Valerie Solanas

If Valerie signals a link between truth and madness, between the world of reason and that of unreason, the events that followed her arrest in Times Square on June 3, 1968 for the shooting of Andy Warhol suggest that few could see her as a mechanism for uniting these spheres. Valerie’s truth was lost to the world of mental health diagnoses, treatment, imprisonment, abuse, and ultimately, descent into the intensifying paralysis of paranoia and self-destruction. As the “bag lady of feminism,” Valerie entered a world where the potentially brilliant capacities of her mind were toppled by the science of unreason.1

The People of the State of New York Versus “Valarie” Solanas

A grand jury of the County of New York was convened; Valerie faced two counts of attempted murder—for Andy Warhol and Mario Amaya—as well as one count of first-degree assault, for Fred Hughes, one count of second-degree assault, again for Fred Hughes, and, finally, one count of possessing a weapon. The first count read, somewhat clumsily, “The defendant, in the County of New York, on or about June 3, 1968, with intent to cause the death of Andy Warhol attempted to cause the death of Andy Warhol by shooting him with a pistol.” In an appendix to the document containing the indictments, Florynce Kennedy filed the following description of Valerie: “The prisoner’s name is Valerie Solanis [sic]. (As an actress and author she is known as Valerie Solaris [sic]). She is a well-educated person holding a bachelor’s degree and some credits towards a master’s degree. She is a strong advocate of women’s rights and conveys this message in her writings.”2

On June 4, 1968, Valerie appeared for arraignment before Judge David Getzoff (an appropriate name indeed), who ordered her committed to the New York City Department of Hospitals for psychiatric observation. According to documents filed by Flo, no such examination took place. “Said order was then vacated by Judge Getzoff and Miss Solanis was remanded to the Women’s House of Detention, where she was again searched and internally examined.” (“Internal examinations” typically meant that women stripped naked and endured prodding and “searching” in their genitals, often under the guise that guards were looking for drugs.) Flo added that Valerie was returned to the court on June 5. She was not given representation by counsel or allowed the chance to seek it at either appearance. Valerie had rejected attempts to force her to accept legal aid from the state for both appearances, believing that she was the only person who could represent herself. (In an interview decades later, Roderick Lankler, the assistant district attorney at the time, remembered Valerie as a unique case, remarking, “She seemed a victim of her relationship with [Andy].”)3

On the morning of June 5, Valerie received a “brief and cursory” psychological evaluation from Dr. Grants, a court psychiatrist. Flo wrote of this evaluation, “Dr. Grants was not a fair and impartial observer of Miss Solanas’s mental condition and cannot fully advise the court thereof.” That same day, the judge reinstated the decision to commit Valerie, and she was assigned to Elmhurst Hospital.

Elmhurst Hospital, Queens, New York

“She was, as they put it, “one of the floating people.”

Sometimes people would ask: “Where do you come from?”

“The river,” she replied.

“Where do you live?”

“Nowhere.”

“Who are you?”

“No one.”

—Judy Michaelson, “Valerie: The Trouble Was Men”

Swiftly declared mentally unstable and potentially unable to stand trial because of this condition, the courts transported Valerie on June 5, 1968, to the prison ward of Elmhurst Hospital in the borough of Queens. The typical procedure for such cases involved a transfer to the hospital for ninety days; within that period, a determination would be made whether to discharge the person, continue to treat him or her in general population at Elmhurst, or transfer the person to a section of the hospital with security. Valerie needed to be fully evaluated to determine whether she was competent to stand trial.4 Nearly everyone admitted under circumstances similar to Valerie’s would have been required to undergo extensive psychological testing. Accordingly, she underwent such testing by the chief psychologist, Ruth Cooper, who issued a detailed report on June 13, diagnosing Valerie with “a Schizophrenic Reaction, paranoid type with marked depression and potential for acting out.”5

Coming from a relatively sympathetic psychologist, Dr. Cooper’s observations and insights about Valerie reveal both the highly psychoanalytic framework of the late 1960s psychological diagnostic world, rife with sexist assumptions, along with a certain degree of care and empathy toward Valerie. Dr. Cooper’s report described Valerie as increasingly eager during each of the three testing sessions, “displaying great interest and willingness to cooperate in whatever tasks were presented.” Though Valerie acknowledged a superficial familiarity with the psychological tests and procedures—she had studied psychology in college—she did not have any real knowledge of the procedures used during the testing. Dr. Cooper described her as compliant and cooperative, highly motivated to give a frank and open picture of herself during the testing, and eager to do well on the testing: “Indeed, Miss Solanas was so ready to ‘tell all,’ that often the examiner was forced to intercede to cut off the excess of productivity. Like an eager child, Miss Solanas asked what the newspapers were now writing about her though she angrily accused them of attributing false statements to her and insisted that ‘the press belongs to the rich people and what will happen to me is what the rich people want to happen.’”

Dr. Cooper administered a full battery of tests, including the Wechsler-Bellevue Intelligence Scale for Adults (now the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale), which required Valerie to complete subtests to assess her verbal and performance intelligence (applied logic, spatial skills, and so forth). This test used a standardized scoring method; scores of 100 indicated average intelligence, 75–80 indicated borderline/low intelligence, and 120 and above signaled above-average/high intelligence. Approximately 95 percent of the population scores between 70 and 130 on IQ tests, with only 2.5 percent scoring higher than 130.

Valerie scored 132 in verbal IQ, 125 in performance IQ, with a full-scale IQ of 131; placing her in the 98th percentile of intellectual functioning. In other words, Valerie functioned in the “very superior” category, far above average compared with most of her peers and in the top 2 percent overall. Further, because she had such similar verbal and performance IQ scores—that is, there were no significant discrepancies between different areas of her intelligence—she scored as highly intelligent across all tasks and skills. Dr. Cooper noted that “except for two very minor breaks, there was no clear-cut evidence of gross pathology or of a thinking disorder in this highly structured instrument. The breaks which did occur were in relation to questions involving social and legal mores and reflected her rebellion against existing society.”

Valerie also participated in two projective tests: the Rorschach inkblot test and the Thematic Apperception Test, both of which assess unconscious yearnings, perceptions, and the extent of any psychological disturbance. In the Rorschach—an instrument still used in inpatient hospital and other settings to assess perceptions and thought disorders—people identify patterns and shapes based on what they see within a series of ambiguous images made from inkblots. This test looks for disturbances in perceptual functioning and overall well-being through scoring both the content of the responses (“I see two women playing the drums”) and the specific language of how individuals talk about the images they perceive (“Maybe it’s a he-she figure”). The Rorschach test most reliably measures disturbances in perceptual functioning and, particularly during the late 1960s, was widely used to diagnose schizophrenia (and in some hospitals, it still is used for this purpose). The Thematic Apperception Test asks individuals to create stories with a beginning, middle, and end about a series of drawings that show people engaging in various tasks. By closely examining individuals’ projections onto the drawings, particularly affect about the drawings, psychologists can learn about family histories, unconscious processes, and longings or urges.6

Dr. Cooper reported Valerie’s performance on the projective tests. “While the form level of her response is often excellent, the quality of the content and her elaborations take on a psychotic flavor. She thought of men as ‘pigs’ whom she anthropomorphizes into exploiters and despoilers of women. Not only do they ‘brutalize’ women, but they also annihilate other men. As she sees them, men have no redeeming qualities.” Valerie exercised extreme caution in her descriptions of women, for even though women engaged in constructive and cooperative activities together, and could clearly love each other, women generally needed to be “tested” before they could earn Valerie’s trust.

When asked to make projective drawings of whatever she felt at the time, she constructed a small microcosm of the gender-nonconforming world created in Up Your Ass, populated by highly masculine women who still loved being women. Dr. Cooper wrote that Valerie created “a female who, except for her flowing hair, is an extremely phallic, aggressive creature—far more masculine than the male. Though she masculinizes the female, she verbalizes that it is more desirable to be a female than a male. Even men, according to Miss Solanas’s associations to her drawings, prefer the feminine role. Though they pretend to value masculinity, their private fantasies revolve around being female.” Dr. Cooper speculated that Valerie’s drawings illustrated her confusion about her own sexual identity and her “inability to achieve any resolution to this conflict.” Situating this as a sign of Valerie’s block about admitting any actual sexual wishes, Dr. Cooper believed that Valerie’s overreliance on “all forms of perverse sexual activity” served to deny her actual sexual wishes.

As a final test, Dr. Cooper administered the Bender-Gestalt test, in which individuals are asked to replicate drawings shown to them on different cards. Designed to measure developmental and neurological disorders, the test can also discern perfectionism. Dr. Cooper assessed Valerie’s performance on this test and surmised that Valerie had severe conflict about and alternated between perfectionism and impulsivity: “Miss Solanas wants desperately to create a perfect product and her consequent overconcern with exquisite detail gives rise to stilted, overconcrete, fragmented, larger-than-life reproductions. Thus, while her initial perceptions may be correct, she so magnifies them that their integrity is ultimately undermined.”

Addressing the global picture of Valerie’s psychological health, Dr. Cooper suggested that Valerie showed a consistent preoccupation with violence. “In markedly paranoid fashion she sees society, and particularly men, as aligned against her.” She painted Valerie as torn between external toughness and inner vulnerability. “Though she makes strenuous efforts to present herself as a hard, tough, cynical misanthrope, Miss Solanas is actually a very frightened and depressed child. Her brittle defenses, which range from obsessive-compulsive perfectionism to paranoid projection, do not really serve to contain her overwhelming anxiety.” Noting that Valerie’s defenses gave way readily when confronted with inescapable facts, Dr. Cooper believed that Valerie coped through either impulsive acting out or depression. When Dr. Cooper described Valerie’s anxiety and depression to her, “there was a marked startled reaction on Miss Solanas’ part. She made a feeble effort to deny the observation but was clearly very close to tears.”

When questioned about her childhood (and it should be remembered that in the late 1960s, mother blaming was notoriously common in psychology and psychiatry) Valerie strongly stressed that she had had an idyllic childhood, though “she plaintively conceded that her mother had always been busy elsewhere,—that there had never been time for Valerie.” Valerie had concluded that her mother had more interest in men than in her daughter and consequently, “she holds men responsible for the emotional deprivation and rejection she experienced.” Dr. Cooper added, “While she has consciously devoted much of her energy to proving what ‘pigs’ and ‘exploiters’ men were, her unconscious strivings have been to be male and thus, perhaps, to win her mother’s love.” Dr. Cooper situated Valerie’s psychological troubles as squarely resulting from her mother’s rejection and her longing to seek revenge on the men who took her mother away from her. Notably, the report never mentioned Valerie’s relationship with her father and apparently did not include any mention of sexual abuse ever having occurred.

At the conclusion of her report, Dr. Cooper characterized Valerie as “essentially an emotional and psychological infant who has not yet resolved the critical question of her own identity.” She portrayed Valerie as following a predictable process in which, in order to manage her obsessive-compulsive need for perfection, she became anxious and depressed and eventually delusional in her thinking, with “rage of such proportions that acting-out destructively becomes the only avenue for discharge. . . . Her test protocol indicates that at the present time, Miss Solanas does, indeed, see no other way to cope with her inner turmoil than to discharge it through action.”

