Growing up Stoned: A True Story about a Teenage Murder in a Small Town

By Elizabeth Kaye

When one Milpitas teenager bragged about killing another, his friends didn’t believe him. When he showed them the corpse, they didn’t tell. Stoners don’t narc on their friends.

With an interview with the author by Alex Belth.

About The Stacks Reader Series
The Stacks Reader Series highlights classic literary non-fiction and short fiction by great journalists that would otherwise be lost to history—a living archive of memorable storytelling by notable authors. Brought to you by The Sager Group with support from NeoText (NeoTextCorp.com)

• Language: English
• Publisher: The Sager Group
• Release date: Aug 28, 2023
• ISBN: 9781958861202

Elizabeth Kaye

Elizabeth Kaye is an award-winning journalist who has written five books on subjects ranging from the Los Angeles Lakers to American Ballet Theatre. Her most recent ebook, Lifeboat No. 8: An Untold Tale of Love, Loss, and Surviving the Titanic, rose to #1 on the Amazon and New York Times ebook bestseller lists.

Book preview

INTRODUCTION: ELIZABETH KAYE

The local coverage was enormous. I decided that I would wait until the press cleared out. I never wanted to be part of a press corps because that is so limiting. I like to be the cleanup squad. You get much more that way. My goal was always to write the definitive piece. The piece that once it’s written nobody else will write about it because you’ve already said what needed to be said. That’s always the goal.

Elizabeth Kaye is not the kind of person who takes no for an answer. That helps explain why she has always had a gift for getting people to open up to her. A true child of the sixties—"I wasn’t just from the sixties, she says, I was stuck in the sixties.—Kaye was devoted to Bobby Kennedy and devastated when he was killed. A few years later, after breaking into the business as a TV news writer, she tracked down Juan Romero, the busboy who held Kennedy in his arms the night RFK was assassinated at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. I need to talk to you, she told him. When he replied that he doesn’t speak to reporters, Kaye said, You don’t understand. I need to talk to you."

Kaye wrote a story about Romero that was accepted by the Village Voice and put on the cover to commemorate the fourth anniversary of Kennedy’s death. Kaye’s curiosities border on obsession. By the mid-1970s she supported herself writing profiles of celebrities such as Barbra Streisand, Alan Alda, and Linda Ronstadt for well-paying women’s magazines like Redbook and McCalls. That helped finance her passion projects—writing about whatever struck her fancy, from the Ellsberg trial to Elvis fans in Memphis and bodybuilders in LA.

She wrote often for New West, which became California magazine, which published Growing Up Stoned in 1982. Kaye later wrote for Rolling Stone, and then Esquire, where she specialized in long, intimate portraits of such men as international dancing legend Rudolf Nureyev, ABC News anchorman Peter Jennings, forever restless movie star Sylvester Stallone, and the embattled senator Teddy Kennedy.

Her work is remarkable for its clarity and the kind of hard-won details that can only be earned after spending a lot of time with a subject. She embedded herself and didn’t leave until she got her story. From the high school kids in Growing Up Stoned to the rich and famous, she has the knack for putting people at ease and getting them to share a side of themselves rarely seen in public. Her work is anchored in moral seriousness and, behind the curiosity of what happened in this case, Kaye conveys a sense of disillusionment and despair at how things could have come to this. In a local story of a bunch of teenagers who saw a dead body and then went home, got high, and didn’t mention it, represented the end of the sixties dream once and for all. And a harbinger of things to come.

—Alex Belth

Alex Belth: Did you always want to be a writer?

Elizabeth Kaye: I never thought I could be a writer because most nonfiction writers were men. But I wanted to be one. I was addicted to the news. I used to wait at the newsstand for the New York Post to come and I’d read Pete Hamill’s column, Jack Newfield’s column, and Jimmy Breslin’s column. I devoured Esquire, The Atlantic, Harper’s. Writing spoke to me and it’s what I wanted to do.

AB: Where did you grow up?

EK: I was raised in Philadelphia until I was sixteen, then we moved to New York. My parents knew Nora Ephron’s parents and because of that, when I was about twenty-one, they set up a meeting for me to talk to Nora. I remember walking through the office of New York magazine and just being gobsmacked. All the writers I read and wanted to be were there. And Nora told me what I should do is get a job at a newspaper. I didn’t want to get a job at a newspaper, so I didn’t. Years later, in 1978, Nora came to the luncheon for the Alicia Patterson Fellowship Awards. Ten of us were finalists and they picked five and you had to be interviewed by a panel that included Nora and Tom Wicker. It was very scary and posh. I went up to her and said, I met you ten years ago, and you told me I should work for a newspaper, but I never did. And she said very kindly, If I had known how good you are I wouldn’t have suggested it, which I thought was extremely generous of her. It impressed me that, in addition to being so sharp and acerbic she was generous too.

AB: