Valerie Solanas: The Defiant Life of the Woman Who Wrote SCUM

by Breanne Fahs

  copies of SCUM book (:)

  “Up from the Slime” & “A Young

  Girl’s Primer on How to Attain

  the Leisure Class”

  (reprinted from Cavalier 1966)

  will be sold at reading for

  $1.50 per copy

  Listen to Valerie Solanas on

  Randy Wicker’s Interview Show

  WBAI-FM in a few weeks

  (watch Village Voice for exact date)47

  Valerie’s quest to get Up Your Ass produced and SCUM Manifesto published, though ultimately unsuccessful, had nevertheless sparked some low-level interest from the publishing world, including Robert Marmorstein from the Village Voice. In late fall of 1967, Marmorstein arranged to interview and have dinner with Valerie at a place at the corner of West Twenty-Third Street and Eighth Avenue. Remembering her with fondness and amusement, in his article “SCUM Goddess,” Marmorstein described her brashness and her insistence on setting the terms of their meeting: “I had spoken to Miss Solanis [sic] on the phone.” Her response was, “‘What’s this interview crap? All these characters wanting to interview me. What for? For kicks?’ ‘Your ideas are so unique.’ ‘So, what’s this interview jazz? You want to just bullshit, say so. You can buy me dinner and we’ll bullshit.’”

  Valerie insisted on not getting into a car with Marmorstein: “‘No cars. You be standing on the corner on your own two legs. I don’t get into any cars with men.’ ‘Why not?’ ‘Never mind why not. I’ve had some funny experiences with strange guys in cars. You just be sure to come on foot.’” (One can only imagine that Valerie was referring to her days hitchhiking across the country in 1960–61.) Dressed in slacks, a sailor’s pea jacket, and an army fatigue cap pushed back on her head, she arrived for dinner. About her cap, she had said on the phone, “I always wear it.” When Marmorstein asked her why, she replied with, “I like to. That’s all.”

  Once at the restaurant, Valerie ordered a large well-done steak, French fries, and a salad. When Marmorstein asked if she was serious about the “SCUM thing,” she retorted, “Christ! Of course I’m serious. I’m dead serious.” Valerie declared that she was a writer (“pretty good when I want to”). When he asked why women can’t have a peaceful revolution, she replied, “We’re impatient. That’s why. I’m not going to be around 100 years from now. I want a piece of a groovy world myself. That peaceful shit is for the birds. Marching, demonstrating. That’s for little old ladies who aren’t serious. SCUM is a criminal organization, not a civil disobedience lunch club. We’ll operate under dark and as effectively as possible and get what we want as fast as possible.”48

  Valerie’s earnestness about SCUM had puzzled people. Was she serious? What kind of revolution did she want? Selling her manifesto, doing occasional interviews, and publishing her Cavalier piece, Valerie had begun to make a name for herself. As scholar Jennifer Doyle noted, “By the time her movements in New York took her to the Factory, she had already achieved notoriety, having been interviewed by the Village Voice as the proto-feminist author of this scabrous text.”49 Already an outcast, Valerie had many qualities that made her an ideal candidate for the Factory—interesting, lonely, unique, brash, awkward, sexually ambiguous, angry, vulnerable, and loudmouthed—and she caught the eye of Andy Warhol.

  THE FACTORY SCENE AND WARHOL “STUPIDSTARS”

  Warhol reflected the American dream, but what is phenomenal about him is that he also represented the American disasters, dreams and disasters.

  —Ultra Violet, “The Ultra Violet Interview”

  In an act of revenge, photographer Nat Finkelstein first brought Valerie—difficult, eccentric, and openly queer—to the Factory, Andy’s New York studio renowned as a meeting place for volatile artists, drug users, and wealthy, celebrity-obsessed superstars. Just prior to that, Valerie’s quest to get Up Your Ass produced had led her to Richie Berlin, the sister of Factory superstar Brigid Polk (so named for her reputation for giving out “pokes,” injections of vitamin B and amphetamines). Richie gave Valerie the telephone number for Nat, who photographed events at the Factory, saying that Nat might have some good ideas about how to get the play produced. “God, what a bore,” Finkelstein thought. “I’ll give this to Andy.”50 Nat was annoyed with Andy and did not mind introducing other misfits to his already harried scene. “Andy was fascinated by a million people. She was just a million and one. Andy was fascinated by all of us,” superstar Ultra Violet said.51

