by Breanne Fahs
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 coverage insinuating that Alice had killed them. Alice had claimed that someone had kidnapped the children but her husband accused her of murdering them to spite him (the case remained unsolved, though most sources believe Alice did not kill them.) She had worn a miniskirt to the children’s funeral, a move that 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 working as a cocktail waitress in skimpy outfits. Alice also had a lot of boyfriends and had expressed glee at the dissolution of her marriage, leading to many raised eyebrows about her potential homicidal tendencies.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 had called people “liars” and “worms” and eventually landed two years in prison. Before her time in prison, Alice had been remanded to Elmhurst at precisely the same time as Valerie, and the two had formed a friendship. When they met again at Bedford Hills, the two bonded over the mistreatment they faced by men; Alice had faced a jury composed solely of men, while Valerie felt that Andy had stolen her work. Jeremiah said, “Alice Crimmins was about as notorious as you get. And so was Valerie in those days.”87
BACK TO MATTEAWAN
Valerie 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 letter from 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. I don’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, though her 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 to Matteawan on June 16, 1971. By later that month, she had served her full sentence, and the state discharged 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 hospitals and 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 like her—ordinary women who made a mistake.”89
VALERIE AND FREEDOM
Several people remembered seeing Valerie—often with much surprise—after her release from Matteawan, visiting many of her old haunts and roaming through Greenwich Village. One day as Margo 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 such a strong personal odor, I couldn’t get it out of my nose for weeks. It had seeped into everything in my house. I used rubbing alcohol and could not get her smell off the furniture. That smell is hard wired into my memory. Years later, as I was walking on Eighth Street deep in thought, looking down, I suddenly smelled her. Even after all those years, I knew that Valerie was right near me. I looked up and there she was, wearing the same pea coat and the same outfit as before.” Margo added, “She looked as though she had walked through a tear in space and time. She looked so terribly lonely when I saw her on the street. Looking back, I wish I had spoken to her but I was terrified.” Margo was surprised that Valerie had been released from prison so quickly, admitting, “I was always looking behind 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 and seeing 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 gotten his own apartment and he decided that he wanted to find her another place to stay but still wanted to help her all he could. As a member of the Gay Liberation Front, he knew that the group had a community center a few blocks away so he took her there and noticed there was a women’s consciousness-raising meeting in SoHo that day. Esquire, Jeremiah knew, had recently published a piece 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 long flight upstairs and knocked on a door. The peephole opened and Ti-Grace Atkinson said, “What do you want? Men aren’t allowed.” Jeremiah said, “Look, Valerie is downstairs,” and there was a gasp from the women in the room. The hole closed and a few minutes later Ti-Grace opened the door and asked 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 want to 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 an advertisement in the community section of the Village Voice about a free place to go that offered food and housing for both men and women: the Brooklyn Commune. This particular commune included a variety of communists, including Jim Owles (who went on to run discos in New York and eventually ran for office). Jeremiah called up the commune and said that Valerie needed a place to stay. They said, “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 on the street and said, ‘Do you know who I am?’ I said no. ‘I was part of that collective that you brought Valerie Solanas to and I wanted to say thank you a fucking lot! She destroyed our collective. She caused 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 Brooklyn Commune, the group began fighting about everything, particularly garbage and trash. Valerie convinced 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 rebelled against 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, in Brooklyn, and asked for a place to live. As N. A. Diaman, an early member of the Gay Liberation Front, recalled, “As she sat at our kitchen table I realized I saw her years earlier at Lefty O’Douls in San 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 female then.” 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 provide a 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 be taken in. “I was living alone in a little residential house,” he said, “and this time
she seemed truly crazy. She was convinced she had a transmitter in her uterus . . . everything I’d ever heard about paranoia. Before, she was trying her best to be tough. After Matteawan, she was tough and scared and hurt, and out of touch with reality.”93 Valerie stayed with him for a couple of weeks, talking and smoking hand-rolled cigarettes. She told him stories about the cruelty at Matteawan and her differences of opinion with Andy, especially about royalties and his suppression of her work. He then found 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 near the Chelsea. The Allerton had a reputation as a dive; a porter had found a newborn baby girl in a garbage can.94 While at this hotel, Valerie’s mental health continued to disintegrate and her sense of threat and overall paranoia worsened. This ultimately led to increasingly aggressive outbursts toward drag queens like Candy Darling, whom she believed made fun of women for the benefit of gay men and 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 ramped up.
