Chapter 23

OUT WHERE THE TV IS MADE

1

SALT LAKE TRIBUNE

Cover Execution? Not Barbara

Salt Lake, Jan. 7—Barbara Walters would be horrified if she were asked to cover the execution of Gary Gilmore next week. She would probably turn down the assignment.

Her co-anchor person Harry Reasoner, on the other hand, might move his job to Salt Lake City for the day.

In fact he believes this case should be given national attention by being televised live. “But only this one,” he said….

Early in January, on the night Schiller met Bill Moyers at the Utah Hotel in Salt Lake to discuss going on “CBS Reports,” he asked Tamera Smith to come along. She would, Schiller thought, jump at the occasion. This was the first payoff on all he had promised at her brother’s house. Moreover, he wanted to see how far he could get Moyers to commit himself in front of a stranger.

When they got to the table, Larry introduced her by name, and Moyers was cordial, but he didn’t make the connection to the Deseret News. Knew all about Vern Damico, and Kathryne Baker, but certainly wasn’t holding the names of the little players.

They had a table with this incredible view. There they were on top of the Hotel Utah fifteenth-story level, looking at the towers of the Mormon Temple across the street at the same height, most important Mormon temple in all the world. Those towers had floodlights on them that made the temple look like a castle—a very dramatic sight. Still, Schiller wasn’t altogether impressed. Chartres, when he saw it, had been a delight for his photographer’s eye, and there was always something beautiful about Notre Dame. But this Mormon Temple was the same from every angle. Just a massing upward, with lots of all-out pious feeling. High ambition. It did, however, have another kind of mystery. Schiller had heard you couldn’t visit the Mormon Temple the way a tourist might enter a famous cathedral. To get in, you had to be LDS in good standing with a key, which meant a Recommend by your local Bishop. It underlined how secret a society the Mormons really were.

Maybe it was the idea of this church you couldn’t enter, being right across the street, but Schiller got carried away and decided to gamble. As soon as the preliminaries were over, and Moyers said straight out that he wanted to interview Larry concerning the financial side of the execution of Gary Gilmore, he smiled nicely in reply, and said, “I don’t want you tearing me apart on your show.” Of course, as if he were a catcher, he could see the throw coming in slow motion from the outfield to home plate. “I have something,” he began, “which you want and I’ll give it to you. I’m going to let you read the transcripts of the Gilmore tapes, and pick three minutes for your show. But first, you have to understand my terms. I want you to take twenty minutes right now and listen while I tell you who I am, and what I am, and where my head is at. Then you can decide whether I’m a bona fide journalist or an exploiter.”

It wasn’t the easiest twenty-minute version of his life story to give. Next to a man like Moyers, Schiller considered himself naive in many ways. Still, he always looked at the positive side of things. So he gave Moyers his best shot. Emphasized the face of Larry Schiller that people did not know much about, the work he’d done on artificial kidneys, and on mercury pollution in Japan with the eminent photographer Eugene Smith. Told how his emotional involvement with such worthwhile subjects had changed his life more than others could recognize. There might have been years when he ran fast to come in first, but he was motivated now by the quality of his work. That had to be understood about him. When he felt he had reached Moyers to this degree, Schiller said, “I’m going to let you read the transcripts of Gary Gilmore’s interviews tonight, and you can select three”—he expanded that—“to five minutes’ worth of tape, only there are the following conditions: You can only use Gilmore’s voice, not the interviewer’s. Nor can you say on the show who is asking the questions.” Moyers nodded. “Then,” said Schiller, “I have the right to kill anything you pick. I’ll be reasonable, but I must have such control. I cannot give you carte blanche.” Moyers said, “What do you want in return?”

Schiller could see that Moyers was going to jump at it. He had to. There was not much TV in Salt Lake without Gilmore’s presence. “One,” said Schiller, “I want a journalistic background when you interview me. I want to be photographed in, let’s say, a newspaper office, at a typewriter, or on the phone. I need,” said Schiller, “such background to give me credibility. I have no control over how you’re going to editorialize about me. I may have a little control over what you film, because I know a lot about cutting, so I can see what you’ll be up to, but I have no control over what you, personally, say about me. Therefore, I need a visual background. The second thing is talk of money matters. That can only be discussed if I’m on the move.” “What,” asked Moyers, “do you mean by that?” “I have to be moving as I talk,” said Schiller, “either walking or driving. I will not discuss money matters sitting down.”

“Why not?”

“Because,” said Schiller, “no matter how you shoot it, I’m overweight. If you take me with a normal lens sitting behind a desk, I look like a money man. Shoot with a wide-angle lens and I’m King Farouk.” Moyers chuckled, then laughed. Schiller said, “If you’re willing to make such a deal, and, remember, I’m leaving myself wide open—because you can still say anything you want about me—then I will give you the transcripts. Read them tonight and pick what you want.”

Moyers could, of course, run off and Xerox the stuff. Moyers could do a lot of things, but Schiller trusted him. Besides, there was more than trust. Schiller was confident he could present himself well enough at the news level that Moyers would have bigger things to do with his show than expose him as a character.

Moreover, he had respect for Moyers’s integrity. He thought Moyers had made a pretty strong editor at Newsday. On the basis of being able to give that compliment, Schiller could also say to the man that he wasn’t necessarily going to make a very good “CBS Reports” personality. “You got to learn some acting, Bill.” Moyers said he was aware of the problem. He had even, he confessed, tried looking in the mirror when he spoke, which wasn’t his normal way of doing things.

They began to relax. Moyers mentioned, that in November, when he had first proposed Gary Gilmore to CBS, the word had been, “Do Fidel Castro. We want credibility for your new show.” Then, as Moyers got it from in-house gossip, somebody very big at CBS said to Frank Stanton, “Why not Gilmore? Everybody is talking about him.” Stanton kept saying no until he went to a meeting with Paley who declared, “That’s phenomenal. That’s what we want for Moyers, ratings.”

So Bill had moved his entire team to Provo, film editors and all, and planned to air “CBS Reports” the night of the execution. He figured they would get the top rating that night. Schiller was thinking: I have to sell myself as not being exploitative, but CBS, holier than thou, is going for the good old ratings.

2

Tamera found the dinner really special. When Larry told her they were having dinner with Bill Moyers she didn’t even know who the man was. When she found out, therefore, it was exciting. Not every day did you get to go to dinner with the man who managed press relations for President Johnson.

Up till then, she had been very relaxed. Actually, kind of bored. The men were talking business and she hadn’t felt included. She had had to fascinate herself by trying things on the menu of a sort she’d never eaten before. They all shared a Caesar Salad, for instance. Then, she had a soup something like cold borscht but awful, Gazpacho, she hated that, and, for entree, frogs’ legs. Dessert, she tried the Crêpes Suzettes. She really did try.

The frogs’ legs were pretty good, although actually the whole meal didn’t hit that well. Later, about four in the morning, she went out to Sambo’s and had a good old hamburger.

3

Next morning, Moyers came by to have breakfast, and said, “This is phenomenal. I want to do the entire show with your tapes.”

“No way,” said Schiller, but decided he had to throw Moyers a bone. “I have photographs of Gilmore in Maximum,” he said. “You can’t mention who took the pictures, but if you want to run a montage of stills, well, I won’t give you the prints, but I will shoot a movie film of the stills, provided you pay the lab costs. However, I must design it.”

Moyers’s producer hit the fucking ceiling. “This is news,” he declared, “not entertainment.” Moyers, however, went along with Schiller. After all, the man was giving up his own pictures.

Schiller figured he could design the montage to make Gilmore human, rather than a cold-blooded killer. There was a vulnerability he might be able to communicate. He wanted to get Gilmore before the public looking half-ass acceptable, anyway.

The problem was not that Gilmore was a killer. The problem was not even that he was challenging all the straight people out there. The real difficulty was that he was making fools of them. The public could live with a killer who was crazy, mixed-up, insane. But for a murderer to start controlling the issue—that was developing a lot of active hatred for Gilmore. People felt as if the world was being tipped on edge.

If Schiller was going to have a successful book and a successful film, he had to defuse the public animosity, and get across that there was a whole human quality about his man Gilmore. Every time he saw the reporters at the Hilton going monkey see, monkey do, and thought of the interviews he would have gone out to get if he had been on the job, he couldn’t believe it. They just didn’t do their work. Didn’t try to get an insight into Gary by interviewing the people who might be accessible. Instead, they sat around, drank, swapped stories, worked up a consensus, and thereby put a common evaluation on the story the way an open market arrived at a price. They all used the same few stories in common. Yet if he, Larry Schiller, were to offer examples of interesting human qualities in Gilmore, no one would accept them. They would say he was painting that nice picture for his own financial benefit. Therefore, he had to have the portrait painted by somebody else. Right now, that was going to be Bill Moyers.

4

Larry asked Tamera if they could use a desk at the Deseret News for the interview, and what with the shooting being done on a Saturday night, she didn’t have too hard a time getting permission. Hardly any of the staff was there.

This setup was just what Schiller wanted. He had a big city newsroom behind him all the while he spoke. There he was sitting at a desk, then a shot of him listening to a tape of Gary, then going to work on the typewriter. Moyers’s crew filmed away full blast.

Schiller was sitting in front of the news desk when Tamera came up during a break, and said, “You got to look at something.” Took him to a corner of the room and handed a tear of paper just come off the wire. ABC had pulled out. Fucking pulled out!

There it was, right on a wire service teletype. The President of ABC, Frank Pierce, was not producing any entertainment stories on Gary Gilmore. Incredible. It meant that ABC was 1) writing off seventy grand already spent, and 2) they were leaving Schiller up in the tree.

Now, the game was to finish the interview before Moyers saw that news story. The moment he did, the questions would come.

Schiller remembered a press conference in the Americana Hotel on the day he released the interview he had done with Jack Ruby. Right in the middle, a reporter had stood up and said, “Mr. Schiller, Jack Ruby just died. What do you have to say now?” He had had to give an extemporaneous answer in a hideously delicate situation. Awful. Now, he could practically hear Moyers: “Mr. Schiller, even though we both agree you are not an exploiter, ABC obviously thinks you are.” This was being done on CBS. They could slap ABC right along with him.

The moment there was a real break and they started moving the setup for a new angle, Schiller called a couple of ABC people in L.A. Nobody knew anything. “It’s right from the top,” said Schiller. “You guys better get prepared. Tomorrow morning they may be interviewing you.” He laid it in how they hadn’t been protecting his flanks.

Moyers never brought it up. He interviewed Schiller twice after that, but didn’t say a word. Schiller really respected him for that.

By morning, Schiller decided he might be in a good position. At least he wouldn’t have to deal with a TV show that would milk the real merits of the story. He still had the rights, and could do the book and the movie. All the same, he had to learn how it happened. It was too incredible. During the day, he found out that a top ABC executive’s wife was attending Columbia School of Journalism and came back one night indignant that the network was doing the Gary Gilmore story. She said to her husband, “How can you get into this? Exploiting history.” The top executive—they wouldn’t tell Schiller his name—never spoke to anybody on the West Coast, just told the New York office, “We’re not doing Gilmore as entertainment.” Of course, he was probably worried the FCC would go all over ABC’s ass. “Circus” was no word to face the government with.

5

Holed up in the motel room, ready to go crazy with the pain, Gibbs was still trying to get his story connected with a paper. Trouble was everyone he called spoke to Schiller.

Finally, he came to an agreement with the New York Post. For $7,500. Gibbs told them that he had a handwritten invitation from Gilmore to go to the execution, and lots of letters. The Post had a reporter out in Aspen covering the Claudine Longet trial, and wanted Gibbs to go there, but he was afraid of being recognized by Salt Lake reporters, so talked them into letting him stay at the Royal Inn in Boulder, Colorado. Said he would check in under the name Luciano.