Valerie Solanas: The Defiant Life of the Woman Who Wrote SCUM Read online

  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 le
ft 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 things. That is one response to abuse, where you continue contact or are filled with rage. At the same time, you take it out on yourself.”32

  As a child, Valerie coped with the abuse by initially refusing to live with her father in a permanent way following her parent’s separation. Instead, she lived with family members and friends of the family for a time. Following her parents’ separation, she first went to live with her mother. Shortly after that, when Valerie turned thirteen, Red Moran, Dorothy’s second husband, moved in with the family and lived there for a year, until Valerie turned fourteen. Red, regarded as somewhat strange, had never been married before he met the effervescent and beautiful Dorothy. He had spent most of his time working as a piano tuner, though he always fantasized about a career as a piano performer. “He would perform sometimes,” Robert said. “He wanted to be a piano player, not a piano tuner.”33 Red never took a liking to Valerie, believing when he first met her that something was peculiar about her. He later admitted that he became “anti-Valerie.” He did not like how she “streaked up the staircase and swung on the iron banister” and he disliked that she never obeyed him and never accepted authority from anyone.34