By Wayne Burrows | First published 2011
This interview took place in the Cafe at Lux Cinema on Hoxton Square in early October 2000. No complete transcript of the tape was made at the time, mainly due to the conversation being – I seem to remember – somewhat meandering: Woronov seemed far happier talking about pretty much anything but herself, the very subject we were, of course, meeting to discuss. Places, exhibitions, her asking me questions (rather than vice versa) and lots of other sidelines had a tendency to take over instead. With hindsight maybe that less focused conversation might have told its own story and been interesting in itself but in the event only the parts directly relevant to the article were taken from the tape, which is long since lost or erased. The piece itself first appeared in The Big Issue in the North (Oct 23 – 29, 2000). The text here is an unabridged version, substantially longer than the article as finally published. Still, it was probably (just about) forgiveable at the time to think the long discussions of my bandaged finger and places to go in London could be left safely untranscribed. It’s only 11 years later that I’m less sure.
Mary Woronov on Chelsea Girls (in Warhol Films at the Gershwin Hotel)
From Hanoi Hannah in Andy Warhol’s split-screen underground classic Chelsea Girls (1966) to the monstrous principal, Miss Togar, in the Ramones vehicle Rock ‘n’ Roll High School (1979) Mary Woronov’s film roles would probably lead you to expect their creator might be a somewhat intimidating woman. Add in the murderous farce of Paul Bartel’s pitch black capitalism-as-cannibalism comedy Eating Raoul (1982) and Woronov’s role as a ruthless hit-woman in Gregg Araki’s New Queer Cinema benchmark The Living End (1992) and you could easily be forgiven for feeling a touch nervous about meeting the lady face to face.
After all, as cult and underground acting careers go, Woronov’s has covered the ground and then some. From Warhol to Roger Corman, Hollywood Boulevard to Night of the Comet, pretty much the nearest she got to the mainstream was a Seventies turn as a sadistic warden in an episode of Charlie’s Angels that saw her hosing down the crime-fighting trio in a prison yard. So it’s all the more surprising that when I reach the Lux Café, Woronov appears almost immediately, with no affectations, tall and imposing in a dark summer dress but very visibly relaxed. She settles into a chair while smiling a lot and holds forth far more amiably than I’d dared hope.
Because, let’s face it, you really don’t expect nothing-left-to-prove affability and benign attentiveness from a woman whose own amphetamine-fuelled memoir – Swimming Underground: My Years in the Warhol Factory (Serpent’s Tail) – makes a blackly comic set-piece out of her own, maybe or possibly not entirely fictional, attempted murder of a minor Warhol hanger-on named Vera Cruz on a New York subway track, among many other hair-raising incidents and encounters. So, she’s mellowed, it seems?
