The Journalist and the Murderer (4 page)

Not implausibly, McGinniss interpreted “3–5 capsules” to mean three to five capsules a
day
, which is an overdose, and he went on to propose in
Fatal Vision
that MacDonald killed his wife and daughters in a fit of rage—a rage against the female sex that he had been repressing since early childhood and that the drug (in combination with stress,
fatigue, and Colette MacDonald’s threatening “new insights into personality structure and behavioral patterns,” picked up at the psychology course she was taking and had just come home from) finally permitted him to vent. McGinniss based his theory of the crime on an uncritical reading of three moral tracts—Otto Kernberg’s
Borderline Conditions and Pathological Narcissism
, Christopher Lasch’s
The Culture of Narcissism
, and Hervey Cleckley’s
The Mask of Sanity
—in which the terms “psychopath” and “pathological narcissist” are confidently offered as the answer to the problem of evil (as if labelling were ever anything more than the restatement of a problem). In the MacDonald-McGinniss trial, to lend credence to McGinniss’s labelling of MacDonald as a pathological narcissist, Kornstein invited Kernberg himself to appear as an expert witness and apply to MacDonald the adjectives he applies to the patients in his book—“grandiose,” “cold,” “shallow,” “ruthless,” “exploitative,” “parasitic,” “haughty,” “envious,” “self-centered,” “lacking in emotional depth,” “deficient in genuine feelings of sadness”—who suffer from the malady he has invented. Kernberg prudently declined, and suggested a colleague of his, Michael Stone, for the role of moralist-in-shrink’s-clothing, which Stone accepted and played to the hilt.

Another arresting find of McGinniss’s at the MacDonald apartment was a letter from Joseph Wambaugh, dated March 28, 1975, spelling out the conditions under which he would consider writing a book about MacDonald. The letter’s tone is more like that of the charmless writing in small print on a baggage-claim check than like the communication of an author to a prospective subject. As he read, McGinniss must have marvelled at, and possibly envied, Wambaugh’s
je m’en foutisme
. But then Wambaugh
was an ex-cop (he was once a detective on the Los Angeles police force), and, maybe even more to the point, he was one of America’s most successful popular writers, who apparently could afford to be blunt (as McGinniss, strapped for cash, apparently could not). “You should understand that I would not think of writing
your
story,” Wambaugh wrote, and he went on:

McGinniss quotes this letter in
Fatal Vision
, and also quotes from a note that MacDonald sent to Segal about the letter: “What do you think? He sounds awfully arrogant to me, but it will be an obvious best-seller if he writes the book.” McGinniss goes on, “Wambaugh, of course, had not written the book.… Now I was writing it.” He adds, assuming some of Wambaugh’s toughness, “As would have been the case with Wambaugh, MacDonald
had absolutely no editorial prerogative. And the ‘ugly possibility’ to which Wambaugh referred had now become a reality.”

