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

by Breanne Fahs

  FORGETTING

  The Lost Years and Final Days

  1975–1988

  All of us are prisoners of a rigid conception of what is important and what is not, and so we fasten our anxious gaze on the important, while from a hiding place behind our backs the unimportant wages its guerrilla warfare, which will end in surreptitiously changing the world and pouncing on us by surprise.

  —Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

  VALERIE’S ULTIMATE DEMISE—A FATE SOME SAW AS inevitable and others saw as a tragic result of a misrecognition of her value as a writer, thinker, and revolutionary—raises questions about how to remember, or forget, those who have, as Monique Wittig once said, managed to “blast out the ground.” The many disappearances of Valerie Solanas have created a mythology around the end of her life. The notion of “sightings” is commonly heard among those who knew her—sightings of a ghostly, waifish figure driven to the limits of sanity, falling off the edge and into oblivion. Still, the story of Valerie’s end owes much to her relationship to SCUM Manifesto; even after her release from the mental hospitals, she had faith she could change the world with SCUM. Only after these final hopes were shattered did she truly cease to exist as Valerie Solanas.

  BACK ON THE SCENE

  After her release from Dunlop in late 1973, Valerie’s whereabouts became more difficult to track down. As Mary Harron wrote, “There were many sightings of Valerie Solanas in the East Village in the late seventies, sleeping on a bench in Thompson Square Park or sitting on a stoop at St. Mark’s Place, dirty and unkempt, dazed like a street person.”1 She roamed through St. Mark’s Place, as scholar Jennifer Doyle wrote, “hanging out in the street, managing the rumpled bags of a woman who had nowhere else to go.”2 Valerie spent much time thinking about the fate of SCUM Manifesto, and how to rescue it from the stranglehold Maurice had over it. More than anything, she wanted to reclaim SCUM Manifesto for herself.

  In 1974, Vivian Gornick, who had written the introduction to SCUM Manifesto for Olympia Press in 1971, received a phone call from Valerie. Vivian recalled the conversation as both memorable and fear inspiring. Valerie had called to ask Vivian what she knew about the foreign rights to SCUM Manifesto. Vivian explained that she knew nothing and had written the introduction as a freelancer, was paid a flat fee for her work, and had nothing to do with Maurice or the press. Valerie replied, “Yeah, yeah, okay, okay. But that prick is stealing from me, ya know. He’s publishing the Manifesto all over the place, and I’m not getting a fuckin’ dime. I gotta get ta the bottom a’ this.”3

  Two months later, Vivian received a second phone call; Valerie now demanded to know what Vivian knew about the Italian publication of SCUM Manifesto, as she believed the Italian publishers had been in New York buying publishing rights from people who did not own those rights. Vivian indicated that, once again, she knew nothing about it. Three months later, Vivian received a third phone call, at 7:30 a.m. Six months after that, a call came at 1:00 p.m. and another at 1:00 a.m. Valerie always called from the street, often breaking off the conversation to yell at passersby for interrupting her, and insisted again on knowing about the foreign rights to SCUM Manifesto. “It was always the same street voice speaking with the same guttural urgency asking the same hopeless question,” Vivian recalled. “What did I know about the Swedish Irish Danish Greek rights to SCUM that were being sold surreptitiously by that prick Girodias who was stealing her work her money her life. . . . This went on for two or three years. She was never threatening, but I began to dread the sound of her voice. The urgency in it kept accumulating. She wasn’t stalking me, but she was definitely keeping track. Once she found me in Colorado, and once in Tel Aviv.”4 In Valerie’s final call to Vivian, at two o’clock in the morning, Vivian screamed at Valerie and fired off in a rage about how Valerie could not call in the middle of the night. She never heard from her again.5

  Speaking highly of Valerie’s work, Vivian acknowledged that Valerie had remarkable charm as a writer:

  I was amazed that she was the same conversational, clever creature when I had only known the rasping, self-involved, violent woman. She had a very interesting, bemused, very individual voice. She was very good. The SCUM Manifesto was very good. She was absolutely crazy but she was a brilliant maverick, underworld figure. She was not as talented and worldly, but in many places she really resembled Genet. She was not as sustained but she was as inspired by the underside, black underworld brilliance. . . . To her nothing was unthinkable and unsayable. She was a guttersnipe like Genet and Celine, people who stop at nothing—so crazy they are able to say anything.6

  In 1974, Valerie left for Washington, DC, eager to depart New York and return to her roots. She shared a room with a woman she connected with in the DC women’s community. This roommate—a former student of Dana Densmore from a martial arts school in the district—recalled that Valerie functioned at an acceptable level but clearly seemed mentally ill. “She was functioning but not at a very high level. She was struggling—she was struggling to be in the world at all.”7

  After returning to New York, Valerie moved into a place where she had once lived in the mid-1960s, the Village Plaza Hotel, at 79 Washington Place, near Washington Square Park. By 1973, the hotel had grown even seedier than it had been. A tiny reception desk was arrayed with a mix of signs: “No Refunds,” “All Rents Must Be Paid in Advance,” “No Checks Cashed,” “No Outgoing Calls for Transients.”8 Valerie did not stay long this time, as she had received a sum of money owed to her through her father’s will. (While she was confined in hospitals, this money was withheld from her.)

  Shortly thereafter, she moved to Seventh Avenue and Fourteenth Street into an apartment, nicer than the hotel. One day, while making her usual visit to one of her favorite sandwich shops, Blimpie’s, at Eleventh Street and Sixth Avenue, she met a man with whom she would eventually live, in a long-term, romantic relationship, for the next four years: Louis Zwiren. Easygoing, but suffering from agoraphobia, Louis had a relaxed, straightforward, playful vibe that nicely complemented Valerie’s intensity and ambition. Louis often hung out at the sandwich shop, eating his dinner and hitting on women. The day they met, in 1973, Valerie had walked in and he went over to try to pick her up. In classic Valerie style, she responded in her snarky fashion that the entire place looked like a mausoleum because no one aged there and everyone looked so young. “I went over to her. I started talking to her,” Louis said. “She was sitting by herself. She was biting her fingernails, all the time. . . . I was very comfortable with her, extremely comfortable. She was very easy to talk to.” When asked what had attracted him to Valerie, he said unequivocally that he loved her personality and her humor. Valerie immediately impressed him.

  Valerie talked to Louis about her life, recounting stories about her days on the street as a homeless woman. “She said that as long as she had a pillow, she didn’t mind sleeping outside. She needed a pillow. All she needed was a pillow.” She told Louis that she had two kids—he was the only person she admitted this fact to—but that she had not seen them since right after they were born. Telling him that her mother had raised them, she said she had felt relief that they were well taken care of. “She felt that, being that they’re not fully developed mentally, that they’re not fully human until they’re mentally developed. She was glad to get away from kids,” Louis said. She assured him that she could not have any more kids because doctors at Bellevue Hospital had removed her uterus. He believed this resulted from precancerous cells that had signaled stage 1 cancer, though Valerie claimed the procedure allowed the Mob to bug her and monitor her movements. She told Louis about her time as a prostitute, reporting that older men were much better in bed than their reputations would suggest.

  At first, Valerie hesitated to become sexually involved with Louis, not letting him into her room and then making it clear that she needed a good amount of time before she became sexual with him. Louis remained patient. “It took a long time before we got inti
mate, you know?”9 Louis and Valerie eventually moved in together, at Louis’s place, where they stayed for about a year. The two started a sexual relationship, something Louis felt conflicted about given her extreme hatred of men. Though he was guarded about discussing his sex life with Valerie during our 2012 interview, he discussed it frankly in 1997. “She liked me to go down on her. So she would come.” She did not reciprocate because he did not like women to go down on him. “She wouldn’t let me suck, she wouldn’t let me do anything with her breasts. She . . . didn’t feel anything.” When asked if Valerie felt sexually attracted to women, Louis recalled that she felt women were better than men in bed. She told him she was a lesbian. “I couldn’t understand, because she seemed to enjoy sex and love, you know. She was very affectionate, very affectionate to me. And loyal . . . very warm.” To this, Louis added, “She didn’t hate men if they were in the men’s auxiliary. She just thought men were inferior, that’s all.”10

