A Walk On The Wild Side With Andy Warhol’s Most Fabulous Superstar
Memoir / Biography
Date Published: 02-11-2025
Publisher: Feral House
A young, aspiring writer desperate for a break…and the legendary
Andy Warhol superstar who gave him the story of a lifetime.
“Jeff’s affection for Holly, even as she drunkenly claims, ‘You
ruined my life!’ makes this romp worth the journey.”
—Michael Musto
By the mid-1980s, Holly Woodlawn, once lauded by George Cukor for her
performance in the 1970 Warhol production and Paul Morrissey directed Trash,
was washed up. Over. Kaput. She was living in a squalid Hollywood apartment
with her dog and bottles of Chardonnay. A chance meeting with starry-eyed
corn-fed Missouri-born Jeff Copeland, who moved to Hollywood with dreams of
‘making it’ as a television writer, changed the course of BOTH
of their lives forever.
Love You Madly, Holly Woodlawn is a story of how an unlikely friendship
with a young gay writer and an, ahem, mature trans actress and performer
created the bestselling autobiography of 1991, A Low Life in High Heels.
This book about writing a book is a celebration of chutzpa and love as
Holly, the embodiment of Auntie Mame, introduces Jeff to the glamorous (and
sometimes larcenous) world of a Warhol Superstar. In turn, Jeff uses his
writing (and typing) talent to give Holly the second chance at fame she
craved.
In turns hilarious and heartwarming, Love You Madly, Holly Woodlawn is a
portrait of the real Holly who loved deeply, laughed loudly, and left mayhem
in her wake.
EXCERPT
Chapter 12
O N MEMORIAL DAY, 1989, THE BOOK PROPOSAL WAS
finally finished. We called it On the Wild Side, and it included one
chapter, twenty chapter outlines, a synopsis, and a marketing proposal
that had been written, rewritten, polished, and completed. Our agent,
Robert, oversaw the entire process and served as our editor and proofreader,
spotting typos and fixing sentence structure. He even punched up the humor.
His contribution was immeasurable, and we were so fortunate to have him as
our agent because he was smart, creative, and intuitive. He knew we were on
to something special. He knew it when he spotted Holly’s photo in the trash,
which is how this ball got rolling in the first place. It was all so serendipitous
and odd, yet terribly exciting because I knew this whole experience was
being driven by a bigger cosmic force.
While Holly played cashier at Wacko, I spent the holiday alone inside our
agent’s heat-scorched office, stripped down to my underwear, typing the first
chapter into the agency’s computer. The air conditioner wasn’t working, but
I didn’t care. Not even a Los Angeles heatwave could keep me from one last
opportunity to revise and revise. The one thing that bothered me was the
way the first chapter ended. Holly gets out of jail . . . which was okay, but
instinctively I knew it needed to pack more of a punch.
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Fuck the truth, I thought as I paced the floor. Just make up something! Paint
a crazy-ass picture. Throw in some Judy Garland! She’s always a good time.
And bring in the dancing monkeys. The ideas cracked and roared, and my brain
sparked with a dopamine rush as a storm of inspiration took hold and the final
line struck like a bolt of lightning.
“FREE PUSSY!”
Oh, Lordy! It might have been offensive, but it made sense to me. What
else would she scream now that she was sprung from the clink? Holly
thought it was a hoot.
Later that week, Holly and I celebrated the milestone in Robert’s
apartment and finalized our formal collaboration agreement. If the book
sold, Holly would get sixty percent of the proceeds and I would take forty,
which (I was told) was the standard split for these types of partnerships.
When it came to our byline, I liked “by Holly Woodlawn with Jeff
Copeland.” I could have had “and” but preferred “with” because I thought
it elevated Holly. I wanted her to look like she was more of a writer than she
actually was because I wanted to prove that she wasn’t a mess like so many
people had said. Also, I wasn’t aspiring to have a career as a book writer.
I wanted to be a screenwriter, and because of that, I was holding out for
something far more valuable than a byline on a book jacket.
“I’m very grateful for this opportunity,” I said. “But there’s one thing I
want more than anything.”
I’d mentioned this interest in casual conversation before, but now it was
time to put it in writing.
“I want to write the screenplay,” I said. “This story is going to make a
great film. That’s the only reason I’m writing this book.”
Those screen rights were the ultimate jackpot and my just reward. Holly
screamed with excitement.
“Honey, I can’t wait for the premiere!”
We were all excited, but this was an important term, and it was the only
reason I was working on spec. The screenplay rights were the one golden
carrot I held out for, and I made that clear so there were no misunderstandings.
“The only reason I’m writing this book is so I can write the screen
adaptation,” I said.
