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

by Breanne Fahs

  Valerie fired the first shot with the Beretta. She had kept the .22 Colt revolver in her jacket pocket in case the first gun jammed. She had a fondness for these guns and had selected them specially for the occasion.171 Viva heard the shot over the phone but imagined it was somebody cracking a whip. Amaya, who thought a sniper had started shooting at them from another building, yelled, “Hit the floor!” while Fred, startled, thought a small bomb had gone off in the Communist Party offices two floors above them. “In that frozen second only Andy saw what was really happening.” He turned and saw the gun. “Valerie!” he yelled, “don’t do it! No! No!”172

  Valerie fired a second shot. Andy tried to crawl under a desk, but she moved in, placed the paper bag on the desk, and taking more careful aim, fired a third shot. He fell to the floor. The third bullet had entered the right side of his abdomen and exited the left side of his back. Later, describing the shooting to Jeremiah Newton, she said that Andy would never fall on the floor and die, likening his actions to the “slow motion ballet dance-of-death.” Only one bullet hit Andy, yet its trajectory caused enormous damage to his left lung and to his spleen, stomach, liver, and esophagus before penetrating the right lung and exiting. The bullet caused horrific pain. Andy later told friends, “It hurt so much, I wished I was dead.” It was “like a cherry bomb exploding inside me.”173

  Believing Andy was dead, Valerie then turned toward Amaya, crouching on the floor, and fired a fourth shot, missing him; Amaya whispered a quick prayer. She then fired a fifth shot, directly above his hip. The bullet went through him without damaging any organs, exiting through his back. Amaya fled toward the back room and crashed through the door, breaking the latch with his impact. Valerie pursued him, trying to force the door open while he held it closed with his body. Morrissey, meanwhile, had heard the shots and ran to watch through the small window for the film projector. Billy Name, who had been developing prints in the darkroom, rushed over to find out what the “firecrackers” were all about.174

  Morrissey watched in horror as Valerie crossed the room to Andy’s office, where Jed Johnson was, and tried to open the door. Believing it to be locked (Jed remembered watching the knob going around and around), she gave up and walked back toward Hughes, who begged her not to shoot. As one account had it, “The thin, dapper businessman epitomized the kind of people who laughed at her poverty and revolution. She strode towards him. There was nowhere to hide.” She stopped several feet in front of him and raised the gun. Valerie announced, “I have to shoot you,” aiming the pistol at his chest, after which Hughes fell to his knees, pleading, “Please don’t shoot me, Valerie, You can’t. I’m innocent.” He continued, “I didn’t do anything to you. Please, just leave.”

  After walking to the elevator and pressing the button, she returned and aimed the gun at his forehead. He choked back a sob. She pulled the trigger but the gun jammed; whirling over toward the paper bag on the desk, she took out the backup revolver. Just as she was about to shoot Hughes, the elevator doors opened again and distracted her. She was “very confused, very agitated.” “There’s the elevator, Valerie. Just take it!” Hughes pleaded. Valerie darted onto the empty elevator and disappeared.175

  Andy was lying on the floor, bleeding but conscious and in obvious pain. Hughes called the police and asked for an ambulance. Andy began yelling, “I can’t! I can’t!” and appeared delirious. He later remembered gasping, “I can’t breathe,” with Fred standing over him. When Billy Name entered the loft and found Andy lying on the ground, he approached, and “Warhol heard him cry, but mistook it for laughter. ‘Billy,’ he said softly, ‘don’t laugh. Don’t make me laugh.’” In the midst of this scene, Viva called again and asked what had happened. Fred told her that Valerie had shot Andy and there was blood everywhere. Viva, thinking Fred was joking, decided to have her hair trimmed before having it dyed and remained at the hairdresser’s salon. Gerard Malanga arrived two or three minutes after the shooting and found the Factory in “total mayhem.” When Viva finally arrived and discovered that this had not been a prank—she saw blood on the phone cord—she screamed and passed out. When she recovered, she called Ultra Violet but Ultra did not believe her story; she thought Viva had taken LSD: “I’ve had calls of this type before”; she “wanted to get her hallucinations off my phone line.”176

  Nearly thirty minutes later, the police arrived on the scene, followed by an ambulance, which took Andy and Amaya to nearby Columbus Hospital.177 Andy still had on his leather jacket, trousers and boots, as well as his silvery wig. Paramedics took him out of the building in a wheelchair, about which he later mused, “I thought that the pain I’d felt lying on the floor was the worst you could ever feel . . . but now that I was in the sitting position, I knew it wasn’t.” Most of those present had believed that Andy was dead. According to Morrissey, the paramedics had thought so at first but then found he was still breathing. Amaya tried to reassure the paramedics that Andy was famous and had money. Amaya felt lucky: “I felt a pain in my back and I saw my blood, and I realized I had been shot. But since I was walking around, I felt I couldn’t have been too badly hurt. I guess it was the luckiest escape of my life.”178

  That afternoon, the breaking news that Andy Warhol had been shot, probably fatally, was broadcasted. Upon hearing this, Margo collapsed with anguish because she had not been able to prevent it. “And I’m still not over it,” she said.

  The police report for 33 Union Square West was taken by a Sergeant Shea; the shooting was noted as occurring at 4:05 p.m. “Andy was sitting at his desk talking on the telephone to Susan Hoffman [Viva] of 58 E. 83rd St. The perpetrator was standing approx 12’ from the desk and took a revolver from her person and shot Andy twice in the chest. The perpetrator then shot once Mario Amaya who was standing next to the desk. The perpetrator then fled the scene on foot in an unknown direction. Both aided parties removed to Columbus Hospital by Att. Martinez.” Under the “persons wanted” section, he wrote, “Valorie Solanis [sic] F., W., age 28 5’7” thin built brown curley [sic] hair, wearing white raincoat and carrying shopping bag. Actress starring in film I a Man.”179

  At 4:51 p.m., doctors pronounced Andy clinically dead. They opened his chest and massaged his heart, to attempt resuscitation. He was dead for one and a half minutes before being successfully revived; he was then rushed to emergency surgery where a team of four doctors fought for five and a half hours to save him, with success. The following day, Tuesday, his condition was listed as critical, with doctors giving him a fifty-fifty chance of survival. He had his spleen removed but survived the surgery. Under the care of Giuseppe Rossi and four other doctors, he was, as Andy recalled, “brought back from the dead—literally, because I’m told that at one point I was gone. For days afterward, I wasn’t sure if I was back. I felt dead. I kept thinking, ‘I’m really dead. This is what it’s like to be dead—you think you’re alive but you’re dead. I just think I’m lying here in a hospital.’”180

  In a state of near delirium for days, Andy recalled feeling disoriented by the June 5, 1968, assassination of Robert Kennedy: “I heard a television going somewhere and the words ‘Kennedy’ and ‘assassin’ and ‘shot’ over and over again. Robert Kennedy had been shot, but what was so weird was that I had no understanding that this was a second Kennedy assassination—I just thought that maybe after you die, they rerun things for you, like President Kennedy’s assassination.”181

  Andy’s doctors allowed only his mother—described as “a tiny old woman wearing a babushka” who had a heart ailment and “was brought weeping out of the back room”—and two brothers to see him, barring all others in the hours following the emergency surgery. Andy’s mother was in acute distress. “She seems about to fall to the ground,” Ultra Violet mused. His mother kept uttering, “My boy good boy. He go one o’clock mass St. Paul every Sunday. Good religious boy. They kill him, my Andy.”182

  During Andy’s surgery and his recovery, friends, press, and superstars jammed the tiny lobby of the hospita
l. The press had a voracious appetite for this story, while the superstars fought for the media spotlight. Leo Castelli and Ivan Karp, two well-known art dealers, gave interviews while Viva and Gerard Malanga were set up for a photo shoot. A reporter asked Viva how she would describe Valerie and Viva replied, “Mixed up.” Billy Name paced back and forth, “a bathtub plug hanging on a metal chain from his neck, his eyes as red as a rabbit’s,” Ultra recalled.183 Elsewhere, Ivy Nicholson threatened to kill herself if Andy died and called the hospital constantly, “ready to jump at the fatal word.” When hospital staff wheeled Andy’s mother, Julia, outside to a waiting taxi, “a flock of photographers struggled for front photographs, almost trampling the old woman in the process.” Soon, stories of Valerie’s relationship with Andy began to circulate, with one friend complaining that Valerie had “been bothering Andy a long time, trying to get him to use the script, part of which I read and which was so vile and filthy it turned my stomach. Andy kept turning her off, but he was just too nice a guy to give her a complete brushoff.” When the press interviewed Amaya, he called Valerie’s Wild West entrance “puzzling.”184

