The more time I spent with Andy, the more I answered him back, because I realized that he liked it, or at least respected me for it, the way he did Paul and Fred. That was one of Andy’s strengths: He wasn’t surrounded by yes-men. And sometimes I had to answer back, out of self-defense. I was very wary of being enlisted as an art assistant then, because Andy had started telling me that my hands were my best feature, that my handwriting was “so artistic,” that I held a pen “the way a painter does.” One day he even told me, “You could probably be an artist, Bob.” He didn’t mean I should quit working for him and go off and paint for myself, he meant I should help him paint. But, as I told him that day he started painting in front of my desk, if I did one more thing for him, I’d go crazy.

As Interview’s special contributing editor, I was doing one or two interviews of my own every month, setting them up, researching them, transcribing them, editing them, and proofreading them. I accompanied Andy on most of his interviews and asked many of his questions—Pat Hackett did the transcribing, editing, and proofreading. I was also setting up interviews by friends and celebrities, from Candy Darling to Delfina Rattazzi, and often transcribing, editing, and proofreading them. I was writing most of the “Smalltalk” gossip column, which dovetailed with my second Factory position, assistant social director. That entailed arranging Andy’s social life when Fred was in Europe, and sometimes when he wasn’t, inviting press and celebrities to screenings and lunches at the Factory, helping to organize parties, and whenever possible negotiating to get them for free. It meant going to lunches, cocktails, dinners, parties, screenings, and openings with Andy, covering them for Interview, getting ideas and hustling portraits all along the way. We were also on the verge of signing a contract with Harcourt Brace Jovanovich for The Philosophy of Andy Warhol, of which I was to be the ghostwriter. And I was still helping Vincent out on the endless Nothing Serious video pilot.

So no, thank you, I didn’t want to fingerpaint.

My pay: still $125 a week, $6,500 a year, and when I complained about not having enough money to live on, Andy would say, “If you sold some portraits, you’d make commissions, Bob.”

“But I can’t take Andrea de Portago out to dinner and convince her to convince her mother to get her portrait done, and then make her pick up the check, Andy.”

“Well, if you stayed home more often and wrote some scripts, your name would be in lights and you’d be on easy street, Bob.”

“I hate my apartment.”

“Your apartment is great. It’s on the best street in New York.”

“I know, but it’s only big enough for one person, or two people who are very close.”

“You know two people who are very close?”

I’d laugh and give up, or in this case write the line down for the philosophy book.

At Christmas that year, Andy gave me a $250 bonus, in cash, three fifties on top, and one hundred singles to make it look like more. No art. Vincent handed me a check for an extra week’s pay. I gave Andy a Bergdorf Goodman tie, with BG embroidered all over it, which he loved and wore every day for the next six months, and also a blowup poster of four Instamatics I had taken of him and Elizabeth Taylor, which he loved and put in a time capsule.

Meanwhile, the Glenn problem was driving everyone crazy, except Andy, who saw office intrigue as entertainment, real-life soap opera. Glenn was now feuding with our star cover photographer, Francesco Scavullo, and with Giorgio di Sant’Angelo, who had hired and fired Jude. She and Glenn were fighting too. Andy thought I should weave the O’Briens’ marital saga into a script called Modern Marriage. And when it got further complicated by the role of fledgling disco star Grace Jones, he said, “If you had written down everything that happened to Glenn and Jude like I told you to when you kids first started here, you’d have a great novel now, Bob.” He meant he’d have a great novel.

Andy didn’t want Glenn fired, not only because he basically liked Glenn but also for the same reason he never wanted anyone fired—he was sure they’d react violently and come and get him. So Fred came up with the usual Factory solution: Glenn wasn’t fired, but someone else was hired to do his job: Rosemary Kent, star reporter.

Fred told Glenn that Rosemary wasn’t going to replace him but work with him, although she was given the title of editor-in-chief. Rosemary saw Glenn as “production manager.” This charade lasted for one issue, August 1973, and then Glenn quit. Glenn was soon hired by Jann Wenner to run Rolling Stone’s new New York office. Unfortunately, Glenn made Jude—who had come back to Interview after Giorgio dismissed her—quit too, and years later he said she never forgave him. In any case, they divorced not long after.

Rosemary Kent, like Fred Hughes, was originally from Houston, Texas, but they may as well have been from different solar systems. Fred was pure de Menilville; Rosemary was plain Cowtown, and proud of it. Fred was slim and elegant; Rosemary, in her own words, was “fat and happy” and thought it would be great fun to do a special fat-and-happy issue of Interview, by which she did not mean lots of ads: “Why not use the power of the press to bring back that Rubenesque look?” Fred never talked about his private life, not even when Andy taunted him about it; Rosemary, encouraged by Andy, took great delight in graphically describing her entire erotic history in vivid detail. Worst of all, Rosemary’s favorite word was the word Fred hated most—professional—and whenever Fred disagreed with her about some aspect of the magazine, she’d scold him with, “Well, ah just don’t think youall are being very professional.” Then she’d sob, “Ah just can’t take working in this amateur-type atmosphere.”

Andy had loved going out with Rosemary when she was at WWD: She was bright, she was funny, she talked dirty for his tape recorder, and she put his picture in the paper he most wanted to be in then. But once Peter Brant hired her, at an enormous salary, and caved in to her demand to be called editor-in-chief, a title no one before or after got at Interview, Andy started referring to her as “the Big Cheese.” As in, “You’ve got to do something about the Big Cheese, Bob. She wants to put Dyan Cannon on the cover. And Elliott Gould. And when I said we should be putting beauties on the cover, she told me I was being unprofessional. Do you believe it? She told me that.”

I believed it. She told me it was unprofessional to write about Candy Darling, Sylvia Miles, and Monique van Vooren, so I stopped writing “Smalltalk” altogether. She insisted that Fran Lebowitz do tape-recorded interviews and Fran quit. She attacked Marina Schiano at a cocktail party at the de la Rentas for “only” giving her YSL earrings that Christmas, instead of a silk blouse like she had the year before, “when I was still at WWD.” Somehow, in the midst of transforming Interview into a “professional publication,” she found the time to write what she called “a real juicy story” about Mick and Bianca for Viva, and Bianca called me and said Mick had walked out when he read it, blaming it all on her. Rosemary’s second-favorite word was “juicy.”

She interviewed Peter Beard and asked him lots of “juicy” questions about Lee Radziwill, and Lee called me and said Peter was so depressed about it could I possibly try and tone things down? Then she sent Barbara Allen, the pretty young wife of Interview’s co-publisher, out to Montauk to do photos of Peter for the story, and when they clicked, she encouraged Barbara to leave Joe for Peter. “Barbara married Joe for all those YSL dresses,” Rosemary told me, “and now she regrets it. She and Peter are perfect for each other.” But what about Lee? “Who cares about Lee?” Andy was beside himself. He saw everything going down the drain: Interview’s backing, the rent from Montauk, afternoons with Lee and Jackie.

But Rosemary’s biggest fiasco, and my biggest headache, was her fight with Scavullo. Nobody had clamored more for the hiring of Rosemary Kent than Scavullo and his stylist Sean Byrnes. But the minute she had the job, all hell broke loose. It was over her wedding (to Henry Meltzer, an equally fat-and-happy architect), set for the fall of 1973, at Scavullo’s house in Southampton.

Scavullo told Rosemary she could invite 75 guests; she had already invited 225-and-counting. He wanted a sedate seated luncheon on a Sunday afternoon; she wanted a wild buffet hoedown that went on all night. They both came to me to complain. Rosemary sobbed that Scavullo was being “cruel”; Scavullo screamed that Rosemary was being “monstrous.”

“I’ve already invited half the state of Texas to this wedding and now I have nowhere to have it,” she wailed.

“I’m not going to have my beautiful house in the country destroyed by her ticky-tacky friends,” he shouted.

“He’ll never do another cover for Interview again!” she decreed.

“I’ll never do another cover for Interview again!” he agreed.

