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

by Breanne Fahs

  Michael met Valerie at the Lion’s Head to talk about her book and her reasons for shooting Andy. When asked if she had shot Andy because he was a “male chauvinist pig,” Valerie said he was putting words into her mouth, expressed anger that such claims were launched against her, and corrected him for “making her sound like a psycho.” She reminded him that she had shot Andy because he stole her play, an argument Michael found compelling; she was like “all kinds of writers who talk about what others stole from them and say they want to kill them.”50

  Michael felt distrustful toward and nervous about Valerie after the interview, convinced that, despite his best attempts to present her in a flattering light, she would seek revenge on him. After the piece ran in High Times, Valerie pestered him about a photo he had used in the piece, believing he doctored it to make her look bad, and Michael became increasingly fearful of her. One day, while he was sitting with his wife, Nancy, at a restaurant in the East Village after the interview came out, he saw Valerie cross the street right outside the restaurant. “He jumped up, excused himself, and ran to the bathroom,” Nancy said. “He had fantasized that she was after him, but when she crossed the street, she just walked on.”51

  For her interview with the Village Voice, which would take place a few weeks later, Valerie contacted Howard Smith, who had covered the shootings for the Voice back in 1968. Valerie had previously interviewed with him for the Voice years before and told him that if he publicized SCUM Manifesto, she would do an interview for the Voice and would recount the “fascinating things in the last few years” she had done. On July 25, 1977, the Voice published “Valerie Solanas Interview,” where she told Howard Smith and Brian Van der Horst to write that she would give another interview to a periodical that made the highest bid “above a certain minimum that I have in mind.”52

  With Valerie’s paranoia weighing more heavily at this time—though notably this period also coincided with her lucid, detail-oriented, and sharp-witted letters to Majority Report—in the interview she discussed her thoughts about SCUM Manifesto, her plans for her new book, and her concerns about the “money men” and the Mob who had exploited her. Howard asked Valerie how she would describe SCUM Manifesto in one statement; Valerie replied, “That the males can’t love—they’re emotionally deficient, and because of these emotional deficiencies they fuck up the world. And all the evils of the world emanate from this male incapacity to love. . . . The first part of the manifesto is an analysis of male psychology, and the second part is like, you know, what to do about it.”

  Valerie provided rare insight into the problem of whether she intended SCUM Manifesto as a serious document meant to be taken literally or as a satirical tool. When asked whether other women had joined the Society for Cutting Up Men (a name she once again insisted was given to the manifesto by Maurice and not by her), she said SCUM was “hypothetical”: “There’s no organization. It’s either nothing or it’s just me, depending on how you define it. I mean, I thought of it as a state of mind. In other words, women who think a certain way are in SCUM. Men who think a certain way are in the men’s auxiliary of SCUM.” As seen in the rough cuts of the interview, she added, “It’s just a literary device. There’s no organization called SCUM—there never was, and there never will be.”53

  Ten years had passed since the original, informal publication of SCUM Manifesto in 1967 (and nine years had passed since the shooting); Howard inquired about Valerie’s whereabouts since the shooting. Valerie explained that she had been on strike, “by doing nothing.” When asked why she had ended her “strike,” Valerie repeated the story she had told in Majority Report: that her new book was coming out and she wanted the money men to confess that they had her declared insane against her will. The statute of limitations had run out, she said, and they could now freely admit that they framed her as insane in order to better sell copies of her new book. Howard pressed Valerie, pointing out that through her being declared insane, she received a reduced sentence of three years. “Well actually it was zero to three,” Valerie countered, “but I did the whole three.” “Somebody paid the doctors to say you were insane?” “Yeah,” said Valerie, “but I’m not going into reasons. I’m being evasive about a lot of things because, as I said, I’m not giving an interview really. Well I am, in a way, but it’s a little—a mini—interview. I don’t want to make it too big a deal.”

  She spoke of her new book, Valerie Solanas, and claimed that she would receive a one-hundred-million-dollar advance for it. Howard scoffed, “Come on. Who’s giving you a hundred million dollars?” Valerie advised, “‘Who’ is the wrong question. The question is ‘Why.’ . . . I leave that to you to figure out. You think about it, and you tell me.” When asked if the book was coming out with a good publisher, Valerie said that maybe it would be General Motors, adding, “What difference does it make?” With Howard appearing shocked by her claims of a huge advance, Valerie reminded him that her new book would be a for-sure international bestseller: “Just look at it this way. I figure this thing’s going to sell internationally, right? I mean, even the garbage. Ti-Grace Atkinson’s translated into French. Total shit. Now you know goddamn well that this will go all over the world, right?” She pursued the point: “And you got four billion people—even allowing there are illiterates and all. Let’s say it sells for $5; then they’ll only have to sell 20 million to recoup. That’s all over the world and then don’t forget there’s gonna be the plagiarisms, the paraphrasers, and the paraphrasers of the paraphrasers, etc., etc., etc. So they’re really buying 25 books. Then there are movie rights. I mean that’s nothing. That’s history’s greatest bargain.”54

  Valerie said she wrote the book to the Mob—notably not the Mafia—as those in the Mob were more accurately described as the money men, who “are going to publish my book, and I’m in the process now of getting things straight with these men. The Contact Man. He’s the one man that I write to—the Contact Man for the whole mob. I send my messages to him and he disseminates them to the various appropriate people. . . . The Contact Man is simply a man to whom I address my letter to the total Mob.” Asked why the Contact Man could not write back to her, Valerie outright made a claim to mental illness: “I would like this crazy message put in the paper. Because I’m crazy. This is my crazy message to the world, all right?” Howard asked what the Contact Man did. “Some people like to collect stamps, people are interested in different things . . .” Valerie added, “The Contact Man contacts.” (As noted earlier, Valerie believed the Contact Man to be Mark Zussman, and had fired off several lengthy letters to him with her allegations.)

  When asked about the press coverage of the Andy Warhol shootings, Valerie insisted that the press mostly got it wrong: “I concede I shot Warhol. But that’s not the issue. I’m not talking about the shooting. I’m talking about a whole lot of other things. They said a lot more than that I shot Andy Warhol. They said a lot more things that were untrue.” Somewhat surprisingly, given that Valerie had rarely spoken of her sexual identity publicly, during the interview she took issue with Howard’s characterization of her as “not a lesbian”: “The part where you said, ‘She’s a man-hater, not a lesbian.’ . . . I thought that was just totally unwarranted. Because I have been a lesbian, and I consider the part where you said, ‘She’s not a lesbian’ to be serious libel. Although at the time I wasn’t sexual. I was into all kinds of other things . . . The way it was worded gave the impression that I’m a heterosexual, you know.”

  She denied that she had called Andy in late 1968 demanding that he drop all charges, put her in more movies, buy all her manuscripts for twenty thousand dollars, and arrange for her appearances as a guest on TV shows. “I never said anything even remotely comparable to any of those things,” she insisted. “You don’t want anything from them [Andy and the stupidstars]?” Howard asked. Valerie replied, “This is so absurd, this is so fucking absurd. Remember, this is Morrissey, who is the right-hand man of Warhol, who is my enemy, right? Naturally, they’re going to
try and make themselves look good. They’re not going to say, ‘Well, she had good reason to shoot us, we’re motherfuckers.’” She pressed on saying that, while they should not necessarily automatically take her word for it, they should at least have some doubt about Andy and his gang. Howard said, “A lot of these people were upset to the extent that your veracity would, of course, be doubted because you’d admitted shooting Warhol.” Valerie smartly replied, “That’s a contradiction. If I admitted shooting him, then my veracity should be higher than usual. Right?”

  In some unpublished sections of the interview, Valerie stated, “One thing I’m going to get into in my book is the insane and extensive jealousy of me. . . . One thing I’m going to do is prove SCUM Manifesto, and a lot of other things.” To the question of how she had earned her living for the six years since she had been out of jail, Valerie responded, “Well right now I’m on unemployment. And I consider that a step up. I mean, I don’t have to worry about where my rent’s coming from, you know. I have my time just to do what I want.”55

  The same month, she did an interview with Gregory Dunn of the New York Daily Planet, repeating her statement about what she had been doing for the past several years: “I haven’t been doing anything public—writing, giving interviews, shooting anybody, etc.—for the past nine years, because I’ve been on strike. . . . Almost everything written about me so far is bullshit. After my next book’s published and I’m the most powerful person in the world I’m getting even with all the bullshit artists. Certain main ones I’m getting in my next book as well. I got a long long memory and a long, long shit list.” With her one-hundred-million-dollar advance, she would finance a jail, “my very own personalized jail.” She complained that the East Side Book Store on St. Mark’s Place would not sell SCUM Manifesto because it cost too much: “He’s [the owner] a hot air man. I could puff the book up with hot air and say, ‘Here’s your hot air. Now it’s worth $1,’ and he’d agree. Most books are nothing but hot air. I’m selling history’s greatest bargain. For one measly buck you get ‘SCUM Manifesto,’ history’s best piece of writing, to be surpassed only by my next book.”56

  Following the publication of the Voice interview, Valerie contacted Mark Zussman again and offered to do another interview for one million dollars. “True, I gave an interview to Smith, but that was a mini-interview, + I’m not even giving another of those for anybody else. My next interview will be the longer, paid for interview. If you mention SCUM Manifesto be sure to say they can order from me for $2.00 (see last page of Manifesto).”57 She advised him about an “ex-contact man” in Germany named Jörg Schröder and her Italian contact man Ferdinando Cappabianca in Rome. Valerie wrote to the Mob again two weeks later, complaining that a company in Spain was planning on publishing the manifesto without a contract. “If they publish the shit, there will not only be a copyright infringement suit, but a libel suit, and, if libel isn’t considered a criminal offense in Spain, there’ll have to be teeth bashing, so, if you don’t want another Edizioni delle donna-L’Espresso type case on your hands, you had better see to it that they don’t publish the shit.”58

  Once the Voice interview came out, Valerie contacted the paper to argue that they had misrepresented her throughout the interview. She sent a “Mr. Ryan” a long letter detailing how he had violated their agreement to publish her precise words, ending with “I want the Village Voice to pay me $520,000.00, fire Howard Smith, print an article written by me detailing the bullshit in the interview and explaining about the doctored up picture. . . . If I don’t get it all by then, I’ll institute libel and violation of contract suits and demand $1.5 million.”59 With her letter she enclosed a photograph that in her opinion represented her better than the one published with the Voice article.

  In early August 1977, the Voice published a short piece, “Valerie Solanas Replies,” in which Valerie presented her grievances about the previously published interview. Firing off accusations about how the interview painted Maurice and Paul Morrissey as “neutral, objective bystanders,” while her words were distorted and taken as fundamentally suspect, Valerie added more on her true intentions with her new book. In this piece—her final piece of published writing known to date—she clarified what Valerie Solanas would entail, explaining that “it’ll be about everything, that it won’t be an autobiography, although it’ll include discussions of the shooting and related events, that the part about me will be a small percent of the book, that most of it will be general, that among many other things I would prove the statements in SCUM Manifesto. . . . I’ll get extensively into the subject of bullshit, a very important subject. I’ll deal very intensively with the subject of bullshit.”60 She had recently requested a review copy of Robin Morgan’s Going Too Far and felt that “the book’s garbage. I didn’t read it yet, but I don’t have to to know it’s garbage. Then why do I want the book? Because I’m a garbage collector. My next book’s gonna be about garbage—the cause, nature of and cure for garbage.”61

  “THE SCHIZOPHRENIC SCREAM” (1977–1979)

  In SCUM Manifesto, I think it’s a schizophrenic scream and I think that’s how you have to understand it. There are sort of flashes, bright lights, brilliant insights. Much like Nietzsche, some of it is incoherent but there are also moments of profound insight. You’re with them and then it’s gone.

  —Ti-Grace Atkinson, interview by the author

  Ultimately, Valerie’s correct SCUM Manifesto received some attention, but generally it did not sell well. Valerie was devastated. The Majority Report staff was disappointed too, as they had come around to rooting for Valerie and the manifesto. Joanne remembered, “I don’t know whether male customers covered the copies with other things when in the store, or whether men or women buried it. In feminist bookstores it sold very well.”62 By mail order, Valerie had sold a few copies to some Japanese businessmen. “She expected it to be a big seller, but it had, like, no sales at all,” Louis Zwiren recalled. “She was impressed with the Japanese because they bought some of them. When the manifesto did not sell well, Valerie refused to speak of it.”63

  Facing this ultimate, soul-crushing disappointment, Valerie lost interest, for the first time in her life, with the SCUM Manifesto. She told Joanne to destroy the remaining copies, telling her that she no longer had faith that she could peddle the book to the world. “Valerie said to chuck them,” Joanne recalled. “I asked her whether she meant it, because I was going to throw every copy away to keep Valerie from coming back and asking me about them, wanting them. Valerie said yes, and so I deep sixed them.”64

  And then Valerie disappeared. She had achieved her goal of creating a self-published, self-edited, self-generated, self-regulated, self-distributed copy of the manifesto, only to find out that it would not garner the success and fame she craved. Late in 1977, as the manifesto failed (in Valerie’s eyes), it seemed as though madness finally consumed her. Valerie’s paranoid schizophrenia intensified. She concocted more and more elaborate and outlandish fantasies about others monitoring her behavior. It’s possible that her decline had to do with a withdrawal from medication. Louis claimed that he and Valerie had had an excellent relationship until she stopped taking her medication, though where she got this medication, or whether she had ever in fact taken it, remains unclear. Perhaps SCUM Manifesto had served as her medication. Without it—at least without the promise that she could repair the fractures in her work caused by Maurice Girodias—she unraveled.

  After she had the copies of SCUM Manifesto destroyed, Valerie’s fantasies about the Mob overwhelmed her. Louis, her primary support system at that point, found it too difficult to tolerate her mental condition. He loved Valerie, and watching her deteriorate broke his heart. “He was a very sweet guy,” Mary Harron said. “They got on well. I think he’d had some troubles as well. But he was a very nice man, and they did have a good relationship, and that’s the funny thing. I mean life is always different to theory, isn’t it? And she may have written theoretically about hating all men,
but in practice there were some men that she liked.”65

  Louis sympathized with Valerie, asserting that she never did any illicit drugs but felt she was losing her mind. According to Louis, Valerie started to develop evermore detailed theories about how the Mob communicated with her. “She was telling me the proof of the Mob is that she saw spots on the sheets. Like different color spots. Like yellow spots, red spots, polka dots on her sheets. Spots. . . . She talked about colored polka dots on the sheet. And then she looked at it again and the sheet had no polka dots. There was no polka dots. And then another time she looked at it and the polka dots are back. So she’s saying that’s proof that there’s the Mob. They’re pulling some kind of gag on her. They’re fuckin’ with her mind.”66

  Valerie believed that the Mob not only monitored her actions but also tried to communicate with her in various unwanted ways, like through the sheets, mostly because of the potential money-making capacity they saw in her writings and evidenced in her thoughts. Valerie described to Louis a particularly narcissistic fantasy about the Mob. He explained, “The Mob is only interested in making money. That’s her contention. The Mob is purely interested in money. And she is the most, she is the hottest, potentially the hottest money-making thing in the world. Her new book is going to be so great, the Mob wants to know exactly what she’s gonna come out with. . . . The Mob wants her work and will try to get it before she can put it on paper.”67 (Valerie’s paranoid reactions always had roots in the real world; she felt cheated, as she received royalty payments from only the Japanese edition of SCUM Manifesto and perhaps received a small sum from the German edition. She never received any royalty payments from any United States edition.)