48 THENEWYORKER,APRIL11, 2022
off as the happy hooker,” in the early
seventies, but she had no memory of
Bourgoin. Hollander added that the
building used to be called the “hori-
zontal whorehouse,” where “every floor
had one or two hookers.” Eventually,
I found the owner of apartment 11-H,
where Bourgoin supposedly lived, and
he told me that a man named Beau
Buchanan had rented it in 1976. A di-
rector and producer of porn movies,
Buchanan died in 2020. He easily could
have known Bourgoin—but did Bour-
goin take Buchanan’s address and make
it his own, or had he really lived there?
It seemed a reasonable guess, given
the period fashions and the profes-
sional composition, that the photo-
graph of Bourgoin and the woman he
had identified as Eileen had been taken
on one of the movie sets he worked
on in the seventies. The 4ème Œil felt
reasonably sure that Eileen was Dom-
inique Saint Claire, a well-known
adult-film actress of the era. A porn
expert I contacted suggested, inde-
pendently, that Eileen might be Saint
Claire, but, looking at the pictures of
Saint Claire that were available online,
I wasn’t convinced. (My attempts to
contact Saint Claire were unsuccessful.)
I watched a head-spinning selection
of films from the era and called a num-
ber of former actors—one was a maker
of traditional and erotic chocolates—
searching for some hint of Eileen. The
movies that Bourgoin wrote are almost
impossible to get ahold of, but Jill C.
Nelson, a biographer of John Holmes,
agreed to mail me a DVD of “Extreme
Close-Up” from her personal collec-
tion. It’s a love-triangle story in which,
as the DVD’s jacket copy notes, an
American writer “is led into a world
of European sexual delights where fan-
tasy merges with reality.” I watched the
movie attentively—at one point paus-
ing an open-mouthed-orgasm scene
to search for a snaggletooth—but none
of the women resembled the one in
Bourgoin’s photograph.
I
n early March, I called Bourgoin
from a street corner in a rural vil-
lage on France’s southwest coast, near
where he now lives. I wasn’t expecting
him to answer; I had tried to contact
him before, without much luck. But,
to my surprise, he picked up and
quickly furnished his address. Several
miles down the road, I found him
standing in funky green shoes outside
a modest house with an orange tiled
roof and voile curtains with teapot ap-
pliqués and gingham trim.
Bourgoin invited me inside. I no-
ticed, as he made coffee, that his knife
rack was shaped like a human body,
stuck through with blades at various
points: forehead, heart, groin. Even-
tually, we sat down at a small table in
the sunroom. He seemed unruff led
by my unannounced visit, almost as
though he’d been waiting for some-
one to show up.
A person who was once close to
Bourgoin told me that he was an “ex-
cellent actor” and “extremely convinc-
ing, because, when he lies, he believes
it very strongly, and so you believe it,
too.” At the table, though, Bourgoin
was diffident. He didn’t seem to be
putting much effort into making me—
or, possibly, himself—believe what he
said. Or maybe he believed it so deeply
that the delivery was no longer rele-
vant. When I asked how many kill-
ers he had actually interviewed, he re-
plied, in English, “It depends. Each
time I was going to a jail, I asked to
meet serial killers other than the ones
I was authorized to film or interview.
So sometimes at Florida State Prison
I met in the courtyard during the
promenade—I don’t know, two?
five?—other serial killers.” He was
just as evasive on other subjects. I
asked him about the prank that he
played on Dahina Sy. “It was a fake
spider,” he said, as though that ex-
plained everything. (He later claimed
that he was unaware of Sy’s arachno-
phobia.) When I brought up the rings
that Alice, his father’s former wife,
had given him, he said that he had
called to thank her the next time he
was in New York.
His instinct, in tense moments,
was to show me his collections: piles
of dusty tabloids, stacks of pulp fic-
tion, an attic full of DVDs, desks and
dressers and wardrobes containing
boxes of old notebooks in which he
had dutifully listed and rated, in a
prim, upright hand, every film he’d
seen. When I asked about the apart-
ment at 155 East Fifty-fifth Street, he
produced three large envelopes, post-
marked in the early fall of 1975 and
sent to “Stéphane Bourgoin, A.R.T.
Films” at that address. A.R.T., he said,
was a distribution company that had
belonged to a friend of his, Beau Bu-
chanan. The envelopes didn’t shed
much light on Bourgoin’s doings
in seventies New York, but for him
such objects seemed almost equiva-
lent to experiences.
In an article called “How I Was
Bamboozled by Stéphane Bourgoin,”
the Swiss journalist Anna Lietti ex-
amined her decision to write a mostly
positive article about Bourgoin, de-
spite her discomfort with his “overly
smooth” presentation. “I was disap-
pointed by the superficiality of my in-
terlocutor and the lack of depth of
his remarks,” Lietti, describing him
as a sort of human reference book,
wrote. “He lined up facts, dates, de-
tails, without offering a perspective,
an original key to understanding these
monsters to which he devoted his
life.” In his countryside house, Bour-
goin seemed a sad figure—a collec-
tor of trivia and paraphernalia, a man
who just as easily could have spent
decades amassing esoteric toys or ob-
sessing over cryptocurrency, rather
than living off the misfortunes of oth-
ers. It was as though he thought that
gathering enough props would make
him a protagonist.
“I’m sorry that I lied and exagger-
ated things,” Bourgoin told me, at one
point. “But I never raped or killed
anybody.”
I asked what lies he was apologiz-
ing for.
“All the lies,” he said. But, he added,
“there was mostly one important lie
that I would do again.”
Bourgoin was referring to the Ei-
leen story—the foundational lie upon
which he had constructed his career.
He admitted that he had invented her
name, and the location of the murder.
