[Valerie Solanas did have dinner with publisher Maurice Girodias in 1967 and that is depicted in the movie. I re-imagined that scene here. The scene with the customer in the courtyard (it's described, not depicted, in this story) is also in the movie. I changed that too to make it fit my vision of her personality.
The scene here involving the pimp is entirely from my imagination.]
*****
By the summer of 1967 Valerie had made acquaintances with two prominent New Yorkers, men who might, she thought, help her into ventures that would improve her financial and social status. One of them was the artist Andy Warhol who had by then developed an entourage of people who functioned as both his friends and employees. At that time he was moving beyond his earlier interest in the visual arts to include both live and filmed performances.
Valerie had at first tried to get him interested in a play she had written. He was unimpressed with the idea but he did get her parts in two movies he directed. She tried to ingratiate herself with his hangers-on but they mostly resisted her moves to get closer to them. They imagined themselves as being weird but also as cool and hip, while Valerie seemed to them to be merely weird. It took her a while to realize that she remained an outsider even among other outsiders.
The other man she met was not as well-known as Warhol but he seemed interested in developing her as a client. He was Maurice Girodias, founder and owner of a publishing company, Olympia Press. In the last two decades he had handled the work of Vladimir Nabokov, William Burroughs, Henry Miller and many others. A native of France, he was forty-eight when he met Valerie, a fellow tenant for a while at the Chelsea Hotel. When he found out that she claimed to be a writer, he invited her to dinner to talk over her prospects with his firm.
On the evening of the dinner meeting Valerie appeared wearing a new dress and shoes. The shoe heels were higher than anything she had worn in years and she tottered a bit as she approached the table where he was sitting. He stood up to greet her and was about to make a compliment about her appearance but something stopped him from doing that. He didn't know her that well but he already was sure that the anything close to the term "light-hearted" didn't apply to her. It wasn't just that she seemed so serious most of the time. There was some darker side to her that he sensed but didn't fully understand yet.
For her part Valerie knew that this was an important meeting and she needed to project a professional attitude as best she could. That wasn't easy for her as she often spoke what was on her mind even if it went against her best interests. The previous couple of years had hardened even further. She had to think before she spoke tonight.
They made some small talk about the restaurant and the menu it offered. Maurice suggested lobster, "It's one of their specialties here."
"Oh no, I've had that before," Valerie said. "It's a real mess cracking those things open." She was familiar with the seafood restaurants on the Jersey Shore of her youth.
"So it's not the taste then."
"I do like it, we used to get it at this place called Captain Starn's in Atlantic City." She remembered going there with her grandmother on the streetcars that ran out to a neighborhood called The Inlet.
Instead she ordered a shrimp and rice dish and a glass of white wine. While they waited for their orders he talked a bit about his publishing ventures and some of the authors he had met. He was a bit surprised that when the waiter brought Valerie's food she immediately took the initiative and ordered more items for herself: a plate of French fries and a glass of beer.
Maurice had been to enough lunch and dinner meetings to know that most of the important business got done later in the proceedings when the main course was done. Yet he noted that for a couple of minutes Valerie ate in silence and seemed not to hear the few remarks he made.
Then the reason came to him. He knew something of her hardscrabble life hustling on the streets and he guessed,
she probably hasn't had a decent meal in a while.
As if reading his mind, she suddenly stopped and said, "Oh, Maurice, I'm sorry, I sometimes go for a while without a real meal."
He noticed that she seemed genuinely embarrassed; he saw a brief break in her tough demeanor.
Maybe she fakes some of that toughness.
"That's all right, I understand," he said.
"Yeah, a lot of times, the best I get are those hot dogs from Nathan's on Eighth Street. Those things - well, let's just say that they get tiring very fast."
A little later they were having more wine while Valerie indulged in a piece of chocolate cake. She asked him, "All right, Maurice, what exactly is it that you see in me? You want me to write about my experiences on the street I suppose."
"That could be among the possibilities. I was thinking of either fiction or a nonfiction treatment, maybe both. We'll have to see."
"You don't really know anything about what I have to do, do you?"
"No, of course not, I never said I did." He tried to read her expression, and he could see defiance above an underlying sense of pain and anger. He decided to ask her, "Do you ever turn down clients, do you ever refuse to do what they ask?"
She leaned back and drank some more wine.
I should get another one of these - what would it be, the third? - but after all he's paying for it.
Then she answered, "Sometimes I do, Maurice, but sometimes you get too far into a thing to back off. It's like - well, like any other job, sometimes you do what the work requires, get it?"
After a pause she continued, "I'll admit this to you - I wouldn't tell anyone else - but I'm afraid out there. All of the women there are afraid. If something happens to us no one knows or cares."
Maurice thought,
I would care
, but he didn't say it; he assumed it would strike a false note with her.
Valerie said, "There are other, call them smaller issues. Like some of these johns, these customers, well sometimes they're not the most, ah, hygienic people around. The way some of these guys smell, they way they taste . . ."
Maurice thought,
taste? Oh, of course.
"You know what's even worse?" she said, "Maybe it's the things they say."
Maurice wanted to know about that. He figured it was Valerie's choice to describe it or not. She said, "They come to me, they pay me for whatever they want, a blowjob, anal sex, they want to paddle my ass, they want me to paddle
their
ass - and then they have the nerve to loathe me, to think I'm a dirty little object they have used."
She was very intense now and Maurice felt some anxiety;
I wouldn't want to get on her wrong side.
She said, "I don't judge their urges, everybody's got some, but if you hate yourself, you hate what you want, don't you dare blame me for it. I'm not your problem."
"It's projection of course," he offered.
She laughed and said, "So what do you think of my manifesto? You see where it's coming from now?"
Maurice had read one of the mimeographed copies that she had created herself and had been selling on street corners in recent months. Eventually he would publish an edition from his own company but at this point in 1967 he wasn't quite sure what he thought of it. "There's some interesting ideas in it, but . . ." He decided to offer an opinion, "Maybe you're own experiences are not a fair way to judge all men."
