The Executioner's Song

by Norman Mailer

  Once the reporter and photographer left, Gibbs just kept drinking. But it didn't mix with the Oral Varidase, and he got sick to his stomach. The bartender had to help him to the rest room. Gibbs had sent off a thousand of the five thousand right away to his mother, but had been flashing money like a fiend. In the restroom, first thing he knew, a broad was standing there with her dude right behind her.

  She lunged at Gibbs, figuring that with his bad leg she could push him down easy but he dropped her with a fist, then nailed her boy friend. This was how he told the story later. When he went back to the bar, two cops happened to be in the restaurant and arrested Gibbs.

  The Lance LeBaron didn't seem to work—and he was in the slammer with $100,000 bail.

  With the execution scheduled for Monday, Schiller had begun to feel the final pressure by Thursday. Rupert Murdoch started calling from New York to offer sums for an exclusive on the execution. All Schiller had to do was walk out to the press after the firing-squad did their job, make a short public statement, then go into a room with one of Murdoch's reporters. Schiller realized he couldn't just say no, or Murdoch might try to get into the execution chamber some other way, bribe a guard, whatever. Rupert Murdoch hadn't bought control of the New York Post and the Village Voice and made a fortune in Australian newspapers for nothing. So, Schiller planned to string Murdoch along. For that matter, he was keeping Time and Newsweek and a couple of others on the string.

  Then an Englishman called Schiller. "We want you to walk the Last Mile." Larry replied, "I am not Edward G. Robinson." "You mean to say," said this British journalist, "that somebody's not going to walk the Last Mile with your man?"

  "I'm not walking any Last Mile," Schiller screamed, "I don't even know if I want the fucking guy to be executed."

  Then, an interview was brought in by Moody that covered Gary's feelings about the hood. It could be fleshed out to 1,500 words for the newspapers, yet not give away the vitals of the story. Schiller decided to release it to a few chosen reporters. That would be Breslin, Dave Johnston, and Tamera Smith.

  Barry and he almost came to fists. "Don't you fucking tell me how to run this," he said to Farrell, "I'm really using my head."

  These last couple of days, the world press had been coming in, by God, flocking over Salt Lake as if it were the scene of a heavy weight championship. Now, he didn't have to worry about twenty local reporters who hated his guts. He had three hundred guys to deal with and each wanted a lock of Gary's hair or a fingernail cutting. Plus, the execution itself. He had better get ready for that.

  Schiller called Gus Sorensen and brought Barry Farrell down on himself again. Schiller said, "I have to deliver a message to the Warden. I want to make sure Sam Smith realizes I ain't going to screw him if I get invited to the execution. The Warden is the only one who can stop me, okay? The law says he can't, but he can. So I got to deliver a message that if I'm invited, I'll conduct myself his way."

  Gus Sorensen came over Thursday afternoon, and Larry gave the interview. It was designed to show that he saw his responsibilities and would abide by the rules of the prison.

  Stephanie's team only made three or four sales in Europe. While Stephanie had enjoyed being in Paris at the Georges Cinq, she hated being a businesswoman. A couple of the foreign magazines agreed to buy, then backed out. In France, where Schiller had been counting on a big sale, some local murder took headlines away from Gilmore.

  So after Larry paid off the cost of the trip, which for the three women came to ten grand, he had netted no more than another ten. No bonanza. To make it worse, Stephie had decided to stop in New York.

  She would most definitely not come out to Utah. The whole thing, Gilmore, the press, the execution, was repulsive to her.

  It was near midnight, while Larry was digesting Stephie's news, that Moyers phoned to say he was going to get in to see Gilmore.

  Wanted Schiller to know that. "No," said Schiller, "no way."

  "Well, Larry," said Moyers, "Gilmore's willing to see me."

  "That's a lie, Bill. I would have heard."

  But would he? Moyers wasn't the type to call, unless he was pretty sure. Schiller was trying to figure out how the man could get in. It had to be through Mikal. So now he asked, "Have you seen Gary's brother?"

