The Friedkin Connection: A Memoir

by William Friedkin

  Fran was a bon vivant. He knew and loved good food and wine, but mostly he valued good conversation, wherever he found it. He would often stop by the mailroom, which was down the hall from his office, to talk to Ray Damalski, whose fresh-brewed coffee and Polish humor he enjoyed. The two other young guys in the mailroom had no interest in engaging with Fran, so I was the sole recipient of his keen intelligence and vast store of knowledge. He was a fascinating storyteller, versed in all things current and historical. He was like no teacher I ever had in grammar or high school. His only son, Dennis, was away at Harvard, and Fran gradually became a surrogate father to me. Fran’s passion was the Civil War and all its famous battles, on which he could hold forth for hours. He continued to encourage me, and because he had clout at the station, when he boasted of my potential to the executives, they started to pay attention. Fran knew my ambitions and saw in me hidden reserves of talent I had no idea I possessed. He continued to give me books and discuss them with me. He and his wife, Maggie, invited me to their apartment on the Near North Side, where I met their friends: writers, artists, teachers, and politicians. He took me to the Art Institute and introduced me to the Impressionists and the seventeenth-century Dutch painters. On Saturday afternoons we’d have lunch at Riccardo’s Restaurant on North Rush Street below Michigan Avenue. As well as being a good Italian restaurant, Riccardo’s was a hangout for artists and writers, newspapermen and advertising executives. Fran knew them all, and they’d stop by our table and share stories that added to my understanding of the world.

  It’s painful to recall how little knowledge or experience I had at that time. My world was insular; family, friends, uptown Chicago—no travel anywhere, no exposure to other cultures. Chicago was segregated then, not just racially but ethnically: Poles hung out with Polish people; Germans, Jews, and Irish the same. I had few opinions of my own, and they were based solely on prejudices formed in my youth. To put it bluntly, I didn’t know a damn thing about anything. But I was born with ambition.

  One day, after a year and a half in the mailroom, Damalski said: “They’ve got an opening for a floor manager in a couple of weeks. I recommended you.” I was elated. I felt I was ready and I thanked Ray effusively. “I’m gonna miss you here,” he said, “you’re one of the best I ever had.” I told Ray how much I’d appreciated and learned from him. “I probably should o’ moved you up sooner, kid,” he said, “but you were too valuable here.”

  Though I had prepared myself, observing the work of the floor managers and becoming friendly with the directors, my first weeks on the new job were a disaster. I would throw cues in front of the camera while the show was on, instead of from the side, and often I’d screw up the set preparations I was supposed to organize. The best and most senior director at the station was Barry McKinley. He directed every kind of show, and he drew the best assignments, including the Chicago Symphony Orchestra telecasts. I was assigned to Barry in the hope that I’d learn faster. He was about forty years old, short, stocky, and bald, with a wicked sense of humor, and he didn’t suffer fools gladly. We were doing commercials for the William A. Lewis Clothing Company, “where the models buy their clothes,” three-minute live spots within the body of a syndicated hour-long film show. Barry would tell me from the control room over the headphones how to position the models: “Move that cunt to her left.” I would address the woman by name and ask her politely to move. Then, “Move that other bitch forward three steps.” I’d do the same. Invariably, they would relocate too slowly for Barry, so his words to me became even more blunt: “These scumbags are stupid, Friedkin. You’ve got to crack the fuckin’ whip.” I continued to make my requests politely until Barry opened his key to the studio and shouted over the speakers so everyone could hear: “You’ve got to be a prick, kid! Everyone thinks you are anyway!” I didn’t know if this was true, but I soon learned that a more forceful approach was more effective. Time was a factor, and the director had to get what he wanted when he wanted it.

  Once, Barry asked me to set up three cans of hair spray for a live commercial. The cans were to be placed on a display rack covered by blue velour. I set the three identical cans side by side. “What’s wrong with you, kid?” Barry shouted over the headphones. I turned and looked helplessly up to the control room. “Make a picture out of it!” he screamed. I fiddled around with the cans, lining them up farther apart and then together, to no avail, until Barry exploded, jumped out of his chair in the control room, and came down to the studio floor. This was a no-no for a floor manager. He stormed over to the display. “I told you to make a picture out of it!” he shouted again. Then he moved one can to the foreground, the other two slightly behind. That was the first and only lesson I’ve had in pictorial composition. After a few months, I got the hang of it and became one of the best and most eager floor managers. I was doing eight shows a day—kid shows, talk shows, variety programs; I became floor manager for the station’s most important show, They Stand Accused, a live courtroom drama in which the lawyers were real, the judge was real, and the witnesses were all actors. All the participants were given a scenario earlier in the day, then we had an hour to rehearse before the show went out across the country, just before The Jackie Gleason Show.

  I had worked on a few hundred shows when a slot opened and I became a “live” director after less than a year “on the floor.” I was earning two hundred dollars a week, a small fortune at the time, and thought I’d be happy doing “live” TV for the rest of my life.

  In 1960 I bought my first car, a brand-new red Chrysler Valiant, about two grand. I used to drive Fran up to the North Shore of Lake Michigan to the Ravinia Hotel every Sunday morning for breakfast. On my bookshelves I still see the books he gave me fifty years ago, all of which I read and we discussed: the bound works of Dickens, Ruskin, The Autobiography of Lincoln Steffens, Sandburg’s Lincoln, Churchill’s History of the English Speaking Peoples and History of the Second World War, the collected essays of Rebecca West, the writings of H. L. Mencken, and Shirer’s Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. Fran and Maggie were the first to see creative potential in me and encourage it.

  One day Fran told me about a film that was playing at the Surf Theatre, a small revival house on the Near North Side. “It’s damn good,” he said, “one of the best ever. Came out in 1941 but still plays. You should see it.” On a Saturday afternoon, I went alone to see Citizen Kane. I went to the noon show and was mesmerized from the opening credits to the final shots of the burning sled and the smoke rising from Xanadu Castle and the sign on the gate that read: NO TRESPASSING. I left the theater just after 10:00 p.m., having watched the film five times. I became aware of the techniques of storytelling possible only in motion pictures. Composition, lighting, sound, editing, music, acting, writing, all put to use in a way that was completely harmonious and original. The story was fascinating, and its secret was revealed not to the other characters in the film but only to the audience in the theater, and they could make of it what they chose. No film I’ve seen before or since meant so much to me. I thought, “Whatever that is, that’s what I want to do. I don’t know how, but I have to find out.” I read everything I could about Kane and its young creator, Orson Welles. And on that Saturday, just three years younger than Welles when he created Kane, I resolved to become a filmmaker.

  I discovered the foreign films that came to the Surf, and to other revival houses around Chicago: Federico Fellini’s La Dolce Vita, Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’Avventura, La Notte, and L’Eclisse, the films of Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut, and the French New Wave; Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon. From these and from the early works of Stanley Kubrick and Elia Kazan and Alfred Hitchcock, I acquired the inspiration, the techniques, and the burgeoning desire to make films. The literature Fran had given me provoked thoughts and ideas. The histories and biographies opened vistas to which I had previously been blind or indifferent. The paintings at the Art Institute took on context, and I understood the progression of art, from the cave painters to the
Abstract Expressionists. The years of paying no attention at school were behind me, and gradually I was becoming “aware,” slowly acquiring the tools I would need.

  In 1961, I was going home on the Outer Drive in Chicago near the lakefront, heading north to Foster and Sheridan. It was just after 1:00 a.m., and I had directed the sign-off routine for WGN-TV. I turned on the radio, searching for WJJD, the jazz station where Daddy-O-Daylie did his all-night program. By accident I stumbled on a piece of music that seemed as though it came from another planet. I had never heard anything like it. Quiet, then thunderous, then quiet again. Powerfully rhythmic, complex and orgiastic. Long, sinuous lines of haunting melody giving way to urgent intensity. I pulled to the side of the Outer Drive and parked. Moonlight shone off Lake Michigan as I turned up the volume and let the music engulf me, frightening and exhilarating. Then suddenly it was over. A long pause, then a deep voice announced, “The Rite of Spring—Le Sacre du Printemps—composed in 1913 by Igor Stravinsky, conducted by Pierre Monteux.” This was the first piece of classical music that had ever taken hold of me. Through sound alone, it opened the door to images and ideas that lay dormant within me.

  Years later, at Orchestra Hall in Chicago, I watched as an old man moved slowly with the help of a walker to the podium in front of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. It looked as though he’d never make it. The walker was removed, and he stood facing the audience, to thunderous applause. He was swaying slightly. Then he turned to the orchestra, and there was dead silence. He raised his right arm slowly, and the first quiet notes of his greatest composition were brought to life. No music stand, no score in front of him. The music flowed from him. Its details, the tempi he coaxed out of the orchestra, were unlike any other version I had heard. Decades passed since I first heard that recording, but not until I watched this majestic work conducted live by Stravinsky himself did I realize the transformative effect it had on my life. Like Citizen Kane, The Rite of Spring gave me the inspiration to create.

  Apart from Ray Damalski and Fran Coughlin, the most important of my chance encounters, the one that determined the course of my career, took place in 1960 at a cocktail party in an elegantly appointed mansion on the Near North Side of Chicago, known as the Gold Coast. The hostess, Lois Solomon, invited me because she thought I was “interesting.” All her other guests were interesting. They were doctors, lawyers, judges, actors, teachers, playwrights, scientists; Nobel and Pulitzer Prize winners; and Lenny Bruce at the height of his notoriety as a nightclub comic. I was then a twenty-five-year-old television director at WTTW, the public broadcasting station in Chicago, having just been fired in a cost-cutting measure by WGN-TV.

  I met Lois at WTTW, where she produced several local arts shows. She was the sister-in-law of Irv Kupcinet, known nationally as “Kup,” the syndicated columnist of the Chicago Sun Times and talk show host on the local CBS channel. Lois’s husband, Leonard, was the owner of a well-known Gold Coast pharmacy called Solomon Drugs. Lois, one of Chicago’s celebrated hostesses, was a vivacious, highly intelligent, inquisitive woman, who would later be appointed Chicago’s cultural commissioner.

  Even though I was completely out of my league, my curiosity compelled me to the Solomon home, and this gathering of about a hundred of Lois’s friends, family, and recent acquaintances. The party spread into several rooms. Squeezed into a corner, trying to become invisible, I found myself standing next to a dark, good-looking young man in priest’s clothing, holding a martini. He introduced himself as Father Robert Serfling. “Where’s your church, Father?” I asked, just to make conversation. He took a sip of his drink before answering with a smile, “I don’t have a church—I’m the Protestant chaplain at the Cook County Jail, on Death Row.” My antennae went up. All the others in the room, their conversations, their existence, dissolved into soft relief as I focused on the priest, who resembled a young Clark Kent. How could I know he would open the gates to my life’s work? That this chance meeting would be the first step in my career as a filmmaker? I had no idea what else to say to him, but he seemed friendly enough, so I asked if he had ever met anyone on Death Row who he thought was innocent.

  “As a matter of fact,” he answered evenly, “there’s a guy awaiting execution now. He’s thirty-two years old. His name’s Paul Crump, and he’s one of five guys on Death Row. They all say they’re innocent, but this guy might be. The U.S. Supreme Court denied his writ of certiorari for the second time, and he’s scheduled to die in the electric chair in six months.”

  At that point, Lois drifted to our corner and asked if I was having fun, and if I wanted to meet Lenny Bruce or Oscar Brown Jr., another famous Chicago-bred entertainer. I did, but not before getting Father Serfling’s phone number at the county jail.

  For the rest of that weekend I thought only about that brief conversation. I knew nothing about Paul Crump or the nature of his crime. But this chance meeting with Father Serfling, and his assertion that an innocent man was about to be executed, triggered a sense of purpose in me.

  The following Monday morning, I called him just after 9:00 a.m. He remembered me, and I asked him if there was any way I could meet Mr. Crump.

  “Why?” he asked.

  “I told you I was a television director. Maybe there’s a way I can help him—”

  “How?”

  I had no idea. Just a hunch. “Possibly by making his story public,” I said.

  “Paul’s been on Death Row for seven years. I wouldn’t want to get his hopes up—”

  “Neither would I.”

  “Let me talk to the warden,” Father Serfling offered. “He likes Paul and doesn’t want to execute him. It’s not easy to visit a man on Death Row, but let me ask him.”

  The Cook County Jail takes up a full square block on Twenty-Sixth Street and California on Chicago’s southwest side. A level five maximum security prison, it’s an ominous low-lying building that holds a few thousand inmates pending resolution of their trials, after which they are either freed or sentenced to state prison. All except the inmates in the basement.

  They were held in a separate section, just steps from the yellow brick room that housed the electric chair.

  Warden Jack Johnson was heavyset, about six-three, with a military crew cut. He resembled a marine drill sergeant or the center for the Chicago Bears, but he was smart, well read, and thoughtful. He wore short-sleeved white shirts with a slim black tie and black trousers. A .38 Special was holstered to his belt. He could be gruff, but he was usually soft-spoken and pleasant. He had about him the air of a man who was sympathetic to human foibles. He had presided over the execution of three men, and he didn’t want to execute a fourth. He stood behind his large desk and came around to shake my hand as Father Serfling introduced us.

  “What can I do for you, young man?” he asked.

  “Warden, Father Serfling told me about Paul Crump, and I was wondering if you could talk to me about him, and maybe let me meet him?”

  The warden walked slowly to a barred window and stared down at me. His appearance made you wary, but his manner put you at ease. He listened thoughtfully, after I explained that I might be able to get Paul’s story on television, then he sadly shook his head. “There’s no more that can be done.”

  “Father Serfling thinks he’s innocent,” I interrupted.

  The father smiled and held up his hands defensively.

  “What do you think?” I asked the warden.

  “It doesn’t matter; I have to execute him if that’s what the court orders.”

  The only sound in the room was the air conditioner in one of the windows. The warden moved back behind his desk, lit a cigarette, and spoke quietly. “Paul’s been here for nine years. When he came in, he was angry and bitter. I had to isolate him and deprive him of a lot of privileges. I’ve never seen an inmate change so much—”

  “How so?”

  “He lost all the bitterness. He’s now the most cooperative inmate I’ve got. He’s the barn boss on death row, which means he kee
ps everyone else in line. He’s a completely different man today from the one who came in here when he was twenty-three. In terms of rehabilitation, I would say Paul is the best example I’ve seen.”

  “What about the possibility that he’s innocent?”

  A flash of anger. “Mr. Friedkin, I’m trying to tell you that doesn’t matter anymore. He’s been found guilty all the way up to the Supreme Court. Guilt or innocence is no longer an argument.”

  “Is there any argument to be made?”

  “The only one would be rehabilitation, but that would be determined by the Governor, and it’s never been done.”

  I realized I had taken up too much of the warden’s time, but he suddenly asked if I’d like to meet Paul.

  A young black man, thirty-two years old, was led into the warden’s office, an armed guard at each side. Paul Crump wore khaki trousers and a white T-shirt, not standard prison garb. He had an athlete’s muscular physique from doing pushups in his eight-by-eight-foot cell. His piercing dark eyes looked straight into mine as the warden introduced us.