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

by Breanne Fahs

  The Housing Authority apartment Valerie moved into was in Louis’s building, at 170 East Third Street on the Lower East Side (which had a heavily immigrant population at that time), directly across from the Most Holy Redeemer Church. The two spent a great deal of time reading and writing, with Louis visiting the New York Public Library and Valerie preferring to go to bookstores and speak the text of books into her tape recorder so she could listen back later at home. Having their own apartments had its benefits: Valerie preferred to stay in most of the time and told Louis he could go “gallivanting around” as often as he liked while she worked in private. “I’d hang out with people in the restaurant, take walks at night,” Louis said. “She never minded, you know? I liked that about her. She didn’t care whether I was there or not. She was a very unusual woman that way.” She cooked spaghetti for herself and talked to Louis often about SCUM Manifesto and her other writings. “She thought it was the greatest thing ever written.”

  Having lived in squalor most of her adult life, Valerie enjoyed having her own space in which to write and work, though it often was infested with cockroaches. Valerie had a sink in her room and the cockroaches would climb up out of the sink through the drain. Louis recalled, “I would always try to kill them if they came out because cockroaches are very intelligent. They would come out when nobody was looking. Valerie, on the other hand, used to urinate right onto them. She’d sit on the sink and urinate on the cockroaches. She hated having to go into the hallway every time to pee!” Valerie also dealt with an exploitative superintendent in her building who constantly raised the rent unless he could get a blow job. Valerie complied, “to keep the rent low, took it in stride,” Louis said. “It made her angry. She had to do it more than once, but she didn’t let things like that stop her. She had bigger things to work on, her writings and letters, you know?”21

  Shulamith Firestone (“Shulie”), who had long followed Valerie’s movements and tracked articles about her in the press, visited Valerie there at her apartment. “I found her in an apartment better than mine,” she remarked, “ground floor, off the courtyard of a large brick building with white Doric columns in the front. The building was by far the nicest one on the block, 3rd Street between Avenues A and B, then next door to an Italian vegetable market. The room was simple and spare, the size of a small studio apartment, with a bed and a desk.” She recalled that “Valerie was slight, fair, aging, with a certain suspicious look in the eyes, and always with an overall poor girl chic. She wore little white socks and her collar up, and she rolled her own cigarettes, carefully and with concentration, Big Top.”

  At this visit, Shulie gave Valerie a copy of an underground paper that had an article on how to call Europe free of charge, presumably so that Valerie could dispute the copyright with European agents who had stolen her work. “She was very grateful. She waxed paranoid on the subject of the ‘media mafia’ that was out to get her. I thought maybe it was true.” Shulie met Louis, whom she described as “very handsome in a weak sort of way,” noting that he “seemed devoted to Valerie. I knew she was a lesbian, and interpreted this young fellow as someone she hung out with at Blimpie’s, where she said she went at night. I figured it was all she could do to survive on the kind of welfare budget she was on.”22

  One day Louis went over to the library and, with his penchant for reading about obscure scientific findings and facts, happened on a study by Russian scientists who had made a new discovery about a trace mineral called sodium selenate. It was a toxic chemical known to cause cancer and Alzheimer’s disease but also played a key role in preventing heart disease, hyperthyroidism, and immune disorders and its absence in the American diet had caused a number of health problems in the overall population. Mice lived longer when given a controlled dose of sodium selenate. (At the time, the Food and Drug Administration banned this substance in all vitamins and in soil and farming production because of its toxic properties, but in the 1980s, scientists in the United States agreed that selenium played a key role in healthy diets and should be given to consumers in small doses. Most vitamin supplements today contain small amounts of sodium selenate.)

  Louis went home and quickly told Valerie about these findings, particularly the point about mice living longer and not getting old when consuming sodium selenate. Despite this substance not having been approved for human consumption, Valerie went right out and, though relatively broke, ordered some of the mineral from a nearby chemical laboratory (likely claiming she would use it for something other than personal consumption). “I was very passive, afraid of strangers, so I didn’t have the personality to do this, but Valerie did,” said Louis. A week later, she brought back small packages of sodium selenate, already measured out so she would know exactly how much to consume each day. “She thought she would live forever,” Louis said wistfully. “She was telling me she’s never going to die and she would live forever. She said as long as there was doo-wop music, she would be happy. As long as it didn’t become repetitious to her, she would have a reason to live. She wanted to live forever.” Knowing Valerie’s obsessive enthusiasm for this new plan to live forever, Louis worried that Valerie would overdose on the substance; the drug’s side effects included hair loss, stomach problems, nerve damage, irritability, and fatigue. Speaking lovingly of Valerie, he wondered if her delusions would lead (or, by the time of her death, had led) her to take too much.23

  Nonetheless, with Louis as a constant companion, an apartment of her own in which to live and write, and the alleviation of the soul-crushing hassle of meeting her basic needs, Valerie was becoming increasingly stable and was able to function better than she had in most of the previous decade. Because she did not have to worry about where she would sleep or what she would eat she could expend her energies on more fruitful pursuits.

  Walking down the street one day, Jane Caputi, an early radical feminist, was passing Valerie when she recognized her from her picture. She invited Valerie to eat with her and two friends; given the prospect of a hot meal, Valerie somewhat reluctantly agreed. “We were all reading the SCUM Manifesto out loud and memorizing sections of it,” Jane recalled, “so we were looking at it a lot. Of course you don’t take all of it as seriously. There’s a great deal of humor and wit there.” Once Valerie heard that they wanted to talk about SCUM Manifesto, she became far more enthusiastic about the prospect of the meeting. The group met at a Sheridan Square diner (138 Seventh Avenue) to talk about the book. “She wanted to meet and talk about SCUM Manifesto,” Jane remembered. “She was thrilled that we were into it. She was into it. I was kind of young at the time—like twenty-two or something—and you could see that she had a lot of damage, but I think the work is a work of genius.”24

  Before running into Valerie, Jane had been to see her grandmother. She was dressed in a nice sweater and looked, as she said, “so middle class.” Jane noticed that Valerie was dirty and unkempt, and “it did make me feel like she was probably unsafe and insane.” The group met face-to-face with Valerie’s difficult behavior; Valerie “obviously had a lot of anger,” and everybody could see that.

  Valerie told the group that while she was locked up at Bellevue, doctors performed an experimental operation on her and she had a full hysterectomy. Bellevue had a documented history of doing such procedures.25 While Valerie claimed that she had wanted to get rid of her uterus, Jane was horrified by the story. Valerie seemed to not necessarily view what was done as tampering with her, but Jane had reservations about Valerie’s true feelings about the procedures: “My reaction to that was that they were trying to systematically hurt her or destroy her by violating her body. . . . You’ll always find some of that attitude with women. I really don’t know what it meant to her to lose her uterus.” Doctors at Bellevue experimented on women in order to develop more sophisticated techniques for gynecological surgery and often performed these procedures against the patient’s will: “You just wonder what they did to her in Bellevue. Obviously they did physical treatments and surgery in one instance.
Why would they have done that? Was it medically important? Were they experimenting on her? What led up to it? What kind of drugs were they giving her? Who knows!”

  On the subject of Andy, Valerie gave the impression (though it did not dominate the conversation) that she felt bad about shooting him, that she regretted her actions. She also divulged that she had begun work on a new manuscript called “The Final Word” (which never ultimately came to fruition). She talked about this work but when the group asked to see some of it, she said that she did not have anything ready yet. They never knew whether she had actually written anything at all. After buying Valerie a bagel, the group talked about Valerie’s most passionate subject: SCUM Manifesto. Jane remembered, “We talked about ideas in SCUM, what that meant. I told her Mary Daly was really into her work. She gave me some copies of the manifesto, the printed mimeographed copies.” The group sat and talked about SCUM Manifesto for most of the meeting. Valerie’s eyes lit up; she was happy to see others responding to her work. She reiterated that she never meant for SCUM to refer to the Society for Cutting Up Men, that Maurice had made it up against her will. As Jane said, “I do think it’s an important philosophical distinction. She really meant the lowest, most abject being that has the most power to provide knowledge. I think that’s a great philosophical claim. She talked about scum coming from the gutter, scum coming from everything objectified and thrown away. This is a brilliant philosophical position.”26 After that, no one from the group ever saw Valerie again.

  MAJORITY REPORT: VALERIE’S LAST PUBLISHED WRITINGS

  I’m grateful for the ferry ride, even if it turns out the ferryman is a scoundrel.

  —Dana Densmore, interview by the author

  In response to claims that Valerie had been intermittently hospitalized throughout the 1970s, Valerie’s mother, Dorothy Moran, claimed, “She was writing. She fancied herself a writer, and I think she did have some talent. . . . She had a terrific sense of humor.”27 By 1975, after returning to New York, Valerie showed an eagerness to write again and put herself back into the writing scene. She first sent a letter for publication in Ms. magazine in April 1976 that was rejected. She then submitted a poem to Majority Report: The Women’s Liberation Newsletter, a New York–based feminist periodical founded in May 1971 that published independently and operated with an editorial collective under the leadership of Nancy Borman. The publication intended “to dispense information, encourage participation, and provide support. We intend to arm our sisters with the consciousness and the unity to fight our oppression.”28 To this end, Majority Report published feminist groups’ newsletters and writings in exchange for printing and mailing list costs; each feminist group received “quality printing,” “a huge circulation,” “an organized staff,” and “publication every two weeks.” With the motto “Let’s beat the media by creating our own,” and a reputation as “America’s least ladylike newspaper,” Majority Report did not disclaim, explain, or criticize its content, but allowed it to stand on its own, even when provoking intense disagreements between readers. Importantly, Majority Report also assured readers that it would publish any advertisements and letters “intact and free from editing,” advancing a philosophy Valerie had certainly appreciated and sought out. In many ways, this publication represented an ideal outlet for Valerie; committed to feminist principles of fairness and equality while not shying away from radical ideas, Valerie found, for a time, an intellectual home with Majority Report.

  Valerie first encountered Majority Report when she submitted a poem for a special issue devoted to the work of “authentic street people” who had proposed to take over artistic control of Majority Report for a issue titled “The Lesbians Are Coming.” Nancy Borman remembered, “I gave it over, not thinking. They wanted to include poetry and photography. While I was giving them artistic control only, they neglected to deal with copyright stuff. They included pieces without getting the rights to publish them.”29 Valerie wrote some excellent poems for Majority Report, though they did not generally publish poetry; her poems caught the eye of Nancy and the other editors and they eagerly published one of them in this special issue. They also published a reprint of Valerie’s 1966 Cavalier article about panhandling but did not seek her permission. When the issue came out, she complained bitterly about the misspellings and lack of copyright and that her poem was poorly punctuated. She called the editorial offices and yelled on the phone, calling herself a punctuation expert. Nancy responded by asking Valerie if she wanted a job at Majority Report, as they needed someone who could help beginners learn how to edit. “Lo and behold,” Nancy said, “she agreed—she volunteered at the magazine that ripped her off.”

  This began a year-and-a-half-long relationship between Valerie and Majority Report, as she joined the editorial team and worked a couple of days every few weeks helping with a variety of editorial tasks. Throughout this time, Valerie was, according to Nancy, “uncannily pleasant.” Still obsessed with Andy and copyright issues, she and Nancy had many conversations, as Nancy recalled: “I remember a discussion we had at the Lion’s Head; she drank a black coffee and I had a beer. She seemed slightly crazy, but the rest of my staff seemed more crazy. She seemed obsessed with her past, with the rip-off of her work.” Valerie talked at length about her time at Matteawan and her anger at Robin Morgan for not securing copyright to print excerpts of SCUM Manifesto in Sisterhood Is Powerful. “She didn’t moan and complain about her living situation,” Nancy said; because Valerie had no phone, Nancy assumed she lived on welfare.

