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

by Breanne Fahs

  Kate Millett, radical feminist author of Sexual Politics, was perplexed by the news that Valerie had shot Andy, saying that before the shooting, “SCUM [Manifesto] was taken by many as similar to Swift’s Modest Proposal. . . . It was such an extreme statement—that’s why it caused so much consternation and argument.” There were lots of arguments happening about SCUM Manifesto and “the argument was very impassioned.”10 Once Valerie shot Andy, SCUM was no longer mere rhetoric. “No one really thought there was a SCUM group. That was part of its ironical literary quality. It is like books being purported to come from or be found in people’s drawers—it had a spurious origin. I saw its rhetorical quality before the shooting—after, I couldn’t see it the same way.”

  Kate described Valerie as a fascinating case: “a female artist driven to terrible lengths by the response—or lack of response—of the art world around her, and then finally lashing out in this way against the superhero or leader of the avant-garde. You can see its symbolic level here as someone who writes a feminist manifesto so extreme that most feminists are horrified.” SCUM brimmed with sarcasm but never represented why she shot Andy. Kate told a story: “There was once a suffragette who threw herself under a horse at Ascot in a desperate attempt to get the attention of government so that women would get the vote.” She continued, “The shooting was like that. I don’t think it meant that one had to go shoot someone to be consistent with SCUM’s notions.” Kate was touched and fascinated by the whole incident: “It had meaning to me, the way she seemed to represent frustration as the woman artist ignored, driven to a kind of revenge.” In NOW at that time, as Kate suggested, women faced pressures about “respectability”: “Don’t be a lesbian or be called dykes at marches. . . . In NOW they were trying to define themselves away from Valerie. The shooting and its impetus were familiar to a great many. Maybe that’s why it made people so uneasy. Ti-Grace, in being very kind to her, took a lot of flak from the leadership of NOW. She was compassionate by nature, and suffered as a result.”

  On hearing about Valerie’s arrest for the Warhol shootings, Ti-Grace had an impulse to immediately leave her apartment and head toward the courthouse. As Kate noted, “It was very much like Ti-Grace to take an interest in Valerie because she was so radical. She was a philosopher—she liked the radical, the irrational—she was very smart and very thoughtful. It was very courageous of her to do it.” At the time of the shooting, Ti-Grace was helping many women get illegal abortions and people had told her that she would be thrown in jail for it. “I can’t live with myself if I don’t do what I can,” Ti-Grace admitted. “So I raced down and who do I see coming up the steps in criminal court? Florynce Kennedy! Flo and I by then had the same instincts. Her feeling was, like any black person she saw going into the judicial system, ‘They’re going to be in trouble. They needed help.’ She was on her way. We were both on our way.”

  Flo, a prominent civil rights attorney and reputable badass, had represented numerous Black Panthers and knew that people in prison needed money coming in from the outside and needed to make it clear to fellow inmates that they had people who cared about them on the outside. Flo brought legal savvy to Valerie while Ti-Grace brought empathy, solidarity, and support. “It didn’t really have to do with who she was or what was going on,” Ti-Grace said. “I visited her in prison to see what I could do to help. What did she need? Was she alone? I gathered from this other call I had that she didn’t have a big crowd around her.”

  Flo agreed to represent Valerie pro bono; both she and Ti-Grace were granted the right to visit Valerie in prison soon after the shooting. Flo recounted to the East Village Other:

  Valerie hasn’t lost weight. She looks darling . . . looks very good . . . seems to be taking it okay. The average person, you know, is very anxious to get out. Not Valerie! To her the whole world is a nuthouse and she’s sheltered from the craziness. The whole world is a garbage pail. There is no pressure now. I tell you, Valerie was in fairly good spirits. She’s a damn good fighter. She wants to defend herself. Yes, she doesn’t want any legal aid. I took the position that she was very intelligent and best able to fight for herself. One of the best things the oppressor likes is for you to put up a big struggle, and is put off balance when you don’t.11

  Flo advised Valerie to keep responses to the press brief and Valerie did so, giving only short answers about her defense, insisting that “SCUM Manifesto will be my entire defense.” To “Doing any writing?” she replied, “No.” “What of Maurice?” “Skip it.” “Anything to say to anyone?” “Skip it.” “A biographical note?” “Skip it.” “And how do you pass the day?” “Thinking and playing chess,” was her smug response. Valerie stayed tight-lipped about her motives and her case, taking seriously Flo’s advice about not giving the press information that could get distorted.

