Before the 1940’s, if one woman in an audience stood up and shrieked at the top of her lungs throughout an entire show she’d have been carted off to an asylum. By the mid-forties, however, entire audiences behaved like that, screaming, tearing at their clothes and hair, leaving their seats to board the stage. On December 30th, 1942, while Frank Sinatra sang at the Paramount Theater in New York, the behavior of the audience changed, and a part of our relationship to well-known people changed forever. Psychiatrists and psychologists of the day struggled to explain the phenomenon. They recalled medieval dance crazes, spoke of “mass frustrated love” and “mass hypnosis.” The media age did bring a type of mass hypnosis into American life. It affects all of us to some degree, and some of us to a great degree.
Before the advent of mass-media, a young girl might have admired a performer from afar, and it would have been acceptable to have a passing crush. It would not have been acceptable if she pursued the performer to his home, or if she had to be restrained by police. It would not have been acceptable to skip school in order to wait for hours outside a hotel and then try to tear pieces of clothing from the passing star.
Yet that unhealthy behavior became “normal” in the Sinatra days. In fact, audience behavior that surprised everyone in 1942 was expected two years later when Sinatra appeared again at the Paramount Theater. This time, the 30,000 screaming, bobby-soxed fans were joined by a troop of reporters. The media were learning to manipulate this new behavior to their advantage. Having predicted a commotion, 450 police officers were assigned to that one theater, and it appeared that society had learned to deal with this phenomenon. It had not.
During the engagement, an 18-year old named Alexander Ivanovich Dorogokupetz stood up in the theater and threw an egg that hit Sinatra in the face. The show stopped, and for a moment, a brief moment, Sinatra was not the star. Now it was Dorogokupetz mobbed by audience members and Dorogokupetz who had to be escorted out by police. Society had not learned to deal with this, and still hasn’t. Dorogokupetz told police: “I vowed to put an end to this monotony of two years of consecutive swooning. It felt good.” Saddled with the least American of names, he had tried to make one for himself in the most American way, and but for his choice of a weapon, he would probably be as famous today as Frank Sinatra.
Elements in society were pioneering the skills of manipulating emotion and behavior in ways that had never been possible before: electronic ways. The media were institutionalizing idolatry. Around that time, the world met a teenager named Elizabeth Taylor, who began an excursion through public life that defines the celebrity idol as we know it today. A lesser-known teenager of the forties named Ruth Steinhagen would define the anti-idol as we know it today.
Ruth particularly liked a ballplayer named Eddie Waitkus. He was more exclusively hers than Frank Sinatra, who belonged to everyone. Even though they’d never met, Ruth devoted her life to Eddie. He was of Lithuanian descent, so she tried to learn that language. He was number 36 on the Chicago Cubs, so she became obsessed with that number, buying every record she could find that was produced in 1936. She collected press clippings about Eddie, slept with his picture under her pillow, attended every game she could, and sent him letter after letter, even though he never responded. At dinner each evening, Ruth arranged the chairs so that there was an empty one facing hers. She told her sister, “Eddie is in that chair.”
Many of Ruth’s friends had crushes on baseball players, and while her parents were glad at first thatshe too had an idol, they became concerned about her behavior. They took her to two psychiatrists, and her mother was glad to hear them report, that nothing was wrong with her—except that she should forget about Waitkus (which is a little like saying nothing was wrong with John Hinckley except that he should forget about Jodie Foster). Of course, Ruth did not forget about Waitkus, even for a moment, and when he was traded to the Philadelphia Phillies, she stated that she could not live if he moved away from Chicago.
She began to discuss suicide with one of her girlfriends and then set out to buy a gun. She wanted a pistol, but because a permit was required, she went to a pawnshop and bought a rifle instead.
In the first week of June 1949, Ruth had decided on something better than suicide. She told her friend Joyce to “watch for the fireworks on Tuesday,” the day she checked into the Edgewater Beach Hotel in Chicago, knowing from the Phillies’ schedule that Eddie would be staying there. She brought along a suitcase filled with Eddie memorabilia, including the ticket stubs from fifty games she’d attended. She also brought the rifle.
