The nostalgia craze—which I’ve always thought started when Paul handed me those Rita Hayworth stills—was all over New York in 1973 and 1974. Everything old seemed new and everything new seemed old, and the way to the future seemed to be through the past. Andy and entourage were at the Josephine Baker and Maria Callas comebacks—the former a hit, the latter a flop—as well as at the comeback of Sal Mineo, in a Broadway play called The Children’s Mass. We were convinced it was based on the Holly Woodlawn story, especially since the lead character kept saying everything was “absolutely flawless,” which is what Holly said about everything. Holly was in the audience, too, and Andy was very nervous about seeing her for the first time since the fights over money during the making of Women in Revolt, but she behaved absolutely flawlessly and was thrilled to have a play based on her life, even if it dwelt on drugs, booze, hustlers, and murder. “It makes me a legend,” Holly reasoned, “like Marilyn Monroe.”

Even Holly went nostalgic in 1973, launching a cabaret act at Reno Sweeney, itself a takeoff on a thirties-style nightclub. Now that Andy and Holly had made up, we went to see her night after night, taking our uptown friends and European art dealers to hear Holly belt out her big number, “Cooking Breakfast for the One I Love,” waving a frying pan in one hand and a spatula in the other. The opening act at Reno Sweeney was a new old group called Manhattan Transfer, two guys and two girls, like a barbershop quartet spliced with the Andrews Sisters. The real Andrews Sisters came back too, in early 1974. So did Ricky Nelson, at the Bottom Line. Andy and company went to those openings too.

One night in April 1973, Andy passed up dinner with Joan Crawford for dinner with Marshall McLuhan, and was furious with himself for making the wrong choice. The man who said that the medium was the message, and that television would eliminate books, wouldn’t talk with Andy’s tape recorder on. “I thought he knew about machines,” Andy said. “Oh, Bob, it was soooo boring. And to think I missed Joan Crawford for that.”

By the fall of 1973 Andy had his very own Old Hollywood star to take to all those nostalgic openings: Paulette Goddard, who had co-starred with Joan Crawford in the 1939 movie version of The Women.

Andy had first met Paulette in spring 1973 at the opening of the Metropolitan Museum’s Gold Show, featuring everything from a seventeenth-century 24-karat Saint Sebastian to the gold-lined helmet the astronauts wore to the moon. It was the perfect place to meet a woman famous for her passion for gold and diamonds, rubies, emeralds, and sapphires—a passion she shared with Andy.

Andy had been working on a feature for Vogue, using Polaroid’s latest camera, on the most beautiful women in America, and John McKendry, the Met’s curator of photography and prints, had suggested that he photograph Paulette at the Gold Show opening. Andy was delighted, Paulette was delighted; the only problem was getting them together that night. When Paulette was upstairs, Andy was downstairs, and when Andy was upstairs, Paulette was downstairs—and each refused to ascend or descend for the other. So I was ascending and descending the Met’s very long, very marble staircase, trying to get them both in the same place at the same time. After three or four round trips, just as I decided to give up, there they were, together, talking and laughing.

Paulette was a walking Gold Show in herself: wearing a body-hugging gold lamé gown with an Egyptian tombful of gold around her neck, studded with big rubies. And she still wore her red hair the way she did in her first great hit, Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times. She told us Charlie had given her the trademark hairdo by dunking her head in a tub of water and leaving it the way it came out: in a straight, close pageboy, with bangs over her forehead that gave her a perpetually young and sportive air.

Her attitude, now, however, was more haughty than sporty. When Andy took out his Polaroid camera, she refused to pose, saying she had never agreed to, even though John McKendry had assured us that she had. And when she was at last persuaded to change her mind, she insisted on posing full face, even though Andy asked her to pose in profile. They disagreed, and they kept on disagreeing for the rest of the decade. And I spent the rest of the decade in between them, trying to get them together—which they somehow always did on their own, just when I least expected, just when I was about to give up.

“Who does Paulette Goddard think she is?” Andy said later that night. And a minute later, as he peered closely at her rubies in his Polaroid: “Gee, she really is the greatest, isn’t she?” Paulette had told Andy, “You don’t break rules, you just don’t have rules.” And Andy had asked me, “Was that a compliment, Bob?”

Despite their prickly first meeting at the Gold Show that spring, and the disastrous party in Rome that summer, Paulette couldn’t wait to get together with us, she said, when she returned to New York in September. Paulette spent half the year in Europe, based at her Swiss lakefront villa near Locarno, which had been left to her by her third husband, Erich Maria Remarque, the novelist who wrote the World War I bestseller All Quiet on the Western Front. Between Charlie Chaplin and Remarque, Paulette had been married to the actor Burgess Meredith for two years in the forties. “Burgess,” she always said, pronouncing his name with disdain, “was the biggest mistake of my life. It cost me all my beautiful Picassos and Braques. Oh, how I cried. But I got more. Yes, I did.”

A few days after she got back to her aerie in the glamorous Ritz Tower on Park Avenue at East 57th Street, Andy, Fred, and I took her to dinner at La Caravelle. We were seated at the first table, just inside the door, thanks to Paulette, we thought. A few tables down sat John Fairchild, with Condé Nast chief Alexander Liberman and his wife, Tatiana, Oscar and Françoise de la Renta, and Marina Schiano. They kept waving at us, and Andy was sure that was because of Paulette too. “Maybe John Fairchild will take the ban off now,” Andy said, explaining to Paulette about the Rosemary Kent mess. “You don’t need that kind of publicity, Andy,” she said. “You’re the most important artist in the world. Why, in Switzerland, everybody knows that. Even my Italian maid.”

“Oh, really,” said Andy.

“I told Andy the same thing,” said Fred, “but he never listens to anything I say.”

“I do too, Fred. That’s all I do. Listen to whatever you say. Oh, that’s Fred’s wife down there, Marina Schiano. They’re married but they don’t live together.”

“That’s the best kind of marriage to have,” said Paulette. “I call it a maître d’ marriage. Not too much romance, just someone to take care of all the boring stuff, like dealing with the servants, the menus, the reservations. That’s what Erich used to do for me. He wrote all morning and in the afternoon he took care of all that.”

“Well, Marina certainly doesn’t do that for me,” said Fred.

“But you do it for her, and isn’t that nice,” said Paulette.

“No,” said Andy, “Fred and Bob do it for me.”

Paulette was wearing a typical Goddard getup: a svelte white dress—for the glow—and the most remarkable diamond necklace any of us had ever seen. Hanging from a chain of two-karat diamonds were at least a dozen larger diamonds in ascending size from five karats to twenty karats, and each one was a different shape: round, oval, oblong, square, pear, marquise. Andy was transfixed. “I never saw a necklace like that,” he said. “Why are they all different shapes and sizes?”

“They’re all my old engagement rings,” Paulette explained matter-of-factly. “I always sent back the setting, and kept the rock.”

“You did! Oh, how greaaaaat. Isn’t that greaaaaaat, Fred? Isn’t that greaaaaat, Bob?” Three long greats meant he meant it.

Andy was enchanted, but also very wary. “Do you think she’s looking for a new maître d’, Bob? I should never have told her that I collect diamonds, too. Now she’ll expect me to send her an engagement ring, so she can send it back without the rock. Oh, I bet she just wants a book out of us, right? She did say the book with Anita Loos wasn’t working out. The Perils of Paulette is a terrible title, isn’t it, Bob?”

“Well, I can think of a better one.”

“What?” asked Andy.

“From Chaplin to Warhol, by Paulette Goddard Remarque.” It was my turn to torture him a bit.

“Oh, Bob,” he wailed. “She does want to marry me! You have to let her know that I’m married already.” Then he quickly added, “To Archie.”

Andy wasn’t being entirely paranoid, or self-aggrandizing. Remarque had only died in 1970, and other than her aging mother, who lived on Second Avenue, Paulette didn’t have any family, any children, and, it seemed, had few friends, other than Anita Loos. And they were having problems with their book, or at least Paulette said so. “Anita’s trying to portray me as one of the girls,” she had said at dinner.

“What girls?” asked Andy, edging his tape recorder closer.

“Oh, you know, Garbo, Dolores del Rio, Mercedes da Costa … that whole group.”

“You mean,” Andy spluttered, “uh, lesbians?”

“Now, Andy,” Paulette scolded, “I’m surprised to hear a man of your sophistication, an artist, use a word like that. Only psychiatrists use those boring clinical words—homosexual, bisexual, oedipal. In Hollywood, we said someone was single-gaited, or double-gaited, and they were, believe me, they were.”

Andy saw more and more of Paulette that fall, but always with me along. One of the things that terrified him about her was the way, as he put it, “she walks around in broad daylight with all her jewelry on. What if she’s mugged, Bob? Does she think I’m going to defend her?” But, of course, Paulette’s jewelry was a big part of her attraction for Andy. They could go on for hours about it. She claimed that different stones had different physical effects on the body: “Rubies warm the blood, sapphires cool it” was one maxim of hers. He was fascinated by the three rings she always wore on one finger, her “everyday diamonds,” she called them: a rare blue diamond, a rarer yellow diamond, and the rarest pink diamond, each the size of an almond. “Gee,” Andy told her, “Liz Taylor’s diamonds aren’t as good as yours.”

“That’s why she started That International Rumor about me,” snapped Paulette. She said it with capitals, as if it were the title of a movie: That International Rumor.

“What International Rumor?” asked Andy eagerly.

“Never mind,” said Paulette. “If you haven’t heard it, I’m not going to tell you.”

Andy was sure that Anita Loos must be trying to put the International Rumor into The Perils of Paulette, and that’s why Paulette was growing increasingly disenchanted with the project. He was equally sure that it had something to do with Dolores, Mercedes, and Greta.

In November, Dracula was ready to be screened for the press—it came out before Frankenstein, because 3D took longer to edit. Andy brought Maxime, because she was the star, Fred brought her daughter Loulou, and I brought Paulette. She loved it. Over dinner at Pearl’s later, she said that Joe Dallesandro was “a born star,” but suggested that he take ballet lessons to learn to move more gracefully for the camera. “It magnifies everything, you know,” she said. “I ran away from home when I was fourteen, to study ballet. I worked to pay for the lessons. And it was a great help with Charlie’s movies, which were all movement—movement and mime. Joe should study mime, too.” We promised to pass the advice along.

Paulette also said that stardom had just come to her. “I was obliged to be a star, because I was married to Charlie Chaplin.” At another dinner, at Elaine’s, I repeated that line to Alexis Smith, then starring in The Women on Broadway. “I’m sure Paulette did a little something to become a star,” said Alexis. “Moved ever so slightly. Just a fraction of an inch.” As I told Andy on the phone later, “Our lives really are becoming like some Clare Booth Luce play!”

“Oh, I know,” he said, cracking his bubble gum into the receiver, like a contented kid. “It’s really great the way you got us together with Paulette, Bob. She’s the best, Bob.”

Around New Year’s the Daily News predicted that Andy Warhol and Paulette Goddard would marry in 1974, and Andy wasn’t thanking me at all. “I can’t marry Paulette,” he whined, as if the newspaper item were a directive from on high. “She’ll outlive me. She will, Bob.”

Sometimes Andy was less worried about her wanting to marry him than he was about her wanting to marry me. Was that part of her technique? For Christmas she had given me an expensive black cashmere scarf, leaving it with the doorman at the Ritz Tower for me to pick up. “She didn’t leave one for me?” Andy asked when I told him about it. “She brought caviar to the Factory Christmas party for you,” I said. “That wasn’t for me, it was for the office.” “So then why did you take it home?” “I gave it to Archie.”

