ANDY WARHOL: “Susan Bottomly (later known as International Velvet) was the new girl in town. She was only about 17 – a very tall brunette, very beautiful. When I think back on all the beauties we knew, I realize there was something special about the way they all held their heads and moved their arms. There were other girls who were just as beautiful as she was, but her way of moving made her extra beautiful. People constantly wanted to know, ‘who is she?’”
STEVEN WATSON: “On Gerard’s 23rd birthday, poet Rene Ricard introduced him to a beautiful 17 year old Brookline debutante named Susan Bottomly. When she had seen Edie’s photo in Vogue, she said to herself, ‘This is the image that represents the way I feel.’ At her coming out party, Susan made a wish that she could become a Warhol superstar. Gerard immediately envisioned Susan in this role, and before his visit was over, he filmed a portrait of her. She sat before a mirror, applied makeup, and drank (one could describe it as ‘Poor Little Rich Girl’ meets ‘Drunk’). A few days later Susan and Gerard took a train to New York and settled into the Chelsea Hotel. At the age of 16 Susan had already appeared on the cover of ‘Mademoiselle’ and signed up to be a model with the Eileen Ford Agency. She was soon given her Factory name: if Elizabeth Taylor = National Velvet, then Susan Bottomly = International Velvet.”
GERARD MALANGA: “She was a seventeen-year-old in a twenty-one-year-old body.”
ANDY WARHOL: “Velvet’s father was a district attorney in Boston. Her family had money and they paid for her room at the Chelsea and sent her an allowance. She always had the most expensive makeup and the newest clothes. She also had one of the few bodies that could really bring out the ultimate look in a dress… And with her long neck she could wear the new big earrings the way nobody else could.”
ANDY WARHOL: “International Velvet would spend hours putting on the latest makeup, stroking on Fabulash over and over again, painting her eyes three different shades of brown, brushing the rouge slowly, slowly, up and out, with those big fat sable brushes from the theatre makeup stores, outlining her lips, then whiting them out. Watching someone like Velvet, who had such perfect, full, fine features doing all this on her face was like watching a beautiful statue painting itself.”
ULTRA VIOLET: “I’m fascinated by her makeup. Her eyes are widened by white shadow above her lids and darker shadow in the creases of the lids. White dots at each corner of the eye create the illusion of eyes opened very wide. Alternating black and white lashes are painted on the skin of her upper and lower lids to amplify her lashes and make her eyes radiate like two stars. She has shadow on her chin and on her cheeks. She dusts talcum powder all over her face and with an extra-large round brush dusts off the surplus white until only a pale cast remains to accentuate her fairness and the transparency of her skin. She is so beautiful she looks unreal. I ask her, ‘How long have you used talcum?’ ‘All my life – first on my behind, now on my face.’”
ULTRA VIOLET: “International Velvet is an honest-to-goodness beauty: young, slender, feminine, a real woman, the first real woman I’ve seen in this masquerade of misfits. She has style and class. She even has a boyfriend, David Croland, and he looks normal too.”
MARY WORONOV: “Velvet was a slob; a girl slob, messy but sexy like underwear and perfume. Velvet, or International Velvet as Andy called her (like he tried to call me Mary Might, a name I instinctively fought and refused to answer to, knowing that somehow it was a plot to steal my soul), was a society girl from Boston hoping to follow in Edie Sedgwick’s footsteps, footsteps that seemed to lead straight to the rubber room so far as I could see, but that was her problem.”
