Writer’s note: Though I have done my best to use sensitive language, this post does contain mentions of suicide as well as the misgendering of a trans person. I took a page out of Bad Gays podcast’s book and never used Elizabeth Eden’s deadname while still keeping the pronouns used by her contemporaries in quotes unedited. I chose to do this as a way to acknowledge the politics of the era and the way that people Eden knew viewed her at the time.
In the insufferable heat of a late August afternoon, three young men walk into a bank. The noise of tellers clacking away at their keyboards and the shrill dialing of rotary phones sounds in the background as the men shuffle aimlessly around the room. They hold their heads down, whispering to each other, cutting their eyes at the other patrons. One of the men carries a large present—a white box, tied with a thin blue ribbon—under his arm. Another one holds a briefcase. They wipe the sweat off their brows as the tension in the room climbs. They steel themselves for the thirteen hours to come.
Dog Day Afternoon (1975) is based on a true story. It’s the first words you see when you click play, as if Sidney Lumet, the director, is worried that you will forget that fact once the film begins. It’s not a stretch. The premise begins simple enough. A bank heist in Gravesend. Gun-wielding robbers in dark suits. But the outrageous shenanigans the movie devolves into is foreshadowed only eight minutes in when the lead robber Sonny, played by Al Pacino, nearly drops the shotgun before the stick-up even begins.
The first half of the movie plays out like a comedy. They lose the youngest robber Stevie, played by Gary Springer, to cold feet. Pacino portrays an erratic, amateur criminal who’s more concerned with chatting on the phone and befriending the hostages than making it out with the money. He starts a fire in the waste paper basket; he argues with the head teller (Penelope Allen); he races back and forth across the sidewalk in front of the bank as the gathering crowd cheers. In response to one of the tellers asking when he’ll be finished with the botched heist, Pacino, in his heavy New York accent, delivers the iconic line, “Oh, girlie, please.”
The stand-off continues and the theatrics go on. But the film takes a turn when Sonny’s motivation is revealed: his wife Leon (Chris Sarandon) needs a sex change. She can’t afford it, and her mental health is deteriorating. Sonny robbed the bank to get her the money as a birthday present.
Dog Day Afternoon is a riot. It’s a sweaty, hilarious, heartfelt romp that exemplifies everything great and terrible about people. It had me giggling all throughout. It effectively balances the somber, emotional moments—and there are plenty—with humor and the inherent craziness of the story. The film was nominated for several awards including an Oscar for best original screenplay. People have said that every heist movie after it tried to be Dog Day Afternoon, but none of them could recreate the magic. Perhaps because, as they told us, Dog Day Afternoon is based on a true story.
John Stanley Wojtowicz was born in 1945 to an Italian-American mother and a Polish immigrant father. By all accounts, his childhood was normal and filled with afternoons playing baseball around the corner with other neighborhood boys (Berg, 2013). He followed the straight and narrow path to graduate high school, meet his future wife Carmen Bifocul, and join the army. He was promptly shipped off to Vietnam where he witnessed the horrors of war. While he was stationed at the Da Nang Air Force Base, there was an attack, and 90% of his fellow soldiers were killed. Teresa, his mother, would later say: “the service screwed him all up” (Berg, 2013).
Wojtowicz married Carmen Bifocul in 1967 upon his return from Vietnam, to the chagrin of his in-laws. They had two children together before splitting in 1969, the year of the Stonewall riot. Wojtowicz said, “That’s when the first man walked on the moon, Neil Armstrong, and then they had the Stonewall riots…and that’s what they call the birth of the gay movement, okay? So the gay movement happened at the same time that the guy walked on the moon and I walked on Carmen. So that logically follows that that’s where I would wind up” (Berg, 2013).
After joining a prominent queer rights organization, the Gay Activist Alliance, Wojtowicz took part in several protests under the name Little John Basso. One of which he staged a mock wedding—cake and all—with another man in the New York City Marriage License Bureau. At GAA, he “was known as a troublemaker with a high sex drive” and would occasionally “bring his toddler son to meetings” (Lemey, 2022).
Also around this time, he met the alleged motivation for his bank-robbing escapades: Elizabeth Eden. They were both attending St. Anthony’s Feast in Little Italy, and John was immediately head-over-heels: “and I feel for him because I’m one of those at-first-sight guys” (Lemey, 2022). They had a whirlwind romance and the wedding happened “within months” (Plummer, 2022). It was a Catholic ceremony, officiated by a priest, Eden in a wedding gown and Wojtowicz in his army uniform. “He was very proud of me,” said Eden (Berg, 2013).
Very little of Elizabeth Debbie Eden’s early life is documented, but we do know she was born on August 19th in Ozone Park, Queens. She was Jewish and Italian. Her friends would describe her as a “loudmouth” and that when she started cursing, “the paint would peel off the walls” (Berg, 2013). She was reportedly a great dancer with a lot of energy, and she was always the life of the party. She could often be seen carrying around her portable record player, ready to spin some Judy Garland (Berg, 2013).
Both Eden and Wojtowicz said they were madly in love. According to Eden, Wojtowicz was a romantic. He would bring her a dozen roses every week, and when Eden expressed how sad she was when the flowers died, Wojtowicz gifted her a dozen velvet roses to represent the undying nature of their love (Berg, 2013). But the marital bliss was short-lived. Eden’s mental health was suffering as she couldn’t afford the gender-affirming surgery she so desperately needed. Wojotwicz was not originally supportive of the idea, but when Eden was committed after an attempt to take her own life, he knew what he had to do.
“I loved him, and he kept trying to kill himself because he wasn’t happy being a man. I tried to get him the money for his birthday on the 19th [of August] and I didn’t have the money, so the next day he took an overdose and he died a clinical death, then they put him in the nuthouse on Monday. I saw him in the nuthouse on Monday, and then Tuesday I went to rob the bank” (Plummer, 2022).
The robbery itself played out surprisingly similarly to the one depicted in Dog Day Afternoon. Wojtowicz and two accomplices, Bobby Westenburg and Salvatore Naturile, spent that August afternoon driving around trying to find a suitable bank to rob (Dimuro, 2023). Instead of a white present with a blue bow, Wojtowicz’s shotgun was transported in a Wriggley’s Spearmint Gum box that was so heavy the wannabe heist men dropped it, causing the gun to fire and them to flee the scene. The trio also attended a screening of The Godfather that day, no doubt inspiring Wojtowicz to slip the teller a note that ended with “This is an offer you can’t refuse” (Dimuro, 2023).
Westenburg quickly fled. Wojtowicz and Naturile took eight hostages, and a police stand-off began. Like in the film, Wojtowicz did in fact order pizzas to share with the hostages and tossed money to the gathering crowd of which his ever-adoring mother was a part of (Dimuro, 2023). Other theatrics, though, didn’t make the cut like Wojtowicz frenching an old boyfriend of his in front of the bank and yelling at cops who called him homophobic slurs (Berg, 2013).
Hours into the event, the police got a hold of Elizabeth Eden. They drove her in from Belleview, the mental institution she resided in, to speak with Wojtowicz. Eden refused to see him face to face but was able to talk to him over the phone to try and convince him to surrender (Berg, 2013). She was unsuccessful.
Through negotiations, a van was eventually called to take Wojtowicz, Naturile, and the hostages to the airport. Upon arrival, the FBI stormed the van, killing Naturile and taking Wojtowicz into custody (Dimuro, 2023). At twenty-six years old, Salvatore Naturile was the only casualty that day.
While he was in the slammer, Wojtowicz was allowed to view Dog Day Afternoon, after which he gave himself the nickname “The Dog”, which he insisted on being called. He married for a third time an inmate named George Heath in a prison yard ceremony. And his mother “would smuggle him in sliced provolone in her bra” (Lemey, 2022). Wojtowicz served five years out of the twenty he was sentenced.
From the proceeds of the film, Elizabeth Eden was able to pay for her surgery, and she began living happily as a woman. However, she did sue Warner Bros. over their portraying her as a gay man instead of what she was: a transgender woman (Lemey, 2013). Wojtowicz and Carmen Bifocul jumped on the suing bandwagon too, as they were both unhappy with Bifocul being played as a nagging, unattractive wife who may-or-may-not have turned her husband gay. In any case, Eden, Wojtowicz, and Bifocul all made some money.
The story of Dog Day Afternoon could be a movie in itself, or perhaps a badly written episode of a daytime soap opera. Wojtowicz himself is a character right out of The Sopranos. In his cartoonishly New York accent he swears like a sailor, speaks candidly about his many sexual encounters, proudly points out his Italian heritage, calls himself “The Dog” and “The Man”, goes on tangents, and proclaims himself to be but a hopeless romantic who robbed Chase Manhattan Bank for one reason and one reason alone: love. To be frank, he reminds me of my extended family members. Most of them plus my father were born and raised in Brooklyn. When he speaks, I hear my grandfather, especially in interviews where an old, graying Wojtowicz announces to the interviewer all his numerous health problems, or when he loudly calls the audience an idiot as he answers a rhetorical question (Berg, 2013). It’s not hard to imagine him as an estranged uncle my family doesn’t talk about anymore.
Elizabeth Eden unfortunately passed away in 1987 from AIDS. She was only forty-one. After being released from prison, John Wojtowicz applied to work as a security guard at Chase Manhattan Bank, saying, “I’m the guy from Dog Day Afternoon, and if I’m guarding your bank, nobody’s going to rob the Dog’s bank” (Plummer). They turned him down. He lived to be sixty before passing away from cancer in 2006.
Wojtowicz was not perfect. He constantly misgenders Eden and uses her dead name. Even if he didn’t physically harm them, he traumatized those eight hostages and caused the death of his accomplice for $38,000 and some travelers checks, far less than he thought he would get. He’s certainly no hero. I find myself wanting to dislike him, in all his cockiness and delusions of grandeur. But I can’t. I can’t help but love him. I can’t help but root for him when I see footage of the robbery. But I root for Elizabeth most of all, who was an innocent party dragged into the throng when all she wanted was to live as herself.
That’s how audiences felt when they sat down in the theater on September twenty-first, 1975. Moviegoers cheered on the admitted homosexual “even as [Wojtowicz] threatened to shoot people. Even as he signed away his life insurance to make sure that if he died in jail, his girlfriend would still get her surgery” (Lemey, 2013). People who would have in any other case shunned a couple like John Wojtowicz and Elizabeth Eden connected to them, their story, and the magic of Dog Day Afternoon.
Madeline Johnson
Contributor to Project Invisible String
August 21, 2024
Works Cited
Berg, A. & Keraudren, F. (Directors). (2013). The Dog [Film]. Drafthouse Films.
Dimuro, G. (2023, November 29). John Wojtowicz and the Brooklyn Bank robbery that inspired the classic film “dog day afternoon.” All That’s Interesting. https://allthatsinteresting.com/john-wojtowicz.
Lemey, H. & Miller, B. (Hosts). (2024 Mar. 01). Bad Gays [Audio podcast]. Spotify. https://open.spotify.com/show/0NPrqSLJNdVV1cugFBfQ8a.
Plummer, T. K. (2022, October 11). John Wojtowicz and the bank robbery that inspired an Oscar nominated film. Avenue Magazine. https://avenuemagazine.com/dog-day-afternoon-real-story-john-wojtowicz/.
Comentarios