Lovers in a dangerous time

It’s a sultry summer evening on the Toronto set of Soldier’s Girl, and the film’s star, Troy Garity, is almost ready to talk about playing murdered soldier Barry Winchell. The keyword is almost. Garity has been a distant, looming presence throughout most of the shoot, accessible to his immediate colleagues, but wary of most everyone else, particularly anyone resembling a journalist.

Now, a month into the filming, it’s coincidentally three years to the day since Pfc. Barry Winchell’s death. In the predawn hours of July 5, 1999, inside the 101st Airborne infantry barracks at Fort Campbell, Ky., Winchell’s head was smashed to pieces against his pillow with a Louisville Slugger baseball bat while he slept. The force of the blows was such that bits of brain matter and bone fragments mixed with blood splattered against the wall behind him like a crimson halo.

Garity was powerfully affected by the story of Barry Winchell’s short life and brutal death. Inside his air-conditioned trailer, far from prying eyes, the actor almost apologizes for his reticence about being interviewed, conceding that the role is one of the hardest he’s essayed. He lost 15 pounds to play the part, not only working out with a trainer but also working on building a house. “I tried to do as much manual labor as I could,” he says; that included putting up drywall, digging holes, and smashing tile to bulk up.

Garity is very much his own man, and crew members have warned me to avoid bringing up his lineage to him at all costs. Production staffers feel the actor had fought long and hard to distance himself from qualifying titles: son of Jane Fonda and Tom Hayden, grandson of Henry, nephew of Peter, cousin of Bridget. Garity is his paternal grandmother’s maiden name, and it’s conceivable that a great number of viewers won’t make the Fonda connection at all when they see him on-screen as Winchell, a role he has been fighting his way into since shooting began.

“We’re four weeks into shooting, and I’m still finding out things about this guy,” Garity says thoughtfully. “Whenever I think I have it, I realize I don’t. I probably won’t have it until the movie is done and over and I see it and I’ll say, ‘Oh, fuck, that’s how I should have done it.’”

Winchell never regained consciousness after the beating, and he died at Vanderbilt University Medical Center the next day. His murderer, an emotionally disturbed 18-year-old near-alcoholic Army private named Calvin Glover, had been steadily provoked and manipulated into a drunken rage by Winchell’s roommate, Justin Fisher, who had taunted Glover over having lost a fight earlier that day to Winchell, “a faggot.” In the previous weeks, Winchell had been the object of mounting antigay harassment, taunts, and slurs because of his relationship with Calpernia Addams, a transgendered nightclub performer in nearby Nashville. While the explanations remain mostly speculative, the affair provoked Fisher to what appeared to be an obsessive, jealous fury. Although Winchell was murdered with a baseball bat, the real weapon appears to have been Calvin Glover, wielded by Justin Fisher.

The story captured headlines worldwide, as much for the unprecedented savagery of the attack as for the other elements: the increasingly desperate failure of the Army’s profoundly homophobic “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy, the prurient hint of forbidden sexual and romantic scandal, and the near-Shakespearean tragedy of the circumstances surrounding Winchell’s death. Here was a handsome, clean-cut, tough, stoic, all-American soldier in the classic mold—the sort the Army claims to venerate—murdered for no other reason than suspicion of homosexuality. Articles in Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair, and The New York TimesMagazine all asked the same question: Why?

Garity, although insightful, articulate, and politically precocious, has a professional armor that doesn’t crack until he’s asked at what point the intensity of his role struck him full force.

“There were two moments when it became overwhelming,” he says. “Through the process of reading the script so much and doing a lot of research, I began to endow [myself with] certain emotions from the script, namely paranoia and fragmentation”—to the point that he began imagining that members of the crew were talking about him behind his back. “This happened specifically during the week we spent filming Barry in the middle of the witch-hunt on the barracks,” he says.

“I feel disgusting saying that,” he adds furiously, “because it has nothing to do with the hell this kid went through.

“The second moment,” he continues, “was the day we filmed the murder scene.” His voice trails off, and he takes a deep breath and leans forward, eyes downcast. When he looks up, his eyes have grown moist. “They had to put the prosthetics on my head to match the injuries that this kid endured. And to think of the misery that this act of complete cowardice cost, and this poor kid’s family…”

His voice is now thick with tears. “I don’t know how to play it honestly because I didn’t know Barry and I don’t know his family. He didn’t tell anybody. Not once in these five months of torture he was going through did he complain. Not to anybody.” He pauses, brushing away the tears with the back of his hand. “My goal is to take his face down off the poster and make him a real person again.”

If the specific details of the last months of Barry Winchell’s life remain visible only as an incomplete mosaic of recollections by the various people who knew him, much of the question of “Why?” seems to be answered by Soldier’s Girl. The movie’s script is the fruit of a long fascination with Winchell’s life and death on the part of out screenwriter Ron Nyswaner (Philadelphia), who encountered the story in 2000 in one of the magazine articles detailing the murder and its aftermath.

“I called my agent on my cell phone and said, ‘I’ve discovered the story I was born to write, and you have to make sure I get the chance to write it,’ Nyswaner says. Initially without access to Addams or Winchell’s friends and family, Nyswaner did as much research as possible via magazines, newspapers, the Internet, and trial transcripts.

“It always takes two things to interest me in a drama,” Nyswaner muses, “and they have to be opposed to one another. There was Barry’s Midwestern decency and Calpernia’s articulate and somewhat ironic sense of herself.” Later, when he met Addams, Nyswaner adds, she told him, “I know my life has a somewhat Jerry Springer tone to it.” Says Nyswaner: “I thought, This is someone who has irony and a sense of humor, even though she was involved in this horrible tragedy. Those two things coming together interested me.’”