Valerie Solanas: The Defiant Life of the Woman Who Wrote SCUM (4 page)

Dorothy and Red insisted on hiding Valerie’s second pregnancy also. School records from the time of this pregnancy indicate that Valerie had a “home teacher at Anacostia High School across the District of Columbia line.” Red later denied knowing anything about Valerie’s pregnancy. Judith recalled, “It was not unusual, in the ’50s and early ’60s, for a young girl to disappear and then reappear nine months later, spirit broken but youthful figure intact.”
40
A family friend related that the experience broke Valerie. “Since then,” claimed the friend, “she’s been pretty much against men. Oh, just say the whole deal was taken care of by the parents.
”
41
Judith remembered, “I was told that Valerie had a baby, he was adopted by a ‘decent’ family, and that there was to be no more discussion about it. I doubt if anyone cared about Valerie’s feelings.
”
42

Valerie gave birth to her second child, David, on March 31, 1953. She lived on and off with the Blackwell family until she graduated from Oxon Hill High School the following year. According to David, Valerie’s family had made a quid pro quo deal with the Blackwells: they could keep David as their own if they agreed to pay Valerie’s tuition at the University of Maryland, College Park. “You might say I was bought with money,” David wrote in a letter in 1996.
43
Valerie visited David often until he turned four. She was “emotionally torn up over him.” The visits abruptly stopped and David never saw his mother again. Emphasizing that Valerie did not pay for college through prostitution, but rather with the Blackwells’ financial assistance, David spoke about the lack of options unwed mothers faced during the early 1950s: “Valerie Solanas was an unwed mother in the 1950s. The word
choice
wasn’t in the vocabulary. She was a victim of society. In today’s society it was [
sic
] OK to have children out of wedlock.
”
44

David discovered his identity as Valerie’s son in 1993 at the age of forty, five years after her death; prior to that, when he was in school, he’d wondered where he got his writing talent from. The discovery startled him: “Not knowing whether to believe it or not, he went to the National Gallery of Art in Washington and asked to talk to somebody who knew about Andy Warhol. A young graduate who had studied Warhol came out to see him. She showed him a book which had a picture of Valerie Solanas in it. ‘As soon as I saw her picture, I thought, That looks just like me. My whole world started whirring. And then I read about her. I thought, this woman sounds so wacked out. . . . I found out things that were unhappy to find out.
’”
45

When the 1996 film
I Shot Andy Warhol
was released, David contacted its producers and got in touch with Valerie’s sister and the extended family. He had spit on the movie poster, not wanting others to remember Valerie the way the movie portrayed her. He felt most degraded by depictions of her engagement in prostitution: “What hurts me is that she did it for $25, she did it for a cup of coffee. What upsets me is that she degraded herself.” Prior to 1996, Judith had not known what happened to her biological nephew named David and expressed reluctance about discovering his existence. “Judy was much more strained and reluctant to talk,” David recalled. “The whole subject of Valerie, let alone the discovery of her sister’s son, had almost been too much to cope with.” Judith’s daughter, Karen, however, expressed joy and amazement at the discovery: “I am so mad knowing there was a cousin out there in the world and none of us had ever met him.
”
46

Currently, David works as a photographer and public relations consultant in Washington, DC. He specializes in photos of naked or barely clothed women floating underwater, describing the subject matter as “erotic, sensual, and sexual.” During our first phone conversation, David asked if I wanted him to photograph me underwater, expressing that he found this photographic method exciting and considered this work his contribution to feminism. He also admitted, “I’m prolific just like my mother. It kind of runs in my blood, you know? I’m cynical too, but I don’t have anything to be ashamed of because I wear it like a badge. That’s where I get it.” He met his half sister, Linda Moran. “It was splendid. I got a sibling out of the deal. When all was said and done, we both know that people want to know things about us, and pretty much everybody else was making money except us.” He added, “Listen, let me tell you, when you’re talking to me, you’re talking to Valerie, seriously. They threw away the mold when they made me.
”
47

David contacted the extended family in 2002 and visited Valerie’s cousins and aunts. “He looks real, real like Valerie,” Valerie’s cousin Robert remarked about David. “He’s got that square jaw and everything. He’s a photographer and does these photographs of models for these magazines. . . . He drove a semitrailer. He sold knives and carousel horses. He took pictures of beautiful girls.
”
48
(Robert reported that their interaction had fizzled since this first visit and that neither had initiated further contact.) David was pained by not having met Valerie before she died, lamenting, “I could have helped her out. I think that if I’d ever met Valerie, I would have been the best medicine she could have had.
”
49
He firmly believed that Valerie would have been proud of his erotic underwater photography business: “I get it from Valerie. Valerie would be so proud; that’s one reason I would like to meet her—I wish. Because I’m not gay, but I like when I go underwater with women, you know, my legs are shaved, and I actually wear panties.
”
50

We cannot know the impact of the covert adoption of David on young Valerie or later in life. She never spoke about having her children taken away from her and almost always kept secret that she had any children at all. Valerie, mother of two by age fifteen, in an era that shamed and silenced those kind of stories, maybe even denied this reality to herself. Still, by giving her son away (or more accurately, through his being
taken
away), Valerie was offered educational opportunities and potential for advancement that she may have otherwise been denied.

Valerie excelled in high school from ages fifteen to eighteen, though she had few friends. In her senior year, she received all As with one exception: her physics class. She learned at this age to think more and more for herself. She refused to conform to the gender norms of the day, changing her dress, style, and mannerisms to fit her temperament. At one point, her high school records indicated that she lived alone and held a job, though whether she had her own apartment or how she supported herself is unclear. A classmate remembered her as the brunt of jokes: “Out of the 87 of us, she was the odd one, definitely. . . . She was always decent, though she kept her distance. Except when provoked. Then she would flare up.
”
51
One of the boys in her class put a tack on her chair. In response, Valerie turned around and hit the boy sitting behind her with her fists. She accidentally hit the wrong boy, but her classmates never told her. Generally, the boys picked on Valerie, while the girls ignored her. Still, Valerie gave her classmates the impression that she was independent and could take care of herself. Beneath her high school yearbook picture ran the caption “Val. Brainpower and a lot of spirit.
”
52

As a teenager, Valerie had a steadfast determination about her educational future, setting her sights on college despite the many hurdles she faced. In her senior year at Oxon Hill High School, she asked the principal, Michael Hernick, for a letter of recommendation, which he happily agreed to write and in which he declared, “I understand that Valerie Solanas needs a letter of recommendation. She is an exceptionally bright girl with lots of courage and determination. She lacks financial support at home, and is determined to get an education, and is proving that determination.” Valerie’s graduation record noted that she overcame her obstacles by “setting new goals.
”
53

College and Graduate School (1954–1959)

Regarded by nearly everyone she met as fiercely intelligent and witty, Valerie left the Blackwell home in 1954 and enrolled at the University of Maryland, College Park. To contextualize the climate of the university at the time, consider that Valerie’s entrance into the university occurred only three years after African Americans were first admitted there.
54
Men far outnumbered women at the time, with so-called traditional values still guiding much of university life (with such values influencing clothing, attitudes about dating and sexuality, women’s compulsory “quest” for marriage, and the near total silence surrounding homosexuality).

Valerie blazed into university life, maintaining a B average throughout her undergraduate years. As in her high school days, she lacked friends and needed financial help; “money was to become an important element in her life.
”
55
Majoring in psychology (though beside her yearbook photo it says she received a BS in chemistry), she supported herself by working in the psychology department’s experimental animal laboratory and, perhaps, by accepting financial assistance from the Blackwell family. Her college fees totaled less than a hundred dollars a year, and she made ends meet in a variety of ways to get herself through college.

Her professor and laboratory supervisor, Robert Brush, worked with her on experiments that examined active and passive learning behavior in rats and dogs. Brush specialized in animal learning, hormone-behavior interactions, endocrine physiology, and behavioral genetics. During his years at the University of Maryland (1956–59), he worked primarily on “traumatic avoidance learning” and avoidance responses in dogs and rats.
56
In the lab, he and Valerie investigated how animals avoided aversive stimuli (such as electric shocks) to generate new learning; Valerie’s role would likely have included observing and testing animal behavior, applying electric shocks, and recording responses. During these years, she started to formulate her theories of men’s genetic inferiority, ideas that would appear later in
SCUM Manifesto
. “The male,” she wrote, “is a biological accident: the Y (male) gene is an incomplete X (female) gene, that is, it has an incomplete set of chromosomes. In other words, the male is an incomplete female, a walking abortion, aborted at the gene stage.
”
57

Brush, who died in 2010, had much sympathy and affection for the iconoclastic Valerie, calling her “a very interesting, unusual student. I would use the words
diffident
and
brash
at the same time.” He found her bright and dedicated, if difficult. “She was rebellious as hell. . . . She had a chip on her shoulder a mile high. But she liked me, and I liked her. I had a warm spot for her—I felt she’d come up the hard way.
”
58

Despite her rebelliousness, or perhaps because of it, Brush remembered Valerie as quite competent and diligent, as someone who “did a very proper job of handling all the research activities. She struck me at the time as being tangled up in personal problems, but I always thought she could work her way out of them. She never talked about it, but I got the impression that she [got] kicked around a little bit. She was older, more mature, and had seen the seamier side of life. Even then she knew all the four-letter words. . . . She did not have that fresh-from-the-tub, neatly-combed-hair appearance, but she was reasonably well put together.
”
59

Unlike other women of the late 1950s, Valerie did not wear the standard skirts and sweaters, preferring jeans and casual shoes. Brush noted this and said that he liked Valerie in part because he felt that “she had the cards stacked against her.
”
60
In a phone call decades later, he expressed his belief that she had been sexually abused and commented that she lived at the bottom of the social scale. When he heard about the 1968 shooting of Warhol over a decade after he had worked with Valerie, he remembered saying, “Oh my God, poor Valerie,” and felt deep sympathy for the conditions that had brought her to that act.
61

Valerie injected something new into the college environment. Unlike the women of her time, she had a mix of rebelliousness, anger, irreverence, and volatility. Classmates found her funny, bright, and interesting, qualities that helped to neutralize her more intense and aggressive character. Her classmate Bob Gallagher, who later became a philosophy teacher, described her as profoundly smart, driven, studious, serious, and not interested in partying like other students. Jean Holroyd, a psychology major who admired Valerie, said, “We were bright, not rebellious. . . .
She
was rebellious. . . . She’d been on her own a long time.
”
62
A male classmate commented that she was “straightforward, outspoken, didn’t strike me phony in any way. We shared a beer once.
”
63

Valerie earned a reputation of bouncing from place to place and being fanatically frugal. She often expected friends to pay for her when they went out and rarely had any money of her own to contribute. She also had difficulty gauging the limits of others’ generosity and kindness and would expect more of the same if someone helped her out. This quality extended well into her later life; she frequently returned to the same people for favors long after they had first welcomed her advances. This, combined with Valerie’s keen sense of personal revenge when slighted, caused problems for her during her college years and beyond. For example, she raised hell in the girls’ dorm and once tipped a crate of bottles down a flight of stairs after a fight with another woman. “Ultimately, she was either asked to leave the dorm, or requested permission to leave and took her own apartment. It was more or less of a girls’ fight.
”
64
After she left the dorm and moved in with some classmates, problems continued. While she was living with three women classmates in a basement apartment, one roommate offended her; in retaliation, Valerie “peed in the girl’s orange juice and put it back in the fridge.
”
65