Robin Williams stars in The Night Listener |
The notion that truth is stranger than fiction can sometimes sound clichéd, but when you hear the real-life tale that inspired author Armistead Maupin’s bestselling novel The Night Listener, now a compelling psychological thriller starring Robin Williams and Toni Collette, it’s the only way to sum up how much more bizarre the actions of genuine people can be.
The plot of The Night Listener hinges on a key revelation that comes about a third of the way into the film, and at the risk of delving into one of the most compelling film backstories we’ve heard in a while, Hollywood.com is hesitant to unleash spoilers. So fair warning: unless you’ve already enjoyed the original novel or had the twist spoiled by some less considerate media source, you might not want to proceed until you’ve had a chance to see the film’s surprises unfurl—bookmark this story, then come back to learn the equally shocking inspiration behind it.
The Set Up
“Life has a way of handing me these things,” said Maupin, the acclaimed writer whose groundbreaking newspaper essays about gay life in San Francisco became the basis of his book Tales of the City, which in turn became a much-heralded—and controversial—PBS TV series. “The Night Listener was just something that happened to me up to a point. But the basic setup just fell into my lap 13 years ago, and I knew instantly that I would have to write about it.”
Maupin was already enjoying the success of his earlier works when he found himself drawn into a drama he could have never suspected, due to his high profile. “In San Francisco he's like the mayor, the second mayor,” said Robin Williams, his longtime friend and fellow San Franciscan who would ultimately play a fictionalized version of the author in The Night Listener. “We have our regular mayor and then we have Armistead. I've known him and [his then-companion] Terry Armstrong for years. They're like friends and family to me.”
As a typical result of his writing success, in 1993 Maupin “was sent the galleys of a book by a publisher in New York written by a 14-year-old boy who was dying of AIDS, who had suffered abuse at the hands of his parents who had been in sort of a pedophiliac ring, and he had been rescued by a social worker. I was asked to write a blurb—At the beginning of the film there's that line that says, ‘Don't worry. You won't have to write a blurb.’”
That book was Rock and a Hard Place: One Boy's Triumphant Story, the poignant, sometime horrific and supposedly true memoir of Anthony Godby Johnson. The book came with a forward from Los Angeles author Paul Monette, another renowned essayist on gay relationships and a friend of Maupin’s who was dying of AIDS. Monette had been contacted by Johnson—who himself was expected to die of AIDS within six months—and coaxed into providing the forward, as had another even more famous personality. “Mr. Rogers, of all people, had written the afterward,” said Maupin, “So it came with pretty impeccable credentials.”
As a result both Monette and Fred Rogers had established warm, long-distance relationships with the terminally ill but life-loving boy, who lived with an adoptive guardian in Union City, New Jersey in a highly secretive arrangement for fear that his abusive parents or their sick sexual circle might hunt him down. Maupin was thunderstruck by Tony Johnson’s story, and immediately provided a cover blurb, but found himself wanting to do more.
“I was so moved by the book and frankly a little envious of Paul that he had had this amazing friendship with this kid on the phone, this little saintly kid, that I said, 'May I call him and tell him how much I like it?' So he spoke to the adopted mother and they said, 'Oh, he's a fan of Tales of the City. He would love to talk to you.' So before I knew it, this kid with this surprisingly undeveloped voice was talking to me on the phone, and I found him to be feisty and charming and bright and not at all depressing considering all of the things that he had been through. And very gay-friendly, although he himself was heterosexually identified.”
With Tony’s adoptive mother Vicki Johnson (real name Vicki Fraginals) serving as the go-between, Maupin and the boy developed a deep connection through their frequent phone conversations over the ensuing months, though Tony was always too sick for a one-on-one meeting to be arranged. Maupin was blissfully ignorant that there might be something entirely more outlandish going on until one fateful telephone call.
“My partner at the time, Terry Anderson, who co-wrote the screenplay listened to the mother for the first time,” he recalled. “He had heard the boy before. He talked to her for about ten minutes and hung up and turned to me and said, 'I can't believe you've never noticed it.' I said, 'Noticed what?' He said 'It sounds like the same voice to me.’”
