Linda Riss was 20 when she met the man who later stole her eyesight. She was beautiful, with flawless skin and huge brown eyes – “like a painting”, friends said. Burt Pugach was a successful lawyer, used to getting what he wanted, and he had to have Linda. Theirs was to become an extraordinary love affair – twisted, passionate and embittered. And within a year it had turned into a dangerous obsession, which ended splashed across the front pages of the New York tabloids.

If Linda could have known that the catch of her life would ultimately cheat on her, stalk her, attack and blind her, then go to prison for it – perhaps she’d have turned away when he introduced himself that autumn day in 1957.

Or perhaps she wouldn’t have. Because when he was released from jail 14 years later, she married him. They are still married today.

Stranger still: after 23 years of marriage to Linda, in 1997 Burt was arrested and tried for stalking a Filipino secretary he’d been having a five-year affair with, and Linda gave the shining character evidence that acquitted him. “Burt is a wonderful, devoted husband,” she testified. This time the story made national headlines. Their relationship is still a mystery – what made her stick by him? Was it a triumph of forgiveness, obsessive devotion, self-delusion? Or was Linda looking to Burt for financial protection?

The American public has long been fascinated by this bizarre tale. And next month a feature-length documentary about the couple’s unusual relationship opens in cinemas across the UK.

The story began when Burt spotted Linda walking in a park in the Bronx. He was in a good mood; it was the Jewish holiday Rosh Hashanah. An East Bronx boy who grew up in the Depression, he had become a successful accident lawyer with a fat wallet, a Cadillac, a plane and a nightclub on Long Island. He’d just returned from London, where he’d been making a film called Death over My Shoulder. He fed Linda a line: was she one of his actresses? Did she recognise him? No, she didn’t, but he asked her out anyway and she agreed. When she got home a dozen red roses were waiting for her: “Love from Burt”. He wined and dined her at the Latin Quarter, the Copa, all the best places. He introduced her to celebrities, and when they went to Burt’s club, the band always struck up Buddy Clark’s song Linda: “When my lucky star begins to shine/with one lucky break/I’ll make Linda mine.” Linda’s family thought she’d landed the catch of her life. Burt proposed and she accepted.

Even in the early days, Burt, then 30, was controlling. He would pressure her to sleep with him. She never did; not before they married.

He was jealous of any male friends Linda had. He frequently accused her of cheating – once even taking her for a doctor’s examination to confirm her virginity. It was “very wearing”, Linda recalls, but the glamour and attention were flattering to a Bronx girl who’d grown up fatherless, living with her grandmother while her mother went out to work, who’d always thought herself “homely, even ugly” and “never very confident”.

Linda was planning the wedding when she heard a rumour that Burt was already married and had a child. She confronted him. He admitted it and promised a speedy divorce. She cried and told him: “Call me when the papers come through.” Twenty-four hours later, he showed up at her apartment brandishing them.

But Linda wasn’t fooled. She jotted down the index number and had it checked. The papers were forged. Pugach’s wife, Francine, refused to end the marriage – she cared full time for their daughter, Caryn, who had severe learning difficulties. Linda called off the affair and began dating other men. But Burt became obsessive. He called Linda and her friends incessantly, wrote love letters, sent gifts. Then his law firm, Weitz and Pugach, was charged with illegal conduct for fee-splitting. Burt was anxious about losing his licence. “I was distraught; they were going to ruin my life over absolutely nothing, the pressure was overwhelming.”

His calls and letters to Linda increased and became more threatening: “If I can’t have you, no one else will.” Once he found himself opposite her home with a gun, but he didn’t have the courage to shoot. Eventually, he hired three men to carry out a plot to maim her for life.

On June 15, 1959, Linda’s mother answered the door at their apartment in the East Bronx, and was told there was a delivery for Linda. When Linda reached the door, the caller threw the chemical lye in her face. She lost her hair and her sight in one eye. Over time, she became completely blind. Linda knew Burt was behind the attack and told the police. He was arrested, as were his three accomplices, and was convicted in 1961. He was sentenced to 30 years in prison, and let out after 14 for good behaviour.

Linda recovered from the attack and later travelled around Europe with friends. She had admirers and would go dancing. She recalls: “I had a marvellous time. I was no wallflower. I was a free agent. I dated and did what every young person does.” But beneath her dark glasses, Linda’s eyes were disfigured, though her skin was unscathed. She had no serious boyfriends. One man wanted to marry her, but she was nervous that he’d never seen her eyes. She met him one evening and wore glasses with clear lenses. It was the last time she heard from him. “It was devastating,” she says, “but you have to move on.”

