Andy Warhol is shot by Valerie Solanas in 1968 - NY Daily News Andy Warhol is shot by Valerie Solanas in 1968 Andy Warhol is shot by Valerie Solanas in 1968 NEW YORK DAILY NEWS Unconscious after shooting, critically wounded Andy Warhol is carried to ambulance. (Jack Smith) NEW YORK DAILY NEWS Tuesday, June 2, 2015, 12:00 PM (Originally published by the Daily News on June 4, 1968. This story was written by Frank Faso, Martin McLaughlin, Richard Henry.) Andy Warhol, 36-year-old pop artist, maker of underground movies and darling of the avant-garde set, was critically wounded at 4:30 p.m. yesterday when one of his female film stars barged into his sixth-floor Union Square office and, without a word, fired a barrage of bullets at Warhol and a business associate. Of the four shots fired at close range, one .32 caliber bullet hit Warhol and another inflicted a relatively minor wound on the associate. Warhol underwent five and a half hours of emergency surgery by a team of four doctors at Columbus Hospital.

He was given a “50-50 chance to live.” The suspect, Valerie Solanas, 28, surrendered to rookie Patrolman William Schmalix, on traffic duty at Seventh Ave. and 47th St., at 7:30 p.m. Schmalix, 22 and a cop only since February, said she handed him a .22 revolver and a .32 automatic and told him: “The police are looking for me. I am a flower child. He had too much control over my life.” Refuses to Give Address Booked at the E. 21st St. station on charges of felonious assault and possession of a dangerous weapon with intent to kill, the short-haired brunette declared that she lived “nowhere.” When asked who she was, she replied: “I’m really a writer,” and said she was a 1962 University of Maryland graduate. Asked to explain the shooting, she stated: “There are many involved reasons. I have written manifesto of what I am and what I stand for.” The bullet that hit Warhol twisted crazily through his abdomen and chest, wreaking much damage.

It entered through the left lung, hit his spleen, stomach, liver and esophagus before penetrating the right lung and emergency from his right side. X-rays established that only one slug had caused the damage, according to the hospital’s medical director, Dr. Massimo Bazzini. Art Dealer Wounded Also wounded by one shot, in the attack witnessed by four other astonished persons, was Mario Amaya, 34, a visiting art dealer editor from London. He was hit near his left hip. Warhol was at the desk of his office nicknamed The Factory and headquarters of his Films Inc., 33 Union Square West. Near him was Amaya. Grouped near the elevator end of the Swedish-studio-type chamber were Paul Morrissey and Fred Hughes, two Warhol workers, and two other persons. Miss Solanas, who had been at the studio without seeing Warhol earlier in the afternoon, got off the cage-type elevator at the opposite end of the room from Warhol. Her entry did not create a stir. Casual in yellow blouse and tan slacks covered by brown jacket, she sauntered toward Warhol, who was talking on a phone and opening mail.

She drew a gun and began firing, first at Warhol and then at Amaya. Before the others could stop her, she ran back to the elevator, started the car down and escaped. Detective Frederick Stepat and policewoman McCarthy escort Valeria Solanas, 28, into 13th pct, for the shooting Andy Warhol. Valerie surrendered to a cop in Times Square, allegedly admitting to the shooting, and saying, "I am a flower child." (Russo, Frank) Moments after Andy Warhol was critically shot at his 33 Union Square office, his associate, Mario Amaya, walks to ambulance with back wound. Bullet narrowly missed his spine. (Jack Smith) The two victims were rushed to the hospital. After treatment, Amaya emerged, carrying his bloody shirt and with bandages on his torso. One bullet had entered his left side, above his hip, gone around his rib cage and emerged from his back, after narrowly missing his spinal cord.

“I Was Very Lucky” Amaya, a short, dapper man who had come to New York to persuade Warhol “to do a retrospective exhibition in London,” said: “I was very lucky.” Amaya is a modern-art promoter and edits a magazine, Art and Artists. A resident of London’s Fashionable South Kengsington section, he has been staying at 345 E. 52d St. here. He commented “Warhol has a lot of unusual friends.” Police had put out an alarm for the short, thin actress, whose last known address was the Chelsea Hotel, 222 W. 23d St., between Seventh and Eighth Aves. It is an oldtime literary and artistic hangout that was the locale of “The Chelsea Girls,” one of Warhol’s most famous films. Miss Solanas, who starred as the “Girl on the Staircase” in another famous Warhol flick, “I, a Man,” was roundly denounced by Warhol friends who gathered in a hospital waiting room with Andy’s mother, Julia. Mrs. Warhol, with whom the artist had been sharing an apartment at 1342 Lexington Ave., at E.

89th St., wept and talked to herself in a Slavic language. After a while, hospital attendants put her in a wheelchair and took her to a private room. She has a heart ailment. Trying to Avoid Excitement Hospital spokesmen said that there was nothing seriously wrong with the mother, that they wanted her away from the excitement of Andy’s friends. Two of them indicated that Valerie might have shot their hero because he had not filmed a script that she kept thrusting on him, a script with an obscene title. Gerald Malanga, Andy Warhol and Lou Reed (l. to r.) at Salvation, a West Village disco for the very in. (Thomas Monaster) Valerie Solanas starred as the “Girl on the Staircase” in another famous Warhol flick, “I, a Man”. “She is a strange character and she’s been bothering Andy a long time, part of which I read and which was so vile and filthy it turned my stomach,” one woman friend said.

“Andy kept turning her off, but he was just too nice a guy to give her a complete brushoff.” 2d Friend Confirms Story “I know for a fact she’d been bugging him for a long time to make a movie out of her script,” a male friend said. A girl calling herself Ultra Violet, another Warhol film femme, said: “This underground movie world is a mad, mad world with a lot of mad people in it. Maybe this girl, Valerie, was mad herself.” Another said Valerie has a strong, masculine will and added: “I hated her.” Two Kinds of Friends About 20 agitated Warhol friends milled about. A few men who wore business suits said they were art gallery people. Other friends wore the leather, lace, denim and beads of the underground. One had a bathtub plug on a chain around his neck. An actress known as Viva, who had been comforting Warhol’s babushka-wearing mother, insisted calmly: “He isn’t going to die.” Viva said she had been talking with Warhol by phone when he was shot. “I heard five shots and a lot of screaming,” Viva related. “I heard Andy screaming.

I thought it was a joke, then the phone was dropped.” Tags: Andy Warhol and Valerie Solanas: Why She Shot Him Frank Russo—NY Daily News Archive / Getty Images Detective Frederick Stepat and policewoman McCarthy escort Valeria Solanas, 28, into 13th precinct, for the shooting of Andy Warhol, on June 3, 1968, in New York City June 3, 1968: Valerie Solanas, the author of the SCUM Manifesto, attempts to assassinate Andy Warhol Andy Warhol might have made a career out of “photographing depravity and calling it truth,” according to TIME’s 1968 assessment , but even he had his limits — and Valerie Solanas’ brand of depravity was too far out even for this “blond guru of a nightmare world.” Solanas, a writer and women’s rights activist, pushed feminism to radical new heights in 1967, when she founded the Society for Cutting Up Men (she was its only member) and self-published the SCUM Manifesto, which begins: Life in this society being at best an utter bore and no aspect of society being at all relevant to women, there

 remains to civic-minded, responsible, thrill-seeking females only to overthrow the government, eliminate the money system, institute complete automation and eliminate the male sex.