It was if the tumblers from some psychological padlock had clicked into place and opened a locked wall in Maupin’s mind: Tony was, in fact, Vicki Fraginals. “I could see it immediately.” In the book and the film, Robin Williams’ character Gabriel, the fictionalized version of Maupin, is first in denial and then intensely obsessed with exposing the elaborate deception, having taken the non-existent boy deep into his own wounded heart, but Maupin actually decided to continue to play along. “I was mostly just excited as a writer because I thought, 'My God, what if this is true? Why would anyone do this?' because he was talking to the world. He was talking to Jermaine Jackson and Tom Robins, the writer. Keith Oberman had a very strong relationship with him. So I lived for six years splitting my brain right down the middle: He's real. He's not real. Either thing could be true, and some days I would hear her very clearly in his voice, and then other days I would be certain that I was merely hoping that this would be true, because it was such a good story.”
Living in Fiction
During the six year period—in which “Tony” never succumbed to his illness, though AIDS purportedly claimed his testicles, conveniently keeping his voice from ever deepening—Maupin tried to arrange meetings, always unsuccessfully. “I tried many times and was invited many times, and the invitation was invariably retracted at the last minute for a number of reasons. 'Oh, he's come down with something. He's not feeling well now.’” Once, the author set up a test that seemed too tempting, when he was invited to make a speech on AIDS at Yankee Stadium to 50,000 people at the Gay Games. “I thought, 'This is perfect,”” said Maupin, knowing the “boy” was an avowed Yankees fan. “We called him up and said, 'Look, we're going to send an ambulance, a limo, whatever you want to take Tony and put him in the dugout at Yankee Stadium so I can make the speech. I'll include him in the speech.' She was having none of it.”
Although Maupin’s attempts to uncover the truth were often playful and others—like a hard-hitting examination by Newsweek magazine—he was aware that it was also painful for the many people “Tony” had drawn into his fictional world. “It was hard because all of the people around him, his editor and his agent were still saying, 'Trust us. He exists. We haven't seen him, but we're sure that he exists.’” The publishers have still yet to renounce the memoir’s authenticity.
“He was anything that you needed him to be,” explains Maupin. “With me he was sort of a wise-cracking secular humanist who was very pro-gay and who would talk to me about the homophobia and the AIDS wards. The best thing that he ever did for me was a great laugh. I was on the phone with him one day – notice how I still say he?—and he said, 'Hang on, I've got a call I have to take.' He came back two minutes later and said, 'That was Fred,’ meaning Fred Rogers—Mr. Rogers. This was at a time when Tales of the City had just been under attack by the religious right and PBS had dropped the sequel because of it…He said, 'Fred has a message for you: “Tell PBS to go f*ck itself.”’ I said 'Mr. Rogers does not talk like that.' He said, 'Oh, you don't know how he talks.’”
Later, Maupin said, The New Yorker magazine’s investigative reporter actually called up the producers Mr. Roger's Neighborhood and repeated the alleged quote to them. “When they finally stopped laughing they said, 'He's a Presbyterian minister.' But he knew that I would think that was the coolest little insight.”
“It was a very odd thing to live in this mystery for such a long time,” confessed Maupin. “I didn't really believe it until I saw a voice analysis and I really, fully said, ‘All right, there it is. There's the truth.’”
Maupin finally met Vicki Fraginals in person when “Tony” participated—in voice only—in an Oprah Winfrey-produced TV documentary on abused children and the two found themselves together in the New York studio where it was produced. “She was very pleasant, pretty blonde—a very large woman. I saw her and my first instinct was to hug her. Part of me still wasn't sure.”
“I spoke to Tony afterwards and he said, 'How was it meeting Mom?' I thought, 'Boy, I better answer this one carefully.' He had always said, up to that point 'Mom is a real babe.' Well, she was a lovely woman, but she wasn't a babe. I said, 'Well, she was great. She was very sweet to me.' And he said, 'Well, Mom said that she looked at you and knew that you were going to hug her.' I said, 'Well, I felt like doing it.' He said, 'Were you surprised by how she looked?' I said, 'Well, a little bit. She was a little bit bigger than I thought she would be.' He said, 'You know she put on all that weight after she adopted me.' That's so interesting to me psychologically.”
Photo(s) by Miramax- © 2006- All Rights Reserved