Andy was in Rome a lot in 1973, co-producing Andy Warhol’s Frankenstein and Andy Warhol’s Dracula, with Carlo Ponti, Sophia Loren’s husband and then the most important producer in Italy, and acting in The Driver’s Seat, opposite Elizabeth Taylor. He loved Rome. It was his kind of town: gossipy, fashionable, starstruck, “soooo glamorous.” The swank nightclubs were clogged with movie stars like Ursula Andress, Elsa Martinelli, Florinda Bolkan, Maria Schneider, Helmut Berger, and Hiram Keller, and the newsstands were bursting with scandal sheets, like Oggi, Due Mille, and Eva Express, which chronicled, often inaccurately but always dramatically, their romantic ups and downs, ins and outs. It was a recherché fifties kind of scene, the last days of the end of an era, before the oil crisis and the Red Brigades. Starlets still received diamonds and rubies from producers. Contessas still furnished gigolos with Maseratis and Alfa Romeos. And everybody knew every detail of everybody else’s private lives and discussed everything endlessly over long, late lunches and longer, later dinners. Andy’s kind of town, all right. What’s more, as he put it, “They let dogs eat in all the restaurants, and Archie loves pasta.”

Andy, Archie, and Fred commuted between New York and Rome that spring while Frankenstein and Dracula were being shot at Cinecittà. Paul, Jed, and Pat Hackett, who was helping Paul with the scripts that Ponti had insisted on, lived in the rented Villa Mandorli off the posh Appia Antica, next door to Valentino. It was a tough schedule: Ponti had given them eight weeks, and an $800,000 budget, to shoot both movies back to back. It was the first time the Factory crew had worked in 35mm—instead of 16mm—and the first film, Frankenstein, was shot in 3D—you could barely make a move without everything going out of focus. This meant that every shot had to be very carefully choreographed in advance, which severely crimped Paul’s improvisational style. When it came time to start Dracula, with time and money running out fast, 3D was abandoned.

These were the last two Factory films that Paul Morrissey directed and the last two Factory films Joe Dallesandro starred in. I heard about the infighting on the set from Andy and Fred, and from Monique van Vooren, who starred in Frankenstein, and Maxime de la Falaise, who starred in Dracula. It was the same kind of infighting that had ruined L’Amour, which finally opened in early 1973 and flopped.

Paul was very much in charge on Frankenstein and Dracula; it was the success of Heat that had led Ponti to finance the films in the first place. But Paul depended on Jed to edit and on Pat to help with the script, and they both chafed under his high-handed direction. Paul never suggested, proposed, or hinted. He ordered. And then, as often as not, he changed his mind, and ordered the very opposite, in the same shrill manner. That’s what got to Jed. He’d edit a scene the way Paul wanted it and then Paul would hate it and tell him to do it another way, only to have Paul hate that and tell him to put it back together the way it was originally. This might be normal for some director-editor relationships, but the Factory wasn’t a normal movie company, Paul wasn’t a normal director, and Jed wasn’t a normal editor. And Andy was always available to listen to Jed’s complaints, either in person or over the phone, and to take his side, which didn’t help. “Paul is being so mean to Jed,” he’d tell me, after a long night of long distance.

He also listened to Pat’s complaints about Paul. She felt she was being treated like a secretary, when she was not only writing a large portion of the dialogue but also coaching the actors after hours. Maxime told me that it was Pat, not Paul, who gave her the most direction, who stayed up late going over the next day’s lines with her, rewriting so they came out more naturally. But Maxime also respected Paul for the way he held the overall structure together. And that wasn’t easy, with an all-Italian crew and a polyglot cast that included Udo Kier, the German actor who played Count Dracula; Joe Dallesandro, who played the stake-wielding hero; one of Ponti’s spaghetti starlets; and Maxime, the medieval cook, making her movie debut. Maxime was quite believable as an impoverished aristocrat hoping one of her five unmarried daughters would attract the wealthy count from Transylvania. Her consort was played by Vittorio de Sica, the venerable Italian director. Dracula, as it turned out, was his last appearance on screen, and he almost stole the movie. The other scene stealer was Roman Polanski, the Polish director, as a taverna lounge lizard who beats Count Dracula at cards.

Dracula had its moments, but it wasn’t one of Paul’s best. It lacked the kind of pathos and biting social observation that gave the humor of Trash, Women in Revolt, and Heat their depth and edge. Perhaps Paul, and Andy, Jed, and Pat, were too American, too Pop and camp, to do justice to this Central European legend. You can’t send up what you don’t have down.

Andy Warhol’s Frankenstein, despite the 3D, was equally one-dimensional: funny but not much else. Both films were commercial successes by Factory standards in the United States, Europe, and, for the first time, Japan. Frankenstein alone took in $4 million in the United States according to Variety, and as much as $20 million worldwide (though these figures were disputed by Ponti, and the Factory sued). And if the film itself lacked social significance, its opening at Cinema One, on Third Avenue in New York, made some kind of social statement, with the likes of Lee Radziwill, Pat Lawford, Nan Kempner and Lily Auchincloss, plus John Phillips, Bianca Jagger, and Halston, all sitting in the dark wearing those special 3D glasses. Somewhere, in one of Andy’s time capsules, there’s a photo of that audience; he should have silkscreened it into a mural.

Frankenstein employed much the same cast as Dracula, including Udo Kier as the villain and Joe Dallesandro as the hero who kills him. But one of Ponti’s spaghettini, the redhead, was replaced by another, a blonde, and Maxime de la Falaise was swapped for Monique van Vooren. Monique was the kind of character that exists only in Fellini movies: hyper-sophisticated, hyper-dramatic, hyper-hysterical. Tall, buxom, and blond, she even looked like Anita Ekberg in La Dolce Vita. She claimed to have discovered Hiram “Satyricon” Keller and to have lost many of her male admirers to her close friend and frequent Manhattan house guest, Rudolf Nureyev. She was always heartbroken, but she never missed a party.

