Paul America had been a silver-Factory Superstar. Tall, blond, and handsome, he had appeared in a single movie (like Valerie Solanis), playing the title role in My Hustler, shot on Fire Island in the summer of 1965. Now, nine summers later, he was back, pressing the buzzer at 33 Union Square West, an alumnus coming to call. He was buzzed in on the strength of his name, but the minute he came through the bulletproof door we knew it was a mistake. He was unrecognizable: huge, bearded, beer-bellied, in overalls and faded flannel shirt, wild eyes roving until they met Andy’s and locked into a terrifying stare. “Oh, hi,” said Andy, “gee.” Paul America stood there, staring. “Oh,” said Andy gently, “I’ll tell Pat you’re here.” He walked toward the back room as quickly as he could without running. Paul America stood there, staring at Andy’s disappearing back, like a ticking time bomb. And then he turned and left. And Vincent shouted, “You can come out now, Andy.”

It was time to move on. We needed more space, we needed more security. In August 1974, we found both just across Union Square, at the corner of Broadway and East 17th Street. The third Factory occupied the entire third floor of 860 Broadway, a six-story brick building that curved with the corner and extended through the middle of the block to East 18th Street, where there was a rear entrance with a freight elevator and a second staircase. This meant that Andy could escape undetected if disgruntled Superstars or off-the-wall fans came knocking at the bulletproof door we took across the square with us. We also installed a proper security system in the new place, with closed-circuit TVs, instead of trying to pass off Keith Sonnier’s conceptual video sculpture as high-tech protection. We tried to get the landlord, who was Larry Rivers’s brother-in-law, to hire an armed guard for the lobby, but he said the other tenants would object, and Andy said it was too expensive for us to hire our own. Nonetheless, we were leaving the place where Andy had been shot, and we all felt less afraid.

Andy, of course, found new things to fret about in the new space: the curving wall of windows facing Union Square and Broadway, which let in lots of light and air, might also allow a rock or bomb to be thrown from the street. “It’s only three floors up,” said Andy, “and everybody can see right in and know if I’m here. Did you ever think of that, Fred?” That didn’t stop Andy from making the windowsill his favorite place to sit and read the newspapers.

Another “security” measure, which only Fred Hughes could have dreamed up, was to hire foreign receptionists. Jane Forth, who retired to have a second child, Branch Emerson, was replaced first by Frank Waill, a Parisian friend of the Beauvau-Craons whose French was far superior to his English, and then by Laura Moltedo, a Venetian friend of the Rattazzis who took the job to learn English. This ruse actually worked: The troublesome old Superstars stopped calling after having to spell their names four or five times before Monsieur Waill announced that Monsieur Warhol wasn’t in, and when Signorina Laura answered the phone with “Ciao,” most of the nut cases assumed they had the wrong number and hung up.

The move’s only downside was moving itself. There were two basic problems: Andy didn’t want to hire professional movers, insisting that “you kids” were perfectly capable of lugging things like the brass-and-marble Normandie desk across Union Square, past the junkies and winos, in the middle of August. When we said we weren’t, he said we were lazy, and he didn’t want to move anyway. He also expected us to carry the hefty sofas and chairs, the baby grand piano, the giant Campbell’s Soupcan, the movie screen and projectors, the video and editing equipment, the desks, filing cabinets, bookshelves, and typewriters, the rolled-up canvases, stretched portraits, and hundreds of portfolios of prints, the thousands of back issues of Interview, and all the tenth-floor office furniture, plus the alpine stacks of corrugated boxes filled with Polaroids, tape cassettes, manuscript pages, financial and legal records, old magazines and books, canceled stamps, used batteries, movie stills.… That was the second major problem, Andy didn’t want to throw anything out.

