Tender Murderers Read online

  Early in 1967, Valerie gave him a copy of play she'd written, hoping he'd produce it. The play, titled Up Your Ass, was so dirty that Andy suspected she might be an undercover cop trying to entrap him. He promptly misplaced it somewhere in the chaos of the Factory, and when Valerie asked for its return that May, he told her he'd lost it. To placate her, he gave her a small part in his film I, a Man and paid her all of $25. A review in the American Film Institute Catalogue of Motion Pictures describes Valerie as being “the only good thing about that movie.”

  At the same time, Valerie sold her SCUM Manifesto to Olympia Press publisher Maurice Girodias, a Frenchman who had already made a name for himself by publishing edgy books like Lolita, Candy, and Tropic of Cancer. He gave her the grand sum of $500, which, even in those days, was pretty pathetic. A year later, he was able to pay writer Mary Sativa $2,000 for her hippie cult classic Acid Temple Ball, so obviously he had the money and could have paid Valerie more. In an interview with me, Sativa remembered Girodias as being “elegant and charming,” and he seems to have used that charm to get Valerie to sign a contract she later regretted. According to actor, filmmaker, and Warhol associate Paul Morrisey, the contract said something like, “I will give you five hundred dollars and you will give me your next writing and other writings.” Valerie interpreted this to mean that Girodias would own everything that she wrote for the rest of her life.

  Despite Morrisey's reassurance that the contract wasn't worth the paper it was written on, she panicked. First Andy had stolen Up Your Ass (she thought), and now Maurice Girodias was stealing everything else she would ever write. In a fit of paranoia, Valerie decided that the two of them were in it together, plotting to steal her life's work. (Ironically, Andy and Girodias didn't even know each other!)

  Valerie began to harass Girodias. In his introduction to the 1968 Olympia Press first edition of The SCUM Manifesto, the publisher writes:

  Obviously, the pixies were moving in, pretty fast. She started calling me, day and night, either to insult me, or to ask me in an urgent voice what I thought of her. . . . Further threats, insults and twisted blandishments arrived by mail, sometimes in envelopes addressed to “Girodias-the-Toad.”

  She approached Paul Krassner, publisher of the underground newspaper The Realist, and borrowed $50, for food, he believed. With the money she bought a Saturday night special. She had decided to shoot Maurice Girodias. Mary Sativa commented, “I think there must have been a large number of writers who wanted to shoot (Girodias).”

  At 9 A.M., on June 3, 1968, Valerie went to the Chelsea Hotel, where Maurice Girodias lived, only to learn that he was gone for the weekend. She waited there for three hours and finally made her way to the Factory, where Paul Morrisey found her waiting outside for Andy Warhol. Andy wasn't coming in that day, he told her. “Well that's alright, I'll wait,” Valerie answered. And wait she did. Finally, at 4 P.M., Andy showed up, and they came up in the elevator together. Valerie was actually pretty that day; she had put on makeup, dressed for the part, and for a change was not wearing her Bob Dylan cap. She'd been prepared to shoot Girodias, but if he was unavailable, Andy would have to do. But Andy didn't know that when he commented, “Look, doesn't Valerie look good?”

  As they emerged from the elevator, the phone was ringing. It was Viva, for Andy. She hoped to worm some money out of him to pay her electric bill before they shut off her power. As Andy spoke to Viva, Valerie took a .32 automatic pistol from the brown paper bag she had tucked under her arm, and shot him once, twice, both shots missing him. Her third bullet penetrated his lungs, spleen, liver, and esophagus. Andy fell to the floor, and she turned her gun on Mario Amaya, an art critic who'd been waiting to meet Andy. She got him in the right hip, and he limped to safety in the back studio, locking the door behind him. Fred Hughes, Andy's manager, was next. Valerie aimed her gun at his head—and the elevator door opened! Drawing on God only knows what reserves of strength and nerve, Hughes said, “Oh, there's the elevator. Why don't you get on, Valerie?”

  Valerie, from the cover of her SCUM Manifesto

  And she did!

  At 8 P.M. that night, Valerie turned herself in to a cop who was directing traffic in Times Square. She gave her reason for shooting Andy: “He had too much control of my life.” Inexplicably she added, “I am a flower child.” A judge sent her to the psych ward.

  The feminists adored her! Radical feminist lawyer Flo Kennedy, who defended her, said she was “one of the most important spokeswomen of the feminist movement.” Ti Grace Atkinson, New York chapter president of NOW, called her, “the first outstanding champion of women's rights.” Robin Morgan's 1970 feminist diatribe against the male-dominated left wing, Good-bye to All That, ends with the declaration: “FREE VALERIE SOLANAS! FREE OUR SISTERS! FREE OURSELVES!”

  On Christmas Eve 1968, Valerie actually phoned Andy at the Factory, demanding he pay $20,000 for her lost manuscript, so she could use the money for her defense. Needless to say, she didn't get the money. Andy did, however, refuse to testify against her, and in June 1969, she was given three years for “reckless assault with intent to harm.” The year she'd spent in the psych ward counted as time served. Velvet Underground superstar Lou Reed commented, “You get more for stealing a car,” and wrote a song about it called “I Believe,” in which he said that he would have pulled the switch himself to electrocute Valerie.

  Andy recovered, but he was never quite the same. An entry in his journal, dated August 7, 1977, reads:

  By the way, Valerie has been seen hanging around the Village and last week when I was cruising there with Victor, I was scared I'd run into her and that would be a really weird thing. What would happen? Would she want to shoot me again?

  In 1987, doctors did what Valerie failed to do, and Andy Warhol died in the hospital from a botched gallstone operation. At his funeral in Saint Patrick's Cathedral, an unidentified woman stood outside on the steps and shouted, “The monster is dead! The monster is finally dead!”

  Valerie outlived Andy by a year, dying alone at the age of fifty-two, of emphysema and pneumonia, in a cheap San Francisco hotel room. She was still working as a prostitute, and according to her sister sex workers, stayed elegant and slim until the end, dressing in silver lamé.

  Valerie's mother, Dorothy Moran, said, “She had a terrific sense of humor.”

  The Movie and the Play

  In 1996, Lili Taylor played Valerie Solanas in writer-director Mary Harron's I Shot Andy Warhol. The film is an excellent reflection of the bizarre life in and around Warhol's Factory, and Taylor is a believable, funny, and poignant Solanas.

  Valerie's play Up Your Ass was finally discovered in the Warhol Museum, in a box beneath some film lighting equipment, and was produced by the George Coates Performance Works in San Francisco in 2000. The play's lead character, panhandler Bongi Perez—obviously Valerie's alter ego—spouts rage-filled, hilarious, and raunchy invective right out of the author's now world-famous manifesto. As for the SCUM Manifesto itself, it can be found on the Internet, on dozens of Web sites.

  Valerie Solanas paper dolls, from Real Girl comics

  Squeaky Fromme

  “It Didn't Go Off”

  It was 1975, and among the crowd waiting to catch a glimpse of President Gerald Ford that September morning in Sacramento, California, was a slight woman in a long red dress. Some people may have been annoyed at the way she pushed her way to the front of the onlookers; others may have heard her mutter, “He's not your public servant.” Some may have even thought the little redhead was kinda cute. Beneath the red dress, she had a Colt .45 automatic strapped to her leg, and she had come to shoot the president. Her name was Squeaky Fromme.

  Lynette Alice Fromme seemed like a girl Beaver Cleaver. Growing up during the ‘50s in an affluent southern California neighborhood, she was cute as a button, with her red hair and freckles. She was an A- student and star of a kids’ dance troupe, the Lariats. The troupe traveled all over the country, even visiting the White House and performi
ng on The Lawrence Welk Show. Her 1963 graduating class at Orville Wright Junior High named her Personality Plus.

  But there are no real-life Beaver Cleavers. Lynette's home life was miserable. Her father was mean and brutal, a control freak. Although he made good money as an aircraft engineer and owned two cars, he would check the odometer after allowing his wife to use the car, to make sure that she hadn't driven further than he authorized, and he took the car keys with him when he went away on business trips. When Lynette entered high school, she had to drop out of her beloved Lariats. She couldnt get to practice sessions because Mr. Fromme would no longer allow his wife to drive her there. She had a sister and brother, but Mr. Fromme seemed to pick on Lynette most often, and sometimes she came to school with makeup covering bruises and black eyes.

  As Lynette matured, her father's treatment of her worsened. Several times he kicked her out of their house, announcing, “You're not part of this family anymore.” Lynette took minimum wage jobs at hamburger stands and stayed on friends' couches until he let her back. When she turned eighteen, Mr. Fromme kicked his daughter out one last time. She gathered up her meager possessions and hitchhiked to Venice Beach. Sitting on a bench in the sun, wondering where to go, she met Charlie Manson.

  Already in his thirties, Charlie had spent most of his life in prison for various petty crimes. His mother, who gave birth to him at sixteen, was jailed for armed robbery when he was five. He lived with his aunt and an uncle whose idea of punishing little Charlie was to make him wear girls' clothes. By the time he was a teenager, he'd been in too many reformatories and had escaped from them eighteen times. He had never really learned to read.

  Between prison terms, Charlie pimped and fathered at least two babies with two different women. In prison, he learned to play guitar. From his cellmates he picked up bits and pieces of philosophies, from Scientology to Robert Heinlein's hippie classic Stranger in a Strange Land. Then in 1967, he was let out of prison into a brave new world full of big-eyed young people—especially young women–who were looking for a meaning to life. Charlie used his pimping talents and soon moved in with a pretty twenty-three-year-old from Berkeley. They hung around Telegraph Avenue and the Haight-Ashbury with the other hippies, and Charlie made a little money playing guitar in local clubs. Then one day he decided to hitchhike to Venice Beach, which he'd heard was a Southern California version of the Haight, and there was Lynette.

  Now let's call her Squeaky, the nickname she earned as part of the Manson Family because of her cute little voice. Family was what both Squeaky and Charlie were looking for. Squeaky wanted a loving father, and Charlie, who wanted any kind of family because he'd never had one, filled the bill. She became the second of Charlie's Girls, but he soon acquired more; impressionable middle-class chicks with long hair and long legs, hanging onto every word of his pseudo-hippie philosophy, and of course, sleeping with him. Attracted by the drugs and free sex, young men came along, too, although never as many of them. They drove around California in an old school bus, but most of the time they lived at the Spahn ranch in the southern California desert. The ranch had been used by film studios for decades as a backdrop for Westerns. Owner George Spahn, eighty years old and nearly blind, let the Family crash there for free. It helped that the girls slept with him.

  At first, life at the Spahn ranch was comparatively idyllic, if you could accept Charlie's odd philosophy. Vegetarians, the girls dumpster-dived outside of supermarkets for slightly squished fruits and veggies. Charlie was into being, like, natural. Everyone grew their hair long, and the men had beards. Acid flowed freely and it was all about, like, love, man.

  Like a zillion other Americans, Charlie adored the Beatles and played their White Album over and over. In the songs, he heard messages from the Beatles. Songs like “Helter Skelter” and “Little Piggies” told him how big corporations were polluting the Earth, and how there'd be an apocalypse when downtrodden black people, led by the Black Panthers, rose up and destroyed the white. But the Family would be safe, because they'd find the hole in the Mojave Desert that led to an underground paradise where the Aztecking Montezuma had taken his people 500 years ago.

  Things went from weird to worse. Motorcycle gangs started hanging out at the ranch, and the drugs of choice went from acid and pot to speed and heroin. A Family member, Bobby Beausoleil, sold a batch of bad mescaline to some bikers. When they wanted their $2,000 back, Bobby went to the guy he'd bought the mescaline from, a music teacher named Gary Hinman. There was a fight, and Bobby stabbed Gary. Charlie's angels ministered to the poor guy, but three days later he died anyway, and Charlie got a brilliant idea: Let's blame the killing on the Black Panthers. So they wrote “Political Piggy” on the living room wall, in Gary's blood, and left a bloody panther paw print. They also took Gary's Fiat, and Bobby Beausoleil was sleeping in it on the highway when the cops found him and arrested him on suspicion of murder.

  Squeaky in her red robes

  This was when Charlie got another brilliant idea: If they could pin the murder on the Black Panthers, the cops would let Bobby go. Why not kill some more people, anybody would do, and make it look like the Black Panthers did it? And that's what they did.

  On August 8, 1969, Charlie sent three girls and one of the guys, Tex Watson, to a Bel-Air house, where they slaughtered coffee heiress Abigail Folger; her boyfriend Voytek Frykowski; hairstylist Jay Sebring; and Steven Parent, a teenager who was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. The victim who caught the attention of the public, however, was beautiful blonde Sharon Tate, starlet and wife of director Roman Polanski, eight months pregnant with their child.

  One of the girls, Sadie Glutz, really Susan Atkins, wrote the word “Pig” on the door in Sharon Tate's blood.

  The next day, Charlie came along for the ride, when they invaded the home of Rosemary and Leno LaBianca. But he stayed only long enough to tie up the couple, and left before the killing started. His girls wrote “Death to Pigs” and “War” on the wall in the couple's blood, and on the refrigerator, “Healter” (sic) “Skelter.”

  A true pimp, Charlie got his girls to commit murder for him and thought he'd kept his hands clean. But Sadie Glutz had talked to Bobby Beausoleil's girlfriend about the killings, and she went to the cops. They busted Sadie, and she talked some more. Soon Tex and the three other girls–and Charlie–were in jail.

  But not Squeaky. She was kind of second in command, a den mother to the Family, and Charlie felt she was too important to risk, so he never sent her out to kill. In fact, the ones who killed for Charlie were those followers whom he callously considered expendable. If they were caught, or even killed by the cops, it wouldn't have mattered to him.

  With Charlie in jail, Squeaky became the group's leader. During the trial, she and the other girls carved the letter X into their foreheads, shaved their heads, and literally moved to the corner of Broadway and Temple Street, just outside the Los Angeles Hall of Justice. They swept the area clean, curled up in the bushes at night, and passed the day singing and giving out statements to the press. As for the press, they loved Squeaky. Not only was she the most verbal, but she was so darned cute, with her red hair and freckles!

  On January 25, 1971, Charlie and his codefendants were found guilty of murder. After they were sentenced to prison for life, the girls dispersed. They found other boyfriends, mostly hard drug-using motorcycle gang members. Only Squeaky and a few others remained fiercely faithful to Charlie. Squeaky kept up a regular correspondence with him, and she tried to keep the faith, but in her hands Charlie's original mission altered subtly. The war between blacks and whites, the hole in the Mojave Desert, took a back seat to ecology. Ending pollution, stopping the slaughter of whales and baby seals became of utmost importance. She exchanged her embroidered hippie dresses for red robes. Red, she told reporters, was “the blood of sacrifice.”

  Inspired by the Symbionese Liberation Army, which had kidnapped newspaper heiress Patty Hearst, Squeaky invented an organization, the International People's
Court of Retribution, which existed only in her head. In the name of the prople's Court, Squeaky and a few of the last still-faithful girls sent out hundeds of threatening letters to the CEOs of major corporations. Stop polluting or die, they wrote, stop the slaughter of whales and baby seals or we'll slaughter you and your families.

  Charlie was moved to Folsom Prison, and Squeaky moved to Sacramento to be near him, bringing the People's Court with her. She was growing more and more fixated on ecology; it was all she wanted to talk about. The people in power were killing trees and animals, destroying the Earth. They must be stopped at all costs!

  That's when President Gerald Ford came to visit Sacramento. It was all over the newspapers and the television screens; maps showed where and when he'd be appearing in public. Squeaky developed a plan so loony it could compete with Charlie's plans: She could call attention to Charlie again–he'd been out of the news for some time now–and call attention to the disastrous state of the planet at the same time.

  On September 5, 1975, Squeaky Fromme strapped her gun, an antique .45, to her leg, hiding it beneath the folds of her long red robe, and joined the crowds in front of the Sacramento Hotel, from which Ford would emerge at 9:55 A.M., on his way to a meeting with Gov. Jerry Brown. Right on time, Ford, flanked by photographers and Secret Service agents, walked out, shaking hands right and left. And suddenly in front of him was a cute little elfin redhead in a red robe, with her hand out, but there was a gun in it, pointed at him. Then Squeaky was on the ground, in the grip of Secret Service men, her gun wrestled from her hand. “Easy, boys,” witnesses heard her tell them, “it didn't go off.” At least one witness insisted that what she had said was, “It wasn't loaded anyway.”

  Indeed, there was no bullet in the gun's chamber.