SHE: True Holly Woodlawn Story

A new memoir about working with a Warhol superstar prompts me to contemplate aging, the nature of our fallible memory, and the funhouse mirror of time itself. And also, wigs.

Strike a pose: Holly Woodlawn. Photo credit: Peter Palladino

My partner of nearly 30 years turned 60 yesterday.

I can hardly believe I’m writing such grotesque numbers. Why, surely it was just yesterday that my father turned 60. I clearly remember how crucially important it was to me that we get everyone together. Fly everyone in —he’s 60 and will soon collapse into a pile of dust. Hurry!

Sixty may not be young, but it’s not that old, like, elderly-old. Is it? Is it? Honestly, I really wouldn’t know. After all, I’m fun, frisky, and fairly functional for 55. (And I still know how to alliterate.)

But, yes, as you grow older, time warps into a funhouse mirror. It’s a rascal that tricks the mind just as surely as it kicks the balls. And memory, time’s partner in crime, can be a mean little bastard, too.

I’ve been thinking about aging and memory lately because I recently interviewed an author, and now memoirist, Jeff Copeland, for Windy City Times. Copeland is the writer who helped Holly Woodlawn—the chaotic, gender-bending muse of Lou Reed’s “Walk on the Wild Side”—write her 1991 autobiography, A Low Life in High Heels. By the time Jeff met Holly, any modicum of fleeting fame she had garnered for roles like a dumpster diving welfare cheat in 1970's Trash had long since faded. She was then based in L.A., where West Hollywood gays barely turned out for her occasional cabaret performance. Holly who?

Down & Out: Holly Woodlawn and Joe Dallesandro in Trash (1970)

Jeff, a hungry writer looking for his break, proposed working on a project together to rekindle her career and ignite his. The book that came from that partnership earned some good notices at the time, but getting it written was like running the Boston Marathon in stilettos, and the earnings were as slender as Holly's penciled-in eyebrows.

Ultimately, the book shattered their friendship. This year, Jeff published his memoir of what it took—and took out of him—to write that book. Love You Madly, Holly Woodlawn is a breezy, fast-paced zip down Santa Monica Boulevard of the 1980s. It's a tale of fame, money, and lawyers. And, of course, wigs. Glamour wigs. Cheap wigs. Delta Burke wigs. So many wigs.

Wigs aside, at its core, Love You Madly is really a writer’s story.

Starving writers searching for an audience for that screenplay, novel, poem, Substack, LinkedIn post, or manifesto will recognize themselves in his story. The struggle is real. Memories, on the other hand…

See, for me, memory was the thing I was most curious about when I spoke to Jeff. As a journalist, you’re usually pressed for both time and for column inches. So can you imagine the absolute turmoil of getting a clear, cohesive, verifiable fact from someone whose entire persona is built on their facility for self-invention? And can you trust your own memories of that experience while looking at yourself through that damn funhouse mirror of memory.

Highs & Lows: Holly Woodlawn's autobiography was well-received, but there wasn't a happy ending for her partnership with co-writer Jeff Copeland.

Jeff told me he was able to cobble together a trustworthy account of Holly’s story through good, old-fashioned shoe leather: first-person interviews, research trips, press clippings, and assiduous fact-checking, which he recounts in the book.

But his own story—that is, his story of writing her story—perhaps not unsurprisingly so many years later, was also fraught with the challenges of telling a clear, compelling narrative amid time and space constraints.

“I had seven or so boxes of materials,” Jeff told me. “I didn’t keep a formal journal, but I saved things.”

Over time, he pieced his story together using what he’d held onto—receipts, handwritten notes, drafts, and old manuscripts he’d squirreled away during those years. Still, as Jeff explained, even all of that can only get you so far.

“Because memory doesn’t always flow linearly,” he said. “The memories are true, but  some scenes are composites, I placed them where they made the most sense for the story’s trajectory.”

The result is a portrait that excavates a deeper truth—one that’s as much about the nature of memory as it is about Holly herself. That’s why I asked Jeff why he revisited this story now.

Jeff sees Holly Woodlawn, a teenage transgender runaway who escaped a hostile world only to find herself surviving on the streets before elbowing her way into Andy Warhol's Factory, as a kind of poster child for why DEI initiatives still matter.

But the burden of time—and the fragility of memory—played its part as well.

Jeff told me he ultimately wrote the book as a way to fortify his own memories against what time can snatch from us.

“I wanted to write it down so I wouldn’t forget it,” he told me. “My father had Alzheimer’s, and now my mother has dementia. I just thought, if I ever go down that rabbit hole, I want the story written so someone can read it to me.”

• Read my interview with Jeff here.

• Buy Jeff's book here