Swimming Underground: My Years in the Warhol Factory
Mary Woronov
152pp, Serpent's Tail
£9.99
Snake
Mary Woronov
214pp, Serpent's Tail
£13.99
Buy it at BOL
When I was a little girl, no one seemed more glamorous than the characters who made up Andy Warhol's three-ring circus of junkies, freaks and ladyboys: no pop star, no film actress, no Pan's Person - not even cold, dark Louise, who even when dancing to Rubettes records habitually looked as though she had gazed upon the horrors of the 20th century and found them sadly wanting in both originality and style. Simply, they seemed as far from normality - British Home Stores, Bartlett pears and Two-Way Family Favourites - as it was possible to get, and for that my teeny provincial heart was lost to them.
When I grew up I met a few of them, and oh dear! Far from being the paragons of cool I had believed them to be, they were uniformly dull, self-loathing and, worst of all, needy - never a good look. Similarly, while reading Mary Woronov's autobiography when you're 12 might easily fill you with the desire to shave your eyebrows off, call yourself Brian Superstar and pretend to be bisexual, reading it with the ease of adulthood will make you offer up a prayer that you never did get to Max's Kansas City in the end.
Though lacking the moon-goddess radiance of Nico and the amphetamine-soda fizz of Edie Sedgwick, Mary Woronov was a lynx-eyed teenage beauty who became known as Mary Might, a dancer in the Exploding Plastic Inevitable, the kinky dance troupe that accompanied the young Velvet Underground. (It is strange and sad to think that without the Velvet Underground there could have been no Hot Gossip.) She is clever enough to know that childhoods, like holiday snaps, are boring unless they're yours, and is an adult by page 7 and at Warhol's Factory by page 15. She is also living proof of what Warhol once said when accused of exploiting his "Superstars": "It wasn't like someone gave me all the babies with perfect chemicals; these people were screwed up already. I merely helped them get the attention they wanted so badly." If we are to believe Mary, even as a child her head was "a regular zoo". She had a violent temper in the persona of a dog called Violet, a "rage rat" and a "comedy crow", leading her to commit vicious physical attacks upon (she says) masochistic schoolmates.
Spending her adolescence in the mandatory "sullen rage" of the overbright and underfocused teen, Mary took against sex at an early age (probably because her first boyfriend was named Carl Bezzari, which if they'd married meant she'd be called - ah, you work it out), sublimating her desires into drugs and crushes. This made her the perfect sparring partner for the Factory's hyper-bitch speed queens, for one of whom - Pope Ondine - she conceived a terrible passion.
Completely lacking in self-pity (and you show me another recent autobiography of a drug addict that can claim the same; what pathetic woofters those footballers are, compared to this frail 58-year-old!), short, shocking and very sour, this is the sort of book that will make you glory in your grown-upness; whereas once it might have read like a "How To" manual, now it reads as a "Thank Christ I Didn't" cautionary tale.
However, Snake, Woronov's first novel, demonstrates that actually, despite what Mr Blair's government keeps telling us, it is possible to do hard drugs for decades (though Mary, unlike Ondine, never shot speed directly into her eyeball, thank goodness) and emerge, like Stephen King, not only mentally undimmed but actually probably all the better for it. Woronov's bleached-out, seen-it-all voice is the perfect pitch for this purple/noir murder mystery.
Indeed, long before the junkies and the freaks of the 1960s had raised their dazed heads above the pop parapet, the detective writers of America - James M Cain, Dashiell Hammet, Raymond Chandler - spoke with the affectless deadpan that would become so associated with the burn-out following one trip too many.
Sandra, a damaged beauty straight out of Cain, is trapped in a stagnant, sex-soaked marriage, her existence alleviated only by drugs and fantasies of killing her creepy husband. When the local drug-dealer makes her dream a reality, Sandra is the only witness and is taken hostage by him as they go on the run across America. Inevitably they fall in love, and when capture seems imminent, Sandra checks into a rehab clinic to wait for the heat to die down and for her black knight to claim her. Yes, I know: Woronov obviously got a boxed set of Lost Heart Of Amerikan Anomie Indie Hits last Christmas and cribbed all the best bits from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Palmetto, True Romance and Buffalo 66 - you can just hear Christina Ricci mouthing lines like "There are advantages to dating a pervert. My apartment is spotless, thanks to the two fags Donald sends to my door every week." But even though it is a simple and familiar tale, it is told with an engagingly female, bratty twist, mercifully free of the macho posturing that usually accompanies such tales of dark-side derring-do.
She is especially good on the basic ridiculousness of sadomasochism and how it functions as a litmus test to detect any significant level of humour: can you really do all that and keep a straight face? "The more she practised her new path of freedom, the less free she felt. Instead, an insidious numbing effect was taking hold of her as she tried to cope with Donald's growing perversions ... It was endless. She could barely shut the closet door."
At a time when women are being pressed on all sides to embrace pornography and kinky sex as the agents of their freedom, Mary Woronov demonstrates with deadpan elegance that a world that revolves around our genitalia is, eventually (OK, after quite a bit of fun), as babyish, narrow and boring a world as any other based around a temporary itch. Sandra's flight from luxury and sexual excess to the purity of the open highway and the false ID will strike a chord with many women who have reluctantly added Porn Queen to their ever-expanding roster of domestic duties. Clearly, Ms Woronov still isn't impressed by sex; blame Mr Bezzari.
