The Most Beautiful SuicideOn 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. The serenity of McHale’s body amidst the crumpled wreckage it caused is astounding. Years later, Andy Warhol appropriated Wiles’ photography for a print called Suicide (Fallen Body). 
-1st May 1947 Evelyn McHale jumped 86 floors from the top of the Empire State Building. She was 23 years old.

I was watching Stranger than Fiction last night (a good movie, by the way) and a character talks about suicide: “There’s a photograph in the book called The Leaper. It’s old, but it’s beautiful. From above the corpse of a woman who’d just leapt to her death. There’s blood around her head, like a halo… and her leg’s buckled underneath, her arm’s snapped like a twig, but her face is so serene, so at peace. And I think it’s because when she died, she could feel the wind against her face.”

This picture is sad, but it is simultaneously serene. It isn’t full of gore, and Evelyn looked as if she was sleeping. Her calm repose contrasted greatly from the grotesque wreckage of a bier she herself created beneath her. 

The Warhol print isn't all its cracked to be (in his defence, maybe I haven't found a great copy online). He probably would have said in her Empire State Of Leap she had her Fifteen Minutes of Fame. But I see this photograph and I think of her walking the streets of Manhattan in the early, misty morning as if it were any other day, carrying her pocketbook with a few dollars, a make-up case. I see her, pure in her pearls, her white gloves. The jacket may have been her favorite, pink wool, and she probably wore it too often. It all seeps way inside me and I cannot shake it off. Right now, I'm sitting alone in my home - sullen, confused about that note and morbidly inspired to re-imagine a 'print' of my own, an ode to Evelyn if you will. Tonight it will be only my computer and me.