During the filming, Monique took it into her head to fall in love with Paul. When Andy heard, he started calling her every night to ask how her seduction of the notoriously inhibited Paul was going. Andy would reassure her that Paul “didn’t, uh, like boys, or anything, he was, uh, just shy with women.” He told her to really go after him.

This was all Monique had to hear. The next day, she was batting her eyelashes, hiking up her skirt, and leaning over to reveal her cleavage, all aimed at Paul. He paid her no mind, as this was pretty much the way she always behaved. That night Andy told Monique that Paul was typically Irish-Catholic, very strict and serious, not the type to have a quick fling with his leading lady. Monique took to wearing a big gold crucifix, saying the rosary between takes, and going on about her Catholic girlhood and convent education. And although Paul never succumbed to Monique’s nunnish charms, on several occasions since I have heard him say, “You know, Monique is not the decadent sophisticated European jet-set type she makes herself out to be. She’s actually quite serious and devout.”

I hated hearing about all these Roman goings-on secondhand; I wanted to be there. Finally, in July, Giorgio di Sant’Angelo invited me to accompany him and his assistant, Jay Johnson, for a one-month Roman holiday. Jed and Paul were still in residence at the Villa Mandorli, wrapping up postproduction on Frankenstein and Dracula. Andy gave me permission to go and said we could stay at the villa. He gave me a few hundred dollars, in brand-new hundred-dollar bills, admonishing me to “bring back lots of receipts.” I think he liked the idea of my checking up on Jed, and on how he was getting along with Paul.

My month in Rome was everything a vacation should be. We slept late, took lunch by the pool, shopped on the Via Condotti, came home for a nap, went to late dinners in fun restaurants and smart apartments, then stayed up late perambulating around the Piazza Navona or dancing at Scarrabocchio. Every other day or so, Andy called to get a full report, although I was becoming better at editing what I told him, and I’m sure he sometimes wondered if the chaperone hadn’t turned into the ringleader. And when he pressed too hard—“You were out how late? Was Jed there too? Did you ask that rich kid, Aldo Palma, for his portrait yet?”—I’d yell into the phone, “I’m on vacation, Andy!” “You’re always on vacation, Bob,” he’d mutter back, and hang up.

One day, Giorgio decided that he was going to give a party to thank all the Romans who had given parties for him. “But no pasta,” he pronounced. “I want to have an American party. Hot dogs and hamburgers, ketchup and mustard, sauerkraut and watermelon.” The cook was totally perplexed. She finally figured out that hamburgers were flattened-out meatballs, but where was she to find frankfurters in Rome? Someone eventually found some at an American army base. We gave up on the sauerkraut. (Now, of course, there’s a McDonald’s on the Via Veneto.)

I had another bright idea: why not invite Paulette Goddard and Anita Loos? I knew they were working in Rome on Paulette’s life story, The Perils of Paulette, because Paulette had told me they would be when we first met her a few months earlier.

The party was slated to start at nine, which in Rome means come at ten. Not Paulette. On the dot of nine, a big black Mercedes came rolling down our graveled drive, and out they stepped. Paulette was in a figure-hugging white dress and white high heels. She wore only three colors—white, pink, and red—because they reflect light, giving a glow to the skin. It was an old Hollywood trick, and Paulette was first and foremost an old Hollywood star. Anita wore a black Chanel suit, made especially for her in miniature. And she had retained her trademark hairdo from the thirties, a bob with bangs.

I saw their arrival from my upstairs bedroom window and hurriedly finished dressing. Giorgio was still in his room, changing his hair color, something he did as often as other men shave. Jay Johnson and his sister, Susan Johnson, were locked in the bathroom, doing their makeup. Jed was in the kitchen, trying to persuade the cook not to fry the hot dogs in olive oil and garlic. Only Paul was there to greet our star guests. As I dashed downstairs, he was already listing, and praising, every movie the former Mrs. Charlie Chaplin had ever appeared in, from Modern Times to Babes in Baghdad, and every movie Anita had written, from Intolerance to The Greeks Had a Word for It.

It was an hour before Giorgio descended from his dyeing salon, also in white. He too charmed Paulette and Anita with tales of having seen all their movies when he was growing up in Argentina. Jed was still in the kitchen, trying to persuade the cook not to put breadcrumbs and oregano in the hamburgers. Jay and Susan were still upstairs doing their makeup. Our Roman guests had yet to arrive. And Paulette and Anita were hinting that they hadn’t had a thing to eat since noon.

By ten-thirty, Paulette was really hungry, Giorgio and Jed were in the kitchen trying to calm the cook, Susan and Jay were still doing their makeup—and our Roman guests all arrived in one big bunch, pouring out of a motorcade of Mercedeses and Alfa Romeos: Valentino, Giancarlo Giametti, Lucia Curia, Elsa Martinelli, Willy Rizzo, Daniela Morera, Max DeLys, Florinda Bolkan, Countess Marina Cicogna, Franco Rossellini, Count and Countess Crespi, Hiram Keller, Nando Scarfiotti, and Audrey Hepburn’s husband, Dr. Dotti, all chirping away in a mad mélange of Italian, French, Portuguese, and English, creating a huge commotion in our entrance foyer. Paulette was momentarily diverted, as they all told her how much they loved all her movies.

