In the movie Wolf, Jack Nicholson plays a polite editor forced into one frustrating situation after another with a chilly, unpleasant Michelle Pfeiffer, cast as a spoiled heiress who cops a streetwise attitude that Nicholson finds simply insufferable. “I think I understand what you’re like now,” he says, exasperated after one affront too many. “You’re very beautiful and you think men are only interested in you because you’re beautiful. But you want them to be interested in you because you’re you. The problem is, aside from all that beauty, you’re not very interesting: you’re rude, you’re hostile, you’re sullen, you’re withdrawn. I know: you want someone to look past all that, at the real person underneath. But the only reason anyone would bother to look past all that is because you’re beautiful. It’s ironic, isn’t it? In an odd way, you’re your own problem.”
Margaux Hemingway seems to have spent the last twenty years thinking that she should have been able to do something with herself because she was beautiful, when in truth, on the evidence, she was capable of absolutely nothing. Here was a simple girl, who should have led the simple Idaho fishergirl’s life and found some version of the happiness to which we entitle most Americans, and which most seem to accept. Beauty carried her away from her Idaho home, and by the time the good looks had taken their leave, Margaux could not find her way back. “She was just a gentle soul who got lost in fame and fortune,” her friend, chiropractor Caren Elin, said.
So she retreated to that refuge for the dull-witted, the world of New Age therapy, a brain-dead insult to the very Native American culture it is supposed to revere, and she found herself saying things like, as she told People in 1994, “I needed to go inside and clear the blockages, because nothing was coming to me, no jobs, no work.”
She thought the problem was “blockages.”
In August 1996, nearly two months after Margaux Hemingway’s life-drained, lifeless body had been discovered, the Los Angeles County coroner reported that she had died from a deliberate overdose of phenobarbital, a sedative and occasional epilepsy treatment that also happens to be one of the few orally imbibed drugs that—when taken in excess—can be relied upon to induce death, and not just coma or vomiting or a cry for help. In fact, phenobarbital is so dependable that it was also used in the mass suicide of the Heaven’s Gate cult less than a year later with a 100 percent rate of effectiveness. Nevertheless, when Margaux’s friends and family were faced with such irrefutable evidence of her desire to die, they seemed to think there must have been some clerical or bureaucratic error. They, too, seemed to think the problem was “blockages.”
“If she were going to commit suicide, everyone would have known,” her sister, occasional actress Mariel Hemingway, told Vogue, rejecting the autopsy report. “She would have made a big flipping deal about it. I don’t even mean that as a bad thing, but she let people know. She was not suicidal at all. She was never in a better place in her life. She was physically in great shape and getting herself together mentally. She was only going forward.”
“At any other time in her life, it wouldn’t have been so shocking,” Mariel’s husband, Steve Crisman, concurred in People, pointing out that Margaux had been very involved with yoga and meditation. “This was the best I’d seen her in years. She had gotten herself back together.”
“No matter what the coroner finds, it’s a mystery,” said Stuart Sundlun, an ex-boyfriend, in Vogue, denying the possibility of suicide because Margaux had made doctor’s appointments for the coming weeks, and besides, “She would have left a note.”
“Her career was coming into fruition, she looked amazing,” added her friend Gigi Gaston, though the only evidence she gave of Margaux’ booming career was Gaston’s own desire to write a script with her.
As for whatever sense of peaceful well-being Margaux might have projected at the end of her life, while living in a single monastic room with unpacked boxes—cartons conveniently ready to go, a courteous act typical of suicides—I can only say: the calm before the storm.
Caren Elin, the chiropractor, might have been the only one to sense a serious problem, and that was only because it had literally been spelled out for her when, on the day of her death, Margaux Hemingway left Elin a message that was transcribed onto her pager. It was just two words: help me.
With the possible exception of Kurt Cobain—who was surrounded by too many people who were too fucked up to stick to any kind of party line and who was just too florid and exultant in the pursuit of his own demise for any pretense of life-love to be presented—it’s hard for me to think of any recent famous suicide who was not, for the record, completely happy, healthy and sane at the time of his death.
It was an accident; she just slipped; he lost control; these sound like excuses for domestic violence used on a triage nurse at the ER. Everyone falls; no one jumps. In fact, Gloria Vanderbilt maintains that her son Carter Cooper toppled off a roof because the medication he was taking made him dizzy. Had he been a government official, by now a theory would be making its way through the Internet about how he didn’t jump or fall—he was pushed, with evidence of an FBI cover-up of a CIA fuck-up vis-à-vis campaign contributions from Maoist Chinese factions and a paper shredder full of documents to follow. Or something like that. The White House, particularly Hillary Clinton, did such a good job of convincing people that Vince Foster was delirious with delight in his Washington post—save for some nastiness from those John Birchers at The Wall Street Journal—that his decision to go to Fort Marcy Park and shoot himself in the head was instantly fraught with suspicion and intrigue and doubt. “Of a thousand people, of those who might commit suicide, I would never pick Vince,” the First Lady was said to have declared, according to The New York Times columnist Frank Rich. Even after Whitewater special prosecutor Kenneth Starr declared Foster’s death an unequivocal suicide, the conservative lunatic fringe continued to play on-line sleuth. Christopher Ruddy, a journalist fired by the New York Post for refusing to abandon his Foster conspiracy theories, has since found employment at the ultraconservative Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, and has managed to turn his inquiry into the lonesome last moments of a depressed and despondent attorney into a book-length account called The Strange Death of Vincent Foster (which, amazingly, was published by the Free Press—definitely a haven for right-wingers, but probably not the kind of place that would publish The Turner Diaries or, I’d have thought, one man’s obsessive fantasy of government cabals).
