Valerie Solanas: The Defiant Life of the Woman Who Wrote SCUM (3 page)

The couple had one more daughter, Genevieve, at the height of Prohibition in 1925, giving Louis the challenging status of being the only boy in a family of five children. The 1930 census indicated that Julius and Maria spoke Spanish, had five children (with Louis and Julia living at home), and rented space to four boarders—“Frank,” “Mizzi,” Andrew Sanchez, and Lewis Vasquez—at their Atlantic City home at 113 North Chelsea Avenue (valued then at seventy-five dollars).

Louis’s childhood was spent in the chaotic and violent era of Prohibition and bootlegging in Atlantic City (brought vividly to life in HBO’s series
Boardwalk Empire
). At the time of the 1929 stock market crash, he would have been fourteen, old enough, as family members say, to understand the “old Atlantic City group” (that is, having a clear understanding of money, mobsters, and power). As a young man, Louis secured a job as a bartender in Atlantic City before gambling was legalized; he often covered for the seedy undercurrents of back room Atlantic City, learning from his father how to negotiate minding your own business. Maintaining a jovial and lively outlook on life and treating strangers with generosity, Louis often paid for drinks for the homeless and other poor people who came into the bar looking for a little relief; when dining out with family, he rarely let anyone else pick up the check. He told jokes, played the drums, and always had a sharp and witty sense of humor. In his short stint in the army, he learned how to play the accordion and eventually earned a reputation for playing that instrument and joking around with the kids in his family. His nephew Robert remembers that “he was always telling jokes, really funny, and he was always playing magic tricks with the kids. He would tell us stories. He was a lot of fun to be with, one of those ‘crazy uncles’ that all the kids seemed to love. We were a very tight family.
”
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After Louis’s divorce from Dorothy in 1947, he had a short-lived marriage to Kay, a mortician and cosmetologist; the couple would often invite family to their home for dinners and parties. (Kay died of liver failure and was buried at Arlington National Cemetery.) Still, he maintained a reputation for staying out of others’ business, even when others questioned him about Valerie. When the
New York Post
contacted him after Valerie shot Andy Warhol, he told the reporter, “I’m a bartender. I don’t answer questions. I just listen to the other person. I’m a good listener. When was the last time I saw my daughter? I don’t remember.
”
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Louis had a fairly close relationship with his sisters, particularly Genevieve and Carmen (Julia died quite young). Genevieve’s son, Robert, said of his mother and her siblings, “They were really good friends. They got along really well and did really well. We all lived nearby in DC and we would walk to Louis’s house. My aunt [Carmen] lived a little further away but we saw each other all the time.
”
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Carmen, described as a warm, friendly, no-nonsense woman who told dirty jokes, had a risqué side and, like her siblings, maintained an open attitude about sexuality. “The family always had a free attitude about sex,” Robert said. “They didn’t criticize anybody, didn’t care about ‘gay marriage’ or who did what with whom. They called it like it is. When I didn’t understand what fellatio was, Carmen looked at my mother [and] just said, ‘Well, did you tell him it’s a
blowjob
?
’
That’s the way they were.
”
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With a reputation for heavy drinking and pornography use (after Louis’s death, the family discovered a large stash in his apartment—though nothing “off the wall”), Louis worked as a bartender for most of his adult life, mostly at the Dennis Hotel in Atlantic City, until his death in 1971. After Kay died, Louis started seeing a new girlfriend, whose brother did not like her dating someone like Louis, a ruffian with a penchant for women and booze. One afternoon, the girlfriend’s brother went into a bar and picked a fight with Louis. Another man who had flirted with Louis’s girlfriend also got involved and the three stumbled around throwing punches in fits of drunken rage. During this fight, one of the men hit Louis so hard that his skull was fractured. “They were all drinking and they just left him lying there on the floor. He just bled to death in his head like a brain hemorrhage,” Robert related quietly.