Vincent suffered the most through this ordeal, as Fred was off to Monte Carlo again in August, Pat Hackett and I were out in Montauk rushing to meet a September 15 deadline on the Philosophy book, and Jed had his hands full at home. As moving day approached, with Andy still insisting that we could do it all ourselves, Fred landed from the Côte d’Azur and overruled him. In retaliation, Andy wouldn’t hire painters for the walls that Fred had designed to separate Interview from the Factory proper. “I never wanted walls,” Andy said. “You’d rather have all the messengers who come and go to Interview watch you paint?” asked Fred. “I could paint behind a screen,” replied Andy. “Right, Andy, you do that,” said Fred, leaving to check out the work on the new place. “You should carry something if you’re going across the street, Fred,” said Andy. “It’ll be one less thing for the movers to move. They charge by the hour you know.” “I know, Andy!!”

By the end of September, everything was in its place in the new Factory. Off the elevator was a small bare vestibule, and through the bulletproof door was another larger one, where the alleged Cecil B. DeMille Great Dane stood beside a massive white marble 1920 console, and over that hung an Art Deco poster by Jean Dupas advertising a 1925 furniture exhibition in bold letters: Palais de la Nouveauté. Twin sets of tall glass doors, designed by Fred, with raw wood frames and sleek brass handles, opened to the Interview offices and to the Factory. On the Factory’s vast black reception desk, made by combining the two fake slate tops and their supporting file cabinets from the old Factory, sat a large wood bust of Leonardo da Vinci, said to be the figurehead of an old ship. At either end sat Frank Waill, making Holly Woodlawn spell her name out for the tenth time, and Chris Hemphill, typing up the tapes of Paulette Goddard in Monte Carlo.

To the right was a gilded Art Deco salon suite—sofa, two armchairs, and pouf—designed by Maurice Dufréne in 1925, and upholstered in tapestry by Jean Beaumont. Beyond that, at the far end of the front room, was Fred’s office, partially hidden behind high black screens made from the same fake slate. It looked more like a decorator’s shop than a manager’s office. His desk was always buried under mountains of chic clutter, his latest finds from the antiquaires of Paris, rolled-up American Indian blankets, pyramids of marbled paper boxes from Venice, portfolios of old photographs and fashion illustrations, bills, contracts, date books, letters, engraved invitations … “You’ve got to clean your desk up, Fred,” Andy would say when a crucial document was missing. “Lady Anne Lambton is coming from London to do it for me” was Fred’s typical reply.

To the left of the reception desk was the Normandie desk with a phone for Andy, who continued to use everybody else’s phone and everybody else’s desk, especially Vincent’s. His office looked very much like a manager’s office, with a wall of file cabinets bursting with legal documents and tax records. Andy never nagged Vincent about cleaning up his desk because the mess was usually made by Andy. There was always an open cardboard box on the floor, a time capsule in progress. In fact, Vincent’s “private” office was the antechamber through which everyone passed on their way to the dining room.

This was the pièce de résistance of the third Factory, where Andy and Fred could finally show off all the treasures from their Paris shopping sprees, the Art Deco masterpieces that Andy called “used furniture” and “L’Amour props.” The former tenant of this Factory had been Sperry & Hutchison of S&H Green Stamps, and their chairman had built himself a splendid office with an antique pink marble fireplace and carved oak paneling brought over from a baronial English estate.

It was the ideal setting for the large oval dining table of Macassar ebony and burled amboyna, and the twelve birch armchairs upholstered in red leather, all by Emile-Jacques Ruhlmann. There was also a Ruhlmann sideboard, with a white marble top, that we used as a bar. Hanging above that was a late nineteenth-century Orientaliste painting in a Carlo Bugatti frame, which matched a Bugatti pedestal done in the same Moorish-fantasy style. The fireplace was set in an alcove, and as there was no way Andy was ever going to allow a fire to be lit, Fred blocked it with several Somali ancestor-worship poles, and above the mantelpiece he hung an enormous moosehead, an office-warming present from John Richardson, who had himself received it as a gift, but couldn’t get it through his door. The only other painting in the room was “The Wind,” a lush Scottish Victorian oil of two girls leading a goat through a forest.

That was the essence of Fred’s decorating style: Nothing matched and yet it all worked. His final touch was a crucifix made of pink sea-shells from South America, which he hung over the utilitarian medicine cabinet in the small bathroom off the dining room—the Factory bathroom, we called it, as opposed to the Interview bathroom off the entrance vestibule. That one had a couple of closed stalls and a urinal, which Andy was afraid to use “because you never know who you might run into in there.”

Behind the dining room, heading toward 18th Street, was the combination Xerox room–kitchen, with all-black appliances that took months to come from Italy; the projection booth, where the reels of Andy’s early movies were stored; and the forty-foot-long screening room, which came to be known as the middle room, as we weren’t making any movies to screen. There were more Art Deco treasures lined up against the walls of this room: twelve cast-iron chairs by Edgar Brandt; and a pair of display cases from a defunct Philadelphia department store, which Andy left mysteriously empty. Invariably, visitors asked what they were, until Andy put a stuffed lion in one and a stuffed owl in the other, and then visitors asked if Andy had a thing about dead animals.

At the far end of the middle room was a floor-to-ceiling door, and behind that, stretching seventy or eighty feet to 18th Street, was the largest room in the new Factory: the storage area, which housed everything from the time capsules, neatly labeled and shelved in chronological order, to an eighteenth-century American door and frame in peeling pale blue paint. Andy said it was his favorite piece, because “You can go in and out of it and still go nowhere.”

To the left of the storage room was Andy’s painting studio, an empty stretch of space with a sink in one corner. Further back was more storage, for paintings and prints, and then the freight elevator. Off Andy’s area was Pat Hackett’s office, a bleak cubicle facing an inner alley, where she typed the diary and scripts. Then, heading back toward 17th Street, came my office, which, like Vincent’s, was more like a hallway than a private room. It had two doors: one from Andy’s area, and one to the Interview office. Interview staffers used it as a shortcut to the Xerox machine, and Andy used it as a shortcut to the Interview office. There was a window with bars on it, facing the alley, and my semicircular Art Deco desk. I dragged one of the Brandt chairs in from the screening room to use as a desk chair. Andy often told me to be careful with it, although the red leather seat was already peeling and the rest of it was iron.

The Interview office was long, narrow, and dark. One wall was lined with the metal shelving from the old tenth-floor office, collapsing under the weight of back issues, and the other, facing the grim alley, was lined with beat-up old desks, real “used furniture.” There was a small, airless mailroom to one side, and then the reception desk and the tall glass doors that opened to the vestibule, across which one could see the Factory reception room, with its beautiful decor, open space, and bright light.

The third Factory was laid out like a circle and as you went round it, you passed through the quarters, each with its own mood and style, of the various businesses in the Factory family, with Interview still the poorest relation, and Andy Warhol Films, Inc. more estranged than ever. There were no mirrored walls for Superstars to preen in, just long stretches of white walls to lean paintings against. Despite a quadrupling of space, there was no place to put the framed photographs of Joe Dallesandro, Viva, Tom Hompertz, and International Velvet that had hung over Paul’s desk in the second Factory; they were stuck in the unused projection room for good.

Paul didn’t have a desk at the third Factory, nor did he have a title in the new company Andy formed. The new stationery, and the lobby directory at 860 Broadway, said Andy Warhol Enterprises—or AWE for short. Andy was chairman, Fred was president, and Vincent was vice-president, secretary, and treasurer. Andy Warhol Films, Inc. henceforth existed only as the copyright owner of the movies that Andy and Paul had made together. And Paul was gone.

Also gone was Joe Dallesandro, who stayed in Rome after the success of both Frankenstein and Dracula in Italy, making spaghetti westerns for $100,000 a picture. His brother Bobby was gone too; Andy had Vincent tell him that he could no longer afford a “chauffeur” with the rent on the new place. His fate had been sealed the afternoon his car broke down in the middle of the intersection of Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street, with Andy and Paulette, covered in diamonds, sitting in the back seat. “We had to jump out in all the traffic,” Andy said, “and all the 42nd Street people were looking at Paulette’s fur coat, and she was screaming at me, and I was screaming at Bobby … ”

Rosemary Kent didn’t make it across the square either. She was fired on June 11, 1974, in what we called “the coup d’état.” The final battle was over the cover of the special English issue we were doing that summer: Fred wanted Charlotte Rampling, the elegant English actress he had fallen for in a big way at one of those Rothschild balls; Rosemary wanted her fat-and-happy English bulldog, Sedgewick’s Boogie Woogie. After a meeting with Peter Brant, who had been pushing for Rosemary’s dismissal for months, Fred said that he would do it “at the first convenient moment.” That came while he was conveniently in Paris, and the task fell to Rosemary’s archenemy, associate publisher Carole Rogers. After Vincent had the locks changed first thing in the morning, Carole called Rosemary at home and told her, “on behalf of Peter, Joe, Fred, and Andy, I’m calling to say that your services are no longer required at Interview.” Andy was sitting nearby, reading the papers, as if he had nothing to do with it. Later he said, “I’m sure Rosemary’s going to sue. We should never have given her a contract.”

When Fred came back from Paris, he appointed me editor, and Peter Lester, a young Englishman who had come over to help on the special English issue, managing editor. Within a month, Peter Lester complained that his title sounded “too businessy” and Fred agreed to give him my title, and I was given the title executive editor. As Andy and Fred expected me to “run” the magazine, I thought I should be called editor-in-chief, but Fred said that title had been forever tainted in Andy’s mind by Rosemary Kent. Actually, executive editor, with its “businessy” ring, turned out to be rather accurate, as it soon became evident that I was not only held responsible for editorial content but also advertising sales and promotion. In simplest terms, I was once and for all the boss at Interview, and, along with Fred and Vincent, one of Andy’s three right-hand men at the third Factory.

Soon, I came up with an idea for a column called “Excerpts from the Diary of Andy Warhol.” Pat and I worked on a sample column, and when we showed it to Andy, he thought it was a great idea, saying every name we mentioned would have a reason to buy the magazine, and every restaurant or shop we mentioned would have a reason to advertise. But he crossed out his name and scrawled “BC” over it. That’s how my column, “OUT: Excerpts from the Diary of Bob Colacello” was born. It was the first time I was called Bob in print, not Robert, and just as Andy dropped a vowel, I did too. We came up with “OUT” because the whole thing was so “In” it was ridiculous. Most people didn’t get it and referred to it as “Out and About” or “Going Out,” or “Way Out.”

I came to see it as a parody of “Jennifer’s Diary” in the British Harper’s & Queen, in which an ancient society matron follows Princess Margaret and the Duchess of Kent from garden party to tea party to charity gala, recording in excruciating detail what they wore and ate, but never what they said. I liked to put in what people said, as well as wore, ate, and drank, and although Princess Margaret eventually made it into “Bob Colacello’s OUT,” I was usually recording the party doings of the Empress Vreeland and His Highness Halston.

Andy critiqued the first column for me: “Leave my name out,” he said. “And instead of putting in gossip put in ads, like what perfumes everybody was wearing.” He said his favorite day in the first column was the one where I just listed fifty names, from Mick Jagger to Ronnie Cutrone’s girlfriend, Betsy Jones, who had been at Stevie Wonder’s party at the Delmonico Hotel, and left it at that. “Every one of those people will tell ten friends their name is in the paper,” said Andy, “and ten times fifty is how much?” Five hundred. “Gee, Bob, your column might really make Interview big. Just stick in every name you ever meet and every brand name they’re wearing. And no gossip. We can’t afford to get anybody mad at us yet.”

My new job and title came with a new salary from Motion Olympus, Inc., the company Peter Brant and Joe Allen had set up as owners. It was $150 a week, in addition to the $125 a week I had been receiving from Andy since 1972, which was raised at the end of 1974 to $150, making my combined salary $300 a week, or $15,600 a year. I was also given a $450 Christmas bonus, in a straightforward check. I spent half of it, $225, on an antique Japanese wood box for Andy.

Looking back at my financial records and tax returns for the years I worked at the Factory is depressing. In 1974, for example, I had over $5,000 in unreimbursed business expenses, and as I still wasn’t on payroll, no pension or medical insurance plan. It was the same story for 1975 and 1976. In 1977, my salary was raised to $450 a week, or $23,400 a year, and I was finally put on payroll and given an expense account. I was probably the highest-paid person there, except perhaps for Vincent. Fred’s salary was still $100 a week; everything else was expenses and commissions. These were large, of course, but often he had to beg Andy to pay him what was owed when it came in, rather than stretch it out into lots of smaller payments. Andy always had an excuse when it came to money. Back in the summer of 1974 it was the increased expenses of the new office, and the high cost of buying and furnishing his new house.

Andy also moved that year—to a six-story brownstone at 57 East 66th Street, between Madison and Park avenues which he bought in early 1974, when real-estate prices had plummeted in the recession brought on by the oil crisis. He paid $310,000 outright, because he didn’t believe in mortgages. Andy didn’t have to do much renovation beyond removing wall-to-wall carpeting and interior repainting. He kept the old kitchen and the old bathrooms just the way they were. Jed, who moved with him, was in charge of the decorating, though Fred also advised and consented.

Andy constantly complained about how much money Jed was spending, even though the style he had chosen, American Empire (Early Nineteenth-Century), was still completely undiscovered and, for the most part, unwanted. Most of the pieces Jed bought cost between a couple of hundred and a couple of thousand dollars. One room, the second-floor library, was done in Art Deco with pieces Andy already had. Still Andy went on, almost daily, about “the fortune” Jed was spending “like water.” Of course, once it became known that Andy Warhol’s house was done in American Empire, and that Yves Saint Laurent had asked Jed to do his new Hotel Pierre apartment in the same style, the prices started climbing and never stopped—until certain individual pieces Jed had bought for Andy came to be worth as much as his entire decorating job.

Andy’s move sparked a chain reaction: Fred moved into Andy’s old house on Lexington Avenue at 89th Street, and Vincent moved into Fred’s old apartment on East 16th Street, within walking distance of the Factory, which he dutifully opened and closed every day, checking every faucet and every ashtray, as Andy fretted and made him double-check them. No one was more patient with Andy than Vincent, or more loyal. Even among ourselves, he would never talk against Andy, or take any side but Andy’s, though he would sometimes try to get Andy to change his mind when he was being particularly obstinate. Vincent was reliable, practical, and hard-working, which made him the logical choice for all his new corporate titles, even though he was only twenty-four at the time. For me, the key to Vincent’s nature was something he told me one night at Le Jardin, between dances with a very pretty Halston model. “I wouldn’t even attempt to fall for a beauty unless I had one hundred thousand big ones in the bank.”

Andy had tried to talk me into moving into his old house, the one he’d never let me into, “rent free.” But I sensed that would be the trap of traps, having my boss as my landlord. Andy nearly didn’t let me inside his new house either. A few nights before the big Factory move, Andy, Fred, Jed, Vincent, and I had a “board meeting” dinner at Quo Vadis on East 63rd Street, the favorite restaurant of Diana Vreeland, Lee Radziwill, and Jackie Onassis. After dinner, Fred and I walked Andy and Jed home. When we got to the house, Andy said, “Oh, uh, oh, goodnight,” and started fumbling for his keys. Jed shrugged his shoulders, as if to say, “What can I do?” But Fred put his foot down. “Andy,” he snapped, “you mean you’re not going to invite Bob in to see the house?” “It’s late, Fred.” “Andy, Bob is the editor of your magazine, he picks you up to go out night after night, you are not going to keep him standing in the street like you did uptown.” “Oh, okay, do you want to see the house, Bob?”

… tour of Andy’s new house. Very stately. That’s the best word for it. American primitive portraits in the front hall. Upstairs, one Deco salon, one American Empire. On the third floor, A’s bedroom with a canopy bed—dark brown silk canopy. Next to the bed: two crucifixes, two alarm clocks, a box of dog biscuits. Green wood shutters. FH: “This is the way a gentleman should live.”

Andy and Jed often fought about letting friends into the house. Jed, naturally enough, wanted to have friends over, for fun, and also to show off all his hard work. His bedroom was also on the third floor, in the back, rather severely done in Mission oak. I could understand why Andy didn’t want word of where he lived to get out, but he pushed it to the extremes of paranoia. It took six months to get Lee Radziwill invited over, two years before Andy would have Diana Vreeland for a drink. Both women had Andy to dinner countless times at their apartments, so it was a bit awkward when they expressed curiosity about Andy’s house and he pretended he didn’t know what they were getting at. I wanted Andy to ask Paulette Goddard, but he wasn’t going to let her see how well he lived—“Then she’ll really want to marry me,” he said. He didn’t want people to see how rich he was, especially people who might be potential clients. He said they’d stop feeling sorry for him, and stop buying his art. I once asked him why he didn’t have any of his own art in his house. He said it would be “corny.”

When Diana Vreeland was finally allowed into the house in 1976, Andy took a picture of her sitting on a new acquisition: an Egyptian Revival chair, with a gilt eagle back and gilt lion legs, that resembled a throne, fit for the Empress of Fashion. Fred wanted Andy to paint Diana’s portrait, for history’s sake really, but he told Andy it would be in exchange for her society introductions and Interview advice. Andy said she never actually sold anyone a portrait of his, or an ad, so she didn’t deserve a “commission.” He also said, “Oh, now Diana’s going to tell everyone what my house looks like and they’re all going to want to see it, and I just can’t, Fred, I just can’t.”

Sometimes, when I was too tired to sit at the typewriter, I dictated “OUT” to Brigid Berlin and paid her $25 to transcribe it. One Saturday, she dropped off a column. She had never been to my cramped East 76th Street studio before, and the minute she arrived, Dali called and asked Brigid if “Count Valpolicella” was in. Brigid couldn’t miss the irony of it all. “You’re writing your Society column and Dali’s calling you a count,” she said, “and there’s your broom between the refrigerator and the wall.” It was ridiculous, and a little sad when I thought about it, which wasn’t often: the difference between the glamorous life I was leading in my column, and the life I had at home.

So, in February 1975, I rented an airy three-room apartment in the Leonori, at 26 East 63rd Street, a turn-of-the-century residential hotel that had recently been renovated. The rent was $450 a month, almost twice what I had been paying, so there went most of my new Interview salary. The living room, bedroom, and kitchen had all been freshly painted white, and I got Andy to give me a leftover roll of Mao wallpaper, and had window shades made. Andy also gave me a fake Venetian console for the foyer wall. Fred gave me a real Art Deco table for the same exact spot. My mother contributed a carpet sweeper, even though I didn’t have carpeting. “Wall-to-wall is always nice,” she said. She also brought me a box of salt, for good luck, as did Adriana Jackson, Mariana Schiano, Elsa Peretti, and Delfina Rattazzi. For a long time that was my spice shelf: five boxes of Diamond Crystal iodized salt.

Now that Andy and I lived three blocks apart, we saw even more of each other, though Andy had his ways of reminding me that proximity didn’t necessarily mean closeness. Shortly after moving in, I came down with flu, my temperature soaring in the middle of the night. I didn’t have any aspirin, and when it hit 103 degrees, I panicked and called Andy about two in the morning. “You can’t call me this late,” said Andy. “I thought Jed could come around the corner with some aspirin,” I said. “But what if he gets what you have and gives it to me?” was Andy’s reply. Jed picked up on an extension and promised Andy that he would leave the aspirin with the doorman, to avoid the risk of infection, but he actually did come up to see if I was all right, and I promised not to tell anyone he had.

The next day, Andy called to see how I was feeling and to blame my flu on “too much partying,” making sure to mention every party I’d be missing during my recuperation. The usual Warhol sympathy call. Then he started in on another of his campaigns: to get me to go to his doctor, Denton Cox. “He’s a great doctor, Bob. He has a big Rolls-Royce.” “Is he going to examine me in the car, Andy?” “It won’t cost you anything, Bob. I’ll pay.” “Andy, I already go to your accountant, your lawyer, and your bank. I’m not going to your doctor!” “But I’ll pay, Bob.” “Right, and you’ll ask Dr. Cox to send you my urinalysis the next morning!”

“Wake up, Bob. It’s time to go shopping. My ship came in.” That was Andy’s way of saying that a check had arrived from Anselmino of Torino, or Alexander the Greek, or his new art dealer in Bonn, Hermann “the German” Wunsche. And the minute his ships docked, Andy turned into the drunken sailor of shopping, bingeing out on everything from Fiestaware to diamonds. In 1975, Andy moved up from the Mercedes to a new black-and-brown Rolls-Royce Silver Shadow—Jed was under strict instructions to say Andy had traded it for art. The following summer he acquired a second Rolls-Royce, a rare old station wagon, for Montauk (though it was in such fragile condition it never left the Southampton mechanic’s garage).

After I moved, he started calling me almost every morning to “go shopping on the way to work.” As Ivan Karp has said of Andy, “He was one of the helpless collectors. Helpless. He had to find something every single day.” Andy was a shopping junkie, hooked on hoarding. Some things he used, like his Fiestaware, or displayed, like his cookie-jar collection in his glass-fronted kitchen cabinets. But most things were stuck in closets in the shopping bags they came in, or buried in the rapidly growing stacks in the vast Factory storage area.

Andy had two regular shopping routes from his house to midtown, where he grabbed a taxi to the Factory. The first was the “junk shop” route, down Second Avenue from the Sixties to the Fifties. One shop on this route was Sarsparilla, where Andy bought hundreds, if not thousands, of Walt Disney’s original acetates, the individual hand-painted frames of the cartoons: Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, Snow White, Cinderella. I remember his turning down Fantasia, because it wasn’t the “real” Disney style. Another day, in another shop, he picked up a wolfhound rug, stuffed head and all, for almost nothing, because the owner wanted it out of the shop. “It’s repulsing the customers,” he said. Andy took it down to the Factory and added it to his collection of stuffed animals, which he was Polaroiding for what became his Cats and Dogs shows in London and Kuwait.

Andy’s second regular walk, the jewelry route, took him from Fred Leighton’s antique jewelry shop on Madison Avenue in the Sixties, where he bought Mexican turquoise-and-silver pieces, ornate Indian jewelry of the Moghul era, and Art Deco diamond, emerald, and sapphire bracelets, among many other things. The next stop was usually Seaman Schepp’s, on Park Avenue at 58th Street, where he bought forties brooches, bracelets, and rings with huge semiprecious stones, often competing with Diane von Furstenberg and Marisa Berenson for the same pieces. Sometimes we stopped in Tiffany’s to check out the latest Elsa Peretti designs, which he never bought there because he could get them wholesale or trade them from Elsa herself.

The last stop was what Andy called “The Street of Dreams”—West 47th Street between Fifth and Sixth avenues, otherwise known as the Diamond District. Andy’s favorite shop there was a tiny hole in the wall, owned by a man called Boris Tinter, who had a hook instead of a left hand. When Andy walked in, Boris would say, “I have something special I’ve been holding for you,” and out from under his counter would come a diamond bracelet or a string of pearls, hanging from Boris’s hook. On the corner of 47th and Fifth was the big Diamond Exchange, a sort of supermarket of gem dealers, all in yarmulkes, all greeting Andy as if he were their best friend. He only took me there once and we rushed right out, Andy saying, “Gee, they’re so aggressive in there.” I’m sure he realized it was a mistake to let me see how well the diamond dealers knew him. Andy looked at jewelry the same way he looked at his mail: He held it right up to his eye and studied it closely, murmuring questions about karats, facets, cuts, flaws, color, brilliance, and “d-quality.” He knew exactly what he was doing.

