Bob Colacello: you never know who you'll end up meeting at Interview, and as Bob Colacello, the magazine's former editor, reveals, you never know where those encounters will take you

CC: Was that ever discussed?

BC: Yeah. A group of us were invited for a week-end at Patty and Gustavo Cisneros's house in La Romana [Dominican Republic], and on that trip John Gutfreund, who was then the head of Salomon Brothers, said to me: "I think Interview is ready to take off. We could probably raise several million dollars to invest in it, but I'm sure one condition would be that you have some equity in the magazine so you're sure to stay." I went back and told Andy this, and instead of being delighted that we could really make the magazine big, he told me I was getting too big for my britches. He wouldn't hear of it, and I realized you can only hang around a genius for so long before everything that's yours becomes theirs.

CC: So you went on to establish yourself as your own person, and thus became Bob Colacello the great journalist.

BC: I had to learn how to do journalism when I got to Vanity Fair [where Colacello is a special correspondent], because at Interview we were just turning on the tape recorder and letting people say what they wanted to. I think the interviews we did in those days had a fascinating fly-on-the-wall quality, but we weren't investigative journalists. We weren't out to expose people, though sometimes they exposed themselves unwittingly.

CC: I know the last four or five years of your life have been devoted to working on this book, which is going to be the definitive work about the Reagans as a couple. How did this project begin?

BC: It actually started with an assignment from [Vanity Fair editor] Graydon Carter in 1997. He called me into his office and said, "I think it's time to take a look at the Reagans again. I want you to really examine their personal side, not just the political end of things." I was thrilled because they're the perfect subjects for me. The social side is very important in their case, but the story also allowed me to use the education I had from Georgetown, and my lifelong interest in politics and history. So that led to nine months of research and writing, which produced the longest story Vanity Fair has ever run--almost 30,000 words. It ran in two parts, in the July and August '98 issues. Because of those two pieces, several publishers approached me about expanding them into a book. I signed a contract with Warner Books in November 1998, thinking that because I had so much material from my Vanity Fair articles, I would have no problem completing the project in the two years stipulated by my contract. But a biography is like quicksand. When you're writing about two people who have lived 176 years between them, you can spend 176 years trying to track down every detail, every moment, and every fact about their lives. So I got one extension and then another. There was a point when I thought it would never be over, and that the rest of my life would just be about trying to finish this book. Somewhere along the way I sold my apartment in New York City and became a full-time resident of Amagansett, Long Island. I got an office by the East Hampton airport. It's like half an airplane hangar, which is how much room I needed for all the material I'd accumulated.