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Valerie had an ambivalent relationship with her father. While the details of much of her childhood remain vague and slippery, she likely suffered sexual abuse from her father throughout her childhood years. Valerie apparently disclosed sexual abuse to two psychologists, who wrote in a 1968 report, “[Valerie] describes a rather pitiful childhood, including parental conflict, sexual molestation by her father, and frequent separation from her home. The patient’s mother was married three times and Miss Solanas recalls having seen only little of her because she was often being sent to various relatives. The patient added that when she was an adolescent, she was a ‘hell-raiser.’ By the age of 13 her mother re-married.
”
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These stories are difficult to access or confirm with Valerie’s family, though Judith had remarked, “Valerie had experiences I didn’t have, things I didn’t know about until I read the psychological evaluations of her after she shot Warhol. Our father sexually abused her. It was after the divorce and every Sunday our mother sent us off to be with him. I was only four; Valerie was six. Something was wrong there. I never wanted to go, but I didn’t understand.
”
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Her cousin, Robert, characterized both parents as kind people, saying it was hard to imagine that Louis sexually abused Valerie: “In the larger picture, he was a pretty good father. He did help her out with money and he did give her a place to stay whenever she came to DC. He did go to New York a couple of times to see her. I mean, he wasn’t a bad person. He was an alcoholic.” When I pressed Robert about the possibility of abuse, he replied somewhat tentatively, “From the point of my aunt and my mother, it’s true, yeah. He had a fondness for pornography but we never thought he would be a child abuser. If anything, he was an alcoholic.” Robert emphasized that Louis abused only Valerie and never touched anyone else. “Nobody told us about Valerie,” he said.
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Louis had a tendency toward physical violence, which, combined with the alcoholism, led to problems. Judith remembered that their mother did not protect Valerie from much of anything, adding, “It’s been reported she was a promiscuous teenager. How do you relate promiscuity to a young girl who learned about sex in the most degrading, perverted manner, from an adult who was supposed to protect her?
”
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Judith directly linked Valerie’s sexual abuse to later problems, saying in her memoir, “Valerie’s sexual molestation by her own father, the one man she truly loved, catapulted her into an obscene, perverted world she could not comprehend. Who was there to protect her? Did she tell anyone, her mother, a teacher, a priest? Did they believe her or did they punish her for having the audacity to repeat such a horrid tale?
”
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How this abuse affected her—and whether it influenced her ideas in
SCUM Manifesto
and other writings—remains an open question. As Jane Caputi, a radical feminist who met Valerie in the mid-1970s and currently chairs the women and gender studies program at Florida Atlantic University, claimed, “It’s not as simple as the abuse leads to the manifesto, that you’re filled with rage and that leads to things directly. But those experiences do take away the illusions. Those abuses don’t prescribe seeing through things, but they
do
affect things. That is one response to abuse, where you continue contact or are filled with rage. At the same time, you take it out on yourself.
”
32

