She Shot Andy Warhol

Valerie Solanas, clutching a newspaper with a headline about her, shouts back at the crowd while arriving for her arraignment.

(Bettmann/Corbis)

Thirty-eight years ago, on June 4, 1968, Andy Warhol was shot five times in the abdomen and right lung by Valerie Solanas, a self-proclaimed feminist revolutionary who had played a bit part in one of his films.

She was front-page news the next day, but her 15 minutes of fame quickly faded. In three days she was in jail, Warhol was in stable condition, and the headlines were about the assassination of Sen. Robert F. Kennedy.

Solanas, born in 1936 to working-class parents in Atlantic City, New Jersey, ran away from home at a young age to escape sexual molestation by her father. She developed a hair-trigger temper, but despite her harrowing childhood she graduated with honors from the University of Maryland in 1958 with a degree in psychology, having paid for school by working as a prostitute. She started graduate study at the University of Minnesota, got bored, and drifted to New York City sometime around 1965.

She took up residence at the Chelsea Hotel, then a kind of farm system for the Factory, Andy Warhol’s studio and production house. Warhol had made a name for himself in the early 1960s with his giant silk-screen images of Brillo boxes and Campbell soup cans and now held court at the Factory, cultivating an aura of celebrity by constantly staging “social happenings” attended by artists and stars.

Solanas, who spent her days pounding feverishly on her typewriter, was shopping around a play titled Up Your Ass, but its rough language and cornball humor turned off the publishers. Someone passed it along to Warhol as a joke; he liked the title and invited her to the Factory. He offered her a part in his film I, a Man. For a meager $25, she played a tough-talking drifter who engages in humorous, improvised verbal combat with a man trying to pick her up.

After the film she stalked the edges of the Factory, barely making a living turning tricks. Her earnest fury and butch appearance would never fit in with the detached languor of the glamorous Warhol gang. In 1967 she wrote the “SCUM Manifesto,” an anti-male, anti-capitalist screed that called on women to “eliminate” men. Maurice Girodias, the founder of the Olympia Press and a fellow resident of the Chelsea Hotel, agreed to publish it, calling it social satire in the tradition of Jonathan Swift. He said her “fixed expression was that of a Douanier Rousseau personage frozen in wooden immobility against its picture book background, and yet one could vaguely sense the sunken dreams fermenting inside.”

Her contract promised her a $500 advance, but she grew paranoid, thinking Girodias was trying to control her and her writing. She also turned her rage on Warhol, who managed to lose her manuscript for Up Your Ass. She made frequent threatening phone calls to both men and fired off postcards to them like this one: “Toad, you and your fellow toad Girodias (2 multi-millionaires) working together control only bums in the gutter, then only with relentless, desperate, compulsive effort.”

On June 3 she resolved to put an end to their perceived vise grip on her life. After picking up two guns she had left at a friend’s house, she went to Girodias’s office. He was away on business, so she headed over to the Factory, waiting until Warhol arrived. He let her accompany him up the elevator, but then went to telephone his new star Ultra Violet.

While he was on the phone, Solanas pulled a .32-caliber automatic from a paper bag and opened fire. She hit the artist five times and then turned on Mario Amaya, a visiting art critic, wounding him in the hip. As Warhol fought for his life on the operating table, Solanas turned herself in to the police. She told them she had shot him because “he had too much control over my life.”

After recuperating, Warhol entered a newly productive period, making his famous portraits of Marilyn Monroe and Mao Zedong, among other works. He lived to be 60, dying of complications related to gallbladder surgery in 1987.

Meanwhile Solanas faded into obscurity. After serving three years in prison she returned to promoting her manifesto and lived on park benches in New York. She claimed the only thing she regretted was that she had failed to kill Warhol. “I consider it immoral that I missed,” she told The Village Voice. “I should have done target practice.” She drifted to San Francisco and lived in a welfare hotel there. In 1988 the building’s superintendent found her body a week after she had died of pneumonia.

Girodias did publish the “SCUM Manifesto.” (He apparently made up the fact that SCUM stood for “Society for Cutting Up Men.” Solanas denied that was her acronym.) But it didn’t sell well and gradually disappeared from circulation. It is reprinted occasionally, packaged as a “feminist classic” or as a relic of the crazy days of 1960s New York, and can easily be found on the Internet.

There are some brilliant nuggets nestled within its rambling and childish pages, and certain fringes of the feminist movement have embraced Solanas’s work. But her intelligence was no match for her madness, and her senseless violence can’t be construed as a cogent political act, even in her chaotic, violent SCUM world. The shooting of Warhol, a gay man, contradicted her ideals. She wrote that gay men, “by their shimmering, flaming example, encourage other men to de-man themselves and thereby make themselves relatively inoffensive.” The shooting was more likely set off by her eviction from the Chelsea Hotel than by any revolutionary ideology.

Solanas’s legacy will always be one of failure. If it weren’t for a 1996 movie about her, I Shot Andy Warhol, only a handful of people would remember her name. The film’s director, Mary Harron, said of the manifesto, “I thought I've never had the courage to even think some of these things and Valerie Solanas only had that courage because she cut her mooring and separated herself from traditional feminine virtues such as fairness, compassion and empathy. . . . It made me wonder about blighted talents, vanished possibilities, and what might be lurking in the great host of humanity we call failures.”

—Elizabeth D. Hoover is a former editor at American Heritage magazine.