“Dominick did the rewrites with me,” said Joseph Hardy. The two men bonded over the script. “The writing was medieval, really bad. We rewrote every scene, and would hand out what we’d written the day before as the actors arrived on set each morning.”
Hardy thoroughly enjoyed working with Dominick and appreciated his irreverent sense of humor, but he drew the line at participating in one of his producer’s quirkier habits. “Dominick loved to go to funerals of famous people,” said Hardy. Dominick liked to tell stories about going to Gertrude Lawrence’s funeral with Stephen Sondheim and getting kicked out. He told of going to Clifton Webb’s funeral with Mart Crowley and the mortician being so nice because very few other mourners showed up. He told of going to Louis Armstrong’s funeral with Howard Rosenman but having to leave because they could not stop laughing at an obscenely large floral arrangement made up to look like a big trumpet.
Hardy refused to attend celebrity funerals. “It’s morbid,” he said.
“I know, but it’s fun,” said Dominick.
“They’re dead!” said Hardy. Nonetheless, the director liked and respected Dominick. “He never apologized for being a fan.”
Regarding their totally revamped Users script, Dominick took special pride in a scene he had thought up in which the Jaclyn Smith character finds her husband, played by Tony Curtis, in the shower with another man. “Dominick told me who the real people were in Hollywood, who he’d based the characters on,” said Hudson Hickman, an associate producer on the movie. “I didn’t know who he was talking about.” The twenty-six-year-old Hickman had recently moved from Mississippi and been hired by Doug Cramer, The Users being the young man’s first TV credit in Los Angeles. “Dominick became a real mentor. He knew Hollywood and what it took to be a good producer.”
Dominick’s tales of Hollywood did not end with his behind-the-scenes scoop on the movie’s same-sex shower scene. “He also told me about a sponge baby. I’d never heard that term before. It had to do with how a gay man conceived a child with a woman,” said Hickman. “Again, I didn’t know the people he was talking about.”
When The Users went into production in early 1978, Dominick used his producer influence to get Frederick Combs and Norman Carby small roles in the TV movie. “Combs was the love of Nick’s life,” said Hardy. Unlike Mart Crowley and other gay friends in the entertainment business, Hardy did get Dominick to speak openly about his sexual orientation. “He was always very honest with me about it. We went around and around about it.”
Hardy told Dominick, “The most difficult thing to live with is dishonesty.”
“I know. I know. But it’s such a thing,” Dominick said of being born gay.
Not that Hardy found it easy to be out in a town like Hollywood. The stigma “still existed as far as getting hired,” he noted. “I came up against it, but I had such a good agent.” In Hollywood, not being married after a certain age counted as a professional liability. Aging bachelor writers and agents were the least affected. Even unmarried directors had it much easier than producers and studio executives, in other words, closeted gay men like Dominick who were expected to socialize and network with wives on their arm.
Having been a successful theater director in New York City, Hardy did not enjoy the Hollywood social scene. He found it frivolous. “Who cares about those people?” he asked Dominick.
“I care completely whether they like me or not,” Dominick said without apology.
“Nick longed to be invited,” said Hardy. “It was so sad when he no longer was.”
Doug Cramer and Aaron Spelling expected The Users to be a huge ratings success. Before reality told them otherwise, they hired Dominick to write the script for the sequel. He would write as well as produce a major network TV miniseries. There was only one problem: what is the sequel to The Users, the story of a small-town girl who marries a has-been movie star and schemes to give him a comeback that will also launch her own career as an actress?
No one knew, and that included Dominick. Desperate to come up with a story, he told Cramer about his own Hollywood roman à clef. Cramer liked its plot and convinced him to put the brash Sue Mengers character at the center of The Users sequel, a creative infringement that somehow did not seem to matter in the heat of their brainstorm.
Until now, Dominick had been considering suicide. Not long before he landed the first Users job he found himself wanting to jump in front of a train in Santa Barbara. On another occasion, he poked himself gently with a butcher knife to feel what it would be like to plunge the blade into his flesh. He blamed it on the grass he had been smoking and vowed to stop. But he did not stop smoking grass. If not for his therapist, Dominick thought he might have gone through with his suicide attempts. Despite his finances, he never missed a weekly visit to the doctor’s office on Overland Avenue. Dominick considered him and his doctor an odd couple. This Jewish man was so unstylish and square, yet he understood his patient. Dominick always found the money to pay his therapist, as well as his hustlers.
