Of Whom the Bell Told

Even if works of the imagination could talk, they could never testify. Being fictional, how could they swear to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but? Nonetheless, a number of angry plaintiffs in recent years have brought libel suits charging that they were represented, and misrepresented, by fictional characters in stories, novels and films. The latest such suit, against the film version of Sylvia Plath's novel The Bell Jar, ended last week with a court-endorsed settlement that sent a cautionary and somewhat paradoxical message: when you make things up, be sure to tell the truth.

Dr. Jane V. Anderson, who teaches psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, * contended that she was the model for Joan Gilling, a central character in both the book and the movie. Claiming that the film defamed and humiliated her by presenting Gilling as a suicidal lesbian, she brought suit in a Boston federal court. The 14 individual and corporate defendants included Plath's widower, the British poet laureate Ted Hughes, who sold the movie rights of her novel for $60,000, as well as the filmmakers and two television companies that showed the movie, CBS and Time Inc.'s Home Box Office.

Anderson fell short of her stated goals -- $6 million in damages and a ban on further showings of the film -- but she won from the defendants an admission that the movie had "unintentionally defamed" her. All new copies, including new videocassettes, must now carry prominent disclaimers labeling the story as fiction. She was also awarded $150,000, a sum that will just about cover her current legal expenses. Said her attorney, Harry L. Manion III: "We've won a permanent record for all the world to see."

Before the settlement ended the trial just prior to her cross-examination, Anderson was an impressive witness in her own behalf, vehemently denying she had ever been a lesbian. "I never, never in any way attempted to seduce Sylvia Plath into a homosexual relationship," she told the court in unwavering tones. Referring to other details in the film, she added, "I also never made any suicide attempts or had scars on my breast. And certainly I never hung myself." Precisely, said defense lawyers, because the character is fictional. "Joan Gilling commits suicide, in the book and the movie, and yet Jane Anderson is here in court," Attorney Alexander H. Pratt Jr. pointed out to the jury in his opening statement. "Obviously the character was fictitious."

The law has no well-developed standard for judging the culpability of fiction; libel rulings have been concerned mostly with news reports. Real people have served as models for fictional characters, from Proust's Baron Charlus to Bellow's Humboldt. An author's weave of truth and invention is difficult to unravel, and never more so than in a semiautobiographical work like The Bell Jar, which was first published in Britain in 1963, just a month before Plath committed suicide. The story of a young woman's descent into madness spoke to the rising women's movement as well as the romantic instincts of the college generation, and when the novel appeared in the U.S. eight years later, Plath became a cult figure.

. Anderson says she quickly recognized herself when she read the book in 1971. She and Plath were longtime acquaintances. They both grew up in Wellesley, Mass.; both went on to Smith College, where at different times they even dated the same man. Both were mental patients during the same five months at McLean Hospital near Boston. Anderson's suit was prompted not by the book but by a scene in the movie that was invented by the filmmakers. It shows a suicidal Gilling making advances to Esther Greenwood, the fictional Plath. On the stand, Anderson said she found the seduction attempt "sickening beyond words and extremely objectionable."

The fact that her suit even came to trial, much less that it resulted in a semi-success, disturbed many writers and First Amendment experts. "The idea that the more you fictionalize, the more you falsify, the more liable you become is quite intolerable," argues Harvard Law Professor Laurence Tribe. Even though the settlement creates no binding precedent, any Anderson victory, says Novelist Gilbert Sorrentino (Mulligan Stew), is "bad news for writers of fiction. It will open the floodgates for more cases like this."

Libel plaintiff lawyers like Attorney Gerry Spence counter that the victims of a writer's vendetta or recklessness are entitled to recompense. "We must be free to fictionalize, but we can't hurt people with the exercise of our freedom," says Spence. Six years ago he represented a former Miss Wyoming, Kimerli Pring, in a suit against Penthouse, which ran a tale about the sexual feats of a fictional Miss Wyoming. Though an appeals court threw out the lower-court award of $12.5 million, the case sent a shiver through publishers. Another shudder had come with a 1979 decision on the novel Touching. A California psychologist who ran nude therapy groups convinced a jury that he was the basis for an unflattering portrait in the book and won $75,000 in damages from Author Gwen Davis and her publisher, Doubleday, which turned around and sued the author to retrieve its losses.

As a result of cases like these, there has been a heavy vetting of manuscripts by the legal departments of major publishers. Because first novels, which The Bell Jar was, are so often disguised autobiography, they get special attention. Says a New York publishing-house lawyer: "If a 23-year-old Columbia graduate comes in with a first novelabout a 22-year-old Columbia student, alarms go off around here." Hmmm. The ironies and twists of the Bell Jar case would make great material for a young writer. On second thought, maybe not.