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

by Breanne Fahs

  Also on Christmas Eve, Valerie allegedly phoned the Factory and, when Andy answered, insisted that he drop all criminal charges against her, help get SCUM Manifesto published in the Daily News, pay her twenty-five thousand dollars in cash for all the manuscripts she had ever written, put her in more of his movies, and get her booked on the Johnny Carson Show. If Andy failed to comply, she “could always do it again.” (Valerie expressly denied this in a 1977 interview.) Andy immediately felt fear: “My worst nightmare had come true: Valerie was out.”60 After he notified the DA’s office, the DA went to court and obtained a warrant for her rearrest for aggravated harassment, though the cops could not find her, even while she continued sending threatening letters.

  Valerie’s call affected Andy deeply. He was afraid, and went on mad limousine rides around town to evade her. As Glenn O’Brien recalled, “Valerie was on the loose. She was locked up for a little while, but when I was at the Factory a couple of years later, she would call. Vincent Fremont and I might pick up the phone, and there’s Valerie. She’d ask for Andy. At one point she called up, and Andy answered, and she said that she wanted him to get her on the Johnny Carson Show. . . . That’s what she wanted . . . publicity.”61

  Valerie targeted others at the Factory aside from Andy, directing particular venom toward Taylor Mead and Viva. In his apartment after the shooting, Taylor found two unopened letters from Valerie, one of which said, “I’m gonna get you, Viva, and Andy.” Valerie had a long history of threatening Viva, going back to the time before the shooting when they both lived at the Chelsea Hotel. One day Viva’s husband, Michael Auder, saw Valerie in the lobby, held a hunting knife to her throat, and said, “You ever come back here again I’ll slit your throat.”62 Valerie responded to direct threats, and after that she did not go back looking for Viva, though she did threaten her in later letters to Andy.

  Valerie’s obsessive phone calls continued throughout December 1968; then in early January they abruptly stopped. As Andy recalled, “She must have found some other interests because I never saw her again, although occasionally people would say they’d seen her on the street someplace, usually in the Village.”63 The reason she stopped calling, however, may have been because two weeks later she was arrested for making threats to Andy, Maurice Girodias, Barney Rosset, Howard Hughes, and Robert Sarnoff of NBC. In the letters, she claimed, “I have a license to kill.”64

  WOMEN’S HOUSE OF DETENTION, NEW YORK CITY

  After Valerie’s threats led to her subsequent arrest, on January 9, 1969, she was remanded to the Women’s House of Detention in Manhattan. Curiously, earlier that day Valerie had entered the court building oblivious of the arrest warrant against her, only to be seized by the police and have her bail revoked. The Women’s House of Detention, like Matteawan, had a documented pattern of abuse of women and a long history of housing controversial figures such as Ethel Rosenberg, Polly Adler, Angela Davis, Afeni Shakur, Joan Bird, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, and Evelyn Nesbit.65 In its last years, around the time of Valerie’s imprisonment there, radical Black Power activist Angela Davis, who had been housed in the wing for the “mentally unstable” so she could not radicalize other inmates, described the prison as grossly negligent and abusive. “First of all, this prison is filthy. It is infested with roaches and mice. Often we discover roaches in our cooked food. Not too long ago, a sister found a mousetail in her soup. A few days ago I was drinking a cup of coffee and I was forced to spit out a roach. Roaches literally cover the walls of our cells at night, crawling across our bodies while we sleep. Every night we hear screams of inmates who wake to find mice scurrying across their bodies.”66 Andrea Dworkin, a well-known and outspoken critic of men and their abuses of power, wrote later of how two prison doctors sexually assaulted her during a cavity search, an event that helped to prompt the eventual closing of the Women’s House of Detention in 1971.67

  In February 1969, the courts agreed to set Valerie’s bail at fifty thousand dollars (though one hundred thousand dollars had been requested) because of the alleged new threats to Andy and her recent history as a psychiatric patient and because her more flattering psychological reports had not been made public (in fact, even the DA’s office had not seen the reports). Valerie’s chances of making bail or securing release appeared grim. She passed the time working in the kitchen, attending “beauty school” (the Women’s House of Detention had classes in housekeeping, dressmaking, cooking, and cosmetology, the last two of which Valerie participated in), and writing letters to Andy, infuriated that the press had claimed she had run off to Hollywood and worn a skirt to the shooting.68

