Trainwreck: The Women We Love to Hate, Mock, and Fear . . . And Why (10 page)

We need public hysterics because the idea of the “madwoman” is intimately connected to our ideas of womanhood in general. Once we knew that some women had hysteria, all women had it, or at least 75 percent of them. Women who cry, women who laugh. Women who like sex, women who don’t like sex. Drunk, old, poor, queer. Every woman has something wrong with her, if you go looking for it. And while mental illness and addiction violate every rule that a “nice” woman is supposed to live by—rendering her disobedient, abrasive, emotional, ugly—they confirm everything that misogynists suspect women to be at heart.

If all female sexuality is inappropriate, no one is more inappropriate than the woman who rips her clothes off or kisses strangers. If all female emotions are irrational, no one is more irrational than the woman utterly deprived of reason. If all women are weak and need to be protected and controlled by men, no one in the world is more obviously weak than the woman you have to lock up for her own safety. The madwoman is where the trainwreck gains velocity, becomes a phenomenon, not because other women fall short of her sins, but because we monitor women for those sins in order to prove that women are mad.

So, when we get a live one, we parade the evidence: make her a painting, or a photograph, or a live show, or the cover of
Star Magazine
. By breaking the rules of femininity, these women confirm that femininity is a necessary containment structure; that, if you took the chains off, women would run amok. But, to have a rule, we need rule-breakers. So we give you Courtney Love. We give you Amy Winehouse. We give you Amanda Bynes.

For men, the point of this is obvious: It keeps them distrustful of women, ready and eager to laugh at or dislike women, and quietly, constantly assured that they don’t really have to take women all that seriously. Which, since most of the culture is aimed at conveying that message anyway, is not surprising. But in truth, men are not the primary beneficiary of all this rule-defining.

The degrading, degraded female images are really aimed
at you: Yes, you, the nice, normal girl trying to figure out how to behave in public. We give you a constant stream of images and a whole lot of very good reasons to play by the rules and never, ever let the act slip. Because you aren’t a nice girl who spends one night a year playing dress-up as a monster. You’re a monster who spends 364 nights a year playing dress-up as a nice girl.

•

Anatomy of a Trainwreck

VALERIE SOLANAS

“I ask you, ladies and gentlemen,” the talk-show host asked, “have you ever heard anything more sick and perverted than this woman?”

This was 1967, on the set of the conservative
Alan Burke Show
. The woman in question had shown up, against her friends’ advice, in answer to Burke’s open call for lesbians willing to be interviewed on-air. She had, apparently, kept her cool throughout most of the show, while Burke taunted her with questions about her sexual experience with men: “What’s the matter, Valerie, can’t get one? Didn’t anyone ever take you to prom?”

Valerie Solanas had been sexually abused from a young age. She had borne two children by the time she was fifteen,
one of them quite possibly her father’s. We don’t know if she told any of this to Alan Burke; the producers didn’t keep a tape of her appearance. Anything we know about the episode comes from interviews that her friends gave to biographers after the fact. One thing they are all clear on is that, after enough of these questions, Valerie had begun crying and cursing at Burke. The producers cut her mic, and Burke walked off the set.

Valerie chased him across the stage and tried to hit him with a chair.

The frightening thing about
The Alan Burke Show
, in retrospect, is that well before anyone knew who Valerie Solanas was—before she made any headlines, or did any of the shocking things that would eventually make her a household name—it established her role in public life. From the very first moment she showed up, on Burke’s set and in the living rooms of his viewers, she was a madwoman in a cage; a scary, angry, man-hating lesbian that you could poke with a stick until she lashed out.

By the end of the next year, of course, she would have a résumé to fit the job description. Solanas’s mental health is not really in question: In an attempt to murder Andy Warhol, art critic Mario Amaya, and Warhol’s manager Fred Hughes, she shot Warhol in the gut and Amaya in the hip. The gun jammed while she had it aimed it at Hughes’s head. After the shooting, she spent time in mental institutions, public housing, or homeless. She was paranoid, occasionally
violent, and by the end of her life, she was a derelict, known to the local police as “Scab Lady” for her habit of self-mutilating by stabbing herself repeatedly with a fork.

But to say that she was crazy misses the point that she was also a philosopher of craziness. Flash back to La Salpêtrière, and the collection of women housed there: the addicts, the prostitutes, the homeless, the queer. All the women society no longer had a use for. From this cast-off and collected scum of the earth arose the whole idea of the “madwoman.” And from a madwoman (a prostitute, a queer woman, a homeless woman, an eventual addict) arose
SCUM
.

The
SCUM Manifesto
—which Valerie was already self-publishing and giving lectures on before she met Warhol—was meant to build a utopia out of the women who had been thrown away, a perfect world run by
“those females least embedded in the male ‘Culture’ … too uncivilized to give a shit for anyone’s opinion of them, too arrogant to respect ‘Daddy’ or the wisdom of the Ancients, who trust only their own animal, gutter instincts.” The world of ruined women, in her view, was the only world worth living in: “Unhampered by propriety, niceness, discretion, public opinion, ‘morals,’ the respect of assholes, always funky, always dirty, SCUM gets around.”

It was less a refutation of misogyny than a script-flip. Women were emotional? Well, “having a crudely constructed nervous system that is easily upset by the least display of emotion or feeling, the male tries to ensure a ‘social’
code that ensures perfect blandness, unsullied by the slightest trace of feeling or upsetting opinion.” Women were led astray by sexual appetites? Behold: The male was “obsessed with screwing; he’ll swim through a river of snot, wade nostril-deep through a river of vomit, if he thinks there’ll be a friendly pussy awaiting him.” It was an erudite satire, calling on the whole history of women’s mental health—Solanas had done both her undergraduate and postgraduate work in psychology; the
Manifesto
takes time to flip off Freud by declaring that men’s personal deficiencies are due to “pussy envy”—but written from the other side of the mirror. A tour of La Salpêtrière, with Louise Augustine holding the camera.

In another decade there might have been a place for her to land, or at least a label by which she could be understood: Feminism, queer theory, and punk have all claimed her since. But in the early 1960s, Valerie’s society of dirty, angry, fucked-up women didn’t exist. She was writing to will it into being. She tried to physically incarnate it, by writing a play (the immortally titled
Up Your Ass
) wherein Bongi Perez—sort of a roughed-up, wisecracking, queer lady street Jesus—heckles “nice,” brainwashed women out of their illusions. At one point, a man tells her that she’s ugly, so she pulls him behind the bushes and fucks him to prove a point; in the grand finale, a frustrated suburban mother strangles her whiny son to death so that she can go pick up chicks with Bongi. It’s that kind of play.

It would have been Valerie’s world, on stage. Made real, and corporeal, and with her at its center. In the story of her life, nothing was so important, not even the
SCUM Manifesto
. (She’d thrown that to publisher Maurice Girodias in an attempt to get out of a bad contract; he’d wanted a novel, and refused to publish what she gave him—until she was in the news). It was the play that she wanted Andy Warhol to film, that she gave to him, that he tried to make disappear by offering her a movie role instead; it was the play that, finally, Warhol claimed he’d just plain lost, and refused to return to her.

How could he have known what she would do? How could a woman who had already taken so much humiliation—sexual abuse, poverty, losing her children; homelessness, begging, sex with men she hated, to stay on the right side of starvation; being laughed at and booed by a studio audience; a night when Warhol incited a friend to call Valerie a “disgusting dyke” and then sneered when she said she’d been molested—be expected to do anything but take one more insult, a very minor insult, a lost copy, as par for the course?

How could anyone know what Valerie would do, when a powerful man tried to make her work disappear?

But she did it. It was the culmination of her suspicions—ever since the
Alan Burke Show
—that she was being set up, that someone didn’t want her to be heard, someone was trying to turn her into a joke. It was the Mob, and Warhol and
Girodias both worked for it, and they’d taken her uterus and replaced it with a radio transmitter so they could track her everywhere. And, after she did it, she never published another book. She fell into the world of the Mob, the world where Valerie was only Scab Lady, and there fell silent.

But Girodias published the
Manifesto
; it was Girodias who told the world that SCUM was an acronym for “Society for Cutting Up Men,” and called her genocidal in his preface. Lucky her, she even became a valid talking point outside the art world. Feminism had been on the rise, and now conservatives could point to its logical outcome: some man-hating, crazy lesbian who wanted to kill all men. You couldn’t say that there were none. One of them made the news. And you couldn’t, in good conscience, recommend that any nice girl get mixed up with the criminal element. The fame lasted, although, thanks to Girodias’s contract, Valerie never saw a dime: As late as 1977,
The Village Voice
would call her up and run interviews of her ranting about the Mob.