Then, like something out of an old slapstick farce, down the stairs came Susan Johnson, crying hysterically, mascara dripping down her teenage cheeks, followed by a roaring rush of water—a tidal wave! Jay had sat on the edge of the old porcelain sink to get closer to the mirror; the sink had collapsed and was now a gushing geyser. In seconds, the foyer was awash, the Romans were slipping and sliding on the tile floor, Jed was trying to fight his way up the stairs against the flood, Paul was shouting at the maid and cook to get some mops, Giorgio was looking for the number of an emergency plumber, and I was trying to placate Paulette, who was screaming that she wanted to leave, that she was starved, that her shoes were ruined, that she had never been to a worse party in her life.

There was only one thing preventing her departure: Her Mercedes was blocked by other cars, and everybody was too agitated to figure out which car was whose. But Paulette was screaming, “Move that car! Get me out of here!”—so somehow Jed, Max DeLys, and I literally lifted a Ferrari out of the way, and Paulette and Anita took off, never, I felt sure, to be seen again by us.

After we’d mopped up, Jed and Jay had a fight, and Jed stormed out. Jay ran after him, pleading, “Don’t do it!” “Don’t do what?” I asked, as I tried to calm him down. “I can’t tell you, but it’s all my fault. I’m always ruining everything. I wish I could be good like Jed, but I can’t. Please, Bob, you have to make sure he’s all right.”

I found Jed at the nearby villa of Andrew Braunsberg, the producer who had helped put together our Ponti deal. Jed was in bed, in his clothes, sobbing. “Maybe Andy’s right,” he said. “Life is too hard.”

“It’ll get better,” I told him. “You’ll see. You’ll get to direct your own movie soon. I’ll talk to him about it.”

“Andy doesn’t care.”

“Yes, he does. And you’ve done so much already.”

“Life’s too hard.”

I went back to our villa. The cook was proudly passing a platter of hamburgers all’olio and frankfurters oreganato or vice versa. Jay was crying on Naty Abascal’s shoulder and Susan was crying on Paul Palmero’s shoulder, or vice versa. Sometimes it seemed like everything and everyone in our particular world was vice versa, upside-down, inside-out, starting with Andy. I had another vodka, another line of Roman coke—it was just coming in there too—and forgot about Jed and Jay, Paulette and Anita. The next morning, Paulette called on the dot of nine to thank me for asking her to Giorgio’s party. It was the best party she’d ever been to, she said. Anita had loved it. She’d sat up all night writing down everything that had happened, and now they had the final chapter of The Perils of Paulette. “And that girl,” Paulette said, “that beautiful Botticelli girl who came down the stairs in tears, with the water coming down behind her. Anita said it was like a scene in a movie, and it was. And it was so sad. It reminded me of me, when I was her age and suffering so with Charlie.

“Now be sure to call me in New York this fall,” she added. “I’ll be at the Ritz Tower after the fifteenth of September, and I’d like to see more of you and Paul Morrissey and those handsome young twins, and, of course, Andy. I hope you’re going to call him and tell him he missed the party of the year.”

A few days later Andy called me. “I’m coming over in a few days,” he said, “to act with Liz Taylor in Franco Rossellini’s new movie. Why don’t you wait there for me? You can come on the set with me. You can watch Archie.”

Archie went everywhere with Andy, to work, to dinner, to parties, and to Europe. He had already crossed the Atlantic ten times, on Andy’s lap, never in the hold. (Later, Andy got a second dachshund, named Amos, and Archie stayed home with Amos.)

Andy arrived in Rome on Sunday, August 5, with Archie on an Hermès leash. On the flight over, he had read Norman Mailer’s Marilyn Monroe book. Was it good? I asked. “I never knew Marilyn had so many abortions.” Who but Andy Warhol would read Marilyn Monroe’s biography in preparing to meet Elizabeth Taylor? He was worried about the script. “You’ve got to find out if I have any lines. I hope not. Oh, is there any steak for Archie?”

On Monday he read the script. Or rather, he had me read it for him. I told him his lines: “Let’s go, let’s go. I fear I am dangerously late.”

“That’s not the way I talk,” said Andy. “They should make it the way I talk.”

“Gee,” said Andy, “I knew Liz Taylor was short, but I didn’t know she was that short.”

It was eight-thirty in the morning, Tuesday, August 7, at Rome’s Leonardo da Vinci Airport. The Driver’s Seat was based on Muriel Spark’s novel about a psychotic German hausfrau who flies to Rome in search of the perfect lover—and killer. That was Elizabeth Taylor’s part. She briefly considers as a candidate the character that Andy played, to quote the script, “a rich creep of undisclosed nationality and occupation.” “Gee,” said Andy, “my first movie and I’m typecast already.” It was just a cameo, but Andy was taking his billing very professionally. “Tell them,” he told me, “not to say ‘guest star.’ I want to be listed as ‘and introducing.’ ”

Now, here we were, on location and on time, which meant getting up at dawn, for Andy’s first day of shooting. The only problem was that nobody else was on time, not the crew, not the director, Giuseppe Patroni Griffi, not the producer, our friend Franco Rossellini—just this short, stocky, dark-haired woman pacing back and forth at the other end of the empty terminal. She looked like Elizabeth Taylor, but we couldn’t be sure from that distance. “That must be her,” Andy said one moment. “That can’t be her,” he said the next. “Oh, where is everybody? Why are we the only ones here? Do you think the movie was called off? Maybe Liz had a fight with Franco. Or is that Liz over there? Why won’t she say hello? Oh, Archie, I’m all washed up in the movies before I even started.”

“Maybe you should go and see if that is Liz Taylor,” Andy was telling me, over the roar of jetliners taking off and landing, as it approached ten-thirty. I was saved from this awkward task by the arrival of a couple of crew members, who introduced themselves, and then the lady in question: She wasn’t Elizabeth Taylor, but her Italian stand-in, who walked through the scenes so shots could be set up without Miss Taylor’s presence (which, we would soon learn, was not always guaranteed on her movies).

The stand-in told us that this was her eighth Elizabeth Taylor movie. Andy said, “Gee, we thought you were short. I mean, we thought Liz Taylor was short. I mean, what do I mean, Bob?” “Andy means,” I imaginatively translated from English to English, “he thought you actually were Elizabeth Taylor because you look just like her; you’re so pretty.” It didn’t matter; the stand-in didn’t understand English. The minute she was out of earshot, Andy whined, “Why don’t I have a stand-in to walk through my setups, instead of having to get up in the middle of the night. Huh, Bob? Did you ever think of asking Franco that?” I hadn’t.

There was still no sign of the real Elizabeth Taylor when Franco Rossellini arrived at two in the afternoon and called lunch. “That woman will be the end of me,” he announced dramatically as he led Andy, Archie, and me into a fast-pasta restaurant overlooking a busy runway.

Franco was the bachelor nephew of Roberto Rossellini, the pioneer neo-Realist director who is perhaps best known in America for his affair with Ingrid Bergman. Franco loved to refer to “my aunt Ingrid” and knew everyone in the Italian movie business on a first-name basis—Anna (Magnani), Sophia (Loren), Carlo (Ponti), Federico (Fellini), Luchino (Visconti). And, as this dolce vita world was the playground of the original fifties and sixties jet set, he was also on first names with such luminaries as Marella (Agnelli), Marie-Hélène (de Rothschild), Rosemarie (Marcie-Rivière), and Cristina (Ford). It was Franco Rossellini who first introduced Doris (Duke) to Imelda (Marcos) in the sixties, and, for that matter, who first introduced Andy to Imelda a bit later in the seventies. He was fast, funny, bitchy, bright, stylish, a little bit lazy, the Roman’s Roman.

That day, over spaghetti alla Bolognese airport-style, Franco went on about Jackie and Ari and Maria (Callas, of course, whom he had starred in his movie version of Medea, directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini). “You know,” he said, “people think that Maria was a prima donna, very difficult and insecure and demanding, but she was nothing, nothing at all, compared to Elizabeth Taylor. This woman will be the end of me, I tell you. You know how many times I called her at the Grand Hotel this morning? Every hour on the hour since nine this morning. And does she even come to the phone for me? No, I get the hairdresser telling me Miss Taylor is not feeling her best, Miss Taylor is looking a little puffy—it’s costing me tens of thousands of dollars for every hour we don’t shoot, and Miss Taylor is looking a little puffy! Oh, well, this is the price we pay for the stars, right, Andy? I must warn you, Andy, whatever you do, don’t call her Liz. She hates to be called Liz. It’s always Elizabeth and only Elizabeth. Like the Queen.”

Andy was all ears, and tape recorder.

“And another thing, Andy, don’t take that tape recorder around her.”

“Oh, really,” said Andy. “It’s a good thing you’re here, Bob, you can be my tape recorder. Bob remembers everything everybody says. It’s really great.”

Now it was Franco’s turn to say, “Oh, really,” and Andy quickly added, “But we don’t let him print it.”

Just as we were about to ask for the dessert included in the prixfixe lunch, the waiters dropped everything and pulled out signs from behind the bar, proclaiming ON STRIKE! and DOWN WITH RICH TRAVELERS!

“Does this mean we don’t have to pay?” asked Andy.

“No, it means we don’t get dessert,” answered Franco, adding, “Now, it’s three o’clock. Let’s see if Elizabeth Taylor has honored us with her presence. Did I tell you how much it’s costing me to keep her at the Grand Hotel? Forty thousand dollars a month! She told me she didn’t want to be paid for the movie, just expenses, which I thought was a good deal, until I found out that expenses meant a seven-room suite at the Grand Hotel. One for her, one for the secretary, one for the hairdresser, the wardrobe mistress, the dogs, and you should see what the dogs did to that room! They had to move all the furniture out and cover everything with newspapers; there was no other way. I mean, do you think Elizabeth Taylor is going to walk her dogs down the Via Veneto? And the secretary and the hairdresser and the wardrobe mistress can’t do it because they have to be with her, because God forbid she should be without her entourage for even a second. But the final straw was when she went to Bulgari and started charging jewelry to her room at the Grand Hotel. I had to draw the line. I mean, you can carry this just-expenses business just so far.”

At four in the afternoon, Elizabeth Taylor sauntered onto the set, followed by her secretary, her hairdresser, and her wardrobe mistress. She didn’t look puffy, she wasn’t that short, and her eyes really were purple. She was already costumed in the one dress her character wears throughout the movie, a pink, green, yellow, orange, and blue print Valentino that more than met the script’s requirement for something “garish and vulgar,” and was said to have cost $22,000, including four copies to rotate during shooting. Her hair was teased up and out—the script again—but she still looked beautiful, “really beautiful,” as Andy put it.

Her secretary and her hairdresser were a pair of Mediterranean musclemen named Ramon and Gianni, in matching tight white T-shirts and tight white trousers, accessorized with red patent-leather belts, shoes, and shoulder bags. Every so often, between takes, Ramon would pull a mirror out of his bag and hold it up in front of Elizabeth’s face; then Gianni would pull a teasing comb out of his bag, and hand it to Elizabeth, who would fitfully tease her own hair higher. She looked almost mad when she did that, though one couldn’t be sure if she was just in character or almost mad.

“Gee,” said Andy, “why don’t you carry a mirror and comb around for me, Bob?” “Because,” I replied, “I’m carrying Archie around for you, Andy.” We were standing off to the side, watching Elizabeth get to work, which she did almost immediately. All she had to do, said Griffi, was follow the X-marks taped to the floor. Much to Franco’s relief, she was perfect on the first take: She walked through the terminal with two hundred extras, all supposedly coming off a plane from Hamburg; she screamed her best Virginia Woolf scream as an “Arab terrorist” cut through the crowd, and “fainted” convincingly when he “stabbed” a man in front of her.

It all happened so fast and looked so real that Andy, who hadn’t read the script, thought it was real, and panicked. “My God,” he blurted, “Liz is still Jewish, isn’t she? We better get out of here.” Elizabeth was still Jewish (out of loyalty to her third husband, Mike Todd), and Andy’s paranoia wasn’t totally unjustified: The Athens airport had been turned into a bloody battlefield by Arab terrorists only a week before, and the waiters’ strike, which seemed funny at lunch, had spread throughout the airport. Electrical wires had been cut, we had to use a generator to continue shooting, and the constant din of arriving and departing jumbo jets did nothing for our nerves. Even little Archie developed a case of the shakes.

When the take was finished, Franco signaled for Andy and me to come and meet Elizabeth, who gave us a quick hello and then turned toward her trailer, set up just outside the terminal’s wall of windows, like a little cottage from Hollywood. “Ah, Elizabeth,” coughed Franco, “perhaps Andy would like to have a little drink too.” She invited Andy to her trailer. That left me standing there with Archie in my arms. “Uh, oh, oh,” said Andy, “can Bob bring my dog too?”

“So long as he doesn’t piss on my carpet,” snapped the most famous movie star in the world, marching ahead.

“Gee, Bob,” whispered Andy as we followed. “What a great opening line. I mean, that’s the first thing Elizabeth Taylor said to me. You’ve got to remember it for my memoirs.”

The second thing that Elizabeth Taylor said to Andy was that she had called the Factory in the sixties to ask if she could have a print of his famous portrait of her and was refused.

“It must have been a mistake,” said Andy. “But why don’t I take some Polaroid pictures and make a new portrait of you?”

She was so busy searching for his hidden tape recorder she barely replied. Or was she afraid it would cost her money? Andy tried again. “It would be great if I could take a few Polaroids and do a new portrait of you, because the other one was from newspaper photographs and this would be better and uh … ” I could see his mind calculating, “And … uh, I could give you one.” He wasn’t really giving anything away; he no doubt could sell a whole series of Liz II paintings and prints. But Elizabeth didn’t, or pretended she didn’t, understand. Andy tried one more time, but she cut him short with “I’m too puffy to be photographed today.”

Then she gulped down a Debauched Mary, her name for a drink that was “five parts vodka and one part blood,” and launched into a diatribe against lesbians in the movie business, all of whom, she seemed to think, were after her. “That fucking dyke!” she screamed about someone we knew.

“Oh, she’s really nice,” said Andy, trying to be loyal.

“Nice! I’ll tell you what that bull dyke did to me. I was on my deathbed—this is when I had to have the tracheotomy because I couldn’t breathe—and Richard was at my side, holding my hand, day and night. And that bull dyke released a photograph of Richard dancing with her dyke girlfriend on Ari Onassis’s yacht from three years before, as if he were dancing with her then—she didn’t tell them it was an old photograph—while I was dying in the hospital! You call that nice?”

“She did that?” asked Andy, getting nervous. “Oh, I can’t believe it. It must have been a mistake. The magazine must have done it or something.”

“Time magazine doesn’t do things like that intentionally. Your dyke friend tricked them into it, and I want you to let her know that I know what she did.”

“Oh, oh, uh, really.” Andy was really nervous now. “Oh, uh, Bob will. He knows her better than I do.”

Later, Andy said to me, “Do you think Liz Taylor is a lesbian?” I told him that I thought she’d made it clear that she was anything but. “Then why were they all after her?” he persisted. “I mean, maybe they knew that’s what she wanted.” That’s the way Andy’s mind worked. He was often convinced that people were saying the opposite of what they meant. Maybe because he often did so himself.

Lesbianism in Hollywood somehow led Elizabeth to the Kennedy family, and an evening that she and Richard Burton had spent with Bobby Kennedy, years ago. Bobby had challenged Burton to a “Shakespeare contest” and won. When she talked about Burton—they were in the midst of their first divorce—it was with a mixture of affection, anger, and remorse. She seemed so unhappy about the whole thing. Andy was all ears, and no tape recorder—he had slipped it to me and I had hidden it in my inside jacket pocket, turned off. Nonetheless, Andy was thrilled: Not only was he hanging out with Elizabeth Taylor, but she was talking about his favorite subject, sex, and even using four-letter words.

With a remarkable memory for dates, places, people, and dialogue, she recounted the long and torturous history of her illnesses, accidents, and operations. “Feel my back,” she suddenly commanded Andy, who was startled but followed orders, gingerly. “No, lower … lower  … there. Can you feel the crushed vertebrae?”

Andy said he could, and then startled me by announcing, “Now I’ll have to show you my scars.” He loosened his tie and unbuttoned his shirt. He was wearing, as always, the medical girdle that had held him together since the shooting. His upper torso was crisscrossed with the scars of stitches.

“You poor baby,” said Elizabeth Taylor softly, “you poor baby.”

An assistant knocked on the trailer door and said that the crew was ready for Miss Taylor’s next shot. When Elizabeth saw the way it had been set up, she refused to do it and marched off for the day, followed by Ramon, Gianni, and her wardrobe mistress, a beleaguered Italian woman with pins in her mouth. “It just doesn’t work,” Elizabeth told Franco, “and anyway, it’s close to six and I don’t work after six.” Even Griffi agreed that she was right about the shot, and the alternative she had suggested turned out to be much better, the flow of characters simpler, the background more dramatic. “Gee, she could be a director,” said Andy admiringly. “Are you out of your mind?” snapped Franco Rossellini, who was furious. “She arrives at four in the afternoon, and then she has the nerve to tell me she doesn’t work past six! That woman will be the end of me.”

The next day, Andy decided to “be late like Liz.” Of course, when we arrived at 11 A.M., everyone was already there, including Elizabeth. Andy was whisked into Makeup, where his wig was smoothed down, and even trimmed a bit, while he sat there shaking. He wanted a lot more makeup than they wanted to put on him.

While I held Archie, Andy went through his scene several times with Miss Taylor’s stand-in, then with Elizabeth herself. He changed his opening line from “Let’s go” to “C’mon, girls,” and “I fear I’m going to be dangerously late” to “I’m late.” Andy handed her the book she had dropped in the confusion of the terrorists’ attack and ran off with his entourage. She screamed, “He’s afraid of me! Why is everyone afraid of me?”

This dull bit of business was repeated through four master shots, four sets of closeups of Elizabeth, and four sets of closeups of Andy, a dozen times in all.

Finally, Andy got me to ask her secretary, Ramon, if she would like to come to the villa for lunch the following day. Ramon asked her, and she said yes. “Oh, good,” said Andy, “we’ll take some Polaroids then.” Only if she didn’t still look puffy, Elizabeth said.

The following morning when I told the cook that Elizabeth Taylor was coming for lunch, she enlisted the aid of nearly every other cook on the Appia Antica, luring them with the promise of serving the star. Soon a half-dozen of them were busily preparing their specialties, from lasagne al forno to chicken cacciatore. One of them told me in broken English that she had been hired by Eddie Fisher years ago, when he had rented a villa on the Appia Antica and was still married to Elizabeth. Unfortunately, she explained almost tearfully, she never met Miss Taylor, because the one and only time she came to the villa, “she and Mista Fisha hava bigga fight in the middle of da night and she run away before I can serva da breakfast.” This time, she told me, she was going to be sure to get her autograph. Meanwhile, Andy Braunsberg was calling every principe and principessa he knew to ask them for lunch with Elizabeth Taylor.

By one, when she was expected, everything was ready: the lasagne, ravioli, ziti, spaghetti, cavatelli, and gnocchi, the chicken, veal, lamb, beef, sole, shrimps, and lobster, the bourbon and vodka, the principes and principessas, Eddie Fisher’s former cook and her autograph book, even Anna Karina, actress wife of director Jean-Luc Godard. But where was Elizabeth? Then it was two o’clock. But where was Elizabeth? And then it was three o’clock. But where was Elizabeth? The principes and principessas were offended. The half-dozen cooks were on the verge of tears. “Are you sure you told her today?” asked Andy. “No, I told her tomorrow, which is today.” “Well, maybe she thought tomorrow was tomorrow.” Andy and I were fast degenerating into what he called our “Abbott and Costello Show.”

Elizabeth arrived at three-thirty, without explanation or apology. Ramon and Gianni were two feet behind her, in their matching white and red. She was dressed casually, for lunch in the country: blue jeans, a purple T-shirt with mirrored embroidery à la Marrakech circa 1966, assorted gold chains, and an American-flag ring made of diamonds, rubies, and sapphires, a gift, she said, from Gianni Bulgari. “Isn’t it a giggle?” she said. “Oh, it’s just great,” sighed Andy.

“This is the way she dressed to meet Sophia,” Ramon informed us, talking about Elizabeth as if she weren’t there. “Madame Ponti wore a Dior suit with a Dior handbag and Dior shoes.”

“And Dior gloves!” screeched Elizabeth in delight. “Can you imagine? She was standing at the front door of her own house, waiting to greet me, in gloves!”

“Oh, I know,” said Andy. “She was wearing gloves when we went there for lunch too. But she’s really great. Really great.”

Elizabeth coughed and asked for a Jack Daniels neat. Then when everyone else went into the dining room and the half-dozen cooks marched out with their half-dozen pastas, she said she wasn’t hungry and just wanted to sit outside with us. She consumed several more neat Jack Daniels’. I was afraid to go into the kitchen: I was sure I’d find the half-dozen cooks slitting their dozen wrists.

Andy suggested that Elizabeth should direct films because she knew so much about setting up shots and lighting and dialogue and she, flattered, said that was her ambition. She told us that she always worked for a percentage of her films. “I own ten percent of Virginia Woolf, and that’s the highest-grossing black-and-white film ever made. And I just bought seventy-five percent of Around the World in Eighty Days from the Todd children.” She smiled shrewdly. “I’m going to re-release it every year at Christmas.”

“Gee,” sighed Andy. “Maybe you should be a producer and a director.” He paused, and added, “Uh, do you think we could do some Polaroids now?”

“Oh, Andy,” said Elizabeth, “you are sweet. But don’t you think I’m looking awfully puffy?”

“No, you look great. Doesn’t Liz, I meant Elizabeth, look great, Bob?” I said she did.

“I tell you what, Andy. We’ll do the photographs when you come back in October to shoot your other scene. Okay?”

