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

by Breanne Fahs

  In the next few days, Valerie again approached the Realist to publish SCUM Manifesto but Paul Krassner, its editor, rejected it outright. Still, on May 31, 1968, Paul agreed to meet her at the Chelsea Hotel and take her to lunch. During their meeting, Valerie asked him for some money and told him about SCUM and its plans to “herd all the men in the world and keep them caged up for the purpose of stud farming.”148 Attempting to show empathy and sympathizing with the anguish of a pamphleteer, Paul gave her fifty dollars.

  Disagreements exist about whether Valerie told Paul of her plans to shoot Maurice or Andy. Some have speculated that Maurice knew in advance that Valerie wanted to shoot him and Andy, so Maurice abruptly left town for Montreal a few days before the shooting.149 Other sources imply that Valerie had targeted Andy all along and never intended to shoot Maurice. Geoffrey LeGear, Valerie’s friend, later wrote to Maurice that prior to the shooting, Valerie had admitted that she was “sick” for most of 1968. “She says that the weather was miserable, she had no money, she couldn’t trust anyone, she was already considering killing Warhol (she had actually bought an icepick), and so on.”150 Valerie’s complaints about Maurice had begun to multiply in the weeks before the shooting. She was angry that he refused her calls and letters, that he refused to directly answer anything, and she felt that her work had been stolen irrevocably. Still, she targeted Andy earlier and with more ferocity than she did Maurice, implying that Andy had been a primary target in Valerie’s mind for much of early 1968.

  In mid-May, she called the Factory repeatedly and issued various threats and demands to Andy about her manuscript. Gerard Malanga, Andy’s trusted friend and associate, recalled that “Andy could slice you with a glance,” noting that everyone loathed the thought of getting on Andy’s bad side. Though Andy had taken Valerie’s calls before and they had amused him, her barbed threats changed his outlook. “Nothing ruffled Warhol so much as an ultimatum or a threat,” Gerard said. “He would shoot his persecutor the kind of look his father used to freeze his three sons with if they laughed on Sunday.”151 Andy stopped taking Valerie’s calls.

  The last weekend of May, Valerie sought out her friend Ben for some advice. Ben had dissolved Black Mask and had aligned with the Family (Up Against the Wall, Motherfucker) to take radical action by occupying Columbia University. During the infamous campus takeover of the administration, no one was able to get in or out. Still, Valerie somehow cleverly got into the buildings and found Ben. “She came down to see me. She wasn’t more animated or troubled then,” Ben remembered, “and she said, ‘Hey, Ben, what would happen if I shot somebody?’ I said, ‘Well, it depends on two things: Who do you shoot, and if they die or not.’” He added nonchalantly, “Her question just seemed like a matter-of-fact question, and it was a week later that she shot him.”152

  JUNE 3, 1968

  The day Valerie shot Andy—a sunny summer day precisely two months after the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. in Memphis, and two days prior to that of Robert Kennedy in Los Angeles at the Ambassador Hotel—she became instantly infamous. Angry and alone, unable to find a publisher for SCUM Manifesto or a producer for Up Your Ass, homeless and hungry, and frustrated by her inability to persuade Maurice or Andy to relinquish their control over her writings, Valerie set out to strike at the heart of the pop-art giant.

  Her first stop that morning: a visit to 208 West Twenty-Third Street, to her former neighbor May Wilson, the mother of William Wilson, who played a peripheral role in Andy’s crowd. (May Wilson had remembered Valerie from earlier encounters with her on Twenty-Third Street, seeing her approach men with the sassy question, “Wanna hear me say a dirty word for a dollar?”) This time, Valerie’s visit was not a social call. A few weeks prior to June 3, she had asked May to keep under her bed a bulky-looking, flower-patterned cloth laundry bag containing all of Valerie’s belongings. May had agreed, though she noticed that the laundry bag contained no clothes. “There was something that felt like a gun,” May said, “but having worked in vaudeville, I thought it might be a stage prop.”153 Valerie collected this bag early in the morning and took several items from it and placed them into a brown paper bag that she kept inside the carpet bag. These items included her address book, a Kotex pad, and two handguns: a .32 Beretta automatic and a .22 Colt revolver. She had paid sixty-five dollars for the .32 but she didn’t trust it so she had added a second gun as backup.154

  Whether after leaving May’s apartment Valerie showed up at Maurice Girodias’s office demanding to know his whereabouts has not been confirmed; some believe this actually happened, while others believe Maurice started this as a rumor so he could sell more copies of SCUM Manifesto once he released it after the shooting.155 The more likely story—one that kept Up Your Ass and SCUM Manifesto at the center of her thoughts—places Valerie at the Actor’s Studio at 432 West Forty-Fourth Street early that morning. Play in hand and gun in her carpet bag, she arrived at the studio eager to secure a producer for Up Your Ass, hell-bent on finding a rightful place for her play. Valerie demanded to be heard.

