Scarred
Not long after she made her trek from Texas to New York, Marla Hanson saw her modeling career end at the hands of a razor-wielding thug. Six years later, the cuts on her face have healed, but the emotional wounds remain.
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Maddox never returned to Marla’s racial attitudes, in Texas or elsewhere. In the end, he argued that Bowman got the cuts on his hands trying to intervene and protect her from Roth. On May 5, 1987, the jury convicted Bowman and Norman. The following week, Atlas sentenced Roth to five to fifteen years in jail. Two months later, Bowman and Norman got the same. Last year, each man’s initial parole was denied.
For a year after the attack, Marla didn’t seek psychological help, for fear it would undermine her testimony. When the trials were over, she hit rock bottom. Financially she was okay. She had sold the rights to her story to a television production company, and Milton Petrie had set up a trust fund designed to pay her $20,000 a year for life. But though her plastic surgeon had worked wonders and makeup could conceal the rest, her modeling career was over. Her face now represented something that nobody wanted to buy. She got some offers as an actress, but the characters ended up marred or dead. She drifted into a depression that was at times suicidal. She would hit the streets with friends and stay out all night, which briefly lifted her spirits, then go home and binge sleep, sometimes for two or three days. Sleep was her refuge. She couldn’t get out of bed.
At the same time, in a city intoxicated by celebrity, her brush with fame made her seem interesting. She was constantly asked to all the hippest parties. The invitations fueled her paranoia: Why her? The scars? The squalid trial? Yet much of the attention was genuine. One night, a young filmmaker named Keith McNally, who then owned an elite club called Nell’s, asked Marla to come to a dinner party for director Bernardo Bertolucci. Marla accepted but didn’t show up. When he called, she said she was in bed. He kept calling—”We’re having salad now. Everybody’s asking about you. That’s the worst way to deal with depression.”—until finally she appeared in time for dessert. Another guest at that party was Jay McInerney.
McInerney was the eighties’ answer, at least in lifestyle, to F. Scott Fitzgerald. The themes of his writing seemed to anticipate Marla. In his first novel, Bright Lights, Big City, the protagonist is observed coked-up and yapping at the ankles of his lost love, a runway fashion model. His second, Ransom, is set in Japan, where Marla yearned to work as a model. During the summer of 1987, soon after he and Marla had started dating, McInerney began his third novel, Story of My Life, the tale of a Manhattan party girl.
McInerney was separated but not yet divorced from his wife, Merry, who had attempted suicide and was hospitalized for most of 1988 for her own depression. Meanwhile, Marla had moved in with McInerney; and the scrutiny of their love affair moved from the gossip columns to the glossy press. The satirical monthly Spy had already lumped McInerney with a brat pack that included Less Than Zero author Bret Easton Ellis and book editors Gary Fisketjon and Morgan Entrekin. Now Marla was seen as the flapper along for the ride. Cruelly, Spy took to calling her “the walking docudrama.”
At the start of her relationship with McInerney, Marla had been to see a psychologist who told her that the attack and its aftermath had reduced her emotional maturity to that of a twelve-year-old. The psychologist gave her a choice: Regain some control of your life or you’ll wind up sleeping on a park bench. If every work opportunity was related to the attack, he said, learn to do something else. Eventually, Marla decided to go back to school and study filmmaking. Her benefactor, Milton Petrie, was delighted; he was a regent at New York University, which had a respected film program, and the tuition was $20,000 a year—the amount Marla received from the trust fund. She began to lead a double life. Some nights, she was a tabloid celebrity, partying alongside McInerney, Carl Bernstein, and Patty Hearst. Other nights she was a swamped liberal arts student, ill-prepared by a small-town Missouri high school and three semesters of Bible college in Waxahachie.
