Money, Murder, and Dominick Dunne: A Life in Several Acts

by Robert Hofler

  No sergeant could ever again say he acted like a sissy after Dominick received the Bronze Star for bravery.

  When the war in Europe ended on May 8, 1945, Dominick and Bresky were sent to Bavaria to await their transfer home. As would often happen throughout his life, Dominick endured the hardship in uncommonly high style and comfort. A small castle stood near the American camp, and while the other soldiers may have nicknamed Dominick and Bresky the “gold-dust twins,” it was their privileged upbringing and attendant polished manners that made them fit to be cited for special duty at the royal residence. The old princess of Lippe lived in the castle, and the gold-dust twins were chosen to protect her in the aftermath of the war. It was not much of a job, but with characteristic grace and style Dominick embellished his duties by reading the princess copies of Life magazine sent to him from home. Dominick loved royalty, and while he understood that the prisoner labor in Nazi Germany—the Poles, the Romanians, the Lithuanians—hated their masters, he knew the princess to be a better person. To his eyes, these now-freed “slaves,” as he called them, treated the old woman with genuine affection. They had been forbidden to marry, but with the war now over, the princess arranged to hold a mass outdoor wedding at her castle for any former prisoners wanting to wed. There was not much food, but Dominick and Bresky did what they could to embellish the wedding feast by bringing all the Hershey bars, eggs, and cigarettes they could gather from their rations.

  Dominick enjoyed celebrating with the old princess more than he did with his own family when he returned home a decorated war hero. No one on Albany Avenue mentioned his Bronze Star until the family dined at a restaurant on Dominick’s first Thursday night back home—Thursday being “the cook’s night off.” At the restaurant, a friend of his mother offered her congratulations, and giving Dominick a big hug, she looked at Dr. and Mrs. Dunne to say, “You must be so proud!” It was the first acknowledgement in West Hartford of his Bronze Star.

  When Dr. Richard Dunne Sr. died unexpectedly two years later of a ruptured aorta, at age fifty-one, the family held a traditional Irish wake, with hundreds of townspeople paying their respects at the house on Albany Avenue. In his middle age, Dominick recalled in a letter to his brother John how he had disappeared for hours during the wake when he should have been home with his mother, two sisters, and three brothers. Instead of mourning, Dominick spent those hours with his new boyfriend, Andreas Devendorf, having sex in Dr. Dunne’s black Buick near the ninth hole of the local golf course. Fortunately, hard rain pelted the car and steamed over the windows to give them a modicum of privacy. Dominick wrote of his lover, “My father had disliked him, but nothing was ever said.” Nor did Dominick ever publicly reveal why Dr. Dunne hated Andreas, but he knew why.

  Dominick visited his father’s grave only once, for the burial, but continued to see a lot of Andreas Devendorf, an underclassman at Wesleyan University in nearby Middletown, Connecticut.

  The following summer, Dominick convinced his mother he needed to brush up on his Spanish by traveling to Guatemala with his young lover. They stayed in the Spanish colonial town of Antigua, and walking down the cobblestone streets there one day with Dominick, Andreas Devendorf saw a friend from America. “Gore!” he shouted. “Andreas!” Gore Vidal shouted back. Dominick was duly impressed. Vidal’s first novel, Williwag, about his experiences in World War II, had just been published to critical acclaim, and he was already at work on another. (That novel, The City and the Pillar, would make him infamous due to its homosexual theme.) Vidal was renting a house in Antigua and invited the two men to stay with him for a few days. He was not only a WASP who happened to be very handsome, wealthy, and talented; Vidal also descended from an American political dynasty that Dominick envied almost as much as the servants whom the young novelist had at his every command “to wait on him and serve meals on time.” Dominick also recalled, “You cannot overestimate the amount of personal charisma Gore Vidal had at that time.”

  He liked to tell the story of how Devendorf and Vidal knew each other. “They met in the men’s restroom at the East Hampton cinema where they fucked!” he said.

  Vidal told a slightly different version. “We met in the men’s restroom at the East Hampton cinema and then went back to my father’s attic to fuck,” he recalled.

  Vidal was not living alone in Antigua, and his other guest that season gave a bisexual frisson to the young writer’s mystique. Dominick knew Anaïs Nin as Henry Miller’s former mistress. The Cuban memoirist, born in Paris, was already in her forties when she began her brief affair with the twenty-two-year-old Vidal. Having sex with a man so much younger made her an exotic in Dominick’s eyes, as did the colored yarn Nin braided in her hair and the Isadora Duncan poses she kept striking, even when she showered or went swimming. It was there in the water—either a swimming pool or a small pond, depending on how he fashioned the story—that Dominick claimed to have unexpectedly and briefly penetrated the nymph-like Nin. “Utter nonsense!” said Vidal, who claimed that Dominick and his ex-mistress never had sex, in or out of the water. Dominick, proud of the conquest, made sure to keep proof of it. Nin’s handwritten inscription to him in her book Children of the Albatross reads, “For Nick, Will you float me home? Anaïs, 1947.”

  Dominick’s affair with Andreas Devendorf lasted longer than his moment with Nin (or Vidal’s with her, for that matter). Vidal described Andreas as being good-looking, but “hairy like a tarantula.” While Dominick and Vidal continued to see each other sporadically throughout their lives, Devendorf’s life took another path. He left Wesleyan University after his sophomore year and, according to Dominick, came to resemble a character out of an Evelyn Waugh novel: a dissipated, broken youth who could never divorce himself from his family’s money and control, he ended his life going in and out of mental institutions. Those character traits aside, Dominick wrote in his journal that his lovemaking with Andreas was the only time sex with another man was “innocent” and not an act of “humiliation.”

  His affair with Devendorf took place during Dominick’s first two years at Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts. Having gone to war, Dominick was a little older than most students in his class. Unlike his two years at Canterbury, which had no drama department, Dominick found an extended family of like-minded young men who enjoyed performing on stage regardless of how that artistic pursuit might have compromised their masculinity in the eyes of others. Williams College suspended its theater productions during the war, but by 1947 those shows made a significant comeback, and not because of any returning soldier-professor.

  That year, Dominick auditioned against a freshman for the lead in Emlyn Williams’s thriller Night Must Fall, which had opened on Broadway to great success only a decade before. The two students tried out three times before the role of the psychopath Danny, who charms his way into a country household, was awarded to the underclassman. Stephen Sondheim got respectable reviews, but Dominick went on to receive even better reviews in the Williams Record for his performance later that season as the tortured mercy-killer George in John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men. Whatever competition existed between the two men, it did not get in the way of their befriending each other, as well as two other theater mavens. Charles Hollerith Jr. and Howard Erskine also appeared in nearly every other production staged at Williams College in the late 1940s. Sondheim, of course, belonged in a different league—and it was not only his immense talent as a songwriter that put him there. Oscar Hammerstein II called him his protégé—Sondheim called him Okie—and the young composer would tell his college friends gossip like “Gosh, Okie’s upset because Gertrude Lawrence can’t reach this note and they’re gonna have to . . .”

  In addition to acting, Sondheim wrote musicals and revues, and after his first year at Williams, he quickly turned a Sondheim show into an annual campus event, with his three friends often on stage in the cast, beginning with the original musical revue All That Glitters. Except for Hollerith, whom the playwright Mart Crowley described as
“the gayest straight man I’ve ever met,” they were homosexual. Like the theater, it was a bond. And they possessed other qualities making them friends, whether it was their camp sense of humor or unbridled ambition, because unlike most college chums they never really lost touch with one another.

  Hollerith’s son, Chuck, recalled the four men’s quarter-annual ritual, initiated as soon as a famous restaurant opened on the East Side of Manhattan in the 1950s. “At the beginning of each season of the year, they had lunch at the Four Seasons restaurant,” he said. “Sometimes it would be just three of them, but that tradition continued well into the 1970s.”

  In their respective yearbooks at Williams College, Sondheim received the most attention in the Gulielmensian. His senior-year tally of accomplishments, voted on by classmates, led him to be included on lists ranging from the Most Talented to the Most Likely to Succeed. His three close friends in the theater were not mentioned in any of those categories, although Dominick did make one list. He came in sixth in his class for being among the Best Dressed on campus.

