Sex. Murder. Mystery(230)

“I don't think I've signed away my rights,” she told Kate, who passed along the information.

After that Chicago visit, things improved considerably. Mary called James Kent “fifteen or twenty” times.

Bob Graham and the Fixot project be damned. It didn't seem to matter, not when the BBC had Mary Kay Letourneau calling the shots from prison herself—or so James Kent had believed. But just as others found out, with the Mary Kay Letourneau story, nothing lasts forever.

Bob Graham employed tabloid tactics to ensure that his story was protected. James Kent was appalled when he learned that the ghostwriter had told principals in the Letourneau story that Inside Story was tabloid trash akin to Inside Edition. Nothing could be further from the truth. Inside Story was a documentary series of which there was probably no American counterpart in terms of quality. It got back to him that Bob Graham had told sources that the BBC “did hatchet jobs” on people.

Another time, James Kent received a disturbing call from the author.

“I did receive a very threatening phone call from him, telling me that I had gone around telling interviewees that it was all right for them to talk to me, the BBC, because Laffont had no objections. I never told one interviewee that. He said if that continued, he'd sue me and the BBC.”

At the same time, Bob Graham made it clear that he—not Mary—was running the show.

Mary Letourneau kept James Kent and the BBC on a string for as long as she could. No one could confirm her motives, other than that she wanted to keep her options open; she wanted to control something in which she could not fully participate. But she pulled back, away from the one producer who seemed sympathetic and genuinely concerned about her.

“That was to me a broken promise,” he said.

Something else crossed James Kent's mind. He wondered if the love affair had run its course and that was the real reason for Mary Kay's silence, and indeed the silence of others close to the case. Maybe people were keeping mum because Vili Fualaau was no longer pining for his teacher, the mother of one baby, with another on the way.

If Vili Fualaau has already found someone else, it is a bit of a mockery, isn't it? It undermines Mary Kay's case that there was a deep and meaningful love relationship, James Kent thought.

The manner in which those closest to Mary Kay doled out their attentions made many feel they were doing reporters and producers a personal favor by even entertaining the possibility of an interview. The distrust and animosity from those who were speaking on Mary Kay's behalf was uncalled for and undoubtedly detrimental to her position.

“You are so lucky! The BBC is so lucky! You are going to get the chance to speak to Mary Kay Letourneau.”

“Mary Kay needs the media more than the media needs Mary Kay,” James Kent said later. “This is something her attorneys fail to recognize, apart from David. She's the one in jail. No one seems interested in getting her out.”





Chapter 79

A FUNNY THING had happened to Mary Kay Letourneau on the way to prison. She had become the center of a freak show, Globe's favorite cover girl, an editor's antidote for flagging sales, a producer's favorite incarcerated “Get.” Mary Kay Letourneau went from person to property. Moneymaker. All she had wanted to do was get her message out. Bipolar or not, she wanted the world to know that she loved a boy and he returned that love. No matter what people thought the story was, she said, it was about two families and it was about love. She was hopeful that the French book would change the way some viewed her.

Lawyers Bob Huff and David Gehrke had repeatedly insisted Paris-based Fixot was a publishing company without peer in the entire world and there'd be no selling Mary Kay's story short. Bob Graham, they also said, was the right writer for the job of taking her words and formatting them into a book. But when the ghostwriter left the women's prison after a pair of interviews in 1998, she had been left holding the bag.

“I remember when Bob Graham was leaving and I told him,” she told a friend later, “ 'we haven't touched on a big part of the story.' ” According to Mary Kay, he never returned.

Mary Kay recalled how her biographer said he didn't feel she “trusted” him enough. It was true that she did have an uncomfortable feeling about the writer, but the publisher chose him. She'd had no choice. There had been no interview to see if he was compatible or even if he was a writer worthy of her story from a literary point of view.

“I was reluctant,” she said. “I have to follow my heart on some things, and I have a good sense about people… and I didn't feel good about Bob Graham from the beginning.”

As the weeks passed, Mary Kay's pregnancy brought a fullness to the gaunt features seen when she was arrested in January. Mary Kay told friends she was grateful for the baby. The pregnancy was a diversion from her own troubles as she waited for the writer to return. She had ideas; things that she wanted to say.