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‘It doesn't stop here … soon I will prove myself worthy as a singer and take the world by storm.”
When 30-year-old Paula Goodspeed, after her failed American Idol audition, wrote these hopeful words on her MySpace site in February, 2006, she probably had no idea she would become famous, however horribly. It has been one week since she was found dead in her car, parked close to the home of Paula Abdul, her long-time idol.
Yet the story continues to grow, as more details of Goodspeed's state of mind and her obsession with Abdul emerge. What little there exist of Goodspeed's written words and images are being ricocheted across the Net. Meanwhile, on YouTube, a video by “Amanda” (whose user name is UnificationNow) is getting a lot of mileage.
This video, ungrammatically titled The Two Paula's, was posted two days after the suicide. It features someone playing the dead Goodspeed brightly talking about the afterlife while calling Abdul a “tweaker.” Like much cutting-edge art, it is bold, and heretical, but the many viewers are not buying art at this price. “You should be in hell for this,” reads one of the many disgusted responses; “… have the respect for her family,” another asserts. “Have some compassion,” reads still another post.
The Second Time is the Charm for Paula Abdul's Stalker, the news site PhillyBurrbs.com just announced, repellently referring to news that this was Goodspeed's second suicide attempt, under the same circumstances. For her final ride in the death car, Godspeed tied a picture of Abdul to her rearview mirror, a poignant metaphor for her sense that her trials were finally behind her.
Not every commentator is unkind, although so many, particularly the more powerful media, have focused on how Goodspeed's death is affecting Abdul, who has released a default statement about being shocked and wishing to extend her prayers.
Not much is known about Paula (born Susan) Goodspeed. She was an aspiring designer (“They call me the fashion genius,” she told a bemused Ryan Seacrest); also a student and aspiring entertainer, of course. She was artistically inclined and – disquietingly like the deranged Barbra Streisand fan in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas – had been drawing “life-sized” portraits (and innumerable small ones) of Abdul since her childhood. These drawings are also available online, and they are stark in their naiveté, in their unaffected, compulsiveness. UnificationNow and her kind probably dream of producing art this pure.
Goodspeed's MySpace site tells the story of her arduous day-long Idol auditions toward finally meeting with the jury. Yet nowhere does she indicate an awareness of the producers' or the on-site screeners' machinations.
Dressed like a confectionery nightmare in pink scraps, and wearing braces and pink rubber bands on her teeth, Goodspeed sang Proud Mary in much the same way Michael Ondaatje sweetly disparages someone's singing in his poem Sweet Like a Crow: “Your voice sounds like a scorpion being pushed through a glass tube/like someone has just trod on a peacock/like wind howling in a coconut …”
The trio of judges loathed her, of course. They laughed and laughed. Cowell concentrated on her mouth filled with metal. This rejection hurt Goodspeed deeply. She wrote of “haters” on her site, and added, “I have to believe … there is something good about me.”
She was so obviously chosen to amuse the audience, and to give the judges an opportunity to mock yet another William Hung. But this was different. Hung, it turned out, had the strength and savvy to parlay his absurd attempts at getting onto Idol into a short-lived career as a camp idol of another kind.
Goodspeed did not. As with her drawings, she believed she could sing. Worse, she believed that American Idol is some sort of democratic event, in which garnering an audience in front of the judges ensures a measure of belief in one's skills.
In this case, and so many others, Idol – now, along with other reality-TV fare, being hotly scrutinized by psychologists and other analysts as capable of inflicting grievous psychic pain on its participants – is less like The Gong Show, where alternative performance was the order of the day, than like a frat house's dog fight or pig dance, where heartless jocks clamour to find the ugliest woman to bring to the party in the hope of winning a prize.
The show is culpable, and should exercise more caution before it allows fools like Randy Jackson to doubt anyone's worth in the world. More critically, we should all wise up: American Idol's contestants are rarely chosen for their talent but for their ability to cause cringing and amused nausea. Many of them try this gambit as a means of being on TV. Some do not, and are set up in this game of emotional roulette.
If Goodspeed was a “stalker,” as she is called routinely, she was light-years away from being a Mark David Chapman or Robert John Bardo (who killed actress Rebecca Schaeffer.) She is not even close to the far less vile, if creepy, woman who thought she was David Letterman's wife; to Robert Dewey Hoskins or Jack Jordan (Madonna's and Uma Thurman's stalkers, respectively).
Goodspeed did, toward the very end, send flowers to Abdul, along with her cellphone number, and disguised the note to indicate the present was from Abdul's lover. On the stalking scale, this merits a subzero: I, like many mere civilians, have been distressed more (if not, in fact, uneasily flattered) by a grad-school colleague, a garbage man, a poet.
Why do people like Goodspeed exist, and should we sympathize with them? She was clearly delusional, yet she was vividly in pain. Fixated on such an unlikely minor star as Abdul since her youth, Goodspeed followed her to death, likely feeling safe in her tragic Horton Hears a Who! proximity to the sublime object of her love and dreams.
In her book Black Sun, Julia Kristeva writes, as if describing the two Paulas' fateful collision, of “the delights of reunion that a regressive daydream promises itself through the nuptials of suicide.”
One hopes that this unholy wedding is dissolved in heaven, where such strange angels surely must sing.
