Night People

By Paul Gray

BAD DREAMS

by Anthony Haden-Guest

Macmillan; 420 pages; $14.95

Rarely is a practicing journalist acquainted with all of the principals in a celebrated murder case, including the deceased. This unlikely coincidence fell into the lap of Author Anthony Haden-Guest in August 1978, when New York police arrested Howard ("Buddy") Jacobson, a successful horse trainer and all-purpose entrepreneur, for the murder of a man named Jack Tupper. The writer knew and had once interviewed Jacobson and his girlfriend and business partner, Melanie Cain, a fashion model. The victim had often been encountered, by Haden-Guest and others, in trendy restaurants and bars on Manhattan's East Side; he was an affable table hopper in his mid-30s with a reputation for shady connections. Just before his death, Tupper had also become known as Melanie Cain's new boyfriend. Buddy Jacobson, so the theory went at the time, had put a stop to that.

A jury later agreed. After escaping from the Brooklyn House of Detention for 40 days, Jacobson, then 49, was sentenced to a minimum of 25 years in prison. A lot of odd things, though, occurred between crime and punishment, and Haden-Guest was well positioned to observe and record them all. There is little suspense in Bad Dreams; even readers who have never heard of the Jacobson affair will have no trouble guessing the outcome. But the book is an exhaustive account of the after-effects of a murder: the grindingly slow legal process, the grief of the victim's relatives and friends, their rage at seeing the accused, out on bail, pick up his life and business as usual.

In Jacobson's case, that meant characteristically garish activity. He bought and sold East Side apartment buildings, squired a constantly replenished stock of stewardesses and models half his age, protested his innocence to dazzled reporters and blew as much smoke as he could toward the prosecutors. Physical evidence at the scene of the crime was altered. Potential witnesses received threats. Rumors began floating that Tupper had been killed by drug-dealing associates. He had, in fact, once picked up $300,000 for helping a gang of old friends who smuggled hashish and marijuana through Kennedy Airport. None of these distractions before the trial could be traced to Jacobson directly, but those familiar with his icy intelligence and manipulative methods, including Haden-Guest, saw Buddy's touch in all of them.

What the author did not see and cannot explain is why Jacobson risked his empire over the defection of Melanie Cain. Stunning women and winning horses were much the same to him; he used them and then threw them away. Haden-Guest clearly likes Melanie; she was, after all, his principal source for much of the story. But his flattering portrait of her does not show why Jacobson should have preferred her to all the others. Indeed, the innocent, honorable woman described here hardly seems credible, given her surroundings. As a psychiatrist asks her, "Well, why did you live with a man as terrible as this Buddy Jacobson for so long?" An advertising man, meeting with Melanie about a potential modeling job, is more blunt: "I would like to know how you could be so ignorant, and so stupid, as to live next door with another man when you've just broken up with your boyfriend! Let me tell you, I know Buddy Jacobson, and the guy has absolutely no class. I just don't understand you!"

These are good questions; the author should have asked them himself. He is not interested in judging the bizarre little world that allowed Jacobson, Cain and, for a while, Tupper to thrive, but he shows it in considerable detail: a place where the tense is always present, where money is as easy as a compromise, and where identity is bestowed by the familiar nod of a headwaiter at this week's restaurant. For all the columns it garnered in the tabloids, the Jacobson case had almost no redeeming social significance. No book about it could offer the innocent victims of In Cold Blood or the ritualized horrors of the Manson Family in Helter Skelter. Also, Haden-Guest's prose tends to lapse from the serviceable into the unfortunate: "Chaperones with eyes like cobblers' awls," "His voice sounded like a biscuit cracking." Bad Dreams does not rise very far above its racy subject; but it provides a chilling look at the empty way some people live and die.

--By Paul Gray

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