The Midnight Show

Compiled Transcripts #3

Stevie Doyle (via telephone): This has embarrassed me for a really long time, so I’m going to keep this quick and direct, if you don’t mind. And off the record, yeah?

Madeline: All right.

[Note: Flagging this section: again, redact for confidentiality.]

Stevie Doyle: Yeah, fine. It was me. I sent, I want to say, fifteen letters to Lillian purporting to be a fanatical admirer between the middle of season one and the middle of season two.

I’m left-handed, but I wrote them with my right hand so they would look more unhinged.

It was a horrible thing to do and I regret it every day, but before you ask if I was some psycho, in love with or obsessed with Lillian, that is not true, and it also isn’t true that I hated her.

I didn’t. As I told you, she was like my little sister.

And, like in many families, she annoyed the crap out of me.

I think I’ve been honest about that in our conversations, don’t you?

But it went a little deeper than that, and the reason I haven’t brought it up directly before now is because I’ve been trying to protect Lillian’s reputation. Not my own. That’s the truth.

Here’s the reality, though: Lillian wasn’t an angel!

And she wasn’t a consistently creative genius, some bottomless well of comedy, like everybody likes to pretend either.

She had dry periods. And from time to time, she flagrantly stole material.

Mainly from me, because she knew nobody would listen if I complained about it. And she was right, they didn’t.

Madeline: You’ve alluded to this before. I have to say, I’m pretty shocked she stole material. Could you give me an example?

Stevie Doyle: Mole people summer vacation.

All those sketches. Everybody thinks I worked on them but Lillian came up with them, and it’s bullshit.

I ran it past her, just shooting the shit, when we were having lunch together—family of subterranean people who come up through a manhole to visit the normal people as a vacation.

And then lo and behold, she pipes up in the next pitch meeting, “I’ve got kind of a crazy idea.

” I was shocked too. Like you, I didn’t think she was that kind of person.

Still, it took a long time for me to realize I had to keep my mouth completely shut around her.

She still had ways. She’d steal roles from Brooke, very sweetly, and Brooke would blame me for it, of course, because Lillian would sit there and say, “Stevie and I have partnered on an idea this week,” and it would be the one I was working on with Brooke.

Lillian was a snake, as I said. A very cute one.

But here’s the thing: she also wasn’t. Not the Lillian I knew from back in Boston.

The show was changing her, and we all hated it.

Watching her get polluted. Ask any of her old friends whether they thought being on The Midnight Show was healthy for Lillian.

Ask Kent. Ask Sammy! Fuck her legacy to comedy, was fame good for her?

Hell no. So I did what I did, selfishly and also unselfishly.

I wanted her to make the right decision, which would have been to step away, but she didn’t. And you see what happened in the end.

Madeline: But don’t you think your letters might have contributed to that end?

Stevie Doyle: You know what? Lillian would love for me to think that’s what did it. My prank, yeah, that’s it, those letters are the reason she’s gone. I don’t fucking know. Maybe.

[Stevie pauses. I’m unsure if he’s hung up. Then:]

I hold a lot of anger toward Lillian. Obviously. And talking to you, you know, I wonder if part of that is…I always thought we’d make up. After the show, someday, we’d get past it all and be family again. I’d have a chance to apologize and vice versa. And she took that option away from me.

[Again there’s silence over the line. I hear a hard sniff, like he’s trying not to cry.]

I’m angry that she died and left me with all this guilt for all these years. It’s never gonna go away now. No shot.

And I know my resentment makes me look like a schmuck at best, a suspect at worse, but I was never a threat to Lillian. It never went any further than what I told you just now.

Madeline: I just want to get complete clarity about this…

Stevie Doyle: Sure, fire away. What else do I have to lose? My career’s been dead for decades. Probably died with her, if I’m being honest.

Madeline: There was no stalker. No obsessive fan. Not you, not anybody. Not Gina, as you seemed to want to suggest—

Stevie Doyle: Gina’s far from innocent. She was pretty damn obsessed with Lillian. And then, of course…[He laughs dryly.] There was Bobby.

