Five months had passed since the arrest. Five months of hearings and deliberations to see whether the audiotapes of Dr. Jerome Oziel were admissible in the murder trial of Lyle and Erik Menendez. Police seizure of therapy tapes is rare, because ordinarily conversations between patients and therapists are secret. But there are occasional exceptions to the secrecy rule, one being that the therapist believes the patient is a serious threat to himself or others. Only the defense attorneys, who did not want the tapes to be heard, had been allowed to participate in the hearings. The prosecution, which did want them to be heard, was barred. Oziel had been on the stand in private hearings from which the family, the media, and the public were barred. Judalon Smyth had also been on the stand for two days in private sessions, being grilled by Leslie Abramson. The day of the decision had arrived.
There was great tension in the courtroom. Noelle and Jamie, the girlfriends, were there. And Maria, the grandmother. And an aunt from Miami. And a cousin. And the probate lawyer. And others.
Then the Menendez brothers walked in. The swagger, the smirks, the smiles were all gone. And the glamour. So were the Armani-type suits. Their ever-loyal grandmother had arrived with their clothes in suit bags, but the bags were returned to her by the bailiff. They appeared in V-necked, short-sleeved jailhouse blues with T-shirts underneath. Their tennis tans had long since faded. It was impossible not to notice the deterioration in the appearance of the boys, especially Erik. His eyes looked tormented, tortured, haunted. At his neck was a tiny gold cross. He nodded to Noelle Terelsky. He nodded to his grandmother. There were no smiles that day.
Leslie Abramson and Gerald Chaleff went to Judge James Albracht’s chambers to hear his ruling on the admissibility of the tapes before it was read to the court. The brothers sat alone at the defense table, stripped of their support system. “Everybody’s staring at us,” said Erik to the bailiff in a pleading voice, as if the bailiff could do something about it, but there was nothing the bailiff could do. Everybody did stare at them. Lyle leaned forward and whispered something to his brother.
The fierce demeanor of Leslie Abramson when she returned to the courtroom left no doubt that the judge’s ruling had not gone in favor of the defense. As the judge read his ruling to the crowded courtroom, Abramson, with her back to the judge, kept up a nonstop commentary in Erik Menendez’s ear.
“I have ruled that none of the communications are privileged,” said the judge. There was an audible sound of dismay from the Menendez family members. The tapes would be admissible. The judge found that psychologist Jerome Oziel had reasonable cause to believe that Lyle and Erik Menendez “constituted a threat, and it was necessary to disclose the communications to prevent a danger.” There was no doubt that this was a serious setback to the defense.
Abramson and Chaleff immediately announced at a news conference that they would appeal the judge’s ruling. Abramson called Oziel a gossip, a liar, and “less than credible.” Neither Judalon Smyth’s name nor her role in the proceedings was ever mentioned.
A mere eight days later, in a stunning reversal of Judge Albracht’s ruling, the 2nd District Court of Appeals blocked the release of the tapes, to the undisguised delight of Abramson and Chaleff. Prosecutors were then given a date by which to file opposing arguments. Another complication occurred when Erik Menendez, from jail, refused to provide the prosecution with a handwriting sample to compare with the handwriting found on forms for the purchase of two shotguns in San Diego, despite a warning by the court that his refusal to do so could be used as evidence against him. In a further surprise, Deputy District Attorney Elliott Alhadeff, who won the original court ruling that the tapes would be admissible, was abruptly replaced on the notorious case by Deputy District Attorney Pamela Ferrero.
• • •
Since their arrest in March, Lyle and Erik Menendez have dwelt in the Los Angeles County Men’s Central Jail, in the section reserved for prisoners awaiting trial in heavily publicized cases. The brothers’ cells are not side by side. They order reading material from Book Soup, the trendy Sunset Strip bookshop. Erik has been sent The Dead Zone, by Stephen King, and a book on chess. They have frequent visits from family members, and talk with one friend almost daily by telephone. That friend told me that they have to pay for protection in jail. “Other prisoners, who are tough, hate them—who they are, what they’ve been accused of. They’ve been threatened.” He also told me they feel they have lost every one of their friends. Late in August, when three razor blades were reportedly found in Erik’s possession, he was put in solitary confinement, deprived of visitors, books except for the Bible, telephone calls, and exercise. That same week, Lyle suddenly shaved his head.
Los Angeles District Attorney Ira Reiner stated on television that one motive for the murders was greed. Certainly it is possible for a child to kill his parents for money, to wish to continue the easy life on easy street without the encumbrance of parental restrictions. But is it really possible for a child to kill, for merely financial gain, in the manner Kitty and Jose Menendez were killed? To blast holes into one’s parents? To deface them? To obliterate them? In the fatal, coup de grâce shot, the barrel of one shotgun touched the cheek of Kitty Menendez. You wonder if her eyes met the eyes of her killer in the last second of her life. In this case, we have two children who allegedly participated in the killing of each parent, not in the heat of rage but in a carefully orchestrated scenario after a long gestation period. There is more than money involved here. There is a deep, deep hatred, a hatred that goes beyond hate.
The closest friend of the Menendez brothers, with whom I talked at length on the condition of anonymity, kept saying to me over and over, “It’s only the tip of the iceberg.” No amount of persuasion on my part could make him explain what the iceberg was. Months earlier, however, a person close to the situation mouthed but did not speak the word “incest” to me. Subsequently, a rich woman in Los Angeles told me that her bodyguard, a former cop, had heard from a friend of his on the Beverly Hills police force that Kitty Menendez had been shot in the vagina. At a Malibu barbecue, a film star said to me, “I heard the mother was shot up the wazoo.” There is, however, no indication of such a penetration in the autopsy report, which carefully delineates each of the ten wounds from the nine shots fired into Kitty Menendez’s body. But the subject continues to surface. Could it be possible that these boys were puppets of their father’s dark side? “They had sexual hatred for their parents,” one of the friends told me. This same person went on to say, “The tapes will show that Jose molested Lyle at a very young age.”
Is this true? Only the boys know. If it is, it could be the defense argument that will return them to their tennis court, swimming pool, and chess set, as inheritors of a $14 million estate that they could not have inherited if they had been found guilty. Karen Lamm, however, does not believe such a story, although it is unlikely that Kitty would have revealed to her a secret of that dimension. Judalon Smyth was also skeptical of this information when I brought up the subject of sexual abuse. She said she had heard nothing of the kind on Halloween afternoon when, according to the California Court of Appeals decision, she listened outside Dr. Oziel’s office door as Lyle and Erik talked about the murders. She said that last December, almost two months after the October 31 confession to Oziel, which was not taped, the boys, feeling that the police were beginning to suspect them, voluntarily made a tape in which they confessed to the crime. In it, they spoke of their remorse. In it, apparently, they told of psychological abuse. But sexual abuse? Judalon Smyth did not hear this tape, and by that time Dr. Oziel was no longer confiding in her.
October 1990
QUEENS OF THE ROAD
Just when you thought you knew all there was to know about the highly publicized Collins sisters, Joan and Jackie, or Jackie and Joan, comes the news that big sister Joan, the soap-opera superstar, whose divorces and romantic exploits have been making tabloid headlines for thirty years, has turned literary in her fifty-fifth year and is
moving in on the printed-page turf of her little sister Jackie, the superstar novelist, whose eleven-volume oeuvre has sold 65 million copies in thirty languages throughout the world over the last two decades. Yes, friends, Joan Collins, between takes as the beloved bitch Alexis Carrington Colby on “Dynasty,” has written her own novel, called Prime Time, about a top-rated soap opera on American television, with eight or ten characters, all of them actors and actresses, and a leading lady who has overcome obstacles, both personal and financial, to regain her stardom.
And as if that weren’t enough, Joan’s literary agent, the legendary Irving “Swifty” Lazar, a superstar in his own right, has sold Joan’s book for a million bucks to, you guessed it, Jackie’s publisher, Simon and Schuster, where her editor is another superstar, Michael Korda, a novelist in his own right, who—hang on to your hat—also happens to be Jackie’s editor. (Lazar sold it abroad for an additional $2 million—$1 million in England alone—without showing one written word.)
“I get along very well with both of them,” said Korda. “I’m very fond of them.”
There are those who will tell you that Jackie isn’t happy with the proximity, and neither is her superstar agent, Morton Janklow, who long ago moved in on Swifty Lazar’s turf as the agent who got the most bucks for his writer clients. As a reaffirmation of Simon and Schuster’s warm feeling for its massive money-maker, Michael Korda signed Jackie up for two additional books after the completion of her current contract.
“I don’t like to talk figures,” said Jackie Collins in her Beverly Hills home about her new deal, “but I will say it’s a record-breaking contract.”
Michael Korda, from his New York office, added, “If this isn’t the largest amount of money in American book publishing, it sure ought to be. It’s about the same size as the Brazilian national debt.” Then he added, almost as an afterthought, “But I also bought two more books from Joan.”
“Is there a feud going on between them?” I asked.
“Probably so, at some level,” he answered. “Jackie can’t help but feel that Joan is crowding her territory.”
Said Irving Lazar, “Certainly, there is sibling rivalry at times.”
Said Joni Evans, formerly of Simon and Schuster, now publisher of Random House, “Of course, there has to be.”
Said Morton Janklow, “Yes, Jackie and Joan have flare-ups, but since Simon and Schuster has both books, Irving and I can see to it that they don’t come out head to head. So both sisters will have a couple great months.”
The Collins sisters themselves are quick to tell you that there is no trouble between them at all, although their publicist, Jeffrey Lane, who is actually Joan’s publicist, best pal, and traveling companion, but who doubled as Jackie’s publicist for this article, laid down some ground rules for me to abide by, namely that if Jackie’s name was used first in one sentence, then Joan’s must be used first in the next, and that there was to be equal copy on each sister. Like that.
The fact is, I know both of these ladies. The first time I ever saw Joan was in 1957. She walked up off the beach in Santa Monica, California, where I was renting a beach house, wearing a bikini before anyone I knew was wearing a bikini, and asked if she could use the bathroom. She was then in the first of her two stardoms, the one that didn’t last. Of course she could use the bathroom. In my scrapbooks I have pictures of her from the sixties, at parties my wife and I had in Beverly Hills: with Mia Farrow, before she married Frank Sinatra; with Ryan O’Neal, after he split from Joanna Moore; with Michael Caine, long before he married Shakira; and with Natalie Wood, after her first marriage to Robert Wagner. Joan was then in the second of her four marriages, to the English star Anthony Newley. In every picture she is having a good time.
Jackie I met much later. We sat next to each other at one of Irving Lazar’s Academy Awards parties at Spago. It struck me then how alike the sisters are, and also how different. Last year at the Writers’ Conference in Santa Barbara, Jackie and I were both speakers, along with Thomas McGuane, Irving Stone, William F. Buckley, Jr., and others. Jackie arrived only minutes before she was scheduled to speak, in a stretch limousine with a great deal of video equipment to record her speech. Only, she didn’t make a speech the way the rest of us did. The conference provided her with an interviewer, and the interviewer asked her questions. There wasn’t an empty seat in the hall. “Can you give the writers here some advice?” the interviewer asked. “Write only about what you know,” she told them. Later, when the floor was thrown open to questions from the audience, the audience was told in advance by the interviewer, “Miss Collins will answer no questions about her sister.” Her sister was, at the time, involved in the highly publicized extrication from her fourth marriage.
“It’s nonsense,” said Jackie when I asked her about the rumors of a rift. “We’re very amicable together.”
“I don’t have a rivalry with my sister,” said Joan when I asked her. “People are always saying I have rivalries—particularly with Elizabeth Taylor and Linda Evans. I’ve never said a bad word about another actress, at least in print. And now they’re saying I have this rivalry with Jackie. It’s not true.”
“Let me put it this way,” said Jackie. “We’re not in each other’s pockets, but we’re good friends. We’re not the kind of sisters who call each other every day, but she knows I’m there for her.”
“Jackie lives a totally different life from me,” said Joan. “If I get five days off from work, I take off. I like Los Angeles, but I’m more European than she is in my outlook. I like staying up late. I like sleeping late. I like two-hour lunches, with wine. I do not like tennis, golf, lying by the pool. What I like doing here is to work very hard and then leave.”
“We have a lot of the same friends,” said Jackie. “Roger and Luisa Moore, Dudley Moore, Michael and Shakira Caine. Then Joan has her whole group of friends, and I have my whole group.”
“I like getting on planes and going on trips,” said Joan.
“Hollywood Wives gave me a high profile,” said Jackie. “Before that, in England, I was always Joan’s little sister. I was lucky to have made it in America before Joan hit in ‘Dynasty.’ What I love about Joan is that she’s one of the great survivors. She did things ahead of her time that have since become accepted. She always lived her life like a man. She was a free spirit. If she saw a guy she wanted to go to bed with, she went after him, and that was unacceptable behavior at the time.”
“Oh, God, Jackie, that’s great,” said Joan, touching the emerald of a borrowed necklace her sister was wearing for the shoot. “Is it yours?”
Jackie laughed. “No, darling.”
“You should buy it for yourself,” said Joan. “You can afford it.”
Joan Collins is the embodiment of the kind of characters that Jackie Collins writes about. She is beautiful, famous, rich, was once a movie star, has been what is known in Hollywood as on her ass, meaning washed up and nearly broke, and then resurrected herself as a greater television star than she ever was a movie star. Jackie flatly denies that her character Silver Anderson in Hollywood Husbands was based on her sister, although Silver Anderson is a washed-up, middle-aged star who makes it back, bigger than ever, in a soap opera, who “wasn’t twenty-two and didn’t give a damn,” and who “had a compact, sinewy body, with firm breasts and hard nipples.”
Joan has been married and divorced four times. “I’ve always left my husbands,” she said, about Maxwell Reed, Anthony Newley, the late Ron Kass, and the recent and unlamented Peter Holm, who asked for, but didn’t receive, a divorce settlement of $80,000 a month. Her host of romances over the years, which she delineated in detail in her autobiography, Past Imperfect, have included Laurence Harvey, Warren Beatty, Sydney Chaplin, Ryan O’Neal, and Rafael Trujillo, the son of the dictator of the Dominican Republic, an affairette masterminded in the fifties by Zsa Zsa Gabor. She currently lives in a house that Joan Crawford might have lived in at the height of her fame. Built by Laurence Harvey but redone totall
y by Joan, it has a marble entrance hall and white carpets and white sofas and a peach bedroom with an Art Deco headboard and a spectacular view of the city of Los Angeles. She has posed for more than five hundred magazine covers, and many of them are framed on the walls of her office. She has diamonds for all occasions, and Bob Mackie and Nolan Miller design the glittering evening gowns she favors for her public appearances. Swifty Lazar says, “Joan is addicted to the precept that life is for fun and having a great time. She throws caution to the wind. It has brought her troubles at times. She has been broke when she didn’t have to be. She is much less cautious than Jackie. She worries much less about what’s going to happen in ten years. She lives totally in the present.”
Known as a great hostess, she loves having parties as much as she loves going to them. She gives Sunday lunches, seated dinners for eighteen, and buffet suppers for forty, and recently she tented over her swimming pool and had several hundred of her nearest and dearest friends, mostly famous, in for a black-tie dinner dance, with, according to Swifty Lazar, “great music, great wines, and place cards,” the kind of party that people in Hollywood always say they used to give out here but don’t give anymore. She loves nightlife, and one of her complaints about Hollywood, where she has lived on and off since the 1950s, is that everyone goes to bed too early. As often as possible, every three weeks or so, she is on a plane to London for four or five days, because her three children are there. Tara and Sacha, twenty-five and twenty-three, by her marriage to Anthony Newley, are living on their own. Her other daughter, Katyana, called Katy, by Ron Kass, who died in 1986, is the child she literally willed back to life after she was struck by a car and hovered between life and death for weeks in an intensive-care unit when she was eight. Katy, now fifteen, attends school in London and lives in a rented flat with Joan’s longtime English secretary and a nanny. Although Joan is said to party nonstop during her London weekends, it is to see her children that she travels there so often, and not to see her latest love, Bill Wiggins, known as Bungalow by the English tabloids because he has “nothing upstairs and everything down below.” As of this writing he is no longer her latest love but just “a dear friend.” “She loves it there,” said Douglas Cramer, an executive producer on “Dynasty.” “Next to the Queen, she’s the queen.”
The Mansions of Limbo Page 5
