November 20, 1960: Norman Mailer Stabs His Wife

November 20, 1960: Novelist Norman Mailer stabs his wife at a party they were hosting -- and, for all intents and purposes, he gets away with it.

Born in 1923 in Long Branch, Monmouth County, New Jersey, he was, for want of a better choice of words, raised in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, and graduated from Harvard University. He served in the Pacific Theater of World War II, as a typist at a regimental headquarters, then a wire lineman, then volunteered for a reconnaissance platoon, seeing combat, and finally as a cook. He was discharged with the rank of Sergeant, and said that being in the U.S. Army was "the worst experience of my life, and also the most important."

It led to the publication of his 1st novel in 1948, The Naked and the Dead. It sold over 1 million copies in its 1st year, and has been called the 1st great novel about World War II. (Not the greatest, but, chronologically, the first one that could be called "great.") He was 25 years old, and already a literary superstar.

His subsequent novels did not sell as well, nor were received as well. While still writing fiction, he turned to journalism, becoming one of the co-founders of The Village Voice, New York City's "alternative weekly" newspaper, in 1955.

In 1957, the magazine Dissent published his essay The White Negro: Superficial Reflections on the Hipster, connecting what Mailer called the "psychic havoc" wrought by the Holocaust and the Cold War to the aftermath of slavery in America, in the figuration of the Hipster. The essay was a call to abandon the numbing culture of conformity during the Administration of President Dwight D. Eisenhower.

It wasn't Mailer (I've been unable to find out who it was) who labeled it "the Ike Age," as a "cold" period like an "ice age," but that is the kind of thing Mailer would have thought of. Instead, much like the "Beat Generation" writers like Jack Kerouac (whose novel On the Road came out that year) and Allen Ginsberg (whose poem Howl, published the year before, was even more in-your-face about it), Mailer wanted Americans to rebel, to seek out new forms of entertainment, and to be more sexually liberated, things he associated with black American culture.

The essay's reviews were mixed: While black activist Eldridge Cleaver liked it, it was ripped by black authors James Baldwin and Ralph Ellison, and even the white and Jewish Ginsberg himself, whom, due to his open defiance of just about every Judeo-Christian ethic there was, Mailer had previously called "the most courageous man in America."

In 1960, Mailer covered the Democratic National Convention for Esquire magazine, writing a very complimentary story about John F. Kennedy, titled Superman Goes to the Supermarket. Along with the works of Tom Wolfe, it is considered one of the foundations of what became known as the New Journalism.

Mailer married 6 times, having 8 children. His 1st marriage, to Beatrice Silverman, ended in 1952 because he was having an affair with painter and actress Adele Morales, a New York native with a Spanish mother and a Peruvian father. Norman and Adele married in 1954, and had 2 daughters, Danielle and Elizabeth.

Inspired by Kennedy's recent election as President, Mailer decided to run for Mayor of New York in the next year's election. On November 19, 1960, he hosted a party at the Upper West Side apartment he shared with Adele and their daughters. Mailer had enlisted his well-connected friend, journalist George Plimpton, to attract figures from the city's "power structure." The idea was to use this party to unite these people with what he saw as his base, the "disenfranchised" people of the City -- most of whom couldn't have given a damn about who the Mayor was.

David Rockefeller, America's leading banker, and the brother of Governor Nelson Rockefeller of New York, declined his invitation. But Ginsberg showed up. So did several people described by an account years later as "derelicts, cut-throats and bohemians." A friend of Mailer's who was there, publisher Barney Rosset, called it "the most dangerous evening I've ever spent in my life."

Fights broke out. This pleased the increasingly drunk Mailer, who fancied himself both a "man's man" and a "ladies' man," enjoyed drinking copiously, and also enjoyed challenging people to get into a boxing ring and fight him. These were all traits he shared with his literary (including journalistic) idol, Ernest Hemingway, still alive at that point. Adele later said that he left the apartment, "almost incoherent." She said, "He was down in the street, punching people," and, "He didn't know what his name was. He was so out of it."

At 4:30 AM, November 20, he came back into the apartment. Only 6 guests remained, and Adele was getting ready for bed. Adele mocked his, as we would say today, "toxic masculinity." She also made a reference to his mistress, who may or may not have actually existed. His rage peaking, he took out a rusty 2 1/2-inch penknife, and stabbed Adele through the breast, narrowly missing her heart; then stabbed her in the back. He walked out of the room, and told the remaining guests, "Don't touch her. Let the bitch die."

She was taken to University Hospital, underwent emergency surgery, and made a quick recovery. The next day, with the story not yet having hit the newspapers, Mailer appeared, as previously scheduled, for an interview on The Mike Wallace Show. He advertised his mayoral bid, and spoke of a knife as "a symbol of manhood." Wallace, one of the finest journalists in CBS history, did not yet know what Mailer had done.

At first, Adele said that she was wounded by falling on some broken glass. Two days after the stabbing, she admitted that Mailer had done it. Mailer was at the hospital, and the police arrested him. Based on her account of his state of mind at the time of the stabbing, he was involuntarily committed to Bellevue Hospital, home of the most famous (or infamous, if you prefer) psychiatric ward in America. He was released after 17 days.

Mailer cut a deal, pleading guilty to a reduced charge of assault, saying, "I feel I did a lousy, dirty, cowardly thing." He was sentenced to 3 years' probation, but no prison time, unless you count the 17 days at Bellevue. He had tried to kill his wife, and, essentially, he got away with it.

Mailer did not officially run for Mayor of New York in 1961. That year, his hero, Hemingway, committed suicide. Mailer was never going to do that -- at least, not intentionally. His ego prevented that. Adele divorced him in 1962. In 1967, he covered the antiwar demonstration at the Pentagon, publishing The Armies of the Night, one of his most-lauded works. His stabbing of his then-wife seemed to have been forgotten.

