Pain behind success stories
It can make you king of the world, or kill you. Social media is a brawl with gloves off, which is why I don’t use it, and why President Donald Trump is where he is today, undisputed king of the world and the universe, a very stable genius with infinite powers.
I could add handsome, but that would be a lie. While Trump crows and tweets, friends of Caroline Flack, former Love Island host and general It girl of the UK, mourn her death this past week, the fourth person connected with the popular show to suicide, in her case while facing charges of assaulting her boyfriend. She was evidently too fragile for the bear pit where she earned her living, but in death she was still tabloid fodder.
The Sun newspaper, which had given the assault charge blanket coverage, calling her, ever so wittily, Caroline Whack, devoted five pages to her death. I guess death sells. It did for Princess Diana, and her sons are still dealing with that.
We had our own Caroline Flack here, who six years ago killed herself in Sydney. I was struck by the resemblance between the two this week, and by the thought that few people today probably remember Charlotte Dawson, who at 47 had run the gamut of career possibilities for good-looking blonde women, as Flack seems to have, and had run out of luck.
Social media trolls had fun with her distress also, while Australian newspapers tracked her boyfriends and frocks. Her life was condensed into tragic headlines.
I wonder always why they do it, these queens of the fashion pages whose lives seem pretty and perfect until we inevitably discover that they’re not.
I remember unease at watching an NZ documentary about how an adult Dawson, adopted at birth by a loving family, found her biological parents. Everyone on the programme looked equally uneasy at playing along except Dawson, and I wondered what the point of it was.
In true success story style, Dawson dropped out of school at 16 to start a glamorous life modelling in Europe and New York. Next came fashion and style work in Australia for a long list of titles, and she was regularly photographed in their pages looking suitably fashionable and stylish.
Back in Auckland she was a presenter on TVNZ programmes. That ended unhappily, with Dawson declaring that, ‘‘New Zealand is small, nasty and vindictive. It’s a tiny, little village … a tiny country at the end of the earth.’’
She briefly married a top Australian swimmer, Scott Miller, an event recorded in glamorous photography. His promising career also turned to tragedy when he became addicted to drugs.
Dawson blamed him for the severe depression she suffered after she had an abortion at his insistence, giving an Australian magazine the headline, ‘‘I gave up my baby for my husband.’’
We learned, along the way, that she’d been sexually abused by a neighbour when she was six years old.
When she died Dawson was best known here as the host of Getaway, and in Australia as a judge on Australia’s Next Top Model. She was out of work, and her flat in Sydney’s prestigious
Woolloomooloo was for sale. A real estate agent found her body when he called to inspect the place before the auction.
Flack’s last known words were, ‘‘Be nice to people. You never know what’s going on. Ever.’’ Dawson might have said the same, though she let the world know everything.
Sometimes, thanks to tabloid and social media, we know too much. I actually didn’t need to know any of this.