She’d crossed paths with Warhol two years earlier, badgering him to produce a play she had written . He passed, later saying that he had skimmed the satirical and highly scatological script and found it so obscene that he “suspected Ms. Solanas was working for the police on ‘some kind of entrapment,’” per the New York Times. Solanas occupied a place so far on the fringes of the avant-garde scene at Warhol’s Factory that the pair probably wouldn’t be mentioned in the same breath today — except that she forced herself into the historical record on this day, June 3, in 1968, when she shot and critically wounded Warhol, apparently outraged by his rejection and the fact that he had lost his copy of her play. The shooting brought Solanas the attention she craved, although mainstream feminist organizations, including the National Organization for Women , distanced themselves and disavowed her agenda. Solanas pleaded guilty to assault and was sentenced to three years in prison after being found competent to stand trial . She was later diagnosed with schizophrenia.

Warhol, meanwhile, spent two months in the hospital recuperating from surgeries to repair his damaged lungs, esophagus, spleen, liver and stomach, and in some ways he never fully recovered. His injuries were so severe that he had to wear a surgical corset for the rest of his life, according to the Andy Warhol Museum . The mental anguish lingered as well. “Since I was shot, everything is such a dream to me. I don’t know what anything is about,” he told the New York Times near the end of 1968. “Like I don’t even know whether or not I’m really alive or—whether I died. It’s sad.” His experience left him so afraid of hospitals that he refused surgery after being diagnosed with a gallstone in 1973, his doctor told the Times . “He was convinced if he was hospitalized, he would die,” the doctor said. Unable to put off treatment after his gallbladder became infected, he finally underwent surgery on Feb. 21, 1987. He died the next day, of a heart attack.

Read more about the shooting, from 1968, here in the TIME archives: Felled by Scum She Shot Andy Warhol, June 3, 1968 | The 1968 Exhibit Home | Covering 1968 | 2010 - June | She Shot Andy Warhol, June 3, 1968 Thu, 2010-06-03 15:03 — Brian Horrigan At 4:51 PM on this day 42 years ago, the pop artist Andy Warhol was declared clinically dead. He had been shot a few hours earlier in the studio/offices known as "the Factory" in lower Manhattan. *The shooter was Valerie Solanas, an unhinged radical feminist who had written a pornographic play that she wanted Warhol-- then at the peak of his notoriety--to produce as a film. *(A virtually minute-by-minute chronology of the incident has been compiled, and is available on the Warholstars website .) *In spite of severe injuries to multiple organs, Warhol somehow survived, though he never completely recovered.

*He died after gall-bladder surgery in 1987 at the age of 58. Valerie Solanas was arrested some hours after the shooting, after turning herself in to a policeman on a beat. *She was later quoted as saying that the reason she shot Warhol was that she "just wanted him to pay attention to me. Talking to him was like talking to a chair." *A movie based on the incident, with a terrific performance by Lili Taylor as Solanas, was released in 1996. Besides the 1966 play that Warhol turned down, the only other literary product of Valerie Solanas that survives is the virulently anti-male "SCUM Manifesto," written in 1967 and then mimeographed and distributed by Solanas in 1968 on the streets of New York. * A portion of the single-spaced document (with*obscenities removed)*is reproduced here (courtesy of Cabinet magazine, Summer 2005).

* SCUM may (or may not) stand for the "Society for Cutting Up Men," and the manifesto lists a "few examples of the most obnoxious and harmful types [of men]: *rapists, politicians . . . ; lousy singers and musicians; Chairmen of Boards; Breadwinners; landlords; owners of greasy spoons and restaurants that play Musak . . . . ; cops; tycoons; scientists . . . ; liars and phonies . . . ; all men in the advertising industry . . .; all members of the armed forces. . . ." After the shooting and conviction, Solanas served a three-year prison term. *In the 1970s, she was hailed by some leading feminists as a victim and martyr, and as "an outstanding champion of women's rights." *She died in 1988 at the age of 52.

2010-06-03 21:03:58 Valerie Solanas Valerie Solanas by gary comenas (2015) Valerie Solanas (1977): "I should have done target practice." Valerie Solanas was born April 9, 1936 to a twenty-one year old bartender, Louis Solanas, and an eighteen year old dental assistant named Dorothy Biondo. A the time of Valerie's birth they were both living at 104 South Frankfort Avenue in Ventnor City, New Jersey. Valerie's last name on her birth certificate is spelled "Solanus." Her father's last name is also spelled "Solanus." (FAH9) of the woman who wrote SCUM (and shot Andy Warhol) , (NY: The Feminist Press, 2014) According to Solanas' biographer, Breanne Fahs in Valerie Solanas: The Defiant Life of the Woman Who Wrote SCUM (and Shot Andy Warhol) , Valerie's last name was misspelled on her birth certificate, as was her father's.

The spelling that was used on court papers after she shot Warhol was "Solanis." The spelling that Valerie used during her lifetime was "Solanas." When she published her version of the SCUM Manifesto in 1977, she used the "Solanas" spelling. (FAH197/338fn6) Two years after Valerie was born, her sister, Judith, was born. Four years after Valerie was born, her parents separated and then divorced in 1947 when Valerie was eleven years old. Valerie lived with her mother who was married a second time two years after her divorce to a piano tuner named Red Moran. (FAH9/14) Valerie had difficulties at school. She went to junior high at the Holy Cross Academy where she often skipped classes and at one point assaulted one of the nuns who taught there. Her parents then placed her in a public school. She was bullied in the public school, however, so she was sent to a boarding school in the autumn of 1950. She stayed in the boarding school for two years. It was at the boarding school that she had her first lesbian sex and her first child.

She gave birth to Linda Moran in 1951. Valerie was fourteen years old at the time. Linda was raised as Valerie's sister and only discovered that she was actually her daughter in adulthood. (FAH21) The identity of Linda's father is unknown. In her biography of Valerie, Breanne Fahs raised the possibility that either Valerie's father or step-father could have also been the father of her child. Her father had sexually abused her as a child although it's not known how long the abuse continued. If it was the case that either Valerie's father or step-father was also the father of her child, Fahs conjectures that it would have given "the family extra incentive to keep the pregnancy quiet and to raise Linda as a sister to Valerie rather than as a daughter." But there is no firm evidence that Linda's father was Valerie's father or step-father. (FAH18 22) After leaving boarding school, Valerie gave birth to another child. She had become pregnant in the summer of 1952 after beginning a relationship with an older sailor. A baby boy, David, was born on 31 March 1953.

He was handed over to the parents of the sailor, the Blackwells, to look after at their home in Washington, D.C. Valerie lived on and off with the Blackwells until she graduated from Oxon Hill High School in 1954. According to David, the Blackwells were allowed to keep him and raise him as their own as long as they paid Valerie's tuition at the University of Maryland. Valerie stopped visiting him when he was four and he did not learn he was her son until 1993, at the age of forty. (FAH23/24) David is still alive. He takes underwater photographs of women in swimsuits and occasionally poses with them as "Mer-Man": " Mer-Man and Olga Pose Together Underwater " (Valerie Solanas' son and an underwater model) Valerie graduated from the University of Maryland at College Park in 1958 with a major in psychology. She entered a Master's program in psychology at the University of Minnesota in the autumn of 1958 but dropped out after almost a year. She hitchhiked around the country, ending up in Berkeley, California in the summer of 1960.

She started writing her play, Up Your Ass, circa 1960-61. During 1961-2 she reportedly attended another graduate school - this time in New Jersey - for at least a year but the exact school is unknown. While living in New Jersey she would take the bus to visit New York and particularly Greenwich Village. She finally moved to New York in the summer of 1962, initially staying in a women's residence hotel. She listed its address on a postcard she sent to her father as 350 W. 88th Street. According to her biographer, Valerie "spent the next three years - from 1962 to 1965 - working, writing, and living in and around Greenwich Village... In a near-constant struggle to make ends meet and to feed herself, Valerie became a pro at bumming cigarettes, talking others into buying her a quick meal, and selling conversation." According to some accounts, she may have engaged in prostitution at this time, although this has been denied by her family. By late 1965 she was living in Room 606 at of the Chelsea Hotel.

(FAH38/41-44) Valerie finished Up Your Ass in 1965 and sent an unsolicited copy to Andy Warhol in late '65, never actually having met him at that point. On 9 February 1966 she wrote to Warhol "Dear Andy, Would you please return my script, Up Your Ass, that I left with you some time ago? Thanks. Valerie Solanas." By that time she may have already started writing her SCUM Manifesto. According to her biographer she wrote the Manifesto from 1965 to 1967, copyrighting it on 19 May 1967.

Fahs notes that Valerie "published an outline" of the Manifesto "in the Voice in February 1967, likely finished an original draft of the book in May, and completed a revised version of it in late June 1967; in a postcard to her father dated June 14, 1967, she wrote that she was nearly finished writing it." (FAH43/53-54/61) I've checked the February 1967 issues of the Village Voice and have been unable to find an outline of the manifesto. Valerie made the claim about the outline in a letter she sent to the magazine Majority Report which appeared in their 30 April - 13 May 1977 issue. Although there is no outline in the Voice, there are a number of ads in the February '67 issues in which the "Scum book" appears to have consisted of her play, Up Your Ass, and an article she wrote earlier for the men's magazine, Cavalier. Village Voice ad, 2 February 1967, p. 22 Village Voice ad, 9 February 1967, p.

6 Village Voice ad, 9 February 1967 Up From the Slime was another title for Valerie's play Up Your Ass that she had left with Warhol. (The full title was Up Your Ass or From the Cradle to the Boat or The Big Suck or Up from the Slime.) (FAH47) The ad for the reading that appeared in the next issue of the Voice, included a cast listing: Village Voice, 16 February 1967, p. 22 "A Young Girl's Primer..." was the previously mentioned article that she wrote for the July 1966 issue of the men's magazine Cavalier. The title used in Cavalier, however, was "For 2c: Pain, The Survival Game Gets Pretty Ugly." The Cavalier editors added "How a nice young lady can survive in the city: The easiest way to be comfortable is flat on your back." In the article Valerie wrote about her life in the city, supporting herself by panhandling in order to free up her time for writing. (FAH45) Before Valerie copyrighted the SCUM Manifesto in May 1967 she also held SCUM meetings.

She advertised one of the meetings in an ad that appeared in Bulletin section of the April 27th issue of the Voice. Village Voice ad, 27 April 1967, p. 2 Valerie continued to hassle Warhol and others in order to get her play produced. In addition to Warhol, the people she contacted included Louise Thompson who ran a theatre group; Gene Feist, founder of the Roundabout theatre; Paul Krassner, the editor of the avant-garde publication the Realist; Ralph Ginzburg at Avant-Garde magazine; Ed Sanders, owner of the Peace Eye Bookstore (and one of the founders of the Fugs) and Robert Marmorstein from the Village Voice. (FAH82-85) According to Valerie's biographer, Breanne Fahs, it was the photographer Nat Finkelstein who "first brought Valerie to the Factory." Valerie reportedly met Brigid Berlin's sister Richie and Richie gave her Nat Finkelstein's number. Warhol would later comment that he thought her script was so dirty that she must have have been a cop. Fahs notes that Warhol "listened to Valerie's statements and put some of them into his movie which infuriated Valerie...

Many of her lines appeared in Women in Revolt, clearly without her permission or approval." (FAH88-89/99) Valerie contacted Maurice Girodias of Olympia Press about publishing her writings after seeing an ad in the back of an Olympia Press paperback asking for authors to submit their work. As it turned out, Girodias also lived in the Chelsea although Valerie had never come across him there. On 29 August 1967 she signed a contract with Girodias which specified that she would get $500 as an advance on royalties of a novel she agreed to write for him. The contract also included first refusal rights on her next two book-length works. She later claimed that Warhol had promised to produce her play and to make a film of her SCUM Manifesto (starring Valerie), but that her contract with Girodias prevented this. In January 1968 she sent Girodias a note giving him permission to publish the SCUM Manifesto as she did not intend to write the novel.

(FAH111112/116/117/120) With the $500 advance she received from Girodias Valerie travelled to California where her sister Judith and her friend Geoffrey LeGear were both living at the time. She was there from January to mid-February. While at her sister's she continued to write to Warhol. On January 25, 1968, she wrote "Dear Andy, You asked me twice where the unsigned 'SCUM Manifesto' contract is, would you like to have it? I'll sell it to you for $20,000.

I'm dead serious." On February 1st she wrote "I really do believe that if you didn't have your lies + deception + notarized affidavits, you'd shrivel up + die." On February 7th she wrote, "Toad - If I had a million dollars, I'd have total control of the world within 2 wks; you + your fellow toad, Girodias, (2 multi-millionaires) working together control only bums in the gutter, + then only with relentless, desperate, compulsive effort." On February 10th she wrote, "you can shove your plane fare up your ass; I now have a little sum saved - enough for, not only planefare, but a few other things as well." On February 11th she wrote "Daddy, if I'm good, will you let Jonas Mekas write about me? Will you let me do a scene in one of your shit movies? Oh, thank you, thank you." (FAHS120-1) In late May Valerie left a message at Ed Sanders' bookshop Peace Eye saying that she wanted her manifesto returned to her.

She also approached Paul Krassner at the Realist again in order to try and get them to publish the SCUM Manifesto, but they declined. She also contacted Cavalier magazine in late May with the idea of writing a "Lesbian at Large" column, with no success. She clearly felt ignored by Warhol and the others - all of whom were men. She would later say that she shot Warhol in order to get his attention, that talking to him was like talking to a chair. (FAH133/BC32) Valerie shot Warhol on June 3rd - not long after the series of rejections she received from the people she was trying to get interested in her work. She had kept a gun at the artist May Wilson's house who lived next door to the Chelsea at 208 West 23rd Street. According to May Wilson's son, the writer William S.

