PENTHOUSE WORLD MEDIA - Key Persons
Anjelica Huston had agreed to testify for the prosecution if the district attorney's office would drop the drug charges against her. Gunson's case was strong. There were photos of the little girl sprawled in a Jacuzzi as she sipped champagne. There were semen-stained panties. And there was Huston's promised testimony. Still, Gunson wanted the girl on the stand as a willing, not a reluctant, witness. Her family had now begun putting real pressure on the district attorney's office for a plea-bargaining agreement. But there was an immediate obstacle to this: the district attorney, John Van de Kamp, had made it public policy that no plea bargaining be considered unless it concerned the most serious of the charges leveled against a defendant. Polanski faced very serious charges and was unwilling to plead to the most serious.
Gunson was not happy about accepting a plea bargain: he believed in his case and wanted to go to trial, provided that the girl and her mother would testify. Sources close to him later said that he had wanted to drop the whole thing if the victim wouldn't take the stand. It was evident, though, that Polanski was too public a figure for this to be possible.
Both sides reluctantly pressed to win the best terms they could. In the course of plea-bargaining negotiations, Dalton twice privately repeated an offer whereby, as part of the rehabilitation process, Polanski would voluntarily found and fund a theater-arts school for disadvantaged children, where he would also teach. "That would be a nifty place for a child molester!" grumbled a member of the prosecution team. Dalton's offer wasn't taken up.
By early August, however, a plea-bargain had been arranged. On August 8, the day before the scheduled start of his trial, Polanski appeared in Santa Monica court to change his plea to guilty on a single charge: the least serious one of the six original counts, "unlawful sexual intercourse." He had not wanted to plead guilty to any of them, and even this count could result in his deportation, but Dalton had convinced him that he must compromise.
Gunson wasn't happy either. The girl's family threatened not to appear if Polanski's plea was not accepted. Gunson went into court determined that the girl's story would not be forgotten or tossed aside. He had made up his mind that Polanski would not be able to walk out of the courtroom and say afterward that he hadn't done anything. It had to be made clear that Polanski had ravished the child and had admitted it publicly. For this reason, the conditions under which Polanski's guilty plea was accepted were unusual. First, he was required to enter the plea under oath - an unusual step - specifying precisely to what he pleaded guilty. Gunson wanted no ambiguity. So, after taking the oath, Polanski stood before Judge Rittenband and said, "I had sex with a female person, not my wife, under the age of eighteen. She was the complaining witness."
When he had finished, Gunson read Polanski a long list of questions, each of which he answered. "On March 10, 1977," asked Gunson, "the day you had intercourse with the complaining witness, how old did you believe her to be?" "I understand she was thirteen," Polanski said. "Did you know she was thirteen years of age then?" Gunson continued. "Yes." Polanski also said he knew that his plea of guilty carried a possible sentence of 1 to 50 years in state prison and that he could be deported.
Bill Burr has come a long way since he told a Philadelphia audience to go ahead and die on the way home from his comedy show back in 2006. And that was one of the kinder sentiments he conveyed that night. In an epic, 14-minute rant at a hostile crowd during an Opie and Anthony tour stop, Burr unleashed a scorched-Earth tirade on the City of Brotherly Love that must be seen to be believed (try YouTube). Some of the gentler moments included, "The terrorists will never bomb you people, because you're fucking worthless!" and "You one-bridge-having piece-of-shit city that no one fucking cares about." It was a tour de force of improvised bile-spewing that, remarkably, never repeated itself and, even more remarkably, eventually won over the crowd.
But the Boston comic insists that legendary beat-down is no longer his signature moment, and he's right. Burr is still a relentless road comic, he has two DV D specials, and he's moved on to the roles of amateur psychologist and aspiring actor. His short film Cheat debuted at the Tribeca Film Festival this spring (which Burr calls the "March Madness of film festivals"), his "Monday Morning Pod cast" has a cult following, and he's landed a guest role on the upcoming season of the Emmy-winning AMC series Breaking Bad. Yes, that dark, fucking hilarious night of the soul in Philly is long gone.
We found that out in a recent chat with Burr. during which he also told us about his busy schedule, helping hopeless romantics fall out of love, and how he's dealing with the tyranny of Twitter.
I flipped by the movie Date Night recently, and there you were, playing a desk cop. I was thinking, Bill Burr's an actor?
I will probably play a lot of cops or hairy best friends. Do you really think you're going to see a redheaded male lead in an action movie? That's truly when all groups will be able to celebrate that Hollywood has finally stopped with the stereotyping. Of course, then no one would go see the movie.
Bruce Eberle's mysterious entry into the case remains intriguing but difficult to assess. Typically, Jones says that she has little or no recollection of the circumstances under which Eberle suddenly volunteered to raise money for her. "I'm not so sure how we got connected," she replies with a sigh. "Do you know? Can you tell me?"
Despite an agreement with Penthouse to disclose the fund's complete records, her present lawyers have provided only a few documents of any interest (including a brochure and testimonial letters promoting the Eberle firm). Those documents do suggest that the Jones camp had ties to organizations and individuals connected with Richard Mellon Scaife, the notorious Clinton-hating Pittsburgh billionaire.
For example, the Legal Fund file includes two photocopied checks sent in October and November 1995 from the Fund for Living American Government, an obscure Washington, D.C., "charitable" group run by a Scaife attorney named William J. Lehrfeld. The checks, totaling $50,000, were made out to Joe Cammarata and were accompanied by a letter from Lehrfeld reminding the Jones attorney that he had signed an agreement to provide FLAG with a "suitable accounting of fees, expenses and costs… out of the grant funds… to assure and confirm the charitability of this grant."
In the same file is a letter from the Southeastern Legal Foundation to Bruce Eberle, praising the fundraiser's work on behalf of the conservative legal group and its star client, former FBI agent Gary Aldrich. Aldrich had written a best-selling (and largely fictional) book about his service in the Clinton White House. His resulting legal difficulties were handled by Southeastern-the single largest contributor to which is a foundation controlled by Scaife.
These are tantalizing hints of the forces behind the Jones lawsuit, but it is clear that the plaintiff herself has only the vaguest notion about such matters. "I didn't even know what a conservative or a liberal was," she says, giggling. "Somebody had to explain it to me."
The Eberle firm's intervention certainly helped to keep the case going after the settlement was rejected and Jones's original lawyers quit. The plaintiff herself confirms that around the same time she declined Clinton's offer, Eberle promised to raise more than $300,000. According to news reports, he also made an extraordinary down payment of $100,000 to the Legal Fund-before a single fundraising letter had been mailed.
(A copy of the contract between the direct-mail firm and Jones shows that Eberle did make a "cash advance" to her legal fund within ten days after the deal was signed, but the amount could not be verified because Jones's current attorneys redacted all financial figures, citing a prior confidentiality agreement with Eberle.)
All of that money is long gone, and Paula Jones still has to pay the $20,000-plus to the IRS. On top of that, her legal expenses are mounting as she fights off lawsuits in Virginia and Colorado related to the Legal Fund. But regardless of the cost, she says she doesn't regret suing the president. "I'm glad it's over with, that's for sure," she says, "and I wish it could have been over with a lot sooner. I'm not looking for fame or fortune or anything like that."
Gary Allan has bypassed the manufactured hits and easy path to stardom, opting instead to chronicle the deeper potholes along the road of life. It's working for him.
Gary Allan could be called the Jack Kerouac of country music. The 43-year-old singer-songwriter is a maverick whose music hangs out in the dark corners of Nashville's psyche. He writes emotion-packed hits about life's harsher struggles-and he knows what he's talking about. One night in October 2004, his 36-year-old wife, Angela, was feeling ill. She sent him out of the bedroom for a soda. While standing in the kitchen, Allan heard a loud pop and thought Angela had thrown something, only to discover she had stuck a pistol in her mouth and pulled the trigger. Allan's releases since then have continued to relate his life experiences, and allowed him to express his grief.
