Valerie Solanas: The Defiant Life of the Woman Who Wrote Scum (and Shot Andy Warhol)

"Valerie Solanas finally provides an in-depth, decade-spanning history of Valerie’s life, including mid-teen pregnancies, anti-essentialist college newspaper rebuttals, SCUM lectures, Up Your Ass casting calls, transience, letters of grammatical corrections to Majority Report, a continual emphasis from various sources on Valerie’s intelligence, radicalism, humor, comedic improv timing, and intensity, and thorough discussions of her work dismantling and repudiating sexuality, gender, morality, marriage, the money system, and the patriarchal status quo."

—Nath Ann Carrera, singer/musician

This compelling biography shows the complexity of Valerie Solanas, placing her in the context of so many later-twentieth-century cultural realities—the commodity explosion of the art world, nuclear family damage and dysfunction, emergent baby-boomer generation narcissism, and the complicated internal struggles of the feminist movement.

—Catherine Morris, Sackler Family Curator at the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art

Valerie Solanas was an enigma, an outsider even among misfits, and one of the most shocking radicals in a decade teeming with them. Breanne Fahs’ book is a long overdue excavation of the obsessions, paranoia, and rage that fueled both Solanas’s visionary manifesto and her appalling attempt to murder Warhol.

—Cynthia Carr, author of Fire in the Belly: The Life and Times of David Wojnarowicz

Published in 2014 by the Feminist Press at the City University of New York

The Graduate Center

365 Fifth Avenue, Suite 5406

New York, NY 10016

feministpress.org

Text copyright © 2014 by Breanne Fahs

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, used, or stored in any information retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without prior written permission from the Feminist Press at the City University of New York, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

First ebook edition April 2014

First printing April 2014

Cover design by Herb Thornby, herbthornby.com

Text design by Drew Stevens

Ebook design by Ellen Maddy

Inside front/back cover:

Lies! Lies! Valerie Solanas. This is a reproduction of Valerie Solanas’s handwriting on the 1971 copy of SCUM Manifesto housed in the collection at the New York Public Library. To sabotage the Olympia Press edition of SCUM and to protest unauthorized changes to her manifesto, she marked up her book with her own graffiti. For the full story, see Chapter 5.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data available upon request.

eISBN 978-155861-849-7 (ebook)

ISBN 978-155861-848-0 (paperback)

Contents

Front Cover

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

Preface

SOUNDING OFF

Atlantic City to New York City, 1936–1967

SHOOTING

SCUM, Shots, and Stupidstars, 1967–1968

PROVOCATION

The Contentious Birth of Radical Feminism, 1968–1973

MADNESS

Of Mental Hospitals and Men, 1968–1974

FORGETTING

The Lost Years and Final Days, 1975–1988

PHOTO INSERT

Acknowledgments

Notes

References

Bibliography

About the Author

About the Press

Also Available From the Feminist Press

For G. Elmer Griffin,

who cracked open the universe

and

for Eric Swank,

for more than our share

of la dolce vita

Only part of us is sane: only part of us loves pleasure and the longer day of happiness, wants to live to our nineties and die in peace, in a house that we built, that shall shelter those who come after us. The other half of us is nearly mad. It prefers the disagreeable to the agreeable, loves pain and its darker night despair, and wants to die in a catastrophe that will set back life to its beginnings and leave nothing of our house save its blackened foundations.

—REBECCA WEST

preface

We only become what we are by the radical and deep-seated refusal of that which others have made of us. . . . I think we understood this truth at one time, but we have forgotten it—that no gentleness can efface the marks of violence; only violence itself can destroy them.

—Jean-Paul Sartre, preface to Frantz Fanon, Wretched of the Earth

Tracking the life of Valerie Solanas, much like pursuing the movements of an invisible wolf, has led to many dead ends. Standing in the dusty, empty lots of downtown Phoenix, a place where Valerie once roamed the streets eating out of Dumpsters, digging a fork into her scab-filled arms, and howling at the moon, I stare at the silent mountains with a familiar mix of amusement, mourning, and awe. She’s dangerous, they still say, I won’t even talk to you until I see a death certificate.¹

In one of Valerie’s more paranoid phases near the end of her life, she insisted she would write a book called Valerie Solanas. It would provide the definitive account of her life, told by herself, and, she imagined, it would sell at least twenty million copies (with a one-hundred-million-dollar advance from the Mob). Valerie hated the idea of imperfection, of others representing her life and work, of errors to the official record of how things went down. At the same time that she believed a uterine transmitter had been implanted in her against her will, sending details of her movements and words to what she called the Mob, she also took the time to correct spelling and grammar errors in the feminist periodical Majority Report. Her misfire at Andy Warhol felt like a blow to her reputation. She went by an absolute standard, even as she slipped into deeper and deeper psychosis. The irony of now writing a book called Valerie Solanas that gives an unauthorized account of her life, offering up a text filled with the potential for error (and, of course, Valerie’s posthumous cosmic revenge) is not lost on me.

