THE ‘SOCIALITE JUNKIE’

Will Pavia meets Cat Marnell, the former beauty editor and amphetamine addict who secured a $500,000 advance to write her memoir

Will Pavia meets Cat Marnell, the former beauty editor and amphetamine addict who secured a $500,000 advance to write her memoir

When Cat Marnell was in her 20s she worked as a beauty editor at Lucky magazine, while also managing a full-time addiction to prescription amphetamines and experimenting with a growing list of sedatives that sometimes allowed her to sleep at night.

“I would sleep three nights out of seven, literally, for years,” she says. “I was so tired. I was so ugly and gross. I look at pictures of me when I’m 25 — I look 47.” She got by with the help of some excellent self-tanning lotions. “Every day, I would put on self-tanner, to just look a little better,” she says. “You can package anything to make it appeal to someone. But on the inside, it’s very gnarly. When I started working in beauty and stuff, honestly, I was self-tanning my drug addiction.”

But after her career imploded, spectacularly, in the summer of 2012, after she lost her second job in a row for being a drug addict and was placed on disability benefits and retreated to her bed, she still managed to make the whole escapade sound rather glamorous. This was actually the moment that Marnell rocketed into the public consciousness.

A diarist from the New York Post emailed to ask if it was true that she had lost another job because she was on drugs. “I’m always on drugs,” she replied, breezily, from her bed. “Look, I couldn’t spend another summer meeting deadlines behind a computer at night when I could be on the rooftop of Le Bain smoking angel dust [PCP] with my friends.”

Bloggers cheered. Here was the remorseless spirit of Keith Richards, incarnated in a posh girl from the suburbs of Washington DC who looked like a model and dressed like a punk. No office cubicle could contain her.

Suddenly, she was hot property. The offers flooded in: interview requests, pitches from television producers and publishers; she was paid a $500,000 advance to write her life story;

Vice magazine hired her to write a column called “Amphetamine Logic”, about living the high life.

“I’m the one with the $40 French self-tan who’s dressed like a sort of slutty commedia dell’arte Zanni, in white rags, a Dior slap bracelet, a Winston — I know, inexplicably — tucked behind my ear,” she wrote in her opening missive.

The columns were raw and sometimes rather confusing, but they pulled in huge audiences. Who else wrote like this about drugs, while still on them? Young hipsters in the East Village congratulated Marnell, while older commentators worried, in print, about the ethics of employing a drug addict to be a drug addict. Was she being exploited? Were we all exploiting her, by reading her?

Marnell, who is 34, says she tries hard to offer the gory details of a life on drugs.

“There’s a lot of gross-out stuff, which I hate,” she says. But writing about it, “You have to put in the gory stuff, because it’s ugly.”

The first time she overdosed, on Xanax bars and Ambien, washed down with a Diet Snapple, police had to close down the street and extract her from her apartment, kicking and screaming, strapped to a trolley. She assured interviewers that she was not going to die. She had this whole raging drug addiction under control. But she seemed a mess.

Going to meet her, on a chilly Friday afternoon, I wonder if she’ll be at home. Then here she comes, stepping out in her woollen hat and a black lacy dress. Over it she has on an enormous army parka, lined with pink fur, which makes her look very small.

We were going to talk in her flat but Marnell says she has to get out of there. “Bad vibes,” she says. We mount a brief search for a taxi, but then she sees a bus heading north, so we get on that instead and sit in a rather narrow double seat that feels very slightly too intimate for the beginning of an interview. I congratulate her on her book, How to

Murder Your Life. It’s like one of her columns: funny, compelling, slightly horrifying. The more of the book you read, the more amazed you are that she managed to write one.

Marnell regards it as miraculous, too. The first year after she signed the contract, “I hadn’t written one word because I was so messed up,” she says. “I was always like, ‘Of course I will [write it].’ It just goes to show that addiction is so crazy. All that stuff you hear about, ‘People lose their jobs, their families.’ I was thinking, ‘That stuff would never happen to me. I would never let it happen.’ But it happens. When you look at someone like George Michael — I don’t know what killed him — or Amy [Winehouse]. Any of them. I’m really hoping that Keith Richards never does. I will be destroyed.”

MARNELL IS often seen as a great authority on celebrity overdoses. Editors have looked to her as they might a war correspondent, embedded on the battlefield. She was close to the story.

“So many of you have expressed your disgust at how much I talk about drugs,” she wrote, after Whitney Houston was found dead in a bath.

“I really tried to stop for a while, but you know what? No one else is writing about this stuff … Why can’t we acknowledge that lots and lots of women abuse drugs? They are a huge part of so many women’s lives, including mine … You call it oversharing. I call it a life instinct. Because look how easy it is, even when you are Whitney f***ing Houston, to withdraw your voice and pretend like you’re a good girl and not mention that you’re using. To slip silently into the water. To disappear.”

That one got shared everywhere. When Philip Seymour Hoffman was found dead, also in a bathroom, with a heroin syringe in his arm, plenty of people wanted another bit of Marnell. The celebrity website TMZ asked her to speak for her fellow overdosing junkies. “They were like, ‘What does the junkie community think?’” she says, as we rattle north on the bus. “I’m like, ‘There is no junkie community. We’re all just weirdos in our houses, alone.’”

