THIS MAN’S LIFE
IWAS in Paris threeand-a-half weeks ago for the night to interview someone. Not wanting to sit in my hotel room with a TV spewing dystopian fear and paranoia, I went for a late walk. At that hour, the City of Light seemed empty.
And especially lonely.
I get lonely when I am away like this without my wife and kids. “In addition to my other numerous acquaintances,” the Danish philosopher Kierkegaard once remarked, “I have one more intimate confidant. My depression is the most faithful mistress I have known — no wonder, then, that I return the love.” For my late walk around Paris I had the same faithful mistress by my side. Hand in hand, we walked around the Left Bank of Paree, lost in troubled thoughts that the world was coming to end.
Coming to my senses again, walking along the cobbled Rue des Beaux Arts in the St-Germain-des-Pres I spotted, by chance, L’Hotel, once the palace/love-nest of Marguerite of Valois, queen of Navarre from 1572 and of France from 1589.
I went in.
I recognised the surroundings as the place where I interviewed Dita
Von Teese in 2009. Like most men of my age, I am trying to be woke but I have already told you about my nocturnal walk around Paris with my mistress, so I might as well tell you my memories of the 21st Century’s answer to Gypsy Rose Lee while I’m at it: Dita Von Teese, born plain ole Heather Sweet from Rochester, Michigan, on September 26, 1972.
I had lunch with her in Mao in Dundrum Shopping Centre in October 2005. After the Thai salad, she went upstairs in Harvey Nichols and did a striptease in a gargantuan Martini glass. After the show, Dita told me how much she was looking forward to her wedding that December in Ireland to the selfproclaimed Beelzebub of shock rock Marilyn Manson. They were married on December 3 at Gurteen Castle in Kilsheelan in Co Tipperary. On December
29, 2006, she filed for divorce.
In the summer of 2007, I met Dita again. Over breakfast in Soho House in London, she told me that on the Christmas Eve, 2006, she moved, broken-hearted, out of the house she shared with Manson in LA and into a rented house. She drove her beige 1939 Chrysler to her new home in the Hollywood hills. “I had to go back to see if I had forgotten anything.”
Like your husband, for instance, I joked.
“That was kind of strangest thing,” she replied, almost reflectively, “because he was so in a drug fug on Christmas Eve that he couldn’t even do anything about it. All I would get was these phone calls. He wasn’t even there that night when I left. His record label had removed him from the house to try to force him to make a record. One night I had been out Christmas shopping
— for him!” Dita laughed, “and I came home and the house was empty except for the animals. I was there by myself thinking; ‘What’s happening?’”
Bizarrely, Marilyn later gave an interview to Spin magazine, where he claimed:
“I was sleeping on the couch in my own home. I was no longer supposed to be a rock star. I was someone who had to be apologised for. I wasn’t prepared to be alone. I came out of this naked, a featherless bird. I was completely destroyed. I had no soul left.”
Whatever about a soul, Dita had no dignity left emerging far from unscathed from her 11-month marriage to the Count Dracula of ersatzgoth. That morning in London, Dita was quick to point out that Marilyn’s ridic whingeathon about sleeping on the couch in his own home was not by her choice.“If he did sleep on the couch, it was by his choice,” the superstar of US fetishism told me over Eggs Florentine and orange juice in London.
“Possibly, because he couldn’t bear to sleep in our bed in which he was having an affair with his girlfriend. Which I didn’t know about at the time. I never put anyone on the couch, believe me. And that same bed made a starring role in his music video. Our real bed! It became laughable. I was like — wow. It’s like a Valentine,” Dita said, her famous face etched in resigned melancholy. “It was very sad.”
Cut to 2009 in Queen Marguerite’s former residence on the Left Bank, where the alt queen of burlesque is joking about setting up a relationship counselling service one day where she can advise the broken-hearted who live down the end of lonely street on how to overcome their hurt and move on when the time is right. “When you break up, being on your own is the hardest thing but it is the most important thing you can do,” Dita said. “Men find it so easy to be with someone else straight away.”
She says that Paris has a rich history and appreciation of her artform. It was more than striptease. She says in
Paris they still remember names like pre-World War II artistes like Mistinguett (the risque French performer aka Jeanne Bourgeois) and Josephine Baker (the black American expatriate erotic entertainer who became a French citizen in 1937).
“America has a hard time coming to terms with the idea that striptease could’ve been a form of classic entertainment,” Dita told me. “There was a reason Josephine Baker found more accolades here than where she was from, so even in the 20s and 30s it was a lot freer here than where she came from.”
The reason she was in Paris is that designer Jean Paul Gaultier rang her to ask her would she fly to Paris to model for him.
“I’ve always thought that sexy was about glamour and mystery, and the image of the femme fatale or the pin-up girl,” she tells me. She has gone from being a blonde hick named Heather from America’s mid west to a generously proportioned brunette with an aristocratic Austrian name — the toast of Paris. And beyond.