Decades later, in an interview conducted by Mary Harron and her research team for her film I Shot Andy Warhol, Dr. Cooper admitted that “Valerie is a surprisingly vivid memory” and that she “remembered her with sympathy as an ‘engaging young woman—challenging and stimulating,’ with a sense of humor, who was obsessed with gender and would continuously turn the conversation back to the inferiority of the male.”7

Shortly after Dr. Cooper completed her psychological evaluation, Valerie received another evaluation, from two psychiatrists, Arthur Sternberg and Mannuccio Mannucci, who issued their report on June 26; the diagnosis was “Schizophrenia, Chronic, Paranoid type.” These doctors noted that Valerie displayed superior intellectual functioning along with excellent memory, though she displayed agitation that masked underlying depression. Not surprisingly, Valerie seemed to respond more negatively to male evaluators than to Dr. Cooper. Under the belief that her judgment and insight were markedly impaired, the report described her as out of control during the evaluation: “Her language was profuse with vulgarities of every description, and she spoke in a rapid, high-pressured way. Her thoughts were coherent and logical until she became involved with descriptions of her philosophy. She reiterated her views that men are no longer necessary and should be subjugated into a feminist society. She added that extermination of males is justified when necessary, and that she would be willing to carry out this deed if she ever had to.” Valerie repeatedly reiterated during the testing that she felt justified in her actions “both in the past and in the future.”8

Drs. Sternberg and Mannucci gathered an extensive childhood history from Valerie, noting that she described herself as a “hell raiser” and that she and her friends would often shoplift and commit other petty thefts. When asked about her whereabouts for the past five years, Valerie related that she had traveled through various parts of the country and had lived with several men, none of whom she liked. She expressed particularly hostile sentiments toward Andy Warhol and explained that he had too much control over her life and had stolen her literary work and that he and his crowd had been sending information to the newspapers with the intent of ruining her reputation. She also believed that Andy had biased her psychiatric testing results and had frequently asked the evaluators if they could say she was “crazy” and should be locked up. Interestingly, though the report concluded with the diagnosis of schizophrenia, it states that “there is no evidence of hallucinations, depersonalization, or derealization.” (These three facets of schizophrenia still inform the diagnosis today; Valerie apparently never experienced frank hallucinations or an overwhelming sense of unreality in her identity or her environment.) The psychiatrists concluded that Valerie had been deteriorating for some time and that, because of her impulsivity and antisocial behavior, she constituted a serious risk of being homicidal, could not stand trial because of mental illness, and should be transferred to a state psychiatric health facility.

While in Elmhurst Hospital, Valerie refused to allow Maurice Girodias’s lawyer, Don Engel, to represent her, insisting on having Flo’s legal counsel. Flo filed a petition on June 7 to officially declare herself Valerie’s attorney and on June 11 she argued in a formal appeal, “Valerie Solanis [sic] has been confined against her will at Elmhurst General Hospital from June 5, 1968 to the present. Since she is a newsworthy personality she has been the subject of supposed news articles. These articles (see exhibits marked P-Q) are extremely prejudiced, but because Miss Solanis [sic] is not allowed to see copies of her press coverage at Elmhurst General Hospital, she is unable to refute the trial and conviction which the press has already conducted.”9

Flo argued her case on the basis of several criteria: Valerie did not receive adequate representation, the court’s evaluation was based on hearsay, she had not been advised of her constitutional rights, she did not receive a proper physical or psychiatric examination, no bail was offered, and no date for a preliminary hearing was set. The courts largely ignored Flo’s report and proceeded with Valerie’s transfer without acknowledging any relevance of the procedural aspects of Valerie’s case. It mattered little that she had been mistreated or misrepresented, and they frankly could not understand her insistence on representing herself rather than accepting legal aid.

The following day, June 12, Elmhurst Hospital filed a full psychological report with the courts—this was prior to Dr. Cooper’s more comprehensive evaluation—declaring Valerie mentally ill. The report from Drs. Sternberg and Mannucci advised that the court should send Valerie to a mental hospital such as Matteawan, as “the patient is extremely psychiatrically disturbed. Her condition is due to a long-standing paranoid psychosis and it is felt that, at this time, she is a definite homicidal threat to the community.”10 Valerie internalized this news by feeling an even deeper commitment to rebel, writing Maurice, “Keeping me in jail or in Elmhurst will not wear me down. I’ve fought too long & too hard already for my work—not just against you since Nov. 1967, but for two years before & I should most certainly not give up now.”11

On June 13, Valerie appeared before state supreme court justice Thomas Dickens. She was represented by Flo, who called her “one of the most important spokes-women of the feminist movement.” Flo asked for a writ of habeas corpus because Valerie was inappropriately held at Elmhurst, but the judge denied the motion and sent Valerie back to the hospital. At the arraignment, Valerie had two supporters aside from Flo: Ti-Grace Atkinson and Wilda Holt. The New York Times declared the next day, “She has been called a female Genet, but she has not been taken seriously.” Answering questions the next day from behind a locked gate back at Elmhurst, Valerie denounced comparisons between herself and Genet, saying, “Genet just reports, despite what Sartre and De Beauvoir, two overrated windbags, say about the existential implications of his work. I, on the other hand, am a social propagandist.”12 Valerie called herself a “superfeminist” and “revolutionary” and promised that SCUM Manifesto would be submitted as her legal brief at her trial.

Valerie’s indictment and the ruling of insanity came through on June 27, listing the charges of attempted murder, assault, and illegal possession of a gun. In contrast to the mood of this event, Mario Amaya would joke later, “Andy and I always used to say that we were the first feminist casualties.”13 (Whether he meant to slam feminism, or just cope with his pain, is unclear. Mario had a reputation for outlandish comments, and once said he felt more upset with Valerie for ruining his white linen suit than for shooting him.)

The “Lowly Toad”

Valerie spent most of the following month directing her hostilities toward Maurice Girodias, whom she continued to portray as manipulative, cruel, self-serving, and the epitome of why SCUM should exist. In the midst of vitriolic letters she sent to him, Maurice put up money for Valerie to retain a lawyer—something he did for many of his writers who found themselves in legal trouble. This lawyer, Don Engel, who Valerie wanted nothing to do with, who had represented Terry Southern in his Candy dispute, recalled in a later interview that he would have happily represented Valerie if she had been declared competent to stand trial. Instead, she was ruled insane and Engel never got the chance to defend her in court. Valerie was, by then, “off the rails.”14

In an interview following the publication of SCUM Manifesto in summer 1968, Maurice told the Village Voice that he both supported the manifesto and felt rage toward women: “I’m happy to be alive and I’m a publisher. I still feel she has a very good point. I have no argument with it. But I feel a similar case can be made about females, only women are worse. I will write one about women someday. Then I’ll shoot one and get published myself.”

Maurice visited Valerie in prison; he stated that she looked “very happy to be there” and was “extremely confused.” He added, “I’m sure that her manifesto will convince the judges that she’s not legally responsible—unless there’s a woman judge.” During his visit, Maurice asked, “Why didn’t you shoot me? Why Warhol and not me?” She replied, “Oh, I wouldn’t do that to you.”15 Maurice felt that Valerie was “not entirely in her normal mind” and “not in very good shape” and “still doesn’t realize what she’s done.” Angry that Flo, “that woman,” wanted to represent Valerie, he said the hospital “doesn’t want any more freaks. . . . It would be disastrous if she represented Valerie at the trial. . . . Paranoid authors are no great authority.”16

During her incarceration at the hospital, Valerie grew increasingly angry and paranoid about Maurice, believing that he had self-serving intentions and compulsively lied to her. She told Wilda Holt, “If I trusted G, I’d have something like inverse paranoia.”17 Calling him “The Great Operator, The Great Manipulator” but inviting him for a visit shortly after she arrived at Elmhurst, she accused him of failing to follow through on his commitments to her.18 For example, after he claimed to send her $5.00 that she never received, she wrote, “Why don’t you fuck the authorities and the system for a while instead of your authors?”(June 28, 1968).

She sent letters demanding stamps (July 9, 1968) and many other letters accusing Maurice of sabotaging the goals of SCUM: “I formulated SCUM & wrote the ‘SCUM Manifesto’ to create a better world. It’s ironic & pathetic that it’s fallen into such hands as yours & Warhol’s. If you want to be aligned with me, cultivate goals beyond being able to say, ‘I have more money than J. Paul Getty’; you must strive to transcend your sniveling self & immerse yourself in the betterment of the community; you must learn to work with people, not against them; you must learn to pretend you’re human, & not a toad, become an expert human impersonator you must have as your sole constant goal the happiness of women, both in the mass and those you’re personally associated with. I’m convinced the rewards you reap from doing so will be enormous” (July 18, 1968). In another letter that same day, Valerie described her goals for SCUM: “There are 2 aspects to SCUM—the destructive and the constructive, destroying the old world through sabotage and beginning to create a swinging, groovy, out-of-sight female world, both aspects to operate simultaneously. Ironically, you’re best suited to contributing to the constructive end—you’re just not the saboteur type: you’re strictly a contract & finance man.”

Two days later, she admitted that she wanted to devote every bit of her time to SCUM and pleaded with Maurice to join her goals for SCUM: “You don’t have long to go, Big Daddi-o; so what are you going to do about it? Are you going to be a doddering old contract man with lots and lots of money, or are you going to be a groovy, brawling and battling SCUMmer? Are you going to help yourself and help SCUM get rolling, or are you going to continue to fuck everybody—including yourself?”(July 20, 1968).

Perhaps comically, Valerie also pleaded with Maurice to serve as the head of the men’s auxiliary of SCUM:

I’ve been thinking lately in purely practical terms about SCUM. You would be the most appropriate person to have as head of the Men’s Auxiliary, being you’re the publisher. Warhol very much wanted the position, but you’d be more desirable than him, since you’re much more articulate, & have a flair for writing which he doesn’t have . . . As head of the auxiliary you would work closely with me, go recruiting with SCUM, travel around with SCUM on the Scumnibus, attend all SCUM events (unless you didn’t want to), make personal appearances and give speeches on behalf of the Men’s Auxiliary, & you could, if you wanted, appear as Top Turd at all Turd sessions.19

Despite this vitriol, Maurice continued to communicate with Valerie, forwarding her reviews and commentary about SCUM Manifesto from the New York Times, Newsweek, and the East Village Other. He sent copies of her published book, as well as paper, pencils, envelopes, and a money order. He pleaded with Valerie to have more nuance in her views of men and to celebrate her intellectual gifts:

Even if you refuse to see this [letter], I have always acted as your friend. I cannot condon [sic] your claim that you have ‘a mission’ which gives you the right to kill people. But I agree with your idea that people are impossibly selfish and cruel: only I think that this applies to mankind at large, not to a particular group like males or females. And murder will not cure that state of things. I wish therefore that you stopped considering yourself like a small-time Hitler, and came down to more sensible views. You are an intelligent and gifted person, and I see no reason why you should not, one day, accomplish something real for yourself. So—why don’t you start trying to see the good side of things, the fact that no-one (not even men!) is always all bad, the fact that no-one is after you, or wants to harm you. You believe that the whole world conspires against you: at the same time you complain that people do not pay enough attention to what you say and do. Don’t you see the contradiction in those two feelings? Think about it!20

Despite clear evidence of her severe paranoia—particularly in her interactions with Andy and Maurice—Valerie also had an uncanny sense of the truth in her dealings with them. On June 6, a mere three days after the shooting, Maurice received a letter from Dell Publishing Company thanking him for submitting Valerie’s work but rejecting SCUM Manifesto, revealing that Maurice had, immediately following the shooting, submitted her work for publication. Further, in an attorney’s letter of October 30, 1968, Maurice directly specified that he did not follow through on paying Valerie the five hundred dollars he owed her on purpose; because they had never specifically signed a contract for SCUM Manifesto, which he published shortly after the shooting, he admitted that he refused to pay her the royalties specified in her earlier contract. Instead, he wrote that he would pay her four and a half cents a copy, a substantially lower amount than her contract had specified back in August 1967.21

Prior to the shooting, Valerie had written to Maurice, certain that he intended not to pay out her full royalties:

Lowly Toad, I’m now hip to what both of those contracts mean—I sold the novel outright; the only right I have is the right to the royalties, which I’m sure you’ll find a way of beating me out of. The refusal rights clause means you have the right to buy my next 2 book-length works on the same greasy terms as you bought the novel. In the second unsigned contract the phrase “we will retain 50%—” means that I won’t get anything; it doesn’t imply, as you said that I’d get the other 50%. . . . I will never again, needless to say, ever sign one of your sleazy, greasy contracts.22

Maurice’s refusal to pay royalties to most of his authors eventually resulted, in 1971, in picketing outside the Olympia Press offices by other authors. Maurice admitted to his lawyers that he took Valerie’s statement that SCUM Manifesto was his, “to have and to hold, forever,” as a representation that Valerie had signed over to him the rights to publish the work.23 Vivian Gornick, who wrote an introduction for SCUM Manifesto and knew Maurice personally, agreed that he ripped off Valerie: “There is no question that he screwed her—none, none, none. He bought her off. He paid her no royalties and was making a lot of money from the SCUM Manifesto.”24

In practical ways, Valerie perceived Maurice as purposefully hiding information about the preface and commentary sections of future editions of the manifesto, and she accused him of failing to notify her of his plans for the manifesto or Up Your Ass (which he had apparently obtained a copy of shortly after the shooting). Valerie’s friend Geoffrey LeGear wrote to Maurice, “Why did you not have the guts, she asks, to let the Manifesto stand or fall on its own? Why were you so cowardly as to try to explain it away before it could speak for itself?” Valerie was enraged that Maurice had not sent her any mail from readers and that he had held back information about sales and reviews and other reactions to her work. She took particular issue with the comparison between SCUM Manifesto and Swift’s Modest Proposal, and Geoffrey explained that “there is no similarity between them whatsoever—the whole point about ‘A Modest Proposal’ is irony; the whole point about Valerie is that there is no irony.” Valerie also hated the notion that Maurice had compared her to Hitler and SCUM Manifesto to Mein Kampf. As Geoffrey wrote, “Hitler originated nothing (nationalism and racism are as old as history), but Valerie wants the end of nations and racism by ending the male sex which is responsible for them—really quite beyond Hitler’s range, don’t you think?”25

Further, Valerie took issue with the biography of her that Maurice had constructed in the preface to SCUM Manifesto, objecting to his discussing her “‘loveless childhood’ (in a certain way she had a groovy childhood); her ‘sexual immaturity’ (in a certain way Valerie has passed beyond sex); her ‘feeling of isolation’ (in a certain way Valerie had too many people around her).” She wondered if Maurice wanted to hurt her, by “superficial speculation on her supposed personal history,” noting that one only writes that way about a person once he or she had died and that Maurice knew little of her personal history because he had had no real personal relationship with her.

After Maurice published the first edition of SCUM Manifesto in August 1968, Valerie demanded that in the next edition he include a new preface signed by him but dictated by Valerie: “It’s to be called ‘Confessions of a Toad.’ The ‘SCUM (not S.C.U.M.) Manifesto’ part of the new book must be proofread by me. If you don’t fulfill these conditions, you’ve definitely had it with me in every way. I’d rather live my life in the bughouse than write one line for you under the present conditions. . . . I told you the shooting of Auntie Wahoo was a marking point, that all your offenses prior to then were shot away, but that everything you do afterwards counts. You’ve earned quite a few demerits since then; you almost reached the point of no return.”26

Valerie’s feelings of betrayal had reached a breaking point. Geoffrey explained to Maurice:

Valerie feels, or apparently feels, that you have so mistreated, misunderstood, and misjudged her that you have destroyed her. She feels that there is no hope left for herself or her work, that she will never have a chance to speak for herself, to justify herself and her ideas. She feels totally degraded and can see no way out, at least no way that will allow her to preserve her integrity. Not to get attention (a cruel thrust if it is not true), but to end her degradation is her motive in wanting to kill herself. . . . When it comes to her, where do you find yourself? Right with the establishment you always supposed yourself to be fighting.27

In addition, Geoffrey defended Valerie not only before the shooting but also well after it, insisting to both Maurice and Andy that Valerie’s ideas in SCUM Manifesto had the force of truth behind them. Geoffrey, who worried constantly about the chance that Valerie would commit suicide out of despondency caused by Maurice’s treatment of SCUM Manifesto, wrote to him:

Let me ask you two questions. First, is not the world a mess, and are not the males in charge? And can you conceive, honestly, of the world ever being any different? Second, do men need women more, or do women need men more? And could you conceive, honestly, of a reason to go on living if there were no more women in the world? . . . Valerie may have the truth, the truth that didn’t exist. Wouldn’t it be strange if time justified Valerie? And if time did, wouldn’t it be a shame not to have been on the right side when it counted, at the beginning?28

Valerie sensed that Maurice was unsympathetic toward the revolutionary gender dynamics presented in SCUM Manifesto; this was confirmed when she saw what he had written in the introduction: “This little book is my contribution to the study of violence.”29 Using the many letters he received from her during this period, he also described Valerie in sexist terms, telling a French radio station: “She was naïve. She was very smart. She could not come to terms with these contradictory forces: her outrageous feminism and the fact that she did not look quite like a woman but neither like a man. . . . It’s hard to figure out how she did not reach that crisis earlier. I would not have married her, of course, but I really did like her. I found her very funny.”30

Still, friends of Maurice’s claimed that Valerie’s threats affected him deeply and he became increasingly paranoid that she would shoot him in retaliation for his not complying with her demands. One friend, Iris Owens, said, “I don’t think that people regarded him to have stepped out on a ledge in having been associated with her. That only came after she showed herself capable of murder.”31 A year later, after repeatedly asking Valerie to stop contacting him, he wrote to her, “I am not interested in your other works, past, present, or future. I hope that this clarifies my position once and for all, and I must ask you to dismiss me from your thoughts, and not to write me again.”32

As did Andy, Maurice expressed a curious affection for Valerie, despite her constant threats and his well-documented fear of her. Responding to her constant name-calling—“Lowly Toad,”—Maurice described Valerie in rather warm terms: “Even though she keeps calling me Toad, there is in that name a background of friendship and tenderness. We got along really well, while fighting and hating each other like you would not believe.”33 Valerie hurled at him the ultimate rebuke: “I know you live for my letters. What else is in your grim, puny life?”34 She advised that he seek “SCUM therapy”: “The goal of this therapy is to rid you of certain hang-ups which are severely interfering with my rights & interests. The methods are my own & are derived from & consistent with SCUM doctrine. I’ve tested my methods out on other males & have achieved remarkable results.”35 Eerily prescient as always, Valerie foreshadowed Viagra: “One of the goals of the therapy will be to enable you to get a hard on as often as you want, any time you want, & to sustain it as long as you want. Achieving this sub-goal (among others) is a necessary step in achieving the final goals. . . . Achieving a perpetual hard on (PH) involves first being aware of certain truths, & 2nd undertaking a certain attitude that I’ve worked out.”36 She has, she goes on to say, cured several men of impotence. In regard to Valerie’s relationship with Andy, Maurice took a paternalistic outlook, describing Valerie’s hate mail to Andy as intimate and an expression of comfort; she had “something of the quality of a very rebellious and difficult child, writing the much resented and much needed father for money.”37

“Auntie Wahoo”

Just as Geoffrey’s letter to Maurice outlined Valerie’s complaints against him, a letter he wrote to Andy detailed Valerie’s feelings about the shooting and her reasons for it. He wrote on December 3, 1968, “I’m not sure if Valerie would have shot you if Girodias had been as well known as you are, but she does, nevertheless, have a number of complaints against you, as well as against him.” Valerie felt Andy, who she often called “Auntie Wahoo,” was “playing games with her.” The complaints included several points. She believed Andy wanted to stage a two-part dramatic production using her panhandling article and her play and that it would be staged at the Grove Press Theatre. Valerie thought Andy had spoken to Maurice and decided not to stage the play after hearing that Maurice had claim over her works. Shortly after she signed the contract with him, she believed that Andy had “changed his mind, became vague, and did nothing more about the production—despite [his] former enthusiasm.”38

Valerie felt particularly betrayed that Andy recognized Maurice’s prior claim on her work and cooperated with Maurice to maintain it. She remembered Paul Morrissey saying, “You know, you just signed away your play” and, hearing that she should give Maurice a blow job, that she was tough and could “take it,” or “have yourself committed to a mental institution, in order to frustrate him,” or “write him a novel a day, on file cards, and give those to him,” and so on. She thought her twenty-dollar payment for I, a Man insulted her work and that Andy used material from the philosophy of SCUM and from the manifesto in his lecture tours too often. Geoffrey summed this up by writing in his letter to Andy, “In order to cooperate with Girodias, you were blocking her efforts to have her work produced or published and to have her ideas and activities publicized.” Pleading with Andy to forgive Valerie, drop all charges, and assist with her case, he ended the letter by asking Andy if he had done all he could to help her.39

Valerie continued to write to Andy herself in the fall and winter of 1968, sending him one letter that, in her own way, tried to make amends:

I’m writing this letter because I’m a compulsive communicator.

For the past few weeks I’ve been evaluating + reevaluating everything. My morale has gone way up; I no longer feel demoralized, + my attitude towards a lot of things has changed. I no longer feel any hostility towards you or towards anyone else; I feel at peace with the world, + I feel, now that the Manifesto’s been published + now that with all the publicity I have a chance to earn money without being dependent on men, that I’m in a much better position than I was to deal with you, Girodias, + all the other vultures I encounter.

I intend to forget the past—harbor no grudges, regret no mistake—+ begin completely anew. I also have a new attitude about my contract situation; I made a terrible mistake signing it, but I don’t intend to continue to be gotten by it; I intend to chalk it up to experience + begin anew.

I’m very happy you’re alive + well, for all your barbarism, you’re still the best person to make movies with, +, if you treat me fairly, I’d like to work with you.

Valerie40

Valerie’s fear of Andy’s desire for publicity had some basis in reality, but it seems that Andy also had some affection for Valerie, according to Ultra Violet: “It’s normal he didn’t press charges. He got a lot of publicity from the shooting and he loved publicity. Why would he press charges? How much money was there to recover from her? Nothing probably! So what would he gain by pressing charges? He had the front page news of the Post so that was good enough. That doesn’t mean he didn’t care for her.”41

With Andy’s hunger for fame in mind, Valerie wrote to Andy in late September stating that she did not want any publicity for SCUM or the trial, as it would only benefit him and Maurice. She expressed her willingness to do another film with him: “I’m not asking you to do a film with me; I’m telling you that if you want to—+ I know for certain that you do, + nothing you put in the paper to the contrary will dispel my certainty; let’s just say my intuition tells me where it’s at—I’ll be willing to, if you treat me fairly, + that’s a big if, as fairness isn’t your forte.” Believing that Andy had not pressed charges because he knew the district attorney would do so, she accused him of selfishness: “You’re trying to get credit for great nobility + compassion without doing one noble or compassionate thing. If you really wanted to be noble, you could get the D.A. to drop the charges, but I know you’d never do that, because you want me to have a trial because of the great publicity value involved.”42 She concluded by accusing Andy and Maurice of trying to ride her coattails:

What gives me a fantastic edge over you + the Great Toad is that I feel no compulsion to do a movie with you, do any more works or even get the play produced, nice as all of those things would be. I have a lot of projects in mind that don’t constitute works + that, therefore, The Great Toad, + hence you, would have no claim on. You, on the other hand, having no intrinsic worth, are limited to who you can find + use, + you can ride along only so far with Viva, Bridget Polk, and the rest of your trained dogs. Having worked + associated with me, you’ve had a taste of honey, + it must be awfully difficult to have to go back to Viva saying “Fuck you” in restaurants. . . . Weren’t you saying something, Boy, last June 3 about how if I turned in 2 more works, signed a bunch of contracts with The Great Toad with you, then did the movie, you’d allow me a few crumbs of publicity? I won the first round; I’ll win the rest.”43

As Valerie further distanced herself from her previous claims of goodwill toward Andy, she wrote another letter in late October 1968 telling him to drop the charges: “A few weeks ago I felt good will toward you + a willingness to work with you if conditions were right, but your running on about not pressing charges against me while charges remain is fast mitigating that good will. . . . Who I work with + what projects I work on is determined largely by my feelings, not just business considerations. You seem to feel a need to be hailed as Good Guy of the Year. Seeing that the charges against me are dropped would do much to enhance that image.” She ended the letter saying, “One more thing you should’ve learned by now is that I mean what I say.”44

Matteawan, Beacon, New York

In late August 1968, Valerie was moved from Elmhurst Hospital—where she received care that would qualify as “acceptable”—to Matteawan, where she entered the chaotic world of the criminally insane. Using a diagnosis of “Paranoid State with Affective Features and Emotional Instability,” the courts ordered Valerie’s transfer to Matteawan on August 16, 1968. Two days later, she was admitted to the hospital where she would spend the next four months at one of the most notoriously hellish places any “mentally ill” person could go.

