The Journalist and the Murderer (13 page)

“What about boring books?” I asked. “Are they living things?”

“No. They don’t come alive for me. But I’m sure that the authors of those books go to their graves thinking they have brought something to life. And maybe people don’t feel that I have brought something to life, but I feel that I
have. I’m not an intellectual. I write from the guts, and I’m talking to you from the same part of my anatomy. When I was testifying, Bostwick tried to make a book seem like a pair of shoes. I said that when I wrote my first book I didn’t have a thought about making money; I only thought what a great honor it would be to get something published. Even now, I don’t write for money. I’ve made plenty of money. I don’t even think about money anymore, except when I have to pay lawyers who are trying to bankrupt me.”

“So you’re one of those lucky people who write for the pleasure of it, and who happened to strike a nerve that has caused millions of people to buy your books.”

“That’s right. I feel it’s a goddam miracle. And because I’ve been blessed like this, and had this enormous stroke of luck, I feel I have an obligation, as McGinniss felt he had one, to fight for those other authors, ninety-nine per cent of whom can’t even think of making a living from writing.”

O
N
S
EPTEMBER
18, 1987, McGinniss appeared on William F. Buckley’s television talk show “Firing Line,” together with Floyd Abrams, the New York libel lawyer and expert on the First Amendment. Watching a tape of the program a few months later, I was fascinated by the transformation McGinniss had undergone. The defensive and uncomfortable man I had spoken with in Williamstown and the desperate, hounded, Orestes-like figure of the trial transcript had become a relaxed and expansive celebrity author, exuding a kind of boyish excitement and disbelief about being somebody in the world. I had met this McGinniss, too, in the letters to MacDonald;
showing off his worldly successes to MacDonald was evidently as deep a need for him as was misleading MacDonald about the book.
“The New York Times Book Review
is not only going to do a major review [of
Going to Extremes
] but is actually sending someone up here next week to interview me,” McGinniss wrote happily to MacDonald in a letter of August 6, 1980. “That is like having Knighthood conferred.” On July 16, 1982, he boasted to MacDonald about Phyllis Grann, his new editor at Putnam (McGinniss had changed publishers by this time), who was “probably the highest-ranking, most prestigious and successful woman in the entire publishing business” (even though, as McGinniss felt constrained to let MacDonald know, she “started in publishing as Nelson Doubleday’s secretary”). Five months later, he triumphantly described to MacDonald, in his cell, the sales conference at which
Fatal Vision
had been presented: “At the conclusion of the presentation of this book, which consisted of not only Phyllis Grann raving about it but marketing director, book-club & subsidiary-rights person, publicity director, and finally the president of the company all saying how special it was … sales reps were asked to conduct a secret ballot to rate the books in terms of how they thought they would sell—and
Fatal Vision
(and this is a secret, please, no Xeroxes of this letter to friends in Cal. or anywhere else!)—was chosen
number one.
”

Now, on television, sitting with people who were clearly on his side, McGinniss chatted easily and fluently about the lawsuit, like a man recounting to a dinner table of friends a freakish misfortune that had befallen him on his way to work. After listening to McGinniss’s account, Abrams remarked, “One of the startling things to me is that here you have someone who the [criminal-trial] jury
has found committed this most heinous of all acts, and you still had people on the [civil-trial] jury who listened with great interest, maybe sympathy, and willingness to treat him like everyone else. Maybe a jury is supposed to do that, but it’s pretty unusual when you have a murderer in front of you.” The dialogue continued:

Buckley led the discussion to the issue on which he himself had testified:

McGinniss told Buckley and Abrams how the mistrial had come about: “After three days of deliberation, the jury expressed the view that they were hopelessly—not even deadlocked so much as confused—and were not going to be able to render a verdict.… There was a special verdict form which had thirty-seven different boxes to check off ‘Yes’ or ‘No,’ and it became apparent that they simply didn’t understand how the facts that had been presented at the trial related to the questions that they had in front of them, and after three days they announced that they were unable to really agree upon anything, and they asked to be allowed to go home.”

T
HE
jurors themselves told a different story about the mistrial. When I met with four of them in Los Angeles, they said they had felt capable of making their way through the verdict form (two of the six jurors held master’s degrees), but were helpless in the face of a juror named Lucille Dillon, who refused to deliberate. After the first question on the verdict form had been discussed
and voted on, with five in favor of MacDonald and one, Dillon, in favor of McGinniss, Dillon walked away from the table and would have nothing further to do with the group, sitting near a window reading, while the rest, perforce, deliberated on what to do about her. “Our mistake was that when we wrote a letter to the judge telling him that Lucille wouldn’t deliberate, we said she was for McGinniss,” Sheila Campbell told me. “If we had left it open, and just said we were having trouble with Lucille, we might have got another juror in.” This was so. When the judge proposed to Bostwick and Kornstein that Dillon be replaced with an alternate, Kornstein naturally refused to relinquish a juror known to be on his side, and the judge was forced to declare a mistrial. The trouble had started early in the trial, when Dillon, an animal-rights activist, brought animal-rights literature to the jury room and wasn’t able to interest the other jurors in her cause. She became the weird Other to the majority, and they became the Oppressors to her. When the time for deliberations came, the majority realized too late—like other majorities who have ignored the warning signals of annoying minorities—that they had scorned this woman at their peril and were now powerless against her.

