Torment Saint: The Life of Elliott Smith (5 page)

For a time the Oscars was a remedy of sorts, or at least a powerful distraction. Early on, people at Miramax predicted he’d be playing the
song on TV some day, but when the nomination actually came, it was, Elliott felt, a “totally freakish accident.”
¹⁵
So much so that initially he decided not to perform. The exposure was just too weird, he said, too ridiculous, and also, according to several of his friends, terrifying. The specter of success, its trappings and creativity-crushing responsibilities, unnerved him. But also, the event itself was
not him
. It didn’t square with who he thought he was, what he was all about. He belonged on the outside; he never bought in. His songs were dissections, dismantlings of “pompous … self-congratulatory ventures.”
¹⁶
He compared his appearance to riding in the space shuttle or walking on the moon. It would be, he figured beforehand, fake and worthless. Plus, “There’s such a pressure to be happy and successful and a winner in America,” Elliott explained. “That’s such a joke. And you’re meant to project that image at all times, otherwise you’re a loser. Then if you complain about the cult of the winner, people assume you are espousing the cult of the outsider.” The fact is, Elliott did not want to espouse anything. His songs were simply, essentially about what it meant to be a person. They weren’t manifestos. They also weren’t finger-pointing didacticisms, a feature of early folk Elliott found repellent.

In the weeks leading up to the big night, he was freaked out, according to friends. He didn’t want to perform; he didn’t want
not to
either. No move made sense. But if he elected to bow out, event organizers told him, someone else would take his place. The song had to be done, after all. At some point in these back-and-forth negotiations the name Richard Marx was slyly floated. The ruse worked, although Elliott seemed to know it was a bluff. He would perform, he decided. Not for himself, but for his friends and mother. It would make it easier for her to tell acquaintances what he did, he reasoned (“There’s a silver lining in the corporate cloud,” Elliott declares in the
Figure 8
song “Wouldn’t Mama be Proud”). He asked to arrange the strings parts; producers agreed. He also planned a secret mockery, a bit of implied mischief most would likely not even get. The idea was to wear a white sport coat with a pink carnation, in homage to the 1957 rock ‘n’ roll tune by Marty Robbins, who wrote the song after driving past a high school and finding students dressed for prom. “I’m dressed up for the dance,” Robbins sings, “I’m all alone in romance … A white sport coat and a pink carnation/I’m in a blue blue mood.” The sentiment fit: a sad, dateless loser
dressed up to no purpose. But in the end the carnation got dropped. The tacky white sport coat also disappeared, in favor of Prada.

The ceremony took place at L.A.’s Shrine Auditorium, just across the street from where Elliott’s sister Ashley Welch lived at the time. Billy Crystal hosted, as he had the year before. Curtains opened grandly to reveal him on the bow of a slowly sinking
Titanic
replica, an overbaked nod to the famous Leonardo DiCaprio shot. Titanic was the film that year, a forbidding favorite with fourteen nominations and eleven eventual Oscars. While Crystal mugs, the camera swings to Jack Nicholson and Dustin Hoffman smiling approvingly. “Welcome to the
Titanic
,” Crystal announces foreshadowingly. “We are just like that great ship. We are huge, we are expensive, and everybody would like us to go a lot faster.” More laughter and applause follow. Crystal then launches into a song-and-dance collage aimed at best picture nominees.
Titanic
gets the
Gilligan’s Island
treatment. As for
Good Will Hunting
, Crystal sings to audience members Matt Damon and Ben Affleck, “Your script was tight and, dammit, so are your buns!” You’re a hit, he continues, and it’s clear to see, “and you haven’t yet hit puberty.” “Dropping your pants is a lot of fun, just like they do in Washington,” Crystal observes in reference to the next film,
Boogie Nights
.

Elliott was, of course, anything but A-list material. Organizers actually tried suggesting he go in through the back door. “The Oscars people didn’t treat [Elliott] with respect,” says Joanna Bolme. “They looked at him like, ‘We gotta get this guy on and off as quickly as possible.’ ”
¹⁷
Elliott and Bolme did in fact walk the red carpet, everybody snapping photos, Elliott at one point crushed by industry throng, all of whom pushed past him toward superstars. Winding his way, he found himself directly behind Madonna, that night’s Best Original Song presenter. His chief concern was to not step on the train of her dress—long, black, and billowing, cut revealingly down the middle. Finally he managed to squeeze past her. (There is a brief pan of Smith online, standing behind Madonna as she’s being interviewed, with Joan Rivers riffing in the background.)
¹⁸

Bolme is right. Although Elliott was the only nominee who wrote and performed his own song, the only one who actually played an instrument, “Miss Misery” was by far the most truncated tune. The song came in at a scant 2 minutes, 14 seconds. Dion was given 3:39, Bolton 3:22, and Aaliyah, 3:12.