I asked him what he did with his jewelry, and he said he put it on Archie and Amos and they played together on the bed. And, gradually, he started wearing it—under his clothes where it couldn’t be seen—a diamond necklace under a turtleneck, for example. One of his jewelry-collecting cronies, Joan Quinn, recalls Andy wearing a gold-and-crystal David Webb frog inside his jacket, and when she spotted it and said she had wanted to buy it from a Madison Avenue shop they both frequented, Andy said, “Oh, I got a really good deal.” She also remembers the “piles of old high-school graduation rings that Andy used to buy by the pound on 47th Street.”

Barbara Allen remembers Andy in Paris in the mid-seventies, “wearing this beautiful Art Deco diamond bracelet, which kept slipping out from under his shirtsleeve. I asked to see it and Andy took it off and I put it on and then I said that I was going to wear it for the night. Andy got really nervous. He hated me wearing it, but I just wanted to tease him, to give him a hard time for a change. He followed me around all night checking to make sure that I still had it, and he was so relieved when I finally gave it back to him.”

Shopping with Andy, like doing anything with Andy, was both enjoyable and a bit of a chore. As much as he wanted a companion to share in the experience, he couldn’t help being competitive and secretive. Bruno Bischofberger once introduced him to a dealer in American Indian rugs. Andy was delighted to see a stack of forty or fifty rugs. He made the dealer show him each one, listening carefully to what he said about their quality, origin, style, etc. When the exhausted dealer reached the bottom of the pile, Andy, thoroughly educated, announced he was ready to go, and Bruno, thoroughly embarrassed, hurriedly bought two or three rugs. The next time Bruno was in town, he visited the dealer, who told him that Andy had come back that afternoon and bought the ten least-expensive ones, at four or five hundred dollars each. “I guess he didn’t want me to think he was rich,” Bruno says. “But actually I thought it was another example of Andy’s biggest flaw as a collector. He always wanted a bargain, when actually he would have been smarter to buy the one great rug for $5,000 rather than the ten cheapest. Because the great things go up, and the bargains stay bargains.”

Joan Quinn agrees. “When we’d go shopping together, he’d always come back. He wouldn’t buy in front of me, because he wouldn’t want to take the cash out, or make the deal, or bicker and dicker, which is what he did when he went back. He never bought on the spot. He didn’t want me to know what he was collecting, but he always wanted to know what I was collecting.”

On one of my first shopping expeditions with Andy, he talked me into buying a Maxfield Parrish print. He said that he would buy it, but he already had several Parrishes and the price, $90, was a bit high, “but it’ll probably go up.” I said that it really didn’t go with my apartment. “It doesn’t have to go, Bob,” countered Andy, in a tone that suggested I was a philistine fool. “It just has to go up.” It did go up, to the top of my closet.

Another “collection” that Andy got me started on was what he called “Mafiaware”—black glassware with scalloped edges from the Depression era. “It’s a bargain,” he said, “and your mother will love it.” “My mother’s not in the Mafia, Andy.” “She’s not?” He bought me the first two pieces, a creamer and sugar bowl, for five dollars, and whenever he found more he’d get Vincent to buy it for me as a birthday or Christmas present. The one time I served something to my mother on it, she said, “Why would you want black dishes? It reminds me of those real gavones.”

For Andy, however, collecting had nothing to do with decorating. Fred had decorated the Factory and Jed had decorated his house, and, little by little, Andy undecorated both places with his bags and boxes, stacks and piles, collections, possessions, investments, hedges against inflation and fear.