Valerie Solanas: The Defiant Life of the Woman Who Wrote SCUM
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Dear Pop, I’m sure you’re wondering why I haven’t shown up by now. Well, my affairs here still aren’t straightened out, + they’re too involved to explain in a letter. I’ll explain them to you when I see you. Hope to be down to A.C. within a few weeks. How was your visit with Carmen + Mena? Love, Val100
By late fall 1967, women at the Factory had grown tired of Valerie and had increased their efforts to expunge her presence from the inner circle. One day, Andy spotted her sitting at a table near his at Max’s. He and Viva approached and Viva hurled at her, “You dyke! You’re disgusting!” Valerie supposedly answered this insult with the story of her sexual abuse at the hands of her father.101
Andy said nothing; he generally disliked violence and cruelty, once saying in an interview about the scene in Chelsea Girls where a man slaps a woman around, “I don’t really believe in violence and stuff, but we happened to see it so often in some of the things we were filming, and I always, you know, shut off the camera or something like that, and got nervous about it. . . . I feel bad about the girl, you know—it wasn’t her fault. She just happened to be there, and it didn’t matter who she was, because if it wasn’t that girl it would have been someone else.”102 Whether Andy believed that Valerie had told the truth about the sexual violence she revealed remains unclear.
UP FROM THE SLIME WITH MAURICE GIRODIAS
The collision of Valerie with the notoriously sleazy French publisher Maurice Girodias would prove a fateful union for them both. Known as not only sleazy but also brilliant, Maurice always struggled—and almost always failed—to match his eye for talent with sound business practices. After multiple bankruptcies in Paris and multiple successful discoveries of works such as Lolita and Naked Lunch, he arrived in New York eager to succeed as a publisher with the American version of Olympia Press. Mary Harron dramatized Maurice as saying, in I Shot Andy Warhol, “People will very soon tire of the vulgar, erotic sex fiction of the last few years. A new form of erotic literature is going to emerge from the dungheap of pornography. We are moving to a new, more refined form of fiction that’s more autobiographical and tolerates a greater erotic content.”103 Maurice felt the public could no longer be scandalized but he nevertheless wanted to feel out new trends while with Olympia Press with the ultimate goal of discovering unknown talent.
Although both Maurice and Valerie lived at the Chelsea Hotel, they had not met. Fatefully one day Valerie ran smack into an advertisement placed in the back pages of all US Olympia Press paperbacks that year:
NOTICE TO UNKNOWN WRITERS
The Olympia Press, founded in Paris (on a shoestring) by Maurice Girodias in 1953, allegedly to pervert American tourists into a pornographic way of life, published The Story of O in 1954, Lolita and The Ginger Man in 1955, all of de Sade’s novels and most of Henry Miller’s best works, Candy in 1958, Naked Lunch and Durrell’s Black Book in 1959—not to speak of dozens of other interesting authors, masterpieces and diversions. . . . We are not interested in anyone famous, or half famous. Our function is to discover talent. Unknown writers are our specialty. You have been rejected by all existing publishers: well and good, you have a chance with us. We read everything—promptly, discriminatively and optimistically.104
Maurice, a self-described pornographer who wanted to attack the establishment, had a habit of conducting nearly all his official business meetings in cafés or apartments, often with terrible financial practices and an insistence on paying writers flat fee payments for their erotic works.105 He routinely turned on friends and associates and maintained a bleak view of the world, priding himself on rebelliousness and visionary thinking and allegedly oversexualizing the women he admired.
Valerie and Maurice shared a desire to unearth the things society most wanted to repress, to give voice to the scummiest of voices. Consequently, Valerie sent Maurice a note at the Chelsea introducing herself as a writer. Maurice reported of his first meeting with Valerie that “her manner was friendly, lively, and she had a sense of humor—which somewhat took the edge off the anti-masculine doctrine she proceeded to preach to me. The title of her play, Up Your Ass, was sufficiently indicative of her iconoclastic disposition, and naturally I sympathized as I was supposed to. The play was rather clever, and I found it amusingly wild. I also found myself, quite to my surprise, in agreement with what I understood of her theories.” He described her appearance during that meeting (again with an air of amusement and interest): “Her fixed expression was that of a Douanier Rousseau personage froze in wooden immobility against its picture book background.”106 He found her “extremely energetic and brutal, like New York girls who beg and live by their wits are.”107 Maurice appreciated the extremity of Valerie’s writings, feeling that she pushed her distortions so far that she converted them to valid fantasies.
