Andy Warhol and Bob Colacello's collaboration

Andy Warhol and Bob Colacello’s collaboration made Interview both a working enterprise and a means of keeping Warhol connected to new people and public life. Its reach extended beyond the magazine: Colacello accompanied Warhol on a demanding promotional tour, and Warhol brought him into privileged social settings. Yet their closeness did not eliminate friction. When Warhol tried to comment on a book Colacello was producing with Brigid Berlin, the two colleagues repeatedly talked over him, and he withdrew from the discussion.

Interview as a shared enterprise

By 1976, Interview’s growing circulation and celebrity appeal had made the magazine a steady source of fresh faces for Warhol. His promise to put people in the magazine had taken the place of his earlier offer of a role in a film. Warhol sometimes conducted cover interviews himself, while Colacello was visibly involved in the magazine’s dealings with its subjects and audience. In one telling instance, he reassured a society matron worried about her photograph by joking that anyone over twenty would be retouched. The joke captured the publication’s self-mocking glamour and its willingness to treat appearance as part of the editorial process.

That work took place within a magazine Warhol had made central to his professional life. He had become its full owner and publisher, and he took an active interest in its layouts and efforts to attract advertisers. Colacello’s presence on the phone and in the magazine’s orbit connected the publication’s polished public image to its daily personal exchanges. Interview offered Warhol a continuing way to meet people; Colacello helped sustain the social and editorial world that made those encounters possible.

Work carried into public life

The partnership also involved shared appearances outside the office. At Jackie O.’s Christmas party in December 1978, Warhol noticed that Colacello had not been included in the invitation and brought him along. Colacello was delighted by the invitation and by the party’s small courtesies. The following day, Jackie O. called Warhol several times and eventually told him directly that she had invited him, not Colacello, because she was concerned that Colacello would write about what happened. Warhol told her not to worry: Colacello would not write anything. The episode exposed the tension built into their work. Colacello’s identity as a writer could make him unwelcome in a private room, while Warhol’s loyalty to him brought him through the door.

Their professional partnership was also tested on the road. After three weeks of travel with Colacello and Fred Hughes to promote Exposures, Warhol described a tour that began with a chic appearance in President Carter’s box at the Kennedy Center and ended with a book signing at B. Dalton’s on Hollywood Boulevard. At the signing, a woman with a knife wound challenged Warhol’s identity, turning a routine promotional stop into an unsettling public encounter. In Dallas, a party for the book was held in a department-store boiler room, and a local man offered to escort the visitors to a discotheque because he thought its atmosphere might require protection. These sharply contrasting stops show the conditions under which Colacello and Warhol represented the book together: celebrity access and publicity on one side, unpredictable encounters and regional assumptions on the other.

Creative tension over a book

The limits of the partnership surfaced when Warhol tried to review text for a photo book with Colacello and Brigid Berlin. Each time he made a suggestion, Colacello raised his voice to insist that the text was already excellent, and Berlin agreed just as emphatically. Warhol felt there was little point in being asked to read work whose makers rejected every suggestion, so he left them to it. He thought the result was poor, although he liked the title, Social Disease, and considered the photographs very good.

The disagreement was not a break in the relationship so much as a revealing contrast in their working roles. Warhol wanted to participate in shaping the book; Colacello and Berlin treated their own judgment as settled. The episode left Warhol outside a project bearing Colacello’s editorial labor, even as the two continued to work together in the wider world of Interview and book promotion. Their collaboration was therefore sustained by shared work and access, but not by unquestioned agreement.