The woman who shot Andy Warhol - self-destructive history of Valerie Solanas

Her Fifteen Minutes

 

 

 

The truncated, self-destructive history of Valerie Solanas

 

 

 

Dec 1, 2014, Vol. 20, No. 12 • /Weekly Standard

 

By CHARLOTTE ALLEN

 

 

 

Valerie Solanas (1936-1988) is remembered by most people only as a name—the name of the woman who shot Andy Warhol. on the day of the shooting, June 3, 1968, Warhol was at the pinnacle of his fame, first as a pop artist, and then, as the 1960s progressed, a cinematic auteur. Warhol’s innumerable home-movie-style films, hastily and sloppily put together at his Manhattan studio, the Factory, and starring the beautiful and minimally talented hangers-on of both sexes, acquired a cult following among trendsters of the time. 

 

 

 

 

new york daily news archive / getty images

 

 

 

Solanas, who had had a bit part as a butch lesbian (more or less herself) in one of those films, I, a Man (1968), was in a running dispute with Warhol, who she claimed had either stolen or lost a play she had written called Up Your Ass, the sole manuscript of which she had turned over to him in the hope that he would produce it. At the time, her main claim to fame—if it could be called such—was SCUM Manifesto, a violently antimale tract that she had worked on for several years and finally self-published via mimeograph in 1967. “SCUM” was said to be an acronym for Society for Cutting Up Men—although Solanas repeatedly denied it. Maurice Girodias, whose Olympia Press had published such succès de scandale as Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita and the American edition of The Story of O, published a commercial edition of SCUM Manifesto in early 1968 that Solanas complained made substantial changes to the text that she had never authorized.

 

 

 

She invaded the Factory in the late afternoon of June 3 armed with a .32 Beretta automatic, plus a .22 Colt revolver as backup. (She had earlier shown up at Girodias’s office with the guns, but he was not around.) She fired three shots at Andy Warhol. The first two were misses, but the third bullet passed through his abdomen, severely damaging most of his internal organs and nearly killing him. She aimed two more shots at Mario Amaya, an art magazine editor who was meeting with Warhol: The first shot missed him, and the second, entering just above his hip, did only minor damage. Solanas fled the building but turned herself in to the police a few hours later. Within hours, a grand jury convened to indict her on two counts of attempted murder, plus some related charges, including illegal possession of a firearm.

 

 

 

Her photograph was plastered onto the front page of nearly every newspaper in New York and elsewhere, and it probably would have stayed there for weeks were it not for Robert Kennedy’s assassination three days later. Most people promptly forgot all about Valerie Solanas. In any event, a judge deemed her too unstable to stand trial, and she disappeared for more than a year into a series of jail wards and public (mental) hospitals. Paranoid schizophrenia seemed to be the diagnosis.

 

 

 

Finally, the following June, a lawyer negotiated a three-year prison sentence for Solanas, with credit for time served, on a single charge of assault with intent to harm. “You get more for stealing a car!” musician Lou Reed, a friend of Warhol, shouted when the judge read out the sentence. (Warhol himself had declined to testify.) By this time, Solanas’s 15 minutes of fame—the phrase, of course, is of Warhol’s coinage—had long expired, and the New York Times relegated the news of her sentencing to its back pages. Those were the early days of “women’s liberation,” as it was called at the time, but even the feminists who had made her a heroine in their war against patriarchy ultimately rejected her, largely because she had managed to alienate most of them with her abrasive and out-of-control personality.

 

 

 

This is the first full-length biography of the enigmatic, deeply troubled, and mostly ignored 1960s figure. Author Breanne Fahs is the director of the Feminist Research on Gender and Sexuality Group at Arizona State University—a title that made me groan, although not so much as at the titles of her previous volumes, Performing Sex (2011) and The Moral Panics of Sexuality (2013). And I wish I didn’t know that Fahs is the professor at Arizona State who recently gained notoriety by offering extra credit to her male students for shaving off their body hair and to her female students for growing theirs. 