A few days after New Year’s, Paulette called me at home and said that I was her “favorite beau” and that she wanted to give me Erich Maria Remarque’s nutria-lined raincoat, but it was in storage in Zürich. We spent the following weekend going to museums together, including a Pop Art show at the Guggenheim. Andy was beside himself when I gave my report. “You’re my maître d’, Bob,” he said. “Andy, I was teaching her about your kind of art.” “Oh, really, did you sell her a portrait? What are you waiting for, Bob?” “She already has her portrait by Diego Rivera.” “She does? Well, maybe we should take her to lunch next Sunday. Why don’t you call her right now and ask her? Tell her it’s on me.”

We had lunch at the Regency Hotel, Paulette, Andy, Jed, and I. Andy brought Paulette a two-ounce bottle of Joy, the most expensive perfume in the world then, with a note that said, “Have a really smelly New Year.” Paulette started talking about Chaplin: “Charlie always told me, ‘Don’t play it, be it.’ You know, Max Eastman and Upton Sinclair ruined Charlie, by intellectualizing what he did, and then he couldn’t do it anymore. That’s what’s so great about you, Andy. You don’t intellectualize what you do, you just do it. I mean it. Bob took me up to the Guggenheim last week to see your pictures and I got that immediately. I really did.”

“Oh, gee, really,” Andy was spluttering. I could tell he was getting ready to make a move. “Well, the intellectuals never liked my work. I guess it’s not abstract enough for them.” He was stalling. “Oh, gee, you know, Bob told me that you’re still having problems with Anita Loos on your book.”

“Oh, I am, Andy, I am. Anita has my life all mixed up with hers and it wasn’t that way at all.”

“Uh, well, we were thinking that since we just tape record and you can say anything you want in the tape recorder, maybe we could do your book with you. Couldn’t we, Bob?”

I said we could, as we were pretty sure this is what Paulette wanted anyway.

“Oh, Andy,” Paulette sighed, as if he’d just given her a big engagement ring for her necklace. “Would you? I think that’s a great idea. I’m going to call up Bill Jovanovich first thing tomorrow morning and see if he’ll agree to it. He knows I’m fed up with Anita.”

The next day, Paulette called me and said that Bill Jovanovich, of Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, and an old friend of hers, was all for our book, and as soon as she “let Anita down gently,” and we worked out the contracts, we could start.

“Why do we have to wait for the contracts to start?” Andy asked. “We already have enough tapes for a few chapters, right?” I said that Paulette had made it quite clear that she didn’t consider anything she had said so far on the record. “Oh, let’s just keep seeing her, and she’ll never know which tapes we did before the contract and which ones we did after, right?” Right.

The day after that, the Enquirer called the Factory, saying they had heard that Andy was seeing a lot of Paulette Goddard. I asked Andy what I should tell them and he said, “Tell them I left Liz Taylor for Paulette.” I told the Enquirer that. “Well, what’s the exact nature of their relationship?” the reporter wanted to know. “Breakfast, lunch, and dinner,” I replied. Then I called Paulette, thinking I better prepare her for the Enquirer headlines. “When I get off the phone I’m going to have a good hoot,” she said, “but I don’t want to waste your time now listening to me laugh.” “What does she mean by that, Bob?” asked Andy. “Oh, I bet she’s really mad.”

The three of us started going to all the fashion shows together: Halston, Giorgio di Sant’Angelo, Oscar de la Renta. Paulette and Andy would always get front-row seats and I’d be seated next to them, which would make Rosemary Kent furious, because she’d be further down the runway or in the second row. Paulette would carry on a conversation throughout the show, “in that voice that carries,” Andy would later say. “It’s so embarrassing, right, Bob?” But it didn’t carry over the disco music all the designers were starting to play, and Andy’s tapes were undecipherable. Had Paulette figured that out?

