Gilmore · MacDonald · Shakur · Kennedy · Nixon · Perry
And Spector, and Stone...a Robert Sam Anson reader
the true crime that's worth your time
The culture has struggled with its relationship to the true-crime genre from the beginning, of course, but it’s quite striking to read a dispatch from a preoccupying case of a bygone era and realize someone could have written it yesterday. I had that feeling while leafing — gently, wearing archival gloves — through a copy of the February 4, 1977 New Times magazine that I’d gotten in at the shop. The first few grafs of the late Robert Sam Anson’s “Death In Zion” struggle queasily with Anson’s assignment: to post up in Utah and cover the execution of Gary Gilmore. (The next few contend with the Uncannily Wholesome Valley that is Utah itself.)
Any meditation on Gilmore, his grimy crimes, “Old Testament” Utahn attitudes, the ironically short hop between the word “gentile” and “gentility,” the simultaneous disdain for and appetite of international press for feverishly vengeful American crime stories, etc. is like meditations on baseball and Las Vegas, in that it’s so overstuffed with symbols and parallels merely by existing that overwriting in a journalistic “diary” on the topic is almost a given. Mostly, though, Anson manages to avoid it — not an easy feat in a piece this length, on a story this wild, with appearances by Mikal Gilmore, Bill Moyers, Howard Cosell, Rupert “Murdock,” the Wobblies, Larry Schiller’s lizard belt, Geraldo Rivera, and a visit to the firing-squad site that, were it undertaken today, would be described in performatively somber, waiting-to-feel-something detail in the penultimate episode of a podcast season.
It’s functionally impossible to find “Death In Zion” in digitized form, but along about the fifth or sixth futile search string, finally I locked in on Robert Sam Anson’s name — he’s a genre-reporting hall-of-famer of the second half of the twentieth century. Anson, who died at the end of 2020, left his fingerprints (…as it were) all over any number of the 64-point cases of the last half century, so I’ve put together an Anson codex for your longreading delectation. Not everything’s available virtually and/or for free, or at least not that I could find and still clamber out of this wikihole in a timely fashion, but you can always
if you need a hand (or reach out to me via email; this is what I do). — SDB
Jeffrey MacDonald
“The Devil and Jeffrey MacDonald,” Vanity Fair // I’ve read this 1999 return to the murders of Colette, Kristen, and Kimberly MacDonald several times before, but it’s been some years. Anson’s take on MacDonald is fairly clear — he thinks the accused is an asshole — but he’s circumspect enough about his sense of MacDonald’s guilt, and for long enough, that it’s a compelling read even for deep readers on the case. I tore through the article, eager to see not just what less-often-cited facts Anson might choose to include
MacDonald occupied himself with finding someone who would write his life story—and who would turn over a hefty share of the royalties in the bargain. An early choice was Joseph Wambaugh, the L.A.RD. sergeant turned best-selling crime novelist. But that approach fell through after a meeting. "I had interviewed dozens and dozens of people who were survivors of horrific crimes— some immediately after the event, some many years later," Wambaugh recalled. "I had never, in all my experience, seen anyone describe an event like that in the almost cavalier manner that Dr. MacDonald described it." So MacDonald settled on Joe McGinniss, another renowned author (The Selling of the President, 1968), who'd written of frequently cheating on his wife, and of dreaming about the violent demise of their children.
Now all that remained was the trial, which did not go well.
but what conclusion, if any, he might draw from them — or from the fact that Janet Malcolm was, as of Anson’s writing, “now corresponding regularly with MacDonald and admitting she'd become one of his ‘groupies.’” Or that Anson cites “Ruth Shalit, author of a 1997 New Republic article drawn from material provided by [Fatal Justice author Fred] Bost and [MacDonald appellate attorney Harvey] Silverglate.” Probably a value-neutral allusion when Anson wrote it, but: still.
Tupac Shakur
“To Die Like A Gangsta,” Vanity Fair // Anson doesn’t try to do too much here, either, which is the only smart play — although I wouldn’t mind reading an oral history of the writing and editing of the piece, given the clipped diction and the heavy reliance on Kevin Powell’s work for Vibe for Tupac quotes. (And on the fact that every single obit mentions a) Anson’s “difficult” rep and b) how that helped him steer Los Angeles Magazine into the ground in record time.) Anson does have a way of getting that one anecdote or detail you haven’t heard a gazillion times, though:
[Shakur] had quieter times, such as the night on the road he sneaked off with Shock[-G, Shakur’s friend in Digital Underground] and a couple of girls to the dark of the tour bus. As Shock snuggled with his date, he heard Tupac whispering a few rows up. "I'm thinkin' he's gettin' it on with this young lady," says Shock, "but then I listen. He's explaining Terms of Endearment to her, real low, so, like, I won't hear. I almost laughed. What does Pac know about Terms of Endearment?"
If you have a Discovery+ subscription, you can watch Anson talking about the case on Vanity Fair Confidential S02.E09, “Death of a Warrior Poet” (he’s also in a S1 episode about Phil Spector).
Presidents
“They’ve Killed The President!”: The Search for the Murderers of John F. Kennedy // I haven’t read it, and I didn’t expect to “remedy” that, because CIA-conspiracy theories about this assassination just wear me out. A contemporary review in the NYT, however, implies that, while Anson felt the Warren Report was a cover-up, he also felt that proceeded
probably from benign rather than sinister motives, and he works from that general perspective. His main tactic is simply to assemble all of the arguments, theories and evidence that critics of the commission have advanced over the years. accepting the more reasonable and dismissing the flaky and the softheaded (most notably those arising from the investigation of Jim Garrison in New Orleans). The overall impact is remarkable.
