Executioner's Song, The - Norman Mailer [262]
Or they could focus completely on Nicole and turn the thing into a study of a young girl who has been married a few times, is saddled with children, then falls in love with a criminal. Play down the murders, but emphasize the romantic difficulties of trying to live with a man that society does not trust.
Schiller was not trying to impose judgment, he told Rudolph, on the relative merits of these separate scenarios. He was just saying you could bypass Gilmore, make it a woman's story, and still have something of value.
No sooner had he hung up, than the radio was informing him that Gilmore and Nicole had tried a joint suicide. Immediately he booked a plane ticket to Salt Lake. At the airport, he called Rudolph again to suggest another alternative. Still, assuming they couldn't get the rights to Gilmore, they could do a study of a girl who wanted to die and so entered into a suicide pact with a criminal, thereby looking for a star-struck way to solve an unendurable problem.
Schiller repeated that he was sure of the potentialities, and wanted ABC to finance him in a real way. Not hotel bills or airplane fares, Schiller said, because that, Lou, he could always handle with his credit cards, no, Schiller wanted backing to get in there and deal for Gilmore. He would call again from Salt Lake.
He might have known. The moment that suicide attempt hit the media, not only was Larry Schiller on the plane, but everybody was heading for Salt Lake, ready to check into the Hilton where each of the media monkeys could watch all the other monkeys. There were going to be a lot of monkeys in that zoo.
From stories that got back to him, Schiller knew he was well known in the media for his impatience and his funds of energy. He always gave his big friendly grin when he heard such stories. They protected his secret weapon: it was that he had patience. He didn't tell people. Cultivated the opposite image. But he didn't mind being in situations where he just had to sit and wait. Give him an airplane trip or a waiting room. If you counted the years from the age of fourteen when he began to make money as an expert on skid marks, he had, by his own estimate, been running like a maniac for close to twenty-five years. So he didn't mind sitting on occasion.
His father, who once managed the Davega store in Times Square, and knew enterprise when he saw it, bought him a Rollei-cord when he was a kid, and a police band radio, and Schiller would hear accidents come in on the radio, get on his bike and ride to the place. If it was far away, and he only arrived after the vehicles had been removed, he could still photograph the skid marks. Then he would sell the prints to the insurance companies. It was his apprenticeship for getting to the scene.
Having broken into the media as one of Life's youngest photographers, Schiller had covered Khrushchev at the United Nations, and Madame Nhu in a convent, was at the Vatican when the Pope died, and took a picture of Nixon crying as he lost to Kennedy, a famous picture. He knew how to travel without a suitcase. Syndicated the Fisher quintuplets' story and photographed the Alaska earthquakes, Dallas and Watts, the Olympics, covered the trial of Sirhan Sirhan.
He reported income over six figures before he was twenty-four, and got awful tired of photographing different heads on the same body.
He was conceivably the best one-eyed photographer in the world-lost the sight of the other in an accident when he was five years old-but he got weary of walking into people's lives, shaking their hands, photographing them, walking out. He left Life and went into producing books and movies and fast magazine syndications on stories that weren't small. Wanted to do people in depth. Instead, did Jack Ruby on his deathbed, and Susan Atkins in the Manson trial.
He got a terrible reputation. Schiller worked hard to change that image. He published a book, Minamata, about mercury poisoning in Japan, and created the still montages in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and Lady Sings the Blues, produced and directed The