Though he played his major-label showcase in 1996-an eternity ago in the music business-he has just now moved from supporting-act status to headlining theatres and arenas, despite releasing back-to-back platinum records and selling more than six million albums to date. And that's just the way he likes it. This epitome of cerebral country cool with four No. l hits and more than ten Top 10 singles never likes to get anywhere in a hurry.
Gary Allan Herzberg grew up in Huntington Beach, California, and spent his days surfing the bright waters of the Pacific, his nights in the dim blue-collar bars, playing both shit-kicker country and attitude-laced punk. Whatever he did, he immersed himself in it, a philosophy that sticks today. The motorcycle enthusiast is also an avid golfer, replete in Payne Stewart knickers. ("My 16-year-old was hilarious. She said, ‘Dad, what are you doing? You look like a dork.'")
You can say a lot about George Burns, but you cannot ever really say enough about him. So we let George speak for himself.
George Carlin was born on May 12, 1937, in the Bronx. New York. While serving a stint in the military, he began working as a disc jockey; after teaming with fellow radio personality Jack Burns on a Shreveport, Louisiana, morning show, he and Burns in 1956 began performing in clubs as a comedy team. Carlin and Burns made their recorded debut in 1960 with a live show consisting of their rendition of Lenny Bruce's "Djinni in the Candy Store" routine (Bruce was not only a major influence but an early supporter of the duo) along with a spot-on impersonation of Mort Sahl and a sketch called "Captain Jack and Jolly George" - a spoof of children's shows, inviting young girls to "send for your Lolita kit."
The Carlin-Burns team found some success, but eventually broke up; the 1960 album was not released until many years later under the name The Original George Carlin. On his own, Carlin began performing in clubs as a clean-cut, straitlaced performer; his proper solo debut. 1967's Take-Offs and Put-Ons, introduced America to classic routines like "Wonderful WINO," about a mindless disc jockey. That year he also was tapped to costar in "Away We Go," a TV summer-replacement series for "The Jackie Gleason Show." Yet despite his success, Carlin loathed his suit-and-tie image. As the 1960s youth rebellion grew in numbers, so did Carlin's interest in the ideals of the counterculture. Also growing was Carlin's hair.
Now long-haired and bearded. Carlin saw his once lucrative career begin to slip away - but that didn't seem to faze the "hippie" comic. His no-holds-barred rants on sex, drugs, and politics soon attracted a growing and loyal fan base. Following 1972's AM and FM (which still displayed some traces of the old routines). Carlin's 1972 Class Clown and the following year's Occupation Fool marked his total commitment to fucking the establishment. (Note: Class Clown featured the recorded debut of the "seven dirty words" bit, the subject of a Supreme Court ruling after the F.C.C. nearly stripped Pacifica Radio of its FM license for playing the routine on the air. Carlin himself was arrested after a Milwaukee concert appearance for violating local obscenity laws.)
The controversy only made him a bigger star, and in 1975 he was tapped to host the debut episode of the NBC sketch-comedy showcase "Saturday Night Live." The same year also saw the release of the LP An Evening With Wally Lando Featuring Bill Slaszo, highlighted by an early performance of what soon evolved into Carlin's popular "Baseball vs. Football" routine. In 1976 Carlin appeared in the film Car Wash, and in 1977 he issued On the Road.
Yet it seemed as if time was catching up to Carlin, with a new breed of way-out comedians like Steve Martin, Robin Williams, and Andy Kaufman beginning to emerge. As younger, hipper comics flourished, Carlin's brand of sociopo-litical humor seemed outdated. Plagued by substance-abuse problems, he did not record again until 1981's A Place for My Stuff, and he gained a reputation for unpredictable, often abusive onstage behavior.
Down but not out, in 1985 a clean and sober Carlin put out Carlin on Campus and in 1986 Playin' With Your Head. After 1988's What Am I Doing in New Jersey? he was surprised to find Generation Xers rediscovering his act, thanks to his appearances in the popular Bill and Ted screen comedies; in the early 1990s he courted an even younger audience by assuming the lead role on the PBS children's series "Shining Time Station."
Still, Carlin did not neglect his core audience; 1990's Parental Advisory, Explicit Lyrics, and 1992's Jammin' in New York found him as feisty as ever, and in 1994 he starred as an abrasive cabdriver in the short-lived Fox sitcom "The George Carlin Show." In addition, Carlin, who now has 11 HBO specials to his credit, recently shocked the book business with his best-selling Brain Droppings (Hyperion). As for the immediate future, he continues to perform in comedy clubs across America, and later this year will be seen in the star-studded Kevin Smith film Dogma.
Helen Gurley Brown is certainly the best businesswoman in the world. She printed 400,000 extra copies. Hell, if she'd known what was going to happen, she'd have printed two million extra copies. The reason it sold is that women have a lot better sense of humor than men give them credit for, and they're tired of coming home and looking at Penthouse and Playboy pictures with all that cleavage and having the husband say, "Why the hell don't you look like that, Martha?" - after they've had eight babies, you know. So it was a chance to take something and stick it in the husbands' ears. Jesus, to be a part of that was a terrific fun thing. But it could have been a disaster. I could be playing to empty theaters right now.
You knew Jayden Cole then, but meeting Jayden Cole now can open your eyes about the evolution of a Penthouse Pet. Education is good.
If you know Jimmy Pardo and Matt Belknap from "Never Not Funny," you might be interested in what they thought ten years ago when we asked.
John Whitehead was just as determined. "I felt sometimes that he [White-head] was just a little bit pushy about getting this thing to court and, you know, getting it going," says Jones. "I really do believe [Rutherford] had a different agenda than what I had. And I think a lot of people did. But I can't prove that." She is less certain about the ulterior motives of the Rader, Campbell lawyers themselves.
"I'm sure some of them didn't like [Clinton] but… I think they just wanted to help me," says Jones.
Elton John defied British rock star convention by refusing to allow the tabloid press to smear his name. At this stage of his career, Sir Elton is fine.
Nineteen eighty-seven was the lowest ebb of Elton John's career. He had undergone an operation for a mysterious throat ailment, rumored to be cancer.
He's Still Standing
His marriage to the German studio engineer Renate Blauel was foundering. He had launched an unsuccessful lawsuit to regain copyright to his most famous songs, like "Daniel" and "Goodbye Yellow Brick Road," from his former publisher, Dick James. He was having problems with alcohol, drugs, and eating disorders. His career seemed in irreversible decline. It was now that he became the target of a tabloid newspaper expose unique even by Fleet Street's long history of victimization and untruth.
In this exclusive excerpt from Elton John (Harmony Books), rock biographer Philip Norman reveals how Elton found the will to face his detractors head-on.
What The Sun was shortly to unloose on Elton did not happen in isolation. For five or six years already, he had been the target of anti-gay smears and sneers in Britain's tabloid press, a public whipping boy for the growing phobia about AIDS. The unwritten law that rock stars never sue allowed things to be written about him that in any other context would instantly have drawn libel writs. The Daily Express, the Daily Star, The People, and the News of the World had all, at one time or another, had their knives into Elton. It was just that, true to form, The Sun sank lowest.
Early in 1987 the paper had received a tip-off from one of its network of paid spies and informers. The tip-off led to a 19-year-old male prostitute, or rent boy, named Stephen Hardy, who told a story calculated to make any Sun man salivate. He claimed to have attended gay parties at the home of Rod Stewart's manager, Bill Gaff, in Finchampstead, Berkshire, and to have been involved in drug taking and homosexual orgies there with Elton John.
No one can object to a tabloid publishing an expose, however nasty, if sufficient informed sources have been found to corroborate it. Behind the screaming headlines of old-fashioned scandal sheets could always be found the most meticulous delving and triple-checking. To The Sun, however, the unsupported word of Stephen Hardy was basis enough for another great coup in the tradition of "Gotcha!" and "Freddie Starr Ate My Hamster." Hardy was paid 2,000 pounds for his revelations, with further regular sweeteners of 250 pounds.
"Elton in Vice-Boys Scandal" was The Sun's four-deck front-page splash on February 25. There followed the "confession" of Stephen Hardy under the alias Graham X. He claimed to have been the pimp who had recruited teenage rent boys for parties at Billy Gaff's house, specifically as sexual partners for Gaff and Elton. Over a period of months, he said he had supplied "at least ten youngsters, who were each paid a minimum of 100 pounds each, plus all the cocaine they could stand." According to Graham X, aided by The Sun's distinctive typography, Elton "LOVED his boys to be tattooed skinheads or punks with spiky hair, SNORTED cocaine throughout the orgies, which lasted up to four days, and BEGGED the teenagers to indulge in his bondage fantasies. The sordid rent-boy sessions began just 18 months after Elton's highly publicized Valentine's Day marriage to German bride Renate Blauel."
The story was presented not as an exultant soft-porn feast, but as a solemn moral duty, with Graham X, in the bosom of The Sun, now reformed and penitent. "I am ashamed of what I did … I am speaking out to show how widespread this sort of thing is and to warn other gullible young kids to steer clear of people like these."
Inside, hammering home the moral message, was a double-page spread, "Elton's Lust for Bondage," in which Graham X "confessed" to his own sexual encounters with Elton at Billy Gaff's house. He said that on the first occasion, Elton had been lying on a bed in a pair of skimpy leather shorts, "looking like Cleopatra and twirling a sex aid between his fingers." Elton, he claimed, had shown him bondage accessories, "handcuffs, a chain, leather braids, and a whip," and had fantasized about tying him to a tree in the woods before making love to him. On a later occasion, he said, he had witnessed a foursome between Elton, Billy Gaff, and two rent boys, which had ended with them swapping partners.
Ironically, it was none of this spunout sleaze, but the spurious attempts to give it social uplift, that would prove The Sun's undoing. In a foot-of-page "box" story, Graham X told how he had repented his rent-boy life after falling in love with a girl, but had carried out one final pimping mission to pay for their engagement ring. So "he took two youngsters to Gaff's home on April 30 last year. It was the last time he saw Elton."
It was the only specific date mentioned in the whole story, and in The Sun's office there was someone who recognized it as deeply unsafe. Nina Myskow had returned to the paper a few months earlier after a stint as TV critic for The People. Knowing she was a longtime friend of Elton's, The Sun's legal adviser showed her the Graham X copy a couple of weeks before publication. Nina still kept up with Elton intermittently and was sure she remembered that on April 30, 1986, he and his assistant, Bob Halley, had both been out of Britain. "I said, ‘If you're going to go with this stuff, for God's sake make sure you check and double-check that date.' " Her advice fell on deaf ears.
In fact, on April 30, 1986-as many more of his friends, like Bryan Forbes, remembered-Elton had been in New York, staying at the Carlyle Hotel. He had had lunch with his old confidant Tony King, then gone to see his costume designer, Bob Mackie. Any number of people could confirm that he had remained in New York one further night, flying home, with Bob Halley, by Concorde early on May 1.
That one slip, if nothing else, opened up The Sun to a massive libel suit. Even so, there were those around Elton who urged him in the strongest terms not to sue. Mick Jagger, in particular, phoned to warn against it, citing his own experience with the News of the World 20 years earlier. That, too, had arisen from the grossest of factual boo boos. Jagger had been accused of boasting about his drug consumption in an interview with News of the World reporters, who did not realize they were actually talking to another Rolling Stone, Brian Jones. Jagger had issued a libel writ, only to be followed and spied on by the paper until finally set up for the Redlands drug bust that led to his and Keith Richards's imprisonment. If Elton tried to fight The Sun, even on this seemingly winnable count, what campaign of still dirtier tricks could be expected before the case finally came to court?