  Their relationship was far from monogamous. Valerie often stayed with, and had sex with, a woman named “Space” (Connie De Marco), a beautiful Italian “far out” artist at the Village Plaza Hotel with whom Louis had also had a sexual relationship with previously. Space had a colorful history; she once divulged to Louis that the best sex she had ever had was with a man named Blind Richie, a blind saxophone player who would run with wild energy through the streets of New York with his cane. Valerie loved Connie, telling Louis that her favorite women in the world had tan skin and “mulatto” backgrounds. “Brown is best,” she would say matter-of-factly.11

  Valerie’s liaisons rarely followed prescriptive ideas about romantic versus platonic love. Still the men who developed sexual intimacy with Valerie mostly described her as warm, loving, and gentle. When asked whether Louis and Valerie called each other “girlfriend” and “boyfriend,” Louis noted, “We were, like, living together and having sex.”12 Louis noted that to those who brushed Valerie off, she was hostile, and toward people she did not know well, she was “hard.” But she had another side of her: she’d crack jokes, “shoot the shit,” and “smile like a little girl.” Another male friend expressed surprise at Valerie’s eventual warmth toward him: “She turned out to be very warm. When she doesn’t feel defensive about men, she can be a very likeable person.”13

  Louis loved Valerie, remembering small quirks about her and speaking of her with affection. He knew that her favorite song—“The Air That I Breathe,” by the Hollies—made her happy:

  If I could make a wish, I think I’d pass

  Can’t think of anything I need

  No cigarettes, no sleep, no light, no sound

  Nothing to eat, no books to read

  Making love with you has left me peaceful and warm inside

  What more could I ask

  There’s nothing more to be desired

  Sometimes all I need is the air that I breathe and to love you

  All I need is the air that I breathe yes to love you.

  She loved listening to doo-wop; as long as she could listen to doo-wop, she would always feel that life was worthwhile. She hated classical music, often ranting that it should not even count as real music. Valerie was always excited to talk to Louis about her ideas and theories, insisting that she hated the idea of “reverse racism” and felt certain that black people could never harbor truly racist feelings against whites, that whites were the only real racists. A huge fan of Levi’s jeans, she always wore jeans and swore to Louis that even tight-fitting jeans were the most comfortable clothing on earth. She drank Ovaltine (malted milk powder) constantly and had spaghetti with Ragu sauce nearly every night for dinner. An incessant smoker, she rolled her own cigarettes (always with Tops tobacco) and had a “tobacco odor” that Louis loved.

  One day Valerie decided to go see Disney’s Fantasia; she remembered loving it as a girl. The local movie theaters had rereleased it and she had desperately wanted to see the film again. “She went by herself to see it. I didn’t go with her to see it for some reason,” Louis recalled. “She said it was for kids. She thought it was the greatest thing in the world as a kid but as an adult, she said it was nothing, you know? She was disappointed.”

  Valerie was in the habit of shoplifting. It became a way to show love and affection to others—as she sometimes gave away what she stole—while also allowing her to survive. Eager to cook for herself in her kitchenless apartment, she stole a hot plate from the corner store on Fourteenth Street, then did it again four or five times. Eventually the owner caught her in the act and banned her from the store. She then returned with money to buy one but he would not sell it to her even if she paid for it: “She kept trying to come back a couple of times to buy it but he just wouldn’t,” Louis said. In the middle of winter one time, when the weather hit four degrees below zero, Valerie was arrested for shoplifting. The arrest revved up her paranoia that the Mob would find her and she would have to return to jail. “They never matched her fingerprints so they let her go,” Louis said. On another night, Louis told Valerie he had always wanted to try caviar. Immediately, she went out to Balducci’s, a gourmet food market on Sixth Avenue, and stole several jars of caviar and brought them home. “We were eating a lot of caviar then!” Louis chuckled.

