Evelyn McHale
Born September 20, 1923 and one of seven siblings, she was a child in Washington D.C. when McHale’s mother left the household and her parents divorced. Her father, a bank examiner, retained custody of all the children. After high school, McHale became a WAC, stationed in Jefferson, Missouri. Her feelings about her time in the WACs can be gleaned from the fact that she burned her uniform after finishing her stint. She made her way to New York City where she worked as a bookkeeper and lived quietly with her brother and sister-law in Baldwin, Long Island. She met her fiancé Barry Rhodes, a Pennsylvania college student just discharged from the Air Force, and was a bridesmaid at the wedding of Rhodes’ younger brother. After the wedding, she removed her bridesmaid’s gown and burned that too.
The 30th of April, 1947 was Rhodes’ 24th birthday and she took the train out to Easton to celebrate with him, spending the night. He later insisted nothing appeared to be wrong, but instead of going home when she returned early in the morning, McHale checked into the Governor Clinton Hotel on 31st Street. There, she wrote a note, which included the words: “I don’t think I would make a good wife for anyone. [Rhodes] is much better off without me. Tell my father, I have too many of my mother’s tendencies.” She then crossed out the first two sentences, but put the note into her purse and went to the observation platform on floor 86 of the Empire State Building where she placed her neatly-folded cloth coat, her purse and a collection of family photos she had carried with her against the railing. Before jumping, she dropped her white scarf over the edge, and followed its trajectory down. Clearing the building’s setbacks, she hit a United Nations Cadillac limousine which was parked on 34th Street. As with any New York City catastrophe, a crowd began to converge.
A photography student across the street, Robert C. Wiles, heard the loud crash of her body hitting the metal, and ran over too. Fortuitously, he had his camera and took a photo of her as she lay on the roof of the crumpled car. It was snapped just four minutes after she died and, despite the 1050-foot fall, her body looked intact. Wiles’ photo ran as a full-page Picture of the Week in the May 12, 1947 issue of Life Magazine and also appeared in The Best of Life. The caption read: “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.” This photo, which became an iconic image, was the only photograph Wiles ever managed to get published.
Her calmly elegant demeanor, her legs crossed at the ankles, the way the car’s metal folded like sheets and framed her head and arms—perhaps these were the reasons that McHale’s death was given its title as “the most beautiful suicide.” When she died, she was still wearing her pearls and white gloves.
In her suicide note, she specified that she wanted no service and wished to be cremated, which she was. She also wanted no remembrance, hoping to exit quietly. But, as Mitchell Pacelle pointed out in his book, Empire: A Tale of Obsession, Betrayal, and the Battle for an American Icon, “the Empire State Building offered an incomparable platform for telling the world, ‘You failed me.’ A leap off the observation deck was not something loved ones could hide from the world.” The newspapers the next day were full of headlines such as, “Doubting Woman Dives to Death.” McHale’s death became a resource for artists. Perhaps the most famous work is Andy Warhol’s painting, Suicide (Fallen Body), 1962, in which the artist uses a repetitive grid of 16 images from Wiles’ photograph. Oddly, the painting looks almost abstract and is one of four different suicide images made by Warhol that year.
McHale’s suicide continues to resonate. She was the subject of a song by the Portland indie band, Parenthetical Girls, who released the song, “Evelyn McHale” in 2010 as one side of an EP recording titled, Privilege, pt. 1: On Death & Dismemberment. It is also the subject of a 2011 work by Matthew Barney, DRAWING RESTRAINT 17; Evelyn McHale, which laid cast polycaprolactone over the original Life Magazine page. In 2011, the fall advertising campaign for Neiman Marcus used an image on the cover of their catalog of Drew Barrymore splayed across a car that evoked the original Life photograph. A 2012 painting by a contemporary Filipino artist, Jonathan Ching (I Dream What I Dream What I Dream When I am Awake) also made use of McHale’s image in death.
Aside from McHale, the general theme of jumping from the Empire State Building has resonated with artists. A life-size cast iron sculpture of a man by the British artist, Antony Gormley, was placed on a ledge of the Empire State Building (as well as some other buildings around New York City) in 2010, as part of Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s public arts program. 911 was dialed so frequently by passersby reporting sightings of a man apparently contemplating suicide that one officer called the art project “a pain in the ass.”
The Empire State Building is 102 stories high and until the World Trade Center is rebuilt, it is the tallest building in New York City. McHale was not the first and certainly not the last to leap from its height. Six months after the building opened in 1931 Friedrich Eckert, a 32-year old Queens shopkeeper, jumped over a metal gate on the upper-floor observatory and threw himself from the balcony. At least 30 others have successful committed suicide by jumping from this building. This number pales, however, by comparison to suicides at another iconic structure, the Eiffel Tower, which has seen at least 360 deaths.
Jennifer Vorbach
