Valerie Solanas: The Defiant Life of the Woman Who Wrote SCUM (23 page)

After leaving NOW, Ti-Grace had minimal contact with Valerie, aside from delivering a book—Thomas Szasz’s
Life, Liberty, and Psychiatry—
Valerie had requested and having an encounter in which Valerie asked her to let her mother know where she was and how to reach her.
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She gave Ti-Grace her mother’s phone number in Baltimore. Ti-Grace called and spoke first to Valerie’s sister, Judith who disclosed to Ti-Grace that schizophrenia ran in the family and lots of family members had suffered from it. Admitting that Valerie had shown some signs of schizophrenia years before, Judith said that they had not heard from her in a long time. Ti-Grace also spoke to Valerie’s mother, whom she remembered as a “kind, middle-class woman”; Ti-Grace worried that Valerie’s mother would be disturbed by Valerie’s pornographic references (“a staple for her”) and struggles with mental illness. Ultimately, Ti-Grace regretted placing such an strong emphasis on Valerie as a symbol of the feminist movement, saying, “I paid plenty for defending her.”

The Aftermath of Hurricane Valerie

If SCUM ever marches, it will be over the President’s stupid, sickening face; if SCUM ever strikes, it will be in the dark with a six-inch blade.

—Valerie Solanas,
SCUM Manifesto

Following the Warhol shootings and Valerie’s imprisonment,
SCUM Manifesto
received an immediate surge in attention. Maurice pushed to have the manifesto published as quickly as possible, using the shooting as a selling point, and in August 1968 Olympia Press released the book, with an introduction by Maurice and commentary by Paul Krassner. The work had provoked a series of questions from sympathizers and enemies alike. NOW had fractured into liberal and radical camps, and Valerie had induced panic at the Factory, where the group already known as outsiders had been dealt a serious blow to their usually calm and free-form existence. Despite her newfound fame—something Valerie had longed for—she still struggled to make connections and find any sort of home. Having alienated nearly everyone who could help her, she found herself, once again, radically alone.

Prior to her imprisonment, Valerie had carried around a small trunk of her most prized belongings, lugging it from place to place as she moved from the Chelsea Hotel to various people’s homes, where she slept in a kind of permanent impermanence. During Valerie’s imprisonment at Matteawan in late 1968, Ti-Grace had received a phone call from Anna Kross, the judge who had handled Valerie’s arraignment. Judge Kross indicated that she had a trunk that belonged to Valerie and asked Ti-Grace to come to her home to see which things in it should be preserved.
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Inside the trunk Ti-Grace found a copy of
Up Your Ass
and copies of the
Cavalier
piece and another piece she wrote for
Hustler
magazine. (Ti-Grace called it “typical male pornography, S&M, really written from that place. I assume she was writing it to make some money and you can’t play around too much if you want the money.”) Also inside the trunk were letters. “Valerie had joined the National Women’s Party in the fifties and she had written to Paul Freund about the Equal Rights Amendment. She had kept the correspondence and I remember getting chills and saying, ‘Oh my God, this is how I’m going to end up!
’
” Valerie’s letters were “sort of girlish,” polite, according to Ti-Grace; in them Valerie asked Freund why he did not support the Equal Rights Amendment. He wrote her back a “liberal but patronizing” letter. “He was this great constitutional lawyer who taught at Harvard, telling her the ERA was covered by the Fourteenth Amendment and not to worry about it,” Ti-Grace scoffed.

Ti-Grace asked Judge Kross to keep the trunk until Valerie was released from prison and Kross agreed. On a visit to see Valerie in prison, Ti-Grace told her she had her trunk. Valerie was enraged that Ti-Grace had seen her things. “I don’t know,” mused Ti-Grace, “if it was the Paul Freund or the porn. I think she never wanted anybody to know that she ever had an interest in something like the Equal Rights Amendment.” (And for Valerie, a documented interest in within-movement feminism would be far more scandalous than the pornography she had penned.) The fact that Valerie had kept the letters showed their importance to her; she did not keep any other letters, not even from family members. No personal letters or belongings at all were found in the trunk.

