Complex Nostalgia for a Bygone Era: Alex Auder on Her Chelsea Hotel Childhood

There are many stories about the Chelsea Hotel—whether it be through film, text, or oral history—but only a few can resist playing into the stereotypes that continue to both plague and elevate the building in our popular culture. There’s the endless laundry list of celebrities, artists, eccentrics, and ghosts. The anecdotes of strange goings-on are either exaggerated or reduced to cardboard cutouts of the events that actually transpired. The obsessive, self-reverent declarations: “I was there… No, I really was there!”

Three important books are: Arthur Miller’s Timebends (1987), Patti Smith’s Just Kids (2010) and Alex Auder’s Don’t Call Me Home, published this past spring. In Timebends, Miller flees to the Chelsea in the 1950s following his divorce from Marilyn Monroe. Just Kids, set in the ’60s and ’70s, features the teenage Patti coming of age alongside Robert Mapplethorpe through the mentorship of the Hotel’s community.

And in Don’t Call Me Home, Auder grows up as the sometimes child, sometimes compatriot of her Warhol Superstar mother, Viva Hoffman. Living an itinerate, bohemian life, the Hotel was a haven they returned to. Ironically, none of these stories are about the building. In these autobiographies, the Hotel serves, at one point or another, as the setting for their journeys.

Auder occupies the building between the ’80s and ’90s. There’s a sense that time is ticking. As she moves through the surrounding neighborhood, she frequents bars and tenements that will soon be demolished, displacing communities that will no longer afford to live there. By the end of her story, her Chelsea is only a decade away from becoming one of the most expensive regions of NYC, peopled by a slew of corporate prototypes clad in irksomely, near identical clothing.

A year ago, the Chelsea was reopened as a luxury hotel. Its website features archival photos of Patti Smith, Mapplethorpe, Dylan, and others who were willing to suffer the rat and roach infested, crumbling walls for the sake of affordability and community when many would not. Gary Oldman, famously tried to stay in the Chelsea Hotel to prepare for his role as Sid Viscious in Sid and Nancy (1986). “I stayed there one night, and when I turned on the light, there were cockroaches crawling over the phone. I immediately checked out.”

Now, most of the rooms are filled with guests who spend a fistful of days in pink-walled, gilded suites installed with extra-large, marble bathrooms, sans vermin. Auder’s recollections make one grimace at the perversity of marketing the place based off of its legacy but selling drinks and rooms at a price point accessible to a rarified and wealthy community.

Technically, I’ve known Alex Auder since I was little, but I don’t remember it. Her time at the hotel overlapped with mine (I lived there from the ’90s to present day). Like her, my mother was an artist but of a different sort—a principal singer at the Metropolitan Opera. And much like Auder, the roles I occupied within our small family of two was manifold, going far beyond that of “child.” Joining her on tour, my life was far from “stable.” I came and went. Sometimes I would be gone for years. But, the Hotel was mainstay, a shockingly stable force despite its reputation for being anything but that.

When I read Don’t Call Me Home, what struck me most was the opening of a window into the unique dynamics that develop between a single, artist mother and her child. Auder makes no bones about the volatile nature of her relationship with her mother, opening the memoir in the present day by declaring she wants to “kill” Viva out of sheer exasperation. It’s refreshing and raw—haven’t we all felt such absolute, primal vexation towards a parent? Viva Hoffman was notoriously eccentric; often dubbed the popular misnomer, “difficult.” Auder deftly renders their complex, often trying relationship, grounded in a deep love.

There are unspoken questions at the heart of this: what does it take to be an iconoclast and single mother in the 1970s? If childhood is an education, what did Alex gain through her incredible life with Viva? What does a child lose in the conventional upbringings we value today?

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Alex Auder: I’m curious how you felt, and if you felt a bit protective and maybe a little nervous to see me writing about the Hotel.

Amanda Chemeche: No. The idea of ownership, the idea of “my hotel,” is problematic. Plurality in storytelling is really important. It’s a good sign when more people are telling stories. There aren’t places like this anymore. I think it existed as long as it did because Stanley Bard worked in opposition to NYC’s changing urban regulations

AA: Yeah, I agree. I truly loved the Chelsea, and still do, in what my image of it was before. And definitely felt a visceral relief when I saw that the stairwell in the lobby was the same, almost as though I was worried I was going to have an organ cut out of me if I walk in and they had done something really crazy with it.

