She says she sometimes feels like a stuffed Ginny Foat doll, the star puppet in an absurd script.
She feels that way even now, with her book on the market, the TV rights sold to Marlo Thomas and her speeches worth thousands on the lecture circuit. She has been forced twice to play the prisoner role: Sit down, line up, shut up, eat.
She has played the obedient defendant: Sit down, be ladylike, look vulnerable, keep the neckline high and the heels low.
This month, in conjunction with the release of her autobiography, ”Never Guilty, Never Free” (excerpted this week in Tempo), she is playing the celebrity author, in city after city on look-alike morning talk shows.
Why did one of your feminist friends set you up to be arrested for murder, Ms. Foat? Why did you stay so long with an alcoholic husband who beat you during sex, Ms. Foat? How was the prison food?
The former Virginia Galluzzo, nice Italian Catholic girl from Brooklyn, replays her strange life for the audiences, still feeling that a hand other than her own is moving her, that this is just the book-tour act of the script. By the time Foat landed in Chicago a few days ago, she had depleted a large supply of cough drops and wanted nothing more than to get home to the San Francisco Bay area.
She would rather not say exactly where in the Bay area, but she doesn`t mind talking about her new dog. She pulls his picture from her purse and mentions that he will soon attend guard dog school.
On Sept. 30, while she was making the talk-show rounds, her former husband Jack Sidote, the man who tipped off this whole domino roll of fate by claiming she helped him murder a South American businessman in New Orleans in 1965, was paroled from a Nevada prison.
Asked about Sidote, she pauses. She glances at a nearby tape recorder, looks away, draws a deep breath and glances again at the recorder. She says she is afraid to say much, other than that she feels pity for him and rage that he can still hold her in fear.
”I`ll never be free of Jack Sidote,” she says. ”I`ll never be free of the pain of what happened. I`ll also never be free of the accusations of what happened. If I`m quoted in the newspaper it`s not as Ginny Foat, feminist activist or political activist or child care activist. It`s `Ginny Foat, former president of California NOW, acquitted in the bludgeoning murder of. . . .` ”
At 44, Foat`s hair is turning from black to silver-gray, but her skin is clear and scarcely lined. Her New York accent emerges every now and then to give a finer edge to her wisecracks.
At least for the tour, she has returned to high heels, but her neckline remains demure. The cowl of her silky gray blouse hides a gold necklace that was, says Ginny, a present from friends the first time she was in jail, in 1977. She has worn it every day since.
In the modern age of autobiography, with busloads of celebrities and their relatives rushing to indulge their confessional impulse, anyone with a first-person tale to tell is bound to be suspected of an impure motive. It may be money or vengeance, self-promotion or a compulsion to publicly notch the bedpost.
Foat claims that her reasons for writing ”Never Guilty, Never Free”
were straightforward. Money was primary, she says, catharsis a valuable byproduct. Educating others was an incentive. Vindication, she says, didn`t figure in at all.
”When I was arrested in 1983, it became this media circus,” she says.
”We were getting calls from producers and writers and people who were asking about movie rights and book rights and TV rights and all these other rights, and I was just trying to get my own legal rights.”
She says that when she signed the book contract, she didn`t think about actually having to write the book or that people would then read what she had written. She thought only, ”I`ll sign anything just so I`ll have money for my defense.”
The trial cost $270,000, she says, and any profits from the book and TV movie beyond that will go to Legal Advocates for Women, a non-profit group she helped found.
Foat didn`t relish dredging through the memories again–of the beatings, the illegitimte baby, the four marriages. The first time she bared her life publicly, on a witness stand in Jefferson Parish, La., had been excruciating. ”I was sick to my very soul with pain and disgust, and with fury, too,” she writes. ”I felt like raising my eyes at last. I felt like screaming at those strangers staring at me: Is this what you came to see? Is this it? Well, here are the wounds, with all the scabs ripped off, and I`m raw and I`m bleeding and I may never heal again. Is it enough? Am I innocent now?”
After interviewing several writers, Foat chose Laura Foreman as her book collaborator. She felt an instant kinship with the former New York Times reporter.
Foreman was forced to resign from the Times in 1977, after the Philadelphia Inquirer revealed that while working as an Inquirer political reporter she had violated conflict-of-interest standards.
While covering the re-election campaign of Philadelphia Mayor Frank Rizzo, she had an affair with one of Rizzo`s close associates, former Pennsylvania state Sen. Henry ”Buddy” Cianfrani. She accepted about $10,000 in gifts from Cianfrani, even as she continued to write stories about him. The scandal ruined her newspaper career. Foreman and Cianfrani are now married.
”Laura had had her own personal tragedy at the height of her career, in which people told stories that were not true about her and she lost everything,” Foat says. ”She lost everything she had worked all those years for through a scandal.”
”Never Guilty, Never Free” has been criticized for dealing too little with the power struggles in Foat`s feminist circles, for trying too hard to cram the details of her life into the convenient battered-wife mold, for painting Foat as weaker than she is in order to explain why she stuck with Sidote for so long. Some critics have wondered how much of the book is Foat and how much Foreman.
Foat says she wrote parts of the book herself and that she and Foreman spent months in long taped interviews, interrupted by shared crying spells.
”I wanted it to be my life story told in a way that other people could identify with,” Foat says, ”that would be a very honest accounting, coming from a vulnerable place so that maybe if it was read by a mother raising a daughter, changes might be made in how she raised that daughter. If it was read by a woman living in a relationship in which she was being abused maybe she would get out of that relationship. If read by a man, maybe it would help him understand what`s different in a man`s life than in a woman`s.”
”Never Guilty, Never Free” attempts to explain how a girl from a conventional family got mixed up with an abusive alcoholic, why she stayed with him and how her experiences led her to feminism.
It portrays a woman afflicted by insecurities and a serious case of the good-girl syndrome. Her life as presented in the book goes something like this:
She married at age 20, but the marriage soon fell apart. Pregnant by another man, she fled in shame to a home for unwed mothers and had a child she gave up for adoption.
When she met Jack Sidote in the spring of 1965, he was working as a bartender at a popular New York resort. He was lean, broad-shouldered, black- haired and renowned in his small crowd as a womanizer. He was also married. In October, in passionate love, Foat set off on a cross-country odyssey with Sidote, wandering from Florida to Nevada, taking odd jobs and rooms in cheap motels.
Sidote drank heavily and he began beating Foat, often accompanying his punches with stories of people he had killed. Afterward he would cry and apologize and say the stories were false. Foat blamed his anger on her inadequacies.
They eventually settled in Southern California and married soon afterward. The beatings continued.
In May, 1968, Sidote was convicted of involuntary manslaughter in a shooting incident. While he was in jail, Foat met Raymond Foat, a middle-aged Englishman who wooed her with kindness. Though Foat visited Sidote every week during the almost two years that he was in prison, she began to realize that she was flourishing in his absence. She had also fallen in love with Foat.
She divorced Sidote and married Foat in May, 1971, but not before Sidote had beaten her and warned that if she left him he would kill her or see her
”rot in jail.”
By 1974 she was running a successful catering company with a friend. One day, angry that her bank had demanded her husband`s signature before giving her a loan, she attended her first NOW meeting and embraced feminism with with the passion of a convert. Her husband felt increasingly neglected.
In 1977, seven years after she had last seen John Sidote, she was arrested when Sidote accused her of helping him commit two murders during their travels, one in Nevada, the other in New Orleans. Louisiana didn`t bring the case to trial, and at the last minute, Sidote, who had been sentenced for his part in the crime, refused to testify against her in Nevada.
After her release from jail, she and Raymond Foat tried to revive their marriage, but divorced soon afterward. They have remained friendly.
In, 1980 Foat married again, this time to a TV producer 16 years her senior. Within a year the marriage was annulled. In 1981, she was elected president of California NOW.
In Louisiana, meanwhile, the warrant for Foat`s arrest was still active. For reasons apparently rooted in NOW`s internal power struggles, one of Foat`s NOW colleagues alerted Louisiana authorities to the warrant`s existence.
In January, 1983, Foat was again arrested.
The prosecution built its case on testimony from Sidote, who had been granted concessions on his jail term in exchange for testifying against Foat. During the trial, he admitted his alcoholism and the beatings, and contradicted some of his previous descriptions of the murder.
After deliberating for an hour and 50 minutes, the jury declared Foat not guilty.
”Never Guilty, Never Free” ends there. Foat, however, says that moment of elation in the courtroom was followed by weeks of depression. She slept a lot and avoided beginning the book.
Though she feels she is regaining her grip on life, she says the healing is far from finished. Even now she wakes up and is afraid to open her eyes;
maybe she has been dreaming this life of book tours and freedom, maybe the bars are still there.
Foat hopes to go to law school next year and maybe into politics. ”I no longer have any skeletons in the closet for anyone to dredge up, as they usually do in politics,” she says. ”I`ve written about all my skeletons myself.”
Asked whether she will marry again she laughs and says, ”Absolutely not,” then adds that the media`s fascination with her four marriages has always puzzled her.
”I really thought that it was just the sign of an old-fashioned gal, who married them rather than just going to bed with them,” she says. ”Well, I married four men. Three of them were damn good choices.”
Foat doesn`t expect her book to persuade disbelievers of her innocence, and she says she has resigned herself to being permanently stained by the accusation.
”I just hope that if I`m ever about to be physically accosted by some stranger on the street,” she says, ”that that stranger recognizes me and thinks I`m guilty of murder and runs away from me.”
She laughs briefly.
”That`s the only way I can look at it.”
