[Originally published in Movietone News 50, June 1976]
Sam Fuller: “You can always tell about a leaper by the distance his toes are from the edge of either the window or the ledge of the roof he’s threatening to jump from. If you’re covering it, watch those toes. If they stick out, he’s not a fraud, he’s going, and he’s going fast. They usually make a silly speech.
“See that still of a girl in the picture of me at the typewriter? The suicide? I had collected a lot of suicide notes. When you cover a story, you ask the coroner, ‘Can I have the note?’ Ironically, 90 percent of the notes end with: ‘God forgive me.’ No matter what the hell they are, they always say that: that’s really right before they’re going to die. It’s a fear complex. They have no one to turn to, so they turn to the only commodity sold to them and forced down their goddam young throats—’God.’ It’s silly.
“So I decided I’d write a book called God Forgive Me—God Forgive Me, and write about all these characters, and also reprint their notes in the book. I left the notes with my mother and went to Frisco. By God, she lost them. She was very panicky about it, it was just a terrible thing. It was my fault, I kept them all in a paper bag. The best note I had was this girl who killed herself. She wrote it with an eyebrow pencil on a small paper bag. ‘This is my Independence Day. Here is the way I am celebrating it. God forgive me.’
“My mother said, ‘How can you even hold on to these?’ It depressed her. Every one of those little pieces of paper. One of them: three old maids, sisters, between 70 and 85 years old; they were panhandlers, beggars, they worked the subway entrances for money. Then they decided they had nothing to live for. They had eight or ten cents when the cop found them. They pooled their money and bought nightgowns and stuffed all the goddam cracks and gassed themselves to death. And that’s when my mother said, ‘I don’t want to see any more of these notes, they’re horrible, they’re horrible. In your story you said you found out from the landlord that they had nothing to live for. Well, a lot of people have nothing to live for. Why did they kill themselves?’
“And I said, ‘You oughtta be on the night desk instead of my editor, because he never asked me that.’ She said, ‘I don’t understand this. We know a lot of people who said, “Oh, it’s terrible going on, this existence,” so why didn’t they kill themselves? You didn’t get the story.’ And she was right. And I said, ‘How the hell am I going to get it from three old, OLD maids’—that was my lead, by the way: ‘Three old, old maids joined the young in heaven yesterday.’ My night editor liked that very much.”
Q: What strikes me is not so much that they killed themselves but that they were so organized as to do it together.
SF: “And also in new nightgowns. I wrote that up beautifully: ‘They came in clean and they wanted a clean exit.’ I really went to town on it. The only thing I didn’t like was my mother’s comment.”
Q: There’s nothing worse than a critic who’s right.
SF: “And especially when in my heart the landlord’s statement, that they had nothing to live for, was ridiculous. If they were panhandlers, certainly they had nothing to live for. And my mother brought that home very, very strongly.”
Q: So for you the question was, What did they have to die for?
SF: “They had one thing to die for: Escape. Relief.”
Q: Why did they wait so long?
SF: “I don’t know. They were virgins according to the coroner. That’s pretty unusual for that age. So that means they were three nutty old maids.”
Fuller was 12 when his father died and he moved with his mother and brothers to New York City from Worcester, Mass. There he continued his vocation: newsboy. “My mother did nothing-she was a mother.” His brothers—one an excellent cartoonist—are now dead.