Vali Myers: The Witch of Positano Who Tattooed Patti Smith and Lived With 100 Animals
Vali Myers left home in Melbourne at 14, slept rough in post-war Paris, got thrown out of France for vagrancy and spent the best part of 50 years in a crumbling domed cottage in a ravine above Positano, with no electricity, no plumbing and somewhere north of 100 animals. Along the way she inspired a Tennessee Williams character, tattooed Patti Smith's knee, asked Donovan to pay her in goats and got told by Salvador Dalí to put on a show. The locals called her a witch. She was really an artist who refused to live any way but her own, and most of the time she paid for it.
Quick Answers
• Who was Vali Myers? An Australian artist, dancer and tattooist (1930 to 2003) known for intricate pen-and-ink drawings, a striking tattooed face and a long bohemian life in Paris, New York and southern Italy.
• Why was she called the Witch of Positano? Locals gave her the name because of her look, her menagerie and her isolated life in a wild valley outside the town. A 1967 documentary then made it stick.
• Who did she know? Jean Genet, Django Reinhardt, Jean-Paul Sartre, Tennessee Williams, George Plimpton, Salvador Dalí, Andy Warhol, Patti Smith, Donovan, Marianne Faithfull and Mick Jagger, among others.
• Where did she live? Il Porto, a centuries-old domed pavilion in the Vallone Porto above Positano, from 1958, then partly in Melbourne from 1993.
• What happened to her home? She got the valley protected as a wildlife oasis. Her partner Gianni Menichetti still lives there with his animals.
• Where's her work now? Her archive, including diaries, drawings and even her brass bed, was donated to State Library Victoria in 2018.
The Wild Goose of Box Hill
Vali Myers was born in Sydney in 1930. Her mother was a violinist and her father a marine wireless operator, and in 1941 the family moved to Box Hill on the edge of Melbourne. Her mother's nickname for her was "Wild Goose", which turned out to be fairly accurate. Myers later said her family were sweethearts, but the suburbs were another matter. In the State Library Victoria's podcast series The Chapters, archivist Fiona Lane describes how conspicuous Myers felt in conservative 1940s Melbourne, with people staring as she walked down the street.
At 14 she left home and took factory jobs to pay for dance lessons. It worked. By the late 1940s she was the leading dancer with the Melbourne Modern Ballet Company, still only a teenager. Then, in 1949 or 1950 depending on which account you read, she got on a ship for Europe and didn't come back for 43 years.
Sleeping Rough on the Left Bank
Paris was still rationing and rebuilding when she arrived, and Myers had next to nothing. She ended up on the streets of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, dancing for money in Left Bank clubs like Tabou and l'Escale. W magazine says the bartenders nicknamed her le chat, the concierges called her la bête and others went with la morte vive, the living dead, on account of her white face and heavily kohled eyes. She reckoned the eye make-up kept evil spirits away.
It wasn't the romantic version of bohemia. She was jailed several times for vagrancy, and in 1952 the French authorities refused to renew her visa and she had to leave. Screen Slate notes she was later allowed back. She'd met an Austrian architecture student called Rudi Rappold in Vienna that same year, and they married in 1955, which gave her the right to stay in Europe. Anyone who's read about Joe Strummer living rough in Paris decades later will recognise the city's habit of swallowing up people with nowhere else to go.
From 1955 to 1958 she lived at the Hotel Alsace-Lorraine, which, as Lane points out, shared a concierge with Marcel Proust in his final years. Myers kept the curtains shut, barely went out and later called it her dark incubation period. By then she was badly hooked on opium, and the drawings she was making in that room were some of the most intense of her life.
The Girl in Love on the Left Bank
In the early 1950s the Dutch photographer Ed van der Elsken was shooting the young drifters of Saint-Germain, and Myers became the centre of it all. His 1956 photobook Love on the Left Bank wraps real photographs around an invented love story, and its heroine Ann is Myers. The Eyes points out that the early dummy of the book simply called her Vali before the name was changed.
The pictures turned her into a symbol of post-war bohemia almost overnight, much as Kiki de Montparnasse had been for 1920s Paris. If you like van der Elsken's grainy, close-up style, it's worth comparing with Brassaï's Paris by night and René Groebli's 1953 honeymoon photographs, taken in the same city at almost the same moment.