In her room, Ruth wrote a letter to her parents (“I hope you understand things. I love you. Things will work out for the best”) but crumpled it up and threw it in the trash. She then wrote a note to Eddie:
Mr. Waitkus, we’re not acquainted, but I have something of importance to speak to you about. I think it would be to your advantage to let me explain it to you. As I’m leaving the hotel the day after tomorrow, I’d appreciate it greatly if you could see me as soon as possible. My name is Ruth Anne Burns, and I’m in room 1297-A. I realize this is a little out of the ordinary, but as I said, it’s rather important. Please come soon. I won’t take up much of your time. I promise.
Ruth tipped a bellman three dollars to deliver the note. On reading it, Eddie thought she was probably just another “Baseball Annie” (what we’d today call a groupie), and he agreed to visit her. Ruth put a knife in her skirt pocket, intending to stab Eddie in the heart as he entered her room, but he hurried past her, sat down in a chair, and asked, “So what’s all this about?”
“Wait a minute. I have a surprise for you,” Ruth said, and then went to the closet and took out the rifle. “For two years, you have been bothering me, and now you are going to die.” Ruth fired one shot into Eddie’s chest. It punctured a lung and lodged just under his heart. (Waitkus survived and even returned to professional sports. I found an old baseball card of his. Under the heading “My Greatest Thrill in Baseball,” it reads, “In 1949, I was shot by a deranged girl.”)
The things Ruth said and did after the shooting were extraordinary in 1949, but no longer. She explained to police:
I liked him a great deal and knew I could never have him, and if I couldn’t have him neither could anybody else. I’ve always wanted to be in the limelight. I wanted attention and publicity for once. My dreams have come true.
Ruth was eloquently expressing a sentiment all too familiar to modern-day Americans. In describing the aftermath of the shooting, she said:
Nobody came out of their rooms. You would think they would all come rushing out. I got mad. I kept telling them I shot Eddie Waitkus, but they didn’t know who Eddie Waitkus was. After that, the police came, but I was burning because nobody was coming out of those other rooms. Nobody seemed to want me much. I could’ve walked right out of that place and nobody would have come after me.
At nineteen years old, Ruth felt it was better to be wanted by the police than not to be wanted at all. About twenty years later, a young woman named Valerie Solanas apparently felt the same way. An aspiring actress and writer, Solanas carried a gun into the headquarters of Andy Warhol and shot the famous artist. Soon after, Solanas walked up to a cop in Times Square and said, “The police are looking for me.” She added proudly, “They want me.” (It was Andy Warhol who gave us the quote that is itself an icon of the media age: “In the future, everybody will be famous for 15 minutes.” Ironically, Valerie Solanas got her 15 minutes at Warhol’s expense. She got another 90 minutes last year, when an entire film was made about her life.)
The Solanas attack occurred in 1968, and we were already jaded, but back when Ruth Steinhagen shot Eddie Waitkus, this kind of thing was nothing short of remarkable. When Ruth told her mother that she intended to get a gun and shoot Eddie Waitkus, her mother replied, “You can’t do that. Women don’t do those things.” Mrs. Steinhagen would be proved wrong by Ruth, and by Valerie Solanas, and more recently by Squeaky Fromme and Sara Jane Moore (both of who
m attempted to kill President Gerald Ford).
Due to Ruth’s choice of target, hers was not a shot heard round the world, though it did make her the first in a long line of media-age public-figure stalkers and attackers, some famous, many others not famous.
Experts decided Ruth was insane, and she was committed to a mental facility. Three years later, experts decided she had regained her sanity, and she was freed. Still alive today, Ruth Steinhagen is the senior member of a uniquely American minority. It’s not that other nations haven’t had their share of assassination, but killings rooted in some idealistic or political expediency are a far cry from shooting a stranger just to get “attention and publicity for once.”
There is also the uniquely American choice of targets. In the thirties and forties, baseball players and statesmen were the most prominent and adored idols. By the time Joe DiMaggio married Marilyn Monroe, the torch of idolatry had been passed from sports to entertainment. Twenty-six years later, an actor became president, and a media addict (John Hinckley) shot him, claiming an obsession with a film actress (Jodie Foster). After a long courtship, the marriage between violence and entertainment was consummated.
Idolizing heroes and falling for their seductive appeal is normal in America, but what is a mild drug to most is a poison for some people. To learn more about that poison, I sought a meeting with an unlikely expert in the field, Robert Bardo, the man who killed Rebecca Schaeffer.
To visit him I had to pass through two metal detectors and follow a prison escort down a series of long green corridors, each ending at a locked steel gate that, after careful scrutiny, a guard would let us through. Finally I was shown into a small concrete cell with two benches anchored to the floor. My escort said he’d be back soon, then closed and locked the cell door. Even with the certainty that one will be let out, being locked in a prison cell is like being locked in a prison cell; it feels awful.
Waiting for Bardo, I thought of Robert Ressler, the FBI agent who’d spent much of his career at the Behavioral Sciences Unit studying and interviewing America’s most prolific killers. Sitting in the cell reminded me of Ressler’s final prison meeting with Edmund Kemper, a man who’d brutally killed ten people, several of whom he had decapitated. Kemper was literally a giant, six foot nine inches tall and more than three hundred pounds. At the end of a four-hour interview, Ressler pressed the call button for the guard to come and get him out. Some time went by, but no guard. About 15 minutes later, he pressed the button again, and then again. Still no guard. Kemper must have intuitively detected Ressler’s concern, because on the tape of their interview he can be heard to say, “Relax, they’re changing shifts, feeding the guys in the secure areas. Might be fifteen, twenty minutes before they come and get you.”
After a thoughtful pause, Kemper added, “If I went apeshit in here, you’d be in a lot of trouble. I could screw your head off and place it on the table to greet the guard.”
Kemper was correct. Against his terrific size advantage and experience at killing, Ressler didn’t stand a chance. Kemper, who had endured a long abstinence from his compulsive habit of murder, now had a live one: a famous FBI agent. Ressler warned the killer that he’d be in big trouble if he murdered a federal official, but Kemper, already serving seven life terms, scoffed, “What would they do, cut off my TV privileges?”
There followed a thirty-minute contest of fear and courage, with Ressler using his impressive behavioral insight to keep Kemper off balance. At one point in their high-stakes debate, Kemper acknowledged that if he killed Ressler, he would have to spend some time in “the hole,” but he added that it would be a small price to pay for the prestige of “offing an FBI agent.”
One of Ressler’s several gambits: “You don’t seriously think I’d come in here without some way to defend myself, do you?”
Kemper knew better: “They don’t let anybody bring guns in here.” That was true, but Ressler suggested that FBI agents had special privileges and that a gun might not be the only weapon available to him.
Kemper didn’t bite. “What have you got, a poison pen?” So it went until guards arrived, thankfully before Kemper put his ruminations into action. As Kemper was walked out, he put one of his enormous hands on Ressler’s shoulder. “You know I was just kidding, don’t you?” But Kemper wasn’t just kidding. He was feeding on a favorite delicacy of serial killers: human fear.
The murderer who soon joined me in the cell had been after different rewards: attention and fame. With a young man’s light stubble from a few days of not shaving and his prematurely receding hair a mess, Robert Bardo was not menacing like Kemper. In fact, he was the image of an awkward teenager. In another life (and in his previous life) he’d have been the guy dressed in a white apron sweeping the floor in the back of a drive-through restaurant. Robert Bardo was, as he put it, “a geek.”
Because I had studied him extensively when I consulted on his prosecution, meeting Bardo was like meeting a character from a book I’d read. I knew most of the lines he might speak, but the young man in front of me was a far more human incarnation than court transcripts or psychiatric reports could ever conjure, more human perhaps than I wanted him to be.
The power he’d discharged in one terrible second on the steps of Rebecca Schaeffer’s apartment wasn’t in that cell with us. He didn’t have the confidence to intimidate anyone, nor did he have those dead-cold murderer’s eyes that intimidate all on their own. In fact, he was reluctant to even look at me. We both knew what a murderous thing he’d done, and he knew very well from the trial exactly how I felt about it.
Bardo had been asked a great many questions since the killing and he was used to that, so I decided to let him speak first, to follow rather than lead him. As it turned out, that took a lot of patience. For about fifteen minutes, we just sat there, him with his head down, me counting on the idea that he wouldn’t be able to pass up the attention I was withholding.
The otherwise quiet cell was occasionally filled with the clang of some distant gate being slammed. (Noise is one of the few things that roams freely in a prison; the concrete walls that keep out so much carry it into every corner.)around the bed to cover her up, something small crushed under my feet. From that tiny signal (combined with all that preceded it), I knew a terrible thing had happened while I slept. It was a barbit"
Bardo finally looked up at me and studied my face intently. “Arthur Jackson asked me to give you a message.” (Jackson was the obsessed stalker who had brutally stabbed actress Theresa Saldana. After I testified against Jackson in court, he condemned me to “burn in hell.”)
“He wants you to meet with him too.”
“Not today,” I replied.
“Then why do you want to talk to me?”
“Because you have something to contribute,” I answered.
“I do want to help other people avoid what happened to Rebecca,” he said.
That choice of words implied some distance from his crime, which I didn’t want to grant him.
“Nothing just happened to Rebecca. You make it seem as if she had an accident.”
“No, no. I killed her. I shot her, and I want to help others not get killed by someone like me.”
“That sounds like you think there is someone else like you.”
He seemed surprised that it wasn’t obvious. “There is. I mean there are… many people like me.”
He was quiet for a long while before he continued: “I’m not a monster. On television they always want to portray me as someone frightening.”
I looked at him and nodded. We’d been together for nearly a half hour, and I had not asked him a single question.
“I was someone frightening, of course, but I’m not now. That video of me telling how I shot Rebecca makes me look like the worst assassin of all, and I’m not the worst.” He was concerned about his public image, about how he stacked up against his peers.
Like nearly all modern-day assassins, Bardo had studied those who came before him. After Mark Chapman
went to prison for killing John Lennon, Bardo wrote to him and asked why he had done it. Chapman, the famous assassin, and Bardo, the apprentice, had a brief correspondence. “If he told me not to do my crime,” Bardo said, “that would not have overridden my emotions. Emotions are the key, out-of-balance emotions. Emotionally healthy people do not harm others.”
Bardo had also studied everything he could find on the Arthur Jackson case. Jackson had hired a private detective to locate his victim, so Bardo did too. Jackson used a knife, so on one of his earlier trips to kill Schaeffer, Bardo brought one along. Jackson traveled thousands of miles in pursuit of his target, sometimes in a crisscross fashion—as do nearly all assassins—and Bardo did too. They started off a continent apart but ended up living in the same building.
In a videotaped interview done by the defense months before Bardo knew I was working on the case, he revealed the extent of his research into public-figure attack. Describing the lack of security he had encountered around Rebecca Schaeffer, he said: “It’s not like she had Gavin de Becker or anything.”
Now, in offering me advice, Bardo hoped to distinguish himself from other assassins. He would become, he thought, the anti-assassin, helping famous people avoid danger. Of course, he was now famous himself, a fact that carried him to an almost too ironic comment on public life: “All the fame that I have achieved from this results in me getting death threats and harassment. The media says things about me that aren’t even true. I have no control over them invading my privacy, bringing up my case over and over again on TV so they can make money off it. They portray me in ways I never saw myself.”
The Gift of Fear Page 28
