Susan Dunn Whittier Bottomly, born October 1, 1948, came out of old New England stock with the kind of pedigree that expects pearls and polite futures. Instead, she turned willful early—boarding schools, repeat expulsions, a restless streak that didn’t fit the living-room script. By sixteen she was modeling with Ford, and in December 1965 her long-necked, patrician face hit the cover of Mademoiselle. It was the sort of entrance that usually leads to couture and safe success. Bottomly took the sharp left turn.
In 1966 she met Gerard Malanga, who pulled her into Andy Warhol’s Factory orbit. Warhol rechristened her “International Velvet,” and she became a superstar in the Factory sense: not trained, not packaged, but magnetic in a way the camera couldn’t stop staring at. She appeared in Warhol films such as Chelsea Girls, Paraphernalia, Since, Superboy, and Four Stars, drifting through those hazy, improvisational rooms like a society girl learning to breathe different air. Warhol fixated on her beauty and especially her movement—grace that read as both innocence and threat, the kind of presence that makes other people ask who you are before you speak.
Her Factory years were bright and tense: screen fame, fashion attention, a rising profile in New York style circles, and full immersion in the Velvet Underground scene. After Warhol’s world began shifting and splintering, Bottomly stepped away. In 1969 she married photographer Frederick Terry Krementz, moved to Paris, and modeled widely in Europe through the 1970s under the name Susan Kent. Later, after divorce, she traded the spotlight for the business side of beauty, running a modeling agency in Utah in the 1980s.
Bottomly’s story is a quick flare: debutante to downtown icon, then back out again—leaving behind a film-strip ghost of the mid-60s Factory at its most electric.
