Viva Viva!

August 23 is the birthday of Viva (Janet Susan Mary Hoffman, b. 1938).

Viva was one of the few Warhol Superstars to have a modicum of a screen career after departing the Factory. The daughter of a well-heeled Syracuse lawyer, she grew up in a super-conservative Catholic household, and even considered becoming a nun. She went to Paris to become a painter but wound up putting her striking cheekbones and angular body to employment as an art and photography model. This career brought her back to New York City, where she fearlessly introduced herself to Andy Warhol at an opening by hitting him up for money. Not unreasonably, he reckoned that she ought to earn any money he gave her, and the way people ordinarily did that was by acting in his movies. While her screen name sounds pretty fabulous and Italianate, Warhol was reportedly inspired to call her that by the packaging on a roll of paper towels.

Viva was to appear in Ciao! Manhattan (shot 1967, released 1972) with Edie Sedgwick; The Nude Restaurant (1967) with Taylor Mead,Billy Name et al; Bike Boy (1967) with Joseph Spencer and Ingrid Superstar; Tub Girls (1967) with Brigid Berlin; Lonesome Cowboys (1968) with Joe Dellassandro, Eric Emerson, and Mead; San Diego Surf (1968) with just about all of the above; The Loves of Ondine (1968); and most notorious of all, the forthrightly pornographic Blue Movie (1969) with Louis Waldon. Warhol’s stroke of genius in casting Viva in this film (and some of the earlier ones) was that it was a way to get around the Supreme Court’s famous “redeeming social value” qualification to avoid outright banning of smut. Since these were underground art films he would just set her to talking, and she would improvise dialogue by gabbing about events of the day. Since Viva was a bright, well educated, sophisticated woman, her speeches sounded like intelligent political and social commentary, presumably the intention of the film-maker. It was really just Viva talking, recorded by the camera before, during, and after performing sexual acts.

Like just about everyone, Viva was quite close to Warhol for a couple of years only to be just as definitively iced out by him subsequently. He was on the phone with Viva when Valerie Solonas shot him at the Factory. The split came in 1969 when she wrote him from Paris to demand money. Warhol had funded her trip to Paris in the first place; her letter had an extortionate tone that rubbed him the wrong way. He ignored her letter. She later wrote the 1970 tell-all book Superstar.

Meanwhile, Viva had begun to begun to find avenues of expression outside Warhol’s circle. In 1969 she starred in the Agnes Varda film Lions Love with Jerome Ragni and James Rado, the creators and stars of Hair. The three play a throuple who take a meeting with independent film-maker Shirley Clarke. (Varda is in the film too. It’s not nearly as linear as I’m making it sound). This was followed by Sam’s Song with Robert De Niro, one of his first films. In Midnight Cowboy (1969) she was stunt cast as a woman who hosts a Warhol-style party attended by the hustler Joe Buck (Jon Voight). She also had a small role in the Italian film Trapianto, consunzione e morte di Franco Brocani (The Transplantation, Consumption, and Death of Franco Brocani — [awkward translation mine], 1969).

Next came Keeping Busy (1969), a film made by French photographer Michel Auder depicting Viva and Louis Waldon during their down time while making Blue Movie. She married Auder the following year and starred in his film Cleopatra (1970). Their daughter Alexandra Auder was born in 1971. A book and video project entitled The Baby followed in 1974. Auder later released the videos as Chronicles: Family Diary. Their last screen project together was Auder’s film Seduction of Patrick (1979), co-written by Gary Indiana, with Taylor Mead also in the cast. The couple broke up sometime after that. Auder married Cindy Sherman in 1984.

Meantime, 1972 proved to be a peak year for Viva. Ciao! Manhattan was finally released, and Viva had roles in two legit Hollywood movies, the Woody Allen comedy Play It Again, Sam, and Cisco Pike with Kris Kistofferson. She was also the narrator in the experimental jazz opera Escalator Over the Hill (1971), created by Carla Bley and Paul Haines, with Jack Bruce of Cream, Linda Rondstadt, et al, among the cast.

A new phase of activity began in the ’80s, when she was in Forbidden Zone (1980), a movie by the Mystic Knights of the Oingo Boingo, music by Danny Elfman, directed by his brother Richard. She also had a bit part in the campy Flash Gordon (1980) and roles in two Wim Wenders’ films The State of Things (1982) and Paris, Texas (1984). Meanwhile, she’d had an affair with soap opera actor Anthony Herrera which gave the world Gaby Hoffman (b. 1982). She was still living at the Chelsea Hotel at this point; Hoffman was raised in that crazy scene.

This is where the torch pretty much gets passed to Hoffman. Gaby was a successful child actress in major films starting at around age seven. Her early work includes Field of Dreams (1989), Uncle Buck (1989), This is My Life (1992), Sleepless in Seattle (1992) and Mel Gibson’s first film as director The Man Without a Face (1993), in which Viva also appears. At the age of 11 Gaby starred in her own NBC sit-com Someone Like Me (1994), which was cancelled after half a season. She was also in a TV movie remake of Freaky Friday (1995) with Shelley Long — which would make for an excellent trick trivia question. Her next stretch of theatre films included Now and Then (1995), Woody Allen’sEveryone Says I Love You (1996), Volcano (1997), All I Wanna Do (1998), 200 Cigarettes (1999) and several more, by which time she had become a successful teen actor. She’s been in dozens of stage and screen projects since then. She may be best known for her simultaneous regular roles on Girls (2014-2017) and Transparent (2014-2019). I am delighted to learned that she lives in Ft. Greene, Brooklyn; I had cause to mention that neighborhood the other day.

Alex Auder’s memoir Don’t Call Me Home, about growing up with Viva in the ’70s and ’80s, was published in 2023.