Trainwreck

by Sady Doyle

  Which makes death an extremely satisfying solution. These women, the trainwrecks, have offended us by being unfeminine, by being other than what a “good” woman should be. In Whitney’s case, or Billie’s, by being black women making good in a white man’s world. In Marilyn’s, by being overtly sexual in the buttoned-up 1950s. In Amy Winehouse’s case, by being a girl with the hard-living, brawling lifestyle and foul mouth of a tough guy. They have offended us by succeeding despite the countless social structures and conventions that try to prevent women like them from even existing: by being wealthy, famous, public, without even bothering to obey the rules of quiet acquiescence that we try to drum into little girls’ heads from the day they’re born.

  But death neutralizes them. It removes them from the public eye, definitively and permanently. And it shows, at last, that they really shouldn’t have been who they were: shouldn’t have taken those risks, done those things, said those words, lived that life. By dying, a trainwreck finally gives us the one statement we wanted to hear from her: that women like her really can’t make it, and shouldn’t be encouraged to try. That she really wasn’t normal. That she didn’t belong in our world.

  A live trainwreck is an affront. A dead one is confirmation: No one can be that beautiful, that sexual, that successful, that free. Something has to go wrong; she has to pay, with her life, for breaking the rules. Breaking these women to the point of public emotional or mental collapse doesn’t do enough to keep women scared of being like them, or of free and equal participation in the public sphere. We really do need a few heads to roll, to make sure that the message is clear. It’s an ugly message, and a frightening one. Which is why it makes sense that we deny it, and wrap it up in sentiment; we cloak the harshest, and least permissible, expression of misogyny with the name of forgiveness, and of love.

  Back to Princess Diana, and the world’s most widely attended funeral. Underneath all the flowers and tears and pop songs, something infinitely darker was occurring: In the four weeks directly after her death, suicide rates among British women in Diana’s age group rose by 45 percent. The same thing happened after Marilyn, and her eroticized death: The overall U.S. suicide rate rose by 12 percent. Monroe’s case is typically explained as “suicide contagion,” the fact that suicidal people have a greater tendency to act when a suicide is in the news. But Diana did not kill herself. She simply died, and so did women like her, by their own hand.

  Put forth death as the ideal condition for troubled women—as something that makes them beautiful, forgivable, important—and plenty of troubled women will die. Not because these women are more gullible or foolish than anyone else, but because, in sufficiently dire straits (at the bottom of addiction, or depression, or simple loneliness) death already looks like an easier and better solution than continued pain and helplessness. Suicide-prevention experts know this. It’s why they plead with journalists, over and over, not to make death look more appealing or glamorous than recovery.

  Sober people understand that addicts and alcoholics are probably dying, but so do many addicts and alcoholics themselves; either the illness has them so tightly that they can’t believe recovery is possible, or their lives (like Billie’s life) are already so painful that death is no longer as frightening as it would be to a happy person. Neurotypical people understand that depression or mental illness result in suicide, but so do people with mental illness. The question is whether, knowing this, they still decide to take the medicine and make it through the day.

  For those people, life is always the harder sell. Most therapies are focused on selling it, and even in the best of conditions, the best therapies can fail. They are infinitely more likely to do so when all the patient has to do is turn on the TV to hear that she will be heaped with scorn if she recovers, and with tributes if she gives in.

  The cost of death’s glamour is dead women—not only the ones we play on the jukebox and read about in the papers, but the hundreds or thousands whose names we don’t know. We continue to fill the air with angelic dead girls and demonic sick people, with immortal suicides and washed-up old women. And when women die, we deny all responsibility: We loved them all along.

  To forgive the dead, to immortalize the dead, is not forgiveness. It’s one more sign of how impossible forgiveness is—of telling women that, once they’ve fallen, their punishment will never end. It is a way of telling a woman who breaks the rules that she cannot stand for long. That, sooner or later, the house always wins. Whatever you try, there are more of us than there are of you, and there is only one ending.

  And that ending, of course, is another beginning. After we’ve buried the trainwreck, and forgiven her everything, we have to deal with the sad fact that she can’t entertain us any more. The death of the trainwreck, and the orgy of public compassion that follows, is also just a very loud, noisy process of denial and distraction that takes place while the media trains its sights on the next lucky girl.

  Part II

  THE TRAINWRECK: HER OPTIONS

  5

  SHUT UP

  Here’s a serious question: When was the last time you, an average person and/or consumer of celebrity media, thought about Tara Reid?

  If you’re like most of us, it’s probably been a while. Years, in fact. And yet, in the early 2000s, Reid was a genuine, no-fooling member of the A-list. She was a major player in the American Pie series, had a small but significant role in The Big Lebowski, and was cast in several major teen entertainments (Josie and the Pussycats, Van Wilder, something called Urban Legend that appears to be a horror film and is most notable today for its intensely fin de siècle cast of Reid, Jared Leto, and Rebecca “the Noxzema Girl” Gayheart). At the height of her reign as Youth Culture royalty, she was engaged to its fearsome God-Emperor, Carson Daly of Total Request Live.