To thank us for introducing her to all our designer friends, Paulette introduced us to her Old Hollywood and high-society friends. We went to lunch at La Côte Basque with Maria Cooper Janis and her mother, the former Mrs. Gary Cooper, now Mrs. Rocky Converse, wife of Southampton’s number-one physician. Andy wanted to talk about Gary Cooper, but Maria wanted to talk about her ESP paintings and Uri Geller bending her keys. Andy was fascinated, but not as much as he would have been about Gary.

Paulette took us to a party at Raffles, the private club in the basement of the Sherry Netherland, given by Earl Blackwell. Andy sat between Eugenia Sheppard, the diminutive fashion and society reporter for the New York Post, and the equally diminutive Anita Loos, which made him nervous because he wasn’t sure if Paulette had told her about the switch in co-authors yet. “She looks like an eighty-two-year-old little girl,” Andy said of Anita later. “She’s adorable. And she told me all this good stuff about Paulette. I think I know what the International Rumor is now, but I can’t tell you because you’ll tell Paulette.”

Last Tango in Paris (which Andy thought was based on his 1968 Blue Movie) was the talk of the town, and Paulette wanted to meet Bernardo Bertolucci. So Andy and I got them together for drinks at the Pierre Hotel one afternoon. It was the most interesting time we had with her in this pre-book-contract period, when she thought everything was off the record, and Andy pretended he didn’t know what that meant. Paulette told us about the meeting of Chaplin and Cocteau, on a slow boat to Japan in the thirties. “They hated each other,” she said, “and it was a very slow boat.”

She also said that Chaplin had wanted to be a writer, a serious writer, “more than anything else in the world. He got tired if people expected him to be Charlie Chaplin at dinner parties; he wanted to be taken seriously. And then Upton Sinclair and Max Eastman came along and convinced him he was serious and that was the end of him. And our marriage. Life with Charlie became unbearable. He would get up in the morning with that long face, write until lunch, and after lunch tear up everything he wrote in the morning. And then he’d take it out on me.”

Later, Bertolucci told us that he was sure Paulette made this all up “to get her revenge on Chaplin, by making him seem the failed writer. She’s something, this woman, no?” We thought she was something too, and looked at each other with dollar signs in our eyes, thinking we had a surefire bestseller in Paulette’s book. When she finished with Chaplin and Cocteau, she got onto Diego Rivera and Leon Trotsky in Mexico City in the forties.

Paulette didn’t say she had an affair with Rivera, but she sure made it sound that way. She talked about the portrait he had painted of her, and their long lunches and dinners with Trotsky, who was in exile in Mexico. She claimed that she and Rivera were on their way to Trotsky’s house the day he was assassinated by Stalin’s henchmen. “As we approached the house in our car,” she said, “we saw a car full of thugs with their fedoras pulled over their faces parked outside the gate. Diego said, ‘Duck, Paulette, duck!’ And he stepped on the accelerator and home we went.”

“And then what happened?” asked Andy.

“And then we never saw Trotsky again,” said Paulette. “You know, Trotsky had something that very, very few people have: the power of concentration. You have it, Andy. You pretend not to. But I’ve watched you. And I know you do.”

“Oh, I got it,” Andy said, “when I went on this round-the-world trip with a friend in the fifties. I got it in Bali, actually, when I saw people burning the dead and dancing.”

The day after Valentine’s Day, 1974, I organized an instant “picnic” lunch at the Factory for Christopher Isherwood and his artist friend Don Bachardy, inviting Paulette, Anita, and Maria Cooper Janis. Paulette pitched in with a pound of caviar, saying, “I’ve never been to a picnic. Except in Indochina.”

“When were you in Indochina?” Andy wanted to know. So did Sony.

“When General Patton took me during World War II.”

“You knew General Patton?” asked Andy.

“Of course I did. I knew a lot of generals. I’ll tell you all about it when we start the book.”

“Oh, can’t we start today?”

“There are too many people for me to concentrate properly.”

“Thank you for lunch,” said Anita Loos on the way out, “and good luck with your book with Paulette. You’ll need it.”

Paulette had let her down gently.