“I guess what I’m asking is, was it unusual behavior for her to go to the museum?”
“Yes. Sort of. I don’t want to say ‘yes’ because she is always doing unusual things. Was this unusual behavior? Yes. Was unusual behavior a matter of course? Yes. I’m not just talking about the crazy outfits and the weird videos. She doesn’t act like a usual person. Even though she never acts normal, you get used to her, and you can predict how she’s going to act or respond to something. This wasn’t predictable behavior. Molly is just as crazy as everyone thinks she is, but at the same time, she is the most level-headed, clear-thinking, sharp person I’ve ever met. No one is like her. And she is nice to everyone. Can I tell you something off the record? And you won’t print it?”
“Yeah, sure. Like, legally, I’m not going to be allowed to print something you say is ‘off the record.’ My editor will listen to this recording. The fact-checker, I mean, they’ll listen to it.”
“Okay. Well, off the record: I’m pretty sure [Molly] had some deep dark secrets she was keeping. I wouldn’t be surprised if there was this huge part of Molly and her life that no one knew about, that she somehow kept hidden, and she just decided to go do that instead. Or it consumed her, without her being able to stop it.”
Nix told Applebaum she had given Taer this strange, almost rambling, conspiracy theory–esque quote, and Applebaum asked her to put it on the record, for reasons Nix still doesn’t understand.m Taer and her editors included the quote in the Tribune article. It was the starting gun for a thousand more conspiracy theories, opinion pieces, blog posts, and status updates. It became one of the most enduring sentiments of the early days of Molly Metropolis’s disappearance.
It also makes Nix seem unbalanced and spastic; she’s not. Nix has a steady temperament. She’s more inclined to recede than to babble. Molly’s disappearance brought out an extreme in her.
As Taer turned off the voice recorder and awkwardly started to leave, Nix burst into tears. She cried into the corner of her blanket, apologizing and trying to stop. When she couldn’t, she hid her face and asked Taer to leave. Instead, Taer grabbed Nix’s upper arm and squeezed it. Nix hated when people said “don’t cry” to try to comfort a crier, and she expected that out of Taer. According to Nix, Taer subverted expectations and said, “You keep on fucking crying for as long as you need to. I’m just going to hold onto your arm like this.”
They sat together for a long time. Nix cried, and Taer held her arm. Taer wrote that she was attracted to people who expressed their deep emotions honestly and even more attracted if the person wasn’t usually effusive; it made Taer feel special. She latched on to Nix that afternoon.
Nix captured Taer’s attention, but Molly Metropolis captured her imagination. Taer wanted to know everything about Molly’s possible secret life. Her pursuit of Molly Metropolis began that night, perhaps even in those quiet moments while Nix wept and she held her arm. Taer’s Molly Metropolis idolatry was already the embodiment of pop star fixation, but with the added hook of a mystery, it developed into a full-blown obsession. Over the next few weeks, she investigated Molly’s secret activities and the deeper mystery of her disappearance. As Taer sunk into her obsession, she too became progressively more secretive, until she also disappeared on a rainy weekend in Chicago.
* * *
* “Molly Defies the Sophomore Slump,” last modified December 23, 2009; www.nytimes.com/2009/12/23/arts/music/molly-defies-sophomore-slump.html?ref=music.
† “Outrun electro” is a genre of electronic music, sometimes called synthwave, based on 1980s synthesizers played in pulsating, repeating arpeggios. Outrun had a popular following before Molly adopted the style for many of her tracks, but she was the first to introduce the sound to Top 40 pop.
‡ In his review of the album, Los Angeles Times music journalist Sam Lambert called Molly’s sound “dance pop for strange and unusual kids who see ghosts,” referencing Winona Ryder’s famous line in the 1988 movie Beetlejuice: “I myself am strange and unusual.” Before writing his review, Lambert must’ve seen Molly’s first music video, in which Molly’s look consciously echoed Ryder’s in Beetlejuice.
§ From my interview with Nadia Piereson, one of Molly’s backup dancers.