Huh. Okay, well, if it crosses my desk I might stop it, then. That, and…
“The Shooting Of JFK,” Esquire // The November 1991 piece is a chronicle of the film, not murder of the man, although not everyone cares to make that distinction.
It’s also kind of mind-boggling to recall that JFK was controversial, a cultural wedge issue that people who should have had better things to do (including, if I may, Stone himself) got splenetic about on Meet The Press.
Some have ridiculed his film (“Dances with Facts”); others have recommended that it be boycotted.
This has not stopped Oliver Stone. Giving as good as he’s gotten, he’s branded one critic a CIA agent, accused another of theft, and ventured the view that a vast, powerful plot is working hammer and tongs against him. He’s cited Aristotle, Pontius Pilate, and Allen Dulles in defending his film, and likened himself to figures ranging from Orson Welles to William Shakespeare. Along the way, he has also charged past and present elements of his own government with conspiracy, murder, obstruction of justice, and aiding and abetting a felony before and after the fact—not to mention maintaining a laboratory in suburban Maryland where ex-Nazi scientists devise lethal cancer serums to silence bothersome opponents.
The profile goes on to furnish an “undisputed” timeline of November 22, 1963, a brisk bio of Stone in the 1960s and early ’70s, and the main players in the Jim Garrison book that set Stone on his cinematic journey.
Exile: The Unquiet Oblivion of Richard M. Nixon // I just finished re-reading The Final Days; the publisher’s summary would have me believe Exile picks up where TFD left off. Some of the typos that persist across the internet in copy describing the book aren’t terribly encouraging —
Driven from office in disgrace, this strange, tough, determined, brilliant man made a dramatic comeback from physical and mental injury, eventually emerging from his elf-imprisonment to confound his critics and enemies. Picking up where The Final Days left off, Robert Sam Anson describes Nixon's private anguish, his legal and financial struggles, his loyal family, the behind-the-scenes drama of Gerald Ford's pardon, the catharsis of Nixon's interviews with David Frost, and his relationships with his fellow conspirators, with Presidents Reagan, ford, and Carter, and with Henry Kissinger and Alexander Haig.
— especially when you’re forced to accept that Exile is not the story of Tricky Dick getting treed by the Republic of Keebler’s Department of Homeland Security (hee), but I do find profiles of Nixon fascinating and if this one comes into inventory, I might pull it out of line too.
…everything else
ROBERT SAM ANSON: “HERE ARE 12 THINGS I LEARNED DURING THE 10 MINUTES OR SO I WAS EDITOR OF LOS ANGELES MAGAZINE.” // I Googled up, down, and sideways for Anson’s Time pieces on the Tate-LaBianca murders; organized crime; and various other true-crime topics I’d seen hinted at in his obituaries, but the closest I could really get to that first thing was a correspondence with Jack Limpert. The dateline on this is a bit confusing, as Limpert implies he’d just been emailing with Anson a couple weeks prior to his death — which seems unlikely, given that the cause of said death was evidently a long battle with dementia, but I suppose it isn’t impossible, given the memories Anson was asked to access (my mother could identify out-of-focus people in photos from her sister’s wedding; it was info she’d been given minutes before that was a challenge).
In any event, it’s primarily notable for Anson’s inside-media-baseball words of wisdom on his embattled tenure at L.A. Mag, but if anyone wants to try their own set of search strings on the other stories mentioned, this isn’t the worst starting point.
I was hired in late March 1995 by publisher Joan McCraw at a time when Los Angeles [assuming he means the mag here] was owned by Cap Cities-ABC. I was then in the middle of what was—rightly—expected to be a not terribly friendly book about Michael Eisner’s management of the Walt Disney Company.1
Why did I want the job? Well for starters, I loved Los Angeles, believe it or not, and knew the city pretty well, both from my Disney investigations (doing this book was like mounting the Normandy Invasion), but from frequent reporting expeditions for a variety of national magazines, especially New Times and Esquire.
Also, I’d been hired by Time as a correspondent right out of college, and the L.A. bureau was my first posting. I was there from 1967 to 1969 and covered politics (Tom Bradley’s first run for mayor, and Bob Kennedy’s 1968 primary campaign), organized crime, and a smorgasbord of mayhem, including the Sharon Tate killings (Polanski lived a few blocks away from me in Benedict Canyon, and bodies were still on the lawn when I arrived), racial disturbances, Bobby’s assassination, the Santa Barbara channel oil spill, and well, you name it. I was just a kid and had tremendous fun.
And finally, the only Anson work I currently stock besides the New Times issue, which I think was under consideration as a review topic last month but didn’t make the cut:
Best Intentions: The Education and Killing of Edmund Perry // The shooting of Perry by Lee Van Houten in Morningside Heights in June of 1985 has fallen somewhat below the horizon, but showed up constantly in other media in the late eighties through to the early nineties. In addition to Anson’s book, there’s a Law & Order episode, a dedication in Do The Right Thing, the assertion that Michael Jackson’s “Bad” is a murder ballad inspired by Perry’s death, and more. Other cases that occupied nightly-news broadcasts at around that time seem to have persisted more in the shorthand of area natives for Ed Koch’s New York, which is interesting. — SDB
Friday on Best Evidence: ChatGPT subs in for Eve! …jk, but it IS an all-tech issue.
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IINM, the project got killed and Anson sued the publisher