She communicated increasingly by telephone as her health declined and her self-consciousness about her appearance increased. The failed plastic surgeries were a source of genuine distress. She had been one of the most photographed women in the world; to find the result of that photography intolerable to look at, and to withdraw rather than be seen as changed by age, was a particular kind of suffering.
The phone calls she made and received in these years were, by multiple accounts, vivid. She remembered the Vienna of her childhood with clarity. She remembered the filming of Ecstasy. She remembered the dinner party where she and Antheil had worked out the basics of the frequency-hopping system. She was not confused or diminished; she was private. There is a difference.
When the EFF announced the Pioneer Award in 1997, the news reached her in Florida. Her son Anthony reportedly told her. Her response — “It’s about time” — whatever the precise words, captured something accurate: the recognition was real and it was late and both facts were simultaneously true. She was eighty-two. She had been sitting on this story for fifty-five years.
She died on January 19, 2000. The cause was congestive heart failure. She had been ill for some time. Her son James later contested the will, an action that was unsuccessful and that added an unfortunate legal coda to the end of a life that had already had enough of legal disputes — the Ecstasy and Me lawsuit, the 1991 shoplifting charge. The legal contests around her were, in many ways, a continuation of the pattern: her identity, her image, her story were always something other people also had claims on.