ǁ Cyrus based this description on something Nix said to him in an e-mail, according to his notes, but I have no more clarifying details to offer. It will be important to remember Holly Golightly tried to trick people into thinking they knew her by presenting a false version of herself. —CD
a Here, Molly’s riffing off of two moments from Debord’s book Society of the Spectacle: “Being a star means specializing in the seemingly lived,” and “The consumption celebrity superficially represents different types of personality.” —CD
b “Eulogy for Molly Metropolis,” last modified January 10, 2012; www.vulture.com/2012/01/eulogy-for-molly-metropolis.html.
c ValerieVamp22, January 22, 2010 (2:32 a.m.), comment on aPOPcalypse_hereine, “I Can’t Seem to Find Molly”; www.youtube.com/watch?v=C0XL44DcJeeN
d “Why Did Molly Disappear?: Molly Metropolis’s Final Illuminati Mission Complete,” last modified February 6, 2010; vigilantcitizen.com/musicbusiness/why-did-molly-disappear.
e Chicago Tribune, “Review: Molly Metropolis at the United Center,” by Bran Hollis Brooks.
f Cyrus K. Archer didn’t have a chance to fill in the missing links in this account of the day Molly Metropolis disappeared. Molly gave Nix her phone just before the museum trip earlier that day. Molly often left her phone with Nix when she didn’t feel like dealing with incoming calls or messages, so Molly getting rid of her phone didn’t seem unusual to Nix. According to Molly’s dancers and friends, Molly was an unreliable phone user and often forgot to return calls and texts, which was part of the reason that they weren’t particularly worried when she didn’t return messages on the day she disappeared. According to Nix, she discovered Molly was missing when she went to Molly’s hotel room to “give her the heads up it was time to go to sound check,” but found the hotel room empty, and Molly nowhere to be found. Then Nix began her small-scale search. —CD
g Nix believes it “must’ve been Kelly [Applebaum],” who tweeted this. Applebaum believes it “must’ve been Gina [Nix].” Any number of the dancers and PR support staff knew or had access to Molly’s Twitter password, and her account had been previously hacked at least once. Despite vehement denials, Nix is the most likely suspect because she was in possession of Molly’s phone at the time. The final suspect is, of course, Molly Metropolis herself. The police used the fact that no one would step forward to claim authorship of the Tweet as possible evidence that Molly had chosen to disappear willingly.
h When I interviewed Taer’s family members, several of them told me slightly different versions of this story. I choose to include the version told to me by Taer’s paternal grandmother, Louisa Collins Taer.
i In my conversations with Nix, she added: “Let’s be real—Cait probably wanted to fuck me, and was having emotional problems about it. Maybe I was having emotional problems about wanting to fuck her.” —CD
j Cyrus taught English and creative writing at Oberlin College while Caitlin Taer matriculated there. She didn’t take any of Cyrus’s classes, but they almost certainly crossed paths. Archer taught in the same departments Taer studied in. —CD
k To put together Taer’s discovery of Molly Metropolis’s disappearance, Cyrus drew both from Taer’s Tumblr posts and her notebook. —CD
l As with this conversation, all further dialogue is taken from Caitlin’s various audio recordings, captured by her iPhone’s built-in voice recorder and saved to her computer.
m Although they spoke to Cyrus, neither Kelly Applebaum nor anyone on the SDFC public relations team returned repeated calls and e-mails for comment on this decision or any other part of the book. My best guess as to Applebaum’s motivations here is that the SDFC team assumed a conspiracy theory controversy would help sell Cause Célèbrety and eventually Cause
Apocalyptic. —CD
Inside her blanket fort on her mom’s couch, Nix snuggled her laptop and watched her quote about Molly’s possible secret life go viral. She liked seeing her name pop up thousands of times. She felt like she was doing something while the rest of the world stagnated around her. However, she hated that she liked trading on Molly’s name. She called Taer and asked her not to use their interview again. Taer agreed, and asked Nix to come visit her.
Nix wanted to see Taer but refused to go into the city where Molly Metropolis’s touring staff waited impatiently for marching orders. Their anxiety made Nix anxious, so she texted with them to keep updated on the gossip and goings-on, but didn’t participate in their stilted social gatherings. At Nix’s insistence, Taer returned to Flossmoor to walk down the snow-caked dirt paths of the park that bordered their junior high school, where Nix used to get high with other field hockey players during the off season. Taer and Nix had a lot to catch up on. They found, as they shared stories about terrible roommates and awkward sexual awakenings, that they had grown more similar since high school. They had both come out during college, and they bonded over their high school friends’ similarly shocked reactions.
