A Valentine’s feast for a kindred free spirit

Photographer Mia Hansen and poet Ira Cohen, two of the many revelers who feted the life of Vali Myers at the Hotel Chelsea on Valentine’s Day

By Ed Hamilton

In a remote corner of the Hotel Chelsea, behind a yellow door trimmed in red and topped with plastic flowers, lies a short hallway painted in the same red and yellow stripes. A unique, antique brass lighting fixture dangles from the ceiling. A turn to the left brings one into the main room, a dreamlike mélange of faded grandeur set against a backdrop of intense, radiant color.

On Feb. 14th, Valentine’s Day, friends of the late artist, witch and free spirit Vali Myers assembled in her old room at the Hotel Chelsea to commemorate her passing, as they have every year since her death on Feb. 12 in 2003. In no sense wicked, Vali was a witch with a heart of gold who touched a great many lives with her vibrant spirit and optimistic outlook. “To know her was to love her,” said poet, filmmaker and publisher Ira Cohen. “Vali was an original, a modern-day Kiki of Montparnasse. A million people were charmed by her.” Vali was a champion of life and love in all its varied manifestations, and hence it’s fitting that her friends should gather on a holiday that has its roots in an ancient pagan fertility festival.


	Carol Beckwith, courtesy The Vali Myers Trust Vali Myers in the Hotel Chelsea, 1989

Party-going Bohemians drank wine, swapped stories around a roaring fire, watched videos of Vali’s life, and perused copies of her illustrated diaries, which are reminiscent of illuminated manuscripts of the Middle Ages. Andrea Ho, who designed the book jacket for the soon-to-be-released “Vali Myers: A Memoir” by Vali’s longtime lover Gianni Menichetti, showed off a mock-up of the book. Jeremiah Newton, NYU film and television liaison, arrived with several of his students in tow because he thought it was important for a new generation to be aware of Vali. And William Barton, a classical soloist who most recently played with the Brooklyn Philharmonic, gave an impressive and thoroughly enjoyable demonstration of the Didgeridoo, a tribal instrument from Vali’s native Australia.

It wasn’t only intellectuals who fell in love with Vali either, as her appeal was universal. “She was life itself,” said retired NYPD policeman Scotty Diller. “One night we drank gin and busted all the bottles. We broke all the glass in the whole place in a wild frenzy until we finally fell together, exhausted, on a bed of broken glass.”

The host of the party, Tony Notarberardino, a photographer and fellow Australian who knew Vali for ten years before her death, has maintained Vali’s room as it was when she lived there in the seventies and eighties, assembling antique lighting fixtures and mirrors to provide a striking counterpoint to the bright reds, yellows and greens of the walls and to the blue, flower-adorned ceiling. Hand painted by Vali herself, the room is a work of art. However, “it’s not a museum,” Tony makes clear, “but an organic thing.” He adds to it occasionally, whenever he finds a piece that he thinks belongs.

“The room is very sexy,” said Zeus Colovoai, a muralist. “It looks like the Casbah. And it seems like a good place to hallucinate. I wish I could have a memorial like this. Vali is going to live forever. And this party is like an Irish wake.”

Vali Myers was born in 1930 in Sydney, Australia, a wild, red-haired child, who as a teen became leading dancer for the Melbourne Modern Ballet Company. She left home at 19, moving to Paris where she was swiftly embraced by the post-war Bohemian society of the Left Bank. In the cafés and bars of St. Germain des Prés, she ran with the likes of Jean Cocteau, Jean Genet, Salvador Dali and Jean-Paul Sartre, making quite an impression on the scene with her dramatic, Kohl-painted eyes and ecstatic, animalistic dance style.

On the run from the Parisian authorities and drug smuggling charges, Vali took refuge in the small village of Positano, near Salerno, Italy. There, in a tiny cottage high on a mountain cliff, together with a herd of goats and a pack of dogs, Vali and her then-husband Rudy set up housekeeping in the sixties. The seclusion gave Vali a welcome opportunity to develop her art. At night she would enclose herself in a cage with her pet fox, Foxy, the better to focus her energies as she bent in the lamplight to execute her meticulously detailed, symbol-rich paintings.

