Cracky Chan

Christine Chubbuck: 29, Good-Looking, Educated. A Television Personality. Dead. Live and in Color.

SARASOTA, FLA. − Christine Chubbuck flicked her long dark hair back away from her face, swallowed, twitched her lips only slightly and reached with her left hand to turn the next page of her script. Looking down on the anchor desk she began to read: “In keeping with Channel 40’s policy of bringing you the latest in” − she looked up from the script, directly into the camera and smiled a tentative smile. Her voice took on a sarcastic tone as she emphasized “blood and guts . . . and in living color.” She looked back down at her script, her left hand shook almost unnoticeably.

Her right arm stiffened.  “We bring you another first.”  Her voice was steady.  She looked up again into the camera.  Her eyes were dark, direct and challenging.  “An attempted suicide.”  Her right hand came up from under the anchor desk.  In it was a .38 caliber revolver.  She pointed it at the lower back of her head and pulled the trigger.  A loud crack was heard.  A puff of smoke blew out from the gun and her hair flew up around her face as though a sudden gust of wind had caught it.  Her face took on a fierce, contorted look, her mouth was wrenched downward, her head shook.  Then her body fell forward with a resounding thud against the anchor desk and slowly slipped out of sight.  
 Hours later at the hospital, shortly before Christine Chubbuck died, her mother was interviewed by a local reporter.
“She was terribly, terribly, terribly depressed.  She had a job that she loved.  She said constantly that if it ended tomorrow she would still be glad she had had it.  But she had nothing else in her social life.
“No close friends, no romantic attachments or prospects of any.  She was a spinster at 29 and it bothered her.  She couldn’t register with people.  That’s the main thing.  She was very sensitive and she tried and she would reach out, you know. ‘Hi, how are you, won’t you come have a cup of coffee with me,’ and you say ‘no,’ but you don’t say ‘Won’t you come have a cup of coffee with me,’ that sort of thing, in her personal relationships, and it really got to her.  She’d been very depressed.  She’d been seeing a psychiatrist who really didn’t feel that she was that serious about not wanting to live.  She felt if you’ve tried as hard as you can, you’ve prepared yourself, you work hard, you reach your hand out to people and nobody takes it, then there’s something wrong with your drumbeat, and she really felt she couldn’t register with anyone except her family.  And at 29, that’s sad.”

Monday, July 15, was just another day at Channel 40.  Chris Chubbuck arrived about a half hour before the 9:30 morning talk show, “Suncoast Digest.”  She had had a quick cup of coffee with her mother at their house on nearby Siesta Key, asked her mother to leave her chocolate poodle out because she’d be back at 10:45, jumped in her yellow Volkswagen convertible and dashed off to the studio.  She looked particularly good that morning.  She had a tan, her waist-length black hair was clean and shiny and her black and whit print dress complemented her long slim figure.  She was in extraordinarily good spirits.  Her guest arrived and she showed him and his wife into the studio, then excused herself to write her script for the newscast.  This was a departure and it puzzled the technical director Linford Rickard, and the two camera-women.  Chris normally opened her show in her interview area and conducted a rather informal half hour.  Only occasionally on weekends has she ever anchored the news and never once had she opened her show with a newscast.
But Chris was so reliable and so professional that everyone figured she knew what she was doing.  She sat down at her typewriter, quickly wrote her 10 minute news script, told the control room that she wanted to use film of the shootout that weekend, and took her place at the anchor desk, across the room from her interview area. 
She placed under the anchor desk a large bag of puppets she had made, which she occasionally brought with her to use on her broadcast or to five a puppet show at a local hospital for mentally retarded children.  Hidden in the bag was the .38 caliber pistol.
She told the two camera-women that she would open with a short segment of news, then move over to her interview area. 
She began with three items of national news, then led into a film piece about a local shooting at a restaurant the night before.  When she finished the lead-in she waited for the film to come up, but nothing happened.
“I looked up and said to her, ‘Chris, the film’s not going to roll,’” said Jean Reed, the camera-woman, “and she just looked at me very levelly and said, “It isn’t going to roll.”  Then she just smiled as thought she were terribly amused.  Normally she would have been furious and said, ‘Oh, this damn, two-bit outfit.’  But she just sat there calmly.
“Then, when she went into that blood and guts thing I thought what sick humor.  And after she shot herself I was furious and ran over to the anchor desk, fully expecting to se her lying on the floor doubled up with laughter.  But I saw her stretched out, blood running out of her nose and mouth and her whole body twitching.  I said, ‘My god, she’s done it.  She’s shot herself.’” 
On the desk, after Chris had been rushed to the hospital, a blood soaked news story was found.  It was the story of her own suicide attempt, written in long hand.  It described the attempt, how she was taken to Sarasota Memorial Hospital, and it listed her in critical condition.

Hours after the shooting, the story was on network radio, television and on front pages of newspapers all over the world. "TV Star Kill Self," "TV Personality Takes Own Life On Air, "On Camera Suicide," read headlines of tabloids from Tokyo to London to Australia to the New York Daily News. People were stunned. Lee Harvey Oswald, George Wallace, a Viet Cong prisoner had all been shot before viewers' eyes and it riveted the world. But never in history had anyone deliberately killed herself on live television. And it was Christine Chubbuck's story.

    She left no suicide note.  A week before she died, she mentioned to Rob Smith, 22, the night news editor, that she had purchased a gun.
    "What for?" asked Rob.
    "Well, I thought it would be a nifty idea if I went on the air live and just blew myself away," she answered, and then laughed her funny cackle.
    "I just changed the subject," said Rob.  "That was just too sick a joke for me."
    Several weeks before she died, she told Mike Simmons, 26, the news director, that she wanted to do a film piece on suicide.  He gave her the go-ahead.  She called the local police department and discussed methods of suicide with one of the officers.  She was told that to kill oneself with a gun, the "best" method was to use a .38 caliber pistol.  And to be absolutely sure of success, a wadcutter, a slug that disintegrates into tiny pieces in the body, should be used.
     She was also told that the gun should be pointed not at the temple, which wouldn't necessarily kill, but at the lower back of the head.  It is there that the heart and lungs, the life functions, are sustained. 
     When Chris Chubbuck killed herself, she followed those instructions.  There seemed to be no doubt that she had every intention of killing herself.  There were some who were confused by the word "attempted" suicide in her script.  But those who worked with her had a ready explanation.  Chris was too good a newswoman to write suicide when it might have failed.  She was too precise.  And even her mother thought it not unusual.  
    So once it had been established that she fully intended to die, obviously the question became why.  And of course, why did she choose to do it the way she did?
    When somebody commits suicide, especially violently and publicly, once the initial shock dies away and people can absorb what has happened, they can begin to speculate on why.  This is what was happening in Sarasota one week after the death of "TV Star Chris Chubbuck."  Everyone had his or her own idea of why it happened.

?She had worked for nearly a year with a young man named George Peter Ryan, a tall, handsome, blond stockbroker who read the stock reports on the local news show. George ("Gorgeous George: to some of his friends) was divorced and had had personal problems himself. He was heavily involved in transactional analysis. Chris developed a crush on him. In fact, she confided to one of her friends that she had decided that George was the perfect person to help her solve her problems. She went to George on his 30th birthday in late June with a cake. And later at the press party, she made hit clear to him in a subtle way that she was available. He rejected her.

Chris’ closest friend, if she had one, was Andrea Kirby. Andrea, 32, was the sports reporter for Channel 40. She was Southern, petite, divorced and had a way with men. Andrea was also tough and ambitious.

Andrea had recently been hired by a Baltimore TV station and was leaving Sarasota in a few days. That depressed Chris somewhat because she saw her friend leaving and going on to bigger and better things while she was left behind. It was Andrea to whom Chris confided her plan to proposition George. Andrea had no patience with Chris’ tendency to feel sorry for herself. Occasionally she would say, “That’s right, Chris. Just kick yourself in the ass.” What she didn’t say was that she and George were already seeing each other. “When Chris found out that George and I were going out, that depressed her,” Andrea said.