Valerie had long had conflicted feelings about her role in the feminist movement, often preferring to insist on total outsider status. Her letters pleading on behalf of the ERA—notably written during her period in graduate school—suggested that she cared more about such politics than her later self would let on. For the most part, she expressed near constant anger with feminists, believing they were “schmucks.” She told others that she was never a feminist, had no interest in any political movements, and was a writer and an artist, nothing else. Valerie viewed feminists as “dupes” and “know-nothings,” telling her friend Jeremiah that she felt flattered by the attention from the women’s movement but bitter because she had no following for SCUM’s plan to attract true saboteurs.
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Within-movement feminists could never truly “unwork,” could never sabotage, undermine, and operate on a
criminal
basis.

In a lengthy letter to Ti-Grace in February 1969, Valerie derided Ti-Grace’s efforts to defend her and show interest in SCUM:

I know you’ll be delirious with delight to learn that you’re going to at last receive the widespread recognition that you’ve been groveling and sucking after for the past 8 or 9 months. Your preface days will soon be over; you are going to emerge in all your suave, polished, cultivated splendor in my text. To repay your kindness in interpreting & explaining me & expounding on my motives to the public & because you’ve been grossly misunderstood I’m going to interpret & explain
you
& expound on
your
motives to the public. My next book after
Wrap Up
, the last word on everything (that’s why it’s called
Wrap Up
; it wraps every thing up), will be
Why I Shot Andy Warhol and Other Chit Chat
, a collection of essays. One of the essays will be titled, “Out of the Woodwork.” In it I will describe what crawled out of the woodwork when SCUM was sprayed into the air. . . . How’s your rewording of
SCUM Manifesto
, which you thought of
before
you read the
Manifesto
, coming along
?
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Valerie seemed to have a bottomless rage toward feminists who appropriated her work. After her release from Matteawan in late 1971, she began contacting radical feminists, making various complaints. First, she attacked Robin Morgan for publishing an excerpt of
SCUM Manifesto
in the collection
Sisterhood is Powerful
without her permission and without payment. Valerie’s original letter to Robin joked, “If you can’t write, anthologize. Keep plugging, Baby. Valerie Solanas.
”
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Robin had in fact mailed Valerie a letter asking permission to reprint sections of
SCUM Manifesto
for a small fee but had never heard back.
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Robin subsequently proceeded to include sections of
SCUM Manifesto
without Valerie’s permission. Though Valerie did receive payment for her excerpt in
Sisterhood Is Global
(though the payment may have disappeared during her hospitalization), she hated Robin for using her work. As Robin recounted, “Now, suddenly, she
is
released—and livid. She decides that (1) she is not now and never has been a feminist but is a ‘killer dyke biker,’ (2) I have defamed her by printing her work in the context of feminism, and (3) I am somehow responsible for her having been sent to a mental institution in the first place.” Valerie phoned Robin repeatedly, informing her that she planned to throw acid in her face and blind her for life. “I try to reason with her,” Robin wrote, “finally stop answering the phone, shudder a lot.
”
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Another radical feminist, Judith Brown, wrote of her exhaustion with Valerie in a letter: “The big romance with Valerie is over for us down here.” She added, “I’m sorry if our period of wrangled consciousness on that issue caused you some trouble, but having gone through a ‘Valerie thing,’ I can better deal with it in others.
”
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Maintaining her targets of vengeance, Valerie called Ti-Grace and asked to see her. Ti-Grace described what happened:

I said, “Valerie, I don’t want to see you anymore,” and she said, “Oh, I just got out of prison and it’s my birthday.” Well, being the sort of woman she hates right from the
SCUM Manifesto
, I’m moved so I say, “Oh it’s your birthday, right? I’ll make some dinner and ask some people over.” I asked Shulie [Firestone] and Anne [Koedt] and another radical feminist friend. I don’t cook for people normally, but I made some spaghetti and a cake. I remember that the cake was sort of sloping. Well, of course, it wasn’t her birthday. She just comes in and announces—it was very embarrassing—to everyone that no, she wasn’t a feminist and she had no interest in the women’s movement whatsoever. She was an artist. She was a writer. That’s it. Well, that sort of dampened the evening and people were leaving. Valerie was staying and, fortunately, Anne hadn’t left yet. Valerie said that she was moving in with me and I was—I’ll never forget this scene. I had picked up the dishes and was standing over the sink washing the dishes. She’s got her pea coat on. She’s got her pen in her pocket, shoving me like it’s a gun, pushing it against me, saying she’s going to stay, that she’s moving in. I’m crying while doing the dishes. This is a humble housewife or something! I was crying because I didn’t cook for anybody and I realized she’d lied to me and I had done something I don’t like to do in order to please her or honor her in some way, and she just spit all over me. I was crying because no man could get away with that with me. I would have spotted it. I would have been more suspicious. It was very sad. I’m standing over the dishes crying. What is this scene?! Anne, who’s a rather quiet person, she really sized it up. She said, “Come on, Valerie, I’m going to give you a ride. I’m taking a cab downtown and I’ll give you a lift. Come on. I’m not leaving until you come with me.” She finally got up and left.

A week later, Valerie again called Ti-Grace, to relate her latest exploits. Ti-Grace stopped her immediately: “Just stop! I tried to be your friend. Maybe it’s my fault, maybe I don’t know how to be your friend, but I’ve tried and I’ve had it. You abuse me and I don’t like anybody abusing me. I don’t like men abusing me, and I don’t like women abusing me. I don’t want you to call me anymore.” Valerie responded, “You don’t like this?” Ti-Grace, sensing amazement on Valerie’s part, reiterated, “No, Valerie, I don’t. I don’t like to be insulted and abused. Please don’t call me anymore.” “Okay” came the reply. And she never did call her again. Ti-Grace believed that “she genuinely thought this was a way to relate to people. She certainly didn’t want to change and I think she was genuinely surprised that I was so upset and that it was really over.”

Valerie had finally succeeded in alienating even the closest of political allies, leaving only a small handful of people who sympathized with, or admired, her. Believing herself a writer, Valerie refused all claims on her political alliances or motives. Ben Morea offered an animated description of the central role her writing played in her life: “She was 100 percent artist. One hundred percent writer. It was always part of the conversation and part of her life, writing her thoughts, her desire to communicate ideas. It came up all the time. It was just part of our conversation.
”
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In his view, “She saw a need to raise a lot of issues around what happens to women and the
SCUM Manifesto
was the best way she could express herself.
”
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Ben emphasized the importance of thinking of Valerie as a
writer
:

The best I’d ever hope is that she was given respect as a woman of thought and a woman of letters rather than as a maniacal killer. I would hope that people would see the creative, the important side of her, and respect her for that. Of course she was an artist. André Breton once said something like, “To go out and randomly kill somebody is a revolutionary act, a surrealistic act.” In other words, it’s not a homicidal act, but even if it was a homicidal act, she was justified as far as I’m concerned. . . . I don’t think she would have been upset if the story illuminated her true nature, her creativity. She had a purpose. She was driven by a purpose. She saw a vacuum that she felt that she could delineate. I think that she would have been in some ways grateful to have that exposure. I think that if somebody wrote a negative piece about her and made the high point of her life shooting Andy, she would have been upset, rightfully, because that wasn’t the high point. That was just a footnote. She existed independent of the act of shooting Andy. She existed as a writer.

Giving his thoughts on Valerie and feminism, Ben recalled her distaste for liberals in general, and particularly for
feminist
liberals:

She saw herself as a radical, just as I had a disdain for political liberals because I consider myself a radical. She spoke of her disgust, how stupid they were, or how shallow they were, or how one-dimensional they were, but she never came across as a really angry person. She came across as a person angered by stupidity and angered by the situation that existed but not as an angry person. I was much more like that than she was. She had a lot to contribute to the feminist political world and had a lot to offer and should be taken seriously. I had a lot to offer in my world, in my arena, the more political, artistic, cultural world, in general. Radical feminists who reject Valerie aren’t radical feminists. It’s a game. They’re liberal. They were afraid to go that last mile. Radicals are ready to go over the edge. Liberals just go so far. She threatened them because she went all the way. She played out her conviction rather than just riding it. I played out my conviction rather than just riding it. That’s the difference between radicals and liberals.
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