Photograph by David Torrence
Seated at an oval marble desk surrounded by David Hockney’s brilliant colors, Julian Schnabel’s textural complexity and Andy Warhol’s instruction to “Repent and Sin No More,” Robert Lococo punches a Manhattan area code.
“Hi, it’s Lococo.” He’s calling painter Donald Sultan, whose red and black poppy paintings Lococo Fine Art Publishers is about to turn into limited-edition prints. “How are you?” Lococo asks, his inflection making the question all-important. Two seconds later, he’s doing business: “The only question in my mind is, do I want to make an edition of 75?” he says casually. “It is, isn’t it? Unless we made the same print and switched the colors around. How much? And how much do you want?” He laughs delightedly at Sultan’s answer. “Wait a second. If I tell you $25,000 now then what do you think, for one print? Yeah, 50. OK. Be careful this weekend. Who are you going with? I don’t want anything to happen to you!”
He hangs up and yells for the firm’s director, Mark Niesman. “Mark? I told him we should maybe only make this an edition of 50. I offered him $25,000, and he’s going to complain. But I already know I’m going to pay him $40,000, because I have it written down here.”
He walks through the gallery—everything’s cool here, from the chilly air conditioning to the icy white walls to the Milt Jackson jazz—and leans over a high wooden table in the workroom. “Benny, I want you to make this flower black,” he tells curator Ben Shambaugh. They have already removed the original background from Sultan’s Poppies series, and Lococo has come up with a printing technique that will translate—not mimic—the paintings’ texture: linoleum, tar, flocking, plaster, tile, wood.
He turns to a different artist’s project, toying with alternate backgrounds. “I hate the red,” he tells Niesman. “It looks like $1.95, doesn’t it?”
Lococo asks other people constantly, almost reflexively, what they think. Then his gut takes over, and he chooses and never looks back. That’s when the breezy mood drops away and he becomes meticulous, hypervigilant, cheerfully demanding.
“OK, clean it up,” he tells Shambaugh. “Make these lines just a little crisper. It’s gonna take a lot of work, but just go ahead and do it.” He stops short. “Boy, that scale looks odd, Ben. Why does that one look so awkward?”
We’re talking a millimeter’s difference in the crop. “The guy’s got a good eye,” Shambaugh says with a shrug; each of Lococo’s sliver, speck and 16th-of-an-inch corrections means hours hunched at the computer, but the results brought in $4 million in the first quarter of 2007.
“Hey, Mark,” Lococo calls. “I want to go to New York tomorrow.”
At age 10, Lococo sketched at an easel in hisbedroom. He could smell his mother’s homemade Italian marinara sauce simmering, hear the snip of his father’s shears from the barbershop in the front room. Both parents were Sicilian. Cousins, aunts and uncles streamed in and out of the little brick bungalow on Hampton near Eichelberger, but the party scenes Robert sketched were far more glamorous. Wincing at his parents’ carved wooden sailboat and plaster of Paris frontiersman—which he’d later learn to dismiss as “store-bought art”—he hung his own work. Then he moved to his “office,” stacking other sketches neatly on his little desk. “I’m going to sell art someday,” he told his mother.
“You’ll starve to death first,” she warned.
Friends predicted otherwise. Mary Jane Miller (née Gleason) says that at Southwest High School, “Robert already knew that he was going to be famous. When everybody else had $5, he had $50. His first real car was this beautiful chocolate-brown Mercedes. He would never do anything in a second-rate or cheap way.
“He had this outrageous laugh, from the depths of his belly,” she remembers. “I think he did it to annoy the teachers.” Lococo once flung a cream pie at a passerby to break the monotony. Yelled at regularly, he found ways to torment their most reviled teacher, “a wicked old biddy with purple nail polish,” Gleason says. “She once told Bob that he should quit high school and go directly to beauty college.”
