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

by Robert Hofler

  Dominick could only wish he had already written such a roman à clef and been paid, because in 1977 MCA announced its own line of video cassettes. Rather than compete, RCA unceremoniously shuttered its video division, and Dominick had no choice but to apply for unemployment insurance. He no longer had a job, not even a midlevel one.

  Desperate to pay his rent, Dominick did what a lot of people in Hollywood do when their back is up against the wall: he thought about writing a screenplay. It is much quicker than writing a novel; there are so many fewer words to type. The only problem: he did not have an idea for a screenplay. He spoke to his friend Tony Kiser, whose years as associate producer of the long-running Rock Hudson series McMillan were coming to an end. Kiser looked to segue from television to movies.

  “I pitched to Dominick [a story] about a rich guy falling in love with some hooker,” said the producer. “It was along the lines of that Richard Gere movie with Julia Roberts.”

  Apparently, what Dominick wrote was no Pretty Woman. Plus, he gave it the unpromising title A Time to Smell the Roses and made the even greater error of showing the screenplay to his brother and sister-in-law. John and Joan had just written a great box-office success, the 1976 remake of A Star Is Born, starring Barbra Streisand. The critics hated it, but because many moviegoers actually paid to sit through A Star Is Born, what the critics wrote did not matter. The Didions sat atop the screenwriter heap in Hollywood. It was not the best time for Dominick to be asking their advice, but he showed them A Time to Smell the Roses anyway. He thoroughly enjoyed writing it and considered his writing top-notch. The Didions did not. Joan sat quietly. Even when she did deign to speak, Dominick often complained he could not hear his very frail sister-in-law. It was why he called her Frail behind her back. John, whom Dominick nicknamed Big Time, took a much more active role when it came to analyzing the many problems with A Time to Smell the Roses. He read aloud some of the screenplay’s dialogue, emphasizing its clichés and general clumsiness of style. Frail sat there and said nothing as Big Time proceeded to eviscerate his older brother’s ego.

  “It was a real stinker,” Kiser said of the screenplay. Dominick did not disagree after John’s critique, but he never forgot, or forgave, his brother’s brutal words that day. Years later, Dominick wrote a letter to John, recalling the humiliation and “every comma” of his criticism regarding A Time to Smell the Roses. He even went so far as to blame John’s extreme negativity for his “nearly dying of shame” three days later.

  Kiser recalled the contretemps. “At that point in their relationship, which was chilly, I’m sure John would’ve not been in the least supportive, especially since he and Joan were enjoying a successful career as screenwriters. The toast of Hollywood, as it were at the time,” he added.

  Asa Maynor, another friend, also saw the intense brother rivalry and how it affected Dominick. She had been married to the 77 Sunset Strip heartthrob Edd “Kookie” Byrnes and often ran into Dominick at parties where she and her husband were “one of the dress extras,” as she ruefully described their nine-year marriage.

  “Dominick always wanted to write and he hadn’t because John was so famous. Dominick didn’t want to look like he was hopping on John’s bandwagon,” said Maynor, an actress who later became her friend’s financial analyst.

  Alex Dunne put the competition between brothers in even stronger terms. “Dad always felt that John followed him [in the entertainment business], and when Dad got into the writing profession, John was like, ‘How dare you, on my territory?’ Very indignant.”

  Three days after his brother tore into A Time to Smell the Roses, Dominick checked himself into the hospital for a routine operation to have a cyst removed. Very unexpectedly, he suffered cardiac arrest, almost died, had an “out-of-body experience,” and emerged from the hospital a “very different man.” He even threw away his toupee, finally.

  Dominick now realized he must escape Los Angeles. He thought back to the day when a neighbor moved out of the Spalding Drive building and told him she was relocating to the Cascade Mountains in Oregon. The Cascade Mountains! Those words sounded so beautiful, so tranquil. He wanted to move there, even though he had never been. Such a place sounded ideal for writing his Hollywood novel about people like Sue Mengers and Ray Stark. If only he could somehow save enough money to make the trip and live in Oregon long enough to finish the book.

  Every other Wednesday in 1977, Dominick picked up his check for $108 at the unemployment office in Beverly Hills. On one of those visits, the lines stretched longer than usual, and he was already late for another Allan Carr party. Suddenly, he found himself almost dreading another Allan Carr party. They were vulgar, often silly affairs. Then again, they were the only party invitations he received, and Dominick had to admit: Carr remained a loyal friend, even after he had struck movie gold the previous year. While visiting Mexico City, the caftan-wearing manager saw a Spanish-language movie about cannibalism and immediately obtained the rights to dub and distribute Survive! in the United States. Having made a lot of money from such schlock, he and his coproducer, Robert Stigwood, were now trying to parlay that success by turning the mediocre Broadway musical Grease into a movie. Even if Stigwood could get the Bee Gees to write new songs, Dominick thought Grease as a movie would never work, not that anyone ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public. Certainly not Allan Carr.

  The country continued to sink into a recession, and the lines for unemployment were endless, even in Beverly Hills. Unfortunately, it was not a typical Wednesday afternoon at the unemployment office. NBC sent a TV crew to tape the long lines for a story the network was doing on the recession. Deeply ashamed, Dominick quickly grabbed a discarded newspaper and used it to cover his face, praying, “God, please don’t let my picture get on the news.” He dodged that blow to his pride, but it put him in a foul mood for the party, and it did not help that the party was in honor of Gladyce Begelman, who had written an absolutely shameless book.

  Beverly Hills on a Thousand Dollars a Day could not have been a more unfortunate, ill-timed book title. Columbia Pictures had recently suspended the author’s husband from his presidency at the studio for what was being called financial irregularities. In fact, David Begelman had forged a few checks.

  Not yet full blown, the nascent scandal rallied the Hollywood elite—people like Ray Stark and Barbra Streisand—to show their support for Begelman by refusing to talk to reporters about it. Dominick noted, “The heavy artillery were out showing solidarity behind one of their own kind. . . . Still, no one in Hollywood wanted publicly to get so close to throw a book party for his wife and her tacky new book, which was a guide to women on how to overspend.”

  Allan Carr, on the verge of big success with Grease, wanted to be seen as a major Hollywood player and used his book party for Gladyce Begelman to help secure that status. Power brokers who had never been seen at an Allan Carr party attended this one. They wanted to show their support for Begelman without actually having to say nice things about him to the press or throw his vulgar wife a party.

  Carr gave his party at Hilhaven Lodge a Christmas theme with nary a menorah in sight. As the host toasted Mrs. Begelman with a long speech, blithely ignoring the two ghostwriters who had done all the work, a group of carolers in the background sang “Money Money Money” from the musical Cabaret. The husband of the fake authoress stood next to Dominick at the buffet table, where both men turned the cocktail party into a much-needed lunch. As Carr lectured his guests about Gladyce’s important book, David Begelman piled pate de foie gras on pieces of pumpernickel bread to fill his mouth. “And she was like an opera star receiving applause at the end of a great performance,” noted Dominick. His review: “It was like a gangster’s party.”

  And there was something else about the party Allan Carr (née Alan Solomon) threw for Gladyce Begelman. Just as Dominick felt out of place among the successful Protestants on Prospect Hill, so this Irish Catholic did not really belong among the successful Jews
of Hollywood. In his private journal, he took out his tortured frustration, leaving the pages replete with the K-word to describe them.

  Dominick realized how much he no longer wanted to be part of this industry scene and that the day of his departure was imminent. Perhaps he would have departed sooner, but like some mafioso trying to go straight, Hollywood kept drawing him back in.

  The first setback to his leaving Los Angeles occurred when he lunched with his agent, Arnold Stiefel, at the Polo Lounge right before Christmas 1977. Dominick heard his name being paged in the restaurant. It had been a very long time since that last happened. He excused himself and went to the front desk, where he met a man he had never seen before. John Berry, a reporter from the Washington Post, introduced himself and told Dominick that years earlier he had been his younger brother Stephen’s roommate at Georgetown University, where they were both expelled for binge drinking. When Berry saw Dominick enter the Polo Lounge, he noticed a strong resemblance to Stephen Dunne; he thought he would give it a shot and have Dominick paged.

  Berry was in town to investigate the brewing Begelman scandal at Columbia Pictures and had little time to get the story. Esquire and the Wall Street Journal already had reporters on it. Those articles had not yet appeared, but Berry and co-reporter Jack Egan feared being scooped and hoped that Dominick, with all of his Hollywood contacts, could help them. As Berry explained, the owner of the Post, Katharine Graham, took a personal interest in the scandal because it affected her dear friend Dina Merrill and her husband, Cliff Robertson. Begelman had forged a $10,000 check made out to Robertson, who had never received the money even though it later appeared on the actor’s W-2 form. Merrill complained to Graham that the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times were not covering the scandal. Could she do something about it in her newspaper?

  While Dominick did not know the inside details of the case, he did know Robertson and Merrill, who had been to his home a few times when he was married to Lenny. Robertson, in fact, was Dominick’s house guest in West Hartford when he and Lenny first met in 1953. Regarding the Begelman scandal, Dominick noted, “I knew every participant and their wives and their mistresses.” He assured Berry that he could help him with vital telephone numbers, and before saying their good-byes, the two men made a date to talk later that day.

  Back in the Polo Lounge, Dominick lied to Stiefel, a good friend of Begelman, and said he had just run into an old friend from college. He would later recall how Stiefel told him over lunch that his career as a producer was finished in Hollywood: “I can’t get you a picture. Nobody wants you.”

  Dominick did not blanch at the bleak news. For a brief moment, he almost did not care. He wanted to be a journalist. This was his chance. He had written for the Kingswood School newspaper when he was a student there. He had always wanted to be a crusading reporter, and it stirred his moral indignation that powerful people in Los Angeles put pressure on Dorothy Chandler and her newspaper, the Los Angeles Times, to ignore the story. If she did not, they would refuse to donate to her beloved Music Center with its Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. “The story was being swept under the table,” he complained.

  John Berry’s proposal rejuvenated Dominick, lifted him completely out of his funk, and overnight he turned into what he called a “crazy person.” He phoned Berry as soon as he got home that afternoon and gave the reporter every vital phone number from his Rolodex. Dominick wanted nothing more than to get his revenge on a town that turned its collective back on him. He did not know the inner workings of Columbia Pictures; he could not help John Berry and Jack Egan grasp the studio politics. But he did possess important information, which not only included private telephone numbers but also where all the power players had vanished to over the year-end holidays. The Starks were in Sun Valley, Danny Melnick was in Vail, and so on.

  In the following days, when Berry made his phone calls, he let Dominick listen in on another line as Melnick, Stark, and others freaked out at the reporter’s pointed questions.

  “I felt alive again,” Dominick wrote. He knew Sue Mengers was at the heart of his obsession to get even. If he still had a great job, he would be like everybody else in Hollywood and ignore the story just to be politic. But he did not have a job. He did not have to shut up.

  “It’s when my dad began to think he could be a journalist,” said Griffin Dunne. It was not just the two Washington Post reporters who fascinated Dominick. Showing little loyalty to Jack Egan and John Berry, he also began feeding information about Begelman to Liz Smith at the New York Daily News, to Andrew Tobias at Esquire, and to Lucian Truscott IV at the New York Times. He gave reporters little anecdotes that did not expose the scandal but enlivened the story, gave it color—things like Ray Stark having once been a florist at a cemetery.

  On December 20, 1977, David McClintick broke the story in the Wall Street Journal, followed a few days later by Egan and Berry’s piece in the Washington Post. Andrew Tobias at Esquire had the story first, but due to the magazine’s long lead time his article followed the others. “Marie Brenner put me in touch with Dominick,” said Tobias, “but more of my information came from David Geffen.”

  “John Berry and I continued on the story after our first article,” Jack Egan recalled. “It led to the much bigger story of Hollywood finances, and how the studios practice creative accounting, ripping off some of the biggest stars, who are guaranteed a percentage of the profits, which never materialize. We owed Dominick a lot.”

  At the height of the scandal, Dominick spotted David Begelman at Mortons restaurant. He said hello, shook the crook’s hand, and asked how he was doing. It was a glorious moment for Dominick. Begelman had no idea how this Hollywood has-been, this industry nothing, reveled in being one of the “major instigators” behind the mogul’s stupendous fall from grace and power.

  Lucian Truscott repaid his debt to Dominick by recommending him to Betty Prashker, a prominent book editor at Doubleday. A lunch meeting was arranged. She asked Dominick what he wanted to write. He said he wanted to write a roman à clef about the Begelman scandal. He was not quite sure how to approach the subject but told Prashker what form he thought the novel should take. He wanted it to be part letters, part screenplay, part diary. Prashker listened and nodded, but she was not enthusiastic enough to assign such an ambitious, if inchoate, book to a novice writer.

  Helping reporters bring down David Begelman satisfied Dominick’s need for revenge, but he continued to dream about the lovely sounding Cascade Mountains and his escape from Hollywood. But how to get the money to make the trip and live for a few months while he wrote his novel?

  An old friend came to his rescue. Dominick knew Doug Cramer from their Young Turk days together in television when Dominick was the much bigger deal at Four Star. In the 1970s, Cramer was now the much bigger shark, having partnered with Aaron Spelling to make such lucrative junk as The Love Boat and Charlie’s Angels. Cramer also was married to Dominick’s old phone-buddy Joyce Haber, and one night the power couple invited him to their home. For some reason Dominick never could comprehend, Mr. and Mrs. Cramer decided to tell their two children they were getting a divorce on the very night he came to dinner. Dominick would describe Haber as being drunk and looking as blousy as Bette Midler in the final reel of The Rose. It did not go well. In some respects, the embarrassment of this family spectacle reminded him of his Café de Flore meeting with Sue Mengers and Jean-Claude Tramont, only much more dramatic due to Haber’s ever-running tears, booze, and mascara. With both these Hollywood couples, Dominick knew too much about them, too much for there ever to be a comfortable working relationship. In the end, the Cramer kids did not seem to mind much that their parents were separating and instead fought over a toy truck one of them had received as a present to soften the blow of the impending divorce. When he left their house that night, Dominick thought Doug Cramer would be the last person to offer him a job. As with Mengers and Tramont, he knew too much.

  Unbeknownst to him, Doug Cramer and Aaron Spelling
were looking to turn Joyce Haber’s best-selling novel The Users into a TV movie and needed somebody to head up the project. Since the 1976 potboiler focused on the high and low life in Hollywood, Spelling said what an executive almost never says when he is looking for a producer. “We need somebody who knows about tent parties,” he said.

  Cramer immediately thought of Dominick and his lavish Black and White Ball with its huge outside tent for dining and covered pool for dancing. Spelling liked the idea but had to ask, “Where’s he? I haven’t heard about him for a long time.” Cramer said that Dominick Dunne was around but not working.

  Dominick got the picture. They did not want to hire him because he was a good producer. They wanted to hire him because of his social reputation. The tent-party qualification, however, did not seem out of line to the man hired to direct The Users. “Tent parties were all the rage,” said Joseph Hardy. “The movie’s big scene takes place at a tent party.”

  What Dominick did not know was that Spelling and Cramer wanted him for another equally critical but seemingly obscure reason. Dominick had been friendly with Haber during her gossip days at the Los Angeles Times. And “neither Aaron nor I wanted to deal with Joyce,” said Cramer, who had recently divorced his wife.

  The two executive producers sweetened the deal by also hiring Dominick to do some script rewrites. No sooner was this news relayed to Joyce Haber than she spread the rumor that the rewrites were actually being done by John Gregory Dunne and Joan Didion. On other days, she spread the rumor that Mart Crowley was doing the rewrites.