When they got cold, they stopped at the Flossmoor Station Restaurant and Brewery, a refurbished train station with hearty portions of bland Midwestern cuisine and windows that rattled each time a Metra train pulled into the working station next door. The girls took off their mittens and, clutching pints of the excellent house Hefeweizen, moved on to more intimate conversation. Taer told dirty little stories about parties that developed into groups of students making out and having sex during Oberlin’s cold, dark Winter Term. Nix talked about fake I.D.s, Chicago clubs, and mounds of cocaine.
Eventually, Taer turned the conversation to Nix’s relationship with Molly Metropolis and the fallout from her disappearance. Taer recorded the discussion,* even though Nix asked for their chat to be off the record. Taer assured Nix that she wouldn’t give the Tribune her quotes “but if they ask me to get something specific from you, and I already have it, I can just ask you about it. Plus, there are laws to protect anonymous sources, if you want to become an anonymous source.”
“I think they would guess my identity,” Nix replied, a little angrily. “But fine. And you have to buy my drinks, then.”
Taer was using the Tribune as a scapegoat during that conversation. Her editors at the paper never solicited her for more quotes, and she knew she wouldn’t be asked for them. Taer recorded the interview for her own purposes. Regarding this recording, she wrote, “I’d better keep track,” though she avoided explicitly spelling out her motivations for doing so.
As they ate potato skins and drank a second beer, Taer and Nix intensely debated whether or not Molly Metropolis had disappeared as a publicity stunt. Taer thought Miranda Young might be trying to kill off Molly Metropolis, to make way for a new character or to return as herself: “So, ‘Molly Metropolis’ disappeared, and that’s part of the canon of the story of Molly Metropolis that Miranda Young is writing—like, the end of a narrative, a cliffhanger, sort of an end. Then she comes back as like, the Thin Black Duchess or something. ‘Molly Metropolis Is Alive and Well and Living Only in Theory.’ ”
Letting the David Bowie reference go by without comment, Nix disagreed. “She wouldn’t do that to her family and they don’t know where she is.”
“Maybe they’re in on it.”
“No, they are really freaking out and I’ve met them—they’re not like Molly.”
“I mean, you’re the one that knows her, obviously, but are you telling me she wouldn’t pull some Brian Slade–style shit?”†
“She would but I don’t think she did, and if it was a game she wouldn’t wait so long to come back,” Nix said. “Besides, ‘Molly Metropolis’ isn’t some Ziggy Stardust thing. She’s not so split personality about it. Calling herself Molly is like me calling myself Gina. It’s really just a nickname.”
“Really?”
“Really. It’s so much less fucked up than you think it is.”
“Okay.”
“You want it to be fucked up,” Nix said.
“No,” Taer replied, defensively. “I don’t care what it is. I just want to know about it.”
This conversation, and similar ones that followed, were no more meaningful than a speculative blog post; Taer’s investigation into Molly Metropolis’s disappearance truly began several days later, on January 24, when Nix asked Taer if she wanted to visit Molly’s last hotel suite.
By the end of January, SDFC was ready to give up the ghost. They had already let go of most of the touring staff, but continued to pay for Molly’s hotel room at the Peninsula because Applebaum had been using it as a PR office and media war room. Applebaum stayed in Chicago for ten days waiting for Molly Metropolis to reemerge, but ten days was her limit. She needed to return to Los Angeles. Applebaum called Nix, asked her to clean out Molly’s hotel room, and offered her an entry-level position on one of SDFC’s publicity teams. Nix declined the offer because she wanted to stay in Chicago, but agreed to clean the hotel room so Applebaum would keep her on the payroll until the end of the month. Nix had signed several non-disclosure agreements assuring SDFC she wouldn’t reveal details of Molly’s private life to outsiders. Nix says she shouldn’t have invited Taer to join her, but at that moment she didn’t care.
The Peninsula Hotel is only half a block off the Miracle Mile, a short walking distance from the Millennium Station and the nearby Millennium Park. Nix rode the Metra Electric Line from Flossmoor to the Millennium Station at Randolph Street, while Taer waited for a Green Line L train in the cold, shivering in her jeans, wood-heeled boots, and coat. Taer transferred from the Green to a Red Line train to downtown Chicago.
They met in the lobby of the hotel. With their cheap coats and messy hair, they did not blend with the Peninsula’s upscale clientele,‡ but they walked confidently through the carpeted halls of the top floor, linking arms at the elbows and flirtatiously bantering, while a concierge led them to Molly Metropolis’s penthouse. When they walked into the suite, giddily tripping over a pair of ankle boots, they saw that all the rooms had been ransacked and Molly’s belongings were scattered across the floor. Taer and Nix assumed the mess was the result of a police investigation, but they were wrong.
The CPD had combed through the suite and confiscated anything that could be evidence of some kind of wrongdoing or could hint at a reason why Molly would willfully disappear, but they had done so neatly and without haste, according to both the officers’ written reports of the investigation and my interviews with the same officers after the fact. They had taken Molly’s laptop, her cameras, and several articles of clothing, but they hadn’t been concerned with finding “clues” among Molly’s shoes and clothes because Molly’s hotel suite wasn’t officially a “crime scene.” In fact, at the time, the CPD believed that Molly had probably vanished willingly, either as part of a publicity stunt like Taer had suggested or as a way to escape the pressures of public life.§
Nix started sorting through the clothes, folding and packing them neatly. Taer couldn’t fold the shirts well, and Nix quickly became frustrated with her messiness. She sent Taer away from the neat piles, tasking her with collecting all the far-flung items. Taer began gleefully exploring the hotel room mess. She sidestepped a pile of lingerie and peeked into a closet, looking for Molly’s stage costumes. She didn’t find them; they had been stored at the venue and shipped back to SDFC’s offices in New York. The costumes Molly officially owned would eventually be turned over to her family, who in turn donated them to the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum in New York City, where they were featured in a special exhibit which debuted at the 2012 Met Ball. Her best outfits and accessories—her LED glasses from the “Light Brite” video, the black leotard with metallic sleeves she wore in the “New Vogue Riche” music video, all of her insane Johan Van Duncan Haute Couture shoes—are now enshrined and on display.
Wi
th permission from Nix, Taer took off her shirt and put on one of Molly’s. he shirt fit poorly, so she tried on another. Nix joined in. They tried on tight black jeans, Marc Jacobs black blazers, vintage leather ankle boots, Jeffery Campbell wedges, studded black leather vests and coats, T-shirts by Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen’s clothing line The Row, tights with holes up the back of the thigh, Chanel pantsuits and see-through shirts made of vintage lace. They took pictures with Nix’s phone. Nothing fit; Nix’s hips were too wide, her feet were too big, and her torso was too long. Taer’s breasts were too large to fit into Molly’s shirts and the pants were too small. When they finished trying something on, they folded it and packed it into one of their cardboard boxes, which Nix would eventually ship to Molly’s family.
They packed for hours, drawing out the process by ordering a boozy lunch from room service. Eventually, and only half seriously, Taer started looking for hiding places. She searched for secret drawers in the desk and checked to make sure the mattress, sofa cushions, and pillows were plush, not re-stuffed with “money, drugs, or other secret things.” Then she went around the room, moving each painting to see whether a safe was hidden behind one of them. Some of the art on the wall belonged to the hotel; some of it belonged to Molly and traveled with her to each stop on her tour. Molly had a map of the original Chicago L system, a screen print of an island, and a screen print of a map of changes to the Chicago L system that had been proposed by city planner Daniel Savoy in 1962, but rejected by the Chicago Public Transport Subcommittee.ǁ
Taer didn’t find anything until she reached the screen print above Molly’s bed: the island, printed in a shocking pink ink, with several dozen tiny drawings of ships surrounding the coastline. The screen print was signed by “Antoine Monson.” Unlike the maps of the L, obvious depictions of Taer’s own city, which seemed normal to her only because she didn’t think about them hard enough, the screen print of the island seemed unusual. Taer asked Nix about it, but Nix only knew Molly liked it, not why she did. She suspected Molly was drawn to the shipwrecks, represented by those tiny ships dotting the shoreline. Shipwrecks meant error, disaster, and horror; those were the kind of monstrosities that captivated Molly. She clung to frightening things. Nix knew that, but she didn’t know anything about the screen print; she didn’t even know the island’s name.
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