A real-life tale of beauty and the beast

NEW YORK — She was 22, a sheltered, dark-haired Bronx beauty said to look like Elizabeth Taylor.

He was a decade older, a suave lawyer who courted her with flowers, rides in his powder-blue Cadillac and trips to glittering Manhattan nightclubs. He was married, although not to her.

Before long, tiring of his unfulfilled promises to divorce his wife, she ended their affair. He hired three men, who threw lye in her face, blinding her, and went to prison for more than a decade.

Afterward, she married him.

Linda Riss Pugach, whose blinding by her lover, Burton N. Pugach, in 1959, became a media sensation, and whose marriage to Pugach, in 1974, became an equally sensational sequel, died Tuesday at 75.

The cause was heart failure, said Burton Pugach, her husband of more than 38 years and her only immediate survivor.

In 1974, The New York Times called the attack on Riss “one of the most celebrated crimes of passion in New York history.” In the years since, the strange romance of Burton and Linda Pugach (pronounced POOHgash) has seldom been far from public view.

A book about the couple, A Very Different Love Story, by Berry Stainback, was published in 1976. More recently, the Pugaches were the subject of a widely seen documentary, Crazy Love.

Part cautionary tale, part psychological study, part riveting disaster narrative, the film was released in 2007 to favourable, if somewhat astonished, notices.

In the decades after their marriage, the Pugaches seemed hungry for limelight. Although reporters who visited their home wrote often of their unremitting bickering, the couple just as often appeared in the newspapers or on television to declare their mutual devotion.

They received renewed attention in 1997, when Burton Pugach went on trial on charges that he had sexually abused a woman and threatened to kill her.

At the trial, at which Pugach represented himself, Linda Pugach testified on his behalf, telling him in open court, “You’re a wonderful, caring husband.”

The alleged victim in the case was Pugach’s mistress of five years.

He was convicted of only a single count — harassment in the second degree — of the 11 with which he was charged, and he was sentenced to 15 days in jail.

“We loved each other more than any other couple could have,” Burton Pugach, intermittently weeping, said of his wife in a discursive telephone interview Wednesday.

He added, “Ours was a storybook romance.”

But to judge from the news accounts then and now, the story in question was Beauty and the Beast. Or, more precisely, it was that story’s unseen second act — the one in which the title union has degenerated into long, grinding yet strangely indissoluble banality.

Linda Eleanor Riss was born in the Bronx on Feb. 23, 1937. Her parents divorced when she was very young, and she was reared by her mother, grandmother and an aunt.

She graduated from James Monroe High School in the Bronx; when she met Burton Pugach, who specialized in negligence law, she was working as a secretary at an airconditioner dealership.

After breaking off her affair with Pugach, Riss became engaged to another man.

The attack, in June 1959, scarred her face and left her almost completely blind; over time, she lost what sight remained. To the end of her life, her face was framed by large dark glasses.

After the attack, Burton Pugach appeared determined to continue their relationship. He telephoned her to suggest that they reconcile and later wrote her a torrent of letters from prison.

“At one point,” The Times reported in 1959, “he was said to have promised, ‘I’ll get you a Seeing Eye dog for Christmas.’ ”

Wednesday, Burton Pugach, 85, denied having ordered the use of lye.

“I asked one guy to find someone who would beat her up, to try and get her back,” he said.

Testifying at Pugach’s trial in May 1961, Riss said he had told her, “If I can’t have you, no one else will, and when I get finished with you, no one else will want you.”

There were ultimately two trials connected with the attack, and even by the standards of high-profile proceedings, they were spectacular. Burton Pugach was declared insane three separate times, only to have the decisions reversed at his behest.

On another occasion, about to start the day’s proceedings, Burton Pugach removed a lens from his eyeglasses and slashed his wrists, crying: “Linda, I need you. Linda, I love you. Linda, I want you.”

The wounds were not serious, and the trial continued.

Convicted in July 1961 for his role in the attack, Pugach was eventually sentenced to 15 to 30 years in state prison.

The case was ultimately appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court on the grounds that wiretap evidence against Pugach had been obtained illegally; the court ruled against him, 7-2.

Pugach was paroled from the Attica Correctional Facility in March 1974, after serving 14 years for his role in the attack and for an earlier conviction on related charges.

In November, after Pugach had gone on television several times to propose to Riss, they were married.