  When she fell, she fell hard. The Daly engagement ended. She began to be known as a “party girl,” one of the era’s many code words for “promiscuous” and “drunk.” Reid leaned into this, hosting a new variant on E!’s nightlife-around-the-world show Wild On!; it was called Taradise, it lasted for one year, and Reid would later say that it was “probably the stupidest thing I ever did … I didn’t know it was going to ruin my career.” Which was reasonable, because when other women had hosted a show with the same “go to a city, check out the nightclubs” premise, their careers had not in fact been ruined.

  Humiliating as any of this may have been, it was also not the most personal or cruel reason that people had for hating her: By 2006, Tara Reid was mostly spoken about as a medical freak show, a collection of mutilated body parts and hideous scars. Her downfall came through a red-carpet “nip slip” (cousin to the “upskirt,” the “nip slip” is the practice of taking semi-topless photos of a woman whose boob has popped out of her dress, under the pretext that breasts are inherently newsworthy), which revealed that her areola had been stretched out by breast implants.

  “I was smiling like a fool and people were snapping away. When I realized it, I cried and begged the photographers not to print it, but it was everywhere,” Reid said. “I was on the Web sites as having the ugliest boobs in the world.”

  Before long, stories about Reid’s “botched” plastic surgery dominated all discussion of her. It wasn’t just the breasts: Her stomach, which similarly had liposuction scars and looked a bit rippled (she says she had a hernia) was also the subject of vehement, widespread disgust.

  These were relatively minor, human blemishes, the sort you would expect to find on a body formed of malleable flesh instead of heated, hormonal fantasy, but you wouldn’t know it from reading about them; Reid was routinely framed as existing somewhere between Frankenstein’s monster and the Elephant Man on the scale of medical anomaly. CBS News called Reid’s breasts “deformed”; People ran a feature about whether Reid was “ ‘moving on’ from the botched breast augmentation and stomach liposuction that left her disfigured in 2004.”

  Reid was quoted in both those pieces. This was the final stop on her
humiliation tour: She had to give interviews about her surgery, in which she publicly repented for the fact that she—a starlet, a sex symbol, a woman whose job it was to look thin and conventionally pretty—had gotten medical help to look thin and conventionally pretty.

  “It wasn’t really the pictures that hurt me. The comments hurt me. People wrote, ‘Look at that flabby old actress,’ ‘She used to be so hot,’ ‘She’s gross.’ It’s like, gosh, come on. I’m not fat,” she told People. Predictably, the commenters of the world did not come flocking to Tara Reid’s doorstep to offer heartfelt apologies. Perhaps more significant was the quote she gave CBS News, on how having a body that had become a national spectacle (old, freakish, blemished, unsexy) affected one’s career as an actress who mostly played young, beautiful seductresses. The surgery had only been undertaken to help her career; she thought her breasts were uneven, thought her stomach wasn’t flat enough, and, well, “I figured, I’m in Hollywood. I’m getting older. I’m going to fix [it].” And yet, afterward:

  “I couldn’t wear a bikini,” she said. “I lost a lot of work.”

  And that was it. At the peak of the Tara Reid Era, it seemed that people would never stop talking about her. She had ruled youth culture, as a sex symbol; she had ruled tabloid culture, as the epitome of ugliness. But when we ran out of things to hate Tara Reid for, we stopped thinking about her. After her body and personality had been rendered hyper-visible, invaded and dissected and ripped apart in every way imaginable, in the end, Tara Reid just sort of … disappeared.

  Silence and invisibility are a familiar end point for celebrity trainwrecks. It’s not just Tara Reid who vanished; the same cycle repeated itself, even faster, for Vanessa Hudgens, who was perhaps the most visible face of Disney’s TV empire next to Miley Cyrus, and the lynchpin of the hugely popular High School Musical series, until her private nude photos were leaked—she had taken them for her boyfriend; someone else got hold of them, as “someone else” seems to keep on doing—and she was dropped from the franchise.

  Hudgens didn’t even have a period of infamy and reality-TV notoriety before we dropped her into the oubliette. She had a much younger fan base; she was a Disney employee, and therefore expected to be a model of sexless virtue; she was a woman of color, a biracial actress with a Filipina mother, whose sexuality was already more closely monitored, and more suspect, than the white and blond Reid (or, for that matter, Cyrus). Hudgens didn’t get dragged around through the mud, as her white peers did; she simply went from ubiquitous to invisible, pretty much overnight.

  These women still exist, and they still work in entertainment—Reid’s presence is one of the recurring jokes of the Sharknado series, and Hudgens has grabbed roles in indie movies like Spring Breakers, where her acting has actually been fairly well received—but their star power has long since dissipated in a cloud of dirty jokes and negative headlines. Somehow, they just stopped being part of the conversation. Some women, like Britney Spears and Amanda Bynes, have their silence imposed upon them, by parental conservatorship. Even mainstays of the trainwreck industry, big attractions like Lindsay Lohan and Paris Hilton, have become less visible over time. The “fame” of a trainwreck is usually quick-burning; like a cat toying with a mouse, we trash these women for just as long as they have an entertaining amount of fight in them, and then, we get bored.