First to appear were Aaliyah and Michael Bolton, followed by Trisha Yearwood, Elliott, and Dion. In short, four bombastic vocals, emotionally overripe, and one fragile dose of absolute discontinuity, fresh out of inpatient treatment for alcohol and suicide. As Sam Coomes put it, “Pretty much the worst music on earth … and then Elliott comes out. Very similar to the sort of extreme mental shift you get on an acid trip.”
¹⁹
Bolton’s hair was cut short—no mullet. He wore what looked like a trench coat over a white-collared, open shirt. Before going on he was introduced gushingly as “the exciting Michael Bolton.” The song was “Go the Distance.” He vows, “I will search the world; I will face its harms.” A case of full-frontal courage against all odds. In a tightly fitting black dress, Aaliyah takes a similar line in “Journey to the Past”: heart don’t fail me now, she pleads, courage don’t desert me. Dion, the last to perform, stands before rolling mist in a turtleneck gown and a “heart of the sea” necklace. “My Heart Will Go On,” she predicts. In Elliott’s songs, hearts do the opposite. They waver, they get rained on.

In later interviews Elliott said he was too bewildered to get nervous, but most friends saw it differently. They describe him as “scared shitless.” He stepped out to a strings intro in his white Prada suit, hair customarily disarranged, guitar slung around his back. There had been talk of him sitting on a chair, but the Oscar people nixed the idea; it wouldn’t look good, they figured. Plus, the chair would need to be gotten rid of before Dion took the stage moments later. Dion disarmed Elliott. Backstage she asked if he was nervous; he said he was, and she reassured him, suggesting he use the adrenaline to make his song better. It is a beautiful song, she added. “Then she gave me a big hug,” Elliott recalled. “It was too much … She was really sweet, which has made it impossible for me to dislike [her] anymore … It was too human to be dismissed.”
²⁰

As he begins, Elliott’s voice, never especially powerful, seems to tremble slightly. Everywhere friends were watching, in bars or houses on Hawthorne in Portland, literally holding their breath. Jennifer Chiba remembers the night clearly. Her first response? “Who the fuck is that?!” She says, “I didn’t know that that’s what he was about. It was breathtaking.”
²¹
A close friend said it was like, for a moment, your favorite thing in the world was everybody else’s favorite thing. From a far distance, friends and family held
Elliott’s fear. They hung on each tremulous line. They rooted for him to power through. And he did. He bowed twice. Once by himself, then later sandwiched between Yearwood and Dion.

Presenter Madonna, who had just released
Ray of Light
, her long black train pooling and dragging like an animate oil slick, called the songs “a contrast in styles,” a clear reference to Elliott, the single contrasting example. A bit of hostile posturing occurs. As Madonna reads Dion’s name—the
Titanic
theme a forbidding favorite—she turns to the side and rolls her eyes. Then, seconds before she crowns “My Heart Will Go On” as winner, she winces, “What a shocker.” The crowd murmurs; the songwriters hop to the stage, collecting their statues. Everybody knew who was going to win, Elliott said later. “If I won it,” he adds, “I would have put it in my closet. But Celine will put it on her mantelpiece.”
²²

This was to become, in terms of assorted reverberations, the longest two minutes of Elliott Smith’s life. The show was over, but it went on eternally, a snatch of time Elliott was forever taken back to. There’s a tendency to see discontinuous events like these as turning points, moments of upheaval leading to transformation, lasting change. Elliott, ever the enemy of simple formulations, resisted that idea. “I don’t feel like things are very changed,” he said afterward. “I do the same things I did before. I think about the same things … It was really weird. It was pretty fun. For a day.”
²³

The picture of him as fragile stuck. He hated it, found it too personal and dismissive, but there was nothing he could do about it. “People were saying all this stuff simply because I didn’t come out and command the stage like Celine Dion does.”
²⁴
He decided, then, to stop reading his press. He tired of questions constantly redirected back to who he was, as opposed to focusing on the music, which he liked talking about more. Plus it interfered with attempts to get out of his own “weird headspace.” He practiced a self-erasure. “I don’t think it’s important who I am,” he said. “I really like playing music, but I don’t really want to be anything in particular.”
²⁵

