Chapter 34

On the summer night in 2009 when Norma returned home from Phoenix to find her screen door locked, she drove one hundred miles south to Waco. The two nights she spent in the town she called her Bethlehem did not reawaken in her a desire to be with Connie. So she drove on farther south—sixty miles to the town of Bartlett, fifty miles to the town of Bastrop, and then a few miles more to a country town where, on Main Street, she entered the chamber of commerce and heard her name.

“I said,” recalls Adena Lewis, who ran the chamber, “ ‘Norma McCorvey—what are you doing in Smithville, Texas?’ ” Norma did not quite answer. “I’m tired,” she said. “I’m just tired.’ ”

Norma had had an exhausting month—removed from a Senate hearing room for heckling a future Supreme Court justice, lying and crying to a filmmaker in Phoenix, fleeing in fury her partner and home. But it was the general turmoil of her life that bled her. On this Thursday morning, August 13, the stranger who recognized Norma told her that she’d landed, recalls Lewis, in “ ‘the perfect place to rest.’ ”

Smithville was tranquil, 3.7 square miles that were home to 3,800 people (and one giant gingerbread man). The town lies some forty miles southeast of Austin, and two miles south of a state park. It was to that park—a thousand acres bursting with loblobby pine—that Lewis now sent Norma, highlighting the route on a map and writing her cell number on it. “The state park just captivated her,” recalls her friend Daniel Vinzant. “That drive on that day made her ecstatic.”

Norma was still on a high when, two days later, she phoned Lewis from a local eatery. She was moving to Smithville, she said, and wanted help finding a home. Lewis connected her with a woman named Lauren Nailen, who welcomed Norma to her bed-and-breakfast at no charge. The women became fast friends, fellow Christians happy to sit beside the pool, recalls Nailen, and “talk about what we used to do before we were born again.”

Norma stayed at the Auberge LaGrange near a month, eating bowls of tinola, a Filipino soup Nailen made for her of chicken and spinach and ginger. In September, days before turning sixty-two, Norma moved into a house a few miles east of town. By year’s end, she had settled into a cottage on Burleson Street, pecan trees all about. When 2010 brought another Roe anniversary, Norma was happy to be in Smithville, skipping the March for Life for the first time since her conversion.

Roe found her, however. Her lawyer Allan Parker happened to meet a Catholic filmmaker named Peter Mackenzie at a pro-life event in San Antonio. Mackenzie had written a pro-life film script called Doonby and was set to shoot it in Smithville. Parker told him that Jane Roe happened to live there and suggested that Mackenzie put her in his film.

MACKENZIE HAD WANTED to help the pro-life cause ever since his native England legalized abortion in 1967. “It wasn’t a religious thing,” he says, in a voice made croaky by throat cancer. “It was a moral issue.” Decades later, he wrote Doonby. The film recounts the spiritual awakening of a sleepy town, a rebirth brought about by a man revealed, in a Hitchcockian twist, to have never been born but aborted.

Abortion, of course, lends itself to dramatization. It figures in plotlines in Eugene O’Neill and Edith Wharton, in The Godfather Part II and Fame. Back in 1964, the screenwriter William Goldman wrote of a producer warning a playwright that “there better not be a big abortion scene—I’m bored with them already.”

Still, representations of abortion are anything but static. The author Katha Pollitt, for example, observed that while women writers give it a “bloody realism”—the poet Sharon Olds writing of soaked slippers in “The End”—men use it most often as “a symbol—of modern alienation, of a larger sterility.” To hear men tell it, abortion is something a man might talk a woman in or out of; Hemingway wrote of a man telling his lover that “it’s really an awfully simple operation,” while Richard Yates wrote of another telling his wife that “the very thought of it makes my stomach turn.” The women do as prompted; one has an abortion, one does not. (When Yates’s antihero about-faces and tells his wife “I wish to God you’d done it,” she gives herself an abortion and dies.)

Roe had since empowered women. But in 2010, as Mackenzie readied to shoot his film, rare was the script that depicted abortion in America as it usually was—something done in safety and without regret. Instead, films and TV shows elevated mortality rates and soft-pedaled state restrictions. A pair of recent films, Juno and Knocked Up, presented women who were hard to find off-screen—women happily carrying to term desperately unwanted pregnancies.