Matteawan State Hospital, officially established in 1893, was a hospital for the criminally insane, particularly high-risk women. Sharing the grounds with the Beacon Institute for Defective Delinquents after 1966, Matteawan had by then earned a reputation for some of the worst human rights violations in New York State history. According to Robert Spoor, director of the Clinical Information Department at the New York State Department of Mental Hygiene, “There were terrible accusations of abuse at Matteawan. It was closed after a court decision. They used to send violent cases of the mentally ill there, but then it was declared unconstitutional because they were mixing people who had committed crimes with people who were regarded as dangerous enough to commit them.”45

Several news stories at that time reported outlandish abuses at Matteawan, where fourteen psychiatrists served six hundred patients. A string of lawsuits exposed conditions as “incredible.” Guards and doctors routinely beat and killed patients and forced them to engage in experimental surgeries. Guards regularly denied patients basic medical care and habitable living conditions. At the time Valerie entered, patients received a slice of bread and a half cup of leftover coffee a day to subsist on. Patients were often kicked and stomped on and sometimes beaten to death by sadistic guards. Overcrowding, withholding of necessary medications, and lack of doctors were cited in reports, and some lawmakers who had visited the institution called Matteawan the worst mental hospital they had ever seen. In the late 1960s, to control the patients, doctors prescribed tranquilizers to over 40 percent of Matteawan inmates, while massive numbers of patients received electroshock therapy (known to cause brain damage) or were placed in straitjackets. At times, guards forced patients to live in rooms with no toilets, no mattresses, and no consistent water or food; they sat in the dark, receiving a meal once every three days.46

As the institution where criminally insane women were typically placed, Matteawan housed the suicidal, the eccentric, and the self-destructive, including several regulars from the Factory. In fact while Valerie was at Matteawan, a curious coincidence occurred: Edie Sedgwick, Warhol superstar, became a fellow inmate as she continued her downward spiral with barbiturates. Valerie met Edie during this time, now under quite different circumstances from their first meetings among the Andy Warhol elite. Ultra Violet recalled the curious parallel between the two figures; Valerie was under examination to find out if she was rational enough to stand trial for shooting Andy, while Edie “struggled to recover the sanity she lost in the Warhol years.”47 Valerie also encountered Andy’s friend Vera Cruise, who told Andy in late 1969 that she had gone to Matteawan earlier that year for car theft and “was seeing a lot of Valerie.” She mentioned that Valerie had talked about “getting Andy Warhol” when she got out.48

Though Valerie was quite withdrawn while at Matteawan, she did spend time with Geoffrey LeGear during his regular visits to the hospital. Geoffrey came to New York from where he lived in California and rented an apartment in Beacon so he would be in close proximity to Valerie. He visited her twenty-six times between August and early December 1968, mostly to discuss her grievances toward Andy and Maurice. While little is known about Geoffrey’s background or why he and Valerie became close (he refused to talk about this), his relationship with her helped her to survive her hospitalization at Matteawan. He did whatever he could to secure her release and earnestly tried to help her communicate with those she felt anger toward.

In writing to Andy and Maurice, Geoffrey pleaded with them to assist Valerie and, in particular, for Andy to forgive her. He wrote to Andy, “You yourself have said you have forgiven her, and also that you take her seriously as a writer, and therefore, presumably, also as a thinker. And finally, Valerie was, and probably still is, on the verge of suicide, believing that you could, but aren’t, doing anything to help her. . . . As far as I am able to know, Valerie has given up on her own affairs. And if, because of anything I failed to do, she were lost, this would be a great sadness to me.”49

Outlining Valerie’s complaints about Maurice, he wrote that she perceived him as responsible for her eviction from the Chelsea Hotel and the subsequent loss of her trunks and for tapping her phone, preventing her from consulting lawyers and celebrities to assist her, forcing her to write a novel, and blocking Andy from producing her play. He concluded the letter by saying, “It’s obvious I agree with her, in a certain way. In another way, I could say she’s wrong in fact but right in truth—that is, she is essentially right. In still another way, I could say it’s all a delusion. You see, I’m not sure.” Valerie also told Geoffrey to stop visiting (“It’s nothing personal”), that Maurice had killed SCUM Manifesto, that she was dead already, and that “Valerie Solanas” no longer existed. At the end of his letter he wrote, “Valerie has said she is through with trying to kill people (excepting, evidently, herself).” Valerie later wrote to Andy and Maurice that it was wrong for Geoffrey to interpret her wishes, saying, “Only I can interpret me.”50

Questions still arose about Valerie’s mental competence and ability to stand trial for the shootings. On December 9, 1968, Matteawan officials declared her “sufficiently recovered from her psychotic state and now mentally well enough to be returned to court of original jurisdiction for further disposition of her case.”51 On December 12, she returned to court and Judge Schweitzer ordered another psychiatric examination by a court-appointed doctor and set her bail at ten thousand dollars to prevent her release. The same day, Geoffrey arrived at the court and handed over the full amount in cash, an act that convinced Valerie that Geoffrey had connections to the Mob. The Mob had no connection to the Mafia, but were a group of men—among them Maurice Girodias, Howard Hughes (famed businessman, aviator, and agoraphobic), Robert Sarnoff (from NBC Studios), Mark Zussman (from Playboy Enterprises), and Barney Rosset (publisher of Grove Press)—who Valerie believed paid off doctors and wanted to steal her ideas, writings, and work from her. (From then on, she refused to trust Geoffrey and even told others they had never met before. Geoffrey said they last spoke in 1971.)52 Valerie had gained her freedom, giving her plenty of opportunity to seek contact again with her nemesis, Andy Warhol.

“Andy Warhol’s Feminist Nightmare”

Valerie’s shooting Andy marked a major turning point for both of them: Valerie entered a sphere of both fame and madness, while Andy became paranoid, withdrawn, fearful, and forever changed. What each of them had always embodied—for Valerie, a descent into madness and for Andy, the delirium of a consumerist world—only intensified after the shooting. In this way, they found the limits of their own logic; passionate, wild Valerie found herself locked up, and Andy drifted further into his life-as-dream state.

Given the vitriolic sentiments of many Factory regulars toward Valerie (Taylor Mead referred to her as having a “gutter-snipe idiot-mind”), Andy took a surprisingly forgiving and almost respectful tone toward Valerie in the post-shooting years.53 He never pressed formal charges against Valerie despite the urgings of his entourage (though, as mentioned earlier, Valerie interpreted this as a way to make himself look generous because he knew the DA would press charges), and he never spoke particularly negatively about Valerie. He clearly believed that Valerie had in some way acted as her nature dictated. Whenever questioned about Valerie, he would respond in a typically distant and apathetic way, even when discussing her attempt on his life. Two weeks after the shooting, he admitted in an interview, “It’s too hard to care. . . . I don’t want to get too involved in other people’s lives. . . . I don’t want to get too close. . . . I don’t like to touch things. . . . That’s why my work is so distant from myself.”54 Valerie had an equally complicated emotional tone when addressing Andy. Writing to him from Elmhurst and Matteawan, she sometimes threatened him and at other times was needy and almost appreciative of their relationship. She spewed hate and then asked to work with him again. She renounced him as a selfish, sniveling coward and then asked him to drop the charges against her.

Even as Valerie’s tone grew increasingly hostile and threatening toward Andy, her letters also communicated that she felt some remorse for the shooting. Jeremiah Newton confirmed this, saying that she regretted shooting Andy and was wounded by the rejection she faced from others after her release from Matteawan.55 Her dealings with Andy revealed a hostile ambivalence. In a letter of December 21, 1968, she wrote to Andy, “I just want you to know that if the charges against me aren’t dropped, I will never make a movie with anyone. I have many projects in mind + feel not the slightest compulsion to ever do a movie.”56

On Christmas Eve 1968, out on bail, Valerie contacted both Maurice and Andy, telling Maurice in a letter that she knew of his plots against her, that he purposefully wanted to stir up problems with her so she would seem like a “ranting & raving” lunatic, and that she would not give up insisting on a correct version of SCUM Manifesto: “Our struggles boil down to a waiting game, & I’m prepared for a long, long wait, and I can wait anywhere in & out of jail or in the bughouse. You must realize that I’m intensely ego involved over this situation; I have an enormous amount of pride. You offended, insulted & degraded me so deeply & in so many ways that I’m psychologically incapable of doing even a little of what you want without your fulfilling all the conditions I’ve imposed on you, even if not doing so means the practical destruction of me.”57

Valerie wrote Maurice a second letter on the same day detailing that she had written Up Your Ass and a document called “Wrap Up” and that she intended her next book to be Why I Shot Andy Warhol and Other Chit Chat. In the letter, she demanded a “decent editor,” the ability to publish without any preface or with a preface approved by her, that the entire manuscript have no errors or “corrections,” and that the cover contain a written statement denouncing previous editions of SCUM Manifesto and declaring that edition as the correct one. She also demanded all her fan mail, that Maurice return all copies of SCUM Manifesto to her, and that she receive a decent contract for the book.58

Valerie included a formal statement for the New York Daily News that was to precede the publication of SCUM Manifesto in the corrected edition: “Olympia Press’s edition of SCUM Manifesto by Valerie Solanas was, for reasons that will be explained in the future, a deliberate botch. The publisher of Olympia Press rendered some paragraphs and sentences of the original SCUM Manifesto unintelligible; he left some sentences of the original, for no sound reason, out of his edition; he substituted for completely apt words in the original weak, ineffective, inept and often times downright inaccurate words in his edition. To partially rectify the gross injustice the publisher of Olympia Press perpetrated against SCUM Manifesto we are here printing the original SCUM Manifesto in its entirety.”59

Also on Christmas Eve, Valerie allegedly phoned the Factory and, when Andy answered, insisted that he drop all criminal charges against her, help get SCUM Manifesto published in the Daily News, pay her twenty-five thousand dollars in cash for all the manuscripts she had ever written, put her in more of his movies, and get her booked on the Johnny Carson Show. If Andy failed to comply, she “could always do it again.” (Valerie expressly denied this in a 1977 interview.) Andy immediately felt fear: “My worst nightmare had come true: Valerie was out.”60 After he notified the DA’s office, the DA went to court and obtained a warrant for her rearrest for aggravated harassment, though the cops could not find her, even while she continued sending threatening letters.

Valerie’s call affected Andy deeply. He was afraid, and went on mad limousine rides around town to evade her. As Glenn O’Brien recalled, “Valerie was on the loose. She was locked up for a little while, but when I was at the Factory a couple of years later, she would call. Vincent Fremont and I might pick up the phone, and there’s Valerie. She’d ask for Andy. At one point she called up, and Andy answered, and she said that she wanted him to get her on the Johnny Carson Show. . . . That’s what she wanted . . . publicity.”61

Valerie targeted others at the Factory aside from Andy, directing particular venom toward Taylor Mead and Viva. In his apartment after the shooting, Taylor found two unopened letters from Valerie, one of which said, “I’m gonna get you, Viva, and Andy.” Valerie had a long history of threatening Viva, going back to the time before the shooting when they both lived at the Chelsea Hotel. One day Viva’s husband, Michael Auder, saw Valerie in the lobby, held a hunting knife to her throat, and said, “You ever come back here again I’ll slit your throat.”62 Valerie responded to direct threats, and after that she did not go back looking for Viva, though she did threaten her in later letters to Andy.

