By Antonella Gambotto-Burke

If Marilyn Manson didn't exist, David Sedaris would have to create him. The black-lipsticked 38-year-old rock star's unheated Californian pile features mounted baboon heads, Gottfried Helnwein's Epiphany 1 (Adoration of the Magi) , a lithograph depicting the baptism of a Nazi Christ (Helnwein also shot the cover of Manson's fifth album, The Golden Age of Grotesque ), and the Joachim Luetke sculpture Homunculus (a baby with chicken feet for hands and the lower body of a caterpillar). On a table, the anonymous aborted foetus in formaldehyde given to him as “a beautiful morbid gift” by ex-wife and burlesque diva Dita von Teese. Misinterpreted as a wry take on his spiritual corruption, the decor is, in fact, a canvas of self-loathing: Manson's self-perception is that of a malevolent baboon.

These psychological ruptures have been lucrative. The self-anointed “God of Fuck” is, in fact, a disciplined and driven entrepreneur. Local shows have almost sold out, two of his albums hit number one on the US charts, four achieved platinum status, another four made gold, and his autobiography, The Long Hard Road Out of Hell , was a New York Times bestseller. Prototype 35 of his absinthe, the wonderfully named Mansinthe, has sold out despite being priced at close to a thousand Australian dollars per bottle, his first album in four years, Eat Me, Drink Me , debuted in the top ten, and Phantasmagoria: The Visions of Lewis Carroll , the upcoming film Manson wrote and scored and will direct and star in, will feature his girlfriend of ten months, actor Evan Rachel Wood, as well as model Lily Cole and Tilda Swinton.

Now deep into his Rape of the World Tour (his promoter, Michael Coppel, wisely did not use the title on promotional material), Manson is put through to me from Lincoln , Nebraska . He is, in many respects, a surprise. The lugubrious monotone he affects becomes almost girlish in curiosity, he giggles easily, is prompt to reply, charming, and whimsical in his pretensions. Later, I discover that this is not an unusual experience for a female interviewer; Manson's public relations skills are superb. He saves his belligerence, serial-killer analogies, and Schadenfreude for men.

In discussing his sensitivity to humiliations – founding Marilyn Manson keyboardist, Stephen Gregory Bier Jnr. (“Pogo”), has just slammed Manson with a 24-count, 96-page breach-of-contract complaint accusing him of bilking the band of some USD20,000,000 – he muses: “I think probably my initial betrayal in life came when I changed my mind, opened my eyes to different ways of thinking about religion as a kid. I thought the world was going to end and when it didn't, I felt really cheated.”

This feigned anticipation of Armageddon is just another Dial-a-Controversy in Manson's canon; like most everything else he has ever done and said (“Christians are some of the greatest Satanists because they've managed to pull off such an amazing scam that its almost respectable”), arousing the ire of the Christian Right is just another way of hurting his Episcopalian mother. I point out that the “initial betrayal” predated his reaction to his mother's beliefs; in rejecting them, he was rejecting her. Religion was just the fall guy.

“I agree with you,” he slowly says.

I was struck, I continue, by the lack of detail about your mother in your otherwise outrageously revealing autobiography. In it, he states that he attempted to choke her, spat at her, and hit her. Suspecting her of infidelity to his emotionally dislocated Vietnam vet father, he hurled a heavy perfume bottle at her face and permanently scarred her. “She still has a scar,” he wrote, “which has served as her constant reminder never to have another child.”

Uncharacteristically, he is silent.

“Is that right?” I persist.

When he replies, his tone is strange and high. “Yeah.”

I ask how she provoked his violence.

Disingenuously, blurring words, he replies: “I don't really have an explanation for it. My mother has...” his cough is strangled “become very ill in the past year, so that's also hard for me, and my father and I became much closer. I saw the dedication that my father had to stick by my mother and take care of her, so I've gone through a lot. She's … mentally ill. I'm not sure of all the … exact parts of it, but she had a mental breakdown.” He is uncomfortable, and sounds burdened. “She didn't know who she was for a while.”

Manson's violence towards his mother – a violence both prodigious in its emotional intensity and exploited for commercial gain – now seems to gnaw at him. Born Brian Warner, Manson chose the promiscuous, submissive, sweetly pill-dazzled Marilyn Monroe and violent psychopath Charles Manson as the primary “parental” influences of his public persona, an interesting Freudian reflection of Hugh and Barb Warner of Canton , Ohio . In his early days as Marilyn Manson, he designed flyers with “Beat Up Your Mom Music” scrawled at the bottom; the EP Smells Like Children includes a recording of his mother discussing pills with her mother as the “song” May Cause Discoloration of the Urine or Feces (also released as part of the soundscape of Revelation #9 ); and in his book, the little he says about her is mostly disparaging. “She just cried,” he wrote of her response to his cruelty, “and I never felt sorry for her.”

He pauses. “It's hard for me now to really talk about my mother …”

So he doesn't want to discuss the issue?

“She was, uh, a little bit like the mother in [the film] Requiem for a Dream at times,” he hesitates.

In Requiem for a Dream , the pill-addicted mother slowly slips into psychosis and institutionalization as her heroin-addicted son's gangrenous arm is amputated.

“That period in the 70s when doctors were passing out diet pills?” he reminds me. “My mum was … a little off of her head at times. I don't remember what she did so much; more that she was very neurotic. I feel like she projected her hypochondria on me. I was always sick as a kid, but don't know how much of it was her wanting me to be sick to not ever let go of me in a Munchausen [Syndrome] sort of way. She would often call me by my father's name and then sometimes call me by her father's name.”

A macabre short story he wrote at the time – Manson has always aspired to write, and briefly worked as a music journalist – begins with necrophilia and ends with the narrator's mother stitching his eyelids shut and burying him alive.

So did he feel buried alive by her?

“I guess,” he mutters. “I prefer not to discuss it publicly in any further detail.”

While his mother slowly slipped into psychosis in 2006, Manson's marriage to von Teese grew gangrenous. The two enjoyed a five-year relationship before marrying in 2005, years during which von Teese tied up girls as he watched, was asked by him to expose her breasts to strangers, and brought home pornographic actor friends (curiously, DVDs such as The Kitchen - which features her waxed and rosy genitals on the cover – are not advertised on her website). He remains convinced that marriage ruined everything. Manson wanted to stay up all night snorting cocaine, sipping absinthe, watching TV and dabbling with watercolors; von Teese wanted him to grow up.

She claims he reacted by beginning an affair with Wood, a "friend" he had met at a Chateau Marmont party; he claims Wood was merely the angel who restored his will to live after he and von Teese separated. The date is not academic; lawyers were involved, and Manson requested that all claims for spousal support be blocked. He launched into publicity for Eat Me, Drink Me (named for the labels on the transformative properties in Lewis Carroll's  Alice in Wonderland ), armed with a litany of complaints. “I was no longer supposed to be a rock star,” he told Spin music magazine. “I came out of this naked, a featherless bird. I was completely destroyed psychologically … I had no soul left.”

Manson has either mellowed about von Teese or realised the potential for costly damage to his persona; either way, he now contradicts previous comments about being “yelled at for things that I can't change, and don't want to change,” and melodramatic accusations of soul-sucking that von Teese has since clarified as cocaine-fuelled.

“Dita's a very kind and soft-spoken person,” he delicately says, “and I think that she was very concerned about what would happen tomorrow, and so today was compromised. But there became this, I guess, impression that maybe she didn't know me as much as I thought she did. And I think there was this idea that, ‘Okay, well you can stop with all of your opinions now, we're at home now, you don't have to be that guy anymore.' And I couldn't really explain that I don't know how to be anybody else.”

He says this last sentence very quietly, as if underscoring his fundamental sense of dissociation. Manson's substance abuse is widely documented, and also cited by von Teese as one of the reasons she left. “I don't want him to die,” she recently said. “… it was getting worse and worse and worse … I wasn't the only one to confront him about it.” Bier Jnr., in his affidavit, also refers to Manson's significant drug habit.

One would think that his history with cocaine would be a sufficient deterrent. He overdosed in 1996. In 2002, a wrongful death suit was filed against him by Maria St. John for allegedly supplying her 28-year-old daughter Jennifer Syme, Keanu Reeves' partner and the mother of his stillborn daughter, with cocaine and then encouraging her to drive while incapacitated. Syme died after ploughing into three parked cars.

But Manson, like his “father figure” Anton LaVey, the late Church of Satan founder revealed as a sadistic pathological liar, is a great believer in personal choice without accountability. “It's not my responsibility to wipe someone's ass,” he once said.

Eager for the acknowledgement of older males – Manson described his own father as violent and self-serving - he accepted LaVey's offer of the honorary title of Reverend, a title he has never for a moment taken seriously. When I mention LaVey, he grows awkward. How could you have validated such a clown, I ask.

“I've learned a lot and I've grown up some since meeting him,” Manson says, appearing embarrassed. “As for his stories, I don't think I ever believed them. He comes from a carnival background and people who do, they tell stories. I was more open to some of the opinions that he had which then led me to read other philosophers.”

He is, of course, referring to the inflated, phallocentric rhetoric of third-rate philosophers such as Friedrich Nietzsche (“What is the ape to man? A laughingstock or a painful embarrassment.”).

Says Manson: “I've tried to make it so there's nothing anybody can hold me to or any way that anyone can humiliate me. I do it on my own terms. I've tried to make myself the villain from the beginning, so there's nowhere to go but up .”

Again, that Nietzschean terror of being made to look like a baboon.

The Teutonic imprint on Manson's work and aesthetic, though, has less defensible overtones. The Helnwein obergruppenfuhrer party; that fascist fetish for impeccable aesthetics. The disgust for tenderness. That dichotomy between professional courtesy and brutality towards perceived inferiors (his mother, say). His desperation to be the Nietzschean Übermensch (superman) that would impress his angry, absent, militaristic, and probably racist father. And then there was the handbag he bought von Teese (Eva Braun's), and his collection of SS typewriters, swastika wall tiles and matching custom-made rugs for his home library, not to mention the Nazi government coat hangers once owned by Hitler.

“The Nazi attraction was simply something that ... ” he cautiously pauses. And then: “I did a lot of research when making The Golden Age of Grotesque because I felt that America was mirroring that time in Berlin of great artistic output and also of great censorship. My fascination has never been with so much with the government side of Nazi Germany, but with the birth of Expressionism. I made a logo for The Golden Age of Grotesque that was very evocative of Nazi imagery, and people said: ‘You can't release that in Germany!' And I said: ‘Well, that's exactly what the Nazis would have done!' I'm not trying to celebrate anything; I'm trying to make an artistic statement .”

The Artistic Statement argument smells like hypocrisy when his own reluctance to discuss sensitive issues is addressed. On one hand, Manson exploits the grief and humiliation of millions in his profitable pursuit of infamy; on the other, he curls up like a snail when his own grief and humiliation is explored. And then there is his lifelong abhorrence of censorship to consider; at one point, he even suggested that there was a need for censorship “because there need to be boundaries in order to cross the boundaries,” as if censorship were the capricious gesture of a militia programmed to stifle all creative impulse. Far from being a pernicious challenge to artistic freedom, I point out, censorship of, say, pornography is often about human rights violations: some 13 million lives around the world are destroyed through sexual slavery to produce what is, in essence, stress relief.

Manson pauses at the mention of pornography. “I wasn't so much into a lot of the decadence element of the Weimar Republic ,” he flubs, “as much as just the concept of people for the first time crossing the line as to how art was made. Up until a certain period of time, people would only paint what they saw , not what they could imagine .”

His explanation is so much claptrap. El Greco existed centuries before the Expressionism – he was, in fact, one of its precursors – and as for imaginative art, Hieronymus Bosch is only one of the many who predated the Expressionists. But Nietzsche, in The Birth of Tragedy (a work whose slipshod scholarship was said to have stained his entire academic career), presented Expressionism as the bulwark of Dionysian impulse against “rigid and menacing” Apollonian structures, and so Manson adopted it.

Manson's philosophy is pocked by similar inconsistencies. Recognizing his teenage audience's frustration with imposed limitations, he presents himself as their flawed liberator, hawking philosophical freedom and trading in the iconography of the forbidden: drugs, porn, Satanism. His 2002 tour was called Guns, God and Government, presenting history's supposedly greatest forces of oppression as an unholy trinity. And yet most of our world is primarily oppressed by the criminals subsidized by drugs and porn, I remark, both promoted by you as liberating forces.

“I find it strange that you think that I'm such a supporter of, or so fascinated by, pornography because I don't even watch it,” he chides, “… for the most part. I mean, I've commented on things, and there are a lot of sexual elements in everything I do , but as far as pornography goes, I don't really find a great purpose for it. I was exposed to it early on, and maybe that turned my stomach for it. Make it known that that's not my thing.”

His dainty outrage is inauthentic. Pornographic actress Jenna Jameson wrote that Manson, with whom she was briefly involved, expressed desires to see “girls fuck prosthetic limbs”, and von Teese regularly brought home pornographic magazines for him (“There are porno mags around the house all the time,” she told a British newspaper). Ignoring his insincerity, I point out that drugs are equally pernicious. Every time you and those like you use cocaine, I say, people in the Second and Third Worlds are further oppressed through torture, murder, and the denial of civil liberties. How can you reconcile yourself with that when you claim to embody liberty? Or do you only believe in liberty for people like yourself?

For the first time, Manson audibly cools. “I don't think something like that ever crosses my mind,” he murmurs. “I've tried to really make my life a little bit simpler .”

Simple for you, perhaps, I say, but not so simple for them.

“My vice is absinthe . I don't know so much about its repercussions.”

The repercussions of First World drug use are pretty serious, I say.

“I know that!” he cries, annoyed. And then, avoiding the topics of hypocrisy and white imperialism altogether: “I don't find absinthe to be so much of an alcohol as much as this thing that fits in between all of the different places. I don't really like drunkenness; I don't find it to be very beneficial creatively. But absinthe, I think, suits me.”

I drop the issue. When I mention that he was introduced by the record company's telephonic intermediary as Humbert Humbert, Manson laughs with warm satisfaction. But beyond the obvious – and uninteresting – 19 year age difference between you and Wood, I remark, there is the fact that Lolita is actually a novel about a narcissistic and unrequited love that ends in tragedy.

He pauses. “Well, I have to pick a clever name to pander to the public!”

His humor is disarming, and I laugh.

Pleased, he continues. “ Lolita struck me as something that – and this is giving myself a great compliment – I would have written, in the way that he phrases things.”

He is serious. I am silent as I consider the correlation between the footage I have seen of Manson masturbating a small dog and Vladimir Nabokov's masterpiece.

“My girlfriend gave me a first edition of Lolita for my birthday this year,” he continues, “in her infinite sense of humor. And heart-shaped glasses – which of course never really appear in the movie - are from the Kubrick movie poster [for Lolita ].”

Heart-Shaped Glasses (When the Heart Guides the Hand) , the first single from Eat Me, Drink Me, features a video filmed by Titanic director James Cameron. In it, Manson croons to Wood, who – with nicely bobbed hair, gloves and a demure frock – blankly masturbates in an audience of writhing naked lesbians, Manson's image reflected in her heart-shaped glasses. The chorus - “Don't break my heart/ and I won't break your heart-shaped glasses” – suggests a pugilistic retribution (“Dump me, and I'll punch your lights out!”) more in keeping with Norman Mailer than the tender Nabokov.

Manson has always used women to maintain his reputation. When a male journalist once asked him whether he preferred cake or sodomy – Cake and Sodomy is an infamous Manson composition – he replied: “I'd have to say sodomy. It takes a strong woman to bear the burden of ass-fucking and I respect any girl that does and I buy her a lot of jewellery. I kick the ones that don't out of my house.” (Given that Pogo's writ specifies that the 1930s seven-carat round-cut diamond engagement ring Manson bought von Teese cost USD150,000, one wonders at her genius in that department.)

Sodomy is, it seems, a fixation of his. Jenna Jameson wrote not only of Manson's near-suicidal appetite for cocaine and pills, but of his fevered attempts to mount her a l'Anglaise (“Every time we were naked, he'd be going for my butt like a rat to cheese”).

Which brings us back to Wood. I ask if he can imagine fathering a child with her.

“Not anytime soon ,” he giggles, “but I believe so. We would both be good parents despite what other people might think.”

I imagine a baby in Manson's unheated mansion, his cot somewhere to the left of the mounted baboon heads and a floor or so below the skeleton of a 17th century man in a wheelchair, watching his black-lipsticked father extemporise in a cocaine frenzy and smashing windows when the mood took him. I imagine his grandparents – the Vietnam vet, the doped psychotic – popping in for scones and tea, Gottfried Helnwein painting his christening portrait, and his mother having a lot of trouble sitting down. I stop imagining.

* Originally published in The Weekend Australian

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