In 1969, he finally ran for Mayor, with a platform of making New York City the 51st State -- which would have cut Long Island off from the rest of the State of New York, and would have forced either the old State or the new one to change its name -- and banning private cars from Manhattan Island. He came up with bold campaign slogans: "No more bullshit!" and "The other guys are the joke." As his running mate, for the office of President of the City Council, he enlisted a real journalist, New York Daily News columnist Jimmy Breslin.

In the Democratic Primary on June 17, the Mailer-Breslin ticket got 41,288 votes, good for 5 percent of the popular vote, finishing 4th out of 5 tickets. It actually got 10 percent of the vote in Manhattan, but no more than 4 percent in any other Borough. Since Mailer's candidacy wasn't taken seriously by anybody, his stabbing of his wife never became an issue. City Comptroller Mario Procaccino won the nomination, and lost the general election to the incumbent Mayor, John Lindsay. Neither Mailer nor Breslin ever ran for office again.

Mailer continued writing controversial books, and became the target of the wrath of feminists. I wanted to say, "If a writer of similar profile today..." but realized that I couldn't finish that sentence. No writer today has a similar profile to Norman Mailer. Or the aforementioned James Baldwin and Tom Wolfe, or Truman Capote, or Gore Vidal, whom Mailer once head-butted backstage when they were both guests on The Dick Cavett Show in 1971. All of those men blurred the line between novel-writing and journalism in the 1960s. Nobody has done that in the 21st Century.

Writers simply aren't the kind of celebrities in the age of mass media, including social media, that they were in 1960, or even in 1970. Case in point: In 1980, Johnny Carson cut The Tonight Show from 90 to 60 minutes. Before, he had frequently had writers on the show. Afterward, because he couldn't do a 15-to-20-minute in-depth interview, broken up by a commercial or two, authors' appearances on his show became considerably rarer. Mailer appeared on the show in 1969, 1972 and 1974, but only once after the shift to 60 minutes, in 1985.

(Carson had Capote on 19 times, the last in 1976. Capote's substance abuse issues got worse, and he died in 1984. Vidal was luckier: Carson had him on 25 times, 7 after the shift. Wolfe appeared twice, both in 1980, right before the shift. Baldwin, Kerouac and Ginsberg never appeared on The Tonight Show.)

However, having seen what happened with football star-turned-actor O.J. Simpson in 1994, if a person, in any field, having a similar level of fame, tried to kill his wife now, he would be instantly "canceled," well before he went to trial.

In 1997, Adele Morales published The Last Party, detailing the near-fatal night in 1960. In a 2000 interview, Mailer called stabbing Adele "the one act I can look back on and regret for the rest of my life." It was his only public expression of remorse for the act. He died in 2007, at age 84. In their headline for his obituary, The New York Times called him a "Towering Writer with Ego to Match." He was actually just 5-foot-8, but his effect on writing was huge, as was his ego.

Adele died in 2015, at age 90. With considerable irony, she was, as far as I can determine, the last living person who was at that party. (Had he accepted his invitation, it could have been David Rockefeller, who lived until 2017, age 101.) Of her daughters with Norman, Danielle, a.k.a. Dandy, is a painter; and Elizabeth, a.k.a. Betsy, is a writer.

Left to right: Adele Morales, Betsy Mailer, Dandy Mailer, in 2011

Perhaps Mailer's real idol should have been King Henry VIII of England. After all, he married 6 women, and mistreated all of them. However, while Henry had 2 of his wives killed, 1 more than Norman tried, Henry never had the guts, or the insanity, to do it himself, while Norman did. But Norman was rightly committed for it, something that only happened to one King of England, and it was George III, not Henry VIII.

From his 1st marriage, Norman had a daughter, Susan, who is, perhaps with more irony, a psychoanalyst. She wrote a book about her relationship with her father. From his 3rd marriage, Norman had a daughter, Kate, an actress. From his 4th marriage, Norman had 2 sons, producer Michael and actor Stephen. From his 5th marriage, Norman had a daughter, Maggie, a painter. And from his 6th and last marriage, he had a son, John Buffalo Mailer, a writer and actor.

*

November 20, 1960 was a Sunday. Baseball season was over. These games were played in the NFL:

* The New York Giants lost to the Philadelphia Eagles, 17-10 at Yankee Stadium. This was the game where the Eagles' Chuck Bednarik knocked the Giants' Frank Gifford out of the game with perhaps the most famous hit in football history, a key event in the Eagles' run to the NFL Championship that year. I have a separate entry for that event.

* The football version of the St. Louis Cardinals, who had been in Chicago until this season, beat the Washington Redskins, 26-14 at Griffith Stadium in Washington.

* The Pittsburgh Steelers beat their arch-rivals, the Cleveland Browns, 14-10 at Forbes Field in Pittsburgh.

* The Chicago Bears beat the Detroit Lions, 28-7 at Wrigley Field in Chicago.

* The Los Angeles Rams beat the Green Bay Packers, 33-31 at Milwaukee County Stadium.

* The San Francisco 49ers beat the Dallas Cowboys, 26-14 at the Cotton Bowl in Dallas. The Cowboys, a 1st-year expansion team, went 0-11-1 that 1st season. Their only non-loss was a tie against the Giants at Yankee Stadium.

* Since there were now 13 teams in the NFL, one team had to have a bye week every week. This week, it was the Baltimore Colts.

This was the 1st season of the American Football League. These were their games on the day:

* The Houston Oilers beat the Denver Broncos, 20-10 at Jeppesen Stadium in Houston.

* The Buffalo Bills beat the Los Angeles Chargers, 32-3 at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum.

* The Boston Patriots, the Dallas Texans, the New York Titans and the Oakland Raiders -- the teams now known as the New England Patriots, the Kansas City Chiefs, the New York Jets and the Las Vegas Raiders -- had irregular schedules, and did not play on November 20.

There were 2 games in the NBA. The Boston Celtics beat the Cincinnati Royals, 120-103 at the Cincinnati Gardens. And the Los Angeles Lakers beat the Detroit Pistons, 135-131 at the Olympia Stadium in Detroit. Elgin Baylor scored 52 points for the Lakers.

