Trainwreck: The Women We Love to Hate, Mock, and Fear . . . And Why (12 page)

The circumstances of her death, too, have attracted a fetishist’s possessive attention. Aside from the conspiracy theories (
Murdered by Kennedys! Driven mad by the CIA!
) showbiz-memorabilia collector Todd Mueller raved to
Vanity Fair
in 2008 about a cache of “amazing stuff” that was about to enter the Monroe market,
“including the half-drunk bottle of champagne she used to wash the pills down that night.” The Wikipedia article for “Death of Marilyn Monroe” (she and Princess Diana are among the few celebrities to have a
whole article specifically dedicated to the circumstances of their demise) shows an alarming specificity in reporting that Monroe was buried in
“the ‘Cadillac of caskets’—a hermetically sealed antique-silver-finished 48-ounce (heavy gauge) solid bronze ‘masterpiece’ casket lined with champagne-colored satin-silk.” Photos of Monroe in that casket circulate online, and show up in any Google search related to her death. So do photos of her on the autopsy table.

Finally, Hugh Hefner, the man who’d leaked Monroe’s nudes in the first issue of
Playboy
decades before the phrase “leaking nudes” was even in the lexicon—he became an instant celebrity; she had to apologize for the photos, and feared for her career—bought the crypt next to Monroe’s for $75,000. It was a gruesome joke, “sleeping with” the woman he’d almost ruined, and doing so without her consent—claiming her in death, as he’d claimed the right to exploit her in life.
“I’m a sucker for blondes and she is the ultimate blonde,” Hefner told
CBS Los Angeles
. “It has a completion notion to it. I will be spending the rest of my eternity with Marilyn.”

Meanwhile, the vault above Monroe’s went to Richard Poncher, a man who reportedly told his wife,
“If I croak, if you don’t put me upside down over Marilyn, I’ll haunt you the rest of my life.” She made sure he was flipped over in the coffin to accommodate his wishes. Or, at least, to accommodate them until 2009, when the good widow Poncher put his spot up for auction on eBay.
Bidding started at $500,000.

With the difficult woman inside removed, Monroe’s body—that much-remarked-upon, much-commodified object—was once again the property of the public. She belonged to us. We had the right to know. To see. To lie next to; to lie on top of. Who was to stop us?

And then, there is Lana Del Rey: The Dead Girl Come Alive. The girl who was, as her first album title informed us,
born
to die. Her entire career to date has been about compressing the trainwreck into a performance, a marketable archetype: lovely, “crazy,” drawn to the wrong men, and doomed to die young. In song after song—“Off to the Races” is a prime offender, but then, so is most of her first album—her voice ascends into a breathy, cooing, little-girl register (“Hi … who,
me
?”) that mimics Marilyn Monroe’s. (A register that, by the way, was not Monroe’s real voice, either—in audio tapes of interviews, she’s full-throated and assertive, and she descends by about half an octave. She
was
an actress, after all.) In the video for “National Anthem,” Del Rey actually plays Monroe, and in “Body Electric” she’s haunted by her ghost. In others she flips through tabloids that describe her own out-of-control downward spiral; she holds a gun to her head; she is a naked, bloodied corpse dragged from a Diana-esque car wreck; she’s drowned by her lover in a swimming pool. She writes songs about loving it when her man hits her, about getting mixed up with
a man who loves guns and heroin, about loving a man who “likes his girls insane.” About her own death (“When I get to heaven, please let me bring my man”) and sometimes her own suicide: (
“I wish I was deeeeead,” cue Marilyn voice,
“dead like you
”).

She’s said that elsewhere. In one infamous interview she told
The Guardian
, “I wish I was dead already.” She might not have meant it literally—most of Del Rey’s songs are predicated on sounding as if she died several decades ago—but it resonated, in part because it was the one line that seemed to sum up the entire Del Rey brand.

After all, she is right about one thing: Death is more glamorous than living in the wreck. After Winehouse’s death, for example, news outlets and social media were filled with thoughts about the tragedy of addiction, and Winehouse’s helplessness in the face of it. It’s substantially harder to find anyone expressing similar sentiments about the still-alive Courtney Love. And everyone remembers Monroe. They may also remember that she had a “rival,” the similarly blonde and curvy Jayne Mansfield, who was supposedly decapitated in a car wreck. (She wasn’t, but people liked the story.) Yet you’d be hard-pressed to find anyone who could name the third member of the so-called “Three M’s”: Mamie Van Doren, who is alive and well and posing for topless photos as an octogenarian in California.

