The Executioner's Song

by Norman Mailer

  Having failed there, Athay had gone to Judge Lewis on Saturday afternoon, but by now, the legal weakness of his case was apparent.

  He had no statistics to offer. He couldn't show that 50 percent of the state population, say, had once thought Dale Pierre should be executed, but now because of the emotionalism of the Gilmore case, the figure had gone up to 90 percent. Nothing to muster but logic.

  So Athay lost again in Judge Lewis's Court, and knew as he fought his way past the press in the corridor, that one way or another, he would try to get to the U.S. Supreme Court tomorrow.

  The Utah Coalition Against the Death Penalty held its meeting in the State Office Building auditorium on Saturday afternoon and Julie Jacoby thought it was all rather decorous. The only outsider who got up to speak was Henry Schwarzschild, and he didn't go on for long. It was best if locals did the talking. Professor Wilford Smith, a bona fide Mormon from BYU, was a true catch, and there was Frances Farley, who was not only a Utah State Senator but a woman, and Professor Jefferson Fordham from the University of Utah Law School, then James Doobye, President of the Salt Lake City chapter of the NAACP. Buttons were available at the door—WHY DO WE KILL PEOPLE WHO KILL PEOPLE TO SHOW THAT KILLING PEOPLE IS WRONG?—and the program said, "Your donations are greatly appreciated."

  Hoyle counted the house at 175, a decent turnout. There were men and women present that Julie didn't know, plus all the ACLU folk she could recognize. It was what you could call the liberal community in Salt Lake.

  Once again, the committed were preaching to the converted. In Julie's mind it was futile. Everyone knew the mouse was fighting the elephant.

  Nonetheless, they wanted to do something. The idea, as Julie saw it, was not to let those unthinking bloodthirsties swallow the day without some resistance. The world was watching Utah, and so they wanted the world to know some people in Utah did not agree with the prevailing forces.

  In fact, they got some publicity. The Salt Lake Tribune gave them the front page of the second section and ran a marvelous picture of Dean Andersen of St. Mark's Episcopal Cathedral in front of a beautiful banner a couple of students had made. It was navy blue with white letters and said, "NO EXECUTION."

  SALT LAKE TRIBUNE

  "Official Blood Bath"

  Protestors Say of Utah Death Penalty

  Salt Lake, Jan. 6—The execution of Gary Mark Gilmore has turned into a "super bowl of violence," an Episcopal priest charged Saturday.

  "It is complete with a Barnum and Bailey circus atmosphere and movie rights, reserved seats, T-shirts and love letters. We could all laugh about it, but in two days a team of volunteers will kill Gary Mark Gilmore without appeal," the Very Rev. Robert Andersen said.

  DESERET NEWS

  Salt Lake, Jan 5—About 15 or so bishops from the National Council of Churches are expected to arrive Sunday afternoon to participate in a Sunday-Monday vigil at Utah State Prison.

  Henry Schwarzschild, coordinator of the National Coalition against the Death Penalty, called the execution "a brutalizing horror," a "dangerous precedent," and "judicial homicide."

  That same afternoon, the Warden held a press conference and Tamera brought back a firsthand account of how they were going to move Gary from Maximum Security over to the cannery, where he would face the firing squad. Sam Smith had also given out regulations for the media. The outer gates to the prison were going to be closed to the press on Sunday night at 6 P.M. They would not open again till 6 A.M. of the 17th. That meant any of the press who wanted to be on the grounds at any time during the hours preceding the execution would have to spend the night in the prison parking lot.

  Schiller now had a problem. If he went in at six in the evening he would not be able to receive any last-minute phone calls Gary might be able to make to the motel. On the other hand, Gary was going to be allowed to spend his last night with Moody, Stanger, and members of his family. There was even a small chance the Warden would let Larry join that group. In that event, it was better to be right on the prison grounds. A dilemma. While he was pondering this, Tamera said, "Larry, I'd like you to come to BYU this afternoon and give a speech about Gary Gilmore to the Social Sciences class. "Tamera," said Schiller, "what is this?"

  "Look," she said, "my Bishop asked me."

