Valerie Solanas: The Defiant Life of the Woman Who Wrote SCUM (6 page)

In the spring 1959 semester, Valerie racked up four As and two Bs, and, adding to her primary interest in psychology, declared a graduate minor in philosophy. She hung on for two semesters as a graduate student, earnestly trying to find her way in a system that favored men and their experiences. Then, after nearly a year in graduate school, she claimed she “got bored,” abruptly dropped out of school, and disappeared.

Valerie’s sister, Judith, believes that Valerie’s withdrawal from graduate school signaled that “something had gone terribly wrong.
”
79
After dropping out of the University of Minnesota, Valerie drifted through various parts of the country and lived with several men, none of whom she liked. With hitchhiking as her means of transport, she made a jagged trip from Minnesota to California. From fall 1959 to spring 1960, she roamed around, lost and trying to find her way.

She eventually arrived in Berkeley in the summer of 1960 and spent time at the university, hanging out with people and taking a few classes there. While visiting California, still spinning from her departure from graduate school, her recent excursions throughout the country, and the anger she felt bubbling up toward men and their privilege, she started to ruminate on what would become her most famous work:
SCUM Manifesto
. Honing in on her love of writing, she also laid plans for a play.

Valerie had not yet found a place where she belonged. Traveling back again across the country, she hitchhiked her way to New Jersey, where she attended another graduate program (the exact school is still unknown) for a period of at least a year (1961–62). Many years later, she told a good friend that during that period in New Jersey, on weekends and school breaks she would periodically leave school and take the bus to Manhattan and go to Greenwich Village. On discovering the Village, she had fallen in love with its atmosphere and vowed to live there one day. In stark contrast to the relatively mellow cities of her childhood and adolescence, New York offered something far more compelling: freedom to express herself, openness to differences in sexual identities, and the chaotic tangle of modern urban life. Greenwich Village symbolized for Valerie the center of a new universe: “Women were holding hands and men were holding hands and she liked that. She wanted to live in New York City one day. It’s where she’s lived, more or less.
”
80

Valerie’s spirits brightened in these years, and she would take trips home to tell family about her experiences venturing into New York City. Robert said, “When you would sit down and talk with her, she seemed to know a lot about everything. When it came to politics and social behavior and the way people acted, she knew a lot about that and it was absolutely accurate and everything. I found it fascinating.
”
81
Judith’s husband, Ramon, similarly recalled, “I loved listening to Valerie! I’d stay up half the night. You didn’t talk, you listened to her theories. She read everything. Her thinking was far in advance of everyone. She talked about what she called the Mob (GE, RCA, all the giant corporations that were taking over the media—later in the ’60s we called it the System) and how soon they’d control all the information. Nobody was talking about that then. And about men. She had our number!
”
82

Early Days in New York (1962–1966)

While living in New Jersey and commuting into New York for day trips, Valerie made a decision that would forever change her life: she was determined to become a writer. Sometime around 1960–61, she started writing her play,
Up Your Ass
, a gender-bending romp about a character named Bongi and the “degenerates” she encounters along her way
.
Valerie’s energy, wit, sarcasm, and humor now met with her increasing exposure to alternative ways of living and thinking—bohemia, the budding counterculture of Greenwich Village, and early traces of a queer community. New York had transformed her professional interests—while only a few years earlier she had wanted to pursue a degree working in evolutionary and biological psychology, she now saw herself as a playwright and provocateur.

Valerie longed to move to New York City permanently but could not yet afford it. Visiting there, the outcast of outcasts finally felt at least a marginal sense of belonging. In the summer of 1962, she moved to Manhattan, finding lodging at a women’s residence hotel in a brownstone near the river on the Upper West Side. She listed on a postcard to her father a return address of 350 West Eighty-Eighth Street. Though she did not yet live in Greenwich Village, she was exuberant about her move. On June 28, 1962, she sent a postcard to her father, Louis, and his wife, Kay, to 2503 Fourteenth Street Northeast in Washington, DC, that read:

Dear Pop + Kay,

I have a really nice room in a girls’ residence hotel. Only 12/wk + all the hotel services—24hr switchboard service, etc. I was going to live in the Village, but it’s too expensive.

