The Executioner's Song

by Norman Mailer

  STANGER Larry's quite a mover, all right.

  GILMORE You guys have made some moves, but it hasn't been enough, I haven't gotten the phone call.

  STANGER It hasn't been successful.

  GILMORE Man, I've gone sixteen days without eating, and I'll go forever.

  I'll do whatever I have to do to get that phone call. If it takes a bribe, pay it. I don't give a shit what it takes . . . I want to talk to Nicole and I don't know if I'll be cooperative with anybody until I do.

  I guess that sounds like an ultimatum. I don't know if I have the right to ask you to arrange a phone call in order to get answers to these questions, but I guess that's what I'm doing.

  STANGER You've got a right to ask what you want, Gary.

  GILMORE I want to talk to Nicole.

  As soon as the lawyers returned to Provo with a tape, Schiller, if he was in town, would come over to their office to make a copy immediately.

  That gave him an opportunity to listen in the lawyers' presence. When Gary now said, "Arrange a phone call," Schiller turned to Moody and remarked, "Come on, does he think I'm going to give somebody twenty-five dollars?" Moody said, "Gary thinks five thousand should do it." "To whom? Who gets it?" Schiller asked.

  Moody replied, "Gary says, 'Look for a doctor.' " Schiller said, "I don't think we should get involved in that, Bob. We're going for the long haul."

  He had the feeling Gary was testing how far he would go. In effect, they were all asking: How much money does Schiller have in his pocket? Has he another five thousand to hand out? Larry considered it a good way to establish his integrity with Moody if he didn't go along. "I don't think we should get involved," he repeated. "I'll send Gary a telegram."

  DEC. 5, 1:30 P.M.

  GARY GILMORE

  UTAH STATE PRISON BOX 950

  DRAPER UT 84020

  IN REFERENCE TO YOUR REQUEST TO COMMUNICATE WITH A THIRD PARTY, THIS IS NOT THE MOMENT OR THE TIME, AND THE MEANS YOU HAVE SUGGESTED ARE REJECTED BY ME. I AM HERE TO RECORD HISTORY, NOT TO GET INVOLVED IN IT. REGARDS.

  LARRY.

  "Actually," said Schiller to himself, "I have become part of it. All around me, I'm becoming part of the story."

  Now that Gilmore wouldn't answer his questions, Schiller decided he'd better pick up a couple of collateral interviews. Vern had told him that his daughter'd be well worth talking to, so with Stephie he went to visit Brenda and Johnny. It wasn't a great interview but he was delighted with Brenda. She was out front, wisecracking and offered a real image for a TV show. Almost good looking enough to be a Charlie's Angel-type girl. Her husband Johnny also impressed Schiller, but in another way. He felt a little uneasy of him physically.

  A strong man, reluctant to talk.

  All the while, he loved having brought Stephie. Taking her to the interview warmed Brenda up. Stephie gave these awkward interview situations a little—he didn't want to say class—a little bit of culture, the little bit of softness needed. She was an asset. That is, until they left the place. "You sat there and ate all those hors d'oeuvres," she said, "all that ham and pineapple." Had to be said, Schiller told himself. She was an asset going in, and a liability going out. Her criticisms were so rough, he was fucked for the rest of the day.

  So he was half relieved to interview Sterling Baker and Ruth Ann later in the week when Stephie was not along. He couldn't get over what a gentle fellow Sterling was. So shy, in fact, that he had to take him out to a restaurant. The man just could not sit and be interviewed without something like food to distract the atmosphere. All the same, Sterling showed another side of Gary. Here was this fellow, real gentle, and Gary had been drawn to him.

  Moody and Stanger were trying to devise a way for Gary to telephone Nicole. Many a scheme was discussed.

  In the meantime, to keep Gary happy, they were getting a few letters ferried to and from Nicole. Naturally, Gary wanted to know how good looking Ken Sundberg was, and Moody had to assure him Sundberg was a serious young Mormon who would not drive a wedge between Nicole and himself.

  GILMORE Can I ask you guys a personal question? Sometimes when things become a reality, people don't think about them exactly like they might. You guys aren't going to have any second thoughts?

