Meet the Pugachs

Tolstoy writes in his journals about the ambiguity that inhabits all literary characters, and his words float back to me as I sit in Burt and Linda Pugach's half-dark living room in Rego Park, Queens. Net curtains block almost all the white sunlight, Linda's paintings hang a little skewwhiff on the walls and the spongy orange furniture points in opposite directions. The front door is of grey metal, one in a forbidding line down a detergent-smelling corridor, and you have the overwhelming sense, standing outside it, of a prison or a mental hospital. Is this, you wonder, the emotional landscape inside? Because in June 1959 Burt hired two men who threw acid in Linda's face, blinding, balding and disfiguring her. Later, after 14 years in jail, he proposed marriage to her and she accepted. They have been living here for 33 years - ever since. Having spoken to Burt on the phone, I have taken an intense dislike to him already. Creepy man.

The door opens. Burt stands inside. He gives the simultaneous impression of strength and nervousness. His eyes are small and brown and he is unexpectedly dashing in a cream summer suit and smart blue shirt, still good looking at 80. 'Hello!' he cries. I enter the crepuscular apartment. 'So we'll sit at the conference table,' Burt says in his emphatic voice, the nasal voice of American gangsters out of thrillers from the Fifties. He frowns, peering round the living room. 'Where's my wife? I had her a minute ago!' 'I'll be out in a minute!' calls a muffled voice from the bathroom. 'She'll be out in a minute,' Burt confirms.

Linda comes out. She is an elegant and petite 70-year-old in a ruffled white shirt and long straight white skirt. Her blond-brown wig huddles over big black sunglasses. She has a faint moustache and is completely blind. As she hovers in front of me I reach to squeeze her hand. She lets out a dry half-laugh. 'There you go,' she says in her thick Bronx accent. She feels her way to the chair beside Burt and sits down, drawing out a cream and green bundle of knitting. He swings his chair sharply to the side, so he has his back to her. As if she is not there he continues holding forth about the campaign he is waging against corruption in the courts, producing a fingered, folded photocopy of a story from the New York Times as evidence. She knits on with her soft, vulnerable little fingers, low-key, understated, exuding dispiritedness, or perhaps just ennui.

Their story was the stuff of sensational headlines in its day. Now, a documentary named Crazy Love (released here in October) has dug up the scandal, and in a slick edit-job has interwoven Burt and Linda and their aged friends and colleagues to recreate the jigsaw of the romance, assault and wedding. Watching it, you feel the clutch-in-the-stomach chill of a horror movie. Snapshots and video footage resurrect Linda Riss, the voluptuous brunette beauty, a virgin from Brooklyn, glimpsed by Burt on a park bench in 1956. ('I thought he was a nut,' Linda observes of their first meeting.) The story unfolds: of his doting, violent mother, of how her father had left home when she was four; how she was farmed out to relatives at five. How the flamboyant, morally sketchy Bronx lawyer went on to woo her with his powder-blue Cadillac, his nightclub, his plane. How she lived the dream and then found out he was married. How they parted, and he produced divorce papers to prove his integrity. How the papers turned out to be fakes, and Linda washed her hands of him.

Off she went to Florida with her friend Joyce and met the buff, lantern-jawed Laurence Schwartz. Unlike Burt, he was handsome; unlike Burt he was poor. Who cared? Linda and Larry were happy.

Until he went into the Army and Burt reappeared. He had dispatched his father to assure Linda he was on the level - 'And you can't believe the father was as devious as the son.' She took Burt back, until his wife, Francine, rang her to warn she would never give Burt a divorce. He had, it turns out, cheated constantly; they had a handicapped daughter. Linda went back to Larry. They got engaged. Burt got suicidal. He followed Linda. Then he hired three men to beat her up - or so he says. In fact, they rang her doorbell, explaining they had an engagement present. She answered with her hands at her head, twisting her hair into a knot; they tossed the acid. 'He threw the liquid right in my face.'

She had months in hospital, bandages over her head, operations. Larry, when he saw her bluey, blinded eyes, made his excuses and went. Burt was blackmailed by his thugs. They ran him off the road, broke his ribs. The police punched those same ribs as they escorted him to jail for 30 years - he served 14. 'I felt it wasn't long enough. I wanted him to rot there,' Linda tells the camera, poker-faced. She flew to Europe and had some fun, behind her sunglasses, but didn't marry - 'I was damaged merchandise'. She still had some sight back then. But when Burt came out of jail her life had narrowed and darkened: she was living in a tiny apartment in Manhattan, facing a future alone. A Southern boy had proposed marriage but cried off when she took off her glasses. Burt, however, never stopped writing; now he proposed on TV. Margaret Powers, the policewoman who had protected Linda from him, played cupid. 'To me, she was just as beautiful as ever,' Burt tells the cameras. They married in November 1974.

And here they are. I can't work out what their marriage has been. A prolonged exercise in revenge by her? A prolonged exercise in revenge by him? An attempt at redemption (him)? An attempt at redemption (her)? I wonder if he bullies her. I wonder if she bullies him. Then comes the final twist in this dark tale: 11 years ago, Burt ended a five-year affair. The mistress claimed he threatened to 'blind her like Linda' and promised to leave Linda and marry her. ('I lied,' he concedes of this.) Burt represented himself in court and got off. After the verdict Linda, ringed by reporters, defended her man. Did their wives, she demanded, a firework of fury, know what they were doing all the time? 'He did nothing!' she spat. Burt, ebullient with relief, told them he would take Linda home and have sex with her.

So why would either of them want to make such a movie? Why dig up the old scandal? Linda lets out a wry, almost bitter chuckle. 'I did not want to make it,' she says. 'Everything she says is against her will,' Burt exclaims breezily. He still has his back to her. So why didn't she want to make it? 'She wanted to make it!' Burt insists irritably. 'Hey listen, don't talk for me, Burt!' Linda bursts out. 'I'm going to tell my story, or I'm not going to talk.' 'Aaah,' laments Burt on a surrendering note. 'You want to hear the truth,' he asks, laughing without amusement, 'or you want to hear her point of view?'

Linda is knitting away. 'Let me put it this way,' she says. 'When Dan Klores, who made it, came over to talk to me he brought an actress with him ...' 'Ah, stop with that,' Burt exclaims. 'Well, I'm sorry,' she retorts, 'that's what did happen! And he was talking about a motion picture and I know that for years this project has been around ...' 'They took options,' Burt clarifies. 'And then dropped them so it never got off the ground.' 'So I figured "This is not going to happen, I'll go along with it",' Linda concludes. So if she'd known it would actually be made, she wouldn't have got involved?

She represses a tiny sigh. 'Fifty years,' she says in her feminine voice - she is still pretty. 'Fifty years, I've been back and forth with this story.' And for her, I say, such bad memories. 'It's so long ago. It's another lifetime,' she says. 'I don't even look at it as sad. It is part of my life, and I accept it, and that's where we're at.' But she could have said no to the movie? 'Could have said no,' she echoes distantly. 'That is for sure.' 'But we didn't,' Burt asserts, and Linda gives a disconcerting laugh. 'Don't say we didn't!' she says.

It's impossible for me to fathom their dynamic. Do they love each other, or hate each other? Are they happy, or angry? 'The DA decided to prosecute me for virtually nothing,' Burt is telling me: he is off, amazingly, into an account of his affair. 'She admitted coming up to my office every day, to practically harass me, there was a five-year affair that she wanted to turn into marriage and I didn't.' He doesn't have a trace of embarrassment at talking about it in front of Linda; nor does she turn a hair. 'Afterwards,' he cries, 'I knew I had been deliberately framed, deliberately, I went out on a mission to expose corruption in the courts, and boy, did I make enemies, I found bribes that were being taken in custody cases ...'

I tune him out and look at Linda. She sits there, uninterestedly, or maybe rebelliously, knitting with her little fingers. Would it be difficult for her to manage on her own? 'No,' she says. 'It would be difficult in certain respects but I'm pretty strong. To have gone through all of this,' she adds, 'I think I'm damn strong. As a matter of fact.'

I ask if it was hard for her to come to terms with - 'my blindness?' she finishes calmly. 'Very hard,' she says. 'I had reshaped my life, I had met someone else, I had got engaged, and that precipitated the act. So was it hard? I would say so.' 'But she wasn't blind until 1990,' Burt points out. 'You got to remember, it took over 30 years to lose her vision. So when we got married she knew what I looked like.'

I ask if she thinks she would have ended up alone if she hadn't married Burt. 'I refuse to believe that,' she says. 'I refuse to believe I didn't have any gentlemen friends at the time. I could have gotten by. I still passed muster!' 'Shall I make a confession?' Burt enquires. 'I still got a crush on her,' he says. 'He does,' Linda agrees, shaking her head. 'Truth is stranger than fiction! I beat on him all the time!'

