Marilyn Manson and Tim Burton and Their Women

Ben Wener of the Orange County Register catches up with music personality Marilyn Manson (Brian Warner), and something in the article sticks out to me.

During that time, Manson…settled deeply into a relationship with burlesque queen Dita Von Teese, who, arriving after Manson's time with actress Rose McGowan, appeared to be his twisted soulmate.

After six years together, they married – and almost immediately, Manson says, Von Teese expected him to change. His vampiric hours, his drug use and absinthe consumption, perhaps most vitally his philosophy of self-preservation through fiercely independent thinking and creative transformation – she'd have preferred he put all that away and be a more normal husband.

And for a brief time Manson slowly felt himself conforming. "I started to feel bad about being me," he told me in his gravelly but gentle voice during a phone chat a few weeks ago. "I started to feel like I had to turn me off somehow, to prove that I fit into this convention I know now didn't suit me properly."

I’m not going to defend Manson’s lifestyle or personal actions. That’s not why I picked this story. But the first clue that all was not right was how long they were together before getting married. When people get married after several or more years of being a couple (especially if that includes living together as well as sex), I give the marriage a slim chance of lasting. Unless - one or both members of the couple were still full-time students and they waited to be finished with that phase of life before getting married.

Getting married is often, in these cases, someone’s desperate attempt to save the relationship by “taking it to the next level”. Women think it validates the relationship as “successful”. Men think it will get the woman to stop nagging (and she will stop nagging to get married, but she won’t stop nagging). But they’ve already been pretending to be at that level. There was probably nothing “positive” that he got from being married that he wasn’t getting from her before. And so he marries her, and she rewards him by nagging him. Who wants to live like that?

“I don't necessarily think I couldn't be married again. I think that I assumed - and it was me projecting my idea of romance onto Dita - that she believed in things the same way I did. I think we got to a point where she was feeling like, 'Well, I assumed you would eventually grow out of this.' And I'm saying, 'But this is me.' My marriage started to transform into something that was too concerned with the rest of the world, with how it would get portrayed in Vogue magazine - and that sort of thing was exactly what I had fought hard to stand against. But I got lost between love and belief in myself. I didn't know who I was supposed to be anymore."

"I'm absolutely not looking for someone who agrees with me about everything," Manson quickly adds, "or someone who wants to please me by believing what I believe.”

Women: I can't stress this enough. When you marry a man, you are accepting him AS-IS. You are accepting that he has his own likes and dislikes, his faults, his job, his hobbies, his habits, his philosophy, his bank account, his family, his friends, his history, his possessions, and everything else that has made him who he is. DO NOT EXPECT HIM TO CHANGE FOR THE BETTER. Expect him to get older - that will definitely happen - but not necessarily more mature.

You can’t make him change. Asking him to change, demanding that he change, threats, nagging, whining, bitching, holding out – that will only drive whatever it is you don’t like about him underground. For example – if you want him to stop smoking weed, he may appear to stop. But he will still do it – just not around you, and he will lie to cover it up. Don't marry him if you don't like him or if you can’t live with everything about him for the rest of your life. Do not rely on assumptions, hopes, wishes, projections, etc. Deal with the reality of who he is NOW.

If you have agreed to be faithful to each other in marriage, only then should you expect that from him - but if he has a history of not showing self-control in that area, you’re probably going to be disappointed. Oh, and his biology doesn’t change by signing a marriage certificate. He will still find other women attractive and want to look at them. He will still want sex from you.

Finally - Just as getting marriage will not change him, do not expect that having his baby will change him. If you get pregnant to try to make him a better man or get him to do what you want, you’ll be a fool.

“But I need the same dark romantic yearning. I had been watching all these movies, like 'True Romance' and 'Harold and Maude' and 'The Hunger' and 'Bonnie and Clyde,' and I started wondering where that sort of feeling had gone. I thought that was where I was at in my life, and I couldn't understand why I didn't feel that same fearlessness."

He regained it, however, via two life-altering vehicles: Evan Rachel Wood, the pretty, preternatural actress from "Thirteen" and the coming "Across the Universe," who at 19 is half Manson's age; and the rejuvenating new album "Eat Me, Drink Me," very likely the most crucial work of Manson's career.

Uh, yeah, well getting some strange, especially young strange, will do that. But those feelings are likely to fade all over again as that strange becomes familiar and older.

Look, I'm no fan of Manson. He strikes me as a geek who realized that the only way he was going to make something out of himself was by being “contrarian” and going for shock value, like those kids who go all punk or goth or whatever because they couldn't come close to making the cheerleading squad or being in the popular crowd, or whatever. There's always another generation of kids around the corner looking to piss off their parents, and he’s smart enough to figure out how to make money off of that. He is not original - he's derivative of folks like Alice Cooper, only Alice Cooper was pioneering and has been an enduring original talent.

Maybe he got picked on by churchgoing kids. Who knows? Churches are full of jerks because people are jerks, especially as teens. But it isn’t like Manson has it all together. I heard him once talking about how mustaches were a sign that a man is gay. This from a guy who also talked about performing manual sex on one of his male bandmates.

While we’re on the subject of relationships, let’s check in on Tim Burton’s situation.

Tim Burton's ex-girlfriend was ordered Wednesday to revise her lawsuit against the movie director after a judge ruled it didn't sufficiently support claims that Burton had backed out of a promise to financially support her.

Why would a “promise” be legally binding in this kind of case and this case only? People promise each other all kinds of things all of the time, and yet a broken promise almost never results in a court case, except when it comes to women who’ve been dumped. So much for independence and equality.

Notice the article refers to this woman as “Tim Burton’s ex-gilfriend”, not Tim Burton as “the former beau of…”. These women insist on having a man more rich and/or famous than themselves, and when it doesn’t last, they try to take some of his wealth with them.

Lisa Marie, an actress who appeared in several of Burton's films, sued last December, alleging Burton used fraud to cheat her out of assets he promised to share with her during their nearly 10-year, live-in relationship.

You weren’t married. Get over it. Marriage is how you get guaranteed support from a man, not shacking up.

Burton said he and Marie would "combine their efforts and earnings and would share equally any and all" accumulated property, her lawsuit claimed.

If he really did that, then he is a fool.

Court papers filed by Burton's attorneys countered that the director gave Marie $5 million to sign the contract, which released him from any further claims to his assets. He contended that if she wanted to rescind the deal she was obligated to return the money.

Five million dollars for what? He could have hired prostitutes and other professionals (chefs, interior decorators) to do whatever it was she did for him for a lot less.

What have we learned?

1. Don’t shack up.

2. Don’t expect a man to change simply because he got married.