In 2013, Tiffany & Co. celebrated Baz Luhrmann’s new film version of “The Great Gatsby” with a day of events that concluded with a Roaring ’20s-style party at the Fifth Avenue flagship. I swanned through the night in a black column dress that was accented mainly by a Kate Spade necklace of green turquoise florets. Throughout the evening, several people stopped me – this was at Tiffany’s, remember – to say what a great necklace it was.
That was the Kate Spade effect. Whether it was with a statement necklace or a book with an inspirational saying or one of her signature vibrant handbags that marked a young woman’s coming of age and defined a generation in the good-times ’90s, Spade had a way of lifting you up. That she could not do the same for herself proved to be her tragedy. …
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Read MoreNow it all makes sense – the drug-taking, the trigger macho culture and, perhaps most important, the revelation of bisexuality.
Suicide, as I wrote about the hanging death of former New England Patriots’ tight end Aaron Hernandez, always begs the question, Why? But those of us who believe passionately in reason – that there is an answer for everything, no matter how unknowable it may seem at the moment – knew there had to be more to the murder of Odin Lloyd, and Hernandez’s life in prison sentence for it, than the company they kept and any perceived disrespect within their gang culture. ...
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Read MoreIn “The Penalty for Holding” (Less Than Three Press, May 10) – the second novel in my series “The Games Men Play” – quarterback Quinn Novak wonders which is more depressing: prison or a hospital.
I think on this day you would have to say prison ...
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Read MoreAn Aug. 13th article in The New York Times on the death of actor-comedian Robin Williams carried this striking statistic:
“More than 70 percent of all suicides in the United States are white men, most of them in their middle years, and many take their lives in the wake of some loss, whether professional, personal or physical.”
Notice the demographic. It’s the group that has held power in American society, a power that’s been eroding as an increasingly multicultural coalition – women, blacks, Latinos, Asians – takes form. While often independent, these minorities certainly came together to elect Barack Obama president and defeat the predominantly white male Tea Party – twice.
The white American male, then, is going the way of the dinosaur.
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Read MoreToday brought the shocking news of Oscar-winning actor and comedian Robin Williams’ death at 63 from asphyxia in an apparent suicide.
Suicide always begs the question, Why? Why would someone who had so much end it all? It’s the theme of a very good, underrated early Keanu Reeves movie, “Permanent Record,” about a golden student who takes his own life and the friends who are left to wonder, Well if that can happen to someone so together, what about the rest of us?
Except that suicides don’t think of themselves as being very together people. As I said in my novel “Water Music,” many suicides don’t want to die. They want not to live, which is a very different thing...
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Read MoreWhen a beautiful, talented woman dies in the prime of life, words fail. I don’t know why the death of L’Wren Scott hit me so hard. As editor of WAG magazine, I featured her dresses in the mag’s pages from time to time. They always captured the myriad aspects of elegance, how it could be prim, erotic, even whimsical. I remember one smashing wine-colored number that I actually helped a reader track down. She just had to have that dress.
Still, I didn’t know Scott. And I can’t say I have the passion for fashion that I have for, say, the arts or certain sports. There’s something unforgiving about fashion. Maybe she felt it, too.
Suicide begs the question, Why? Why do people who seem to have considerable resources of all kinds end it all?
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