The “models” included Lily Auchincloss, Candy Darling, Nan Kempner, Pat Ast, Berry Berenson, Lauren Hutton, Jane Holzer, Kitty Hawks, China Machado, Donna Jordan, and Jane Forth, cradling her newborn baby by Eric Emerson, a boy they named Emerson Forth. It was Halston’s fashion show at the 1972 Coty Awards presentation ceremony at Lincoln Center, and Andy, at Halston’s request, and with considerable help from Joe Eula, had produced it. Andy’s bright idea: to have the models cooking breakfast on stage, which had been outfitted with the latest in kitchen appliances from General Electric. It was almost surreal to see Mrs. Kempner, who kept the best cook in town at home on Park Avenue, flipping a fried egg over easy, trying not to get any grease spots on her floor-length, red sequined Halston sheath. Andy’s favorite part: the smell of bacon fat wafting through the audience of fashion grandees assembled in the Mitzi Newhouse Theatre, which Diana Vreeland pronounced “the most optimistic fragrance in the world!”

Thanks to Fred I was a dresser, alongside the eligible young Baron Eric de Rothschild, Revlon heir John Revson, and Michael Butler, the multimillionaire aviation heir and producer of Hair. Our enviable “job” was to help the modeling socialites, Superstars, and fashion editors, and a few of Halston’s favorite working models like Karen Bjornson and Nancy North, in and out of their dresses. Most were braless, and between changes a rising star from the Netherlands, Apollonia von Ravenstein, was shimmying and shaking for the bachelor dressers.

I had landed in New York that morning on the “red eye” from Los Angeles, and was surprised when Fred asked me to take part in the Coty fun. It was also the first time we had had a real talk on the phone. He wanted to know “everything” that had happened on the Hollywood trip: Had Paul driven me crazy? Had Andy been nice to me? Had I finally had enough of Sylvia?

So I was quite full of myself at Halston’s party after the Coty Awards, dancing up a disco storm simultaneously with a beautiful model named Jennifer Lee (who went on to marry and divorce Richard Pryor) and Prince Egon von Furstenberg, and later at Max’s Kansas City downing vodka stingers with Candy and Eve Orton, the fashion editor of Harper’s Bazaar, who assured me that her editor-in-chief, James Brady, loved my pieces on Mick Jagger and Lee Radziwill and wanted more.

The next morning, Scavullo called with the news that the adventurous James Brady had been replaced by cautious Anthony Mazzola. Then my literary agent, Ellen Levine, called to say that Dutton didn’t like my first 150 pages and wanted a complete rewrite before they’d advance me any more money. Screw Dutton, screw Bazaar, screw freelance writing, I fumed, heading downtown in a taxi I couldn’t afford: I’m still special contributing editor of Interview, Fred is finally being really friendly, Jed had suggested making a movie together when we were in Hollywood—I’m going back to the Factory full-time and for good.

My new salary was $125 a week and I was basically back where I’d been before Mexico and Bridgehampton: overseeing my former assistant at Interview, who had no desire to be overseen. “You’ve got to do something about Glenn,” said Paul, who had had a big fight with him over how many Joe Dallesandro photos to run in our Heat special issue. “See if you can get Glenn to be more amenable to Paul,” said Fred, who was tired of mediating their frequent disputes. Fred hated problems and Glenn was becoming a problem.

It’s too bad that Glenn wouldn’t, or couldn’t, defer to authority. In the year or so (spring 1972 to summer 1973) that he was managing editor and art director, Interview kept getting bigger and better, more varied and stylish. In addition to discovering Fran Lebowitz, Glenn had expanded the contributing-editors list to include bright young journalists like Lisa Robinson (on rock stars), Scott Cohen (on sports stars), and John Calendo (on old Hollywood stars). He signed up the well-connected Joan Juliet Buck, a movie producer’s daughter who had been to school in England with Anjelica Huston, as London correspondent, and added a page of “London Smalltalk,” which recorded the monthly doings of the Zandra Rhodes/David Hockney set. The colorful R. Couri Hay, another new contributing editor, was the scion of the Hay Whitney Hays, and the best friend of Candy Darling’s hairdresser, Eugene of Cinandre. Couri’s specialty was thrusting a tape recorder into the face of someone like Frank Sinatra at a movie première and shouting, “I’m R. Couri Hay from Andy Warhol’s Interview. What did you think of the movie, Frank?” Andy always called him E. Couri Hay, just to drive him crazy.

Glenn also started a Hollywood “bureau,” in the person of Susan Pile, Pat Hackett’s closest friend, and a former Factory transcriber, who had moved to L.A. and gone into P.R. We used whatever friends and contacts we had, and when we put all our friends and contacts together, we came up with some pretty good things. That’s partly why it was so important to get along with Andy, Paul, and Fred: They had the best contacts. Thanks to Fred, for example, Lee Radziwill interviewed Mick Jagger in Montauk and Bianca Jagger interviewed Yves Saint Laurent in Paris.