Even Sylvia Plath, whose suicide had a certain poetic inevitability, has been portrayed as one hoping to be saved: British writer and literary critic A. Alvarez posited in The Savage God, his 1971 study of suicide, that Plath expected her course of death to be disrupted by the arrival of an au pair girl, a rescue that did not come off when the gas from the oven that killed Plath also drugged her neighbor downstairs, so that no one was conscious enough to get the door.
But beyond the world of bitter fame, in every encounter I’ve ever had with a person who was close to a suicide—particularly when the method was ambiguous, a drug overdose that could be construed as accidental—that person always insists, police report or coroner’s conclusion to the contrary, that the death was definitely a mistake, the girl obviously botched up her tranquilizer dosage, she was doing so well, she had finally made a turnaround, the new medication seemed to really be working, she had just bought a ticket to Venice for the Bienniale, she was coming to lunch on Saturday, she had paid off her American Express bill, we were going to get our nails done on Sunday: she was doing fine.
The main thing those close to suicides want to make clear is that she was doing just fine.
I don’t think that this is just a way to get themselves off the hook, to claim that they did not come running because there was nothing wrong. Frankly, if they offered these upbeat reports on the end of days because they wanted to shirk responsibility and stave off blame and make themselves feel less guilty, it might be an improvement over the emotional fallacy that they are in fact committing: these claims of the h
appy, healthy suicide show a lack of insight into the human condition, an inability to see that when you decide you are going to end it all, the relief brings a reprieve to your suffering for the remainder of your days, and you will be cheerful—gladdened, as no one else is, by the thought that the light at the end of the tunnel is the oncoming train. Knowing that you have finally found a solution to your sufferings—knowing that after the uselessness of est, of psychoanalysis, of behavior modification, of Anthony Robbins, of chakras, of crystals, of herbs, of Prozac, of Ritalin, of Valium, of Librium, of lithium, of drinking Blue Nun for breakfast, of recreational heroin use, of addictive heroin use, of AA, of NA, of Zen Buddhism, of graduate school, of meditation, of primal screams, of Dr. Laura, of Deepak Chopra, of plain old psychodynamic therapy—knowing that this fatiguing and futile search has finally yielded the resignation of failure, you will most likely at long last be in good spirits. The big sleep is a big reward.
That is why the most difficult, histrionic hysterics in life can become models of efficiency in death, assuming an air of clear-eyed order of the variety that makes people say, If only they had tended to their lives with such care, they could have been happy—completely obscuring the fact that, obviously, they just couldn’t. It’s like thinking a disastrously failed marriage can be saved just because the couple got along well for a weekend in St. Barts. For successful suicides, the death wish and its execution allows a refuge of reason that is not applicable to any other areas of endeavor. “Dying / Is an art, like everything else / I do it exceptionally well,” Sylvia Plath wrote in “Lady Lazarus,” a poem concerned with resurrection. “I guess you can say I’ve a call.” Despite the claim to dying “exceptionally well,” Plath did not have the foresight to put her papers in order (more evidence for partisans of the rescue theory) before her suicide in 1963, which is why her sister-in-law Olwyn Hughes, whom she didn’t much care for, ended up in charge of her posthumous career. This lesson was not lost on Anne Sexton, who attempted to kill herself nine times before getting it right, and complained to her psychiatrist that Plath’s suicide “took something that was mine—that death was mine!” In anticipation of her 1974 self-asphyxiation, Sexton made up a will, appointed her daughter Linda literary executor, prepared a folder with detailed funeral instructions, and settled her affairs. The tidiness of a planned death has even found its way into fiction, with Edith Wharton’s talent for the telling detail on display at the end of The House of Mirth, in the aftermath of tragic beauty Lily Bart’s fatal overdose of a soporific called “chloral”: when Lily’s thwarted lover, Lawrence Selden, goes to her rooming-house digs to sort through her things, steeling himself for a disarray of debts, “[t]o his surprise he found that all the bills were receipted; there was not an unpaid account among them.”
Unlike those who use suicide attempts as cries for help, those who are serious will do all that they can to conceal their intentions from anyone who might get in the way. They will buy plane tickets they never plan to use, make leg-waxing appointments set for dates long after rigor mortis will have set in, and enroll in courses on flower arranging that have nothing to do with pushing up the daisies. They will not, as Mariel Hemingway believes, “make a big flipping deal about it.”
For the first time in their lives, they will be discreet, subdued—they will be fine.
