The Crazy Love of Burt Pugach and Linda Riss

This is a show biz blog and Burt Pugach (1927-2020) had a modest footprint in show business. He was invested in New York nightclubs, and he produced the crime drama Death Over My Shoulder (1958) with Keefe Braselle, Bonar Colleano, and Jill Adams.

But history will always remember him for something else, a memory amplified by the 2007 documentary Crazy Love, co-directed by Dan Klores and Fisher Stevens. I’ve watched this movie twice, and surely will many more times, for it’s a powerful story, well told. I’m somewhat shocked it hasn’t been dramatized yet, but it’s only a matter of time. Pugach was a New York City lawyer, a kind of pioneering ambulance chaser who rapidly made a fortune by literally handing his business card to accident victims. The prototype for Saul Goodman and all those guys from the subway ads and tv commercials. He was also a notable schlemiel, who bore a marked resemblance to Arnold Stang.

In 1959 he began dating 21 year old Linda Riss (1937-2013), a knock-out from the East Bronx. She was a “good girl” of the type who didn’t put out until marriage, and surely she only consented to spend time with Pugach because he spent a lot of dough on her, brought her to fancy night clubs, and so forth. When she learned that he already had a wife and child, however, she dumped him, and he went berserk. It’s easy to see why any straight man would become obsessed with the gorgeous and glamorous Riss, not just when she was 21, but throughout her life. But as many women have learned to their cost, obsession is not love. And Pugach was unhinged. In old clips and photos of the period, I get a vague hipster/beatnik vibe from Pugach, and can’t help wondering if his underworld/show biz involvement gave him access to pot and speed, because he wasn’t right in the head. Vowing revenge, he hired a couple of thugs to go to Riss’s house and…throw lye in her face. The lye you get in soap is mild, but in its pure form it’s caustic and just as dangerous as its chemical opposite, acid. So it badly disfigured Riss’s face and made her partially (eventually totally) blind.

Having previously threatened Riss, Pugach was easy to nab as the perpetrator. He did 14 years in prison and was disbarred. And that would have been a dramatic story, in and of itself. In fact, I’m pretty sure that it was the inspiration for Edith Massey throwing acid in Divine’s face in John Waters’Female Trouble (1974). Most true crime tales are no more exotic than that, and many lack the spicy show biz angle. But there’s a twist that makes it still more fascinating.

For Pugach never stopped being obsessed with Riss. He wrote letters to her through his incarceration. When he got out of prison in 1974 he looked her up. And then…she took him back and they got married.

It’s one of the ultimate tales of a woman loving her abuser. As the film relates, her love life had suffered as a result of her disfigurement. She got close to marriage with another man at one point, but it didn’t pan out. In the film she helps spin the narrative that it’s a great love story, that Pugach is an attentive husband, that he takes good care of her. The two even cowrote a book in 1976, entitled A Very Different Love Story. But it was also a lye story…and a lie. The attack might have killed her. And, later, in 1997, Pugach showed his true colors by cheating on Linda, and threatening THAT woman. In the film, he weaves a sob story about abuse and privation in his own childhood, and that may have well been the case, but he was clearly not a man for women to be involved with, but something more along the lines of a psychopath.

Judge for yourself! Crazy Love is available to stream from multiple sources. At present, it’s available for free (with ads) on Youtube.