Girlfriend for 13 years -and little to show for it
Scott gave the best years of her life to a rock god, writes
HANGING is a particularly decisive and masculine form of suicide. Women generally resort to less aggressive means, such as an overdose. There is at least a chance you will come back from that.
So there can be little doubt that fashion designer L’Wren Scott intended to take her own life in her Manhattan apartment in New York on Monday morning. Shortly before, Scott had texted her assistant, asking her to “come by” later.
The assistant said Scott must have wanted her to find her body quickly because she would not have liked the beautiful apartment “to get messy or smelly”.
Fastidious to the last, then. There is poignancy in that and in the fact that, when the news broke, the BBC ran the headline “Mick Jagger’s girlfriend found dead”.
How inadequate the term “girlfriend” sounded, as it must surely have done to Scott, who had been the Rolling Stone’s lover since 2001. Thirteen years is a long time to be a man’s “girlfriend”, especially when that man has described you as “someone I’m sort of seeing”. Thirteen years is a long time to be a girlfriend, even when you still have time on your side. And Scott did not. She was going to turn 50 next month.
Forget all those magazines telling you that 50 is the new 40. Fifty is a mortal shock, a menopausal maelstrom, even if you have got all the pieces of life’s jigsaw — partner, kids, home — in place. Fifty is when the oestrogen starts to dry up and you know that if you do not have children of your own, you are never going to have them.
If you work in the fashion industry, as Scott did, and you are dating a 70-year-old Peter Pan, then you are also painfully aware that youth and perfection are the currency and that your own currency is being devalued by the year. She was running perilously short of the other kind of currency too: she owed about £4-million (about R72-million) to suppliers. A friend claimed that Scott had planned to announce the closure of her business this past week.
If Scott and Jagger had been married, the debt would have been a drop in the ocean (in 2010, Sir Mick’s personal fortune was estimated at £190-million). But bear in mind Jagger’s marriage to Jerry Hall in 1990, after they had had two children. When it ended and the assets were divided, he disputed that their Balinese wedding had been legal.
Lupe Montufar, who worked as Scott’s housekeeper for 16 years, told the New York Daily News: “She would tell me she wanted to get married and have a family, but she didn’t want to get her hopes up or say it out loud to Mick. She didn’t want to pressure him.”
According to Montufar, Scott “sacrificed a lot” to be in a relationship with Jagger. She turned a blind eye to his predilections, accepting that “other women” were the price you had to pay for being the consort of a rock god.
Jagger’s publicist denied the “horrible and inaccurate gossip” that her client had split up from Scott recently. Jagger himself said he was “struggling to understand” the death of “my lover and best friend”.
Nonetheless, Scott had given him the best years of her life, sacrificing her hopes of becoming a mother to keep him.
Did she sense that her sell-by date was imminent and, with her business about to fail, wonder if it had all been worth it?
Suicide is always a chilling mystery, a desolating act, and often an accusation. In the case of L’Wren Scott, though, you feel simply, and more keenly than ever: what a waste.