Valerie Solanas: The Defiant Life of the Woman Who Wrote SCUM (11 page)

Valerie then sent the play to Paul Krassner, an early yippie, the editor of the
Realist
, and a notorious avant-garde publisher. Paul looked at the play but found it unfit to pursue: “I rejected it on the grounds that I had no overwhelming desire to share Valerie’s misanthropic evangelism with my friends.” However, Valerie intrigued him and he agreed to meet with her for dinner at the Forty-Second Street Automat. Paul had a lively interpretation of Valerie: “She was a cross between an early Rosalind Russell movie and the Ancient Mariner, only instead of plucking at the elbows of strange wedding guests on the street, you had the feeling she would rather be breaking up the honeymoon itself by somehow managing to get in the marriage bed, replacing the wife with her albatross.
”
42

The meal with Paul went well enough that he invited Valerie to talk to his class at the Free University on Fourteenth Street. She happily agreed and, once there, electrified the room, explaining to the students why SCUM needed to wipe men off the face of the earth and how men had advantages women could never have. One of the students asked, “Miss Solanas, how long have you been in this SCUM bag?” Valerie spoke with pride of this talk, mentioning it to Andy Warhol in a conversation nearly a year later.
43
Anne Koedt, a burgeoning radical feminist who had begun to sense the rumblings of the emerging women’s movement, saw Valerie speak about SCUM at the Free University. Anne admired Valerie’s anger and the precision of her words: “I’m glad she said what she said; it was an interesting kind of performance. Maybe it was genuinely felt, but it brought up a question: What do you
do
with that rage? Some of it must have been founded in truth, but where do you direct it? She told us it was okay to be angry, which was hard then.
”
44

Valerie continued her search to get
Up Your Ass
produced and
SCUM Manifesto
published, sending the manuscript of the play on to Ralph Ginzburg at
Avant-Garde
, “the highbrow magazine of erotica, whose style was a long way from her scruffy street language and corny humor.
”
45
Ralph rejected the play, telling Valerie that she had to come and pick up the copy herself because he did not want to send it by the US Postal Service on the chance of its being read and censored. (He was facing pornography charges for publishing
Eros
in 1962 and could not risk a second violation for mailing
Up Your Ass
.) Valerie also sought out the owner of Peace Eye bookstore, Ed Sanders, a local beat poet and anarcho-socialist entrepreneur who was friends with Andy Warhol and had his silkscreened flowers plastered over the walls. Sensing that they might be a good fit—he ran a journal called
Fuck You/A Magazine of the Arts
—she gave him her twenty-one-page draft of
SCUM Manifesto
, asking him to publish it. He, too, refused.
46

Seeking further publicity for the play, Valerie staged a reading of
Up Your Ass
at the Director’s Theater at 20 East Fourteenth Street in the East Village, taking out a series of ads over the course of four weeks to promote this “pre-production reading” of the play. The ad in the
Village Voice
read:

SCUM

(Society for Cutting Up Men)

presents

pre-production reading of

UP FROM THE SLIME

by Valerie Solanas

Beg. Wed. Feb 15. 8:30 PM

every day except Tues. & Thurs.

Directors Theater School 20 E. 14th St.

admission by contribution

Cast (in alphabetical order)

Harold Anderson,

Donald Eggena, Bonnie Greer,

Marcia Sam Ridge,

Gary Tucker, Barbara Wallace

copies of SCUM book (:)

“Up from the Slime” & “A Young

Girl’s Primer on How to Attain

the Leisure Class”

(reprinted from Cavalier 1966)

will be sold at reading for

$1.50 per copy

Listen to Valerie Solanas on

Randy Wicker’s Interview Show

WBAI-FM in a few weeks

(watch Village Voice for exact date)
47

Valerie’s quest to get
Up Your Ass
produced and
SCUM Manifesto
published, though ultimately unsuccessful, had nevertheless sparked some low-level interest from the publishing world, including Robert Marmorstein from the
Village Voice
. In late fall of 1967, Marmorstein arranged to interview and have dinner with Valerie at a place at the corner of West Twenty-Third Street and Eighth Avenue. Remembering her with fondness and amusement, in his article “SCUM Goddess,” Marmorstein described her brashness and her insistence on setting the terms of their meeting: “I had spoken to Miss Solanis [
sic
] on the phone.” Her response was, “‘What’s this interview crap? All these characters wanting to interview me. What for? For kicks?’ ‘Your ideas are so unique.’ ‘So, what’s this interview jazz? You want to just bullshit, say so. You can buy me dinner and we’ll bullshit.
’
”

