She was a Fabulous Cue Card Reader

By the time

the early sixties

came around,

she really became a muse.

She was always there,

she was very clever.

Give her a mirror

and she turned it into

a drama.

It was as if

She was irreplaceable.

There was this

Incredible reaction

Between her and her clothes.

Into her eighties,

she was often seen

riding carousels in the

middle of the night.

A flask hidden in her purse,

a personality in her face.

On her ninetieth birthday,

she bought a black wig.

“It’s my page boy thatch,” she’d say.

“I went through them all;

Pigtails, pixies, peroxide blonde.”

When she was 100,

she told her biography writer,

“My life was a labor of love

I was keeping alive.

Somebody had to do it.”

As a kid

she rejected her family’s

Bourgeois lifestyle.

She met her first husband,

a friend of her sister’s,

when he was at Oxford.

But the strain of living

beyond their means,

meant that

they had grown apart

by 1954.

A much-maligned documentary,

produced by Andy Warhol’s protégé,

Paul Morrissey,

portrayed her

As a malingerer with profound depression.

“It’s unresolved grief and trauma

As well as a refusal to mature,” she told Morrissey.

Toward the end of her life,

a court sent her to a mental institution

to recover from a physical

and mental breakdown.

Her final words before she died

were, “I think sometimes

We just know we’re supposed to do

Certain things…”

When she died, and no one claimed her body

so, she was interred in a Potter’s Field.

Her tombstone read,

“Always have something to say

even if you don’t know

how to say it.”

In life, she created an emotional "catbird seat",

where she didn’t have to risk being vulnerable.