What do Taxi Driver, The Warriors and Klute all have in common? While each are classics of 1970s cinema, they all present the Big Apple as a suffocating urban jungle, where something close to Thomas Hobbes’ famous “State of Nature” prevailed. Danger was omnipresent, with the city a paranoid morass of the human fight for survival.
It’s a common theme in modern history that struggle often breeds great art. While The Weimar Republic is often talked about as the ultimate example of this, New York City in the 1970s was arguably much more successful on the artistic front. From film and visual art to music, there was something about its environment that caused people to create works that continue to inspire to this day.
One of the most successful bands to come out of New York City during the decade were New Wave heroes, Blondie, a staple of the CBGB scene, who pioneeringly blended punk with funk, disco and other distinct elements. By the time their self-titled debut arrived in 1976, they had long since ingratiated themselves into the city’s scene.
Furthermore, bleached-haired frontwoman Debbie Harry was 31 at the time, and the oldest in the group by some way. Her life before the group had been a fascinating one, with her bringing a more grounded, mature presence to them because of it.
She was also deeply aware of just how dangerous the city could be. When speaking to a newspaper in 1989, she recalled the story of how in her pre-Blondie days in the early 1970s, she was nearly abducted by who she claimed was the infamous serial killer, Ted Bundy.
One night after going out in high heels, which killed her feet, no cabs were free, so she felt compelled to thumb down a car on Avenue C in the East Village.
“This was back in the early ’70s,” she said. “I wasn’t even in a band then … I was trying to get across town to an after-hours club. A little white car pulls up, and the guy offers me a ride. So I just continued to try to flag a cab down. But he was very persistent, and he asked where I was going. It was only a couple of blocks away, and he said, ‘Well I’ll give you a ride.’”
She continued: “I got in the car, and it was summertime and the windows were all rolled up except about an inch and a half at the top. So I was sitting there and he wasn’t really talking to me. Automatically, I sort of reached to roll down the window and I realised there was no door handle, no window crank, no nothing. The inside of the car was totally stripped out.”
Things could not be much worse, and Harry realised that there was also a hole where the radio and glove compartment should be. Terrifically though, she threw her arm out of the window and managed to open the door from outside. “As soon as he saw that, he tried to turn the corner really fast, and I spun out of the car and landed in the middle of the street.”
They had only made it two blocks along, but Harry was free, certain that she’d escaped a harrowing end. It was only a couple of years later that she realised it could well have been the infamous Ted Bundy who tried to abduct her.
“It was right after his execution that I read about him,” she recalled. “I hadn’t thought about that incident in years. The whole description of how he operated and what he looked like and the kind of car he drove and the time frame he was doing that in that area of the country fit exactly. I said, ‘My God, it was him.’”
Eventually, the story was eventually debunked by Harry herself, with her claiming that the car she flagged down did not match the infamous description of Bundy’s Volkswagen. Furthermore, he isn’t known to have operated in New York. That’s a terrifying point, though. It means there was another serial killer on the loose. It makes slices of fiction such as Taxi Driver feel all the more real.
