Educating Dita (Via the Telegraph)
Apr 22nd, 2025 by Jessica Gold Haralson
She is newly single, and keen to set the record straight. Dita Von Teese, the world’s most glamorous ‘demure stripper’, speaks frankly for the first time about the lessons she’s learnt from life with – and without – the shock-rocker Marilyn Manson
The world around Dita Von Teese may be on fire with speculation about her impending divorce from the ‘death rocker’ Marilyn Manson after just over a year of marriage – not to mention the feverish, vampire-themed courtship that Manson is rumoured to be having with a young actress – but you’d never know it to look at her.
Sitting on a sofa at the Chateau Marmont hotel in Los Angeles, with big diamond bracelets stacked up on her bird-like wrists and her long blue-black hair moulded carefully around her supernaturally white cleavage, Von Teese, 34, looks more like some rare collectable china doll than an actual person. It’s almost a surprise when she turns her head and speaks.
But speak she does. Demurely and cautiously at first, but later with raw, clear-eyed sadness and startling frankness about the demise of her five-year relationship with the absinthe-drinking ‘Anti-Christ Superstar’ and his party-hard lifestyle that she says drove them apart.
Up until now the wasp-waisted Von Teese has been almost as famous for her coy, ladylike discretion as she has for bathing on stage in a crystal-studded champagne glass. Indeed, Von Teese – who earned almost £500,000 last year and is recognised as the most celebrated burlesque dancer in the world – initially agreed to be interviewed on the condition that I not ask her about Manson or the divorce. But a week after our first meeting she calls me late at night from Seoul, Korea, and says she has changed her mind.
‘I want to set the record straight about some things,’ says Von Teese, who has just read the April issue of Rolling Stone magazine, in which Manson talks about both the ‘black hole of depression’ he experienced while married to her, and the new love who inspired his forthcoming album. Von Teese’s voice is high and quivering with emotion. ‘Some things have been said about my marriage that are not fair, and I want to respond.’
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