INTERVIEW— BACK TO THE FUTURE?

What is Brant Publications doing with Andy Warhol's old mag?

The Press

BOB COLACELLO

It was a lot like the old days, when Andy was alive and I was editing Interview. The magazine was giving a brunch at Odeon for Metropolitan Opera soprano Aprile Millo, but only one of the sixty guests was from the world of music and that was Moby, the D.J. from the disco Mars. Otherwise, the downtown bistro was filled with fashion designers, jewelry designers, hat designers, shoe designers, photographers, painters, sculptors, and starlets. Sprinkled among their leather jackets and Gap T-shirts were the occasional Armani blazer and Hermes scarf, worn by advertising representatives from those companies. Like Factory lunches in the seventies, this seemingly casual Saturday in Tribeca was actually a glamorous setup to sell ads (at $8,950 a color page). A waitress hawked Cointreau on the rocks, Cointreau in coffee, and Cointreau and orange juice. That was like the old days too.

Most Warholish of all, though, was the drama going on behind the scenes, a drama that had begun with Andy's death in 1987 and was only now coming to its conclusion.

Four days before co-hosting this brunch, Sandy Brant, the new publisher of Interview, had dismissed its editor of two years, Shelley Wanger, and replaced her with Ingrid Sischy, the former editor of Artforum. Although both sides were being unbelievably polite, with Sandy Brant saying she "loved" Shelley Wanger and Shelley Wanger calling Ingrid Sischy "an excellent choice," the change was based on real personal and creative differences. And while Wanger graciously agreed to stay on through a two-month transition period and Brant graciously agreed to continue paying her $ 100,000-plus salary through the third year of her contract, things were not so civilized that Shelley was at the brunch.

Actually, Wanger's demise had been rumored since the summer, when Sandy and her husband, Peter M. Brant, an increasingly powerful player in the art and horse worlds, bought the magazine from the Warhol estate. It cost them $12 million—a lot for a small magazine that was losing money—though at one point or another there was interest from such major media moguls as Si Newhouse, Rupert Murdoch, Malcolm Forbes, and Jann Wenner, as well as from Revlon chairman Ronald O. Perelman and from Ian Schrager and the late Steve Rubell.

Forbes, the final underbidder, has gone into direct competition instead. "We are basically making Egg," he told me, "into what we would have made Interview back into." The owner of Rolling Stone and Us had similar intentions. "Shelley was taking Interview in a very different direction than I would have," Wenner said. "I thought it had to go back to being very light and entertaining." The Brants, too, talk of going back to the future. And perhaps they can do it better than anyone else: they have been among the most important collectors of Warhol's art since the late sixties, and they owned Interview once before, or at least a chunk of it, from 1972 to 1975.

"I see myself as a guardian," said Sandy Brant, a fine-featured collegiate woman of forty-two, with long straight sandy-colored hair, a little black dress by Ralph Lauren, and big plain gold jewelry. Likewise, her co-host, Paige Powell, Interview's longtime director of advertising and promotion, often starts sentences with "Andy would have... Paige, mid-thirties, also thin but perkier, with spiky short hair, is referred to as "the Widow Warhol" by some Factory staffers. After I left Interview in 1983, Paige regularly accompanied Andy on his nightly quest for more business, and at the brunch it seemed that she was already playing the same role for "shy" Sandy that she used to play for "shy" Andy. First, she brought onetime Interview writer Tama Janowitz over to Sandy's table to say hello, and got their small talk going. Then, just as it was running out, she came back with onetime Interview photographer Peter Beard.

Even before the switch in editors was announced, both Sandy and Paige were ecstatic about bringing back graphic artist Richard Bernstein—who had designed almost every Interview cover from 1972 until 1988, when Wanger stopped using him—for this month's twentieth-anniversary issue. And both were eager to tell me about another old Interview hand at the brunch who was also coming back: Glenn O'Brien, the magazine's longest-running columnist, was being named editor-atlarge. Glenn, fortysomething, looking like a Barneys ad in a gray pin-striped suit, black polo shirt, and black Belgian loafers, had been nudged out as managing editor by Peter Brant the first time around. It was Glenn O'Brien who recommended his friend Ingrid Sischy to the Brants.

Under Gael, Interview was all Pop and no art. Under Shelley, all art and no Pop.

Sischy was at Odeon too. Bom in South Africa in 1952, she is a short vivacious woman with dark shaggy hair falling in her face like the early Rolling Stones', and big battered red-and-gray checked glasses. Her "uniform" is a two-sizes-too-big man's shirt, sometimes striped, over colored pedal pushers. She had hardly known Andy, but she had published his work in Artforum. Several people, in explaining why they thought she was the perfect choice for the job, reminded me of her 1982 cover

of a model wearing an Issey Miyake dress. What could be more Warholian, they said, than fashion on the cover of an art magazine?

Peter Brant bounded in right in the middle of brunch and sat down next to Sischy. Athletic, his hair still thick and dark at age forty-two, he wore a bespoke blue blazer, gray flannels, a rep tie. If Sandy looks like a sorority sister, Peter looks like a frat-house stud. "We want to bring back the spirit of fun and discovery that Andy gave to the magazine," he told me, launching into a speech in the grandstanding manner of many moguls. "A lot of people thought that Andy was crazy, because of some of the people he had around, but Sandy and I spent a lot of time with Andy and we know that wasn't true. I mean, hell, Andy was one of the best businessmen I ever knew. He was really good at it. He just instinctively knew what business is really about. Andy was actually one of the biggest influences on my life and Sandy's. He was just one of the all-time greats. I mean, you take Andy and you take someone like Malcolm Forbes. Andy was a really great man, a figure for the history books, and Malcolm is great, he's nice, I like him and what he stands for—but you can't compare him to Andy."

Peter Brant also praised his wife. "She works ten, twelve hours a day on the magazine business. You can't beat that kind of dedication from an owner. I don't care who you are, you just can't beat it." Then, before dessert, he jumped up, instructing me, "Leave me out of your story," and dashed off to Belmont racetrack, where he watched one of his Thoroughbreds, Stella Madrid, win the $136,200 Matron Stakes. The leading two-year-old filly in the country, Stella Madrid was named after Julian Schnabel's daughter, whom the painter named after a prostitute friend of the Surrealist filmmaker Luis Bunuel. Later, Schnabel told me that he owned the filly with Brant. And that Peter owns "several" of his paintings. In fact, Schnabel and Brant seem to be locked into the same sort of deal-making and collecting relationship Peter had with Andy. Schnabel also said that he had recommended his great friend Sischy for editor of Interview right after the Brants bought it again.

Meanwhile, back at Odeon, Sandy Brant stayed until the last potential advertiser drained the last drop of Cointreau, and then, at 3:30 on a sunny Saturday afternoon, she went back to the office to work.

You can't leave Peter Brant out of this story. O.K., he's at the racetrack or on the polo field while his workaholic wife slaves night and day running Brant Publications, sometimes laboring so late that she stays overnight at the Mark Hotel, around the comer from their Madison Avenue office, instead of being chauffeured back to their Greenwich, Connecticut, estate. But he's the deal-maker, the big-picture guy, the one who really decided to get rid of Wanger. (A friend of the Brants' told me that, when asked about Shelley two days after they bought the magazine, Sandy said she was "wonderful" and Peter sliced the air above the table with his right hand.)

"There are people who don't like Peter Brant," says Ed Hayes, the Warhol Foundation lawyer, and an occasional indoor-badminton partner of Brant's. "But 1 think he's an exceptional guy. He's an extremely accomplished athlete, a very, very competitive man, incisive and decisive. And he's building up a mini-conglomerate in the art business.

Some think the Brants' desire for anonymity stems from an old-money pose, eschewed by the usual new-money Fifth Avenue socialites, that publicity is bad form. The Brants are never seen with the Kravises or Oscar de la Renta, and would never give a party like the Steinbergs or Malcolm Forbes. Their social life is centered on their main interests, art and horses. But you'll never read it in the gossip columns when the Duchess of York comes to stay at the heavily guarded home where they live with their five children—a teenage boy and girl and girl-boy-girl triplets aged nine.

Others assume that they have something to hide. Because, confusingly, there are actually two Peter Brants—in some circles he's called the "good" Peter Brant as opposed to the "bad"

Peter Brant, the Kidder, Peabody stockbroker convicted of insider trading with that Wall Street Journal reporter a couple of years back. The confusion caused several people to whisper about shady dealings, unsavory connections, and suicidal business associates, none of which had anything to do with the new owners of Interview. Not that the "good" Peter Brant hasn't had his share of weird incidents—a 1980 fire that destroyed their stables, killing nine horses, which the Brants suspected might have been arson; a 1985 extortion attempt against him by a former employee, involving death threats and shots fired through the living-room window, which led to two convictions. Ironically, Peter and Sandy Brant have only heightened their mysteriousness by insisting on the lowest of profiles. "There is something Gatsbyesque about Peter Brant," says an Interview contributor. "You know, everyone standing around at their parties, asking each other, 'Where does the money come from?' "

The money comes from the newsprint business, and there seems to be lots of it, with estimates of total worth running in the $200 million range. The list of their known assets is formidable. Brant is president and C.E.O. of Brant/Allen Industries of Greenwich, a privately held partnership with Joe Allen (there are two of them, too—this one is not the restaurateur). The company was started by Peter's father, Murray Brant, with Joe's father, now deceased. While figures are unavailable, the company is a major force in the industry, providing paper for publications like The Washing- ton Post and The Wall Street Journal. In addition to Interview, Brant Publications, a privately held partnership between Peter and Sandy, also owns Antiques magazine, which they bought in 1983, and Art in America, which they bought in 1984. ("After we turned it down," notes Malcolm Forbes.) Both monthlies have been looking slick and thick lately, and Sandy Brant, who oversees both circulation and advertising sales, says they're profitable. In 1985, Brant bid $51 million for The Village Voice, but lost out to Leonard Stem's $55 million topper. (Or so Peter told Andy, who told his diary, at a party on Malcolm Forbes's yacht.) Last year, Brant Publications acquired the small but highly prestigious art-book publisher Stewart, Tabori & Chang.

Everyone I interviewed for this article, including Peter Brant, called Shelley "a class act"

This February, the magazines and the book company will move into the fivestory cast-iron building on Broadway in SoHo that Brant Publications recently took a fifty-year lease on. It is currently being renovated by Jed Johnson and Alan Wanzenberg, who have also decorated the Brants' houses in Greenwich, Palm Beach, and Saratoga. The Larry Gagosian Gallery is said td be taking the ground floor of the Broadway building, for a rumored $1.5 million annual rent. Another art-world rumor has Brant backing Gagosian, though this appears to emanate from friends of Arnold Glimcher's Pace Gallery, which is locked in a fierce struggle with Gagosian over the anticipated de Kooning estate. (Only in the art business are there fights over estates before the artist dies.) And an impeccable inside source told me that Brant is now trying to buy the ultra-bluechip Leo Castelli Gallery. "Peter and

Leo went to see Daniel Wildenstein," this source said, referring to another blue-chip gallery owner, "to get him to go in on the deal, but he turned it down." A second well-placed source confirmed that Brant wants Castelli.

Separately from Brant Publications, Peter also partly owns The Thoroughbred Record, which he converted from a weekly into a monthly, and which is said to be losing money. If so, it may be the only part of his far-flung equine empire that isn't flourishing. According to the Daily Racing Form, Brant ranked twelfth among money-winning owners in the U.S., with earnings of $1,378,577 for the first nine months of 1989, not including Stella Madrid's Belmont victory. "And owning a brood mare like that," a Saratoga source says, "is like having a lifetime annuity."

"He's a very, very good judge of horses," says Etti Plesch, a grande dame of European racing and a big-winning owner herself. "And he has a very beautiful, very important stud farm in Kentucky. And you should see the farm he has in Argentina for his polo ponies. I was there last January and it really is quite something, what he's built down there, exquisite really. You know, of course, that he's also a very good polo player himself."

According to the U.S. Polo Association, Brant is a seven-goal player, on a scale up to ten, and he's often referred to as "the number-one amateur player in America." "Peter has gotten good at polo by dint of hard work and by having enough money to hire the best Argentine players to play with him and to get him the best ponies," says a former employee, who like most of my horse-world sources adamantly refused to be identified, saying, "Peter's too powerful."

His team of high-goal Argentinean pros includes the well-paid Hector Barrantes, dashing stepfather of the Duchess of York. The Brant team is based at the Greenwich Polo Club, which Peter founded and built. Its stone clubhouse and green-roofed grandstand are both straight out of Saratoga circa 1900.

Yet for all his success and power in the horse world, mystery and controversy surround his activities there. If he has all the drive to control of a Donald Trump, he has also prompted one wag to dub him "the John McEnroe of polo." There was a $30 million lawsuit, which Brant lost, against the U.S. Polo Association, which had suspended him for abusing an official and challenging him to fight. His lawyer told the press that the U.S.P.A. was "trying to prevent Peter from forming a rival group and competing for the best players and the best horses." And polo people are still wondering about what happened with the partnership he had formed to build a new polo club facing the ocean in Vero Beach, Florida, with Galen Weston, the Canadian retailing tycoon, and Geoffrey and Jorie Butler Kent, the Butler Aviation heiress, who fund Prince Charles's polo team (at an estimated annual cost of $300,000). "Everything was hunkydory," a horse-world observer told me. "Prince Charles was even photographed at the site last year—and then suddenly, Peter's out, and no one knows why." There is also lots of talk among the Lexington and Saratoga sets about Brant's acquisition of Fasig-Tipton, the Christie's of the horse world. Billionaire Carl Icahn was a fellow investor on this deal. "Peter tries to play every angle," I was told. "He owns the horses, the magazine that writes about the horses, and now the auction house that sells the horses. That's bound to create resentment, especially in an inbred, old-money, extremely snobby group like horse breeders."

And if he gets Castelli, he'll have another complete set—the art, the art magazine, and the art gallery. And the sets all seem to dovetail. Another Brant Thoroughbred is named Absolut Citron, an homage to their major vodka advertiser (for which Andy painted a famous ad).

In the last decade, Brant has made another fortune in real estate. In 1980 he bought 90 percent of the 1,481-acre Conyers Farm, the largest estate in Greenwich, for $18 million from Lee Annenberg's daughter, Elizabeth Rosenstiel Kabler. He added 148 of the acres to his adjacent 300-or-so-acre White Birch Farm and then marketed the other 1,167 acres, in mostly 10-acre plots costing an average of $750,000 each. A 1983 New York Times article, which called the deal a "gamble," estimated that Brant "may realize some $60 million in sales from his $18 million investment."

Among the buyers at Conyers Farm were tennis stars Ivan Lendl and Wojtek Fibak. One large purchase, about a hundred acres, was made by Henryk de Kwiatkowski, the Polish-American aviation tycoon, Thoroughbred owner, and amateur polo player, whose relationship with Peter Brant can best be described as friendly but competitive, with the emphasis on the but. Peter and Sandy Brant were at Kwiatkowski's wedding last summer to Barbara Allen, the former wife of Brant's partner Joe Allen. Joe and his second wife, Rhonda, a sculptor who has shown at Wildenstein's, were not at the wedding, even though they weekend just down the road in a house they rent from Peter and Sandy. If this sounds like a small world, it is. Small and tense.

What could be more Warholian than fashion on the cover of an art magazine?

The house that the Allens rent from the Brants was built by Robert Venturi, who could be called the Andy Warhol of architecture. It is essentially a Pop parody of a suburban split-level, carport and all, with an exterior of mint-green cement blocks and a triangular blackand-white tiled entryway that mocks every pretentious foyer from Great Neck to Encino. It was a daring house to commission, and even more daring to live in. It also marked the beginning of the Brants' involvement with Venturi, who then built houses for them, since sold, in Vail and Bermuda, and with serious architecture in general. Philip Johnson, whose Glass House in New Canaan is not far away, is a close friend. And their new house at White Birch Farm, completed in 1984, was built by Allan Greenberg, best known for the suite of offices he designed at the State Department. "Perhaps

America's pre-eminent classical architect today," wrote critic Paul Goldberger in a 1986 New York Times Magazine article that never mentioned the Brants by name. Of the house he added, "It is not only Mr. Greenberg's largest house; it is among the grandest residential structures completed anywhere in America in recent years."

It has also been called "the biggest Colonial ever built" and "Mount Vernon on steroids." But, unlike their first house, the Venturi split-level, there is nothing parodic or ironic about Peter and Sandy's great white mansion: it is simply and unabashedly magnificent, extravagant and restrained, traditional and provocative, huge and homey. They have furnished it, with the help of Jed Johnson and Alan Wanzenberg, in a startling mix of nineteenth-century American antiques and postwar American art. In addition to the Schnabels, and first-rate works by sixties stars like Warhol, Lichtenstein, Rauschenberg, and Johns, there are major paintings by Pollock, de Kooning, Twombly, Eric Fischl, and Ross Bleckner. A Warhol Mona Lisa shares a landing with a grandfather clock. The family room is filled with museum-quality Art Deco furniture and objects by Ruhlmann, Franck, and Dunand. A side wing encloses a full-size swimming pool under a vaulted ceiling and surrounded by high Palladian windows with views of rolling green hills and white-fenced paddocks where chestnut Thoroughbreds romp and loll.

It's almost as if Wangerand now Sischy-were editing a magazine published by a ghost.

"They have great taste," says private art dealer Thomas Ammann. "It's very rare. You see very few collectors who have everything great, who have the eye for everything—not just painting, but furniture, architecture, landscaping... What they did up in Greenwich is really, really beautiful. Even the polo club is perfect."

Peter and Sandy Brant were college sweethearts at the University of Colorado, at Boulder. He was from Forest Hills, Queens, an affluent neighborhood ten miles from Manhattan. She was from Arcadia, a middle-class suburb of Los Angeles. He drove a Ferrari, she studied hard. Neither graduated, marrying instead at the end of the sixties and moving to Manhattan. Peter and Sandy started buying Warhols from Leo Castelli, and Andy was so curious about these twenty-year-olds who were collecting his work that he asked David Whitney, who hung shows at Castelli, to introduce them.

"David took us to the Factory," Sandy recalled at the Odeon lunch, "and we met Andy and Fred [Hughes, Warhol's manager] and Jed [Johnson, then Warhol's film editor]. We ended up going to dinner at Max's with them and we all got along so well that we decided that night to take a trip to Paris together to shop for Art Deco."

That Paris trip led to Peter Brant financing Warhol's movie L'Amour, which bombed. The loss hardly hurt him, however, because Peter had begun a string of brilliant coups that expanded the paper business exponentially—as with Sandy, he is the negotiator and Joe the nuts-and-bolts man who makes it all work.

In 1972, Peter did two more deals with Andy: he published the Mao prints and, along with Joe Allen and Swiss art dealer Bruno Bischofberger, he bought 50 percent of Interview—and then sent his wife down to the Factory to work. Sandy Brant took over advertising, which at that point was being sold by Glenn O'Brien's wife, Jude Jade, and usually amounted to one or two pages in an issue, most of it in trade with the Village junk shops that provided us with the thirties movie-star stills we ran a lot of then.

We didn't see much of Peter, but Sandy came in early every morning and kept calling the advertising executives at the movie and record companies until they gave her an appointment. She then sat in their offices and kept talking, in her soft-spoken unfailingly polite but very persistent way, until they gave her an ad.

Glenn took over from me as editor in 1972, and Peter and he clashed. Their stylish wives didn't get along either, and soon Jude went to Giorgio di Sant'Angelo, and Glenn went to Rolling Stone. Rosemary Kent, a WWD editor, was hired in 1973, and fired in 1974. I took over again. Peter was inspiring but erratic: one day he complained about the stationery bills; another day he told us to come up with a budget to make the magazine glossy.

Andy and Peter had their differences too, though neither ever expressed them to each other, preferring to use Fred Hughes as their mutual punching bag. Andy was especially jealous of Peter's passion for horses, seeing every Thoroughbred the Brants bought as one less painting the Factory sold. Fred, in his endless cleverness, assuaged Andy's resentment for a time by persuading Joe Allen to commission a Warhol portrait of his horse Ferrous.

At the end of 1975, Brant and Allen pulled out of Interview, which was running at a loss of about $100,000 a year, and gave their shares back to Andy in exchange for paintings. The following year, however, they invested about $800,000 in another Warhol movie, Bad, directed by Jed Johnson, who had become Sandy Brant's close friend and constant collecting companion. When Bad did badly at the box office, Peter blamed Andy for not giving his all to the project, and proceeded to put five big Warhols up for auction at Sotheby's in 1978, at a time when the contemporaryart market was rather weak. Fortunately, Fred's old friends the de Menil family bid them up to respectable prices. But Andy vowed he'd never forgive Peter. In September 1981, he dictated this to his diarist, Pat Hackett: "I had to meet Peter Brant for lunch at the office.

. . .He picked out some prints, and now we're all settled with him on the money he invested in Bad and he never has to come back. Good."

Three years after that entry, in July 1984, the Brants were buying Warhols again. On Andy's first visit to their new house, he took note of how his work was hung: "And I went into the big room where they had a Marilyn over the mantle in a gold frame and it looked just beautiful. Really beautiful. It looked like a million-dollar painting. It looked so right in that room with all the America stuff. .. . And they had my Merce Cunningham in the same room where the Jasper Johns was.

The mood at Interview after Andy died in February 1987 was a lot like the mood at Interview before Andy died: demoralized, paranoid, chaotic. To begin with, the rumors which had started the year before that Si Newhouse was about to buy the magazine seemed more credible now that the Warhol estate was required to sell it within a few years by federal and state law, or transfer it to the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. And there were more rumors of more potential buyers, most notably Ronald Perelman, who was said to want it for his wife, TV personality reporter Claudia Cohen. But that was only the beginning.

Gael Love, who had taken over as editor when my successor, Robert Hayes, died in 1984, put the staff under strict orders not to talk to Fred Hughes, Interview's president. If they did, she told them, she'd fire them. Meanwhile, Bally's Casino chief Robert Mullane was rumored to be willing to fund a magazine for her. The strain left her so frazzled that by the end of her tenure deadlines were missed, causing serious distribution delays.

Advertising director Paige Powell resented Fred's power as executor of the Warhol estate and director of the Warhol Foundation, feeling that she had been much closer to Andy in his last few years. She was most upset about Fred's decision to auction off the contents of Andy's house, preferring that it be kept intact and turned into a shrinelike museum. Toward that end, she took it upon herself to write letters to several people on the Forbes 400 list, including Sid Bass, Gordon Getty, and H. Ross Perot, urging them to buy all 10,000 objects at the weeklong Sotheby's sale and to put everything back in the house, which presumably they would have to buy too, as Fred had put it up for sale as well, for $8 million. "I was careful to use my own stationery," Paige said, "not Interview's. "

That nicety was apparently lost on Fred, who read her the riot act when a copy of one letter found its way to his desk. In any case, Fred had long considered Paige an annoyance, thrust into the center of things at the Factory by Andy, to torture him. As for Gael Love, Fred had been trying to replace her before Andy's death, but he couldn't persuade the editor he wanted to leave her job at House & Garden. "I've been wooing Shelley Wanger for three years," he told me when he hired her in December 1987, having fired Gael Love a few months earlier.