I spent the afternoon of Thanksgiving, 1987, with Lucille Dillon in my hotel room in Los Angeles. She was a pleasant-looking, self-possessed woman of sixty, with graying curly hair, who was wearing white slacks, a white overblouse, and white sneakers on very tiny feet; she spoke in a melodious soft voice and had a most appealing deep-throated chuckle. We ate a room-service lunch of avocado salad and sherbet, and she told me of her experiences at the trial.

“I saw McGinniss as a very good man,” she said. “It just showed about him. We’ve all met people where we get this strong impression of goodness. MacDonald? I had no feeling one way or the other about him. I wondered about him, but I had no impression of him. I liked both the lawyers. They both looked like very good men, too, and I thought they did very good jobs. There was something about them, the look in their eyes, something good. I thought the judge was a very nice man, very patient, kindly, courteous, considerate.”

I said, “The defense has criticized the judge for letting the case come to trial. They said that he didn’t understand that this was a First Amendment case, and that if he had he would have dismissed it.”

“I agree with that. To me, the First Amendment was on trial in this case—the First Amendment of the Constitution, guaranteeing the right to free speech. I saw that very early. I understood that someone was trying to stop someone from saying something, and I didn’t like it one bit. I believe in the Constitution.”

“When did you develop your interest in the First Amendment?”

“In high school, I read the Constitution, and I loved it. It was a wonderful thing to read, just beautiful. It protected people. This was a document that protected you, and they would have to fight against that document to get to you unfairly. On a trip to Washington, I got a copy of the Constitution. I haven’t read it all. I tried to. I read most of it, but it got a little tedious, and I quit. I just totally believe in it. It’s not always enforced, it’s not always used by the government. This is a complaint I have. There are many unconstitutional things the government does.”

“What things are you thinking of?”

“I’m thinking of the income tax. One of the reasons the Constitution was written was to guarantee that Congress control the money supply, and that it not get into the private hands of bankers. The federal income tax was put into effect in 1913—even though the Constitution forbids that—and now people don’t have much of anything. Everything is taxed.”

Dillon told me that she had remarried her second husband after being divorced from him for nineteen years. “It’s really a financial arrangement,” she said. “I said to him, ‘I’m getting on in years, and if anything should happen to you the boys will be stuck taking care of me. There aren’t too many jobs in Oxnard.’ That is where I was at the time. I did odd jobs, I worked at the Fabric Well awhile, little things, but they don’t last, those kinds of jobs. So I said, ‘Why don’t you marry me again, so I can have your Social Security? In case anything happens, the boys won’t have to take care of Mother in her old age.’ He said, ‘I’ll think about it,’ and then he said O.K. So he has his life—his quiet life—and I have mine. He has his room, and I have my room. We own a mobile home together. It was strictly a money deal. Strange, isn’t it?”

As I listened to Lucille Dillon, I felt more acutely conscious than ever of the surrealism that is at the heart of journalism. People tell journalists their stories as characters in dreams deliver their elliptical messages: without warning, without context, without concern for how odd they will sound when the dreamer awakens and repeats them. Here I sat, eating my Thanksgiving dinner with this stranger dressed in white, whom I would never see again, and whose existence for me henceforth would be on
paper, as a sort of emblematic figure of the perils of the jury system.

“Was it Kornstein who persuaded you?” I asked.

“Oh, no. Nothing persuaded me. As more information came out, it just confirmed me more and more. Everything that was said as the case unfolded confirmed what I knew at the beginning. I could not change my mind.”

Dillon went on to speak of her aversion to the other jurors. “I felt something was going on that wasn’t right. I wondered, Are these people supporters of MacDonald? Could it be that everyone in this room is a MacDonald supporter? How come they’re so sympathetic to him? I wondered about that. I will always wonder about that. They got along with each other beautifully. It was as if they had already known each other, they were so friendly. They laughed all the time, and talked constantly and loud, and they were all of one mind, like one person, in full agreement. They were not very intelligent. I’m not saying that I am, but I sensed a lack of intelligence in these people. They were childish and silly and ignorant. It’s not nice to be around people like that. I went into the hall a few times to get away from them, from their nasty dispositions and nasty attitudes. I was on a jury a few years ago, and it was the same. They were not nice people. It was a trial about a young man. They were going to hang that young man for a questionable thing. The boy was accused of smuggling marijuana into prison. They wanted to send him to prison. They were older folks. They were mean. They didn’t care if they ruined his life. I couldn’t agree to it.”

“So it was another hung jury?”

“It was another hung jury.”

•   •   •

M
C
G
INNISS
, in one of his late letters to MacDonald, quoted a passage he had written earlier in the day which he evidently felt it safe to let MacDonald read (though “I’m bending my principles even to do this”), about the criminal-trial judge’s attitude toward Bernard Segal, MacDonald’s defense counsel: