In-Person Interview—Faye Blanchet, Gina Ross, and Sally Schumacher #3
Gina: I think Madeline here might have me beat.
Here you go, Sergeant Cohen: I did find her on the bridge that night.
That’s what took so long. She was smack in the middle of the arch, shivering against the beams and looking down at the water.
Nowhere, as she called it. She looked so fucking lost. When I saw her, that’s when I started crying.
But I knew that wasn’t gonna help matters, so instead, I began to… I don’t know. Monologue.
Faye: She jogged up to me, no preamble, no “Don’t do it, Lillian.” Just, “So I don’t have any personal contacts directly, but I think through friends of friends, if you know what I’m saying, I think we could arrange to have Bobby taken out. Permanently.”
[Her Gina impression is un-freaking-canny. Sally turns away to cover her laughter.]
Gina: I do not sound like that.
Faye: “We both know you’re not the problem, he is.
What you’re doing here is absurd, and you’re smart.
I know we can crack this, I swear we can.
Let’s come up with another solution.” I was so tired.
I sat down cross-legged on the pavement, and Gina sat facing me.
I said, “He’s never going to let me go.” She said, “I know. He’s a fucking psycho.
” And I laughed. I really needed that. But I was also concerned that she seemed to be serious about murdering Bobby!
Gina: That was my actual plan until we came up with a better one.
Madeline: Which was to fake your death.
Faye: We sat for over an hour in the cold there, huddled up, chatting away like we were at a slumber party. We got around to what we would have done if The Midnight Show had never happened.
Gina: I’d have been serving drinks at the Round until I inevitably turned into Holly. Low-hanging tits and all.
Faye: And I said I’d have been studying for my PhD in French literature at Boston University.
Gina said, “There. Good. Do that. But not at BU. Let’s just get you to France, shall we?
” It blurs from there. I think we doubled back to dump my bag in the park, make it look like I’d left it there before jumping, though we took my apartment key.
Gina: Before you ask yet again, yes, it was at that point that we went back to her apartment together.
Lillian waited in the alley while I got what she needed.
Her doorman knew me, so I went right on up, told him I was looking for her.
I had her key, remember, so I let myself in, grabbed her passport, a change of clothes, a hat, et cetera.
The stop was easy enough to explain away to the cops, at least—I was bereft, searching for my friend, exploring all possibilities of where she was.
No one has ever grilled me on it to the extent that you did.
Madeline: Well, you picked the perfect cover. Sobbing in Lillian’s hallway. I assume most interviewers would be uncomfortable pressing on that. Whereas I’m a failed comedian and therefore extremely comfortable feeling uncomfortable.
Gina: As we’ve borne witness to repeatedly.
Anyway, on the night in question, Lillian and I then went to my apartment, where yes, we ran into your new pal Carlos.
Had a real heart-to-heart, made an appeal to the guy—he was such a supporter of mine and Sally’s, and I told him we’d take care of him for a good long while if he’d cooperate.
Corroborate, rather. We cooked up his testimony together: He would say that I came back, alone, myself, around five a.m., at which point he and I called the police.
But what really happened between four and five a.m., that gap in your precious timeline: I knocked for Sally, clued her in, and she stepped out, quietly, so Stevie wouldn’t wake up from his sofa stupor.
Fast-forward a few hours, and we got Lillian on the next flight out of JFK that morning under the name Faye Martin.
Faye: I shaved my head, remember?
Gina: How could I forget?
Faye: I changed clothes, dressed up like a punk. We ripped one of Gina’s T-shirts and reattached the sleeve with safety pins. Sally even gave me a guitar to carry on to sell the effect.
Sally: It was lying around. I never even played the thing.
Madeline: So you did know, Sally. From the beginning.
Sally: Who else could have handled the practical side of these arrangements?
Madeline: And nobody recognized you?
Faye: Not a soul.
Gina: Now, remember, this is 1983. No passport scans back then, no easy tracing.
And we’d lucked out with that “Megapolitan” blizzard the week before—flights were still being rebooked that weekend, with airline workers overwhelmed, the airport chaotic.
Perfect backdrop to blend in, glide through.
Her guitar case was lined with cash we’d donated to the cause.
The rest is history. Lillian Martin, gone.
Sally: It was stressful, I’ll be honest. After she left, we kept waiting for the other shoe to drop, but it was easy enough for the police to believe that it was an accident, drugs.
People were shouting about other theories, and it tipped everything into question. Too many possibilities, no answers.
Gina: Meanwhile, Lillian was nowhere. Dead. Memorialized. And that Jane Doe who emerged from the depths of the river a year later, well—she didn’t hurt matters either. Poor thing. At least she got a nice gravesite out of it, whoever she was.
Madeline: So no one knows who she is, even now. Does that bother you?
Gina: Doesn’t keep me up at night. What would have been her other fate, sitting in a morgue for all eternity?
Burial in a mass grave? At least this gives her a grave that people visit, flowers—she wouldn’t have had that otherwise.
And a year had passed without anyone identifying her.
It wasn’t going to happen. How many young women disappear every year, Cohen, without any fanfare?
Without so much as a peep? We could at least give one of them a real resting place.
Madeline: And you gave Bobby an annual photo op, which I’m sure he appreciates.
Gina: So long as he still thinks she’s dead, I’m not complaining.
Madeline: Have you all stayed in touch this whole time?
Gina: No. That didn’t seem prudent. But what was it, 1998?
Sally and I got a letter from a newly married academic named Faye Blanchet who lived near Nice and wondered whether we might want to come for a visit.
Even if I hadn’t figured out it was Lillian, I think we would have shown up just for the vacation.
Faye: It was 1997. You were in People, photos of your wedding, and it made it into the papers here. That was the only time I ever felt like I was missing out. I was sad I hadn’t been a part of that. So I took a chance, wrote a letter, and…we’ve been meeting up every year since then, haven’t we?
Sally: A lot’s changed over those years. We’ve watched our kids grow up.
Faye: I’ve got a grandchild on the way.
Gina: You didn’t tell me that!
Faye: I was waiting to tell you in person!
Madeline: Sorry, just…did you ever worry that it would expose you, if anybody saw you with Gina?
Faye: You know, one nice thing about the French is they could not give deux merdes about American comedy.
Unless you’re Jerry Lewis. Nobody recognized me when I moved here, and I mean nobody.
I bleached my hair when it started growing in, but still.
It was refreshingly humbling to turn up at the Sorbonne and have their only question for me be how I could explain the employment gap following my undergraduate degree.
I went by my middle and last names, Faye Martin, like on the flight—and other than that, I just blended right in, settled into a job editing a literary magazine, very low-key but also interesting, and that was it. I improvised my way into a new life.
Madeline: Did your husband know you’d been a public figure back in the US?
Faye: I told him early on, as soon as I realized he was a wonderful human being and I did not want to start an authentic relationship based on a very big lie.
He was incredibly empathetic. He had a full life already, and so to him, it was a point of interest, part of what made me, me, not a flaw.
I didn’t tell my son until after Claude died.
Michel was surprised, to say the least! He’s watched a few old episodes of TMS since then and reports back which sketches he finds funny.
It’s sweet. But aside from him, yeah, no one knows. Just us here around this table.
Gina: Which leads us to…this very moment.
[Gina and Sally stare at me with a look that could best be described as locked and loaded.]
Madeline: I am curious why you agreed to this interview, given the inherent…you know, repercussions.
Faye: Well. I would be lying if I said I wasn’t acutely aware of a potential fallout. But on the other hand, I’ve experienced a kind of droning, chronic stress over the years, forever waiting for the axe to fall.
Gina: This article would be a sharp fucking axe, Faye.
Faye: I recognize that. My assumption is that there would be an immediate impact once your piece was published, Madeline.
Even if you leave out the details of my name, address, all that, I expect reporters will jump on the story and try to make their name by tracking me down.
Ultimately, I’m sure someone will succeed in doing so.
Of course they will. So I expect I’ll have to grapple with a lot of public scrutiny over a finite period of time.
Potentially some legal issues as well. Actually, we should probably all wrap our heads around that—
Sally: We will do whatever we need to, if this is what you want, Faye. But I have to say, what you’re describing is an undoing of everything you’ve built over the past four decades. And that’s kind of hard to watch as your friend.