Just then, a friend of Braunsberg’s arrived, a perfectly nice associate producer who had worked in Puerto Vallarta on Night of the Iguana, when Richard Burton’s romance with Elizabeth Taylor was at its height. At first she was happy to see him, and they reminisced. But the more they talked, the more Elizabeth insisted that he call Burton, who was also in Rome, staying at Carlo Ponti’s villa. “He won’t take calls from me,” she said, fighting back the tears, “but from you he would.”

The friend resisted, she persisted. She became obsessed with the idea. She dragged him into the library, begging him to call. A minute later, she let out a blood-curdling scream and came running back to the terrace. “I’m no easy lay,” she shouted. “I’m no easy lay. That motherfucker tried to put the make on me,” she sobbed. “I’m crying on his shoulder and he tries to grab me.” This was turning into a real Elizabeth Taylor movie and Andy wasn’t sure he wanted a part in it anymore.

She pulled Andy by the hand and walked into the garden. He followed obediently, looking back at me like a lost kid. She led him to a corner framed in hedges, and they sat down on wrought-iron chairs on either side of a table. I couldn’t hear what they were talking about—well, Elizabeth was talking, and Andy was listening—but I could see what they were doing: she was picking the leaves from the hedge, Andy was wringing his hands and every so often signaling me to come. But I was stuck with Ramon and Gianni, who acted as if we were all having a perfectly normal afternoon.

Elizabeth kept picking leaves and piling them on the tabletop, until it was covered and the hedge was bare. Eventually, I walked over and asked her if she’d like a drink. She looked at me with purple eyes full of anger, and I retreated. Andy called softly, “Oh, Elizabeth is staying for dinner. Maybe you should tell the cooks.” I headed for the kitchen, where the half-dozen cooks sat dejectedly, dividing up the leftovers. “Miss Taylor is staying for dinner,” I announced, and they suddenly turned giddy, like death-row inmates who’ve just been pardoned. I told them we’d sit down to eat at eight.

A few minutes before eight, Miss Taylor disappeared into the servants’ bathroom, off the kitchen. We sat down at the dining table and waited. And waited. And waited. The cooks hovered in the doorway, desperate to serve the twice-slaved-over meal. Ramon and Gianni took turns knocking on the bathroom door, but she wouldn’t let them in, and she wouldn’t come out. Somehow, somebody called a doctor, who arrived in a black car with a black bag. Apparently, she let him into the bathroom and slipped away with him, not saying goodbye. We just heard his wheels crunching over the gravel, and saw Ramon and Gianni jumping in Elizabeth’s car and hurrying after them. Andy and I were left sitting at the dining table, facing a sad-eyed staff and a vast overcooked feast. “Gee,” said Andy, completely perplexed. “She has everything: magic, money, beauty, intelligence. Why can’t she be happy?”

The following day, before we left for New York, I arranged to send two dozen long-stemmed red roses to Miss Taylor at the Grand Hotel. On the card I wrote: “Dear Elizabeth, I think you’re the greatest. Please take care of yourself. Love, Andy.” I was proud of how well I could adapt my handwriting to Andy’s, how well I could forge his signature. On the plane, in first class, Andy held Archie up to his face and said, “Wouldn’t it be great if I could marry Liz? Then we’d really be on easy street, wouldn’t we, Archie?” Archie silently nibbled the caviar Andy was feeding him.

In October, Andy, Archie, Fred, and I flew back to Rome to shoot his “big love scene with Liz.” It wasn’t really a love scene, just a weird exchange between Andy and Elizabeth in the mysteriously empty lobby of the Cavalieri Hilton. Andy did have a “long speech,” at least, long for Andy—ten whole sentences in a row—which made absolutely no sense. The opening line was “The King is an idiot.” “I’ll never be able to do this, Bob. This is a twenty-thousand-dollar speech. And I’m working for free. You’ve got to try and make it shorter.”

Andy’s big scene: He took his place on a couch in the Hilton lobby. The assistant director shouted, “Scene 242, Take One,” just like in the movies. Miss Taylor came running in and noticed Andy sitting there. “Remember me?” she said. That was Andy’s cue. He opened his mouth and stuttered, “The King, the King, the King … ” Elizabeth sat down on the couch with Andy and took his hand, telling him how she lost a $20,000 Fabergé cigarette case on her way to the beach the other night. Andy fluffed his lines again, she sat down again, took his hand again, and told him how someone stole $55,000 worth of jewels from her in London. No go, Andy a blank. She took Andy’s hand and told him how Richard Burton left a suitcase containing $3 million worth of jewels at the Geneva train station, but got it back.

Andy just couldn’t do it. She ordered two Debauched Marys, “to relax the memory.” Andy’s memory was more than relaxed, it was completely supine. Finally, she suggested that Andy write out his lines in his own hand on large cue cards, which he did, and the filming went on through master shots, cutaways, closeups of Miss Taylor, close-ups of Andy. When it was all over, several hours later, Andy looked as drained as I’d ever seen him. “I was so awful,” he said, “but Liz was great. She held my hand and told me all about her jewelry problems. She always refers to Before the Diamond and After the Diamond, B.D. and A.D. Isn’t that great?”

Andy added, “Oh, she said I could take Polaroids of her tomorrow.” But the next day, Ramon called and told me that Elizabeth “looks much too puffy.”

A few days after our return from Rome that October, Andy called me at home one morning to announce that he and I would be escorting Lee Radziwill and her sister Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis to the Brooklyn Museum that afternoon. I had never met the former First Lady, and was far from nonchalant. Andy wasn’t nonchalant either; he was worried—about his “chauffeur,” Bobby Dallesandro. Bobby, who copied his brother Joe’s street-cowboy style but lacked his charisma, was supposed to drive Andy to and from work. He usually managed to make it to Andy’s house by noon, but he often had an excuse for why he couldn’t wait for Andy in the afternoon—a night class at Queens Community College, a sick aunt who had to be taken to the doctor, something wrong with the station wagon. Andy was always threatening to fire him, but Paul would intercede, and Andy would take a taxi uptown.

