They never needed to reimagine ‘Bobby’

On the night that Robert F. Kennedy was mortally wounded at the Ambassador Hotel, five others were felled by his assassin’s bullets: a labor leader, two newsmen, a Democratic Party activist and a teenage campaign volunteer.

It took years for the whispers and stares to cease, the investigators to disappear, the introductions that started with “He got shot with Bobby Kennedy” to stop. As the 1968 assassination receded in the nation’s memory, their stories seemed destined for the historical trash heap.

Today, a major motion picture revolving around the assassination, “Bobby,” opens in Los Angeles and New York. Their characters don’t exist in the film, which -- quoting from the publicity material -- “reimagines one of the most explosively tragic nights in American history.”

But they recognize that “Bobby” may renew public interest in a night that, for them, needs no “reimagining” -- forcing them out of the shadows and into the intersection of Hollywood and history.

“I’m sure there’s a service being done by making the movie,” said William Weisel, a retired ABC News associate director who was hit in his left side by a bullet as he stood behind Kennedy. “But it’s not the facts, and I think that’s a shame.... I want to remember it the way it was.”

None of those wounded were consulted during the making of the film. Some don’t care to see it.

Weisel, then 30, was one of five bystanders shot by Sirhan B. Sirhan, a 24-year-old Palestinian, as Kennedy made his way through the crowded kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel just after midnight on June 5, 1968, after thanking supporters gathered in the hotel ballroom to celebrate his victory in California’s Democratic presidential primary.

Paul Schrade, then 43, was a regional director for the United Auto Workers who had broken ranks with union leadership to campaign for Kennedy. He was hit by a bullet in the head and bled so heavily onlookers thought he was dead.

Ira Goldstein, 19, was a rookie radio reporter who had just shaken hands with Kennedy when a bullet hit him in the hip. He hobbled to a chair and collapsed.

Irwin Stroll was a 17-year-old campaign volunteer whose parents found out he’d been shot when they saw him on television, stumbling out of the Ambassador’s kitchen, his pants leg stained with blood.

Elizabeth Evans, 43, was a Democratic Party activist who had supported Kennedy’s opponent, Eugene McCarthy, but went to the Ambassador that night because she loved a party. She was grazed in the forehead by a bullet as she bent over to retrieve a shoe she’d lost when jostled by the crowd.

They have rarely spoken to one another since that night, with nothing to connect them but a shared moment in history.

Stroll went on to become a successful interior designer and died in 1995.

Evans was reportedly divorced not long after the assassination and later faded from the political scene.

Schrade lost his union post in 1972 and returned to the factory floor. He spent years helping Latino farmworkers and black leaders in South L.A. and campaigned, on behalf of the Kennedy family, for a school on the site of the Ambassador, which was closed in 1989. On Monday, construction of that school will begin.

Weisel returned to his job at ABC’s White House bureau, but 12 years later he moved to the Napa Valley, where he runs a restaurant and bed-and-breakfast.

A disillusioned Goldstein left the news business, returned to school and eventually started his own business. He lives in relative obscurity today and plans to keep it that way.

For six months after he was shot, he said, Secret Service agents shadowed him and public curiosity turned him into a reluctant celebrity. “I couldn’t go anywhere without being asked questions,” he said.

“I thought about it every day for 10 or 15 years,” he said. “After that, it sort of went away.”

Now he can’t remember the last time he looked at the mark the bullet left -- “a pinpoint now, about the size of a pencil lead.” And he’s not interested in seeing “Bobby.”

“I knew when the movie came out, this would all start up again,” he said wearily. “I don’t need to see it. I was there.”

Weisel, now 68, can’t avoid his scar. The 13-inch gash bisects his torso, from side to side. But for him, that physical memento was the only damage done.

He spent weeks as a guest of the Beverly Hilton, recuperating from surgery. ABC flew his mother out; friends visited from Washington, D.C. “It was wonderful,” he recalled.

He met briefly with Sirhan’s family; the gunman’s mother, Mary, wanted to apologize. “I didn’t want to,” Weisel groused. “My mother said, ‘Oh, go. You should do that.’ So I did. I went out in the lobby, and his brothers were there bowing and scraping, and I was trying to smile.”

When Weisel returned to Washington, he became a fixture on the political social circuit. “I was invited to parties where I didn’t even know the people,” he said. “I’d notice people over in the corner looking at me, whispering, ‘You see that guy? He took the second bullet.’ ”

But his notoriety made for some uncomfortable moments. Months after the shooting, he encountered former Alabama Gov. George Wallace while covering a political event. He recalled Wallace eyeing him suspiciously, then announcing, “You’re the guy I’m going to stay away from,” as if Weisel might attract another bullet. At a political rally four years later, Wallace was shot and paralyzed from the waist down.

Weisel learned firsthand about the long arm of the law. He said he found out later that law enforcement officials scoured his Pennsylvania hometown, “talked to my grandmother, my third-grade teacher.... My mother told me, ‘Your grandmother called crying.’ They were asking all these questions: ‘Is he a communist? Was he a good student?’ ”

Unlike the others who were shot that night, Weisel wasn’t a Kennedy supporter. Robert Kennedy was tough for a newsman to cover, he said, because of the fervor of his supporters. The Kennedys “were so popular, people would steal anything from you -- your watch, your buttons, your rings -- anything he’d touched or [from] somebody who’d touched him.”

Schrade also remembers that enthusiasm; it’s what has inspired him to try to keep Kennedy’s legacy alive.

“It took a long, long time for me to get over it,” he said. “I was very angry, very sad. The only thing that pulled me out, so I could understand where I was, what had happened, was to get active in social justice.”

Schrade learned that the film “Bobby” was in the works in typical Hollywood fashion. He heard about it from a neighbor, the son of a friend of “Bobby” writer and director Emilio Estevez.

“The film is more Hollywood than documentary,” said Schrade, who attended a pre-release screening. “But it’s really good for young people, particularly. They do a really good job of presenting Bobby through speech clips and cuts from [old] videotape” that capture the idealism of the era.

Schrade can’t resist a bit of proselytizing. “Bobby was the only candidate who went to [meet with farmworkers in] Delano, who went to Watts.... The only guy speaking for poor people, against the war in Vietnam.

“Now look where we are today, right back where we were. There’s an ugly, illegal, immoral war. Look at [Hurricane] Katrina; it exposed how we treat poor people.”

But he refuses to torment himself with “what ifs.”

“I can’t play that game,” he said. “First of all, it’s too painful. But more, what’s the use of it? We are where we are.... His legacy is good enough for dealing with our problems now.”

sandy.banks@latimes.com