  Judge Gerald Culkin, known as a “gentleman” by fellow judges, took on the case and called a friend, Lorraine Miller, then a young up-and-coming lawyer, to represent Valerie. Sensing that Valerie would not handle a male lawyer very well, the judge told Miller point-blank, “You’re a tough lady. . . . Maybe you can relate to her.” Culkin continued, “I thought you would be the only one who could handle her!” Lorraine admitted that, though Valerie was a difficult, even impossible, client, she desperately wanted Valerie to go to trial. She thought they could build a case that would give her a shot at a decent defense, but Valerie believed that going to trial would only give Andy and Maurice more publicity. Lorraine recalled that Valerie kept insisting, “I don’t need a lawyer. I know what I did and I know why I did it, and I would do it again. Warhol and Girodias stole my work.” Lorraine pleaded with Valerie, “But if we went to trial you might present a sympathetic picture that people might understand.” “No, no, no, I don’t want to do that,” insisted Valerie. “It would only give Warhol and Girodias more publicity! They’re capitalizing on me!” Lorraine reminded Valerie that she could go to jail if they did not go to trial. “I’m in jail now!” Valerie yelled. Even when Lorraine suggested that the publicity would help her sell more copies of SCUM Manifesto, especially with “how Valerie carried on with language and all the rest of it,” Valerie refused. “It wasn’t about the publicity,” Lorraine concluded. “Valerie said over and over, ‘I’ll sell the manifesto on my own.’”69

  Valerie did not even want an official lawyer, so Lorraine negotiated for Valerie and served as her “advisor,” as Valerie refused to let anyone officially represent her. (Valerie always called Lorraine her advisor, never her lawyer.) Judge Culkin told Valerie that anyone who serves as his or her own lawyer has a fool for a client, but Valerie did not relent. Lorraine recalled, “The judge asked her whether she liked me, and she said, ‘I like her well enough,’ but still wanted to be her own lawyer. She said that I could stand by her, which I learned was a big deal to her.”70

  The first time Lorraine encountered Valerie at the Detention Center, Valerie screamed and cursed at her.

  Conversations with her were such combinations of dirty words. She had quite a command of the English language and cursed like crazy, using words I’d never even heard before, and I just got up in my most composed manner and gave it right back to her. At that point, she sort of sat down and said, ‘You’re OK.’ I said, ‘If that is what makes me OK, I’m not sure that I want to be OK,’ but I had tried everything to establish rapport with her and there was no way to talk to her unless it was her way. I just spewed back the words I learned from her. I said, ‘I can when I talk to a slut like you.’ She thought that was very funny. It was a real learning experience for me. We ultimately became friends.

  Coming up with conclusions similar to those of Dr. Cooper, Valerie’s psychological examiner at Elmhurst Hospital, Lorraine believed that Valerie’s outbursts and bad behavior stemmed from wanting her mother’s attention and seeing her mother bring men in and out of the house when Valerie was young. “She was always trying to get her mother’s attention and approval but these men were in the way. Valerie thought that she was unattractive and so forth, and so she turned it into manipulation.” Valerie’s mother, Dorothy, who came up to New York to speak with Lorraine, had an open, gregarious manner. “She wasn’t embarrassed. She said, ‘I don�
�t understand this. I love Valerie!’” Lorraine worried that Dorothy had no idea about the impact she had on Valerie’s life; “Valerie felt neglected, jealous of her mother’s boyfriends, desperate for her approval and love. She told me that.” As a case in point, Lorraine believed that, despite Valerie clearly being a lesbian, she was driven to bisexuality by a lack of love from women.

