From an unpublished interview with Andy Warhol by Scott Cohen, October 1980:

SC:  You’re fifty-two and still a virgin?

AW:  Yeah, I’m still a virgin.

SC:  With all these beautiful people hanging around, don’t you ever get turned on?

AW:  Well, I think only kids who are very young should have sex, and people who aren’t young should never get excited. After twenty-five, you should look, but never touch.

Was he still a virgin? I think that technically he was. Whatever little sex he may have had in his fifty-two years was probably a mixture of masturbation and voyeurism—to use his word, abstract. Andy chose his words carefully and he knew that the opposite of abstract was figurative, concrete, real. By the late seventies, Andy was desperately trying to have real sex—that’s what all the groping and grabbing in discos and limos was all about—but the sad truth was that the Society boys and male models he chased didn’t want to go home with Andy, they wanted to go out with Andy Warhol. And so he said, again and again, until he convinced the press, his kids, and most of all himself: I don’t want to have sex, because I don’t want to be involved. The fear of involvement covered the pain of rejection. And what began as a psychological defense mechanism became the curse of his existence, poisoning every relationship he had, cutting him off from all emotional intimacy. Where did that leave Andy at the beginning of the eighties? I sat in on that Scott Cohen interview and the line that rang truest was: “I think it’s horrible to live.”

On December 21, 1980, Jed left Andy. It was a Sunday morning, and as the car that would take him to the airport waited outside their door, Jed told Andy that, when he returned from his skiing trip to Vail, he was moving into the West 67th Street apartment he had bought a few months earlier as an office for his growing decorating business. He was going to share it, he said, with his new partner, Alan Wanzenberg, a good-looking young architect who had recently left I. M. Pei’s office.

At first Andy handled it the way he did his mother’s death and didn’t tell anyone anything. But try as he might, he couldn’t hide Jed’s departure, or his own stifled anguish, for long. On Monday, Chris Makos told me that Andy had called him at eight in the morning and “was saying strange things like, ‘There’s no Christmas spirit at my house.’ ” I assumed it was his usual Scrooge mood. On Tuesday, Andy didn’t turn up at the office Christmas lunch until four in the afternoon, when everybody was back at their desks. “I’m not giving any art this year,” he announced. That was an annual line, too, but this year Vincent and I didn’t try to change his mind. We already knew what had happened. Jed’s friend from New York magazine, Henry Post, had whispered the news to Brigid at lunch, and she had whispered it to Vincent and me. None of us dared mention anything to Andy.

That night, Marina Schiano called and said that she had begged Jed to put off telling Andy he was leaving until after Christmas. “Don’t get me wrong,” she said. “I understand completely why Jed had to do what he did. But my heart goes out to Andy. It’s no joke, thirteen years with someone and then one day he gets up and walks out. And four days before Christmas.”

Jed called Andy on Christmas Day, but Andy wouldn’t come to the phone. Still, Andy pretended to all of us at the office that it was no big deal. But he wasn’t acting right, I felt. For one thing, he decided to go on a diet—and he was already so thin. The day after New Year’s, I called him from Brooks and Adriana Jackson’s house in Key West, and asked him if everything was okay. “Oh, yeaaaahhh,” he said in his fakest tone. “Everything’s greaaattt. Couldn’t be better.”

“Well, Marina’s worried about you,” I said, trying to convey my own concern.

“Listen, Bob,” he snapped, “tell Marina it’s none of her business. I’m very happy and I’m so lucky to finally have that problem out of my life.”

And yet the man who swore he would never get involved again started getting involved with someone new the very day after Jed left.

Jon Gould was vice president for corporate communications at Paramount Pictures. Andy had Brigid send him a dozen red roses at his office in the Gulf & Western building on Columbus Circle, with the excuse that he might get us ads. Andy had met Jon a month earlier through Chris Makos. Chris had met Jon at the baths, though he kept that fact secret until much later, when Jon was firmly ensconced in Andy’s life and threatening to push Chris out.

Jon seemed to have two personalities, two styles, two lives: straight and gay, preppy and flamboyant, on his own in Los Angeles and with Andy in New York. He was twenty-seven when he met Andy, very tall, almost handsome from some angles, almost ugly from others, with thinning hair and a muscular build, awkward when he walked into a room, agile on the ski slopes and the dance floor. He was extremely proud of his old New England roots and counted Nathaniel Currier, of Currier & Ives the printmakers, as a great-great uncle. His family lived on a nine-hundred-acre estate in Amesbury, Massachusetts, that had been founded by their direct ancestors circa 1620. They also owned a summer house in New Hampshire, a big classic gray clapboard facing the Atlantic, filled with wicker furniture, snapshots of family clambakes, and a collection of framed New Yorker “summer issue” covers going back to the twenties. Jon had graduated from New England College, where he’d concentrated both on business and the arts, including drama and dance, in June 1977. He’d spent that summer at Harvard in the highly selective Radcliffe Publishing Program, making many of the friends that would form the nucleus of his New York clique, including Gary Fisketjon, Morgan Entrekin, Jonathan Roberts, who later was involved with The Preppy Handbook, and Katy Dobbs, whose first New York job was at Glamour magazine. Jon landed a job in the advertising department of Rolling Stone, where he caught Jann Wenner’s eye by increasing movie ads by 400 percent in one year. A pitch letter he wrote to Barry Diller got him the job at Paramount in 1978. “He couldn’t believe it,” says Katy Dobbs. “I mean, Jon was this kid from New Hampshire, really green. It all happened so fast for him, maybe too fast. And then along came Andy.”

Old money, Harvard, Hollywood—it was a résumé that Andy couldn’t resist. And there was something else about Jon Gould that drew Andy toward him: like Jed, he had a twin brother named Jay. “Isn’t it weird?” Andy told me. When Jon called to thank him for the roses, Andy ordered Brigid to send him a dozen every day, still using the ads alibi. After two weeks, Jon asked Chris to get Andy to stop; the roses were embarrassing him at work.

Andy had cast Chris in the Cupid role, and he advised Andy “to go for it. Even if it’s unrequited, it’s good for you to let your feelings out.”

“I had to convince Jon that it was worthwhile to be with Andy,” Chris says. And Andy started convincing him in the way he knew best, by taking him along to glamorous parties: C.Z. Guest’s dinner for the Herreras at Doubles; Bianca’s birthday dinner at Mortimer’s. We all went to 54 after that dinner and I could hardly believe my eyes when I saw Andy being thrown around the dance floor like a scarecrow by André Leon Talley. His wig looked as if it were about to fall off, but Andy was oblivious of everything and everyone but Jon, who stood watching from the bar. “I wanted to show Jon I could dance,” Andy told me the next day, “because he’s the best dancer. But he just said I embarrassed him by dancing with a boy. Oh, what am I going to do, Bob? You have to get to know him and tell me what to do.”

On Jon’s birthday, Andy invited him to the opening of The Little Foxes and took him backstage to meet the star, Elizabeth Taylor. Then he asked Thomas Ammann and me to join the two of them for dinner at Le Cirque. I liked Jon. He was bright, articulate, polite, and he complimented Interview a lot. The only thing that worried me was the way Andy hung on his every word and laughed loudly at all his jokes, even when they weren’t meant to be jokes.

A few nights later, after another Society dinner at Doubles, I dropped Andy off at Jon’s loft about fifty blocks out of my way. I could see that Andy was crazed with anxiety and needed to talk to someone. “Jon said I could come over to watch TV,” he said. “Maybe tonight will be the night. Oh, Bob, I don’t know what to do. You’re a Taurus, give me some tips on how to handle Tauruses.”

The next day Andy told Chris that he would buy him a gold watch if he could get Jon to fall for him, or better yet, move in with him. Chris persuaded Jon to spend the following weekend with Andy at his friend Peter Wise’s family house on Cape Cod. Andy was so excited that he ran out and bought Jon a double strand of pearls. Chris showed me the Polaroids he took of Jon wearing them on the beach. They were big and baroque and Jon looked uncomfortable in some shots and self-satisfied in others. “He wondered what was going on,” Katy Dobbs says. He was worried, she says, about a seemingly offhand remark Andy had made in a recent Interview cover story: “I sleep with a sock.” The sock, Jon had told her, was his. Andy had stolen it from his gym bag. “There was tremendous ambivalence,” she says, “on Jon’s part.”

And a giddy determination on Andy’s. He desperately tried to make himself more attractive. He never wore his glasses anymore, only his bright blue contacts. He tried mascara to look prettier. He wore Cub Scout pants to look younger. He replaced his plastic shopping bag with a backpack to look more macho. He grabbed Sabrina Guinness’s lipstick in an elevator one night and smudged it across his cheeks. “Who do you think you are? Diana Vreeland?” I teased. “It works, Bob, it works!” he shouted in joy. He was lifting weights and losing weight. And showering Jon with gifts: lizard boots from Susan Bennis/Warren Edwards, a Barry Kieselstein-Cord sterling silver belt, a gold Rolex, a Bulgari signature watch, a drawing of the Bulgari watch. It sometimes made me mad to watch this sudden spurt of extravagance, especially when I thought about the time Fred got him to do Jed’s portrait and Andy did it in miniature. But that was the point of what he was doing: If he had lost Jed because he was stingy, then he was going to win Jon with his generosity. Jed complained of his coldness and neglect. Well, he was going to show Jon just how warm and attentive he could be. He was going to show all of us. And show Jed too.

At the end of May, when Jon flew to L.A. for his monthly Paramount meetings, Andy had Brigid send him one hundred “love letters” a day. These missives consisted of misprinted “Earhole Productions” labels gummed onto blank envelopes containing blank sheets of hotel stationery. “That way there’s no writing, no evidence, no palimony, right?” said Brigid. Perhaps. But Andy had also come up with a way to respect Jon’s intense desire to keep his gay life private and still to let him know that Andy was back in New York, pining away.

He was also wasting away. He seemed to live on shreds of salad, sips of fruit juice, and vitamin pills. “You’re too thin,” I told him one day in June. “No, I’m not,” he said, angry at me for bringing the subject up. I had gone to his house to pick up some drawings he had to sign for a client and he was frantic because Archie, who had just had an operation on his stomach, was trampling all over them. Then Jed called to check on the dogs and Andy turned stiff and sour. “Uh-huh,” I heard him saying. “Oh, really. Uh-huh. Yeah. No. Well, you’re not here, so how would you know?” His cheekbones pressed against his skin, his wrists looked as if they were about to snap, and for the first time I thought of Andy as an old man. A couple of days later, Dr. Cox told him that he couldn’t go on a trip to the West Coast because he had walking pneumonia.

Within a week, he insisted on getting out of bed to fly to Atlanta for an Interview promotion at the Limelight disco. They flew down ten Interview staffers and contributors and a pack of paparazzi for a big party, but Andy refused to come out of the manager’s office for an hour and a half—he was talking long distance to Jon. On the Fourth of July weekend, Andy was down in the dumps because Jon went to see his family in New Hampshire and didn’t invite Andy along. We went to a screening of Raiders of the Lost Ark, at Paramount.

As we walked home on Central Park South, Andy opened up. “I guess it’s kind of great to have a family,” he said. “Jon really cares about his so much. But I don’t have a family. I never wanted to, so I guess now I’m happy. I never had a grandmother. Isn’t that strange?”

“Why don’t you ever see your brothers?” I asked.

“Oh, I’m mean to them. I always say I’m out of town.” He didn’t say anything for half a block and then he went back to Jon. “I have to be in love with Jon,” he said, “or I’ll go crazy.”

“Try not to think about it so much, Andy.”

“If I don’t think about it, I’ll go crazy.”

After I dropped Andy, I went to a party full of fashion models and rich kids. A new arrival from California approached me and asked, “Do you know Andy Warhol?” He’s my boss, I said. “Do you know Jed Johnson?” Pretty well, I said. “His new friend Alan?” Not so well. “Alan’s old friend Steve?” Barely. “Well,” said the Californian, puffing out his pecs, “I just broke up with Steve.” That was what fame came down to: some kid getting off on being the ex of the ex of the ex of the ex of a star, while the star went home alone.

At the end of July, Andy and I went to Newport, Rhode Island, with Ina Ginsburg for an anti-suicide benefit chaired by Nuala Pell, the senator’s wife. Despite Ina’s sidelong glances and nervous titters, Andy told everyone we met that he was for suicide. The only problem was that he wasn’t joking. Whenever he and I were alone, he started in on Jon. He was upset because Jon had turned down his invitation to come to Newport with us. “I mean, this is just what he likes, right?” he asked, as he stared out the window of the Bellevue Avenue mansion where we were staying at the roaring waves hitting the rocks of Cliff Walk. “Oh, what should I do, Bob? I can’t not see him. We finally slept in the same bed, but … How do you do it? I mean, he really likes me. Rupert’s so aggressive. I wonder how he does it?”

I told Andy that I had always considered myself a bit of a romantic retard, but next to him I felt like I had a doctoral degree from Errol Flynn University. It worked—he laughed. Still laughing, he said, “I guess the reason nothing happens with me and Jon is … we’re both girls, right?”

“Can’t we talk about something else?” I finally pleaded. “Why do you have to be so obsessed with Jon?”

“These things just happen, Bob.” That became his line after that whenever we discussed “the Jon problem.” On the way to the Newport airport, where our chartered Cessna was waiting, Andy startled Ina again by saying, several times, “Oh, I hope it crashes. That would be a good ending.”

That summer Andy decided to become a male model. Chris Makos took test shots for his head sheet and Andy asked Zoli down to lunch. Zoli agreed to represent Andy for special assignments, which is agency lingo for celebrity endorsements. “Oh, I want to be a regular model,” said Andy. “I think it would be so much fun to go around with my portfolio like all the other kids.”

“You mean you’re willing to do go-sees?” Zoli asked—models’ auditions.

“Oh, yeah,” Andy said. “And runway. And catalogue. And editorial. Can’t you get me in those great jean ads, jumping up and down with a bunch of other cute guys?”

Zoli said he’d try. After that, Andy’s first question every day when he arrived at the Factory was “Did Zoli call?”

Zoli did get him a couple of runway jobs and Daniela Morera put him in a L’Uomo Vogue spread jumping up and down with some other cute guys, but it was obvious that he was being used for his joke value. That October, Halston asked him to model in a Martha Graham charity fashion show at Bloomingdale’s. He didn’t appear until the end of the show, accompanied by Victor Hugo. His face was caked with makeup and he wore a voluminous royal blue taffeta smock with a big red bow around his neck. He looked like a cross between a clown and a Christmas present. Victor wore the same outfit in emerald green. As Andy minced down the runway, I could hear the ladies around me buzz. The words they used were weirdo, creep, and sissy.

The next day, I told Andy Halston and Victor had made a fool of him. “They did not!” he yelled. “I looked great! You’re just jealous, Bob, because you’re too short to model.”

Two weeks later, we had another fight over the latest Chris Makos photos of Andy, drag pictures of Andy looking like the corpse of Candy Darling. “But Andy looks like a beautiful young girl in these photos,” said Chris. “Yeah, Bob,” said Andy, lifting one of them to his eyes to admire his flawless white skin and long blond locks. “What’s wrong with these photos? I look really good.”

That Thanksgiving, we were in a box at Madison Square Garden for Rod Stewart’s concert. Andy was sitting in front of me, jerking his head violently up and down and side to side, not in time to the music. His wig was teased out into a wild punk pouf and I could tell that he thought he looked real cool. I thought he looked like a three-year-old having a temper tantrum or a fifty-three-year-old having a nervous breakdown. When he turned around and saw the expression on my face, he gave me a sick little smile and said, “Oh, I know I’m going crazy, Bob. But you don’t really care, do you?”

The emotional turbulence of the past two years had taken its toll and Andy’s work showed it. I wasn’t sure if he cared about that either. After the 1979 Retrospectives and Reversals, he’d got stuck in a rut, recycling old ideas, as if he were too tired or too distracted to come up with anything new.

For his first big series of paintings and prints of the eighties, Andy reached back to his fifties staple: shoes. The Diamond Dust Shoes of 1980 actually started out as an advertising assignment from another staple: Halston. Victor Hugo sent down a big box of various styles to be photographed for the ad campaign of Halston’s shoe licensee, Garolini. Ronnie turned the box upside down and dumped the shoes out. Andy liked the way they looked spilled all over the floor. So he took a few Polaroids and had Ronnie take a lot more. The diamonddust idea was stolen from Rupert Smith, who had been using the industrial-grade ground-up stones on some prints of his own. He was foolish enough to tell Andy where to buy it and foolish enough to be surprised when it turned up as Andy’s art. “Oh, it fell on my painting and stuck,” said Andy. It was the first time since I had started working for Andy that I was totally turned off by his work. He said I didn’t know what I was talking about, adding just to be sure to get Mrs. Garolini to buy a big one for their showroom. I did, but it was one of the few sales—none of Andy’s dealers in Europe or America wanted to do a Diamond Dust Shoes show.

Andy had more success with another big series in 1980: Ten Portraits of Jews of the Twentieth Century. The prints, which were done first, marked the beginning of a long line of formulaic editions, and the paintings were practically copies of the prints. The idea came from New York dealer Ronald Feldman. Around the office, the working title was “Jewish Geniuses,” because Feldman had sent down a list of over one hundred candidates and every one of them was an indisputable master in his or her field. “Why are they all so smart, Bob?” Andy asked. “Could it be something in their diet? Don’t you wish you were Jewish sometimes?”

Andy thought about Jews a lot. He was fascinated by them, afraid of them, dying to be accepted by them—but he never mentioned that his mother’s grandmother was Jewish. Often, he seemed to think that almost everyone he met was Jewish and hiding it. He regularly said things like: “Can you be Jewish and named Cathy?” “She had that plain, good, pretty look, so she must be Jewish.” “She was putting down kids and dogs, trying to make me think she’s not Jewish.” Part of it came out of his feeling of rejection by the Jewish intellectuals of the art world. When Helen Frankenthaler suggested Kenneth Noland for the series one night at Elaine’s, Andy’s comment to me was “I never knew Kenneth Noland was Jewish! So that’s why he gets such good reviews.”

The final choices were more Feldman’s than Andy’s: Einstein, Freud, Kafka, Martin Buber, Gertrude Stein, George Gershwin, Louis Brandeis, Golda Meir, Sarah Bernhardt, and the Marx Brothers. Andy wasn’t sure who Buber and Brandeis were. He liked Golda Meir, “because we already have a screen of her.” And he showed some mild enthusiasm for the Hollywood contingent, Groucho, Harpo, and Chico, and for Sarah Bernhardt, who he couldn’t believe was Jewish. He let Rupert and Ronnie do almost all the work on this series, as if he were afraid to get close to it, for fear that his real feelings might come out. It’s a pity, because the finished products were mechanical and dull.

He seemed embarrassed and annoyed at the first showing of Ten Portraits of Jews of the Twentieth Century, at the Jewish Center of Washington, in Bethesda, Maryland, in March 1980. “Everybody’s Jewish here, Bob,” he said. “It’s a Jewish center, Andy. What do you expect?” “They’re all asking me ‘why’ and ‘how,’ Bob. What do I say?” “Tell them you admire the intelligence and creativity of the Jewish people, because you do.” “I do?” A man came up to Andy and asked, “Did you use all these different patches of color to show all the different facets of Gertrude Stein’s personality?” Andy said, “Yes.”

Then Ronald Feldman came over and told us that he had sold so many portfolios of prints that he was raising the price from $6,000 to $9,000. “You mean the price just went up while we were standing here?” asked Andy, suddenly less embarrassed and annoyed. Feldman explained his brilliant marketing strategy: He had divided the edition of 250 portfolios into 10 groups of 25, each priced in increments of $3,000. The first group had been sold at $3,000 before the opening, sight unseen, to cover his costs. By the time we left the Jewish Center, Feldman had hit the $12,000 level, and some of those who had paid a lower price a few hours earlier were reselling their portfolios at a profit on an instant secondary market. “Oh, this is so great,” said Andy. “We’ve got to get Ron to give us some more Jewish ideas, Bob.”

Andy also did a big German series in 1980—portraits of Josef Beuys, whom many saw as the most important figure of postwar German art. The Beuys by Warhol series was jointly commissioned by the Hans Meyer Gallery of Düsseldorf and the Lucio Amelio Gallery of Naples. Beuys was everything Andy was not: intellectual, political, anti-fashionable. At the press conference after the Naples opening, Beuys went on and on about art and history and philosophy, while Andy sat there staring at São Schlumberger’s big emerald ring.

Beuys was very involved with the new Green Party and let it be known that he would like Andy to contribute a poster for their 1980 election campaign. Andy agreed—the Beuys deal was too big to say no. When the then Factory receptionist, Princess Ingeborg (“Pingle”) of Schleswig-Holstein, a sweet-hearted, plain-dressing young German aristocrat, heard about it, she had a fit. The Green Party was an East German front, she said. Fred told her that Andy had to do it for business. “You care more about money than my country!” Princess Pingle screamed. Later, in tears, she told me she was considering quitting her job. “I just can’t go on working for a person,” she sobbed, “who would make a political statement without even knowing what it means.”

Andy had a talk with Princess Pingle. He told her that Beuys couldn’t possibly be a Communist. “His daughter wants to be a model,” he said. (Actually, Andy wanted to make her a model.) Princess Pingle calmed down, but still Andy worried. What if his rich German portrait clients thought like her? What if the Greens really were Communist and he got in trouble with the IRS when Reagan came in? What if he didn’t do the poster and Beuys got mad? “Oh, I know what to do,” Andy told me. “You write my name and my line on the poster for me, Bob. That way I can always say I didn’t know what was going on, right?” So, in my best fake Warhol script, I wrote, “ANDY WARHOL DUR FÜR GRÜN.”

“This is so ridiculous,” I told Andy. “You endorsing an environmental party.”

“Oh, I know,” said Andy. “And I can’t even go to the country, right, Bob?”

We laughed our way through the litany of Andy’s complaints against nature.

“I can’t go to the beach … ”

“… because you turn purple.”

“I can’t go to the mountains … ”

“… because you can’t breathe.”

“I can’t go to the, uh, woods … ”

“… because it’s so itchy.”

For a moment, it was like the days of our Abbott and Costello act.

The only person Andy really wanted to paint in 1980 was the Pope. He had been wanting to paint the Pope, any pope, since at least the early sixties. At the Naples opening of his Beuys show, word came from one of the vast network of Italian socialites he had competing to land the Holy Father that the holy moment was at hand. Andy and Fred got up at five the next morning and rushed to Rome in a limo, but the supposedly private audience turned out to be an audience for five thousand. “At least we were in the front row,” Andy said, “but the Pope thought Fred was me.”

In 1981, Andy’s big series were the Dollar Signs, which harked back to the Dollar Bills of the early sixties, and the Myths, which brought him full circle to the cartoon idols that launched his Pop Art career. Recycled or not, Andy’s art was bringing in more and more money. By 1980, the art business was probably grossing about $5 million a year. Each of the big series was at least an $800,000 deal, and there were many smaller deals and sales of earlier works too. After the 1979 Whitney show, the private-portrait business hit new heights. I estimate that in the early eighties Andy was painting about fifty clients a year. At $40,000 for a two-panel portrait—and many clients commissioned four or more—that added another $2 million to the annual total.

On one afternoon in Miami alone, three local socialites sat for their Polaroids in rapid succession, though we had to make sure that they didn’t see each other going and coming from Andy’s suite, because they were bitter rivals. On another day in Zürich, Bruno Bischofberger took us to a client in the morning, Thomas took us to a client in the afternoon, and an Argentine man stopped us on the street and asked, “Are you Andy Warhol? Can you paint my wife’s portrait?” We took the man and his wife back to the hotel, and while Andy popped the Polaroids, Fred checked out the check.

Between 1980 and 1982, I sold almost a million dollars in art myself, most of it commissioned portraits. My clients included Lynn Wyatt, Florinda Bolkan, and Diana Ross, who stunned us by paying her $95,000 bill—for four portraits of herself and each of her three daughters—on the spot. Consuelo Crespi helped me get the Krizia designer, Mariuccia Mandelli; Ina Ginsburg introduced me to the Hyatt Hotels tycoon, Jay Pritzker; Ina’s friend Gaetana Enders, the wife of the American ambassador to Canada, led me to Conrad Black, the financial whiz kid of Toronto. After her husband was transferred to Brussels, Gaetana arranged for Andy to do the portrait of the old Belgian Surrealist, Paul Delvaux, which grew into a $120,000 deal and an exhibition sponsored by Baron Léon Lambert at his elegant art-filled bank. Adriana Jackson, who had helped me snare my first “victim,” Maria Luisa de Romans, back in 1972, now sent me her younger sister, Loleta Marinotti, as well as the Bertis, who were the leading manufacturers of industrial dishwashers in Italy. She also talked Iolas into commissioning the Alexander the Great paintings and prints, another substantial deal. I split my commission with some of these helpful ladies; Andy rewarded others with their own portraits.

Then there was Lily Auchincloss. Andy had a thing about getting her portrait. She was one of those people he’d been pursuing since the fifties, when he was making the magazine rounds and she was a stylish young heiress working in the features department of Bazaar. “She’s a van Ameringen, Bob,” he reminded me every time her name came up. “That’s International Flavors and Fragrances, Bob. They sell the perfume to all the big perfume companies. Do you know how much money that is, Bob?” Andy wanted Lily’s portrait so badly he even made a donation to her pet cause, the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. No doubt his desire was fueled by the fact that Lily was also a trustee of the Museum of Modern Art, another obsession of his since the fifties. So when she invited me to spend a weekend at her house in Bermuda, Andy was beside himself. “Tell her she doesn’t have that much time to have her portrait done,” were his farewell words. “I mean, while she still looks good.”

Something told me that sales pitch would not work. And I never made sales pitches in any case. People knew that Andy painted portraits. They also knew that I worked for Andy. I waited for them to put two and two together, although I wasn’t above dropping a hint at an appropriate moment. When our conversation quite naturally came around to Andy, I told Lily about his latest portraits. “I’m not the portrait type,” she said. “I don’t want to wake up every morning and look at me.” She added that she would like to buy something by Andy, “so long as you get the commission.” I recommended a Mick Jagger portfolio, as we only had two left and I was sure they would increase in value. (Shortly before Andy died, Lily sold hers for the same price she paid for it, $16,000. It’s now worth ten times that.)

My social life was paying off, for me and Andy. But the people I was selling to were also becoming my friends, and that made Andy nervous. I was making more and more trips on my own. I found it easier to sell Andy without Andy there, pushing me to pop the question and blow the deal. On weekends, I often went to Washington and stayed at Ina Ginsburg’s house, editing the interviews she was doing with increasingly high-level politicians and officials, Republican and Democratic, going out to cocktails and dinners looking for new stories and new clients. I went to the Amazon with São Schlumberger and ten art collectors from the Museum of Modern Art’s International Council. I went to Colombia with Diane von Furstenberg and came back with a twelve-month advertising contract.

In February 1980, Andy, Fred, and I were in Zürich, and scheduled to depart for Düsseldorf in the morning. I decided not to go with them after all and drove to Gstaad with Thomas Ammann instead. It was a turning point of sorts, that road not taken, and afterward they seemed increasingly envious of my social life. In Gstaad I ended up staying with Bill and Pat Buckley. They asked me back every winter and also to Connecticut for summer weekends. In the spring and fall of 1980, their Park Avenue lunch parties usually included Jerry Zipkin, Estée Lauder, Nan Kempner, Fran Stark, and Betsy Bloomingdale, all of whom had either just spoken to Nancy Reagan that morning or were going to speak to her that afternoon. Except Bill Buckley, of course: He had just spoken to or was about to speak to Ronnie.

In July 1980, Denise and Prentis Hale invited me to their 10,000-acre ranch north of San Francisco. “You can’t say no to Denise,” Andy told me. “If we can get her portrait, we’ll get that whole crowd.” Andy liked Denise for two reasons. He said she was “the smartest of all those ladies because she puts her jewelry on and off in the limo where the hotel safe people can’t see how big it is.” And she was the ex-wife of Vincente Minnelli, which meant she was the ex-stepmother of Liza, which meant Andy had something to talk to her about.

Prentis Hale was the semiretired chairman of Carter Hawley Hale, which owned Neiman-Marcus, Bergdorf Goodman, a few hundred other department stores, and the Waldenbooks chain. He had become like a second father to me and Andy wasn’t happy to hear the advice he had given when I told him about my liver problems: “Anybody who doesn’t treat you right, who puts you down, drives you to drink and drugs, get rid of ’em. Cut ’em right out of your life.” Nor was Andy thrilled to hear about Prentis Hale’s collection of Renoirs and Bonnards. “If they like Impressionists,” he always said, “they don’t like my art.” Prentis didn’t. But Denise wanted her portrait in the worst way and Andy was waiting, Polaroid packed, for the call from the Coast when I went to stay with them for the second time. “Tell her we can trade for jewelry,” he said. I thought that would work as well as telling Lily Auchincloss she was running out of time.

After a long weekend by the heated pool in the ninety-degree heat, I flew to Los Angeles with the Hales in their corporate jet. That night, Denise and Prentis gave a small dinner in a private room at Le Restaurant for William French Smith and his wife, Jean, and William Wilson and his wife, Betty. “They’re the inner-inner,” Denise explained. “They’re the ones Reagan really listens to.” As it turned out, Smith became Attorney General, and Wilson, after convincing Reagan he should establish diplomatic relations with the Holy See, was the first ever American ambassador to the Vatican.

At the Hales’ dinner, the conversation moved to a discussion of the way the press was covering the Reagan presidential campaign. Bill Smith and Bill Wilson seemed more worried about the media than about Jimmy Carter. Wilson seemed to blame me personally for the press’s not reporting Carter’s alleged transfer of two jet fighters to Libya. “I didn’t know about that,” I said. But before I could explain that I was probably interviewing Diana Ross when it happened, he shouted, “I’m telling you it’s true!”

Janet de Cordova, the wife of the producer of “The Tonight Show,” stepped in and told Wilson that while I wasn’t a Washington correspondent, I had some pretty good ideas about how to help Reagan’s image with young voters. Wilson glared, Smith nodded, and Denise beamed. When I finished, Prentis said, “Young man, you could do a great thing for your country if you got Andy to switch.” Everyone agreed, as Prentis went on to say that he didn’t know why young people would admire “an artist who can’t paint, but they do, so we have to get him on our side.” Then he paused and added, “And if Andy did switch, I’d know for sure that he’s a big whore.”

When I got back to New York two days later, I broached the idea of doing a portrait for the Reagan campaign to Andy and Fred. To make it more palatable, I said I was almost certain that I could sell several more to his rich supporters after the election. Andy had already done a portrait for Ted Kennedy’s campaign, but it was obvious that Carter was going to win the nomination at the Democratic Convention in New York the following week. Fred immediately vetoed the idea, saying it would look ridiculous to switch from Kennedy to Reagan. “Why?” I said. “It just shows that you think Carter’s doing a bad job.”

The ensuing argument was not really about politics, though it had a lot to do with power. That became all too apparent when Andy announced that it was his birthday and he was taking Fred, Thomas Ammann, Richard Weisman, and a Texan friend of his to lunch. “Fred says you can’t come,” Andy told me, “because you’ll just get into a fight with Richard”—Weisman was a big Carter booster. After the lunch, I found out the real reason why Fred didn’t want me there. Thomas told me that the Texan offered to buy 25 percent of Interview for $2 million. Of course, neither Fred nor Andy mentioned a word of that to me.

In October, New York magazine asked Andy to do a portrait of Reagan for their cover and Andy wavered, as it wouldn’t be an endorsement and it was becoming more apparent every day that Reagan was going to win. Fred vetoed that out of hand too, saying, “Andy’s not an illustrator.” It was the same week that Andy’s Beatles cover for Rolling Stone hit the stands—approved by Fred.

The day after the election, Andy called from Düsseldorf and asked to speak to me. “Oh, Bob, I’ll do Reagan’s portrait now,” he said. I said he should have done it when Prentis Hale asked, or New York asked. I didn’t think they would want it now. “Oh, Bob, you’ve got to get me in with the Republicans. You’ve got to.”

Two days later, he called from Paris. “Are you going to the Inauguration?” he asked. I said my Republican friends could probably arrange for me to cover it for Interview. “Oh, can I come as your photographer, Bob?” asked the instant Reaganite convert.

Andy and I did cover the inauguration together. Or rather, he said, “Oh, this is too glamorous, Bob,” for four days and four nights, and I took notes and photographs for my “OUT” column, knowing my photographer would never part with his. Andy also stole my idea for a Christmas present for Jerry Zipkin that year: the last Carter White House Christmas card, signed by Jimmy and Rosalynn. Then he also stole my card, saying he’d lost his. “To Zip, love Andy,” he wrote—in his own hand—across it, not even “Andy and Bob.” Jerry roared with laughter when Andy gave it to him and said he was taking it with him to Palm Springs to show the Reagans at the Annenbergs’ New Year’s Eve party.

Meanwhile, I had arranged interviews with two of the Reagan children, Patty Davis and Ron, Jr., for our November issue, which turned out to be perfect timing, when their father won the election, and led to a tremendous amount of national and international pickup for Interview. We didn’t see Patty again, but Ron and his new wife, Doria Palmieri, were living in New York and Andy and I began to go out to dinner and the movies with them, just the four of us, and four Secret Service agents.

After the election and Ron and Doria’s hush-hush City Hall marriage, Andy and I took them to Nippon for a celebratory dinner. They seemed like two simple, normal kids, thrust into a complicated, abnormal situation. They said they got married so quickly and quietly to avoid going through tense events like all their parents meeting for the first time in front of TV cameras at the White House. Ron was about to tour with the Joffrey II ballet company and Doria said that meant she had to give up her job at a small publishing company in the Village. She wondered if she could do interviews for us. Maybe she could get us Frank Sinatra, I said. She said she’d try, if we could get her David Bowie. “Do you think you’d be interested in my father?” Ron asked.

In March 1981, when the Joffrey II tour was over, Doria started looking for a job, as Ron’s ballet salary was a pittance and the Reagans believed in making their kids stand on their own two feet. I hired her as my secretary. And while her presidential name certainly didn’t keep her from getting the job, as it might have elsewhere, she was more than qualified. I was impressed by the way she had handled a difficult transition with spunk, tact, humor, and intelligence. I had watched her keep the press hounds and political hangers-on at bay, bring Ron back down to earth, and win over her formidable mother-in-law as well as her mother-in-law’s formidable friends, including Pat Buckley and Jerry Zipkin. If she could handle that, I thought, she could handle working at the Factory. And, unlike the well-meaning heiresses that Fred usually hired for me, Doria Reagan could type, file, take dictation, and answer the phone properly. After twelve years, it was about time I had a real secretary.

Nancy Reagan posed for the December 1981 Interview cover but not, as many assumed, because her daughter-in-law worked for us. Jerry Zipkin, not Doria or Ron, got us the First Lady. And Mike Deaver approved it because he believed it would be helpful to have the President’s wife on the cover of a young, hip magazine after the White House china crisis, not because Doria worked there. Andy was indifferent, and sure it would never happen.

I thought she would be the perfect Christmas cover: Red was her color and she had the right combination of glamour, substance, and shock value—Nancy Reagan by Andy Warhol! It would also be a scoop; she hadn’t given any in-depth print interviews yet, only a television one to Barbara Walters. And it would make the rest of the press look at Interview with new respect. I wrote a short note to Jerry, asking him to ask her, with a postscript saying that we’d always count him among our close friends whether he did or not. Jerry showed the note to Mrs. Reagan and she said yes just like that—she liked the postscript, Jerry said.

Then Mike Deaver called and pressed for a list of questions to be approved in advance. I explained that wasn’t our style. Jerry convinced him that prepackaged questions would produce stiff answers and that our casual approach would work out just fine. Finally, Mrs. Reagan’s press secretary, Sheila Tate, called to set the time and date. “So, it’s just you and Doria, right?” she said. Doria was coming to relax everybody, not to participate in the interview. But it was also key to have Andy there—that was the whole point! I could almost see the distasteful expression on Sheila Tate’s face as she said, “Andy Warhol. Well, I’ll have to ask Mrs. Reagan about that.”

“Oh, no,” I told Doria. “I’m really in a fix. Andy’s acting like he could care less, but if I have to tell him he can’t come, he’ll take it out on me.” Doria said she’d call Sheila Tate and explain the situation, and was back in a few minutes with the good news: Mrs. Reagan “didn’t blink an eyelash” when Sheila Tate told her about Andy. Everything was set. I couldn’t believe it was actually happening: an exclusive interview with the First Lady, before Vogue or W or Ladies’ Home Journal, before Time and Newsweek. I ran to the Factory side of the office to tell Andy, barely stopping at my sister’s desk to tell her to call every advertiser we ever had or hoped to have. Andy’s reaction was: “Oh, really. Do I have to go too?”

The day before our trip to Washington, Jerry called. He was in a state. “I just had this horrifying vision,” he said, “of Andy starting off the interview with one of those crazy questions of his, like ‘How big is the President’s cock?’ So please, for my sake, be sure to drive it through that head of his—no sex questions.”

Andy was livid. “Does Jerry think I would do something like that? He doesn’t really know me, but you do, Bob. How can you even think that I would do something like that?”

The first thing Andy said to Nancy Reagan when we arrived at the White House was: “I have a bet with Doria that Ron will never get into Joffrey I.” She didn’t laugh. Then he went off onto a long, fragmented riff about “how weird Hollywood people are,” including his standard line, “they talk behind your back instead of to your face.” I think she thought he was talking about her. “I’m sorry, Andy,” she said several times, “I just don’t get what you’re saying.”

Mrs. Reagan wanted to talk about her newly chosen cause, the anti-drug program. I think he thought that she was talking about him. “I never saw anyone take drugs,” he said several times. “Have you, Bob?” I sat there, frozen in a cold fury, my mind emptying of all the serious questions I had planned to ask her. The next day, I went back to the White House for the photo session, with Robert Hayes and our photographer, Chris Alexander, but without Andy. I was much more relaxed, and so was Nancy Reagan. She became teary-eyed when Chris Alexander brought up their recently deceased mutual friend, Rosalind Russell. But she was all smiles for the camera. It was obvious that she liked it a lot more than the tape recorder.

A few days after the interview, Paul Morrissey stopped by the Factory and Andy couldn’t wait to tell him that Nancy Reagan was Jewish. “She told us that Nazimova was her grandmother,” he said, “and I remember reading somewhere that Nazimova was Jewish. So that means she’s Jewish, right?”

“Andy,” I corrected him, “Nazimova was Nancy Reagan’s godmother, not grandmother.”

“You can have a Jewish godmother?” said Andy. Then, making sure that Doria wasn’t within earshot, he added, “Well, Nazimova was a lesbian. Did you know that, Bob?”

Later, Mrs. Reagan told Doria that she had been stunned when Andy went off on his long tangents, because she had been under the impression that he barely talked and that I usually asked most of the questions. She had felt sorry for me during the interview, Doria said, because Andy seemed to be deliberately throwing me off track. All that showed in the transcript. Brigid and I labored over it for hours, trying to make Andy sound as if he knew what he was talking about. We only made minor adjustments to Mrs. Reagan’s short, tentative sentences—she often used “where” when it should have been “which” or “that.” One major adjustment: In her anti-drug remarks, Mrs. Reagan put pot in the same category as heroin and cocaine. I not only disagreed with that but also thought it would destroy her credibility with the very audience she was trying to reach. After some discussion with Deaver and Tate, it was agreed to delete her references to marijuana. (And I went home that night and smoked a guilt-free joint.)

Mrs. Reagan called me at home when the Christmas issue came out. “Hold a minute for Mrs. Nixon,” the obviously ancient White House operator announced. When I repeated the line to Mrs. Reagan, it really broke the ice. She said that she liked the interview, especially the preface, in which we taped Ron reminiscing about her. She loved the photographs and wanted to order one as a Christmas present for the President. She kept me on the phone for twenty minutes. She wondered what Doria would like for Christmas. She asked my opinion of her problems with the press. She giggled girlishly as I described the frantic social life of Gstaad. And she returned again and again to what was obviously the real purpose of her call: She was worried to death that her children might be kidnapped by Libyan agents and pleaded with me to tell Ron and Doria that they must keep their Secret Service protection. “Just don’t say it comes from me,” she said, like a real mother.

The Nancy Reagan cover was a home run: talked about, written about, praised, and pilloried. It so infuriated Alexander Cockburn that he did a four-page Village Voice parody, with Andy and me asking the same questions of Hitler. Even I had to admit it was funny—hysterically funny.

The entire issue had a great mix of subjects, from Diana Trilling to Buzzy Kerbox, Hawaii’s World Cup surfer, great photographs by Bruce Weber and Robert Mapplethorpe, and the greatest lineup of bylines yet: from Liz Smith and Rex Reed to Debbie Harry interviewing the Swiss artist who won an Oscar for the Alien sets. There was also an excerpt from Fran Lebowitz’s second book of collected columns, Social Studies, which had just hit the New York Times bestseller list, making Andy dislike her all the more: “I finally talked to Fran,” he told me. “I tried to give her a lot of bad advice and ruin her life.”

And we had seventy-six pages of advertising, just under our biggest ever September issue (which had included eighteen pages from Calvin Klein). And the ads ranged from Martha of Park Avenue and Palm Beach to a hot new rock star called Prince posed in a bikini in a shower with a crucifix. December capped another record-breaking year for advertising sales: Total pages were up 20 percent, revenues were up 30 percent to $628,000. I decided to give everyone on the Interview staff a raise.

Andy and Fred wouldn’t give me a raise though, for the third year in a row. All this good news should have made them happy, but for some reason it didn’t. Maybe they were both too racked by personal problems by then.

Andy’s problem was loneliness, and Jon Gould.

Fred’s problem was drinking, and Andy.

All through 1980 and 1981, Fred’s drinking continued to rage out of control. Night after night there were ugly, aggressive scenes. Sometimes his aggression was directed at me. In June 1981, when Andy came down with walking pneumonia, Fred and I went on the planned West Coast trip without him. At the Interview promotion party in Seattle, whenever anyone complimented me on the magazine, Fred told them that it wasn’t a money maker, as if he were a competitor instead of its president. In Los Angeles, at the dinner my friend Marina Cicogna gave to unveil the portrait of my client Florinda Bolkan, Fred attempted to stand on his head in the middle of Marina’s Venetian-style salon and screamed, “I WILL NOT BE A GOOD BOY! I WILL NOT BECOME A BORING GROWN-UP LIKE THESE PEOPLE”!—all the while glaring upside down at me.

I wasn’t the only object of Fred’s scorn. In fact, the more he liked or admired a person, the bigger a scene he made, and the more flowers he sent the following day with an abjectly apologetic note. There was a scorcher at the Metropolitan Museum involving two of Fred’s idols, Jackie Onassis and the would-be king of Italy, Vittorio Emmanuel II. He was asked to be an usher at the New York memorial of another long-time idol, Cecil Beaton, but was so hung over that he arrived after everyone had been seated. He lashed out at his friend Pilar Crespi at Mortimer’s over a nine-year-old perceived slight. He shouted, “MIDDLE CLASS! MIDDLE CLASS!” at the Herreras and the Erteguns at Elaine’s and then threw glasses against the wall. He railed against the Catholic Church at Courtney Kennedy’s prewedding dinner and was asked to leave by her mother, Ethel. Diana Vreeland had me on the phone for two hours after that incident. “I never thought that Fred would end up as a bum,” she said.

His fantasy life was out of control too. One night at Mr. Chow’s he got going on his tiresome tale about his family having owned Houston. When I heard him add that they had also owned Manhattan, I couldn’t help laughing. Andy told me that I shouldn’t make fun of Fred. “He’s probably telling the truth,” he said. That was the night that Andy started introducing me as “Fred Hughes.”

Of course, Fred was under a lot of business pressure, especially since his entire social life, like mine, was expected to be one long business dinner. And there were other reasons for Fred to drink in 1981. Both his father and his grandfather died that year. Andy said no one was allowed to mention the deaths to Fred or to anyone else; that was the way Fred wanted it. And Fred yelled at Barbara Allen because she had told Cornelia Guest about his father’s death and Cornelia had sent him a note.

Nonetheless, the big problem was Andy. It was all too obvious that Fred drank to get his attention and all too obvious that Andy didn’t want to give it to him. Fred’s drinking problem guaranteed Andy the upper hand. Once a year he had a very public “man-to-man talk” with Fred and told him in front of all of us that his drinking was “bad for business.” And then, Fred wouldn’t drink for a week or two. But when he started in again, Andy said nothing, or made excuses for his behavior, and Fred’s behavior went from bad to worse.

Jerry Zipkin took me aside a few nights after Fred somehow managed to expose Pat Buckley’s breast at a dance at the Carlyle. Things had gone far enough, said Jerry. It reflected very badly on Andy and me; it was time to do something. “You know how much I like the three of you. But I can’t go on defending you forever.”

Fred’s most explosive scene that year was aimed directly at Andy. We had gone to Paris in March 1981 for Nelson Seabra’s Red Ball. Fred was already feeling slighted because Seabra, a Brazilian grandee, had asked Andy and me for dinner, and him for after dinner. That same week, Birgitte de Ganay was giving a dinner at La Fleury, the family château at Fontainebleau, and Florence Grinda asked her to invite the three of us. We drove out in a chauffeured Mercedes with Florence, Fred in new salmon suede evening slippers from Hermès. Andy teased him about them. And then started moaning, “This is so glamorous,” the moment he saw the moat.

“Gee, thanks, Florence,” Andy said on the way back in the car, with Fred in the front seat next to the driver, zooming up the autoroute toward Paris. Then Andy suggested that Florence do some work for Interview. For some reason, that set Fred off. “I’M SICK AND TIRED OF YOU ACTING LIKE YOU HAVE ANYTHING TO DO WITH INTERVIEW, ANDY!” he shouted. “WHEN I’M THE ONE WHO DOES ALL THE WORK! AND WHAT THANKS DO I GET? YOU AND BOB TAKE ALL THE CREDIT. THAT’S ALL I EVER HEAR. ANDY AND BOB. BOB AND ANDY. ANDY AND BOB. BOB AND ANDY!” He was standing up in his seat now, turned around toward us, shaking his arms in the air, his fists clutched so tightly that his knuckles had turned white. Florence was sobbing, pleading with him to calm down, saying what a great team the three of us were. “Everyone in Paris says it,” she said. “Everyone loves the three of you together.”

“ANDY AND BOB! THAT’S WHO EVERYBODY LOVES. THEY TREAT ME LIKE A PIECE OF SHIT!” He suddenly lurched across the back of his seat at Andy, as if he wanted to hit him. Andy didn’t flinch, but the driver swerved to the side of the road and stopped the car. He said he wouldn’t be able to continue unless Monsieur Hughes controlled himself. Poor Fred soon passed out.

Florence said it was sad to see Fred destroying himself, he was such a special person, something should be done to help him. I suggested a drying-out clinic. “Fred doesn’t have a problem,” Andy insisted. “You just get too uptight, Bob. You should have a drink.”