The Journalist and the Murderer Read Online Free

the answer to a prayer one had no longer thought worth uttering. The dovetailing of desires was remarkable: McGinniss would get his insider’s spot (“I wouldn’t have wanted to just go to the trial and sit out there with the other reporters,” he told me. “I wanted to do it from the inside looking out, and I wanted total access to MacDonald and his lawyers”), and MacDonald would get his money.In the deal that was presently struck—presided over by Segal and Sterling Lord, McGinniss’s agent, who had got McGinniss a contract with the Dell/Delacorte publishing company and his three-hundred-thousand-dollar advance—McGinniss would receive not only total access but also a written promise of exclusivity and a release from all legal liability: MacDonald would lend himself to no other writer and would not sue McGinniss for libel if he didn’t like what was written. For his part, MacDonald would receive twenty-six and a half per cent of the advance and thirty-three per cent of the royalties. The arrangement was a kind of reification of the hopes and good intentions that writers and subjects normally exchange at the beginning of their enterprise. The money that MacDonald was to get was simply a more tangible manifestation of the reward that every subject expects to receive at the end of the project—why else would he lend himself to it? And, similarly, the written assurances that McGinniss received from MacDonald were no different from the tacit ones that writers normally receive from subjects: It is
understood
that the subject will not sue, and that he will not faithlessly go to another writer.
    It is understood—and yet it is also known that subjects do sometimes sue writers, and that they do sometimes leave one writer for another, or abruptly break off the interviews. It is the latter eventuality, with its immediate disastrous effect on his project, that causes the writer the greatest anxiety (a lawsuit can occur only after the project is completed, in some hazy distant future) and impels him toward the devices and disingenuousnesses that came under such unprecedentedly close scrutiny in the MacDonald-McGinniss lawsuit. But the writer isn’t alone in his anxiety. Even as he is worriedly striving to keep the subjecttalking, the subject is worriedly striving to keep the writer
listening
. The subject is Scheherazade. He lives in fear of being found uninteresting, and many of the strange things that subjects say to writers—things of almost suicidal rashness—they say out of their desperate need to keep the writer’s attention riveted. In the MacDonald-McGinniss encounter—the encounter of a man accused of a terrible crime with a journalist whom he tries to keep listening to his tale of innocence—we have a grotesquely magnified version of the normal journalistic encounter. Even though the crimes to which the normal subject pleads innocent—vanity, hypocrisy, pomposity, inanity, mediocrity—are less serious than those of which MacDonald stood accused, the outcome tends to be the same: as MacDonald’s tale ultimately failed to hold McGinniss—whose attention soon shifted to the rhetorically superior story of the prosecution—so do the majority of stories told to journalists fail of their object. The writer ultimately tires of the subject’s self-serving story, and substitutes a story of his own. The story of subject and writer is the Scheherazade story with a bad ending: in almost no case does the subject manage to, as it were, save himself.
    A S IF sensing the deeper structures of the Devil’s pact he was brokering between MacDonald and McGinniss, Segal, when called upon to approve a release from McGinniss’s publisher, scribbled in a proviso whose language, on first reading, seems oddly ambiguous for a lawyer to use. The release was dated August 3, 1979, and was written in the form of a letter from MacDonald to McGinniss which began, “I understand you are writing a book about my lifecentering on my