Press: A Tale Of Midnight

...Sam's story was the first fruit, some charged, of Rupert Murdoch's attempt to bring the tasteless, boisterous, thoroughly lively excess of British popular journalism to the United States...

...A front page "open letter" to Sam from the Post's Australian reporter Steven Dunleavy, who concluded: "Help us to help you to help the city to once again sleep in peace...

...and the awful possibility exists that someone with a slightly different psychosis--a nutty desire to be notorious, say--has now been me, tieulously tutored in how to proceed...

...He did not appear to be the victim of a fascinating malfunction--a short-circuit, say, between sex and Satan---but of the mental equivalent of a train wreck...

...As a threat to the lives of New Yorkers Sam would have to be ranked pretty far down the list, but as an object of fear he was formidable indeed...

...From one angle Sam's story was strictly a matter of taste...

...The rationale behind the blazing headline was the fact that Sam's victims of the previous night had been shot in the Bensonhurst section of .Brooklyn, far from the sites of his previous attacks...

...For one thing, the police actively sought the cooperation of the press in an attempt to smoke Sam out, and it is arguable that without the unprecedented publicity Berkowitz's neighbors in Yonkers would never have put two and two together and concluded he was something more than a nut with a grudge against dogs...

...We are not truly precipitate if we conclude the cops got him, nor simplistic for taking at face-value the medical opinion of a NYPD detective who said, "The guy is completely wacko...

...Their evidence includes the short-barreled, .44 calibdr revolver which Sam used to kill six and wound seven people in eight separate attacks since July 29, 1976...

...To the .44 Caliber Killer on his 1st Deathday," a reference to the anniversary of Sam's first killing...

...11801 ' ~ Prepaid plus 7Sc per copy postage & handling...

...If he is a monster, he's a monster of indifference...

...It is almost as if Herzog, faced with the impossibility of knowing this country, felt for just that reason that he must somehow at least embrace or surround it...

...One wonders whether Herzog didn't feel that he could confront life all the better by coming here, to a desert where life just barely hangs on at all...

...She survived...

...There was a high-minded, even priggish note to some of it, as if fascination with Sam were somehow coarse and frivolous, like a taste for Ko]ak, Harold Robbins, the cuisine of McDonald's...

...Sam's elusiveness ought to generate a sense of mystery, but it doesn't...

...The high-minded critics seemed to argue that newspapers are supposed to be sober and informative, not titillating...

...That was the very reason he went...

...Had press publicity of the whole episode prejudiced all potential jurors in New York...

...Son of Sam...

...Commonweal: .$95 alcoholic a job tending bar...

...In other words, it really was a pilgrimage, an act of faith, a mythical, mystical gesture rather than an attempt to get anywhere in this world...

...Most of the critical comment was directed at the News and the Post for waging an old-fashioned tabloid circulation war, hyping the genuine stories and piping the rest...

...Was Berkowitz's right to a fair trial prejudiced by news stories which stated flatly that he was Sam...

...arrives . , ~ ~ o m o realistic ~ ' ~ ~robab/Hfies in . _9 _9 t h ~ c i e n t i f i c }facts...

...I supose I've got to register at least a mild, formal protest on all three points, but my heart's not in it...

...It neglects the nature of the beast...

...Perhaps the most wonderful pilgrimage Herzog ever made, though, was the one to Albania when he was fifteen...

...Sam scary and fascinating...

...In the journey to Albania there is a strange mixture of comprehensiveness and incomprehensibility that is found in Herzog's films as well...

...Post...

...The Times was more circumspect (August 12, "BERKOWITZ CHARGED IN 'SAM' CASE, ORDERED HELD FOR MENTAL TESTS") but did not stint its coverage (two full pages the day after Berkowizt's arrest) of what was, when all is said and done, just one more psycho killer loose in a city with 1,500 murders a year...

...It was quite a whirl while it lasted, quite a carnival...

...Perhaps having the new film to make assuaged his feeling of helplessness before his own impulse to go see an old man reportedly living alone in the path of the volcano Soufriere...

...Sam did that all by himself...

...no defiance...

...His eyes are large and liquid...

...IT'S ONLY WAY OUT...

...Re...

...a fingerprint on Sam's letter to Jimmy Breslin in June...

...others--"a loner...

...His story is like all the...

...A story becomes a story when the press elects, in a competitive process just this side of collusion, to treat it as a story...

...Sam killed six people, bm it was the press, not his murders, which made him an object of general fear...

...But Herzog is equally capable of undertaking such obsessed journeys without the worldly justification of filmmaking, . . . . . . . . . . When he heard his sponsor and long-time friend Lotte Eisner was dying in Paris, for example, he immediately set off on foot, walking all the way from Germany to Paris on back roads...

...It was a circus alright...