  Valerie fit right in with her staff, though Nancy qualified this: “When I say that she was no more unstable than others, that is not to say that I had a stable staff. We were on the Lower East Side, where everything was down and out, and enough pressures to flip. There were pressures just to survive, and landlords, and living among thugs and bums and not much hope.” Valerie found it reassuring that nobody received payment for working at Majority Report, as that cleared a lot of her anger about the inadequate copyright for her poem. “She used to get upset when she thought that others were getting paid and she was not,” Nancy said, “so I said, ‘We can offer you nothing,’ and we fulfilled that promise, but she took the opportunity and many benefitted.”

  Valerie worked hard and had no interest in revealing her identity as the would-be Andy Warhol assassin. “She slaved away with us, devoting lots of labor to a bi-weekly publication. People there would say, ‘Hi, my name is Julie, what is your name? And she would just introduce herself as Valerie. No one knew who she was and Valerie did not tell them,” Nancy recalled. Working with Valerie changed Nancy’s view of her dramatically. While she had once thought of her as crazy for shooting Andy, she eventually understood her motivations. Because she and Valerie had such a positive working relationship, Nancy did not fear Valerie’s retribution or anger, but rather, tried to help her achieve her goals. Ti-Grace Atkinson remarked that the women publishing Majority Report knew Valerie and involved themselves closely with her: “Some knew her on a more personal basis, but they were still afraid of her. She was hard to deal with.”30

  Valerie elicited awe, sympathy, and fascination from most of the women at Majority Report at that time. Louise Thompson, a writer and poet from the Lower East Side who had known Valerie before the shootings, described her as “stunningly brilliant” and her play as impressive and obscene. Julia Mauldin, a poet known for her toughness, who lived in Valerie’s neighborhood, also spoke highly of Valerie, saying that Valerie encouraged her to pursue poetry and get published, to have more self-confidence in her work, and to be less shy about her talents. As someone who had punched out a liberal, white, lesbian leader, Julia had been ostracized from the feminist community, just as Valerie had. When Valerie heard about this incident, she called Julia in the middle of the night at her West Village apartment (Julia had no idea how Valerie got her number) and recounted her story about Andy. Apparently, she told Julia that Andy Warhol was the first man she thought of in a romantic way. “She loved him
and he led her on,” Julia told Nancy. Nancy refuted this story, saying that Valerie never had any romantic feelings for Andy and that she had never mentioned loving Andy. “It’s possible that Julia might have evoked this story from her,” Nancy admitted, “as Julia is a straight person who was black; her poetry was brilliant and beautiful, from the heart, like Valerie’s. I died for the poetry of them both.” Nancy also noted, “If you have this notion of the romantic attachment, you have this wonderful or horrible element. He was such a dull person, and she took the play around to people in such a naïve manner. Because it was a little dirty, no one would put it on. Supposedly he said he would put it on.”

  Valerie spoke frequently to Julia about the shooting and the pain she felt about his mistreatment of her leading up to her actions. She felt hurt and used and believed he “dumped her” after he got what he wanted and that this pattern had repeated itself throughout his life with women at the Factory. Valerie did not want stardom, Julia said; Andy had benefited far more from the shooting than Valerie had. Julia described Valerie as not crazy but fast-paced: “There was so much going on at once, at such speed. I thought she had a lot of talent, that she was eccentric. She was hyper; if you did not sit back and watch her in the context, you might have thought that she was crazy. But if you back up, you could put it together. She had so much energy. The things she told me about made me wonder how she had survived it. It was like cutting into a pie, taking out the ingredients, and leaving the crust.”31