Collected Essays

by Joan Didion

  In a way the uneasiness had to do with the entire difficult question of “Easterners”. It was not that Shelby Coffey was an Easterner or that David Laventhol was an Easterner but that Easterners had been brought in, that there was no Chandler in the publish­er’s office, no one to whom the Los Angeles Times was intrinsically more important than, say, Newsday, no one who could reliably be expected to have a visceral appreciation not just of how far the Times had come but of how far Los Angeles itself had come, of how fragile the idea of the place was and how easily it could be lost. Los Angeles had been the most idealized of American cities, and the least accidental. Its develop­ment had proceeded not from the circumstances of geography but from sheer will, from an idea. It had been General Otis and Harry Chandler who con­ceived the future of Los Angeles as one of ever-expanding possibility, and had instructed the readers of the Times in what was needed to achieve that future. It had been Otis Chandler who articulated this vision by defining the Times’ sphere of influence as regional, from Santa Barbara to the border and from the moun­tains to the sea, and who told the readers of the Times that this was what they wanted.

  What the Times seemed to be telling its readers now was significantly different, and was based not on the logic of infinite opportunity proceeding from infinite growth but on the logic of minimizing risk, on corpo­rate logic, and it was not impossible to follow that logic to a point at which what might be best for the Times and what might be best for Los Angeles would no longer necessarily coincide. “You talk to people in Orange County, they don’t want news of Los Ange­les,” David Laventhol said one afternoon in late No­vember of 1989. “We did a survey. Ask them what news they want, news from Los Angeles rates very, very low.”

  We were talking about his sense that Southern California was fragmenting more than it was coalescing, about what one Times editor had called “the aggressive disidentification with Los Angeles” of the more recent and more uniformly affluent communities in Ventura and San Diego and Orange counties. This aggressive disidentification with Los Angeles was the reason the Orange County Edition had been made autonomous.

  “I spent many years in the New York market, and in many ways this is a more complex market,” David Laventhol said. “The New York Times and some other papers were traditionally able to connect the entire New York community. It’s much tougher here. If anything could bind this whole place together—anything that’s important, anything beyond baseball teams—it would probably be the Times. But people are looking inward right now. They aren’t thinking in terms of the whole region. It’s partly a function of transportation, jobs, the difficulty of commuting or whatever, but it’s also a function of lifestyle. People in Orange County don’t like the West Side of Los Angeles. They don’t like the South Side of Los An­geles. They don’t like whatever. They’re lined up at the county line with their backs to Los Angeles.”

  Some years ago, Otis Chandler was asked how many readers would actually miss the Times were it to stop publishing tomorrow. “Probably less than half,” Otis Chandler had said, and been so quoted in his own paper. For reasons that might not have been clear to his market-research people, he had nonetheless con­tinued trying to make that paper the best in the coun­try. During the 1989 Christmas season there was at the Times, as there had traditionally been, a party, and a Christmas toast was given, as it had traditionally been, by the publisher. In the past the publishers of the Times had stressed the growth of the enterprise, both achieved and anticipated. It had been a good year, David Laventhol said at the 1989 Christmas party, and he was glad it was over.

  —1990

  New York

  * * *

  Sentimental Journeys

  * * *

  1

  We know her story, and some of us, although not all of us, which was to become one of the story’s several equivocal aspects, know her name. She was a twenty-nine-year-old unmarried white woman who worked as an investment banker in the corporate fi­nance department at Salomon Brothers in downtown Manhattan, the energy and natural resources group. She was said by one of the principals in a Texas oilstock offering on which she had collaborated as a member of the Salomon team to have done “top-notch” work. She lived alone in an apartment on East 83rd Street, between York and East End, a sublet cooperative she was thinking about buying. She often worked late and when she got home she would change into jogging clothes and at eight-thirty or nine-thirty in the evening would go running, six or seven miles through Central Park, north on the East Drive, west on the less traveled road connecting the East and West Drives at approximately 102nd Street, and south on the West Drive. The wisdom of this was later questioned by some, by those who were accustomed to thinking of the Park as a place to avoid after dark, and defended by others, the more adroit of whom spoke of the citizen’s absolute right to public access (“That park belongs to us and this time nobody is going to take it from us,” Ronnie Eldridge, at the time a Dem­ocratic candidate for the City Council of New York, declared on the op-ed page of the New York Times), others of whom spoke of “running” as a preemptive right. “Runners have Type A controlled personalities and they don’t like their schedules interrupted,” one runner, a securities trader, told the Times to this point. “When people run is a function of their lifestyle,” another runner said. “I am personally very angry,” a third said. “Because women should have the right to run anytime.”

  For this woman in this instance these notional rights did not prevail. She was found, with her clothes torn off, not far from the 102nd Street connecting road at one-thirty on the morning of April 20, 1989. She was taken near death to Metropolitan Hospital on East 97th Street. She had lost 75 percent of her blood. Her skull had been crushed, her left eyeball pushed back through its socket, the characteristic surface wrinkles of her brain flattened. Dirt and twigs were found in her vagina, suggesting rape. By May 2, when she first woke from coma, six black and Hispanic teenagers, four of whom had made videotaped statements con­cerning their roles in the attack and another of whom had described his role in an unsigned verbal statement, had been charged with her assault and rape and she had become, unwilling and unwitting, a sacrificial player in the sentimental narrative that is New York public life.

  Nightmare in Central Park, the headlines and display type read. Teen Wolfpack Beats and Rapes Wall Street Exec on Jogging Path. Central Park Horror. Wolf Pack’s Prey. Female Jogger Near Death After Savage Attack by Roving Gang. Rape Rampage. Park Marauders Call It “Wilding”, Street Slang for Going Berserk. Rape Suspect: “It Was Fun”. Rape Suspect’s Jailhouse Boast: “She Wasn’t Noth­ing”. The teenagers were back in the holding cell, the confes­sions gory and complete. One shouted “hit the beat” and they all started rapping to “Wild Thing”. The Jogger and the Wolf Pack. An Outrage and a Prayer. And, on the Mon­day morning after the attack, on the front page of the New York Post, with a photograph of Governor Mario Cuomo and the headline “None of Us Is Safe”, this italic text: “A visibly shaken Governor Cuomo spoke out yesterday on the vicious Central Park rape: ‘The peo­ple are angry and frightened—my mother is, my fam­ily is. To me, as a person who’s lived in this city all of his life, this is the ultimate shriek of alarm.’ “

  Later it would be recalled that 3,254 other rapes were reported that year, including one the following week involving the near decapitation of a black woman in Fort Tryon Park and one two weeks later involving a black woman in Brooklyn who was robbed, raped, sodomized, and thrown down an air shaft of a four-story building, but the point was rhetorical, since crimes are universally understood to be news to the extent that they offer, however erroneously, a story, a lesson, a high concept. In the 1986 Central Park death of Jennifer Levin, then eighteen, at the hands of Robert Chambers, then nineteen, the “story”, extrap­olated more or less from thin air but left largely un­corrected, had to do not with people living wretchedly and marginally on the underside of where they wanted to be, not with the Dreiserian pursui
t of “respectability” that marked the revealed details (Robert Chambers’s mother was a private-duty nurse who worked twelve-hour night shifts to enroll her son in private schools and the Knickerbocker Greys), but with “preppies”, and the familiar “too much too soon”.

  Susan Brownmiller, during a year spent monitoring newspaper coverage of rape as part of her research for Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape, found, not surprisingly, that “although New York City police statistics showed that black women were more fre­quent victims of rape than white women, the favored victim in the tabloid headline . . . was young, white, middle class and ‘attractive’.” In its quite extensive coverage of rape-murders during the year 1971, ac­cording to Ms. Brownmiller, the Daily News published in its four-star final edition only two stories in which the victim was not described in the lead paragraph as “attractive”: one of these stories involved an eight-year-old child, the other was a second-day follow-up on a first-day story that had in fact described the vic­tim as “attractive”. The Times, she found, covered rapes only infrequently that year, but what coverage they did “concerned victims who had some kind of middle-class status, such as ‘nurse’, ‘dancer’ or ‘teacher’, and with a favored setting of Central Park”. As a news story, “Jogger” was understood to turn on the demonstrable “difference” between the victim and her accused assailants, four of whom lived in Schomburg Plaza, a federally subsidized apartment complex at the northeast corner of Fifth Avenue and 110th Street in East Harlem, and the rest of whom lived in the projects and rehabilitated tenements just to the north and west of Schomburg Plaza. Some twenty-five teenagers were brought in for questioning; eight were held. The six who were finally indicted ranged in age from fourteen to sixteen. That none of the six had previous police records passed, in this con­text, for achievement; beyond that, one was recalled by his classmates to have taken pride in his expensive basketball shoes, another to have been “a follower”. I’m a smooth type of fellow, cool, calm, and mellow, one of the six, Yusef Salaam, would say in the rap he pre­sented as part of his statement before sentencing.

  I’m kind of laid back, but now I’m speaking so that you know / I got used and abused and even was put on the news. . . .

  I’m not dissing them all, but the some that I called.

  They tried to dis me like I was an inch small, like a midget, a mouse, something less than a man.

  The victim, by contrast, was a leader, part of what the Times would describe as “the wave of young professionals who took over New York in the 1980’s”, one of those who were “handsome and pretty and educated and white”, who, according to the Times, not only “believed they owned the world” but “had reason to”. She was from a Pittsburgh suburb, Upper St. Clair, the daughter of a retired Westinghouse senior manager. She had been Phi Beta Kappa at Wellesley, a graduate of the Yale School of Management, a con­gressional intern, nominated for a Rhodes Scholarship, remembered by the chairman of her department at Wellesley as “probably one of the top four or five students of the decade”. She was reported to be a vegetarian, and “fun-loving”, although only “when time permitted”, and also to have had (these were the Times’ details) “concerns about the ethics of the Amer­ican business world”.

  In other words she was wrenched, even as she hung between death and life and later between insentience and sentience, into New York’s ideal sister, daughter, Bacharach bride: a young woman of conventional middle-class privilege and promise whose situation was such that many people tended to overlook the fact that the state’s case against the accused was not invul­nerable. The state could implicate most of the defendants in the assault and rape in their own videotaped words, but had none of the incontrovertible forensic evidence—no matching semen, no matching finger­nail scrapings, no matching blood—commonly pro­duced in this kind of case. Despite the fact that jurors in the second trial would eventually mention physical evidence as having been crucial in their bringing guilty verdicts against one defendant, Kevin Richardson, there was not actually much physical evidence at hand. Fragments of hair “similar [to] and consistent” with that of the victim were found on Kevin Richard­son’s clothing and underwear, but the state’s own criminologist had testified that hair samples were necessarily inconclusive since, unlike fingerprints, they could not be traced to a single person. Dirt sam­ples found on the defendants’ clothing were, again, similar to dirt found in that part of the park where the attack took place, but the state’s criminologist allowed that the samples were also similar to dirt found in other uncultivated areas of the park. To suggest, how­ever, that this minimal physical evidence could open the case to an aggressive defense—to, say, the kind of defense that such celebrated New York criminal law­yers as Jack Litman and Barry Slotnick typically pre­sent—would come to be construed, during the weeks and months to come, as a further attack on the victim. She would be Lady Courage to the New York Post, she would be A Profile in Courage to the Daily News and New York Newsday. She would become for Anna Quindlen in the New York Times the figure of “New York rising above the dirt, the New Yorker who has known the best, and the worst, and has stayed on, living somewhere in the middle”. She would become for David Dinkins, the first black mayor of New York, the emblem of his apparently fragile hopes for the city itself: “I hope the city will be able to learn a lesson from this event and be inspired by the young woman who was assaulted in the case,” he said. “Despite tremendous odds, she is rebuilding her life. What a human life can do, a human society can do as well.” She was even then for John Gutfreund, at that time the chairman and chief executive officer of Salo­mon Brothers, the personification of “what makes this city so vibrant and so great,” now “struck down by a side of our city that is as awful and terrifying as the creative side is wonderful”. It was precisely in this conflation of victim and city, this confusion of per­sonal woe with public distress, that the crime’s “story” would be found, its lesson, its encouraging promise of narrative resolution.

  One reason the victim in this case could be so readily abstracted, and her situation so readily made to stand for that of the city itself, was that she re­mained, as a victim of rape, unnamed in most press reports. Although the American and English press convention of not naming victims of rape (adult rape victims are named in French papers) derives from the understandable wish to protect the victim, the rationalization of this special protection rests on a number of doubtful, even magical, assumptions. The conven­tion assumes, by providing a protection for victims of rape not afforded victims of other assaults, that rape involves a violation absent from other kinds of assault. The convention assumes that this violation is of a na­ture best kept secret, that the rape victim feels, and would feel still more strongly were she identified, a shame and self-loathing unique to this form of assault; in other words that she has been in an unspecified way party to her own assault, that a special contract exists between this one kind of victim and her assailant. The convention assumes, finally, that the victim would be, were this special contract revealed, the natural object of prurient interest; that the act of male penetration involves such potent mysteries that the woman so pen­etrated (as opposed, say, to having her face crushed with a brick or her brain penetrated with a length of pipe) is permanently marked, “different”, even— especially if there is a perceived racial or social “difference” between victim and assailant, as in nine­teenth-century stories featuring white women taken by Indians—”ruined”.

  These quite specifically masculine assumptions (women do not want to be raped, nor do they want to have their brains smashed, but very few mystify the difference between the two) tend in general to be self-fulfilling, guiding the victim to define her assault as her protectors do. “Ultimately we’re doing women a disservice by separating rape from other violent crimes,” Deni Elliott, the director of Dartmouth’s Ethics Institute, suggested in a discussion of this cus­tom in Time. “We are participating in the stigma of rape by treating victims of this c
rime differently,” Ge­neva Overholser, the editor of the Des Moines Register, said about her decision to publish in February of 1990 a five-part piece about a rape victim who agreed to be named. “When we as a society refuse to talk openly about rape, I think we weaken our ability to deal with it.” Susan Estrich, a professor of criminal law at Harvard Law School and the manager of Michael Dukak­is’s 1988 presidential campaign, discussed, in Real Rape, the conflicting emotions that followed her own 1974 rape:

  At first, being raped is something you sim­ply don’t talk about. Then it occurs to you that people whose houses are broken into or who are mugged in Central Park talk about it all the time. ... If it isn’t my fault, why am I supposed to be ashamed? If I’m not ashamed, if it wasn’t “personal”, why look askance when I mention it?

  There were, in the 1989 Central Park attack, spe­cific circumstances that reinforced the conviction that the victim should not be named. She had clearly been, according to the doctors who examined her at Metro­politan Hospital and to the statements made by the suspects (she herself remembered neither the attack nor anything that happened during the next six weeks), raped by one or more assailants. She had also been beaten so brutally that, fifteen months later, she could not focus her eyes or walk unaided. She had lost all sense of smell. She could not read without experi­encing double vision. She was believed at the time to have permanently lost function in some areas of her brain.