Reminded, he snorts. “Had I done that, I would probably be Vidal Sassoon.” He credits his confidence to his lack of credentials, pointing out that good students are conditioned to obey—and copy slavishly. “I didn’t excel in school, and that enabled me to rely on my own intuition. I’m a very fast seer and absorber.
“I was—am—dyslexic,” he continues. “That made me stop, look, feel it, know it from my gut. You become much more focused. And you have to depend on your personality to get you through a lot of things.”
"Everybody has their own America, and then they have the pieces of a fantasy America that they think is out there but they can't see."
—Andy Warhol
Lococo phones the builder of the luxe condos at 4545 Lindell, one of a handful of interior-design jobs he’s deigned to accept in recent years. “What are you doing?” he asks. “I need to go to the building. What do you mean, for me anything? For you anything! No, no, I’ll just park on the street. I don’t want to have to be special.”
Sweating under his hard hat, he climbs to the ninth floor to check on the penthouse. “I wasn’t even sure I wanted this job,” he admits, recalling how he took the blueprints and, instead of submitting a simple proposal, aggressively redrew the common spaces, eliminated the hallways, put in double elevators that opened directly into the individual condos. “They were completely taken aback,” he says with a cream-pie grin.
When Lococo showed up with his plan, architect Lou Saur started the meeting with “Well, this is the fourth designer on the project, let’s see what he’s going to come up with, and then we’ll go on to the fifth.” Lococo announced that he’d never attend a meeting at Saur’s office again. Then Saur saw the proposal—and ate his words.
“Most interior designers just do an overlay; he played off the design,” Saur says now. “He did his own thing, but he did it in the right way, integrated it. I almost thought”—his highest compliment—“we were working with another architect.”
Lococo’s design career had begun in high school, when he used Rembrandt prints for ambience in a window display for a mom-and-pop clothing store. Then he started College Painters, Inc., playing Tom Sawyer and running the company while his friends scraped and painted. He found himself giving décor advice to wealthy clients, and the logic dawned on him: “If you hang out with rich people and you have rich customers, you’re going to be rich!”
The casual demeanor that had helped him brush aside failures in school, the reliance on gut instinct, the ability to read people, if not books—now it all came together, forming a scaffold for his exquisite taste. At 24, he opened Robert Lococo Interiors at Plaza Frontenac, and he caught wealthy St. Louis’ attention instantly.
“You have to know when to push people and when the project is sold,” he says now. “There’s just a nod or a sigh of relief, and you know. So often people oversell it. You wouldn’t take a girl to bed and say, ‘Now, are you ready to do it?’”
Lococo has a knack for relaxing people about big decisions. He educated his clients—“when people are confused, they’re insecure”—and he made sure they had fun spending their money. “I never had one unhappy customer,” he says, “and I charged the most.”
He did a few wildly uncharacteristic projects, like the cosmic Burger King at Northwest Plaza, with its burgundy patent-leather walls. His trademark interiors, though, had a monochromatic elegance; luxurious texture in lieu of pattern; a contemporary aesthetic tempered by soft edges and classical restraint.
“It was difficult to make a mistake,” he admits. “I was conservative with color, and that just happened to be the cusp of a new trend.” For him, the excitement came in choosing the art: “That’s where color, action and movement came into my projects.”
"Success is what sells." —Andy Warhol
Lococo’s brother died in his forties, and it shook Robert more than he lets on. He went from playing at nightclubs to playing dad for his nephews, and he started letting go of old obligations and ambitions, focusing instead on work that made him feel alive. In 1989, he realized he couldn’t bring himself to design another hotel room.
He sold his interior-design company, invested in some projects put together by his friend George Mulder, an art publisher in Amsterdam, then bought Mulder’s business. By then, Henry Geldzahler, the first curator of 20th-century art at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, was a mentor. “He liked my enthusiasm,” Lococo says. “I think he thought I was cute. He said, ‘Listen, you come from that nice decorating business, but it’s not very intellectual, so your first project has to be with William Burroughs.’”
