Read Valerie Solanas: The Defiant Life of the Woman Who Wrote SCUM Online
Authors: Breanne Fahs
Tags: #Biography, #Women, #True Accounts, #Lesbans, #Feminism
Valerie Solanas: The Defiant Life of the Woman Who Wrote SCUM (2 page)
There
is
something about the
SCUM Manifesto
. Its brashness, its vivid, startling anger, its outrageous humor and wit, its uncanny insights and truth. It has a one-of-a-kind tone, never replicated by anyone. In an undergraduate college course I teach on manifestos, I ask students to write their own manifesto and they often stare up at me in panic, not knowing how to find
that voice, a voice like Valerie’s.
That she could carry such force, hurl such obscenities, take us right to the edge and then
shove
, serves as a testament to the power of Valerie Solanas. That she wrote
SCUM Manifesto
on rooftops, banged it out on an old typewriter she carried around in lieu of more reasonable items like clothes and toiletries, makes it all the more poetic. Valerie loved her words, her works. The story of Valerie’s life, more than anything, is a story of her relationship to the manifesto. From its start in the mid-1960s, when she bragged to her father about writing it, until her final documented conversation in November 1987, when she pleaded with Warhol “stupidstar” Ultra Violet to get a copy of it from the Washington, DC copyright office,
SCUM Manifesto
played a central role in how Valerie understood, and spoke to, the world. As librarian Donny Smith wrote in
The History of Zines
, her manifesto, like Valerie herself, “has never found a comfortable place. . . . Sometimes it’s a feminist classic, sometimes a marginal tract, a cult classic, a rant, man-hating, anti-feminist, surrealist, anarcho-socialist, utopian, apocalyptic.”
4
In the growing accounts of 1960s counterculture, amid the piles of theory and mythology amassing about Valerie’s life, where does she
belong
? How does one tell a story about someone like Valerie, someone whose life is entrenched in myth and imbued with seemingly bottomless emotional energy? I set out over a decade ago—long after Valerie’s death—to write the story of Valerie Solanas. I got my first copy of
SCUM Manifesto
in 1999 from a friend who had returned from studying abroad in Paris, where she had heard a lecture by the prominent French philosopher Jacques Derrida. In this lecture, Derrida had pulled out a copy of the manifesto from his briefcase, praising it as
necessary
, somehow, to the intellectual history of women. My first reading of
SCUM Manifesto
transformed something in me, too, for in the midst of studying critical theory, I had found someone with no regard for the academic canon, no apologies for her reckless humor and wild destruction. Later, as a graduate student in clinical psychology and women’s studies, I searched for more of her story but could find only small pieces of it.
Hers, I believe, is the best kind of story, told through a pile of fragments and trash: dusty, lefty zines like
Holy Titclamps
and
DWAN
, transcripts of conversations now twenty years old, news clippings, DIY art mags, Hollywood scripts, material from a coroner’s office, half-recorded answering-machine messages, discussions in cat-filled apartments, blurred photos, YouTube videos, narratives from shaky memories, phone calls, missing files, consciousness-raising rants of radical feminists, browning letters and postcards, Library of Congress copyright registries, run-ins with the Warhol elite, notes from meetings in now-demolished diners, posters featuring the middle finger, long-forgotten pamphlets and newsletters. After all, Valerie, of all people, truly appreciated and yearned for knowledge from
scum
, seeing truth only in the gutters and landfills, in the sludge and the muck, in the abject, forgotten, broken pieces left behind by the more reasonable, affluent world. SCUM, she said, “is for whores, dykes, criminals, homicidal maniacs.
”
5
This biography of her life—a life that many have labeled a sheer impossibility (Valerie was homeless! She had twenty different names! Her mother burned all her belongings! She was
dangerous
!)—contextualizes the bigger societal stories surrounding Valerie and her writings. It is a story that stands at the crossroads of many things. As a story of violence, it accounts for the traumas of an individual girl and a woman who detected a spirit of collective anguish. As a story of madness, it weaves in and out of the horrors of psychosis, the difficulty of diagnosis, the impossibility of reason, and the institutions that trap and release so many of our heroes. As a story of art, it returns, again, to the question of how one’s life speaks to one’s work and how the deftly cool and calculating Andy collided with the hot-tempered and fiery Valerie. Finally, as a story of truth, it demands a consideration of the “shit we have to go through in this world just to survive,” calling forth, across the time and space of the last four decades, a reckoning.
6
—Breanne Fahs
sounding off
Atlantic City to New York City
1936–1967
“Pardon me, Sir, do you have fifteen cents?” (I don’t say it’s for carfare, unless they ask; the preciousness of my time demands brevity.)
“What do I get for fifteen cents?”
“How ’bout a dirty word?”
“That’s not a bad buy. Ok, here. Now give me the word.”
“Men.”
—Valerie Solanas, “A Young Girl’s Primer, or How to Attain the Leisure Class”
Valerie has been called many things: “a glitch,
a mistake,” “an outcast among outcasts,” “the first outstanding champion of women’s rights,” “the Robespierre of feminism,” “Andy Warhol’s feminist nightmare,”
“a female Lenny Bruce, created and destroyed by a truth most of us can’t face or joke about,” “a radical feminist Jean Genet,
”
“a woman who looked as though she had walked through a tear in space and time.
”
1
One of Valerie’s close friends, Jeremiah Newton, said simply, “She believed in something. She believed in herself. I thought that was admirable. In an era when people didn’t believe in themselves and bullshitted or wanted to believe in other people, she believed in herself and she was so sure one day the world would discover her and she would have the fame that she so richly deserved. That’s how she felt.
”
2
In her 1966 introduction to her play,
Up Your Ass
(which figured in her actions two years later, when she shot and nearly killed pop superstar Andy Warhol at his New York City “Factory”), she wrote: “I dedicate this play to ME a continuous source of strength and guidance, and without whose unflinching loyalty, devotion and faith this play would never have been written.
additional acknowledgements
: Myself-for proof-reading, editorial comment, helpful hints, criticism and suggestions and an exquisite job of typing. I—for independent research into men, married women and other degenerates.
”
3
Valerie insisted on her own telling, her own writing, and her self-reliance. She believed in two kinds of people: the “originators” and the “interpreters,” that is, those who created ideas and those who talked about the ideas others created.
4
Such a philosophy lent itself to long stretches of isolation; her existence as an outcast defined her—from her early days as an out lesbian in Maryland’s Oxon Hill High School to panhandling and engaging in prostitution on the streets of New York, from her nearly decade-long confinement in mental hospitals on charges of insanity to her final days of living in a welfare hotel in San Francisco.
And yet for all of Valerie’s aloneness and withdrawl from the world, she managed to write the most widely produced document from late 1960s radical feminism—
SCUM Manifesto
. By many accounts, and despite Valerie’s frank aversion to communal social movements, she inadvertently inspired the radical feminist movement after her shooting of Andy Warhol fractured the National Organization for Women (NOW) in 1968. Further, she continues to provoke feminists and nonfeminists alike to
react
to her work, ideas, anger, rage, and symbolic persona, with piles of academic articles and chapters theorizing about her identity continuing to grow. Nearly everyone who knew her personally felt that she had an incessant intensity and markedly unique sense of humor; they also recounted stories of how she betrayed, humiliated, embarrassed, or otherwise violated them. She threatened to throw acid in the faces of her friends, called men “walking dildos,” shot a person who had some at least marginal sympathy for her, and accused many people of stealing her ideas and plagiarizing her words. Even those on the fringe found her excessive, impolite, difficult, and long winded. Jo Freeman, longtime radical feminist and women’s rights advocate, told me frankly, “Valerie should be forgotten.
”
5
And, for the most part, she has been forgotten. Or distorted. Or lost in the dust pile of (feminist?) history. As such, this telling of her life is a version composed only of fragments, shards, remnants, whispers, truths bubbling up, old memories, scribbles, and trash. It is necessarily partial and in pieces, a collection of
SCUM
, SCUM, and scum.
Early Family Life (1936–1953)
Valerie Jean Solanas was born at 5:37 a.m. on Thursday, April 9, 1936, to Louis “Lou” Solanas, twenty-one, a bartender, and Dorothy Biondo, eighteen, a dental assistant, both of whom lived at 104 South Frankfort Avenue in Ventnor City, New Jersey. Both of Valerie’s parents were first-generation Americans with immigrant parents. Louis’s working-class family came from the Catalonian region of Spain, while Dorothy’s mother originated from Genoa, Italy, and later married an American. Louis and Dorothy had two daughters; Valerie arrived first, followed by Judith, two years later.
