Different Stories, Same Sad Ending

In some ways, the memorials said it all.

For writer J. Anthony Lukas, who killed himself on June 5, the massive amphitheater at New York’s Ethical Culture Society bulged to capacity with the country’s journalistic elite.

Writers John Gregory Dunne, David Halberstam, Betty Friedan and Jonathan Yardley were there. So were Joseph Lelyveld, executive editor of the New York Times, and Hendrik Hertzberg, editorial director of the New Yorker. Lucas’ editor, Alice Mayhew, and his prep school classmate, New York Times book critic Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, crowded onto the amphitheater’s unforgiving wooden benches.

One by one, friends walked to the microphone and remembered someone who was gentle and intense, brooding and funny--someone who had battled melancholia all his life--and they made it clear that Tony Lukas was a man they were all proud to have known. A lost treasure.

Eleven days later, the gathering for another famous writer who also committed suicide was far different.

The friends of novelist and nonfiction writer Michael Dorris seemed lost in the dark, oversized auditorium at New York’s Donnell Public Library. Sitting mostly around the edges, they left the center of the hall nearly empty.

In early April, Dorris had locked himself in a dingy New Hampshire motel room and downed a lethal dose of sleeping pills and vodka. A few days earlier, he had learned that investigators in Minnesota were preparing to file child abuse charges against him.

So when his friends went up to a microphone to remember Dorris, they circled around a terrible question: Was Michael Dorris the funny, prolific, talented writer, teacher and anthropologist who became a media superstar also Michael Dorris the child abuser?

Two famous writers. Two jarring suicides. Lukas’ and Dorris’ deaths, coming so close together, forced many in the publishing and writing business to look at how this strange trade, with its years of loneliness followed by what is often a self-generated froth of publicity, contributed to their depressions and their suicides. The two suicides provided a counterpoint between a traditional death of a suffering artist and some newer, Media Age version of this ancient human tragedy.

A meticulous craftsman, Lukas believed that the work itself was its best advertisement, so he agonized over every comma. He spent the last day of his life making minuscule final changes on the page proofs of his forthcoming book, “Big Trouble.” Lukas, who doubted his own considerable success, was the latest in a long line of distinguished writers--Virginia Woolf, Jack London, Sylvia Plath--who have found their depressions too hard to endure.

Dorris spent many of his 52 years in public, using his carefully crafted persona not just to push his books but to promote worthy causes, from the need for warning labels on bottles of alcohol to the establishment of the Native American studies department at Dartmouth College. When his reputation began to melt around him, Dorris killed himself rather than fight back.

A Brooding Darkness

If a clear, gentle image of the dead can be resurrected for a brief period, the friends of Lukas managed it at his memorial. His humor, his intensity, his brooding darkness that could cloud over his brilliance--it was all there, laid out for the hundreds who attended.

His journalism was praised, of course, as well as his kindness to young reporters. His years at Putney, the progressive Vermont boarding school, and Harvard University were recalled as well as his stretch at the New York Times, where he won the first of his two Pulitzer Prizes for a groundbreaking piece on the counterculture. For Lukas, writing was a vacation from living, one editor said. There were the stories that brought sad laughter. A Harvard roommate, Richard Ullman, now a professor of international affairs at Princeton University, told about the time as young men out of college, they drove from Italy into Yugoslavia with illegal Western currency. The border guards in those Cold War days were strict about such matters, so Lukas came up with a plan. He bought a large bag of potato chips, emptied it and put the money in the bottom and the potato chips back on top. As the guards took their car apart, Lukas munched on the chips noisily.

Another friend, Mark Goodman, explained how Lukas could be as persistent and dogged in play as he was in his reporting.

“It is written somewhere on this planet that everyone must have one friend, one truly close friend who drives them absolutely crazy,” Goodman said, as heads nodded knowingly. “Mine was Tony Lukas.”

Others touched on the depression that had finally pushed the 64-year-old Lukas to strangle himself in his Manhattan apartment after a final visit to his psychiatrist.

“He got out of life almost everything he wanted--the admiration of his peers, the love of a wonderful woman,” said Halberstam, a longtime friend. “Sadly, none of it gave him the solace he so richly deserved.”

Rachel Twymon, who as a young girl was a principal subject of Lukas’ book on school busing, “Common Ground,” keened over this august audience. When she spoke of how Lukas remained in touch with her long after the book was completed--how he had encouraged her to continue with her education--she brought some of the nation’s toughest journalists to silent tears.

“I wish you could have called me, Tony,” she sobbed into the microphone. “Maybe this time I could have helped you.”

Lukas let his pain show, even to virtual strangers. Large and rumpled, with sagging shoulders and black eyes that could look exhausted and fierce at the same time, Lukas bore into people and ideas. But the flaws he forgave in others, he did not seem to be able to allow for himself.

After his death, Judith Gaines, a reporter for the Boston Globe, wrote about interviewing him about “Big Trouble,” which uses the 1905 assassination of former Idaho Gov. Frank Steunenberg to examine American class warfare.

