Joan Didion: Slouching Towards Bethlehem

January n, 1965, was a bright warm day in Southern California, the kind of day when Catalina floats on the Pacific horizon and the air smells of orange blossoms and it is a long way from the bleak and difficult East, a long way from the cold, a long way from the past. A woman in Hollywood staged an all-night sit-in on the hood of her car to prevent repossession by a finance company. A seventy-year-old pensioner drove his station wagon at five miles an hour past three Gardena poker parlors and emptied three pistols and a twelve-gauge shotgun through their windows, wounding twenty-nine people. “Many young women become prostitutes just to have enough money to play cards,” he explained in a note. Mrs. Nick Adams said that she was “not surprised” to hear her husband announce his divorce plans on the Les Crane Show, and, farther north, a sixteen-year-old jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge and lived.

And, in the San Bernardino County Courthouse, the Miller trial opened. The crowds were so bad that the glass courtroom doors were shattered in the crush, and from then on identification disks were issued to the first forty-three spectators in line. The line began forming at 6 a. m., and college girls camped at the courthouse all night, with stores of graham crackers and No-Cal.

All they were doing was picking a jury, those first few days, but the sensational nature of the case had already suggested itself. Early in December there had been an abortive first trial, a trial at which no evidence was ever presented because on the day the jury was seated the San Bernardino Sun-Telegram ran an “inside” story quoting Assistant District Attorney Don Turner, the prosecutor, as saying, “We are looking into the circumstances of Mrs. Hayton’s death. In view of the current trial concerning the death of Dr. Miller, I do not feel I should comment on Mrs. Hayton’s death.” It seemed that there had been barbiturates in Elaine Hayton’s blood, and there had seemed some irregularity about the way she was dressed on that morning when she was found under the covers, dead. Any doubts about the death at the time, however, had never gotten as far as the Sheriff’s Office. “I guess somebody didn’t want to rock the boat,” Turner said later. “These were prominent people.”

Although all of that had not been in the Sun-Telegram’s story, an immediate mistrial had been declared. Almost as immediately, there had been another development: Arthwell Hayton had asked newspapermen to an n a. m. Sunday morning press conference in his office. There had been television cameras, and flash bulbs popping. “As you gentlemen may know,” Hayton had said, striking a note of stiff bonhomie, “there are very often women who become amorous toward their doctor or lawyer. This does not mean on the physician’s or lawyer’s part that there is any romance toward the patient or client.”

“Would you deny that you were having an affair with Mrs. Miller?” a reporter had asked.

“I would deny that there was any romance on my part whatsoever.”

It was a distinction he would maintain through all the wearing weeks to come.

So they had come to see Arthwell, these crowds who now milled beneath the dusty palms outside the courthouse, and they had also come to see Lucille, who appeared as a slight, intermittently pretty woman, already pale from lack of sun, a woman who would turn thirty-five before the trial was over and whose tendency toward haggardness was beginning to show, a meticulous woman who insisted, against her lawyer’s advice, on coming to court with her hair piled high and lacquered. “I would’ve been happy if she’d come in with it hanging loose, but Lucille wouldn’t do that,” her lawyer said. He was Edward P. Foley, a small, emotional Irish Catholic who several times wept in the courtroom. “She has a great honesty, this woman,” he added,”but this honesty about her appearance always worked against her.”

By the time the trial opened, Lucille Miller’s appearance included maternity clothes, for an official examination on December 18 had revealed that she was then three and a half months pregnant, a fact which made picking a jury even more difficult than usual, for Turner was asking the death penalty. “It’s unfortunate but there it is,” he would say of the pregnancy to each juror in turn, and finally twelve were seated, seven of them women, the youngest forty-one, an assembly of the very peers— housewives, a machinist, a truck driver, a grocery-store manager, a filing clerk — above whom Lucille Miller had wanted so badly to rise.

That was the sin, more than the adultery, which tended to reinforce the one for which she was being tried. It was implicit in both the defense and the prosecution that Lucille Miller was an erring woman, a woman who perhaps wanted too much. But to the prosecution she was not merely a woman who would want a new house and want to go to parties and run up high telephone bills ($1, 152 in ten months), but a woman who would go so far as to murder her husband for his $80, 000 in insurance, making it appear an accident in order to collect another $40, 000 in double indemnity and straight accident policies. To Turner she was a woman who did not want simply her freedom and a reasonable alimony (she could have had that, the defense contended, by going through with her divorce suit), but wanted everything, a woman motivated by “love and greed.” She was a “manipulator.” She was a “user of people.”

To Edward Foley, on the other hand, she was an impulsive woman who “couldn’t control her foolish little heart.” Where Turner skirted the pregnancy, Foley dwelt upon it, even calling the dead man’s mother down from Washington to testify that her son had told her they were going to have another baby because Lucille felt that it would “do much to weld our home again in the pleasant relations that we used to have.” Where the prosecution saw a “calculator,” the defense saw a “blabbermouth,” and in fact Lucille Miller did emerge as an ingenuous conversationalist. Just as, before her husband’s death, she had confided in her friends about her love affair, so she chatted about it after his death, with the arresting sergeant. “Of course Cork lived with it for years, you know,” her voice was heard to tell Sergeant Paterson on a tape made the morning after her arrest. “After Elaine died, he pushed the panic button one night and just asked me right out, and that, I think, was when he really — the first time he really faced it.” When the sergeant asked why she had agreed to talk to him, against the specific instructions of her lawyers, Lucille Miller said airily, “Oh, I’ve always been basically quite an honest person….I mean I can put a hat in the cupboard and say it cost ten dollars less, but basically I’ve always kind of just lived my life the way I wanted to, and if you don’t like it you can take off.”

The prosecution hinted at men other than Arthwell, and even, over Foley’s objections, managed to name one. The defense called Miller suicidal. The prosecution produced experts who said that the Volkswagen fire could not have been accidental. Foley produced witnesses who said that it could have been. Lucille’s father, now a junior-high-school teacher in Oregon, quoted Isaiah to reporters: “Every tongue that shall rise against thee in judgment thou shalt condemn? “Lucille did wrong, her affair,” her mother said judiciously. “With her it was love. But with some I guess it’s just passion.” There was Debbie, the Millers’ fourteen-year-old, testifying in a steady voice about how she and her mother had gone to a supermarket to buy the gasoline can the week before the accident. There was Sandy Slagle, in the courtroom every day, declaring that on at least one occasion Lucille Miller had prevented her husband not only from committing suicide but from committing suicide in such a way that it would appear an accident and ensure the double-indemnity payment. There was Wenche Berg, the pretty twenty-seven-year-old Norwegian governess to Arthwell Hayton’s children, testifying that Arthwell had instructed her not to allow Lucille Miller to see or talk to the children.