...Dunleavy was the third reporter to solicit Sam's surrender, following Jimmy Breslin (who actually received a letter from Sam in June) and Pete Hamill...

...In April a note was found pinned to a car seat between the bodies of --July 28...

...Five people were struck by lightning in the city in July alone, for example, and only the traffic department knows how many jaywalkers died during the period of Sam's rampage because they neglected to cross at the green...

...9 There are probob/yrnany ~ _ _9 ~ I ~sheuniverse, he ~ ~t~.~,~ ~ " I far superior in intelligence to .moo e,o s ro ros Kenneth l in our space explorations, we _9 must seriously contemplate the possibility of contact...

...only a mild interest in what comes next...

...Breslin to .44 killer: GIVE UP...

...Same date, same paper...

...Perhaps some learned spelunker of the mind will fit all the pieces together--the hatred of dogs, the love of uniforms, the obsession with Satan, the blankets darkening the seventh-floor window which overlooked the Hudson River, the strange names he chose for himself-"the chubby behemoth," "John Wheaties, '~ "the Wicked King Wicker...

...Perhaps some learned Freudian or Jungian or neo-Reichian attached to Kings County (Brooklyn) Hospital will figure out how it all fits together, but I wouldn't bet on it...

...In one of his letters Sam included a strange sketch: two crossed lines forming an "," with a cross above and an "S" below and the male and female sexual symbols to either side...

...August 4. New York Post...

...NO ONE IS SAFE FROM THE SON OF SAM...

...At the moment the press seems to be showing the classic symptoms of a morning after, questioning the intemperate words and headlines of the long night before...

...He might have fired his pistol night and day without making so much as a blip in the mortality statistics, but with the help of the press he loomed as large in the minds of his fellow citizens as the Grim Reaper himself...

...The clues have a suggestive, almost surreal quality---Son of Sam, Son of Darkness, blanket-darked room...

...But the criticism strikes me as being at times niggling in spirit, and at worst wrong-headed and unfair...

...You're inviting a binge, and it's niggling to cite the reprobate's every intemperate word the morning after...

...There hadn't been anything like it in years, and a lot of people hoped there would never be anything like it again...

...Where Delan0 encounte=: occurs with other intelligent beings, we must be ~'~ __.o o_ MANYI constructively to their existence but expand our essentially mancentered views of God to encompass these children of the same Creator...

...Glanced at quickly the symbols "read"---QSO, the astronomer's shorthand for quasars, mysterious light and energy sources in the deepest reaches of space...

...They make it obvious that life matters more, not art...

...WhateVer the nature of his obsession, it did not seem to depend on the interest of strangers...

...MOBSTERS JOIN HUNT," a typically flat Post headline, but the story below wins the Thin Air Award...

...Cancer is scary without being interesting...

...You liked it or you didn't depending...

...We've seen Sam's face before, although no one seemed to mention it...

...Had the sensation contributed to Sam's pyschosis, whatever that might prove to be...

...Contact: Vocation Director, 224 Shore Rd...

...a collection of Sam press clippings in Berkowitz's apartment...

...But the role of the press in Sam's sto.ry is something else again...

...Circulation for the day was up 400,000, to 1 million...

...At one point an African boy holds up to the camera a pet fox or dog, 16 September 1977:596...

...Dept...

...But Sam on the loose, writing weird letters to columnists, sneaking about the outer boroughs with a pistol, shooting young women who all seemed to be Catholics with long h a i r . . . ! Sam's story was a tale for midnight, of the sort children tell each other, first cousin to stories about ghosts, flying saucers, sea monsters, three-toed man-eating bears, or anything else mysterious, elusive and threatening...

...TRAVELING MAN 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 THE SCREEN Wemer Herzog is given to pilgrimages...

...But a lot of criticism I've seen had the appearance of plain dislike masquerading as disapproval...

...The making of a film is sometimes, I suspect, the pretext for a pilgrimage, as when Herzog stopped in the middle of editing one film to rush off to Guadeloupe and do another...

...He goes off to remote comers of the world to make his films--Peru, the Cameroons, Wisconsin--and the films are often about people traversing a landscape...

...His mental world was as hermetic as a telephone booth...

...In its Talk of the Town column The New Yorker accused the press of irresponsibly making a bad situation worse, and after the arrest Newsweek and the Times also raised some of the inevitable questions: Had the press surrendered to sensationalism...

...The classic gambit on a dead news day is a rehash under some such headlines as COPS HUNT KILLER, 16 September 1977:594 CITY IN FEAR, WHERE WILL SAM STRIKE NEXT...

...Small wonder...

...add tax...

...This fellow is in another world...

...The press made Sam notorious because it couldn't help itself, but it did not make him sensational...

...That there should be a forbidden country right in Europe is what fascinated him...

...Screaming red headline the day of Berkowitz's arrest: "CAUGHT...

...THOMAS POWERS MISSIONARIES OF THE SACRED HEARTS ~ Apostolic, prayerful community seeking college age men to join us in m~ng Jesus" love visible as priests & brothers...

...08221...

...kept to himself," "soft-spoken," "just an average sort of guy...

...Sam's story had a certain zip, but no staying power...

...W e l l . . . there was something gaudy and crude about the whole Sam hoorah...

...no amusement...

...and once he got there, unable to enter, he hiked through Yugoslavia and Greece all around Albania's borders as close as he could get, peering into this land of mystery...

...His purpose, he says, was to prevent her from dying, not by getting there to see herin he could have done that better by planembut simply by the self-assertion and self-sacrifice of the walking...

...In New York, after all, there is plenty to watch out for...

...The first big headlines came in March, when Mayor Beame and Police Commissioner Michael J. Codd called a press conference to announce a nut was on the loose with a .44 caliber revoler...

...The Daily News' circulation was up 350,000, the Times' 50,000...

...Although Herzog says that film matters more to him than life, a claim he has backed up by risking his life to make films, the films themselves give the impression of being the mere by-product o f a vision, like poems written down by automatic dictation...

...He was the one who drew attention to his quasi-religious dementia (a disturbing subject which deserves more attention than it has so far received), and his chosen means of self-expression--the murder of young women and their boyfriends by moonlight--hardly invited indifference, once its pattern had been determined...

...The type is too familiar...

...They seem to be peripheral faults to me, peculiar to the case...

...WORLDSI immensely thoughtprovoking treatise supported $7.00 scholarship___ ~ ~ I At b~176176 ONE' or direct from the publisher EXPOSITION PRESS, INC...

...August 11...

...But what they really seemed to dislike was the rawness of the story itself, the appetite for awful detail piled on detail, the shameless posturing of columnists, the sense the tabloids gave of relishing the scariness of it all, having the time of their lives...

...By David Berkowitz...

...Where do you begin with a mess like that...

...Besides, Sam carried out five of his eight attacks, during which he refined his shooting style, before there had been any publicity at all...

...Again, the impulse was a pilgrim's, not an explorer's, for Herzog knew he couldn't get into Albania once he arrived...

...If the Times was punctilious in the proprieties, liberally sprinkling its stories with "alleged" and "according to police," it nevertheless joined the tabloids in treating the story as a story...

...Criticizing the tabloids for their all-out pursuit of Sam is a bit like criticizing the lion for gorging upon the lamb...

...Technically Berkowitz is a "suspect" innocent until proven guilty, but the law is one thing, life another...

...The unrestrained spirit of the thing was nicely captured by some of those who tried to cash in, like the lawyer who allegedly offered to sell tapes of his conversations with Berkowit7 to the News...

...There is no fear nor alarm in his expression...

...and there is no question the rights of any less-loony, more trial-likely defendant might have been seriously prejudiced...

...CW, Hicksville, N.Y...

...Linwood, N.J...

...And so on...

...If the case of Sam is not exactly closed, all that remains is to fill in the details...

...In one particularly egregious example the Post published some of Berkowitz's letters to an old girlfriend under the headlines, "HOW I BECAME A MASS KILLER...

...According to the New York Police Department, a 24year-old postal clerk named David R. Berkowitz is the Son of Sam...

...A possible analogy would be the manner in which certain celebrities become famous for being famous...

...If you strip away all the carnival hoopla which surrounded Sam's last three months at large, he was just another nut with a gun...

...Daily News...

...In N.Y...

...The question of what makes a story is the knottiest in journalism...

...Perhaps some psychiatrist will pinpoint the blown fuse, but I doubt it...

...Ke" e h .I D?J~176 a V_.-~ ' e s t with a strong llf~ "~ ~ " ~ ~/ackground...

...and Berkowitz's admission that he shot all those people because Satan, or a 6,000-year-old "Sam," or a "sign" told him to...

...The only thing I still remember with any clarity is a photo of Berkowitz, on the front page of the Times the morning after .the arrest...

...his mouth slightly open, delicate in shape, almost feminine...

...Consider Fata Morgana, Herzog's 1971 documentary on the southern Sahara...

...It took them long enough as it was...

...Furthermore, tabloid sensationalism is dangerous, encouraging Sam to kill more...

...August 1. Post...

...High among possible candidates would be the following: ---July 5. New York Daily News...

...Sam captured proved to be so chaotically loony he failed to sustain interest...

...Giving the press a story with so much mystery and violence is like offering an Are there people on other _ j ~ m o s t certainly," ~ _9 says the author...

...a Berkowitz neighbor who wanted $15,000 for an interview, and an old Berkowitz girlfriend who sold some of his letters to the News and the Post...

...In his films his approach to life seems very much the same...

...So they said...