Dominick somehow managed to finish the teleplay for the sequel to The Users in record time. It told the story of the agent Mona Berg (Sue Mengers), who has an affair with a hitchhiker (based on Dominick and Norman Carby’s friend Tom Keller), whom she turns into a TV star, only to have him marry Cecilia Lesky (Ray Stark’s daughter, Wendy). Berg murders the TV star, but rather than going to prison, producer Marty Lesky (Ray Stark) makes her CEO of a major studio (David Begelman in reverse).
Before ABC aired The Users on October 1, 1978, Aaron Spelling Productions held a star-studded screening at MGM in Culver City. Dominick invited Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne, and for his own date he brought Dominique, who had been working as a part-time secretary for his brother and sister-in-law.
Dominick felt the movie played well for the invited guests, but when the lights came up in the MGM screening room, he saw John and Joan make a quick exit. Later, he looked for them at the after-party in the commissary but soon realized they had left the studio lot after the screening.
“John and Joan were bad behaviorists, full of themselves,” said Joseph Hardy. “They were unkind. Nick had introduced them to everybody in Hollywood, and then they wanted nothing to do with him.”
Despite there being several photographers at the party, no one took Dominick’s picture, which in his mind meant he had not really produced The Users. They instead lavished their flash bulbs on Joyce Haber, who never once congratulated him on a job well done. At one point during the party, Doug Cramer asked Dominick to introduce Tony Curtis to his ex-wife. Dominick did not know that the actor hated the erstwhile gossip columnist, and Curtis looked at Dominick like he had just passed gas when he tried to make the introduction. Curtis even called Haber a “cunt” to her face. Had Cramer set him up? Dominick called it the worst party of his life.
The next day, his brother phoned to tell him that the movie was “fun,” then changed the subject. John went on to commiserate about the “blah review” that the New York Times gave Griffin Dunne’s movie, Head over Heels, which had recently screened at the New York Film Festival.
Dominick had not read the reviews but was deeply disappointed for Griffin. It was the first film his son had produced. Dominick tried to bring the conversation back to The Users but regretted it when his brother and sister-in-law, now on the other line, gave him faint praise. The conversation left him with a bad feeling, the kind he used to get whenever his father congratulated him, “making me feel worse instead.”
In the next issue of Women’s Wear Daily, Dominick read how the Didions made “grim-faced early departures” from the screening. He also read some positive reviews of Griffin’s new movie, reviews his brother avoided telling him about.
The Users, however, received few favorable reviews, not that reviews mean anything in television. Ratings, however, do, and they were not good enough to warrant making a sequel. Also, “Spelling and the network wanted nothing to do with Nick’s script for the sequel,” said Hardy. “It was
too good at skewering Hollywood.”
For the second year in a row, Norman Carby gave Dominick a bag of groceries for Christmas. “It’s the only present I got that made any sense for what the state of my life is,” he told his boyfriend.
Groceries were nice, but a bigger Christmas present arrived belatedly after the first of the year, thanks to Dominick’s agent. Arnold Stiefel, a veritable miracle worker, recycled Dominick’s teleplay and turned it into a proposal for a novel to be titled Joyce Haber’s “The Users,” Part 2.
Dominick loved the advance money, from Simon & Schuster no less, but hated the title. Except for a couple of characters, it was his story, not Joyce Haber’s. But as Stiefel explained, Simon & Schuster was paying a hefty $75,000 advance precisely because of Joyce Haber’s name being in the title. Dominick groused, “It takes a little of the kick away right from the first day when there’s another writer’s name in the title ahead of yours.” But he needed the money. Stiefel had other good news. Dominick’s editor at Simon & Schuster would be Michael Korda, a major kingpin of the book industry, as well as son of the legendary British film producer Alexander Korda. It pleased Dominick how his brother and sister-in-law greeted the Michael Korda news with pained silence.
