The Executioner's Song

by Norman Mailer

  His father, who once managed the Davega store in Times Square, and knew enterprise when he saw it, bought him a Rollei-cord when he was a kid, and a police band radio, and Schiller would hear accidents come in on the radio, get on his bike and ride to the place. If it was far away, and he only arrived after the vehicles had been removed, he could still photograph the skid marks. Then he would sell the prints to the insurance companies. It was his apprenticeship for getting to the scene.

  Having broken into the media as one of Life's youngest photographers, Schiller had covered Khrushchev at the United Nations, and Madame Nhu in a convent, was at the Vatican when the Pope died, and took a picture of Nixon crying as he lost to Kennedy, a famous picture. He knew how to travel without a suitcase. Syndicated the Fisher quintuplets' story and photographed the Alaska earthquakes, Dallas and Watts, the Olympics, covered the trial of Sirhan Sirhan.

  He reported income over six figures before he was twenty-four, and got awful tired of photographing different heads on the same body.

  He was conceivably the best one-eyed photographer in the world—lost the sight of the other in an accident when he was five years old—but he got weary of walking into people's lives, shaking their hands, photographing them, walking out. He left Life and went into producing books and movies and fast magazine syndications on stories that weren't small. Wanted to do people in depth. Instead, did Jack Ruby on his deathbed, and Susan Atkins in the Manson trial.

  He got a terrible reputation. Schiller worked hard to change that image. He published a book, Minamata, about mercury poisoning in Japan, and created the still montages in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and Lady Sings the Blues, produced and directed The American Dreamer with Dennis Hopper, did the interviews for a book on Lenny Bruce by Albert Goldman. He won an Academy Award in Special Category for The Man Who Skied down Everest. It did not matter. He was the journalist who dealt in death.

  Sitting on the airplane, resting from twenty-five years of galloping out of explosions into cover portraits, from riots to elections, sitting in one place with the fatigue of that twenty-five years embedded like skid marks in his limbs, sitting on this plane full of media monkeys heading for Salt Lake, Schiller thought it through. The Gilmore story would not help his reputation, yet he could not let it go. It irritated the nerve in him that never gave up

  So far, after two quick trips to Salt Lake, he had come back with empty hands. He was not accustomed to such meager results. On instinct, he had gone to Salt Lake just ten days after Gilmore announced he would not appeal, but found nothing. Boaz was in control of the scene, and Boaz had little interest in him. Boaz was dealing with David Susskind.

  Schiller read over the telegram he had sent two days ago to Gilmore.

  NOVEMBER 14

  GARY GILMORE

  UTAH STATE PRISON, BOX 250

  DRAPER UT 84020

  ON BEHALF OF ABC MOVIES, THE NEW INGOT COMPANY, AND MY ASSOCIATES WE WISH TO PURCHASE THE MOTION PICTURE AND PUBLICATION RIGHTS TO YOUR TRUE LIFE STORY FROM YOU OR YOUR ELECTED REPRESENTATIVES STOP OUR OWN CREDITS ARE 14 YEARS OF MAJOR MOTION PICTURES AND 6 BEST SELLING BIOGRAPHIES STOP MORE RECENTLY WE PRODUCED THE HIGHLY RECEIVED FILM "HEY, I'M ALIVE" THE TRUE LIFE STORY OF RALPH FLORES, A MORMON LAY PREACHER, AND A YOUNG GIRL WHO CRASHED IN A LIGHT PLANE IN THE YUKON AND SURVIVED 49 DAYS WITHOUT FOOD STOP THIS FILM ABOUT FAITH IN GOD AND CONVICTION WAS PRAISED BY THE MORMON CHURCH AND VIEWED BY OVER 30 MILLION PEOPLE STOP AMONG OUR OTHER CREDITS IS "SUNSHINE," THE TRUE STORY OF LYN HELTON A YOUNG MOTHER IN DENVER COLO WHO GAVE HER LIFE AT A YOUNG AGE IN RETURN FOR TIME WITH HER DAUGHTER STOP THIS STORY OF THE RIGHT TO DIE ISSUE AND STRENGTH OF CONVICTION WAS VIEWED BY OVER 70 MILLION PEOPLE AND THE BOOK IN HER WORDS READ BY OVER 8 MILLION PEOPLE STOP A COPY IS BEING SENT TO YOU UNDER SEPARATE COVER STOP WE WISH TO PRESENT YOUR STORY AS TRUTH NOT AS FICTION STOP I HAVE SEEN MR. BOAZ AND NOTED TO HIM THAT I WOUL CORRESPOND WITH YOU STOP I LOOK FORWARD TO HEARING FROM YOU OR YOUR REPRESENTATIVE STOP PLEASE CALL COLLECT AT ANY TIME STOP SINCERELY YOURS

  LAWRENCE SCHILLER

  There had been no answer. His telegram might just as well have gone into the dead-letter bin at the post office.

  He went out to see Vern Damico at the shoe store in Provo and Vern wasn't there. He bumped into a couple of local reporters in Salt Lake and said, I'm not here to compete with you, just like you to tell me who is what in this city, and how do you get in to see Gilmore?

  They weren't getting in either. Schiller heard of Nicole, but also heard she wouldn't talk to anyone. He kept missing her at the prison.

  Those first and second trips to Salt Lake, Schiller was hitting stone walls. Couldn't find the story. He got into his rented car and drove from Provo to the airport in Salt Lake, and on the drive, staring down the Interstate, said to himself, If I can't find the story, then nobody can find it. But if nobody can, then it has to be a good story. He couldn't stop thinking about it.

  The moment he heard news of the double suicide attempt, Schiller said to himself, there is a story and it's real. Since it's real, it has, in this case, to be fantastic.

  At the Hilton, it looked like the crowd of press had expanded from fifty to five hundred. The foreign press was beginning to come in. The British in numbers. When the British arrived en masse, the stamp was on the meat. The story would have the largest worldwide appeal.

  Schiller made a few phone calls. His luck seemed to have changed. Reached Vern Damico on the first ring, and had a good talk, asked Mr. Damico's opinion of where Nicole might be. Damico seemed to think she was at the hospital in Provo, and Schiller made an appointment afterward to talk with him. Schiller got into his rented car. The monkeys would stay at the Hilton and exchange theories on the crime, but he was on his way to the hospital in Provo.

  The waiting room was small and had a lot of people. Schiller went up to the desk and asked for Nicole Barrett. They acted as if they had never heard of her. He went around the corner, and put a call in to the hospital administrator, and asked if any of Nicole Barrett's relatives could be located quickly. The woman said they were coming in and out all the time. The mother's been here, Schiller was informed, but she's not here right now. Schiller sat down in his heavy brown coat and prepared to wait. It was a hot waiting room, but he was comfortable. Gilmore was in the hospital, under guard. Gilmore was out of it and could not be reached. Back in Salt Lake, the monkeys would run back and forth, trading information, but there was nothing in the story that counted now except Gilmore and Nicole. Since he couldn't get to Gilmore, he would wait to make contact with Nicole. It was very simple to Schiller.

  There was no anxiety about sitting there for hours. Other reporters would be on the phone, checking back to hear what was going down, but Schiller sat and relaxed and let the heat of the room pour over him and the fatigues of twenty-five years perspired slowly, a drop and another drop from the bottomless reservoirs of fatigue, and he sat there quietly thinking, and let his sins and errors wash over him, and reviewed them. He considered it obscene not to learn from experience.

  His worst sin, his number-one error, he usually decided, was the Susan Atkins story. He had been in Yugoslavia when the Tate-LaBianca murders took place, but six months later, driving down the Santa Monica freeway, news came over the radio that a girl in prison named Susan Atkins had just given information on Tate-LaBianca to her cellmate. Next day, Schiller learned that one of her attorneys was Paul Cruso, who in 1963 had written the contract when Schiller sold a nude photograph of Marilyn Monroe to Hugh Hefner. It obtained the highest price ever paid for a single picture up to then, $25,000. Schiller now called Paul Caruso and said Susan Atkins's story could be sold around the world, and would help to pay for her defense.

  So, Schiller was brought in to see Susan Atkins between her two Grand Jury appearances, and she confessed the murders in a series of three connected interviews. He did sell it all over the world. Then it was reprinted in America. Suddenly, Susan Atkins was no longer the State's star witness, because she now had a
vested, interest in her own story. Schiller had destroyed part of the State's case.

