Evelyn

This weekend, Rachel and I went to Austin, TX. It was a lovely town that reminded me very much of Portland. There were a lot of vintage shops and a lot of tattoos. We even got to see March Fourth, the Portland goth-freak marching band/sideshow act play along with Austin's own White Ghost Shivers at Antone's on 5th Street downtown. It was a hell of a show. Day to day, we ate some of the best food I've had in what seems like ages. Seeing the trailers for the special events at the Alamo Drafthouse made me wish I could attend their screenings all year round. Our time in Austin was a wonderful few days, over too soon.

Also this weekend, Austin put on a "City-Wide Garage Sale" at the local convention center, which ended up being much more of a flea market or vintage bazaar in practice. There were a lot of tchotzkies and knick-knacks, jewelry, beads, old clothes and the like, but one booth in particular caught my attention: it was a seller of old magazine pages, from the earliest decades of the 20th century to the 70's. Full-page ads, illustrations, celebrity photos... and one section labeled "Bizarre." I came to it last and as I flipped through the selection I was presented with an array of shockingly morbid and sensational images, apparently clipped from Life magazine's Picture of the Week section in the 40's.

One picture of the week was a still of a woman's body falling through the air in front of a New York storefront-- according to the caption, she'd been perched on a ledge eight stories above, threatening to jump, and the photographer snapped the photo only a second before she met the earth. Another jumper was a black man who had been interrupted in his suicide attempt at the edge of the Washington bridge. He was being held from falling by a police officer and a priest; the photograph showed him only a moment after he wrenched free, his face twisted in a grimace as he began his descent to the river below. Another was of an overturned semi truck, the cab set aflame; through a small mangled gap in the carriage a young man's pleading face could be seen. The caption read something like, "as the flames roar about him, a truck driver pinned inside his vehicle begs for onlookers to find a gun and shoot him." Another was of a drowned boy being carried from a river bank.

I was shocked that any of these would be in the back pages of Life magazine-- how could images so raw and grim see national print? Was Life a different magazine sixty years ago? But one image of all of them stopped me cold and wouldn't leave my head:

The small caption, inset onto the photo itself, reads, "AT THE BOTTOM OF EMPIRE STATE BUILDING THE BODY OF EVELYN McHALE REPOSES CALMLY IN GROTESQUE BIER HER FALLING BODY PUNCHED INTO THE TOP OF A CAR" An excerpt from the facing page elaborates: "On May Day, just after leaving her fiancé, 23-year-old Evelyn McHale wrote a note. 'He is much better off without me ... I wouldn't make a good wife for anybody,' ... Then she crossed it out. She went to the observation platform of the Empire State Building. Through the mist she gazed at the street, 86 floors below. Then she jumped. In her desperate determination she leaped clear of the setbacks and hit a United Nations limousine parked at the curb. Across the street photography student Robert Wiles heard an explosive crash. Just four minutes after Evelyn McHale's death Wiles got this picture of death's violence and its composure."

I was instantly awed by the photo, transfixed. It's incredibly dramatic, and fraught with contradictions; I was amazed at how beautiful and elegant Evelyn looks, so peaceful, at rest. But of course the reminders of her state are unavoidable: the twisted metal and granulated glass that envelops her; the shoes lost and stockings tattered about her ankle; the way her hand grips her necklace, desperately, with a permanence. But her appearance is so delicate-- she's made up, with lipstick, and her dainty white gloves. There's no physical signs of bodily trauma, no blood, or limbs at tortured angles. Somehow it is an image of peace in a death where there should be none.

All that afternoon and the next morning I was thinking of her. I had to return to the garage sale and buy it. I couldn't explain why, and I still don't know. For some reason I felt that I needed to take it with me. The image is powerful.

Looking for an attachment for this post, I put her name into google. A grad student's homepage features the same image, and a story of the author being touched by the photo at a young age. She also shares that Evelyn was turned into Pop art by Warhol; the caption to Warhol's appropriation of the image reads much differently from both Life's and my own interpretation: "The repleated image of the body of a suicide, crumpled, twisted and almost unrecognisable within the near-abstract forms surround it, presents one more disturbing vision of disaster." This text, in my opinion, is utterly removed from the image itself, and what makes it so affecting. Evelyn is not crumpled, twisted, or unrecognizable; quite the opposite in fact is central to why her picture holds such power. She is whole, composed, graceful in death, almost as if not in death at all, but at rest, asleep, as the evidence of trauma billows around her, seemingly kept at bay by her own defiance of its chaos.

In any case, it's clear that I'm not the only one who's been moved by this photo over the years, and a copy of it is now in my home. It was an odd purchase, one I can't necessarily rationalize-- I haven't got anything to do with this picture but keep it in a drawer. But it was something I couldn't leave in that box in Austin, for whatever reason. I wonder what Evelyn would think if she knew that people born 35 years after her death would be touched by the image of her final sad, defiant act.