Wilson, "Valerie asked to keep her laundry, not her gun, under my mother's bed, but believe me, May Wilson not only knew that the cloth bag did not contain laundry, she sometimes pulled it out to show people, the gunshipness of the gun being obvious when the cloth of the laundry bag was pressed against it." (Email 22/12/2003) The details in Breanne Fahs' biography of Valerie's activities before she got to Warhol is different from others. Some accounts have Valerie first showing up at Maurice Girodias' office before making her way to Warhol's offices. Fahs notes "The more likely story - one that kept Up Your Ass and SCUM Manifesto at the center of her thoughts - places Valerie at the Actor's Studio at 432 West Fourty-Fourth Street early that morning.

Play in hand and gun in her carpet bag, she arrived at the studio eager to secure a producer for Up Your Ass, hell-bent on finding a rightful place for her play." (FAH133) According to Fahs, Sylvia Miles was at the studio at the time and Valerie gave her a copy of the play before heading to the apartment of Margo Feiden, a playwright, to seek assistance in publishing Up Your Ass. Feiden had produced Peter Pan on Broadway. She showed Feiden the gun and said she was going to shoot Warhol. Feiden rang the police after Valerie left but was told she was wasting police time. (FAHS 134-137) Valerie shot Warhol at 4:05. She gave herself up to a policeman in Times Square between 7-8 pm. (FAH144/147)Not everyone was devastated by the news of the shooting. Artist Ben Morea who was a co-founder of the Black Mask group that later became the Up Against the Wall Motherfuckers group was a friend of Valerie. After the shooting he distributed a pamphlet in support of her. Ben Morea : "After she shot him I wrote a pamphlet supporting her.

I may have been the only person who did that publicly. I went up to MOMA and handed it out there. Everybody I met was very negative about it, but, hey, I disliked Andy Warhol immensely and I loved Valerie. I felt she was right in her anger and that he was way more destructive than she was because he was helping to destroy the whole idea of creativity in art. Some people dislike the term, but I feel that creativity is a kind of spiritual act, a profound thing for people to do. Warhol was the exact opposite, he tried to deny and purge the core of creativity and put it on a commercial basis." Ti-Grace Atkinson, the head of the New York chapter of the National Organization of Women also took an interest in Valerie's case after the shooting, as did the civil rights lawyer Florynce Kennedy who volunteered to represent Valerie. She had previously represented members of the Black Panthers. Valerie, however, eventually rejected their support. On August 5, 1968 she wrote to Ti-Grace, "I know you, along with all the other professional parasites with nothing of their own going for them, are eagerly awaiting my commitment to the bughouse, so you can then go on t.v.

+ write press releases for your key people defending me + deploring my being committed because of my views; remember, I want to make perfectly clear that I am not being committed because of my views of the "SCUM Manifesto"... Nor do I want you to continue to mouthe [sic] your cultivated banalities about my motive for shooting Warhol. Your gall in presuming to be competent to discourse on such a matter is beyond belief. In short do not ever publicly discuss me, SCUM, or any aspect at all of my care. Just DON'T." (FAH170-1) When Valerie also refused to cooperate with Florynce Kennedy, Florynce resigned. Andy Warhol dies (the first time) June 3, 1968 - The Shooting of Andy Warhol Viva and Andy Warhol's mother after the shooting 11:00 am Andy Warhol and Fred Hughes talk on the phone. Fred tells him how he was mugged the night before on 16th Street coming home from Maxs. 2:30 pm Valerie Solanas goes to the Factory (33 Union Square West) and is told Warhol is out.

She thinks that he is conspiring against her with Maurice Girodias, publisher of Olympia Press. (UV170/171). She leaves and waits outside near 16th Street. (L&D296/7) She had once brought a script to the Factory for Andy to read called 'Up Your Ass'. Warhol looked through it briefly and it was so dirty, he .thought she might be working for the police department and that this was some kind of entrapment. When Warhol admitted to losing the script, Solanas started asking for money. Andy Warhol (via Pat Hackett in POPism): One afternoon when she [Valerie Solanas] called, we were in the middle of shooting a sequence for 'I, A Man, so I said why didnt she come over and be in the movie and earn twenty-five dollars instead of asking for a handout.

She came right over and we filmed her in a short scene on a staircase and she was actually funny and that was that. (POP271) 4:15 pm Warhol arrives at the Factory in a cab, wearing a brown leather jacket over a black t-shirt , black jeans and black Beatle (Chelsea) boots. (L&D296) Previously, he had picked up a prescription for Obetrol, then browsed at Bloomingdales, and had also rung the bell of Miles White, the costume designer, who lived on East 55th Street, but he wasnt home. (POP270/DD71)When Andy arrives outside the Factory, his boyfriend Jed Johnson approaches from 17th and Broadway carrying some fluorescent lights. Valerie Solanas joins them and all three enter the building. While waiting for the elevator, Warhol notices that Valerie is wearing a thick turtleneck sweater underneath a trenchcoat on a hot summer day. Even stranger, she has on mascara and lipstick even though as a die-hard feminist she never wears make-up.

Warhol also notices that she is bouncing slightly on the balls of her feet, twisting a brown paper bag in her hands." Upstairs, Fred Hughes is sitting at his desk writing a memo, Paul Morrissey is talking to Viva on the phone who is ringing him from Kenneths Hair Salon where she is having her hair dyed in preparation for her role in John Schlesingers film Midnight Cowboy. Art critic and curator, Mario Amaya, is waiting for Andy in order to discuss an upcoming retrospective in London. When Warhol, Jed and Valerie arrive, Paul leaves the office to go to the bathroom, leaving Andy to talk to Viva. (L&D) Jed goes into Warhol's private office in the rear corner of the room. Andy signals to Fred Hughes to take over the conversation with Viva.Valerie Solanas takes a .32 automatic from the paper bag and fires a shot. Viva hears the shot over the phone but thinks it is somebody cracking a whip left over from theVelvet Underground days. Andy screams "No! No! Valerie! Dont do it!" She fires a second time. He falls to the floor and tries to crawl under a desk. She fires a third time.

The bullet enters Andys right side and goes straight through him, coming out the left side of his back. Warhol later tells friends "It hurt so much, I wished I was dead." Thinking that she has killed Warhol, Solanas turns to Mario Amaya who is crouching on the floor and fires a fourth shot at him. She misses so she shoots again, hitting him slightly above the hip. The bullet goes through him without damaging any organs, exiting from his back. He gets up and runs into the back room, using the weight of his bleeding body to hold the doors shut. Valerie Solanas points the gun at Fred Hughes who begs her not to shoot him. Im innocent, he protests. Please, just leave. She walks over to the elevator and presses the button then returns to him, aiming at his forehead with the gun. She pulls the trigger, but it jams. She grabs a back up gun, a .22 caliber from the paper bag but the elevator arrives and she leaves. As soon as she leaves, Fred Hughes calls for an ambulance and the police. The phone rings.

It is Viva, still at the hairdresser's, wondering what is going on. Fred tells her that Valerie just shot Andy and that there is blood everywhere, then hangs up the phone. Viva, thinking it is a joke, decides to have her hair trimmed before having it dyed. She tells the hairdresser to charge it to United Artists. Gerard Malanga arrives at the Factory with Angus Maclise two or three minutes after the shooting. Gerard was preparing a one man show at the Cinematheque and was picking up money from Andy to pay for a film announcement. The scene at the Factory was "total mayhem." (GM193) Warhol lies bleeding on the floor with Billy Name leaning over him crying, while they wait for the ambulance to arrive. (POP273) 4:35 pm The ambulance arrives at the Factory. Instead of bringing a stretcher, the attendants arrive with a wheelchair to carry Warhol out. Andy: "I thought that the pain I'd felt lying on the floor was the worst you could ever feel...

but now that I was in a sitting position, I knew it wasn't." (DD75) The ambulance takes away both Warhol and the wounded Mario Amaya. The driver tells Mario that "if we sound the siren, it'll cost five dollars extra." Mario replies "Go ahead and sound it. Leo Castelli will pay." (DD75) 4:45 pm Andy Warhol arrives by ambulance at the emergency room of Columbus Hospital on 19th Street between Second and Third avenue. (POP274) 4:51 pm Andy Warhol is pronounced clinically dead. The doctors cut open his chest and massage his heart. They are amazed by the damage caused by the bullet which went through his lung, then ricocheted through his oesophagus,gall bladder, liver, spleen, and intestines before exiting his left side, leaving a large hole. He is dead for 1 1/2 minutes before they revive him. They operate for five and a half hours, removing his spleen. He is in critical condition, but survives.

8:00 pm Valerie Solanas walks up to rookie traffic cop, William Shemalix and says The police are looking for me and want me. She hands the guns over to the cop saying that she had shot Andy Warhol because he had too much control of my life. (L&D296/03) She is arrested and sent to Bellevue Hospital for psychiatric examination, then to Elmhurst General in Queens. She is initially held without bail but eventually her bail is set at $10,000. (UV186) Valerie Solanas: "I just wanted him to pay attention to me. Talking to him was like talking to a chair." (BC32) Footage of Valerie Solanas being led from court to jail ( ) 9:00 pm Fred Hughes and Jed Johnson are released from the 13th Precinct police station where the police had been questioning them. Fred later tells Andy: They questioned us until about nine oclock that night. They told us we were material witnesses, and I was so naive I didn't realize that that meant they were holding us as suspects...

until after they booked Valerie, I guess. (POP278) Fred Hughes: About eight plains clothes detectives came up, and they were running all over the place... like the Keystone Kops... and after theyd been poking around for at least two hours - every drawer in every cabinet was pulled out - I saw a paper bag sitting right on top of the desk where you [Andy] were shot... in this paper bag was another gun, Valeries address book, and a Kotex pad! (POP279) Ivy Nicholson 1965 While Andy is recuperating in the hospital, Ivy Nicholson, (Batman Dracula/Couch/The Thirteen Most Beautiful Women/****/The Loves of Ondine/I, A Man),a tall beautiful model, sometime actress, and mother of four children, threatens to kill herself if Andy dies, thinking that Andy will marry her.

Louis Waldon (Nude Restaurant/Lonesome Cowboys/Blue Movie) takes her home and keeps an eye on her while she calls the hospital every ten minutes, ready to jump at the fatal word. (UV173) In a telephone conversation to Andy while he is still in the hospital, Ultra Violet asks him How do you explain it all? Why were you the one to get shot? He replies, I was in the wrong place at the right time. (UV178) On This Day: Valerie Solanas Shoots Andy Warhol Valerie Solanas is booked after shooting Andy Warhol, June 3, 1968. On This Day: Valerie Solanas Shoots Andy Warhol June 03, 2011 06:00 AM Andy Warhol Nearly Killed Valerie Solanas, angered that Andy Warhol had lost a script of hers, made an afternoon visit to Warhol’s Midtown Manhattan studio , known as The Factory, with a .32 revolver stashed in a brown paper bag.

Warhol, accompanied by his boyfriend, Jed Johnson, and art critic Mario Amaya, saw Solanas outside The Factory and invited her in. Once inside, Solanas pulled out the gun . The Village Voice’s Howard Smith described: “Warhol turned and saw the gun. ‘Valerie,’ he yelled. ‘Don't do it! No! No!’ She fired three shots, and Warhol fell to the floor.” Solanas then shot Amaya and aimed at Warhol’s manager, Fred Hughes, but her gun jammed and she fled. She later turned herself in to rookie traffic cop William Shemalix, handing him her gun and saying she had shot Andy Warhol “because he had too much control of my life.” After the shooting, Warhol was taken to Columbus Hospital and was pronounced dead, but doctors resuscitated him and he survived after emergency surgery. PBS: Andy Warhol: A Documentary Film Andy Warhol was an eccentric artist and filmmaker who frequently collaborated with other artists and writers, often employing them for his films.

He became one of the most influential personalities of his generation, entertaining the young and hip in his New York City “Factory.” Holding an unabashed fascination with celebrity, Warhol famously remarked, “In the future everybody will be world famous for fifteen minutes.” He created art that embraced consumerism and a culture of mass production . The famous “Campbell’s Soup Cans” series in the early 1960s made Warhol a world-renowned artist and something of a celebrity. Warhol, who also delved into sculpture and filmmaking, is credited with fathering Pop Art. Warhol’s life became more subdued after the shooting. He died at the age of 58 in February 1987 due to complications after gall bladder surgery. The BBC offers a glimpse of Warhol’s methods and inspiration through a series of recorded interviews in which the artist discusses his technique, his favorite subject, (Liza Minelli) and his love of his Sony Walkman. A troubled woman, Valerie Solanas had been abandoned by her father as a child . She gave birth at age 15 and later worked as a prostitute in New York City.

In the early 1960s, hoping to become a member of Warhol’s entourage, Solanas had showed him one of her plays , “Up Your Ass.” Warhol later said of the play, “I looked through it briefly and it was so dirty, I thought she might be working for the police department and that this was some kind of entrapment.” Hoping to appease Solanas, Warhol paid her 25 dollars to be in his film, “I, a Man.” Solanas began hanging around Warhol and The Factory, but received little attention. In 1967, she outlined her radical feminist ideology in the SCUM Manifesto , described by American Heritage’s Elizabeth Hoover as “an anti-male, anti-capitalist screed that called on women to ‘eliminate’ men.” She served three years in prison for the shootings, and spent much of her life on the streets and in mental hospitals for schizophrenia before her death in 1988.