  Schiller thought, Maybe she hopes to improve her standing with the Church. Probably thinks of herself as inactive, lately. So he said, "All right, it's an excuse to get out of this madhouse."

  He carted himself to the university on the afternoon of the 15th and went into this hall at BYU with something like four hundred fucking college students, all Mormons, and this teacher who was a Bishop got up and blah blah blah. He introduced Tamera Smith, said she was once a student here and now works for the Deseret News and Tammy got up and made a ten-minute speech, very pious, ideal Mormon girl striving for her Recommend. Then the Bishop introduced Schiller who stood there and made his indictment-of-journalism speech. Couldn't remember a word afterward, but it was a standard thing he kept in the back of his mind. Any day he couldn't talk for fifteen minutes would be a very bad day.

  After a while, he asked for questions, and thirty hands flew up, and he pointed to a student who said, "Mr. Schiller, can you please tell me why you're wearing a Gary Gilmore belt?"

  Larry looked down and, by God, he had a Gucci on. Interlocking G's on the buckle. So, he explained the initials to those four hundred Mormons, and then said to the fellow who asked the question, "You are a journalist, because you have turned one thing into another, and that is journalism." The rest of it was simple, very simple and very placid. He wouldn't call the students bright or intelligent, so much as in their own world. They were hostile to Gilmore, of course, but hostility in a Mormon was so reserved, you didn't even see it. It just showed in the questions. "Why," they would ask, "don't you do the story about Ben Bushnell rather than Gary Gilmore?" and Schiller would answer that at this point in the realm of the United States, Gary Gilmore was making history. Fair or not, Benny Bushnell and his death never would. The kids didn't like it, but he was very straight on. Told them he was not there to please them, but to show the other side of the coin. "I'm not going to hide what I am," had been one of his first remarks. So it went. They asked. He answered.

  Two hours out of his life.

  Back at the motel, Schiller had an interesting conversation with one of the police officers, Jerry Scott, that he had hired on Moody's recommendation. Scott was a great big fellow with dark hair, reassuring in appearance, and had taken a leave of absence from his cop job to work for Schiller. He obviously knew the name of the game. Since he could only protect one entrance of the motel building at a time, he generally parked his police car on the back side to scare off anybody coming from that direction. On the near side, there was Scott waiting.

  This afternoon, right after BYU, Larry discovered Scott was the same policeman who had driven Gary Gilmore from Utah County Jail to Utah State Prison on the day his trial ended. What a bonus. It gave Schiller the idea that Jerry Scott was bringing good luck. Just as well.

  Scott was getting paid about five hundred bucks a week.

  By Saturday evening, Schiller decided that he ought to have a 16mm movie camera in action. So he made arrangements with CBS for one of their crews and explained he would need long shots of the prison with snow on the ground, and all the atmosphere they could find. It would cost another three thousand bucks, but he had hopes. Later, when he saw the film, it was lousy. The crew didn't know how to shoot anything but newsreel footage. Blew all the opportunities for mood building.

  He also made one last attempt to get Stephie to come in from New York. Again she refused. First, he asked her, then he begged.

  She would not come. It was a long and heated argument, and he didn't often lose such discussions, but she was adamant. He was really mad.

  "You're always criticizing me," he said.

  "Don't you see," she cried out, "I criticize you because I love you, and I want to help you."

  I
n certain ways, he felt as close to breaking up with her as he ever had. Yet he knew he wouldn't. That could be the reason in a funny way it was going to work. Maybe, he told himself, he had to understand that Stephie did not see herself as a total go-down-the-road-with-him-gambler—which is what he'd always demanded of his first wife. Rather, Stephie had a nervous system, and it was delicate, and she wished to protect it. She had been in a terrible car accident just a few years before and scarred by it. Her beauty was delicate, it was vulnerable beyond his understanding, and at that moment, maybe it was the weight of every emotion he had been carrying, but he felt a great tenderness toward her, even if she wouldn't join him.

