The Journalist and the Murderer

by Janet Malcolm

  McCarthy disappoints McGinniss by being reserved and opaque. He is “not a man inclined toward quick intimacy,” McGinniss reports, and, to avoid a drinking expedition that McGinniss organizes when Howard Cosell turns up at the restaurant, McCarthy slips away while McGinniss is in the men’s room. Ted Kennedy is similarly elusive. In Berrigan, McGinniss finds the expansive interlocutor he has been seeking, but the morning after their boozy late-night conversation McGinniss opens the notebook in which he inscribed Berrigan’s aperçus, and instead of “the disciplined, accurate notes of a trained professional” he finds only illegible scrawls and the punch line of a coarse joke. With one striking exception, the stories McGinniss tells on himself in Heroes are pretty unsurprising. The exception is an extraordinary incident that takes place at ten-thirty in the morning in the kitchen of William Styron’s house on Martha’s Vineyard, where McGinniss has spent the night—most of it sitting up and drinking with Styron, whose book Lie Down in Darkness he has read four times. McGinniss writes:

  I woke up at ten-thirty, if not still drunk, then not yet quite sober. The morning was murky and wet. Styron was still sleeping. I went down to the kitchen looking for something to eat. I opened the refrigerator. The first thing I saw was the can of fresh, vacuum-packed crabmeat, which had been shipped up from Georgia. He had told me about this crabmeat in some detail the night before. It was the only canned crabmeat in America, he had said, which tasted like fresh crab. This was due to the vacuum-packing, he had explained. It was very expensive crabmeat and extremely hard to get, and it was one of his favorite things to eat. He had been saving this can for a special occasion, because it was the last he would be able to get until the following summer.

  I opened it. It made a hissing sound, like a can of peanuts, or tennis balls. I ate a piece. It was delicious. Moving quickly to his pantry I took out some flour. Then some Tabasco, and Worcestershire sauce. Then I took eggs, milk, heavy cream, butter, and green peppers from the refrigerator. Then I made bread crumbs. I had to move fast. I had to get this done before he woke up. I mixed, rolled, measured, stirred, and poured, for twenty minutes. Then I put the whole business in the oven. It would be crabmeat pie: an original recipe. It would be delicious. How could it miss? I had used the whole big can of crabmeat.

  Styron appears in his bathrobe, and when he learns what McGinniss has done he is unbelieving, then outraged. “You used that crabmeat?” Styron says, and McGinniss goes on, “It was as if he had come upon me making love to his wife. ‘I didn’t expect you to do this,’ he said.” The story ends happily—Styron regains his good humor and geniality when he eats the crabmeat pie and finds it delicious—and lamely. For what the incident is about, what lies below its light surface, is the dire theme of Promethean theft, of transgression in the service of creativity, of stealing as the foundation of making. That McGinniss is rewarded, rather than punished, for his theft confuses the issue. Yes, a subject may occasionally grudgingly concede that what has been written about him isn’t bad, but this doesn’t make the writer any less a thief. The rare, succulent crabmeat, picked out of the shell, packed, sealed, refrigerated, jealously hoarded, is like the fragile essence of a person’s being, which the journalist makes away with and turns into some horrid mess of his own while the subject sleeps. (“That crabmeat has a very delicate flavor,” poor Styron whimpers on hearing of McGinniss’s Tabasco and Worcestershire sauce and bread crumbs and heavy cream.) When McGinniss wrote this chapter, he could hardly have known that someday he would be in a courtroom in California having his liver ravaged by a pitiless lawyer. Or did he write those letters to MacDonald to make sure that such a fate would be his?

  MCGINNISS met MacDonald in June 1979, in Huntington Beach, California. McGinniss had just finished Going to Extremes, a work of reportage about Alaska that was to restore to him the reputation he had lost with The Dream Team and Heroes, and establish him as a humorist of no inconsiderable gifts. He was in California as a visiting columnist for the Los Angeles Herald Examiner, writing a column of light, sharp commentary. However, the meeting with MacDonald put a halt to McGinniss’s traffic with comedy, and brought him to a genre—the “true-crime novel”—in which he had never worked. Fortunately for him, the books of this genre published in America today apparently need to fulfill only one requirement—that they be interminably long—and when Fatal Vision, the true-crime novel McGinniss eventually wrote, weighed in at six hundred and sixty-three pages it insured for itself the place on the best-seller list that its publishers had anticipated when they gave him a three-hundred-thousand-dollar advance.

  McGinniss was led to his subject by an item he read while scanning the Los Angeles newspapers for topics for his column: the Long Beach Police Officers Association was sponsoring a dinner dance to raise funds for the legal defense of Jeffrey MacDonald, a local physician, who was about to be tried for murder. McGinniss remembered the crime, which had occurred nine years earlier. On February 17, 1970, MacDonald’s pregnant wife, Colette, aged twenty-six, and his two daughters, Kimberly and Kristen, aged five and two and a half, were bludgeoned and stabbed to death in the family’s apartment at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, where MacDonald was serving as a doctor in a Green Beret unit. MacDonald was charged with the murders and then cleared by an Army tribunal. But his story about waking up to the screams of his wife and older daughter and about seeing four intruders—three men holding clubs and knives and a woman with long hair holding a candle and chanting “Acid is groovy” and “Kill the pigs”—led to no arrests, and continued to raise the question of why no traces of the intruders had been found in the apartment, and why MacDonald had been merely knocked unconscious and slightly cut up when his wife and children were savagely done to death. In response to pressure from Alfred Kassab, the stepfather of the murdered woman, the Justice Department revived the investigation in 1971 and, over a period of years, built up a compelling enough case against MacDonald to bring him to trial. In the intervening eight years, MacDonald had moved to California, and had made a life for himself that appeared to be shadowed neither by the loss of his family nor by the cloud of suspicion that had hung over him from the day of the murders. He had not remarried and was leading a pleasant, blameless life in the California style. He was a hardworking, successful physician—he had become director of emergency at St. Mary’s Hospital, in Long Beach—and he lived in a small condominium apartment on the water, to which he liked to bring friends and girlfriends, often entertaining them with rides in his thirty-four-foot boat named (what else?) the Recovery Room. He was a handsome, tall, blond, athletic man of thirty-five, who had grown up in a lower-middle-class household in Patchogue, Long Island, the second of three children, and had always had about him a kind of preternatural equipoise, an atmosphere of being at home in the world.

  MacDonald went to Princeton on a scholarship in 1961, then to Northwestern University Medical School, and then to Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center, in New York, for his internship. In the summer following his sophomore year at Princeton and her sophomore year at Skidmore, MacDonald’s girlfriend, Colette Stevenson, became pregnant. The couple decided against abortion and were married in the fall of 1963. Colette left Skidmore, and Kimberly was born in Princeton; Kristen was born in Illinois. Photographs show Colette to have been a pretty, blond girl with a soft, rounded face; all accounts of her stress her reserve, her quietness, her kindliness, and her conventional femininity. At the time of her death, she was taking an evening course in psychology at the North Carolina State University extension at Fort Bragg.

  A few days before the fund-raising dinner dance, McGinniss went to see MacDonald at his apartment and interviewed him for his column. Near the end of the interview, MacDonald asked McGinniss if he would like to attend the murder trial—in Raleigh, North Carolina—and write a book about the case from the perspective of the defense team, with whom he would live, and to all of whose plans, strategies, and deliberations he would be privy. This proposal had a special appeal for McGinniss. The situatio
n that MacDonald outlined resembled McGinniss’s situation with the Nixon advertising people, which had had such a successful result. Although none of us ever completely outgrows the voyeurism of childhood, in some of us it lives on more strongly than in others—thus the avid interest of some of us in being “insiders” or in getting the “inside” view of things. In my talk with McGinniss in Williamstown, he used an arresting image: “MacDonald was clearly trying to manipulate me, and I was aware of it from the beginning. But did I have an obligation to say, ‘Wait a minute. I think you are manipulating me, and I have to call your attention to the fact that I’m aware of this, just so you’ll understand you are not succeeding’? Do little bells have to go off at a certain point? This has never been the case before. This could inhibit any but the most superficial reporting. We could all be reduced to standing in the street interviewing the survivors of fires.”

  McGinniss, of course, wanted to be in the burning house itself, and when MacDonald presented his proposition, the allure of the flames was strong enough to cause him to accept a condition that another writer might have found unacceptable—namely, that he give MacDonald a share of the book’s proceeds. McGinniss was not the first writer MacDonald had approached. For many years, at the prodding of his lawyer, Bernard Segal (who had defended him before the Army tribunal, and who remained his lawyer until 1982), MacDonald had been offering himself as a subject to writers. It had been Segal’s idea—fantasy, as it proved—that a book would bring in a sizable portion of the money needed to pay for MacDonald’s defense. “We were running into the red substantially,” Segal testified at the McGinniss trial. “People were working without salaries … and I thought a book with an advance that was substantial and fair would help out.” Two writers who had nibbled at the bait but had not been netted were Edward Keyes and Joseph Wambaugh; Keyes couldn’t get the necessary advance, and Wambaugh couldn’t come to the trial, because he was making a film. The hope of finding a writer had been pretty much abandoned, and when McGinniss turned up on the eve of the trial he was like the answer to a prayer one had no longer thought worth uttering. The dovetailing of desires was remarkable: McGinniss would get his insider’s spot (“I wouldn’t have wanted to just go to the trial and sit out there with the other reporters,” he told me. “I wanted to do it from the inside looking out, and I wanted total access to MacDonald and his lawyers”), and MacDonald would get his money. In the deal that was presently struck—presided over by Segal and Sterling Lord, McGinniss’s agent, who had got McGinniss a contract with the Dell/Delacorte publishing company and his three-hundred-thousand-dollar advance—McGinniss would receive not only total access but also a written promise of exclusivity and a release from all legal liability: MacDonald would lend himself to no other writer and would not sue McGinniss for libel if he didn’t like what was written. For his part, MacDonald would receive twenty-six and a half per cent of the advance and thirty-three per cent of the royalties. The arrangement was a kind of reification of the hopes and good intentions that writers and subjects normally exchange at the beginning of their enterprise. The money that MacDonald was to get was simply a more tangible manifestation of the reward that every subject expects to receive at the end of the project—why else would he lend himself to it? And, similarly, the written assurances that McGinniss received from MacDonald were no different from the tacit ones that writers normally receive from subjects: It is understood that the subject will not sue, and that he will not faithlessly go to another writer.

  It is understood—and yet it is also known that subjects do sometimes sue writers, and that they do sometimes leave one writer for another, or abruptly break off the interviews. It is the latter eventuality, with its immediate disastrous effect on his project, that causes the writer the greatest anxiety (a lawsuit can occur only after the project is completed, in some hazy distant future) and impels him toward the devices and disingenuousnesses that came under such unprecedentedly close scrutiny in the MacDonald-McGinniss lawsuit. But the writer isn’t alone in his anxiety. Even as he is worriedly striving to keep the subject talking, the subject is worriedly striving to keep the writer listening. The subject is Scheherazade. He lives in fear of being found uninteresting, and many of the strange things that subjects say to writers—things of almost suicidal rashness—they say out of their desperate need to keep the writer’s attention riveted. In the MacDonald-McGinniss encounter—the encounter of a man accused of a terrible crime with a journalist whom he tries to keep listening to his tale of innocence—we have a grotesquely magnified version of the normal journalistic encounter. Even though the crimes to which the normal subject pleads innocent—vanity, hypocrisy, pomposity, inanity, mediocrity—are less serious than those of which MacDonald stood accused, the outcome tends to be the same: as MacDonald’s tale ultimately failed to hold McGinniss—whose attention soon shifted to the rhetorically superior story of the prosecution—so do the majority of stories told to journalists fail of their object. The writer ultimately tires of the subject’s self-serving story, and substitutes a story of his own. The story of subject and writer is the Scheherazade story with a bad ending: in almost no case does the subject manage to, as it were, save himself.

  AS IF sensing the deeper structures of the Devil’s pact he was brokering between MacDonald and McGinniss, Segal, when called upon to approve a release from McGinniss’s publisher, scribbled in a proviso whose language, on first reading, seems oddly ambiguous for a lawyer to use. The release was dated August 3, 1979, and was written in the form of a letter from MacDonald to McGinniss which began, “I understand you are writing a book about my life centering on my current trial for murder.” The letter’s third paragraph, where Segal’s emendation took place, originally read:

  I realize, of course, that you do not propose to libel me. Nevertheless, in order that you may feel free to write the book in any manner that you may deem best, I agree that I will not make or assert against you, the publisher, or its licensees or anyone else involved in the production or distribution of the book, any claim or demand whatsoever based on the ground that anything contained in the book defames me.

  Segal felt constrained to change the final period to a comma and to add these words: “provided that the essential integrity of my life story is maintained.” Eight years later, in the MacDonald-McGinniss suit, it became MacDonald’s contention that the “essential integrity” of his life story had not been maintained in McGinniss’s book, and that McGinniss was guilty of a kind of soul murder, for which it was necessary that he be brought to account. The federal judge assigned to the case, William Rea, also seemed to hear the Commendatore’s music wafting out of the complaint and, in his denial of McGinniss’s motion for summary judgment, to concur with the plaintiff’s moralistic view of the case.

  But all this was many years into the future. In the summer of 1979, MacDonald and McGinniss were Damon and Pythias. In common with many other subjects and writers, they clothed their complicated business together in the mantle of friendship—in this case, friendship of a particularly American cast, whose emblems of intimacy are watching sports on television, drinking beer, running, and classifying women according to looks. A few weeks after writing about MacDonald for the Herald Examiner, McGinniss gave up his guest column and flew to Raleigh to take up his insider’s post with the MacDonald defense; he moved into the Kappa Alpha fraternity house on the North Carolina State University campus, which Segal had rented for the summer, and there joined MacDonald, his mother, Segal, and the various lawyers, paralegals, law students, and volunteers of the defense group. One member of this group was Michael Malley, a lawyer, who had been MacDonald’s roommate at Princeton and had taken part in MacDonald’s defense at the Army hearing that dismissed the charges against him in 1970. Now, on leave from his law firm in Phoenix, Malley had once again put himself at the service of his friend, and, alone of the group, was not happy about the insertion of McGinniss into its midst. As Malley was to testify later, he had nothing against McGinniss pers
onally—indeed, he liked him, as everyone else did—but he felt there was something fundamentally risky about letting a writer into the inner councils of the defense. “I felt that if Joe was there all the time, we had a real problem about the attorney-client privilege,” Malley said, adding, by way of explanation, “The privilege is that anything you say to your attorney isn’t going to go beyond the attorney unless the client agrees to it. But if there is an outsider present, somebody who doesn’t belong to the defense team, the privilege is waived. And Joe, to me, clearly seemed to be an outsider, and I simply didn’t like it.” Malley told Segal of his concern about McGinniss, and Segal came up with a solution to the problem of the attorney-client privilege which Malley reluctantly accepted: McGinniss would be made an official member of the defense team—he would sign an employment agreement with Segal—and would thus be protected against, for example, any attempt by the prosecution to get at the defense’s secrets by subpoenaing his notes.

  The criminal trial in Raleigh lasted seven weeks and ended, on August 29, with MacDonald’s conviction—to the shock and horror of the defense. McGinniss, on hearing the verdict, cried, as did everyone else in the defense group. MacDonald was put in handcuffs and taken to a federal prison in Butner, North Carolina. The next day, he wrote a letter to McGinniss—the first letter in a correspondence that was to last almost four years. “I’ve got to write to you so I won’t go crazy,” he began. His letter ended with this emotional paragraph:

  I want to see Bernie [Segal], because I love him & he is probably hurting beyond belief & wants to know he is not to blame. I want to see my Mom, because no matter how I look, by seeing me she will be better (and I probably will be, too). I would also love to see my best friends—including (I hope) you. But in all honesty, I’m crying too much today, and do cry whenever I think of my close friends. I feel dirty & soiled by the decision & can’t tell you why, and am ashamed. I somehow don’t feel that way with Bernie & Mom but think today it would be difficult to look at you or shake your hand—I know I’ll cry and want to hug you—and yet the verdict stands there, screaming, “You are guilty of the murder of your family!!” And I don’t know what to say to you except it is not true, and I hope you know that and feel it and that you are my friend.