Valerie insisted on not getting into a car with Marmorstein: “‘No cars. You be standing on the corner on your own two legs. I don’t get into any cars with men.’ ‘Why not?’ ‘Never mind why not. I’ve had some funny experiences with strange guys in cars. You just be sure to come on foot.
’
” (One can only imagine that Valerie was referring to her days hitchhiking across the country in 1960–61.) Dressed in slacks, a sailor’s pea jacket, and an army fatigue cap pushed back on her head, she arrived for dinner. About her cap, she had said on the phone, “I always wear it.” When Marmorstein asked her why, she replied with, “I like to. That’s all.”

Once at the restaurant, Valerie ordered a large well-done steak, French fries, and a salad. When Marmorstein asked if she was serious about the “SCUM thing,” she retorted, “Christ! Of course I’m serious. I’m dead serious.” Valerie declared that she was a writer (“pretty good when I want to”). When he asked why women can’t have a peaceful revolution, she replied, “We’re impatient. That’s why. I’m not going to be around 100 years from now. I want a piece of a groovy world myself. That peaceful shit is for the birds. Marching, demonstrating. That’s for little old ladies who aren’t serious. SCUM is a criminal organization, not a civil disobedience lunch club. We’ll operate under dark and as effectively as possible and get what we want as fast as possible.
”
48

Valerie’s earnestness about SCUM had puzzled people. Was she serious? What kind of revolution did she want? Selling her manifesto, doing occasional interviews, and publishing her
Cavalier
piece, Valerie had begun to make a name for herself. As scholar Jennifer Doyle noted, “By the time her movements in New York took her to the Factory, she had already achieved notoriety, having been interviewed by the
Village Voice
as the proto-feminist author of this scabrous text.
”
49
Already an outcast, Valerie had many qualities that made her an ideal candidate for the Factory—interesting, lonely, unique, brash, awkward, sexually ambiguous, angry, vulnerable, and loudmouthed—and she caught the eye of Andy Warhol.

The Factory Scene and Warhol “Stupidstars”

Warhol reflected the American dream, but what is phenomenal about him is that he also represented the American disasters, dreams and disasters.

—Ultra Violet, “The Ultra Violet Interview”

In an act of revenge, photographer Nat Finkelstein first brought Valerie—difficult, eccentric, and openly queer—to the Factory, Andy’s New York studio renowned as a meeting place for volatile artists, drug users, and wealthy, celebrity-obsessed superstars. Just prior to that, Valerie’s quest to get
Up Your Ass
produced had led her to Richie Berlin, the sister of Factory superstar Brigid Polk (so named for her reputation for giving out “pokes,” injections of vitamin B and amphetamines). Richie gave Valerie the telephone number for Nat, who photographed events at the Factory, saying that Nat might have some good ideas about how to get the play produced. “God, what a bore,” Finkelstein thought. “I’ll give this to Andy
.
”
50
Nat was annoyed with Andy and did not mind introducing other misfits to his already harried scene. “Andy was fascinated by a million people. She was just a million and one. Andy was fascinated by all of us,” superstar Ultra Violet said.
51

Valerie called Andy, and because Andy thought the title of the play sounded interesting, he invited her to the Factory for a meeting. Valerie wanted to meet Andy not as an admirer or a fan but, according to film director Mary Harron, as a “political creature, a sociologist. . . . She found there an opportunity, or the possibility of one, that she could see nowhere else.” Attracted as she was by his power and influence, his celebrity, and his ability to get things done, “where else could Valerie have gone? Certainly not the New Left; in 1967, it was as sexist as the Pentagon.
”
52

When Valerie first arrived at the Factory for her meeting with Andy, he suspected her of being an undercover cop, telling an interviewer in
Cahiers du cinema
shortly after their meeting, “People try to trap us sometimes: [Valerie] called up here and offered me a film script . . . and I thought the title was so wonderful and I’m so friendly that I invited her to come up with it, but it was so dirty that I think she must have been a lady cop. I don’t know if she was genuine or not but we haven’t seen her since and I’m not surprised. I guess she thought that was the perfect thing for Andy Warhol.
”
53
In response to Andy’s accusing her of being a cop, Valerie unzipped her pants, exposed her vulva, and said, “Sure, I’m a cop and here’s my badge.
”
54

To place Valerie in the context of the Factory, consider its denizens and the qualities that might have drawn her to this group. It offered a stylized facsimile of the world Valerie knew all too well; what she experienced as hard reality, the Factory appropriated as gritty, artistic drama. Still, as Mary Harron noted, “in the mid sixties this big silver room was the most radical place in America (culturally speaking). The films there almost signaled the end of the avant-garde—in art and painting nothing more extreme or challenging has been done since.”
Those drawn to the Factory were misfits, running from their families, wealth, the Catholic Church, expectations of marriages and families; and “they found shelter there together, even if they sometimes tore each other apart.” They experimented with how many drugs they could take, how much (or little) sex they could have, “how far you can hold an image, how long you can talk . . . trying to define new parameters, rules, ways of being, refashioning the world.
”
55

Andy was a master of his public image—something Valerie said was his “true art”—as he knew how to generate a sense of style and celebrity for those who would otherwise remain on the fringes. He placed himself at the epicenter of gossip and fashion, shamelessly seeking fame, to the extent of founding
Interview
magazine as a way to get tickets to movie premieres.
56
He took gay culture to the broader public, giving Valerie the ultimate opportunity to fit in. Yet despite these qualities, Andy loomed large as the “father” of the Factory, and women stayed on the outside, particularly those who did not come from wealthy backgrounds. Andy had no tolerance for “street women,” preferring the company of the glamorous women who came from mountains of wealth and who would promote the image of high fashion. Valerie fit in only as an outsider, hence her gleeful description of the superstars as “stupidstars.” As Ultra said, “She was not a superstar in the Factory. Maybe she wanted to be part of the Factory, or maybe she wanted to be a superstar, but she did not have what it takes. The superstars were very, very beautiful and she was an individual, an extremist. The superstars all looked different, had a common denomination, whereas she was more of a unique outsider. She was
very much an outsider
.
”
57

As Walter de Maria, a conceptual artist who played drums for John Cale and Lou Reed, recalled, “There was a serious tone to the music and the movies and the people, as well as all the craziness and the speed. There was also the feeling of desperate living, of being on the edge.
”
58
A few months before Valerie entered the scene, a young man had appeared in the Factory with a gun and played Russian roulette with it; he fired off a few shots, missed, and departed. Andy had reacted with silence. On another occasion, a woman named Dorothy who was known as a “part-time junkie” also entered the Factory with a gun, a loaded revolver, and aimed it nicely at a stack of Marilyn Monroe paintings, blowing a hole through the six canvases. “Andy was kind of upset but he didn’t criticize her, didn’t condemn her,” wrote Ultra Violet on this incident.
59
Instead, according to Billy Name, Andy was peeved that she did this on her own and not as part of one of his films.

People at the Factory did not concern themselves with the future. “I think the present was blazing and every day was incredible, and you knew every day wasn’t always going to be that way,” said Mary Harron.
60
The tenuous quality of life on the edge had an appeal for the mainstream, as Andy provided a window into lives that were rapidly self-destructing, often on camera. After reviewing three and a half hours of Andy’s underground epic
The Chelsea Girls
(1966), featuring life among a group of gays, lesbians, and drug addicts, one critic labeled it “a tragedy full of desperation, hardness, and terror.
”
61
Mary Woronov, one of the Factory superstars, called those at the Factory the “Mole People”—a collection of misfits, addicts, desperate dreamers, hangers-on. Andy merely played with realities that Valerie had lived. He showed no affect toward circumstances that sparked and fueled Valerie’s rage.