  Meanwhile, as Andy went through surgery, Valerie was approaching a rookie traffic cop named William Shemalix, a twenty-two-year-old who had been a cop only since February, in Times Square at Forty-Second Street and Seventh Avenue. Sometime between seven and eight o’clock that evening, she turned herself in as the woman who shot Andy Warhol. She handed Officer Shemalix her .32 automatic and her .22 revolver and said, “The police are looking for me. They want me. He had too much control over my life. The police are looking for me and they want me.” The cop noted that the .32 automatic had recently been fired. (Some reports held that Valerie told Shemalix that she was a flower child, but she denied this, asserting, “I never said I was a flower child. I would never say such a sick thing.”)185

  Immediately Valerie was taken to the Thirteenth Precinct station house, only a few blocks from the Factory (and two blocks from where Andy was having surgery), where she was held for questioning and eventually booked. Telling police that she had no home address, no business address, and no occupation and lying about her age—she claimed her birth date was April 9, 1940, four years later than her actual date of birth—she now faced high-pitched scrutiny. Downstairs at the station, a battery of photographers waited for an hour outside the door of the room where she would be booked. Twenty reporters milled about the booking room. When she finally came through the door, her hands were cuffed behind her back. “It was bedlam,” wrote one reporter. “Photographers climbed behind the booking desk, elbowing cops out of the way. While police tried to book her, she posed and smiled for photographers. It was impossible to book her; the clicking and whirring of the cameras drowned out the sound of her voice.”186

  Dressed in khaki jeans, a blue turtleneck sweater, a yellow knit shirt, a trench coat, and torn blue sneakers, Valerie, when asked where she lived, told the reporters, “I live nowhere.” When asked if she was an actress, she said, “No, I’m really a writer.” In response to “Where’d you get the gun?” she shouted, “Vermont!” The press demanded answers for why she shot Andy Warhol. Of her motives, she claimed, “I have a lot of very involved reasons. Read my manifesto and it will tell you what I am.” Soon after, police kicked the reporters out of the station and took her to the fingerprint room for booking. She was charged with several offenses, including “felonious assault and possession of a deadly weapon.” She was initially held without bail but eventually it was set at ten thousand dollars.187

  Meanwhile, Fred Hughes and Jed Johnson were held for questioning as material witnesses—perhaps as suspects in Andy’s shooting—until nine in the evening, when Valerie was officially booked. Police roped off the Factory and began, as Fred later told Andy, “running all over the place, putting tape where the bullets were. . . . They got into everything—opened every drawer, went through, God, I don’t know, the stills of Sleep, old coffee shop receipts. . . . After they had been poking around for at least two hours—every drawer in every cabinet was pulled out—I saw a paper bag sitting right on top of the desk where you were shot. I went over to the bag, and . . . in this paper bag was another gun, Valerie’s address book, and a Kotex pad!”188 Apparently, police had searched everywhere but the bag even though it had been sitting right on top of the desk all that time.

  “POP GOES POP-ARTIST”

  The Manifesto speaks in the voice of the lost and grief-stricken child of the West of this moment. Savage and breathlessly icy, cruelly ungiving with a world that has cheated it of its life, it is a voice beyond reason, beyond negotiation, beyond bourgeois decencies. It is the voice of one who has been pushed past the limit, one whose psychological bearings are gone, who can no longer be satisfied with anything less than blood.

