WHO'S AFRAID OF JANET SUSAN MARY HOFFMAN?

You know, for all that Andy Warhol is embraced as a ‘gay icon’ (not my words but plenty of other people’s), it was the women in Warhol’s films that first really grabbed my attention.  

Mary Woronov, Edie Sedgwick, Ultra Violet, Nico.  They looked fabulous, like nobody I’d ever met, and of course I knew that in the real world they’d never give me the time of day, but then a lot of the women I met wouldn’t give me the time of day in any case.  Better to be rejected by a superstar than some girl from the high school.

So yes, watching Warhol’s films, I could just about put up with the antics of Ondine, Taylor Mead et al, as long as Viva (nee Janet Susan Mary Hoffman) popped up once in a while, generally without many clothes on.

Now, I would never have thought of Viva as much of a walker, so imagine my surprise delight when I came across this 1975 interview she did for Interview magazine:

BOB: What’s your life like in California?

VIVA: We live in a mountain cabin with no central heating. While Michel saws wood, i’m writing books for five hours a day. And then we take a drive to the coast to watch the whales migrate and the pelicans. So I’ve had a completely domestic life. A Virginia Woolf life. You seem to be getting bored already.

BOB: No. I’m just listening.

VIVA: And Virginia said to write good literature, you have to read good literature and take long walks. So I began writing at 9:30 in the morning with a bottle of Jack Daniels and when the tip of my tongue got numb around two, I quit. Michel took Alexandra [Viva’s child] to school and finished sawing wood for the fireplace. This is after living in a trailer with no windows, a 30s trailer, you know, that costs a million dollars today, full of inlaid wood, with Alexandra sleeping on a table…

BOB: But…

VIVA: … in the rain, in the mud, typing on a battery-operated typewriter, outside the trailer, in the mud – alright we finally got into a house. So I was living like Virginia Woolf, taking long walks through the mountains, reading Proust and writing. 

If I never imagined Viva as a walker, even less did I imagine her as a fellow traveler with Virginia Woolf.  Walking creates some strange bedfellows.