Valerie Jean Solanas
1936 -
1988
An insanely brilliant (or brilliantly insane) woman.
She is probably best known for shooting
pop-artist
Andy Warhol in
1968 and for authoring the
SCUM (Society for Cutting Up Men)
Manifesto.
When her moral standards were challenged with a
quip about her shooting Andy Warhol:
"I consider that a moral act. And I consider it immoral that I missed. I should have done target practice."
Lesser known works include a
play entitled
Up Your Ass and her
memoir:
A Young Girl's Primer. She also wrote various articles for
magazines/
newsletters here and there, many of which were
rejected by publishers. She appears in two films by Andy Warhol's
studio The Factory called
I, A Man and
Bikeboy. I think both films were directed by
Paul Morrissey. Her parts were pretty small in each of them.
A film was made about her in
1997 called
I Shot Andy Warhol. It was directed by
Mary Harron(
director of
American Psycho). The cast includes
Martha Plimpton,
Stephen Dorff,
Jared Harris and
Lili Taylor as Valerie.
Satisfactorily
informative and
accurate biographical information on Valerie (aside from the stuff regarding the time when she blew a hole in Andy) is
scarce, but I've done some digging and here's what I found (I think it's
mostly true):
Born in
Ventor,
New Jersey on April 9th, 1936.
Parents: Louis and Dorothy Bondo Solanas
Has at least one sister, named Judith.
Her dad
sexually abused her when she was a little girl. At fifteen she gave birth to a son. The
father was a
married man and possibly a
sailor. The baby was "taken away" and Valerie never saw it again.
She went to
Catholic School for a while but at some point apparently couldn't take it anymore and decided to go against her
parents wishes and dropped out in favor of regular
High School.
She attended
college at the
University of Maryland at
College Park where she was a "
good student". While she was there she worked in the
Psychology department's
animal laboratory. I'd be interested to know what kind of stuff she did in there... Hmm...
After college she did a lot of
travelling around
America. In order to make money she
panhandled, worked as a
prostitute and charged
males money for the privilege of engaging in
interesting conversation with her. It was during this time (around
1965) that she wrote her play,
Up Your Ass in either
New York, or
Berkeley, or both.
By
1966 she had more or less settled in
Manhattan, in
the Village. She slept on
rooftops and when she could afford the rooms, in
cheap hotels. One day, a friend of hers brought her along with him to
The Factory and she managed to meet Andy Warhol. She hung about
on the fringes of Warhol's crowd for a while. Valerie was still
turning tricks, and panhandling and such, but she also began making a little cash by selling her written work (read:
propaganda)on the street. She made
mimeographed copies of her
SCUM Manifesto and sold them for a quarter each to males, females got
discounts. Later, the Manifesto was published by
Maurice Girodias, who is also known for publishing books such as
Lolita,
The Story of O and
Tropic of Cancer.
At some point in
1967 she gave Andy Warhol her
only copy of Up Your Ass because she wanted him to
produce it for her. In fact, she
insisted that he produce it. Andy wouldn't do it though. He was a little
paranoid, and later claimed that the play "was so
dirty" that he'd thought that she must have been an
undercover cop trying to
entrap him and bring
obscenity charges against him. Valerie continuously
pestered Warhol about putting on her play for about a year, I think. When it dawned on her that he really wasn't going to produce it, she told him to give it back to her. That's when he admitted that the
script had been
lost. As it had been her only copy of the play, Valerie was pretty
pissed off.
But she still continued to hang around The Factory, mostly talking to Andy about SCUM and
feminism and
whatnot. She often demanded that he give her money. He put her in a couple of movies and paid her 25 bucks for her part in
I, A Man. Over time, Valerie became increasingly paranoid that Andy was using her. She thought he was involved in a plot with her publisher to steal the rights to her work and take all her money. When she went on the
Alan Burke show (
presumably to talk about SCUM or
somesuch) she was
forcibly removed from the set after refusing to
censor herself and throwing a chair at the host when he began asking her
manipulative and
biased and basically
pig-headed questions. This incident added to her paranoia. She thought she had been purposely set up by people close to her(Andy? Girodias?) to be
humiliated on television. She couldn't trust many people. They were all out to
ruin her.
In June of
1968, Valerie went looking for her publisher armed with a
.32 medium-caliber pistol in a
brown paper bag. She was informed that Girodias had gone out of town for the weekend and so she changed her plans and headed over to The Factory. Andy Warhol wasn't around when she got there but she waited patiently for him for a few hours, riding up and down the elevator
numerous times. When Andy finally arrived, she followed him into the upstairs office. As he stood talking on the phone, Valerie pulled out her gun and shot at Andy Warhol three times, hitting him once. She then shot a man named
Mario Amaya, who was nearby waiting to talk with Andy. She attempted to shoot
Fred Hughes, Andy's manager, who was also in the room, but the gun jammed so she took the
elevator back downstairs instead.
nobody died.
Actually, that's
not completely true. Andy Warhol was declared
clinically dead but was
resuscitated in the hospital. His insides were pretty
royally fucked up by the bullet.
Later that day, Valerie turned herself in to a
traffic cop in
Times Square. "The police are looking for me and want me," she said. "I shot Andy Warhol. He had too much control of my life."
She plead
guilty to
attempted murder,
assault and
illegal possession of a firearm and was sentenced to three years in
New York State Prison for Women. She only had to serve two years though, because she'd spent a year in
Ward Island Hospital's psychiatric ward awaiting trial and her time there counted as
time served.
After her release from prison in
1971, she was in and out of mental institutions including the
infamous Bellevue. In New York she loitered around
St. Mark's Place and
Tompkins Square Park looking "
dazed". During this time she reportedly was living with a man on
3rd street and had a good relationship with him until she stopped taking her
prescribed lithium. She eventually moved to
San Francisco where she supported herself by, you guessed it, panhandling and
prostitution.
She died of
pneumonia in April of 1988 in the
Hotel Bristol, a
welfare hotel on
Mason Street in the
Tenderloin District of San Francisco.
This is a pitiful attempt at a
bio, by the way. If you really want to get an idea of what this woman was, then read
her manifesto. & bring your
sense of humor along. I highly recommend watching
I Shot Andy Warhol as well, even though it's somewhat
fictionalized.