The failed assassination of Andy Warhol in 1968
Like anyone who pushed the boundaries of art in the mainstream, Andy Warhol was hated in his time.
Which makes a certain degree of sense. Warhol went against two core tenets of art as a whole and was richly rewarded for it. The first was that art had to be meaningful to be beautiful, and the second was that art had to come from an artist who sweated and slaved over something he (and it was almost always he) put his entire soul in. In some circles, he was viewed as an antithesis to the very point of art; in more extreme circles, he was someone trying to destroy it from the inside out.
In fact, he was so hated that when he was shot and very nearly killed in 1968, many suspected that it was in response to this. That some enraged artist had become so infuriated that this advertiser had become the world’s most famous artist, they decided to end his campaign against the medium he loved, thus saving it. This wasn’t the case; instead, it was a very different and much more disturbing story centred around one infamous woman.
Valerie Solanas was actually an old collaborator of Warhol’s who’d appeared in one of his films. An aspiring writer, Solanas had infiltrated the infamous Factory scene created by Warhol with one goal in mind: getting the infamous artist to produce her play Up Your Ass. An unflinching look at a sex worker who ends up killing a client of hers, loosely based on Solanas’ own experiences as a prostitute. After talking with Warhol about the script, he was enchanted by its name and promised to read it.
However, when he read through the script, he felt that it was so absurdly pornographic that it must have been an FBI set-up and binned the script. Something that made it incredibly awkward when Solanas called back to ask what he thought, and when it became clear that he wasn’t going to work on it, she asked for it back. Something that Warhol couldn’t do, as he’d dropped the script like a bad habit. Solanas, pretty reasonably if you ask me, was apoplectic.
She was also, as you can imagine, quite severely down on her luck. So much so that when Warhol offered to make it up to her by offering her a bit part in his next movie, she took it because it was $25 that she wasn’t going to make otherwise. Word is that this experience turned out to be a lot more fun than she though it would be and what’s more, it brought her into contact with the Maurice Girodias, an editor and publisher of The Olympia Press.
Solanas and Girodias hit it off, and the editor offered her an informal deal. For $500, he would own the publishing rights to her next novel, “and other writings”. While Girodias insisted that this meant other writings that she brought to him, Solanas suddenly decided that it meant he now owned all her future work in perpetuity. This, combined with Warhol losing her script, made her convinced that the two were in cahoots, stealing her work for their own benefit.
Solanas, being the woman who wrote The Scum Manifesto, wasn’t going to take this lying down. However, there’s speculation that the initial target wasn’t actually Warhol, but Girodias. The two were staying at the Chelsea Hotel, and on the day of the attempted assassination, Solanas spent three hours in the lobby of the hotel asking for the publisher before taking her rage elsewhere. First to the Actor’s Studio in Manhattan, then to producer Margo Eden’s offices, both in attempts to get influential eyes on drafts of Up Your Ass.
After that, she made her fateful trip to The Factory, where she snuck in after Warhol arrived with his assistant Jed Johnson, then shot Warhol three times and art critic Mario Amaya once… The Factory ringleader was in critical condition, but after being rushed to the hospital and undergoing five hours of surgery, his life was saved despite injuries to his spleen, stomach, liver, oesophagus, and lungs. Amaya also lived too, and despite Solanas originally getting away, she turned herself in to a Police officer later that same evening.
Solanas’ act made headlines all over the world, quite literally in the case of New York’s Daily News, who published the headline “Actress Shoots Andy Warhol” the following morning. Solanas demanded a retraction… After all, she was a writer, not an actor.