Plimpton, Genet and Tennessee Williams
Her circle in Paris reads like a cultural who's who. Jean Genet, Django Reinhardt, Jean-Paul Sartre and Tennessee Williams all knew her, and W magazine adds that Genet complimented her make-up. The most useful friendship, though, was with George Plimpton, co-founder of The Paris Review. He bought her drawings and ran a portfolio of her work in the magazine's spring 1958 issue, which gave her a reputation as an artist and not just a face in someone else's photographs.
Williams is said to have based Carol Cutrere, the wild, heavily made-up outsider in his 1957 play Orpheus Descending, on Myers. Several sources state it flatly, but it's best treated as inspiration rather than a straight portrait. Either way, the character's painted face and refusal to behave are very hard to read as anyone else.
Getting Clean in a Ravine
In 1958, partly to break the opium habit and partly because French immigration was still giving her grief, Myers and Rappold headed for Italy. Above Positano they found the Vallone Porto, a steep, wooded gorge with a stream and a waterfall, and in it an abandoned 18th-century domed pavilion built by a local aristocrat as a summer folly. Messy Nessy Chic describes it sitting at the edge of a cliff around a thousand feet high, reachable only on foot.
There was no electricity and no plumbing, just cold water from the stream. Myers painted the place inside and out and often worked through the night by gaslight. One unexpected detail comes from The Paris Review's second portfolio of her work in 1975. It describes her drawing inside a cage set up in her own home, there to protect her and her pet fox, and adds the line "She is not a prisoner." It sounds like legend-building, but the magazine presents it as a practical shelter for her and the fox in a house overrun with animals.
Foxy, Ramona the Pig and 100 Other Animals
The animals were the heart of Il Porto. Myers kept more than 100 over the years, including dogs, cats, a monkey, a pig called Ramona, a donkey called Fanny and a tortoise called Winnie, who lived past 100 and only died in recent years. Dozens of dogs and the odd pony ended up not just in the compound but in her bed.
The best known was Foxy, a vixen Myers found starving outside a burrow in 1965 after hunters had shot her mother. Foxy lived with her for 14 years, curled round her neck like a stole and slept beside her, and Myers called her the most beloved of all her animals. In a 1992 diary entry held by State Library Victoria, she summed herself up in the same terms: "Born foxy, she escaped education and cultural conditioning."
The nickname Witch of Positano came from the town below. To people in the 1960s, a red-haired, tattooed foreigner living in a gorge with a fox on her shoulders looked like something out of a folk tale. She wasn't practising anything, but she wasn't going out of her way to change their minds either.
Saving the Valley
Myers didn't treat Il Porto as a pretty backdrop. As development crept up the Amalfi Coast she fought the local authorities over plans for the valley, and eventually after a long struggle she got it protected as a wildlife oasis.
That's easy to skip past in a story full of rock stars, but it's probably the most lasting thing she did. The gorge is still wild today, and Menichetti still lives in it.
Gianni Menichetti and the Food Delivery That Lasted 30 Years
Myers and Rappold eventually split. In early 1971 a young Tuscan called Gianni Menichetti, who'd been studying oriental languages in Naples, turned up in the valley. Messy Nessy says he first met her while delivering food to the pavilion. He became her partner, her co-guardian of the animals and later her biographer. She taught him English and filled him up on poetry, literature and music.
He never left. A 2022 profile by Positano News found him still living in the valley after around 50 years, keeping dozens of dogs plus chickens, ducks and turtledoves, and making a weekly trip to Piano di Sorrento to haul food back for all of them. He supports himself by selling his own art and poetry.
Goats, Jagger and Season of the Witch
By the mid-1960s the hippie crowd had caught up with her. Sheldon Rochlin and Flame Schon's 1967 documentary Vali: The Witch of Positano, co-produced by Plimpton, shows her tattooing a friend, feeding a fox, an owl and a large rabbit, drinking tea and writing in her black book of dreams. It became a cult film, and the pilgrims started making the walk.
Marianne Faithfull came to see her art and brought her boyfriend, Mick Jagger. Myers was much keener on Faithfull, reportedly saying she was "always into Marianne" and didn't really register Jagger at first. W magazine says the couple bought her drawing The Death of Jezebel, though that detail only turns up in one source. It's a nice counterpoint to the Stones' summer at Villa Nellcôte, where everyone very much knew who Jagger was.