Bobby Everett: As the Buddha says, patience is the highest Nibbana.

It’s taken a long time for me to come to terms with the fact that we’ll likely never know who did it.

Unless there’s some deathbed confession, which does happen.

But the one thing I do know, absolutely, is that this was not something Lillian did to herself.

She was happy. We were happy. We had the rest of our lives to look forward to.

Kent Romero: The suicide angle is bullshit.

No, never bought it. Lillian was too afraid of dying.

Now, as for other theories…Bobby left the party conspicuously soon after Lillian did.

The timing works for him to have caught up with her.

He has an alibi, supposedly, but I will always suspect him, the fucker.

And he knows full well what I think. Why hide it?

I don’t play nice, not with stakes like these.

Madeline: Do you have a sense of what his motive would have been?

Kent Romero: I think, in his mind, she’d humiliated him. He’d made this grand gesture in front of the entire country, and he expected gratitude. Submission. By leaving that night, Lillian was on some level rejecting him, and it sent him over the edge.

Bobby Everett: I was exhausted. It had been a whirlwind week.

Lillian had been staying with me over at the Plaza—I’d sold my apartment back in January and bought a place in Brentwood—so I figured she’d make her way to the hotel once she’d walked around a bit, burned off some stress.

I headed to my suite and turned in, basically.

There was a bellhop there who saw me come in, quoted one of my old sketches to me, which was sweet. He said as much to the police.

Kent Romero: You know one of the fun things about bellhops? They’re right up there with drivers and doormen as the easiest people to bribe.

Madeline: What about Yuna? Did you suspect her at all?

Gina Ross: Bobby’s ex? Not really, no.

Madeline: Did Lillian have a restraining order taken out on her? There was something in her journal…

Gina Ross: I can’t remember if it went as far as a restraining order, but yeah. Yuna confronted Lillian on the street a few times, called her a whore, grabbed her. It got ugly. By ’83, though, Yuna had moved on with her life, as far as I know. I don’t even think she was in the country.

Madeline: We haven’t ever discussed Sam as a possibility either.

Gina Ross: For what, her murderer? Sam as in Sam Petrosian or the Son of Sam?

Sam Petrosian? A human teddy bear turned psycho killer?

That’s some Five Nights at Freddy’s shit right there.

To set your mind at ease…actually, Sally can better speak to this.

She was at the party a little longer than I was.

Sally Schumacher: Honestly, Sam was the voice of reason that night. Probably the most calm of all of us, partly because he had his girlfriend with him.

Madeline: I didn’t realize he had a girlfriend at that point.

Sally Schumacher: I think they’d just started dating, but yeah, it was Susan.

Gina Ross: As in his future wife. How’s that for an alibi?

So what do you think? Have we exhausted the list of “everyone Lillian ever met”?

I told you, I’ve said everything I have to say on this subject.

Decades ago. It wasn’t foul play. That never crossed my mind.

Not given the state that Lillian was in that night.

So it had to be drugs, much as it guts me to once again say it.

Madeline: Can we go back a bit, to when Kent told you that Lillian said she was going “nowhere”? What exactly did you do?

Gina Ross: This is all in my statement, but okay.

Let’s get into it. I chased her to the Williamsburg Bridge.

It took me for-fucking-ever to hail a cab to get near enough to the bridge, then from that point, it was a footrace.

And I’m not an athletic person—doing some of those Jane Fonda videos for sketch research was the extent of my exercise regimen back then.

My muscles were screaming, and it was frigid, below zero, the city still covered in piss-riddled snow.

I was crying with worry; I remember that feeling of crystallized tears on my face.

And just thinking over and over again, “I need to find her. I need to talk to her before something happens. I hope I’m not too late. ”

All these horrible scenarios were flooding my mind, of her scoring easily, then passing out on the Lower East Side somewhere, never having made it to the bridge, or God, losing her step, her control, and…

people had seen her, people I asked on the street, heading to the bridge, and then I got there.

To the middle. To the other side. And she wasn’t walking across it. She wasn’t anywhere. Not anymore.

Brooke Balsinger: Broken record, but I’ll say it again: Lillian’s blood is on Gina’s hands.

There was real jealousy there, Millie, a need to own or possess her.

Hand to God, it was more than just a crush.

It was dangerous. Gina was fixated, and when Bobby proposed or married Lillian or whatever the hell happened in that episode, Gina snapped, went on the hunt for Lillian.

I’m not saying it was cold-blooded murder, but maybe the opposite?

You know? I mean, Gina Ross has an uncontrollable and well-documented temper.

Maybe things got physical. Heck, maybe Gina was on drugs and pushed her off that bridge, ever think of that?

All I know is that the last thing I heard Gina say before she bolted out of Winthrop’s that night was “I know where she’s going.

” Everybody heard her say it, but no one will ever speak out about it except me.

There are so many lies, so much hypocrisy—that’s the word, hypocrisy—in that group of people. That’s why I don’t do reunions. I have too low a tolerance for the smell of bullcrap. Bobby Everett agrees with me, by the way. He won’t do reunions either, so why should I?

Anyway. If you’re looking for a suspect who knew Lillian well, my money has always been on Gina Ross.

Madeline: So you don’t think it was suicide?

Gina Ross: Even after all this time, I don’t.

I think it was a mistake, a tragic, infuriating, and likely avoidable accident.

I was there with Lillian in LA, during the hazy days.

It was never about checking out of life entirely, it was about sanctuary.

Going to “nowhere,” a place she couldn’t be found.

In-between places are scary for most, but for Lillian, they were where she could hide.

That said, heroin is a game of roulette. It’s a very, very dangerous drug. Never touched it, never will. I think she was riding high in terrible weather and lost control, fell off. It’s still devastating.

Madeline: But you went to her apartment after that? The report said—

Gina Ross: Of course I did. I mean, at the time, I was hopeful I had it wrong.

A thousand thoughts were flying through my head when I searched that whole damn bridge and Lillian was nowhere to be found.

I thought…I don’t know, maybe I’d just missed her, or misunderstood, jumped to the wrong conclusion, and she was snug in bed watching late-night Laverne & Shirley reruns or scribbling in her journal.

Madeline: So you searched the bridge area for around an hour? In the freezing cold?

Gina Ross: Yep. Searched both sides.

Madeline: Then you headed uptown, went to Lillian’s apartment, at 680 Park Avenue, around four. The doorman let you up, but Lillian, obviously, wasn’t there.

Gina Ross: Jesus, you really do love a timeline.

Madeline: And then you headed back to your own apartment. At 23 East 63rd, a building one avenue and three streets away. Around five a.m., the report says, you speak to another doorman—your own doorman—and you call the police together.

Gina Ross: Correct. I was a mess. And Carlos was a class act. I knew he would help. Really not sure what you’re doing here, kid.

Madeline: Bear with me. I’m a little hung up on why that took another hour. Did you knock on Lillian’s door, get no reply, and then stay there, in her building? Or take a long detour home?

Gina Ross: Well. If you must know, I sat down in her hallway. The way the mind works during trauma isn’t linear or rational. I was on the edge myself that night, about to have a nervous breakdown. So I sat for a while, who knows how long, and I cried.

Madeline: But we do know how long—for over forty-five minutes.

Gina Ross: What the hell are you trying to get at here?

Madeline: The truth.

Gina Ross: Ambush-style. You know, for someone so critical of archetypes, you’re Cliché Hack Journalist Incarnate right now—

Madeline: I’m getting the sense that no one else has given this a second thought. And I know it might be hard to talk about, but it’s within my rights to ask—

Gina Ross: “Within my rights.” What rights? This is painful shit, and you’re in my home, choosing to rub my face in it. Asking why I didn’t, what, jog home from my best friend’s apartment and hit the hay once I realized she could really be dead?

Madeline: I think there are many people hiding—

Gina Ross: Are you implying I’m hiding something?

Madeline: I’m not trying to upset you. I’m trying to do my job.

Gina Ross: Christ, Cohen.

I think you’ve got what you need. That’s all for today.

[Sally sees me out.]