And the entire NHL, the "Original Six," was in action. The New York Rangers lost to the Detroit Red Wings, 4-3 at the old Madison Square Garden. The Toronto Maple Leafs beat the Boston Bruins, 3-2 at the Boston Garden. And the Montreal Canadiens and the Chicago Black Hawks played to a tie, 1-1 at the Chicago Stadium.

October 7, 1971: "The French Connection" Premieres

October 7, 1971: The French Connection premieres, based on the 1969 book by Robin Moore, itself based on a real break-up of a drug-smuggling operation in New York in 1962.

Moore (1925-2008) had served in the U.S. Army Special Forces, and not only co-wrote the lyrics to "The Ballad of the Green Berets" with Staff Sergeant Barry Sadler, but wrote the novel The Green Berets, which became a 1968 John Wayne film. In 1971, he collaborated with Dutch call girl Xaviera Hollander on her memoir The Happy Hooker: My Own Story, which was made into a series of 3 films, each starring a different actress. In 1986, Moore was convicted of tax fraud.

The real case, with heroin going from Indonesia, where the poppies were grown; to Turkey, where it was processed; to Marseille on the south coast of France, where it was distributed throughout the world; to New York, and then distributed throughout America, was cracked by Detectives Eddie Egan (1930-1995) and Sonny Grosso (1930-2020).

The French drug kingpin they sabotaged, but never arrested, was Jean Jehan. Jehan used French television personality Jacques Angelvin (1914-1978) to make contacts in America. Angelvin apparently never knew what was really going on until he was arrested. Jehan was arrested by French authorities in 1967, because he was given immunity due to being an anti-Nazi Resistance fighter in World War II. He was seen alive in Nice, on the French Riviera, as late as 1977, and is believed to have died of old age in his native Corsica. But Angelvin served 4 years in an American prison.

In the movie, directed by William Friedkin, Egan became Jimmy "Popeye" Doyle, played by Gene Hackman; Grosso became Buddy "Cloudy" Russo ("Cloudy" being the opposite of "Sunny," or "Sonny"), played by Roy Scheider; Jehan became Alan Charnier, played by Fernando Rey. Angelvin became actor Henri Devereaux, played by Frédéric de Pasquale. And Angelvin's 1960 Buick Invicta, with 112 pounds of bagged heroin hidden in the rocker panels, became a 1970 Lincoln Continental Mark III.

Friedkin, who had previously directed The Thin Blue Line, The Night They Raided Minsky's and The Boys In the Band; and would go on to direct The Exorcist, The Brink's Job, Cruising, To Live and Die In L.A. and Blue Chips, knew who he wanted to play Charnier, but couldn't remember the man's name: All he remembered was that he was a Spanish actor who had worked with Spanish director Luis Buñuel in a French-language movie.

Someone told him it was Rey, and he invited Rey to come to New York to discuss the movie. Then he found out that the actor he really wanted was Francisco Rabal -- and that Rey hadn't even appeared in the movie that Friedkin was thinking of, Belle du Jour. Rabal was able to meet with Friedkin first, but, as it turned out, he could speak neither English nor French. Rey, as it turned out, could speak both of those languages just well enough to pull the role off.

The film made a star of Hackman, but he wasn't even close to the first choice to play Doyle. Friedkin wanted Paul Newman. If not him, then Steve McQueen. Both were superstar actors and experienced drivers, which was integral for the chase scene. But both would have demanded paychecks too big for the producers, so they never asked Newman. They did ask McQueen, but he had made Bullitt in 1968, with its famous chase scene over the hills of San Francisco, and he didn't want to do another cop film.

They considered Jackie Gleason, who was already too old for the role (he was 54 when it was filmed in 1970; Newman was 45, while McQueen and Hackman were both 40), and hadn't done a film since his comedy Gigot flopped in 1962. (Gleason later played a cop in chase scenes in the Smokey and the Bandit films.) They asked Peter Boyle (who was 35), who thought the idea for the film was too violent.

They asked a real New Yorker, but not a real actor: New York Daily News columnist Jimmy Breslin (who was 42). Breslin, who had covered the original story, was intrigued with the idea of playing a detective. But he had never driven a car before -- living your whole life in New York City, that is possible -- and didn't want to start with such an important scene. He wanted the movie to succeed enough to admit that he was the wrong guy.

They asked Lee Marvin (46) and Robert Mitchum (53, nearly as old as Gleason), already veteran tough guys; and James Caan (30), who'd just finished Brian's Song, and was already in line to play Sonny Corleone in The Godfather. All of them turned it down. Rod Taylor (40), star of the 1960 version of The Time Machine, wanted it, but Friedkin didn't want him. So he cast Hackman, then known for a supporting role in Bonnie and Clyde and starring in I Never Sang for My Father.

What everyone remembers from the film is the chase: After Pierre Nicoli, played by Marcel Bozzuffi, escapes from Doyle, he boards an elevated train in New York's Subway system. So Doyle commandeers a 1971 Pontiac Le Mans (a brand-new car at the time), and drives under the elevated line, hitting other cars but staying on the chase, until he sees Nicoli disembark, and finally shoots him. The line was the old BMT West End Line in Brooklyn, at the time running as the B Train, now the D Train. The chase lasts from the 86th Street station to the 62nd Street station.

Some of the cops who acted as advisors on the film told Friedkin that a cop would not have shot a suspect in the back, because that would be murder, not self-defense. Friedkin told them, "I am secure in my conviction that that's exactly what Eddie Egan would have done, and Eddie was on the set while all of this was being shot."

The ending of the film matches the reality: While the big deal is busted, and the heroin is confiscated, Charnier gets away. This inspired one of the earliest film sequels, The French Connection II, in which Doyle gives up the home-field advantage to try to bust Charnier on his own turf, in Marseille, with results that, at first, prove disastrous. (That film has no connection to real life: Egan did not pursue Jehan any further.)

The French Connection was nominated for 8 Academy Awards, and won 5, including Best Picture, Best Actor for Hackman, and Best Director for Friedkin. Over 50 years later, it has a 96 percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes, and a 94 percent rating on Metacritic. Akira Kurosawa called it one of his favorite films, David Fincher called it one of the five films that "had a profound impact on my life," Brad Pitt called it one of the reasons he took the lead role in Fincher's film Se7en, and Steven Spielberg said he studied it in preparation for his film Munich.

Bozzuffi died in 1988, Rey in 1994, de Pasquale in 2001, Scheider in 2008. As of October 7, 2022, Friedkin and Hackman are still alive. (UPDATE: Friedkin died in 2023.)

One more thing: For a stakeout, Hackman as Doyle plays a "sidewalk Santa," ringing a bell and raising money for the Salvation Army. And the scene takes place on a very cold day in New York, with some snow on the ground. If Die Hard, which has no snow at all, is a "Christmas movie," then so is The French Connection, which is a much better movie.

*

October 7, 1971 was a Thursday. Football was in midweek. The NHL season started the next day; the NBA season, 4 days after that; the American Basketball Association season, the night after that. And baseball was between its League Championship Series and its World Series, which the Pittsburgh Pirates would win over the Baltimore Orioles in 7 games. So there were no scores on this historic day.

August 10, 1977: The Son of Sam Is Caught

August 10, 1977: The New York Police Department finally cracks the case, and arrests 24-year-old Yonkers mailman David Berkowitz as "The Son of Sam," whose 8 shootings in New York City in the last year wounded 13 people, killing 6 of them, permanently blinding another, and permanently paralyzing another.

Even though I was only 7 years old, and certainly didn't fit the profile of one of his victims, I followed the case intently on the local news. I was fascinated about how the big tough City collectively lost its mind over this one guy, and how they celebrated around 1:30 in the morning on August 11, when Mayor Abe Beame announced that they got him.

There were 2 other stories that really freaked me out as a kid: The Jonestown Massacre in November 1978, and the Three Mile Island nuclear plant meltdown in March 1979.

*

1st shooting: July 29, 1976, Pelham Bay Park, The Bronx: Donna Lauria, an 18-year-old medical technician, and her co-worker, Jody Valenti, a 19-year-old nurse, were sitting in Valenti's car, after returning from a disco in nearby New Rochelle. A man fired 3 shots, killing Lauria, while Valenti sustained a minor wound. The shooter got away, and Valenti gave the police a description of him.

2nd shooting: October 23, 1976, Flushing, Queens: Carl Denaro, a 20-year-old Citibank security guard, and Rosemary Keenan, an 18-year-old student at Queens College, were sitting in Keenan's car next to Bowne Park. 

Apparently, only one shot was fired, but Denaro was hit in the head. Keenan was cut by broken glass, but otherwise unharmed. She sped away, and got Denaro to a hospital, where he was saved, but a metal plate was needed to replace part of his skull. Neither of them saw the shooter.

3rd shooting: November 27, 1976, Floral Park, Queens: Two students at Martin Van Buren High School, 18-year-old Joanne Lomino and 16-year-old Donna DeMasi, were talking on the porch of Lomino's house when a man shot each of them once. DeMasi was hit in the neck, but her wound was not life-threatening. Lomino was hit in the back, and paralyzed.

Both girls said they didn't see the shooter's face. A neighbor said she saw a blond man running with a pistol in his left hand.

4th shooting: January 30, 1977, Forest Hills, Queens: After midnight, John Diel, a 30-year-old bartender, and his fiancé, Christine Freund, a 26-year-old secretary, were in Diel's car, having just seen the big hit movie of the moment, Rocky. Three shots were fired into the car. Diel was cut by broken glass, but not shot. He drove to a hospital, to no avail: Freund, hit twice, was dead within hours.

She lived long enough to tell the police that she hadn't seen the shooter. Diel said he didn't see the shooter, either. So far, the shooter had been very lucky -- at least, in terms of getting away with it.

Only now did the police begin to piece these crimes together. Each of these four shootings used .44 caliber bullets, and the shooter seemed to be targeting young women with long dark hair. But they were working on the theory that there were different shooters, because the suspect from the Lauria-Valenti shooting (the 1st) had black hair, and the one from the Lomino-DeMasi shooting (the 3rd) had blond hair.

5th shooting: March 8, 1977, Forest Hills, Queens: Virginia Voskerichian, 19, was returning home from her studies at Columbia University, when she saw a man point a gun at her head. She put her textbooks in front of her face to protect herself, but it wasn't enough: A single shot broke through the books, hit her, and killed her instantly. 

This was the only Son of Sam shooting that had a single victim, rather than having a pair of targets. This was just one block from the Freund-Diel shooting.

On March 10, the police announced that there were 5 shootings that all seemed to be the work of one man, whom they were calling "The .44-Caliber Killer," in lieu of evidence that would have suggested another name at the time.

The year before, Australian press baron Rupert Murdoch had bought the New York Post. Previously, it had been a liberal paper, particularly popular with Jewish intellectuals. Murdoch made it a hard right-wing newspaper, slamming the City's liberals, the State's liberals, the country's liberals, for allowing crime to go unchecked, for allowing government spending to go unchecked, you know, the usual right-wing bullshit. 

The City's other major tabloid that survived the big newspaper closings of the 1960s was the Daily News. (The words "New York" have never been in the official title, but their masthead has called them "New York's Picture Newspaper" and "New York's Hometown Paper.") It had previously been a populist conservative paper, due to its roots as having been a part of the Chicago Tribune Company. But with the Post taking a rightward turn, the News realized it needed to shift and fill the Post's former void, and they became a left-populist paper -- not Communist, or even Socialist, but definitely liberal. 

Murdoch's sensationalism, which he had perfected in his native country and then in Britain, was brought to the Post, and its huge, salacious headlines brought its circulation to unheard-of levels. The Daily News was forced to fight fire with fire. And the .44-Caliber Killer drove both papers' circulation to the higher points than they'd had in years.

