In light of all that, the news of Michael Dorris’s suicide in a New Hampshire motel room on April 11 came as an ugly shock. Even friends who had known of the 52-year-old author’s depression were surprised. “He was despondent,” said Suzan Harjo, a friend of 30 years who last saw Dorris a month ago, “but he never mentioned he had contemplated taking his own life.” Even more shocking were reports that the author had been under investigation in Minneapolis, where the family now lives, for sexually abusing one of his children. To those few intimates with whom he discussed the investigation, Dorris denied any guilt but thought that the allegations, if made public, would destroy him and his family. He was convinced, according to his friend Douglas Foster, that suicide would forestall the publicity that would harm his children.
In the week since he died, the different aspects of Michael Dorris’s persona seemed to multiply and darken. There was Dorris the optimistic, hardworking writer and champion of Native American issues. This Dorris was also a loving husband and father of six children, three of them adopted by him while he was still single. Then there was the more sinister figure portrayed in the news leaks about the alleged sexual abuse of a young daughter.
There is at least one more Michael Dorris. According to Louise Erdrich, her husband’s suicide had nothing to do with charges of sexual abuse. Dorris, she insists, was “suicidal from the second year of our marriage.” His public cheerfulness “was only the third floor of a building with a very deep basement.” In an interview with NEWSWEEK, she said, “He committed suicide because he was in pain. No one commits suicide to protect their children. Obviously, he needed to believe that. His suicide will be more painful for them to handle than any coming to terms with reality.”
Erdrich’s description of Dorris’s chronic depression astonishes some of his friends. But author Robb Forman Dew, a friend of both Dorris’s and Erdrich’s, thinks “it makes a lot of sense. Michael wanted to keep his despair private. He was presenting himself as what we all want to be, comfortable and successful. That’s an exhausting chore.” On at least one occasion he suppressed a key fact about himself. NEWSWEEK has learned that Dorris’s own father committed suicide upon returning home from World War II. Michael learned about the suicide when he was in college, yet in a 1989 essay he said his father was killed on “an icy mountain road” in Germany during the war.
The almost-too-good-to-be-true image that Dorris and Erdrich cultivated has always drawn a certain amount of benign gossip. After she won the 1984 National Book Critics Circle Award for her first novel, “Love Medicine,” interviewers were surprised to find both Erdrich and Dorris answering the questions, insisting that they wrote together, that he deserved as much credit as she did. The gossip had him pegged as a sort of Svengali, or, worse, an opportunist riding his wife’s coattails. After Dorris published his own novel “A Yellow Raft in Blue Water” in 1987 and got glowing reviews, the gossip subsided.
In 1989, Dorris published “The Broken Cord,” and won his own National Book Critics Circle Award for his account of his struggle with his adopted son Abel, who was afflicted with Fetal Alcohol Syndrome–birth defects brought on by drinking during pregnancy. The condition was little known when Dorris adopted the 3-year-old boy in 1971. Indeed, it was not until he published his book that FAS became the public cause it is today. Three years later, teaching at Dartmouth, where he started the Native American Studies program, Dorris adopted Jeffrey, then Madeline, both of whom he suspected of suffering from Fetal Alcohol Effect, a milder form of the affliction. (Louise and Michael later had three girls of their own.)
Abel eventually needed constant supervision. Jeffrey and Madeline moved through a series of institutions; Jeffrey spent time in jail. In a series of messy court cases beginning in 1994, Jeffrey was unsuccessfully prosecuted after he threatened Dorris and Erdrich with physical harm and demanded $15,000. “Michael came in with a great deal of idealism,” says his friend, the psychologist and novelist Jonathan Kellerman, “and it all went to hell. He became very angry. Michael was from the liberal mentality that you can always change things, and unfortunately we know that there are things that are hardwired and can’t be changed.”
“The Broken Cord” became an acclaimed made-for-TV movie in 1992. “The Crown of Columbus,” a novel the couple wrote together, and for which they received a $1.5 million advance, was panned and sold disappointingly. But the couple continued to champion their idea of literary partnership–finishing each other’s sentences on and off the page. “I didn’t think a marriage that intertwined could last,” said Robb Dew. “It was as if there was no air.” At the same time, the family suffered a series of devastating calamities. Abel was hit by a car and died. Two years later the court battles began with Jeffrey, who had been threatening them with violence since 1989. They took the threats seriously, leaving Dartmouth and moving in secret to Montana, and later to Minneapolis.
Last year Erdrich moved out, to a house six blocks away, and the couple shared custody of the three younger children. Dorris told friends that Erdrich wanted to be independent, but the move depressed him even further. “I do not think he slept in the last year of his life,” Erdrich said last week. But to the end, says Sandi Campbell, the couple’s assistant, “this man was totally in love with this woman.” According to Harjo, “She left a nightgown hanging on a hook in the bedroom. Michael said he didn’t have the heart to remove it. It was a symbol she was coming back.”
On March 29, Douglas Foster, calling from California, reached Dorris at his Cornish, N.H., cottage, where he’d stopped while on a book tour for his new novel. Dorris admitted he was attempting suicide. Foster called the police, who got to Dorris in time to revive him. On Thursday, April 10, he checked out of a Vermont rehab center on a one-day pass. After renting a car, purchasing three bottles of Nytol, a bottle of vodka and some tapioca pudding, he checked into the Brick Tower Motor Inn in Concord, N.H., under a phony name and hung a DO NOT DISTURB sign on the door of room 40. The only thing he had left in him to write was a suicide note. He apologized for the inconvenience, proclaimed his love for his family and said, in closing, “[I] will be peaceful at last.”