Taking aim from the literal and metaphorical gutter, closing in on the power and audacity of those who prowled for thrills and never pandered for Daddy’s approval, Valerie wrote in her renowned, funny, and vitriolic SCUM Manifesto of women who had a SCUM state of mind: Unhampered by propriety, niceness, discretion, public opinion, ‘morals,’ the ‘respect’ of assholes, always funky, dirty, low-down SCUM gets around . . . and around and around . . . they’ve been the whole show—every bit of it . . . SCUM’s been through it all, and they’re now ready for a new show; they want to crawl out from under the dock, move, take off, sink out. But SCUM doesn’t yet prevail; SCUM’s still in the gutter of our ‘society,’ which, if it’s not deflected from its present course and if the Bomb doesn’t drop on it, will hump itself to death.² In Valerie’s world, the lowly, downtrodden, abject, forgotten, nasty women living in the shitpile would inevitably take over the world. SCUM has power. SCUM knows truth.

Valerie saw things, knew things, sensed things far earlier than her contemporaries of the 1960s, giving her work a quality that is both beyond the pale and startlingly prescient. At a time before computers and Twitter, before sophisticated infertility treatments and 24/7 headline news, before no-fault divorce and marital rape laws, before punishable sexual harassment and antidiscrimination policies, she understood, somehow, the core of what would come to dominate modern American life. She sensed that constant surveillance would allow unlimited access to the powerless from the powerful. She believed that men would continue to justify wars based on increasingly asinine reasons. She predicted test-tube babies and the ability to reproduce without the bodies of men. She forecasted the invention of Viagra (calling it her perpetual hardness technique, which would render men manageable and easy to deal with). The gender-bending romp she created in her 1965 play, Up Your Ass, featured characters that even the best of queer theorists cannot categorize or understand. She loved women, hated men, defined herself as asexual, adamantly refused to identify as heterosexual, but resented accusations of herself as a lesbian.

Ti-Grace Atkinson, one of the founders of radical feminism, once reflected that for the visionaries and revolutionaries, they must ask, Just how far out can I get from the time and context in which I live?³ Just how far away could Valerie get from a context in which women wore strings of pearls, married in their early twenties, renounced sex before marriage, and lived out scenes from Mad Men in real time? Just how much distance could she create between herself and a cultural context that trivialized, insulted, and ignored women, particularly successful, ambitious, intelligent women? Certainly, this distance, embodied most brilliantly in the SCUM Manifesto, made Valerie far more dangerous than the .22 Colt revolver or .32 Beretta automatic she wielded when she strode into the Factory and shot Andy Warhol on June 3, 1968.

There is something about the SCUM Manifesto. Its brashness, its vivid, startling anger, its outrageous humor and wit, its uncanny insights and truth. It has a one-of-a-kind tone, never replicated by anyone. In an undergraduate college course I teach on manifestos, I ask students to write their own manifesto and they often stare up at me in panic, not knowing how to find that voice, a voice like Valerie’s. That she could carry such force, hurl such obscenities, take us right to the edge and then shove, serves as a testament to the power of Valerie Solanas. That she wrote SCUM Manifesto on rooftops, banged it out on an old typewriter she carried around in lieu of more reasonable items like clothes and toiletries, makes it all the more poetic. Valerie loved her words, her works. The story of Valerie’s life, more than anything, is a story of her relationship to the manifesto. From its start in the mid-1960s, when she bragged to her father about writing it, until her final documented conversation in November 1987, when she pleaded with Warhol stupidstar Ultra Violet to get a copy of it from the Washington, DC copyright office, SCUM Manifesto played a central role in how Valerie understood, and spoke to, the world. As librarian Donny Smith wrote in The History of Zines, her manifesto, like Valerie herself, has never found a comfortable place. . . . Sometimes it’s a feminist classic, sometimes a marginal tract, a cult classic, a rant, man-hating, anti-feminist, surrealist, anarcho-socialist, utopian, apocalyptic.⁴

In the growing accounts of 1960s counterculture, amid the piles of theory and mythology amassing about Valerie’s life, where does she belong? How does one tell a story about someone like Valerie, someone whose life is entrenched in myth and imbued with seemingly bottomless emotional energy? I set out over a decade ago—long after Valerie’s death—to write the story of Valerie Solanas. I got my first copy of SCUM Manifesto in 1999 from a friend who had returned from studying abroad in Paris, where she had heard a lecture by the prominent French philosopher Jacques Derrida. In this lecture, Derrida had pulled out a copy of the manifesto from his briefcase, praising it as necessary, somehow, to the intellectual history of women. My first reading of SCUM Manifesto transformed something in me, too, for in the midst of studying critical theory, I had found someone with no regard for the academic canon, no apologies for her reckless humor and wild destruction. Later, as a graduate student in clinical psychology and women’s studies, I searched for more of her story but could find only small pieces of it.

Hers, I believe, is the best kind of story, told through a pile of fragments and trash: dusty, lefty zines like Holy Titclamps and DWAN, transcripts of conversations now twenty years old, news clippings, DIY art mags, Hollywood scripts, material from a coroner’s office, half-recorded answering-machine messages, discussions in cat-filled apartments, blurred photos, YouTube videos, narratives from shaky memories, phone calls, missing files, consciousness-raising rants of radical feminists, browning letters and postcards, Library of Congress copyright registries, run-ins with the Warhol elite, notes from meetings in now-demolished diners, posters featuring the middle finger, long-forgotten pamphlets and newsletters. After all, Valerie, of all people, truly appreciated and yearned for knowledge from scum, seeing truth only in the gutters and landfills, in the sludge and the muck, in the abject, forgotten, broken pieces left behind by the more reasonable, affluent world. SCUM, she said, is for whores, dykes, criminals, homicidal maniacs.⁵

This biography of her life—a life that many have labeled a sheer impossibility (Valerie was homeless! She had twenty different names! Her mother burned all her belongings! She was dangerous!)—contextualizes the bigger societal stories surrounding Valerie and her writings. It is a story that stands at the crossroads of many things. As a story of violence, it accounts for the traumas of an individual girl and a woman who detected a spirit of collective anguish. As a story of madness, it weaves in and out of the horrors of psychosis, the difficulty of diagnosis, the impossibility of reason, and the institutions that trap and release so many of our heroes. As a story of art, it returns, again, to the question of how one’s life speaks to one’s work and how the deftly cool and calculating Andy collided with the hot-tempered and fiery Valerie. Finally, as a story of truth, it demands a consideration of the shit we have to go through in this world just to survive, calling forth, across the time and space of the last four decades, a reckoning.⁶

—Breanne Fahs

sounding off

Atlantic City to New York City

1936–1967

Pardon me, Sir, do you have fifteen cents? (I don’t say it’s for carfare, unless they ask; the preciousness of my time demands brevity.)

What do I get for fifteen cents?

How ’bout a dirty word?

That’s not a bad buy. Ok, here. Now give me the word.

Men.

—Valerie Solanas, A Young Girl’s Primer, or How to Attain the Leisure Class

Valerie has been called many things: a glitch, a mistake, an outcast among outcasts, the first outstanding champion of women’s rights, the Robespierre of feminism, Andy Warhol’s feminist nightmare, a female Lenny Bruce, created and destroyed by a truth most of us can’t face or joke about, a radical feminist Jean Genet,a woman who looked as though she had walked through a tear in space and time.¹ One of Valerie’s close friends, Jeremiah Newton, said simply, She believed in something. She believed in herself. I thought that was admirable. In an era when people didn’t believe in themselves and bullshitted or wanted to believe in other people, she believed in herself and she was so sure one day the world would discover her and she would have the fame that she so richly deserved. That’s how she felt.²

In her 1966 introduction to her play, Up Your Ass (which figured in her actions two years later, when she shot and nearly killed pop superstar Andy Warhol at his New York City Factory), she wrote: I dedicate this play to ME a continuous source of strength and guidance, and without whose unflinching loyalty, devotion and faith this play would never have been written. additional acknowledgements: Myself-for proof-reading, editorial comment, helpful hints, criticism and suggestions and an exquisite job of typing. I—for independent research into men, married women and other degenerates.³ Valerie insisted on her own telling, her own writing, and her self-reliance. She believed in two kinds of people: the originators and the interpreters, that is, those who created ideas and those who talked about the ideas others created.⁴ Such a philosophy lent itself to long stretches of isolation; her existence as an outcast defined her—from her early days as an out lesbian in Maryland’s Oxon Hill High School to panhandling and engaging in prostitution on the streets of New York, from her nearly decade-long confinement in mental hospitals on charges of insanity to her final days of living in a welfare hotel in San Francisco.

