The heat-softened plastic flowers, the withering balloons and the sightless stares of the teddy bears made me lose my appetite and feel faint. Who had placed these tokens there? Certainly not anyone who really knew the Kennedys or Bessettes. These offerings had been left by persons who wished to be connected to this event, who felt elevated by presuming this closeness to a famous family.

When did the misappropriation of mourning begin? Grieving was once a dignified condition—with privacy respected, seclusion secured. If I wrack my now tragedy-strained brain, I think the truly massive funerary gifts from strangers began in shrink-wrapped earnest with the death of Princess Di. I recall a telescopic long shot: acres of cellophane-wrapped bouquets, spread, rotting on the ground, then, later, the tales of mourners wading into her memorial pool, clogged with more “offerings.”

On the home front, I can conjure another disturbing, precedent-setting scene: the death site of Susan Smith’s two little sons, the ramp into John D. Long Lake in Union County, S.C., where Ms. Smith drowned her toddlers in their car seats. I was stunned to see the greeting cards and teddy bears piling up on this death pier. Television news showed these “mourners”—parents whose outrage had led them first to a Toys “R” Us, and then to the dock. What did this accomplish for two small boys who died? Was this a contemporary and egalitarian update of the ancient Egyptian belief that possessions might accompany the dead pharaohs? Could the purple plush Barney travel into eternity with Ms. Smith’s sons, acting as a stuffed sentinel into the afterlife?

In a moment on live TV, a man who had driven some distance was shown, yanking his own child to the death scene. I wondered if this wasn’t more severe a lapse of taste than ordinary rubbernecking? Why would someone go out of his or her way to pay such “tribute?” Did they wake up and say, “Hey, let’s go to that ramp where the mother rolled the car with her children into the water?” I had the thought—perhaps unfair—that the father had some dark impulses of his own, and he was expunging these urges through sanctimonious voyeurism. I could not regard this man as much “better” than Ms. Smith, who had at first sniffled on national TV to “find whoever took my children and bring ’em back.” She uttered the usual tearful pleas with a tinny insincerity that matched the cheap toys laid to rest on the dock.

The only innocents in the Susan Smith drama were the dead boys. The mourners—save those who really knew the children—struck me as emotional accomplices after the fact. Who, after all, sees the news and thinks, “Now I must run out and buy teddy bears to place at the spot?”

Yet these forensic “presents,” teddy-bear and floral placements, are now commonplace. The line between personal and public has been erased, as a talk-show audience nation has pre-empted the lives and deaths of anyone in the media for whatever reason. The grisly pleasure taken in this behavior is barely disguised. When the now-famous runaway bride Jennifer Wilbanks turned up alive in Georgia instead of in the predicted culvert, the townspeople seemed outraged: The public displays of mourning had already begun, and there was a community rehearsing for her funeral. Her fiancé had the grace to welcome her home, but most of the town looked enraged. Not, I might venture, at the wasted expense of searching for her corpse, but at the disappointment in not having a corpse for a final vigil. The accustomed rhythm—search, ribbons, corpse, teddy bears—had been disrupted.

In the past few days, I was also troubled by a radio interview with a woman who was commenting on the death of a high-school hero in Iraq. She was busy manufacturing yellow ribbons. She was so busy with those ribbons that the true loss of a young life seemed a loose end. The industry of ribboning had wrapped up the grief process and tied the final bow of justification on the war that killed the boy.

In contrast, Cindy Sheehan, the “Peace Mom” who refuses to accept Presidential platitudes, is demonstrating an earned, and genuine, way to mourn—and also to channel her inconsolable loss into a meaningful action against the forces that killed her son. She is the personification of true feeling, as opposed to sentimentality.

Now, as mass tragedy engulfs us on several fronts, the magnitude may wash away much of the falseness that has taken over as a national habit. In New Orleans, death became mundane: “Turn left at the corpse.” Perhaps this pragmatism more accurately depicts the state of involvement of most strangers on the scene. In a sunken mass grave, there is no way to float kitsch.

