A Family’s Pain, for All to See

Bob and Marietta Marich had spent much of their lives in show business, earning prominence in this sprawling metropolis where both were deeply involved in theater and she once hosted a popular TV talk show that he produced.

The Marichs passed on to their children, Michael and Allison, a love of performing arts that motivated both to become actors.

Michael had studied theater at the University of Houston, where his teachers included famed playwright Edward Albee. Dreaming the dreams of many young thespians, he joined his older sister in Los Angeles in 1992, and two years later took a modest studio apartment on the second floor of a white-stucco, dormitory-style building at the corner of Cheremoya and Franklin avenues in Hollywood.

In 1996, he died there.

Michael’s death--from a heroin overdose combined with alcohol--devastated his parents and sister. What happened afterward compounded that pain and motivated Bob and Marietta to initiate two lawsuits, one in Los Angeles Superior Court against the entertainment firms behind the syndicated “reality” series “LAPD: Life on the Beat,” the other in federal court against the city of Los Angeles and two Los Angeles Police Department officers sent to investigate Michael’s death.

Even though they never knew Michael to use drugs or drink excessively, the Marichs are now resigned to what led to his death in the early morning hours after an evening of partying with friends. Michael “made a dumb, dumb mistake” in doing drugs that night, Bob acknowledged in the eulogy he gave for his son in Los Angeles.

The legal war continues, however. The couple has appealed last year’s dismissal of their suit against MGM/UA Telecommunications Inc. and its subsidiary, QRZ Media Inc., which produces “Life on the Beat.” The city, meanwhile, is seeking dismissal of the Marichs’ other suit.

“Life on the Beat” caused the family great anguish by videotaping and displaying Michael’s body in his apartment. The crux of the Marichs’ legal case, though, is a telephone call to them by an LAPD officer who they charge invaded their private grief because it was recorded and included in the show’s segment on Michael’s death.

The tragedy has immersed the family in a controversy that also touches on other issues.

One is LAPD conduct. Another is the propriety of close ties between police, fire and emergency units and the so-called “reality” TV series that videotape them--action shows such as “Life on the Beat,” whose rosy depictions of their subjects raise questions about their credibility.

Overriding these, perhaps, is the issue of common decency. Does having the possible legal right to do something also grant media the moral right? Shouldn’t the Golden Rule of “Do unto others . . . “ apply here?

“Every right is offset by other rights, and a decent person of character weighs and balances those,” says Michael Josephson, president of the Josephson Institute of Ethics in Los Angeles.

In dispute is just how much weighing and balancing “Life on the Beat” did regarding Michael Marich.

*

Michael was 27 when he died, a promising actor with growing TV and movie credits and an income that topped $80,000 in the last nine months of his life. He so impressed Albee that the playwright anointed him a “shooting star” in a letter read at a memorial service for Michael in Los Angeles.

As a teen, Michael hung out with his friends some nights drinking beer in Houston’s Memorial Oaks cemetery. Today, he’s buried there.

His grave is not far from the verdant, meticulously kept middle-class section of Houston where he and his sister were reared and grew to love the theater, and where their parents have lived in the same comfortable ranch house since 1963.

Like the Marichs’ marriage of 47 years, their house and neighborhood project stability. That was shattered for them about 9:30 p.m. on Oct. 20, 1996, a Sunday, when Marietta was in the den watching a movie on TV while Bob slept in their bedroom. She was about to turn in when the phone rang.

“I wondered who would be calling at this hour,” recalls Marietta, a handsome, genteel-mannered teacher and actress who still works occasionally in films. “I answered the phone, and I started to hang up because I thought it was one of those calls about giving you a new long-distance service.” The voice was male. “He asked to speak to my husband. I told him that he was asleep and that I could talk to him. He said, ‘I really need to talk to Mr. Marich.’ I said again that he was asleep and that I could take a message. He said, ‘It’s about his son.’ I said, ‘I’m Mrs. Marich.’ He said, ‘Are you Michael Marich’s mother?’ I said I was. And he said, ‘Well, your son is deceased.’

“I said, ‘Michael?’ And he said, ‘That’s correct, Michael Marich.’ I didn’t know what to think. I just didn’t believe it. It didn’t sound like an official call. It didn’t sound real. He sounded preoccupied, like when kids call and you know they are horsing around.

