Praise for Cell 2455, Death Row
“With extraordinary energy, Chessman made, on the very edge of extinction, one of those startling efforts of personal rehabilitation [and] salvation of the self.”
—Elizabeth Hardwick, Partisan Review
“Chessman’s story is strange and terrifying. It gives a great deal of insight into a criminal’s mind.”
—New York Herald Tribune
“It is surely the crime book of the year—or almost any year.”
—Chicago Tribune
“A highly readable document liberally enriched with authentic lingo . . . a sparkling contribution in the field of criminological thought.”
—The New York Times
“An extraordinary biography . . . It is absorbing and disturbing and raises questions which society has never answered completely . . . a fascinating, detailed account of criminal adventures.”
—Milwaukee Journal
“The book is extraordinary in its vividness, its sordid detailing of crime. He has a lot to say—and his points drive home.”
—Virginia Kirkus
“One of the best books of its kind ever written.”
—Los Angeles Daily News
“The most remarkable portrait of a criminal career and personality ever produced. . . . Nothing comparable to it has ever appeared in print.”
—Harry Elmer Barnes, editor of A Manual of Universal History
“It will be surprising indeed if a more astonishing book is published anywhere this year.”
—Saturday Review
CARYL CHESSMAN
CELL 2455
DEATH ROW
CARROLL & GRAF PUBLISHERS
NEW YORK
I dedicate this book to the memory of the gentle Hallie, my mother,
who dreamed a deathless dream
CELL 2455, DEATH ROW
A Condemned Man’s Own Story
Carroll & Graf Publishers
An Imprint of Avalon Publishing Group, Inc.
245 West 17th Street, 11th Floor
New York, NY 10011
Copyright © 1954 by Caryl Chessman and Joseph Longstreth
Introduction © 2006 by Joseph Longstreth
First published in 1954 by Prentice-Hall, Inc., New York
First Carroll & Graf edition 2006
Published by arrangement with the Estate of Peg and Joseph Longstreth
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in whole or in part without written permission from the publisher, except by reviewers who may quote brief excerpts in connection with a review in a newspaper, magazine, or electronic publication; nor may any part of this book be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or other, without written permission from the publisher.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.
ISBN-13: 978-0-78671-815-3
ISBN-10: 0-78671-815-3
eBook ISBN: 9780786735839
9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Printed in the United States of America
Distributed by Publishers Group West
CARYL CHESSMAN, WRITER
BY JOSEPH E. LONGSTRETH AND ALAN BISBORT
For years, Caryl Chessman had no means of reaching the world outside his concrete-and-steel cubicle—the 4½-foot-wide, 10½-foot-long, and 7½-foot-high cage known as Cell 2455, Death Row—other than through the written word. Letters formed the basis on which he maintained human relations and kept in touch with other kindred minds and spirits. He maintained a large correspondence for many years, and his letters, as his correspondents were keenly aware, were lengthy and detailed. They frequently dealt with the problems of the people he was writing to, and his pages of encouragement to other would-be authors reveal a little-known aspect of his personality. His generous and courageous words helped sustain many a falterer; his strengths reached out from the pages of his letters.
One measure of literary success is the number of people an author reaches. In this respect, Caryl Chessman scaled the pinnacle of writing achievement. Through the large sales of his four published books, which were translated into more than a dozen languages, he communicated with millions of people around the world. The impact of his works cannot be denied, and few authors have aroused comparable empathy or antipathy.
If one wished to evaluate a writer merely as a storyteller, the most casual reading of passages from Caryl Chessman’s published books—perhaps most notably Part Two of Trial by Ordeal, “Who Are These Doomed?”—establish the author as a first-rate raconteur. Here, he opens a window onto a world of institutionalized death, bringing to life the collective carcass of capital punishment by introducing us to condemned neighbors like Jerry, Sandy, Gene, Buck, and Honest Mike, as well as to the sixty men who have walked past his cell on their way to the gas chamber: “One was an old dodderer with a persecution complex. Another was a frightened youngster with a harelip who was executed before he really had to shave. They were tall and short and in between; thin and fat; young and old; religious and irreligious; bright and dull. . . . Among them were men of Indian, African, Irish, Spanish, Jewish, Polish, French, Scandinavian, and English blood.” Into this world crept The Incher, “a stunted mouse with distinctive and comical face markings” that won the affection of some of the condemned men. Soon enough, the prison officials put an end to the love-fest, sending out for the exterminator to rid Death Row of its mice. The unfolding scenario would be classic satire if it weren’t heartbreakingly real.
From almost any viewpoint, Caryl Chessman was an author whose written words have left an impression that can’t be ignored. In the twelve years between his sentencing and his execution, Chessman shaped one of the most remarkable bodies of work in American legal history: three wide-selling memoirs (Cell 2455 Death Row [1954], Trial by Ordeal [1955], and The Face of Justice [1957]) and one novel (The Kid Was A Killer [1960]). His books earned the praise and support of some of the most respected figures of his time—from Eleanor Roosevelt to Albert Schweitzer, from Aldous Huxley to Marlon Brando. His face peered out stoically from the cover of Time magazine.
What history and time may glean from the Chessman writings, we cannot determine; and perhaps those of us who were intimately involved with his life and death and his publications are still too close to the whole affair to have a fully objective view. It is the considered view of many that, with the hysteria and dramatics of impending executions removed, and with the truly melodramatic circumstances of Caryl Chessman’s life and death receding into memory, the man’s literary works will gain in stature and significance. Few American prisoners have written as well or as com-pellingly. Chessman was not just a good writer; he was a good thinker, with a clarity of mind and an ability to bring his thoughts directly to the page—given the soul-numbing conditions under which he labored—that have evoked the great humanists. His books should remain in print in perpetuity, as time slowly reveals the depth of which this unique person was capable.
It was by way of writing that I first met and got to know Caryl Chessman. He sent me a letter over the transom. I was in New York, where I had established a literary agency with some friends, Critics Associated. Caryl had sent a manuscript about his life to Simon & Schuster and asked them to send him a list of accredited agents. My name was on that list. Caryl was interested in music, an aspect of his life and personality that no one has commented on in all the accounts then or since. At the same time this was going on, I had translated and arranged a libretto for an opera that was being produced and was running in New York, Mozart’s Don Pedro, as staged by the Lemonade Opera. It was well reviewed by the press, and my work was singled out by name in many rev
iews. Caryl loved music, and he was reading all these reviews in the New York papers and my name was in the reviews. Upon such a tenuous connection hung the fate of America’s best-known prison writer. He wrote me:
For a long, long time I have known there was a story that cryingly needed to be told, and, after winning a stay of execution approximately 17 months ago that literally jerked me back from the grave and psychologically from beyond, the grave, I set out to tell that story, not, be assured, in a penny dreadful fashion, but still in a fast-paced and thoroughly readable way.
Fortunately, San Quentin’s warden, Harley O. Teets is a modern, progressive penologist. Not only did Harley Teets encourage me to write my book, but he made it possible for me to do so. He permitted me exhaustively to document it, research it. Equally fortunately, his boss, Director of Corrections, Richard A. McGee, who heads one of the best, largest and most enlightened correctional programs in the Nation, has speedily cleared the book and approved my sending it to a publisher. Since it tells a vitally important story of the function of California’s Department of Corrections and the urgency of public understanding and backing of that function, I am confident you will have the cooperation of that department in the publishing and publicizing of Cell 2455, Death Row.
This, of course, is not to say that the department will be any active partner either in the publication or promotion, but it is to say that its members concerned will permit you and I [sic] freely to work together in bringing my book to the reading public. In turn, it is my voluntary desire to cooperate fully with Director of Corrections Richard A. McGee and San Quentin’s Warden Harley O. Teets. . . .
All of which is one way of leading up to an introduction . . . [but] my manuscript must speak for itself.
Attached to this cover letter was a manuscript: Cell 2455, Death Row.
These letters to book agents and editors are frequently lengthy and boring, expounding on many subjects only vaguely connected with the script in question. After experiencing a few thousand cover letters, one acquires a kind of sixth sense, a feeling about them. The ability to look beneath the cover letter comes to the fore, and one can tell rather quickly whether or not the author is writing seriously, or is a serious writer. Caryl Chessman’s letter was arresting—not just because he stated calmly that he was a condemned man, nor that he had “known every kind of criminal, from the petty and obscure to nationally known killers and ‘public enemies’” and had been psychiatrically diagnosed as an “aggressive psychopathic personality”—but because a sense of real urgency and a ring of sincerity gripped those of us in New York who read it.
That cover letter was written by a writer, a man who was capable of putting words onto paper in a fashion that compelled one to read on: forced one, by the way the words were put together and by the truths they contained, to pay attention to what the writer was saying, and to carefully weigh the meaning in the flow of words. Whether the man had a story of sufficient import to tell, the discipline to sustain a book, or the objectivity to analyze and report convincingly, remained to be seen.
The first steps, after the rewarding and exciting—indeed electrifying, not to say profoundly disturbing—experience of reading the manuscript of Cell 2455, Death Row, were very important. We had to make sure that this unknown, condemned man had actually written this script. Such concrete information was quickly obtained from the very officials mentioned by the author. Warden Teets and Mr. McGee sent letters, upon request, attesting to two important facts: first, that Caryl Chessman was the author of his manuscript, and that they knew this firsthand; second, that Chessman was legally within his rights to negotiate contracts for the disposition of his property, the product of his mind, and that such negotiations had their approval and full awareness. They assured me of their cooperation, and for some time they did cooperate in full.
Since it was almost unbelievable to me, initially, that a man in Caryl Chessman’s position, and with his long record of crime, had actually written such a powerful document—a document that I believed unique in the annals of publishing—I have been able to understand why the question of Chessman’s authorship has come to other minds as well, even after its publication. But I immediately took steps to get at the truth, and I remain shocked that others, especially those in highly responsible positions with the press, made statements questioning Chessman’s writing abilities without any apparent effort to do the same thing I had done. All that it would have required of these journalists was to have made a couple of phone calls.
Several leading syndicated columnists accused Chessman of having a “ghost,” and in some instances they made it clear that they believed I had actually written the Chessman books. To curtail these rumors, Chessman eventually took to putting his fingerprints and signature on every page of his manuscripts.
In March 1957, I showed reporters the original manuscript of The Face of Justice. Chessman signed and fingerprinted each page. Courtesy of Peg Longstreth
Let it be understood, categorically and finally, that Caryl Chessman was, at all times, his own writer. Each and every word of all his works is the word of the mind of Caryl Chessman. True enough, he took full advantage of editorial assistance, of suggestions and recommendations. And, to be sure, Chessman needed editorial direction. He was given, for example, to the excessive use of adjectives, and he sometimes interpolated legal questions into dramatic portions his story, where they stopped the flow of his moving tale. Such flaws were quite natural, considering the circumstances under which the author lived and wrote.
Cuts were made in Chessman’s manuscripts by myself and by Monroe Stearns, the editor at Prentice-Hall. The excised passages were, in and of themselves, worthwhile, but added nothing to the story. In fact, they distracted the reader from more significant passages. In almost every case, Chessman saw the necessity for this help, and appreciated the efforts to make his work more effective.
It should be made clear that, when Caryl Chessman did not want something changed, he was adamant. Sometimes he had good reasons; sometimes his reasons were obscure. Sometimes we agreed, and sometimes we disagreed. Chessman could become angry when a suggested change did not meet with his approval, but no more so than most authors, and considerably less than many. An author who meekly permits anyone to do anything to his works cannot have much faith in the material he has produced. Chessman’s expression of his anger, too, could be forceful. For years, he lived in a world that recognized physical force above all other things. The man himself understood this; in one of the last letters he wrote to me, dated April 26, 1960, he stated:
I am deeply and abidingly grateful for your assistance over the last several years as my literary agent and friend. I am well aware of how trying and even at times how seemingly thankless have been your efforts on my behalf Yet, knowing how intensely I felt about the things of which Fd written, you always persevered.
As you know, for the last 12 years, mine has been a harsh world where, if you failed, you didn’t live to get a commendation for a good try and a pat on the back. It has been a world without next-times, and so perhaps the iron disciplines I had to impose on myself to survive against almost impossible odds on occasion gave the impression that I was a. brusque, unfeeling guy who gave no thought to the sensibilities of others in his drive toward, a goal. lam certain, however, you know how far from the truth this is. Time, circumstance and a complex of other difficulties, though, have combined to make it impossible for me always to communicate with a nice regard for diplomacy.
Caryl Chessman, the writer, spent much of his time on extensive legal research, reading and studying, thinking and evaluating. Measuring Chessman’s putting of words on paper, one cannot ignore the vast number of pages of legal documents that he produced during his years on Death Row, for his own legal case and for the many other condemned men he helped in this regard. To count the pages alone would be staggering. Court officials and judges throughout the country were amazed, sometimes awed, and often irked, by Caryl Chessman, the legal writer. One
brief alone, the Appellant’s Opening Brief in the Supreme Court of California, dated September 2, 1958, contained 318 pages. And the page entitled NOTE XVI begins with two simple statements:
“There are several different transcripts before the Court on appeal. These total some 60 volumes.”
From this mountain of legal documents grew the oft-repeated charge that “Caryl Chessman made a mockery of the law.” A man facing death does not mock: he fights. Chessman’s wealth of experience in writing legal documents—in fighting, not mocking, death—undoubtedly had a marked influence on his writings in other spheres. Even in personal letters, he could scarcely restrain himself from careful documentation, from citing a source, an authority for a certain remark.
The creative writer, the imaginative writer, also crept into Caryl Chessman’s legal writing. In these works, he was acutely aware of the unfolding drama involved, and his keen sense of the dramatic permeated the pages. Carefully annotated and researched though they were, a Chessman brief always had a sense of scene, a feeling of being staged, being witnessed, being read aloud. One could almost hear the voice behind the powerful words. And in some instances, the dramatics outweighed the facts. How troublesome this must have proved, sometimes, to those who had to read such documents carefully; and yet how refreshing, considering the sterility of most legal documents.
It is from the sense of drama inherent in these legal documents, even those of but a few pages, and from the narrative drive in his books, that I have often speculated about what the possible future of Chessman’s literary skills could have been, had they not been so conclusively terminated.
As my relationship with Caryl Chessman developed, through extensive correspondence and personal visits to San Quentin and Los Angeles to meet his father Serl and his longtime attorney and friend Rosalie S. Asher, I came to know a great deal about Chessman’s literary strivings, their beginnings and their tribulations. In truth, they differed little from those of many people, except that he finally reached his goal and became a success, a published author in many languages.
Cell 2455, Death Row Page 1