As a child, Valerie coped with the abuse by initially refusing to live with her father in a permanent way following her parent’s separation. Instead, she lived with family members and friends of the family for a time. Following her parents’ separation, she first went to live with her mother. Shortly after that, when Valerie turned thirteen, Red Moran, Dorothy’s second husband, moved in with the family and lived there for a year, until Valerie turned fourteen. Red, regarded as somewhat strange, had never been married before he met the effervescent and beautiful Dorothy. He had spent most of his time working as a piano tuner, though he always fantasized about a career as a piano performer. “He would perform sometimes,” Robert said. “He wanted to be a piano
player
, not a piano tuner.
”
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Red never took a liking to Valerie, believing when he first met her that something was peculiar about her. He later admitted that he became “anti-Valerie.” He did not like how she “streaked up the staircase and swung on the iron banister” and he disliked that she never obeyed him and never accepted authority from anyone.
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Valerie became deeply unhappy about living with Red and her mother and started to rebel against them and against the various institutions and expectations she felt constrained her. She cut short her shoulder-length hair; she did not like long hair anymore. She “ran into her sister’s bedroom, dumping her things all over the room. She went into the kitchen and turned the garbage pail upside down.
”
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Spending time in the basement, she would have arguments with herself while she ironed.

After Red moved in, Valerie persistently skipped junior high school. Her mother and Red had placed her in Holy Cross Academy but Valerie assaulted one of her teachers—a nun—and ran away from school, hitchhiking all the way to an aunt’s house in Baltimore. In response, her parents placed her in public school. There, she became the butt of pranks and jokes. She dressed and acted differently from her peers; the other kids teased and taunted her, calling her names and isolating her from friendships and other forms of social acceptance.

Having such trouble in school, in the fall of 1950 at age fourteen, Valerie was sent away to a boarding school, where she stayed for about two years. At that school she started to explore her sexuality and had her first homosexual experiences. The school provided Valerie with improved academic opportunities and her grades rose; she excelled academically, started to identify as a lesbian, and fell in love. Many years later, she told her publisher, Maurice Girodias, that she had fallen in love only once in her life, with a girl she met at that boarding school.

Some accounts of this period hold that the so-called boarding school Valerie attended was actually a school for pregnant (“wayward”) girls. We do know that Valerie became pregnant at age fourteen and gave birth, in 1951, to a daughter, Linda Moran.
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Following the birth, Valerie’s mother, Dorothy, raised Linda as Valerie’s sister in order to avoid social judgments from others about Valerie’s deviance and promiscuity. Linda learned only recently that Valerie was her biological mother and not her sister. As Robert said, “[Linda] knows now. She learned that a few years ago. She was raised with her aunt [Judith] and thinking that her aunt was her older sister and she wasn’t. She is very friendly and very family oriented.
”
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Valerie likely became pregnant shortly before enrolling at the boarding school. Throughout her life she never spoke of having a daughter. In fact, only one of her friends from her time in New York—her partner for four years, Louis Zwiren—knew about her having a child at all. The family kept this secret for six decades. In later interviews with numerous psychologists, she denied having any children when disclosing her personal history.

The question of who fathered Linda Moran poses yet another series of open questions. Valerie had started to explore her sexuality at the time, so she may have become involved with someone outside the home. Alternatively, the pregnancy may have resulted from her situation at home. She had probably already experienced sexual abuse at the hands of her biological father, and she never clarified whether her stepfather also abused her: in her later interviews with psychologists, she did not specify whether her biological father or stepfather abused her. If either Louis or Red did sexually abuse Valerie at that time, either of them may have fathered Linda, giving the family extra incentive to keep the pregnancy quiet and to raise Linda as a sister to Valerie rather than as a daughter (though in those days any out-of-wedlock pregnancy was scandalous enough to justify the family’s secrecy about it). None of these possibilities have been confirmed, but they do suggest a fuller picture of the struggles Valerie underwent as a teenager.

To make matters more complicated, Valerie maintained ongoing contact with Louis throughout her life, while she expressed near total rejection of Red. At age fifteen, after returning from boarding school, she ran away from her mother and Red to go live with her father, and documents show continued contact with him until his death in 1971. Valerie sent Louis postcards and letters detailing her whereabouts and she fell into a deep depression around the time she would have heard news of his death.
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Valerie became pregnant again in the summer of 1952, shortly after her fifteenth birthday. During that summer, she began a relationship with a sailor who was temporarily stationed near her home after returning from the Korean War. This much older man, already married and with three children, had no interest in maintaining a relationship with Valerie and did not want to help raise their child. Knowing she could not care for a baby alone, Valerie (at Dorothy and Red’s urging) agreed to give the baby to the parents of a friend of the sailor, Sherrod and Louise Blackwell. The couple lived in Southeast Washington, DC, and had money to support the child. Sherrod was as a high-ranking military officer whose income “allowed Valerie to live comfortably in their middle-class home” at 723 Atlantic Street.
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