  At the Actor’s Studio, she sought out producer Lee Strasberg, famed actor and the studio’s director, to convince him to produce Up Your Ass. By chance, when she arrived, the actress Sylvia Miles (of Midnight Cowboy) was the only one there. Sylvia had just heard that she’d gotten the part in Midnight Cowboy and had gone to the studio quite early that morning to start work. She said, “The bell rang and I went downstairs thinking it was Lee Strasberg, and there was a girl standing there and her hands were wrapped around a packet, asking for him. She looked a little weird. Dirty, well I don’t mean that. More like messy. She was not coiffed. She had a different look, a bit tousled, like somebody whose appearance is the last thing on her mind. Scruffy, dark hair, sallow dark complexion, piercing eyes.” Sylvia saw Valerie holding a book called “SCUM.” Valerie quickly asked Sylvia to read her play, but Sylvia ushered her out and told a bold-faced lie, that Strasberg wouldn’t be back until 1:00 p.m. Sensing the threat in Valerie’s presence, she felt compelled to lie in order to get Valerie to leave the studio. “I shut the door because I knew she was trouble. I didn’t know what sort of trouble, but I knew she was trouble,” Sylvia said. After meeting Valerie, Sylvia accepted the copy of Up Your Ass which she read, but only after the events of that afternoon. The play, she said, was “awful and full of obscenities!”156

  Now at Times Square, Valerie next headed for the apartment of Margo Feiden—child prodigy and playwright—to seek assistance in publishing Up Your Ass. Valerie targeted Margo as a well-known woman playwright and producer—at age sixteen, Margo had produced Peter Pan on Broadway and was the world’s youngest producer, according to the Guinness Book of World Records.157 They had never met in person; Valerie found out where Margo lived, on Crown Street in Brooklyn (a space Margo said could “disorient you to the real world when you step back outside”), and set out to meet her and persuade her to produce Up Your Ass.158 If anyone would have sympathy for Valerie’s goals and work, Valerie thought, Margo could be that person. Well connected, ahead of her time, and intent that women enter “good ol’ boy” spaces, Margo could, in Valerie’s eyes, bring her the fame she so rightly deserved.

  Margo had left early to take her eighteen-month-old daughter to the pediatrician’s office and had returned to the apartment around nine o’clock to find Valerie on her stoop. It was a warm summer’s day, but Valerie strangely wore a heavy, full-length, wool winter coat, a dark cap, and fingerless gloves that showed her worn fingers. In this outfit, Margo could not discern Valerie’s gender with any certainty. Before Margo reached her house, she sensed that Valerie was there to see her. Valerie, whom Margo would later describe as having a “loud smell,” asked to speak with her, and Margo invited her inside.159

  Never sitting down and never removing her coat, Valerie talked endlessly, telling Margo about Up Your Ass, asking her to produce the play, and describing in detail her plans for a SCUM takeover. “She had this formulation all worked out,” Margo r
ecalled. “Every question had an answer. Valerie was clever, smart, energizing.” Valerie, according to Margo, “answered questions as though she were a PhD candidate fully prepared for her orals.”

  Valerie predicted matter-of-factly that in her ideal world of the future, all men would be killed, as they were inherently evil. Women had a different sensibility: they never started wars, did not rape, and would soon be able to reproduce without the assistance of men, anyway. Margo was struck by Valerie’s statement that “within our lifetimes, it will be possible for children to be conceived and born without having intercourse with men.” Valerie seemed to predict test-tube babies nearly ten years prior to the development of such medical technology. Margo asked, “But aside from procreation, what about women who want to have sex with men?” Valerie responded, “We’ll keep men in bullpens and women will come and choose which one they want (number 3, number 30, number 98).” Margo continued, “But what about women who love their sons?” Valerie assured her that, soon, gender choice would be available, and so only daughters would be born. Women could raise their sons who were already born knowing that they would end up in this corral someday. For almost four full hours, Valerie continued to describe a whole host of things men were responsible for but that women didn’t do: wife abuse, child abuse, war, the inequitable financial system, capitalism, corporations, failed governments, and so on.