Valerie’s obsessive phone calls continued throughout December 1968; then in early January they abruptly stopped. As Andy recalled, “She must have found some other interests because I never saw her again, although occasionally people would say they’d seen her on the street someplace, usually in the Village.”63 The reason she stopped calling, however, may have been because two weeks later she was arrested for making threats to Andy, Maurice Girodias, Barney Rosset, Howard Hughes, and Robert Sarnoff of NBC. In the letters, she claimed, “I have a license to kill.”64

Women’s House of Detention, New York City

After Valerie’s threats led to her subsequent arrest, on January 9, 1969, she was remanded to the Women’s House of Detention in Manhattan. Curiously, earlier that day Valerie had entered the court building oblivious of the arrest warrant against her, only to be seized by the police and have her bail revoked. The Women’s House of Detention, like Matteawan, had a documented pattern of abuse of women and a long history of housing controversial figures such as Ethel Rosenberg, Polly Adler, Angela Davis, Afeni Shakur, Joan Bird, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, and Evelyn Nesbit.65 In its last years, around the time of Valerie’s imprisonment there, radical Black Power activist Angela Davis, who had been housed in the wing for the “mentally unstable” so she could not radicalize other inmates, described the prison as grossly negligent and abusive. “First of all, this prison is filthy. It is infested with roaches and mice. Often we discover roaches in our cooked food. Not too long ago, a sister found a mousetail in her soup. A few days ago I was drinking a cup of coffee and I was forced to spit out a roach. Roaches literally cover the walls of our cells at night, crawling across our bodies while we sleep. Every night we hear screams of inmates who wake to find mice scurrying across their bodies.”66 Andrea Dworkin, a well-known and outspoken critic of men and their abuses of power, wrote later of how two prison doctors sexually assaulted her during a cavity search, an event that helped to prompt the eventual closing of the Women’s House of Detention in 1971.67

In February 1969, the courts agreed to set Valerie’s bail at fifty thousand dollars (though one hundred thousand dollars had been requested) because of the alleged new threats to Andy and her recent history as a psychiatric patient and because her more flattering psychological reports had not been made public (in fact, even the DA’s office had not seen the reports). Valerie’s chances of making bail or securing release appeared grim. She passed the time working in the kitchen, attending “beauty school” (the Women’s House of Detention had classes in housekeeping, dressmaking, cooking, and cosmetology, the last two of which Valerie participated in), and writing letters to Andy, infuriated that the press had claimed she had run off to Hollywood and worn a skirt to the shooting.68

Judge Gerald Culkin, known as a “gentleman” by fellow judges, took on the case and called a friend, Lorraine Miller, then a young up-and-coming lawyer, to represent Valerie. Sensing that Valerie would not handle a male lawyer very well, the judge told Miller point-blank, “You’re a tough lady. . . . Maybe you can relate to her.” Culkin continued, “I thought you would be the only one who could handle her!” Lorraine admitted that, though Valerie was a difficult, even impossible, client, she desperately wanted Valerie to go to trial. She thought they could build a case that would give her a shot at a decent defense, but Valerie believed that going to trial would only give Andy and Maurice more publicity. Lorraine recalled that Valerie kept insisting, “I don’t need a lawyer. I know what I did and I know why I did it, and I would do it again. Warhol and Girodias stole my work.” Lorraine pleaded with Valerie, “But if we went to trial you might present a sympathetic picture that people might understand.” “No, no, no, I don’t want to do that,” insisted Valerie. “It would only give Warhol and Girodias more publicity! They’re capitalizing on me!” Lorraine reminded Valerie that she could go to jail if they did not go to trial. “I’m in jail now!” Valerie yelled. Even when Lorraine suggested that the publicity would help her sell more copies of SCUM Manifesto, especially with “how Valerie carried on with language and all the rest of it,” Valerie refused. “It wasn’t about the publicity,” Lorraine concluded. “Valerie said over and over, ‘I’ll sell the manifesto on my own.’”69

Valerie did not even want an official lawyer, so Lorraine negotiated for Valerie and served as her “advisor,” as Valerie refused to let anyone officially represent her. (Valerie always called Lorraine her advisor, never her lawyer.) Judge Culkin told Valerie that anyone who serves as his or her own lawyer has a fool for a client, but Valerie did not relent. Lorraine recalled, “The judge asked her whether she liked me, and she said, ‘I like her well enough,’ but still wanted to be her own lawyer. She said that I could stand by her, which I learned was a big deal to her.”70

The first time Lorraine encountered Valerie at the Detention Center, Valerie screamed and cursed at her.

Conversations with her were such combinations of dirty words. She had quite a command of the English language and cursed like crazy, using words I’d never even heard before, and I just got up in my most composed manner and gave it right back to her. At that point, she sort of sat down and said, ‘You’re OK.’ I said, ‘If that is what makes me OK, I’m not sure that I want to be OK,’ but I had tried everything to establish rapport with her and there was no way to talk to her unless it was her way. I just spewed back the words I learned from her. I said, ‘I can when I talk to a slut like you.’ She thought that was very funny. It was a real learning experience for me. We ultimately became friends.

Coming up with conclusions similar to those of Dr. Cooper, Valerie’s psychological examiner at Elmhurst Hospital, Lorraine believed that Valerie’s outbursts and bad behavior stemmed from wanting her mother’s attention and seeing her mother bring men in and out of the house when Valerie was young. “She was always trying to get her mother’s attention and approval but these men were in the way. Valerie thought that she was unattractive and so forth, and so she turned it into manipulation.” Valerie’s mother, Dorothy, who came up to New York to speak with Lorraine, had an open, gregarious manner. “She wasn’t embarrassed. She said, ‘I don’t understand this. I love Valerie!’” Lorraine worried that Dorothy had no idea about the impact she had on Valerie’s life; “Valerie felt neglected, jealous of her mother’s boyfriends, desperate for her approval and love. She told me that.” As a case in point, Lorraine believed that, despite Valerie clearly being a lesbian, she was driven to bisexuality by a lack of love from women.

At that time, Valerie had a boyfriend who supported her and put up legal fees while he worked as a soda jerk at Schrafft’s on Broadway. He had a master’s degree in English from Stanford University and his deeply disapproving (and “aghast”) parents were not happy about his selection of Valerie as a girlfriend. “I really think that women were her ultimate object and that she viewed men as people who got in her way to being with women. She used men like that poor schnook.” Lorraine added, “Valerie was a hostile, abusive kind of person. She treated him with complete disregard and disdain. He was tall and handsome, just smitten with her.”71

Ultimately, Lorraine felt that she could never truly understand Valerie and never had a clear sense of whether she could have won the case, “It’s hard to tell. After all, this was premeditated, so it’s unlikely but there might have been some sympathy. I got her a good deal, anyway. She shot two people and could have killed them. Warhol went through a lot of dangerous surgeries and rehabilitation. That’s pretty serious stuff.” Valerie insisted on taking a plea bargain, and Lorraine got Valerie a good deal—three years including time served. “When I discussed the plea deal with Valerie she said, ‘That’s fine! You did a good job.’ I said, ‘I did? I still think if you want to take a shot we can.’ She said, ‘I’ll look like garbage.’ She was pretty smart. She was no fool.”72

While Lorraine negotiated the plea deal, the courts ordered Valerie to undergo another round of psychological testing to determine her fitness to stand trial. The psychological report issued January 17, 1969, repeated the diagnosis of schizophrenic reaction of the paranoid type but noted that Valerie was a difficult subject to test reliably. Dr. Emmanuel Messinger, the psychological evaluator, colorfully described Valerie’s oppositional temperament: “She fluctuates between cooperativeness and a complete refusal to cooperate. This, however, is not a pathologic type of negativism in the psychiatric sense. When she first came into the examiner’s office she announced, ‘I’m not taking this examination. I’m not answering any questions.’ After about five minutes, however, she began talking freely and it was clear that she was oriented in all spheres, has good memory, and a high degree of native intelligence. She can furnish information on any subject that she is disposed to.” As recorded in the report, Valerie told the examiner that she had originally objected to the interview “because I think it should be a matter of common sense. The Judge should be able to tell how nutty a person is.”73 Shortly after the evaluation, she refused all further psychological testing while at the Women’s House of Detention.

As Valerie’s advisor, Lorraine agreed that she was not off-the-wall crazy, but characterized her as calculated, manipulative, and obsessed. Lorraine had negotiated a deal with Judge Culkin to get Valerie one to three years maximum, regarded as a light sentence. She had convinced the judge that the only way to get rid of Valerie was to give her a sentence that she had to take. Valerie pleaded guilty to the crime of assault in the first degree to cover the indictment. She said that she had not wanted to kill Andy but only to “get him to pay attention to me.”74

In all, Valerie spent four months at the Women’s House of Detention (January to May 1969) and was admitted again to Elmhurst Hospital for reevaluation on May 15, 1969. Drs. Sternberg and Rubinstein of Elmhurst noted in their May 28, 1969, report that Valerie presented as alert and cooperative, markedly less anxious than in her previous hospitalization there, and that “her level of diffuse hostility has subsided significantly.”75 Describing her mood as monotonous and shallow, and claiming that she displayed clear and logical thoughts that veered toward overintellectualizing, they noted that “a diffuse paranoid flair was evident,” particularly as Valerie expressed paranoia about going back to Matteawan against her will. Diagnosed now with “Schizophrenia, Paranoid Type, Improved,” Valerie was transferred to Bellevue Hospital’s Psychiatric Division for another examination ordered by Judge Culkin. The report of this testing concluded by saying that Valerie no longer seemed obsessed with Andy Warhol, though her spirit had waned. Even Maurice agreed that her incarceration had done her a deep disservice, writing in a letter to her, “In spite of your crazy desire to antagonize everyone since you cannot have everyone at your mercy, you are still a very alive and intelligent person and it is a form of suicide to force the courts to send you indefinitely to a hospital in which you may remain for the rest of your life.”76

Bellevue Hospital, New York City

Valerie’s stay at Bellevue, among the most notorious mental hospitals in the country and perhaps the world, exposed her once again to the horrors and abuses of the so-called mental health system. It was while she was at Bellevue, that, on June 9, 1969, Judge Culkin sentenced Valerie to three years, including time served, in state prison on the new charge of “reckless assault with intent to harm.”77 The singer and songwriter Lou Reed, a friend of Andy, chided, “You get more for stealing a car.” By contrast, when Valerie heard her sentence read, she yelled out in court, “Warhol deserved what he got! He is a goddamned liar and a cheat.”78 No doubt Valerie’s short sentence was attributable to Lorraine’s expertise, but Andy’s refusal to testify against Valerie also contributed to the outcome. According to his older brother, John Warhola, Andy was so thin and weak that he “didn’t want to bother.”79 News of this sentence, written succinctly, appeared in the back pages of the New York Times, beside a notice to Manhattan residents about a change in the summer garbage collection schedule. Valerie reportedly reacted to her sentence by telling the judge, “This is my first offense. I’ve been locked up for a year. People have been convicted of homicide who had records and got less.”80 With time served, Valerie would serve two more years at the most.

Throughout 1969 and into early 1970, Valerie continued to send angry letters to Maurice and Andy, expressing her agitation over how Olympia Press had treated the publication of SCUM Manifesto and complaining that she deserved better publicity. She began one of these letters to Maurice saying sarcastically, “I write this letter on the assumption that you haven’t killed yourself.”81 She refused to do an interview with the Village Voice’s Howard Smith and felt increasingly paranoid about how her life would be presented: “PREDICTION: Some day there will appear Why I Shot Andy Warhol and Other Chit Chat with my name on it, but written by one of your geeks. There will also appear my biography (definitive, of course), also written by a geek & a Psychological Study of Two Assassins: Valerie Solanas and Sirhan Sirhan.”82 Valerie sensed both that she had made some impact and that it would be appropriated in a way she disagreed with, as unauthorized accounts of her life threatened her relentless self-reliance.

In January 1970, she announced to Maurice somewhat vaguely that she had devised a “slimy greasy plan that you’d be tickled silly with. . . . But I finally rejected it, pulled myself out of the grease, up from the slime, & adopted a plan. . . . I felt so liberated & ecstatic when I made my decision; could deeply feel it’s [sic] rightness.” She concluded the letter with a requirement that Maurice announce on the cover of the next edition of SCUM Manifesto, “I am a turd, a lowly, abject turd” accompanied by “Confessions of a Turd.”83

Valerie directed her rage toward anyone who wanted to write about her without her consent, including the Village Voice. Calling its journalists “sniveling cowards, liars, and libelers,” Valerie chided:

I don’t want an article written about me, but I realize that, being I’m poverty-stricken and in jail, my desires count for nothing and that you’ll go ahead and write an article anyway. . . . Few journalists on this paper or any other would ever dare print anything about me other than the enormous, lavish lies (and the “facts” Howard Smith related in his last two scenes articles about me are among the most enormous and lavish I’ve seen), your masters (Wahoo and the vilest and toadiest of all toads, the great toad, Maurice Girodias) pay you to print. If you did, Big Daddies Wahoo and Toad would take you off their payrolls and withdraw their promises to publish your shit books.84

She ranted against perceived abuses inflicted on her by the Village Voice and referred to the power she would soon have: “If you’re the rational people you think you are, you’d realize that one’s potential power is directly proportional to the number of bribes and lies it takes to try to squelch it. . . . When scum secures power, lap away at my ass whenever I lift a finger.” She claimed she had developed a “perpetual hardness technique” and would use it on Maurice: “The personality changes brought about by achieving PH vastly increase his sexual feeling. I intend to give the Toad intensive scum therapy and teach him the PH technique, which will effect great changes in his personality, which will, in turn, render him manageable and easy to deal with, and I will as a result get my works back.” She concluded, hectoring the Voice: “Would you like to do something highly innovative? Have a journalistic first? Next time you print your string of filthy lies or mindless prattle about me—spell my name right.”

Bedford Hills Prison, Bedford, New York

In March 1970, executive assistant district attorney David S. Worgan rejected Valerie’s request for parole, stating, “In view of the seriousness of the instant crime, this office sees no basis for an early parole.”85 Two months later, Valerie entered the Bedford Hills prison, where she remained only a few weeks, then was transferred back to Matteawan. She became uncommonly quiet during this period, corresponding with almost no one and writing only a few letters.

While at Bedford Hills, Valerie encountered a notorious prisoner she had met at Elmhurst Hospital, Alice Crimmins. Strikingly beautiful, Alice had married a paranoid police officer, then divorced him. Their children were found dead in nearby lots, resulting in massive amounts of press coverage insinuating that Alice had killed them. Alice had claimed that someone had kidnapped the children but her husband accused her of murdering them to spite him (the case remained unsolved, though most sources believe Alice did not kill them.) She had worn a miniskirt to the children’s funeral, a move that caused outrage and earned her the title “the beautiful murderess.” Newspapers described her as a “sexpot” and a “sexy redhead,” referring to her nickname, “Rusty,” which she had had while working as a cocktail waitress in skimpy outfits. Alice also had a lot of boyfriends and had expressed glee at the dissolution of her marriage, leading to many raised eyebrows about her potential homicidal tendencies.86

Alice had gone to trial several times and had been found not guilty twice; then, in May 1968, though no evidence linked her to the murders, she was found guilty. During the different trials, she had called people “liars” and “worms” and eventually landed two years in prison. Before her time in prison, Alice had been remanded to Elmhurst at precisely the same time as Valerie, and the two had formed a friendship. When they met again at Bedford Hills, the two bonded over the mistreatment they faced by men; Alice had faced a jury composed solely of men, while Valerie felt that Andy had stolen her work. Jeremiah said, “Alice Crimmins was about as notorious as you get. And so was Valerie in those days.”87

Back to Matteawan

Valerie had grown numb and disconnected and was serving out her time in uncharacteristic silence. After arriving back at Matteawan in late May 1970, she sent a letter to her father, Louis:

Dear Pop,

Received your letter for 5/20. It took 3 days from S.C. to Bedford + 2 days from Bedford to here. I’ve only received 1 other letter from you—that was last Oct. I told you in my last letter that I was at Matteawan. Did you forget? Thanks a lot for the $12. I don’t care to correspond with or see anyone.

Valerie.

They credited the value of the 2 stamps to my account.88

Few documents detail Valerie’s thoughts or feelings during the remainder of her sentence, though her father’s death in early 1971 may have affected her quite deeply. In April 1971, she (amazingly) escaped from Matteawan and evaded police for two months but was captured and recommitted to Matteawan on June 16, 1971. By later that month, she had served her full sentence, and the state discharged her permanently and she was finally free to go. Louise Thompson, a feminist writer, poet, and activist who knew Valerie, noted the change in Valerie after her stays in the psychiatric hospitals and in prison: “I knew her before prison, and I know that she was destroyed there. She was not crazy. She was angry. I have worked with many women at Bedford Hills and there are lots of women like her—ordinary women who made a mistake.”89

Valerie and Freedom

Several people remembered seeing Valerie—often with much surprise—after her release from Matteawan, visiting many of her old haunts and roaming through Greenwich Village. One day as Margo Feiden was walking down Eighth Street, she had a vivid experience concerning Valerie, although Valerie never knew it. “Valerie had a very strong odor, not like a homeless person, but such a strong personal odor, I couldn’t get it out of my nose for weeks. It had seeped into everything in my house. I used rubbing alcohol and could not get her smell off the furniture. That smell is hard wired into my memory. Years later, as I was walking on Eighth Street deep in thought, looking down, I suddenly smelled her. Even after all those years, I knew that Valerie was right near me. I looked up and there she was, wearing the same pea coat and the same outfit as before.” Margo added, “She looked as though she had walked through a tear in space and time. She looked so terribly lonely when I saw her on the street. Looking back, I wish I had spoken to her but I was terrified.” Margo was surprised that Valerie had been released from prison so quickly, admitting, “I was always looking behind me. I was afraid of another encounter with her. She was always there, alive in my mind.”90

Valerie’s friend Jeremiah remembered standing on Sixth Avenue in the Village one afternoon and seeing Valerie suddenly get off the bus on the corner, carrying her suitcase, and walk right up to him. She had no place to stay and no money, and she asked if she could stay with him. He had just gotten his own apartment and he decided that he wanted to find her another place to stay but still wanted to help her all he could. As a member of the Gay Liberation Front, he knew that the group had a community center a few blocks away so he took her there and noticed there was a women’s consciousness-raising meeting in SoHo that day. Esquire, Jeremiah knew, had recently published a piece saying that feminists had sympathy for Valerie’s aims, and he took Valerie to the consciousness-raising meeting in hopes that through the women there, Valerie could find a place to stay.

When the two arrived at the building where the meeting was to be held, Jeremiah walked a long flight upstairs and knocked on a door. The peephole opened and Ti-Grace Atkinson said, “What do you want? Men aren’t allowed.” Jeremiah said, “Look, Valerie is downstairs,” and there was a gasp from the women in the room. The hole closed and a few minutes later Ti-Grace opened the door and asked what Valerie wanted. When Jeremiah explained that she needed a place to stay, Ti-Grace said, “Well, we can’t help her.” Jeremiah went downstairs and told Valerie that these women did not want to see her or help her and that she had wasted their time.

The next day, Jeremiah saw her again, standing on the street, and mentioned to her that he saw an advertisement in the community section of the Village Voice about a free place to go that offered food and housing for both men and women: the Brooklyn Commune. This particular commune included a variety of communists, including Jim Owles (who went on to run discos in New York and eventually ran for office). Jeremiah called up the commune and said that Valerie needed a place to stay. They said, “Well, bring her right over!” Valerie and Jeremiah walked over to the little brownstone, introduced themselves, and Valerie took a liking to it and moved in.

Relating this episode later, Jeremiah chuckled and said, “Some years later, this man stopped me on the street and said, ‘Do you know who I am?’ I said no. ‘I was part of that collective that you brought Valerie Solanas to and I wanted to say thank you a fucking lot! She destroyed our collective. She caused problems immediately and she took a gun out of her bag and shot into the ceiling. . . . It’s ’cause of you that this happened, so I blame you.’” Right after Valerie arrived at the Brooklyn Commune, the group began fighting about everything, particularly garbage and trash. Valerie convinced the women that it was not their job to take out the garbage and that men should do it—“Why should a woman take out men’s shit?” The group got into a big fight and the women rebelled against the men. As Jeremiah said, “Valerie was really, really serious about the SCUM Manifesto.”91

After the Brooklyn Commune broke up, Valerie approached the Baltic Street Collective, in Brooklyn, and asked for a place to live. As N. A. Diaman, an early member of the Gay Liberation Front, recalled, “As she sat at our kitchen table I realized I saw her years earlier at Lefty O’Douls in San Francisco where I sometimes ate lunch when I was working at Brentano’s Books. She was thin, dark-haired, and androgynous when I first noticed her. I wasn’t sure if she was quite male or female then.” He now found her sane and nonthreatening, but he decided not to let her into the collective: “Richard suggested calling one of the lesbians we knew from GLF [Gay Liberation Front] to provide a place for her to stay rather than agreeing to take her in. It was certainly a wise decision.”92

Drifting, and with no place to live, in the summer of 1971 Valerie went to visit Dick Spottiswood, her good friend from college. She showed up on his doorstep looking lost and aimless, needing to be taken in. “I was living alone in a little residential house,” he said, “and this time she seemed truly crazy. She was convinced she had a transmitter in her uterus . . . everything I’d ever heard about paranoia. Before, she was trying her best to be tough. After Matteawan, she was tough and scared and hurt, and out of touch with reality.”93 Valerie stayed with him for a couple of weeks, talking and smoking hand-rolled cigarettes. She told him stories about the cruelty at Matteawan and her differences of opinion with Andy, especially about royalties and his suppression of her work. He then found a place for her to stay and gave her some money. She drifted off and he never saw her again. Dick admitted, however, “I was and am very, very fond of Val.”

Valerie next moved into the Allerton Hotel at 302 West Twenty-Second Street, a welfare hotel near the Chelsea. The Allerton had a reputation as a dive; a porter had found a newborn baby girl in a garbage can.94 While at this hotel, Valerie’s mental health continued to disintegrate and her sense of threat and overall paranoia worsened. This ultimately led to increasingly aggressive outbursts toward drag queens like Candy Darling, whom she believed made fun of women for the benefit of gay men and had therefore committed “war crimes.” Jeremiah, who had befriended both Valerie and Candy, recalled that Valerie “felt there was a war going on.”95 Her militant SCUM ethics had again ramped up.

Around that time, Valerie’s paranoia led her to believe that the Mob had started governing her affairs and that she needed to confront or outsmart this group of men who wanted to steal her fame and manipulate her publicity. Following her release from Matteawan, she believed that doctors working in conjunction with the Mob had placed a transmitting device into her uterus, allowing them to track her movements and words at all times. She started writing letters and making phone calls to those she felt had wronged her, targeting many of the “usual suspects” whom she felt constituted the Mob. Barney, along with Fred Jordan (vice president of Grove Press), received numerous phone calls beginning in August 1971 and continuing through early September. Valerie threatened them, said she would stage her own kidnapping, and demanded publicity.

