She walked on the wild side: Holly Woodlawn, transgender star and musical muse, dead at 69

The broad outline of her biography is known to millions - even though few, as they sing along with Lou Reed's Walk on the Wild Side, would recognise the harsh life of a transgender Puerto Rican woman immortalised by a pop hook. As Reed sang: “Holly came from Miami, F-L-A/Hitchhiked her way across the USA/Plucked her eyebrows on the way/Shaved her legs and then he was a she/ She says, ’Hey, babe, take a walk on the wild side’.” Now, the woman Reed sung about - and whose raw talent pop artist Andy Warhol commandeered for two of his famous underground films - is gone. Holly Woodlawn died Sunday at 69. The cause was cancer and cirrhosis, as Penny Arcade, a fellow Warhol superstar who raised funds for Woodlawn in her final days, said in a telephone interview. “There was no role model for a Holly Woodlawn,” Arcade said. “We're talking about a time where the reward was freedom in itself. For Holly, whatever sacrifices she made in terms of acceptance of her family and society could never compete with the sense of freedom that Holly needed - the freedom to be herself.” Woodlawn was born Haroldo Santiago Franceschi Rodriguez Danhakl in 1946 in Puerto Rico. She was not repressed. WATCH: Take a Walk On The Wild Side “I was raised in Puerto Rico for the first few years of my life, where the culture is more Caribbean,” Woodlawn told the Guardian in 2007. “Everyone's naked, it’s hotter, you come out earlier. I was having sex when I was seven and eight in the bushes with my uncles and cousins - of course, they were only 11 or 12 themselves. I was raised in a house full of women and my uncle was gay.” Still, Woodlawn didn't really recognise the “he” she started out as. “I don't even know who he was,” she said. “When I was younger, I was extremely shy and living in what's now Miami Beach. My father had a nice job. I guess we were middle income. I had good schools. I just was unhappy because I didn't know who I was.” As Reed so memorably wrote, Woodlawn left home at 15 and headed for New York. As a performer with the Play-House of the Ridiculous - what fellow performer Arcade called “the original glitter glam queer political rock-and-roll theater of the 60s” - Woodlawn was soon on the periphery of Warhol's Factory scene, a hodgepodge of artists, musicians and hustlers re-inventing American culture. And though the pecking order in that scene was ever-shifting, Woodlawn, cast in two landmark Warhol films, Trash (1970) and Women in Revolt (1971) - found herself at the centre of it for a time. Of Warhol’s stunt casting, Woodlawn said: “I think that basically Andy just loved glamorous women, and around that time, he just didn't know any.” Women in Revolt, by Arcade's account, inspired Warhol to inspire Reed to write Walk on the Wild Side in the first place. “It wasn’t Lou Reed's idea to write,” said Arcade, who also appeared in the film. “Warhol suggested it to Lou Reed because of the movie we were all in, ‘Women in Revolt’.” Reed - known for both his temper and his feuds with Warhol - died in 2013, and is not around to object to this re-telling. But by Reed's own admission, he drew on lives of Woodlawn and others in what he called “the gay life” to make “Transformer” (1972), arguably his best album. “What I've always thought is that I'm doing rock and roll in drag,” Reed, who endured conversion therapy as a youth and dated a transgender woman while a rock star, said after the song's release. Of another song on “Transformer,” he said: “The gay life at the moment is not that great. I wanted to write a song which made it terrific, something that you’d enjoy. But I know if I do that, I'll be accused of being a f**; but that's all right, it doesn't matter. I like those people.” Woodlawn did not object to being immortalised, and called Walk on the Wild Side “completely true.” But two Warhol films and getting name-checked in a very famous song didn't lead to a life of leisure. “I was very happy when I gradually became a Warhol superstar,” Woodlawn said in 2007. “I felt like Elizabeth Taylor! Little did I realize that not only would there be no money, but that your star would flicker for two seconds and that was it. “But it was worth it, the drugs, the parties, it was fabulous. You live in a hovel, walk up five flights, scraping the rent. And then at night you go to Max's Kansas City where Mick Jagger and Fellini and everyone's there in the back room. And when you walked in that room, you were a STAR!” Woodlawn relocated to Los Angeles, studied fashion design, continued to make films, and appeared in the Emmy-winning series Transparent last year. But for the rest of her life, she was a performer on the margins - doing cabaret shows, making appearances at Warhol-related events, and writing a memoir that is now out-of-print. Penny Arcade expressed dismay that, in the era of Caitlyn Jenner, the lives of trans women of less privilege - women out for decades - are overlooked. “A Caitlyn Jenner erases the visibility of Holly Woodlawn,” she said. It’s far from clear that Woodlawn - a woman not known for her politics - would care. Once asked whether she thought the armed forces discriminated against trans people, her reply was classic. “Thank god they do,” she said. “Otherwise I'd be fighting in Vietnam.”