The intruder slipped into the D Magazine office unnoticed. After-work drinks were an evening ritual in 1976, and most of the staff had already split for the gin mill of the moment. Managing editor Gay Yellen and the art director, however, were still in the layout room, nailing down art for the next issue’s cover. Yellen felt a presence, and when she looked up, she saw a trembling man standing inside the doorway aiming a handgun in their direction. “He looked more scared than anything,” she says. The man was in his 20s, with shaggy, unkempt hair, wearing jeans and a jean jacket over a t-shirt. “He looked ragged. Pitiful. Of course, I don’t know if you’ve ever had a gun pointed at you, but it’s scary as hell.”
Jesus Christ, as the man claimed to be, said he needed to get his story out, but the staff at the radio station down the street had turned him away. “I thought, I’ve got to keep this guy talking,” Yellen says. “So I said, ‘Why don’t you tell us your story, and we’ll see if we can use it in the magazine?’ ” The minutes ticked by as the man held her and the art director at gunpoint, spouting disturbing antisemitic delusions, until the magazine’s business manager happened upon the scene on his way out the door. “Is everything OK?” he asked, walking up behind the gunman, seeing only his colleagues’ terrified faces. Yellen steadied her voice as she explained the young man’s intent and suggested the manager call their boss for help getting his story out.
Police arrived within minutes, and the self-proclaimed savior was hauled away. “I start shaking just talking about it,” Yellen says, recounting the incident from her home in a Houston high-rise. She has no idea what came of the troubled figure, but decades later, the frightening moment informed the opening scene she wrote for the third book in her Samantha Newman romance mystery series, which includes The Body Business, The Body Next Door, and The Body in the News. (Although in Yellen’s make-believe scene, the leading lady tackles the gunman to the ground.)
Yellen made her first foray into fiction not long after leaving D Magazine, in 1977, when she collaborated with a terrorism expert to pen a sprawling novel that followed Carlos the Jackal, who was (in real life) one of the most wanted men in the world. The book, Five Minutes to Midnight, was a hit and went through five printings in hard copy and another five in paperback.
“He looked ragged. Pitiful. Of course, I don’t know if you’ve ever had a gun pointed at you, but it’s scary as hell.”
Yet, Yellen never set out to be a writer at all. After college, she moved to Los Angeles to pursue acting. “The sexual environment out there was murder,” she says. “I couldn’t hack it. My personality just didn’t meld with the men who pinched and touched in an interview to see how you’d react.”
She ended up working as a production assistant at the American Film Institute and took odd jobs to supplement her meager income. Through friends, a freelance offer from Tennis Illustrated magazine came her way that would launch her onto a new career path and, incidentally, led to a memorable encounter with a notable Dallasite.
On her first writing assignment, she was sent to cover the opening of a tennis resort in Lake Tahoe. As the puddle jumper took off, an older gentleman in the seat next to her began talking about his ranch in Africa. “From all my Hollywood experience, I thought, I know a guy trying to pick me up when I see him,” Yellen says. She buried her nose in a book. But soon the plane bobbled in the air as it flew into a storm. The pilot was forced to land in Reno, and, since it was late in the evening, Yellen had no way to get in touch with the magazine nor her contact at the resort. Her seatmate made her an offer. He happened to own a hotel in the area, and he said he would be happy to provide her with dinner and a room; then the next day his driver would deliver her to the resort. She nervously accepted, having no other option.
Yellen put on a frigid front during their steak dinner, worried that the gentleman might expect something in return for his kindness. She braced herself as he walked her to a room that night. But as she turned the key, the man simply confirmed his driver’s details and wished her luck. “He had been a perfect gentleman,” Yellen says. “I will never forget that man.”
Yellen’s “knight in shining armor” was none other than Carroll Shelby, creator of the Shelby Mustang. The Woodrow Wilson High School graduate was recently played by Matt Damon in Ford v Ferrari.
This story originally appeared in the October issue of D Magazine with the headline “Deadly Business.” Write to holland@dmagazine.com.
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