Bernard Lefkowitz was in Chicago recently to discuss “Our Guys,” his book about the 1989 rape of a retarded girl by a group of affluent teenagers in Glen Ridge, N.J. Lefkowitz, a long-time journalist and a professor at Columbia University, traveled a long, difficult road to get the book published: Commissioned, and then dumped, he explained, by Simon & Schuster, it was eventually published last year in hardcover by the University of California Press and is now being published in paperback by Vintage Books. Tribune literary editor Elizabeth Taylor spoke with Lefkowitz while he was in Chicago:
Q. You’re a very New York kind of guy–how did you get interested in suburban New Jersey?
A. My wife was a reporter for a while at the Bergen Record, which is the second-largest paper in New Jersey, so I got to know a little bit about it. But I read a story in the Times about five boys being arrested for this rape. And there are two things that struck me about it. One was the number of boys who were supposedly in the basement when the rape occurred–there were 13 boys in the basement. And I found out, with a little poking around, that the next day two dozen boys had gathered outside the house where the rape had occurred and passed around the bat and the broomstick that had been used in the rape. This was a small town, the school was small (and) these guys represented something like a third of the boys in the senior class. I’ve always tried to write about things that opened a window on American culture, how we live. I wasn’t interested at all in what happened. What happened was pretty apparent. But why it happened was really interesting to me. And why so many boys would gather to do this to a retarded young woman with an IQ of 49. So, I wanted to find that out.
And then the Times did a follow-up story, and I was interested, as well, in which people in the town vilified the victim and praised the character of the boys that were in the basement. And that really hooked me. I just couldn’t understand it, and I wanted to find out why they had come to this view. (They were saying) these guys had splendid characters and the girl was a seductress, a temptress who would lure these boys into the basement and seduce them.
Q. You’ve also written “Tough Change: Growing Up on Your Own in America” (1987), a report on the lives of adolescents. Given the cultural obsession with girls, how did you get interested in boys?
A. Adolescent boys grow up to be adolescent men. I have interviewed hundreds of kids in my life. Every kid I have met, in some way, reflects the adult world around him. It’s sometimes distorted, it may be exaggerated, but it reflects the world. I don’t think Glen Ridge is a town of rapists, but I think the attitudes that they had toward young women they had at an early age, which was that they were strangers and aliens. That they were not friends and equals. . . .
As I got into it more deeply, it became apparent that the fact that they were allowed to get away with such a long history of (mistreating) young women, that dated way back to junior high school, showed them that the adult community approved, or at least didn’t care enough about what they did. In Glen Ridge, this kind of treatment of young women was expected as a normal, growing up rite of passage. . . . Not unusual. Until it became a rape. Then it became unusual. . . .
The book is questioning how we are raising kids. Are we raising boys in a way that will allow them to emerge with principles and be honorable and decent, especially with young women?
Q. What distinguishes your book from being just more reporting on an issue in the headlines is the sense of context you provide. Are you saying that Glen Ridge is a quintessentially American town?
A. Both politically and socially, this is an extremely conservative place. For instance, wives often worked in Glen Ridge, but they made very little of the key decisions affecting family life–the financial decisions, the career decisions. They seemed to be, at least among the people I was interviewing, they seemed to be dominated by the men in the family, fathers mostly. And so you would think, in a conservative community, that things like respecting people’s rights and individuality would be important values, but they weren’t.
Q. How did you start doing the book?
A. When I first came to Glen Ridge, the town was extremely hostile to me. I would call somebody up and the phone would slam down and people would say, “Oh, you’re the communist.” This was the summer of ’89, and I decided I would (go) around to college campuses for the next five or six months and interview students who had graduated from (Glen Ridge’s high school) class of 1989 on the college campuses that they were at. And once I got to them, outside of their hometown and away from their parents, they just couldn’t stop talking. Including young women who were real avid defenders of these guys. . . .
And I got this core of information about how these kids had grown up and the control that boys had in the community and what the high school was like. The one thing that I came away from feeling so strongly about was that these girls had come to accept that submission was the price of acceptance in growing up. And that if you didn’t submit you were socially miscast, you became a pariah, your own parents questioned your ability to socialize, and so they learned that it doesn’t pay to complain.
And they would tell me these stories in these affectless sort of emotion-drained voices, as if this was what you had to do. This was the price you had to pay . . . to grow up to be a woman. And that was truly shocking.
Q. While your book concerns a tragedy, the story of the making of the book is sort of a success story.
A. It’s a brick-by-brick story.
Q. What happened?
A. Six months after I signed this contract with Simon & Schuster I had a lunch with the editor who had bought the book . . . and she screamed at me for 45 minutes in the midtown restaurant. . . .
She wanted to know why I wasn’t writing. I said, for a couple of reasons: One is that doing this kind of work can be lengthy, but more important is that the criminal-justice system just hadn’t started up. These guys have been arrested but the rest of what had to happen, including the trial, was off in the distance. . . .
I just couldn’t seem to explain to her that not only was the trial a natural ending for this story, but as any reporter would understand, a trial makes available a huge amount of information that you otherwise can’t get. There’s trial transcripts and records and depositions. And it’s also an opportunity to develop relationships with all different kinds of people during the course of the trial.
And also, a young woman with an IQ of 49 took the stand and told the world how she had been brutalized by these guys in a way that was halting, ambivalent and enormously moving, and not to include that in the book–I mean, I didn’t know that was going to happen, but you could reasonably anticipate that if she took the stand it would be very important.
So two years go by, I’m doing the reporting and I am waiting for the trial and Simon & Schuster says, “We want to cancel the contract and we want our money back.” I hired a lawyer to negotiate it and they compromised by saying we’ll cut one-third of your advance that they had agreed to because it was taking too long. And then we would give you five or six months after the (trial) to turn in the manuscript. Which I did. And the manuscript was long, and I said . . . it would take me two to three months more and I would have it cut down to a reasonable (length). . . .
To be frank, it was very hard to interest any other editor in New York. Simon & Schuster had said this was a book not fit to publish. And to get an editor to read it was almost impossible. But fortunately my agent did find an editor at the University of California Press who found the material interesting, and it got published by them.
