A Chelsea Girl Still Bewitched by Warhol

The auditorium of the Museum of Contemporary Art was filled to capacity a couple of weeks ago, when Mary Woronov added her two cents to the Andy Warhol retrospective. Woronov, one of the stars of his films, is still a beauty, with dark eyes and planar cheekbones. She doesn’t look all that different from when she appeared in “Chelsea Girls” in 1965, although her hair is brown now and streaked with gray.

Woronov narrated a slide show of other Factory regulars and brief clips of her film appearances, and then read from her most recent book, “Eyewitness to Warhol.” In two essays and a self-interview, she examines the meaning of the artist’s films, which she considers “monumental.”

“What Warhol was doing is what any artist does: He tried to pin down the thing he finds most alluring and elusive. For Andy, it was intimacy,” she told the audience. “ ‘Screen Tests’ allows you to look for as long as you like into someone’s eyes, while they look back at you.”

This is Woronov’s second book devoted to Warhol; her first, “Swimming Underground,” a memoir of her life at the Factory, came out in 1995. This slim, silver-paper-bound volume is a much more objective view. Her publisher is art historian Victoria Dailey, who became intrigued through informal conversations with Woronov. Dailey, whose eponymous company occasionally published books on the arts, found Woronov’s accounts of working with Warhol to be refreshingly irreverent: “acerbic, insightful and accurate” are her words.

Although Woronov’s first book was autobiographical, in these essays she describes Warhol’s filmmaking process and philosophy. Woronov is a survivor, one of the few of the Factory denizens still alive. She offers a unique firsthand account of her experience observing Warhol socially and as one of his actors.

Woronov, 60, lives with her dog, Tina, and cat, Ashley, in what she calls a “witch’s cottage” off Beverly Boulevard in Hollywood. She has painted the walls of the tiny house in bright colors, and the upstairs studio floor is lime green. The rooms are hung with dozens of landscape and figure paintings by Woronov, who has never given up making art despite almost failing the subject at school.

Everywhere, however, there is evidence of her most recent occupation: author. Walls are lined with books, and she writes at a big table looking out onto a courtyard.

She may have 72 film credits to her name (her favorite being “Eating Raoul,” in which she co-starred as one half of the murderous couple), but since the success of “Swimming Underground,” she has turned to writing, mostly concentrating on fiction. “Snake: A Novel,” and “Niagara,” her most recent book, were both published in Britain by Serpent’s Tail.

“Eyewitness to Warhol,” however, is more analytical. In describing “Chelsea Girls,” she writes, “Warhol movies are not narrative, linear or entertaining.... Andy was not into entertainment, which moves along. He was into voyeurism, which moves in, close, as close as possible, stopping on the subject until it’s uncomfortable.... And when you refuse to move on, when you stop for no reason, you open up a void, which imagination is forced to fill.”

Woronov’s book also details Warhol’s working process. For example, when the script ran out before the film was used up, Warhol would tell scriptwriter Ronald Tavel to jump in front of the camera and improvise.

Before a life of sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll at the Factory, Woronov lived a largely middle-class existence in the suburbs of Brooklyn, N.Y. Her stepfather was a doctor and she was sent to private school from age 6, which is, she says, “the only reason I am as intelligent as I am.”

She was a 20-year-old art student at Cornell University when her class visited Warhol’s New York City studio in 1964. Poet Gerard Malanga grabbed her and insisted she take a screen test. As the steel doors of the elevator shut on her classmates’ faces, she recalls, “I forgot I ever knew them.”

“That was my most famous move, ever,” she says of leaving school for full-time Factory life.

Warhol was painfully shy and surrounded himself with an entourage so he wouldn’t have to make conversation. Woronov says, “I don’t think I talked to Andy but five times.” But she was close to other Factory regulars. She traveled with Lou Reed to Los Angeles as a dancer with the multimedia performances of the Velvet Underground’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable shows.

It was under the tutelage of Paul Morrissey, who directed Warhol’s “Chelsea Girls,” that she came to memorize her first lines and seriously pursue acting. The documentary-style, stream-of-consciousness film is, in Woronov’s words, the Factory’s answer to Hollywood. For hours in the film, she reclines on a Chelsea Hotel bed with two other women, but her scenes are not sexy, she says. She explains the Warholian ethos: “You can’t have a movie without a female star, but it was the guys who were sexy.” Morrissey decided on the split-screen format of the film, explaining that if the audience was bored with one view, “they can watch the other, they can choose.”

Woronov appeared in half a dozen films but also acted with the experimental Theater of the Ridiculous. Then came 1968, when Valerie Solanas shot Warhol. “After that,” Woronov says, “it was all different. Andy got rid of all those freaks. It was a new crowd. You’d have to go through four secretaries to see him. It was all uptight and clean. He didn’t do movies anymore, so he didn’t need us.”

Post-Factory, Woronov continued acting in New York (she was praised for her work in “In the Boom Boom Room” at Lincoln Center) and moved, in 1973, to Los Angeles. Starring roles in many of Roger Corman’s films followed. She married, moved to the Valley, divorced, and got caught up in the punk scene of the ‘70s and ‘80s. “I was like this old woman at the Starwood,” she jokes, “but I loved the music.” An illness curbed her club activities, however, and it was during her recovery that she began to write.

Initially, she penned a series of short stories to accompany a catalog of her paintings, “Wake for the Angels.” Then she delved into her memory for “Swimming Underground,” which the London Observer called “obscenely interesting: absurd, lurid, and grandiose,” and Reed called “the best book on Warhol.”

Woronov admits that the line between fiction and nonfiction might get a little blurred in her books, as befits a product of the Factory where life blended with art. “Snake: A Novel” is about a woman trapped in a bad marriage, and “Niagara” includes a character based on her younger brother.

“I have one story to tell and it’s my life,” she says.

As for “Eyewitness to Warhol,” it came about because “everyone always asks me about Warhol.” Her first book she sees as history; this book is her explanation of what was behind it all. “It took me a long time to figure out that he was looking for intimacy,” she says.

Woronov continues to act; she had the lead role last year in an independent film by Todd Hughes, “The New Women,” which concerns the fate of the last women on Earth. The low-budget movie, shot in black-and-white, excites her. “I love working this way,” she says with a laugh. “It reminds me of the old days.” The film, which was shown at the Toronto Film Festival, still hasn’t been released.

“I am not a brilliant actress but I’m entertaining. This is why I’ve become a cult queen.”

Turning serious, Woronov adds, “The one thing that Andy taught me was workaholism. You just have to keep working. I have a mind that doesn’t stop.

“There is always a little further to go.”

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MARY WORONOV reads from “Eyewitness to Warhol,” Dawson’s Bookshop, 535 N. Larchmont Blvd., Los Angeles. Date: Saturday, 2:30 p.m. Phone: (323) 469-2186.

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Hunter Drohojowska-Philp is a regular contributor to Calendar.