More and more people who choose to end their lives by suicide make headline news in today’s world. Right or wrong, it happens. When a newspaper or news show reports this tragic event, beautiful is never a word associated with suicide. But it has been used many times in the past. Furthermore, as I was researching for this post in the old newspapers, almost all used the word beautiful to characterize the victim.
New York, New York
Evelyn McHale was born Sept. 20, 1923, and ended her life on May 1, 1947.
She was born one of nine children in Berkeley, California. Her mother had suffered depression for most of her life. Her untreated illness cost her the marriage and the custody of her children. Her husband got control and moved to New York.
Early Years
Evelyn graduated school, joined the Women’s Army Corps, and later became a bookkeeper in the city. That is where she met Barry Rhodes and became engaged. This is also where the sad part of her story begins.
The Climb to the Top
Evelyn would take the train on April 30, to Eastern Pennsylvania, where Rhodes lived. Retaking the train home the next day, when she decided to stop at the Empire State Building.
She would ascend to the 86th-floor observatory and jump, ending her life on top of a parked car below. The suicide note was found in her black handbag.
She Becomes Famous After Death
Robert Wiles, a person very near to the car Evelyn landed on, quickly took a picture of the horrific event and sold it to Life magazine. You see Evelyn landed with her feet crossed, laying on her back with a pleasant look on her face. If not for the crowd below witnessing her jump, she appears as if she were just taking a nap.
Named by Life magazine as ” The Most Beautiful Suicide.” which you can read the article here: https://rarehistoricalphotos.com/beautiful-suicide-evelyn-mchale-leapt-death-empire-state-building-1947/ that is how she would be described from now on. Not as a nice woman who had much to live for, pr as a girl who would never get her dream wedding, but as ” The Most Beautiful Suicde.”
Time magazine stated the photo as “technically rich, visually compelling and …downright beautiful,” describing her body as “resting, or napping, rather than … dead” and appearing as if she is ” daydreaming of her beau.”
A young woman takes her life, she will be missed, there is nothing beautiful about that. People will make money from her suicide and use that image to make it.
1.Andy Warhol used the picture in one of his prints entitled Suicide [Fallen Body]
2. David Bowies’s 1993 video for the single “Jump They Say,” showed him splayed out just like Evelyn atop a car.
3. The recreation of the popular image on the lower right corner of Pearl Jams ” Backspacer” album.
4. Lastly the photograph is referenced in the movie Stranger Than Fiction.
Using the Right Words
When I was looking through the newspaper archives from the Library of Congress, I noticed from early editions the phrase “Beautiful” was often used in the description of a suicide. [ mostly with women ]. You must understand that news then was sensationalized to draw peole to buy. The crudest most appalling descriptions drew the largest crowd of buyers, and they never missed telling the whole story.
Today with bullying and mental health problems and financial and personal problems, people commit suicde daily. Would we decriibe that as “Beautiful,” never.
There are right ways to phrase things and not right ways, such as now: we say suicidal death, not successful attempt; we say suicide not completed suicde. As I right this I wish I could go back in time and take away the “Beautiful,” and replace it with tragic.