She returned to New York. When Burt got out of jail in 1974, she was still a virgin, aged 37. While in jail, Burt resumed sending Linda love letters. He wrote things like “You will never find a man to love you more than me” and signed them “Your loving husband, Burt.” In the documentary, he describes prison as “dreadful. There were no windows. You could masturbate but nothing else”. He was transferred briefly to an asylum after he slashed his wrists, and would cry out: “Linda, I love you. Linda, take me back.” Towards the end of his sentence, he asked his lawyer, Bill Kunstler, to call Linda and find out if there was anything she needed. The request came: “Tell him I need money.” Burt began sending Linda regular $50 instalments.

On Burt’s release in 1974, Linda was put under police protection. There was a general consensus among her friends that she was too vulnerable to stay husbandless. “I never thought of myself as the marrying kind,” Linda says. “Besides, I thought I was damaged merchandise.” But her friends persuaded her to meet Burt – after everything, he still seemed to love her. They married later that year in a storm of headlines: “Blinded bride-to-be weds her attacker.”

It’s hard to believe that Linda Pugach, now 71, never stopped to consider why the man who blinded her did what he did, but she is adamant that it hasn’t crossed her mind and sounds surprised to be asked.

“I never gave it any thought,” she says in her cigarette-gravelly voice. “I don’t know if Burt loved me, I really never thought about it. What he did doesn’t sound like love to me; does it to you? I must have forgiven him. I’ve been with him 34 years. I don’t know what people think and I don’t care.” She hisses out smoke, coolly.

Linda, by her own admission, never had a high opinion of herself, partly because of her upbringing. “I had a friend who lived across the street. Her family would gather round and admire how beautiful she was, how gorgeous she was, how smart. That never happened in my family. Growing up without a father I’m sure had an effect on the feelings I had about myself.”

These days, it seems Linda has a very strong sense of herself. She makes herself up every day, though she can’t see her face. She says she likes the “mystique” of her dark glasses, and knows her wardrobe inside out: “I know where my blacks are, my reds, my blues. When I go shopping, I can touch something and know if it’s got my name on it.” She says she’s difficult to live with: “I’m a tough cookie. I’m opinionated, I’m determined.”

Did she ever tell Burt how hurt she was, how angry, after the attack? “No. Once I’d decided I was going to marry him, that was something I’d never do. That would be so terribly unfair. But I’m not a pushover, let’s put it that way.”

While we talk, Burt is out shopping for furniture polish. Linda’s mobile rings to a loud salsa tune and she turns it to loudspeaker.

“I’m doing an interview.”

It’s Burt. He says: “Okay, just a second. Revitalising oil, is that what you want?”

“Yeah, it’s a spray can.”

“Okay, it’s got something with it – I don’t know what. A free duster. Do you want it?”

“Absolutely.”

“By the way, I could’ve taken my pants back.”

“Pants?”

“The pants – to Macy’s. I could have taken them back and gotten the brown outfit.

“Burt, I’m talking. Goodbye.”

“But…”

“Goodbye. Goodbye.”

“He’d have gone on for 20 minutes. Sorry about that.”

Burt does all the shopping, but Linda calls herself the hausfrau. “His papers are all over this apartment,” she says. “I want to take a match and burn them. I like it neat and clean but everywhere I step there’s more papers. And his clothes are everywhere. I hate it.”

Part of their apartment was destroyed and rebuilt after an electrical fire last August – Linda was at home alone and escaped by the skin of her teeth. She is sad she lost so many clothes and some of the artwork she did before she lost her sight completely 20 years ago, but won’t move out. “I love this place. It works for me, but it doesn’t really feel like me any more – I decorated the whole place when we first moved in.”

Are they rich? “Burt would never tell you so, but yes,” she says. “We both grew up in the Depression. I had literally nothing growing up. When I go shopping now, I won’t buy an item unless it’s on sale – the truth is, I don’t even have to look at the price tag. We could live on Park Avenue if we wanted, but we don’t. It’s in our nature. We’re victims of our upbringing.”

It’s plain that money, saving it and spending it, is central to their life. They don’t have children. “By the time we got married I was 37 and I think it was too late,” says Linda. When Crazy Love opened at Cannes, the Pugaches were seen swanning down the red carpet in matching white mink, signing autographs like Hollywood stars. Burt’s bank balance must have been a factor in Linda’s initial decision to marry him. “Well, I’d call it his education,” she says. “What I’m saying is, if he was just a lift operator or a taxi driver, that wouldn’t have turned me on, you know?

“I’m not trying to deny that money played a part in my thinking. I was never interested in forming a union with someone who would not be a good provider. Has it made me happy? Sure. When we’re not fighting we’re happy.”

This somewhat materialistic view of their marriage is shared by Burt, though he puts it more romantically: “I can see how she acted for money, sure. Everything we do has money-motivated elements. But I believe she loved me to begin with, and she loved me when we got married too. She had confidence in my ability to provide for her – and I did.”

In retrospect, the $50 payments Burt sent her from prison smack of bribery, though he denies anything of the sort: “It was the right thing to do, just like taking care of her now is the right thing to do. And if she hadn’t come back to me I’d have continued to take care of her in that way.”

Though they reportedly earned a $50,000 fee for Crazy Love, Burt and Linda seemed reluctant to publicise it when I called them to talk. The fee was a one-off, with no royalties. There is considerable bad blood over the fact that it never went to Hollywood. In his thick Bronx accent Burt told me he wouldn’t speak unless he was paid. “Listen,” he says. “I won’t see a further penny from this thing. If you want to compensate us for it, we’ll do it.” Eventually he agreed to interviews on condition that I mention his new project, an upcoming television series called Greed in the Courts, about what he describes as “organised crime” in the American judicial system.

This is an axe Burt likes to grind. He says his attack on Linda was an act of insanity brought on by the pressure of the “ridiculous” court summons for illegal practice at his firm in the 1950s. He lost his law licence in 1960 when he was convicted of the assault. Ever since he left prison he has worked as a paralegal adviser, based in the apartment in Queens that he and Linda have shared since their honeymoon. He says he has all sorts of documents proving incompetence and corruption in the courts.

“In New York lawyers come behind used-car salesmen for reliability. They’re crooks, thieves. They betray their kind. Why would it be any different when they become judges?” Being a lawyer by trade, doesn’t that make him crooked too? “No. Some of us walk the line,” he says.

But he has been less than reliable as a husband. “I’ve cheated on Linda,” he says, “but I wouldn’t be the first man to cheat.” Linda repeats this like a soundbite: Burt cheated, but he’s a man – that’s what men do. Does Linda know how many times? “I don’t even know how many times,” Burt chortles. “No, I’m not proud of it. Some people drink, some people do drugs. This is what I did. What do you want me to do, duck away and lie to you?” So he made Linda his property, robbed her of her sight and thereby largely her freedom. All the while he was free to conduct affairs at will.

At 81 the lothario in Burt Pugach is still in evidence: he is initially hard-nosed but soon lapses into semi-flirtation. He asks me how old I am, whether I’m married. At my age, he tells me, he’d be going on two dates per night. He tells me he was once kicked out of a London hotel for bringing a different woman back each night: “I was always a good-looking guy. I still have women come up to me. Not often – I’m 81 – but they do. I don’t respond any more. It isn’t out of choice, it’s that I got old.”

The notorious New York columnist Jimmy Breslin, who covered the Pugach saga in the 1960s and ’70s, once described Burt as “a hard man to dislike”. He is funny, often self-deprecating and honest about his mistakes. Is he sorry for what he did to Linda? “Every single day. I destroyed my life, because I destroyed hers.”

But what about the cheating? Didn’t Linda feel he owed her loyalty as well as financial security? Again, she is incredulous that I ask. “I don’t see loyalty in that respect. Quite honestly, it’s all bullshit – he was on the front page of every newspaper. He didn’t kill anyone. He was having an affair – let’s face it, every man does this. He never stalked Evangeline.” Evangeline Borga is the Filipino secretary Burt was arrested for harassing. He was later tried and acquitted.

“What always killed me about this ‘big affair,’” says Linda, “was that she must have been a moron to put up with it. He left the house after dinner at 7pm and was home every night by 9.30. Two hours a day? You’ve got to treat a girl better than that! I wouldn’t have gone for it.”

I point out that she did go for Burt – after he stalked her, threatened her, blinded her and cheated on her. “Well, if I’d put it together like that I’d have shit-canned him; maybe I’m not that smart either,” and she roars with throaty laughter.

But, quite clearly, Linda is a smart lady. She’s made herself a comfortable life with Burt, and rules the roost too. Then she says: “Between you, me and the lamppost, I don’t say much good about Burt usually, but the man is brilliant. I have gotten calls from people all over this country telling me how wonderful and brave I am, but really I’m very average. Burt couldn’t make the kind of living he does if he weren’t superior. What he’s doing with me is still a mystery to me.”

Linda’s odd mixture of self-deprecation and pride at having snagged Burt Pugach is the riddle at the heart of Crazy Love. At one point she mentions “getting her own back” in marrying Burt – as if putting up with her demands is some kind of punishment she inflicted on him. But, as they both declare, after 34 years of marriage they must be doing something right. Perhaps they are genuinely happy together. Perhaps it’s an arrangement that, like their fire-damaged apartment, just works for them – and when it burnt down they rebuilt it.

Crazy Love opens at selected cinemas in the UK on July 18. Visit: www.tartanfilms.com

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