Executioner's Song, The - Norman Mailer [264]
The waiting room was small and had a lot of people. Schiller went up to the desk and asked for Nicole Barrett. They acted as if they had never heard of her. He went around the corner, and put a call in to the hospital administrator, and asked if any of Nicole Barrett's relatives could be located quickly. The woman said they were coming in and out all the time. The mother's been here, Schiller was informed, but she's not here right now. Schiller sat down in his heavy brown coat and prepared to wait. It was a hot waiting room, but he was comfortable. Gilmore was in the hospital, under guard. Gilmore was out of it and could not be reached. Back in Salt Lake, the monkeys would run back and forth, trading information, but there was nothing in the story that counted now except Gilmore and Nicole. Since he couldn't get to Gilmore, he would wait to make contact with Nicole. It was very simple to Schiller.
There was no anxiety about sitting there for hours. Other reporters would be on the phone, checking back to hear what was going down, but Schiller sat and relaxed and let the heat of the room pour over him and the fatigues of twenty-five years perspired slowly, a drop and another drop from the bottomless reservoirs of fatigue, and he sat there quietly thinking, and let his sins and errors wash over him, and reviewed them. He considered it obscene not to learn from experience.
3
His worst sin, his number-one error, he usually decided, was the Susan Atkins story. He had been in Yugoslavia when the Tate-LaBianca murders took place, but six months later, driving down the Santa Monica freeway, news came over the radio that a girl in prison named Susan Atkins had just given information on Tate-LaBianca to her cellmate. Next day, Schiller learned that one of her attorneys was Paul Cruso, who in 1963 had written the contract when Schiller sold a nude photograph of Marilyn Monroe to Hugh Hefner. It obtained the highest price ever paid for a single picture up to then, $25,000. Schiller now called Paul Caruso and said Susan Atkins's story could be sold around the world, and would help to pay for her defense.
So, Schiller was brought in to see Susan Atkins between her two Grand Jury appearances, and she confessed the murders in a series of three connected interviews. He did sell it all over the world. Then it was reprinted in America. Suddenly, Susan Atkins was no longer the State's star witness, because she now had a vested, interest in her own story. Schiller had destroyed part of the State's case.
He was sick to the stomach over that, but it took a while to acknowledge the fact. It came upon him little by little. He was asked to dinner one night by a famous lawyer and couldn't understand why, until he saw that six eminent Judges were also present. They wanted to hear why a journalist would do what he had done. It was a very intelligent dinner, and he was delighted to sit with such fine and serious people, but unhappy to realize he'd been fucking them over.
Earlier, he sold the Susan Atkins story to New American Library for $15,000, a quick sale for a quick and rotten book, a way of liquidating his involvement, but it didn't liquidate so much as proliferate.
Newsweek interviewed him about the book and he said, "Look, I published what Susan said. I don't know whether it's true or not." Newsweek ended their article with that quote: "I don't know whether it's true or not." It made the sweat break out on his forehead to think about it. He had learned one lesson he would never erase, and thought of it again on the night he dined with the Judges. The secret of people who had class was that they remained accurate to the facts.
Schiller called it history. You recorded history right. If you did the work that way, you could end up a man of substance.
So when Helter Skelter came out, he said to himself, "Schiller, you really fucked up. With the profit you made