This was during the year that Marnell was busy not writing a word of her book. As it happened, she had overdosed on heroin only a few months earlier. “I was not a heavy heroin user, and I haven’t done it since I overdosed,” she says.

“Most people don’t want to hang out around a drugged-up girl, but if they do, it’s not because they are healthy people. That’s how addictions come to inform your whole life,” she says.

When I started working in beauty, honestly, I was self-tanning my drug addiction. Cat Marnell

“I let worse and worse people into my life, like, predators.” She writes about these men. You wouldn’t trust them with your goldfish. There’s a bloke called Marco who regularly steals from her, and a photographer from LA, whom she took up with partly to get rid of Marco, who turns steadily nastier. “I treated my body like shit. I didn’t respect it. Like, why would anyone else?” she says. “I attracted bad people who violated me sexually, who stole from me, [who would] shoot me up with things I wouldn’t normally have done, but they wanted to keep me sick so they could exploit me. I put myself in that situation.”

This was the time when she was supposed to be living on rooftops smoking angel dust. “It was so surreal,” she says. “Because I was down here, but my persona, this person the press seized upon, she was all the way up there. There was such a disconnect where everyone’s calling me a socialite. I got put on this list ahead of Ivanka Trump.”

She became a hugely famous socialite without leaving her apartment.

“I did that whole press explosion from bed,” she says. At one point a British magazine, she forgets which, wanted to do a photoshoot. “I couldn’t even show up for it,” she says. “These editors were freaking out in London, [but] I was so sick.” She was on a lot of downers at the time. The big difference now, she says, brightly, is she no longer uses Xanax or Klonopin or any of those tranquillisers. And she no longer drinks alone. Back then she would mix her convenience store iced coffees with whisky. “I used to be really sick,” she says. “When I would go take a walk, my legs would hurt because I hadn’t been walking for three weeks. This is when I was getting so famous.” So you didn’t go to any nightclubs? “I would go to a nightclub, like, once. Social media, you can control anything.”

We get off the bus and step into the Bowery Hotel. I once saw the Hollywood actor Stephen Dorff in here, I say. It’s not a great anecdote, but it is the best I have.

Marnell says she once was propositioned by Dorff at a party at the Cartier Mansion on Fifth Avenue. “I was like, ‘Dude,’” she says. “I guess it was endearing since he was so attracted to me. I was young. He seemed very agitated. Clammy.” Jesus, even her Dorff stories are better than mine.

“It was my 22nd birthday,” she says. “He was just horny. As movie stars are, you know.” “DO YOU have coffee?” Marnell asks a waiter in the Bowery Hotel. The waiter seems to mishear the order. He umms and ahhs, and frowns, and looks at her carefully. Marnell is small and thin, with large green eyes and blond hair that escapes from beneath a blue wool cap. She looks vaguely like Lindsay Lohan and, as we have said, she is a drug fiend and a hellion, a Hunter S. Thompson for millennials, living wild and free.

“If it’s not on the menu we don’t have it,” the waiter tells Marnell. “You don’t have coffee?” she asks. “Oh!” he says. “I thought this was about something else.” He is suddenly all relieved smiles. They have coffee! He will bring her steamed milk on the side. Right away.

I think he thought you were ordering some weird drug, I say.

“Yeah, right?” says Marnell. “I have actually had sex in this bathroom here, in the past year. Doing cocaine.”

I’ve no idea what to say to this.

MARNELL’S ADDICTION developed in her teens. People will say, “poor little rich girl and everything, and that’s fair enough”, she says. “People feel like I don’t know anything about struggle, but I do know about the big sadness. That’s what Edie Sedgwick called it. I think that at the core of my addiction has been a sadness that feels unbearable, and I don’t know where that came from, but it’s just there.”

The atmosphere at home was akin to a bad relationship, she says. Eventually, she asked to be put in a boarding school, where she felt much happier. But she was still struggling, academically, until she discovered Ritalin. A girl in her dorm slipped Marnell her first tablet, and once a battery of tests had diagnosed her with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, she got a prescription.

Suddenly, she was a star student. “My grades were Ds, then As,” she says. “The only thing I did different was put a pill in my mouth. I didn’t learn anything to overcome these obstacles. It was just brain alteration.”

The pills also suppressed her appetite. “I never learnt how to deal with food,” she says. “Every time I go to rehab, I gain 20lb [9kg], and that’s always what sends me back to using.”

In New York, where she began interning for fashion magazines, Marnell developed bulimia. She also developed a network of private doctors who would happily refill her prescription for Adderall and other drugs.

Being an addict gave her an interesting perspective on the beauty industry. Her daily diet of amphetamines and tranquillisers, with sleep deprivation, binge eating and vomiting, is not conducive to dewy skin and glossy hair. (Marnell’s turned to dreadlocks.) But it did give her an exacting approach to cleansers and lotions. And the myriad labours of a magazine editor’s assistant: the fetching, ordering of the diary, the organising of samples, the desk tidying, the placing of a grande misto coffee with organic milk from Starbucks, on her boss’s desk when she arrived in the morning, with the lid off (otherwise, as her boss said, removing the lid would be “just one more thing I

There is no junkie community. We’re all just weirdos in our houses, alone. Cat Marnell