10. THE SONG
October 30, 2007, was a date that would be etched into our memories, cited again and again in countless articles, police statements, and courtroom dispatches. I was leaving a Broadway play when Mandy rang my cell phone. The words came out like a bolt of lightning: Linda was dead. In the ensuing blur, all I remember is running for a cab, and—miraculously for Broadway at ten in the evening—one was there. As my heart began to sink, I told the driver, “965 Fifth Avenue.”
Mandy happened to be working in New York that week and was staying at her mom’s. When she’d opened the door at around ten, the apartment was in total darkness. Sensing something wasn’t right, Mandy went from room to room until she found Linda on the floor, facedown, cold and hard, with her head hidden in a hoodie. Luckily, the light was so dim, Mandy didn’t see the pool of blackened blood or that Linda’s head was bashed in. She knew her mother was dead but thought it was a heart attack or some natural cause. In a state of panic like The Scream painting, Mandy ran out of the room and dialed 9-1-1.
When I reached Linda’s building, the cops were everywhere. Both Samantha and Arlene, Linda’s sister, as well as my assistant, Rodney, had already arrived and were pushing their way through the police cordons. We stood there in total shock waiting to see Mandy, who was being questioned by detectives. There was never any doubt that Linda was dead; we knew they were taking her directly to the morgue.
We had barely taken in our new reality when the media started banging our doors down. In Jewish tradition, funerals should be within forty-eight hours of death, so we began organizing a ceremony in Linda’s childhood synagogue in Riverside, unaware of what mayhem we were inflicting on ourselves and this neighborhood temple. All our friends flew in from around the world and squashed in, many of them having to sit on the floor, as packs of journalists pushed around mourners, clambering for photos of crying celebrities. We were moved by the huge turnout, but we were totally unprepared for the maelstrom it became.
Samantha and Mandy read their eulogies, but when the crowds dispersed, they went looking for answers. Mandy was particularly anxious, because she’d just been questioned a second time by the cops, who kept repeating the same questions to the point of exhaustion. They went straight to the hospital to ask the medical examiner what was the cause of death, and it was then they were presented with the gruesome evidence of a brutal murder.
Someone must have leaked the news to NY1 and 1010 WINS. All the newspapers quickly followed. REALTOR TO THE STARS BLUDGEONED TO DEATH ran the headlines. MANHATTAN MURDER MYSTERY was one newspaper title in London. If it bleeds, it leads, and this one had celebrity names to tag on and play with. All the movie and pop stars Linda had sold apartments to were reeled off in glamorous whodunnit stories beside photos of Linda with the Ramones or Elton John.
It took ten long days for the killer to be identified, but that only marked the beginning of a tortuous cat-and-mouse game. The cops questioned us all, and even I was worried that my alibi sounded lame. We were all starting to look at each other funnily until they hauled in Linda’s personal assistant, a twenty-six-year-old woman, Natavia Lowery.
After the confession, the cops uncovered evidence of her repeated theft and reckoned she’d stolen at least $30,000 in the two months she’d occupied the job. In one particularly bizarre sting just three weeks previously, Lowery forged Linda’s signature on a check and called American Express, pretending to be Linda. This was how she raised the necessary $4,000 to get into the premiere of American Gangster, apparently in an attempt to meet Denzel Washington. Yes, Linda’s new assistant was a reputed psycho with a history of pathological lying and cheating, including accusations of stealing a friend’s identity and embezzling from a church. Confronted with so much damning evidence, Lowery confessed to the murder on camera. Sniffling but not really crying, she claimed that Linda had insulted her and blew pot smoke in her face. In a fit of rage, Lowery said she grabbed a three-foot stick that Linda used for yoga and hit her six times.
The autopsy, however, depicted a far more gruesome death. Linda’s last moments must have been pure horror; she was whacked twenty-four times with a blunt instrument, possibly this stick that Lowery had described but never revealed the whereabouts of. If that wasn’t disturbing enough, Linda was sixty-two and had just pulled through a long and hard battle against breast cancer. Then, just weeks before the murder, a tumor had been identified on Linda’s brain; it was benign but obviously a source of major concern. Lowery knew that Linda was lucky to be alive, which only added to the grotesque horror of it all.
Our nightmare spiraled into a three-year saga as Lowery recanted her confession, claiming she hadn’t been given a lawyer. Because the weapon was never located and because no DNA was found on or around the body, Lowery and her lawyers walked into the ensuing murder trial pleading guilty to the theft but claiming innocence to the murder.
It was blindingly obvious to anyone sitting in the gallery the accused was guilty as hell. I mean, seriously? You calmly confess to a murder on camera, no signs of any undue police pressure, and then you turn around and claim your rights were violated, and, uh, you didn’t mean what you said? By changing her story so many times, Lowery only succeeded in illustrating her pathological dishonesty, her complete stupidity, and, worst of all, her total lack of remorse.
I can only presume that once Lowery’s lawyers explained the finer details of her legal situation, she was given a tiny glimmer of hope to wriggle out and save some face in her own family’s eyes. She told her family that Linda’s murder was a high-society conspiracy, because hey, who cares about evidence when you can make people believe the system is rigged? At one point, Lowery got so caught up in her own impossible lies, she looked at Mandy and seethed, “You know you did it.” Lowery’s family wanted to believe their daughter was innocent, but in playing along with her denial, they made fools of themselves, whining to the press about corruption.
On a purely human level, I had some sympathy for her parents, but their behavior revealed so much about themselves. Both the crime and the ridiculous defense came back to Lowery thinking Linda was richer and more powerful than she really was. Thirty grand in two months? A hole that big could not have gone unnoticed for too long. Linda was a real estate agent, not the Bank of El Dorado. Okay, we Steins knew plenty of stars, but that doesn’t mean you have the New York justice system in your pocket.
I shouldn’t be too harsh on the parents, because in my own way, I was useless during that murder trial. I only turned up for a few sessions even though I should have been there to shoulder my daughters, who turned up every day. Mandy in particular got dragged through the mud by Lowery’s lawyers, who tried to insinuate she had reasons to kill her mother. I just couldn’t stomach that courtroom. Once I saw the defense happily playing along with Lowery’s games, I was waiting to hear she’d changed her story again, was pleading manslaughter, and for her lawyers to keep shooting in all directions, claiming that Linda could drive a person to violence. Had Linda’s stormy character become the issue, I knew I’d have been the first mug put under the spotlight. The whole thing wasn’t going to end well for any of us. Lowery was going down, but I knew she’d claw at us as she slid.
If there’s one thing people love in the United States of America, it’s a celebrity murder. I think every country does, but we’ve taken the serious business of crime and law to theatrical extremes. We’ve got our fugitive live chases, our perp walks, our televised courtrooms. Our culture has been so forged by westerns, cop shows, and twenty-four-hour news channels, our criminal justice system has become a branch of the entertainment industry. You could probably say the same about our political system, too.
The more cameras you point around a situation, the more its protagonists are likely to lie or crack under the pressure. The whole thing becomes a stage performance. There’s a reason why defense lawyers line up to take on a big-news case. Win or lose, it’s how they get a name for themselves. Even Mandy had to fire her first lawyer, be
cause, like an agent representing a character in TV show, he started shooting his mouth off to the press machine.
The journalists can be just as selfish. Like a pack of piranhas in a bucket of bloody water, there’s nothing like a group of cameramen fighting each other for the best image. The more of them there are, the worse they behave. I saw scenes of invasive disrespect toward Mandy and Samantha that would make you lose faith in humanity. They were darting around from door to door, getting in and out of cars, trying to avoid being photographed. You couldn’t avoid the cameras and would see yourself in the papers the next day, looking like a rabbit in the headlights.
Justice was at least delivered. It took an hour for the jury to convict Lowery on all counts. Linda was killed in the afternoon when only Lowery was in the apartment. The building was far too secure with camera surveillance for any intruder to come in unobserved. Even discounting the recanted confession, the jury agreed with detectives that absolutely everything pointed to Lowery. Security cameras showed how she left the apartment with her trousers inside out, probably to hide the bloodstains. She then walked down the street and withdrew $800 from a cash machine with one of Linda’s credit cards.
We’ll never know the precise details of how the fight was sparked, but I can almost imagine the scene. I’d say Linda discovered something and went berserk. She probably had no time to think or telephone the cops; she most likely flipped out and called Lowery every name under the sun. Even if she did, it’s still a piss-poor excuse for murdering an old lady who’s just caught you emptying her bank account. No matter how brash and rude Linda was capable of being, she didn’t deserve to be beaten to death.
I left that nightmare with a lasting lesson about people. Okay, so Linda was “crazy” when it came to partying, insulting cab drivers, squeezing fucks into a sentence, smoking pot on the streets of Manhattan. Yes, she was sometimes a handful, but she was not a sicko by any psychiatric definitions. Linda was mostly bluster and show. She had a kind heart, she stood by all of us, she raised money for charities and genuinely cared about other people’s problems. Linda remembered everyone’s birthday, and I’m sure she was kind to Natavia Lowery. It’s as if Lowery never computed the gravity of her actions. It was her blankness, her numbness that I found so disturbing.
The true lunatics in this world aren’t the big screaming personalities or the artists diving off stages. They’re the silent ones who feel nothing except envy. They’re so invisible, so blind to their own danger, you don’t even see them coming. Life is cheap for those who are already half-dead inside. Linda opened her door to a wolf in secretary’s clothing who thought she’d landed the keys into a self-service candy store. Bearing in mind that she had been accused of fraud and embezzlement, Lowery should never have been recruited by Douglas Elliman and the temp agency who sent her to Linda. Don’t these agents do any background checks for the fees they charge?
When I think of Natavia Lowery and her family’s angry statements to the press, I am drawn to the image of the late, great Leonard Cohen standing in his own courtroom hell. Leonard Cohen’s manager and erstwhile lover, Kelley Lynch, had emptied his bank accounts during his long sabbatical in a Buddhist monastery. When Lynch was ordered to pay back the money and sentenced for subsequent charges of harassment, Leonard Cohen was granted his wish to deliver his own personal message that, to me, resonated louder than the judge’s hammer. “It is my prayer,” said Cohen, “that Ms. Lynch will take refuge in the wisdom of her religion, that a spirit of understanding will convert her heart from hatred to remorse, from anger to kindness, from the deadly intoxication of revenge to the lowly practices of self-reform.”
When the camera crews ran off to the next tragedy, we finally had the space to mourn in solitude. Once I felt Linda gone forever, I realized how much I loved her. I know it wasn’t the love that Linda had dreamed of as a young woman, nor was it the type of love I’d felt for others. But Linda was the woman of my life, the costar of my movie. It wasn’t just the children we’d brought into existence; for thirty-five years, we remained connected by a hotline that was never severed, even when the proverbial phone bills lay unpaid. Linda’s mile-a-minute company always woke me up and got me punching on my toes, and although I bitched about her, I enjoyed the electrifying effect she had on me. We were like Bonnie and Clyde. That photo of us standing outside the Roundhouse in 1976—look what sparks fly when you rub two sharp Steins together.
I wish I could say that Linda’s murder was the greatest tragedy to befall our family. Just two years after the case was wrapped up, Samantha began getting migraines and was diagnosed with brain cancer. For two years, she underwent heavy treatment in the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center on the corner of Central Park and 106th Street. As her condition worsened and became more desperate, she tried experimental treatment in the Duke Cancer Center in Durham, North Carolina. Tragically, it was all in vain. Samantha died in February 2013 at the age of forty, leaving behind an eight-year-old daughter, Dora, named after my mother.
There are many hard knocks you can overcome—heartbreaks, heart surgery, divorce, public humiliations, even the murder of your ex-wife. But there’s one pain like no other. Burying a son or daughter runs against the laws of nature. It doesn’t just break your heart; it breaks your will to carry on. Linda’s murder had hit us like a train, but at least she’d lived to sixty-two. At least her daughters had grown up. In time, we were able to tell Linda stories and laugh about the old days. When Samantha died, there was a silent emptiness around her grave that never turned to acceptance or laughter. Just to see that eight-year-old little girl staring into the hole where her mother was gone forever. My heart turned to stone.
For months, I couldn’t even cry. I bumped into people on my rounds, and they’d extend their condolences. Every time I was reminded, I just froze into a dead silence, a zombie, lost to emptiness. And when the tears eventually welled up early one morning, I don’t think I’ve ever wailed like that in my life. No human can cry from the pits of the soul like an adult who has lost his child. You ask the sky why this happened. And there is no answer. It is the most damning sentence this life can hammer down.
What made the pain so bad was that Samantha did not have an entirely happy life, and I know I’m partly to blame. Being raised by nannies was tough enough, but discovering that I was gay I think affected the girls to a certain degree. But I always thought, in truth, they were both very supportive and ahead of their time in accepting gay dads. To be fair, they always had gay friends, they were open-minded New Yorkers, and most of Linda’s friends were gay. Samantha and Mandy grew up around a lot of gay men. But it’s one thing to accept that friends and surrogate uncles are gay, another to find out your own father prefers men.
As a kid, Samantha was positive, always busy, always popular at school, she was a natural-born crowd stirrer who inherited her mother’s organizational skills. But as she entered the crazy mirrors of adolescence and college, she felt that life had given her a bum deal. And like so many young adults make the mistake of doing, she began asking herself those pointless questions: “Why me? What did I do to deserve this?” She developed eating disorders, which I now realize may have been an attempt to get my attention. They say it’s a cry for help, generally directed at the family. Unfortunately, this wasn’t a distress flare I understood or could answer. And the more I didn’t address her problems, the deeper she slipped. This was during my own wildest years in the late eighties and early nineties when I was living my own life to the max. I knew she was suffering, but I just didn’t know how to reach her. Even Linda was stumped. Mandy, too.
Samantha slipped out of reach in personal ways, until, thank God, she started taking control of her demons. There was only one person who could help her, and it wasn’t her strange daddy or her crazy mom or her kid sister; it was herself. With counseling, better company, clearer thoughts, stricter self-discipline, she figured her way out of the labyrinth she’d gotten lost in. Like so many people who’ve been to hell and
back, she came out strong. Everyone enjoyed Samantha’s company, she had principles, she listened, she was kind to others. When she died, I noticed that she hadn’t touched a penny of her mother’s inheritance. It’s just a detail, but I’ve always admired those who can resist the cheap thrill of spending; it’s a sign of good character. Samantha was no snob, no brat, no rich kid. She knew the true value of people and things.
The only happy thought that I’ve clutched onto like a piece of broken raft is the absolute joy Samantha felt to bear a child. Baby Dora was the culminating triumph of her whole life’s journey, the fruit, the treasure found at the end of her soul searching. From the moment she knew she was pregnant, her eyes lit up and remained sparkling with a mother’s pride for the last eight years of her life. Even when she was very sick, that love continued burning like a beacon. Samantha accepted her own destiny better than those of us who loved her. I guess that as she walked her own spiritual path into the inevitable, Dora provided the happy ending to an otherwise cruelly brief life. Her time had not been in vain. The circle of life was respected, and motherhood brought her the gratitude and meaning that she’d been missing for so many years. So, little Dora, when you grow up and we are not around, always remember that you were bathed in your mother’s love and wrapped in the warm coat of my mother’s name. Should doubts ever whisper in the darkness, call on your foremothers for guidance and you will never be alone.
Siren Song_My Life in Music Page 30