LETTER: TPS, "Valerie Solanas," to "MOB c/o Mark Zussman."
Solanas, Valerie. Typed postcard signed, “Valerie,” to “MOB,” addressed on verso to “MOB c/o Mark Zussman,” and forwarded to “H.W. Zussman,” September 5, 1977; one leaf, recto only.
Valerie Solanas writes to “MOB” with a strange, detailed declaration about needing to survey another person for her book. Solanas, the radical feminist author of SCUM Manifesto who garnered fame for her attempted assassination of Andy Warhol in 1968, was diagnosed after the attempt with paranoid schizophrenia and this postcard suggests that perhaps she did not recover from all of her symptoms. In full:
9/5/77
MOB:
It would really be good for my book if I could get proof of what Pacheco's doing. The only way I can think of to get the
proof is to have a hidden camera (maybe an infra-red one that can photograph thru walls) with a zoom lens photographing
everything that gets punched into the computer, as well as the puncher.
Valerie
“MOB,” to whom Solanas addresses this postcard, seems to be Solanas’s name for the men financing her book, about whom she spoke to The Village Voice in an interview on July 25, 1977:
V: I’m writing to what I call the Mob, and I do not mean the Mafia…by the Mob, I mean the Money Men. The Money Men are going to publish my book, and I’m in the process now of getting things straight with these men. The Contact Man. He’s one man that I write to -- the Contact Man for the whole mob. I send my messages to him and he disseminates them to the various appropriate people…The Contact Man is simply a man whom I address my letter to the total Mob. I don’t write to…
S: It’s not the Mafia…
V: I told you. The Money Men. Just the Money Men, that’s all. They know who they are. I don’t have to get specific. There’s one Contact Man. I write to him.
…
S: Have you met?
V: On the phone, yeah, and through letters.
(So: no.)
However, she said they were going to meet “in a few weeks in person,” while the postcard was sent six weeks after the interview’s publication.
Solanas also gives information about the never-published book she refers to in the postcard: It is called Valerie Solanas, and she is receiving a hundred million dollar advance payment from “the Money Men” to whom she writes through the “Contact Man.” The book would be about “everything, that it won’t be an autobiography, although it’ll include discussions of the shooting and related events, that most of it will be general, that among many of things I would prove the statements in SCUM Manifesto….I’ll deal very intensively with the subject of bullshit.”
Solanas asked the Voice to publish contact information for the “Contact Man,” a request they refused on legal grounds. It is possible that the “Contact Man” was Zussman as she said that she “[wrote] to—the Contact Man for the whole mob. I send my messages to him and he disseminates them to the various appropriate people.”
Smith, Howard, and Brian Van Der Horst. "Valerie Solanas Replies." The Village Voice [New York City] 1 Aug. 1977: 28.
"Valerie Solanas Interview." Interview by Howard Smith. The Village Voice [New York City] 25 July 1977: 32.
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