Valerie Solanas meant to stand for the dirty, angry, fucked-up, thrown-away women of the world. And she did: not as messiah, but as bogeyman. When she was just a writer, no one wanted her. But she was more than marketable as a criminal, and a cautionary tale. Ladies and gentlemen, have you ever heard anything more sick and perverse than this woman?

There is one piece of Solanas’s writing that, unaccountably,
never made it to publication. No one has ever published that play. But copies of it can be found online, if you dig for them. Each page is stamped, “From the Collection of THE ANDY WARHOL MUSEUM.”

•

From most vantage points, Valerie Solanas is indefensible. She wasn’t upset or misunderstood or under stress: She was actually crazy. And, though most people fear the mentally ill unless we can pity them, Valerie’s illness never rendered her a passive victim. She was continually cruel, even flat-out abusive, to the people in her life—not just the snooty Factory denizens, but people who were genuinely kind to her, including the feminists who organized to help her during her trial. Her sexual politics were not so perfect that she was beyond criticism; radical as Valerie was, her thoughts on transgender women (something she elaborates on quite a bit in
Up Your Ass
) could be corrosively ugly and even bigoted. And, oh, yeah,
she tried to murder three people
. What line of defense can you concoct for that?

Maybe this one:
As art critic Catherine Lord points out, eight years before anyone knew the name “Valerie Solanas,” Norman Mailer stabbed his wife to settle an argument at a party. Two years before that, William S. Burroughs got drunk and accidentally shot his wife in the head while attempting to demonstrate his marksmanship. And yet, in your lifetime, you are strikingly unlikely to ever meet someone
who informs you that the notorious murderer, William S. Burroughs, also wrote books. Norman Mailer served time in Bellevue, but somehow, an explanation of his life story tends to open with “author” rather than “lunatic.”

Or you could go back to Kurt Cobain. Poor Kurt, dead Kurt, Kurt who suffered: He was a heroin addict, he was deeply and intentionally difficult, he called up at least one journalist and threatened to kill her, he had his daughter taken away when she was two weeks old, and (oh, yeah) he shot himself. And, in all of this, the take-away for his tween fanbase was that his wife was crazy.

Mental illness and addiction ruin women—make them sideshows, dirty jokes, bogeymen, objects of moral panic—but they seem to add to a man’s mystique. No one made fun of Kurt’s track marks; they built him a cult. Just as, throughout history, men have built cults around the sacred, illuminating madness of Antonin Artaud, or Vaslav Nijinsky, or David Foster Wallace, or Jack Kerouac, or Iggy Pop, or Jackson Pollock, or Vincent Van Gogh. That list, taken in a different light, reads Schizophrenic, Schizophrenic, Suicide, Drunk, Got So High He Can’t Remember the 1970s, Drunk, and Suicide. (Comma, Plus That Thing with the Ear.) Yet the diagnoses don’t end them, or even really define them. Instead, their struggles elevate them, make them special: We all understand that genius and madness are connected. At least, we do when the genius is male.

Lou Reed was a brilliant, queer kid who reportedly had a psychotic break, moved to New York City, befriended Warhol, and became a legend. Valerie Solanas was a brilliant, queer kid who had a psychotic break, moved to New York City, befriended Warhol, and had her play thrown away and got called a “disgusting dyke” at parties. Lou hated Valerie to the very end of his days (sample lyric: “There’s something wrong if she’s alive right now”) and I will always love Lou. But I hope that, from his throne in Curmudgeonly Rock Dude Heaven, even Lou can see that the difference between what happened to him and what happened to Valerie was pretty much Valerie’s entire point.

The world is the world. Masculinity is supposed to be brave, risk-taking, rebellious; femininity is supposed to be sweet, agreeable, people-pleasing. Madness makes the one gender riskier and braver; it makes the other less compliant and harder to deal with. And so it is that a male painter can get wasted and drive his car into a tree to impress his mistress (a mistress who is, I need to stress, in the car at the time) and only add to the legend that is Jackson Pollock, whereas if a former child actress gets drunk and passes out in her SUV, innocence itself has died.