“Darling, of course, you’ll write the movie!” Holly agreed. “It’s going to
be fabulous!” review copy
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Our agent did not disagree and
I requested a provision about
screenplay rights be added to our
agreement. But what I got instead
was this: “Neither of us may enter
into any agreement for any of the
rights in and to the work without
the written consent of the other
party.” Well . . . that didn’t say a
darn thing about screenplay rights!
But in my heart, I knew I had
nothing to worry about. Holly was
my best friend. I knew she’d look
out for me, and I was so excited
about becoming a real writer,
I didn’t want to spoil the high
by making demands, appearing
difficult, and ruffling feathers. I just
wanted to move forward.
I’d spent years feeling like a “have not” in Hollywood, and this collaboration
agreement made me feel like I was on the brink of being a “have” . . . even
though it was a deal that still paid no money. The money would come later,
if and when the book sold to a publisher. I believed it would, but that didn’t
matter to my apartment manager, Babe Yancey. She wanted to see those hardearned greenbacks that I could only get from doing “real work.” According
to Babe, the only job that mattered was the one that paid. Anything else was
just “fiddle-farting around.”
Shortly afterward, my job as a photo assistant came to an end. Apparently,
my lackluster enthusiasm for the work had impeded my performance,
particularly when it came to working with a powder puff. By the end of June,
I was struggling to make it on wooden nickels, sour grapes, and a glimmer
of hope. Through a temp agency, I found work as a secretary on a television
western called The Young Riders. It was a good gig, but when they asked me
to join the show full-time as a writer’s assistant, I declined because the hours
were long and it would leave no time for late-night writing adventures with
Miss Woodlawn, once our book sold.
Then I got a call from Paul Reubens’ office, asking if I’d be interested in
working as his assistant on Pee-wee’s Playhouse. I liked Paul Reubens a lot,
The original cover that I drew for our book proposal. While much of Holly’s story took place in
the ’60s and ’70s, the title graphic was wacky
tacky ’80s. It made no sense whatsoever…but
it was fun! 1989.
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but I wanted to be a writer. I didn’t want to be an assistant again. That
was a twelve-hour-a-day commitment. I couldn’t start working for Paul
Reubens and then quit in the middle of his show to write a book with Holly
Woodlawn. Writing is a lot of work, and I didn’t have the energy to do both,
so I put all my chips on Holly Woodlawn, betting, in the long run, she’d have
the greater payout.
“Sounds like a crock of horse shit to me,” Babe Yancey grumbled when I told
her the reason I was late with the rent. For once, I agreed with her. I tumbled
from one temp job to another that summer, eagerly anticipating a publishing
deal, but it never came. As the months dragged on, Holly’s patience began to
wane. She was bored. The whole reason she came back to Los Angeles was to
work on a book about her life, and now the project had stalled.
“What’s going on with that book proposal?” Holly asked almost daily
only to get the same frustrating answer. Nothing!
So when a friend of hers asked if she’d like a free trip to Europe, Holly
jumped at the chance. This friend was named Harriet and she was a musical
theatre powerhouse who blew in from New York to work on a TV series.
I first met her when I drove Holly to her apartment on Hawthorne Avenue
in Hollywood.
Harriet was a portly little troll with a big round head and long, thin
stringy brown hair. She didn’t look or act theatrical at all. In fact, she looked
frumpish, like a middle-aged hausfrau who spent all day scrubbing floors,
and she spoke with a deep, almost monotone voice.
“Oh, darling, she’s a real hot mama,” Holly told me later. “She’s into
leather, bondage and all that S&M stuff.”
“You’re kidding,” I said.
“Oh, no, honey, she’s a hardcore diva,” Holly laughed. “A bona fide, triedand-true dominatrix dyke, stomping around in her leather boots, cracking
her whip, showing her pretty young girlfriends who’s boss.”
“How do you know?” I asked as I visualized a scenario that tickled more
than it shocked.
“We’re sisters, honey. She told me all about it. Oh, that Harriet! She’s got
more kinks in her wig than a closeted Presbyterian. And wait until you see
her in drag.”
It never occurred to me that a biological woman could do female drag.
In my mind, the concept of “drag” was reserved for a man impersonating
a woman or a woman impersonating a man. But Harriet didn’t disappoint
when it came to the art of transformation. When Holly and I went to see her
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perform at an AIDS benefit in West Hollywood, I was curious as to how
this homely, stringy-haired gal would carry off a live performance on stage.
I was not only surprised, but I was literally astounded. Harriet was a force
and she looked fantastic. Painted face, huge hair, and a thunderous voice that
gave me chills.
But despite her tremendous talent, Harriet, like a lot of actors in
Hollywood, never hit the big time. She hopped from job to job, had a few
good TV gigs, made a disco record in Europe, and performed at cabarets
while hustling antique jewelry and vintage tchotchkes on the side. But all
that hard work wasn’t enough to sustain her during the down times when she
wasn’t working, and by the end of summer, Harriet was belly-up financially.
Knee-deep in debt, she decided to fuck all and take Holly to Europe for an
all-expenses-paid vacation.
“How does that make sense?” I asked Holly upon hearing of the scheme.
“Hon, you do what you gotta do,” said Holly as she sorted pennies from a
jar of change. “Harriet’s going broke and I’m going to help her.”
“What?!”
“We’re maxing out her credit cards, darling. We’re going to spend every
bit of credit she’s got. All her cash, too. Honey, by the time she gets back
to America, she’ll be flat busted. Then she’ll claim bankruptcy and the bill
collectors won’t be able to touch her.”
“But I don’t understand. Why?”
“Because she doesn’t have enough money to pay her bills. So before they
take away her credit, she’s going to live it up and blow through it. That way
when she comes back, she’ll be so poor she’ll get welfare and food stamps.”
I couldn’t even wrap my head around that logic.
“But Holly, what about your job?”
“Oh, they know I’m going.”
Holly had worked at Wacko for only a few months and was already taking
off on a two-week vacation!
“Miss Lawn needs to convalesce,” reasoned Harriet, who always truncated
Holly’s last name. We were sitting in her dimly lit 1920s apartment and I
was admiring her collection of framed vintage Maxfield Parrish prints that
adorned her darkly colored walls.
“The respite will be good for us both,” Harriet continued. “You know,
darling, it’s not good for a person to work too hard.”
“And don’t I know it,” chirped Holly. “That Wacko cash register is
wearing me out!” review copy
124
The truth is Holly could barely work the cash register at Wacko. She
always pressed the wrong buttons and was lousy at counting change. A
friend of mine told me he tried to buy a two-dollar postcard once and Holly
got so flustered with the register buttons she threw her hands in the air and
said, “Oh, honey, just take it!”
Then one day, Harriet showed up. Holly told me she came in with a shopping
bag that was the size of a wheelbarrow. When she got to the register and
dumped her take onto the counter, Holly was beside herself. Harriet reached
into her pocketbook, pulled out five dollars, and handed it to Holly.
“Harriet, what are you doing?” Holly asked.
“I’m paying my bill,” said Harriet. “Here’s five bucks.”
“Honey! You’ve got at least two hundred dollars’ worth of stuff here.”
“I know,” said Harriet. “Take the five bucks.”
“No!” Holly was aghast. “You can’t give me five dollars for all this! I’ll
get fired.”
“Oh, all right!” huffed Harriet as she crammed all the stuff back into her
shopping bag. “Here’s twenty.”
She begrudgingly slapped two tens on the counter, grabbed her shopping
bag, and walked out the door.
“Honey, I was plucked,” Holly told me afterward. “The nerve of that
broad. She robbed us blind!”
But now Harriet’s nerve was paying off in ways Holly never imagined, and
within a few weeks, I received a postcard from Paris that read:
“Bonjour from La Tour Eiffel! Paris is f lawless. The people suck!
See you soon. Love you madly, Holly.”
While Holly and Harriet cavorted from Paris to Amsterdam to indulge
in an all-you-can-smoke hashish buffet, my temp job came to an end and my
beautiful Fiero broke down. I was out of work, out of a car, and down to
my last can of corn in the cupboard. My rent was due in two days, and no
matter how hard I hustled for work, nothing materialized . . . except for a job
interview in the bowels of the San Fernando Valley that turned out to be an
awful ruse staged by a hidden camera TV show called Totally Hidden Video.
It was just one more slap in the face, one more shitty indignation . . . except
for those who were on the opposite side of those hidden cameras, making six
figures a year and driving Porsche review copy s.
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The postcard Holly sent to me while she cavorted around Europe, blowing through Harriet’s line
of credit. 1989.
That night, I sat on my Murphy bed and sorted my bills. I had enough
money to make my monthly car note, but I only had half of the rent. I knew
that wouldn’t go over well with Babe Yancey.
“All you writers are full of shit,” Babe growled when I told her of my
plight. “If you worked a regular job and stopped fiddle-farting around with
that Holly Woodland, you wouldn’t be in this mess. Shit!”
Then she slammed the door in my face. I’d spent four years trying to make
it in Hollywood. Always hustling, always hoping, hungry to be a winner. Just
once. But I was still lost in a labyrinth of grand dreams and twisted realities,
and while I was persistent and tenacious, pushing to forge my way to the golden
statue in the center, I only dug myself deeper into a strange, inescapable hole.