Donovan was another visitor. In 1967 he flew her to London to dance on stage at the Royal Albert Hall during Season of the Witch. Asked what she wanted as a fee, she named one Nubian goat. Money mattered to her only when it fed the animals.
The Chelsea Hotel, Patti Smith and a Lightning Bolt
In 1971 Myers moved into New York's Chelsea Hotel to sell drawings and raise money for the sanctuary. It was her kind of place. Her circle there included Gregory Corso, William S. Burroughs and Abbie Hoffman, and W magazine says Chris Stein of Blondie befriended her and later named his daughter after her.
Patti Smith had idolised her since she was 14. When they finally met at the Chelsea, Myers had a fox on her shoulder, and Smith asked her to tattoo a small lightning bolt on her knee. By then Myers had her own tattooed outline round her mouth and ink on her hands and feet, the kind of work that would have impressed George Burchett in his day.
The big names helped in other ways. Dalí praised her as an original painter and told her to exhibit in Amsterdam, and she showed there in 1972. Andy Warhol, never one to miss a commercial angle, told her to sell posters and postcards of her work. That was good advice for someone whose drawings could take months, sometimes years. Dalí's own idea of showmanship was rather louder, as his 1973 Playboy shoot proves.
The Art Under the Legend
Strip away the anecdotes and you're left with the drawings, which are extraordinary. Myers worked mostly in pen and ink with watercolour, sometimes adding tempera, sepia ink or gold leaf. Her pictures are crammed with tiny, obsessive linework: women who often look like her, foxes, dogs, hybrid creatures and patterns that seem to grow out of the figures. Dido, made over 1973 and 1974, mixes pen, black ink, watercolour and tempera, while Stella Maris from 1998 uses sepia ink.
She wasn't an easy fit for the gallery world. Dealers found her small drawings too personal, and she struggled to sell them because she saw each one as a piece of herself. She much preferred running her own shows, and held around 15 major solo exhibitions and private viewings in New York, Amsterdam, Italy and Australia. At the Basel Art Fair, where her work hung beside Mati Klarwein and a young Barbara Kruger, she reportedly got Rudi to distract security so she could take her pictures back off the wall.
She also kept visual diaries from the mid-1950s right up to 2002, mixing her handwriting with photographs, clippings and sketches. They're as much a part of the work as anything she framed. There's a clear link to the women of the Bauhaus here, artists whose lives and art couldn't be pulled apart, even if Myers would have hated the idea of a school.
A Legend Comes Home to Melbourne
In 1993, after 43 years away, Myers flew back to Melbourne. People recognised her at Tullamarine Airport, helped along by Ruth Cullen's documentary The Tightrope Dancer, and she was soon on breakfast television with Bert Newton. As she put it, "It seems I've become a legend in the meantime."
Her first Melbourne show was at the Emerald Hill Gallery later that year. She then set up a studio-gallery in the Nicholas Building on Swanston Street, with pink walls, sunflower motifs, carved Indian chairs, a silver table and her brass bed. She split her final years between Melbourne and Positano.
Death and What She Left Behind
Myers was diagnosed with stomach cancer in 2002 and died in Melbourne on 12 February 2003, aged 72. Her ashes were scattered at sea, as she'd asked. The National Portrait Gallery of Australia holds a 2001 photograph of her by Eva Collins, and notes that her studio was opened to the public after her death. A second film, Painted Lady, came out in 2003.
In 2018 the Vali Myers Art Gallery Trust gave her archive to State Library Victoria. It covers drawings, diaries, photographs, posters, paintboxes, jewellery, cosmetics and that brass bed, and the library is still working through digitising it. Her look keeps coming back too. Florence Welch cited her as an influence on the 2015 album How Big, How Blue, How Beautiful. Prada and Marc Jacobs both drew on her style for their autumn 2013 runways.
The witch tag is catchy, but it sells her short. Vali Myers was a working artist who spent 50 years drawing by gaslight, fighting developers, feeding a hundred animals and turning down the easy money. She lived exactly how she wanted, and she was honest that it wasn't always pretty.
Further Reading
For the inside story, Gianni Menichetti's Vali Myers: A Memoir is written by the man who shared Il Porto with her for three decades. If you want to see her as Paris first did, Ed van der Elsken's Love on the Left Bank is the photobook that made her famous.
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