  In private, however, Valerie spoke freely about the shooting. When she learned she would meet Ti-Grace and Flo, she wrote enthusiastically to Ti-Grace, saying, “I’d be delighted to see you. Please come up as soon as possible.” (Valerie also insisted, in a postscript, that “there was some nonsense in the paper about how my real name is the above, but my stage name + the name by which my friends know me is VALERIA SOLANIS. The latter was simply a misprint in the credits of “I, a Man.” The only name I ever use for any purpose is the 1st.”)12 Ti-Grace remembered that, at their first meeting, Valerie spoke clearly and openly about the shooting. “She recounted, with great glee, details about shooting Warhol, how he begged. It was a bit gruesome,” Ti-Grace recalled. “There was a deliciousness to her pleasure of recounting it that made me uneasy. She took great pleasure in describing how humiliated they were, how they were begging for mercy. It seemed inhuman to me. It had nothing to do with feminism at all. It had to do with artist’s rights.” Valerie described how she had taken out the gun and they started running around and trying to escape but could not leave because they were in a loft. She seemed to relish seeing them as helpless victims, on their knees begging her not to shoot them. “She did a whole imitation of it and she shot him again,” Ti-Grace noted. “It was very detailed, not pleasant.”

  Valerie gave the background of how she came to shoot Andy, telling Flo and Ti-Grace that while living at the Chelsea Hotel, she was evicted for not paying rent. She lived on the street out of her little trunk and just before her eviction, Maurice, who also lived at the Chelsea Hotel, came to see her and said that he could help her out. He gave her five hundred dollars to buy SCUM Manifesto and her next two works and all the rights to them. Ti-Grace sensed Valerie’s panic. “She was paranoid schizophrenic so her impulses weren’t under the greatest control. She was under a lot of stress.” Ti-Grace got a fairly precise version of Valerie’s story: “She signed the contract, later realized what she had done, and of course he didn’t publish it and she lost the rights to publish it. She believed he had sold the movie rights to Warhol, too, so she was angry at Girodias. She sought advice from PEN, a big writer’s union, and they told her that Girodias was a well-known sleaze who had done the same thing with Nabokov’s Lolita and Terry Southern’s Candy; they had tried to break the contract and it was impossible. It was a shit contract and there was nothing she could do. She did try to resolve this in some sort of obvious, pedestrian way and also sought legal advice. It was terrible.”

  Valerie told Flo and Ti-Grace that Maurice had been out of town the day of the shooting, and besides, she did not want to hurt the publisher. Instead, she felt shooting Andy would be great for publicity. She wasn’t that bad a shot, she said. (In a later meeting between Ti-Grace and Maurice, the latter directly admitted he would never have published SCUM Manifesto if Valerie hadn’t shot Andy, because it would not have been worth it.) “Valerie was a good PR person,” Ti-Grace said. “She knew she had to shoot Warhol.”

  Sure enough, shortly after the shooting, all the bookstores carrying the mimeographed copies Valerie had distributed sold out of them, including Eighth Street Bookshop, Sheridan Square Paperback, Underground Uplift
Unlimited, Tompkins Square Book Store, and East Side Book Store. Even Ti-Grace couldn’t find a copy. Valerie caught wind that Ti-Grace had not yet read the manifesto and attacked her in a letter, “Florynce told me that you hadn’t read it (the Manifesto). That being so, you really have no business writing and publicly speaking about it. It’s also obvious that, not only do you not understand SCUM, but that SCUM is not for you. SCUM is for whores, dykes, criminals, homicidal maniacs. Therefore, please refrain from commenting on SCUM + from ‘defending’ me. I already have an excess of ‘friends’ out there who are suffocating me.”13

  Sadly, Maurice had the only available copy that Valerie knew of. Furious that they had not read the manifesto, she demanded that Ti-Grace and Flo meet with Maurice to get his copy, the only reliable and accessible copy. “You have to get that from him and try to get him to publish it,” Valerie pleaded, so Ti-Grace followed through and pursued Maurice for the copy. “I didn’t want to meet with him,” Ti-Grace admitted, “but I called him to ask him to Xerox it and that I would pay for it. He was really slimy and said he couldn’t afford to copy it so I’d have to meet him for lunch to get it. He was a sleaze. Pure sleaze. If he had control of my work, I’d burn everything I ever wrote!”

  After Ti-Grace obtained SCUM Manifesto from Maurice (with his refusing to make copies from it), Ti-Grace cut stencils over the course of three evenings and then mimeographed seventy copies, writing Maurice, “I will give a number to her lawyer, Florynce Kennedy, and send the rest to carefully selected persons who have requested to see it, e.g., critics, feminists, philosophers, seriously interested press. I think this will promote a lively and well prepared milieu into which her book, when it is published, can be projected.”14 Ti-Grace told Valerie, “You know, it’s ironic, for three weeks I couldn’t get near a copy: now I have 70 copies sitting in boxes in my living room. Still no play!!”15 Ti-Grace chastised Maurice about Paul Krassner’s commentary on Valerie (she had obtained it in draft form from Maurice and it was to be published in Olympia Press’s edition of Valerie’s manifesto): “I thought it was vicious, irrelevant, egocentric, self-serving, and at no point facing the content of the Manifesto. I didn’t even think it was a respectable analysis of the irrelevancies he does discuss. Its only purpose is to set the most perfect example of what Valerie is most against; it was quite eerie.”16

  Several weeks after the shooting, once she had met with Flo and Ti-Grace, Valerie became increasingly paranoid, agitated, and troublesome to deal with. She sent letters in which she crossed out the phrase printed on prison letterhead, “GOOD CORRECTION REDUCES CRIME” and wrote in its place “ELIMINATING MEN REDUCES CRIME.”17 Flo and Ti-Grace both noticed that Valerie’s delusions worsened. As Ti-Grace recalled, “You’d be talking to her and she would all of a sudden look at you and see you as somebody else, which was unnerving. We learned very quickly that if you cared about her at all, she became really abusive. I was trying to help her and she became abusive with me. She was abusive with Flo, too. Still, we persisted.” Ti-Grace sent Valerie money for stamps and personal items and insisted on showing solidarity with her. In return, and revealing Valerie’s tendency to reject those who helped her, her letters became more pointed and cruel toward Ti-Grace: “Astute of you to recognize that being denied association with me is oppressive, but that’s the way it is; I only develop friendships with my equals—originators, not interpreters.”18 That August, Valerie launched a full-frontal attack on Ti-Grace in another letter:

  I know you, along with all the other professional parasites with nothing of their own going for them, are eagerly awaiting my commitment to the bughouse, so you can then go on t.v. + write press releases for your key people defending me + deploring my being committed because of my views; remember, I want to make perfectly clear that I am not being committed because of my views or the “SCUM Manifesto.” . . . Nor do I want you to continue to mouthe [sic] your cultivated banalities about my motive for shooting Warhol. Your gall in presuming to be competent to discourse on such a matter is beyond belief. In short do not ever publicly discuss me, SCUM, or any aspect at all of my care. Just DON’T.19

  She added in a letter three weeks later, “Your colossal gall is inversely proportional to your pride. But what you’re doing is understandable, as SCUM’s where it’s at; SCUM is IT. And you’re not the only one to recognize it; Everyone wants to be part of SCUM, to make it his or her own; the world will eventually be overcome by + turned into SCUM. If you’re not in SCUM, you’re nowhere; SCUM’s not only IT, but it’s all there is.”20

  As time went by, Ti-Grace kept making excuses for Valerie’s behavior, believing that her time in prison had changed her: “I did know a lot of people who were in prison and came out and had been really changed by it. They were hard to be around and were damaged by it. It’s not that they were crazy. They were damaged. That’s something different. I didn’t know with Valerie. I knew she had lived on the edge financially. I knew she was panhandling. That has to be hard. It puts you in a humiliating position where you’re begging. I felt for her.”