  He was sick to the stomach over that, but it took a while to acknowledge the fact. It came upon him little by little. He was asked to dinner one night by a famous lawyer and couldn't understand why, until he saw that six eminent Judges were also present. They wanted to hear why a journalist would do what he had done. It was a very intelligent dinner, and he was delighted to sit with such fine and serious people, but unhappy to realize he'd been fucking them over.

  Earlier, he sold the Susan Atkins story to New American Library for $15,000, a quick sale for a quick and rotten book, a way of liquidating his involvement, but it didn't liquidate so much as proliferate.

  Newsweek interviewed him about the book and he said, "Look, I published what Susan said. I don't know whether it's true or not." Newsweek ended their article with that quote: "I don't know whether it's true or not." It made the sweat break out on his forehead to think about it. He had learned one lesson he would never erase, and thought of it again on the night he dined with the Judges. The secret of people who had class was that they remained accurate to the facts.

  Schiller called it history. You recorded history right. If you did the work that way, you could end up a man of substance.

  So when Helter Skelter came out, he said to himself, "Schiller, you really fucked up. With the profit you made on the original sale, you could have done a definitive study of the entire Manson family. You threw away what should have been an important book." It was embarrassing to recollect. He even had to appear in Court to testify on how the Susan Atkins interviews took place. When the Judge said, "How would you characterize your occupation, Mr. Schiller?" he replied, "I believe I am a communicator." The courtroom laughed.

  They thought he was a hustler. The memory burned into the skin right under his beard. "I believe I am a communicator," and the courtroom laughed. He would do this Gilmore one differently. Lay a proper foundation for every corner of the story. And he sat in the room and waited in the heat in his heavy brown coat, and the hours went by.

  There was a bearded guy at the other end of the room. Schiller with his black beard and the other guy with his bright brown beard eyed each other. After an hour or two, a girl came in who looked to be media and went over to the other beard and soon started bawling the shit out of the fellow. Schiller could pick up that his name was Jeff Newman and he was from the National Enquirer, and the girl was saying, "You knew she was going to attempt suicide and you sat on it. You and your fucking newspaper." It made Newman so upset, he got up and went out. Now, Schiller went over to the girl and said, "I'm Larry Schiller, representing ABC television." She turned on him like an eagle, claws out, said, "You, too!" Schiller didn't even know her name. She was a local stringer, but sure carrying on. The men didn't give a damn about the women, she was saying, and yet the women were killing themselves over the men. Schiller nodded and got away as quick as he could.

  Then a very tall young fellow with dark black hair that came down to his shoulders, and a girl's name tattooed on his knuckles, came in, and looked so shook Schiller figured he had to be Nicole's brother, that is, if she had a brother and Schiller went up and introduced himself but it was apparent the fellow didn't want to communicate, so Schiller sat down again and waited, and another couple of hours went by before he saw a woman standing at the candy shop next to the waiting room. She was thin and small boned, had her hair in a bun, and looked like a very tough western woman who could have walked across the plains. By the expression on her face—such iron fatigue and held-in sorrow, he was sure it had to be Nicole's mother (although later he found out it was Nicole's grandmother, and Nicole's mother wasn't even forty yet) so he wrote a note to introduce himself as Lawrence Schiller and said he was here to discuss the events taking place in their lives in relation to the motion picture and book rights and would appreciate a meeting with her or her authorized representative, or an attorney (it was always better to say "authorized representative" before you said "attorney" so they knew you weren't suing). He finished by mentioning that he was prepared to pay Nicole a minimum of $25,000 for her rights, and put the note in an envelope that had Mrs. Baker written across it.

  He handed that to the woman and said, "As you will see, I am Lawrence Schiller from ABC television. This is not the time and place, but when the occasion is right, I would appreciate it if you would open my envelope and read it." Then he turned around walked out of the hospital. A contact had been made.

  When the front-page story on Gilmore came out in the New York Times, November 8th, David Susskind was fascinated. For a front-page piece, it was well written, and gave a good description of the murders, the man's sentence, and his decision not to appeal. Put that together with Gilmore's previous criminality, and it all suggested a fascinating scenario.