 

 

 

Still, she has produced an admirably researched (including interviews with surviving Factory alumni and Solanas family members), mostly ideology-free, and touchingly sympathetic portrait of a woman whose ability to cope with reality was compromised from the very beginning and steadily deteriorated through her 52 years of a hard life made exponentially harder by her talent for self-destruction. In Fahs’s retelling, Solanas was neither quite the lesbian nor quite the man-hater that she seemed to be—she had several loyal boyfriends—but she certainly was insane, following a classic schizophrenic pattern that began in adolescence.

 

 

 

Valerie Solanas was born in Ventnor City, on the Jersey Shore. Her father was a bartender and a handsome devil; her mother was a dental assistant and very pretty. (Solanas herself was quite good-looking, despite her best efforts to look otherwise in adulthood via mannish jeans, unkempt close-cropped hair, and an ugly newsboy hat that won her the sobriquet “Barge Cap” among the fastidious Factory set.) Their marriage didn’t last, thanks to Louis Solanas’s drinking and taste for pornography. The couple separated when Valerie was 4, and she and her younger sister lived, off and on, with their mother (plus boyfriends and, eventually, two subsequent husbands) and various other relatives. Her sister later wrote in a memoir that their father had sexually molested Valerie, but another relative interviewed by Fahs categorically denied this, and Solanas remained close to her father, at least by correspondence. 

 

 

 

Solanas’s childhood and adolescence were chaotic, to say the least. She excelled academically and read voraciously but also skipped school, shoplifted, assaulted a nun at a Roman Catholic institution she briefly attended, and had gotten pregnant twice by the time she reached age 15. Her mother raised one of the children, a daughter, pretending that the girl was Valerie’s sister; the other, a boy, was adopted by a couple in Washington, D.C., who agreed to let Valerie live with them and to pay her tuition at the University of Maryland.

 

 

 

College was more of the same. Majoring in psychology, Valerie made the honor society and worked for one of her professors in an experimental animal laboratory. She also fought—physically—first with her dormitory mates and then with her roommates in an off-campus apartment. She supported herself by working off and on as a cocktail waitress and a prostitute. Her love life incorporated both women and men. It also included a six-month marriage to a Greek classmate who wanted to become an American citizen. 

 

 

 

At the same time, she began to display a distinctive talent as a writer. Her specialty was lengthy, witty letters to the Diamondback, the Maryland student newspaper, that showed off her nascent feminism with a Jane Austenesque flair: “Do I detect a touch of male arrogance and egotism in the astute report which Mr. Parr so thoughtfully prepared for us?” she wrote in response to a classmate’s suggestion that University of Maryland women were mainly interested in getting their MRS degrees. The letters won her a weekly slot on a local radio chat show in which she dished out irreverent advice to callers with dating and marriage problems.

 

 

 

After graduating in 1958, Solanas’s life became more disjointed. She entered and dropped out of two different graduate programs. She hitchhiked restlessly across the country and back. Then she decided to become a writer and, in 1962, moved to New York. 

 

 

 

Around that time, she started writing Up Your Ass (full title: Up Your Ass, or From the Cradle to the Boat, or The Big Suck, or Up from the Slime). The play, produced for the first time in 2001, 13 years after her death, features a foul-mouthed lesbian named Bongi, a Solanas alter ego. Solanas also went to work on SCUM Manifesto. She had almost no money, and she lived sometimes in the boho-chic Chelsea Hotel (until she got locked out for failing to pay her bill), sometimes in other people’s apartments, and sometimes on rooftops or on the street. She ate at the seedy cafeterias that have all but disappeared from today’s Manhattan: Needick’s and the Automat, where she would finish what was left on other people’s plates. She panhandled and prostituted herself to the men she claimed to hate so she could buy cigarettes or a hot meal.

 

 

 

Still, she had a remarkable gift for insinuating herself into the highest levels of New York’s Greenwich Village counterculture. In 1966, she succeeded in getting an article published in Cavalier magazine, a sort of second-tier Playboy. The article —“A Young Girl’s Primer, or How to Attain the Leisure Class”—brashly advised girls how to survive in the city “flat on your back.” She used mimeographs and advertisements in underground newspapers for relentless self-promotion: setting up an actual SCUM society, holding rehearsals in a Chelsea basement for Up Your Ass. In 1967, she went on TheAlan Burke Show to talk about her life as an open lesbian. Burke was a kind of television precursor to Rush Limbaugh: The two started calling each other names, Solanas tried to hit him over the head with a chair, and she got booted off the show. 

 

 

 

She ingratiated herself with Paul Krassner, editor of the beatnik magazine the Realist. Krassner invited her to a class he was teaching at the Free University, where she electrified his students by explaining why SCUM needed to wipe men off the face of the earth.

 

 

 

A 1967 interview in the Village Voice led to her meeting Andy Warhol. To Warhol, Solanas was another eccentric in his collection of “superstars.” To Solanas, Warhol was her chance to get Up Your Ass sold and produced. But she and the Factory proved to be a bad fit: The Factory regulars, narcissistic and supremely fashion-conscious, looked down on the ill-groomed Solanas, and she, for her part, called them “stupidstars.” Meanwhile, she had signed a contract with Girodias, who was notorious for chiseling his authors, and she began to feel nervous and paranoid. In January 1968, Warhol informed her that he had lost interest in producing Up Your Ass. She fled to her sister’s house in San Mateo, California, where she arrived filthy and with a carton of SCUM Manifestos, which she sold on the streets of San Francisco. She wrote letter after enraged letter to Warhol and Girodias. 

 

 

 

By this time, she was “spinning with psychological imbalance,” Fahs writes, yelling at her sister, wearing every piece of clothing she owned at once. She took a bus back to New York, somewhere along the way acquiring two guns. once back in Manhattan, she launched tirades against all of her former literary connections—Krassner, the editors at Cavalier (who had turned down a rambling column of hers about how all men were pigs), and, above all, Warhol and Girodias. By mid-May, Warhol had stopped taking her calls and she was talking to a friend about shooting somebody.

 

 

 

Solanas was released from prison—-actually a state hospital for the criminally insane-—-on June 16, 1971. She promptly returned to Greenwich Village, where, penniless, she lived mostly on the streets and in a welfare hotel. She continued to issue threats to Girodias and others. In November, after she showed up with an icepick at the office of Barney Rossett, publisher of Grove Press, she was recommitted to a mental hospital, where she stayed until late 1973. 

 

 

 

After that there were some good years, of sorts. She found a state-paid apartment and a steady boyfriend, Louis Swiren (although her relationships with women continued), and she even got a job, writing and editing for a feminist magazine called Majority Report. Of course, she couldn’t resist picking fights with other feminists—and with just about everyone else who could help her career. A “corrected” version of SCUM Manifesto that she self-published (with help from Majority Report) did not sell well, and she had the remaining copies destroyed. She was becoming overwhelmed by schizophrenic fantasies about “the Mob,” as she called Girodias and other enemies. In late 1979, she broke up with her boyfriend, left her apartment, and resumed living on the streets and panhandling. 

 

 

 

Then she disappeared, resurfacing in 1981 on the streets of Phoenix, Arizona. She became a local fixture among the city’s homeless population. The police would find her bathing naked in a downtown fountain, sleeping on park benches, trolling trash bins for food, and sometimes sitting on a curb digging at her body with the tines of a fork. By 1985, she had found her way to San Francisco, where she occupied a room at the Bristol, a welfare hotel, and banged out pages on a typewriter. She had stopped using the name Valerie Solanas. on April 25, 1988, Bristol employees discovered her dead body, covered with maggots, inside her room. A coroner’s report listed the cause of death as pneumonia, probably brought on by emphysema. Warhol had died of cardiac arrhythmia the previous year.

 

 

 

Solanas’s mother had her buried in a Catholic cemetery known as Our Lady of Sorrows in Fairfax Station, Virginia, near her mother’s home. “Our Lady of Path-Blazing, Hell-Raising, Truth-Telling Sorrows,” Fahs writes. Well, maybe. I think, for Valerie Solanas, it was just plain sorrows.

 

 

 

Charlotte Allen is a frequent contributor to The Weekly Standard.