Bob Colacello, the discreet narrator of the mythical era of pop culture

The prodigious memory of Bob Colacello should be the heritage of humanity or, at least, of New Yorkers. Now 76, he was once an illustrious member of Andy Warhol's clique — he worked at The Factory and ran the magazine Interview— sees himself, in a certain way, as the natural heir of his Neapolitan grandmother, a great storyteller who was even requested by her neighbors to tell them the dates of their respective weddings. He “he remembered everything about those who lived in the block. They asked him, 'When did I get married?' And he said, 'It was right when Roosevelt arrived, so it must have been 1933.' She was like an informal archivist of everything that happened on that block of a middle-class neighborhood in Brooklyn, but Bob's “neighbors” were quite different: Warhol, Halston, Imelda Marcos, Salvador Dalí, the Reagans… Her anecdotes belong to the official and unofficial history of the 20th century. Of the first and the last she already wrote biographies (Holy Terror and Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House), but he continues to reveal pearls in talks and presentations or in this interview in his apartment on the Upper East Side, where he lives surrounded by portraits made by artists as different as Francesco Clemente or Dustin Yellin. Halston remembers that they called him “his highness“for always going”high” (placed). She remembers about the Filipino president that she became infatuated with a painting by Francis Bacon from the New York Metropolitan and they had to explain to her that those works were not for sale (she ended up buying eight by the same painter at the Marlborough). He remembers about the painter from Figueras that he would invite people to parties at the St. Regis without taking no for an answer (Gala would call giving the day and time and hang up the phone immediately afterwards) and his weakness for trans performer Dominican Potassa de la Fayette.

Bob Colacello was always there, half crouched, with his horn-rimmed glasses, among the flashes of his “boss,” and that made him a kind of discreet narrator of one of the most mythologized eras of pop culture. He has now published a book titled New York Memories (Ivorypress) with short texts, almost greguerías, accompanied by evocative black and white photographs by the Spanish David Jiménez. In it, honoring the memories I Remember (I remember) his admired Joe Brainard, begins all his lines with i forgot (forget). “I forgot that Woody Allen always sat at the most visible table at Elaine's pretending to be invisible.” Or: “I forgot that Truman [Capote] He told me: 'Don't listen to Andy [Warhol]. She knows nothing about love.”

But what distinguished Colacello from other squires of the king of the pop art like 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 sardonically and refers again to his grandmother, whom one day he found crying. When she asked her what had happened, she 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 kings left in the world.” Thus, when on one of her trips to Paris she was dancing with the princesses María Gabriela and María Beatriz de Savoy, he called her to tell her and she told 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 in touch with his legacy ever since. He was recycled as one of the most reputable interviewers of Vanity Fair (with interviews with the then Prince Charles of England or Naomi Campbell), and now combines his most personal writings with his status as associate co-director of the Peter Marino artistic foundation in Southampton (where he has his second residence) and with his work in the renowned galleries of Vito Schnabel, son of Julian Schnabel, as he does not lose his curiosity about the work of the new generations. “My friends' children think I'm the best friend. cool from their parents,” 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. So I feel that now I am the oldest and it is my turn to help the young people. I learned from Andy, how at The Factory he always organized spontaneous meals with all kinds of people, from the ambassador of Iran or China to Peter Beard and a couple of models. But it's not something that only he did; Jean Cocteau also did it in Paris in the 1920s. I think everything becomes more boring and closed-minded, less creative, when you only have Germans, or only doctors or only generation X, a single race… Everything ends up becoming a ghetto, or a tribe. And I think we have to be careful with that current trend,” he reflects, and ends with a pop twist to his argument: “In my time, all the white drag queens imitated Diana Ross and Gloria Gaynor.”

In the meeting and in the exchange lies the pleasure for who considers himself “the only person in the United States who was as close to Warhol as to Nancy Reagan” and who explains that what many criticized as frivolous in Andy Warhol's art had some much deeper roots. When he gave a talk last September at the Independent 20th Century art fair, held in New York, he defended the culture of celebrity as the cult of contemporary society and recalled that the figure of the icon comes, precisely, from religion in who was educated Warhol, the Byzantine Catholic Church. “When he painted Marilyn, Elvis, Jackie [Kennedy] or Liz [Taylor] They were secular saints that the United States worshiped,” he says. And he also recognized that only someone coming from a social class as low 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 that came with coupons to send to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer or Warner Brothers so they could send you photos signed by Mickey Rooney or Shirley Temple. Andy went to the movies every Saturday and grew up with that visual imagery of fame. “His story is born from that intersection of the Hollywood publicity machine and the Church of Eastern Europe,” concludes Bob Colacello.

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