  Shortly after the article caught his eye, almost immediately in fact, Susskind's old friend and associate Stanley Greenberg called, and they had a good conversation. Stanley had written a TV story fifteen years ago about a man awaiting execution. The man had been so long on Death Row that he changed in character, and the question became, "Who was being executed?" Metamorphosis the play had been called, and Susskind always felt that it had had some effect on the end of capital punishment in New York State, and maybe even a little to do with the Supreme Court decision that saved a lot of men's lives on Death Row. "Of course," Stanley said now to David, "inviolate and forever simply means till the next generation. Then you have to do it all over again."

  Greenberg was a man of some decorum, but Susskind could tell he was aroused, "What fascinates me about this Gilmore case," he was saying, "is that it's an open commentary on the utter failure of our prison system to rehabilitate anybody. Why, the guy's been in and out his whole damn life and he just keeps getting worse. It all escalated from car stealing up to armed robbery with a dangerous weapon. That's a devastating commentary," said Greenberg. "Secondly, it could offer a wonderful statement about capital punishment and how godawful it is, eye for an eye. I even think that reaching a large audience can probably save the guy's life. Gilmore says he wants to die, but he's obviously out of his head. I think our production could be a factor in the man's not being executed." That appealed to Susskind. "They can't execute this man," he said to Stanley, "he's deranged. He's insane. They should have understood that way back."

  They talked a long time. Finally Susskind said to Greenberg, "Why don't you go to Utah? I think this story's got several layers of importance and interest and could make very exciting, dramatic material. If, on investigation, it holds up, and we can get the releases we need, we might have something here."

  Greenberg couldn't go right away because of his contract at Universal, but each day. they talked to each other, and Susskind began conversations with Boaz. He quickly decided Dennis was not your typical lawyer.

  Boaz boasted, "I've got releases from everybody. Got them all."

  He kept talking about how he had locked up everything. Susskind called Stanley Greenberg and said, "This is a very odd attorney. However, he's got his eye on the money machine."

  Dennis said, "Look, I can't cooperate if you don't put your evidence of good faith on the line. Money," said Dennis, "is not to be considered not of the essence," and giggled. "What do you want?" asked Susskind. "Well, now," said Dennis, "it's getting to be a worldwide case." "How can I," asked Susskind, "be sure you have all the releases you say you have?" "You," said Dennis, "have to start somewhere. You better start by trusting me. I have exactly what I told you I have. If you don't believe me, there are ten other people out here who want it. It's just that I like your reputation, Mr. Susskind. I'd like to give you first crack at it." He wanted a goodly sum, in the neighborhood of $50,000 for the rights of all the principals involved in the case, and asked Susskind to put that into a telegram, which David did, and sent it off.

  Susskind also enclosed a legal package. It had a contract and release forms. Boaz might have told him that he had it all but
when Susskind asked him in what form were the releases, Dennis said, "One- and two-sentence quitclaims."

  "Oh, look," said Susskind, "that doesn't work at all, you're going to have to use established legal forms, waiver of rights for the payment, all such. It has to conform to what we do in the motion picture and television business."

  Dennis said, "I don't understand why you have to have all that folderol."

  "It's not folderol," said Susskind, "it's of the essence. People can change their minds. A one- or two-sentence release probably contains language too loose to bear up under scrutiny. I'm sorry, I have to send you release forms." He did. Susskind went to his lawyers and they sent off the package.

  By pure coincidence, Stanley Greenberg arrived at the Salt Lake Hilton on the 16th, the afternoon of the double suicide saga, and so precisely the busiest day of the month for the media. Stanley had telephoned the night before from Kensington in California, where he lived just north of San Francisco, to confirm an appointment with Boaz, but under the circumstances, in all the brouhaha at the Hilton over the double suicide, he never expected the lawyer to keep his date. To Greenberg's surprise, however, Dennis did show up, and just late enough to have given Stanley Greenberg time to look carefully at the network news at six o'clock. Right after, to his astonishment, Boaz knocked at his hotel room door.

  If not for this dramatic event today, they would almost certainly have met, Greenberg thought, as adversaries, or at the least, he would have felt obliged to deal with Boaz as a bizarre specimen of a lawyer willing to kill off his client. Now, however, Boaz seemed to have gone through a considerable shift of opinion in the greatest hurry. So their conversation proved to be more productive than Stanley could have hoped.