Holly Woodlawn, Warhol Superstar, Dead at 69
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IN MEMORIAM Holly Woodlawn, Warhol Superstar, Dead at 69 MARTHA E. STONE lawn subway station, or it could be a variation on “Holly- wood.” Holly apparently considered gender reassignment sur- OU REED immortalized Holly Woodlawn in the first gery when in her early twenties but rejected it at that time: verse of “Walk on the Wild Side,” on his 1972 “Honey, once they cut it off, it’s off!” Disagreements have LTransformer album with the lyrics: arisen: was Holly transgender, a gay man who was a drag queen, or “genderqueer”? In an often-quoted remark from the Holly came from Miami, F-L-A. late 1970s in answer to how she would be best described, she Hitch-hiked her way across the USA said: “[W]hat difference does it make, as long as you look fab- Plucked her eyebrows on the way Shaved her legs and then he was a she ulous?” She says, “Hey babe, take a walk on the wild side.” Film director Paul Morrissey had read a 1969 interview with Holly, in which she stated, not entirely truthfully, that she Holly Woodlawn, née Haroldo Danhakl, was born on October was a Warhol superstar. At that time, she was appearing in 26, 1946, in Juana Díaz, a town about seventy miles from San Warhol superstar Jackie Curtis’ play Heaven Grand in Amber Juan, Puerto Rico, to a Puerto Rican mother and a U.S. soldier Orbit at the Playhouse of the Ridiculous. (The Village Voice who deserted the family soon after Haroldo was born. Reports called it a “melodious freakfest.”) Morrissey—who character- differ as to what happened next. Suffice it to say that Haroldo’s ized Holly as polite, likable, shy, and unassuming—cast her in mother and stepfather, Joseph Ajzenberg, eventually settled in Warhol’s Trash (1970) along with Joe Dallesandro. Miami Beach, which is where Haroldo lived until leaving for She appeared in about two dozen films, including Warhol’s New York City as a teenager. 1971 Women in Revolt, in which the Women’s Liberation Movement is parodied. She starred in the 1972 musical spoof of Hollywood musicals, Scare- crow in a Garden of Cucumbers, in which she played the dual roles of Eve Harrington and Rhett Butler. According to Gary Comenas of warholstars.org: “Bette Midler sang a lullaby on the soundtrack and Holly performed an elabo- rate musical number, ‘I’m Lost in My Dreams of Heaven,’ flanked by chorus boys in white. Lily Tomlin did a cameo voiceover as Ernestine in a scene filmed in the apartment of Jane Wag- ner, Lily Tomlin’s partner.” At the premiere, as Bob Colacello recalled in Holy Terror (1990), Holly arrived in a limo with live white doves at- tached to her wrists. “How Holly,” Warhol su- perstar Candy Darling was quoted as saying. Holly ended her screen career in the role of Vi- vian in two episodes of the Amazon series Transparent. She was one of several of the Warhol crowd to be cast in that TV series. Holly inaugurated a cabaret act in the 1970s, capitalizing on the name she’d developed, and continued to perform throughout the subsequent decades. Probably one of her last New York ap- pearances was in 2013, when she offered “sto- In 1991’s A Low Life in High Heels: The Holly Woodlawn ries and songs” at a one-night-only performance at the West Story (written with Jeff Copeland), Holly remembered living Bank Cafe’s Laurie Beechman Theatre in Hell’s Kitchen. It a marginal life after arriving in New York, working at a vari- has been suggested that she was already suffering from “wet ety of jobs, from turning tricks to clerking to modeling. In that brain” as a consequence of her prodigious consumption of al- memoir, she commented on her feelings about gender: “I never cohol, not to mention opiate-based pain killers, throughout her once felt like a woman trapped in a man’s body. I felt more life. She died of cancer soon after her 69th birthday at an as- like a man trapped in high heels!” sisted living facility in Los Angeles (having lived a bicoastal The precise source of her name will probably never be life for many years) on December 6, 2015. Joe Dallesandro known. Possibly it was taken from Truman Capote’s heroine had remained a lifelong friend and was with Holly when she Holly Golightly in Breakfast at Tiffany’s (which she may never died. He, Jackie Curtis, and Candy Darling were also immor- have read), or possibly Woodlawn Cemetery, or perhaps Wood- talized in subsequent verses of “Walk on the Wild Side.” 10 The Gay & Lesbian Review / WORLDWIDE.