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

by Breanne Fahs

  Valerie perseverated in talking about the shooting, recounting the events over and over to Louis; she could not figure out how they had known everything about her the day after the shooting, how they had put all the details of her life in the New York Times within a single day. (The Judy Michaelson article, published in fact two days after the shooting, on June 5, 1968, did present a breathtaking amount of accurate, well-researched information collected over a short time.) Her belief system was elaborate: the Mob knew everything about her, had 24/7 surveillance on her, and had paid for her eventual release from incarceration; Geoffrey LeGear, her once trusted friend, had paid her bail using the Mob’s money. She hated that she had not killed Andy, as it was bad for her reputation. “It made her look like she couldn’t, like she was a fuck-up. She felt that she was exactly like the women that she wrote about that were fuck-ups. . . . She felt very competent, and then when she didn’t kill Andy Warhol, it made her feel incompetent,” says Mary Harron.68

  As if to predict her own imminent future, Valerie liked to prove to Louis that she could handle the realities of death. One day she went downstairs to find that the police had entered somebody’s room in their building to find that a woman had overdosed on drugs. “Valerie told me, ‘Come, you gotta see this, you gotta see this woman. Her head is about five times the regular size. It’s purple and five times the regular size.’” When Louis refused to view the scene, saying that it could “fuck up my head,” Valerie insisted that she had a strong mind and could see anything, that it would not bother her to see dead people.69

  After seeing this dead woman, Valerie became consumed with her own logic, sure that her delusions had a basis in reality, that the Mob watched her at all times. At the nucleus of Valerie’s paranoia was her belief that a radio transmitter in her uterus broadcasted all her words and actions to the Mob, that she could even send them messages through her bugged uterus. “She didn’t want to do it, but they put it there,” said Louis. She believed they put the transmitter there against her will because they wanted to find out everything she said and did. To cope with this, Valerie started writing letters in code, “so I couldn’t understand what she was saying,” Louis said. When Louis was asked whether he thought Valerie was crazy, he energetically replied, “We know she’s crazy! We know that, but it doesn’t mean that her stuff wasn’t valid . . . It doesn’t invalidate her writings because she’s nuts.”70 Valerie predicted a lot of things that came to fruition, telling Louis about cloning. “She said now it’s necessary for men because of sex to promote the species, but when they come out with cloning there won’t be any more need. The man won’t be necessary. It’s logical.”71

  Toward the end of their relationship—likely in late 1979—Valerie’s schizophrenia had consumed her almost entirely. She refused to talk aloud because she felt so strongly that the Mob wanted to steal her ideas. Louis broke up with her, primarily because he had to leave the apartment after a man he let stay with him brought in cats and activated Louis’s allergies. Louis was Valerie’s last remaining shred of stability. She left her apartment—even though it was fully paid for by the state—and started her homeless life again. She roamed the streets, wandering aimlessly. “She got evicted because she wasn’t actually in the apartment. I guess she was paranoid about being in the apartment,” Louis said.

  After their breakup, Valerie went to see Louis one last time. “I started living with the woman I was going to marry, on Waverly Place, and Valerie came around. Downstairs there was a desk. And she would keep talking on the intercom with her mouth closed, trying to communicate with her mouth closed. It sounded like humming. I wanted to break off the involvement with her.”72 Valerie tried to make contact, tried to connect. “I didn’t keep in touch with her [in the 1980s]. Because she was too crazy. She made me feel very sad.”73

  Disoriented and not speaking, Valerie no longer sold conversation or operated as the savvy, gender-bending hustler. Having lost her apartment on Third Street, she panhandled near St. Mark’s Place, asking people for quarters in mumbles, never opening her mouth. One day Shulamith Firestone ran into her and Valerie asked her for a quarter. “I saw that she was begging,” Shulie recalled. “She had lost her apartment, and presumably her welfare. She asked for quite a few quarters after that, and I was sorry to see her turning into a mere panhandler in my eyes.” Valerie had stopped speaking coherently, and she spoke to Shulie in gibberish. “The sound issued from deep within her throat, like someone with larynx trouble. She looked at me with hatred, and threatened me. I was deeply troubled. Were these the demons of killer psychosis, or did she just have a bad case of bronchial pneumonia and shouldn’t be on the street? But I was too afraid to invite her into my sublet.”

  Later, a friend of Shulie’s ran into Valerie on St. Mark’s Place and said that Valerie had approached him for shelter. “She was covered with sores and wearing only a blanket to beg in,” Shulie reported. “She had been on the street approximately three months without shelter. Not long after that, she disappeared from the street entirely. She had been ‘picked up.’”74

  PHOENIX, ARIZONA (1981–1985)

  We know nothing of how it all works

  how we end up in one bed or another,

  speak one language instead of the others,

  what heat draws us to our life’s work

  or keeps us from a dream until it’s nothing

  but a blister we scratch in our sleep.

  —Dorianne Laux, “Late-Night TV”

  Valerie’s virtual disappearance from the public record—and from family narratives—during the early 1980s made it almost impossible to track her movements or understand what happened to her when she finally left New York. In late 1979, her mother, Dorothy Moran, filed a missing persons report on Valerie, to no avail. Some suggest that Valerie had developed an elaborate series of fake names and that she moved around the country as she struggled with ever-intensifying paranoid schizophrenia. Those who had cared for her—particularly Louis—lost contact with her completely. She stopped sending letters to friends and family, giving up contact with Andy, too. Her mother claimed that Valerie “lived peacefully in New York during the seventies and later in Phoenix and San Francisco.” On how she supported herself, Dorothy added, “I think she had some good friends that helped her out a lot.”75 Valerie left no traces of herself for the entire year of 1980.

  From 1981 until 1985, Valerie lived in dusty and rapidly growing Phoenix, Arizona—a landscape comprised of mostly ramshackle houses and rundown apartment buildings, drive-through fast food joints, gun stores, a few public buildings, and rows of thin palm trees. While she registered a downtown Phoenix address, 620 North Second Street, Phoenix, AZ 85004, with the Social Security SSI department, she primarily lived outdoors, managing to survive the blistering heat as temperatures soared into the 100s and even 110s during the six-month summer.

  It did not take long for Valerie to make her presence known. A former Phoenix police officer and current writer, Bud Vasconcellos (also known by his pen name, Bud Maxwell), spoke of his encounters with Valerie, which started in early spring of 1981: “The first time I ran into Valerie Solanas I was working the downtown afternoon beat and we got dispatched the radio code of a 918, saying that there was an insane person, a white female in her mid-forties, standing in the middle of Central and Washington, wearing a nightgown, and crowing like a chicken. She was stopping traffic.” Bud and his partner, Rick Nassy, drove to the scene and got out of their car. Valerie, gaunt and thin, was standing in the intersection barefoot, wearing a white nightgown that came down to her knees and wrapped in a thin white blanket. “She looked like Casper the ghost,” Bud said; she wore the blanket so that others couldn’t see her.76

  The thinness of the blanket allowed Valerie to see out from underneath it, and as Bud and his partner approached, Valerie took off running. “And the whole time she is running, she’s just going, ‘Caw, caw, caw.’ Horns are honking, people are looking, people are laughing, and I looked at my partn
er and I said, ‘I’m not chasing this crazy girl, are you?’ He was a kind of laid-back cop and he goes, ‘Nope!’” Bud said that Valerie must have just arrived in town because they walked that beat all the time and had never encountered anyone like her. “We would have known if she had been there.”

  Nearly every day for the next three years, Bud and his partner had some interaction with Valerie. In the summertime she wore tennis shoes (otherwise her feet would burn on the sidewalk); in the winter she often went barefoot. Every time they tried to get close to her, she ran, and because they had no reason to arrest her, they had to let her go. Down the street she went, howling at the moon. Eventually, Bud got close enough to discover that she had scabs all over her body, including on her face, arms, and legs. “I said, ‘What kind of disease does this woman have?’ But as time went on, I saw what had caused the scabs,” Bud said. “Valerie carried a kitchen fork with her, and we saw her sitting on the curb, or sitting on a park bench, and she would just dig at every part of her body with the tines of the fork. She just maniacally scraped herself and caused these scabs all over herself.” From then on, Valerie became known in the Phoenix police department as “Scab Lady.” This is the ninth-largest police department in the country and Valerie Solanas was so well known that we would get a dispatch that just said, ‘Scab Lady, Central and Washington, disturbing.’ She was that well known. But nobody put two and two together to figure out that this was Valerie Solanas because no one knew her name.”

  One night around nine o’clock, when Bud and his partner were driving past Patriot Park in downtown Phoenix, they saw Valerie sitting on a bench in the closed park. “I told him, okay, here’s our chance to get her name.” They walked up to her and noticed she was asleep on the bench. Bud put on rubber gloves and pinned her on the bench to hold her down. Bud told her they would not leave until she told them her name, shouting, “If you don’t tell me your name, jail’s right behind me and you’re going to jail for being in the park after hours.” “Fuck you!” Valerie yelled. Bud responded, “No, fuck you. You’re gonna give me your name or you’re going to jail.” She said, “Valerie.” Bud replied, “Valerie what?” She shouted, “Valerie Solanas, you son of a bitch!”

  They ran a background check on her but everything came up clean so they let her go. From then on, they would see Valerie running place to place. On several occasions, they saw her bathing nude or washing her feet in the fountain in front of the downtown library on Central and McDowell around three or four in the morning. She slept on park benches and in dark alleys and roamed the streets, crowing and frightening the businesspeople who worked in the offices downtown. She ran from the police, refusing to speak a word to them. “Valerie was a runner,” Bud said. “She ran everywhere, and, boy, as soon as she saw us she’d run like hell.”

  Valerie struggled to find enough food to eat and found most of her meals in Dumpsters and trash bins: “She roamed from Dumpster to Dumpster finding enough garbage to keep alive and from alley to alley to find a place to sleep.” Bud saw her eating mostly leftovers discarded by others. According to Bud, she never took drugs, never spoke to anyone—not the police and not other homeless people—and was “totally isolated by choice.”

  The last time Bud saw her was late in the summer of 1984. Bud stated, “She never appeared after that.” On her psychological state, he said, “She definitely needed to be in a mental hospital. She was a danger to herself and others.” He later learned her history and when he saw pictures of her from the time of the Andy Warhol shootings, knew with certainty that the Valerie he met in Phoenix had indeed been Valerie Solanas. “I’ll tell you what,” Bud added, “Valerie Solanas was the highlight of the downtown area. I have always thought about how strange she was. I mean, she was the strangest of the strangest. I have always remembered every detail of those encounters. Every contact I had with her is indefinitely imprinted in my mind.”

  SAN FRANCISCO (1985–1988)

  Eventually, Valerie found her way to San Francisco, a place notorious for its homeless population. Here, Valerie would live out her final three years. This period began with a brief stay at 149 Ninth Street and, after that, room 420 in the Bristol Hotel at 56 Mason Street, a single-occupancy welfare hotel at the edge of the seedy, drug-infested Tenderloin district.77 The serial killer Richard Ramirez, the “Night Stalker,” known for killing at least thirteen people, raping numerous others, and worshipping Satan, had a brief stay in room 317.78

  Mary Harron visited the Bristol in 1995. “Fifty-six Mason Street turned out to be a cavernous welfare hotel, with worn linoleum and scrawled signs warning tenants about loud radios and paying the rent on time. It was in the worst part of the Tenderloin, near a couple of theaters that show pornographic films; evidently, Valerie’s circumstances had never changed.”79