Lococo knew of Burroughs only as a writer. “No, no, he does these shotgun paintings,” Geldzahler told him. “Listen, Lococo, this is what a publisher does, he comes up with an idea for a project, so come up with an idea to do with William Burroughs.”
Lococo read up on Burroughs and then closed the books, appalled. “He was a terrible drug addict, and he killed his wife by accident. What a horrible sinner this guy was!” That was it: Burroughs would do Seven Deadly Sins, shooting wood blocks with a 12-gauge and writing accompanying text. Burroughs accepted the assignment with alacrity, naming the wood blocks only afterward. “‘This is lust!’ he’d say, and push his cane at that one,” Lococo recalls. “‘And this one is greed!’”
All that remained was for Burroughs to write the text. Instead, he had a triple bypass and broke his hip. “Finally he recovers, and people are telling me, ‘This is what making art is all about. Students will be writing theses on these for years to come.’ And I’m thinking, ‘I’m only worried about Mrs. Goldstein putting them over her sofa, ’cause they’re pretty tough.’”
The Seven Deadly Sins show opened on Madison Avenue at Larry Gagosian Gallery, arguably the world’s most prestigious dealer. “Allen Ginsberg was there, Lauren Hutton—it was like the old Warhol days,” Lococo says. “Prints were bought by the Whitney, the L.A. County Museum of Art, a museum in Copenhagen ...”
His second career was already a success.
"In the future everyone will be famous for 15 minutes." —Andy Warhol
“Janie, what are you doing? I don’t think I’m going to Basel, are you going to Basel? ... I’m in the Midwest right now, I’m coming into the city tomorrow,” Lococo says into his cellphone. He listens, smiling slightly. “I’m not really anxious to sell much right now ... Don’t you think we’ve already made enough this year?” He teases her a little longer, says they’ll talk soon and hangs up.
“That was Baby Jane Holzer”—the first of Warhol’s superstars. “She wants to buy. Anything I have. But you know, I don’t want to make things available too easily.”
Leaving a voice mail for a private collector he doesn’t know, he enunciates more carefully: “This is Robert Lo-co-co”—he dwells a half-second on each long “o”—“returning your call about the drawing of the dachshund by Andy Warhol. It is available.”
Stacked next to Lococo’s perfectly ordered desk are auction catalogs fringed with Post-its: He intends to track the Warhol purchases at Christie’s and Sotheby’s spring auctions. “Green Car Crash (Green Burning Car I)” has a catalog all to itself and is expected to sell for a record-breaking $30 million.
Lococo is one of an elite circle of dealers connected with the Warhol Foundation, a relationship that started seven years ago, after he bought the Dorothy Blau Gallery in Miami Beach. “She was an 80-year-old grande dame selling contemporary art, and she knew Warhol and commissioned socialite portraits from him,” Lococo explains. “She said, ‘You should buy this gallery; you are such an elegant man.’ I said, ‘Honey, I have no interest whatsoever in a retail gallery. I’m not buying this gallery.’ And three months later I owned that gallery.”
He’d decided he could make a little money owning the only real contemporary gallery in south Florida. He put together a show called Andy Warhol’s Pretty Women and exhibited it first in St. Louis, with 25 portraits priced to sell for $75,000 each. Except they didn’t. “One dear friend bought one; it was a pity sale,” he says. He shipped the show down to the Blau gallery, opened the newspaper and saw “a story sent by God, on how the thing to buy was Warhol’s socialite portraits.” In the four days before the show opened, every painting sold. Today, they’re worth between $500,000 and $1.5 million apiece.
Lococo had always loved Warhol’s work. “I liked the familiarity,” he says. “It was so fresh, and you could just bite right onto it immediately. Instant gratification.” He met the man only once, long after the heyday of the Factory, the tinfoil–and–silver-paint echo chamber where Warhol and his devotees made serial art out of sex, drugs, money, death and groceries.
How would Lococo have fit into that scene?