THE IDEA OF having Jane Roe in his film excited Mackenzie. He set aside a small part for her, that of a woman who seeks to dissuade her young neighbor from having an abortion. Mackenzie then met with Norma for lunch, and she was aboard.

Norma liked the script. She also liked that Mackenzie would pay her some $25,000; she had little income beyond the $500 those Texas Catholics still sent her monthly. In late May, Norma moved back into the Auberge LaGrange, where Mackenzie was housing his cast, a plaintiff among actors.

Norma made an impression. John Schneider, the former Dukes of Hazzard star and the film’s leading man, told the press that he had expected Jane Roe to be “complicated, protective and cerebral,” but had found her instead to be “down to earth, open and unaffected.” She was, of course, also prone to anger and drink, and thirsty for attention. It struck Mackenzie that she resembled a type common among actors—someone poor and uneducated, he says, “pitchforked into fame and limelight.”

Norma loved the stage. She hadn’t acted since Catholic school, when she played a peasant girl in South Pacific. But she could still recite the lines from Macbeth she’d memorized as a girl about the brevity and meaninglessness of life. And she’d been playing Jane Roe for forty years. Cast now as Nancy Thirber, she recited her lines with emotion. “You don’t have to do this,” she pleaded, slowly looking up at a young beauty named Erin Way. “Children are a miracle—a gift from God!”

Norma and her fellow actress sat down a day later at a local diner. Over a plate of fried zucchini, Norma told Way that she’d never had an abortion. “She said,” recalls Way, ‘ “I think people forget that I’m a mother.’ ”

DOONBY FINISHED SHOOTING IN JULY, and Norma set off to look for a new home, visiting a handful of century-old cottages with a realtor. “She just liked to look at the houses,” recalls Jeannie Ralph. “And then she would say, ‘Well, I better rent something before I buy.’ ” Norma settled on a small wooden house a half mile away, two rooms with a kitchen and bath.

It was Norma’s fourth home in the year she had lived in Smithville. But she resided above all at the local bars, chief among them Huebel’s, which had been serving up beer since 1945. Norma had been drinking almost as long; she’d struggled with alcohol since her first drink at age twelve in 1959. Now, several days a week, Norma set down dollar bills for dollar beers at first call, drinking ten or so Bud Lights until a friend drove her home.

Norma tended to tell her story when drunk. She gave her new friends copies of whichever of her two books suited them. To a bartender named Susan DeVine—who remained thankful at forty-two that she’d been able to terminate a pregnancy at seventeen—Norma gave I Am Roe. To Henry Lee Taylor, she gave Won by Love.

Taylor had met Norma that summer of 2010 after buying a round at Huebel’s. The two were soon drinking buddies, meeting at the bar every few weeks over cigarettes and large quantities of beer.

Taylor’s opposition to abortion was personal: “I could have been wasted,” he says. Instead, he’d been born and put into foster care and adopted at age two. Forty-one years later, he had, much like Norma, lived a life marked by poverty and alcohol and familial estrangement. Says Taylor: “Having similar bruises helped connect us.” Like Norma, though, Taylor had been saved. He was now, in fact, a Baptist pastor. And if he turned to vodka to help him sleep, and was in infrequent touch with his children, he had a strong third marriage and a good job directing funeral services at a tony home in Austin where he was, he notes, the first black hire.

Norma still spoke of abortion from time to time. But those conversations were private. Since skipping the March for Life months before, she had continued to step back from Roe—letting her ministry dissolve, and cutting off, once again, her strongest remaining tether to Roe, the lawyer Parker. Norma had now been depleted by both sides of the abortion debate—“scorned, rejected, snubbed, discredited and excluded” before her conversion, in the words of a pro-choice activist, and exploited after it by a group that included Benham, Parker, Newman, Terry, Schenck and Pavone. “Which is it Fr. Frank,” Norma emailed Pavone one year before. “Just for show or DO YOU REALLY Care as you claim?”

“She feels at the end of the day a little bit like she doesn’t have a side to belong to,” says the actor Way. “She’s a little bit of an orphan.”

Norma was, of course, partly to blame for her alienation. She was disagreeable and opportunistic. Still, she had never felt quite at home in either camp. “On the pro-choice side, she could be who she wanted to be but they didn’t respect her,” says Melissa. “On the pro-life side, they respected her but she couldn’t be who she wanted to be.”

