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Time - Man of the Year
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1992-09-22
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PRESS, Page 62Read All About Lolita!
How the New York tabloids titillated readers by turning a bizarre
tale into a Fatal Attraction parable of teen prostitution
By WILLIAM A. HENRY III -- Reported by Andrea Sachs/Merrick
The 10-minute ride from Amy Fisher's waterfront Long
Island home to the academically elite John F. Kennedy High
School, where she is in her final year, is a montage of Middle
American normality: flags fluttering over front porches,
hand-painted signs tacked to trees announcing weekend garage
sales, white-haired elders watering lawns, teenage boys working
on cars. But somehow, as Fisher traveled that brief and
reassuring stretch of terrain day after day, her life took the
sort of detour that is every parent's nightmare. She is accused
of becoming a prostitute by age 15, meeting customers through
an escort service and sustaining contact via a beeper that she
showed off in the high school girls' room. Far worse, she is
charged with falling in love with an alleged client, a
38-year-old auto-body-shop owner, and shooting his wife in the
head. Fisher insists she is an innocent 17-year-old who wants
only to attend her graduation on June 28. Indictment for
attempted murder and bail of $2 million are barring her way.
If the sad charges against her are true -- and even her
attorney does not seem to dispute her career as a pubescent
prostitute -- Fisher's sordid story still would seem to have
little to reveal about the norms of her community. Her town of
Merrick is a place where success is equated with discipline,
exemplified in the manicured lawns and shrubbery of Berkley
Lane, where she grew up, and with drive and ambition, epitomized
in the way the high school carries grade-point averages out to
four decimal places for precision in class rank. This is where
the American Dream still works, where crime is something
glimpsed on a newscast, where the next generation prompts hope
and not despair. Neither neighbors nor teachers nor her perhaps
more candid peers see the girl's fall from grace as typical. To
her fellow townspeople, Amy Fisher's life offers no moral
alert, no cautionary lessons. She is just a postcard from beyond
the edge.
None of this doubt about larger meaning has deterred the
press by a nanosecond. The story had elements to push almost
anyone's emotional buttons. The Oedipal tinge of an affair
between an adolescent and a man old enough to be her father. The
Fatal Attraction echoes of a woman who supposedly would stop at
nothing to possess the man she craved. The perennial conundrum
of how a daughter from a nice and prosperous family might have
gone so thoroughly wrong. New York City's three tabloid
newspapers have covered the "Long Island Lolita" story with a
thoroughness and imagination that they rarely bring to stories
about the city's politics or its $29 billion budget. One Daily
News photographer was staked out full time as close as he could
get to the house of Fisher's alleged lover. His hope: that the
victimized wife, home from the hospital, would come out onto the
deck for a moment of sunshine -- and an unintended photo
opportunity.
Back at the city desk, headline writers have outdone
themselves. A story about the unverified claim of a Long Island
chef that he was recruited by Fisher to commit the murder, only
to renege once he had been serviced by her, was billed by the
News as paid me in sex. The rival Post topped that for
titillation, peddling the same story as amy's horny hit man.
Tabloid TV programs have been bawdier -- and scrappier.
After A Current Affair ballyhooed upcoming videotape of a call
girl plying her trade with a bare-bottomed customer, said to be
Fisher and a john, the competing Hard Copy aired a smidgen of
the scene half an hour sooner, allegedly swiping it off a
satellite feed. This prompted a lively melee over journalistic
ethics in two corners not normally thought to possess many.
The invasion of their middle-class retreat has horrified
Fisher's neighbors and those of her alleged victim, Mary Jo
Buttafuoco. The throng of reporters has turned life near both
houses into a kind of theater. At the Fisher home on a quiet
dead end and at the Stitch N Sew fabric store owned by Amy's
parents a few minutes' drive away, doors are shut, blinds are
drawn, the symbolic drawbridge is up, and the castle is meant
to seem inviolable. At the Buttafuoco home, the style is
defiance. A steady stream of traffic, automotive and human,
proclaims this a happy house where nothing has gone wrong. On
the door is a wreath entwined with pink ribbon and dotted with
pink and white flowers. At the high school the official posture
is no comment, frequently laced with off-the-record worry that
the headlines will somehow cheapen the whole place. Last week
a mother snarled at a reporter, "There's more than one student
in the school. You should have been here last night for the
honors convocation." Then she slammed her car door and drove
away.
The irony for Amy Fisher's schoolmates and neighbors, as
they feel themselves victims of media marauders, is that many
have surely been avid consumers of the tabloid journalism they
are now deploring. Then, of course, the subjects of the story
were safely distant, and embarrassed friends and associates not
even thought of. In those easier times, this sort of story
seemed to them juicy. They are learning that the juices in such
stories are most often squeezed out of other people's lives.