Valerie Solanas: The Defiant Life of the Woman Who Wrote SCUM (22 page)

As one who would later join New York Radical Women, Carol Hanisch also felt sympathy for Valerie, claiming that her radical friends felt angry that Andy promised Valerie things and did not do them. “We felt that she had a legitimate gripe with him—a male ripping off a woman. We felt like defending her against him, or at least not totally dismissing her.” Carol felt that
SCUM Manifesto
had a dramatic impact on radical feminists, in that “the passion and outrageousness of it let others be more passionate and outrageous. Some saw truth in the discussion of how men act.
”
41

Anne Koedt, another founder of radical feminism, characterized Valerie’s influence by emphasizing Valerie’s willingness to express anger toward men: “So many women were afraid to be angry. Her coming out as angry was probably healthy, as it let other women come out as angry.” Still, Anne feared that Valerie would distort the true goals of feminism and that the press picked her up only so they could dismiss her as a crazy lesbian man hater: “She was one of the prototypes picked up to discredit the movement.” Speaking of her interactions with Valerie prior to the shooting, Anne recalled, “She struck me as one who self-destructed in a blaze—I could see it early. She had a very driven quality, but she seemed self-destructive. She was more ‘
I’m
angry,’ not ‘
we’re
angry.’ She had a lonely rage.
”
42

Valerie’s rage, however lonely, did strike a chord with many radical feminists of the time. A pamphlet that circulated titled
Feminism Lives!
labeled Valerie as a political prisoner and provided more evidence that radical feminists defended her cause. The pamphlet read:

She isn’t there, as is commonly thought, directly for any criminal activity, but so that men in power can convince themselves she is insane and/or force her to shut up, and to show all women the political consequences of speaking their minds before men, or of any attempt by women to define ourselves. . . . This woman, with a single book, has done as much to bring the cause of women’s liberation before the public as all the activist groups combined. “Valerie Lives!” is a cry being heard more often, in one form or another, from the mouths of affluent women to the etchings on public walls.
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As president of NOW during this time, Ti-Grace caught heat for siding with, and nurturing, the radical factions. “I was being raked over the coals,” she recalled. She continued:

They tried to impeach me as president of NOW for going to [Valerie’s] aid at all. It’s sort of like a Rorschach test, Valerie was. Betty Friedan, before I became a threat to her, was once very supportive and confiding. I remember she was really in a fix once because she had a place on Fire Island with her husband and they had a big fight. She chased him down the beach with a carving knife screaming she was going to cut it off. Lots of people saw her and he was going to bring this up in divorce proceedings. She asked me what to do and I told her, “Well, there were witnesses, so what can you do? You’ve got to brazen it out and just say, ‘I’m a passionate woman. What do you want from me?’” I thought that was good advice. So when Betty flipped out at my assertion that there was a connection between violence and feminism, I thought of her chasing her husband down the beach with a carving knife. She’s telling me
I’m
crazy.

Betty wanted nothing to do with Valerie’s case, writing to Ti-Grace, “I don’t like the politics of this,” and sending telegrams to Flo that read, for example, “
desist immediately from linking now in any way with valerie solanas. miss solanas motives in warhol case entirely irrelevant to now’s goals of full equality for women in truly equal partnership with men.”
Flo responded with “Valerie is superior to many of the people in NOW. She already says Simone de Beauvoir, Sartre, and Genet are overrated windbags so you can imagine what she thinks of NOW. She’s worth all the NOW members put together. That’s right!
”
44

Despite the clear support shown by Ti-Grace and Flo for Valerie during her early days at Elmhurst Hospital, Valerie soon wanted nothing to do with them. Flo had pleaded with Valerie to work with her to secure her release, warning that she would likely be sent to Matteawan, a New York State hospital for the so-called criminally insane and known colloquially as a snake pit. Valerie resisted. Ultimately, Valerie’s resistance and stubborn refusal to cooperate led Flo to resign as her lawyer. Flo, following several weeks of Valerie’s bad behavior toward her, expressed her fury to Ti-Grace: “I don’t let anybody abuse me.” But Ti-Grace stayed on, however dismal the prospects seemed, giving Valerie money, visiting often, and trying to gather support for her legal case.

