At the time, the people of Midland had no way of knowing that they were actors in a larger drama about the national Zeitgeist–America in 1987 was coming out of the cold war and entering a confessional age that transforms domestic traumas into popular obsessions. Wisely, Jessica’s parents chose to keep their daughter away from the spotlight and to allow her to grow up as a normal little girl. Now in sixth grade at a private school, she gets A’s and B’s, likes country music, is sweet on a boy and plays with her three cats and two kittens. The adults around her, however, were swept up in a whirlwind that they recall today with bewilderment and shame.
Jessica McClure was almost 1 1/2 when she fell down an eight-inch-wide well in her aunt’s backyard. Her mother had gone inside–just for a moment–to answer the phone. For 58 hours, nearly 100 rescue workers labored to get her out, drilling a shaft 29 feet down and 5 feet across. Diamond-tipped drill bits snapped on the bedrock; the progress was slowed when the drillers, exhausted, broke down and sobbed because they could hear the little girl, still alive, singing nursery rhymes and crying for her mother. While she was being pulled free, inch by inch, by a paramedic using K-Y lubricating jelly, 3.1 million people were watching live on CNN–at the time, the largest audience ever to watch the cable news service. (According to polls by the Pew Charitable Trust, Jessica’s rescue is the only news event about an individual that has rivaled Princess Diana’s death in public interest.) ““Everybody in America became godfathers and godmothers of Jessica while this was going on,’’ President Reagan told her parents, Cissy and Chip McClure, over the phone. She was invited to throw out the first pitch for the Texas Rangers and serve as Grand Marshal for the National Independence Day Parade.
The euphoria began to wear off shortly after the Hollywood producers arrived in town. They offered people involved in the rescue thousands of dollars for permission to tell their story. A committee of rescuers formed to entertain their bids. Then a second committee of different rescuers formed to hear other proposals. Each insisted that they were trying to tell the true story and accused the other of being greedy.
Then the rumors started up about Jessica’s parents. Cissy, it was whispered, was getting uppity, refusing to wait in line at Denny’s because, she announced, ““I’m Jessica’s mother.’’ Chip and Cissy had supposedly bought a Mercedes and a Rolls-Royce with the donations that had poured in. (Actually, they bought a Thunderbird and a new pickup truck–and set up a lucrative trust for Jessica; it’s now reportedly worth about $700,000.) Married at 16, the pair might have split anyway, but their divorce was messy.
Fame also addled two of the most prominent rescuers. During the rescue, Andy Glasscock, now a police sergeant, spent nearly three days lying on the ground by the well, trying to keep up Jessica’s spirits with gentle chatter. (““What does a kitty do?’’ he asked. ““Meow,’’ came the distant whimper.) Soon he was jetting to Hollywood and neglecting his own family. He thanks his wife for forcing him into marriage counseling–and saving him from the fate of his co-worker Robert O’Donnell.
Prone to claustrophobia, O’Donnell was not the most obvious choice to take on the task of extricating Baby Jessica from the pipe where she was stuck, 22 feet below the ground. But he was tall and thin, the right shape for wedging into the rocky tunnel drilled into the well just below her resting place. O’Donnell later compared the experience to lying in a grave. When, spent in every way, he finally surfaced from the hole that October evening, he heard church bells ringing all over town. He was soon asked to appear on ““Oprah’’ and judge the G.I. Joe American Heroes contest. He became intoxicated with fame. Could People magazine, he asked, help him with his autobiography? Then the migraine headaches began coming every day. He began popping pills. His wife kicked him out, and he lost his job when he began passing out from heavy doses of sedatives. Living alone at his mother’s, he would read his scrapbook, inscribed by his mother-in-law with the words MY HERO, and hurl it angrily across the room. ““This is what ruined my life,’’ he swore. ““I never want to see it again.’’ When terrorists blew up the federal building in Oklahoma City in 1995, he longed to go help in the rescue–but, jobless, he didn’t have bus fare. He shot himself a few days later.
Jessica’s mother still has nightmares. She hears the drills pounding and her daughter’s cries, and she wakes up in a cold sweat. Jessica, however, seems quite happy; she lives with her mother, who has remarried, and she visits her dad on the weekends. As a little girl, she would cry out ““No!’’ and ““Don’t!’’ in her sleep, and she will always have a spidery scar on her forehead from skin grafts, and the trace of a limp from losing a little toe. But she says she has no actual memory of falling down the well or being rescued. Asked by a visiting reporter from the Ladies’ Home Journal recently whether she wanted to look at clippings about her accident, she wrinkled her nose and replied, ““Nah.’’ Neighbors say she appears quite normal.
That is consolation to retired fire chief James Roberts, who helped supervise the rescue. ““I’m ashamed of the way we all acted,’’ he told NEWSWEEK last week. ““But you know, for all the talk, all the problems, we have a healthy little 11-year-old girl running around here, and there isn’t anyone who can take that away from us.''
