[August 4th
marks the 125th
anniversary of the day that Lizzie Borden may or may not have taken an axe
and given her mother
forty whacks and her father forty-one (more on that crucial ambiguity in
Friday’s post). So this week I’ll AmericanStudy five histories or stories of deeply
troubled children, leading up to a special weekend post on two children who are
anything but!]
On two layers to
the sensational case beyond the televised trial.
I’m not going to
even try to argue that TV sensationalism wouldn’t be the main context for analyzing
the 1993
murder trial of the Beverly Hills brothers Lyle and Erik Menéndez (accused
of killing their parents José and Kitty). As Friday’s Lizzie Borden post will
reflect, Americans have been obsessed with true crime stories and famous trials
for centuries; but the Menéndez trial was the first to be televised in its
entirety, airing
on Court TV nearly two years before the OJ trial (which is sometimes
erroneously described as the first televised trial). Indeed, the Menéndez
trial’s TV broadcast was considered so influential that when the 1993 trial ended
in a deadlocked jury and LA District
Attorney Gil Garcetti decided to retry the case, the second trial’s judge, Judge
Stanley Weisberg, refused to allow cameras in the courtroom. There’s no way
to know for sure if that change helped produce the second trial’s guilty
verdicts, but in any case it unquestionably reflects how much the TV angle
became a central part of the story of this famous trial and these famously
troubled children.
As with any
famous case or trial, however, there are other layers and contexts beyond the
immediate ones of those legal proceedings. In the case of the Menéndez
brothers, I believe that it would be interesting and potentially important
(although I don’t want to put too much stress on either of this post’s latter
two contexts) to think about them as second-generation immigrant Americans. Their
father José had fled to the United States from Cuba in the late 1950s after
Castro’s revolution; he was only sixteen years old, and so in many ways his own
identity was likewise formed in the United States, but he nonetheless was a
first-generation immigrant to the country. Like many of the post-Castro exiles,
José was from a prominent and wealthy Cuban family; but while many of those
families emigrated en masse, José came by himself, meaning that he did have to
start his life over in the United States in the stereotypical immigrant manner.
One of the prosecution’s central narratives in the brothers’ trial was that
they had been spoiled, given everything they could ever want and more, by their
parents; while the focus there was on defining them as sons of privilege, I
think it’s equally possible to see that trend as influenced by their father’s
own story, and by the American Dream (one often felt
with particular clarity by immigrant Americans) of giving your children
more than you had been able to have.
If that national
and cultural context might help explain the Menéndez brothers’ backgrounds,
however, a very different one applies to their lives since their 1996
convictions and sentences to life in prison without parole. Both men have been
married during the two decades since those sentences began: Lyle twice, first
to pen
pal Anna Eriksson in July 1996 and then (after they divorced in 2001) to magazine
editor Rebecca Sneed in 2003; and Erik once, in June 1999 to Tammi
Saccoman (who has since written the book They
Said We’d Never Make It—My Life with Erik Menéndez [2005]). It’s easy
to turn such prison relationships and marriages into comic fodder, but if we’re
looking to understand and analyze them with more depth and nuance, I would
suggest one of the most unique and compelling American books. I wrote at length
in
this post about Norman Mailer’s The
Executioner’s Song (1979), the nonfiction narrative of convicted serial
killer Gary Gilmore written as he awaits his execution; as I noted there,
Mailer focuses much of his book on Nicole
Barrett, the girlfriend who stayed with Gilmore throughout his prison
sentence and execution. Mailer goes well beyond any facile or reductive
understanding of Nicole or her relationship with Gary, and if we’re looking to
think seriously about the Menéndez brothers’ prison marriages, his book should
be required reading.
Next problem
child(ren) tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other histories or stories you’d highlight?
