Audition (83 page)

Blake had been desperately trying to get on television ever since, not to plead his innocence but to talk to his little daughter, Rosie, whom he hadn’t seen in a year. Two sets of his defense lawyers had quit his case, fearing that he might incriminate himself if he spoke in public. His third attorney also strenuously objected but had not resigned. The last stumbling block was the Los Angeles County Jail, whose sheriff, Leroy Baca, had steadfastly refused to let any journalist, with or without the lawyers’ approval, do an interview from the jail. But I had a reason to believe I could make him change his mind. (By the way, this was the same Sheriff Baca who was in charge of Paris Hilton when she was sent to jail in 2007.) I called him and asked if I could meet with him the next time I was in Los Angeles. We did, and the sheriff could not have been nicer, but said, “I can’t give you permission. It’s against regulations.” And here is where I played my trump card.

I’d interviewed prisoners there before, I pointed out. “Who?” he asked, startled. “When?” “In 1996. The Menendez brothers,” I replied. (You’ll read about them later.) He hemmed and hawed and finally agreed to check it out. He had trouble believing I was right, but I was. And he relented. “There
is
a precedent,” Sheriff Baca told me. “In that case, you can do it.” Even though I was trying so hard to get his permission, I was still surprised when he gave it.

So the scene was set for the sensational, touching, hilarious, wild, peculiar interview with Blake. He cried at times, was hostile at others, talked directly to his two-year-old daughter, and, in general, acted as if he were still acting.

Blake was convinced he’d be convicted and never see his daughter again. When I asked him what he wanted to say to Rosie, his eyes brimmed with tears. “Life is a spectacular gift, Rosie,” he said directly to the camera. “Don’t ever sell it short. And I’ll always be there with you. I’ll never, ever leave you.” And then this wasted man started to sing to her. “‘You’re the end of the rainbow,’” he sang, tears spilling down his cheeks. “‘My pot of gold. You’re Daddy’s little girl to have and hold.’” On and on he went. It was as pathetic as it was unbelievable.

When I asked him, “What if you are found guilty?” he angrily shouted these lines at me: “What do I care? How do you kill a dead man? What are they going to do to me that they haven’t done already? They took away my entire past. They took away my entire future. What’s left for them to take? They’re going to take my testicles and make earrings out of them?”

You can’t top that.

After the interview aired, the judge granted him bail and released him. Blake looked so pale and thin the judge might have been afraid he would die in jail. Blake thought our interview was the reason he was released. He still says so.

In March 2005, Blake was found not guilty of murdering his wife. There was no physical evidence linking him to the murder and the drug habits and contradictory statements of the retired stuntmen discredited their testimony. Our interview may also have played a small role in his acquittal; parts of it were played at the trial. At the press conference afterward Blake publicly thanked me.

As for his little daughter, Rosie, she has been adopted by Delinah Blake Hurwitz, Blake’s older daughter from his first marriage, a professor of developmental psychology. I met her and she was lovely. Blake did something right.

Of all the convicted murderers I interviewed, I was closest to Jean Harris. Too close, in fact, but I’ll get to that. She was the most improbable murderer. Harris had been the prim and proper headmistress of an elite school for girls, the Madeira School, in McLean, Virginia. Her victim was her longtime and unfaithful lover, Herman Tarnower, a well-known cardiologist and author of the best-selling book
The Scarsdale Diet.
Harris was fifty-six when she shot Tarnower. He was sixty-nine. Hardly the age, one would think, for a crime of passion, but that’s what it was.

Harris, who had been “seeing” Tarnower, as she would put it, for fourteen years, began to come apart on a Saturday morning in March 1980. An insomniac, she hadn’t slept a wink. The day before she had expelled four popular students for smoking pot, the girls’ furious parents were at the school berating her, and there was a student protest going on in support of the “Madeira Four” outside her window. She had also run out of the antidepressants Tarnower had been supplying her with for ten years, but when she phoned him for a new shipment, he added more stress. At one point in their relationship he had promised to marry her and then backed off. She knew that the lifelong bachelor was having an affair with his young assistant, but Tarnower rubbed salt in the wound when he now told Harris that she would not be seated on his right at an upcoming tribute to him nor, indeed, would she even be seated at his table.

It was all too much for the already fragile Harris, and after writing Tarnower a furious letter about the young assistant, she said she prepared to kill herself. But she wanted to have one last conversation with Tarnower before she died. And the fatal sequence began.

On March 10 Harris put a loaded gun in her purse, bought a bouquet of flowers, and drove five hours from Virginia to Tarnower’s house outside New York. It was 10:00 p.m. and raining when she arrived. He was in bed, told her he didn’t want to talk, and to make matters worse, he turned his back on her. Then she saw a negligee and a pair of slippers in the bathroom and lost it completely. What happened next became the central point of the trial. The defense claimed Harris held the gun to her head, Tarnower intervened, and in the ensuing struggle the gun accidentally went off, fatally wounding the cardiologist. The prosecution claimed she had shot the doctor on purpose. Either way, Tarnower lay dying on the floor from four bullet wounds. Harris was arrested, convicted of second-degree murder, and sentenced to fifteen years to life.

This bare-bones recital of the facts in no way conveys how sensational this case was at the time, and the ripples it caused for years to come. Feminist groups cast Harris as the victim of an uncaring man who threw her over for a younger woman. In their eyes she shouldn’t have been convicted of anything when clearly, Tarnower had been the SOB. Her imprisonment raised such passion that an ad hoc group formed called the Jean Harris Defense Committee, which orchestrated a letter-writing and signature-gathering campaign to petition Governor Mario Cuomo to grant Harris clemency. Every year, as regular as clockwork, he refused.

I had written many letters to Mrs. Harris and her lawyer asking for an interview so that she could tell her side of the story. Nearly two years after her conviction she finally consented to sit down with me at the Bedford Hills Correctional Facility, a maximum-security prison for women in New York.

I’ll never forget my interview with Harris, the first she’d given. When I met her in prison, she was wearing the same good-little-girl leather hair band she’d always worn, a white shirt under a beige cable-knit sweater, and still looked very much the schoolmistress. Though she had lost an appeal for a new trial just two days before, she was calm and dry-eyed when she sat down with me. Until I asked her about Tarnower.

“Do you still love him?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said.

“Do you think about him?” I asked.

And then she crumpled and completely broke down. “Don’t. Don’t,” she sobbed, pushing me away with her hands.

“I won’t. I won’t,” I quickly responded, not wanting to cause her any more pain. “Let’s talk about your life here a little bit, all right?”

But Jean Harris wanted to talk about Tarnower.

“I think about him constantly,” she said through her sobs. “It’s one of the reasons I don’t care if I get out. I can’t imagine what it would be like out there, without him. Isn’t that stupid!?”

She recovered and we went on with the interview, but her wrenching outburst stayed with me for a long time. Here was a woman who was going to spend at least the next thirteen years in prison and didn’t care about getting out because “he” was not going to be there. I had rarely witnessed that kind of love and was very moved by it.

Harris put her life to good use in prison. In a subsequent interview she and I did at Bedford Hills, she showed me a child-care center she’d helped set up where the inmates could read stories or play games with their children when they came to see them. Along with a visiting nun, she taught a class in prison parenting for pregnant inmates and young mothers so they could cope better on the “outside.” With the nun, she also started the Children of Bedford Foundation to give better educational opportunities to the children of prisoners. Some of those children went to college and even on to law school.

Harris suffered a heart attack in jail, and the Jean Harris Defense Committee intensified its efforts to secure her pardon. I signed every petition that came my way and joined the letter-writing campaign to Governor Cuomo, who still refused to release her.

Was I the impartial journalist? Yes, in terms of my interviews with Harris, but on my own time definitely not. I cared about her and thought her fifteen-year prison sentence was an injustice. ABC, however, and rightly so, did not support my personal involvement in the pardon effort, and soon after a newspaper columnist wrote about my participation, ABC News told me that I was no longer permitted to report on the case. I continued to visit Harris from time to time, but I was silenced professionally for the last nine long years of her incarceration, during which she had another heart attack.

