-- San Francisco Chronicle obituaries, February 20, 1991
I had come across Colleen's name before; I remembered reading someplace that she was from Butte, or her family was. I had a hunch that she would be an interesting case, that she wouldn't mind my looking into the circumstances of her death. And I was right.
"She was in a lot of ways very evasive," said one of her teaching associates. Even her best friend, a former student and practicing journalist for the Gainsville paper, didn't know her very well. "You'd see her and then not see her for weeks," she told me. Colleen had told her that once she had locked herself in her apartment for two months, having her food delivered. Later I was told that her father was from Montana, that he owned some radio stations there, that he had made a lot of money. "The whole family is in big money," one of her colleagues told me, but others said that it was more a matter of unusual talent and brains; but these kinds of stories were a little vague and everyone agreed that Colleen kept a lot of things to herself, so who knows.
"Drugs," saida woamn friend when I showed her the first paragraph of the obit. Then she added "Never had any children. Colleen was out to prove something, and she couldn't do it."
She didn't get on well with her mother, who now owned a business in Seattle; she had a theory that her mother had ruined her father's life,, but then there was friction with the father, too, though it was Colleen who took him in for a month after he had some heart surgery. Her father was the most brilliant man in the world, Colleen told her friends; she loved him, but then they weren't very close, either; it seemed that Colleen never called or went back to family on holidays. There were fights too with her three brothers, one of them she hadn't talked to since 1982; but she was close to Steve, a musician-writer, age 32.
Her itinerary had been Butte-Seattle-New York-Gainsville-West Hollywood. She was born in Seattle in 1950, graduated from NYU and received a law degree from Fordham University in 1976. Somewhere along the line she had a brief youthful marriage.
After I read the obituary I went out and bought one of her books, The Woman's Health Cookbook, "Sound advice for living without PMS, stress, depression, hypoglycycemia, and fatigue." Co-authored with a woman named Lis Bensley, also formerly of the New York Times. The premise of the book is that many women suffer. The suffering is exhibited and measured in terms of irritability, depression, mood disturbances. The cause of the suffering is metabolism and the cure an adjustment of diet.. After discussing these problems and presenting advice on avoiding addictive substances such as salt, caffeine, alcohol, the book presents recipes minimizing refined sugar, suggests lots of rough carbs.
I just interrupted piece to call her coauthor, Lis Bensley, in New York. I felt a little funny about this, calling someone about a friend who died, but I reminded myself that my aims were certainly sympathetic, that I was really interested in making some positive sense out of something that most people might dismiss as an aberration.
Lis Bensley was painting a closet and her kids were yelling in the background when I called but she took a few minutes to talk. She said that after law school Colleen went to business school. Then she worked for the Times and started to write books about investing. High Risk, High Reward Investing, 1982, was her first followed by another on money market funds the following year. She got interested in woman's health problems and ghosted a book on PMS with a doctor who was trying to establish a network of specialty clinics based on the PMS syndrome. During the eighties -- her 30s -- Colleen held a couple of New York magazine editorships. She had connections in the fast moving New York magazine world, friends at Spy. She had been involved in the national launch of Manhattan, inc, and served as editor for that magazine for a year in 1986. Even at the top she felt unstable, impermanent. She told a friend later that her favorite article in Manhattan, inc was the 1984 story of a woman journalist who decided that she had done what she could do, and then carefully orchestrated her death. She recommended it to anyone who wanted to make it to the top. She wrote a book titled High Rolling and another on the Disney takeover, Project Fantasy, another on Vatican intrigues, another on insider trading. "Colleen was very bright" Lis told me. "Always full of ideas. Too bright for her own good sometimes. The whole family is like that."
Colleen's interests were evidently focussed on risks, crashes, scandals, highs and lows, both financial and personal. One imagines that these interests and her literary productions were in some sense a reflection of the extreme terrains of her internal geography.
In 1986, age 36, she took off for Florida to teach journalism at Gainsville, supported on a Gannett Distinguished Visiting Professor of Journalism. When she arrived in Florida she weighed 200 pounds; when she died she weighed 120. The Florida move was what one might have expected. "She was running away from her life in New York," a friend told me. "Colleen was a small town girl." At Florida she taught magazine journalism courses. She had no tolerance for spoiled, indifferent, conservative, or stupid students, and made it clear to everyone that she thought that Florida had more than its share of those. But she would do anything for those she liked, those who put themselves in her hands. She'd plan their lives for them. For them, it seemed that she was on top of the world, in complete control. But on the whole she taught that Florida had been a step down form New York, that she was on the skids. "Andy, bag lady" she told one of her friends. She was not a good money manager and had serious indebtedness. Many of her students hated her.
Her recent articles listed in Reader's Guide were all on the subject of woman's hair styling. Return of the Flip: a Favorite Sixties Hairstyle Makes a Comeback. Another: Talking Heads: Over Forty and Sensational, Harpers Bazaar, August 1990. It seems her interests were getting menopausal, or perhaps she was just working a formula for the money. A friend said that most of her recent writing had been just for income, though she also had an interest in Fifth Amendment issues and had been active legal research on the subject of obscenity in rap. Her view was that rap was a kind of legitimate language with its own origins and that it wasn't the prerogative of white people to decide that it was a bad influence on the public.
Lis said she'd put me in touch with someone in the family. I don't know whether I'll pursue that or not. But Colleen herself would no doubt approve. "Suicide, like bizarre murders and the sex lives of celebrities, holds a morbid fascination for even the most civilized among us," she wrote in a full chapter on suicide in her 1983 book on PMS.
I had a theory, based on how she had come to focus on the temporal, even physical sufferings which she captured under the rubric of PMS, that Colleen she would see suicide as a relief from the pain of life. But now I saw a different pattern; Tempting fate, like moths that fly too near a flame, is as deliberate a contest for some as a chess match. At stake is not an intricately carved knight, nor a queen, nor a king, but oneself Colleen was a player, a chaser of the impossible dream, and for her suicide was not so much a means of relief from the pain which any player pays for his or her highs, but a new and ultimately thrilling game in itself. Suicide was playing for the highest stakes of all. If the prize is oblivion, there is in even that a kind of unmatchable cool and final purity, when the suicide can say like, Sylvia Plath to a lover:
I am too pure for you or anyone,