  Valerie called Andy, and because Andy thought the title of the play sounded interesting, he invited her to the Factory for a meeting. Valerie wanted to meet Andy not as an admirer or a fan but, according to film director Mary Harron, as a “political creature, a sociologist. . . . She found there an opportunity, or the possibility of one, that she could see nowhere else.” Attracted as she was by his power and influence, his celebrity, and his ability to get things done, “where else could Valerie have gone? Certainly not the New Left; in 1967, it was as sexist as the Pentagon.”52

  When Valerie first arrived at the Factory for her meeting with Andy, he suspected her of being an undercover cop, telling an interviewer in Cahiers du cinema shortly after their meeting, “People try to trap us sometimes: [Valerie] called up here and offered me a film script . . . and I thought the title was so wonderful and I’m so friendly that I invited her to come up with it, but it was so dirty that I think she must have been a lady cop. I don’t know if she was genuine or not but we haven’t seen her since and I’m not surprised. I guess she thought that was the perfect thing for Andy Warhol.”53 In response to Andy’s accusing her of being a cop, Valerie unzipped her pants, exposed her vulva, and said, “Sure, I’m a cop and here’s my badge.”54

  To place Valerie in the context of the Factory, consider its denizens and the qualities that might have drawn her to this group. It offered a stylized facsimile of the world Valerie knew all too well; what she experienced as hard reality, the Factory appropriated as gritty, artistic drama. Still, as Mary Harron noted, “in the mid sixties this big silver room was the most radical place in America (culturally speaking). The films there almost signaled the end of the avant-garde—in art and painting nothing more extreme or challenging has been done since.” Those drawn to the Factory were misfits, running from their families, wealth, the Catholic Church, expectations of marriages and families; and “they found shelter there together, even if they sometimes tore each other apart.” They experimented with how many drugs they could take, how much (or little) sex they could have, “how far you can hold an image, how long you can talk . . . trying to define new parameters, rules, ways of being, refashioning the world.”55

  Andy was a master of his public image—something Valerie said was his “true art”—as he knew how to generate a sense of style and celebrity for those who would otherwise remain on the fringes. He placed himself at the epicenter of gossip and fashion, shamelessly seeking fame, to the extent of founding Interview magazine as a way to get tickets to movie premieres.56 He took gay culture to the broader public, giving Valerie the ultimate opportunity to fit in. Yet despite these qualities, Andy loomed large as the “father” of the Factory, and women stayed on the outside, particularly those who did not come from wealthy backgrounds. Andy had no tolerance for “street women,” preferring the company of the glamorous women who came from mountains of wealth and who would promote the image of high fashion. Valerie fit in only as an outsider, hence her gleeful description of the superstars as “stupidstars.” As Ultra said, “She was not a superstar in the Factory. Maybe she wanted to be part of the Factory, or maybe she wanted to be a superstar, but she did not have what it takes. The superstars were very, very beautiful and she was an individual, an extremist. The superstars all looked different, had a common denomination, whereas she was more of a unique outsider. She was very much an outsider.”57

  As Walter de Maria, a conceptual artist who played drums for John Cale and Lou Reed, recalled, “There was a serious tone to the music and the movies and the peop
le, as well as all the craziness and the speed. There was also the feeling of desperate living, of being on the edge.”58 A few months before Valerie entered the scene, a young man had appeared in the Factory with a gun and played Russian roulette with it; he fired off a few shots, missed, and departed. Andy had reacted with silence. On another occasion, a woman named Dorothy who was known as a “part-time junkie” also entered the Factory with a gun, a loaded revolver, and aimed it nicely at a stack of Marilyn Monroe paintings, blowing a hole through the six canvases. “Andy was kind of upset but he didn’t criticize her, didn’t condemn her,” wrote Ultra Violet on this incident.59 Instead, according to Billy Name, Andy was peeved that she did this on her own and not as part of one of his films.

  People at the Factory did not concern themselves with the future. “I think the present was blazing and every day was incredible, and you knew every day wasn’t always going to be that way,” said Mary Harron.60 The tenuous quality of life on the edge had an appeal for the mainstream, as Andy provided a window into lives that were rapidly self-destructing, often on camera. After reviewing three and a half hours of Andy’s underground epic The Chelsea Girls (1966), featuring life among a group of gays, lesbians, and drug addicts, one critic labeled it “a tragedy full of desperation, hardness, and terror.”61 Mary Woronov, one of the Factory superstars, called those at the Factory the “Mole People”—a collection of misfits, addicts, desperate dreamers, hangers-on. Andy merely played with realities that Valerie had lived. He showed no affect toward circumstances that sparked and fueled Valerie’s rage.