  MOODY Let us say this, Gary, I think Ron and I both have come to look upon you and feel and treat and consider you to be a good friend and I don't like the thought of your being executed, but damnit, we're here to do what you want. We'll continue to work at that even though it is not a pleasurable thing to even think about.

  STANGER It certainly is not.

  GILMORE You know I'm not asking that you like me. I'm not a likable person, right.

  STANGER Whether you like it or not, we've grown to like you very much.

  GILMORE The only thing I ask is just respect my own thoughts about death.

  Stanger didn't really believe Gilmore was ever going to get it.

  There were too many Judges secretly hostile to the idea of capital punishment. On the other hand, Stanger didn't see why he couldn't give his utmost. He liked to respect the role he had assumed. In a manner of speaking, he had been an actor all his life. Of course there were all kinds of ironies in this case anyway. Here he was supposed to be interviewing Gilmore on his past, yet Gary got off more on getting Ron to talk about his own life.

  Having been born in Butte, Ron could get a quick laugh by saying, "Leave out the 'e' and you got it spelled." His two older brothers, he told Gary, used to sell newspapers over his near-dead body. Ron would start hawking on the best corner, and quick enough, a couple of bigger newsboys would jump him. As they did, his brothers would jump them, and get the corner for a while.

  Back in the '40s, feeling cold and dirty in the winter, he'd be tired from carrying papers around. He'd go to bars and those old gals drinking would buy all he had left out of sympathy. Greatest practice for the law was learning to make those faces that draw sympathy.

  Then the family moved to Oregon and there were hardly any Mormons in the town. The church was above a laundry one time. He met people who believed Mormons had horns because they kept more than one wife. Stanger was just a kid but he would say, "I'm all for it." In fact, his grandfather had been a polygamist. When Stanger first came to BYU, they asked in assembly how many of the kids had polygamous ancestors. Near everybody stood up. Of course, those polygamist families were not particularly happy, thought Ron. "You gave so and so a baby," one wife would yell "and you ain't given me one." If you came from a second family, like his dad did, you knew the difference between first and second. Hell, it was hard enough to keep one wife happy.

  Gary asked him to go on. Thought all this was fascinating.

  Ron said he was the first member of his family ever to go to college, and hardly knew why he picked BYU unless it was to be in a place where Mormons were the accustomed thing. He hadn't been to school more than a few days when this gal who was blond and cute said something about Ernie Wilkinson. Ron opened his big mouth and said, "Who is that?" Thought Ernie was her boy friend. How was he supposed to know Wilkinson was the President of the University.

  The gal got so sarcastic Ron walked away. "There," he said to his friends, "is one girl I could never go out with." Now they'd been married twenty-two years, and had quite a family. Five kids, all in adolescence at once, all adopted.

  When Ron and Viva couldn't have children, they waited five years, then put in an application through the Church, and had to wait another two years to get their first adoption. It took so long they already had a bunch of other applications out, and within a year three more children were in the house.. Four kids under four years of age.

  They were going to hold out for a girl on the fifth, but heard about an infant they could get immediately from a sister agency in Oregon.

  Ron and Viva took all four and jumped on a plane to Portland to pick up the new little one.

  Once aboard, they distributed children to everybody. Said to strangers, "Here, we got too many, would you take one?" On
the way back, they had a tyke in the lead, then the twins, barely walking, Ron next, holding the next-to-littlest one, and Viva coming up behind with one more baby. Two old ladies came over and said, "We need to ask a question. Are you Mormons?" When they nodded, the old ladies said, "We could tell. It's such a big family." Later, on the plane, Viva remarked, "Wouldn't it have been funny if you told them we were both sterile?"

  He and Gary laughed a long time over that one.

  Chapter 16

  BRIDGE TO THE NUTHOUSE

  Schiller got an advance copy of Barry Farrell's article in New West.

  It was called "Merchandising Gary Gilmore's Dance of Death" which sounded bad, and the piece covered Gilmore's negotiations with Boaz, Susskind, and Schiller. To Schiller's satisfaction, the parts on himself, while plus and minus, were generally okay.

