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........................we canna help ye if ye willna help yourself.......... do you want to live in the dark? Go to your room and think about what you've done. yes. you.  He just wasn't embraced by the light, that's all. Not the first time, anyway. One hot June afternoon in 1968, Andy Warhol, the Pope of Pop Art, lay motionless on a table in the operating room of a New York hospital. His condition had been critical, but it wasn't any longer: he was clinically dead. But we're getting ahead of the story. Truman Capote, catty to the bitter end, once famously called Warhol "a Sphinx without a secret." A case can certainly be made for Capote's point of view: Warhol, a commercial artist from Pittsburgh -- the first in his immigrant Catholic family to go to college -- made a name for himself in New York as a magazine illustrator. Warhol specialized in drawing ladies' shoes; he was the best high heel man in Manhattan. (Phyllis Diller once called him ``the foot fetishist.") As a Real Artist, he used the same technique -- he copied things. He transposed icons from daily life, banal and sacred, into Art. By the late '60s, when Warhol was famous for being famous as much as he was famous for being a famous painter, he had elevated observation to an art form. He watched. That detached anthropologist's view of the world is, perhaps, what makes the Warhol demi-monde such fruitful ground for contemporary culture hounds. The golden age of Warhol -- the mid to late '60s era of film, Edie Sedgwick, the Velvet Underground, the Factory as the high temple of anti-glamor -- has yielded an astonishing amount of grist for the sociologist's mill. Since the artist's death in 1987, his life (in which he always seemed to be only a supporting player) has been examined from many angles -- diaries, biographies, documentaries, art collections, lawsuits. The fascination is accelerating. Recent additions to the catalogue of Warholiana include the 1995 memoir "Swimming Underground," by Chelsea Girl and Velvet Underground dancer Mary Woronov. This spring we had the documentary Nico Icon, a harrowing portrait of the doomed, blank-eyed, hollow-voiced German model who became a minor asteroid in the Warhol solar system. This fall, Miramax will release Julian Schnabel's Build A Fort, Burn It Down (aka Basquiat), a biography of the late artist and Warhol collaborator Jean-Michel Basquiat. Fort is unusual in that it offers a glimpse of the older Andy (David Bowie plays the artist as a middle-aged man -- the Warhol estate has kindly loaned him genuine Andy wigs for the role.) But right now, with the release of Mary Harron's I Shot Andy Warhol, we're revisiting what is almost certainly the strangest chapter in the Book of Andy. Harron, a British researcher and former punk music critic, presents a detailed, resonant biography of the late Valerie Solanas. Solanas, an outcast among outcasts, is known for two things. She authored a strange, hilarious, compelling, counterculture diatribe, a tract known as the SCUM Manifesto. And she shot Andy Warhol. That summer the Factory was on an upper floor of a warehouse in lower Manhattan; the address on the police report was 33 Union Square West. A wheezing freight elevator opened directly into Warhol's grimy office. Verifiably famous hippies and artists sometimes dropped in at the long, shabbily furnished, silver room (the walls were covered with the foil inner linings of cigarette boxes), but the Factory was really the domain of what Mary Woronov calls ``The Mole People'' -- misfits, addicts, desperate dreamers, hangers-on. This was where Warhol churned out his no-budget, no-edit films, and where he continued to produce lucrative silk-screened portraits, despite his ostensible retirement from the art world. That day, June 4, 1968, Warhol was on the telephone talking to Viva (aka Susan Hoffmann of Syracuse), star of his aptly titled film The Nude Restaurant. Viva, a bona fide Warhol Superstar, was asking for money, which she needed to pay her Con Edison bill. She had previously managed to squeeze cash out of Andy -- no small feat in itself -- but she didn't get anything that day. Before Warhol could reply, Solanas -- an actress, playwright, panhandler, prostitute, and self-proclaimed `superfeminist' -- made her presence in The Factory known. The gun was a .32, a medium-caliber pistol. Solanas aimed it, and then fired it, into Warhol's chest. Early reports from the hospital would imply that the pop artist had been shot at least twice, possibly three times. In the end, though, it turned out that he had been struck by a single bullet, which tore a long, twisting path through his abdomen. After shooting Warhol, Solanas turned to Mario Amayo -- a critic, art dealer, and Warhol associate -- and shot him. Then she turned to the third man in the room, Warhol business manager Fred Hughes. " I guess I'll have to shoot you, too," she said, according to Hughes. Hughes went down on his knees immediately, and began to beg. Solanas considered briefly, then pushed the elevator button. ``...the male should be of use to the female, wait on her, cater to her slightest whim, obey her every command, be totally subservient to her, exist in perfect obedience to her will..." -- from the SCUM Manifesto Solanas waited patiently for the elevator to arrive, and left without shooting Hughes. The next day, June 5, she got what she undoubtedly wanted: a long Page One story (albeit with her name misspelled) in the New York Times. She had bungled the job, though. Despite the seriousness of Warhol's condition -- for a brief period he had no vital signs at all -- he didn't die. He wandered back down the long white happy tunnel and into the Land of the Living. Solanas' timing, as usual, was as bad as her execution. An almost-dead pop artist didn't merit much ink, no matter how bizarre the circumstances surrounding his injury, not during the long, bloody election year of 1968. A couple of months earlier, Martin Luther King had been gunned down in Memphis. Two days after Solanas' attempt on Warhol's life, Presidential hopeful Robert Kennedy would be assassinated in a California hotel. The Viet Nam war raged; Richard Nixon campaigned zealously for the White House. Andy Warhol went to the hospital, and Valerie Solanas went to jail. Solanas never saw Page One again. A year later, after being deemed sane, she stood trial for the shooting. She was sentenced, in the summer of 1969, to three years in jail. This news was succinctly reported deep in the back pages of the Times, in an article which appeared adjacent to a notice to Manhattan residents about a change in the summer garbage collection schedule. When she died of pneumonia in a seedy San Francisco hotel in 1988 (she did manage to outlive Warhol, but only by a year), there was no mention of her demise in any major newspaper. What survives of Valerie Solanas is her piece de resistance, the SCUM Manifesto, an extensive blueprint for a female utopia. SCUM is an acronym which stands for ``the Society for Cutting Up Men." (Warhol got some of his own back in a film titled Women In Revolt, which stars doomed transvestite Candy Darling, who died shortly after of illegal hormone injections. The women of the title belong to a group called Politically Involved Girls, the acronym for which, of course, is PIGS.)The SCUM Manifesto was copyrighted in 1967, while Solanas was living -- where else -- at the Chelsea Hotel. It is an astounding tirade, unmistakably filled with genuine rage, but by no means humorless. In one (extremely) lengthy paragraph the author itemizes the most offensive kinds of males. "a few examples of the most obnoxious or harmful types are: rapists, politicians and all who are in their service (campaigners, members of political parties, etc); lousy singers and musicians; Chairmen of Boards; Breadwinners; landlords; owners of greasy spoons and restaurants that play Muzak; `Great Artists'; cheap pikers and welchers...men who speak when they have nothing to say; men who sit idly on the street and mar the landscape with their presence;" -- the SCUM Manifesto When she couldn't find a publisher, she took matters characteristically into her own hands, buying an ad in the Village Voice. She proclaimed the glories of the Society with a weirdly funny mix of peppy Madison Avenue prose and totalitarian fervor. SCUM, she wrote, "will bring about a complete female take-over, eliminate the male sex, and begin to create a swinging, groovy, out-of-sight female world." No one offered to print it. Solanas appeared in one Andy Warhol film, the 1967 I, A Man, playing a lesbian. Warhol films are inherently impervious to criticism, so any summation of their merits and flaws must be taken with a grain of salt, but most critics agree that Solanas is the best thing in it. This collaboration fueled Solanas' hunger to make her voice heard. She had written a play, called -- she did have a way with titles -- "Up Your Ass." (The New York Times, in an article written after the shooting, offers this description: ``about a man-hating panhandler. It ends with a mother strangling her son.") Solanas gave a copy to Warhol, and believed that he would turn it into a film. Warhol, according to Mary Harron, lost the manuscript in the chaos of the Factory. This was in the pre-Kinko's days; Solanas had no extra copy. It was this personal affront, more than any of Solanas' passionately held anti-male political feelings, that led to the shooting. A quick roll call of the women among the Warhol dead -- Edie Sedgwick, Nico -- reveals that the best remembered of them shared a strange, passive, absent quality. They were objects to be looked at and acted upon. Not Valerie Solanas. She may have existed on the far, angry fringes of sanity, but she was a woman of action. "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." -- Valerie Solanas, 1968, from the locked ward at Bellevue Hospital Solanas moved from violent propaganda to violent action in a way that has since become chillingly familiar. Not without result, either: after the shooting, her beloved SCUM Manifesto was snatched up for publication. What happened that June day continues to reverberate in the American subconscious, perhaps because it speaks so clearly to an increasingly polarized society. Valerie Solanas was a have-not, a misfit among misfits; she didn't even belong at The Factory, the last refuge of the disenfranchised. She told police that she shot Warhol because he had "too much control of my life." These days, that same story unfolds almost every night on the evening news. The full text of the SCUM Manifesto is available online. |