With so many to mourn, it may be time to return to appropriate response, and acknowledge that flowers, poems and gifts are the province of the bereaved. In our accelerating new Dark Age, while we grieve for so many lives lost, we may also mourn grief itself.

When did the misappropriation of mourning begin? Grieving was once a dignified condition—with privacy respected, seclusion secured. If I wrack my now tragedy-strained brain, I think the truly massive funerary gifts from strangers began in shrink-wrapped earnest with the death of Princess Di. I recall a telescopic long shot: acres of cellophane-wrapped bouquets, spread, rotting on the ground, then, later, the tales of mourners wading into her memorial pool, clogged with more “offerings.”

On the home front, I can conjure another disturbing, precedent-setting scene: the death site of Susan Smith’s two little sons, the ramp into John D. Long Lake in Union County, S.C., where Ms. Smith drowned her toddlers in their car seats. I was stunned to see the greeting cards and teddy bears piling up on this death pier. Television news showed these “mourners”—parents whose outrage had led them first to a Toys “R” Us, and then to the dock. What did this accomplish for two small boys who died? Was this a contemporary and egalitarian update of the ancient Egyptian belief that possessions might accompany the dead pharaohs? Could the purple plush Barney travel into eternity with Ms. Smith’s sons, acting as a stuffed sentinel into the afterlife?

In a moment on live TV, a man who had driven some distance was shown, yanking his own child to the death scene. I wondered if this wasn’t more severe a lapse of taste than ordinary rubbernecking? Why would someone go out of his or her way to pay such “tribute?” Did they wake up and say, “Hey, let’s go to that ramp where the mother rolled the car with her children into the water?” I had the thought—perhaps unfair—that the father had some dark impulses of his own, and he was expunging these urges through sanctimonious voyeurism. I could not regard this man as much “better” than Ms. Smith, who had at first sniffled on national TV to “find whoever took my children and bring ’em back.” She uttered the usual tearful pleas with a tinny insincerity that matched the cheap toys laid to rest on the dock.

The only innocents in the Susan Smith drama were the dead boys. The mourners—save those who really knew the children—struck me as emotional accomplices after the fact. Who, after all, sees the news and thinks, “Now I must run out and buy teddy bears to place at the spot?”

Yet these forensic “presents,” teddy-bear and floral placements, are now commonplace. The line between personal and public has been erased, as a talk-show audience nation has pre-empted the lives and deaths of anyone in the media for whatever reason. The grisly pleasure taken in this behavior is barely disguised. When the now-famous runaway bride Jennifer Wilbanks turned up alive in Georgia instead of in the predicted culvert, the townspeople seemed outraged: The public displays of mourning had already begun, and there was a community rehearsing for her funeral. Her fiancé had the grace to welcome her home, but most of the town looked enraged. Not, I might venture, at the wasted expense of searching for her corpse, but at the disappointment in not having a corpse for a final vigil. The accustomed rhythm—search, ribbons, corpse, teddy bears—had been disrupted.

In the past few days, I was also troubled by a radio interview with a woman who was commenting on the death of a high-school hero in Iraq. She was busy manufacturing yellow ribbons. She was so busy with those ribbons that the true loss of a young life seemed a loose end. The industry of ribboning had wrapped up the grief process and tied the final bow of justification on the war that killed the boy.

In contrast, Cindy Sheehan, the “Peace Mom” who refuses to accept Presidential platitudes, is demonstrating an earned, and genuine, way to mourn—and also to channel her inconsolable loss into a meaningful action against the forces that killed her son. She is the personification of true feeling, as opposed to sentimentality.

Now, as mass tragedy engulfs us on several fronts, the magnitude may wash away much of the falseness that has taken over as a national habit. In New Orleans, death became mundane: “Turn left at the corpse.” Perhaps this pragmatism more accurately depicts the state of involvement of most strangers on the scene. In a sunken mass grave, there is no way to float kitsch.

With so many to mourn, it may be time to return to appropriate response, and acknowledge that flowers, poems and gifts are the province of the bereaved. In our accelerating new Dark Age, while we grieve for so many lives lost, we may also mourn grief itself.

To wit: a balmy Saturday night around 11 P.M., outside the stage door of the Eugene O'Neill Theater. It was two days before Mr. Dennehy and Death of a Salesman would sweep the Tony Awards. Dozens of women were lined up behind two barricades, clutching programs from Salesman . Big, poufy beauty-parlor hairdos, median age 50. They were waiting for Brian Dennehy, their big man, their wide-bodied Willy Loman–he could eat Dustin Hoffman for breakfast!–who lumbers across the stage each night on his plastic knees. One woman, who said she had come in from Blue Point, L.I., to see the show, gripped the barricade, turned to the woman beside her and announced, "He's a Long Island boy. Went to Chaminade. One of our famous boy's Catholic schools."

Vicki Lucachick, a 55-year-old woman from Los Angeles, said she'd gladly permit Mr. Dennehy to eat crackers in bed. "Sorry, dear," she said, turning to her husband, a slender man inablueblazer. "There's something very attractive about him. My husband knows that I love him. It's hard to explain what it is. There's just this, this manliness ."

Heidi Higgins, a robust woman from Rockland County, gestured toward her fiancé, who shares a rhinocerotic body type with Mr. Dennehy. "He knows about my infatuation. That's why he got the tickets," she said. "I'm a bigger woman and I prefer bigger men."

At 11:15, a sound like an Apache battle cry came from the back of the crowd. "There he is!" Out swaggered Brian Dennehy, all 6 feet 2 inches of him, three bills easy, in pale blue jeans and a beige linen jacket, doing his best to stifle his proud Irish smile. The women pushed against the barricade. Several stood on tiptoes. Mr. Dennehy carried his own pen and began signing programs. He looked at the programs as he signed. The women kept their eyes fixed on his face.

Then one woman, a slight, 40-ish woman, did something they all wanted to do. "Can I hug you?" she asked, tentatively. He wrapped his arms around her, and for a moment she was invisible, enveloped in Dennehy flesh. Mr. Dennehy released her–she beamed–then, after yukking it up with a cop, he ducked his massive head into the waiting town car.

Brian Dennehy is a new breed of Broadway matinee idol, a man who appeals to the kind of women who buy most of the tickets to Broadway shows.

"It's about fuckin' time," said Mr. Dennehy's agent of 22 years, Susan Smith, a pleasant woman who seems to swear a lot. "We've got this idea of matinee idol all ass-backwards. It's been these 12-year-old boys with no brains in their heads who emote nothing. Brian is that old-fashioned sense of what a man is, for those people that might have seen Spencer Tracy or Gary Cooper."

Indeed, the Midwestern tourists and Long Island matinee ladies who can afford Broadway's $70 tickets can only imagine sending Leonardo DiCaprio to his room, not inviting him to theirs. In 1997, women made up 60 percent of Broadway audiences, and, on any given night, only 12 percent of the audience is from Manhattan. And the Manhattanites are more likely to be lusting after pansexual Alan Cumming in Cabaret or Kevin Spacey as the lithe and smooth Hickey in The Iceman Cometh . Actors with the kind of bodies they see in the gym every morning.

Tastes run different on mainstream Broadway. A group called the Michael Crawford Phantom Movie Campaign says that they will boycott a movie version of Phantom of the Opera if Warner Brothers casts sexy Latin actor Antonio Banderas, and not Mr. Crawford, in the Phantom role. "Banderas is not a musical star, just a pretty face … What is needed is an exciting voice and gobs of sex appeal, which is M.C.," wrote Geri A. Mellgren-Kerwin, on the campaign's Web page.

If you ask Elizabeth Franz, who won the Tony as Linda Loman in Salesman , about the 60-year-old Mr. Dennehy's sexual power, she will tell you it comes from his vulnerability.

"When you really get to know him, you realize how insatiable he is," said Ms. Franz. "He needs so much approval, but he has this incredible exterior. He needs help, he needs protection, and he needs to be taken take care of."

And there are plenty of women eager to do so. Joyce Breach, a nightclub singer in her 50's who has seen Salesman three times, the way teenage girls kept going back to see Mr. DiCaprio in Titanic , summed up her feelings as she watched Mr. Dennehy from the audience. "I would characterize it as steam heat," she said.