Valerie and Maurice should have admired each other; intellectually, as Mary Harron pointed out, they had far more in common than did Valerie and Andy: “Both loved words, and took pride in being subversive. . . . Girodias believed that a society that frustrated women’s talents was sterile and oppressive for both sexes, and having a good sense of the zeitgeist, he could feel the tremors of the women’s movement.” While in Paris, he had encouraged women to write erotica, seeing them as uniquely talented and capable of communicating the foundations of sexuality. “He loved women and prided himself on understanding and appreciating them, although that appreciation was of the old school, inextricably bound up with sex and romance.”108
For CJ Scheiner, a man who knew Maurice from that time, Maurice was “a gentleman of a school that disappeared two centuries ago”; while Maurice had a certain formality, he could accept almost anybody’s views on anything. To conceal his paternal Jewish ancestry from the Nazis, he changed his name from Kahane to Girodias.109 His history was chock-full of rebellious impulses: when he was eighteen or nineteen, his girlfriend left him for someone else, so he fled to Tibet for two years. “This was his way of handling a broken heart,” Scheiner said.110
According to Mary Harron, “Of anyone Valerie met in that time in New York, he came the closest to appreciating her talents, albeit without truly ever understanding her.”111 (Maurice even had a daughter named Valerie.) Their publishing arrangements in many ways boosted Valerie’s spirits and made her keenly aware of how much was at stake in selling a publisher rights to her works.
In the August 29, 1967, contract signed by Valerie, Maurice specified that he would pay a total of five hundred dollars cash as an advance on the royalties he would pay for the novel she agreed to write for him. He specified, “You have agreed to let me have an outline and a few excerpts within a week from today; if this proves satisfactory I will then undertake to pay you a further $1,000 in several instalments [sic], and $500 thirty days after publication of the book, against a royalty of 6% on the first 50,000 copies sold; 8% on the next 100,000 copies sold, and 10% thereafter.”112 He added that their contract included first refusal rights on her next two book-length works. The contract used vague language and provided “fertile ground for Valerie’s paranoia.”113
After the signing, Maurice took Valerie to dinner at El Quixote, next door to the Chelsea Hotel. Valerie astonished him by turning up in makeup and a magnificent red dress. (Notably, this story was distorted in a postshooting report that held that Maurice took Valerie to see the ballet Don Quixote, which impressed Valerie, and that she wore a dress and asked, “Don’t you think I’m a good looking girl?” Valerie expressly denied this ever occurring.)114 The two had started their relationship with a decent rapport and some mutual admiration.
In many ways, Maurice admired and liked Valerie, speaking openly about her in a radio interview in Paris: “She did not look quite like a woman but neither like a man. . . . I would not have married her, of course, but I did really like her; I found her very funny.”115 They had formed a friendship with some mutual affection. Friedman, Maurice’s lawyer, recalled that Maurice thought she was a little bit crazy, but he never really talked about it.116 In Aug
ust 1967, Valerie invited Maurice to a private screening at the Factory of the film she had starred in, I, a Man. Maurice described Valerie as relaxed and friendly in Andy’s company. Still, Valerie called out the injustices she saw at the Factory—particularly Andy’s biases against women and his underpayment of his actors—which foreshadowed her eventual break from Maurice over matters of autonomy, financial control, and intrusiveness. Her socializing with Andy and Maurice at this screening would mark one of the final times she felt at ease with either of them.
