HOW COULD HE HAVE DONE IT?

By GINIA BELLAFANTE

On the last evening of his life, as he dined in Sydney, Australia, with his father Kelland and stepmother Susan at the restaurant Flavour of India, Michael Hutchence did not appear to be the sort of alienated rock personality whose despair would overtake him. So spirited was he, in fact, that at one point during dinner he sprang from his chair and pressed a kiss on the lips of the restaurant's enthralled assistant manager. Later, he would chat amiably with strangers at the bar of the nearby Ritz-Carlton hotel, where he was staying, and keep the daiquiris and Moet flowing until 4 a.m. for an actress friend he invited to his suite.

Eight hours later, however, the 37-year-old lead vocalist of the once top-selling band INXS was found naked and dead, hanging by his neck from a belt attached to the self-closing mechanism of the door to his hotel room. Hutchence, a new father about to embark with his band on their 20th-anniversary tour last Tuesday, had apparently killed himself, a fact that many close to him are finding almost incomprehensible. "Everyone felt that if someone had called us and said, 'Michael overdosed,' we would have said, 'Jesus, we saw that coming 10 years ago,'" explained Ed St. John, a former editor of Australian Rolling Stone and a friend of the singer's. "If he'd crashed his motorbike off a cliff, we would have said, 'Yeah, that's Michael.' But the suicide is the hardest part to understand. I've never seen him depressed." That irrepressibility may have fueled one early theory about the cause of death: autoerotic asphyxiation. It seemed in keeping with his quest for thrills and new sensations.

The Australian police, however, dismissed the notion, and signs of inner pain quickly emerged. A bottle of Prozac, the antidepressant, was found in the singer's hotel room. And on his last night, his father Kelland saw a young man in some turmoil. Professionally, Hutchence had watched INXS's last album fail, and suffered the indignity of young rockers like Noel Gallagher of Oasis dismissing him as a has-been. During dinner at Flavour of India, the elder Hutchence told Michael, "Son, I'm worried about you." The singer replied that he was "fine," but barely touched his food, opting for countless Marlboro Lights instead. But Hutchence did seem to need an ear. At approximately 8 o'clock on the morning he died, he reportedly left a distraught message on the answering machine of a former girlfriend, Michelle Bennett, telling her he needed to talk. When she arrived at his hotel room soon afterward, she knocked on the door but got no response, and returned home. Hotel security later found Hutchence's body.

During the last hours of his life, Hutchence made another phone call--to Irish musician Bob Geldof, ex-husband of Paula Yates, Hutchence's girlfriend. Geldof and Yates, a flamboyant television talk-show host, went through a disconcertingly modern separation two years ago. As part of the settlement, Yates, already linked to Hutchence, moved back into Geldof's home with her new lover, and Geldof took up residence in Hutchence's Chelsea home, a mile away. The detente didn't last. Since last year, Yates and Geldof have been in a custody dispute over their three children. Hutchence wanted Yates, the three Geldof girls and the couple's own daughter, 16-month-old Heavenly Hiraani Tiger Lily, to join him in Australia for a four-month stay after Christmas. Geldof said he didn't want his children to be away for so long. Angered, Hutchence phoned him and, according to a neighbor at the Ritz, shouted, "She's not your wife anymore!" Geldof denies there was a row and said Hutchence made no sense on the phone. Hutchence, he said, had barraged him with calls for months and "was always off his head."

At the news of Hutchence's death, Yates telephoned Geldof, according to reports in the British press, yelling, "You've murdered Michael just as sure as if you had strangled him yourself!" Reporters onboard the flight to Sydney for the funeral say Yates drank heavily and blurted out, "Bob killed my baby," adding that she took the alcohol because "I want to forget what has happened."

For the funeral on Thursday, Yates chose a low-cut black dress for mourning, even as friends and relatives remained bewildered at the singer's passing. Hutchence's brother Rhett said he visited the room where his brother died. "It seemed a sad room," he said, "definitely not Michael." Perhaps, though, it was the Michael no one got to know.

--Reported by Tim Blair/Sydney and Kate Noble/London

With reporting by TIM BLAIR/SYDNEY AND KATE NOBLE/LONDON