There’s a lot of action here in N.Y.; the town really swings. I should’ve moved here long ago.

I have a part-time job in a coffee house in the Village. I’m making just enough to live.

I showed my uncompleted play to the director of Sheridan Square Theater (off-Broadway) to get an opinion. He said it has a lot of potential + he encouraged me to finish. I hope to finish in a month or two.

Give my regards to everybody. I’ll write again when I have something interesting to say. Love, Val

In the early 1960s, Sheridan Square Theater was known as the “wrong place for the right people” and attracted some of the more brilliant and edgy characters of the day—jazz musicians, actors, and those seeking underground gay nightclubs. That Valerie sought it out as her first choice suggests that she had a good sense of a potential audience from quite early on in the writing process. She worked tirelessly on
Up Your Ass
, spending time waitressing, writing, and working toward her goal of saving enough money to live in the Village. Whether she engaged in prostitution during these years remains a question, as waitressing jobs in New York then would probably have allowed her to eke out just enough to live on, as she mentioned to her father. No other documents exist to confirm her residence, activities, or movements from this period.

Valerie spent the next three years—from 1962 to 1965—working, writing, and living in and around Greenwich Village. Carrying around her heavy, old manual typewriter, she fired off her missives as she moved from place to place: “From one temporary crash pad to the next, from the Hotel Earle to the Chelsea Hotel, she always carted it along, and when she had no home, she kept it in a storage locker.
”
83
Though she may have finished
Up Your Ass
earlier, she did not register it with the Library of Congress copyright office until 1965.

By then, Valerie had moved to the Hotel Earle, just off Washington Square Park, which offered a separate wing for drag queens and lesbians. Still traveling alone most of the time, she ate most of her meals at the Twenty-Third Street Automat, which was cheap and allowed her to pass the time and spark up random conversations with fellow patrons. More confident, struggling for money, and connected more intensely with the countercultural mecca of the Village, Valerie in 1965 had finished
Up Your Ass
and was roaming the streets as a tragicomic street figure. Mary Harron, who wrote and directed the film
I Shot Andy Warhol
,
based on Valerie’s life, wrote in the introduction to the script, “Her days were spent drifting, panhandling on street corners, passing the afternoon over a cup of coffee in a cheap restaurant. . . . When she couldn’t collect enough money panhandling, she would turn tricks.” Harron continued on this theme in personal notes from around 1992, painting a vivid portrait of Valerie’s life in those days. “A picture of her life in cheap hotels, days spent drifting. . . . I see her lying on the bed in a room filled with old newspapers and piles of manuscripts, panhandling on street corners, cheap restaurants, automats. She liked to hang out, to ‘shoot the shit.’ In those days there was such a thing as bohemia—a true division between hip and straight, between downtown and uptown—but Valerie’s world was on the far margins, isolated even from bohemia.”

In a near-constant struggle to make ends meet and to feed herself, Valerie became a pro at bumming cigarettes, talking others into buying her a quick meal, and selling conversation. She often missed rent. And in late 1965 she was kicked out of the Hotel Earle for lack of payment and decided to move for a brief time to a scummy welfare hotel, the Village Plaza Hotel, at 79 Washington Place.
84
Next she lived in room 606 at the infamous Chelsea Hotel, at 222 West Twenty-Third Street, known as a residence for people on the fringe. The Chelsea has one of the most colorful histories of any hotel in the world. The owner, who city officials forced out in 2007, had what he called a “seventh sense” for fame, and would allow those he believed would become famous to default on their rent for long periods. The hotel would later house other budding writers and artists, among them Bob Dylan, Allen Ginsberg, Janis Joplin, Patti Smith, Iggy Pop, and Leonard Cohen. Dylan Thomas died of pneumonia there on November 9, 1953, and Nancy Spungen, girlfriend of the Sex Pistols’ Sid Vicious, was found stabbed to death in the Chelsea on October 12, 1978.

Early Writings

Those who knew Valerie well all agreed that her primary identity was that of a writer. In a 1991 interview with Rowan Gaither, Valerie’s mother remarked that Valerie “fancied herself a writer”; never was this more true than during Valerie’s early years in Greenwich Village. She wrote her three primary works—
Up Your Ass
,
SCUM Manifesto
, and her piece for
Cavalier
magazine—between 1962 and 1967. Valerie’s productivity, interest in writing, and spot-on social commentaries flourished during these years.

“A Young Girl’s Primer”

In July 1966, Valerie published an article in
Cavalier
magazine titled, “A Young Girl’s Primer, or How to Attain the Leisure Class.” At that time,
Cavalier
published articles and photos similar to those in the more mainstream
Playboy
magazine, combining tastefully nude photos of celebrities and models with articles geared toward middle-aged men. (When I bought a stack of them in 2011, the seller on eBay was advertising them by emphasizing that one had “pictures of Julie Christy’s nipples.”) Valerie’s piece appeared in
Cavalier
with an alternative title: “For 2c: Pain, The Survival Game Gets Pretty Ugly.
”
85
In one of many sexist trivializations and mockeries of Valerie’s writing, the table of contents listed her article with a line by the
Cavalier
editors that said, glibly, “How a nice young lady can survive in the city: The easiest way to be comfortable is flat on your back.”

Confident, funny, and brash, the piece details the sexual pursuits of a no-nonsense city girl who casually makes money selling conversation and sex in order to free up time to write and pursue her own interests. She may indeed be “flat on her back” in this story, but not without a heavy dose of wit, snarkiness, and vengeance. As Harron wrote, “The persona Valerie adopts here—confident, cool, swinging, in charge—is an idealized self, the version of herself she most wanted to be.
”
86

The article showcases Valerie’s fast-paced movements through Manhattan, following the writer through a hectic day of miniature rejections and small triumphs, idle time and outright hustling, with biting humor thrown in for good measure. In one such humorous reversal, Valerie wrote of a fellow panhandler, “Here comes that old derelict: ‘Say, Miss, could you help me out? All I need’s another seven cents and I can get me a drink.’ ‘You lying mother, you don’t want a drink; you’re collecting money for mutual funds.
’
”
87

“Primer” takes pleasure in small deceptions, wordplays, and power trips; Valerie confidently tricks men into giving her money, only to eventually tell them
they
are worthless. For example, she writes of one man who is soliciting information about prostitutes: “Tell me where there’s some girls and I’ll give you a dollar.” “Okay, give me the dollar.” “Here.” “There’s girls all over the street. See ya.”

She constructs shoplifting as patriotic, pokes fun at socialists, and views time in terms of financial value: “I’ll grab a listen. A Socialist. I listen a while, then leave, continuing to do my bit toward bringing about socialism by remaining off the labor market. But first a few little acquisitions from the 5&10, since it’s right here. I enter, considering what more I, as a woman, can do for my country—shoplift.” She jokes and heckles, talking about time as valuable for a writer trying to make it in New York City. She tells a man who wants to chat, “Look, my time’s valuable. Standing here talking to you’ll cost me four-fifty an hour,” or later, “That’s conversation. I charge six bucks an hour for that” (76).

In this piece, Valerie floats above any negative ramifications of the hard life, choosing instead a persona filled with self-confidence, amusement, and smarts. After convincing one man to pay her six dollars for an hour’s worth of conversation over dinner, she adds, “For an additional four bucks I do the illustrations on the napkin.” Always keenly ready for antagonistic jokes at the expense of the “nice, middle-class lady, one of Betty Friedan’s ‘privileged, educated girls
’
” she so despised, she writes of panhandling, “This job offers broad opportunity for travel—around and around and around the block. And to think—some girls settle for Europe.” When she encounters a woman handing intellectual fliers to men only, Valerie fires back, “She’s been programmed beautifully” (76).

A foretaste of Valerie’s later writings in
SCUM Manifesto
appear, too, as she ponders her lot in life: “A few days off, then back to work. I pan around, wondering how I can help rid the world of war, money and girls who hand pamphlets to men only. Salvation won’t stem from nice, middle-class ladies pushing for Mr. Cole” (77). The article foreshadows Valerie’s more forceful arguments in her manifesto, where “nice girls” must be discarded, men (including those who want her to walk on them with golf shoes, stilettos, and cowboy boots) know they are worthless, and women take matters into their own hands.