  "Yeah," said Moyers, "he's in my room. He's been in my room for days."

  There went the ball game. Schiller felt wiped out. God what kind of good, incredibly valuable information Moyers had been pumping out of Mikal. Lost was an organic form of communication.

  After he hung up, he knew pure ego jealousy. They wouldn't let him in to see Gilmore. He had tried every goddamned trick and still had no more relationship with the guy than a fucking tape recorder. He called Bob Moody and said, "Bill Moyers claims he's getting in. Get to Gary and tell him how it will blow everything we've built up here and worked hard for."

  Larry called Moyers back, and started calmly. But when they got to the place where Moyers still said he would see Gary Gilmore on his own, Schiller blew. "Bill," he said, "you're double-crossing me. I've been helping you on the assumption you're playing ball with me, and you're trying to get in through Mikal. That's not the guy I had dinner with." Schiller was putting all his strength into the mouthpiece of the phone. "I wouldn't use a brother to get in," he said to Moyers. "The guy has come here to save his brother's life. He has to make that decision, and you're befriending him just to see Gary Gilmore." Right over the phone, Moyers came roaring back. "You have no idea," said he, "what I'm going through. I've been trying to encourage Mikal to think the thing out. I've sat with him. He was in my room all last night, for God's sakes," said Moyers. "Don't tell me I've been using somebody," and Schiller thought he sounded ready to cry. So, Schiller took the phone, which had a long cord, and walked with it into the bathroom in order that the two secretaries couldn't hear. To Moyers, he said, "I don't want the fucking guy to die." Moyers said, "I don't want him to die either." It came over them that everybody was walking around with death in his belly. At a given moment a man they knew was going to be killed. On signal, everybody was going to leap across an abyss.

  After he hung up, Schiller went to his bedroom and began to study the view from the window. It was snowing. Suddenly Schiller hated snow. He couldn't have said why. Felt like a blanket was slowing his efforts. It seemed dreamlike and this situation was crazy enough that he didn't want to be in a dream.

  Now, somewhere around midnight, a big call came in from Murdoch. He was ready to make his top offer. One hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars. But for the execution. A firsthand exclusive account from Lawrence Schiller.

  Years ago, Larry had gotten $25,000 for a single photograph of Marilyn Monroe nude. Now he was being offered a hundred and twenty-five grand to describe the shooting of a man. It would be pure gravy. He wouldn't have to give up the book, or the Playboy interviews, not the movie, nothing. Murdoch wouldn't even know if he got the whole execution or not. Schiller could save the best parts for himself. Give Murdoch one-half: he would probably be just as happy.

  The publisher was interested in the exclusive—in raising circulation. He could never even print the whole thing. It really was tempting, It really was.

  Schiller walked to the window again. The snow was coming down hard by now and he was tired. His hand ached from squeezing the phone. He started crying. He could not explain what it was about, or why he was crying, but it went through him uncontrollably.

  He said to himself, "I don't know any longer whether what I'm doing is morally right," and that made him cry even more. He had been saying to himself for weeks that he was not part of the circus, that he had instincts which raised him above, a desire to record history, true history, not journalistic crap, but now he felt as if he was finally part of the circus and might even be the biggest part of it, and in the middle of crying, he went into the bathroom and took the longest fucking shit of his life. It was all diarrhea. His system, after days of running nonstop and nights with crummy sleep, was b
y now totally screwed up. The horrors were loose. The diarrhea went through him as if to squeeze every last rotten thing out, and still it came. When he thought he might be done, he looked out the window at the snow and made the decision that in no way was he ever going to sell Gary Gilmore's execution. No. No way could anybody convince him. He would not make that fucking mistake for greed or security.

  No. He didn't care if he never saw a penny at the end. He had to stay by what his gut told him. He started crying again and said to himself, "I can't even spell decently. I can't write the way I feel and want to express myself." It got real heavy and he heard again the disgust in Stephanie's voice over the phone when she refused to come from New York, and thought of what was going to happen when he told Murdoch and Time and Newsweek and the Enquirer and all the others he had kept on the string that he wasn't going to give them any big private story on the last minute in the life of Gary Gilmore, They would really be after him then. He understood some of the fear at the center of his diarrhea. He was not only turning down easiest money he had ever been offered, but was going to take a beating, and he thought back to the time when he was a kid in Diego, and Chicanos would waste his brother and him coming from school, do it every day, and knew something of the same fear now, and found himself crying once more, all alone in his room, all alone and the night turning into a lighter blue, and the dawn coming up, exhausted beyond belief, fucking wondering why he was there and trying to decide that he had a responsibility above all business shenanigans and everything else to report as best he could. "I owe that to whatever I am," he said, "whether a journalist or an entrepreneur, whatever I am. I may never wind up being anything, but I owe it to myself to build my integrity," and he had an inspiration then that all the people who were respected in all the worlds he had gone through, respected for their integrity, had maybe not all been born with it, not every last one, but built it, job by job and night by separate night, until he got up, at last, and dressed and went out to the corner of University and Center Street in Orem and stood there with a pad and a pencil in his hand, looking at the heavy early traffic going by at the biggest intersection in town in the early morning, all the factory workers' cars going to Geneva Steel, out there slipping and sliding on the snow-slick, wide, wide streets and he would look down to his notebook and check whether the writing had been legible. He realized that if he was going to take accurate notes at the execution, he might not have a second to remove his glance from the scene, and so he had to learn to separate his hand from his eye, and do it without ever referring to the pad, and to himself he said, "For the first time, Schiller, you can't fictionalize, you can't make it up, you can't embroider."

  Then he went back to the motel and spent the first part of the morning calling up Murdoch and the Enquirer and NBC and told everybody the word was no. He would not deal, he would not sell. Instead, he would give it away. After the execution, he would release his private eyewitness account to all the media at once. Nobody in the bidding liked it. The Enquirer griped and groaned, and NBC made it clear what they would do. He could hear the sound of the hunting horn. Only Murdoch was a gentleman. "Appreciate your calling," he said.

  Chapter 28

  T.G.I.F.

  As Mikal came into the visiting room on Friday morning, Gary said, "Schiller doesn't want me to see your friend. It jeopardizes his exclusivity. I ought to fire him, and I would, but it's too late to find somebody else." When Mikal did not reply, Gary said, "What I could do is revoke his invitation to the execution."

  Mikal was planning to leave Salt Lake that evening to spend Saturday and Sunday with Bessie. Gary, however, asked him to stay another day. "I haven't told this to anybody," he now told Mikal, "but I'm not so sure how Monday morning is going to be." He looked through the glass at Mikal. "Maybe that's why I need Schiller. He'll be there recording it for history, so I'll keep cool." He shook his head.

  "I didn't mean for it to become such a big thing. I thought maybe there would be a few articles." Put his hand up, and Mikal pressed his on the other side, and they touched but for the quarter inch of glass between.

  Back in Salt Lake, Mikal met with Richard Giauque for the last time and told him he had decided not to intervene. After he said good-bye, Giauque made a phone call to Amsterdam who said he was aware of what it must have cost Mikal to come to that point, and hung up. There was not much doubt in Amsterdam's mind that the decision was final. Giauque had astute judgment. He would not have passed on such a message if there had been any chance of Mikal's changing his mind.

  By Friday morning, with the execution not seventy-two hours away, Earl Dorius knew a number of legal actions were going to be filed.

  Law was always, to some degree, a game, and that was one good reason, Earl had long ago decided, to keep its processes slow and orderly. It helped to tone down the sporting and competitive aspects.

  Now, however, they had all gotten to the point where they were calculating the hours needed to file each action and counteraction.

  The side of law that was closest to a game had become predominant.

  Earl telephoned the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals in Denver—Utah being one of the six states in the Tenth Circuit—to speak to the Clerk, Howard Phillips, and tell him the Utah Attorney General's office was fearful some last-minute and, legally speaking, curious efforts might be made to prevent the execution. He wanted, therefore, to be able to contact the Court over the weekend, particularly on Sunday, in case the A.G. needed to make a countermove at the eleventh hour.

  Dorius had his secretary check airline schedules, and learned that the last flight from Salt Lake to Denver was at 9:20 on Saturday and Sunday nights which information he passed on to Mike Deamer, Hansen's Deputy Attorney General. It meant that if they had to get to the Tenth Circuit Sunday night after 9:20, special transportation would be necessary.

  Earl's next call was to Michael Rodak, the Clerk of the United States Supreme Court. Rodak and he discussed the mechanics of last-minute appeals to Washington, D.C. They also agreed on a special code Rodak could use if the Supreme Court had to reach Dorius.

  That was very important. They did not want some crank or overmotivated party to be able to call Utah State Prison at the last moment and claim they were the Supreme Court and announce a Stay of Execution.

  The prison had to know it was the Clerk, and only the Clerk, of the U.S. Supreme Court speaking. So Michael Rodak now told Dorius that his nickname was Mickey, and he had been raised in Wheeling, West Virginia. The code would be "Mickey from Wheeling, West Virginia, is calling."

  Friday afternoon, two cases landed on Earl. The first was from Gil Athay representing his Death Row client, Dale Pierre, one of the hi-fi killers convicted for pouring Drano down customers' throats in a stereo and hi-fi store. Athay was arguing the execution of Gary Gilmore would create a public atmosphere that would injure his client's chances for appeal.

  Just as Dorius was walking over to Hansen's office to discuss this development, another call came. The ACLU was bringing a taxpayers' suit before Judge Conder in State District Court. Two cases and one afternoon to do them in.

  It was decided Bill Evans and Earl Dorius would oppose Gil Athay, and Bill Barrett and Michael Deamer would argue the other.

  A couple of hours later they came back with victories in both cases. It was mainly, Earl thought, because the plaintiffs couldn't show any rights denied by the execution. Gilmore's immediate family might be able to claim standing, but there it ended. You simply couldn't have everybody going to Court. Thank God for standing, thought Earl. That afternoon, he had argued the public would be harmed by any further delay of execution, and he meant it. The nightmare of public circuses was that the longer they went on, the more they could make everything worthwhile look ridiculous.

  Friday afternoon after Court, Phil Hansen found himself thinking again about Nicole and Gary Gilmore. After a couple of meetings with Nicole had failed to come off, he had kept thinking about Gilmore and assumed his girl friend would get in t
ouch with him for the appeal. Hansen was so busy with his own practice that it was hard to sit down on any given day and take positive steps about something not even in his office. Before he knew it, therefore, Gilmore was refusing to appeal. At that point, Phil began to wonder how he could possibly step in. Could you save a man who didn't want it? Still, the idea of Gilmore being executed was personally offensive. Phil hadn't spent his years saving a few lives nobody else could—it was in fact the pride of his career—without deciding that the death sentence was an obscenity. If you were a devout Catholic, and a great football coach, it would be obscene if you were coaching Notre Dame and they lost 79-0. This particular week, the execution had been hanging over every puff of cigar smoke in the corridors of every Court in Salt Lake. Hansen came to the end of Friday afternoon with the realization he had had three cases back to back before Judge Ritter, and, in fact, two of the Juries had even been out while the third case was being tried. So, by Friday afternoon, Hansen said to Ritter at the bench, "You worked my ass off all week long. You owe me a drink." Ritter laughed and invited him back to his chambers where he poured quite a few for Phil—Ritter not drinking much anymore—and they talked about Gilmore and waited for a call from Dick Giauque, and tried to find Giauque's partner, Daniel Berman, who was doing legal work for Judge Ritter, and then tried to call Matheson, the new Governor, and all the while, such calls failing to reach anybody, Hansen was brooding over the idiocy of the oncoming execution. "Yes," he said, "Sam Smith will never die of a brain tumor." And chuckled through his cigar smoke, and said, "If all else fails, I'm going to bring a suit that I believe is a novelty."