  At that time, Valerie had a boyfriend who supported her and put up legal fees while he worked as a soda jerk at Schrafft’s on Broadway. He had a master’s degree in English from Stanford University and his deeply disapproving (and “aghast”) parents were not happy about his selection of Valerie as a girlfriend. “I really think that women were her ultimate object and that she viewed men as people who got in her way to being with women. She used men like that poor schnook.” Lorraine added, “Valerie was a hostile, abusive kind of person. She treated him with complete disregard and disdain. He was tall and handsome, just smitten with her.”71

  Ultimately, Lorraine felt that she could never truly understand Valerie and never had a clear sense of whether she could have won the case, “It’s hard to tell. After all, this was premeditated, so it’s unlikely but there might have been some sympathy. I got her a good deal, anyway. She shot two people and could have killed them. Warhol went through a lot of dangerous surgeries and rehabilitation. That’s pretty serious stuff.” Valerie insisted on taking a plea bargain, and Lorraine got Valerie a good deal—three years including time served. “When I discussed the plea deal with Valerie she said, ‘That’s fine! You did a good job.’ I said, ‘I did? I still think if you want to take a shot we can.’ She said, ‘I’ll look like garbage.’ She was pretty smart. She was no fool.”72

  While Lorraine negotiated the plea deal, the courts ordered Valerie to undergo another round of psychological testing to determine her fitness to stand trial. The psychological report issued January 17, 1969, repeated the diagnosis of schizophrenic reaction of the paranoid type but noted that Valerie was a difficult subject to test reliably. Dr. Emmanuel Messinger, the psychological evaluator, colorfully described Valerie’s oppositional temperament: “She fluctuates between cooperativeness and a complete refusal to cooperate. This, however, is not a pathologic type of negativism in the psychiatric sense. When she first came into the examiner’s office she announced, ‘I’m not taking this examination. I’m not answering any questions.’ After about five minutes, however, she began talking freely and it was clear that she was oriented in all spheres, has good memory, and a high degree of native intelligence. She can furnish information on any subject that she is disposed to.” As recorded in the report, Valerie told the examiner that she had originally objected to the interview “because I think it should be a matter of common sense. The Judge should be able to tell how nutty a person is.”73 Shortly after the evaluation, she refused all further psychological testing while at the Women’s House of Detention.

  As Valerie’s advisor, Lorraine agreed that she was not off-the-wall crazy, but characterized her as calculated, manipulative, and obsessed. Lorraine had negotiated a deal with Judge Culkin to get Valerie one to three years maximum, regarded as a light sentence. She had convinced the judge that the only way to get rid of Valerie was to give her a sentence that she had to take. Valerie pleaded guilty to the crime of assault in the first degree to cover the indictment. She said that she had not wanted to kill Andy but only to “get him to pay attention to me.”74

  In all, Valerie spent four months at the Women’s House of Detention (January to May 1969) and was admitted again to Elmhurst Hospital for reevaluation on May 15, 1969. Drs. Sternberg and Rubinstein of Elmhurst noted in their May 28, 1969, report that Valerie presented as alert and cooperative, markedly less anxious than in her previous hospitalization there, and that “her level of diffuse hostility has subsided significantly.”75 Describing her mood as monotonous and shallow, and claiming that she displayed clear and logical thoughts that veered toward overintellectualizing, they noted that “a diffuse paranoid flair was evident,” particularly as Valerie expressed paranoia about going back to Matteawan against her will. Diagnosed now with “Schizophrenia, Paranoid Type, Improved,” Valerie was transferred to Bellevue Hospital’s Psychiatric Division for another examination ordered by Judge Culkin. The report of this testing concluded by saying that Valerie no longer seemed obsessed with Andy Warhol, though her spirit had waned. Even Maurice agreed that her incarceration had done her a deep disservice, writing in a letter to her, “In spite of your crazy desire to antagonize everyone since you cannot have everyone at your mercy, you are still a very alive and intelligent person and it is a form of suicide to force the courts to send you indefinitely to a hospital in which you may remain for the rest of your life.”76

