It was 6 a.m. and attorney Jan Schlichtmann was sitting on a fold-out couch in his office, where he had spent the night after being evicted from his apartment for not paying the rent. He was begging a reluctant witness to come to court to testify, pleading with him to not hang up the phone. But the man did hang up, and Schlichtmann started screaming expletives.
In the next office, author Jonathan Harr was awakened by the noise, having spent the night on a similar couch because he was nearly as broke as Schlichtmann. Harr began writing down Schlicthmann’s side of the phone conversation almost before he was fully awake.
The phrase “living in each other’s pockets” could have been coined with Schlichtmann and Harr in mind. Harr is the author of “A Civil Action,” the latest in a growing number of non-fiction books with the pace, style and suspense of good fiction. Schlichtmann is the book’s main character.
Fed by the increasing appetite of the American public for real-life drama–witness the national obsession with the O.J. Simpson trial and the popularity of reality-based TV shows–a strong market has been created for investigative journalism written like a story, with strong characters and compelling scenes.
“The Hot Zone” by Richard Preston, for example, is a true story of how a virus that is a cousin of the deadly Ebola strain nearly escaped near Washington, D.C. The book was on the New York Times best seller list for 42 weeks in hard cover in 1994 and 1995 and has been on the list for 16 weeks in paperback.
Last year, “Death and Disaster” by Paul Alexander recounted the struggle for Andy Warhol’s fortunes after his death, and “Reckless Disregard” by James Kunen explored the causes, horror and aftermath of a school bus accident in Kentucky that killed 24 children and three adults.
“Life experiences can be as fascinating as fiction, and the novelistic approach fires people’s imaginations,” says Carol Schneider, vice-president of publicity for Random House, publisher of both “A Civil Action,” and the hardcover edition of “The Hot Zone.”
Harr has been nominated for a National Book Award for his book, which is based on a case in which Schlichtmann represented several families of children with leukemia. The families sued two companies, Beatrice and W.R. Grace, claiming that industrial pollution from the firms had caused the leukemia by putting carcinogens in the drinking water in their neighborhood in Woburn, Mass., where the families lived.
Harr’s portrayal of certain characters in the book, especially Schlichtmann, caught the eye of several movie studios, which competed for the rights to the book while it was still in manuscript form. The bidding stopped at $1.25 million in March, and the winner was Wildwood Enterprises, owned by Robert Redford and Rachel Pfeffer.
Redford will act in the film, possibly playing Schlichtmann, Pfeffer says, and Steven Zaillian will write the script and direct. Zaillian won the 1994 Oscar for his screen adaptation of “Schindler’s List.” He also wrote the screen adaptation of “Searching for Bobbie Fischer.”
Redford has a history of playing real characters. He was Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward in “All the President’s Men,” also based on a nonfiction book, and for a time considered acting in the proposed movie version of “The Hot Zone.”
“We went after “A Civil Action” because of the extraordinarily complex character of Schlichtmann,” Pfeffer says. “It is about a lawyer who takes on a case for all the wrong reasons and ends up obsessed and driven.”
Random House still hopes that Harr’s book, like Preston’s, will reach the best-seller lists.
But Preston’s book has some advantages over Harr’s: There was increased interest in viruses due to an actual outbreak of Ebola in Zaire just after publication; the story has a clear villain; and it has a happy ending.
“Killer viruses have replaced communists as identifiable enemies for Americans in the post-nuclear era,” says Christian Messenger, English professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago. “People need to set up an `us and them’ dichotomy. And they like a happy ending. The virus was contained.”
He got the inside story
Some critics, however, have given Harr’s book higher marks than Preston’s, in part because of Harr’s day-to-day presence at the events he describes. There has been concern that some authors who attempt this kind of writing put thoughts in people’s heads or describe events they could not have really known about.
Harr says he demanded that kind of access and wouldn’t have written the book without it. Schlichtmann says he granted it because his clients wanted the story to get out and because he was impressed with Harr’s honesty and skill.
“He was an honest, frank, plain person, and I didn’t feel he had any agenda but telling the story,” Schlichtmann says. “Once he was in, he was like furniture. And it worked. Reading the book, you have a very unique insight into the smell and feel and reality of what happened.”
In the dawn phone call incident, for example, Schlichtmann was sleeping on his office sofa because he had lost his home and car. He had spent all his money on the case that forms the basis of the book.
Harr, who lives in Northampton, Mass., was there because he had gone through his advance from Random House and couldn’t afford a Boston hotel room.
“He was broke and I was broke so he invited me to sleep in the office,” Harr recalls. “I woke up that morning to hear him yelling and immediately started taking notes.”
Harr, who had taken a leave from New England Monthly magazine to write the book, his first, deliberately avoided talking to the attorneys representing Beatrice and Grace during the trial so he would not inadvertently carry information from one side to the other.
But after the trial and while still writing the book, he developed as close a relationship with attorney Jerome Facher, who represented Beatrice, as he had with Schlichtmann. Harr even attended Facher’s law course at Harvard for two semesters, ate dinner with him once a week during that time and watched him try an unrelated case with the same intensity he had given to Schlichtmann. He used what he learned about Facher after the case to flesh out his style and give detail to events in “Civil Action,” such as describing Facher’s “war room,” where he plotted strategy to win the case.
Harr also pored over documents and depositions, tracing the course of the case from its beginning, when the families discovered their children were sick and began to suspect the drinking water, to the final appeal of a complex decision.
At issue in the case were the questions of whether the firms polluted the drinking water and whether those pollutants could have caused leukemia, but the legal manueverings of the trial often overshadowed clear arguments, according to Harr’s book.
The Environmental Protection Agency later sued Beatrice and Grace for polluting the water and forced them to help pay for the cleanup.
Harr spent time with the families, during and after the trial. At one point, he spent a week in the home of one family and shared a bunk bed with the younger brother of one of the children who had died of leukemia.
“I had no intention of exposing the legal profession or pursuing environmental issues,” Harr says. “I wanted to bring characters to life.”
Not a new concept
Using real life as a backbone for storytelling has a long tradition. Even before Truman Capote was credited with creating the genre of the “non-fiction novel” with “In Cold Blood” in 1966, writers had been pushing beyond historical fiction.
Upton Sinclair spent seven weeks working in a meat packing plant to get the raw material for his 1904 novel “The Jungle,” set in Chicago’s stock yards. Walter Lord interviewed 63 survivors and combed through hundreds of letters and other documents for “A Night to Remember,” written in 1955 about the sinking of the Titanic.
C.D.B. Bryan re-created the circumstances around Sgt. William Mullen’s death in Vietnam in “Friendly Fire” in 1976; Tom Wolfe gave readers rare insight into astronauts’ training and family lives in “The Right Stuff” in 1979.
That same year, Norman Mailer traced convicted murderer Gary Gilmore’s life and described his death by firing squad in “The Executioner’s Song,” a book Harr calls one of his strong influences.
In 1981, Tracy Kidder took the genre to a new level when he spent eight months watching a crack team of computer wizards try to build a new kind of computer as fast as they could. Kidder won a Pulitzer Prize for his depiction of their all-night shifts and intense competition in “The Soul of a New Machine.” He has since written similar books on schoolchildren, nursing home residents and the building of a house.
Randy Shilts combined his own observations and reporting with detailed recollections of others in chronicling the early days of AIDS in “And the Band Played On” in 1987.
In an example of real life being as interesting as fiction, Kidder, 49, and Harr, 46, are neighbors in Northampton, Mass. They talk every day and critique one another’s work, Harr says.
“Kidder was actually offered the book first, but he was exhausted from his book tour on `House,’ and knew I was looking for a book,” Harr says. “He read every page of every draft, and helped me figure out that Schlichtmann had to be the organizing force of the book.”
Messenger points to Kidder and others like him as authors whose work shows that “day-to-day reality yields up enough crises that grip the reader without introducing melodrama.”
“Every history is constructed as a romance or a tragedy, and good fiction always embodies a social reality, a bedrock of recognizable things,” Messenger says. “It has become very difficult to understand where fiction ends and history begins. In college, we teach books that walk the line, and maybe there isn’t a line anymore.”
CASE LEFT ATTORNEY A CHANGED MAN
Jan Schlichtmann today says he “counts himself among the most fortunate of men.”
He and his wife, Claudia, have a one-month-old son, Max. He has helped rewrite Massachusetts environmental law. He has seen information he helped uncover about toxic chemicals in the Woburn leukemia cluster case confirmed and published in scientific journals.
“I have a lot of peace. I take pride in what I did,” Schlichtmann says. “I have no regrets and make no apologies.”
But it has been a rough road from the end of “A Civil Action,” Jonathan Harr’s book about a key legal battle in Schlichtmann’s life.
The book ends in 1990, when Schlichtmann loses his last appeal to find Beatrice guilty of wrongdoing in polluting the drinking water in Woburn, files for bankruptcy with $664 in assets and $1.2 million in debts, accepts a loan of money for a plane ticket to Hawaii, goes for a swim in the Pacific Ocean off Kauai and thinks about not swimming back.
“I was very depressed,” he says. “I had lost my belief in and passion for the civil justice system, and having lost that and not having anything else, I questioned the point to my existence.”
For several months Schlictmann hiked around Hawaii with a backpack and a sleeping bag.
“I thought of it as going into a black hole,” he says. “I was out into another dimension, divorced from what was happening. That lasted a long time.”
He started a small firm that worked on energy-efficient lighting, “but people were always asking for consultations on legal matters.”
“Friends started intruding on my peace,” he says jokingly, “and I slowly got seduced back into the practice of law.”
Schlichtmann lived between Hawaii and Massachusetts until a year ago, when he and Claudia decided to move to Boston and get married.
“She has been with me since 1987, through the darkest period of my life, through the wilderness,” he says.
Schlichtmann says that while he would not recommend a trip through that wilderness for others, he believes it led him to understandings he might not have otherwise achieved.
“I don’t look at myself the same way and I don’t look at the civil justice system the same way as I did during the trial,” he says.
“I am wiser about my own limits, and wiser about helping clients get justice from a system that is corrupted by power, influence and cynicism.”
The legacy of the Woburn case, Schlichtmann says, goes far beyond the small amount of money the families who sued received, and the much larger amount he believes they should have received from Beatrice and W.R. Grace, the firms they charged had polluted their water and caused their children to die of leukemia.
“The victory was that the truth about the system came out,” he says. “Important information was uncovered about pollution. Laws have been rewritten. Those victories are more eternal than money and more meaningful for society.”
