Trainwreck: The Women We Love to Hate, Mock, and Fear . . . And Why (13 page)

It was cruel treatment, especially for an artist of her caliber. Because Billie was not just good; she was not just great. She almost single-handedly created an art form. Before Billie, there were singers, and there were jazz musicians. Billie legitimized the idea of the jazz singer as a great musician in her own right: not someone propped up
in front of the band, but a living, breathing, improvising part of it, someone whose recomposition and reinterpretations of the melody were as essential as any horn solo. No matter how sick she got, or how hard it was to sing, when she sang, genius happened. And it never happened the same way twice.

Critics are still figuring out exactly how she worked. Some of the things she did with tempo had no antecedent in Western music, outside a few experimental pieces by Chopin. Biographer Donald Clarke says that only Louis Armstrong was a predecessor, and only Ella Fitzgerald was a peer. Other than that, every jazz singer whose name we know—Sarah Vaughan, Nina Simone, Chet Baker, Frank Sinatra—came after Billie, and was directly influenced by her. More than that, the archetype she created in the public consciousness, the tormented female singer who exorcised her demons on stage—because she was adamant that she actually
felt
everything she sang, every time;
“When I sing, it affects me so much I get sick. It takes all the strength out of me,” she said—is found in every corner of music. She’s responsible for everyone from Erykah Badu and Lauryn Hill to Tori Amos and Fiona Apple, from Amy and Lana to Joni and Janis.

Still, when Billie gave her historic Carnegie Hall concert in 1956—the moment some historians point to as the official canonization of jazz, the moment when it stopped being low entertainment and became high American art—she had
to do it under the guise of tragedy and comeback, with a white man standing next to her and reading excerpts from
Lady Sings the Blues
so that the audience could appreciate how her appeal sprang from her hard-knock life.

And the knocks got harder. The public-rehabilitation circuit was not kind to Billie.
Lady in Satin
was dismissed: It wasn’t “real jazz.” She started to get too sick to make it through the sessions, too nervous to get through them without drinking more and more. Her voice hollowed out to a rasp. As for the book, well: Though Billie’s pain was fine to look at, hearing about it was another thing: Did she have to sound so
angry
?

“There is so much of human suffering, sensitivity and music in her voice,” wrote Harry Lieb, an attorney who worked on the book. “The book, therefore comes as a disappointment, as if in her autobiography she had written to put herself in the worst possible light.” He called it “a series of gripes, with a few scandal items,” and noted that “the cuss words get very tiresome when they are repeated over and over again.”

Lieb believed that Billie’s story should “evoke sympathy, pity, and understanding,” but he apparently had trouble sympathizing with the woman herself. She failed to provide him with the tragedy he was looking for. Reviewers were no kinder: J. Saunders Redding, of the
Baltimore Afro-American
, sniffed at Holiday’s “tragically disordered background,” and, once again, called her out for cussing:
“This
reviewer is no squeamish prude, but Billie Holiday and William Dufty use language so raw with so little warrant that there were times when this reviewer got ‘real sick.’ ” And these were the reactions she’d gotten from people who believed she’d even
worked
on the book—plenty of people believed her white ghostwriter had concocted it wholesale, rather than working from interviews and dictation—or who believed the story therein. Which plenty of people did not. The attempted rape was singled out as particularly unbelievable. Her biographers had to prove it, several times over, before it entered the official story of Billie Holiday’s life.

“My book is just a bitch,” Billie wrote to Dufty. “Did you see that shit that man from my birthplace Baltimore wrote? He even said my Mom and Dad were stinkers for having me. I am sick of the whole goddamn thing. You tell people the truth and you stink.”

And so, she limped on. Getting sicker, getting more infamous. Letting the rumors fly and the people stare, having to prove herself all over again every time she opened her mouth:
“I’m not supposed to get a toothache, I’m not supposed to get nervous; I can’t throw up or get sick to my stomach; I’m not supposed to get the flu or have a sore throat,” she said. “I’m supposed to go out there and look pretty and sing good and smile and I’d just better. Why? Because I’m Billie Holiday and I’ve been in trouble.”

And she stayed in trouble, until she was in that hospital
bed, under police guard, and by that point so famously sick that she got to read the early write-ups of her own death in the paper.
BILLIE HOLIDAY IS DYING OF DOPE AND ALCOHOL ADDICTION
, read one headline.
BILLIE DOOMED
, ran another.

“We’re all doomed, baby,” she told the nurse. “What the hell else is news?”

And then she was gone, at forty-four-years-old, giving a suitably tragic ending to the world that had loved her pain.

•

Death seals the deal, for trainwrecks. It grants them their glamour. It makes them, not worthy of attention—they always have that; it’s our primary weapon against them—but worthy of love. And that love, I would submit, is half nostalgia and half relief. It’s the care we give, once we’re not being asked to care any more.

For all our fetishization of celebrity death, the fact is, we can usually see it coming from miles away. When Billie Holiday got mixed up with heroin
in the 1930s, it might have been a mistake, something she got into without knowing she couldn’t get back out. But, in the twenty-first century, no one is under the impression that a crack or heroin addict is destined to live a long, healthy life. Everyone has heard the AA definition of alcoholism—“progressive, incurable, and fatal”—often enough to know that a history of DUIs or public intoxication doesn’t speak well for that person’s health. And everyone understands that mental illnesses like
bipolar disorder or schizophrenia, or even severe cases of depression, can and do kill people.

We understand all of this, that is, until it comes to female celebrities. For them, we persist in enjoying the spectacle: turning Anna Nicole Smith’s dazed, drug-addled public incoherence, or Whitney’s unconvincing denials, or even Amy Winehouse’s progressive and frightening emaciation, into our own campy entertainment, sarcastically branding it “magical” until the day of the overdose, when it finally stops being funny.

We typically reserve the death penalty for people who have committed extremely serious offenses. If these women have to pass away before we can forgive them, or even like them, it would stand to reason that they’d done something wrong. Yet, in almost every case, they were their own worst victims. To starve in public, or to stay in an abusive relationship, or to need alcohol or prescription drugs or street drugs to make it through the day, is a statement of pain, not of hostility. They terrorized us by being themselves.

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.