Andy interviewed Bianca—we were all very big on Bianca, especially when we noticed that her picture on the cover sent sales up. Thanks to my growing friendship with Scavullo, he did a spectacular cover shot of Bianca, in a black cloche trimmed with white feathers and a veil and long black gloves with a big diamond ring worn over them, and four more pages of fashion shots inside—all at great expense in assistants, hair, makeup, printing, and retouching, and all for free. Scavullo wasn’t the only big-time studio photographer who was willing to do this for us; Bill King, Chris von Wangenheim, and others did too—they liked the fact that we usually ran their photographs full page, and our page was very large, and we hardly ever put type across a photograph.

Scavullo got us Dali, Giorgio got us Lena Horne, Halston got us Lauren Bacall, and Adriana Jackson got us Romano Mussolini, the jazz-pianist son of Il Duce. Well, only my grandmother in Brooklyn thought that last one was a favor. Even Geri Miller stopped twirling her tits long enough to come up with an intimate, at-home chat with Peter Boyle, “King of Unreleased Movies.” Andy interviewed Ryan O’Neal and his eight-year-old daughter, Tatum, who had just starred in her first film, Paper Moon. She pestered Andy to call up Candy Darling and ask her over. The first thing Candy said to Tatum was “Gotta cigarette, kid?”

Andy also interviewed Jim Bailey when he came to do his impressions at Carnegie Hall. “The show was great,” Andy told him. “But I think you’re great as a boy. I think you should just forget the other stuff and go on as a boy.” Lorna Luft had apparently convinced Lucie Arnaz that the Warhol crowd wasn’t so strange, because she invited us to another opening of Jim Bailey’s, at the Waldorf-Astoria’s Empire Room. We sat at the front and center table with “the family”—Lucie; her brother, Desi Arnaz, Jr.; his fiancée, Liza Minnelli; and her half-sister, Lorna. When Jim came out as Judy, Lorna jumped up and down in her chair, screeching, “Liza, he’s just like Mama! He’s just like Mama!”

Our “Gala Christmas Issue” had Andy dressed as Santa on the cover, aiming his Big Shot at black super-model Naomi Sims, who sported a big red poinsettia behind her ear. Inside, the interviews ran the gamut from Bette Davis to Ron “Superfly” O’Neal, plus director Frank Perry, writer James Purdy, artist Lucas Samaras, designer Clovis Ruffin, musician Curtis Mayfield, soap-opera actor Tom Fucello, and Princess Christina of Sweden. Jack Nicholson covered the New York Film Festival for us. And Fran Lebowitz’s monthly column tore into the movies:

The Unholy Rollers is AIP’s Sistine Chapel. It is that rare a work: a perfect bad movie. It stars Claudia Jennings as Karen. For Claudia and Claudia alone they make orange pancake that streaks. She looks best under neon light. Miniature golf was invented with her in mind. Fifties rock expresses fully the depths of her soul. She is the real Raquel Welch.

There was also a Diana Ross centerfold by Bill King in that December issue. We just put in everyone famous, interesting, talented, and/or beautiful whom our assorted contributors and friends had met that month. Reading an issue of Interview then was like hanging out in the back room of Max’s Kansas City or going to a private party at Halston’s salon. It was becoming the inside chronicle of celebrity life in the seventies. There was no other magazine quite like it, though one could see the influence of the Village Voice, Rolling Stone, WWD, Modern Screen, and Sixteen. But unlike those publications, we didn’t separate avant-garde culture, rock ’n’ roll, fashion, movies, and TV, which were all rising and mixing in the seventies. We mixed and rose with them, little by little.

Our investors, Peter Brant, Joe Allen, and Bruno Bischofberger, were pleased enough with Interview’s progress to spring for better paper—smooth, white-coated stock instead of rough, low-grade newsprint. We were printing about twenty thousand copies a month, not bad considering the first issue print order of only one thousand three years earlier.

Advertising was up, too. Though still far from a profitable level, it had multiplied from that one-eighth-of-a-page trade ad from Cinemabilia into six or seven full pages a month (at $800 a page), mostly from movie and record companies. This was largely due to the tireless efforts of our new director of advertising, Sandy Brant, Peter’s stylish wife. We didn’t see much of Peter, but Sandy came in early every morning and kept calling the advertising executives at the movie and record companies until they gave her appointments. She then sat in their offices and kept talking, in her soft-spoken, unfailingly polite, but very persistent way, until they gave her ads.

Sandy’s assistant was a frizzy-haired brunette named Susan Blond. Typically, she was a serious painter at the Whitney Museum School when Andy lured her to Interview’s advertising department with party invitations. “The best part of my job,” she says, “was being in that video soap opera that Andy was making up at Maxime de la Falaise’s with Candy Darling and Geri Miller. It was called Phonies.”

