Tabloid: The Honey Blonde and the 'Manacled Mormon'

Joyce McKinney, a North Carolina honey blonde with the gift of gab, loved Kirk Anderson. He may have liked her as well, but he left her to serve as a Mormon missionary. That might have been the end of it, except that Joyce had steely determination to match her brains (a self-proclaimed 168 IQ) and beauty (she won a pageant with the improbable name of "Miss Wyoming — World"). Accompanied by her friend Keith "KJ" May, Joyce tracked Kirk to London, spirited him off to a cottage in Devon, strapped him spread-eagled to the bed and had her way with him. She says it was his way too, but after three days he slipped off to phone the police, asserting she had kidnapped and raped him. When Joyce was arrested, and the particulars of her story and Kirk's religion became known, the British tabloids erupted in a yellow-journalism Mor-gasm: "The Case of the Manacled Mormon," the headlines giggled and brayed. "The Mormon Sex-in-Chains Case."

This was in 1977-78, long before News of the World reporters discovered how to steal the phone messages of a dead 13-year-old girl. But McKinney didn't need hacking. She was a tabloid dream, a gal who glowed in tawdry limelight. As the London police put her in a paddy wagon, she scrawled a "Help me!" note to place against the rear window. Before being incarcerated, she says, she had written two letters, to her parents and the press, and "I hate to sound gross, but I put one in my vagina and one in my rectum." She gave exclusive interviews to the Daily Express, while decrying the nude photos of her that the Daily Mirror published. (She knew the pictures were doctored because her voluptuous bosom was shown as "flat-chested. Those were fried eggs.") She says her celebrity brought her fan mail from men who pleaded, "Please come and kidnap and rape me." To newsmen and judges, she kept on chatting. "I said to my lawyer, 'If you can't talk, would you let me, 'cause I can sure talk,'" she says today. "Thank God for all those years of drama school!"

And all these years later, McKinney talked, nonstop, to director Errol Morris. She's front and center in the Oscar-winning documentarian's Tabloid, which, after his sober docs about the Holocaust (Mr. Death), Vietnam (The Fog of War) and Abu Ghraib (Standard Operating Procedure), plays like a vacation at a seedy seaside resort. The issue at hand — whether McKinney engaged in criminal behavior with Anderson — is of little moment; what's important is the personality of the lady in question. "I'm not a movie star," she says, speaking into Morris's "Interrotron" (a camera-mirror device that allows the interview subject to look at Morris off-screen while seeming to talk directly into the camera). "I'm just a person, a human being that was caught in extraordinary circumstances." Yet she is the star of this movie — a natural performer, overweight but charismatic, a drawling, enthralling Southern belle (perhaps slightly cracked) who is ready for Morris's film-long medium-closeup.

She instantly seizes attention as she recalls her early idyll with Anderson and his sudden transformation into a righteous Mormon: "Kirk No. 1 was the man I fell in love with, and Kirk No. 2 was Cult Kurt." She claims that the Devon hideaway she spirited him away to was "kind of a honeymoon cottage" where she nonetheless intended to keep having sex with him until she missed her period, thereby certifying pregnancy. At first, she says, "He was sexually impotent because of this brainwashing...The Mormons were in my bedroom." But the Kirk No. 1 somehow rematerialized, and McKinney turns teary when she describes their three days of possibly consensual lovemaking as "the melding of two souls." As to the charge of raping a man, she smiles and says, "I think that's like puttin' a marshmallow in a parking meter."