The wonderful memory of Bob Colacello should be the legacy of humanity, or at least of New Yorkers. Now 76, the famous former member of Andy Warhol's clique – he worked at The Factory and directed Interview magazine – sees himself as the natural heir to his Neapolitan grandmother, a great accountant. Stories that were She was even asked by her neighbors to provide the dates of their respective weddings. “He remembered everything about the residents of the block. They asked him, “When did I get married?” and he replied, “It was right around the time Roosevelt arrived, so it must have been 1933.” She was like an informal archivist of everything on that block happened in a middle-class neighborhood in Brooklyn, but Bob's “neighbors” were completely different: Warhol, Halston, Imelda Marcos, Salvador Dalí, the Reagans… Their anecdotes are part of the official and unofficial history of the 20th century. He has already written biographies of the First and the Last (Holy Terror and Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House), but he continues to reveal gems in lectures and presentations or in this interview in his Upper East Side apartment, where He lives surrounded by portraits of artists as diverse as Francesco Clemente and Dustin Yellin. He remembers Halston being called “His Highness” because he was always “high.” The Philippine president recalls being fascinated by a painting by Francis Bacon at the Metropolitan of New York and having to explain to her that these works were not for sale (she ended up buying eight works by the same painter at the Marlborough). He remembers the painter from Figueras inviting guests to parties at the St. Regis without taking no for an answer (Gala called with the day and time and hung up immediately after) and his weakness for the Dominican trans -Actor Potassa de la Fayette.
Bob Colacello was always there, half-crouched, in his horn-rimmed glasses, amid the flashbulbs of his “boss,” and that made him a kind of discreet narrator of one of the most mythologized eras in pop culture. Now he has published a book called “New York Memories” (Ivorypress) with short texts, almost greguerías, accompanied by striking black and white photographs by the Spaniard David Jiménez. As a homage to the memoir “I Remember” by his beloved Joe Brainard, he begins all the lines with “I forgot”. “I forgot that Woody Allen always sat at the most visible table at Elaine's and pretended to be invisible.” Or: “I forgot that Truman [Capote] He told me, “Don’t listen to Andy.” [Warhol]. “He doesn’t know anything about love.”
But what distinguished Colacello from other squires of the king of pop art, such as Peter Marino and Chris Makos, was his decidedly conservative, republican and monarchical character. “Someone had to be a monarchist in the art world,” he says sarcastically, again referring to his grandmother, whom he found crying one day. When asked what happened, he replied: “They murdered the king of Iraq.” [Faisal II], and he was only 23 years old. Oh, Robert, when you grow up there will be no more kings in the world.” When, on one of his trips to Paris, he danced with the princesses María Gabriela and María Beatriz de Savoy, he called her to tell her , and she said to him, “Oh, Robert, I always knew you would reach the top.” “Everyone in Europe knew that those titles were really worthless, but in the United States we have always loved royalty.” says Bob.
Colacello separated professionally from Warhol at the age of 35 and has remained closely connected to his legacy ever since. Considered one of Vanity Fair's most renowned interviewers (with interviews with the then Prince Charles of England and Naomi Campbell), he now combines his most personal writings with his status as deputy co-director of the Peter Marino Artistic Foundation in Southampton (where his second residence) and with his work in the renowned galleries of Vito Schnabel, Julian Schnabel's son, he does not lose his curiosity about the work of new generations. “My friends’ kids think I’m their parents’ coolest friend,” he says.
“When Andy hired me, I was 22 years old and suddenly I was having dinner with Diana Vreeland, who was about 70 years old, or with Truman Capote. They were people a generation or two older than me and they opened their doors to me, they were charming. That's why I feel like I'm the oldest now and it's my turn to help the young people. I learned from Andy how he used to organize impromptu meals at The Factory with everyone from the ambassador of Iran or China to Peter Beard and a few models. But it's not something only he did; Jean Cocteau also did it in Paris in the 1920s. I think everything becomes more boring and narrow-minded, less creative when there are only Germans, or only doctors, or only Generation X, a single race… In the end everything becomes a ghetto or a tribe. And I think we have to be careful with this current trend,” he reflects, ending with a pop twist to his argument: “In my day, all the white drag queens were imitating Diana Ross and Gloria Gaynor.”
In the encounter and the exchange lies the joy for the person who considers himself to be “the only person in the United States who was as close to Warhol as Nancy Reagan” and who explains that what many criticized as frivolous about Andy Warhol's art , much deeper reasons had roots. Last September, when he gave a lecture at the Independent 20th Century art fair in New York, he defended the culture of celebrity as the cult of today's society, recalling that the figure of the icon comes precisely from the religion in which they were raised became Warhol, the Byzantine Catholic Church. “When I painted Marilyn, Elvis, Jackie [Kennedy] or Liz [Taylor] They were secular saints who revered the United States,” he says. And he also recognized that only someone from as low a social class as Warhol – the fourth child of an Austro-Hungarian family in Pittsburgh whose father worked in the coal mines – could become the great portraitist of fame. “His mother bought him cheap zines with coupons that he could send to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer or Warner Brothers so they could send you signed photos of Mickey Rooney or Shirley Temple. Andy went to the movies every Saturday and grew up with this visual idea of fame. “His story emerges from the intersection between the Hollywood advertising machine and the Church of Eastern Europe,” concludes Bob Colacello.
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