In fact, on August 1, she sent a typed letter to Barney, Maurice, Robert Sarnoff, Howard Hughes, and “all your business associates,” declaring:

we kidnapped valerie solanas. we know she is very valuable to you. but before we pick up the 50 million dollars, which you must pay to get her back alive, you must first print in its entirety in the tues., aug. 3, 1971 n.y. daily news beginning on page 1, continuing on page 2, from there page 3 and so on until no more space is needed the original scum manifesto preceded in conspicuous type by the statement valerie (who unwittingly gave us both the idea and the opportunity for this plan) wrote, which we are enclosing with this letter. the headline on page 1 must say: “scum manifesto deliberately botched.” besides being a wild, groovy and right thing to do, which frankly tickles us silly, this will prove you are interested enough in her to pay the $50 million, which you will pay in installments.96

As Playboy magazine’s Mark Zussman recalled, “Valerie had somehow gotten it into her head that I was the contact man for an entity she called the Mob—and to which she had various urgent messages to impart. Some of her correspondence was addressed to me directly but more of it was addressed to the Mob in my care.”97

Valerie told Barney that if he did not print her book in the Daily News, she would kill him. Barney had called the police on September 11, 1971, convinced that Valerie would actually harm him and his family. After her subsequent arrest that day, she was released on her own recognizance pending a hearing for the charge. When Valerie did not appear in court at the assigned time, the judge produced a bench warrant for her arrest. After another threat to Barney, police arrested Valerie a second time, setting a court date of October 7, 1971. For targeting Howard Hughes, she also faced two counts for threatening and potentially assaulting him as well.

Released once more, Valerie called the Grove Press offices again on November 2, 1971, saying, “I’m going to do it today unless the Mob does the right thing. I am not…speaking to anybody. I know there is no such book as The Art of Cutting Up Men, and if there was, I wouldn’t care.” She called again on November 3 demanding fifty thousand dollars from the Mob and saying that she would do “it” but not elaborating on what that was. She informed Fred that she would wander around and that the Mob could reach her if they wanted to (under the belief that the Mob could communicate with her through the implant in her uterus).98

On November 5, after Valerie once again threatened Barney, showing up at his office with an ice pick and threatening to use it, she was again arrested and was charged with aggravated harassment. At her hearing, the DA concluded that there was not sufficient evidence of specific intent to charge her with possession of a dangerous weapon. Barney pleaded with the judge, Judge Bayer, that, though he had never had any personal contact with Valerie to date, he feared for his life. Consequently, Valerie was held for psychiatric observation but eventually released after a finding of insufficient grounds to continue holding her.

Following Valerie’s release, Barney became increasingly afraid that she would harm him; he hired a lawyer, Shad Polier, to manage communications between the courts and his office. Valerie had written Barney a three-page letter detailing her intentions to harm him and Maurice and telling Barney that he should worry about his safety. Shad wrote the court that “it would seem that for some time now Miss Salanis [sic] has had no visible means of support and on the very day of her most recent arrest, her belongings were removed from her room at the hotel where she had been staying for the reason that she had not paid her rent. . . . Mr. Rosset has no hostility toward her. On the contrary, he believes that she is a very sick person psychiatrically and in need of treatment.”99 Barney himself also admitted to liking Valerie and said that SCUM Manifesto was a brilliant piece of feminist literature; he concurred with Valerie’s assessment that Maurice intended to make money from her work even as he tried to befriend her.

In December 1971, Valerie was again arrested for harassment; her quest to seek retribution from those she felt had wronged her had not subsided. She was sent back to Elmhurst Hospital for psychological testing. On January 5, 1972, the findings of psychiatric evaluations conducted at Elmhurst certified Valerie as mentally ill and a final order was made dismissing the charges against her. The psychiatrists at Elmhurst disagreed on whether Valerie posed a danger to others but their recommendation to the state commissioner of hygiene was that Valerie be sent to a secure state hospital until she recovered.

When notified of this recommendation, Barney and Fred asked Shad Polier to argue for Valerie’s transfer to Matteawan (confirming for Valerie her suspicion that people had paid off the judge to have her incarcerated). The leading psychiatrist at Elmhurst, Dr. Andrew Tershakovec, argued that such a transfer would require a very strong showing of present dangerousness and he “indicated quite definitely that he did not feel that Valerie fell into that category.”100 In response, Barney initiated criminal proceedings that resulted in Valerie’s rearrest, conviction for aggravated harassment, and sentencing to confinement at Dunlop Manhattan Psychiatric Hospital on Wards Island.

Dunlop Manhattan Psychiatric Hospital, Wards Island, New York

After the 1971 closing of the Women’s House of Detention (primarily for documented human rights abuses), most women who would have entered that hospital were sent to the Dunlop Manhattan Psychiatric Hospital on Wards Island, New York. Valerie entered Dunlop on January 21, 1972, the final result of her calls to Maurice demanding fifty thousand dollars in payments and threats to Barney and Fred concerning Grove Press. On January 15, 1973, Valerie sent Barney a letter directly threatening to kill him: “I’m in the hospital now, but I’ll be out soon, + when I get out I’ll fix you good. I have a license to kill, you know, + you’re one of my candidates. Valerie Solanas.”101

In response, Barney and Fred asked Valerie’s supervising psychiatrist, Dr. Allen, to notify them if Valerie left the hospital for any reason. Once he felt safe and Valerie no longer posed a direct threat, Fred admitted that he liked and admired Valerie and her work: “I thought that [SCUM Manifesto] was the first manifestation of women’s rage against men, and I thought that it was authentic. I thought it also had a literary quality. This book made me aware, for the first time, of women’s anger in a patriarchal society.”102

In early February, Valerie escaped from Dunlop Hospital. On hearing this news, Barney hired a private detective through the Pinkertons Detective Agency to attempt to learn her whereabouts. Valerie had apparently vanished. After her escape, private detectives hired by Grove Press found evidence that she had been living at 302 West Twenty-Second Street. After interviewing a hotel manager, three residents, and workers at a dry cleaner’s, the Pinkertons detective found nothing to go on. Valerie had not been seen for several months and the interviewees did not know where she was.

Two weeks later, Valerie began concretely testing her theories about the Mob. She phoned Fred and, believing he knew her location, asked him if he had notified the police of her whereabouts. Fred indicated that he had not told anyone. Valerie “rambled on to something about ‘the Mob’ and ‘Smitty,’ all of which meant nothing to Mr. Jordan, and the call was then quickly concluded.”103 She again demanded to be put on the cover of the Daily News. An hour later, she called back and asked if Fred knew she had escaped from a mental institution. She set up an appointment with Fred to discuss her potential employment with Grove Press, but she admitted to him that she feared the police and knew they would be waiting for her if she kept their appointment. Strategizing about how to avoid rearrest, she asked Fred to send a letter to Dr. Allen at Wards Island stating that Grove Press would employ her as an editor. Dr. Allen should also send a certificate of her release to her mother, Dorothy. Only under these conditions would she keep the appointment. Playing along, Fred agreed to these things, hung up the phone, called Dr. Allen, and then called the police.

As Valerie approached the Grove Press offices, she was promptly arrested. A court date was set for March 22, 1973. While she was being held, Valerie’s paranoia about the Mob worsened. Absolutely convinced that Barney and Fred wanted to manipulate and control her, she sent them a series of letters and postcards. In one card to Barney she attempted to assure him that she meant him no harm but had to prove to the Mob that she was aware of their intentions: “I wrote that letter to prove to the Mob (I knew you’d show it to the rest of the gang) I’m convinced they and not the doctors are responsible for my being held in the hospital.”104 (To a degree, she was right, as Barney and Fred had petitioned to have her held even when the psychiatric evaluators suggested this was unnecessary.) Two days later, she wrote to Barney and Fred saying she was onto their antics: “The detective (Fallon?) knew where I was, because you told him. You knew because of the transmitter in my uterus. . . . It was also because of the uterine transmitter you knew where I was when I was in front with the icepick.” She denied wanting to kidnap anyone and said she could not accomplish that even if she did want to, but that they wanted her in jail so they could photograph her papers without her consent.105

She sent another letter, on March 27, from Dunlop, rambling about discrepancies in her trials, conversations with the lawyers, and other occurrences: “To that same end in Sept. ’71 Girodias made a point of telling me on the phone my mother had power of attorney.” She outlined a list of twenty-five demands for the Mob, including a good edition of the manifesto and assistance with “getting other people’s papers.”106 In a letter to the Mob, she reiterated her series of twenty-five demands (on that same day, she was released from Dunlop, an event that likely intensified her paranoia that the Mob had control of her confinement). Prior to listing her demands, she outlined various concerns with the inconsistency of her trial, what Barney knew, his motives for trying to get her locked up, inconsistencies in the arresting officers’ testimony, and the problems of “Bernstein” knowing too much (the identity of this person is unknown). She also mentioned that her mother, Dorothy, had obtained power of attorney over her and had received “a few hundred dollars” from Maurice as payment for SCUM Manifesto. With regard to Barney’s case, she asked, “How can I be prosecuted for a letter I wrote while a mental patient?” Her demands—what she wanted “before I’ll do any acting or writing or making appearances or composing or inventing” were:

1. All mail sent to me c/o Olympia Press or c/o the papers.

2. An official discharge from the hospital.

3. All criminal charges dropped.

4. Copies of all notes and papers stolen from me.

5. Photos of the note cards you photographed in Cal.

6. The return of my trunks and all their contents.

7. Copies of all reports done on me since Jun. ’68.

8. Certain back issues of newspapers and magazines.

9. A copy of every WLM [women’s liberation movement] book published since ’68.

10. Opportunity to see or hear privately certain t.v. and radio casts.

11. Copies of all the bugging tapes.

12. The correct edition of the SCUM Manifesto printed on the front page of the 10 largest Sun. papers in the English-speaking world.

13. Your assistance in rounding up certain people I want to interview.

14. Your assistance in acquiring certain people’s papers and notes.

15. A good edition of the Manifesto, that is, the correct edition proof-read by me and not accompanied by any preface or introduction unless approved by me printed up and distributed.

16. A public confession, written jointly by me and one of you. The confession’s to be published as a book and possibly in the newspaper. I’m very doubtful of the latter. The book’s to contain the correct manifesto with a detailed description written by me of the botch job done in the incorrect editions.

17. My royalties from past editions of the manifesto and I want 10% of the gross.

18. Several million in damages (exactly how much I haven’t decided yet).

19. Certain things, which I’ll tell you when the time comes, put in the paper.

20. Public (on T.V.) cancellation of contract.

21. Public elimination of Segal’s power of attorney.

22. Public statement that you have no claim on any of my works, past or future.

23. Public (on T.V.) reading and signing of new contact for future works.

24. Advance on future works.

25. New contracts to include full artistic control by me of all my works.107

Valerie’s obsession with artistic integrity and ownership of her works, along with her perfectionism toward how it was presented, appeared consistently in these letters. The letters also suggest greater evidence of schizophrenia, particularly in an April 17, 1973, letter in which Valerie detailed, perhaps satirically, her demand to receive money for sex: “Mob: You can fuck me for $5 million per mob member per fuck. That’s only for the first fuck of each mob member. The 2nd time a given member fucks me I’ll only charge him $4 million, and only $3 million for the 3rd and only $2 million for the 4th, and $1 million for each fuck thereafter. In other words, if mob member A is fucking me for the first time, but he’s the 2nd member to do so, he pays $5 million. The 2nd time he fucks me he pays $4 million. Valerie.”

