Quote from Ebay seller: "Interview Magazine, January 1979, Signed By Andy Warhol. Magazine dimensions: 17" x 11.5". Magazine is fixed at back to board and sits in frame with plexiglass cover. Truman Capote Interview (extensive) with many photographs. There is a small tear on the front page at the end of the Andy Warhol signature (as pictured.) This is an important copy of Interview Magazine with an extensive Truman Capote interview. If you are a Warhol and/or Capote fan, you will enjoy this vignette. In the late 1970s, Capote was in and out of rehab clinics, and news of his various breakdowns frequently reached the public. In 1978, talk show host Stanley Siegal did a live on-air interview with Capote, who, in an extraordinarily intoxicated state, confessed that he might kill himself. One year later, when he felt betrayed by Lee Radziwill in a feud with perpetual nemesis Gore Vidal, Capote arranged a return visit to Stanley Siegal's show, this time to deliver a bizarrely comic performance revealing salacious personal details about Radziwill and her sister, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. In an ironic twist, Warhol (who had made a point of seeking out Capote when he first arrived in New York) provided the author with the platform for his next artistic renewal. Warhol, who often partied with Capote at Studio 54, agreed to paint Capote's portrait as "a personal gift"—rather than for the six-figure sums he usually charged—in exchange for Capote contributing short pieces to Warhol's Interview magazine every month for a year. Initially the pieces were to consist of tape-recorded conversations, but soon Capote dispensed with the tape recorder and chose instead to craft meticulously composed "conversational portraits" that applied his literary skills to the magazine's dialogue-driven format. Out of this creative burst came the pieces that would form the basis for the bestselling Music for Chameleons (1980). To celebrate this unexpected renaissance, he underwent a facelift, lost weight and experimented with hair transplants. Nevertheless, Capote was unable to overcome his reliance upon drugs and liquor and had grown bored with New York by the turn of the 1980s. After the revocation of his driver's license (the result of speeding near his Long Island residence) and a hallucinatory seizure in 1980 that required hospitalization, Capote became fairly reclusive. These hallucinations continued unabated and scans revealed that his brain mass had perceptibly shrunk. On the rare occasions when he was lucid, he continued to hype Answered Prayers as being nearly complete and was reportedly planning a reprise of the Black and White Ball to have been held either in Los Angeles or a more exotic locale in South America. On a few occasions, he was still able to write. In 1982, a new short story, "One Christmas", appeared in the December issue of Ladies' Home Journal and the following year it became, like its predecessors "A Christmas Memory" and "The Thanksgiving Visitor", a holiday gift book. In 1983, "Remembering Tennessee", an essay in tribute to Tennessee Williams, who had died in February of that year, appeared in Playboy magazine. The series of short stories by Truman Capote began with the February 1979 issue. They were later published in book form as Music for Chameleons. Truman had appeared on Interview's January cover, with an interview inside the issue. He also had a facelift in February. (BC406) Bob Colacello: "It had all started one day in November 1978. Between swimming with Truman, smoking pot with Truman, dining with Truman, and dancing with Truman, it suddenly occurred to me that we should put Truman on the cover. Andy loved the idea: He already had entire days of Truman on tape. When I called Truman to say we wanted him on our January cover, he said he would only do it if Andy did the cover portrait himself. I explained that if Andy did Truman, he'd have to do every cover after that and we had to keep Andy's portrait business separate from the magazine's covers. 'Well, if I'm not good enough for Andy, ' said Truman, 'Then his magazine isn't good enough for me.' I went to Andy with Truman's reply, and we came up with a counter offer: Andy would paint Truman's portrait, not for the cover, but as a personal gift, in exchange for Turman's contributing a piece to Interveiew every month for one year. 'He really wouldn't have to do anything,' Andy said. 'Tell him that I'll just tape him with any person he wants every month and then Brigid [Berlin] will type it up and can make something out of it. Tell him it's a new way to write without writing. I'm sure he'll go for it...' Conversations with Capote debuted that February. Andy had taped Truman at the apartment of Robert Livingston, a gay activist who was dying of cancer, and at the office of Dr. Norman Orentreich, the highly publicized dermatologist... But it was the last time he [Capote] based a piece on tapes made by Andy. The problem was that Andy overtaped and threw the conversations off course, and then Brigid couldn't deal with typing up that much tape, and Truman couldn't deal with cutting down that much material. They both became quite hysterical over the fifty-page Orentreich manuscript, and finally Brigid exploded at Andy when he arrived at the Factory one afternoon. 'You just thing the more the better,' she told him. 'And you say the stupidest things.' Andy was used to Brigid's bluntness and hit back with a blunt line of his own, 'You look fat today, Brigid.' " Go there!