6th shooting: April 17, 1977, Pelham Bay Park, The Bronx: Just a few blocks from the Lauria-Valenti shooting, Alexander Esau, a 20-year-old tow truck operator, had borrowed his brother's car for a date with Valentina Suriani, an 18-year-old student at Lehman College in The Bronx.

Four shots were fired. Both were hit in the head. Suriani died instantly. Esau died a few hours later, remaining conscious just long enough to tell the police that he didn't see the shooter. This was the first time that two people died in one of the shootings, and the first time with a male fatality.

It was here that the story took on macabre turn. A letter was found at the scene, addressed to the leader of the task force looking for the killer, Captain Joseph Borelli. The killer called himself "the Son of Sam." According to him, "Father Sam" was a demonic figure who commanded him to kill. The Son closed the letter with a warning that he would be back.

On May 30, Daily News columnist Jimmy Breslin -- whom, in a post I wrote after his death, I called "America's greatest newspaper writer" -- received a letter claiming to be from the killer. Now, he had sent a letter to the police and to a newspaper writer, matching the most famous serial killer in history, Jack the Ripper of 1888 London, who, as best as could be determined then, was never identified and never caught. This letter to Breslin was full of lurid prose, and Breslin said, "This guy could take my job."

Jimmy Breslin: A New Yorker's New Yorker.

Breslin conferred with the police, and they agreed with him that the letter should be published. After all, at the time, the Daily News had the highest circulation (most individual papers bought) of any newspaper in the country, over 2 million, and some of those two million people might find clues to the killer's identity in the writing style.. 

(Today, with the high cost of ink and paper, and the Internet, both having rewritten the rules, the Times gets about 830,000, no other single-city paper in America gets even 500,000, the Daily News gets about 260,000, and the Post is down to 230,000. It doesn't help that those high costs have driven up the cost of the newspapers themselves: From 1977 to 2021, the Times has gone from 25 cents to $4.00, the Daily News from 20 cents to $3.00, and the Post from 25 cents to $2.00.)

The Daily News did publish the letter, on Sunday, June 5, along with an editorial written by Breslin. Here's that front page:

Things weren't going so well in Chicago at the time, either.

The killer did not give up. And now, with his targets believed to be young women with long dark hair, women were tying their hair up, and afraid to go out to discos, as disco had taken over from Rock and Roll as the dominant form of music.

7th shooting: June 26, 1977, Bayside, Queens: Sal Lupo, a 20-year-old mechanic, and Judy Placido, 17, who had just graduated from high school, were not afraid to go to a disco, in this case Elephas in Bayside. But when they got into Lupo's car, Placido was scared to be just sitting there, even reminding Lupo that the Son of Sam was still on the loose. 

Sure enough, three shots were fired. Lupo was wounded in the arm. Placido was shot in the head, neck and shoulder. Incredibly, both survived. But neither one of them got a good look at the shooter. 

In spite of the fact that both had survived, the city's hysteria, and the hype from the media, both print and broadcast, became out of control. The first anniversary of the first shooting was coming up on July 29, and the NYPD were sure, based on something the killer had written in the Breslin letter, that this would be the date that he would strike again.

It turned out to be a fakeout. He waited one more night.

8th shooting: July 31, 1977, Bath Beach, Brooklyn: One night, plus a few hours (making it the 31st instead of the 30th), later. Robert Violante, a clothing store salesman, and Stacey Moskowitz, a secretary, both of them 20 years old, were sitting in Violante's car. Violante leaned over to kiss Moskowitz, when four shots were fired into the car. 

Both were hit in the head. Violante was blinded, and saw nothing after a flash of light, meaning the gunshot itself. Moskowitz hung on for 2 days, unconscious and unable to talk to the police, before she died.

This was the first shooting in Brooklyn, and Moskowitz was the first blonde victim. Perhaps the killer was changing his modus operandi to mess with the police. Whatever his intentions, the City was shaking with fear, and the media didn't help the situation. It seems like nothing they printed brought the police any closer to finding the guy.

But this time, he did something else he hadn't done before: He made a mistake. However insane he was suspected to be, he had always gotten away without leaving a clue behind. This time, the police looked for whatever witnesses they could find, and thought that, perhaps, people who got parking tickets near the latest shooting might be witnesses.

On August 10, they found a ticket given to a yellow 1970 Ford Galaxie, belonging to David Berkowitz, 24, an Army veteran living in Yonkers, just over the City Line, and who was working for the Post Office with a Bronx delivery route. 

Berkowitz's Galaxie

They made a call to the Yonkers police, and from talking to them, decided that Berkowitz no longer sounded like a potential witness, and now sounded like a potential suspect. 

When they found the Galaxie, they opened the trunk, and saw guns and other incriminating evidence. At night, they waited for him to come out of the apartment building at 35 Pine Street. He did, and approached the car. Was he on his way to kill again? This time, it didn't matter. When they arrested him, he asked, "What took you so long?"

The Post had the better headline. The Daily News had one that was much more subdued:

Berkowitz pleaded guilty to all eight shootings, thus avoiding a sensational trial, and possibly also the death penalty. In other words, he wasn't totally insane.

Years later, in prison, he would tell an interviewer that he had done the first shooting and the sixth, but not the others. In the Breslin letter, he referred to what he called "The Twenty Two Disciples of Hell." This has led to speculation that there were many people involved in the killings, in various capacities. It's also worth noting that Berkowitz did not match the description given by Jody Valenti, or the front-page-plastered police sketch.

He said that he was driven mad buy a barking dog, that he said told him to kill. The dog belonged to a neighbor, Sam Carr, the father of two of his friends. So that's where the name "Son of Sam" came from.

The Summer of '77 was a tough one for the City. In addition to the killings, crime in general seemed to be out of control, there was a terrible heat wave, a blackout on July 13 led to some of the worst looting the City has ever had, and the race to elect the Mayor got very nasty, leading to Beame's defeat after just one term, and the election of Ed Koch. And the City was still struggling to climb out of its financial crisis that bottomed out in the Autumn of 1975.