6
When Valerie was four years old, her parents separated, after much conflict in their marriage. Having decided that Valerie and Judith would flourish when living apart from both their parents, in 1940 Dorothy and Louis sent the girls to live with their maternal grandparents in Atlantic City. At the time, Atlantic City had a thriving four-mile boardwalk complete with diving horses on the Steel Pier, candy shops selling saltwater taffy and cotton candy, amusement park rides, and hoards of locals and tourists hitting the beach. The family lived on a street with “respectable postwar blue-collar housing, with a mix of races and nationalities” and the girls spent much of their time playing on the boardwalk with the neighborhood children.
7
Valerie’s sister, Judith (Martinez, formerly Monday), later questioned the decision to send them away, particularly given Valerie’s closeness to her father: “I was just an infant. I didn’t know my father. But Valerie was very attached to her father, and I think his betrayal of her had a great deal to do with her problems later.
”
8
Details of Valerie’s childhood are revealed in mixed accounts, with some describing Valerie as a happy little girl, full of energy, charm, and vitality, while others painted her as aggressive and naughty. Judith described the young Valerie as a “very bright, very pretty little girl, extremely intelligent with a caustic wit,” adding that Valerie revealed a mix of precociousness and early genius.
9
Valerie learned to read and write before she was six, often composing her own lyrics to pop songs around age eight. In one of these songs, Valerie changed the lyrics of “Oh, How We Danced on the Night We Were Wed” to “Judy’s head comes to a great big point, whenever she walks it comes all out of joint, her nose is so much like a banana, it reaches from here to Savannah.
”
10
Valerie always did things earlier and faster than her peers, playing piano at age seven, reading everything from Nancy Drew to Louisa May Alcott, and beating anyone on the block at Chinese hopscotch or double Dutch jump rope. She carried around a doll named Sally for much of her childhood but also enjoyed her dog Stinky and her turtle Myrtle. Decades later, Louis Zwiren, her then boyfriend, remembered Valerie’s affection for Stinky, saying that she sometimes affectionately called him her “puppy dog” and that “she had a dog when she was a girl, and she loved her dog. When she came home the dog would be waving its tail and . . . she had fond memories of how excited the dog was to see her.
”
11
To a journalist, Valerie described her childhood as idyllic; she grew up doing things most young girls do: surfing in the summer, going to dances, and getting a crush on a high school boy
.
12
Other accounts give a more cautious reading of Valerie’s youth. Those who knew Valerie only when she was young saw her as friendly, funny, and precocious, while those who knew Valerie later on (particularly just before or after the shooting) portrayed her childhood as more disturbed or scary. Family friends and acquaintances characterized her as rebellious and antiauthoritarian: “There is the sense, in talking to family and those close to the family, of a ‘bad seed,’ the child who was always difficult,” wrote journalist Judy Michaelson in a story published two days after the Warhol shootings.
13
When Valerie was five, her maternal grandfather hit her with a belt and she just stood there laughing. A neighbor, Clara Shields, remembered her with “a mixture of affection and bemusement,” and that she had a certain volatility. Bright and lonely, Valerie hated abuses of power. She beat the shit out of a young boy who tormented a younger girl on the boardwalk in Atlantic City and stood up for girls when boys picked on them at school.
Valerie grappled with many disadvantages growing up: “bad home life, poverty, psychological instability, born in the wrong time.
”
14
Later reports by psychologists described Valerie’s wild adolescence, filled with shoplifting and other petty crimes, early sexual experiences, and instability with all of her caretakers; or, as reporter Liz Jobey wrote, “Valerie’s intellectual precocity had been too much for her parents and hadn’t been harnessed so she’d been naughty at school.” Judith remembered Valerie as constantly battling social norms: “She always fought off all attempts to mold her into a nice young lady. I was the one who went for the crinolines, the spike heels, and the lipstick.
”
15
By contrast, Valerie was a hell-raiser and brawler who chased boys who made her angry or insulted Judith; outraged, Valerie would yell at them and berate them to “fight like a man.”
As an adult
,
Judith lovingly portrayed Valerie as one of the funniest people she had ever met and noted that “she always wanted to be a writer.” Speaking of Valerie “with a strain of dark humor and a quiet bluntness that Valerie would have appreciated,
”
16
Judith said she and Valerie always maintained contact, that Valerie had always let her and her mother know where she was, at least until the last decade of her life: “Oh, I was with Valerie her whole life.
