Viva

Viva was born Janet Susan Mary Hoffmann in Syracuse, New York, to Mary Alice (McNicholas) and Wilfred Ernest Hoffmann, a well-to-do lawyer. She is the first child of a devout Catholic family, and is of German, Irish, English, and one eighth Italian, ancestry. Her parents had eight more children. She told her mentor, Andy Warhol, that her father was a religious fanatic and her mother worshiped the Irish-Catholic Witch-Finder General Joseph McCarthy, insisting that the children watch the televised Army-McCarthy hearings of 1954. Janet Hoffman was educated in parochial schools and attended a Catholic college, Marymount, in Tarrytown, New York. She spent her junior year in college abroad, studying art at the Sorbonne in Paris, boarding at a convent. Hers was a life that made her ache for rebellion, and rebel the young Ms. Hoffman eventually did. She became the first non-anonymous performer to perform an act of sexual intercourse on screen, in Warhol's Blue Movie (1969), at the end of the