So no, I wasn’t panicking. I figured she’d ditched to grab some sleep in the car. That would have been a standard Addy move. She could nap anywhere. But Addy’s mom was more suspicious.
Addison at the Lim house, making a chalk drawing, courtesy of Eve Lim.
MAUREEN STONE: As the minutes ticked by, good Lord, yes, I became nervous. The tour was ending, and we were heading back from the bedrooms, down the sweeping staircase to the entrance hall. Addison liked to get lost; I knew that. The circus, the playground, a shopping mall. Then you’d find her splashing in the penny fountain or strolling near the animal cages. She was a mother’s nightmare that way.
Once we were all in the main hall, and I heard the commotion from above, I had this dread, sixth-sense knowledge that it was Addison, and it was trouble.
ROY STONE: Everyone gets the joke of Green Hall, right? That Errol Flynn once stayed in that mansion, and he was famous for swinging from the chandelier? Addison was recreating it. For laughs. End of story.
LUCY LIM: Literally. Swung. From the chandelier. Two hundred pounds of lights and crystal, and Addy was just riding it like an electric horse. No harness, no rope. I remember she had on this purple stocking cap, like an elf hat. This was Addy, as insane and dangerous as I’d ever seen her. The noise was unbearable, too, a creaking, haunting groaning, and crystal prisms kept falling off and smashing to the black-and-white marble floor. If the cord hadn’t been strong enough, Addy would have smashed to the floor, too.
Later I asked her, “Weren’t you terrified? Didn’t you think about how gruesome it would be to die that way?”
And she said, “Lulu, you worrywart, I never think about death. Death just Is.”
We watched the clip go viral on YouTube, and that was cool. The boingziest boingzjob, we called it. When Addy moved down to New York, she first got known as “Chandelier Girl.” Since then, truckloads of people have asked me, “What was that like, to see Addison do that live? To be in that instant with her?”
You want the honest answer? It was like being drunk on fear.
ZACH FRATEPIETRO: The chandelier video was my introduction to Addison Stone. I met Addison right when she first moved to New York, but I’d seen the clip before; everyone had. In the art world, it made a small splash. First time I brought Addison to dinner to meet my mother, Carine, that’s how I introduced her. “Presenting Chandelier Girl.” One of those rare times when my mother seemed impressed. Addison told me it was her tribute to Edgar Allan Poe. Her class was reading The Pit and the Pendulum. Pretty funny, right?
MADDY MEYERS: My cousin liked to break rules. Whatever high-concept garbage Addison was selling about the chandelier episode, the Poe homage or the Errol Flynn reboot, please—she did it for the rush and the fame. Addison pulled that stunt, and any other stunt, because the one thing she believed in was No Rules, Ever. She thought people should always do exactly what they wanted. She did it to do it. She did it because it felt good. I will just say that after that day, nobody ever called her Allison again, even by mistake. Not even my mom, who’d always felt like if Addison couldn’t even call her “Aunt” Jen, then she sure wasn’t going to call her some new, self-adopted name. But the chandelier was like a baptism by fire. After that, we all realized that Addison was playing for a bigger theater than just friends and family. That was the day she became Addison, forever.
LUCY LIM: Future Addy sprang into motion that day. Green Hall had everything that inspired her. It was shock and beauty and Addy at the center. It was Addy who got that video to go viral, too. She was controlling the hell out of her image, even back then, before she had an image to control.
STEVEN JOHANNES: Addison listed an ad in the RISD classifieds, and she paid me cash, and I filmed it with my own camera—so it’s not copyright infringement. You hear that, Max Berger, you ass**le? Berger sends me legal letters from time to time. He says that clip is part of the Addison Stone estate. It’s not and he can suck it.
Chandelier Girl is still my most downloaded bit. People ask me about it all the time. I was thinking about doing something for the ten-year anniversary of it, especially with Addison becoming so famous since she died. No disrespect.
Addison had specific instructions. She’d thought it all out ahead, which was another reason I hadn’t counted on her being a kid. I remember she texted something like, Be at the Green Hall mansion at 1 p.m., wait for me to show, we will meet briefly, then you will wait for me to give the signal to film. Cash up front. Half pay if security interferes. With a map of exactly where to meet. If I’d known I was taking orders from a teenager, I’d have never shown. Although she wasn’t “Addison Stone” yet, right? She was just some wacky chick.
“So what’s your film?” I asked her when we met.
“I’m riding the Green Hall chandelier.”
“You test it yet?” I asked.
“No. That’s the thriller part. It might not hold.” Then she asked if I was still in—since it wasn’t legal, what we were doing. Or even smart. Or sane. So there was all that risk. I was in. I was worried, but I needed the cash—and she had it.
We set up the shot. It’d have to be one take, obviously.
She said, “Keep filming even if it drops.”
I was like, “If it drops, kiddo, you will die.”
And she was like, “Exactly. And if I die, you need to make that death worth watching.”
Who could forget a girl saying something as bleak as that?
LUCY LIM: People think of Green Hall as the gateway stunt, right? Addy was transitioning from a round-eyed, “Look at me, I can sing and draw and paint and dance” art-room girl into the daredevil icon that we made into a T-shirt.
That’s what I think is the deep-mineral core of all Addy’s messages. People can get into bigger thoughts, like BRKLN’s “Personal Exuberance of the Anarchist” article that came out a few years later. But Green Hall was a rush in her ears. It was the beginning of something.
Except that the “exuberant anarchy” of Green Hall wasn’t the gateway stunt, after all. Because after that, Addy lost her mind and everything fell apart.
“The Personal Exuberance of the Anarchist”: BRKLN magazine cover.
III.
“SHE LOOKED LIKE A SKELETON IN A T-SHIRT.”
MAUREEN STONE: After Newport, I began to watch my daughter extra carefully. Goodness, I had to. I was a nervous wreck. She’d always been an unpredictable girl, but what she’d done that day wasn’t just a prank, or a teen being quirky. It was a wildness inside her. I couldn’t understand it.