  Uncle Vern seemed less attracted to Susskind than to Larry Schiller, who made a point of getting around to meet the family. Schiller's advice to one and all was to hire a lawyer, and when the lawyers were hired they found in Schiller someone who could talk their language, who knew all about court-appointed guardians and trusts, who carried with him a briefcase full of elaborate contracts for the rights to stories even more spectacular than Gilmore's.

  That was good. Farrell was treating him with some seriousness.

  All the more unhappy did it make Larry then that the next line said:

  The man was something of a carrion bird: Already he'd done business with Susan Atkins, Marina Oswald, Jack Ruby, Madame Nhu, and Lenny Bruce's widow.

  Once Schiller got over the impact, it didn't bother him too much. A magazine writer had to put in zingers, and after being screwed on In the Beginning, the Muhammad All book, Farrell owed him a shot anyway. Besides, the rest of the piece was brilliant. A very good article. "Carrion bird" was going to get picked up, but on balance he was ahead. He began to think again of inviting Farrell to work on the questions.

  Schiller was suffering with Moody and Stanger's interviews. He just could not accept how little the lawyers were bringing back. Gary had said he would not answer any more questions, but he meant written ones. Talking to him for hours, they should have been able to elicit more. On top of that, they made technical errors.

  In the beginning, the lawyers didn't really know how to use a tape recorder. Once, Stanger did an interview with a dead battery. Schiller had to buy fresh ones. He couldn't comprehend how Stinger could keep laughing it off. Once the cassette was not turned over. The lawyers had recorded twice on the same side. Must have sat there, and rewound the tape, then recorded on top of themselves. Ron's attitude seemed to be: If we make a mistake, we get it tomorrow. One time Schiller had met Ron and Bob in a little coffee shop just a couple of miles down the road from the prison. Right away they wanted to listen to a tape just smuggled out. Played it in the coffee shop. Schiller said, "Let's go back to the office for that." But they had to hear what they had done. There, in the fucking restaurant. People nearby could have overheard it all. They couldn't seem to comprehend it wasn't wise, that tomorrow it could all be cut off. Why, they acted as if it was their prison. Schiller, trying to hold on to his temper, sometimes had to tell himself, maybe it is. It was practically their hometown, after all.

  "Forget Larry Schiller the businessman," he told them. "That's a side of me, but we're forgetting it. We have history here. We have to get that." When they continued to show resistance, he said finally, "I'm going to give these interviews over to Vern." He was halfway serious. It couldn't be any worse and Gary might open up. What was making Schiller paranoid is that the lawyers didn't bring back a tape every time they went out. He began to wonder what they did discuss when they wouldn't tape. Kept saying to them, "Take down anything and everything, even your legal discussions. Talk about the will It's all. You never know when it's going to be important." Sometimes he would give them a message for Gary and not be certain it had gotten through. Certainly didn't hear it on the tapes.

  "Vern may not have your education," he would then threaten, "but he'll listen to me." It all consumed one horrendous week. He didn't have the hours to deal with ABC, movie rights, planning the story, getting ready for the execution, or time to study the letters.

  Finally he told them to instruct Gary to call each of them Larry when doing an interview. It was better for Gilmore, he explained, to be thinking constantly of the man to whom he was telling the story of his life. Maybe that way, Schiller thought, they would find it easier to ask a tough question or two. Schiller was trying everything.

  More and more he was thinking of an approach to Barry Farrell.

  There were a lot of memories he kept of Barry from Life magazine, so Schiller continued to feel pretty damn pleased with the overall respect Farrell had shown in New West. In the old Life days, Schiller had never been able to get rid of a feeling that Barry Farrell had a subtle contempt for him, and was made out of more exceptional stuff than himself. Not more exceptional, maybe, but certainly special.

