A Ticket to the Circus (38 page)

I was to play the girl at the table with Stanford White, his date of the moment, and as soon as I got to the set, they hurried me into period costume and did up my long hair into a Gibson Girl do, and there I was, guzzling ginger ale champagne with Norman at the table while Donald O’Connor led the chorus girls in a song called “I Could Love a Thousand Girls.” It was a tricky scene, as Norman/Stanford gets shot and killed. He had been outfitted with a small blast pack taped to a metal plate that protected his head—underneath a wig that looked like his hair—and was attached to a tube that snaked down his neck, under his clothes, and ended under the table, where a special effects man was waiting to pump fake blood out the head wound and onto the floor. They could do only two takes, as they had only two wigs and suits of clothes, so it had to go perfectly. Norman was to stand, turn, and fall with his right side next to the floor so the tubing wouldn’t show. My job was to kneel beside him and scream bloody murder. The rehearsals went fine, and they packed Norman’s ears with wax and cotton so the sound from the blast wouldn’t damage his hearing.

Norman and me in the scene from
Ragtime.

“Action,” Milos called out, and the band started the song; the dancers began to dance. I took a sip of my ginger ale and laughed with Norman/Stanford, who was wearing a big bushy mustache, the only thing on him that looked at all like the real White. Thaw, played by Robert Joy, rushed up with a maniacal look on his face, shot the gun, the blasting cap went off, and Norman stood, turned, and fell perfectly. The only thing that went wrong is that when he fell, he whacked his head on the heavy silver champagne bucket next to the table and there was a real cut with real blood coming out of his forehead. I was screaming my heart out, looking at the real wound, and then Milos said, “Cut! That was perfect.” Norman didn’t move. I nudged him. “Norman? The scene is over. You can get up.” He remained perfectly still. I thought he had knocked himself out on the champagne bucket for real, and started shaking him. He resisted me, trying to remain motionless. Finally, Milos came over and yelled, “Norman! It’s okay! The scene is over.” Norman couldn’t hear him and thought I’d just been overacting. He’d been trying to remain dead. I was never so relieved to see someone open their eyes. We got him cleaned up and did a second take just in case, but the first take was the one they kept. Our honeymoon had started with a bang.

S
oon after publication of
The Executioner’s Song
, Norman wrote a script for a four-hour NBC miniseries that was based on the book. I had left the modeling agency after Wilhelmina had tragically died of lung cancer in 1980. I’d then signed up with William Morris, thinking I needed a real acting agency, especially after my spectacular screaming performance in
Ragtime.
Who knew where that might lead? I was studying acting at Herbert Berghof Studio in the Village, and while my agent had sent me on several auditions, I hadn’t gotten many parts, just a couple of day player bits on soap operas—parts called “under fours” because they were under four lines of dialogue.
The Executioner’s Song
was a perfect opportunity for me to continue my acting career. The only problem was that there was only one small part that might even be feasible for me in the movie, the role of a girl named Lu-Ann who worked in a factory and had gone out on a date with Gary Gilmore when he’d first gotten out of prison. She was not a particularly attractive girl. She was a bit sour with a no-nonsense approach to life, but they have a date, Gary gets drunk on beer and tries to put the make on her, she lectures him, like a schoolmarm, on having to work for what he gets, and he scares her.

Larry Schiller, who was directing the film, said I was too glamorous for the part; he wouldn’t even let me read for it. But I
had
to be in the movie, I just had to! Like Lucy Ricardo, I was going to weasel myself into the movie or bust. If Larry thought I was too beautiful, then I would show him. I have never, at least not while compos mentis, gone out in public without my makeup on, but on this day I not only didn’t put on makeup, I greased my face with cream to make my complexion shiny and ugly, and I combed my hair in the style that used to be beloved by poor Arkansas girls in the fifties. The top half of it was piled in a kind of biscuit thing held up by bobby pins, and the bottom hung down long, with a white part separating the two halves. The girls who wore it usually had bangs, too, and little spit curls in front of their ears, but I didn’t go that far. I cut off a pair of jeans and put on a baggy
blouse with elastic around the neck, and flip-flops. I didn’t even recognize myself.

