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

by Breanne Fahs

  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 find out 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 do you find the homeless? That was serious work. I had to cheat and lie because only her family was allowed to have any kind of information. People said, ‘You’re crazy to even try to find her! She’s so dangerous!’ Well, I did not know twenty years later what state she would be in, and maybe by then she no 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 have blown away.”85 Those she talked to advised her to keep away from volatile Valerie. Ultra ignored them, writing letters to missing persons bureaus all over the country. She checked the shelters and soup kitchens all over New York and eventually found that there were several variants of Valerie’s name (Solanis, Solaris, and others). Ultra eventually found Valerie’s Social Security and SSI numbers, and using these pieces of information, she slowly tracked her down. First she found her address in Phoenix, and then got a forwarding address to a general mailbox in San Francisco, and then to her first address in San Francisco. Pretending to be Valerie’s sister and that she needed to send Valerie an urgent message, Ultra finally got Valerie’s phone number at the Bristol Hotel from the Social Security office in November 1987.86

  Again pretending to be Valerie’s sister, and saying she had news of their mother, Ultra (calling herself Isabelle Gray) called the hotel and convinced the super at the Bristol to retrieve Valerie from her room and to take the call. Valerie picked up the phone and Ultra, recording the call, said, “Is this Valerie Solanas?” “Yeah.” “You mean the famous Valerie Solanas?” “Yeah.” “I was calling to find out if you were interested in having the SCUM Manifesto reprinted?” “Well, no I’m not.” “Have you written any other things besides the Manifesto?” “No I haven’t.” “How come?” “I’ve got nothing to say.” “What are you doing now?” “Nothing . . . By the way I’m not in this place under Valerie Solanas.” “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 mean anything. Are you a publisher?” “Yeah, yeah.” “The thing is, see, I get SSI and I don’t want to mess up my SSI with money.” “You mean if you earn some money they will cut you off?” “Yeah.” “Well there’s probably a way around that.” “I mean, you could have the money sent to your sister.” “Can you live on what they give you?” “Oh yeah.” “How do you spend your days? Are you making any movies or 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 newspaper edition 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 a copy. 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 Washington or something?” “Oh yeah, I forgot, that’s right! The copyright office might have a copy of that. That’s right. 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 1967 mimeographed copy, lied and said she did not have a copy. Both prior to and after this call Ultra tried to secure copyright for both Up Your Ass and SCUM Manifesto so that she could publish them herself.)87 Ultra continued, “Yeah, well, so what are your future plans?” “Well I’ll think about this here, this project here. Publishing the SCUM Manifesto.” “How do you spend your time? Do you go to 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, I didn’t.” “Would you believe he died last February?” “Oh, really.” “Yeah, you did not know?” “No I didn’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 died like 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 office and 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 cost you a lot.” “Yeah.” “Well, what happened to all those sixties movement people, what happened to them?” “I don’t know.” “You mean it died out?” “I guess so. Well, I want to hang up now. Write to the copyright office about the Manifesto. Maybe you could call me when you get the copy from the copyright 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 it hard to get her out of my mind. I keep thinking what a shame it is that she’s mad, utterly mad. For in the beginning, beyond her overheated rhetoric, she had a truly revolutionary vision of a better world run 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 original conversation, as she wanted to ask her for a picture so that she could see what she looked like. “I could not get her on the phone. I thought that was strange. I never spoke to her again. I soon found out why.”90

  By April 25, 1988, no one had seen Valerie for a week and the rent was overdue. The supervisor at the Bristol Hotel, Lev Krayzman, used a pass key to unlock her room. Upon entering, he discovered Valerie “kneeling on the floor of the one room apartment, and her upper torso was facing down on the side of the bed. Her body was covered with maggots and the room appeared orderly.”91 The police report (misspelling the name as Valerie Solanos) continued, “Krayzman did not touch or move Valerie but opened an unlatched window in the room due to the foul odor.”92 The coroner’s report gave the cause of death as acute and chronic aspirational bronchopneumonia and centrilobular pulmonary emphysema. The report also noted cachexia and fatty metamorphosis of the liver. Valerie likely died from pneumonia brought on by (incurable and smoking-related) emphysema.

  The police report recorded Valerie’s death date as the day Krayzman discovered her body (April 25, 1988), though given its deterioration, Valerie’s actual death likely occurred two to three days prior. Valerie had knelt for days decomposing in her small room. Nevertheless, April 25, 1988, at 4:50 p.m. was given as both her time of death and the time she was found. Her headstone also reads April 25, 1988.93

  The news came as quite a shock to family members. Her mother, Dorothy, had her body cremated on May 9, 1988, at the Fernwood Crematory in Mill Valley, California. Valerie’s ashes were then transferred to the Rapp Funeral Service Home in Silver Spring, Maryland. At the request of her mother, Valerie was buried at St. Mary’s Catholic Church Cemetery at 5612 Ox Road in Fairfax Station, Virginia, near her mother’s home.94

  The small church and cemetery, also known, poignantly, as Our Lady of Sorrows, situated alongside a small country road in a bucolic setting with rolling hills and plentiful trees, had its own history of strife and conflict. Built originally as a place to bury Irish immigrants who perished while building the railroad in Virginia, during the Civil War years it became a field hospital and burial ground
for thousands of wounded and dying soldiers. Clara Barton, struck by the sheer horror of seeing this kind of suffering among the soldiers, decided to found the American Red Cross based on her experiences there.

  Wandering the well-kept grounds looking for Valerie’s grave, I found the site an uncommonly peaceful place for Valerie to rest. It was Memorial Day 2012. The sun pressed down, thick humid summer air blew gently, songbirds chirped cheerily, and when I reached down to adjust a set of fake flowers and a cheap American flag placed on Valerie’s grave, a set of black pincher bugs scurried out, angry that I had disturbed their temporary shelter. I have reached the most perfect end of the mythical life of Valerie Solanas.

  Following Valerie’s death, her mother destroyed all her belongings because she wanted Valerie to rest 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-righteous hypocrites,” 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 only Art, the only Culture, will be conceited, kookie, funkie females grooving on each other, cracking each other up, while cracking open the universe.”96

  PHOTO INSERT

  Valerie’s father, Louis Solanas, and mother, Dorothy Marie Biondo.

  Birth certificate of Valerie Jean Solanas, born April 9, 1936.

  Left: Valerie Solanas, age fourteen, 1950. Center: Valerie’s Oxon Hill High School yearbook photo, 1954. (Photos courtesy of David Blackwell.) Right: Valerie’s University of Maryland college yearbook photo, 1958. (Photo courtesy of Special Collections, University of Maryland Libraries.)

  David Blackwell, Valerie’s son, discovers Warhol art at a New York gallery, 2005. (Photo courtesy of David Blackwell.)

  Linda Moran, Valerie’s daughter.

  Valerie’s play, Up Your Ass, was included in the 1967 edition of 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 copy of 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 a teenager in New York City, late 1960s. (Photo courtesy of Jeremiah Newton.)

  Valerie held auditions for Up Your Ass in the spring of 1967 in the basement of the Chelsea Hotel.

  Andy hired Valerie to perform in his film, I, a Man, where she played 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 Kansas City, 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 Warhol displays his scars after recovering from the shooting. (Photo: Richard Avedon.)

  Valerie is escorted to a police car after her arrest in Times Square on June 3, 1968. (Photo courtesy of Jeremiah Newton.)

  Valerie smiles as she enters the New York Police Department building after shooting Andy Warhol and Mario Amaya. (Photo: Frank Russo / Getty Images.)

  Valerie is held behind bars on June 3, 1968. (Photo Jerry Haynes / New York Daily News.)

  Radical feminist Ti-Grace Atkinson giving a talk in 1971. (Photo: Bill Sanders.)

  Radical feminist Roxanne Dunbar (later Dunbar-Ortiz) upon her graduation from her graduate program at the University of California, Los Angeles, 1967. (Photo courtesy of Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz.)

  Florynce “Flo” Kennedy, famed civil rights attorney, served as 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 SCUM Manifesto held by the New York Public Library, calling Vivian Gornick 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 Manifesto in 1977, distributing it via mail and through local bookstores in the East Village. (Photo courtesy of The Dobkin Collection.)

  An advertisement placed in the Village Voice by Valerie Solanas on April 27, 1967. (First published in the Village Voice, a Village Voice Media publication.)

  Valerie printed this advertisement for her 1977 SCUM Manifesto in the May 28-June 10, 1977 issue of the feminist newsletter, 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 is now the site of the Phoenix Art Museum. (Photo: Argenta Images.)

  Louis Zwiren, Valerie’s romantic partner during the late 1970s, seen here in his New York State Social Services photograph, ca. 1975. (Photo courtesy of Louis Zwiren.)

  Valerie at the High Times offices in early 1977. (Photo by Howard Berman. Reprinted with permission from High Times magazine.)

  Valerie’s mother chose to bury her at the bucolic St. Mary’s Catholic Church Cemetery at 5612 Ox Road in Fairfax Station, Virginia. This church, also known as “Our Lady of Sorrows,” once inspired Clara Barton to found the American Red 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 and uniqueness—has been a daunting and often overwhelming task, one that has called on so many sources of support for these many years. Sifting through thousands of fragments and grappling with the enormity of Valerie herself has put me in the debt of numerous people, most specifically those whom I have interviewed over the years about Valerie’s life and work. The book absolutely would not exist without the tremendous effort put forth in the early and mid-1990s by film director Mary Harron, who managed the herculean feat of constructing and reconstructing Valerie’s story with the help of her research and film team for the 1996 movie I Shot Andy Warhol. When she handed me boxes full of documents 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 the founders of the radical feminist movement, who not only spent an entire weekend telling me her story but 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 my life, taught me how to see the root of things, and added much depth and nuance to Valerie as provocateur. Thanks especially to Jane Caputi for capturing that combination of tragedy and awe that Valerie’s life summons for those of us still drawn to her orbit. Many thanks to Ben Morea, who left his 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 by radical social movements. To Jeremiah Newton, Valerie’s “baby brother,” and to Louis Zwiren, thank you for the conversations that painted Valerie as wholly human and, in these small circles, truly well loved.

  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 only this manuscript but also the 2004 Verso Press edition of
SCUM Manifesto. Many thanks to Romaine Perin, 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, Paul Morrissey, Bud Maxwell Vasconcellos, Jacqueline Ceballos, Jo Freeman, Sheila Tobias, and Margo Feiden, who contextualized Andy Warhol and the Factory, filled in vivid details from the day of the shooting, mused about Valerie, and added further contradictions to such an already complicated woman. 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 departed Robert Fustero, for providing access to the family stories, photos, and idiosyncrasies, and to Valerie’s son, David Blackwell, and Valerie’s sister, Judith Martinez Solanas, for what they gave.