Inevitably, one of the lives had to end. In October 1991, after four years together in which they discussed having children, Marla and McInerney put the relationship on hold, ostensibly to think things over. The shocker came just two months later, at Christmastime: McInerney married an old friend, Helen Bransford, a jewelrymaker and Nashville heiress. Marla’s heart, again, was broken.
Last winter and spring, Marla buried herself in her coursework at NYU, trying to finish her senior year. She had to write, direct, and produce a thirty-minute film, and she proved a resourceful filmmaker. She needed to raise $50,000 on top of her tuition and living expenses to complete the project, so she resorted to credit cards. Her script called for scenes in an airport, hard to pull off even if you’re a major director—yet last January, during a lull in air traffic on Super Bowl Sunday, she and her crew filmed at New York’s La Guardia Airport.
Marla’s entry into the business had been neither B-grade nor shoddy. Gina Gershon, who appeared in The Player as an ambitious producer’s assistant, volunteered to play the lead role in Marla’s film. Spike Lee’s sound editor worked with her crew, and cult musician Leonard Cohen contributed a song to the sound track. Author George Plimpton consented to have his office destroyed for one scene. Other than cable networks, which use short films as fillers, and some theater distribution in Europe and Japan, Marla’s project has virtually no commercial potential, but it’s not an academic exercise. She hopes to cause a stir at arty film festivals and launch a career. While a lot of big-name artists are hoping she succeeds, others see her as an opportunist. “People in New York were laughing at her,” a literary agent told me. “That’s how this town works: five minutes of notoriety, then you hustle it for all it’s worth. Marla Hanson goes to Hollywood? Why not? Marla Maples is on Broadway.”
Over breakfast at another New York cafe, Marla happily described for me the plot of the film, which is titled Love on the Boston Shuttle. Her script follows a day in the life of animal behaviorist Taylor Crowley, a single, thirtyish workaholic who has gone too long without love or sex. Early on, Taylor catches a predawn flight to deliver a lecture at Harvard on the mating habits of pit vipers. On board, while she reviews her notes and squints at color slides of lustily entangled copperheads, she conducts an avid but outspoken flirtation with a handsome male stranger.
The narrative relies on a voice-over monologue: “Am I this desperate? Fantasizing about a man that I haven’t even met…” Later she despairs at ever seeing him again and curses her luck: “I always find men who have just come out of a bad relationship… or who are still in one and just forgot to tell me… or who think marriage is a senseless bourgeois convention, but who might like to have children… someday.”
“Women do that?” I asked her as she poured her tea. “Take a fantasy and run it out for years? Marriage, babies?”
“Oh, yeah,” she said. “Constantly.”
All of a sudden, Marla was interrupted by violent sounds behind her: a broken dish, squawks of chair legs on a hardwood floor, casual voices all at once struck mute. Two young men in shorts and tank tops were brawling—rebounding off the bar and jostling the table where we sat. One of the men dumped a glass of tomato juice over the other’s head. Their expressions grew enraged, yet no blows were thrown. They wrestled along, with their arms clamped tightly around each other’s ribs, in a furious hugging dance that cleared the cafe’s doorway and sent them sprawling across a stack of packaged ice on the sidewalk. They rolled off and parted, then came back through the door, jousting again near our table as the cafe’s owner rushed to shoo them out.
“Stay away from Chris’s Gym!” screamed the one with juice on his head.
For me, it was a perfect New York moment, but not for Marla. Her animation of seconds before disappeared. Her face was completely rigid, and her eyes were as flat as jade. She was all alone—looking for a sure and fast way out.
“You didn’t think that was funny,” I said when the cafe calmed down.
“It scared me,” she replied.
Her reaction seemed sad and excessive. But then, I’m male, and I’m bigger than she is, and-the all-important distinction—nothing close to what she had experienced has ever happened to me. She will never think again that she can sing her way past the dangers of night.
From the cafe’s doorway, I watched her gingerly weave around sacks of ice smeared with tomato juice. She tossed her hair and soon vanished into the crowd of her chosen city.
My Library
