Killer Celebrities

Abbott was a Utah forger, bank robber, and killer whose series of essay-letters to Norman Mailer about prison life were published by Random House in 1981, in a volume entitled In the Belly of the Beast. Abbott had come to Mailer’s attention a few years earlier when he learned that the novelist intended to write about Gary Gilmore, another self-publicizing Utah convict who had chosen to be executed rather than appeal his conviction for two murders.

It was a sensational case at the time: No American had been put to death judicially in the previous decade, and a 1972 Supreme Court ruling had found most state death-penalty statutes to be unconstitutional. Gilmore’s combination of bad-boy good looks, tough-guy bravado—when asked for his last words, he declared, “Let’s do it”—and choice of firing squad instead of hanging brought him renown and sacks of fan mail. It’s not difficult to see Norman Mailer’s attraction.

Abbott, however, informed Mailer that he thought Gilmore was something of a poseur and that Gilmore’s accounts of Utah prison life were largely imaginative. This seems to have had little effect on Mailer’s attitude toward Gilmore—which, in The Executioner’s Song (1979), earned him the inevitable Pulitzer Prize—but it did prompt Mailer to encourage Abbott to keep on writing, to raise interest among New York editors and publishers, and to lobby for Abbott’s parole, which was granted.

The second act of this particular drama has not been forgotten. On the night before the New York Times review of Abbott’s book appeared (in the rapturous words of Terrence Des Pres, In the Belly of the Beast was “awesome, brilliant, perversely ingenuous”), he and two women repaired to a Manhattan café where Abbott got into an argument with a 22-year-old actor-waiter named Richard Adan. Abbott ended the argument by stabbing Adan to death. At his trial, in the winter of 1982, Abbott was found guilty of Adan’s murder. He published yet another prison memoir five years later (My Return) and always failed to gain parole since he expressed no remorse for his crime and consistently blamed the prison system for his conduct. He finally murdered himself while still imprisoned, in 2002.

Abbott may have had a point about the long-term effects of incarceration, but what sticks in my memory is not the primordial nature of Jack Henry Abbott but the conduct of Norman Mailer. He and his wife Norris Church were regular attendants at Abbott’s Manhattan trial along with other celebrity supporter-admirers such as Jerzy Kosinski and Susan Sarandon. (For what it’s worth, some years later Sarandon named a son, fathered by actor Tim Robbins, Jack Henry.) You can admire Mailer for sticking by a protégé, in good times and bad, or regard his strikingly cold-blooded attitude toward the death of Richard Adan with a certain horror. Mailer did subsequently express misgivings about his interlude with Jack Henry Abbott, but characteristically they reflected entirely on his own predicament. It was, he told a reporter, “another episode in my life in which I can find nothing to cheer about or nothing to take pride in.”

What prompts these recollections of the Mailer-Abbott connection was last week’s long-delayed obituary of Edgar Smith, who died in a California prison hospital in March, age 83. Smith, like Abbott, was a talented psychopath and murderer; in contrast, however, he earned the allegiance not of a well-known left-wing writer like Norman Mailer but the godfather of modern conservatism, William F. Buckley Jr.—proving, I suppose, that gullibility knows no partisan boundaries.

Smith had been convicted of the grisly 1957 murder of a 15-year-old New Jersey high school student named Victoria Zielinski and sentenced to death. Like Abbott, Smith was a skilled jailhouse lawyer and indefatigable correspondent on his own behalf. And among the people he approached was Buckley, founding editor of National Review and not one, I should guess, predisposed to take up such causes. But Smith’s case—like many crimes, arrests, and convictions—featured its share of loose ends, imperfect policing, fallible memories, and reasonable doubt. Enough, indeed, that Buckley became persuaded of Smith’s innocence and asked, in a 1965 Esquire piece, “Doesn’t it strain the bounds of credibility that an essentially phlegmatic young man, of nonviolent habits, would so far lose control of himself, in the space of a minute or two, as to murder under such circumstances a 15-year-old girl he hardly knew?”

A less generous person than Buckley, such as myself, might respond, “Not at all. It happens quite frequently.” But Smith, like Abbott, was a capable writer—and shrewd enough to impart to Buckley, along with his detailed legal arguments, suggestions that he shared Buckley’s politics. In due course, Knopf published Smith’s account of his judicial ordeal—Brief Against Death (1968), with an introduction by Buckley—and three years later, after he produced a second volume (A Reasonable Doubt), New Jersey granted him the choice of a new trial or a guilty plea to second-degree murder and immediate release. He took the plea.

I was an undergraduate at the time and neither a regular reader of Buckley nor a viewer of his celebrated PBS interview program Firing Line. But the case was lavishly covered in the press, and I tracked down a television set in my dormitory—those were the days!—on the evening in December 1971 when Smith, very nearly fresh from prison, appeared on Firing Line.

Nearly a half-century later, I would like to say that I was immediately suspicious of Smith, whose manner and appearance did strike me as slightly unappetizing and whose answers to Buckley’s polite questions—especially about the guilty plea—were at best elliptical. But so what? Buckley had not argued that his guest was an angel, and years on death row had no doubt instilled a certain guardedness and guile. I accepted the notion that Edgar Smith might well have been wrongfully convicted and imbibed the useful lesson in life that people are not always as they seem.

The following chapter of the story may be predicted. In the next year Smith published a third volume (Getting Out) and became a frequent guest on radio and television shows and a popular campus speaker, lecturing from experience on penal reform. But celebrity is a two-edged sword: No doubt, Smith enjoyed his temporary status but was dangerously ill-prepared when the novelty wore off. He drifted to San Diego, drank heavily, worked sporadically—and one evening in 1976 kidnapped at gunpoint and stabbed a woman who managed to escape from his car. While still at large in Las Vegas, Smith got in touch with Buckley, who in turn contacted the FBI.

After his trial and conviction in California, Smith sought to ameliorate his sentence by presenting himself as a compulsive sex offender—and confessed to the 1957 murder in New Jersey. For his part, William F. Buckley Jr. was considerably more honest, and surely more straightforward, than Norman Mailer: He admitted that he had been deceived by Smith and regretted his role in the tragic aftermath.

Which, in retrospect, has ramifications beyond two squalid confidence men. Prisoners, especially prisoners who are innocent, have a rational impulse to plead for justice. And famous writers, whose charitable words can be persuasive, are natural objects of attention. Yet vanity is sometimes mixed with understanding, and writerly perception has its limits. For every Emile Zola who crusades for Alfred Dreyfus, there are Mailer and Abbott and Buckley and Smith, making cynics of us all.

Philip Terzian is a senior editor at THE WEEKLY STANDARD.