AC: Did you realize you were creating an historic document? You’ve taken us back to NYC’s art scene in the 1980s. It’s a pleasure to read your accounts of Cindy Sherman’s studio and costumes, Michel Auder’s filmmaking and more.

AA: I was compelled to tell a story just out of that way you just want to tell a story. You know what I mean? But I did have a perspective from a special time and place and a really poignant moment in art. And that I was around just from dumb luck and genes. Two people decided to have sex so I was around for these trailblazing artists, Michel and Cindy, and my mom.

As for the Chelsea Hotel, I’m also sure you relate to that feeling of, “Okay, but it’s not how people describe it.” So, I did feel responsible to describe the Chelsea in the way it really was, in both its grit and glory. And that obviously we were all outliers.

AC: I loved the way you rendered the hotel as a space. The artwork in the lobby, such as the black painting with upside down rainbows and the papier-mâché pink lady. The doors belonging to the artists’ apartments, the sounds of people moving through the building. The basement, the scary fucking elevator.

And you so accurately depict what it was like to be a child there. It really was a giant jungle gym. When you talked about spitting down the stairwell I was like “I did that!” Or running behind the front desk, or playing with the art on display.

How important was it for you to do that? Because I’ve not read many writers detailing the space that was the hotel in that way you did.

AA: I wanted to treat it as living, breathing, sentient…like a somatic relationship with the architecture, which is what I felt it was. And the sounds of the swinging doors moving, and the way the hallway sounded. I felt like it was a love affair that I was trying to render correctly on the page.

AC: Here’s a beautiful line: “Although plenty of people came through the Chelsea, we quickly made friends with many of the permanent residents.” Like you, I came and went over the years. But I always felt at ease with the people whenever I came back. Why do you think it is? Is there something special about the building? The makeup of the people?

AA: It was almost like a commune or perhaps another country…the Chelsea hearkens to that in a funny, obviously super urban environment. We didn’t lock our doors and everybody knew each other. There was a sense of adventure. Anything could happen in those hallways but also it wasn’t threatening. Of course, now and then there was something dangerous happening like a fire or a fight and cops around.

There’s definitely something about the lobby too that felt like a true, communal space. You were never kicked out. You could do anything there. Yeah. I don’t know. It was a little microcosm, really a world in and of itself.

It’s a very good question that I cannot answer, but it did feel like a community. And obviously, in any community, sometimes you want to avoid people and you don’t always get along. But it did feel like a real home.

AC: Why do you think there’s so many inaccurate, exaggerated depictions of the Chelsea Hotel?

AA: It’s human nature to mythologize. On many levels, all stories are based on that. Obviously, we go back to the Odyssey, it’s like one is going to use these iconic mythologies in order to tell a story. I do think it’s intrinsic to storytelling.

That said, the difference between the mythology of the Chelsea Hotel and the actual Chelsea Hotel is quite different. Even in the sense of the people who lived there. Like okay, yes, Patti Smith lived there, but not for very long. The super famous people who pass through are associated with it. But the real Chelsea Hotel was just regular old people.

The glamour of the Chelsea was the fact that it was unglamorous. To me, Merle is the Chelsea Hotel, not Patti Smith. I think it’s important to get as close to the reality of something as we can, unless we’re writing a fairy tale, that’s different.

AC: How would you say that the definition or even the status of artists has changed?

AA: Today it’s not respected to not have money. I don’t want to say poor because poverty is a different thing that’s a horrible, economic injustice in the world. So clearly, I was a very privileged person, even though, yes, we had welfare at times, but being poor and in an underprivileged neighborhood in Manhattan was very different than being Viva in the Chelsea Hotel. But that said, back then, having no money was not looked down upon at all.

Even saying “artist” or “poor artist,” I always bristle at that. In the hotel, your parents, your neighbors…they were just doing it, they weren’t saying, “I am an artist.” There wasn’t a brand of that. I think that Michel and Viva particularly, were just living their lives. That’s what they did.

AC: Do you think the era you existed in is over? Is it safe to say that, your book, set in the ’80s and ’90s depicts a swan song for lifestyles that no longer exists today?

AA: There’s tons of people making art in our city but we just don’t see it. Someone just might not have the wherewithal or can’t get it out in the world I think that it is rarely possible in this late-stage capitalism. That era of ’50s, ’60s, ’70s and moving into the ’80s was special in New York. Like a Petri dish for those communities. But it couldn’t go on because things get commodified, including art. I think it’s just a fact of economic policy. If the rich aren’t taxed and there’s no boundaries on real estate. That’s what happened to New York. There’s no longer a place for it.

AC: Do you have any thoughts about this new iteration of the hotel?

AA: The newly re-opened Chelsea is banking on the ’50s-’80s, when not having money was considered cool. Now not having money, you’re considered a lazy good-for-nothing, unsuccessful. But it’s so fascinating that they have a picture of my mother and father on the website. And I’m saying that in a negative way. They’re using that imagery, meanwhile, there’s nothing about their actual modus operandi that has an iota, an inkling of camaraderie with that era and those artists.

I’ve been in the lobby bar a couple times. It’s so formal and weird, absolutely wrong. No sense of humor. Literally nothing the way it should be at a Chelsea Hotel bar. You’ve seen the cocktail menu, have you?

AC: Isn’t there a Viva cocktail?

AA: One’s called the Viva Superstar, for $30. I made a joke to the bartender, “Well, I guess I should have this for free, since it’s named after my mother.” He did not know what the fuck I was talking about, and had no sense of humor.

AC: Your prose dexterously moves us through the stages of a daughter’s love over the duration of her adolescence—idolizing, questioning, individualizing. What does it mean to be the child of a Warhol Superstar? Were your experiences altered because of the natural presence she had? That special aura that drew Warhol to her in the first place?

AA: It’s so hard to articulate, and that’s why I wrote the book. I only know Viva as mom, not as the icon. As I was growing up, she was fading from the limelight. The things that made her captivating and seductive when she was young were what drove people crazy as she got older. Without that youth—not that she wasn’t always beautiful—without the youth and cultural structure of the Warhol era around her, she was often thought of as insufferable.

Me and Gaby didn’t experience a lot of being the daughters of an icon though I will say we were able to move through the world in a way that, let’s say, another person with the same bank account as Viva and a single mom would not have been able to move around it. Do you get my point?

There was a sense of glamor and we traveled a lot, and I ate at Mr. Chow’s sometimes. We were in Los Angeles and all that. It was pretty thrilling, definitely. Yet the child does suffer from the narcissism of the parent because they can’t help but mourn or rant against what was lost as women age. As these female icons age, they lose that. It’s a little different now for the positive, I think.

I was part of a book club, they interviewed me, just a local book club, and they were like, “How are you even still finding love after being neglected so much?” I was like, “Oh no, I wasn’t neglected.” My point is that it is a feminist story. Being a single mother artist in that era of New York City is hard and a big deal, and that Viva was doing her best as this kind of fallen icon, true artist who had to raise two children with no money in the Chelsea Hotel.

AC: I am writing a book about living Paris with Mom in the 1990’s. She broke her leg on stage at the Bastille Opera House. I was about seven, but I became a caregiver, a cook, a cleaning person, and actually. In the end, we ran out of food, and one of the local prostitutes—because we were on the Rue Saint-Denis—started helping me. It was all very eccentric and I certainly wasn’t treated as a “normal child” but also, my mom was a single, female artist with a lot of demands on her. In many ways, it was great being folded into her world, having jobs to do. And, of course, at times it was mad.

Speaking of, is it absurd to expect artists like Viva to be fabulous and extreme—which is what gives them this crackling power on the screen—then expect them to become a completely different person in order to manifest the maternal ideal?

AA: That’s exactly right, because Warhol made her famous precisely because of her personality. She wasn’t playing a character. That’s also the very particular thing about Warhol, these people weren’t playing characters in his films.

AC: In the book we see you working as an actress, hobnobbing amongst Bohemians, raising a child and understanding sex in a more mature way than your peers. At one point, you generously gift your mother a part of your money. Do you think the adult roles you fulfilled gave you a unique education? And how do you value it?

AA: Yes, I 100 percent do. I’ve basically lamented the lack of that as a Gen X parent. As much as I wrote a book that, at times, depicted the horrors of that, I definitely feel the lack of such exposure forms a very different kind of child that is very overprotected. There’s a certain sophistication and resilience. By sophistication, I don’t mean that in a snobby way. I mean the ability to take in many truths at once and recognize the nuances of life, and have tolerance and resilience.