Slouching Towards Bethlehem Read online

  That was the sin, more than the adultery, which tended to reinforce the one for which she was being tried. It was implicit in both the defense and the prosecution that Lucille Miller was an erring woman, a woman who perhaps wanted too much. But to the prosecution she was not merely a woman who would want a new house and want to go to parties and run up high telephone bills ($1, 152 in ten months), but a woman who would go so far as to murder her husband for his $80, 000 in insurance, making it appear an accident in order to collect another $40, 000 in double indemnity and straight accident policies. To Turner she was a woman who did not want simply her freedom and a reasonable alimony (she could have had that, the defense contended, by going through with her divorce suit), but wanted everything, a woman motivated by “love and greed.” She was a “manipulator.” She was a “user of people.”

  To Edward Foley, on the other hand, she was an impulsive woman who “couldn’t control her foolish little heart.” Where Turner skirted the pregnancy, Foley dwelt upon it, even calling the dead man’s mother down from Washington to testify that her son had told her they were going to have another baby because Lucille felt that it would “do much to weld our home again in the pleasant relations that we used to have.” Where the prosecution saw a “calculator,” the defense saw a “blabbermouth,” and in fact Lucille Miller did emerge as an ingenuous conversationalist. Just as, before her husband’s death, she had confided in her friends about her love affair, so she chatted about it after his death, with the arresting sergeant. “Of course Cork lived with it for years, you know,” her voice was heard to tell Sergeant Paterson on a tape made the morning after her arrest. “After Elaine died, he pushed the panic button one night and just asked me right out, and that, I think, was when he really—the first time he really faced it.” When the sergeant asked why she had agreed to talk to him, against the specific instructions of her lawyers, Lucille Miller said airily, “Oh, I’ve always been basically quite an honest person....I mean I can put a hat in the cupboard and say it cost ten dollars less, but basically I’ve always kind of just lived my life the way I wanted to, and if you don’t like it you can take off.”

  The prosecution hinted at men other than Arthwell, and even, over Foley’s objections, managed to name one. The defense called Miller suicidal. The prosecution produced experts who said that the Volkswagen fire could not have been accidental. Foley produced witnesses who said that it could have been. Lucille’s father, now a junior-high-school teacher in Oregon, quoted Isaiah to reporters: “Every tongue that shall rise against thee in judgment thou shalt condemn? “Lucille did wrong, her affair,” her mother said judiciously. “With her it was love. But with some I guess it’s just passion.” There was Debbie, the Millers’ fourteen-year-old, testifying in a steady voice about how she and her mother had gone to a supermarket to buy the gasoline can the week before the accident. There was Sandy Slagle, in the courtroom every day, declaring that on at least one occasion Lucille Miller had prevented her husband not only from committing suicide but from committing suicide in such a way that it would appear an accident and ensure the double-indemnity payment. There was Wenche Berg, the pretty twenty-seven-year-old Norwegian governess to Arthwell Hayton’s children, testifying that Arthwell had instructed her not to allow Lucille Miller to see or talk to the children.

  Two months dragged by, and the headlines never stopped. Southern California’s crime reporters were headquartered in San Bernardino for the duration: Howard Hertel from the Times, Jim Bennett and Eddy Jo Bernal from the Herald-Examiner. Two months in which the Miller trial was pushed off the Examiner’s front page only by the Academy Award nominations and Stan Laurel’s death. And finally, on March 2, after Turner had reiterated that it was a case of “love and greed,” and Foley had protested that his client was being tried for adultery, the case went to the jury.

  They brought in the verdict, guilty of murder in the first degree, at 4:50 p. m. on March 5. “She didn’t do it,” Debbie Miller cried, jumping up from the spectators’ section. “She didn’t do it.” Sandy Slagle collapsed in her seat and began to scream. “Sandy, for God’s sake please don’t” Lucille Miller said in a voice that carried across the courtroom, and Sandy Slagle was momentarily subdued. But as the jurors left the courtroom she screamed again: “You’re murderers....Every last one of you is a murderer!’ Sheriff’s deputies moved in then, each wearing a string tie that read “1965 SHERIFF ‘S RODEO,” and Lucille Miller’s father, that sad-faced junior-high-school teacher who believed in the word of Christ and the dangers of wanting to see the world, blew her a kiss off his fingertips.

  The California Institution for Women at Frontera, where Lucille Miller is now, lies down where Euclid Avenue turns into country road, not too many miles from where she once lived and shopped and organized the Heart Fund Ball. Cattle graze across the road, and Rainbirds sprinkle the alfalfa. Frontera has a softball field andtennis courts, and looks as if it might be a California junior college, except that the trees are not yet high enough to conceal the concertina wire around the top of the Cyclone fence. On visitors’ day there are big cars in the parking area, big Buicks and Pontiacs that belong to grandparents and sisters and fathers (not many of them belong to husbands), and some of them have bumper stickers that say “SUPPORT YOUR LOCAL POLICE.”

  A lot of California murderesses live here, a lot of girls who somehow misunderstood the promise. Don Turner put Sandra Garner here (and her husband in the gas chamber at San Quentin) after the 1959 desert killings known to crime reporters as “the soda-pop murders.” Carole Tregoff is here, and has been ever since she was convicted of conspiring to murder Dr. Finch’s wife in West Covina, which is not too far from San Bernardino. Carole Tregoff is in fact a nurse’s aide in the prison hospital, and might have attended Lucille Miller had her baby been born at Frontera; Lucille Miller chose instead to have it outside, and paid for the guard who stood outside the delivery room in St. Bernardine’s Hospital. Debbie Miller came to take the baby home from the hospital, in a white dress with pink ribbons, and Debbie was allowed to choose a name. She named the baby Kimi Kai. The children live with Harold and Joan Lance now, because Lucille Miller will probably spend ten years at Frontera. Don Turner waived his original request for the death penalty (it was generally agreed that he had demanded it only, in Edward Foley’s words, “to get anybody with the slightest trace of human kindness in their veins off the jury”), and settled for life imprisonment with the possibility of parole. Lucille Miller does not like it at Frontera, and has had trouble adjusting. “She’s going to have to learn humility/’Turner says.” She’s going to have to use her ability to charm, to manipulate.”

  The new house is empty now, the house on the street with the sign that says

  PRIVATE ROAD

  BELLA VISTA

  DEAD END

  The Millers never did get it landscaped, and weeds grow up around the fieldstone siding. The television aerial has toppled on the roof, and a trash can is stuffed with the debris of family life: a cheap suitcase, a child’s game called “Lie Detector.” There is a sign on what would have been the lawn, and the sign reads “ESTATE SALE.” Edward Foley is trying to get Lucille Miller’s case appealed, but there have been delays. “A trial always comes down to a matter of sympathy,” Foley says wearily now.” I couldn’t create sympathy for her.” Everyone is a little weary now, weary and resigned, everyone except Sandy Slagle, whose bitterness is still raw. She lives in an apartment near the medical school in Loma Linda, and studies reports of the case in True Police Cases and Official Detective Stories. “I’d much rather we not talk about the Hayton business too much,” she tells visitors, and she keeps a tape recorder running. “I’d rather talk about Lucille and what a wonderful person she is and how her rights were violated.” Harold Lance does not talk to visitors at all. “We don’t want to give away what we can sell,” he explains pleasantly; an attempt was made to sell Lucille Miller’s personal story to Life, but Life did not want to buy it. In the district attorne
y’s offices they are prosecuting other murders now, and do not see why the Miller trial attracted so much attention. “It wasn’t a very interesting murder as murders go,” Don Turner says laconically. Elaine Hayton’s death is no longer under investigation. “We know everything we want to know,” Turner says.

  Arthwell Hayton’s office is directly below Edward Foley’s. Some people around San Bernardino say that Arthwell Hayton suffered; others say that he did not suffer at all. Perhaps he did not, for time past is not believed to have any bearing upon time present or future, out in the golden land where every day the world is born anew. In any case, on October 17, 1965, Arthwell Hayton married again, married his children’s pretty governess, Wenche Berg, at a service in the Chapel of the Roses at a retirement village near Riverside. Later the newlyweds were feted at a reception for seventy-five in the dining room of Rose Garden Village. The bridegroom was in black tie, with a white carnation in his buttonhole. The bride wore a long white peau de soie dress and carried a shower bouquet of sweetheart roses with stephanotis streamers. A coronet of seed pearls held her illusion veil.

