Andy never did get Imelda Marcos’s portrait. But there were other rainbows to chase on his nightly runs up and down Fifth and Park avenues, from cocktails at Nan Kempner’s to dinner at the Iranian embassy to coffee at John Richardson’s to Elaine’s for a nightcap—or two. After Regine’s opened around the corner on Park and 59th in May 1976, Andy would often stop in on his way home, “just for a minute to see if anybody good is there.” Good meant rich and famous, and a minute meant an hour—or two.

Andy was now accepting almost every “good” invitation he received. “Just in case,” he’d say, and “You never know”—where the pot of gold might be. Often that meant three dinner parties in one night, with Fred covering one, Vincent a second, me a third, while Andy and Jed dashed from bash to bash. Andy actually preferred this to sitting through a four-course meal, especially if he was stuck next to a lady who wouldn’t let him tape. He liked to “appear” at as many parties as possible, increasing his chances of being mentioned in the next morning’s columns, which was his favorite way to start the day: reading about himself. It also kept him from getting “too involved,” as he put it, at any one place, though it sometimes miffed the hostesses. When I mollified them by explaining Andy’s other social obligations for the evening, they’d invariably ask, “How does he do it?”

One of his tricks was to eat a good square meal at home before he went out: roast chicken or turkey, mashed potatoes, puréed turnips, parsnips, or cauliflower, all washed down with fruit juice mixed with Perrier. Sometimes he’d finish off with an apple or a pear, always peeled, just in case washing hadn’t removed the pesticides and even though he had bought it from Perrone’s, the most expensive market on the East Side, where the fruit wasn’t supposed to have pesticides. Everything had to be the best and fresh, never frozen. He told me that he liked “white foods because they look clean.” He favored purées because solid vegetables were too hard on his torn-up intestines, which is also why he avoided lettuce and other roughage. And he tried very hard not to put too much butter on his mashed potatoes, because he always worried about another gallbladder attack. His restricted diet was another reason why formal dinners were difficult for him: The fancy food was too tempting and it was awkward to pass it all up. Hostesses minded that almost as much as they minded his coming and going in the middle of the meal.

Andy’s predinner dinners were prepared by his new Filipino housekeeper, Nena, who came to work and live at Andy’s house in the middle of 1975, after Jed made it clear that he couldn’t be a movie director, interior decorator, and maid. (“Andy says I should be going out and directing movies and bringing home the bacon,” Jed once told me, “but how am I supposed to do that if I’m always cleaning up after the messes he makes?”) Nena was soon joined by her sister Aurora, because keeping up a house of that size was an awful lot of work. Andy was awkward around them at first and unsure of how to refer to them, stumbling over “the maids” and finally settling on “the girls.” They were capable, hard-working, quiet, and discreet. And little by little he adjusted to having them around and even grew rather fond of them. Once, when we were off to see Imelda, he told me, “Nena said to be careful around Mrs. Marcos; many Filipino people don’t like her. She was worried about me. Isn’t that sweet?” He’d call them every day when he traveled “to make sure everything is all right” and always brought them back expensive perfumes and scarves from the airport boutiques. Still, he pretended that he never really wanted servants, just as he never really wanted to live in a big house, that “it was all Jed’s fault that I have all these bills to worry about, all these mouths to feed. Those girls look little, Bob, but they eat a lot. I bet they are having parties while I’m out trying to make a buck. They could be.”

Andy’s other trick for getting through three or four social stops in one night was having his employees do all his social work for him. We worked the room for Andy. We popped the question for Andy. We even ate the food for Andy, who passed things he couldn’t eat onto our plates, so he wouldn’t be embarrassed when the hostess or the waiter noticed he hadn’t touched a thing. Fred kissed the ladies’ hands upon arrival, Vincent flattered them on their dresses or their figures, I whispered jokes in their ears, and Andy said, “Oh, hi. Gee.”

Andy would find an old friend or a young beauty or the one wrong person in the room, the oddball cousin, the penniless divorcée, the ostracized social climber who’d pushed her way into the party, and talk exclusively to him or her, especially if that person was a talker who would pour his heart out to Sony, while Andy just sat there and listened, occasionally asking the one wrong question, like a kid who noticed the one false note in a situation: “Does your uncle, the host, really like your aunt? Or does he like boys? You can tell me.” Almost invariably, the oddball cousin not only told Andy, but also told the uncle or aunt what Andy had asked, and then Fred or Vincent or I would have to clean up the mess in the morning.

Sometimes the hostess or the rich visitor from Paris she thought would be perfect for an Andy Warhol portrait would ask me why Andy was ignoring her and I’d go over to Andy and try to suggest that perhaps he should circulate a bit. I had to be really careful about how I phrased it, because if I came across as too bossy or snobby Andy would retaliate with “Gee, this is the most interesting person here, Bob. You should really do a big interview on her.” And then there would be another mess to clean up in the morning, when the one wrong person called to make an appointment for her cover story.

Usually when I suggested that the potential portrait client could use a little personal attention from her potential portrait painter, Andy would tell me, “That’s what you’re here for, Bob. Tell her to hurry up and commission me while she still looks good.” The one wrong person would always find that funny and would always repeat it too. And I’d walk back across the room to the one right person and tell her, “Andy said he loves your new dress, your new husband, your new apartment, your new Rubens.… ” If she was a difficult sort, or stone sober, or stone drunk, she might come back with “Well, then, why doesn’t he tell me himself?” And I’d answer that Andy was very shy and not very verbal, a purely visual person who could only really express himself in his work, and that when he said “Gee” or “Great” it really was a major effort, and a major compliment. Sometimes Andy actually would be helpful and walk back across the room with me, and say “Gee” and “Great” a lot, while I “translated” his baby talk into grownup conversation.

And sometimes he’d really surprise me and hit it off with the one right person, usually if he sensed he could ask the one wrong question and get away with it. Why was he so unreliable, and even downright unhelpful, especially after moaning and groaning in the taxi to the party about how we had to bring home the bacon this time, as if our lives depended on it? Part of it was his Ruthenian social awkwardness, part of it his constant fear of rejection. But a big part of it was his need to harass those closest to him, to keep us on our toes, to make us earn our keep, to remind us that we were there because of him. He hated it when “Fred gets on his high horse” or “Bob gets too big for his britches,” as he would put it to each of us about the other. And God forbid that we should have a good time at a business dinner, or worse yet, begin to think that we were asked somewhere just because somebody liked us. Like a mother whose worst nightmare is an empty nest, Andy wanted his kids to be popular but unloved, confident but insecure, to be the life of the party but not to upstage him. The contradictions compounded until it was very hard to know which Andy wanted more: success or control.

I didn’t dwell on such thoughts back in the high party years between 1975 and 1978. Instead, while Andy was home replenishing his energy with a home-cooked meal, and putting on another layer of pimple cream, and not changing because “artists aren’t supposed to dress up and I’ll never look right anyway,” I was home changing because “you gotta look good for the ladies, Bob,” and shaving for the second time that day, and replenishing my energy with the only thing in my refrigerator: a bottle of chilled Stolichnaya.

“Andy Warhol is still going to parties in great style,” Eugenia Sheppard noted in her syndicated column of September 26, 1974. “At Iranian Ambassador to the U.N. and Mrs. Fereydoun Hoveyda’s dinner the other night, Andy arrived with no less than eleven people in tow, including Lee Radziwill, in a black sequined pants suit; Diana Vreeland, in lots of ivory jewelry … ”

We nicknamed the Iranian embassy the “Caviar Club,” and Andy was invited there about once a month—we had been introduced by the Italian Ambassador to the UN, Piero Vinci, and his wife, Maria Laura, before they were transferred to Moscow. Like the Vincis, Ambassador Hoveyda, a former film critic, and his young German-born wife, Gisela, sought out cultural figures to spice the usual diplomatic, business, and social mix, and that was one of the reasons their embassy was the hottest ticket among the UN missions. Other regular guests were Elia Kazan and Barbara Loden, Shirley MacLaine, Gail and Sidney Lumet, Bob Wilson, Marion Javits, and Louise Nevelson—though Andy, as usual with artists, “never knew what to say to her.” Just as predictably, he felt more comfortable with Karl Lagerfeld, who was always a guest of honor there when he was in town because he had known Gisela since childhood.

During the 1975 New York Film Festival, the ambassador asked us to a big dinner for his old Cahiers du Cinema pal, François Truffaut, and Andy was pleased when the French filmmaker told him that the sixties Warhol movies had influenced his own work, adding, “though they influenced Godard more.” Andy was also pleased when Bob Wilson, the rising star of the avant-garde, told him, “You’re my idol.” Andy replied, “I hope tonight’s not the night I fall off my pedestal.”

He was less pleased by my conversation with Ambassador Wah at a dinner for Prince and Princess Sadruddin Aga Khan. “Why would Andy Warhol,” the Chinese ambassador wanted to know, “paint Marilyn Monroe with an orange face?” I said that Andy was being abstract. “In China,” he replied, “art is never abstract.” “I hope you didn’t tell him I painted Mao with a green face, Bob,” said Andy.

Ambassador Hoveyda was happy for Andy to bring his entourage—which could be anyone from Diana Vreeland, Lee Radziwill, and Paulette Goddard, to Mick Jagger, Hiram Keller, and Alice Cooper, plus Fred, Jed, Vincent, Lady Anne, Catherine, Barbara Allen, and, occasionally, Archie—who sat on Andy’s lap, licking up the fish eggs.

Iranian embassy dinners were always impressive, and slightly absurd, which made it all the more enjoyable for us: the five-pound bowls of Imperial Gold caviar, said to be “even better than Beluga,” the place cards embossed in gold with the imperial lion, the gold-framed photographs of the imperial family in their gold crowns. The townhouse at 1033 Fifth Avenue was one of the largest in the city, and its spacious pale blue salons reeked of official power and wealth, though the geometric mirror mosaics gave it a shot of exotic glitz. We all grew quite fond of the ambassador. His paisley brocade dinner jackets and purple bowties, his pipe puffing and collage making, his genial and witty after-dinner tales undercut the pomposity of the imperial thrust. And we grew even fonder when, some sixteen dinners later, in January 1976, he passed the word from Teheran: Her Imperial Majesty Empress Farah Diba wanted Andy to come to Iran and paint her portrait.

“Really?” said Andy, eyes bright, voice brighter. “Let’s go there right away and do it.” Then he lowered his voice and muttered to me, “Before something happens.”

One week later, something did happen: The Village Voice accused Senator Jacob Javits of “sleeping with a highly paid foreign agent”—meaning his wife, Marion, who had recently taken an $80,000-a-year consulting job with Iran Air. To make matters worse for the popular Jewish senator, the Voice portrayed the Shah as an enemy of Israel, ignoring the fact that he had guaranteed its oil supply as part of the fragile Mideast truce Kissinger negotiated after the 1973 war. It was the opening salvo in the ensuing campaign the Voice led in the American press against the Pahlavi regime. “How much do you want to bet,” said Andy, “that we don’t get to do Farah Diba’s portrait now? And it will all be Marion’s fault.”

Marion resigned her Iran Air job, but the dinners went on and we kept going to them. There were dinners for the Smithsonian’s Islamic Art Institute, for Regine, for Nureyev. After the publicity over the “Marion Hari Scandal,” a pair of New York City cops were stationed outside, which made Andy a trifle nervous, but our trip to Iran was falling into place, and we were meeting more and more useful people at the embassy. Such as Nima Farmanfarmaian, a young Iranian writer whom Vincent dated for a while, who happened to be Eugenia Sheppard’s assistant, and who also happened to mention Andy in the column every other day.

Another stunning Iranian we met there was Mercedes Kellogg, the young wife of Ambassador Francis Kellogg, Nixon’s special liaison for the refugees from Southeast Asia. We also met John Kluge, the chairman of Metromedia, and later, in the eighties, the second-richest man in America (according to Forbes magazine), who showed interest in Andy’s TV show. Vincent and I hurriedly wrote him a treatment, which was hurriedly rejected. A more lasting friendship, and business relationship, developed with paper king Charles Gilman and his wife, Sondra. The Gilmans were serious collectors and Andy ended up painting both of them and their two children.

Paulette Goddard, who was one of Andy’s more frequent Iranian embassy dinner dates, loved going there because she could wear her major jewelry and feel safe—once the ambassador lent Paulette his bodyguard to escort her diamonds, rubies, and emeralds home. At a dinner on Valentine’s Day 1975, she was wearing what appeared to be half the mineral wealth of Burma, provoking Lena Horne to say, “I’d love to steal a ruby.” “I bet you would,” said Paulette. “This is just like a movie,” said Andy, “we’ve got to put it in the book, Bob.”

We were still taping Paulette for the book everywhere we went together, though in early 1975 the title had been changed when HBJ discovered a porn novel called Her. Our book was now Her, Him and Them—we realized that Paulette would never sit down and have a heart-to-heart with Andy, so it had to be a book about everyone Paulette met with Andy. At an embassy dinner for the Shah’s twin sister, Princess Ashraf, and the ambassador’s older brother, Prime Minister Amir Abbas Hoveyda, we taped an entire chapter of Her, Him and Them. Senator Charles Percy of Illinois recalled meeting Paulette back in the forties as a Chicago college student who won a date with her in a studio promotion. “And you were so adorable,” said Paulette, “the perfect gentleman.” “Well, I was so intimidated,” said the senator. “You were covered in diamonds, like the big Hollywood star you still are.” “Well, I don’t know about the last part,” said Paulette, “but I am still covered in diamonds.”

Andy was happy with this new “cast of thousands” approach, and he had me set up another “scene” for the Paulette book soon after: lunch at Lutèce with the Hoveydas and the Dalis. Paulette was wearing her Dali lip pin “to please Dali,” which did not please Gala. Her first shot was to grab Andy’s tape recorder and shove it into the vase of flowers in the middle of the table. Andy fished poor Sony out and hid her under the table.

Then I made the mistake of crossing my legs and slightly tapping Gala’s leg in the process. “You kick Gala!” she grunted, and punched me in the arm. “Punch her back!” snapped Paulette. It occurred to me that Gala would probably be nicer to me if I did, so I gently hit her arm. Andy was shocked, Dali laughed, and Paulette shouted, “Harder! Hit her harder!” Gala and I exchanged a few more blows, hers much more forceful than mine, and when she realized I wasn’t going to let her have the last punch—even though Andy was harping, “What do you think you’re doing, Bob?”—she threw her arms around me and gave me a big kiss. “Bravo!” declared Dali, waving his scepter to bless our reconciliation, as Andy gingerly lifted Sony out from under the table.

Then everyone got down to business: Paulette tried to interest the ambassador in buying her collection of antique Persian rugs, the ambassador tried to interest Dali in donating a painting to Teheran’s new museum of modern art, Dali tried to interest Gisela in donating money to the Dali Museum in Cadaqués, Gisela tried to interest Andy in buying tickets to her benefit for Bob Wilson, Andy tried to interest Gala in letting him paint her portrait, and Gala tried to interest me in ordering two plain poached eggs, as she was, instead of the Lutèce plat du jour. “What a great lunch,” said Andy on our way down to the Factory. “I just hope the tape didn’t get wet. Maybe if I punched Gala too, she would let me do her portrait.”

“I couldn’t believe the way Paulette was encouraging me to hit Gala,” I said. “I was just being funny, but Paulette really meant it.”

“Oh, I know,” said Andy. “There’s something wrong with Paulette lately.”

Not long after, Paulette asked me to help her clear out her storage bin at a Second Avenue warehouse. She said there might be something there for my apartment and that I could take anything I wanted. I liked a thirties silkscreen of a deer and a doe and Paulette stunned me by making me write out a “loan agreement,” explaining that it had been a gift from King Vidor, so she didn’t feel she could actually give it to me. “Let’s get out of here,” she snapped, even though we’d barely begun to sort through the old furniture and bric-a-brac. “It’s depressing me.” As I walked her back to the Ritz Tower, she told me, in code, what was really depressing her. “I have an appointment with a surgeon tomorrow,” she said. “Get the picture?” I didn’t, but she refused to discuss it further.

“Oh, God, it must be something terrible if she won’t tell us,” said Andy when I told him. “But you should tell her that she has to work even harder on the book now, just to keep busy.”

In the month before her mystery operation at the end of March 1975, Paulette wouldn’t talk about the book or her problem. She wouldn’t see us either, always saying that she had to see “the surgeon,” and then rushing to hang up. We found out the date of the operation from Anita Loos, but the hospital said no calls were allowed. Anita told us when Paulette was being discharged, and Andy went with me to Fernando Sanchez’s showroom to pick out a rose satin negligee and robe to send her at the Ritz Tower. He even wrote the card in his own hand: “Get well soon. We miss you. Love, Andy and Bob.”

When Paulette called to thank us a few days later, he hurriedly passed the phone to me, saying, “You’ve got to convince her she should talk about her operation for the book. It can’t be all caviar and diamonds. Tell Paulette she can buy a lot more caviar and diamonds if we have a bestseller.” It might have helped Paulette to talk about it—whatever it was—and it might have made a bestseller, but at the time Andy’s pressing seemed heartless. Soon he was asking, “Did you ask Paulette when we could start taping her recovery?” Paulette wouldn’t see Andy, or tape, or talk about the book, for the rest of April and most of May.

Paulette finally swept back into Andy’s life at the end of May, making a grand entrance in red Halston chiffon and that big engagementring necklace. It was at the Factory dinner for São Schlumberger, the first and almost the only time that Andy allowed a party there at night. He had Ronnie Cutrone hang the Cats and Dogs paintings, because he knew that São had a weakness for both, and sure enough she did end up buying a big Cat painting for her new house in Cap Ferrat. We hired two Pinkerton guards for the lobby and a fleet of waiters, despite Andy’s suggestion that Ronnie man the gate and the rest of us work the tables. The fifty guests included Jack Nicholson and Anjelica Huston, Faye Dunaway, Carroll Baker, Diana Vreeland, Jerry Zipkin, the entire Halston group, and Larry Rivers.

Some of our younger friends turned up after dinner, along with a woman who could often be found at the hipper parties in the mid-seventies, discreetly exchanging hundred-dollar bills for small packets of aluminum foil. Andy hardly noticed her presence. He was too busy taping Paulette. “She drank so much vodka,” he told me after she left, “and I did too.” “Did you get her to talk?” I asked. “Oh, yeah. She told me that her doctor was the meanest man she ever met in her life, and that her operation was the worst thing that ever happened to her—but she didn’t say what it was.”

The next day Paulette called me and said to tell Andy “all the operation business is off-the-record. I had a ski accident, and that’s that.” Her capacity for denial seemed as enormous as Andy’s—another way in which they were perfectly matched.

Paulette just didn’t want to work, especially on a book about herself. The movie star whose intelligence had lifted her above the usual vulgar vanity was now wallowing in self-pity about the beauty she was convinced she had somehow lost for good. Andy was worried about her, and worried about the book, which was due in six weeks, on July 15, 1975. He and I worked every weekend at the Factory or his house, going through the manuscript: almost six hundred pages redacted down from our twenty-five taping sessions by Chris Hemphill, who had organized some chapters by themes, such as “Caviar” and “Gems,” and others by scenes, like the one with Senator Percy or the lunch at Lutèce.

When we handed in the pile of transcripts, Paulette was already packing for her six months in Switzerland, and Andy was already saying he was not giving back the money if they hated it.

They hated it.

When Paulette returned to New York in the spring of 1976, Andy wanted to tape some more, but her heart wasn’t in it. She had physically recuperated in her villa by the lake, but she never really recovered psychologically: She didn’t want to face her life, she wanted to forget it. Her relationship with Andy took on a quality not unlike that between the aging movie star in Heat and her movie-producer ex-husband: I’ll come to your openings if you come to mine. Paulette and Andy went to everybody’s openings, were photographed together, and made all the papers, as famous couples always do, and then didn’t see each other until the next opening.

One night in May 1976, we went to Janet Gaynor’s opening at the Wally Findlay Gallery. This was the kind of art opening Andy liked in the seventies. The retired actress, whom he remembered from the 1937 version of A Star Is Born, brought out all the big stars from the twenties to the fifties, from Lillian Gish to Betty Furness. Paulette was besieged by fans in their fifties to their seventies, some wearing as much jewelry as she was. While she signed autographs, out of duty not joy, Andy and I wandered off to look at Janet Gaynor’s Renoiresque peonies and petunias.

“The paintings are so bad,” Andy said, “but I bet they go up. Look how big she signs her name. It’s like buying an autograph and then you get the flowers thrown in, right? Sometimes I wonder if I should be with this kind of gallery and make a lot of money quick, but Fred says that’s the wrong way to think. Oh, look, there’s Irene Selznick. Let’s go ask her about Paulette.”

The elegant widow of David O. Selznick, and daughter of Louis B. Mayer, told us the real reason why her late husband didn’t use Paulette in Gone With the Wind. Paulette had told us that Chaplin wouldn’t release her from her exclusive contract with his company. But Irene Selznick said, “This was going to be the biggest family movie ever made and David wanted to see Paulette and Charlie’s marriage certificate, because the rumor in Hollywood was that they had never made it official. Charlie told us that they had been married by the captain of a ship off the coast of Shanghai, so there was no certificate. David decided it was too big a risk to take and that’s when the great search for Scarlett O’Hara began. Paulette was heartbroken, and she never forgave Charlie, but it wasn’t because he wouldn’t let her out of her contract; it was all about the missing marriage certificate.”

Suddenly, Paulette was at our side. “Hello, Irene,” she said coldly. “Hello, Paulette,” said Mrs. Selznick even more icily.

“That woman has always hated me,” Paulette growled, as Irene turned her back. “She’s a bitch, and she always was.”

Paulette was acting stranger and stranger. She was never the most patient of people, but after her operation the slightest delay drove her to distraction. If we were five minutes late in arriving at the Ritz Tower, she’d drive off to the theater without us and leave our tickets at the box office. “Well, I guess we have to find a taxi,” said Andy one time, “now that my rich girlfriend has stranded us.” It soon became “your rich girlfriend,” after HBJ rejected our revised manuscript and Paulette refused to have a third go at it. “It’s all Paulette’s fault,” Andy said, “because she never really talked. And that’s your fault, Bob, because you didn’t pay the price.”

Andy had a similar seesaw attitude about Fred’s intensifying friendship with Diana Vreeland. Andy was both proud that one of his kids was the Empress of Fashion’s favorite courtier, and envious that he wasn’t on her arm, particularly at her annual imperial pageant each December, the high point of the Manhattan social season, the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute Ball. He always made Fred pay for his own ticket.

When Diana invited Fred to three dinners in one week, Andy said, “You can’t go out with Diana every night, Fred. You have to go out with me sometimes, you know.” When she didn’t invite Fred to a dinner, Andy said, “I guess Diana’s dropping you, Fred. You better pay more attention to her.” He approved of Fred’s going to Japan with her in 1975 “because she’s invited by the head of Sony and that might be good for business.” He disapproved of Fred’s going to Russia with her in 1976 because “there’s no business in Russia; she just wants Fred there to carry her bags.” His biggest worry, repeated often, was that “Diana’s filling Fred’s head with funny ideas.” He meant that she made Fred feel that he was not just Andy Warhol’s hairdresser. And when he really got out of control, he’d accuse Diana, in her late seventies, of “wanting to go to bed with Fred,” in his early thirties.

To alleviate Andy’s resentment, Fred encouraged Diana to ask Andy out with her on his own. It never really worked. Their dates started out well enough, because while Andy was always late, Diana was always later. But they usually ended up badly, because Diana liked to linger at parties, chatting until the wee hours, and Andy couldn’t wait to get on to the next party, or go home. He often left without her, asking someone else to take her home, and she’d call him the next morning and, as he put it, “scream at me.” Sometimes he’d add, “She really is funny,” and sometimes, “Who does she think she is?”

Andy’s real ambivalence was about Diana herself, and it probably went back to the fifties, when she was Bazaar’s extremely social fashion editor, and he was their sometime illustrator, “Andy Paperbag.” They went about their business in entirely opposite ways, Andy and Diana, and yet they were alike. They both had to be in charge, but Diana was openly dictatorial and made no bones about it, while Andy was a closet control freak, who deviously pretended he didn’t know what was going on and claimed, “I just follow my hairdresser around.” Andy and Diana also shared a need to be surrounded by what he called “beauties” and she called “attractive young people,” but while Andy sat there like the eye of the storm, silently turning his tape recorder in the direction of whoever was talking, Diana talked up a storm.

“Dietrich,” she declared one night at dinner, “is not a woman, not a man, but a phantom.” She paused dramatically, and lowering her voice to a deep hush, added, “as could only come out of Central Europe.” Then she snapped back to her sharp editress voice. “Of course, I adore Central Europe, simply adore it.” And ended in an almost poetic chant: “Munich. Zürich. Salzburg. Vienna. Buda-PEST!” Another long pause, followed by an invasive question, “You’re from that part of the world, aren’t you, Andy?”

And, as always, an evasive answer: “Oh, I’m from Pennsylvania.”

“Oh, Bob,” she went on that night, “you’re so lucky you’re a wop, because when a wop walks into a room, it lights up.” “What lights up,” I shot back, “the room or the wop?” Diana loved that. “Oh, Bob, you’re too much. Isn’t he, Andy? You know, you’re so lucky to have these boys.” She often reminded him of that, and he rarely appreciated it, though we did.

Another night she pronounced: “There is no such thing as an ugly duchess.” And another she explained why Valentino was a great designer. “He understands opulence, in the Oriental sense—real luxury,” she intoned imperially. “Why, he rang me up from Rome the other day just to say he was thinking of having his yacht lacquered RED! Now, that’s taste.”

Red, of course, was Diana’s favorite color, and she painted it on everything from her front door to her cheeks, which she “rerouged” after dinner, the way other women put on more lipstick. Her second-favorite color was purple, which she used to accent the reds in her apartment and her wardrobe, both of which were opulent, in the Oriental sense. Yet for all the real luxury in her style of dressing and decorating, there was also a sense of simplicity and comfort, just as under all her pronunciamentos and italics there was a straightforward and cozy woman, who knew how to enchant men.

Diana had been a widow since 1969, and her sons lived in Rome and Los Angeles; her grandsons, whom she doted on, passed in and out of New York on their way from Europe to the Far East. So we Factory “boys” helped fill the void—she always called me “My boy around the corner.” Diana also had her favorite “girls”—Marisa Berenson, Penelope Tree, Marina Schiano. She preferred strong, independent women—“It’s whimpering women I can’t take!” When I complained to her about Bianca’s demands about her Interview cover shoot for the Jack Ford issue, saying she expected magic, Diana replied, “Magic doesn’t come to those who don’t expect it.”

“What a great line,” said Andy. “Diana really does say the greatest things.” And yet, he also said of her, on several occasions, “She doesn’t know what she’s talking about. She just makes everything up.” He went back and forth. They were not, in any case, a compatible couple. Diana liked to touch, to feel, to take your hand in hers, to put her arm in yours, all the normal things that Andy couldn’t deal with, that made him back off. She often mistook his physical pulling away for a gesture of personal distaste, and it made her mistrust Andy, which he sensed, making matters worse. “Diana doesn’t really like me,” he told me once, with resignation, not envy, in his voice. She never disputed his genius as an artist, and she adored his fey, funny side, but there was a latent ambivalence in her feelings toward him that was almost as strong as his toward her.

The best thing Diana ever did for Andy, as far as he was concerned, was to have him to dinner with the Duchess of Windsor, in May 1975. Andy was so excited about meeting her that he brought her a small Flower painting (from the 1964 series), which the Duchess mistook for a box of candy and kept trying to open.

Andy had given Diana a tape recorder for Christmas six months earlier, and she took it out of its case for the first time after the Duchess of Windsor went home. “Tonight’s the night,” she told Andy, “that you teach me how to use this thing.” But the batteries had gone dead and Diana didn’t have any others in the house and, incredibly, Andy didn’t have any in his bag. He could have taken the batteries out of his tape recorder and put them in hers, but that would have meant that whatever was said would be on Diana’s tape, not Andy’s.

Despite the underlying ambivalence and mistrust between the Empress of Fashion and the Pope of Pop, it was her stamp of approval that put him in the middle of Park Avenue society in the middle of the seventies. It was Mrs. Vreeland, more than anyone else, who pushed Andy, and Fred and me, by introducing us to her swell friends at her small dinners and by bringing us to the small dinners of her swell friends.