  Writer Bruce Boone, who visited the hotel in the mid-1990s and spoke with those who knew Valerie from those days, wrote of the Bristol Hotel: “The hotel lobby was dispiriting. I mean, here was this woman who had this New York life—the go-go years, Warhol and that crowd, whatever—and in her minor maybe but real way famous—in this hellhole of a welfare pits of a hotel. There was the heartbreak of having to know how a great spirit ended, totally unknown too, and just a hooker (just!), after beign Valerie! I felt in communion—strongly—with her spirit: like trying to console it maybe for its manifest and undeserved evil end.”80

  My own visit in December 2008 suggested a similar dreariness. The manager (who refused to give his name) said, in response to my questions about Valerie, “I’m not interested in the past. I’m only interested in the future.” He then reluctantly divulged that the man who worked the front desk for nearly thirty years had died of a heart attack the week before my arrival. Laughing loudly, he said, “You missed him!” This now-dead manager used to tell tales of how “the crazy ones like Valerie always came in and out on the fire escape.”

  The manager remarked that Russians used to use the hotel as a safe house during the Cold War and he himself had owned it until 2003, when the Patel family bought it. The hotel has rented rooms to mostly homeless and HIV-positive tenants since the beginning of the AIDS epidemic. Even in 2008, rooms cost $7.77 a night. (One can see the signs for the hotel when standing at the Powell Street cable car turnaround area—one of the most highly populated tourist areas in San Francisco.)

  As I spoke with him through the scratched window, a man entered and yelled, “I need a miracle!” dragging several plastic bags of empty cans with him. Another man walked in from the street and asked, “White sister, white sister, what are you doing?” I told him about Valerie. Drunk and smelling of urine and beer, he said that he worked for two Valeries and that he had a white sister in Mississippi. Another guy near the elevator, clearly high on something, wanted me to take some photos of him. Still another solicited sex. Twenty years after her death, the place emanated Valerie’s despair but also her humor.

  During her time here, Valerie mostly kept to herself, getting by. Some say her hotel room was full of typewritten pages and that she still wrote furiously into the night. One of the supers at the Bristol had a vague memory of Valerie. “Once, he had to enter her room, and he saw her typing at her desk. There was a pile of typewritten pages beside her. What she was writing and what happened to the manuscript remain a mystery.”81

  Though Valerie stopped calling herself Valerie Solanas while living in San Francisco, she still had some faint connection to her former identity. For example, a reader of the magazine High Times wrote in asking if Valerie Solanas had died. In response, Valerie wrote a letter to the magazine saying that she was alive and well and was living in California. Her cousin, Robert, read the article and immediately notified the family of Valerie’s whereabouts.82

  In a search for information about Valerie’s years in San Francisco, Bruce Boone spoke with two women who helped to fill out the picture of Valerie’s final years: “In the midst of this terrible welfare atmosphere I found two charming middle-aged ladies, hookers act
ually, sitting in the office with the Pakistani manager and they actually remembered Valerie: —We hear Valerie was actually a famous person. —Yeah, writer and all. —Really? —Uh huh. Know anything about her?” The women then told a story about, in Bruce’s words, “the ironies of a feminist man-hater ending up servicing men. To pay for the dope habit.” Bruce asked what kind of drugs she used and they said Valerie had a methamphetamine habit and that “she looked pretty good considering . . . skinny and all.” “Was she pretty?” “Yes, pretty. And there was that great silver lamé dress she’d go hooking in. It was all silver and lamé, her favorite, and she looked really good.”83 These prostitutes who claimed to know Valerie described her as elegant and slender. This image provides a sharp contrast to the other reports of Valerie being covered in scars and scabs during this period.

  Throughout her San Francisco years, Valerie seemed to support herself with her SSI payments supplemented by prostitution. She had to officially register herself under the name Valerie Solanas to receive these benefits, leaving the only trace of her former self with that government office. Living at the Bristol Hotel, she changed her name to ensure anonymity. To those around her in San Francisco, she was no longer Valerie Solanas. She scraped by, holed up in her room most of the time, banging out pages on her worn typewriter. No one knew exactly where she was.