  John Wayne: A Love Song

  IN THE SUMMER of 1943 I was eight, and my father and mother and small brother and I were at Peterson Field in Colorado Springs. A hot wind blew through that summer, blew until it seemed that before August broke, all the dust in Kansas would be in Colorado, would have drifted over the tar-paper barracks and the temporary strip and stopped only when it hit Pikes Peak. There was not much to do, a summer like that: there was the day they brought in the first B-29, an event to remember but scarcely a vacation program. There was an Officers’ Club, but no swimming pool; all the Officers’ Club had of interest was artificial blue rain behind the bar. The rain interested me a good deal, but I could not spend the summer watching it, and so we went, my brother and I, to the movies.

  We went three and four afternoons a week, sat on folding chairs in the darkened Quonset hut which served as a theater, and it was there, that summer of 1943 while the hot wind blew outside, that I first saw John Wayne. Saw the walk, heard the voice. Heard him tell the girl in a picture called War of the Wildcats that he would build her a house, “at the bend in the river where the cottonwoods grow.” As it happened I did not grow up to be the kind of woman who is the heroine in a Western, and although the men I have known have had many virtues and have taken me to live in many places I have come to love, they have never been John Wayne, and they have never taken me to that bend in the river where the cottonwoods grow. Deep in that part of my heart where the artificial rain forever falls, that is still the line I wait to hear.

  I tell you this neither in a spirit of self-revelation nor as an exercise in total recall, but simply to demonstrate that when John Wayne rode through my childhood, and perhaps through yours, he determined forever the shape of certain of our dreams. It did not seem possible that such a man could fall ill, could carry within him that most inexplicable and ungovernable of diseases. The rumor struck some obscure anxiety, threw our very childhoods into question. In John Waynes world, John Wayne was supposed to give the orders. “Let’s ride,” he said, and “Saddle up.” “Forward ho” and “A man’s gotta do what he’s got to do.” “Hello, there,” he said when he first saw the girl, in a construction camp or on a train or just standing around on the front porch waiting for somebody to ride up through the tall grass. When John Wayne spoke, there was no mistaking his intentions; he had a sexual authority so strong that even a child could perceive it. And in a world we understood early to be characterized by venality and doubt and paralyzing ambiguities, he suggested another world, one which may or may not have existed ever but in any case existed no more: a place where a man could move free, could make his own code and live by it; a world in which, if a man did what he had to do, he could one day take the girl and go riding through the draw and find himself home free, not in a hospital with something going wrong inside, not in a high bed with the flowers and the drugs and the forced smiles, but there at the bend in the bright river, the cottonwoods shimmering in the early morning sun.

  “Hello, there.” Where did he come from, before the tall grass? Even his history seemed right, for it was no history at all, nothing to intrude upon the dream. Born Marion Morrison in Winterset, Iowa, the son of a druggist. Moved as a child to Lancaster, California, part of the migration to that promised land sometimes called “the west coast of Iowa.” Not that Lancaster was the promise fulfilled; Lancaster was a town on the Mojave where the dust blew through. But Lancaster was still California, and it was only a year from there to Glendale, where desolation had a different flavor: antimacassars among the orange groves, a middle-class prelude to Forest Lawn. Imagine Marion Morrison in Glendale. A Boy Scout, then a student at Glendale High. A tackle for U. S. C. , a Sigma Chi. Summer vacations, a job moving props on the old Fox lot. There, a meeting with John Ford, one of the several directors who were to sense that into this perfect mold might be poured the inarticulate longings of a nation wondering at just what pass the trail had been lost. “Dammit,” said Raoul Walsh later, “the son of a bitch looked like a man.” And so after a while the boy from Glendale became a star. He did not become an actor, as he has always been careful to point out to interviewers (“How many times do I gotta tell you, I don’t act at all, I re-act”), but a star, and the star called John Wayne would spend most of the rest of his life with one or another of those directors, out on some forsaken location, in search of the dream.

  Out where the skies are a trifle bluer Out where friendships a little truer That’s where the West begins.