  Yet this is not our first crop of disappearing girls. And the state of disgrace that befalls most celebrity trainwrecks—the metaphorical “disappearance” that comes with a sudden drop-off in fame—is actually not the worst thing that can happen to a woman. Alongside their stories, there is also a confusingly large number of female culture creators—smart, exceptional female artists, some of them actual geniuses—who have, quite literally, disappeared. As in, “from the face of the Earth.”

  Connie Converse, for example, has been called “the first American singer-songwriter.” She lived in Greenwich Village in the 1950s, and recorded self-written ballads (often in her friends’ living rooms) that borrowed heavily from folk and pop tradition, but skewed it toward sharp, often funny depictions of her own emotional landscape. It was the same approach that Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen would become generational icons for adopting, but she did it in 1954, a decade before anyone had heard of either man. And it’s a good thing she recorded those songs—and copyrighted them; her brother got the rights—because, by 1961, she believed she was a failure, and moved back home to Michigan, where she worked as a secretary. By 1973, she was depressed, and drinking heavily. And in 1974, she wrote a few letters to her family members saying that she wanted a fresh start, got into her car, and left town. She was never seen again. Her body of work was only discovered when a friend who’d recorded her in the ’50s played a tape on a radio show. In 2004.

  Somehow, that’s not the only time a female genius’s biography has ended with the woman in question evaporating into thin air. Consider the strange case of Barbara Newhall Follett, a child prodigy who published two critically acclaimed novels by the age of fourteen. The Saturday Review of Literature called her work “almost unbearably beautiful”; her book reviews (yep, she wrote those too) inspired H. L. Mencken to tell her parents that “you are bringing up the greatest critic we heard of in America.” By the age of sixteen, her family had lost everything in the Great Depression, and she was working as a secretary. By twenty-three, she was in a rocky marriage; at twenty-five, she had a particularly bad argument with her husband, left the apartment carrying thirty dollars in cash, and (you guessed it) was never seen again.

  In cases like Follett’s and Converse’s, one tends to expect the worst. (And one expects it, particularly, for Follett, whose husband did not report her missing for two weeks.) But these women didn’t necessarily disappear into death. They may have simply disappeared into something even grimmer: everyday, anonymous existence.

  Converse may have been the first female musician to disappear, but she’s not the only one—indeed, she’s not even the only one in folk music. Judee Sill was the Next Big Thing, a Laurel Canyon wunderkind who appeared on the cover of Rolling Stone; when she died of a drug overdose in 1979, her friends were shocked, largely because she’d gone missing so long ago that they’d assumed she was already dead. Shelagh McDonald recorded two popular folk albums, then disappeared until 2005, when she gave a brief interview to say that she’d been working in department stores and living on welfare; she had been so sure that her popularity would “burn out” that she never thought to pick up her royalty checks.

  Then, there’s Vashti Bunyan, a rising British pop star who went missing for the last three decades of the twentieth century. She only reappeared in 2000, due to the fact that her self-written 1970 album Just Another Diamond Day—a resounding critical and commercial failure at the time of its release—was considered a masterpiece, and was selling for around $2,000 per copy. None of which went to Bunyan, of course; she had no idea she had become famous until she Googled her own name. In the intervening time, she’d been a housewife. Her children knew Diamond Day existed, but were forbidden to listen to it in her presence; the failure had been so painful that Bunyan herself couldn’t bear to hear the work that made her name.

  Women disappear because they’ve been wrecked—because we’ve hated them for long enough to get bored of them. But they also disappear due to being misunderstood, or condescended to, or ignored. They vanish into irrelevance, but they also disappear into poverty, or addiction, or domesticity, or day jobs. The natural tendency is to see these disappearing girls as titillating unsolved mysteries. But they weren’t spirited away to never-never land; they were talented professionals whose careers were put on hold for decades, or for the rest of their lives. And, in the face of the sheer number of stories like this, it’s hard to interpret any one story as an individual tragedy or mystery.

  The more reasonable explanation is that the historical lack of support for women as artists or public figures—the dismissal and condescension they face, the pressure to do the “r
easonable” thing and put marriage and family first, the lack of cultural context that would make supporting and promoting them a political act—has resulted, not only in women avoiding the arts or being shamed out of them (I confess, I do think) but in a landscape where even relatively famous and ambitious women were so unimportant that they could disappear without a trace.

  Which brings us to the idea that silence is not just an unlucky outcome, for a woman. It may be the natural outcome—as far as many people are concerned, the ideal outcome—of being female in a sexist world.

  Which is to say: In the present day, silence may be the end of a famous woman’s career. But in the story of women as a whole, silence has always been the beginning: The culturally prescribed and enforced mode of female life, the thing every woman’s work had to fight through or around in order to exist. As Virginia Woolf put it, in her much-misquoted and much-bumper-stickered adage: “Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.”

  A Room of One’s Own, of course, is a book entirely devoted to female silence; it sets out to answer the question of whether there were women in literature, and, if not, where they’d all gone. And, in that book, Woolf wrestled with the fact that the history of women’s writing—one of the most permanent, and most obvious, ways that women have managed to make themselves heard in public—is also a history of women who have tried not to be noticed or seen as writers: