Shortly after she disappeared, Chandra Levy started showing up everywhere.
On television. On radio. In the newspaper. On leaflets. On posters. On the covers of Newsweek and People. She has become the ultimate oxymoron: the famous non-famous person, the absent presence.
And she has forced us to reckon with some extraordinarily vexing questions about how we decide what is and isn’t legitimate news, about the relevance of adultery in the private lives of public officials in the post-Clinton era, about the resonance of the missing person in the human imagination — and the most urgent question of all:
What happened to her?
Levy, 24, disappeared three months ago as she was winding up her job as an intern with the Federal Bureau of Prisons in Washington, D.C. The search has been complicated by her reputed romantic involvement with Gary Condit, a married Democratic congressman from California, whose apartment has been searched by the police for clues to Levy’s fate.
But you already know all that, don’t you?
If you own a TV set, radio or computer with Internet access, or if you read newspapers or magazines, of course you do. The Levy case — with its fizzy cocktail of sex, youth, power and intrigue — has dominated both cable and network news shows, but cable has been most obsessed. One critic dubbed CNN the “Condit News Network.” Fox News has interviewed psychics about the young woman’s whereabouts.
The question of whether and how much to cover Levy’s disappearance is already the stuff of journalism grad-school seminars and round-table discussions on C-SPAN: Is it news or is it just nosiness?
Beyond the journalism ethics issue, though, a deeper question seems to tug at the country’s coatsleeve: the irresistible allure of the missing person. While cynics may claim that the real reason for our interest in the story is the naughty itch of illicit sex, others point to a host of factors — most prominently, the power of the most basic mystery of all: Where did she go?
“The idea that anybody is able to disappear in America today is a strange one,” said Roger Rosenblatt, essayist for Time and PBS’ “Newshour with Jim Lehrer.” Most stories these days, he noted, are about the opposite, about the loss of privacy and the ease with which we are tagged, tracked and downloaded into databases. “If anything, we’re too identifiable.”
Yet people still continue to drop out of sight suddenly and unexpectedly, sometimes temporarily and sometimes forever. In Chicago, the public has been riveted by the disappearance of two South Side girls, Tionda Bradley, 10, and her 3-year-old sister, Diamond, who haven’t been seen since July 6. Also perplexing is the case of Christina Sandmeyer, 22, an Evanston native who disappeared earlier this month during a bike ride near Santa Cruz, Calif.
An old-fashioned mystery
Levy’s disappearance, for all its fetching qualities as an old-fashioned mystery, must not be relegated to the status of a good yarn, Rosenblatt said. “As soon as you start translating this into summer mystery reading, you’re cheapening it.” Author of an upcoming Time essay about why he had heretofore avoided writing about Levy, Rosenblatt said, “I know that, when we get through this speculative business, this will be a story about the awful things people do to one another.”
Yet Amy Reiter, a Wilmette native who writes the gossip column for Salon.com, said the mystery angle is reason enough to keep Levy in the headlines. “It’s the stuff of myth, of Shakespeare, and it’s also a down-home whodunit, a murder mystery, a dog-eared paperback read by flashlight under the covers,” she declared.
The mystery, in fact, is what sets the Levy case apart from that other famous romantic entanglement between a powerful man and a much younger woman working as a Washington intern: President Clinton’s liaisonwith Monica Lewinsky.
“That was a very different story,” Reiter said. “Sure, it had the bushy-haired intern, the double-talking politician. But no one went missing. No one was, possibly, killed.”
Deflecting tragedy with jokes
The missing-person motif long has enthralled the public, from the disappearance of aviator Amelia Earhart to the mystery of Jimmy Hoffa’s fate. On a summer night in 1930, New York Supreme Court Judge Joseph Force Crater dropped out of sight; after a while, an insensitive public made him a national joke, Rosenblatt said.
“The whole life becomes defined by this odd act of disappearing. At ball games, you’d have people announcing over the public address system, `Judge Crater, please go to your car.'”
Humor often covers up anxiety. Our nervousness and discomfort over unresolved endings and potential tragedies often are deflected by jokes. Just as we may never know who killed Jon Benet Ramsey or Nicole Simpson and Ron Goldman, we may never find Earhart or Crater or Levy — and that realization leaves us frustrated, as if we’d turned to the last page of a novel and found it ripped clean out of the book.
“All of us,” said Larry Sabato, “crave a mystery. In our daydreams, we imagine ourselves solving a big one, being our own Sherlock Holmes.”
Sabato, political science professor at the University of Virginia and author of the seminal 1991 book “Feeding Frenzy,” which examined the media’s appetite for political scandal, added that the Levy case has built-in public appeal. “You have a missing person and a terrific mystery.” And the audience is agog: “There’s a reason why so many channels have shows like `Greatest Mysteries’ and `History’ Mysteries.’ [PBS] Masterpiece Theater has `Mystery.'” ABC News airs a show called “Vanished” that chronicles a mysterious disappearance each week.
The flip side
William O’Rourke, an English professor at the University of Notre Dame and former director of the school’s graduate creative writing program, said the Levy case “has all the ingredients one looks for” in a story that enthralls the public. “There’s an aesthetic of mystery. And a mystery is the flip side of perfect understanding. There’s something vaguely platonic and utopian about it.
“Everybody talks about this as a tawdry case, but at the heart of it is this aspiration to perfect understanding. A higher calling. Human beings are attracted to elegance, to something that makes perfect sense. All that we get, all that ordinary human beings get, is mystery.”
Haunted by the missing
Many literary works employ the same theme we find so captivating in the Levy case, O’Rourke and others said. In the Tim O’Brien novel “In the Lake of the Woods” (1994), a politician’s wife mysteriously disappears. The 1993 movie “Sommersby,” based on the 1982 French film “The Return of Martin Guerre,” told the story of a man who was missing for six years but then — apparently — returned. And many commentators on the Levy case have cited “Ladder of Years,” the 1995 Anne Tyler novel about a woman who just up and leaves her ordinary domestic life.
It is an effective and resonant motif because people who are missing — either through their own volition or foul play — haunt us. Their unexplained absences don’t fit the pristine, smooth rationality of the modern world, when all problems seemingly can be solved by science and technology. We find such mysteries challenging, a bit annoying, but absolutely compelling.
Or do we? There is some dispute about the public’s actual interest in the Levy case, about whether we’re salivating for every scrap of news or just being force-fed a steady diet of information about the case.
Andrew Kohut, director of the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, reported that, in a nationwide survey conducted by his organization, only 16 percent of Americans classified themselves as “very interested” in the Levy story. By contrast, Kohut said, 48 percent of Americans said they were “very interested” in the O.J. Simpson story as that saga unfolded, while 48 percent were comparably captivated by the Clinton-Lewinsky affair.
Plenty of interest
According to a recent CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll, however, 63 percent of Americans are following the Levy case closely.
Which numbers are correct? Maybe both. For Americans often are conflicted by such stories; on one hand, they find themselves drawn to them, but on the other, perhaps they feel they shouldn’t be. So the numbers are apt to change from day to day, perhaps even moment to moment, as Americans say not what they actually think, but what they think they’re supposed to be saying.
Mark Crispin Miller, who teaches media studies at New York University and has written many books on media topics, vigorously challenged the notion that people care about the Levy story.
“While there’s much about the story that is fascinating, it’s of interest to media people primarily because it’s an anti-Clinton story by another name,” he declared. “The people in that industry are feeling an acute nostalgia for the days when they could throw themselves into a story without doing any real journalism.
“I’m mystified by this story. It seems to me that the amount of attention paid to this mystery is out of all proportion to the public’s interest in it.”
Yet as Reiter argues, the Levy story strikes deep chords in the human psyche, because it “has it all: sex, power, politics, violence, intrigue, lies, sudden reversals, the scent of money, a family wronged, the clash of cultures — East meets West, buttoned-up Washington, D.C., meets let-it-all-hang-out California — the age-old pairing of an older man and a younger woman.
“Heck, it even has a cyber angle — the cops checking out Chandra’s computer to find out what sites she visited.”
Theories from the public
At a Cubs game last week, several Chicago area residents expressed frustration with the onslaught of coverage of Levy’s disappearance — but then offered up theories about her fate, which means the story has intrigued them to the point of speculating about it. A major theme in many people’s reactions to the case is irritation over what they see as an injustice: The only reason the media cares, many said, is because Levy was involved with a powerful politician.
Jim Rand, a Merrillville, Ind., resident, said, “There’s been way too much coverage of it. But my question is, how does a story like that get elevated? I think there’s some underlying agenda. A lot of people get abducted. Quite frankly, I get tired of hearing about it.”
Joan Alesia and her niece, Maria Alesia, both said media coverage of the Levy case was excessive.
“Why do they do it? Because there’s a congressman involved,” Maria Alesia said. “There are other people missing out there.” She added, “But I know what everybody’s thinking. They’re thinking, `Remember in [the 1987 Scott Turow novel] `Presumed Innocent,’ where it was the wife?'”
Public theater
The fact that some people might see the Levy story in fictional terms doesn’t surprise O’Rourke. “These scandals and trials are our `Shakespeare in the Park’ now, our public theater,” he said. “Everybody now gets a structured theatrical with a beginning, a middle and an end. We’re so well-trained that it almost becomes a question of, `What’s this season’s show?'”
The only problem, O’Rourke added, will be the ending, since Hollywood isn’t writing the script.
“If she doesn’t show up, if she becomes an unsolved mystery, how will the media step out of it? How will they drop it? This one could, possibly, not have an ending.”
But Hollywood continues to be in the picture. Some have speculated that Levy disappeared on purpose, desiring to cast suspicion on Condit in retaliation for his refusal to leave his wife for her.
If so, that would echo the conclusion to the 1987 movie “Fatal Attraction” that was filmed but later discarded after audience testing. The character played by Glenn Close, spurned by Michael Douglas’ character, was to have committed suicide and implicated him in what looked like murder — a final vengeance from beyond the grave.
