day it became clear that in his own eyes he was not her enemy but a devoted fan, bent on ‘saving’ her innocence from the wicked world.
Rebecca was an only child with parents who are a psychologist and a writer. She was doing well at school but was side-tracked into modelling by her own stunning looks. A model agency in her home town of Portland, Oregon, snapped her up at fifteen, and within a couple of years she headed for New York, where she was taken on to the books of one of the big, prestigious agencies. Her fresh-faced good looks made her a natural for teenage magazine covers. Friends from the time remember her as streetwise and confident, not tough but not frightened by the big city.
Not tall enough for fashion modelling and reluctant to limit herself to photographic modelling, she pursued her dream of becoming an actress, signing up for acting and dancing classes. She struggled, as all youngsters in the cut-throat business do; when her agent tried to let her know that she had been given a part in a CBS sitcom, My Sister Sam, her telephone was disconnected because the bill had not been paid, and the agent was forced to call at her home and tape a message to the door.
She moved to Los Angeles for the part, and found a quiet flat in a respectable, middle-class area of the city. After sharing with other models in New York she consciously chose to live on her own. But she was not lonely: she was popular on the set, she had girl friends and a few months before her death she was dating an actor who she knew from her home town.
‘We’d travel, go to parks, have picnics. She liked to horseback ride or just spend time on a mountain top. She was the only actor I’ve ever known who managed to become successful and remain unjaded,’ he said after her death. ‘She was extremely curious and spirited.’
After her exposure in the sitcom her future looked very bright. She landed a good role in a dark comedy, Scenes from the Class Struggle in Beverly Hills, and signed to do another feature film, One Point of View. She loved the work and the laid-back Californian lifestyle.
Into this idyll stepped a 19-year-old stranger with a glossy publicity photograph of the actress he idolized. Robert Bardo, who came from Tucson, Arizona, traced his idol by hiring a private detective who checked address records at the California State Department of Motor Vehicles. (After Rebecca’s death, celebrities successfully petitioned for access to the records to be restricted.)
It was a warm Tuesday morning in July 1989 when Bardo turned up in the street outside Rebecca’s apartment block with a large manila folder under his arm, from which he pulled out her photograph from time to time. The curly-haired young man in a yellow polo shirt accosted a few passers-by, asking if they knew where she lived, and asking if the address he had for her was a house or an apartment block. Others who did not speak to him also remembered him – there was a strange and memorably disturbing quality about him.
‘He looked weird,’ said one neighbour who bumped into him twice. ‘It was strange seeing him twice. You think about it for a second, then you go your own way. That’s what you do in LA.’
Someone else described him as handling the folder containing the photograph gingerly, as though it were precious: ‘It was like it contained food and he didn’t want to turn it over.’
Shortly afterwards, another neighbour heard the sound of a shot and two screams, and then breaking glass. Rebecca Schaeffer’s body lay slumped on the doorstep of the block. Her intercom was broken, and she had come down in person to see who her caller was. A single bullet hit her in the chest and ripped through two panes of glass. By the time the neighbour reached her side there was no discernible pulse and she was pronounced dead on arrival when her body was taken to hospital. The youth in the yellow polo shirt had last been scene jogging calmly away from the scene of the crime. He disappeared down an alleyway.
Almost immediately, police and friends reached the conclusion that the murderer was a deranged fan. There could be no other motive.
‘I can only assume it was somebody who didn’t know her but was obsessed with her. I can’t imagine that anybody who really knew her would do this. She was so mature and intuitive that she would have made sure this couldn’t happen,’ said the director of her TV series.
By the following day, Bardo was back in his home town of Tucson, where police picked up reports of a man behaving bizarrely and disrupting traffic at a major road junction. They arrested Bardo. In the meantime LA police had a tip-off from a friend of Bardo’s in Tennessee, who knew that the youth had harboured a long-term obsession with the actress, had written to her, phoned her agent several times and had talked about hurting her. A photo of Bardo was faxed from Arizona to California, and the neighbours who had seen Bardo on the day of the murder identified him immediately.
At Bardo’s home the police found a collection of videos. He had everything Rebecca Schaeffer had ever appeared in. He had apparently visited her at Warner Brothers studios the year before, to deliver a five-foot high teddy bear to her. He’d confessed his love for her to a security guard, but his desire for her had tipped into hatred when he saw the character she was playing in Scenes From the Class Struggle lose her virginity on screen.
At his trial the judge refused to accept that Bardo was mentally unstable, although he had a history of mental illness. The judge, sentencing him to life without parole, said, ‘He had different motives from most people, but again most people aren’t murderers.’
Before he was given a life sentence, to be served at the notorious San Quentin prison, Bardo made a long, rambling speech to the court. ‘I do realize what I’ve done and the pain I caused and it was irreversibly wrong,’ he said. He admitted stalking his ‘goddess’ for days, ‘hoping to get the chance to say hello to her’. When he finally rang her doorbell and she appeared, he was too tongue-tied to speak – so he pulled out a gun and shot her, laughing as he did it.
‘WHEN I STARTED out, I didn’t have any desire to be a great actress or to learn how to act. I just wanted to be famous.’
It was Katharine Hepburn who said those words, and she was being characteristically honest. There are many celebrities who talk about their vocation, their art, the importance of their work. They are not (necessarily) phoneys: as a breed actors and actresses have a high work ethic. Theirs is a craft that can be worked on and developed and improved, and the good ones are constantly honing their natural skills and talents for the camera or the stage. But few are as ruthlessly truthful as Hepburn; they did not lie in their childhood beds and dream of attending drama classes, voice training, stage technique; they did not fantasize about early morning calls to make-up, about finding their best scenes on the cutting-room floor, about difficult and demanding directors. What they dreamed about was fame. Names in lights, top billing, adulation. Some coveted the financial rewards of stardom, others would (in the secrecy of their adolescent yearnings) have even sacrificed that for the heady taste of public adulation.
Even had they been presented with a true picture of the downside of stardom, it is unlikely that any of them would have abandoned their dreams. Years later, having fulfilled their ambitions, and well-aware of the bitter realities that come with the other trappings of celebrity, a few genuinely wonder whether the chase was worth the quarry; most would still not exchange Hollywood mansions, hot and cold running servants and an eager public dancing attendance on them for obscurity, a nine-to-five job in an office or on a factory production line, and a modest home. They may feel afraid, angry, intruded upon and at risk at different times, but the balance still weighs, they reckon, in their favour.
And then along comes a monster …
It’s true that all Hollywood stalkers are deranged, but the degree of derangement varies enormously. Some will be content to write long, rambling, nonthreatening letters; others will turn up on the doorstep with a knife or a gun. Some celebrities attract more obsessive fans than others, partly because of the nature of the parts they play and their public profile. It’s fair to say, although no research has been done into it, that every above-the-title star will have at least one stalker, and some will have many. But there seems to be no way of predicting which star will