“I told him to clean up the station wagon,” said Andy, “because he was going to have Jackie O in it, and he said, ‘Who?’ Can you believe it? So I had to spell it out for him: Mrs. Jac-que-line Kenn-e-dy O-nassis, the wife of Pres-i-dent John F. Kenn-e-dy. I think he finally got it. Oh, why can’t I have a normal chauffeur like everybody else? I’m sure Bobby is going to be late, and I just know he’s going to get lost.”

Bobby was late, he did get lost, and his idea of cleaning up the station wagon was throwing the piles of fast-food packaging, empty beer cans, and old coffee containers, not to mention a used condom or two, from the floor in the front to the storage area in the back. He wasn’t a bad guy, just a bad chauffeur.

After Bobby picked us up, we went to Lee’s apartment, where she and Jackie were waiting in the lobby. It was raining and they were in identical tan trenchcoats, with almost identical kerchiefs around their heads. They hopped in the back seat—Andy and I were squeezed up front with Bobby—and we headed toward Brooklyn.

After the usual greetings, Mrs. Onassis’s first words were: “So tell me, Andy, what was Liz Taylor like?” I couldn’t believe it. Here was the only person in the world who was more famous than Elizabeth Taylor and she wanted to know what Elizabeth Taylor was like. Her first question was right out of an Interview interview. And what’s more, it was asked in the voice of Marilyn Monroe! If Marilyn Monroe had gone to Foxcroft and Vassar, that is. The same girlishly sexy breathiness. It was a revelation, of sorts.

“Oh, gee,” said Andy. “She was great. She held my hand and told me about B.D. and A.D. It was great.” The back seat was silent. Then Andy pressed the playback button on his human tape recorder, and I reeled off a somewhat censored version of Andy’s Elizabethan adventures, starting with an explanation of those initials—Before the Diamond, and After the Diamond. Every so often, I’d pause and let Andy pipe up with a punchline.

Meanwhile, Bobby Dallesandro had decided to take a “short cut” to the Brooklyn Museum, which involved a lot of zigzagging through the high-crime side streets of Bedford-Stuyvesant. Andy was getting more and more fidgety, especially since every corner seemed to have a stop sign, and a crowd that invariably recognized Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis sitting in the back seat of this beat-up old station wagon. We drove through a stretch of slum known as Little Haiti, with rundown stores with names like Port au Prince Deli and Pétionville Pawnshop. Jackie said she loved Haiti, and told us about the primitive painters whose fee was based on what you wanted in a painting: $50 for a house, $25 for each tree, another $25 for each cow, pig, or dog.

“That sounds a lot like the way I work,” noted Andy, honestly. “I love it when people tell me what they want me to paint. Maybe I should do portraits of people with their dogs, and charge extra for the dog. Isn’t that a good idea, Bob?”

Jackie and Lee laughed. They seemed to be having a good time, despite the winos peering through the windshield at every stop sign. When we finally got to the museum, I noticed something else about Jackie, and the way she dealt with her almost oppressive fame. She simply acted as if it didn’t exist, as if those murmuring admirers were pointing at someone else. Like a thoroughbred in blinders, she kept her eyes fixed on the goal, always looking straight ahead at the Egyptian artifacts on display, never at the hubbub her presence was causing. It wasn’t a haughty or arrogant attitude, but it did keep people at a respectful distance. I could hear them whispering about her—“Is that her sister? Is that a Burberry raincoat? Who’s the guy in the wig?”—but no one asked her for an autograph or came too close. They treated her more like a saint than a celebrity, and it had a lot to do with the way she carried herself.

I also noticed something about the relationship between Jackie and her younger sister. Lee seemed to know everything there was to know about the exhibition. “Oh, look, Jackie,” she would say, “that bowl is just like the one we saw in the Cairo Museum.” She could list the Pharaohs and the dates they ruled. She seemed to have the mind of a curator, and the eye of an aesthete. Jackie looked at her the way a pupil looks at a teacher, intently, taking it all in. Lee talked, Jackie listened. Lee led, Jackie followed. And there was no sign of their reputed competitiveness. On the contrary, they seemed to have complementary personalities.

By the end of the afternoon, I saw Jackie’s first question about Liz Taylor in a different light. She wasn’t being silly, or dumb, or starstruck. It was a deliberate disarming ploy, her way to let us know that she was like any other normal person, curious about the same things we were, anybody was. She wasn’t lost in the stars at all.

Was Andy? That’s much more complicated. I think he was in the sixties, as his fame swelled his head with a feeling of omnipotence, and the shooting brought him down to earth again, with a frightening, eye-opening thud. And I think that he eventually lost his way once more in the last few years of his life.

But until then, his sense of reality was razor sharp. Yes, he’d gush over Elizabeth Taylor’s diamonds and Paulette Goddard’s rubies, but whenever he came across that De Beers ad in a magazine, he’d ask, “A diamond is forever what, Bob?” Yes, he collected diamonds himself, but he didn’t show them off; he hid them at home. They weren’t status symbols for him to show off, but investments to ward off his dire fear of poverty. His gushing over stars, and the minor celebrities he called stars, was as much an act as Jackie’s question about Liz, designed to disarm and charm and relax. It was funny, it was normal, it made Andy accessible. But in private, his usual response to a star he had met was not “Gee” and “Wow” and “Great”—it was “Who does she think she is?” Eventually, he even said it about Jackie.