Between the arrest of the Son of Sam, and the Yankees going on the hot streak that led to a World Series win, this was the week that began to pull New York City out of the abyss, and let people feel optimistic again, reminding everyone just how good New York could be.

You know, before the mid-1980s' further escalations of crime, racial tension and municipal corruption reminded everyone just how bad New York could be.

Now 69 years old, Berkowitz remains in prison, at Shawangunk Correctional Facility in Shawangunk, Ulster County, New York. Since the early 1990s, he has claimed to be a born-again Christian, active in prison ministry, calling himself the Son of Hope. He says he doesn't expect to ever be released, and that may be for the best -- not because he could kill again, but because, even after all these years, someone might try to avenge his victims and kill him. After all, in 1979, he was stabbed in prison and nearly died.

Unlike Charles Manson, who maintained his crazy look until the end, Berkowitz no longer has the crazy eyes and the sadistic smirk. Now, he looks completely harmless. Maybe he is. But he still deserves to spend the rest of his life in prison.

As for those of his victims who survived: As far as I can tell, all of them are still alive as of this writing, 45 years later. Thus far, Jody Valenti, Carl Denaro and Robert Violante are the only ones to have spoken publicly about their experiences. Denaro is among those who believe that Berkowitz did not act alone.

Despite his blindness, Violante managed to get a job, and stay at it for 35 years until he retired. With some irony, it was with the U.S. Postal Service.

I should note that the expression "going postal," meaning carrying out a moment of madness that results in death, is not attributed to Berkowitz. It happened a few years later, when a different postal worker carried out a mass shooting.

*

August 10, 1977 was a Wednesday. It was the offseason for the NFL, the NBA and the NHL. Yes, I know this post is long. You probably thought I was never going to get around to the scores. Well, here are the Major League Baseball games that were played that night:

* The New York Yankees beat the Oakland Athletics, 6-3 at the original Yankee Stadium. Earlier in the day, Yankees owner George Steinbrenner called manager Billy Martin into his office, and gave him an ultimatum: Bat Reggie Jackson 4th, every game, or you're fired.

Billy had been betting Reggie 3rd, 5th and 6th, but didn't want him in the cleanup spot. Billy never respected Reggie, citing his poor defense (which was a gross exaggeration) and the fact that "His strikeouts are gonna mess up my running game."

Billy has often been called a genius. He wasn't. He had Reggie Jackson, Graig Nettles, Thurman Munson, Chris Chambliss and Lou Piniella. With hitters like those, he didn't need a running game. He did have one, though, with Mickey Rivers and Willie Randolph. Not wanting to lose the only job he ever wanted, Billy caved in, and batted Reggie 4th in every game remaining in that season, except for two when he gave Reggie a day off. 

Result? In this game, Reggie went 2-for-4 with an RBI, Nettles hit a home run, and Ron Guidry outpitched Vida Blue. The Yankees went on a hot streak, overtook the Boston Red Sox and the Baltimore Orioles, won the American League Eastern Division, beat the Kansas City Royals to win the AL Pennant, and beat the Los Angeles Dodgers to win the World Series. George's ultimatum worked.

* The New York Mets lost to the St. Louis Cardinals, 3-1 at Shea Stadium. That's right, both New York teams were at home on the same night. Incredibly, while the Yankees were winning and the Mets were collapsing, the Mets actually had the higher attendance on the night, although just barely, 16,463 to 16,440.

Soon, though, the move made by team president M. Donald Grant, including the trading away of Tom Seaver two months earlier, would begin to drive attendance down so far that Shea became known as Grant's Tomb.

* The Philadelphia Phillies swept a doubleheader from the Montreal Expos at Veterans Stadium in Philadelphia, winning both games by a 6-1 score. The Phils got home runs from Bake McBride in the opener, and Greg Luzinski and Bob Boone in the nightcap. (Yes, kids, that's Aaron Boone's father. Although he was best known as a good defensive catcher, he could hit a little.)

* The Boston Red Sox beat the California Angels, 11-10 at Fenway Park in Boston. The Angels led 10-5 going into the bottom of the 7th, but the Red Sox came back, sparked by a home run by Bernie Carbo.

* The Baltimore Orioles beat the Seattle Mariners, 5-4 at Memorial Stadium in Baltimore.

* The Pittsburgh Pirates beat the Chicago Cubs, 2-1 at Three Rivers Stadium in Pittsburgh. This was the longest game of the season, won by a sacrifice fly by Pirate catcher Ed Ott in the bottom of the 18th inning.

Like their fellow Chicagoans on the South Side, the North Side's Cubs were in 1st place in their division, the NL East, at the All-Star Break. But they faltered, as they so often did before 2016. It wasn't as dramatic as their regular-season collapse of 1969, but it was bad enough.

* The Detroit Tigers beat the Milwaukee Brewers, 5-3 at Tiger Stadium in Detroit.

* The Cleveland Indians beat the Chicago White Sox, 6-1 at Comiskey Park in Chicago. The White Sox, powered by a group of sluggers known as the South Side Hit Men, had led the AL Western Division for most of the season, but had just gotten swept at home by the Kansas City Royals, dooming them.

* Speaking of the Royals, they beat the Texas Rangers, 4-3 at Arlington Stadium in the Dallas suburb of Arlington, Texas.

* The San Diego Padres swept a doubleheader from the Atlanta Braves at San Diego Stadium. The Padres won the 1st game 8-6. They won the 2nd game 2-1 in the bottom of the 11th inning.

Jerry Turner led off the inning with a single. Dave Winfield hit a double, but Turner couldn't score. George Hendrick was intentionally walked, to load the bases and set up the play at any base. It didn't work, as Gene Tenace drew an unintentional walk to end it. Cliché Alert: Walks can kill you. (Mind you, that's only a metaphor. It's not actually going to end your life, the way the Son of Sam did for 6 people.)