Cesar Estrada Chavez was born on March 31, 1927, on a small farm near Yuma, Arizona, which had been purchased by his Mexican paternal grandfather in 1889. In 1937 the farm was lost because of taxes. Ten-year-old Cesar hit the road, doomed to the life of a migrant laborer. He attended more than thirty school, managing to finish the seventh grade.
He served for two years in the navy, seeing active duty on a destroyer in the Pacific during the closing months of World War II in 1947 he married Helen Fabela whose father had been a colonel under Pancho Villa. They have eight children, four of whom live at home in a modest two-bedroom house in Delano. His parents, now in their eighties, still live in San Jose in the Chicano ghetto called Sal Si Puedes (Get Out … If You Can).
Chavez is five feet, six inches tall and weighs a lean 140, having lost 30 pounds during his fasts. He wears his black hair neatly parted far over on the left. He has the dark, steady eyes and the curving nose of his Indian forebears. He wears plain work trousers and a plaid shirt - the uniform of those who work for La Causa.
Chavez's following has been described by journalist Rick Beban as "more than a union, more than a social movement; at times … a religion of its own." These people eat beans. They sleep three, five, or even eight to a room, when they must. They ride to work, or to the picket lines, in cars and trucks which look as if they have been handed down by those legendary migrants, the dust-bowl Okies of the thirties. They do not give up.
Wittingly or unwittingly, some of the liberal press are helping the Teamsters in their efforts to seal Cesar's tomb. On September 15, 1974, the New York Times Magazine published an article by Winthrop Griffith, who is a free-lance writer based in northern California. Griffith acknowledges that the Teamsters have been playing rough, but he leaves you with the impression that it's all more or less God's will.
He writes, "The ascendancy of the Teamsters over the UFW indicates that maybe the passionate visionary, who was once victorious, must inevitably give way to the cool technicians of an entrenched organization."
Cesar may be a saint to the New York Times, but it's almost as if they resent his letting the Teamsters move in. Now they have to go back to reporting the same story which they thought had ended. So the Times heaves a liberal sigh and murmurs a few kind words over the body before moving on to fresher copy. It hurts their heads and bores them silly to keep writing about good guys who are slow to get computerized and who can't even learn how to put in the fix, for Christ's sake. If only the UFW would stop acting human and become "an entrenched organization" with "cool technicians." Well, what can you expect from a bunch of peons?
Roman Polanski accepted an assignment from Vogue Hammes, a sophisticated French men's magazine, to shoot a photo spread on little girls of the world. If was 1977, and Polanski, still unable to secure financing for Pirates, signed a development deal with Columbia Pictures to script and direct an adaptation of Lawrence Sanders's The First Deadly Sin.
He decided to work on the scenario and gather candidates for the kiddie spread in California. While Polanski was in Paris, his friend Henri Sera reminded him of a woman Sera had introduced him to the year before in a Los Angeles bar. A minor actress, she had two daughters. Sera was dating one of them and suggested her younger sister, then 13, as a potential model. Arriving in Los Angeles, Polanski checked into the Beverly Wilshire Hotel and telephoned the woman's home in Woodland Hills in the San Fernando Valley no less than 11 times. On February 13, Polanski drove his rented Mercedes to visit mother and child and make his pitch.
Ushering him into the living room, the attractive woman in her thirties told Polanski that the child was waiting in her bedroom; so they could talk. As credentials, Polanski brought the issue of the French Vogue he had guest-edited. The photos of Nastassia Kinski had an erotic undertone, but she was fully clothed - and the mother got the impression that Polanski would be photographing her child for French Vogue, an exciting prospect because of the magazine's status and influence. But French Vogue is a fashion magazine for women, different in tone and audience from its often-erotic counterpart, Vogue Hammes. When Polanski mentioned that he was looking for an 11-year-old, the mother admitted that her daughter was 13, perhaps too old for his needs. Polanski said he would have a look anyway, and the candidate was summoned before him. Sera had been right; she was perfect. Polanski set a date, February 20, for a photographing session. Recollecting this initial meeting, the mother would hit upon an important fact: they had discussed the child's age. Polanski knew she was 13.
A week later Polanski was back, armed with cameras and equipment. The first session took place behind the house, but when the mother asked to watch, Polanski suggested that this would "inhibit" her daughter; so she left them alone. After a few routine shots, Polanski asked the child to remove her blouse but assured her that he would crop the photos to avoid showing her "boobies," as he called her breasts. Polanski didn't think topless photography improper, since it is common in Europe. But the child was dubious enough not to tell her mother. As far as the woman knew, her daughter had been clothed throughout.
Another photography session with the 13-year-old was scheduled for March 10, but this time Polanski wanted to take her to the home of a friend, Victor Drey, on Mulholland Drive. Polanski turned up at Woodland Hills to pick her up and to give the mother Drey's telephone number. A friend of the child's was visiting, and the mother assumed that Polanski would take the two of them, but as they got ready to leave, she saw that the friend wasn't getting into the car. She rushed over to ask what had happened. Polanski, the friend said, had told her she couldn't come. The mother watched as Polanski and her daughter drove off together.
Later, when she dialed Drey's number, a woman on the other end of the phone assured her that everything was all right. Other people were present, and Polanski was busy shooting pictures. As the light began to dim, Polanski decided to move to Jack Nicholson's house, also on Mulholland Drive. Nicholson, he knew, was in Aspen, Colo., and the house was being occupied by his girlfriend, Anjelica Huston. Polanski phoned the Nicholson house and then the child's mother, giving her the new number and assuring her that Anjelica Huston would be present.
When Polanski and his model arrived at Nicholson's, only the caretaker, Helena Kallianotes, was there. Polanski asked for a drink, and she sent him to the refrigerator, where he found a magnum of champagne.
Later the young model would reconstruct the events that followed. She was confused about sequence and time because she and Polanski had been left alone by Miss Kallianotes and the champagne went to the 13-year-old's head. "I don't know how much, because I was drinking some of his, too. I just kept - I just kept drinking it for pictures and, you know."
Polanski had begun to shoot more photos. Then he stopped and went into a bathroom. Following him, the girl saw that he had a container of pills, one of which was broken into three parts in his hand. "Is this a Quaalude?" he asked.
She said yes, telling him that she had once taken a Quaalude that she had found; it belonged to her older sister.
"Do you think I will be able to drive if I take it?" he asked. "Well, I guess I will."
Then he swallowed it and asked her, "Do you want part?" "No… oh, okay," she replied. The champagne and the pill disoriented her.
Polanski photographed her in Nicholson's elaborate Jacuzzi, sometimes topless, sometimes totally nude. In a few shots she clutched glasses of champagne. Then Polanski began to take off his clothes to join her in the Jacuzzi. She was still alert enough to panic and told him they had to call her mother.
The telephone rang at the child's Woodland Hills home, and the mother answered. "Are you all right?" she asked her daughter.
Job Titles:
- Cofounder of the American Indian Movement
Russell Means, cofounder of the American Indian Movement, has become a symbol of a revitalized people seeking freedom from a century of oppression. Throughout the 1970s, like a guerrilla theater, Means captured a national audience and alerted it to the plight - and the power - of the indigenous American. He orchestrated a prayer vigil on top of Mount Rushmore, claiming the monument was an insult to nature; he sued the Cleveland Indians baseball team, arguing that the team mascot, Chief Wahoo, demeaned the image of Indians; he led 1,300 other Indians into Gordon, Nebr., to protest the suspicious death of Raymond Yellow Thunder. Means and 77 other Indians were arrested in Custer, S.Dak., after rampaging through the town, incensed that a white man had received reduced charges for the stabbing death of Wesly Bad Heart Bull. In 1972 Means helped plan the Trail of Broken Treaties Caravan, an election-week march on Washington that ended with the takeover of the Bureau of Indian Affairs-which Means and his followers immediately renamed the Native American Embassy.
The most prolonged and dramatic battle of his career began on February 27, 1973, when Means and several hundred armed supporters seized a church and trading post in the village of Wounded Knee, S.Dak. It was there, 83 years earlier, that the American Indian Wars ended: the U.S. Seventh Cavalry slaughtered Chief Big Foot and some 350 members of his tribe, mostly women and children. There was no massacre in 1973. Under federal siege and on national television, Means and his followers held the town for 71 days, exchanging gunfire with the FBI and earning support from church and civil-rights groups - which airlifted supplies to the occupiers - across the country. "If the federal government once again turns a deaf ear and closes its eyes to the Indians," said Means, "the Indian Wars will start all over again. There will be death. I don't consider that a threat. That's reality."
Though maligned by many as a renegade, the leader of the Wounded Knee occupation was never far from harsh realities. Born into poverty on the Pine Ridge Reservation (South Dakota) on November 10, 1939, Russell Charles Means was the oldest son of Hank and Theodora Means. He grew up in a Vallejo, Calif., public housing project but remembers, from the few extended visits to Pine Ridge, that he was never far from his Sioux heritage. His grandfather warned him of the dangers of the white world. He and his brother Dale would watch in anger Indians being killed in the movies. They played cowboys and Indians with the white kids in Vallejo. "Sometimes we beat the hell out of them. I didn't even know why. I guess they represented the cavalry to me. But we had them all wanting to be Indians."
Young Means attended racially mixed schools, maintained good grades, and was an enthusiastic boy scout and a fine athlete. But at the age of 16 he transferred to the almost entirely white San Leandro High School. Taunted and barraged by racial slurs, he quickly learned that victimization of the American Indian was more than film fantasy or historical abstraction. He soon dropped out of school and began drifting. For the next ten years he worked at odd jobs across the country: picking tomatoes, teaching ballroom dancing, sorting mail, shoveling elephant manure at a circus. He became addicted to heroin, kicked the habit, then got hooked on alcohol.
By the late sixties he had wandered into a job at the Office of Economic Opportunity in Cleveland, was a husband and a father trying to emulate the white man's ways. But it was then that he met fellow Indians Dennis Banks and Clyde Bellecourt and their nascent American Indian Movement. At first put off by the moccasins and belts and sashes and Indian jewelry that the group's members wore, Means was soon convinced that AIM was serious business. At that point the Russell Means who had been attempting to become assimilated into white society transformed himself into a twentieth-century Indian renegade, fighting to dramatize his people's plight.
Until Means and AIM appeared, American Indians were a forgotten people, the poorest of all ethnic minorities in the United States, shunted onto reservations in barely habitable regions of the country. The average yearly family income among the nearly 1 million population was $1,500. Unemployment varied from 40 to 80 percent. Life expectancy was 44 years, 20 years less than what it was for whites. Infant mortality among the Indian population was three times the national average; alcoholism and suicide were rampant.
With their prayer vigils and riots and marches and occupations, Means and AIM not only got their message through to the white man and his government; they also inspired other Indians in all parts of the country to assert themselves. Once-warring tribes organized themselves, elected regional leaders, and lobbied in cities, on reservations, and in Washington for rights they realized had been stripped away from them during a century of near colonial subjugation.
Job Titles:
- Head of a Distinguished Right - Watching
Willie Bennett never did get out of jail. In building their case, authorities also implicated Bennett in the unrelated robbery of a Brookline video store; he was convicted of that last October and sentenced to 12 to 25 years in prison.
Meanwhile, it appears likely that the criminal case will never be officially closed. At the district attorney's stubborn insistence, the grand jury homicide investigation continued to sputter along well into 1991, investigating Matthew Stewart's role in the case. But Matthew, protected under an eighteenth-century Massachusetts law that says people aren't legally required to report knowledge of a crime committed by a blood relative, maintained throughout that he had known nothing more about the murders than what he said the day before Chuck's death.