  In Dominick’s senior year, Sondheim took him to the final run-through of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s impending hit musical, starring Mary Martin and Ezio Pinza. If acting on stage at Williams had not already done it, seeing South Pacific completely hooked Dominick. “This is it!” he said. “I gotta be in this kind of light!”

  Dominick took extreme pride in his being the first in the Williams College gang of four to land a big job in show business. He first tried acting, but the legendary teacher Sanford Meisner, who had apparently never heard of Alan Ladd or Mickey Rooney, told Dominick that at a stocky five foot six he was too short to be a leading man. “If you’re a character man, you won’t make it until you’re forty or something,” Meisner told him. “You’re so ambitious, go behind the camera.”

  Fortunately, television was new, and a family acquaintance had to make only a phone call to get Dominick a stage-manager position at NBC. Overnight, he became popular with friends whose children never missed an episode of Howdy Doody, sang “Ta-ra-ra Boom-de-ay” endlessly, and wanted nothing more in life than to sit in the show’s famed Peanut Gallery to watch a wooden puppet perform live with an avuncular actor in cowboy drag named Buffalo Bob. Dominick left it to parents to explain what the TV crew in Studio 3A at Rockefeller Center did to poor Howdy’s arms and legs, “these incredibly filthy things,” right before air time.

  Hollerith and Erskine followed Dominick with their own careers in entertainment, not into television but the theater, where they became producers. Erskine also acted, his last professional assignment being a Victorian partygoer in Martin Scorsese’s 1993 movie The Age of Innocence.

  And Sondheim? The protégé of Oscar Hammerstein II found himself on Italy’s Amalfi coast in 1953, working as an assistant to producer Jack Clayton on the film Beat the Devil. In letters from Sondheim to Dominick, it is not quite clear what the young composer’s job entailed because Sondheim himself was not quite sure, although he expressed hope he would be working on the film’s score when Clayton returned to England for postproduction.

  The letters, dated February 1953, can best be described as “camp,” a word Sondheim used more than once to describe the starry cast. In a manner that urbane homosexuals of the period thought amusing, Sondheim often mixed up the pronouns, as well as the honorifics, to describe Humphrey Bogart, Jennifer Jones, Peter Lorre, Robert Morley, and director John Huston. He also filled his letters with gossip about Jones being a lesbian, Lorre recovering from his drug addiction, and Morley’s wife coming to visit the production in the wake of the actor’s boyfriend, already ensconced in Ravello. In one letter, Sondheim introduced his new friend Truman Capote, on location in Italy to rewrite the script. No doubt, Dominick knew of Capote, who had already written one successful novel, Other Voices, Other Rooms, and one Broadway flop, The Grass Harp. Sondheim made no mention of those works. Instead, he commented on being utterly beguiled by the elfin young man despite his extreme “effeminacy.” Sondheim insisted that Dominick find a way to meet Capote when the twenty-eight-year-old writer next visited New York City.

  Although they are not the kinds of letters that two heterosexual men of any era would ever have written to each other, in one detail they display a very ordinary sentiment. Sondheim wrote how he wanted to return to the beautiful Italian coast one day for his “honeymoon.”

  2

  Marriage and Puppets

  In autumn 1953 Dominick’s mother gave the opening-night party for a new play titled Late Love, starring Arlene Francis and Cliff Robertson. It was Broadway-bound, and in those days, shows often held their tryout in Hartford, Connecticut, before facing the critics in New York City. Dorothy Dunne gave the party at her home in nearby West Hartford as a favor to her son’s college friend Howard Erskine, an associate producer on the play. Erskine’s girlfriend would be staying at the Dunne house, and Howard, busy with the show, left it to Dominick and Dorothy to take care of Ellen Beatriz Griffin, arriving from New York City. “Would you meet my girlfriend at the train station?” he asked them.

  Lenny Griffin, as she was nicknamed, grew up on a 30,000-acre ranch in Nogales, Arizona, heir to herds of Santa Gertrudis cattle, as well as the Griffin Wheel Company, “which made the wheels on all the railroad trains in America in the days before air travel.” Those were the words Dominick used to describe her fortune.

  His words to describe Lenny were also to the point. “She was a beauty. She was an heiress,” he said.

  Lenny’s friend Mart Crowley described her wealth as vast. “She grew up with the likes of Gloria Vanderbilt,” said the playwright. “She was rich, rich, rich, an only child.” She was also a dark, serene, almost melancholic beauty who considered herself attractive enough to be a model in New York City. For a brief time, she also tried to be an actress, and lived at the exclusively female Barbizon Hotel. She made the trip up from New York for Dorothy Dunne’s party to celebrate her boyfriend’s play, and when she stepped off the train, it would be difficult to say who was attracted to her first or more, the mother or the son. “That’s the girl you’ll marry,” Dorothy told Dominick, and in the car ride to their house he admitted to having been “mesmerized” by Howard Erskine’s pretty date.

  Publicly, Dominick always said Lenny was the only person he ever really loved. In a letter written to his children in 1979 but never sent, Dominick also expressed his deep love for their mother. But it was a complicated love. In that letter of confession, he spoke of their marriage being “proof positive” he was not the homosexual his father accused him of being. And he gave another reason for loving her: Lenny “believed” in him. No one else in his family ever did, he wrote. A few months before his death in 2009, Dominick told a British reporter, “In my era, gay men were expected to get married.”

  Dominick did not say it at the time, but he was one of those people. So was Lenny’s boyfriend Howard Erskine, who would also go on to marry and have children. Like Dominick said, gay people got married in 1954, whether or not they told their spouses about their true sexual orientation. Usually, they did not. Usually, the spouses found out the truth.

  Regarding the day he met Lenny, Dominick wrote in his published memoir, “Late Love was a hit, and my mother’s party for the stars was a smash.” Three weeks later, he asked Lenny to marry him. She waited a week before she wrote a letter, telling him in the most formal terms, “Miss Ellen Beatriz Griffin accepts with pleasure the kind invitation of Mr. Dominick Dunne to be his lawful wedded wife.”

  They shared a love of letter-writing, and her pre-wedding letters to him during a cross-country trip, from New York to Arizona, are filled with the infectious anticipation of a young woman in love and looking forward to a life together as husband and wife. That long train trip took her through the South and exposed Lenny for the first time to the brutal treatment of blacks there. At one point in her journey, she wandered into the wrong room at a train station, and in a letter she expressed her general disorientation and horror to D
ominick. She thanked him for warning her about the abuses of segregation.

  Six months after they met, Lenny and Dominick married on April 24, 1954, at the Sacred Heart Church in the border town of Nogales. A huge reception, complete with mariachi band, followed at her family’s vast Rancho Yerba Buena, the music a nod to the Mexican heritage of the bride’s very aristocratic mother, Beatriz Sandoval Griffin.

  It thrilled Dominick that the New York Times devoted as much copy to his nuptials as the Old Gray Lady gave to a Kennedy wedding that same day in April. MGM star Peter Lawford married Patricia Kennedy, daughter of tycoon and former UK ambassador Joseph P. Kennedy, and the two wedding announcements ran side by side on the same page. Despite the attention of the Times, marrying Lenny did not give Dominick everything he had hoped for in the first weeks of their marriage. The Social Register dropped Ellen Beatriz Griffin the day she took the name Mrs. Dominick Dunne; she could not have cared less, but it disappointed Dominick so much that he did not tell family or friends.

  Being in the Social Register was the one thing Dominick thought he might have over the Kennedys. In his opinion, even the Kennedys were not really respected until Jack “married Jacqueline Bouvier and became the thirty-fifth president of the United States.” By then, he had already begun to hate the Kennedys, but in the 1950s Dominick worshipped them despite his being a Republican.

  John F. Kennedy and Jacqueline Bouvier beat the Dunnes and the Lawfords to the altar by about six months. It impressed Dominick that one of his coworkers at NBC had been invited to the Kennedy/Bouvier wedding. Sometime in 1954, the new Mrs. Kennedy came to visit Freddy Eberstadt at the network’s Rockefeller Center offices in New York City. “We’d known each other since we were kids,” Eberstadt said of Jackie. He introduced her to Dominick. “Nick was very protective of the Kennedys then,” he noted. “He worshipped them.”