The Fame Lunches

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  Certain shades of limelight wreck a girl’s complexion.

  —Truman Capote, Breakfast at Tiffany’s

  Don’t tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass.

  —Anton Chekhov

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Epigraphs

  Introduction: Travels at My Desk

  I. STARDUST AND ASHES

  The Fame Lunches

  Platinum Pain (Marilyn Monroe)

  Locked in the Playground (Michael Jackson)

  Gidget Doesn’t Live Here Anymore (Sandra Dee)

  The Mystery of Dr. B. (Bruno Bettelheim)

  Hunting Diana (Princess Diana)

  The Peaceful Pugilist (Mike Tyson)

  In Warm Blood (Truman Capote)

  Endless Love (Courtney Love)

  Days of Brilliant Clarity (Richard Burton)

  II. SKIN-DEEP

  Against Lip Gloss or, New Notes on Camp

  In My Head I’m Always Thin

  The Yom Kippur Pedicure

  The Unbearable Obsolescence of Girdles

  Brace Yourself

  Android Beauty

  III. OUT OF PRINT

  Freud Without Tears (Adam Phillips)

  Bloomsbury Becomes Me (Lytton Strachey)

  The Loose, Drifting Material of Life (Virginia Woolf)

  Moping on the Moors (The Brontë Sisters)

  The Lady Vanquished (Jean Rhys)

  Last Tango (Anne Carson)

  Dust-to-Dustness (W. G. Sebald)

  Portrait of the Artist as a Fiasco (Henry Roth)

  A Tip of the Hat (John Updike)

  IV. HIGHER VALUES

  When a Bag Is Not Just a Bag

  A Fashionable Mind

  Our Money, Ourselves

  Let the Fur Fly

  Marketing Mysticism

  V. WOMEN IN THE SINGULAR

  An Independent Woman (Liv Ullmann)

  Sleeping Alone (Diane Keaton)

  What the Camera Sees in Her (Cate Blanchett)

  A Thorny Irish Rose (Nuala O’Faolain)

  Illuminating the Ordinary (Alice Munro)

  That British Dame (Margaret Drabble)

  Sister Act (Betty Friedan)

  VI. THE MATING GAME

  Life on a Dare (Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald)

  On Not Learning to Flirt

  Glass House (J. D. Salinger and Joyce Maynard)

  So Not a Fag Hag

  A Matched Pair (Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath)

  The Consolations of Thread Count

  Can This Divorce Be Saved?

  Brilliant Monsters (V. S. Naipaul)

  Do I Own You Now?

  Acknowledgments

  Also by Daphne Merkin

  Copyright

  INTRODUCTION: TRAVELS AT MY DESK

  So here I am, sitting at my desk, more than fifteen years after the publication of my first essay collection, still prowling around the contemporary scene in the manner of an armchair sleuth, dusting for clues, weighing the evidence, and deducing the who, how, why—and, not least, the what it all means. Directly across from me is an apartment building filled with people who are unknown to me despite being part of my landscape, just as I must be an occasional Rear Window–like presence to them. Downstairs on the corner is a Williams-Sonoma store, selling burnished copper pots, heavy Le Creuset saucepans, and a myriad of clever gadgets for the culinary-minded. I am not any sort of cook to speak of, but sometimes I go into the store in search of distraction and wander around, if only to marvel at the sheer display of so much inducement to labor. I pick up packages of Himalayan pink salt crystals and sugar cubes imported from France, eye the whisks and the knives and the mandolines, and think of all that goes into mastering the arts of cooking and baking. I have often wondered if the act of writing would be less arduous than it is—less of a lonely conversation between the self and the self—if it came with a greater number of ingenious implements, something beyond the limited and austere armamentarium of screen and keyboard, pad and pen, pencil and eraser.

  Of course, there is no getting away from the fact that even if writing did come with more doodads—had more in the way of physical equipment attached to it—it would remain a luxury, while the preparation of food is a necessity. If we don’t eat, we eventually die; if we don’t write (or read, for that matter), life more or less goes on. Which brings me to the subject of essays, in particular, an idiosyncratic breed that lights up the eyes of some readers but has never enjoyed a good rep among publishers. One might argue that since there has never been a welcome time for essays—at least not since Montaigne—now is no worse (although, arguably, no better) a moment for them than any other. Then again, there are so many reasons not to write at unhurried, reflective length in the age of the tweet and other Insta-outlets for people’s attention that the imperative (if that’s what it is) to do so might be said to be an ever more valuable one, in need of impassioned practitioners.

  It occurred to me while putting this collection of essays together that I write, in whatever guise, largely out of emotional necessity. This is as true of me now as it was when I first began writing poetry as a young girl. I still remember my debut poem, which was about the unhappy life of a Victorian doll—who was, as I put it in my wordy ten-year-old way, “neglected, ignored, yes, even scorned.” This poem was eventually thrown out along with a sheaf of others, but that phrase has stayed with me down the years, the insistent lament of the unloved child I took myself to be.

  I suppose that one of the reasons the effort to make sense of things when I sit down to write feels so crucial is that I lead my life in an incurably unstructured fashion, bordering on the chaotic, with the specter of attendant meaninglessness never far off. Much as I might long to be a person of orderly routines, I have spent most of my adulthood wildly discarding rules and regulations, some of them dictated by my Orthodox Jewish upbringing and some imposed by the characters, parental and otherwise, who raised me. Despite this—or, as is more likely, because of it—I have always been interested in trying to create shapely narratives out of the unwieldy material the world offers up, unraveling surface incongruities the better to detect an underlying pattern. To echo Virginia Woolf, I write to “create wholes.” It seems to me that if I only look long enough and think deeply enough, what appears at first glance to be beyond fathoming will prove intelligible.

  Although I have come to be known for bold, almost reckless self-disclosure in my work—whether the topic happens to be the terrors of pregnancy, the erotics of spanking (a two-decade-old essay that will undoubtedly dog me for the rest of my days), or my habitations on various psychiatric wards—in my life I am a cautious and at times fearful person, the kind who has trouble leaving home. (This might be as good a place as any to mention that I’ve never learned to drive and that I live within a mile of where I grew up.) I’m also a champion brooder, someone who circles her psyche like one of those infinity scarves, knitting anxiety and obsession together in an inextricable loop. Writing, for all of its being an entirely cerebral activity, is a means of navigating beyond my own confines and challenging my native inertia; it gets me out of my head, forcing me into unpredictable encounters, whether I’m traveling halfway across the globe or no farther than my desk. In doing so, it appeases my intractable and utterly catholic curiosity—about the ravages of divorce, the global disappearance of girdles, t
he lives of the Brontës, and everything in between.

  The truth is I’ve been something of a bifurcated, high/low girl from the very start, as you’ll see from this compilation, someone as intrigued by the seemingly superficial as by the culturally momentous. Culled from a body of published work spanning four decades (and more than three hundred thousand words of literary journalism), this book encompasses profiles, book reviews, and what used to be called think pieces. In pulling together such a diverse group, I aspired to create something approaching a stylistic imprint—what Flaubert once referred to as “an absolute manner of seeing things.” These essays, then, are bound together by the sensibility behind them, informed by all its deliberate habits of mind and unconscious blind spots. If I had to define this sensibility, I would say that it’s characterized by a certain porousness—an unfiltered receptivity to the comings and goings of the zeitgeist—as well as a cultural egalitarianism, a willingness to examine the vagaries of fashion or the meaning of lip gloss with the same attentiveness I bring to the politics of reputation (as in the case of Bruno Bettelheim) or the poetry of Anne Carson. I proposed many of the subjects herein to receptive editors, although in some instances (Adam Phillips, Alice Munro, Margaret Drabble) I had to keep coming back to argue my case in the face of initial resistance. Others, such as Michael Jackson and Sandra Dee, were suggested to me, and turned out to have a surprising grip on my imagination. I’ve also included a selection of my literary criticism, the genre in which I began my writing life and to which I will always return.

  So, too, I’ve always liked to talk about the unmentionable, whether it’s our love-hate relationship with money, our demonization of fatness, or the brute reality of living alone. It is my belief that this bare-boned way of seeing things helps keep me intellectually honest. What I admire most about my favorite essayists, whether it be William Hazlitt, or Roland Barthes, or, ever and always, Virginia Woolf, is the way their voices seem to emanate from the corners of the writing self rather than its booming, position-taking center. I like to think I have achieved some approximation of that intimate, taking-you-into-its-confidence tone in my own work.

  I suppose a word is in order about the title, which came to me in a flash when I was writing the essay to which it is appended and later decided would make an apt title for the collection as a whole. I never intended it as a literal description—as in having actual lunches with actual famous people, although I have had my share of those—so much as a metaphorical one, a comment upon our obsession with celebrity and the ways in which celebrity affects, for better or worse, those within its halo, as well as those outside it. Sometimes it seems to me that the private life no longer suffices for many of us, that if we are not observed by others doing glamorous things, we might as well not exist. This may be a too reductive—or, simply, general—way of putting it, but what I know for sure is that our consciousness of fame has changed the equation by which we measure our lives and validate our actions.

  Finally, my hope is that these essays, wherever you choose to pick them up, will provide some inner nods of recognition, a reverberation of thoughts and feelings you might have had on your own. Perhaps you will even find something nurturing in them. I would be lying if I claimed they were always fun to write, what with hovering deadlines and the jitters-inducing pressure to pin down—“create wholes” from—half-formed thoughts and hazy impressions with some degree of grace and lucidity (while not, heaven forbid, coming up too short or too long vis-à-vis the prescribed word count). That said, there is invariably a liberating moment that arrives at the end of this process, when all the writing and rewriting, the arranging and rearranging of paragraphs, has made the story as good as I felt I could possibly make it. At that point there is nothing further to be done but to send the piece out into the world, for it to be discovered—or, perchance, neglected, like my long-ago Victorian doll. It’s a chance we writers take over and over again, against all odds, half-wishful, half-willful, alone behind our desks, scribbling into the darkness.

  I

  STARDUST AND ASHES

  THE FAME LUNCHES

  2000

  This is a story about sadness, writing, the promise of fame, my mother, and, oh yes. Woody Allen. Marilyn Monroe figures in it, too—as someone I’ve thought about enough to try and rescue from her own sadness, after the fact, in the form of writing about her—and somewhere over in the corner is Richard Burton, with his blazing light eyes and thrown-away gifts, whom I’ve also written about in a redemptive fashion. Elvis never spoke much to me—too Southern, too baroque—but if he had, you can be sure I’d have tried to save him, too. What this really is, then, is a story—its roots go back to adolescent fantasy, but it lingers with me even now—about trying to save myself through saving wounded icons. Famous people, in other words, but not just any famous people. These were fragile sorts who required my intervention on their behalf because only I understood the desolation that drove them. I imagined having long, intimate lunches with them, in which we shared ancient sorrows. These occasions would end on a tentative note of self-celebration that was all the more consoling for being so fleeting.

  It begins, I guess, with my mother, because it begins with my sense of not having been loved—or, to put it more precisely, responded to in a way that felt like love—as a child. This sense of emotional deprivation, of not having gotten what you needed when you should have, is a deeply subjective feeling. It’s hard to prove, in any event, lacking any concrete evidence except your own impassioned testimony, which is why this conviction elicits its share of eye-rolling impatience from people who believe that this kind of retrospective interpretation is a self-indulgent, fairly recent phenomenon, brought on by too much therapy or too much navel-gazing. Still, it seems to me to be a feeling a lot of people share, and I think it has to be given its due, even if only as a negative trope—a context of origins that explains all later failures or shortfalls. It can lead to radically different outcomes; you can become a serial killer, or you can become an artist. Jeffrey Dahmer or Kurt Cobain. (Interesting, though, how both of them came to violent ends.) Most people, of course, land somewhere in the middle: they try to arrange themselves around this perceived loss and go on from there, hoping they’ll do it better with their own kids or that they’ll find what they need with a lover or spouse, the dream of grown-up romance covering over the scars of childhood.

  What it led to in my case was an imaginary life as a serial killer and an ongoing real life as someone who was afraid of (not to mention furious at) her parents but who sought refuge in writing—who kept trying to establish herself, firmly and concretely in her own mind, as a writer. (It’s hard to think of yourself as a professional writer: I still think of it as something I do on the side, even though by now I make something approaching a living at it. I think this has a lot to do with the fact that there’s nowhere to go in the morning when you’re a writer, even if you have an office, except inside your own head.) As for the serial killer business, what I mean by this is not that I was furtively luring people into my home, there to chop them up, and then sprinkling their remains with Chanel No. 5 so no one would suspect anything because of the unspeakably foul odor emanating from my apartment. It was a far more mediated kind of thing, in which for a rather sustained period during my twenties, I continually aired the possibility of killing my parents on my then therapist, a gifted guy with a red beard. He tried to defuse my very evident distress by giving me every antidepressant known to man—this was before the age of Prozac—and he also used to suggest, only half humorously, that I walk up and down in front of my parents’ apartment building with a placard saying, “Merkins unfair to children,” as though I were an underpaid worker on strike.

  I read a lot of books about serial murderers, to help fuel my wavering but quite genuine parricidal impulse and out of a sense of identification with their rage. One, called The Shoemaker, about a father-son homicidal duo, stuck out in my head, because of the atrocity of the details, which included the use
of a hammer to keep the family in line. But I also wanted to figure out whether any good could possibly come out of this course of action, beyond an extended prison sentence. Perhaps, I mused, I’d grow strong and well in my little cell, away from the impositions of everyone I had known in my past life … It was in this light that I envisioned myself becoming a sort of Birdwoman of Alcatraz, an expert on the mating patterns of the hummingbird. What I really wanted to know, though, was whether my shrink would appear in court in my defense, the better to explain to the stony-faced jurors that I had been mistreated from birth and hence was simply exacting my due.

  The shrink in question died abruptly, of a recurrent illness, but to cut to the chase—which is a phrase a friend of mine always uses whenever I go on in my loop-the-loop way, in which one dangling thought leads to another—what I think I’m saying is that I was a desperate character from way back. Even when I was younger and thinner than I am now, I was desperate, although it’s hard for me to imagine from my present vantage point how I could have been desperate then, when I was so young and thin. But I was, and one of the ways I tried to rescue myself from my own sense of desperation, aside from musing about murdering my mother and father, was to imagine that other people—not just any other people, but people who took up space in the public imagination—were as desperate for validation as I appeared to be. I was a nobody, but it seemed to me that even somebodies—somebodies who hadn’t been loved enough in the cradle, that is—felt themselves to be misunderstood nobodies, deep down. I knew this in my bones, just as I knew that I had never liked that famous poem by Emily Dickinson, the one where she trills in her mysterious hide-and-seek voice:

  I’m Nobody! Who are you?

  Are you—Nobody—Too?

  Then there’s a pair of us!

  The woman had it all wrong, but what would she know, stuck in those New England snowdrifts all by herself? The trick was to get out of being a nobody by harnessing yourself to a somebody who was, deep down, a nobody, too. The trick was to give status to your own woundedness.