Then I went up to the Helmsley Palace on Madison Avenue, where Larry was staying. The men at the desk immediately came out to greet me, and I asked for Larry Schiller. They asked my name, and I said Lucille McGillicuddy. I said I was an actress, there for an audition. They stepped over to the side and had a little confab, while I looked them and the place over, like it was the first time I’d ever seen a big hotel, or anybody wearing a necktie, for that matter. Finally, they must have decided to let Larry deal with it rather than risk a scene, so they let me into the elevator and I rode up to the fifth floor and knocked on his door. He opened it and looked me full in the face for an entire minute or more, uncomprehendingly, until I started laughing. Then it dawned on him who I was, and he grinned that possum grin of his and said, “You have the part.”

We started filming in Utah in the fall of 1981, with Tommy Lee Jones playing Gary Gilmore and Rosanna Arquette playing his girlfriend, Nicole. Tommy Lee would go on to win an Emmy for this performance, but he played Gary as an exuberant boy who just got let out of detention rather than as the depressed, psychotic man I think Gary actually was. Convicts speak of flattening time in jail, and if you flatten enough time, you, yourself, become flat, but it was Tommy Lee’s choice to make him manic, and it worked for the film in the end.

In our scene, we start in the bar and then go for a drive in my car. We were filming in November, although it was supposed to be summer, and it was freezing that night. I was dressed in a short-sleeved thin top, and Tommy Lee was wearing a T-shirt with the sleeves cut out. They had done my hair up in a beehive and used blue eye shadow and red lipstick. I looked better than I had at the Helmsley Palace, but not by much. In the bar scene, Tommy Lee was drinking real beer, and by the time we had moved to the car, he was feeling pretty relaxed. He had just gotten married, and his wife, Kim, was there that night. I remember her standing on the sidewalk and waving as we drove by, and him saying, “Look at her in those little bootsies. Isn’t she a cutie?” She was indeed a cutie, and I was happy he was so in love. It was so cold that both of us were shivering in our summer outfits, and between takes we grabbed our coats from the backseat and huddled under them for
warmth. We had to suck on ice cubes so our breath wouldn’t fog in the air, which only made us colder. At some point, someone brought us cold Chinese food, which we ate for dinner, and by the end of the night, Tommy Lee had gone through I don’t know how many cans of beer. The last take, where he gets angry and throws the beer can out the window, was verging on being really scary. But we had it.

W
hen word first got out that Norman was writing a book about Gary Gilmore, he started getting letters from prisoners. A lot of them. Most were on the order of “Why are you wasting your time on that bum Gilmore when my story is so much better?” (P.S. They all were innocent.) One letter he got was different. The guy said that he knew Gilmore, and if Norman wanted to know what being in prison was really like, he was the one to tell him. It was signed Jack Henry Abbott, and Norman showed it to me and said it was surprisingly well written. I never intruded into Norman’s writing or research unless he asked me to read something, but I hated the whole idea of him getting so involved in the lives of prisoners. I felt like all of them were con men. Still, Norman and Jack started a correspondence, and Norman found Jack’s letters to be most helpful for
The Executioner’s Song.

Over time, more and more letters came from Jack, one or more nearly every day. Jack described how life in prison worked, the brutality, the relationships with the guards, how you had to demand respect, how you were either a stand-up guy or a punk. The lowest level of person in prison was the snitch. Most snitches didn’t live long. In due course, Norman told Jack he thought the correspondence could make an interesting book. Norman would write a preface for it. The book was called
In the Belly of the Beast
, and others thought it was worthy of publication as well.

Jason Epstein, Norman’s editor, brought it to Random House, where Erroll McDonald, another editor there, took it on as a project. The novelist Jerzy Kosinski was also interested in Jack and had corresponded with him for years. Bob Silvers, the editor and one of the founders of
The New York Review of Books
, Lionel Abel, the essayist, and other major players in the publishing world also championed Jack’s writing. They compared him to Jean Genet, a French convict who turned his life around and became a successful novelist and playwright. Genet had been helped by Jean Cocteau, Jean-Paul Sartre, Pablo Picasso, and other prominent artists in France. In much the same
spirit, Jack’s admirers wrote to the Utah parole board saying they thought Jack was a real talent who could have a career as a writer. They all would help him.

Jack was due for a regular parole hearing, but nobody seriously thought he was going to be let out. He was a career criminal whose Chinese mother had been a prostitute and his father a G.I. who had abandoned them. He was a troublesome boy and went to reform school when he was about twelve; his mother committed suicide somewhere along the line, and he became what they called a state-raised child. After reform school, he went to prison in 1963, when he was nineteen, for breaking into a shoe store and stealing checks, which he then wrote out to himself. Three years into that sentence, he killed an inmate in a knife fight and was given an additional sentence of three to twenty years.

In 1971 he escaped from a Utah prison and held up a bank in Denver, but he was caught the next month and got another sentence of nineteen years. He had a record of psychiatric testing that pronounced him paranoid with the potential for sudden violence. At one trial, he leaped out of the witness box and grabbed a juror’s throat. In another instance, he stabbed a doctor in the nose with a sharpened ballpoint pen. The doctor had been sewing up the arm of a prisoner whom Jack had just knifed. At the time he was writing to Norman, he was thirty-six and had spent all but nine months of the past twenty-two years behind bars, fifteen of those in solitary confinement.

I learned these facts much later from an article in
The New York Times
by M. A. Farber, but at the time Norman didn’t confide anything at all about Jack or his past to me, and I’m not sure exactly how much he knew. I was opposed to any help Norman was proposing to give Jack, and any discussion always ended in a fight. I hadn’t read Jack’s letters, and I certainly didn’t know Norman had offered Jack a job as his research assistant, or just how committed he was to supporting him, but when we found out Jack was getting out of prison, neither of us was really expecting it. In fact, I didn’t know about it until one night when I was cooking dinner. Norman put on his trench coat and told me from the open doorway that he was going to the airport to pick up Jack.

“I’ve invited him for dinner, honey. It’s his first night out of jail, and I think he should have a good home-cooked meal, but don’t worry,
you won’t have to see him again.” I was practically speechless. But not quite.

“What are you going to do with him? Are you supposed to take care of him and babysit him? He’s not going to know anybody, and who knows what he’ll do? I’m not having him over here around the kids, that’s for sure. Didn’t you learn anything from writing about Gary Gilmore? Somebody who has been in prison his whole life can’t just change and be a normal person overnight. I wish you had talked to me about this.”

“Then we would have argued for weeks instead of a few minutes. I think he can make it. He’s talented. His book is going to do well, I know. He’ll have plenty of people to help him. Frankly, I was as surprised as you were when they told me he was getting out this early. I thought the chances of him getting parole were slim. I don’t know what happened. But now I’ve got to go get him. So, please. Just let him come tonight, and then you will never have to see him again. I promise. Please?”

I was on the landing watching as Jack climbed the three flights of stairs to our apartment. I saw the top of his head first, the hair neatly parted down the middle. He was wearing a dark blue pin-striped suit with a vest, a white shirt, and red tie, and little round glasses. It was a color Xerox of what Norman wore all the time. He came up to the door, smiled, and stuck out his hand. “I’m Jack,” he said. He was about as tall as I am, slim, neat, and nervous. I couldn’t tell what his ethnicity was. He had a slightly exotic look, with tan skin, and was much more attractive than I had anticipated. I wasn’t afraid of him at all. In fact, there was something rather moving about him, dressed up in his Norman suit with those little glasses.