Inside the Mind of Peter Braunstein, continued
Some who knew Braunstein and worked with him believed something was wrong all along. He was fired from his job with WWD in 2002 after he apparently stepped on the toes of a staffer from Vogue Magazine, which was owned by the same company as WWD. To Braunstein it appeared the conflict was over his simply securing extra tickets to a fashion show, but to his editors it was part of a pattern of arrogant and belligerent behavior he'd displayed for the length of his employment. Braunstein was told that it was all well and good for a journalist to be aggressive sometimes to get a story, but his behavior was beyond mere truth-seeking. In a mediabistro.com messageboard exchange he had with a fellow member of the press in 2003, Braunstein bared his teeth in a post he made under his own name:
do you have any other life but this BB? have you been laid, EVER? i'm sure it was a thrilling experience for you and the person you paid to make it with you. people like you hide behind their machines and throw out these lame posts, figuring you can act with impunity. i posted something political, and you made it personal. okay. if you can break away from the inflatable plastic sex doll you spend time with, why don't you name a place and a time and we'll get down, man to wimp. or maybe i'll just find out who and where you are and pay you a visit. but i'm sure that's not your game - that would actually require courage, or virtue.
It may have been Peter Braunstein's relationship with fashion writer and editor Jane Larkworthy that combined with his obsession with Warhol and Sedgwick to make him snap. On January 8, 2004, Page Six of the New York Post published a blurb entitled, "Boyfriend Goes to Bellevue." The piece purported to be about an incident where Jane Larkworthy attacked Braunstein, then had him committed to a psychiatric ward. It read, in part:
(Peter) Braunstein claims Larkworthy was jealous of the attractive young actresses he was meeting while casting his upcoming off-Broadway play, "Andy and Edie..."
(...) "Edie Sedgwick was incarcerated in Bellevue, so the joke I make is that I was Edie for two hours," Braunstein says. "Needless to say, I ran screaming from Larkworthy's abode and haven't seen her since..."
Braunstein actually harmed himself and attempted to blame it on Larkworthy. The story in the Post was deliberately planted by him — it was the first volley in a kind of war Braunstein seemed to wage against Jane Larkworthy.
One of the most peculiar links from the webpage for "Andy and Edie" was one Braunstein titled, "Startling Revelation: How I Became Edie Sedgwick as a Result of My Two Years of Emotional Starvation with the Dreaded BioHazard." Though Braunstein did not hesitate to name Larkworthy elsewhere on the site, he re-named her "BioHazard" in this pseudo-blog, for reasons of "propriety and nomenclature." He wrote, of BioHazard:
In a flash I understood everything: Why BioHazard, Interrupted seemed like an 8-year-old girl trapped in a 40-year-old's skin; why she regarded the world with such hatred, mistrust, forgone defeatism, and resentment; why she was a beauty editor; why the only sentiment she could readily stomach was pity; and why she could never, ever give or receive love. This pre-developed core creature hated me (even more so when it saw me staring at it), but mostly and above all it hated itself.
Braunstein's derision was not reserved just for messageboard postings or ranting about Jane Larkworthy, though. On a page intended to describe a stunt Braunstein had conceived to promote "Andy and Edie," one pulled at a party sponsored by Allure Magazine, Braunstein took a moment to deride an actor formerly cast as Warhol, David Runco:
I decided to bring Andy and Edie with me (real stage actors Melody Bates and David Runco. Runco, after receiving permission from his girlfriend to go outside, attended. All seemed right, but unfortunately I had to fire him when he took a Custer's Last Stand over the right of his girlfriend - Andrea Reese, whom we had originally cast as Vreeland -to be paid more than the entire rest of the cast even though she had quite a small role. It seems that lack of success in this business correlates directly with a sense of entitlement; that is, losers tend to have more attitude. It really makes sense when you think about it.)
It is as if Braunstein's writing, as found on the webpages intended to promote his play, also illuminated his downward spiral. How he moved from creative inspiration to obsessive anger and grandiosity, then to delusion — his writing of "dreaming of Edie every night" seems both honest and unhinged, all at once.
How Peter Braunstein may have made the leap from an attention-hungry but highly intelligent and engaging writer and pop historian to an apparently organized and potentially dangerous sexual predator is still not clear — but what might be clear is that it wasn't actually that much of a leap. Authorities found a collection of books in Braunstein's former residence where he'd highlighted passages depicting cruelty to women. Popular weblogs devoted to Manhattan-based media gossip like www.gawker.com and tabloid papers like the Post rounded up a number of often-anonymous testimonies as to Braunstein's bizarre, aggressive, and sometimes frightening behavior over the years. It seemed he may have been a ticking bomb even when he was writing witty pieces about the porn industry for various now-defunct webzines (online magazines) and the Village Voice.
As of November 8, 2005, Peter Braunstein was still on the run from the law, and no one seemed to know where he was. He made various untraceable phone calls to people in the week following the Halloween attack, threatening former co-workers and acquaintances if they testified against him. His father pleaded in the papers for him to turn himself in. People who had formerly known him only as a brash guy who wore tacky '70's kitsch-style clothing saw his past eccentricities in a new and terrifying light.
A number of people in Manhattan who were accustomed to being the ones who brought big stories to public attention had become players in a truly weird tale. They hid from the mad playwright and dreaded the next rise of the curtain.
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