“Valerie Solanas finally provides an in-depth, decade-spanning history of Valerie’s life,including mid-teen pregnancies, anti-essentialist college newspaper rebuttals, SCUMlectures, Up Your Ass casting calls, transience, letters of grammatical corrections toMajority Report, a continual emphasis from various sources on Valerie’s intelligence,radicalism, humor, comedic improv timing, and intensity, and thorough discussions of herwork dismantling and repudiating sexuality, gender, morality, marriage, the money system,and the patriarchal status quo.”

—NATH ANN CARRERA, singer/musician

“This compelling biography shows the complexity of Valerie Solanas, placing her in thecontext of so many later-twentieth-century cultural realities—the commodity explosion ofthe art world, nuclear family damage and dysfunction, emergent baby-boomer generationnarcissism, and the complicated internal struggles of the feminist movement.”

—CATHERINE MORRIS, Sackler Family Curator at the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center forFeminist Art

“Valerie Solanas was an enigma, an outsider even among misfits, and one of the mostshocking radicals in a decade teeming with them. Breanne Fahs’ book is a long overdueexcavation of the obsessions, paranoia, and rage that fueled both Solanas’s visionarymanifesto and her appalling attempt to murder Warhol.”

—CYNTHIA CARR, author of Fire in the Belly: The Life and Times of David Wojnarowicz

Published in 2014 by the Feminist Press at the City University of New YorkThe Graduate Center365 Fifth Avenue, Suite 5406New York, NY 10016

feministpress.org

Text copyright © 2014 by Breanne Fahs

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, used, or stored in any information retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means,electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without prior written permission from the Feminist Press at the CityUniversity of New York, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

First ebook edition April 2014First printing April 2014

Cover design by Herb Thornby, herbthornby.comText design by Drew StevensEbook design by Ellen Maddy

Inside front/back cover:“Lies! Lies! Valerie Solanas.” This is a reproduction of Valerie Solanas’s handwriting on the 1971 copy of SCUM Manifesto housed inthe collection at the New York Public Library. To sabotage the Olympia Press edition of SCUM and to protest unauthorized changes toher manifesto, she marked up her book with her own graffiti. For the full story, see Chapter 5.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data available upon request.

eISBN 978-155861-849-7 (ebook)ISBN 978-155861-848-0 (paperback)

CONTENTSFront CoverCopyrightDedicationEpigraphPreface

SOUNDING OFFAtlantic City to New York City, 1936–1967

SHOOTINGSCUM, Shots, and Stupidstars, 1967–1968

PROVOCATIONThe Contentious Birth of Radical Feminism, 1968–1973

MADNESSOf Mental Hospitals and Men, 1968–1974

FORGETTINGThe Lost Years and Final Days, 1975–1988

PHOTO INSERT

AcknowledgmentsNotesReferencesBibliographyAbout the AuthorAbout the PressAlso Available From the Feminist Press

For G. Elmer Griffin, who cracked open the universe

and

for Eric Swank, for more than our share

of la dolce vita

Only part of us is sane: only part of us loves pleasure and the longer day of happiness,wants to live to our nineties and die in peace, in a house that we built, that shall shelterthose who come after us. The other half of us is nearly mad. It prefers the disagreeableto the agreeable, loves pain and its darker night despair, and wants to die in acatastrophe that will set back life to its beginnings and leave nothing of our house saveits blackened foundations.

—REBECCA WEST

PREFACEWe only become what we are by the radical and deep-seated refusal of that which others have made of us. . . . I think weunderstood this truth at one time, but we have forgotten it—that no gentleness can efface the marks of violence; onlyviolence itself can destroy them.

—Jean-Paul Sartre, preface to Frantz Fanon, Wretched of the Earth

TRACKING THE LIFE OF VALERIE SOLANAS, MUCH LIKE pursuing the movements of an invisible wolf, hasled to many dead ends. Standing in the dusty, empty lots of downtown Phoenix, a place where Valerieonce roamed the streets eating out of Dumpsters, digging a fork into her scab-filled arms, and howlingat the moon, I stare at the silent mountains with a familiar mix of amusement, mourning, and awe.She’s dangerous, they still say, I won’t even talk to you until I see a death certificate.1

In one of Valerie’s more paranoid phases near the end of her life, she insisted she would write abook called Valerie Solanas. It would provide the definitive account of her life, told by herself, and,she imagined, it would sell at least twenty million copies (with a one-hundred-million-dollar advancefrom the Mob). Valerie hated the idea of imperfection, of others representing her life and work, oferrors to the official record of how things went down. At the same time that she believed a uterinetransmitter had been implanted in her against her will, sending details of her movements and words towhat she called the Mob, she also took the time to correct spelling and grammar errors in the feministperiodical Majority Report. Her misfire at Andy Warhol felt like a blow to her reputation. She wentby an absolute standard, even as she slipped into deeper and deeper psychosis. The irony of nowwriting a book called Valerie Solanas that gives an “unauthorized” account of her life, offering up atext filled with the potential for error (and, of course, Valerie’s posthumous cosmic revenge) is notlost on me.

Taking aim from the literal and metaphorical gutter, closing in on the power and audacity of thosewho prowled for thrills and never pandered for “Daddy’s” approval, Valerie wrote in her renowned,funny, and vitriolic SCUM Manifesto of women who had a SCUM state of mind: “Unhampered bypropriety, niceness, discretion, public opinion, ‘morals,’ the ‘respect’ of assholes, always funky, dirty,low-down SCUM gets around . . . and around and around . . . they’ve been the whole show—everybit of it . . . SCUM’s been through it all, and they’re now ready for a new show; they want to crawlout from under the dock, move, take off, sink out. But SCUM doesn’t yet prevail; SCUM’s still in thegutter of our ‘society,’ which, if it’s not deflected from its present course and if the Bomb doesn’tdrop on it, will hump itself to death.”2 In Valerie’s world, the lowly, downtrodden, abject, forgotten,nasty women living in the shitpile would inevitably take over the world. SCUM has power. SCUMknows truth.

Valerie saw things, knew things, sensed things far earlier than her contemporaries of the 1960s,giving her work a quality that is both beyond the pale and startlingly prescient. At a time beforecomputers and Twitter, before sophisticated infertility treatments and 24/7 headline news, before no-fault divorce and marital rape laws, before punishable sexual harassment and antidiscriminationpolicies, she understood, somehow, the core of what would come to dominate modern American life.She sensed that constant surveillance would allow unlimited access to the powerless from thepowerful. She believed that men would continue to justify wars based on increasingly asininereasons. She predicted test-tube babies and the ability to reproduce without the bodies of men. Sheforecasted the invention of Viagra (calling it her “perpetual hardness technique,” which would“render men manageable and easy to deal with”). The gender-bending romp she created in her 1965play, Up Your Ass, featured characters that even the best of queer theorists cannot categorize or

understand. She loved women, hated men, defined herself as asexual, adamantly refused to identify asheterosexual, but resented accusations of herself as a lesbian.

Ti-Grace Atkinson, one of the founders of radical feminism, once reflected that for the visionariesand revolutionaries, they must ask, Just how far out can I get from the time and context in which Ilive?3 Just how far away could Valerie get from a context in which women wore strings of pearls,married in their early twenties, renounced sex before marriage, and lived out scenes from Mad Menin real time? Just how much distance could she create between herself and a cultural context thattrivialized, insulted, and ignored women, particularly successful, ambitious, intelligent women?Certainly, this distance, embodied most brilliantly in the SCUM Manifesto, made Valerie far moredangerous than the .22 Colt revolver or .32 Beretta automatic she wielded when she strode into theFactory and shot Andy Warhol on June 3, 1968.

There is something about the SCUM Manifesto. Its brashness, its vivid, startling anger, itsoutrageous humor and wit, its uncanny insights and truth. It has a one-of-a-kind tone, never replicatedby anyone. In an undergraduate college course I teach on manifestos, I ask students to write their ownmanifesto and they often stare up at me in panic, not knowing how to find that voice, a voice likeValerie’s. That she could carry such force, hurl such obscenities, take us right to the edge and thenshove, serves as a testament to the power of Valerie Solanas. That she wrote SCUM Manifesto onrooftops, banged it out on an old typewriter she carried around in lieu of more reasonable items likeclothes and toiletries, makes it all the more poetic. Valerie loved her words, her works. The story ofValerie’s life, more than anything, is a story of her relationship to the manifesto. From its start in themid-1960s, when she bragged to her father about writing it, until her final documented conversation inNovember 1987, when she pleaded with Warhol “stupidstar” Ultra Violet to get a copy of it from theWashington, DC copyright office, SCUM Manifesto played a central role in how Valerie understood,and spoke to, the world. As librarian Donny Smith wrote in The History of Zines, her manifesto, likeValerie herself, “has never found a comfortable place. . . . Sometimes it’s a feminist classic,sometimes a marginal tract, a cult classic, a rant, man-hating, anti-feminist, surrealist, anarcho-socialist, utopian, apocalyptic.”4

In the growing accounts of 1960s counterculture, amid the piles of theory and mythology amassingabout Valerie’s life, where does she belong? How does one tell a story about someone like Valerie,someone whose life is entrenched in myth and imbued with seemingly bottomless emotional energy? Iset out over a decade ago—long after Valerie’s death—to write the story of Valerie Solanas. I got myfirst copy of SCUM Manifesto in 1999 from a friend who had returned from studying abroad in Paris,where she had heard a lecture by the prominent French philosopher Jacques Derrida. In this lecture,Derrida had pulled out a copy of the manifesto from his briefcase, praising it as necessary, somehow,to the intellectual history of women. My first reading of SCUM Manifesto transformed something inme, too, for in the midst of studying critical theory, I had found someone with no regard for theacademic canon, no apologies for her reckless humor and wild destruction. Later, as a graduatestudent in clinical psychology and women’s studies, I searched for more of her story but could findonly small pieces of it.

Hers, I believe, is the best kind of story, told through a pile of fragments and trash: dusty, lefty zineslike Holy Titclamps and DWAN, transcripts of conversations now twenty years old, news clippings,DIY art mags, Hollywood scripts, material from a coroner’s office, half-recorded answering-machinemessages, discussions in cat-filled apartments, blurred photos, YouTube videos, narratives fromshaky memories, phone calls, missing files, consciousness-raising rants of radical feminists,browning letters and postcards, Library of Congress copyright registries, run-ins with the Warhol

elite, notes from meetings in now-demolished diners, posters featuring the middle finger, long-forgotten pamphlets and newsletters. After all, Valerie, of all people, truly appreciated and yearnedfor knowledge from scum, seeing truth only in the gutters and landfills, in the sludge and the muck, inthe abject, forgotten, broken pieces left behind by the more reasonable, affluent world. SCUM, shesaid, “is for whores, dykes, criminals, homicidal maniacs.”5

This biography of her life—a life that many have labeled a sheer impossibility (Valerie washomeless! She had twenty different names! Her mother burned all her belongings! She wasdangerous!)—contextualizes the bigger societal stories surrounding Valerie and her writings. It is astory that stands at the crossroads of many things. As a story of violence, it accounts for the traumas ofan individual girl and a woman who detected a spirit of collective anguish. As a story of madness, itweaves in and out of the horrors of psychosis, the difficulty of diagnosis, the impossibility of reason,and the institutions that trap and release so many of our heroes. As a story of art, it returns, again, tothe question of how one’s life speaks to one’s work and how the deftly cool and calculating Andycollided with the hot-tempered and fiery Valerie. Finally, as a story of truth, it demands aconsideration of the “shit we have to go through in this world just to survive,” calling forth, across thetime and space of the last four decades, a reckoning.6

—Breanne Fahs

SOUNDING OFFAtlantic City to New York City 1936–1967

“Pardon me, Sir, do you have fifteen cents?” (I don’t say it’s for carfare, unless they ask; the preciousness of my time demandsbrevity.)“What do I get for fifteen cents?”“How ’bout a dirty word?”“That’s not a bad buy. Ok, here. Now give me the word.”“Men.”

—Valerie Solanas, “A Young Girl’s Primer, or How to Attain the Leisure Class”

VALERIE HAS BEEN CALLED MANY THINGS: “A GLITCH, a mistake,” “an outcast among outcasts,” “the firstoutstanding champion of women’s rights,” “the Robespierre of feminism,” “Andy Warhol’s feministnightmare,” “a female Lenny Bruce, created and destroyed by a truth most of us can’t face or jokeabout,” “a radical feminist Jean Genet,”“a woman who looked as though she had walked through atear in space and time.”1 One of Valerie’s close friends, Jeremiah Newton, said simply, “She believedin something. She believed in herself. I thought that was admirable. In an era when people didn’tbelieve in themselves and bullshitted or wanted to believe in other people, she believed in herselfand she was so sure one day the world would discover her and she would have the fame that she sorichly deserved. That’s how she felt.”2

In her 1966 introduction to her play, Up Your Ass (which figured in her actions two years later,when she shot and nearly killed pop superstar Andy Warhol at his New York City “Factory”), shewrote: “I dedicate this play to ME a continuous source of strength and guidance, and without whoseunflinching loyalty, devotion and faith this play would never have been written. additionalacknowledgements: Myself-for proof-reading, editorial comment, helpful hints, criticism andsuggestions and an exquisite job of typing. I—for independent research into men, married women andother degenerates.”3 Valerie insisted on her own telling, her own writing, and her self-reliance. Shebelieved in two kinds of people: the “originators” and the “interpreters,” that is, those who createdideas and those who talked about the ideas others created.4 Such a philosophy lent itself to longstretches of isolation; her existence as an outcast defined her—from her early days as an out lesbianin Maryland’s Oxon Hill High School to panhandling and engaging in prostitution on the streets ofNew York, from her nearly decade-long confinement in mental hospitals on charges of insanity to herfinal days of living in a welfare hotel in San Francisco.

And yet for all of Valerie’s aloneness and withdrawl from the world, she managed to write themost widely produced document from late 1960s radical feminism—SCUM Manifesto. By manyaccounts, and despite Valerie’s frank aversion to communal social movements, she inadvertentlyinspired the radical feminist movement after her shooting of Andy Warhol fractured the NationalOrganization for Women (NOW) in 1968. Further, she continues to provoke feminists andnonfeminists alike to react to her work, ideas, anger, rage, and symbolic persona, with piles ofacademic articles and chapters theorizing about her identity continuing to grow. Nearly everyone whoknew her personally felt that she had an incessant intensity and markedly unique sense of humor; theyalso recounted stories of how she betrayed, humiliated, embarrassed, or otherwise violated them. Shethreatened to throw acid in the faces of her friends, called men “walking dildos,” shot a person whohad some at least marginal sympathy for her, and accused many people of stealing her ideas andplagiarizing her words. Even those on the fringe found her excessive, impolite, difficult, and long

winded. Jo Freeman, longtime radical feminist and women’s rights advocate, told me frankly,“Valerie should be forgotten.”5 And, for the most part, she has been forgotten. Or distorted. Or lost inthe dust pile of (feminist?) history. As such, this telling of her life is a version composed only offragments, shards, remnants, whispers, truths bubbling up, old memories, scribbles, and trash. It isnecessarily partial and in pieces, a collection of SCUM, SCUM, and scum.

EARLY FAMILY LIFE (1936–1953)Valerie Jean Solanas was born at 5:37 a.m. on Thursday, April 9, 1936, to Louis “Lou” Solanas,twenty-one, a bartender, and Dorothy Biondo, eighteen, a dental assistant, both of whom lived at 104South Frankfort Avenue in Ventnor City, New Jersey. Both of Valerie’s parents were first-generationAmericans with immigrant parents. Louis’s working-class family came from the Catalonian region ofSpain, while Dorothy’s mother originated from Genoa, Italy, and later married an American. Louisand Dorothy had two daughters; Valerie arrived first, followed by Judith, two years later.6

When Valerie was four years old, her parents separated, after much conflict in their marriage.Having decided that Valerie and Judith would flourish when living apart from both their parents, in1940 Dorothy and Louis sent the girls to live with their maternal grandparents in Atlantic City. At thetime, Atlantic City had a thriving four-mile boardwalk complete with diving horses on the Steel Pier,candy shops selling saltwater taffy and cotton candy, amusement park rides, and hoards of locals andtourists hitting the beach. The family lived on a street with “respectable postwar blue-collar housing,with a mix of races and nationalities” and the girls spent much of their time playing on the boardwalkwith the neighborhood children.7 Valerie’s sister, Judith (Martinez, formerly Monday), laterquestioned the decision to send them away, particularly given Valerie’s closeness to her father: “Iwas just an infant. I didn’t know my father. But Valerie was very attached to her father, and I think hisbetrayal of her had a great deal to do with her problems later.”8

Details of Valerie’s childhood are revealed in mixed accounts, with some describing Valerie as ahappy little girl, full of energy, charm, and vitality, while others painted her as aggressive andnaughty. Judith described the young Valerie as a “very bright, very pretty little girl, extremelyintelligent with a caustic wit,” adding that Valerie revealed a mix of precociousness and early genius.9

Valerie learned to read and write before she was six, often composing her own lyrics to pop songsaround age eight. In one of these songs, Valerie changed the lyrics of “Oh, How We Danced on theNight We Were Wed” to “Judy’s head comes to a great big point, whenever she walks it comes all outof joint, her nose is so much like a banana, it reaches from here to Savannah.”10

Valerie always did things earlier and faster than her peers, playing piano at age seven, readingeverything from Nancy Drew to Louisa May Alcott, and beating anyone on the block at Chinesehopscotch or double Dutch jump rope. She carried around a doll named Sally for much of herchildhood but also enjoyed her dog Stinky and her turtle Myrtle. Decades later, Louis Zwiren, herthen boyfriend, remembered Valerie’s affection for Stinky, saying that she sometimes affectionatelycalled him her “puppy dog” and that “she had a dog when she was a girl, and she loved her dog.When she came home the dog would be waving its tail and . . . she had fond memories of how excitedthe dog was to see her.”11 To a journalist, Valerie described her childhood as idyllic; she grew updoing things most young girls do: surfing in the summer, going to dances, and getting a crush on a highschool boy.12

Other accounts give a more cautious reading of Valerie’s youth. Those who knew Valerie onlywhen she was young saw her as friendly, funny, and precocious, while those who knew Valerie later

on (particularly just before or after the shooting) portrayed her childhood as more disturbed or scary.Family friends and acquaintances characterized her as rebellious and antiauthoritarian: “There is thesense, in talking to family and those close to the family, of a ‘bad seed,’ the child who was alwaysdifficult,” wrote journalist Judy Michaelson in a story published two days after the Warholshootings.13 When Valerie was five, her maternal grandfather hit her with a belt and she just stoodthere laughing. A neighbor, Clara Shields, remembered her with “a mixture of affection andbemusement,” and that she had a certain volatility. Bright and lonely, Valerie hated abuses of power.She beat the shit out of a young boy who tormented a younger girl on the boardwalk in Atlantic Cityand stood up for girls when boys picked on them at school.

Valerie grappled with many disadvantages growing up: “bad home life, poverty, psychologicalinstability, born in the wrong time.”14 Later reports by psychologists described Valerie’s wildadolescence, filled with shoplifting and other petty crimes, early sexual experiences, and instabilitywith all of her caretakers; or, as reporter Liz Jobey wrote, “Valerie’s intellectual precocity had beentoo much for her parents and hadn’t been harnessed so she’d been naughty at school.” Judithremembered Valerie as constantly battling social norms: “She always fought off all attempts to moldher into a nice young lady. I was the one who went for the crinolines, the spike heels, and thelipstick.”15 By contrast, Valerie was a hell-raiser and brawler who chased boys who made her angryor insulted Judith; outraged, Valerie would yell at them and berate them to “fight like a man.”

As an adult, Judith lovingly portrayed Valerie as one of the funniest people she had ever met andnoted that “she always wanted to be a writer.” Speaking of Valerie “with a strain of dark humor and aquiet bluntness that Valerie would have appreciated,”16 Judith said she and Valerie always maintainedcontact, that Valerie had always let her and her mother know where she was, at least until the lastdecade of her life: “Oh, I was with Valerie her whole life.”17 Valerie, Judith, and their mother,Dorothy, had a quiet closeness, though Judith protected Valerie’s story with ferocity. Judith has beendescribed as highly intelligent, well-groomed, looking a lot like Valerie, and lacking some ofValerie’s dynamism. Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, a radical feminist and writer who founded Boston’s Cell16 and sympathized with Valerie’s politics, met Judith at a play in 2001 and said, “It seemed like shereally cared about Valerie. She was really sad missing her.”18

Still, Valerie’s colorful and interesting family does shed some light on the contradictions that infuseher life story. Her mother, Dorothy, was born February 3, 1918, in Philadelphia, to Rose Marie Cella,from Genoa, Italy, and Michael Biondo, an Italian American born in Philadelphia in 1891. (Dorothy’spaternal grandparents, Lorenzo Biondo and Maria Milazzoto, came from Sicily.) Rose hadimmigrated to the United States as an infant and lived with her father, a fruit dealer, and her mother inPhiladelphia. Michael and Rose married prior to Michael’s enlisting in the army in 1914; upon hisreturn from the war, they moved to Atlantic City (216 North Morris Avenue) before the 1929 stockmarket crash. Michael, who was “neat and dapper,” according to Judith, worked as a shoemaker andplumber, while Rose, a tall and beautiful woman, worked as a dressmaker in a factory. The couplestruggled to raise their only daughter, Dorothy, on their small salaries.

According to family genealogical records, Valerie’s grandfather Michael worked with his cousinJames “Jimmy” Tindaro in the plumbing business but eventually decided to work in the “saloonbusiness,” opening up a bar that served bathtub gin. When the Depression hit, Michael worked as asinging waiter in a comedy burlesque show. (Rose died in 1955, Michael in 1973.)

Traveling in similar Atlantic City working-class circles, Dorothy met Valerie’s father, LouisSolanas, married him in 1936, and gave birth to Valerie. Family remembered Dorothy as a strikinglybeautiful woman, a good mother, and a kind, soft-spoken, down-to-earth person who loved the girls.

“She wasn’t judgmental. She accepted Valerie for who she was. That was it,” Valerie’s cousin RobertFustero said.19 Lorraine Miller, who met Dorothy in 1968, described her as a very pretty lady,attractive, with brown curly hair and a warm, friendly disposition. After separating from Louis in1940, four years into their marriage, Dorothy officially divorced him in 1947 when Valerie waseleven years old.

Two years later, Dorothy married her second husband, Edward “Red” Francis Moran, a piano tuneroriginally from Newburgh, New York.20 The family moved to Virginia, where Dorothy remained formuch of her life. She and Red lived in a built-to-order home in Riverbend Estates with a view overthe Potomac, then later moved to an apartment in Marlow Heights. In her later years, after Red’s deathin 2000, Dorothy left for Boca Raton, Florida, and settled there, remaining in the area until her deathat the Boca Raton Community Hospital on July 21, 2004.

After moving away from her family, Valerie stayed in contact with her mother and sister most of thetime, often telling them where she lived and when she would next return to see them. Though Dorothydid give one interview about Valerie, to Rowan Gaither, she refused to speak further to journalists,academics, or other interviewers about her daughter. One German researcher, Peter Moritz Pickshaus,who tried to interview Dorothy, described her as “rather gruff and not willing to be of any help. . . . Ifound the voice and the gruffness of her mother in accord with what I was told about Valerie’stemper.”21 Following news of Valerie’s death, Dorothy apparently burned all of Valerie’s manuscriptsand belongings, threw away her personal items, and largely refused to talk to reporters seekinginformation, telling them, “Let her rest in peace.”

Valerie’s father, Louis, was born in 1915 to Julius Solanas and Maria Prats, both of whom hadrecently emigrated from Spain to Canada. Julius and Maria had married in Spain when Julius wastwenty-seven and Maria was nineteen. The couple had had two children—Carmen and Juanita—before leaving for Canada, in 1911, when their third daughter, Julia, was born, followed by the birthof Valerie’s father in Montreal in 1915. In 1916, now in the United States, with four children and awife in tow, Julius secured a job as a silversmith and jeweler in Atlantic City during its heyday.Working up through the ranks of old-time Atlantic City, Julius eventually landed a job as a silversmithat the luxurious, decadent Ambassador Hotel by 1934. The hotel was considered the jewel of AtlanticCity, filled with wealthy patrons who took the train down for weeks at a time to enjoy the shores,swimming, and sunlight.

The couple had one more daughter, Genevieve, at the height of Prohibition in 1925, giving Louisthe challenging status of being the only boy in a family of five children. The 1930 census indicatedthat Julius and Maria spoke Spanish, had five children (with Louis and Julia living at home), andrented space to four boarders—“Frank,” “Mizzi,” Andrew Sanchez, and Lewis Vasquez—at theirAtlantic City home at 113 North Chelsea Avenue (valued then at seventy-five dollars).

Louis’s childhood was spent in the chaotic and violent era of Prohibition and bootlegging inAtlantic City (brought vividly to life in HBO’s series Boardwalk Empire). At the time of the 1929stock market crash, he would have been fourteen, old enough, as family members say, to understandthe “old Atlantic City group” (that is, having a clear understanding of money, mobsters, and power).As a young man, Louis secured a job as a bartender in Atlantic City before gambling was legalized;he often covered for the seedy undercurrents of back room Atlantic City, learning from his father howto negotiate minding your own business. Maintaining a jovial and lively outlook on life and treatingstrangers with generosity, Louis often paid for drinks for the homeless and other poor people whocame into the bar looking for a little relief; when dining out with family, he rarely let anyone else pickup the check. He told jokes, played the drums, and always had a sharp and witty sense of humor. In

his short stint in the army, he learned how to play the accordion and eventually earned a reputation forplaying that instrument and joking around with the kids in his family. His nephew Robert remembersthat “he was always telling jokes, really funny, and he was always playing magic tricks with the kids.He would tell us stories. He was a lot of fun to be with, one of those ‘crazy uncles’ that all the kidsseemed to love. We were a very tight family.”22

After Louis’s divorce from Dorothy in 1947, he had a short-lived marriage to Kay, a mortician andcosmetologist; the couple would often invite family to their home for dinners and parties. (Kay diedof liver failure and was buried at Arlington National Cemetery.) Still, he maintained a reputation forstaying out of others’ business, even when others questioned him about Valerie. When the New YorkPost contacted him after Valerie shot Andy Warhol, he told the reporter, “I’m a bartender. I don’tanswer questions. I just listen to the other person. I’m a good listener. When was the last time I sawmy daughter? I don’t remember.”23

Louis had a fairly close relationship with his sisters, particularly Genevieve and Carmen (Juliadied quite young). Genevieve’s son, Robert, said of his mother and her siblings, “They were reallygood friends. They got along really well and did really well. We all lived nearby in DC and wewould walk to Louis’s house. My aunt [Carmen] lived a little further away but we saw each other allthe time.”24 Carmen, described as a warm, friendly, no-nonsense woman who told dirty jokes, had arisqué side and, like her siblings, maintained an open attitude about sexuality. “The family always hada free attitude about sex,” Robert said. “They didn’t criticize anybody, didn’t care about ‘gaymarriage’ or who did what with whom. They called it like it is. When I didn’t understand whatfellatio was, Carmen looked at my mother [and] just said, ‘Well, did you tell him it’s a blowjob?’That’s the way they were.”25

With a reputation for heavy drinking and pornography use (after Louis’s death, the familydiscovered a large stash in his apartment—though nothing “off the wall”), Louis worked as abartender for most of his adult life, mostly at the Dennis Hotel in Atlantic City, until his death in 1971.After Kay died, Louis started seeing a new girlfriend, whose brother did not like her dating someonelike Louis, a ruffian with a penchant for women and booze. One afternoon, the girlfriend’s brotherwent into a bar and picked a fight with Louis. Another man who had flirted with Louis’s girlfriendalso got involved and the three stumbled around throwing punches in fits of drunken rage. During thisfight, one of the men hit Louis so hard that his skull was fractured. “They were all drinking and theyjust left him lying there on the floor. He just bled to death in his head like a brain hemorrhage,”Robert related quietly.26

Valerie had an ambivalent relationship with her father. While the details of much of her childhoodremain vague and slippery, she likely suffered sexual abuse from her father throughout her childhoodyears. Valerie apparently disclosed sexual abuse to two psychologists, who wrote in a 1968 report,“[Valerie] describes a rather pitiful childhood, including parental conflict, sexual molestation by herfather, and frequent separation from her home. The patient’s mother was married three times and MissSolanas recalls having seen only little of her because she was often being sent to various relatives.The patient added that when she was an adolescent, she was a ‘hell-raiser.’ By the age of 13 hermother re-married.”27

These stories are difficult to access or confirm with Valerie’s family, though Judith had remarked,“Valerie had experiences I didn’t have, things I didn’t know about until I read the psychologicalevaluations of her after she shot Warhol. Our father sexually abused her. It was after the divorce andevery Sunday our mother sent us off to be with him. I was only four; Valerie was six. Something waswrong there. I never wanted to go, but I didn’t understand.”28 Her cousin, Robert, characterized both

parents as kind people, saying it was hard to imagine that Louis sexually abused Valerie: “In thelarger picture, he was a pretty good father. He did help her out with money and he did give her aplace to stay whenever she came to DC. He did go to New York a couple of times to see her. I mean,he wasn’t a bad person. He was an alcoholic.” When I pressed Robert about the possibility of abuse,he replied somewhat tentatively, “From the point of my aunt and my mother, it’s true, yeah. He had afondness for pornography but we never thought he would be a child abuser. If anything, he was analcoholic.” Robert emphasized that Louis abused only Valerie and never touched anyone else.“Nobody told us about Valerie,” he said.29 Louis had a tendency toward physical violence, which,combined with the alcoholism, led to problems. Judith remembered that their mother did not protectValerie from much of anything, adding, “It’s been reported she was a promiscuous teenager. How doyou relate promiscuity to a young girl who learned about sex in the most degrading, perverted manner,from an adult who was supposed to protect her?”30

Judith directly linked Valerie’s sexual abuse to later problems, saying in her memoir, “Valerie’ssexual molestation by her own father, the one man she truly loved, catapulted her into an obscene,perverted world she could not comprehend. Who was there to protect her? Did she tell anyone, hermother, a teacher, a priest? Did they believe her or did they punish her for having the audacity torepeat such a horrid tale?”31 How this abuse affected her—and whether it influenced her ideas inSCUM Manifesto and other writings—remains an open question. As Jane Caputi, a radical feministwho met Valerie in the mid-1970s and currently chairs the women and gender studies program atFlorida Atlantic University, claimed, “It’s not as simple as the abuse leads to the manifesto, thatyou’re filled with rage and that leads to things directly. But those experiences do take away theillusions. Those abuses don’t prescribe seeing through things, but they do affect things. That is oneresponse to abuse, where you continue contact or are filled with rage. At the same time, you take itout on yourself.”32

As a child, Valerie coped with the abuse by initially refusing to live with her father in a permanentway following her parent’s separation. Instead, she lived with family members and friends of thefamily for a time. Following her parents’ separation, she first went to live with her mother. Shortlyafter that, when Valerie turned thirteen, Red Moran, Dorothy’s second husband, moved in with thefamily and lived there for a year, until Valerie turned fourteen. Red, regarded as somewhat strange,had never been married before he met the effervescent and beautiful Dorothy. He had spent most ofhis time working as a piano tuner, though he always fantasized about a career as a piano performer.“He would perform sometimes,” Robert said. “He wanted to be a piano player, not a piano tuner.”33

Red never took a liking to Valerie, believing when he first met her that something was peculiar abouther. He later admitted that he became “anti-Valerie.” He did not like how she “streaked up thestaircase and swung on the iron banister” and he disliked that she never obeyed him and neveraccepted authority from anyone.34

Valerie became deeply unhappy about living with Red and her mother and started to rebel againstthem and against the various institutions and expectations she felt constrained her. She cut short hershoulder-length hair; she did not like long hair anymore. She “ran into her sister’s bedroom, dumpingher things all over the room. She went into the kitchen and turned the garbage pail upside down.”35

Spending time in the basement, she would have arguments with herself while she ironed.After Red moved in, Valerie persistently skipped junior high school. Her mother and Red had

placed her in Holy Cross Academy but Valerie assaulted one of her teachers—a nun—and ran awayfrom school, hitchhiking all the way to an aunt’s house in Baltimore. In response, her parents placedher in public school. There, she became the butt of pranks and jokes. She dressed and acted

differently from her peers; the other kids teased and taunted her, calling her names and isolating herfrom friendships and other forms of social acceptance.

Having such trouble in school, in the fall of 1950 at age fourteen, Valerie was sent away to aboarding school, where she stayed for about two years. At that school she started to explore hersexuality and had her first homosexual experiences. The school provided Valerie with improvedacademic opportunities and her grades rose; she excelled academically, started to identify as alesbian, and fell in love. Many years later, she told her publisher, Maurice Girodias, that she hadfallen in love only once in her life, with a girl she met at that boarding school.

Some accounts of this period hold that the so-called boarding school Valerie attended was actuallya school for pregnant (“wayward”) girls. We do know that Valerie became pregnant at age fourteenand gave birth, in 1951, to a daughter, Linda Moran.36 Following the birth, Valerie’s mother, Dorothy,raised Linda as Valerie’s sister in order to avoid social judgments from others about Valerie’sdeviance and promiscuity. Linda learned only recently that Valerie was her biological mother and nother sister. As Robert said, “[Linda] knows now. She learned that a few years ago. She was raisedwith her aunt [Judith] and thinking that her aunt was her older sister and she wasn’t. She is veryfriendly and very family oriented.”37

Valerie likely became pregnant shortly before enrolling at the boarding school. Throughout her lifeshe never spoke of having a daughter. In fact, only one of her friends from her time in New York—herpartner for four years, Louis Zwiren—knew about her having a child at all. The family kept this secretfor six decades. In later interviews with numerous psychologists, she denied having any childrenwhen disclosing her personal history.

The question of who fathered Linda Moran poses yet another series of open questions. Valerie hadstarted to explore her sexuality at the time, so she may have become involved with someone outsidethe home. Alternatively, the pregnancy may have resulted from her situation at home. She hadprobably already experienced sexual abuse at the hands of her biological father, and she neverclarified whether her stepfather also abused her: in her later interviews with psychologists, she didnot specify whether her biological father or stepfather abused her. If either Louis or Red did sexuallyabuse Valerie at that time, either of them may have fathered Linda, giving the family extra incentive tokeep the pregnancy quiet and to raise Linda as a sister to Valerie rather than as a daughter (though inthose days any out-of-wedlock pregnancy was scandalous enough to justify the family’s secrecy aboutit). None of these possibilities have been confirmed, but they do suggest a fuller picture of thestruggles Valerie underwent as a teenager.

To make matters more complicated, Valerie maintained ongoing contact with Louis throughout herlife, while she expressed near total rejection of Red. At age fifteen, after returning from boardingschool, she ran away from her mother and Red to go live with her father, and documents showcontinued contact with him until his death in 1971. Valerie sent Louis postcards and letters detailingher whereabouts and she fell into a deep depression around the time she would have heard news ofhis death.38

Valerie became pregnant again in the summer of 1952, shortly after her fifteenth birthday. Duringthat summer, she began a relationship with a sailor who was temporarily stationed near her homeafter returning from the Korean War. This much older man, already married and with three children,had no interest in maintaining a relationship with Valerie and did not want to help raise their child.Knowing she could not care for a baby alone, Valerie (at Dorothy and Red’s urging) agreed to givethe baby to the parents of a friend of the sailor, Sherrod and Louise Blackwell. The couple lived inSoutheast Washington, DC, and had money to support the child. Sherrod was as a high-ranking

military officer whose income “allowed Valerie to live comfortably in their middle-class home” at723 Atlantic Street.39

Dorothy and Red insisted on hiding Valerie’s second pregnancy also. School records from the timeof this pregnancy indicate that Valerie had a “home teacher at Anacostia High School across theDistrict of Columbia line.” Red later denied knowing anything about Valerie’s pregnancy. Judithrecalled, “It was not unusual, in the ’50s and early ’60s, for a young girl to disappear and thenreappear nine months later, spirit broken but youthful figure intact.”40 A family friend related that theexperience broke Valerie. “Since then,” claimed the friend, “she’s been pretty much against men. Oh,just say the whole deal was taken care of by the parents.”41 Judith remembered, “I was told thatValerie had a baby, he was adopted by a ‘decent’ family, and that there was to be no more discussionabout it. I doubt if anyone cared about Valerie’s feelings.”42

Valerie gave birth to her second child, David, on March 31, 1953. She lived on and off with theBlackwell family until she graduated from Oxon Hill High School the following year. According toDavid, Valerie’s family had made a quid pro quo deal with the Blackwells: they could keep David astheir own if they agreed to pay Valerie’s tuition at the University of Maryland, College Park. “Youmight say I was bought with money,” David wrote in a letter in 1996.43 Valerie visited David oftenuntil he turned four. She was “emotionally torn up over him.” The visits abruptly stopped and Davidnever saw his mother again. Emphasizing that Valerie did not pay for college through prostitution, butrather with the Blackwells’ financial assistance, David spoke about the lack of options unwedmothers faced during the early 1950s: “Valerie Solanas was an unwed mother in the 1950s. The wordCHOICE wasn’t in the vocabulary. She was a victim of society. In today’s society it was [sic] OK tohave children out of wedlock.”44

David discovered his identity as Valerie’s son in 1993 at the age of forty, five years after her death;prior to that, when he was in school, he’d wondered where he got his writing talent from. Thediscovery startled him: “Not knowing whether to believe it or not, he went to the National Gallery ofArt in Washington and asked to talk to somebody who knew about Andy Warhol. A young graduatewho had studied Warhol came out to see him. She showed him a book which had a picture of ValerieSolanas in it. ‘As soon as I saw her picture, I thought, That looks just like me. My whole worldstarted whirring. And then I read about her. I thought, this woman sounds so wacked out. . . . I foundout things that were unhappy to find out.’”45

When the 1996 film I Shot Andy Warhol was released, David contacted its producers and got intouch with Valerie’s sister and the extended family. He had spit on the movie poster, not wantingothers to remember Valerie the way the movie portrayed her. He felt most degraded by depictions ofher engagement in prostitution: “What hurts me is that she did it for $25, she did it for a cup of coffee.What upsets me is that she degraded herself.” Prior to 1996, Judith had not known what happened toher biological nephew named David and expressed reluctance about discovering his existence. “Judywas much more strained and reluctant to talk,” David recalled. “The whole subject of Valerie, letalone the discovery of her sister’s son, had almost been too much to cope with.” Judith’s daughter,Karen, however, expressed joy and amazement at the discovery: “I am so mad knowing there was acousin out there in the world and none of us had ever met him.”46

Currently, David works as a photographer and public relations consultant in Washington, DC. Hespecializes in photos of naked or barely clothed women floating underwater, describing the subjectmatter as “erotic, sensual, and sexual.” During our first phone conversation, David asked if I wantedhim to photograph me underwater, expressing that he found this photographic method exciting andconsidered this work his contribution to feminism. He also admitted, “I’m prolific just like my

mother. It kind of runs in my blood, you know? I’m cynical too, but I don’t have anything to beashamed of because I wear it like a badge. That’s where I get it.” He met his half sister, Linda Moran.“It was splendid. I got a sibling out of the deal. When all was said and done, we both know thatpeople want to know things about us, and pretty much everybody else was making money except us.”He added, “Listen, let me tell you, when you’re talking to me, you’re talking to Valerie, seriously.They threw away the mold when they made me.”47

David contacted the extended family in 2002 and visited Valerie’s cousins and aunts. “He looksreal, real like Valerie,” Valerie’s cousin Robert remarked about David. “He’s got that square jaw andeverything. He’s a photographer and does these photographs of models for these magazines. . . . Hedrove a semitrailer. He sold knives and carousel horses. He took pictures of beautiful girls.”48 (Robertreported that their interaction had fizzled since this first visit and that neither had initiated furthercontact.) David was pained by not having met Valerie before she died, lamenting, “I could havehelped her out. I think that if I’d ever met Valerie, I would have been the best medicine she could havehad.”49 He firmly believed that Valerie would have been proud of his erotic underwater photographybusiness: “I get it from Valerie. Valerie would be so proud; that’s one reason I would like to meet her—I wish. Because I’m not gay, but I like when I go underwater with women, you know, my legs areshaved, and I actually wear panties.”50

We cannot know the impact of the covert adoption of David on young Valerie or later in life. Shenever spoke about having her children taken away from her and almost always kept secret that she hadany children at all. Valerie, mother of two by age fifteen, in an era that shamed and silenced thosekind of stories, maybe even denied this reality to herself. Still, by giving her son away (or moreaccurately, through his being taken away), Valerie was offered educational opportunities andpotential for advancement that she may have otherwise been denied.

Valerie excelled in high school from ages fifteen to eighteen, though she had few friends. In hersenior year, she received all As with one exception: her physics class. She learned at this age to thinkmore and more for herself. She refused to conform to the gender norms of the day, changing her dress,style, and mannerisms to fit her temperament. At one point, her high school records indicated that shelived alone and held a job, though whether she had her own apartment or how she supported herself isunclear. A classmate remembered her as the brunt of jokes: “Out of the 87 of us, she was the odd one,definitely. . . . She was always decent, though she kept her distance. Except when provoked. Then shewould flare up.”51 One of the boys in her class put a tack on her chair. In response, Valerie turnedaround and hit the boy sitting behind her with her fists. She accidentally hit the wrong boy, but herclassmates never told her. Generally, the boys picked on Valerie, while the girls ignored her. Still,Valerie gave her classmates the impression that she was independent and could take care of herself.Beneath her high school yearbook picture ran the caption “Val. Brainpower and a lot of spirit.”52

As a teenager, Valerie had a steadfast determination about her educational future, setting her sightson college despite the many hurdles she faced. In her senior year at Oxon Hill High School, she askedthe principal, Michael Hernick, for a letter of recommendation, which he happily agreed to write andin which he declared, “I understand that Valerie Solanas needs a letter of recommendation. She is anexceptionally bright girl with lots of courage and determination. She lacks financial support at home,and is determined to get an education, and is proving that determination.” Valerie’s graduation recordnoted that she overcame her obstacles by “setting new goals.”53

COLLEGE AND GRADUATE SCHOOL (1954–1959)

Regarded by nearly everyone she met as fiercely intelligent and witty, Valerie left the Blackwellhome in 1954 and enrolled at the University of Maryland, College Park. To contextualize the climateof the university at the time, consider that Valerie’s entrance into the university occurred only threeyears after African Americans were first admitted there.54 Men far outnumbered women at the time,with so-called traditional values still guiding much of university life (with such values influencingclothing, attitudes about dating and sexuality, women’s compulsory “quest” for marriage, and the neartotal silence surrounding homosexuality).

Valerie blazed into university life, maintaining a B average throughout her undergraduate years. Asin her high school days, she lacked friends and needed financial help; “money was to become animportant element in her life.”55 Majoring in psychology (though beside her yearbook photo it says shereceived a BS in chemistry), she supported herself by working in the psychology department’sexperimental animal laboratory and, perhaps, by accepting financial assistance from the Blackwellfamily. Her college fees totaled less than a hundred dollars a year, and she made ends meet in avariety of ways to get herself through college.

Her professor and laboratory supervisor, Robert Brush, worked with her on experiments thatexamined active and passive learning behavior in rats and dogs. Brush specialized in animal learning,hormone-behavior interactions, endocrine physiology, and behavioral genetics. During his years at theUniversity of Maryland (1956–59), he worked primarily on “traumatic avoidance learning” andavoidance responses in dogs and rats.56 In the lab, he and Valerie investigated how animals avoidedaversive stimuli (such as electric shocks) to generate new learning; Valerie’s role would likely haveincluded observing and testing animal behavior, applying electric shocks, and recording responses.During these years, she started to formulate her theories of men’s genetic inferiority, ideas that wouldappear later in SCUM Manifesto. “The male,” she wrote, “is a biological accident: the Y (male) geneis an incomplete X (female) gene, that is, it has an incomplete set of chromosomes. In other words,the male is an incomplete female, a walking abortion, aborted at the gene stage.”57

Brush, who died in 2010, had much sympathy and affection for the iconoclastic Valerie, calling her“a very interesting, unusual student. I would use the words diffident and brash at the same time.” Hefound her bright and dedicated, if difficult. “She was rebellious as hell. . . . She had a chip on hershoulder a mile high. But she liked me, and I liked her. I had a warm spot for her—I felt she’d comeup the hard way.”58

Despite her rebelliousness, or perhaps because of it, Brush remembered Valerie as quite competentand diligent, as someone who “did a very proper job of handling all the research activities. Shestruck me at the time as being tangled up in personal problems, but I always thought she could workher way out of them. She never talked about it, but I got the impression that she [got] kicked around alittle bit. She was older, more mature, and had seen the seamier side of life. Even then she knew allthe four-letter words. . . . She did not have that fresh-from-the-tub, neatly-combed-hair appearance,but she was reasonably well put together.”59

Unlike other women of the late 1950s, Valerie did not wear the standard skirts and sweaters,preferring jeans and casual shoes. Brush noted this and said that he liked Valerie in part because hefelt that “she had the cards stacked against her.”60 In a phone call decades later, he expressed hisbelief that she had been sexually abused and commented that she lived at the bottom of the socialscale. When he heard about the 1968 shooting of Warhol over a decade after he had worked withValerie, he remembered saying, “Oh my God, poor Valerie,” and felt deep sympathy for the conditionsthat had brought her to that act.61

Valerie injected something new into the college environment. Unlike the women of her time, she

had a mix of rebelliousness, anger, irreverence, and volatility. Classmates found her funny, bright, andinteresting, qualities that helped to neutralize her more intense and aggressive character. Herclassmate Bob Gallagher, who later became a philosophy teacher, described her as profoundly smart,driven, studious, serious, and not interested in partying like other students. Jean Holroyd, apsychology major who admired Valerie, said, “We were bright, not rebellious. . . . She wasrebellious. . . . She’d been on her own a long time.”62 A male classmate commented that she was“straightforward, outspoken, didn’t strike me phony in any way. We shared a beer once.”63

Valerie earned a reputation of bouncing from place to place and being fanatically frugal. She oftenexpected friends to pay for her when they went out and rarely had any money of her own to contribute.She also had difficulty gauging the limits of others’ generosity and kindness and would expect more ofthe same if someone helped her out. This quality extended well into her later life; she frequentlyreturned to the same people for favors long after they had first welcomed her advances. This,combined with Valerie’s keen sense of personal revenge when slighted, caused problems for herduring her college years and beyond. For example, she raised hell in the girls’ dorm and once tipped acrate of bottles down a flight of stairs after a fight with another woman. “Ultimately, she was eitherasked to leave the dorm, or requested permission to leave and took her own apartment. It was more orless of a girls’ fight.”64 After she left the dorm and moved in with some classmates, problemscontinued. While she was living with three women classmates in a basement apartment, oneroommate offended her; in retaliation, Valerie “peed in the girl’s orange juice and put it back in thefridge.”65

University officials frequently required that Valerie attend psychological counseling followingthese various incidents; at this, Valerie balked and rebelled. She responded with anger and on oneoccasion overturned a table during a counseling session. She frequently received disciplinary actionand was once nearly expelled. Classmates considered her somehow older, hardened, cynical, anddifferent from most women her age. In stark contrast to her peers, Valerie cared little for disguisingher sexual interest in women yet occasionally slept with men. She was an out lesbian with anoccasional boyfriend, an identity that might be confusing even by today’s standards, let alone in theconservative mid-1950s collegiate culture. An anomaly and a misfit, Valerie preferred to cultivate herown intelligence and free-spiritedness over the conventional aspirations of women her age: “She wasan open lesbian at a time when most students were still agonizing over sex before marriage.”66

Despite the turmoil Valerie ignited in her peers, she excelled in school during her college years.She made Psi Chi, the university honor society in psychology, and became a frequent contributor toher school newspaper, the Diamondback. Cultivating a personality that emphasized humor, audacity,and an acute awareness of sexism, she wrote letters in response to what she perceived as the variousinjustices committed against women at the time. Though she worked as a feature reporter in 1956,writing tame pieces (such as brief snippets on donating blood and on the costs of a graduate diploma),she began to develop more direct attacks against patriarchy and sexism in her senior year, often usingsarcasm and alliteration to make her points.

Valerie declared in one of her letters, somewhat eerily, that she wrote with a pen “dipped inblood.”67 In a 1957 letter to the editor responding to a classmate’s claim that women seek collegedegrees only to find a suitable husband, Valerie wittily retorted:

Do I detect a touch of male arrogance and egotism in the astute report which Mr. Parr so thoughtfully prepared for us? Theinsipid innuendoes advanced by him are representative of the type of rationalizations indulged in by the typical, conceited,immature male. It is characteristic of males of this calibre [sic] to blithely believe that women are wasting away without them.Such a belief enhances their blatantly bloated egos.

Mr. Parr would have us believe by his childish chatter that coeds, although lusting for lads, are incapable of hauling in ahusband, due to the blasé indifference of their virile associates. He tries to convey an illusion of famished females being rejectedon all sides by the dashing, debonair men-about-campus. This is pure nausea! One only has to attend one of the many informaldances, and he will be impressed by the drove-like array of stags mincing mournfully about in quest of a winsome woman . . .

Mr. Parr’s cogent comment that “many coeds are not here to concentrate on the BA degree, but rather on the MRS degree,”suggests, to me, a wisp of wishful thinking. Can our sadistic statistician cite any “cruel evidence” to substantiate this stablingstatement? Apparently he conducted his informal survey solely among the “deadwood” of the female, collegiate populace. If Mr.Parr would broaden his associations to include the more serious-minded element of coedhood, I have no doubt that his conclusionswould be of an entirely different nature. But perhaps I’m asking too much, since it’s characteristic of everyone to choose asassociates those who are on a comparable intellectual level.

Certainly many girls expect to eventually commit matrimony (though not all, by far), but can we logically conclude from thisthat marriage is their primary purpose in coming to college? . . .

I’m afraid Mr. Parr’s puerile arguments are doomed to fizzlehood. Therefore, I suggest that the infantile Mr. Parr abandonletter writing and adopt a hobby more suitable to his status, such as throwing snow balls in front of the girls’ dorms or instigatingpanty raids.—Valerie Solanas

Through such letters, Valerie gained a reputation at her campus as “Maryland’s own little suffragette”(a nickname one of her classmates gave her), who used humor, satire, and anger to fight back against(what she termed) the “pure bigoted drivel” in the newspaper.

While she gained quite a following among unmarried women students at the university, many menrallied against her both in the newspaper and in one-on-one exchanges. One writer, Hank Walsh,whom Valerie had attacked, called her mode of thinking “Solanian interpreted psychology” and statedsarcastically, “Keep up the good work, Valerie, America needs you.” In a more astute observation ofValerie’s techniques of using sarcasm and advocating for women’s domination of men, one reader, J.L. Partello, responded in a letter to the editor, “It would appear that Miss Solanas establishes a pointonly so she can stab something or someone with it. Since Miss Solanas has, in the fashion of a femaleDon Quixote, chosen her own field of battle and her weapons to her own advantage, it would bedifficult, if desirable, to dislodge her from her present obnoxious station. . . . My only suggestion forothers on campus who might for some reason be interested, is for them to accept Valerie as a campusinstitution as they would the fountain in front of the math building, and otherwise, go their busy ways.”

Indeed, Valerie honed in on the power of sarcasm in many of these columns, even sharing herrhetorical strategies in a few of her letters. Foreshadowing later debates about the seriousness ofSCUM Manifesto, Valerie declared in a 1957 letter to the editor of the Diamondback, “The primarypurpose of satire is to sarcastically scorn human voices and follies.” Her classmates were puzzledabout whether her comments about smashing patriarchy and advocating matriarchy represented herbeliefs or sarcasm, something Valerie never directly confirmed one way or another. In oneDiamondback column, she wrote of women taking power: “The he-man has had his heyday and thefemmes are forging ahead. So stouthearts (if you are, indeed, stouthearts), recapture your kingdom!Charge onward in your covered wagons! Don’t be pulled to the pillars of Valerie’s temple! Takeheed! Take arms! Take Geritol!”

Early debates about the seriousness of Valerie’s ideas mimic almost precisely those that followedSCUM Manifesto nearly a decade later. Valerie always walked a thin line between humor andsarcasm, on the one hand, and seriousness and viciousness, on the other. Known by many asincredibly funny (even as a child), Valerie argued in the Diamondback for the merits of humor as atool to repudiate sexism: “Humor is not a body of logical statements which can be refuted or proved,but is rather a quality which appeals to a sense of ludicrous. Nor can humor, if it is truly good humor,be triumphed over by mere ‘massive education.’”68

Valerie honed in on the fundamental inequalities around her during her college years, furious that

women shouldered an undue burden of both housework and emotional labor in their relationships. Inone letter to the Diamondback, she sniped: “A case in point is his statement that ‘men come home atnight too tired to make decisions, so the wife willy-nilly has to.’ Of course his wife isn’t tired. Allshe did all day was chase after the kids, cook, wash clothes, shop, free-scrub floors, etc., whileharassed hubby warmed a seat in an air-conditioned office (in between coffee breaks). But he’s tootired to make decisions.” Valerie also used her psychology training to deconstruct the “naturalness” ofgender roles, telling readers, “It’s quite sure that were he to take a basic course in psychology, hewould realize that no one is naturally anything (where personality variables are concerned).”

With a penchant for recruiting others to her cause, Valerie submitted several letters that included alist of names, following her own, of women who “ardently upheld” her views in her letters to theDiamondback. In one of her final letters to the editor, titled “Final Thrust,” she concluded with apoem: “Therefore, it seems quite fitting/To dispense with the verbal hitting:/To lay our pens aside foranother fray/However, one point must emerge; From my quasi-sadistic purse—/The thrust of my penwas a must! Touche!”

Having cultivated a reputation for being an outspoken and sardonic advocate for women’s rights,Valerie was given a fifteen-minute slot on a local radio chat show during which callers would seekher characteristically sarcastic and irreverent advice for their “mainstream” problems about dating,marriage, money, friendship, social etiquette, and school. Valerie offered her trademark mix offerocity and humor to address women’s issues of the day, making up her answers on the fly. Her sister,Judith, laughed as she recalled, “People would actually take her answers seriously.”69

Despite Valerie’s general tendencies toward being alone, she did develop a few friendships duringcollege, primarily among the more avant-garde crowd. She had a few friends who hung out at PrinceGeorge’s restaurant to talk about philosophy and the meaning of life. These friends were artistic,poetic, and interested in jazz. A number of them were psychology majors. The group liked to readHerman Hesse and talk about politics and culture. One, Jean Holroyd, said Valerie had a very, veryhard life and did not develop necessary trust, always preferring to live on the fringe: “She hadtrenchant things to say. It came up that she was a lesbian. Even in our crowd Valerie was on theedge.”70

In her later years at college, Valerie rented a room in College Park nearby and, according to DickSpottiswood, a student she knew, worked her way through the rest of college as a prostitute andcocktail waitress. Dick felt intimidated by Valerie, describing her as having a brutal honesty abouther. She told him stories about the sexual abuse she had experienced and the many difficult events thatshe had confronted. In an interview he showed mixed emotions, recalling that one summer Valerie hadsuggested that he come up to Atlantic City with her to find work as a waiter while she worked as acocktail waitress and turned tricks: “Whenever possible, she would get her tricks drunk and roll them[steal from them].”71 (Valerie later told psychiatrists that she made money in college throughprostitution while living a “homosexual life for enjoyment.”72) One night when she suggested that sheand Dick have sex, he was somewhat alarmed, as “she was someone I feared.”73 He was at her place;she was cooking on a little hot plate and suddenly asked, “How would you like to spend the nightwith me?” Somewhat nervously, he replied, “Valerie, I thought you liked girls,” to which sheresponded, “Everyone likes a change once in a while.” It was, he said, a clinical experience.74

In her push-pull relationships with her male friends, Valerie expressed a deep-seated ambivalencetoward the men in her life. Valerie once asked Dick to make an X-rated movie (“something strictlypornographic”) and would occasionally wear makeup around him. “She looked feminine andvulnerable. She looked beautiful,” he recalled and recounted that Valerie led two separate lives—one

as a “working girl” and the other as a scholar. On campus, she would “plunge into her academicwork.” His relationship with Valerie was marked by both her intense neediness and her generosity. “Ifshe could do you a favor she would,” he remarked. Still, if you helped her once, she often came backfor more. When Dick tried to cut back on helping her, she perceived this as a slight and retreatedcompletely, never asking him for anything again.75

Valerie’s sexual escapades threatened and confused people and often got her into trouble. Familymembers wondered whether Valerie should be placed in a mental hospital for “oversexed women,”because she used sex for personal advancement and money-making. “She just enjoyed sex and usingsex as a means to an end,” her cousin Robert said.76 Her romantic entanglements, however, were evenmore difficult to decipher.

Her relationships with men during this time may have led to a brief, opportunistic marriage. Whileliving in College Park, she met and took classes with a Greek classmate, Paul Apostolides, whowanted to stay in the country and become a US citizen. “He discovered that if you married anAmerican citizen, back then you became an American citizen automatically, so she said, ‘Okay, we’llget married,’” Robert reported. The marriage lasted six months, after which time Apostolides went onhis way and she went on hers and they divorced. “She may have gotten paid for it,” her cousin said.“Knowing her she probably got something out of it. That was a very short marriage for the time.”77

Valerie eventually graduated from the University of Maryland at College Park in 1958 with a majorin psychology. Interested in pursuing a career in evolutionary and biological psychology, she appliedand gained admission to the master’s program in psychology at the University of Minnesota that sameyear. Entering the program in the fall of 1958, she expected to find opportunities for continuededucational advancement and exploration. Instead, she faced quite the opposite: the glass ceiling andother forms of gender bias; she was one of only a few women to enter her graduate program. Sheconcluded that all the grants and scholarships went to women, while all the jobs, research money, andresources went to men. Women faced the continual barrier of not being able to advance within thefield, something Valerie resented. She wanted and expected more from her graduate education. Nolonger sheltered by her mutually affectionate relationship with Robert Brush, she faced the harshreality that she could not advance professionally as a female psychologist. “Valerie Solanasunderstood how the deck was stacked against any female who wanted something other than marriageand motherhood,” the reporter Judith Coburn later wrote.78

In the spring 1959 semester, Valerie racked up four As and two Bs, and, adding to her primaryinterest in psychology, declared a graduate minor in philosophy. She hung on for two semesters as agraduate student, earnestly trying to find her way in a system that favored men and their experiences.Then, after nearly a year in graduate school, she claimed she “got bored,” abruptly dropped out ofschool, and disappeared.

Valerie’s sister, Judith, believes that Valerie’s withdrawal from graduate school signaled that“something had gone terribly wrong.”79 After dropping out of the University of Minnesota, Valeriedrifted through various parts of the country and lived with several men, none of whom she liked. Withhitchhiking as her means of transport, she made a jagged trip from Minnesota to California. From fall1959 to spring 1960, she roamed around, lost and trying to find her way.

She eventually arrived in Berkeley in the summer of 1960 and spent time at the university, hangingout with people and taking a few classes there. While visiting California, still spinning from herdeparture from graduate school, her recent excursions throughout the country, and the anger she feltbubbling up toward men and their privilege, she started to ruminate on what would become her mostfamous work: SCUM Manifesto. Honing in on her love of writing, she also laid plans for a play.

Valerie had not yet found a place where she belonged. Traveling back again across the country, shehitchhiked her way to New Jersey, where she attended another graduate program (the exact school isstill unknown) for a period of at least a year (1961–62). Many years later, she told a good friend thatduring that period in New Jersey, on weekends and school breaks she would periodically leaveschool and take the bus to Manhattan and go to Greenwich Village. On discovering the Village, shehad fallen in love with its atmosphere and vowed to live there one day. In stark contrast to therelatively mellow cities of her childhood and adolescence, New York offered something far morecompelling: freedom to express herself, openness to differences in sexual identities, and the chaotictangle of modern urban life. Greenwich Village symbolized for Valerie the center of a new universe:“Women were holding hands and men were holding hands and she liked that. She wanted to live inNew York City one day. It’s where she’s lived, more or less.”80

Valerie’s spirits brightened in these years, and she would take trips home to tell family about herexperiences venturing into New York City. Robert said, “When you would sit down and talk with her,she seemed to know a lot about everything. When it came to politics and social behavior and the waypeople acted, she knew a lot about that and it was absolutely accurate and everything. I found itfascinating.”81 Judith’s husband, Ramon, similarly recalled, “I loved listening to Valerie! I’d stay uphalf the night. You didn’t talk, you listened to her theories. She read everything. Her thinking was farin advance of everyone. She talked about what she called the Mob (GE, RCA, all the giantcorporations that were taking over the media—later in the ’60s we called it the System) and howsoon they’d control all the information. Nobody was talking about that then. And about men. She hadour number!”82

EARLY DAYS IN NEW YORK (1962–1966)While living in New Jersey and commuting into New York for day trips, Valerie made a decision thatwould forever change her life: she was determined to become a writer. Sometime around 1960–61,she started writing her play, Up Your Ass, a gender-bending romp about a character named Bongi andthe “degenerates” she encounters along her way. Valerie’s energy, wit, sarcasm, and humor now metwith her increasing exposure to alternative ways of living and thinking—bohemia, the buddingcounterculture of Greenwich Village, and early traces of a queer community. New York hadtransformed her professional interests—while only a few years earlier she had wanted to pursue adegree working in evolutionary and biological psychology, she now saw herself as a playwright andprovocateur.

Valerie longed to move to New York City permanently but could not yet afford it. Visiting there, theoutcast of outcasts finally felt at least a marginal sense of belonging. In the summer of 1962, shemoved to Manhattan, finding lodging at a women’s residence hotel in a brownstone near the river onthe Upper West Side. She listed on a postcard to her father a return address of 350 West Eighty-EighthStreet. Though she did not yet live in Greenwich Village, she was exuberant about her move. On June28, 1962, she sent a postcard to her father, Louis, and his wife, Kay, to 2503 Fourteenth StreetNortheast in Washington, DC, that read:

Dear Pop + Kay,I have a really nice room in a girls’ residence hotel. Only 12/wk + all the hotel services—24hr switchboard service, etc. I wasgoing to live in the Village, but it’s too expensive.

There’s a lot of action here in N.Y.; the town really swings. I should’ve moved here long ago.I have a part-time job in a coffee house in the Village. I’m making just enough to live.

I showed my uncompleted play to the director of Sheridan Square Theater (off-Broadway) to get an opinion. He said it has alot of potential + he encouraged me to finish. I hope to finish in a month or two.

Give my regards to everybody. I’ll write again when I have something interesting to say. Love, Val

In the early 1960s, Sheridan Square Theater was known as the “wrong place for the right people” andattracted some of the more brilliant and edgy characters of the day—jazz musicians, actors, and thoseseeking underground gay nightclubs. That Valerie sought it out as her first choice suggests that she hada good sense of a potential audience from quite early on in the writing process. She worked tirelesslyon Up Your Ass, spending time waitressing, writing, and working toward her goal of saving enoughmoney to live in the Village. Whether she engaged in prostitution during these years remains aquestion, as waitressing jobs in New York then would probably have allowed her to eke out justenough to live on, as she mentioned to her father. No other documents exist to confirm her residence,activities, or movements from this period.

Valerie spent the next three years—from 1962 to 1965—working, writing, and living in and aroundGreenwich Village. Carrying around her heavy, old manual typewriter, she fired off her missives asshe moved from place to place: “From one temporary crash pad to the next, from the Hotel Earle tothe Chelsea Hotel, she always carted it along, and when she had no home, she kept it in a storagelocker.”83 Though she may have finished Up Your Ass earlier, she did not register it with the Library ofCongress copyright office until 1965.

By then, Valerie had moved to the Hotel Earle, just off Washington Square Park, which offered aseparate wing for drag queens and lesbians. Still traveling alone most of the time, she ate most of hermeals at the Twenty-Third Street Automat, which was cheap and allowed her to pass the time andspark up random conversations with fellow patrons. More confident, struggling for money, andconnected more intensely with the countercultural mecca of the Village, Valerie in 1965 had finishedUp Your Ass and was roaming the streets as a tragicomic street figure. Mary Harron, who wrote anddirected the film I Shot Andy Warhol, based on Valerie’s life, wrote in the introduction to the script,“Her days were spent drifting, panhandling on street corners, passing the afternoon over a cup ofcoffee in a cheap restaurant. . . . When she couldn’t collect enough money panhandling, she would turntricks.” Harron continued on this theme in personal notes from around 1992, painting a vivid portraitof Valerie’s life in those days. “A picture of her life in cheap hotels, days spent drifting. . . . I see herlying on the bed in a room filled with old newspapers and piles of manuscripts, panhandling on streetcorners, cheap restaurants, automats. She liked to hang out, to ‘shoot the shit.’ In those days there wassuch a thing as bohemia—a true division between hip and straight, between downtown and uptown—but Valerie’s world was on the far margins, isolated even from bohemia.”

In a near-constant struggle to make ends meet and to feed herself, Valerie became a pro at bummingcigarettes, talking others into buying her a quick meal, and selling conversation. She often missedrent. And in late 1965 she was kicked out of the Hotel Earle for lack of payment and decided to movefor a brief time to a scummy welfare hotel, the Village Plaza Hotel, at 79 Washington Place.84 Next shelived in room 606 at the infamous Chelsea Hotel, at 222 West Twenty-Third Street, known as aresidence for people on the fringe. The Chelsea has one of the most colorful histories of any hotel inthe world. The owner, who city officials forced out in 2007, had what he called a “seventh sense” forfame, and would allow those he believed would become famous to default on their rent for longperiods. The hotel would later house other budding writers and artists, among them Bob Dylan, AllenGinsberg, Janis Joplin, Patti Smith, Iggy Pop, and Leonard Cohen. Dylan Thomas died of pneumoniathere on November 9, 1953, and Nancy Spungen, girlfriend of the Sex Pistols’ Sid Vicious, was foundstabbed to death in the Chelsea on October 12, 1978.

EARLY WRITINGSThose who knew Valerie well all agreed that her primary identity was that of a writer. In a 1991interview with Rowan Gaither, Valerie’s mother remarked that Valerie “fancied herself a writer”;never was this more true than during Valerie’s early years in Greenwich Village. She wrote her threeprimary works—Up Your Ass, SCUM Manifesto, and her piece for Cavalier magazine—between1962 and 1967. Valerie’s productivity, interest in writing, and spot-on social commentaries flourishedduring these years.

“A Young Girl’s Primer”In July 1966, Valerie published an article in Cavalier magazine titled, “A Young Girl’s Primer, or

How to Attain the Leisure Class.” At that time, Cavalier published articles and photos similar tothose in the more mainstream Playboy magazine, combining tastefully nude photos of celebrities andmodels with articles geared toward middle-aged men. (When I bought a stack of them in 2011, theseller on eBay was advertising them by emphasizing that one had “pictures of Julie Christy’snipples.”) Valerie’s piece appeared in Cavalier with an alternative title: “For 2c: Pain, The SurvivalGame Gets Pretty Ugly.”85 In one of many sexist trivializations and mockeries of Valerie’s writing, thetable of contents listed her article with a line by the Cavalier editors that said, glibly, “How a niceyoung lady can survive in the city: The easiest way to be comfortable is flat on your back.”

Confident, funny, and brash, the piece details the sexual pursuits of a no-nonsense city girl whocasually makes money selling conversation and sex in order to free up time to write and pursue herown interests. She may indeed be “flat on her back” in this story, but not without a heavy dose of wit,snarkiness, and vengeance. As Harron wrote, “The persona Valerie adopts here—confident, cool,swinging, in charge—is an idealized self, the version of herself she most wanted to be.”86

The article showcases Valerie’s fast-paced movements through Manhattan, following the writerthrough a hectic day of miniature rejections and small triumphs, idle time and outright hustling, withbiting humor thrown in for good measure. In one such humorous reversal, Valerie wrote of a fellowpanhandler, “Here comes that old derelict: ‘Say, Miss, could you help me out? All I need’s anotherseven cents and I can get me a drink.’ ‘You lying mother, you don’t want a drink; you’re collectingmoney for mutual funds.’”87

“Primer” takes pleasure in small deceptions, wordplays, and power trips; Valerie confidentlytricks men into giving her money, only to eventually tell them they are worthless. For example, shewrites of one man who is soliciting information about prostitutes: “Tell me where there’s some girlsand I’ll give you a dollar.” “Okay, give me the dollar.” “Here.” “There’s girls all over the street. Seeya.”

She constructs shoplifting as patriotic, pokes fun at socialists, and views time in terms of financialvalue: “I’ll grab a listen. A Socialist. I listen a while, then leave, continuing to do my bit towardbringing about socialism by remaining off the labor market. But first a few little acquisitions from the5&10, since it’s right here. I enter, considering what more I, as a woman, can do for my country—shoplift.” She jokes and heckles, talking about time as valuable for a writer trying to make it in NewYork City. She tells a man who wants to chat, “Look, my time’s valuable. Standing here talking toyou’ll cost me four-fifty an hour,” or later, “That’s conversation. I charge six bucks an hour for that”(76).

In this piece, Valerie floats above any negative ramifications of the hard life, choosing instead apersona filled with self-confidence, amusement, and smarts. After convincing one man to pay her sixdollars for an hour’s worth of conversation over dinner, she adds, “For an additional four bucks I do

the illustrations on the napkin.” Always keenly ready for antagonistic jokes at the expense of the“nice, middle-class lady, one of Betty Friedan’s ‘privileged, educated girls’” she so despised, shewrites of panhandling, “This job offers broad opportunity for travel—around and around and aroundthe block. And to think—some girls settle for Europe.” When she encounters a woman handingintellectual fliers to men only, Valerie fires back, “She’s been programmed beautifully” (76).

A foretaste of Valerie’s later writings in SCUM Manifesto appear, too, as she ponders her lot inlife: “A few days off, then back to work. I pan around, wondering how I can help rid the world ofwar, money and girls who hand pamphlets to men only. Salvation won’t stem from nice, middle-classladies pushing for Mr. Cole” (77). The article foreshadows Valerie’s more forceful arguments in hermanifesto, where “nice girls” must be discarded, men (including those who want her to walk on themwith golf shoes, stilettos, and cowboy boots) know they are worthless, and women take matters intotheir own hands.

Up Your Ass (1965)Valerie’s notorious play, Up Your Ass, has received far more attention for its alleged role in the

Andy Warhol shootings than it has for its artistic merits. That said, the play represents one of only afew finished works (albeit unpublished) created by Valerie during this time and one that wouldfatefully bring her into Andy Warhol’s orbit a few years later. The play provides another window intoa version of Valerie she wanted to be: forceful, sarcastic, in charge, playful, eccentric, grandiose, andfunny. Technically titled Up Your Ass or From the Cradle to the Boat or The Big Suck or Up fromthe Slime, the play showcases Valerie’s interest in theorizing and writing from the social gutter.About the play’s title, she joked, “Just in case the play should ever become a Broadway smash hit, atleast there would be something acceptable to put on the theater marquee.”88 Filled with cursing,playful linguistic romps (much like her work in the Diamondback years earlier), and hair-raisinglyirreverent characters, Up Your Ass was the fictional companion to the later SCUM Manifesto.

In the full title of the play, Valerie was referencing the notion that if women rock the cradle (that is,care for children), they won’t be rocking the boat, changing the world, causing trouble, wreakinghavoc. The play features a hustler-panhandler heroine, Bongi Perez, and a variety of other hyper-stereotyped yet funky characters: the unconscious woman, the john, the Christian fanatic, and the dragqueen. Reporter Judith Coburn wrote of Up Your Ass:

Putting forward a veritable clusterfuck of oddball characters, Up Your Ass features: Alvin, the dopey Hugh Hefnerite with hisrevolving bed; Ginger, the Cosmo career gal getting ahead and getting even by “lapping up shit”; Spade Cat, the black smoothiewho gets all the girls; White Cat, the loser who never gets any; Mrs. Arthur, the sex-obsessed wife and homicidal mother; herpenis-crazed kid known only as “The Boy”; Russell, the classic misogynist bore; and then, the ever-present Solanas character, thesanctimonious but wacko family counselor. . . . There’s also Miss Collins and Scheherazade, two over-the-top drag queens,sendups both of Warhol’s Candy Darlings and the tiresome claque of “superstars” like Ultra Violet. . . . At the play’s center isValerie’s alter ego, Bongi Perez, a street-smart lesbian hustler and know-it-all who is as sex obsessed as everyone else and whoputs out for her tricks but not for lovers.89

With vaudeville-like sequences of events, often flopping wildly between Bongi’s internalnarratives and her interactions with those she meets on the street, Up Your Ass harnesses the fullpower of Valerie’s forcefulness and wit. The play includes Bongi’s selling her body for cash, fiftybucks for “five minutes with a three-quarter minute intermission,” ten bucks more for her to “sneer,curse, and talk dirty.” She goes on: “Then there’s my hundred-dollar special, in which, clothed only ina diving helmet and storm troop boots, I come charging in, shrieking filthy songs at the top of mylungs.” She eventually convinces her john to follow her into an alley for a quick twenty-five-dollar

hand job. Prostituting and hustling, Bongi spouts rhetoric that would later appear in SCUMManifesto: “All roads lead to Rome, and all a man’s nerve endings lead to his dick. . . . You might aswell resign yourself: eventually the expression ‘female of the species’ will be a redundancy.”90

Reviewing the play from its February 2001 run at PS 122 Theater in New York, New York in theVillage Voice, Alisa Solomon wrote: “The play centers on a wisecracking, trick-turning, thoroughlymisanthropic dyke called Bongi . . . [who] banters with drag queens (one yearns to be a lesbian:‘Then I could be the cake and eat it too’). She entreats—and ill treats—clientele (letting a john buyher dinner, she tells him, ‘I’m gonna help you fulfill yourself as a man’).”91 Up Your Ass lets no one offthe hook, taking jabs at masculinity and femininity and reserving as much humorous hostility forDaddy’s girls as it does for exploitative hetero men. Taking aim, Valerie portrays a well-heeledsocialite gobbling up a turd because, Bongi says, “everyone knows that men have much more respectfor women who are good at lapping up shit.”

As a sample of the dialogue in Up Your Ass, Bongi says, “Oh, my, but aren’t we the high class ass.You got a twat by Dior?” Later, a character named Spade Cat says, “That’s a mighty fine ass. Andyours ain’t at all bad. You may consider that a high compliment, being I’m a connoisseur of asses.There’s nothing dearer to my heart than a big, soft, fat ass.” Bongi replies, “Because it matches yourbig, soft, fat head?” Bongi proceeds to have dinner with a man she despises and recounts her“engaging memories” of stomping up and down on a man’s chest and breaking the glasses he wore inhis shirt pocket. “I’ll take it you’ll do just about anything,” the man says. “Well, nothing too repulsive—I never kiss men.” (He later admits, “I have quite a light, playful streak in me that I keep sharpenedup by a faithful reading of the more zestful men’s magazines—Tee-Hee, Giggle, Titter, Lust, Drool,Slobber, and, just for thoroughness, Lech.”)92

In a later scene, she talks to a woman named Ginger, who enjoys “lapping up turd,” and who says,“We both agreed that a woman with any kind of spunk and character at all doesn’t have to choosebetween marriage and a career; she can combine them. It’s tricky, but it can be done.” Bongi retorts,“What’s even trickier yet is to combine no marriage with no career.” Ginger goes on to pridefully tellBongi she has always been a rebel; on her refusal to pick up her toys as a child, she says, “I’d stampmy foot and say ‘No!’ twice before picking them up. Oh, I was a mean one. My latest rebellion is mychildhood religion; I’ve just rebelled against that. I used to be a High Episcopalian.” “What’re younow?” “Low Episcopalian. Do you know they’re even days when I doubt the Trinity?” “You meanMen, Money, and Fucking?” “No, Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. What religion do you belong to?” “Iused to belong to the Catholic, but I wrote it off when they started talking about demoting Mary” (11).

Bongi has dinner with Ginger and her “boyfriend,” Russell, which leads to some banter betweenthem. When Russell blows out a match Bongi has lit for her cigarette, she yells, “You dumb ass!What’d you blow my match out for?” “I was only trying to be a gentleman. I wanted to light it foryou.” “Russell’s a perfect gentleman at all times,” Ginger says. “You mean he fucks with his necktieon?” Bongi quips. After Bongi rants at them for the unnecessary gesture, Ginger snidely says, “Shehas penis envy. You should see an analyst. I’d recommend mine, Dr. Aba Gazavez, a truly remarkableman. You’ve probably heard of him; he’s the famed authority on women and the leading exponent ofthe doctrine that labor pains feel good.”

The end of the play features a teacher from a Creative Homemaking class discussing the joys ofbecoming a homemaker: “Integrate your sex life with baby bottle washing: wait until hubby’s gettingready to take his bath; then, quick, soap up the baby bottle brush, working it up into a nice foamylather; then when hubby’s all nicely naked and is leaning over to test his bath water, you come te-e-a-a-r-r-ing in . . . (demonstrating.) . . . r-a-a-m-m-ing the brush right up his asshole. So, you see, Girls,

marriage really can be fun” (14–15, 23–24).Ginger later asks, “Tell me, what must a woman do to seduce a man?” “Exist in his presence,”

Bongi replies. “Come on, now; there’s far more to it than that.” “Well, if you’re in a really big hurry,you can try walking around with your fly open.” “Why don’t you run for president?” asks the AlleyCat. Bongi replies, “Nah, I like to think big.” Lecturing Russell on the inevitable demise of men,Bongi says, “You may as well resign yourself: eventually the expression ‘female of the species’ll be aredundancy.” Russell responds, “You don’t know what a female is, you desexed monstrosity.” Bongisnipes back, “Quite the contrary, I’m so female I’m subversive.” “Well I for one wouldn’t make loveto you for a million dollars.” “Maybe not, but you’d do it for nothing” (16–18).

In her final conversation in the play, Bongi speaks to a woman named Arthur who hates herhusband and endures bad sex with him. Arthur muses, “Sure, I’d like to do something radical anddaring—like think, but you have to make a few concessions, if you want to live in society, so I havesex and collect antiques; I kinda like musty things from out of the past.” “You mean like men,” Bongireplies. “You might say that; men do have a naturey aura about them; when they’re around Fuck is inthe air; it’s overpowering; it carries you away with it, sucks you right up.” Bongi says, “Very fuckyworld we live in. My only consolation’s that I’m me—vivacious, dynamic, single, and queer. . . . Youknow what really flips me? Real low-down, funky broads, nasty, bitchy hotshits, the kind that whenshe enters a room it’s like a blinding flash, announcing her presence to the world, real brazen andpublic. If you ever run across any broads look like neon lights, send ’em my way” (27–28).

Valerie took immense pride in Up Your Ass. This document held much of her identity as a writer,artist, and provocateur. She spent many years drafting and editing the play (recall that she firstshowed it to a director in 1962), refining words and story lines, making sure the dialogue flowedsmoothly. In the 1967 copy of Up Your Ass, retained in the late 1990s by the Andy Warhol Museum,recovered from a silver-painted trunk belonging to Billy Name, Valerie’s handwritten correctionsappeared throughout the manuscript.93 Small instructions of where a character should hold her glasses(“he had his glasses in his shirt pocket”) and careful spelling error corrections (“Hungers” to“Hunters”) appear throughout this copy. Valerie’s original 1965 copyrighted version—a carbon copyof the hand-typed, sixty-page version placed with the Library of Congress collections—includednumerous typographical errors carefully corrected in her hand using white tape and blue ink. Valeriehad seen Up Your Ass through years of corrections and refinements and had even producedmimeographed copies of the play in 1967 to sell at several bookstores: Eighth Street Bookshop,Sheridan Square Paperback Corner, Underground Uplift Unlimited, Tompkins Square Book Store, andEast Side Book Store.94

Valerie had tried to sell her play to alleviate her constant cash flow problem, printing anadvertisement in the Village Voice on October 13, 1966, that put a relatively high price on the play:

photo offset copies of“UP FROM THE SLIME”by Valerie Solanasare now available at$10 per copy222 W. 23rd St, Room 606

Valerie wanted to find an audience, to revel in the play’s subversive, over-the-top campiness; still,the price suggests a seriousness in how Valerie circulated the play. A ten-dollar investment in 1966from someone mail-ordering Up Your Ass signified real interest in the work.

Valerie had eyed Andy Warhol quite early on as someone who would perhaps show interest in

producing the play (though her reproducing copies of the play to raise money contradicts the popularassumption that Andy had her only copy). Valerie sent him a copy (before she personally knew him)sometime in late 1965, just after she copyrighted the play. In a letter to him dated February 9, 1966,she wrote, “Dear Andy, Would you please return my script, Up Your Ass, that I left with you sometime ago? Thanks. Valerie Solanas.”95 Because Andy refused to produce Up Your Ass (and lost hiscopy), and because other producers found it so vulgar and pornographic that they could not or wouldnot produce it, reviews of the work began only after the 2000 staging (the play’s first)—notably set tothe music of ABBA and featuring an all-female cast—at the George Coates Theater in San Francisco.(George Coates learned of the play only after his assistant director, Eddy Falconer, saw the film IShot Andy Warhol and suggested that they stage the play in San Francisco as a revolt against the strict“decency” clause recently implemented by the National Endowment for the Arts.)96

Like SCUM Manifesto, the play still retained a timely and relevant feel, reaching much further thanmost contemporary plays in its depiction of a gender-bending dystopia. Nearly forty years after itsinception, Up Your Ass provoked postmodern anxiety in its audiences and reviewers. As AlisaSolomon stated in her Voice review, “What astonishes more is the ahead-of-its-time critique ofgender roles and sexual mores embedded in the jollity. Queer theory has nothing on the boundary-smashing glee of Solanas’s dystopia, where the two-sex system is packed off to the junkyard. Thinkearly Charles Ludlam infused with feminism, glitter drag mixed into the Five Lesbian Brothers.”97

As it does with many writers, the act of writing may have transported Valerie—howevertemporarily—away from the conditions of her life. The gender dystopia found in Up Your Assmimicked her wildly fluid approach to her own sexual identity. Always hard to pin down, she neverfully identified as a lesbian but adamantly refused to identify as heterosexual. Bongi allowed her toexist in an as-yet-undefined other space. Through Up Your Ass and “Primer,” Valerie could circulatein New York City as a bright, ambitious, clever, wisecracking woman, able to thrive whilepanhandling, engaging in prostitution, “shooting the shit,” and writing. This version of herself found away to survive that did not overly compromise her: “I finally hit upon an excellent-payingoccupation,” she joked in “Primer,” “challenging to the ingenuity, dealing on one’s own terms withpeople and affording independence, flexible hours, great stability and, most important, a large amountof leisure time.”98 This version of Valerie may have stood in stark contrast to her coping with daysfilled with “sordid rooms, inadequate food, and performing blow jobs to pay rent. . . . There weretimes when Valerie slept on rooftops and ate what was left on other peoples’ plates at the Automat.”99

Valerie lived a hard life, and it would only become harder over the next two decades.Her good friend Jeremiah Newton, a filmmaker and expert on countercultural New York, could not

fully resolve the contradictions of her existence:I felt bad for Valerie. She was so intelligent and she told me she would have sex with men and she hated men. I said, “How couldyou do something you don’t really like?” She said, “You have to do things for money.” Well, I thought that’s a bad thing to do. Shedid it occasionally for money, brought people up on the roof of the Chelsea Hotel. I would never do anything for money that Ididn’t want to do. I thought as smart as she was, she was stupid to do that, to have men touch her. It didn’t make sense to me. Itwas irrational. She was still rational, but that was irrational. You don’t do something you so hate doing for money.”100

Valerie’s family seemed hesitant to admit that Valerie prostituted herself for money; to them shetalked incessantly about her writings and never about how she actually survived on next to nothing.Robert framed this as her response to her limited options: “Valerie probably worked as a prostitute. Ifshe needed a place to stay, or if she needed money for cigarettes or food, she would prostitute herself.I don’t think she did it on a regular basis. If she had sold her play properly or sold her book properly,she wouldn’t have had to do this to make money. Back then they didn’t have a lot of homeless shelters

or social workers so you did what you needed to do for the money. If she prostituted herself, it wasfor that night, not as a regular hobby or career.”

However difficult her financial and psychological condition, Valerie kept in contact with herfamily during those years and would visit her father, mother, aunts, uncles, and cousins whenever shecould scrape together enough money to travel. She went home for Christmas most years, eager torevel in home cooking and to tell stories about New York and her life as a writer. The family wasdivided generationally about whether to dismiss Valerie as a kook or see her as fascinating: “Wefound her to be like one of those characters that we could tell stories about,” Robert said. “The kidsall liked to sit around and listen. The older generation thought she should be locked up and didn’tunderstand it.” Talkative, hyper, and hungry, she told stories about New York over heaping plates ofspaghetti. “All she ever wanted to eat when she came down here was spaghetti. My mother wouldmake her roast beef and gravy or anything and she’d say, ‘Don’t you have any spaghetti?’ and mymother would say, ‘All right, we’ll make you some spaghetti.’ As long as she had spaghetti, she didn’tcare.”101 (Valerie is said to have had a voracious appetite: “I was not halfway through my plate ofChinese vegetables, but she had already finished her steak, French fries, and salad.”)102

Given the numerous accounts of her wolfing down food when it was available and her nearlyconstant requests to move in with almost anyone who would listen, it is evident that Valerie lived onthe edge: she was often hungry (as are most people who panhandle for a living) and rarely had anystability in where she slept or lived. She was known for asking people if she could live with themeven if she loathed them. The Chelsea Hotel evicted her several times, in summer 1967, in fall 1967,and in early 1968. Certainly, Valerie saw men as having unfair access to money, resources, andpower. She keenly sensed the inequities building around her in late 1966 and early 1967. Bouncingfrom place to place, meal to meal, she had little shame about asking for a place to live, a hot meal, ora “piece of the action.” She had work to do, things to say, pieces to write. She needed a place to land.During an interview with the journalist Robert Marmorstein, she asked if he would let her stay withhim:

“I’ll keep out of your way. I wouldn’t make a bad looking roommate either, would I?”“No, you wouldn’t, but why me? I’m flattered. You hardly know me.”“You’ve got an apartment. That’s all I need to know about you. I’ve got lots of work to get out and no place to stay. It’d just

be for a couple of months.”“I thought you had an apartment.”“I’m staying with some old dame. But she gets on my nerves. She’s square. Doesn’t know which end is up. Can’t get used to

my hours. I’ve got to get out of there.”“Your manifesto says that a good SCUM girl would just as soon stick a shiv into a man’s back as look at him. How could I feel

safe with you in my apartment?”“Look, I’m a revolutionary, not a nut. That kind of thing takes organization. I’m practical, not stupid. We’re years away from

that sort of thing. I’m not ending up in some fink jail.”“I’m sorry. But I really have no room. How about the girls you have in SCUM? Couldn’t you stay with any of them?”“They’re all as bad off as I am. All the ones I know are barely scrounging out places themselves. Christ, the shit you have to

go through in this world just to survive.”103

SHOOTINGSCUM, Shots, and Stupidstars 1967–1968

Let us burst into history, forcing it by our invasion into universality for the first time. Let us start fighting; and if we’ve noother arms, the waiting knife’s enough.

—Jean-Paul Sartre, preface to Franz Fanon, Wretched of the Earth

RARELY HAS HISTORY SEEN A MORE CURIOUS COUPLING than Andy Warhol and Valerie Solanas. Bothmisfits and outcasts, genderqueers and nonconformists, they operated in their own orbit and, in doingso, left an indelible mark on the world. Despite their connection, to frame the significance ofValerie’s life around her shooting of Andy would minimize her merits as an author and her broaderintentions as a revolutionary. Too often when SCUM Manifesto is cited as her major achievement, theWarhol shooting is never far behind. When the shooting of 1968 is given as Valerie’s fifteen minutesof fame, SCUM Manifesto serves as its footnote. This pairing resolves any form of contradiction thatmay arise when comparing her life and work, as the contradictions between the manifesto andValerie’s life, between theory/satire and practice, are masked by the overly reductive formulation ofAndy Warhol shooting equals SCUM Manifesto in practice.1

In many ways, her relationship with Andy merely formed a center point for many forces movingthrough Valerie’s life at the time: her growing anger toward men, particularly men with power,prestige, and wealth; her interest in self-promotion and fame, particularly as a writer; her emergingconnection with the avant-garde, queer, and drag scene in New York; her wobbly mental health andthe intensifying deterioration in her rational thinking; and the classic contradiction between her desirefor acceptance and her outright rejection of all organized groups or movements. Andy tapped into allthese, particularly by showing a spark of interest in Up Your Ass and Valerie’s tour de force, SCUMManifesto.

SCUM MANIFESTO (1967)

The SCUM Manifesto is an extraordinary document, an authentic love-hate child of its time, written in the unholy accentsof inspired madness. . . . Written at white heat, and containing within itself the secret knowledge of the victim, theeconomical insight of the obsessed, the multiplied courage of the utterly disinherited, SCUM is the work of the ultimateloser, of one beyond redemption, and as such its quality is visionary.

—Vivian Gornick, introduction to S.C.U.M. Manifesto

To understand Valerie’s relationship to Andy—indeed to understand Valerie at all—one mustconsider Valerie’s unusual relationship to her writing. Shortly after shooting Andy, she hurriedly tolda reporter, “Read my manifesto and it will tell you what I am.”2 Several scholars have honed in onthis quote as both peculiar and notable—she chooses “what I am” rather than “who I am”; she writesherself into the text after just having committed violence against three men; and she maintains, at amoment of intense stress, that her manifesto is of central importance.3

SCUM Manifesto was written between 1965 and 1967. Valerie published an outline in the Voice inFebruary 1967, likely finished an original draft of the book in May, and completed a revised versionof it in late June 1967; in a postcard to her father dated June 14, 1967, she wrote that she was nearlyfinished writing it. The work is as sweeping as it is radical. Copyrighted originally on May 19, 1967,

by Valerie, the self-published edition of the manifesto represented the culmination of years ofcontemplation, effort, and revisions. SCUM Manifesto marinated in Valerie’s life for many years, butas Mary Harron aptly put it, “In style it feels as if it were written in one great rush. It isn’t quite likeanything else but it does resemble Artaud’s surrealist manifesto—visionary, hallucinatory rhetoric.Also de Sade in its black vision of human nature, its complete inversion of accepted values. And,more disturbingly, it resembles the better bits of writing by the Unibomber. It is a product of a giftedmind working in isolation, with no contact with but also no allegiance to academic structures—isolated and therefore owing nothing to anyone.”4

When reading the manifesto, we sense almost immediately that Valerie has broken things: rules,norms, barriers, the rhetoric of politeness, academic modalities, reverence for those who camebefore. It takes on all the characteristics of manifestos distilled to their purest form: urgency, anger, asweeping sense of the we, impatience, irrationality, high polemics, drive, and forward thinking. It hasa strange mix of humor, aggression, playfulness, wit, sarcasm, and truth. People often say, afterreading SCUM Manifesto, that they have never encountered anyone who wrote or thought likeValerie; this, to a certain extent, gives the manifesto its force, its sense of oddly contemporary flairdespite its now being written nearly a half century ago.

Valerie theorized from the gutter, from the sidelines, from scum, from the foulness of humanity. Shedove into the swamp of patriarchy and slogged through the muck. She understood that this mentality—theorizing from the “garbage pail that men have made of the world”—was all women had left to use.In her writing, she became a verbal sniper, picking off the key tenets of sexism, taking aim at nearlyevery major institution men promote and celebrate:

war, money, marriage and prostitution, work, prevention of automation, nice-ness, politeness, clean language, “dignity,” censorship,trivial “entertainment,” secrecy, suppression of knowledge and ideas, ignorance, fatherhood and mental illness (fear, cowardice,timidity, humility, insecurity, passivity), authority, government, boredom, monotony, “Great Art,” “Culture,” philosophy, religion,morality based on sex, competition, prestige, status, formal education, prejudice (racial, ethnic, religious, etc.), social and economicclasses, domesticity motherhood, materialism, sexuality, ugliness, destruction of cities, poisoning of air, hate, contempt, distrust,prevention of conversation and friendship and love, isolation, suburbs, violence, disease and death.5

SCUM Manifesto had such a profoundly unique style and tone that it evades categorization. Drawingon men’s biological inferiority, Valerie began the manifesto with all the dynamism and radicalism shecould muster: “Life in this society being, at best, an utter bore and no aspect of society being at allrelevant to women, there remains to civic-minded, responsible, thrill-seeking females only tooverthrow the government, eliminate the money system, institute complete automation, and destroy themale sex.”6

The text then bends and swerves through nearly every major institution that oppresses women,spliced with humor, irreverence, seriousness, swipes at Daddy’s girls (“The effect of fatherhood onfemales is to make them male—dependent, passive, domestic, animalistic, nice, insecure, approvaland security seekers, cowardly, humble, ‘respectful’ of authorities and men, closed, not fullyresponsive, half dead, trivial, dull, conventional, flattened out and thoroughly contemptible”),hippies, suburban moms, and corporate businessmen. Men, in other words, feel so insecure abouttheir masculinity that they intrude on, and generally obliterate, the autonomy of their wives anddaughters and even female strangers. Their sweeping women off to the suburbs, for example, revealsmen’s deep-seated insecurity and need for women’s comfort and company. Men prevent women’sfriendships, define Great Art as a reflection of themselves, go to war for meaningless reasons,demand “respect” from women and children, develop educational institutions based only onexclusivity, and cannot love anyone or anything. “The male cannot progress socially, but merely

swings back and forth from isolation to gang-banging” (10, 16).Key to SCUM Manifesto are Valerie’s rants against sexuality itself; she paints sexual desire as a

complete waste of time, something women should forget altogether and eliminate:Sex is the refuge of the mindless. And the more mindless the woman, the more deeply embedded in the male “culture,” in short,the nicer she is, the more sexual she is. . . . On the other hand, those females least embedded in the male “Culture,” the least nice,those crass and simple souls who reduce fucking to fucking; who are too childish for the grown-up world of suburbs, mortgages,mops and baby shit; too selfish to raise kids and husbands; too uncivilized to give a shit for anyone’s opinion of them; too arrogantto respect Daddy, the “Greats” or the deep wisdom of the Ancients; who trust only their animal, gutter instincts; who equateCulture with chicks; whose sole diversion is prowling for emotional thrills and excitement; who are given to disgusting, nasty,upsetting “scenes;” hateful, violent bitches given to slamming those who unduly irritate them in the teeth; who’d sink a shiv into aman’s chest or ram an icepick up his asshole as soon as look at him, if they knew they could get away with it, in short, those who,by the standards of our “culture” are SCUM. . . . These females are cool and relatively cerebral and skirting asexuality. (27–28)

Valerie also counters accusations of Freudian penis envy: “Women, in other words, don’t have penisenvy; men have pussy envy. . . . Screwing is, for a man, a defense against his desire to be female. Sexis itself a sublimation. The male, because of his obsession to compensate for not being femalecombined with his inability to relate and to feel compassion, has made of the world a shitpile” (4).

Advocating a unique philosophy of “unworking,” Valerie outlines a plan for SCUM to take over thecountry within a year “by systematically fucking up the system, selectively destroying property, andmurder”:

SCUM will become members of the unwork force, the fuck-up force; they will get jobs of various kinds and unwork.SCUM will unwork at a job until fired, then get a new job to unwork at.SCUM will forcibly relieve bus drivers, cab drivers, and subway-token sellers of their jobs and run busses and cabs and

dispense free tokens to the public.SCUM will destroy all useless and harmful objects—cars, store windows, “Great Art,” etc.Eventually SCUM will take over the airwaves—radio and TV networks—by forcibly relieving of their jobs all radio and TV

employees who would impede SCUM’s entry into the broadcasting studios.SCUM will couple bust—barge into mixed (male-female) couples, wherever they are, and bust them up.SCUM will kill all men who are not in the Men’s Auxiliary of SCUM. Men in the Men’s Auxiliary are those men who are

working diligently to eliminate themselves, men who, regardless of their motives, do good, men who are playing ball with SCUM.(38–39)

Valerie ends SCUM Manifesto as forcefully as she began it: “The sick, irrational men, those whoattempt to defend themselves against their disgustingness, when they see SCUM barreling down onthem, will cling in terror to Big Mama with her Big Bouncy Boobies, but Boobies won’t protect themagainst SCUM; Big Mama will be clinging to Big Daddy, who will be in the corner shitting in hisforceful, dynamic pants. Men who are rational, however, won’t kick or struggle or raise a distressingfuss, but will just sit back, relax, enjoy the show, and ride the waves to their demise” (47).

Valerie did not write SCUM Manifesto while having a psychotic break or while on a bender. It didnot derive from her “madness” per se, but rather, slowly emerged after dozens of revisions andrewrites over many years. If SCUM Manifesto is mad, it bubbles up from a collective madnessbrewing in many women, not from Valerie’s own personal explosion of inner turmoil. On this point,the critical theory scholar Avital Ronell wrote in her introduction to the 2004 edition:

It is important to note that psychosis speaks, that it often catches a fire from a spark in the real; it is fuelled and fanned andremains unsettling because, as wounded utterance, it is not merely or solely demented. I am not persuaded that we have before usonly a psychotic text. But it does rise out of the steady psychoticization of women, a threat under which most of us live andagainst whose coarse endurance we contribute enormous amounts of energy. Unless one is able to perform the FreudianSpaltung, a protective self-splitting, many of we minoritized, evicted creatures spend ourselves staving off the pressures of socialpsychoticization. But even in the land of social derangement Valerie Solanas got to travel the blind alleys and sidestreets of grandfeminist mappings. It is not as though language and lit show no tolerance for a girl’s derangement. On the contrary, some types of

accepted derangement are hard-won. We have fought for every inch of clinical corroboration and for the symptomal housingprojects that shelter our anguish. Certain diseases become a woman. Strengthening her stature in unexplored domains of suffering,they encourage her daredevil collapses, linguistic feints. Valerie, however, poor Valerie refuses the prestige and license of hysteriaor any of the neighboring neurotic dialects that might be understood in feminist precincts. She is no Dora, no Anna O., noMarquise von O. . . . She bears none of the finely crafted, delicate, brilliant flush of symptoms with which, thanks to the work ofoutstanding feminist theorists, a new form of dissidence and social disruption could be tried. Our Valerie, by contrast, was apsycho.7

In many ways, Valerie understood this reality all too well—she walked a fine line between madnessand sanity when writing SCUM Manifesto, undoing the world as she traveled in spheres of aloneness.She did not have the luxuries other “madwomen” have sometimes had; she could not take to thefainting couch, join up with the (then nonexistent) feminist movement, fight hard against the crueltreatment of women and the violence against them, or rely on the company of others. She forged aheadalone, clawing her way out.

In the end, Valerie produced a document about which she felt enormous pride. She shared an earlydraft with Jeremiah Newton and expressed how much the manifesto meant to her; as this close friendrecalled, “She wouldn’t let me touch it. I think she read it to me. It was the only copy she had. Shebelieved in it. She worked very hard to create it. She was very proud of it. It was so important toher.” Jeremiah believed that Valerie had touched on a truth: that men’s selfishness and evil had madea mess of the world and that women should rule instead. “That’s why she liked me,” he said; “I didn’tfight with her and say, ‘Oh, you’re full of shit, you bitter lesbian bitch.’ I agreed with her. I said,‘You’re absolutely right.’ I think women are fine to rule the world and I can assure you women didn’tat that point.”

Jeremiah reveled in Valerie’s intelligence and ability to provoke: “She had a very high IQ. She wasa thinker. You could tell that she was always thinking. She would always ask questions.” Certain ofValerie’s deep connection with her manifesto, Jeremiah understood the sacrifices she had made for it,the price she had paid to write it, the self-made revolutionary she had created in SCUM Manifesto:“She felt she paid for her manifesto with her own life. She put her own life into it. It was a verypassionate thing, the SCUM Manifesto.”8

SCUM RECRUITMENTWith men and Daddy’s girls as her primary targets, Valerie maintained a take-no-prisoners tonethroughout her manifesto. She wanted revolution and for a time held SCUM meetings in New York tocirculate her ideas and to recruit members. The meetings attracted a wide variety of so-calleddegenerates: masochistic men, angry women (including women who had experienced sexualviolence), queer youth, and butch lesbians, as well as the purely curious. Some women who attendedSCUM meetings reacted with dismay and confusion to the presence of men. Despite her sweepingcritiques of men and her claim that they should be wiped off the face of the earth, Valerie had created(and unwittingly recruited) a category of men who would be welcomed into the ranks of SCUM: themen’s auxiliary. In a flier advertising a SCUM forum she hosted in May 1967, she wrote, “SCUM hasa men’s auxiliary to accommodate those men who wish to perform a public service and hasten theirinevitable demise.”9 In the manifesto, she describes the men’s auxiliary more fully and colorfully:

Men in the Men’s Auxiliary are those men who are working diligently to eliminate themselves, men who . . . are playing ball withSCUM. . . . Men who kill men; biological scientists who are working on constructive programs, as opposed to biological warfare;journalists, writers, editors, publishers, and producers who disseminate and promote ideas that will lead to the achievement ofSCUM’s goals: faggots who, by their shimmering, flaming example, encourage other men to de-man themselves and thereby make

themselves relatively inoffensive.10

The seriousness of SCUM and Valerie’s intentions for SCUM recruitment have spurred ongoingdebates about the meaning of SCUM Manifesto. Was Valerie actually recruiting others to join SCUM,or did these meetings represent a rather elaborate and satirical performance of the self? Did she havean organization or did she merely want to disseminate ideas? Perhaps Valerie simply wanted accessto like-minded people, people who had a SCUM state of mind. Maybe she sought an audience. Sheposted fliers and circulated recruitment posters for SCUM throughout 1967 and did lead some SCUMmeetings, where she talked about her ideas in SCUM Manifesto. Radical feminist Anne Koedtremembered attending one of these meetings and noted that it was a lively occasion.11

Living at the Chelsea Hotel until October 1967, Valerie used the location as a hub for her SCUMplans, running auditions for her play, posting advertisements for SCUM, and distributingmimeographed copies of fliers. She placed an ad in the Village Voice, announcing the formation of anorganization called SCUM, which the Voice viewed as a humorous concoction.12 Her ad listed forty-seven ways that men had made the world “a garbage pail,” among them war, fatherhood, poisoning ofair, suburbs, friendship, and love. She posted another ad in the April 21, 1967, issue, and a weeklater, again in the Voice, a notice appeared: “Valerie Solanas. SCUM. Fri., April 28, 8:30PM/Farband House, 525 4th Ave (at 12th). Men $2.50. women $1.00.”13

In response to one of the ads placed in the Voice, a woman named Wilda Holt showed up. Wildahad a pen name, Wilda Chase; she was, according to the radical feminist Ti-Grace Atkinson, a sweetwoman with a horrendous story. Wilda had grown up in the Tennessee-Kentucky area. Her grandfatherhad raped her. A case was brought that had gone to trial and Wilda lost, leaving her humiliated andwithout further recourse. She was attracted to SCUM and to Valerie’s philosophies, and she andValerie quickly became friends. Wilda, who lived most of her life at a woman’s hotel, developed asomewhat sadomasochistic dynamic with Valerie: she would shriek at Valerie and hurl obscenities ather, which would stop Valerie from harassing her and put her on better behavior. “You have to talk toher like that,” Wilda claimed. Petite and “sort of Southern Belle looking,” Wilda had a reputation foroutbursts at early meetings of the National Organization for Women (NOW). If she heard anythingdiscriminatory or upsetting about a man, she would shout, “Kill him! Kill him!” at the top of herlungs.

At one point, Valerie made sexual advances toward Wilda but Wilda turned her down flat.According to Ti-Grace, “Wilda was filled with rage about sexuality. Valerie had a habit of exposingherself. . . . She would undo her jeans and fiddle with her clitoris. . . . Apparently, she did this at aSCUM meeting and was making some sort of sexual overtures at Wilda, who would have none of it.”14

Wilda shut Valerie down fast and got her to stop such bizarre advances. This cemented their years-long friendship, and the two of them had many similarities: both grew up with the experience of incestand other sexual abuse, both felt enormous rage toward men, and both jockeyed for power anddominance as an expression of love and affection.

In a document some have likened to SCUM Manifesto for its scathing tone, Wilda wrote a piececalled “The Twig Benders,” a story in which schoolmistresses sexually abuse boy pupils in order tosocialize them into manhood. In this story, the abusive female “Director” pokes boys’ penises withneedles, behaves nonchalantly when one of the schoolboys kills himself, and uses the boys’ miserablecompliance to “catalyze her sexual energy into a blast of an orgasm that sent her into orbit.” Boysclamor to look pretty, wear makeup, and please their mistresses, causing them plummeting self-esteemand self-loathing.15 At the conclusion of the story, Wilda employs a Valerie-esque strategy, reversingthe gender roles to expose the absurdity of men’s violence against women: “It is men’s destiny to

suffer, and they must accept it.” In an iteration of the tragic end met by many of Valerie’s friends andsympathizers, in the mid-1970s, Wilda took a .45 Dobson gun and blew her own head off.16

Indeed, my search for Valerie sympathizers and friends has led to many dead ends, as severalcommitted suicide, others chose to cut their ties to her, and still others have fallen into obscurity.SCUM Manifesto was witty, intelligent, and violent, sure, but it was also lonely. Isolation followedValerie, however much she recruited and connected, attacked and provoked. She ate many mealsalone at Nedick’s at Eighth Street and Sixth Avenue (called the “Orange Room”), a restaurant in aone-story building where a lot of queer people hung out in those days. “There were all these phonebooths on one side that you could sit in and there would be junkies dining out in the phone booths,”Jeremiah recalled. “It was quite a reputable place. People wouldn’t bring their children there but thefood was cheap and good.”17 Occasionally, Valerie staged readings at Nedick’s.

Valerie found some companionship with women through sexual encounters. Writer and activistMagie Dominic disclosed that she had had a sexual relationship with Valerie while Valerie lived atthe Chelsea Hotel. “I can’t remember how I met Valerie. One day she was suddenly there. Valerie andI slept together on two occasions. At her room in the Chelsea Hotel. Valerie was the only woman Islept with in the ’60s. We never called it forbidden love. We just called it sleeping together. And wedid. In each other’s arms like two old tired women.” Valerie told her, affectionately, “Someoneshould write a play about you . . . and call it Cleopatra.” Magie, who had faced incest, rape, andviolence, reflected, “I think if people had tried to harm me while I was with Valerie, she would havekilled them with her bare hands.” Still, Magie, too, stopped taking her calls. When the Chelsea yetagain threatened to evict Valerie, Valerie asked Magie if she could stay with her and Magieresponded with “a difficult no.”18

Valerie, the loner, often traveled temporarily with other misfits and outcasts, those tossed out of themainstream for one reason or another. On one occasion, she went to Nedick’s with Candy Darling,one of New York’s most famous drag queens, who would eventually become a Warhol superstar. BothValerie and Candy regularly frequented Washington Square Park (a hangout for beatniks, folksingers,and lefties since the 1950s), talking, eating, and keeping each other company. Valerie liked andadmired Candy, who felt the same way about Valerie. “Candy could never be called a drag queen,”Valerie’s friend Jeremiah said, “That’s why she inspired so many artists. There was never anythingcommon about her. She had an androgynous quality.”19 Around this time, Valerie met a bisexualprostitute named “English” Ingrid Pat. Valerie took a particular liking to Ingrid Pat, who let Valeriestay at her house and with whom she formed a close friendship.20 These early encounters allowedValerie to have some companionship at the margin, though for the most part she walked alone.

Valerie famously rejected, alienated, and repeatedly threatened to kill nearly every friend she had.Whoever found her cause to be sympathetic was often eventually met with hostility; whoever took herseriously in the end found her overbearing, frightening, or excessive; whoever tried to help herusually regretted having done so. Rarely did she earn and keep people’s affection, as was apparentfor those still alive to reminisce about her. She often resisted ingratiating herself, preferring instead tooffend and incite.

Still, those who gravitated toward her acknowledged her contradictions and felt a certain fondnesstoward Valerie. As one person who knew her remarked, “She was always known to be odd evenwithin a pretty odd scene. But she was friendly, very warm. All her hate was in her writing. Inperson, she was gentle, not aggressive at all.”21

AUDITIONS FOR UP YOUR ASSWhile living at the Chelsea, Valerie began recruiting actors for her play, Up Your Ass, circulatingmimeographed literature in the lobby (about which resident Arthur Miller complained to the hotelmanager).22 She posted an eye-catching advertisement that read:

S.C.U.M. (Society for Cutting Up Men)Is looking for garbage mouth dykes (butch or fem) with some acting ability (experience not necessary) to appear in garbage-mouth, dykey anti-male play (a comedy) called UP YOUR ASS or UP FROM THE SLIME or FROM THE CRADLE TO THEBOAT by Valerie Solanas—to be presented in four weeks at the Director’s Theatre School. Excerpts of the play are going to bepublished in EVO (East Village Other) and Down Here Magazine. Author Valerie Solanas is to be interviewed in a few weeks onRandy Wicker’s interview show (WBAI-FM).

Also looking for talented garbage-mouth, pretty, effeminate looking males and regular straight-looking males. If interested intrying out for a role, call CH3-3700 X606 [Chelsea Hotel, room 606]. If not interested, don’t throw this away—give it to a friendor a friend of a friend who might be interested.23

Jeremiah Newton, seventeen years old and gay, saw the advertisement and responded. “I guess youcould say I fell into a category of being effeminate/straight looking and took the ad off the wall andcalled the Chelsea asking for room 606.” It was the spring of 1967 and he had gone to St. Mark’sBookshop on St. Mark’s Place. On the wall of a kiosk in the middle of the store, he saw Valerie’s signseeking actors for Up Your Ass. Jeremiah’s call to Valerie would herald a longterm friendship. Hedescribed the call: “‘Hello,’ a voice shouted on the other end. ‘I’m having trouble with my phone—can you hear me?’ I could, but just barely. ‘Meet me in the lobby of the Chelsea tonight at 9PM andI’ll read you.’ ‘What’s your name?’ ‘Know where the Chelsea is?’ I certainly did. I gave mydescription—tall with long brown hair and asked what she looked like. ‘A butch dyke.’ Then thephone went dead.”24

Valerie arrived ten minutes late for their appointment, “marching out of [the Chelsea’s] wheezingelevator, mumbling some unheard words to the nearby bell clerk.” Staring at Jeremiah, she called himover and, liking his “type,” asked for the key to the basement. “Just don’t touch the steam pipes,” shewarned. Jeremiah remembered the meeting vividly: “She was a slight woman, dressed in a sweatshirtand I think she might have had a cap on. She said she didn’t want me up in her room because it wouldruin her reputation. It was very flattering to me because I was probably seventeen years old. Shewasn’t very frightening. She sort of had a squint. She wasn’t physically beautiful or anything or thatglamorous. She seemed to be sure of what she was doing and I admired her. Here was a persontotally sure of who she was and her craft as a writer.”25

Valerie unlocked the basement door, and told Jeremiah that she had no intention of killing him.Once in the basement amid the rumbling sounds from the Chelsea’s ancient plumbing, she handed hima dog-eared script and asked him to read several lines. He read for her from a spiral metal staircase.“She wouldn’t let me take it with me and she gave it to me one page at a time. She was veryproprietary at that. I don’t think she had many copies. In those days there weren’t Xerox machines.You had to crank up the mimeograph stuff.”26

He continued to read and then they started talking about politics, especially about the war inVietnam and how Jeremiah feared the draft. Valerie said, “Well, if women ran the country, then therewould be no war, ’cause no woman would send her child off to war.” Jeremiah asked if she plannedto kill all the men in the world. “An ever so slight smile played across her thin lips and, looking at medead in the eye, [she] said, ‘I don’t want to kill all men—but I think males should be neutered orcastrated so they can’t fuck up any more women’s lives.’” They continued discussing all the badthings that happen to women, how women got the short shrift. She announced that men could be used

as breeding machines and she would not kill her friends. When he asked if gay men would get hurt,she replied, “No. Take Candy Darling, for instance. Here you have a perfect victim of malesuppression. You see gay men are OK but they’ve got to be taught to be more respectful of women’srights. I have big plans for some gay men.”27

Taking a liking to Jeremiah, Valerie offered him a part in her play and he happily accepted. Shereminded him that she was not yet sure which part he would play because the play was not yetfinished. Jeremiah simply knew he wanted to hang around Valerie; she was unlike anyone he knew orhad encountered. When speaking of her personality, he noted being particularly struck by her uniquewit:

She had a sense of humor that was very dry, cerebral. She wasn’t a comedian by any stretch. Just the fact that she was soserious made her funny. She always wore that pea coat and that gray fisherman’s cap, and she never wore makeup really. Shehad a scowl on her face all the time. In an era which prided itself on beauty, she really wasn’t beautiful. She was very plain andshe was aware of that. She always commented about beautiful women, how they were wasting themselves on men, and shewanted to fall in love like any young person.28

The two held regular rehearsals for Up Your Ass, sometimes rehearsing in the Chelsea’s basementand sometimes on the rooftop. Valerie likely auditioned several others and apparently had lined up acast—including Harold Anderson, Donald Eggena, Bonnie Greer, Marcia Sam Ridge, Gary Tucker,and Barbara Wallace—by late 1967 according to an ad she placed in the Village Voice, though howshe selected actors or whether anything came of the process remains unclear. Actress Phyllis Raphaelsaid she, too, auditioned for Valerie: “I’m pretty sure it was at La MaMa. . . . I recall the auditionbeing held in a large space somewhere in the East Village. . . . It wasn’t exactly a highlight of myacting career and my best sense of it was that the material wasn’t of very much dramatic value orimportance nor did the audition appear to me to be on the up and up. I can tell you that she came on tome and called the next day to offer me a part but I wasn’t interested.”29

THE ALAN BURKE SHOWIn mid-May 1967, Jeremiah asked Valerie if she would be willing to go on The Alan Burke Show, atelevision talk show broadcast on Saturday nights at 11:00 p.m. in New York City, to discuss her lifeas an out lesbian. A friend of Jeremiah’s named Kathy relayed that Burke had requested that somelesbians go on the show to talk about their lives but the producers of the show could not find womenwho would speak openly about the issue of lesbianism. Candy Darling had already refused to go onthe show, so Jeremiah asked Valerie. Gleefully, Valerie agreed. Jeremiah then worried that he hadmade a terrible mistake. Alan Burke was a staunch conservative and an aggressive host, often treatingguests poorly. Burke was seen as a monster, a far right “shock jock” who spewed hateful rhetoric toantagonize his guests. He enjoyed baiting his guests with the help of his studio audience and the soundeffects of a fictitious lion that he supposedly kept backstage and that he threatened to unleash onuncooperative guests. Jeremiah said, “I wouldn’t want to have appeared on the show as a gay man.People didn’t talk about those things in those days. I mean, it was very dangerous.” Valerie’s casualresponse to Jeramiah’s anxiety was “I can handle him.” For Valerie, the show was a chance atrecognition and sharing her ideas. To Burke, however, “she was a grotesque cartoon who wouldprovide fodder for his audience.”30

When Valerie arrived at the television studio, she was immediately sent up to get makeup put onher. “Valerie never wore makeup and was enchanted by the makeup artist’s craft. She sat in one ofthose swivel barber chairs facing a brightly lit mirror while the woman makeup artist made her up.

With makeup on, she looked strange.” Jeremiah remembered that the end result gave Valerie abuffoonish appearance, “a cross between a deranged Betty Boop and the infamous Koko the Klown.”

When Valerie walked into the studio for the taping—a studio filled with 350 straight, whitemidwesterners, among them ex–Korean War and World War II veterans and “middle-aged yahoos andtheir shackled wives”—she was the only lesbian in attendance. Burke behaved in a hostile andbelligerent manner toward her during the taping. He immediately announced that even though he hadnothing against lesbians, he found them repulsive. Valerie reacted with a bland expression. Theaudience was full of homophobes and right wingers, who began to boo her. She tried to talkintelligently, had tried to play along with what they had asked of her (makeup and all), and Burke onlyamplified his nastiness. “His questions were really a diatribe of his own worst fears andpremonitions of the future.”31

Burke tried to provoke Valerie by asking if she had ever been with a man: “What’s the matter,Valerie, can’t get one? Didn’t anyone ever take you to the prom?” His pace was relentless and hiscruelty deliberate. Jeremiah deeply regretted bringing her to the show. “I watched Valerie’s face getbrighter and brighter. However, she kept her temper as she quietly tried to inform Burke about thehistory of women’s rights in America and around the world. He couldn’t have cared less.” (He didn’teven care to keep a copy of the tape.)32

Valerie’s recollection of this event painted Burke as hypocritical and hypersensitive, with tensionsrising quickly between them during the taping:

The producer, Burke’s producer, tells me to say anything I want during the taping and if I say anything real bad they can alwaysbleep it out. So I get to this studio, and there’s an audience, just the way you see it on television, and Burke asks me, “What’s thereason for your organization?” And I say, “Men have fucked up this world.” There’s this little school girl gasp from the audienceand Burke says, “You’ll have to watch your language, young lady.” And I say, “Bleep it out if you don’t like it.” So I talk somemore and he keeps interrupting me telling me to be careful what I say. “You’re offending my studio audience,” he says. “Fuckyour studio audience,” I tell him. He tells me if I don’t leave, he will, and he did. Just got up and walked right off the platform,leaving me sitting alone. They cut the mike off and everything. Not even the audience could hear what I was saying.33

Valerie eventually became angry and called Burke a name, after which Burke called her aderogatory name, kicked her out of his studio, and booted her off the show. Jeremiah rememberedwatching the scene: “He called her a name and she chased him. He ran and grabbed the curtains andtried to climb up them, so she grabbed him by the ass. It was real pandemonium, people screamingand yelling in the audience.” Burke said, “I ask you ladies and gentleman, have you ever heardanything as sick and perverted as this woman?” In the background, a tape of a lion roared over theshrieking audience, who wanted Valerie’s blood. And Valerie, quick with a coup de grâce, picked upa chair and tried to hit Burke over the head with it but he danced off camera making faces. She satback and waited, tears of rage in her eyes, arms around the chair. At that point, security guards andseveral “brave” men from the audience rushed up and removed her. There was a struggle as she waspried from the chair. Finally, a guard took her by the arm and threw her out into the street. “I neversaw her so angry,” Jeremiah recalled, “She was pacing up and down.” She kept repeating, “Thatbastard! That prick!”34

Valerie believed she had been set up, not by Jeremiah but by someone who wanted to attack herbeliefs and interests. “She got really paranoid,” Jeremiah recalled, “and I remember seeing her walkdown the street, watching her disappear into the distance. What a nightmare it was. It was veryembarrassing. I didn’t see her after that until 1968.”35

THE HUSTLEFollowing this event, Valerie immediately sprang back into action to mobilize SCUM. On a flier sheposted, she declared: “Valerie Solanas, because she was kicked off the Alan Burke show (to beshown Sat. May 20) for ‘talking dirty’ after only fifteen minutes on and prevented from fullyexplaining to the public how and why SCUM will eliminate the male sex, will conduct a SCUMforum on Tues., May 23, 10:30 PM at 20 E. 14th St. (admission: men $2.50; women $1.00).” Shecontinued, “If you would like to work to help end this hard, grim, static, boring male world and wipethe ugly, leering male face off the map, send your name and address to Valerie Solanas, 222 W23,N.Y.C. 10011.”36

For this SCUM meeting, she rented a hall and advertised by distributing fliers throughout NewYork City. Ultimately, about forty people showed up, with the audience composed mostly of men eventhough she ended up charging an admission of $2.50 for men and nothing for women. When she wasasked what the people who attended the meeting were like, Valerie responded, “The men? They werecreeps. Masochists. Probably would love for me to spit on them. I wouldn’t give them the pleasure.. . . The men may want to kiss my feet and all that crap. Who needs it.” She described the womenmore sympathetically: “Mostly young girls. Pretty too, most of them. Some from the [V]illage, somestill living at home with their folks. Poor kids. No money. . . . They’re willing to help any way theycan. Some of them are interested in nothing but sex though. Sex with me. I mean, I can’t be bothered.I’m no lesbian. I haven’t got time for sex of any kind. That’s a hang-up. I work 24 hours a day forSCUM.”37

Right after The Alan Burke Show incident, Valerie had mimeographed two thousand copies ofSCUM Manifesto and advertised it in underground newspapers. For these copies, she charged twodollars for men and a dollar for women, saying to a reporter, “That’s the only use men are today, tosupport our organization. To help with their own destruction.” She also took her newly finishededition of the text to circulate on the streets, on consignment in local bookstores (a dollar for men,twenty-five cents for women), in coffeehouses, and at Max’s Kansas City. She pitched the manifestoherself, particularly hoping women would buy it, but also sold small stacks of her mimeographedcopies at the more leftist bookstores in the village. In a later interview, she described the process as“a real drag,” saying, “I try to sell to women, but they can’t afford it unless they’re with men, so I onlyapproach couples. If they’re amused, okay, I’ve made a sale. But I don’t care, as long as they take ithome and read it, and I get a buck out of it.” Valerie repeatedly attempted to sell the manifesto thisway, approaching young, well-dressed couples, trying to get their attention and often failing. “Theywalked right past her,” an onlooker noted. “She gave no reaction, not even a shrug.” As this onlookerwatched her try again, Valerie approached another couple and managed to get their attention: “Theywere standing there listening to her, both smiling and holding each other’s arms, while she spoke tothem seriously, earnestly, pointing to the manifesto.”38

In early summer 1967, Valerie faced her final eviction from the Chelsea Hotel and, after two yearsliving there, she was homeless again. “She wasn’t friendly with anyone here. She wanted to disposeof all men. Her activities didn’t go down well with the tenants here,” said the hotel manager. At theChelsea, Valerie had had access to a somewhat normal writing and living environment, complete witha dresser, bed, table, and typewriter, whereas after her eviction she faced an increasingly unstableenvironment, ultimately losing a predictable place where she could work, write, and escape thestresses of New York City. Faced with imminent financial distress and homelessness, the urgency ofsecuring a producer for Up Your Ass was intensified.39

To try to get Up Your Ass produced, she began having meetings with various producers andpublishers throughout New York City. Valerie first sought out Louise Thompson, from the East Villagetheater scene, to produce her play. Louise ran a theater group that was hosting the reading of a play bya woman. After Valerie found out about this, she attended the reading and then went to the party thatfollowed, schmoozing with Louise and the other women. Louise took a liking to Valerie and to UpYour Ass, finding it sexual, funny, and full of witty dialogue. “I showed some friends the play and theywere really shocked by it,” she said, “I was not. Valerie was just so frustrated with it. It was veryblue material. I am sorry now that I did not do it!” Valerie and Louise spoke together in the kitchenduring the party, bantering back and forth about Valerie’s hostility toward men and her passion forhaving Up Your Ass produced. Louise told Valerie plainly that she could not produce it because thepolice would shut her theater down if she did. “She and I had a long conversation and she understoodmy point,” Louise said.40

Next, Valerie visited Gene Feist, founder of the theater the Roundabout. A self-described coward,he remembered Valerie’s dynamism well: “When we started, I was often the only one there, manningthe box office, cleaning up the theater, doing the chores.” One afternoon in mid-1967, Valerie enteredhis office, a move that put Gene off a bit, as people typically stopped at the front window. Valerieurgently introduced herself to Gene and he asked what he could do for her. “She throws this script onmy desk.” Gene remembered the title as Up Your Ass with a Meathook and described Valerie as alunatic. “People who are either severely ill or have been institutionalized get this kind of sexless,dumb look, an oxen look. That’s what she had. I was getting more and more alarmed—here I was, anatural-born coward, and it was obvious she was insane.” He explained to Valerie that they onlyproduced the classics and she accepted that, took her script back, and left the building. “I locked thedoor and breathed a sigh of relief, and as soon as I calmed down, you know the first thing I thought? Ishould’ve told her to go see Andy [Warhol]. She had a threatening presence. But Andy felt crazypeople were gifted.”41

Valerie then sent the play to Paul Krassner, an early yippie, the editor of the Realist, and anotorious avant-garde publisher. Paul looked at the play but found it unfit to pursue: “I rejected it onthe grounds that I had no overwhelming desire to share Valerie’s misanthropic evangelism with myfriends.” However, Valerie intrigued him and he agreed to meet with her for dinner at the Forty-Second Street Automat. Paul had a lively interpretation of Valerie: “She was a cross between an earlyRosalind Russell movie and the Ancient Mariner, only instead of plucking at the elbows of strangewedding guests on the street, you had the feeling she would rather be breaking up the honeymoonitself by somehow managing to get in the marriage bed, replacing the wife with her albatross.”42

The meal with Paul went well enough that he invited Valerie to talk to his class at the FreeUniversity on Fourteenth Street. She happily agreed and, once there, electrified the room, explainingto the students why SCUM needed to wipe men off the face of the earth and how men had advantageswomen could never have. One of the students asked, “Miss Solanas, how long have you been in thisSCUM bag?” Valerie spoke with pride of this talk, mentioning it to Andy Warhol in a conversationnearly a year later.43 Anne Koedt, a burgeoning radical feminist who had begun to sense the rumblingsof the emerging women’s movement, saw Valerie speak about SCUM at the Free University. Anneadmired Valerie’s anger and the precision of her words: “I’m glad she said what she said; it was aninteresting kind of performance. Maybe it was genuinely felt, but it brought up a question: What doyou do with that rage? Some of it must have been founded in truth, but where do you direct it? Shetold us it was okay to be angry, which was hard then.”44

Valerie continued her search to get Up Your Ass produced and SCUM Manifesto published,

sending the manuscript of the play on to Ralph Ginzburg at Avant-Garde, “the highbrow magazine oferotica, whose style was a long way from her scruffy street language and corny humor.”45 Ralphrejected the play, telling Valerie that she had to come and pick up the copy herself because he did notwant to send it by the US Postal Service on the chance of its being read and censored. (He was facingpornography charges for publishing Eros in 1962 and could not risk a second violation for mailing UpYour Ass.) Valerie also sought out the owner of Peace Eye bookstore, Ed Sanders, a local beat poetand anarcho-socialist entrepreneur who was friends with Andy Warhol and had his silkscreenedflowers plastered over the walls. Sensing that they might be a good fit—he ran a journal called FuckYou/A Magazine of the Arts—she gave him her twenty-one-page draft of SCUM Manifesto, askinghim to publish it. He, too, refused.46

Seeking further publicity for the play, Valerie staged a reading of Up Your Ass at the Director’sTheater at 20 East Fourteenth Street in the East Village, taking out a series of ads over the course offour weeks to promote this “pre-production reading” of the play. The ad in the Village Voice read:

SCUM(Society for Cutting Up Men)presentspre-production reading ofUP FROM THE SLIMEby Valerie Solanas

Beg. Wed. Feb 15. 8:30 PMevery day except Tues. & Thurs.Directors Theater School 20 E. 14th St.admission by contributionCast (in alphabetical order)Harold Anderson,Donald Eggena, Bonnie Greer,Marcia Sam Ridge,Gary Tucker, Barbara Wallacecopies of SCUM book (:)“Up from the Slime” & “A YoungGirl’s Primer on How to Attainthe Leisure Class”(reprinted from Cavalier 1966)will be sold at reading for$1.50 per copy

Listen to Valerie Solanas onRandy Wicker’s Interview ShowWBAI-FM in a few weeks(watch Village Voice for exact date)47

Valerie’s quest to get Up Your Ass produced and SCUM Manifesto published, though ultimatelyunsuccessful, had nevertheless sparked some low-level interest from the publishing world, includingRobert Marmorstein from the Village Voice. In late fall of 1967, Marmorstein arranged to interviewand have dinner with Valerie at a place at the corner of West Twenty-Third Street and Eighth Avenue.Remembering her with fondness and amusement, in his article “SCUM Goddess,” Marmorsteindescribed her brashness and her insistence on setting the terms of their meeting: “I had spoken to MissSolanis [sic] on the phone.” Her response was, “‘What’s this interview crap? All these characterswanting to interview me. What for? For kicks?’ ‘Your ideas are so unique.’ ‘So, what’s this interviewjazz? You want to just bullshit, say so. You can buy me dinner and we’ll bullshit.’”

Valerie insisted on not getting into a car with Marmorstein: “‘No cars. You be standing on thecorner on your own two legs. I don’t get into any cars with men.’ ‘Why not?’ ‘Never mind why not.I’ve had some funny experiences with strange guys in cars. You just be sure to come on foot.’” (Onecan only imagine that Valerie was referring to her days hitchhiking across the country in 1960–61.)Dressed in slacks, a sailor’s pea jacket, and an army fatigue cap pushed back on her head, she arrivedfor dinner. About her cap, she had said on the phone, “I always wear it.” When Marmorstein askedher why, she replied with, “I like to. That’s all.”

Once at the restaurant, Valerie ordered a large well-done steak, French fries, and a salad. WhenMarmorstein asked if she was serious about the “SCUM thing,” she retorted, “Christ! Of course I’mserious. I’m dead serious.” Valerie declared that she was a writer (“pretty good when I want to”).When he asked why women can’t have a peaceful revolution, she replied, “We’re impatient. That’swhy. I’m not going to be around 100 years from now. I want a piece of a groovy world myself. Thatpeaceful shit is for the birds. Marching, demonstrating. That’s for little old ladies who aren’t serious.SCUM is a criminal organization, not a civil disobedience lunch club. We’ll operate under dark andas effectively as possible and get what we want as fast as possible.”48

Valerie’s earnestness about SCUM had puzzled people. Was she serious? What kind of revolutiondid she want? Selling her manifesto, doing occasional interviews, and publishing her Cavalier piece,Valerie had begun to make a name for herself. As scholar Jennifer Doyle noted, “By the time hermovements in New York took her to the Factory, she had already achieved notoriety, having beeninterviewed by the Village Voice as the proto-feminist author of this scabrous text.”49 Already anoutcast, Valerie had many qualities that made her an ideal candidate for the Factory—interesting,lonely, unique, brash, awkward, sexually ambiguous, angry, vulnerable, and loudmouthed—and shecaught the eye of Andy Warhol.

THE FACTORY SCENE AND WARHOL “STUPIDSTARS”

Warhol reflected the American dream, but what is phenomenal about him is that he also represented the Americandisasters, dreams and disasters.

—Ultra Violet, “The Ultra Violet Interview”

In an act of revenge, photographer Nat Finkelstein first brought Valerie—difficult, eccentric, andopenly queer—to the Factory, Andy’s New York studio renowned as a meeting place for volatileartists, drug users, and wealthy, celebrity-obsessed superstars. Just prior to that, Valerie’s quest to getUp Your Ass produced had led her to Richie Berlin, the sister of Factory superstar Brigid Polk (sonamed for her reputation for giving out “pokes,” injections of vitamin B and amphetamines). Richiegave Valerie the telephone number for Nat, who photographed events at the Factory, saying that Natmight have some good ideas about how to get the play produced. “God, what a bore,” Finkelsteinthought. “I’ll give this to Andy.”50 Nat was annoyed with Andy and did not mind introducing othermisfits to his already harried scene. “Andy was fascinated by a million people. She was just a millionand one. Andy was fascinated by all of us,” superstar Ultra Violet said.51

Valerie called Andy, and because Andy thought the title of the play sounded interesting, he invitedher to the Factory for a meeting. Valerie wanted to meet Andy not as an admirer or a fan but,according to film director Mary Harron, as a “political creature, a sociologist. . . . She found there anopportunity, or the possibility of one, that she could see nowhere else.” Attracted as she was by hispower and influence, his celebrity, and his ability to get things done, “where else could Valerie have

gone? Certainly not the New Left; in 1967, it was as sexist as the Pentagon.”52

When Valerie first arrived at the Factory for her meeting with Andy, he suspected her of being anundercover cop, telling an interviewer in Cahiers du cinema shortly after their meeting, “People tryto trap us sometimes: [Valerie] called up here and offered me a film script . . . and I thought the titlewas so wonderful and I’m so friendly that I invited her to come up with it, but it was so dirty that Ithink she must have been a lady cop. I don’t know if she was genuine or not but we haven’t seen hersince and I’m not surprised. I guess she thought that was the perfect thing for Andy Warhol.”53 Inresponse to Andy’s accusing her of being a cop, Valerie unzipped her pants, exposed her vulva, andsaid, “Sure, I’m a cop and here’s my badge.”54

To place Valerie in the context of the Factory, consider its denizens and the qualities that mighthave drawn her to this group. It offered a stylized facsimile of the world Valerie knew all too well;what she experienced as hard reality, the Factory appropriated as gritty, artistic drama. Still, as MaryHarron noted, “in the mid sixties this big silver room was the most radical place in America(culturally speaking). The films there almost signaled the end of the avant-garde—in art and paintingnothing more extreme or challenging has been done since.” Those drawn to the Factory were misfits,running from their families, wealth, the Catholic Church, expectations of marriages and families; and“they found shelter there together, even if they sometimes tore each other apart.” They experimentedwith how many drugs they could take, how much (or little) sex they could have, “how far you can holdan image, how long you can talk . . . trying to define new parameters, rules, ways of being,refashioning the world.”55

Andy was a master of his public image—something Valerie said was his “true art”—as he knewhow to generate a sense of style and celebrity for those who would otherwise remain on the fringes.He placed himself at the epicenter of gossip and fashion, shamelessly seeking fame, to the extent offounding Interview magazine as a way to get tickets to movie premieres.56 He took gay culture to thebroader public, giving Valerie the ultimate opportunity to fit in. Yet despite these qualities, Andyloomed large as the “father” of the Factory, and women stayed on the outside, particularly those whodid not come from wealthy backgrounds. Andy had no tolerance for “street women,” preferring thecompany of the glamorous women who came from mountains of wealth and who would promote theimage of high fashion. Valerie fit in only as an outsider, hence her gleeful description of the superstarsas “stupidstars.” As Ultra said, “She was not a superstar in the Factory. Maybe she wanted to be partof the Factory, or maybe she wanted to be a superstar, but she did not have what it takes. Thesuperstars were very, very beautiful and she was an individual, an extremist. The superstars alllooked different, had a common denomination, whereas she was more of a unique outsider. She wasvery much an outsider.”57

As Walter de Maria, a conceptual artist who played drums for John Cale and Lou Reed, recalled,“There was a serious tone to the music and the movies and the people, as well as all the craziness andthe speed. There was also the feeling of desperate living, of being on the edge.”58 A few monthsbefore Valerie entered the scene, a young man had appeared in the Factory with a gun and playedRussian roulette with it; he fired off a few shots, missed, and departed. Andy had reacted withsilence. On another occasion, a woman named Dorothy who was known as a “part-time junkie” alsoentered the Factory with a gun, a loaded revolver, and aimed it nicely at a stack of Marilyn Monroepaintings, blowing a hole through the six canvases. “Andy was kind of upset but he didn’t criticizeher, didn’t condemn her,” wrote Ultra Violet on this incident.59 Instead, according to Billy Name, Andywas peeved that she did this on her own and not as part of one of his films.

People at the Factory did not concern themselves with the future. “I think the present was blazing

and every day was incredible, and you knew every day wasn’t always going to be that way,” saidMary Harron.60 The tenuous quality of life on the edge had an appeal for the mainstream, as Andyprovided a window into lives that were rapidly self-destructing, often on camera. After reviewingthree and a half hours of Andy’s underground epic The Chelsea Girls (1966), featuring life among agroup of gays, lesbians, and drug addicts, one critic labeled it “a tragedy full of desperation,hardness, and terror.”61 Mary Woronov, one of the Factory superstars, called those at the Factory the“Mole People”—a collection of misfits, addicts, desperate dreamers, hangers-on. Andy merelyplayed with realities that Valerie had lived. He showed no affect toward circumstances that sparkedand fueled Valerie’s rage.

Ultra Violet called Andy a “sphinx without a riddle.” When asked about competition between thesuperstars, Ultra said, “I could not say that there was a lot of love between the superstars. We werenot about loving one another. We were about loving ourselves, so there wasn’t [sic] really any kind offights. But again, Warhol was the center because he was there, everybody was multidirectional,aiming at Warhol, so he was the cosmic glue that held people together in some kind of peacefulsituation.”62

Valerie couldn’t have been more different from the women Andy surrounded himself with at theFactory. With Ultra Violet’s thick French accent and extreme style of dress (for our 2012 interviewshe wore a purple muumuu and large purple jewelry as she discussed her conversion to Mormonism),Viva’s wealthy pedigree, Edie Sedgwick’s trust-fund self-destruction, Penny Arcade’s sultrysexuality, and Brigid Polk’s stylish outfits, Andy’s female superstars formed a posse dedicated tonarcissism, hedonism, fashion, glamour, self-involvement, drugs, and sex. As a revolutionary, foul-mouthed, working-class butch dyke dressed in plain clothes, Valerie stood starkly outside it all. Shedidn’t fit in with any of them. At the Factory they gave her the nickname Valerie Barge Cap for thedark-blue cap she always wore, with “the brim low over her eyes,” and took note of “the khakitrousers, the old shirt, the scraggly hair.”63

Still, for Andy, Valerie had a certain appeal. As Ultra Violet said, “Valerie was a bit hermetic, a bitmysterious. When she spoke, she expressed herself in a very interesting way. She had her owndialect, her own phrasing, so that was intriguing. . . . She had a certain charisma of her own. Not thatshe was beautiful nor repulsive, but she had a unique little presence, you know? A bit intense.”64

Valerie, like Andy, came from a background much different from those of the wealthy socialites andhip artists the Factory attracted. Described by one reporter as a “not unusual looking woman withclear brown eyes and a restless mind, who had given a great deal of thought to the world and itsproblems,” she had a working-class attitude and a little deliberate funkiness.65 In the many interviewsMary Harron and her film team conducted for I Shot Andy Warhol, Harron wrote of being struck bythe similarities between Valerie and Andy:

Warhol had seen something of himself in Valerie. . . . When Andy Warhol looked into the eyes of Valerie Solanas, he would haveseen much more of himself than when he looked into the eyes of a beautiful debutante like Edie Sedgwick or one of the gorgeousmale hustlers who decorated the Factory. Warhol and Valerie had much in common: both were Catholic, born into blue-collarfamilies; had spent their childhood in poverty; were intellectually precocious; and had experienced being tormented at school.Perhaps most important, both claimed to have rejected sex, although for different reasons: Valerie had had too much sex; Warhol,too little.66

Andy’s parents had emigrated from Miková, in northeastern Slovakia, in 1921 and settled inPennsylvania, first in Philadelphia and then in McKeesport. His father was a construction worker andgeneral laborer and died when Andy was nine. Andy had nervous breakdowns as a small child—afact he attributed to two things: “I was weak and I ate all this candy.” His transformation from a shy,

uncommunicative boy into a gifted artist baffled his childhood friends. “The morality of the middleclass bugged Warhol,” claimed one journalist. “He grew up in it and now he was running away fromit. He was running hard but getting nowhere because he was running The New Morality of the Four-Letter Word, and there’s no traction there.”67 Andy wanted nothing of the working-class women heknew growing up, choosing instead to renounce his former life as a child of immigrant parents (AndyWarhola) to become a dramatized, wealthy version of himself (Andy Warhol).

Andy created women as offshoots of the male imagination, something Valerie could never (andwould never want to) live up to. She was a dangerously real product of a world hell-bent on treatingwomen as mirrored distortions of the male ego. She was antipornographic in her gruffness andscumminess. “Why did it go wrong? Valerie was probably destined to be dropped by the Factory,”wrote Harron. “She was a political animal and an intellectual and they were from the art and fashionworlds and the drug demi-monde. . . . However bold she might have been in print, in person theyfound her shy, retiring, mousey. . . . She was too serious, monomaniacal.”68 Further, the Factorychampioned women’s beauty but sexualized the men, leading to a cruel mix of closeted gay men,fashion- and beauty-obsessed women, and little movement politically for queer culture. Valerie’saspirations—for acceptance, an audience, and sympathetic or like-minded misfits—fizzled there.

There is definite irony in Valerie’s selection of Andy as the epitome of sexism and patriarchy, forAndy maintained an air of asexuality and queerness, had virtually none of the characteristics oftraditional men in the 1960s, and openly appreciated gender nonconformity. Andy’s sexuality had anuncommon fluidity; as Mary Harron wrote, “Warhol has often gone on record as saying that sex is toomuch trouble, but he is fascinated by the idea of sex, and many of his films were semi-pornographic ina distanced, ironic way.”69 Perhaps, like many in Valerie’s life, Andy stood in for a variety ofemotionally charged, missing, or distorted figures. He was a mentor, friend, co-conspirator, andfellow artist, and, to a certain degree, he was an originator, as she believed she was. Valerie likedAndy, for a time, but as Jeremiah said, “He wasn’t the type of person you would call ‘Daddy.’ He wasonly interested in you as long as you were interested in him.”70

Valerie added something new—she was a butch dyke, and elicited polarized reactions from Andy’sgang. Gerard Malanga, Andy’s chief assistant at that time, said Valerie stood out as a “fringe person”at the Factory. Shy and isolated, she rarely talked to other members of Andy’s entourage but desired“one on ones” with Andy. She wanted his undivided attention and set out with fierce determination toget it. Billy Name, Andy’s house photographer and general custodian in the mid-1960s, rememberedValerie as “a talented woman who didn’t know how to push herself,” with a movie persona that was“almost flat. Absolutely featureless. No personality.”71

Though Gerard and Billy had some sympathy for Valerie, others felt only spite toward her. TheWarhol associates typically “remember” details of Valerie with increasing elements of disgust andrejection. Director Paul Morrissey, “whose star was rising at the Factory at this time,” openly hatedValerie and called her a “pathetic street person, almost mentally defective.”72 (His opinion didn’tchange. In our 2011 interview, he asserted, “I sure feel hostile towards her,” adding, “I feel hostile toyou with your idiot book about somebody like that. You don’t even know who she was. You heardthis, you heard that, you heard this. But you keep finding poor people to say something about her.”)73

Paul framed Andy as a “social worker . . . nice to everyone”74 and saw Valerie as yet another caseof someone exploiting Andy’s generosity and goodwill, though Valerie took a different view, callinghim a “hard son of a bitch, that Warhol.” Ultra cautioned Andy about Valerie as a “dangerous cookie. . . a real bitch.” When Ultra read parts of the manifesto to Andy, he commented, “She’s a hot waterbottle with tits. You know, she’s writing a script for us. She has a lot of ideas.” Ultra warned, “You

have to know what she’s writing about. You might be a target for her.”75

Ultra took an interest in Valerie, finding her an intriguing character, “demented of course,” anddescribing her as having “narrow, piercing eyes . . . brown hair cut in bangs, a sagging mouth.” Whenthey first met on the set of one of Andy’s films, Ultra was impressed by Valerie’s philosophy thatwomen lived in a man’s world and suffered because of men’s flaws. Ultra sympathized with Valerie’sframing of Andy as mistreating the women of the Factory: “When a film has succeeded, he kept theprofits and seized the headlines,” Ultra remarked. “I compare the Factory always to multi-levelmarketing without pay. That was the Factory. But in the sixties you had communal things, and ‘Makelove, not war,’ and people shared things. A lot of people did not expect to be paid. You would dothings willingly for the fun of it. But it’s true that Andy did not really pay people. We did not have acontract. We were not there to be paid. We were there because somehow we stumbled there and itwas an interesting scene.”

Drawing parallels between herself and Valerie, Ultra said, “Valerie was a woman. I’m a woman. Ithink she was unique. And she suffered. I understand that one would suffer for the state of being, forthe state of society, which as I said before is never right. I understand someone rebelling against thestate of things, even the relationship between men and women, which is not exactly as it should be. Iunderstand Valerie, to a point.”76 Viva, another Warhol superstar, also aligned more closely withValerie’s take on how men systematically exploit women as Viva understood the feminist movementmore than other superstars did.

ANDY AND VALERIEValerie occasionally joined Andy for conversation at Max’s Kansas City, a bar and restaurant at 213Park Avenue South, famous as a hangout for artists, celebrities, and hanger-ons and largelyconsidered the “in” place to go. It was to become an epicenter of pop culture, sporting a vibe thatcrossed old-fashioned values with the young and hip. It had a marquee outside that said “max’s kansascity,” in lowercase letters, followed by “steak, lobster, chick peas.” A peculiar mix between a diveand fancy establishment, the place featured a dim, smoky atmosphere and red-cloth-covered tables setwith bowls of chick peas, as well as colored lights that changed every twenty minutes and a tank ofpiranhas that needed feeding every hour (this came to an end when, after a disgruntled employee cuthis finger and dropped blood in the tank, the piranhas tore each other apart in the frenzy). Max’sattracted everyone—the elderly, drinkers, artists, people from the world of fashion, Euroglitz, LowerEast Siders, celebrities, and club kids. The only people blocked from entry were what Max’s owner,Mickey Ruskin, called OBs (other boroughs) and men in suits. (He once made Warren Beatty go backto his hotel to change into more casual clothes.)77 The place was especially famous for its back room,or as Mary Woronov called it, the “royal court of screaming assholes.”78 The back room wasseparated from the main area by a narrow corridor called the DMZ zone, which often became cloggedwith curious onlookers and harried waitresses. It was also called the celebrity room, a place wherethe hip, famous, and beautiful gathered to be seen and to gossip. Ostensibly, anyone could sit there ifhe or she had the nerve and was prepared to be challenged by Ruskin, who took great interest in theroom’s occupants.79

Andy ate at Max’s Kansas City every night in those days, occupying the “captain’s table” (asGerard Malanga called it) in the back room.80 Radical feminist and revolutionary Rosalyn Baxandallworked there as a waitress (enduring shifts in the mandatory leather miniskirt) and regularlyencountered Andy Warhol and his entourage. She recalled that “they played music, they played jazz,

and people drank a lot and tipped you well, except for Andy Warhol. They played Coltrane and goodpeople played music there. It was an avant-garde place to go and talk. I guess you could see thesepeople if you were interested in them. Artists and radicals. The food wasn’t good. I think they hadsteak and hamburgers. It wasn’t cheap but they’d let you sit there for ages in the old booths.” Rosalynnoted that artists, playwrights, and Wall Street types would all collide. “It was hip,” she said, “butAndy just seemed so awful and never tipped well. Other people tipped unbelievable. You could get afifty dollar tip some nights! But not Andy. He was cheap.”81

In 1967, Valerie and Andy spent time together at Max’s Kansas City, Valerie musing about thingsshe had on her mind while he held court over his emerging group of superstars. He listened toValerie’s statements and then put some of them into his movies, which infuriated Valerie. “He wouldgive the lines to Viva and Valerie told him to stop it and he kept doing it,” a friend recalled.82 Valerierepeatedly told Andy to stop stealing her lines, but he refused, continuing to feed them to different—and perhaps more conventionally attractive—female stars he surrounded himself with.83 Many of herlines appeared in Women in Revolt, clearly without her permission or approval. She often was angryat Andy, but he just shrugged her off, attributing her reactions to eccentricity.

Valerie and Andy developed a certain rapport during this period. On August 1, 1967, Valerie sentAndy a SCUM recruiting poster to put in the Factory bathroom and quipped, “Maybe you know somegirls who’d like to join. Maybe you’d like to join the Men’s Auxiliary.” She asked if he would like tofilm SCUM forums and rallies: “I’m just about finished with the SCUM Manifesto. (Wasn’t when thisposter was made up; thought I’d be, + I’ve been getting money through the mail for it), + I’ll be sellingit on the street within a few days. In other words, SCUM’s about to get into high gear. . . . Shortlyafter The Manifesto hits the streets, lots of activities will follow quickly after—the world’ll becorroded with SCUM.”84 Two weeks later, she sent a second poster for him to post in “the LadiesRoom,” and a third poster “to keep under your pillow at night.” She was, as always, relentless andfanatical about SCUM recruitment. She called the Factory frequently during spring and summer thatyear demanding Up Your Ass back and asking for money. Andy tape-recorded her calls because“Valerie was a great talker.”85

Perhaps Valerie’s energy, vigor, and ferocity did provide Andy with an amusing contrast to his ownlimp personality. As Ultra said, “I am struck by her activism in the face of Andy’s passivity. I contrasther passion for a cause, no matter how weird, to his indifferent voyeurism.”86 That summer, whenValerie was regularly showing up at the Factory and demanding support for SCUM, she interviewedAndy and he recorded the interview. With playful chitchat and mutual amusement, they engaged in thefollowing banter, evidence of their dynamic at that time:

Valerie: the only thing I can think to say is that Andy Warhol, I think, is scared of SCUM. I think he’s scared to death of SCUM.. . .Valerie: Why don’t you like to answer questions Andy?Andy: Do you really work for the CIA?Valerie: Yeah.Andy: You do? Why?Valerie: I like the CIA.Andy: Really? What does it mean?Valerie: It stands for, un, why should I have to answer questions? Why don’t you like to answer questions?Andy: I really never have anything to say. . . .Valerie: Andy! Did anyone ever tell you you were uptight?Andy: I’m not uptight.Valerie: How are you not uptight?Andy: It’s such an old-fashioned word.Valerie: You’re an old-fashioned guy. You really are. I mean, you don’t realize it but you really are. . . .

Valerie: Do you ever come, Andy?Andy: No. . . .Valerie: What do you use for stimulation when you think you need it? Bankbooks?Andy: No, uh . . .Valerie: George Washington’s picture?Andy: No uh, An electric vibrator.Valerie: The electric dildo?Andy: Yeah. . . .Valerie: Andy, how long do you think the money system’s going to be around?Andy: Uhh, not too long.Valerie: Do you envision a place for yourself in the world of the future?Andy: I thought I was a member of the men’s auxiliary.Valerie: You’re in the men’s auxiliary but you’re by no means on the escape list. . . .Valerie: What effect has SCUM had on your life?Andy: Uh, it makes me like girls more.Valerie: Why?. . .Andy: Before they were only boys.Valerie: Now they’re what?Andy: Girls. . . . That girls didn’t exist before.Valerie: You thought there were only boys.Andy: Yeah.Valerie: That there was only one sex.Andy: That’s right.Valerie: And now you know there are two.Andy: Now there are two. . . .Valerie: Do you like the funky SCUM girls or do you like the male ones? . . . You know, like pretend they’re weak and havenothing to say and all that shit.Andy: Uh, well—both. . . .Valerie: Andy, you never had a kid?Andy: Uh, no. I don’t believe in them.Valerie: Sometimes accidents happen. You’ve never had an accident?Andy: I don’t believe in kids.Valerie: But you’ve never had an accident?Andy: No, I don’t believe in them.Valerie: You don’t believe in accidents? Have you ever had a wife?Andy: Uh, yes.Valerie: How long ago?Andy: Years ago.Valerie: How many years ago?Andy: Fifteen years.Valerie: How long were you married?Andy: A few weeks.Valerie: And what happened?Andy: Uh, I uh, . . . Have you ever been married?Valerie: No.Andy: Why not?Valerie: I don’t believe in it.Andy: Oh. Where’s your girl friends?Valerie: They just left. You know my girl friends. I picked them up in a gay bar last night. . . .Andy: Oh, do you have a sex drive?Valerie: Oh. I said I used to, but I don’t anymore.Andy: Why not?Valerie: Except that I have lapses—I have occasional lapses, but I have a pretty good record for the last few years.Andy: Really?Valerie: Yeah. I try to discipline myself.Andy: Well, how do you do that?Valerie: Willpower.Valerie: Andy, will you take seriously your position as head of the men’s auxiliary of SCUM? Cause you do realize the

immenseness of this position?Andy: What is it? Is it that big?Valerie: Yes, it is.87

Believing Andy had enough self-deprecation to participate in SCUM, Valerie asked him to fund a“SCUMMY thing” event at either the Electric Circus or Café Bizarre (two avant-garde spaces knownfor offbeat, edgy, and experimental theater), telling him she did not have any money and could notafford to advertise. She pleaded, “Well, I don’t have it worked out in detail, but it would be some sortof forum—except it wouldn’t be exactly a forum. . . . I don’t know what to call it. Just a SCUMMYthing. You know, sort of, not really a lecture, except that there’d be a lot of interaction with theaudience. But it was similar to what I was doing at the SCUM forums and they were very successful, Imean, by successful I mean they were popular—they weren’t well known, they were popular.”88

(And, of course, Valerie did host two different SCUMMY thing events, first on April 28, 1967, at theFarband House, and then on May 23, 1967, at the Directors Theater.)

Valerie repeatedly reminded Andy that she had nothing and could afford nothing and, in an eagertone, that she was excited that he had agreed to produce and direct Up Your Ass. Whether Andypromised that he would produce the play is unclear, though she certainly became convinced of thisand knew well the volume of films he had recently made. After numerous revisions and edits, shepresented a polished version of her play to him in June 1967. This version of the script, a twenty-nine-page, single-spaced copy with a few handwritten notes and corrections, represented theculmination of years of work. Earlier drafts, which she kept in her possession, were never thrownout, even when she moved around from place to place after her various evictions from the Chelseaand other hotels.89 Valerie and Andy had started to negotiate different possibilities for the play, tossingaround the idea of producing it at Grove Press’s Evergreen Theatre as a two-part production thatwould feature “The Primer” as the first part and Up Your Ass as the second. The momentum behindthis plan had excited and energized Valerie.

Her pride in Up Your Ass consumed her. She wrote to her father detailing her pleasure in living inNew York and her excitement about her manuscripts. A postcard of June 14, 1967, read:

Dear Pop, Thanks an awful lot for the money. This will really be such a help to me, + I deeply appreciate it. I’m looking forwardto seeing you in 2 weeks. I’ll bring my play with me. Hope to finish my manifesto in a few days—Love, Val90

Two weeks later, in a postcard dated June 29 that she sent from her home address at the ChelseaHotel, she pridefully told her father about her potential success with Up Your Ass:

Dear Pop, Just received your letter + the money. Thanks a lot. I don’t want to travel over the weekend or over the 4th of Julyholiday, as the roads are dangerous, so I’ll visit you Thurs, July 6th. I have some things cooking regarding my play. Hopesomething will have materialized by the time I see you. Love, Val91

Her giddiness and energy from the perceived promise that Andy would produce the play onlyintensified in the coming months. When she ran into Jeremiah in front of Carol Blanes, a store thatcatered to drag queens, Valerie related with enthusiasm that Andy would soon be purchasing a scriptfrom her. Her time had finally come to give her work a proper audience.

As the days went by Valerie grew increasingly impatient with Andy dragging his feet. She inquiredrepeatedly about his interest in the play. Andy didn’t answer. Eventually, he told her that he had lostthe manuscript and, knowing that this would upset her, strategized about ways to get her off his back.In a later memoir, Andy recalled how he arrived at his ultimate solution:

When I finally admitted to her that it was lost, she started asking me for money. She was staying at the Chelsea Hotel, she said,and she needed the money to pay her rent. One afternoon in September when she called, we were in the middle of shooting asequence for I, a Man, so I said why didn’t she come over and be in the movie and earn twenty-five dollars instead of asking fora handout. She came right over and we filmed her in a short scene on a staircase and she was actually funny and that was that.92

Valerie happily accepted his offer, and her faith in Andy was temporarily restored. As MauriceGirodias, Valerie’s eventual publisher, recalled, “She was extremely warm and friendly andeasygoing with him. It was when I, a Man was in the last stages of production.”93

I, a Man, starring Ingrid Superstar, Ultra Violet, International Velvet, Ivy Nicholson, Brigid Polk,Viva, and Valerie, gave a snapshot of major players at the Factory. Loosely inspired by the Swedishsexploitation film I, a Woman (1965), Andy’s film featured a man’s encounters with six differentwomen as he awkwardly tries to hit on them. Valerie appeared one hour into the film, playing herself,spouting ideas similar to those in the manifesto.

Valerie’s scene in I, a Man showcased a tough butch lesbian rejecting a pickup line from a man(played by Tom Baker) she encounters in an elevator. She talks about men’s “squishy asses” (“I’m asucker for squishy ass, but what else have you got?”) and “men’s tits” and asks the man, “What am Idoing up here with a finko like you?” She grabs his ass and tells him to “shove off,” reminding him,“Look, I got the upper hand, let’s not forget that.” When he makes sexual advances, she retorts, “I stilldon’t like your tits,” and “Come on, man, what’s this shit?” repeating, “We’re talking about tits. . . .You brought the subject of men’s tits up, now, let’s pursue the subject.”

After Valerie smiles directly at the camera, seemingly colluding in the absurdity of the scene, shereturns for a funny, vicious, Valerie-esque exchange with Tom:

Valerie: You dig men sexually?Tom: You mean have I balled men? Nah, uh, not since I was young.Valerie: Why not?Tom: It’s not my instinct.Valerie: Why?Tom: I have to follow my instincts.Valerie: Why?Tom: Why? My instincts tell me what to do.Valerie: My instincts tell me what to do.Tom: What do your instincts tell you to do now?Valerie: Same thing your instincts tell you to do.Tom: My instincts tell me to, uh, let’s go upstairs and get together.Valerie: Your instincts tell you to chase chicks, right?Tom: Right!Valerie: My instincts tell me to do the same thing.Tom: Oh. Wow.Valerie: Why should my standards be any lower than yours?

Valerie’s scene ends with her explaining, after Baker proposes to “do” her roommate, “No, myroommate wouldn’t like you.” She pushes him out of the way, declaring, “I don’t live here. I wanna gohome. I wanna beat my meat,” as she exits the stairwell.94

During the filming, according to Ultra Violet, Andy was “moaning” behind the camera, “a kind ofapproving moan. He liked her switch-blade pronouncements.” Andy liked her performance becausehe found her honest and funny.95 Tom Baker was energized by Valerie. He stated, “I felt no personalthreat from Valerie. Just the opposite. I found her intelligent, funny, almost charming, and very, veryfrightened.”96

Valerie insisted that she had never been paid the twenty-five dollars Andy owed her for appearingin the movie. She believed Andy had a habit of misleading and using other people. She honed in on

his exploitation of the women at the Factory, at times urging them to fight back against his indifferenceand callousness.97 Ultra recalled Valerie telling her, during a shooting of I, a Man, “Those disgustingpigs, men! They’re all leeches. . . . Why do you let him exploit you? Why don’t you shove a shiv intohis chest or ram an ice pick up his ass?” Valerie complained. “Talking to him is like talking to achair.” Of her own measly (and nonexistent) payment for the film, she told the Village Voice, “A snakecouldn’t buy a meal on what he pays out.”98

Still, Valerie was proud of having snagged a small part in one of Andy’s films. On August 24,1967, just before the film I, a Man opened, she invited her sister, Judith, to visit New York and seethe movie with her. The two attended an afternoon matinee at the Hudson Theater. Judith wasappalled at the movie and Valerie, having been so proud of her role in it, did not take well to herreaction. Judith exclaimed, “It’s for the lecher crowd. No one ever went broke underestimating theAmerican public.” Judith remarked that Valerie’s speech had changed, that her voice sounded moreshrill than it once had. She noticed other changes: “I studied her face through my dark glasses. Whenhad she stopped smiling? I suddenly realized that although she laughed at some things, she no longersmiled. . . . Only someone who knew her well could see it, the light had vanished.”99

Paranoia was growing in Valerie, particularly with regard to how others would potentially misuseher writings. She became so frightened that “they” would take her work that at one point she snuckmanuscripts out with the laundry and hurried to another friend’s house because she thought her mailwas being read and her room was bugged. She hated lawyers and cops, leaving her with few means toaddress these perceived violations. Showing frustration with Andy, she wrote to her father again, onAugust 4, 1967:

Dear Pop, I’m sure you’re wondering why I haven’t shown up by now. Well, my affairs here still aren’t straightened out, +they’re too involved to explain in a letter. I’ll explain them to you when I see you. Hope to be down to A.C. within a few weeks.How was your visit with Carmen + Mena? Love, Val100

By late fall 1967, women at the Factory had grown tired of Valerie and had increased their effortsto expunge her presence from the inner circle. One day, Andy spotted her sitting at a table near his atMax’s. He and Viva approached and Viva hurled at her, “You dyke! You’re disgusting!” Valeriesupposedly answered this insult with the story of her sexual abuse at the hands of her father.101

Andy said nothing; he generally disliked violence and cruelty, once saying in an interview about thescene in Chelsea Girls where a man slaps a woman around, “I don’t really believe in violence andstuff, but we happened to see it so often in some of the things we were filming, and I always, youknow, shut off the camera or something like that, and got nervous about it. . . . I feel bad about the girl,you know—it wasn’t her fault. She just happened to be there, and it didn’t matter who she was,because if it wasn’t that girl it would have been someone else.”102 Whether Andy believed that Valeriehad told the truth about the sexual violence she revealed remains unclear.

UP FROM THE SLIME WITH MAURICE GIRODIASThe collision of Valerie with the notoriously sleazy French publisher Maurice Girodias would provea fateful union for them both. Known as not only sleazy but also brilliant, Maurice always struggled—and almost always failed—to match his eye for talent with sound business practices. After multiplebankruptcies in Paris and multiple successful discoveries of works such as Lolita and Naked Lunch,he arrived in New York eager to succeed as a publisher with the American version of Olympia Press.Mary Harron dramatized Maurice as saying, in I Shot Andy Warhol, “People will very soon tire of

the vulgar, erotic sex fiction of the last few years. A new form of erotic literature is going to emergefrom the dungheap of pornography. We are moving to a new, more refined form of fiction that’s moreautobiographical and tolerates a greater erotic content.”103 Maurice felt the public could no longer bescandalized but he nevertheless wanted to feel out new trends while with Olympia Press with theultimate goal of discovering unknown talent.

Although both Maurice and Valerie lived at the Chelsea Hotel, they had not met. Fatefully one dayValerie ran smack into an advertisement placed in the back pages of all US Olympia Presspaperbacks that year:

NOTICE TO UNKNOWN WRITERSThe Olympia Press, founded in Paris (on a shoestring) by Maurice Girodias in 1953, allegedly to pervert American tourists into apornographic way of life, published The Story of O in 1954, Lolita and The Ginger Man in 1955, all of de Sade’s novels and mostof Henry Miller’s best works, Candy in 1958, Naked Lunch and Durrell’s Black Book in 1959—not to speak of dozens of otherinteresting authors, masterpieces and diversions. . . . We are not interested in anyone famous, or half famous. Our function is todiscover talent. Unknown writers are our specialty. You have been rejected by all existing publishers: well and good, you have achance with us. We read everything—promptly, discriminatively and optimistically.104

Maurice, a self-described pornographer who wanted to attack the establishment, had a habit ofconducting nearly all his official business meetings in cafés or apartments, often with terriblefinancial practices and an insistence on paying writers flat fee payments for their erotic works.105 Heroutinely turned on friends and associates and maintained a bleak view of the world, priding himselfon rebelliousness and visionary thinking and allegedly oversexualizing the women he admired.

Valerie and Maurice shared a desire to unearth the things society most wanted to repress, to givevoice to the scummiest of voices. Consequently, Valerie sent Maurice a note at the Chelseaintroducing herself as a writer. Maurice reported of his first meeting with Valerie that “her mannerwas friendly, lively, and she had a sense of humor—which somewhat took the edge off the anti-masculine doctrine she proceeded to preach to me. The title of her play, Up Your Ass, was sufficientlyindicative of her iconoclastic disposition, and naturally I sympathized as I was supposed to. The playwas rather clever, and I found it amusingly wild. I also found myself, quite to my surprise, inagreement with what I understood of her theories.” He described her appearance during that meeting(again with an air of amusement and interest): “Her fixed expression was that of a Douanier Rousseaupersonage froze in wooden immobility against its picture book background.”106 He found her“extremely energetic and brutal, like New York girls who beg and live by their wits are.”107 Mauriceappreciated the extremity of Valerie’s writings, feeling that she pushed her distortions so far that sheconverted them to valid fantasies.

Valerie and Maurice should have admired each other; intellectually, as Mary Harron pointed out,they had far more in common than did Valerie and Andy: “Both loved words, and took pride in beingsubversive. . . . Girodias believed that a society that frustrated women’s talents was sterile andoppressive for both sexes, and having a good sense of the zeitgeist, he could feel the tremors of thewomen’s movement.” While in Paris, he had encouraged women to write erotica, seeing them asuniquely talented and capable of communicating the foundations of sexuality. “He loved women andprided himself on understanding and appreciating them, although that appreciation was of the oldschool, inextricably bound up with sex and romance.”108

For CJ Scheiner, a man who knew Maurice from that time, Maurice was “a gentleman of a schoolthat disappeared two centuries ago”; while Maurice had a certain formality, he could accept almostanybody’s views on anything. To conceal his paternal Jewish ancestry from the Nazis, he changed hisname from Kahane to Girodias.109 His history was chock-full of rebellious impulses: when he was

eighteen or nineteen, his girlfriend left him for someone else, so he fled to Tibet for two years. “Thiswas his way of handling a broken heart,” Scheiner said.110

According to Mary Harron, “Of anyone Valerie met in that time in New York, he came the closestto appreciating her talents, albeit without truly ever understanding her.”111 (Maurice even had adaughter named Valerie.) Their publishing arrangements in many ways boosted Valerie’s spirits andmade her keenly aware of how much was at stake in selling a publisher rights to her works.

In the August 29, 1967, contract signed by Valerie, Maurice specified that he would pay a total offive hundred dollars cash as an advance on the royalties he would pay for the novel she agreed towrite for him. He specified, “You have agreed to let me have an outline and a few excerpts within aweek from today; if this proves satisfactory I will then undertake to pay you a further $1,000 inseveral instalments [sic], and $500 thirty days after publication of the book, against a royalty of 6%on the first 50,000 copies sold; 8% on the next 100,000 copies sold, and 10% thereafter.”112 He addedthat their contract included first refusal rights on her next two book-length works. The contract usedvague language and provided “fertile ground for Valerie’s paranoia.”113

After the signing, Maurice took Valerie to dinner at El Quixote, next door to the Chelsea Hotel.Valerie astonished him by turning up in makeup and a magnificent red dress. (Notably, this story wasdistorted in a postshooting report that held that Maurice took Valerie to see the ballet Don Quixote,which impressed Valerie, and that she wore a dress and asked, “Don’t you think I’m a good lookinggirl?” Valerie expressly denied this ever occurring.)114 The two had started their relationship with adecent rapport and some mutual admiration.

In many ways, Maurice admired and liked Valerie, speaking openly about her in a radio interviewin Paris: “She did not look quite like a woman but neither like a man. . . . I would not have marriedher, of course, but I did really like her; I found her very funny.”115 They had formed a friendship withsome mutual affection. Friedman, Maurice’s lawyer, recalled that Maurice thought she was a little bitcrazy, but he never really talked about it.116 In August 1967, Valerie invited Maurice to a privatescreening at the Factory of the film she had starred in, I, a Man. Maurice described Valerie as relaxedand friendly in Andy’s company. Still, Valerie called out the injustices she saw at the Factory—particularly Andy’s biases against women and his underpayment of his actors—which foreshadowedher eventual break from Maurice over matters of autonomy, financial control, and intrusiveness. Hersocializing with Andy and Maurice at this screening would mark one of the final times she felt at easewith either of them.

Soon Valerie realized that Maurice could technically own both SCUM Manifesto and Up Your Assbased on the contract she signed, which soured her relationship with him. She later wrote to journalistHoward Smith that she had first believed that the contract would establish a claim on her next twobooks after the novel she was writing was completed, but when she realized (or interpreted) that thecontract included her next two works from the time of signing the contract, and that Girodias couldtake SCUM Manifesto and Up Your Ass as her next two “book-length works,” she felt trapped andduped. She wrote:

I stupidly thought the contract was just to establish his claims on the novel, so I couldn’t keep the $500, then sell the novel tosomeone else, so I signed it, + it turned out to be the contract, + he owned the novel + all subsidiary rights. . . . I thought ‘next’meant after the novel was written, but it turned out that ‘next’ meant after the contract was signed, so he had a claim on the‘SCUM Manifesto’ + he had the Manifesto in mind when he wrote up the contract, as well as the play, which I learned too late hecould take in place of the novel if I didn’t turn one in.117

Valerie’s paranoia about the contract she signed only intensified and, in a strange irony, she sought

advice and help from Andy to help her make sense of the contract she had signed with Maurice. PaulMorrissey said that, regardless of how much Andy tried to help Valerie, she refused to believe thecontract with Maurice was meaningless (Andy’s lawyers had already determined it would not hold upin court):

So she brought me this stupid piece of paper, two sentences, tiny little letter. On it Maurice Girodias said: ‘I will give you fivehundred dollars, and you will give me your next writing, and other writings.’ Something like that. It didn’t mean he owned them. Itmeans she would submit them to him, and he’d look at them. It was a totally meaningless thing. I said: ‘Valerie, it doesn’t mean heowns your writing.’ She said: ‘Oh, no—everything I write will be his. He’s done this to me, He’s screwed me! He’s . . .’ I said: ‘Itdoesn’t mean that.’ So then, I was talking to lawyers. . . . Ed, would you do us a favor. There’s a girl, she has this agreement,piece of paper. Would you look at it and tell her whether it has any legal basis?’ And I said: ‘Valerie—you’re gonna go see alawyer—you won’t pay him—he’ll charge us, and he’ll look at the paper, tell you what he thinks of it.’ Valerie said: ‘Oh, that’s . . .Thanks . . .’ So I spoke to him again later, and he said: ‘Oh, that girl came in. She’s really crazy. I told her that this paper meansnothing! It doesn’t mean he owns her writings—it doesn’t mean that. I told her that—she wouldn’t believe me. She said: ‘You’relying, you’re stealing, you’re lying, you’re crazy!’ I said: ‘Oh well, O.K. . . .’ What it is is she wanted to believe this stupid thing.118

Andy’s lawyer, Ed Katz, had indeed told Valerie the contract had no legal standing, but Valerie felt norelief from this legal consultation. “He screwed me,” she exclaimed. “Said everything was okay. Ithink he was being paid by the publisher. You can’t trust any of them.”119

Valerie sensed deception keenly and swiftly. Maurice had a track record of slimy, underhandeddealings. As an example, he had once decided to put an avant-garde cabaret theater in the basement ofhis office building. When they started excavating the basement, they found human skeletons there; thebuilding towered over an old cemetery. As an acquaintance recalled, “Maurice decided the onlyreasonable thing to do was to put all the bones in a bag and in the middle of the night take them outand dump them into someplace so he could continue to build his theater in the basement. He was anincredible scoundrel. How he managed his own business is beyond me. He went through fortunes likecrazy; he made his own bad luck.”120

LOSING UP YOUR ASS

Mary Harron has rightly commented that “the Factory had a reputation as the most outrageous place inAmerica, but it couldn’t handle Valerie Solanas.” Once Valerie felt she could no longer trust Maurice,she turned her sights again on Andy’s producing Up Your Ass and making a movie from SCUMManifesto. Particularly after I, a Man had screened, Valerie ramped up her efforts to pressure Andyinto producing her play, making the movie, and paying her more money. She became increasinglyfocused and obsessive about getting his attention, calling him at home (he had no idea how she hadobtained his number). This likely scared him, prompting him to pull back from Valerie and ignore herrepeated attempts to colonize his attention. While many of the “stupidstars” had unstable fits, drugoverdoses, needy and demanding outbursts, and desperate struggles over Andy’s attention, Valeriewas dogged and calculated in her offenses: “She was . . . serious, not to say, monomaniacal,” Harronwrote. “She believed in politics. She was a revolutionary, whereas Warhol had no desire to changethe status quo.”121

Believing that Andy had promised to produce Up Your Ass and start filming immediately for SCUMManifesto (starring Valerie), she hated that he had stalled on both these promises. She later revealedto Howard Smith the nuances of her conviction that Andy and Maurice had manipulated her:

[Andy and I] were to start shooting immediately + sign the contract + acting after the shooting, which is customary. Then I signed

the contract with Girodias, + Warhol said we don’t do the movie until I sign the acting contract 1st. Then I finished “SCUMManifesto” + Girodias gave me a contract for it, which I didn’t sign, as it was a sell-out. But since he had a claim on it by virtue ofthe novel contract I couldn’t sell the Manifesto to anyone else. By this time I was hip to what the 1st contract meant, so I decidednot to do the novel, but if I didn’t, he could take “Up Your Ass” in place of it, so I sent him a letter saying he could publish ‘SCUMManifesto’ in place of the novel, thereby saving the play at least. The “SCUM Manifesto” was lost either way. But he refused.He insisted I sign the contract for the Manifesto. Warhol meanwhile told me that until I signed the “SCUM Manifesto” contract,did the novel, or signed over the play, + turned in a 3rd work (Girodias had a claim on 3 works), + signed the acting contract forthe movie “SCUM Manifesto,” we wouldn’t do the movie nor would anything of mine get published. In other words they had mein a position where I had to give them my heart + soul in return for crumbs.122

Valerie began to unravel. She never delivered the promised novel to Maurice, and consequently,her relationship with him suffered. As Maurice wrote:

Then she got worse and worse characterwise. She didn’t want to work on the novel she was supposed to write for me. The novelwas supposed to be an autobiography, a personal confession. And she began getting extremely angry with Warhol. She felt heowed her a lot of money. But there was no contract, no written papers of any sort. I kept trying to pacify her vis-à-vis Warhol.And I am sure Warhol was doing the same when she went to complain about me. She got angry at me because I would notpublish her SCUM (Society for Cutting Up Men) Manifesto, and because she could not write that novel. She transferred theanger. Just to insult me publicly, she would write letters to me here at the Chelsea after she was kicked out, to “Girodias, TheToad.”123

In all likelihood, Andy lost any potential interest in producing Up Your Ass or making a movie fromSCUM Manifesto around the time Valerie signed the contract with Maurice. Whether Andy lostinterest in Up Your Ass because of Valerie’s contract with Maurice remains unclear. Andy becamedisinterested in and aloof toward Valerie’s projects and Valerie saw this as the consequence of hersigning with Maurice. Not a fighter by nature, Andy took his distance from Valerie in a subtle manner,as the potential of producing her off-off-Broadway play did not hold his attention.

Experiencing a growing distaste for both Andy and Maurice, Valerie now also found herself in thefall of 1967 with nowhere to live and believing she was in breach of contract. She had few friends,and nowhere to go. In typical Valerie style, her hostility toward Maurice did not prevent her fromasking him, in a 4:00 a.m. phone call, if she could move into his place at the Chelsea with him,assuring him rather sweetly that she would stay out of his way and be a good roommate. During suchconversations, she would ask him what he thought of her and her work, convinced that he wouldabuse her contract and take advantage of her. “A connection had been made in Valerie’s mind betweenher two mentors, Warhol and Girodias, who she came to believe were united in conspiracy againsther. Warhol had stolen her play; Girodias had tried to tie her up with his ‘greasy contract.’”124

Valerie believed that Andy wanted to make a film of the play and not pay her rights for it, and shewould launch into diatribes about how he was a “vulture and a thief.” Her anxieties were both basedin fact and somewhat bizarre; Andy had lost the play, in part because of Valerie’s entanglements withMaurice, in part because of frank disinterest, in part because of Andy’s sloppiness, and in partbecause he generally neglected everyone in his sphere who felt passionately about anything. He alsodid use many of Valerie’s lines and sentiments in Women in Revolt later on (without compensatingher). As usual, Valerie exhibited a unique blend of schizophrenic paranoia and outright accuracy. As apassionless person, Andy felt proud of his detached and observant way of taking in the world. That hetossed Valerie’s play aside was consistent with his general demeanor about nearly everything at theFactory. The wild disjuncture between Valerie and Andy likely led him to forget about Up Your Assand SCUM Manifesto altogether. As Alisa Solomon wrote in the Village Voice, “Warhol must haveflung it aside in uncomprehending horror. How could the cool, asexual, pallid pop artist, enthralledby consumer culture, find his way into this overheated, sex-drenched, knee-slapping diatribe that callsfor doing away with men and money? Could there be two more contrary sensibilities?”125 (In a 1980

interview, Andy admitted that he had looked through Up Your Ass briefly but felt the play wouldentrap him. No one knows whether he ever read, or liked, SCUM Manifesto.)126

Finding herself again living on the street, Valerie pestered Maurice to publish SCUM Manifestoand, “after some wrangling and aggressive letters on her part, he agreed, but she balked at the newcontract he had prepared,” as Harron described it.127 Always a writer, Valerie began sending heaps ofhate mail to Maurice’s office, referring to him almost exclusively as the “Lowly Toad.” Valerie madeseveral vitriolic and threatening phone calls to his office at Olympia Press, though he did not thinkmuch of them.

By early January 1968, Valerie’s intensity, short-tempered impatience, and rage had reached apeak. Her mental health skidded on the edge, and she had begun to worry family members. Though shehad never regularly communicated with either her sister or her mother during this period (at most shesent a postcard to notify them when she moved), she began inundating them with letters and long-distance phone calls. All she could do was talk about Andy Warhol and Maurice Girodias, insistingthat they had stolen from her, that lines from I, a Man had been dubbed over, and that Andy had usedher material in lectures he was giving in New York. She started writing long, rambling letters to hersister and mother about Andy and Maurice and how people were out to get her. When Judith asked hermother, “Have you heard from Valerie?” she learned that her mother, like Judith, had becomeextremely concerned by the quality of the letters.128

Valerie now believed the only way to save Up Your Ass from the slimy hands of Maurice was tosign over SCUM Manifesto. In January 1968, she mailed Maurice a letter:

M. G.—I don’t intend to write the novel. You can publish “SCUM Manifesto” in it’s [sic] place. The “SCUM Manifesto” is now yours, tohave & to hold—forever.

Valerie Solanas129

VALERIE VISITS CALIFORNIAResigned to the “greasy” contract with Maurice, Valerie left New York in early 1968 with her five-hundred-dollar advance and traveled to California to visit Judith and a dear friend, Geoffrey LeGear.Valerie called this time in California, from late January to mid-February, her “little vacation.”130

At the time of Valerie’s visit to California, Judith had separated from her husband. When Valerieshowed up at Judith’s San Mateo home at six o’clock in the morning carrying several boxes ofmanuscripts and mimeographed copies of SCUM Manifesto, Judith felt worried. As Warholbiographer Steven Watson wrote, Valerie was in the worst state Judith had ever seen her in: “She wasso filthy, her waist-length hair so knotted that Judith put her in a bathtub and cut off all her hair. ‘Shehad a carton full of SCUM manifestoes she was selling on the street, but only had the filthy clothesshe had on her back.’”131 Judith scoured her from head to toe three times and put all her clothes in theDumpster nearby. She bought her new clothes, tennis shoes, and flannel pajamas.

Valerie complained bitterly about Andy and Maurice, continuing her rants about the mistreatmentshe faced from them. Judith remembered their conversation vividly: “She told me that a publisher inNew York—Maurice Girodias—wouldn’t publish SCUM but gave her money to write a novel. ThenWarhol and Girodias were conspiring to steal her play and her manifesto. . . . I didn’t know what tomake of it. She was the one who knew about writing and the publishing world.”132

She sent many letters to Andy during her time with her sister, the first of which said, “Dear Andy,You asked me twice where the unsigned ‘SCUM Manifesto’ contract is, would you like to have it? I’ll

sell it to you for $20,000. I’m dead serious.”133 Her next letter to Andy stated, “I really do believe thatif you didn’t have your lies + deception + notarized affidavits, you’d shrivel up + die. Valerie”(February 1, 1968). Next she chided Andy: “Toad—If I had a million dollars, I’d have total control ofthe world within 2 wks; you + your fellow toad, Girodias, (2 multi-millionaires) working togethercontrol only bums in the gutter, + then only with relentless, desperate, compulsive effort” (February 7,1968).

In an ominous letter of February 10, Valerie intimated she intended to buy a gun: “You can shoveyour planefare up your ass; I now have a little sum saved—enough for, not only planefare, but a fewother things as well. Besides, I’ve decided to stay out here for a while. My little vacation has doneme a world of good, + in the course of having it I got a few gassy scenes going. (‘other things’ mayrefer to guns). Valerie.”

The next day, she wrote a sarcastic letter calling Andy “Daddy”: “Daddy, If I’m good, will you letJonas Mekas write about me? Will you let me do a scene in one of your shit movies? Oh, thank you,thank you.”

Valerie was working herself into a panic, and the visit with her sister was short-lived. Valerie lefther sister’s house after only a few weeks and then fled twenty miles north to San Francisco, whereshe went to peddle the manifesto on the street and consign it to bookstores. She continued to mailletters to Andy and Maurice, this time giving an address at Seventh and Mission Streets in SanFrancisco.

She then went across the bay to Berkeley, where she spent a few months living with a psychologystudent who attended the University of California. When she first arrived in Berkeley, she approacheda student and asked if he wanted a female roommate. He already had two roommates so he referredher to a neighbor whom he disliked. The student remembered that Valerie “looked like a dike [sic]. . . She was always wearing this sort of motorcycle cap.”134

Valerie showed up at the neighbor’s apartment a month after the student had given her the address.Convinced that she would be an acceptable roommate, this male student allowed her to move in withhim. Then, “the misery began.” Consistent with Judith’s account, Valerie worried constantly about UpYour Ass, SCUM Manifesto, and the copyright infringement she suspected of Andy and Maurice. Herparanoia became so intense that she ruminated on whether her dental fillings were bugged. Herroommate and others who came to the apartment became alarmed. The psychology student, who livedupstairs, said, “Once I saw [my neighbor] leaning out the window, nailing it shut,” apparently fearfulof Valerie’s ranting. “They would talk until all hours and she would spend a lot of time at thetypewriter.” Valerie had asked her roommate to put a special lock on his door. “Eventually her hostmoved out and she finished out the month alone in the apartment.”135

Leaving the Berkeley apartment and again finding herself homeless, she spent two weeks with herfriend Geoffrey LeGear in Berkeley and San Francisco.136 (Geoffrey LeGear still lives in California.He is seventy-seven years old, born the same year as Valerie. He lived with Valerie in Berkeley, SanFrancisco, and New York in 1967 and 1968, and last spoke with her in 1971. He described Valerie as“unforgettable . . . a combination of Hamlet and Cleopatra, the antic disposition, the infinitevariety.”)137 Valerie related to Geoffrey the issues she had with Maurice and Andy and strategizedabout how she could address her problems. She trusted Geoffrey’s advice and admitted that herparanoia had grown worse, hoping he could provide some clarity about the stranglehold Maurice hadon her writings. Geoffrey lent a sympathetic ear but could not quell the storm emerging from Valerie.

Following her time with Geoffrey, she returned to her sister’s home, still spinning withpsychological imbalance. She showed up at Judith’s office, in a high-rise, wearing every piece of

clothing she owned (including the flannel pajamas and all the clothes Judith had bought her), in bulkylayers. She insisted that she had to return to New York immediately and demanded money so that shecould do so. Judith knew something was wrong. “This was bizarre even for Valerie. I argued withher, pleaded for her to move in with me, and she yelled back until I gave in.”138 Then, because theplane ride to California had frightened her so intensely, she refused to fly back, telling Judith that shevowed never to ride in an airplane again. Judith bid her goodbye as “she boarded a Greyhound busfor a long trip across America, returning to her twin nemeses.”139 A week later, Valerie arrived back inNew York, angry as ever and reenergized in her efforts to seek revenge on the “Toads,” Andy andMaurice.

VALERIE, GET YOUR GUN

Even people who respected Warhol and his work thought that people at the Factory were being used as cannon fodder foravant-garde art. She probably wanted to be taken more seriously than she was by the people at the Factory. . . . She wasprobably a terribly ambitious young woman writer. It is a fascinating case—a female artist driven to terrible lengths by thelack of response of the art world around her, and then lashing out at the superhero of the avant garde.

—Kate Millett, interview by Mary Harron

Sometime before the peak of her anxiety and rage, Valerie encountered a young radical named BenMorea, the founder and leader of Up Against the Wall, Motherfucker (UAW/MF), a notoriously angry,hell-raising, anarchist group of artists and countercultural radicals (a “street gang with analysis”)affiliated with the Lower East Side branch of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). Referringto himself as a “self-educated ghetto kid and painter,” Ben had used his experiences with drugaddiction and prison as a teenager to reinvent himself as an artist with social awareness.140 “Therelationship with Solanas is shrouded in mystery,” said John McMillian, a reporter for the New YorkPress who interviewed Ben in 2005. The Motherfuckers “were very unsavory but some weresurprisingly smart and knowledgeable.”141

Ben, who had given only a handful of interviews since his disappearance from the limelight in thelate 1960s (shortly before the 1968 Chicago Democratic National Convention), recounted to me hismeeting Valerie in 1967:

I published an anarchist, artistic, cultural paper called Black Mask and I used to on occasion sell it on the street for a nickel on thecorner of Eighth Street and Fifth Avenue. Monetary gain wasn’t the purpose. The nickel was just that if you hand it out freepeople take it no matter what. So, I thought for a nickel they would go out of their way to get it and look at it. So I used to chargea nickel. One day I was selling the paper in the Village and Valerie, who I didn’t know at the time, came up to me and said shewould like to get a copy, but she didn’t have a nickel. I told her, “You don’t really need a nickel. Since you want a copy, you canhave it. I only charge a nickel to make sure somebody wants it.” She said, “No, no. Wait here,” and she went into a bookstore andstole a copy of her own book, SCUM Manifesto, brought the book back to me, and said, “Here, I’ll trade you.” She just went andstole it from some bookstore! That’s how I met her. I immediately was attracted to her, her effort. It impressed me. I canremember over time we just got closer and closer, more friendly, and then for a period of time she used to stay with me. I had aloft then and I was also an artist. I cannot remember how she told me, or I knew, or I sensed that she was transient and didn’thave a permanent place. I made my home available to her. She used to come and stay with me on occasion, just overnight, maybeseveral nights in a row, and then I wouldn’t see her for a few nights.

His friendship with Valerie remained platonic and he described her as his closest friend: “I lovedValerie.”142

Certainly, Ben was an excellent match politically for Valerie’s radical sensibilities. On hisattraction to Valerie as a person, Ben said, “I always loved people who were loose cannons, whodidn’t fit the mold.” He believed in complete cultural upheaval, never made apologies for men’s

violence and mistreatment of women, and insisted on anti-assimilation. When Valerie stayed withhim, he offered political conversation and sympathy for her hatred of the corporate, mass-producedgoals of Andy Warhol’s so-called art. He, too, hated Warhol: “Aesthetically and ideologically, Iwould lean much more toward her than towards him. I would vilify him for trying to destroy thecreative act and make it a money act. I mean, he really stands out as a negative factor to me and shedoes not.”143

When asked how he felt toward Valerie or whether the relationship was sexual, Ben replied:You know I loved her. She was a very beautiful person, but she was a little unbalanced, which never bothered me and still doesn’tbother me. I had such strong feelings, good feelings for her. She was fairly mild mannered compared to what people wouldassume by her actions. It was never obvious that she would go to that extreme. She was not an aggressive person. She was verynice and she was very sweet around me all the time. In the movie, they show that we had some sexual liaison which wascompletely untrue. We were just really close friends, a platonic relationship rather than a physical relationship. I assumed that shewas either asexual, bisexual, but she had lesbian tendencies and I couldn’t tell and it didn’t matter to me if she mainly thought ofherself as lesbian or if she was bisexual. I mean, I could tell that her sexuality was less defined by the norm. We didn’t have thatkind of relationship, that kind of appeal towards each other. We had a bond. A kind of friendship bond. She was my buddy.

Along these lines, Ben endorsed the portrayal of his character, Mark Motherfucker, in the film I ShotAndy Warhol, saying it offered a true portrayal of Valerie and that it didn’t bother him that theydepicted a sexual liaison between them:

They couldn’t find me. They tried to find me, but I was out of communication for at least forty years. You couldn’t find me if youwanted to. They had no other way to show how close we really were other than that. People couldn’t understand it in platonicterms. They couldn’t understand closeness without sex.

We particularly bonded over our dislike of Andy. She disliked his manipulation of people. She was opposed to that relationshipbetween men and women, that sense of manipulation, and it became aesthetic as well as political. She was calm and mellow withme, but you’ve got to remember, I was a pretty volatile person in those days. Maybe if she was around a liberal, she would havecome across as more threatening and strong, but around me, it didn’t come off that way at all. She was my friend, my equal. Shewas her own person. You could just tell that she was not what we in the ’60s used to call straight. She was just not a straightperson, a person who was wrought in this materialistic world. She had an edge to her. It wasn’t like she was overtly crazy. Shewas crazy in the sense that we all were on my end of the spectrum. We were all opposed to this materialistic, dominant,oppressive world that the straights loved. We made it clear by our actions, our thoughts, our appearance. We tried to make it clearthat we were not part of the straight world and you could tell she was not. Had she been a straight person, we probably wouldn’thave had the relationship that we had. But I was not really open or friendly to straight people at all. I had no interest in it, in thatworld or the people from that world.

Believing Valerie had a more light-hearted personality than many gave her credit for, he recounteda story where he confronted Valerie about her intentions to “eliminate” him because of his gender:

One evening I said to her, “You know, Valerie, I was wondering, your main focus is killing men and here I am, a man. What doesthat mean?” She looked at me and said she had never thought of that in those terms. She thought for a minute and said, “Well Ipromise you, you’ll be the last man we kill.” In other words, she didn’t take herself overly serious. She was easy to get along with,and a lot of the conversation was about what I’ve been doing, things I was involved with, and thoughts that I had or thoughts thatshe had about art in general and politics, how it affected art and vice versa, how art affected politics.

To make matters more complicated, Ben advocated political violence and had brought guns toseveral political demonstrations and events. Much speculation exists about where Valerie got her gunor guns. I Shot Andy Warhol depicts a scene where Valerie steals a gun from the character MarkMotherfucker; Ben insisted that it did not happen that way: “While we’re on the subject, the movieshows her stealing the gun from me and that was not true. I mean, I had guns and my family [UpAgainst the Wall, Motherfucker] had guns at the time, but she would never steal from me and I don’tknow where she got the gun. I left there soon after and I never saw her again.” Ben’s account iscorroborated by Valerie, who admitted shortly after her arrest that she got guns in Reno and Vermont

(likely while traveling across the country after leaving California).144

Back in New York and eager to find Ben, Valerie was volatile and intense, and started to worrythose around her. A few days after her return to New York, she attended a party in the East Villageand “freaked out,” according to a person there, going into a tirade that frightened guests, who fearedthat she would become violent. A woman at this party noted that no one thought Valerie’s behaviorstemmed from drug use; rather, “she was freaked out in her head.”145 Other reports confirmed thatValerie’s anger was ramping up. Ed Sanders, owner of Peace Eye bookstore, had held on to SCUMManifesto for a long time. That week, she had returned there and demanded the manuscript back, butthe clerk did not have it: “She left a note in late May. She wanted the manuscript back. I got theimpression from the store clerk that she was miffed.”146

That same week, Valerie visited the offices of Cavalier magazine—the outlet where she hadpublished her 1966 article on panhandling—and approached Allen LeMond, then an editor, aboutwriting a column called “Lesbian at Large.” During this encounter, she insisted that she would speakonly with a woman editor, so he put her in touch with Gail Madonia. Valerie told Madonia that shewanted to write a column about women’s rights. According to Madonia, “We were considering it,since there was a big growth in women’s rights at the time, and she did not have the notoriety then.”The editors asked Valerie to write a sample piece, which was “all about women and there were noconcessions about men at all. . . . It was a rambling thing about how men were pigs. It was a stronganti-male column. Rejecting the piece, they spoke on the phone only once after that and mentioned thatthey were also not interested in publishing SCUM Manifesto.”147

In the next few days, Valerie again approached the Realist to publish SCUM Manifesto but PaulKrassner, its editor, rejected it outright. Still, on May 31, 1968, Paul agreed to meet her at the ChelseaHotel and take her to lunch. During their meeting, Valerie asked him for some money and told himabout SCUM and its plans to “herd all the men in the world and keep them caged up for the purposeof stud farming.”148 Attempting to show empathy and sympathizing with the anguish of a pamphleteer,Paul gave her fifty dollars.

Disagreements exist about whether Valerie told Paul of her plans to shoot Maurice or Andy. Somehave speculated that Maurice knew in advance that Valerie wanted to shoot him and Andy, so Mauriceabruptly left town for Montreal a few days before the shooting.149 Other sources imply that Valerie hadtargeted Andy all along and never intended to shoot Maurice. Geoffrey LeGear, Valerie’s friend, laterwrote to Maurice that prior to the shooting, Valerie had admitted that she was “sick” for most of1968. “She says that the weather was miserable, she had no money, she couldn’t trust anyone, she wasalready considering killing Warhol (she had actually bought an icepick), and so on.”150 Valerie’scomplaints about Maurice had begun to multiply in the weeks before the shooting. She was angry thathe refused her calls and letters, that he refused to directly answer anything, and she felt that her workhad been stolen irrevocably. Still, she targeted Andy earlier and with more ferocity than she didMaurice, implying that Andy had been a primary target in Valerie’s mind for much of early 1968.

In mid-May, she called the Factory repeatedly and issued various threats and demands to Andyabout her manuscript. Gerard Malanga, Andy’s trusted friend and associate, recalled that “Andy couldslice you with a glance,” noting that everyone loathed the thought of getting on Andy’s bad side.Though Andy had taken Valerie’s calls before and they had amused him, her barbed threats changedhis outlook. “Nothing ruffled Warhol so much as an ultimatum or a threat,” Gerard said. “He wouldshoot his persecutor the kind of look his father used to freeze his three sons with if they laughed onSunday.”151 Andy stopped taking Valerie’s calls.

The last weekend of May, Valerie sought out her friend Ben for some advice. Ben had dissolved

Black Mask and had aligned with the Family (Up Against the Wall, Motherfucker) to take radicalaction by occupying Columbia University. During the infamous campus takeover of the administration,no one was able to get in or out. Still, Valerie somehow cleverly got into the buildings and found Ben.“She came down to see me. She wasn’t more animated or troubled then,” Ben remembered, “and shesaid, ‘Hey, Ben, what would happen if I shot somebody?’ I said, ‘Well, it depends on two things: Whodo you shoot, and if they die or not.’” He added nonchalantly, “Her question just seemed like amatter-of-fact question, and it was a week later that she shot him.”152

JUNE 3, 1968The day Valerie shot Andy—a sunny summer day precisely two months after the assassination ofMartin Luther King, Jr. in Memphis, and two days prior to that of Robert Kennedy in Los Angeles atthe Ambassador Hotel—she became instantly infamous. Angry and alone, unable to find a publisherfor SCUM Manifesto or a producer for Up Your Ass, homeless and hungry, and frustrated by herinability to persuade Maurice or Andy to relinquish their control over her writings, Valerie set out tostrike at the heart of the pop-art giant.

Her first stop that morning: a visit to 208 West Twenty-Third Street, to her former neighbor MayWilson, the mother of William Wilson, who played a peripheral role in Andy’s crowd. (May Wilsonhad remembered Valerie from earlier encounters with her on Twenty-Third Street, seeing herapproach men with the sassy question, “Wanna hear me say a dirty word for a dollar?”) This time,Valerie’s visit was not a social call. A few weeks prior to June 3, she had asked May to keep underher bed a bulky-looking, flower-patterned cloth laundry bag containing all of Valerie’s belongings.May had agreed, though she noticed that the laundry bag contained no clothes. “There was somethingthat felt like a gun,” May said, “but having worked in vaudeville, I thought it might be a stage prop.”153

Valerie collected this bag early in the morning and took several items from it and placed them into abrown paper bag that she kept inside the carpet bag. These items included her address book, a Kotexpad, and two handguns: a .32 Beretta automatic and a .22 Colt revolver. She had paid sixty-fivedollars for the .32 but she didn’t trust it so she had added a second gun as backup.154

Whether after leaving May’s apartment Valerie showed up at Maurice Girodias’s office demandingto know his whereabouts has not been confirmed; some believe this actually happened, while othersbelieve Maurice started this as a rumor so he could sell more copies of SCUM Manifesto once hereleased it after the shooting.155 The more likely story—one that kept Up Your Ass and SCUMManifesto at the center of her thoughts—places Valerie at the Actor’s Studio at 432 West Forty-Fourth Street early that morning. Play in hand and gun in her carpet bag, she arrived at the studioeager to secure a producer for Up Your Ass, hell-bent on finding a rightful place for her play. Valeriedemanded to be heard.

At the Actor’s Studio, she sought out producer Lee Strasberg, famed actor and the studio’s director,to convince him to produce Up Your Ass. By chance, when she arrived, the actress Sylvia Miles (ofMidnight Cowboy) was the only one there. Sylvia had just heard that she’d gotten the part inMidnight Cowboy and had gone to the studio quite early that morning to start work. She said, “Thebell rang and I went downstairs thinking it was Lee Strasberg, and there was a girl standing there andher hands were wrapped around a packet, asking for him. She looked a little weird. Dirty, well Idon’t mean that. More like messy. She was not coiffed. She had a different look, a bit tousled, likesomebody whose appearance is the last thing on her mind. Scruffy, dark hair, sallow darkcomplexion, piercing eyes.” Sylvia saw Valerie holding a book called “SCUM.” Valerie quickly

asked Sylvia to read her play, but Sylvia ushered her out and told a bold-faced lie, that Strasbergwouldn’t be back until 1:00 p.m. Sensing the threat in Valerie’s presence, she felt compelled to lie inorder to get Valerie to leave the studio. “I shut the door because I knew she was trouble. I didn’tknow what sort of trouble, but I knew she was trouble,” Sylvia said. After meeting Valerie, Sylviaaccepted the copy of Up Your Ass which she read, but only after the events of that afternoon. The play,she said, was “awful and full of obscenities!”156

Now at Times Square, Valerie next headed for the apartment of Margo Feiden—child prodigy andplaywright—to seek assistance in publishing Up Your Ass. Valerie targeted Margo as a well-knownwoman playwright and producer—at age sixteen, Margo had produced Peter Pan on Broadway andwas the world’s youngest producer, according to the Guinness Book of World Records.157 They hadnever met in person; Valerie found out where Margo lived, on Crown Street in Brooklyn (a spaceMargo said could “disorient you to the real world when you step back outside”), and set out to meether and persuade her to produce Up Your Ass.158 If anyone would have sympathy for Valerie’s goalsand work, Valerie thought, Margo could be that person. Well connected, ahead of her time, and intentthat women enter “good ol’ boy” spaces, Margo could, in Valerie’s eyes, bring her the fame she sorightly deserved.

Margo had left early to take her eighteen-month-old daughter to the pediatrician’s office and hadreturned to the apartment around nine o’clock to find Valerie on her stoop. It was a warm summer’sday, but Valerie strangely wore a heavy, full-length, wool winter coat, a dark cap, and fingerlessgloves that showed her worn fingers. In this outfit, Margo could not discern Valerie’s gender with anycertainty. Before Margo reached her house, she sensed that Valerie was there to see her. Valerie,whom Margo would later describe as having a “loud smell,” asked to speak with her, and Margoinvited her inside.159

Never sitting down and never removing her coat, Valerie talked endlessly, telling Margo about UpYour Ass, asking her to produce the play, and describing in detail her plans for a SCUM takeover.“She had this formulation all worked out,” Margo recalled. “Every question had an answer. Valeriewas clever, smart, energizing.” Valerie, according to Margo, “answered questions as though she werea PhD candidate fully prepared for her orals.”

Valerie predicted matter-of-factly that in her ideal world of the future, all men would be killed, asthey were inherently evil. Women had a different sensibility: they never started wars, did not rape,and would soon be able to reproduce without the assistance of men, anyway. Margo was struck byValerie’s statement that “within our lifetimes, it will be possible for children to be conceived andborn without having intercourse with men.” Valerie seemed to predict test-tube babies nearly tenyears prior to the development of such medical technology. Margo asked, “But aside fromprocreation, what about women who want to have sex with men?” Valerie responded, “We’ll keepmen in bullpens and women will come and choose which one they want (number 3, number 30,number 98).” Margo continued, “But what about women who love their sons?” Valerie assured herthat, soon, gender choice would be available, and so only daughters would be born. Women couldraise their sons who were already born knowing that they would end up in this corral someday. Foralmost four full hours, Valerie continued to describe a whole host of things men were responsible forbut that women didn’t do: wife abuse, child abuse, war, the inequitable financial system, capitalism,corporations, failed governments, and so on.

“She had instant answers for everything,” Margo remembered, “She was able to debatemasterfully. Clearly she was brilliant, very smart, with intelligent, sad eyes. She took in everything.Still, what I saw before me was a tragically damaged person. It was there for just anybody to see.”

Margo believed that Valerie could garner lots of followers if she had been just a little less crazy,citing her “eyes that drew me in” and Valerie’s uncanny intensity and extraordinary intelligence. “Shewas on a completely different level than most people.”

After Valerie’s presentation of her ideas, she asked Margo point-blank to commit to producing theplay. Margo told Valerie, “You’re wasting your time. I won’t produce it.” Angry at this response,Valerie, who was carrying a large bag made of carpet squares, put her hand down and pressed itagainst the bag, showing the outline of what was inside. Valerie asked, “Do you know what this is?”Margo said, “It’s a gun.” Valerie took out the gun and Margo looked at her baby daughter sleeping inthe carriage. “Here’s Valerie holding a gun, pointing it toward the ceiling, and my baby daughter issleeping inches away,” Margo said. “She never pointed the gun at me or my child.”

Keeping the gun pointed upward, Valerie insisted that Margo would produce her play, thoughMargo continued to refuse Valerie’s demands. Meeting this resistance, Valerie suddenly said that nowshe had every intention of leaving Margo’s apartment and immediately going to Andy Warhol’s studioto shoot him. Valerie told a shocked Margo, “Yes, you will produce the play because I’ll shoot AndyWarhol and that will make me famous and the play famous, and then you’ll produce it.” Margoimplored Valerie, “You don’t want to do that. You don’t need to shoot Andy Warhol because thatwon’t get me to produce your play.” Valerie insisted that if she shot Andy Warhol, Margo wouldproduce her play; Margo continued to implore Valerie not to shoot Andy. Then abruptly, Valeriedecided to leave the apartment. Before exiting, she pushed the manuscript of her play into Margo’shands; it was 12:45 p.m.

“I have a strange gratitude that she spared our lives,” Margo said, crying softly. “I never believedthat she would shoot me or my daughter, but I knew she had every intention of finding Andy Warhol atthat moment and shooting him.”160

Locking the door behind Valerie, Margo frantically called her local police precinct, Andy Warhol’sprecinct, police headquarters in Lower Manhattan, and the offices of Mayor John V. Lindsay andGovernor Nelson Rockefeller to report what had happened and inform them that Valerie was on herway at that very moment to shoot Andy Warhol. Margo said, “I kept calling all the precincts—mine,Warhol’s, the mayor’s—and kept getting the same kind of answer: ‘Listen lady, how would you knowwhat a real gun looked like?’ ‘You’re wasting police time!’ ‘You’re taking up the time of someoneelse who needs the police right now.’ They thought I was a prank caller. No one believed me. Theysaid they could not arrest her until she shot him. ‘You can’t arrest someone because you believe she isgoing to kill Andy Warhol,’ they would say.” Margo left her phone number with different people andtried to reach those who could contact Andy, such as Robert Feiden, Margo’s cousin and Andy’sfriend.161 “I was afraid to tie up my phone lines. Remember, there was no call waiting at that time. As Iwas frantically making these phone calls, I left the television on, knowing that if Andy were shot,regular programming would be interrupted with breaking news.”

Valerie’s next stop was the Factory. While she had been away, Andy had moved the Factory fromits original location, at 241 East Forty-Seventh Street in Midtown Manhattan, to a more upscalelocation, at 33 Union Square West, that left the Factory’s shimmery, silver-foiled excess in the past.The new space embraced a more modern aesthetic: “retro chic, with white walls, polished floors, artdeco desks, and a new door policy with a bias in favor of the rich and famous.”162 When Valeriearrived at the Factory, Andy was out collecting a prescription for Obetrol, an amphetamine he tookdaily.163 On Sixteenth Street, a block from the Factory, Valerie encountered Paul Krassner with hisdaughter, Holly. Krassner found her “less tomboyish than usual. Her Dylan cap was gone; her hair hadbeen cut and styled in a feminine fashion. She seemed calm, friendly, in good spirits. We talked a

little while about nothing special, then said goodbye.” After they parted ways, he went to dine atBrownie’s, a vegetarian restaurant nearby, and Valerie headed west. Five minutes later, shereappeared, entering Brownie’s and approaching Krassner to ask if he would mind if she joined himand Holly for lunch. “Well, yeah, I do mind, actually,” he replied, “but only because I don’t get achance to see my daughter that much.” “Okay, I understand,” she said, and promptly left therestaurant.164

She returned to the Factory around two thirty and encountered Paul Morrissey outside. She toldhim, “I’m waiting for Andy to get money.” Morrissey replied, “Andy’s not coming in today,” just toget rid of her: she was always asking Andy for ten or fifteen bucks. Valerie left and took up a positiondown the block and around the corner, leaning against a wall on Sixteenth Street, clutching her brownpaper bag (by then the carpet bag had disappeared) and perspiring in the heat of the day. An hourlater, she was in the building, coming in from the elevator; she announced that she was still waitingfor Andy. She was sent away, but “she came up like seven times.”165 Valerie insisted on waiting forAndy no matter how long it took.

Howard Smith, a popular writer for the Village Voice, set the scene for what would soon become agruesome and nearly fatal day at the Factory: “It was an ordinary afternoon at the Factory, the huge,new loft on the north side of Union Square which is the center of the Warhol scene. Sun came in thewindows and gleamed off the mirror-topped desks. Paul Morrissey, Warhol’s executive producer, andFred Hughes, an assistant, sat around talking with Mario Amaya, a visiting art magazine editor fromLondon.”166 Amaya, of Art and Artists magazine, had come to town to try to persuade Andy to have aretrospective exhibition in London.

At 4:15, Andy arrived outside the Factory—wearing a brown leather jacket over a black T-shirt,black jeans, and black Chelsea boots. He encountered two familiar figures: his boyfriend, JedJohnson, who was approaching from Seventeenth Street carrying a bunch of fluorescent lights, andValerie, who was standing outside the Factory near the wall of the building. They all entered and rodeup the elevator together. Andy noticed that Valerie was “bouncing slightly on the balls of her feet,twisting a brown paper bag in her hands” and that “she was very heavily dressed for the warmsummer weather”—she wore a turtleneck sweater beneath a fleece-lined trench coat on that hot day—and also that “she was wearing lipstick and makeup . . . evidently something she saved for importantsocial occasions.”167

When they reached the sixth floor, the elevator doors opened and Valerie and Andy stepped out,walking toward Morrissey, Hughes, and Amaya. Hughes was sitting at his black, glass-topped desknext to a window that overlooked the park and writing in a black leather notebook. Morrissey wasspeaking on the phone across from him, “tugging at his big mane of curly hair.” In between the twodesks paced Amaya, who had been waiting over an hour to speak with Andy. Amaya had removed hisjacket and, reflecting on the new decor at the Factory, was smoking a cigarette. Jed Johnson crossedthe room and went into Andy’s private office at a rear corner of the room and Hughes walked over toAndy to remind him of Amaya’s appointment to discuss the retrospective.168

Andy remarked to everyone in the room, “Look—doesn’t Valerie look good!” Morrissey said thatshe did look good but then (he says it was jokingly) warned, “You gotta go now, ’cause we gotbusiness, and if you don’t go I’m gonna beat the hell out of you and throw you out, and I don’t want. . .” Valerie backed away but “had this funny look in her eye.”169 Amaya then walked to the back of theroom to get another cigarette from his jacket, which was lying on the art deco–style couch.

Morrissey had taken a phone call from Viva, who had called from Kenneth’s Hair Salon, where shewas having her hair dyed in preparation for her upcoming role in Midnight Cowboy. Hughes noticed

Valerie and said, “You still writing dirty books, Valerie?” then wandered off. Morrissey handed thephone to Andy so he could speak with Viva then left to go to the bathroom. While Andy spoke withViva on the phone, Valerie pulled out a small gun—the .32 Beretta automatic—from the pocket of hertrench coat and pointed it at him; no one seemed to pay attention, so she raised the gun slightly.Hughes leaned forward to pick up his phone. Andy leaned forward, cradling his phone.170

Valerie fired the first shot with the Beretta. She had kept the .22 Colt revolver in her jacket pocketin case the first gun jammed. She had a fondness for these guns and had selected them specially for theoccasion.171 Viva heard the shot over the phone but imagined it was somebody cracking a whip.Amaya, who thought a sniper had started shooting at them from another building, yelled, “Hit thefloor!” while Fred, startled, thought a small bomb had gone off in the Communist Party offices twofloors above them. “In that frozen second only Andy saw what was really happening.” He turned andsaw the gun. “Valerie!” he yelled, “don’t do it! No! No!”172

Valerie fired a second shot. Andy tried to crawl under a desk, but she moved in, placed the paperbag on the desk, and taking more careful aim, fired a third shot. He fell to the floor. The third bullethad entered the right side of his abdomen and exited the left side of his back. Later, describing theshooting to Jeremiah Newton, she said that Andy would never fall on the floor and die, likening hisactions to the “slow motion ballet dance-of-death.” Only one bullet hit Andy, yet its trajectory causedenormous damage to his left lung and to his spleen, stomach, liver, and esophagus before penetratingthe right lung and exiting. The bullet caused horrific pain. Andy later told friends, “It hurt so much, Iwished I was dead.” It was “like a cherry bomb exploding inside me.”173

Believing Andy was dead, Valerie then turned toward Amaya, crouching on the floor, and fired afourth shot, missing him; Amaya whispered a quick prayer. She then fired a fifth shot, directly abovehis hip. The bullet went through him without damaging any organs, exiting through his back. Amayafled toward the back room and crashed through the door, breaking the latch with his impact. Valeriepursued him, trying to force the door open while he held it closed with his body. Morrissey,meanwhile, had heard the shots and ran to watch through the small window for the film projector.Billy Name, who had been developing prints in the darkroom, rushed over to find out what the“firecrackers” were all about.174

Morrissey watched in horror as Valerie crossed the room to Andy’s office, where Jed Johnsonwas, and tried to open the door. Believing it to be locked (Jed remembered watching the knob goingaround and around), she gave up and walked back toward Hughes, who begged her not to shoot. Asone account had it, “The thin, dapper businessman epitomized the kind of people who laughed at herpoverty and revolution. She strode towards him. There was nowhere to hide.” She stopped severalfeet in front of him and raised the gun. Valerie announced, “I have to shoot you,” aiming the pistol athis chest, after which Hughes fell to his knees, pleading, “Please don’t shoot me, Valerie, You can’t.I’m innocent.” He continued, “I didn’t do anything to you. Please, just leave.”

After walking to the elevator and pressing the button, she returned and aimed the gun at hisforehead. He choked back a sob. She pulled the trigger but the gun jammed; whirling over toward thepaper bag on the desk, she took out the backup revolver. Just as she was about to shoot Hughes, theelevator doors opened again and distracted her. She was “very confused, very agitated.” “There’s theelevator, Valerie. Just take it!” Hughes pleaded. Valerie darted onto the empty elevator anddisappeared.175

Andy was lying on the floor, bleeding but conscious and in obvious pain. Hughes called the policeand asked for an ambulance. Andy began yelling, “I can’t! I can’t!” and appeared delirious. He laterremembered gasping, “I can’t breathe,” with Fred standing over him. When Billy Name entered the

loft and found Andy lying on the ground, he approached, and “Warhol heard him cry, but mistook it forlaughter. ‘Billy,’ he said softly, ‘don’t laugh. Don’t make me laugh.’” In the midst of this scene, Vivacalled again and asked what had happened. Fred told her that Valerie had shot Andy and there wasblood everywhere. Viva, thinking Fred was joking, decided to have her hair trimmed before having itdyed and remained at the hairdresser’s salon. Gerard Malanga arrived two or three minutes after theshooting and found the Factory in “total mayhem.” When Viva finally arrived and discovered that thishad not been a prank—she saw blood on the phone cord—she screamed and passed out. When sherecovered, she called Ultra Violet but Ultra did not believe her story; she thought Viva had takenLSD: “I’ve had calls of this type before”; she “wanted to get her hallucinations off my phone line.”176

Nearly thirty minutes later, the police arrived on the scene, followed by an ambulance, which tookAndy and Amaya to nearby Columbus Hospital.177 Andy still had on his leather jacket, trousers andboots, as well as his silvery wig. Paramedics took him out of the building in a wheelchair, aboutwhich he later mused, “I thought that the pain I’d felt lying on the floor was the worst you could everfeel . . . but now that I was in the sitting position, I knew it wasn’t.” Most of those present hadbelieved that Andy was dead. According to Morrissey, the paramedics had thought so at first but thenfound he was still breathing. Amaya tried to reassure the paramedics that Andy was famous and hadmoney. Amaya felt lucky: “I felt a pain in my back and I saw my blood, and I realized I had been shot.But since I was walking around, I felt I couldn’t have been too badly hurt. I guess it was the luckiestescape of my life.”178

That afternoon, the breaking news that Andy Warhol had been shot, probably fatally, wasbroadcasted. Upon hearing this, Margo collapsed with anguish because she had not been able toprevent it. “And I’m still not over it,” she said.

The police report for 33 Union Square West was taken by a Sergeant Shea; the shooting was notedas occurring at 4:05 p.m. “Andy was sitting at his desk talking on the telephone to Susan Hoffman[Viva] of 58 E. 83rd St. The perpetrator was standing approx 12’ from the desk and took a revolverfrom her person and shot Andy twice in the chest. The perpetrator then shot once Mario Amaya whowas standing next to the desk. The perpetrator then fled the scene on foot in an unknown direction.Both aided parties removed to Columbus Hospital by Att. Martinez.” Under the “persons wanted”section, he wrote, “Valorie Solanis [sic] F., W., age 28 5’7” thin built brown curley [sic] hair,wearing white raincoat and carrying shopping bag. Actress starring in film I a Man.”179

At 4:51 p.m., doctors pronounced Andy clinically dead. They opened his chest and massaged hisheart, to attempt resuscitation. He was dead for one and a half minutes before being successfullyrevived; he was then rushed to emergency surgery where a team of four doctors fought for five and ahalf hours to save him, with success. The following day, Tuesday, his condition was listed as critical,with doctors giving him a fifty-fifty chance of survival. He had his spleen removed but survived thesurgery. Under the care of Giuseppe Rossi and four other doctors, he was, as Andy recalled, “broughtback from the dead—literally, because I’m told that at one point I was gone. For days afterward, Iwasn’t sure if I was back. I felt dead. I kept thinking, ‘I’m really dead. This is what it’s like to bedead—you think you’re alive but you’re dead. I just think I’m lying here in a hospital.’”180

In a state of near delirium for days, Andy recalled feeling disoriented by the June 5, 1968,assassination of Robert Kennedy: “I heard a television going somewhere and the words ‘Kennedy’and ‘assassin’ and ‘shot’ over and over again. Robert Kennedy had been shot, but what was so weirdwas that I had no understanding that this was a second Kennedy assassination—I just thought thatmaybe after you die, they rerun things for you, like President Kennedy’s assassination.”181

Andy’s doctors allowed only his mother—described as “a tiny old woman wearing a babushka”

who had a heart ailment and “was brought weeping out of the back room”—and two brothers to seehim, barring all others in the hours following the emergency surgery. Andy’s mother was in acutedistress. “She seems about to fall to the ground,” Ultra Violet mused. His mother kept uttering, “Myboy good boy. He go one o’clock mass St. Paul every Sunday. Good religious boy. They kill him, myAndy.”182

During Andy’s surgery and his recovery, friends, press, and superstars jammed the tiny lobby of thehospital. The press had a voracious appetite for this story, while the superstars fought for the mediaspotlight. Leo Castelli and Ivan Karp, two well-known art dealers, gave interviews while Viva andGerard Malanga were set up for a photo shoot. A reporter asked Viva how she would describeValerie and Viva replied, “Mixed up.” Billy Name paced back and forth, “a bathtub plug hanging on ametal chain from his neck, his eyes as red as a rabbit’s,” Ultra recalled.183 Elsewhere, Ivy Nicholsonthreatened to kill herself if Andy died and called the hospital constantly, “ready to jump at the fatalword.” When hospital staff wheeled Andy’s mother, Julia, outside to a waiting taxi, “a flock ofphotographers struggled for front photographs, almost trampling the old woman in the process.” Soon,stories of Valerie’s relationship with Andy began to circulate, with one friend complaining thatValerie had “been bothering Andy a long time, trying to get him to use the script, part of which I readand which was so vile and filthy it turned my stomach. Andy kept turning her off, but he was just toonice a guy to give her a complete brushoff.” When the press interviewed Amaya, he called Valerie’sWild West entrance “puzzling.”184

Meanwhile, as Andy went through surgery, Valerie was approaching a rookie traffic cop namedWilliam Shemalix, a twenty-two-year-old who had been a cop only since February, in Times Squareat Forty-Second Street and Seventh Avenue. Sometime between seven and eight o’clock that evening,she turned herself in as the woman who shot Andy Warhol. She handed Officer Shemalix her .32automatic and her .22 revolver and said, “The police are looking for me. They want me. He had toomuch control over my life. The police are looking for me and they want me.” The cop noted that the.32 automatic had recently been fired. (Some reports held that Valerie told Shemalix that she was aflower child, but she denied this, asserting, “I never said I was a flower child. I would never say sucha sick thing.”)185

Immediately Valerie was taken to the Thirteenth Precinct station house, only a few blocks from theFactory (and two blocks from where Andy was having surgery), where she was held for questioningand eventually booked. Telling police that she had no home address, no business address, and nooccupation and lying about her age—she claimed her birth date was April 9, 1940, four years laterthan her actual date of birth—she now faced high-pitched scrutiny. Downstairs at the station, a batteryof photographers waited for an hour outside the door of the room where she would be booked.Twenty reporters milled about the booking room. When she finally came through the door, her handswere cuffed behind her back. “It was bedlam,” wrote one reporter. “Photographers climbed behindthe booking desk, elbowing cops out of the way. While police tried to book her, she posed and smiledfor photographers. It was impossible to book her; the clicking and whirring of the cameras drownedout the sound of her voice.”186

Dressed in khaki jeans, a blue turtleneck sweater, a yellow knit shirt, a trench coat, and torn bluesneakers, Valerie, when asked where she lived, told the reporters, “I live nowhere.” When asked ifshe was an actress, she said, “No, I’m really a writer.” In response to “Where’d you get the gun?” sheshouted, “Vermont!” The press demanded answers for why she shot Andy Warhol. Of her motives, sheclaimed, “I have a lot of very involved reasons. Read my manifesto and it will tell you what I am.”Soon after, police kicked the reporters out of the station and took her to the fingerprint room for

booking. She was charged with several offenses, including “felonious assault and possession of adeadly weapon.” She was initially held without bail but eventually it was set at ten thousanddollars.187

Meanwhile, Fred Hughes and Jed Johnson were held for questioning as material witnesses—perhaps as suspects in Andy’s shooting—until nine in the evening, when Valerie was officiallybooked. Police roped off the Factory and began, as Fred later told Andy, “running all over the place,putting tape where the bullets were. . . . They got into everything—opened every drawer, wentthrough, God, I don’t know, the stills of Sleep, old coffee shop receipts. . . . After they had beenpoking around for at least two hours—every drawer in every cabinet was pulled out—I saw a paperbag sitting right on top of the desk where you were shot. I went over to the bag, and . . . in this paperbag was another gun, Valerie’s address book, and a Kotex pad!”188 Apparently, police had searchedeverywhere but the bag even though it had been sitting right on top of the desk all that time.

“POP GOES POP-ARTIST”

The Manifesto speaks in the voice of the lost and grief-stricken child of the West of this moment. Savage and breathlesslyicy, cruelly ungiving with a world that has cheated it of its life, it is a voice beyond reason, beyond negotiation, beyondbourgeois decencies. It is the voice of one who has been pushed past the limit, one whose psychological bearings are gone,who can no longer be satisfied with anything less than blood.

—Vivian Gornick, introduction to SCUM Manifesto

The papers were full of the news: “Pop artist Andy Warhol fought for his life today, after beinggunned down in his own studio by a woman who had acted in one of his underground films.” By June5, Valerie had appeared on the front page of several newspapers, including the New York Daily News,which featured the headline “Actress Shoots Andy Warhol.”189 The shooting rippled through thenewspapers and across the radio and likely would have gotten even more attention had RobertKennedy not been assassinated two days later. Reactions ranging from horror and disbelief tosympathy and awe were seen in New York City. The day after Valerie’s arrest, leaflets praising heraction were circulated on Eighth Street, disseminated by Ben Morea and the Motherfuckers. Handingout mimeographed leaflets in Tompkins Square Park and near the Museum of Modern Art, supportingValerie for attacking Andy’s love of capitalism and hatred of creativity, the Motherfuckers staged avibrant street performance in which they lionized her as a fellow anarchist and rebel. Standing insolidarity with Valerie, they wrote a prose poem that read:

VALERIE LIVES!ANDY WARHOL SHOT BY VALERIE SOLONAS.PLASTIC MAN VS THE SWEET ASSASSINTHE FACE OF PLASTIC/FASCIST SMASHEDTHE TERRORIST KNOWS WHERE TO STRIKEAT THE HEARTA RED PLASTIC INEVITABLE EXPLODEDNON-MAN SHOT BY THE REALITY OF HIS DREAM (AS THE CULTURAL ASSASSIN EMERGES)A TOUGH CHICK WITH A BOP CAP AND A .38THE TRUE VENGEANCE OF DADAA TOUGH LITTLE CHICKTHE “HATER” OF MEN AND THE LOVER OF MANWITH THE SURGEON’S GUN

NOWAGAINST THE WALL OF PLASTIC EXTINCTIONAN EPOXY NIGHTMARE WITH A DEAD SUPERSTARTHE STATUE OF LIBERTY RAPED BY A CHICK WITH BALLSTHE CAMP MASTER SLAIN BY THE SLAVEAND AMERICA’S WHITE PLASTIC CATHEDRAL IS READY TO BURN.VALERIE IS OURS AND THE SWEET ASSASSIN LIVES.SCUM IN EXILE

In response to questions about how he rationalized supporting Valerie, Ben replied, “Rationalize? Ididn’t rationalize anything. I loved Valerie and I loathed Andy Warhol, so that’s all there was to it. Imean, I didn’t want to shoot him. Andy Warhol ruined art.”190

Maurice read about the shooting the next day flying on a plane back from Montreal. Struck by thecontrast between SCUM Manifesto as a document of outrageous satire and Valerie’s brutal actions,Maurice was dumbfounded: “But no, it was a joke; it had to be! She could not possibly haveconvinced herself that she was able to carry out the greatest genocide in the history of mankind[single-handedly].”191

Questions of motive began springing up shortly after the shooting, as people demanded answers forthis “deranged” action. Valerie resisted answering most questions, especially those she founddemeaning and distracting from the truth. Legal Aid lawyer Jeffrey Allen encountered her stubbornrefusal to give details about her motives. He told reporters, “She wouldn’t tell me anything. Shewouldn’t talk to anybody. She’s very tense, like a rubber band stretched out as far as it could go.”While in custody, Valerie explained in somewhat sparse terms why she had shot Andy, apparentlyconflating her paranoia about Maurice with that about Andy: “It was reported in the newspapers thatthe motive for doing this was because Andy would not produce my play. It was for the oppositereason. He has a legal claim to all my works. It’s not often that I shoot somebody. I didn’t do it fornothing.”192 She believed that Maurice had sold the movie rights to Andy and said, in a later interview,“Warhol had me tied up lock, stock, and barrel. He was going to do something to me which wouldhave ruined me.”193

Details of Valerie’s conversation with assistant district attorney Roderick Lankler began to appearin the papers.

Question: You tell me in your own words what happened.Answer: Very simply. I shot him.Q: Who did you shoot?A: Andy Warhol. . . .Q: And how did it happen, how did you go up there, how did you shoot him?A: I went up there and he wasn’t there and I went up there it was about 2:30. He wasn’t there and Morrissey was there. I didn’tfeel like talking to him. I told him, “I will wait downstairs.” I saw Andy Warhol. I went upstairs with him. We shoot the shit a whileand then I shot him.Q: What did you shoot him with?A: A gun.Q: That gun?A: Yeah. .32 Calabre [sic] Beretta.Q: Where did you get this?A: Vermont. . . .Q: .25 calabre [sic]. Did you have this on you too?A: Yeah. I had it in my pocketbook.Q: And was this loaded also?A: Yeah.Q: And where did you get that?

A: In Reno.Q: Did you have any other weapons on you at the time?A: I had that ice pick in the bag.Q: Why did you have that for?A: I don’t know. I thought maybe the gun would jam. . . .Q: Why did you want to shoot him?A: That’s something it’s very involved and I don’t want to get into that right now. . . .Q: Did you shoot anyone else?A: Well, I accidentally shot Amaya.Q: How did you happen to shoot him?A: He just got in the way. . . .Q: What did you do then after you shot him?A: I left.Q: Where did you leave to?A: I just went downstairs. I wandered around.Q: And then where did you go?A: And then I got on a subway and I got off at 42nd Street and then I walked about a block and I ran into him (indicating Ptl.Schmilax). . . .Q: These two boxes of cartridges, did you have those with you?A: No. They were in a bag which was left at the studio.Q: And were these items also left in the bag?A: Right.Q: I’m indicating a Social Security card and a PSICHI National Honorary Psychology card and a University of Md. Identificationcard.194

People at the Factory suspected that Valerie shot Andy because she felt bitter about his notproducing Up Your Ass; they also recalled that she had at one time accused Andy of dubbing over hervoice in the film I, a Man. Valerie sensed that Andy only wanted to exploit her and she had indeedcalled to accuse him of stealing, and losing, the copy of her play that he had received from her.195

Recall that decades later, Andy’s copy of Up Your Ass, a copy Valerie cared deeply about, was foundat the bottom of a silver trunk belonging to Billy Name, “tossed in with Billy’s lighting equipment andother gear.” As Judith, Valerie’s sister, said, “So you see Warhol did steal Valerie’s play, just like shefeared.”196

Others have offered psychological analyses for why Valerie shot Andy. In the Village Voice, AmyTaubin wrote: “Lacking the attributes that might have made her an asset to the Warhol scene—shewasn’t pretty, rich, well-connected, or willing to serve—she was quickly rejected. In a sense,Solanas shot Warhol because it was her only way of getting his attention.”197 In some ways, Margoagreed, as she believed Valerie did not shoot Andy in order to get away with it. Valerie turned herselfin where she could get the most publicity, in Times Square. “She shot him because she was powerlessand she wanted to become famous.”198

Valerie’s own insights about the shootings speak to her frustrations with Andy, her general rage atthe mistreatment she faced with Olympia Press and Maurice Girodias, and her broader gendercritiques. A decade after the shooting, she told her then-boyfriend, Louis Zwiren, that the only factualreporting about the shootings appeared in True Crime.199 Judith astutely observed, “Valerie did notwant to kill Andy Warhol, the individual, but Warhol the man, the one with the power, the control, thefame, the money, the prestige. Everything came together in one horrendous moment when paranoiddelusion fused with intolerable reality. . . . I don’t think she planned it. . . . Girodias was the realtarget, but for Valerie everything was her theories. Violence was just something that happened.”200

Some (particularly the press) even blamed Andy himself for bringing on the shooting, with oneTime piece exclaiming, “Like some Nathanael West hero, the pop-art king was the blond guru of a

nightmare world, photographing depravity and calling it truth. He surrounded himself with freakilynamed people—Viva, Ultra Violet, International Velvet, Ingrid Superstar—playing games of lust,perversion, drug addiction, and brutality before his crotchety cameras. Last week one of his grotesquebit players made the game quite real. . . . Val was as bad as her word.”201 Even Andy had a remarkablynonchalant way of explaining the shooting: “I couldn’t figure out why, of all the people Valerie musthave known, I had to be the one to get shot. I guess it was just being in the wrong place at the righttime. That’s what assassination is all about. I realized that it was just timing and that nothing terriblehad ever happened to any of us before now. Crazy people had always fascinated me because theywere so creative—they were incapable of doing things normally. Usually they would never hurtanybody, they were just disturbed themselves; but how would I ever know again which was which?”202

Valerie faced a hearing on June 5 and refused the service of two lawyers whom Maurice had hiredfor her, preferring to speak on her own behalf. During the trial, she was asked whether she had shotAndy because he would not film one of her scripts. Valerie replied again that “it was for the oppositereason. He had a legal claim on my work.” Criminal court judge David Getzoff ordered the remarkstricken from the record, admonishing Valerie, “You must realize this is a serious charge.” Sheretorted, “That’s why it’s going to remain in my competent hands.”203 Valerie regretted next to nothing,only later admitting that her single regret about shooting Andy was that she could not get her playback.204

An acquaintance later told reporters, “If anyone ever told Valerie she was a bad shot, she’d kickhis head in!”205 In a 1977 interview with Howard Smith, Valerie reflected on the shootings: “I go by anabsolute moral standard.” “You believe you go by an absolute standard?” Smith repeated. “That’sright.” “That doesn’t mean it necessarily is . . . Valerie, you have often been unfair. I’m sure you arenot a saint.” “Yes I am. I don’t rip people off. Compared to you I absolutely am. Most certainly. Ohyes. You can put that in print.” “Valerie, do you want to get into a discussion now about shootingpeople?” “I consider that a moral act. And I consider it immoral that I missed. I should have donetarget practice.”206

PROVOCATIONThe Contentious Birth of Radical Feminism 1968–1973

There are so many roots to the tree of anger/that sometimes the branches shatter/before they bear.—Audre Lorde, Who Said It Was Simple

“DARLING, SHE’S FURIOUS. YOU HAVE TO SPELL HER name correctly,” cautioned Florynce Kennedy,speaking to the press. “It’s Solanas. S-O-L-A-N-A-S. Not Solanis. She’s tired of you writersmisspelling her name.”1 Perhaps more than any of her many other identities, Valerie Solanas identifiedas a provocateur. Known for her fierce anger and humor, she pushed, prodded, and provoked her waythrough the history of the women’s movement, even posthumously. Whether her actions hadrevolutionary potential—or whether they signified personal torment and despair—provoked intensedebate following her shooting of Andy Warhol.

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, leader of the radical feminist group Cell 16, once astutely said of Valerie,“Perhaps destroyers like her can never transform their energy but only inspire others.”2 Or, aslibrarian Donny Smith believed:

She scared other women, and not just with her ideas. She looked like a dyke and often identified herself as one, loudly. Sherefused to hold a regular job, and her panhandling and prostitution made it all too obvious how dependent a woman was on themale-dominated economy for “nurture and feed.” She could be hostile, arrogant, and condescending, and was full of panics,anxieties, and paranoias. She had no patience for politicking. She considered her manifesto the last word on feminism and anyfurther discussion was either plagiarism or “bullshit.” She was in no way qualified to be a revolutionary or a feminist leader.3

Still, Valerie found her way, albeit unwillingly, into the center of the emerging feminist movement,helping to transform it and break it apart.

A CLIMATE FOR WOMEN’S RAGE GROWS

While the hand’s rocking the cradle it won’t be rocking the boat.—Valerie Solanas, Up Your Ass

While Valerie never officially aligned with any organizations in the swelling collective anger arisingfrom the late 1960s women’s movement, her ideas and actions played a role in the trajectory of thiscollective challenge to patriarchy. Prior to the Warhol shootings and the publication of SCUMManifesto, a climate for women’s rage had started growing across the United States, particularly inNew York City. The government tailored women’s rights according to their marital status, refused torecognize women as independent from men, and defined nearly all aspects of social life inpaternalistic terms—women needed protection, engaged in caretaking, and held traditional social andsexual values to affirm their femininity. Women were getting increasingly fed up with this—particularly as they noticed how many more privileges and rights men had secured—giving newmomentum to a collective, growing sense of women’s rage.

The epicenter of anger was the issue of abortion, as the government blocked basic measures toprotect women’s health and safety during unwanted pregnancy. Radical feminist Ti-Grace Atkinsondescribed this vividly:

Drip, drip, drip. It was all over, all over, just all over. Women couldn’t sit in first class on the plane without a man with them. Trivial,

but constant. Women couldn’t open their own bank accounts without a male signature. I was the first elected president for NewYork NOW and I had the telephone for NOW in my home. You could always tell an abortion call before they said a thing. Thevoice was humiliated and tentative—awful, awful, awful, just a disaster. People were calling all day every day about their abortionexperiences. It was their humiliation, that these women had to call a stranger and they always had complications. They werealways further along than they could admit even to themselves. They never had any money. The people doing the abortions were,for the most part, crazy. Many of the women got raped on the tables. It was really heavy, sick, sick, sick, heavy stuff. I mean, youhave to understand how women were hated. Just remembering now, it’s hard.4

The National Organization for Women, founded in 1966 by twenty-eight women who had attendedthe Third National Conference for the Commission on the Status of Women, sprang up in response tothe growing concerns about women’s institutionalized powerlessness. Seeking to establish a base oflike-minded women committed to equality, NOW recruited a number of women to its ranks, includingTi-Grace Atkinson and Betty Friedan, both of whom NOW eventually appointed as leaders (Betty aspresident of NOW, Ti-Grace as chapter president). Both within and outside of NOW, women startedto organize around the issue of abortion, reaching across class and race lines and joining together tofight back. Ti-Grace reveled in the diverse interest women showed for NOW: “They were terrific.We looked different. We dressed differently. We lived in different parts of New York. The intensity ofinterest in feminism was primary and we were ready to go for broke. None of us cared what it took.We wanted out. We wanted this.” From Shirley Chisholm to Pauli Murray, NOW included a wideswath of women interested in fighting patriarchy. Shulamith “Shulie” Firestone, a writer and painter,and Anne Koedt, a commercial artist, joined Ti-Grace and numerous others to form a game plan ofhow to address the issue of abortion. As Ti-Grace had said, “I have long understood that the only wayto reach people on feminism is to go for that aspect that is their jugular.”5

NOW initially wanted to sponsor an abortion reform law (one that would later become the basisfor current debates about abortion) specifying the rights of the mother versus the rights of the fetus. Ti-Grace remembered pleading with others, “Don’t do that. You’re basing it around the fetus and you’releaving that wide open. It can be manipulated. You’ve got to take all of the laws off the books and sayit’s simply a medical procedure. It’s between a woman and her doctor. Otherwise, you’re in serioustrouble.” The “reform” feminists like most of those in NOW tried to assure the “repeal” feminists likeTi-Grace, Cindy Cisler, and others that the right to privacy represented a sound basis for abortion andthey could get more radical later. Ti-Grace knew better: “It doesn’t work that way. This was our shotand we had to get it right then. You have to get rights based on the right grounds. . . . That’s thedifference between liberal and radical feminists. What is the difference between people who aresatisfied with the mainstream and people that aren’t? Part of it is how they see themselves. I believewomen are a class, and I wanted a revolution.”

Throughout 1968, NOW members continued to block efforts to radicalize the abortion debate,standing firm in their view that the right to privacy argument would best advance feminist principleswhile giving women the freedom to seek abortion. Growing frustrations within NOW about this issuebegan to splinter the group. “Everybody in NOW said they wanted a revolution,” said Ti-Grace.“Everybody wanted a revolution. I didn’t know anybody who didn’t want a revolution and I couldn’tunderstand why every time it came to an action, we would have big fights even though we all said wewanted the same thing.” Eventually, NOW determined that they would petition for abortion based onthe right to privacy rather than the more radical approach to decriminalize abortion altogether.

Radical feminists within NOW decided that, in order to undermine sexist ideologies about women,marriage should be the next target. Ti-Grace recalled, “They weren’t going to go after that. They’dsay, ‘Oh, yeah,’ and sort of agree with you on the surface, but when you talked about doing somethingabout it, there was no way.” The late 1960s inundated women with propaganda and brainwashing

about the importance of marriage, the necessity of finding and keeping a man. Ti-Grace joked abouther own perceptions: “I realized at seventeen that, gee, I’m going downhill. The wedding is the highpoint of your life. That seemed rather depressing and odd to me. I do remember being overwhelmedin the late ’60s by the perception that instead of being a treasured part of the universe, I was a pieceof shit and was just going to be used and abandoned.” (And, indeed, there were no categories for actslike “marital rape” until 1976, as the State saw women as men’s property.)

In addition to problems within NOW, radical women felt marginalized by men in both the new andold Left, who rarely challenged notions that women should provide sexual and domestic labor to men.As Dana Densmore, member of radical feminist group Cell 16, said, “People that were reallycounterculture did not have any investment in changing gender roles. The women that were involvedwere getting an incredible education in the tension between what we were looking for, what we wereputting our lives on the line for, and how badly we were being treated by those very organizations andthe men of those organizations.” Men on the left, especially socialists, felt threatened by the idea ofwomen holding them accountable. “Just our refusal to go along with prescribed categories was sothreatening,” Dana recalled, “and the reaction so violent (I don’t just mean physical violence), thatwe received constant threats. The implication is that, ‘We will fight back, as if our testicles were onthe line.’”6 Dana felt that women’s lives were at stake, that their radical feminist politics were nojoking matter—a conflict that later inspired the radical feminist journal No More Fun and Games,published from 1968 to 1973.

In particular, sexual politics rose up as a hotly contested issue, as women tried to communicate, asTi-Grace said, that “someone can be all for sex, and still not find being objectified sexy.” The climatearound women fighting back, fighting the Right, fighting within the Left, and fighting each otherbecame the dominant narrative of late 1960s feminism.

THE CRYSTALLIZATION OF RAGE

In almost any woman you can unearth an incredible fury. It is often not even conscious, a threshold thing. But it’s there, andit’s an anger that can be a powerful radicalizing force.

—Bernadine Dohrn7

NOW kept having internal fights over goals and tactics, and, as Ti-Grace said, “Valerie was one ofthese fights. There was so much violence. You kept hearing things about how many women got killed.Battering was starting to come up and it was being talked about. Women were just the victims everyplace, and if you didn’t want to be a victim, but you saw all of this, it was just overwhelming. Realrage.” Ti-Grace first heard about the SCUM Manifesto only one day prior to Valerie’s shooting AndyWarhol. Ti-Grace received a call at her home from a Village Voice writer named Rosetta Reitz, aradical feminist and eventual founder of a jazz label, who had allowed Valerie to live with her (Ti-Grace rightly noted, “Valerie always needed a place to live”), asking if she had heard about thisdocument—SCUM Manifesto—and mentioning that it would interest the feminist movement. Rosettasaid that she feared Valerie’s instability, as Valerie had been violent toward her, and said she did notwant to live with her anymore. Still, she thought SCUM Manifesto had compelling qualities thatwould speak to the growing women’s movement.

The following day, Ti-Grace saw the news coverage of the shooting and noted that the shooter hadtold the press, “He had too much control over my life.” Valerie had unwittingly found some newallies. “Well, the first thing I thought was that Warhol is not exactly the exemplar you choose for male

supremacy,” Ti-Grace admitted. “He was asexual, so I knew it wasn’t some personal relationship.This was right after the big New York Times piece on feminism (and a lot on me) so everybody wasaware that there was this anger building around them. The Times presented the shooting as if Valeriewas somehow connected with feminism. All I saw was: she had shot Warhol. I knew there wasexploitation and it matched because finally some woman had done something that was appropriateto the feelings we were having. She was fighting back. That’s what it felt like.”

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz felt similarly moved by hearing the news of Valerie’s expression of rage.Having spent time working with Martin Luther King, Jr. and various Black Panthers, she feltincreasingly distant from peaceful strategies of social change. Sitting in a café in Mexico City, shehad read the headline “Super-Woman Power Advocate Shoots Andy Warhol” and decided to leaveMexico immediately, eager to be a part of “that delicious moment, that exciting, formative time.”8

When she thought about Valerie’s shooting Andy and standing up to patriarchy, she began fantasizingabout Valerie as a symbol of women’s rage. “I would go to the United States to launch this revolutionwith this superwoman ideology and also find Valerie. Because I had come out of four years ofgraduate study in history, I thought Boston was symbolically and historically a perfect place. I startedcalling everyone I knew. We would organize to defend Valerie and we would take the whole ‘FreeHuey’ movement as a model to create this ‘Free Valerie’ movement. Everyone was always copyingeveryone so it’s hard to get a new idea. I was tired of playing the ‘Who’s more oppressed’ games inthe South and wanted a change.”9 Roxanne became concerned with who would represent Valerielegally, knowing how pivotal legal representation can be in times of social crisis.

Kate Millett, radical feminist author of Sexual Politics, was perplexed by the news that Valeriehad shot Andy, saying that before the shooting, “SCUM [Manifesto] was taken by many as similar toSwift’s Modest Proposal. . . . It was such an extreme statement—that’s why it caused so muchconsternation and argument.” There were lots of arguments happening about SCUM Manifesto and“the argument was very impassioned.”10 Once Valerie shot Andy, SCUM was no longer mere rhetoric.“No one really thought there was a SCUM group. That was part of its ironical literary quality. It islike books being purported to come from or be found in people’s drawers—it had a spurious origin. Isaw its rhetorical quality before the shooting—after, I couldn’t see it the same way.”

Kate described Valerie as a fascinating case: “a female artist driven to terrible lengths by theresponse—or lack of response—of the art world around her, and then finally lashing out in this wayagainst the superhero or leader of the avant-garde. You can see its symbolic level here as someonewho writes a feminist manifesto so extreme that most feminists are horrified.” SCUM brimmed withsarcasm but never represented why she shot Andy. Kate told a story: “There was once a suffragettewho threw herself under a horse at Ascot in a desperate attempt to get the attention of government sothat women would get the vote.” She continued, “The shooting was like that. I don’t think it meant thatone had to go shoot someone to be consistent with SCUM’s notions.” Kate was touched andfascinated by the whole incident: “It had meaning to me, the way she seemed to represent frustrationas the woman artist ignored, driven to a kind of revenge.” In NOW at that time, as Kate suggested,women faced pressures about “respectability”: “Don’t be a lesbian or be called dykes at marches. . . .In NOW they were trying to define themselves away from Valerie. The shooting and its impetus werefamiliar to a great many. Maybe that’s why it made people so uneasy. Ti-Grace, in being very kind toher, took a lot of flak from the leadership of NOW. She was compassionate by nature, and suffered asa result.”

On hearing about Valerie’s arrest for the Warhol shootings, Ti-Grace had an impulse toimmediately leave her apartment and head toward the courthouse. As Kate noted, “It was very much

like Ti-Grace to take an interest in Valerie because she was so radical. She was a philosopher—sheliked the radical, the irrational—she was very smart and very thoughtful. It was very courageous ofher to do it.” At the time of the shooting, Ti-Grace was helping many women get illegal abortions andpeople had told her that she would be thrown in jail for it. “I can’t live with myself if I don’t do whatI can,” Ti-Grace admitted. “So I raced down and who do I see coming up the steps in criminal court?Florynce Kennedy! Flo and I by then had the same instincts. Her feeling was, like any black personshe saw going into the judicial system, ‘They’re going to be in trouble. They needed help.’ She wason her way. We were both on our way.”

Flo, a prominent civil rights attorney and reputable badass, had represented numerous BlackPanthers and knew that people in prison needed money coming in from the outside and needed tomake it clear to fellow inmates that they had people who cared about them on the outside. Flo broughtlegal savvy to Valerie while Ti-Grace brought empathy, solidarity, and support. “It didn’t really haveto do with who she was or what was going on,” Ti-Grace said. “I visited her in prison to see what Icould do to help. What did she need? Was she alone? I gathered from this other call I had that shedidn’t have a big crowd around her.”

Flo agreed to represent Valerie pro bono; both she and Ti-Grace were granted the right to visitValerie in prison soon after the shooting. Flo recounted to the East Village Other:

Valerie hasn’t lost weight. She looks darling . . . looks very good . . . seems to be taking it okay. The average person, you know, isvery anxious to get out. Not Valerie! To her the whole world is a nuthouse and she’s sheltered from the craziness. The wholeworld is a garbage pail. There is no pressure now. I tell you, Valerie was in fairly good spirits. She’s a damn good fighter. Shewants to defend herself. Yes, she doesn’t want any legal aid. I took the position that she was very intelligent and best able to fightfor herself. One of the best things the oppressor likes is for you to put up a big struggle, and is put off balance when you don’t.11

Flo advised Valerie to keep responses to the press brief and Valerie did so, giving only shortanswers about her defense, insisting that “SCUM Manifesto will be my entire defense.” To “Doingany writing?” she replied, “No.” “What of Maurice?” “Skip it.” “Anything to say to anyone?” “Skipit.” “A biographical note?” “Skip it.” “And how do you pass the day?” “Thinking and playing chess,”was her smug response. Valerie stayed tight-lipped about her motives and her case, taking seriouslyFlo’s advice about not giving the press information that could get distorted.

In private, however, Valerie spoke freely about the shooting. When she learned she would meet Ti-Grace and Flo, she wrote enthusiastically to Ti-Grace, saying, “I’d be delighted to see you. Pleasecome up as soon as possible.” (Valerie also insisted, in a postscript, that “there was some nonsense inthe paper about how my real name is the above, but my stage name + the name by which my friendsknow me is VALERIA SOLANIS. The latter was simply a misprint in the credits of “I, a Man.” The onlyname I ever use for any purpose is the 1st.”)12 Ti-Grace remembered that, at their first meeting, Valeriespoke clearly and openly about the shooting. “She recounted, with great glee, details about shootingWarhol, how he begged. It was a bit gruesome,” Ti-Grace recalled. “There was a deliciousness to herpleasure of recounting it that made me uneasy. She took great pleasure in describing how humiliatedthey were, how they were begging for mercy. It seemed inhuman to me. It had nothing to do withfeminism at all. It had to do with artist’s rights.” Valerie described how she had taken out the gun andthey started running around and trying to escape but could not leave because they were in a loft. Sheseemed to relish seeing them as helpless victims, on their knees begging her not to shoot them. “Shedid a whole imitation of it and she shot him again,” Ti-Grace noted. “It was very detailed, notpleasant.”

Valerie gave the background of how she came to shoot Andy, telling Flo and Ti-Grace that whileliving at the Chelsea Hotel, she was evicted for not paying rent. She lived on the street out of her little

trunk and just before her eviction, Maurice, who also lived at the Chelsea Hotel, came to see her andsaid that he could help her out. He gave her five hundred dollars to buy SCUM Manifesto and hernext two works and all the rights to them. Ti-Grace sensed Valerie’s panic. “She was paranoidschizophrenic so her impulses weren’t under the greatest control. She was under a lot of stress.” Ti-Grace got a fairly precise version of Valerie’s story: “She signed the contract, later realized what shehad done, and of course he didn’t publish it and she lost the rights to publish it. She believed he hadsold the movie rights to Warhol, too, so she was angry at Girodias. She sought advice from PEN, abig writer’s union, and they told her that Girodias was a well-known sleaze who had done the samething with Nabokov’s Lolita and Terry Southern’s Candy; they had tried to break the contract and itwas impossible. It was a shit contract and there was nothing she could do. She did try to resolve thisin some sort of obvious, pedestrian way and also sought legal advice. It was terrible.”

Valerie told Flo and Ti-Grace that Maurice had been out of town the day of the shooting, andbesides, she did not want to hurt the publisher. Instead, she felt shooting Andy would be great forpublicity. She wasn’t that bad a shot, she said. (In a later meeting between Ti-Grace and Maurice, thelatter directly admitted he would never have published SCUM Manifesto if Valerie hadn’t shot Andy,because it would not have been worth it.) “Valerie was a good PR person,” Ti-Grace said. “She knewshe had to shoot Warhol.”

Sure enough, shortly after the shooting, all the bookstores carrying the mimeographed copiesValerie had distributed sold out of them, including Eighth Street Bookshop, Sheridan SquarePaperback, Underground Uplift Unlimited, Tompkins Square Book Store, and East Side Book Store.Even Ti-Grace couldn’t find a copy. Valerie caught wind that Ti-Grace had not yet read the manifestoand attacked her in a letter, “Florynce told me that you hadn’t read it (the Manifesto). That being so,you really have no business writing and publicly speaking about it. It’s also obvious that, not only doyou not understand SCUM, but that SCUM is not for you. SCUM is for whores, dykes, criminals,homicidal maniacs. Therefore, please refrain from commenting on SCUM + from ‘defending’ me. Ialready have an excess of ‘friends’ out there who are suffocating me.”13

Sadly, Maurice had the only available copy that Valerie knew of. Furious that they had not read themanifesto, she demanded that Ti-Grace and Flo meet with Maurice to get his copy, the only reliableand accessible copy. “You have to get that from him and try to get him to publish it,” Valerie pleaded,so Ti-Grace followed through and pursued Maurice for the copy. “I didn’t want to meet with him,” Ti-Grace admitted, “but I called him to ask him to Xerox it and that I would pay for it. He was reallyslimy and said he couldn’t afford to copy it so I’d have to meet him for lunch to get it. He was asleaze. Pure sleaze. If he had control of my work, I’d burn everything I ever wrote!”

After Ti-Grace obtained SCUM Manifesto from Maurice (with his refusing to make copies fromit), Ti-Grace cut stencils over the course of three evenings and then mimeographed seventy copies,writing Maurice, “I will give a number to her lawyer, Florynce Kennedy, and send the rest tocarefully selected persons who have requested to see it, e.g., critics, feminists, philosophers,seriously interested press. I think this will promote a lively and well prepared milieu into which herbook, when it is published, can be projected.”14 Ti-Grace told Valerie, “You know, it’s ironic, forthree weeks I couldn’t get near a copy: now I have 70 copies sitting in boxes in my living room. Stillno play!!”15 Ti-Grace chastised Maurice about Paul Krassner’s commentary on Valerie (she hadobtained it in draft form from Maurice and it was to be published in Olympia Press’s edition ofValerie’s manifesto): “I thought it was vicious, irrelevant, egocentric, self-serving, and at no pointfacing the content of the Manifesto. I didn’t even think it was a respectable analysis of theirrelevancies he does discuss. Its only purpose is to set the most perfect example of what Valerie is

most against; it was quite eerie.”16

Several weeks after the shooting, once she had met with Flo and Ti-Grace, Valerie becameincreasingly paranoid, agitated, and troublesome to deal with. She sent letters in which she crossedout the phrase printed on prison letterhead, “GOOD CORRECTION REDUCES CRIME” and wrote in its place“ELIMINATING MEN REDUCES CRIME.”17 Flo and Ti-Grace both noticed that Valerie’s delusionsworsened. As Ti-Grace recalled, “You’d be talking to her and she would all of a sudden look at youand see you as somebody else, which was unnerving. We learned very quickly that if you cared abouther at all, she became really abusive. I was trying to help her and she became abusive with me. Shewas abusive with Flo, too. Still, we persisted.” Ti-Grace sent Valerie money for stamps and personalitems and insisted on showing solidarity with her. In return, and revealing Valerie’s tendency to rejectthose who helped her, her letters became more pointed and cruel toward Ti-Grace: “Astute of you torecognize that being denied association with me is oppressive, but that’s the way it is; I only developfriendships with my equals—originators, not interpreters.”18 That August, Valerie launched a full-frontal attack on Ti-Grace in another letter:

I know you, along with all the other professional parasites with nothing of their own going for them, are eagerly awaiting mycommitment to the bughouse, so you can then go on t.v. + write press releases for your key people defending me + deploring mybeing committed because of my views; remember, I want to make perfectly clear that I am not being committed because of myviews or the “SCUM Manifesto.” . . . Nor do I want you to continue to mouthe [sic] your cultivated banalities about my motivefor shooting Warhol. Your gall in presuming to be competent to discourse on such a matter is beyond belief. In short do not everpublicly discuss me, SCUM, or any aspect at all of my care. Just DON’T.19

She added in a letter three weeks later, “Your colossal gall is inversely proportional to your pride.But what you’re doing is understandable, as SCUM’s where it’s at; SCUM is IT. And you’re not theonly one to recognize it; Everyone wants to be part of SCUM, to make it his or her own; the worldwill eventually be overcome by + turned into SCUM. If you’re not in SCUM, you’re nowhere;SCUM’s not only IT, but it’s all there is.”20

As time went by, Ti-Grace kept making excuses for Valerie’s behavior, believing that her time inprison had changed her: “I did know a lot of people who were in prison and came out and had beenreally changed by it. They were hard to be around and were damaged by it. It’s not that they werecrazy. They were damaged. That’s something different. I didn’t know with Valerie. I knew she hadlived on the edge financially. I knew she was panhandling. That has to be hard. It puts you in ahumiliating position where you’re begging. I felt for her.”

Like Ti-Grace, other feminists felt empathy for Valerie, and they arrived in New York wanting tovisit her in prison. Roxanne had brought to the city a group of women who wanted to support Valerieand, after asking the court for Flo’s contact information, had arranged a meeting with Valerie and thegroup of women supporters. “It took a while for Flo to get the paperwork through but we went andhad a visit with Valerie,” Roxanne remembered. “It was a little disturbing because she was in reallybad shape. We could only see her through this plastic barrier and it was really scratched and had littlekids’ handprints all over it. We could hardly see her and she could hardly see us. She couldn’t figureout who we were. We were talking all militant about revolution and everything. We wanted to go backand say how brilliant Valerie was.”21

Roxanne was impressed by Valerie’s intensity and energy. “I remember her eyes, even through thishard-see-through plastic screen. She had these piercing eyes, I mean, they really looked inside of you.She seemed like a person who had no ability to be false or lie in any way, so you felt stripped of yourusual way of dealing with someone, you know, all the things you do plus the physical things you do toestablish contact—gestures, facial expressions. She made you look at yourself differently. It stripped

me of my defenses. You couldn’t bullshit with her at all.”22 Roxanne felt that, looking at Valerie, shewas looking into a mirror. “All I could make out clearly were her piercing, black eyes and they werethe same as my eyes.”23

When Roxanne and her good friend Dana Densmore visited Valerie at Elmhurst Hospital (one ofmany mental hospitals that housed Valerie that year) on August 30, 1968, Roxanne was struck byValerie’s intelligence and fortitude, writing in a letter shortly after the visit, “What a mind Valeriehas. I can guarantee that she is not a violent person, nor is she anti-male. She is angry and she is anti-Man. I felt I was in the presence of a very special person. Valerie’s brain fills the atmosphere—itvibrates and radiates. She has no sympathy for the enemy—men—but she does not consider all malesthe enemy. She has identified the enemy well—the managers of what she calls ‘the shitpile.’”24 One ofRoxanne’s companions, Maureen Davidica, age nineteen at the time, had read the manifesto and hadby then actually hatched a plan to develop a virus that would kill all men. (Roxanne joked, “WhenAIDS started, I was like, ‘Oh, my God, maybe Maureen did that and it went awry!’”) Roxannedescribed Maureen as militant and scary. When Maureen entered the room where Valerie was, shewas so star-struck she could not open her mouth. She just stared at Valerie as Valerie kept repeating,“Who are you? Who are you?” Valerie had a way of stopping people in their tracks.25

The visit with Valerie left a deep impression on Roxanne. The group sat in the dayroom, drinkingcoffee and conversing, and despite being incarcerated, Valerie did not seem defeated. She talkedincessantly about her writings, even reenacting the entire Up Your Ass script for them from memorythat day, performing as each character and showing off for her radical feminist audience. “I’ve neverbeen sure when it was too late for her to channel her anger and brilliance into something else,”Roxanne admitted. “She had been a loner for a long time. She lived very roughly, on the streets,sleeping on rooftops and she did tricks because of her pain. All of that was right there on the surface.”When thinking about Valerie forty years later, Roxanne recalled, “You could sense a heat coming fromher like dynamism. She was like a hot wire. Even though she seemed to be kind of drugged up andpassive, it still didn’t really control her.”26

Ti-Grace, too, felt a kinship with Valerie, even though Valerie rejected anyone who tried to helpher or empathize with her. Ti-Grace wanted to stay in touch with her and “just try to do whateverfriends do for friends.” She believed that, soon, people would have a chance to see her work and theycould judge Valerie for themselves. Ti-Grace believed in Valerie, in what Valerie could do for thefeminist movement: “She has dragged feminism kicking and screaming into the 20th Century in a verydramatic way,” she told reporters.27 “The Manifesto is the most important feminist document to appearin the English-speaking world that I know of. Solanas places feminism squarely as the key to anymeaningful political, and eventually social, change. She takes the male-chauvinist spiel and turns it onits head. . . . Rightly or wrongly, Solanas has brought feminism up-to-date for the first time inhistory.”28

Meanwhile, Valerie had started to pull away from all support, believing that Maurice would useany legal or media representation of her and SCUM for his own purposes and benefit and that shewould lose her case. She wrote to Ti-Grace: “I really don’t care what hospital I go to, because I’mnot going to operate at all. My intention is to hole up, start a brand new life at the hospital, push alloutsiders out of my mind. The thing is to give Girodias no publicity at all—so how can I operate? . . .SCUM will have its day; it doesn’t have to have it within the next few years.”29

Nevertheless, Ti-Grace wanted Valerie to have a good lawyer and adequate legal representation.She approached NOW and asked for the organization’s formal support for Valerie’s case. She andseveral other radical members of NOW wanted to provide Valerie with legal aid and they wanted

NOW to back these efforts. Ti-Grace and other NOW lawyers argued that Valerie’s case had astriking similarity to other cases that NOW had supported, particularly cases where women werevictimized by either a father or a husband or a mother. While Valerie’s case was not based on asexual connection, there was an economic motive that Ti-Grace believed NOW should take interestin. She recalled her reasoning: “From the newspapers, the fact that she would not fall into the usualcategory of sex-related crime, but an economic one, made her crazy. Whereas men killed each otherall the time for economic reasons without such a label, women could not do this. This made it, from alegal vantage point, a sex discrimination case on its face that NOW should look into. I thought thiswas a rather cool assessment. I was coming from another place—all my rage and so on and so forth.”

When Ti-Grace presented this argument to Valerie, she took issue with this feminist spin on heractions, writing to Judith Brown in October of 1968, “I am not being discriminated against because ofsex. That’s a contrived issue designed to give some unimaginative leeches something to rap about.”30

She also sent a letter to Maurice:Her [Ti-Grace’s] justification for her statement that I’m discriminated against as a female is females who commit violent acts aresent to bughouses instead of jail. Her ‘proof’ of this is that only 5% of prisoners are female and most patients in bughouses arefemale. That statement is false, & even if it were true, it doesn’t follow from these 2 statements that a higher % of women thanmen felons are sent to bughouses. And even if the foregoing were true, it still doesn’t prove that I am being discriminated against;she hasn’t seen the doctors’ report. She (& through her, you), therefore, intends to base a massive case on a false fact & non-sequitor. This is the level of those you align yourself with. Birds of a feather . . .31

Valerie complained that Maurice tried to get his secretaries and other women at Olympia Press to talkto her, retorting, “The soul sisters are few & far between, & you wouldn’t run into them anyway, asyou don’t travel in soul circles. If you want to know what I’m thinking or up to, ask me yourself, yousniveling coward.”32

FRACTURING FEMINISM

Sweetie, if you’re not living on the edge, then you’re taking up space.—Florynce Kennedy

I had to stand completely still to avoid going to pieces. . . . Blue smoke between the trunks. Frost on all the trees. Whiteburning witches. Millett. Atkinson. Brownmiller. Firestone. Solanas. Davis. Morgan. Steinem. Dead potted plants in everywindow.

—Sara Stridsburg, The Dream Faculty

Disagreements about how to proceed with Valerie’s case led to major fractures within NOW. (AsValerie wrote to Maurice the year after the shooting, “N.O.W. is now P.A.S.T.”)33 Liberal feministsargued that they should stay far away from her case, as they did not want feminism associated withviolence and extreme anger. Many radical feminists argued in impassioned ways about how Valerierepresented the crystallization of women’s rage and that they must stand up against the doublestandard placed on violent women compared to violent men. Radical feminists believed NOW muststand up against men’s nearly constant victimization of women and, perhaps, Valerie represented aneffective way to bring this mistreatment into the public eye. Radicals also suggested that NOW shouldsupport all women, regardless of the extremity of their actions.

The tide of feminism had turned, and radical camps had formed in many places. Roxanne hadarrived in Boston to form, or find, a female liberation movement. She had assembled a group thatlater acquired the name Cell 16, and they read the SCUM Manifesto as sacred text while laughing

hilariously at Valerie’s wicked satire. This group emulated Valerie by writing and selling theirpropaganda on the streets of Cambridge and Boston, even charging men for conversation as Valeriehad done. They picketed the new Playboy Club, studied martial arts, and roamed the streets of Bostonin groups, daring men to be offensive.

Groups had started to form in Chicago, New York, and Washington, DC. After linking up withseveral of them, Roxanne and Dana arrived uninvited (though they did not know this!) to an invitation-only, three-day planning meeting for the National Women’s Liberation Conference in Sandy Springs,Maryland. The women at the meeting, though all self-described militants, “cowered at the thought thattheir feminism might make them be perceived as ‘man-haters.’”34 Roxanne decided that “those groovywomen needed a little consciousness-raising so we filibustered, disrupting their rigid agenda andcalm discussions with select readings from SCUM Manifesto.”35 They caused a big controversywhen, as feminist Charlotte Bunch recalled, they read aloud excerpts from SCUM Manifesto. In fact,Roxanne believed Valerie’s contribution to feminism was so substantial that she and others of Cell 16read aloud from SCUM Manifesto as the group’s “first order of business.” With Ti-Grace callingSCUM Manifesto the “most important feminist statement written to date in the English language,”Valerie’s text had become close to required reading among radical feminists within months of theshooting.36

Roxanne was adamant that Valerie’s voice would be heard, pleading in a July 5, 1968, letter to herthen boyfriend, “Valerie’s is a voice in the wilderness shouting her rebellion, saying she will acceptno arguments to the contrary, allow no loopholes or fancy devices that could be used to counter herargument. She is EVERYWOMAN in some basic sense. She is my mother and other broken and destroyedwomen, a martyr for all women everywhere. In that way she is not so different from Che. Read hermanifesto closely. She wants us to see, not a new man, but a new human being created, and now.”37

Like Ti-Grace, Roxanne was outraged that Valerie did not automatically receive support frommainstream feminist groups, particularly NOW:

It seemed to me like the most obvious thing in the world that we would defend Valerie Solanas. After all, she wrote her manifestoand had made points we just couldn’t ignore. It’s maybe not what we would have chosen, but you don’t get to choose everythingthat happens when an issue bursts forth. It would be like rejecting Malcolm X because he was too radical or he was a Muslim orhe’s about “by any means necessary” ideology. I thought Valerie could really be an amazing “reader” of things, or a person whowould speak out more radically than anyone else because now that she shot Warhol, she couldn’t go back on her radicalism.38

Rosalyn Baxandall, another radical feminist living in New York City and interested in Valerie’scase, also felt moved by Valerie’s story and had organized a radical feminist group called W.I.T.C.H.(Women’s International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell) to picket outside Valerie’s trial at thecourthouse between Sixth and Seventh Avenues in midtown Manhattan. Rosalyn remembered that theyhad seminars in which they read sections of SCUM Manifesto aloud in a group: “Valerie wasparticularly appealing to W.I.T.C.H. because of her provocativeness in the Emma Goldman traditionof will and action. I always hated Andy Warhol.” Rosalyn felt connected to Valerie’s rage and angryabout dismissive characterizations of her as simply “crazy.” She said, “I saw Valerie as a feministissue and I felt that she was cheated by having to deal with these horrible men. Some people said shewas crazy but I thought she was very sane. A lot of people were supposedly crazy like AllenGinsberg and people who had been put in mental institutions weren’t crazy at all. They were tellingthe truth. People who didn’t conform were always being labeled as crazy then.” Having worked atMax’s Kansas City where Andy hung out, Rosalyn observed, “He was just so arrogant with his cliqueof men who just thought they were so superior.”39

Laura X, a radical feminist who would go on to lead the efforts to categorize marital rape as a

criminal offense, also felt admiration for and an alliance with Valerie, using Valerie’s words andstories to further radicalize her own politics:

I did not believe in killing people, but like Malcolm X, I thought her analysis was exactly right. All of us understood her analysis ofthe relations between the sexes; many just chose to live our lives in a different way. People in early women’s lib movement passedthe SCUM Manifesto around with great interest and appreciation. It had great resonance with our lives. Valerie Solanas wantedto go against all men; we wanted to go another way, but we understood the betrayal of the men in the civil rights movement.When we combined that with the experience of the women from the suburbs, we had quite a group assembling for the marchdown 5th Avenue. Whether or not a woman ever again touched a hair on a man’s head, all agreed with her analysis of how mentreated women, even if they were philosophically opposed to how she dealt with it.40

As one who would later join New York Radical Women, Carol Hanisch also felt sympathy forValerie, claiming that her radical friends felt angry that Andy promised Valerie things and did not dothem. “We felt that she had a legitimate gripe with him—a male ripping off a woman. We felt likedefending her against him, or at least not totally dismissing her.” Carol felt that SCUM Manifesto hada dramatic impact on radical feminists, in that “the passion and outrageousness of it let others be morepassionate and outrageous. Some saw truth in the discussion of how men act.”41

Anne Koedt, another founder of radical feminism, characterized Valerie’s influence by emphasizingValerie’s willingness to express anger toward men: “So many women were afraid to be angry. Hercoming out as angry was probably healthy, as it let other women come out as angry.” Still, Annefeared that Valerie would distort the true goals of feminism and that the press picked her up only sothey could dismiss her as a crazy lesbian man hater: “She was one of the prototypes picked up todiscredit the movement.” Speaking of her interactions with Valerie prior to the shooting, Annerecalled, “She struck me as one who self-destructed in a blaze—I could see it early. She had a verydriven quality, but she seemed self-destructive. She was more ‘I’m angry,’ not ‘we’re angry.’ She hada lonely rage.”42

Valerie’s rage, however lonely, did strike a chord with many radical feminists of the time. Apamphlet that circulated titled Feminism Lives! labeled Valerie as a political prisoner and providedmore evidence that radical feminists defended her cause. The pamphlet read:

She isn’t there, as is commonly thought, directly for any criminal activity, but so that men in power can convince themselves she isinsane and/or force her to shut up, and to show all women the political consequences of speaking their minds before men, or ofany attempt by women to define ourselves. . . . This woman, with a single book, has done as much to bring the cause of women’sliberation before the public as all the activist groups combined. “Valerie Lives!” is a cry being heard more often, in one form oranother, from the mouths of affluent women to the etchings on public walls.43

As president of NOW during this time, Ti-Grace caught heat for siding with, and nurturing, theradical factions. “I was being raked over the coals,” she recalled. She continued:

They tried to impeach me as president of NOW for going to [Valerie’s] aid at all. It’s sort of like a Rorschach test, Valerie was.Betty Friedan, before I became a threat to her, was once very supportive and confiding. I remember she was really in a fix oncebecause she had a place on Fire Island with her husband and they had a big fight. She chased him down the beach with a carvingknife screaming she was going to cut it off. Lots of people saw her and he was going to bring this up in divorce proceedings. Sheasked me what to do and I told her, “Well, there were witnesses, so what can you do? You’ve got to brazen it out and just say,‘I’m a passionate woman. What do you want from me?’” I thought that was good advice. So when Betty flipped out at myassertion that there was a connection between violence and feminism, I thought of her chasing her husband down the beach witha carving knife. She’s telling me I’m crazy.

Betty wanted nothing to do with Valerie’s case, writing to Ti-Grace, “I don’t like the politics ofthis,” and sending telegrams to Flo that read, for example, “DESIST IMMEDIATELY FROM LINKING NOW INANY WAY WITH VALERIE SOLANAS. MISS SOLANAS MOTIVES IN WARHOL CASE ENTIRELY IRRELEVANT TO

NOW’S GOALS OF FULL EQUALITY FOR WOMEN IN TRULY EQUAL PARTNERSHIP WITH MEN.” Flo respondedwith “Valerie is superior to many of the people in NOW. She already says Simone de Beauvoir,Sartre, and Genet are overrated windbags so you can imagine what she thinks of NOW. She’s worthall the NOW members put together. That’s right!”44

Despite the clear support shown by Ti-Grace and Flo for Valerie during her early days at ElmhurstHospital, Valerie soon wanted nothing to do with them. Flo had pleaded with Valerie to work withher to secure her release, warning that she would likely be sent to Matteawan, a New York Statehospital for the so-called criminally insane and known colloquially as a snake pit. Valerie resisted.Ultimately, Valerie’s resistance and stubborn refusal to cooperate led Flo to resign as her lawyer. Flo,following several weeks of Valerie’s bad behavior toward her, expressed her fury to Ti-Grace: “Idon’t let anybody abuse me.” But Ti-Grace stayed on, however dismal the prospects seemed, givingValerie money, visiting often, and trying to gather support for her legal case.

Once Valerie did arrive at Matteawan, her rejection of help from feminists ebbed and she begancasting a wide net to seek assistance. She pleaded for Roxanne Dunbar, Wilda Holt, Ti-Grace, andGeoffrey LeGear to visit her, writing to Roxanne, “Please visit me as soon as possible at Matteawan.It’s very important. . . . If Ti-Grace is willing, I’d like to see her too. . . . I’d like to have a long, longtalk with Ti-Grace. Maybe at Matteawan, as the visiting time lasts longer + we can visit in person at atable instead of through these things, we can finally straighten out a lot of matters. I’d love to do so, ifshe’s willing. . . . Please, all of you, visit me as soon as possible.”45 She contacted several NOWmembers, including Betty Friedan and Jacqueline “Jacqui” Ceballos. Jacqui recalled that Valeriecalled her several times from prison, sounding angry, wanting NOW to help her: “I said, ‘How can Ihelp you? I am just a member of NOW first of all. You have to go through the board. You can’t justsay to NOW, ‘We’re helping her.’ We were trying to do serious work. We couldn’t be distracted by allthis. The press would skewer us. I mean, I think Valerie is a wonderful person and you know my heartreally goes out to her, but she was not working for feminism. She was working for Valerie Solanas.She shot the guy in the balls. And besides, she sounded crazy. I never heard from her until monthslater when she was moved.”46

Indeed, NOW had blocked all efforts to help Valerie, a move that alarmed radical feminists. MaryEastwood wrote a memo to Betty Friedan (sending copies to Muriel Fox and Delores Alexander)arguing that NOW should defend Valerie, as NOW and the American Civil Liberties Union hadsupported other “assassins” and “robbers” despite those groups’ stance against the types of crimesthese individuals had been accused of: “Human rights is for everybody, even those who oppose us. Ifwe select out those who disagree with us the sincerity of our principles is suspect. . . . If there was asex discrimination issue involved, NOW might at least protest even though we can’t afford to take onany other cases yet.”47

NOW still refused to help Valerie, viewing her as outside the feminist movement and saying shegave feminism a bad name. In protest of this decision, Robin Morgan organized a petition to raisefunds for Valerie’s release to a private institution where she would receive better care.48 Roxannefound fault with how NOW members rejected Valerie’s brilliance because of Valerie’s mental illness.“The objections to her were that it would give our nascent movement a bad reputation to defendsomeone who is crazy. At that time, crazy seemed like a pretty relative term. In 1968, the exactdefinition of crazy, with the government killing a hundred thousand Vietnamese every month, it justseemed like an odd argument for leftist people. That’s the same logic they used against wantinglesbians in NOW—it would give them a ‘bad reputation.’”49 Valerie, then, posed a triple threat: shelooked like a dyke and she was crazy and she was violent. She was NOW’s worst nightmare.

Around the time that Valerie contacted members of NOW and directly asked for help, she also senta letter to Ti-Grace pleading for her and Flo to visit and help her. Ti-Grace was outraged by thisbecause Valerie had got her into serious trouble with Betty already:

She wanted the support of somebody like Betty Friedan so she wrote Betty Friedan and said I was harassing her and would Bettytell me that I had to leave her alone. There was a national board meeting and Betty and I by this time were really at loggerheads.Betty had already been behind an attempt to impeach me for having been in the courtroom with Valerie, and of course Bettydespised Valerie, so I’m sitting next to Betty and she starts frothing, saying I belong to this “Society for Cutting Up Men,” and shehas this letter from a woman that says I’m harassing her. Well, I was shocked. People are making accusations that I’m carryingknives around. I got up and threw my handbag on the table and said, “Take a look inside! This is absurd!” So I get home from thismeeting and there’s a wire from Valerie asking me to help her and I’m really pissed with her at this point, big time.

Despite her anger, Ti-Grace convinced Flo to accompany her to Matteawan, motivated in part bythe evident shock and fear that Valerie was feeling.50 Ti-Grace told Valerie they had to talk about herletter to Betty; Valerie indicated that she did not remember sending it and admitted that she feltembarrassed. Flo announced to Valerie, “I’m here because Ti-Grace made me come. I don’tunderstand crazy. When you said I was fired, I’m gone. I will, if you’d like, try to see if I can get otherlawyers to help you, but it’s not going to be me.” Seeing Valerie in Matteawan did inspire somesympathy from both of them. “Everybody was so heavily drugged. It was just an unbelievable place. Icouldn’t see just abandoning her there,” Ti-Grace said, “On the other hand, by now I really didn’t likeher. I was really fed up with this. I didn’t understand this abuse. Valerie called me names. She reallyattempted to dominate and abuse me. She was very manipulative.” Still, Flo and Ti-Grace did whatthey could to help her.

Ti-Grace begged Valerie to stop abusing her, asserting, “If we fight, it just serves our commonenemy and defeats the goal we’re trying to reach.”51 Valerie wrote to Ti-Grace trying to explain whyshe had reacted so angrily to Ti-Grace’s help, claiming that Ti-Grace too quickly appropriated hercause as her own: “One thing I forgot to mention when I saw you, but which I had intended to in theway of clearing the air + paving the way for friendship is that one thing I had resented about you waswhat struck me as a proprietary attitude towards me + SCUM. I often had the impression that I don’tbelong to me, but to Girodias, Warhol, you—whoever wants to grab at me + SCUM + monopolize us.I don’t know that just telling you this will cause you to refrain from any behavior in the future that’llgive me that impression.”52

Roxanne, too, encountered the force of Valerie’s ambivalence about receiving help from feminists.On her last visit to Matteawan, Roxanne tried to organize a committee to help Valerie with the aid ofFlo and Ti-Grace, but the effort did not last long because Valerie had not wanted any more help fromthem. Valerie had stopped trusting anyone and had become extremely paranoid by then. This hitRoxanne hard, but though Valerie resisted the women’s help, Roxanne still admired her radical self-determination: “She will die or live in the nuthouse forever before she will waver an inch from herinternal freedom. She is a free being. That is the most overwhelming sense I had in her presence,”Roxanne wrote after their last meeting.53

In early October 1968, after her falling out with Valerie over her provision of legal aid, Ti-Graceresigned from NOW and founded the October 17th Movement—a group of radical women alignedaround the idea of upending institutionalized sexism. (This action likely started radical feminism aswe know it today, with Valerie as the destroyer and Ti-Grace as the brains behind it.) Roxanne said ofTi-Grace’s departure, “It was a whole bunch of things. It was defending Valerie, also fighting BettyFriedan’s exclusion of lesbians and of [the] ‘lavender menace.’ Valerie was at the center of a lot ofother big fights.”54 In a press release, Ti-Grace stated her reasons for resigning as the NOW chapter

president: “Since the beginning there have been bitter schisms over taking unequivocal positions oncertain issues: abortion, marriage, the family, and support of persons in the cause who have crossedthe law (e.g. Bill Baird, Valerie Solanas), the inextricable relationship between caste and class.” In aprivate letter to Valerie, Ti-Grace wrote, “I’ve had a hell of a two weeks. Close friendships havebeen split over it, I was put on a sort of trial, I have a good $150 telephone bill because people weretrying to help me from Washington, the membership rose up against the Executive Committee. MyGod, what a circus!”55

Flo admitted that she had become bored and turned off by NOW: “I’ve always thought it was a badidea to wrestle over control of an organization, and when I went to meetings where they would spendendless hours arguing over whether to have red cabbage or white for the slaw, I would just think tomyself, ‘I can’t waste my time on this bullshit,’ and go off and set up a committee. I founded theFeminist Party after NOW got to be so boring and scared; I can’t see leaving my house and gettinginto a subway or a cab to go to a meeting where everybody is more terrified than I am.”56

An October 24, 1968, article in the Washington Post reported that Betty had attempted to expel Ti-Grace from NOW after the latter appeared in court with Valerie following the Warhol shootings. Ti-Grace, who chose to leave NOW, was asked why she had done so. She responded, “There was awhole series of things, including Valerie, the whole attitude, the panic, the abortion issue. I didn’twant a hierarchy. I wanted a rotating president to diffuse power and encourage everyone’s energies.You’ve got a revolution or you’ve got nothing. I didn’t understand why, on everything I thought wasreally important, they were a drag, pulling back.” She felt betrayed by Valerie. “I left in October ’68so I was coming to some pretty depressing conclusions about Valerie by then”; however, “to havereacted the way NOW did to Valerie was really unacceptable.”

After leaving NOW, Ti-Grace had minimal contact with Valerie, aside from delivering a book—Thomas Szasz’s Life, Liberty, and Psychiatry—Valerie had requested and having an encounter inwhich Valerie asked her to let her mother know where she was and how to reach her.57 She gave Ti-Grace her mother’s phone number in Baltimore. Ti-Grace called and spoke first to Valerie’s sister,Judith who disclosed to Ti-Grace that schizophrenia ran in the family and lots of family members hadsuffered from it. Admitting that Valerie had shown some signs of schizophrenia years before, Judithsaid that they had not heard from her in a long time. Ti-Grace also spoke to Valerie’s mother, whomshe remembered as a “kind, middle-class woman”; Ti-Grace worried that Valerie’s mother would bedisturbed by Valerie’s pornographic references (“a staple for her”) and struggles with mental illness.Ultimately, Ti-Grace regretted placing such an strong emphasis on Valerie as a symbol of the feministmovement, saying, “I paid plenty for defending her.”

THE AFTERMATH OF HURRICANE VALERIE

If SCUM ever marches, it will be over the President’s stupid, sickening face; if SCUM ever strikes, it will be in the darkwith a six-inch blade.

—Valerie Solanas, SCUM Manifesto

Following the Warhol shootings and Valerie’s imprisonment, SCUM Manifesto received animmediate surge in attention. Maurice pushed to have the manifesto published as quickly as possible,using the shooting as a selling point, and in August 1968 Olympia Press released the book, with anintroduction by Maurice and commentary by Paul Krassner. The work had provoked a series ofquestions from sympathizers and enemies alike. NOW had fractured into liberal and radical camps,

and Valerie had induced panic at the Factory, where the group already known as outsiders had beendealt a serious blow to their usually calm and free-form existence. Despite her newfound fame—something Valerie had longed for—she still struggled to make connections and find any sort of home.Having alienated nearly everyone who could help her, she found herself, once again, radically alone.

Prior to her imprisonment, Valerie had carried around a small trunk of her most prized belongings,lugging it from place to place as she moved from the Chelsea Hotel to various people’s homes, whereshe slept in a kind of permanent impermanence. During Valerie’s imprisonment at Matteawan in late1968, Ti-Grace had received a phone call from Anna Kross, the judge who had handled Valerie’sarraignment. Judge Kross indicated that she had a trunk that belonged to Valerie and asked Ti-Graceto come to her home to see which things in it should be preserved.58 Inside the trunk Ti-Grace found acopy of Up Your Ass and copies of the Cavalier piece and another piece she wrote for Hustlermagazine. (Ti-Grace called it “typical male pornography, S&M, really written from that place. Iassume she was writing it to make some money and you can’t play around too much if you want themoney.”) Also inside the trunk were letters. “Valerie had joined the National Women’s Party in thefifties and she had written to Paul Freund about the Equal Rights Amendment. She had kept thecorrespondence and I remember getting chills and saying, ‘Oh my God, this is how I’m going to endup!’” Valerie’s letters were “sort of girlish,” polite, according to Ti-Grace; in them Valerie askedFreund why he did not support the Equal Rights Amendment. He wrote her back a “liberal butpatronizing” letter. “He was this great constitutional lawyer who taught at Harvard, telling her theERA was covered by the Fourteenth Amendment and not to worry about it,” Ti-Grace scoffed.

Ti-Grace asked Judge Kross to keep the trunk until Valerie was released from prison and Krossagreed. On a visit to see Valerie in prison, Ti-Grace told her she had her trunk. Valerie was enragedthat Ti-Grace had seen her things. “I don’t know,” mused Ti-Grace, “if it was the Paul Freund or theporn. I think she never wanted anybody to know that she ever had an interest in something like theEqual Rights Amendment.” (And for Valerie, a documented interest in within-movement feminismwould be far more scandalous than the pornography she had penned.) The fact that Valerie had keptthe letters showed their importance to her; she did not keep any other letters, not even from familymembers. No personal letters or belongings at all were found in the trunk.

Valerie had long had conflicted feelings about her role in the feminist movement, often preferring toinsist on total outsider status. Her letters pleading on behalf of the ERA—notably written during herperiod in graduate school—suggested that she cared more about such politics than her later selfwould let on. For the most part, she expressed near constant anger with feminists, believing they were“schmucks.” She told others that she was never a feminist, had no interest in any political movements,and was a writer and an artist, nothing else. Valerie viewed feminists as “dupes” and “know-nothings,” telling her friend Jeremiah that she felt flattered by the attention from the women’smovement but bitter because she had no following for SCUM’s plan to attract true saboteurs.59 Within-movement feminists could never truly “unwork,” could never sabotage, undermine, and operate on acriminal basis.