In some ways, the nonsuicidal cannot be blamed, and may even deserve commendation, for not understanding the mind-set of one who has abandoned all hope, of one who has made a commitment to death. None of us intent on living knows what it’s like on the other side of the proverbial little-tugboat-that-could that pushes us all along, that creates an expanse of optimism, a hope against hope, and provides a buffer against self-destruction that is so sturdy that even the most depressed and most cynical people are usually cushioned against any final gestures of ending it all. Almost everybody is holding out, often idiotically, for that 0.001 percent chance that things will get better, a belief so pervasive it must be genetically coded, or else many more people waiting for Prozac to work or waiting for the delirium tremens to subside would be found with a finger on the trigger and a gun to the temple. Most of us, embarrassingly enough, actually want to live, have a rage to live, and we don’t know the pandect of the would-be dead, can’t understand the counterlogic of their behavior.
“Suicides have a special language,” Anne Sexton wrote in “Wanting to Die.” “Like carpenters they want to know which tools. / They never ask why build.” If suicide is governed by its own laws and logic, the response to suicide has also been codified, the Talmudic twists of human behavior after such a death made practically predictable by sheer repetition, the contentious response of family members, the disputed cause of death, the stupid and crass things people say because they don’t know better: all of these reactions follow a pattern as certain, and as indecipherable, as the flight formations of birds.
My guess is that Margaux Hemingway’s passing will be recorded as the death at a young age of an aging beauty, it will be entered into whatever cultural logbook it is that lists similar casualties of too much too soon or too little too late, that lists the self-destructed geniuses of jazz and philosophy and jive and poetry, that lists the mad scientists and dissipated drunkards and vein-dead junkies and survivors of Auschwitz who could stand the world no longer and fashion models who didn’t know enough of the world to begin with. In the shorthand of this suicide sign-in sheet there might be mention that the cause of death is “disputed” or “denied,” but there is no room for the mythologies that accompany the premature, premeditated death of any famous person, long the province of book-length studies and doctoral dissertations.
And such detailed biographical analyses are themselves likely to be disputed or denied once the author’s worldview falls from favor. The lives of the dead are retroactively subject to change as the ideology of the times changes, so that a “difficult woman” can be reconstructed as a “misunderstood perfectionist,” and a “dumb blonde with big boobs and small talent” can be transformed into a “victim of the patriarchy,” and a “sensitive artist” can suddenly be downgraded into a “psychotic nutcase.” Every suicide, even in private life, gets this speculative treatment, note or no note, since nothing can possibly satisfy the search for meaning in a gesture stemmed in frustration. Suicide, like death itself, is of necessity not a coherent construct to anyone still living.
But a beautiful woman, especially one who fashions intrigue in such a way that she mixes mystery and access just so and becomes an icon in her lifetime, a living screen on which people project their fantasies about womanhood, femininity, art, insanity—a Rorschach test so convincing everyone believes that he alone sees the inkblot the right way—can become a monument to such a variety of meanings—to meaning itself—in the afterlife. Since suicide is often the act of a person who feels dehumanized and objectified, it seems a cruel irony that this self-inflicted death is likely to increase our tendency to view the buried woman as a symbol of whatever ills of society helped to construct the hothouse in which her personal woes flourished. As film critic Molly Haskell points out in her feminist exegesis From Reverence to Rape, a movie star’s suicide “casts a retrospective light on her life. Her ‘ending’ gives her a beginning and a middle, turns her into a work of art with a message and a meaning.” Death seems like an inflated price to pay for respect and integrity, but remember that until she killed herself, Marilyn Monroe was laughable—a luscious, lusty Hollywood parfait, her body parts viewed as much greater than her whole. The posthumous “discovery” of Marilyn’s untapped, unappreciated talent—her revision as feminist icon, as victim of a misogynistic, male-dominated system—which would seem to be a sign of progress is really just craven, cheap and self-serving—compensation for exploitation with more exploitation. It’s easy to mourn the dead, but it’s hard to help the living.
Even Margaux Hemingway, in her blank beauty and in her failure to have a life that meant much of anything, will eventually have those fragments s
ubjected to a coherent narrative: someone will find a message in her death, and, absurdly, a purpose to her life, unconcerned by the fact that if Hemingway could not feel and believe in it with enough conviction to stay alive, it would do her more honor to just accept this assessment and let it be. It is a little-known detail of Margaux’s life that her failed performance in Lipstick, one of the big-budget, big-gobble true turkeys that the motion-picture industry occasionally likes to grace us with—Anne Bancroft in this movie is even more shameful than Laurence Olivier in The Betsy—has been redeemed by some with time. Her character’s assumption of vigilante justice—when the law won’t punish a rapist because he was not a stranger to his victims, Margaux gets him with her very own gun—has been belatedly recognized by feminists as the first example of the avenging female heroine: Margaux as a girl with good aim in Lipstick could be the prototype for roles that would crystallize in more critically and commercially successful films like Thelma & Louise, Terminator 2 and The Long Kiss Goodnight.
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