: That would be nice.

———

Production Director: Alexandra Weiss.

Photo Producer: Georgia Ford.

The post Bob Colacello and Mel Ottenberg Get Deeply Superficial appeared first on Interview Magazine.