The Gift of Fear: Survival Signals that Protect us from Violence (36 page)

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Among individual crimes, assassination has the greatest impact on the American psyche. Bullets have demonstrably influenced most presidential elections in the past forty years. A nation based on the concept that the majority chooses its leaders is entirely undermined when a minority (usually of one) undoes that choice with a gun. Whether the assassin’s target is the mayor of LaPorte, Indiana (killed in his bed by an angry citizen), or the president of the United States, the system we live by also falls victim. Because of their disproportionate impact on our culture, identifying those people who will attack a public figure is our nation’s highest-stakes behavioral prediction, one that affects everyone.

At some point during our not so distant past, the conditions surrounding being famous changed. There is a part of that change that makes public life in Western society more challenging than it ever was before. It is the part that every prominent person, from the local politician to the beauty queen to the radio talk-show host to the internationally known media figure, must consider at some time. With fame there are hassles that some say come with the territory, but where did anyone sign on to the idea that if you do very well you will be at risk of being killed for it? To answer that, we must go back to the infancy of the media age.

Performers, politicians, and sports figures have long been admired and even loved, but that love used to be contained and distant, relegated to a part of the mind and heart reserved for people one didn’t know personally. It was, emotionally speaking, a one-way street, because feelings could be displayed to the public figure only as part of an acceptable function, like voting, sending letters, or seeing a show. Except for applauding louder or longer than others, members of an audience didn’t seek to make themselves known personally to performers.

Before the 1940’s, if one woman in an audience stood up and shrieked at the top of her lungs throughout an entire show she’d have been carted off to an asylum. By the mid-forties, however, entire audiences behaved like that, screaming, tearing at their clothes and hair, leaving their seats to board the stage. On December 30
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, 1942, while Frank Sinatra sang at the Paramount Theater in New York, the behavior of the audience changed, and a part of our relationship to well-known people changed forever. Psychiatrists and psychologists of the day struggled to explain the phenomenon. They recalled medieval dance crazes, spoke of “mass frustrated love” and “mass hypnosis.” The media age did bring a type of mass hypnosis into American life. It affects all of us to some degree, and some of us to a great degree.

Before the advent of mass-media, a young girl might have admired a performer from afar, and it would have been acceptable to have a passing crush. It would not have been acceptable if she pursued the performer to his home, or if she had to be restrained by police. It would not have been acceptable to skip school in order to wait for hours outside a hotel and then try to tear pieces of clothing from the passing star.

Yet that unhealthy behavior became “normal” in the Sinatra days. In fact, audience behavior that surprised everyone in 1942 was expected two years later when Sinatra appeared again at the Paramount Theater. This time, the 30,000 screaming, bobby-soxed fans were joined by a troop of reporters. The media were learning to manipulate this new behavior to their advantage. Having predicted a commotion,
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police officers were assigned to that one theater, and it appeared that society had learned to deal with this phenomenon. It had not.

During the engagement, an 18-year old named Alexander Ivanovich Dorogokupetz stood up in the theater and threw an egg that hit Sinatra in the face. The show stopped, and for a moment, a brief moment, Sinatra was not the star. Now it was Dorogokupetz mobbed by audience members and Dorogokupetz who had to be escorted out by police. Society had not learned to deal with this, and still hasn’t. Dorogokupetz told police: “I vowed to put an end to this monotony of two years of consecutive swooning. It felt good.” Saddled with the least American of names, he had tried to make one for himself in the most American way, and but for his choice of a weapon, he would probably be as famous today as Frank Sinatra.

Elements in society were pioneering the skills of manipulating emotion and behavior in ways that had never been possible before: electronic ways. The media were institutionalizing idolatry. Around that time, the world met a teenager named Elizabeth Taylor, who began an excursion through public life that defines the celebrity idol as we know it today. A lesser-known teenager of the forties named Ruth Steinhagen would define the anti-idol as we know it today.

Ruth particularly liked a ballplayer named Eddie Waitkus. He was more exclusively hers than Frank Sinatra, who belonged to everyone. Even though they’d never met, Ruth devoted her life to Eddie. He was of Lithuanian descent, so she tried to learn that language. He was number 36 on the Chicago Cubs, so she became obsessed with that number, buying every record she could find that was produced in 1936. She collected press clippings about Eddie, slept with his picture under her pillow, attended every game she could, and sent him letter after letter, even though he never responded. At dinner each evening, Ruth arranged the chairs so that there was an empty one facing hers. She told her sister, “Eddie is in that chair.”

Many of Ruth’s friends had crushes on baseball players, and while her parents were glad at first thatshe too had an idol, they became concerned about her behavior. They took her to two psychiatrists, and her mother was glad to hear them report, that nothing was wrong with her—except that she should forget about Waitkus (which is a little like saying nothing was wrong with John Hinckley except that he should forget about Jodie Foster). Of course, Ruth did not forget about Waitkus, even for a moment, and when he was traded to the Philadelphia Phillies, she stated that she could not live if he moved away from Chicago.

She began to discuss suicide with one of her girlfriends and then set out to buy a gun. She wanted a pistol, but because a permit was required, she went to a pawnshop and bought a rifle instead.

In the first week of June 1949, Ruth had decided on something better than suicide. She told her friend Joyce to “watch for the fireworks on Tuesday,” the day she checked into the Edgewater Beach Hotel in Chicago, knowing from the Phillies’ schedule that Eddie would be staying there. She brought along a suitcase filled with Eddie memorabilia, including the ticket stubs from fifty games she’d attended. She also brought the rifle.

In her room, Ruth wrote a letter to her parents (“I hope you understand things. I love you. Things will work out for the best”) but crumpled it up and threw it in the trash. She then wrote a note to Eddie:

Ruth tipped a bellman three dollars to deliver the note. On reading it, Eddie thought she was probably just another “Baseball Annie” (what we’d today call a groupie), and he agreed to visit her. Ruth put a knife in her skirt pocket, intending to stab Eddie in the heart as he entered her room, but he hurried past her, sat down in a chair, and asked, “So what’s all this about?”

“Wait a minute. I have a surprise for you,” Ruth said, and then went to the closet and took out the rifle. “For two years, you have been bothering me, and now you are going to die.” Ruth fired one shot into Eddie’s chest. It punctured a lung and lodged just under his heart. (Waitkus survived and even returned to professional sports. I found an old baseball card of his. Under the heading “My Greatest Thrill in Baseball,” it reads, “In 1949, I was shot by a deranged girl.”)

The things Ruth said and did after the shooting were extraordinary in 1949, but no longer. She explained to police:

Ruth was eloquently expressing a sentiment all too familiar to modern-day Americans. In describing the aftermath of the shooting, she said:

At nineteen years old, Ruth felt it was better to be wanted by the police than not to be wanted at all. About twenty years later, a young woman named Valerie Solanas apparently felt the same way. An aspiring actress and writer, Solanas carried a gun into the headquarters of Andy Warhol and shot the famous artist. Soon after, Solanas walked up to a cop in Times Square and said, “The police are looking for me.” She added proudly, “They want me.” (It was Andy Warhol who gave us the quote that is itself an icon of the media age: “In the future, everybody will be famous for 15 minutes.” Ironically, Valerie Solanas got her 15 minutes at Warhol’s expense. She got another 90 minutes last year, when an entire film was made about her life.)

The Solanas attack occurred in 1968, and we were already jaded, but back when Ruth Steinhagen shot Eddie Waitkus, this kind of thing was nothing short of remarkable. When Ruth told her mother that she intended to get a gun and shoot Eddie Waitkus, her mother replied, “You can’t do that. Women don’t do those things.” Mrs. Steinhagen would be proved wrong by Ruth, and by Valerie Solanas, and more recently by Squeaky Fromme and Sara Jane Moore (both of whom attempted to kill President Gerald Ford).

Due to Ruth’s choice of target, hers was not a shot heard round the world, though it did make her the first in a long line of media-age public-figure stalkers and attackers, some famous, many others not famous.

Experts decided Ruth was insane, and she was committed to a mental facility. Three years later, experts decided she had regained her sanity, and she was freed. Still alive today, Ruth Steinhagen is the senior member of a uniquely American minority. It’s not that other nations haven’t had their share of assassination, but killings rooted in some idealistic or political expediency are a far cry from shooting a stranger just to get “attention and publicity for once.”

There is also the uniquely American choice of targets. In the thirties and forties, baseball players and statesmen were the most prominent and adored idols. By the time Joe DiMaggio married Marilyn Monroe, the torch of idolatry had been passed from sports to entertainment. Twenty-six years later, an actor became president, and a media addict (John Hinckley) shot him, claiming an obsession with a film actress (Jodie Foster). After a long courtship, the marriage between violence and entertainment was consummated.

Idolizing heroes and falling for their seductive appeal is normal in America, but what is a mild drug to most is a poison for some people. To learn more about that poison, I sought a meeting with an unlikely expert in the field, Robert Bardo, the man who killed Rebecca Schaeffer.

To visit him I had to pass through two metal detectors and follow a prison escort down a series of long green corridors, each ending at a locked steel gate that, after careful scrutiny, a guard would let us through. Finally I was shown into a small concrete cell with two benches anchored to the floor. My escort said he’d be back soon, then closed and locked the cell door. Even with the certainty that one will be let out, being locked in a prison cell is like being locked in a prison cell; it feels awful.

Waiting for Bardo, I thought of Robert Ressler, the FBI agent who’d spent much of his career at the Behavioral Sciences Unit studying and interviewing America’s most prolific killers. Sitting in the cell reminded me of Ressler’s final prison meeting with Edmund Kemper, a man who’d brutally killed ten people, several of whom he had decapitated. Kemper was literally a giant, six foot nine inches tall and more than three hundred pounds. At the end of a four-hour interview, Ressler pressed the call button for the guard to come and get him out. Some time went by, but no guard. About 15 minutes later, he pressed the button again, and then again. Still no guard. Kemper must have intuitively detected Ressler’s concern, because on the tape of their interview he can be heard to say, “Relax, they’re changing shifts, feeding the guys in the secure areas. Might be fifteen, twenty minutes before they come and get you.”

After a thoughtful pause, Kemper added, “If I went apeshit in here, you’d be in a lot of trouble. I could screw your head off and place it on the table to greet the guard.”

Kemper was correct. Against his terrific size advantage and experience at killing, Ressler didn’t stand a chance. Kemper, who had endured a long abstinence from his compulsive habit of murder, now had a live one: a famous FBI agent. Ressler warned the killer that he’d be in big trouble if he murdered a federal official, but Kemper, already serving seven life terms, scoffed, “What would they do, cut off my TV privileges?”