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: How did you get through the process?

BC: Wayne Lawson--who I think is the most brilliant magazine editor around for magazine writers, and who's on staff at Vanity Fair--suggested the book be in two volumes, the first going up to the night Reagan was elected president, and the second the White House years and afterwards. It allowed me to see the light at the end of the tunnel. Once we cut the book in half I sort of picked up steam. I actually handed in the manuscript on May 21 of this year, and Ronald Reagan died on June 5, whereupon this whole hysterical process started.

CC: Because the second he died, everyone wanted you as a commentator.

BC: Right, and between handing in the manuscript and Reagan's death, my father passed away. I was literally coming home from his funeral lunch when the news started coming across the radio that Reagan's end looked imminent.

CC: That's right. I think I called you.

BC: You did. You actually conveyed the news to me that the president had died.

CC: It was really a dramatic scene. Could you have done this book without the cooperation of Nancy Reagan?

BC: No. She has been fantastic. She's not only given me access to herself and some of her personal papers like family letters and her mother's scrapbooks, but she's also given me access to all of her friends. She's included me at events at the [Reagan] library, and I've gone with her and her friends to the christening and the actual commissioning ceremony of the USS Ronald Reagan. With all of that, you get more and more insight into the people around her and what these friendships meant. I've been able to really see so much of this from an insider's point of view. The important thing, though, is that when I sit down at the typewriter, I don't see myself as an insider. Then I become an outsider and have to look at my subject as a journalist or a historian does.

CC: After the excerpt appeared in Vanity Fair last August, a number of your more liberal friends expressed surprise that this was such a balanced portrait of the Reagans. Because you are a conservative Republican, they expected the book was just going to be a paean to the Reagans, but you've really examined them, warts and all.

BC: What's important is to humanize people. For a brief while between Interview and Vanity Fair, I wrote cover stories for Parade, and one of the things Walter Anderson, the longtime and brilliant editor of the magazine, told me was, "You've got to find where the struggle was in the lives of these people who are so successful and so glamorous. That's what makes the average person able to relate to them." So in writing about the Reagans I just tried to treat them as human beings.

CC: What do you think makes them such an interesting subject?

BC: For me, it's how these two people who were above average but not extraordinary on their own got together and went all the way to the White House as a team. I really admire Nancy Reagan because I think she's devoted her life to her husband, and even played down her own role for fear that people would say she was running the show. The fact is I don't think he would have made it without her. He had very strong ideas about what he wanted to do as governor and as president; he loved everyone, but he didn't connect that strongly to individuals. He needed someone like Nancy who does connect, who does follow up, who does make judgments. The way they fulfilled each other and complemented each other is, I think, very interesting.