It was not until December 1992, when Harris was in the hospital about to undergo quadruple bypass heart surgery, that Governor Cuomo finally pardoned her, citing her health. She was sixty-nine years old by then, and had spent twelve years in prison. Finally she was a free woman, and so was I to talk on camera with her. Our last interview was in March 1993, three months after her heart surgery and her release from prison.

Harris looked tired but had lost none of her spunk. Her answer to my question about what she had found hardest to adjust to in prison was not the strip searches she had been subjected to every time she had a visitor but rather “the lack of logic.” For example, her visitors’ names had to be submitted in advance and checked off a list by a guard before they could visit her. But some visitors were turned away or had to wait a very long time because the guard couldn’t find their names on the list. “I kept saying to them, ‘Please let me have the list and I’ll arrange it alphabetically for you,’” she said. “And the guard said to me, ‘It won’t do any good because they don’t come alphabetically.’”

When I asked her whether she felt the years in prison had been wasted, she answered, “Not for a minute.” She said she was much stronger than when she’d entered prison. “I didn’t have a very strong will to live when I went in,” she said, “but I have a very strong will to live now.”

What impressed me the most was the contrast between this interview and our first one, when she’d broken down at the mention of Tarnower’s name and said she thought about him all this time.

“Yes, I did, but I don’t anymore. That was twelve years ago, and it’s over and it was very painful. What I think about now is all the things that ought to be done to improve the lives of children in this country, and that consumes me.”

Harris, whose story was portrayed in several books and movies (the most recent was the 2006 HBO film
Mrs. Harris
, starring Annette Bening and Ben Kingsley), is in her eighties now and lives in an assisted living home in Connecticut. She is close to her two sons by a former marriage, pre-Tarnower, and has friends. She still raises funds for the Children of Bedford Foundation. I send a contribution. She sent me a little note in the spring of 2007, asking warmly: “When are you going to stop working? And so hard? I’m pretty rickety—wish I had your energy.” I hope that her life is peaceful. I think she has a right to that.

Mark David Chapman was not the most famous murderer I interviewed, but he had certainly murdered the most famous person—John Lennon. I had tried for over a decade to get an interview with him, writing him a letter on each anniversary of Lennon’s death. It took twelve years for Chapman to say yes and another few months for the warden, after determining that Chapman was now sane enough, to also agree. I finally met with Chapman in 1992 at Attica Correctional Facility in upstate New York.

What made Chapman’s interview worth such a long-term effort was that no one had ever heard in his own words why he killed Lennon. There had been no trial and so no testimony because Chapman had instructed his lawyer to withdraw his insanity plea and instead plead guilty. The court had sentenced him to twenty years to life and, for his own protection, he was being held in an isolated part of the prison. This first television interview with him in 1992, along with the simultaneous publication of a book about him, would break his silence.

I remember Chapman, somber, wearing glasses, shuffling toward me in leg irons, his hands cuffed, wearing the bright orange prison jumpsuit I had become very familiar with, and flanked by two burly prison guards. (Prison guards always seem to be burly.) When he reached the small, bare room the authorities always seemed to assign me and my crew in every prison, he seemed relieved, as would every murderer I interviewed, to sit down and have his cuffs and shackles removed. Like all the others he was eager to talk. But while Chapman was cogent, very quiet, and seemed perfectly sane, what he said was not.

His hatred of Lennon had begun, he told me, when he chanced upon a book about the former Beatle in a library and learned that Lennon was living in an elegant landmark building in New York. “I got very, very angry,” he told me. “I used to love the Beatles. Their idealism meant a lot to me and I saw that, at the time, as a sellout.” Chapman, who had been abused as a child, suffered from depression, and had once attempted suicide, bought a gun and a ticket to New York from Hawaii, determined to kill Lennon. “Why?” I asked him. His reply: “John Lennon fell into a very deep hole, a hole so deep inside me that I thought by killing him I would acquire his fame.”