“Better than me,” says Lococo’s master silk-screener, Alexander Heinrici, who worked for Warhol for eight years. “I was always the country bumpkin from Vienna, and I don’t care about gossip at all. The celebrity cult—Andy propelled it into the stratosphere. His telephone conversations were all about celebrities and who slept with whom. And Robert’s totally tuned into that world.”
He extends his New York trip to spend the weekend in the Hamptons and returns with news: “Paris Hilton is going to be on The View. Her mother and Barbara Walters are good friends. That came from Dominick Dunne.”
"Pop art is a way of liking things." —Andy Warhol
Back in St. Louis, Lococo returns a call from a collector in Hong Kong who’s interested in prints of Liu Ye. “I published these prints in 2000, had them for $2,500 each,” he says afterward. “All of a sudden, Chinese art has gone through the roof. So we raised the price $10,000 each and sold four yesterday. Isn’t it wild?”
His biggest clients at the moment are dealers in Korea. He sells mainly to galleries, not individual collectors—and less than 5 percent of his sales are made to St. Louisans. “There are some great collectors here, but they go to New York to buy their art, because they think those are the big boys,” he says with a shrug. “I sold a Warhol in New York that ended up going to a collector in St. Louis who could’ve bought it from me for a lot less money.”
Just as he moves fluidly between those old antagonists, art and commerce, Lococo glides between St. Louis and New York. Ross Bleckner—the youngest artist ever to have a solo exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum—says Lococo’s always talking about how he loves living in St. Louis. Bleckner sounds bemused, but Lococo’s thought it through.
“In New York you can get overloaded with creative ideas,” he says, “and it’s going to bog you down. I only need to have a few great ideas a year. When I’m there, I can see it from a distance and take what I want. The artists see you from a distance, too. You become a fresh thing, exciting for them, instead of, ‘Oh God, there’s Lococo on the phone again.’”
As a publisher, his creative input can be anything from formulating the concept to cropping out pieces of a larger painting to changing the colors to devising a new printing technique. “Part of it is an ongoing dialogue with the artist in a very casual way, so it becomes his idea,” Lococo says. “I want the artists to feel totally at ease. No pressure, no due date. It’s all about the art.”
Lococo’s been casual his whole life—but he works at it. He keeps a red button on his desk and slaps it when he makes a tough phone call, just to hear the singsong, “That was easy!” Nothing’s less relaxing than somebody who looks like they’re working really hard, he says, “so you bust your butt and make it look effortless.”
Bleckner says he’d never done a print when Lococo approached him about 10 years ago: “I was very hesitant—but he made it uncomplicated by taking care of all the technical stuff. He’s a lot of fun to work with, doesn’t take it too seriously, yet he’s very committed and very honest.”
One artist did have issues with Lococo: Joe Andoe. “He’s fun to hang out with, and we did some good projects,” Andoe says. “But I was being told that things weren’t selling—and seeing them everywhere. So I quit working for him. And a year later I happen to see one of my prints online, on the website of an independent dealer, in a color I didn’t make, and Lococo had signed my name to it.”
Lococo says it was he who dropped Andoe. “We went back and showed him that he got thousands of dollars. And I never signed a print. We make multiple color prints, and the artist and publisher together decide which to edition. The rest are the property of the publisher. The only thing those prints ever had was the initials J.A. and the ID number, for documentation. Plus, he decided that his brother, who had a beauty parlor in Oklahoma, should also be a dealer, and the brother put his paintings on easels in the back yard! I said, ‘I’m going to end this relationship.’ And he lost the best print publisher he ever had.”
"I'd like my own tombstone to be blank. No epitaph, and no name. Well, actually, I'd like it to say 'figment.'" —Andy Warhol
“Talking two hours about myself, afterward it was like I ate two banana-split sundaes,” Lococo says after the first interview for this story. “I was so full of myself—and I didn’t like it.” He thinks for a minute about why. “I was very young when I started in this business,” he says. “In those days I was a real publicity whore—it was all about me. Now I don’t want the attention; it’s all about the artists.”
He says he pulled out his scrapbook after the interview and paged through it, thinking, “Y’know, you were pretty aggressive. You were really working it.” He wrote to Rosalynn Carter, offering to redecorate the White House. He befriended St. Louis’ most famous contemporary architect, William Bernoudy, and most famous sculptor, Ernest Trova. He traveled with Julio Iglesias, worked with David Hockney on etchings that premiered at the Picasso Museum in Paris. He says Kelly Klein (Calvin’s ex-wife) begged him for design help when she moved into the Dakota Apartments.
But as he’s fond of saying, “Everybody has a beginning.”
Around the age of 20, Lococo worked for the celebrated interior designer Jack Brandt—a chapter neither man remembers with pleasure. Brandt says that in 1975, after a customer returned a $1,000 Venetian mirror and Brandt could find no record of its sale, he had Lococo charged with felony theft.
“No mirror was returned,” Lococo insists to this day. “When all this happened, I’d already left to go into business for myself. And the dispute was over $375, not $1,000.” He pleaded not guilty, but six months later changed his plea to guilty. “I had bad legal advice,” he says, “and I thought the best thing to do was not fight it, because I didn’t have any money to fight it.” He spent six months in a work-release program in St. Louis County—his own mother never knew—and by day continued building his career.
“He’s a sonofabitch,” says Brandt. “Yes, he’s been successful, and yes, he’s talented—but he bit the hand that fed him.” Years later, Brandt ran into Lococo at a restaurant. “I didn’t want to seem like a stubborn child, so I shook his hand,” he says, “but I do carry a grudge.”
"Just look at the surface of my paintings and films and me, and there I am." —Andy Warhol
The house is hidden behind a grassy rise on Clayton Road, and the glass at the entrance gives you a voyeuristic frisson; private areas are tucked out of sight, and art is everywhere, from a pitcher by Picasso to paintings by “Bob” Rauschenberg, Jean-Michel Basquiat and, of course, Basquiat’s mentor, Andy Warhol, whose giant “Pink Penis” hangs so calmly in the master bedroom that it fails to shock.
Humor’s everywhere, from the McCoy cookie jars of the 1930s, arms folded over their fat tummies, to “Andy’s little hamburger paintings.” The house lives to entertain. Beyond the 75-foot terrace, a ribbon of jade-green water reflects the chrome Trova sculpture on the brick wall above. Inside, Roman antiquities rest on an Art Deco table, and golden swans arch their necks to support the brown-on-brown silk striped arms of Empire chairs.
“There’s an eclecticism, but there’s a restraint that weaves through everything and creates a relationship between the things,” says one of Lococo’s good friends, interior designer Jimmy Jamieson. “Not a lot of extraneous stuff.”
Lococo has a Theory of Things. “You go to an estate sale, and you see this beautiful Delft porcelain, and you know this woman probably carried it back from Holland and cherished it her whole life, and now nobody wants it.” That forlorn moment reminds him to attach himself first and foremost to people.
Which doesn’t mean he stints on things.
“I call him Elvis; he buys cars like other people change their socks,” Jamieson says. There’s a black Bentley convertible in the garage, tucked beside a black SUV, in front of a black Mercedes convertible. When Bleckner admired the Mercedes, Lococo bought him one and took paintings for payment.
“Certainly he lives a very comfortable, expensive life,” says Jamieson. “And he’s a good businessperson—you measure those rewards in money. But I don’t think money’s his ultimate motivator.”
"I have social disease. I have to go out every night. If I stay home one night I start spreading rumors to my dogs." —Andy Warhol
By 7 a.m., Lococo’s either gossiping with Jamieson (they met 20 years ago, when Jamieson owned a nightclub, Jimmy’s, in the Central West End) or singing operettas with Sigrid Tucci Brooks (they once dated; ask her why it ended and she says, “Now isn’t that a loaded question?”). Jamieson says he’s laughed every day for 20 years and Lococo’s the reason. “He says things everyone else thinks and wouldn’t dare say—but delivers them in such a way that it’s harmless.”
Lococo’s been married twice: at 22, to Christina Chadwell, a nice little Italian girl his mother adored (“I just thought that was the thing to do.”), and at 27, to Tina Roth (“I have no idea why. I met her when I was getting my hair cut; she was a haircutter.”).
Asked how often he’s been madly in love, Lococo throws back, “Maybe never. Do I expect too much?”
“Since I’ve known him, he’s had two relationships he was really committed to,” volunteers Jamieson. “But he likes all the rides at the amusement park—especially the ones that turn him upside down!”
Lococo’s famous not so much for being wild as for comfortably encouraging wildness in others. He can make even the stuffiest laugh at themselves, and he throws extravagant, amazing parties. “When we were younger, they’d get a little crazy,” Jamieson says, “like food fights.” He remembers a vase of water dumped over somebody’s head and how, at the 30th birthday party Lococo threw for him, a guest drank one too many vodkas and fell through the cocktail table. “It shattered,” Jamieson says, “and the party was over. That was the blowtorch crescendo. Had that guest been sober, he’d be dead.”
Jamieson must mean the fall would have killed him; Lococo can be peevish and exacting, but he’s not prone to rage. Just mischief. Brooks remembers a trip on their friend Lester Miller’s yacht: “A friend kept complaining how his Gucci shoes hurt his feet, and Robert said, ‘Oh? Are they hurting your feet?’ and threw them overboard.”
One New Year’s Eve, he lost his patience again: “This wealthy friend of ours was being very mean to the waitress. Finally, I said, ‘I don’t know who you think you are, but your family is just one step away from pushing a fruit cart!’”
Lococo keeps his South Side origins with him at all times, ready to pull them out with a self-deprecating flourish. But if they’re tucked too deep in the pocket of his silk Armani suit, people can find him snobbish and aloof. “In some ways I am shy,” he explains. “And then sometimes you just simply don’t want to engage.”
"Good business is the best art." —Andy Warhol
When you stop to think about it, Lococo has rather a lot in common with the artist who’s made him millions. He and Warhol shared a Catholic working-class childhood; a delight in surfaces; an unerring eye; an uninhibited, almost innocent candor; a detached fascination with sex; the ability to create a sense of intimacy instantly; marketing genius; glee at startling people; amusement at their lives—and an initially hard-won, then effortless, success.
“Green Car Crash (Green Burning Car I)” sold for $71.7 million at auction, more than doubling the already outrageous estimates with a bidding war between two Americans in the room and a Chinese collector on the phone.
When Holzer calls again, Lococo stalls. He’s going to sell her two Warhol celeb portraits in the fall, but he doesn’t want her to know yet. “Honey, she is a ball-buster,” he says, chuckling. “She is going to beat you every time. I have no problems with people like that. I want you to make money, because then you will come back and buy more.”
He takes another call, hangs up and reaches for a box of poodles. Warhol made ink drawings of a poodle he named Velvet, and Lococo colored them with a 1950s palette of pink, periwinkle and green. He wants to do a luxe children’s book, clad in burgundy velvet and exhibited at children’s museums—but he needs text. He had actor Ethan Hawke under contract, but didn’t like his narrative: “The people were snobs, and Velvet was a bit of a slut.”
Now Lococo has resurrected the project, and he’s tying it into a benefit for the Elton John AIDS Foundation, which just drafted a letter to a possible new author: J.K. Rowling.
Once Velvet’s off the back burner, Lococo will turn to his next idea: portfolios of movie stills from Warhol’s films. “I’d release them at Cannes, in one of the VIP Club rooms, project the film onto the white tent,” he says. “It’s a little commercial, but that’s OK. That’s what Warhol taught us: Real art can be commercial.”
Play it right and you’ll never starve for beauty.
