NOTE: In this post I make mention of suicide. It is a difficult topic to write about and I realize some of you reading this may find it difficult to read about, and if it is troubling you may want to avoid this week’s post. Most importantly, if you are having thoughts of suicide, whether or not you are in crisis, there is help and there is hope. You can find help through the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline. Call or text 988 to get help.
You face a problem when you’re a biographer. It’s not unlike any movie you’ve ever seen that involves a dog as a major part of the story. You know how the story’s going to end, and you know it will probably break your heart. Both life stories I’ve written thus far ended abruptly. In the case of Ben Robertson, it was with a plane crash. In the case of Dave Garroway – and there’s no easy way to say this – it was suicide.
This is a hard topic to talk about, for many reasons. For some folks, it’s deeply personal. Maybe others have lost loved ones or neighbors or colleagues this way.1 In the case of Dave Garroway, it was something I knew I’d have to handle because of how I remembered the coverage of his passing in 1982. The more I learned, though, and the more I researched and the more I talked to people in the know, I found that it was nothing new in his life, and that it had been something on his mind for a long time before he finally did it. (Depression sucks, and depression can indeed kill.)
But even though it’s a horrible thing to talk about, I’m doing no one a service if I avoid the topic. My job is to report the bad alongside the good and great, not to burnish an image, because that’s public relations and not biography. My problem then becomes, how do I tell it? The way he went was not gentle, but I have to find a way to tell it without getting lurid.2 I also have an obligation to the Garroway family to treat it with sensitivity. The event was traumatic enough; the last thing I needed was to even accidentally inflict new trauma in the retelling.
I knew what the newspaper stories said about his last observed moments. But I had nothing in between the time his wife left the house to go to an appointment, and the discovery of his body. In my first draft, I wrote what seemed plausible as a sequence of events leading up to that last second, and I tried to write it with as much discretion as I could, because the reader could piece things together. But it just didn’t feel right somehow. Then, as will happen, I made a discovery that changed things.
One of my long-standing interests is aviation history and accident investigation. One specific long-standing interest is the crash of American Airlines Flight 191 in May 1979. It’s the first aviation disaster I remember in detail, and even though I was a child when it happened I was fascinated by the story and have been since.3
The Flight 191 disaster was especially painful for the staff of Playboy magazine, because four people affiliated with the magazine were killed in the crash. Out of the grief came an assignment to writer Laurence Gonzales to conduct an in-depth investigation of aviation safety in the United States. In June 1980, Playboy published the first part of Gonzales’ two-part investigation. All these years later, it remains deep and bracing reading, and I regret that it’s paywalled and hard to access, because it’s seriously good investigative reporting that is written so well.4
Gonzales was out there among the cops and firefighters and reporters and everyone else on the scene that horrible afternoon, and three months later he came back out to survey the scene once more. He began his report with a description of the scene three months post-crash, and made mention of strands of white electrical wire that still stuck through the mud in this field where nothing could grow.
As the first installment concluded, he briefly described a visit to the McDonnell Douglas factory in Long Beach, where DC-10s were being manufactured. He noticed the wire harnesses, with hundreds of miles of electrical wire in each aircraft, and felt there was something eerie about it. Then he realized why. The first installment thus ended with a callback to all those strands of wire still sticking out of the mud near O’Hare.5
And it’s from Gonzales that I got the idea of how to handle Dave Garroway’s final moments. When you read the book, you’ll recognize a similar callback. It allowed me to handle a horrible moment with, I hope, the best available sensitivity.
For that, I must credit Laurence Gonzales. Thank you, sir, for helping me get better at what I do. I’d like to shake your hand.
- In my own life: a next-door neighbor when I was a child, and many years later a colleague of whom I was particularly fond. I know how the news is a shock, especially when you have seen no signs anything was wrong. But that’s how suicide can work.
- My benchmark for how not to do it is the way Jim Bishop described the fatal shot in The Day Kennedy Was Shot. If you’ve read it, you know what I’m talking about. William Manchester found a better way to address the terrible moment in The Death of a President.
- During a layover at O’Hare a few days ago I made a pilgrimage to see Gate K5, where those souls boarded that doomed DC-10 that day. It was powerful. A few days before, during my outbound trip, I saw the crash site itself while we were on approach. They’re building an off-ramp for the nearby expressway across part of the site now. So it goes.
- And given the 737 MAX affair of recent years, sadly relevant. Just as Gonzales refused to fly on DC-10s, I avoid the 737 MAX. Having studied the DC-10 affair in great detail, I see too many parallels. I never flew on a DC-10 but I did get two rides on its successor, the MD-11, and a lot of things were on my mind the whole time.
- This was not the only time Gonzales wrote about a DC-10 crash. He is also author of Flight 232, about the crash of a United DC-10 at Sioux City 34 years ago today. Flight 232 is an excellent piece of documentary journalism and one of the most powerful and truly haunting books you will ever read.