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

by Breanne Fahs

  Finding herself again living on the street, Valerie pestered Maurice to publish SCUM Manifesto and, “after some wrangling and aggressive letters on her part, he agreed, but she balked at the new contract he had prepared,” as Harron described it.127 Always a writer, Valerie began sending heaps of hate mail to Maurice’s office, referring to him almost exclusively as the “Lowly Toad.” Valerie made several vitriolic and threatening phone calls to his office at Olympia Press, though he did not think much of them.

  By early January 1968, Valerie’s intensity, short-tempered impatience, and rage had reached a peak. Her mental health skidded on the edge, and she had begun to worry family members. Though she had never regularly communicated with either her sister or her mother during this period (at most she sent a postcard to notify them when she moved), she began inundating them with letters and long-distance phone calls. All she could do was talk about Andy Warhol and Maurice Girodias, insisting that they had stolen from her, that lines from I, a Man had been dubbed over, and that Andy had used her material in lectures he was giving in New York. She started writing long, rambling letters to her sister and mother about Andy and Maurice and how people were out to get her. When Judith asked her mother, “Have you heard from Valerie?” she learned that her mother, like Judith, had become extremely concerned by the quality of the letters.128

  Valerie now believed the only way to save Up Your Ass from the slimy hands of Maurice was to sign over SCUM Manifesto. In January 1968, she mailed Maurice a letter:

  M. G.—

  I don’t intend to write the novel. You can publish “SCUM Manifesto” in it’s [sic] place. The “SCUM Manifesto” is now yours, to have & to hold—forever.

  Valerie Solanas129

  VALERIE VISITS CALIFORNIA

  Resigned to the “greasy” contract with Maurice, Valerie left New York in early 1968 with her five-hundred-dollar advance and traveled to California to visit Judith and a dear friend, Geoffrey LeGear. Valerie called this time in California, from late January to mid-February, her “little vacation.”130

  At the time of Valerie’s visit to California, Judith had separated from her husband. When Valerie showed up at Judith’s San Mateo home at six o’clock in the morning carrying several boxes of manuscripts and mimeographed copies of SCUM Manifesto, Judith felt worried. As Warhol biographer Steven Watson wrote, Valerie was in the worst state Judith had ever seen her in: “She was so filthy, her waist-length hair so knotted that Judith put her in a bathtub and cut off all her hair. ‘She had a carton full of SCUM manifestoes she was selling on the street, but only had the filthy clothes she had on her back.’”131 Judith scoured her from head to toe three times and put all her clothes in the Dumpster nearby. She bought her new clothes, tennis shoes, and flannel pajamas.

  Valerie complained bitterly about Andy and Maurice, continuing her rants about the mistreatment she faced from them. Judith remembered their conversation vividly: “She told me that a publisher in New York—Maurice Girodias—wouldn’t publish SCUM but gave her money to write a novel. Then Warhol and Girodias were conspiring to steal her play and her manifesto. . . . I didn’t know what to make of it. She was the one who knew about writing and the publishing world.”132

  She sent many letters to Andy during her time with her sister, the first of which said, “Dear Andy, You asked me twice where the unsigned ‘SCUM Manifesto’ contract is, would you like to have it? I’ll sell it to you for $20,000. I’m dead serious.”133 Her next letter to Andy stated, “I really do believe that if you didn’t have your lies + deception + notarized affidavits, you’d shrivel up + die. Valerie” (February 1, 1968). Next she chided Andy: “Toad—If I had a million dollars, I’d have total control of the world within 2 wks; you + your fellow toad, Girodias, (2 multi-millionaires) working together control only bums in the gutter, + then only with relentless, desperate, compulsive effort” (February 7, 1968).

  In an ominous letter of February 10, Valerie intimated she intended to buy a gun: “You can shove your planefare up your ass; I now have a little sum saved—enough for, not only planefare, but a few other things as well. Besides, I’ve decided to stay out here for a while. My little vacation has done me a world of good, + in the course of having it I got a few gassy scenes going. (‘other things’ may refer to guns). Valerie.”

  The next day, she wrote a sarcastic letter calling Andy “Daddy”: “Daddy, If I’m good, will you let Jonas Mekas write about me? Will you let me do a scene in one of your shit movies? Oh, thank you, thank you.”

  Valerie was working herself into a panic, and the visit with her sister was short-lived. Valerie left her sister’s house after only a few weeks and then fled twenty miles north to San Francisco, where she went to peddle the manifesto on the street and consign it to bookstores. She continued to mail letters to Andy and Maurice, this time giving an address at Seventh and Mission Streets in San Francisco.

  She then went across the bay to Berkeley, where she spent a few months living with a psychology student who attended the University of California. When she first arrived in Berkeley, she approached a student and asked if he wanted a female roommate. He already had two roommates so he referred her to a neighbor whom he disliked. The student remembered that Valerie “looked like a dike [sic] . . . She was always wearing this sort of motorcycle cap.”134

  Valerie showed up at the neighbor’s apartment a month after the student had given her the address. Convinced that she would be an acceptable roommate, this male student allowed her to move in with him. Then, “the misery began.” Consistent with Judith’s account, Valerie worried constantly about Up Your Ass, SCUM Manifesto, and the copyright infringement she suspected of Andy and Maurice. Her paranoia became so intense that she ruminated on whether her dental fillings were bugged. Her roommate and others who came to the apartment became alarmed. The psychology student, who lived upstairs, said, “Once I saw [my neighbor] leaning out the window, nailing it shut,” apparently fearful of Valerie’s ranting. “They would talk until all hours and she would spend a lot of time at the typewriter.” Valerie had asked her roommate to put a special lock on his door. “Eventually her host moved out and she finished out the month alone in the apartment.”135

  Leaving the Berkeley apartment and again finding herself homeless, she spent two weeks with her friend Geoffrey LeGear in Berkeley and San Francisco.136 (Geoffrey LeGear still lives in California. He is seventy-seven years old, born the same year as Valerie. He lived with Valerie in Berkeley, San Francisco, and New York in 1967 and 1968, and last spoke with her in 1971. He described Valerie as “unforgettable . . . a combination of Hamlet and Cleopatra, the antic disposition, the infinite variety.”)137 Valerie related to Geoffrey the issues she had with Maurice and Andy and strategized about how she could address her problems. She trusted Geoffrey’s advice and admitted that her paranoia had grown worse, hoping he could provide some clarity about the stranglehold Maurice had on her writings. Geoffrey lent a sympathetic ear but could not quell the storm emerging from Valerie.

  Following her time with Geoffrey, she returned to her sister’s home, still spinning with psychological imbalance. She showed up at Judith’s office, in a high-rise, wearing every piece of clothing she owned (including the flannel pajamas and all the clothes Judith had bought her), in bulky layers. She insisted that she had to return to New York immediately and demanded money so that she could do so. Judith knew something was wrong. “This was bizarre even for Valerie. I argued with her, pleaded for her to move in with me, and she yelled back until I gave in.”138 Then, because the plane ride to California had frightened her so intensely, she refused to fly back, telling Judith that she vowed never to ride in an airplane again. Judith bid her goodbye as “she boarded a Greyhound bus for a long trip across America, returning to her twin nemeses.”139 A week later, Valerie arrived back in New York, angry as ever and reenergized in her efforts to seek revenge on the “Toads,” Andy and Maurice.

  VALERIE, GET YOUR GUN

  Even people who respe
cted Warhol and his work thought that people at the Factory were being used as cannon fodder for avant-garde art. She probably wanted to be taken more seriously than she was by the people at the Factory. . . . She was probably a terribly ambitious young woman writer. It is a fascinating case—a female artist driven to terrible lengths by the lack of response of the art world around her, and then lashing out at the superhero of the avant garde.

