What is love? That’s the question raised in a provocative documentary hitting the big screen these days. Crazy Love premiered at the Sundance Film Fest in January and is now opening in more theaters around the country. Hopefully it will come to Ashvegas at some point. The story explores the relationship between Burt and Linda Pugach. Let’s go to the wires for a summary:
In 1959, long before domestic violence was taken seriously, before stalking laws existed, Burton Pugach, an ambulance-chasing Bronx lawyer, grew obsessed with Linda Riss, a woman 10 years his junior whom he’d spotted at a local park. He wined and dined her at a nightclub he owned, introduced her to celebrities, flew her in his wobbly little plane, bought a house in Scarsdale, N.Y., to entice her into marriage and became incensed that she would not have sex with him. He even forced her to undergo a medical exam to prove she was a virgin. (She was.)
And then, she learned he was married.
Not only that he was married but that he’d forged the very divorce documents he’d offered as proof that he was free. Fed up, she left him, which is when the “if I can’t have you, nobody can” harassment began.
Detectives at her local precinct refused to help.
Eight months after she broke up with Burt, Linda agreed to marry a man her own age. The day after celebrating their engagement, someone posing as a messenger knocked on her door. Thinking her fiance had sent her a gift, she answered, vulnerably, her hands behind her head as she fussed with a French knot.
The messenger, hired by Burt, flung the contents of a mayonnaise jar at her face. The jar was filled with lye; Linda — raven-haired, creamy complected, dark-eyed and all of 22 years old — was instantly blinded in one eye and maimed for life.
The press was all over the crime and the trial. Tabloid heaven. As Jimmy Breslin says in “Crazy Love”: “Sensational. … That sells your papers.”
Yeah, that’s all creepy. Now here’s the real crazy part:
Years passed, she lived in near poverty, alone, partly sighted. (She would lose the blurred vision in her second eye in 1990 and is now blind.) Linda tried, unsuccessfully, to sue the police for failing to protect her.
Meanwhile, from prison, Burt continued to stalk her relentlessly, writing pious and florid declarations of undying love. He befriended attorney William Kuntsler, who interceded with Linda by phone. If he loves me so much, said Linda, why doesn’t he send me any money?
Burt, who claims in the film to have reversed three murder convictions as well as represented the bank robber Willie Sutton while incarcerated in Attica state prison, began charging fellow inmates for his legal services. The first check he sent her was for $4,000. Other checks followed, and, impressed by his attempts at restitution, the parole board granted him release in 1974. He’d served 14 years. And now he was divorced.
Burt was barred by a court order from getting close to his victim, who adapted to her injuries by wearing wigs and sunglasses (and frankly, it’s almost shocking how these accessories gave this physically damaged woman a glamorous air). So he proposed to her via local television, while being interviewed. Linda accepted. They wed on Nov. 27, 1974, in a civil service officiated by a judge.
And it was tabloid heaven all over again: The cover of People. Sally Jessy Raphael. Geraldo Rivera. Mike Douglas. “An Acid Bath for Love” read one headline. “In my heart, I probably do love him,” Linda tells Geraldo when she and Burt are guests after the marriage. “I just find it hard to say the word.”
So, is this true love? What is love? Have you ever been driven to an act of “crazy love”?