”
17
Valerie, Judith, and their mother, Dorothy, had a quiet closeness, though Judith protected Valerie’s story with ferocity. Judith has been described as highly intelligent, well-groomed, looking a lot like Valerie, and lacking some of Valerie’s dynamism. Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, a radical feminist and writer who founded Boston’s Cell 16 and sympathized with Valerie’s politics, met Judith at a play in 2001 and said, “It seemed like she really cared about Valerie. She was really sad missing her.
”
18
Still, Valerie’s colorful and interesting family does shed some light on the contradictions that infuse her life story. Her mother, Dorothy, was born February 3, 1918, in Philadelphia, to Rose Marie Cella, from Genoa, Italy, and Michael Biondo, an Italian American born in Philadelphia in 1891. (Dorothy’s paternal grandparents, Lorenzo Biondo and Maria Milazzoto, came from Sicily.) Rose had immigrated to the United States as an infant and lived with her father, a fruit dealer, and her mother in Philadelphia. Michael and Rose married prior to Michael’s enlisting in the army in 1914; upon his return from the war, they moved to Atlantic City (216 North Morris Avenue) before the 1929 stock market crash. Michael, who was “neat and dapper,” according to Judith, worked as a shoemaker and plumber, while Rose, a tall and beautiful woman, worked as a dressmaker in a factory. The couple struggled to raise their only daughter, Dorothy, on their small salaries.
According to family genealogical records, Valerie’s grandfather Michael worked with his cousin James “Jimmy” Tindaro in the plumbing business but eventually decided to work in the “saloon business,” opening up a bar that served bathtub gin. When the Depression hit, Michael worked as a singing waiter in a comedy burlesque show. (Rose died in 1955, Michael in 1973.)
Traveling in similar Atlantic City working-class circles, Dorothy met Valerie’s father, Louis Solanas, married him in 1936, and gave birth to Valerie. Family remembered Dorothy as a strikingly beautiful woman, a good mother, and a kind, soft-spoken, down-to-earth person who loved the girls. “She wasn’t judgmental. She accepted Valerie for who she was. That was it,” Valerie’s cousin Robert Fustero said.
19
Lorraine Miller, who met Dorothy in 1968, described her as a very pretty lady, attractive, with brown curly hair and a warm, friendly disposition. After separating from Louis in 1940, four years into their marriage, Dorothy officially divorced him in 1947 when Valerie was eleven years old.
Two years later, Dorothy married her second husband, Edward “Red” Francis Moran, a piano tuner originally from Newburgh, New York.
20
The family moved to Virginia, where Dorothy remained for much of her life. She and Red lived in a built-to-order home in Riverbend Estates with a view over the Potomac, then later moved to an apartment in Marlow Heights. In her later years, after Red’s death in 2000, Dorothy left for Boca Raton, Florida, and settled there, remaining in the area until her death at the Boca Raton Community Hospital on July 21, 2004.
After moving away from her family, Valerie stayed in contact with her mother and sister most of the time, often telling them where she lived and when she would next return to see them. Though Dorothy did give one interview about Valerie, to Rowan Gaither, she refused to speak further to journalists, academics, or other interviewers about her daughter. One German researcher, Peter Moritz Pickshaus, who tried to interview Dorothy, described her as “rather gruff and not willing to be of any help. . . . I found the voice and the gruffness of her mother in accord with what I was told about Valerie’s temper.
”
21
Following news of Valerie’s death, Dorothy apparently burned all of Valerie’s manuscripts and belongings, threw away her personal items, and largely refused to talk to reporters seeking information, telling them, “Let her rest in peace.
”
Valerie’s father, Louis, was born in 1915 to Julius Solanas and Maria Prats, both of whom had recently emigrated from Spain to Canada. Julius and Maria had married in Spain when Julius was twenty-seven and Maria was nineteen. The couple had had two children—Carmen and Juanita—before leaving for Canada, in 1911, when their third daughter, Julia, was born, followed by the birth of Valerie’s father in Montreal in 1915. In 1916, now in the United States, with four children and a wife in tow, Julius secured a job as a silversmith and jeweler in Atlantic City during its heyday. Working up through the ranks of old-time Atlantic City, Julius eventually landed a job as a silversmith at the luxurious, decadent Ambassador Hotel by 1934. The hotel was considered the jewel of Atlantic City, filled with wealthy patrons who took the train down for weeks at a time to enjoy the shores, swimming, and sunlight.
