“Without the protective shell of New York, we seemed to have lost our magic,” she writes. The end started fairly quickly for Woronov, when Warhol took his entourage and the Velvet Underground to L.A. And then it all started to go terribly wrong. Paranoid and violent (there is one terrifying passage in which she describes her unsuccessful attempt to murder a Factory groupie who idolized her), she could zing along on methamphetamine for days at a time, swoop home to her parent’s house to sleep it off, and emerge fresh, ready to start again. Together, the two became the onstage dancers for the Velvet Underground, undulating next to the band with bull whips and syringes, acting out savage sadomasochistic war dances while Reed droned the words to “Heroin.” But it couldn’t have been more than three years from her first visit to the Warhol Factory as a sculpting student on a field trip with her class from Cornell to her final fall into a drug-induced abyss.Ī speed freak from a wealthy, hateful family familiar to anyone who’s read Anne Sexton, Woronov fell into a deep, platonic mind-meld with Gerard Malanga, a filmmaker and sometime poet who introduced Woronov to Warhol, and into The Life. Woronov details her life over an inexact period of time–refusing to remember summers or springs or numerical years.

In a breathless, claustrophobic, and gripping narrative voice, Woronov exactly renders the junkie’s inertia and fear. Her other credits include such non-events as Mortuary Academy and Silent Night, Bloody Night.Īnd write she can. In Swimming Underground, Woronov’s autobiographical account of that time, we learn just exactly how stoned everyone was.Īn on-the-fringe B-actress, Woronov has most famously starred in the Warhol underground film Chelsea Girls and in Paul Bartel’s acclaimed sexual cannibalism frolic Eating Raoul. Rocker Lou Reed and the derelict poets from his Velvet Underground hung out there Warhol was busy making such films as his Screen Test, which involved an unmoving camera staring directly into an unmoving face for upwards of 15 minutes everyone was stoned. With its walls decorated entirely in silver paper torn from the inside of cigarette wrappers, the Factory–Warhol’s grimy party studio–was the in place to be. In the late 1960s, actress Mary Woronov was hanging out with Andy Warhol’s crowd at the Factory in New York.

Swimming underground by mary woronov