The first Simon & Schuster check came to $30,000 dollars, and it angered Dominick that Stiefel took his 10 percent “knowing I was broke,” but not so broke he could not afford a weight-loss treatment at the expensive Schick Center and something called the Advocate Experience. He heard about the est-like group therapy for gay men and lesbians from friends who had gone to sessions in Los Angeles. Dominick could not risk exposure where he lived, so traveled to San Francisco for back-to-back weekend meetings there.
“I told him not to go,” said Hardy. “Nick was honest enough about his sexual orientation. Why add spice to the brew?”
Not everyone agreed with Hardy. “Dominick was never honest with himself about his sexual orientation,” said Carby.
Dominick knew about mass group therapy. He had been going to AA meetings in Los Angeles for years but never spoke or shared his stories in front of fellow alcoholics. The Advocate Experience somehow forced him to be more than an observer. On the second day of the San Francisco retreat, Dominick took the mic and talked about his sexual orientation openly and honestly for the first time in his life. The response he received overwhelmed him. One-hundred twenty gay men and lesbians applauded and gave him a standing ovation. He wrote of being “uncheered” in his life, so the response left him feeling immensely gratified and wanted. He belonged. Yet, now that he had told people he was gay, he was not sure. Was his sex with men merely “revenge” on his father? He vowed to answer the question, writing in his journal that “the time of understanding is nigh.”
The Advocate Experience advised closeted homosexuals to disclose their sexual orientation to close friends and relatives. Rather than tell them face to face, Dominick chose to write to his children. “He discussed the letter with me,” said Hardy.
The letter began “Dear Kids.” Dominick let his three children know how much he loved them and that however they reacted to his news would be fine. But he felt compelled to inform them now that he had always been gay, and the shame of his secret was “a giant cancer eating its way through my body.”
Although he dated it January 21, 1979, from the Hyatt Regency Hotel in San Francisco, Dominick did not mail the letter. At the top of it, he scrawled the words “not sent.”
Life back in Los Angeles continued with a veneer of normalcy. He had money. He was writing a novel, at long last, but he had to be careful. As soon as he told people his novel was about Sue Mengers, they told him horrible gossip just so he would put it in his book, even though much of it was not true. Dominick loved the story a bigtime TV producer told him about Mengers wearing a dildo and using it on Jean-Claude Tramont, but he did not believe it.
Writing a novel for Michael Korda at Simon & Schuster would put him back on the A-list. He just knew it.
A bright spot that spring were his British house guests, Henry and Claire Herbert, the earl and lady of Pembroke, who were staying with him at the Spalding Drive apartment. The Herberts held a title going back to the twelfth century, and even though Dominick could barely pay his back taxes, he threw a party in their honor, inviting seventy of his closest friends. And forty of his closest friends did not bother to show up, which was especially disappointing because in Dominick’s estimation, those not attending were “all the glitter and glamour ones.” The absentees included his old bosses Aaron Spelling and Doug Cramer, as well as Marisa Berenson, who had shot Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon at Wilton, the Herbert’s family estate near Salisbury, England. “I had a young, rich, and beautiful earl and countess as bait. I realized then I was a dead duck,” Dominick told friends.
The night of the fiasco Dominick entertained a masochistic fantasy in which his brother John phoned to ask him why he was giving a party when he was broke. John never made such a call, but in a way Dominick almost wished he had, because his brother would have been right.
Dominick did not want the earl and lady to get the impression that he had been completely ostracized in Hollywood despite the poor turnout for the party. Desperate, Dominick asked Arnold Stiefel to take them all out to dinner at Chasen’s. The plan was for his agent to pick up the check and Dominick would reimburse him later. It did not go as planned. Stiefel left an overly generous tip, in Dominick’s estimation, despite knowing the state of his client’s finances. “It’s Chasen’s!” Stiefel explained.
Leaving the restaurant, Dominick made a big deal of saying hello to Danny Melnick. He could not forgive Melnick for spreading the unfounded having-sex-with-another-man rumor about him, but maybe if he made nice Melnick would stop telling the story. Almost as important, Dominick wanted the earl and lady to know that he knew the man slated to replace David Begelman as the president of Columbia Pictures. When he said hello, Melnick failed to say hello back.
Henry and Claire soon left Spalding Drive for Palm Springs. A few days after their departure, Dominick received a letter from Doug Cramer, apologizing for not coming to his party in their honor. Cramer replied that he had never received the invitation and commiserated how he only learned of the party when Henry and Claire came to dinner at his house in Palm Springs. The letter told Dominick one very important thing: Cramer had not invited him to his dinner party.
If nothing else, there was always something going on at Hilhaven Lodge. Allan Carr, however, was not the Allan Carr of the disgraceful Gladyce Begelman book party. During the summer of 1979, he became the man who produced Grease, the top-grossing movie musical of all time. Carr let the success go straight to his head. “Grease was the best and the worst thing that ever happened to him,” said his friend David Geffen. Before he went on to produce the major disco dud Can’t Stop the Music, starring the Village People and Bruce Jenner, Carr gave a major party that was part wedding celebration and part baby shower for Alana Hamilton and Rod Stewart.
Things happened at the party to amuse Dominick. Beyond the bride’s advanced state of pregnancy were the ice sculptures, which melted in the summer heat to mix with the seafood cocktail, where it ran off the table and onto the ladies’ dresses. He also enjoyed listening to Swifty Lazar’s wife ask Valerie Perrine, being touted for an Oscar for her performance in Lenny, if she bought her colorful dress at Frederick’s of Hollywood.
Dominick lived for such low encounters among the Hollywood high life. As if such fun came for free at an Allan Carr party. The manager-turned-producer approached Dominick sometime during dinner. He had always dangled the carrot of giving his unemployed friend a script to write. While no assignment had ever materialized, Carr wanted to collect prematurely on his munificence. He asked Dominick to give him an after-dinner toast to congratulate him on the beautiful party and also to break the big news: Carr would be producing the movie version of A Chorus Line.
Dominick said he could not give the toast; he did not feel comfortable doi
ng it. Carr told him he could. They went back and forth on what Dominick could or could not do when a butler arrived just in time to divert the host’s attention. There was a problem with the aspic stork or something. Dominick turned to his friend Wendy Stark to tell her what just happened. She wisely advised him not to give any such speech.
At least Dominick still had his Simon & Schuster novel to write. Ray Stark had recently asked him about it. “You’ve been working on that for an awful long time, haven’t you?” said the producer. “Fran’s brother is like that. He can never get anything finished.”
At a luncheon at the Beverly Hills Hotel, a columnist from the Los Angeles Times asked Dominick about the novel. Before he could answer, Doris Stein walked by slightly less tipsy than usual and said, “No, that’s his brother.” Doris no longer invited Dominick to Misty Mountain, but that did not mean she had stopped spreading gossip about him.
It got worse.
Lenny phoned Dominick to say that her good friend Connie Wald had to disinvite him to her party next week in honor of socialite Marguerite Littman. Sue Mengers requested it. Maybe she demanded it. The agent would not be in the same room with the man who called her a fat girl. It fell to Lenny to give him the bad news.
No sooner was Dominick unceremoniously disinvited to one party than an invitation arrived last-minute for another. Jack Benny’s widow, Mary, had her secretary phone Dominick at four o’clock in the afternoon for a party that night. Dominick knew what that meant: someone had canceled, and Mary now had an odd number of guests at her table. Or tables. The secretary called it a “barbeque,” but since it was a barbeque at Mary Benny’s house Dominick knew there would be nothing casual about it. He considered taking the high road and telling the secretary no. He could not possibly attend. He was busy. But Dominick was not busy. He did not have other plans.
No sooner did he enter the Benny house that night than Dominick saw Fran Stark. He hoped he did not see Ray himself. The producer had bought Dominick’s pitch about an Olivia Newton-John movie based on the Svengali/Trilby legend in which the pop singer plays a secretary at a recording studio before making it big. Stark paid him $10,000.
Money, Murder, and Dominick Dunne: A Life in Several Acts Page 13
