A Death Prompts Thoughts on Families and Friends

I spent one morning last week thumbing through a book sent to me a couple of months ago. Its title is “Living Room Lectures.” Its author was a friend.

Written in a fluid yet scholarly style tailored mostly to classrooms, it contrasted the dark portrayals of families in films of the 1950s with their near-mythological status in TV sitcoms of that period. Movie families were often torn by dysfunction, generally speaking, while TV families covered it up.

The book was published in July, its dedication reading: “With love for Ken, and for our children, Philip and Laura.” In her acknowledgments at the beginning of the book, the author continued: “My love and gratitude go to my husband, Ken Donney, for his constant faith, his intellectual insights, and his continual good humor as we juggled two careers, two babies and two thousand diapers in the midst of completing this project.”

The author was Nina C. Leibman.

Nina is now dead. Ken Donney is charged with her murder. They were married 10 years.

Our lives first crossed in 1985, when she interviewed me for a paper she was writing as a graduate student in film and television at UCLA. Nina went on to earn a Ph.D. from UCLA and to do some teaching in her field at Loyola Marymount University and USC. Because of our mutual interests, and also because we liked each other, we kept in touch, exchanging cards on holidays and things like that. On rare occasions we would speak on the phone, and from time to time would run into each other. Although we weren’t really close, we did socialize a few times.

At a moving memorial service for Nina in Los Angeles last Wednesday, a longtime friend lovingly described her as being a constant “tonic.” She was also very smart, possessing the kind of acute intelligence that bridged diverse, seemingly incompatible worlds. Although a scholar in her pop-culture specialty, she had one foot firmly planted on the pavement with the rest of us. It was a nice mix. She had this admirable capacity to create something erudite from the seemingly mundane, and she always seemed to be running off to conferences to read academic papers she had written relating to TV, papers identifying meaningful trends often obscured by the trivial.

We’d never discussed it, so I wonder now what Nina thought of daytime talk shows and their relentless depictions of the institutions of family, marriage and friendship as being essentially twisted, perverse and unworkable. As an astute observer and student of media, she surely would have been up on the subject--how talk program after talk program rubs our noses in domestic violence and other levels of abuse and dysfunction, but only as they seem to victimize the unempowered, uneducated underclass.

Would she have put on her mortarboard and taken notes on the stereotypes, charted the gender, racial and economic roles assigned to guests by most talk shows? Would she have laughed at the folly of these characters who trivialize real pain with their burlesque antics or are themselves trivialized by the shows purporting to sympathize with them? Or would she have related to the pain?

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I can’t recall whether it was a call or card that we got from Nina saying she and Ken were moving to Northern California. She was going to be a lecturer at UC Santa Cruz. That didn’t last, though, and ultimately she wound up writing grants at Santa Clara University, where Ken, an attorney, had become career services director at the law school.

It’s curious how the past connects to the present, and how almost-forgotten events now jump out at you as symbols. Once in the late 1980s, my wife, Carol, and I were invited to dinner at the small apartment Nina and Ken were then renting in Santa Monica. Carol and I remarked afterward how blissful they appeared, how proud they seemed of each other’s accomplishments. I recall that night how, over dinner, we hashed over David Lynch’s weird film “Blue Velvet,” which they liked a lot. “Blue Velvet” dealt with the violence and depravity hidden behind a facade of normality in a small town straight out of Norman Rockwell.

In September, Nina filed for divorce from Ken.

Early in the morning of Oct. 27, she was stabbed to death in their Santa Cruz home. Her body was discovered slumped on the floor by police after a call made to 911 dispatchers by Ken at 2:30 a.m. Authorities say she had been stabbed 14 times in the neck, back and chest with an eight-inch knife. They said that when police arrived, Ken was spattered with blood, and his right hand was cut. Philip, 7, and Laura, 4, were unharmed, but one or both may have been awake when their mother was slain.

Last Wednesday, 49-year-old Ken, his right arm and hand heavily bandaged, pleaded not guilty to a charge that he murdered his wife, who was 38.

At times like this you search for ironies. One is the last sentence of “Living Room Lectures.” It urges that more attention be paid to media portrayals of families and their impact on society, and to how we can utilize such depictions to create “a more harmonious home life.”

Another irony is that in 1985, Nina wrote about me, and now, a decade later, I’m writing about her. She dropped me a note when her book came out. I wish I had saved it.