In a lengthy letter to Ti-Grace in February 1969, Valerie derided Ti-Grace’s efforts to defend herand show interest in SCUM:

I know you’ll be delirious with delight to learn that you’re going to at last receive the widespread recognition that you’ve beengroveling and sucking after for the past 8 or 9 months. Your preface days will soon be over; you are going to emerge in all yoursuave, polished, cultivated splendor in my text. To repay your kindness in interpreting & explaining me & expounding on mymotives to the public & because you’ve been grossly misunderstood I’m going to interpret & explain you & expound on yourmotives to the public. My next book after Wrap Up, the last word on everything (that’s why it’s called Wrap Up; it wraps everything up), will be Why I Shot Andy Warhol and Other Chit Chat, a collection of essays. One of the essays will be titled, “Out of

the Woodwork.” In it I will describe what crawled out of the woodwork when SCUM was sprayed into the air. . . . How’s yourrewording of SCUM Manifesto, which you thought of before you read the Manifesto, coming along?60

Valerie seemed to have a bottomless rage toward feminists who appropriated her work. After herrelease from Matteawan in late 1971, she began contacting radical feminists, making variouscomplaints. First, she attacked Robin Morgan for publishing an excerpt of SCUM Manifesto in thecollection Sisterhood is Powerful without her permission and without payment. Valerie’s originalletter to Robin joked, “If you can’t write, anthologize. Keep plugging, Baby. Valerie Solanas.”61 Robinhad in fact mailed Valerie a letter asking permission to reprint sections of SCUM Manifesto for asmall fee but had never heard back.62 Robin subsequently proceeded to include sections of SCUMManifesto without Valerie’s permission. Though Valerie did receive payment for her excerpt inSisterhood Is Global (though the payment may have disappeared during her hospitalization), shehated Robin for using her work. As Robin recounted, “Now, suddenly, she is released—and livid.She decides that (1) she is not now and never has been a feminist but is a ‘killer dyke biker,’ (2) Ihave defamed her by printing her work in the context of feminism, and (3) I am somehow responsiblefor her having been sent to a mental institution in the first place.” Valerie phoned Robin repeatedly,informing her that she planned to throw acid in her face and blind her for life. “I try to reason withher,” Robin wrote, “finally stop answering the phone, shudder a lot.”63 Another radical feminist,Judith Brown, wrote of her exhaustion with Valerie in a letter: “The big romance with Valerie is overfor us down here.” She added, “I’m sorry if our period of wrangled consciousness on that issuecaused you some trouble, but having gone through a ‘Valerie thing,’ I can better deal with it inothers.”64

Maintaining her targets of vengeance, Valerie called Ti-Grace and asked to see her. Ti-Gracedescribed what happened:

I said, “Valerie, I don’t want to see you anymore,” and she said, “Oh, I just got out of prison and it’s my birthday.” Well, being thesort of woman she hates right from the SCUM Manifesto, I’m moved so I say, “Oh it’s your birthday, right? I’ll make somedinner and ask some people over.” I asked Shulie [Firestone] and Anne [Koedt] and another radical feminist friend. I don’t cookfor people normally, but I made some spaghetti and a cake. I remember that the cake was sort of sloping. Well, of course, itwasn’t her birthday. She just comes in and announces—it was very embarrassing—to everyone that no, she wasn’t a feminist andshe had no interest in the women’s movement whatsoever. She was an artist. She was a writer. That’s it. Well, that sort ofdampened the evening and people were leaving. Valerie was staying and, fortunately, Anne hadn’t left yet. Valerie said that shewas moving in with me and I was—I’ll never forget this scene. I had picked up the dishes and was standing over the sink washingthe dishes. She’s got her pea coat on. She’s got her pen in her pocket, shoving me like it’s a gun, pushing it against me, sayingshe’s going to stay, that she’s moving in. I’m crying while doing the dishes. This is a humble housewife or something! I was cryingbecause I didn’t cook for anybody and I realized she’d lied to me and I had done something I don’t like to do in order to please heror honor her in some way, and she just spit all over me. I was crying because no man could get away with that with me. I wouldhave spotted it. I would have been more suspicious. It was very sad. I’m standing over the dishes crying. What is this scene?!Anne, who’s a rather quiet person, she really sized it up. She said, “Come on, Valerie, I’m going to give you a ride. I’m taking acab downtown and I’ll give you a lift. Come on. I’m not leaving until you come with me.” She finally got up and left.

A week later, Valerie again called Ti-Grace, to relate her latest exploits. Ti-Grace stopped herimmediately: “Just stop! I tried to be your friend. Maybe it’s my fault, maybe I don’t know how to beyour friend, but I’ve tried and I’ve had it. You abuse me and I don’t like anybody abusing me. I don’tlike men abusing me, and I don’t like women abusing me. I don’t want you to call me anymore.”Valerie responded, “You don’t like this?” Ti-Grace, sensing amazement on Valerie’s part, reiterated,“No, Valerie, I don’t. I don’t like to be insulted and abused. Please don’t call me anymore.” “Okay”came the reply. And she never did call her again. Ti-Grace believed that “she genuinely thought thiswas a way to relate to people. She certainly didn’t want to change and I think she was genuinely

surprised that I was so upset and that it was really over.”Valerie had finally succeeded in alienating even the closest of political allies, leaving only a small

handful of people who sympathized with, or admired, her. Believing herself a writer, Valerie refusedall claims on her political alliances or motives. Ben Morea offered an animated description of thecentral role her writing played in her life: “She was 100 percent artist. One hundred percent writer. Itwas always part of the conversation and part of her life, writing her thoughts, her desire tocommunicate ideas. It came up all the time. It was just part of our conversation.”65 In his view, “Shesaw a need to raise a lot of issues around what happens to women and the SCUM Manifesto was thebest way she could express herself.”66 Ben emphasized the importance of thinking of Valerie as awriter:

The best I’d ever hope is that she was given respect as a woman of thought and a woman of letters rather than as a maniacalkiller. I would hope that people would see the creative, the important side of her, and respect her for that. Of course she was anartist. André Breton once said something like, “To go out and randomly kill somebody is a revolutionary act, a surrealistic act.” Inother words, it’s not a homicidal act, but even if it was a homicidal act, she was justified as far as I’m concerned. . . . I don’t thinkshe would have been upset if the story illuminated her true nature, her creativity. She had a purpose. She was driven by a purpose.She saw a vacuum that she felt that she could delineate. I think that she would have been in some ways grateful to have thatexposure. I think that if somebody wrote a negative piece about her and made the high point of her life shooting Andy, she wouldhave been upset, rightfully, because that wasn’t the high point. That was just a footnote. She existed independent of the act ofshooting Andy. She existed as a writer.

Giving his thoughts on Valerie and feminism, Ben recalled her distaste for liberals in general, andparticularly for feminist liberals:

She saw herself as a radical, just as I had a disdain for political liberals because I consider myself a radical. She spoke of herdisgust, how stupid they were, or how shallow they were, or how one-dimensional they were, but she never came across as areally angry person. She came across as a person angered by stupidity and angered by the situation that existed but not as anangry person. I was much more like that than she was. She had a lot to contribute to the feminist political world and had a lot tooffer and should be taken seriously. I had a lot to offer in my world, in my arena, the more political, artistic, cultural world, ingeneral. Radical feminists who reject Valerie aren’t radical feminists. It’s a game. They’re liberal. They were afraid to go that lastmile. Radicals are ready to go over the edge. Liberals just go so far. She threatened them because she went all the way. Sheplayed out her conviction rather than just riding it. I played out my conviction rather than just riding it. That’s the differencebetween radicals and liberals.67

MADNESSOf Mental Hospitals and Men 1968–1974

Madness deals not so much with truth and the world, as with man and whatever truth about himself he is able to perceive.. . . It plays on the surface of things and in the glitter of daylight, over all the workings of appearances, over the ambiguityof reality and illusion, over all that indeterminate web, ever rewoven and broken, which both unites and separates truth andappearance. It hides and manifests, it utters truth and falsehood, it is light and shadow. It shimmers, a central and indulgentfigure . . .

—Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization

IF VALERIE SIGNALS A LINK BETWEEN TRUTH AND MADNESS, between the world of reason and that ofunreason, the events that followed her arrest in Times Square on June 3, 1968 for the shooting ofAndy Warhol suggest that few could see her as a mechanism for uniting these spheres. Valerie’s truthwas lost to the world of mental health diagnoses, treatment, imprisonment, abuse, and ultimately,descent into the intensifying paralysis of paranoia and self-destruction. As the “bag lady offeminism,” Valerie entered a world where the potentially brilliant capacities of her mind weretoppled by the science of unreason.1

THE PEOPLE OF THE STATE OF NEW YORK VERSUS “VALARIE” SOLANASA grand jury of the County of New York was convened; Valerie faced two counts of attempted murder—for Andy Warhol and Mario Amaya—as well as one count of first-degree assault, for Fred Hughes,one count of second-degree assault, again for Fred Hughes, and, finally, one count of possessing aweapon. The first count read, somewhat clumsily, “The defendant, in the County of New York, on orabout June 3, 1968, with intent to cause the death of Andy Warhol attempted to cause the death ofAndy Warhol by shooting him with a pistol.” In an appendix to the document containing theindictments, Florynce Kennedy filed the following description of Valerie: “The prisoner’s name isValerie Solanis [sic]. (As an actress and author she is known as Valerie Solaris [sic]). She is a well-educated person holding a bachelor’s degree and some credits towards a master’s degree. She is astrong advocate of women’s rights and conveys this message in her writings.”2

On June 4, 1968, Valerie appeared for arraignment before Judge David Getzoff (an appropriatename indeed), who ordered her committed to the New York City Department of Hospitals forpsychiatric observation. According to documents filed by Flo, no such examination took place. “Saidorder was then vacated by Judge Getzoff and Miss Solanis was remanded to the Women’s House ofDetention, where she was again searched and internally examined.” (“Internal examinations”typically meant that women stripped naked and endured prodding and “searching” in their genitals,often under the guise that guards were looking for drugs.) Flo added that Valerie was returned to thecourt on June 5. She was not given representation by counsel or allowed the chance to seek it at eitherappearance. Valerie had rejected attempts to force her to accept legal aid from the state for bothappearances, believing that she was the only person who could represent herself. (In an interviewdecades later, Roderick Lankler, the assistant district attorney at the time, remembered Valerie as aunique case, remarking, “She seemed a victim of her relationship with [Andy].”)3

On the morning of June 5, Valerie received a “brief and cursory” psychological evaluation from Dr.Grants, a court psychiatrist. Flo wrote of this evaluation, “Dr. Grants was not a fair and impartial

observer of Miss Solanas’s mental condition and cannot fully advise the court thereof.” That sameday, the judge reinstated the decision to commit Valerie, and she was assigned to Elmhurst Hospital.

ELMHURST HOSPITAL, QUEENS, NEW YORK

“She was, as they put it, “one of the floating people.”Sometimes people would ask: “Where do you come from?”“The river,” she replied.“Where do you live?”“Nowhere.”“Who are you?”“No one.”

—Judy Michaelson, “Valerie: The Trouble Was Men”

Swiftly declared mentally unstable and potentially unable to stand trial because of this condition, thecourts transported Valerie on June 5, 1968, to the prison ward of Elmhurst Hospital in the borough ofQueens. The typical procedure for such cases involved a transfer to the hospital for ninety days;within that period, a determination would be made whether to discharge the person, continue to treathim or her in general population at Elmhurst, or transfer the person to a section of the hospital withsecurity. Valerie needed to be fully evaluated to determine whether she was competent to stand trial.4

Nearly everyone admitted under circumstances similar to Valerie’s would have been required toundergo extensive psychological testing. Accordingly, she underwent such testing by the chiefpsychologist, Ruth Cooper, who issued a detailed report on June 13, diagnosing Valerie with “aSchizophrenic Reaction, paranoid type with marked depression and potential for acting out.”5

Coming from a relatively sympathetic psychologist, Dr. Cooper’s observations and insights aboutValerie reveal both the highly psychoanalytic framework of the late 1960s psychological diagnosticworld, rife with sexist assumptions, along with a certain degree of care and empathy toward Valerie.Dr. Cooper’s report described Valerie as increasingly eager during each of the three testing sessions,“displaying great interest and willingness to cooperate in whatever tasks were presented.” ThoughValerie acknowledged a superficial familiarity with the psychological tests and procedures—she hadstudied psychology in college—she did not have any real knowledge of the procedures used duringthe testing. Dr. Cooper described her as compliant and cooperative, highly motivated to give a frankand open picture of herself during the testing, and eager to do well on the testing: “Indeed, MissSolanas was so ready to ‘tell all,’ that often the examiner was forced to intercede to cut off the excessof productivity. Like an eager child, Miss Solanas asked what the newspapers were now writingabout her though she angrily accused them of attributing false statements to her and insisted that ‘thepress belongs to the rich people and what will happen to me is what the rich people want tohappen.’”

Dr. Cooper administered a full battery of tests, including the Wechsler-Bellevue Intelligence Scalefor Adults (now the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale), which required Valerie to complete subteststo assess her verbal and performance intelligence (applied logic, spatial skills, and so forth). Thistest used a standardized scoring method; scores of 100 indicated average intelligence, 75–80indicated borderline/low intelligence, and 120 and above signaled above-average/high intelligence.Approximately 95 percent of the population scores between 70 and 130 on IQ tests, with only 2.5percent scoring higher than 130.

Valerie scored 132 in verbal IQ, 125 in performance IQ, with a full-scale IQ of 131; placing her in

the 98th percentile of intellectual functioning. In other words, Valerie functioned in the “verysuperior” category, far above average compared with most of her peers and in the top 2 percentoverall. Further, because she had such similar verbal and performance IQ scores—that is, there wereno significant discrepancies between different areas of her intelligence—she scored as highlyintelligent across all tasks and skills. Dr. Cooper noted that “except for two very minor breaks, therewas no clear-cut evidence of gross pathology or of a thinking disorder in this highly structuredinstrument. The breaks which did occur were in relation to questions involving social and legalmores and reflected her rebellion against existing society.”

Valerie also participated in two projective tests: the Rorschach inkblot test and the ThematicApperception Test, both of which assess unconscious yearnings, perceptions, and the extent of anypsychological disturbance. In the Rorschach—an instrument still used in inpatient hospital and othersettings to assess perceptions and thought disorders—people identify patterns and shapes based onwhat they see within a series of ambiguous images made from inkblots. This test looks fordisturbances in perceptual functioning and overall well-being through scoring both the content of theresponses (“I see two women playing the drums”) and the specific language of how individuals talkabout the images they perceive (“Maybe it’s a he-she figure”). The Rorschach test most reliablymeasures disturbances in perceptual functioning and, particularly during the late 1960s, was widelyused to diagnose schizophrenia (and in some hospitals, it still is used for this purpose). The ThematicApperception Test asks individuals to create stories with a beginning, middle, and end about a seriesof drawings that show people engaging in various tasks. By closely examining individuals’projections onto the drawings, particularly affect about the drawings, psychologists can learn aboutfamily histories, unconscious processes, and longings or urges.6

Dr. Cooper reported Valerie’s performance on the projective tests. “While the form level of herresponse is often excellent, the quality of the content and her elaborations take on a psychotic flavor.She thought of men as ‘pigs’ whom she anthropomorphizes into exploiters and despoilers of women.Not only do they ‘brutalize’ women, but they also annihilate other men. As she sees them, men have noredeeming qualities.” Valerie exercised extreme caution in her descriptions of women, for eventhough women engaged in constructive and cooperative activities together, and could clearly loveeach other, women generally needed to be “tested” before they could earn Valerie’s trust.

When asked to make projective drawings of whatever she felt at the time, she constructed a smallmicrocosm of the gender-nonconforming world created in Up Your Ass, populated by highlymasculine women who still loved being women. Dr. Cooper wrote that Valerie created “a femalewho, except for her flowing hair, is an extremely phallic, aggressive creature—far more masculinethan the male. Though she masculinizes the female, she verbalizes that it is more desirable to be afemale than a male. Even men, according to Miss Solanas’s associations to her drawings, prefer thefeminine role. Though they pretend to value masculinity, their private fantasies revolve around beingfemale.” Dr. Cooper speculated that Valerie’s drawings illustrated her confusion about her ownsexual identity and her “inability to achieve any resolution to this conflict.” Situating this as a sign ofValerie’s block about admitting any actual sexual wishes, Dr. Cooper believed that Valerie’soverreliance on “all forms of perverse sexual activity” served to deny her actual sexual wishes.

As a final test, Dr. Cooper administered the Bender-Gestalt test, in which individuals are asked toreplicate drawings shown to them on different cards. Designed to measure developmental andneurological disorders, the test can also discern perfectionism. Dr. Cooper assessed Valerie’sperformance on this test and surmised that Valerie had severe conflict about and alternated betweenperfectionism and impulsivity: “Miss Solanas wants desperately to create a perfect product and her

consequent overconcern with exquisite detail gives rise to stilted, overconcrete, fragmented, larger-than-life reproductions. Thus, while her initial perceptions may be correct, she so magnifies them thattheir integrity is ultimately undermined.”

Addressing the global picture of Valerie’s psychological health, Dr. Cooper suggested that Valerieshowed a consistent preoccupation with violence. “In markedly paranoid fashion she sees society,and particularly men, as aligned against her.” She painted Valerie as torn between external toughnessand inner vulnerability. “Though she makes strenuous efforts to present herself as a hard, tough,cynical misanthrope, Miss Solanas is actually a very frightened and depressed child. Her brittledefenses, which range from obsessive-compulsive perfectionism to paranoid projection, do not reallyserve to contain her overwhelming anxiety.” Noting that Valerie’s defenses gave way readily whenconfronted with inescapable facts, Dr. Cooper believed that Valerie coped through either impulsiveacting out or depression. When Dr. Cooper described Valerie’s anxiety and depression to her, “therewas a marked startled reaction on Miss Solanas’ part. She made a feeble effort to deny theobservation but was clearly very close to tears.”

When questioned about her childhood (and it should be remembered that in the late 1960s, motherblaming was notoriously common in psychology and psychiatry) Valerie strongly stressed that she hadhad an idyllic childhood, though “she plaintively conceded that her mother had always been busyelsewhere,—that there had never been time for Valerie.” Valerie had concluded that her mother hadmore interest in men than in her daughter and consequently, “she holds men responsible for theemotional deprivation and rejection she experienced.” Dr. Cooper added, “While she has consciouslydevoted much of her energy to proving what ‘pigs’ and ‘exploiters’ men were, her unconsciousstrivings have been to be male and thus, perhaps, to win her mother’s love.” Dr. Cooper situatedValerie’s psychological troubles as squarely resulting from her mother’s rejection and her longing toseek revenge on the men who took her mother away from her. Notably, the report never mentionedValerie’s relationship with her father and apparently did not include any mention of sexual abuse everhaving occurred.

At the conclusion of her report, Dr. Cooper characterized Valerie as “essentially an emotional andpsychological infant who has not yet resolved the critical question of her own identity.” She portrayedValerie as following a predictable process in which, in order to manage her obsessive-compulsiveneed for perfection, she became anxious and depressed and eventually delusional in her thinking, with“rage of such proportions that acting-out destructively becomes the only avenue for discharge. . . .Her test protocol indicates that at the present time, Miss Solanas does, indeed, see no other way tocope with her inner turmoil than to discharge it through action.”

Decades later, in an interview conducted by Mary Harron and her research team for her film I ShotAndy Warhol, Dr. Cooper admitted that “Valerie is a surprisingly vivid memory” and that she“remembered her with sympathy as an ‘engaging young woman—challenging and stimulating,’ with asense of humor, who was obsessed with gender and would continuously turn the conversation back tothe inferiority of the male.”7

Shortly after Dr. Cooper completed her psychological evaluation, Valerie received anotherevaluation, from two psychiatrists, Arthur Sternberg and Mannuccio Mannucci, who issued theirreport on June 26; the diagnosis was “Schizophrenia, Chronic, Paranoid type.” These doctors notedthat Valerie displayed superior intellectual functioning along with excellent memory, though shedisplayed agitation that masked underlying depression. Not surprisingly, Valerie seemed to respondmore negatively to male evaluators than to Dr. Cooper. Under the belief that her judgment and insightwere markedly impaired, the report described her as out of control during the evaluation: “Her

language was profuse with vulgarities of every description, and she spoke in a rapid, high-pressuredway. Her thoughts were coherent and logical until she became involved with descriptions of herphilosophy. She reiterated her views that men are no longer necessary and should be subjugated into afeminist society. She added that extermination of males is justified when necessary, and that shewould be willing to carry out this deed if she ever had to.” Valerie repeatedly reiterated during thetesting that she felt justified in her actions “both in the past and in the future.”8

Drs. Sternberg and Mannucci gathered an extensive childhood history from Valerie, noting that shedescribed herself as a “hell raiser” and that she and her friends would often shoplift and commit otherpetty thefts. When asked about her whereabouts for the past five years, Valerie related that she hadtraveled through various parts of the country and had lived with several men, none of whom she liked.She expressed particularly hostile sentiments toward Andy Warhol and explained that he had toomuch control over her life and had stolen her literary work and that he and his crowd had beensending information to the newspapers with the intent of ruining her reputation. She also believed thatAndy had biased her psychiatric testing results and had frequently asked the evaluators if they couldsay she was “crazy” and should be locked up. Interestingly, though the report concluded with thediagnosis of schizophrenia, it states that “there is no evidence of hallucinations, depersonalization, orderealization.” (These three facets of schizophrenia still inform the diagnosis today; Valerieapparently never experienced frank hallucinations or an overwhelming sense of unreality in heridentity or her environment.) The psychiatrists concluded that Valerie had been deteriorating for sometime and that, because of her impulsivity and antisocial behavior, she constituted a serious risk ofbeing homicidal, could not stand trial because of mental illness, and should be transferred to a statepsychiatric health facility.

While in Elmhurst Hospital, Valerie refused to allow Maurice Girodias’s lawyer, Don Engel, torepresent her, insisting on having Flo’s legal counsel. Flo filed a petition on June 7 to officiallydeclare herself Valerie’s attorney and on June 11 she argued in a formal appeal, “Valerie Solanis [sic]has been confined against her will at Elmhurst General Hospital from June 5, 1968 to the present.Since she is a newsworthy personality she has been the subject of supposed news articles. Thesearticles (see exhibits marked P-Q) are extremely prejudiced, but because Miss Solanis [sic] is notallowed to see copies of her press coverage at Elmhurst General Hospital, she is unable to refute thetrial and conviction which the press has already conducted.”9

Flo argued her case on the basis of several criteria: Valerie did not receive adequaterepresentation, the court’s evaluation was based on hearsay, she had not been advised of herconstitutional rights, she did not receive a proper physical or psychiatric examination, no bail wasoffered, and no date for a preliminary hearing was set. The courts largely ignored Flo’s report andproceeded with Valerie’s transfer without acknowledging any relevance of the procedural aspects ofValerie’s case. It mattered little that she had been mistreated or misrepresented, and they franklycould not understand her insistence on representing herself rather than accepting legal aid.

The following day, June 12, Elmhurst Hospital filed a full psychological report with the courts—this was prior to Dr. Cooper’s more comprehensive evaluation—declaring Valerie mentally ill. Thereport from Drs. Sternberg and Mannucci advised that the court should send Valerie to a mentalhospital such as Matteawan, as “the patient is extremely psychiatrically disturbed. Her condition isdue to a long-standing paranoid psychosis and it is felt that, at this time, she is a definite homicidalthreat to the community.”10 Valerie internalized this news by feeling an even deeper commitment torebel, writing Maurice, “Keeping me in jail or in Elmhurst will not wear me down. I’ve fought toolong & too hard already for my work—not just against you since Nov. 1967, but for two years before

& I should most certainly not give up now.”11

On June 13, Valerie appeared before state supreme court justice Thomas Dickens. She wasrepresented by Flo, who called her “one of the most important spokes-women of the feministmovement.” Flo asked for a writ of habeas corpus because Valerie was inappropriately held atElmhurst, but the judge denied the motion and sent Valerie back to the hospital. At the arraignment,Valerie had two supporters aside from Flo: Ti-Grace Atkinson and Wilda Holt. The New York Timesdeclared the next day, “She has been called a female Genet, but she has not been taken seriously.”Answering questions the next day from behind a locked gate back at Elmhurst, Valerie denouncedcomparisons between herself and Genet, saying, “Genet just reports, despite what Sartre and DeBeauvoir, two overrated windbags, say about the existential implications of his work. I, on the otherhand, am a social propagandist.”12 Valerie called herself a “superfeminist” and “revolutionary” andpromised that SCUM Manifesto would be submitted as her legal brief at her trial.

Valerie’s indictment and the ruling of insanity came through on June 27, listing the charges ofattempted murder, assault, and illegal possession of a gun. In contrast to the mood of this event, MarioAmaya would joke later, “Andy and I always used to say that we were the first feminist casualties.”13

(Whether he meant to slam feminism, or just cope with his pain, is unclear. Mario had a reputation foroutlandish comments, and once said he felt more upset with Valerie for ruining his white linen suitthan for shooting him.)

THE “LOWLY TOAD”Valerie spent most of the following month directing her hostilities toward Maurice Girodias, whomshe continued to portray as manipulative, cruel, self-serving, and the epitome of why SCUM shouldexist. In the midst of vitriolic letters she sent to him, Maurice put up money for Valerie to retain alawyer—something he did for many of his writers who found themselves in legal trouble. Thislawyer, Don Engel, who Valerie wanted nothing to do with, who had represented Terry Southern inhis Candy dispute, recalled in a later interview that he would have happily represented Valerie if shehad been declared competent to stand trial. Instead, she was ruled insane and Engel never got thechance to defend her in court. Valerie was, by then, “off the rails.”14

In an interview following the publication of SCUM Manifesto in summer 1968, Maurice told theVillage Voice that he both supported the manifesto and felt rage toward women: “I’m happy to bealive and I’m a publisher. I still feel she has a very good point. I have no argument with it. But I feel asimilar case can be made about females, only women are worse. I will write one about womensomeday. Then I’ll shoot one and get published myself.”

Maurice visited Valerie in prison; he stated that she looked “very happy to be there” and was“extremely confused.” He added, “I’m sure that her manifesto will convince the judges that she’s notlegally responsible—unless there’s a woman judge.” During his visit, Maurice asked, “Why didn’tyou shoot me? Why Warhol and not me?” She replied, “Oh, I wouldn’t do that to you.”15 Maurice feltthat Valerie was “not entirely in her normal mind” and “not in very good shape” and “still doesn’trealize what she’s done.” Angry that Flo, “that woman,” wanted to represent Valerie, he said thehospital “doesn’t want any more freaks. . . . It would be disastrous if she represented Valerie at thetrial. . . . Paranoid authors are no great authority.”16

During her incarceration at the hospital, Valerie grew increasingly angry and paranoid aboutMaurice, believing that he had self-serving intentions and compulsively lied to her. She told WildaHolt, “If I trusted G, I’d have something like inverse paranoia.”17 Calling him “The Great Operator,

The Great Manipulator” but inviting him for a visit shortly after she arrived at Elmhurst, she accusedhim of failing to follow through on his commitments to her.18 For example, after he claimed to send her$5.00 that she never received, she wrote, “Why don’t you fuck the authorities and the system for awhile instead of your authors?”(June 28, 1968).

She sent letters demanding stamps (July 9, 1968) and many other letters accusing Maurice ofsabotaging the goals of SCUM: “I formulated SCUM & wrote the ‘SCUM Manifesto’ to create abetter world. It’s ironic & pathetic that it’s fallen into such hands as yours & Warhol’s. If you want tobe aligned with me, cultivate goals beyond being able to say, ‘I have more money than J. Paul Getty’;you must strive to transcend your sniveling self & immerse yourself in the betterment of thecommunity; you must learn to work with people, not against them; you must learn to pretend you’rehuman, & not a toad, become an expert human impersonator you must have as your sole constant goalthe happiness of women, both in the mass and those you’re personally associated with. I’m convincedthe rewards you reap from doing so will be enormous” (July 18, 1968). In another letter that sameday, Valerie described her goals for SCUM: “There are 2 aspects to SCUM—the destructive and theconstructive, destroying the old world through sabotage and beginning to create a swinging, groovy,out-of-sight female world, both aspects to operate simultaneously. Ironically, you’re best suited tocontributing to the constructive end—you’re just not the saboteur type: you’re strictly a contract &finance man.”

Two days later, she admitted that she wanted to devote every bit of her time to SCUM and pleadedwith Maurice to join her goals for SCUM: “You don’t have long to go, Big Daddi-o; so what are yougoing to do about it? Are you going to be a doddering old contract man with lots and lots of money, orare you going to be a groovy, brawling and battling SCUMmer? Are you going to help yourself andhelp SCUM get rolling, or are you going to continue to fuck everybody—including yourself?”(July 20,1968).

Perhaps comically, Valerie also pleaded with Maurice to serve as the head of the men’s auxiliaryof SCUM:

I’ve been thinking lately in purely practical terms about SCUM. You would be the most appropriate person to have as head of theMen’s Auxiliary, being you’re the publisher. Warhol very much wanted the position, but you’d be more desirable than him, sinceyou’re much more articulate, & have a flair for writing which he doesn’t have . . . As head of the auxiliary you would workclosely with me, go recruiting with SCUM, travel around with SCUM on the Scumnibus, attend all SCUM events (unless youdidn’t want to), make personal appearances and give speeches on behalf of the Men’s Auxiliary, & you could, if you wanted,appear as Top Turd at all Turd sessions.19

Despite this vitriol, Maurice continued to communicate with Valerie, forwarding her reviews andcommentary about SCUM Manifesto from the New York Times, Newsweek, and the East VillageOther. He sent copies of her published book, as well as paper, pencils, envelopes, and a moneyorder. He pleaded with Valerie to have more nuance in her views of men and to celebrate herintellectual gifts:

Even if you refuse to see this [letter], I have always acted as your friend. I cannot condon [sic] your claim that you have ‘amission’ which gives you the right to kill people. But I agree with your idea that people are impossibly selfish and cruel: only I thinkthat this applies to mankind at large, not to a particular group like males or females. And murder will not cure that state of things. Iwish therefore that you stopped considering yourself like a small-time Hitler, and came down to more sensible views. You are anintelligent and gifted person, and I see no reason why you should not, one day, accomplish something real for yourself. So—whydon’t you start trying to see the good side of things, the fact that no-one (not even men!) is always all bad, the fact that no-one isafter you, or wants to harm you. You believe that the whole world conspires against you: at the same time you complain thatpeople do not pay enough attention to what you say and do. Don’t you see the contradiction in those two feelings? Think about it!20

Despite clear evidence of her severe paranoia—particularly in her interactions with Andy andMaurice—Valerie also had an uncanny sense of the truth in her dealings with them. On June 6, a merethree days after the shooting, Maurice received a letter from Dell Publishing Company thanking himfor submitting Valerie’s work but rejecting SCUM Manifesto, revealing that Maurice had,immediately following the shooting, submitted her work for publication. Further, in an attorney’sletter of October 30, 1968, Maurice directly specified that he did not follow through on payingValerie the five hundred dollars he owed her on purpose; because they had never specifically signeda contract for SCUM Manifesto, which he published shortly after the shooting, he admitted that herefused to pay her the royalties specified in her earlier contract. Instead, he wrote that he would payher four and a half cents a copy, a substantially lower amount than her contract had specified back inAugust 1967.21

Prior to the shooting, Valerie had written to Maurice, certain that he intended not to pay out her fullroyalties:

Lowly Toad, I’m now hip to what both of those contracts mean—I sold the novel outright; the only right I have is the right to theroyalties, which I’m sure you’ll find a way of beating me out of. The refusal rights clause means you have the right to buy my next2 book-length works on the same greasy terms as you bought the novel. In the second unsigned contract the phrase “we willretain 50%—” means that I won’t get anything; it doesn’t imply, as you said that I’d get the other 50%. . . . I will never again,needless to say, ever sign one of your sleazy, greasy contracts.22

Maurice’s refusal to pay royalties to most of his authors eventually resulted, in 1971, in picketingoutside the Olympia Press offices by other authors. Maurice admitted to his lawyers that he tookValerie’s statement that SCUM Manifesto was his, “to have and to hold, forever,” as a representationthat Valerie had signed over to him the rights to publish the work.23 Vivian Gornick, who wrote anintroduction for SCUM Manifesto and knew Maurice personally, agreed that he ripped off Valerie:“There is no question that he screwed her—none, none, none. He bought her off. He paid her noroyalties and was making a lot of money from the SCUM Manifesto.”24

In practical ways, Valerie perceived Maurice as purposefully hiding information about the prefaceand commentary sections of future editions of the manifesto, and she accused him of failing to notifyher of his plans for the manifesto or Up Your Ass (which he had apparently obtained a copy of shortlyafter the shooting). Valerie’s friend Geoffrey LeGear wrote to Maurice, “Why did you not have theguts, she asks, to let the Manifesto stand or fall on its own? Why were you so cowardly as to try toexplain it away before it could speak for itself?” Valerie was enraged that Maurice had not sent herany mail from readers and that he had held back information about sales and reviews and otherreactions to her work. She took particular issue with the comparison between SCUM Manifesto andSwift’s Modest Proposal, and Geoffrey explained that “there is no similarity between themwhatsoever—the whole point about ‘A Modest Proposal’ is irony; the whole point about Valerie isthat there is no irony.” Valerie also hated the notion that Maurice had compared her to Hitler andSCUM Manifesto to Mein Kampf. As Geoffrey wrote, “Hitler originated nothing (nationalism andracism are as old as history), but Valerie wants the end of nations and racism by ending the male sexwhich is responsible for them—really quite beyond Hitler’s range, don’t you think?”25

Further, Valerie took issue with the biography of her that Maurice had constructed in the preface toSCUM Manifesto, objecting to his discussing her “‘loveless childhood’ (in a certain way she had agroovy childhood); her ‘sexual immaturity’ (in a certain way Valerie has passed beyond sex); her‘feeling of isolation’ (in a certain way Valerie had too many people around her).” She wondered ifMaurice wanted to hurt her, by “superficial speculation on her supposed personal history,” noting thatone only writes that way about a person once he or she had died and that Maurice knew little of her

personal history because he had had no real personal relationship with her.After Maurice published the first edition of SCUM Manifesto in August 1968, Valerie demanded

that in the next edition he include a new preface signed by him but dictated by Valerie: “It’s to becalled ‘Confessions of a Toad.’ The ‘SCUM (not S.C.U.M.) Manifesto’ part of the new book must beproofread by me. If you don’t fulfill these conditions, you’ve definitely had it with me in every way.I’d rather live my life in the bughouse than write one line for you under the present conditions. . . . Itold you the shooting of Auntie Wahoo was a marking point, that all your offenses prior to then wereshot away, but that everything you do afterwards counts. You’ve earned quite a few demerits sincethen; you almost reached the point of no return.”26

Valerie’s feelings of betrayal had reached a breaking point. Geoffrey explained to Maurice:Valerie feels, or apparently feels, that you have so mistreated, misunderstood, and misjudged her that you have destroyed her. Shefeels that there is no hope left for herself or her work, that she will never have a chance to speak for herself, to justify herself andher ideas. She feels totally degraded and can see no way out, at least no way that will allow her to preserve her integrity. Not toget attention (a cruel thrust if it is not true), but to end her degradation is her motive in wanting to kill herself. . . . When it comesto her, where do you find yourself? Right with the establishment you always supposed yourself to be fighting.27

In addition, Geoffrey defended Valerie not only before the shooting but also well after it, insistingto both Maurice and Andy that Valerie’s ideas in SCUM Manifesto had the force of truth behind them.Geoffrey, who worried constantly about the chance that Valerie would commit suicide out ofdespondency caused by Maurice’s treatment of SCUM Manifesto, wrote to him:

Let me ask you two questions. First, is not the world a mess, and are not the males in charge? And can you conceive, honestly, ofthe world ever being any different? Second, do men need women more, or do women need men more? And could you conceive,honestly, of a reason to go on living if there were no more women in the world? . . . Valerie may have the truth, the truth thatdidn’t exist. Wouldn’t it be strange if time justified Valerie? And if time did, wouldn’t it be a shame not to have been on the rightside when it counted, at the beginning?28

Valerie sensed that Maurice was unsympathetic toward the revolutionary gender dynamicspresented in SCUM Manifesto; this was confirmed when she saw what he had written in theintroduction: “This little book is my contribution to the study of violence.”29 Using the many letters hereceived from her during this period, he also described Valerie in sexist terms, telling a French radiostation: “She was naïve. She was very smart. She could not come to terms with these contradictoryforces: her outrageous feminism and the fact that she did not look quite like a woman but neither like aman. . . . It’s hard to figure out how she did not reach that crisis earlier. I would not have married her,of course, but I really did like her. I found her very funny.”30

Still, friends of Maurice’s claimed that Valerie’s threats affected him deeply and he becameincreasingly paranoid that she would shoot him in retaliation for his not complying with her demands.One friend, Iris Owens, said, “I don’t think that people regarded him to have stepped out on a ledge inhaving been associated with her. That only came after she showed herself capable of murder.”31 Ayear later, after repeatedly asking Valerie to stop contacting him, he wrote to her, “I am not interestedin your other works, past, present, or future. I hope that this clarifies my position once and for all, andI must ask you to dismiss me from your thoughts, and not to write me again.”32

As did Andy, Maurice expressed a curious affection for Valerie, despite her constant threats andhis well-documented fear of her. Responding to her constant name-calling—“Lowly Toad,”—Maurice described Valerie in rather warm terms: “Even though she keeps calling me Toad, there is inthat name a background of friendship and tenderness. We got along really well, while fighting andhating each other like you would not believe.”33 Valerie hurled at him the ultimate rebuke: “I know youlive for my letters. What else is in your grim, puny life?”34 She advised that he seek “SCUM therapy”:

“The goal of this therapy is to rid you of certain hang-ups which are severely interfering with myrights & interests. The methods are my own & are derived from & consistent with SCUM doctrine.I’ve tested my methods out on other males & have achieved remarkable results.”35 Eerily prescient asalways, Valerie foreshadowed Viagra: “One of the goals of the therapy will be to enable you to get ahard on as often as you want, any time you want, & to sustain it as long as you want. Achieving thissub-goal (among others) is a necessary step in achieving the final goals. . . . Achieving a perpetualhard on (PH) involves first being aware of certain truths, & 2nd undertaking a certain attitude thatI’ve worked out.”36 She has, she goes on to say, cured several men of impotence. In regard to Valerie’srelationship with Andy, Maurice took a paternalistic outlook, describing Valerie’s hate mail to Andyas intimate and an expression of comfort; she had “something of the quality of a very rebellious anddifficult child, writing the much resented and much needed father for money.”37

“AUNTIE WAHOO”Just as Geoffrey’s letter to Maurice outlined Valerie’s complaints against him, a letter he wrote toAndy detailed Valerie’s feelings about the shooting and her reasons for it. He wrote on December 3,1968, “I’m not sure if Valerie would have shot you if Girodias had been as well known as you are,but she does, nevertheless, have a number of complaints against you, as well as against him.” Valeriefelt Andy, who she often called “Auntie Wahoo,” was “playing games with her.” The complaintsincluded several points. She believed Andy wanted to stage a two-part dramatic production using herpanhandling article and her play and that it would be staged at the Grove Press Theatre. Valeriethought Andy had spoken to Maurice and decided not to stage the play after hearing that Maurice hadclaim over her works. Shortly after she signed the contract with him, she believed that Andy had“changed his mind, became vague, and did nothing more about the production—despite [his] formerenthusiasm.”38

Valerie felt particularly betrayed that Andy recognized Maurice’s prior claim on her work andcooperated with Maurice to maintain it. She remembered Paul Morrissey saying, “You know, you justsigned away your play” and, hearing that she should give Maurice a blow job, that she was tough andcould “take it,” or “have yourself committed to a mental institution, in order to frustrate him,” or“write him a novel a day, on file cards, and give those to him,” and so on. She thought her twenty-dollar payment for I, a Man insulted her work and that Andy used material from the philosophy ofSCUM and from the manifesto in his lecture tours too often. Geoffrey summed this up by writing in hisletter to Andy, “In order to cooperate with Girodias, you were blocking her efforts to have her workproduced or published and to have her ideas and activities publicized.” Pleading with Andy toforgive Valerie, drop all charges, and assist with her case, he ended the letter by asking Andy if hehad done all he could to help her.39

Valerie continued to write to Andy herself in the fall and winter of 1968, sending him one letterthat, in her own way, tried to make amends:

I’m writing this letter because I’m a compulsive communicator.For the past few weeks I’ve been evaluating + reevaluating everything. My morale has gone way up; I no longer feel

demoralized, + my attitude towards a lot of things has changed. I no longer feel any hostility towards you or towards anyone else;I feel at peace with the world, + I feel, now that the Manifesto’s been published + now that with all the publicity I have a chanceto earn money without being dependent on men, that I’m in a much better position than I was to deal with you, Girodias, + all theother vultures I encounter.

I intend to forget the past—harbor no grudges, regret no mistake—+ begin completely anew. I also have a new attitude aboutmy contract situation; I made a terrible mistake signing it, but I don’t intend to continue to be gotten by it; I intend to chalk it up to

experience + begin anew.I’m very happy you’re alive + well, for all your barbarism, you’re still the best person to make movies with, +, if you treat me

fairly, I’d like to work with you.Valerie40

Valerie’s fear of Andy’s desire for publicity had some basis in reality, but it seems that Andy alsohad some affection for Valerie, according to Ultra Violet: “It’s normal he didn’t press charges. He gota lot of publicity from the shooting and he loved publicity. Why would he press charges? How muchmoney was there to recover from her? Nothing probably! So what would he gain by pressing charges?He had the front page news of the Post so that was good enough. That doesn’t mean he didn’t care forher.”41

With Andy’s hunger for fame in mind, Valerie wrote to Andy in late September stating that she didnot want any publicity for SCUM or the trial, as it would only benefit him and Maurice. Sheexpressed her willingness to do another film with him: “I’m not asking you to do a film with me; I’mtelling you that if you want to—+ I know for certain that you do, + nothing you put in the paper to thecontrary will dispel my certainty; let’s just say my intuition tells me where it’s at—I’ll be willing to,if you treat me fairly, + that’s a big if, as fairness isn’t your forte.” Believing that Andy had notpressed charges because he knew the district attorney would do so, she accused him of selfishness:“You’re trying to get credit for great nobility + compassion without doing one noble or compassionatething. If you really wanted to be noble, you could get the D.A. to drop the charges, but I know you’dnever do that, because you want me to have a trial because of the great publicity value involved.”42

She concluded by accusing Andy and Maurice of trying to ride her coattails:What gives me a fantastic edge over you + the Great Toad is that I feel no compulsion to do a movie with you, do any more worksor even get the play produced, nice as all of those things would be. I have a lot of projects in mind that don’t constitute works +that, therefore, The Great Toad, + hence you, would have no claim on. You, on the other hand, having no intrinsic worth, arelimited to who you can find + use, + you can ride along only so far with Viva, Bridget Polk, and the rest of your trained dogs.Having worked + associated with me, you’ve had a taste of honey, + it must be awfully difficult to have to go back to Viva saying“Fuck you” in restaurants. . . . Weren’t you saying something, Boy, last June 3 about how if I turned in 2 more works, signed abunch of contracts with The Great Toad with you, then did the movie, you’d allow me a few crumbs of publicity? I won the firstround; I’ll win the rest.”43

As Valerie further distanced herself from her previous claims of goodwill toward Andy, she wroteanother letter in late October 1968 telling him to drop the charges: “A few weeks ago I felt good willtoward you + a willingness to work with you if conditions were right, but your running on about notpressing charges against me while charges remain is fast mitigating that good will. . . . Who I workwith + what projects I work on is determined largely by my feelings, not just business considerations.You seem to feel a need to be hailed as Good Guy of the Year. Seeing that the charges against me aredropped would do much to enhance that image.” She ended the letter saying, “One more thing youshould’ve learned by now is that I mean what I say.”44

MATTEAWAN, BEACON, NEW YORKIn late August 1968, Valerie was moved from Elmhurst Hospital—where she received care thatwould qualify as “acceptable”—to Matteawan, where she entered the chaotic world of the criminallyinsane. Using a diagnosis of “Paranoid State with Affective Features and Emotional Instability,” thecourts ordered Valerie’s transfer to Matteawan on August 16, 1968. Two days later, she was admittedto the hospital where she would spend the next four months at one of the most notoriously hellish

places any “mentally ill” person could go.Matteawan State Hospital, officially established in 1893, was a hospital for the criminally insane,

particularly high-risk women. Sharing the grounds with the Beacon Institute for Defective Delinquentsafter 1966, Matteawan had by then earned a reputation for some of the worst human rights violationsin New York State history. According to Robert Spoor, director of the Clinical InformationDepartment at the New York State Department of Mental Hygiene, “There were terrible accusationsof abuse at Matteawan. It was closed after a court decision. They used to send violent cases of thementally ill there, but then it was declared unconstitutional because they were mixing people who hadcommitted crimes with people who were regarded as dangerous enough to commit them.”45

Several news stories at that time reported outlandish abuses at Matteawan, where fourteenpsychiatrists served six hundred patients. A string of lawsuits exposed conditions as “incredible.”Guards and doctors routinely beat and killed patients and forced them to engage in experimentalsurgeries. Guards regularly denied patients basic medical care and habitable living conditions. At thetime Valerie entered, patients received a slice of bread and a half cup of leftover coffee a day tosubsist on. Patients were often kicked and stomped on and sometimes beaten to death by sadisticguards. Overcrowding, withholding of necessary medications, and lack of doctors were cited inreports, and some lawmakers who had visited the institution called Matteawan the worst mentalhospital they had ever seen. In the late 1960s, to control the patients, doctors prescribed tranquilizersto over 40 percent of Matteawan inmates, while massive numbers of patients received electroshocktherapy (known to cause brain damage) or were placed in straitjackets. At times, guards forcedpatients to live in rooms with no toilets, no mattresses, and no consistent water or food; they sat in thedark, receiving a meal once every three days.46

As the institution where criminally insane women were typically placed, Matteawan housed thesuicidal, the eccentric, and the self-destructive, including several regulars from the Factory. In factwhile Valerie was at Matteawan, a curious coincidence occurred: Edie Sedgwick, Warhol superstar,became a fellow inmate as she continued her downward spiral with barbiturates. Valerie met Edieduring this time, now under quite different circumstances from their first meetings among the AndyWarhol elite. Ultra Violet recalled the curious parallel between the two figures; Valerie was underexamination to find out if she was rational enough to stand trial for shooting Andy, while Edie“struggled to recover the sanity she lost in the Warhol years.”47 Valerie also encountered Andy’s friendVera Cruise, who told Andy in late 1969 that she had gone to Matteawan earlier that year for car theftand “was seeing a lot of Valerie.” She mentioned that Valerie had talked about “getting Andy Warhol”when she got out.48

Though Valerie was quite withdrawn while at Matteawan, she did spend time with GeoffreyLeGear during his regular visits to the hospital. Geoffrey came to New York from where he lived inCalifornia and rented an apartment in Beacon so he would be in close proximity to Valerie. Hevisited her twenty-six times between August and early December 1968, mostly to discuss hergrievances toward Andy and Maurice. While little is known about Geoffrey’s background or why heand Valerie became close (he refused to talk about this), his relationship with her helped her tosurvive her hospitalization at Matteawan. He did whatever he could to secure her release andearnestly tried to help her communicate with those she felt anger toward.

In writing to Andy and Maurice, Geoffrey pleaded with them to assist Valerie and, in particular, forAndy to forgive her. He wrote to Andy, “You yourself have said you have forgiven her, and also thatyou take her seriously as a writer, and therefore, presumably, also as a thinker. And finally, Valeriewas, and probably still is, on the verge of suicide, believing that you could, but aren’t, doing anything

to help her. . . . As far as I am able to know, Valerie has given up on her own affairs. And if, becauseof anything I failed to do, she were lost, this would be a great sadness to me.”49

Outlining Valerie’s complaints about Maurice, he wrote that she perceived him as responsible forher eviction from the Chelsea Hotel and the subsequent loss of her trunks and for tapping her phone,preventing her from consulting lawyers and celebrities to assist her, forcing her to write a novel, andblocking Andy from producing her play. He concluded the letter by saying, “It’s obvious I agree withher, in a certain way. In another way, I could say she’s wrong in fact but right in truth—that is, she isessentially right. In still another way, I could say it’s all a delusion. You see, I’m not sure.” Valeriealso told Geoffrey to stop visiting (“It’s nothing personal”), that Maurice had killed SCUMManifesto, that she was dead already, and that “Valerie Solanas” no longer existed. At the end of hisletter he wrote, “Valerie has said she is through with trying to kill people (excepting, evidently,herself).” Valerie later wrote to Andy and Maurice that it was wrong for Geoffrey to interpret herwishes, saying, “Only I can interpret me.”50

Questions still arose about Valerie’s mental competence and ability to stand trial for the shootings.On December 9, 1968, Matteawan officials declared her “sufficiently recovered from her psychoticstate and now mentally well enough to be returned to court of original jurisdiction for furtherdisposition of her case.”51 On December 12, she returned to court and Judge Schweitzer orderedanother psychiatric examination by a court-appointed doctor and set her bail at ten thousand dollars toprevent her release. The same day, Geoffrey arrived at the court and handed over the full amount incash, an act that convinced Valerie that Geoffrey had connections to the Mob. The Mob had noconnection to the Mafia, but were a group of men—among them Maurice Girodias, Howard Hughes(famed businessman, aviator, and agoraphobic), Robert Sarnoff (from NBC Studios), Mark Zussman(from Playboy Enterprises), and Barney Rosset (publisher of Grove Press)—who Valerie believedpaid off doctors and wanted to steal her ideas, writings, and work from her. (From then on, sherefused to trust Geoffrey and even told others they had never met before. Geoffrey said they last spokein 1971.)52 Valerie had gained her freedom, giving her plenty of opportunity to seek contact again withher nemesis, Andy Warhol.

“ANDY WARHOL’S FEMINIST NIGHTMARE”Valerie’s shooting Andy marked a major turning point for both of them: Valerie entered a sphere ofboth fame and madness, while Andy became paranoid, withdrawn, fearful, and forever changed. Whateach of them had always embodied—for Valerie, a descent into madness and for Andy, the deliriumof a consumerist world—only intensified after the shooting. In this way, they found the limits of theirown logic; passionate, wild Valerie found herself locked up, and Andy drifted further into his life-as-dream state.

Given the vitriolic sentiments of many Factory regulars toward Valerie (Taylor Mead referred toher as having a “gutter-snipe idiot-mind”), Andy took a surprisingly forgiving and almost respectfultone toward Valerie in the post-shooting years.53 He never pressed formal charges against Valeriedespite the urgings of his entourage (though, as mentioned earlier, Valerie interpreted this as a way tomake himself look generous because he knew the DA would press charges), and he never spokeparticularly negatively about Valerie. He clearly believed that Valerie had in some way acted as hernature dictated. Whenever questioned about Valerie, he would respond in a typically distant andapathetic way, even when discussing her attempt on his life. Two weeks after the shooting, headmitted in an interview, “It’s too hard to care. . . . I don’t want to get too involved in other people’s

lives. . . . I don’t want to get too close. . . . I don’t like to touch things. . . . That’s why my work is sodistant from myself.”54 Valerie had an equally complicated emotional tone when addressing Andy.Writing to him from Elmhurst and Matteawan, she sometimes threatened him and at other times wasneedy and almost appreciative of their relationship. She spewed hate and then asked to work with himagain. She renounced him as a selfish, sniveling coward and then asked him to drop the chargesagainst her.

Even as Valerie’s tone grew increasingly hostile and threatening toward Andy, her letters alsocommunicated that she felt some remorse for the shooting. Jeremiah Newton confirmed this, sayingthat she regretted shooting Andy and was wounded by the rejection she faced from others after herrelease from Matteawan.55 Her dealings with Andy revealed a hostile ambivalence. In a letter ofDecember 21, 1968, she wrote to Andy, “I just want you to know that if the charges against me aren’tdropped, I will never make a movie with anyone. I have many projects in mind + feel not the slightestcompulsion to ever do a movie.”56

On Christmas Eve 1968, out on bail, Valerie contacted both Maurice and Andy, telling Maurice in aletter that she knew of his plots against her, that he purposefully wanted to stir up problems with herso she would seem like a “ranting & raving” lunatic, and that she would not give up insisting on acorrect version of SCUM Manifesto: “Our struggles boil down to a waiting game, & I’m prepared fora long, long wait, and I can wait anywhere in & out of jail or in the bughouse. You must realize thatI’m intensely ego involved over this situation; I have an enormous amount of pride. You offended,insulted & degraded me so deeply & in so many ways that I’m psychologically incapable of doingeven a little of what you want without your fulfilling all the conditions I’ve imposed on you, even ifnot doing so means the practical destruction of me.”57

Valerie wrote Maurice a second letter on the same day detailing that she had written Up Your Assand a document called “Wrap Up” and that she intended her next book to be Why I Shot Andy Warholand Other Chit Chat. In the letter, she demanded a “decent editor,” the ability to publish without anypreface or with a preface approved by her, that the entire manuscript have no errors or “corrections,”and that the cover contain a written statement denouncing previous editions of SCUM Manifesto anddeclaring that edition as the correct one. She also demanded all her fan mail, that Maurice return allcopies of SCUM Manifesto to her, and that she receive a decent contract for the book.58

Valerie included a formal statement for the New York Daily News that was to precede thepublication of SCUM Manifesto in the corrected edition: “Olympia Press’s edition of SCUMManifesto by Valerie Solanas was, for reasons that will be explained in the future, a deliberate botch.The publisher of Olympia Press rendered some paragraphs and sentences of the original SCUMManifesto unintelligible; he left some sentences of the original, for no sound reason, out of hisedition; he substituted for completely apt words in the original weak, ineffective, inept and oftentimes downright inaccurate words in his edition. To partially rectify the gross injustice the publisherof Olympia Press perpetrated against SCUM Manifesto we are here printing the original SCUMManifesto in its entirety.”59

Also on Christmas Eve, Valerie allegedly phoned the Factory and, when Andy answered, insistedthat 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 inmore 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 immediatelyfelt fear: “My worst nightmare had come true: Valerie was out.”60 After he notified the DA’s office, theDA 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 littlewhile, but when I was at the Factory a couple of years later, she would call. Vincent Fremont and Imight pick up the phone, and there’s Valerie. She’d ask for Andy. At one point she called up, andAndy answered, and she said that she wanted him to get her on the Johnny Carson Show. . . . That’swhat she wanted . . . publicity.”61

Valerie targeted others at the Factory aside from Andy, directing particular venom toward TaylorMead 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 threateningViva, going back to the time before the shooting when they both lived at the Chelsea Hotel. One dayViva’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 afterthat 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 theyabruptly stopped. As Andy recalled, “She must have found some other interests because I never sawher again, although occasionally people would say they’d seen her on the street someplace, usually inthe Village.”63 The reason she stopped calling, however, may have been because two weeks later shewas arrested for making threats to Andy, Maurice Girodias, Barney Rosset, Howard Hughes, andRobert Sarnoff of NBC. In the letters, she claimed, “I have a license to kill.”64

WOMEN’S HOUSE OF DETENTION, NEW YORK CITYAfter Valerie’s threats led to her subsequent arrest, on January 9, 1969, she was remanded to theWomen’s House of Detention in Manhattan. Curiously, earlier that day Valerie had entered the courtbuilding oblivious of the arrest warrant against her, only to be seized by the police and have her bailrevoked. The Women’s House of Detention, like Matteawan, had a documented pattern of abuse ofwomen 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 hadbeen 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 infestedwith roaches and mice. Often we discover roaches in our cooked food. Not too long ago, a sisterfound a mousetail in her soup. A few days ago I was drinking a cup of coffee and I was forced to spitout a roach. Roaches literally cover the walls of our cells at night, crawling across our bodies whilewe sleep. Every night we hear screams of inmates who wake to find mice scurrying across theirbodies.”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 thathelped 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 onehundred thousand dollars had been requested) because of the alleged new threats to Andy and herrecent history as a psychiatric patient and because her more flattering psychological reports had notbeen made public (in fact, even the DA’s office had not seen the reports). Valerie’s chances of makingbail or securing release appeared grim. She passed the time working in the kitchen, attending “beautyschool” (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 thatthe 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 afriend, Lorraine Miller, then a young up-and-coming lawyer, to represent Valerie. Sensing that Valeriewould 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 couldhandle her!” Lorraine admitted that, though Valerie was a difficult, even impossible, client, shedesperately wanted Valerie to go to trial. She thought they could build a case that would give her ashot at a decent defense, but Valerie believed that going to trial would only give Andy and Mauricemore publicity. Lorraine recalled that Valerie kept insisting, “I don’t need a lawyer. I know what I didand I know why I did it, and I would do it again. Warhol and Girodias stole my work.” Lorrainepleaded with Valerie, “But if we went to trial you might present a sympathetic picture that peoplemight understand.” “No, no, no, I don’t want to do that,” insisted Valerie. “It would only give Warholand Girodias more publicity! They’re capitalizing on me!” Lorraine reminded Valerie that she couldgo to jail if they did not go to trial. “I’m in jail now!” Valerie yelled. Even when Lorraine suggestedthat the publicity would help her sell more copies of SCUM Manifesto, especially with “how Valeriecarried 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 Lorraineher advisor, never her lawyer.) Judge Culkin told Valerie that anyone who serves as his or her ownlawyer has a fool for a client, but Valerie did not relent. Lorraine recalled, “The judge asked herwhether 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 ather.

Conversations with her were such combinations of dirty words. She had quite a command of the English language and cursed likecrazy, 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. Atthat 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 spewedback 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 reallearning experience for me. We ultimately became friends.

Coming up with conclusions similar to those of Dr. Cooper, Valerie’s psychological examiner atElmhurst Hospital, Lorraine believed that Valerie’s outbursts and bad behavior stemmed fromwanting her mother’s attention and seeing her mother bring men in and out of the house when Valeriewas young. “She was always trying to get her mother’s attention and approval but these men were inthe 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, gregariousmanner. “She wasn’t embarrassed. She said, ‘I don’t understand this. I love Valerie!’” Lorraineworried 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 casein point, Lorraine believed that, despite Valerie clearly being a lesbian, she was driven to bisexualityby 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 asoda 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 agirlfriend. “I really think that women were her ultimate object and that she viewed men as peoplewho 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 senseof whether she could have won the case, “It’s hard to tell. After all, this was premeditated, so it’sunlikely but there might have been some sympathy. I got her a good deal, anyway. She shot two peopleand 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 gooddeal—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.’ Shesaid, ‘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 ofpsychological testing to determine her fitness to stand trial. The psychological report issued January17, 1969, repeated the diagnosis of schizophrenic reaction of the paranoid type but noted that Valeriewas a difficult subject to test reliably. Dr. Emmanuel Messinger, the psychological evaluator,colorfully described Valerie’s oppositional temperament: “She fluctuates between cooperativenessand a complete refusal to cooperate. This, however, is not a pathologic type of negativism in thepsychiatric sense. When she first came into the examiner’s office she announced, ‘I’m not taking thisexamination. I’m not answering any questions.’ After about five minutes, however, she began talkingfreely and it was clear that she was oriented in all spheres, has good memory, and a high degree ofnative intelligence. She can furnish information on any subject that she is disposed to.” As recordedin the report, Valerie told the examiner that she had originally objected to the interview “because Ithink 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 Houseof Detention.

As Valerie’s advisor, Lorraine agreed that she was not off-the-wall crazy, but characterized her ascalculated, manipulative, and obsessed. Lorraine had negotiated a deal with Judge Culkin to getValerie one to three years maximum, regarded as a light sentence. She had convinced the judge thatthe only way to get rid of Valerie was to give her a sentence that she had to take. Valerie pleadedguilty to the crime of assault in the first degree to cover the indictment. She said that she had notwanted 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) andwas admitted again to Elmhurst Hospital for reevaluation on May 15, 1969. Drs. Sternberg andRubinstein of Elmhurst noted in their May 28, 1969, report that Valerie presented as alert andcooperative, markedly less anxious than in her previous hospitalization there, and that “her level ofdiffuse hostility has subsided significantly.”75 Describing her mood as monotonous and shallow, andclaiming that she displayed clear and logical thoughts that veered toward overintellectualizing, theynoted that “a diffuse paranoid flair was evident,” particularly as Valerie expressed paranoia aboutgoing back to Matteawan against her will. Diagnosed now with “Schizophrenia, Paranoid Type,Improved,” Valerie was transferred to Bellevue Hospital’s Psychiatric Division for anotherexamination ordered by Judge Culkin. The report of this testing concluded by saying that Valerie nolonger seemed obsessed with Andy Warhol, though her spirit had waned. Even Maurice agreed thather 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 aliveand intelligent person and it is a form of suicide to force the courts to send you indefinitely to ahospital in which you may remain for the rest of your life.”76

BELLEVUE HOSPITAL, NEW YORK CITYValerie’s stay at Bellevue, among the most notorious mental hospitals in the country and perhaps theworld, exposed her once again to the horrors and abuses of the so-called mental health system. It waswhile 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.” Bycontrast, when Valerie heard her sentence read, she yelled out in court, “Warhol deserved what hegot! He is a goddamned liar and a cheat.”78 No doubt Valerie’s short sentence was attributable toLorraine’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 tobother.”79 News of this sentence, written succinctly, appeared in the back pages of the New YorkTimes, beside a notice to Manhattan residents about a change in the summer garbage collectionschedule. 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 gotless.”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 andcomplaining that she deserved better publicity. She began one of these letters to Maurice sayingsarcastically, “I write this letter on the assumption that you haven’t killed yourself.”81 She refused todo an interview with the Village Voice’s Howard Smith and felt increasingly paranoid about how herlife would be presented: “PREDICTION: Some day there will appear Why I Shot Andy Warhol andOther Chit Chat with my name on it, but written by one of your geeks. There will also appear mybiography (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 itwould be appropriated in a way she disagreed with, as unauthorized accounts of her life threatenedher relentless self-reliance.

In January 1970, she announced to Maurice somewhat vaguely that she had devised a “slimy greasyplan that you’d be tickled silly with. . . . But I finally rejected it, pulled myself out of the grease, upfrom the slime, & adopted a plan. . . . I felt so liberated & ecstatic when I made my decision; coulddeeply feel it’s [sic] rightness.” She concluded the letter with a requirement that Maurice announce onthe 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,” Valeriechided:

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 nothingand that you’ll go ahead and write an article anyway. . . . Few journalists on this paper or any other would ever dare print anythingabout me other than the enormous, lavish lies (and the “facts” Howard Smith related in his last two SCENES articles about meare among the most enormous and lavish I’ve seen), your masters (Wahoo and the vilest and toadiest of all toads, the GREATTOAD, 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 powershe would soon have: “If you’re the rational people you think you are, you’d realize that one’spotential 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 haddeveloped a “perpetual hardness technique” and would use it on Maurice: “The personality changesbrought about by achieving PH vastly increase his sexual feeling. I intend to give the Toad intensivescum 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 worksback.” She concluded, hectoring the Voice: “Would you like to do something highly innovative? Havea journalistic first? Next time you print your string of filthy lies or mindless prattle about me—spellmy name right.”

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

While at Bedford Hills, Valerie encountered a notorious prisoner she had met at Elmhurst Hospital,Alice Crimmins. Strikingly beautiful, Alice had married a paranoid police officer, then divorced him.Their children were found dead in nearby lots, resulting in massive amounts of press coverageinsinuating that Alice had killed them. Alice had claimed that someone had kidnapped the children buther husband accused her of murdering them to spite him (the case remained unsolved, though mostsources believe Alice did not kill them.) She had worn a miniskirt to the children’s funeral, a movethat caused outrage and earned her the title “the beautiful murderess.” Newspapers described her as a“sexpot” and a “sexy redhead,” referring to her nickname, “Rusty,” which she had had while workingas a cocktail waitress in skimpy outfits. Alice also had a lot of boyfriends and had expressed glee atthe dissolution of her marriage, leading to many raised eyebrows about her potential homicidaltendencies.86

Alice had gone to trial several times and had been found not guilty twice; then, in May 1968,though no evidence linked her to the murders, she was found guilty. During the different trials, she hadcalled people “liars” and “worms” and eventually landed two years in prison. Before her time inprison, Alice had been remanded to Elmhurst at precisely the same time as Valerie, and the two hadformed a friendship. When they met again at Bedford Hills, the two bonded over the mistreatment theyfaced by men; Alice had faced a jury composed solely of men, while Valerie felt that Andy had stolenher work. Jeremiah said, “Alice Crimmins was about as notorious as you get. And so was Valerie inthose days.”87

BACK TO MATTEAWANValerie had grown numb and disconnected and was serving out her time in uncharacteristic silence.After arriving back at Matteawan in late May 1970, she sent a letter to her father, Louis:

Dear Pop,Received your letter for 5/20. It took 3 days from S.C. to Bedford + 2 days from Bedford to here. I’ve only received 1 other letterfrom you—that was last Oct. I told you in my last letter that I was at Matteawan. Did you forget? Thanks a lot for the $12. Idon’t care to correspond with or see anyone.

Valerie.

They credited the value of the 2 stamps to my account.88

Few documents detail Valerie’s thoughts or feelings during the remainder of her sentence, thoughher father’s death in early 1971 may have affected her quite deeply. In April 1971, she (amazingly)escaped from Matteawan and evaded police for two months but was captured and recommitted toMatteawan on June 16, 1971. By later that month, she had served her full sentence, and the statedischarged her permanently and she was finally free to go. Louise Thompson, a feminist writer, poet,and activist who knew Valerie, noted the change in Valerie after her stays in the psychiatric hospitalsand in prison: “I knew her before prison, and I know that she was destroyed there. She was not crazy.She was angry. I have worked with many women at Bedford Hills and there are lots of women likeher—ordinary women who made a mistake.”89

VALERIE AND FREEDOMSeveral people remembered seeing Valerie—often with much surprise—after her release fromMatteawan, visiting many of her old haunts and roaming through Greenwich Village. One day asMargo Feiden was walking down Eighth Street, she had a vivid experience concerning Valerie,although Valerie never knew it. “Valerie had a very strong odor, not like a homeless person, but sucha strong personal odor, I couldn’t get it out of my nose for weeks. It had seeped into everything in myhouse. I used rubbing alcohol and could not get her smell off the furniture. That smell is hard wiredinto my memory. Years later, as I was walking on Eighth Street deep in thought, looking down, Isuddenly smelled her. Even after all those years, I knew that Valerie was right near me. I looked upand there she was, wearing the same pea coat and the same outfit as before.” Margo added, “Shelooked as though she had walked through a tear in space and time. She looked so terribly lonely whenI saw her on the street. Looking back, I wish I had spoken to her but I was terrified.” Margo wassurprised that Valerie had been released from prison so quickly, admitting, “I was always lookingbehind me. I was afraid of another encounter with her. She was always there, alive in my mind.”90

Valerie’s friend Jeremiah remembered standing on Sixth Avenue in the Village one afternoon andseeing Valerie suddenly get off the bus on the corner, carrying her suitcase, and walk right up to him.She had no place to stay and no money, and she asked if she could stay with him. He had just gottenhis own apartment and he decided that he wanted to find her another place to stay but still wanted tohelp her all he could. As a member of the Gay Liberation Front, he knew that the group had acommunity center a few blocks away so he took her there and noticed there was a women’sconsciousness-raising meeting in SoHo that day. Esquire, Jeremiah knew, had recently published apiece saying that feminists had sympathy for Valerie’s aims, and he took Valerie to the consciousness-raising meeting in hopes that through the women there, Valerie could find a place to stay.

When the two arrived at the building where the meeting was to be held, Jeremiah walked a longflight upstairs and knocked on a door. The peephole opened and Ti-Grace Atkinson said, “What doyou want? Men aren’t allowed.” Jeremiah said, “Look, Valerie is downstairs,” and there was a gaspfrom the women in the room. The hole closed and a few minutes later Ti-Grace opened the door andasked what Valerie wanted. When Jeremiah explained that she needed a place to stay, Ti-Grace said,

“Well, we can’t help her.” Jeremiah went downstairs and told Valerie that these women did not wantto see her or help her and that she had wasted their time.

The next day, Jeremiah saw her again, standing on the street, and mentioned to her that he saw anadvertisement in the community section of the Village Voice about a free place to go that offered foodand housing for both men and women: the Brooklyn Commune. This particular commune included avariety of communists, including Jim Owles (who went on to run discos in New York and eventuallyran for office). Jeremiah called up the commune and said that Valerie needed a place to stay. Theysaid, “Well, bring her right over!” Valerie and Jeremiah walked over to the little brownstone,introduced themselves, and Valerie took a liking to it and moved in.

Relating this episode later, Jeremiah chuckled and said, “Some years later, this man stopped me onthe street and said, ‘Do you know who I am?’ I said no. ‘I was part of that collective that you broughtValerie Solanas to and I wanted to say thank you a fucking lot! She destroyed our collective. Shecaused problems immediately and she took a gun out of her bag and shot into the ceiling. . . . It’s’cause of you that this happened, so I blame you.’” Right after Valerie arrived at the BrooklynCommune, the group began fighting about everything, particularly garbage and trash. Valerieconvinced the women that it was not their job to take out the garbage and that men should do it—“Why should a woman take out men’s shit?” The group got into a big fight and the women rebelledagainst the men. As Jeremiah said, “Valerie was really, really serious about the SCUM Manifesto.”91

After the Brooklyn Commune broke up, Valerie approached the Baltic Street Collective, inBrooklyn, and asked for a place to live. As N. A. Diaman, an early member of the Gay LiberationFront, recalled, “As she sat at our kitchen table I realized I saw her years earlier at Lefty O’Douls inSan Francisco where I sometimes ate lunch when I was working at Brentano’s Books. She was thin,dark-haired, and androgynous when I first noticed her. I wasn’t sure if she was quite male or femalethen.” He now found her sane and nonthreatening, but he decided not to let her into the collective:“Richard suggested calling one of the lesbians we knew from GLF [Gay Liberation Front] to providea place for her to stay rather than agreeing to take her in. It was certainly a wise decision.”92

Drifting, and with no place to live, in the summer of 1971 Valerie went to visit Dick Spottiswood,her good friend from college. She showed up on his doorstep looking lost and aimless, needing to betaken in. “I was living alone in a little residential house,” he said, “and this time she seemed trulycrazy. She was convinced she had a transmitter in her uterus . . . everything I’d ever heard aboutparanoia. Before, she was trying her best to be tough. After Matteawan, she was tough and scared andhurt, and out of touch with reality.”93 Valerie stayed with him for a couple of weeks, talking andsmoking hand-rolled cigarettes. She told him stories about the cruelty at Matteawan and herdifferences of opinion with Andy, especially about royalties and his suppression of her work. He thenfound a place for her to stay and gave her some money. She drifted off and he never saw her again.Dick admitted, however, “I was and am very, very fond of Val.”

Valerie next moved into the Allerton Hotel at 302 West Twenty-Second Street, a welfare hotel nearthe Chelsea. The Allerton had a reputation as a dive; a porter had found a newborn baby girl in agarbage can.94 While at this hotel, Valerie’s mental health continued to disintegrate and her sense ofthreat and overall paranoia worsened. This ultimately led to increasingly aggressive outbursts towarddrag queens like Candy Darling, whom she believed made fun of women for the benefit of gay menand had therefore committed “war crimes.” Jeremiah, who had befriended both Valerie and Candy,recalled that Valerie “felt there was a war going on.”95 Her militant SCUM ethics had again rampedup.

Around that time, Valerie’s paranoia led her to believe that the Mob had started governing her

affairs and that she needed to confront or outsmart this group of men who wanted to steal her fame andmanipulate her publicity. Following her release from Matteawan, she believed that doctors workingin conjunction with the Mob had placed a transmitting device into her uterus, allowing them to trackher movements and words at all times. She started writing letters and making phone calls to those shefelt had wronged her, targeting many of the “usual suspects” whom she felt constituted the Mob.Barney, along with Fred Jordan (vice president of Grove Press), received numerous phone callsbeginning in August 1971 and continuing through early September. Valerie threatened them, said shewould stage her own kidnapping, and demanded publicity.

In fact, on August 1, she sent a typed letter to Barney, Maurice, Robert Sarnoff, Howard Hughes,and “all your business associates,” declaring:

WE KIDNAPPED VALERIE SOLANAS. WE KNOW SHE IS VERY VALUABLE TO YOU. BUT BEFORE WE PICK UPTHE 50 MILLION DOLLARS, WHICH YOU MUST PAY TO GET HER BACK ALIVE, YOU MUST FIRST PRINT INITS ENTIRETY IN THE TUES., AUG. 3, 1971 N.Y. DAILY NEWS BEGINNING ON PAGE 1, CONTINUING ON PAGE 2,FROM THERE PAGE 3 AND SO ON UNTIL NO MORE SPACE IS NEEDED THE ORIGINAL SCUM MANIFESTOPRECEDED IN CONSPICUOUS TYPE BY THE STATEMENT VALERIE (WHO UNWITTINGLY GAVE US BOTH THEIDEA AND THE OPPORTUNITY FOR THIS PLAN) WROTE, WHICH WE ARE ENCLOSING WITH THIS LETTER.THE HEADLINE ON PAGE 1 MUST SAY: “SCUM MANIFESTO DELIBERATELY BOTCHED.” BESIDES BEING AWILD, GROOVY AND RIGHT THING TO DO, WHICH FRANKLY TICKLES US SILLY, THIS WILL PROVE YOU AREINTERESTED ENOUGH IN HER TO PAY THE $50 MILLION, WHICH YOU WILL PAY IN INSTALLMENTS.96

As Playboy magazine’s Mark Zussman recalled, “Valerie had somehow gotten it into her head that Iwas the contact man for an entity she called the Mob—and to which she had various urgent messagesto impart. Some of her correspondence was addressed to me directly but more of it was addressed tothe Mob in my care.”97

Valerie told Barney that if he did not print her book in the Daily News, she would kill him. Barneyhad called the police on September 11, 1971, convinced that Valerie would actually harm him and hisfamily. After her subsequent arrest that day, she was released on her own recognizance pending ahearing for the charge. When Valerie did not appear in court at the assigned time, the judge produceda bench warrant for her arrest. After another threat to Barney, police arrested Valerie a second time,setting a court date of October 7, 1971. For targeting Howard Hughes, she also faced two counts forthreatening and potentially assaulting him as well.

Released once more, Valerie called the Grove Press offices again on November 2, 1971, saying,“I’m going to do IT today unless the Mob does the right thing. I am not…speaking to anybody. I knowthere is no such book as The Art of Cutting Up Men, and if there was, I wouldn’t care.” She calledagain on November 3 demanding fifty thousand dollars from the Mob and saying that she would do“IT” but not elaborating on what that was. She informed Fred that she would wander around and thatthe Mob could reach her if they wanted to (under the belief that the Mob could communicate with herthrough the implant in her uterus).98

On November 5, after Valerie once again threatened Barney, showing up at his office with an icepick and threatening to use it, she was again arrested and was charged with aggravated harassment. Ather hearing, the DA concluded that there was not sufficient evidence of specific intent to charge herwith possession of a dangerous weapon. Barney pleaded with the judge, Judge Bayer, that, though hehad never had any personal contact with Valerie to date, he feared for his life. Consequently, Valeriewas held for psychiatric observation but eventually released after a finding of insufficient grounds tocontinue holding her.

Following Valerie’s release, Barney became increasingly afraid that she would harm him; he hireda lawyer, Shad Polier, to manage communications between the courts and his office. Valerie had

written Barney a three-page letter detailing her intentions to harm him and Maurice and telling Barneythat he should worry about his safety. Shad wrote the court that “it would seem that for some time nowMiss Salanis [sic] has had no visible means of support and on the very day of her most recent arrest,her belongings were removed from her room at the hotel where she had been staying for the reasonthat she had not paid her rent. . . . Mr. Rosset has no hostility toward her. On the contrary, he believesthat she is a very sick person psychiatrically and in need of treatment.”99 Barney himself also admittedto liking Valerie and said that SCUM Manifesto was a brilliant piece of feminist literature; heconcurred with Valerie’s assessment that Maurice intended to make money from her work even as hetried to befriend her.

In December 1971, Valerie was again arrested for harassment; her quest to seek retribution fromthose she felt had wronged her had not subsided. She was sent back to Elmhurst Hospital forpsychological testing. On January 5, 1972, the findings of psychiatric evaluations conducted atElmhurst certified Valerie as mentally ill and a final order was made dismissing the charges againsther. The psychiatrists at Elmhurst disagreed on whether Valerie posed a danger to others but theirrecommendation to the state commissioner of hygiene was that Valerie be sent to a secure statehospital until she recovered.

When notified of this recommendation, Barney and Fred asked Shad Polier to argue for Valerie’stransfer to Matteawan (confirming for Valerie her suspicion that people had paid off the judge to haveher incarcerated). The leading psychiatrist at Elmhurst, Dr. Andrew Tershakovec, argued that such atransfer would require a very strong showing of present dangerousness and he “indicated quitedefinitely that he did not feel that Valerie fell into that category.”100 In response, Barney initiatedcriminal proceedings that resulted in Valerie’s rearrest, conviction for aggravated harassment, andsentencing to confinement at Dunlop Manhattan Psychiatric Hospital on Wards Island.

DUNLOP MANHATTAN PSYCHIATRIC HOSPITAL, WARDS ISLAND, NEW YORKAfter the 1971 closing of the Women’s House of Detention (primarily for documented human rightsabuses), most women who would have entered that hospital were sent to the Dunlop ManhattanPsychiatric Hospital on Wards Island, New York. Valerie entered Dunlop on January 21, 1972, thefinal result of her calls to Maurice demanding fifty thousand dollars in payments and threats to Barneyand Fred concerning Grove Press. On January 15, 1973, Valerie sent Barney a letter directlythreatening to kill him: “I’m in the hospital now, but I’ll be out soon, + when I get out I’ll fix yougood. I have a license to kill, you know, + you’re one of my candidates. Valerie Solanas.”101

In response, Barney and Fred asked Valerie’s supervising psychiatrist, Dr. Allen, to notify them ifValerie left the hospital for any reason. Once he felt safe and Valerie no longer posed a direct threat,Fred admitted that he liked and admired Valerie and her work: “I thought that [SCUM Manifesto] wasthe first manifestation of women’s rage against men, and I thought that it was authentic. I thought italso had a literary quality. This book made me aware, for the first time, of women’s anger in apatriarchal society.”102

In early February, Valerie escaped from Dunlop Hospital. On hearing this news, Barney hired aprivate detective through the Pinkertons Detective Agency to attempt to learn her whereabouts.Valerie had apparently vanished. After her escape, private detectives hired by Grove Press foundevidence that she had been living at 302 West Twenty-Second Street. After interviewing a hotelmanager, three residents, and workers at a dry cleaner’s, the Pinkertons detective found nothing to goon. Valerie had not been seen for several months and the interviewees did not know where she was.

Two weeks later, Valerie began concretely testing her theories about the Mob. She phoned Fredand, believing he knew her location, asked him if he had notified the police of her whereabouts. Fredindicated that he had not told anyone. Valerie “rambled on to something about ‘the Mob’ and ‘Smitty,’all of which meant nothing to Mr. Jordan, and the call was then quickly concluded.”103 She againdemanded to be put on the cover of the Daily News. An hour later, she called back and asked if Fredknew she had escaped from a mental institution. She set up an appointment with Fred to discuss herpotential employment with Grove Press, but she admitted to him that she feared the police and knewthey would be waiting for her if she kept their appointment. Strategizing about how to avoid rearrest,she asked Fred to send a letter to Dr. Allen at Wards Island stating that Grove Press would employher as an editor. Dr. Allen should also send a certificate of her release to her mother, Dorothy. Onlyunder these conditions would she keep the appointment. Playing along, Fred agreed to these things,hung up the phone, called Dr. Allen, and then called the police.

As Valerie approached the Grove Press offices, she was promptly arrested. A court date was setfor March 22, 1973. While she was being held, Valerie’s paranoia about the Mob worsened.Absolutely convinced that Barney and Fred wanted to manipulate and control her, she sent them aseries of letters and postcards. In one card to Barney she attempted to assure him that she meant himno harm but had to prove to the Mob that she was aware of their intentions: “I wrote that letter toprove to the Mob (I knew you’d show it to the rest of the gang) I’m convinced they and not the doctorsare responsible for my being held in the hospital.”104 (To a degree, she was right, as Barney and Fredhad petitioned to have her held even when the psychiatric evaluators suggested this was unnecessary.)Two days later, she wrote to Barney and Fred saying she was onto their antics: “The detective(Fallon?) knew where I was, because you told him. You knew because of the transmitter in my uterus.. . . It was also because of the uterine transmitter you knew where I was when I was in front with theicepick.” She denied wanting to kidnap anyone and said she could not accomplish that even if she didwant to, but that they wanted her in jail so they could photograph her papers without her consent.105

She sent another letter, on March 27, from Dunlop, rambling about discrepancies in her trials,conversations with the lawyers, and other occurrences: “To that same end in Sept. ’71 Girodias madea point of telling me on the phone my mother had power of attorney.” She outlined a list of twenty-fivedemands for the Mob, including a good edition of the manifesto and assistance with “getting otherpeople’s papers.”106 In a letter to the Mob, she reiterated her series of twenty-five demands (on thatsame day, she was released from Dunlop, an event that likely intensified her paranoia that the Mobhad control of her confinement). Prior to listing her demands, she outlined various concerns with theinconsistency of her trial, what Barney knew, his motives for trying to get her locked up,inconsistencies in the arresting officers’ testimony, and the problems of “Bernstein” knowing toomuch (the identity of this person is unknown). She also mentioned that her mother, Dorothy, hadobtained power of attorney over her and had received “a few hundred dollars” from Maurice aspayment for SCUM Manifesto. With regard to Barney’s case, she asked, “How can I be prosecutedfor a letter I wrote while a mental patient?” Her demands—what she wanted “before I’ll do anyacting or writing or making appearances or composing or inventing” were:

1. All mail sent to me c/o Olympia Press or c/o the papers.2. An official discharge from the hospital.3. All criminal charges dropped.4. Copies of all notes and papers stolen from me.5. Photos of the note cards you photographed in Cal.6. The return of my trunks and all their contents.7. Copies of all reports done on me since Jun. ’68.

8. Certain back issues of newspapers and magazines.9. A copy of every WLM [women’s liberation movement] book published since ’68.10. Opportunity to see or hear privately certain t.v. and radio casts.11. Copies of all the bugging tapes.12. The correct edition of the SCUM Manifesto printed on the front page of the 10 largest Sun. papers in the English-speakingworld.13. Your assistance in rounding up certain people I want to interview.14. Your assistance in acquiring certain people’s papers and notes.15. A good edition of the Manifesto, that is, the correct edition proof-read by me and not accompanied by any preface orintroduction unless approved by me printed up and distributed.16. A public confession, written jointly by me and one of you. The confession’s to be published as a book and possibly in thenewspaper. I’m very doubtful of the latter. The book’s to contain the correct manifesto with a detailed description written by meof the botch job done in the incorrect editions.17. My royalties from past editions of the manifesto and I want 10% of the gross.18. Several million in damages (exactly how much I haven’t decided yet).19. Certain things, which I’ll tell you when the time comes, put in the paper.20. Public (on T.V.) cancellation of contract.21. Public elimination of Segal’s power of attorney.22. Public statement that you have no claim on any of my works, past or future.23. Public (on T.V.) reading and signing of new contact for future works.24. Advance on future works.25. New contracts to include full artistic control by me of all my works.107

Valerie’s obsession with artistic integrity and ownership of her works, along with herperfectionism toward how it was presented, appeared consistently in these letters. The letters alsosuggest greater evidence of schizophrenia, particularly in an April 17, 1973, letter in which Valeriedetailed, perhaps satirically, her demand to receive money for sex: “Mob: You can fuck me for $5million per mob member per fuck. That’s only for the first fuck of each mob member. The 2nd time agiven member fucks me I’ll only charge him $4 million, and only $3 million for the 3rd and only $2million for the 4th, and $1 million for each fuck thereafter. In other words, if mob member A isfucking me for the first time, but he’s the 2nd member to do so, he pays $5 million. The 2nd time hefucks me he pays $4 million. Valerie.”

Valerie’s psychotic tendencies reached a new peak during this time, especially as her fears aboutthe Mob linked up with her anxieties about losing control of SCUM Manifesto. Related to herperception that Barney and Fred had not afforded her proper publicity, she became convinced in thesummer of 1973 that the uterine implant she received at Matteawan would give her cancer. (Whethershe ever had signs of cancer remains unclear.) She wrote to Barney and Fred describing theunresolved contradictions of their contacts with her and said they must “confess to all the shit they’vepulled on me since 5½–6 years ago” (March 3, 1973). She accused them of framing her as “crazy”and hiring a therapist named Smitty to misdiagnose her as insane based on “an inappropriate smile,”just like the last time she was examined by a court doctor (March 6, 1973). She made bizarreovertures of marriage to Fred, leading him to plea with her that he was not interested, which he laterregretted: “It was such a mistake, because psychiatrists always say that one should not make oneself afocus of someone’s insanity. I had done so by trying to reason with her.”

To secure Valerie’s hospitalization, Barney and Fred hired a smart lawyer, Harry Wachtel(someone with excellent contacts in Mayor John Lindsay’s administration), who convinced Valeriethat they could get her out as long as she agreed not to contact them again or bother them in any way.“We struck a deal with her,” Fred explained. “We told her that if she did not want to be in the hospitalall of her life, she would have to make that deal with us.”108 Barney, Fred, and their lawyer did indeedarrange things with the hospital so that Valerie would remain at Dunlop for several more months; only

if she agreed not to harass the two men would she be allowed to leave. Valerie’s paranoia, howeverextreme at times, had a basis in reality in this case, in that she suspected Fred and Barney ofmanipulating her situation. She never wrote to or otherwise contacted Fred or Barney again, sensingthat it could land her back in prison. Finally, Valerie had her freedom.

In July 1973, Valerie read an article titled “302 Women Who Are Cute When They’re Mad,” in thatmonth’s issue of Esquire (which announced on its front cover, “This Issue Is About Women”). Thearticle identified her place in the genealogy of the feminist movement (“Ms. Solanas claimed she didit [shot Andy Warhol] because Warhol was a disgusting male chauvinist pig who used and abusedwomen and failed to recognize their talents.”). Furious about this characterization, she wrote a letterto the magazine that they rejected on the basis that it was too self-promoting, though they eventuallypublished sections of it, adding their own commentary. In this letter, Valerie “contradictedanonymously-written false statements made about me in the July, 1973 Esquire, the false statementsbeing that I shot Warhol because he had rejected a movie script and that I had referred to him as amale chauvinist pig (a phrase not in my vocabulary and which had yet to be coined at the time I wassupposed to have said it) who used and abused women and failed to recognize their talents. . . . It’lltake a wee bit more than Valerie Monroe and the anonymous Esquire writers (who won’t beanonymous when my book comes out) to obliterate SCUM.”109

HOW IT CHANGED THEM

That shooting was wonderful in a way because of the great myth. In order to become a myth you must be shot. Andsurvive of course.

—Ultra Violet, quoted in Steven Watson, Factory Made: Warhol and the Sixties

Reflecting on the impact of Valerie’s actions both on her own life and on those in the Factory, manyhave noted that the June 3, 1968, shootings (and, subsequently, Valerie’s stints in various psychiatrichospitals) altered the course of their lives. Jeremiah believed that, in some spiritual sense, Valerieand Andy both died in the moment she shot him. For Mary Harron, “Warhol never recovered the senseof invulnerability that had fueled him as an artist. As for Valerie, she was now ‘the crazy woman whoshot Andy Warhol.’ She would never have what she most wanted: to be taken seriously as a writer.”110

Louis Zwiren, Valerie’s boyfriend from 1975 to 1979, remarked that Valerie felt like a failure for notactually killing Andy: “The fact that she wasn’t able to pull it off and murder Andy Warhol showedthat—it made her feel ineffectual and was a blemish on her reputation.”111

Valerie had missed her chance to kill Andy but had earned a reputation for hating men, even frommen themselves. In January 1973, Colorado Springs’s Gazette Telegraph published an announcementsaying that the men’s auxiliary of SCUM had written several letters to the paper but the paper hadrefused to publish them. In May 1973, M.A.S. wrote to Maurice from both Colorado Springs andSioux City, Iowa, announcing the establishment of a new church dedicated to SCUM—the Church ofSolanas: “Just a line telling you about the new church and the continuing transformation of S.C.U.M.into the nucleus of the vanguard party thru such. Please keep publishing the S.C.U.M. Manifesto.” (Itis evident that Valerie did not send this letter, as she never referred to SCUM Manifesto using theabbreviation with periods and the signature was not in her handwriting.)

In 1974, Valerie met up with Jeremiah for an interview related to a book he was writing aboutCandy Darling. Still sleeping either at the Hotel Earle or on rooftops, Valerie wanted a hot meal.Jeremiah found her “waifish” in the lumpy clothes she wore to hide her scrawny body (he called her

“Barnacle Bill the Sailor”).112 The pair tried to dine at the Red Lion (151 Bleecker Street), a literaryplace that a variety of writers and thinkers often frequented. “They wouldn’t seat us,” Jeremiahremembered. “They wouldn’t look at her. They said, ‘You’re going to have to go somewhere else.’They didn’t want her there. As we were walking down the block, somebody saw her and spat on theground across the street.”113 This upset Valerie at the time. She told Jeremiah that things like thathappened to her constantly. That afternoon, once they got settled at Juliet’s Supper Club on TenthStreet, Valerie smoked numerous cigarettes and talked to Jeremiah (whom she affectionately calledher “baby brother”) about her decisions and the future.

When he asked about her experiences in the psychiatric hospitals, Valerie said she had met someinteresting people and enjoyed being in a place where they fed her every day and she did not have toworry about her next meal. Living on the street, on the other hand, meant she had to constantlynegotiate ways to get enough food. Musing about the future, she said that someday soon babies wouldbe born in test tubes and women would have no need to interact with men at all. (She had discussedthis publicly the day after the shooting, exclaiming to the New York Post, “We must beginimmediately!”) Valerie believed she would live to be a thousand years old and would rule the world.With this statement, Jeremiah realized that Valerie’s mental illness had worsened, as paranoia andgrandiosity wove in and out of their conversation. She expressed concern that Jeremiah would usewhat she said to him for something other than his book on Candy Darling. “If you’re going to dosomething else with this interview, I’m going to shoot you,” she announced. “I thought, well maybeshe has a gun with her right now,” Jeremiah said later. “Maybe she did, you know?”

Valerie did not want to talk about why she had shot Andy. In that shooting, Jeremiah thought,Valerie may have permanently sacrificed her credibility as a satirist. “She really painted herself intoa corner and became known as the woman who shot Andy Warhol—and became the victim of themale establishment.” Valerie was sorry that she had shot him but did not want to say so aloud,Jeremiah assessed. And she was isolated. “She was ostracized by a lot of people. They didn’t wantanything to do with her. Nobody did. That was the last time I saw her.”114

Andy Warhol’s life, too, was permanently altered by Valerie’s action. In a 1980 interview, he said,“Before I was shot, I always thought I was more half-there than all there—I always suspected that Iwas watching TV instead of living life.” After being shot, he says, he knew that he was watching TV:“The channels switch, but it’s all TV.”115 He admitted to not knowing the difference between realityand fantasy: “I’m trying to decide whether I should pretend to be real or fake it. I had always thoughteveryone was kidding. But now I know they’re not. I’m not sure if I should pretend that things are realor that they’re fake. You see, to pretend something’s real, I’d have to fake it. Then people would thinkI’m doing it real.” When asked whether he felt he had any complicity in the shooting, he replied, “Iguess I really don’t know what people do. I just always think they’re kidding.” In part reflecting hisoutlook on the world, he reported: “It happened so quickly. . . . It was a surprise, but the biggersurprise was that she had dressed up for the occasion. She wore lipstick, eye makeup, her hair wascombed.”

Andy claimed that he harbored no negative feelings toward Valerie: “I’ve never really dislikedanyone. And I don’t think she was responsible for what she did. It was just one of those things. . . . Ican’t feel anything against Valerie Solanas. When you hurt another person, you never know how muchit pains.” He admitted he could no longer do the same things he once did, that his body looked like a“Dior dress,” and that he feared taking showers. “It’s sort of awful, looking in the mirror and seeingall the scars. It’s scary. I close my eyes. But it doesn’t look that bad. The scars are really verybeautiful; they look pretty in a funny way. It’s just that they are a reminder that I’m still sick and I

don’t know if I will ever be well again.”116

Ultra Violet worried about his deterioration, noting that Andy suffered with perpetual fear: “In thiscrystalline vision of Andy’s future, I see that from now on his art will be repetitive, automatic, empty,a rerun of what went before. His life will veer off in a different, safer, more conforming direction.The artist, the sorcerer, the conjuror, the diabolist of the 1960s is gone. The man—the businessman,the moneyman—will live on, accumulating more and more money and mountains of possessions toallay his terror.”117 When Mary Harron met with Andy in 1980, she was shocked at his appearance. “Ihad always thought of Warhol as permanently 30. At first sight he is unearthly. His skin is like nothingI’ve ever seen on a human being. His face, beneath the dyed silver hair, is so pale that it seems tohave been modeled out of putty, ridged with little crevices that are, in fact, nothing more sinister thanadolescent acne scars. He speaks very softly, and with a shy boyish charm that immediately begins totake effect.”118 John Leonard, who also interviewed Andy, similarly noted that Andy seemed “evenmore vulnerable: small, thin, goggled, with his talking box in his lap and his bright green socks,diminished under the high ceiling, white walls, and flak-blossoms of sunlight. Like a child playingwith his toys.”119

In the aftermath of his recovery, Andy asked noted celebrity photographer Richard Avedon tophotograph some of his scars. In the resulting photos—which would appear later in numerousmagazines and other publications—Andy stares blankly into the camera with his chest exposed,revealing a labyrinth of scars left by his bullet wounds. He was constantly on edge about Valerie:“Every single time I’d hear the elevator in the shaft just about to stop at our floor, I’d get jumpy. I’dwait for the doors to open so I could check who it was.”120 When Andy heard that Valerie had beenspotted in the Village, he became paranoid, always looking out for sudden ambush.121 At the sametime, however, he was in something of a dream state: “I don’t know what anything is about. Like Idon’t even know whether or not I’m really alive or—whether I died. It’s sad. Like I can’t say hello orgood-bye to people. Life is like a dream.”122

In all likelihood, Valerie’s act against Andy did summon his eventual death. The wounds sheinflicted had wreaked havoc on his body and left him afflicted with chronic medical problems (and aconstant fear of doctors). He had to wear a surgical corset for the rest of his life. His demise stemmedfrom his severe and complicated physical problems and difficulties subsequent to treatment for them:he had gone in for gallbladder surgery; the surgery was successful, but he perhaps received improperfollow-up care—family members alleged he had suffered from water intoxication (overhydration)and neglect.

Although Andy ultimately died from cardiac arrhythmia following his surgery, his severe and ratherunpredictable medical issues started on the day Valerie shot him.123 As Ultra Violet noted, “Probablyhis premature death had to do with Valerie, because when he went to the hospital, he was notmonitored properly, and a lot of things happened there. They did not monitor his intake and outtake ofliquid, they had him on penicillin when he was allergic to it, so she really was responsible for hisdeath. He could not stand up properly. He was the picture of death from then on.”124

Andy expressed worry that the shooting had changed his outlook: “The fear of getting shot againmade me think that I’d never again enjoy talking to somebody whose eyes looked weird. But when Ithought about that, I got confused, because it included almost everybody I really enjoyed!”125 InJeremiah’s view Andy never behaved the same after the shooting. “Andy and I never discussed theshooting, but I know it changed his life. People said he was totally different afterwards. And it reallydid kill him, years later, his injuries and all. It really affected his health.”126 As concluded in thedocumentary Ken Burns made about Andy in 2006, “The event in Andy’s life (apart from his

discovery of who he was as an artist, which was very powerful when it hit him), the event wasValerie Solanas’s attempt to murder him. The narrative was: the rise to success; at the peak of thatsuccess, the breaking into it of horror, of someone who was crazy enough to wish him dead, and thenthe rest of his life in some ways facing down what he met that day.”127 Two years prior to his death onFebruary 22, 1987, Andy conducted an interview with the British style magazine Face. When askedwhat would happen to his art collection once he died, he replied, “I’m dead already.”128

FORGETTINGThe 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 theimportant, while from a hiding place behind our backs the unimportant wages its guerrilla warfare, which will end insurreptitiously 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 amisrecognition of her value as a writer, thinker, and revolutionary—raises questions about how toremember, or forget, those who have, as Monique Wittig once said, managed to “blast out theground.” The many disappearances of Valerie Solanas have created a mythology around the end of herlife. 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 ofValerie’s end owes much to her relationship to SCUM Manifesto; even after her release from themental hospitals, she had faith she could change the world with SCUM. Only after these final hopeswere shattered did she truly cease to exist as Valerie Solanas.

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

In 1974, Vivian Gornick, who had written the introduction to SCUM Manifesto for Olympia Pressin 1971, received a phone call from Valerie. Vivian recalled the conversation as both memorable andfear inspiring. Valerie had called to ask Vivian what she knew about the foreign rights to SCUMManifesto. 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 Manifestoall 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 whatVivian knew about the Italian publication of SCUM Manifesto, as she believed the Italian publishershad been in New York buying publishing rights from people who did not own those rights. Vivianindicated that, once again, she knew nothing about it. Three months later, Vivian received a thirdphone 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 forinterrupting her, and insisted again on knowing about the foreign rights to SCUM Manifesto. “It wasalways the same street voice speaking with the same guttural urgency asking the same hopelessquestion,” 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 herlife. . . . This went on for two or three years. She was never threatening, but I began to dread thesound of her voice. The urgency in it kept accumulating. She wasn’t stalking me, but she wasdefinitely keeping track. Once she found me in Colorado, and once in Tel Aviv.”4 In Valerie’s finalcall to Vivian, at two o’clock in the morning, Vivian screamed at Valerie and fired off in a rage abouthow 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 awriter:

I was amazed that she was the same conversational, clever creature when I had only known the rasping, self-involved, violentwoman. 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 manyplaces 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—socrazy they are able to say anything.6

In 1974, Valerie left for Washington, DC, eager to depart New York and return to her roots. Sheshared a room with a woman she connected with in the DC women’s community. This roommate—aformer student of Dana Densmore from a martial arts school in the district—recalled that Valeriefunctioned at an acceptable level but clearly seemed mentally ill. “She was functioning but not at avery 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, thehotel 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 forTransients.”8 Valerie did not stay long this time, as she had received a sum of money owed to herthrough 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 thanthe hotel. One day, while making her usual visit to one of her favorite sandwich shops, Blimpie’s, atEleventh 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 fromagoraphobia, Louis had a relaxed, straightforward, playful vibe that nicely complemented Valerie’sintensity and ambition. Louis often hung out at the sandwich shop, eating his dinner and hitting onwomen. The day they met, in 1973, Valerie had walked in and he went over to try to pick her up. Inclassic Valerie style, she responded in her snarky fashion that the entire place looked like amausoleum because no one aged there and everyone looked so young. “I went over to her. I startedtalking 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 askedwhat 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 homelesswoman. “She said that as long as she had a pillow, she didn’t mind sleeping outside. She needed apillow. All she needed was a pillow.” She told Louis that she had two kids—he was the only personshe admitted this fact to—but that she had not seen them since right after they were born. Telling himthat her mother had raised them, she said she had felt relief that they were well taken care of. “Shefelt that, being that they’re not fully developed mentally, that they’re not fully human until they’rementally 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 believedthis resulted from precancerous cells that had signaled stage 1 cancer, though Valerie claimed theprocedure allowed the Mob to bug her and monitor her movements. She told Louis about her time as aprostitute, 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 roomand 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 intimate, you know?”9 Louis and Valerieeventually moved in together, at Louis’s place, where they stayed for about a year. The two started asexual relationship, something Louis felt conflicted about given her extreme hatred of men. Though hewas guarded about discussing his sex life with Valerie during our 2012 interview, he discussed itfrankly in 1997. “She liked me to go down on her. So she would come.” She did not reciprocatebecause he did not like women to go down on him. “She wouldn’t let me suck, she wouldn’t let me doanything with her breasts. She . . . didn’t feel anything.” When asked if Valerie felt sexually attractedto women, Louis recalled that she felt women were better than men in bed. She told him she was alesbian. “I couldn’t understand, because she seemed to enjoy sex and love, you know. She was veryaffectionate, very affectionate to me. And loyal . . . very warm.” To this, Louis added, “She didn’thate 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, awoman named “Space” (Connie De Marco), a beautiful Italian “far out” artist at the Village PlazaHotel with whom Louis had also had a sexual relationship with previously. Space had a colorfulhistory; she once divulged to Louis that the best sex she had ever had was with a man named BlindRichie, a blind saxophone player who would run with wild energy through the streets of New Yorkwith his cane. Valerie loved Connie, telling Louis that her favorite women in the world had tan skinand “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 themen 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 sideof her: she’d crack jokes, “shoot the shit,” and “smile like a little girl.” Another male friendexpressed surprise at Valerie’s eventual warmth toward him: “She turned out to be very warm. Whenshe 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. Heknew 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 passCan’t think of anything I needNo cigarettes, no sleep, no light, no soundNothing to eat, no books to readMaking love with you has left me peaceful and warm insideWhat more could I askThere’s nothing more to be desiredSometimes all I need is the air that I breathe and to love youAll 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 thatlife was worthwhile. She hated classical music, often ranting that it should not even count as realmusic. 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 racistfeelings against whites, that whites were the only real racists. A huge fan of Levi’s jeans, she alwayswore jeans and swore to Louis that even tight-fitting jeans were the most comfortable clothing onearth. She drank Ovaltine (malted milk powder) constantly and had spaghetti with Ragu sauce nearlyevery night for dinner. An incessant smoker, she rolled her own cigarettes (always with Topstobacco) 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. Thelocal movie theaters had rereleased it and she had desperately wanted to see the film again. “Shewent by herself to see it. I didn’t go with her to see it for some reason,” Louis recalled. “She said itwas for kids. She thought it was the greatest thing in the world as a kid but as an adult, she said it wasnothing, you know? She was disappointed.”

Valerie was in the habit of shoplifting. It became a way to show love and affection to others—asshe sometimes gave away what she stole—while also allowing her to survive. Eager to cook forherself 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 thestore. 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 themiddle of winter one time, when the weather hit four degrees below zero, Valerie was arrested forshoplifting. The arrest revved up her paranoia that the Mob would find her and she would have toreturn 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, agourmet food market on Sixth Avenue, and stole several jars of caviar and brought them home. “Wewere eating a lot of caviar then!” Louis chuckled.

Valerie’s paranoia and “dark moods” intruded on the otherwise enjoyable existence she and Louishad together. She would get paranoid and say mean things to him, mostly putting him down. “I wouldfeel hurt,” he said. “I wouldn’t be talking much, but it wasn’t that big of a deal.” Louis felt that Valerietreated 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.” Shewould tell him he was “the greatest” and would say he had “Louis logic” because he didn’t think likeeveryone 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 toldLouis, 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. Shereceived 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 in1971, 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 early1975, 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. Judithdecided 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 toOctober 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 healthcare again. Following her discharge from the South Florida State Hospital, Judith could never againget her institutionalized; after dealing with mental hospitals for over five years, Valerie was finishedwith them. In any case, the family did not have money to put her in private care.16 Valerie now movedback and forth between Florida and New York, surviving primarily on her Social SecuritySupplemental Security Income (SSI) checks. When in Florida she stayed with Judith, but would oftenget restless and return to stay with Louis in New York. While in Florida, Valerie wrote Louis lettersmostly on paper bags that she folded up, wrote on, and put a stamp on. She refused to write himletters that used regular envelopes.17

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

In late 1975, Valerie returned to New York for a longer period than usual, eager to have a stretch oftime to write and think in her own space. By chance, as soon as she arrived in the city, she ran intoLouis at the Port Authority Bus Terminal in New York City as he was walking to the bathroom. Happyto 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 toprostitution if she applied for assistance from the New York Housing Authority to live in a HousingAuthority apartment. He helped her fill out the application and she eventually received approval forher own apartment. Though they had lived together before, Valerie welcomed the possibility of herown space that would allow for Louis’s company while still giving her privacy. This security freedup her time to write.19 (Valerie’s application was memorable: she boldly crossed out “husband’sincome,” “husband’s employment,” and “him” in all sections of the form.)20

The Housing Authority apartment Valerie moved into was in Louis’s building, at 170 East ThirdStreet on the Lower East Side (which had a heavily immigrant population at that time), directly acrossfrom the Most Holy Redeemer Church. The two spent a great deal of time reading and writing, withLouis visiting the New York Public Library and Valerie preferring to go to bookstores and speak thetext of books into her tape recorder so she could listen back later at home. Having their ownapartments 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 inthe 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 cookedspaghetti for herself and talked to Louis often about SCUM Manifesto and her other writings. “Shethought it was the greatest thing ever written.”

Having lived in squalor most of her adult life, Valerie enjoyed having her own space in which towrite and work, though it often was infested with cockroaches. Valerie had a sink in her room and thecockroaches would climb up out of the sink through the drain. Louis recalled, “I would always try tokill them if they came out because cockroaches are very intelligent. They would come out whennobody 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!” Valeriealso dealt with an exploitative superintendent in her building who constantly raised the rent unless hecould get a blow job. Valerie complied, “to keep the rent low, took it in stride,” Louis said. “It madeher angry. She had to do it more than once, but she didn’t let things like that stop her. She had biggerthings to work on, her writings and letters, you know?”21

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

At this visit, Shulie gave Valerie a copy of an underground paper that had an article on how to callEurope free of charge, presumably so that Valerie could dispute the copyright with European agentswho had stolen her work. “She was very grateful. She waxed paranoid on the subject of the ‘mediamafia’ 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 alesbian, and interpreted this young fellow as someone she hung out with at Blimpie’s, where she saidshe went at night. I figured it was all she could do to survive on the kind of welfare budget she wason.”22

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

Louis went home and quickly told Valerie about these findings, particularly the point about miceliving longer and not getting old when consuming sodium selenate. Despite this substance not havingbeen approved for human consumption, Valerie went right out and, though relatively broke, orderedsome of the mineral from a nearby chemical laboratory (likely claiming she would use it forsomething other than personal consumption). “I was very passive, afraid of strangers, so I didn’t havethe personality to do this, but Valerie did,” said Louis. A week later, she brought back small packagesof 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 todie 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 liveforever.” Knowing Valerie’s obsessive enthusiasm for this new plan to live forever, Louis worriedthat Valerie would overdose on the substance; the drug’s side effects included hair loss, stomachproblems, 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 andwrite, and the alleviation of the soul-crushing hassle of meeting her basic needs, Valerie wasbecoming increasingly stable and was able to function better than she had in most of the previousdecade. Because she did not have to worry about where she would sleep or what she would eat shecould expend her energies on more fruitful pursuits.

Walking down the street one day, Jane Caputi, an early radical feminist, was passing Valerie whenshe recognized her from her picture. She invited Valerie to eat with her and two friends; given theprospect of a hot meal, Valerie somewhat reluctantly agreed. “We were all reading the SCUMManifesto out loud and memorizing sections of it,” Jane recalled, “so we were looking at it a lot. Ofcourse you don’t take all of it as seriously. There’s a great deal of humor and wit there.” Once Valerieheard that they wanted to talk about SCUM Manifesto, she became far more enthusiastic about theprospect of the meeting. The group met at a Sheridan Square diner (138 Seventh Avenue) to talk aboutthe book. “She wanted to meet and talk about SCUM Manifesto,” Jane remembered. “She wasthrilled that we were into it. She was into it. I was kind of young at the time—like twenty-two orsomething—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 nicesweater 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 withValerie’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 anexperimental operation on her and she had a full hysterectomy. Bellevue had a documented history ofdoing such procedures.25 While Valerie claimed that she had wanted to get rid of her uterus, Jane washorrified 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 wasthat they were trying to systematically hurt her or destroy her by violating her body. . . . You’ll alwaysfind 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 forgynecological surgery and often performed these procedures against the patient’s will: “You justwonder what they did to her in Bellevue. Obviously they did physical treatments and surgery in oneinstance. Why would they have done that? Was it medically important? Were they experimenting onher? 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 hadbegun 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 haveanything ready yet. They never knew whether she had actually written anything at all. After buyingValerie a bagel, the group talked about Valerie’s most passionate subject: SCUM Manifesto. Janeremembered, “We talked about ideas in SCUM, what that meant. I told her Mary Daly was really intoher work. She gave me some copies of the manifesto, the printed mimeographed copies.” The groupsat and talked about SCUM Manifesto for most of the meeting. Valerie’s eyes lit up; she was happy tosee others responding to her work. She reiterated that she never meant for SCUM to refer to theSociety for Cutting Up Men, that Maurice had made it up against her will. As Jane said, “I do thinkit’s an important philosophical distinction. She really meant the lowest, most abject being that has themost 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 brilliantphilosophical 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’smother, Dorothy Moran, claimed, “She was writing. She fancied herself a writer, and I think she didhave 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 senta letter for publication in Ms. magazine in April 1976 that was rejected. She then submitted a poem toMajority Report: The Women’s Liberation Newsletter, a New York–based feminist periodicalfounded in May 1971 that published independently and operated with an editorial collective under theleadership of Nancy Borman. The publication intended “to dispense information, encourageparticipation, and provide support. We intend to arm our sisters with the consciousness and the unityto fight our oppression.”28 To this end, Majority Report published feminist groups’ newsletters andwritings in exchange for printing and mailing list costs; each feminist group received “qualityprinting,” “a huge circulation,” “an organized staff,” and “publication every two weeks.” With themotto “Let’s beat the media by creating our own,” and a reputation as “America’s least ladylikenewspaper,” Majority Report did not disclaim, explain, or criticize its content, but allowed it tostand on its own, even when provoking intense disagreements between readers. Importantly, MajorityReport also assured readers that it would publish any advertisements and letters “intact and free fromediting,” advancing a philosophy Valerie had certainly appreciated and sought out. In many ways, thispublication represented an ideal outlet for Valerie; committed to feminist principles of fairness andequality while not shying away from radical ideas, Valerie found, for a time, an intellectual homewith Majority Report.

Valerie first encountered Majority Report when she submitted a poem for a special issue devotedto the work of “authentic street people” who had proposed to take over artistic control of MajorityReport 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 controlonly, they neglected to deal with copyright stuff. They included pieces without getting the rights topublish them.”29 Valerie wrote some excellent poems for Majority Report, though they did notgenerally publish poetry; her poems caught the eye of Nancy and the other editors and they eagerlypublished one of them in this special issue. They also published a reprint of Valerie’s 1966 Cavalierarticle about panhandling but did not seek her permission. When the issue came out, she complainedbitterly about the misspellings and lack of copyright and that her poem was poorly punctuated. Shecalled the editorial offices and yelled on the phone, calling herself a punctuation expert. Nancyresponded by asking Valerie if she wanted a job at Majority Report, as they needed someone whocould help beginners learn how to edit. “Lo and behold,” Nancy said, “she agreed—she volunteeredat the magazine that ripped her off.”

This began a year-and-a-half-long relationship between Valerie and Majority Report, as she joinedthe editorial team and worked a couple of days every few weeks helping with a variety of editorialtasks. 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: “Iremember a discussion we had at the Lion’s Head; she drank a black coffee and I had a beer. Sheseemed 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 atRobin Morgan for not securing copyright to print excerpts of SCUM Manifesto in Sisterhood IsPowerful. “She didn’t moan and complain about her living situation,” Nancy said; because Valeriehad 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 moreunstable than others, that is not to say that I had a stable staff. We were on the Lower East Side, whereeverything was down and out, and enough pressures to flip. There were pressures just to survive, andlandlords, and living among thugs and bums and not much hope.” Valerie found it reassuring thatnobody received payment for working at Majority Report, as that cleared a lot of her anger about theinadequate copyright for her poem. “She used to get upset when she thought that others were gettingpaid and she was not,” Nancy said, “so I said, ‘We can offer you nothing,’ and we fulfilled thatpromise, but she took the opportunity and many benefitted.”

Valerie worked hard and had no interest in revealing her identity as the would-be Andy Warholassassin. “She slaved away with us, devoting lots of labor to a bi-weekly publication. People therewould say, ‘Hi, my name is Julie, what is your name? And she would just introduce herself asValerie. No one knew who she was and Valerie did not tell them,” Nancy recalled. Working withValerie changed Nancy’s view of her dramatically. While she had once thought of her as crazy forshooting Andy, she eventually understood her motivations. Because she and Valerie had such apositive working relationship, Nancy did not fear Valerie’s retribution or anger, but rather, tried tohelp her achieve her goals. Ti-Grace Atkinson remarked that the women publishing Majority Reportknew 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 thattime. Louise Thompson, a writer and poet from the Lower East Side who had known Valerie beforethe shootings, described her as “stunningly brilliant” and her play as impressive and obscene. JuliaMauldin, a poet known for her toughness, who lived in Valerie’s neighborhood, also spoke highly ofValerie, 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 aliberal, white, lesbian leader, Julia had been ostracized from the feminist community, just as Valeriehad. When Valerie heard about this incident, she called Julia in the middle of the night at her WestVillage 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. “Sheloved him and he led her on,” Julia told Nancy. Nancy refuted this story, saying that Valerie never hadany romantic feelings for Andy and that she had never mentioned loving Andy. “It’s possible that Juliamight 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 themboth.” Nancy also noted, “If you have this notion of the romantic attachment, you have this wonderfulor horrible element. He was such a dull person, and she took the play around to people in such anaïve manner. Because it was a little dirty, no one would put it on. Supposedly he said he would put iton.”

Valerie spoke frequently to Julia about the shooting and the pain she felt about his mistreatment ofher 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 Valeriehad. Julia described Valerie as not crazy but fast-paced: “There was so much going on at once, atsuch speed. I thought she had a lot of talent, that she was eccentric. She was hyper; if you did not sitback and watch her in the context, you might have thought that she was crazy. But if you back up, youcould put it together. She had so much energy. The things she told me about made me wonder how shehad survived it. It was like cutting into a pie, taking out the ingredients, and leaving the crust.”31

Joanne Steele, distributor of Majority Report, viewed Valerie as more disturbed, saying that sherepresented a dangerous part of the movement and seemed unstable. Joanne was particularly alarmedby Valerie’s lack of caring interactions with others, particularly in that she often acted like an abusedchild who fluctuated between domination and passivity (but was never in between). When bossedaround, Valerie became mouselike, withdrawn, and even needy. Still, Joanne admired how Valerieunderstood women’s oppression and how she could not take it anymore. For Joanne, SCUMManifesto exemplified that women should not “take shit,” that they should be strong so that they couldseparate themselves from and lose their vulnerability to men: “The Manifesto had an importantmessage for women to hear. Nothing else was as virulent. She was the first to say you can hate youroppressor.”32

For Valerie, working at Majority Report bolstered her new sense of self-reliance; she hadstruggled for nearly a decade with hospitalizations, publishing battles, and lack of regularemployment. She began work in 1976 on a new book, Valerie Solanas, and showed a renewedinterest in circulating SCUM Manifesto and its ideas.

Around this time—sometime in late 1976 or early 1977, Valerie checked out of the New YorkPublic Library the 1971 Olympia Press edition of SCUM Manifesto and wrote all over it withvarious complaints. On the front cover, she wrote, “Read all about fleas in my next book to be titledValerie Solanas”; circling Vivian Gornick’s name, she penned, “One of the many fleas riding on myback. Valerie Solanas.” “This is not the title,” she declared, in reference to Maurice’s use of theabbreviation form S.C.U.M. (she preferred SCUM to S.C.U.M., later calling Maurice’s decision touse the latter “extraordinarily tasteless”). On the back cover she wrote, “lie” and on the jacket shecalled Maurice and Vivian “fleas.” She accused the volume of being “full of sabotaging typos” andwrote, “LIES! FRAUD!” on the copyright page.33 Clearly, her interest in the absolute integrity of her workand words played a major role in her action of defacing a library book and in her obsession withhaving a correct edition of SCUM Manifesto released to the public. From this point on, Valerie refersto her version of SCUM as “CORRECT,” in all capitals, as a way to emphasize this importantdistinction from the Olmpia Press edition.

In 1976, after eighteen months working for Majority Report, Valerie decided to leave the editorialteam and pursue writing her new book full time. As an editor, Valerie could not publish anything inMajority Report because of the newsletter’s policy discouraging dual roles, but if she left, she wouldbe able to use the publication as a springboard to advertise SCUM Manifesto and debate with othersabout feminist ideas. Majority Report became an ideal site for Valerie to publish her latest musingsand squabbles with feminists who had misrepresented her and to engage, however unwittingly, withthe women’s liberation movement.

Following her departure from Majority Report, Valerie began a series of letters and commentariesthat continued for a full year. Her “wars” staged on the pages of Majority Report started in 1976when the radical group C.L.I.T. (Collective Lesbian International Terrorists)—which included SusanCavin, Marsha Segerberg, and Maricla Moyano—wrote two collections called “the C.L.I.T. papers.”

These texts drew from SCUM Manifesto to detail a philosophy that advocated female separatism andthe revolutionary overthrow of patriarchy. In November 27, 1976, a group of men claiming to be fromthe men’s auxiliary of SCUM wrote a response to excerpts from the C.L.I.T. papers that had beenpublished in Majority Report (and later in Dyke, a Quarterly); they found it shameful for the C.L.I.T.papers to have a “mindless association of SCUM ideas with separatism from men, an idea which wasnot in the SCUM Manifesto.” These men—Lee Hazlitt and Stan Rudolf—stated that Valerie had had aresponse to the “incongruous and shameless mingling of SCUM ideas with a mishmash of asininities”:“It’s brilliant and original—brilliant ideas from SCUM Manifesto and an original stream of errors.”34

In a later response to the C.L.I.T. papers, Al Reinheimer argued that its members did not advocateviolence of any kind and were “possibly nervous about the many unattributed paraphrased (and somenot paraphrased) lines from SCUM Manifesto, which lines where interspersed throughout their sea ofgibberish and contradictions, adopted as part of their philosophy that the belief that ideas can bestolen is wrong, male, a convenient philosophy for those on the receiving end.” He later added,“‘How,’ they asked, ‘can you steal an idea?’ I will tell them how—by representing someone else’sideas as your own, by signing your name (whether real or a pseudonym) to someone else’s work”(vol. 6 [January 8–21, 1977]).

Two issues later, a writer, Carolyn Escherarris, aptly noted that much of the early 1970s radicalwomen’s movement work stole, copied, mimicked, or veered eerily close to SCUM Manifesto:

There’s a scumminess to the general atmosphere. Just as the totally non-violent C.L.I.T.’s signed some of their papers killa manand man masher, so there are other very tame little groups calling themselves Killer Dykes, and there’s a Drastic Dyke Collectivein North Carolina. Then there was Roxanne Dunbar . . . who was quoted as saying: ‘When our group first came together in someof our early programmatic sessions it was proposed that the group assassinate some man to make our presence known.’ Thewoman interviewing her commented that that sounds like a lesson from Valerie Solanas. Dunbar evaded the remark by sayingthat, although Solanas is brilliant, ‘she didn’t really have much to tell’ Dunbar and her crowd and ‘really wasn’t interested inlearning politically [from them].’ Dana Densmore, another FLM member, is fond of using phrases like ‘frontal attack’ and ‘It’s allover now.’ And the scumminess extends to titles: Up Against the Wall, Mother . . . a book whose title contradicts its content;Bitch, a would-be humor sheet; Shameless Pussy Press; the British feminist newspaper, Shrew and the American feministnewspaper, Up from Under . . . And I can hardly mention Joreen’s BITCH Manifesto, which must be an example of something”(vol. 6 [February 15–18, 1977]).35

The piece accused other feminist writings of stealing Valerie’s ideas, failing to have wit, insight, ororiginality, and being “surrounded by a babble about ancient matriarchies, witches, and othernonsense—talk of women having only girls, female take-overs, gynocracies.” In particular, Carolynargued that SCUM Manifesto “radicalized Ti-Grace out of NOW,” “gingered up the ladies’ slogans,”“gave birth to WITCH [Women’s International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell]” and “reads like aprophecy of radical feminist thought for the past 8 years”(vol. 6 [February 15–18, 1977]). If Valeriewas indeed “Carolyn,” she had unleashed her signature mix of humor and go-for-the-jugular attack inher letters to the editors in Majority Report.

In April 1977, Valerie published, as herself, a lengthy letter in response to these pieces, beginningby differentiating her beliefs from those of Redstockings—a radical feminist group founded in 1969by Ellen Willis and Shulamith Firestone—and saying that her influence on the women’s liberationmovement was far more limited than these pieces made it seem. Valerie acknowledged that she hadcontributed to the movement in four ways: “Two letters discussing my influence only on C.L.I.T.Papers, a very brief letter that indirectly quoted a remark I made in 1968 that de Beauvoir was anoverrated windbag, and a letter by me in which I implied agreement with, but did not repeat,Carolyn’s statements, except to expand on the trashing of Jo Freeman.” Valerie goes on to critique theuse of “liberation” names for women’s pseudonyms, claiming that the people who used her ideas

would not attach their real names to their work:It’s also significant that Joreen writes her uninfluenced junk (e.g., her book, The Politics of Women’s Liberation and magazinearticles) under the name of Jo Freeman, teaches political science at the State University of N.Y. at New Paltz under the name ofJo Freeman, was interviewed for articles about women’s lib under the name Jo Freeman. When she wrote Bitch Manifesto andwhimpered in MS [Ms. magazine] about getting trashed she liberated herself into Joreen. The C.L.I.T.’s, whose pseudonym(liberation?) Carolyn said was significant and who say they don’t want to be stars and that their politics demand anonymity, publishtheir uninfluenced stuff under their own names. By the way, the pre-liberation of the too puny for words Betsy Warrior, who wasliberated in 1968, is Betsy Mahoney (her married name).

Later in her letter, Valerie added, “Writers can’t evade responsibility for their works by writinganonymously” (vol. 6 [April 2–15, 1977]). She believed that the C.L.I.T.s tried to stay anonymous sothat if its works were deemed less than brilliant, its members could hide behind their anonymity,while if they became celebrated for brilliance, they could “out” their real identities.

Valerie’s attacks disgruntled many leading women in the movement, particularly Jo Freeman (akaJoreen). Several issues later, when Jo Freeman responded by claiming that she took her manifestofrom the Communist Manifesto and not from SCUM Manifesto, Valerie retorted, “By this logic a titleconsisting of any noun at all in front of the word Manifesto would qualify the title as a take-off on theCM. Then why the word bitch? Why not spaghetti?” She griped that the Bitch Manifesto mimicsSCUM Manifesto too often and that its only real contribution lies in its copying of SCUMManifesto’s ideas: “Yes, kiddies, there’s only one truth, only one correct line—and it’s mine.”Continuing her attack on Joreen, Valerie chided her for admitting that she had not read SCUMManifesto, which “reveals Joreen’s extremely nervous suspicion that her ‘arguments’ won’t preventher remaining exposed as the tenth-rate hack she is” (vol. 6 [April 30–May 13, 1977]).36

Shortly after this exchange in Majority Report, Valerie took action against Jo Freeman by callingJo’s university and launching a formal complaint to the dean. Her accusation was that Jo hadplagiarized her. Jo remarked later, “Valerie wouldn’t give her name but said that I had plagiarizedher. Now, on one level, nothing came of this, but for someone to call up the dean of your school andtell them that a faculty member is plagiarizing is a pretty serious accusation, and if the departmentdoesn’t like you, it’ll get you even if there is no substance to it. You must know that. It’s how politicsgo. . . . That’s why she provoked hostility. She acted beyond the bounds of reasonableness.” Jo wenton, “She may have co-opted the label but she wasn’t a feminist. She was just crazy. All she did wasgive us a bad name. I think she should just be forgotten, like a bad meal that didn’t go down well.”37

In another line of attack in Majority Report, Valerie’s arguments against the C.L.I.T.s took manyforms. She critiqued their characterization of historical matriarchy and that whites were the only onesto oppress blacks and argued against the group’s characterization of those who rejected the femalerole when it said that “women who reject the traditional female role are confused and invariablywind up either in jail, the bughouse, or on three martinis a day.” Valerie retorted that “real radicalfeminists are the ones that ran for the hills” and pointed to “a contradiction: they say they don’tbelieve anything any man says about anything, but respectfully quote many men at length.” Harnessingher trademark humor and trashing of all things women’s liberation, Valerie ended the letter:

C.L.I.T. Papers isn’t the only totally worthless work produced by the Women’s Bowel Movement (which constitutes a very largepercentage, but not all of the women’s movement). A few of the better known ones are: Amazon Odyssey by Ti-Grace Atkinson,Dialectic of Sex by Shulamith Firestone, The First Sex by Elizabeth Gould Davis, and Women and Madness by Phyllis Chesler.I’ll do them in my book and also give an explanation for how such garbage came to be so widely respected within the women’smovement. I’ll also have a few words to say about Simone de Beauvoir. . . . Flush away one turd and the Bowel Movement’sdiminished by one. Bye. Bye. (vol. 6 [March 19–April 1, 1977])

As one would expect, feminists—particularly radical feminists—did not take well to such critiques

and outright trashing, though Valerie had no problem having a linguistic boxing match with anyonewho questioned her logic. (She even sent death threats to lesbian feminist writer and critic JillJohnston, for misspelling her name in Lesbian Nation.) Brooke Williams wrote in Majority Reportthat Valerie always stood outside the movement and did not “play nice” with the emerging factions ofthe women’s movement: “Although SCUM Manifesto was influential, Valerie Solanas was never inthe movement, either creating or building. She was an outsider, at most an admired one, and her actionagainst Warhol was an individual action” (vol. 6 [March 19–April 1, 1977]). Valerie replied toBrooke’s claims, “Nobody ever said I invented feminism. And everybody—myself included—already knows by now all about how the SDS [Students for a Democratic Society] and SNCC[Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee] women sulked and whimpered and pouted becausethey got tired of sucking the SNCC and SDS men’s asses” (vol. 6 [April 2–15, 1977]). Valeriebelieved that her ideas arrived long before other women’s liberation works: “SCUM Manifesto wasfirst published in Oct. 1967, and the outline for it appeared in a Feb., 1967 Village Voice. Brooke,was the WLM [women’s liberation movement] also the stimulus for my anti-male play, Up Your Ass,registered with the copyright office in May, 1965?” (vol. 6 [April 30–May 13, 1977]).

Brooke portrayed Valerie as jealous and opportunistic in her efforts to discredit radical feminists;Valerie had been “saying she created radical feminist theory, and that the radicals were merelyworking off SCUM Manifesto, thereby denying them credit.” This was followed by a surprisingadmission that Valerie may indeed have catalyzed radical feminism:

Having reread SCUM Manifesto in light of this controversy, I must admit Solanas has a point. SCUM Manifesto has providedthe basis of the theory of a part of the women’s movement. This part can be described broadly as the evolving cultural feministwing, in which lesbian separatist groups like CLIT play a part. . . . The rest of the manhating aura of SCUM Manifesto issupplied by Solanas’ simple expedient, brilliant for satire but not so useful for political analysis, of turning male chauvinist ideologiesupside down or backwards into their mirror opposite. . . . But while she neatly turns them around, she does not challenge theirbasic world views—of the human condition as neurotic, not oppressed (note in this context her support of the idea that women arebrainwashed) for example. (vol. 6 [April 30–May 13, 1977])

In a rare moment in which she clarified her intentions in SCUM Manifesto, Valerie retorted in alater letter that she did not intend to simply turn around the logic of male chauvinism but to arguetruth about men. “SCUM Manifesto’s right, and I’ll prove it in my next book.” Drawing on Freudianconcepts of motherhood and fatherhood and Phillip Wylie’s ideas of “Momism,” Valerie outlined herspecific claims about fatherhood: “SCUM Manifesto says the unloving, disapproving distant Fatherleads to a lack of independence in both girls and boys”; if women try to leave men, men will “curl upand die (especially in bed)” (vol. 7 [June 25–July 8, 1977]).

In another letter, her reaction to claims that she used Majority Report to sell her upcoming bookhad a more garbled edge: “Why should I, author of SCUM Manifesto, shooter of Andy Warhol, belimited to MR [Majority Report]? I’m tempted to ask if the money men’s public confession to payingoff to have me declared insane that’s required for their getting my next book to publish will besufficient promotion, but I’m an objective nut and can see why Brooke would doubt that the moneymen will rat themselves out just to get what will be history’s by far best seller.”

On the question of why she did not pursue legal action against those who plagiarized her work,Valerie declared, “I’m sure Brooke believes that, because I never sued my publisher, he doesn’t oweme any money or that, because I didn’t institute a libel suit against Esquire, their statements about methat I said in an MR letter were false must be really true, or that, because I didn’t institute 2000 libelsuits in ’68 and ’69 there really wasn’t massive bullshit printed about me, as I said there was, or evenany bullshit at all.” Later, when discussing her trashing of Redstockings, Simone de Beauvoir, andradical feminism, she wrote sarcastically, “See Feminist Revolution, my notes on which I have filed

under C for comic books.” Later she wrote, “You’ll see that by ‘radical feminists’ they meanRedstockings (and most especially Kathie Sarachild Amatniek, Shulamith Firestone, and Anne Koedt)plus the ubiquitous Ti Grace [sic], noted flea, who, although not a member of Redstockings, was verychummy with that crowd.”

After reviewing claims by Kathie, Shulie, Anne, and Ti-Grace that Simone de Beauvoir andRedstockings contributed to the enactment of a host of important social reforms, including granting ofabortion rights and passage of the Equal Rights Amendment by Congress, and helped advance theory,organizing tactics, slogans, and the awakening of women to involvement in actions all over the world,Valerie inventoried her own contributions: “My claim is very humble indeed. I claim merely to haveinfluenced a pack of assholes—the silly slogans, totally worthless writings, and fucked-up lifestyle ofempty, semi-conscious women with zero talent, women incapable of a single original valid idea,women who believe that, if they’re not Valerie Solanas, they’re nothing.” She corrected letters writtento her by advocating, as she did in SCUM Manifesto, the “unwork” force, property destruction, and aclear articulation of the twenty-two institutions she wants to destroy: war; “niceness,” politeness, anddignity; money, marriage, prostitution, work, and the prevention of an automated society; fatherhoodand mental illness (fear, cowardice, timidity, humility, insecurity, passivity); animalism (domesticityand motherhood) and suppression of individuality; prevention of privacy; isolation, suburbs, andprevention of community; conformity; authority and government; philosophy, religion, and moralitybased on sex; prejudice (racial, ethnic, religious, etc.); competition, prestige, status, formaleducation, ignorance, and social classes; prevention of conversation; prevention of friendship (love);“Great Art” and “Culture”; sexuality; boringness; secrecy, censorship, suppression of knowledge andideas and exposes; distrust; ugliness; hate and violence; disease and death. After listing thesepriorities, Valerie aptly characterized her work by saying SCUM Manifesto was designed to teachwomen why they should purposefully “fuck up.”

Ending this letter with a clarification about her next book—a work that has never been seen—Valerie celebrated its self-promotional aspects: “My next book will be the promotion—a piece ofself-promotion like this world has never seen. That’s why I’m gonna call it Valerie Solanas—I call aspade a spade. I’m out to take over. That’s why I need to write only truth. You can’t stand for long ona pile of shit. It’ll require many pages to definitively demolish (trivialize, rip-off, whichever youprefer) the WLM. I’ll do that in my book, which will by no means be confined to the WLM.” (vol. 6[April 2–15, 1977]). She claimed that her next book would not be controversial: “There’ll be nocomeback. . . . It’ll be the beginning of the end” (vol. 7 [June 11–24, 1977]).

When Valerie outlined the content of this new book, she revealed some of her increasinglyparanoid suspicions about the framing of her shooting Andy Warhol:

In my upcoming book I’ll explain why I shot Warhol and present an airtight case against various other parasites, many of whomare female (‘defenders,’ ‘interpreters,’ etc.), who were sucking my blood about that time. My case will be based partly on a publicconfession of the money men (not just Maurice Girodias and Warhol) who were involved with me at the time, of all their naughtydoings regarding me (paying off to have me declared insane and for massive amounts of bullshit to be written about me, to namejust a few things) and the reasons for them. Yes, some of the naughties they must confess to are felonies, but the statute oflimitations (7 years) has run out on them. Their public confession is a necessary condition for their getting my next book topublish.” (vol. 6 [February 19–March 4, 1977])

Feeding Valerie’s love of polemical banter, this missive started a firestorm of letters from womendenouncing her. Brooke Williams argued that Valerie’s forthcoming book, “according to thescuttlebutt, consists of a collection of 3”x5” cards, without a publisher” (vol. 6 [April 30–May 13,1977]). In another letter several issues later she sneers, “Who cares what Valerie Solanas has to say?

(She should go back to pulling triggers. She’s pretty heavy-handed with the medium of words).”Valerie responded sarcastically: she had sent Random House a carton of three-by-five-inch cards,“but they said they’re only publishing pages this year. I said, ‘Can I interest you in some New YorkTimes pages? I write in the margins.’ They said that’s not a bad idea, and they’d think about it,because when the readers of my book get tired of reading Brooke and Joreen’s letters that I’m goingto bill my book out with, they read the New York Times editorials. So you can see, I’m making someheadway.”

Valerie’s sense of authorship and the absolute precision she demanded from others who publishedher work extended to her relationship with Majority Report. When others accused her of distortingtheir words, she defended herself with “It’s legitimate for me to read between the lines of her [thewriter’s] letter and say what I believe to be implied by her statements, so long as I also state what sheactually said and make clear that my interpretation’s my interpretation. I did both.” She rejectedclaims that she used Majority Report to gain notoriety or publicity: “Brooke says I’m ‘using the issuesolely to gain personal notoriety [as opposed to impersonal notoriety?] and a publisher. ‘Solely’disallows the possibility that I say what I say at least in part because I believe it. Brooke would stripme of my conceit” (vol. 7 [June 11–24, 1977]). Valerie struck out at Majority Report for allowingtypos in her letters to the editors. In the issue following her first lengthy such letter, she published athirty-four-item list of typographical errors she had found in that first letter. “Some of the errorschanged or muffled my meaning. Other errors were relatively minor, but, being a perfectionist, I’ll listall the errors!” (vol. 6 [April 16–29, 1977]). And in the following issue, Valerie wrote, “MargieRobertson in her MR letter, complained that I’m a semi-absolutist. I’m not; I’m an absolutist. What thehell is a semi-absolutist, anyway?” (vol. 6 [April 30-May 13, 1977]).

SELF-PUBLISHING SCUM MANIFESTO (1977)Shortly after this flurry of letters in Majority Report, Valerie became obsessed with the idea ofprinting her own correct version of SCUM Manifesto. She learned that Olympia Press had becomebankrupt recently and that this meant that the publishing rights for SCUM Manifesto had officiallyreverted back to her. She now had total control over how to publish the manifesto—something thathad been denied to her for nearly a decade. She approached Majority Report to see if they couldtypeset it as long as she retained exclusive rights to edit and oversee it. Nancy Borman remembered,“We struck a deal so that it would make enough money for the people working for it. She reallywanted there to be an authentic copy. She was no more unreasonable than any customer in a smalltype shop. Joanne Steele was going to distribute it at newsstands and through her channels.”38 Valeriewould distribute the manifesto via mail order and on the streets. She wanted her manifesto in itspurest form—as she had written it, without intrusions and changes from Olympia Press and the“Toads,” and completely on her own terms. For Valerie, the publication of a correct edition of SCUMManifesto would be the culmination of many years of fighting for a pure, accurate text.

Valerie felt immense joy at having an authentic copy of SCUM Manifesto distributed to the world.Joanne Steele recalled that “[For SCUM Manifesto] we used the same printer that we used forMajority Report. [The manifesto] was wall-to-wall words, though a thin Majority Report. It waseight pages of newsprint like the Daily News. I was surprised that she was publishing it again.”Valerie insisted on not putting a price on this version, leaving it open to fluctuate depending on whereand to whom she sold it. Joanne was struck by this, particularly given that Valerie had lived on thestreet in the past, had long stretches of inconsistent meals and sleeping arrangements, and still had no

reliable income aside from her state assistance. “This shows that she was not concerned with money,”Joanne said, “that she was not a careerist.”39

After the correct SCUM Manifesto was printed, Valerie displayed an uncommon excitement andhopefulness. She and Joanne distributed it throughout New York City, with Joanne selling copies fromher car and Valerie hawking copies to bookstores and newsstands and placing ads asking for others tosell it.

One such advertisement appeared in Majority Report:Besides selling on newsstands, SCUM Manifesto’s being sold for $2.00 through the mail (send orders to me at the addressbelow). Pay (by cash, money order, or certified check) and being hawked on the streets for $1.00.

I’ll let anybody who wants to hawk it—women, men, Hare Krishna, Daughters of the American Revolution, the AmericanLegion. Maurice Girodias, you’re always in financial straits. Here’s your big chance—hawk SCUM Manifesto. You can peddle itaround the massage parlor district. Anita Bryant, finance your anti-fag campaign selling the only book worth selling—SCUMManifesto. Andy Warhol, peddle it at all those hot shit parties you go to.

SCUM Manifesto sells everywhere—campuses, Times Square, Harlem, the U.N., fag bars, Gristedes, along the dock, underthe dock (if you can find anybody under it), Wall Street, construction sites, Sutton Place, junior high schools, criminal court house.

Peddlers, pick up your SCUM Manifesto’s at my place: 170 E. 3rd St., NYC 10009 or mail your orders to me at the sameaddress. 50¢ a copy. Minimum order for peddlers is 200. No credit, no discounts. I don’t like arithmetic. And don’t have gangwars over territories—that’s not nice.40

Beneath the advertisement appears the statement “Here’s what various public people have had to sayabout me and SCUM Manifesto,” followed by quotes:

“I never read it.” —Jo Freeman

“SCUM Manifesto and radical women’s liberation have always been in opposition.”—Brooke

“[SCUM Manifesto] is of no value for understanding anything except [Girodias’s] desire to make some money.”—PhoebeAdams

“[In 1967] I had a contract [for SCUM Manifesto] prepared for [Valerie].”—Maurice Girodias

“Just a few more months of peddling SCUM Manifesto up and down 42nd St. and I can get off the welfare.” —Maurice Girodias

“[Valerie Solanas] killed herself at the age of 32 in a mental hospital.”—Paule Lebrun

“[Valerie Solanas] gave herself that death of the scorpion trapped in a circle of fire.” —Francoise d’Eaubonne

“The police told me they found Valerie Solanas dead in a Paris hotel room.”—Francoise d’Eaubonne

“Valerie Solanas is a real blast.” —Andy Warhol, 1978

She also posted another ad in the Village Voice:Olympia Press went bankrupt and the publishing rights to SCUM Manifesto reverted to me, Valerie Solanas, so I’m issuing theCORRECT edition, MY edition of SCUM Manifesto. It’s now being sold for $1.00 on newsstands in NYC and for $2.00 through the mail(send orders to me at address below and say you’re responding to MR ad; pay by cash, money order or certified check) and beinghawked on the streets for $1.00.

I’ll let anybody who wants to hawk it—women, men, Redstockings, Pat Buckley, Phyllis Schafly [sic], Maurice Girodias,you’re always in financial straits. Here’s your big chance—hawk SCUM Manifesto.

You can peddle it around the massage parlor district. Ti-Grace, you can come back to N.Y. without having to live on welfare:by selling the only book worth selling—SCUM Manifesto. Andy Warhol, peddle it at all those hot shit parties you go to. Jo(Joreen) Freeman, I’ll let you peddle it around the SUNY campus. Make it required reading for your students and sell it to them.Everybody, make big money selling the anti-money system SCUM Manifesto. Don’t defend it, don’t interpret it, don’t even like it.Just SELL IT! SELL IT! SELL IT! SCUM Manifesto’ll sell anywhere—campuses, Times Square, Harlem, the U.N., fag bars,Gristedes, along the dock, under the dock (if you can find anybody under it), Wall Street, construction sites, Sutton Place, juniorhigh schools, criminal court house.

Peddlers, pick up your SCUM Manifesto’s at my place: 170 E. 3rd St., NYC 10009. Pay 50¢ a copy. Sell it for $1.00. Out-of-

town peddlers, order it from me for 50¢ a copy. Peddlers must buy at least 200 at a time. No credit. No discounts. I don’t likearithmetic. And don’t have gang wars over territories—that’s not nice.

Valerie Solanas41

As shown in these ads, at the time of SCUM Manifesto’s release, Valerie listed her address as 170East Third Street, the small apartment building a few blocks from Tompkins Square Park where shelived with Louis Zwiren. Valerie spent a great deal of time talking to Louis about the manifesto, andshe worked long hours printing it and sending out copies by mail order. At the same time she wasworking diligently on her new book, though she was secretive and would not divulge any details toLouis. She believed others wanted to steal her ideas and exploit her work and had no patience forsaboteurs.

In particular, Valerie again became obsessed with the idea of finding out the identity of the “contactman” for the Mob, directing particular attention toward Mark Zussman, then editor of Oui andPlayboy magazines, based in Chicago. She repeatedly sent him copies of SCUM Manifesto (thecorrect edition), urging him to print it in Playboy where readers could purchase the manifesto. Everdedicated to her work, she even tried again to get her play, Up Your Ass, produced, writing Mark ashort postcard: “I’ll send you a copy of the play for you to look at for $100.00 plus cost of copying +postage. Copying-$3.40, postage (estimate) .35 = $3.75. Valerie.”42

She wrote Mark clarifying her views on a recent piece put out by Marlene Edwards of ZodiacNews Service in San Francisco, calling the labeling of her as the “founder of a group called SCUM”a libelous slander. “This reduces me to the level of Redstockings, Radical Feminists and the membersof 1000’s of other totally worthless, insignificant, pathetic little ‘feminist’ groups. What did I expectto do with my little group of 7? 8? 15? 36?” She was angry that the word shit was censored on theair; a quote from the Manifesto was read aloud as “Every man deep-down knows he’s a worthlesspiece of [bleep].” When Marlene said SCUM Manifesto was the work of a group, Valerie retortedthat this statement constituted “a libel so profound that, if uncorrected, it amounts to murder. It means:a) that I lack mental, psychological independence, am incapable of independent thought. b) I gottogether with a group of unnamed assholes and together wrote the manifesto . . . c) that the work isgarbage. What else can a collectively written work be? The changes reduced the SCUM Manifesto tothe level of Redstockings Manifesto.”43

Valerie believed that these perceived libelous slanders sabotaged the sales of her forthcomingbook, Valerie Solanas, on which she was working intensively. “How many people will read the workof a nut? How many will read a group-written tract? How many will read a book about only theshooting of Warhol, written by the nut who shot him, put in no perspective?”44 She followed up with aletter to the Mob (Mark Zussman) on September 5, 1977 that detailed her paranoia about a mannamed Pacheco stealing her ideas: “It would be really good for my book if I could get proof of whatPacheco’s doing. The only way I can think of to get the proof is to have a hidden camera (maybe aninfra-red one that can photograph thru walls) with a zoom lens photographing everything that getspunched into the computer, as well as the puncher. Valerie.”45

Valerie resented anything that distracted her from her work. She typed away furiously in herapartment, maintaining an almost fanatical concentration. In an uncharacteristic twist, she also spenttime looking after her financial affairs quite closely during that year. She sent a letter to the Mobdetailing her difficulty receiving her March 1977 SSI payment and blaming them for continuallysabotaging her efforts to get this paid out to her. She believed the Mob had shortchanged each of hersubsequent checks and said, “If I don’t get all the back money the SSI owes me . . . I’m gonna insist

you punch them [SSI officials] out for me, that you can’t look at my next book until I see hercompletely toothless. And I mean I better not see one tooth.”46

Valerie was imbued with renewed energy and vitality. To celebrate her success with printing thecorrect edition of SCUM Manifesto, and to show off the realization of her dream, she invited hermother to visit. Her mother obliged. Years later, the building superintendent from 170 East ThirdStreet, Mrs. P., remembered Valerie as “a pig, a bug” who was “filthy and unclean” but who had a“very nice, very clean” mother.47

Valerie put all her energy into SCUM Manifesto. Majority Report had published numerousexcerpts, and this triggered Valerie to write numerous letters to the editor about commas and colons,revealing her obsession with the tiniest of details regarding the publication of SCUM Manifesto. Staffdisagreed about whether she was on an endless power trip, came from a place of principle, or had amental illness. As Joanne said, “She was very unstable. You didn’t know if she would run, fall, ordance next.” Over time, Joanne became increasingly concerned about the manifesto’s not having aprice tag, as she assumed Valerie would expect money regardless of whether copies were stolen orsold. She urged Valerie to put prices on all the copies, but Valerie refused. “I told her that I hoped thatshe had a lot of money to pay me for putting [them] on,” Joanne said.48

In Valerie’s final letter to Majority Report, she listed six corrections to previously publishedletters that discussed her work. She told readers that even though she went out to the streets of theWest Village one night to sell new copies of SCUM Manifesto, she mostly worked through mail orderand hawkers: “I was out one night peddling Manifestos just as an experiment to see how well they’dsell on the street.” She described another facet of the work: “It was the publishing rights, not thecopyright (which had always been mine), which reverted to me when Olympia Press went bankrupt.”She was, as always, attuned to her rights of authorship: “The book was not ‘originally published byOlympia Press,’ but by me in 1967.” She complained that the Olympia Press edition had many serioustypographical errors, as “words and even extended parts of sentences were left out, rendering thepassages that should’ve been in incoherent.” In her final published claim in Majority Report, Valeriedefended her 1966 Cavalier piece: “The MR (vol. 7, #4) editorial said that the Nov. 1975 MR issueentitled The Lesbians are Coming ‘was a collection of prose, poetry, and photography by members ofthe Lower East Side community.’ MR neglected to mention that the article written by me (first printedin the July 1966 Cavalier) in that issue was reprinted without my knowledge or permission” (vol. 7[June 23–August 5, 1977]).

PARANOIA GROWS: VALERIE AND THE NEWS MEDIA (1977)

Valerie’s first project, she says, “is to dispel the notion that I am a self-promoter and that everything I do is designed to getme publicity.” To that end she is hard at work on a book with the proposed title Valerie Solanas.

—Michael Chance, “High Society: Valerie Solanas”

Valerie felt an intense desire to promote SCUM Manifesto now that she had the correct edition incirculation. At the urgings of Majority Report editors, she sought out and participated in threeinterviews in June 1977: one with High Times magazine (targeting stoners), one with the VillageVoice (targeting East Village residents and countercultural lefties), and one with the New York DailyPlanet (targeting the New York underground). In all these interviews, she spoke in lucid, engaging,but paranoid ways about her relationship to her work, her reasons for shooting Andy Warhol, and herplans for the future. She wanted to plug SCUM Manifesto to increase its sales and popularity. In the

High Times interview, with Michael Chance (the husband of Majority Report editor Nancy Borman),she frequently became excited and behaved unpredictably. Her image as a hardworking, relativelystable figure gave way to one of an individual suffering from increasing madness. Michaelremembered, “She looked like someone wasted in the ’70s. I assumed it was jail pallor. She gave off‘off-balanced’ vibes—pretty intense, wild.”49 Valerie leaned hard on the edge of reason.

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 puttingwords into her mouth, expressed anger that such claims were launched against her, and corrected himfor “making her sound like a psycho.” She reminded him that she had shot Andy because he stole herplay, an argument Michael found compelling; she was like “all kinds of writers who talk about whatothers 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 thepiece ran in High Times, Valerie pestered him about a photo he had used in the piece, believing hedoctored it to make her look bad, and Michael became increasingly fearful of her. One day, while hewas sitting with his wife, Nancy, at a restaurant in the East Village after the interview came out, hesaw Valerie cross the street right outside the restaurant. “He jumped up, excused himself, and ran tothe 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, Valeriecontacted Howard Smith, who had covered the shootings for the Voice back in 1968. Valerie hadpreviously interviewed with him for the Voice years before and told him that if he publicized SCUMManifesto, she would do an interview for the Voice and would recount the “fascinating things in thelast 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 interviewto 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 alsocoincided with her lucid, detail-oriented, and sharp-witted letters to Majority Report—in theinterview she discussed her thoughts about SCUM Manifesto, her plans for her new book, and herconcerns about the “money men” and the Mob who had exploited her. Howard asked Valerie how shewould 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 themanifesto is an analysis of male psychology, and the second part is like, you know, what to do aboutit.”

Valerie provided rare insight into the problem of whether she intended SCUM Manifesto as aserious document meant to be taken literally or as a satirical tool. When asked whether other womenhad joined the Society for Cutting Up Men (a name she once again insisted was given to the manifestoby Maurice and not by her), she said SCUM was “hypothetical”: “There’s no organization. It’s eithernothing or it’s just me, depending on how you define it. I mean, I thought of it as a state of mind. Inother words, women who think a certain way are in SCUM. Men who think a certain way are in themen’s auxiliary of SCUM.” As seen in the rough cuts of the interview, she added, “It’s just a literarydevice. 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 (andnine 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 hadended her “strike,” Valerie repeated the story she had told in Majority Report: that her new book wascoming out and she wanted the money men to confess that they had her declared insane against herwill. The statute of limitations had run out, she said, and they could now freely admit that they framedher as insane in order to better sell copies of her new book. Howard pressed Valerie, pointing out thatthrough her being declared insane, she received a reduced sentence of three years. “Well actually itwas zero to three,” Valerie countered, “but I did the whole three.” “Somebody paid the doctors to sayyou were insane?” “Yeah,” said Valerie, “but I’m not going into reasons. I’m being evasive about alot 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 milliondollars?” Valerie advised, “‘Who’ is the wrong question. The question is ‘Why.’ . . . I leave that toyou to figure out. You think about it, and you tell me.” When asked if the book was coming out with agood publisher, Valerie said that maybe it would be General Motors, adding, “What difference does itmake?” With Howard appearing shocked by her claims of a huge advance, Valerie reminded him thather new book would be a for-sure international bestseller: “Just look at it this way. I figure thisthing’s going to sell internationally, right? I mean, even the garbage. Ti-Grace Atkinson’s translatedinto French. Total shit. Now you know goddamn well that this will go all over the world, right?” Shepursued the point: “And you got four billion people—even allowing there are illiterates and all. Let’ssay it sells for $5; then they’ll only have to sell 20 million to recoup. That’s all over the world andthen don’t forget there’s gonna be the plagiarisms, the paraphrasers, and the paraphrasers of theparaphrasers, etc., etc., etc. So they’re really buying 25 books. Then there are movie rights. I meanthat’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 weremore accurately described as the money men, who “are going to publish my book, and I’m in theprocess now of getting things straight with these men. The Contact Man. He’s the one man that I writeto—the Contact Man for the whole mob. I send my messages to him and he disseminates them to thevarious appropriate people. . . . The Contact Man is simply a man to whom I address my letter to thetotal Mob.” Asked why the Contact Man could not write back to her, Valerie outright made a claim tomental illness: “I would like this crazy message put in the paper. Because I’m crazy. This is my crazymessage to the world, all right?” Howard asked what the Contact Man did. “Some people like tocollect stamps, people are interested in different things . . .” Valerie added, “The Contact Mancontacts.” (As noted earlier, Valerie believed the Contact Man to be Mark Zussman, and had fired offseveral lengthy letters to him with her allegations.)

When asked about the press coverage of the Andy Warhol shootings, Valerie insisted that the pressmostly got it wrong: “I concede I shot Warhol. But that’s not the issue. I’m not talking about theshooting. I’m talking about a whole lot of other things. They said a lot more than that I shot AndyWarhol. They said a lot more things that were untrue.” Somewhat surprisingly, given that Valerie hadrarely spoken of her sexual identity publicly, during the interview she took issue with Howard’scharacterization of her as “not a lesbian”: “The part where you said, ‘She’s a man-hater, not alesbian.’ . . . I thought that was just totally unwarranted. Because I have been a lesbian, and I considerthe 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 aheterosexual, you know.”

She denied that she had called Andy in late 1968 demanding that he drop all charges, put her inmore movies, buy all her manuscripts for twenty thousand dollars, and arrange for her appearances asa guest on TV shows. “I never said anything even remotely comparable to any of those things,” sheinsisted. “You don’t want anything from them [Andy and the stupidstars]?” Howard asked. Valeriereplied, “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 themselveslook 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, theyshould at least have some doubt about Andy and his gang. Howard said, “A lot of these people wereupset to the extent that your veracity would, of course, be doubted because you’d admitted shootingWarhol.” Valerie smartly replied, “That’s a contradiction. If I admitted shooting him, then my veracityshould be higher than usual. Right?”

In some unpublished sections of the interview, Valerie stated, “One thing I’m going to get into in mybook is the insane and extensive jealousy of me. . . . One thing I’m going to do is prove SCUMManifesto, and a lot of other things.” To the question of how she had earned her living for the sixyears since she had been out of jail, Valerie responded, “Well right now I’m on unemployment. And Iconsider that a step up. I mean, I don’t have to worry about where my rent’s coming from, you know. Ihave 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, repeatingher statement about what she had been doing for the past several years: “I haven’t been doing anythingpublic—writing, giving interviews, shooting anybody, etc.—for the past nine years, because I’vebeen on strike. . . . Almost everything written about me so far is bullshit. After my next book’spublished 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 shitlist.” With her one-hundred-million-dollar advance, she would finance a jail, “my very ownpersonalized jail.” She complained that the East Side Book Store on St. Mark’s Place would not sellSCUM Manifesto because it cost too much: “He’s [the owner] a hot air man. I could puff the book upwith hot air and say, ‘Here’s your hot air. Now it’s worth $1,’ and he’d agree. Most books arenothing but hot air. I’m selling history’s greatest bargain. For one measly buck you get ‘SCUMManifesto,’ 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 andoffered to do another interview for one million dollars. “True, I gave an interview to Smith, but thatwas a mini-interview, + I’m not even giving another of those for anybody else. My next interviewwill be the longer, paid for interview. If you mention SCUM Manifesto be sure to say they can orderfrom me for $2.00 (see last page of Manifesto).”57 She advised him about an “ex-contact man” inGermany named Jörg Schröder and her Italian contact man Ferdinando Cappabianca in Rome. Valeriewrote to the Mob again two weeks later, complaining that a company in Spain was planning onpublishing the manifesto without a contract. “If they publish the shit, there will not only be a copyrightinfringement suit, but a libel suit, and, if libel isn’t considered a criminal offense in Spain, there’llhave to be teeth bashing, so, if you don’t want another Edizioni delle donna-L’Espresso type case onyour 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 hadmisrepresented her throughout the interview. She sent a “Mr. Ryan” a long letter detailing how he hadviolated their agreement to publish her precise words, ending with “I want the Village Voice to payme $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 institutelibel and violation of contract suits and demand $1.5 million.”59 With her letter she enclosed aphotograph 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 whichValerie presented her grievances about the previously published interview. Firing off accusationsabout 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 trueintentions with her new book. In this piece—her final piece of published writing known to date—sheclarified what Valerie Solanas would entail, explaining that “it’ll be about everything, that it won’tbe an autobiography, although it’ll include discussions of the shooting and related events, that the partabout me will be a small percent of the book, that most of it will be general, that among many otherthings I would prove the statements in SCUM Manifesto. . . . I’ll get extensively into the subject ofbullshit, a very important subject. I’ll deal very intensively with the subject of bullshit.”60 She hadrecently requested a review copy of Robin Morgan’s Going Too Far and felt that “the book’sgarbage. 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 andcure 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 offlashes, bright lights, brilliant insights. Much like Nietzsche, some of it is incoherent but there are also moments of profoundinsight. 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 sellwell. Valerie was devastated. The Majority Report staff was disappointed too, as they had comearound to rooting for Valerie and the manifesto. Joanne remembered, “I don’t know whether malecustomers 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 someJapanese businessmen. “She expected it to be a big seller, but it had, like, no sales at all,” LouisZwiren recalled. “She was impressed with the Japanese because they bought some of them. When themanifesto 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 nolonger had faith that she could peddle the book to the world. “Valerie said to chuck them,” Joannerecalled. “I asked her whether she meant it, because I was going to throw every copy away to keepValerie from coming back and asking me about them, wanting them. Valerie said yes, and so I deepsixed 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 notgarner the success and fame she craved. Late in 1977, as the manifesto failed (in Valerie’s eyes), itseemed as though madness finally consumed her. Valerie’s paranoid schizophrenia intensified. Sheconcocted 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 shegot this medication, or whether she had ever in fact taken it, remains unclear. Perhaps SCUMManifesto had served as her medication. Without it—at least without the promise that she couldrepair 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 Moboverwhelmed her. Louis, her primary support system at that point, found it too difficult to tolerate hermental condition. He loved Valerie, and watching her deteriorate broke his heart. “He was a verysweet guy,” Mary Harron said. “They got on well. I think he’d had some troubles as well. But he wasa very nice man, and they did have a good relationship, and that’s the funny thing. I mean life isalways different to theory, isn’t it? And she may have written theoretically about hating all men, but inpractice there were some men that she liked.”65

Louis sympathized with Valerie, asserting that she never did any illicit drugs but felt she was losingher mind. According to Louis, Valerie started to develop evermore detailed theories about how theMob communicated with her. “She was telling me the proof of the Mob is that she saw spots on thesheets. 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 nopolka dots. There was no polka dots. And then another time she looked at it and the polka dots areback. 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 withher in various unwanted ways, like through the sheets, mostly because of the potential money-makingcapacity they saw in her writings and evidenced in her thoughts. Valerie described to Louis aparticularly narcissistic fantasy about the Mob. He explained, “The Mob is only interested in makingmoney. That’s her contention. The Mob is purely interested in money. And she is the most, she is thehottest, 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 andwill try to get it before she can put it on paper.”67 (Valerie’s paranoid reactions always had roots inthe real world; she felt cheated, as she received royalty payments from only the Japanese edition ofSCUM Manifesto and perhaps received a small sum from the German edition. She never receivedany royalty payments from any United States edition.)

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 theyhad put all the details of her life in the New York Times within a single day. (The Judy Michaelsonarticle, published in fact two days after the shooting, on June 5, 1968, did present a breathtakingamount of accurate, well-researched information collected over a short time.) Her belief system waselaborate: the Mob knew everything about her, had 24/7 surveillance on her, and had paid for hereventual release from incarceration; Geoffrey LeGear, her once trusted friend, had paid her bail usingthe Mob’s money. She hated that she had not killed Andy, as it was bad for her reputation. “It madeher look like she couldn’t, like she was a fuck-up. She felt that she was exactly like the women thatshe wrote about that were fuck-ups. . . . She felt very competent, and then when she didn’t kill AndyWarhol, 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 therealities of death. One day she went downstairs to find that the police had entered somebody’s roomin their building to find that a woman had overdosed on drugs. “Valerie told me, ‘Come, you gotta seethis, 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 seedead people.69

After seeing this dead woman, Valerie became consumed with her own logic, sure that herdelusions had a basis in reality, that the Mob watched her at all times. At the nucleus of Valerie’sparanoia was her belief that a radio transmitter in her uterus broadcasted all her words and actions tothe Mob, that she could even send them messages through her bugged uterus. “She didn’t want to doit, but they put it there,” said Louis. She believed they put the transmitter there against her willbecause they wanted to find out everything she said and did. To cope with this, Valerie started writingletters in code, “so I couldn’t understand what she was saying,” Louis said. When Louis was askedwhether 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’snuts.”70 Valerie predicted a lot of things that came to fruition, telling Louis about cloning. “She saidnow it’s necessary for men because of sex to promote the species, but when they come out withcloning 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 consumedher almost entirely. She refused to talk aloud because she felt so strongly that the Mob wanted to stealher ideas. Louis broke up with her, primarily because he had to leave the apartment after a man he letstay with him brought in cats and activated Louis’s allergies. Louis was Valerie’s last remaining shredof stability. She left her apartment—even though it was fully paid for by the state—and started herhomeless life again. She roamed the streets, wandering aimlessly. “She got evicted because shewasn’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 wasgoing to marry, on Waverly Place, and Valerie came around. Downstairs there was a desk. And shewould keep talking on the intercom with her mouth closed, trying to communicate with her mouthclosed. It sounded like humming. I wanted to break off the involvement with her.”72 Valerie tried tomake contact, tried to connect. “I didn’t keep in touch with her [in the 1980s]. Because she was toocrazy. 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’sPlace, asking people for quarters in mumbles, never opening her mouth. One day Shulamith Firestoneran into her and Valerie asked her for a quarter. “I saw that she was begging,” Shulie recalled. “Shehad lost her apartment, and presumably her welfare. She asked for quite a few quarters after that, andI was sorry to see her turning into a mere panhandler in my eyes.” Valerie had stopped speakingcoherently, and she spoke to Shulie in gibberish. “The sound issued from deep within her throat, likesomeone 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 pneumoniaand 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 hadapproached 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 longafter that, she disappeared from the street entirely. She had been ‘picked up.’”74

PHOENIX, ARIZONA (1981–1985)

We know nothing of how it all workshow we end up in one bed or another,speak one language instead of the others,what heat draws us to our life’s workor keeps us from a dream until it’s nothingbut 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 early1980s made it almost impossible to track her movements or understand what happened to her whenshe finally left New York. In late 1979, her mother, Dorothy Moran, filed a missing persons report onValerie, to no avail. Some suggest that Valerie had developed an elaborate series of fake names andthat 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 stoppedsending letters to friends and family, giving up contact with Andy, too. Her mother claimed thatValerie “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 outa 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 landscapecomprised of mostly ramshackle houses and rundown apartment buildings, drive-through fast foodjoints, gun stores, a few public buildings, and rows of thin palm trees. While she registered adowntown Phoenix address, 620 North Second Street, Phoenix, AZ 85004, with the Social SecuritySSI department, she primarily lived outdoors, managing to survive the blistering heat as temperaturessoared 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 andcurrent writer, Bud Vasconcellos (also known by his pen name, Bud Maxwell), spoke of hisencounters with Valerie, which started in early spring of 1981: “The first time I ran into ValerieSolanas 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 ofCentral 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 andwrapped in a thin white blanket. “She looked like Casper the ghost,” Bud said; she wore the blanketso that others couldn’t see her.76

The thinness of the blanket allowed Valerie to see out from underneath it, and as Bud and hispartner 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 mypartner and I said, ‘I’m not chasing this crazy girl, are you?’ He was a kind of laid-back cop and hegoes, ‘Nope!’” Bud said that Valerie must have just arrived in town because they walked that beat allthe 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. Inthe summertime she wore tennis shoes (otherwise her feet would burn on the sidewalk); in the wintershe often went barefoot. Every time they tried to get close to her, she ran, and because they had noreason 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 hadcaused 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 thefork. 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-largestpolice department in the country and Valerie Solanas was so well known that we would get a dispatchthat just said, ‘Scab Lady, Central and Washington, disturbing.’ She was that well known. But nobodyput 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 indowntown Phoenix, they saw Valerie sitting on a bench in the closed park. “I told him, okay, here’sour chance to get her name.” They walked up to her and noticed she was asleep on the bench. Bud puton rubber gloves and pinned her on the bench to hold her down. Bud told her they would not leaveuntil she told them her name, shouting, “If you don’t tell me your name, jail’s right behind me andyou’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.” Budreplied, “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 orwashing her feet in the fountain in front of the downtown library on Central and McDowell aroundthree 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 thepolice, 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 trashbins: “She roamed from Dumpster to Dumpster finding enough garbage to keep alive and from alley toalley to find a place to sleep.” Bud saw her eating mostly leftovers discarded by others. According toBud, 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 afterthat.” On her psychological state, he said, “She definitely needed to be in a mental hospital. She wasa danger to herself and others.” He later learned her history and when he saw pictures of her from thetime of the Andy Warhol shootings, knew with certainty that the Valerie he met in Phoenix had indeedbeen Valerie Solanas. “I’ll tell you what,” Bud added, “Valerie Solanas was the highlight of thedowntown area. I have always thought about how strange she was. I mean, she was the strangest ofthe strangest. I have always remembered every detail of those encounters. Every contact I had withher 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 NinthStreet and, after that, room 420 in the Bristol Hotel at 56 Mason Street, a single-occupancy welfarehotel 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, andworshipping 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 cavernouswelfare 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 showpornographic 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 knewValerie from those days, wrote of the Bristol Hotel: “The hotel lobby was dispiriting. I mean, herewas 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 wasthe 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 itmaybe for its manifest and undeserved evil end.”80

My own visit in December 2008 suggested a similar dreariness. The manager (who refused to givehis name) said, in response to my questions about Valerie, “I’m not interested in the past. I’m onlyinterested in the future.” He then reluctantly divulged that the man who worked the front desk fornearly 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 Valeriealways 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 andhe himself had owned it until 2003, when the Patel family bought it. The hotel has rented rooms tomostly 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 cablecar 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 andasked, “White sister, white sister, what are you doing?” I told him about Valerie. Drunk and smellingof urine and beer, he said that he worked for two Valeries and that he had a white sister inMississippi. Another guy near the elevator, clearly high on something, wanted me to take some photosof him. Still another solicited sex. Twenty years after her death, the place emanated Valerie’s despairbut also her humor.

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

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

In a search for information about Valerie’s years in San Francisco, Bruce Boone spoke with twowomen who helped to fill out the picture of Valerie’s final years: “In the midst of this terrible welfareatmosphere I found two charming middle-aged ladies, hookers actually, sitting in the office with thePakistani manager and they actually remembered Valerie: —We hear Valerie was actually a famousperson. —Yeah, writer and all. —Really? —Uh huh. Know anything about her?” The women thentold a story about, in Bruce’s words, “the ironies of a feminist man-hater ending up servicing men. Topay for the dope habit.” Bruce asked what kind of drugs she used and they said Valerie had amethamphetamine 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 silverand lamé, her favorite, and she looked really good.”83 These prostitutes who claimed to know Valeriedescribed her as elegant and slender. This image provides a sharp contrast to the other reports ofValerie being covered in scars and scabs during this period.

Throughout her San Francisco years, Valerie seemed to support herself with her SSI paymentssupplemented by prostitution. She had to officially register herself under the name Valerie Solanas toreceive these benefits, leaving the only trace of her former self with that government office. Living atthe 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, bangingout pages on her worn typewriter. No one knew exactly where she was.

Shortly after Andy’s death on February 22, 1987, Ultra Violet, who regarded Valerie as “demented,deranged, brilliant, and ‘a personality in her own right,’” decided to track her down. “I wanted to findout what happened to everybody, who died, and that was the real reason I tried to track her down,”Ultra Violet explained. “That was really my motivation. She was the original homeless, so how doyou find the homeless? That was serious work. I had to cheat and lie because only her family wasallowed to have any kind of information. People said, ‘You’re crazy to even try to find her! She’s sodangerous!’ Well, I did not know twenty years later what state she would be in, and maybe by then sheno longer hated men or the world. When you hate men, you hate the world.”84

Ultra Violet called “all the crazies of the sixties” and found that few remained and “most haveblown away.”85 Those she talked to advised her to keep away from volatile Valerie. Ultra ignoredthem, writing letters to missing persons bureaus all over the country. She checked the shelters andsoup kitchens all over New York and eventually found that there were several variants of Valerie’sname (Solanis, Solaris, and others). Ultra eventually found Valerie’s Social Security and SSInumbers, and using these pieces of information, she slowly tracked her down. First she found heraddress in Phoenix, and then got a forwarding address to a general mailbox in San Francisco, andthen to her first address in San Francisco. Pretending to be Valerie’s sister and that she needed to sendValerie an urgent message, Ultra finally got Valerie’s phone number at the Bristol Hotel from theSocial Security office in November 1987.86

Again pretending to be Valerie’s sister, and saying she had news of their mother, Ultra (callingherself Isabelle Gray) called the hotel and convinced the super at the Bristol to retrieve Valerie fromher room and to take the call. Valerie picked up the phone and Ultra, recording the call, said, “Is thisValerie Solanas?” “Yeah.” “You mean the famous Valerie Solanas?” “Yeah.” “I was calling to findout if you were interested in having the SCUM Manifesto reprinted?” “Well, no I’m not.” “Have youwritten any other things besides the Manifesto?” “No I haven’t.” “How come?” “I’ve got nothing tosay.” “What are you doing now?” “Nothing . . . By the way I’m not in this place under ValerieSolanas.” “What name do you use?” “Zno Hol. Z-N-O H-O-L.” “Wow that’s original.” “Yeah it is.”“How did you figure this out?” “Well it’s a long story.” “What does Zno Hol mean?” “It doesn’t meananything. Are you a publisher?” “Yeah, yeah.” “The thing is, see, I get SSI and I don’t want to mess upmy SSI with money.” “You mean if you earn some money they will cut you off?” “Yeah.” “Wellthere’s probably a way around that.” “I mean, you could have the money sent to your sister.” “Can youlive on what they give you?” “Oh yeah.” “How do you spend your days? Are you making any moviesor anything?” “I have a project.” “Oh yeah? Can you talk about it?” “No I can’t.”

Valerie’s interest in republishing SCUM Manifesto perked up: “Do you have the newspaperedition of the SCUM Manifesto?” “No. Where can you find that?” “That’s the one I want printed up.”“Well you must have a copy I hope?” “No I don’t.” “It was also published in a little book, wasn’t it?”

“Yeah, but that’s no good. It’s full of mistakes. It’s not the same at all.” “Well someone must have acopy. Don’t you have friends who have a copy?” “Louis Zwiren might have a copy.” “Where is he?”“I don’t know.” “Well how do you locate him?” “I don’t know.” “Wasn’t it copyrighted in Washingtonor something?” “Oh yeah, I forgot, that’s right! The copyright office might have a copy of that. That’sright. I forgot. I did send them a copy.” “How many were printed?” “I think about five thousand.”“And they sold like hotcakes?” “No they didn’t.” (Ultra, wanting to hang on to her 1967mimeographed copy, lied and said she did not have a copy. Both prior to and after this call Ultra triedto secure copyright for both Up Your Ass and SCUM Manifesto so that she could publish themherself.)87 Ultra continued, “Yeah, well, so what are your future plans?” “Well I’ll think about thishere, this project here. Publishing the SCUM Manifesto.” “How do you spend your time? Do you goto church? What do you do? You believe in God?” “I don’t want to discuss it.”

Ultra then asked, “Did you learn that Andy Warhol died?” Valerie paused then replied, “No, Ididn’t.” “Would you believe he died last February?” “Oh, really.” “Yeah, you did not know?” “No Ididn’t.” “Oh. He’s dead.” “Whatta ya know?” “Actually, he died in a hospital strangely enough.”“What was the trouble?” “He went in for an operation and they operated and he woke up and he diedlike the next day or two days later.” “Oh.” “Now how do you feel about that?” “I don’t feel anything.”“Well, what did you think of him?” “I don’t want to discuss it. Could you write to the copyright officeand get a copy of SCUM Manifesto? The newspaper edition of SCUM Manifesto.” “The newspaper.That’s the one you like?” “Yeah.” “Did you print that yourself?” “Yeah I did.” “That must have costyou a lot.” “Yeah.” “Well, what happened to all those sixties movement people, what happened tothem?” “I don’t know.” “You mean it died out?” “I guess so. Well, I want to hang up now. Write to thecopyright office about the Manifesto. Maybe you could call me when you get the copy from thecopyright office. You can call me back.”88

Later Ultra wrote about this call: “I’m glad I tracked down Valerie. After I speak to her, I find ithard to get her out of my mind. I keep thinking what a shame it is that she’s mad, utterly mad. For inthe beginning, beyond her overheated rhetoric, she had a truly revolutionary vision of a better worldrun by and for the benefit of women.”89 Ultra felt sadness and regret about not ever reaching her again,sensing that Valerie had faded off. She did try to call Valerie about a month after the originalconversation, as she wanted to ask her for a picture so that she could see what she looked like. “Icould not get her on the phone. I thought that was strange. I never spoke to her again. I soon found outwhy.”90

By April 25, 1988, no one had seen Valerie for a week and the rent was overdue. The supervisor atthe Bristol Hotel, Lev Krayzman, used a pass key to unlock her room. Upon entering, he discoveredValerie “kneeling on the floor of the one room apartment, and her upper torso was facing down on theside of the bed. Her body was covered with maggots and the room appeared orderly.”91 The policereport (misspelling the name as Valerie Solanos) continued, “Krayzman did not touch or move Valeriebut opened an unlatched window in the room due to the foul odor.”92 The coroner’s report gave thecause of death as acute and chronic aspirational bronchopneumonia and centrilobular pulmonaryemphysema. The report also noted cachexia and fatty metamorphosis of the liver. Valerie likely diedfrom pneumonia brought on by (incurable and smoking-related) emphysema.

The police report recorded Valerie’s death date as the day Krayzman discovered her body (April25, 1988), though given its deterioration, Valerie’s actual death likely occurred two to three daysprior. Valerie had knelt for days decomposing in her small room. Nevertheless, April 25, 1988, at4:50 p.m. was given as both her time of death and the time she was found. Her headstone also readsApril 25, 1988.93

The news came as quite a shock to family members. Her mother, Dorothy, had her body crematedon May 9, 1988, at the Fernwood Crematory in Mill Valley, California. Valerie’s ashes were thentransferred to the Rapp Funeral Service Home in Silver Spring, Maryland. At the request of hermother, Valerie was buried at St. Mary’s Catholic Church Cemetery at 5612 Ox Road in FairfaxStation, Virginia, near her mother’s home.94

The small church and cemetery, also known, poignantly, as Our Lady of Sorrows, situatedalongside a small country road in a bucolic setting with rolling hills and plentiful trees, had its ownhistory of strife and conflict. Built originally as a place to bury Irish immigrants who perished whilebuilding the railroad in Virginia, during the Civil War years it became a field hospital and burialground for thousands of wounded and dying soldiers. Clara Barton, struck by the sheer horror ofseeing this kind of suffering among the soldiers, decided to found the American Red Cross based onher experiences there.

Wandering the well-kept grounds looking for Valerie’s grave, I found the site an uncommonlypeaceful place for Valerie to rest. It was Memorial Day 2012. The sun pressed down, thick humidsummer air blew gently, songbirds chirped cheerily, and when I reached down to adjust a set of fakeflowers and a cheap American flag placed on Valerie’s grave, a set of black pincher bugs scurriedout, angry that I had disturbed their temporary shelter. I have reached the most perfect end of themythical life of Valerie Solanas.

Following Valerie’s death, her mother destroyed all her belongings because she wanted Valerie torest in peace. Her sister, Judith, believes “resting in peace” would not have been Valerie’s wish.“She’s out there feisty as ever, raising hell in cyberspace and still offending all self-righteoushypocrites,” she muses.95 In a line Valerie added to her correct edition of SCUM Manifesto in 1977,she wrote, “The true artist is every self-confident, healthy female; and in a female society, the onlyArt, the only Culture, will be conceited, kookie, funkie females grooving on each other, cracking eachother up, while cracking open the universe.”96

PHOTO INSERT

Valerie’s father, Louis Solanas, and mother, Dorothy MarieBiondo.

Birth certificate of Valerie Jean Solanas, born April 9, 1936.

Left: Valerie Solanas, age fourteen, 1950. Center: Valerie’sOxon Hill High School yearbook photo, 1954. (Photos

courtesy of David Blackwell.) Right: Valerie’s University ofMaryland college yearbook photo, 1958. (Photo courtesy of

Special Collections, University of Maryland Libraries.)

David Blackwell, Valerie’s son, discovers Warhol art at a NewYork gallery, 2005. (Photo courtesy of David Blackwell.)

Linda Moran, Valerie’s daughter.

Valerie’s play, Up Your Ass, was included in the 1967 editionof SCUM along with a reprint of her Cavalier magazine article

from 1966. (Photo courtesy of The Dobkin Collection.)

Valerie Solanas’s original self-published mimeographed copyof SCUM Manifesto, copyrighted in 1967.

Controversial Olympia Press publisher, Maurice Girodias,who published S.C.U.M. Manifesto in 1968.

Andy Warhol, prior to the shooting at the Factory on June 3,1968. (Photo: Argenta Images.)

Valerie’s friend and “baby brother,” Jeremiah Newton, as ateenager in New York City, late 1960s. (Photo courtesy of

Jeremiah Newton.)

Valerie held auditions for Up Your Ass in the spring of 1967 inthe basement of the Chelsea Hotel.

Andy hired Valerie to perform in his film, I, a Man, where sheplayed a tough butch lesbian rejecting a man’s pickup lines in

a stairway. (©2014 The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh,PA, A museum of Carnegie Institute. All rights reserved.)

Famed restaurant and Andy Warhol hangout, Max’s KansasCity, New York City, 1976. (Photo: Bob Gruen.)

Andy Warhol and members of the Factory, New York City,October 30, 1969. (Photo: Richard Avedon.)

Andy Warhol, artist, New York, August 20, 1969. Andy Warholdisplays his scars after recovering from the shooting. (Photo:

Richard Avedon.)

Valerie is escorted to a police car after her arrest in TimesSquare on June 3, 1968. (Photo courtesy of Jeremiah

Newton.)

Valerie smiles as she enters the New York Police Departmentbuilding after shooting Andy Warhol and Mario Amaya.

(Photo: Frank Russo / Getty Images.)

Valerie is held behind bars on June 3, 1968. (Photo JerryHaynes / New York Daily News.)

Radical feminist Ti-Grace Atkinson giving a talk in 1971.(Photo: Bill Sanders.)

Radical feminist Roxanne Dunbar (later Dunbar-Ortiz) uponher graduation from her graduate program at the University

of California, Los Angeles, 1967. (Photo courtesy of RoxanneDunbar-Ortiz.)

Florynce “Flo” Kennedy, famed civil rights attorney, servedas Valerie’s lawyer immediately after the Warhol shootings.

(Photo courtesy of Ti-Grace Atkinson.)

Various editions of SCUM Manifesto: 1968 (left), 1971(center), and 2004 (right).

Valerie marked her own graffiti on the 1971 copy of SCUMManifesto held by the New York Public Library, calling VivianGornick a “flea” and saying that Maurice Girodias’s version

of her text was “full of sabotaging typos.”

Valerie self-published this correct version of SCUM Manifestoin 1977, distributing it via mail and through local bookstores

in the East Village. (Photo courtesy of The DobkinCollection.)

An advertisement placed in the Village Voice by ValerieSolanas on April 27, 1967. (First published in the Village

Voice, a Village Voice Media publication.)

Valerie printed this advertisement for her 1977 SCUMManifesto in the May 28-June 10, 1977 issue of the feministnewsletter, Majority Report. (Photo courtesy of Redstockings

Women’s Liberation Archives for Action.)

Matteawan State Hospital, Beacon, New York, 2008. (Photo:© Christopher Payne, from Asylum: Inside the Closed World of

State Mental Hospitals.)

Valerie after leaving prison, circa 1975.

Valerie bathed in the fountain at the Phoenix civic plaza(photographed here in 1984 and later demolished) most

nights around three in the morning during the 1980s. This isnow the site of the Phoenix Art Museum. (Photo: Argenta

Images.)

Louis Zwiren, Valerie’s romantic partner during the late1970s, seen here in his New York State Social Servicesphotograph, ca. 1975. (Photo courtesy of Louis Zwiren.)

Valerie at the High Times offices in early 1977. (Photo byHoward Berman. Reprinted with permission from High Times

magazine.)

Valerie’s mother chose to bury her at the bucolic St. Mary’sCatholic Church Cemetery at 5612 Ox Road in Fairfax

Station, Virginia. This church, also known as “Our Lady ofSorrows,” once inspired Clara Barton to found the AmericanRed Cross after tending to wounded soldiers here during the

Civil War.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

THE WORK OF CONSTRUCTING THE LIFE OF VALERIE SOLANAS—doing justice to her complexity anduniqueness—has been a daunting and often overwhelming task, one that has called on so manysources of support for these many years. Sifting through thousands of fragments and grappling with theenormity of Valerie herself has put me in the debt of numerous people, most specifically those whom Ihave interviewed over the years about Valerie’s life and work. The book absolutely would not existwithout the tremendous effort put forth in the early and mid-1990s by film director Mary Harron, whomanaged the herculean feat of constructing and reconstructing Valerie’s story with the help of herresearch and film team for the 1996 movie I Shot Andy Warhol. When she handed me boxes full ofdocuments in September 2008, I knew that I finally had enough fragments to write this book.

I also extend deep gratitude to Ti-Grace Atkinson, a force of nature in her own right and one of thefounders of the radical feminist movement, who not only spent an entire weekend telling me her storybut also became a friend, mentor, confidante, and teacher. To radical feminists Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz,Dana Densmore, Kathie Sarachild, and Rosalyn Baxandall, your stories and words have changed mylife, taught me how to see the root of things, and added much depth and nuance to Valerie asprovocateur. Thanks especially to Jane Caputi for capturing that combination of tragedy and awe thatValerie’s life summons for those of us still drawn to her orbit. Many thanks to Ben Morea, who lefthis other life in order to return as himself to tell the stories of Valerie and Up Against the Wall,Motherfucker. His graciousness and generosity attest to the profound connections made possible byradical social movements. To Jeremiah Newton, Valerie’s “baby brother,” and to Louis Zwiren, thankyou for the conversations that painted Valerie as wholly human and, in these small circles, truly wellloved.

I have immense gratitude for the team at the Feminist Press and for my editor, Amy Scholder,whose wisdom, patience, and dedication to Valerie’s story have ensured the publication of not onlythis manuscript but also the 2004 Verso Press edition of SCUM Manifesto. Many thanks to RomainePerin, for copyediting the book, and to Jeanann Pannasch, Elizabeth Koke, and Drew Stevens,Feminist Press warriors.

Thank you to Ultra Violet, Lorraine Miller, Vivian Gornick, Sylvia Miles, CJ Scheiner, PaulMorrissey, Bud Maxwell Vasconcellos, Jacqueline Ceballos, Jo Freeman, Sheila Tobias, and MargoFeiden, who contextualized Andy Warhol and the Factory, filled in vivid details from the day of theshooting, mused about Valerie, and added further contradictions to such an already complicatedwoman. Donny Smith and Freddy Baer, your groundwork on Valerie paved the way for this story—thank you. I am enormously grateful to Valerie’s cousin, the ever gracious and recently departedRobert Fustero, for providing access to the family stories, photos, and idiosyncrasies, and toValerie’s son, David Blackwell, and Valerie’s sister, Judith Martinez Solanas, for what they gave.

Certainly, this book would still be languishing in purgatory without the institutional support I havereceived from Arizona State University, Duke University, and the University of Michigan. ArizonaState University’s Center for Critical Inquiry and Cultural Studies provided support for photos andtravel costs to conduct some of the interviews, while the Scholarship for Research and CreativeActivities grant through Arizona State University funded two summer’s worth of work. DeanElizabeth Langland’s support of my work came at just the right time—thank you! I also had the truepleasure of doing archival research at the Duke University Sallie Bingham Center for Women’s

History and Culture while on a Mary Lily Research Grant in the summer of 2008. Thank you to thesuperb archivist Kelly Wooten and to Duke for investing in, and preserving, the history of radicalfeminism. I am also grateful to the Dobkin Collection, particularly Sarah Funke Butler, who sogenerously helped me with documents and photos concerning Valerie from their collection. I owethanks to the University of Michigan, which provided funding to visit the Andy Warhol Museumarchives in Pittsburgh back in 2006 and to Matt Wrbican, lead archivist at the Warhol archives, andGreg Burchard, the rights and reproductions specialist, who provided many of the rich histories anddocuments about Valerie during the late 1960s and early 1970s.

For the many striking images in this book, I owe gratitude to numerous photographers, archivists,and friends: I thank the estate of Diane Arbus, Richard Avedon, Howard Berman, Jennifer Bertagni,David Blackwell, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, Robert Fustero, Matt Grace, Bob Gruen, Jeremiah Newton,Fred Palumbo, Christopher Payne, Drew Stevens, and Louis Zwiren.

I have also had the great fortune of working with a number of talented students, whose energy,talent, and bravery humbles me every day. They have propelled the book along by fact-checking,taking photos, tracking down contact information, reading drafts, compiling references, thinkingdeeply about Valerie’s life, and providing humor and laughter amid this most tragic of stories. Loveand thanks to Jennifer Bertagni, the crème de la crème, whose imprint is everywhere in this text, andwhose support brought so much life and passion to the work—words cannot describe how much Ihave valued our many conversations about Valerie over the years. Thanks to the Feminist Research onGender and Sexuality Group—the FROGS—whose extraordinary work ethic, diligence, earnestness,and passion have kept me going. I owe much to those who have worked on this text and who believedin Valerie’s story, particularly Michelle Ashley Gohr, Adrielle Munger, Kelly Trujillo, Jaqueline“Jax” Gonzalez, Kalen Brest, Denise Delgado, Jennifer Pryor, Kathleen Courter, Judith Sipes,Mitchell Call, Perla Solorzano, Michael Karger, Emily Dolan, Rose Coursey, Stephanie Robinson-Cestaro, Natali Blazevic, Yessica del Rincon, Eva Sisko, Amanda Garcia, Victoria Guinn, andMarisa Loiacono.

I extend appreciation to my many colleagues and friends who have contributed so much to thisproject. Susannah Straw-Gast gave me my first copy of SCUM Manifesto at college back in 1999—thank you, thank you, thank you. Carroll Smith-Rosenberg first validated my interest in writing a bookon Valerie and, in so many ways, deserves recognition for this book’s existence. Thanks to DeborahMartinson, superwoman of feminist biography—I adore you and will never have enough words withwhich to sing your praises. Thanks to my colleagues at Arizona State University and beyond,particularly Marlene Tromp, Monica Casper, Stephanie Fink, Elizabeth Langland, Patrick Grzanka,Mary Margaret Fonow, Michael Starcliff, Ilana Luna, Gloria Cuadraz, Valerie Kemper, Clare Croft,Leonore Tiefer, Rebecca Plante, Andrew Smiler, Virginia Braun, Michelle Tea, Rose Carlson,Jennifer Baumgardner, Michael Kimmel, and Abby Stewart.

Thanks especially to my family, particularly my incredible mother, who dug up genealogy onValerie, read drafts, tracked down Holy Titclamps for a Christmas present, and endured with suchspirited and generous attention my many “daily briefings” in the world of Valerie research. To mysister, I love you and all the warmth you’ve shown for this project. To my cousin Chris Brown, thanksfor all the laughs and for the mortician’s insights about Valerie’s death, and to my aunt Marilee Davis,I so appreciate our conversations about Our Lady of Sorrows and all the love you give to me. SaraMcClelland, my simpatico friend who may very well be the most gracious person on earth, you neverwavered from seeing this work as significant and reminding me why it matters. Sarah Stage and MaryDudy, I would be lost without you and love you dearly. To my friends, near and far—especially Lori

Errico-Seaman, Sean Seaman, Denise Delgado, Garyn Tsuru, Jennifer Tamir, Marcy Winokur, SteveDuBois, Devaki Ramalingam, Annika Mann, Joe Rheinhardt, Sharon Kirsch, Robert Wardy, JoannaMartori, Jan Habarth, Anne Hager, Damon Whitaker, Pat Hart, Karen Swank-Fitch, Ursula Swank,Wendy D’Andrea, Connie Hardesty, Toby Oshiro, Marc Lombardo, and David Frost—who neverthought me foolish for writing a book about a feminist assassin while going up for tenure, and whonever reduced the complexity and utter force of Valerie’s story, I love you all.

Finally, with full awareness of the irony in doing so, I dedicate this book to two extraordinary men.I wrote this book for Elmer Griffin, my great teacher, for showing me the power of radical thoughtand how to use its transformative energy to write, read, think, and live. And for Eric Swank, for allthose qualities that evade words, and for showing me what is possible.

NOTES

PREFACE1. “She was paranoid, hostile, violent and so impossible to deal with that one person I talked to insisted on being shown a copy of her

death certificate before he agreed to be interviewed.” Mary Harron, letter to British Broadcasting Company, September 26, 1992,Mary Harron personal collection, Brooklyn, NY.

2. Valerie Solanas, SCUM Manifesto (San Francisco, 1996), 28. Unless otherwise noted, all quotes from the SCUM Manifesto are fromthis edition.

3. Ti-Grace Atkinson, interview by Breanne Fahs, Cambridge, MA, February 1, 2008.4. Smith, “The History of Zines.”5. Valerie Solanas, letter to Ti-Grace Atkinson, June 16, 1968, Ti-Grace Atkinson personal collection, Cambridge, MA.6. Quote from Marmorstein, “SCUM Goddess,” 11.

SOUNDING OFF1. Atkinson, interview by Fahs, February 1, 2008; the Field Boss, “15 Minutes Later”; Ti-Grace Atkinson, as quoted in Fahs, “Radical

Possibilities”; Norman Mailer, as quoted in Mary Harron and Daniel Minahan, I Shot Andy Warhol, viii; Gaither, “Andy Warhol’sFeminist Nightmare”; Coburn, “Valerie’s Gang,” 9; Margo Feiden, interview by Breanne Fahs, New York, March 15, 2010.

2. Jeremiah Newton, interview by Breanne Fahs, New York, March 14, 2010.3. Valerie Solanas, “Up Your Ass” (mimeograph), 1965, Andy Warhol Museum Archives, Pittsburgh, PA, 1. Other copies are currently in

Margo Feiden personal collection, New York; and Ti-Grace Atkinson personal collection, Cambridge, MA.4. Valerie Solanas, letter to Ti-Grace Atkinson, July 5, 1968, Ti-Grace Atkinson personal collection, Cambridge, MA.5. Jo Freeman (aka Joreen), interview by Breanne Fahs, phone, October 14, 2010.6. Birth certificate, Valerie Jean Solanas. Valerie’s name was misspelled, as Valerie Jean Solanus, as was her father’s, as Louis Solanus.7. Quote from Harron and Minahan, introduction to I Shot Andy Warhol, xi.8. Judith Martinez, as quoted in Jobey, “Solanas and Son.”9. Martinez, as quoted in Jobey, “Solanas and Son.”10. Coburn, “Valerie’s Gang,” 9.11. Louis Zwiren, as quoted in Smith, “To Live with a Man,” 3.12. Marmorstein, “SCUM Goddess,” 9.13. Michaelson, “Valerie.”14. Harron and Minahan, introduction to I Shot Andy Warhol, xii.15. Jobey, “Solanas and Son.”16. Coburn, “Valerie’s Gang,” 9.17. Jobey, “Solanas and Son.”18. Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, interview by Breanne Fahs, San Francisco, December 11, 2008.19. Robert Fustero, interview by Breanne Fahs, phone, September 20, 2008.20. Michaelson, “Valerie.”21. Peter Moritz Pickshaus, letter to Mary Harron, March 12, 1993, Mary Harron personal collection, Brooklyn, NY.22. Fustero, interview by Fahs, September 20, 2008.23. Michaelson, “Valerie.”24. Robert Fustero, interview by Breanne Fahs, Silver Spring, MD, May 25, 2012.25. Fustero, interview by Fahs, May 25, 2012.26. Fustero, interview by Fahs, May 25, 2012.27. Dr. Arthur Sternberg and Dr. Mannuccio Mannucci, psychological report, Elmhurst Hospital, June 26, 1968, Mary Harron personal

collection, Brooklyn, NY.28. Martinez, as quoted in Coburn, “Valerie’s Gang,” 9.29. Fustero, interview, September 20, 2008; May 25, 2012.30. Martinez, as quoted in Michaelson, “Valerie,” 9.31. Martinez, as quoted in Michaelson, “Valerie,” 35.32. Jane Caputi, interview by Breanne Fahs, Atlanta, GA, November 15, 2009.33. Fustero, interview by Fahs, May 25, 2012.34. Michaelson, “Valerie.”35. Michaelson, “Valerie.”36. Linda Moran’s genealogical website (http://www.biondocella.com/showphoto.php?personID=I5&tree=Linda&ordernum=1) states

that Moran was born April 8, 1951, to Edward Francis Moran and Dorothy Marie Biondo; these dates would confirm this time line.37. Fustero, interview by Fahs, September 20, 2008.38. Watson, Factory Made, 35; Valerie Solanas, letter to Louis Solanas, May 23, 1970; June 29, 1967, in Breanne Fahs personal

collection, Phoenix, AZ.39. David Blackwell, letter to Mary Harron, June 5, 1996, Andy Warhol Museum Archive, Pittsburgh, PA.40. Martinez, as quoted in Coburn, “Valerie’s Gang,” 9.41. Michaelson, “Valerie.”42. Martinez, as quoted in Watson, Factory Made, 36.43. Blackwell, letter to Mary Harron, June 5, 1996.44. Blackwell, letter to Mary Harron, June 5, 1996.45. Jobey, “Solanas and Son.”46. Jobey, “Solanas and Son.”47. David Blackwell, interview by Breanne Fahs, phone, November 6, 2011.48. Fustero, interview by Fahs, September 20, 2008.49. Jobey, “Solanas and Son.”50. Blackwell, interview by Fahs, November 6, 2011.51. Michaelson, “Valerie.”52. Watson, Factory Made, 36.53. Michaelson, “Valerie.”54. Martinez, “University of Maryland.”55. Michaelson, “Valerie.”56. Church, Brush, and Solomon, “Traumatic Avoidance Learning.” See also Brush, “The Effects of Shock Intensity”; Brush, “On the

Differences.”57. Solanas, SCUM Manifesto, 1.58. Harron and Minahan, introduction to I Shot Andy Warhol, xiii–xiv.59. Michaelson, “Valerie.”60. Michaelson, “Valerie.”61. Mary Harron, personal notes, circa 1992, Mary Harron personal collection, Brooklyn, NY. Harron believed that Brush was the first

person she contacted who had expressed sympathy for Valerie.62. Harron and Minahan, introduction to I Shot Andy Warhol, xiv.63. Michaelson, “Valerie.”64. Michaelson, “Valerie.”65. Harron and Minahan, introduction to I Shot Andy Warhol, iv.66. Harron and Minahan, introduction to I Shot Andy Warhol, xiii.67. Coburn, “Valerie’s Gang,” 9.68. Solanas, Diamondback.69. Coburn, “Valerie’s Gang,” 9.70. Harron, personal notes, circa 1992.71. Harron and Minahan, introduction to I Shot Andy Warhol, xv.72. Arthur Sternberg and Joseph E. Rubenstein, Elmhurst Hospital psychological report, May 28, 1969, Mary Harron personal collection,

Brooklyn, NY.73. Dick Spottiswood, interview by Mary Harron, New York, circa 1992.74. Harron and Minahan, introduction to I Shot Andy Warhol, xv. See also Spottiswood, interview by Harron, circa 1992.75. Spottiswood, interview by Harron, circa 1992.76. Fustero, interview by Fahs, September 20, 2008.77. Fustero, interview by Fahs, September 20, 2008.78. Coburn, “Valerie’s Gang,” 9.79. Jobey, “Solanas and Son.”80. Newton, interview by Fahs, March 14, 2010.81. Fustero, interview by Fahs, September 20, 2008.82. Ramon Martinez, as quoted in Coburn, “Valerie’s Gang,” 9.83. Watson, Factory Made, 241.84. Ultra Violet, notes about Valerie’s whereabouts, Ultra Violet personal collection, New York. The Library of Congress recorded that

Valerie registered “Up Your Ass,” giving 79 Washington Place as her address, on June 11, 1965.85. Valerie Solanas, “A Young Girl’s Primer” [“For 2c: Pain, The Survival Game Gets Pretty Ugly”], Cavalier, July 1966, 38–40, 76–77.86. Harron and Minahan, introduction to I Shot Andy Warhol, xvii.87. Solanas, “A Young Girl’s Primer,” 39. Further page numbers appear in the text.

88. Jay, Tales of a Lavender Menace, 143.89. Coburn, “Valerie’s Gang,” 11.90. Solanas, “Up Your Ass,” 6.91. Solomon, “Whose Soiree Now?”92. Solanas, “Up Your Ass,” 1–5. Further page numbers appear in the text.93. Billy Name was a photographer in Warhol’s inner circle. Warhol “adopted” him into the Factory. Billy hand-painted his large silver

trunk, now on display at the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, after the Factory adopted the motif of the color silver.94. Warner, “‘Scummy’ Acts,’” 52–55. For a thorough treatment of the specifics of the chronology of the “Up Your Ass” copies, and for

an exposition of why Andy’s losing Valerie’s copy did not result in the shooting per se, see 50–64. The following institutions possess orhave possessed copies of “Up Your Ass”: Hofstra University (copy acquired in 1971), the University of Virginia (acquired between1964 and 1977), Indiana University (acquisition date unknown), and the University of Arizona (acquired in 2003 but now lost).

95. Valerie Solanas, letter to Andy Warhol, February 9, 1966, Andy Warhol Museum Archives, Pittsburgh, PA.96. Up Your Ass ran at the George Coates Theater in San Francisco, January 12–April 8, 2000, and then traveled to PS 122 in New

York, February 7–25, 2001, returning to San Francisco, January 18–21, 2001.97. Solomon, “Whose Soiree Now?” 64.98. Solanas, “A Young Girl’s Primer,” 38–39.99. Harron and Minahan, introduction to I Shot Andy Warhol, xvii.100. Newton, interview by Fahs, March 14, 2010.101. Fustero, interview by Fahs, September 20, 2008.102. Marmorstein, “SCUM Goddess,” 9.103. Marmorstein, “SCUM Goddess,” 9.

SHOOTING1. Fahs, “Radical Possibilities,” 591–92.2. Smith, “The Shot That Shattered the Velvet Underground.”3. Rowe, “Just Read My Manifesto.” See also Fahs, “Radical Possibilities,” 591.4. Mary Harron, notes for I Shot Andy Warhol, Mary Harron personal collection, Brooklyn, NY.5. Valerie Solanas, “SCUM flier meeting announcement,” May 23, 1967, Andy Warhol Museum Archive, Pittsburgh, PA.6. Solanas, SCUM Manifesto, 1. (Further page numbers appear in the text.)7. Ronell, “Deviant Payback,” 16–17.8. Newton, interview by Fahs, March 14, 2010.9. Solanas, “SCUM flier meeting announcement.”10. Solanas, SCUM Manifesto, 39.11. Anne Koedt, interview by Mary Harron, New York, circa 1992.12. Michaelson, “Valerie.”13. Archibald, “Inventory/How to Join the Men’s Auxiliary.” The ad was reproduced in Fictional States, no. 18 (Summer 2005).14. Atkinson, interview by Fahs, February 1, 2008.15. Chase, “The Twig Benders,” 3.16. Atkinson, interview by Fahs, February 1, 2008.17. Newton, interview by Fahs, March 14, 2010.18. Dominic, Queen of Peace Room, 56.19. Newton, script notes for Mary Harron, 1994. Later, when Candy was asked about the Andy Warhol shooting, she said, “Valerie

shouldn’t be judged by us for what she did.” She adamantly refused to criticize Valerie’s attack against Warhol, even though Candyherself loved him. See Newton, interview by Fahs, March 14, 2010.

20. “English” Pat may also have gone by the name Ingrid Phorn. When Mary Harron’s research and film assistants tried to find her inthe early 1990s, no one had seen or heard from her in quite some time. See Newton, interview by Fahs, March 14, 2010.

21. Unidentified acquaintance, as quoted in Smith, “The Shot That Shattered the Velvet Underground.”22. Guiles, Loner at the Ball, 301.23. Jeremiah Newton, letter to Mary Harron, June 25, 1993, Mary Harron personal collection, Brooklyn, NY.24. Newton, letter to Mary Harron, June 25, 1993.25. Newton, interview by Fahs, March 14, 2010.26. Newton, interview by Fahs, March 14, 2010.27. Newton, letter to Mary Harron, June 25, 1993.28. Newton, interview by Fahs, March 14, 2010.29. Warner, “‘Scummy Acts,’” 208.30. Watson, Factory Made, 352. See also Newton, interview by Fahs, March 14, 2010.

31. Newton, letter to Harron, June 25, 1993.32. Jeremiah Newton, letter to Mary Harron, undated, Mary Harron personal collection, Brooklyn, NY. Daniel Burke, Alan Burke’s son,

relayed to Diane Tucker, a researcher at the British Broadcasting Corporation, that no tape of this show exists any longer: “I couldfind nothing else that I felt was what you were looking for. Most video from the 60’s and early 70’s was on two inch tape. The cost ofkeeping tapes from that period was apparently so expensive that it was the practice of many broadcasters to reuse the tapes if therewas no plan to rebroadcast them.” Daniel Burke, letter to Diane Tucker, September 9, 1993, Mary Harron personal collection,Brooklyn, NY.

33. Marmorstein, “SCUM Goddess,” 9.34. Newton, interview by Fahs, March 14, 2010.35. Newton, interview by Fahs, March 14, 2010.36. Solanas, “SCUM Flier Meeting Announcement.”37. Marmorstein, “SCUM Goddess,” 9.38. Marmorstein, “SCUM Goddess,” 9.39. Watson, Factory Made, 351.40. Louise Thompson, interview by Mary Harron, New York, circa 1992.41. Scherman and Dalton, Pop, 419–20.42. Watson, Factory Made, 299.43. “Valerie Solanis [sic] Interviews Andy.” (transcript), undated (circa 1967), Pittsburgh, PA, Andy Warhol Museum Archive.44. Koedt, interview by Harron, circa 1992.45. Watson, Factory Made, 299.46. Shirley, “Slum Gods.” See also Sanders, Fug You, 314–15.47. Valerie Solanas, advertisement for Up Your Ass, Village Voice, February 16, 1967, 22, as cited in Warner, “‘Scummy Acts,’” 58.48. Marmorstein, “SCUM Goddess,” 9–10.49. Doyle, Sex Objects, 32.50. Watson, Factory Made, 299.51. Ultra Violet, interview by Breanne Fahs, New York, April 17, 2012.52. Harron and Minahan, introduction to I Shot Andy Warhol, xvii.53. Andy Warhol, interview by Cahiers du cinema, May 1967, Paris. This was mentioned in Scherman and Dalton, Pop, 317.54. Rich, “Manifesto Destiny,” 16.55. Harron, research notes for introduction to I Shot Andy Warhol, Mary Harron personal collection, Brooklyn, NY.56. In a permanent exhibit viewed on April 14, 2012, at the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, there is a quote that details this fact.57. Ultra Violet, interview by Fahs, April 17, 2012.58. Harron, “Pop Art/Art Pop.”59. Ultra Violet, Famous for 15 Minutes, 185.60. Harron, “Pop Art/Art Pop.”61. Coutros, “Offbeat Artist/Producer.”62. “The Ultra Violet Interview.”63. Michaelson, “Valerie.”64. Ultra Violet, interview by Fahs, April 17, 2012.65. The quote is from Marmorstein, “SCUM Goddess,” 9.66. Harron and Minahan, introduction to I Shot Andy Warhol, xix.67. Tallmer, “Andy Warhol.” See also Faso and Lee, “Actress Defiant,” 40.68. Harron, research notes for introduction of I Shot Andy Warhol.69. Harron, “Pop Art/Art Pop.”70. Jeremiah Newton, interview by Mary Harron, New York, circa 1994.71. Scherman and Dalton, Pop, 385.72. Harron and Minahan, introduction to I Shot Andy Warhol, xix.73. Paul Morrissey, interview by Breanne Fahs, phone, April 7, 2011.74. Harron and Minahan, introduction to I Shot Andy Warhol, xix.75. Ultra Violet, Famous for 15 Minutes, 167–68.76. Ultra Violet, interview by Fahs, April 17, 2012.77. Watson, Factory Made, 316–17.78. Woronov, Swimming Underground, 373.79. Jeremiah Newton, letter to Mary Harron, July 19, 1994, Mary Harron personal collection, Brooklyn, NY.80. Bockris, Life and Death of Andy Warhol, 1998 edition, 211.81. Rosalyn Baxandall, interview by Breanne Fahs, New York, April 8, 2011.82. Louis Zwiren as quoted in Donny Smith, “Proving You’re Not Crazy,” 24.83. Much of the early work compiling the bibliography related to Valerie Solanas was done by Donny Smith. His zine, DWAN, named

after his drag name given to him by his friend Susan, included three Solanas supplements. The first outlined different documents andarticles that discussed Valerie and it provided an initial outline of the different editions of SCUM Manifesto available (including,notably, her self-published writings). Smith also interviewed several acquaintances and friends of Valerie in the next two Solanassupplements, both of which are cited frequently in this text—see Ruel Gaviola, “Donny Didn’t Shoot Andy Warhol.” In an interviewby Donny Smith about his interest in Valerie, he said, “I’m interested in lesbian culture and history, especially lesbian separatism. Butwhenever I come across something about lesbians written by a man, I think, ‘Boy, that’s creepy.’ But then how is he any differentfrom me? Anyway, maybe about 1989, I was crawling through the stacks of Love Library in Lincoln, Nebraska, searching for a bookwhose title I couldn’t remember, but I had a general idea where I’d seen it on the shelf. And I found instead a book called RANTS,which included an excerpt from SCUM Manifesto. I was amazed. It was like what I’d been waiting for all my life. Sharp and crazyand completely poetic. Like a more modern William Blake. Plus a lesbian.”

84. Valerie Solanas, letter to Andy Warhol, August 1, 1967, Andy Warhol Museum Archive, Pittsburgh, PA.85. Watson, Factory Made, 325.86. Ultra Violet, Famous for 15 Minutes, 183.87. “Valerie Solanis Interviews Andy,” 25–27.88. “Valerie Solanis Interviews Andy,” 19–20.89. The Margo Feiden draft and that of Ti-Grace Atkinson of “Up Your Ass” are both clearly older versions of the play than the version

Andy Warhol received. The “SCUM Book” had the most finalized version and was distributed relatively widely. At least threeuniversities have versions of the “SCUM Book” in their collections (Hofstra, Virginia, and Indiana).

90. Valerie Solanas, postcard to Louis Solanas, June 14, 1967, Breanne Fahs personal collection, Phoenix, AZ.91. Valerie Solanas, postcard to Louis Solanas, June 29, 1967, Robert Fustero personal collection, Silver Spring, MD.92. Warhol and Hackett, POPism, 271. Although Andy referred to I, a Man being filmed in September, it was actually filmed in June

1967. The first version of the film ran ninety-nine minutes and opened at the Hudson Theatre on August 24, 1967. See Angell, Filmsof Andy Warhol.

93. Michaelson, “Valerie.”94. I, a Man, directed by Andy Warhol, 1967–1968, Andy Warhol Museum Archives, Pittsburgh, PA. Clips of this film are available on

YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sPQVtIk3g7s). Valerie saw the film with Maurice Girodias and recalled that, on seeingIvy Nicholson there, he remarked, “Oh, that’s Ivy Nicholson, who used to eat my wife.” See Geoffrey LeGear, letter to MauriceGirodias, December 1, 1968, Andy Warhol Museum Archive, Pittsburgh, PA.

95. Ultra Violet, Famous for 15 Minutes, 169. See also Bockris, Life and Death of Andy Warhol, 2003 edition, 273.96. Bockris, Life and Death of Andy Warhol, 2003 edition, 273.97. Though Freddy Baer suggested that Valerie had a nonspeaking role in Bikeboy, Valerie did not. She asked Viva (who was at the time

complaining loudly about menstrual cramps) what she made on Bikeboy and discovered that they both received twenty dollars. See“Valerie Solanis Interviews Andy,” 10.

98. Ultra Violet, Famous for 15 Minutes, 169; Harron and Minahan, introduction to I Shot Andy Warhol, xxi; Marmorstein, “SCUMGoddess,” 9.

99. Judith Martinez, as quoted in Watson, Factory Made, 352.100. Valerie Solanas, letter to Louis Solanas, August 4, 1967, Breanne Fahs personal collection, Phoenix, AZ.101. Bockris, Life and Death of Andy Warhol, 2003 edition, 280.102. Ogar, “She Slept Here.”103. Harron and Minahan, I Shot Andy Warhol, 109.104. Girodias, “Notice to Unknown Writers.” Note that there was also a copy of this published in the 1968 Olympia Press version of

SCUM Manifesto.105. Victoria Morheim, Girodias’s assistant, described this in De St. Jorre, Venus Bound. Valerie once ran into Arthur Miller at the

Chelsea and thrust a flier into his hands to urge him to attend a SCUM meeting.106. Girodias, introduction to S.C.U.M. Manifesto.107. Maurice Girodias, interview by Mary Harron, New York, circa 1992.108. Harron and Minahan, introduction to I Shot Andy Warhol, xxi.109. “Maurice Girodias,” Encyclopedia Britannica.110. CJ Scheiner, interview by Breanne Fahs, February 7, 2011. The preceding quote from Scheiner is also from this interview.111. Harron and Minahan, introduction to I Shot Andy Warhol, xxi.112. Maurice Girodias, contract with Valerie Solanas, August 29, 1967, Mary Harron personal collection.113. Watson, Factory Made, 334.114. Harron and Minahan, introduction to I Shot Andy Warhol, xxi. See also Watson, Factory Made, 334; Michaelson, “Valerie.” Valerie

denied this occurrence, as mentioned by LeGear in LeGear, letter to Girodias, December 1, 1968.115. Harron and Minahan, introduction to I Shot Andy Warhol, xxi.116. Friedman, interview by Mary Harron, New York, circa 1992.117. Valerie Solanas, letter to Howard Smith, September 27, 1968, Dobkin Collection, New York.118. Paul Morrissey, as quoted in “June 3, 1968.”

119. Watson, Factory Made, 334.120. Scheiner, interview by Fahs, February 7, 2011.121. Harron and Minahan, introduction to I Shot Andy Warhol, xxii.122. Solanas, letter to Smith, September 27, 1968.123. Harron and Minahan, introduction to I Shot Andy Warhol, xxii.124. Harron and Minahan, introduction to I Shot Andy Warhol, xxii–xxiii.125. Solomon, “Whose Soiree Now?” 46.126. Barron, “A Manuscript.”127. Harron and Minahan, introduction to I Shot Andy Warhol, xxiii.128. Jobey, “Solanas and Son.”129. Harron and Minahan, introduction to I Shot Andy Warhol, xxiii. The letter was likely written the second or third week of January

1968 before Valerie left for California.130. Valerie Solanas, letter to Andy Warhol, February 10, 1968, Andy Warhol Museum Archive, Pittsburgh, PA.131. Watson, Factory Made, 367; Coburn, “Valerie’s Gang,” 11.132. Coburn, “Valerie’s Gang,” 11.133. Valerie Solanas, letter to Andy Warhol, January 25, 1968, Andy Warhol Museum Archive, Pittsburgh, PA. Further dates are shown

in the text.134. Ogar, “She Slept Here.”135. Ogar, “She Slept Here.”136. Accounts differ about whether she met Geoffrey LeGear in 1968 in the San Francisco area or whether they were friends prior to

this trip. For claims that they met there, see Watson, Factory Made, 367. For hints that they may have met earlier than that, seeGeoffrey LeGear, letter to Andy Warhol, December 3, 1968, Andy Warhol Museum Archive, Pittsburgh, PA, and LeGear, letter toGirodias, December 1, 1968.

137. Geoffrey LeGear, email message to Breanne Fahs, February 4, 2014.138. Coburn, “Valerie’s Gang,” 11.139. Watson, Factory Made, 367.140. Fahs, “Reading Between the Lines.”141. John McMillian, as quoted in McLemee, “Dark Superstar,” July 2, 2004, http://www.mclemee.com/id72.html.142. Ben Morea, interview by Breanne Fahs, phone, March 10, 2011. See also Ben Morea, interview by Breanne Fahs, March 18, 2012,

Brooklyn, NY. In “The History of Zines,” Smith reports that Valerie got a few Greenwich Village bookstores to carry hermimeographed copies of the manifesto, which is likely where she stole the copy to give to Morea, given that the first Olympia Pressedition of the manifesto was not released until after the 1968 shooting. These bookstores included Eighth Street Bookshop, at 17 WestEighth Street; Sheridan Square Paperback Corner, at 10 Sheridan Square; Underground Uplift Unlimited, at 20 St. Marks Place;Tompkins Square Book Store, at 97 Avenue B; and East Side Book Store, at 17 St. Mark’s Place. See Valerie Solanas, SCUMAdvertisement, Village Voice, February 2, 1967.

143. Morea, interview by Fahs, March 10, 2011. The quotes from Ben Morea that follow are from this interview.144. “Statement of Valerie Jean Solanas Made to Roderick Lankler, Assistant District Attorney,” public document, June 3, 1968, Mary

Harron personal collection, Brooklyn, NY.145. Michaelson, “Valerie.”146. Sanders, Fug You, 315.147. Allen LeMond, interview by Mary Harron, New York, circa 1992.148. Krassner, Confessions.149. Cohen, “Hung Like an Obelisk.”150. LeGear, letter to Girodias, December 1, 1968.151. Bockris, Life and Death of Andy Warhol, 2003 edition, 290.152. Morea, interview by Fahs, March 10, 2011.153. Scherman and Dalton, Pop, 421.154. Watson, Factory Made, 378.155. Cohen, “Hung Like an Obelisk.”156. Sylvia Miles, interview by Breanne Fahs, New York, April 9, 2011.157. Margo Feiden, now a famed art dealer in New York City, often went by the name Margo Eden then. “In those days you had to have

a stage name, and I was surprised when [Valerie] asked me if I was Margo Feiden.” See O’Brien, “History Rewire.” Glenn O’Brienedited Interview magazine for three years, wrote its music column, and was a definite Andy Warhol supporter. See also “MargoFeiden Sets Guinness Book of World Records.”

158. I interviewed Margo Feiden at this same location—a space she has lived in for at least forty-five years. In my first meeting with her,she practically floated down her staircase to greet me. She was dressed all in black and her hair was styled in long red pigtails;(eerily) she wore a sailor’s cap nearly identical to the one Valerie almost always wore. She offered me handmade seltzer water andfrequently interrupted our conversation to tell her assistant to deal with the ever-present sound of her hyperactive alarm system in the

apartment. With intense emotionality and careful description, Margo recalled the events of that morning in impeccable detail.159. Feiden, interview by Fahs, March 15, 2010. Further quotes from Margo Feiden are from this interview.160. Assistant district attorney Roderick Lankler took notes about Margo Feiden on June 4, 1968, the day after the shooting. He recorded

Margo’s name, along with information about Valerie’s visit to The Alan Burke Show.161. When I asked Feiden why she had waited forty-one years to tell anyone what had transpired that morning, she divulged, “I was

traumatized. It was the age of Kent State, where mistrust of everyone was everywhere. I was never suspicious of police before.When you’re lost or in trouble, you find the police, but when they wouldn’t take the call, I feared that I would be a target and that thepolice would concoct a story about what had happened.” Feiden also admitted that she feared Valerie’s retribution for not producingUp Your Ass: “I liked her. I couldn’t not tell the truth. I felt strongly against producing the play and I couldn’t lie to her about it. Theway she listened, you couldn’t bullshit her. She listened on a different wavelength than others did.”

162. Harron and Minahan, introduction to I Shot Andy Warhol, xxv.163. Sleep.164. Krassner, Confessions, 256–57.165. “June 3, 1968”; Watson, Factory Made, 379; Bockris, Life and Death of Andy Warhol, 2003 edition, 296.166. Smith, “The Shot That Shattered the Velvet Underground.”167. Bockris, Life and Death of Andy Warhol, 1998 and 2003 editions; Harron and Minahan, introduction to I Shot Andy Warhol, xxv.

Geoffrey LeGear also said that Valerie denied having worn a skirt when she shot him and that Andy made this up to get publicity overthis. Margo Feiden also said nothing of Valerie wearing makeup or lipstick that morning. See LeGear, letter to Warhol, December 3,1968.

168. Smith, “The Shot That Shattered the Velvet Underground”; Bockris, Life and Death of Andy Warhol, 2003 edition, 197–98, 297.169. “June 3, 1968.”170. In LeGear, letter to Warhol, December 3, 1968, Geoffrey LeGear wrote that Valerie accused Warhol of lying about this phone call

and that “Viva’s being on the phone and seeing the gun are just low moves to get publicity, that there is no truth in them whatsoever.”Harron met Hughes years later; she offered a description: “He is small, neat, impeccably dressed, but brash. I suspect that brashnessis his most likeable characteristic.” See Harron, “Pop Art/Art Pop.” Bockris, Life and Death of Andy Warhol, 2003 edition, 298.

171. “Statement of Valerie Jean Solanas to Lankler.” Valerie admitted to her boyfriend, Louis Zwiren, that she had both of these guns.See Donny Smith, DWAN Solanas Supplement no. 3, 25. For more on the shooting, see Richard F. Shepard, “Warhol GravelyWounded in Studio”, 36. See also Faso, McLaughlin, and Henry, “Andy Warhol Wounded by Actress”; Behrens and Mann, “AndyWarhol Is Shot by Actress.” For a discussion of how much she spent on the Beretta gun, see Girodias, introduction to S.C.U.M.Manifesto, xii.

172. Bockris, Life and Death of Andy Warhol, 1998 edition, 298; Smith, “The Shot That Shattered the Velvet Underground.”173. Bockris, Life and Death of Andy Warhol, 2003 edition, 298; Warhol and Hackett, POPism, 343.174. Smith, “The Shot That Shattered the Velvet Underground”; Bockris, Life and Death of Andy Warhol, 2003 edition, 299.175. Bockris, Life and Death of Andy Warhol, 2003 edition, 299; Smith, “The Shot That Shattered the Velvet Underground”; Warhol

and Hackett, POPism, 345.176. Smith, “The Shot That Shattered the Velvet Underground”; Warhol and Hackett, POPism, 344; Bockris, Life and Death of Andy

Warhol, 2003 edition, 301; Ultra Violet, Famous for 15 Minutes, 169; Malanga et al., Gerard Malanga.177. Mario Amaya recalled the ambulance driver telling him, “If we sound the siren, it’ll cost five dollars extra,” to which Amaya

responded, “Go ahead and sound it. Leo Castelli will pay.” See “Andy Warhol Chronology.”178. Ultra Violet, Famous for 15 Minutes, 170–71; Warhol and Hackett, POPism, 345; Smith, “The Shot That Shattered the Velvet

Underground”; “I Saw Her Walk into the Office.”179. Sergeant Shea, Police Report on Valerie Solanas, New York City police records, June 3, 1968.180. Warhol and Hackett, POPism, 345. See also Bockris, Life and Death of Andy Warhol, 1998 edition; Smith, “The Shot That

Shattered the Velvet Underground.”181. Warhol and Hackett, POPism, 345–46.182. Ultra Violet, Famous for 15 Minutes, 172; Smith, “The Shot That Shattered the Velvet Underground.”183. Ultra Violet, Famous for 15 Minutes, 172. She went home feeling both exhausted and exhilarated. “For all these years now, I’ve

been trained to experience events of every kind in terms of headlines and photographs in the paper. Real emotions? Real feelings?They have been smothered by our obeisance to the media, warped by our need to strike a pose, smile, smile some more, whip out awitty retort” (173–74).

184. Smith, “The Shot That Shattered the Velvet Underground”; “Andy Warhol Fighting for Life”; “Warhol Still Grave.”185. Among the variant spellings reported for this officer’s name were Shemalix and Schmalix. Bockris, Life and Death of Andy

Warhol, 1998 edition. See also Warhol and Hackett, POPism, 349. The first statement about the flower child quote from Valerie wasin Michaelson, “Valerie.” Valerie denied saying this in “Warhol Still Grave.”

186. Indictment paperwork, New York City police records, June 3, 1968. See also Smith, “The Shot That Shattered the VelvetUnderground.”

187. Shepard, “Warhol Gravely Wounded,” June 4, 1968; Dorr-Dorynek, “Lonesome Cowboy”; Smith, “The Shot That Shattered theVelvet Underground”; Ultra Violet, Famous for 15 Minutes. Note that her bail was eventually paid by her friend Geoffrey LeGear.

188. Warhol and Hackett, POPism, 351.189. “Andy Warhol Fighting for Life.” The quote in the heading of this section is from Lou Reed, “Songs for Drella,” as quoted in Fahs,

“Radical Possibilities,” 599. Andy Warhol thought it a strange coincidence that the date of the News headline was precisely six yearsto the day after the June 4, 1962, “129 DIE IN JET” headline that he silkscreened for his painting. See Warhol and Hackett, POPism,349.

190. Ben Morea, as quoted in McMillian, “Ben Morea, Garbage Guerrilla.” Pamphlet by Up Against the Wall, Motherfucker to supportValerie Solanas, June 4, 1968, reprinted in Dorr-Dorynek, “Lonesome Cowboy” and in Kritchman and Smith, “Valerie Lives!” Quotepreceding the pamphlet is from Morea, interview by Fahs, March 10, 2011; see also McLemee, “Dark Superstar.”

191. Harron and Minahan, introduction to I Shot Andy Warhol, xxiv.192. Kaufman and Griffin, Outlaw Bible, 204.193. Harron and Minahan, introduction to I Shot Andy Warhol, xxv.194. Between 9:43 and 9:51 p.m. on June 3, 1968, Valerie had a conversation with Lankler. See “Statement of Valerie Jean Solanas to

Lankler.”195. This copy, with a 1965 copyright and spanning twenty-nine single-spaced pages, was written after Margo Feiden’s partially complete

thirty-plus double-spaced version that contained Valerie’s early notes for the play. This raises questions about the timing of howValerie distributed her copies of the play, as Valerie had only earlier copies on her person when approaching Margo Feiden and LeeStrasberg on the morning of June 3. Nevertheless, Valerie’s relationship to Up Your Ass—whether motivated by seeking fame,subversiveness, a relentless desire to promote the goals of SCUM, or the value she placed on textual integrity—likely contributed toher shooting Andy.

196. Coburn, “Valerie’s Gang,” 9.197. Taubin, “Shooting Andy Warhol,” 36.198. Margo Feiden still believes that Warhol did not possess a copy of Up Your Ass and that Valerie did not shoot him because of the

play. In an exchange with Glenn O’Brien, she said, “She did that shooting as a publicity stunt to be famous, so that I would produceher play. Why should Andy Warhol’s name, in any way, be sullied? Why should people think that she had any justification for what shedid? He gave her none.” O’Brien replied, rather lamely, “That’s what upset me about that film, I Shot Andy Warhol [1996]. I knewthe woman who made that film, and I felt it was really unconscionable and exploitative, that it represented that she had somejustification, when obviously there was none.” In the same interview Feiden indicated that the play she possessed was called TheSociety for Cutting Up Men, when it was in fact a partial copy of an earlier draft of Up Your Ass. Feiden further said that thewomen’s movement “had nothing to do with why she shot him. Nothing! Are you sure there was a play that she had given him andthat he lost it? Are you sure of that?” See O’Brien, “History Rewire”; see also Feiden, interview by Fahs, March 15, 2010.

199. Smith, DWAN Solanas Supplement no. 3.200. Coburn, “Valerie’s Gang,” 11.201. “New York: Felled by SCUM.”202. Bockris, Life and Death of Andy Warhol, 1998 edition, 235.203. Michaelson, “Valerie.”204. Dunbar-Ortiz, “From the Cradle to the Boat.”205. An acquaintance at the Chelsea Hotel quoted in “Andy and a Girl Who Hates Men.”206. Smith and Van der Horst, “Valerie Solanas Interview,” 32.

PROVOCATION1. Coutros, “Offbeat Artist/Producer.”2. Dunbar-Ortiz, Outlaw Woman, 138.3. Smith, “To Live with a Man.”4. Atkinson, interview by Fahs, February 1, 2008. Unless stated otherwise, all quotes from Atkinson in this chapter are from this

interview.5. Atkinson, Amazon Odyssey, 41.6. Dana Densmore, interview by Breanne Fahs, Santa Fe, NM, October 24, 2009.7. Bernadine Dohrn, quoted in the epigraph above, was then the interorganizational secretary of Students for a Democratic Society. See

Morgan, “Do You Remember La Pasionaria?”8. Dunbar-Ortiz, Outlaw Woman, 119.9. Dunbar-Ortiz, interview by Fahs, December 11, 2008.10. Kate Millett, interview by Mary Harron, New York, circa 1992. Further quotes from Millett are from this interview.11. Florynce Kennedy, as quoted in Coutros, “Offbeat Artist/Producer.”12. Valerie Solanas, letter to Ti-Grace Atkinson, June 11, 1968, Ti-Grace Atkinson personal collection, Cambridge, MA.13. Solanas, letter to Atkinson, June 16, 1968.14. Ti-Grace Atkinson, letter to Maurice Girodias, June 27, 1968, Ti-Grace Atkinson personal collection, Cambridge, MA.

15. Ti-Grace Atkinson, letter to Valerie Solanas, June 27, 1968, Ti-Grace Atkinson personal collection, Cambridge, MA.16. Atkinson, letter to Girodias, June 27, 1968.17. Valerie Solanas, letter to Ti-Grace Atkinson, June 26, 1968, Ti-Grace Atkinson personal collection, Cambridge, MA.18. Solanas, letter to Atkinson, July 5, 1968.19. Valerie Solanas, letter to Ti-Grace Atkinson, August 5, 1968, Ti-Grace Atkinson personal collection, Cambridge, MA.20. Valerie Solanas, letter to Ti-Grace Atkinson, August 27, 1968, Ti-Grace Atkinson personal collection, Cambridge, MA.21. Dunbar-Ortiz, interview by Fahs, December 11, 2008.22. Dunbar-Ortiz, interview by Fahs, December 11, 2008.23. Dunbar-Ortiz, “From the Cradle to the Boat.”24. Dunbar-Ortiz, “From the Cradle to the Boat.”25. Dunbar-Ortiz, interview by Fahs, December 11, 2008.26. Dunbar-Ortiz, interview by Fahs, December 11, 2008.27. Coutros, “Offbeat Artist/Producer.”28. Ti-Grace Atkinson, letter to Guy Gravesen at Rampart magazine, July 28, 1968, Ti-Grace Atkinson personal collection, Cambridge,

MA.29. Solanas, letter to Atkinson, August 27, 1968.30. Valerie Solanas, letter to Judith Brown, October 1968, quoted in Judith Brown and Carol Giardina, letter to Kathie Amatniek, October

6, 1968 (microfilm), part 2, series 7A, Redstockings Organizational Collection, Redstockings’ Women’s Liberation Archives for Action,Gainesville, FL. Note that Kathie Amatniek changed her name to Kathie Sarachild.

31. Coutros, “Offbeat Artist/Producer.”32. Valerie Solanas, letter to Maurice Girodias, September 27, 1969, Mary Harron personal collection, Brooklyn, NY.33. Solanas, letter to Girodias, September 27, 1969.34. Dunbar-Ortiz also remembers sending long letters to her husband, Jean-Louis, trying to transform him into the leader of a male

feminist movement. “I did not succeed,” she writes. One such letter included the following: “Jean-Louis, I haven’t rejected Che[Guevara] in admiring Valerie Solanas. For me, Che will always be a saint, and I learn from him, try to be like him. Yet I know he didnot mean what I have made of his message. He was dedicated to patria o muerte, and for me it’s humanidad o muerte. Che, in usingan old symbol and an inherently oppressive fixture, the nation-state, did not deal with patriarchy and how the state reproduces it andrequires it. . . .Women are not taken seriously even when they die bravely for a cause. It is the same with Valerie. She is viewed as apsychopath even by radicals, the same ones who call Che a great revolutionary and Billy the Kid a social bandit, but a female rebel isneither—she is surely either a spy or a seductress, or at best a helpmate.” Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, letter to Jean-Louis, July 5, 1968,as cited in Dunbar-Ortiz, “From the Cradle to the Boat.”

35. Dunbar-Ortiz, “From the Cradle to the Boat.”36. The quotes are from Echols, Daring to Be Bad: Sara Evans, 209; Ti-Grace Atkinson, 107.37. Dunbar-Ortiz, letter to Jean-Louis, July 5, 1968.38. Dunbar-Ortiz, interview by Fahs, December 11, 2008.39. Baxandall, interview by Fahs, April 8, 2011.40. Laura X, interview by Mary Harron, location unknown, circa 1992.41. Carol Hanisch, interview by Mary Harron, location unknown, circa 1992.42. Koedt, interview by Harron, circa 1992.43. Valerie Lives!, pamphlet (Redstockings Women’s Liberation Archives for Action), 3. This group recommended SCUM Manifesto as

“mind food” and in the pamphlet chided Maurice Girodias and Paul Krassner for frequently referring to Valerie’s clothing: “Ournomination for the award in the flippy yippy artsie fartsie ‘radical’ left category is Paul Krassner whose commentary is publishedalong with the Manifesto, and whose hipness is revealed by such phrases as: ‘Didn’t pluck out the stray hairs between hereyebrows.’” See bibliography in the pamphlet.

44. Coutros, “Offbeat Artist/Producer.”45. Valerie Solanas, letter to Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, September 13, 1968, Ti-Grace Atkinson personal collection, Cambridge, MA.46. Jacqueline Ceballos, interview by Breanne Fahs, Phoenix, AZ, September 27, 2009.47. Mary Eastwood, open memo to Betty Friedan, June 29, 1968, Ti-Grace Atkinson personal collection, Cambridge, MA.48. Morgan, Saturday’s Child, 315.49. Dunbar-Ortiz, interview by Fahs, December 11, 2008.50. Atkinson wrote to Jo Benson at 25 magazine of the profound impact Valerie’s actions and words had on the women’s movement: “I

have thought of writing a quite separate piece on the response with the Women’s Movement to the Manifesto, which, if you canbelieve it, has been at least as interesting and certainly more violent than Valerie’s work.” Ti-Grace remained a hinge between the twoworlds—the world of Valerie and that of her interpreters. See Ti-Grace Atkinson, letter to Jo Benson, July 14, 1968, Ti-GraceAtkinson personal collection, Cambridge, MA.

51. Ti-Grace Atkinson, letter to Valerie Solanas, July 9, 1968, Ti-Grace Atkinson personal collection, Cambridge, MA.52. Valerie Solanas, letter to Ti-Grace Atkinson, September 27, 1968, Ti-Grace Atkinson personal collection, Cambridge, MA.53. Dunbar-Ortiz, “From the Cradle to the Boat.” See also Dunbar-Ortiz, interview by Fahs, December 11, 2008.

54. Dunbar-Ortiz, interview by Fahs, December 11, 2008.55. Press release from Ti-Grace Atkinson, October 21, 1968, Ti-Grace Atkinson personal collection, Cambridge, MA; Atkinson, letter to

Solanas, June 27, 1968.56. Kennedy, Color Me Flo, 62.57. Ti-Grace Atkinson, letter to Valerie Solanas, November 10, 1968, Ti-Grace Atkinson personal collection, Cambridge, MA.58. According to Peter Moritz Pickshaus, Rosetta Reitz, an art and music critic, radical feminist, and close friend of Valerie, was asked

by the criminal court to keep Valerie’s papers and writing. See Pickshaus, letter to Mary Harron, March 12, 1993.59. Newton, interview by Harron, circa 1994.60. Valerie Solanas, letter to Ti-Grace Atkinson, February 27, 1969, Ti-Grace Atkinson personal collection, Cambridge, MA.61. Valerie Solanas, letter to Robin Morgan, October 10, 1970, Sallie Bingham Center for Women’s History and Culture, Duke University

Archives, Durham, NC.62. Robin Morgan, letter to Valerie Solanas, June 9, 1969, Sallie Bingham Center for Women’s History and Culture, Duke University

Archives Durham, NC. Robin mailed the letter to the Women’s House of Detention; her check registers from 1973 note that aseventy-five-dollar payment was stopped and that Valerie never received it.

63. Morgan, Saturday’s Child, 315. This was also mentioned in Valerie Solanas, letter to Robin Morgan, undated, Sallie Bingham Centerfor Women’s History and Culture, Duke University Archives, Durham, NC,.

64. Brown and Giardina, letter to Sarachild, October 6, 1968.65. Morea, interview by Fahs, March 10, 2011.66. Ben Morea, as quoted in Hahne and Morea, Black Mask , 158.67. Morea, interview by Fahs, March 10, 2011.

MADNESS1. The quote is from Moore, “Bag Lady of Feminism.”2. Valerie Solanas, “Indictment Paperwork,” June 3, 1968, Mary Harron personal collection, Brooklyn, NY. Valerie’s name was

misspelled as Valarie Solanas in the court documents, and her age was given as twenty-eight, four years younger than she was.3. Roderick Lankler, interview by Mary Harron, New York, circa 1992.4. Shad Polier, memo to Barney Rosset and Fred Jordan, January 24, 1972, Mary Harron personal collection, Brooklyn, NY.5. Dr. Ruth Cooper, Psychological Report, June 13, 1968, Mary Harron personal collection, Brooklyn, NY. Unless otherwise noted, all

subsequent quotes from Cooper are from this report.6. The Rorschach has received much criticism for its diagnostic capacity; many critics have noted that it is not reliable for diagnosis and

should never be used in psychiatric settings for that purpose. Its ability to detect psychosis, however, has been a strong point of theRorschach for many decades, though few psychologists and psychiatrists receive full training on how to administer and score the testnow. I received formal training in both the Rorschach and the Thematic Apperception Test while getting a PhD in clinical psychologyand women’s studies at the University of Michigan. Though psychologists occasionally use these tests today, most rely on morequantitative and less projective methodologies. As a practicing clinical psychologist, I can attest that projective tests are still sometimesused today to assess psychotic thinking and unconscious desires.

7. Cooper.8. Harron and Minahan, introduction to I Shot Andy Warhol, xxvi.9. Sternberg and Mannucci, Psychological Report, Elmhurst Hospital, June 26, 1968. Note also that Valerie had requested that a copy of

SCUM Manifesto be sent to Dr. Sternberg. Girodias complied with this request on June 17, 1968, and sent Dr. Sternberg a letter withthe SCUM Manifesto included; see Maurice Girodias, letter to Dr. Arthur Sternberg, June 17, 1968, Mary Harron personal collection,Brooklyn, NY.

10. Valerie Solanas Indictment Paperwork Filed by Florynce Kennedy, June 7, 1968, Mary Harron personal collection, Brooklyn, NY.11. Sternberg and Mannucci, Psychological Report, Elmhurst Hospital, June 12, 1968, Mary Harron personal collection, Brooklyn, NY.12. Valerie Solanas, letter to Maurice Girodias, June 1968 (exact date illegible), Mary Harron personal collection, Brooklyn, NY.13. Bender, “Valeria Solanis,” 52.14. Bockris, Life and Death of Andy Warhol, 2003 edition, 307.15. Don Engel, interview by Mary Harron, New York, circa 1992.16. This also suggests that Girodias may have wanted the publicity arising from the shooting and that he himself circulated the rumor that

Valerie first wanted to shoot him but ultimately decided on Andy Warhol.17. Coutros, “Offbeat Artist/Producer.”18. Valerie Solanas, as quoted in Wilda Holt, letter to Ti-Grace Atkinson, undated, Ti-Grace Atkinson personal collection, Cambridge,

MA.19. Valerie Solanas, letter to Maurice Girodias, June 7, 1968, Mary Harron personal collection, Brooklyn, NY. Further dates of letters, all

in this collection, appear in the text.20. Maurice Girodias, letter to Valerie Solanas, July 26, 1968; August 2, 1968; July 9, 1968, Mary Harron personal collection, Brooklyn,

NY.21. Maurice Girodias, letter to attorneys Shriver and Brooke, October 30, 1968, Mary Harron personal collection, Brooklyn, NY.22. Valerie Solanas, letter to Maurice Girodias, undated (likely April or May 1968), Mary Harron personal collection, Brooklyn, NY.23. Maurice Girodias, letter to Woodrow A. Shriver, October 25, 1968, Mary Harron personal collection, Brooklyn, NY.24. Vivian Gornick, interview by Mary Harron, New York, circa 1992.25. LeGear, letter to Girodias, December 1, 1968.26. Valerie Solanas, letter to Maurice Girodias, August 25, 1968, Mary Harron personal collection, Brooklyn, NY. Several documents

described Valerie’s distaste for the periods in the abbreviation S.C.U.M. that Girodias had used in the title. LeGear wrote, “She alsoobjects to the periods of abbreviation in the title. She is a true writer in all this, but every detail in the Manifesto has its reason, itsmeaning—and therefore its effect on the content. Valerie is as careful a thinker as a writer.” LeGear, letter to Girodias, December 1,1968. “Auntie Wahoo” is a name Valerie used for Andy in her letters; for example, a letter of May 8, 1969, is addressed “AuntieWahoo, 1342 Lexington Ave, NYC 10028” (Andy Warhol Museum Archive, Pittsburgh, PA).

27. LeGear, letter to Girodias, December 1, 1968. This same letter indicates that Valerie believed that Girodias may have sensed thepower of her words as “the seed, if not the fruition, of a new order. Yeats’ ‘beast slouching towards Bethlehem to be born,’ the 21stcentury, two thousand years of a new, a really new order.”

28. LeGear, letter to Girodias, December 1, 1968.29. See Harron and Minahan, introduction to I Shot Andy Warhol, xxvii.30. Maurice Girodias, interview by Mary Harron, New York, circa 1992.31. Iris Owens, interview by Mary Harron, New York, circa 1992.32. Maurice Girodias, letter to Valerie Solanas, January 7, 1969, Mary Harron personal collection, Brooklyn, NY.33. Maurice Girodias, letter to unknown recipient, undated, Mary Harron personal collection, Brooklyn, NY.34. Valerie Solanas, letter to Maurice Girodias, January 5, 1970, Mary Harron personal collection, Brooklyn, NY.35. Valerie Solanas, letter to Maurice Girodias, March 2, 1969, Mary Harron personal collection, Brooklyn, NY.36. Solanas, letter to Girodias, March 2, 1969.37. Girodias, interview by Harron, circa 1992.38. LeGear, letter to Warhol, December 3, 1968.39. LeGear, letter to Warhol, December 3, 1968.40. Valerie Solanas, letter to Andy Warhol, September 20, 1968, Mary Harron personal collection, Brooklyn, NY.41. Ultra Violet, interview by Fahs, April 17, 2012.42. Valerie Solanas, letter to Andy Warhol, September 24, 1968, Andy Warhol Museum Archive, Pittsburgh, PA.43. Solanas, letter to Warhol, September 24, 1968.44. Valerie Solanas, letter to Andy Warhol, October 25, 1968, Andy Warhol Museum Archive, Pittsburgh, PA.45. Robert Spoor, interview by Mary Harron, New York, circa 1992.46. Tolchin, “Lawmakers Irate over Matteawan,” 1; Tomasson, “Ex-Mental Patient Given $300,000,” 49; Williams, “Matteawan”;

“Petitions”; “Ex-Matteawan Patient Dies”; “Death Ends Woman’s Bid”; “2 Hospital Guards at Matteawan Held in Death of Patient.”47. Ultra Violet, Famous for 15 Minutes, 212.48. Warhol and Hackett, POPism, 361.49. LeGear, letter to Warhol, December 3, 1968.50. Watson, Factory Made, 395.51. Judge Brust, letter to W. C. Johnston, M.D., December 9, 1968, Mary Harron personal collection, Brooklyn, NY.52. The bail slip reads, “12/12/68, $10,000 cash (ten thousand), Geoffrey LeGear—1131 Lake Street, San Francisco, Calif, #150270.”

See also Louis Zwiren, interview by Breanne Fahs, Phone, October 23, 2012.53. Mead quote from “June 3, 1968.”54. Goldsmith, I’ll Be Your Mirror, 96.55. Newton, interview by Fahs, March 14, 2010.56. Valerie Solanas, letter to Andy Warhol, December 21, 1968, Andy Warhol Museum Archive, Pittsburgh, PA.57. Valerie Solanas, letter to Maurice Girodias, December 24, 1968 (letter 1), Andy Warhol Museum Archive, Pittsburgh, PA.58. Valerie Solanas, letter to Maurice Girodias, December 24, 1968 (letter 2), Andy Warhol Museum Archive, Pittsburgh, PA.59. Valerie Solanas, letter to Maurice Girodias, undated, Andy Warhol Museum Archive, Pittsburgh, PA.60. Warhol and Hackett, POPism, 360; Ultra Violet, Famous for 15 Minutes, 187.61. Feiden, interview by Fahs, March 15, 2010.62. Paul Morrissey, as quoted in “June 3, 1968.”63. Warhol and Hackett, POPism, 361.64. Ultra Violet, Famous for 15 Minutes, 187.65. Loschiavo, “From Activists and Authors“; Mead, “Setting It Straight.” The House of Detention also caused controversy in the Village

when the area was gentrifying. The New School put in a bid to buy the building but later reneged on the deal. New York City officialsdecided to demolish the building and relocated its residents to Rikers Island. See “Creating Digital History.”

66. Davis, “Prison Memoirs.”67. Jeffrey, “Feminist Icon Andrea Dworkin Dies.”68. Kross, “Program for Women.”69. Lorraine Miller, interview by Breanne Fahs, phone, May 23, 2013.70. Lorraine Miller, interview by Mary Harron, New York, circa 1992.71. Miller, interview by Harron, circa 1992; Miller, interview by Fahs, May 23, 2013.72. Miller, interview by Fahs, May 23, 2013.73. Dr. Emanuel Messinger, Psychological Report, Women’s House of Detention, January 17, 1969, Mary Harron personal collection,

Brooklyn, NY.74. Valerie Solanas indictment as covered by the Daily News, February 26, 1969.75. Sternberg and Rubenstein, Psychological Report, May 28, 1969.76. Maurice Girodias, letter to Valerie Solanas, April 28, 1969, Mary Harron personal collection, Brooklyn, NY.77. “Warhol’s Assailant Gets Up to 3 Years.”78. Gaither, “Andy Warhol’s Feminist Nightmare,” 35.79. John Warhola, as quoted in Bockris, Life and Death of Andy Warhol, 1989 edition, 248.80. “Warhol’s Assailant Gets up to 3 Years.”81. Valerie Solanas, letter to Maurice Girodias, January 2, 1970, Andy Warhol Museum Archive, Pittsburgh, PA.82. Valerie Solanas, letter to Maurice Girodias, April 26, 1969, Andy Warhol Museum Archive, Pittsburgh, PA.83. Solanas, letter to Girodias, January 2, 1970.84. Valerie Solanas, unpublished letter to Village Voice, April 5, 1969, included in Jonas Mekas, letter to Mary Harron, July 26, 1993,

Mary Harron personal collection, Brooklyn, NY.85. Official Prison Records, Bedford Hills Prison, Mary Harron personal collection, Brooklyn, NY. The Bedford Hills Prison was known

as Westfield State Farm until 1901.86. “Before Casey Anthony, There Was Alice Crimmins . . .”87. Newton, interview by Fahs, March 10, 2011. Ti-Grace Atkinson noted the male composition of the jury. See Coutros, “Offbeat

Artist/Producer.”88. Valerie Solanas, letter to Louis Solanas, May 23, 1970, Breanne Fahs personal collection, Phoenix, AZ. The return address was

“Beacon, New York” and the sender identified as “V. Solanas #13878.”89. Thompson, interview by Harron, circa 1992.90. Feiden, interview by Fahs, March 15, 2010.91. Newton, interview by Fahs, March 14, 2010. Despite its name, the Brooklyn Commune was located in Manhattan, perhaps at 186

Spring Street. It later became a gay commune, known for its early organizing around gay and lesbian rights in New York City. SeeAndrew Berman, letter to Robert Tierney, July 16, 2012, Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation Archive, New York.

92. Diaman, “The Baltic Street Collective,” 241.93. Spottiswood, interview by Mary Harron, circa 1992.94. “Newborn Baby Girl Is Found in a Welfare Hotel’s Garbage.” The building is now a boutique hotel called the Gem.95. Newton, letter to Harron, June 25, 1993.96. Valerie Solanas, letter to the Mob, August 1, 1971, Mary Harron personal collection, Brooklyn, NY.97. Mark Zussman, letter to Ultra Violet, November 24, 1987, Ultra Violet personal collection, New York.98. Fred Jordan, Memo to Grove Press, November 2, 1971; November 3, 1971, both Mary Harron personal collection, Brooklyn, NY.99. Shad Polier, Memo to Naomi Goldstein and the Criminal Court Clinic of New York City, November 9, 1971, Mary Harron personal

collection, Brooklyn, NY.100. Shad Polier, letter to Fred Jordan and Barney Rosset, January 6, 1972, Mary Harron personal collection, Brooklyn, NY. Valerie was

originally sent to Matteawan by the corrections department. After three years, she was discharged from the corrections departmentbut she seemed to need involuntary psychiatric care, so she was placed in the custody of the mental health department in 1971. Oncethey felt she was no longer dangerous, they subsequently discharged her, but she got involved with the criminal court system againbased on aggravated assault. This is detailed in Spoor, interview by Harron, circa 1992.

101. Valerie Solanas, letter to Barney Rosset, January 15, 1973, Mary Harron personal collection, Brooklyn, NY.102. Fred Jordan, interview by Mary Harron, New York, circa 1992.103. Pinkertons Agency, memo to Fred Jordan and Barney Rosset, February 23, 1973, Mary Harron personal collection, Brooklyn, NY.

This memo detailed the call on February 23, 1973 at 10:15 a.m. from Valerie Solanas to Fred Jordan. The interviews and their resultare in Pinkertons Agency, memo to Fred Jordan and Barney Rosset, February 15, 1973, Mary Harron personal collection, Brooklyn,NY.

104. Valerie Solanas, letter to Barney Rosset, March 3, 1973, Ultra Violet personal collection, New York.105. Valerie Solanas, letter to Barney Rosset and Fred Jordan, March 5, 1973, Mary Harron personal collection, Brooklyn, NY.106. Valerie Solanas, letter to Barney Rosset and Fred Jordan, March 27, 1973, Mary Harron personal collection, Brooklyn, NY.107. Valerie Solanas, letter to the Mob (aka Fred Jordan and Barney Rosset), March 23, 1973, Mary Harron personal collection,

Brooklyn, NY. Further dates are in the text.

108. Jordan, interview by Harron, circa 1992.109. Majority Report 5 (April 2–15, 1977); 6, no. 21 (February 19–March 4, 1977). See also Valerie Solanas, unpublished letter to the

editor of Esquire, July 1973, 80–81.110. Harron and Minahan, introduction to I Shot Andy Warhol, xxviii.111. Louis Zwiren, as quoted in Smith, “The History of Zines.”112. Newton, interview by Harron, circa 1994.113. Newton, interview by Fahs, March 14, 2010.114. Newton, interview by Fahs, March 14, 2010.115. Andy Warhol, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol, 91.116. Andy Warhol, as quoted in “Alive & Well,” 37.117. Ultra Violet, Famous for 15 Minutes, 182.118. Warhol, interview by Mary Harron for Melody Maker Magazine, February 16, 1980.119. Leonard, “Return of Andy Warhol.”120. Warhol and Hackett, POPism, 358.121. Guiles, Loner at the Ball, 355.122. Leonard, “Return of Andy Warhol.”123. “Andy, FAQ”; Boorstin, “Hospital Asserts It Gave Warhol Adequate Care”; Sullivan, “Care Faulted in Death of Warhol.”124. Ultra Violet, interview by Fahs, April 17, 2012.125. Warhol and Hackett, POPism, 352.126. Newton, interview by Fahs, March 14, 2010.127. Andy Warhol, directed by Burns.128. Warhol, interview by Fiona Russell; Harron and Minahan, introduction to I Shot Andy Warhol, xxix.

FORGETTING1. Harron and Minahan, introduction to I Shot Andy Warhol, xxviii.2. Doyle, Sex Objects, 73.3. Gornick, “Manifesto Destiny,” 70.4. Gornick, “Manifesto Destiny,” 70.5. Vivian Gornick, interview by Breanne Fahs, New York, April 9, 2011.6. Gornick, interview by Harron, circa 1992.7. Densmore, interview by Fahs, October 24, 2009.8. “Faded Ad.”9. Zwiren, interview by Fahs, October 23, 2012.10. Smith, “To Live with a Man.” See also Zwiren, interview by Fahs, October 23, 2012.11. Zwiren, interview by Fahs, October 23, 2012.12. Zwiren, interview by Fahs, October 23, 2012.13. Smith, “To Live with a Man.”14. Zwiren, interview by Fahs, October 23, 2012.15. See Baer, “About Valerie Solanas.” This is also mentioned in Zwiren, interview by Fahs, October 23, 2012. A memo from the medical

records department to Ultra Violet dated December 4, 1987, confirmed that her records had been destroyed and also confirmed heradmission and discharge dates.

16. Dunbar-Ortiz, interview by Fahs, December 11, 2008; Zwiren, interview by Fahs, October 23, 2012.17. Zwiren, interview by Fahs, October 23, 2012.18. Dunbar-Ortiz, interview by Fahs, December 11, 2008.19. Zwiren, interview by Fahs, October 23, 2012.20. Wilma Kuhn, letter to Ultra Violet, December 2, 1987, Ultra Violet personal collection, New York.21. Zwiren, interview by Fahs, October 23, 2012.22. Firestone, “I Remember Valerie,” 130–31.23. Zwiren, interview by Fahs, October 23, 2012.24. Caputi, interview by Fahs, November 15, 2009.25. Porges, “Vaginal Hysterectomy at Bellevue.”26. Caputi, interview by Fahs, November 15, 2009.27. Gaither, “Andy Warhol’s Feminist Nightmare,” 35.28. Valerie’s April 1976 letter was mentioned in Majority Report 6 (April 2–15, 1977). “Nancy Borman, who had been involved

editorially with the publication since its inception, seemed to provide guidance and consistency throughout the magazine’s decade oftransitions with its publishing groups and editorial office locations. Borman was an outspoken member of the New York chapter of the

National Organization for Women. It was to her in Jamaica, New York, that correspondence was forwarded when the collective wasin transition. Her name appears on the cover of the first issue as one of the ‘sisters who contributed to and helped produce MajorityReport,’ the mainstream press identified her as editor when she represented the publication, and she is listed as the publisher duringthe last year of its operation.” See Endres and Lueck, Women’s Periodicals, 196.

29. Nancy Borman, interview by Mary Harron, New York, circa 1992. Further quotes from Borman are from this interview.30. Ti-Grace Atkinson, interview by Mary Harron, New York, circa 1992.31. Julia Mauldin, interview by Mary Harron, New York, circa 1992. The transcriber for this interview was not sure about the spelling of

Julia’s name.32. Joanne Steele, interview by Mary Harron, New York, circa 1992.33. This copy of SCUM Manifesto is currently held in the New York Public Library Archives.34. Majority Report 6 (November 27–December 10, 1976). Further citations to Majority Report appear in the text by volume number

and date. When asked why Valerie suddenly appeared on the scene to comment on the C.L.I.T. papers, she responded, “It occurredwhen it did, because I was around, i.e., in circulation, making statements for people to pick up on. Until shortly before then I wasn’taround,” see Majority Report 6 (April 2–15, 1977). Unless otherwise stated, all Majority Report references are from Ti-GraceAtkinson personal collection, Cambridge, MA.

35. Controversies about whether Valerie invented Carolyn or whether she actually existed appeared in several subsequent issues ofMajority Report, including vii, no.4; In my opinion, the “voice” of Carolyn eerily mimics Valerie’s tone, style, and rhythm, not tomention humor and the unique qualities of her narcissism.

36. Jo’s bitterness over these words remained in 2010, when she told me, “I wrote the Bitch Manifesto and she wrote the SCUMManifesto. I think a manifestation of her craziness is that she would see the use of our similar word of the title as somehow a rip off.That’s how crazy she was. If anything, I ripped off the Communist Manifesto and so did she” (October 24, 2010).

37. Freeman, interview by Fahs, October 14, 2010.38. Borman, interview by Harron, circa 1992.39. Steele, interview by Harron, circa 1992.40. Advertisement for SCUM Manifesto placed in Majority Report 7 (1977).41. Advertisement for SCUM Manifesto placed in Majority Report 7 (May 28–June 10, 1977), Redstockings Women’s Liberation

Archives for Action, Gainesville, FL.42. Valerie Solanas, postcard to Mark Zussman, August 9, 1977, Stephen Edelson Collection, Chicago. Mark Zussman loathed Valerie,

telling Howard Smith, “Actually, I’m for putting both Sam [“Son of Sam”] and Valerie away—rather than turning them into folkheroes. I’m henceforth going to make an effort to be amused by psychopaths only when they’re behind bars and under sedation.”Mark Zussman, letter to Howard Smith, August 4, 1977, Dobkin Collection, New York.

43. Valerie Solanas, postcard to the Mob (Mark Zussman), August 1, 1977,; see also Valerie Solanas, letter to the Mob (Mark Zussman),August 1, 1977, both in Dobkin Collection, New York.

44. Solanas, letter to the Mob (Zussman), August 1, 1977.45. Valerie Solanas, letter to the Mob, September 5, 1977, Dobkin Collection, New York.46. Valerie Solanas, letter to the Mob, September 2, 1977, Ultra Violet personal collection, New York.47. Smith, DWAN supplement no. 3, 1.48. Steele, interview by Harron, circa 1992.49. Michael Chance, interview by Mary Harron, New York, circa 1992.50. Chance, interview by Harron, circa 1992.51. Borman, interview by Harron, circa 1992.52. Smith and Van der Horst, “Valerie Solanas Interview,” 32. Unless stated otherwise, all quotes from the interview are from this source

and this page. Howard Smith had an interest in Valerie, perhaps in part because of his lifelong interest in mood disorders. In the early1990s, he joined the board and became the chair of the Mood Disorders Support Group, a New York organization that helps those withdepression and mania (www.mdsg.org).

53. Howard Smith, “Interview Roughs for Valerie Solanas Interview,” July 29, 1977, Dobkin Collection, New York, 2–3.54. “Valerie Solanas Replies,” Village Voice, August 1, 1977, 28.55. Smith, “Interview Roughs,” 4.56. Dunn, “Valerie Charges Back.”57. Valerie Solanas, letter to Mark Zussman, July 9, 1977, Ultra Violet personal collection, New York; see also Solanas, letter to the Mob

(Zussman), August 1, 1977.58. Valerie Solanas, letter to the Mob, September 22, 1977, Ultra Violet personal collection, New York. In the letter she included

Schröder’s address: Marz Verlag, Van Deelen Film Verlag, Am Altenroth 8, D-6406 Hosenfeld 3, West Germany.59. Valerie Solanas, letter to Mr. Ryan, August 4, 1977, Dobkin Collection, New York.60. “Valerie Solanas Replies,” 28.61. Dunn, “Valerie Charges Back.”62. Steele, interview by Harron, circa 1992.63. Zwiren, interview by Fahs, October 23, 2012.

64. Steele, interview by Harron, circa 1992.65. Mary Harron, interview by Donny Smith, “Solanas Supplement,” DWAN no. 2, May 1997.66. Zwiren, as quoted in Smith, “To Live with a Man.” See also Zwiren, interview by Fahs, October 23, 2012.67. Zwiren, as quoted in Smith, “To Live with a Man.”68. Zwiren, as quoted in Smith, “To Live with a Man.”69. Zwiren, as quoted in Smith, “To Live with a Man.”70. Zwiren, as quoted in Smith, “To Live with a Man.”71. Zwiren, DWAN Solanas Supplement 3, 30.72. Zwiren, interview by Fahs, October 23, 2012.73. Zwiren, as quoted in Smith, “To Live with a Man.”74. Firestone, “I Remember Valerie,” 132.75. Gaither, “Andy Warhol’s Feminist Nightmare,” 35.76. Bud Vasconcellos, interview by Breanne Fahs, Phone, October 12, 2012. All Vasconcellos quotes are from this interview.77. The Ninth Street address was listed on Valerie’s Social Security documents. This building is now a western wear clothing shop.

Records show that the Social Security Administration terminated her disability (SSI) payments at her Phoenix address in 1986 and shereceived these payments in San Francisco after that.

78. Evarels, “Spooky Times at the Bristol Hotel.”79. Harron and Minahan, introduction to I Shot Andy Warhol, xxx.80. Boone, “‘Look on My Works.’”81. Smith, “The History of Zines”; Harron and Minahan, introduction to I Shot Andy Warhol, xxxi.82. Fustero, interview by Fahs, September 20, 2008.83. Boone, “‘Look on My Works.”84. Ultra Violet, interview by Fahs, April 17, 2012.85. Ultra Violet, Famous for 15 Minutes, 187–88.86. Ultra Violet, interview by Fahs, April 17, 2012.87. Ultra Violet, letter to Library of Congress Copyright Office, November 1, 1991, Ultra Violet personal collection, New York.88. Ultra Violet, recorded phone call with Valerie Solanas, November 1987, Breanne Fahs personal collection, Phoenix, AZ. In Ultra’s

memory of this call, Valerie called herself Onz Loh, but the name was, in fact, Zno Hol, according to the tape recording.89. Ultra Violet, Famous for 15 Minutes, 188.90. Ultra Violet, interview by Fahs, April 17, 2012.91. Coroner’s Report, Valerie Solanas, San Francisco, April 25, 1988.92. Heinz Hoffman, “Police Report for the Death of Valerie Solanas,” File 388383170, San Francisco Police Department, April 25, 1988.93. Letter from Chief Medical Examiner Boyd G. Stephens to Ultra Violet, August 26, 1988, Ultra Violet personal collection, New York,

confirms that Valerie did not die of AIDS. Also, according to mortician Christopher Brown, police should identify the date of death asan estimate of the actual date of death, not the date the victim was discovered. Given the weather conditions, presence of maggots,foul odor, likelihood of current drug use (which speeds up decomposition), and the fact that the window was closed, Valerie likely diedon April 23, 1988 (see Christopher Brown, interview by Breanne Fahs, Phone, October 31, 2011). Taylor Mead, one of Warhol’sassociates, in a style typical of the Warhol crowd, threw a “party-wake” at the Café Bizarre following news of Valerie’s death; seeGuiles, Loner at the Ball, 309.

94. Death Certificate, filed November 19, 1991, signed May 9, 1988. Valerie’s grave is located at St. Mary of Sorrows Catholic ChurchCemetery, 5612 Ox Road, Fairfax Station, Virginia (number 14927731). For more information about this church, see “About theChurch.”

95. Coburn, “Valerie’s Gang,” 16.96. Solanas, SCUM Manifesto (Self-Published, 1977), 4.

REFERENCES

ARCHIVES AND PERSONAL COLLECTIONSTi-Grace Atkinson personal collection, Cambridge, MA (TGA)Dobkin Collection, New York (D)Sallie Bingham Center for Women’s History and Culture, Duke University Archives, Durham, NC (DUA)Stephen Edelson Collection, ChicagoBreanne Fahs personal collection, Phoenix, AZ (BF)Robert Fustero personal collection, Silver Spring, MDGreenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation Archive, New York (GV)Mary Harron personal collection, Brooklyn, NY (MH)Redstockings’ Organizational Collection, Redstockings Women’s Liberation Archives for Action, Gainesville, FLUltra Violet personal collection, New York (UV)University of Missouri–St. Louis Archives, St. Louis, MOAndy Warhol Museum Archive, Pittsburgh, PA (AWMA)

LETTERS TO THE EDITOR, MAJORITY REPORT, BY VALERIE SOLANASVol. 5, November 27–December 10, 1976.Vol. 6, January 8–21, 1977.Vol. 6, February 15–18, 1977.Vol. 6, February 19–March 4, 1977.Vol. 6, March 19– April 1, 1977.Vol. 6, April 2–15, 1977.Vol. 6, April 30–May 13, 1977.Vol. 7, May 28–June 10, 1977.Vol. 7, June 11–24, 1977.Vol. 7, June 23–August 5, 1977.Vol. 7, June 25–July 8, 1977.Vol. 7, August 16–29, 1977.

UNPUBLISHED CORRESPONDENCE BY VALERIE SOLANAS“Valerie Solanas to Andy Warhol.” Letter. December 21, 1968. AWMA.“Valerie Solanas to ‘The Mob’.” Letter. August 1, 1971. MH.“Valerie Solanas to ‘The Mob’.” Letter. March 3, 1973. MH.“Valerie Solanas to ‘The Mob’.” Letter. September 2, 1977. UV.“Valerie Solanas to ‘The Mob’.” Letter. September 22, 1977. UV.“Valerie Solanas to Andy Warhol.” Letter. August 1, 1967. Andy Warhol Museum.“Valerie Solanas to Andy Warhol.” Letter. February 1, 1968. AWMA.“Valerie Solanas to Andy Warhol.” Letter. February 10, 1968. AWMA.“Valerie Solanas to Andy Warhol.” Letter. February 11, 1968. AWMA.“Valerie Solanas to Andy Warhol.” Letter. February 7, 1968. AWMA.“Valerie Solanas to Andy Warhol.” Letter. January 25, 1968. AWMA.“Valerie Solanas to Andy Warhol.” Letter. June 5, 1969. AWMA.“Valerie Solanas to Andy Warhol.” Letter. May 7, 1969. AWMA.“Valerie Solanas to Andy Warhol.” Letter. October 25, 1968. Andy Warhol Museum Archive.“Valerie Solanas to Andy Warhol.” Letter. September 24, 1968. AWMA.“Valerie Solanas to Andy Warhol.” Letter. undated. AWMA.“Valerie Solanas to Andy Warhol.” Letter. February 9, 1966. AWMA.“Valerie Solanas to Andy Warhol.” Letter. September 20, 1968. MH.“Valerie Solanas to Barney Rosset and Fred Jordan (‘the Mob’).” Letter. March 5, 1973. MH.“Valerie Solanas to Barney Rosset and Fred Jordan (‘the Mob’).” Letter. March 6, 1973. MH.“Valerie Solanas to Barney Rosset and Fred Jordan (‘the Mob’).” Letter. April 17, 1973. MH.“Valerie Solanas to Barney Rosset.” Letter. January 15, 1973. MH.

“Valerie Solanas to Barney Rosset and Fred Jordan.” Letter. March 27, 1973. MH.“Valerie Solanas to Fred Jordan and Barney Rosset (‘the Mob’) at Grove Press.” Letter. March 23, 1973. MH.“Valerie Solanas to Fred Jordan and Barney Rosset (‘the Mob’) at Grove Press.” Letter. April 17, 1973. MH.“Valerie Solanas to Howard Smith.” Letter. July 29, 1977. D.“Valerie Solanas to Howard Smith.” Letter. September 27, 1968. D.“Valerie Solanas to Louis Solanas.” Letter. May 23, 1970. BF.“Valerie Solanas to Louis Solanas.” Postcard. June 29, 1967. Silver Spring, MD. Robert Fustero personal collection.“Valerie Solanas to Louis Solanas.” Postcard. June 14, 1967. Phoenix, AZ. BF.“Valerie Solanas to Mark Zussman.” Letter. July 9, 1977. UV.“Valerie Solanas to Mark Zussman (‘The Mob’).” Letter. August 1, 1977. D.“Valerie Solanas to Mark Zussman (‘The Mob’).” Postcard. August 1, 1977. D.“Valerie Solanas to Mark Zussman.” Postcard. August 9, 1977. Stephen Edelson Collection.“Valerie Solanas to Mark Zussman (‘The Mob’).” Letter. September 5, 1977. D.“Valerie Solanas to Maurice Girodias.” Illegible date. MH.“Valerie Solanas to Maurice Girodias.” Letter. April 15, 1969. MH.“Valerie Solanas to Maurice Girodias.” Letter. April 26, 1969. MH.“Valerie Solanas to Maurice Girodias.” Letter. April 4, 1969. MH.“Valerie Solanas to Maurice Girodias.” Letter. August 12, 1968. MH.“Valerie Solanas to Maurice Girodias.” Letter. August 25, 1968. MH.“Valerie Solanas to Maurice Girodias.” Letter 1. December 24, 1968. MH.“Valerie Solanas to Maurice Girodias.” Letter 2. December 24, 1968. MH.“Valerie Solanas to Maurice Girodias.” Letter. February 7, 1968. MH.“Valerie Solanas to Maurice Girodias.” Letter. February 18, 1968. MH.“Valerie Solanas to Maurice Girodias.” Letter. January 29, 1968. MH.“Valerie Solanas to Maurice Girodias.” Letter. January 5, 1969. MH.“Valerie Solanas to Maurice Girodias.” Letter. January 2, 1970. MH.“Valerie Solanas to Maurice Girodias.” Letter. January 5, 1970. MH.“Valerie Solanas to Maurice Girodias.” Letter. January 17, 1970. MH.“Valerie Solanas to Maurice Girodias.” Letter. July 18, 1968. MH.“Valerie Solanas to Maurice Girodias.” Letter. July 20, 1968. MH.“Valerie Solanas to Maurice Girodias.” Letter. July 29, 1968. MH.“Valerie Solanas to Maurice Girodias.” Letter. July 9, 1968. MH.“Valerie Solanas to Maurice Girodias.” Letter. June 29, 1968. MH.“Valerie Solanas to Maurice Girodias.” Letter. June 7, 1968. MH.“Valerie Solanas to Maurice Girodias.” Letter. March 2, 1969. MH.“Valerie Solanas to Maurice Girodias.” Letter. October 11, 1968. MH.“Valerie Solanas to Maurice Girodias.” Letter. September 27, 1968. MH.“Valerie Solanas to Maurice Girodias.” Letter. June 28, 1968. MH.“Valerie Solanas to Maurice Girodias.” Letter. September 27, 1969. MH.“Valerie Solanas to Maurice Girodias.” Letter. Undated (circa July 1968). MH.“Valerie Solanas to Maurice Girodias.” Letter. Undated. AWMA.“Valerie Solanas to Robin Morgan.” Letter. October 10, 1970. DUA.“Valerie Solanas to ‘Mr. Ryan.’” Letter. August 4, 1977. D.“Valerie Solanas to Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz.” Letter. September 13, 1968. TGA.“Valerie Solanas to Ti-Grace Atkinson.” Letter. July 5, 1968. TGA.“Valerie Solanas to Ti-Grace Atkinson.” Letter. June 16, 1968. TGA.“Valerie Solanas to Ti-Grace Atkinson.” Letter. August 5, 1968. TGA.“Valerie Solanas to Ti-Grace Atkinson.” Letter. August 27, 1968. TGA.“Valerie Solanas to Ti-Grace Atkinson.” Letter. February 27, 1969. TGA.“Valerie Solanas to Ti-Grace Atkinson.” Letter. June 11, 1968. TGA.“Valerie Solanas to Ti-Grace Atkinson.” Letter. June 16, 1968. TGA.“Valerie Solanas to Ti-Grace Atkinson.” Letter. June 26, 1968. TGA.“Valerie Solanas to Ti-Grace Atkinson.” Letter. September 27, 1968. TGA.“Valerie Solanas to Village Voice Editors.” Letter. April 5, 1969. MH.“Valerie Solanas to Fred Jordan.” Letter. March 3, 1973. MH.“Valerie Solanas to Barney Rosset.” Letter. March 3, 1973. MH.

OTHER UNPUBLISHED CORRESPONDENCEAtkinson, Ti-Grace. “Ti-Grace Atkinson to Guy Gravesen at Rampart Magazine.” Letter. July 28, 1968. TGA.—. “Ti-Grace Atkinson to Jo Benson.” Letter. July 14, 1968. TGA.—. “Ti-Grace Atkinson to Maurice Girodias.” Letter. June 27, 1968. TGA.—. “Ti-Grace Atkinson to Valerie Solanas.” Letter. June 27, 1968. TGA.—. “Ti-Grace Atkinson to Valerie Solanas.” Letter. July 9, 1968. TGA.—. “Ti-Grace Atkinson to Valerie Solanas.” Letter. November 10, 1968. TGA.Berman, Andrew. “Andrew Berman to Robert Tierney.” Letter. July 16, 2012. GV.Blackwell, David. “David Blackwell to Mary Harron.” Letter. June 5, 1996. MH.Brown, Judith, and Carol Giardina. “Judith Brown and Carol Giardina to Kathie Amatniek.” Letter. October 6, 1968. Microfilm. Part 2,

series 7A. Redstockings’ Organizational Collection, Redstockings Women’s Liberation Archives for Action. Brust, Judge Joseph A. “Judge Joseph A. Brust to W. C. Johnston, M.D.” Letter. December 9, 1968. MH.Burke, Daniel. “Daniel Burke to Diane Tucker.” Letter. September 9, 1993. MH.Church of Solanas. “Men’s Auxiliary of SCUM to Maurice Girodias.” Letter. May 19, 1973. MH.Dell Publishing. “Dell Publishing to Maurice Girodias.” Letter. June 6, 1968. MH. Everheart, Jane. “Jane Everheart to Cosmopolitan

Magazine.” Letter. October 9, 1969. DUA.Girodias, Maurice. “Maurice Girodias to Shriver and Brook.” Letter. October 30, 1968. MH.—. “Maurice Girodias to Valerie Solanas.” Letter. Brooklyn, August 29, 1967. MH.—. “Maurice Girodias to Valerie Solanas.” Letter. July 26, 1968. MH.—. “Maurice Girodias to Valerie Solanas.” Letter. April 28, 1969. MH.—. “Maurice Girodias to Valerie Solanas.” Letter. August 29, 1967. MH.—. “Maurice Girodias to Valerie Solanas.” Letter. August 2, 1968. MH.—. “Maurice Girodias to Valerie Solanas.” Letter. January 7, 1969. MH.—. “Maurice Girodias to Valerie Solanas.” Letter. July 6, 1968. MH.—. “Maurice Girodias to Valerie Solanas.” Letter. July 7, 1968. MH.—. “Maurice Girodias to Valerie Solanas.” Letter. June 14, 1968. MH.—. “Maurice Girodias to Valerie Solanas.” Letter. June 27, 1968. MH.—. “Maurice Girodias to Valerie Solanas.” Telegram. June 6, 1968. MH.—. “Maurice Girodias to Valerie Solanas.” Letter. July 9, 1968. MH.—. “Maurice Girodias to Valerie Solanas.” Letter. circa April/May 1968. MH.—. “Maurice Girodias to Woodrow A. Shriver.” Letter. October 25, 1968. MH.Harron, Mary. “Mary Harron to British Broadcasting Company.” Letter. September 26, 1992. MH.—. “Mary Harron to John Wyver at BBC NY, Pitch About Valerie Solanas Documentary.” Letter. September 26, 1992. MH.Johnston, W. C. “W. C. Johnston to Judge Joseph A. Brust.” Letter. December 9, 1968. MH.—. “W. C. Johnston, Matteawan Hospital to District Attorney Frank S. Hogan.” Letter. December 6, 1968. MH.Kennedy, Florynce. “Florynce Kennedy to Valerie Solanas.” Letter. September 29, 1968. TGA.Kuhn, Wilma. “Wilma Kuhn to Ultra Violet.” Letter. December 2, 1987. UV.LeGear, Geoffrey. “Geoffrey LeGear to Andy Warhol.” Letter. December 3, 1968. AWMA.—. “Geoffrey LeGear to Maurice Girodias.” Letter. December 1, 1968. AWMA.Morgan, Robin. “Robin Morgan to Valerie Solanas.” Letter. June 9, 1969. DUA.Newton, Jeremiah. “Jeremiah Newton to Mary Harron.” Letter. July 19, 1994. MH.—. “Jeremiah Newton to Mary Harron.” Letter. June 25, 1993. MH.—. “Jeremiah Newton to Mary Harron.” Letter. Undated. MH.Pickshaus, Peter Moritz. “Peter Moritz Pickshaus to Mary Harron.” Letter. June 8, 1993. MH.Pinkertons Agency. “Pinkertons Agency to Fred Jordan and Barney Rosset.” Memo. February 23, 1973. MH.—. “Peter Moritz Pickshaus to Mary Harron.” Letter. September 29, 1993. MH.—. “Peter Moritz Pickshaus to Mary Harron.” Letter. March 12, 1993. MH.Polier, Shad, “Shad Polier to Barney Rosset and Fred Jordan.” Letter. January 24, 1972. MH.—. “Shad Polier to District Attorney Milton Glass.” Letter. January 6, 1972. MH.—. “Shad Polier to Edward Allen.” Letter. January 19, 1973. MH.—. “Shad Polier to Fred Jordan and Barney Rosset.” Letter. January 6, 1972. MH.—. “Shad Polier to Naomi Goldstein and the Criminal Court Clinic of New York City.” Letter. November 9, 1971. MH.Stephens, Boyd G. “Chief Medical Examiner Boyd G. Stephens to Ultra Violet.” Letter. August 26, 1988. UV.Sternberg, Arthur. “Letter from Arthur Sternberg M.D. to Mannuccio Mannucci M.D. regarding Valerie Solanas, Elmhurst Hospital.”

Letter. June 12, 1968. MH.—. “Letter from Arthur Sternberg M.D. to Mannuccio Mannucci M.D. regarding Valerie Solanas, Elmhurst Hospital.” Letter. June 26,

1968. MH.Ultra Violet. “Ultra Violet to Library of Congress Copyright Office.” Letter. November 1, 1991. UV.

Ultra Violet. “Ultra Violet Calls Valerie Solanas.” Recorded Phone Call. Transcript. November 1987. BF.Warhol, Andy. “Andy Warhol to Valerie Solanas.” Letter. September 20, 1968. MH.“Wilda Holt to Ti-Grace Atkinson. ” Letter. Undated. TGA.Zussman, Mark. “Mark Zussman to Howard Smith.” Letter. August 4, 1977. D.—. “Mark Zussman to Ultra Violet.” Letter. November 24, 1987. UV.—. “Mark Zussman to Ultra Violet.” Letter. November 24, 1987. UV.

OTHER SOURCESAdvertisement for SCUM Manifesto. Majority Report 7 (May 28–June 10, 1977). Redstockings’ Organizational Collection,

Redstockings Women’s Liberation Archives for Action, Gainesville, FL.Cooper, Ruth. “Psychological Report of Valerie Solanas by Ruth Cooper PhD, Elmhurst City Hospital.” Report, June 13, 1968. MH.Coroner’s Report. “Valerie Solanas.” San Francisco, April 25, 1988.Eastwood, Mary. “Open Memo from Mary Eastwood to Betty Friedan.” Open memo, June 29, 1968. TGA.Federal Bureau of Investigation. “The Andy Warhol FBI Files.”Girodias, Maurice. Contract with Valerie Solanas. Contract, August 29, 1967. MH.Harron, Mary. “Interview Notes from Jeremiah Newton.” Notes, circa 1992. MH.—. Research notes for introduction to I Shot Andy Warhol. MH.Hoffman, Heinz. “Police Report for Death of Valerie Solanas.” File 388383170, San Francisco Police Department, April 25, 1988.Indictment Paperwork. “Valerie Solanas.” New York City Police Department, June 3, 1968.Jordan, Fred. “Fred Jordan to Barney Rosset.” Memo, August 4, 1971. MH.Jordan, Fred. “Fred Jordan to Barney Rosset.” Memo, November 2, 1971. MH.—. “Fred Jordan to Barney Rosset.” Memo, November 3, 1971. MH.—. “Fred Jordan to Grove Press.” Memo, November 2, 1971. MH.—. “Fred Jordan to Grove Press.” Memo, November 3, 1971. MH.Kennedy, Florynce. “Florynce Kennedy to NOW.” Memo, November 18, 1968. DUA.—. Indictment Paperwork Filed by Florynce Kennedy on Behalf of Valerie Solanas. Court Papers, June 7, 1968. MH.Martinez, Judith Solanas. Email message to author, May 25, 2008.—. Email message to author, June 30, 2008.—. Email message to author, July 13, 2008.Messinger, Emanuel. “Psychological Report, Women’s House of Detention.” Report, January 17, 1969. MH.Official Prison Records from Bedford Hills Prison. MH.“Open Memo from Ti-Grace Atkinson to NOW.” Memo, October 21, 1968. TGA.Pinkertons Agency. “Pinkertons Agency to Fred Jordan and Barney Rosset.” Memo, February 15, 1973. MH.“Press Release from Ti-Grace Atkinson.” Press release, October 21, 1968. TGA.Smith, Howard. “Interview Roughs for Valerie Solanas Interview,” July 29, 1977. D.Solanas, Valerie. SCUM advertisement. Village Voice, February 2, 1967.“Statement of Valerie Jean Solanas Made to Roderick Lankler, Assistant District Attorney.” Statement, June 3, 1968. MH.Sternberg, Arthur, Dr., and Dr. Mannuccio Mannucci. “Psychological Report, Elmhurst Hospital.” Report, June 12, 1968. MH.Sternberg, Arthur, Dr., and Dr. Mannuccio Mannucci. “Psychological Report, Elmhurst Hospital.” Report, June 26, 1968. MH.Sternberg, Arthur, and Joseph E. Rubenstein. “Elmhurst Hospital Psychological Report.” Report, May 28, 1969. MH.“Ti-Grace Atkinson to Charlotte: Open Letter Pavane (for a Dead Infanta).” Unpublished manuscript, April 22, 1974. TGA.Ruscin, Ailecia. “Riot Dyke: Valerie Solanas and the SCUM Manifesto.” Box 10, circa 1998. Ailecia Ruscin Zine Collection, 1994–

2002. DUA. Valerie Lives!. Pamphlet. Redstockings’ Organizational Collection, Redstockings Women’s Liberation Archives for Action, Gainesville,

FL.“Valerie Solanis [sic] Interviews Andy Warhol.” Transcript. Undated (circa 1967). AWMA.“Valerie Solanas to Andy Warhol.” SCUM Recruitment Poster, August 1, 1967. AWMA.Valerie Solanas Death Certificate. November 19, 1991. State of California, Department of Health, Division of Vital Statistics. Informant,

Ramon Baxter. San Francisco. MH.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

WORKS BY VALERIE SOLANAS“A Young Girl’s Primer on How to Attain the Leisure Class” [“For 2c: Pain, the Survival Game Gets Pretty Ugly”]. Cavalier, July 1966,

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Feminismo, 1977.SCUM Manifiesto de la Organización para el Extermino del Hombre. Translated by Ana Becciu. Madrid: Kira Edit, 2002.“Up Your Ass.” Unpublished manuscript. Andy Warhol Museum Archives, Pittsburgh, PA, 1965.“Up Your Ass.” Unpublished manuscript. Library of Congress, Washington, DC, 1973.

GENERAL PUBLISHED SOURCES“About the Church.” St. Mary of Sorrows. http://www.stmaryofsorrows.org/Permanent/about_the_church.htm.Adams, Elsie, and Mary Louise Briscoe. Up Against the Wall, Mother . . . on Women’s Liberation. Beverly Hills, CA: Glencoe Press,

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INTERVIEWSAtkinson, Ti-Grace. By Breanne Fahs. Cambridge, MA, February 1–2, 2008.

—. By Mary Harron. Phone, circa 1992.Baxandall, Rosalyn. By Breanne Fahs. New York, April 8, 2011.—. By Mary Harron. Phone, circa 1992.Blackwell, David. By Breanne Fahs. Phone, November 6, 2011.Borman, Nancy. By Mary Harron. Phone, circa 1992.Bristol Hotel manager. By Breanne Fahs. San Francisco, December 12, 2008.Brown, Christopher. By Breanne Fahs. Phone, October 31, 2011.Caputi, Jane. By Breanne Fahs. Atlanta, GA, November 15, 2009.Ceballos, Jacqueline. By Breanne Fahs. Phoenix, AZ, September 27, 2009.Chance, Michael. By Mary Harron. New York, circa 1992.Cisler, Cindy. By Mary Harron. Phone, circa 1992.Densmore, Dana. By Breanne Fahs. Santa Fe, NM, October 24, 2009.Dunbar-Ortiz, Roxanne. By Breanne Fahs. San Francisco, December 11, 2008.Engel, Don. By Mary Harron. New York, circa 1992.Erikson, Nancy. By Mary Harron. Phone, circa 1992.Feiden, Margo. By Breanne Fahs. New York, March 15, 2010.Freeman, Jo (aka Joreen). By Breanne Fahs. Phone, October 14, 2010.Friedman, Mr. By Mary Harron. New York, circa 1992.Fustero, Robert. By Breanne Fahs. Phone, September 20, 2008.—. By Breanne Fahs. Silver Spring, MD, May 25, 2012.Girodias, Maurice. By Mary Harron. New York, circa 1992.Gornick, Vivian. By Breanne Fahs. New York, April 9, 2011.—. By Mary Harron. New York, circa 1992.Hanisch, Carol. By Mary Harron. New York, circa 1992.Harron, Mary. By Breanne Fahs. Brooklyn, NY, September 14, 2008.Jordan, Fred. By Mary Harron. New York, circa 1992.Koedt, Anne. By Mary Harron. New York, circa 1992.Lanker, Roderick. By Mary Harron. New York, circa 1992.Laura X. By Mary Harron. New York, circa 1992.LeMond, Allen. By Mary Harron, New York, circa 1992.Mauldin, Julia. By Mary Harron. New York, circa 1992.Miles, Sylvia. By Breanne Fahs. New York, April 9, 2011.Miller, Lorraine. By Breanne Fahs. Phone, May 23, 2013.—. By Mary Harron, New York, circa 1992.Millett, Kate. By Mary Harron. Phone, circa 1992.Morea, Ben. By Breanne Fahs. Phone, March 10, 2011.—. By Breanne Fahs. Brooklyn, NY, March 18, 2012.Morrissey, Paul. By Breanne Fahs. Phone, April 7, 2011.Newton, Jeremiah. By Breanne Fahs. New York, April 8, 2011.—. By Breanne Fahs. New York, March 14, 2010.—. By Mary Harron. New York, circa 1994.Owens, Iris. By Mary Harron. New York, circa 1992.Rosset, Barney. By Mary Harron. New York, circa 1992.Scheiner, CJ. By Breanne Fahs. Phone, February 7, 2011.Spoor, Robert. By Mary Harron. New York, circa 1992.Spottiswood, Dick. By Mary Harron. New York, circa 1992.Steele, Joanne. By Mary Harron. New York, circa 1992.Thompson, Louise. By Mary Harron. New York, circa 1992.Tobias, Sheila. By Breanne Fahs. Tucson, AZ, October 24, 2010.Ultra Violet (Isabelle Dufresne). By Breanne Fahs. New York, April 17, 2012.Vasconcellos, Bud Maxwell. By Breanne Fahs. Phone, October 12, 2012.Zwiren, Louis. By Breanne Fahs. Phone, October 23, 2012.

ABOUT THE AUTHORBreanne Fahs is an associate professor of women and gender studies at Arizona State University, apracticing clinical psychologist, and the author Performing Sex and The Moral Panics of Sexuality.

The Feminist Press promotes voices on the margins of dominant culture and publishesfeminist works from around the world, inspiring personal transformation and social justice.We believe that books have the power to shift culture, and create a society free of violence,sexism, homophobia, racism, cis-supremacy, classism, sizeism, ableism and other forms ofdehumanization. Our books and programs engage, educate, and entertain.

See our complete list of books at feministpress.org

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Table of ContentsTitle PageCopyrightTable of ContentsDedicationEpigraphPrefaceSOUNDING OFFSHOOTINGPROVOCATIONMADNESSFORGETTINGPhoto InsertAcknowledgmentsNotesReferencesBibliographyAbout the AuthorAbout the Feminist PressAlso Available from the Feminist Press