[Because Shapiro was out of
town trying to raise money to produce Strangers at the end of 1990, I sent him reports on my progress as I was
working. Aside from wanting to keep him
apprised of what I was up to and what I was learning, I wanted to be sure I was
getting what he needed and wasn’t just following a rabbit down a hole.
[The memos in Part 2 of “Leonardo Shapiro’s Strangers” were written simultaneously with my journal record, posted in Part 1 (8 January), so some of them reiterate the same information I wrote to myself. I sent Shapiro more detailed information than I kept in my journal, however, and in the journal, I asked myself question and recorded my thoughts.
[(I also sent the director copies of the newspaper articles I was finding that I thought would be useful to him, namely pieces in which were quoted the mothers of Atlanta’s missing and murdered children. The principal purpose of my search was for statements Shapiro could use as dialogue for the “vocal track” of Strangers.)
[At the same time, I was also searching reports on the nuclear accident in Goiania. Brazil, for some specific details Shapiro wanted: the final tally of the dead and sickened from the radiation, now almost three years earlier. (As it happens, I never found a true count until many years later, when I researched the incident again in 2020, 23 years after Shapiro’s death, for my Rick On Theater post “Goiânia, Brazil, 1987,” 9 August 2020.)]
MEMOS TO LEONARDO SHAPIRO
To: Leo Shapiro
From: [Rick]
Date: 26 August 1990
Re: Research Progress
Here’s the latest collection of clippings on the Atlanta murders and disappearances. I assume, since you didn’t relay any instructions to the contrary from the last batch, that this is what you’re looking for. I have, for instance, been omitting references to the investigation itself, and the tentative suspects. I have included, however, several tangential articles on cases paralleling the child murders in one way or another.
In an effort to cut down on costs and paper, I’ve occasionally copied only part of an article; I presume you don’t actually need the full piece in order to glean bits of dialogue. (I have a record of what I’ve copied and can get the missing parts if you want them.) I’ve been high-lighting what I think are useful quotes or near-quotes; background material is indicated by a bracket and interesting but not clearly useful stuff is marked with a bracket and a question mark.
I thought you might like a wrap-up of my progress up to now:
Marilyn [Zalkin, Shapiro’s assistant] has sent along the photocopies [from the Atlanta Constitution] I made on the Atlanta murders through December 1980. It wasn’t until the middle of 1980 that the police recognized the connection among the deaths and disappearances, so the coverage has just begun to pick up. Most of it focuses on the investigation rather than the victims or their families, but there’s more and more of the latter, too, now.
I figure I’ll go up to the arrest [21 June 1981] or trial [6 January-27 February 1982] of Wayne Williams, then switch to the Atlanta Daily World, the black Atlanta paper the Schomburg Center holds. I hope that’ll yield some good stuff for you. My guess is that it’ll take me a week or so more to get through the rest of the Constitution’s coverage; it takes several hours for me to go through a month of the paper issue by issue now because there are so many articles referring to the case.
Aside from the clippings I sent you, I have run across an article, part one of a series, on the street kids of Atlanta. The article only mentions the murders in passing, but the kids talk about their lives and fears on the streets in language more redolent of their condition than the pieces dealing directly with the murders; it’s more street language than the other quotations. Marilyn seemed to think you might want this article (and the follow-up when I find it). Let me know and I’ll get it.
I also found a reference to a Donahue show from 29 Jan. 1981, taped in Atlanta focusing on the murders that featured two mothers [Camille Bell and Willie Mae Mathis] on the panel and several others in the audience. If they still have one that old, I imagine we can get a transcript of the show if you want it. Let me know if you want me to send for it. (Current transcripts are handled by Journal Graphics, Inc., 267 B’way, NYC 10002; (212) 227-READ.)
I haven’t been keeping real notes on the progress of the Atlanta investigation, but it has several curious aspects that may interest you. Let me know if you want any follow-up on this, too. For instance, there was considerable controversy over the organization of the police leadership of the investigation. Efficient it wasn’t, and some people were not consulted who probably ought to have been—probably for political reasons.
Also, a number of odd outsiders were brought in, including a New Jersey psychic [Dorothy Allison] and five super-detectives from other cities—including one from NYC—none of whom seemed to have really been any help; there were also two German shepherd search dogs from Philadelphia which only understood German commands.
In a dispute with the Atlanta police authorities’ actions, the Fulton County DA [Lewis Slaton, 1922-2002; 90% of Atlanta is in Fulton Co.; remaining 10% is in DeKalb Co.] mounted his own investigation. When the city turned to the FBI, the Bureau denied any jurisdiction because the case had no interstate aspect, even though they had investigated a similar case in Buffalo involving several black men on the basis that civil rights had been violated.
At one point, after the bodies of two missing boys had been discovered by a civilian search team, the remains were removed by investigators before the medical examiner got to the scene. He threatened to charge the cops and the GBI [Georgia Bureau of Investigation] detectives on the scene with a violation of state law.
In April ’81, William [H.] Webster [b. 1924; director of the FBI from 1978 to 1987] announced that the FBI knew the killers in 3 or 4 cases, indicating that the children’s parents were involved, but that they didn’t have enough evidence for an arrest; the Atlanta cops and the parents’ group were both outraged.
In other curious incidents, comedian-activist Dick Gregory [1932-2017] accused the CDC [Centers for Disease Control; now Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] of taking the kids for experiments at the NIH [National Institutes of Health] and psychic Jeanne Dixon [1904-97] made vague predictions about the case (Feb. 1981).
In March, Sammy Davis, Jr. [1925-90], and [Frank] Sinatra [1915-98] planned a huge fund-raiser in Atlanta; former [Georgia] Governor Lester Maddox [1915-2003] took out an ad in the paper pleading for the killer to give himself up; a second concert was planned by Gladys Knight [b. 1944] and Stevie Wonder [b. 1950]; the Guardian Angels, led by Lisa Evers (Sliwa) [b. 1958], arrived to teach self-protection and a cult expert/de-programmer was consulted. In April, Roy Innis [1934-2017] of CORE [Congress of Racial Equality] produced a “suspect” and a “witness” which turned out to be a false lead.
I found a book called Serial Murder [1988] by Ronald M. Holmes and James De Burger that mentioned Wayne Williams, but only in passing. The authors had requested an interview with him, but he rejected the idea. There are a few other books I’m still trying to track down, one by a private detective investigating the case, that may yield some useful material.
I presume you got the message on the Goiania accident I left on your machine before you left. In case you didn’t, the latest reports I’ve found so far all report no deaths from the radiation other than the four family members who died within a week or so of the accident. These reports include two books published in 1989 (Multiple Exposures: Chronicles of the Radiation Age by Catherine Caulfield) and 1990 (Medical Management of Radiation Accidents edited by Fred A. Mettler), and a 1989 report in a scientific journal (International Journal of Radiation Biology, June 1990).
I’ve located nothing more recent than these, and no references to deaths or illness from ancillary causes such as cancer or leukemia were reported. My contact with the Union of Concerned Scientists in Cambridge, Mass., garnered nothing useful; Physicians for Social Responsibility had no information at all. Do you want any more specific or detailed information on this?
I have accumulated a few additional statistics you might find useful. Caulfield reports that, in addition to the four deaths, there were 17 cases of severe radiation poisoning and that 250-1000 people were contaminated. 25 homes were abandoned and 2500 sq. miles in the center of the city were cordoned off for decontamination. She reported that this process would take over a year.
The Mettler book reported that 244 people were involved and that 20 received “significant exposure.”
The IJRB recorded the 4 deaths and stated that 85 houses were contaminated and that 200 people were evacuated. The report also said that prices of material produced in Goiania dropped 40% for more than a month although none was shown to be contaminated.
[Later reports of many of these statistics are included in “Goiânia, Brazil, 1987.”
§ §
To: Leo Shapiro
From: [Rick]
Date: 7 September 1990
Re: Research Progress
Here’s the latest collection of clippings on the Atlanta murders and disappearances. From what Marilyn told me on the phone today, I gather you don’t want me to go any further on this subject. I was planning to move on to the Atlanta Daily World, a black paper at Schomburg in Harlem, but I won’t move on unless you tell me to. Marilyn seemed to think that you had enough useful stuff from the AC; is that correct?
I’ve gone up to the end of June 1981. Wayne Williams was identified as the prime suspect on 4 June, after which, at least for the rest of that month, the coverage focused exclusively on him. He was charged with the first murder on 22 June. There were still a number of missing kids on the task force’s list, but for the most part, I suspect the coverage will steer away from the victims from this point on and concentrate on Williams and the case against him. I was planning to stop here and shift over to the ADW. I still will if you want.
By the way, in my last report, I gave the wrong zip code for the transcript service of the Donahue show. It’s 10007, not 10002. Do you want me to follow up on that?
Just to fill you in on the other developments of the Atlanta case since my last summary, the Jacksons [formerly the Jackson 5] scheduled a benefit concert for July, but I don’t know if it was ever staged. In May ’81, Mohammed Ali [1942-2016] added $400,000 to the reward fund, raising it to an even half mil.
Keep in mind some interruptions in my availability this month. I have already told Marilyn about these over the phone, but just to be certain: I’ll be out of town from 12 through 17 Sept. [I went to Washington, D.C., to visit my folks], then I have been summoned for jury duty starting on 24 Sept. Jury duty’s usually 2 weeks, but my experience has always been that they let us go after a week or ten days unless I get on a case. [This was before the one-day-or-one-trial policy was initiated.]
Thanks for the TDR article. It has confirmed and clarified a lot for me. If it isn’t too premature to raise the thought, however, I would appreciate your considering having the author mention my participation; I’d be grateful for the credit.
[I no longer remember what this article was or who wrote it. I myself published a TDR profile of Shapiro and Shaliko in 1993, but a long essay, “In Process: Leonardo Shapiro, the Shaliko Company, and Strangers” by Michael Wright, came out in 1991 (written in 1990) in Text and Performance Quarterly.]
I have some undigested thoughts regarding the [Shiva] Naipaul metaphor you directed me to. I give them to you here, but note that I haven’t really worked anything out; these are just random ideas. The pertinent passage reads:
. . . . Joblessness is a euphemism. It would be more accurate to say that a technologically sophisticated society has no use for these people [i.e., the black masses]. They are redundant. They are good for nothing. They do not even evoke fellow feeling. One can think of them as the human equivalent of the radioactive waste produced by nuclear power plants: sterile and potentially lethal. What, the ecologists ask, is one to do with this waste? Bury it miles underground? Shoot it into outer space? Discover some way of breaking it down and rendering it harmless? The junk people, the human waste left behind by American history, are no less negative, no less dangerous a quantity. One sees them on the streets of midtown Manhattan, carrying glittering noisemaking machines, dressed to kill, the ugliness and the hatred of the discarded slave glowing in their eyes. You see them in Harlem, standing drunk or drugged on street corners. What is to be done with them?
Above this passage, Naipaul makes another allusion, attributed to journalist I. F. Stone:
the American Negro, he said, was condemned to live in Egypt, but it was an Egypt that had already built its pyramids and no longer needed slaves. “Mechanization on the farm and automation in industry have at last set him free, but now freedom turns out to be joblessness.”
Additionally, Naipaul earlier (pp. 213-214) invoked H. G. Wells’s [1866-1946] The Time Machine [1895]
in which the hero of the tale transports himself to the year 802,700. He finds himself in a land of gardenlike beauty where the sun always shines, the trees are laden with delicious fruit and flowers are resplendent. He meets a beautiful race--the Eloi: graceful, delicately formed creatures clad in robes. They seem very open, very laid-back, very up-front. Their life is an endless round of innocuous pleasure. The Eloi spend their days playing childish games, fashioning garlands for one another, splashing in warm, sparkling streams and making gentle love. Bountiful nature appears to have showered on them every blessing.
But slowly the Time Traveler begins to realize that this Eden conceals a nightmare. The Eloi, he discovers, have no capacity for concentration or for any other kind of strenuous mental activity. Human intelligence in the year 802,700 has all but atrophied. These gorgeous, charming creatures have even forgotten what fire is. When night falls they crowd into the ruined palaces of a long-vanished civilization and huddle together for mutual protection and comfort, showing great fear. For in the tunnels deep underground live their counterparts, the mutant Morlocks, lemurlike descendants of a once-oppressed proletariat who, transformed by darkness and confinement, can no longer bear the brightness of day. At night, ravenous with hunger, they emerge from their caverns to feed at will on the defenseless, fruit-eating children of light. Paradise turns to horror.
Eloi and Morlocks: the New Age is replete with both.
Naipaul frequently thereafter refers to the underclass as Morlocks. Following his nuclear-waste metaphor, for instance, he cites a 1980 prison riot in New Mexico in which the prisoners had killed and mutilated one another. He remarks that “The society did not react. . . . Nobody cares what the Morlocks do to one another. They are beyond the pale even of humane curiosity. Junk is junk.”
While the nuclear-waste metaphor may be the core of Strangers as you see it, Wells’s allegory also seems to be a fruitful image as well. There may even be a useful tie-in with your theory that the UFO-spotters think of the aliens as their “white men.” What they want to build, on that assertion, would resemble a society in which they would be the listless, pampered Eloi with a strong, capable Morlock society to do the work—before the mutation that made them predators. The implied danger is obvious, especially when linked with the nuclear-waste image. The question still remains, how to make all this clear to an audience, allowing them to make the necessary connections in the performance, without spelling it out? I don’t know yet; but the key certainly seems in the centrality of these two images.
One thought that occurs to me—not well thought-out, but possibly useful—is to assist the image with costuming. If the victims of the social waste-system are identified the same way as radioactive waste, the image would be communicated. This would be particularly so if the symbol is used after the Brazilian family is contaminated. They actually are radioactive, but the others—the Atlanta children, Hedda, the Central Park wolf-pack—are only contaminated symbolically. It may be too obvious for your taste, but it’s a place to start thinking.
Unless you want me to continue searching for Atlanta material, I’ll move on to thinking about the script structure so we can begin to work on that. I’ll call you when I get back from DC so we can get together and talk. I think I we’ll need a face-to-face for this part; at least I do.
[The “face-to-face” is reproduced in the transcript of a conversation I had with Shapiro, coming up in Part 3 (14 January). Unfortunately, that was pretty much the end if the work on this project; Shapiro was never able to get back to Strangers.
[As
I’ve already stated, Shapiro was unable to raise the funds necessary to mount a
full production of Strangers in 1991. He retired
from New York theater in 1992, moving to New Mexico the next year, and died at
51 in January 1997.]
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