Is she getting her revenge? 'I don't think so!' Linda says. 'Just to be with me is revenge enough, if you want to put it that way. I'm not easy.' 'She asks for something, it's got to be done that second,' Burt clarifies. 'Yesterday, not tomorrow,' Linda agrees.

But why would Burt help make a film that publicised such a terrible thing? 'The movie humanised me,' he says. I think to myself we must have been watching different films. At many moments he comes off as creepy and amoral and controlling - at one point he even took Linda to work, took her out for lunch, and picked her up at the end of the day. He had jealous rages. He lied again and again. 'It indicated I'm not a serial killer,' Burt is explaining.

How did he look back on what he did? 'As a neurotic reaction to a terrible situation,' he says promptly. 'Was I lonely in jail? Not the least bit. I had 100,000 friends, I was extremely popular amongst the inmates!' But Linda didn't see him in jail? 'No. Not until I got out and she started running after me.' He peers at her. 'Am I going to get a reaction from that?' 'No,' Linda says tiredly. 'You just go ahead. Rave and rant on.'

He says jail changed him. 'It made me stronger. It honed my skills as a lawyer.' But presumably the point was also to feel remorse? 'Look,' he says, without rancour. 'Every day of my life I regret what I did - whether I went to jail or not. A day after I did it I regretted what I did. If I could undo that, I would. As I said before, if I was myself I wouldn't have done it. Was I crazy at the time? I don't know how you define it, but it was a terrible reaction to a terrible situation. I couldn't think straight. So do I regret what I did? Well, I didn't do it, I caused it.'

I am starting to see his point of view - this man haunted by a terrible mistake he made a half century ago. He tells me he had electric shock treatment. Was he in a mental hospital? 'Let me put it this way: I was sentenced to prison and I tried any way I could to get out of it, I feigned it,' he replies. Wooooh. At that moment the phone rings and he answers it. 'My line, he got a call,' Linda says to me quietly. 'Now I have to eavesdrop.' He puts down the phone and comes back. 'You look good today,' he tells Linda. 'Me?' she asks. 'I didn't look good yesterday?' 'That was not intended,' Burt says.

Linda has been telling me what she likes doing. She goes to school twice a week, does a lecture course and has a free meal afterwards, and yoga and fitness. 'And the last season I gave a sewing course. Pretty fantastic, right?' she enquires. 'For someone who can't see, to teach people how to sew! It's a little strange. I want him to take me out dancing in the evenings,' she adds, gathering momentum, 'and he won't! He says he has a trick knee. I say he has a trick head!'

Did they want children? 'Probably when I was 19 or 20,' Linda says. 'I had a daughter, but she died 10 years ago,' Burt says. 'One reason why I did believe we should not have children was that any child would probably grow up hating my guts because of what I did. There are still people who won't talk to me. So you don't know who will or who won't. I didn't know Linda would forgive me.' 'Are we going to be much longer with this?' Linda enquires. 'I need to go downstairs and do my nails!' She stands up and wanders toward the bathroom, bumping heavily into a wall, as if drunk.

I tell Burt that must be tough. 'There are hostile people around. I always think they are fulfilling a need.' He wipes his eyes. 'Most people I know think it's past, it's over. And certainly I've proved my worth as a human being ...' He's trying to make up to her still? 'Doing everything I can,' he says, and I start to think: perhaps he is. Do they ever talk about what he did? 'No. Never. We never discuss it. Really. She knows that I really did not intend it. When I hired the guy to do it, it was to beat her up, not to throw lye. They decided to do that, and blackmail me for it. Everybody knows we are completely devoted to each other. You try to hurt me and she'll kill you!'

'I don't know about that!' Linda drawls. She has reappeared and sways to almost touch Burt with her hip. 'Let's not get carried away.' I ask how they look back on their lives and there is silence. 'It's a waste,' Burt says. 'In the sense that I certainly should have devoted my life to something other than destruction.'

'OK guys, what time is it?' Linda asks. She's bored and wants to do her nails. I like them both by the time I leave, which teaches me a lesson, a huge lesson, the tiniest, micro one of Linda's own: that nothing is black and white, and there is such ambiguity in life as well as fiction.

ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7tbTEoKyaqpSerq96wqikaKSZm7KiusOsq7KklWR%2FcXyWaJiun19lgnCywKagpbGRo7Gzscuaq6Knnqi1qrzSbA%3D%3D