  Like Ti-Grace, other feminists felt empathy for Valerie, and they arrived in New York wanting to visit her in prison. Roxanne had brought to the city a group of women who wanted to support Valerie and, after asking the court for Flo’s contact information, had arranged a meeting with Valerie and the group of women supporters. “It took a while for Flo to get the paperwork through but we went and had a visit with Valerie,” Roxanne remembered. “It was a little disturbing because she was in really bad shape. We could only see her through this plastic barrier and it was really scratched and had little kids’ handprints all over it. We could hardly see her and she could hardly see us. She couldn’t figure out who we were. We were talking all militant about revolution and everything. We wanted to go back and say how brilliant Valerie was.”21

  Roxanne was impressed by Valerie’s intensity and energy. “I remember her eyes, even through this hard-see-through plastic screen. She had these piercing eyes, I mean, they really looked inside of you. She seemed like a person who had no ability to be false or lie in any way, so you felt stripped of your usual way of dealing with someone, you know, all the things you do plus the physical things you do to establish contact—gestures, facial expressions. She made you look at yourself differently. It stripped me of my defenses. You couldn’t bullshit with her at all.”22 Roxanne felt that, looking at Valerie, she was looking into a mirror. “All I could make out clearly were her piercing, black eyes and they were the same as my eyes.”23

  When Roxanne and her good friend Dana Densmore visited Valerie at Elmhurst Hospital (one of many mental hospitals that housed Valerie that year) on August 30, 1968, Roxanne was struck by Valerie’s intelligence and fortitude, writing in a letter shortly after the visit, “What a mind Valerie has. I can guarantee that she is not a violent person, nor is she anti-male. She is angry and she is anti-Man. I felt I was in the presence of a very special person. Valerie’s brain fills the atmosphere—it vibrates and radiates. She has no sympathy for the enemy—men—but she does not consider all males the enemy. She has identified the enemy well—the managers of what she calls ‘the shitpile.’”24 One of Roxanne’s companions, Maureen Davidica, age nineteen at the time, had read the manifesto and had by then actually hatched a plan to develop a virus that would kill all men. (Roxanne joked, “When AIDS started, I was like, ‘Oh, my God, maybe Maureen did that and it went awry!’”) Roxanne described Maureen as militant and scary. When Maureen entered the room where Valerie was, she was so star-struck she could not open her mouth. She just stared at Valerie as Valerie kept repeating, “Who are you? Who are you?” Valerie had a way of stopping people in their tracks.25

  The visit with Valerie left a deep impression on Roxanne. The group sat in the dayroom, drinking coffee and conversing, and despite being incarcerated, Valerie did not seem defeated. She talked incessantly about her writings, even reenacting the entire Up Your Ass script for them from memory that day, performing as each charac
ter and showing off for her radical feminist audience. “I’ve never been sure when it was too late for her to channel her anger and brilliance into something else,” Roxanne admitted. “She had been a loner for a long time. She lived very roughly, on the streets, sleeping on rooftops and she did tricks because of her pain. All of that was right there on the surface.” When thinking about Valerie forty years later, Roxanne recalled, “You could sense a heat coming from her like dynamism. She was like a hot wire. Even though she seemed to be kind of drugged up and passive, it still didn’t really control her.”26

  Ti-Grace, too, felt a kinship with Valerie, even though Valerie rejected anyone who tried to help her or empathize with her. Ti-Grace wanted to stay in touch with her and “just try to do whatever friends do for friends.” She believed that, soon, people would have a chance to see her work and they could judge Valerie for themselves. Ti-Grace believed in Valerie, in what Valerie could do for the feminist movement: “She has dragged feminism kicking and screaming into the 20th Century in a very dramatic way,” she told reporters.27 “The Manifesto is the most important feminist document to appear in the English-speaking world that I know of. Solanas places feminism squarely as the key to any meaningful political, and eventually social, change. She takes the male-chauvinist spiel and turns it on its head. . . . Rightly or wrongly, Solanas has brought feminism up-to-date for the first time in history.”28