In the year after Graham passed, Anjelica sat for another interview with Vanity Fair. The subheadline reads, “Anjelica Huston remembers her late husband, the renowned sculptor Robert Graham, with love and champagne,” a fitting tribute to both of them. When asked what she wants to do next, Anjelica says she will oversee Graham’s artistic legacy. Beyond that, her answer reflects the same peculiar coyness and class that she’s worn since her youth. “Two folded newspapers carrying his obituary lay under scattered flowers. She pointed to a surprising headline from one that read: wait and see. ‘That’s been my guide,’ she explained. ‘It’s absolutely Bob. I recognize it as his voice.’”17
Anjelica remains as handsome a woman as ever, and the same boldness that allowed her to send boys into bogs on her behalf as a girl now informs her creative choices as she appears in film and television. Nicholson continued his philandering well into the 1990s and early 2000s, but as he settles into old age, he finds himself less able to attract women. He no longer parties and wakes with a glass of milk in proper senior citizen fashion. “I would love that one last romance but I’m not very realistic about it happening. What I can’t deny is my yearning,” Nicholson told Closer in 2015 at the age of seventy-seven.18 There is something at once pathetic and inevitable about his fate and his fear that he will die alone. Whether or not Anjelica finds another long-term partner is immaterial, but not because she has already had such enduring romances with extraordinary men. It is instead because of the unabashedly rich relationship she has to the woman she was and the one she has become. She may be long retired from the otherworldly lifestyle of dancing and loving her way around the world awash in the affections of artists, yet she retains a belief in their magic. Her treasure trove of memories seems a reliable companion and if the memories ever fade, there will always be the fairies.
Long-Game Bitches
On Princess Di, Lisa “Left Eye” Lopes, and the Fine Art of Crazy Exing
IN THE WARMER MONTHS, IT is not hard to find several blocks in lower Manhattan cordoned off for weekend street fairs, offering space to vendors selling everything from barbecue and ice cream to massages and wholesale jewelry. I feel my most acute sense of buyer’s remorse when I think of such a street fair I went to in 2006. There I came across an airbrush artist selling T-shirts bearing the images of iconic musicians, alive and dead. Among the shirts featuring well-known hip-hop artists, one adorned with the faces of Lisa “Left Eye” Lopes, Aaliyah, and Princess Diana caught my eye for its baffling juxtaposition of these two young women of hip-hop alongside a former monarch, with the words “RIP Baby Girls” scrawled below them for added effect. It was a black shirt, and their faces were rendered flawlessly in somber grays and whites that indicated Diana’s seemingly incongruous presence was not some kind of joke. Left Eye wears her signature rectangle of eye black under the left eye and a tough expression, Aaliyah’s preternatural beauty peeks out in a knowing grim and seductive look from the one eye that is not covered in the dramatic sweep of her bangs, and Diana smiles ear to ear as she effortlessly wears a small crown and pearl necklace in the portrait that covered People magazine the week following her death.
Everyone I have ever told about the shirt has laughed in agreement that Diana’s presence is amusing. “Baby girl” is such a distinctly American term of endearment and is linked specifically to Aaliyah, and Diana’s brand of royal glamour is so different from the particular aesthetics of R & B luxury embodied by her shirt-mates. But on the eighteenth anniversary of Diana’s death, I fell into an Internet rabbit hole of articles about the last few years of her life that made me reconsider Diana’s suitability to be represented there. It is easy to think of Diana as much older than she was because she married at twenty and began having children soon thereafter, rendering her more of a parental figure than a style or sex icon. But to be a bride at twenty is indeed to be a baby girl. The princess emerged as a clever and brave divorcée who had unmoored herself from the vampires in the British royal family. I recently GChatted with a friend who is similarly preoccupied with popular culture about the princess, and she replied, “Oh yeah, Diana was the ultimate stealth psycho ex.”
In Paul Burrell’s memoir of his time as Diana’s employee and confidant, The Way We Were, he recalls how Diana filled a trash bag with a Prince of Wales china set and smashed it with a hammer in a fit of symbolic and real destruction of her marriage. “Let’s spend a bit more of his money while we can!” she had said gleefully in the days after her divorce, which netted her a lump sum of $26 million, in addition to a yearly allowance of $625,000 for her office.1 Armed with a freer schedule and a sexier wardrobe, Diana had a Vanity Fair photo shoot with Mario Testino scheduled. “With her unerring sense of the dramatic, Diana timed Testino’s stunning shoot to appear on the cover of Vanity Fair on the first anniversary of her divorce,” Tina Brown would later report in The Diana Chronicles.2
What all three of these women also share in common, beyond their early deaths, is a legacy of having encroached on the territory of men in their romantic dealings. Like Diana, Lisa earned a legacy as a crazy ex-girlfriend after she famously burned down the house of her boyfriend Andre Rison. Lisa died at thirty, just five years younger than Diana was at the time of her death. Dying at twenty-two, Aaliyah was the true baby of this trio of women killed in accidents over a five-year period in the late 1990s and early 2000s.