Alexandra Auder reflects on growing up as the daughter of an Andy Warhol muse

Alexandra Auder’s memoir is Don’t Call Me Home.

Nick Nehez/Viking/Penguin Random House

Alexandra Auder’s mother, Viva, was one of Andy Warhol’s muses. Viva appeared in the Warhol films Lonesome Cowboys and The Loves of Ondine, and she was on the phone with Warhol in 1968 when he was shot.

Growing up in Warhol’s orbit meant Auder’s childhood was an unusual one. As a kid, she played the daughter of a dominatrix in an underground film. After her parents split up when she was 5, Auder and Viva went on the road, traveling cross-country in a beat-up car with a cat they picked up along the way.

“It had no heat,” Auder says of the car. “So at some point we were in the Rocky Mountains with no heat. And my mother would say, ‘Oh God, my feet are just freezing to death,’ and I would rub one of her feet while she was driving to keep them warm.”

For several years, Viva, Auder and Auder’s younger half-sister, Gaby Hoffmann, lived in the Chelsea Hotel in Manhattan, which was famous for having been home to Leonard Cohen, Dylan Thomas, Virgil Thomson, and Bob Dylan, among others.

Viva, left, stands with actor Gerard Malanga in the waiting room of Columbus Hospital in New York on June 3, 1968, the day Andy Warhol was shot.

Marty Lederhandler/Associated Press

“I absolutely loved living there,” Auder says of the Chelsea. “Of course, there’s transient people coming in and out. … A ‘normal’ person might be horrified at the crowd — and there were often cops and some strange riffraff — but…