  —Kate Millett, interview by Mary Harron

  Sometime before the peak of her anxiety and rage, Valerie encountered a young radical named Ben Morea, the founder and leader of Up Against the Wall, Motherfucker (UAW/MF), a notoriously angry, hell-raising, anarchist group of artists and countercultural radicals (a “street gang with analysis”) affiliated with the Lower East Side branch of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). Referring to himself as a “self-educated ghetto kid and painter,” Ben had used his experiences with drug addiction and prison as a teenager to reinvent himself as an artist with social awareness.140 “The relationship with Solanas is shrouded in mystery,” said John McMillian, a reporter for the New York Press who interviewed Ben in 2005. The Motherfuckers “were very unsavory but some were surprisingly smart and knowledgeable.”141

  Ben, who had given only a handful of interviews since his disappearance from the limelight in the late 1960s (shortly before the 1968 Chicago Democratic National Convention), recounted to me his meeting Valerie in 1967:

  I published an anarchist, artistic, cultural paper called Black Mask and I used to on occasion sell it on the street for a nickel on the corner of Eighth Street and Fifth Avenue. Monetary gain wasn’t the purpose. The nickel was just that if you hand it out free people take it no matter what. So, I thought for a nickel they would go out of their way to get it and look at it. So I used to charge a nickel. One day I was selling the paper in the Village and Valerie, who I didn’t know at the time, came up to me and said she would like to get a copy, but she didn’t have a nickel. I told her, “You don’t really need a nickel. Since you want a copy, you can have it. I only charge a nickel to make sure somebody wants it.” She said, “No, no. Wait here,” and she went into a bookstore and stole a copy of her own book, SCUM Manifesto, brought the book back to me, and said, “Here, I’ll trade you.” She just went and stole it from some bookstore! That’s how I met her. I immediately was attracted to her, her effort. It impressed me. I can remember over time we just got closer and closer, more friendly, and then for a period of time she used to stay with me. I had a loft then and I was also an artist. I cannot remember how she told me, or I knew, or I sensed that she was transient and didn’t have a permanent place. I made my home available to her. She used to come and stay with me on occasion, just overnight, maybe several nights in a row, and then I wouldn’t see her for a few nights.

  His friendship with Valerie remained platonic and he described her as his closest friend: “I loved Valerie.”142

  Certainly, Ben was an excellent match politically for Valerie’s radical sensibilities. On his attraction to Valerie as a person, Ben said, “I always loved people who were loose cannons, who didn’t fit the mold.” He believed in complete cultural upheaval, never made apologies for men’s violence and mistreatment of women, and insisted on anti-assimilation. When Valerie stayed with him, he offered political conversation and sympathy for her hatred of the corporate, mass-produced goals of Andy Warhol’s so-called art. He, too, hated Warhol: “Aesthetically and ideologically, I would lean much more toward her than towards him. I would vilify him for trying to destroy the creative act and make it a money act. I mean, he really stands out as a negative factor to me and she does not.”143

  When asked how he felt toward Valerie or whether the relationship was sexual, Ben replied:

  You know I loved her. She was a very beautiful person, but she was a little unbalanced, which never bothered me and still doesn’t bother me. I had such strong feelings, good feelings for her. She was fairly mild mannered compared to what people would assume by her actions. It was never obvious that she would go to that extreme. She was not an aggressive person. She was very nice and she was very sweet around me all the time. In the movie, they show that we had some sexual liaison which was completely untrue. We were just really close friends, a platonic relationship rather than a physical relationship. I assumed that she was either asexual, bisexual, but she had lesbian tendencies and I couldn’t tell and it didn’t matter to me if she mainly thought of herself as lesbian or if she was bisexual. I mean, I could tell that her sexuality was less defined by the norm. We didn’t have that kind of relationship, that kind of appeal towards each other. We had a bond. A kind of friendship bond. She was my buddy.

  Along these lines, Ben endorsed the portrayal of his character, Mark Motherfucker, in the film I Shot Andy Warhol, saying it offered a true portrayal of Valerie and that it didn’t bother him that they depicted a sexual liaison between them:

  They couldn’t find me. They tried to find me, but I was out of communication for at least forty years. You couldn’t find me if you wanted to. They had no other way to show how close we really were other than that. People couldn’t understand it in platonic terms. They couldn’t understand closeness without sex.

  We particularly bonded over our dislike of Andy. She disliked his manipulation of people. She was opposed to that relationship between men and women, that sense of manipulation, and it became aesthetic as well as political. She was calm and mellow with me, but you’ve got to remember, I was a pretty volatile person in those days. Maybe if she was around a liberal, she would have come across as more threatening and strong, but around me, it didn’t come off that way at all. She was my friend, my equal. She was her own person. You could just tell that she was not what we in the ’60s used to call straight. She was just not a straight person, a person who was wrought in this materialistic world. She had an edge to her. It wasn’t like she was overtly crazy. She was crazy in the sense that we all were on my end of the spectrum. We were all opposed to this materialistic, dominant, oppressive world that the straights loved. We made it clear by our actions, our thoughts, our appearance. We tried to make it clear that we were not part of the straight world and you could tell she was not. Had she been a straight person, we probably wouldn’t have had the relationship that we had. But I was not really open or friendly to straight people at all. I had no interest in it, in that world or the people from that world.

  Believing Valerie had a more light-hearted personality than many gave her credit for, he recounted a story where he confronted Valerie about her intentions to “eliminate” him because of his gender:

  One evening I said to her, “You know, Valerie, I was wondering, your main focus is killing men and here I am, a man. What does that mean?” She looked at me and said she had never thought of that in those terms. She thought for a minute and said, “Well I promise you, you’ll be the last man we kill.” In other words, she didn’t take herself overly serious. She was easy to get along with, and a lot of the conversation was about what I’ve been doing, things I was involved with, and thoughts that I had or thoughts that she had about art in general and politics, how it affected art and vice versa, how art affected politics.

  To make matters more complicated, Ben advocated political violence and had brought guns to several political demonstrations and events. Much speculation exists about where Valerie got her gun or guns. I Shot Andy Warhol depicts a scene where Valerie steals a gun from the character Mark Motherfucker; Ben insisted that it did not happen that way: “While we’re on the subject, the movie shows her stealing the gun from me and that was not true. I mean, I had guns and my family [Up Against the Wall, Motherfucker] had guns at the time, but she would never steal from me and I don’t know where she got the gun. I left there soon after and I never saw her again.” Ben’s account is corroborated by Valerie, who admitted shortly after her arrest that she got guns in Reno and Vermont (likely while traveling across the country after leaving California).144

  Back in New York
and eager to find Ben, Valerie was volatile and intense, and started to worry those around her. A few days after her return to New York, she attended a party in the East Village and “freaked out,” according to a person there, going into a tirade that frightened guests, who feared that she would become violent. A woman at this party noted that no one thought Valerie’s behavior stemmed from drug use; rather, “she was freaked out in her head.”145 Other reports confirmed that Valerie’s anger was ramping up. Ed Sanders, owner of Peace Eye bookstore, had held on to SCUM Manifesto for a long time. That week, she had returned there and demanded the manuscript back, but the clerk did not have it: “She left a note in late May. She wanted the manuscript back. I got the impression from the store clerk that she was miffed.”146

  That same week, Valerie visited the offices of Cavalier magazine—the outlet where she had published her 1966 article on panhandling—and approached Allen LeMond, then an editor, about writing a column called “Lesbian at Large.” During this encounter, she insisted that she would speak only with a woman editor, so he put her in touch with Gail Madonia. Valerie told Madonia that she wanted to write a column about women’s rights. According to Madonia, “We were considering it, since there was a big growth in women’s rights at the time, and she did not have the notoriety then.” The editors asked Valerie to write a sample piece, which was “all about women and there were no concessions about men at all. . . . It was a rambling thing about how men were pigs. It was a strong anti-male column. Rejecting the piece, they spoke on the phone only once after that and mentioned that they were also not interested in publishing SCUM Manifesto.”147