Once Valerie did arrive at Matteawan, her rejection of help from feminists ebbed and she began casting a wide net to seek assistance. She pleaded for Roxanne Dunbar, Wilda Holt, Ti-Grace, and Geoffrey LeGear to visit her, writing to Roxanne, “Please visit me as soon as possible at Matteawan. It’s very important. . . . If Ti-Grace is willing, I’d like to see her too. . . . I’d like to have a long, long talk with Ti-Grace. Maybe at Matteawan, as the visiting time lasts longer + we can visit in person at a table instead of through these things, we can finally straighten out a lot of matters. I’d love to do so, if she’s willing. . . . Please, all of you, visit me as soon as possible.
”
45
She contacted several NOW members, including Betty Friedan and Jacqueline “Jacqui” Ceballos. Jacqui recalled that Valerie called her several times from prison, sounding angry, wanting NOW to help her: “I said, ‘How can I help you? I am just a member of NOW first of all. You have to go through the board. You can’t just say to NOW, ‘We’re helping her.’ We were trying to do serious work. We couldn’t be distracted by all this. The press would skewer us. I mean, I think Valerie is a wonderful person and you know my heart really goes out to her, but she was not working for feminism. She was working for Valerie Solanas. She shot the guy in the balls. And besides, she sounded crazy. I never heard from her until months later when she was moved.
”
46

Indeed, NOW had blocked all efforts to help Valerie, a move that alarmed radical feminists. Mary Eastwood wrote a memo to Betty Friedan (sending copies to Muriel Fox and Delores Alexander) arguing that NOW should defend Valerie, as NOW and the American Civil Liberties Union had supported other “assassins” and “robbers” despite those groups’ stance against the types of crimes these individuals had been accused of: “Human rights is for everybody, even those who oppose us. If we select out those who disagree with us the sincerity of our principles is suspect. . . . If there was a sex discrimination issue involved, NOW might at least protest even though we can’t afford to take on any other cases yet.
”
47

NOW still refused to help Valerie, viewing her as outside the feminist movement and saying she gave feminism a bad name. In protest of this decision, Robin Morgan organized a petition to raise funds for Valerie’s release to a private institution where she would receive better care.
48
Roxanne found fault with how NOW members rejected Valerie’s brilliance
because of
Valerie’s mental illness. “The objections to her were that it would give our nascent movement a bad reputation to defend someone who is crazy. At that time,
crazy
seemed like a pretty relative term. In 1968, the exact definition of crazy, with the government killing a hundred thousand Vietnamese every month, it just seemed like an odd argument for leftist people. That’s the same logic they used against wanting lesbians in NOW—it would give them a ‘bad reputation.
’
”
49
Valerie, then, posed a triple threat: she looked like a dyke
and
she was crazy
and
she was violent. She was NOW’s worst nightmare.

Around the time that Valerie contacted members of NOW and directly asked for help, she also sent a letter to Ti-Grace pleading for her and Flo to visit and help her. Ti-Grace was outraged by this because Valerie had got her into serious trouble with Betty already:

She wanted the support of somebody like Betty Friedan so she wrote Betty Friedan and said I was harassing her and would Betty tell me that I had to leave her alone. There was a national board meeting and Betty and I by this time were really at loggerheads. Betty had already been behind an attempt to impeach me for having been in the courtroom with Valerie, and of course Betty despised Valerie, so I’m sitting next to Betty and she starts frothing, saying I belong to this “Society for Cutting Up Men,” and she has this letter from a woman that says I’m harassing her. Well, I was shocked. People are making accusations that I’m carrying knives around. I got up and threw my handbag on the table and said, “Take a look inside! This is absurd!” So I get home from this meeting and there’s a wire from Valerie asking me to help her and I’m really pissed with her at this point, big time.

Despite her anger, Ti-Grace convinced Flo to accompany her to Matteawan, motivated in part by the evident shock and fear that Valerie was feeling.
50
Ti-Grace told Valerie they had to talk about her letter to Betty; Valerie indicated that she did not remember sending it and admitted that she felt embarrassed. Flo announced to Valerie, “I’m here because Ti-Grace made me come. I don’t understand crazy. When you said I was fired, I’m gone. I will, if you’d like, try to see if I can get other lawyers to help you, but it’s not going to be me.” Seeing Valerie in Matteawan did inspire some sympathy from both of them. “Everybody was so heavily drugged. It was just an unbelievable place. I couldn’t see just abandoning her there,” Ti-Grace said, “On the other hand, by now I really didn’t like her. I was really fed up with this. I didn’t understand this abuse. Valerie called me names. She really attempted to dominate and abuse me. She was
very
manipulative.” Still, Flo and Ti-Grace did what they could to help her.