Who Norma wanted to be was gay and pro-choice—but only moderately pro-choice. Norma no more absolutely opposed Roe than she’d ever absolutely supported it; she’d long since decided that abortion ought to be legal for precisely three months. In this, Norma had remained consistent, publicly stating her position decades apart, days after both Roe and her Christian rebirth.

It was exposure, a youth lived among both the religious and the bohemian, that had tempered Norma. That exposure only grew after Roe. Countless women—on both sides of the ruling—had confided in her the abortion stories they kept from others. Norma related to both sides, and confided her ambivalence about abortion to friends pro-choice and pro-life alike—the abortion provider Charlotte Taft, the abortion opponent Judy Wiggins.

If Norma was uncomfortable with the increasing surety and absolutism of both movements, she was hardly alone. Like her, a majority of Americans resided in what Norma termed, after her conversion, “the mushy middle.” Indeed, a poll would soon reveal that whereas 1 percent of Americans felt that abortion ought to never be legal and 28 percent felt that it should always be legal, 52 percent felt that it should be legal sometimes, their support dropping by trimester from 61 to 27 to 14 percent.

Norma thus reflected the majoritarian middle ground. She embodied the national ambivalence, the desire for legal yet limited abortion, as no Schlafly or Steinem could. That stood to reason. The two conflicting forces that had most shaped abortion in the U.S. had also shaped her—sex and religion the helical strands of her DNA. As her lawyer Parker once noted: Norma was “a microcosm of America.”

NORMA HAD BEEN in Smithville a year when, on the first fall night of 2010, the bartender DeVine threw her a birthday party. There was alcohol and cake and flowers and presents. DeVine gave Norma a brown lap blanket to keep her warm. Norma was soon drunk and pole dancing. “I like my life now,” Norma would tell a reporter. “I keep a simple routine. No complications.”

Life in Smithville was indeed uncomplicated for Norma. There was beer and billiards and a black cat she named Mr. Baby. But if the town was good to Norma—DeVine at her door every morning to talk over coffee—it was an escape.

There was a couple in town who reminded Norma that she’d run not only from Connie but her homosexuality, too. Rosie Lopez and Teri Costlow had met in 2005, a client and a counselor at an outpatient rehab facility in Long Island. They became a couple and, in 2009, opened a facility of their own, a residential recovery program in Smithville complete with twelve steps, therapy, meditation and yoga. Beside it, they opened a weekend-only restaurant staffed by their residents. There at the Comfort Café—where the prices were merely suggested—they came to know Norma.

Costlow felt indebted to Norma, to the plaintiff whose suit had enabled her to have a legal abortion at eighteen. But it was Lopez, a fellow free spirit who’d struggled with addiction and religion and her sexuality, who felt a kinship with Norma. She had let go of religion but not belief, and was free now to love whom she wished. Her God was not only accepting but capable of wonders—like bringing to her Jane Roe.

Lopez wished for Norma to heal as she had. Over endless hours with her on the café patio, she came to believe that what Norma admired above all was authenticity, living a life unapologetic. But shame and guilt were preventing her from doing so. “Religion wounded her more than Roe wounded her,” says Lopez. “She lost her identity.”

Indeed, having lived for fifteen years in a world that damned her homosexuality, Norma began in 2011 to present herself to pro-life friends as straight—or at least as someone trying to be—first texting her friend Henry Taylor that she was praying for a husband, then telling her old friend Ronda Mackey that she was looking for one. “I’m dating men now,” she told her over the phone. “I’m having sex with them.”

Mackey had seen Norma just once in the thirteen years since her work on Norma’s ministry had left her on meds and in therapy. When Mackey responded that it would be better if Norma married before having sex, Norma screamed at her, “I thought you’d be proud of me!” Norma never spoke to Mackey again. But she took her words to heart. For she then told her Mississippi friend Judy Wiggins not that she was looking for a husband but that she’d found one, and was married. Wiggins responded with the hope that he treated her well. Upset with her response, Norma cut her off, too. And here, the fantasy of her heterosexuality reached its inevitable end. Norma told her friend Daniel Vinzant that she’d been married but that the marriage had been annulled by the mother of the man she had wed—Frank Di Bugnara.

In the six years since Di Bugnara had heard Norma on his car radio outside Phoenix, he had come to reconceive the film he had titled Roe v. Norma as less about Norma than Roe. Still, his fascination with Norma had only grown. “I was in deep,” he says. Thirty-five and single, he gave her story nearly all his time, strengthened by the thought that his film was the contribution to humanity that that holy pharmacist in Scottsdale had foreseen back in his boyhood.

Di Bugnara had brought Norma back to Phoenix for a fundraiser the year before. And as he flew about the country to network and raise money, he remained in touch with his protagonist, sending her occasional texts and emails (and, when asked, money too). That Norma had imagined them marrying, Di Bugnara was wholly unaware.

But for the law, Norma would likely have married Connie. They had exchanged silver rings. But Norma had left her behind, and friends now helped Connie get by. Sheree Havlik tended to her after a fall. Her neighbor Utah Foster took her to the bank. But her body, her speech and memory were deteriorating. Dementia was encroaching. Her debt was growing. In August 2011, sixteen months after that first notice of foreclosure, her niece Linda picked up the phone. “They gave us thirty days,” she says. Connie and her niece moved in with another niece, her house of forty-four years put up for public auction.

NORMA WAS USED TO MOVING. In the two years before her arrival in Smithville, she had lived in Mississippi and Kansas and Virginia and Texas. In the two years since, she had lived in an inn and three houses. In late 2011, she moved into a subsidized apartment in a public housing complex called Smithville Gardens.

Norma now qualified for Section 8 housing; she gave few talks and, since Doonby, her income had dropped below the federal poverty level.

Few might have imagined that Jane Roe was living in the projects on MLK Boulevard. The affidavit she signed in 1970 had opened worlds to her, from Manhattan to Hollywood to London, Norma feted and monetized and profiled and portrayed by a movie star who called her Pixie.

Decades before, Norma had told her girlfriend Diane that she would be famous. But once she was, she sometimes wondered to what end. Back at the abortion clinic on Markville Drive, she’d even lain on an examining table, her feet in stirrups, so as to better picture the life she might have lived had she gotten the abortion she sought. Would she have been happier? Come to Smithville, it had done Norma good to leave Roe behind. And when she briefly returned to it—joining a pro-life march in Dallas weeks into 2012—she was undone when a stranger asked how she lived with the blood of millions on her head. Hours later, in the middle of an on-air conversation about Doonby with a talk show host, Norma hung up and then posted on Facebook that the film was terrible.

The filmmaker Mackenzie was exasperated. Still, he says, he felt for Norma. She’d been leeched for as long as she’d been Roe. Plus, she’d already helped him, telling the Hollywood Reporter, for example, that it was God who had led her to Smithville and thus to Doonby. “I obeyed,” she had said. “I had no family there, no friends. I just obeyed.”

NORMA WAS IN POOR HEALTH, beset by depression and insomnia and a bad hip that slowed her walk. When one day she grew short of breath and landed in the hospital, she learned that she also had COPD, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. Her chest began to tighten more often, and she took to calling Melissa, who would alert the Smithville police.

Norma thought often of her daughters. She texted her friend, the pastor Taylor, that her “heart has been low for my youngins.” And when a reporter came to her in Smithville, she had the accompanying photographer shoot her on a playground swing—that which evoked for her not only the millions lost to Roe but the three girls she herself had lost to adoption.

There were other women like Norma who’d placed for adoption children they’d wished to abort. A ten-year study would later show that 85 percent of them, even five years after those adoptions, had come to be thankful that they’d not had an abortion. It was, it seemed, the human condition to feel for any child once it was birthed.

Still, whenever Norma expressed regret at having let her children go, she did so without emotion. Says DeVine: “There was a disconnect.” Nor was Norma there for the one child still in her life. When on Christmas Eve, Mary’s husband Raymond died, and Melissa mourned the man she had come to love as a father, Norma offered her no comfort.

It had always been this way for Norma; she demanded a great deal but gave little. And so, in February 2012, Mackenzie did not bother inviting her to attend the screenings of his film in Mississippi and Texas. Norma remained at home with Mr. Baby and a second cat she named Cuddles.

DOONBY WAS UNAPOLOGETICALLY PRO-LIFE. The film was also gritty—much of it took place in a bar—and the evangelical community did not support it, says Mackenzie. But the Catholic community did; the daily paper of the Vatican called it “moving and thought-provoking,” and true to the “painful regrets [of abortion] epitomized” by the person and performance of one Norma McCorvey.

Father Pavone had introduced the film to the Holy See, arranging a screening at Castel Gandolfo, a town near Rome where the pope vacationed. The priest, though, was increasingly at odds with his superiors in the U.S. After an audit revealed mismanagement of funds at Priests for Life and Pavone refused to open the books, a bishop in Texas had ordered Pavone to move to Amarillo. But nine months later, in the spring of 2012, the Vatican released Pavone, and he returned to New York in “good standing.”

Norma, meantime, remained in Texas. And when, that summer, the manager of the housing project told her that her cats had to go, she instead moved with them into the home of a nurse who for twenty-three years had felt in her debt.

Heidi Erwin had been a senior in high school when she got pregnant. She loved her boyfriend and they would later marry. But she was desperate to go to college and did not hesitate to have an abortion. Years later, in 2010, she’d happened upon Jane Roe at Huebel’s and done her best to thank her. Says Erwin: “I had a lot of respect for Norma. Maybe I was in awe of her.” She bought Norma a beer. Two years later, in July 2012, Erwin had bought her many more when she and her husband put Norma up in the bedroom they kept in their garage.

The great majority of women who have abortions have children, too. Erwin was among them, and her son and daughter, eight and four, darted about the yard outside Norma’s door. Norma showed little interest in them. She stayed inside most days with her cats and cigarettes. And when she did speak with Erwin and her husband, Democrats who believed in choice, she was apt to turn surly. She seemed agitated. Her mood was not improved when, in August, she gave up alcohol, contenting herself with O’Doul’s.

Smithville had provided Norma a refuge from Roe, a three-year slatch between waves. The town had not used her in any way. Still, Norma wished to be gone. “She was withdrawing,” says Erwin. Norma asked the filmmaker she’d imagined to be her husband to take her away, and Di Bugnara flew her to Phoenix in September, happy for the opportunity to introduce her to a group of investors. But a French dip sandwich got her sick and then angry, and she returned to Texas at once.

Di Bugnara still had another year on his contract with Norma. But over four years, their collaboration had produced five minutes of film and cost him hundreds of thousands of dollars—a loss, he says, that “had a permanent and massive impact on the trajectory of my life.” He abandoned the project and never saw Norma again.

Norma moved right along. That same September, she flew to Randall Terry in West Virginia for $1,000 and one last strop of his razor. “Do not vote for Barack Obama,” she said in an ad endorsing another Terry bid for Congress. “He murders babies.”

NORMA STILL TOLD LIES. She told the innkeeper Nailen that—like the biblical Esau selling his birthright for a bowl of lentils—she’d taken on her plaintiffship for “a piece of pizza and a beer.” She told a British reporter that on the day Roe became law, she had felt like a “mass murderer” and slit her wrists. She told the Doonby director that an abortion provider had instructed her to reassemble an aborted fetus. And wishing now to leave Smithville for good, she began, as so many times before, to invent another peril, telling her friend Vinzant, he recalls, that she was “in a dangerous place,” that the man putting her up in his garage made her feel uncomfortable.

Finding Norma a new home would not be easy; she smoked and had cats and struggled with stairs and had no money for rent. But Vinzant wrote to Catholic friends in Dallas. In early November, a woman just northwest of the city volunteered to take her in to the little gray stucco home that she shared with one of her seven children.

Her name was Angie Heiter. She was sixty-four, a year younger than Norma. She had brown hair and brown eyes and almost always wore green. Having lost her husband to cancer a few years prior, and laid him to rest beneath a tombstone that read “ETERNALLY PROLIFE,” she’d moved to Irving and taken a job answering phones at an Indian holding company. Church, though, was her lifeblood, a traditional Catholic church called Mater Dei where she taught rosary-making and headed pro-life activities. Heiter had just been named pro-life person of the year by the same Catholic organization that sent Norma monthly checks when, one Sunday in November 2012, volunteers drove Norma to her. Norma departed Smithville as abruptly as she’d arrived.