Evidence that Marilyn Manson is the last rock star (as outlined in a recent profile in Spin magazine):
1. Marilyn Manson has a creepy butler–just like rock stars! Or, you know, the Addams Family!
I ring the front doorbell of the mansion, which has a grand, old-Hollywood look to it. The door opens and standing before me is a stocky young man in a dark T-shirt and loose jeans. There are two rings through his lips.
"Follow me," he says.
"In here," says the man, indicating a door to my left. I enter a dark chamber.
"Wait here for Manson," he says, and leaves, closing the door behind him. His manners are grave, formal, and elegant, despite his casual dress and seeming youth.
2. Like countless rock stars before him, Manson is not afraid to decorate his house like a gothic Lewis Carroll museum. Oh, and he has a typewriter next to a computer–for authenticity!
I sit down, and my eyes adjust to the candlelit gloom. I'm in a smallish den with black-velvet sheets sealed tight over the windows. There's a flat-screen TV, a couch, an Apple computer, and an old-fashioned Torpedo typewriter. The walls are lined with bookshelves holding hundreds of DVDs, and standing to my right is an eerie three-foot-high wax statue of Alice in Wonderland. On the table next to me is a yellowed human skull, the nostrils acting as a holder for some black pens.
3. When entertaining a guest, Manson doesn't have his butler reach for an ordinary scotch, or an everyday beer. He serves absinthe–just like Bruce Springsteen and cartoon Draculas do!
Manson's manservant comes back into the room and hands me a clear goblet with a pinkish liquid. There's no smoke coming off the top, but I feel like there is. "Absinthe," he says, and stands over me, silent and erect. He's an excellent manservant, and I appreciate his discipline and freakish behavior.
4. He totally stays up all night–just like the last rock star, or teenage goths would!
We start to talk, and Manson is sniffling a little. Right away, he starts to tell me about the breakup of his marriage to burlesque queen Dita Von Teese. They were together for six years and then, in their seventh year, they got married. "It's the old cliché," he says. "Marriage changes everything."
The behavior he had manifested for the first six years — such as living like a vampire — became unacceptable to Von Teese, he says. But he wasn't willing to give up his vampire's hours. "I'm my most creative between 3 and 5 A.M.," he says. "That's the way I've always been."
5. But the biggest reason that Manson is the last rock star is that he's not afraid to use his divorce to sell records. Oh, and he's also not afraid to refer to himself as "the devil."
"But then I realized that what's wrong about me is right," he says. "To play devil's advocate — but that doesn't really work, since I'm the devil — people would say that drugs and alcohol wrecked my marriage. But buyer beware. She said she had tolerated the lifestyle because she hoped I would change and threatened to leave if I didn't. I was sleeping on the couch in my own home. I was no longer supposed to be a rock star. I was someone who had to be apologized for. I wasn't prepared to be alone. I came out of this naked, a featherless bird. I needed to get my wings back by making this record."