  BELLEVUE HOSPITAL, NEW YORK CITY

  Valerie’s stay at Bellevue, among the most notorious mental hospitals in the country and perhaps the world, exposed her once again to the horrors and abuses of the so-called mental health system. It was while she was at Bellevue, that, on June 9, 1969, Judge Culkin sentenced Valerie to three years, including time served, in state prison on the new charge of “reckless assault with intent to harm.”77 The singer and songwriter Lou Reed, a friend of Andy, chided, “You get more for stealing a car.” By contrast, when Valerie heard her sentence read, she yelled out in court, “Warhol deserved what he got! He is a goddamned liar and a cheat.”78 No doubt Valerie’s short sentence was attributable to Lorraine’s expertise, but Andy’s refusal to testify against Valerie also contributed to the outcome. According to his older brother, John Warhola, Andy was so thin and weak that he “didn’t want to bother.”79 News of this sentence, written succinctly, appeared in the back pages of the New York Times, beside a notice to Manhattan residents about a change in the summer garbage collection schedule. Valerie reportedly reacted to her sentence by telling the judge, “This is my first offense. I’ve been locked up for a year. People have been convicted of homicide who had records and got less.”80 With time served, Valerie would serve two more years at the most.

  Throughout 1969 and into early 1970, Valerie continued to send angry letters to Maurice and Andy, expressing her agitation over how Olympia Press had treated the publication of SCUM Manifesto and complaining that she deserved better publicity. She began one of these letters to Maurice saying sarcastically, “I write this letter on the assumption that you haven’t killed yourself.”81 She refused to do an interview with the Village Voice’s Howard Smith and felt increasingly paranoid about how her life would be presented: “PREDICTION: Some day there will appear Why I Shot Andy Warhol and Other Chit Chat with my name on it, but written by one of your geeks. There will also appear my biography (definitive, of course), also written by a geek & a Psychological Study of Two Assassins: Valerie Solanas and Sirhan Sirhan.”82 Valerie sensed both that she had made some impact and that it would be appropriated in a way she disagreed with, as unauthorized accounts of her life threatened her relentless self-reliance.

  In January 1970, she announced to Maurice somewhat vaguely that she had devised a “slimy greasy plan that you’d be tickled silly with. . . . But I finally rejected it, pulled myself out of the grease, up from the slime, & adopted a plan. . . . I felt so liberated & ecstatic when I made my decision; could deeply feel it’s [sic] rightness.” She concluded the letter with a requirement that Maurice announce on the cover of the next edition of SCUM Manifesto, “I am a turd, a lowly, abject turd” accompanied by “Confessions of a Turd.”83

  Valerie directed her rage toward anyone who wanted to write about her without her consent, including the Village Voice. Calling its journalists “sniveling cowards, liars, and libelers,” Valerie chided:

  I DON’T want an article written about me, but I realize that, being I’m poverty-stricken and in jail, my desires count for nothing and that you’ll go ahead and write an article anyway. . . . Few journalists on this paper or any other would ever dare print anything about me other than the enormous, lavish lies (and the “facts” Howard Smi
th related in his last two SCENES articles about me are among the most enormous and lavish I’ve seen), your masters (Wahoo and the vilest and toadiest of all toads, the GREAT TOAD, Maurice Girodias) pay you to print. If you did, Big Daddies Wahoo and Toad would take you off their payrolls and withdraw their promises to publish your shit books.84

  She ranted against perceived abuses inflicted on her by the Village Voice and referred to the power she would soon have: “If you’re the rational people you think you are, you’d realize that one’s potential power is directly proportional to the number of bribes and lies it takes to try to squelch it. . . . When scum secures power, lap away at my ass whenever I lift a finger.” She claimed she had developed a “perpetual hardness technique” and would use it on Maurice: “The personality changes brought about by achieving PH vastly increase his sexual feeling. I intend to give the Toad intensive scum therapy and teach him the PH technique, which will effect great changes in his personality, which will, in turn, render him manageable and easy to deal with, and I will as a result get my works back.” She concluded, hectoring the Voice: “Would you like to do something highly innovative? Have a journalistic first? Next time you print your string of filthy lies or mindless prattle about me—spell my name right.”

  BEDFORD HILLS PRISON, BEDFORD, NEW YORK

  In March 1970, executive assistant district attorney David S. Worgan rejected Valerie’s request for parole, stating, “In view of the seriousness of the instant crime, this office sees no basis for an early parole.”85 Two months later, Valerie entered the Bedford Hills prison, where she remained only a few weeks, then was transferred back to Matteawan. She became uncommonly quiet during this period, corresponding with almost no one and writing only a few letters.