Fred backed Rosemary, because he’d never liked Scavullo; Andy backed Scavullo, because he was working for free; and I somehow negotiated a ceasefire. As for the wedding, Rosemary and Henry rented out an abandoned bank in Tribeca, which was then still known as the Lower West Side, but they didn’t bother to have it vacuumed or dusted. Andy brought Paulette Goddard to please Rosemary, but she wouldn’t sit down in her white suit, and made Andy take her back uptown after five minutes. Rosemary was “really hurt.” I stayed on for the square dancing, not to mention the performing chimpanzee on roller skates, which Giorgio di Sant’Angelo (who had designed her “cowgirl” wedding gown) dubbed “Rosemary’s Baby.”

In early December, Peter Brant and Joe Allen called a meeting. “Everyone acting very Wall Street,” I wrote in my diary:

 … sitting around the oval table, sipping sherry (Fred’s chic touch), discussing circulation, advertising, and cost figures. Joe Allen says we’re losing $2500 per week. AW: Gee, the paper is getting bigger, we used to lose only a few hundred. Rosemary sticks her foot in it by asking for more money for good writers. Professional writers. Fred objects to that word for the thousandth time. Expounds his theory of frivolity (as an anti-depressant) and dilettantism. I back him up with perhaps too strong an attack on Rosemary’s choice of writers. I even bring up the WWD-copycat complex.

The next day, Andy told me that my remarks were “really intelligent.” Fred said that I was “a little harsh,” especially the WWD cut. “Bob’s right,” said Andy, defending me. And I was: Leo Lerman, the features editor at Vogue, had told me that everyone at Condé Nast was calling Rosemary Kent’s Interview “WWD Jr.”

John Fairchild had apparently also taken note: He banned Andy from being mentioned in WWD then (and evermore). Andy was upset, saying that he knew we should never have hired Rosemary. Fred said it was Andy who wanted to hire her in the first place, and Andy said it was Fred. Finally they agreed to blame it on Peter Brant. Fred rationalized that being dropped by WWD was a blessing in disguise, because too much social coverage was bad for Andy’s image as an artist. Andy didn’t seem convinced. Wasn’t all coverage good coverage? And didn’t WWD reach just the right audience for a society portraitist?

Things got worse. Rosemary slammed the bulletproof door in my face when I told her not to run a hideous photo of Sharon Hammond, a beautiful young Park Avenue hostess at whose parties we were meeting good portrait prospects. She had a knack for choosing the one bad shot on a contact sheet, and blowing it up real big. A few weeks later she hung up on Fred when he asked her to be more civil to Vincent. The next day, after Joe Allen had reported that monthly losses were now up to $12,000 and ordered a cutback of editorial pages, Rosemary threw out a Scavullo fashion spread and an interview by Andy.

Rosemary was just too “professional” and “juicy,” too fat and happy, for us. Beyond matters of style and personality, she just didn’t understand the complicated interlocking relationships between Andy’s various businesses. Interview was meant to further Andy’s other interests, not derail them. And Rosemary had become increasingly frustrated. She was the editor-in-chief, the Big Cheese, but everywhere she turned there were bosses: Andy and Fred, Peter and Joe, Vincent in matters of money, Pat Hackett when it came to Andy’s interviews. Peter and Joe had also hired an associate publisher named Carole Rogers, who had been circulation manager of the Village Voice, and who quarreled so badly with Rosemary that their husbands almost came to blows one day and Vincent had to run upstairs to separate them. Scavullo was the bossiest of all, because he worked for free, and, even though I was still only special contributing editor, Andy and Fred expected me to “supervise Rosemary.” Vincent once said that Andy let everyone make up his or her job and find their own niche. The problem was, everyone made up the same job and found the same niche: boss.

The only boss who wasn’t around as 1973 turned into 1974 was Paul Morrissey. When the Interview masthead was reshuffled in the August 1973 issue—Rosemary’s first—Andy and Fred were no longer editors but president and executive vice president. Paul, who had also been an editor, was dropped. By whom I don’t know, because I was in Rome then, as was Paul.

When he got back in late 1973, he didn’t come to the Factory regularly anymore, and often had a young lawyer named Richard Turley call in for his messages. Perhaps he didn’t feel welcome. Pat Hackett was furious with him because he didn’t give her the credit she felt she deserved on Dracula and Frankenstein. Jed was balking at the idea of making any more movies with him and more than ever wanted to direct a movie of his own. Vincent, who had been almost completely under Paul’s wing before he went to Rome, had become much closer to Andy. And to Fred—Vincent even started having suits made at Fred’s New York tailor, Everall Brothers, and smoking a cigar. Vincent was a boss now, too, with his own video projects. The truth is, with Paul away, we had all become bossier.

In January 1974, Paul flew out to Hollywood to try to sell a western called West, not unlike Lonesome Cowboys, with Mick and Bianca in the Joe and Viva roles. Bianca was game, but was Mick? He seemed more interested in another Paul Morrissey idea, Caligula, which also interested Franco Rossellini and Gore Vidal. They eventually ended up doing it without Mick or Paul, financed by Bob Guccione, the publisher of Penthouse—and suing each other forevermore.

Paul kept calling from the coast, prodding me to come up with movie ideas quick. He said he had a meeting with Ray Stark, who thought Dracula was “Third Avenue camp.” “Hollywood wants clean movies,” Paul said Ray said. I came up with an instant idea for Mick and Bianca and football-star-turned-movie-actor Jim Brown: a simple love triangle, in which Bianca has to choose between black and white, macho and androgyne, the cleancut world of sports and the decadent world of rock. No. How about a World War II movie, I said, with all the men in the army and all the women working in an arms factory at home, and the men are all weak (Max deLys, Helmut Berger, Hiram Keller, Taylor Mead), and the women are all strong (Maxime de la Falaise McKendry, Sylvia Miles, Florinda Bolkan, Brigid Berlin). No.

“What about Sherlock Holmes?” Andy said—Princess Mdvani owned the rights to Conan Doyle’s works and wanted Andy to produce a modern version. Paul said he had already told Ray Stark, who wasn’t interested.

Andy was still pressing for me to write New York (based on Fellini’s Roma), Modern Marriage (based on the O’Briens), and his latest idea, Times Square (based on Le Jardin). Once he came in with a pile of National Enquirers, and said that Pat and I should write a script based on the headlines. Pat tried harder than I did.

“Why doesn’t Paul come in?” Andy wondered one day, going uptown in a taxi from the Factory. I said I didn’t know. “Well, why is Richard Turley calling for his messages?” I didn’t know that either. Round and round we went, in circles of ambiguity, and most ambiguous of all was the relationship between Andy and Paul. “I think it’s only a matter of months before Paul Morrissey leaves Andy, or vice versa,” my diary records on November 30, 1973. “I think it’s a good thing.” They drifted away from each other over the next year, though it was hard to say who was leaving whom. There wasn’t a fight, or a divorce, just a permanent trial separation. But I was wrong about its being a good thing, at least for Andy. The only movie made after Paul’s departure was Andy Warhol’s Bad, in 1976, directed by Jed, with a screenplay by Pat—based on those Enquirer headlines. And while it wasn’t that bad, it wasn’t that good.

Back then, I had high hopes of working with Jed and Pat. We spent a lot of time together coming up with ideas and going out in search of inspiration. One night in November 1973, when Andy and Fred were in Paris, Jed and I went to dinner at the Jacksons’, and then decided to check out Max’s Kansas City, which neither of us had been to since Le Jardin opened. He suggested going up to Andy’s house first, to get Andy’s Mercedes. In the four years that I had known Andy, I had yet to see inside his house, so I was very curious.

Andy’s house, 1342 Lexington Avenue: There’s a big Cy Twombly blackboard painting in the foyer. The first floor is divided in two rooms, both rather clubby feeling, crowded with American primitive artifacts, old iron cows, roosters, sheep, old portraits, old quilts over old couches, and a couple of wooden Indians near the stairway. Jed made me promise not to tell a soul I had been there.

Andy had a new idea for a Broadway play, a musical based on Lou Reed’s new album, Berlin. One night in January 1974, Andy and I went to dinner with Lou Reed at Reno Sweeney’s, a new cabaret-style restaurant in the Village, to talk things over. Lou’s opener was, “I want you, Andy, your ideas—not Paul’s or Brigid’s.” He glared at me across the table—he didn’t want my ideas either. It was a very difficult dinner, with Lou hesitant to tell too much about his ideas, afraid Andy would steal them, wary, like Robert Mapplethorpe and Fran Lebowitz. He did explain the psychology of the lead character a bit: He only shows emotion when he’s out of speed, Lou said, and when his drug dealer makes it with his girlfriend but not him. When the girlfriend commits suicide, he can only describe and feels nothing. Was this the Lou Reed story then? He’s so skinny, small, hair cut very short, little silver shirt, jeans, pea coat, nothing starlike at all. He took us to the Ninth Circle “to see the kids I’m talking about.” There was one kid who caught Lou’s eye—very young (17?), dark hair around his face, eye shadow. Everyone else looked like extras in a movie about decadence in … Berlin. Ugly, bearded, painted, bruised, bandaged, strange. A couple was dancing and we couldn’t figure out if it was two girls, two boys, a boy and a girl. We couldn’t figure out if another was in blackface or really black. Everyone seemed depressed, and when they laughed, it was mocking. Only the kid seemed enthusiastic (for his own decline?). People kept coming to our table and saying hello to Andy, rather respectfully, which was funny considering how degenerate they all looked. I think Andy was enjoying himself, getting ideas, not paranoid at all. Lou just sat there numb.

And yet we never had another meeting with Lou Reed, who said he was off to Amsterdam for a “tryst.”

Now I can understand Lou Reed’s reluctance to have his brain picked clean by Andy, but then I agreed with Andy when he told the kids at the Factory, “Gee, Lou was acting so strange last night, right, Bob? He was really mean to Bob, right Bob? And he really hates Paul and Brigid, right, Bob?” And I didn’t see that by taking Andy’s side I was only making it more difficult to protest when Andy wanted to pick my brain clean.

One of the ways he did that was through what he called the “Fantasy Diary.” When he first proposed it, I wriggled out of it, but after Vogue decided to publish my “Liz and Andy” Rome diary, he became increasingly insistent. “I’ll tell you everything I do,” he said, “and then you just make it up from there. Just make it up. Just turn the pages out. And put in lots of sex and philosophy.” “Who does he think he is now,” I asked my diary, “the Marquis de Sade?”

I had been keeping a diary since almost the first day I met Andy. Sometimes I’d write it late at night, sometimes when I got up. A typical morning entry began, “I am extremely hung-over and don’t remember much of yesterday,” and then went on for three detailed pages typed single space. Andy knew and would occasionally ask offhandedly, “Are you still writing your diary? Oh really.” Then, after the IRS started auditing him in 1972, he started dictating an Expenses Diary to Pat Hackett, at first when he came in every day, and later over the phone—that’s what eventually grew into The Andy Warhol Diaries, published posthumously.

So starting in September 1973, once a day, I tapped out the Fantasy Diary—wildly exaggerated versions of Andy’s days and nights. He told me he went to lunch with Philip Johnson and David Whitney one Sunday: I wrote about the three of them riding in a white Cadillac convertible, cruising down Fifth Avenue, David driving, while Andy and Philip threw Godiva chocolate-covered cherries, Andy’s latest craze, at their cheering fans. He told me he had stopped in at Jolie Gabor’s costume-jewelry shop on Madison Avenue: I made up an orgy at Madame Gabor’s, including most of Park Avenue society, all squishing around on a floor covered in Godiva chocolate-covered cherries. In the Fantasy Diary, a French-American fashion gala in Versailles ended up with Marie-Hélène de Rothschild slapping Hélène Rochas in the Hall of Mirrors, while Halston’s models did high kicks on the runway, and the titles in the audience threw—yes, Godiva chocolate-covered cherries.

At the time, I was reading Nigel Nicholson’s book Portrait of a Marriage, in which he, his parents, Harold Nicholson and Vita Sackville-West, her mother, Lady Sackville, and his brother, Ben Nicholson, all sit down to meal after meal and then all go to their rooms and describe meal after meal in their diaries. It struck me that this was what the Factory was turning into—with Andy and Pat doing the Expenses Diary, Fred trying to keep one going too, and me doing the Fantasy Diary, which I would give to Pat, who kept it in a box in her office, then going home and writing my own diary. I was beginning to despair, however, that my diary was losing its energy, not to mention its individuality. Andy, my diary records, “read Fantasy Diary and liked it a lot. Now he wants to take me shopping for underwear and write fifty pages on it.”

Then along came a literary agent named Mrs. Carlton Cole. Roz Cole was Patrick O’Higgins’s agent and he introduced us to her at a holiday brunch given by Sharon Hammond’s mother, Ellen Lehman McCluskey Long. Roz told Andy that he should write his autobiography. He told her that I was writing his biography, referring to my Warhol films book, which Curtis Brown had sent to five or six publishing houses since Dutton dropped it, with no luck. Roz was very quick on her feet: “Well, why don’t you write your philosophy. I mean, if anyone has a philosophy, it’s got to be you.” Andy loved that idea—hadn’t he been telling me to put “lots of philosophy” into the Fantasy Diary? Of course, his idea of philosophy was going shopping for underwear, and musing on love and sex along the way—and why not? “Philosophy is anything, Bob. Just make it up.”

So I stopped writing the Fantasy Diary—I was running out of things to do with chocolate-covered cherries anyway—and started writing the proposal for THE Philosophy of Andy Warhol, which we delivered to Roz Cole at the beginning of February 1974. We were very insistent on that capitalized THE—we saw it as the real title and the perfect follow-up to Andy’s 1968 novel, a.

Andy said I would own part of the book. I was pleased with the prospect of making some real money; Roz was talking about a $50,000 hardcover advance, and $150,000 for the paperback. But I was also a bit blue about my films book going nowhere and suddenly writing a book for Andy instead of about Andy. I didn’t want to be just a ghostwriter, so Ellen Levine, my agent at Curtis Brown, and I were talking about new ideas for a book of my own. And Andy, in his way, was trying to help. A phone call from him on December 11, 1973, shows how:

AW:  Oh, Bob, this is [a rich young European I had slept with once]. I really miss your cock.

BC:  Hi, Andy.

AW:  Oh, Bob, I’m soooo hot for your cock.

BC:  Hi, Andy.

AW:  Oh, we have a book for you to do, Bob. Princess Marconi.

BC:  Who?

AW:  Don’t you know who she is, she was the sister of … the one who married … and her brother married … [he meant Princess Mdvani, whose brother, Prince Mdvani, was one of Barbara Hutton’s husbands].

BC:  American?

AW:  No, Georgian, from Russia.

BC:  She really wants a book?

AW:  Yeah, she wanted Patrick O’Higgins to do it but Paul talked her into using you. I’m going to tape her—Reminisces—and you can do her biography.

BC:  But, Andy, my books are going to be just like your books.

AW:  Noooo. I’m doing Paulette [Goddard]. You’re not doing Paulette, are you?

BC:  No, my agent was up though and she’s going to try and get Candy.

AW:  You’re doing Candy?

BC:  If my agent finds out that Bantam really wants it.

AW:  Why don’t you shove it up your agent—then she’ll really work for you.

BC:  What about Mrs. Vreeland’s biography? Fred said he was getting me that.

AW:  Really? Oh, see, I want to tape her Reminisces too.

BC:  You mean for one book called Reminisces?

AW:  No, different books: Paulette Reminisces, Mrs. Vreeland Reminisces, Princess Marconi Reminisces.…  We’re all going to make a fortune on books this year.

BC:  I wish I could think up something new to do.

AW:  Have you thought about work? That’s new, Bob, work. I mean, you could have a play by now.

BC:  I know, it just seems that these things take so long. I want things to be fast.

AW:  Well, you can dance fast, you can come fast, you can whip off pages fast.…

BC:  But that’s just the Fantasy Diary, because I know no one will see it except Pat Hackett.

AW:  But you should write everything like that, fast and cheap. Just do it and then you’ll have something.