“I woke up Bob, and he had a hard time focusing. I told him this man was on the phone saying Michael is dead.” Bob took the phone.

“ ‘Mr. Marich?’ ” Bob remembers the caller saying. “He said, ‘Your son is dead.’ I said, ‘What?’ He said, ‘Are you the father of Michael Marich?’ I said, ‘Yes.’ He said, ‘Well, he’s dead.’ I said, ‘Who is this?’ He identified himself. I said, ‘Los Angeles police?’ He said, ‘That’s right.’ ”

Bob tried to gather his thoughts. “I told him I would call him back. And meanwhile, Marietta was screaming and moaning. Then I called back Michael’s apartment, and I said, ‘What are you saying, that he’s dead?’ He said, ‘That’s right, he’s dead. He died of a drug overdose. That’s what we think.’ And he wanted to know what I was going to do with the body. And I was just in a fog. I kept saying, ‘Oh, no. Oh, no. Oh, no.’ I hung up, and I started crying.”

What Bob and Marietta didn’t know on Oct. 20 was that, like slabs of meat, they and their dead son were already on a TV assembly line that was rolling forward irrevocably.

They didn’t know that some of LAPD Officer Eric Jackson’s words to them on the phone that night were being recorded in Michael’s apartment by a camera crew for QRZ Media, which had an agreement with the LAPD to ride with and tape officers for a weekly program about police.

They didn’t know that four months later, Jackson’s call--made in apparent violation of LAPD policy--and extensive footage of their son’s rigid body would be featured on the nationally syndicated “Life on the Beat,” despite what the family insists were its pleas for this not to happen.

They didn’t know that on the evening the program with Michael’s four-minute segment ran nationally, Marietta would be working late in her Houston home--unaware that “Life on the Beat” was shown outside Los Angeles--and would casually glance at the TV that she kept on without sound “just for company” to be jolted by seeing her son’s body on the screen.

He was seated on the floor cross-legged, barefoot, barebacked, gruesomely bent forward so that his head nearly touched the carpet and was only a few inches from the toy two-headed dinosaur one of his friends had given him as a joke.

Although blurring his face and never identifying him by name, the camera scanned Michael’s body from a dozen angles.

“How far have we sunk?” Marietta asks today. “How low can television go?”

“What right did they have to do that?” wonders Bob, a feisty former World War II paratrooper who is 75. “I liken it to a vulture circling a piece of carrion.”

“Vulture is too kind for them, and to call what they did grotesque is too dignified,” adds Allison, who, like her parents, remains irate at both the LAPD and the Los Angeles-based companies behind the TV series that put her younger brother’s torso on display.

The segment also included building manager Arlee Reed telling Officer Lisa Lawson that although Michael was no problem tenant, “they made noise late” the last three nights. It included Lawson commenting on Michael’s blurred wallet pictures, plus her saying, “We need to contact the father,” and her describing Michael as an actor who had gotten “a little newfound money and decided to celebrate.”

*

Created four years after a camera captured LAPD officers savagely beating Rodney King, “Life on the Beat” didn’t arrive in a vacuum in 1995 when, in its first season, it showed jarring footage of a man who had hanged himself. The era of reality-based series that monitor police, fire and emergency personnel in so-called video verite began in 1989 with the advent of Fox’s still-running “Cops.” Because such shows are so cheap to produce, their profit potential is huge. Thus, the success of “Cops” begat a slew of clones this decade, the latest being the A&E; network’s “L.A. Detectives,” whose subject is the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department.

The amount of collusion on such shows--the extent to which each participant sees itself as an extension of the other--is an ongoing subject of debate. Although former LAPD Lt. Dan Cooke and two current senior officers, Lt. John M. Dunkin and Deputy Chief David J. Gascon, are listed by “Life on the Beat” as technical advisors, each says he has no duties and isn’t paid.

Yet even if the LAPD and its personnel have no direct financial stake in “Life on the Beat,” the police and the show collaborate in a mutually beneficial venture:

* Positive publicity benefits a police force whose image has needed periodic refurbishing. Thus, it’s in the LAPD’s best interest that the show thrives and sustains a good reputation. “It opens up LAPD to the public and provides the public with information about their law enforcement,” Commander Dave Kalish, spokesman for LAPD Chief Bernard Parks, says of “Life on the

Beat.”

* The TV company gets material for a show.

But how truthful a show, given that logic dictates that nothing will be presented that jeopardizes the producers’ access to their subject? If another Rodney King-type incident occurs, can viewers expect to see it on “Life on the Beat” or “L.A. Detectives”?

The LAPD’s agreement with “Life on the Beat” gives the department “the right to view and comment on each step of the production for any material the department believes inappropriately or inaccurately portrays” LAPD activities or personnel. This is not “creative control,” the agreement adds, but “input to ensure an accurate portrayal. . . .”

QRZ Media executive Cynthia Shapiro says she hasn’t encountered “negative” footage shot by “Life on the Beat,” adding: “Look, the camera is right there. If you knew a camera was on you, I don’t think you’d do anything negative.”

Kalish of the LAPD cites that point as why “Life on the Beat” promotes good behavior by officers. “If there’s a camera crew riding with you,” he says, “you’re going to do everything by the book.”

And when cameras aren’t present? “Ninety-nine percent of the time, officers do the right thing,” says a retired LAPD sergeant who requested anonymity. “But what about the outtakes, about the abuse, about the misconduct when it does happen, about the things that go wrong that the public never sees? The public is getting a very narrow, sanitized-only view of what happens.”

Although many law enforcement agencies embrace and grant ride-along privileges to “reality” series, others turn thumbs down. “Our officers have enough distractions just responding to their calls in the field,” says San Diego Police spokesman Bill Robinson. “And I also worry about our officers playing to the camera instead of concentrating on their jobs.”

After once being a participant on a reality series, the Massachusetts State Police today is opposed to such shows, says public affairs director Capt. Robert Bird. “The reality shows I’ve seen make no attempt to educate the public,” Bird says. “They are put together to entertain and literally titillate. When someone is killed or police are responding to a suicide . . . that should not be thrown out there for the public’s entertainment.”

“Life on the Beat” entertainment? “These guys are not journalists,” says the anonymous ex-LAPD police sergeant. “But it’s difficult, even for the sophisticated public, to make a distinction between real TV news and what these shows are saying and showing.”

But QRZ’s Shapiro says, “I believe all our programs are newsworthy.”

Superior Court Judge Irving S. Feffer agreed when throwing out the Marichs’ suit against QRZ Media and MGM/UA, saying “newsworthy events are taking place on this show,” in effect ruling it was protected by the 1st Amendment.

Were the Marichs gratuitously sacrificed on the altar of the 1st Amendment or did displaying Michael’s body and taping the call to his parents really serve society? “Drug overdoses are a major problem in the country,” Shapiro says. “The Marich piece sends a powerful, sobering message,” says Karen Frederikson, an attorney representing QRZ Media.

If the intent was an anti-drug message, did delivering it require showing Michael’s body from 12 angles? “My brother is not a public-service announcement,” Allison says.

Citing pending appeals, LAPD and QRZ Media officials would not respond to most questions put to them. Officers Jackson and Lawson, who is now a detective, refused to answer questions.

Attorney Frederikson also would not speak about the case in detail, but said she disagrees “strongly” with the Marichs’ account of what transpired after Michael’s death.

*

In that account, the Marichs insist that QRZ Media was implored to abort Michael’s TV appearance. But to no avail.

Marietta says it was while adapting a play for eighth-graders she teaches that she looked up the evening of Feb. 5, 1997, and was mortified to see a body on TV that she recognized. It was Michael’s.

But how? Why?

Allison was the first in her family to learn, from one of her brother’s neighbors, that in addition to LAPD officers, “there had been a TV show” in Michael’s apartment after he died. “He said it was one of those tabloid-type shows, and that made my stomach turn,” said Allison, an intense, striking blond. “So they came in with the police, and what, it was lights, camera, action, with a free prop--my brother’s body?”

Just how the “Life on the Beat” camera crew gained entry to Michael’s apartment is in dispute. Allison said she heard from building manager Reed that he allowed taping inside Michael’s apartment only after being told by an officer that it was for “LAPD records.”

Numerous calls to Reed were not returned. But Allison’s account is supported by a letter provided by the Marichs, bearing what they say is Reed’s signature. In part, it says about the aftermath of Michael’s death:

“I was interviewed by a female officer in the hallway of the apartment building that I manage. The interview was videotaped for what I was told by the female officer was for LAPD police records. . . . Any permission that was given by me was given in confusion and at a time when I was under great duress. If not for the statements by the female police officer . . . I would have denied permission for the crew to film. I feel any right to show Michael or his apartment should be given only by his family.”

Laurence W. Watts, the Marichs’ Houston attorney, says Reed also claimed that the TV crew wore “the LAPD logo.” LAPD’s Kalish said that although he didn’t know the case’s details, “Obviously, we would not condone deceiving anyone as to who the media are.”

The crews do not deceive, QRZ’s Shapiro said. “They identify our show as our show, separate from the LAPD. We might have T-shirts. I don’t know what they were wearing. If they were wearing our show’s clothing, it would have been clothing that looked nothing like LAPD uniforms.”

Yet an “LAPD: Life on the Beat” logo might be confused with an LAPD logo, evidenced by a photo in a 1997 newspaper story showing a “Life on the Beat” sound man in a baseball hat with “LAPD” emblazoned across the front above much tinier lettering. To a casual observer, he might appear to be a police employee.

Even if “Life on the Beat” did gain entry to Michael’s apartment through deception, that probably would not affect the legal merits of the Marichs’ two lawsuits.

A much different matter, apparently, is Jackson’s phone call to the Marichs notifying them of Michael’s death. Attorney Watts expresses confidence that Judge Feffer’s dismissal of his clients’ suit in state court will be overturned because of a subsequent California Supreme Court ruling--aimed primarily at “reality” shows--that newspapers and TV stations can be sued for using newsgathering techniques that invade privacy.

That ruling stemmed from a suit filed by Californian Ruth Shulman and her son after she learned that her conversation while being rescued from a 1990 auto accident that left her a paraplegic was recorded by a tiny microphone worn by a flight nurse who arrived by helicopter. Shulman’s words outside and inside the helicopter, including her plea to be allowed to die, were later broadcast nationally on the now-defunct series “On Scene: Emergency Response.”

“Actually, the two cases are quite different,” argues QRZ attorney Frederikson. “One basic difference is that the individuals suing in the Marichs’ case are the parents, [who] were never filmed. And they do not have any right to the premises.”

Of critical importance to the Marichs’ privacy case, apparently, is to what extent they can be heard responding to Jackson.

After watching the segment, Judge Feffer said that he “couldn’t hear one word” of what the Marichs said.

In contrast, the Marichs, who haven’t seen the phone footage, were told by friends that they can be heard during the Jackson call. Others viewing that footage might conclude that a very careful listener might discern the Marichs’ voices. Adding to the possible confusion, “Life on the Beat” appears to have edited the sound track out of sequence so that when Jackson addresses Bob, it’s Marietta who appears to be responding in muffled anguish. Only later can Bob’s faint “Oh, no” be heard.

If “Life on the Beat” did not intend to record the Marichs without their knowledge, why were their voices retained when they could have been erased?

Police are exempted from a California law prohibiting taping of conversations without all parties’ knowledge. Yet why was the notification call made from Michael’s apartment in the first place, if not for theatrics?

“We follow around police officers and show what they do all day, and that’s what they do all day,” “Life on the Beat’s” Shapiro responded.

Disputing that is former Lt. Cooke, who found it “odd” that the call to the Marichs was recorded and was surprised that they were informed by phone of their son’s death. “I’m outraged,” he said. “I’ve made personal notifications. We would go out to the house and be there to comfort the individual. And if it’s out of town, you call the police in that city and they make the notification.”

LAPD policy requires that death notification be made “in person,” said spokesman Kalish, “or if it is outside the city, the [Los Angeles County] coroner’s office is asked to do it.” Coroner’s office spokesman Scott Carrier said his department’s policy in those instances is to ask police in the other city to inform next of kin.

Kalish said he would be “very surprised” if Jackson called the Marichs at the show’s behest. “Sometimes there are extenuating circumstances, which might have been [what happened] in this case,” he said.

Craig Harvey, chief coroner investigator, said he knew of no such circumstances in this case. Jackson called the Marichs, he said, “prior to the arrival of our staff on the scene.”

All of that was unknown to Allison when she went to LAPD’s Hollywood Division the morning after Michael’s death to get the key to his apartment, and asked an officer what could be done about the videotape. In her mind, displaying Michael’s body on camera was reason enough to stop “Life on the Beat” from proceeding.

*

On Monday

* In the second of two parts, Howard Rosenberg follows the Marich family as it tries to persuade QRZ Media not to broadcast the footage of Michael’s dead body.