#warhol's factory

“There was something about her. It wasn't necessarily sexuality but a charismatic energy that seemed as much rooted in intelligence as beauty. She seemed completely connected with the moment. There was something international about her. She made everywhere seem like Paris. She had a sweet, expressive face like Monroe but possessed a slim, modern body. She was edgy yet so fresh that even her false eyelashes came off as real.”

/ Punk poetess Patti Smith reflecting on Edie Sedgwick /

“Mary Woronov burned herself into my brain when, as a college student in 1966, I first saw her smouldering, imperious performance in Andy Warhol’s epic film Chelsea Girls. She was one of the most original, stylish and articulate sexual personae of the royal House of Warhol. I never forgot her, and I followed her subsequent movie career with great fascination … Warholism, which is my philosophy as a critic, merged the visual and performing arts and closed the gap between high and popular culture. Thirty years later, it can be clearly seen that the Warhol Factory, with all its riveting decadent excesses, was as seminal an avant-garde circle as that of the Dadaists and Surrealists after World War I in Paris.”

/ Camille Paglia from the back cover blurb on Mary Woronov’s 1995 autobiography Swimming Underground: My Years in the Warhol Factory /

“This was the first time I had ever travelled with Ultra Violet. She was still a big mystery; nobody knew what her scene was – she kept her life very secret (as opposed to everybody else we knew who were always telling you the most intimate things about themselves). I’d met her one day in ’65 when she walked into the Factory in a pink Chanel suit and bought a big Flowers painting that was still wet for five hundred dollars. Her name was Isabelle Collin Dufresne then and she hadn’t dyed her hair purple yet. She had expensive clothes and a penthouse on Fifth Avenue, and she drove a Lincoln that was the same as the presidential one. She was past a certain age, but she was still beautiful; she looked a lot like Vivien Leigh. Ultra would do almost anything for publicity. She’d go on talk shows “representing the underground” and it was hilarious because she was as big a mystery to us as she was to everybody else … she’d tell journalists “I collect art and love.” But really what she collected were press clippings. Gradually we pieced together that she was from a rich family of glove manufacturers in Grenoble, France, that she’d come to America as a young girl to visit the painter John Graham (coincidentally in the same building where the Castelli Gallery was), who introduced her around the New York Art world, and then when he died she met Dali, and then she met me, and then she became Ultra Violet. She was popular with the press because she had a freak name, purple hair, an incredibly long tongue and a mini-rap about the intellectual meaning of underground movies.”

/ From POPism: The Warhol Sixties (1980) by Andy Warhol and Pat Hackett /

“Tally Brown was a magnetic and flamboyant performer, a classically trained vocalist and actress who became who became a Warhol Superstar. On her first visit to Warhol’s silver factory, she fell asleep on the artist’s famous curvy couch during the filming of Batman Dracula (1964) and awoke to find the camera pointed at her … Brown’s talent and powerful stage presence made her a natural fit for Warhol’s circle, and she went on to appear in several of his movies. Brown appreciated that Warhol never “coerced” his stars to do anything but allowed them to “do as much as their compulsions made them.”

/ Text from the Warhol Museum’s exhibit Tally Brown, 2021 /

“She had a face that was so striking you had the choice of whether to call her beautiful or ugly. I happened to love the way she looked, and I was impressed by 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 … 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 … And if a good way to get around the censors was to confuse them, then Viva was perfect for the times, because when she took her clothes off, there was always the question of whether her bony body was a turn-on or -off – the “prurience” was really in question there.”

/ Andy Warhol reminiscing about his leading lady Viva in his 1980 memoirs POPism: The Warhol Sixties /

“This was the first time I had ever traveled with Ultra Violet. She was still a big mystery; nobody knew what her scene was – she kept her life very secret (as opposed to everybody else we knew who were always telling you the most intimate things about themselves). I’d met her one day in ’65 when she walked into the Factory in a pink Chanel suit and bought a big Flowers painting that was still wet for five hundred dollars. Her name was Isabelle Collin Dufresne then and she hadn’t dyed her hair purple yet. She had expensive clothes and a penthouse on Fifth Avenue, and she drove a Lincoln that was the same as the presidential one. She was past a certain age, but she was still beautiful; she looked a lot like Vivien Leigh. Ultra would do almost anything for publicity. She’d go on talk shows “representing the underground” and it was hilarious because she was as big a mystery to us as she was to everybody else … she’d tell journalists “I collect art and love.” But really what she collected were press clippings. Gradually we pieced together that she was from a rich family of glove manufacturers in Grenoble, France, that she’d come to America as a young girl to visit the painter John Graham (coincidentally in the same building where the Castelli Gallery was), who introduced her around the New York Art world, and then when he died she met Dali, and then she met me, and then she became Ultra Violet. She was popular with the press because she had a freak name, purple hair, an incredibly long tongue and a mini-rap about the intellectual meaning of underground movies.”

/ From POPism: The Warhol Sixties (1980) by Andy Warhol and Pat Hackett /