Soon Valerie realized that Maurice could technically own both SCUM Manifesto and Up Your Ass based on the contract she signed, which soured her relationship with him. She later wrote to journalist Howard Smith that she had first believed that the contract would establish a claim on her next two books after the novel she was writing was completed, but when she realized (or interpreted) that the contract included her next two works from the time of signing the contract, and that Girodias could take SCUM Manifesto and Up Your Ass as her next two “book-length works,” she felt trapped and duped. She wrote:
I stupidly thought the contract was just to establish his claims on the novel, so I couldn’t keep the $500, then sell the novel to someone else, so I signed it, + it turned out to be the contract, + he owned the novel + all subsidiary rights. . . . I thought ‘next’ meant after the novel was written, but it turned out that ‘next’ meant after the contract was signed, so he had a claim on the ‘SCUM Manifesto’ + he had the Manifesto in mind when he wrote up the contract, as well as the play, which I learned too late he could take in place of the novel if I didn’t turn one in.117
Valerie’s paranoia about the contract she signed only intensified and, in a strange irony, she sought advice and help from Andy to help her make sense of the contract she had signed with Maurice. Paul Morrissey said that, regardless of how much Andy tried to help Valerie, she refused to believe the contract with Maurice was meaningless (Andy’s lawyers had already determined it would not hold up in court):
So she brought me this stupid piece of paper, two sentences, tiny little letter. On it Maurice Girodias said: ‘I will give you five hundred dollars, and you will give me your next writing, and other writings.’ Something like that. It didn’t mean he owned them. It means she would submit them to him, and he’d look at them. It was a totally meaningless thing. I said: ‘Valerie, it doesn’t mean he owns your writing.’ She said: ‘Oh, no—everything I write will be his. He’s done this to me, He’s screwed me! He’s . . .’ I said: ‘It doesn’t mean that.’ So then, I was talking to lawyers. . . . Ed, would you do us a favor. There’s a girl, she has this agreement, piece of paper. Would you look at it and tell her whether it has any legal basis?’ And I said: ‘Valerie—you’re gonna go see a lawyer—you won’t pay him—he’ll charge us, and he’ll look at the paper, tell you what he thinks of it.’ Valerie said: ‘Oh, that’s . . . Thanks . . .’ So I spoke to him again later, and he said: ‘Oh, that girl came in. She’s really crazy. I told her that this paper means nothing! It doesn’t mean he owns her writings—it doesn’t mean that. I told her that—she wouldn’t believe me. She said: ‘You’re lying, you’re stealing, you’re lying, you’re crazy!’ I said: ‘Oh well, O.K. . . .’ What it is is she wanted to believe this stupid thing.118
Andy’s lawyer, Ed Katz, had indeed told Valerie the contract had no legal standing, but Valerie felt no relief from this legal consultation. “He screwed me,” she exclaimed. “Said everything was okay. I think he was being paid by the publisher. You can’t trust any of them.”119
Valerie sensed deception keenly and swiftly. Maurice had a track record of slimy, underhanded dealings. As an example, he had once decided to put an avant-garde cabaret theater in the basement of his office building. When they started excavating the basement, they found human skeletons there; the building towered over an old cemetery. As an acquaintance recalled, “Maurice decided the only reasonable thing to do was to put all the bones in a bag and in the middle of the night take them out and dump them into someplace so he could continue to build his theater in the basement. He was an incredible scoundrel. How he managed his own business is beyond me. He went through fortunes like crazy; he made his own bad luck.”120
LOSING UP YOUR ASS
Mary Harron has rightly commented that “the Factory had a reputation as the most outrageous place in America, but it couldn’t handle Valerie Solanas.” Once Valerie felt she could no longer trust Maurice, she turned her sights again on Andy’s producing Up Your Ass and making a movie from SCUM Manifesto. Particularly after I, a Man had screened, Valerie ramped up her efforts to pressure Andy into producing her play, making the movie, and paying her more money. She became increasingly focused and obsessive about getting his attention, calling him at home (he had no idea how she had obtained his number). This likely scared him, prompting him to pull back from Valerie and ignore her repeated attempts to colonize his attention. While many of the “stupidstars” had unstable fits, drug overdoses, needy and demanding outbursts, and desperate struggles over Andy’s attention, Valerie was dogged and calculated in her offenses: “She was . . . serious, not to say, monomaniacal,” Harron wrote. “She believed in politics. She was a revolutionary, whereas Warhol had no desire to change the status quo.”121
Believing that Andy had promised to produce Up Your Ass and start filming immediately for SCUM Manifesto (starring Valerie), she hated that he had stalled on both these promises. She later revealed to Howard Smith the nuances of her conviction that Andy and Maurice had manipulated her:
[Andy and I] were to start shooting immediately + sign the contract + acting after the shooting, which is customary. Then I signed the contract with Girodias, + Warhol said we don’t do the movie until I sign the acting contract 1st. Then I finished “SCUM Manifesto” + Girodias gave me a contract for it, which I didn’t sign, as it was a sell-out. But since he had a claim on it by virtue of the novel contract I couldn’t sell the Manifesto to anyone else. By this time I was hip to what the 1st contract meant, so I decided not to do the novel, but if I didn’t, he could take “Up Your Ass” in place of it, so I sent him a letter saying he could publish ‘SCUM Manifesto’ in place of the novel, thereby saving the play at least. The “SCUM Manifesto” was lost either way. But he refused. He insisted I sign the contract for the Manifesto. Warhol meanwhile told me that until I signed the “SCUM Manifesto” contract, did the novel, or signed over the play, + turned in a 3rd work (Girodias had a claim on 3 works), + signed the acting contract for the movie “SCUM Manifesto,” we wouldn’t do the movie nor would anything of mine get published. In other words they had me in a position where I had to give them my heart + soul in return for crumbs.122
Valerie began to unravel. She never delivered the promised novel to Maurice, and consequently, her relationship with him suffered. As Maurice wrote:
Then she got worse and worse characterwise. She didn’t want to work on the novel she was supposed to write for me. The novel was supposed to be an autobiography, a personal confession. And she began getting extremely angry with Warhol. She felt he owed her a lot of money. But there was no contract, no written papers of any sort. I kept trying to pacify her vis-à-vis Warhol. And I am sure Warhol was doing the same when she went to complain about me. She got angry at me because I would not publish her SCUM (Society for Cutting Up Men) Manifesto, and because she could not write that novel. She transferred the anger. Just to insult me publicly, she would write letters to me here at the Chelsea after she was kicked out, to “Girodias, The Toad.”123
In all likelihood, Andy lost any potential interest in producing Up Your Ass or making a movie from SCUM Manifesto around the time Valerie signed the contract with Maurice. Whether Andy lost interest in Up Your Ass because of Valerie’s contract with Maurice remains unclear. Andy became disinterested in and aloof toward Valerie’s projects and Valerie saw this as the consequence of her signing with Maurice. Not a fighter by nature, Andy took his distance from Valerie in a subtle manner, as the p
otential of producing her off-off-Broadway play did not hold his attention.
Experiencing a growing distaste for both Andy and Maurice, Valerie now also found herself in the fall of 1967 with nowhere to live and believing she was in breach of contract. She had few friends, and nowhere to go. In typical Valerie style, her hostility toward Maurice did not prevent her from asking him, in a 4:00 a.m. phone call, if she could move into his place at the Chelsea with him, assuring him rather sweetly that she would stay out of his way and be a good roommate. During such conversations, she would ask him what he thought of her and her work, convinced that he would abuse her contract and take advantage of her. “A connection had been made in Valerie’s mind between her two mentors, Warhol and Girodias, who she came to believe were united in conspiracy against her. Warhol had stolen her play; Girodias had tried to tie her up with his ‘greasy contract.’”124
Valerie believed that Andy wanted to make a film of the play and not pay her rights for it, and she would launch into diatribes about how he was a “vulture and a thief.” Her anxieties were both based in fact and somewhat bizarre; Andy had lost the play, in part because of Valerie’s entanglements with Maurice, in part because of frank disinterest, in part because of Andy’s sloppiness, and in part because he generally neglected everyone in his sphere who felt passionately about anything. He also did use many of Valerie’s lines and sentiments in Women in Revolt later on (without compensating her). As usual, Valerie exhibited a unique blend of schizophrenic paranoia and outright accuracy. As a passionless person, Andy felt proud of his detached and observant way of taking in the world. That he tossed Valerie’s play aside was consistent with his general demeanor about nearly everything at the Factory. The wild disjuncture between Valerie and Andy likely led him to forget about Up Your Ass and SCUM Manifesto altogether. As Alisa Solomon wrote in the Village Voice, “Warhol must have flung it aside in uncomprehending horror. How could the cool, asexual, pallid pop artist, enthralled by consumer culture, find his way into this overheated, sex-drenched, knee-slapping diatribe that calls for doing away with men and money? Could there be two more contrary sensibilities?”125 (In a 1980 interview, Andy admitted that he had looked through Up Your Ass briefly but felt the play would entrap him. No one knows whether he ever read, or liked, SCUM Manifesto.)126