Read All About Lolita!

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

The 10-minute ride from Amy Fisher's waterfront Long Island home to the academically elite John F. Kennedy High School, where she is in her final year, is a montage of Middle American normality: flags fluttering over front porches, hand-painted signs tacked to trees announcing weekend garage sales, white-haired elders watering lawns, teenage boys working on cars. But somehow, as Fisher traveled that brief and reassuring stretch of terrain day after day, her life took the sort of detour that is every parent's nightmare. She is accused of becoming a prostitute by age 15, meeting customers through an escort service and sustaining contact via a beeper that she showed off in the high school girls' room. Far worse, she is charged with falling in love with an alleged client, a 38-year-old auto-body-shop owner, and shooting his wife in the head. Fisher insists she is an innocent 17-year-old who wants only to attend her graduation on June 28. Indictment for attempted murder and bail of $2 million are barring her way.

If the sad charges against her are true -- and even her attorney does not seem to dispute her career as a pubescent prostitute -- Fisher's sordid story still would seem to have little to reveal about the norms of her community. Her town of Merrick is a place where success is equated with discipline, exemplified in the manicured lawns and shrubbery of Berkley Lane, where she grew up, and with drive and ambition, epitomized in the way the high school carries grade-point averages out to four decimal places for precision in class rank. This is where the American Dream still works, where crime is something glimpsed on a newscast, where the next generation prompts hope and not despair. Neither neighbors nor teachers nor her perhaps more candid peers see the girl's fall from grace as typical. To her fellow townspeople, Amy Fisher's life offers no moral alert, no cautionary lessons. She is just a postcard from beyond the edge.

None of this doubt about larger meaning has deterred the press by a nanosecond. The story had elements to push almost anyone's emotional buttons. The Oedipal tinge of an affair between an adolescent and a man old enough to be her father. The Fatal Attraction echoes of a woman who supposedly would stop at nothing to possess the man she craved. The perennial conundrum of how a daughter from a nice and prosperous family might have gone so thoroughly wrong. New York City's three tabloid newspapers have covered the "Long Island Lolita" story with a thoroughness and imagination that they rarely bring to stories about the city's politics or its $29 billion budget. One Daily News photographer was staked out full time as close as he could get to the house of Fisher's alleged lover. His hope: that the victimized wife, home from the hospital, would come out onto the deck for a moment of sunshine -- and an unintended photo opportunity.

Back at the city desk, headline writers have outdone themselves. A story about the unverified claim of a Long Island chef that he was recruited by Fisher to commit the murder, only to renege once he had been serviced by her, was billed by the News as paid me in sex. The rival Post topped that for titillation, peddling the same story as amy's horny hit man.

Tabloid TV programs have been bawdier -- and scrappier. After A Current Affair ballyhooed upcoming videotape of a call girl plying her trade with a bare-bottomed customer, said to be Fisher and a john, the competing Hard Copy aired a smidgen of the scene half an hour sooner, allegedly swiping it off a satellite feed. This prompted a lively melee over journalistic ethics in two corners not normally thought to possess many.

The invasion of their middle-class retreat has horrified Fisher's neighbors and those of her alleged victim, Mary Jo Buttafuoco. The throng of reporters has turned life near both houses into a kind of theater. At the Fisher home on a quiet dead end and at the Stitch N Sew fabric store owned by Amy's parents a few minutes' drive away, doors are shut, blinds are drawn, the symbolic drawbridge is up, and the castle is meant to seem inviolable. At the Buttafuoco home, the style is defiance. A steady stream of traffic, automotive and human, proclaims this a happy house where nothing has gone wrong. On the door is a wreath entwined with pink ribbon and dotted with pink and white flowers. At the high school the official posture is no comment, frequently laced with off-the-record worry that the headlines will somehow cheapen the whole place. Last week a mother snarled at a reporter, "There's more than one student in the school. You should have been here last night for the honors convocation." Then she slammed her car door and drove away.

The irony for Amy Fisher's schoolmates and neighbors, as they feel themselves victims of media marauders, is that many have surely been avid consumers of the tabloid journalism they are now deploring. Then, of course, the subjects of the story were safely distant, and embarrassed friends and associates not even thought of. In those easier times, this sort of story seemed to them juicy. They are learning that the juices in such stories are most often squeezed out of other people's lives.

With reporting by Andrea Sachs/Merrick