Word: colacello
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...without her famous surname. "You could put her out in the sunlight in the middle of the day and she looked like an angel," he recalls. But others credited her rapid ascent to the Hemingway mystique. "As celebrity became aristocracy, it became inheritable," says former Interview magazine editor Bob Colacello, who knew Hemingway as part of the crowd at the now legendary Studio 54. "She inherited this fame and this position." Hemingway later said she felt like an imposter in that world and started drinking "to loosen...
Holy Terror is something of a get-even book. Colacello spends an obligatory few words professing initial affection for his benefactor, but he is soon disillusioned by Warhol's "bad skin, bad teeth, bad hair" and all the work Colacello has to do, ghostwriting Warhol's books, selling ads, even doing Warhol's social climbing for him when he is too tired to go out at night. Editing is too kind a word for Colacello's job at Interview, which included cozying up to advertisers and selling expensive Warhol celebrity portraits, for which Colacello would earn a fee (about...
Celebrity is not new. Leo Braudy in The Frenzy of Renown traced its origins to Alexander the Great and other leaders who used fame to consolidate their power. But as a lucrative career in itself, celebrity is a recent creation. A herd of columnists like Colacello moos after the newly famous, chronicling tectonic shifts in the species and its habitats imperceptible to anyone but the most tireless observers. The columnists then become famous for their mooing...
...easy work. Hours must be spent reading the gossips, days whiled away worrying about seating plans. The phone is a tactical weapon. A night at home alone induces existential dread, and success for someone like Colacello is measured not simply in invitations secured but also in invitations to events from which Warhol is excluded. Friendship seems to be beside the point; in a moment of accidental insight, Colacello remarks of the clot of people around Warhol that they wanted to go out with Andy, not home with...
...Colacello can be funny when he notes that the drawback to linking up with high-visibility people like Imelda Marcos is "their tendency to attract assassins." But mostly, he is petty and meanspirited. He fittingly closes with a bit of celebrity mugging that serves as a pathetic epitaph for his putative patron. In a group invited to Warhol's house after his death, Colacello takes the opportunity to steal into Warhol's private bathroom so that he can catalog the anti-aging cosmetics and acne ointments for inclusion on the last page of this book. These two creatures of hype...