Alexandra Auder’s mother, Viva, a Warhol sensation, almost gave birth in the Chelsea Hotel lobby, a feverish bohemian enclave on Manhattan’s West 23rd Street, but made it to the hospital with the help of the staff. A bellhop helped her into a cab and exclaimed, “I want a girl!”
Finally The Daughter Of A Warhol Superstar, Alexandra Auder Speaks Out
Alexandra Auder’s book Don’t Call Me Home: A Memoir starts with memories of the author’s hard birth, milking, and bonding with her mother in their Hotel Chelsea apartment, of going to exotic places, watching her mother put on makeup, and mast*rbating to her plush toys, as revealed by The New York Times.
However, she soon reveals that her filmmaker father obsessively recorded these early moments and that they are not her own recollections. After repeated viewings at home, the recorded events begin to blend with Auder’s personal recollections.
“I will watch my life come into being, on loop, on a little black-and-white video monitor,” she writes. “For any of this to happen—to matter—the camera will always be recording, the moment of my mother’s water breaking just another in a string of documented moments between brushing her teeth and arguing with the cops. This is a video memory.”
Auder’s amazing tale actually begins in the rooms of the Hotel Chelsea, New York’s historic bohemian landmark, so this is only the beginning. Before its controversial renovation and reopening in 2022, The Chelsea was the home, laboratory, and playground of the downtown art world’s demimonde for many decades.
Famous guests included Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, Edie Sedgwick, and Nico, and their deaths at the hotel have become legendary: Dylan Thomas went into a coma in Room 205, and Nancy Spungen was murd*red by her boyfriend Sid Vicious in Room 100.
The hotel is perhaps best known as the setting of Andy Warhol’s cinematic paean The Chelsea Girls. However, much of Auder’s childhood also took place in this very structure. Auder, her mother (the actress, writer, and Warhol muse Viva Superstar, née Janet Susan Hoffmann), and eventually Auder’s younger sister (also an actress) lived in the 23rd street hotel on and off from the early 1970s to the early 1990s, though they were frequently threatened with eviction for not paying the rent or having disagreements with the hotel’s longtime caretaker Stanley Bard.
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Now 52 years old, Auder began documenting her own story of the Chelsea nearly 30 years ago, as a senior writing project at Bard College. Auder is an actress and yoga instructor living in the Philadelphia suburbs with her husband and two children. Since then, the manuscript has undergone multiple alterations as the author has experienced the rites of passage associated with maturing from adulthood to midlife. Don’t Call Me Home is infused with a sense of nostalgia and wonder as the author, with the benefit of time and experience, spins a charming tale out of her troubled and at times terrible childhood.
In her own words, Auder’s codependent relationship with her mother (whom she commonly referred to as “Vivah Supehstahhhh” even as a child) began in earnest after her father, Michel Auder, abandons the family after a particularly violent marital argument. When he tried to take Alexandra, then five years old, with him, she said, “My mother and I fused.” She and Viva become close, bonded by blood and the volatility of a hand-to-mouth existence.
They take up residence where they can: LA roadside motels, a house in West Hollywood, a house in Miami, the family house in the Thousand Islands, an aunt’s house in Argentina, a guesthouse in suburban Connecticut. When they finally land back at the Chelsea, Auder is eight years old and yearning for her first experiences of urban freedom. For her, wandering the labyrinthine hallways and hand-painted rooms of the hotel feels like “Dorothy stepping into Technicolor Oz.”
“All of this is right and good; we were in the center of things; the rhythm of NYC was in my bones,” she writes. “The Chelsea felt like mine…. [I] prided myself on how I fit in there, how I knew every nook and secret spot of the hotel.”
She loved the crazy scenes of downtown New York in the 1980s, from the artists’ lofts in Tribeca to the seedy clubs in Alphabet City and the dance floor at the Palladium. From her father’s A Coupla White Faggots Sitting Around Talking with Gary Indiana and Taylor Mead to Wim Wenders’s The State of Things, she has been featured in a number of independent films thanks to her acting chops. You can see the tweet below with respect to Alexandra Auder.
@greenpnyt has a great article in @nytimes today https://t.co/HF3F5oRcBK about #AlexandraAuder and her new #memoir DON’T CALL ME HOME. So grateful I got to do a #bookreview for @AP & add to my knowledge of all things Warhol. https://t.co/fLAxaIlYSJ #amreading #readingcommunity pic.twitter.com/NWYLWJqgcl
— Ann Levin (@annlevinnyc) May 4, 2023
However, the growing pains of separation from her mother accompany Auder’s early exposure to the world, and much of Don’t Call me Home examines the tensions Auder feels between being a rebellious teenager and a responsible daughter. Auder has the freedom to explore the city at will, but her mother’s increasingly dramatic conduct at home forces her to choose sides: against her father, extended family, boyfriends, and eventually even her husband.
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