Andy Warhol once said, “Dying is the most embarrassing thing that can ever happen to you, because someone’s got to take care of all your details.”
I don’t recall where I first read it, but the notion has troubled me since I did. Death never was again a question of assets so much as one of liabilities. If I were to die tomorrow, just what would I leave behind?
I’m a wanderer, traveling the world on gypsy feet. I’d rather buy a new wardrobe than carry what I own—fashion’s the fastest expiring art anyway. One should never become attached to more than she could pack in the dead of night and carry under the cover of darkness. (With comments like these, why am I so surprised when people write me asking if I’m a spy?)
Seriously, though, nothing is irreplaceable. Except the mementos. Pictures and diaries and letters and lists and notes have followed me around the world in boxes. They’re still making their way to me now. Some from as far south as Peru and others as far out as Micronesia.
Imagine I died. What would people find?
THE MARILYN FILES
“You can tell a lot about a woman from the things she left behind,” opens the Vanity Fair piece about Marilyn Monroe. The magazine has dedicated much of its 25th anniversary issue to the gorgeous and tragic starlet.
The main feature, written by Sam Kashner, is the story of two filing cabinets filled with Monroe’s personal effects, which until this year had been in possession of Marilyn Monroe’s (ready for this brainful?) business manager’s sister-in-law’s son, Millington Conroy.
At Frank Sinatra’s suggestion, Marilyn Monroe kept her life inside two filing cabinets—letters, invoices, financial records, and the mementos that meant the most to her. After her tragic death, in 1962, at the age of 36, the cabinets, together with an assortment of jewels, fur coats, and other personal belongings, were stashed away by the actress’s business manager, Inez Melson. This secret trove would remain virtually unknown to the world for more than four decades, until photographer Mark Anderson began an epic two-year project of documenting it. His photographs, made public for the first time, offer new insights into the life of Hollywood’s most iconic figure.
LOCKING EMPTY BOXES
How we are perceived to be isn’t really who we are. To a large extent, we can control the kind of information we release about ourselves and the kind of impression we make on others, both online and offline.
I don’t have secrets, really, but I’m an insanely secretive person anyway. My sister does a mean impression of me at thirteen, letting her come into my room after having sworn she would keep her hands in her lap and not look at anything but my face. Nothing has changed: when she came to visit me in Peru in 2006, she saw first hand how rarely I let even my dearest friends into my apartment.
People who know me think it’s endearing. “She locks empty boxes!” my aunt told my husband before we got married. “Don’t try to open them and she’ll show you the world.” They think it’s endearing. And I’m glad because looking at it objectively, I think it’s downright neurotic. Well, thank god I’m a writer: to a certain extent this kind of eccentricity is expected.
WHO AM I?
On impulse shortly after reading the Kashner piece in Vanity Fair, I pulled out a desk drawer and spilled all the contents on my coffee table and began to look through the contents objectively, as through a stranger’s eyes.
Who am I?
A woman who receives thank you notes and postcards and keeps them, though she doesn’t keep a single bank statement. A woman who travels a lot by plane and occasionally by train and who scribbles on maps when she travels by road. A woman who is photographed a lot (who took these photos?) and who keeps photos of other people with no indication of who they are (lovers? Friends?). A lot of pictures of places, the sort a tourist would take, except with no people in them (why? Did she actually go there or did people send them to her? Or does she travel alone and therefore have no one to take photos of her in these wondrous places?).
She gets a lot of letters that begin with, “I’ve never met you, but…” What does she do? Why do people send her things–letters mention art, perfumes, chocolates, books, clothes, shoes, flowers, manuscripts? Why?
“How does it feel being the one person in the world I can send this to?” a letter asks. “Everyone who reads these pages comes away with a loathing for their author. That is how I measure their worth.”
The postmark shows this letter came from a prison.
Why her?
I couldn’t answer that now even if I wanted to.
COUNTING PI
We were driving back from Arizona when we got the call.
I had my head out the window, enjoying the sun and wind as we cruised 80MPH across the border into California. I turned to look at my husband, who looked at me briefly before saying, plainly, “Henry died.”
Henry was eighty, but age didn’t really matter. He was a mathematician and even though I can’t do math to save my life, I still love it. We connected through this appreciation and a mutual love of horse races.
My clearest memory of him is sitting before him as he sat in for dialysis. He was wearing a shirt that said, “you’re young and stupid, I’m old and treacherous. You don’t stand a chance.”
He seemed ashamed of being there and needing that machine. I took his hand and smiled.
“How many decimals of pi do you know off the top of your head?”
Oh, he went on forever.
THE WARHOL DIARIES
One of the first gifts I got from someone who read my blog, someone I’d never met, was at the age of seventeen or eighteen. He bought me over a hundred dollars worth of Andy Warhol books for no reason other than that I loved Warhol and he, the reader, loved my writing. (To date, I’ve not met him.)
It’s possible that I read the quote I mentioned earlier among these, though I don’t think so. What sticks most in my mind from these books is how in Pat Hackett’s Warhol Diaries, Warhol mentioned the cost of everything, so cabbing uptown with Bianca Jagger always something like, “split a cab with Bianca ($4).” There is a weird magic in seeing how human the people you adore are. Andy Warhol, one of the few examples of an artist who was successful in his own time, was insanely frugal? He fussed about sharing cabs? Really?
Hackett’s dedication to Warhol is admirable and that’s not hard to miss, especially when you compare her comments to those of, say, Mary Woronov, author of Swimming Underground.
Just as you can’t separate the scientist from the experiment, you can’t separate the person doing the remembering from the memory of you. The amount of regard with which you are remembered is what spells the difference between a prurient exploitation of your memory and a tribute.
A LITTLE IN LOVE
“Much of the ‘side of Marilyn that no one has ever seen before’ includes ordinary things like receipts, telegrams, bottles of Chanel No. 5, and checkbooks,” writes Dodai Stewart, senior editor at Jezebel. “Does this stuff just seem mundane in this day and age, because we live in a celebrity culture where we know all about Britney’s meds, Lindsay’s post-rehab life and Paris Hilton’s Valtrex prescription?”
It’s the typical vulture culture reaction. But there is something different in the way that the Monroe items are presented. This isn’t a spread in a gossip rag or a vulgar shot offered at PerezHilton.com. The pictures of Monroe’s effects are taken against a backdrop of rose petals and flowers.
Kashner writes:
By the time I first spoke with [Mark Anderson], he had been photographing Monroe’s personal correspondence, her jewelry, her furs, and her handbags for almost two years, and he admitted he had fallen a little bit in love with her, just as all her photographers had… Anderson was haunted by the ghost of Marilyn. He was having trouble sleeping at night, at one point he was drinking too much, and on occasion he called Marietta, his wife, “Marilyn.” He had decided that the best way to photograph the items in the archive—the 400 canceled checks, the ledgers and memos and letters—was to place them against a backdrop of rose petals. So he was spending his mornings at the Los Angeles Flower Market buying roses, like a hopeful suitor. “Imagine the power of this woman who has been dead for 45 years,” Marietta observed, “that I was becoming jealous.”
As creepy as it may sound, Anderson’s love for the icon shows. I’m no Marilyn Monroe junkie and even I was moved looking over some of those letters and receipts, presented with the care and attention to detail that only someone who loved you could exercise.
EULOGY
It’s with this love that I look over pictures of Henry and his notebooks where he played with numbers day after day.
For the first time since I became obsessed with the notion of what people would see of me were I to suddenly die, I smile and hope that one day, someone will care enough to go through my stuff and remember who I was with love.
I’m going to miss you, Henry. You genius, you darling, you cranky eccentric.
I can hear you now, telling me to quit with the emo shit and get back to work. All right, all right! But only because I know that you know that I mean every word.
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