The Village

by John Strausbaugh

  She got herself booked onto Alan Burke’s late-night TV talk show. Burke was an abrasive conservative host who booked guests such as an abortionist or a nun turned go-go dancer solely to harangue them. Solanas proved too much for him. She started cursing the minute she opened her mouth, and when she wouldn’t stop he stalked off the set in frustration. Sadly, the show never aired.

  In 1968 she approached Paul Krassner, founding Yippie, editor of the East Village–based underground paper the Realist, sometime hip standup comedian at the Village Gate, and collaborator with Lenny Bruce on How to Talk Dirty. She got a fifty-dollar loan from him and used it to buy a .32 caliber handgun. She already had a .22. On the morning of June 3, 1968, she went to the Chelsea looking for Girodias. Instead of her normal tomboyish attire she was dressed for business in a nice turtleneck and raincoat, with her hair done and wearing makeup and carrying the pistols in a brown paper bag. After waiting around in the Chelsea lobby for a few hours she headed for the Factory, which Warhol had moved six months earlier from its original midtown space to 33 Union Square West, just across the park from his favorite hangout, Max’s Kansas City, the coolest club in the city at that point. Solanas sometimes went to Max’s stalking Andy, but then so did every other wannabe in the city. Where the original Factory, known as the Silver Factory, had been a cross between an art studio, a clubhouse, and a drug den, the Union Square space signaled a new businesslike Warhol, organized like an office with a reception area and desks. The first time Solanas rode the elevator up to the sixth-floor space that afternoon she encountered Warhol’s filmmaking partner Paul Morrissey who, like most of Warhol’s crowd, had long ago decided she was a nut and a pest. He shooed her out. She rode the elevator up and down several more times that afternoon, until Morrissey threatened, ironically, to beat her. Then Andy arrived. He was his usual passive, placating self, telling her how nice she looked. When Morrissey went to use the bathroom, Solanas pulled out the .32 and started shooting. Andy screamed and crawled under one of the desks as her first two shots missed. She calmly squatted, stuck the gun into his armpit, and fired again. The bullet ripped through both lungs, his liver, and spleen. She then put the gun to the head of Fred Hughes, Warhol’s manager, who had dropped to his knees. As he begged her not to shoot the elevator arrived. Solanas rode it down to the street.

  Warhol was rushed to nearby Columbia Hospital, where the paparazzi were already magically waiting, and where he was initially pronounced dead before a surgical team went to work saving his life. Solanas wandered up to Times Square, where she handed her pistols to a rookie cop, telling him she’d shot Warhol because “he had too much control over my life.” By the time she was brought in for booking at the Thirteenth Precinct, a few blocks from where Warhol lay on an operating table, an enormous cloud of paparazzi had descended there too. “I was right in what I did!” she shouted to them. She was remanded to the House of D and from there to a psych ward. From behind bars she sent Jonas Mekas ranting letters to pass along to the Voice, where Ed Fancher declined to print them. “So she blamed me for it all and threatened me in typical Solanas fuming language,” Mekas said.

  Three days later in Los Angeles, a little after midnight on June 6, Sirhan Sirhan upstaged Solanas by shooting and killing Robert F. Kennedy. In the shadow of that national tragedy, Warhol didn’t get much sympathy in the press; the general tenor was that his shooting was comeuppance for his amoral, decadent lifestyle. Some feminists championed Solanas as a hero. She was in a psychiatric facility that August when Girodias published SCUM Manifesto, with a commentary by Krassner entitled “Wonder Waif Meets Super Neuter.” She pleaded guilty to reckless assault in 1969 and was locked up until 1971. She was arrested again that year for making new threats to Warhol and others. In and out of psych wards, she drifted to the Tenderloin in San Francisco, where she lived in relative obscurity in the 1980s, turning tricks again. She died in a welfare hotel there in 1988.

  It wasn’t until 2000, more than three decades after she first tried to get it produced, that Up Your Ass had its world premiere, in a theater just a few blocks from where she’d lived in San Francisco. It had its New York premiere the following year at P.S. 122, in a rapidly gentrifying East Village that was going through a wave of nostalgia for the hip, crazy downtown Manhattan of the 1960s.

  28

  The Radical ’60s

  IN WHAT AT LEAST

  SEEMED ANGER THE AQUARIANS IN THE BASEMENT

  HAD BEEN PERFECTING A DEVICE

  FOR MAKING SENSE TO US

  IF ONLY BRIEFLY AND ON PAIN

  OF INCOMMUNICATIONS EVER AFTER.

  —James Merrill

  THE BIG POLITICAL BATTLES IN THE VILLAGE OF THE 1950S HAD been about local issues, chiefly defeating Robert Moses and Carmine DeSapio. In the 1960s the Village became one node in a national network of youth rebellion, racial upheaval, and the antiwar movement. American politics turned harder, more violent, more deadly earnest through the 1960s, driven by the construction of the Berlin Wall, the Cuban missile crisis, JFK’s assassination, and LBJ’s massive escalation of U.S. involvement in Vietnam. By 1967 the United States had committed more than half a million troops to the war and protest rallies were regular occurrences. The murders of Medgar Evers and other blacks and civil rights activists had set a grim tone for the decade. By the mid-1960s many black Americans were frustrated with the slow progress of the nonviolent civil rights movement. Riots broke out; the Black Panthers were formed. On April 4, 1968, Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. America, along with much of the rest of the world, seemed to be pulling itself apart along political, racial, class, and generational fracture lines.

  In Greenwich Village antiwar sentiment ran very high. The Washington Square United Methodist Church on West Fourth Street, nicknamed the Peace Church, became a nerve center of the city’s antiwar movement. It was home to the Greenwich Village Peace Center, where volunteers counseled young men facing the draft, and a station for the War Resisters League’s “underground railroad,” which helped draft resisters relocate to Canada. Antiwar groups from the Catholic Worker to the Trotskyist Spartacists met there, as well as the antinuke groups the National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy and Women Strike for Peace.

  Women arrested at antiwar rallies in the city found themselves locked up in the House of D. On Saturday, February 20, 1965, two eighteen-year-old college students, Lisa Goldrosen and Andrea Dworkin, found themselves in the D after being arrested during an antiwar protest at the UN. They later testified that they were brutally mistreated and humiliated by male doctors “examining” them for venereal diseases and forced constantly to fend off the rough advances of other prisoners. They were not allowed to use a telephone until Monday. That March, the New York Post ran an exposé based on their testimony. They didn’t experience anything other women hadn’t for thirty years by then, but in the 1960s those other inmates were overwhelmingly poor black and Hispanic women. Dworkin and Goldrosen were white, middle-class college coeds. As so often happens that’s what it took to generate public outrage.

  When Grace Paley was arrested at another war protest some months later and detained in the facility, conditions had slightly improved in light of the outcry the Post had stirred up. Paley had been arrested before at antiwar protests, but it had always resulted in overnight stays at worst. This time a judge threw the book at her and gave her six days. “He thought I was old enough to know better,” she later wrote, “a forty-five-year-old woman, a mother and teacher. I ought to be too busy to waste time on causes I couldn’t possibly understand.” At least she could look out her cell window and watch her kids walking to school. She was a Villager, her apartment just a few minutes from the jail.

  Born in 1922, she grew up speaking Russian and Yiddish in the Bronx, the youngest child of Russian Jewish immigrants. Her father, Isaac Goodside (anglicized from Gutseit), had started out poor on the Lower East Side when he reached America but was a comfortably well-off neighborhood physician by the time she was born. Bot
h parents were Socialists, and Grace grew up surrounded by arguments between hard-liners and progressives, Trotskyists and Leninists that left her, she later wrote, “neurotically antiauthoritarian.” As a young woman she took Auden’s Thursday-evening class at the New School. “It was my life, my whole life in that Thursday night,” she later told an interviewer. “I came down to this fascinating place, and I sat in the back of this class with those other two hundred people, and he talked.” Coming from the Bronx, she’d never encountered an upper-crust British accent before. “I couldn’t understand him. Not only was there this very strong accent, but he used to lisp a great deal. It was impossible. But I didn’t miss a class.” Although she was writing poetry from the age of five, it wasn’t until the mid-1950s, a single mother in her early thirties living in a basement apartment in the Village, that she began writing fiction. When she’d written three stories a neighbor, Ken McCormick, told her that if she wrote seven more he’d publish them in a book—he was an editor at Doubleday. It took her a few years, but in 1959 Doubleday published The Little Disturbances of Man. Two more slim collections came out in 1974 and 1985. She wrote in the voice of the postwar American Jew, the generation after Delmore Schwartz’s. Hitler had proved Schwartz right, and Paley’s characters could still be heavy with historical sorrows, but they also said things to each other like, “As you know, I grew up in the summer sunlight of upward mobility. This leached out a lot of that dark ancestral grief.” It earned her a loving following. From the early 1960s on she taught writing at Columbia, City College of New York, and Sarah Lawrence.

  At the same time she grew increasingly active in the antiwar movement. She could often be found on a corner of Sixth Avenue—a friendly, gum-cracking neighborhood mother, handing out antiwar, antinuke, and women’s lib literature—or at the Peace Center, where as a member of the War Resisters League she helped to organize the protest rallies in which she regularly participated. Her week in the House of D did not deter her. In 1969 she was one of a small group of peace activists who traveled to North Vietnam and came back with three American POWs, a small goodwill gesture from the government there at a time when the Nixon administration seemed amenable, briefly, to such overtures.

  IN 1970 RADICAL POLITICS TURNED DEADLY IN THE VILLAGE. BORN in 1945, Cathy Wilkerson grew up in haute bourgeois comfort in Connecticut. When her parents divorced she stayed with her mother; her father, an executive at the ad agency Young & Rubicam, remarried and in 1963 bought the sumptuous Greek Revival town house at 18 West Eleventh Street, just off Fifth Avenue, in the “nicest” part of the Village. That year Cathy, a sophomore at Swarthmore, was arrested while picketing outside a dangerously decrepit and overcrowded black school in Chester, Connecticut. A few years later she was in Chicago editing the newsletter New Left Notes for the Students for a Democratic Society. When SDS began in 1962 it was mainly involved in civil rights issues, but from the mid-1960s on it grew increasingly active in the antiwar movement. In 1969 SDS claimed a hundred thousand members on college campuses nationwide, the same level as the CPUSA in its heyday in the 1930s. Wilkerson attended the national convention in Chicago that June, when SDS burst apart at the seams. Fed up with the organization’s policy of nonviolent protest, which seemed to be having little effect, a faction calling itself Weathermen from the line in Dylan’s “Subterranean Homesick Blues” essentially hijacked and later dismantled SDS. Among its leaders were Mark Rudd, who as chairman of the SDS chapter at Columbia had led the 1968 student uprising there, and Bernardine Dohrn. Wilkerson went along with them. The Weathermen group styled itself as a cadre of the world armed revolt against U.S. imperialism and as a corollary to the Black Panther Party. They adopted Fred Hampton and Mark Clark, two Panthers killed in a police raid, as role models and patron saints. Never more than a thousand committed members nationwide, Weathermen set themselves the goals of radicalizing the nation’s working class, disrupting government and corporate operations, and bringing about the revolution in America by any means necessary. Attempts to organize the working class and to align with the Panthers would fail miserably: workers beat them up and the Panthers rejected them as “scatterbrains.” Meanwhile their advocating violence alienated the rest of the antiwar movement.

  Weathermen’s first public action was a demonstration in Chicago that fall that came to be known as Days of Rage. They’d expected tens of thousands of protesters but only a few hundred showed up. From its starting point in a park the march flowed out into the streets and soon got out of hand, with protesters breaking car and shop windows. Cops chased them through the streets, shooting at a few, bludgeoning and arresting others, including Wilkerson. She was out on bail two weeks later. Having proven to themselves the futility of public demonstrations, Weathermen now turned to direct action. “We will loot and burn and destroy. We are the incubation of your mother’s nightmare,” one of them orated. Looking back on this moment forty years later in her memoir Flying Close to the Sun, Wilkerson writes, “Now it seems fantastic that I responded to the clear signs of political idiocy” by going along.

  Breaking up into small cells in secret locations around the country, the group members went into an intense period of self-indoctrination, hoping to transform themselves from middle-class college kids into “more effective tools for humanity’s benefit,” Wilkerson writes. Through grueling, humiliating group interrogations they attempted to purge themselves of personality and individualism in order to create a faultlessly doctrinaire and obedient collective that was as much cult as communist, the Borg of the revolution. Because traditional relationships might weaken members’ bonds with the collective, they were supposed to have sex only with randomly assigned partners or in cheerless-sounding group orgies.

  In the winter of 1970 Wilkerson was attached to the cell in New York City. Because the cell needed a safe place to hide and work, she went to visit her father at 18 West Eleventh Street. She hadn’t seen much of her Nixon-voting father in recent years but was able to convince him to let her stay in the town house while he and her stepmother were on a Caribbean vacation; she told him she had the flu and had nowhere else in the city to stay. She and a handful of other revolutionaries moved in as soon as her father left. It was plush digs for a gang of Marxist terrorists, one of four spacious town houses Henry Brevoort Jr. built in the 1840s for his children. Later, Charles Merrill, founding partner of Merrill Lynch, lived there; his son James, the poet, was born into wealth there in 1926. Cathy’s father had handsomely furnished the house and the pantry was well stocked.

  One member of the New York cell, Kathy Boudin, was actually a Village native with family roots in the Village’s left-intellectual history. Her father, Leonard Boudin, was a well-known civil liberties lawyer. He represented Dr. Spock and William Sloane Coffin in their case and also Daniel Ellsberg when he was tried under the old Espionage Act for leaking the Pentagon Papers. Leonard’s uncle Louis Boudin, a Russian Jewish émigré, was a labor lawyer and Marxist writer. An aunt of Kathy’s was married to the liberal investigative journalist I. F. Stone. Kathy went to Bryn Mawr with another member of the cell, Diana Oughton, daughter of a wealthy Illinois Republican.

  Weathermen collectives around the country had set off a number of firebombs by this time, targeting military recruitment centers, campus ROTC centers, courthouses, and the offices of corporations doing business with the military. The devices they used were basically Molotov cocktails—glass bottles filled with gasoline and ignited by a lit rag—and did not do much damage, if they even went off at all. Wilkerson’s group decided, despite a nearly perfect lack of demolitions knowledge, to step up to pipe bombs filled with dynamite and nails, detonated with blasting caps on electronic timer fuses. They set to work constructing them in the town house’s unfinished subbasement. They chose Fort Dix in New Jersey for their target. They didn’t want to harm regular soldiers, who might well be draftees from lower-income communities, so they decided to detonate the bombs during a dance in the officers’ club.

  Just before n
oon on March 6, 1970, Wilkerson was ironing sheets in the kitchen when a series of explosions burst up from the subbasement and splintered the kitchen floor. Smoke, splinters of wooden beams, and shards of brick roared up from the crater where the floor had been, followed by a rush of flames. The explosions blew out a two-story section of the front wall of the house, shooting glass, bricks, and tongues of flame clear across the street. The shock wave rocked the entire block and shattered windows up to the sixth floor in the apartment house across the way. Down in the subbasement Terry Robbins, Ted Gold, and Oughton had made a fatal error in hooking up the blasting caps and timers to their pipe bombs and were blown to pieces when the exploding bombs set off three cases of extra dynamite. Wilkerson and Boudin, who’d been taking a shower upstairs, stumbled outside, blinded by smoke, through the gaping hole in the front wall. Boudin was miraculously unharmed; Wilkerson was bleeding from numerous small cuts, her clothes in shreds. Behind them, the entire interior of the house collapsed into the crater, where a huge fire roared and belched black smoke through the blown-out windows.

  Neighbors gathered instantly, thinking it had been a gas main explosion. A news photo shows Dustin Hoffman, who lived next door at 16 with his wife and kids, having a most Greenwich Village reaction: he is racing out of his house with a painting he saved. Hoffman was a movie star by then—The Graduate had come out in 1967, Midnight Cowboy in 1969—but New Yorkers were famously blasé about celebrities living among them. The theater critic Mel Gussow also lived at 16; he and his wife were in the crowd as well. None of them ever slept another night in the structurally compromised 16. A neighbor let Wilkerson and Boudin use her shower and gave them some of her clothes to wear. As cops and fire trucks arrived, Wilkerson and Boudin slipped out of the neighbor’s house, walked away from the crowd, and went down into the nearest subway station. They and other Weathermen members went into hiding, becoming the Weather Underground and finding themselves on the FBI’s most wanted list.