  Shirley Pedler had been called down to a studio by ABC News and ran smack into Dennis Boaz. "You're going to get what you want'" she said to Dennis, "I hope you're happy." Boaz looked at her, and said, "Gee, Shirley, can't we be friends?" "I don't want," she told him, "to be your fucking friend." He stood there a little taken aback, and finally turned to the people with him. "Oh, she says she doesn't want to be my fucking friend," he said, and tried to laugh it off. Away he went, away she went, and she was furious. That was one man who had come in to gratify prestige needs. All he wanted, she thought, was to be involved in an event of national import.

  Of the two girls in the office Debbie was a former Playboy Bunny, a small good-looking redhead who gave you a lift with her personality and did her work well. The other, Lucinda Smith, was an absolute beauty, Barry decided, dark hair, fabulous eyes, the sweetest voice, one of those intimate, purring, matter-of-fact California voices. Barry liked having her there. She was emotional and cried easily, and there was so much to cry about in the last week that he thought she was indispensable to the office. A chorus, nay, a brook of clear feeling to bring a breath of tenderness to the plasticoid abyss of their motel.

  God, she wasn't that many years out of Corvallis run by the Religious of the Sacred Heart of Mary. Lucinda had been the only Presbyterian there. Her father, Barry learned, used to be head writer and director for Groucho Marx, and she had grown up in Studio City, just as secluded as you could get in the San Fernando Valley, had had an honest-to-God coming-out party, and gone to UCLA. Perfect Southern California pedigree. Now she was listening to Gary Gilmore say fuck, piss, shit.

  She had gotten her job through an exclusive employment agency run by two girls. Lucinda had been an English major, and when Schiller called, the agent thought of her immediately, told her it would be an interesting experience. While Lucinda hadn't met Mr. Schiller before the job began, she did have a talk with his secretary in Los Angeles, and was told that if she didn't cut the mustard, she'd be sent home immediately. It gave her the feeling of a boss who laid down the law before they even met. That was stimulating. They would treat her on her merits, rather than her social standing.

  Since the other girl had gone in a day ahead of her, she took the plane from Los Angeles by herself. When she got to the Orem TraveLodge, Mr. Schiller was very polite, and said, "Do you want to rest for a while?" She said, "No, I'll get started." Hardly put her bags down before she began to transcribe tapes, one after another. That tempo would increase. Lucinda started at twelve hours a day, and was close to working around the clock by the weekend. She didn't really want to sleep. There was kind of an eerie feeling over the whole thing. She felt better being with Larry and Barry and Debbie. Alone in her room, it would start to come over her what was going on.

  On Saturday night, she did take a break and turned on the TV. There was "Saturday Night Live." They had a parody of Gary Gilmore.

  The cast was putting makeup on an actor playing the convict and the director kept saying, "A little more light over here, a little more eye shadow." They were getting him ready to be shot for the camera. Very sarcastic. Kept putting on the makeup. She never thought television would be this weird. She had always thought "existential" was an odd word, but it now was so bleak and cold outside, just a little bit of eternal snow on the ground, and she felt as if no one had ever gone out of this motel with these Xerox machines, and the typewriters.

  Barry Farrell was studying Gary's old letters to Nicole. Reading one of them, he nearly groaned. It was too late in the day to question Gilmore about this, not too late, that is, to ask the question—God, they had asked him everything—but it was certainly too late to get an answer that would reveal anything. They should have prepared the ground over many weeks.

  "I was in the State Hospital in Oregon," Gary had written, "trying to beat an armed-robbery beef and this 13-year-old boy came 'cause he couldn't get along at home. He was really pretty, like a girl, but I never gave him much thought until it became apparent that he really liked me. I was 23 then. I'd be sitting down and he would come up and sit beside me and put his arm around me. It was just natural to him, a show of friendship. One time he came up in the locker room and asked if he could read this Playboy I had. I said sure, for a kiss. Man, he was dumbfounded! His eyes got big as silver dollars and his mouth dropped wide open. He said 'No!' and it was really pretty, and I fell in love on the spot. He thought it over then and decided he wanted to read that magazine pretty bad, cause he gave me,rather let me take, a very tender little kiss on the lips. I used to watch him down at the swimming pool. He was one of the most beautiful people I've ever seen, and I don't think I've ever seen a prettier butt. Anyhow, I used to kiss him now and then., and we got to be pretty good friends. I was just struck by his youth, beauty, and naivete. Then one of us was sent elsewhere."

  Barry valued it greatly, that kiss. Gilmore was confesing. It struck him as the most moral moment in the letters. Finally Gilmore was admitting to something that had been on his mind all along, something which had gone right through all his evasions with sex—all that transparent discomfort with sexual material. Yet here, in this little confession, it was lifted. He could say it. What a sweet kiss. A nice moment.

  Farrell didn't think it was a matter of homosexuality as such. He took it for granted that Gilmore, like the majority of men, Farrell knew, who lived their lives in prison, had been one sort or another of situational homosexual. The choices, after all, were homosexuality, onanism, or abstinence. Farrell thought almost nobody chose abstinence, and those that did were probably none the better. It was just that Gilmore had a skewed and miserable relation to sex. Like many another prisoner, his natural sexual fantasies must have been burned out long ago by masturbation. No woman could do it as well as one could do it oneself. So his confession wasn't to homosexuality.

  It was Gilmore admitting to Nicole how difficult, and pretty, and far-off, and kooky was sex for him.

  Farrell decided to break his own rules and insert the letter as part of the bona fide interview. A cheat. So be it. As Schiller had said, "Get down in the gutter with us sinners."

  Then he came across something else. From way back in December.

  It had been under his nose all the while:

  GILMORE All right. (pause) There's a book I would like, but I don't think you can get it in Provo. You might be able to get it in Salt Lake. It's called Show Me. A book of photographs of kids. You think you can get it? It's probably about a $15 book.

  INTERVIEWER Yeah, I think we can.

  GILMORE I tried to buy it in Provo. It was advertised years and years ago. It may be banned in places like Salt Lake

  INTERVIEWER What is it about?

  GILMORE About the photographs of children.

  INTERVIEWER Why would it be banned?

  GILMORE Because it's a sexual book. I read about it off and on for years and I got real curious. They banned it in some parts of Canada and the United States. But they got it in Salt Lake . . .

  INTERVIEWER This is an educational book?

  GILMORE Well, it's a high line, a real classic. It was made in Germany and all German children and they're really artistic, tasteful, tactful photographs. It's not a piece of smut, but I wanted to see it.

  Farrell passed it by and then came back. That little elucidative light one depended upon was flickeri
ng again. Yes. Could it be said that Gilmore's love for Nicole oft depended on how childlike she could seem? That elf with knee-length socks, so conveniently shorn—by Gilmore—of her pubic locks. Those hints in the letters of hanky panky with Rosebeth, the rumble with Pete Galovan. Barry nodded. You could about say it added up. There was nobody in of prison whom hardcore convicts despised more than child molesters. The very bottom of the pecking order. What if Gilmore, so soon as he was deprived of Nicole, so soon as he had to live a week without her, began to feel impulses that were wholly unacceptable? What his unendurable tension (of which he had given testimony to every psychiatrist who would listen) had had something to do with little urges? Nothing might have been more intolerable to Gilmore's idea of himself Why, the man would have done anything, even murder, before he'd commit that other kind of transgression. God, it would even account for the awful air of warped nobility he seemed to extract from his homicides. Barry felt the woe of late discovery. He could not say a word about this now. It was too insubstantial. In fact, it was sheer speculation. If Gilmore was willing to execute himself for such a vice, assuming it was his vice—beware of understanding the man too quickly! then let him at least die with the dignity of his choice. In fact, how much could a word like dignity conceal?

  On Saturday evening, near midnight, Father Meersman set up the Maximum kitchen as a chapel and said a Mass for Gary, using one of the portable metal serving tables as an altar. In order to be able to see everything, Gary sat up on one of the fixed kitchen tables with his feet on the bench. A guard who had once been an altar boy served Mass.

  Father Meersman laid out the portable altar stone, which in these circumstances, coming from his Mass kit, was a cloth, and then he laid on miniature altar linens, put out the corporal, the chalice, and the paten, the candles in their holders, set the crucifix, and gave a missalette to Gary so he could participate. Father Meersman wore a complete set of vestments, white alb, cincture, stole, maniple, and chasuble. Across from him, Gary was wearing a white shirt and pants.