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On April 9, 1936 in Ventor, New Jersey, Valerie Jean Solanas was born to Louis and Dorothy Bondo Solanas. Her father sexually molested her; sometime in the 1940`s her parents divorced, and Valerie moved with her mother to Washington, D.C.. In 1949 Valerie`s mother married Red Moran. Rebellious and stubborn, Valerie disobeyed her parents and refused to stay in Catholic high school; in response her grandfather whipped her.

At the age of 15 in 1951, Valerie ended up on her own. She dated a sailor and may have gotten pregnant by him but still managed to graduate from high school in 1954. She was a good student at the University of Maryland at College Park, supporting herself by working in the psycology department`s animal laboratory. She did nearly a year of graduate work in psychology at University of Minnesota.

After college, Solanas panhandled and worked as a prostitute to support herself. She traveled around the country and ended up in Greenwich Village in 1966. There she wrote "Up Your Ass", a play " about a man-hating hustler and a panhandler. In one version, the woman kills the man. In another, a mother strangles her son."

Early in 1967 Solanas approached Andy Warhol at his studio, the Factory, about producing " Up Your Ass", as a play and gave him her copy of the script. At the time Warhol told the journalist Grechen Berg: " I thought the title was so wonderful and I`m so friendly that I invited her to come up with it, but it was so dirty that I think she must have been a lady cop.... We haven`t seen her since and I`m not surprised. I guess she thought that was the perfect thing for Andy Warhol."

Also in 1967 Solanas wrote and self published the Scum Manifesto. While selling mimeographed copies on the streets, she meant Maurice Girodias of Olympia Press (French publisher of Lolita, Candy and Tropic of Cancer) who gave her an advance for a novel based on the manifesto. (With this $600 cash she visited San Francisco.) During this time Ultra Violet read the Manifesto to Warhol who commented, " She`s a hot water bottle with tits. You know, she`s writing a script for us. She has a lot of ideas."

Later, in May 1967, after Warhol had returned from a trip to France and England, Solanas demanded her script back; Warhol informed her he had lost it. Apparently, Warhol had never any intention to produce Up Your Ass as either a play or a movie; the script was simply lost in the shuffle, thrown into one of the Factory`s many stacks of unsolicited manuscripts and papers. Solanas began telephoning insistently, ordering Warhol to give her money for the play.

In July 1967 Warhol paid Solanas twenty-five dollars for performing in "I, a Man," a feature-length film he was making with Paul Morrissey. Valerie appeared as herself, a tough lesbian who rejects the advances of a male stud with the line that she has instincts that "tell me to dig chicks---- why should my standards be lower than yours?" Solanas also appeared in a nonspeaking role in "Bikeboy," another 1967 Warhol film. Warhol was pleased with her frank and funny performance; Solanas also was satisfied enough that she brought Girodias to the studio to see a rough cut of the film. Girodias noted that Solanas "seemed very relaxed and friendly with Warhol, whose conversation consisted of protracted silences."

In the fall of 1967 at the New York cafe, Max`s Kansas City, Warhol spotted Solanas sitting at a nearby table. He instigated Viva`s insult of S