Andy had been searching for a way to do something fast, easy, cheap, different, and modern in television ever since he’d bought video equipment the year before and put Vincent Fremont and Michael Netter in charge of “the video department.” Actually Andy, as usual, wasn’t sure what he wanted to do with TV, and, as usual, was constantly polling his friends and associates for ideas. When I told him about Marshall McLuhan’s observation that the word phony entered the language after the invention of the telephone, and that “People are phony on the phone,” Andy saw a new way to use an old idea. “Let’s just do a TV show on the phone. It can be people calling each other up and fighting.” He loved the idea of people fighting on TV, just so long as he wasn’t in the middle of it.

“But Andy,” I protested, “you said I should do my book over the phone, and Pork is all phone calls; it’s the same old thing.”

“No, it’s not,” argued the artist who saw no reason why he shouldn’t do a dozen paintings of the same subject in a dozen different colors, and then do prints of the same thing. “One’s a book, one’s a play, and one’s a TV show.”

Once they started videotaping, with Charles Rydell and Brigid Berlin as the fighters, Andy soon had a new idea for a title, Nothing Serious, and a new idea for combining the fight with interviews, soap opera with a talk show. And instead of just fighting on the phone, why not fight over the dinner table, and have celebrities come to dinner to talk about their new projects, while the regulars fought. And the dinner table could be Maxime de la Falaise McKendry’s, because she was writing a food column for Vogue, which she had hopes of expanding into a TV show, à la Julia Child. Andy’s idea was that Maxime could give recipes, when she wasn’t interviewing and fighting. That was it. To make Andy Warhol’s Nothing Serious: Take one-quarter of the Julia Child show and mix with one-quarter of the Honeymooners, add one-quarter of As the World Turns and one-quarter of the Johnny Carson show, stir in some singing and dancing, garnish with aspiring Superstars, serve very cool. The day after each shooting when it was all played back at the Factory, we’d realize that it was just too amorphous and amateurish to make it into anything viable. Nothing Serious was really nothing serious.

Sometimes I wonder if Andy wanted it to work. I wonder if any of it—the video projects, Interview, even the movies, anything other than the art and the selling of the art—was meant to be serious. Paul was serious about the movies, Glenn and I cared about the magazine, Vincent was committed to coming up with a TV show that worked—but was Andy? He certainly never minded the typos and other mistakes in Interview. “Why do you have to spend so much time proofreading?” he’d always ask. He liked things to be “bad,” he liked things to be “boring”—concepts that may or may not have worked in the realm of art, but were not of much use in the movies, magazines, or television. Sometimes I found this attitude refreshing; other times it was just discouraging. If Andy didn’t really care whether anything came of our efforts, then how should we? Maybe all these side businesses were just a way to keep himself busy, to surround himself with creative young people, to put friends on the payroll, to run up expenses and tax deductions against the art profits, to promote the sale of art and make Andy more famous, to spend the days and kill the nights, to ward off his fear and anxiety and emotional distress, to not be alone.

Or maybe Andy genuinely believed that if we took ourselves too seriously, fretted and sweated and tried to be professional instead of just doing it fast and easy and cheap, the end result would be stale and dull instead of turning out different and modern, magic and new.

Certainly everything Andy did, including the commissioned portraits, provided the perfect framework for nonstop social life—and the perfect excuse for nonstop social climbing. Nothing Serious is a good example. As a TV show it was a dead end. But our friendship with Maxime, which grew out of it, wasn’t. And it was at her real dinner parties, not the ones we videotaped, that I met—and Andy and Fred got closer to—many of the social stars of the seventies and eighties.

Maxime was researching a book of medieval cooking. That meant she’d find ancient recipes in the archives at the Cloisters for dishes like twelfth-century Russian borscht—skinned ducks boiled in beet soup—and try them out on us. And she didn’t like it at all when she found bits of dark, fatty duck meat left at the bottoms of our bowls. “I hauled those ducks in from Long Island myself,” she said, scowling, “so you’d best clean your plates. If you want to be asked back, that is.” She always questioned her guests at the end of each meal and we always told her how delicious everything had been, secretly wishing that she were researching a book on twentieth-century French cooking. Still, everyone went to Maxime’s—the Erteguns, the Rayners, the Kempners, the Ryans, John Richardson, Boaz Mazor, Kenny Jay Lane—everyone that WWD nicknamed the Cat Pack.

