Read Your Face Tomorrow: Poison, Shadow, and Farewell for Free Online

scandals she was involved in, nor her crazy pink mansion on Sunset Boulevard, nor even the bold fact that she was the first star of the modern era to show her tits in a conventional American film, but the dismal legend of her death, so humiliating for a sex symbol like her and created perhaps by a satanist, a pervert, a wizard. This, ironically, caused more of a sensation and brought her more publicity than anything she ever did during a lifetime spent pursuing the limelight, daily renouncing all privacy and what the overwhelming mass of people would call dignity. What a shame she couldn't enjoy the thousands of reports about her and the accident, and see whole pages devoted to her horrible death, like something out of a novel. It made no odds that the coffin in which she was buried was pink: her name was forever swathed in black, the blackness of a fatal, diabolical curse and a sinful life crowned by punishment, a dark road surrounded by mud, and a lovely head separated from its voluptuous body until the end of time. If she hadn't died in that way, with the possibly invented details that so fire the rabble's imagination, she would have been almost completely forgotten. Kennedy wouldn't, obviously, if he'd simply suffered a heart attack in Dallas, but you can be quite sure that he would be remembered infinitely less and with only slight emotion if his name were not immediately associated with being gunned down and with various convoluted, unresolved conspiracy theories. That, in essence, is the Kennedy-Mansfield complex, the fear of having one's life forever marked and distorted by the manner of one's death, the fear that one's whole life will come to be viewed as merely an intermediary stage, a pretext, on the way to the lurid end that will eternally identify us. Mind you, we all run the same risk, even if we're not public figures, but obscure, anonymous, secondary individuals. We are all witnesses to our own story, Jack. You to yours and I to mine.'
    'But not everyone fears such an ending,' I said. 'There are those who desire and seek out theatrical, spectacular deaths, even if, lacking any other recourse, they can only achieve this with words. You have no idea the care many writers have taken to utter a few memorable last words. Although, of course, it's hard to know which will truly be your last word, and more than one writer has blown the opportunity, by being over-hasty and speaking too soon. Then, at the final moment, nothing suitable has come to mind and they've spouted some utter nonsense instead.'
    'Yes, I agree, but it's still a response based on fear. Anyone who yearns to die a memorable death does so because he fears not living up to his reputation or his greatness, whether assigned to him by others or by himself in private—it makes no difference. The person who feels, to use your term, narrative horror, as you believe Dick Dearlove does, is as afraid of someone spoiling his image or the story he's been telling as someone might be who's planning his own brilliant or theatrical and eccentric denouement, it depends on the character of the individual and on the nature of the blot, which some will confuse with a flourish, but death is always a blot. Killing and being killed and committing suicide are not the same thing. Nor is being an executioner, or being mad with despair, or a victim, or being a heroic victim or a foolish one. Obviously, it's never good to die before one's time—and, still worse, foolishly—but the living Jayne Mansfield wouldn't have disapproved of the legend of her death, although she would might well have wished she hadn't worn a wig on that particular car journey. And I don't think your Lorca or that rebellious, provocative Italian filmmaker, Pasolini, would have been entirely displeased with the kind of blot that fell on them, from an aesthetic or, if you like, narrative point of view. They were both of them somewhat exhibitionist, and their memories have benefitted from their unjust,