* The Los Angeles Dodgers beat the Cincinnati Reds, 1-0 at Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles. Rick Rhoden pitched a 2-hit shutout to outduel Fred Norman. The "Big Red Machine" had won 5 of the last 7 National League Western Division titles, to the Dodgers' 1. This series would shift the dominance L.A.'s way, as the Dodgers made the Playoffs in 7 of the next 12 years, while the Reds only did so once over that stretch.

* And the game between the Minnesota Twins and the Toronto Blue Jays, scheduled for Exhibition Stadium in Toronto, was rained out. Because both teams finished far out of their respective Division races, it was never rescheduled.

June 17, 1962: The Marv Throneberry Game

June 17, 1962: The early days of the New York Mets are full of myths about their ineptitude, but this one actually happened.

It was the 1st game of a Sunday doubleheader, against the Chicago Cubs, at the Polo Grounds. The Cubs won, 8-7. Lou Brock, not yet a St. Louis Cardinal, not yet known as a base stealer, and never really known for his power, hits a home run in the 1st inning, into the center field bleachers at the Polo Grounds. Only 2 players had ever done that before: Joe Adcock, and, in a Negro League game, Luke Easter. Hank Aaron of the Milwaukee Braves went on to do it the very next day.

Earlier in that inning, Marv Throneberry made an error at 1st base for the Mets. In the bottom of the inning, it looked like he'd redeemed himself: He hit a long drive, deep into the right-center field power alley, and he slid into 3rd base with a 2-run triple.

But the Cubs appealed, saying he didn't touch 2nd base. And 2nd base umpire Stan Landes ruled "Marvelous Marv" was out. Met manager Casey Stengel stormed out of the dugout -- as much as any 72-year-old man can storm, I suppose -- and was ready to argue. But 1st base coach Cookie Lavagetto told him, "Don't bother, Casey. He didn't touch 1st, either."

And Casey yelled, "Well, I know he touched 3rd, because he's standing on it!"

Ernie Banks also hit a home run. Billy Williams' triple gave the Cubs an 8-5 lead in the top of the 9th. In the bottom of the 9th, the Mets got an RBI double from former Yankee Gene Woodling, and an RBI single from Frank Thomas. But Don Elston got a strikeout to end it. Who was the last batter? Of course: Marv Throneberry.

The Cubs won the 2nd game, too, 4-3 when Ron Santo hit a home run off Wilmer "Vinegar Bend" Mizell in the top of the 9th. Williams also homered in this game. Throneberry didn't do so badly at the plate: He went 1-for-3, and had an RBI on a sacrifice fly. But he did also make an error.

Marv, once one of the Yankees' top prospects, and recipient of a 1958 World Series ring, but stuck at 1st base behind Moose Skowron and Joe Pepitone, became the symbol of the '62 Mets' ineptitude. Jimmy Breslin, then a columnist for the New York Herald Tribune, wrote a book about the '62 Mets, titled after a quote of Stengel's: Can't Anybody Here Play This Game? In it, he wrote, "Having Marv Throneberry play for your team is like having Willie Sutton work for your bank."

(From 1920 to until his arrest 1952, Sutton was America's most successful bank robber. He denied saying he robbed banks "Because that's where the money is," but later said he wished he'd said it, because it was true.")

He had enough power to be described with the old baseball cliché "oafish clout," which enabled him to hit 16 home runs down the close right-field line at the Polo Grounds. But he was nearly as bad a fielder at 1st base as Dick Stuart, later to be known as "Dr. Strangeglove" but a better power hitter. Still, Met fans loved Marv.

Early in 1963, he got sent down to the Buffalo Bisons, and was released from the Met organization early in the 1964 season. He never played a home game at Shea Stadium. He went back home to Tennessee, went into business for himself, returned to fame by making commercials for Miller Lite beer, and lived until 1994.

The Mets finished the season 40-120. The "winning" percentage of .250 was the lowest in Major League Baseball since the 1935 Boston Braves went 38-115, for .248. The 120 losses were the most since the 1899 Cleveland Spiders set the all-time low point in baseball performance by going 20-134.

And it wasn't just Throneberry. Stengel could point to any number of bad performers, but, instead, blamed them collectively. "Come and see my amazing Mets," he would say: "I been in this game for 100 years, but they've shown me ways to lose I never seen before." In good times and bad, they have been "the Amazin' Mets" or simply "The Amazin's" ever since.

Throneberry made 17 errors in only 97 games. Supposedly, on his birthday, September 2, Stengel told him, "We was gonna give you a cake, but we was afraid you would drop it." Rod Kanehl, who played pretty much any position, but none of them well, made 32 errors in 112 games.

Charlie Neal, a decent 2nd baseman for the Dodgers after Jackie Robinson retired, made 28 errors in 135 games. Shortstop Elio Chacón made 22 errors in 113 games. Félix Mantilla, their most-used 3rd baseman but a 2nd baseman by trade, made 20 errors in 129 games. Frank Thomas -- not the later Chicago White Sox Hall-of-Famer -- a left fielder with "oafish clout," but so big, slow and clumsy he was known as "Big Donkey," made 14 errors, an alarming total for an outfielder.

Part of the problem was that, knowing they couldn't attract fans with winning baseball, they tried to attract fans with familiar names. So they got as many former Yankees, New York Giants and Brooklyn Dodgers as they could. Throneberry was not a memorable Yankee, but Woodling was. From the Dodgers, they got Duke Snider, Gil Hodges and pitcher Roger Craig.

Craig had helped the Dodgers win the World Series in Brooklyn in 1955 and in Los Angeles in 1959. He later became a renowned pitching coach, and managed the San Francisco Giants to the 1989 National League Pennant. But in 2 seasons with the Mets, he went 10-24 and 5-22, despite not pitching all that badly. During a mound conference, he told Stengel he was doing the best he could, and Stengel told him, "You could strike them out. Don't you know we can't catch grounders?"

Their best player was center fielder Richie Ashburn, then 35 years old, a legend for the Philadelphia Phillies. When he was told he was named the team's Most Valuable Player, he decided being MVP for "the worst team ever" meant it was time to retire, and he went back to Philadelphia, and spent the last 35 years of his life in the Phillies' broadcast booth.

