My Movie Star Break Up

and other erotomania

Henri de Tolouse-Lautrec’s Alone (Elles), 1896

When I was 15, my family was out of a house for a year. We spent the first semester of my sophomore year living in The Melba Inn. It was dilapidated, cramped to the point that when we ate dinner in our room, one of us had to sit on a toilet. But at breakfast, we could eat in the Inn’s dining room. The whole place smelled of cornflakes and cat.

Staying there, too, and eating breakfast next to us was David Letterman’s stalker.

Margaret Mary Ray wore a brown stocking wool cap and multiple layers of clothing, even in balmy September. A few years prior, she’d been pulled over for not paying a toll, then the cops discovered she was driving Letterman’s Porsche, stolen from his driveway. She insisted she was his wife, even said they had a child together. During our shared Melba Inn season, Ray was arrested several times (eight total) for trespassing on Letterman’s property. At one point she left cookies and Jack Daniels in his foyer, at another she was found asleep on his tennis court. One night Letterman and his girlfriend woke up to see Ray watching them from their hall.

Erotomania is a delusional disorder that exhibits as a belief that someone is infatuated with you. Usually the object of the delusion is someone unattainable, because of class or fame or perhaps because he is imaginary or dead. It primarily afflicts young, shy women. 

In The Physiognomy of Mental Diseases, Alexander Morison included sketches of women suffering from erotomania. There’s an obviousness to these images, they capture one aspect of the women and define them by it. Worst of all, they’re easy— I cringe writing this—to laugh at. 

Letterman made a few jokes at Ray’s expense on his show, but he never used her name, never pressed charges, and he said later in an interview that he felt great compassion for her. It’s the rare moment when women acting badly are treated kindly. Sort of. Instead of throwing her in the river to see if she would float like our Puritan ancestors, we publicly chortled, then ignored her.

Typically, each sex afflicted by erotomania follows a narrative pattern: there’s the comedy of a woman and the tragedy of a man. (The Great Gatsby’s titular character, we might safely argue, falls into the tragic portrayal of erotomania. Whereas, astronaut Lisa Nowak made headlines as the “diaper-wearing astronaut” when she drove 900 miles to stalk and threaten her ex’s new girlfriend.)

“Female patient suffering from erotomania” from Alexander Morison’s The Physiognomy of Mental Diseases

I dated a movie star my senior year of high school.

Two years after life at The Melba Inn and a week before the school year started, we drove home from Six Flags sharing Twizzlers in the trunk of a friend’s Honda Accord. The attraction between us was hotter than the trunk itself in New Jersey August, and by drive’s end, we’d decided to date, emerging from the popped trunk like shy newborns, silently wailing desire for one another.

In that moment, the lacuna of teenage loneliness felt filled. 

He remains largely unchanged today (I follow him on Instagram). There’s a cragginess to him that sits well on men, even as that same cragginess renders women invisible. 

We met in gym class junior year. I’d transferred schools to study Japanese, and on my first day, I kept staring at the guy slapping shuttlecocks across the badminton net at me, thinking he looks so familiar, how do I know him? By lunch, it had been made known to me who he was.   

He was all practiced postures: the flip of a lighter in his hand, an apple spun off the jerk of his elbow into his mouth, the smirk. He played the same few chords of Beastie Boys’ “Sabotage” on available guitars at parties. He was a series of gestures signifying, well, not much. But he was the ultimate boy quality: all bluster. 

And that fall, he was in the blockbuster movie of the year. While I didn’t think that would matter to me, it mattered to me. Leading up to and after the movie’s premiere, he’d train into New York and visit his co-stars, one of whom was our generation’s true heartthrob. They’d go to clubs, do drugs too adventurous for the rest of us—the kind the wealthy-enough are doing for therapy now. He was very proud of this, and I’d listen to the details as he told them to one, then another, then another group of friends. Even his gestures were identical with each retelling. It deflated me a little each time to hear it, to see his enthusiasm undiminished each time. I wanted to be the first telling, but I realized while listening, I was one stop on a long and brightly lit assembly line. I was never invited on these New York trips, and for some reason, never expected to be.

After my cross-country season’s muscles shrank, he complimented me on the weight I lost. I didn’t double down, but I blamed my lack of self-control for not doubling down and losing more. Later, I learned he suggested a girlfriend would be “next level hot” with some pounds gone.

That winter, I got dumped. 

I cringe to remember how I handled the months that followed. I’d walk where I thought he might drive by, as if that’s ever a good look. Or sometimes, in the company of Sarah McLachlan and Fiona Apple, the car would take me to wherever I knew him to be, seemingly without my control. I took pictures of his favorite car model, printed them, and showed them to him with feigned indifference in English class, as if I just carried around car photos in my backpack.

I tracked the girls, too. Even as I stereotyped each new girlfriend, his dimensions grew in my estimation. There was the girl-next-door captain of the basketball team he’d crushed on since middle school—his date for prom later that year. There was the cheerleader from my former school I knew to have an eating disorder—he referred to her as his “Dreamweaver’, or so he told mutual friends who conspicuously shared it with me. I listened to “Dreamweaver” alone in my room, hungry with jealousy and thirsty for catharsis. 

At lunch, I’d find a friend willing to sit with me in the school parking lot and listen to me cry.  Surely, he’d realize soon he’d made a terrible mistake? I felt for him more out of the relationship than I ever had in it. It was glorious to marinate in my cheap feelings, invite his celluloid self into my living room, watch all the gestures he made in real life too, all the intimacies I’d seen firsthand, when I’d been a front row audience member. 

***

There’s a lazy line between heartbreak and obsession. I don’t pretend to say my heartbreak was mental illness: I wanted him to like me, yes, but it was desire, never delusion. Limerence at most. Ray’s illness served as a cautionary tale then and for my rejections to come, but even as a teenager, I also felt some kinship with her: as I confronted the object of my pain in Calculus by day, movies by weekend, Ray confronted hers each evening on late night television. 

To be jilted, on the outside looking in, like Gatsby standing vigil at the window watching his obsession and her husband discuss getaway plans over cold chicken and ale in their kitchen, like Ray curled up asleep on Letterman’s tennis court, like me flipping through Cosmo’s profile of my ex, both hollows and fills. In her final letter to her mother before kneeling on a train track, Ray described her delusions as comforting because they convinced her she was loved and important, even as they cost her her life.

Beyond how she dressed and how she was portrayed on Late Night with David Letterman, I can’t pretend to know the woman sitting next to me at breakfast so many years ago. I didn’t know until today that she was an honors student; or that she hitched across the country multiple times with and without her children; or that two of her brothers also had delusions. It’s odd, what we laugh at and what we find tragic in the moment; and in hindsight, what we realize was funny and what was actually tragedy. 

Even as I suffered through that heartbreak, a part of me knew one day I’d look at it differently. What a privilege it is to look back on it, to outgrow it— to laugh at what once broke our hearts.

Many thanks to Ann Blum and Camilo Moreno-Salamanca for their very thoughtful reading and feedback. Any suggestions not attended to are not because they weren't good, but only because I'm so tired of writing about this break up today I could scream. It was time to move on.

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