Viva: The Last of the Great Warhol "Superstars"

Viva is second only to Edie Sedgwick as the greatest of all Andy Warhol's "superstars". Her place in cinema (if not "sinema") is secure as she is the first identifiable actress to perform an act of sexual intercourse in Warhol's "Blue Movie" (also known as "F#@&ing").

Viva was born Janet Susan Mary Hoffman on August 23 1938 in Syracuse, New York, the first of nine children born to a devout Catholic family. Her father, like that of International Velvet, her precursor as the preeminent Warhol Superstar, was a well-to-do lawyer. She told her mentor Warhol that her father was a religious fanatic and her mother worshiped the Irish-Catholic Commie Witch-Finder General Joe McCarthy, insisting that the children watch the televised Army-McCarthy hearings of 1954.

"My father is a self-made man, a big criminal lawyer who never lost a case," Viva told journalist Guy Flatley in a New York Times interview. "We lived on a big estate in Syracuse, with a lake and a lot of boats. But we had to rent the boats from my father when we wanted to use them. In fact, we had to rent anything that needed a key to start it. I think my father sort of digs my being a movie star, but my mother says I'm dragging the family name through the gutter. The last time she went to the movies was to 'The Great Caruso.' "

Janet Hoffman was educated in parochial schools and attended a Catholic college, Marymount, in Tarrytown, New York. The young Janet thought of becoming a nun, but claimed that she was dissuaded from the idea by none other than Bishop Fulton J. Sheen. She spent her junior year abroad, studying art at the Sorbonne in Paris, boarding at a convent. It was there that she claimed she learned to pain nudes under the tutelage of a Catholic priest!