Aside from Throneberry missing the bases, the biggest '62 Mets story involved Ashburn and Chacón. A Venezuelan shortstop who had helped the Cincinnati Reds win the Pennant the year before, he kept backing up to catch pop-ups for which Ashburn had moved up and yelled, "I got it!" -- the universal signal to your teammates that you are going to catch the ball.

Well, maybe not so universal. Joe Christopher, an outfielder who had played on the Pittsburgh Pirates when they won the 1960 World Series (as had Mizell), had played Winter ball in a Caribbean league, and knew some Spanish. He reminded Ashburn that Chacón's English was bad, and that he should yell, "I got it!" in Spanish, which is, "¡Yo la tengo!"

So Ashburn practiced saying it. The next game, there was a pop-up, midway between the infield and center field. Ashburn moved up. Chacón moved back. Ashburn yelled, "¡Yo la tengo!" And Chacón stopped. He understood. But Thomas, in left field, didn't understand, and crashed into Ashburn. After the play, Thomas asked Ashburn, "What the hell is a yellow tango?" (In 1984, a group of Met fans formed a band named Yo La Tengo.)

And yet, the '62 Mets attracted 922,530 fans to their home games, 6th out of 10 teams in the NL. And it was a different kind of fandom. The media called these young Met fans, some of them too young to have gone to Giant or Dodger games on their own, but now old enough to do so, "The New Breed." In The New Yorker magazine, Roger Angell described them as follows:

Everybody thinks New York only cares about champions, but we cared about the Mets. I remember going to some games in June that year, and they were getting walloped, they were getting horribly beaten. But the crowds came out to Polo Grounds in great numbers and people brought horns and blew these horns.

After awhile I realized that this was probably anti-matter to the Yankees who were across the river and had won for so long. Winning is not a whole lot of fun if it goes on. But the Mets were human and that horn I began to realize was blowing for me because there’s more Met than Yankee in all of us. What we experience day to day in our lives, there’s much more losing than winning, which is why we love the Mets.

The Mets lost 111 games in 1963. They lost 109 games in 1964, their 1st season in Shea Stadium. They lost 112 games in 1965, their last with Stengel as manager. Slowly, they got better. When they finally got into contention for the first time, in 1969, going all the way and winning the World Series, the words "Amazin' Mets" were no longer ironic, they were fitting. But, based on how bad they were earlier, they were called the "Miracle Mets."

How bad were they? On May 26, 1964, they beat the Cubs 19-1 at Wrigley Field. This was before the Internet, and, with Wrigley Field not having lights, it was a day game, and some fan decided he couldn't wait for his evening newspaper to come out. So he called the paper -- which paper it is depends on who's telling the story -- and asked how the Mets did today.

The man on the other line said, "They scored 19 runs."

The caller said, "Did they win?"

I've also heard the story another way: Someone in the city room of the Herald Tribune yelled out that the Mets scored 19 runs, and it was Breslin who yelled out, "Did they win?"

Whoever it was asking, he knew his team. Until they became Tom Seaver's team in 1969, the Mets were Marv Throneberry's team, even in 1968.

But their fans loved them, whether at the crumbling old Polo Grounds or the brand-new, yet airplane-ridden, Shea Stadium. As Rihanna would sing, nearly half a century later, "We found love in a hopeless place."

*

June 17, 1962 was a Sunday. These other games were played in baseball:

* The New York Yankees also got swept, by the Cleveland Indians at Cleveland Municipal Stadium. The Indians won the opener, 6-1. Dick Donovan outpitched Bill Stafford, and rookie Jim Bouton allowed a run in 2 innings. The Tribe won the nightcap, 6-3. Pedro Ramos won, Bouton's future Seattle Pilots roommate Gary "Ding Dong" Bell got the save, and Jim Coates got shelled in 2 innings. Whitey Ford actually pitched a perfect 7th inning in relief.

Over the 2 games, Yogi Berra went 2-for-7 with a home run and 2 RBIs, Roger Maris went 2-for-7 with a walk and was hit by a pitch, and Mickey Mantle, battling injury, only appeared in the 2nd game, as a pinch-hitter, and struck out.

* The Philadelphia Phillies beat the Cincinnati Reds, 7-2 at Connie Mack Stadium in Philadelphia. Frank Robinson went 1-for-3 with a walk.

* The Baltimore Orioles beat the Washington Senators, 4-3 at District of Columbia Stadium in Washington. (It was renamed Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Stadium in 1969.) Brooks Robinson went 1-for-5.

* The Pittsburgh Pirates beat the Milwaukee Braves, 7-3 at Forbes Field in Pittsburgh. Hank Aaron went 2-for-4. So did Roberto Clemente, and he also had an RBI. Harvey Haddix outpitched Warren Spahn.

* A doubleheader was split at Tiger Stadium in Detroit. The Detroit Tigers won the 1st game, 8-5. Purnal Goldy, playing in place of the injured Al Kaline, hit 2 home runs for the Tigers. The Boston Red Sox won the 2nd game, 5-0. Frank Malzone hit home runs in both games for the Red Sox. Carl Yastrzemski went 1-for-5 with 3 walks.

* The Los Angeles Angels swept a doubleheader from the Chicago White Sox at Comiskey Park in Chicago, 5-3 and 6-5.

* The Kansas City Athletics beat the Minnesota Twins, 10-6 at Kansas City Municipal Stadium. Harmon Killebrew hit a 2-run homer, but it wasn't enough.

* The Los Angeles Dodgers beat the Houston Colt .45s (who became the Astros in 1965), 6-2 at Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles.

* And the San Francisco Giants beat the St. Louis Cardinals, 6-3 at Candlestick Park in San Francisco. Stan Musial went 0-for-3. Willie Mays went 2-for-4 with 2 RBIs.

And the Final of the World Cup was held at the Estadio Nacional in Santiago, Chile. Defending Champion Brazil made it back-to-back World Cups, beating Czechoslovakia, 3-1. I have a separate entry for this event.