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

by Robert Hofler

  It had been going on since they lived together as brothers on Albany Avenue in West Hartford. Despite their seven-year age difference, Dominick resented John calling himself “Dad’s favorite son,” and worse, it was true. By John’s own assessment, he was “allowed to get away with far more” than his older siblings. Dr. Dunne accepted John; he did not accept Dominick. He liked John’s “cheekiness” and he hated Dominick’s being a “sissy.” John called himself “the son of a surgeon” because he was proud of his father’s exalted status in the Irish-Catholic community. “I can think of no higher praise,” he said. It was the kind of thing Dominick would never have said or written about his father.

  Dominick later remarked how he got along great with Joan and John on The Panic in Needle Park but Play It as It Lays was another story. He felt he had made valuable suggestions for the Needle Park script, as well as Play It as It Lays. The Didions, however, were not interested in his ideas. In turn, the couple worried about Dominick’s increasing substance abuse and how it adversely affected his reputation in Hollywood—and, by association, theirs.

  Peter Bart was one of many Hollywood powerbrokers who sometimes offered Dominick a ride home after an industry event. “He drank a lot, was confused,” said Bart, then a vice president and head of production at Paramount Pictures. “Nick would emerge from a function and wander around looking for a car or a cab. He was always a little mystified what he was doing there. I was surprised how he figured out to get from here to there.”

  It was easier helping talent on their way up, like the Didions, who had great publishing credits, than helping talent on his way down, like Dominick, who had a great substance-abuse problem. Regarding his brother, Dominick felt the irony of their opposing career trajectories, which only exacerbated his humiliating downward spiral.

  “Nick knew everyone in the movie business in Los Angeles, and when John came out there Nick introduced him to everybody, helped him,” said Freddy Eberstadt. Later, John did not return the favor, and often used his adopted daughter as an excuse, trotting her out at industry events instead of inviting his brother. “When Quintana was still a little girl, John would take her to dinner where Nick might be expected to go. John would phone Nick to tell him that they were taking Quintana instead,” Eberstadt recalled.

  Regardless of Joan and John’s treatment, Dominick dedicated himself to seeing his sister-in-law’s novel brought to the screen in a faithful adaptation. It was an unusual project to be produced by a major studio. During the winter 1972 production, journalist Rex Reed wrote, “The filming of Play It as It Lays is being observed with raised eyebrows and clinched teeth in a town not famous for its liberal attitude towards movies that tell the truth about itself.”

  “Nick was a very good producer,” said Schumacher. “He knew the world we were making the movie about. He saw the humor in everything. And his humor was ironic and it could be stinging.” But it was not a fun shoot, because it was not a fun script. Also, Frank Perry had much to prove.

  “It was important for Frank to be the director, and Nick let that happen. This was Frank’s first film without [Eleanor],” said Schumacher, referring to Perry’s ex-wife, with whom he had made such successful films as David and Lisa and Diary of a Mad Housewife.

  The Perrys’ divorce proved less than amicable, according to their friend Dotson Rader. “Frank thought Eleanor was trying to sabotage his career,” said the journalist. Frank Perry felt especially vulnerable after their separation when his wife began having an affair with a female painter. “It left him with a sense of betrayal,” said Rader, “and that suspicion and wariness fell over into his relationships with Tony Perkins and Dominick Dunne on the set of Play It as It Lays. Eleanor changed the way Frank looked at people. He didn’t fully trust deeply closeted people.” Perry also surmised that Didion had based the BZ character on her brother-in-law.

  Never truly embraced by Perry and increasingly estranged from his brother and sister-in-law, Dominick soldiered on as producer. Making his job even tougher was Ned Tanen, who hated the film even more once he started seeing rushes. The Universal Pictures executive called it Didion “vomiting up her life.”

  Dominick, in turn, called Tanen “the most awful person.”

  His sense of isolation and abandonment only increased when the film’s crew took to calling the leading lady Miss Paranoia, and even more difficult for Dominick, they made fun of Tony Perkins’s sexual orientation by leveling gay slurs at his character, BZ. When dealing with the macho crew, Dominick protected himself by talking about his ex-wife and three children. Perkins did not have that cover, although he would soon get it when a reporter from Andy Warhol’s Interview magazine arrived on set. In time, Berry Berenson and Tony Perkins would marry and have two sons.

  Finally, Play It as It Lays was in the can, edited, and ready to be released. Immediately after the premiere, Dominick told Ned Tanen how much he hated him, and said telling off the executive was “marvelous.”

  It would have been even more marvelous if the film had been a critical and commercial success on its release in October 1972. Major critics like Vincent Canby in the New York Times and Charles Champlin in the Los Angeles Times liked it, but Stanley Kauffmann in the New Republic and Pauline Kael in the New Yorker called it a pretentious bore. Dominick described it as having “won an award at the Venice Film Festival, but only ten people saw it. It was that kind of picture.”

  Dominick considered himself a good producer. He had taste. He knew how things should look. And when called upon, he could spruce up the dialogue on the spot. He also had a knack for suggesting ideas to directors and making them think it was their idea. He never made a lot of money as a producer. He called it “peanuts.” Then again, Dominick’s idea of mere nuts was what other people lived on and lived well. Looking back at the 1970s, he would lament “the thousands of dollars” he had spent on hustlers, not to mention drugs, parties, designer clothes, and the large apartment on Spalding Drive.

  After the film’s release, Dominick finally confronted his sister-in-law about his being the prototype for BZ. Joan Didion told him no: the character was based on a man they both knew who, in Dominick’s opinion, bore no resemblance whatsoever to a closeted, suicidal movie producer.

  Dominick admitted he should have seen the similarities between himself and BZ as soon as he first read the novel. He always had a “masseur to lunch,” just as BZ does. But he chose not to see.

  It was a curious, singular distinction. What other man had produced two films, each of which featured a prominent character based on him that he, in turn, chose not to recognize? His vision of himself was “blurred in those days,” as he would later describe it.

  One good thing about Dominick’s next project was that its screenwriter left him out of the picture. The bad thing was that Jean-Claude Tramont wrote the screenplay, and he could not write. Compounding the script problems was Tramont’s girlfriend-agent, Sue Mengers, whose recommendation to Paramount Pictures led to Dominick being named the producer. It was a favor for his casting so many of her clients in Play It as It Lays. It was also a favor that would end his career in Hollywood.

  Besides being a paying job, Ash Wednesday possessed one big plus—at least for someone as chronically star-struck as Dominick.

  “An Elizabeth Taylor movie!” he gushed. “That’s a big deal.” He decided to forget (as did Robert Evans, head of Paramount Pictures) that the actress had not made a hit movie in more than four years, and as her box-office clout shrank, her outrageous and costly behavior on and off set exploded.

  Unlike Dominick, Larry Peerce harbored few illusions about making an Elizabeth Taylor movie, and worse, he found Tramont’s basic story ludicrous: a middle-aged woman (Taylor) undergoes a facelift to win back her philandering husband (Henry Fonda). “Nick and I were involved in this nightmare,” Peerce recalled. “Nick was divorced; I was getting a divorce. We were two guys desperate for a job.”

  While Peerce had the box-office hit Goodbye, Columbus to
his credit, his reputation took a big hit when Paramount’s head of production fired him from what was to be his follow-up romantic blockbuster, Love Story.

  “Larry wanted to add a back story about the Vietnam War,” said Peter Bart, who thought Peerce was trying to “overintellectualize” Erich Segal’s potboiler about a rich kid who falls in love with a poor girl dying of cancer.

  Unlike his producer, Peerce never genuflected before movie stars. Dominick told people he “liked the idea” of doing a film about a woman’s facelift. But then there was the script. Dominick knew writing, and he knew they could not film Tramont’s script.

  “Tramont wrote the first two acts of a script; that’s where the film ended. It needed another act,” said Peerce. Dominick agreed and started negotiations with Paramount to fly Tramont to Cortina d’Amprezzo, Italy, to do rewrites as soon as the film began shooting there.

  Dominick and Peerce met Elizabeth Taylor and her husband, Richard Burton, on New Year’s Eve 1972. The world’s most famous couple was staying at the Grand Hotel in Rome and Burton was cleaning up dog poop on the carpet when the two men arrived. He offered his guests champagne and then poured himself a very large scotch on the rocks. “Which he downed as if it were club soda,” said Peerce. Even before Taylor made her belated appearance, Burton drank three more. “And he was not a man who could hold his liquor. He must have had a liver the size of a golf ball.”

  Taylor finally appeared “very regal, bedecked in lavish jewelry,” noted Peerce. “She told me at some point that she drank mostly what Richard drank. It soon became obvious that she could tolerate alcohol much better than he could.”

  On that first night in Rome, the four of them dined at La Toula, one of the Eternal City’s most expensive restaurants. The Burtons traveled there in a huge limousine, so large that Peerce did not have to stoop to enter it. Dominick expected to follow him when Burton blocked his way. Without explanation, he told Dominick to take a taxi or some other mode of transportation to La Toula. The two men’s relationship never recovered, presaging deep troubles to come.

  Having somehow alienated Burton, Dominick nearly did the same with his famous leading lady when he suggested they dine one night with Andy Warhol. She initially scoffed at the idea. “That man made millions off me!” exclaimed Taylor, incensed at the artist’s quadruple silk screens of her in Cleopatra getup circa 1964. (Fifty years later, the quadtych would be valued at $20 million.) Warhol’s slight rip-off aside, Taylor finally agreed to meet the king of pop art.

  Warhol’s first mistake was showing up at the restaurant in Rome with his usual gang of hangers-on, transvestites, assorted freaks, and Paul Morrissey, the man responsible for actually writing, directing, and producing most of the Warhol movies. “You, over there!” Taylor ordered Warhol’s entourage, and pointed to the opposite corner of the restaurant.

  The Warhol/Taylor confab became one of Dominick’s favorite anecdotes in years to come. He recalled how it began as a pleasant, chatty, alcohol-doused dinner before it turned ugly. After dessert, Taylor got up to go to the ladies room, and pushing herself off the red leather banquet she felt something hard under her sable coat. Warhol had surreptitiously placed a tape recorder there, and it was taping their every word.

  “You’ve been recording me while I’m drunk?!” she cried.

  Dominick felt “mortified and furious at Andy,” since he had arranged the dinner. Warhol’s pasty white skin turned Campbell’s soup red as he removed the tape from the recorder and meekly handed it to the star. Dominick and Taylor left in what he called “stormy silence.” Later, Paul Morrissey told Dominick that the problem with Ash Wednesday was not the script. “If you called it Elizabeth Taylor’s Facelift, everyone would go to see it!” he advised.

  Shooting began in March 1973, and when the Burtons finally arrived at the ski resort of Cortina d’Ampezzo, Dominick flew from room to room at the Miramonti Majestic Grand Hotel to give everyone the big news. “The Burtons are coming! The Burtons are coming!” he announced with childlike excitement. His room overlooked the front of the hotel and its driveway, and Dominick invited everyone to witness the spectacle of the Burtons’ arrival. They came chauffeured in a stretch limousine, a Mercedes-Benz, followed by a large truck hauling thirty pieces of luggage and anything else needed to camp out in a five-star hotel in the Italian Alps for a few weeks. There was also their usual entourage, which included a secretary, butler, chauffeur, hairdresser, makeup artist, maid, and two Maltese terriers. Dominick noted that the Burtons’ luggage appeared to be made out of carpet emblazoned with big roses.

  It was a cozy company of actors hand-picked by their producer. Dominick had seen Keith Baxter on Broadway in the hit thriller Sleuth and wanted the British stage actor to play the gay photographer David in Ash Wednesday. For the role of the gigolo Erich, Dominick indulged in typecasting, giving the part to the twenty-eight-year-old actor Helmut Berger, whose sixty-four-year-old lover had lobbied hard for his current inamorato. The Italian director Luchino Visconti even went so far as to hold a private screening for Dominick, showing him his new film, Ludwig, in which Berger, again typecast, played the mad, decadent king of Bavaria. After the screening, Visconti and Dominick chatted, and among other topics the legendary director launched into a complaint about today’s young actors “who have everything handed to them.”

  Berger interrupted the old man. “You think it’s easy fucking you every night?” he asked. Dominick could not resist casting such an actor.

  Keith Baxter did not think the European press exaggerated when they called Helmut Berger “the most beautiful man in the world.” Not that Berger let such an accolade go to his head. He never played hard to get. “Helmut and I had an affair, which I soon regretted,” said Baxter, “because Helmut would stay out all night, hit the clubs, and then come banging on my door every morning at three o’clock. Dominick adored Helmut, but nothing came of it. Dominick was a very moral person, and he was very aware of his daughter and boys and Lenny.”

  Dominick, in fact, was simply more discreet than moral, at least when it came to the most beautiful man in the world. According to Dominick’s longtime partner, Norman Carby, Berger could count Keith Baxter and Dominick as two of his many off-the-set conquests during the production of Ash Wednesday. Whenever Baxter did not answer an early morning call from Visconti’s boyfriend, it was Dominick who benefited.

  Into this maelstrom of male camaraderie walked Elizabeth Taylor, already well known in Hollywood for her close relationships with homosexuals like Roddy McDowall, Rock Hudson, and Montgomery Clift. She even brought her own entourage of male companions, as Larry Peerce and Dominick were soon to discover. Taylor’s first scene in the film took place in the town square outside a church. Dominick could not stop telling people, “This is an Elizabeth Taylor movie!” Beyond camera range, tourists and townspeople stood in the plaza to gawk at the movie star, still notorious from Cleopatra, made years earlier in Italy. In the church scene, Keith Baxter plays a fashion photographer shooting a model who opens her fur coat to reveal she is wearing nothing but a bikini as churchgoers stare in shock on their way from Mass. One of those dismayed spectators, unfortunately, was not a paid extra. He was a monsignor, and he brought the production to an abrupt halt. “Scandale!” he cried upon seeing the nearly naked model. Dominick tried to explain. “No, it isn’t that kind of a film.”

  Since the monsignor required much persuading, Taylor took the opportunity to give herself a long break and invited Baxter to her trailer.

  “Do you like vodka?” Taylor asked her dark, handsome costar.

  “We were there two and a half hours,” Baxter recalled, while poor Dominick dealt with the priest and his anger over a near-naked model desecrating his church. “We sat there drinking and talking, and Elizabeth talked about being terribly constipated. She didn’t know what to do.”

  “Just stick your finger up your ass,” said her butler, Raymond Vignale.

  “I’ve tried that,” said Elizabeth.

>   “It doesn’t work because you wear that big ring!” Vignale cracked. In addition to being chronically constipated, Taylor admitted that she and Burton had not had sex in months, despite her butler’s best efforts to provide them with pornography.

  While his actors proceeded to get smashed on vodka, Dominick dealt with the irate monsignor. He would later admit, “My drinking reached its zenith during [Ash Wednesday], but everyone was drunk on that movie, no one ever noticed, except possibly the village priest of Cortina d’Ampezzo.” After Dominick lied and called the model’s exposure a huge mistake, he graciously said good-bye to the priest and promptly fell down the church steps. “We were all drunks, except Henry Fonda, and doing [cocaine],” said Dominick, sniffing and touching his nose to suggest the drug.

  Jean-Claude Tramont tried to rewrite the script to Peerce and Dominick’s satisfaction but was not up to the job. He also turned himself into something of a joke on set when he gave everybody gifts of T. S. Eliot’s poem “Ash Wednesday” and signed them “with best wishes, Jean-Claude.”

  Pretentiousness laced with lack of talent is never endearing, and to the amusement of his actors Dominick revealed that Tramont also qualified as a complete phony. “I’d known him when he called himself Jack Schwartz and was an usher at NBC when I was doing live TV,” Dominick told them. Taylor also hated the script and thought less of the man who wrote it when her butler overheard Tramont launch into a scathing critique of the star’s questionable taste in clothes. She told Dominick, “Get that asshole off the set!” He had two choices: alienate Sue Mengers, who helped get him the job; or alienate his star, who threatened to become even more intractable.

  Dominick had no choice. He fired Tramont and hired a rewrite man. “And we got Bob Evans to OK it,” said Peerce. But ill fortune struck when the Writers Guild called a strike. “And that was the end of the rewrite.” Stuck with the Tramont script, the two men took satisfaction in having at least “run him off the mountain,” said Peerce.