  Valerie’s paranoia and “dark moods” intruded on the otherwise enjoyable existence she and Louis had together. She would get paranoid and say mean things to him, mostly putting him down. “I would feel hurt,” he said. “I wouldn’t be talking much, but it wasn’t that big of a deal.” Louis felt that Valerie treated him with immense sweetness most of the time. “I thought shoplifting for me was pretty sweet,” he said. “Outside of sex, there wasn’t much touching, but verbally she was very affectionate.” She would tell him he was “the greatest” and would say he had “Louis logic” because he didn’t think like everyone else. Sometimes she called him, tenderly, her “Jew boy,” making Louis laugh. One time, when he let a homeless couple live with them, Valerie called the man, Ron, a “lump.” She always told Louis, affectionately, that he was never a lump like Ron. “She differentiated me from the other lumps, I guess,” he said.14

  Louis recalled that Valerie always maintained contact with both her mother and her sister. She received letters from her mother about family happenings and wrote back to her mother diligently. “Her mother wrote very well,” Louis recalled. She never referred to her father, who had died in 1971, aside from laughing about how Louis and her father had the same first name.

  Over time, Valerie’s mental health continued to deteriorate, and Louis grew concerned. In early 1975, Valerie had become more and more agitated, distressed, sure that others wanted to harm her. Torn between a life in New York working on her writing and being in Florida near her sister, Judith, who had moved there from Washington, DC, she decided to go south in February 1975.

  In Florida Valerie continued to battle her intensifying symptoms of paranoia and panic. Judith decided her sister needed psychiatric care and convinced her to accept psychiatric hospitalization. Valerie spent eight months in South Florida State Hospital in Hollywood, Florida from February 13 to October 8, 1975.15 The hospital, specializing in psychiatric care, was built in the 1950s. Here Valerie had a much better track record of care compared with that of her previous hospitalizations. Nevertheless, her experiences in this hospital engendered a later refusal to ever seek mental health care again. Following her discharge from the South Florida State Hospital, Judith could never again get her institutionalized; after dealing with mental hospitals for over five years, Valerie was finished with them. In any case, the family did not have money to put her in private care.16 Valerie now moved back and forth between Florida and New York, surviving primarily on her Social Security Supplemental Security Income (SSI) checks. When in Florida she stayed with Judith, but would often get restless and return to stay with Louis in New York. While in Florida, Valerie wrote Louis letters mostly on paper bags that she folded up, wrote on, and put a stamp on. She refused to write him letters that used regular
envelopes.17

  Judith repeatedly tried to persuade Valerie to stay with her in Florida, to straighten out and “live a normal life,” but Valerie would never stay long, intent on maintaining her nomadic ways. Staying with Judith in Florida also presented challenges to Judith’s family, as Valerie often caused trouble. One time, Valerie nearly started a fire while smoking in bed—and Judith had children in the home. Yet Judith never kicked her out of the house. Typically, Valerie simply showed up on her doorstep and then, just as simply, vanished along with her typewriter and the little cloth bag that carried her belongings.18

  In late 1975, Valerie returned to New York for a longer period than usual, eager to have a stretch of time to write and think in her own space. By chance, as soon as she arrived in the city, she ran into Louis at the Port Authority Bus Terminal in New York City as he was walking to the bathroom. Happy to see him again, she asked him for help finding a place to live so that she could work on her writing. Louis, who was still struggling with agoraphobia and had received approval for state housing, convinced Valerie that she could get her own apartment and also support herself without resorting to prostitution if she applied for assistance from the New York Housing Authority to live in a Housing Authority apartment. He helped her fill out the application and she eventually received approval for her own apartment. Though they had lived together before, Valerie welcomed the possibility of her own space that would allow for Louis’s company while still giving her privacy. This security freed up her time to write.19 (Valerie’s application was memorable: she boldly crossed out “husband’s income,” “husband’s employment,” and “him” in all sections of the form.)20