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

by Robert Hofler

  Eberstadt worked as a unit manager on Watch Mr. Wizard, a children’s science program on NBC. Also employed there was John Calley, the future chairman and CEO of Sony Pictures Entertainment, who started at the network in the mail room. Calley liked to deliver what he thought were smart remarks, and the crack he made about the new Mrs. Kennedy upset Dominick tremendously. Calley had joked, “Did you know the only reason Jackie married Jack is because Freddy threw her aside?”

  Dominick recoiled at the bad wisecrack. “Nick didn’t find that one bit funny,” said Eberstadt.

  After Howdy Doody, Dominick quickly climbed the NBC ladder to become stage manager for the prestigious Robert Montgomery Presents, one of the first TV shows to perform original hour-long dramas live on the air. Every week at 30 Rockefeller Plaza in Studio 8H, Dominick performed a ritual he loved from the moment he first said the words, “One minute, Mr. Montgomery.”

  Robert Montgomery called back at him from across the studio, “Thank you, Dominick,” at which the actor-producer-host would look into the camera to say, “And good evening, ladies and gentleman.”

  Dominick knew it. “Well, I was a star!” he exclaimed.

  While Eberstadt’s young son, Nicholas, might have preferred that his father’s friend continue working with a wooden puppet, Robert Montgomery Presents and other shows Dominick stage-managed at NBC introduced him to the kind of theater talent that would soon turn into movie legends. James Dean, Walter Matthau, Steve McQueen, and Joanne Woodward performed, as well as some stars no longer in demand in Hollywood—actors like Claudette Colbert, Ginger Rogers, Roddy McDowall, and Franchot Tone.

  Dominick especially enjoyed taking his younger brother John, a student at nearby Princeton University, to parties in Manhattan populated by his new actor friends. The teenager did not know Grace Kelly from Geraldine Page, but those showbiz introductions would be useful to John in his future as a screenwriter, not that he ever felt obliged to return the favor.

  Frank Sinatra was an exception to the star-to-be or former-star rule in live TV of the mid-1950s. Fresh off his Oscar win for From Here to Eternity, Sinatra headlined NBC’s 1955 musical version of Our Town, an assignment that turned into a stage manager’s worst nightmare when the star took a dislike to the crew and cast, including the very young Paul Newman and Eva Marie Saint, and refused to show up for the dress rehearsal. Sinatra and his frazzled stage manager would meet again in Hollywood, much to Dominick’s grief and humiliation.

  “I followed Dominick from afar at NBC. He was a big deal,” said Liz Smith. In the mid-1950s, the future gossip columnist worked on the network’s weekly travelogue Wide Wide World. “Dominick was always kidding around with me how we had started together in television, but I don’t think he really remembered me from then.”

  After a brief stint in television, Smith began her long career in journalism, starting as an assistant to Igor Cassini, who wrote the Cholly Knickerbocker gossip column for the Hearst newspapers. Cassini was to New York’s high society what Hearst’s Louella Parsons was to Hollywood. Whether Dominick knew her or not at NBC, he avidly read Cassini and Smith’s copy in the newspaper. No articles fascinated him more than three published under Cholly Knickerbocker’s byline in 1955. That year, a chorus girl turned society lady, Ann Woodward, shot and killed her husband, Billy, heir to the Hanover National Bank fortune. The Knickerbocker column ran three in-depth stories on the deadly incident and then dropped the scandal as if it never happened. Three decades later, Dominick would speculate in his roman à clef The Two Mrs. Grenvilles that Hearst put a stop to Cassini writing about the scandal, even though Liz Smith, who had worked for the powerful gossip, doubted such high-level intervention ever took place. “Cassini didn’t want to be ostracized at Hearst, and Hearst didn’t want to be, either,” said Smith, referring to the newspaper’s access to New York’s high society, which quickly closed ranks around the Woodward family. “I don’t ever remember Hearst stopping Cassini.” Dominick, for his part, saw it differently. He saw the conspiracy, the power play, the intrigue, the dark side. He often did when it came to money and murder.

  If he looked like a “big deal” to Liz Smith in the 1950s, Dominick felt somewhat less so when old acquaintances like Gore Vidal came to visit him at Rockefeller Center. Vidal brought his so-called stepsister Jacqueline Kennedy (they shared the same stepfather) to NBC one day during rehearsals when Dominick, on his hands and knees, was spreading tape on the floor to simulate the boundaries of the scenery. He felt “like a mick” despite wearing his J. Press sport jacket, gray flannel slacks, Brooks Brothers shirt with button-down collar, and striped tie. Unlike most stage managers, he overdressed. He even felt like a mick when the very Irish John O’Hara came to visit the studio for all five days of rehearsals on the Robert Montgomery Presents adaptation of the writer’s first novel, Appointment in Samarra, published in 1934. Everyone working on the show knew they were doing something bold for 1950s television: like the novel, the TV adaptation of O’Hara’s novel would end with the suicide of its hero, Julian English, a victim of the Hangover Generation of the 1930s. Dominick admired O’Hara not only as a writer but as an Irish American who exuded total confidence with his fame, his talent, and his ethnic heritage. The novelist also wore the most beautiful tweed suits Dominick ever saw on a human being.

  O’Hara and his wife watched from a viewing room while the actors performed Appointment in Samarra live before the cameras. Afterward, they came to the studio to greet Robert Montgomery and make their way to an uptown party to celebrate. Dominick later wrote a friend that O’Hara saw the “yearning” in his eyes and motioned for him to join them that night. Dominick felt compelled to say no. He knew his place. He was not invited. O’Hara shrugged, said it did not matter, and quickly extended an invitation to be his guest. It surprised the young stage manager when everyone at the party treated him not like a TV minion but as if he “belonged,” and they were so “nice.” Although he never saw O’Hara again, Dominick made it his major goal in life to get himself invited to more parties of that caliber. He only had to move to an even more fabulous place.

  In 1957 Dominick left NBC and New York to visit Los Angeles, the city of his childhood dreams. It was not supposed to be a long stay. At seventy-five dollars a week, CBS hired him to be the assistant to Martin Manulis, producer of the network’s top-of-the-line drama series Playhouse 90. He had imagined himself living in Hollywood ever since Aunt Harriet Burns, a nun turned spinster, took him there back in the 1930s and they had dined at the Brown Derby to gawk at all the movie stars. In a way, those movie stars became Dominick’s fantasy family, the nice family whose pictures he pinned to his bedroom wall because they were beautiful, and did not beat him or call him a sissy.

  Working with stage actors on live TV in New York stirred Dominick’s imagination, but it could not compare to what he would soon experience in Los Angeles on Playhouse 90. In bringing live television to the West Coast, CBS made possible on a regular basis what had not been in the East: week after week, major movie stars were only a short limousine ride away from their homes in Beverly Hills to the CBS studio in Los Angeles. Film production had slowed considerably, and in between the occasional movie, the biggest stars could further enhance their career with TV’s easy money and vast exposure. The first Playhouse 90 episode Dominick worked on was a remake of the play and movie The Petrified Forest, with Humphrey Bogart reprising his role of the gangster Duke Mantee.

  Much to his surprise, it was Frank Sinatra who recommended Dominick to Bogart to be stage manager on the Robert E. Sherwood drama. “Word got around that I was good with the stars who were scared of live television,” Dominick recalled. CBS put him up at the preternaturally pink Beverly Hills Hotel for the three-week rehearsal. One day, Dominick told Bogart he went to Canterbury School and Bogart revealed that he also had attended an East Coast prep school, Andover. As soon as they got beyond those minor academic preliminaries, the young man from New York confessed, “God, I love looking at movie stars
!”

  “What are you doing Friday night?” Bogie asked, and Dominick found himself invited to an affair that turned the John O’Hara party into something resembling a beer blast. There at Bogart and Lauren Bacall’s Holmby Hills home Dominick heard Judy Garland and Frank Sinatra sing, and everyone from Spencer Tracy to Lana Turner showed up. Dominick knew how to tell a story, and when those names were not dazzling enough, he would also throw in the fact, or the fiction, that the party ended with everyone, including the dogs and “the women in their gowns,” jumping into the pool. Whatever actually went on in or out of the water that night, Dominick definitely could not sleep when he returned to the palm-leafed hallways of the Beverly Hills Hotel. He phoned Lenny in New York City to tell her he thought he had died and gone to the Academy Awards, only better. “Lenny, we’ve got to move to Hollywood,” he insisted. “It’s incredible.” That Bogart party was everything the little boy who ought to have been born a girl ever wanted in life.

  Lenny and Dominick already had a two-year-old son, Griffin, and a newborn, Alex. “Nick went out to L.A., and Lenny was not enthusiastic about it,” said Freddy Eberstadt. “The idea was it would be for a minimum of six weeks, a maximum of six months. They were not going to be Angelinos. In a sense, they never came back.”

  Stage managers and producer assistants who made seventy-five dollars a week could not afford to rent large houses on the beach in Santa Monica. Dominick did not care. He wanted to live in Harold Lloyd’s beach “cottage” with its “seven or eight bedrooms”—Dominick could not count them all. Stunned at its immense size, Lenny got no farther than the kitchen when she turned to her husband to remark, “Were you drunk?” And there was another big plus to the humongous cottage: the famous couple whose wedding he had followed with such devotion in the New York Times lived down the beach in the old Louis B. Mayer house. They had been linked in print; now Dominick could call Pat and Peter Lawford his neighbors.

  “We spent too much money,” Dominick admitted. “Lenny was always inclined to hold back. Not me. I was of the more-more-more school.” It was mostly her money he spent, and his profligacy caused problems in the Griffin family. “Lenny’s mother was a gorgon,” said Mart Crowley. “She not only ruined Lenny’s life; she despised Nick.” The Mexican dowager considered her son-in-law a gold digger, and the beach house was only the beginning. In the near future, Dominick would infuriate her further by indulging in a far more extravagant example of reckless spending.

  Despite their opposing views on money, Dominick described Beatriz Sandoval Griffin in reservedly sympathetic terms, calling his mother-in-law a “strong, uncompromising woman who has never not stated exactly what was on her mind in any given situation, a trait that has made her respected if not always endearing.”

  Dorothy Dunne proved much less judgmental. Dominick wrote his own mother enthusiastic letters about his roseate new life in Los Angeles. For his family’s first Christmas on the West Coast, Dominick mentioned the big fete at the neighbors’ down the beach. The Lawfords held a premature tree-trimming party where the kids got to open their gifts two weeks ahead of time, because Pat and Peter would be spending the holidays in Palm Beach. What Dominick did not write is how sorry he felt for the son-in-law of Joe Kennedy, having seen the Brit be “humiliated” by the fierce patriarch in front of guests. Nor did he write that he found himself physically attracted to Lawford, who would be the first of his many Hollywood infatuations. Years later, Dominick admitted to having had many such “crushes,” as he called them. “I wasn’t good at love. Never worked.” A future boyfriend disagreed slightly. “Dominick told me he was in love with Peter,” said Norman Carby. “He was very open about it.”

  Dominick also kept secret from his mother the whole truth about the annual Christmas parties at his boss’s house. He did write Dorothy about Charlton Heston’s tradition of reading “’Twas the Night Before Christmas” to all the children gathered at the Manulis home; how the Edgar Bergen family, including wife Fran and daughter Candice, joined them there, as did Gone with the Wind producer David O. Selznick and his movie-star wife, Jennifer Jones; and that the gossip columnist Louella Parsons got “plastered.”

  But reporting on who drank too much was about as controversial as Dominick got with Dorothy. There were other advantages to living among the stars and the powerbrokers of Hollywood, and Dominick shared those secrets with neither his mother nor his wife.

  “I met Nick at his home when the boys were two and three,” said Scotty Bowers, a well-known bartender around town. Bowers shared a couple of friends with Dominick, and it was those two out-of-town guests who took him to the home of the young TV executive and his family where he and Dominick met for the first time. While Bowers tended bar at Hollywood parties, he earned additional income by running a thriving escort service, operated from a filling station on Hollywood Boulevard. His service catered to a number of homosexuals in the entertainment business, and those illustrious clients included Martin Manulis and Ralph Levy, producer of such long-running TV series as The Jack Benny Program and The George Burns and Gracie Allen Show. “There were about six guys who were all big in television,” Bowers said of his vast client list. “They were all buddies and used my service. TV was starting up then.”

  It was a small, powerful community of gay TV executives with wives and kids. “Dominick was shy at first,” Bowers recalled. After they met at Dominick’s house, Bowers later saw the young husband and father at an all-gay party. “I was bartending. Dominick was already there, and as soon as he saw me he ran to the balcony to hide. He didn’t want me to see him. He spent the next four hours out on that balcony.”

  Dominick eventually outgrew his shyness to join Manulis and Levy as a Bowers client. “He liked it if the guy had a place of his own, so he could go there,” Bowers said of Dominick’s taste in call boys. “Some men liked to go out to dinner first. Dominick wasn’t one of those. He was in and out quick.” Hiring prostitutes, in addition to gossiping and name-dropping, was another trait Dominick shared with his brother John. But being heterosexual, John Gregory Dunne could boast of his sex-for-hire predilections in his memoir Harp. Dominick had to hide his. It was just one of many differences between being straight and being gay in mid-twentieth-century America.

  Dominick’s days with the Bowers service began after he and Lenny, in 1958, bought a two-story Georgian house at 714 Walden Drive in Beverly Hills. Again, much of the purchase money came from Lenny. Both he and she wanted to move. There had been too many personal tragedies in the rented house on the beach. One of the nannies died unexpectedly, and Griffin, age three, found the body. Far worse, two children born to Dominick and Lenny died of hyaline membrane disease within days of being born. When the first of the baby girls died, the hospital called Dominick at two thirty in the morning. He said he wanted to see his child. They said no. It was not recommended. He went to the hospital anyway and demanded to see her. They took Dominick into a kitchen where the dead baby lay under a sheet on the counter, her skin having already turned yellow. He could only look for a moment, and yet it would be “an image” he never forgot. To welcome Lenny home, Dominick planted a rose garden for her in their yard despite it being a rented house, one they would soon leave.

  They had not lived long on Walden Drive when tragedy also struck there. This death, however, was not in any way personal, and Dominick could indulge in its spectacle without reservation or remorse from a couple of blocks away. It was the kind of famous murder case he had thrived on as a boy and young man, only this particular murder topped even Ann Woodward’s when it came to sheer glamour, not to mention media coverage. Who knew? Maybe he moved to Beverly Hills as much for its movie-star parties as its movie-star scandals. This one took place “almost just around the corner” from where he now lived.

  Despite the heavy rain in Beverly Hills on April 4, 1958, Dominick and Lenny heard the police sirens sometime before midnight. It was Good Friday. Their sons, Griffin and Alex, were already upstairs in bed. Earlier tha
t night, they had all watched The Phil Silvers Show. Later, Dominick and Lenny tuned into Edward R. Murrow’s interview with singer Anna Maria Alberghetti on Person to Person.

  When the sirens grew louder and then came to a sudden stop nearby, Dominick grabbed an umbrella and went out to take a look. Lenny told him not to bother. Ten minutes later, when Dominick returned to tell Lenny about the police and the commotion over on North Bedford Drive, she expressed embarrassment that the neighbors might see him peering into the house where a movie star lived. For Lenny, it did not matter that the movie star was Lana Turner and someone in the house had just been stabbed to death and that someone was her gangster boyfriend.

  Dominick kissed his wife goodnight and told her not to wait up. “I wouldn’t miss this for the world,” he said. And off he went, leaving their house a second time that night to gawk like an autograph hound at the spectacle in front of Lana Turner’s rented house. Not only was the ambulance parked in front, but there were a half-dozen police cars and many more cars with reporters and photographers piling out of them.

  People were pointing at a white Thunderbird parked in the curved driveway of the colonial house built by Laura Hope Crews with her earnings playing Aunt Pittypat in Gone with the Wind. Black shutters dressed the ten windows, and if you added pillars the place could have doubled for Tara. The white T-bird belonged to Johnny Stompanato. Or it had belonged to Johnny Stompanato, now dead. People were telling Dominick that Lana’s daughter by her second husband, Joseph Stephen Crane, had killed the gangster. Others said Lana herself had done it. But why then was the fourteen-year-old Cheryl Crane the one led out of the house in handcuffs?

  “I stood outside Lana Turner’s house and watched as Jerry Geisler, the criminal lawyer, went in and out,” Dominick recalled. He even claimed to have heard Lana shriek at Geisler from within the house, “Why won’t they let me bring my baby home?!”