  Nothing very bad could happen in the dream, nothing a man could not face down. But something did. There it was, the rumor, and after a while the headlines. “I licked the Big C,” John Wayne announced, as John Wayne would, reducing those outlaw cells to the level of any other outlaws, but even so we all sensed that this would be the one unpredictable confrontation, the one shootout Wayne could lose. I have as much trouble as the next person with illusion and reality, and I did not much want to see John Wayne when he must be (or so I thought) having some trouble with it himself, but I did, and it was down in Mexico when he was making the picture his illness had so long delayed, down in the very country of the dream.

  It was John Wayne’s 165 th picture. It was Henry Hathaway s 84th. It was number 34 for Dean Martin, who was working off an old contract to Hal Wallis, for whom it was independent production number 65. It was called The Sons of Katie Elder, and it was a Western, and after the three-month delay they had finally shot the exteriors up in Durango, and now they were in the waning days of interior shooting at Estudio Churubusco outside Mexico City, and the sun was hot and the air was clear and it was lunch-time. Out under the pepper trees the boys from the Mexican crew sat around sucking caramels, and down the road some of the technical men sat around a place which served a stuffed lobster and a glass of tequila for one dollar American, but it was inside the cavernous empty commissary where the talent sat around, the reasons for the exercise, all sitting around the big table picking at huevos con queso and Carta Blanca beer. Dean Martin, unshaven. Mack Gray, who goes where Martin goes. Bob Goodfried, who was in charge of Paramount publicity and who had flown down to arrange for a trailer and who had a delicate stomach. “Tea and toast,” he warned repeatedly. “That’s the ticket. You can’t trust the lettuce.” And Henry Hathaway, the director, who did not seem to be listening to Goodfried. And John Wayne, who did not seem to be listening to anyone.

  “This week’s gone slow,” Dean Martin said, for the third time.

  “How can you say that?” Mack Gray demanded.

  “This...week’s...gone...slow, that’s how I can say it.”

  “You don’t mean you want it to end.”

  “I’ll say it right out, Mack, I want it to end. Tomorrow night I shave this beard, I head for the airport, I say adios amigos! Bye-bye muchachos!”

  Henry Hathaway lit a cigar and patted Martin’s arm fondly. “Not tomorrow, Dino.”

&
nbsp; “Henry, what are you planning to add? A World War?”

  Hathaway patted Martin’s arm again and gazed into the middle distance. At the end of the table someone mentioned a man who, some years before, had tried unsuccessfully to blow up an airplane.

  “He’s still in jail,” Hathaway said suddenly.

  “Injail?”Martin was momentarily distracted from the question whether to send his golf clubs back with Bob Goodfried or consign them to Mack Gray. “What’s he in jail for if nobody got killed?”

  “Attempted murder, Dino,” Hathaway said gently. “A felony.”

  “You mean some guy just tried to kill me he’d end up in jail?”

  Hathaway removed the cigar from his mouth and looked across the table. “Some guy just tried to kill me he wouldn’t end up in jail. How about you, Duke?”

  Very slowly, the object of Hathaway’s query wiped his mouth, pushed back his chair, and stood up. It was the real thing, the authentic article, the move which had climaxed a thousand scenes on 165 flickering frontiers and phantasmagoric battlefields before, and it was about to climax this one, in the commissary at Estudio Churubusco outside Mexico City. “Right,” John Wayne drawled. “I’d kill him.”

  Almost all the cast of Katie Elder had gone home, that last week; only the principals were left, Wayne, and Martin, and Earl Holliman, and Michael Anderson, Jr. , and Martha Hyer. Martha Hyer was not around much, but every now and then someone referred to her, usually as “the girl.” They had all been together nine weeks, six of them in Durango. Mexico City was not quite Durango; wives like to come along to places like Mexico City, like to shop for handbags, go to parties at Merle Oberon Pagliai’s, like to look at her paintings. But Durango. The very name hallucinates. Man’s country. Out where the West begins. There had been ahuehuete trees in Durango; a waterfall, rattlesnakes. There had been weather, nights so cold that they had postponed one or two exteriors until they could shoot inside at Churubusco. “It was the girl,” they explained. “You couldn’t keep the girl out in cold like that.” Henry Hathaway had cooked in Durango, gazpacho and ribs and the steaks that Dean Martin had ordered flown down from the Sands; he had wanted to cook in Mexico City, but the management of the Hotel Bamer refused to let him set up a brick barbecue in his room. “You really missed something, Durango” they would say, sometimes joking and sometimes not, until it became a refrain, Eden lost.