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 and manipulate her publicity. Following her release from Matteawan, she believed that doctors working in conjunction with the Mob had placed a transmitting device into her uterus, allowing them to track her movements and words at all times. She started writing letters and making phone calls to those she felt 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 calls beginning in August 1971 and continuing through early September. Valerie threatened them, said she would 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 UP THE 50 MILLION DOLLARS, WHICH YOU MUST PAY TO GET HER BACK ALIVE, YOU MUST FIRST PRINT IN ITS 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 MANIFESTO PRECEDED IN CONSPICUOUS TYPE BY THE STATEMENT VALERIE (WHO UNWITTINGLY GAVE US BOTH THE IDEA 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 A WILD, GROOVY AND RIGHT THING TO DO, WHICH FRANKLY TICKLES US SILLY, THIS WILL PROVE YOU ARE INTERESTED 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 I was the contact man for an entity she called the Mob—and to which she had various urgent messages to impart. Some of her correspondence was addressed to me directly but more of it was addressed to the Mob in my care.”97
Valerie told Barney that if he did not print her book in the Daily News, she would kill him. Barney had called the police on September 11, 1971, convinced that Valerie would actually harm him and his family. After her subsequent arrest that day, she was released on her own recognizance pending a hearing for the charge. When Valerie did not appear in court at the assigned time, the judge produced a 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 for threatening 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 know there is no such book as The Art of Cutting Up Men, and if there was, I wouldn’t care.” She called again 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 that the Mob could reach her if they wanted to (under the belief that the Mob could communicate with her through the implant in her uterus).98
On November 5, after Valerie once again threatened Barney, showing up at his office with an ice pick and threatening to use it, she was again arrested and was charged with aggravated harassment. At her hearing, the DA concluded that there was not sufficient evidence of specific intent to charge her with possession of a dangerous weapon. Barney pleaded with the judge, Judge Bayer, that, though he had never had any personal contact with Valerie to date, he feared for his life. Consequently, Valerie was held for psychiatric observation but eventually released after a finding of insufficient grounds to continue holding her.
Following Valerie’s release, Barney became increasingly afraid that she would harm him; he hired a 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 Barney that he should worry about his safety. Shad wrote the court that “it would seem that for some time now Miss 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 reason that she had not paid her rent. . . . Mr. Rosset has no hostility toward her. On the contrary, he believes that she is a very sick person psychiatrically and in need of treatment.”99 Barney himself also admitted to liking Valerie and said that SCUM Manifesto was a brilliant piece of feminist literature; he concurred with Valerie’s assessment that Maurice intended to make money from her work even as he tried to befriend her.
In December 1971, Valerie was again arrested for harassment; her quest to seek retribution from those she felt had wronged her had not subsided. She was sent back to Elmhurst Hospital for psychological testing. On January 5, 1972, the findings of psychiatric evaluations conducted at Elmhurst certified Valerie as mentally ill and a final order was made dismissing the charges against her. The psychiatrists at Elmhurst disagreed on whether Valerie posed a danger to others but their recommendation to the state commissioner of hygiene was that Valerie be sent to a secure state hospital until she recovered.
When notified of this recommendation, Barney and Fred asked Shad Polier to argue for Valerie’s transfer to Matteawan (confirming for Valerie her suspicion that people had paid off the judge to have her incarcerated). The leading psychiatrist at Elmhurst, Dr. Andrew Tershakovec, argued that such a transfer would require a very strong showing of present dangerousness and he “indicated quite definitely that he did not feel that Valerie fell into that category.”100 In response, Barney initiated criminal proceedings that resulted in Valerie’s rearrest, conviction for aggravated harassment, and sentencing to confinement at Dunlop Manhattan Psychiatric Hospital on Wards Island.
DUNLOP MANHATTAN PSYCHIATRIC HOSPITAL, WARDS ISLAND, NEW YORK
After the 1971 closing of the Women’s House of Detention (primarily for documented human rights abuses), most women who would have entered that hospital were sent to the Dunlop Manhattan Psychiatric Hospital on Wards Island, New York. Valerie entered Dunlop on January 21, 1972, the final result of her calls to Maurice demanding fifty thousand dollars in payments and threats to Barney and Fred concerning Grove Press. On January 15, 1973, Valerie sent Barney a letter directly threatening to kill him: “I’m in the hospital now, but I’ll be out soon, + when I get out I’ll fix you good. 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 if Valerie left the hospital for any reason. Once he felt safe and Valerie no longer posed a direct threat, Fred a
dmitted that he liked and admired Valerie and her work: “I thought that [SCUM Manifesto] was the first manifestation of women’s rage against men, and I thought that it was authentic. I thought it also had a literary quality. This book made me aware, for the first time, of women’s anger in a patriarchal society.”102
In early February, Valerie escaped from Dunlop Hospital. On hearing this news, Barney hired a private 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 found evidence that she had been living at 302 West Twenty-Second Street. After interviewing a hotel manager, three residents, and workers at a dry cleaner’s, the Pinkertons detective found nothing to go on. 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 Fred and, believing he knew her location, asked him if he had notified the police of her whereabouts. Fred indicated 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 again demanded to be put on the cover of the Daily News. An hour later, she called back and asked if Fred knew she had escaped from a mental institution. She set up an appointment with Fred to discuss her potential employment with Grove Press, but she admitted to him that she feared the police and knew they 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 employ her as an editor. Dr. Allen should also send a certificate of her release to her mother, Dorothy. Only under 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.
