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 ...
Her father was of one half German, one quarter Italian, and one quarter Irish, descent. Her mother had Irish and English ancestry.
2
Palm Springs, CA, USA [July 2013]
3
She sent Andy Warhol a threatening letter from Paris. She had gone there in November 1968 using a round-trip ticket that Andy had paid for. In the letter, she threatened: "If you don't send me money, I'll work against you as well as I worked for you". Warhol was disappointed by her behavior and ignored her.
4
She was the eldest of nine children born to conservative parents. Her father was a prominent criminal lawyer. After attending parochial grade schools, she went to Marymount, a Catholic College in Tarrytown, New York. She studied in Paris at the Sorbonne in her junior year, living in a convent on the Right Bank while studying art.
$9 Million