Andy was especially jealous of Peter's passion for horses, seeing every Thoroughbred bought as one less painting sold.

That opportunity had finally come when Love checked into the hospital for "minor surgery." Several editorial, production, and circulation staffers went to a meeting in Fred's Vreeland-red office and told him about their problems with Gael. Though Fred later told New York magazine this had nothing to do with his decision, Paige Powell said that when she advised him to wait until Gael was out of the hospital, he replied, "You don't seem to understand, Paige. I have a mutiny on my hands."

Going from Gael Love to Shelley Wanger was like going from the sun to the moon. Gael's father, a Mr. Malkenson, was in the construction business and, she liked to say, "built the Long Island Expressway" (prompting us to dub her the L.I.E. heiress). Shelley's father, Walter Wanger, was one of Hollywood's most celebrated and intellectual producers, and her mother, Joan Bennett, one of its most elegant stars. Gael's husband, a Guggenheim by marriage, worked in the New Jersey cheddarcheese industry. Shelley's husband, a grandson of Averell Harriman, works for the liberal think tank the American Assembly. Gael began her career as a volunteer at Interview, answering phones. Shelley started out at The New York Review of Books, polishing V. S. Naipaul essays. Gael wore tight, bright Puccis from the sixties. Shelley favored basic black turtlenecks over straight black skirts with flat black shoes. Gael was always breaking her diet. Shelley was bom thin. Gael has been called tyrannical and rude in print. Everyone I interviewed for this article, including Peter Brant, called Shelley "a class act" (I came to think of it as her middle name—Shelley "Class Act" Wanger). Gael did special issues on Miami and TV. Shelley did special issues on the Soviet Union and the Future. The Wall Street Journal once described

Interview in the seventies as "a small work of art." That's what we saw it as, too—Pop art. But under Gael, it was all Pop and no art. And under Shelley, it became all art and no Pop.

Shelley Wanger's first issue, in March 1988, did not have its cover airbrushed by Richard Bernstein, which enraged the Warhol cult. Instead, Francesco Clemente did a startling selfportrait, which seemed to be painted in pastels and blood. In a bow to the classic Interview style of one star tape-recording another, Wanger had playwright John Guare question Chloe Obolensky, the set designer for Peter Brooks's productions. It wasn't exactly Lee Radziwill chitchatting with Mick Jagger on a speedboat off Montauk, but even the most fanatical Warholians had to admit that the form had hit rock bottom with Gael Love matches like Joey Adams by Soupy Sales. Out of ten features, only four were Q and A's. The rest were written by gallants from her loyal roster of House & Garden writers, Christopher Hitchens, Jonathan Lieberson, and Bruce Chatwin. Again, the Andy diehards grumbled.

There was also a jazzy new art director, replacing Marc Balet, who had laid out the magazine since 1977—and who left for a stake in Gael Love's new glossy, Fame (along with a few of the staffers who had once joined the "mutiny" against her). Also gone for good was Warhol favorite Christopher Makos, whose monthly photo column regularly featured dying-to-be-discovered young bicyclists, gymnasts, windsurfers, skateboarders, college students, and Chippendale's dancers showing off their pecs and abs. "Shelley took all the sex out of Interview," says former executive editor Kevin Sessums, who worked with both Love and Wanger. "If she saw a barechested man, it was out. Her attitude was very condescending towards Interview readers. It told them, 'I don't like you.' Interview's, not about being serious. It needed some serious stuff, but that's all there was under Shelley."

"Shelley's very intelligent," says Julian Schnabel. "And I appreciated a lot of the articles she ran, but they could have been in another magazine also. They didn't necessarily belong in Interview. ... And it lost that rough, raw look that made it accessible to young people."

The more Shelley Wanger cleansed Interview of its body worship and mindlessness, the more she turned off the Warhol cult, the hip young kids, not all gay, who bought it for just those things. It was unclear what new audience she was aiming at. Such transformations are not easy, and it takes time to reposition a publication in the marketplace. From 1987 to 1989, circulation drooped from 161,000 to 151,000. And time was running out on the legal deadline (though if the estate had chosen to transfer the magazine to the foundation, Shelley would have had five more years to find a new readership).

In early 1989, Fred Hughes and lawyer Ed Hayes quietly asked Henry Ansbacher Inc., the magazine-brokerage firm that sold Ms. for Gloria Steinem, to help with Interview. Its head, Hylton Philipson, says he "discreetly contacted about thirty people, including several Europeans and one Japanese" and those who had already expressed interest in buying it: Si Newhouse, Rupert Murdoch, Malcolm Forbes, Jann Wenner, and the Brants. Put off by Fred's hardto-get act, Ronald Perelman had already dropped out. Though Philipson won't say who, some of these big names also dropped out, after they saw financial figures for the period 198489. Annual revenue was in the $5 million range, but "profitability was not a feature."

Other sources told me that Shelley Wanger had a white knight of her own, Rea Hederman, who owns The New York Review of Books. He was said to be "going around town saying that the deal was railroaded to the Brants." He told me, "Something was funny. I was interested in it. I liked what Shelley was doing. I made many phone calls to Ansbacher, but I never in fact received all the information I needed to make my decision. On the Friday before the deadline for bids, Ansbacher's office promised the supplemental information by Monday morning. When it didn't arrive, I called them again and was told the magazine was sold over the weekend."

Philipson says Hederman asked for a "voluminous" amount of material: they gave him everything that was available; the magazine didn't keep very good records. "We never got a number from Hederman," he says, "and we had a pretty good idea of how high five other people would go. We concentrated on them." He calls the Brants "the preferred suitors," but makes it very clear that that didn't matter in the eyes of the law. "Fred Hughes had a fiduciary responsibility, and there was only one criterion for the sale: price." Jann Wenner told me that the bidding came down to the Brants, Forbes, and himself and that he thought "the Brants paid way too much. We felt five million dollars was a stretch. It was losing money, it had a horrible printing contract, advertising and circulation were going down, and it needed a major investment to bring the physical package up to date with the competition like L.A. Style, which has a much more attractive look."

Malcolm Forbes wouldn't disclose his last bid, saying only, "We weren't willing to pay as much as the Brants. They were willing to go higher because Sandy had her heart set on it." Philipson notes, "Peter had the checkbook, but Sandy has to run it and she had to convince him that it could be turned around. They bought it to make money." What did he think of the Brants? "They're a great team, Peter and Sandy. Both incredibly able. Both have nerves of steel. They're very, very good people."

Though the Brants didn't actually take possession until July 1989, the deal was announced in The Wall Street Journal on May 9, 1989. I knew that there was no way that Peter Brant, whom I had won over by saying that I too thought Goldwater would have been a great president, was going to have his name on a magazine that published Christopher Hitchens on Cuba, Edward Said on Yasser Arafat, and Alexander Cockbum on anything. A Warhol Foundation higher-up told me that Peter Brant told him that the magazine was much too left-wing for his liking. Paige Powell said, "Shelley was making it into a liberal-Democrat kind of thing."

Of course, much more than politics divided Shelley Wanger and the Brants. In any case, Wanger doesn't think that she gave the magazine an obvious political slant. "I like people because they're great stylists," she told me. "That's why I used Cockbum and Hitchens. And also P. J. O'Rourke, who's considered pretty far right." And she professed ignorance as to why she was let go, saying only, "I think it's perfectly normal that they would want to bring in their own people."

Class act to the end? Or not too worried, because, claims an Interview colleague, her contract specified that she receive a small percentage of the sale price if the magazine was sold. Ed Hayes says there was no percentage deal, but Shelley was given a "bonus" of a "confidential" amount.

Other Interview staffers and writers think there were other reasons for Wanger's dismissal. One told me that Shelley didn't like Sandy Brant from their first meeting, complaining, "She's so humorless." Another said, "You can't have two thin, pretty, intelligent women working together." And a third, who is close to Shelley, said that she felt "the Brants had an agenda all along, because they were incredibly distant." Peter and Sandy had only one dinner with Shelley, and the next day she said Peter had given her a lecture about his theory of publishing, but that was it.

One of Sandy Brant's first moves as publisher was to let go almost the entire advertising sales force, though Paige Powell was given a lucrative contract and moved uptown to the current offices of Brant Publications on Madison Avenue in the old Sotheby's building. In August, the same month that Shelley had her one and only dinner with Peter and Sandy, rumors spread of a similar bloodbath on the editorial side. Several names were bantered about as Shelley's replacement, including that of Glenn O'Brien. He was the only Interview old-timer that Shelley had kept— though when I asked her about his "Beat" column she just lowered her lids and shuddered elegantly. Over the years "Beat" had evolved from rock reviews to a revue of Glenn's own psyche. It has its following, but also its detractors, who say it is hard to read. "But easy to write," quips one Interviewer.

At the end of September, the day after the anniversary issue was put to bed, Sandy Brant was chauffeured down to the Factory in her Mercedes and met with Fred Hughes. She returned later that day and met with Shelley for the last time. "Shelley was upset," my source said, "but she only expressed it later in cutting remarks through a little smile."

If Brant gets Castelli, he'll have the art, the art magazine, and the art gallery.

Interview is back in the hands of the Warholian true believers: the Brants, Paige Powell, Glenn O'Brien—and Ingrid Sischy? "She thought Andy was great," says Julian Schnabel. "And she really knows his work. She's very, very curious about the world and a very good funnel for all kinds of information about the pulse of today. I don't think the magazine will be like before, but it will be alive."

Even Shelley Wanger's admirers agree. "Ingrid's a brilliant choice, an incredibly talented choice," says art critic Brooks Adams, who has written for both Wanger and Sischy. "And I'm sure she can get along with Sandy Brant." Picasso biographer John Richardson recalls working with her during her brief stint as a consulting editor at HG, after Wanger had left there for Interview: "I was terrified that a modish intellectual with ideas deriving from structuralism etc. was joining the magazine, and to my delight she turned out to be bullshit-free."

"Ingrid Sischy.. .doesn't belong to any team or party," art critic Robert Pincus-Witten told Janet Malcolm in a two-part New Yorker profile of Sischy titled "A Girl of the Zeitgeist." She made Artforum into everything serious art magazines were not supposed to be—hip, unpredictable, and amusing— and even turned a former Warhol Superstar, Rene Ricard, into a star art critic. Another of her favorites, Carter Ratcliff, was the rare high-art critic who had a real appreciation of Warhol's work. And some of the people she offended were also offended by Andy: William Rubin, the curator who took the modem out of the Museum of Modem Art; Hilton Kramer, the critic who thought it had never belonged there; Richard Serra, the artist who seems to have it mixed up with Marxism. In 1984, The New York Review of Books published a long poem by 77'm^-magazine art critic Robert Hughes titled "The Sohoiad: or the Masque of Art, a Satire in Heroic Couplets Drawn from Life," lampooning many of the young artists championed by Artforum, including "Julian Snorkel," "Jean-Michel Basketcase," "David Silly," and "Keith Boring." Sischy told Janet Malcolm that she didn't find it funny and said, "This poem reflects the gap that exists between the serious literary audience and the serious art audience."

That's also the gap between Shelley Wanger and Ingrid Sischy. The New York Review of Books was, of course, Wanger's first editorial home, and Robert Hughes was one of her oldest, closest friends. He was also one of Warhol's oldest, meanest enemies. Out of such atavistic alliances and feuds new careers are made and lost— especially at Andy Warhol's Interview, as the trademark above the masthead still reads, in bright-red script. It's almost as if Wanger—and now Sischy— were editing a magazine published by a ghost.

I have a real love affair with the present," says Ingrid Sischy. "I'm not very interested in the future, and I don't believe in the good old days." And then she says, "Warhol was the emblem of breaking boundaries. Socially, culturally, structurally, economically, art-historically. He was interested in everything going on and so am I."

We are lunching at the Oyster Bar a few days after meeting for the first time at the Odeon. She has rushed across town from her office at The New Yorker, where she will continue to work for one week a month—consulting on "the front of the book," reviewing photography, and writing the major AIDS piece she's been doing for the past two years. She tells me that she's not committed to using Richard Bernstein for every cover. But I later learn that, in another back-tothe-future move, she's been lunching Fran Lebowitz, who used to cover the waterfront for Interview. And that she has hired Italian Vogue art director Fabien Baron, who designed the Barneys ads that Glenn O'Brien wrote the copy for.

Over broiled sole, she fills me in on her background: Sarah Lawrence (also Wanger's alma mater); a first job at Print Collector's Newsletter; running Printed Matter, which published artists' books; curatorial intern in MOMA'S photography department; editor of Artforum at age twenty-seven. "I'm not an art historian," she explains. "I'm just a person who's passionate about visuals— painting, sculpture, prints, photography. I started columns on advertising and fashion at Artforum."

But, she says, she doesn't collect anything—not paintings, not Art Deco, not even cookie jars. "I live in one room and everything I own fits in one bag."

Personality magazines like Interview can be compared to dinner parties— with the story subjects as the guest list. In the trendy-downtown-magazine market, which Interview invented originally, there's a whole new crop of hopeful hosts and hostesses giving paper parties for what Malcolm Forbes calls "a market with 75,000 to 125,000 readers." There's L.A. Style, Paper, Model, The Face, and local versions from Boston to San Francisco. To edit his Egg, hard-boiled Malcolm Forbes has lured former restaurant critic Hal Rubinstein from Details, which is owned by Si Newhouse and edited by the Alice Mason of SoHo, Annie Flanders.

It will be interesting to see whose bash turns out best. Interesting, too, to watch how Ingrid Sischy gets along with Sandy Brant. How Glenn O'Brien gets along with Peter Brant. Whether Julian Schnabel starts to play a role in the publication parallel to the one Andy used to play. Whether Sandy Brant raises her social profile now that she's the publisher of a social magazine. (She and Paige Powell have already been giving lunches and dinners at Cafe Luxembourg and the super-hot 150 Wooster. And Sandy's name turned up this fall as co-chairman of a Dia Art Foundation benefit beside that of Anne Bass, whom she resembles in many ways.) Perhaps most interesting of all will be to see how Peter Brant uses Andy Warhol's Interview in his continuing progress in the art business.