Project MUSE - Trasher Feminism: Valerie Solanas and Her Enemies Valerie Solanas and Her Enemies Jennifer Pan (bio) Abstract Late last year former NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly visited Brown University to deliver a lecture on “proactive policing,” a tepid euphemism for a stop-and-frisk policy that primarily targeted black and Latino youth. Lying in wait was a group of students who had assembled to protest Kelly and his policies and who booed and shouted until the commissioner decided to leave the podium. When the students’ victory reached the social justice media circuits, the left divided. Many celebrated the protests; others believed the shout-down was a low blow and undermined efforts to curtail police abuses. Keywords trasher feminism, Valerie Solanas, feminist, trashing, SCUM, radical, review Valerie Solanas: The Defiant Life of the Woman Who Wrote SCUM (and Shot Andy Warhol) . By Breanne Fahs. The Feminist Press, 2014, 352 pp. Late last year former NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly visited Brown University to deliver a lecture on “proactive policing,” a tepid euphemism for a stop-and-frisk policy that primarily targeted black and Latino youth.

Lying in wait was a group of students who had assembled to protest Kelly and his policies and who booed and shouted until the commissioner decided to leave the podium. When the students’ victory reached the social justice media circuits, the left divided. Many celebrated the protests; others believed the shout-down was a low blow and undermined efforts to curtail police abuses. Several high-profile progressive commentators, including Nation columnist Katha Pollitt and MSNBC host Chris Hayes, issued rebukes, with Pollitt declaring, “It’s fashionable on the left to mock liberalism as weak tea—and sometimes it is. But you know what is getting rid of stop-and-frisk? Liberalism.” When the radical writer Valerie Solanas shot Andy Warhol in 1968, a prominent segment of second-wave feminism underwent similar fractures over the utility of this extreme action. In a new biography of the would-be Warhol assassin, author Breanne Fahs documents how the National Organization of Women fissured in the aftermath of the shooting. Ti-Grace Atkinson, then the president of NOW, rallied to Solanas and enlisted prominent civil rights attorney Flo Kennedy to handle her defense.

NOW’s founder, Betty Friedan, on the other hand, condemned Solanas’s actions and warned Kennedy in a telegram to “desist immediately from linking NOW in any way with Valerie Solanas. Miss Solanas [sic] motives in Warhol case entirely irrelevant to NOW’s goals of full equality for women in truly equal partnership with men.” Stoking the flames of this rift was Solanas herself, a wildly irascible malcontent who lashed out even at those trying to help her. From jail, three months after her arrest, she wrote Atkinson: I know you, along with all the other professional parasites with nothing of their own going for them, are eagerly awaiting my commitment to the bughouse . . . I want to make perfectly clear that I am not being committed because of my views or the “SCUM Manifesto”. . . . Nor do I want you to continue to mouthe [sic] your cultivated banalities about my motive for shooting Warhol Your gall in presuming to be competent to discourse on such a matter is beyond belief. In short, do not ever publicly discuss me, SCUM, or any aspect at all of my care. Just DON’T.

Solanas, who penned the vitriolic SCUM Manifesto, has long functioned as a kind of mythical misandrist in the collective imagination of the feminist movement. The vision of radical social upheaval outlined in SCUM tends to evoke the infamous Pat Robertson quote that many liberal feminists have essentially dedicated their careers to debunking: “The feminist agenda is not about equal rights for women. It is about a socialist, anti-family political movement that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism, and become lesbians.” With perhaps the exception [End Page 83] of killing children, Robertson’s characterization describes Solanas’s politics with darkly funny accuracy. As the SCUM Manifesto suggests—and Fahs’s biography confirms—Solanas had little interest in achieving “equal partnership” with men under the existing structures of society or, for that matter, working within any established feminist organizations.

While Friedan’s Feminine Mystique urged dissatisfied housewives to seek employment outside of the home as the path to fulfillment, the SCUM Manifesto advocated—alongside the eventual elimination of men—the radical idea of “unwork,” or a perpetual labor slowdown in which women would accept jobs only to do bad work, destroy equipment, and get fired, repeating the process until they eventually destroyed the fulcrum of women’s exploitation: capitalism. “What will liberate women from male control,” Solanas declared, “is the total elimination of the money-work system, not the attainment of economic equality with men within it.” “SCUM” has been remembered, somewhat apocryphally, as an acronym for “Society for Cutting Up Men.” Solanas did use the phrase a handful of times during her early days in New York, littering the lobby of the Chelsea Hotel, where she briefly lived, with advertisements for meetings. She later insisted, however, that “SCUM” was not an acronym but rather a reference to the refuse of society: the women who would eventually overthrow the male-dominated political and economic regime.

According to Solanas, men’s inherent inferiority had rendered them a class responsible for war, racism, and suburbs, among other social ills. The solution for a better world, she proposed, was for SCUM to unwork, kill all men, eliminate money, and implement the complete automation of society. “SCUM is out to destroy the system,” wrote Solanas, “not attain certain rights within it.” In the manifesto’s breathtaking conclusion, she asserted that once money was eliminated, there would be no further need to kill men, as they would be “stripped of the only power” they held over women. After this point, men would be allowed to “exist out their puny days dropped out on drugs or strutting around in drag or passively watching the high-powered females in action.” As the first comprehensive biography of Solanas, Fahs’s Valerie Solanas delivers a thorough, empathic portrait of the notoriously volatile but little-understood writer. A formidable biographer, Fahs reconstructs, mostly from primary sources, the familial and social conditions that surrounded the creation of Solanas’s masterworks, the SCUM Manifesto and the lesser-known but equally searing play Up Your Ass.

Born in 1936 in New Jersey, Solanas grew up in poverty and earned a reputation among her school peers as a rebellious but brainy misfit, prone to fights with boys and petty crimes like shoplifting. According to Fahs, she likely suffered sexual abuse at the hands of her father and may have become pregnant by him, giving birth at the age of fourteen to a child that her family would raise as her sister. Solanas had another child a year later, who was given to family friends to raise and never again had contact with her after the age of four. Despite this tumultuous adolescence, Solanas would go on to attend the University of Maryland, where she excelled academically and received a degree in psychology. She arrived in New York City in the early 1960s after dropping out of a master’s program and drifted on the margins of the avant-garde art scene until her fateful encounter with Warhol. Solanas spent most of her adult life in states of economic and emotional precarity. Impoverished, often homeless, and likely suffering from untreated schizophrenia, she routinely alienated her few friends as a result of her erratic behavior.

Despite the posthumous induction of the SCUM Manifesto [End Page 84] into the feminist canon, Solanas never received royalties for her work and always struggled, living hand to mouth. Even after death, her legacy has lived on uneasily, as both she and her ideas have been subject to numerous distortions, perhaps the most widely dispensed of which being the claim that she shot Warhol because he was a “male chauvinist pig.” On this count alone, Fahs’s book, which meticulously reassembles Solanas’s scattered and misunderstood life, is an essential corrective. Solanas shot Warhol in the summer of 1968 and, in some senses, killed him. He was clinically dead for a minute and a half at the hospital, and though he was resuscitated, friends later reported that the shooting initiated a long, downward trajectory of poor health that culminated with his death in 1987. Though a flurry of media reports portrayed the attack as an outburst of militant feminist rage, Solanas herself consistently stated that she had simply shot Warhol for stealing one of the few copies of her play, Up Your Ass, which she had asked him repeatedly to produce.

That Warhol had declined to do so clearly was not due to an aversion to Solanas’s work itself—in fact, he had a pernicious habit of cribbing lines from their conversations and from her writing for his own work. After Solanas complained, Warhol eventually cast her as more or less herself—a fast-talking lesbian acidly rebuffing the advances of a hapless suitor—in his film I, a Man, but she claimed she never received payment for her role. Labor, it seemed, usually went uncompensated at Warhol’s Factory, and labor almost always seemed to go uncompensated for Solanas. Around the same time she was negotiating the production of Up Your Ass with Warhol, she had also signed over the rights to the SCUM Manifesto in a slippery contract she would come to regret—and for which she also never saw royalties. As Fahs’s book suggests, Solanas’s primary motive for shooting Warhol was his theft of her wages and artistic work.

Five years after the shooting, Esquire would overlook these factors and write that Solanas had “claimed she did it because Warhol was a disgusting male chauvinist pig.” But Solanas herself shot back in a blistering letter to the magazine, denying any relationship to the feminist movement. And when NOW president Ti-Grace Atkinson met with Solanas in prison after the shooting, she recalled, “[Solanas] took great pleasure in describing how humiliated they were, how they were begging for mercy. It seemed inhuman to me. It had nothing to do with feminism at all. It had to do with artist’s rights.” That Solanas has entered the cultural lexicon as the vengeful feminist archangel rather than the patron saint of exploited artists perhaps has as much to do with those who rallied to her cause in the wake of the shooting as it does with the militant program of male elimination she proffered in SCUM. Her assault on Warhol and the caustic brilliance of SCUM compelled several prominent second-wave feminists, including Shulamith Firestone, Vivian Gornick, and Robin Morgan, to seek her out and offer their support following her arrest.

Though initially receptive to their attentions, Solanas would eventually turn against all of them, convinced they were trying to appropriate her plight for their own brand of movement feminism, which she vehemently declared was made up of “dupes” and “know-nothings.” In a series of letters from jail to Ti-Grace Atkinson, Solanas railed, “It’s obvious that, not only do you not understand SCUM, but that SCUM is not for you. SCUM is for whores, dykes, criminals, homicidal maniacs. Therefore, please refrain from commenting on SCUM + from ‘defending’ me. I already have an excess of ‘friends’ out there who are suffocating me.” As Fahs makes clear, though Solanas’s vicious diatribes on the theft of her work often seemed to verge on clinical paranoia, even her most outlandish assertions often contained a kernel of truth.

(Robin Morgan, for instance, would incorporate an excerpt of the SCUM Manifesto into her feminist anthology, Sisterhood is Powerful, without Solanas’s permission and, Solanas believed for some time, without payment.) At times, though, Fahs also seems to want to situate Solanas within the parameters of the second wave, even as she deftly shows how Solanas herself resisted this identification. In her book’s preface, for example, she describes the cultural milieu in which Solanas [End Page 85] wrote SCUM as 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.” This was perhaps the environment that most of the constituents of NOW were pushing against, but Solanas—who never married, who clandestinely gave birth to two children in her teens, and who lived in poverty her whole adult life—was no more a part of an upper-middle-class second wave than she was of Warhol’s wealth-saturated art world.

Liberal feminist plums such as “glass ceiling” (a phrase Fahs uses at one point) come off as inadequate ways to understand the life of someone who was, to continue the metaphor, more interested in blowing up the entire building. A more precise evaluation of Solanas’s politics might locate them not within the cultural currents of the second wave, but rather as a manifestation of a particular tendency found within (but also without) feminism. Solanas was arguably the preeminent “trasher” of her era, referring to activists like Atkinson and Jo Freeman as the “Women’s Bowel Movement” and castigating the tracts and groups that she believed had emulated the SCUM Manifesto, including the C.L.I.T. Papers, Freeman’s Bitch Manifesto, and the organization W.I.T.C.H. (Women’s International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell). Yet her insult-laden screeds against “establishment” feminists also opened a space for her to edify her own theories.

The SCUM Manifesto may have had nothing to do with the second wavers’ push for abortion rights or equal pay, but it was about teaching women why they should “purposefully fuck up.” During a time when the most visible expression of feminism centered on the assertion that women were as just as capable as men of waged employment, Solanas’s recognition of the political possibilities of failure was an unexpected—and radically provocative—gesture: one that, at once, recognized the centrality of women to capitalist production and also championed the destruction of that very system. Likewise, the feminist discourse that is commonly dismissed as “trashing” today often serves as a flashpoint for resistance against liberal feminism and includes, among others, women of color criticizing the systemic racism that continues to pervade much of these liberal feminist spaces. If calls to end trashing are efforts to close the gaps between various factions within feminism, then Solanas has helped to remind us that trashing can also be the insistence that these gaps cannot be filled—that feminism must represent a multiplicity of claims and seek to redress several interlocking forms of exploitation.

Controversy over “trashing” reignited again in February, thanks to an essay in the Nation by Michelle Goldberg that suggested that online feminism had curdled. The source of its demise: a “toxic” new Twitter culture that had given rise to petty infighting and tyrannical language policing. Citing a 1976 essay by Jo Freeman that first detailed the epidemic of feminist trashing, Goldberg stated, “This is hardly the first time that feminism . . . has been racked by furious contentions over ideological purity.” But as with Freeman (whom Solanas was to subsequently trash), the “furious contentions” described by Goldberg are less about bids for “ideological purity” than appeals for recognition. A more radically inclusive feminism, therefore, would be one that enables marginalized groups to assert themselves against dominant narratives of feminism rather than beseeching them to all fall in line. As Solanas reminds us, revolutionary ideas don’t emerge quietly from the elite stratum of a society; they often bloom from its scum.

[End Page 86] "Actress Shoots Andy Warhol," Daily News, June 4, 1968 by Andy Warhol on artnet Auctions SHARE Contact Specialist Lot Details This is the only known copy of this New York Daily News article personally signed by Warhol. This was the first version of the article published the day after the artist was infamously shot by radical feminist Valerie Solanas. Warhol signed the front page of the paper alongside the headline and photograph where he is pictured sitting next to the woman who went on to attempt to assassinate him. He also added a drawing that playfully drips off of the 'd' in his first name. This lot includes the complete 32 page newspaper. The artist's signature was obtained in 1978 in Zurich. After the article ran in the Daily News, Solanas requested that a correction be made to the article, the tabloid-esque headline of which reads "ACTRESS SHOOTS ANDY WARHOL" in all caps.

She did not approve of her categorization as an actress, and the headline was changed later that evening with an updated caption that featured a Solanas saying "I'm a writer, not an actress." Solanas turned herself and the assault weapon, a .32 automatic pistol, in to the police later that day. She was later indicted on charges of attempted murder, assault, and illegal possession of a gun, and because of her diagnosis of chronic paranoid schizophrenia, Solanas served a mere three years for her act of brutality. In addition to shooting Warhol, Solanas had also shot art critic Mario Amaya in the hip and attempted to shoot Fred Hughes, Warhol's manager, point blank. Andy Warhol (1927-1987) is arguably the face of the Pop Art movement of the 1960s, a genre that would alter the American art market indefinitely. Warhol received his Bachelors of Fine Arts from the Carnegie Institute of Technology in 1949, and subsequently moved to New York City to pursue a career in the arts.

It was not long before he was creating ground-breaking works, including paintings, prints, photographs, and films, that brought attention to American pop culture and the lifestyle of Hollywood celebrities. Warhol embraced market culture and helped to lead a change in the New York art scene that would in turn influence others to also look to consumer culture and goods for artistic inspiration. Today, he is regarded as one of the most prominent artists of the twentieth century, contributing not only thousands of works of art that are housed in museums and collections worldwide but also an iconic style that would impact the art market and artists alike for decades. His works have been exhibited in over two thousand exhibitions, including retrospectives at The Gagosian Gallery, New York, NY (2008); Musée National d´Art Moderne, Paris, France (1990); and The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL (1989). Selected Public Collections: Andy Warhol Shot by Factory Actress Valerie Solanas | Village Voice Andy Warhol Shot by Factory Actress Valerie Solanas Remember Me Or sign in with a social account: FACEBOOK GOOGLE + TWITTER YAHOO! Don't have an account yet? Sign Up › Connect. Discover. Share.

Get the most out of your experience with a personalized all-access pass to everything local on events, music, restaurants, news and more. Enter your email or sign up with a social account to get started FACEBOOK TWITTER GOOGLE+ YAHOO! Don't have an account yet? Sign Up › Andy Warhol Shot by Factory Actress Valerie Solanas Tuesday, May 4, 2010 at 6 a.m. Clip Job: an excerpt every day from the Voice archives. June 6, 1968, Vol. XIII, No. 34 The Shot That Shattered The Velvet Underground by Howard Smith It was an ordinary afternoon at The Factory, the huge, new loft on the north side of Union Square which is the center of the Warhol scene. Sun came in the windows and gleamed off the mirror-topped desks. Paul Morrissey, Warhol's executive producer, and Fred Hughes, an assistant, sat around talking with Mario Amaya, a visiting art magazine editor from London.

Suddenly the elevator doors opened and Andy Warhol walked into the loft with Valerie Solanis, a sometime write and super-woman-power advocate who had appeared in his film, "I, a Man." She had come by The Factory earlier in the afternoon looking for Warhol, and had waited for him outside in front of the building for three hours. They walked over to talk with Morrissey, Hughes, and Amaya. It was typical Factory small talk, Hughes recalled. "You still writing dirty books, Valerie?" he asked. Upcoming Events Tickets Mon., Jan. 23, 7:00pm Hughes wandered off, and Morrissey took off to the bathroom. Then the telephone rang, and Warhol went to answer it. While he spoke with Viva, the reigning superstar, Valerie Solanis pulled a .32 automatic out of the pocket of her trench coat. Warhol turned and saw the gun. "Valerie," he yelled. "Don't do it! No! No!" She fired three shots, and Warhol fell to the floor. Then she turned on Amaya, and shot him in the hip. Amaya fled to a back room in the loft and crashed through a door, breaking the latch with the impact.

She pursued him, and tried to force the door open while Amaya held it closed with his body. Morrissey, meanwhile had heard the shots and ran to watch her through the small projection window. She then turned and walked back to Hughes who, terrified, begged her not to shoot. "I have to shoot you," she told him. Hughes fell to his knees, pleading "You can't. I'm innocent." Just as she seemed about to shoot, the elevator doors opened again and distracted her. "She was very confused, very agitated," Hughes recalled. She turned back, pointing the gun at Hughes, who was still on his knees, pleading for his life, and then Valerie Solanis darted on the empty elevator and disappeared. Hughes called the police and an ambulance. Warhol lay on the floor, he said, still conscious and bleeding only slightly, but obviously in great pain. He seemed delirious, and cried "I can't! I can't!" Then photographer Billy Name came into the loft, saw Warhol, and went to him. Warhol heard him cry, but mistook it for laughter. "Billy," he said softly, "don't laugh.

Don't make me laugh." The police arrived, and finally the ambulance, and Warhol was taken to Columbia Hospital. "They thought he was dead at first," Morrissey said. But Warhol was alive, and was rushed to surgery, where a four-man team of doctors fought for five and a half hours to save him. Tuesday his condition was still listed as critical, and doctors gave him a 50-50 chance to live. While the doctors operated, friends, press, and superstars jammed the tiny lobby of the hospital. The press was voracious; the superstars responsive. In one corner Leo Castelli and Ivan Karp were being interviewed; in another, Viva and Gerard Malanga were being set up for photographs. Later, Warhol's mother, a tiny old woman wearing a babushka, was brought weeping out of the back room. Malanga and Viva went to comfort her, and a hospital attendant brought a wheelchair to take Mrs. Warhol, who has a heart ailment, outside to a waiting taxi. A flock of photographers struggled for front photographs, almost trampling the old woman in the process.

Then word arrived that Valerie Solanis had turned herself in to a rookie cop at Times Square, and some of the press rused to the 13th Precinct station, only a few blocks away, where she was to be booked. While she was being questioned upstairs, a battery of photographers stood poised for an hour in front of the door through which she would enter. Twenty other newsmen milled about the room. When she finally came through the door, her hands were cuffed behind her back, it was bedlam. Photographers climbed behind the booking desk, elbowing cops out of the way. While police tried to book her, she poised and smiled for photographers. It was impossible to book her; the clicking and whirring of the cameras drowned out the sound of her voice. The police gave in, and let the press interview her. She was responsive to the questions. When asked about a motive, she sad "I have a lot of very involved reasons. Read my manifesto and it will tell you what I am." After a few minutes, the police hustled the reporters out of the station and took her back to be booked in the fingerprint room. She was charged with felonious assault and possession of a deadly weapon.

Valerie Solanis's life revolved around her "manifesto," a 21-page mimeographed document entitled S.C.U.M., Society for Cutting Up Men. She was a manhater, not a lesbian, but consumed with a passionate loathing of men. All the passion was contained in the manifesto, which she sold to support herself by placing ads in The Voice and peddling it -- at $1 for men and 25 cents for women -- at coffeehouses and Max's Kansas City. "She was always known to be cold," said an acquaintance, "even within a pretty odd scene. But she was very friendly, very warm. All her hate was in her writing. In person, she was gentle, not aggressive at all." Yet, suddenly she turned savage, and people at The Factory searched for a motive. She was bitter, they said, because Warhol had refused for over a year to use a script that she had written. She also had at one time accused Warhol -- absurdly, his associates said -- of dubbing in over her voice in the film, "I, a Man." Neither clue seems sufficient to explain the horror that shattered the Velvet Underground.

[Each weekday morning, we post an excerpt from another issue of the Voice, going in order from our oldest archives. Visit our Clip Job archive page to see excerpts back to 1956.] Contact:

Question: Whom did Valerie Solanas shoot in 1968?
Answer: (Andy) WARHOL