'Down and Out'

Ground zero of the suburban theater ladies is the Joan Hamburg Show, the Wednesday morning radio show on WOR-AM that broadcasts upstairs at Sardi's, with a studio audience of about 200. They watch the show, eat lunch, then trundle over to the matinees. Mr. Dennehy was the third guest on June 2. The ladies had given Art 's George Segal a nice reception, and Night Must Fall 's Matthew Broderick got the cheek pinching. But, said Ms. Hamburg, "When Brian came in, those women stood up . They went crazy. Everything he said, they laughed. They were thrilled. I'm telling you, they were thrilled! I've had all the celebrities on. But with this huge room, his personality is so pervasive, you could here a pin drop. You never see that."

Of course, there is a long tradition of portly guys getting the girls: Henry VIII, the Three Stooges' Curly Howard, Jackie Gleason, Luciano Pavarotti. "You know if a chubby guy wakes you up at 6:30 in the morning, it's not to go running," said Carrie Snow, a writer in her 40's living in Los Angeles who has had a crush on Mr. Dennehy even before he played a chunky alien in Cocoon .

Who is the real Brian Dennehy? As a young father, he worked as a meatpacker and a truck driver. He's an ex-Marine and politically conservative, an avid reader of the American Spectator who did stump work for Al D'Amato's failed Senate campaign. He has health problems–two years ago, he had both of his bum knees replaced with plastic ones, and in March, during the Salesman run, he was hospitalized for "exhaustion," something that initially seemed like a heart attack. "It was going out after the show and eating late and not getting enough sleep," said Lisa Protzmann, Mr. Dennehy's personal assistant at the O'Neill. She quipped, "Every restaurant in New York has been alerted not to let him drink too much." Said his agent, Ms. Smith: "Brian's had an extraordinary life, and he probably wouldn't change five minutes of it. But sometimes you pay for an extraordinary life, and he may be doing that at this juncture."

By the way, he's been married for 11 years to his second wife, Jennifer, a 42-year-old Australian brunette whom he met on the set of Return of the Man From Snowy River , on which she worked as a costume designer. They live in the sticks in Connecticut with their two young kids.

Just a couple of years ago, Mr. Dennehy wasn't signing many autographs. He was most often seen in TV ads, lurking in a dark suburban hedge, motioning toward a light in a bathroom and intoning, "She woke up with heartburn."

Before Salesman , said Ms. Franz, "Brian was down and out, in a way. He says he wasn't even doing B movies, he was doing C movies, because he had saturated the movie business. And then this came along."

"Frankly, if Gene Hackman had taken early retirement and Bob Duvall wasn't the brilliant actor that he is, Brian's career would have emerged on a different plane," said Ms. Smith.

Broadway does wonders for a flagging career. Women are also swooning over Tom Wopat ( The Dukes of Hazzard ) in Annie Get Your Gun and Richard Chamberlain in The Sound of Music . Ms. Protzmann, Mr. Dennehy's assistant, estimated that Mr. Dennehy receives three to five letters a day from smitten women who range from college age to middle age. Many of the letters include photographs and dinner invitations. One woman wrote that her widowed mother had built a shrine devoted to the actor, centered around an autographed napkin. The woman wrote that her mother had become accustomed to referring to Mr. Dennehy as her imaginary husband.

A friend of Ms. Protzmann's mother, when she heard about the young woman's job, asked Ms. Protzmann to pass a message to the star. "'I want you to tell him for me that I think he's very, very sexy,'" Ms. Protzmann recounted. "And she had this really saucy look in her eyes, you know, she kind of raised one eyebrow. I was really shocked."

One irony is that Mr. Dennehy was not cast for his sex appeal. "Of course, sex is a huge concern of producers, but they don't generally do a casting call for that," said casting director Barry Moss, who cast Jekyll and Hyde and Footloose . "They have people in mind who are known commodities. You'll hear them saying, 'Names, names, names! We need names!'"

Sean Cummisky, who monitors the comings and goings at the backstage door at the Eugene O'Neill Theater, said that Mr. Dennehy's phalanx of women was actually not the largest he had seen. That distinction belongs to Lucy Lawless, star of TV's Xena: Warrior Princess , who attracted a screaming, largely lesbian throng of 1,000 to the backstage door on her closing night playing Rizzo in Grease two years ago. Mr. Cummisky said he was taken by surprise by Mr. Dennehy's female fans, how they would try to one-up each other by claiming they'd been fans longer, or seen more of Mr. Dennehy's movies, or traveled the furthest to see Salesman . They ask Mr. Cummisky what Mr. Dennehy is like in private, if he's faithful to his wife, and if they'll be able to get a picture taken with him. "After they get the picture, they'll be like, 'Ooooh! '" he said. "It's like a really obsessed fan kind of thing. I don't see him as a sex model. And it's not only older women. You see some women about 30 years old out there."

An hour after winning his Tony Award for best actor, Mr. Dennehy was standing with Ms. Smith in the middle of Les Pyrénées restaurant. He was wearing a tuxedo he bought at Rochester Big and Tall, and scarfing down bow tie pasta with pesto, trying to avoid the question of what it's like being Broadway's biggest stud. "Oh, please," he said, between bites of a crusty roll. "I've had so many women come up to me and say, 'You know what, you remind of my father,'" he said, laughing. "Draw what sexual conclusions you wish from that, but I think that women find me a comforting, maybe powerful presence, and I don't think it goes any farther than that. Because every time I've been available for contacts, there didn't seem to be anybody there."

He paused. Chewed. "Well, not that I was terribly lonely," he said. He looked at his agent. "Susan was funny. I used to go out with all these models, and I'd say, 'Susan, what do you think?' And Susan would say, 'She's dumb as a fuckin' post.' And I says, 'Yeah, but what does that got to do with anything?'"

How unfortunate women are! Denied, among so many things, the simple satisfactions of violence, the credit for having gotten down and ripped some sucker's heart out without being instantly excused and summarily dismissed as mindless, innocent victims of major PMS! Our cultural unwillingness to admit that women are capable of willful aggression-that Mom might use that rolling pin to do some serious damage-is the subject of Patricia Pearson's well-researched and thought-provoking new book, When She Was Bad .

Bad hardly describes the rich and varied lineup of depraved female miscreants that Ms. Pearson has assembled for our appalled consideration. The much reviled Susan Smith looks rather wan and amateurish beside the more cold-blooded but less celebrated Marybeth Tinning, who murdered nine of her children before it struck the Schenectady, N.Y., police that something might be amiss. Here we have dreamy Amy Ellwood, blithely cruising Long Island with her dead or dying newborn in a cooler in the hatchback of her car; feisty Karla Faye Tucker, who reported having an orgasm while taking a pickax to a guy with whom she'd been feuding; and the remorseless Karla Homolka, who videotaped her fiancé raping and killing her younger sister and the two young Ontario women she and her husband-to-be kidnapped off the street. Aileen Wuornos, the Florida hitchhiker who, over the course of two years, shot seven men foolish enough to give her a ride, lags in the ranks of serial killers, just behind the schoolmarmish Dorothea Puente, who buried eight welfare recipients in the garden of her Sacramento boarding house.

As if these individual cases weren't proof enough, Ms. Pearson marshals enough statistics to convince the most dubious jury that women are-and have been for some time-on a rampage of murder and mayhem. "Women commit the majority of child homicides in the United States … an equal rate of sibling violence and assaults on the elderly, about a quarter of child sexual abuse, an overwhelming share of the killing of newborns, and a fair preponderance of spousal assaults … about 17 percent of known American serial killers are women.… A 1995 study of young American military couples, arguably the most patriarchal of all, found that 47 percent of the husbands and wives had bruised, battered, and wounded each other to exactly the same degree." And, closer to home, "In New York City in 1994, girls committed one third of all serious offenses-assault, robbery, harassment-against teachers. In 1991, they were arrested for more than 1,000 felonies."