Ti-Grace begged Valerie to stop abusing her, asserting, “If we fight, it just serves our common enemy and defeats the goal we’re trying to reach.
”
51
Valerie wrote to Ti-Grace trying to explain why she had reacted so angrily to Ti-Grace’s help, claiming that Ti-Grace too quickly appropriated her cause as her own: “One thing I forgot to mention when I saw you, but which I had intended to in the way of clearing the air + paving the way for friendship is that one thing I had resented about you was what struck me as a proprietary attitude towards me + SCUM. I often had the impression that I don’t belong to me, but to Girodias, Warhol, you—whoever wants to grab at me + SCUM + monopolize us. I don’t know that just telling you this will cause you to refrain from any behavior in the future that’ll give me that impression.
”
52

Roxanne, too, encountered the force of Valerie’s ambivalence about receiving help from feminists. On her last visit to Matteawan, Roxanne tried to organize a committee to help Valerie with the aid of Flo and Ti-Grace, but the effort did not last long because Valerie had not wanted any more help from them. Valerie had stopped trusting anyone and had become extremely paranoid by then. This hit Roxanne hard, but though Valerie resisted the women’s help, Roxanne still admired her radical self-determination: “She will die or live in the nuthouse forever before she will waver an inch from her internal freedom. She is a free being. That is the most overwhelming sense I had in her presence,” Roxanne wrote after their last meeting.
53

In early October 1968, after her falling out with Valerie over her provision of legal aid, Ti-Grace resigned from NOW and founded the October 17th Movement—a group of radical women aligned around the idea of upending institutionalized sexism. (This action likely started radical feminism as we know it today, with Valerie as the destroyer and Ti-Grace as the brains behind it.) Roxanne said of Ti-Grace’s departure, “It was a whole bunch of things. It was defending Valerie, also fighting Betty Friedan’s exclusion of lesbians and of [the] ‘lavender menace.’ Valerie was at the center of a lot of other big fights.
”
54
In a press release, Ti-Grace stated her reasons for resigning as the NOW chapter president: “Since the beginning there have been bitter schisms over taking unequivocal positions on certain issues: abortion, marriage, the family, and support of persons in the cause who have crossed the law (e.g. Bill Baird, Valerie Solanas), the inextricable relationship between caste and class.” In a private letter to Valerie, Ti-Grace wrote, “I’ve had a hell of a two weeks. Close friendships have been split over it, I was put on a sort of trial, I have a good $150 telephone bill because people were trying to help me from Washington, the membership rose up against the Executive Committee. My God, what a circus!
”
55

Flo admitted that she had become bored and turned off by NOW: “I’ve always thought it was a bad idea to wrestle over control of an organization, and when I went to meetings where they would spend endless hours arguing over whether to have red cabbage or white for the slaw, I would just think to myself, ‘I can’t waste my time on this bullshit,’ and go off and set up a committee. I founded the Feminist Party after NOW got to be so boring and scared; I can’t see leaving my house and getting into a subway or a cab to go to a meeting where everybody is more terrified than I am.
”
56

An October 24, 1968, article in the
Washington Post
reported that Betty had attempted to expel Ti-Grace from NOW after the latter appeared in court with Valerie following the Warhol shootings. Ti-Grace, who chose to leave NOW, was asked why she had done so. She responded, “There was a whole series of things, including Valerie, the whole attitude, the panic, the abortion issue. I didn’t want a hierarchy. I wanted a rotating president to diffuse power and encourage everyone’s energies. You’ve got a revolution or you’ve got nothing. I didn’t understand why, on everything I thought was really important, they were a drag, pulling back.” She felt betrayed by Valerie. “I left in October ’68 so I was coming to some pretty depressing conclusions about Valerie by then”; however, “to have reacted the way NOW did to Valerie was really unacceptable.”