What the Oscars crystallized for Elliott most powerfully was the problem of ambivalence, and of fame—how much to want, how much to run away from. At least with regard to material circumstance, things had changed. Now he was known. And he would be signed shortly to behemoth DreamWorks, a far cry from the Cavity Search and Kill Rock Stars labels.
There was money, too, and with it opportunities for self-destruction. Success, in other words, made drugs possible, as one friend put it. The numbers vary, but in years to follow, from 2000 to 2002, Elliott would come to spend upward of one thousand dollars per week on illicit substances. Suddenly he was in the spotlight. Suddenly he lost privacy—he got recognized, he was asked for autographs. Before he drank, sometimes heavily, but he wasn’t drunk all the time, and not every night. Drugs were different, though; they became all-consuming. They were like a career to which he would dedicate himself single-mindedly. He wasn’t a drug addict when he wasn’t known, a friend explained.
²⁶

The most forbidding challenge was emotional. Music was one thing, by far the most natural, uncomplicated aspect of Elliott’s life. It couldn’t and wouldn’t stop coming. The drugs slowed but never kinked the flow. Yet post-Oscars, Elliott was increasingly uncomfortable in his own skin. The accolades embarrassed him. There was guilt too, a need to diminish his own self-importance, a feeling of “what I do is no better than anyone else.” His belief, one he recognized at a very deep level, was that he was the wrong kind of person to be big and famous. The poorness of fit was obvious. The world of Madonnas and Hoffmans and Nicholsons was not one he wished to live in or even really visit. “It was all these famous singers,” he recalled, “and then it was like, ‘Who’s that guy? In the white suit? With the dirty hair? Who hasn’t sold millions of records? What in the world is he doing there?’ ” The question was a good one: “I was wondering the same thing,” he said.
²⁷

To Jennifer Chiba, the conflict had mainly to do with an incongruence between warranted attention on the songs—praise the songs deserved—and Elliott’s inner feeling that “he was crap.” He got enough of a taste of fame, John Chandler says, then decided, “Why would I want this?” “I don’t want to sell me. I’m not a product,” he said. He “tried on the fame hat, then said, ‘No. Not for me.’ ”
²⁸
Even “Miss Misery” itself became tiresome, an aural reminder of all those things he wished to move past, to forget. “I’ll play it when I don’t have to be the weird Oscar guy anymore,” he said. “I don’t think it’s a crowd pleaser. No one really calls that out … I’m really tired of it.”
²⁹
He didn’t get the prize, of course, but he wouldn’t have wanted it anyway. As he told Jonathan Valania, “If there’s one thing I can’t stand, it’s winners.”
³⁰

Elliott returned to the Oscars in songs, the night’s packed, complicated meaning an ongoing source of curiosity. On one hand, he was dismissive, he deflated the event’s importance, laughing off its empty bombast. At the same time, there seems to be an ongoing attempt at making sense of things, of figuring his final attitude toward the whole ordeal, which remained, in different ways, emotionally unfinished. He tired of the interviews, the subject was grating and almost depressing; but on his own, in the music, he kept bringing it up.

One song friends say has Oscar connotations is “Stupidity Tries,” off the album
Figure 8
. It’s a paean to fecklessness, absurdity, and self-doubt. At its root is a brilliantly dense commentary, more comical than confused or anguished (although some of the latter managed to leak in too). Elliott recorded versions of the tune at Abbey Road studios, a location of deep meaning to him, yet even that fact he mostly minimized. As it begins Elliott’s got a foot in the door but he’s not sure why, it makes no sense; he’ll be cut down to size, he figures. They found some “privateer,” he sings, “to sail across the sea of trash” (“sea of trash” was lifted from a Sluggo song on a Hullabaloo release). This might be the single instance of “privateer” appearing in a rock song, but the word choice is deft. These were independent renegade attack vessels, of benefit to smaller naval powers, sometimes made up of pirates and convicts. They disrupted commerce, attacked and captured foreign ships. So, on Oscar night, it was Elliott in his humble craft, taking aim at the moneyed
Titanics
of the world, the big ships. Nautical references continue. He looks from floor to floor for a port of call, a place to unload, a storm-protecting harbor, as if he just wants to get out. In early versions of the song he refers to himself as a Spanish lord; the recorded version adds specificity. He’s a “drunk conquistador conquering the Governor’s Ball”—his abilities, in other words, as professional warrior diminished comically by drink. The tune ends on a note of meaninglessness: Elliott can’t think of a thing he hopes tomorrow brings. “Oh, what a surprise” he adds. Nothing new comes. He’s back where he started. The enemy’s still within; he’s not exactly Elliott, but he’s there nonetheless, to be dealt with somehow.