Yet despite the evidence, Ms. Pearson claims, we continue to deny that the angel of the house could wreak such devilish havoc. As female violence escalates, we keep inventing new ways to explain it away; thus the wicked perpetrators are seen as debilitated sufferers, their consciences ravaged beyond repair by repressed memory, child abuse, spousal battery, hormonal imbalance and calculated brainwashing at the hands of Mr. Wrong. Even when women-like Guinevere Garcia, who killed her 61-year-old ex-husband just months after completing a jail term for smothering her baby daughter-admit their guilt and declare their willingness to be executed for their crimes, the courts and the public come forward to show them the error of their ways. "Garcia is the quintessential case of a battered woman and an abandoned child," Bianca Jagger told the prisoner review board; Ms. Garcia's sentence was commuted to life in prison.

Encouraged by this outpouring of excessive compassion, women seem only too eager to accept the myth of their own innocence. A six-city study found that "80 percent of women who killed claimed they were 'not responsible,' whether their victims were men, other women, or children." Many insist they were acting in self-defense, even when the lethal threat turns out to have been merely a verbal insult. And women like Jean Harris and Betty Broderick, "who traveled considerable distances to enter without invitation the homes of their ex-mates and shoot them dead, claimed that they actually intended to kill themselves."

Surely, the most dangerous consequence of all this-beyond, of course, the obvious threat to the female criminal's victim-is that police departments have been tragically slow to distinguish between the homicidal maniac and the solicitous mother, between the kindly grandma and the poisoner bumping off her charges for their welfare checks, between the angel of mercy and the angel of death. Moreover, according to Ms. Pearson, "the failure to take explicit responsibility for our actions poses a conundrum whose implications extend well beyond the lot of the criminal women … [It] undermines what good can come of women's recognition of their capacity for aggression. It sabotages the credibility of every female cop and combat soldier; every battered wife who stands up to abuse … Women have virtually no access to anger management counseling, sex offender therapy, child abuse prevention programs, and prison security-all because we won't concede their fundamental agency."

The case histories in When She Was Bad have an irresistibly grisly fascination, and much of Ms. Pearson's book is convincing-not that we need to be persuaded that our "victim culture" has deeply eroded our most basic notions of personal morality and social responsibility. It's encouraging, too, to find someone taking on the insane notion, bandied about by certain feminist psychologists and theorists, that women are, by nature, less rigid and harshly judgmental, kinder, sweeter, more forgiving, nurturing and sensitive to the delicate nuances of human relations.

But we may also find ourselves arguing with Ms. Pearson as we read along, especially at moments when, we feel, her enthusiasm for her own argument causes her to oversimplify, to ignore the ambiguities and complexities that might contradict her thesis. She rightly criticizes the sentimental distortions of the made-for-TV movie about Aileen Wuornos, but seems not to have seen Nick Broomfield's brilliant documentary about the serial killer, in which Ms. Wuornos appears as a bizarre composite of unalloyed aggression and (as her supporters claim) an almost psychotic degree of childlike malleability and dependence. Ms. Pearson refers to Ophelia as the classic example of a woman turning violence inward but, interestingly, has little to say about Lady Macbeth-an example to us all that women can stir up a heap of trouble.

Do we really believe that society refuses to countenance female violence? The press was, to say the least, assiduous in covering the Susan Smith case and, more recently, that of the "Prom Mom" who bore, and abandoned, her baby at the high school dance. In fact, there seems to be nothing that our culture likes better than a sensational infanticide-precisely because it goes against our notions of how the gentle sex should behave and at the same time confirms our suspicions about what monsters women secretly are. What's notable about these cases is not our eagerness to excuse the killers, but, on the contrary, the barbarity with which a presumably civilized populace calls out for their blood.

Ms. Pearson is correct in claiming that women are still viewed by men, and by other women, through the murky lens of the most reductive stereotypes. But there is more than one stereotype; in fact, there are two. We have always been willing to believe that women are either whores or saints, witches and angels, instead of acknowledging that most women-most people-fall somewhere in between. This inability to comprehend that humans of both genders are mysterious and incalculably complex mixtures of good and evil has made it all the more difficult for women like Susan Smith and Aileen Wuornos to receive justice or mercy-or, as we might wish for them, help.