  —Vivian Gornick, introduction to SCUM Manifesto

  The papers were full of the news: “Pop artist Andy Warhol fought for his life today, after being gunned down in his own studio by a woman who had acted in one of his underground films.” By June 5, Valerie had appeared on the front page of several newspapers, including the New York Daily News, which featured the headline “Actress Shoots Andy Warhol.”189 The shooting rippled through the newspapers and across the radio and likely would have gotten even more attention had Robert Kennedy not been assassinated two days later. Reactions ranging from horror and disbelief to sympathy and awe were seen in New York City. The day after Valerie’s arrest, leaflets praising her action were circulated on Eighth Street, disseminated by Ben Morea and the Motherfuckers. Handing out mimeographed leaflets in Tompkins Square Park and near the Museum of Modern Art, supporting Valerie for attacking Andy’s love of capitalism and hatred of creativity, the Motherfuckers staged a vibrant street performance in which they lionized her as a fellow anarchist and rebel. Standing in solidarity with Valerie, they wrote a prose poem that read:

  VALERIE LIVES!

  ANDY WARHOL SHOT BY VALERIE SOLONAS.

  PLASTIC MAN VS THE SWEET ASSASSIN

  THE FACE OF PLASTIC/FASCIST SMASHED

  THE TERRORIST KNOWS WHERE TO STRIKE

  AT THE HEART

  A RED PLASTIC INEVITABLE EXPLODED

  NON-MAN SHOT BY THE REALITY OF HIS DREAM (AS THE CULTURAL ASSASSIN EMERGES)

  A TOUGH CHICK WITH A BOP CAP AND A .38

  THE TRUE VENGEANCE OF DADA

  A TOUGH LITTLE CHICK

  THE “HATER” OF MEN AND THE LOVER OF MAN

  WITH THE SURGEON’S GUN

  NOW

  AGAINST THE WALL OF PLASTIC EXTINCTION

  AN EPOXY NIGHTMARE WITH A DEAD SUPERSTAR

  THE STATUE OF LIBERTY RAPED BY A CHICK WITH BALLS

  THE CAMP MASTER SLAIN BY THE SLAVE

  AND AMERICA’S WHITE PLASTIC CATHEDRAL IS READY TO BURN.

  VALERIE IS OURS AND THE SWEET ASSASSIN LIVES.

  SCUM IN EXILE

  In response to questions about how he rationalized supporting Valerie, Ben replied, “Rationalize? I didn’t rationalize anything. I loved Valerie and I loathed Andy Warhol, so that’s all there was to it. I mean, I didn’t want to shoot him. Andy Warhol ruined art.”190

  Maurice read about the shooting the next day flying on a plane back from Montreal. Struck by the contrast between SCUM Manifesto as a document of outrageous satire and Valerie’s brutal actions, Maurice was dumbfounded: “But no, it was a joke; it had to be! She could not possibly have convinced herself that she was able to carry out the greatest genocide in the history of mankind [single-handedly].”191

  Questions of motive began springing up shortly after the shooting, as people demanded answers for this “deranged” action. Valerie resisted answering most questions, especially those she found demeaning and distracting from the truth. Legal Aid lawyer Jeffrey Allen encountered her stubborn refusal to give details about her motives. He told reporters, “She wouldn’t tell me anything. She wouldn’t talk to anybody. She’s very tense, like a rubber band stretched out as far as it could go.” While in custody,
Valerie explained in somewhat sparse terms why she had shot Andy, apparently conflating her paranoia about Maurice with that about Andy: “It was reported in the newspapers that the motive for doing this was because Andy would not produce my play. It was for the opposite reason. He has a legal claim to all my works. It’s not often that I shoot somebody. I didn’t do it for nothing.”192 She believed that Maurice had sold the movie rights to Andy and said, in a later interview, “Warhol had me tied up lock, stock, and barrel. He was going to do something to me which would have ruined me.”193

  Details of Valerie’s conversation with assistant district attorney Roderick Lankler began to appear in the papers.

  Question: You tell me in your own words what happened.

  Answer: Very simply. I shot him.

  Q: Who did you shoot?

  A: Andy Warhol. . . .

  Q: And how did it happen, how did you go up there, how did you shoot him?

  A: I went up there and he wasn’t there and I went up there it was about 2:30. He wasn’t there and Morrissey was there. I didn’t feel like talking to him. I told him, “I will wait downstairs.” I saw Andy Warhol. I went upstairs with him. We shoot the shit a while and then I shot him.

  Q: What did you shoot him with?

  A: A gun.

  Q: That gun?

  A: Yeah. .32 Calabre [sic] Beretta.

  Q: Where did you get this?