I didn’t have a credit card to bail me out of this mess, and I refused to call
my parents and ask for a handout. This was my shit to shovel, my problem to
solve, and I needed some fresh ideas. So I called my friend Jean, whom I’d
met two years earlier on the Paramount lot.
Jean was the salt of the earth. Coincidentally, she was also from Missouri
and had driven by herself from St. Louis to Los Angeles to pursue a
career as a comic actress. Jean was quirky and fun with short dark hair,
bright expressive eyes, hilarious facial expressions, and a black two-piece
permanent press business ensemble that she wore every day.
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“This suit is the best investment I ever made,” she said. “All I have to do is
flip up the collar and change my blouse, and it’s a whole new look.”
Jean was the quintessential American everywoman. She could play the
nice mom next door, the Avon lady, and the friendly grocery store checker
. . . if granted the opportunity. She was also grounded and responsible, and
her moral principles and values were the very antithesis of Holly’s crackpot
lunacy. I could count on Jean; we looked out for each other. When she was
out of work, I helped get her jobs. When I was low on cash, she made me
dinner. A couple of months earlier, when Jean told me she wanted to move
because she found a dead drug dealer in her apartment building’s Jacuzzi, I
took her to the Las Palmas Apartments where a one-bedroom unit next door
to Holly had become available.
Jean was a good friend. In a moment of despair, I called her.
“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph!” Jean exclaimed. “Jeff, come to Las Palmas and
move in with me. You can have the bedroom. I’ll sleep in the living room closet.”
Problem solved! It would cost $250 to rent Jean’s bedroom, and that’s
exactly what I had. By the time Holly blew in from Europe, I was her
neighbor and we shared a common wall.
The biggest challenge of living with Jean wasn’t a lack of space or a lack
of privacy, it was a shifty, bug-eyed cat named Booter. Whenever I left my
bedroom to go into the kitchen, that gray short-haired asshole would dart
out of nowhere, swat at my ankles, and scare the hell out of me. But despite
those aggressive shock-and-awe attacks, I enjoyed living next door to Holly
and sharing a common wall. If either of us wanted to chat, we knocked on the
wall and stuck our heads out our windows.
“Hey, Lola!” Holly called out. “I’m making Puerto Rican pork chops.
Come on over!”
Holly loved to cook and introduced me to the joy of cilantro.
“Darling, I took the bus to East Hollywood today and loaded up on Latin
spices. That’s the only way to do it, hon. Latin-style!”
Then she pulled out a big bottle of Glen Ellen chardonnay and filled a cup.
“One cup for the recipe,” she said, tossing the wine into a hot mid-century
electric skillet. “And two cups for Mama.”
She tipped the bottle into a tall glass tumbler.
“I thought you quit drinking.”
“Oh, what’s a little sip every now and then? Where’s Jean?”
“She’s at the Groundlings studying improv. She won’t get home ’til
around nine.”
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“Improv classes!” Holly scoffed. “What’s she wasting her money on that
for? A couple glasses of wine is all it takes. Honey, if I was stacked like her,
I’d have a million bucks by now. She needs to know how to work it. I’ll give
her some lessons on how to be a real woman.”
“I’m sure she’ll appreciate that,” I said, smiling to myself at the irony.
Holly had her own ideas of what a “real woman” should be, and those
could usually be summed up into two words: Lana Turner.
“Have you seen her in The Prodigal?” asked Holly as she minced fresh garlic
on a plate.
“No.”
“Oh, honey! She’s fabulous! Lana Turner plays a beautiful high priestess
who glides across the screen in these fabulous gowns with glamorous
beading down to there and tits up to here, and that face looking all blonde
and gorgeous. Oh! Mon Dieu! Jeffrey, when I saw that movie I plotzed. I
said, ‘Vera! If you’re gonna be a woman, be one draped in beads and chiffon.’”
Holly threw the garlic into the simmering sauce and threw back another
glass of wine. Then she chopped up a mess of cilantro and added that to
the broth.
“Who taught you to cook?”
“I used to live with a chef,” she said. “He taught me the importance of
having good knives. Don’t ever let them soak in the dishwater! You have to
hand-wash them separately, one at a time.”
It sounded like good advice to me, even though neither of us could afford
good knives or a pair of scissors, for that matter. We were so poor, we had to
cut the meat with our teeth.
About the Author
For nearly 30 years, Jeff Copeland worked as a show biz hobo, hopping from
one gravy train to the next. He was nominated for an Emmy (yay!) and lost
(boo!), and has enjoyed working on fun, interesting, and exciting content
for a variety of TV networks and film studios, including ABC, FOX, and
HGTV.
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