And yet for all of Valerie’s aloneness and withdrawl from the world, she managed to write the most widely produced document from late 1960s radical feminism—SCUM Manifesto. By many accounts, and despite Valerie’s frank aversion to communal social movements, she inadvertently inspired the radical feminist movement after her shooting of Andy Warhol fractured the National Organization for Women (NOW) in 1968. Further, she continues to provoke feminists and nonfeminists alike to react to her work, ideas, anger, rage, and symbolic persona, with piles of academic articles and chapters theorizing about her identity continuing to grow. Nearly everyone who knew her personally felt that she had an incessant intensity and markedly unique sense of humor; they also recounted stories of how she betrayed, humiliated, embarrassed, or otherwise violated them. She threatened to throw acid in the faces of her friends, called men walking dildos, shot a person who had some at least marginal sympathy for her, and accused many people of stealing her ideas and plagiarizing her words. Even those on the fringe found her excessive, impolite, difficult, and long winded. Jo Freeman, longtime radical feminist and women’s rights advocate, told me frankly, Valerie should be forgotten.⁵ And, for the most part, she has been forgotten. Or distorted. Or lost in the dust pile of (feminist?) history. As such, this telling of her life is a version composed only of fragments, shards, remnants, whispers, truths bubbling up, old memories, scribbles, and trash. It is necessarily partial and in pieces, a collection of SCUM, SCUM, and scum.

Early Family Life (1936–1953)

Valerie Jean Solanas was born at 5:37 a.m. on Thursday, April 9, 1936, to Louis Lou Solanas, twenty-one, a bartender, and Dorothy Biondo, eighteen, a dental assistant, both of whom lived at 104 South Frankfort Avenue in Ventnor City, New Jersey. Both of Valerie’s parents were first-generation Americans with immigrant parents. Louis’s working-class family came from the Catalonian region of Spain, while Dorothy’s mother originated from Genoa, Italy, and later married an American. Louis and Dorothy had two daughters; Valerie arrived first, followed by Judith, two years later.⁶

When Valerie was four years old, her parents separated, after much conflict in their marriage. Having decided that Valerie and Judith would flourish when living apart from both their parents, in 1940 Dorothy and Louis sent the girls to live with their maternal grandparents in Atlantic City. At the time, Atlantic City had a thriving four-mile boardwalk complete with diving horses on the Steel Pier, candy shops selling saltwater taffy and cotton candy, amusement park rides, and hoards of locals and tourists hitting the beach. The family lived on a street with respectable postwar blue-collar housing, with a mix of races and nationalities and the girls spent much of their time playing on the boardwalk with the neighborhood children.⁷ Valerie’s sister, Judith (Martinez, formerly Monday), later questioned the decision to send them away, particularly given Valerie’s closeness to her father: I was just an infant. I didn’t know my father. But Valerie was very attached to her father, and I think his betrayal of her had a great deal to do with her problems later.⁸

Details of Valerie’s childhood are revealed in mixed accounts, with some describing Valerie as a happy little girl, full of energy, charm, and vitality, while others painted her as aggressive and naughty. Judith described the young Valerie as a very bright, very pretty little girl, extremely intelligent with a caustic wit, adding that Valerie revealed a mix of precociousness and early genius.⁹ Valerie learned to read and write before she was six, often composing her own lyrics to pop songs around age eight. In one of these songs, Valerie changed the lyrics of Oh, How We Danced on the Night We Were Wed to Judy’s head comes to a great big point, whenever she walks it comes all out of joint, her nose is so much like a banana, it reaches from here to Savannah.¹⁰