  Ultra Violet called Andy a “sphinx without a riddle.” When asked about competition between the superstars, Ultra said, “I could not say that there was a lot of love between the superstars. We were not about loving one another. We were about loving ourselves, so there wasn’t [sic] really any kind of fights. But again, Warhol was the center because he was there, everybody was multidirectional, aiming at Warhol, so he was the cosmic glue that held people together in some kind of peaceful situation.”62

  Valerie couldn’t have been more different from the women Andy surrounded himself with at the Factory. With Ultra Violet’s thick French accent and extreme style of dress (for our 2012 interview she wore a purple muumuu and large purple jewelry as she discussed her conversion to Mormonism), Viva’s wealthy pedigree, Edie Sedgwick’s trust-fund self-destruction, Penny Arcade’s sultry sexuality, and Brigid Polk’s stylish outfits, Andy’s female superstars formed a posse dedicated to narcissism, hedonism, fashion, glamour, self-involvement, drugs, and sex. As a revolutionary, foul-mouthed, working-class butch dyke dressed in plain clothes, Valerie stood starkly outside it all. She didn’t fit in with any of them. At the Factory they gave her the nickname Valerie Barge Cap for the dark-blue cap she always wore, with “the brim low over her eyes,” and took note of “the khaki trousers, the old shirt, the scraggly hair.”63

  Still, for Andy, Valerie had a certain appeal. As Ultra Violet said, “Valerie was a bit hermetic, a bit mysterious. When she spoke, she expressed herself in a very interesting way. She had her own dialect, her own phrasing, so that was intriguing. . . . She had a certain charisma of her own. Not that she was beautiful nor repulsive, but she had a unique little presence, you know? A bit intense.”64

  Valerie, like Andy, came from a background much different from those of the wealthy socialites and hip artists the Factory attracted. Described by one reporter as a “not unusual looking woman with clear brown eyes and a restless mind, who had given a great deal of thought to the world and its problems,” she had a working-class attitude and a little deliberate funkiness.65 In the many interviews Mary Harron and her film team conducted for I Shot Andy Warhol, Harron wrote of being struck by the similarities between Valerie and Andy:

  Warhol had seen something of himself in Valerie. . . . When Andy Warhol looked into the eyes of Valerie Solanas, he would have seen much more of himself than when he looked into the eyes of a beautiful debutante like Edie Sedgwick or one of the gorgeous male hustlers who decorated the Factory. Warhol and Valerie had much in common: both were Catholic, born into blue-collar families; had spent their childhood in poverty; were intellectually precocious; and had experienced being tormented at school. Perhaps most important, both claimed to have rejected sex, although for different reasons: Valerie had had too much sex; Warhol, too little.66

  Andy’s parents had emigrated from Miková, in northeastern Slovakia, in 1921 and settled in Pennsylvania, first in Philadelphia and then in McKeesport. His father was a construction worker and general laborer and died when Andy was nine. Andy had nervous breakdowns as a small child—a fact he attributed to two things: “I was weak and I ate all this candy.” His transformation from a shy, uncommunicative boy into a gifted artist baffled his childhood friends. “The morality of the middle class bugged Warhol,” claimed one journalist. “He grew up in it and now he was running away from it. He was running hard but getting nowhere because he was running The New Morality of the Four-Letter Word, and there’s no traction there.”67 Andy wanted nothing of the working-class women he knew growing up, choosing instead to renounce his former life as a child of immigrant parents (Andy Warhola) to become a dramatized, wealthy version of himself (Andy Warhol).

  Andy created women as offshoots of the male imagination, something Valerie could never (and would never want to) live up to. She was a dangerously real product of a world hell-bent on treating women as mirrored distortions of the male ego. She was antipornographic in her gruffness and scumminess. “Why did it go wrong? Valerie was probably destined to be dropped by the Factory,” wrote Harron. “She was a political animal and an intellectual and they were from the art and fashion worlds and the drug demi-monde. . . . However bold she might have been in print, in person they found her shy, retiring, mousey. . . . She was too serious, monomaniacal.”68 Further, the Factory championed women’s beauty but sexualized the men, leading to a cruel mix of closeted gay men, fashion- and beauty-obsessed women, and little movement politically for queer culture. Valerie’s aspirations—for acceptance, an audience, and sympathetic or like-minded misfits—fizzled there.

  There is definite irony in Valerie’s selection of Andy as the epitome of sexism and patriarchy, for Andy maintained an air of asexuality and queerness, had virtually none of the characteristics of traditional men in the 1960s, and openly appreciated gender nonconformity. Andy’s sexuality had an uncommon fluidity; as Mary Harron wrote, “Warhol has often gone on record as saying that sex is too much trouble, but he is fascinated by the idea of sex, and many of his films were semi-pornographic in a distanced, ironic way.”69 Perhaps, like many in Valerie’s life, Andy stood in for a variety of emotionally charged, missing, or distorted figures. He was a mentor, friend, co-conspirator, and fellow artist, and, to a certain degree, he was an originator, as she believed she was. Valerie liked Andy, for a time, but as Jeremiah said, “He wasn’t the type of person you would call ‘Daddy.’ He was only interested in you as long as you were interested in him.”70

  Valerie added something new—she was a butch dyke, and elicited polarized reactions from Andy’s gang. Gerard Malanga, Andy’s chief assistant at that time, said Valerie stood out as a “fringe person” at the Factory. Shy and isolated, she rarely talked to other members of Andy’s entourage but desired “one on ones” with Andy. She wanted his undivided attention and set out with fierce determination to get it. Billy Name, Andy’s house photographer and general custodian in the mid-1960s, remembered Valerie as “a talented woman who didn’t know how to push herself,” with a movie persona that was “almost flat. Absolutely featureless. No personality.”71

  Though Gerard and Billy had some sympathy for Valerie, others felt only spite toward her. The Warhol associates typically “remember” details of Valerie with increasing elements of disgust and rejection. Director Paul Morrissey, “whose star was rising at the Factory at this time,” openly hated Valerie and called her a “pathetic street person, almost mentally defective.”72
(His opinion didn’t change. In our 2011 interview, he asserted, “I sure feel hostile towards her,” adding, “I feel hostile to you with your idiot book about somebody like that. You don’t even know who she was. You heard this, you heard that, you heard this. But you keep finding poor people to say something about her.”)73

  Paul framed Andy as a “social worker . . . nice to everyone”74 and saw Valerie as yet another case of someone exploiting Andy’s generosity and goodwill, though Valerie took a different view, calling him a “hard son of a bitch, that Warhol.” Ultra cautioned Andy about Valerie as a “dangerous cookie . . . a real bitch.” When Ultra read parts of the manifesto to Andy, he commented, “She’s a hot water bottle with tits. You know, she’s writing a script for us. She has a lot of ideas.” Ultra warned, “You have to know what she’s writing about. You might be a target for her.”75

  Ultra took an interest in Valerie, finding her an intriguing character, “demented of course,” and describing her as having “narrow, piercing eyes . . . brown hair cut in bangs, a sagging mouth.” When they first met on the set of one of Andy’s films, Ultra was impressed by Valerie’s philosophy that women lived in a man’s world and suffered because of men’s flaws. Ultra sympathized with Valerie’s framing of Andy as mistreating the women of the Factory: “When a film has succeeded, he kept the profits and seized the headlines,” Ultra remarked. “I compare the Factory always to multi-level marketing without pay. That was the Factory. But in the sixties you had communal things, and ‘Make love, not war,’ and people shared things. A lot of people did not expect to be paid. You would do things willingly for the fun of it. But it’s true that Andy did not really pay people. We did not have a contract. We were not there to be paid. We were there because somehow we stumbled there and it was an interesting scene.”

  Drawing parallels between herself and Valerie, Ultra said, “Valerie was a woman. I’m a woman. I think she was unique. And she suffered. I understand that one would suffer for the state of being, for the state of society, which as I said before is never right. I understand someone rebelling against the state of things, even the relationship between men and women, which is not exactly as it should be. I understand Valerie, to a point.”76 Viva, another Warhol superstar, also aligned more closely with Valerie’s take on how men systematically exploit women as Viva understood the feminist movement more than other superstars did.