The Gilded Palace of Sin: Viva

DANNY FIELDS: “After Nico came Viva – very special, very smart, very crazy, and a good mother.”

VIVA: “Andy was at this party. I screwed up my courage and asked him if I could make a movie. I thought I’d make a few Warhol movies and become a big Hollywood star – starting at the bottom, with Andy my first step toward my ultimate, incredible glory and fame and riches and stardom.”

VIVA: “When I first met Andy, it was just after I got out of school, and I had never heard of him; he was a commercial artist. This photographer I was living with said, ‘You have to meet Andy because he’s such a good artist,’ and he was pushing me to be a fashion illustrator. Gerard Malanga was always trying to get me to come up to the Factory whenever I ran into him on the street. So one day I said, ‘Okay, now that Andy’s famous, I’ll ask him to loan me some money.’ I needed $16 to pay my rent at The Chelsea. I was living with my sister Jeanie in a big room. We had a refrigerator and a hot plate in one room with no bathroom. But it was sort of a nice room. It was in a corner in the back, and there was a lot of sunlight. I used to do my drawings in there. I said to Andy, ‘What do you mean, you don’t have any money? I just saw a ‘Campbell’s Soup’ painting at the Janis Gallery. You’re famous. Come on, you must have some money. Give me $16.’ He said no, so I never went back to see him. Before we went, Gerard tried to seduce me on the bed. I said, ‘Gerard, come off it. You know you’re a fag.’ And he said, ‘I am not, I am not. Where did you hear that?’ I said, ‘I heard you were Andy’s lover.’ ‘I am not,’ he said. So I said, ‘Try my sister,’ but she didn’t want to. Gerard was very dandy in those days. He carried an umbrella, and he wore those high collars and double-breasted suits and ties.”

VICTOR BOCKRIS: “A painter who had given up painting for acting when she met Andy, a talented writer who began collaborating with Paul on scripts, Viva was strikingly beautiful. Her features were delicate and aristocratic, her hair was worn in an individual frizzed-out style. Best of all, as far as Andy was concerned, she complained endlessly about personal subjects that no respectable woman talked about in public, and with a kind of mocking upper-class languor that Andy began to imitate in his own speech.”

ULTRA VIOLET: “As soon as I see her, I know that Viva will be my chief competitor for Superstardom. She has the same reaction, for we constantly upstage one another. I die of jealousy each time I see her picture in the paper with Andy. Luckily Andy has two sides, and the instant a photographer appears on the scene, Viva and I rush over. I maneuver to be on Andy’s right, for then my name will be first in the caption.”

ANDY WARHOL: “Viva had a face that was so striking you had a choice of whether to call her beautiful or ugly. I happened to love the way she looked, and I was impressed with all the references she kept dropping to literature and politics. She talked constantly, and she had the most tiresome voice I’d ever heard – it was incredible to me that one woman’s voice could convey so much tedium.”

PAUL MORRISSEY: “Viva was a performing genius on the order of Mick Jagger, a comic Greta Garbo.”

VIVA: “Paul said, ‘Painting is a dead medium’… so I said, ‘Fine, I’m a performing genius, painting is dead.’”

ULTRA VIOLET: “Viva complained about having no sex, she complained about restaurants and lousy food, she complained about being depressed, she complained about the word artist, she complained about people hanging up on her, she complained about male chauvinism, she complained about getting phone calls from weirdos, she complained about Andy’s way of stirring people up to fight, she complained about being called a brainless nincompoop.”

ANDY WARHOL: “We all loved Viva; we’d never seen anything like her and from then on, it was just taken for granted that she’d be in whatever movie we did. She was funny, stylish, and photogenic – and she gave great interviews.”

VIVA: "Andy stood on the stage, blushing and silent, while Paul Morrissey, the professor, delivered a totally intellectual anti-intellectual rapid-paced fifteen minute mini-lecture putting down art films, hippies and marijuana, saying things like 'At least heroin doesn't change your personality.' Then I... answered questions - 'The reason we make these movies is because it's fun, especially the dirty parts' - and advised them to drop out of school. Then I would rant about everybody in authority."

VIVA: “I have Andy now to think ahead and make the decisions. I just do what he tells me to do. Andy has a certain mystique that makes you want to do things for him. Sometimes though when I think about Andy, I think he is just like Satan. He just gets you and you can’t get away. I used to go everywhere by myself. Now I can’t seem to go anywhere or make the simplest decision without Andy. He has such a hold on all of us. But I love it when they talk about Andy and Viva.”

ANDY WARHOL: “Viva would vacillate between thinking she was beautiful beyond compare and thinking that certain parts of her face and body were plain ugly. She spent three days with Paul and me in Sweden in February ’68 right before the opening of a big retrospective of my work at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, and she came back desperately wanting a nose job. I thought she’d get over it – I mean, the people in Sweden were so perfect-looking that we all felt a little strange about ourselves by the time we left – but no, she carried on about that nose job for months, and finally she asked Billy when would be the perfect astrological time to get it done. He did up a nose job chart for her. Meanwhile we all kept on telling her how beautiful her nose was, and in the end, she never did go through with it.”

VIVA: “My only fans are those who see me on film. Once they get to know me, they’re no longer a fan. I’ll have to make some angelic kind of virgin movie. If I play some virginal angelic types then no one will be disappointed.”