The Lonely City (10 page)

This is not to say, however, that isolation was what Solanas desired. In fact, isolation was one of the things she blamed on men: the way they separated women from each other, hauling them off to the suburbs to form self-absorbed family groups.
SCUM
is deeply opposed to this kind of atomisation. It’s not just a lonely document; it’s also a document that seeks to identify and remedy the causes of isolation. The deeper dream, beyond that of a world without men, is revealed when the word
community
is defined: ‘A true community consists of individuals – not mere species members, not couples – respecting each others individuality and privacy, at the same time interacting with each other mentally and emotionally – free spirits in free relation to each other – and cooperating with each other to achieve common ends’ – a statement with which I am in complete accord.

After Valerie finished the manifesto at the beginning of August 1967, she worked frenetically to publicise its existence. She mimeographed 2,000 copies and hand-sold them on the streets, $1 for women, $2 for men. She distributed fliers, conducted forums, posted adverts in the
Village Voice
and made recruiting posters.

One of the recipients of these posters was Andy Warhol. On 1 August, Valerie mailed him three copies, two for the Factory and one ‘to keep under your pillow at night’. It was a gift for an ally, not an enemy. They’d met earlier that spring, while she was trying to get
Up Your Ass
produced. At the time, she’d been arranging dozens of meeting with producers and publishers, but they all passed, some expressing anxiety about its pornographic contents (the play is extremely bawdy, centring on the exploits of a hard-boiled dyke called Bongoi).

Valerie hadn’t wandered or drifted into the Factory. She’d come deliberately, looking for amplification of her voice, her work. She was focused and intent; ‘dead serious’ in her own words. That spring she’d sometimes come to sit at Warhol’s table in the backroom of Max’s Kansas City, braving the stares, the drag queens giving her the once over. She was a fast-talker, a hustler, and he liked that, regularly taping their phone conversations and apparently lifting a number of her lines for later movies.

Their conversations were playful and often very funny. In one of them, reported in Fahs’s biography, Solanas asks: ‘Andy, will you take seriously your position as head of the men’s auxiliary of SCUM? Cause you do realise the immenseness of the position?’ Andy: ‘What is it? Is it that big?’ Valerie: ‘Yes, it is.’ She pretends to be in the CIA, quizzes him about his sexual practices
and, like the Sugar Plum Fairy, interrogates him about his own silence, his abnormal reticence.

Valerie: Why don’t you like to answer questions?

Andy: I really never have anything to say . . .

Valerie: Andy! Did anyone ever tell you you were uptight?

Andy: I’m not uptight.

Valerie: How are you not uptight?

Andy: It’s such an old-fashioned word.

Valerie: You’re an old-fashioned guy. You really are. I mean, you don’t realize it but you really are.

Back in June, she’d given him a bound copy of
Up Your Ass.
He’d expressed interest in producing it; in fact their conversations had progressed as far as suggesting venues and possible double-bills. But some time that summer Warhol lost or discarded it. As a kind of apology, a way of getting her off his back, he cast Valerie in his film,
I, a Man.
In it, she refuses the sinuous femininity of most of the Superstars, male and female alike, performing instead an aggressively anti-sexual androgyny, awkward, jittery and amusingly contemptuous.

Warhol wasn’t by any means the only publisher or promoter Valerie was pursuing that summer. At the end of August, a few days after the premiere of
I, a Man,
she signed a contract for $500 for a novel with a notoriously sleazy publisher, Maurice Girodias at the Olympia Press. As soon as the ink was dry, she began to fret. Did the contract mean she had inadvertently signed away the rights to both
Up Your Ass
and
SCUM Manifesto
? Who
actually owned her words? Had she given them away? Worse, had they been stolen from her?

Warhol was sympathetic to Valerie’s worries about the Girodias contract, even arranging for his own lawyers to look it over for free. There was no problem, they all agreed; the contract was vaguely worded and in no way binding, but their reassurances did nothing to ameliorate her growing anxiety. Words were what counted for Valerie; they were the flung rope between her and the world. Words were a source of power, the best way of making contact, of reshaping society on her own terms. The idea that she might have lost control over her own writing was devastating. It plunged her into the isolation chamber of paranoia, where the self is necessarily armed and barricaded against incursion and attack.

But as the old adage goes, just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not after you. Solanas was not mad in thinking that she could see oppression everywhere she looked, or that society was a system dedicated to excluding and side-lining women (1967, the year in which
SCUM
was first published, was also, one might remember, the year in which Jo Hopper donated her life’s work to the Whitney, which subsequently destroyed it).Valerie’s growing loneliness and isolation was caused not just by mental illness, but also because she was voicing something about which the community at large was in denial.

Over the course of the next year, Solanas’s relationship with Warhol soured. Her attempts to have him produce the play or make a film out of
SCUM
became more aggrieved, more desperate and deranged. She’d been evicted from the Chelsea Hotel for
non-payment of rent, and was drifting around the country, homeless and broke. She sent him hate mail from the road. One addresses him as ‘Toad’; another reads: ‘Daddy, if I am good will you let Jonas Mekas write about me? Will you let me do a scene in one of your shit movies? Oh, thank you, thank you’ – not, one might imagine, a tone or attitude to which Warhol was much accustomed.

Things came to a head in the summer of 1968. Back in New York, and more paranoid than ever, she began to ring Andy persistently at home, a number almost no one in his entourage even had, let alone used. Eventually, he stopped taking Solanas’s calls at all (one of the ongoing threads in
a
is the necessity of establishing this sort of protocol, so that calls to the Factory could be screened and unwanted advances avoided).

On Monday 3 June, Valerie collected a bag from a friend’s apartment and then went to visit two producers, Lee Strasberg and Margo Feiden. Strasberg was out but Valerie spent four hours at Feiden’s apartment. At the end of an exhausting and exhaustive discussion about her work, she asked if Margo would be willing to produce her play. When Margo refused, she pulled out a gun. After some persuasion, she left, saying she was going to shoot Andy Warhol instead.

She arrived at the Factory just after lunch, carrying a brown paper bag containing two handguns, a Kotex pad and her address book. This was the new Factory: a glossy loft on the sixth floor of 33 Union Square West, at the northernmost tip of the square. The old Silver Factory had been demolished that spring and with the shift in location the personnel too had begun to change, the speed-heads
and drag queens gradually replaced by sleek and suited men, the business-minded associates who would shepherd Warhol into increasingly lucrative pastures from now on.

When Valerie arrived Warhol was out, and so she hung around outside, going up and down in the elevator at least seven times to check she hadn’t missed him. He finally appeared at 4.15, encountering both Valerie and his then boyfriend Jed Johnson in the street outside. The three of them took the elevator up together. In
POPism,
his memoir of the 1960s, Warhol recalled that Valerie was wearing lipstick and a heavy coat, though the day was very hot, and that she was bouncing a little on the balls of her feet.

Upstairs, people were working, among them Warhol’s collaborator Paul Morrissey and his business manager Fred Hughes. Andy sat down at his desk and took a call from Viva, Susan Bottomley, who was having her hair dyed in Kenneth’s Hair Salon. As they chatted, Valerie pulled out the .32 Beretta and fired twice. No one but Andy saw where the shots had come from. He tried to climb under the desk, but she stood over him and shot again, this time hitting him at close range. Blood was gushing through his t-shirt, splattering the white cord of the phone. ‘I felt horrible, horrible pain,’ he remembered later, ‘like a cherry bomb exploding inside me.’ Next, Solanas shot the art critic Mario Amaya, wounding him superficially. She was about to fire at a pleading Fred Hughes when the elevator door opened and she was persuaded to step inside. ‘There’s the elevator, Valerie. Just
take
it.’

By then Warhol was crumpled on the floor in a pool of his own blood. He kept saying he couldn’t breathe. When Billy Name bent over him, shaking and heaving, Warhol thought he was
laughing and started to laugh too. ‘Don’t laugh, oh, please don’t make me laugh,’ he said, but Billy was crying. The bullet had ricocheted sideways through Andy’s abdomen, passing through both his lungs, his oesophagus, gall bladder, liver, intestines and spleen, leaving a gaping exit wound in his right flank. His lungs were punctured and he was fighting for air.

It took a long time to get him out. Everything dragging, everything lagging. The stretcher wouldn’t fit in the elevator and so he had to be carried down six flights of steep stairs, a journey so distressing that he lost consciousness. Mario had to tip the ambulance driver $15 to put the siren on, and once Warhol was finally in the operating room, it seemed anyway that they were too late. Both he and Mario distinctly heard the doctors muttering
No chance.
‘Don’t you know who this is?’ Mario screamed. ‘It’s Andy Warhol. He’s famous. And he’s rich. He can afford to pay for an operation. For Christ’s sake, do something.’

Inspired perhaps by the mention of fame and riches, the surgeons did decide to operate, but as they opened up Andy’s chest his heart stopped beating. Though they managed to resuscitate, Warhol was clinically dead for one and a half minutes, flung out of life altogether by the least regarded of all the voice artists who’d collected around him: a journey he later said he could never be totally certain he had returned from.

*

Everyone always got Valerie wrong. When she was arrested (giving herself up to a traffic cop in Times Square at around
the time Andy was having his spleen removed), she told the throng of journalists at the Thirteenth Precinct station house that the answer to why she’d shot Andy Warhol would be found in her manifesto. ‘Read my manifesto,’ she insisted. ‘It will tell you what I am.’ Evidently no one did, since she was misidentified on the front page of the
Daily News
the next morning. The famous headline ran:
ACTRESS SHOOTS ANDY WARHOL.
Furious, she demanded a retraction, and the evening edition of the story included her correction: ‘I’m a writer, not an actress.’

It would become increasingly hard to maintain control of her own story, dismaying considering she claimed she’d shot Warhol because he had too much control over her life. Now she had to contend with the full apparatus of the state; to spend three years shuttling back and forth between courts, mental hospitals and prisons, among them the notoriously filthy and brutal Matteawan State Hospital for the Criminally Insane (where Edie Sedgwick was also a patient at the time), Bellevue Psychiatric Hospital (where Valerie’s uterus was removed), and the Women’s House of Detention.

Her case became a cause célèbre among feminists, but she quickly fell out with the women who flocked to her defence. She didn’t want anyone speaking for her, or co-opting her ideas. Nor did she stop her attacks on Warhol. During the years of her incarceration, she kept sending him letters, some threatening or coercive, some conciliatory, even chummy. Briefly at liberty in the winter of 1968, she reinstituted her campaign of telephone harassment. In
POPism,
Warhol remembered answering the phone to her on Christmas Eve, and almost fainting when he heard her
voice. She threatened, he said, to ‘do it again . . . My worst nightmare had come true.’

Instead, she went back to prison. By the time she re-emerged, she was quieter, more subdued, as you might expect from someone who’d been trapped in places where sexual and physical assaults were common, where prisoners were expected to survive on a slice of bread and a single filthy cup of coffee a day, and were frequently locked as punishment into cells devoid of furnishings or light.

Back in New York, Valerie spent much of her time hunting for food and a place to sleep. People who knew her in that period attest to the way she was excluded from communes and women’s groups, both of whom had become wary of her hostility, her savage tongue. Strangers avoided her in the street. She was frequently spat at and thrown out of cafés, not because she was recognised as Warhol’s putative assassin, but because she gave off a tang of difference, a silent signal of being somehow outcast, undesirable, even blemished. She drifted around the Village, a miserable, skinny figure, huddled in layers of winter clothes. She was still fixated with the idea that people were stealing her words, only now she thought a transmitter had been hidden in her uterus.

The loneliness of the second half of Solanas’s life was a product of many factors. The most obvious and frequently stated was her growing loss of touch with consensual reality. Paranoia is isolating in itself, by its own mechanisms of mistrust and withdrawal, but it also carries a stigma, as does time spent in prison. People pick up on these perceived markers of abnormality. They sidestep the
street mutterer and shun the former criminal, isolating them if not submitting them to actual violence. What I am trying to say is that the vicious circle by which loneliness proceeds does not happen in isolation, but rather as an interplay between the individual and the society in which they are embedded, a process perhaps worsened if they are already a sharp critic of that society’s inequities.