This idyllic retreat was not without its perils, however. The townspeople didn’t take warmly to this strange hippie woman and her motley brood. Once when Vali and Rudy were away, boys from the town ventured up the mountain and killed some of the dogs. In response, Vali tattooed the names of the murdered dogs on her feet and performed a wild, retaliatory witch-dance through the streets of the village. The townsfolk apparently thought better of messing with her after that.

Harsh winters made the cottage unlivable year-round, and Vali needed to sell her paintings to make a living, so the Hotel Chelsea, where she maintained an apartment throughout the seventies, eighties, and early nineties, became a welcoming and accepting home away from home, close to the market for her art. Vali’s appearance was always striking and idiosyncratic: with her bushy red hair, long gypsy robes, heavy jewelry and facial tattoos — along with her black eye make-up, designed to ward off evil spirits — one would think she probably warded off a good many mortal souls as well.

But apparently she did not. “I first met her in 1986 at the Limelight where she was hanging out with Allen Midgette, Andy Warhol’s surrogate,” said filmmaker Clayton Patterson. “I was inspired by her energy and vitality and I knew I had to catch it on film. The first video I ever shot was of Vali here in the Chelsea.” She was friends with Gregory Corso while she lived at the hotel, and Chelsea regulars such as George Plimpton, Norman Mailer and Tennessee Williams bought her art. “She always had a great Salon when she lived here,” Ira Cohen said. “She surrounded herself with interesting and unusual people, and normal people too. I introduced her to Bombay gin and forever after she was a devotee.” Art agent Rick Librizzi tells how one of Vali’s numerous (and much younger) boyfriends once fell down the Chelsea stairwell after a night of revelry. “Vali and the man were dancing on the landing,” Librizzi said. “He was an Irish dancer, so he was really kicking up his heels. He was tall, so when he hit the rail he just toppled over.” Luckily, he lived, as the railings on a lower floor broke his fall.

Vali’s art and her witchcraft are of a piece. In a typical painting, rendered in psychedelic, almost hallucinatory color, she surrounds her image with totemic spirit animals and power objects. Her paintings are realistic, while at the same time depicting a rich personal mythology employing idiosyncratic symbols with meanings primarily relevant to her life alone. (For examples of her work see “Vali Myers,” intro by George A. Plimpton, 1980, Open House, London.)

Vali had no intention, at least at first, in becoming a fine artist; her interest was in the psychic life and the occult, and she produced the drawings for her use alone. They represent both a meditative act and a feat of magic. Her painstaking attention to detail — she drew with a pen nib attached to a goose quill for lightness of touch — required her to focus all her mental powers in a rigorous act of concentration. By surrounding herself in her paintings with foxes, ravens, owls, toads, and goats, she sought to draw these animals into her orbit in order to partake of their power. Similarly, in an act of sympathetic, or imitative, magic, she depicted herself in the guise of famous witches of the past, and as goddesses drawn from various world mythologies.

“Her art is surreal art,” said painter Hawk Alfredson, adding that although he didn’t know her, he can relate to Vali, as he’s always been something of a weird character himself. “Being a Swede, I’m very critical, but this is gorgeous,” he said, indicating a framed Vali print on the wall. When told that Vali made her own pigments, sometimes grinding and mixing in the bones of her favorite pet animals, Alfredson said simply, “She’s an alchemist.”

As with her paintings, Vali intended her painted room to focus her power as well. The large yellow and red flower on the ceiling is reminiscent of a sun mandala and could have been used as an aid in meditation, perhaps as she was lying in bed. “Even here in the middle of Manhattan,” Alfredson said as he surveyed the scene, “when you enter this room you can let out a big sigh, and maybe connect with Vali’s spirit.”