Fran Lebowitz - Interview magazine columnist - Interview

Interview, Oct, 1994 by Marc Balet

FL: In the old-fashioned sense of the word. And because we were on business, we could eat; we would get a minimum of two meals out of that trip.

MB: When did you leave Interview, and why?

PL: I left in 1981 because I didn't have to be there anymore, frankly. I mean, it had changed a lot. I left after my second book, Social Studies [1981], came out. I had worked there for about ten years. Robert [Hayes] was the managing editor when I left. But of the ten years that I was there, Bob Colacello was the editor for the longest period.

MB: And I know that no one edited you. Was that the deal all the way through?

FL: Yes. I made a deal right at the beginning when I first came there. For a totally unknown, young, unconnected person, I was rather demanding. I had two demands: that I would own the copyright--and I copyrighted every single word that was in Interview--and that they wouldn't edit me. And they had no real argument with that. Most people who think about it, which is not most people, think that Metropolitan Life was a compilation of my Interview pieces. But in fact, the pieces that were in Metropolitan Life I wrote for the book, but I gave them to Interview to publish each month as I wrote them, so that I didn't have to write two things a month and overburden myself with work. I was also writing a column for Mademoiselle at the time.

MB: Had everything in the book already been published in Interview by the time the book came out?

FL: There were a few things that weren't.

MB: Like "Notes on 'Trick"'?

FL: NO, I did publish that in Interview, the only place, by the way, in which it was understood at all. It was never understood in the book. Of all the reviews the book got, it was hardly ever mentioned. The only time it got the attention I felt it deserved was when I published it in Interview.

And that's the other thing. When I say I liked writing for Interview, it also means I liked publishing in Interview. Of all the publishing experiences I have had--which have not been that many, actually--by far the most interesting and pleasurable was with Interview at that time. My real audience was that old Interview audience. It wasn't that I wrote for them; it's just that they were the same as me. That's a real audience--an audience isn't an audience you make up using demographics, which is the way television and movies are done. To have an audience that so understands what you do, it becomes, in a certain way, a collaborator because you can do your best in a natural way.

MB: And who are you thinking of now when you're writing?

FL: I don't write for Interview anymore.

MB: I mean in general.

FL: I haven't changed. I don't think of anyone. I still think of myself. I still think of me sitting in the back of Max's. I have never had a demographic approach to writing. Interview did not initially have a demographic approach to publishing. It certainly does now. I mean, they have a letters to the editor column. Relative to the kind of magazine it was when I started working there, Interview has a very broad-based appeal, a very great consciousness of its audience. When I originally worked there, we were the audience. We weren't thinking, Will they like it there, or will they like it here, even the people going around saying, "We want to be a giant magazine."