Valerie’s psychotic tendencies reached a new peak during this time, especially as her fears about the Mob linked up with her anxieties about losing control of SCUM Manifesto. Related to her perception that Barney and Fred had not afforded her proper publicity, she became convinced in the summer of 1973 that the uterine implant she received at Matteawan would give her cancer. (Whether she ever had signs of cancer remains unclear.) She wrote to Barney and Fred describing the unresolved contradictions of their contacts with her and said they must “confess to all the shit they’ve pulled on me since 5½–6 years ago” (March 3, 1973). She accused them of framing her as “crazy” and hiring a therapist named Smitty to misdiagnose her as insane based on “an inappropriate smile,” just like the last time she was examined by a court doctor (March 6, 1973). She made bizarre overtures of marriage to Fred, leading him to plea with her that he was not interested, which he later regretted: “It was such a mistake, because psychiatrists always say that one should not make oneself a focus of someone’s insanity. I had done so by trying to reason with her.”

To secure Valerie’s hospitalization, Barney and Fred hired a smart lawyer, Harry Wachtel (someone with excellent contacts in Mayor John Lindsay’s administration), who convinced Valerie that they could get her out as long as she agreed not to contact them again or bother them in any way. “We struck a deal with her,” Fred explained. “We told her that if she did not want to be in the hospital all of her life, she would have to make that deal with us.”108 Barney, Fred, and their lawyer did indeed arrange things with the hospital so that Valerie would remain at Dunlop for several more months; only if she agreed not to harass the two men would she be allowed to leave. Valerie’s paranoia, however extreme at times, had a basis in reality in this case, in that she suspected Fred and Barney of manipulating her situation. She never wrote to or otherwise contacted Fred or Barney again, sensing that it could land her back in prison. Finally, Valerie had her freedom.

In July 1973, Valerie read an article titled “302 Women Who Are Cute When They’re Mad,” in that month’s issue of Esquire (which announced on its front cover, “This Issue Is About Women”). The article identified her place in the genealogy of the feminist movement (“Ms. Solanas claimed she did it [shot Andy Warhol] because Warhol was a disgusting male chauvinist pig who used and abused women and failed to recognize their talents.”). Furious about this characterization, she wrote a letter to the magazine that they rejected on the basis that it was too self-promoting, though they eventually published sections of it, adding their own commentary. In this letter, Valerie “contradicted anonymously-written false statements made about me in the July, 1973 Esquire, the false statements being that I shot Warhol because he had rejected a movie script and that I had referred to him as a male chauvinist pig (a phrase not in my vocabulary and which had yet to be coined at the time I was supposed to have said it) who used and abused women and failed to recognize their talents. . . . It’ll take a wee bit more than Valerie Monroe and the anonymous Esquire writers (who won’t be anonymous when my book comes out) to obliterate SCUM.”109

How It Changed Them

That shooting was wonderful in a way because of the great myth. In order to become a myth you must be shot. And survive of course.

—Ultra Violet, quoted in Steven Watson, Factory Made: Warhol and the Sixties

Reflecting on the impact of Valerie’s actions both on her own life and on those in the Factory, many have noted that the June 3, 1968, shootings (and, subsequently, Valerie’s stints in various psychiatric hospitals) altered the course of their lives. Jeremiah believed that, in some spiritual sense, Valerie and Andy both died in the moment she shot him. For Mary Harron, “Warhol never recovered the sense of invulnerability that had fueled him as an artist. As for Valerie, she was now ‘the crazy woman who shot Andy Warhol.’ She would never have what she most wanted: to be taken seriously as a writer.”110 Louis Zwiren, Valerie’s boyfriend from 1975 to 1979, remarked that Valerie felt like a failure for not actually killing Andy: “The fact that she wasn’t able to pull it off and murder Andy Warhol showed that—it made her feel ineffectual and was a blemish on her reputation.”111

Valerie had missed her chance to kill Andy but had earned a reputation for hating men, even from men themselves. In January 1973, Colorado Springs’s Gazette Telegraph published an announcement saying that the men’s auxiliary of SCUM had written several letters to the paper but the paper had refused to publish them. In May 1973, M.A.S. wrote to Maurice from both Colorado Springs and Sioux City, Iowa, announcing the establishment of a new church dedicated to SCUM—the Church of Solanas: “Just a line telling you about the new church and the continuing transformation of S.C.U.M. into the nucleus of the vanguard party thru such. Please keep publishing the S.C.U.M. Manifesto.” (It is evident that Valerie did not send this letter, as she never referred to SCUM Manifesto using the abbreviation with periods and the signature was not in her handwriting.)

In 1974, Valerie met up with Jeremiah for an interview related to a book he was writing about Candy Darling. Still sleeping either at the Hotel Earle or on rooftops, Valerie wanted a hot meal. Jeremiah found her “waifish” in the lumpy clothes she wore to hide her scrawny body (he called her “Barnacle Bill the Sailor”).112 The pair tried to dine at the Red Lion (151 Bleecker Street), a literary place that a variety of writers and thinkers often frequented. “They wouldn’t seat us,” Jeremiah remembered. “They wouldn’t look at her. They said, ‘You’re going to have to go somewhere else.’ They didn’t want her there. As we were walking down the block, somebody saw her and spat on the ground across the street.”113 This upset Valerie at the time. She told Jeremiah that things like that happened to her constantly. That afternoon, once they got settled at Juliet’s Supper Club on Tenth Street, Valerie smoked numerous cigarettes and talked to Jeremiah (whom she affectionately called her “baby brother”) about her decisions and the future.

When he asked about her experiences in the psychiatric hospitals, Valerie said she had met some interesting people and enjoyed being in a place where they fed her every day and she did not have to worry about her next meal. Living on the street, on the other hand, meant she had to constantly negotiate ways to get enough food. Musing about the future, she said that someday soon babies would be born in test tubes and women would have no need to interact with men at all. (She had discussed this publicly the day after the shooting, exclaiming to the New York Post, “We must begin immediately!”) Valerie believed she would live to be a thousand years old and would rule the world. With this statement, Jeremiah realized that Valerie’s mental illness had worsened, as paranoia and grandiosity wove in and out of their conversation. She expressed concern that Jeremiah would use what she said to him for something other than his book on Candy Darling. “If you’re going to do something else with this interview, I’m going to shoot you,” she announced. “I thought, well maybe she has a gun with her right now,” Jeremiah said later. “Maybe she did, you know?”

Valerie did not want to talk about why she had shot Andy. In that shooting, Jeremiah thought, Valerie may have permanently sacrificed her credibility as a satirist. “She really painted herself into a corner and became known as the woman who shot Andy Warhol—and became the victim of the male establishment.” Valerie was sorry that she had shot him but did not want to say so aloud, Jeremiah assessed. And she was isolated. “She was ostracized by a lot of people. They didn’t want anything to do with her. Nobody did. That was the last time I saw her.”114

Andy Warhol’s life, too, was permanently altered by Valerie’s action. In a 1980 interview, he said, “Before I was shot, I always thought I was more half-there than all there—I always suspected that I was watching TV instead of living life.” After being shot, he says, he knew that he was watching TV: “The channels switch, but it’s all TV.”115 He admitted to not knowing the difference between reality and fantasy: “I’m trying to decide whether I should pretend to be real or fake it. I had always thought everyone was kidding. But now I know they’re not. I’m not sure if I should pretend that things are real or that they’re fake. You see, to pretend something’s real, I’d have to fake it. Then people would think I’m doing it real.” When asked whether he felt he had any complicity in the shooting, he replied, “I guess I really don’t know what people do. I just always think they’re kidding.” In part reflecting his outlook on the world, he reported: “It happened so quickly. . . . It was a surprise, but the bigger surprise was that she had dressed up for the occasion. She wore lipstick, eye makeup, her hair was combed.”

Andy claimed that he harbored no negative feelings toward Valerie: “I’ve never really disliked anyone. And I don’t think she was responsible for what she did. It was just one of those things. . . . I can’t feel anything against Valerie Solanas. When you hurt another person, you never know how much it pains.” He admitted he could no longer do the same things he once did, that his body looked like a “Dior dress,” and that he feared taking showers. “It’s sort of awful, looking in the mirror and seeing all the scars. It’s scary. I close my eyes. But it doesn’t look that bad. The scars are really very beautiful; they look pretty in a funny way. It’s just that they are a reminder that I’m still sick and I don’t know if I will ever be well again.”116

Ultra Violet worried about his deterioration, noting that Andy suffered with perpetual fear: “In this crystalline vision of Andy’s future, I see that from now on his art will be repetitive, automatic, empty, a rerun of what went before. His life will veer off in a different, safer, more conforming direction. The artist, the sorcerer, the conjuror, the diabolist of the 1960s is gone. The man—the businessman, the moneyman—will live on, accumulating more and more money and mountains of possessions to allay his terror.”117 When Mary Harron met with Andy in 1980, she was shocked at his appearance. “I had always thought of Warhol as permanently 30. At first sight he is unearthly. His skin is like nothing I’ve ever seen on a human being. His face, beneath the dyed silver hair, is so pale that it seems to have been modeled out of putty, ridged with little crevices that are, in fact, nothing more sinister than adolescent acne scars. He speaks very softly, and with a shy boyish charm that immediately begins to take effect.”118 John Leonard, who also interviewed Andy, similarly noted that Andy seemed “even more vulnerable: small, thin, goggled, with his talking box in his lap and his bright green socks, diminished under the high ceiling, white walls, and flak-blossoms of sunlight. Like a child playing with his toys.”119

In the aftermath of his recovery, Andy asked noted celebrity photographer Richard Avedon to photograph some of his scars. In the resulting photos—which would appear later in numerous magazines and other publications—Andy stares blankly into the camera with his chest exposed, revealing a labyrinth of scars left by his bullet wounds. He was constantly on edge about Valerie: “Every single time I’d hear the elevator in the shaft just about to stop at our floor, I’d get jumpy. I’d wait for the doors to open so I could check who it was.”120 When Andy heard that Valerie had been spotted in the Village, he became paranoid, always looking out for sudden ambush.121 At the same time, however, he was in something of a dream state: “I don’t know what anything is about. Like I don’t even know whether or not I’m really alive or—whether I died. It’s sad. Like I can’t say hello or good-bye to people. Life is like a dream.”122

In all likelihood, Valerie’s act against Andy did summon his eventual death. The wounds she inflicted had wreaked havoc on his body and left him afflicted with chronic medical problems (and a constant fear of doctors). He had to wear a surgical corset for the rest of his life. His demise stemmed from his severe and complicated physical problems and difficulties subsequent to treatment for them: he had gone in for gallbladder surgery; the surgery was successful, but he perhaps received improper follow-up care—family members alleged he had suffered from water intoxication (overhydration) and neglect.

Although Andy ultimately died from cardiac arrhythmia following his surgery, his severe and rather unpredictable medical issues started on the day Valerie shot him.123 As Ultra Violet noted, “Probably his premature death had to do with Valerie, because when he went to the hospital, he was not monitored properly, and a lot of things happened there. They did not monitor his intake and outtake of liquid, they had him on penicillin when he was allergic to it, so she really was responsible for his death. He could not stand up properly. He was the picture of death from then on.”124

Andy expressed worry that the shooting had changed his outlook: “The fear of getting shot again made me think that I’d never again enjoy talking to somebody whose eyes looked weird. But when I thought about that, I got confused, because it included almost everybody I really enjoyed!”125 In Jeremiah’s view Andy never behaved the same after the shooting. “Andy and I never discussed the shooting, but I know it changed his life. People said he was totally different afterwards. And it really did kill him, years later, his injuries and all. It really affected his health.”126 As concluded in the documentary Ken Burns made about Andy in 2006, “The event in Andy’s life (apart from his discovery of who he was as an artist, which was very powerful when it hit him), the event was Valerie Solanas’s attempt to murder him. The narrative was: the rise to success; at the peak of that success, the breaking into it of horror, of someone who was crazy enough to wish him dead, and then the rest of his life in some ways facing down what he met that day.”127 Two years prior to his death on February 22, 1987, Andy conducted an interview with the British style magazine Face. When asked what would happen to his art collection once he died, he replied, “I’m dead already.”128