The Most Beautiful Suicide

On the piece of paper Evelyn left before the tragic leap, she wrote:

“I don’t want anyone in or out of my family to see any part of me. Could you destroy my body by cremation? I beg of you and my family – don’t have any service for me or remembrance for me. My fiancé asked me to marry him in June. I don’t think I would make a good wife for anybody. He is much better off without me. Tell my father, I have too many of my mother’s tendencies“

She was only 23 years old.

Can a suicide keep beauty and transform into a work of art?

I think yes. The praise of the death of a beautiful girl is terrible and seductive. From Andy Warhol to David Bowie – in his song “Jump They Say” – the traumatic existence of a life broken in its blossom, makes the protagonist an eternal heroine.

Taken from my book “Il Macabro e il Grottesco nella Moda e nel Costume“, the description of the fact.

“Edgar Allan Poe, within its essay Philosophy of composition,
wrote that

«the death of a beautiful
woman is undoubtedly the most poetic
topic of the world »

and about this
the image realized by chance
by the former assistant photographer

Robert Wiles on the first of May
1947 is rich of emotion.

He succeeded in capturing the twenty-three years-old
Evelyn McHale lying with
elegant but unnatural composure
on the top of a limousine after a
long flight from the eighty-sixth floor
of the Empire State Building.

The girl seems to be sweetly
collapsed among the dark plates of
the car, the glasses smashed, the lacquered steel
bent on itself because of the violence
of the impact and the girl there, supine as
a sleeping beauty in a breathless
sleep.

From the ice-cold metal of the
car there comes, violently, the red colour
of the sophisticated suit. White is the

blouse and white are the long gloves
that still adorn her hands. Her blonde
hair frame a beautiful face
with a perfect makeup. The tights are
taken down. abbassate. Her arms are bent and
the left hand seems to be gentle near
the face, half-closed in a gesture that
seems to be sophisticated and charming.

The suicide,
in this case, loses the atrociousness of
its meaning thanks to the beauty of
an image that seems to come from a fashion magazine.

The paradoxical
absence of blood and disfigurement,
combined with the composure of the subject,
gave birth to the title with
which the picture was called:
“The Most Beautiful Suicide”.

The image gives
origin to a strong contradiction
in the observer’s mind, seduced
by the aesthetic of death that seems to be
cruelly sweet.

We would like to ask
Evelyn the reason of that gesture,
the frustration for the incomprehensibility
of her choice generates a morbid
attention to the details that
tell her life: the white scarf that
vertically fell from the window
reaching the body, the beauty case left apart together with the folded coat, her suicide note.

A violent death for a
picture having an immortal beauty.

This charming and simultaneously
aberrant image was published
in the magazine “Life” with the
title The Most Beautiful Suicide.

The caption told:

«At the bottom of
the Empire State Building the body
of Evelyn McHale reposes calmly in
grotesque bier, her falling body punched
into the top of a car».

The shot has been then redesigned by Andy Warhol
in 1962 with the name: Suicide (Fallen
Body), in a study about the relationship between beauty, death and Pop Art.”

© COPYRIGHT

Evelyn Francis McHale

BIRTH	20 Sep 1923   Berkeley, Alameda County, California, USA
DEATH	1 May 1947 (aged 23)   Manhattan, New York County (Manhattan), New York, USA
BURIAL	Fresh Pond Crematory and Columbarium Middle Village, Queens County, New York, USA