But there is something else in play here, some older
narrative. It’s instructive to look to the music itself—to the genre and style that Del Rey, like Amy Winehouse before her, chose to signify an appetite for self-destruction.
“I’m a big jazz aficionado,” Del Rey told
Fader
in 2014. “Hopefully my next foray will be into jazz.” Or you could look to the name she moans, on “Blackest Day,” to epitomize her appetite for self-destruction:
All I hear is Billie Holiday. It’s all I play
.

She’s right about that, too. On some level, Lana Del Rey—like Whitney Houston, like Amy Winehouse, like any number of women—is just playing Billie.

•

Anatomy of a Trainwreck

BILLIE HOLIDAY

“I was playing a gig in New Jersey, walking across the yard, and I heard it over a loudspeaker,” said pianist Carl Drinkard. “ ‘Jazz singer Billie Holiday was arrested in her hospital room for possession of narcotics.’ I looked at Be-Bop Sam, a little trumpet player, and I said, ‘Lady’s gonna die.’ I knew it just like I knew my name.”

Drinkard was right. Billie Holiday—Lady Day, to anyone who knew her; Eleanora Fagan, at birth—was dying. She was an alcoholic, up to a bottle of gin a day, in the hospital
because her liver was failing. When a bag of heroin was confiscated from her room, she was arrested and quickly began going through withdrawal. Possibly, she could have survived the cirrhosis. Possibly, she could have survived the heroin withdrawal. But she could not do both. Her body couldn’t handle two crises at the same time.

Drinkard was not the only one planning around Lady Day’s death that day. Her ghostwriter, William Dufty, was trying to sell an article to
Confidential
, so that he could get her money to keep the heroin coming.
Playboy
and
Esquire
had already turned him down—Billie Holiday had been done to death; the topic had been exhausted—and
Confidential
would only give him a shot if he found some new angle.

“And I said to myself, new angle, new angle, new angle, and I was desperate, so I said, what about ‘Heroin Saved My Life,’ ” Dufty told Holiday archivist Linda Kuehl, “and he said terrific. They were concerned with one thing, that they get it in the magazine while she was still alive, and I couldn’t guarantee that she would live.”

She did live long enough to get the money, but not to spend it. The wad of fifty-dollar bills from
Confidential
was on her when she died, and it would turn out to be the only money she had in the world.

Billie Holiday, the most celebrated singer of her generation—hell, of
any
generation—had spent most of her adult life flat broke. For one thing, she’d been convicted of heroin
possession in 1947, and people with prison convictions could not play New York nightclubs that served alcohol. She was a New York jazz singer, and jazz singers made their living by playing nightclubs.
“I could play in theaters and sing to an audience of kids who couldn’t get in any bar. I could appear on radio or TV. I could appear in concerts at Town Hall or Carnegie Hall,” she said. “That was OK. But if I opened my mouth in the crummiest bar in town, I was violating the law.”

Record sales didn’t help, either. She had been singing since the 1920s, and recording since 1935, but until 1944, when she signed with Decca, she didn’t receive a cent in royalties. She performed for a flat fee. People could be tremendous Billie Holiday fans without ever once paying Billie Holiday to sing.
Articles “by” Billie Holiday, on the topic of her addiction—
“I’m Cured for Good”; “Billie’s Tragic Life”; “Can a Dope Addict Come Back”; etc.—were how she tried to make up for the income her actual addiction cut off.

If this is starting to sound familiar, it should. Billie Holiday was working the image-rehabilitation circuit, no different than Whitney doing Diane Sawyer. She wrote a memoir with Dufty,
Lady Sings the Blues
, that told the world she was sober and in a great relationship. (She was neither.) She recorded a “comeback” album with a more commercial pop sound
—Lady in Satin
, and in this particular year, “commercial pop” meant a full orchestra rather than a jazz band—that
was marketed as being based on her tragic life story. She even submitted to a Very Special Episode of television about her downfall and redemption,
The Comeback Story
, on ABC. She did everything we do now, but she did it for the first time.

Billie Holiday was born in 1915, at the very dawn of the modern era. Slavery had ended just fifty years prior; plenty of white people in the United States could still remember it, or had owned slaves themselves. And plenty of black Americans had actually survived being enslaved, even if they were children at the time. To give you an idea, the end of slavery was about as far removed from Billie Holiday’s birth as Beatlemania is from you today: If you’re under thirty-five, you might find it quaint, but your mother or grandmother probably remembers that first
Ed Sullivan Show
appearance like it happened yesterday.

And, as far as racial progress was concerned, it might as well have
been
yesterday. Racism still held an iron grip on the American consciousness and government. The world was still spectacularly cruel to young black girls. But Billie had to deal with all this, while also being one of the first entertainers to deal with the contemporary mechanisms of entertainment and celebrity, which came roaring and shuddering to life over the course of her career. Billie was, among other things, a test case: one of the first women in America
who was prevented from selling her gift, and forced to sell her pain.

In some sense, it had always been part of her appeal. As biographer John Szwed notes, of the three songs most associated with Billie Holiday in her lifetime, all were about violence, and two were about death. “My Man,” domestic abuse. “Gloomy Sunday,” suicide. “Strange Fruit,” a song about lynching that can suck the breath out of you to this day. It wasn’t as if she didn’t record light, sentimental love songs; there were dozens of them. But something about Billie made you remember the sad songs first: That weird, bruised voice, getting more worn and clawed-open every year, twisting its way through the songs. She always seemed to sing from the other side of something. As if pain were an ocean, a wide dark place she’d traveled; as if it were a country, and she had crossed the border and started sending reports back home.

And, yes, some part of that pain came from her life. From being born poor, to a mother who was young and unmarried, and never allowed to forget it. From giving herself an abortion as a teenager to avoid the life her mother had. From surviving an attempted rape by a neighbor—for which she and her mother were punished when they reported it.

“I’ll never forget that night,” she would later say, in
Lady Sings the Blues
. “It’s the worst thing that can happen to a woman. And here it was happening to me when I was ten.”
Her attacker led her into a brothel, claiming he was taking her there to meet her mother, and assaulted her after she fell asleep. Afterward, when Billie’s mother took her to the police station in Baltimore, the law came crashing down on them both.

“[Instead] of treating me and Mom like somebody who went to the cops for help, they treated me like I’d killed somebody. They wouldn’t let my mother take me home,” she said. “I guess they had me figured for having enticed this old goat into the whorehouse or something. All I know for sure is they threw me into a cell.”

Billie was deemed not to have sufficient adult supervision, torn away from her mother, and placed in an institution for wayward girls.

Later, there were her men, all of whom beat her. (One of them went at her with a whip for waking him up at night; one of them used to kick her in the ribs and stomach before she performed, telling her bandmates he had to
“beat the shit out of her so she sings good.”) There was the fact that she was a bisexual woman, in an age when most people didn’t even know the word “bisexual”; there were the white women who adopted her as a part of their rebellious phase and dropped her when it suited them. There was racism: national tours where she couldn’t reliably eat in restaurants or use public bathrooms, and shows where she was forced to wear blackface on stage because she looked pale under the lights, and club owners couldn’t risk the scandal that might
ensue if she were mistaken for a white woman performing with black men.

And then, at last, there was heroin. Which seems, in retrospect, less like a downfall than a logical outcome: Who could be surprised that a woman who’d experienced almost every variety of human pain found herself drawn to the world’s strongest anaesthetic? But still, it was the pain that Billie had to spend her life justifying, explaining, publicly defending, and, ultimately, just plain selling to an increasingly white, middle-class audience who were eager for a look at the much-mythologized underworld figure—the criminal, drug-addicted black jazz musician—and who drank up her music for a taste of how the other half lived.

“Everybody was happy about the crowds that used to flock to the theater. People were standing when the place opened in the morning. People were still standing for the last show at night. Everybody thought this was great, except me,” she said. “I thought people were just coming to see how high I was. ‘They hope I’ll fall on my face or something,’ I used to say.”