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

by Breanne Fahs

  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 a lot 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” and attracted some of the more brilliant and edgy characters of the day—jazz musicians, actors, and those seeking underground gay nightclubs. That Valerie sought it out as her first choice suggests that she had a good sense of a potential audience from quite early on in the writing process. She worked tirelessly on Up Your Ass, spending time waitressing, writing, and working toward her goal of saving enough money to live in the Village. Whether she engaged in prostitution during these years remains a question, as waitressing jobs in New York then would probably have allowed her to eke out just enough 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 around Greenwich Village. Carrying around her heavy, old manual typewriter, she fired off her missives as she moved from place to place: “From one temporary crash pad to the next, from the Hotel Earle to the Chelsea Hotel, she always carted it along, and when she had no home, she kept it in a storage locker.”83 Though she may have finished Up Your Ass earlier, she did not register it with the Library of Congress copyright office until 1965.

  By then, Valerie had moved to the Hotel Earle, just off Washington Square Park, which offered a separate wing for drag queens and lesbians. Still traveling alone most of the time, she ate most of her meals at the Twenty-Third Street Automat, which was cheap and allowed her to pass the time and spark up random conversations with fellow patrons. More confident, struggling for money, and connected more intensely with the countercultural mecca of the Village, Valerie in 1965 had finished Up Your Ass and was roaming the streets as a tragicomic street figure. Mary Harron, who wrote and directed 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 of coffee in a cheap restaurant. . . . When she couldn’t collect enough money panhandling, she would turn tricks.” Harron continued on this theme in personal notes from around 1992, painting a vivid portrait of Valerie’s life in those days. “A picture of her life in cheap hotels, days spent drifting. . . . I see her lying on the bed in a room filled with old newspapers and piles of manuscripts, panhandling on street corners, cheap restaurants, automats. She liked to hang out, to ‘shoot the shit.’ In those days there was such 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 bumming cigarettes, talking others into buying her a quick meal, and selling conversation. She often missed rent. And in late 1965 she was kicked out of the Hotel Earle for lack of payment and decided to move for a brief time to a scummy welfare hotel, the Village Plaza Hotel, at 79 Washington Place.84 Next she lived in room 606 at the infamous Chelsea Hotel, at 222 West Twenty-Third Street, known as a residence for people on the fringe. The Chelsea has one of the most colorful histories of any hotel in the world. The owner, who city officials forced out in 2007, had what he called a “seventh sense” for fame, and would allow those he believed would become famous to default on their rent for long periods. The hotel would later house other budding writers and artists, among them Bob Dylan, Allen Ginsberg, Janis Joplin, Patti Smith, Iggy Pop, and Leonard Cohen. Dylan Thomas died of pneumonia there on November 9, 1953, and Nancy Spungen, girlfriend of the Sex Pistols’ Sid Vicious, was found stabbed to death in the Chelsea on October 12, 1978.

  EARLY WRITINGS

  Those who knew Valerie well all agreed that her primary identity was that of a writer. In a 1991 interview 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 three primary works—Up Your Ass, SCUM Manifesto, and her piece for Cavalier magazine—between 1962 and 1967. Valerie’s productivity, interest in writing, and spot-on social commentaries flourished during 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 to those in the more mainstream Playboy magazine, combining tastefully nude photos of celebrities and models with articles geared toward middle-aged men. (When I bought a stack of them in 2011, the seller on eBay was advertising them by emphasizing that one had “pictures of Julie Christy’s nipples.”) Valerie’s piece appeared in Cavalier with an alternative title: “For 2c: Pain, The Survival Game Gets Pretty Ugly.”85 In one of many sexist trivializations and mockeries of Valerie’s writing, the table of contents listed her article with a line by the Cavalier editors that said, glibly, “How a nice young 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 who casually makes money selling conversation and sex in order to free up time to write and pursue her own 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 writer through a hectic day of miniature rejections and small triumphs, idle time and outright hustling, with biting humor thrown in for good measure. In one such humorous reversal, Valerie wrote of a fellow panhandler, “Here comes that old derelict: ‘Say, Miss, could you help me out? All I need’s another seven cents and I can get me a drink.’ ‘You lying mother, you don’t want a drink; you’re collecting money for mutual funds.’”87

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

  She constructs shoplifting as patriotic, pokes fun at socialists, and views time in terms of financial value: “I’ll grab a listen. A Socialist. I listen a while, then leave, continuing to do my bit toward bringing about socialism by remaining off the labor market. But first a few little acquisitions from the 5&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 New York City. She tells a man who wants to chat, “Look, my time’s valuable. Standing here talking to you’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 a persona filled with self-confidence, amusement, and smarts. After convincing one man to pay her six dollars 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 Bet
ty Friedan’s ‘privileged, educated girls’” she so despised, she writes of panhandling, “This job offers broad opportunity for travel—around and around and around the block. And to think—some girls settle for Europe.” When she encounters a woman handing intellectual 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 in life: “A few days off, then back to work. I pan around, wondering how I can help rid the world of war, money and girls who hand pamphlets to men only. Salvation won’t stem from nice, middle-class ladies pushing for Mr. Cole” (77). The article foreshadows Valerie’s more forceful arguments in her manifesto, where “nice girls” must be discarded, men (including those who want her to walk on them with golf shoes, stilettos, and cowboy boots) know they are worthless, and women take matters into their 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 a few finished works (albeit unpublished) created by Valerie during this time and one that would fatefully bring her into Andy Warhol’s orbit a few years later. The play provides another window into a version of Valerie she wanted to be: forceful, sarcastic, in charge, playful, eccentric, grandiose, and funny. Technically titled Up Your Ass or From the Cradle to the Boat or The Big Suck or Up from the 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, at least 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-raisingly irreverent 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, wreaking havoc. 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 drag queen. 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 his revolving bed; Ginger, the Cosmo career gal getting ahead and getting even by “lapping up shit”; Spade Cat, the black smoothie who gets all the girls; White Cat, the loser who never gets any; Mrs. Arthur, the sex-obsessed wife and homicidal mother; her penis-crazed kid known only as “The Boy”; Russell, the classic misogynist bore; and then, the ever-present Solanas character, the sanctimonious 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 is Valerie’s alter ego, Bongi Perez, a street-smart lesbian hustler and know-it-all who is as sex obsessed as everyone else and who puts out for her tricks but not for lovers.89

  With vaudeville-like sequences of events, often flopping wildly between Bongi’s internal narratives and her interactions with those she meets on the street, Up Your Ass harnesses the full power of Valerie’s forcefulness and wit. The play includes Bongi’s selling her body for cash, fifty bucks 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 in a diving helmet and storm troop boots, I come charging in, shrieking filthy songs at the top of my lungs.” 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 SCUM Manifesto: “All roads lead to Rome, and all a man’s nerve endings lead to his dick. . . . You might as well 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 the Village Voice, Alisa Solomon wrote: “The play centers on a wisecracking, trick-turning, thoroughly misanthropic 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 buy her dinner, she tells him, ‘I’m gonna help you fulfill yourself as a man’).”91 Up Your Ass lets no one off the hook, taking jabs at masculinity and femininity and reserving as much humorous hostility for Daddy’s girls as it does for exploitative hetero men. Taking aim, Valerie portrays a well-heeled socialite gobbling up a turd because, Bongi says, “everyone knows that men have much more respect for 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. And yours 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 your big, 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 in his 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 sharpened up 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 choose between 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 tell Bongi she has always been a rebel; on her refusal to pick up her toys as a child, she says, “I’d stamp my foot and say ‘No!’ twice before picking them up. Oh, I was a mean one. My latest rebellion is my childhood religion; I’ve just rebelled against that. I used to be a High Episcopalian.” “What’re you now?” “Low Episcopalian. Do you know they’re even days when I doubt the Trinity?” “You mean Men, Money, and Fucking?” “No, Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. What religion do you belong to?” “I used 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 between them. 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 for you.” “Russell’s a perfect gentleman at all times,” Ginger says. “You mean he fucks with his necktie on?” Bongi quips. After Bongi rants at them for the unnecessary gesture, Ginger snidely says, “She has penis envy. You should see an analyst. I’d recommend mine, Dr. Aba Gazavez, a truly remarkable man. You’ve probably heard of him; he’s the famed authority on women and the leading exponent of the doctrine that labor pains feel good.”

  The end of the play features a teacher from a Creative Homemaking class discussing the joys of becoming a homemaker: “Integrate your sex life with baby bottle washing: wait until hubby’s getting ready to take his bath; then, quick, soap up the baby bottle brush, working it up into a nice foamy lather; 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 la
ter 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 Alley Cat. 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 a redundancy.” Russell responds, “You don’t know what a female is, you desexed monstrosity.” Bongi snipes back, “Quite the contrary, I’m so female I’m subversive.” “Well I for one wouldn’t make love to 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 her husband and endures bad sex with him. Arthur muses, “Sure, I’d like to do something radical and daring—like think, but you have to make a few concessions, if you want to live in society, so I have sex and collect antiques; I kinda like musty things from out of the past.” “You mean like men,” Bongi replies. “You might say that; men do have a naturey aura about them; when they’re around Fuck is in the air; it’s overpowering; it carries you away with it, sucks you right up.” Bongi says, “Very fucky world we live in. My only consolation’s that I’m me—vivacious, dynamic, single, and queer. . . . You know what really flips me? Real low-down, funky broads, nasty, bitchy hotshits, the kind that when she enters a room it’s like a blinding flash, announcing her presence to the world, real brazen and public. 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 first showed it to a director in 1962), refining words and story lines, making sure the dialogue flowed smoothly. 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 corrections appeared 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 copy of the hand-typed, sixty-page version placed with the Library of Congress collections—included numerous typographical errors carefully corrected in her hand using white tape and blue ink. Valerie had seen Up Your Ass through years of corrections and refinements and had even produced mimeographed 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, and East Side Book Store.94