Feminism - There She Goes Again

Excerpted from
Bitch; In Praise of Difficult Women
By Elizabeth Wurtzel

The calm before the storm: most of us understand this reference to the peaceful, dark gray of the sky in the moments preceding thunder crack and lightning bolt and a cloudburst of torrents of rain as meteorology's metaphor for the way that when things seem the most stable and contained, it is often just a decoy for disaster, a respite nature grants as a cruel joke before a big huge mess, before the hangman shows up, before the bomb drops, before really bad things start to happen.

This simple and commonplace expression, the kind busy people use to describe a rare period of downtime, the kind of saying that seems so obvious, that reminds us to trust the silences no more than we trust the noise, that makes note of the way the signals we receive are often counterintuitive, that tells us not to get too comfortable with our assumptions-this stupid expression about the weather whose meaning and implications I never gave any thought to at all-suddenly struck me as rich and resonant when I realized it is completely wasted on friends and relatives of suicides.

It seems like every suicide was healthy, happy, sane and sanguine-a few problems, nothing serious-at least as far as the mourners are concerned.

Consider the case of Margaux Hemingway, a former model and failed actress, who, at the age of forty-one, on 28 June 1996, died in her studio apartment in Santa Monica, her body bloated beyond recognition, her hands folded over her nightgown as she lay tidily on her bed, her position that of a corpse in a coffin. The news of Hemingway's passing was mentioned on television bulletins or in wire-service stories in the newspaper almost as an afterthought, more a confirmation than an announcement. It was as if to say that if you wondered what had happened to that Idaho fresh pretty girl with big bones and baby blues and bushy brows and that whole seventies outdoorsy glamour thing, the one who appeared in a movie called Lipstick and seemed to be recovering from the humiliation ever since-if you wondered what happened to her and occasionally thought that she might be dead, then it turns out that you were right.

None of these early reports mentioned the cause of death, which was not to be determined by the Los Angeles County coroner-chastened to caution by the public relations fiasco of the O.J. trial-for seven more weeks. But even without the benefit of the autopsy report, it seemed obvious that this was a suicide: relying on only the meager details about Hemingway obtained through media osmosis, through a fame that had become as indelible and unnoticeable as invisible ink, I knew that nothing about Margaux's situation-nothing about being a woman in your forties living alone in one room without a view - sounded especially happy.

I remembered Margaux Hemingway as a thing of beauty, the model graced with a million-dollar contract-unheard of in 1975-to be the face of a fragrance called Babe, created by a company called Faberge, in what seemed like an effort at forging a female counterpart to Joe Namath's success as spokesman for an aftershave called Brut. I could envision the famous photograph taken of Margaux at Studio 54, appearing-either by design or by default-as the quintessential Quaalude casualty, a picture-perfect depiction of disco decadence with the spaghetti strap of her camisole insouciantly and sloppily slipped over her shoulder, her left nipple bared, her spaciness outspaced only by the blank stare of her kid sister Mariel in the background. (It is this picture of these two granddaughters of a Nobel Prize-winning author-along with the alleged careers of Sofia Coppola, Julian Lennon, Ashley Hamilton, Zoe Cassavetes, Charlie Sheen, the Phillips sisters Mackenzie, Chynna and Bijou, and the Wilson girls Carnie and Wendy-that makes me wonder why famous people continue to breed.) I could recall images of Margaux on the cover of Time and Vogue and Harper's Bazaar as the model of modern American beauty, the inside pages of her fashion spreads and face shots that frame her as the first supermodel: I'd seen them all in the dentist's waiting room during my prepubescent cavity-prone years, and they came back to me after her death as recovered memories that were not false so much as vague. But the images were vivid enough to remind me that for Margaux to have been in that glossy, glittery place-sheltered by the sweet, slippery safety that success at a young age secures for you when you are too busy to want it, and snatches away from you when you are finally desperate enough to need it - and now have her life, at forty-one, enclosed into one small room, was a sure sign of suicide.

I didn't, when I heard those first news reports, know the gory details, the twenty-eight-day detox at Betty Ford, the subsequent stay at a private clinic in Twin Falls, Idaho, or the fact that her death was a day shy of the thirty-fifth anniversary of her grandfather Ernest's suicide via Abercrombie & Fitch shotgun. I didn't know about the failed marriages, the declared bankruptcy in 1991 with debts of $815,900 and assets totaling $6,795. I didn't know about the posing in Playboy, the infomercials, the Psychic Friends' Network endorsements, the public claim that her grandfather molested her and the resultant estrangement from her family. I didn't know that she had changed the spelling of her name, nee Margot, to the more exotic x-variation, chosen for the wine her parents drank the night she was conceived, and I did not yet know that she had been named for Margot Ma com her, a character of Papa Hemingway's invention blessed with a face "so perfect that you expected her to be stupid." I didn't know that she dropped out of high school, that the only real job she'd ever held involved doing publicity for Evel Knievel, or that her first husband picked her up in the Palm Court at the Plaza Hotel on her first day in New York when she was just nineteen.

I didn't know that she had to lose forty pounds to be a model, that she did a half-hour television show for the BBC' in which all she did was talk to Lynn Redgrave about her struggle with bulimia, that she was traumatized by a skiing accident that caused her to gain seventy-five pounds from immobility. I didn't know all the New Age nonsense, that she consulted with a Cheyenne medicine man, that she learned the art of shamanism from the Northwest Coast Indians, that she studied the philosophy of the Hawaiian kahunas, that she hoped a chiropractor might cure her epilepsy, or that she ended up in jail in India for reasons that are unclear while on a trip to visit holy sites. I did not know that at her funeral, held at something called the Agape Church of Religious Science, an ex-boyfriend said, "I feel her, you feel her, she's in the wind." I did not know that she'd moved into the apartment that she chose to die in less than a month before, that the boxes were still unpacked. I did not know all the other pieces that make this seem like a life worth interrupting.