Valerie Solanas: The Defiant Life of the Woman Who Wrote SCUM (12 page)

Ultra Violet called Andy a “sphinx without a riddle.” When asked about competition between the superstars, Ultra said, “I could not say that there was a lot of love between the superstars. We were not about loving one another. We were about loving ourselves, so there wasn’t [
sic
] really any kind of fights. But again, Warhol was the center because he was there, everybody was multidirectional, aiming at Warhol, so he was the cosmic glue that held people together in some kind of peaceful situation.
”
62

Valerie couldn’t have been more different from the women Andy surrounded himself with at the Factory. With Ultra Violet’s thick French accent and extreme style of dress (for our 2012 interview she wore a purple muumuu and large purple jewelry as she discussed her conversion to Mormonism), Viva’s wealthy pedigree, Edie Sedgwick’s trust-fund self-destruction, Penny Arcade’s sultry sexuality, and Brigid Polk’s stylish outfits, Andy’s female superstars formed a posse dedicated to narcissism, hedonism, fashion, glamour, self-involvement, drugs, and sex. As a revolutionary, foul-mouthed, working-class butch dyke dressed in plain clothes, Valerie stood starkly outside it all. She didn’t fit in with any of them. At the Factory they gave her the nickname Valerie Barge Cap for the dark-blue cap she always wore, with “the brim low over her eyes,” and took note of “the khaki trousers, the old shirt, the scraggly hair.
”
63

Still, for Andy, Valerie had a certain appeal. As Ultra Violet said, “Valerie was a bit hermetic, a bit mysterious. When she spoke, she expressed herself in a very interesting way. She had her own dialect, her own phrasing, so that was intriguing. . . . She had a certain charisma of her own. Not that she was beautiful nor repulsive, but she had a unique little presence, you know? A bit intense.
”
64

Valerie, like Andy, came from a background much different from those of the wealthy socialites and hip artists the Factory attracted. Described by one reporter as a “not unusual looking woman with clear brown eyes and a restless mind, who had given a great deal of thought to the world and its problems,” she had a working-class attitude and a little deliberate funkiness.
65
In the many interviews Mary Harron and her film team conducted for
I Shot Andy Warhol
, Harron wrote of being struck by the similarities between Valerie and Andy:

Warhol had seen something of himself in Valerie. . . . When Andy Warhol looked into the eyes of Valerie Solanas, he would have seen much more of himself than when he looked into the eyes of a beautiful debutante like Edie Sedgwick or one of the gorgeous male hustlers who decorated the Factory. Warhol and Valerie had much in common: both were Catholic, born into blue-collar families; had spent their childhood in poverty; were intellectually precocious; and had experienced being tormented at school. Perhaps most important, both claimed to have rejected sex, although for different reasons: Valerie had had too much sex; Warhol, too little.
66

Andy’s parents had emigrated from Miková, in northeastern Slovakia, in 1921 and settled in Pennsylvania, first in Philadelphia and then in McKeesport. His father was a construction worker and general laborer and died when Andy was nine. Andy had nervous breakdowns as a small child—a fact he attributed to two things: “I was weak and I ate all this candy.” His transformation from a shy, uncommunicative boy into a gifted artist baffled his childhood friends. “The morality of the middle class bugged Warhol,” claimed one journalist. “He grew up in it and now he was running away from it. He was running hard but getting nowhere because he was running The New Morality of the Four-Letter Word, and there’s no traction there.”
67
Andy wanted nothing of the working-class women he knew growing up, choosing instead to renounce his former life as a child of immigrant parents (Andy Warhola) to become a dramatized, wealthy version of himself (Andy Warhol).

Andy created women as offshoots of the male imagination, something Valerie could never (and would never want to) live up to. She was a dangerously real product of a world hell-bent on treating women as mirrored distortions of the male ego. She was
anti
pornographic in her gruffness and scumminess. “Why did it go wrong? Valerie was probably destined to be dropped by the Factory,” wrote Harron. “She was a political animal and an intellectual and they were from the art and fashion worlds and the drug demi-monde. . . . However bold she might have been in print, in person they found her shy, retiring, mousey. . . . She was too serious, monomaniacal.
”
68
Further, the Factory championed women’s beauty but sexualized the men, leading to a cruel mix of closeted gay men, fashion- and beauty-obsessed women, and little movement politically for queer culture. Valerie’s aspirations—for acceptance, an audience, and sympathetic or like-minded misfits—fizzled there.

There is definite irony in Valerie’s selection of Andy as the epitome of sexism and patriarchy, for Andy maintained an air of asexuality and queerness, had virtually none of the characteristics of traditional men in the 1960s, and openly appreciated gender nonconformity. Andy’s sexuality had an uncommon fluidity; as Mary Harron wrote, “Warhol has often gone on record as saying that sex is too much trouble, but he is fascinated by the idea of sex, and many of his films were semi-pornographic in a distanced, ironic way.
”
69
Perhaps, like many in Valerie’s life, Andy stood in for a variety of emotionally charged, missing, or distorted figures. He was a mentor, friend, co-conspirator, and fellow artist, and, to a certain degree, he was an
originator
, as she believed she was. Valerie
liked
Andy, for a time, but as Jeremiah said, “He wasn’t the type of person you would call ‘Daddy.’ He was only interested in you as long as you were interested in him.
”
70

Valerie added something new—she was a butch dyke, and elicited polarized reactions from Andy’s gang. Gerard Malanga, Andy’s chief assistant at that time, said Valerie stood out as a “fringe person” at the Factory. Shy and isolated, she rarely talked to other members of Andy’s entourage but desired “one on ones” with Andy. She wanted his undivided attention and set out with fierce determination to get it. Billy Name, Andy’s house photographer and general custodian in the mid-1960s, remembered Valerie as “a talented woman who didn’t know how to push herself,” with a movie persona that was “almost
flat
. Absolutely featureless. No personality.
”
71

Though Gerard and Billy had some sympathy for Valerie, others felt only spite toward her. The Warhol associates typically “remember” details of Valerie with increasing elements of disgust and rejection. Director Paul Morrissey, “whose star was rising at the Factory at this time,” openly hated Valerie and called her a “pathetic street person, almost mentally defective.
”
72
(His opinion didn’t change. In our 2011 interview, he asserted, “I sure feel hostile towards her,” adding, “I feel hostile to you with your idiot book about somebody like that. You don’t even know who she was. You heard this, you heard that, you heard this. But you keep finding poor people to say something about her.”)
73

Paul framed Andy as a “social worker . . . nice to everyone
”
74
and saw Valerie as yet another case of someone exploiting Andy’s generosity and goodwill, though Valerie took a different view, calling him a “hard son of a bitch, that Warhol.” Ultra cautioned Andy about Valerie as a “dangerous cookie . . . a real bitch.” When Ultra read parts of the manifesto to Andy, he commented, “She’s a hot water bottle with tits. You know, she’s writing a script for us. She has a lot of ideas.” Ultra warned, “You have to know what she’s writing about. You might be a target for her.
”
75

Ultra took an interest in Valerie, finding her an intriguing character, “demented of course,” and describing her as having “narrow, piercing eyes . . . brown hair cut in bangs, a sagging mouth.” When they first met on the set of one of Andy’s films, Ultra was impressed by Valerie’s philosophy that women lived in a man’s world and suffered because of men’s flaws. Ultra sympathized with Valerie’s framing of Andy as mistreating the women of the Factory: “When a film has succeeded, he kept the profits and seized the headlines,” Ultra remarked. “I compare the Factory always to multi-level marketing without pay. That was the Factory. But in the sixties you had communal things, and ‘Make love, not war,’ and people shared things. A lot of people did not expect to be paid. You would do things willingly for the fun of it. But it’s true that Andy did not really pay people. We did not have a contract. We were not there to be paid. We were there because somehow we stumbled there and it was an interesting scene.”

Drawing parallels between herself and Valerie, Ultra said, “Valerie was a woman. I’m a woman. I think she was unique. And she suffered. I understand that one would suffer for the state of being, for the state of society, which as I said before is never right. I understand someone rebelling against the state of things, even the relationship between men and women, which is not exactly as it should be. I understand Valerie, to a point.
”
76
Viva, another Warhol superstar, also aligned more closely with Valerie’s take on how men systematically exploit women as Viva understood the feminist movement more than other superstars did.

Andy and Valerie

Valerie occasionally joined Andy for conversation at Max’s Kansas City, a bar and restaurant at 213 Park Avenue South, famous as a hangout for artists, celebrities, and hanger-ons and largely considered the “in” place to go. It was to become an epicenter of pop culture, sporting a vibe that crossed old-fashioned values with the young and hip. It had a marquee outside that said “max’s kansas city,” in lowercase letters, followed by “steak, lobster, chick peas.” A peculiar mix between a dive and fancy establishment, the place featured a dim, smoky atmosphere and red-cloth-covered tables set with bowls of chick peas, as well as colored lights that changed every twenty minutes and a tank of piranhas that needed feeding every hour (this came to an end when, after a disgruntled employee cut his finger and dropped blood in the tank, the piranhas tore each other apart in the frenzy). Max’s attracted everyone—the elderly, drinkers, artists, people from the world of fashion, Euroglitz, Lower East Siders, celebrities, and club kids. The only people blocked from entry were what Max’s owner, Mickey Ruskin, called OBs (other boroughs) and men in suits. (He once made Warren Beatty go back to his hotel to change into more casual clothes.)
77
The place was especially famous for its back room, or as Mary Woronov called it, the “royal court of screaming assholes.
”
78
The back room was separated from the main area by a narrow corridor called the DMZ zone, which often became clogged with curious onlookers and harried waitresses. It was also called the celebrity room, a place where the hip, famous, and beautiful gathered to be seen and to gossip. Ostensibly, anyone could sit there if he or she had the nerve and was prepared to be challenged by Ruskin, who took great interest in the room’s occupants.
79

Andy ate at Max’s Kansas City every night in those days, occupying the “captain’s table” (as Gerard Malanga called it) in the back room.
80
Radical feminist and revolutionary Rosalyn Baxandall worked there as a waitress (enduring shifts in the mandatory leather miniskirt) and regularly encountered Andy Warhol and his entourage. She recalled that “they played music, they played jazz, and people drank a lot and tipped you well, except for Andy Warhol. They played Coltrane and good people played music there. It was an avant-garde place to go and talk. I guess you could see these people if you were interested in them. Artists and radicals. The food wasn’t good. I think they had steak and hamburgers. It wasn’t cheap but they’d let you sit there for ages in the old booths.” Rosalyn noted that artists, playwrights, and Wall Street types would all collide. “It was hip,” she said, “but Andy just seemed so awful and never tipped well. Other people tipped unbelievable. You could get a fifty dollar tip some nights! But not Andy. He was cheap.
”
81

In 1967, Valerie and Andy spent time together at Max’s Kansas City, Valerie musing about things she had on her mind while he held court over his emerging group of superstars. He listened to Valerie’s statements and then put some of them into his movies, which infuriated Valerie. “He would give the lines to Viva and Valerie told him to stop it and he kept doing it,” a friend recalled.
82
Valerie repeatedly told Andy to stop stealing her lines, but he refused, continuing to feed them to different—and perhaps more conventionally attractive—female stars he surrounded himself with.
83
Many of her lines appeared in
Women in Revolt
, clearly without her permission or approval. She often was angry at Andy, but he just shrugged her off, attributing her reactions to eccentricity.

Valerie and Andy developed a certain rapport during this period. On August 1, 1967, Valerie sent Andy a SCUM recruiting poster to put in the Factory bathroom and quipped, “Maybe you know some girls who’d like to join. Maybe you’d like to join the Men’s Auxiliary.” She asked if he would like to film SCUM forums and rallies: “I’m just about finished with the SCUM Manifesto. (Wasn’t when this poster was made up; thought I’d be, + I’ve been getting money through the mail for it), + I’ll be selling it on the street within a few days. In other words, SCUM’s about to get into high gear. . . . Shortly after The Manifesto hits the streets, lots of activities will follow quickly after—the world’ll be corroded with SCUM.
”
84
Two weeks later, she sent a second poster for him to post in “the Ladies Room,” and a third poster “to keep under your pillow at night.” She was, as always, relentless and fanatical about SCUM recruitment. She called the Factory frequently during spring and summer that year demanding
Up Your Ass
back and asking for money. Andy tape-recorded her calls because “Valerie was a great talker.
”
85