Catie Disabato - The Ghost Network

When the Canadian government denied their requests, the Pullmans allegedly threw an epic public tantrum and planned to illegally abduct a horse. They reportedly bribed a young member of the CCGC to allow them unfettered access to the island on an appointed night. Later that year, the Merrimac washed up on the Northeastern shore of Sable, the area of the island that has collected the highest number of shipwrecks. The CCGC aquatic force pulled four bodies out of the water, three adults and one child. The remains were DNA tested but the results are unavailable somehow the reports were never sent to any other U.S. authority other than the FBI, or the bodies were never identified even through testing, or the identities of the dead were never otherwise reported by some other bureaucratic folly. The recovered pieces of the Merrimac had been fitted with animal containment devices a few days before the crash. One week later, the Pullman family and their stable manager, Anthony Perkins, were reported missing. When the family didn’t reappear and were presumed dead, their substantial financial holdings, reportedly in the hundreds of millions, were transferred to an urban renewal charity, the Becker-Ho Foundation, in accordance to Charles and Margot’s last will and testament.

The Pullmans didn’t own a yacht but certainly had the means to buy, rent, or borrow one quickly. In 1999, only three of all the yachts registered in Canada, the United States, and Nova Scotia were called Merrimac . Two of them are still in use today. A Chicago resident named Bruce Adler, a wealthy bachelor in his fifties, owned the third Merrimac . Adler registered the Merrimac with the Chicago Yacht Association and reported that he docked the yacht at the Inner Jackson Harbor until 2001, when he broke the ship down to scrap wood. However, the Inner Jackson Harbor’s longtime Harbor manager, Nancy Gould, remembers that that sailboat, not a yacht, was always tied to Adler’s dock.

Did the Pullman family borrow Adler’s yacht, sail it to Sable with the intent of stealing a horse, and accidentally crash on the shore of the island? If so, what would Alder have to gain by concealing this fact? And why would a twenty-three-year-old pop star have a screen-printed version of a map of the island on her wall? Where would a map like that even come from?

I can only answer the final question. Molly Metropolis commissioned the screen print on her wall, but it was copied almost exactly from a map called “Sable Island: Known Wrecks Since 1583,” drawn by John Fauller and now part of the collection at the Nova Scotia Museum of Natural History.

For whatever reason, Molly must’ve considered her screen print version of that map one of her most important wall hangings. Besides the place of prominence she gave it above her bed, she also used it as a hiding place. When Taer moved the print, a notebook, which had been wedged between the wooden box frame and the wall, fell onto the bed. Nix recognized it immediately. It was Molly Metropolis’s personal diary.

* This recording is a harbinger of a fixation Taer developed with her recording device. She zealously recorded most of her conversations about Molly, spurred on early in her investigation by something Molly wrote in her own notebook: “Never work, always document!”—the phrase itself was a cheeky bastardization of a Situationist assertion “Never work!” Molly strove to make the act of living her life its own art. The documentation of her actions was compulsory, so art could be made without work.

† “Brian Slade” refers to Todd Haynes’s 1999 film Velvet Goldmine , about a David Bowie pastiche character who faked his own death onstage.

‡ Molly Metropolis wasn’t the only celebrity who stayed there. Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie famously favored the Peninsula whenever they stayed in Chicago with their brood.

§ This is a theory that her family and friends contested to the police as strongly as Nix contested it to Taer. In September 2009, on an unreleased date, Molly Metropolis’s mother, Melissa Young, underwent open heart surgery. Molly stayed with her family at the hospital for a week, and was attentive all through the tour. Molly’s family believed that she never would’ve disappeared purposefully while her mother was still recovering.

ǁ The Transit Subcommittee chose plans designed by Savoy’s rival, Ronald Mansfield, but those plans weren’t implemented either because the Commercial Transport Committee eventually chose to divert the L restoration funds to building another Metra line, the Metra Electric South Shore Line that Taer and Nix used to travel between the city and Flossmoor.

After packing the rest of Molly Metropolis’s belongings into boxes and ferrying them to the hotel’s mailroom, Nix and Taer left the Peninsula, taking Molly’s notebook with them. When I spoke with Nix, she told me they stole the notebook out of “simple curiosity.” However, in an interview with Berliner, when I asked him if he could provide an outside perspective on Nix’s comment, Berliner said: “Their curiosity wasn’t simple.”

Nix and Taer didn’t examine the notebook’s contents until they got back to Taer’s apartment and Taer’s roommate had gone out for the evening, leaving dirty dishes in the sink. For half an hour, they thumbed through the pages together, reading passages out loud and examining Molly’s sketches of outfits and accessories. After this brief examination, Nix decided not to delve any deeper into Molly; she felt done with the notebook. Reading it felt like a betrayal, or like “grave-robbing your grandmother,” as Nix told me.

Taer had the opposite reaction. She wanted to read every word and look for clues in the sketches of costumes and half-finished song lyrics. Although Taer and Nix found the notebook together, and Nix arguably had more claim to it as Molly’s ex-assistant, Taer treated the notebook like it was her property. Unfortunately, she had it with her when she vanished into Lake Michigan. The final written words of a figure about to become an icon sank to the bottom of a lake. Only ghostly secondhand information about Molly Metropolis’s notebook survives.*

Although I would’ve preferred to examine Molly’s notebook firsthand, I enjoyed Taer’s tour of the contents via her own writing. Taer’s personality enticed me from the first moment I picked up her diary. She lacked self-awareness, but occasionally had a sharp critical eye. Just after “Apocalypse Dance” was released, she wrote:

Metro started out as a stand-in for the listener, someone as obsessed with fame as the listener (me? us?) is. With “Cause Apocalyptic,” she appears to be going in a different direction. Fame is inside her (infected her?) and she can no longer be a stand-in for me, or a version of me, but that sense — of her having once been me — lingers …

Taer liked the idea of being an obsessive as much as she liked obsessing:

So I can do a deep criticism here, on the lyric level, about love and revenge being the same thing, because they are both about obsessive attention, but then it gets all twisted because of course I’m obsessing. Like, would my time really be more valuable if I was just listening to Boxer or Doolittle for the billionth time? †Would my time be more “legitimate?” Is the level of fame important in determining the quality of the obsession? Is the type of fame important?

Most of Taer’s notes on Molly’s notebook are somewhat muddled, even big direct quotes — except one note, dated a few days before she disappeared, written with sloppy and hurried handwriting: “It was all in her notebook, in some form or another, it was all in there!”