The Legacy of Interview Magazine and a Trip to 1988

“I have to tell you, I was the only person there whose name I didn’t know,” Heilpern says.

Like everything Warhol touched, it could turn mass culture into counterculture, and vice versa, just by squinting.

The magazine’s patented celebrity-on-celebrity dialogues compounded the formula, like mixing colors on a palette. Instead of a journalist to interview Jack Nicholson, get Julian Schnabel. (For the results, see the April, 2003, issue.)

Tynan responds, “It was impressive. My friend Phyllis Newman said that as she walked in, a stranger came up to her, thrust out his hand and said, ‘May I introduce myself. I’m Donald Trump.’ She said later, ‘I knew then he was running for office.’ ”

The tape recorder (which Warhol called “my wife”) was always on, fashioning one-act plays out of casual conversations—the journalistic answer to found art.

What Interview became, over the decades, was unmistakably Warholian: a celebrity magazine as art object, in which fame was the raw material. Famous people, by virtue of being famous—or declaring themselves so—were inherently interesting, so why not recruit them into the art of conversation?

If you tend to blame celebrity culture run amok for our current national woes, you might find some poetry in this week’s news that Interview would fold, bankrupt, just short of its fiftieth year—mired in lawsuits over unpaid work and rampant infighting. But mostly it’s just a bummer, like hearing about an East Village punk den shutting its doors—ev... See more