At one point in the interview, Gaines asked: “I guess what I really want to know is what do you mean by ‘class’?”

Lukas looked blank. He seemed unnerved, she wrote, and told her he could not go on with the interview because “I can’t believe that I spent seven years on this book and hadn’t parsed this sufficiently.”

A week later, he was dead.

As Lukas’ friends looked for reasons that made sense, some noted that the end of a book project is a particularly vulnerable period for a writer. Handing over the manuscript means losing control and giving a less nurturing world a chance to paw over it, to criticize it.

“There is tremendous uncertainty at this point about the value of what you have written and how it will be received,” said Charles Kaiser, a writer and close friend of Lukas. “Nobody who hasn’t disappeared from the world for five or seven years can know what this feels like, especially for someone like Tony, who had the highest standards of anyone that we know. Therefore, no matter how magnificent it is, it could never be good enough.”

Dissecting a Reputation

The memories of Michael Dorris were far more complicated, and perhaps for that reason far fewer people attended his memorial. Many stayed away from the event, some upset and angry about the possibility that someone they liked and trusted might have abused his own children. “I feel duped” was how one put it. The 100 or so people who gathered at the Donnell Library auditorium sat in small whispering clusters. For all but the closest friends and family, their appearance seemed like an act of duty. For many, the memorial was a chance not only to remember Dorris’ talent and humor but also an opportunity to address their confusion or anger about a friend whose secret layers were suddenly the stuff of news.

“In the past few months,” said Bob Edwards of National Public Radio, “more positive words have been written about Timothy McVeigh than about Michael Dorris.”

Edwards, whose deep voice and slow, easy cadence make every phrase sound weighty, said later that Dorris’ suicide made him “angry at everybody, at myself for not stopping him, at the media, even at Michael.”

At the memorial, however, he concentrated on the lawyers and the reporters--”buzzards,” as he put it, who were picking over his friend’s reputation.

Although the Minnesota child abuse case is closed, reporters have written about what was in the file and how close Dorris came to being charged by one of his biological daughters.

His wife, Louise Erdrich, who had separated from Dorris a year ago, did not come to the memorial but sent a letter to be read. It said, in part: “Every day since Michael’s death I have tried to think of what to say to our children. We talk and talk and like the stories their father and I wrote together, the explanation comes out different every time. . . . His death leaves us gasping.”

She went on to talk about how proud she was of him. “A marriage and a writing life are much more than the notoriety and confusion of the last few months. . . .

“Yes, he was complicated. I wouldn’t have married anyone who wasn’t.

“Yes he had a shadow side, so do all people of more than one dimension.”

Like the others who spoke, historian Simon Schama focused on the knowable part of Dorris:

“So perhaps there are things about the complete Michael I did not know and will never know, but the Michael I did know was, to me and my family, an immense blessing, a source of complete joy and excitement.”

Dorris’ story seemed superhuman. He launched the Native American studies department at Dartmouth 25 years ago, and it is now a thriving and highly regarded program. He wrote books, 14 in all--nonfiction, novels, children’s books. He adopted three children, and when one suffered from acute fetal alcohol syndrome, he wrote “The Broken Cord,” which brought world attention to a terrible disorder caused by pregnant mothers who drink. The warning label on a bottle of alcohol is one of his legacies.

But there was more. He was married to Erdrich, an esteemed novelist, and they lived what one writer called “the literary love story of the decade.” They had three biological daughters, dream children, beautiful, nice and smart. They wrote together and edited each other’s words, an intense interaction that most married couples, even married writers, could envy at a distance. And they had the time to help leagues of writers and legions of friends around the country.

It all seemed too good to be real and, of course, it was.

The child suffering from fetal alcohol syndrome died at age 23 in a hit-and-run car accident. The two other adopted children had difficulties with school, with the law and with the family. At one point, Dorris accused the boy of extortion, but lost the case in a Denver court. Both children had become embittered; one was homeless at the time of Dorris’ death.

During family therapy after his separation from Erdrich, one of Dorris’ biological daughters said he had sexually abused her. By law, such charges must go to state investigators.

At that point, as he told his friend Douglas Foster, director of the journalism school at UC Berkeley, “My life is over.”

“He spent an inordinate amount of energy--you could see it as an obsession--on keeping up what some have called his facade,” Marc Anthony Rolo, a friend, told the online publication Salon. “Michael started falling apart, I believe, when the chasm between his public persona--which was in a sense fictional--and his self in private life just couldn’t be reconciled.”

“He saw this suicide as a noble sacrifice for his family,” said Foster. “And we had a couple of very big arguments about it. He thought that by taking himself out of the picture, it would all cause less grief for everyone.”

Instead, Foster says Dorris has not been there to combat the charges, “the lies,” as he calls them. He has not been there to answer his friends’ doubts.

After all his knowledge of the media and its strange habits, he did not understand how powerful and enticing a story he would leave behind.

“I guess he was naive, really,” Foster said. “He thought that by doing this, people would leave him and his family alone.”