But toward MacDonald himself McGinniss continued to behave with his customary ingratiation. For almost four years—during which he corresponded with MacDonald, spoke with him on the telephone, received his tapes, and, on two occasions, visited him—he successfully hid the fact that in the book under preparation he was portraying MacDonald as a psychopathic killer. In 1981, writing to his editor at Dell, Morgan Entrekan, about the book’s narrative strategy, he expressed his concern lest its protagonist seem “too loathsome too soon,” and proposed that the worst revelations about his character be “postponed until the end, when we draw closer and closer to him, seeing the layers of the mask melt away and gazing, at least obliquely, at the essence of the horror which lurks beneath.” He added—referring to his uneasy relations with the actual MacDonald—“The ice is getting thinner, and I’m still a long way from shore.” But he need not have worried; MacDonald never twigged to the ruse. Like the dupe in the Milgram deception, the naïve subject of a book becomes so caught up in the enterprise and so emotionally invested in it that he simply cannot conceive of it in any terms other than those the writer has set for it. As the Milgram subject imagined he was “helping” someone to learn, so MacDonald imagined he was “helping” McGinniss write a book exonerating him of the crime, and presenting him as a kind of kitsch hero (“loving father and husband,” “dedicated physician,” “overachiever”). When, instead, McGinniss wrote a book charging him with the crime, and presenting him as a kitsch villain (“publicity-seeker,” “womanizer,” “latent homosexual”), MacDonald
was stunned. His dehoaxing took place in a particularly dramatic and cruel manner. McGinniss had steadfastly refused to let him see galleys or an advance copy of the book. In a letter of February 16, 1983, he had written sternly, “I understand your impatience, and it is to that that I will attribute the unpleasantness of your tone.… At no time was there ever any understanding that you would be given an advance look at the book six months prior to publication. As Joe Wambaugh told you in 1975, with him you would not even see a copy before it was published. Same with me. Same with any principled and responsible author.” MacDonald had accepted the rebuke, and had enthusiastically lent himself to the pre-publication publicity campaign for the book. His assignment was an appearance on the television show “60 Minutes,” and it was during the taping of the show in prison that the fact of McGinniss’s duplicity was brought home to him. As Mike Wallace—who had received an advance copy of
Fatal Vision
without difficulty or a lecture—read out loud to MacDonald passages in which he was portrayed as a psychopathic killer, the camera recorded his look of shock and utter discomposure.

Milgram, in the chapter on methodology in
Obedience to Authority
, explains that he did not use Yale undergraduates as subjects because of the risk that word of the experiment might get out among the student population. But there is reason to think—extrapolating from the writer-subject experiment—that even subjects who had heard of the Milgram experiment would have fallen into its trap after only a slight alteration of its character. MacDonald, after all, had heard of people who were displeased with what was written about them (sometimes to the point of suing the writer), and still he behaved as if there were no
possibility that his “own” book could be anything but flattering and gratifying. Perhaps even more striking is MacDonald’s continuing and, under the circumstances, crazy trust in the good intentions of journalists. To this day, after all that has happened to him, he continues to give interviews to journalists, continues to correspond with them, continues to send them material (through an out-of-prison information office run by a woman named Gail Boyce), and does everything he can to be helpful to them, just as he did with McGinniss. Something seems to happen to people when they meet a journalist, and what happens is exactly the opposite of what one would expect. One would think that extreme wariness and caution would be the order of the day, but in fact childish trust and impetuosity are far more common. The journalistic encounter seems to have the same regressive effect on a subject as the psychoanalytic encounter. The subject becomes a kind of child of the writer, regarding him as a permissive, all-accepting, all-forgiving mother, and expecting that the book will be written by her. Of course, the book is written by the strict, all-noticing, unforgiving father. During our conversation in Williamstown, McGinniss quoted the following passage from an essay by Thomas Mann, which he had come upon in a book by another of his literary heroes, Joseph Campbell:

“This isn’t something that you can argue before a jury of people who don’t read books,” McGinniss said to me, “but it seems to me to get right to the heart of it.” He told me that he had “compartmentalized” his conflicting attitudes toward MacDonald. “The first letter I got from the guy, written eighteen hours after his conviction, brought tears to my eyes. I felt genuine sorrow. He wrote, ‘All I want to know is that you’re still my friend and you believe in me.’ So what’s the appropriate response? To send back a paragraph that says, ‘I reserve the right to my own opinions, and I remind you that I’m the author and you are the subject, and we have to keep things on that level’? Or do I write back and say, ‘You sound terrible, prison must be awful, I really feel bad for you’? All of which was an expression of genuine feeling at that time on my part. Not a lie. But I was compartmentalizing. I was suspending my critical faculty long enough to allow me to write that letter.”

The letter in question was written on September 11, 1979, twelve days after MacDonald’s first letter to McGinniss. It read, in part:

On September 28, 1979, McGinniss wrote again: