Bitch

by Elizabeth Wurtzel

  It is also a barely recalled footnote to Margaux’s life—a detail that would merit a complete chapter in anyone else’s—that legislation in the state of California that was passed to make it easier to convict those accused of “acquaintance” or “date” rape was named for Ms. Hemingway. This previously unacknowledged crime—which was used in Lipstick strictly for titillation purposes; like most Dino De Laurentiis movies this one was not an attempt at consciousness raising—accidentally and ultimately made its star a martyr. And perhaps, one could argue, it was Lipstick, not Women’s Studies 101, that served as the most potent weapon for imposing certain parts of the feminist agenda on a mostly apolitical public.

  In time, Margaux’s friends and family could take this shred of a thread and try to find in it some real moral fiber. They might try to make it seem as if Margaux had planned it this way all along. They could point to a California law that bears her name and insist that she was a feminist force. They could pretend not to notice that most of her life was whatever she stumbled upon—she was conscripted into her modeling career, it was not some Cindy Crawford-style scheme—which is how it is when you spend most of your life loaded. They could let the waste of it all speak for itself: they could see that the true life story is almost always more poignant than the ordained narrative. Or they could try to find reason in her life, pretend Jean-Paul Sartre had never invented Existentialism, had never explained the nauseating emptiness inside every being, this big hollow that all of us fight so hard against, wrestling with a phantom because it is all we can do to make this big nothing bearable. But suicides are the people who have given up the battle: they deny reason. They are tired and they want to go to sleep.

  And no one else can leave it at that. Suicide has a cult following: the fan club of self-destruction resulted in the 1981 Rolling Stone cover of Jim Morrison in one of his famous lizard-king, enlightened-savage poses with a caption that read, “He’s Hot. He’s Sexy. And He’s Dead.” Whatever strange and fanatical response the men who died too young inspire, the books on Jim, Jimi, James and Kurt combined don’t come close to the amount of literature that is devoted to reinventing, reassessing, and redeeming Marilyn. Add Sylvia, Anne and Janis to the list and the library almost doubles. As interesting as these women—gifted with the force and talent and beauty to turn their emotional disasters and chronic hysteria into performance art—were in their short lives, there is no way they could have anticipated the sweet hereafter. These women, rich with interpretive possibility, become mental-health pornography once dead.

  Madness has always had great visuals, its ugly affliction often creating a freakish beauty when it preys upon and plays upon the young and lovely and charmed and blessed, inflicting the bipolar image of the female grotesque: the luminosity of beauty is matched only by the stupefaction of insanity, the opaque eyesore of sadness and despondency, a mixture of prettiness and pollution so striking and inexplicable that it is as hypnotic and paralyzing as a skyscraper burning down, so strange that mystification becomes inevitable.

  Logic would seem to dictate that there could be nothing comely or charismatic about a woman in extremis, mid-breakdown, caught in an emotional car wreck, but the illogic of fact has made the history of beautiful women coextensive with the history of miserable, depressed women. Certainly, most men will insist that nothing is less alluring than a woman in a straitjacket—even a very beautiful woman is just a lunatic at that point, insanity acting as the great leveler—and the seizures, vomiting, drooling, tics and assorted side effects of Haldol and other medications are a putrid sight on a pretty face, an anaphrodisiac. The first mention of a woman beset by sorrow concerns the matriarch Leah, in the book of Genesis, and a presumption of beauty deficiency has become her unfortunate legacy. The text refers to Leah as “tender-eyed,” which is interpreted as an idiom for lachrymose, since the Bible never concerns itself with ophthalmology unless it is to point out that someone is completely blind. Because of her sorry disposition, Leah is thought to be unattractive; because Jacob was in love with her younger sister Rachel, but was forced to marry Leah—by a ruse pulled by the girls’ father to ensure that his elder daughter was wed first—Leah is thought to be pitiful. But in spite of this particular indignity—not merely a mercy fuck but a mercy marriage, one so steeped into Jewish traditional memory that in Orthodox weddings the bride always wears a veil across her face, which she pulls back before the end of the ceremony to prove that she is “Rachel” and not, heaven forfend, the undesirable “Leah”—nowhere in the text does it describe Leah as ugly or even homely or plain. And yet lack of looks seems to be the aspersion cast upon this older sister over time, as if the only explanation for her depression or downbound spirits was a failure to attract suitors—as if unhappiness were an affliction of the unbeautiful. Yet despite the popular axiom that beauty = happiness, ugliness = misery, both the cinematic treatment and the cultural mythology of the madwoman and the sad woman have almost invariably turned her into a sex object, a dead and voluptuous artifact of some misunderstood other time, a creature whose tragedy is not that she was in pain, not that she was gifted, not that she was mistreated, but rather that she was an exquisite bauble that the world destroyed.

  I have always found the gargantuan dichotomy between what we find sexually arousing in the abstract and who we actually want to sleep with to be, frankly, frightening—and I assume this gap will only grow as time and technology make all sorts of fantasy lives possible and accessible. I find this particularly disturbing when the persona of the depressed woman is involved, because in real life, while plenty of men have a Jesus complex and want desperately to rescue the sad-eyed lady of the lowlands immortalized in song, for the most part most guys who are emotionally stable enough to actually be purposefully involved with a woman breaking down have the good sense just to keep away. Most guys do not want to get involved with a girl on fire—the ones who do seem only to want to add fuel to the flames, but very few seem interested in finding a bucket of water. Relationships as therapy are rare, and yet the romantic possibilities are such that they are constantly dangled before us in popular culture as a rather wistful, visible temptation—love as refuge from a world gone mad in Hiroshima, Mon Amour; love as refuge from a world so false in sex, lies, & videotape; love as refuge for madness itself in Sid and Nancy.

  In the Jean-Jacques Beineix film Betty Blue, the sexy and seductive fleshpot of the title—played with French exoticism and zaftig ease by Béatrice Dalle—makes her way through a hysterical crack-up, a natural disaster of the mind that blows through her with the amorality of a dust bowl, brutal and fatal without even meaning it. The breakdown is manifested by inexplicable, almost whimsical episodes of violence and self-destruction—the kind that make people around her say, But a minute ago she seemed just fine—that escalate in severity, until, finally, Betty picks up a scissors and pokes out her right eye. By the end of the movie, she is buckled down, bandaged up and shrouded in white sheets in an insane asylum, her beauty useless, her condition repellent.

  But this ultimate ugliness does not nullify the film’s overall effect, its illustration of the reigning attraction of the madwoman. Up until the lockup, and until her final destruction, Betty is a force who keeps her lover Zorg—a hapless nice guy, a housepainter she tries to turn into an author, a man who has no idea what to make of Betty—and everyone in the movie, and everyone in the movie theater watching, in her complete thrall. The film has such a relentless and overwhelming feel, Betty’s personality seems to demolish and dominate everything in her wake, that it starts to seem perfectly possible that the whole world is being held hostage to this woman’s moods and turns—even if it is just a movie. I know plenty of people who walked out of Betty Blue, or just plain hated it, resenting its reverent, adoring, painstaking attention to a woman they saw as an immature, indulged nutcase. But people who like it love it, and watch, fascinated, as Betty lives on impulse—trapped by her own insanity, she appears to be completely free: she defenestrates one household
appliance after another from a beachside bungalow, adds lighter fluid and a match, creating a bonfire of ironing boards and crock pots, à la plage; then she tosses a kerosene lamp into the emptied cottage, and sets it ablaze as well; she dumps paint on Zorg’s boss’ car in protest of some undetectable slight to Zorg’s undetectable genius; she stabs a woman who is rude to her in the breast with a fork.

  But the most riveting of Betty’s tantrums is in her bestial, raw sexuality, the way it runs rampant through her relationship with Zorg, the way its purity and strength threatens to destroy the woman who contains it and everything that comes near her. Betty Blue opens with one of those blunt, unforgiving European sex scenes—no music, no flattering lights, Betty’s saddlebags jiggle a little, Zorg’s male frontal nudity is completely uncloaked—the kind of scene you’d never see in an American movie, the kind that really does make you want to go home and fuck the first person you see. And so from the start, the film promises to flesh out the fantasy of the madwoman as an animal in the sack, the notion that it is her unhinged erotic drive that is making her so crazy, with Dalle’s bad-mood beauty the plot’s best accessory, her astonished blue eyes, lush black hair, carefree fleshiness, and high cheekbones on a sucked-in face making her impossible to resist.

  Betty Blue, by design or not, is actually an updated variation on the 1964 film Lilith, with Jean Seberg as the mental patient in the title role and Warren Beatty as a directionless war veteran who finds some purpose in the employ of a luxurious, liberally run insane asylum whose director believes the patients are delicate geniuses damaged by a coarse, cold world. (This enlightened atmosphere seems to have been modeled on R. D. Laing’s theories of curing the mentally ill by allowing them the freedom to act out.) Beatty falls for the blonde caprices of the promiscuous, seductively distraught Lilith—wild-eyed Seberg wears flowery sleeveless dresses and swallows broken glass on a dare—who is both too clever and too much of a draw for Beatty, and the whole mess ends with her suicide and his ruin. Other cinematic portraits of a woman breaking down have been similarly sexy or, at any rate—perhaps because few actresses are not physically blessed—the afflicted heroine is always beautiful: Think of Natalie Wood in Splendor in the Grass, Catherine Deneuve in Repulsion, Carrie Snodgress in Diary of a Mad Housewife, Ann-Margret in Carnal Knowledge, Tuesday Weld in Flay It As It Lays, Gena Rowlands in A Woman Under the Influence, Diana Ross in Lady Sings the Blues, Ronee Blakley in Nashville, Demi Moore in St. Elmo’s Fire.

  In 1965, Julie Christie won an Oscar for her performance in John Schlesinger’s Darling, a portrait of a troubled model who is fashionably mod against a backdrop of swinging London, when Mary Quant and David Bailey and the Rolling Stones defined the times, when even Americans flocked to see Blowup and Alfie and Look Back in Anger, when England still dreamed. (Christie’s role actually inaugurated the era of the British blonde—Anita Pallenberg, Marianne Faithfull, Vanessa Redgrave, Jean Shrimpton—with her beautiful hair, bad choices in men, and attendant addictions.) The movie is eager and excited, Christie an avatar of London in its butterfly burst: the dowdy, dingy, corrosive crust of war scraped away at last, the fustian pretense of the infallibility of all things British blown away by the smarmy sex and cheap tricks of the Profumo Affair. This is London with libido rising, every angry young man master of his blooming, blushing English rose: British heterosexuality has not shown such buoyant good health since Pamela Harriman decamped for Paris back in 1948.

  The booming, heady cultural atmosphere of Darling is important to keep in mind because its presence is practically a character in the movie, it all feels so fun and rich and fabulous and micro-minied and motorcycled that it could easily distract us from the empty, sinking sorrow that is the real story of the leading lass’s life. Which is, of course, precisely the point: if the delights of decadence can distract an audience that is only inhaling its secondary smoke, imagine what hedonism can do for the pretty girl in the picture who is getting a direct hit. With so much to live for and so much of so much, Darling’s heroine soon goes wrong in all the usual ways, and we are meant to understand that her wrecked romances and unhappy relationships and sense of alienation are the result of her beauty and the opportunities it gave her, the places that it took her. (Maybe Margaux Hemingway should have seen this movie, whose premise is confirmed by the book Model, Michael Gross’s best-selling expose of the mannequin trade—and its many young and beautiful casualties.)

  Whatever preposterous notions were played out in Betty Blue, and however much the movies prettify depression, Darling’s thesis seems to be borne out by real life, and by a world that exposes the pretty young things to so much more, invites the beautiful woman to venture forth so much more readily, takes her to a place that her mother told her she shouldn’t go, and makes her believe that she is safe, that she is so gorgeous and people adore her so much that nothing could possibly go wrong. Good looks in moderation and within the dictates of convention are always a good thing: a girl who is cheerleader-pretty will be popular and blessed with boyfriends, having the time of her life in high school, when no one else is. It is a girl who is exquisite, or preternaturally sexy, or possessed of a talent that makes her beautiful—it is a girl who is special, radiant, a sensitive artist, a delicate flower; it is a girl whose loss to the world would be viewed as the greatest tragedy; it is the prized China doll who has the most reasons to be careful—she is precisely the one who is most likely to mistake her own delicacy for invincibility.

  The roster of renowned women who had bouts with depression, who were treated for mental illness, who had chemical dependencies, who tried suicide, who died by their own hand, or who lived out their lives between mood swings and crying jags, between bad spells and psychotic episodes, a sinking feeling always chasing them down—and whose charisma, charm, beauty, style, sex appeal and talent almost never gave out—is legendary: screen dream Greta Garbo, screen gem Natalie Wood, screen goddess Rita Hayworth, sex goddess Marilyn Monroe, sexpot Dyan Cannon, tragic beauty Vivien Leigh, noir star Gene Tierney, Godard gamine Jean Seberg, dance innovator Isadora Duncan, ballerina Gelsey Kirkland, it-girl Edie Sedgwick, debutante designer Tiger Morse, stifled southern belle Zelda Fitzgerald, French songbird Edith Piaf, singer/junkie Marianne Faithfull, jazz vocalist Billie Holiday, rock chanteuse Nico, schlock chanteuse Karen Carpenter, Nordic-boned and American-bred model/photographer Lee Miller, great grande diva Maria Callas, Mexican painter Frida Kahlo, lobotomized actress Frances Farmer, newscaster Jessica Savitch, royal immortal Princess Diana, country star Tanya Tucker, dead model Gia Carangi, battered model Esmé Marshall, cokehead model Janice Dickinson, English writer Jean Rhys, Algonquin wit Dorothy Parker, several women who were married to Jackson Browne, Robert Lowell or Ted Hughes—and these are just the ones that are most obvious or emblematic.

  To me the most intriguing example of an unraveling glamorous life—perhaps because it keeps going on, an extended near-miss experience—involves excess and insanity and eccentric behavior, along with a lot of physical illness, more than it does depression. Still, it’s a mess. If beauty were the cause of ruin, and degree of beauty defined just how bad things could get, Elizabeth Taylor’s crazy life would be granted the grace of inevitability. It’s hard to remember back to the gorgeous girl on horseback in National Velvet, to the romantic beauty caught in a kiss with Montgomery Clift in A Place in the Sun, to sex-starved Maggie in a slip and in a bad way in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, to the classy call girl driven to doom in Butterfield 8, to the generous Yankee lass who marries into the Texas ranch life in Giant, but rest assured, God gave Elizabeth Taylor one of the all-time awe-inspiring faces, blessed her with the kind of beauty that seems like it ought to have meaning, a surface so perfect that it must have risen from something very deep. With luscious, lustrous mahogany hair, skin that was the last word on alabaster and inexplicable eyes—no one had ever seen orbs so purple, so blue, so violet—Taylor seemed to be otherworldly, and had she never become an actress, never played such strong, difficult parts, sh
e probably would have become one of those forbidding girls, a delicate piece of crystal too fragile to touch.

  But at this point in her life, which has been punctuated by brushes with death and accidents with chicken bones and wedding ceremonies and divorce proceedings and rehab stays, with visits to Michael Jackson’s Neverland and attendance at Luke and Laura’s General Hospital wedding, all that elegance is gone. “My life seems very supercilious to people who only look at it on a superficial level,” Taylor told Barbara Walters in 1977, sliding into the casual, glossed-over malapropisms that seem to be the lingua franca of celebrity—a symptom of stardom and its infantilizing privilege that could easily make one believe that, if there is a hired hand to polish every toenail, then there must be some script girl in Mr. Goldwyn’s office assigned to speaking proper English. Elizabeth Taylor is such a star that it seems perfectly reasonable that she ought to be able to delegate sleeping, breathing, eating, drinking and speaking to some assistant: her existence seems hugely exhausting. She is one of the few people who were not imprisoned in a concentration camp who could call themselves survivors without making me want to puke. I’m not sure what she has survived—fame, I guess—but it seems like something.