  “She had instant answers for everything,” Margo remembered, “She was able to debate masterfully. Clearly she was brilliant, very smart, with intelligent, sad eyes. She took in everything. Still, what I saw before me was a tragically damaged person. It was there for just anybody to see.” Margo believed that Valerie could garner lots of followers if she had been just a little less crazy, citing her “eyes that drew me in” and Valerie’s uncanny intensity and extraordinary intelligence. “She was on a completely different level than most people.”

  After Valerie’s presentation of her ideas, she asked Margo point-blank to commit to producing the play. Margo told Valerie, “You’re wasting your time. I won’t produce it.” Angry at this response, Valerie, who was carrying a large bag made of carpet squares, put her hand down and pressed it against the bag, showing the outline of what was inside. Valerie asked, “Do you know what this is?” Margo said, “It’s a gun.” Valerie took out the gun and Margo looked at her baby daughter sleeping in the carriage. “Here’s Valerie holding a gun, pointing it toward the ceiling, and my baby daughter is sleeping inches away,” Margo said. “She never pointed the gun at me or my child.”

  Keeping the gun pointed upward, Valerie insisted that Margo would produce her play, though Margo continued to refuse Valerie’s demands. Meeting this resistance, Valerie suddenly said that now she had every intention of leaving Margo’s apartment and immediately going to Andy Warhol’s studio to shoot him. Valerie told a shocked Margo, “Yes, you will produce the play because I’ll shoot Andy Warhol and that will make me famous and the play famous, and then you’ll produce it.” Margo implored Valerie, “You don’t want to do that. You don’t need to shoot Andy Warhol because that won’t get me to produce your play.” Valerie insisted that if she shot Andy Warhol, Margo would produce her play; Margo continued to implore Valerie not to shoot Andy. Then abruptly, Valerie decided to leave the apartment. Before exiting, she pushed the manuscript of her play into Margo’s hands; it was 12:45 p.m.

  “I have a strange gratitude that she spared our lives,” Margo said, crying softly. “I never believed that she would shoot me or my daughter, but I knew she had every intention of finding Andy Warhol at that moment and shooting him.”160

  Locking the door behind Valerie, Margo frantically called her local police precinct, Andy Warhol’s precinct, police headquarters in Lower Manhattan, and the offices of Mayor John V. Lindsay and Governor Nelson Rockefeller to report what had happened and inform them that Valerie was on her way at that very moment to shoot Andy Warhol. Margo said, “I kept calling all the precincts—mine, Warhol’s, the mayor’s—and kept getting the same kind of answer: ‘Listen lady, how would you know what a real gun looked like?’ ‘You’re wasting police time!’ ‘You’re taking up the time of someone else who needs the police right now.’ They thought I was a prank caller. No one believed me. They said they could not arrest her until she shot him. ‘You can’t arrest someone because you believe she is going to kill Andy Warhol,’ they would say.” Margo left her phone number with different people and tried to reach those who could contact Andy, such as Robert Feiden, Margo’s cousin and Andy’s friend.161 “I was afraid to tie up my phone lines. Remember, there was no call waiting at that time. As I was frantically making these phone calls, I left the television on, knowing that if Andy were shot, regular programming would be interrupted with breaking news.”

  Valerie’s next stop was the Factory. While she had been away, Andy had moved the Factory from its original location, at 241 East Forty-Seventh Street in Midtown Manhattan, to a more upscale location, at 33 Union Square West, that left the Factory’s shimmery, silver-foiled excess in the past. The new space embraced a more modern aesthetic: “retro chic, with white walls, polished floors, art deco desks, and a new door policy with a bias in favor of the rich and famous.”162 When Valerie arrived at the Factory, Andy was out collecting a prescription for Obetrol, an amphetamine he took daily.163 On Sixteenth Street, a block from the Factory, Valerie encountered Paul Krassner with his daughter, Holly. Krassner found her “less tomboyish than usual. Her Dylan cap was gone; her hair had been cut and styled in a feminine fashion. She seemed calm, friendly, in good spirits. We talked a little while about nothing special, then said goodbye.” After they parted ways, he went to dine at Brownie’s, a vegetarian restaurant nearby, and Valerie headed west. Five minutes later, she reappeared, entering Brownie’s and approaching Krassner to ask if he would mind if she joined him and Holly for lunch. “Well, yeah, I do mind, actually,” he replied, “but only because I don’t get a chance to see my daughter that much.” “Okay, I understand,” she said, and promptly left the restaurant.164