Valerie always did things earlier and faster than her peers, playing piano at age seven, reading everything from Nancy Drew to Louisa May Alcott, and beating anyone on the block at Chinese hopscotch or double Dutch jump rope. She carried around a doll named Sally for much of her childhood but also enjoyed her dog Stinky and her turtle Myrtle. Decades later, Louis Zwiren, her then boyfriend, remembered Valerie’s affection for Stinky, saying that she sometimes affectionately called him her puppy dog and that she had a dog when she was a girl, and she loved her dog. When she came home the dog would be waving its tail and . . . she had fond memories of how excited the dog was to see her.¹¹ To a journalist, Valerie described her childhood as idyllic; she grew up doing things most young girls do: surfing in the summer, going to dances, and getting a crush on a high school boy.¹²

Other accounts give a more cautious reading of Valerie’s youth. Those who knew Valerie only when she was young saw her as friendly, funny, and precocious, while those who knew Valerie later on (particularly just before or after the shooting) portrayed her childhood as more disturbed or scary. Family friends and acquaintances characterized her as rebellious and antiauthoritarian: There is the sense, in talking to family and those close to the family, of a ‘bad seed,’ the child who was always difficult, wrote journalist Judy Michaelson in a story published two days after the Warhol shootings.¹³ When Valerie was five, her maternal grandfather hit her with a belt and she just stood there laughing. A neighbor, Clara Shields, remembered her with a mixture of affection and bemusement, and that she had a certain volatility. Bright and lonely, Valerie hated abuses of power. She beat the shit out of a young boy who tormented a younger girl on the boardwalk in Atlantic City and stood up for girls when boys picked on them at school.

Valerie grappled with many disadvantages growing up: bad home life, poverty, psychological instability, born in the wrong time.¹⁴ Later reports by psychologists described Valerie’s wild adolescence, filled with shoplifting and other petty crimes, early sexual experiences, and instability with all of her caretakers; or, as reporter Liz Jobey wrote, Valerie’s intellectual precocity had been too much for her parents and hadn’t been harnessed so she’d been naughty at school. Judith remembered Valerie as constantly battling social norms: She always fought off all attempts to mold her into a nice young lady. I was the one who went for the crinolines, the spike heels, and the lipstick.¹⁵ By contrast, Valerie was a hell-raiser and brawler who chased boys who made her angry or insulted Judith; outraged, Valerie would yell at them and berate them to fight like a man.

As an adult, Judith lovingly portrayed Valerie as one of the funniest people she had ever met and noted that she always wanted to be a writer. Speaking of Valerie with a strain of dark humor and a quiet bluntness that Valerie would have appreciated,¹⁶ Judith said she and Valerie always maintained contact, that Valerie had always let her and her mother know where she was, at least until the last decade of her life: Oh, I was with Valerie her whole life.¹⁷ Valerie, Judith, and their mother, Dorothy, had a quiet closeness, though Judith protected Valerie’s story with ferocity. Judith has been described as highly intelligent, well-groomed, looking a lot like Valerie, and lacking some of Valerie’s dynamism. Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, a radical feminist and writer who founded Boston’s Cell 16 and sympathized with Valerie’s politics, met Judith at a play in 2001 and said, It seemed like she really cared about Valerie. She was really sad missing her.¹⁸

Still, Valerie’s colorful and interesting family does shed some light on the contradictions that infuse her life story. Her mother, Dorothy, was born February 3, 1918, in Philadelphia, to Rose Marie Cella, from Genoa, Italy, and Michael Biondo, an Italian American born in Philadelphia in 1891. (Dorothy’s paternal grandparents, Lorenzo Biondo and Maria Milazzoto, came from Sicily.) Rose had immigrated to the United States as an infant and lived with her father, a fruit dealer, and her mother in Philadelphia. Michael and Rose married prior to Michael’s enlisting in the army in 1914; upon his return from the war, they moved to Atlantic City (216 North Morris Avenue) before the 1929 stock market crash. Michael, who was neat and dapper, according to Judith, worked as a shoemaker and plumber, while Rose, a tall and beautiful woman, worked as a dressmaker in a factory. The couple struggled to raise their only daughter, Dorothy, on their small salaries.

According to family genealogical records, Valerie’s grandfather Michael worked with his cousin James Jimmy Tindaro in the plumbing business but eventually decided to work in the saloon business, opening up a bar that served bathtub gin. When the Depression hit, Michael worked as a singing waiter in a comedy burlesque show. (Rose died in 1955, Michael in 1973.)