  The first time he worked with Barry was after a period of six months Schiller had spent on and off with Timothy Leary, then Laura Huxley. Life was doing a big piece on LSD and Schiller had done fifty hours of taped interviews and taken thousands of photographs of adolescents and junkies, and college kids, and middle-aged people who took the tour with gurus and had profound experiences. Schiller had begun to think how much he'd like to be a writer, and realized he didn't know how. When he got back to New York, Life had assigned Barry Farrell to write the text, and the man just sat in his fucking office and worked. Schiller really got upset. How could you write a major piece on the use of this drug, he asked Barry, without going out in the field? So he developed an antagonism for Farrell, even a hatred. Yet when the piece came out, the guy had done it all. Really shaped it. That was the year, 1966, when Larry Schiller went from one side to the other on Barry Farrell, and developed a great regard for him as a craftsman and a writer. He did not see why Farrell could not do the same stuff with the Gilmore interviews.

  Of course, this was only part of his feeling for Farrell. Barry was not only a craftsman, but a great ladies' man. The type to get away with three-hour lunches. He wore the right suits and right ties, and Schiller was frankly envious of anybody who could go out that long, come back a little tipsy, and still do a hell of a job. Schiller wasn't that good looking then, no beard, pointed nose, small chin, a hungry look.

  He was just a working photographer, a kind of maniacal smile on his face because he was trying to do ten pictures at once while toting a big load of equipment on his back. Knew he looked bizarre, but tried to be part of the woodwork. The less a photographer was noticed as a human being, the better the pictures. Your camera could be dynamite when people paid you no more attention than a fly on the wall.

  Whereas Farrell, the ladies' man, had a bit of magic about him. Schiller remembered how Barry began to go around with this black girl who was a researcher at Life. A beautiful black girl, oh, God, Schiller remembered, in the '60s to be black and beautiful was to be a star.

  She was sweet, she had this nice honey voice, she was intellectual and not street-wise. There was a whole fineness to her, beauty to her, black, beautiful and intelligent. Now she and Barry were married and had a child together. Schiller decided the hell with it, he was just going to see if he could hire Barry Farrell. It would be like getting a prize.

  He called Barry and asked if he'd be interested. Right from the start, he said it would be no pie in the sky. Nothing like the Muhammad All project. No great returns promised. No book involved. But definite work for definite good pay. Five thousand dollars for editing the Playboy interview. That was all right with Farrell. He had his own book to get back to, he said, and they sparred a little, then discussed it back and forth. To Schiller's surprise, he had the feeling there was less of a selling job here than he had psyched himself up for. They ended with Barry agreeing to take a look at the letters and interviews done so far. In a week or so, he ought to be able to decide.

&nbs
p; "I'm running a bold move," Schiller told Stephie.

  She didn't understand the interplays, didn't see how Farrell could write something like "carrion bird" and still respect you.

  Stephie was furious at the term. Besides, she didn't want Larry to give the interview over to anybody. He obviously wanted to do it himself, she said. Schiller only won the discussion by telling her about The American Dreamer. " 'Schiller went absolutely blank on Dennis Hopper's more mystical ideas'—you want to hear that again?" he asked her. "Don't you see, there's a side of Gary I can miss completely. I don't know from shinola about karma." That convinced her.

  When he could talk Stephie into something, he could convince anyone in the world. She was beautifully sales-resistant.

  Barry Golson now flew out to L.A. to discuss Playboy doing the Gilmore interview, and Schiller could see that the editor was arriving in town with a $20,000 face, just what Schiller thought it was worth, plus expenses. It was also obvious that he and Golson were going to be abrasive on each other. Golson looked at him as a businessman, pure and simple.

  "We're going to need," said Schiller, "a really good writer to edit these interviews." He mentioned Barry Farrell. Golson didn't indicate he knew who Farrell was. "He wrote a book on the actress, Pat Neal," Schiller said. He also gave Golson Farrell's Life credentials. Golson didn't seem to care. Maybe he wanted his own man in. There might be trouble later, Schiller thought, but he tied the deal for $22,000.

  Schiller couldn't resist telling Farrell that Barry Golson of Playboy didn't seem to know him: "It's perfectly understandable that I never heard of Golson," said Farrell in reply, "but I consider it a shocking bit of illiteracy that Golson doesn't react to my name."