  She returned to the Factory around two thirty and encountered Paul Morrissey outside. She told him, “I’m waiting for Andy to get money.” Morrissey replied, “Andy’s not coming in today,” just to get rid of her: she was always asking Andy for ten or fifteen bucks. Valerie left and took up a position down the block and around the corner, leaning against a wall on Sixteenth Street, clutching her brown paper bag (by then the carpet bag had disappeared) and perspiring in the heat of the day. An hour later, she was in the building, coming in from the elevator; she announced that she was still waiting for Andy. She was sent away, but “she came up like seven times.”165 Valerie insisted on waiting for Andy no matter how long it took.

  Howard Smith, a popular writer for the Village Voice, set the scene for what would soon become a gruesome and nearly fatal day at the Factory: “It was an ordinary afternoon at the Factory, the huge, new loft on the north side of Union Square which is the center of the Warhol scene. Sun came in the windows and gleamed off the mirror-topped desks. Paul Morrissey, Warhol’s executive producer, and Fred Hughes, an assistant, sat around talking with Mario Amaya, a visiting art magazine editor from London.”166 Amaya, of Art and Artists magazine, had come to town to try to persuade Andy to have a retrospective exhibition in London.

  At 4:15, Andy arrived outside the Factory—wearing a brown leather jacket over a black T-shirt, black jeans, and black Chelsea boots. He encountered two familiar figures: his boyfriend, Jed Johnson, who was approaching from Seventeenth Street carrying a bunch of fluorescent lights, and Valerie, who was standing outside the Factory near the wall of the building. They all entered and rode up the elevator together. Andy noticed that Valerie was “bouncing slightly on the balls of her feet, twisting a brown paper bag in her hands” and that “she was very heavily dressed for the warm summer weather”—she wore a turtleneck sweater beneath a fleece-lined trench coat on that hot day—and also that “she was wearing lipstick and makeup . . . eviden
tly something she saved for important social occasions.”167

  When they reached the sixth floor, the elevator doors opened and Valerie and Andy stepped out, walking toward Morrissey, Hughes, and Amaya. Hughes was sitting at his black, glass-topped desk next to a window that overlooked the park and writing in a black leather notebook. Morrissey was speaking on the phone across from him, “tugging at his big mane of curly hair.” In between the two desks paced Amaya, who had been waiting over an hour to speak with Andy. Amaya had removed his jacket and, reflecting on the new decor at the Factory, was smoking a cigarette. Jed Johnson crossed the room and went into Andy’s private office at a rear corner of the room and Hughes walked over to Andy to remind him of Amaya’s appointment to discuss the retrospective.168

  Andy remarked to everyone in the room, “Look—doesn’t Valerie look good!” Morrissey said that she did look good but then (he says it was jokingly) warned, “You gotta go now, ’cause we got business, and if you don’t go I’m gonna beat the hell out of you and throw you out, and I don’t want . . .” Valerie backed away but “had this funny look in her eye.”169 Amaya then walked to the back of the room to get another cigarette from his jacket, which was lying on the art deco–style couch.

  Morrissey had taken a phone call from Viva, who had called from Kenneth’s Hair Salon, where she was having her hair dyed in preparation for her upcoming role in Midnight Cowboy. Hughes noticed Valerie and said, “You still writing dirty books, Valerie?” then wandered off. Morrissey handed the phone to Andy so he could speak with Viva then left to go to the bathroom. While Andy spoke with Viva on the phone, Valerie pulled out a small gun—the .32 Beretta automatic—from the pocket of her trench coat and pointed it at him; no one seemed to pay attention, so she raised the gun slightly. Hughes leaned forward to pick up his phone. Andy leaned forward, cradling his phone.170