●The owner of station WXLT-TV is Robert Nelson. He had owned radio stations in the area and three years ago had started this new channel, and ABC affiliate. That station was getting off to a slow start. Their equipment was old, their staff was small, very young and inexperienced. Everybody did everything. They concentrated on the more sensational news in the area, violence, crime, accidents, “blood and guts,” as Chris would often put it. Channel 40, sometimes referred to as “Funny Forty,” estimates its highest viewing audience at 10,000 sets.
Chris’ program had ratings of 500 homes. In season maybe 1,000. She was not by any means a “big TV star,” but she wanted to be. She wanted to be recognized, she was hard working, diligent and competent.
Her friends and family say she hated Nelson because she thought he seemed unconcerned with the quality of the station. She complained often about what she saw as the number of tasteless and violent stories on the air, about the station pandering, in her opinion, to its advertisers, about the lack of pay. When she died she was making little more than $5,000 a year. That was for putting on a morning talk show, doing sometimes four or five stories a day and occasionally working on weekends, anchoring the evening news. She was bitter about the fact that Nelson seemed to want only those who would work for the least amount of money, not those who were the most talented.
Chris’ suicide put station WXLT-TV on the map. Nelson proudly showed his collections of clipping about it to a visitor. “We got the whole front page of the Daily News,” he boasted.
●On the Friday night before Chris killed herself, she had a terrible fight with Mike Simmons, the news director, about her story being cut, in favor of a shootout.
“She was very emotional, would get unusually upset about these things,” said Simmons. “She would, well, throw tantrums a lot.”
A week earlier she had thrown a terrible tantrum when the director placed a bouquet of plastic flowers on her interview table. In front of her guest, a state politician, she had flung the flowers across the studio, screaming, “I won’t have these damned things in my studio.” Everyone was a little unnerved by that scene.
●She had had very few dates in the past months. When she had invited men, several times, to have dinner, they had accepted, then not even bother to show up or call. “I don’t think Chris has had more than 25 dates in the last 10 years,” her mother said.
●Last summer she had had an ovary removed. The doctors told her then that if she didn’t have children within the next two or three years she probably never would. And, of course, there were no prospects.
She had no real friends. She was a strange combination of someone who at once wanted, needed desperately, the support and friendship of others and in another way rejected others out of a sense of defensive pride. Her initial image was one of a self-confident, totally contained, together young woman. She would seem haughty, distant, standoffish really. Yet when people began to know her she evidenced such a crying need for a completely committed relationship that it drove them away for fear they couldn’t give her what she wanted.
“There was a haunting melody in Chris,” said Mrs. Chubbuck. “She gave so many presents, spent so much money, not to buy their friendship … but because she wanted to. It’s almost like her life was a little out of gear with other people. She was the only person I ever knew who would walk into a room and every head would turn … yet nobody ever came over and asked for her phone number. It’s been like that since she was 13.”
Chris Chubbuck lived at home with her mother and her older brother, Timothy, 32, an interior decorator. But it wasn’t the usual situation of a 29-year-old “spinster” living at home. She had left a small town in Ohio several years ago and moved into her family’s summer home on Siesta Key. Two years later, her parents were divorced and her mother moved down. Her younger brother Greg, 28, later came down and began to work in contracting. And last year, Timothy developed mononucleosis and moved down from Boston to live in the guest cottage, replacing Greg who had become engaged.
“It’s sort of like an adult commune,” said Mrs. Chubbuck. “Everybody thinks it’s a little odd, we know that, but it’s a nice arrangement for us. We all have our own privacy.”
Mrs. Chubbuck was 53 last week. She has long, shoulder-length gray hair and a round, open, friendly face, carefully make up over her tan. She describes herself as a “53-year-old hippie who’s with it.” Her conduct throughout the whole suicide episode had been exemplary. Too exemplary, some thought.
“That’s a tough cookie,” people would remark.

copypasta fail

This is the link

http://tosommerfugle.googlepages.com/christine-chubbuck

yawn