At one of Maxime’s dinners I was seated next to Diana Vreeland, which, in the Cat Pack, was like being seated next to the Queen of England. It was the first time I had met this legendary figure, whose name Fred and Andy were always invoking in tones of awe and worship. “She looks a little like an Egyptian mummy come to life,” I wrote in my diary. There was something hieroglyphic about her incredibly erect posture and sharp dramatic gestures, her long-sleeved black cashmere tunic and wide ivory cuffs, and her ink-black hair sleeked back around her ears like a Pharaonic helmet. Others have compared her to a cigar-store Indian, noting her Apache nose and the deep red rouge slashed up her cheekbones and across her forehead like war-paint. Her grand and far-flung style suggested lost empires—Babylon and Cuzco, Moghul India and Czarist Russia. Though, at seventy-two, she was anything but old and decrepit, or old-fashioned and nostalgic.

The conversation that night at Maxime’s was sprinkled with names like Agnelli, Niarchos, Rothschild, Guinness, and Paley. I sat there and listened as a whole world was conjured up: the heavenly world of international High Society, where Aristotle Onassis was Zeus, and the Duchess of Windsor was Aphrodite. It was a world where the all-purpose adjective was “divine,” the most popular form of address was “darling,” the standard gesture of greeting was two quick kisses two inches away from one another’s cheeks. A world of ladies who lunched at the five L’s—La Grenouille, La Caravelle, La Côte Basque, Lafayette, Lutèce—and who were photographed by WWD on their way in and on their way out. A world where In and Out meant good and bad, right and wrong, where it was more important to be on the International Best Dressed List than in the Social Register. It was the world that Andy had finally conquered, after two decades of campaigning. In the fifties, as a fashion illustrator, he was on the fringe of their group, bringing them surprise presents in their offices at Bazaar and Vogue—D.D. Ryan, Gloria Schiff, her “Toni Twin” sister Consuelo Crespi, Lily Auchincloss, and Chessy Rayner all worked at one or the other magazine with Mrs. Vreeland. In the sixties, Andy and his tinfoil Factory were objects of curiosity for the more adventurous—Mary McFadden, Mica and Ahmet Ertegun, Kenny Jay Lane, Freddy and Isabel Eberstadt all went to parties there, usually at the invitation of Jane Holzer.

Now, in the seventies, Andy was finally getting really in with them. Sometimes at the end of the Factory day, while I was helping him find a taxi on the corner of 17th Street and Park Avenue South, he’d invite me to a party that Jed didn’t want to go to with him. He’d keep me waiting outside his front door, on Lexington Avenue, while he hurried to get ready. A few times, when it was really cold or raining hard, he let me into the outer vestibule, but he always closed the inner door behind him. “I’ll be right out,” he’d say. “I’ve got to talk to Jed for a minute.” Or “I’ve got to see if my mother’s okay.”

I remember one party in particular, a smart Park Avenue cocktail party given by a smart couple who were, and still are, leading lights of High Society. All the way there, Andy told me again and again, half seriously, half ironically, “Now this is going to be a really up-there party, Bob. This is the group that really counts. This is Society, Bob.” It was chic and stylish. The ladies were kissing Andy on both cheeks and asking him if he was going to Paris for a Rothschild ball, to which he replied, “Gee, I don’t know. I think maybe Fred is.” The men seemed to be evenly divided between husbands and escorts. It was fun to stand at Andy’s side among the rich and famous, as he whispered out of the side of his mouth: “She’s the one with the money,” he said about the hostess, and “He’s really after you, Bob,” he said about the host. He said it was “a mixed marriage—you know, fags with dykes.”

As soon as we were in the elevator, I started to tell Andy what I thought about the party, but he signaled me to stop. “They give the elevator men big tips to tell them what their friends say,” said Andy as soon as we were out on Park Avenue. “But wasn’t that great, Bob? Everyone was there. That was really it, Bob.”

We had our first office Christmas party at the Factory in 1972, for the kids, some of our friends, and the favored Superstars—Candy, Sylvia, Pat Ast, Geraldine and Maria Smith, Donna Jordan, Jane Forth, Eric Emerson, Joe Dallesandro. It was a cozy “family” affair, with Moët et Chandon champagne and little Joe Jr. chasing baby Emerson Forth around the floor. Andy gave everyone Electric Chair prints, which were worth about $200 each then. I gave Andy my Beales tape from that afternoon at Grey Gardens, the one Lee told Fred she’d rather we didn’t run. Andy was thrilled—“Gee, what a great present, Bob”—and put it in a time capsule with everybody else’s presents, which were mostly jokes in any case. Only Pat Hackett came up with something he took home to use: a case of Heinz ketchup.

Andy gave himself a dog for Christmas, a black dachshund puppy he named Archie, after Archie Bunker, the lower-middle-class loudmouth on the new sitcom All in the Family. He carried it around in his arms at the office party, whispering into its ear, “Talk, Archie, talk. Oh, Archie, if you would only talk, I wouldn’t have to work another day in my life. Talk, Archie, talk.” The funny thing is, I think he was really serious.