Traveling in similar Atlantic City working-class circles, Dorothy met Valerie’s father, Louis Solanas, married him in 1936, and gave birth to Valerie. Family remembered Dorothy as a strikingly beautiful woman, a good mother, and a kind, soft-spoken, down-to-earth person who loved the girls. She wasn’t judgmental. She accepted Valerie for who she was. That was it, Valerie’s cousin Robert Fustero said.¹⁹ Lorraine Miller, who met Dorothy in 1968, described her as a very pretty lady, attractive, with brown curly hair and a warm, friendly disposition. After separating from Louis in 1940, four years into their marriage, Dorothy officially divorced him in 1947 when Valerie was eleven years old.

Two years later, Dorothy married her second husband, Edward Red Francis Moran, a piano tuner originally from Newburgh, New York.²⁰ The family moved to Virginia, where Dorothy remained for much of her life. She and Red lived in a built-to-order home in Riverbend Estates with a view over the Potomac, then later moved to an apartment in Marlow Heights. In her later years, after Red’s death in 2000, Dorothy left for Boca Raton, Florida, and settled there, remaining in the area until her death at the Boca Raton Community Hospital on July 21, 2004.

After moving away from her family, Valerie stayed in contact with her mother and sister most of the time, often telling them where she lived and when she would next return to see them. Though Dorothy did give one interview about Valerie, to Rowan Gaither, she refused to speak further to journalists, academics, or other interviewers about her daughter. One German researcher, Peter Moritz Pickshaus, who tried to interview Dorothy, described her as rather gruff and not willing to be of any help. . . . I found the voice and the gruffness of her mother in accord with what I was told about Valerie’s temper.²¹ Following news of Valerie’s death, Dorothy apparently burned all of Valerie’s manuscripts and belongings, threw away her personal items, and largely refused to talk to reporters seeking information, telling them, Let her rest in peace.

Valerie’s father, Louis, was born in 1915 to Julius Solanas and Maria Prats, both of whom had recently emigrated from Spain to Canada. Julius and Maria had married in Spain when Julius was twenty-seven and Maria was nineteen. The couple had had two children—Carmen and Juanita—before leaving for Canada, in 1911, when their third daughter, Julia, was born, followed by the birth of Valerie’s father in Montreal in 1915. In 1916, now in the United States, with four children and a wife in tow, Julius secured a job as a silversmith and jeweler in Atlantic City during its heyday. Working up through the ranks of old-time Atlantic City, Julius eventually landed a job as a silversmith at the luxurious, decadent Ambassador Hotel by 1934. The hotel was considered the jewel of Atlantic City, filled with wealthy patrons who took the train down for weeks at a time to enjoy the shores, swimming, and sunlight.

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

Louis’s childhood was spent in the chaotic and violent era of Prohibition and bootlegging in Atlantic City (brought vividly to life in HBO’s series Boardwalk Empire). At the time of the 1929 stock market crash, he would have been fourteen, old enough, as family members say, to understand the old Atlantic City group (that is, having a clear understanding of money, mobsters, and power). As a young man, Louis secured a job as a bartender in Atlantic City before gambling was legalized; he often covered for the seedy undercurrents of back room Atlantic City, learning from his father how to negotiate minding your own business. Maintaining a jovial and lively outlook on life and treating strangers with generosity, Louis often paid for drinks for the homeless and other poor people who came into the bar looking for a little relief; when dining out with family, he rarely let anyone else pick up the check. He told jokes, played the drums, and always had a sharp and witty sense of humor. In his short stint in the army, he learned how to play the accordion and eventually earned a reputation for playing that instrument and joking around with the kids in his family. His nephew Robert remembers that he was always telling jokes, really funny, and he was always playing magic tricks with the kids. He would tell us stories. He was a lot of fun to be with, one of those ‘crazy uncles’ that all the kids seemed to love. We were a very tight family.²²

After Louis’s divorce from Dorothy in 1947, he had a short-lived marriage to Kay, a mortician and cosmetologist; the couple would often invite family to their home for dinners and parties. (Kay died of liver failure and was buried at Arlington National Cemetery.) Still, he maintained a reputation for staying out of others’ business, even when others questioned him about Valerie. When the New York Post contacted him after Valerie shot Andy Warhol, he told the reporter, I’m a bartender. I don’t answer questions. I just listen to the other person. I’m a good listener. When was the last time I saw my daughter? I don’t remember.²³

Louis had a fairly close relationship with his sisters, particularly Genevieve and Carmen (Julia died quite young). Genevieve’s son, Robert, said of his mother and her siblings, They were really good friends. They got along really well and did really well. We all lived nearby in DC and we would walk to Louis’s house. My aunt [Carmen] lived a little further away but we saw each other all the time.²⁴ Carmen, described as a warm, friendly, no-nonsense woman who told dirty jokes, had a risqué side and, like her siblings, maintained an open attitude about sexuality. The family always had a free attitude about sex, Robert said. "They didn’t criticize anybody, didn’t care about ‘gay marriage’ or who did what with whom. They called it like it is. When I didn’t understand what fellatio was, Carmen looked at my mother [and] just said, ‘Well, did you tell him it’s a blowjob?’ That’s the way they were."²⁵

With a reputation for heavy drinking and pornography use (after Louis’s death, the family discovered a large stash in his apartment—though nothing off the wall), Louis worked as a bartender for most of his adult life, mostly at the Dennis Hotel in Atlantic City, until his death in 1971. After Kay died, Louis started seeing a new girlfriend, whose brother did not like her dating someone like Louis, a ruffian with a penchant for women and booze. One afternoon, the girlfriend’s brother went into a bar and picked a fight with Louis. Another man who had flirted with Louis’s girlfriend also got involved and the three stumbled around throwing punches in fits of drunken rage. During this fight, one of the men hit Louis so hard that his skull was fractured. They were all drinking and they just left him lying there on the floor. He just bled to death in his head like a brain hemorrhage, Robert related quietly.²⁶

Valerie had an ambivalent relationship with her father. While the details of much of her childhood remain vague and slippery, she likely suffered sexual abuse from her father throughout her childhood years. Valerie apparently disclosed sexual abuse to two psychologists, who wrote in a 1968 report, [Valerie] describes a rather pitiful childhood, including parental conflict, sexual molestation by her father, and frequent separation from her home. The patient’s mother was married three times and Miss Solanas recalls having seen only little of her because she was often being sent to various relatives. The patient added that when she was an adolescent, she was a ‘hell-raiser.’ By the age of 13 her mother re-married.²⁷

These stories are difficult to access or confirm with Valerie’s family, though Judith had remarked, Valerie had experiences I didn’t have, things I didn’t know about until I read the psychological evaluations of her after she shot Warhol. Our father sexually abused her. It was after the divorce and every Sunday our mother sent us off to be with him. I was only four; Valerie was six. Something was wrong there. I never wanted to go, but I didn’t understand.²⁸ Her cousin, Robert, characterized both parents as kind people, saying it was hard to imagine that Louis sexually abused Valerie: In the larger picture, he was a pretty good father. He did help her out with money and he did give her a place to stay whenever she came to DC. He did go to New York a couple of times to see her. I mean, he wasn’t a bad person. He was an alcoholic. When I pressed Robert about the possibility of abuse, he replied somewhat tentatively, From the point of my aunt and my mother, it’s true, yeah. He had a fondness for pornography but we never thought he would be a child abuser. If anything, he was an alcoholic. Robert emphasized that Louis abused only Valerie and never touched anyone else. Nobody told us about Valerie, he said.²⁹ Louis had a tendency toward physical violence, which, combined with the alcoholism, led to problems. Judith remembered that their mother did not protect Valerie from much of anything, adding, It’s been reported she was a promiscuous teenager. How do you relate promiscuity to a young girl who learned about sex in the most degrading, perverted manner, from an adult who was supposed to protect her?³⁰

Judith directly linked Valerie’s sexual abuse to later problems, saying in her memoir, Valerie’s sexual molestation by her own father, the one man she truly loved, catapulted her into an obscene, perverted world she could not comprehend. Who was there to protect her? Did she tell anyone, her mother, a teacher, a priest? Did they believe her or did they punish her for having the audacity to repeat such a horrid tale?³¹ How this abuse affected her—and whether it influenced her ideas in SCUM Manifesto and other writings—remains an open question. As Jane Caputi, a radical feminist who met Valerie in the mid-1970s and currently chairs the women and gender studies program at Florida Atlantic University, claimed, "It’s not as simple as the abuse leads to the manifesto, that you’re filled with rage and that leads to things directly. But those experiences do take away the illusions. Those abuses don’t prescribe seeing through things, but they do affect